#existential horror

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