Work Text:
(today)
"Paula Turnip is haunted"
‘Well that’s just downright fucking poetic,’ Paula thinks to herself for the hundredth time.
Yeah, you could call the Seattle Garages ‘haunted’. You could call them a lot of things, but… haunted seems choice.
‘PAULA TURNIP, BATTING FOR THE GARAGES’, blinks the game report, looming like a great banner over the back wall of the stadium. Here goes nothing, again.
Paula worries her finger over the rough wood of her bat as she steps up to the plate. It’s got one tiny smoothed-down patch on the handle, from years of her running her thumb over it. Mostly out of boredom. Sometimes anxiety.
It’s the latter this time, loathe as she is to admit it. Nothing’s changed this season, other than it hasn’t rained peanuts for weeks, she hasn’t heard even a single sting of feedback, she’s heard none of the confusing echo of reverb, none of the Shoe Thieves can get their hands to stop shaking when they step up to bat or pitch, the Tacos’ final 8 players are desperately trying to hold the rest of their team together, the last time she looked Jessie in the eye she didn’t see an ounce of recognition or emotion, and she can’t hit the ball.
Why can’t she hit the fucking ball?
‘Come on, Paula’. It’s weak, but she whispers it to herself anyway, violent and pointed like a knife plunging into wood.
‘STRIKE, LOOKING.’
Yeah, haunted is a name the Garages could make more than a fair case for claiming. Of course it wasn’t enough for them just to be the home team of Blaseball’s resident zombie pitcher. Jaylen’s more than enough of a haunt on her own. Of course it had to be Mike Townsend who walked out of the shadows last season, with all of the same hunched shoulders and awkward grins and concerning paleness he’s sported since Paula saw him last.
Of course the shadows had also conveniently spit out another pitcher with the same face and hair and last name as Paula’s dead friend.
‘STRIKE, SWINGING.’
Even with a level of near-certainty that the universe is laughing at her, there’s still a hint of doubt, and Paula hates it. She hates the creeping sting of the idea that perhaps she’s truly the only one responsible for assigning meaning to any of this.
Jaylen, back from the dead. Mike Townsend, back from the void. Randy and Dom’s dad, pitching for Paula’s team. A guy who looks so much like Dominic that if Paula catches a hint of him out of the corner of her eye when she isn’t expecting it, she half expects Dom’s old laugh to come out of a mouth that isn’t his.
‘Let’s haunt the fucking Garages, huh,’ Paula thinks again, a bitter laugh dying in her throat. ‘Because clearly we need it.’ What a team to pick. What a player to pick.
‘PAULA TURNIP STRIKES OUT LOOKING’.
Jeez. How the Commissioner and his gaggle of underpaid interns type fast enough to keep up with any of this, Paula will never know.
‘Sorry, Garages. Next time.’ It’s a hollow thought at this point.
But hollows like those take a long time to carve out, and stubbornly refuse to fill.
(season three, day one)
‘I like it,’ Paula thinks happily, beaming down at her Tigers jersey, all red and striped and neat. Well, technically it’s Landry’s Tigers jersey, but it’s hers too. She’s the one who actually gets to wear it. And she’s worn it before, of course, but at the start of a season it always feels as new as the day she first put it on.
“You nervous for today?”
It’s taken Paula a while to get used to the strange oxymoron of Landry’s voice, ringing so loudly and reaching her from such an odd echoing distance despite it. But it’s become so much more of a comfort than Paula would have imagined at the start.
“Absolutely not,” Paula lies, tugging the collar of her uniform into place. “Can’t figure how they’ll make the game any weirder than it already is.”
A deep, hearty laugh fills Paula’s mind. “You never know, Paula. You never know with blaseball.”
Paula huffs, frowning at no one. “Are you trying to make me nervous? It’s weird for me too, you know. Not sure there’s a rulebook for how to deal with playing in a blaseball game where the umpires sometimes start frying players to ash and also technically you’re not the player, you’re just letting the actual player who’s a sentient spirit of fury run around the field in your body.”
Landry laughs again, unflappably cool. The irony of that never gets lost on Paula. “Well, when you put it like that.”
“Alright,” Paula says, picking up her bat and giving it a couple practice swings, the fresh air around Hades tinted with its usual scent of hearth and cinnamon. “Stuff it for a minute, Landry, will you? I’m trying to warm up.”
“My will is yours, Paula Turnip.”
