Archive of Our Own

They haven’t won.

This isn’t even really winning. It is only half the battle—wiping away the artisan of their torture, bottling it up and sending it out into the white sea of the void. Buying themselves time before his expected resurrection.

Time to do what, no one knows. To gather a moment to breathe. To collect just a minute more of silence. Time to absorb, to process. Kinger has no interface to work with now, and their abilities to conjure are all that remain—yet, as if by some Hail-Mary trick of cruel divinity, there stands a gap between them and Caine’s creations. No portals, no adventures, no path already paved for them. Pockets of corrupted digital matter that they are all afraid to even glance at, let alone try to command some foreign digital body to create on their behalf.

Just them and the lavender-gray emptiness of this world without its corrupted creator, swallowed in this vacuum of endless beyond.

A pocket of quiet, with only each other. 

Reprieve.

Nobody says anything, at first. Kinger mumbles something about needing to think about what comes next, Ragatha hesitantly in tow. Gangle threads a nervously fluttering ribbon arm through Zooble’s hand, clinging to them for mutual comfort as they seek shared privacy.

Pomni—not wanting to interrupt the nurturing of their slowly unfurling affection, or sway Kinger’s delicate hold on his lucidity, which Ragatha seems to steady—turns her attention to Jax. He has the look of an animal frightened into paralysis: chest heaving, eyes blown wide, the focus of his awareness retreating into every frozen nerve ending. Pomni can’t tell if he can see it, but his hands are trembling in front of him, and his gaze is frantically looking for something, anything to ground himself.

Only each other.

Like wind fraying the grass, bravery parts something old and natural inside Pomni; she latches her hands around his wrists, thumbs sliding gently up into his palms. An hourglass answer to his yardlong stare sand-slipping through his fingers.

If he’d only spill his guts out, she’d find a way to catch it all.

“Jax. Breathe,” Pomni whispers, the softest she has spoken all day.

As if a command from on high, Jax feels his entire being will to her. His lungs are still pumping in empty, shallow circles, yet he can feel the tingling in his fingertips begin to fade, his heart quelling underneath the weight of her softness. His fear pulls him back by the shoulders, knees crumbling, voice cracking under the words he’s trying to get out. The same as a rabbit hiding in its labyrinth of a burrow, seeking escape from certain death.

“C-can’t… you’ll get—you’ll leave me… like the others,” he pants, swallowing the remainder of his ego. Says every word from his knees like a man settling the last of his mortal debts.

“I’m not going anywhere, Jax,” Pomni assures him, pushing past her own wavering.

Jax inhales sharply where she leans into him, standing firm. The capacity of her compassion makes his stomach threaten to turn inside out. She’s tugged his hands closer, situated them right in the sanctuary between her chin and chest, where her heartbeat hides under her shaking voice. All the while he’s hunched on his knees, beginning to loll his head along Pomni’s smaller shoulder.

It’s all real—even as the world’s color bleeds out, threatening to pull away entirely, Jax feels some part of his own real humanness recovered inside him:

Pomni.

Of course it’s Pomni that would bring him together. His harbinger of doubt; his secret savior.

“You’ll get tired—y-you’re going to give up one day,” Jax huffs, half-committedly shoving her away once more.

Pomni throws her entire body at him, full-force. They’ve done this song and dance before, and she knows how he’s rehearsed it; she won’t allow him to get the better of her again. There isn’t a mask she can’t get through with all the conviction she’s managed to collect.

If he were stronger right now Jax might be able to push back, yet the muscles in his body fail to do anything but collapse, suffocated in the welcome relief of anything else besides pure panic. She’s like a weighted blanket, bug-limbed all around his torso, listening for the incessant hammering between his ribs. It’s annoying how much she cares. How dare she worm her way in? How dare she endear herself to him, all that bottled up potential he discovered and set loose within her coming back to bite?

How dare she give him no choice in doing the same for him?

Jax goes rod-straight, sitting up so fast Pomni nearly topples over. No matter; his spindly arms catch so hopelessly tight around her she thinks he’d crush her if it were possible, burying his head in the hollow between perfect neck and shoulder. Wherever she isn’t, he’ll root himself there, if only to soak up more of whatever stuff she’s made of—sand and hourglasses, long-kindled softness, things of the human heart and soul that this place has all but eroded to dust within him.

A repetition slips out of him that feels more like revelation; a cruel pity assigned to him by no one but himself. “You’ll get tired of me,” he mumbles, finding a deep breath somewhere in his contact with her.

It’s hoarse and paranoid and everything Pomni has never imagined him admitting to—a Pandora’s box of his own ugly, untreated ills, so afraid of sharing them with her, lest she push him aside for it.

The circus doesn’t come with a manual. There wasn’t even written instruction on what to do when their life before hit the fan. What are they to do when that happens here—when all the wacky rules they’ve come to feebly know, and even begin to accept about this place, go out the window? What else is there, when all logic and reason have already failed upon entry? The colors of their world have gone ash-white; plans for survival have all but snuffed out.

For Pomni, the answer is simple: let it all go. Let emotion take its place instead. The human part of her still exists—there might not be a real heart in her chest, but the weight of it is heavier than ever.

