first of the request fic!
No, I didn't forget! RL has just been crazy-busy lately, and I've had barely any time for the computer. Nothing bad (in fact, a lot of exciting and good stuff!), just busy.
Anyways, here's the first of the request fic. reveritas requested brian wilson/dallas braden, visiting ireland, kissing the blarney stone, getting tattooed. and what happened next, based on their actual trip to Ireland, as detailed here.
So!
Brian Wilson/Dallas Braden (SF Giants/Oakland A's)
rated R
5,300 words
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. It is in no way a reflection on the actual life, behavior, or character of any of the people featured, and there are no connections or affiliations between this fictional story and the people or organizations it mentions. It was not written with any intent to slander or defame any of the people featured. No profit has been or ever will be made as a result of this story: it is solely for entertainment. And again, it is entirely fictional, i.e. not true.
homeland.
“You wanna go to Ireland?” Braden asks, as soon as Wilson picks up the phone. No prelude, no hey man, how you doin’?, nothing.
Wilson thinks about it for about two seconds flat, just long enough to process trip and Dallas Braden and Ireland. “You bet,” he says.
“Cool. Ummmmm.” Braden hums when he’s thinking faster than his mouth can work. “We’re gonna… um, you better buy a real big backpack if you don’t have one already.”
“OK, cool,” Wilson says. He’s already thinking about where he can go to get a good solid backpacking backpack, something with big pockets and zippered pouches and, he doesn’t even know, straps and loops and a, a fucking frame or whatever.
Backpacking through Ireland with Braden. He’s totally down with that.
----
They start out on foot, which is easy enough in Dublin, with bridges arching over the river and broadly modern roads studded with pubs, broken up by narrower alleyways, also full of pubs.
Wilson’s not sure what he expected-- something deeply, fundamentally foreign, maybe-- but Dublin is a city like any other major city. It’s got its modern parts and its less modern parts, its cold glassy-fronted buildings reflecting light and its warm brick-fronted buildings absorbing it. None of the locals talk like him, but they also don’t sound all too different from his grandparents, back in South Boston, all their friends and neighbors back there, their voices still heavy with brogue even after all these years. The city is crawling with tourists and American college students on giddy study abroad trips anyways, so it’s not like they’re ever the only Americans in the pub at night.
Still. It’s Dublin. The Guinness is real Guinness. The way old stone buildings interlock with newer brick structures strikes him as somehow unfamiliar, un-American. The biggest monument in the city is something called The Spire, which seems to just be a gigantic silver spike tapering up into the sky, like a flagpole without a flag. He doesn’t really get it, but maybe it’s some particular Dublin thing that he’s not really supposed to get.
They’re strolling along the boardwalk that runs next to the river, late, and the yellow-white streetlights make vertical slashes down into the water. Braden’s tripping his hand along the waist-high rail that’s there to keep drunken foreign idiots like them from falling in and drowning. The solid wooden planks underfoot dull the sounds their sneakers make down to a soft patter that doesn’t echo back.
“This is place is so…” Wilson isn’t sure how to explain it. Different, but not, that’s the start, but that doesn’t really say it, doesn’t begin to get across what he’s thinking. Feeling. Whatever.
“Dude,” Braden says. He stops, wraps his hand around the railing and leans out at an angle, looking back at Wilson. The wind off the water blows Braden’s hair-- which is curly and a little too long and tends to poof up into a halo that makes him look like some kind of skinny leprechaun even under the best of circumstances-- up against the edges of his cheeks. “Dude, yeah, I know. It really is.”
He nods seriously, wind plastering all the hair on his river-facing side flat against his head. Wilson grins, because yeah, yeah, Braden gets it, ‘course he does. He should have known. He doesn’t have to try to explain anything at all.
----
When they first met, two years earlier, that was in Puerto Rico. Hot and sandy and nothing at all like Ireland, not in the place itself or in their reason for being there. Ireland is… well, he’s not really sure exactly what Ireland is, but it’s something to do with, like, discovering themselves, or their history, and also having a really epic adventure together just for the sheer unadulterated hell of it. Puerto Rico had beaches and shit, sure, but at its core, that was business. That was winter ball.
He got down there a couple days early, mostly to check out those beaches and to see how much of his very shaky high school Spanish he was going to have to try to revive. Most everyone spoke English at least a little bit, so it wasn’t like he ever had to worry about asking where the bathrooms were and ending up directed to the local brothel, but his teammates all spoke Spanish unless they were directly addressing him and, yeah, it was maybe a little bit lonely. It was the first time he’d been that kind of excluded in a locker room-- not so much hated on as straight up disregarded. It was kind of worse.
Then Braden showed up. Gringo número dos, according to his teammates, but Braden smiled and rolled with it and within the space of a week had picked up enough dirty phrases in Spanish to ingratiate himself with the locals in a ‘stupid party trick’ kind of way. Wilson had been impressed, and also kind of pissed that he hadn’t realized on his own that learning how to shout Your mom sucks hairy balls at opposing players was the best way to make friends with his new teammates. In retrospect it seemed so obvious.
Braden came to practice one day wearing a bright green Kiss me, I’m Irish! t-shirt. This wouldn’t have been a big deal, except that Wilson was wearing his exact same Kiss me, I’m Irish! t-shirt that day too. The sight of the two white guys in matching shirts was too much for the rest of the team, who spent the rest of the winter ball season treating them like some kind of moronic bad-sitcom-style married couple.
It was impossible to keep from becoming friends with Braden, under the circumstances, and to be totally honest, Wilson hadn’t even tried to fight it.
----
They’re pretty far off the usual tourist paths by now, the more popular towns left behind in favor of sleepier countryside, and early December is not exactly the height of tourist season in Ireland anyways. They stay in a different youth hostel every night, miles and miles (kilometers, man, it’s all in kilometers, Braden corrects every time he misreads the speed gauge on their rental car) between each stop.
Once they’re out of the city they can’t exactly get around on foot, so they’ve got this little red car, rented and insured all to fuck, which is a good thing because they drive on the wrong side of the street here and the steering wheel is in the wrong place and Wilson’s lucky he hasn’t run them off the road yet, although he’s come pretty damn close. There are a number of factors working against him, including
--the whole wrong side of the road thing,
--the fact that the car’s a stick shift, and he doesn’t really know how to drive stick,
--the scenery, which is equal parts stark and lush, and is totally distracting, to the point where he keeps drifting all over the road as he stares at it,
--the hilliness of some of the roads, which is equally bad from the stick shift point of view and the distracting scenery point of view,
--and Braden, who absolutely, categorically refuses to drive, but has no problem at all shrieking like a little girl at every tiny mistake Wilson makes and screaming at him to stay on the left side of the road at least once a minute.
