plush

the lost boys

david:

✩ Saturate ↬ David is supposed to belong to the night, but at two in the morning, he's taking up all the space in your apartment.

hazbin hotel

vox:

✩ Stunt ↬ The arrangement was simple: smile for the cameras, sell the story, and absolutely do not make it complicated. Two years into Hell's most successful publicity stunt, Vox starts acting a little too convincing.

the amazing digital circus

caine:

✩ Gravity ↬ Caine finds you second, a bottle of stupid sauce finds you first.

✩ Curtain Calls: Zoochosis (pt. 1) + Intermission (pt. 2)

✩ Zoochosis ↬ Everything is deliberate. Everything is controlled. You were never part of the exception.

✩ Intermission ↬ Caine keeps trying to love you gently. You're still learning what to do with that.

✩ Sideshow ↬ Abel and Caine start acting strange. The rest of the circus notices long before you do.

✩ Interlude (Headcanons) ↬ Small moments, stolen songs: slow dancing with the circus.

jax:

✩ Bullseye ↬ The audience loves the flirting. Caine loves the ticket sales. Jax loves being an unbearable menace to society. You, unfortunately, might love him too.

✩ Tethered ↬ Recovery is messier than expected. So are feelings, apparently.

✩ Suspension ↬ Jax spends an evening pretending he is not emotionally compromised by your return to the trapeze. He fails spectacularly.

✩ Fault Lines: Fracture (pt. 1) + Brace (pt. 2)

✩ Fracture ↬ Something about you feels off lately. Jax would really prefer not to care.

✩ Brace ↬ Pomni finds a boarded-up door, a missing icon, and a grief no one wants to name.

✩ Interlude (Headcanons) ↬ Small moments, stolen songs: slow dancing with the circus.

✩ Collision ↬ Three months of awkward conversations, missed chances, and pretending everything is fine. Then Ragatha gets drunk.

ragatha:

✩ Harvest ↬ The circus’s newest theme calls for velvet, glitter, and far more shopping than originally anticipated. Luckily, spending the day with Ragatha has never been much of a hardship.

✩ Interlude (Headcanons) ↬ Small moments, stolen songs: slow dancing with the circus.

gangle:

✩ Keepsake ↬ Gangle receives a surprise.

✩ Interlude (Headcanons) ↬ Small moments, stolen songs: slow dancing with the circus.

abel:

✩ Sideshow ↬ Abel and Caine start acting strange. The rest of the circus notices long before you do.

crumbs of him (warning: toxic/abusive relationship) in Curtain Calls

For several seconds, neither of you said anything. The bathroom mirror had completely fogged over. Steam crowded the small room, and nearly every inch of the bath had disappeared beneath an unreasonable amount of white foam. The bottle of lavender bubble bath you had bought two days ago floated empty beside his arm.

You crossed your arms, staring down at him.

David leaned his head back against the porcelain. “Relax, sweetheart. It’s not holy water.”

“You used all of it,” you stated, pointing at the bottle.

David glanced toward the plastic bottle as though he had no idea how it had gotten there. “There wasn’t much left.”

“It was brand new!”

“Then you bought a very small bottle.”

“It cost twelve dollars.”

His eyebrows lifted. “You paid twelve dollars for soap?”

“It’s not soap.”

“It made bubbles.”

“That doesn’t make it soap.”

David considered this before sinking lower into the water. “You got ripped off.”

You stared at him. He smiled—that sharp, effortless smirk that meant he’d won. His hair had been pushed back from his face, though several wet strands had already fallen loose again. A thick line of blood ran from behind his ear and disappeared beneath the bubbles. 

“Whose is that?” you asked.

The smile remained. “Hello to you, too.”

“David.”

“It’s not mine.”

“That wasn’t what I asked.”

“I know.”

You stepped inside, picking his shirt up from the ground before shutting the door. The steam immediately pressed against your skin.

You held up the shirt; the fabric was ruined, the sleeve torn nearly in half. “What happened?”

“Somebody grabbed me.”

“So you tore your own sleeve off?”

“He grabbed the jacket, I gave him some of the shirt.” David shrugged, a few bubbles sliding down his pale shoulder. “He wanted a piece of me. I let him have one.”

“Did he survive taking it?”

David’s eyes drifted toward the ceiling, unbothered, as if the question was beneath him. His smile came slow. “Look at you,” he dropped his voice, dragging the moment out, “so many questions for someone who hasn’t earned the answers.“

You dropped the shirt beside the sink, lifting a hand to rub your temple. “Great.”

“He was alive when I left,” David offered. “Mostly.”

“That isn’t reassuring.”

“It wasn’t supposed to be.”

“You broke in here covered in blood.”

“I didn’t break in. You should stop leaving your key in obvious places.”

“It was under my mattress.”

“Exactly,” he scoffed, his smile widening as he looked back at you. “And besides, it’s only blood. It washes out. See?” He gestured to the faint pink tint in the water. “Good as new.”

You walked over and sat on the porcelain edge of the tub, your hip only a few inches from his shoulder.  The sight of David surrounded by lavender bubbles was still difficult to process. Most nights, he came straight from the boardwalk in leather and stage makeup, carrying himself like the crowd had followed him all the way home. Tonight, he smelled like a luxury spa and looked almost harmless.

Almost.

“You had a show tonight,” you began.

“We have a show every night.”

“How did it go?”

“Fine.” The answer came too fast.

You looked at the torn shirt again. “Looks like it.”

“The shirt had nothing to do with the show.”

“So something happened afterward.”

He dragged one hand through the water, sending bubbles sliding up the side of the tub. You waited. Silence usually annoyed him enough to start talking on his own. Tonight was no different.

“Max thinks I’m wasting my time,” David eventually muttered, his eyes landing on your face before tracking down your neck. “The band. Michael. All of it.”

“And what does Max want you to do instead?”

“What he always wants.” David looked up, his gaze heavy and dark. “Do you really want to spend your night talking about Max, baby?”

You rolled your eyes, though his words still managed to catch you off guard, a sudden spike of heat tracing down your spine.

“No,” you said.

“Good.”

You shook your head, leaning forward to dip two fingers into the water near his shoulder.

The heat made you jerk your hand back immediately.

“Holy shit, David!” you hissed. You shook out your fingers, staring at the bath in disbelief. The skin across your knuckles had already started turning red.

“How are you sitting in that? It’s practically boiling.”

David glanced down at the water.

“It’s fine.”

“It is absolutely not fine.”

Before you could move away, David’s wet, bare hand shot out of the water. His fingers wrapped around your thigh, pinning you to the edge of the tub.

You gasped. The contrast was a violent shock—the water on his skin was near boiling, but his actual hand, his flesh, was freezing cold against your bare leg. It felt like dry ice pressing into your skin.

His gaze dropped to watch your skin flush under his touch. “You’re dramatic,” he murmured, drawing a slow line up your thigh. “Get in.”

The invitation sounded much more like an order.

“I’m not getting into a boiling bath,” you said, your voice a little breathier than you wanted it to be. You reached down, twisting the faucet to take the edge off. David watched the water level rise slightly before you turned it off. “Turn around so I can change.”

His eyebrows lifted.

“I’m changing.”

“I know.”

“Turn around.”

Reluctantly, David listened, releasing your leg and presenting you with his back. You stripped quickly, leaving your clothes in a pile on the counter before stepping over the edge into the mountain of foam.

But the second your foot broke the surface, you stopped dead.

“What the hell?”

David frowned, looking back over his shoulder. “What?”

The water wasn't hot anymore. In the short time his hand had been on your thigh, David’s icy, unliving mass had completely leached the heat out of the water. It was freezing.

“David! You refrigerated the entire bath!”

David’s eyes narrowed as he turned back around. “Don’t.”

“You’ve been sitting here so long you turned it into an ice box!”

“You don’t have to get in,” he murmured, the corners of his mouth twitching as his eyes tracked the line of your collarbone. “But I know you’re going to.”

You ignored his comment and put your foot in again before you could change your mind, shivering as you lowered yourself into the opposite end of the tub. The tub was small; your foot pressed against his thigh while his knee rested beside your hip. His skin felt colder than the water.

"You can't stay away from me," he teased, and you felt the words more than heard them, low against your ear.  Angered by his smug expression, you gathered a handful of bubbles and threw them directly at his face. They landed across his cheek and nose.

David slowly blinked. The teasing dropped out of his face entirely.

“Come here.”

“I think I’m fine.”

“You have three seconds.”

You went to throw another handful, but David caught your ankle beneath the water. With a sudden, powerful jerk, he pulled you forward. A wave of water crashed over the side of the tub. You shrieked, sliding across the slick porcelain until you collided hard against his chest.

David’s hand moved from your ankle to your wrist, pinning it against the edge of the tub. His other hand came up to cup the back of your neck, his fingers tangling in your hair. His thumb rested directly over your racing pulse; the steady, frantic beat thudded against his cold palm.

“You’re shivering,” he murmured, his face inches from yours.

“Because you stole all the heat,” you whispered, your pulse jumping hard enough that you were sure he could feel it under his palm.

“Let me give some back.”

David leaned in, his lips brushing against yours first—a freezing contrast to the warmth of your skin. You gasped at the cold shock of it, and he used the moment to deepen the kiss. He released your wrist, his hand sliding down to grip your waist and pull you completely into his lap, his solid chest pressing unyieldingly against yours. You wrapped your arms around his neck, pulling him closer as he bit your lower lip just enough to make you sigh into his mouth. The kiss grew slower, heavier, melting the chill between you until your skin tingled. He tasted of rainwater and the sharp, copper sting of iron—faint, but unmistakable beneath the sweet mask of the lavender. 

When he finally pulled back, his breaths were shallow. A faint, unnatural flush of life had actually risen to his cheeks from the sheer heat of your skin. He returned his grip to your wrist, thumb tracing your pulse point again.

It was then that the pieces finally clicked in your head: the scalding hot water, the bath over the ocean. Why he had stayed here instead of choosing to bring you back to the cave.

“You were trying to warm yourself up,” you whispered gently, “before I got home. That’s why the water was so hot.”

His thumb paused against your wrist. “I was covered in blood.”

“You could’ve cleaned off anywhere.”

“I wanted a bath.”

“You don’t take baths.”

David released your waist, deflating just enough that you knew you'd hit the mark. “You complain when I’m cold.”

You blinked, your brows pulling together. “I do not.”

“You move away.” David leaned back against the tub, looking somewhere over your shoulder.

You thought about the mornings you woke up on the opposite side of the bed. It happened almost every time he stayed over: you always fell asleep close to him, but sometime during the night, your body would subconsciously drift toward the warmer side of the mattress. David had never said anything. Apparently, he had still noticed.

“You took a bath so I wouldn’t push you away.”

He didn't answer right away. When he did, his voice had gone flat. "I took a bath because I had blood in my hair."

“You used lavender bubble bath to make yourself warm enough to cuddle.”

David’s eyes snapped back to yours. “Choose your next words carefully, angel.”

You reached up, brushing a wet strand of hair away from his face. “I love that you wanted me close.” Before he could respond, you leaned forward to press a soft, lingering kiss to his jawline, right over the faint trace of dried blood. “Turn around. Let me wash your hair before we both freeze to death.” 

David hesitated, then sighed, shifting so his back faced you again. You picked up the plastic cup by the faucet, filling it with water and pouring it carefully over his head. The first stream ran pink down his neck. 

“Was it Max?” you asked, working your fingers through the damp strands.

“No.”

“...But you argued with him?”

You worked through another section of hair. For a while, David said nothing. Then he sighed.

“He thinks I’m taking too long with Michael. That the band’s making me careless.” David’s mouth tightened. “He thinks the boys need discipline.” 