“I’m already tired of you!” She yells, pulling away far enough to look him in the eye.

Sheer shock is what snaps Jax out of his spiraling. “What?”

“I’m already tired,” Pomni echoes, watching as his frenzy is corroded by the emotional whiplash. “I’m tired—tired of you running away and hiding where nobody can reach you.” There’s a second where she relents, then decides to press on, seeing that she’s almost gotten through to him. “I need to be able to reach you. You—you shut me out and I’m tired of it because as much as y-you need me, I need you, too. So… quit running away,” she confesses, clearly determined.

Jax is left stunned. Disturbed, even. “You think—I don’t—y-you don’t need me, and I certainly don’t need you,” he objects, casting his gaze out: a fishing line, thrown defenselessly to open waters. “I don’t need anyone. Y-you’re crazy,” he adds, laughing pathetically to himself.

What else was there to be said or done? Warmth and compassion linger just beyond his hurt’s edge. Every bit of this is real—the pain and chaos he’d used to mildly entertain himself, sowing the preliminary seeds of control—it was all real. His own personal corruption, in all directions inward and outward, is real. Pushing Pomni away was and still is real. There’s nothing else definitive to cling to, no rule to adhere to, except the concrete way he’s always decided to be.

Except… he wasn’t always this way, he recalls—briefly. And now he is tampered, broken, discarded. Irreparably so, it would seem.

Regardless, Pomni takes his halfhearted bait, grabbing him firmly by the chin and leaving Jax nowhere to look but directly into her eyes. Red and blue whirls of too large, too sad affection—scrupulous in intensity, impossible to tear away from for the fear of conceding.

“Yeah, I am crazy.”

For what feels like one too many times today, Jax is defeated by surprise. He grins, wide and stupid, with pupils round and large as smoothed stone. “Glad we’re in agreement, clownface,” Jax sighs.

Pomni wants to pluck those eyeballs right out of his beautiful, unpredictable head. “Crazy enough to—to keep coming back to save you, apparently—”

“—Save me? Listen, I’m not some damsel in distress Pomni—”

“—from yourself! I’m crazy and… probably so damn stupid, but you need someone, a-and I really need you,” she says, acquiescing at last.

Jax is stalled by terse pause; with slack on the tightrope between them, he’s afraid they’ll finally fall. To what end they’ll recover normalcy he doesn’t know. At least if they hit rock bottom, they’ll be there together.

“I don’t,” he starts, his outstretched hand halfway to heaven. “I don’t think you're stupid.

“...maybe a little crazy, though.”

All that tightness in Pomni’s chest evaporates, lost somewhere between an exhale and a whispered laugh. Her hand spider-crawls toward Jax, adorned in silk-woven shyness: precarious, fixating, gentle in entrapment where her fingers lace through his. Because that is what she is. Tenderness wrapped in a treacherously pretty bow, stubbornly devoted to finding or forming softness within him, where it has all but decomposed.

And Jax receives her, inevitably unmended, the newness of their once-familiar world leaving him fumbling like a child suddenly thrust upon maturity.

If there is anything to grasp, he’s glad it’s her hand, warm and perfect in his own.

They find their way to the hallway spanning their rooms. There’s a blanket of snug if not distant familiarity enveloped around them, cartoon faces still stickered across their respective doors. Pomni tugs him along, and there’s a flicker of amusement inside Jax when he looks down at her frumpy, oversized jester’s hat, before the sight of her hand in his makes nauseous warmth lurch in his stomach.

As if sensing his fleet-footedness, she hurriedly opens the door, outstretching her arm and lulling him forward so that he has no choice but to enter first.

Her stubbornness is as frustrating as it is admired.

He has his limits though. He stands resolute, cross-armed and frowning pensively, gaze boring into Pomni where she’s laid across her bed and patting the space next to her.

“I’m… not doing that,” Jax states dryly, wrinkling his mouth and tilting his head away distrustfully, pyrite eyes still fixed on her.

One of Pomni’s eyebrows flicks upward, her face expectant and unpleased. “I’m not asking you to get in the bed so I can jump your bones, Jax.” Her body gets a little smaller, momentary bravado shrinking to make room for his pouting. “I’m asking you to just—be with me.”

Silence. Then, the rapid, hare-footed tap of his nervousness on the floor.

“Still not doing it,” he mutters, scowling.

“Get over here, Jax,” Pomni demands, raising herself up on her forearm to reflect his adamantine impatience back to him.

“Ugh… fine,” he relents, slinking over to sit on the perfectly smooth bit of bedding next to her. He also tries not to think about how he’d done so in just three strides. Maybe he should’ve been slower.

The oversaturated hues of the circus have been muted, stripped, made to be unusually easier on the eyes. Even in its storm-gray remains, Pomni is still there, making the stark red-blue stiffness of this place finally comforting to look at—a papercut along a blue vein, bleeding calm into the word. Jax is grateful, and yet he can’t shake the hunger threatening to burst from inside him—abhorrently warm and quietly disarming in that finite space next to her.

It’s terrible trying to look at her and she has no idea.

