Archive of Our Own

It’s raining in Seattle, and Derrick Krueger is running pitching drills.

Mike watches him from the dugout. Thunder is rumbling just overhead, and fat droplets beat noisily against the roof, collecting at its edge and dripping onto the concrete. The field is a mudpit; the grass soaked, the diamond littered with puddles that could suck the cleats right off a runner. It doesn’t really matter. The season doesn’t start until tomorrow morning, and everything will be dry by then. It always is.

Even from a distance, Mike can see Derrick is soaking wet, blue-and-gray Garages jersey plastered against his skinny torso like a second skin. Aside from a brief moment in which he’d combed his drenched hair back from his face and tucked it under his baseball cap, Derrick has given no sign of noticing this himself. He’s been running warmups and drills for the past half hour, first doing wind sprints in the outfield, then shoulder stretches, then taking the mound with a pile of balls and lobbing slow, easy pitches over the batting box. Whenever he runs out of balls, he leaves the mound, quietly collects them, and begins again.

The rest of the team left long before the rain. They’d gotten the blessing they came for, and they’d celebrated as much as they felt was appropriate, so no need for them to stick around. Mike isn’t sure he agrees. He has some concerns about where a man who’s been dead for four years is supposed to sleep, or shower, or find the money to grab a decent dinner, and he’d been hoping to talk to Derrick about them, but Derrick was already doing wind sprints, and Mike hadn’t wanted to interrupt. So he’d parked himself in the dugout to wait.

Derrick is building up to faster pitches, now. He is, in fact, pitching more consistently than Mike has ever seen him pitch before. Derrick had only been a two star pitcher before he’d died - not the best, but not the worst. Middle of the road. Unremarkable. Maybe he’s gotten better since then. He winds up the same way every time, like some spring inside his lanky body is being pulled taut, then lets the ball fly from his fingertips and go sailing over the plate. There’s an almost hypnotic quality to it, a percussive rhythm of ball leaving hand and smacking against dirt that makes it hard to look away.

In the same way, to the same place, every time, like an asshole, rings in Mike’s ears out of habit, though Derrick isn’t fumbling the ball, or pitching anything that would give a batter an easy time knocking one out of the park. 

Then Derrick throws a pitch directly at the fence behind home plate, and the noise of it overtakes everything else in Mike’s mind.

The volume is the really startling thing. The impact of the ball rattles the entire chain link structure from top to bottom, a shriller imitation of the thunder. Mike might chalk it up to an accident, but Derrick is already wound up with clockwork precision and letting one fly towards the fence again. This ball hits the same spot, a shoulder-high area just beyond where the catcher would be, and sets the metal shaking again with a clamor.

Derrick hits the same spot a third time before the second ball has barely hit the ground, like he’s pitching to the fence now. Maybe he is. His face is unreadable under the brim of his ball cap, and he’s throwing proper fastballs now, every single one of them driving hard into the fence, bouncing off, rolling away in the mud. Clang, and the whole fence bends outwards towards the dugout. Clang, and the chain links buckle. Clang, and one of them snaps under the force of the pitch.

Something about it makes Mike’s stomach turn over. He doesn’t know what he’s watching, doesn’t understand it, but he can’t look away. It’s like Derrick isn’t even imagining a batter at the plate anymore - or he is, and he’s pitching through them.

By the time Derrick runs out of balls to throw, there’s a hole the size of a fist in the metal links of the fence behind home plate.

Derrick steps off the mound, and comes to collect the balls from the field, meticulously chasing down every last one. For a brief, horrible moment, Mike thinks he might turn around and take the mound again when he’s finished. But then Derrick is moving towards the dugout in uneven, long-legged strides, cradling a dirty pile of blaseballs in his arms. Every part of him drips onto the stairs as he descends them. Mike can see now that Derrick is caked with mud up to his knees and elbows, jersey several shades darker from the rain, grass clinging to paper-white skin. He looks like a body someone dredged up from a swamp.

Derrick stops at the bottom of the stairs and looks at Mike, seeing him for perhaps the first time since the rest of the band left the stadium. His eyes are dark, almost black, with twin pinpricks of light dancing deep in the pupils. Mike is almost certain that they used to be gray.

“Did you know they wrote a whole song about Tiana Cash?” Derrick asks.

***

The thing about necromancy is, no one understands it. At least, Mike is pretty sure they don’t. 

The Tigers and the Magic - hell, even the Moist Talkers - all sound like they know what they’re doing, unless you take the time to really listen, and realize that nobody knows what the hell might happen. They sound confident, sure, but Mike knows enough to tell when confidence is masking fear, and these people are scared. It’s writ large in the little things, like the way Hiroto drums her fingers against her coffee cup when she’s listening to other people talk, or the scuff marks on the locker room floor from Mooney pacing the same spot over and over.

Nobody knows if getting a dead player on the idol board is against the rules. You’d think the Commissioner would have something to say about that, but nobody knows how to get a hold of the real Commissioner anymore, and Parker’s more of a hindrance than a help. Nobody knows if the lottery pick will bring back the dead person, either, and Parker is even less help on that one. Maybe the blessing won’t do anything. Maybe it bounces to the next slot on the idol board, the next alive participant. Maybe it brings the dead player back, but you’ll just have an inert pile of ash on your team, sitting in the dugout.

Lots of “maybe”s in that equation. With that many “maybe”s, you need a trial run. A test case. Someone people won’t miss, when it really comes down to it. Everyone wants to bring back Jaylen (first in, first out), but the Magic get the Garages together to insist on starting small, on knowing the consequences instead of going all-or-nothing.

Mike says, “What about Derrick?”

Teddy says, “Who?”

It’s a joke and it’s not a joke. Derrick is the pitcher who replaced Jaylen, and holds the title of Most Recently Deceased Garage (though Season 3 is hardly recent). The band calls him Unremarkable Derrick. He played with them for almost two seasons, but his incineration feels more immediate than that, like he burned up as soon as he arrived. Mike always liked him. They had something between the two of them, something good that they never put a name to. The rest of the Garages hardly remember him. It doesn’t help that he was replaced by Henry, who is...well, Henry makes an impression. The only real impression Derrick left was a scorch mark on the pitcher’s mound.

“He’s the last person we lost to the umps,” Mike says, feeling put on the spot. “He could be our test case, right?”

“Sure,” Allison says. She’s leaning against the locker room wall, picking her teeth with a pocketknife. “I mean, it’s just Derrick. So what?”

The conversation veers towards the logistics of mass-idolization, towards planning for the crapshoot odds of the lottery pick, and Mike tunes out. He looks at the locker that used to be Derrick’s, and wonders if there’s a parallel universe where a different version of the Garages are having this same conversation about bringing Mike Townsend back from the dead. It’s just Mike. So what?

On the other hand, the songs about him play on the radio so often that the band wouldn’t forget who he is. At least he has that going for him.

***

What did the umpires say when the elephant came back from the dead?

Nothing! They didn’t notice.

***

Mike doesn’t play for the Garages anymore since Derrick came back. Well - he does, and he doesn’t. He hangs out in either the dugout or the stands for almost every game, and he brings gift baskets of baked goods to the locker room afterwards, and they call him a relief pitcher, but he never pitches. 

Derrick didn’t even know blaseball had relief pitchers. A part of him wondered, at first, if the team had fired Mike, and were just letting him stick around anyway. It would have been nice if he’d been right. But the truth is, Mike can’t play anymore because of him, because there can only be five pitchers to a team, and the Garages chose a dead guy over an original member of the band. It’s like a bad joke. How did the Garages find a better pitcher than Mike Townsend? They dug up a corpse, and stuck him on the mound instead!

There’s a knot of guilt that rests on Derrick’s sternum when he takes the field for his very first game back with the Garages. Season 7, Day 5. Mike is sitting right there in the dugout, a dark-skinned figure in a slightly-too-big Garages sweatshirt, waving at him. Derrick gives a little half-wave back before he has to look away. Mike has been the only one to make sure he’s adjusting to the world again, to offer him a place to stay, to talk to him outside of practice like Derrick is a human being and not some ghost that shambles around the stadium. It’s a lot of trouble to go to, for a guy who stole your job. Derrick doesn’t know if he deserves it. He and Mike were something before he died, but that doesn’t mean Mike has to do all of that.

Derrick takes the mound and grips the ball tightly in his hand, red stitches pressing into his palm. He breathes deep, adjusts his ball cap, thinks about how strange and wonderful it is to breathe at all. He almost checks his pulse, just to remind himself it’s there, but his heartbeat is so loud in his ears that he doesn’t have to.

There’s barely any reaction in the stands, only a few people cheering. Maybe some read in the bulletin that the Garages brought a pitcher back from the dead, and came to watch for the novelty of it all. Maybe some of the people here even helped push his name up on the idol board, even if they didn’t recognize it. Maybe some of the more casual fans don’t even know he’s the returned-from-the-dead guy and think he’s just someone new in the rotation, like Mike got incinerated when no one was looking.

Derrick would rather this happen than have hundreds of eyes on him, leering spectators perched like vultures in the stands to watch and see if he fucks up. He likes low expectations. He’s only a two-star pitcher. Still, the non-reaction from the crowd sticks in him like a splinter under his fingernail, worrying its way slowly into the skin. It’s just the same as it was when he was alive, only now he’s had four years in the Trench to stew about it.

