The labyrinth.

This is, ironically, the calmest place in the cellar. A series of winding passages, branching off from the main chamber like vessels from a cancer, twisting and winding through the null-data deep beneath the circus, peppered with the rotting husks of now-mindless Abstractions. 

This, very unfortunately for them, is where adventures are stored. Entire landscapes walled off and sealed up, left to rot until they are needed and reset back to their shining original state. Caine’s sorry attempt at keeping things interesting for his prisoners, though his efforts are in vain. The main chamber is so monumentally huge that some Abstractions spend years upon years circling, never once hitting a wall, and so never finding the scarce passage openings that lead to this place. Most of them never discover the rotting mansions and decayed candylands that sit, stagnated, deep underneath the digital earth, NPCs wandering their halls until they are called back to duty. 

The Queen, though — she knew every entrance. She knew every hiding-hole, every nook and cranny and cursed, darkened corner. She made it her job to. 

Queenie lived up to her name. Queenie stretched in miles of leviathan coils, and ruled over the Abstractions with iron talons and something very rare— a set of halfway decent moral standards. She wouldn’t stand for the half-baked cults and rampant hysterics the cellar had been when she arrived, so she set out to fix it. Being a dominant person in both spirit and mind, Queenie soon found those with scraps of sanity and bound them to her, with kindness, with respect, with simple conversation. She was a ruler, a leader, authority and strength. 

Queenie was order to the self-cannibalizing chaos. She was all there ever was, and she bundled those broken hearts close to her — because what else could she do, when the one thing she’d loved had been torn from her?

But he’s safe, she reminded herself, day after day, month after month, year after morbid year.  He’s safe. He’s okay. Be grateful he’s okay. Be grateful he’s sane. 

And so those years passed. And she fought, and fought, and fought, guiding and quelling, settling argument after argument and calming mind after mind. Yes, Queenie was a collector of broken things — she held the cellar community fast and firm, repairing what she could, bringing light to the darkness. A woman of iron will. 

But, like any leader, there were failures. 

There were Cultists. There were madmen. There were those that fell to depths even worse. Abstractions, monsters once people, that that unhinged their hanging jaws and ripped others to shreds. Those that tore blood and sinew from their own bones, eyes from their sockets, guts from their stomachs — or more likely hers, for all she did to stop them. They would fight her like rabid animals, screaming their nothings out into the black void of madness. They wailed and wailed, words gone, minds beyond repair. until their throats were raw. There were those she could not save, and so took by their bleeding throats and dragged, forcing them into the winding passages where few others remained. Leaving them to themselves, praying one day the isolation would slot the broken shards back into place. Friends fell to this madness, becoming bleeding strangers while she was helpless.

Those Abstractions are the ones that line the labyrinths walls now, bloated and rotting, rancid corpses with no crows to pick them clean. Some whisper promises of salvation to eachother — promises of death, that never come true. Their eyes still see, the other Abstractions whisper, That is why you do not try to kill yourself. Because not even death can save you from this.

Queenie knew that, of course. Queenie kept all she loved, or could still love, close to her — close like she should’ve kept him.  

They both have regrets, you realize.

They both mourn the other, in silent, private ways.

 

Or in Kingers case, as openly as he hasn’t for each day she’s been gone. 

 

There is nothing private or silent about the wracking, hiccuping grief that sours the air now. There is nothing discreet about a broken man, and nothing graceful in the way the pieces of him fall to the floor. 

As Queenie curls deep in an unknowable void, talking to voices that are not there, Kinger is feeling his will crumble with each twist of the jagged knife in his chest. With each shaking heave as he sobs into the soft fur, with each moment of silence silhouetted by the gulping breaths between. His mouth fills with mildew and his eyes sting in protest, and he doesn’t stop. He holds the cloak close to him, burying his face in the thick fur until he can barely breathe, arms bundling it up so tightly he can almost trick some part of him into thinking maybe he’s sobbing these jagged half-worded pleas to the woman he failed to keep close, failed to notice the cracks in. In grief, the average man begs God to give him back what he’s lost — but Kinger, he begs that wherever she is, she might forgive him. That maybe there’s enough of her mind left to do so.

Because wasn’t it his fault, in the end?

Wasn’t it him, that failed to be there?

 

“You go have fun honey, I’ll be alright.” 

His hand rested hesitant on the doorframe, looking in with anxiety behind his eyes. A velvet darkness wreathed the room before him, the mess that accompanies their day-to-day living scattered haphazardly over the floor. But, that was over her shoulder, framed by pristine white faux-fur. She’d held his face (or whatever he had of one) with gloves unstained by smudges of ink, their cuffs gilded and stitches worn yet holding strong. She looked at him with sanity, he was so sure. With that strength she’d always carried, with that iron will that so often held him fast, and only ever crumpled in his arms.  

“Really? I-I mean, I could…I could stay…” 

His voice had dropped to a mumble against his will, squirming inside his cloak. She’d laughed, with a snort that said she didn’t believe him. She always could see through him, not that he’d ever been any good at lying — or ever would in earnest, at least to her. 

“Kinger. Love. Darling. Beautiful bumbling idiot of my eye, it’s a bug hunt. I would be one s%^t wife if I stopped you from that, just because I’m tired!”

Selfish, he’d been. Selfish enough to agree, grumblingly, selfish enough to deserve this. She was more important. She always had been, always will be, and he should not have left her. She’d smiled, not knowing she was about to die. Her eyes were bright, full, loving, and yet even now he can’t see the cracks in them, not even with hindsight’s 20/20 — is he still too stupid to see the signs? The signs that must’ve been there, must’ve been so obvious? He’d smiled back, oblivious. He’d smiled back, and he wasn’t enough, to keep her alive. She hadn’t left her room in days, and he thought nothing of it. Maybe his mind had started slipping by then. 

“You’re sure?”

Maybe he was just the idiot he’s always been made out to be. 

“Of course I am, you muppet. Now — I love you,“ a light clonk, as she’d bumped her crown to his. A pseudo-kiss, with no lips to do so with. “So go win me a trophy!” 

A smile, one seen in the eyes, not the mouth. 

“And it better be shiny.” 

Playful sternness, lighthearted ribbing — she was always like that. Easy and comforting, yet so strong, so much stronger than him. Why was he so incompetent not to see that she was about to die, that he was about to lose the only person in this circus that ever made him feel like he meant something, was someone, that he was more than the comic relief? More than the person to beat and whack at, more than the punchline to one giant slapstick joke?

She’s still doing that now, in a sense. 

What kind of comic relief cries his eyes out? 

 

The jagged shaking subsides into weaker, lighter sobs, his body demanding air so violently he’s forced to surface. 

His face feels raw as lamb, his lungs strained to their extremes. The room is pitch-dark, yet patterns swim through his vision like circling sharks — hallucinations. He’s breaking now, is he? Breaking down like a battered old machine, stripped barren of any use he had. What use is he to anyone like this? His head pounding, his teeth grit so hard he can feel each one, heart going so fast it might puncture him from the inside out, clawing for its freedom with birdlike talons. His head hurts, his face aches, and it all feels more real than he knows what to do with — this isn’t what the circus is. In the circus you don’t cry, you sit in the corner and slowly rot in your anxieties — but does that mean this is living? This can’t be it. This can’t be what everyone has been missing. This hurts. 

 

His head hurt. He’d been staring at it for hours. Murky blue light. Keyboard. Technical talk. A hand on his shoulder. Soft and warm, and not gloved. Hers, slightly calloused. Where was he, what day, what time, what memory, what deadline, which — 

“Hey. You okay?” 

He’d looked up. His eyes hurt. His head felt like alphabet soup. Whatever it was he had been focusing on, it wasn’t working, people weren’t listening, and he felt stupid, like he always had been. She’d clicked her tongue with a furrowed brow, said something…something so very her, and she’d pulled him close. She always smelled like the tea she drank, and though he strains with all he is, he still can’t remember it. He can’t remember what it felt like, and something in him cracks. 

 

Kinger chokes, then takes a gasp of air for the first time in what feels like hours. 

He coughs, his ribs bruised from — from what? Hadn’t he been thrown onto the ground a couple times? 

He can’t remember. 

His head is throbbing just as it had been back then, and this time, he knows there are no arms waiting to catch him, or fold him close, or tell him it’s okay. She’s not here to unpick the knot of emotions in his chest and she never will be, will never speak or laugh or love again. She will never see the sun here. She died alone, in the dark, and he was out collecting bugs like the useless waste that he is — what kind of husband, what kind of person, leaves the one they love alone to die? What kind of person is he? His head aches, aches to the point he nearly wants to unscrew it from his neck, reach inside and stop his thoughts dead, stop everything, send the world to a grinding halt, stop his own heart — please, someone, stop this, I can’t stop shaking — 

 

“Checkmate!” 

