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Something swarms with a swelling flutter, muted to distance through the heavy vault doors.
The birds are returning. You'd know that sound anywhere.
Relief courses through your veins – and then guilt. Even omens must retire someday. And their presence is not a comfort to everyone the way it is to you.
The Vault is a fortress, in a way that makes even the Hall of Flame look abandoned. You are one of few here ever to grace both. And it doesn’t count for you, not really. Not in the way it counts for Jaylen, hand frozen in brass and gripping a bat that doesn’t look like it belongs in her hand. For Tillman, headphones in, hands over his ears, all sealed in a perfect metal cast. For Chorby, mouth and wounds agape, letting loose a brassy, soundless scream.
No, you do not play this field anymore. You no longer walk the diamond. This place hasn’t even recognized you as one of its own; if it had, you would have been shut out with the coldness of all this metal. The doors are closed to the league, but you are not of the league. No longer contracted. No longer bound.
You shrink, from storm front to tornado to shade, and finally to human – jacket falling around your shoulders like a second skin, eyes finding context within the shape of a face, the shove of gravity meeting your feet.
This room is built larger than life. The columns stretch like skyscrapers up into glimmering darkness, the tent-sized banners fly in an artificial breeze, and a replica of the Lady herself looms from a golden pedestal, outstretched hands bearing a winged cup. Sharing her bounty. Pouring it like an oil slick over a fire.
Everything cruel in this room is larger than life, and so you must not be.
It isn’t difficult to find Paula’s statue. Her gold-frozen face beams with fluorescent defiance, Tigers jersey worn like a proud mantle, bat at her feet where she’d dropped it. You wonder, not for the first time, if this isn’t what the Coin wanted – players preserved in final moments of triumph or terror or both, helpless flies in amber to be displayed like her own collection of trophies in a grandiose palace of a room that nobody ever gets to see. These are not monuments. You know monuments well; you spent much of your life as one. This has all of the posturing and none of the reverence.
“Paula Turnip.”
Your words echo, lame and thin, mocked and distorted by the frigid stony vault. None of the booming tempest you’re renowned for – this doesn’t feel like a place the weather can touch. You rest your flame-ringed palm against the metal of her clenched fist, and it’s so cold that it nearly puts the fire out.
You died for her once, and it was a worthy death. You would have done it again, were it not for the fact that this isn’t death at all.
“I am… sorry,” you tell her. Perhaps you’re also telling the rest of them. You can’t be sure. “I am so sorry. You don't belong here.”
Your voice comes out in a whisper – you realize it with delayed, bitter surprise. After a century of shouting, you’d thought you would have outgrown the quiet.
The stack of letters on Paula’s bedside table has halted its growth, teeming with sticky notes and scratch work; her penmanship has never been the neatest. It scrawls like a root system.
“Have you finally stopped?” Landry asks.
Paula doesn’t jump at his voice, nor does she turn around at his unannounced presence. Rapport has given way to habit enough these days. There are worse ways to be haunted than this.
“Stopped what?” She loops her jacket over the hook on her door, deep red satin catching in the afternoon light coming up off the Styx. 5 o’clock bounces up over the surface of the water, casting long limber spindles of gold on the wall.
“Planning for your death.”
Paula slumps down into a beanbag chair, the plush of it swallowing her with a clumsy gulp. Her eyes catch on the doorframe. The markings on it – little white numbers scratched in a childish hand. The name “Carmelo Plums” written next to them, proudly signed.
A lump forms in her throat, and she stares at the ceiling. “Nah. Just taking a break.”
Landry sits against the back of the chair, and Paula feels the gentle pressure of his back against hers. Cushioned by a buffer of foam beads and fluffy fabric.
“Are they messages, then?” he asks earnestly. “To those you would leave behind?”
“Some.” She pores over the stack of letters in her mind’s eye. They’re ritual goodbyes, and there are dozens. Some for the Tigers, some for the Garages. Some for the Pies. Some for the Thieves. One for Dom and Randy, wherever they are. One for Mickey. One for Scorp. One for Games, several pages long and scrapped several times over. One for Jess. One for Moody. Another for Moody. One for Plums that she doesn’t understand why she wrote.
