if you haven't learned by now, i really can't help you
it’s old school mulder/crosby from 2004! rejoice!
The Human Condition
By Candle Beck
The first thing that happened was a truck hauling liquor got hijacked on the highway, somewhere near the Nevada border. With the moon set above the treeline, impassive as a judge, the truck driver stood at gunpoint on the side of the road, his hands woven behind his head with his elbows winged, chatting amiably with his captor about baseball while the others took a quick inventory of the truck.
It was the fourth time the driver had been ripped off in the two years he’d driven this route-it was becoming routine, these professional and bloodless excisions predicated on the trucking company’s extensive insurance policies, and the men’s choice of masks (rubbery halloween monsters with painted-on blood: a Frankenstein, a zombie, an alien) lent the whole situation an air of the absurd, leeched of danger.
The driver would be stranded out there fourteen miles from anywhere, and upon learning that he’d forgotten his coat at a diner a few hours east, the highwayman who’d grown up two blocks from Yankee Stadium gave the driver his own jacket, big enough that the sleeves almost completely covered his hands. The other hijackers, not to be outdone, contributed a Power Bar, an apple, two bottles of water, a tattered Reader’s Digest that had been on the floor of their van when they’d stolen it, a couple almost-dead lighters, and a flare in case he got lost.
It was on the balance, the driver would later relate both to his employers and the police, the most kindhearted crime he’d ever been privileged to attend.
*
The second thing, then, is several weeks later, this dude selling pints and handles out of his van behind the Safeway, and good stuff too, top-shelf at laughable prices. Crosby buys so much off him he has to go back inside the store for another bag.
He gets home and shouts for Mulder, the heavy plastic bags digging garrotes across his palms, kicking the door shut. Footsteps muffled like bass drum beats above his head, and Crosby’s yelling to the ceiling, “Merry Christmas, motherfucker.”
Mulder, predictably, is exceedingly pleased to find his rookie come home with an arsenal of Johnnie Walker and Beam and Maker’s and stuff neither of them have ever heard of. They set the bottles upright on the kitchen island like a mess of skyscrapers, thin ribbons of light spearing on the curved edges of the glass, and discuss how they should approach their invasion.
Crosby says they should rip off the labels and drink without knowing what’s what, but if Mulder drinks tequila even by accident he’ll probably throw up (a souvenir of spring break his sophomore year of college), and so instead they spent a couple hours making up new drinks, mixing in soda and Gatorade and Red Bull and cough syrup and Tabasco sauce, until Crosby’s mouth feels stripped and raw, his heart thrumming more than beating.
In the living room, there’s something wrong with the carpet, his cheek smashed, abraded. Mulder’s socked foot is on the back of his neck, toes pushing, and Mulder is talking in parable and screwed-up rhyme, saying, “Rookie year you get a free pass kinda, because I don’t remember drinking bad as this before. I think this is part of the whole thing. Get a little drinking problem. Get all fucked up with the guys.”
Whatever Crosby might say is lost in the sandpaper carpet, a piece of lint itching on his tongue. He rolls over onto his back, Mulder a long bluish blur in his peripheral vision, and the room rocking slightly, back and forth like hypnosis.
Mulder’s drunker than he is for sure, skidding his heel across Crosby’s stomach, making him wriggle and bite at the air. Rookie year and it means something that Crosby can sorta understand what Mulder’s saying.
He thinks that Mulder must have been mostly the same in his own rookie year, maybe the muscles of his arms and chest chipped down a bit, his hair sheared back, but still with that idiot charm of his, the insolent sprawl of his body, half-mast blue eyes. Mulder as a rookie, younger than Crosby is now, still working on a curve and trying to recreate the grip for that mythical splitter that he was taught one afternoon in the Cape League, Mulder making the same dumb rookie mistakes that Crosby has, wide-eyed sometimes as the postage-stamp blue at the end of the tunnel grows and transforms into a sky, a field, a baseball stadium.
At the moment, Mulder is cool and all-knowing, scheming in code with Eric Chavez and teasing Zito and trading dirty jokes with Hudson, pitching better than anyone Crosby’s ever seen, late June of his fourth major league season. Strange to think of him new and unaccustomed, anointed but unproven.
Most of the time, Crosby thinks that he’d like to be Mulder when he grows up.
All this rookie talk leads Mulder to the hazing that will shortly commence, and Crosby gets anxious, clutching both hands around the bottle he’s working on. They want to dress him up in a miniskirt and tube top and platform heels and makeup (makeup!) and parade him through an airport and across the country and all the way to the hotel. Knowing his luck, the bus will get a flat or be hit by a meteor or something and he’ll end up on the side of the road without even a coat to hide his shame, because of course all their luggage will be on the other bus.
Mulder tells him that he worries about this stuff too much.
“What’d you have to wear?” Crosby says, slightly discomforted by the visual of Mulder’s endless legs bare like in the locker room, a shard of his side and the knob of his hip revealed by a too-small shirt.
