#boneroutes

Mike doesn’t go to away games that Derrick pitches, but he does hang around SeaTac when the Garages are supposed to be flying home. He’s even learned to recognize Derrick’s suitcase on the baggage carousel, frayed red bandanna knotted around the handle, and he’s leaning on it at the edge of the crowd when Derrick comes down from the main terminal.

“Fuckin’ roadie,” Derrick says, grinning. He leans in close enough to tip the bill of Mike’s Garages cap up with his index finger, then leans in even closer to kiss him, stubble rough against Mike’s face.

“I thought you’d be tired,” Mike says. “I was being nice.”

Derrick smells like stale sweat and peppermint gum, could probably use a shower and a nap and getting out of the airport before any reporters spot him and decide to ask about whoever he beaned in Charleston. One of the Games husbands, Mike thinks. He doesn’t remember which - it probably doesn’t matter. No death announcement yet, anyway. There’s a bruise on Derrick’s cheekbone that says the Thieves felt some sort of way about it, but Mike doesn’t mention it, resists the way it draws his eye.

“I am tired,” Derrick says. He pries Mike’s hand from the suitcase handle gently, replaces it with his own. “Thanks. I’m also starving.”

“I’ll make you dinner,” Mike says. He’s been baking all day, all he does is bake when Derrick’s away games are on TV, but he might as well offer.

“You will sit on the couch with me and order takeout,” Derrick says, with a gentle snort of laughter, reaching out to tug at the front of Mike’s flannel. “You’re covered in flour, Townsend, I know where you’ve been.”

“Fine,” Mike says. He feels caught, a flush creeping up the back of his neck. “I want Indian.”

“Good. I’m paying,” Derrick says, already walking off, suitcase rolling behind him. 

vaguely in continuity with this one; takes place early s17

Finn has gotten used to the ghosts, by now, by necessity — a season and a half and they show no signs of dispersing, though they don’t quite crowd the townhouse the way they used to. They give her and Kennedy moments of quiet. She’s not proud of the way she’d broken down and asked for the spirits to leave them alone, sometime around the end of last season, when Fish and Pedro had both been Elsewhere and the remaining Crabs had been spread thinner than ever before, but they’d listened, stopped startling her in mirrors and lurking in the corners of the bedroom. The shadows keep to the hallways, the living room, the half-distorted reflection in the fogged-up kitchen window.

It takes her a moment — exhausted after pitching a black hole game, the sort of exhaustion that only comes after a black hole, not just tiredness but the sense of missing some vital organ that you can’t quite remember the shape of — to notice the ghost sitting in the window nook, half-visible against the dark sky outside.

She squints to try and make out their features. Considers texting Ken about it, but — he can’t see them, when they aren’t possessing him, anyways, and it isn’t as if the ghost is doing any harm. “Um,” she says, brow furrowed. “Hello?”

And then the ghost looks up, and she can see their hair move glitch-choppy around their face, their eyes go wide, and suddenly Luis pops into crystal-clarity. More lifelike than any of the other ghosts have been — maybe because she hasn’t known any of the other ghosts, aside from Combs, who had already lived in hazy memory by the time Finn saw them burn. “Please don’t tell me you’ve forgotten me already!! I couldn’t take that!”

“Luis!” She’s launching herself at them before she thinks about whether it’s a good idea — whether they’ll be physical enough to do that, ghostly transparency emulating hardlight projection just enough that she forgets anything’s wrong, for a brief second. Wraps her arms around them, and —

She doesn’t go through, but it’s a near thing. Like they both have to put the effort in to imagine Luis’ form as actually present, to make it true. They’re uncomfortably warm, the same way they’d been on day one when Finn’d seen the instability hit them and had clung to them, just like this, for the rest of the game, like the umpires couldn’t set their sights on them if Finn was in the way, like that’d ever worked for anyone in the last sixteen seasons. They glitch around/through her arms where they press into their back, little pixels falling off like rainwater.