She breathes a halfhearted huff of a laugh. “Don’t know how I’ll mail them. Hall of Flame got a post office?”
Landry laughs too, broad and booming. “Perhaps not.”
“Stupid anyway,” Paula shrugs. “People are sick to death of figuring out what to do if they die.”
Landry’s laugh falters. “You are mistaken, Paula Turnip. You wish to leave something behind, so that those who matter most to you may understand their significance to your life. That is not a stupid desire. To call for conversation even from a memory.”
Paula sighs. “Well they won’t be talking to much of me, but it’s better than nothing I guess.”
“I didn’t leave you that,” Landry wonders aloud, regretful. Paula blinks at the shift in his tone as the temperature in the room drops. The longer he’s been released, the more like the weather he’s become. Some days he’s more atmosphere than person. “I did not leave something behind for you. I realize now that was… a mistake. For all the time I spent merged with mortal life, I’d forgotten the simple relief of what it is to be heard.”
Paula shakes her head. She’s long since let go of the stretch of time she spent mourning Landry’s voice. She walks among the spirits of the passed every day now. Yazmin waves and smiles at her from the fields beyond the pomegranate tree line, she bakes Moody’s breads for the days that friends of the Tigers come to visit, and she brings tribute for Sebastian to the Hall with Jess every weekend.
Landry’s been sky, and he’s been flesh, and there’s a learning curve to figuring out how to be both.
She understands a learning curve. Her violinist fingers are scarred with the calluses of one.
“Gods, V, you think too much. But… thanks.”
“Hindsight,” Landry hums, mournfully amused. “It’s a shame she’s never on time.”
There’s a flare of warmth in the room. It prickles and settles over the surface on Paula’s skin like the tingling aura of a bonfire.
“Would you just promise to help get those letters to people?” she finally asks. “If the umps manage to get me. I would take a page outta your book and just bristle and thunderstorm at people, except that I’m not exactly made of… revelrous fury mist. My options are limited.”
“You don’t need to ask,” Landry hums, settling further back into the chair. “Trust the carrier crows with omens of dread to come, but not with something so important as this. I’ll make sure of it. These days, my life has become mostly knitting. Knitting, and the painting of bird feeders. I do enjoy it, you know. The simplicity of calm.”
Paula knows that to be true. The porch on Moody’s house drips with the feeders now, dangling like chandelier glass from the gutters, lovingly carved and painted and homey. Filled to the brim with mixed seeds and bedding for nests.
The red sky rolls deep over the horizon outside Paula’s window, and she can see the flocks of crows whirling in circles of warning. They always sense an eclipse before anyone else.
“V,” she asks, turning over her shoulder to peer at him. “I need one more favor.”
Landry turns, six lamp-like eyes in his face blinking with dire focus. He answers with a confoundingly mundane nod. “Ask away.”
He doesn’t blink when Paula draws her utility knife from her pocket, nor does he wince when she clips off one of the twigs sprouting from the twisting branch of her left arm. It boasts a vibrant spring green at its point of severing, but it stings no more than a paper cut. A snap of loamy, vital scent drifts through the air.
Landry takes the sapling when she holds it out. The fledgling leaves and tiny buds, pale green and barely unfurled, stand out like stars against the cavernously deep red of his palms.
“Plant this,” she says assuredly. “If I die, there’s a spot for this behind the house, in the garden. Next to the pomegranate tree.”
Landry blinks again in surprise, studying the sapling with intrigue. “Will you… regrow from this?”
Paula shrugs. “That’s a dryad myth, V. I have no idea. But I do know that if I’m dead… it’ll grow.”
She studies the sapling in his hands. Stares at the way the new leaves capture the light, dancing red under their own miniature sky. So small that to them, the palm of a hand is the roof of the world. “I want to be somewhere people can come to, you know? Even if I don’t know they’re there. You understand that.”