Mulder coughs and mutters into his drink that he was hurt at the time and they let him off.
Crosby laughs, mouth open, one leg strewn under the coffee table, and forswears: “You can’t say anything-”
Planting his foot on Crosby’s chest, Mulder pins him, peering down as if Crosby were at the bottom of a very high cliff, and Crosby is caught, breath gone, staring up. Mulder smiles, an edge to it, something drunken and dangerous.
“Oh, it won’t be me, Bobby, you know I wouldn’t do that to you.” Mulder presses down a little harder on his chest, Crosby fish-gasping and feeling weirdly hot under his skin. “I’ll just let Zito know to come up with something really good for you.”
“You wouldn’t,” Crosby says, but it’s weak and breathless and fuck, but he’s kinda liking the hell out of this, the solidity of Mulder’s foot on his chest and the sideways cut of his eyes, the gridwork of his legs bent over him.
And Mulder asks with a smirk, “What’re you gonna do for me, then?”
Crosby hooks his fingers around Mulder’s ankle, starts to snicker, the things he could do. “Paint the house.”
“It’s rented, dude.”
“Do your laundry for the rest of the season.”
“We have a service.” But Mulder’s laughing now too, bent over to see, the white ceiling behind his head from this angle, like Mulder’s official team photos with the blank backgrounds.
“Carry your bags,” Bobby says, and pushes himself upright, his hand climbing Mulder’s leg and clutching at his knee, grinning wildly.
“Rookie,” Mulder says pointedly in answer, and it’s like he can’t breathe right, letting himself fall back into the couch, his eyes twisted closed, same kinda smile on his face. “What else you got?”
And maybe it’s his position, on the carpet between Mulder’s legs, his fingers curved on the seam of Mulder’s jeans, maybe it’s Mulder spread back like that, this lazy mess made of the league’s best pitcher, but Crosby will swear for the rest of his life that he’s not thinking about anything in particular, he’s just making another stupid joke.
So he says, “Suck your dick, man, just say the word.”
Mulder almost dies, he’s laughing so hard. His face turns bright red and he covers his eyes with his hand, howling. Crosby’s beaming at his feet, sliding his fist up the inside of Mulder’s thigh, and that makes Mulder laugh even harder. Feels sorta like hitting a walkoff (not that he’s ever done anything like that), though he knows it’s mostly because Mulder’s drunk.
But Bobby’s drunk too, and he can’t get over how funny it is to rub his knuckles and feel Mulder twitch and jerk, thinking it must be like the rubber hammer and the kneecap, some secret way that Mulder’s body is wired.
Wanting to get a better sense of it, terrifically amused, Crosby presses his free hand flat on Mulder’s stomach, seared briefly by the warmth of it through Mulder’s shirt, and pushes his fist hard and up the line of Mulder’s jeans. Mulder obligingly yanks his hips and gasps and hiccups and. Moans, a little bit.
Crosby’s stunned for a moment, thinking, you got me all wrong! but Mulder hasn’t stopped moving, tiny shivery pushes into Crosby’s hand, his mouth and eyes slit open. It distracts Crosby, forces him to smooth his palm down to the edge of Mulder’s belt, and Mulder archs almost silently, almost imperceptibly.
“Okay man, real funny,” Mulder says, sounding like he’s in pain, and tries to push Crosby’s hand off him, but Crosby won’t let him, because something is happening against the back of Crosby’s hand, and he twists his wrist, presses his hand down curiously against the place where the seams come together and Mulder half-shouts, “Fuck!”
Crosby bites through the inside of his cheek, thinking that it’s just incredible, look what he can do. Mulder typically operates on this amorphous higher plane, something he takes with him off the field like white rosin on his fingertips, lights-out untouchable, and Crosby can’t remember him ever being made quite so physical. It’s addictive at once; Bobby can suddenly think of nothing he’d rather do than seek out every last trigger on Mulder’s body, the hidden places that affirm he’s still more man than myth.
He leans in, pushing Mulder’s legs apart and pushing Mulder’s shirt up, palming his stomach, hot, fucking perfect hot stretch of skin here, of course, and Crosby is dizzy, opening his mouth on the inside of Mulder’s leg, dampening the fabric of his jeans.
Nothing like this has ever happened before.
Crosby can’t get a handle on it, watching himself make swift work of Mulder’s buckle with a mild overlay of astonishment, nearly matter-of-fact in its simplicity: holy fuck.
Mulder’s at least on the same page, his breathing ragged and his hand sort of clawing painlessly at the side of Crosby’s head, scuffing over his hair. He’s making choked noises, mostly disbelief, occasionally, “Bobby, jesus, what-”
Crosby shakes his head, chews on denim and thumbs open Mulder’s jeans. Honest to god, he still feels kinda like laughing, dropped into this surrealist nightmare, entirely loosed of restraint. He has such a fine sense of the ridiculous, and at the same time, he can’t remember the last time he wanted to fuck someone this badly, this quickly. Like Mulder has never been in quite this light before, seeing him for the first time all disoriented and flushed and turned on, and goddamn.