The Garages are playing the Mints, and a solar eclipse blots out the sun. Boyfriend Monreal is at the batter’s box, and she smiles at Derrick, maybe in encouragement, tapping the plate with the tip of her bat before gearing up to swing. He lobs her an easy pitch - ball one, hitting the catcher’s glove with a muffled thwap. The crowd cheers for Boyfriend in unison, the noise so much louder than Derrick remembers it. But everyone loves Boyfriend. Of course they’d cheer that loud.

Two more balls. Derrick pushes his hair out of his eyes, swallows, tells himself he is not about to walk the very first batter he’s facing in his very first appearance since the Garages dragged him out of the grave. He looks to third base and sees Allison almost certainly thinking the same thing, her whole face twisted up in a scowl. It’s a face Derrick has seen a hundred times before, a don’t-blow-this-for-us-asshole face that makes the weight on his chest feel heavier, hard to breathe through.

Derrick looks back to Boyfriend Monreal. She’s smirking, bat slung over her shoulder, waiting for the next pitch, and it occurs to Derrick that she probably doesn’t even know who he is. He could be any Garage, pitching to her. A star batter sees fifty-odd pitchers per season, and remembers none of them, maybe not even the ones on their own team. A star batter only talks about pitchers in the same breath as a joke or a complaint.

She doesn’t see me, Derrick thinks, and the guilt in his chest warms over, turns to rage.

The ball leaves his hand before he remembers telling his body to do it. It’s an imperfect pitch, fast but wobbly, and Derrick is sure Boyfriend is going to clip it with the bat and hit a home run right out of the park, but instead the ball strikes Boyfriend Monreal in the hip and she goes down hard into the dirt.

The crowd goes wild. The Mints go wild. Some of the Garages do, too. Derrick Krueger’s first day back on the mound, and he beans Boyfriend Monreal point blank. Vaguely, Derrick wonders if this is the first ever hit-by-pitch in blaseball. He’ll have to check the stats websites later.

Boyfriend gets up, dusts herself off, waves and smiles at the crowd on her way to first base. There’s a dark spot on her spearmint uniform, right where the ball hit her. Derrick watches it while she walks, thinks about the hole he made in the fence the other night when he wasn’t paying attention, when he was thinking about Tiana, who lived a hundred days less than him and still got a song that deifies her. Curls of black smoke peel away from the spot on Boyfriend’s hip and evaporate in the air.

***

They don’t talk about it until the next morning. 

Derrick has been staying with Mike, because even though he’s getting paid by the league again and could ostensibly make rent on his own, he never had his own apartment to begin with. Just his van - and nobody’s really sure what happened to his van, even after Teddy calling around to various impound lots. Luckily, most of Derrick’s stuff was sent to a storage locker (standard ILB procedure for the deceased), and Mike has a spare bedroom that he was using primarily for his elaborate PC gaming setup. That’s another piece of guilt that weighs on Derrick, the guilt of making Mike rearrange so much in order to make room for him. It doesn’t seem fair. They never even talked about moving in together before Derrick died, and now it feels like Mike didn’t have a choice.

Derrick and Mike don’t see much of each other on days Derrick isn’t pitching. Mike is usually asleep, or baking, or at the stadium watching the Garages play. Mike still goes to every home game, but Derrick has trouble seeing the point in showing up when he isn’t needed. The rest of the team barely acknowledges he’s there. More productive to loiter around the record store that’s spitting distance from Mike’s front door, or go to the aquarium and look at the otters. If there’s a game on, Derrick does his best to avoid it. He doesn’t want to know how much better the Garages are without him.

The morning after Derrick hits Boyfriend Monreal in the hip with a bean-ball, though, Mike is sitting on the couch in his pajamas, nursing a cup of coffee. His hair is a wild mess that curls into his face, and he hasn’t put his contacts in, and Derrick is so busy trudging into the kitchen to make coffee for himself that he hardly notices any of it.

“Why’d you do it?” Mike asks, finally.

Derrick startles, but only for a moment, flinching and tightening his grip on his mug so he doesn’t drop it. When the moment passes, he comes over to lean in the kitchen doorway. He’s slightly too tall for it, and has to fold himself awkwardly to fit, one foot propped against the opposite end of the door frame.

“Do what?” he asks, too tired to put the pieces together, and rubs at his throat. Having a voice again still feels novel to him, after so much time in the Trench.

“Boyfriend Monreal,” Mike says. “Why’d you hit her?”

Derrick takes a long sip of coffee. He’s not sure how to explain what he was feeling when he drove the ball directly at Boyfriend’s hip. Not in so many words, anyway. He knows, at least, that there wasn’t anything controlling his arm except himself - he hadn’t blacked out or dissociated, or been possessed. He’d just boiled over, like an unwatched pot.

“I guess I was mad,” he says, carefully. He’s still figuring out how to put the rest into words. If anyone will get it, Mike will.

“You can’t just hit someone with a pitch because you’re mad.” Mike says it gently, like he’s not sure Derrick is aware. Or maybe like he doesn’t want to bring it up in the first place.

“There’s nothing in the Book that says I can’t,” Derrick points out, maybe a little too defensive. He runs his free hand through his hair, and lets out a long exhale. “I dunno. I guess I got up there, and I just realized - nobody cares, you know. That I’m back. None of them remember me. The big players, like Boyfriend, they look right through me. So does the band.” He pauses. “They kind of did the same thing to you. When you were pitching, I mean.”

Mike sets his mug down on the coffee table, and frowns. “Kind of.”

“Didn’t it ever make you mad?”

“At first, yeah,” Mike says, shifting to tuck his bare feet up underneath of him. “Back when they kicked me out of the band and everything. But then, I guess...they started taking it easy on me. I was never too clear on why.”

“You were an original Garage,” Derrick points out.

“Sure, but that doesn’t mean they have to do that. Besides, Cedric and Henry -”

Mike cuts himself off abruptly, his lips snapping together into a thin line. He looks embarrassed. He shifts on the couch and picks at a hole in his t-shirt, fingers worrying at the frayed threads around its perimeter.

“It’s fine,” Derrick says, looking down into his coffee, mostly because he feels like trying to make eye contact will just make Mike feel worse. He remembers when the band still picked on Mike, how Mike didn’t like to be upset or embarrassed in front of them. Derrick gets it. Better to lick your wounds in private then let people pour salt in them.

Mike is the only person who tries not to bring up Henry around him, like Derrick’s replacement is a raw nerve that shouldn’t be touched on. Honestly, Derrick has only met Henry once, and doesn’t feel any kind of way about him. It’s not Henry’s fault he was incinerated. It was the umpires. Derrick knows that. He was a replacement, too, after all.

“I’m not Cedric or Henry,” Derrick says, when Mike doesn’t try to say anything else. “Or Greer. I’m the guy who replaced Jaylen Hotdogfingers.”

Mike’s face twists up in a frown, now. “That’s not your fault. You didn’t ask to replace her.”

“But I did replace her,” Derrick says. They’ve had this discussion before. It feels like well-tread ground, like tracing his finger over a mark he carved in a wall years ago. “And she was the first one to go. Before anyone even knew you could get incinerated.” He pauses, sips his coffee, makes a face when it scalds his tongue. “I used to come out to games just to watch her pitch. She was really good. Really good. And I’m not.”

“Did you ever...talk to her?” Mike asks, hesitantly. “When you were both…?”

Dead, Derrick assumes, is the missing word there. It’s funny how no one wants to say that word around him. Like they think it might hurt. Derrick doesn’t have the heart to tell those people that he barely remembers being incinerated. Just a flash of light, a burning sensation that started in his chest and radiated outwards, and then darkness. He still has a mark on his chest, fractalling outwards from his heart like the kind of scar you get from a lightning bolt. It doesn’t feel like anything anymore.

“I didn’t,” he tells Mike. “I guess I didn’t want to.”

“Why?”

“Everyone compared me to her. If I hadn’t taken her spot, we probably would’ve made the playoffs. I was the guy messing things up for everyone, just by not being Jaylen.” Derrick sips his coffee again, not noticing the burn this time. “So I didn’t want to talk to her. I was already sick of hearing about her.”

He thinks maybe he still is, but he doesn’t say that. Instead, he downs the rest of his coffee, then asks, “Why’d they bring me back instead of Jaylen, anyway?”

“That was my idea,” Mike says, surprisingly. He was the one who grabbed Derrick out of the Trench, sure, but Derrick didn’t think he had been the brains behind the operation, too. It had seemed like something of a mistake, that Mike had ended up alone in the Trench at all.

“You were the last Garage to go,” Mike says, “and we had to pick someone as a test, to see what would happen. And…” He makes a noise that says he’s fumbling for the right thing to say, a noise Derrick has heard hundreds of times. “I like you. You know that. So.”

“So,” Derrick agrees. He ducks back into the kitchen to wash his mug, scratching absently at his fractal scar through his undershirt.

***

What did Jessica Telephone do when she saw the elephant on the pitching mound?

Nothing. She didn’t recognize him.

