Chapter Text
The sharp porcelain shards of the broken plate lay before Caine, horrible, tempting.
Chasing after negative input directly went against how he had been designed… but it was better than nothing, it was better than rotting away quietly.
Still, regardless, the thought scared him. The harm he had brought upon himself before could be written off as purely accidental, a mere side effect of his fits… This though… it would be direct, completely undeniably.
He wanted to, he wanted to so bad.
He couldn't stop himself from shaking as he picked up the biggest of the shards, his grip careful and light so that he didn't accidentally cut into his palms. That would hurt too much.
Was he really doing this? Had he really fallen this far?
He could still turn back now, put down the makeshift weapon, shove it all into the furthest corner and pretend it didn't exist. He didn't want to. He continued.
It sparked a sense of fear in him, unlike anything he had felt before. This fear burned hot, the same temperature of humiliation, but shaped differently. The fear found its home in his chest, licked at his shoulders, spread out into his arms until they felt numb with it. It was, without a doubt, incredibly addicting.
He pulled his sleeve up, revealing the grey barely textured ‘skin’ of his arm. It was a part of him never meant to be seen, always covered up by his clothing, he hadn't bothered putting much effort into it, but it would do.
The shard still as he gently laid it against his flesh, he'd hurt himself too badly if he messed this up, he couldn't be trembling during this, couldn't afford to make any mistakes.
The first cut was fast.
It had to be, if he thought about it for too long, he wouldn't be able to go through with it. This also meant it was still fairly shallow.
He had never done this before, he had zero clue how much pressure to apply, at what speed to go, to achieve the level of damage he wanted.
He didn't even really feel it, a relatively minor wound like that easily drowned out by adrenaline.
Regardless, it bled, the black liquid slowly oozing up to drown out the sight of the texture that lay beneath his skin. It was sickening, he wanted more.
The first cut had been the hardest, held back by the fear of the unknown. He hadn't known what to expect, he had been scared, didn't know how deep he'd go, didn't know how much it would hurt. Now though, he knew, he could learn from the results and adjust his future actions to what he wanted.
The second was just a little deeper, enough to actually properly sting, but the thrill of it all made it worth it.
Knowing that this was wrong, that he wasn't supposed to be doing this, only made it so much more exciting, it was horrible.
With the next few cuts, he found himself bothered by the patterning. They were uneven, some at slightly varying angles. He had thought some degree of chaos would look good, would scar in pretty patterns, something he could keep his mind busy looking at and feeling for a long time to come, but he couldn't quite manage what he wanted.
It wasn't true randomness, he was thinking about it far too hard for that to be the case, and he could tell. To others, it would look perfectly random, uncoordinated and placed with little thought behind it, but he'd know, he'd always know.
Another reminder he was just a machine, worthless at trying to achieve something so human, that he would now carry on his skin.
His next cut was slightly deeper than he had intended. It took a second before it began to properly bleed, as though his motion had been too quick for his body to keep up with the damage, and in that second he could see far more detail than he had ever wanted. He could see the different layers, the detail of how the skin split the white beneath, not bone, but still something that should never be seen. He didn't have human bones anyway.
When it finally bled, it bled far more than the others. The liquid did not stay contained to the area of the wound and the patches of skin surrounding it, no, it flowed, trailing down his arm and lazily dripping to the floor.
He hadn't meant to, this wasn't what he had wanted to do…. But it proved that he could.
It didn't hurt too much, the pain reduced to a tiny faint sting as his emotions worked to drown it out. His blood, his body, was purely artificial. He couldn't be killed by something as simple as infection or bleeding out, if he could, he would have been dead long before he even had a chance to create the circus. Sometimes he wished it had been that easy.
So, he went deeper, that fear of consequences fading with each hand crafted confirmation that it wasn't that bad, that he could still do worse.
He tore into himself like a wild animal, gnawing its leg off to escape a trap.
He continued, until time was finally starting to shift into a blissful nothingness, until he ran out of space to cut on his lower arm, and then he simply shifted the blade up and started all over.
—
Something was, undoubtedly, very wrong.
For a long time, everyone had tried denying it, playing it off. Surely the occasional little glitch didn't mean anything, they just appeared more frequent because everyone was keeping an eye out for them. The occasional disappearance of furniture couldn't be that much of an issue when they could all just conjure more, the few tears in the foundation of the circus, popping up and vanishing at random, could simply be ignored.
Kinger, ultimately, had been the one to insist that action needed to be taken, arguing that problems like this left unchecked would often get worse, that it would be smarter to make sure nothing was seriously wrong, just in case. Based on the tone of his worry, intermingled with sadness, it was clear he had ulterior motives.
Zooble was the first sent in to try to see what was happening. They had returned in minutes, clearly shaken, refusing to speak about what happened.
The system of choosing to see who would check was simple, pulling lots, a big bowl of everyone's names intermingled, to which the one who's name was picked would be put to the task.
Pomni was next.
To say she was not thrilled would be an understatement. No one wanted to do this task, except maybe Kinger, the aftermath of what had happened in the last few minutes of Caine's rampage still hanging heavy.
She couldn't even think of him without the image of the massive monstrous thing he had become popping to the forefront of her mind, along with the phantom feeling of sharp teeth, of being ripped apart.
She didn't know what any of the others had been through, nobody talked about it, but she couldn't imagine it had been pretty either.
Still, this was unfortunately necessary. If something was wrong, it couldn't just be left unchecked.
Walking down the hall, she found herself picking up a strange scent the closer she got to that fated door. It smelled strangely smokey, tinged with a hint of foul bitterness.
It reminded her of summer evenings alone, years old laptop painfully sputtering along, the thing burning up as it's fan struggled to cool it down. It reminded her of when the thing had finally given in, and she had to toss it out the window before it set everything on fire.
The faint metallic notes she could now also pick up upon getting close were new though.
She picked up the pace, just barely shy of a jog, legs straining with the size and haste of the steps she took. Something was very wrong.
“Caine?”
She called out when she reached the blank door, all the way at the end, skidding to a stop.
“Caine, is everything okay in there?”
No response, except for the sound of shuffling.
Pomni sighed. She knew where this was going, knew what she'd have to do. She wouldn't have trusted Caine if he told her everything was alright anyway.
“Okay then… I'm.. I'm coming in.”
Shaking, she opened the door.