“This is crazy,” he notes absently, letting his thumb follow the trail of hair on Mulder’s stomach. He licks his lips, and Mulder makes a strangled noise, scritch of his nails over Crosby’s head.
“Are you gonna-” A tiny wedge of Mulder’s teeth shows as he bites his lip, skinny slit of his eyes staring at Crosby’s hand.
“I think so. I. Maybe,” Crosby answers, his throat dry. He doesn’t know how people make these kind of decisions. This is deeply, elementally out of his league.
But his hand’s already on Mulder and that was once a line too. Marionettes in his mind, open-mouthed watching Mulder rattle and sigh, straining up and subsiding, a rhythm between them. Mulder’s fixed on everything Crosby does to him, and there’s this odd sense of glee, this power in it. Got Mark Mulder on the serrated edge of control, pinned and stripped down, better than hitting a triple.
So he thinks, what else, and naturally, inevitably, arrives at: steal home.
It’s not nearly as difficult as he would have expected it to be, had he had time to expect anything, which he had not. Mulder helps out, his broad palms on Crosby’s head, small confused sounds from above every so often, like Mulder keeps forgetting why Crosby doesn’t have girl’s hair. He holds Crosby still and basically does all the work for him, his hips rolling, his thumb in the corner of Bobby’s lip.
Couldn’t be further removed from going down on a girl, but it gets Crosby off just the same, his jeans zipper itching his wrist, his hand buried. He tries everything he can think of twice or three times, waiting for Mulder’s voice to break. He wants to be so good at this, in case it never happens again. His mouth goes slowly numb, heat in the back of his throat, the pit of his stomach, Mulder’s carved hip in his hand.
Mulder comes on a stutter, “f-f-fuuck,” and his fingers lock in solid bars, sweeping over Crosby’s ears, his body frozen and strung tight for a long moment. Crosby, oxygen gone, coughs and makes a mess of his shirt, feeling the muscles of Mulder’s stomach flutter.
He sits back, swiftly drags his shirt off one-handed and wipes his face, rests his cheek on Mulder’s leg, Mulder’s hand stroking down the back of his head. Crosby finishes himself off, gasping, sore mouth chafed all to hell on denim, white-out across the backs of his eyelids. Mulder’s name fills his mind like a siren, but he doesn’t allow it voice, terribly thrown for a minute.
He collapses, his shoulder thwomping into the carpet. Working to stabilize his breathing, he clutches at Mulder’s ankle, the drunk returning full-force and he can’t think right, this seems like it should be the stupidest thing he has ever done, but no, no, he’s a genius. This was a masterstroke.
*
The next morning is extremely strange.
Crosby crawled into his room at some unremembered point, after Mulder had passed out face-first into the couch cushions, his body wrung and his feet still on the floor. There’s stiff carpet under Crosby’s face, and he wonders if he fell out of bed or never made it up there at all.
He’s got a tidal headache, rolling in and fogging his vision, receding to dull thud, and his whole face aches, his eyes and jaw and the bruised back of his throat. He hobbles to the bathroom and curls up in the bathtub with the shower blasting his back and shoulders, scalding and sweating out.
It’s a while before real consciousness clicks in, and Crosby’s padding barefoot down the hall, damp footprints in his wake, trying to remember what happened last night. Hungover like this he might as well be dead, barely recognizing Mulder still asleep on the couch, stretched all the way out like a regular person on a rack, and something about his elliptical hipbone, revealed by his bunched-up shirt, something about his unbuttoned jeans.
Crosby puts on some coffee and wraps an icepack in a washcloth and sits with his head on the table, the pack on the back of his neck, the side of his face. It doesn’t really do anything, of course, just a placebo, something else to concentrate on, thin skin over his cheekbone slowly losing feeling.
Clearly, they got drunk. His short-term memory is a sieve at the best of times, and it’s only with great effort he pulls up the torn label of a bottle of whiskey, a brown leaf stuck to the grimed glue. Tabasco and tequila flaying the lining of his stomach, boys in make-up and dresses, Mulder stepping on his chest. He doesn’t trust half of it, and thinking too hard zones him out, waiting for the coffee to beep, holding the icepack to his mouth.
He’s asleep again, or close enough to it, and Mulder materializes in the doorway, hulking with his arms out, his hands pressed flat on the frame. Crosby snags up in surprise, pain crackling behind his eyes, and Mulder’s saying:
“You motherfucker, I can’t find my shirt.”
Crosby blinks. “Um. You’re wearing it, I think.”
