Chapter Text
Gods. What is there to say about elections?
Every team has its own traditions, of course. Each player, their own ways of coping. In Yellowstone, the team would set out before the break of dawn and go for one long, meandering hike together. They had done so for as long as Hex could recall with any certainty. Those earliest memories from the first few seasons of the ILB mostly escape her now; impressionistic, unaided by any concept of structured time. She can feel herself running frantic and free, bounding over hills and skidding down ravines, digging through undergrowth and crushing small rodents between her jaws, savoring the rush, the hot, the melt. She lowers herself into a stream to cool off as the sun crests a distant mountain and falls through the canopy of leaves to form a warm, green den. She watches the eddies of foam, twirling between rocks and capturing errant twigs and bugs. She eats a beetle and takes a nap.
She can still sense the tug in her belly, the magic linking her to her team, a roil of instinct and packlove, and another thing she knows there simply isn’t a word for, a feeling like watching a cloud of buzzing sparks burst up from a campfire and rush into the sky to kiss the stars, a spell without incantation. It nudges her gently awake and points her nose in the direction of her team, her pack, now very far away down the trail. She stretches, opening her maw wide with an impressive yawn, and yet still aches, the tug becoming stronger as the distance grows. They are not worried about her, of course, simply mindful of her absence. Her pack does not howl when they ache; they yahoo.
Halexandrey Walton aches now. She lifts her throat to the sky and howls a song about the ache, the tug. She howls about the gush of the vole she ate, the crunch of the beetle, the cool of the stream, the foam. She sings about the blunt of her teeth and the ripple of her neck after another full season of swinging a bat balanced carefully between her jaws. She sings and runs, runs now, she sings the running, the beat, the rhythm, the trot as she closes the distance, obeying this strange gravity. And then she stops singing, because her pack has heard her song, and they stop to gather and listen, to wait. They are waiting now, and they do not yahoo, but perhaps they are singing to themselves, or perhaps they are listening to the other songs of the park. She thinks of them all, their patience and their pats, the magic they taught to move within her, the treats they offer and the softness of their eyes. This gravity grows not just with distance, but also with time, ebbs and flows now as she explodes with kinetic energy and weaves through the forest toward her family. The sun follows her through the sky. She has a long way to go.
Merlinmeyer always stayed behind. He took care of the business end of everything. Nobody would begrudge him this task, certainly not during her time at Yellowstone. It didn’t hurt that the Magic’s election business tended to be more disappointing than earth shattering back in those days. He would lounge around the ranger station all day in expectation of news that the players knew better than to wait around idly for. Hex sometimes imagines how he might have passed the time. In the morning, perhaps Merlinmeyer would wait until the team was long gone on their hike before laying out every player contract on the long, polished wooden tabletop in the conference room. He might have poured over the details of each document, the parts he wrote, the parts he didn’t, and the parts he couldn’t quite read or which were otherwise redacted. Maybe he meticulously cross-referenced paragraphs and subsections with a copy of the Forbidden Book he kept hidden in his office, if he had such a thing. Hex wouldn’t know; she didn’t pay attention to those more bureaucratic details back then.
But she knows that Alf Merlinmeyer bore the sole responsibility of listening out for peals of thunder in the distance, heralding great cascades of word and sound from the gods, riddles and revelations, the results of the fans’ collective will. The election aftermath in Yellowstone looked ominous but never terribly unusual: skies still darkened by great pulsing murmurations of birds, stray peanuts not yet scavenged by park wildlife, and once simply a shower of coins from on high. It took the rangers weeks to collect the bulk of them, and visitors to the park still occasionally find small caches of rusty, mud-caked coins between rocks and among the detritus of the forest floor. After missing the fanfare, she would return to the ranger station within a few hours of the rest of her pack (once a little before, once long after, and one time all together as a team) and receive the news from Merlinmeyer: which decrees passed, of course, and which teams won the blessings that had evaded the Magic yet again.
Her original team never won a single blessing during Halex’s time with them and for an even longer time after her feedback swap to the Tacos. The Magic’s disappointment grew with time and with Hex’s increasing capacity for complex feelings like disappointment. Her worst days at Yellowstone all happened during games. Incinerations, most of them—Sosa on her first day, Famous the very next, Turq not long before she swapped to the Tacos—and feedbacks to a lesser extent. Comparatively, she never worried much about election days; she had come to expect the bittersweetness of disheartening news at the end of her frenetic romp through nature. Lately, however, the Magic is no more a stranger to tragic elections than any other team. She wonders what happens during those hikes now, but prefers not to think about it.
Feedback feels exceptionally strange. Hex can say so with confidence from either side of the experience, both as a bystander and as a participant. When a feedback swap happens to someone else on your team, you can manage not to notice for a while, at least until you walk off the field at the end of the inning and a stranger sits down in the dugout with you. When Penelope Mathews replaced Alyssa Harrell in the middle of the latter's appearance at bat, Hex probably lay curled up in the outfield and wouldn’t have seen a thing. She had next to no chance of witnessing the moment of flickering that betrays a feedback event, the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it event where spacetime bumps into itself and sends either reality tumbling in opposite directions like carelessly colliding bumblebees. (The Millennials were leading 7-2, and Hex was still sulking about her exile to the outfield after biting several baserunners, so she doesn’t feel too bad for being so checked out during that game.) Penny drew a walk and Eiz tagged her out at second base, a moment of unraveling—of ungathering—that sailed right over Hex’s head like a fly ball. Not until Hex ambled back into the dugout did she notice Alyssa Harrell among her teammates, dressed in a well-worn Yellowstone Magic jersey, looking disoriented and just a bit nauseous. Some players caught on quicker than others, but most stayed silent until the end of the last inning; it would be unwise to disrupt the game and risk drawing the ump’s ire. Play must continue.