“Goddamn, dude,” Wilson growls, white-knuckled on the steering wheel after the latest of Braden’s shrieks, “if you don’t like how I’m driving, why don’t you come over and give it a fucking shot?”
Braden shakes his head violently, making the mess of his curls bounce like some kind of frenzied tribble or something. “Nuh uh, no way, not a chance.”
“Then. Quit. Your bitching.”
“I bitch to keep us alive, Bri.”
Wilson flexes his fingers around the curve of the steering wheel. “Blow it out your ass, Dallas.”
“Feel free to blow my ass anytime you want, baby. Nothin’ quite like the sweet sensation of tongue on your asshole,” Braden says, quite serenely, and Wilson involuntarily jerks the wheel, almost driving into a picturesque and quintessentially Irish low stone field wall.
----
Their fifth night on the road they stop at the Shittiest Hostel in All of Ireland. That’s not its official name, but Wilson’s pretty sure that’s the name he’ll use to refer to it for the rest of his life. The place has shaky cots for beds (obviously not made to hold the body of a professional baseball player-- maybe they’d be fine for Braden’s skinny-ass self, but Wilson sits tentatively at the edge of his and gets up immediately at the warning creak) and a slightly scary, toothless old dude as its proprietor. There is also, as it turns out, no heat.
Which is kind of a problem, in Ireland in December.
They drag their emergency sleeping bags in from the car, cocoon themselves and try to huddle up on the floor, but even that’s not very warm. Wilson is shivering and wondering why staying in hostels ever seemed like a good idea when Braden sits up next to him, taking away the small amount of warmth he’d been getting through that side of his sleeping bag.
“Hey!”
“Dude, you know, these things have zippers.”
Wilson risks poking his head out of the end of his sleeping bag to eye Braden, who is shirtless despite the cold and is busily unzipping his own sleeping bag. “Uh… so?”
Braden pauses with his sleeping bag zipper halfway undone specifically to roll his eyes at Wilson. It would be a futile gesture, but Wilson can see him clearly in the dim light filtering in the window from the nearly full moon (no curtains in the Shittiest Hostel in All of Ireland either).
“So we can zipper them together, duh. Much warmer that way.”
“You sure this isn’t just a ploy to get in my sleeping bag?”
“Oh pleeeeeease.” Braden recommences unzipping. “Weren’t you ever a boy scout? Sharing body heat is, like, the cure for half the bad shit that can happen to you in the wild.”
“Since when were you a boy scout?” Wilson grumbles, but he’s also sitting up to unzip his sleeping bag. He slides out (cold!) to let Braden zipper the two bags together, looking at the intricately knotted clover leaf on Braden’s right shoulder. He hadn’t really realized what a tight piece of work that ink was before, but then again he hasn’t seen all that much of Braden without his shirt on since Puerto Rico, and the Irish tattoos are fairly new.
They burrow in together after Braden finishes; an awkward procedure, because while they both fit, there’s not a whole hell of a lot of spare room. Wilson gets at least two elbows to the face and a knee to the kidneys before they’re able to get settled on their backs, their arms and legs pressed up together in the middle.
At first they’re both still shivering, but with two bodies sharing the same space, the interior of the sleeping bags does heat up a lot more quickly, and it gets downright toasty inside. It’s warm enough for Wilson to squirm out of his t-shirt, folding it up on top of his travel pillow to try and give himself a little extra padding. He’s just about to drift off to sleep when something freezing cold presses into the side of his bare arm and it’s all he can do to keep himself from yelling out loud. He manages to restrain himself to a startled full-body twitch and an angrily hissed, “Dude, what the fuck?”
“Sorry,” Braden mumbles. His breath is hot on the side of Wilson’s neck. “Takes a little longer for my metal to warm up.”
“Your metal… aw, man.” Wilson turns his head, and sure enough, Braden has shifted up onto his side and is trying to spoon up to Wilson, bringing his stupid fucking nipple piercing into chilly metallic contact with Wilson’s nice warm skin. “Maybe this wouldn’t be an issue if you didn’t feel the need to go sticking pieces of steel all up in your man-boobs.”
Braden sniffs. “Whatever.” He shuffles closer and actually puts an arm over Wilson’s chest, snuggling up tight against his side. This is retaliation for the man-boobs comment, Wilson just knows it is. Braden is expecting him to shove his arm off and snipe at him a little and then they can both conk the fuck out. But Wilson is not going to let him win that one, no sir, so he holds still and he keeps his mouth shut and eventually Braden’s slightly stiff surprise, like he can’t quite believe he’s getting away with something, relaxes into real sleep.
After a while Braden’s ridiculous nipple piercing does warm up, and when it gets warm enough for Wilson to ignore it, he’s able to fall asleep too. It’s not like he's unused to sleeping with other people in his bed, after all, and if a sleeping bag is slightly closer quarters than he’s used to, and Braden is much more male than he’s used to, well, whatever. Roadtrip in Ireland, man, you do what you gotta do.
He wakes up comfortable except for one of his arms, which is a little bit numb. At some point during the night he apparently rolled up onto his side, pinning that arm and giving it the heavy, dead feeling that would be a real problem if he had to pitch today, but is merely annoying right now. Other than that, he’s actually pretty damn cozy, considering the fact that he’s on the floor with another dude spooned up tight against his back.
He’s so comfortable, in fact, that it takes him a few minutes to realize that Braden a) is making little humping motions with his hips and b) has really, really obvious morning wood.
The second he realizes, he gets a sharp spike of heat low in his belly, and what the fuck is up with that? It’s not like Braden means anything by it-- the slow, even breath on the back of Wilson’s neck makes it pretty obvious that Braden’s still fast asleep-- and this is something that just… it just happens to guys, it’s not like Braden means it, it’s not like he’s doing it on purpose…
Braden mutters in his sleep, the words slurred and incoherent. Wilson tries to swallow, but his throat’s pretty dry. He reaches back with his free arm, real slow, maneuvering carefully in the tight space of the sleeping bag, twisting back to get a hand on Braden’s hip. He doesn’t really have a plan here, not capable of thinking that clearly, but he has some idea of maybe trying to shift Braden gently away, avoid the worst of the inevitable embarrassment for the both of them.
“Bri,” Braden mumbles.
Wilson freezes. That’s not some chick in a dream; that’s him, that’s what Braden calls him when he uses his first name.
“Um.”
The movement of Braden’s hips gets a little more insistent. The spike of heat in Wilson’s stomach coils up and settles in for the long haul. His own morning wood is demanding attention now, loudly, and would that be weird? Jerking off with Braden doing whatever it is Braden’s doing?