Mulder’s face is flushed and snarling, shaking, his eyes spun silver. He’s fixed his jeans but left the top button undone, and Crosby keeps glancing at it, the tiny bleached wedge of Mulder’s briefs, the crumpled edge of Mulder’s missing shirt. Headache washes in and batters at him, feeling sickly overheated, not sure what’s wrong with his body today.
Something’s wrong with Mulder, too, because he’s fisting his hands against the wood, the muscles in his arms standing out in relief, and saying disjointedly, “Don’t fucking argue with me, I know you have, it’s old fucking news, Bobby. I’ve been awake this whole time, okay? I don’t tell you this stuff just so you’ll turn it the fuck around on me, stupid rookie motherfucker.”
Way too tired for this shit, Crosby shakes his head, steepling his fingers over his eyes. He’d be amused if he didn’t feel so much like he’s about to die. It’s possible that Mulder’s actually making total sense, and it’s just Bobby fracturing everything.
“I made coffee?” he says weakly, and Mulder answers in vicious gibberish, frightening Crosby for a second because he speaks with so much conviction, one of the two of them must have gone insane.
You did this to him, Crosby thinks suddenly, and he doesn’t know what the fuck that means, but he can’t quite take his eyes off Mulder, who’s probably just still drunk.
Pieces of last night are beginning to solidify, taking the place of a nitric dream, and Crosby remembers a few drink names that they’d come up with, whirling dervishes and irish hitmen, and Mulder desiccated a lime with his cheeks hollowed, licking his fingers dry. Mulder’s been that wrecked before, at least three times that Crosby can think of right off, but never has the morning after damaged him this badly.
“How much do you remember about last night, Mark?” Crosby asks, breaking Mulder’s low train-of-thought lunatic’s mumble, Mulder’s hands curled around a cup of coffee, his shoulders hitched up protectively.
Mulder looks up at him, looks incredibly tired and beaten up around the eyes, and he’s waking up more too, the fog in his expression burnt off by caffeine and sunlight. He’s fighting it, like something perilous will befall him if he fully commits himself to the day.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d swear you planned this whole thing,” Mulder tells him, not all the way lucid but closer than he’s been so far.
Crosby, bemused, suffers a spike of reflected light, off the edge of the stove and directly into his eyes, and he winces against the pain, fitting the icepack into his eye socket. He feels awful, nauseated by the smell of coffee, blocked-out memories running like subway trains under the sidewalk, invisibly making the street tremble.
“Well. I haven’t understood a thing you said, and it’s making my head hurt. I’ma go back to bed.”
Likely startled by an honest assessment of the situation, Mulder sits back and widens his eyes at Crosby, laying his hand over his chest as if wounded. Crosby has to laugh at him, his flair for spectacle, his martyred expression.
And he remembers Mulder’s coarse fingers leaving faint chalk marks on his cheek, the dry soft taste of Mulder’s thumb in his mouth.
He trips over his feet in the hallway in shock, blisters his knees with carpet burn. He almost wants to cry from frustration, wants to scream, quit making things worse, but he’s not entirely sure who he’d be talking to if he did.
*
He sleeps all morning and into the afternoon, fitful and sweating as the sun climbed in the window. Upon waking, he lies there for a long time, staring at the white ceiling, working out dream from memory.
He’d brought home bottled ruin and stopped drinking before Mulder did. He’d wandered into dangerous territory, taken a stupid joke too far. He’d pushed up onto his knees between Mulder’s legs, his hand on Mulder’s stomach for balance.
He’d started it.
Crosby doesn’t know what the fuck got into him. He pictures the scene they’d made (in the living room! Which they shared! With two other guys!), Mulder curling over Crosby’s head in his lap, soft line of Mulder’s leg cutting a diagonal across Crosby’s side, the sounds and the heat dampening everything it touched. Crosby’s face colors, his stomach an uncomfortable little ball, but he can’t interpret that. It could be disgust or humiliation or this bone-deep new arousal, or even just his hangover.
Someone pounds on the door, shattering the fraught calm, and Crosby yelps in surprise, his heart jumping. Rich Harden is yelling at him, lazy motherfucker got a game to get to, and Crosby realizes belatedly that in addition to seriously upending his sexual worldview, he’s also got to see Mulder every day for the next four months.
He stays close to the walls like a kid sneaking in past curfew, paranoid without reason. Harden keeps up a steady stream of insults and quips, a sort of low-key inner monologue given breath, and Crosby is relieved that Harden is treating him like normal, nothing on his face, no different than he was yesterday.
Mulder’s gone already, which is worrying. Holding court over breakfast is one of Mulder’s favorite things to do, bickering with Richie and spooning the marshmallows out of his Lucky Charms. Crosby drinks three cups of coffee and tells Harden to shut up about six times; his head is killing him.
You’ve slept with a friend, Crosby tells himself as he rides shotgun, staring out the window. Hard truths will make you a man, Bobby: you’ve slept with a guy, friend or not, the important thing to remember is how quickly you went to your knees.