(today)
Paula used to love fielding, but lately it’s given her none of the joy she used to feel at the sight of the wide-open diamond stretching out in front of her. Now it feels empty and tiring and distant, and the back of her neck prickles like there’s something watching her from behind the stadium walls.
Did it have to be the Mills? Did it have to be them, of all the teams they could play? Today, of all days, when it’s taking every ounce of willpower Paula has to get through this game.
She sure could do without the eyes of so many of the people who rely on her watching her fail. And definitely without Dominic’s old team colors streaking across the field while Dominic’s deeply unnerving generational doppelganger stands on the pitcher’s mound.
Even from behind, he stands like Dominic. Puts his weight slightly on his left leg like Dom does, sets his shoulders in the same way, winds up for a pitch in a way that’s so very Dominic – and that doesn’t even make sense because Paula’s never even seem Dom pitch, but. Well. So much for a logical haunting, she supposes.
She’s sick of this dangling over her. Everyone keeps asking her what being ‘haunted’ actually means, if it changes the way she hits or the way she runs or anything else, but Paula’s far past the point of doubting that she’ll ever get a clear answer for that. And that means no one else will either, because she doesn’t know what to tell them. And she’s sick of trying to come up with placeholders that sound good enough.
Couldn’t it have been someone else on the team? Guilt wears a trench in Paula’s stomach at the idea of wishing a cryptic modification on another one of her teammates, but still. Did it have to be her? Does she have to be the one to worry and wonder about this too?
The bases are loaded, with Bendie at bat. Paula’s too far away to make eye contact with them, to give even a noticeably encouraging nod, but she tries it anyway. Bendie’s been working on themself lately; it’s a little late, granted, but these days Paula feels like all she’s got is either ‘late’ or ‘gone’.
The solar eclipse’s dim ghost light casts a suffocating dusk over the stadium, the whir of the floodlights’ backup generators fills Paula’s ears, and all she can see are the umpire’s hollow eyes peeking up over Bendie’s shoulder.
‘Don’t you fucking dare,’ she thinks.
‘SCHNEIDER BENDIE HITS A GRAND SLAM’. Paula can’t see the board behind her, can’t read the white-text words that fly up onto the black screen with a speed that she still can’t comprehend. But she hears the deafening crack of Bendie’s bat colliding with the ball, feels the rush of sand under her feet as she begins the race for retrieval; she hears the crowd’s chanting and cheers, unified like a single body with ten thousand heads.
‘That’s my friend.’ Beneath the heavy blanket of exhaustion pinning Paula’s heart to the ground, a hint of pride blooms warmly under what light it can find. Feet scuffing sand as she jogs back to her position, she stubbornly wrestles away the irritatingly human stab of jealousy that follows.
She remembers being able to do that. Whether or not she’ll be able to again, she doesn’t know. All she knows is that whatever the fuck “haunted” means, it sure as hell isn’t a blessing.
It’s just another way to remind her that she never fixed the missing hinge on the side door of Moody’s old house. And about a million other things.
(season three, somewhere in the middle)
“You’re fidgety today,” Landry comments, hovering next to her a few feet above the field, and Paula scrunches her nose at him.
This is something else Paula never thought she’d get used to, but the sight of Landry’s true form stopped catching her by surprise ages ago. The strange fiendish frame, an outline of roiling crimson smoke, a deep bellowing laugh, six yellow eyes – all of them so aggressively bright and yet so bafflingly kind.
“That umpire’s looking at me weird,” Paula replies. “I don’t like him.”
Randall Marijuana’s up at bat for the Sunbeams, unkempt shocks of green hair long enough that they’re starting to fall into his eyes – how he bats like that, Paula has no idea – and he grins excitedly out at Dunlap on the pitcher’s mound.
“That’s good,” Landry hums, seemingly observing the umpire as well – although with as many eyes as he has, it’s a little hard to gauge. “Stay alert. Something tells me we’ll be fighting them more and more often these days. But, as we know, ‘What do we say to the God of Death?’”
“Hmm,” Paula says, watching intently as Randall swings a slightly over-eager strike. She never answers that quoted question the way Landry seems to want her to, but he never presses the issue. “You know, Landry, can I ask you something?”
“Anything,” Landry says breezily, and Paula isn’t surprised. In the time she’s known Landry, he’s tended to be cryptic and to have a habit of generally saying strange things, but she’s never known him not to answer a question.