He’s debating it, going over the pros and cons and moral implications as best as he can before coffee, when Braden makes the decision for him, languidly dropping an arm over Wilson’s body and groping him somewhat clumsily through his sweatpants. Wilson exhales shakily. Braden’s not still asleep, not all the way; it’s not really possible at this point.
“So this really was just a ploy to get into my sleeping bag,” he says, voice a little unsteady, aiming for levity and not quite getting there.
“Ummmm. Was not,” Braden mutters, right into the back of Wilson’s neck. “Complainin’?”
Wilson considers. Braden is really very warm and cozy, snugly curled around him. Braden’s hand on his dick feels great even through his pants, and Braden rocking against his ass feels good in a way he’s not quite ready to think about yet. Mostly, though: it’s Braden.
“Not complaining. Just, uh. Just pointing out what a sleazy scumbag you are.”
“Yeah yeah. So tell your sister not to date me.”
“Not gonna be a, Christ,” as Braden sleepily pushes his hand under the waistband of Wilson’s pants, “not gonna be an issue.”
“Uhhhh hmmmm,” Braden agrees, stroking luxuriously and nosing Wilson’s neck. Wilson squeezes his eyes shut and tries to concentrate on keeping quiet so the hostel owner doesn’t hear them through the cheap thin walls.
----
They’d finished off Spring Training the previous year in big league parks, playing Oakland, full schedule style: three at home in San Fran, and then one at the Coliseum.
Wilson had pitched in the first game, just one inning, nothing special, which pissed him off, because the battle with Benitez for closer wasn’t looking too good. Braden didn’t pitch at all. He should have been brooding and a little bit sullen with the knowledge that he wasn’t making the big league roster to start the season (like Wilson, really), but he wasn’t, not at all, and there he was, laughing with teammates, ducking his head when someone would ineluctably make a grab for his hair.
The last time he’d seen Braden before Spring Training, it had been the final day of winter ball. They’d spent four hours on the ballfield followed by six hours on the beach, well into the warm and mild night. Wilson had been digging grains of sand out from underneath his nails for days after and his hair had felt like it was going to be permanently gritty. Too drunk to even attempt Spanish, Braden had stayed with him the entire time, their teammates swirling around them, mostly ignoring them, and it had almost been like the two of them were alone on an island, near-invisible ghosts on the surfline. Like Braden was an inside joke only he got, like Braden was a secret only he knew.
So seeing him in the spring, seeing him loud and boisterous and squirming to escape from Rich Harden’s headlock, jumping on Bobby Crosby’s back… it was a little weird, for Wilson. It was kinda like something he’d gotten used to having all to himself was suddenly not his. It wasn’t even like he got to share Braden. Braden was indisputably theirs, belonging to the Hardens and Crosbys of the world, nothing at all to do with people wearing black and orange on their hats.
It made him sad, a little bit. He’d gotten used to having Braden around.
Batting practice before the last game, he’d been standing a little apart from everyone else. There was still a definite chill riding high in the air in the ballpark, but that wouldn’t last, and he wanted to savor it, because maybe he lived in San Francisco now, but once you’d got New England in your blood, good luck getting it out again.
He had been watching Barry take his cuts in the cage from his vantage point in the outfield. He was far enough away from the plate to soften the sound of the bat cracking against the hide of the ball; it made him kinda paranoid, hearing that shit, even when it was Barry hitting ‘em, because, hell, he was still a pitcher, wasn’t he? So he’d been far enough out towards center to get zen about it, far enough out to enjoy the spectacle without raising his heart rate any.
The sudden weight crashing into his side had caught him off-guard, but he managed to stagger sideways and keep his feet under him long enough to recognize the mass of curls.
“Dude, hey,” Braden said. “Where you been all spring?”
Wilson ruffled Braden’s hair vigorously, just to see him grimace in feigned annoyance. “Been right here, man. Where’ve you been?”
“Y’know. Around.” They both turned to watch Barry attack another softly lobbed pitch, sending it screaming out of the ballpark. Braden whistled softly. “Shit. They don’t hit ‘em like that in double-A.”
“They don’t hit ‘em like that ‘most anywhere else in the majors,” Wilson said. A couple fans in the sparse crowd were chasing down the ball as it bounced along between the outfield seats. “Stick around, you’ll see.”
“If I get called up this year.” Braden had been worrying his lower lip with his teeth, looking back towards home plate. “First things first. But anyway. Me’n some of the guys are goin’ out after the game tonight, you wanna come?”
Wilson elbowed him in the side, gently mocking. “They wouldn’t care about hanging out with a Giant?”
Braden had shrugged. “You’re a cool guy. If I tell ‘em you’re, ummm, y'know, cool, they won’t mind any.”
“Yeah. OK.”
And just like that, Braden was his again; split with all the A’s, sure, ‘cause that was his team and Wilson didn’t, couldn’t have anything on that. But he had a share again, easy as that, and he didn’t even have to do anything.
----
The gardens of Blarney Castle are supposed to be more impressive than the building itself, according to the guidebook, but there’s not much to be impressed by in December. The castle is appropriately big and rough-hewn and stony, though, which is enough to keep Braden happy.
“Lookit this,” he keeps saying, the whole way up the narrow staircase to the top of the tower. “Lookit this. This is what it’s all about, dude. Big old-ass castles. Castles! Ireland.” Wilson nods. Braden’s a fucking idiot, but at the same time, well… big old-ass castles!
The wind blows cold and hard across the top, whistling as it whips through the space. Wilson is a little surprised; he was expecting a solid square floor, but it’s really just a narrow ring around the top of the tower, hollow on the inside, with the stone wall jutting up at regular intervals around the outer edge and a metal railing around the inner edge. The bits of stone wall that stick up-- the guidebook calls it a paneled parapet-- are uneven and worn with age, the gray rock greenish in spots with moss.
It probably gets crowded during the summer, but the only other people up there with them are a middle-aged Japanese couple, a large group of British tourists with five or six very small children running around freely, and a white-haired Irish man who looks about as old as the castle, and is busy holding the Japanese man around the waist while he bends over backwards to kiss the Blarney Stone.
Backwards, over the edge of the parapet and out into free space.
“Shit! Is that what we have to do??!” Wilson takes an involuntary step backwards and feels the metal railing bump into the middle of his spine. "No way. No fucking way."
Braden steps up next to him, casual as anything, and gently prods Wilson with his elbow. “OK, for one thing? No swearing around the kiddies. For another…” He nudges Wilson along the parapet, towards the spot where the Japanese man is now sitting and giving his wife a thumbs up. The British tourists are taking photos of the view, pointing things out to each other, so Braden and Wilson are next in line.
“For another,” Braden says, “it’s no big deal. They got rails you hang onto, see?”