He rests his forehead on the window, closing his eyes. Some kind of warning would have been nice. Orange juice has abolished the taste in his mouth, but there’s still a faint ache in his jaw and when he look at his hands, he sees them open on Mulder’s body, forming to the hook of his ribs, stone arch of his hip.
Incredibly fucked up, he decides, and probably best ignored. Mulder’s not the type to roll with change; neither is Crosby, honestly. He likes the way things were. He has no wish for redefinition or reorientation or anything like it.
The clubhouse is in its usual state of good-natured, half-dressed riot, with a football lining back and forth across the room, country music up loud ‘cause Hudson’s starting, guys playing cards for candy bars and twenty dollar bills. Harden careens off in Zito’s direction, and Crosby lingers with his back to the door for a minute, ensuring that Mulder’s nowhere near before he goes to his locker.
Irritated by this whole frightened rabbit thing he’s got going on, Crosby jerks at his shirt, two buttons popping off in his hand. He swears and kicks the stool over, and Chavez, passing by, lifts his eyebrows.
“What’s with you, rook, you sprain your wrist jerking off or something?”
Crosby’s happy to have an animate target, and he curses at Chavez for awhile, winging his glove into the neat row of jerseys. Everything’s going wrong for him today, and he runs out of insults, dumbly insisting, “Motherfucker,” as Chavez looks at him with pity.
Crosby trails off and falls silent, swallowing hard. He glances at Chavez, and asks as reasonably as he can, “Have you seen Mulder around?”
“Sleeping in the little office,” Chavez tells him with an obnoxious smirky grin. Crosby is starting to hate everybody on the team.
It’s just for general knowledge, just because Crosby doesn’t want to get surprised from around a corner, bump into Mulder, probably literally, with his luck. He gets dressed, leaving his jersey and cleats until they’re due on the field, and gets into the small crowd around the arcade game. He knocks Huddy out of sixth on the high scores and gets cuffed upside the head for it.
An hour or so later, after going down to the cages and getting his ankle wrapped, Crosby finds himself loitering in the hallway, thinking that someone has to get Mulder, game’s on pretty soon. It’s not true, of course; Mulder’s hardly needed up there, but Crosby been kinda on edge, something in the coffee, something wrong with what happened last night.
Mulder’s as long as the couch, one leg on the floor, his arms folded over his chest. The lights are off, but one wall is mostly glass, bleeds in enough to create shadows on Mulder’s face, his wrinkled shirt. Even asleep, he looks godawful, and Crosby is not pleased with himself for being a bit relieved at seeing that.
This is the guy you sucked off, Bobby.
Crosby unconsciously moves on the sides of his feet like he learned at camp, shutting the door behind him. He can tell the moment Mulder wakes up, when Crosby kicks an empty can of Red Bull on the floor, a slight tense shuddering through him, and Crosby’s thinking for the eight thousandth time how strange it is that Mulder sleeps so lightly in the clubhouse, on planes, on the bus, even hotel rooms, when he’s often impossible to stir at home. Mulder’s eyes slit and glitter, the hollow of his cheek outlined sharply.
“Hey,” Crosby says, standing awkwardly with one hand in his back pocket (fucking uniform pants, nothing other option). “I didn’t know if you had anything to do before the game. ‘Cause. It’s almost time for the game.”
Mulder just studies him for a long moment without moving, hardly breathing. Crosby is as uncomfortable as he’s ever been in his life, desperately trying to decode the slow raveling sensation in his stomach; is he terrified, is he turned on, is he repulsed, and Mulder shifts minutely, just the idea of a shrug.
“I told them I was sick and they told me to sleep,” Mulder tells him, his expression opaque.
“Oh. Yeah. Hungover? Me too. Head’s like bashed in.”
“Shouldn’t be too much of a problem for you.” Mulder closes his eyes for a moment, letting his shoulders relax. He’s talking untidily and slow, ‘tole’ instead of ‘told,’ softening ‘problem’ so that it rhymes with ‘solemn,’ and Crosby’s heart is just racing.
He wonders, has Mulder remembered it yet? It seems like he hasn’t, but that might just be strategy, Mulder processing and gathering information from behind a veil of ignorance, setting himself up in the best position to counterattack.
So ridiculously fucked up. He sighs, leaning back against a desk. He can’t tell if Mulder’s eyes are open enough to see.
“You got here pretty early, huh?” Crosby asks, and maybe something flits across Mulder’s face, too dark to be sure.
“I couldn’t go back to sleep.”
“You were all, with the gibberish,” Crosby says, waving his hand. Mulder nods wearily, and pulls his hand out to cover his face as he yawns. “And I guess we were pretty drunk. I think I remember, like, twenty percent at most.”
He watches Mulder closely. He doesn’t know what’s wrong with him, this glutton for punishment thing. He should be playing dumb, or cool, or something to that effect, but more than that he wants to see if Mulder will call his bluff.