A laugh, brash and loud and victorious. A long blade, tucked just under his eyes, grazing his place-where-it-would-be chin. She stood over him with a knife (quite literally) to his throat and a shine in her eyes, the brightness of an unseen grin, set aflame by the pride of victory. It’s no wonder, really — he’s the weakest piece on the board. Even the pawn trumps him, but he never minds losing, not really. Not when she smiles like that. Not when he knew, somewhere deep in a place that the circus could not reach, that they were each others in every way.

 

— The memories come fast and bullet-like. His head hurts. It hurts, but he holds the cloak closer, trembling as it remains balled tight in his shaking arms, pooling over him. His knees press against the hard brick, the stench of rot filling every crevice of his mouth and nose — He can taste the death on his tongue, a copper like bite that screws up his face as glitches prickle against his teeth, settle in his skin, like an itch waiting to break his will with its nagging. His breath heaves, and despite not moving he feels as if he’s run a marathon. He can’t keep this up, he can’t—

The sobs catch and fumble in his throat, and Kinger crumples over the cloak in his lap, lungs still playing catch-up even however-so-long later. The air just doesn’t want to stay in his lungs, heaving in and out in rough gasps. He can’t believe he missed them in the first place — it feels like his head is about to explode from breathing alone, nevermind everything else. The most intense emotion he’s really had to grapple with before this has just been fear, plain and simple. Fight-or-flight, not why-wasn’t-it-me. Stay alive, not stay sane. How long has he been sitting here, even, crying his eyes out to an empty memory? How long has this been going on for? 

Not that there even is time here — or rather too much of it. Too many meaninglessly passing seconds, settling around him like the sudden, horrible silence. The sobs have hitched and caught, his ragged breathing not enough to fill the empty black. It echoes too much, bouncing around and reminding him he is alone. Alone, aside from the creature outside, who said it was a friend. Who said he used to know it, yet the fog persists. He rubs at his eyes, pounding forehead forcing out his drowning thoughts. His arms tremble. His hands are horribly cold. All of him is cold, aside from the parts that still twist in the embers, what little remains of his breakdown now sizzling into a hollow silence. It feels almost like his chest has been carved out, his beating heart taken in someone else’s hand.

Has he ever felt this before? Kinger doesn’t care to remember. The dark and the quiet swing between torture and mercy the longer he sits here, a mind-numbing pendulum — One moment it’s like sandpaper against his brain, the next moment even the sound of his own breathing annoys him — the walls feel like they’re closing in, his skin both melting off and frozen in place, like an itch that won’t be satiated. He hurts , simply and plainly. And he doesn’t know how to make it stop.

 

(You go have fun honey, I’ll be alright.) 

 

His hands tighten against the velvet bundled in his lap. His breath hitches, teeth clenched to keep something in, a lump in his throat that threatens to carve itself out. 

When Kinger first heard the phrase gut-wrenching, he didn’t quite understand it. Wrenching? A tool? What , he had thought, does mechanics have to do with anguish? What he never realized then, and what he realizes now, is that it’s not about the tool. No, it’s more about the motion it makes, the harsh twist, the dull indisputable force of something deep inside him straining. The same thing in him wants to curl up here. Drag himself into that corner and sleep until the glitches prickling around him make his heart stop. 

 

(Sweetheart?) 

 

But, something stops him. 

Would she…want that, for him?

 

( Hey. You okay?)

 

…Would she want that, for him to die and join her here? He’d deserve it. He would, but — No. No, she wouldn’t, she wouldn’t want that. She would want him to breathe, now. If she were here she’d definitely, definitely tell him to breathe. She’s told him so before, on dark apartments and crowded streets. Breathe. Breathe. 

 

(Good. Now — I love you,) 

 

She loved him, didn’t she. Once. And — and he still loves her. No matter how much this hurts, there’s an end to it, somewhere. 

He never used to hurt, before all this happened. But still, somehow, he can’t bring himself to wish it never did.

 

(So go win me a trophy!) 

 

She’s always been one to push him onward. Push him when he needs it, when he can’t carry himself. She’s always inspired strength in him, and perhaps that’s why he feels so fragile now. But he still has his own meager, failing strength, that isn’t quite gone yet. The part of him that the circus stole is the only part still kicking, so he holds onto it with an iron grip — the memories hurt, but no damage is done. It hurts to think, but the echo of what used to be soothes the wounds.

 

(and it better be shiny.)

 

He turns to tears again, but quieter ones. Dripping off his chin without a single hitch in breath. Kinger remains wrapped up in the dark, his hands shaking where they clutch the crinkling softness in his arms. He’s not a stoic person. He’s emotional, and stuttery, and there are so many things that make it harder to get up this time. So many things, like the fact he’s in his own body, the body which hasn’t eaten or rested or had anything to drink long enough to hurt and hinder. Not to mention his warring memories, and the slow feeling of static creeping up his veins. The skin on his cut hand feels numb and prickling, spreading steadily up his bones. The pain reminds him very well that he can’t stay here, among the glitches and the dying things. 

Kinger is acutely aware of his fragile, shaking sanity. The brittle threads that hold him together, wobbling stitches straining at the seams, ready to snap.

But he doesn’t let it. 

And he doesn’t slip. And he doesn’t forget. And he thinks, in lines that wobble but do not loop. And he holds onto his sanity with shaking hands, but they are clenched, and they are clinging, and he’s not going to give up this time. He has his mind. He has his body. He has the golden memories that sit mixed behind his eyes, and he has the smell of rotten chamomile, a blessed reminder of what used to be. He has his head, his heart, his pulse, his face, and he is not the comic relief. He is not an example to point at when new people arrive, to illustrate something broken, when really he was only ever chipped.

And the threads don’t snap, but tighten.

 

To live is to hurt. To heal is to keep living.

 

One down, one to go.

An eternity passes, before his breath calms, and the tears stem. Kinger slowly relaxes his death grip on the cloak, fabric unfurling in shaking arms. The thick fur rests in his lap, and his hands shake as they trace over the cruel tear in the back of it, his breath quiet, only slightly shuddered as he moves. The thick fur is damp under his hands, and the wound striking over his palm must’ve split open again, for it leaves a darker streak over the feathery white ruff. Blood or oil, he doesn't know. He isn’t picky — the veins alone are a blessing to him.

Keep living.

Carefully, gently, he pulls the cloak over his shoulders. The weight of it settles firm around his aching shoulders, and it’s a comfort enough to soothe his pounding heart, if only just a little. It still smells like her.

 

“ Good lord, is that a pillow fort?”  

Grinning, a hand on the doorknob. An eyebrow raised, and a laugh short and sweet. In, or out of this place?

It doesn’t matter.

“No no no — It’s a fortress!”

 

Kinger squeezes his eyes shut, his heart rate jumping again. He takes one breath, then two. The fur tickles at his neck, thick fabric shifting and settling over his shoulders. It’s heavy, and slightly too big for him, but he wraps himself up in the inner lining anyway — this way, the glitches won’t be able to touch his bare skin. This way, he’ll have a part of her with him. The fur against his neck once settled around hers. The weight over his shoulders held her in her final moments, when he could not.

And that, grimly enough, is a comfort.

With wavering, dizzy resolve, Kinger pushes himself up. He does it quickly, before he can chicken out or break down again — he’s up, so he’s gotta be moving, despite the fact he stumbles from the vertigo nearly immediately. Something in his spine protests, but Kinger shakes it off like he has each and every other time he’s had to stand up since Jax threw that piano at him. It knocked something loose in his spine he just can’t seem to fix. He stumbles to his feet, feeling along the wall. Find a way out, find a way home, find…something, someone. Home... Home, for him, is a woman. And if not her, then the faraway house in a world he knows damn well he cannot reach. But he tells himself this anyway, because it’s something to strive for. A reason to keep going. His last standing goal.

Don’t think.  

Just move. 

And he does just that, shaking and shivering and muttering though he is. He’s not going to give up again. He’s not going to sit back down and take it. He’s not going to be the comic relief. He can’t be. He won’t be.

He is going to live , whether he likes it or not.

Kinger ends up spending a good twenty minutes stumbling through the dark. He feels way around the small “room” he’s in with shaking hands, and finds it filled to the brim with knickknacks of all variations. He mutters feverishly to himself as he runs his hands over the plastic shapes and scraps of paper, scooping up anything he thinks might be useful. He amasses quite the little bundle of useful items, including but not limited to; a pencil sharpener, a Rubix cube, a giant tangle of various ribbons and shoelaces, and, most importantly, a flashlight. Which, Kinger discovers, does still have batteries. 

