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Hiroto leans down, peering at the ground. “You think we could throw something off here?”
It’s not the tallest building in Atlantis. At least, she doesn’t think so. She’s not running around with rulers or depth charts or asking random people about building heights. But she’s not afraid of heights, and neither is Fish, which is why they’re sitting on the roof, legs dangling over the edge, side by side but not quite touching.
Fish isn’t talking much lately, on account of being scattered. On account of spending a season and a half Elsewhere nonstop, surrounded by nobody and nothing. They’ve been less talkative in the couple days since coming back. Which is fine. Totally fine. Hiroto can fill the spaces and the silences. She got good at that on the Tigers. She’s really good at it here.
“Something small,” Hiroto continues, and leans back, pressing the heels of their palms into the rooftop. “And it’s late, so it wouldn’t hit someone, but it’d be cool to see the way it bounces in different realities. You know, watching all the different pieces.”
Fish still doesn’t answer. Idly, Hiroto wonders if there’s a universe where Fish answers. Where they throw something off the roof. Where they say they missed spending time together. Where they storm off. They can see all of those, superimposed together, red-Fish blue-Fish green-Fish kaleidoscoping on top of one another.
“You’re glowing,” Fish says.
She claps a hand over her tiger eye, more instinct than anything. “Sorry,” she says, not quite managing sheepishness. “Still getting used to, uh.”
Fish has been on the Georgias longer than Hiroto, but she’s pretty sure they’ve spent less time in Atlantis than she has. They were gone, and back and gone, and back and shadowed and back and gone. The world is going to end in less than thirty days and this is their first shot to spend time together, and Fish is in a bad way, and Hiroto — is trying not to think about that.
“How’d you find this place?” Fish says after a second. They speak slowly. Because they’re scattered, Hiroto thinks. Or maybe they’ve just slowed down a little. They haven’t been on a team together in some forty years.
They look up at the sky. “Jan.”
“Jan?”
“She’s captain, and that means she’s in charge of acclimating me.”
Fish gives them a strange, long, disconcertingly even look. Hiroto huffs out a breath. “Fine. She’s captain and that means she doesn’t want anything to do with being captain, so she showed me around town.”
“You were captain of the Tigers.”
Hiroto shifts, a little uncomfortable. Fish didn’t know her as Captain Wilcox — or, they did, but not directly. They didn’t experience playing with her as Captain Wilcox. By the end she’d been great at getting people used to Hades. Buddy systems and planned visits. Maybe Famous is still doing all that now that she’s gone.
Maybe they’re not. But she’s not thinking about that part.
“Captains can still have fun,” they say, which isn’t really an answer, and they’re not sure if Fish notices that. It’s a little creepy, watching them only half-understand the whole conversation. They need something cool to do, something exciting. Captain Wilcox wouldn’t be exciting. But Jan would, so maybe Atlantis-Hiroto should. “What should we throw?”
“Hiroto,” Fish says, face creased in confusion. “Why?”
“Because!” She throws her arms out wide, one of her hands hitting Fish’s chest. They flinch, delayed by a good two or three seconds. Hiroto’s not thinking about that either. “We’re in this place with infinite possibilities, why shouldn’t we?”
“We could talk.”
“We are talking.”
“I’m not,” Fish says, and Hiroto doesn’t bite her lip but she considers it. “I don’t know what there is to say.”
Hiroto chews that over for a second. “Do you like Atlantis?”
Fish shrugs. “It’s no Sunken Halifax.”
“No Hades, either.”
“I guess not.”
“Do you miss it?”
“Hades?”
“Yeah,” Hiroto says, and then, “No.”
Fish must understand. “The good old days,” they say, and for the first time they smile. “We used to be so angry.”
Hiroto groans. “How did we manage that?”
“Not what I meant,” Fish says, and then stops, breathes deep. Hiroto watches them for a minute, curious. Fish doesn’t seem to notice her eyes on them; they lift their hands in front of their face and press their thumbs to their pointer fingers and breathes in, thumbs to middle fingers and breathes out, and keeps cycling, and keeps breathing.
She waits until they’re done, hands resting at their sides again, to say quietly, “Grounding exercise?”
“Frankie taught me,” Fish answers. “I think he needed it too.”
Hiroto nods, absorbing that. She’s trying her best to stay out of the politics of the Georgias. Not because she doesn’t like the team, and not because she doesn’t like the politics. Nothing like that. She’s just… not interested, right now. She knew her Tigers, before the siesta, over the siesta, reacquainting herself with them every offseason, making sure her team was her team even when they got traded and alted and—
“You might need it too,” Fish says, looking at her sidelong.
“I’m fine,” Hiroto says reflexively. “What were you saying? About the good old days.”
“We were so angry,” Fish says again, a little quicker, a little softer. “It was… good. Having something worth being angry about. Caring so much.”
“It was exhausting,” Hiroto answers, but they can see what Fish means. The days of violence, and Violence. The days of vim and vigor. The days of rising against. It had been good, in its way.
“It was,” Fish agrees. “It was worth being exhausted over.”
“Good people to be exhausted with, too.” Hiroto kicks one of her legs, tapping her heel against the side of the roof. “Remember when we used to hide Scorpler’s stuff?”
For a second she’s worried that the answer is going to be no, judging by the look of intense focus on Fish’s face. And then they say slowly, “In your holes?”
“And everywhere else.”
“They were so mad,” Fish murmurs. Their smile is a little more sure on their face now, growing warmer with every second. “They’d threaten to fill your holes. They actually did, once.”
Hiroto gapes. She doesn’t remember this at all. “They what?”
“Yeah, you took something important, and they tried to refill one of the holes in revenge. Zion and I dug it back out, and we kept waiting for you to notice, but you know what you said when you saw it?”
“What?”
They glance at her, smiling slyly. “You said it was the best hole you ever dug.”
Hiroto can’t help it: they throw their head back and cackle. They might even know which hole Fish means, even all these years down the line. “Man,” they gasp, and knock one of their feet against Fish’s. “How did I never notice?”
“We used to wonder that too,” Fish mumbles. And it takes a second, but they knock one of their feet back against Hiroto’s, a clumsy reciprocation of the gesture.
Hiroto turns to look at Fish. Red-Fish smiles back and green-Fish looks away and blue-Fish says something that real-Hiroto can’t hear. Fish, regular Fish, waits a beat and then tilts their head. “What would you throw?”
Her hands go to her pockets reflexively. She rifles around for a minute before coming up with a ribbon, a hair ribbon. Lottie’s, probably. “We could tie something to this. I have a championship ring on me. Or maybe something heavier. Or—”
“Or,” Fish says, “you’re thinking too much.” And red-Fish and blue-Fish and green-Fish and real-Fish all reach for the ribbon, and Hiiroto lets them. They take it from her fingers and lift it until the wind catches it. and they let go. It flies off, and she can imagine countless hues and colors spiraling in countless directions, and Hiroto could try and look where it goes. She doesn’t.
They stay for a minute, looking at each other, the smallest smiles on both of their faces, until Fish starts to get to their feet. “Well?”
“Well what?”
“Well,” they say, “let’s go find it. Our next adventure. I haven’t gotten to see much of Atlantis yet.”
“I can show you around,” Hiroto says. She only half-means it, only half-knows what to show anyways, but Fish offers a hand and she lets them pull her up. “Or at least we can find somewhere else tall to throw stuff off.”
“That wasn’t throwing,” Fish says. “But sure. Let’s find something to do.”
“If we’re lucky, something’ll find us,” Hiroto answers, and Fish’s face blooms into a real, wide, sharp-toothed grin.