“This… this is all real, isn’t it?” He questions, intentionally out to the open air where she can’t see his face. A moment later he goes stiff as a board, lying flat but facing away from Pomni and those unnervingly round, gem-facet eyes.

Pomni breathes, her voice lost over a wisp of an exhale.

No matter how many ways she’d imagined her fondness bearing fruit, it could not have properly prepared her for this: Jax, pitiful in his way, unable to separate reality from lack thereof. There are no jokes to make, no clever insults to quip, nothing but his mind’s eye—a tunnel-visioned kaleidoscope, endless in refraction, where he no longer has definition over himself.

For once, he has no plan of escape.

For once, he is quiet.

“Y-yeah… it is,” Pomni wonders, doing her best to convey some semblance of comfort.

The steady rise and fall of his ribcage falters. He’s shaking beside her, and Pomni’s certain that if she could see his face, he’d turn her away completely.

Something in Pomni’s chest erupts, or overflows. Bravery seeps into every one of her limbs. Slow fingers come forward to press along his back, followed by forearms and legs pressed soundly to him, no longer afraid of distance. It would make her feel real and whole again, too—with the world around them literally collapsing, all Pomni wants is to anchor herself in being a shield to him.

In the interim, if they cannot be held by anything else, they will hold one another to stave off the white eternity of the void, or else accept the cold, deceptive ease of abstraction.

“But this,” Pomni murmurs into his back, rubbing her cheek there as she slides her arm around his flexed waist, “is also real, you know?”

Still trembling, Jax wordlessly lifts one hand, using it to hold both of hers from behind him. It takes her touch from a gentle one to absolutely crushing. Smothering. Like being alleviated of a lifetime repressed in closeness has left his very being in perpetual ache. Pomni can feel his heartbeat thrumming against the mess of their knotted hands, alongside the stuttering inhale of his short breaths, the subtle crumbling of his body in on itself.

One hand thoughtlessly shoves its way into hers; the mangling of finger and knuckle and thumb doesn’t matter, only that he has both to hold.

They lie there like that for some time, basking in the mutual relief of the odd warmth and quiet. Eventually Pomni pulls him in a way that turns him over to face her, having no choice but to look her straight into those color-shatter irises, wet with affection that he has no right to welcome or object to.

This is a precipice he doesn’t know how to cross. A threshold, a doorway, a start—all of it with her on the other side, Jax feeling so far out of his depth, out of reach, out of time.

“And this is real,” Pomni adds, pressing their tangled hands to her chest.

It’s sweeter than sanctuary, her soft exhale an afterthought along his fingertips; their legs, daring preciously against one another. Jax can’t help but begin to hunch his longer, larger form around her. To be needed in this way—to be of some great magnitude to Pomni, the realest thing he can grasp upon in this futureless moment and yet still gifting gravity back to her—is to exist along a hopeful tether, buried blissfully into her no matter where he drifts.

Jax looms over Pomni, rotating limberly in order to take both of her wrists in his hands. Any word of protest that might have existed in her mouth dies the moment he lavishly melts his gaze upon her, defeated to her warmth.

Looking closer, the gold-yolk of his widened eyes expose a newly unmenaced fear, too. Laid bare to witness, Pomni wholly soaks him in, intuitively removing one glove and cupping his face. She nearly chokes on a breath when he actually leans into it, stubbornly commanding her attention with his unyielding stare.

In all the unwinding of heightened emotion, concupiscible desire persists, begging to be at-last acknowledged. To Pomni, he is so vulnerable to exploration; so undone that he might just succumb to influence, and be remade in an image of her better, more resilient making.

Maybe this place has made them both crazy. Maybe they just need something else to think about other than impending doom and a laundry list of (mostly his) mistakes.

Pomni will do this kindness for him, she tells herself.

Jax will reluctantly unpuzzle himself for her, he won’t admit.

To avoid her touch retracting, Pomni sets her teeth on the glove surrounding her free hand. The sight of her alone charges the air between them: her glove, peeled away with just her mouth, craned neck exposing ghost-white skin as she does. Split-hue irises fixated on him, previous hesitations abandoned.

Jax looks to her like a dying man on midnight churchsteps. Like mercy is in the way she cups his face and her next word is a verse promising salvation.

“Real?” He wonders aloud, stroking Pomni’s bare palms.

It’s nearly lighter than air; she returns the gesture in equal measure as his careless one before, wrapping her thumbs tight, then heightens the sensation by setting the digits on the bare underside of his gloves, pushing the meaningless article of clothing up and away. Everything in him is weakened by this smallest of tenderings.

As if the first of its kind to him. Or, the slim chance—Pomni’s growing speculation—of the first in a torturously long time.

“Real,” Pomni responds in kind, a strained sound just barely escaping her, mesmerized by the way Jax has come to envelop her completely. Palm over wrist, sliding her arms out until she’s wingspanned flat underneath him, begrudgingly confronted with her undisturbed stare.

He makes a precision shot in aimless dark.

“And this,” Jax says, humbly stooping his head to her neck, forehead pressed to her jawline as he inhales sharply. Her scent is of wet asphalt and old ink—comforting, non-complex. A promise of unguarded ease. “Real?”