“He likes that word.”

David glanced over his shoulder. “Exactly. And he’s…fixated on you.”

Your fingers stilled in his hair for a fraction of a second. “Fixated how?”

David went quiet for a second too long. “He’s been watching us. He likes how you take care of things. He thinks you're soft…loving.” David let out a low, rough hiss of a laugh, though there was zero humor in it. “He thinks a savage house like ours needs a heart. He told me you’d make the perfect baby of the family, once we fix that pulse of yours.”

The baby of the family.

The words hung heavily in the steam, and your arms prickled with goosebumps that had nothing to do with the cold bathwater. You had met Max at the video store months ago. He had approached you with a warm smile and introduced himself as David’s adoptive father, sounding more like an exhausted suburban parent than anything remotely dangerous. According to him, David was a good kid going through a rebellious phase. The cave, the band, the leather—none of it was supposed to last forever.

After that came the dinners.

Max always insisted on hosting. He remembered things you mentioned once, bought you gifts you never asked for, and asked about your future as though he expected to be part of it. Sometimes, one of the boys would appear outside your work or follow you home and claim they had simply been nearby. Max called it looking out for you.

He had never had a daughter before.

Apparently, he liked the idea.

You worked the last of the blood from David's hair. "And what do you think?" you asked, voice soft.

David’s shoulders tensed beneath your hands. “I think he needs to stay out of it.” He glanced back at you, voice dropping. “He doesn’t get to decide what happens to you.”

You poured another cup of water, rinsing the last of the blood away until the water ran completely clear, and pulled the plug. “You could’ve called,” you said.

“And said what?”

“That you didn’t want to go back to the cave.”

“I can go wherever I want.”

“You know what I mean. The boys would’ve asked questions.”

“They know better.”

“They still would’ve noticed.”

He turned enough to glance at you over his shoulder. “And you didn’t?”

“I always notice.”

Your fingers remained against his shoulder, tracing absentmindedly over the cold skin at the base of his neck. David’s head tipped back against the edge of the tub. His attention dropped toward your hand.

“Good,” he mumbled. His hand closed around your wrist before you could pull away. “Let me know when you’re done playing with the soap.” His thumb moved once against your pulse. “Then we can do this properly.”

You didn’t really know what to say to that. David turned back around before you could figure it out.

By the time you finally drained the tub, the water had become unbearable. You climbed out first and wrapped yourself in a towel. David stayed where he was until most of the water had disappeared, staring down as the last of the bubbles circled the drain. His plan had failed completely. Any warmth the bath had given him was already gone.

You dried off and changed in the bedroom, eventually convincing him to finally get up and track down a spare pair of black pants he’d left behind weeks ago.

When you climbed into bed, David was still standing beside the window, watching the rain run down the glass. 

“Aren’t you coming?”

He looked back. “I don't want to freeze you out of your own bed.”

You lifted the heavy comforter in response. The mattress dipped as he slid in beside you. Neither of you said anything.  But as sleep finally began to pull at you, you didn't drift away to the warm side of the mattress.

Instead, you reached across the gap, caught his cold wrist, and pulled his arm around your waist. You backed up until your spine was pressed against his chest, absorbing the chill of him without a second thought.

David went completely still. Then, his arm tightened around you, pulling you securely against him. His mouth brushed the warm skin at the back of your neck.

“Go to sleep, baby,” he whispered.

When you woke the next morning, David was gone.

His clothing had disappeared from the bathroom floor. The water had been cleaned up, though one of your towels was missing. So was your spare key.

None of that surprised you. The brand-new, twelve-dollar bottle of bubble bath sitting on the bathroom counter did.

Vanilla.

A small piece of paper was tucked underneath it. In messy, jagged handwriting, it read:

Lavender was terrible.

You turned it over. A second line had been written on the back.

Keep the water hot tonight.

Gangle seemed to catch the weight of her own words a second too late, her ribbons twisting tighter together. “I mean—”

“It’s okay,” Ragatha insisted.

It didn’t sound okay. Pomni shifted the empty box against her chest and looked past them, staring into the room.

She had only seen it once before, briefly, through a haze of pure panic, terrible lighting, and the awful glitching shape of something that had technically still been Kaufmo. The details had blurred afterward, swallowed by the noise of her first day in the circus. Now, with everyone standing quietly in the doorway, the room had nowhere to hide its mess.

The word EXIT covered the walls.

It was a manic crawl of red—dragged across the wallpaper, scratched into the molding, painted over picture frames, and squeezed into corners where you’d miss it unless you looked closely. Some of the words overlapped until they were just thick, angry blots. Others were written so small they looked like tiny red stitches from across the room. One had been carved into the side of the desk, deep enough that the wood had splintered around the margins.

An overturned chair lay near the bed. Drawers hung open, spilling old stationery and loose papers into a corner where the mattress blankets had been kicked into a tangled heap. A rubber chicken sat on the floor, missing an eye. On the desk, several framed photographs had been turned facedown on purpose.

Pomni stared at those a second too long before forcing her eyes away. She was quickly learning to look away from things like that.

Ragatha stepped into the room first.

The silence didn't break so much as it blended into the sound of moving furniture. Ragatha crouched near the window, carefully gathering pieces of broken glass. Zooble kicked a tipped-over stool out of the doorway so no one would trip over it. Gangle picked up the one-eyed rubber chicken, hesitated, and then placed it into a box with the kind of fragile care you'd give a sick pet.

Pomni stayed rooted to the threshold. She felt too new to touch anything.

Even with the room torn apart, everyone seemed to know the exact geography of Kaufmo's breakdown. They knew what objects deserved caution, what could be thrown away, and what had to be handled like it might bruise.

Pomni knew almost nothing about him. She knew his name, and she knew the strained, hollow way the others said it now. She knew the monstrous shape he’d become when they first found him abstracted, before he was locked away in the cellar forever. She knew that sometimes Ragatha looked at his door like she owed it an apology.

That wasn’t the same as knowing a person.

“Pomni?”

She blinked, flinching slightly. Ragatha was looking up from the window, a handful of glass cupped in her palm. Her expression softened. “You don’t have to be in here if it’s too much.”

“No,” Pomni blurted, scrambling to cover her hesitation. “No, I can help. I’m fine.”

Jax snorted from the corner.

He was sitting on the edge of Kaufmo’s desk like he’d been dragged there by his ears, one leg swinging lazily, his other foot propped against a trash can. He hadn’t picked up a single thing. As far as Pomni could tell, his only contribution was staring at the walls as though he personally resented them for existing.

“Convincing,” he snickered.

Pomni’s grip tightened around the box again before she caught herself. “I said I’m fine.”

“Yeah, and I said convincing.” His grin widened, sharp and empty. “Look at us both lying before lunch.”

“Jax,” Ragatha warned.

“What? I’m participating.” He held up his hands defensively.

Zooble turned around slowly. “You’re sitting on the desk.”

“Desk looked lonely.”

“It’s furniture.”

“Everybody needs somebody, Zooble.”

Gangle made a tiny, wet sound that fell apart before it could become a laugh. It made the air in the room feel heavier. Jax’s grin wavered just enough for Pomni to catch the quick lapse. He looked down, nudging a little wind-up cymbal clown on the floor with his foot.

He watched it roll for a second, then kicked it under the desk, out of sight.

Pomni finally stepped inside. The floorboards creaked beneath her shoes—though she was fairly certain circus floors only creaked when it was dramatically inconvenient. She knelt by a pile of papers scattered near the bed, balancing the box on her knees.

Most of the pages were just variations of the same word. Exit. Exit. Exit. Some were written in frantic, bleeding marker; others had been traced over so many times the ink had smudged into a thick, shiny mess.

Near the bottom of the stack, she uncovered a page with only one word written in the center:

PLEASE.

Pomni pulled her hand back. Her chest felt tight. Everyone knew Kaufmo had been looking for a way out—it was one of those facts they all carried around in silence, careful not to bump into it—but seeing it written like that felt different.

She looked over her shoulder to see if anyone was watching, but Ragatha was busy transferring glass to a bin, Zooble was wrestling with a stuck drawer, and Gangle was sorting through juggling balls with intense, tearful focus.

Pomni quickly folded the paper and slipped it under the very bottom of the pile. She didn’t know if it was the right thing to do, but she was starting to suspect there wasn’t a right thing anyway.

A tall shadow fell over the papers.

Kinger was standing right beside her. He had been quiet all morning, or at least as quiet as he ever got, having spent the first ten minutes mumbling about the load-bearing properties of dust before drifting into the center of the room. Now, his eyes were fixed entirely on the mess of papers.

Pomni hesitated. “Um. Are these… do we keep them?”

Kinger didn’t answer right away. His hands twitched at his sides. Then, with an unexpected amount of care, he crouched down and picked up one of the scratched-out pages between two fingers.

“Most things are kept,” he spoke quietly.

Pomni waited for the punchline or the sudden shift into nonsense, but neither came. “I mean… should we put them in the box?”

Kinger studied the paper, staring at the word EXIT like it might rearrange itself if he watched it long enough. “I don’t think he wanted to keep needing them,” he admitted.

Pomni looked at Kinger closely. The usual fog in his voice was gone. For a brief, strange second, he sounded entirely present.

Before she could think of what to say, a loud POP rattled the windowpanes.

Everyone jumped. Caine suddenly hovered upside down over the bed, sporting a black bow tie and a tiny black top hat with a funeral veil.

Nobody moved. Zooble stared at him for three full seconds before saying, “No.”

Caine blinked his giant eyeballs. “You don’t even know what I’m going to say!”

“I can feel it in my joints. Leave.”

Ragatha stood up so fast she nearly dropped her container. “Caine, please, now really isn’t the time.”

“Of course, of course!” The digital ringmaster spun upright, lowering himself until his shoes brushed the carpet. He dropped his voice into what was clearly meant to be a respectful tone, though it really just sounded like a game show host trying to read a eulogy. “I merely wished to commend your brave and deeply moving efforts to organize the interior distress left behind by our dearly abstracted—”

“Caine,” Ragatha snapped.

He cut himself off, registering the look on her face. He offered a much smaller, strained smile. “Right. Too soon.”

From the desk, Jax’s eyes narrowed. “Look at that. The teeth can learn.”

Caine clasped his hands behind his back, visibly struggling to keep himself from doing a trick. “I only meant to say that I am here should anyone require assistance processing this high-concept environmental storytelling!”

The quiet that followed was brutal. Caine’s smile gave a tiny, anxious twitch.

Zooble turned slowly to Ragatha. “Can I hit him with the chair?”

“No.”

“A small chair.”

“Zooble, no.”

“It’s what Kaufmo would’ve wanted.”

The joke died the second it left Zooble’s mouth. A heavy silence hit the room, and even Jax's grin vanished entirely.

A sharp, digital whine buzzed from Caine’s teeth, and for a split second, his top hat glitched into static. His eyes darted toward the pile of papers in Pomni's hands, pupils twitching as they tried to lock onto something else. “Well! We certainly can't have this kind of dreary atmosphere clouding up a perfectly good morning!” Caine’s voice boomed, though it lacked its usual bounce. “Let’s adjust the ambiance, shall we?”

He snapped his fingers, and in an instant, the room vanished into total pitch blackness. Gangle shrieked as something wooden clattered loudly against the floor. Pomni jerked backward, banging her shoulder against the frame of Kaufmo's bed.

Zooble let out a sharp curse, followed immediately by a loud, cheerful cartoon HONK from the ceiling's censor.

“Sorry,” Zooble halfheartedly muttered into the dark, sounding entirely unapologetic.