Sure enough, there are rails bolted to the parapet. So far as Wilson can tell, the whole affair still involves grabbing the rails, edging yourself over the wall until your entire torso is precariously balanced off the side of the tower, and leaning to kiss the overhanging stone. It is still, so far as he can tell, completely fucking insane. He shakes his head emphatically. No way. The guidebook had said something about having to ‘approach the stone upside down and backwards,’ but he hadn’t pictured it as anything like this.
“Look, I’ll go first. So you can see, no big.” Braden is laughing at him without even cracking a smile, Wilson can just tell. But the sonofabitch actually does it, actually walks right up to the thousand-year-old attendant, lies down on the parapet and scoots right over the edge, like it’s no big deal. When his shoulders dip down as he bends to kiss the rock, Wilson almost has a panic attack on his behalf, but Braden doesn’t even seem to miss a beat.
“C’mon,” he says, when he gets back up, brushing his hands across the back of his jeans to get the dust off, and Wilson is so unexpectedly distracted by that-- the roughly compelling sound of Braden’s wide, capable pitcher’s hands moving against denim pulled tight across his ass-- that he tamely allows Braden to lead him over to the spot where he has to sit down before he realizes and backs away a step.
Braden shoots him an exasperated look. Behind him he hears one of the British kids saying, “Mummy, can I go?” and the mother replying, “Not yet, that man’s going first.”
There’s a pause, and then the kid says, “He en’t, he’s just standing there.”
“You’re getting showed up by a toddler,” Braden says, and now the smile is starting to break through on his stupid smug mouth.
Wilson sits down, mostly out of spite, of course completely ignoring the small jolt of intense satisfaction he gets from the pleased expression on Braden’s face. The stone is chilly under his ass and pitted under his palms.
The old man pats his shoulder. “Grab aholda those rails, lean back, I’ll hold on tae ye. Nothin’ tae be afraid of, sure.”
At least 90 feet of vertical space is not nothing to be afraid of, but Wilson takes a deep breath, willfully ignores Braden rolling his eyes yet again, and leans back.
----
“I wanna remember this trip,” Wilson says, sitting up in bed, suddenly frantic. He thumps at the bed slats over his head. This hostel, at least, has actual beds.
Braden mumbles and stirs and eventually pokes his fuzzy-haloed head over the edge of the top bunk to peer blearily down at him. “Dude, what?”
“I said. I wanna remember this trip.”
Braden yawns widely, the inside of his mouth startlingly pink. “So remember it.”
“I wanna remember it in, on me.” This is really important, all of a sudden. Wilson wants, he needs Braden to get it. Middle of the night and right now there’s nothing more important than getting this point across. This, this whole thing, the backpacking and the driving and the country and Braden, he’s doing something here that he’ll want to remember every day for the rest of his life. The person he is out here, with Ireland, with Braden, he’ll want to remember how to be that person for the rest of his life.
There’s a moment where he thinks, this is it. This is the thing that Braden’s not gonna get, this is the thing he’s going to never be able to explain and Braden will never be able to understand, and if Braden doesn’t get it there’s no chance of anyone else ever getting it, but Braden says, “On you, OK. Tomorrow, we’ll go and get you inked. Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Braden makes a sleepy snuffling sound and his head disappears as he settles down to go back to sleep. The relief Wilson’s feeling-- a strong wash of relief, almost scary in its intensity-- is something he can’t quite grasp. It maybe shouldn’t matter so much that Braden gets it, that Braden gets him, but it does. It does.
----
Oakland doesn’t come to town until June, when they start interleague, but whatever, that’s what cell phones and the internet are for, it’s not like he loses track of Braden when they get back from Ireland or anything. In fact he probably talks to Braden more now; there were some days in Ireland where they wouldn’t exchange more than ten or twenty words all day long, struck dumb by the landscape flashing past the windows of their little car, mute in the face of everything that could be said with Wilson’s hand on Braden’s thigh, Braden’s foot knocking against Wilson’s.
Back in the US, he talks to Braden all the time, and never for less than twenty minutes a day, between the phone and emails. It’s not something that he sets out to do, like, gotta talk to Braden every day! It’s just that, well… there’s always something to say to Braden, some stupid little thing that happened that he wants to share, even if it’s just in a quick text message, and when there isn’t, there’s some stupid little thing that happened to Braden that he wants to share.
On nights when the Giants have lost and aren’t likely to be out drinking in the city, Braden will call, a little after midnight. “Hey man,” he’ll say. “Ummmm, you busy?”
Wilson usually isn’t. Not that he stays in so he can be sure that he’s alone when Braden’s likely to call, so nothing will get in the way of Braden’s voice in his ear and his own hand shoved inelegantly down the front of his shorts. It’s not like that. He just doesn’t particularly like going out after losses, that’s all.
So when Oakland finally comes around, whatever, no big deal. It’s not like he’s had a lack of Braden in his life. Right. Totally.
In the first game of the series, neither one of them pitches; Zito starts, gets pounded, and is embarrassingly catatonic after he’s pulled in the sixth. Of course the Giants lose, which has been happening kind of a lot lately. Braden, to his credit, does not mention it.
They’re walking along the pier, quiet in the postgame lateness. Braden is kicking an empty soda can with the insides of his feet, proper soccer style, and Wilson is tripping his hand along the waist-high rail that’s there to keep drunk hippies from falling in and drowning.
Eventually Braden gets bored of the can and stops Wilson with a casual arm around his waist. It’s dark, they’re in jeans and t-shirts, it’s San Francisco; it’s a little risky, maybe, but they probably aren’t going to get more than a glance from anyone passing by.
They lean on the rail, the rounded line of it biting into their stomachs a little, and look down into the water, which reflects them back in murky, wavering blue-black. Braden drops his arm from Wilson’s waist and carefully wraps his fingers around Wilson’s wrist instead, stroking with his thumb the Gaelic cross that’s inked there. It’s the little bit of Ireland, to help him remember, scribed into Wilson’s skin by a cheerful and heavily tattooed Irish man who kept saying things like, “Fair play to ye, lad, doesn’t hurt a tic now does it?” while Braden had held his other hand and not complained at all at the convulsive finger crushing.
“Kinda funny doin’ this outside the homeland, yeah?” Braden says, voice low and almost carried away by the wind blowing in off of the bay. He strokes his thumb over the inside of Wilson’s wrist again.
“Kinda.” Wilson shakes his head even as he says it. “But it’s good here too. I mean, it’s not ‘The Homeland’, but this is home.”
“San Francisco, huh?”
Wilson turns his hand in Braden’s loose grasp, getting them palm to palm, tangling their fingers. “No, you moron, not San Francisco.”
Braden squeezes his hand, hard. And Wilson smiles, because he knows damn well that he doesn’t have to explain anything else at all.