***

The Garages are playing an away game in Philly, and Mike is at home in Seattle baking pumpkin bread. He has the game on TV in the background, but he’s not really paying attention, until a sudden shout from one of the commentators scares the hell out of him when he’s trying to get the cinnamon out of the spice cabinet. Mike jolts, smacks his head on the top of the cabinet, drops the cinnamon, watches it roll under the dishwasher, straightens up to find something he can retrieve it with, and freezes.

Filling the TV screen is the face of Jessica Telephone. Which would be par for the course for a Pies game, if she hadn’t been trapped in a giant peanut shell at the end of last season.

Jessica squints into the sun. The camera pulls back and away from her to show the ruins of the peanut shell she’s still standing in, and the flock of birds pecking at it. There’s so many birds that the ground around Jessica’s feet looks like a shimmering, living shadow, and the sight of it sends a chill down Mike’s spine.

Jessica steps out of the shell debris, and turns back towards the Pies dugout, asking something Mike can’t quite read on her lips from the distance the camera’s at. Someone emerges from the dugout, and hands her a bat.

Jessica Telephone smiles, takes the bat with her to the plate, and hits a two-run home run out of the park.

The crowd in Philly sounds wild in a way Mike has never quite heard before. There’s a feral energy there that worries him. Something else worries him, too - the camera pans over the Garages on the field, the commentator noting that the Pies are now up by 4, and Mike sees Derrick standing on the mound. His eyes are cast into shadow by the brim of his cap, but his face is turned towards home plate, looking away from Jessica as she runs the bases.

Mike thinks about the smoking point of impact left on Boyfriend Monreal’s hip just a week ago, and about Derrick wanting to make people pay attention. He turns his own attention away from the game, and gets down on his knees to grope under the dishwasher for the cinnamon.

When one of the commentators lets out a gasp about fifteen minutes later, Mike doesn’t need them to tell him what happened. He runs his stand mixer and watches Jessica Telephone walk to first.

***

Mike doesn’t really sleep regular hours, now that he’s out of the pitching rotation. He’s a night owl, the way he was before he started playing blaseball - video games until the crack of dawn, sleep, crawl out of bed to watch the Garages if they’re playing a home game, repeat. It’s probably not healthy, only existing between sunset and sunrise, but they don’t call the shadows the shadows for nothing.

His bedroom shares a wall with Derrick’s, the wall that Mike has his desk and computer set right up against. Derrick doesn’t seem to mind him hopping into raids or Overwatch matches at three in the morning, but Mike feels guilty about making too much noise, and tries to stick to quiet games after Derrick goes to bed. Single-player games, ones he can keep the volume low on. This is how he first found out about Derrick’s nightmares.

Mike thinks that’s what they are, anyway. Once a week or so, frequently enough that it’s not a shock, but infrequently enough that Mike can’t accurately predict when it will happen, he hears Derrick startle awake in the other room. The sound of the bed creaking is usually the giveaway. Sometimes Mike can hear Derrick breathing loud enough to be heard through the wall, deep, guttural gasps of air that are almost a parody of breath, like Derrick’s momentarily forgotten how to do it. It’s such a strangled sound that sometimes it makes Mike feel like he’s forgotten how to breathe, too, and he catches himself holding his breath until he can’t hear Derrick anymore.

Mike has thought about getting out of his desk chair and going to talk to Derrick, to try and comfort him. They used to sleep together in the back of Derrick’s van sometimes, side-by-side on the mattress, but reaching for that kind of intimacy feels different now. There’s a divide between himself and Derrick that Mike has to work up the courage to cross, and Derrick is always asleep again by the time Mike has even convinced himself to stand up. The episodes, or night terrors, or whatever they are, only last a minute at most. Mike has heard them happen multiple times a night, but they don’t usually. And as far as he knows, Derrick never leaves his bed while they’re happening.

Well. Not until four nights after Derrick pitches against the Pies.

It’s early in the morning when it happens, actually, though Mike still wants to count it as the nighttime because the sun isn’t completely up yet. Sometimes the sun never comes completely up, if there’s an eclipse, and Mike accidentally goes to bed at 9 or 10 AM, because he relies on the light creeping in through his blinds to tell him when it’s time to log off. But right now the clock on his computer reads 6:30, so he knows for a fact he has at least another hour before daylight. If daylight happens at all.

He’s reached the weird twilight hour of his night where he’s bored, but not tired enough to sleep. Not awake enough to play anything that wants more out of him than running and shooting, but awake enough that if he lies down in bed, he’ll just be tossing and turning for the next couple of hours. Might as well avoid that and pick something to play. He’s mousing over options in his Steam library, when he hears the bed creak in the next room.

Mike pauses and listens. He can’t hear Derrick breathing, this time. The bed creaks again, protesting, and then stops. Mike’s teeth worry at his bottom lip, his eyes feeling too dry under his glasses. He lifts a hand to wipe them, and pauses again. There are footsteps in the hallway.

Mike’s bedroom door swings inwards, and Derrick is standing there, much closer than the footsteps sounded. He fills the doorframe more than he should, even though his posture is slack, his arms dangling at his sides like they’re dislocated. His head rolls on his neck. Mike thinks he must be sleepwalking.

Derrick’s is saying something - or, at least, his lips are moving, forming themselves around the shapes of words that Mike can’t hear. There’s no sound coming out of his mouth, or if there is, it’s too soft, stuck somewhere in the back of his throat.

“Derrick,” Mike says, quietly, wondering how to wake him up, or if he even should. He tries again, louder. “Derrick? You’re sleepwalking.”

Derrick’s head snaps up. His body language suddenly reads alert, maybe even hostile, and when he opens his eyes they shine twin beams of electric blue at Mike like he’s staring down a stadium floodlight.

“PAYMENT PROCESSED,” he says, in a voice Mike doesn’t recognize, a voice that sounds like the gutteral gasps for air that come from deep in Derrick’s chest on the nights he forgets how to breathe. It’s deep, and scratchy, and all Mike can really think is that it must be hurting Derrick’s throat, to make it do that.

Mike gets to his feet, not completely sure what he’s about to do. In the time it takes him to stand up, Derrick blinks, and the searing blue light goes out of his eyes.

“Something happened,” Derrick says, in his normal Derrick-voice. “Can you turn on the news?”

***

What’s gray and black and mostly stands in a corner eating shitty grocery store cookies because he doesn’t actually really know anyone there, he just came because it seemed like the thing to do, and he’s pretty sure nobody actually wants to talk to him anyway?

An elephant at a funeral!

***

Jessica Telephone gets a televised funeral. Her casket is paraded through the streets of Philly, her wives cry in their fashionable funeral clothes and veils as the gilded coffin full of what can only be a handful of ashes is finally lowered into the ground. The Pies are there in their uniforms, faces grim, leaning against each other for support. The Tigers are there, doing the same, as are the Steaks, and faces from every other team in the league pepper the crowd around the grave. Derrick wonders, but never asks aloud, if it wouldn’t make more sense just to put Jessica in an urn and be done with it.

Jessica’s death was televised, too, her last seconds plastered over every news station and sports coverage blog. Derrick has watched it, closed the tab, pulled it up and watched it again, more times than he cares to admit. He knows the beats of it by rote now. Jessica steps up to the plate, readies her bat, and the umpire hurls a ball of fire at her, so bright it washes out everything else in the video. The fire catches. Jessica hits a home run anyway, and goes up in smoke somewhere between third base and home.

It feels too perfect. A small part of Derrick thinks he didn’t want Jessica to die. A bigger part of him thinks he didn’t want her to die like this. He didn’t know, exactly, that the smoking print left from being hit by a pitch would be a target for the umpires, and he never imagined it would turn Jessica into some kind of martyr. Maybe that part was inevitable, though - no matter how Jessica Telephone died, or who had killed her, she would always have become a martyr.

Instability, it’s called, when Derrick hits someone with a pitch. When he marks them for death. It spreads, too - after Jessica, it jumped to her brother Sebastian, because the Pies were playing the Steaks. Maybe the gods have a sense of humor. 

The other Garages won’t look Derrick in the eye anymore, not that many of them did to begin with. They’re probably afraid of what happens when the instability spreads to them. It fades, sure, and it faded from Sebastian just like it faded from Boyfriend Monreal. But there’s always a chance it won’t.

Derrick pitches his first game since Jessica’s death against the Shoe Thieves. He hits no one with the ball, but he sees the fear in the batters’ eyes that he might, and a part of him likes the novelty of that. The Thieves flinch more often than they should, swing at everything that comes their way, strike out one by one. Derrick pitches the first shutout of his life, and barely thinks about it.

He gets back to the apartment before Mike does, changes into sweatpants, reheats one of the curry chicken pasties Mike made over the weekend as a baking experiment. It’s too hot, the sauce inside burning the roof of Derrick’s mouth as the pastry flakes away under his tongue. He doesn’t mind. He likes little things like that - burning his mouth, or getting a paper cut, or accidentally smacking his knee against the corner of the bed. They’re as strange and wonderful as being able to breathe again. They remind him he’s alive.