Of course, the first thing he uses this flashlight for is to check on his arm. What he finds is…less than comforting. Glitches swarm around it, clinging to his skin, staining his palm nearly entirely black. The cut slashes across his palm In a way that makes it hard to close, and Kinger sucks in air through his teeth as the wound smarts beneath the light. 

Don’t think. Just— just move. 

Kinger grits his teeth, flicking the torch off so he doesn’t have to see it. Now it isn’t there! Right? Right, haha….His hands shake and he ignores them, filling the stifling silence with quiet mumbling. He has to find the exit. Not the same exit a certain clown once obsessed over, no, just the exit from this — he half trips over something, catching himself on the wall — junk-filled box . And it is, in every sense, filled with junk. With every move he makes he bumps something or knocks something over, a pile of feathers or marbles skittering over the floor. It’s frankly kind of ridiculous.

Why did the…the cat put me in here? Kinger wonders, mainly to keep his mind off more depressing subjects. Who was the Cat…? I — I knew her. She said so. What— what cats do I know of…s..something about s…

Kinger spends about seven minutes standing stock-still, trying desperately to remember even one proper cat. There was Copper, but he was a robot. Lula was close, but does a lion count as a cat? Pawlifer was a dog, which is about as far as you can get…well, no, the farthest you could get from a cat would probably be a shard of glass. Sharp and hard and not living. Instead of soft and furry and living — come to think of it, cats and dogs are very similar, why are they at odds so much? Is it just some urban myth? Do cats and dogs actually hate eachother? Come to think, why are cats and mice the iconic duo when his cats mostly brought back —- wait, he had cats. What were they called? C…C….C-something. And a white fluffy thing. And — and…gray thing. 

Kinger…can’t remember what the original point of this train of thought was.

That’s…fine. So so so so fine…

It’s not fine. It’s really not fine, but Kinger already had a mental breakdown, and he can’t afford another. You’re supposed to just — pick yourself up, after being sad! That’s how it works. That’s how it’s supposed to be, and yet — yet it’s hard. It’s so hard. He’s so tired, but he shakes his head and keeps going. Keeps moving, even with the bruise on his jaw and the scrapes on his spine. 

And mercifully for the rapidly-descending plotline, his hands find something.

There is a hole, crumbling and dusty, a few feet up from the kick-knacked floor. Kingers mind latches onto it like a drowning man to a life preserver, clinging to any concept of escape. He has to shove a pile of junk into a makeshift ladder, including a decaying wardrobe that honks as he clambers onto it, splinters irritating his only working hand. Dice and shoes and pieces of wood fall tumbling to the floor as he scrambles up his pseudo-ramp, yelping a surprised apology as he accidentally knees a raccoon in the face, before promptly realizing it’s a taxidermy. The weirdest things…

Pulling himself up and out takes a hefty amount of effort, and Kinger winces as he hauls himself to his feet. He balances on an unseen precipice, one hand steadying himself against the side of the hole, which is apparently only two bricks thick.

Click. The torch flicks on, its harsh beam plowing a trench through the murky cellar gloom. He swings it left, then right, seeing only brick passageways, stretching off into the distance. A clump of black goo stares at him boredly from the crook where the wall meets the ceiling, its singular bloodshot eye blinking languidly. So that’s what the smell of rot was. 

Kinger shivers, looking down. The drop is uncertain in the dark, and when he turns the torch downward—

His breath catches. Glitches swarm in the air like flies. Eyes stare blankly from torn, half-stuffing fur. It’s — it’s an abstraction, but not the kind he’s seen, over and over through the years. This is… different. Its face is a mess of overlapping jaws, shining pink gums and yellowed teeth, a meter-long tongue limp on the floor. Multiple limbs sprawl out beneath it, the joints placed oddly, some of them barely recognizable as limbs — its flank rises and falls, catlike ears bursting out of eachother like cursed fractals. Is this the thing that saved me? The— the friend. This was a friend once. Kinger realizes, his eyes tracing the stitches running haphazard through its fur. Fur gives way to stuffing and fabric, which gives way to flickering polygons and eyesore glitches — he can’t recognize it, can barely even associate the monster below with the voice that had spoken to him. That young, bubbly, enthusiastic voice, which once belonged to a cat.

That thought only makes things worse.

Kinger can remember the massive jaws yanking him up — quite literally — by his collar, the pounding rush of its huge strides, the smell of rot and meat on its breath. The six glowing, pulsating eyes, that had regarded him in the dark. The feeling of his mind slipping in and out of reach, and the terrifying realization that —

“I think I’m going insane.” 

It hadn’t answered him. It knew he was right. But how can you lose something you barely ever had? How can a broken mind break further? How much precision does it take, to shatter the shard, split the grain, until there’s nothing left to put together?

Is anything ever, truly, irreparable?

Kinger doesn’t know. He’s always been the idiot, after all. The one nobody listens to. The one thats punched, and whacked, and always takes the damage. Whether it’s at the hands of Jax, or Pawlifer, or Clover, or those hundred others, or the world itself — it doesn’t matter. He takes the damage. He keeps going.

And damn if he’s going to stop now.

 

 

———

 

 

 

“ BOX YOU LAZY SON-OF-A, WHERE ARE YOU!?” 

Kaufmo — still — is not having a very good day. He's been searching for too damn long , and if he doesn’t find Box soon he’s going to commit a felony. Kinger is in danger, and here he is, stuck searching for that cubic f%^ko Box. He never should have left Socks — but it’s too late to turn back now. He’s just gotta pray that she holds out against the hoard. 

He’s searching ruthlessly, but despite already checking the more frequented side passages, Kaufmo is coming up with nothing. Not a whisper, murmur, or even rumor of the guy. He knows Box is notoriously hard to track down, but this is getting ridiculous — he’s already been gone too long. Socks is great, but she tends to panic under pressure. If she bolts, he’ll never be able to find her, or Kinger. And by damn is he letting Kinger join them down here. Queenie would kill him. Then kill him again. Then kill him a third time, because that woman is terrifying when she needs to be. 

She could curb-stomp me easy as breathin’… Kaufmo mumbles to himself, wriggling his way through the cacophony of moving bodies that is the cellar pit. He twists and writhes, frustration growing as his mind screams out into their collective consciousness. 

 

LOOK, HAS ANYONE SEEN BOX!? 

 

Kaufmo calls out into the sea of minds, each of them belonging to a separate Abstraction. Kaufmo barely remembers the reason for their terrible version of telepathy — something about all their files being stored in one massive lump instead of separately, like they were before. He doesn’t care anyway, so long as someone has seen who he’s looking for.

The answer he gets is not very productive.

 

Non là-bas— Waar is hij gebleven? Geen idee, nee, NIET IK! — left, clownman— no, right! — left! — right! — 죽음...죽음...죽음... —FAKER!! DONT LISTEN TO HIM — YOU CALLING ME A LIAR, FRENCHMAN??? — タオはどこ!?戦いたい！  —ILL EAT YOU WHOLE— IS THAT A CHALLANGE?? — hahahahahahahhahahahahahhahaha— Bahse girerim yine labirentte  — hahahahhahahahahahahahhahah — MAYBE! CLOWNMAN, GO RIGHT! — YOU’RE TRYING TO MAKE HIM GO THE WRONG WAY IDIOT — YOURE THE IDIOT!! — guyyyys dont fighhhhhtt — NO YOU!! — NO YOU!!! —I like string cheese :) — SHUT UP CHAD!— WARUM KANN ICH NICHT STERBEN?! GOTT, LASS MICH EINFACH STERBEN! — hey where’d mr twitchy go he was hot~ — FIGHT ME FRENCH BOY — That was Queenies HUSBAND Margerie you utter SLUT —  YOU'RE STUPID! — WELL YOU'RE AN INBRED BAGUETTE-MUNCHING PEICE OF FORESKIN — anybody else like string cheese? — CHAD! STUFF IT! — but….,,, I haven’t seen a man in aaaaagesss……. he was sexyyyyy…… — NOBODY CARES MARGERIE — you’re f%^kign desperate aren’t ye Marge, the man havin’ two feet in a wooden onesie and all — SHUT UP PAWLIFER CANT I HAVE A DECENT ARGUMENT WITHOUT — and Swiss too but string cheese is the best imo!! UwU  — CHAD!! SHUT UP!! NOBODY WANTS YOUR STUPID CHEESE  — hahehahahehehehe anybody up for a fight I wanna BLEED — HELL YES, GET OUTTA THE WAY CLOWN MAN — YEAHHHH —  

 

ALL OF YOU SHUT UP!!