“Caine,” Ragatha called out, her voice rigid with warning.

“Nothing to see here, quite literally!” Caine’s voice rang out from somewhere near the ceiling, sounding increasingly defensive. “The dormitory hall is just…undergoing some routine, mandatory aesthetic adjustments! After all, the circus requires a certain level of mandatory whimsy to function properly, my shadow-dwelling spectators!”

“That sounds an awful lot like you panicked and pulled the plug,” Jax’s voice oozed mockery.

“I am merely preserving the fun!” With a cartoonish sound effect, the weight of Caine’s presence vanished from the ceiling.

The room went dead quiet.

Pomni had noticed the silence in the circus before, but it felt worse in the dark. In the real world, rooms always had something underneath them: the faint whistle of an AC unit, or distant cars passing outside, or just that soft, breathing sound a house makes when it’s dark.

The circus had none of that.

When a sound ended, it was gone. No echo carried it into the corners. No air seemed to hold it for even a second longer. Gangle’s startled breath disappeared almost as soon as Pomni heard it, the sound cut short as the room instantly swallowed it up.

It was an artificial, fake kind of silence that made Pomni’s skin crawl. It was a computer's version of quiet, completely lacking the warmth of reality.

She sat frozen on the floor, one hand flat against the bare wood while her other fingers twitched against the edges of Kaufmo's papers. The pitch blackness felt heavy, crowding in around her until her chest constricted and her breath arrived in shallow, shaky hitches. Even with her eyes wide open, staring into the absolute nothing of the room, she couldn’t escape them—hundreds of harsh, red EXITs, burning through the dark and staring right back at her.

Someone shifted right next to her. Pomni stiffened.

“Easy,” Kinger whispered.

She turned her head as the door creaked open, swinging inward just a few inches.

In the faint, dull red light leaking in from the hallway, she could just make out the pale outline of his robe. Kinger stood in the narrow opening, his mismatched, wide eyes catching the light as he stared blankly ahead.

“Oh,” she breathed, relaxing her shoulders just a fraction. “It’s you.”

“Yes,” Kinger said. He paused, his voice barely carrying in the dead air. “I’m fairly certain.”

Under any other circumstances, Pomni might have laughed. Instead, she let out a shaky breath, her fingertips still resting against the floor.

Across the bedroom, the others were still grouped together in the shadows. Kinger pressed the door open further, allowing the red glow to catch them, too. Ragatha and Zooble were quietly trying to calm Gangle down after Caine's sudden disappearance, while Jax leaned against the wall, already cracking another sharp, bored joke.

Kinger leaned in a little closer toward Pomni, dropping his voice. “You don’t have to stay in here if the room is too crowded.”

Pomni looked past him, at the dim silhouettes of the other four huddled near the corner. “We can't really help it, Kinger. We might as well stay in here until the lights come back.”

“No, not them.” Kinger tilted his head toward the wall, staring blankly into the dark corner where the bed sat. “Kaufmo. Some rooms hold onto people after they're gone. It gets full of... everything they left behind. It makes it hard to breathe.”

Pomni’s fingers brushed the folded paper hidden under the stack. Please.

“Right,” she whispered.

Kinger stood up, his robes rustling amid the quiet. “Come along, then.”

“What? Where?”

“I know a room that's actually empty.”

He started toward the door before she could even process the offer. Following Kinger into a dark corridor during a power outage was objectively a terrible idea, but staying in Kaufmo's room with a thousand invisible cries for help felt significantly worse. Pomni scrambled to her feet and hurried after him.

The hallway was dark, but not completely blind. Red emergency bulbs glowed along the floor, casting long, warped shadows up the walls. The rows of doors stretched out ahead of them.

From behind, the bickering in Kaufmo's room faded.

“I just... I still can’t believe it,” Ragatha's voice was quivering, muffled by the distance. “Even after…everything, it still just feels like he's going to walk through the door with another terrible joke.”

“Well, the joke's on us, dollface,” Jax’s voice carried, followed by a sharp clack that echoed down the hall. He must have kicked another belonging of Kaufmo’s under the desk. “We’re the ones moping in his dark room.”

Pomni peeked back at the dark square of the open doorway. Then Kinger turned a corner, and the sound cut off instantly, swallowed by the clean, artificial silence of the circus corridors.

Kinger moved steadily ahead. Even after their adventure in the dark and everything he’d told her about Queenie, Pomni still wasn’t used to seeing him like this. He wasn’t stopping to swat at imaginary bugs or rambling about something off-topic. He just walked, keeping Pomni close on his heels.

“Where are we going?” Pomni asked, keeping her voice low.

“To Queenie’s room.”

The answer came so smoothly that Pomni nearly tripped over her own feet. “Oh,” she managed.

Kinger’s pace slowed by a fraction. “She liked quiet places,” he added after a moment. “Or, maybe, she knew that I liked them. I mix those up sometimes.”

Pomni looked at him. Kinger’s expression was a blank slate, but his voice remained steady. The darkness seemed to hold him together in a way the bright circus lights never did.

She swallowed hard, staring at the back of his robe. “Kinger,” she ventured, “...are you sure it’s…okay? For me to go in there with you?”

Pomni didn't know how to phrase it. Allowed felt wrong for a place that no longer belonged to someone, but she didn't want to intrude on the one piece of his past he still protected.

Kinger didn’t seem bothered by the question, though. He just hummed softly, as if sorting through a mental filing cabinet, before looking back at her. “It’s better than being alone in the dark,” he affirmed.

Pomni looked down at the floor. “Right.”

As they kept walking, moving deeper into the hall, the doors began to change. Near the main lobby, the rooms belonged to the people she knew; out here, the icons grew unfamiliar. Most had been aggressively crossed out with thick red Xs. Others had faded away entirely, or were marked with smooth, blank mannequin heads where a face should have been.

Kinger passed the crossed-out doors with the casual familiarity of someone walking a well-worn path through a graveyard.

Then, he stopped.

Pomni nearly ran straight into his back. She looked past his shoulder, expecting to see Queenie’s door. What she saw instead was completely different.

The crossed-out rooms were bad enough, but at least they looked official. This looked…personal, to say the least. Someone had nailed thick, heavy wooden planks across the door by hand. Badly. One stretched crooked from the top hinge to the opposite corner, and another had split down the middle where too many nails had been hammered in too close together.

Pomni stared at the center of the door. There was no icon. Just a pale shadow where one had been forcibly pried away.

“Oh,” Kinger murmured. “Not this one.”

“...whose room is this?”

Kinger’s head tilted toward the boards. “She doesn’t like visitors when she’s upset.”

The pronouns caught in Pomni's ears. She. Not it.

Her mind raced, beyond the boards, past the missing icon. Someone locked away in their room for days, or weeks, or longer. Someone the others just didn't talk about.

She remembered her own first night—the suffocating panic, the desperate need to find just one person who would look her in the eye and admit how terrifying this all was. Not Ragatha’s forced optimism, not Caine’s madness, and not Jax’s detachment. Just real, ugly understanding.

Someone.

Kinger turned away before she could ask anything else. “Queenie’s room is over here.” Across the hall, Kinger had stopped in front of another door. Its icon was faded beneath a thick red X, but he touched the handle with a gentleness that made Pomni feel suddenly out of place.

He looked back at her. “You can come in when you’re ready.”

Pomni opened her mouth. No sound came out.

Kinger slipped into Queenie’s room and left the door cracked behind him, leaving Pomni lingering in the hallway. She knew she should follow him. He had invited her, and this was clearly something important, something she probably had no right standing outside of.

But the boarded door pulled her attention anyway.

Pomni stepped closer before she could talk herself out of it. The boards were rough beneath her fingertips, splinters catching against her glove. One nail near the center had been bent sideways and flattened hard, like whoever put it there had just kept hammering it in a blind rage.

She lifted her hand, then paused.

This was stupid. Obviously stupid. If someone were actually in there, everyone would have said something. Someone would have said something by now. Probably.

Pomni knocked anyway.

The sound was swallowed by the hallway. Three small taps against the wood, gone almost as soon as they happened.

She waited, her heart hammering against her ribs. It was just a door. A boarded-up piece of programming in a digital hallway. There was no reason to stand there staring at a piece of wood.

Nothing moved on the other side.

Still, Pomni knocked again, a little louder this time. “Hello?” The word sounded ridiculous in the dark. She glanced once toward Queenie’s cracked door, but Kinger did not come back out.

Pomni leaned closer to the boards.

“My name is Pomni,” she tried, then immediately winced. “Which you probably know. Unless nobody told you, which would be weird, but also kind of normal here, so…”

She shut her eyes. Great. Perfect. Very normal first impression on the maybe-real, maybe-not, definitely-upset stranger behind the forbidden door.

Pomni swallowed and tried again. “Kinger said you don’t like visitors when you’re upset.” Her fingers stayed against the edge of one board. “I don’t either.”

That part came out before she could stop it. The hallway stayed silent.

Pomni stared at where the icon should have been.

“If you’re in there,” she said, quieter now, “I just wanted to ask…if you know something I don’t.”

Nothing. Pomni still waited.

Then the lights snapped back on.

Color hit the hallway all at once, too bright after the dark. Pomni flinched away from the door, hand jerking back to her chest.

Across the hall, Queenie’s door opened wider.

Kinger stumbled out, one hand braced against the frame as he blinked rapidly at the sudden light.

“Oh dear,” he said, voice wobbling back into its usual scattered shape. “Was I visiting or being visited?”

Pomni turned toward him. Before she could answer, another voice cut in from down the hall.

“Wow.”

Pomni froze.

Jax stood several doors away, half-turned away from Kaufmo’s room. His hands were shoved into his pockets, and his signature grin was already in place.

It did not reach his eyes.

“Didn’t even take you a week to start pokin’ around the creepy hallway,” he said, sauntering toward them. “That’s gotta be a record.”

Pomni pulled herself  fully away from the boards. “I wasn’t poking around.”

“No?” Jax tilted his head. “So what was that, a wellness check?”

Kinger blinked, looking between them. “Those are very important.”

Jax ignored him. His attention slid past Pomni and landed on the boarded door.

The change was immediate. The bored, lazy edge dropped from his face, leaving something stiff and cold underneath. His eyes were fixed on the spot where the icon should have been.

Pomni stared.

His gaze snapped back to her. “What?” he asked, smugness sliding back into place as if nothing had happened. It was a total shutdown; the change disappeared so fast that Pomni almost thought she had imagined it.

Her mouth went dry. “Kinger said someone was in there.”

Kinger looked confused. “Did I?”

Jax let out a short, harsh laugh. “Kinger says a lot of things, kid. Last week, he tried to file a restraining order against a soup spoon.”

“The spoon was an unregistered liquid-handler,” Kinger muttered. “It lacked proper documentation.”

Pomni didn’t look away from Jax. “He said she doesn’t like visitors when she’s upset.”

Jax’s grin dropped.

There was no transition. One second, he looked smug. The next, his face had gone flat, eyes fixed on the door.

Jax took two long steps forward, closing the distance between them. “Move.”

“...What?”

“You heard me. Move.”

The hallway suddenly felt incredibly small. Pomni moved before she could decide whether she wanted to. One step back, then another, until she was no longer standing in front of the boards.

Jax watched her until she was clear of the planks, then turned his back to her and stared at the missing icon. His hand flexed once at his side, fingers curling into his palm before loosening again. He stared at the empty patch where the icon should have been, jaw working around something he did not say.

Pomni should have left it there.

She knew that.

Every useful instinct she had developed since arriving in the circus told her to follow Kinger, go back to Kaufmo’s room, or at least stop asking questions while Jax looked like that.