Derrick leans against the kitchen counter, holding the curry pasty in both hands. The Garages are probably celebrating the win against the Shoe Thieves right now. If any other pitcher had been on the mound, the shutout would be all anyone could talk about. Derrick doesn’t keep tabs on the idol board, but he knows the pitchers most likely to throw shutouts always rocket up the charts when it’s their turn in the rotation, from fans trying to make a quick buck. He slipped quietly out of the top 20 the minute the last season’s election ended, apparently, and hasn’t appeared since. Hopefully the people still idoling him got a nice payout.

Derrick expects Mike to stay out late with the Garages, as Mike does sometimes when the team is celebrating a win. They’ll probably go bar-hopping, maybe to the dive around the corner from Teddy’s place that has a karaoke machine in the corner. Derrick remembers that from before he was incinerated, remembers being squeezed right up against Mike in a corner booth, watching Luis and Tot sing “Total Eclipse of the Heart” at each other with no real regard for key or harmonies. Being invited to things like that was probably the closest he got to feeling like part of the team, even if no one really made an effort to talk to him. At least they weren’t looking at him like he was the hole in the world Jaylen had left when she’d died.

Derrick finishes his pasty and debates turning on the news, but lies down on the couch and closes his eyes instead. They’ll just be running the same clips of Jessica Telephone, anyway.

***

Derrick dreams in the blacks and blues of the Trench. He’s somewhere deeper than the Hall of Flame, a room lined with windows that stretch up towards a ceiling he can’t see. The floor here is hard and slick, maybe marble, but it doesn’t make a sound as Derrick walks across it.

He puts his hand to one of the windows. There is an ocean outside, or a flood, and something inside the water is moving.

***

Derrick thinks he’s still dreaming when he opens his eyes again, because the sun has set outside, and Mike’s apartment is dark. He blinks slowly, letting his vision adjust. His whole body feels stiff from the way he’s contorted himself to fit on the couch, and he feels vaguely sick. Not in any real, actionable way, but the kind of dry-mouthed unease that comes from a bad nap.

Mike must be home, because the light is on in his room, casting a faint glow into the hall from the crack under his door. Derrick usually doesn’t bother Mike at night - usually goes to bed long before him, actually - but he finds himself drawn to the light, and then he’s pushing open the door without asking. He pads inside, barefoot, and lays down in Mike’s bed. He hasn’t set foot in here since he first moved into Mike’s place, but the mattress and sheets are all still exactly as Derrick remembers, and he needs something familiar to ground him. He presses his face into a pillow, breathes in the smell of the same laundry detergent he remembers from four years ago, then rolls over onto his side to look at Mike.

Mike is at his computer, but he’s paused his game, the characters dancing in their idle animations on either side of the screen. He takes his headphones off, and spins his chair around to look at Derrick.

“Did you eat dinner?” he asks. “You were asleep when I got here, so I figured -”

“I did,” Derrick says. Mike’s duvet is twisted under him, digging into his ribs, but he doesn’t move to fix it. “I had leftovers.”

“Cool,” Mike says, nodding his head a little. He catches Derrick’s eye and grins. “So, a shutout. That’s exciting.”

Derrick’s heart does something in his chest he can’t describe. Maybe it’s Mike’s smile, or the fact that someone else has finally given him permission to be proud of the game he pitched. Maybe both. He sits up, his hair falling over his eyes.

“It’s because the batters are scared of me,” he says, slightly more excited than he means to be.

“Well,” Mike begins, then trails off. His mouth moves in a funny way that means he’s biting the inside of his cheek, a nervous habit of his that Derrick remembers distinctly. “You saw what happened to Jessica.”

“Everyone did.”

“Did you know it would kill her?” Mike asks. Derrick has the feeling that’s the question everyone has been meaning to ask him, but Mike is the only one brave enough to do it. Mike is braver than most people give him credit for.

“Not really,” Derrick says. He brushes his hair out of his face with the backs of his fingers, and lies down again, on his side. “But, hey. Killing all gods.”

Mike frowns. “Jessica wasn’t a god.”

“Wasn’t she, though?” Derrick asks. “What’s the difference between the Shelled One and someone like Jessica Telephone? They’re both powerful. Fans worship them. People think they’re untouchable. Everyone reads this...weird meaning into everything they do, like they have authority just because they’re the best.”

Mike stands up from his chair. Derrick isn’t completely sure what’s happening, or where Mike is going, until he feels Mike sit down on the bed next to him, and lean back. Suddenly Mike is lying right next to him. It’s not the same way they used to lie together in the back of the van, Mike’s smaller body slotted next to Derrick’s lanky one, arms tossed around waists. There’s a gap between them of a few inches, now, that Derrick can feel distinctly. A circuit itching to be completed. 

“People don’t make gods,” Mike says, his breath on the back of Derrick’s neck.

“People make gods every day,” Derrick says. “They did it to Jaylen, too.”

Mike exhales sharply through his nose, and Derrick feels it ruffle his hair like a passing breeze. They’re so close to each other that Derrick can acutely feel all the points at which their bodies could be touching but aren’t. He can sense Mike’s hands somewhere near his back, Mike’s feet inches away from hooking around his ankles, and if the room were any quieter, he’s sure he would be able to hear Mike’s heartbeat.

“What’s to stop them from doing it to you?” Mike asks, finally. “I mean, don’t you worry about that?” He trails off, pauses in a way that means he’s not quite done, then adds, “I would.”

Derrick rolls over to look at Mike, almost colliding with him in the process. He pulls back, studies Mike’s face, and reads real worry in the expression there. It makes sense. Mike doesn’t like to be the center of attention - Derrick is pretty sure Mike doesn’t even like the nice songs the Garages write about him, considering how quick he is to cringe and change the station when they come on the radio. Being put on a pedestal is probably Mike Townsend’s worst nightmare.

“I don’t think they will,” Derrick says. “Try to make me a god, I mean. Not after...Jessica.”

“Some people probably think what you did was cool,” Mike says, hesitantly.

“Yeah.” Derrick shrugs the shoulder he’s not lying on. “But I’m not untouchable. I could get incinerated again tomorrow, if the umps felt like it, and I wouldn’t be a martyr or anything. People would say it was what I deserved.”

Mike frowns. “It’s not what you deserve.”

“You look so serious.” Derrick grins before he can help it. He didn’t grin a lot in the Trench. His muscle memory of it feels more like a snarl, lips pulling back to expose teeth. “Are you worried about me getting incinerated again?”

“ Yes ,” Mike says empathetically, almost miserably.

“Would you come back and get me a second time?”

Mike’s expression twists into surprise, his eyes widening behind his glasses. Derrick wonders what, exactly, Mike remembers about the short time he spent in the Trench. The labyrinthine hallways with a darkness your eyes never quite adjust to? The way it smells like the sea just before a storm? They haven’t talked about it since Derrick took Mike’s hand and let himself be pulled out of there, worried he might lose his grip at any moment, or that Mike might look back at him and he would turn to ash (the Tigers do speak from experience, after all).

“Yeah,” Mike says, finally. “If I had a way to. I dunno if we’ll be able to do anything like this again.”

“Wasn’t the whole point of this to do it again?” Derrick asks. He knows he’s the litmus test for something bigger, but Mike’s the only one who’s said as much to his face. He still doesn’t know how he feels about it. Probably bad. Once again, the Garages are watching him, wondering what Jaylen would do if she was there in his place.

Mike’s eyes slide away from Derrick’s face. “I dunno if we’ll have the option. I mean, everyone saw what you did. They might try to block us, if we try and get Jaylen back. Or you, if - if something happens to you.”

“I think you’re the only one who’d want me back a second time,” Derrick says.

“Well,” Mike says, visibly straining for words, “I want you to stay.”

“Even if I killed Jessica Telephone?”

Mike leans in, resting his forehead against Derrick’s sternum. Derrick wonders if Mike can hear his heartbeat. It’s been so faint since he came back that sometimes he forgets it’s there at all.

“Yeah,” Mike says, softly. “Yeah, I still want you to stay.”

***

Why did the elephant go to the Safeway?

Because he really didn’t want to eat cereal for dinner any more nights in a row than he strictly had to, and also he was running out of eggs to bake with.

***

Mike isn’t used to running into the other Garages in public, especially now that he lives a nocturnal half-life as a relief pitcher who never actually relieves anyone. He sees the team (besides Derrick) at games, and sometimes at post-game celebrations, and that’s about it. Most of them don’t really talk to him, either, not beyond small talk or thanking him for whatever baking experiment he brought to the locker room. Ron and Arty are the only ones who go out of their way to corner him for real conversation - which is tough, because Ron isn’t a big talker, and Mike can’t remember anything Arty’s said to him by the time the night’s over.

Mike also isn’t used to running into anyone in public because he does his errands in the dead of night, when no one else should be around to witness them. There’s something soothing about sitting in an empty laundromat at 3 AM, or having the aisles of the drug store all to himself when he goes to pick up Benadryl and Twizzlers. Occasionally the Garages’ music will come through tinny store speakers, or a cashier will remark that they feel like they know him, and Mike will cringe, but not much ever comes of it. It’s a comfortable anonymity.