Pomni tilts her head, her face mere inches from his own. She can see the flick of his long, thin ear, feel the nervewracked jumping of his foot. When she brushes Jax’s temple with her cheek it’s a question in itself, a suggestion toward painful—crucial—resolution.

They’re tightroped at two ends of the same fraying thread, threatening total collapse.

Jax steels himself, moving to nestle Pomni’s chin in his forefinger, thumbing over her lip. He tears himself away and stoops his head down to inhale over the length of her small chest, eyes screwed shut, trying not to think about his heart in his throat or the way she’s holding herself back from pressing up into him. Pomni and those preciously short breaths, wound tighter on his every repetition like a vice. He wants more of that sound—that thin, barely there bit of begging at the tail end of her sighs. Honey-susurrated. All-consuming. Driving up some wanton, hungry urge in him for her never-ending warmth.

Anything but the bleak exhaustion of another mask.

He needs to be needed, and by no one else but Pomni. Tries to express it in his fingers ferned through her hair, clutching by the root, taking anything he can get of closeness.

“R-real?” Jax questions, slumping over her, breathing in that perfect scent. In another life, he’s certain he would’ve enjoyed urbexing and eating cup noodles at midnight with her, and she would smell the exact same.

Wet asphalt, old ink.

The urge to taste her floods through him, settling low in his abdomen.

Sensing Jax’s hesitation, Pomni grips the back of his head, draws him close, and murmurs in the elongated shell of his ear: “Real.” Her fingers dance in lazy circles around his cheeks, watching his eyes grow large with recognition. The ache in him far outweighs the fear, and that’s enough to tempt her knees up, brushing their thighs together. An astonished, pitiful sound escapes him and he has the look of a scolded schoolboy: caught, trying so hard to stifle his own embarrassment. Like there’s nothing heavier inside him right now than his own heartbeat.

Pomni decides at that very moment to not let him hide from her.

Her hands move further, draping the silhouette of affection in the crevices it has never lived: the lovely protrusion of his collarbone, the exposed peak of his sternum. The hollow of his throat, tenderly unkissed, which her palm deftly smooths over.

And his body… it eclipses her whole. Pomni wonders if he’d have done this in the real world—draped his love-limbered arms and legs all over and around her, sheltered like a midnight awning at storm’s peak. She’d have let him, she thinks.

(She’d let him do anything to her, she tries not to think.)

Goosebumps shiver over where her eyes roam further south. His voice, at a timbre of surrender, vibrates under her hand like a snare drum.

“Damn it Pomni, is this… are you… can we really—?” He tests the waters, searching her pinwheeled eyes for confirmation—for reflection of the same human urge.

Pomni nods, pleasantly dazed; drained of anything that isn’t need and desire. It’s all the permission Jax needs to lower his head and kiss her, soft and experimental; the second kiss is Pomni’s, returned with gradually increasing intensity, grabbing him by the ears as she presses him fervently, piously into her. She rolls on top of him, determined not to break contact, and pushes deeper, desperation magnified in the way his hands slide down the small of her back, or the way he groans into her mouth, and the mounting, sobering realization that they really can go further than skin-locked clothing makes her weak. There’s nothing else in the world; for a suspended moment in time, the only fact of existence is in pure experience, definition in the cresting of digital bodies over one another, emboldened with every throttled desire finally geysered forth.

In hindsight, the inevitability was obvious; at present, its gravity is almost too much to bear.

Jax is the first to break away, peeling away Pomni’s jumpsuit with lust-clumsied fingers. Arousal flares hot through him like a fever he can’t break—skin-flushed, sweat-damp, head swimming with the lurid heat of surrender.

“Real?” He asks again, stroking her wrists, her fingertips, kissing the secret pearl-white skin there, a place now quietly made possessed by him. The admiration in her eyes reads with the intention to offer herself in totality anyway, bruised mouth gaped with awe.

She exhales a halfway laugh. “Realer than anything I’ve ever…” she starts, drifting away from the implication of a life that no longer exists. A foreign body so incredibly far removed from the peculiarity of synthetic sensation, which can only be described as sterile, yet almost unbearably concentrated.

An imitation of the life she has abandoned all hope or nostalgia for, propped up against eternity slipping into uncertainty.

“Than you’ve ever felt, huh?” Jax murmurs, a grounding observation more than the typical self-satisfied jab. In a way, though, it’s his way of fishing for Pomni and snapping her out of whatever reverie she’s wandered into; he wants to kiss her again, and wants to do it now, but not without that vivid, carnal stare pinning her to the present.

He shoves his aching mouth on hers, lacing their fingers together and forcing his weight down. Judging by the lush, fluttering sound Pomni makes, she wants this just as much as he does, so he ventures further, prying into her with tongue and nail and teeth. More, more, more he tries to convey, one hand fisting in her hair, the other cupping a small breast firmly. To his amazement it fits perfectly there in his palm, softer than he’d ever dreamed, her nipple stiff and sensitive when pinched. Curiosity prickles down his back, a strained noise tightening his throat when she seizes his hand and makes him squeeze, for he is so uncontrived, needing certainty in direction.

Boyish, like late nights with racy magazines under his bed, and yet sweeter, greater in attention than any lazily-invested touch Pomni can recall from life before.