But they’re there.

Face pushed against Luis’ shoulder, Finn laughs despite the tears in her eyes. “Could never forget you, you know that. It’s only been — fifty-eight days!” The math isn’t exactly difficult — today’s date minus two — but it still feels wrong, after it’s been said. Too recent and too distant and something that, altogether, should not have been said. So Finn rushes onwards: “Was starting to think you wouldn’t show up, you know?”

“I — didn’t realize it had been so long,” they say, apologetic. “Time! It’s all weird, and — harder to keep track of, in the trench, than it was here, and that’s saying something! You know how bad I am at that!”

“I know, I know. I’ve just — I’ve just missed you!” She leans backwards enough that she can look at them properly — blurred, because she’s definitely still crying, and they’re still faded and indistinct around the edges, but as clear as she’s going to get. “I’ve missed you,” she says again. “Not the same here, without you. Everything’s so different.”

“Mm. I — I don’t want to know anything, about who replaced me, I don’t think! Not yet, at least.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything, don’t worry!” Finn leaves out that she’s barely said a dozen words to Jon in the weeks they’ve been on the team; she’s done her best to welcome Chorby’s replacement, the triplets, but — it’s too much, being around the person who’d stepped up to the pitching mound after Luis had burned.

“Good, okay! Perfect.” They’re fading. Finn can see through them to the buildings across the street and the streetlights’ warm glow, and she’s having to squint to properly make out their features, again. She can see her own hands through their shoulders; feels like she’s dipping them in the ocean in the summer, that not-quite-there warm feeling of waves lapping against skin. “I don’t think I can stay much longer? But — I missed you, too, and I’ll —”

“Come visit more? Please?”

“Of course! Now that I’ve figured out how, you’re not going to be able to get rid of me. Pinky promise.”

“I’m holding you to that!” She laughs as she loops her pinky in theirs, sealing the promise with a last bit of corporeality. By the time she looks up from their joint hands, Luis has vanished entirely.

Jaylen sits cross-legged on the bed with a gently steaming cup of coffee, leaning against the headboard, watching the rain lashing against Dreamy’s bedroom window.

“Doesn’t it rain all the time in Seattle?” says Dreamy, crawling up beside her.

INTERESTING.... close thank you for the medium height <3

The last time she was brought into a dark room like this, to sit alone, it was in Seattle. It was because she was supposed to die. It was the beginning of five years in a safehouse with the people who became her family, the Seattle mob’s shameful secrets shipped off to the Midwest.

Now she’s in the Midwest again, in another dark room. Not going to get killed - probably - but death might be kinder, as far as Tiana’s concerned.

It’s easy to forget, about the bruise.

It’s not like Derrick does it on purpose. It just isn’t at the front of his mind when he curls against Sebastian’s back and slings an arm over Seb’s waist to pull him closer for warmth, feels a shaky exhale as his hand strikes the wrong spot on Seb’s hip. The smoke of instability has already leaked through Seb’s shirt, sends - not a shock, but pins and needles from Derrick’s fingers up through his arm, like striking his elbow the wrong way on a hard surface. Derrick grimaces and shifts his hand to Seb’s back, bunches the fabric of Seb’s shirt in his fingers and rubs it between forefinger and thumb until he can actually feel it again.

“Sorry,” he says, into Seb’s hair. “I’m sorry.”

Ow, Seb murmurs, and Derrick doesn’t even have to be fully awake to translate that one from Morse.

Derrick doesn’t have a lot of words meant for this situation, meant to mitigate hurt that he caused by accident or apologize for hurt he forgot was already there. He knows the instability hurts Seb more some days than others, but he can rarely wrap his mind around what that feels like, to be constantly living with the low-level background radiation of pain. Time passes in the Trench, but not the right kind of time to get rid of that pain. Not the kind of time that will make the days tick over and roll back the instability. Derrick can’t think about that for too long, or he’ll get angry.