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Fitzgerald Blackburn was, by all laws of reality both immaterial and otherwise, not supposed to be here.
The Trench, the Hall: these were places never meant to be accessible to living players. There were loopholes, of course, between reanimation and Returning, but nothing Fitz could personally exploit. Nor would he want to, given the impact such events had. Season 14 had been long, and it seemed that season 15 would bring a new element of chaos, contained though it would mostly be to mild league, between Chorby Soul and York Silk.
However. Being in the shadows afforded a player certain benefits. Shadow players enjoy a degree of protection from day-to-day incidents and requirements, their bodies in theory held in stasis to crystallize their play ability until such time as the gods’ will or random chance demanded their return; moreover, this insulation from traditional reality enforced a certain… looseness in people’s memories, and a gap in people’s perception if he wasn’t calling attention to himself. Fitzgerald had spent the first week after returning to the spies drifting through the base, catching up as best he could in spite of this. That Yeong-Ho kid looked promising, Math had been a mix of relieved and exhausted from the election’s confluence of probability and emotion.
Umpires did not patrol the interior of the Hall. It was quiet, and still, the crates of peanuts lining the walls from floor to ceiling, each stamped with a player’s name, some with a team or with an untouched note. It tickled at the back of Fitz’s mind, the paradox of the peanuts’ continued generation and unspoiling nature after the fall of the shelled one, as much as how the fans seemed perfectly capable of delivering them all here in tribute. The tickle distracted from the itch that they were not supposed to be here.
Player incinerations do not produce smoke and ash. The umpires’ flame is white-hot and uncompromising, such that players of nonstandard material like metal and stone could not physically withstand it. Fitzgerald had observed this from several incinerations since he had joined the spies. Being a spy is both the art of not answering questions, and not asking them.
They realized they had been standing just beside their entrance (a large access hatch clearly meant for an umpire’s hulking form) for far too long. The ILB did not take their out-of-bounds penalties lightly, no matter how lenient reality was with shadow players. It was time to move. The statues were arranged from earliest to most recent arrivals, effigies with a shifting blue flame surrounding their bases. Jaylen’s flame was out, evidently signaling absence.
Fitz gave a nod to the likeness of Dickerson Greatness, standing triumphant as he had against the Hades Tigers. Before their time; who carved these?
They stopped at Miki Santana, feeling unsteady looking up at her. The statue was monochrome, polished off-black basalt reflecting the blue-green light of the hall in a way that gave her pose, mid-strum half off the ground, an even greater sense of motion. The air was still and silent. The blue flames burned with no sound or smoke. There were no umpires inside, and there wouldn’t be until the season resumed in a month.
Fitz rolled up their sleeve with careful precision, feeling unsteady. They’d seen pictures, recordings even, of Miki Santana. Miki was not like the spy Fitz had grown into, relying as they did on protocol and technical skill to handle most situations; Miki hadn’t been quite as lucky as Fitz had when they swallowed a peanut, winning the intangible coin flip of allergy that most players seemed to lose. The edges of their cloud softened, feeling the updraft of the flame as they looked up at her, then down to the name plate at her feet. It was sentiment, and possibly dangerous, and most of all endangering their real mission, but they reached over the fire.
The flames didn’t react.
As their fingers brushed across the cool metal, they felt a spark somewhere near their core. The hall spun. Luckily, smoke and ash don’t make much sound collapsing on a polished granite floor.
--
What had happened?
Fitz reconstituted quickly, taking in his surroundings with the urgency of someone regaining consciousness all at once.
In front of them was a door: simple wood with a brass knob, painted black with purple highlights along its beveled paneling and in increasingly smaller rectangles therewithin. The thought occurred to them that it looked like an album cover, kind of. There was a dim hallway behind them, with grey carpeting and more simple brown doors stretching back toward an intersecting hallway lit by blue flame. Fitz felt their hand rest on the doorknob, moving with dreamlike lack of control. The air was still, but someone was practicing scales on a guitar behind the door. Was this a dream?
They stepped inside before they could adjust to the light inside.
“Oh my god.” The sound of guitar stopped, though there was a soft thunk as Miki Santana, in the flesh, set down the guitar on the bed beside her with, perhaps, a bit too much force, the twin braids on her shoulders bouncing with the motion. “Please please please please tell me you’re not dead.”
The door behind Fitz seemed to close automatically, their arms falling to their sides with a weight more mental than physical, their bright eyes wide with a mix of disbelief and uncertainty. How? Miki hadn’t aged a day.
