#hidden depth

CHAPTER 15: SOMETHING LIKE TRUST

The door clicked shut softly behind Pomni as Jax closed it, not wanting to draw attention from the others coming down the hallway.  

Jax’s room was fairly pastel, the dominating colors a bubblegum pink. One would think these were details Pomni would have picked up on, having previously been in his room before. 

Except the last, and only, time she’d ever been in there was when Jax was partially abstracting. 

She wasn’t exactly evaluating the feng shui of the room back then. 

Pomni thought maybe it was just her own room she felt didn’t suit her, but looking around at the soft colors and cutesy decor she realized something. 

None of their rooms suited any of them. 

She wondered if that was purposeful on Caine’s part. 

Jax shuffled further into the room, one hand rubbing absentmindedly at the back of his neck. The door clicked again as he locked it this time, more out of habit than actual necessity.

It wasn’t like either of them expected Zooble, Gangle or Ragatha to break into his room to bust Pomni out. Ragatha could be incredibly annoying at times, to Jax at least, but she wasn’t exactly the breaking and entering type. Zooble couldn’t care less about Jax or his shenanigans and Gangle was too afraid of him to try anything.  

“Interesting uh…decor,” Pomni commented, still glancing around. 

“Manly, isn’t it?” he replies, hands on his hips with a lazy smirk on his face. His eyes are cast down to Pomni though, watching as she surveyed his room.

“It’s really…” Pomni turns to look up at him with a little smile, “Pink.”

Jax leans down, “You’re just jealous your room doesn’t have style.”

Pomni huffs a small laugh despite herself. 

“Oh yeah, totally.”

While the aesthetic of his room was certainly a surprise, now that she’d had the time to properly process what it looked like, it was oddly cozy in its own way. 

Or maybe she just liked the lower ambient lighting and less harsh coloration compared to her own room that was an incredibly bright red and blue. 

Pomni was not what one would call a girly girl, but she wouldn’t have really minded a softer color scheme for her bedroom. 

The next detail she notices is the amount of keys lying about the room. There was one in the corner to their left, one under the chair by his desk, two on his desk and another peeking out from under his bed. 

Her eyes drift over his bed, making note of the quilt pattern of his comforter. Then she lifted her gaze up and noticed several polaroids stuck to the wall beside his bed. Nearly all of them were flipped with the photo side against the wall, hiding them. 

Except one. 

She couldn’t fully make it out from here, but she could see one of the people in the photo was very green. 

“You gonna stand there all night or what?” Jax asks, snapping her out of her thoughts. 

“Oh. Right.”

She crosses the room and takes a seat in the chair beside his bed. It squeaks in response to her sitting down. Her feet don’t quite reach the floor since the chair is adjusted to Jax’s height and not hers. 

Jax plops down onto his bed, crossing his legs as his lazy smirk still on his face grows with amusement at the sight of Pomni. 

“Y’know, I’ve never truly understood how much of a shortstack you are until this moment.”

Pomni gives him a look, “You’re so full of @$%&, Jax.”

Jax tilts one side of his head toward her, cupping a hand behind his ear. 

“Sorry, what was that?” he asked, raising his voice mockingly, “I couldn’t hear you from up here!”

Pomni rolls her eyes as she adjusts the seat to suit her own height, but the chair unexpectedly drops straight down quickly - causing a yelp of surprise to leave her lips. 

“Aw, and I had that chair perfectly set just how I liked it too,” Jax lamented, leaning forward into his hand. 

“Boo hoo, cry me a river,” Pomni remarked, shifting side to side with her feet to turn the chair. 

A long silence follows, neither quite sure what to do or talk about. The last time they’d both been in his room together, Jax almost abstracted. 

The memory seemed to now catch up to Jax and he shifted rather uncomfortably, raising his hand up to stare at it quietly. 

Pomni notices the change in Jax’s demeanor and scoots the chair closer to him. 

Their legs almost touch from the proximity and the sudden closeness almost makes Jax jump in surprise like she’d snuck up on him. His eyes were wide as he stared down at her, with her own big pinwheel eyes looking back up at him.

“Hey,” Pomni reaches her hand out toward the hand he’d been staring at and holds it between both of her own. Her gaze never once breaks from his and he finds himself unable to look away. 

The briefest of memories of her in that silver blue dress flashes in his mind, causing him to swallow hard.

Normally, he’d be anxious about just how perceptive she always was. How she was able to so easily read him like a book. Now, it felt a little…thrilling? He wasn’t exactly disturbed about their proximity.

No, he was more disturbed by the fact that he was starting to anticipate and maybe crave it a little. 

Her genuine attitude was as disarming as it was alluring. 

What the $#&@ am I saying?

“It’s okay, Jax,” Pomni says, attempting to comfort him from what she perceived as the discomfort of their previous shared memory of his near abstraction. 