 

Kaufmo screams, knowing it’s useless. There’s never quiet down here, as is very effectively demonstrated by a pair of roughhousing Abstractions tumbling past him in a flurry of quills and polygons. Whether it’s a fistfight between feral enemies or a couple of touch-starved idiots trying to preform sex, Kaufmo has no clue, and he does not need clarification. He does not want clarification — he just wants to find Box, who is for some reason, not by the rift. Kaufmo growls to himself in Italian as he skirts the edge of it, avoiding the blue-stained boundaries of them errors that cluster at its edge.  A giant hole in the cellar air, glitching and spewing errors like artillery shells whenever anyone gets too close. That’s where Queenie used to be — before she was taken by…something.

Kaufmo is starting to think he’ll never understand what’s going on. What with Queenie disappearing in the middle of trying to force Kinger back through the ceiling, the entire cellar is chaos incarnate— even more so than usual, which is damn well saying something. The giant writhing hole of glitches she left behind is only riling people up more, some convinced it could be an exit, others trying to use it for suicide, none of which are successful. And to top it all off, Box is absent from its edge, the small pile of errors he’d set up still neatly stacked. 

Kaufmo quickly writhes away from it, nosing his way through the sea of abstracted bodies, and probing each and every passing mind for info. None have any, and Kaufmo isn’t surprised— Box is an enigma, one of the few down here that retained some sense of dignity. He’s a snarky asshole, but if there’s one thing Kaufmo knows, it’s that he’s smart. Due to being (nearly…?) blind, Box has the cellar mapped out floor to ceiling. He knows things other Abstractions don’t, and Kaufmo learned near immediately that his lack of sight is an advantage if anything. Trying to pry anything out of his mind is like trying to cuddle with a pile of bricks.

So if there’s anybody who knows how to get Kinger to the surface— or at least somewhere safe — it’ll be Box. 

…If Kaufmo can find him, that is.

He rounds another crumbling pillar, one of many that litter the cellar. A few of his peers screech nonsense at him from where they cling to the decaying stone, but all he does is scramble to a stop and fix his mind on them like a spotlight.

“ OI! YOU BOTH! YOU SEEN BOX?”

He practically shrieks, forcing his thoughts to be heard over the others. The two decrepit looking Abstractions just stare at him languidly, clearly out of it. They remind Kaufmo of stoners, if stoners were giant rotting corpses of black mush.

“negativesirnegativesirnegativesirnegativesirnegativesirnegativesir,” 

One rambles, almost boredly, and the other cracks a bony neck out to squint at Kaufmo. Abstractions often become more…biological, the longer they are corrupted. Polygons give way to fur and teeth and eyes, the roving pupils and sclerae pulsating like blood. The longer you are corrupted, the more horrifying you become — and this Abstraction in particular appears to have been down here a very, very long time. Pus and rot drips from twelve chattering beaks, it’s bulbous, bloodshot eyes slightly filmed over. It looks like a corpse, and this is, depressingly, a normal sight. He’ll be like that one day.

“…… Locks…?…..no…no..lock….no key…..no cage………no way out…”

The withered Abstraction mumbles, and Kaufmo grits his metaphorical teeth. Of course, of course it’s still half deaf, even when there’s LITERAL TELEPATHY. Of course! Because his life can never be easy, now can it!? Restraint, restraint, restraint, Kaufmo —

“NOT LOCK!!” He screams, as loud as he can, “BOX. B-O-X, BOX.”

The withered Abstraction hums for a moment, it’s old mind whirring like a dusty cassette. 

Kaufmo physically forces himself to be patient. Remember what Queen told you, he reminds himself, casting his mind back to when he’d first met her. It was only a few short weeks ago, though it feels like an eternity, when she had taken him on that tour of the cellar. Not that he’d really appreciated it, at the time.

They’re…slow, one could say, but they know things. Coaxing a story out of them is a decent way to burn time. 

He can remember her saying, one bus-sized talon gently pushing him along during his terrifying first day. He’d been shaking like a leaf, still unable to believe it had really happened. That he had really, finally abstracted — he’d been terrified of it for so long , yet somehow it was still a surprise when it happened. He was back in his own body, just for a moment, before it all fell apart. The one hopeful moment when he remembered his name, before the twisting, nauseating feeling of bone and acid and polygons ruined it all. When the worst agony of his life split his spine in half, when the feral rage had overtaken his mind until he fell down here and she smacked him out of it. 

… I don’t wanna burn time. He grumbled, shivering. I — I just want to f^&kin’ go home .  

Queenie had turned to him, the many writhing tongues ringing a singular eye, peering out at him from the chasm of her face. She was monolithic, a looming example of what horrifying things Abstraction can do to you, with time. He remembers the skinless jaws peeking out from inside that darkness, the low-poly intestines writhing like snakes — but, he also remembers the understanding she gave him. 

Everyone does. And one day, I promise you, we will.

Her eye had blinked at him, and he’d seen a flash of what she used to be. Her and Kinger, both in the circus and out of it, smiling. Kinger waving as he turns a corner. Her own corrupted organs falling onto the floor. 

But it's best to make the best of it, in the meantime. 

Kaufmo remembers his life, his brothers, his home. His mothers cooking, far in the past. He remembers the noise of construction and power tools in his hands, and he treasures those memories like true wrung gold. Finding that last scrap of hope sullied by this darkness would drive him mad — and to Queen, Kinger is her scrap of hope. Perhaps the sole reason she’s kept her mind this long is because, as long as he wasn’t down here with her, she would know he was alright, sitting somewhere in the safe technicolor where his mind — if not preserved — would at least be kept safe from this raging, ravaging madness. For her to return and find her husband screaming with the rest of them? 

No. No, Kaufmo owes her too much to let that happen.

 

(My name — my real name — is Quin. But you can call me Queen.) 

 

He has to be patient.

 

(I’ll protect you.) 

 

It takes what feels like an eternity, Kaufmo internally screaming with each second that passes by, but finally the ancient Abstraction moves. Its claws pry themselves from well-worn ruts in its stony perch, and slowly, languidly, it stretches out one rotting wing, gesturing up and slightly to the right. Mold and rot falls flaking from its leathery skin, but Kaufmo perks up anyway, feeling the older mind rub up against his own to tell him what it knows.  

 

“Alcove…dusty…code….tendrils…up, right, up up left…alcove…” 

 

It whispers to him, Kaufmo catching a flickering memory of Box’s writhing tendrils amidst the thoughts. 

 

“THANK! YOU!”

 

Kaufmo screams, as loud as he can, and immediately shoves off. 

Geeze, that took too long — Socks BETTER be handling things right now… Kaufmo thinks to himself, leaping up the pillar in giant bounds. If she lets Kinger die, I'm gonna spread her stuffing over the walls. Kaufmo scrapes ribs with a thousand other screaming Abstractions as he clambers up towards the cellar roof, worrying his nonexistent ass off. F%^k, what if she panics and bolts? What if Tao just eats through her? I wouldn’t put it past him, that bastard rips his own skin off for fun…  

Please, God, Kaufmo (who never was quite able to shake that catholic upbringing) prays, mainly out of habit and spite, bring Queen back. I’m so tired of dealing with this bullshit. 

Kaufmo finally reaches the cellar roof, clambering onto it like a spider, if the spider in question was drawn by a four year old who has never seen one and was also rendered in Mario 64. He doesn’t come up here often, but he knows the cellar well enough to expect what he gets — more corpse-like stoner zombies. Kaufmo pays them no mind in his search, ruthless as he crams his many writhing polygons against the brick, probing for a gap. His face scrapes against the grooves and nicks, searching, searching. He bumps foreheads with seven ex-felons in the process (C&A appears to have a habit of abducting criminals) and gets called “new guy” by five of them. He’s been here a week, dammit, is that not traumatized enough?

“you enjoy those polygons, now,” 

One nearby Abstraction grumbles, fixed onto the cellar roof by a complex webbing of glitching flesh. 

“you’ll miss ‘em when they go.”

Kaufmo ignores it, checking the cellar ceiling for an opening brick by brick. He suddenly halts — There. A collision-less patch of wall, just barely big enough for maybe a dime to squeeze through. But in the cellar, anatomy is merely a suggestion. Kaufmo has met like, five people built entirely of organs and jello. Queenie herself has a face made mostly out of intestines and tongues — in fact, Kaufmo is at a disadvantage, having to shove each of his polygons through the gap, one by one.