Please note that Braden's nipple piercings are canonical. I could not make this shit up.
Anyways, here's the first of the request fic. reveritas requested brian wilson/dallas braden, visiting ireland, kissing the blarney stone, getting tattooed. and what happened next, based on their actual trip to Ireland, as detailed here.
So!
Brian Wilson/Dallas Braden (SF Giants/Oakland A's)
rated R
5,300 words
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. It is in no way a reflection on the actual life, behavior, or character of any of the people featured, and there are no connections or affiliations between this fictional story and the people or organizations it mentions. It was not written with any intent to slander or defame any of the people featured. No profit has been or ever will be made as a result of this story: it is solely for entertainment. And again, it is entirely fictional, i.e. not true.
homeland.
“You wanna go to Ireland?” Braden asks, as soon as Wilson picks up the phone. No prelude, no hey man, how you doin’?, nothing.
Wilson thinks about it for about two seconds flat, just long enough to process trip and Dallas Braden and Ireland. “You bet,” he says.
“Cool. Ummmmm.” Braden hums when he’s thinking faster than his mouth can work. “We’re gonna… um, you better buy a real big backpack if you don’t have one already.”
“OK, cool,” Wilson says. He’s already thinking about where he can go to get a good solid backpacking backpack, something with big pockets and zippered pouches and, he doesn’t even know, straps and loops and a, a fucking frame or whatever.
Backpacking through Ireland with Braden. He’s totally down with that.
----
They start out on foot, which is easy enough in Dublin, with bridges arching over the river and broadly modern roads studded with pubs, broken up by narrower alleyways, also full of pubs.
Wilson’s not sure what he expected-- something deeply, fundamentally foreign, maybe-- but Dublin is a city like any other major city. It’s got its modern parts and its less modern parts, its cold glassy-fronted buildings reflecting light and its warm brick-fronted buildings absorbing it. None of the locals talk like him, but they also don’t sound all too different from his grandparents, back in South Boston, all their friends and neighbors back there, their voices still heavy with brogue even after all these years. The city is crawling with tourists and American college students on giddy study abroad trips anyways, so it’s not like they’re ever the only Americans in the pub at night.
Still. It’s Dublin. The Guinness is real Guinness. The way old stone buildings interlock with newer brick structures strikes him as somehow unfamiliar, un-American. The biggest monument in the city is something called The Spire, which seems to just be a gigantic silver spike tapering up into the sky, like a flagpole without a flag. He doesn’t really get it, but maybe it’s some particular Dublin thing that he’s not really supposed to get.
They’re strolling along the boardwalk that runs next to the river, late, and the yellow-white streetlights make vertical slashes down into the water. Braden’s tripping his hand along the waist-high rail that’s there to keep drunken foreign idiots like them from falling in and drowning. The solid wooden planks underfoot dull the sounds their sneakers make down to a soft patter that doesn’t echo back.
“This is place is so…” Wilson isn’t sure how to explain it. Different, but not, that’s the start, but that doesn’t really say it, doesn’t begin to get across what he’s thinking. Feeling. Whatever.
“Dude,” Braden says. He stops, wraps his hand around the railing and leans out at an angle, looking back at Wilson. The wind off the water blows Braden’s hair-- which is curly and a little too long and tends to poof up into a halo that makes him look like some kind of skinny leprechaun even under the best of circumstances-- up against the edges of his cheeks. “Dude, yeah, I know. It really is.”
He nods seriously, wind plastering all the hair on his river-facing side flat against his head. Wilson grins, because yeah, yeah, Braden gets it, ‘course he does. He should have known. He doesn’t have to try to explain anything at all.
----
When they first met, two years earlier, that was in Puerto Rico. Hot and sandy and nothing at all like Ireland, not in the place itself or in their reason for being there. Ireland is… well, he’s not really sure exactly what Ireland is, but it’s something to do with, like, discovering themselves, or their history, and also having a really epic adventure together just for the sheer unadulterated hell of it. Puerto Rico had beaches and shit, sure, but at its core, that was business. That was winter ball.
He got down there a couple days early, mostly to check out those beaches and to see how much of his very shaky high school Spanish he was going to have to try to revive. Most everyone spoke English at least a little bit, so it wasn’t like he ever had to worry about asking where the bathrooms were and ending up directed to the local brothel, but his teammates all spoke Spanish unless they were directly addressing him and, yeah, it was maybe a little bit lonely. It was the first time he’d been that kind of excluded in a locker room-- not so much hated on as straight up disregarded. It was kind of worse.
Then Braden showed up. Gringo número dos, according to his teammates, but Braden smiled and rolled with it and within the space of a week had picked up enough dirty phrases in Spanish to ingratiate himself with the locals in a ‘stupid party trick’ kind of way. Wilson had been impressed, and also kind of pissed that he hadn’t realized on his own that learning how to shout Your mom sucks hairy balls at opposing players was the best way to make friends with his new teammates. In retrospect it seemed so obvious.
Braden came to practice one day wearing a bright green Kiss me, I’m Irish! t-shirt. This wouldn’t have been a big deal, except that Wilson was wearing his exact same Kiss me, I’m Irish! t-shirt that day too. The sight of the two white guys in matching shirts was too much for the rest of the team, who spent the rest of the winter ball season treating them like some kind of moronic bad-sitcom-style married couple.
It was impossible to keep from becoming friends with Braden, under the circumstances, and to be totally honest, Wilson hadn’t even tried to fight it.
----
They’re pretty far off the usual tourist paths by now, the more popular towns left behind in favor of sleepier countryside, and early December is not exactly the height of tourist season in Ireland anyways. They stay in a different youth hostel every night, miles and miles (kilometers, man, it’s all in kilometers, Braden corrects every time he misreads the speed gauge on their rental car) between each stop.
Once they’re out of the city they can’t exactly get around on foot, so they’ve got this little red car, rented and insured all to fuck, which is a good thing because they drive on the wrong side of the street here and the steering wheel is in the wrong place and Wilson’s lucky he hasn’t run them off the road yet, although he’s come pretty damn close. There are a number of factors working against him, including
--the whole wrong side of the road thing,
--the fact that the car’s a stick shift, and he doesn’t really know how to drive stick,
--the scenery, which is equal parts stark and lush, and is totally distracting, to the point where he keeps drifting all over the road as he stares at it,
--the hilliness of some of the roads, which is equally bad from the stick shift point of view and the distracting scenery point of view,
--and Braden, who absolutely, categorically refuses to drive, but has no problem at all shrieking like a little girl at every tiny mistake Wilson makes and screaming at him to stay on the left side of the road at least once a minute.