Mulder’s the king of playing cool, of course. He stretches a little, his hips canting, and Crosby’s stuck on his bare arms, his shirt without sleeves and smooth shoulders. He leaves nothing on his face, looking like a photograph in a magazine, empty like that.
“You brought it on yourself, man,” Mulder says, which isn’t any kind of an answer. Crosby runs a hand over his head, frustrated, and maybe there’s a crack of color, blue and white, a flare of interest on Mulder’s face for a split second, but there’s no real way to confirm it.
He’s getting nowhere, and they’re probably looking for him upstairs. There’s no difference in Mulder when he’s lying, Crosby could spend years trying to catch him out. He briefly entertains the possibility that he might, in fact, spend years, however long they’re both still in Oakland, but immediately dismisses it.
He halfheartedly tells Mulder to come up, but gets no response, and leaves. The clubhouse is deserted and Crosby’s imagination betrays him for a second, thinking of what he and Mulder could get up to before someone comes to find him, on that dingy couch in the blind-striped dark, Mulder’s hands held down over his head, shirt wrenched up over his ribs, a colorless wedge of his hip showing.
Crosby almost trips over a pair of sneakers-Zito’s, the slob. His face is hot to the touch, and he paces around in front of his locker for awhile, tight little circles, working to get himself under control. His hands are shaking as he ties on his spikes, fumbling the buttons of his jersey into place.
The national anthem echoes in the tunnel, filling the space around him and leading him skyward. Annoyingly, it’s a perfect day.
*
Mulder starts to act weird almost immediately.
There’s only minor evidence, imperceptible to people who don’t live with the man, people who have managed to avoid becoming slightly obsessed and occasionally compelled to go down on him. Which, really, Crosby feels like was bound to happen, what with the way Mulder’s pitching right now.
He’s just around more, sticking around an hour after a game he didn’t start, barefoot and chewing gum on the couch in the clubhouse, standing over Crosby while Bobby’s tying his shoes, staying at the breakfast table until everybody’s done, nursing his glass of juice and telling embarrassing stories about their teammates. It never seems to be about Crosby, just Mulder existing by complete chance in the same room, often ignoring Crosby entirely.
But he also keeps asking Crosby for rides home, always some excuse like he’s really tired from that bullpen session, he might fall asleep at the wheel. Once he says, perfectly straight-faced, that he doesn’t want to take his car because he hasn’t had a chance to get it washed this week.
Crosby’s beginning to think that Mulder’s fucking with him.
It’s redundant, of course; Crosby has being fucked-up locked down already. He’s become deeply paranoid, unable to follow conversations and endeavoring to the best of his ability to keep his back to a wall at all times. Off the field he’s lost all grace, tripping over his feet and knocking candy racks over in a spray of red and blue and yellow. Eric Chavez starts to call him Tweak after the kid on South Park; it catches on with predictable fervor.
He’s got a recurring admonition in his mind, popping out of nowhere in moments of quiet, familiar voice asking in exasperated disbelief: what were you thinking?
It keeps him awake at night.
Mulder’s one in a thousand guys, Crosby’s lifetime of teams, flicker of uniform colors and young men with dirty faces, most of them linked primarily in his memory to a single moment, a leap, a perfectly balanced swing, a neat backhand stab-baseball card pictures. Bobby’s seen amazing things, never before faltered as badly as this.
That’s terrible logic, though, it doesn’t hold up. No one’s come close to being what Mulder has been so far this year, and probably no one ever will, at least from Crosby’s perspective, because he’s only a rookie still, everything saturated with light. And Mulder more than anyone else, Mulder clipping through his starts, snapping off sliders that break as hard as glass, a magic thread guiding him to bury pitches under the hands, knee-high on the black. Mulder’s pitching as if it’s elemental to him in the original sense, inscripted at a molecular level, and Crosby can’t help it. He’s living with the best pitcher in the world right now, and yes, he can understand where that’s kinda hot.
He doesn’t trust himself at all, because god knows he’s not gonna stop getting drunk and it would look really weird if he up and moved out this deep into the season. Eventually Mulder’s gonna catch the light in the right way or spike Crosby’s whiskey with cough syrup, a last weightless push too far. Crosby wants to have faith in his restraint, but he remembers the definition of insanity: doing the same thing and expecting different results.
He’s so fucking on edge all the time, short-tempered and mean, and the guys have started scorning him in return, laughing in hotel hallways getting ready to go out without having invited him, ignoring his instinctive quips in team meetings, leaving him asleep on the plane until a steward shakes him awake, pinch-faced and tired in the dark. Crosby sneers and gives twice what he gets, but worse than being abandoned is constantly finding himself alone in rooms with Mulder.
Mulder’s one of the few who still come near him anymore, though at times he hardly seems to register Crosby, whistling like he’s alone, like he’s lost the plot and is just acting out of habit.