It is, as one might imagine, an excruciating process.

When he finally shoves his way through it — damn finally — he finds himself in a dark, and more irritatingly cramped, passageway. The brick scrapes against him from all sides as he crams himself along it, his entire body crushed into the size of a bread loaf. And not a good, Italian loaf, but the small dinky kind you get from Walgreens that tastes like plastic. Kaufmo hauls himself along either way, the very picture of a man on a mission — if that man so happened to look like a schizophrenic lump of play-doh.

His mind is laser focused, following the directions given to him. Up, right, up up left, alcove….

Dammit, where’s the alcove?

Kaufmos face (“face” meaning head-adjacent polygon mass) hits a dead end. He grunts, squirming against it, trying to feel for the “alcove” that was described to him. Finding nothing but brick, a flash of rage shoots through his already erratic code — come on, I wasted time listenin’ to that old windbag! Kaufmo snarls a curse to himself, pivoting and twisting in the small space — feeling, feeling, feeling — ugh, come on, I wanna get out of here! He braces his legs against each of the four walls and pushes, shoving and desperately trying to find some give, anywhere — 

Something wraps around his ankle.

Kaufmos first instinct is to kick it off, but whatever it is tightens — before he knows it he’s being yanked right off his feet.

Kaufmo can feel his polygons being forced one-by-one through a truly unfairly small hole in the wall, his rigging protesting immensely with each second he endures it — but it barely takes a second, Kaufmo landing hard on the other side and yelling an Italian phrase which basically equates to “oh shit my ankle.” He does not actually have an ankle right now, not really, but Kaufmo screams it anyway, if only out of habit. He scrambles for a moment, writhing on the floor and trying to figure out what happened — his head swims, polygons twitching to find only empty space opening up around him. It’s an unfamiliar sensation after the past week of constant claustrophobia in the cellar, the phantom sensation of writhing bodies still twitching over his pseudo-skin.

The thing slithers off him, and Kaufmo shivers, pushing himself to his feet. He wobbles, the ground rocking back and forth underneath him — or maybe his sense of balance has just atrophied since being turned into a giant lump of nightmare fuel. He blinks all thirty of his eyes, adjusting to the faint glow on the other end of the room.

Box.

F^&kin’ finally. 

Box, as Abstractions go, is pretty lucky. His body is a simple cube, with the usual gory mess contained mostly within it — organs and intestines and membranes still spill from the bottom, of course, but that still counts as lucky. Kaufmo has seen inside only a select number of times — a huge pulsating heart sits somewhere in there, which is ironic considering Box himself has the personality of cardboard. Still, dragging yourself along on your own intestines is pretty standard in the cellar, and though Kaufmo doesn’t exactly envy him, Box is still fairly tame.

Box’s fittingly cubic body fits snugly into the back corner, hunched over and fiddling with one of the error messages. A haze of smoke drifts from the miniature firewall he’s currently trying to…bypass? Kaufmo doesn’t know, and Kaufmo doesn’t care either — he’s finally found the guy, and he is not happy about how long it’s taken him.

 

“DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW LONG I'VE BEEN LOOKING FOR YOU!?” 

 

Kaufmo roars, marching over to him. Despite the fact Kaufmo weighs roughly as much as a double-decker bus and each stomp shakes the brick, Box doesn’t even look up from the code he’s fiddling with, his eyes resting still and unseeing. His intestine-tentacle things are strewn haphazardly around the space, twitching as Kaufmo stomps on them. Ew, ew ew EW…

“I’d estimate about an hour.”

Box replies simply, sounding disinterested. A string of spaghetti code is tossed over his shoulder, hitting Kaufmo in the face. The mini firewall sputters like a dying flame, Box muttering a “ there we are… ” under his breath. Kaufmo growls, biting back another retort — he doesn’t have time, he doesn’t have time! It’s so painfully, stupidly ironic — the one, singular time he tries to do something morally good, everything tries to stop him. if this is hell and there's some devil ruling from behind the scenes, it must be laughing it’s ass off right now.

“Listen here asshat,” Kaufmo begins, very diplomatically, “I know you saw what happened, and I need your help to—“

“What was that, anyway? You’re a nosy bastard, I bet you know.” 

Box interrupts flatly, and Kaufmo grits his metaphorical teeth. Self control. Self control. Restraint, restraint, restraint! 

“ Yeah, weird I know!”

He starts again, trying his hardest to keep the frustration out of his voice.

“But as I was saying, that’s not what I’m —“

“ I wonder if she clipped out of the map. That would be like her, poking her nose into odd places…or rather jaws.”

Box continues, as if he hadn’t spoken at all. That damned monotone of his is starting to get annoying, another strand of spaghetti code flying over Box’s shoulder. Kaufmo is this close to losing it. This close. 

You can’t see it because this isn’t an illustration, but my fingers are touching.

 

“CAN YOU SHUT UP FOR TWO SECONDS AND LET ME TALK!? ” 

 

Kaufmo screeches, barreling on before Box can interrupt him again. 

“Listen here you shitty crumbnugget, I’m talking about KINGER. Kinger is down here, with us, and I need—”

“Queen’s husband?”

Box asks, turning to face Kaufmo, one tentacle still resting on the firewall. It crackles quietly as Box pauses for a long moment, thinking, his sightless eyes rolling lazily in their sockets. 

“ Yes! Yes, him, look, I need you to—“

“ So that’s why she was so worked up…”  

He mutters, tapping one tentacle on the brick. Kaufmo, meanwhile, is trying very hard not to blow his top — interruptions or not, at least Box is listening now. The quicker he can convince him to help, the better.

“Yeah! Yeah, him! Listen, you gotta help me get him out of the cellar, the crackheads out there are literally trying to eat him, and I’m pretty sure you n’ can at least agree on how sick that is, right!?”

Kaufmo says in a rush, eager to get to the bit where Box agrees to help and they fix everything and Queenie comes back so he doesn’t have to deal with all this bullshit. Box hums for a moment, his many eyes rolling in their sockets — Kaufmo has no idea why he has so many, when according to him, his circus body didn’t even have one. Come to think, why the hell does every single Abstraction have so many eyes? There’s no point, other than giving Kaufmo a constant sense of vertigo. Kinger is lucky, just having two. Speaking of Kinger and Kinger-related subjects, why is Box taking so damn long to —

“Yeah, no. Hes doomed.”

Box says finally, tapping one intestine on the stone.

 

You can almost hear the little snap! As Kaufmo’s patience breaks. 

 

A bonfire. A crackling, red hot, mountainous pyre of rage. He’s across the room and on top of Box in less than a second, slamming him into the wall with all the force of a semi truck going 80 on the interstate. He kicks the still-flaming error across the floor, it’s pixelated edges skittering over the brick — Kaufmo vibrates with rage, every single polygon In him quivering with it, his stupid, stubby excuses for limbs grinding into Box’s collision, wildly roving eyes pressing so close to Box’s blank ones he could count the veins. He wants to scream . He really wants to scream. He wants to scream until the f&*ker goes deaf.

“Listen here you little shit,”  

Kaufmo snarls, pressed so close to Box’s sorry excuse for a face he can hear the collision cracking, 

“I don’t care if you think he’s doomed. I don’t care if you think the president is a damn drag queen — how the hell don’t you get it? Are you stupid? Has your brain melted into miso soup?”

Kaufmo leans his whole weight into crushing Box like a tin can, increasing the pressure inch by inch.

“This is something new. Kinger is human, Queen f^&kin dissapeared while tryina save him, and left a hole bigger than pawlifers ego — doesn’t that mean anything to you!? Nothing like this has ever happened before, and after the shit show this has turned out to be, Caine might never let it happen again! We can’t just — just stand by and let it all happen like a normal f^%&kin Tuesday!”

Kaufmo jerks his head forward, glowering with every inch of hostility his body has to give.

“You are going to help me, or I’ll beat you into a paste so fine your eyes will be f^&king floating in the puddles. You wanna be a puddle, nessun cervello!?”

Kaufmo spits, grinding his pathetic excuses for legs against the brick with every word. His situation is, frankly, ridiculous — begging for help from the one guy, the one singular person in the entire cellar, who just doesn’t care. But he needs Box, as much as both of them hate it, and he’s going to get that help even if he has to drag Box by the various organs still ribboned over the floor. The polygons where his mouth should be itch, phantom teeth gritting together. The collisions mesh and twitch, code broiling like broth. Kaufmo’s sanity has always been a fragile thing, his patience guarded but brittle. If this stupid gaslighting carries on much longer he’s definitely going to do something both him and Box will regret. 