He’s at the grocery store around midnight on - well, he’s not sure what day it is, but the Garages had a home game, so he didn’t sleep in too late. Mike stuck around for a little while, then went home to eat and watch TV with Derrick, who has been sleeping more and marking people for death less in the week since Jessica died. Mike doesn’t know how long that will last. He pushes his cart down the baking aisle and thinks of the inhuman voice that came out of Derrick to herald Jessica’s incineration, and of the payment it mentioned.

“- not like Teddy will do anything,” someone says from the adjacent aisle, and Mike freezes in place just before rounding the corner. The voice is muffled, doubly so by the large display of artisanal soda Mike is now hiding behind, but still recognizable as Tot Clark.

“I think it’s fine,” a second voice chirps. Mike doesn’t need to hear the slightly autotuned warble of it to know it belongs to Luis.

“You think it’s fine?” Tot asks, in that measured way of hirs that makes it impossible to tell if ze’s being judgy or not. Mike thinks that he and Tot might get along better if Tot was good at having any tonal inflection, or if Mike was good at reading tone at all.

“Yeah!” Luis says.

“You think it’s fine that Derrick made Jessica Telephone unstable, and she was incinerated.”

“I just think -” Luis’s voice is strained, and Mike can tell they’re smiling. “Good for him, you know?”

“I don’t know,” Tot deadpans.

“It’s exciting!” Luis says. Their voice is drifting closer, and Mike shrinks back farther behind the soda display to compensate. “I want to see if he does it again.”

“And if he does?” Tot asks. Still completely measured, like ze and Luis are talking about the next concert setlist instead of real peoples’ lives. 

Mike has heard them do this before, talk immortal-to-immortal, though he gets the feeling they both try not to do it around the rest of the band. It’s too easy to forget that a regular lifetime is something fleeting to them, that Luis has been around for almost three hundred years and Tot for even longer. Either of them could be incinerated, presumably, but maybe they’d be fine with that. They’re the only people Mike knows who talk about incineration with no reverence, who treat it like the blunt, abrupt thing it is - and sometimes as a joke, too.

“Then it’s even more exciting,” Luis says. “Red or blue Gatorade?”

“Blue, obviously. We haven’t had more than six incinerations in the past two years.”

“Exactly! So we’re due.”

“We might be due,” Tot says, grimly.

Mike scoots back into the baking aisle, pulling his cart with him. Luis and Tot are so close now that he can hear their footsteps, and he’s pretty sure that any moment they’re going to come around the corner and see him. There’s a twist of guilt in his stomach from the eavesdropping - getting groceries at this hour of the morning is a private thing, he knows that better than anyone. But he also feels a little sick to hear Derrick be spoken about like some kind of anomaly under a microscope.

Mike turns his back to the soda display and starts walking towards the far end of the aisle. He’s forgotten what baking supplies he even needed. He picks up flour and sugar because that feels right, then finds himself stuck staring at a row of frosting cans, debating the merits of buying one just to eat on its own. He probably shouldn’t. But he’s thinking about it anyway.

“Oh, Mike!” Luis exclaims, and Mike looks up, feeling caught.

“Hi,” he says, adjusting his glasses. 

Mike knows he must look like a mess. He does errands almost exclusively in sweatpants and an EVO hoodie that’s one size too big for him. Luis and Tot, on the other hand, both look like they dressed up specifically to get midnight groceries. Luis probably doesn’t have to try that hard, considering their body is just a projection, but Mike is pretty sure Tot is wearing eyeliner. Who puts on eyeliner to go to Safeway?

“You didn’t go out with everyone after the game today,” Tot says, hir singular visible eye fixed on Mike. There’s nothing in hir tone to indicate ze feels any particular way about what ze’s saying, or that ze wants Mike to elaborate on it.

“Yeah, I was tired,” Mike says, nonetheless. “I went home.”

“You still look tired,” Luis says, and laughs when Tot gives them a sharp look. “What? He does.”

Tot keeps watching Mike for a long moment. There’s no reading hir expression under the bandages, but Mike holds hir gaze anyway. He doesn’t want to look away, even if he’s unsure why.

“Is Derrick still living at your apartment?” Tot asks, eventually.

“Uh, yeah,” Mike says.

Tot hums in thought. “How is he?”

“He’s…” Mike fishes for the right word, for the thing Luis and Tot probably want to hear. It’s hard to figure out what exactly that is, though, so he settles for the truth instead. “He’s good. He sleeps a lot. We eat dinner together pretty much every day, and he hangs out to watch me play games sometimes at night.”

He deliberately excludes Derrick’s late night episodes and sleepwalking. Even so, Luis and Tot exchange a glance that Mike finds absolutely unreadable.

“What?” he asks, when Luis looks back at him.

“Nothing,” Luis says, with an innocent shrug. “I’m glad you’re taking care of him.”

“Derrick doesn’t need to be taken care of,” Mike snaps. He’s surprised to hear his own voice come out of him so cold. He doesn’t think he meant for it to sound that way, but that knot in his stomach is still there from listening to Luis talk about Derrick before, so maybe he’s being defensive.

Tot shifts in place, the grocery basket hanging off one of hir long arms swinging back and forth with the momentum of the motion. The Gatorade bottles inside bounce and collide hollowly against one another, liquid sloshing.

“Some people would disagree,” Tot says, hir voice still perfectly even. “But I don’t think that’s what Luis meant. It’s good that the two of you care about each other.”

“Oh,” Mike says, feeling sheepish.

“Anyway!” Luis chirps, grabbing Tot by the elbow and beginning to steer hir away, Gatorade bottles still rolling around in his basket. “We should let you get back to shopping!”

“And to Derrick,” Tot says, so quietly Mike nearly misses it. Mike looks to hir sharply, and could swear Tot is smiling under the bandages as Luis drags hir along, though there’s no way to prove it.

“Bye Mike! See you later!” Luis says loudly. They yank Tot around the corner, making a hasty retreat back to the aisle they just came from, and then they’re gone.

Mike can already hear them whispering to each other. He could probably eavesdrop more, if he felt like it, but that doesn’t seem fair. Not when Luis and Tot are trying to be...well, Mike thinks they’re trying to be supportive, even if they’re doing it in the most oblique way possible. Luis and Tot are both hard to read, but they aren’t as reluctant to discuss Derrick as the other Garages seem to be, so that’s something. At least they’re acknowledging that Derrick exists, even if he’s just an amusement to them.

“Fuck it,” Mike says to himself, and tosses a can of electric blue frosting into his cart. He hesitates, then picks up another, and stacks it on top of the first. Just in case Derrick wants one.

***

The Garages schedule has them slated to play exactly one series against a team from another division this year. That fact might not have made such an impression if the team they were playing had been a team like the Dale or the Sunbeams - but the blaseball gods are not that kind, and the Garages are playing a series against the Crabs.

At the very least, it’s all home games. Mike brings homemade bagels to the locker room and watches the team mill around, half-heartedly dressing themselves and talking about anything but the game they’re about to play. Everyone knows that the Crabs are the powerhouse of the league now, that they went 80-19 last season, and Mike can feel a sense of impending doom permeating the air without anyone having to bring it up. The Garages are going to go out there and play as hard as they possibly can, and they’re going to get crushed anyway. Which is how it goes sometimes - but at least with other teams, it’s not a foregone conclusion.

“Krueger, you’re pitching,” Teddy says, from the other side of the locker room. “Luis is catching, we need the home plate defense. The Crabs love stealing, so you two need to shut ‘em down every chance you get.”

“Sure thing,” Derrick says. He’s standing close to Mike, near the door, already in uniform. Mike knows that Derrick wouldn’t even bother to be here if he wasn’t pitching, but neither of them are going to tell Teddy that.

“We’re putting Krueger up against the Crabs?” Allison asks, jamming her ball cap over her hair as she walks through the door. “You’re fucking kidding me, Duende.”

“Yeah, can’t we put Tot out there?” Ollie asks from the corner near Teddy.

“Or anyone but Krueger,” someone else - Mike thinks it might be Cedric - groans from behind a row of lockers.

“Derrick pitched a shutout against the Thieves,” Mike says. The sound of his own voice startles him. Like the other night in the grocery store, he’s not sure he really meant to say anything at all.

“The Thieves aren’t the Crabs,” Allison retorts. She tugs her ponytail through the back of her ball cap the way she does everything - violently.

“I - yeah, I guess,” Mike says. He can feel a flush creeping up the back of his neck the longer he stands there, feeling the eyes of the team start to track over towards him. Part of him wants to duck behind Derrick’s comparatively taller frame, to make himself as invisible as possible, but he backs up and out the door instead.

His pace picks up as he gets farther and farther from the locker room. Fleeing. Very cool. Mike barely looks up from his feet to see where he’s going, trusting in his unconscious memory of the labyrinthine hallways of the Hotdogfingers Memorial Stadium to get him out into the stands, or the dugout, or wherever will keep him from feeling uncomfortably seen. He’s annoyed and embarrassed all at once, both at the team for the way they brush Derrick off and at himself for backing down and letting it happen, and it’s all still sitting in his stomach like lead when he runs headlong into someone coming the opposite way down the hall.

“Walk much, asshole?” the person asks snidely.

“I’m so sorry,” Mike says, voice breaking as instinct kicks in and he leaps as far backwards and out of the way as he can. The flush that was building before is back, and his face is burning.