“Y-Yeah…”

“Have you had…y’know…any issues with, uh, that recently?” Pomni asks, carefully wording her sentence. She knows very well how adverse to direct honesty Jax tends to be, so she chooses specifically to ask him in a more roundabout way so it feels just a little less emotionally vulnerable for him to talk about. 

She feels Jax’s grip tighten just a little bit. 

“No,” he replies. 

He’s looking right at Pomni when he says it. There’s no jokes or deflection, no looking to the side, no nervous tapping. 

He’s being honest. 

Pomni relaxes a bit, nodding.

Her gaze slides beyond him, back to the wall of photos. The only photo she saw earlier facing forward was much more clear now that she was only a few feet from it. 

It was a photo of three people, two of whom she recognized. The one in the middle was Jax and the one on the right was Kaufmo. They were both holding mugs of what looked like hot cocoa and Jax was giving bunny ears to the person on the left, depicted as a feminine looking green frog. 

She’d wager a guess that this was Ribbit. 

Pomni’s thumb brushed lightly over the back of his hand before she could really think better of it. 

“Is there…anything you want to talk about?” Pomni asks, looking at him again. 

He was still watching her, so she knew that he knew exactly where she was looking.

Exactly what she was referencing when she asked what he wanted to talk about. Or, rather, who. 

Jax finally looks off to the side, looking pensive and unsure. His hold on her hand didn’t change and he didn’t even really seem to mind their proximity all that much like he used to. 

Progress. 

“Can you tell me about Ribbit?” Pomni asks, nudging her head in the direction of the polaroid behind Jax. 

Jax’s lips part slightly as he looks at Pomni, both like he expected her to ask and yet also didn’t at the same time. His foot begins to tap softly and rhythmically and his eyes seem unable to meet Pomni’s. 

She expects him to say no, to say it’s not any of her business. 

That Pomni already knew more than most likely did about Jax and shouldn’t be sticking her nose where it didn’t belong. It would have been fair for him to respond that way, because yeah - she was being kind of nosey. 

And, yet, even so…

“Okay,” Jax says with a heavy sigh, his shoulders dropping considerably in defeat. 

His gaze drifts for the first time toward the polaroid on his wall behind him, quietly staring at it in deep thought. His expression is neither a smile nor a frown, remaining neutral - though the brief squeeze he gave Pomni’s hand signaled there was certainly some discomfort below his show of neutrality. 

For a moment, Pomni wondered if he would change his mind. 

Instead, he leaned back slightly. He used his free hand to keep himself propped up and looked down toward Pomni again, his eyes uncharacteristically gentle. 

“She was loud,” he said finally. 

Pomni blinked, but remained quiet to let Jax keep talking. 

“When I first arrived here, she was friends with Raggie so I figured she was just another goody-two-shoes, and she kind of was. But she was also funny and no matter how many times I pranked her, she always found creative ways to get back at me for it.”

“How’d you meet?” Pomni asked, genuinely curious. 

Jax groaned dramatically, immediately covering his face with one hand.

“Oh God.”

Pomni laughs softly, “That bad?”

“She threw a drink at me.”

“Huh?” Pomni was at a loss. 

“I deserved it,” he clarified quickly, though he was grinning now despite himself, recalling the memory.

“What did you do?”

Jax looked genuinely offended that she even had to ask.

“Pomni. Be realistic. There are way too many possibilities.”

“You’re impossible,” she deadpanned.

“And yet here you are voluntarily hanging out in my room.”

Pomni rolled her eyes but didn’t argue.

The corner of Jax’s smile twitched upward once before he continued.

“It was one of our first adventures together. Caine made us run some stupid mystery train thing.”

Pomni nodded along, listening intently. 

“There was this NPC detective who kept monologuing every five seconds and Ribbit actually cared about solving the mystery.”

“And I’m guessing you didn’t.”

“I replaced the murder weapon with a rubber duck.”

Pomni stared at him.

“You’re kidding.”

“I am absolutely not kidding.”

Pomni burst out laughing.

Jax grinned wider at the sound, visibly relaxing more into the mattress beneath him.

“She spent like an hour trying to figure out what the ducks meant symbolically,” he continued. “Meanwhile Kaufmo was dying laughing and I was getting increasingly committed to the bit.”

“Okay, but where does the drink even come into play? You said she threw a drink at you.”

“Ribbit realized I sabotaged the entire thing and got so mad,” Jax recalled fondly, “She called me a menace to society.”

“That sounds kind of accurate.”

“Tch. Anyway, then she grabbed the drink at the bar next to her and threw it straight for my face.”

Pomni laughed softly, “And that made you friends?”

“No, actually. What made us friends was afterward I found her crying because she thought she ruined the adventure by getting angry at me.”

Pomni’s smile faded slightly. 

“Oh.”

Jax looked down at their still joined hands.

“She always did that,” he said more quietly. “Beat herself up over the small stuff.”

Something in his expression softened then.

“She apologized to me like four times for throwing the drink.”