Box just gazes into nothing with blank gray eyes, reflecting the shine of Kaufmo’s own neon glow. Unseeing. Un bothered .

“ There’s no way out, and you know it.”

Box growls, his voice low. Kaufmo just scoffs, rolling his many eyes as he leans even harder into the pin. Bullshit, typical, run of the mill, on brand Box bullshit.

“ Oh, f%^k off — at least find a place we can hide him, I know you have more hiding places than a f%^king —” 

“Hide him? Kaufmo, he’s DOOMED!”

Box repeats, his voice so emotional for once that Kaufmo actually shuts up. There’s an edge to Box’s voice, something in his tone, the way he spits the words — it gives pause to Kaufmo’s anger, the bonfire flickering under a light drizzle. Box twitches under him, the rolling of his blank eyes growing more erratic.

“Even if I took him to the deepest depths of the labyrinth, the darkest, most sterile, most uncorrupted halls, the system would still get to him before an escape was in the cards. It’s useless, trust me.

Box spits, as if the words taste bitter in his mouth. They’re certainly bitter to hear, Kaufmo halfway through taking a breath to snap at him before stopping. He leans some of his weight off Box, head swiveling so a different set of eyes can squint at him. That can’t be true. That doesn’t make sense.  

“The hell are you talking about?”

Kaufmo growls, trying to regain some of his bravado. Box just scoffs, sending one organesque tendril slithering across the floor. It roams by touch, feeling over the brick until it finds the abandoned error message, still spitting occasional sparks. He drags it back towards them with a long sound of scraping pixels, holding it up so Kaufmo can see the words still wreathed in sputtering, dying flames. Kaufmo stares at it, uncomprehending— its message is not the sarcastic, insulting quip that most circus errors are. No, this one is…different.

[SYSTEM OVERLOADING]

Box wiggles around in front of him, like an owner teasing their dog with a treat.

“ You see this? This is the work of some poor fool trying his absolute hardest to fix the circus, and failing miserably. Maybe it’s Caine. Maybe it’s some other dumb f%^k.”

He shrugs, tossing the error away like a piece of scrap paper. It clatters onto the floor, Box’s words soon drowning out the rattle it makes as it half-clips through the brick.

“But you wanna know what, exactly, said dumb f^&k is trying to fix?”

Kaufmo gets the feeling he’s going to find out no matter what he says. 

“The Amazing Digital Circus, a construct capable of running an emulator of the human brain over a hundred times over, entirely within itself, in real time — if not even faster — is f&^king running out of RAM. Do you get how crazy that is? How mind-bogglingly, absolutely f&^king bonkers? Do you know what that would take, to do that?!”

“I’ll tell you what it takes; a human. Not a brain, or a consciousness, or whatever the hell we are — a biologically accurate, true to life, human person. I know about Kingers cursed little stroke of luck — it’s hard not to, when the entire circus is overheating to the point I’m pretty sure you could cook an egg on it, all because Kinger— Mr lucky, lucky  Kinger —got himself his body back, and you bet your ass every single cell in him is being rendered separately.”

“So, I’ll repeat myself;”

Box leans forward, crushing his flat plane of a face against Kaufmo’s glitching mess. 

“Even if — and that’s a huge, huge if — we got him out of the cellar, he’d still be doomed. Because once this place starts lagging badly enough, the circus itself is going to start deleting him, file. By. File.” 

“Things making sense yet, Kaufy?” Box snaps, “Putting together the pieces? I mean, why the f^&k do you think it even put him down here in the first place!?”

Box is yelling now, tendrils rising to shove him away. A mass of intestines and livers pushes him backwards, Kaufmo falling like a floursack. He’s too stunned to do much of anything, stumbling back in a kind of daze. His head feels like it’s on loop, Box’s many appendages curled up into frustrated coils where they writhe on the ground. 

The silence is near palpable . It drips down the walls, gathering in the deep grooves Kaufmo was grinding into the brick only a few moments earlier. His mind is racing in circles, looping round and round like a spiral staircase — connecting the dots. Putting together the pieces. Scrambling to find the shards of what he thought was going on and fitting them together.

“ I— you’re telling me Kinger just existing is whats driving this place into the ground!? It can’t be that bad! I’ve seen adventures with — with entire oceans, and you’re tellin’ me one human body is too much!? 

Kaufmo shoots back, scrambling for any kind of argument to disprove this. Anything that might poke a hole, even the tiniest loophole he can squeeze through. 

“A-and anyway,” 

He continues, trying to gain steam. 

“ There ain’t any lag I can see, everything’s running as smooth as ever! If things were actually fallin’ apart like you say, wouldn’t I be able to notice?”

Kaufmo steps forward, the majority of that steam going right to his head.

“You’re full’a shit, you know that, right!? There’s a life on the line, and you spin up some stupid story ta’save your own skin!”

Box releases out a long, dragging snarl of a groan, his cubic body rearranging itself with annoyance. Kaufmo catches a flash of fleshy arteries within, and backs up a step as Box rises on his many pulsating limbs, suddenly seeming a lot bigger than he was a second ago. His gray eyes twitch and roll in their sockets, the shadow he casts sharp and dark in the gloom.

Kaufmo gets the sense he’s just crossed a line.

“ You idiot, you’re in the program that’s lagging!” Box snarls, “Of course we can’t feel it, none of us can! I only know because these damn things—“

He slams a tentacle down on the glitching error, Kaufmo jumping back from the shower of sparks that are produced.

“—Won’t stop telling me! System overloading, system overloading, whenever I try to do anything! System overloading, because it’s busy rendering billions upon bajillions upon multi-millions of microscopic little assets in microscopic little rows, every neuron, every amino acid and chemical reaction and nerve ending — hell, you realize that the circus is probably generating his f%^king atoms, right?! What more do you want!?”

Kaufmo has to scramble backwards to avoid being head-butted, Box advancing on writhing organs. Buttons pushed, sightless eyes rolling, Kaufmo notices the tendrils he stands on begin to twitch. If Box had a mouth there would probably be foam around it, his many appendages writhing and roiling like a furious sea.

“You think I’m enjoying this!? Grow up, Kaufmo! You just want something you can fight, an enemy you can crush instead of the harsh reality — It’s human nature, after all!”

Box barks a laugh, voice twisted up with more than enough emotion to make up for his lack of a face.

“You’ll grow out of that soon enough.”

He spits, a stray intestine lashing over the brick. Kaufmo doesn’t answer, pressed up against the back wall. If he still had a heart, it’d be pounding out of his chest — he needs to stop passing off people who can hit back. He’s serious about this, Kaufmo realizes, he believes this. There’s a long, tense moment as Kaufmo remains there, back pressed flush to the brick, Box looming over him like a living threat of violence — Kaufmo is uncomfortably aware of the fact he’s essentially standing on a carpet of Box’s limbs, any of which could pull him to pieces. 

Box sighs deeply, the frustration leaving him. He rubs an eye with one particularly slimy intestine, sinking back down to his usual height, the looming shadow he cast shrinking with him. Kaufmo puts a great deal of effort into hiding the fact he’s shaking like a leaf. 

“ Look, you want my advice?” 

“ If you want to keep him alive...abstract him. That’s the only option. And if you don’t want to do that, well…”

Box leans back, the tentacles underneath Kaufmo withdrawing slightly.

“… Decapitation is always an option. It’d probably be kinder than what the system will do to him…”

Box voice slips back into a resigned monotone, leaving Kaufmo alone with his negative-emotions soup. The recipe consists of a wide variety of ingredients, such as ‘Disgust’, ‘Horror’, ‘Existential Terror’, and other such high-quality foodstuffs. 

“I— I’m not — I’m not going to kill him!”

He splutters, and Box gives the vague equivalent of a shrug.

“Great. I’d love to see how abstraction affects a guy with a near-infinite collision mesh.”

“Oh just — shut up! Shut up and let me think!”

Kaufmo barks, turning to pace the room, grasping at straws. Those are the two most absolutely shittiest options possible! Let him die, Queen hates him. Abstract him, at least he’d live but — no, no she’d hate that, and Kinger could — well. He was barely holding on when Kaufmo was with him, and if he’s already that fragile, would any of him even survive Abstraction? What should he do? What can he do? There must be something, some way he can keep this, that he can do good without hurting or upsetting or ruining anything— come on, what would Queen do? Reliable, steadfast, badass Queen, who’s everything he isn’t, she would have a plan. Think, Kaufmo, think!

Abstract, or die. Abstract, or die. Queenie hates me, or Queenie hates me. Kinger only sorta-kinda dies but suffers forever, or Kinger definitely dies.