“Yeah, I bet you are,” the other guy says. He’s wearing a Crabs jersey, but Mike honestly doesn’t even need that much of a tip-off to recognize Tillman Henderson. Nothing about him has changed since the Garages and the Crabs played in the Evil League together, especially not his nasal voice or insufferable personality.

“Oh, shit,” Tillman says, with recognition in his voice that makes Mike’s heart sink a little. “You’re the shitty Garages pitcher, right? The guy who they wrote the whole song about being a disappointment.”

“Yeah,” Mike says. He wants to sink through the floor. He wants the Hotdogfingers Memorial Stadium to turn into a hellmouth and swallow him whole. “That’s me.”

“You pitching today?”

“Uh, no. I don’t pitch for them anymore,” Mike says, before realizing that’s technically not true. “Well. Kind of. I’m a relief pitcher?”

“Cool. I don’t care,” Tillman says. “Have fun getting crushed out there.”

Tillman sidesteps him, still much too close, and shoulder checks Mike on his way past him. There’s no way it isn’t intentional. Mike rubs his arm where Tillman struck it, and turns to watch Tillman’s back recede down the hall, the feeling in his stomach turning from lead to something colder.

“Did you see what happened to Jessica Telephone?” Mike asks.

Tillman pauses in his tracks. He turns around, hands shoved deep in his pockets. His jaw works back and forth as he chews the wad of bubblegum in his mouth, blows a grotesquely large bubble with it, and pops it with his teeth.

“She got incinerated,” he says, finally. “So what?”

“Before that,” Mike says.

“Uh, she came out of a giant peanut shell.”

“She was hit by a pitch that made her unstable,” Mike says bluntly. Any impulse he might have felt to be polite to Tillman is gone now. “I guess they call it getting beaned. From what I can tell, it puts you on the fritz. Makes umpires more likely to incinerate you. And it can spread to other people, once you’re gone.”

Tillman snorts. “Well, RIV to them, I guess.”

“Yeah,” Mike says. “You’re about to play a game against the only pitcher in the league who can do that. The unstable thing. So RIV to them, I guess.”

He turns and walks away before Tillman can say anything else. He can sense there’s going to be some kind of retort, and he doesn’t want to hear it. Plus, he wants a beer before the game starts.

***

An elephant walks into a bar, but he can’t get a drink because the bartender’s pretending he doesn’t exist.

***

Derrick knows as soon as he steps onto the mound that the Crabs are too good. He’s heard about the windfall of blessings they’ve gotten, heard that their good luck has put them head and shoulders above every other team in the league, but he’s never seen them play in person until now. It’s - well, disgusting might be too strong a term, but it’s certainly demoralizing. Derrick makes the mistake of walking Forrest Best to first, and suddenly understands the grim aura that was hanging over the locker room as Best uses Kennedy Loser’s entire at-bat to scuttle to second, third, and then finally home.

It’s not really a coincidence, then, when Derrick beans Best and Loser back to back in the next inning. They each get a free walk, sure, and Derrick gets a quizzical look from Luis, but it’s worth it to see the dark fizz of instability that encircles Best’s mannequin torso and Loser’s shoulder. This is balancing the scales. The Crabs are blessed, they are feared and revered like a god might be, and they are touched with the blood and mind of their own god who lives in the Bay. This is deicide like marking Jessica Telephone was deicide.

Best and Loser don’t complain about being hit - not when it happens, and not once the inning is over. Derrick doesn’t know if Best can even talk. Loser certainly can , but Derrick watches him set his jaw rigidly against the pain when the ball strikes him, trapping whatever sound might come out behind his teeth. The other Crabs flock to him when he returns to the dugout, tagged out for trying to steal second, and Loser’s smile is visible even from across the field. Derrick wonders if he’s lying to the Crabs that it didn’t hurt, that he’ll be fine. Maybe he will be. Instability has worn off before its work is done before.

The top of the next inning comes and goes with no runs by the Garages. Derrick takes the mound again, strikes out Notarobot, beans Dreamy and sends her to first. Parra strikes out, and then Henderson is up, dragging his bat in the dirt on his way to the plate.

“Hey, asshole,” he says, raising his voice to be heard over the thick drone of reverb in the air. “You gonna hit me?”

Derrick doesn’t say anything. There’s no point. He winds up instead, and throws a perfect slider right to Luis’s glove. Strike one.

“I get it if you can’t,” Henderson says. He’s grinning, his bat slung too loosely over his shoulder. “You’re, what, a two-star pitcher? I bet you’re just hitting all those other people by accident.”

Derrick winds up again. This time it’s ball one, the pitch curving just a little too far.

“Sucks that they brought such a shitty pitcher back from the dead,” Henderson says. His bat hasn’t moved from his shoulder. “I bet they’d rather have Townsend than you. At least he’s got songs about him and shit.”

Derrick winds up, and pitches. Strike two.

Henderson’s grin stretches across his face. He spits in the grass. “They probably wouldn’t notice if you died again, like, tomorrow.”

Derrick throws the ball before he can think about it. 

The pitch should be strike three, should be the sinker that Luis called for, but instead it’s a four-seam that drills into Henderson’s side hard enough to knock the wind out of him. The instability crawls over Henderson’s jersey in dark patches of static that expand and contract like they’re breathing, and the whole stadium goes still and silent to watch it happen.

Henderson breaks the spell by moving. He should be moving, by all rights, to walk to first now that he’s been hit by a pitch. But he doesn’t do that. Instead he takes his batting helmet off and throws it. His hair is coming undone from its ponytail beneath it, hanging in his eyes, his gaze wild. He drops his bat, and his hands clench into fists at his sides.

“Couldn’t help yourself, huh?” he asks, and charges the mound.

Derrick is - well, he’s not surprised, but he’s a little disappointed. He has time to think that much before Henderson is directly in front of him, throwing a sloppy right hook at his face. 

Things happen fast after that. Derrick is vaguely aware of a fight around him, of Crabs and Garages pairing off on the field either to brawl or just to surround him and Henderson in a claustrophobic press of bodies to keep the umpires from prying them apart so soon. Maybe the Crabs want to see Henderson hurt as badly as the Garages do, because no one stops Derrick when he hits Henderson back, a clean punch to the nose that sprays them both in blood. Henderson throws an elbow to his stomach, and Derrick throws one back to Henderson’s ribs. He’s been in fights before - not since he died, and never on the blaseball field, but he knows how this goes anyway. They go blow for blow until one of them backs off, or they get separated.

Henderson finally gets in the punch he was looking for at the beginning, socking Derrick so hard in the side of the head that his ears ring. Derrick slams a hand into Henderson’s face without really meaning to, mostly trying to shove him away, and feels himself being yanked backwards by the collar of his jersey. He doesn’t fight it. He’s mostly relieved to have an out.

“You shouldn’t let him come back over here,” the person dragging Derrick says warningly. Derrick twists just enough to see that it’s Teddy, talking to the group of Crabs struggling to contain Henderson.

“You should control your fucking pitcher,” Henderson says. His teeth are pink with blood.

Teddy doesn’t reply to that. He takes Derrick by the shoulders and turns him around brusquely, so they’re facing each other.

“How bad did he get you?” he asks.

“I’m fine,” Derrick says. One of his hands is wet, smeared red with blood where he pushed it against Henderson’s face. He looks at it rather than make eye contact with Teddy.

“Can you still pitch?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t hit anyone else,” Teddy says, with the same warning tone he took with the Crabs.

“Okay,” Derrick says. This is the first time anyone in the band has acknowledged the instability to his face. Maybe they can’t ignore it anymore, or maybe they’ll go back to ignoring it the next time he hits a batter who doesn’t hit him back. 

Derrick watches the blood drip between his fingers and onto the pitcher’s mound. When he looks up, Teddy is gone. Henderson is on first, his face marginally less of a mess than before, waves of instability still lapping at his ribs. Luis is crouched behind home plate again. Another Crab is coming up to bat.

Derrick touches one of his stained fingers to the corner of his mouth and smells the copper on it. There’s a ball at his feet, and he crouches to pick it up out of the dirt. As the umpires say, play must continue.

***

The Garages win, and four of the Crabs including Henderon walk off the field marked with the stain of instability. No one congratulates Derrick in the locker room, and he doesn’t expect them to. Luis smiles at him, and Teddy slaps him on the back wordlessly, and maybe that’s enough. Derrick studies his face in the mirror while he changes and is unsurprised to see a bruise blossoming across his cheekbone, where Henderson hit him.

He gets home to find that Mike has beaten him there. The lights in the kitchen are on, and so is the stand mixer, dough hook aggressively churning in the bowl, and Mike is standing at the counter with an apron on. There’s flour up to his elbows, so stark against his brown skin that he looks like he’s been dusted with ash. Mike’s hair is awry in a way that means he’s been running his fingers through it, and the kitchen is a mess, the sink piled with used dishes. It’s strange to see. Usually Mike cleans as he goes, methodically washing bowls and spoons in the space between steps of a recipe. Frantic disarray feels unlike him.

“What are you making?” Derrick asks, hanging his jacket up next to the door. It’s just barely starting to rain outside, and his hair is dewy with it, tiny droplets sliding down his forehead.