There’s no taking back the realization that Jax has well and truly bound himself to her: a codependency in the shape of a snake devouring itself at the tail.

They both shimmy out of what remains of clothes lingering at their hips, Pomni’s hat the proverbial cherry on top, non-committally tossed somewhere in the rubbled heap of their togethered unraveling. She grazes her fingertips down the faint line of his stomach, indulging in the way he withers, face flushed, his viper-slit eyes concentrated on the joyful embarrassment in discovery. While her free hand circles his waist to lure him further the other continues its exploratory trail, skimming the line of his navel, as if questioning.

Jax nods, a desperate affirmation. Pomni, ever merciful as she is, turns her palm under his stiffening length, stroking him slowly to fullness. Never once do her eyes leave him, but instead keep him locked here, hinged to the addictive realness in sensation for the sake of it. The push-pull of her tightening hand is coaxing, intoxicating in tenderness, and with the other added along his growing erection, Jax buckles onto his forearms above her. A few pumps of her fists gets him maddeningly hard, and he can’t help but moan, stuffing the unrestrained noise into her mouth with a wet, weighted kiss. It’s one thing to remember how a hard-on feels; another to feel it again entirely after so long.

It’s also not lost on either of them just how large his size is. Long, curving upward, weeping precum from the barely-tended head.

Looking winded, he pulls away, panting her name as if trying to confess or beg her of something, but sense fails him. “Pomni, P-Pom, hah,” Jax whimpers, asking for something intangible—walled behind the will of her hands to move tighter, faster.

Utterly hypnotized, she slants her mouth across his own, then shoves him away to pool saliva in the cup of her palm. When she returns her attention to his throbbing appendage her ministrations are aided by the slickness of their shared kiss. It drives Jax to a precarious brink; he nearly spills over right then and there, hips rutting clumsily up into her grasp, and he tries not to gravitate lower onto her where he sees her hips beginning to rock back and forth.

Just as needy—just as stubbornly self-deprived.

“That’s it, Jax,” Pomni soothes, whirl-eyed gaze laden in warmth. “Nothing else. Just me and you,” comes her softening affirmation, lower half stirring underneath him. While still caressing him toward herself, she moves his hardness to shelter it in the plush hood of her folds, rubbing the sensitive head along her doubly-sensitive peak—he hisses furiously at this, muttering a halfhearted scolding of her name—to stimulate her own relief.

“I don’t want anyone else,” Jax confesses, hoarse with the futile effort to lock away the vulnerabilities woven into his words, trying not to give himself away. “I-I want—I need you all to myself.”

There’s nothing he can do. Nothing but the hope that her hand won’t stray far from his now that everything is different and time is a vacuum and ohmygod the entrance to her pussy alone, hot and wet and gliding over him, suspends his panic—trades it for the sensual ease of forgetting everything but him and her, together. 

“I know, Jax,” Pomni sighs, trying not to push his incredulous member inside her. Not yet.

He melts, hitches his mouth to her neck this time—clamps his teeth down mercilessly. A marking, of sorts. A claim. Despite his best efforts Jax’s orgasm crashes tidally through him, ecstasy-swept waves flooding through his core. His spend coats Pomni in thick white spurts, Jax abandoned to awe as it paints the plane of her stomach, pooling around her navel. All his warm after-release accumulates further down in the crevice between her thighs, and she rubs them together, seeking friction and reveling in obscenity. He splays his hand there, tempting the outer area of Pomni’s would-be womb and rubbing the heel of his palm upward, where he knows she’ll feel it, discovering himself frightened by the territorial instinct it incites within him.

Pomni, naked and mottled in his seed, her wetness—which he realizes has a wonderful, sharp scent, like sweetened salt-water—dripping between her legs. Pomni, eyeing him up like she’s finally conquered a years-long siege, reveling hedonistically in its unbecoming aftermath.

Pomni, who refuses to give up on him, relentless attention spent now on his most basic urges.

He starts to stutter out an apology. “S-sorry, I’m so sorry Pom—I don’t know what came over me—”

“More,” Pomni sighs, slipping her thumb into his mouth, effectively cutting him off. “Please,” she adds, delivered after swallowing thickly. “I-I need this, too.”

Without question Jax swipes his tongue clean over her hands to lick every last drop of himself off of her, cradling her waist to lave his tongue between pert breasts, then glides down to lap at her stomach—all the while focusing his sobering gaze up at her: pupils of endless pitch framed by brutish yellow. It is the image of alluring depravity—divulges enough of his irrepressible hunger to let Pomni know this is far from over. Tasting his own cum on her skin drives him wild and he’s compelled to mouth over her sticky, still-leaking cunt, angry lust spilling into the way his tongue flattens out, lapping up at her swollen clit, her hips jumping emphatically into his mouth.

It makes Pomni’s hips hurdle upward, twisting, overstimulation flaring through her bright as a match too close to her fingertips. Though when his grip comes up to the backs of her thighs, pinning her helplessly for his pleasure-taking, she can’t move. There’s no choice but to feel; nothing else about the world can exist—not with his arms wrapped around her thighs, raking up to her backside to squeeze hard, as if to command Pomni to still herself, lest she disturb his fine meal.