Crosby still hasn’t gotten an answer on what Mulder remembers about that night, and he’s starting to give up hope that he ever will. Mulder is spectacular at keeping secrets, mostly because he never really pays attention to confessions in the first place, blank-faced and intractable.
A week has passed, and Mulder’s taken to sending Crosby empty text messages a few times a day, and when Crosby asks what the hell that’s supposed to mean, Mulder says he’s got no idea what Bobby’s talking about.
*
They go on the road; Crosby could probably remember where if he thinks about it long enough. A whole series gets rained out, and the guys go stir-crazy shut up in the hotel, and a minor prank war begins, the team split along its lines of allegiances.
Crosby sticks close to Rich Harden, a master strategist and his only real friend left, and he diverts the night manager while Harden steals Mulder’s room key (Mulder has sided with Chavez and Hudson, naturally, and already won the first round by putting smurf-colored dye in Harden’s shampoo). They go up and short-sheet his bed and spread marshmallow whip on his pillow and stretch Saran Wrap across the toilet and poke holes in the plastic cups and set the alarm clock for three a.m., call the desk and arrange a wake-up call for a half-hour later.
Trying to think of other stuff to do, they dial up an adult feature on the spectravision so that Mulder will have to pay for it (the ballclub, oddly, will pay for regular movies but not porn) and idle on the bed, tossing out ideas. Harden’s got his cap pulled down low so that only a fringe of his hair shows, a blue tint.
“You can tell he’s insane because he unpacks,” Harden says, and Crosby nods.
“He not only unpacks, he organizes it by type and color.”
Harden looks kinda repulsed, but that might just be from the stupid hotel room pornography, which is at once neutered and offensive. Zito likes to call them the hairy bobbin’ man ass movies, but Crosby still worries if the fact that this stuff does nothing for him is more evidence that he’s subconsciously gay. He’d ask Harden, because he’s suspected for awhile now that Harden is pretty consciously gay, but he’s not really interested in finding the words to explain his motives.
“We need something else,” Harden says. “They’ve got Byrnes as a mercenary, I think. Their next offensive is gonna be epic.”
Crosby steeples his fingers, glances at his watch. Mulder’s out to dinner but he won’t be too late because he’s still technically starting tomorrow, though there is a ninety-five percent chance of the weather holding. The curtains of rain on the windows are unsettling, and Crosby keeps feeling like he’s got to fight for breath.
“I’ll tell you what we’ll do.” Harden sits up authoritatively. “No need to fuck with the classics. You hide in the closet and I’ll hide in the bathtub and one of us will scare the fuck out of him, and then once he’s calmed down and is all defenseless thinking it’s over, the other will go.”
Crosby shoots Harden a stricken look, says slowly, “That . . . is a classic. I mean. Do we wanna be that unoriginal?”
Harden’s eyebrows pull down. “What? Unoriginal? This is war. Everything’s been done before.”
And so that’s how Crosby finds himself sitting on the floor of the closet, total dark broken only by the slit of grayish light under the door, cursing his inability to think on his feet.
Mulder’s non-waterproof sports coat, an empty garment bag, and three locked-on hangers are the only things on the bar, and Crosby, having let his phone and by extension Tetris die a slow death all day, is left with little to do but consider the many, many ways in which this is a bad idea. The symbolism alone . . .
He lets his head thock back on the wall, blowing out a breath. It’s become pervasive, a sneaky ratty wind seeking every last corner of his life. He can’t shake Mulder and he doesn’t want to, but at the same time, he dislikes pretty much everything that’s happening to him, how he’s acting and how he’s being treated. He can’t really see a way out of it.
Shy of midnight, Crosby is jolted by the sound of the door opening, the strip under the door flaring like a struck match. He’s in something of a daze; they’d cleaned out Mulder’s minibar to ease the wait (corollary to the fake porn/regular movie thing: the team will also pay for macadamia nuts and toblerones, but not the liquor), and Crosby isn’t drunk, only buzzing, trying to remember where the fuck he is that’s so dark.
So he misses the chance to be on his feet and jump out at Mulder like he’s supposed to, as Mulder goes straight to the closet, drawing the door open and hanging up his dripping raincoat without immediately noticing Crosby sitting on the floor. Crosby turns his face up as drops patter across his shoulders and legs, the light above Mulder’s head huge and blinding, and it’s like being outside, sun and rain, which only confuses Crosby more.
“Bobby?”
Spotted, then. Crosby swipes a hand across his face and squints, wishing he could see more of Mulder than his skyscraper silhouette, the wet cuffs of his slacks. He sorta waves, really incredibly disappointed with himself.
“Hi. Boo.”
Mulder’s head tips to the side slightly, and his features are filling in, the tilt of his mouth.
“What is this, a visual demonstration? Because I think I already saw one of those.”
Crosby’s eyes go huge, gaping at Mulder for a second. Mulder’s talking in riddles, or metaphor at least, but it’s closer than he’s gotten yet to admitting it one way or the other.