Pomni frowned, “Even though you deserved it?”

“Oh, I absolutely deserved it.”

Pomni’s smile returned. 

Jax shifted slightly, trying to get more comfortable as he touched on some memories that were anything but comfortable for him to recall. 

“She hated when people fought,” he added, “Like…genuinely hated it. Not in a conflict-avoidant way exactly, she just…” 

He searched for the wording, pursing his lips in thought. 

“She wanted people to get along.”

Pomni tilted her head.

“Kind of like Ragatha?”

Jax’s face scrunched immediately.

“Nah, she was different.”

“How exactly?”

“Ragatha tries to fix everybody.”

The words came out without malice, just matter-of-fact.

“Ribbit didn’t,” he shrugged lightly, “She just…she was just Ribbit.”

Pomni went quiet at that.

Because trying to describe the natural way that someone once brought you comfort wasn’t something easily explained. There was not always some profound and magical reason behind it. 

Sometimes it’s simply because that’s just who they were and what it was. 

Jax looked toward the ceiling now, foot tapping absently again.

“She and Kaufmo were already close before I started hanging around them,” he continued. 

“Honestly, I think Kaufmo decided we were all friends before either of us agreed to it. He kept dragging me into stuff with them.” 

Jax smirked faintly. “He said I needed enrichment activities.”

Pomni snorted, amused by the idea. 

“Ribbit agreed with him, which was rude.”

Pomni noticed the way his voice changed whenever he talked about them.

It was still sarcastic and very Jax, but softer around the edges.

More willingly vulnerable. 

“You really cared about them, huh?” Pomni asked gently.

Jax’s tapping foot slowed.

For a second, Pomni thought he might deflect.

Instead, he gave a small shrug.

“Yeah.”

Pomni looked at the polaroid again, glancing at his two former best friends. Now having a better understanding of who they were and the role they played in Jax’s life here before Pomni ever showed up. 

“One night…” Jax starts speaking, almost like a confession. 

Pomni’s attention is back fully to him, the gravity in his tone suggesting a more solemn conversation was about to take place.

“I found Ribbit sitting outside in the hallway by herself. She asked me if I thought people changed here after long enough.”

Jax laughed softly under his breath.

“I made some stupid joke instead of answering seriously.”

Pomni could already tell where this was going.

“I’m guessing that she didn’t laugh?”

His expression tightened faintly.

“No.”

Silence settled heavily between them.

Jax finally pulled his hand away from Pomni’s, leaning back and rubbing at his face tiredly.

“She was never the same after that.”

The warmth that had filled the room earlier dimmed almost instantly beneath the weight of those words.

Pomni’s chest hurt.

Not because she knew Ribbit, but because she knew exactly what kind of guilt Jax was carrying when he said that. Like he’d failed some test he didn’t realize he was taking.

Truthfully, she knew that you just never know what someone is going through. Sometimes, the wounds our words leave behind are not fully understood until it’s far too late. 

“Jax…”

He waved a hand dismissively immediately, “I’m fine.”

The response was quick and practiced, in that same deflective tone he usually uses when he doesn’t want to explore his vulnerabilities any deeper. 

“You sure?” she asked carefully.

“Yeah.”

Seeming to realize he’d answered too quickly and was well aware of Pomni’s absurd perceptiveness - Jax stood from the bed abruptly and stretched his arms slightly over his head.

“Just tired, that’s all.”

Pomni hesitated between calling his bluff or letting it slide. He’d already spent so much of their time together talking about his past, even though he had no real reason to indulge Pomni. 

She was certain that Jax could only handle a certain amount of emotional vulnerability before having to shut it down to preserve his self image. 

Even so, she debated checking in. The last time he assured her he was fine, he almost abstracted.

“Pomni,” Jax’s voice snapped her out of her thoughts. 

She looked up at him. 

“I’m okay,” he said, more gently this time. 

Jax watched her carefully, like he expected her to argue. 

She didn’t.

Pomni decided to give him the space he seemed to need after all of that. Even if he didn’t want to voice exactly what he was feeling in this moment, she didn’t want to force him. 

Not when he’d shown he really was trying to let Pomni in like he’d promised. 

“Okay,” she says softly, standing up from the chair. 

She puts the chair back and hits the lever so the seat lifts back up to where it’d been previously set to. 

“If you need me,” she says quietly, “You know where to find me. I’m here, Jax.”

Jax swallows hard.

He allows himself a small, tired smile. 

“Yeah,” he murmurs, “I know.”

“Goodnight, Jax.”

“Goodnight, Pompom.”

The door hadn’t even fully closed before his smile faded. Somehow, his room felt smaller without Pomni in it with him. 

His gaze drifted back to the wall, toward the polaroids. 

With a sigh, he walks over to his bed and flops face-first down into it. 

Outside, Pomni hadn’t moved right away. 

She lingered near his door longer than she’d meant to. 

The silence felt so loud.