“Goddamn, dude,” Wilson growls, white-knuckled on the steering wheel after the latest of Braden’s shrieks, “if you don’t like how I’m driving, why don’t you come over and give it a fucking shot?”
Braden shakes his head violently, making the mess of his curls bounce like some kind of frenzied tribble or something. “Nuh uh, no way, not a chance.”
“Then. Quit. Your bitching.”
“I bitch to keep us alive, Bri.”
Wilson flexes his fingers around the curve of the steering wheel. “Blow it out your ass, Dallas.”
“Feel free to blow my ass anytime you want, baby. Nothin’ quite like the sweet sensation of tongue on your asshole,” Braden says, quite serenely, and Wilson involuntarily jerks the wheel, almost driving into a picturesque and quintessentially Irish low stone field wall.
----
Their fifth night on the road they stop at the Shittiest Hostel in All of Ireland. That’s not its official name, but Wilson’s pretty sure that’s the name he’ll use to refer to it for the rest of his life. The place has shaky cots for beds (obviously not made to hold the body of a professional baseball player-- maybe they’d be fine for Braden’s skinny-ass self, but Wilson sits tentatively at the edge of his and gets up immediately at the warning creak) and a slightly scary, toothless old dude as its proprietor. There is also, as it turns out, no heat.
Which is kind of a problem, in Ireland in December.
They drag their emergency sleeping bags in from the car, cocoon themselves and try to huddle up on the floor, but even that’s not very warm. Wilson is shivering and wondering why staying in hostels ever seemed like a good idea when Braden sits up next to him, taking away the small amount of warmth he’d been getting through that side of his sleeping bag.
“Hey!”
“Dude, you know, these things have zippers.”
Wilson risks poking his head out of the end of his sleeping bag to eye Braden, who is shirtless despite the cold and is busily unzipping his own sleeping bag. “Uh… so?”
Braden pauses with his sleeping bag zipper halfway undone specifically to roll his eyes at Wilson. It would be a futile gesture, but Wilson can see him clearly in the dim light filtering in the window from the nearly full moon (no curtains in the Shittiest Hostel in All of Ireland either).
“So we can zipper them together, duh. Much warmer that way.”
“You sure this isn’t just a ploy to get in my sleeping bag?”
“Oh pleeeeeease.” Braden recommences unzipping. “Weren’t you ever a boy scout? Sharing body heat is, like, the cure for half the bad shit that can happen to you in the wild.”
“Since when were you a boy scout?” Wilson grumbles, but he’s also sitting up to unzip his sleeping bag. He slides out (cold!) to let Braden zipper the two bags together, looking at the intricately knotted clover leaf on Braden’s right shoulder. He hadn’t really realized what a tight piece of work that ink was before, but then again he hasn’t seen all that much of Braden without his shirt on since Puerto Rico, and the Irish tattoos are fairly new.
They burrow in together after Braden finishes; an awkward procedure, because while they both fit, there’s not a whole hell of a lot of spare room. Wilson gets at least two elbows to the face and a knee to the kidneys before they’re able to get settled on their backs, their arms and legs pressed up together in the middle.
At first they’re both still shivering, but with two bodies sharing the same space, the interior of the sleeping bags does heat up a lot more quickly, and it gets downright toasty inside. It’s warm enough for Wilson to squirm out of his t-shirt, folding it up on top of his travel pillow to try and give himself a little extra padding. He’s just about to drift off to sleep when something freezing cold presses into the side of his bare arm and it’s all he can do to keep himself from yelling out loud. He manages to restrain himself to a startled full-body twitch and an angrily hissed, “Dude, what the fuck?”
“Sorry,” Braden mumbles. His breath is hot on the side of Wilson’s neck. “Takes a little longer for my metal to warm up.”
“Your metal… aw, man.” Wilson turns his head, and sure enough, Braden has shifted up onto his side and is trying to spoon up to Wilson, bringing his stupid fucking nipple piercing into chilly metallic contact with Wilson’s nice warm skin. “Maybe this wouldn’t be an issue if you didn’t feel the need to go sticking pieces of steel all up in your man-boobs.”
Braden sniffs. “Whatever.” He shuffles closer and actually puts an arm over Wilson’s chest, snuggling up tight against his side. This is retaliation for the man-boobs comment, Wilson just knows it is. Braden is expecting him to shove his arm off and snipe at him a little and then they can both conk the fuck out. But Wilson is not going to let him win that one, no sir, so he holds still and he keeps his mouth shut and eventually Braden’s slightly stiff surprise, like he can’t quite believe he’s getting away with something, relaxes into real sleep.
After a while Braden’s ridiculous nipple piercing does warm up, and when it gets warm enough for Wilson to ignore it, he’s able to fall asleep too. It’s not like he's unused to sleeping with other people in his bed, after all, and if a sleeping bag is slightly closer quarters than he’s used to, and Braden is much more male than he’s used to, well, whatever. Roadtrip in Ireland, man, you do what you gotta do.
He wakes up comfortable except for one of his arms, which is a little bit numb. At some point during the night he apparently rolled up onto his side, pinning that arm and giving it the heavy, dead feeling that would be a real problem if he had to pitch today, but is merely annoying right now. Other than that, he’s actually pretty damn cozy, considering the fact that he’s on the floor with another dude spooned up tight against his back.
He’s so comfortable, in fact, that it takes him a few minutes to realize that Braden a) is making little humping motions with his hips and b) has really, really obvious morning wood.
The second he realizes, he gets a sharp spike of heat low in his belly, and what the fuck is up with that? It’s not like Braden means anything by it-- the slow, even breath on the back of Wilson’s neck makes it pretty obvious that Braden’s still fast asleep-- and this is something that just… it just happens to guys, it’s not like Braden means it, it’s not like he’s doing it on purpose…
Braden mutters in his sleep, the words slurred and incoherent. Wilson tries to swallow, but his throat’s pretty dry. He reaches back with his free arm, real slow, maneuvering carefully in the tight space of the sleeping bag, twisting back to get a hand on Braden’s hip. He doesn’t really have a plan here, not capable of thinking that clearly, but he has some idea of maybe trying to shift Braden gently away, avoid the worst of the inevitable embarrassment for the both of them.
“Bri,” Braden mumbles.
Wilson freezes. That’s not some chick in a dream; that’s him, that’s what Braden calls him when he uses his first name.
“Um.”
The movement of Braden’s hips gets a little more insistent. The spike of heat in Wilson’s stomach coils up and settles in for the long haul. His own morning wood is demanding attention now, loudly, and would that be weird? Jerking off with Braden doing whatever it is Braden’s doing?
He’s debating it, going over the pros and cons and moral implications as best as he can before coffee, when Braden makes the decision for him, languidly dropping an arm over Wilson’s body and groping him somewhat clumsily through his sweatpants. Wilson exhales shakily. Braden’s not still asleep, not all the way; it’s not really possible at this point.