“I- Where are we?” Fitz managed after an uncomfortable pause, managing to straighten up slightly. ”You’re-“
“Agent Santana. And you’re Blackburn.” Miki swiped through their phone, checking carefully, methodically, before sighing with relief. “Shadow agent. What are you doing here?”
After another moment, Miki’s hard look softened, her shoulders relaxing. She wasn’t in uniform, wearing a garages tee and a set of pajama pants. “Talk to me, Blackburn.”
“I’m not here on an official mission. The agency could never sanction it. But I needed to see Son.” Why was talking so hard? It wasn’t like them to get choked up with emotion. The feeling of dreamlike motion had ceased. This was just… a lot. They paused, steadying themselves against the corner of a desk. “I touched your statue. I had no idea what to expect, it’s not like we had information about how the Hall worked. Townsend was not a helpful interview.”
Miki laughed, a low chuckle as they set their phone down on the bed and looked up at them ruefully. “I have a statue? That’s news to me. Here in the Hall, we kind of lose touch with the physical world, at least outside of the things people post online or whatever’s on TV.”
“You have cable?” The idea seemed funny to Fitz. He hadn’t really thought about it, imagining the hall something closer to a prison. Or a crypt. “And yes, you all do, in the Hall.”
“24-hour news cycle. Whatever game is on. It’s off during siestas, though. Can’t make this place too comfortable I guess.” Another laugh, this one a little more rueful. Miki tugged idly at the tuft of hair at the end of one braid. “Son is good, though. You’ll have to go looking for him, see if you can sneak back a letter or a tape or something. Hey-“ Miki held up a tape. “Speaking of.”
Fitz caught it and carefully tucked it into one of the pockets lining his coat, nodding thoughtfully. “I will, and that certainly sounds… grating.” They puffed a soft sigh, straightening up slightly. “Thank you, Santana. I-“ Their voice hitched slightly. “hope I’m not intruding too much. I hadn’t anticipated… how this would work.”
Miki looked up at them with an eyebrow raised, arms folded. Fitz looked back down at her, trying to keep the eddies at the edges of their being stable. It wasn’t a hard look, there was no anger in her shoulders, her eyes were soft, but Fitz could feel the quagmire of their relationship bubbling around them. They felt like they should say something more, about how things hard started in season three. They’d never really considered what a conversation with Miki was like, merely that losing her had been a tragedy, and perhaps that their existence was a tribute to her memory, somehow. Maybe that wasn’t fair to her.
“Fitz… I want to tell you it’s okay. I don’t really know how to read you, I’m sure you’ll be proud to say, but you’re taking this harder than you need to. It’s been over a decade. Neither of us is responsible for the things that happened that day.”
“I know, I know.” Fitz’s exhalation carried a few whisps of ash, their jacket wrinkling as they leaned back against the door. They let the silence ride for a moment, eyes closing, then looked back down at Miki and held up the tape once more. “Should I play this now? Or should I save it for when I get home?”
Miki gestured to a tape player on her desk, shifting back to lean up against the wall herself, picking up the guitar again. “I’ll give you an accompaniment, if you want.”
Fitz had listened to some of Miki’s earlier work, mostly played in memoriam shortly after his arrival on the team. It wasn’t really their style, the noise and the heavier guitar, the sampling and the backmasking. It had made their head spin, ash clogging their throat with an emotion they hadn’t been able to place.
They took Miki’s chair and inserted the tape, bracing for something heavy, expressive, the kind of sound they didn’t expect being close to the speaker would be pleasant for.
They were pleasantly surprised at the low, hushed voice of a singer he couldn’t place, isolated from orchestral backing. Miki plucked notes along with it, meandering along with the melody, her eyes closed.
“Is that Something Wonderful?” They asked, unable to pick out the sample exactly. The track elaborated as it went on: an intermittent static buzz behind the words, then a whistled tune, intercuts of other songs… The work was transformative, to say the least, and Fitz clung to the initial showtune as they tried to make sense of it. Miki was grinning.
“It was, but it’s mine now. I made this a few months after season four ended, trying to think what I’d tell you if I could ever get out. Jaylen talked about the idea sometimes with Mike, too.”
The track faded out slowly and Fitz swiveled the chair to look at Miki again. Something about the pattern of static had caught their attention, perhaps the hint of Feedback still rattling around somewhere in their corporeality. They’d have to listen again later.
For now, they had at least a few more tracks to go through.