“You’ve done all this before. The possession and stuff. I know the danger of the game is new, but you’ve had other hosts.” Paula shifts uncomfortably, digging her toes into the grass. She’s still not sure what Landry’s boundaries are in terms of conversational topics, but this time she’s concerned about touching a nerve. “Have you… has anything bad happened to any of your hosts before? Not because of you, that’s not what I’m asking, but—”
“You are asking if I feel it, if one of my hosts gets hurt.”
And there Landry goes again, with his frustrating way of clarifying things. He’s right.
“Yeah,” Paula nods, relieved. “That’s it.”
“Paula Turnip, are you worried about me?”
“Gods, shut up, of course I’m worried, you goon,” Paula scowls, kicking a puff of dusty grass. “I mean, I’d love to not die, but I’d also love for you not to.”
“Paula, we’ve been over this. I’m simply too pretty to die.”
There’s a shift in his voice, though, as hard as he’s clearly fighting to hide it, and Paula picks it up immediately. Landry? Scared? She never thought she’d hear it in a million years.
So he’s just as lost for all this as she is. It hurts far, far more than she’d anticipated – not a betrayed hurt, nor a resentful one, but a shared, empathetic pain. And one that he’s clearly not ready to talk about.
“Ok, yeah, yeah, whatever, jeez,” Paula says, still not taking her eyes off home plate. “Just… I dunno, it feels weird to tell you this because most of the time when we’re playing the game, you’re running around inside my body, so it’s a little redundant, but – stay safe, okay?”
“I always do.”
Paula snorts. “Would it kill you not to sound like you know everything for once?”
Landry laughs in response, a tangle of red lightning fizzling in his chest as he does. “Like I said, Paula—”
“Mhm. Too pretty to die. Got it. Well, you might want to think less about being pretty and more about the fact that Randy just hit what’s about to be a homer if we don’t get a move on. You ready?”
Bright gold energy crackles across Landry’s six eyes, even as the dense red smoke of his form begins to seep into Paula’s skin. It’s an electrifying, maddeningly powerful rush of adrenaline every time.
“Off we go,” Landry chuckles, and together they run, fragments of lightning leaving singed footprints in the grass behind.
(today)
It’s taking everything Paula has not to turn and meet the umpire’s leer. She feels it on her back as she stands, Patty twirling the ball in her hand pre-pitch the way she does when she gets nervous.
In any number of other games before this, Paula would have felt a daring thrill at the sight of visible nerves in a pitcher. Would have felt that initial surge of confidence, the clarity and sureness that on the next hit, she’d hit the ball all the way out across the sun itself.
But Patty’s eyes are dark with a fear she usually tries so successfully to hide, and Paula feels the synonym of it in her own stomach. The umpires are even twitchier than usual today. Solis is in the outfield, a half-grimace on his face, fighting to keep playing after swallowing yet another of the monstrous referees’ fireballs. She’d been so sure it was about to hit Drac – she’d felt the floor of the world drop out from underneath her – but then of course it was Solis again, snarling out fire from his nose and mouth even as his whole chest burned visibly from across the field.
Paula remembers doing that, once. She can’t believe Andy fucking Solis has done it four fucking times.
No one should have to. Not now, not anymore, not ever.
Patty’s pitch flies free, and Paula swings.
‘STRIKE, SWINGING’.
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Paula says bitterly to herself under her breath, but her eyes are on Andy in the outfield, wincing visibly even as he grits his teeth in an attempt to hide how much it hurts. She doesn’t know why he bothers with that at this point, but –
Well, no. That’s not true. She does know.
(season three, day 110)
“Bottom of the fifth. You ready for this one?” Landry asks, excitement audible in his voice, and Paula nods with a determined grin. Games is batting, and Paula knows that Games tends to hit predictably. If she and Landry can take off running at just the right time, they’ve got a pretty solid shot at catching even his more powerful hits.
“Never more ready,” Paula replies, grinning with thrill of anticipation. “Hades Tigers season three ILB champions, here we come.”
“That’s the spirit,” Landry rumbles happily, as Games watches the ball fly without swinging.
‘STRIKE, LOOKING’.
“Hmm, those interns do type fast, don’t they?”
Paula laughs out loud, to whom an outside observer would assume was herself. “Yeah, no shit. I think about that pretty much every time we’re out here. I can’t tell if I think they’re bored or if they’re having the most eventful day of their lives, having to update our play-by-plays like that every five seconds.”
“Not to brag, but between us, I believe you and I have the much better job.”