Afterwards came the quiet frustration, the grieving, the sincere, pained welcoming, Merlinmeyer eventually vanishing with the new teammate to review her contract. When the Magic gathered to wave at Penny as she boarded a charter bus back to New York, Hex thought to herself, “I know that’s where she lives, but I remember it isn’t her home.” When feedback happens, Hex might say now, you suddenly have to say goodbye to someone you love while your thoughts insist you don’t know them. They’re stolen from you twice, from your mind and from your team, all at once. It’s painful, it’s cruel, and it’s disorienting. Penny was in no more danger on the Mills than on the Magic, and in fact would thrive in New York, but the loss hurt more profoundly than any Hex had experienced before; she only ever knew Sosa as a pile of rock ash under her paws when she wandered onto the field between two walls of columnar basalt, and Famous... Well, that was an awful day, but she had only just met the kid.
But Penny was her friend, her packmate, a warm, glowing presence to curl up beside on freezing Wyoming winter nights. Penny had given her the maroon cap interwoven with every kind of enchantment the team could muster that might allow an otherwise unremarkable magical coyote to play blaseball with anything resembling competence. Penny had taught her the fundamentals of igneous geomancy and how to buy hot dogs at the concessions stand. Penny, Hex, and Eiz together were the Gathering: an unstoppable tide of arcane batting power hitting one after another, every game, every inning. And now Hex had to fight to hold on to each one of those memories, to convince herself that they were true and real, to suppress the nagging suspicion that she had made them all up as part of an elaborate lie. Her thoughts (and Merlinmeyer’s clipboard) now told her that the Gathering was Alyssa, herself, and Eiz, but she could sense no love for this stranger suddenly batting before her in the lineup. Not at first, anyway; in time, Alyssa would become a beloved and genuine member of the Gathering—if only out of habit early on, then out of sincere friendship later—with Hex taking longer than most to warm up to her. She’s not proud of how distantly she treated Alyssa, but grief can work in strange ways for anyone, let alone for a wild animal rapidly gaining in degrees of sentience. She will forgive herself someday.
And then, Turq… that was another awful day. Hex won’t talk about it.
The other side of feedback is much worse. Halex understands now that memories get all... churned up for everyone in close proximity to a feedback event; the further away you are, the less disorienting it feels. Outside the ballpark, there’s a small chance you’ll experience déjà vu. In the stands or the outfield, you might get a bad headache. Players in the dugout and infield will almost certainly feel dazed and confused for the rest of the game, easy enough to mistake for heat exhaustion unless you notice the flickering or an epileptic player gives it away with an unavoidable seizure. But the day Halexandrey Walton feedback swapped from the Yellowstone Magic to the Los Angeles Unlimited Tacos, she might as well have been concussed.
As best as she can figure by looking back at game records and sorting through what remains of her memories from that game, it happened like this. At the top of the eleventh, the game was still tied up 1-1 and the Tacos were up to bat. It was a short inning; with Inky on the mound, Wyatt Quitter grounded out to Bevan almost immediately, and Vito Kravitz struck out next. Then Wyatt Glover stepped up to the plate. Curious thing, this batter named Glover. Halex had spent countless hours as a pup terrorizing communities of North American glovers, which are native to Yellowstone. No meat in them to speak of, really, just odd shadows that scuttle away when you catch them unawares in the underbrush, or chitter vindictively when you snatch their bodies up in your powerful jaws. Glovers in blaseball mitts are the best, the leather just perfect for chewing and teething. She fondly remembers gnawing on one for an entire afternoon as a pup, the umbral inhabitant having abandoned its shell-home and left her alone in peace almost immediately.
Hex can remember intensely watching this particular Glover step up to home plate, as she had become a much more vigilant fielder by that time, and the game record fills in the gaps in her memory. Wyatt Glover batting for the Tacos. Foul Ball, 0-1. Strike, looking, 0-2. And then a sound like a microphone picking up noise from its own speakers and reverberating through a crowded auditorium, beginning with the tinny crackle of the ballpark’s glorified drive-thru intercom and then instantly much, much louder, echoing and amplifying over itself again and again and again and again until the tears in her eyes might have almost saved her from the flickering had she blinked them clear just a second earlier, a strobe brighter than any pulsar in the galaxy, piercing deep into her skull the brightnullbrightnullbrightnull, the very air wavering with loud and light, she flinching with her hackles raised for the first moment and then her tail between her legs the next in instant surrender to the sensory flood as her brain finally caught up to her eyes and shut them instinctively, she yipping once in surprise and unbelievable pain, then biting down almost on her tongue but finding wood there in her jaws instead, turning her head sharply to protect herself from the danger, and hearing—feeling—the loud crack of a bat connecting with a ball right next to her head.
Halexandrey Walton hit a ground out to Washer Barajas.