“So this really was just a ploy to get into my sleeping bag,” he says, voice a little unsteady, aiming for levity and not quite getting there.
“Ummmm. Was not,” Braden mutters, right into the back of Wilson’s neck. “Complainin’?”
Wilson considers. Braden is really very warm and cozy, snugly curled around him. Braden’s hand on his dick feels great even through his pants, and Braden rocking against his ass feels good in a way he’s not quite ready to think about yet. Mostly, though: it’s Braden.
“Not complaining. Just, uh. Just pointing out what a sleazy scumbag you are.”
“Yeah yeah. So tell your sister not to date me.”
“Not gonna be a, Christ,” as Braden sleepily pushes his hand under the waistband of Wilson’s pants, “not gonna be an issue.”
“Uhhhh hmmmm,” Braden agrees, stroking luxuriously and nosing Wilson’s neck. Wilson squeezes his eyes shut and tries to concentrate on keeping quiet so the hostel owner doesn’t hear them through the cheap thin walls.
----
They’d finished off Spring Training the previous year in big league parks, playing Oakland, full schedule style: three at home in San Fran, and then one at the Coliseum.
Wilson had pitched in the first game, just one inning, nothing special, which pissed him off, because the battle with Benitez for closer wasn’t looking too good. Braden didn’t pitch at all. He should have been brooding and a little bit sullen with the knowledge that he wasn’t making the big league roster to start the season (like Wilson, really), but he wasn’t, not at all, and there he was, laughing with teammates, ducking his head when someone would ineluctably make a grab for his hair.
The last time he’d seen Braden before Spring Training, it had been the final day of winter ball. They’d spent four hours on the ballfield followed by six hours on the beach, well into the warm and mild night. Wilson had been digging grains of sand out from underneath his nails for days after and his hair had felt like it was going to be permanently gritty. Too drunk to even attempt Spanish, Braden had stayed with him the entire time, their teammates swirling around them, mostly ignoring them, and it had almost been like the two of them were alone on an island, near-invisible ghosts on the surfline. Like Braden was an inside joke only he got, like Braden was a secret only he knew.
So seeing him in the spring, seeing him loud and boisterous and squirming to escape from Rich Harden’s headlock, jumping on Bobby Crosby’s back… it was a little weird, for Wilson. It was kinda like something he’d gotten used to having all to himself was suddenly not his. It wasn’t even like he got to share Braden. Braden was indisputably theirs, belonging to the Hardens and Crosbys of the world, nothing at all to do with people wearing black and orange on their hats.
It made him sad, a little bit. He’d gotten used to having Braden around.
Batting practice before the last game, he’d been standing a little apart from everyone else. There was still a definite chill riding high in the air in the ballpark, but that wouldn’t last, and he wanted to savor it, because maybe he lived in San Francisco now, but once you’d got New England in your blood, good luck getting it out again.
He had been watching Barry take his cuts in the cage from his vantage point in the outfield. He was far enough away from the plate to soften the sound of the bat cracking against the hide of the ball; it made him kinda paranoid, hearing that shit, even when it was Barry hitting ‘em, because, hell, he was still a pitcher, wasn’t he? So he’d been far enough out towards center to get zen about it, far enough out to enjoy the spectacle without raising his heart rate any.
The sudden weight crashing into his side had caught him off-guard, but he managed to stagger sideways and keep his feet under him long enough to recognize the mass of curls.
“Dude, hey,” Braden said. “Where you been all spring?”
Wilson ruffled Braden’s hair vigorously, just to see him grimace in feigned annoyance. “Been right here, man. Where’ve you been?”
“Y’know. Around.” They both turned to watch Barry attack another softly lobbed pitch, sending it screaming out of the ballpark. Braden whistled softly. “Shit. They don’t hit ‘em like that in double-A.”
“They don’t hit ‘em like that ‘most anywhere else in the majors,” Wilson said. A couple fans in the sparse crowd were chasing down the ball as it bounced along between the outfield seats. “Stick around, you’ll see.”
“If I get called up this year.” Braden had been worrying his lower lip with his teeth, looking back towards home plate. “First things first. But anyway. Me’n some of the guys are goin’ out after the game tonight, you wanna come?”
Wilson elbowed him in the side, gently mocking. “They wouldn’t care about hanging out with a Giant?”
Braden had shrugged. “You’re a cool guy. If I tell ‘em you’re, ummm, y'know, cool, they won’t mind any.”
“Yeah. OK.”
And just like that, Braden was his again; split with all the A’s, sure, ‘cause that was his team and Wilson didn’t, couldn’t have anything on that. But he had a share again, easy as that, and he didn’t even have to do anything.
----
The gardens of Blarney Castle are supposed to be more impressive than the building itself, according to the guidebook, but there’s not much to be impressed by in December. The castle is appropriately big and rough-hewn and stony, though, which is enough to keep Braden happy.
“Lookit this,” he keeps saying, the whole way up the narrow staircase to the top of the tower. “Lookit this. This is what it’s all about, dude. Big old-ass castles. Castles! Ireland.” Wilson nods. Braden’s a fucking idiot, but at the same time, well… big old-ass castles!
The wind blows cold and hard across the top, whistling as it whips through the space. Wilson is a little surprised; he was expecting a solid square floor, but it’s really just a narrow ring around the top of the tower, hollow on the inside, with the stone wall jutting up at regular intervals around the outer edge and a metal railing around the inner edge. The bits of stone wall that stick up-- the guidebook calls it a paneled parapet-- are uneven and worn with age, the gray rock greenish in spots with moss.
It probably gets crowded during the summer, but the only other people up there with them are a middle-aged Japanese couple, a large group of British tourists with five or six very small children running around freely, and a white-haired Irish man who looks about as old as the castle, and is busy holding the Japanese man around the waist while he bends over backwards to kiss the Blarney Stone.
Backwards, over the edge of the parapet and out into free space.
“Shit! Is that what we have to do??!” Wilson takes an involuntary step backwards and feels the metal railing bump into the middle of his spine. "No way. No fucking way."
Braden steps up next to him, casual as anything, and gently prods Wilson with his elbow. “OK, for one thing? No swearing around the kiddies. For another…” He nudges Wilson along the parapet, towards the spot where the Japanese man is now sitting and giving his wife a thumbs up. The British tourists are taking photos of the view, pointing things out to each other, so Braden and Wilson are next in line.
“For another,” Braden says, “it’s no big deal. They got rails you hang onto, see?”