Kaufmo shakes his head with a growl, giving up on the straws. F%^k the stupid straws, he’ll just make up something! No way is he gonna let Kinger join this hell! He’ll find a way, somehow, he always does. When Kinger fell in here, and Queenie disappeared? Kaufmo protected him, Kaufmo made a plan, Kaufmo found Box! And Kaufmo is going to find a third option, or die trying. He’s done being nice, hell, he’s done dealing with Box’s bull. He’ll drag a solution out of the depths of hell! He’ll drag it from the Mariana Trench! Hell, he’ll dig through Caines secret closet of The Princess Bride paraphernalia if he has to!!

“Do whatever you want, so long as you leave me alone.”

Box replies flatly, turning his metaphorical back to Kaufmo, who just hacks a laugh in response. Oh no, nono no , Box is not getting off that easily. Kaufmo may not know what the flying f^&k he’s doing, or where he’s going with any of this, but there’s one detail of his newly-developed plan that is crystal clear.

” Oh no you don’t. You’re comin’ with me, smartass.”  

Kaufmo growls, a grin in his voice. Box yelps — very satisfyingly — as Kaufmo yanks a nearby bundle of intestines towards him, polygons clustering around them so the squirming organs are held in tight knots around his limb.

“What the hell!? What are you doing!?”

Box shrieks, trying (and failing) to cling onto the brick. Kaufmo cackles as he yanks Box away from the back wall, the stubborn Abstraction tumbling into a haphazard pile of organs and angles, right at his metaphorical feet. Kaufmo might, possibly, be enjoying this a little too much, but hey — the guys been trapped in a madhouse for weeks on end, you gotta cut him some slack here!

“Bringin’ you along o’ course!” Kaufmo replies gleefully, “ Cus’ no matter how annoying you are, you clearly know shit.”

“So, I’ll repeat myself,” 

He says, leaning down with a grin in his voice.

“You’re comin’ with me.”

Kaufmo laughs as he turns on his heel, dragging them both out of the alcove with no thought spared to Boxes shrieking protest. He can scream and logic and nihilist his ass off if he wants to, but Kaufmo, he has a plan. A very simple, half assed, objectively useless/terrible plan, but that's what makes it genius.

It goes a little something like this:

 

1. Find Kinger
2. Force box to stop being a pussy about helping
3. Magically fix everything.

  

As I said. Very shitty plan. But it’s all Kaufmo’s got, and hey — if you can’t blind em’ with your brilliance, baffle em’ with your bullshit, right?

 

———

Kinger is walking.

He’s very, very far away from the main cellar by now. His footsteps scuff over hard brick, passages that may be claustrophobic for truck-sized Abstractions wide and spacious for him. 

Lonely, one might think. 

 

But Kinger has far, far too much company for a man walking alone.

 

She’s in front of him. She’s laughing, glowing when she smiles, snorting at some joke he’s since forgotten, then opening her mouth so the teeth fall out. Hands and eyes and arms wave through the dark, and she’s swaying to a song who’s tune got stuck in his ear for days after, or strumming a guitar, or swirling a drink, setup for blow after blow as it bloodstains the memories. The eyes are laughing at him. The arms wave just beyond his torch beam, the halls and the brick closing in around him and winding over his neck. He can barely think — it’s bad right now. Her eyes gaze from the shadows. Her echoing voice rounds every corner. His every thought rattles her name.

Kinger keeps walking, eyes squeezed shut. Not real, not real , he chants to himself, as ghostly figures march beside him. Not real, he repeats, as her eyes glint from the shadows, the phantom of her face smiling too wide.

It’s not just her, but others now. New dusty figures, appearing as old memories sputter in the back of his brain. His family, his friends — he had those. A home, an identity, a life he can no longer recall. Two dim impressions of brothers, one of them blond, the other too murky to see. A sister that’s nothing more than a distant echo of intelligible speech. The half-baked fragments of them hop and skip and waltz in fuzzy patterns through the dark, taunting him like the anglerfishes light — only the torchlight is real, though, only the torchlight can be trusted. So he keeps his stinging eyes fixed tightly upon it, retinal burn tinging the edges goose-green. Not real, he chants inside his mind, not real, he mumbles under his breath, as hands wave and shift just outside the beam. Grabbing at his shoulders, fake and passable as mist. Not real. Not real. Just his broken mind, trying desperately to break itself further. Not real. Not real. Not real.

Digital hallucinations.

Kinger walks for hours this way. His legs hurt, but he’s used to that. His bones ache, and he’s used to that too. Old complaints — they don’t bother him, the shaking ice in his hands or the goosebumps that refuse to leave him. He puts one foot in front of the other, and fights desperately not to think, not to give into the old thought paths that he know will send him wandering aimlessly. 

It’s already happened five times now.

His mind will slip into a memory, and suddenly he’ll be in it, a violent flashback that sucks the air out of him until he can barely think. It’s not like the brief flashes of before — no, no this is different. This feels like being punched. It’s like losing consciousness, Kinger finding himself somewhere different each time he wakes. Leaning against a wall or slumped under a hanging mass of eyes, cloak askew, head pounding— did he move forward? Did he backtrack? He can’t remember, the lost time hidden behind the same fog that looms over his mind like a constant threat. He doesn’t remember what he said, what he did, why he woke up curled into a ball — how long it had been.

And each time, something returns to him.

At first it’s small things. Mundane little moments, snippets of information. When he was young, he lived in a house with yellow curtains. His favorite food was macaroni. He used to get annoyed when the radio would play the same song twice.

Then they start getting stronger.

The flashbacks begin to hurt more, last longer. Headaches start. Now he wakes up with snapshots, glimpses into the life he used to have. His hands on a steering wheel. Watching a cricket ball sail through the air. Staring up at a stained glass window, from a far shorter height than what he stands at now. Flinching as a car wheels around a corner far too fast, screaming as a bolt of lightning obliterates a tree.

And it doesn’t stop. It won’t stop, no matter what he does. He doesn’t know what triggers it — a stray thought or concept is all his mind needs, to send him spiraling.

And the things he remembers, well.

They begin to be…important. 

He was John, once. John H.Bauer. The memories begin to sharpen and lengthen, playing behind his eyes like a cutscene, and — and some of them, some of them have her. Her, Quin, who he met in December, 2008. Who was just as strong, and just as wonderful, and just as kind to him before this hell. Who had a friend named Michelle that ran track and had to be bribed to study. He remembers walking through streets in daylight, gingerly picking his way through a trashed apartment, trying very hard to read his professors handwriting and failing miserably— and all through it, her presence hums.

These memories do more than bring headaches. 

Each time he wakes, the pain in his hand gets worse, and worse. Each time, the glitches climb higher on his skin. Each time, can feel the lost seconds, minutes, hours, becoming longer, and longer, and longer. He can feel the fact his muscles have moved without him, and the haze behind his eyes thickens, or ebbs, or he’s left with the blinding clarity to think about it all and a splitting headache. Left with a memory that hurts him, and an unfamiliar set of dark hallways to walk down, hoping with every step that he’ll get better this time. Hoping that maybe, maybe, he’ll stumble upon a way out, or that something, anything will get better.

It’s terrifying to think that even his own mind is fighting against him. 

Then again. At least it’s working, right?

Kinger walks down passageways and past towering corpses of long-gone old friends. His torchlight swings over walls of bloated black polygons, shuddering glitches fuzzing his vision as he continues on. He doesn’t know who they were, or why they fell. He doesn’t know why he of all people keeps getting on up again, or what it is that’s holding his mind together — but at this point, he can barely think straight enough to care. 

Kinger is no pillar of mental fortitude, or strength. He’s not athletic, nor does he have much common sense. But apparently, he is durable — And if not durable, then enduring. What other word can you use to describe a man who’s been beaten to a pulp so many times his pain tolerance breaks the ceiling? What other word can you use to describe someone who’s gone and is going insane twice over, yet keeps stumbling on? He’s spent years without her, so surely he can stand a few hours with her laughing memory tagging on his heels. If he’s survived being stabbed, bitten, blown up, having pianos and anvils lobbed at his head, then surely, surely he can survive a few glitches crawling up his skin. 

If he suffered through forgetting her, he can certainly survive remembering again. 

Yes, enduring, if anything, is exactly what he is. So Kinger busies himself with anything that isn’t the old distractions. Insects, most regrettably, are off the table. They remind him too much of the Before. Of the not-thinking, barely reacting, losing track of even simple conversations — Anything existential, also gone. Thinking about the circus itself will sometimes send him into a memory not erased, just repressed. And that, that leaves him shaking. He’d rather not remember those. He’d sooner forget them forever. And besides, getting lost in those memories seem to be more dangerous— they nearly sent him tumbling down a pit once. 