“Ecosystem,” Landry murmurs, red smoke dancing in wispy clouds around his hands. “Nothing dies in a way that does not feed something else. Yes, Paula Turnip. I understand. And I am honored.”
Paula nods, the lump in her throat returning tenfold. He’s right, of course. Things die in cycles. She and Landry are both proof of that.
She doesn’t forget that the Tigers are immune to death, but neither does she rely on it. Neither does she let that become a blanket of comfort. Neither does she let it soothe the guilt she feels at the idea of Plums out there now, sent away in her place, no longer safe. The safety of standing still is not real safety at all, she knows. Eventually everything must move. Eventually it must drift or step or run away from its point of origin. Everything finds a way to die.
She won’t die without roots. That’s the only thing she’s certain of.
“Talk to it, by the way,” she tells Landry, nodding towards the sapling. “It’s good for plants when you talk to them.”
An incandescent smile cracks like a breaking storm cloud across Landry’s face, and he folds himself in a fond memory. “Yes, I remember,” he sighs aloud. “On my visits to the Hellmouth, I’ve found Eugenia Bickle’s sunbeast flowers to be marvelously conversational. Far less melodramatic than the dirge-singing asphodel by the stadium gates.”
Paula rolls her eyes at the image. The idea of Landry calling anything or anyone ‘melodramatic’ is a pot-kettle situation of truly epic proportions. But it makes her smile anyway. “Can’t promise this particular tree is gonna do a whole lot of talking back, but… yeah. You know the drill.”
“Is this your letter to me, then?” he asks with a cheeky smile. “The tree before it becomes the paper before it becomes the page. You are many steps ahead.”
The sapling stretches in Landry’s hands, its wooden spine crackling in a cozy ray of sun.
“Oh, shut up,” Paula grumbles as another baby leaf unfurls from a tiny branch. She winces at her own twinge of guilt. Remembering the countless pages of scratched out letters and asks that felt like too much and platitudes that felt hollow and insincere. She’d chewed pen caps to nothing with the frustration over not knowing what to say to him.
Until she’d figured it out, and given up.
“You deserve better. But...I’m shit at goodbyes, V. You’re in my head, anyway.”
“Only when you want me to be,” Landry rumbles agreeably. The sapling bristles in the breeze of its first tiny windstorm.
“Yeah.” Paula nods, watching the branches. Too familiar with what sadness looks like on Landry’s face to be unafraid of meeting his eyes and finding it there. “Well, I promise you. Anything I would’ve written, you already know.”
The vault yawns with its strange, artificial wind, constantly moving while you stand so constantly still. Paula’s statue watches with vacant eyes, staring at a horizon that can only be seen beyond a wall.
“You belong in the garden,” you say, apologetic and echoing. “You belong under the skies of Sixth Circle, watched over by the birds and the rippling streams. You belong to the world of the living, and to the world of the dead. Not to this… lifecast. Not to this imitation.”
“I am so sorry, Paula Turnip,” you tell her again. The metal of her forehead is ice against yours, and you feel the chill ripple down to the base of your skull with a freezing jolt. Still you stand here, the more vital of the two of you for the first time you’ve ever known. “Forgive me. I cannot plant your tree. Not yet.”
You’re unsure why you came here to tell her this. You try to imagine what she’d say – whether she’d be disappointed, perhaps, or angry. Resigned or resentful. You two once shared a mind, and that means her voice has always been clear in your head.
When you search for it now, you hear only metal.
You wince at the swift, booming slam of the vault doors behind you, flames flickering in the angry breeze the movement leaves in its wake.
You return home to the same routine you always do. You accept the gift of an apple from the tree next to the Home Plate. You hum folk songs to coax the star jasmine vines up around their trellises. You trim the cypress to tidy satisfaction. Every day you feed the birds, padding their nests with extra twigs and an abundance of seeds.
What else is there for you, the groundskeeper of Sixth Circle, to do now?
‘Plant this,’ Paula tells you in a memory. ‘If I’m dead, it’ll grow.’
Every day you visit an empty spot of soil in the garden. Every day you wish it felt more like a monument, and less like a grave for someone who’s still alive.