“Right again, dude,” Paula says, smiling. “Smoothies after this, by the way? I’ve been missing the Beams, and I want to give you a chance to talk about… that thing you were having trouble talking about.”
A pensive hum. “I… believe that sounds like a good plan, yes. Thank you.”
Paula doesn’t make any comment to the realization that she’s just heard Landry hesitate – really hesitate – for what feels like the first time ever.
“Yeah, of course, I’ve got you. Now hold on a sec, I think he’s gonna hit this one.”
Games winds up again, and Paula holds her breath, both her and Landry’s adrenaline pulled taut as a tightrope –
‘STRIKE, LOOKING’.
“Next time,” Landry proclaims, an easy chuckle filling Paula’s mind. “I’m proud of you, Paula. You’ve truly embraced the spirit.”
Paula raises her eyebrows, half-grinning. “Are you telling me you picked a good host?”
“I’m telling you I picked a good friend.”
Paula’s teasing, cheek-cramping grin fades into a soft smile. “Hey, I picked you too, remember? That’s how this works.”
Across the field, the umpire’s hand twitches, an eldritch jolting movement that turns Paula’s blood to ice, and the tightrope snaps.
Landry’s voice cracks like a thunderclap in her ears. “PAULA, WATCH OUT!”
Time stops, a great roiling mass of flame frozen six inches in front of Paula’s chest. She’s both inside her body and out of it, watching in third person and in first, and Landry is.. standing in front of her. The real Landry, as close to corporeal as he gets, and he’s facing her. All six of his electric yellow eyes looking into hers.
“Paula, this is it.”
Paula’s blood is pounding in her ears, a tsunami wave breaking over and over, but somehow she can hear him. His mouth… isn’t moving, not the way it usually does when she talks to him like this. No, he’s still.. in her head. His voice is still in her head.
“What—what do you mean? Landry—”
Landry lifts his hands to Paula’s arms, gripping her tightly on the shoulders. And she can feel him, actually solidly feel the warmth of his palms through her jacket – no, not her jacket, his jacket.
“We’ll have to rain check those smoothies, okay?” Landry says, fixing Paula with a look that’s equal parts apology, relief, and love.
Gods. That’s what the spirit of Violence has always felt like to Paula. Like it loves her. Like it loves the people she loves. Like it would shred the skies and the Earth and the air itself to keep them safe.
She didn’t learn that from Landry, no. But maybe this is what he’d always meant by the spirit finding its way to people. It had found its way to her, and she’d made herself a home for it, and she can’t. She CAN’T. Not this, not now, not today.
“Please don’t do this.”
“This is not the end Paula, nor will it ever be the end,” Landry says, eyes crinkling at the corners – so strangely and achingly human for a face so distinctly not. “As you always know the skies of Hades, you will always know me, and I will always know you. The spirit of Violence lives within you, bright as it did the day we met. This is the game. But you are not the game.”
Paula feels tears burning like hot coals on her cheeks as Landry stands up to his full raging spirit height, something she’s so rarely seen him do. He squeezes her shoulders, bends down and presses a kiss to her forehead. It doesn’t hurt.
“You are so much more.”
The clock starts again, tumbling forward through time, and the inferno shoots straight for Paula’s heart. It hits, like death itself is sinking its teeth into her chest, and Paula screams, gut-melting agony shooting through her entire body, until –
Like a siphon, like a vacuum sucking all the air from a room, the flames are pulled out of Paula’s lungs, and Landry stands, solid for a moment – before he’s ringed in a halo of raging flame.
Red lightning burns incandescent in the shape of Paula’s friend before the sky cracks like a hungry mouth, the clouds swirl into a tangled mass, and a deafening bout of satisfied, victorious laughter fills the air.
(today)
‘Jessie would know what to do,’ Paula thinks unfairly, gripping her bat with what she knows is too much force to maintain. ‘Jessie always knows what to do.’
Except that nobody always knows what to do, and Jess is gone, and if Jess knew what to do about any of this then Paula is more than certain she’d be here right now. Instead of trapped somewhere far away, toyed with by something huge and dangerous and intent on making examples out of the lot of them.
Why the fuck do they have to keep taking everyone Paula loves from her?
‘STRIKE, SWINGING’.
That fucking peanut will be back, and the whole league knows it, and Paula knows it. And she prays to whatever she hopes is better than the gods that the Shoe Thieves don’t have to face that monster again, and that nothing touches the Garages or the Mills or the Sunbeams or the Moist Talkers or – or any of them. Her family’s spread out across half the league now. How did that happen?
