Chapter Text
Owen stretched out on the surface of the water, letting himself thin and stretch; as the voidfish emerged from the depths to nip hopefully at Owen, the oil’s glow sparked brighter and brighter until its tenuous light seemed to shimmer. Sunlight never reached this far into the Shadows, but there was, there would be light of Owen’s own making. The fish lipped hopefully at the oil, and it was a pleasantly soothing sensation, easing away the strains of living.
Not that there was a huge amount of stress in the Shadows, at least not for Owen. It had been, if anything, a relief to retreat, after the attack, after Sutton’s death and brief visit afterwards, to pool in the quiet and rest. Owen had spent some time not bothering to be humanoid, oozing restfully along the shoreline of the fragment of the Fens that seemed to have been subluxated into the Shadows. The brackish water tasted lovely, and when the fractured planes aligned Owen could hear the songs of the Fenmaids vibrating up from the depths and setting the spread-out oil humming like a timpani.
Owen felt closest to the Garden in the water. Perhaps it was the occasional budding waterlily that seemed, perhaps, to have a little more of Cali in it than everything else, something that Owen could talk to and imagine being heard. Owen named all the water plants, the ones that seemed to grow in the Shadows to great profusion, the immense battails and the bloodsiphon vines and the hallflame lotus with its blue petals and fiery center.
It had been the hummingbirds that got Owen out of the waters at last, back when Owen was new to the Shadows. It had first seemed that it was a swarm of them come to do battle with the bloodsiphon flowers, stabbing at them with needlesharp beaks while the flower hissed and tried to bite. Eventually, though, the plant drooped, defeated, and allowed the bird to feed, at which point the Heisenberg cloud of hummingbirds resolved, briefly, to a single bird, drinking from the heart of the trumpet-shaped flower for just a moment before exploding into a blurred horde of uncertainty when the plant snapped again, trying to catch it.
Owen remembered, vaguely, that some birds were supposed to be able to see a wider range of colors than humans, and this bird gave the absolute impression that it could, jeweled and shimmering with the sorts of hues that could only be seen in the Shadows. Owen named the colors, too, underviolet and ultrablue, green umber, infrachartreuse.
The cloud of possible birds swarmed around Owen’s head as Owen established a head once more, flickering in and out of existence with the manic fury of a quantum effect. “I bet SCORES would know what was up with you,” Owen said. “You look like you have some mlath going on.”
The swarm coalesced into a single bird that hovered in front of Owen’s face. “What is a SCORES?”
“She’s a fenmaid. And a blaseball player, like me.”
“Blaseball.” The bird suddenly blipped backwards, away from the water. “Come.”
Following a teleporting multiphasic bird was at least a change of pace, so Owen, bemused, reassembled limbs and climbed out of the water, dragging along a twined bandolier of reeds.
Owen did not find following the bird’s lead simple. The creature seemed to consider the folds and discontinuities of the Shadows no more than a momentary consideration, and its warping, constantly shimmering teleportations made the transitions trivial where Owen had to call out to ask for guidance for a long way around. Occasionally it seemed like another hummingbird cloud appeared, and the two of them would fence a moment before one vanished, and Owen could only assume that the birdswarm Owen was following was consistent.
“Blaseball,” buzzed the bird, clustered like a cloud of midges around a rather implausible lamppost that was half buried in eclipse glory vines.
“Where are we going?”
“Blaseball,” insisted the bird, and teleported to directly over Owen’s head, and then away again.
“Blaseball,” Owen sighed, and morphed past a hungry rosebush, leaving it glistening in Owen’s wake.
It could have been days, or months, that Owen followed the birdcloud, or no more than an hour; the fractured reality of the Shadows made it impossible to judge. Eventually, though, Owen broke through a lush tangle of hungry bloodsiphons and emerged into a patch of tomato cages.
They seemed to be completely ordinary tomatoes.
“Blaseball!”
“You can’t really pitch with tomatoes, bird, they explode when batted and nobody can field that. Even aside from the laundry.”
The bird made an irritable noise, buzzed past Owen’s ear, deeper into the garden, and then back again. “Blaseball,” it scolded.
“I’m going to call you Corky,” Owen replied, but followed the swarm. The tomatoes gave way to clusters of corn draped with beans and twined with pumpkin leaves, and from there to banks of strawberries.
“Who’s there?” came a voice from over among the sweet peas. “Wait, what’s that smell... Owen?”
“Zeb?”
“Blaseball!” the hummingbird declared, and then whirled around in a circle and vanished with a soft pop of implied mathematics.
“Owen!” Zeb straightened from his work. “Good to hear you. What brings you to my neck of the woods, then?”
“Either ‘a long story’ or ‘a hummingbird said I should follow them’.” Owen sat down on the edge of a fieldstone wall.
“Hummingbirds, huh? Can’t say I’ve ever heard them say anything.”
Owen shrugged. “You know me and birds.”
“Yup. So what’s the long story?”
“You know how you and Stillo went down here together? I had a rough next season. Team decided to give me a breather, sent me down, called him back up to the roster.”
Zeb nodded. “How’s it been for you?”
“Quiet.”
“Yup.” Zeb plucked a handful of peapods and offered them over. “Wanna give me a hand? I’ve got some cukes over there in the crockery I’d love to, you know-”
Owen laughed. “I’ve even got some good Fens brine for you.”