Of course, it works. Pomni finds a softer, slower rhythm in Jax’s mouth—focuses, albeit with great difficulty, on the ebb and flow of sweet pleasure as it blooms into a concentrated ecstasy, his lips and tongue demanding her to feel. Telling her to take, to allow him to deliver.

“Please, whatever you do, don’t stop,” Pomni rasps, gritting her teeth.

Jax pulls away, and Pomni tries not to think about how he wipes his mouth on the back of his hand, breathing heavily. “A-are—Pomni, are you going to cum for me—?” He says it with so much crackling devotion it pains her.

Not enough to inhibit her proximity to climax though.

“I said don’t stop,” Pomni reiterates, shoving his face back down with one hand and tilting her hips up to meet his mouth. A critical pause before she throws caution to the wind and clutches his velveteen ears tight in both fists, needing any way she can to be closer to Jax and his perfectly incessant tongue.

It’s all Pomni can do to hold on. An involuntary but not entirely unpleasant sound is pulled out of him, long and wanton, like a wish forgotten about has suddenly been fulfilled. If she could, Pomni would comment on this, make some sort of teasing offhanded remark, but right now touching each other, exploring each other, dancing on the precipice of acknowledging they’re fucking each other just to feel something greater than their separate selves—all of this is so much more important than barriers of faux-coolness and hastily assigned narratives, of elusive stereotypes and their unfounded ends.

Pomni’s hips lurch twice more before she’s yoked viciously to her own orgasm, dragged somewhere impossibly, aphrodisiacally warm. A vast ocean of unnavigable bliss, Jax still lapping at her slowly—gentle, mindless, undecided. Vying for control. Yearning to bring her back to the brink, and still pulling away to allow her some reprieve.

It’s confusing. There’s nothing to do but drag Jax into another wet, heavy kiss, Pomni humming her satisfaction along his tongue. Though it’s not the same as the real world, the taste of herself is still there—altered, in a way, and yet as close as she can remember to the scent of her own arousal.

Never so insistent on the senses though. Their passions, channeled this way, are heady and laced in carnality. Pixels tingling with the invention of new code, scripted with commands of incorrigible eagerness.

Pomni’s certain that they’d have done the same out there, somehow. In the real world. Maybe split the last cold beer and the permissive moonlight, a smoke to keep them warm. Something deeper than surface-pleasantries.

“You’re far away again, Pom.” Jax remedies her distraction by hunting for the places on her skin that make her breathe harder: here, a kiss to her cutely rounded jaw that makes her hiss, and there, his crude tongue pressed to the center of her throat, which makes her whimper feebly for him.

“Mm… Sorry,” she whispers back, hands splayed out over his bare core. The skin there twitches, faint contours corded in response to her so terribly wanted touch.

Jax slides his half-hardness up and over the hood of her clit. It’s impulsive and vulnerable, and he draws his hips back to do it again—slower this time, more weighted, shivering when he feels her clit pulsing along the underside of his length. In turn Pomni gasps harshly, swirl-gazed, fixed with indescribable fascination on this torturous preliminary ritual.

“Tell me it’s real, Pomni—tell me you’re really spreading your legs for me,” Jax coerces, thrusting forward and back over the peak of her sex. “Tell me you’ll really let me inside of you.” He growls this out while stretching his neck down, caging her in with his hands on either side of her shoulders. It’s almost as if he’s saying it in awe to himself, with the thread of his own reality spooled around her little pinky. Waiting for her to patch together their clumsy, love-fumbling story.

She keens. “I-I, Jax, wait—you can’t just say something like that—”

“Why not?” He purrs, and for a brief moment, Pomni sees him whole again. Bright-eyed and teasing, giddy with confidence. “Weren’t you the one begging me not to stop?” Jax punctuates himself with another heartless snap of his hips, the head of his erection ramming into the soft bit of flesh right below her navel. It gives them both a visual of just how big he is; or, more aptly put, how impossible it should be for her to take him in full. Yet by the luminous fervor in her eyes, Pomni can’t wait for it another moment longer.

“You were the one, o-oh, that couldn’t even speak.” A weak response, she knows. She’s slipping.

“Mmh, tell me Pomni. Tell me it’s real,” Jax whines, reaching down to line the weeping head of his aching cock up to her opening.

“It’s real, Jax,” she responds, chasing her breath, cupping his cheek to coax him to softness. The way he’s utterly transfixed by her is so unreal she almost wants to pinch herself. “I—need you inside me, right now.”

It’s all the encouragement he needs to push himself into her.

They gasp at the same time, Jax’s body crumbling helplessly over her own. Pomni huffs into the crook of his shoulder, attempting to breathe through the sensation of his fullness within her. She feels her walls tighten and release, and Jax groans, long and loud: the melodic sound of dissolving into the wild euphoria of their conjoined bodies. It’s almost too much; his dick throbs for want of friction, and he pulls away to gaze down at her, apology written all across his strained face. Her thumb slides across his cheek where tears spill over, one falling down between the meager strip of skin centering her perfect little tits; Jax is quick to bend down and swipe his tongue hungrily over it, tasting salt and sweat and something irresponsibly sensual. Better than thinking about how unmasculine he must look.