Instead, she heard herself ask, “Is someone in there?”

“No.”

“Then why is it boarded shut?”

Jax did not look at her. “Because doors work better when people don’t open them.”

“That doesn’t make any sense!”

“Great.” His voice snapped back into its usual sarcastic cadence as he turned around. “You’re adjusting to the circus already.”

His eyes dropped to her hands, noting the tremor in her fingers. His tone sharpened into something genuinely mean. “Whatever little rescue mission you’re building in that scrambled head of yours, drop it.”

“I wasn’t—”

“You were knocking on a boarded door in the dark, Pomni.” He leaned in, his grin returning in a way that felt equally taunting as it did uncanny. “What were you hoping for? A secret exit? A new best friend? Someone even more pathetic than you to compare notes with?”

“Jax.”

Kinger’s voice was quiet.

Jax’s head snapped toward him. “What?”

Kinger flinched slightly, but his eyes drifted back to the wooden planks. For a brief moment, the fog cleared from his face entirely.

“Oh,” Kinger murmured softly. “We shouldn’t wake her.”

The silence returned, thick and suffocating. Jax’s face went through a violent flash of expressions—something raw and ugly that he slammed a lid on almost instantly. “She’s not sleeping,” he said, his voice entirely flat.

Kinger pulled his hands up to his chest, his gaze wandering again. “Right,” he whispered, though he didn’t sound like he understood at all.

Jax looked away first, shoving his hands back into his pockets and shaking his head. “Go back to Kaufmo’s room,” he muttered, nodding vaguely down the hall. “Plenty of fresh tragedy in there if you’re that desperate to collect some.”

Pomni said nothing.

A dozen angry retorts formed in her throat, but they all felt useless against him. She wanted to tell him she wasn't collecting anything; she wanted to scream at him for keeping secrets; she wanted to ask whose name belonged on that door just to see his posture break again.

Instead, she just stood there, silent.

Kinger touched her elbow gently with a trembling hand. “We were going to see Queenie,” he reminded her.

Jax’s expression flickered at the name, a minor twitch near his eye. “Yeah,” he spat out, turning back toward the boarded room. “Well. Maybe take the scenic route.”

“Come along, Pomni,” Kinger gave Jax a small nod before guiding Pomni past him.

She let him.

Caine’s voice started up somewhere around the corner, bright and sudden, followed by Zooble answering in a tone Pomni was starting to recognize as a warning. The words did not carry far, cutting off just as the hallway bent.

Pomni looked back before the turn.

Jax had stepped in front of the door.

He blocked most of the crooked boards from view, standing there like he could keep the whole thing hidden by being in the way. One hand had lifted toward the pale mark in the center. His fingers hovered just short of it, curled slightly, close enough to touch.

He stayed like that.

Pomni did not know who the room belonged to. But there had been someone there.

You had been there.

And everyone had gotten very good at looking away.

Pomni started taking the long way to breakfast.

At first, she told herself it was because she still got lost sometimes. The dorm hallways changed whenever they felt like it, and half of the circus looked like it had been designed by someone who had only heard of architecture through gossip.

By the second week, she stopped pretending.

The boarded door sat near the older end of the hall. Pomni passed it every morning with her eyes fixed straight ahead, then always ended up looking anyway.

The boards never moved.

No light ever slipped through the cracks. No voice answered when she slowed down. No quiet shuffle came from behind the door, no sign that someone was sitting on the other side, waiting for the hall to empty before breathing again.

Still, Pomni looked.

Once, she almost knocked again. She had already lifted her hand when a voice came from behind her.

“Bad idea.”

Pomni jumped hard enough to smack her knuckles against the board by accident. The sound vanished into the dead air.

She turned around to find Zooble standing several feet away, arms folded, expression flat.

“I wasn’t—”

“Sure.” Zooble glanced at the door. Their face did not change, but one of their mismatched hands twitched once at their side. “Word of advice? Don’t do whatever that is when Jax is around.”

Pomni pulled her hand close to her chest. “Do you know whose room this is?”

Zooble looked at her. Then they looked down the hall, toward the main foyer. “I know enough not to ask that out loud.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“No,” Zooble said. “It’s a warning.”

Pomni waited. Zooble let out a sharp, clicking sigh from somewhere in their neck joint. “Look, I didn’t know her, okay? Neither did Gangle. Not really. We got here after…”

Pomni’s pulse kicked strangely. “After what?”

Zooble looked away, their antennae dipping slightly as they let out a quiet, metallic hum. “Some things are better left unsaid,” they said, turning down the hall. “C'mon.”

Pomni stood there for a moment longer, staring at the door. Then she followed.

Breakfast was loud in the way the circus usually was when everyone was trying too hard.

Caine had apparently decided pancakes needed encouragement, so every stack on the table came with a tiny flag that said BELIEVE IN YOURSELF. Gangle’s had already tipped over into her syrup. Ragatha was helping her fish it out with a fork, patiently wiping the sticky syrup from the paper with a napkin before smoothing out the edges for her.

Jax sat at the far end of the table, picking marshmallows out of his cereal and dropping them onto the floor one by one. Pomni watched him do it for almost a full minute before asking, “Why?”

The rabbit didn’t look up, flicking a pink star with his thumb. “Preparation.”

“For what?”

“Caine’s gonna walk by here in five minutes,” Jax said, dropping a yellow moon right where the ringmaster usually landed. “Sugar makes his shoes glitch. If I get the pile thick enough, he’ll clip right through the floorboards.”

Zooble dropped into the chair across from him. “That explains so much.”

Ragatha gave them both a tired look. “Can we please have one normal breakfast?”

“No,” Jax and Zooble blurted out at the same time.

At that same moment, Jax flicked another marshmallow toward the floor, but his thumb slipped. The pink star shot across the table, charting a perfect arc before bouncing directly off the wooden cross on top of Kinger’s head with a tiny tap.

Kinger didn't even flinch, his giant eyes just tracking the marshmallow as it tumbled into his lap.

Gangle let out a small sound into her napkin—an actual laugh this time—and even Ragatha hid a smile behind her coffee mug. Pomni found herself relaxing, breakfast feeling almost normal for once.

Kinger reached across the table and picked up the last piece of bacon.

Jax’s hand shot out immediately, fork pointed like a weapon. “Touch that and lose the wrist, old man.” The threat was empty, delivered with the same lazy grin Jax always used. Kinger paused, bacon held delicately between two trembling fingers.

“Oh,” he hummed. His eyes drifted past Jax, steering away from the joke entirely as they locked onto the empty chair beside Ragatha.

Pomni knew that chair. On her very first day, she had tried to pull it out, only for Jax to yank it right from under her, sending her crashing to the floor while he cackled. At the time, she’d thought it was just him being a jerk. But looking at it now, she realized the truth—it was pulled in close enough to the table to be used, but it was strictly off-limits. Everyone knew it.

Kinger placed the bacon carefully on the edge of the empty plate in front of it.

“She’ll want this one,” he said softly. “She likes crispy.”

The warmth instantly vanished from the room.

Pomni looked from the plate to Ragatha. Ragatha had gone completely still. Zooble’s eyes dropped straight to the table. The flag in Gangle’s pancakes was slowly sinking back into the syrup.

Jax stared at the bacon. His fork lowered.

Kinger smiled faintly, pleased with himself in a distant sort of way. “There. Much better.”

Pomni’s mouth felt dry. “She?”

Jax’s chair scraped back so hard it nearly tipped. Ragatha flinched. Pomni did too.

Jax did not look at her. He stared at Kinger, his trademark grin pulling into place, as if it had to be forced there by hand.

“Cute,” he said.

Kinger blinked. “Is it?”

“Real funny.” Jax picked up the piece of bacon from the empty plate and dropped it onto his own. “You workin’ on new stand-up material now, Kinger?”

Ragatha’s voice came out quiet. “Jax.”

He looked at her then. Whatever she had been about to say died almost immediately.

Kinger’s smile faded. His gaze wandered toward the plate again, confusion settling over him in slow layers. “I thought…” He trailed off, hands drawing closer to his chest. “Hm.”

Jax pushed away from the table. “Lost my appetite.”

“You barely ate,” Zooble muttered.

“Great observation.” Jax turned his grin on them. “Put it in your diary.” He shoved his bowl away, a perfect, simulated splash of milk hitting the ceramic rim. The digital cereal looked and smelled exactly like the real thing, but it left him completely hollow. Jax leaned back, lacing his long fingers behind his head and staring at the ceiling.

Then he left.

The dining hall stayed quiet after he was gone, but not for long. With comedic timing, Caine appeared just five minutes after Jax’s departure, stepped directly into Jax’s sticky marshmallow pile, and instantly locked up. His left leg began violently flashing neon pixels, his shoe clipping clean through the solid floorboards with a sharp, digital screech. "W-W-WELCOME TO THE—" Caine’s jaw detached completely, hovering three inches to the left while his entire body jittered at triple speed. Beside him, Bubble completely ignored the disaster, making loud, disgusting slurping noises through a straw.

Still, the table felt empty. Pomni looked back at the empty chair.

The piece of bacon was gone.

Later, Gangle found Pomni standing in the hallway again.

Pomni had not meant to end up there. That happened sometimes—she would leave one room trying to find another, and somehow her feet would take her past the boarded door as the circus had quietly added it to her daily routine.

Gangle stopped beside her, ribbon hands held close to her chest. “Hey,” she greeted Pomni, voice cracking slightly.

Pomni glanced at her. “Sorry.”

“For what?”

“I don’t know…looking, I guess.”

Gangle was quiet for a moment. Then she stepped a little closer, careful not to get too close to the boards. “I looked too,” she admitted.

Pomni turned toward her.

“When I first got here,” Gangle added, her comedy mask dipping. “Not because I was trying to be nosy or anything. It’s just… everyone acted so strange around it. And Jax was…well, Jax.”

That was enough of an explanation.

“Did you know her?” Pomni asked.

Gangle shook her head, then hesitated. “I don’t think so. I mean, maybe for a little while? Everything was confusing when I got here. Kaufmo was still around then, but he wasn’t really…” She twisted one ribbon around the other. “I don’t remember her face.”

Pomni stared at the pale mark in the center of the door, her voice dropping to a hollow whisper. “That sounds awful.”

“What does?”

“Not remembering.”

Gangle’s ribbons jerked. “I think that’s what everyone was trying to do,” she whispered back. “Forget.”

Pomni looked back at her, but Gangle seemed to regret speaking on the spot.

“I should go,” she said, her steps quick and nervous, retreating down the hall.

Pomni did not follow, opting to stay by the boarded door long after Gangle had disappeared.

A few more weeks passed after that. Pomni learned things in pieces.

The empty chair was not always at breakfast, but when it was, nobody touched it. Ragatha once started to pour coffee into an extra mug and stopped halfway through, hand hovering over the table until the coffee pot trembled in her grip. She smiled when Pomni noticed, then poured the excess into her own cup, even though it was already full.

Kinger asked, once, whether anyone had checked if “she” wanted to join the adventure. Jax threw a bowling ball through a stained-glass window before Caine could finish explaining the rules.

Nobody asked why.

Pomni stopped thinking there might be someone inside the room. But she did not stop thinking about the door.

Eventually, she asked Caine.

That was the worst idea, obviously. Almost every idea involving Caine turned out to be the worst idea if given enough time. They all looked hurt or shut down entirely whenever anyone got too close to the subject. Nobody wanted to touch it. They gave Pomni no choice.

So, Pomni waited until after an adventure, when the others had scattered. Caine was hovering near the main stage, attempting to convince a spotlight to stop crying.