'STRIKE, SWINGING’.
She’s had enough of this, really. And it burns. Like it always does.
“Off we go.”
It rings in Paula’s ears like an old, old echo, finally finding its way back from a wall too far away to see. The eclipse’s light grows hazy, and patches of crimson coalesce across the sky. Raging, laughing, electric.
… It can’t. It WON’T be him. It’ll just be some horrible, bitter imitation, because – and the election results ring like a joke in her memory – ‘Paula Turnip is haunted’.
The red in the sky keeps swirling, spitting electricity in erratic arcs, and an angry bolt strikes the ground in front of Paula with an ear-splitting CRACK.
No, no, no. There’s no way. Not after this long.
But the smoke swirls, a mini tornado around Paula now, mist grazing the surface of her skin like it’s waiting. Waiting for her to say okay. Waiting for her to understand.
“You are so much more.”
Those are… those are old words, right? They’ve been old words to her for years now, words she repeats to herself when she can’t think of what else to do or say. Words she knows how to hear in both Landry’s voice and her own. But as she hears them again now, they sound… different. Older. Stronger.
“Paula. Remember.” The voice grins.
Through the glaring afterimage of the lightning, the looming scoreboard blinks, and Paula can finally make out what it reads.
‘PAULA TURNIP IS HAUNTED! PAULA TURNIP TAKES ON THE BATTING ABILITY OF TIGERS HITTER LANDRY VIOLENCE.’
Holy shit.
Paula nods, understanding, finally – and the red mist merges, familiar, into her skin with a deep, vengeful warmth she never thought she’d feel again.
‘Paula Turnip is haunted’? Yeah, she knows exactly what this fucking means.
Paula – Landry – both of them – raise the bat.
“There is nothing you cannot do, Paula Turnip,” Landry booms, an achingly bright grin in his voice.
It’s him. It’s actually him this time, voice in her ears and all, instead of just the faraway reassuring shriek on the wind. Instead of just the shout without the echo, the fiction without the fact, the knowledge without the knowing.
Landry’s here.
“What happens if I can’t?” Paula whispers back to him, instead of any of the other thousand things she wants to say.
“Then we swing again,” Landry replies, in his simple, matter-of-fact way. “This universe is not ours, Paula. All we have is the way we fight within it.”
Paula actually laughs at that, hands shaky on the bat as Patty winds up to pitch.
“Do you have to be cryptic now, Landry? Really? Does this look like the time?” She’s still laughing as she says it, the edges of her voice frayed with the threat of desperately relieved tears.
“Is it ever the time?” Landry replies, the echo growing closer and steadier still. Paula takes a deep breath, air rushing into her lungs like ice water to a burn.
“These are your people Paula. And their spirits will rise to fight again. They have, do not forget, the spirit of Violence within them. All those loved by you do.”
“How do you know that?” Paula asks, the question coming out more like an apology.
“I always do,” Landry says, the answer coming out more like a promise. “You know, you do not need this, Paula. You are just as good at this game as I am. Better, perhaps. I am, after all, out of practice.”
Whether or not he’s right, Paula doesn’t care. If she has to be haunted, please, please let it be by this. Let it stay like this, for as long as it can.
“Landry, please, I can’t. Not alone.”
Landry smiles gently – that’s always been one of the weirder things, Paula thinks, how she can feel that Landry’s smiling even when she can’t see him or hear his voice – and a comforting wildfire of warmth clutches Paula’s heart. “You are not alone.”
The eclipse deepens overhead, and the stadium is awash in artificial night. Across the pitcher’s mound, Patty gives Paula a reassuring nod, cranks her arm back, and lets the ball fly.
“‘And what do we say to the God of Death?’” Landry quotes in Paula’s ear, asking the question with the air of someone who can barely wait to hear the answer. An answer that finally – finally – Paula feels she can give.
A grin like magma breaking the surface of the Earth crosses Paula’s face, and the heat in her chest rumbles and crackles with a deep, warm, cacophonous laugh. She grips the bat with no-longer-shaking hands, her field of vision tinted with orange and red and sparks of furious lightning. And what spills out of her mouth is a phrase that once left her throat raw and stinging, but now tears itself free like an open flame tasting air after starving for far too long.
“DO IT FOR VIOLENCE!”
In the roiling clouds above Hades, there is a deafening, welcoming laugh, and the spirit of Violence splits the sky.
Paula’s hands burst into flame, and she swings.