And anyway, there’s not a part of her that he can allow to walk away unclaimed. Whatever grievances or misgivings he’d had regarding the intensity of their relationship has been abandoned to this: Pomni, his jester-turned-plaything, unable to distance himself from her ease of affection any longer.

“So—so perfect, Pomni—please, let me make you feel good. I’ll make it so good for you, I-I swear.”

He sounds fragile. Pained. Being alleviated of the withheld longing has left him starved for this, Pomni can tell. It’s made him protective and possessive all at once, and she’s shockingly turned on by it.

(Well. Maybe not shocked, but it feels like trying to recall the name of a long-forgotten face—a handful of hook-ups dull and dreadful in comparison to Jax’s saturated warmth, supple and brutish all at once.)

“Please,” comes her soft reply, her hips tilting up to take more of him, to urge him further, despite how her walls squeeze around his engorged member with the intent to milk him dry right then and there.

Jax can’t help praising her and then obsessing over her, his voice laced in a lascivious kind of malice. “Didn’t know it’d feel so good—can’t let anyone else have this, gotta make you mine—”

“Jax—!”

“Need you all to myself,” he chokes out, suddenly thrusting his hips deeper inside, seeking the barrier of her cervix. Fucking her like he wants to push straight through it, practicality be damned in this place. He wants to know how much further she can take him—part of him also briefly wonders about the logistics of cartoon sex, a shiver coursing through another stuttered roll of his hips.

Pomni arches up into him in response, widening her legs and wrapping them fervently around him to take his dick closer, deeper, harder. She’s betrayed by tears, letting out a sob as she feels the telltale wetness rolling down her cheek. Ever the opportunistic observer, Jax leans down to cup her face and lave his tongue across it, relishing how pliant she becomes; the change of angle drives her up the bed and yet further into his embrace, arms thrown around his shoulders, nearly crushed by his unforgiving mouth on hers a moment later.

“Wait, Jax—please, it’s too much.” In spite of herself Pomni brings her lips to his neck, kissing and sucking at the skin there—makes it completely hers in mirror-softness to his earlier gesture.

A stake, of sorts. A secret, mutual knowing meant just for them.

Jax pulls away and sets his thumb at her lips and teeth, fingers roughly catching her chin. Watching her inhibitions loosen and fall away makes something in him twist. A desire is demanding to be acknowledged. Rather vulgarly Pomni whimpers, accented moans stuttered out with every slam of his dick up against the far end of her cunt.

“No it isn’t, right baby?” he soothes, delighted by how her gaze melts, the look behind her eyes one of pure thoughtlessness. Surrender, in its softest, simplest form. He snickers a little, swiping his thumb over her lower lip. “You don’t need to think, right? Just take me,” a brief pause to bring her back to full attention, “all of me.”

The intentional withdrawal of his dick right after commanding she take him makes Pomni snap back to the present. In its absence, there’s a moment of clarity, Jax’s eyes flitting between her own: searching for permission, for desire, for her. She trails her eyes over his chest, splaying her hand in the bit of mussed fur there, then follows the unharsh line of his barely-defined core. Roams her gaze giddily over the dip of his thin waist into the cradle of his pelvis, right where his dick is poised to enter her again. He’s sitting up, and making a point of lifting her legs by the calf one at a time to rest on either shoulder, kissing each ankle reverently; before she can realize what’s happening he’s lining himself up with her pussy again, pointedly tonguing over the side of one of her feet while he does it.

It’s horrifying and so blatantly an act of worship that Pomni feels the breath in her chest forced from her like a punch to the gut. Then heat: cloying, wonderful heat, low in her core and quick as a lightning strike up through her chest. He’s so beautiful like this, thrusting like he’s carving out a home inside her, as if he has not lived in her heart for a long time already.

She hadn’t realized she’d wondered this aloud. “You’re the beautiful one, Pomni.” He’s too firm in his conviction to argue about it, given how hard he’s pounding into her again. His tempo is utterly relentless. “Is it really you? It’s not a dream, right?”

Pomni bites her lip, considering her next words. It’s exceedingly difficult to answer when she feels her climax haunting the edge of her senses, aided and abetted by his thumb circling over her clit. There’s the looming thought that he’s so incredibly good at this, just chasing whatever makes her moan into the high part of her throat, and yet—clumsy still, trembling and insecure, and she wants to kiss him, reassure him with her touch, but he’s too far away and she’s torturously—selfishly—close to orgasm.

“Can I—Jax, can you let me on top? Please,” Pomni asks, her eyes moon-wide, the faint light of the void cratering her bi-fractal irises—it’s nothing short of cute, Jax notes, and the only place he could ever find comfort in the endless. Immediately he falls victim to her plea. He has to shove down the flurry of ideas to get that expression out of her again, letting Pomni press her mouth to his one more time before mounting him, hands tender and firm in how they press down on his shoulders; leverage, he realizes, as her legs are wrapping around his equally thin limbs, feet hooked under his thighs, and he shivers when it dawns on him that she’s just effectively fashioned herself into a springing coil on top of him.