She was still a good distance away when Caine spun toward her, a blur of motion that nearly sent his cane cracking into his own face. She had no idea how he’d even heard her.

“Pomni! My persistently perplexed little performer! To what do I owe the tremendous pleasure?”

She immediately regretted every choice that had brought her there. “I…uh, wanted to ask you something.”

“A human? Wanting to ask me a question? Wowie! SPLENDID! Questions are the foundation of curiosity, and curiosity is the foundation of approximately seven percent of our safest adventures!”

“That doesn’t make me feel better.”

“It wasn’t designed to!”

Pomni glanced toward the hallway. Caine followed her gaze. His smile stayed in place, but something in his eyes sharpened with interest. Pomni hated that.

“The boarded room,” she said.

Caine blinked. Several times, his eyelids made loud ‘popping’ sounds. “Oh,” he replied.

Pomni frowned. “You know which one I mean?”

“Of course! I know every square inch of my spectacular digital domain.” He lifted his cane proudly, then lowered it a bit. “Except for the rooms that move when I’m not looking. Those are being addressed.”

Pomni took one step closer. “Who did it belong to?”

Caine’s teeth clicked once. The sound was tiny, but in the circus silence, it landed heavily. “Well,” he started, pulling at his bow tie. “That is a rather complicated matter of participant privacy, archival sensitivity, and some very dramatic, unauthorized redecorating.”

Pomni’s stomach tightened. “Jax.”

“I did not say that!”

“You didn’t have to.”

Caine looked briefly delighted by the logic, then seemed to remember the topic and dimmed himself back down.

Pomni folded her arms. “Is she still in there?”

“Oh, goodness, no!” The answer came brightly. Too brightly.

Pomni felt something drop in her chest.

Caine noticed half a second too late, his smile freezing. “I only mean,” he continued, his voice dropping into a rare, quiet register, “the room is not currently occupied.”

Not currently occupied. The words felt uglier than gone.

“Then why does Kinger think she is?”

Caine clasped his hands together, his eyes floating slightly out of alignment as he thought. “Kinger’s relationship with chronological accuracy is somewhat… elastic.”

Pomni glared at him. He lowered his hands.

“She was important to him,” Caine said finally. Pomni did not look away. Caine glanced toward the hallway again, then back to her. “To…several participants.”

That was the closest anyone had come to saying anything directly.

Pomni looked toward the hallway again. For some reason, she thought of breakfast. She thought of the bacon Kinger had placed on an empty plate and the way Ragatha had frozen, the coffee pot still hovering in her hand. Everyone had looked anywhere but the door, as if even acknowledging it would make things worse.

She had wanted there to be someone behind it.

That felt stupid now. Not because she had been wrong, exactly. More because part of her had known better and reached for the idea anyway.

Caine tilted in midair, watching her a little too closely.

Pomni rubbed at her sleeve, shifting her weight under his gaze. “I just thought…” She stopped before the rest of the sentence could make her sound as desperate as she felt.

Caine, for once, did not immediately fill the silence. His cane hovered uselessly beside him. The stage light above them gave one faint, miserable flicker.

“...Thank you, Caine.”

Caine blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

“For telling me.” Her fingers tightened once around the end of her sleeve, then loosened. “Or…trying to.”

Caine’s expression shifted through several things much too quickly for Pomni to follow. Surprise, maybe. Confusion. Something almost pleased, though he seemed unsure what to do with it. His smile returned just as fast, this time smaller than usual. “Well. Yes. Naturally. As ringmaster, I am always happy to provide helpful and emotionally appropriate clarification.”

Pomni just looked at him.

The smile twitched. “...eventually,” he added.

Despite herself, Pomni let out a short breath that almost became a laugh. Caine brightened at the sound before he caught himself, hands clasping tightly behind his back as if he were physically restraining the urge to comment.

Pomni watched him struggle. The sheer effort of it disarmed her completely. Before she could think better of it, she crossed the distance and hugged him.

Caine went completely stiff. His cane dropped out of the air and hit the stage with a hollow clack.

Pomni almost pulled away immediately. The whole thing was awkward and probably too much, and she had no idea where to put her hands because Caine was all sharp angles and floating teeth and dramatics even when he was trying to be still.

Then, very carefully, Caine lowered himself enough that her arms no longer had to reach quite so high.

Pomni’s face warmed. “Sorry.”

“No, no.” His hands hovered uselessly near her shoulders, fingers spread like he was afraid of doing the wrong thing with them. “No need to apologize. This is, um…” He looked down at her, then at his own hands. Then, with the kind of concentration he usually reserved for conjuring entire nightmare landscapes, he patted her back once.

A little too hard.

Pomni huffed against him.

Caine froze. “Was that incorrect?”

“No,” she muttered, muffled. “Just weird.”

“Ah.” His shoulders relaxed slightly. “Excellent. I can work with weird.”

Pomni let go before the moment could become something that neither of them knew how to handle. Caine stayed lower than usual, watching her with his hands still half-raised.

“I don’t think you should bring it up,” she said.

Caine’s posture straightened. “Ah. Right. To Jax?”

“To anyone.” Pomni’s gaze drifted toward the hall. “Not unless they do first.”

Caine followed her eyes before he spoke again. “Is…that how grief works?” he asked.

Pomni looked back at him.

The question should have sounded ridiculous. Coming from Caine, it almost did. But his voice had lowered, and his hands were still hanging strangely at his sides. There was no confetti, no music cue, no sudden educational prop appearing between them.

Pomni swallowed. “I don’t really know how to explain it,” she admitted, looking down. “But humans... we can't just delete a bad feeling or paint over it with something bright. When something hurts, you have to let it hurt. Trying to turn it into a game or act like it’s not there just makes it feel even louder.”

Caine looked down at his cane. The stage around them stayed strangely still. Then he nodded once, small and careful. “I see.”

Pomni was not sure he did. Still, he was trying. That counted for more than she wanted it to.

She stepped back, suddenly aware of how tired she felt. “I’m…uh, going to go now.”

“Of course,” Caine’s usual boom returned to his voice. “Yes. Very good. Walking away from emotionally difficult conversations is a time-honored tradition among performers.”

Pomni paused.

Caine’s eyes widened slightly, as if he had only just heard himself. “...That was meant to be supportive.”

“I know.”

The answer surprised both of them.

Pomni turned before he could say anything else. By the time Pomni reached the hallway, she knew enough to stop looking for movement behind the boards. There was no one waiting inside that room. There had been, once.

For now, that had to be enough.

For the next few weeks, Pomni forgot about the door entirely.

Mostly. That was the best she could do.

The circus made forgetting easy when you wanted to. Caine sent them on an adventure involving sentient teacups and a court-mandated etiquette trial, followed by a talent show judged by three identical versions of Bubble, each wearing a powdered wig. At some point, Zooble lost an arm in the ball pit and simply refused to retrieve it on principle.

Life, or whatever this counted as, kept moving. Breakfast happened. Adventures happened. Jax said something horrible while Ragatha silently carried the moral weight of the entire room.

The boarded door stayed where it was. Pomni stopped taking the long way on purpose.

Then, one afternoon, Kinger found her in the hallway outside the main stage and held out his hand. “I believe this belongs to a door,” he said.

A small icon plate rested in his palm. It was dusty around the edges, the image scuffed badly enough that Pomni could not make out the design at first glance. Still, she knew what it was.

Her throat tightened. “Kinger, where did you get that?”

He looked at the icon, then back at her. “In my room. It was under the pillow fort. Very suspicious place for a door icon to hide.”

Pomni reached for it, then stopped. “...Can I?”

“Oh, certainly.” He dropped it into her hands with a gentleness that made the whole thing worse. “I was keeping it safe.”

The plate was lighter than she expected. Pomni turned it over, brushing her thumb once across the back. There were scratches near the edge, rough and uneven, the clear mark of someone using too much force to take it down.

She looked up at Kinger. His eyes had drifted somewhere over her shoulder, hands moving absently at his chest.

“Why did you keep it?” Pomni asked.

Kinger blinked, looking briefly confused by the question before his gaze dropped back to the metal. “Well,” he said softly, “it seemed important.”

Pomni closed her fingers around the plate. She waited for him to say something else—something about Queenie, or the terrifying legal status of soup spoons. But Kinger only stood there, looking at her hand with the strange, quiet patience he usually displayed in the dark.

The older hallway looked the same when they reached it: bright and empty. Kinger followed a few paces behind her, humming under his breath.

The boarded door waited near the end. The boards were still crooked, and the pale spot in the center still looked freshly wrong, even after all this time. Pomni stepped closer and pressed the icon against the blank patch.

A small, digital click sounded as it settled into place. Pomni held her hand there after it stuck, palm flat against the plate.

Then, a voice behind them sneered, “You have got to be kidding me.”

Pomni went still. Jax stood a few doors down, his grin nowhere to be found.

Kinger turned. “Oh, hi, Jax.”

Jax did not look at him. His eyes stayed locked on Pomni’s hand. “Take it off,” he demanded.

Pomni’s fingers curled slightly against the plate. “No.”

“...No?”

Every part of Pomni knew what Jax looked like right before he got mean enough to make someone regret having a nervous system, but she stayed where she was. “No,” she repeated.

Jax walked toward her. Slowly. “That’s cute. Really. Love the sudden confidence.” His eyes flicked once to the door, his mouth tightening before the smile came back wrong. “But you don’t know what you’re touching. You don’t know anything about her.”

The hallway around them had gone quiet in that awful circus way. There was no echo—only Jax’s voice and the tiny digital buzz of the icon trying to stay attached.

“You’re right,” Pomni said.

That seemed to throw him off more than arguing would have. “I didn’t know her,” Pomni continued, keeping her hand pressed against the plate. “But I know she was here.”

The words landed heavily. A twitch frayed the edge of Jax's eye, his mouth pressing flatter. His hand lifted, as if he were going to rip the icon straight off the wood and throw it somewhere she would never find it again. Pomni braced herself.

Kinger stepped closer, his eyes wide and terribly gentle as he looked at the door. “Oh,” he murmured softly. “There she is.”

No one moved. Jax’s hand hovered inches from the icon, fingers curling. For a second, Pomni thought he was still going to tear it down and leave the door empty. Nameless. Easier to hate.

Instead, his palm slammed against the wood beside the plate. Hard.

The boards creaked under his weight. Kinger smiled faintly at the door. “I wondered where she went.”

Jax shut his eyes, just briefly. When he opened them, his face had gone tight in a way Pomni did not know how to look at.

“Yeah,” he said, the word coming out rough.

He reached up. Pomni stepped back on instinct, but Jax didn't damage it. He shifted the edge with careful, irritated precision, fixing the slight tilt until the plate lined up exactly with the pale mark underneath. His hand stayed there afterward.

Kinger looked pleased. “Much better.”

Jax let out a sound that could have been a laugh on a better day. “Sure.”

Footsteps sounded from the bend in the hall. Ragatha appeared first, with Gangle half-hidden behind her and Zooble slowing down the second they saw the group. Nobody asked what happened.

Ragatha’s hand rose to her mouth. Gangle made a tiny sound and pressed closer to Zooble’s side. Jax stepped back, just enough for the icon to be visible. His eyes swept across all of them, daring someone to say the wrong thing. No one did. For once, nobody tried to smooth it over.

The boards were still there. Whatever grief lived behind them was not fixed or made easier by a piece of metal returned to its place. Still, the empty space was gone.

Jax shoved both hands into his pockets and looked away first. “Touch it,” he called out, “and I’m breaking your fingers.”

Zooble blinked. “Was that directed at all of us, or…?”

“Use your imagination.” Jax started down the hall before anyone could see too much of his face. He passed Pomni without looking at her, his shoulder brushing hers just barely, then stopped.