Sure enough, there are rails bolted to the parapet. So far as Wilson can tell, the whole affair still involves grabbing the rails, edging yourself over the wall until your entire torso is precariously balanced off the side of the tower, and leaning to kiss the overhanging stone. It is still, so far as he can tell, completely fucking insane. He shakes his head emphatically. No way. The guidebook had said something about having to ‘approach the stone upside down and backwards,’ but he hadn’t pictured it as anything like this.
“Look, I’ll go first. So you can see, no big.” Braden is laughing at him without even cracking a smile, Wilson can just tell. But the sonofabitch actually does it, actually walks right up to the thousand-year-old attendant, lies down on the parapet and scoots right over the edge, like it’s no big deal. When his shoulders dip down as he bends to kiss the rock, Wilson almost has a panic attack on his behalf, but Braden doesn’t even seem to miss a beat.
“C’mon,” he says, when he gets back up, brushing his hands across the back of his jeans to get the dust off, and Wilson is so unexpectedly distracted by that-- the roughly compelling sound of Braden’s wide, capable pitcher’s hands moving against denim pulled tight across his ass-- that he tamely allows Braden to lead him over to the spot where he has to sit down before he realizes and backs away a step.
Braden shoots him an exasperated look. Behind him he hears one of the British kids saying, “Mummy, can I go?” and the mother replying, “Not yet, that man’s going first.”
There’s a pause, and then the kid says, “He en’t, he’s just standing there.”
“You’re getting showed up by a toddler,” Braden says, and now the smile is starting to break through on his stupid smug mouth.
Wilson sits down, mostly out of spite, of course completely ignoring the small jolt of intense satisfaction he gets from the pleased expression on Braden’s face. The stone is chilly under his ass and pitted under his palms.
The old man pats his shoulder. “Grab aholda those rails, lean back, I’ll hold on tae ye. Nothin’ tae be afraid of, sure.”
At least 90 feet of vertical space is not nothing to be afraid of, but Wilson takes a deep breath, willfully ignores Braden rolling his eyes yet again, and leans back.
----
“I wanna remember this trip,” Wilson says, sitting up in bed, suddenly frantic. He thumps at the bed slats over his head. This hostel, at least, has actual beds.
Braden mumbles and stirs and eventually pokes his fuzzy-haloed head over the edge of the top bunk to peer blearily down at him. “Dude, what?”
“I said. I wanna remember this trip.”
Braden yawns widely, the inside of his mouth startlingly pink. “So remember it.”
“I wanna remember it in, on me.” This is really important, all of a sudden. Wilson wants, he needs Braden to get it. Middle of the night and right now there’s nothing more important than getting this point across. This, this whole thing, the backpacking and the driving and the country and Braden, he’s doing something here that he’ll want to remember every day for the rest of his life. The person he is out here, with Ireland, with Braden, he’ll want to remember how to be that person for the rest of his life.
There’s a moment where he thinks, this is it. This is the thing that Braden’s not gonna get, this is the thing he’s going to never be able to explain and Braden will never be able to understand, and if Braden doesn’t get it there’s no chance of anyone else ever getting it, but Braden says, “On you, OK. Tomorrow, we’ll go and get you inked. Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Braden makes a sleepy snuffling sound and his head disappears as he settles down to go back to sleep. The relief Wilson’s feeling-- a strong wash of relief, almost scary in its intensity-- is something he can’t quite grasp. It maybe shouldn’t matter so much that Braden gets it, that Braden gets him, but it does. It does.
----
Oakland doesn’t come to town until June, when they start interleague, but whatever, that’s what cell phones and the internet are for, it’s not like he loses track of Braden when they get back from Ireland or anything. In fact he probably talks to Braden more now; there were some days in Ireland where they wouldn’t exchange more than ten or twenty words all day long, struck dumb by the landscape flashing past the windows of their little car, mute in the face of everything that could be said with Wilson’s hand on Braden’s thigh, Braden’s foot knocking against Wilson’s.
Back in the US, he talks to Braden all the time, and never for less than twenty minutes a day, between the phone and emails. It’s not something that he sets out to do, like, gotta talk to Braden every day! It’s just that, well… there’s always something to say to Braden, some stupid little thing that happened that he wants to share, even if it’s just in a quick text message, and when there isn’t, there’s some stupid little thing that happened to Braden that he wants to share.
On nights when the Giants have lost and aren’t likely to be out drinking in the city, Braden will call, a little after midnight. “Hey man,” he’ll say. “Ummmm, you busy?”
Wilson usually isn’t. Not that he stays in so he can be sure that he’s alone when Braden’s likely to call, so nothing will get in the way of Braden’s voice in his ear and his own hand shoved inelegantly down the front of his shorts. It’s not like that. He just doesn’t particularly like going out after losses, that’s all.
So when Oakland finally comes around, whatever, no big deal. It’s not like he’s had a lack of Braden in his life. Right. Totally.
In the first game of the series, neither one of them pitches; Zito starts, gets pounded, and is embarrassingly catatonic after he’s pulled in the sixth. Of course the Giants lose, which has been happening kind of a lot lately. Braden, to his credit, does not mention it.
They’re walking along the pier, quiet in the postgame lateness. Braden is kicking an empty soda can with the insides of his feet, proper soccer style, and Wilson is tripping his hand along the waist-high rail that’s there to keep drunk hippies from falling in and drowning.
Eventually Braden gets bored of the can and stops Wilson with a casual arm around his waist. It’s dark, they’re in jeans and t-shirts, it’s San Francisco; it’s a little risky, maybe, but they probably aren’t going to get more than a glance from anyone passing by.
They lean on the rail, the rounded line of it biting into their stomachs a little, and look down into the water, which reflects them back in murky, wavering blue-black. Braden drops his arm from Wilson’s waist and carefully wraps his fingers around Wilson’s wrist instead, stroking with his thumb the Gaelic cross that’s inked there. It’s the little bit of Ireland, to help him remember, scribed into Wilson’s skin by a cheerful and heavily tattooed Irish man who kept saying things like, “Fair play to ye, lad, doesn’t hurt a tic now does it?” while Braden had held his other hand and not complained at all at the convulsive finger crushing.
“Kinda funny doin’ this outside the homeland, yeah?” Braden says, voice low and almost carried away by the wind blowing in off of the bay. He strokes his thumb over the inside of Wilson’s wrist again.
“Kinda.” Wilson shakes his head even as he says it. “But it’s good here too. I mean, it’s not ‘The Homeland’, but this is home.”
“San Francisco, huh?”
Wilson turns his hand in Braden’s loose grasp, getting them palm to palm, tangling their fingers. “No, you moron, not San Francisco.”
Braden squeezes his hand, hard. And Wilson smiles, because he knows damn well that he doesn’t have to explain anything else at all.
Please note that Braden's nipple piercings are canonical. I could not make this shit up.