“Cinnamon rolls,” Mike says, sounding brusque in the way he does when he’s trying to think of what he’s supposed to be adding to the recipe next. He didn’t look towards the door when Derrick walked in. He doesn’t now.

“Cool,” Derrick says, and comes to lean in the kitchen doorway. Mike finally turns to look at him, and Derrick gets the satisfaction of watching Mike’s eyes wander over his face and find the bruise.

“Your face -”

Derrick exhales what might be a laugh. “You should see the other guy.”

Mike’s lips twitch into a smile that fades before it even starts. He steps a little closer to Derrick, so close that their feet are almost sharing a floor tile. There’s a white fingerprint on his glasses just at the bridge of his nose, where he must have pushed them up.

“You hit Tillman Henderson,” he says.

“In more ways than one,” Derrick says, not entirely trying to be funny.

“You hit Tillman Henderson, and three other people,” Mike says.

“Yeah, I did.”

Mike stands on his tiptoes suddenly, so suddenly that it almost startles Derrick into taking a step backwards, but he doesn’t have time because then Mike is kissing him. The kiss feels longer than it is, and Mike holds Derrick by the lapels of his flannel shirt and smears flour handprints all over them, but Derrick doesn’t mind it at all.

When Mike lets go of him, it’s both too soon and exactly the right time. Derrick looks at Mike, and thinks about kissing him again, but Mike is frowning now so Derrick doesn’t dare.

“Was that okay?” Mike asks.

“That was definitely okay,” Derrick says. “You don’t look okay.”

Mike cringes, and turns away, tending to the dough in the stand mixer. “They’re going to get rid of you.”

Derrick would like to say that he feels winded, or that the floor suddenly drops out from under him, or that he’s even dully surprised by this idea. But he’s not. He leans in the kitchen door frame again, and folds his arms over his chest, crossing one ankle over the other.

“Who’s ‘they’?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” Mike says. “The...fans. Maybe the band. I just have a feeling.”

“You have a feeling they’re going to kill me again?”
“I didn’t say kill.”

“Then what?” Derrick asks. He’s glanced at the blessings this season, and he doesn’t remember most of them, but he knows for sure that there aren’t any that would remove him from the league wholesale. Send him into the shadows, maybe, but…

“I don’t know,” Mike says again. “Maybe they’ll try and trade you to another team. Or with - with someone else who died.”

“With Jaylen,” Derrick supplies, because he knows Mike will talk around her name unless he brings it up first.

“Maybe,” Mike says, sounding guilty.

“You said I was the test run for Jaylen,” Derrick says. He unfolds his arms and crosses over the threshold into the kitchen at last, sidestepping Mike to get himself a water bottle from the fridge. “If I can make people unstable, what do they think she’ll do? They think the gods won’t give her a debt, too? Like she’s immune to consequences because they made her into a symbol ?”

Mike turns towards the stand mixer to check on his dough, and is quiet for a long time.

“A lot of people do still love her,” he says, eventually.

“No,” Derrick says, “they love the idea of her. It’s different.”

He didn’t think that this would get under his skin so much, but it has. Derrick thinks that there are a lot of things he would rather do than be sent back to the Trench. He thought he wouldn’t be afraid to die a second time, now that he knows what it felt like. But now that he remembers what actually living is like, what having a heartbeat and feeling the warmth of the sun on his face and the soreness in his shoulder after a game is like, he can’t imagine anything more horrifying than the idea that it could be ripped away from him in an instant.

Well. Maybe the more horrifying thought is that it could be ripped away from him in an instant, by Jaylen.

“I shouldn’t have said anything,” Mike says. He’s still fussing over the stand mixer, taking the bowl out from under it - probably so he can cover the bowl and let the dough proof. Derrick watches the process with half-interest, seeing it but not really registering it.

“It’s okay,” he tells Mike, when he trusts himself to speak. “I’m not...mad or anything.”

“You sounded a little mad.”

“I told you, I don’t like Jaylen,” Derrick admits freely. He owes Mike that much, if not more. “I never liked that people treated her as this...mythological thing, instead of a person, when everybody else who died didn’t get to have that.” He takes a sip of water and winces as the rim of the bottle brushes a cut on his lip that he didn’t know he had. “I also don’t want to go back to the Trench.”

“The Trench?” Mike asks.

“Where the dead people go,” Derrick says. He’d forgotten that no one up here knows about the Trench yet. “It’s this - I don’t know how to describe it. It’s like a blaseball diamond, but there’s also a labyrinth built around it. Everything’s made out of black stone. It’s underwater, and sometimes you can see things moving in the water, but you can’t make out what they are.”

“Oh.” Mike looks like there’s something else he wants to say, but he doesn’t quite know how to say it. “So you -”

“We - they - keep playing, even after being incinerated,” Derrick says, anticipating the question. “They’re still playing right now.”

Mike sucks in a breath through his teeth. “Fuck.”

“Yeah.”

“And you’re sending more people down there?”

“I have a debt,” Derrick says. This is the most he’s spoken about his debt since - well, since he figured out he had one. He doesn’t know quite what it means, or who he’s debted to, but when Jessica Telephone died, he felt the payment go through. Like a knife he hadn’t known was there being removed from his back. “And I want them to know what it’s like. People treated Jessica Telephone like she wasn’t allowed to die, but everyone dies, and everyone goes to the Trench, I think. And the longer you’re in the Trench, the more it takes from you. Some of the people who died in Season 2 aren’t really people anymore, or at least they can’t talk in their own voices. I couldn’t talk in my own voice, after a few seasons. I want people like Jessica Telephone to know that could happen to anybody. Even people the fans think are invincible.”

“Killing all gods,” Mike mutters, under his breath.

“Yeah,” Derrick says. “All gods.”

“I’m sorry that happened to you,” Mike says. He’s putting the bowl of dough in the oven to proof now, his back still to Derrick. “Losing your voice, I mean. And, uh, everything else, too.”

“Thanks,” Derrick says.

“I don’t think it should have to happen to anyone else,” Mike says. His voice is strained, like he thinks he’s going to start an argument, and is trying not to. “I don’t think you should go back there, but I don’t know if you should be sending new people there, either.”

Derrick isn’t going to disagree. He knows what’s waiting for everyone on the other end of incineration. But he also knows that the batters he’s hitting with his pitches are making the league itself unstable, are worshipped by the fans in a way that they shouldn’t be. A way that keeps them from seeing the other players around them as real people - that keeps them from seeing themselves as real people. Maybe in the Trench they’ll learn how to do that again.

Instead of saying any of that, Derrick caps his water bottle and smiles thinly. “Do you regret kissing me yet?”

Mike wheels around to face him, eyes wide with surprise. “Never.”

“Did you only kiss me because you’re worried I’ll be gone after this season?” Derrick asks, because he can’t help himself from pressing a little more.

Mike takes a step closer to him, then another, looking up to meet Derrick’s gaze and hold it with his own. There’s an intensity in his eyes that Derrick hasn’t seen in four years.

“I kissed you because I wanted to,” Mike says, firmly.

Derrick smiles. “Will you kiss me again?”

Mike does.

***

Derrick goes to sleep that night and dreams about the Trench. It’s not a surprise. He dreams about it almost every time he falls asleep, like it’s painted on the backs of his eyelids or nested somewhere in a dormant part of his brain. He does as he always does, wandering towards the tall window to look out into the vast, dark ocean beyond, the terrible emptiness where things move in the dark. This time, when he puts his hand to the glass, it splinters.

Spiderweb cracks crawl slowly outwards from the tips of Derrick’s fingers, fracturing the window and severing his reflection into infinite distorted selves. Water seeps through the cracks and puddles on the floor. The window buckles slowly, groaning with strain as the pressure of the ocean finds the gaps in the glass and pushes against them, forcing itself through until the window explodes in a sudden, sharp burst. Derrick manages one shuddering breath before the room fills with saltwater and the tide throws him under.

The water is freezing. Usually in his dreams the Trench doesn’t feel like anything, warm or cold, even though Derrick remembers it fluctuating rapidly between temperatures depending on the time of day. But the water soaks through his clothes and chills him to the bone. It plasters his hair to his face and his shirt to his skin, leaves him shivering and clutching at himself in the dark. It forces his mouth open and streams down his throat, into his lungs, but he does not drown.

Two points of light appear in the darkness above him. Derrick can’t comprehend what they are - the only thing he can think of them as is moons, pale and hovering there in the black, getting larger as they draw closer. There’s a moment when he realizes that each of the moons is bigger than he is, a moment when he finds himself floating in front of one, illuminated as if by a giant spotlight, and then the moon blinks and Derrick realizes with horror and revulsion that it’s not a moon at all but the eye of something floating just out of view. He covers his face with his hands. It’s an instinct, maybe not a good one, but something feels like it’s come loose inside of him and he thinks that if he keeps staring this thing in the eye he might lose himself entirely. For all the Garages’ talk of killing gods, for all his talk of killing gods, Derrick has never stared one in the face before. He understands now why people wouldn’t want to.

oh hey, the thing in the dark says, from the water all around him. Its voice is organic and inorganic all at once, a whisper from a broken phonograph layered over a babbling creek. thought somebody was missing

 A tentacle wraps itself around Derrick’s waist and holds him firmly, but not tight enough to hurt. Derrick gives a full-body shudder of revulsion, his palms still pressed against his eyes. He’s breathing under the water fine, but every inch of him is cold and shivering, his feet kicking in a futile attempt to get away from the thing in the dark.