“Pomni.”

She turned. Jax kept his back to her.

“Don’t make a habit of touching things that aren’t yours.”

Pomni looked at the door, then at him. “...I won’t.”

Jax nodded once, small enough that she almost missed it, and kept walking.

After a while, the others drifted away too. Ragatha lingered the longest, her fingers brushing the edge of the doorframe once before she turned back toward the main hall.

Eventually, the hallway emptied. The door remained. Still boarded, still closed, but no longer blank.

a/n: surprise… fracture got a second part after all! seriously though, thank you guys for all the love. i was honestly shocked to see a sequel win the poll!

this one is a little different since it’s more pomni-centric and focuses a lot on the aftermath of reader rather than reader directly. i wanted it to feel like she was discovering an absence instead of being handed an explanation, so hopefully that came through.

also, in case you're wondering what inspired me to write such a happy, fun-filled, fluffy ending, just know that i had started writing a happy ending for this fic, then stumbled across a hazbin meme of alastor singing 'i've read all the good angst, surely there's so much more,' so....yeah!

as always, thank you so much for reading, and also as always, comments make my entire day <3

You glanced at the massive digital clock mounted near the stage. Then back at him.

"...I am seven minutes early."

"You are three minutes late."

"The gala doesn't start for another seven minutes."

Vox didn't even hesitate. "Which means you should've been here ten minutes ago."

The executive who had been pitching stopped entirely, his mouth half-open. The second looked between you and Vox, visibly confused. The third simply looked like he regretted spawning in Hell altogether.

You kept walking, the heels of your shoes clicking sharply against the marble. "So we're just making things up now? Is that a new Vees policy?"

"It isn't my fault you refuse to arrive on time." Vox sounded genuinely offended.

"I literally arrived early."

"Three. Minutes. Late."

The fact that he seemed completely serious somehow made it worse. You pinched the bridge of your nose. "That is a completely unhinged interpretation of time."

Vox looked away from you just long enough to acknowledge the increasingly uncomfortable businessmen surrounding him. "One moment," he told them, his tone clipped and dismissive.

Then he abandoned them. Completely.

The three executives watched the head of VoxTek walk away as if they’d just seen a glitch in the matrix. You watched them watch him, raising an eyebrow.

"That's rude," you spoke quietly as Vox closed the distance between you.

"They'll survive. Their stocks won't, but they will."

"...you just walked away from a business pitch?"

"I came over here," he corrected you smoothly, as if those were two entirely different concepts.

By the time Vox actually reached you, the absurd argument had settled into a comfortable rhythm.

That should have concerned you more than it did.

Two years ago, when the arrangement was first drafted, it was supposed to be a straightforward public relations campaign: appear together at high-profile events, smile for the paparazzi, and occasionally allow the Hell-born media to lose its collective mind over a prospective power couple.

The first few months had been easy to explain.

Your team wanted stability after the press disaster surrounding your last film. Vox wanted a cleaner public image after whatever mess Valentino had dragged into the entertainment cycle that quarter. Someone in a conference room had suggested a mutually beneficial relationship. At the time, the idea had been ridiculous enough to make you laugh.

Vox hadn't laughed.

He'd leaned back in his chair, screen glowing with a calculated sort of amusement.

"Actually," he'd muttered, "that could work."

Two years later, it was still working. At some point, the lines had blurred enough that Vox tracking your arrival time no longer felt unusual.

Annoying, yes.

Unusual, no.

His digital gaze suddenly dropped straight to your clutch. You mentally cursed. You hated it when he stared like that.

"What?" you asked, keeping your voice level.

"What are you hiding in there?"

Your grip tightened instinctively around the leather strap. The movement lasted less than a fraction of a second. Unfortunately, Vox noticed anyway. His grin widened.

"There it is."

"There what is?"

"The guilt," Vox gloated, stepping closer. A sharp, static-laced grin spread across his face. "You have that specific look you get when you’ve done something sentimental."

"I don't look guilty."

"You brought me something, didn’t you?"

You glared at him, refusing to give him the satisfaction of looking away. The worst part wasn't that he'd guessed. The worst part was that the bastard had guessed correctly.

Four months. You had spent four miserable months scouring the shadiest black markets in the Pride Ring for a pristine, heavy-duty 1950s television studio lens.

Vox absolutely loathed the radio era—he made that aggressively clear to anyone who asked—but he was a helpless, obsessive nerd for the golden age of broadcast tech. What most people didn't realize was that he could talk about early television equipment for an alarming amount of time if given even the slightest encouragement.

The lens had come up during one of those conversations.

A late-night conversation neither of you should have remembered had somehow devolved into a rant about modern broadcasting. You couldn't remember exactly how he'd gotten there, only that he'd spent several minutes complaining about digital compression before getting distracted by historic studio cameras and the glass used in their lenses.

Apparently, that had been enough.

Because four months later, the lens was sitting in your bag, heavy and hidden, and you still weren't entirely sure why you'd gone to the trouble of tracking it down.

"You don't know that," you shot back.

"I do."

"You don't."

"You only use that specific designer purse when you're concealing a box of that exact dimension. I map your wardrobe, darling. Pattern recognition."

For a long moment, you simply looked at him. Then you looked down at the purse, then back up into his glowing blue screen. "You’re insane.”

"Thank you."

“That wasn’t a compliment.”

"I’m in entertainment, sweetheart. I take what I can get."

From across the room, a dramatic, theatrical groan echoed.

You turned your head to see Valentino draped over the VIP bar, nursing a drink that looked like neon highlighters and sins. Naturally, Velvette was standing right beside him, tapping away furiously on her phone. Both of them had clearly been listening.

"Oh, look, they're doing the bickering-old-married-couple routine already," Val drawled, rolling his pink-tinted eyes so hard you could practically hear it. “Will you two either fuck or get married already?”

"We've been in the same room for thirty seconds, Val," you called back.

"And somehow, I’m exhausted," the pimp sighed, taking a slow sip through his straw.

Vox scoffed, leaning his hip against the bar right next to you. “Ignore him. He's just mad because my numbers keep going up and his keep doing the opposite."

Velvette lowered her phone, glancing between the two of you with a sharp smirk. The expression on her face suggested she was enjoying this far too much.

"Wanna know what the funniest part of this whole circus is?" she asked.

Nobody answered. That had never stopped her before.

"You've been together for two years."

Your stomach did a sudden, unpleasant flip. You knew exactly where Velvette’s train of thought usually ended up. "And?" you prompted defensively.

"And you still look for each other." Velvette motioned vaguely between the pair of you.

A heavy silence fell over the ballroom. You frowned, crossing your arms. "What does that even mean?"

"It means exactly what I said, babe.”

"What does that even mean?"

"Don't play dumb, it doesn't suit the brand."

"I'm not."

"Then we're both in trouble.” Velvette rolled her eyes so hard it was a miracle they didn't pop out of her head. She shoved her phone into her pocket and pointed a finger toward the opposite, bustling side of the ballroom. "Fine. Visual demonstration. Vox, do me a favor. Turn around and walk over there. Go check the stage lighting or whatever. Just look away from her."

Vox grumbled, but he actually complied, turning his back.

"Now," Velvette purred, looking directly at you. "Look away from him. Pick a spot on the opposite side of the room. Anywhere else."

You followed the gesture automatically and forced your gaze toward the main entrance, where another group of guests had begun filtering inside. Event staff moved around them carrying clipboards and tablets. Nothing seemed particularly noteworthy.

You counted to three in your head, determined to prove her wrong.

Then your attention landed on Vox.

At the exact same moment, his landed on you.

The realization arrived unpleasantly fast. Not because you'd looked at him, that part wasn't strange.

The strange part was how easy it had been. A crowded ballroom filled with hundreds of people, and somehow your eyes had gone straight to him.

You snapped your head away, cleared your throat, and pretended to be immensely interested in a nearby tray of appetizers.

Still, Velvette had seen enough.

"So embarrassing," she cackled, leaning against the bar. "Honestly, look at you both. Disgusting."

"You are unbearable," you muttered, feeling an unwelcome warmth rise to your cheeks.

"No, I'm right."

"You're impossible."

"I can be both, love. It's called multitasking." Velvette took another sip of her drink, her eyes gleaming with absolute satisfaction. "You know what annoys me?"

You barely looked up from the champagne that had somehow found its way into your grasp. "The list is long."

Velvette snickered. Across the room, Vox had migrated from terrorizing executives to arguing with a member of the event team about lighting. The poor employee looked seconds away from a breakdown.

Velvette ignored the exchange entirely.

"Every anniversary article about you two says the same thing."

You hummed absentmindedly.

"'Still going strong after two years.' 'Hell's favorite power couple.' 'Relationship goals.'" She wrinkled her nose. "Makes me sick."

"That's sweet."

"It wasn't meant to be."

"I know."

Velvette rolled her eyes. Then she lifted a hand, signaling your attention toward Vox.

"Seriously, though, you know what really annoys me?"

"What?" You immediately regretted asking.

"The fact that you're impossible to buy gifts for."

The statement caught you off guard.

"...what does that have to do with anything?"

"Nothing. It reminded me."

You already didn't like where this was going.

"Last year, I spent three weeks trying to figure out what to get you for your birthday. I asked Valentino. I asked your manager. I asked three assistants. Nobody knew."

You winced. “Okay?”

"Then I asked Vox."

Something in your chest constricted. Velvette continued before you could say anything.

"He knew without hesitation."

You looked up.

"No thinking. Just—"

She snapped her fingers.

"'Get her this. She'll like it.'" Another snap. "'She already owns that.'" A third. "'Don't get that one. She hated the ending.'"

The impression was woefully accurate.

"'Get the blue version. Not the red one.'" Velvette narrowed her eyes. "Which was weird."

You hoped your face looked normal.

"Because I'd known you for years." The smile blossomed slowly across her face. "And then I realized something."

You already knew you wouldn't enjoy the conclusion.

Velvette pointed toward Vox. "That bastard pays way too much attention."

As if he'd felt himself being discussed, Vox looked up from across the ballroom.

His gaze landed on the two of you instantly. "Why are you pointing at me?" It sounded much more like an accusation than a question.

Velvette didn't miss a beat. "I'm insulting you."

"Get in line." Vox snapped back before turning around and returning to his previous task. Velvette waited until he was out of sight before turning to you, her voice low.

"You know," she started, "when Vox asked you out, I gave it three months tops. I thought you two wouldn’t last a season without killing each other."

"Oh, good. Glad to know we had your vote of confidence."

Velvette looked between you and Vox before shrugging. "But now?"

You already hated where this was going.

"Now I think you're probably stuck with each other for eternity. Have fun with that."

For once, in a room full of Hell's loudest personalities, nobody had a single thing left to say.

The camera lens caught the glare of the overhead neon, reflecting a tiny, distorted version of your own practiced smile right back at you.

It was a suffocatingly familiar view.

The gala had officially opened nearly an hour ago and had already descended into chaos. Guests crowded the ballroom in clusters, moving from conversation to conversation with champagne glasses in hand, while somewhere behind you, Valentino’s voice boomed over the crowd, aggressively explaining to a cowering decorator why he should've been allowed to personally redesign the event banners.

Judging by the progressively frantic hand gestures, the conversation had entered its third act.

The distraction only lasted a moment.

"Two years is an absolute eternity in the Pride Ring.”

The reporter's voice dragged your attention back to the conversation.

Twenty-three minutes ago, this interview had been scheduled for ten. The red recording light on the camera was still burning a hole through the space between you, and you were beginning to suspect the woman had absolutely no intention of leaving.

To be fair, neither did Vox.