He’s always hated the silence, so Kinger starts filling it. He starts reciting his own name so it doesn’t slip from his mind. He starts reciting hers, j oined on a hazy-hidden wedding day. He recites the names of his friends, his professors and favorite authors, telling himself the addresses and phone numbers that rattle randomly through his head. They carry no context, but he tells himself every story he can remember regardless — even mumbling songs, though he’s horrible at carrying a tune. His voice is rusty from disuse, rough from the screaming — how long had he even been doing that? — but the echoing brick doubles it until the tune sounds right to him. 

She’d want him to keep going, so he will. Until he drops, or dies, or something kills him. Until the glitches climb up his skin and leetch the life from his bones. 

  

He’s already tried giving up, and look where that got him.

  

Kinger is rudely broken out of his thoughts, startling as a telltale gust of cold wind blows through his hair. His left hand prickles, pins n’needles filling his palm, and Kinger squeezes his aching eyes shut with a low groan.

Oh no. Not this again… 

The fog behind his eyes thickens. His face twists up in pain as the headache rises, a figure appearing in his peripheral, a disjointed smile plastered on its face. 

Her. It. That thing. A recurring hallucination that seems almost to spite him, like a whole new AI designed to break his mind down to a pulp. It flickers frame-to-frame as the circus air seems to stutter, and Kinger hunches over the torch, desperate to ignore the shadows opening their mouths and laughing, laughing, laughing. Each time a digital hallucination of her tries to appear, his brain fails to recall her face — so this is what he ends up with. A headache and a broken half-shape of her, its face cobbled together like a toddlers drawing.

“Go away,” Kinger mutters, his voice rough and hoarse. 

It does not.

It only laughs, laughs, laughs. It only stops laughing when it starts to twist itself, strangled sounds dragging out the hallucinations throat as it wears what’s left of her face, and dies in front of him.

Kinger squeezes his eyes shut before the neck snaps, filling his mind with white noise in a desperate attempt to drown it out. He wishes he could close his ears too, the thing that is not her beginning to choke over the backing track of crunching bone. He knows it’s fake, of course he does, but hearing that — it still makes his teeth go on edge, gritting them as his skin prickles under a cold sweat. His skin. His skin, because he’s real now, realer than that. It isn’t her, it’s him, his own stupid, treacherous head tearing itself to pieces. It’s him. It’s him. 

Kinger focuses desperately on anything that isn’t the digital hallucination next to him, rummaging through the back drawers of his mind for something, anything, that isn’t this, and isn’t her. Home. Cars, people, traffic, lights and sounds and screens and — 

Screens are not a safe subject.

Two letters burn into the back of his head like an iron brand, and Kinger blanks. His head shuts off and on, the digital hallucinations shrieking at deafening pitch — his foot catches on a crack in the brick, and he tips forward, a fleeting second of lucid horror striking through him just in time to fully appreciate the headache that hits him square between the eyes. Kinger gets the distinct feeling this is what it might be like to be shot through the head, sensing the upcoming flashback approach like a slightly less fortunate person might sense the detonation of a nuclear bomb.

The one thought he manages to have before the haze overtakes him is something along the lines of; God, not again. 

— neht dnA  

.neercs a fo wolg ehT  

.orcleV gnippir fo dnuos ehT .tesdaeH  

”.uoy knaht ,hO ?—uoy nac ,ereH“  

.sleeh hgih fo gnikcilc ,sdrow ni spaG .tuo dezah ,ecaf reH .susnesnoc fo don tnelis reH .denwo eh trihs deralloc eno eht gniraew fo gnileef gniyonna-neht ehT .stnecseroulf fo muh ehT  

”?uoy ot ,ddo…mees eh seoD“  

.niks ymmalc ,dloc tsniaga ekahsdnaH .decrof ssenetilop ,spmubesoog ,esnetni oot seyE .niks namuh ni lamina na ot gniklat fo esnes ysaenu ehT .eulb depirts-nip fo hsalf A .elims ediw-oot A .sepahs gnirekcilf miD  

.ciffart fo gnissap ehT .evird levarg a fo hcnurC  

.A&C gnidaer ngis A 

Kinger lurches forwards, only barely catching himself on the wall, panting like a dog.

 

…It happened again. 

 

He stumbles to a halt with unsteady legs, clutching his head. His heart is racing, legs the consistency of jello — what did he do, run a marathon? — trembling fingers pressed to the brick in the pitch-black. Kinger rubs his forehead, grimacing at the blinding headache. What was that one? It didn’t give him anything new aside from the pain, just hazy impressions of unease and eagerness, rewinding and mixed like the frames of a movie running backwards.

The torch is still off, but he feels the weight of it in his other hand — Kinger thanks his lucky stars he still has it. He could’ve dropped it, or thrown it, or lost it during…whatever happens to him in that lost, unknowable time. When his body isn’t his, and his mind is otherwise occupied.

This can’t go on forever,

Kinger reminds himself, pretending to ignore the way his breath shakes.

I only have so many memories. And — and anyway, I'm remembering who I am, and that's good, isn't it? That’s what I’ve always wanted, right? 

His pounding skull disagrees, as does the thick fog still clouding his thoughts. The figures at the edge of his vision laugh from somewhere far away, but he refuses to look at them. That would be letting them win. Even if they do look like her, sound like her, and wear everything she always did apart from her face — some have her smile, others have her eyes, but none cobble them together in a way that looks anything other than terrifying. None of them have her skin.

Kinger is getting very, very sick of walking. Step after step, walking down hallways that all look the same. The headache is still there, and seems to be sticking around, but it’s weaker. With a cautious glance at the (suspiciously quiet, now) shadows, Kinger deduces the hallucinations have died down too. The half-faces only stare silently from the cracks and corners that line the walls, their eyes glinting and hungry.

Kinger grimaces — it’s almost worse when they’re quiet…

His head may feel clearer now, but that just brings another burden in the terror of being able to think clearly. It’s a new thing to him, the space in his head for thoughts that go where he tells them to, for once — but in this context, is it even something he wants? Open space to think of anything, yet not knowing where the pitfalls lie. He just ends up thinking in circles anyway, keeping himself to the patches of inner ground he knows are safe. The walls all look the same, without the eyes staring at him from the ichor-smeared bricks. Now they only wink from the shadows, and hands ghost at his shoulders, her laughter echoing from far behind. 

Kinger stumbles, his foot landing a good few inches farther down than he expected — he jerks to a surprised stop, blinking.

”What the…?”

Kinger mumbles, turning the torch downward. Its beam illuminates a descending stairwell, built of the same brick as the rest of the cellar, his foot on the first step. It gapes before him, its steps sharp and hard-looking. It’s a very, very lucky thing he didn’t trip — the step edges look sharp, and the scrapes and bruises over his shoulders personally attest to how hard the bricks are. Kinger winces, rubbing a particularly bad scrape on his chin. Yeah, that one stings…

 He turns the torch so it’s beam skitters down the steps, perking up as it illuminates a splash of color at the bottom. 

A striped archway, ornate and rounded. It’s bright red and white stripes are markedly more cheerful than the rest of the cellar, and Kingers eyes widen — it's an ornate thing, made of shiny white-and-red striped…is that plastic? Even the ground changes at the bottom of the stairwell, a smooth ruby-red instead of the mind numbing brick he's been staring at so long. It almost looks like candy to him — though, that’s just because he’s hungry enough to eat the entirety of Greenland. His stomach growls at the very thought. 

Something new! That’s a good sign, isn’t it? 

Kinger thinks, doing his absolute best to be optimistic and not entirely failing. Spurred on by the prospect of a change of scenery, he hurries down the remaining steps with all the grace of a pug with cataracts. The bricks shift and warble as he hops down the mismatched steps, their textures intersecting and shifting like a well made weird core GIF. Kinger pauses at the bottom, staring at the ground below him, red enough that someone in a more morbid state of mind might think it blood. Kinger, however, being a remarkably innocent sort of person despite being stuck with a crowd of various criminals for years, only thinks of cranberries. 

This is, again, probably due to how hungry he is.

The ground is sticky when he tentatively steps onto it, and Kinger is immediately hit with the stench of melting sugar — the sharp scent of sour taffy stings his nose, burnt chocolate giving the air a sooty texture. It’s what he imagines blasting a flamethrower in a candy store would smell like.

Kinger turns the torch upward, and his mouth falls open.

 

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