“Don’t make me go back,” he says, his voice breaking. “Please. I don’t -”

nah, the thing in the dark tells him. they got you fair and square

Derrick spreads his fingers, peeks through them. “So - so what?”

just checking in

headcount was off by one

how’s it going up there

“Oh,” Derrick says. This feels like a moment for him to relax in the thing’s grasp, but every one of his muscles is still painfully taut, ready to run - or swim - away. As if he wouldn’t be caught immediately if he tried.

“Uh, fine,” he says. Then, “Do you - are you the one in charge of my debt?”

sort of

you’re doing a killer job up there by the way

get it

killer

Derrick gets it. He doesn’t say anything, just floats there, the light of the thing’s eye shining through his eyelids.

well i thought it was funny

anyway

keep at it champ

won’t be forever

“What if I want it to be?” Derrick asks.

The thing in the dark blinks. Derrick only knows this because the lights of its giant eyes shut off, and he can no longer feel them on him for the half second it happens.

what

“The fans want to get rid of me in the election,” Derrick says. Even as he tastes the words in his mouth, he knows the idea is bad, that he’s going to burn up whatever goodwill he has left within the league if he’s even allowed to do this. That’s fine. He’s getting good at letting things burn.

“I don’t want to go back to the Trench,” he goes on. “Or to another team. Or to the shadows.” 

He doesn’t even really want to stay with the Garages, but he wants to stay with Mike, and he doesn’t want to die again. He doesn’t want to give anyone the satisfaction of seeing him disappear, of being able to forget his name. He wants to exist in defiance of the universe. In defiance of the people who don’t see him, or wish they didn’t have to. In defiance of the people who won’t talk about what’s right under their noses.

Derrick exhales, bubbles streaming out of his mouth. “I’ll take on another debt. Or more debt. Whatever you want. Just let me stay.”

you’re a weird one, the thing in the dark says.

“Not that weird,” Derrick replies. He thinks that maybe this thing doesn’t understand what it’s like to be afraid of dying, or to be angry at the way you’ve been treated. The way it talks is entirely devoid of human emotion, a flat psychic affect that curls around Derrick’s mind and presses on the inside of his skull.

you’re the one asking for more debt

“Yeah,” Derrick says. “I am.”

It’s not like the debt matters that much, in the grand scheme of things. Most people still don’t know his name, or what he was like the first time he was alive, or how he’s different now. They won’t care if he puts more weight on his back. Derrick doesn’t care, either. He’ll find more gods to kill. The only person who will care is Mike, and he already understands how fiercely Derrick wants to stay.

hmm

i’ll see what i can do

no promises though

The thing’s tentacle around his waist loosens and uncoils, releasing him. Derrick finally uncurls from his fetal position, though he still can’t bring himself to look at the thing, can’t bear to see those eyes looking back at him.

“Thank you,” he says.

i should be thanking you, the thing says. i always liked crab

***

Derrick wakes up standing in the Big Garage without any sense of how he got there, or what time it is. The fluorescent lights are so bright that they make his eyes water, and he has to look down at the floor for a long moment while his vision adjusts. He’s barefoot, he notices, and a quick glance confirms that the soles of his feet are covered in dirt and gravel, like he got out of bed and walked here in his sleep. Maybe he did.

When he looks up again, he finds that the Big Garage is, in fact, populated, and that every single pair of eyes in the place is trained on him, every member of the team frozen in place. Unremarkable Derrick, finally the center of attention.

His throat hurts. He reaches a hand up to massage it. The Big Garage is utterly, eerily silent in a way he’s never heard it before - no one moving around, no instruments or machines ambiently filling the space with noise. Derrick doesn’t want to be the one to break that silence, but he can see that no one else is going to. Teddy is watching him with concern that borders on fear, like he’s a wild animal who’s gotten loose from a cage. Allison’s face is white as a sheet. Even Luis, who has never been anything but genial to Derrick, looks uncertain, their mouth pressed into a tight line.

“What?” Derrick asks, hoarsely.

“What does ‘payment processed’ mean?” Teddy asks, hesitantly, and Derrick doesn’t have time to answer before everyone’s phones begin to vibrate and chime.

Derrick doesn’t have his own phone on him, so he doesn’t check it. He knows what the news is, anyway. He watches as it sweeps through the room, as the silence deepens and grim expressions get grimmer. He thinks that he should probably leave. He should go back to Mike’s before anyone on the team says anything else to him, or does something impulsive, but he doesn’t really feel like walking back to the apartment barefoot.

“How many?” he asks, instead.

Tot Clark looks up sharply from hir phone. “What?”

“How many of the Crabs?” Derrick asks.

“Three,” Tot says, scrolling hir screen with a bandaged finger. “Henderson, Dreamy, and Best. SIBR’s saying it’ll kill the Crabs’s chance at the playoffs.”

Derrick absorbs the information, and nods. Three out of four is fine. He already feels that same sensation again, like a knife being removed from between his ribs, a weight taken off his back. He can stand a little straighter now. The colors of the world feel clearer to him, everything slightly more vibrant than it was a moment ago.

“Okay,” he says. “I’m going home.”

Allison makes a sputtering noise from behind Teddy, like there’s too much rage in her to mold into words, and takes a step forwards, her bat dangling from one hand. Teddy puts an arm out to catch her, his eyes still on Derrick like he might watch something rabid, something that might bite.

“You control those pitches, don’t you?” he asks, plainly. “You’re doing this on purpose.”

“More or less,” Derrick says, with a shrug.

“Why?” The question is desperate, frayed around the edges. Stressed, like Teddy wants to understand but knows he won’t like the explanation.

“We’re supposed to be killing gods. I didn’t forget, like the rest of you,” Derrick says. He turns his back on the Garages, lifts his hand in a wave as he pads towards the exit. “I’ll see you in four days.”

Teddy could let Allison loose, or could come after Derrick himself. Any of the Garages could. Derrick’s left his back open because he knows that they won’t. If the look in Teddy’s eyes was any indication, most of them are afraid of him - or at least of the rage he’s harboring inside of him. That’s fine. At least they’re looking at him, and not through him.

***

Jessica Telephone.

Tillman Henderson.

Sutton Dreamy.

Forrest Best.

Dominic Marijuana.

Hahn Fox.

Moody Cookbook.

Yazmin Mason.

Boyfriend Monreal.

Fish Summer.

Richardson Games.

Knight Triumphant.

***

The Garages go to the playoffs, then the finals. Derrick pitches the second to last game, at the Big Garage, with Mike sitting in the stands and meeting his eyes between every inning. 

The instability from Knight’s incineration chains to Luis, and Derrick can tell they’re scared, their hard light projection affecting harsh, black lines around its edges. They don’t smile again until the series is over and the moon and sun slide apart in the sky like lovers after an argument.

The Garages win the damn thing, and go home champions.

***

Derrick can’t feel the knives in his back anymore. He doesn’t know if that’s a good thing. If his debt is up, if the thing in the Trench decided not to find him another, maybe he’s fucked. There’s a blessing that will scatter three members of the Garages to some other team’s outstretched hands, and Derrick knows everyone wants to see it happen to him.

The election results haven’t come in yet. Derrick is huddled on Mike’s couch under a blanket, a coffee cup cradled between his hands, changing channels on the TV restlessly. He’s never awake this early, but today he woke up with the sun, and this feels better than tossing and turning in bed, wondering what might happen. What other bed he might land in, in a matter of hours.

“If they send you somewhere, I’ll come with you,” Mike says, suddenly standing in the hall. His approach was so quiet Derrick didn’t even hear him.

“That’s not the point,” Derrick says. He shifts over on the couch to make room for Mike, who comes and slides under the blanket with him, head on Derrick’s chest.

“You’ll probably still be able to bean people, if you’re on another team,” Mike says, somewhat pointedly. “I don’t think that’s reliant on you being a Garage.”

“That’s not the point, either,” Derrick says.

“Then what is the point?”

“I won’t go back to the Trench. And I don’t want to make you go anywhere else for me.”

Mike hums. “I don’t mind it.”

“You should mind more things,” Derrick says, leaning his face down into Mike’s hair.

“Probably,” Mike agrees.

“I made a deal to stay,” Derrick says. He hasn’t told Mike about this, not in so many words. He doesn’t think Mike will be mad, but he feels a little silly for making the deal, now. Embarrassed by his own desperation.

“What kind of deal?” Mike asks. He tilts his head back to look up at Derrick, his forehead meeting Derrick’s chin, glasses sliding down the bridge of his nose.

“I don’t know,” Derrick admits. “I don’t even know if it will work. I just. I wanted to stay.”

“I guess we’ll see if you do,” Mike says, lowering his head to look at the TV, and fumbling with the remote. He flips to the news, and Derrick sees that the election results have started.

***

Why did the elephant cross the road?

Did he? Nobody saw it happen.