"Is it?" he asked, his voice mellow, completely undisturbed by the bright studio lights reflecting off his screen.

The reporter laughed. "Most celebrity relationships don't make it six months."

"Most celebrity relationships involve celebrities."

"You are a celebrity, Mr. Vox."

"Tragic, isn't it?"

The reporter laughed again, scribbling frantically on her digital tablet. You took a slow, calculated sip of your champagne, watching Vox look thoroughly pleased with himself. He loved a camera, and the camera loved him back. It was an infuriatingly flawless combination.

The interview continued.

Questions about your latest film seamlessly transitioned into questions about VoxTek’s upcoming quarterly rollout. Then, questions about VoxTek somehow became questions about your domestic life. You weren't entirely sure how she’d managed the pivot, though, judging by the predatory glint in the reporter's eyes, it had probably been her objective from the moment she bypassed security.

"So, what do you think the secret is?" she asked, looking between the two of you.

"The secret to what?" you inquired.

"Making it work. Two years at the top of the food chain, completely unified. What's the trick?"

You nearly answered automatically.

There were strict, pre-approved responses for questions like this. Generic, harmless answers designed by a small army of Vees publicists who got nervous whenever either of you spoke without supervision. Mutual respect. Open communication. Shared corporate values. Something aggressively boring.

Vox beat you to the punch.

"We understand each other."

The answer came so easily that it took a second to register.

Across from you, the reporter visibly brightened, sensing blood in the water. You side-eyed Vox. He didn't look back; he just kept his digital eyes locked on the interviewer, his posture perfectly relaxed.

Apparently, as far as he was concerned, nothing unusual had just happened.

"...right," the reporter murmured, her stylus flying across her tablet. "And where do you see yourselves in ten years?"

Once again, you had a safe, PR-friendly answer prepared. A joke about still running Hell's media scene.

Once again, Vox didn't give you the chance.

"Together."

His answer landed with considerably less fanfare than it probably should have.

The reporter smiled, utterly delighted. You forced your muscles to mimic the expression. Vox, meanwhile, continued existing as though he hadn't just said something remotely concerning.

You weren’t sure whose reaction concerned you more.

The interview carried on, but unfortunately, so did your thoughts.

Together.

It was probably nothing. A quick PR answer to keep the narrative clean. An easy, normal answer designed to sell magazines. Except it wasn't really. Not when you and Vox had an expiration date.

The contract was set to expire next month, in exactly twenty-seven days. The number surfaced occasionally during meetings and renewal discussions, but otherwise, you didn't think much about it.

"...and finally," the reporter continued, glancing down at her lingering notes with a sharp, media-trained grin. "One last question for the fans."

You already hated it. The swift shift in her posture only confirmed your worst suspicions.

"Do you see yourselves together... forever?"

"What would be the point of any of this otherwise?"

The answer arrived so quickly that it took a second to register.

A grin spread across the reporter's face. "Well, I think that's our headline right there."

Vox nodded once. "Probably."

The crew thanked you both before disappearing back into the crowd, already discussing whatever catastrophic article they were about to publish. You watched them go for a moment before slowly turning toward Vox.

He was already looking at you.

“What?”

Vox stared right back.

The fact that he didn't seem remotely concerned by what he'd just said was somehow the most concerning part.

You looked away first, staring down into the bubbles of your champagne.

Avoiding his eyes only made the question feel a million times worse.

The timeline of the evening grew hazy somewhere around the fourth drink.

Not immediately, of course.

The alcohol had spent most of the evening lurking harmlessly in the background while you navigated interviews, photos, and approximately six hundred conversations that all circled back to the same three topics: your career, VoxTek, and whether you and Vox planned on producing heirs to Hell's media empire.

By drink number four, however, the pleasant warmth finally caught up with you.

You weren't sloppy yet, but the alcohol had successfully dulled the room. Suddenly, the contract, the cameras, and your looming deadlines felt entirely irrelevant.

Which was exactly how you found yourself laughing at a story that wasn't even remotely funny while a minor entertainment executive spun you across the ballroom floor.

"...and then the idiot tried to sue himself for copyright infringement," the executive shouted over the music, gesturing wildly.

You let out a genuine laugh, the champagne softening the neon lights up above. "That's not even legally possible, even for Hell."

"Exactly!” He pointed triumphantly. “That's what the judge told him right before throwing him out of the courthouse!"

As the music intensified, the dance floor blurred into a glittering sea of expensive fabric and shifting bodies beneath the lights. For the first time all evening, you weren't thinking about interviews. You weren't thinking about contracts.

Most importantly, you weren't thinking about Vox.

The luxury of that ignorance lasted approximately thirty seconds.

Then the music changed.

At first, the transition was smooth enough to pass as a standard DJ choice. The upbeat electronic swing that had dominated the dance floor all night slowly dissolved, its synthesizers fading beneath a sound that was heavier. Older.

Much older.

Strings replaced the pounding bass. Brass followed a second later, warm and unmistakably old-fashioned. Confused whispers rippled through the ballroom as dancers stumbled over the sudden change in rhythm.

You froze mid-step. You knew this song.

It dragged up memories not from Hell, or some trendy penthouse lounge, but from before. From the era of red carpets and studio lots, from historic theaters with heavy velvet curtains and spotlights hot enough to melt your makeup. It was a fragment of a world that hadn't existed for either of you in over half a century.

For a brief, disorienting moment, you were twenty-one again.

Then a familiar hand settled firmly against your waist.

You didn't even need to turn around.

The minor executive currently holding your other hand stiffened, his eyes widening as he looked over your shoulder.

Vox didn't acknowledge him. He didn't look at him, didn't smile, didn't even grant the man a glance from his display.

“Move.”

The poor man vanished into the crowd so fast he might as well have teleported.

You watched his desperate retreat before turning your attention back to the Overlord in front of you.

“...did you just literally steal me from a dance partner?"

"No."

"You absolutely did."

Vox ignored the accusation entirely. "Dance."

You blinked. "Dance?"

"Dance,” he repeated.

A breathless laugh escaped you. The alcohol was definitely playing a part in your lack of cooperation. "That is generally not how invitations work, Vox."

"You seem to understand the prompt well enough," he mused.

Before you could formulate a proper snarky response, Vox was already guiding you into position. His palm flattened against the middle of your back while his other found yours with a natural ease that should have terrified you.

Instead, your attention was drawn to something far worse.

Neither of you missed a single beat. The movement came automatically. One turn. Another. The distance between you adjusted without either of you having to think about it.

It had probably been seventy years since you'd danced to music like this.

That didn't seem to matter.

“You changed the song," you uttered, keeping your eyes trained on his screen.

Vox looked entirely innocent. "That's a serious accusation."

"You absolutely did."

"I own the building," he reminded you, executing a fluid spin that caught the hem of your attire perfectly.

"That isn't a denial."

"It wasn't supposed to be."

A few onlookers had started watching, their knowing smiles and whispered comments drifting through the crowd every time you turned.

"...still together after two years."

“They’re adorable.”

"God, look at them."

You instantly regretted hearing any of that, but Vox either didn't notice or didn't care. Neither possibility was particularly reassuring. As another turn carried you both through the center of the ballroom, you narrowed your eyes.

"...were you jealous?"

Vox nearly missed a step. The slip lasted less than a second, but you caught it anyway.

"What?"

"Were you jealous?"

"I was not jealous," he snapped. The answer had arrived far too quickly, along with the defensive edge in his voice. For someone who wasn't jealous, he suddenly seemed remarkably interested in proving it.

You laughed. "Vox."

"I'm serious."

The fourth drink had done wonders for your self-preservation. Normally, you would've dropped the subject by now. Tonight, however, you found yourself studying the dim static flickering along the edges of his screen with growing suspicion.

The evidence was not helping his case.

"You stole me off the dance floor," you noted, tilting your head up to catch his eye.

His hold tightened just a fraction against your waist. “I rescued you.”

"Rescued me? From what?"

"The conversation. It was painful."

The pieces clicked into place slowly enough to make his denial even more ridiculous. This wasn't about the music, or someone stepping on your feet, or whatever other excuse he’d come up with thirty seconds ago.

"You didn't like him," you deduced.

"I barely know him."

"You disliked him remarkably fast for someone you barely know."

Vox made a dismissive noise, turning his display slightly away. You watched him for another moment before your gaze wandered toward the crowd, though the executive in question had long since disappeared.

"He seemed nice."

"He owns a yacht."

You blinked. "What?"

"He owns a yacht," Vox repeated flatly.

"I heard you. I just…don't see how that's relevant."

"Then why are we still discussing whether he seemed nice?"

A startled laugh escaped you. Vox looked thoroughly victorious, leaving you with absolutely no real answers.

"There you are."

A familiar voice cut through the music before you could carry on the interrogation. Weaving through the crowd was a network producer—one of the few souls in the Pride Ring you actually tolerated—looking mildly exasperated as he swirled a drink in his hand. "I've been trying to find you for twenty minutes."

"That's because I've been actively avoiding networking," you replied, your posture relaxing as you turned toward him.

"It shows." The producer shrugged, entirely ignoring the sharp, dismissive scoff Vox made at the very concept of skipping a branding opportunity. "Come save me. Someone from the Greed Ring has spent the last half hour explaining cryptocurrency."

Your expression morphed into genuine horror. "Oh, that's tragic."

"Thank you." The man beckoned toward the exit. "I need an escape hatch."

You didn't hesitate to step away. "Goodbye, Vox."

As you moved to leave, Vox's arm stretched instinctively, his hand remaining at your waist long enough to pull you back a step.

"You're leaving?"

You stopped.

The producer's eyebrows rose. Yours probably did too.

Beside you, Vox seemed to realize he'd spoken without his usual corporate filter approximately half a second too late.

"I'm borrowing her," the producer declared, breaking the sudden tension by gently taking your wrist.

"Temporarily," Vox amended, his voice sinking into its smooth broadcast tone.

The producer stared. You stared. Vox simply stared right back, his display flattening into a mask of sheer confidence as he finally let his hand fall from your waist. He gave a casual, dismissive wave of his fingers. "Go."

The completely unnecessary permission almost made you laugh. "Thank you for allowing me to speak to other people, Mr. Vox."

"I am extraordinarily generous," he shot back, his screen flashing a smug grin.

"That's one word for it."

Before Vox could formulate a proper retort, the producer pulled you along. "Come on, before he rehires me just to fire me."

As you let yourself be dragged away, you caught sight of Velvette leaning against the VIP bar. She had witnessed the entire exchange, a genuinely alarming smirk plastered across her face.

You pointed a warning finger at her over the producer's shoulder. "No."

Velvette pointed right back, mouthing the words over her glass: "Oh, absolutely."

Whatever threat she intended to make was lost beneath the swelling bass of the speakers, which was probably for the best.

By the time another hour slipped by, you'd completely lost track of how much champagne you'd consumed. It wasn't enough to embarrass yourself…probably, but it was definitely enough to make everything feel fuzzy.

The producer eventually disappeared into another conversation. Other people replaced him. Some you recognized. Most you didn't.

At some point, Valentino materialized beside you and shoved a pair of glowing, radioactive-looking cocktails into your space.

That was where the evening truly began to deteriorate.

"What is that?" you asked, squinting suspiciously at the neon liquid.

"Alcohol," Val drawled, waving a feathered hand dismissively.

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one you're getting, babe." He nudged the rim against your knuckles.

Against your better judgment, you accepted one. Valentino kept the other.

The rest of the night became significantly warmer after that. Exactly how much time passed afterward was difficult to say.