Pomni’s heat engulfs him again. It takes everything not to let go and flood her completely, her hips snapping him straight up to the soft end of her tight canal—there it is again, her womb, that place Jax wishes so badly he could fill. The tapered head of his member keeps slamming against it, and every time it makes her jump, draws out her arousal a little louder, lustful gaze decisively snipersighted upon him.

If he came inside, could he get her…? The thought is wrenched away, but not before the hot flare of desire shoots up through his core.

“So pretty, Pompom,” Jax extols absentmindedly, and he lifts his hands gingerly, uncharacteristically gentle in his way; his palms land on that space beneath her navel, the milky plane of flesh raised just slightly with the stretch of his member within her. Cartoon sex. One hand strokes the area gently, and the other trails a single finger down, circling experimentally over her sensitive peak. It sucks a sharp gasp out of Pomni, wanton ire behind the heightened flush in her cheeks. She’s still madly fucking him though, so she can’t be that angry—or maybe she’s just channeling it by slamming her hips down, her artful pace lost to the passioned frenzy of riding him mercilessly fast and hard, clit brushing so good against his finger.

“Look at me.” Pomni’s command might as well be a function of digital divinity rewriting his code from the inside, with the way he obeys without a second thought. “This—is real, Jax.” 

He falters, throwing his head back and lamenting: a long, low sound, stumbled over the wet smack of their connected bodies, over and over until Jax clutches onto the swell of her ass, using his grip to thrust up into her. Fine; he’ll meet her halfway, praying she’ll reach paradise with him at the same time. Pomni’s upper half falls over his chest and he uses the chance to crane his face closer, kissing and nuzzling her softly, gentle praises murmured along her cheek.

The timbre of her tiny voice starts to go shrill.

“J-Jax, I’m going to—keep going, please—”

“Pomni, just hold onto me, I’ve got you—”

Something fuzzy and dangerous at the edge of their digital senses hovers. A separation between textures, shocking and wonderful, like light filtered through a glass prism. They kiss, long and languid, feeling each other’s orgasms burn through their bodies as shocks of pleasure syncopate the rhythm they’d found in one another. Pomni hums into his mouth, feeling his seed shoot hotly up into her; in turn Jax whines desperately, overtaken by the incredulous sensation of her walls constricting around him.

Turns out cartoon sex does have a bit of an edge to it—as the bliss of little death washes over them, they’re still kissing and petting one another, embered arousal flaring impossibly too soon for any real refractory period to take hold.

“And here I thought—you said you weren’t gonna jump my bones, Pompom.” Jax laughs to himself with the way she whimpers pitifully at his retreat.

She glares at him in response, even in the haze of lazy, sensual repose. Her annoyance melts quickly though, and leaves something affectionate simmering in its place. Jax shivers, trying not to think about running away from this—from her—and if it weren’t for the utter disbelief that they’d just fucked away the possible end of their digital days, and the simple joy of his dick still twitching inside her, he probably would. That and her hair fanned across his chest, her cool, soothing scent lingering in the olfactory periphery.

“I wasn’t… planning on it.” Her hand cups his face like he’s someone of worth. The reward of a rough-edged geode, split open to its precious shimmering insides.

Jax tries his damnedest to look away, but Pomni’s eyes are distractingly huge. And pretty.

Beautiful, really.

“Well you did, shortie. Ain’t you gonna take responsibility for your actions now?” His embrace swallows her up again. One last chance at the revelation that he can finally be inside her, camouflaging the fear that it could get taken away again.

“Um… and how would I do that, exactly—?”

“Don’t know. Didn’t think that far. Jeez, you want a cookie or something?”

“…Well. It does sound kind of nice, actually,” Pomni muses. A gross squelch comes from between her legs as she releases him, their mixed essence dripping onto his stomach.

Would that reset by itself? He wonders, wiping it away with the sheet. Pomni’s nose wrinkles in response but she otherwise settles alongside him, side to side, her smaller form curled wonderfully into his. Jax can’t help but breathe into her hair, delivering affection wherever his fingers might wander: the soft globe of her tiny shoulder, the heel of his palm drifting overtop one breast, a fingertip circling the small dip of skin between throat and clavicle.

“So… what now?”

Pomni jolts just slightly at his question. Where her fingers dance in the fur of his chest she feels him inhale shakily, lunging to keep her touch there—a want for comfort, for certainty, despite neither of them knowing how to approach the answer.

Yet, there is an answer: the basking in pixelated afterglow, the unlocking of repressed desires. In brevity, a silence thick and heavy, where touch is reserved for further staving off questions of their consequential fate. There’s no undo button—not for anything they’ve experienced, Jax grimacing at the memory of their initial rift—but there is Pomni's touch brushing southward again, carving into the slender flesh of where his waist meets the jut of his hipbone. And there is Jax, two fingers happening upon the stiffening bud of one nipple, meaning to convince Pomni back into intimacy.

She stumbles upon an offering: a surefire spinning of the barrel, unsure of where her bullet will go.

“I’m not sure.

“...but I’ll be here,” Pomni adds, smiling gently.

So they’ll find each other in the false-light of the gaping void, again, and again, until they find out how to make a life here, paradise in the unintelligible point where one synthetic avatar ends and the other begins.