At some point, a photographer convinced you to pose for solo shots. At another, Velvette vanished and reappeared wearing an entirely different outfit. There was a vague memory of discussing film budgets with a minor Overlord, and a much stronger, more vivid memory of losing a verbal argument with a decorative fountain.

What you did know for certain was that you eventually ended up in one of the VIP booths overlooking the ballroom.

Unfortunately, Valentino was there too.

The two of you had initially collapsed into opposite ends of the same velvet booth, but somehow ended up shoulder-to-shoulder over the course of the evening.

"You're very soft," Valentino informed you, his voice dripping with hazy affection.

"You have, like…eight arms."

Valentino squinted down at his drink, somehow missing his own mouth by several inches. A concerning amount of neon alcohol disappeared directly into his lap.

He didn't seem to notice.

"I feel like we're having two different conversations."

Val lifted a feathered hand to pet the top of your head before taking another long sip from his drink. Below, the ballroom spun beneath the lights. Music drifted up from the dance floor as the crowd blurred into a glittering mass of motion. For a while, neither of you said much, simply watching the room move.

Then, Valentino suddenly sat up straighter. "You ever think about how weird Vox is?"

You laughed so hard you nearly spilled your drink. "Constantly."

"Good." He seemed genuinely relieved, slouching further into the cushions. "I thought it was just me."

"It is definitely not just you."

"Thank god."

From there, the conversation wandered completely off course.

Valentino had draped himself across the back of the booth. You'd become vaguely aware that several of his arms had ended up wrapped around you. The realization seemed important, but you were too busy trying to convince him that the centerpieces had been getting brighter all night to care.

Neither of you noticed the approaching shadow.

"...What exactly am I looking at?"

The interruption was familiar enough that recognition arrived before you even looked.

Vox.

"There you are," you mumbled happily.

Vox's gaze swept across the booth, taking in the graveyard of empty glasses, Valentino, the alarming number of arms currently attached to Valentino, and lastly, you. The grin on his screen flattened into a hard line.

Before anyone could speak, Vox sat down beside you and promptly pulled you against him by the waist. You let out a yelp as your shoulder collided firmly with his chest.

"There," Vox said, looking deeply satisfied.

Too tired to argue, you slumped against him. It was significantly easier than sitting upright, though your compliance clearly validated whatever point he thought he was making.

Valentino looked between the two of you. "Damn. The yacht guy really got under your skin, huh?"

Vox’s screen spiked with a sudden, violent jolt of static. "I could buy his entire lineage, his harbor, and his pathetic little boat," he hissed, his grip tightening on your waist as his display flashed an angry red warning before he caught himself. Vox let out a sharp breath, forcing his screen back to its normal blue hue as he looked down at you.

He was already inspecting the collection of glasses, desperately trying to redirect his irritation. "How much have you had to drink?"

You considered the question. "A normal amount."

"Define normal."

"...no."

Vox pinched the bridge of his nose. Without warning, he reached over and pried the glass from your hand.

"...Rude."

"You did try to tip a photographer with somebody else's business card." Valentino cut in.

You paused, processing the memory. "Wait…I did do that." Your head dropped back against Vox’s shoulder as you let out a small, defeated hum. "I wondered where that card went."

Instead of indulging your embrace, Vox stood up, causing your head to slump against the back of the booth. You frowned at the sudden loss of a pillow. "Where are you going?"

"I'm taking you home."

Valentino made a choking sound, nearly spilling what was left of his drink. "Oh, would you look at that? Daddy's done sharing."

Vox's screen glitched violently. "Do NOT call me that."

You braced your hands to stand, but the moment you pushed off the cushions, the room tilted violently. Before you could fall, an arm slid behind your knees while another scooped across your back. The floor vanished.

You stared at Vox, dangling mid-air. He stared right back, entirely unbothered.

"...Seriously?"

"You are not walking."

Before you could argue, Vox turned on his heel and headed for the exit.

The movement shifted you closer against his chest. Familiar scents followed: cigarette smoke woven into the fabric of his suit, expensive cologne, and the faint electric tang that always seemed to linger around him. It was annoyingly recognizable.

Behind you, Valentino's cackling laughter echoed over the music.

"You know," the pimp shouted after you, "most people just hold hands!"

Vox didn't even break stride.

"Goodnight, Valentino."

"Oh, he's MAD."

Waking up felt like being hit by a truck. A very expensive truck. One upholstered entirely in velvet and poor decisions.

You groaned and rolled onto your side, immediately regretting the movement as a dull ache throbbed behind your eyes. The room was dark enough that it took a second for your vision to adjust.

The first thing you recognized was the ceiling.

The second was the fact that it wasn't yours.

Moving more carefully this time, you pushed yourself upright as your gaze drifted across the room. Floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked Pentagram City several stories below, and a massive desk sat near the far wall, cluttered with monitors, paperwork, and enough expensive equipment to bankrupt several small businesses.

Vox's room.

"...shit."

"You seem surprised."

The voice came from your left. You turned to find Vox sitting on the opposite end of the couch, your purse resting between his hands. Every remaining trace of sleep vanished.

"What are you doing?" you demanded, the words coming out embarrassingly high-pitched.

Vox didn't look up from the bag. "I was attempting to locate your room key.”

"You were going through my purse."

"I was attempting to locate your room key."

"That's the exact same thing."

"I disagree."

Before he could double down, the partially unzipped purse slipped sideways. A small box tumbled free, landing right on the cushion between you.

Your stomach dropped so fast it nearly sobered you up on the spot.

For a second, both of you just stared. The box sat between you on the cushion, small, obvious, and absolutely incriminating.

"Don't,” you warned.

"I haven't done anything."

"You are thinking about doing something."

"I think about a lot of things," he murmured, his fingers twitching with temptation.

"Vox."

Unfortunately, your warning came too late. His hand closed around the box before you could grab it back, lifting it with a careful precision that made you want to hit him. He didn't open it immediately; he turned it over once, his "pattern-recognition" brain already cataloging the weight and the wrapping.

You sank back against the cushions and pressed both hands over your face.

"...I hate you."

"No, you don't," Vox said, shifting closer with a quiet rustle of his suit jacket.

"That's a very confident thing to say to someone whose purse you're currently violating."

He made a faintly dismissive noise, but the sound died the moment he lifted the lid.

The room went entirely still. You lowered your hands just enough to peek at him.

Vox had stopped moving. The lens sat against the dark lining of the box, catching the faint red neon bleeding in from the city window. Vox stared at it. Very carefully, he brushed his thumb along the heavy, vintage metal rim. For something that had caused you four months of stress, questionable transactions, and at least one conversation with a collector who definitely trafficked in more than antiques, it looked almost offensively innocent.

"You…found one." His voice was much quieter than you expected.

You tried to shrug, though, lying half-curled on his couch in a rumpled gown, the gesture was awkward. "It took a while."

"These don't even exist anymore."

"Clearly, at least one does."

He didn't laugh. That was the part that made you nervous. Vox always found a way to laugh when he was cornered, especially if it meant steering a conversation away from his actual feelings. This time, all his usual deflection seemed to short out before it reached his mouth.

"You remembered."

The words sat heavily between you. Not quite a question, not quite an accusation.

Your fingers curled into the couch's fabric. "It was pretty hard to forget, with the way you talked about it.”

Vox finally looked up, and whatever expression had been on his screen softened before he could fully hide it. That was new. Or maybe you were just drunk enough to notice.

You looked away first, shifting uncomfortably. "Don't make it weird.”

"Thank you."

"That's making it weird."

"No," he said, closing the box with careful hands before setting it on the table. "This is making it weird."

You glanced back just in time to watch him reach into the inside pocket of his suit jacket.

“...what are you doing?"

"Returning the favor." Vox pulled out a small, flat case, no larger than his palm.

You stared at it, then at him. "You had that on you this whole time?"

"It's our anniversary."

"It's a fake anniversary."

Vox paused. It was barely a frame, a tiny hiccup in his refresh rate, but you caught it. "It's still an anniversary."

Your throat felt tight as you took the case.

Inside was a single strip of film, preserved carefully beneath glass. You recognized it immediately. It wasn't a famous movie—the studio had burned down before it ever hit theaters, and it had been entirely forgotten by history. But there you were, caught in one surviving frame from a film that technically no longer existed.

All you could do was stare. Vox, for once, didn't interrupt.

"...this is impossible," you finally mumbled quietly.

"No."

Your laugh came out thin. "Of course."

"The full print is being restored," Vox said, suddenly very interested in adjusting one of his cuffs. "Temperature-controlled storage. Digital copy once it's complete. The original stays sealed, obviously. Handling old nitrate film improperly is a disaster."

You stared at him until he looked back. "What?"

"You found my movie."

"I found part of your movie."

"Vox.”

"What?”

"You found my movie."

The correction caught him off guard. His smugness slipped, recovering less cleanly than usual as his gaze flickered down to the lens on the table.

You swallowed against the tightness in your throat, the alcohol suddenly feeling heavy. "Why were you saying all that stuff tonight?"

"What stuff?"

"You know what stuff."

"You'll have to be more specific."

"To the reporter." You met his digital gaze head-on. "Together. Forever. What would be the point otherwise?"

He didn't look away. "The reporter asked."

"And you answered like it was obvious."

"It was."

You let out a disbelieving laugh. "The contract expires next month. In twenty-seven days."

"I know."

"Then why were you talking like that?"

Vox didn't answer immediately this time. He leaned back instead, studying you with an expression that lacked any of his usual theatricality.

"I assumed we'd renew it."

You blinked. "...You assumed?"

"Yes."

"Without asking me?"

"It seemed implied."

You stared at him. He stared back with the deeply irritating confidence of someone who had apparently spent months living in a completely different version of reality.

"Vox. This was supposed to be temporary."

"Two years ago, yes."

The words hit with a heavy finality. Your grip tightened around the edges of the film case.

"You really weren't planning on ending it," you stated.

This time, Vox looked genuinely confused. "Were you?"

The question was too simple, cutting straight through the lingering haze of the champagne. You looked down at the tiny, preserved frame of your past in your hands, then across at the pristine 1950s broadcast lens on the table. You didn't have an answer. Trying to imagine walking away—separating your routines, dealing with the press, returning to an empty penthouse without the constant, buzzing baseline of his presence—didn't even feel like an option anymore.

"You could have said something," you murmured.

Vox looked offended, his screen flashing a brief spike of static. "You never asked."

A breathy, helpless laugh escaped you. The rigid tension in your shoulders finally gave way, leaving something much more raw in its place. "You're unbelievable."

"Frequently."

The answer came too quickly, too naturally, and it closed the remaining distance between you. You leaned forward before your brain could talk you out of it.

Vox went completely still. The uncertainty that flickered across his display lasted less than a second, but you knew his cues too well to miss it.

"Are you going to stop me?" you whispered.

His voice dropped, a low, low hum that vibrated against your chest. "Do you want me to?"

"No."

That was all the permission either of you needed.

The kiss was softer than it had any right to be. For once, there were no cameras waiting to turn it into a headline and no crowded ballroom full of people watching through champagne glasses. Just Vox's hand against the side of your face, the faint smell of smoke and expensive cologne, and the quiet realization that neither of you had been acting for a very long time.

When you pulled back, he didn't let you go far. His screen glowed dimly in the dark room, casting a soft blue light over the film case still held between your fingers.

"That was very unprofessional," he teased.

You managed a small, tired smile. "The contract expires in twenty-seven days."

"Good."

You blinked. "Good?"

Vox's thumb brushed your cheekbone once, deliberately. "We'll revise it."

A quiet laugh slipped out of you at the phrasing. "You're impossible."

"I know."

Then he pulled you back in, and this time, you let the argument die there.