“And here I thought you wouldn’t go for the easy joke,” Crosby manages, his throat dry as gin.
“Don’t hide in my closet then. What the fuck were you. Get out of there.” Mulder reaches down and grabs Crosby by the collar and pulls him out, up onto his feet, which have fallen asleep. Crosby stumbles, falls into him, and Mulder makes a hard cut-off noise and catches Crosby around the back of his neck, steadying him.
Mulder’s swaying. Mulder’s drunk. Crosby’s hands lock on Mulder’s belt of their own accord, and Crosby’s staring at him, Mulder’s drowsy blue eyes and the sharp sneer contorting his mouth in a disturbingly effective way.
Falling sensation in Crosby’s stomach, a thin thrill: something’s gonna happen. Mulder’s looking down at him with a mixed-up look, all curious and manipulative, and his other hand comes up, brushes away a drop of water from Crosby’s cheek.
“You could have at least gotten a plastic chainsaw to brandish or something,” Mulder says, his voice lowering and his expression fogging, and Crosby thinks, holy shit is he gonna-
And Richie calls from the bathroom, “Um, did you guys stop playing or what?”
Crosby jerks away from Mulder and crashes awkwardly into the open closet door, feeling the glass rattle. Mulder looks at him as if shocked, his hands and mouth open. Crosby shakes his head, widening his eyes at Mulder with the hope of communicating: I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing and I can’t help it.
Harden emerges, scowling at them. “What is this? Is this some kind of double cross?”
Mulder laughs, ragged enough that Crosby darts a glance at him in concern. Mulder’s already turning away.
“Your boy is just worthless, that’s all. Sniffed him out the second I came in.”
Harden puts his hand over his face, sighs like a martyr. “Incompetence. Everywhere I go, incompetence.”
Mulder flicks open the buttons of his shirt and strips it off, plain white T-shirt stretched over his shoulders, and Crosby presses back into the closet, wishing he could somehow escape their notice, conceal himself again and wait until Mulder falls asleep. He clenches his teeth, not at all comfortable at the way this is all spiraling out of his control.
Harden punches Crosby in the arm, jerking his head at the door when Crosby looks over. Crosby nods; they can’t be around when Mulder starts tripping over the other booby traps, have in fact made plans to switch rooms with unaffiliated guys to avoid Mulder’s immediate revenge.
“You win this one,” Harden says. “But only because Bobby has half a brain.”
Crosby grins kinda desperately. “Yep.”
Mulder casts a dismissive look over at them, pulling his shirt out of his belt and flashing a piece of his stomach, and Crosby’s reaction (fuck, hot) must show on his face, because Mulder’s mouth curves up slightly, staring right back at him.
The hallway is a relief, straight lines and right angles, though Crosby loses his footing several times, clutching at Harden. He keeps looking back over his shoulder, not entirely sure if he’s frightened or eager.
*
Crosby thinks again, something’s gonna happen, several days later, in a different time zone. He wakes up to Mulder knocking on his door, wearing a hoodie over a tank top and talking about breakfast, and Crosby has lost every last shred of his immunity, following Mulder down the hall with his flipflops in hand, his shirt sticking to his skin after a sixty-second shower.
Mulder doesn’t have a lot to say, which is typical for the first hour or so after he wakes up. He pours one of every kind of sugar and sweetener into his coffee, then just a little cream and a few melted chocolate chips dug carefully out of his pancakes. Crosby is fascinated; he could definitely see the potential of that being the best-tasting coffee in the world.
He wants to ask Mulder, there are things that you aren’t good at, right? but can’t find the proper moment.
Crosby remarks on a restored Mustang rolling by, and Mulder sets into a story, lethargic and drawn out, given to tangents, a sentence or two a minute. Mulder had a friend, you see, whose dad owned that exact car except in perfect canary yellow, and he kept it with all the other ridiculous cars in his collection at their place out in Montana, way the fuck up in the mountains, and when Mulder went up there one Labor Day weekend, they played this race game down the abandoned pass, two hundred thousand dollar cars, two hundred miles an hour, wolf-howling in the depth of the afternoon.
Crosby looks away, his forehead lined, because of course Mulder would have a romantic story about the mountains and really fucking nice cars. He keeps feeling like the universe is totally against him.
Mulder kicks him under the table, and then, strangely, hooks his foot around Crosby’s ankle and leaves it like that. Crosby pulls experimentally and Mulder follows the movement. Lifting his eyebrows, Crosby sits back, kinda winded. Mulder smiles.
So. Something’s gonna happen.
In the game that night, Crosby avoids being eviscerated by about a millimeter, a dirty slide and Crosby mid-air, his arm still coming around on the throw, and he can feel the spikes catch and hook in his jersey, snagging him to the side. He lands with his full weight on the runner, his elbow cracking into the guy’s jaw, and thinks viciously, good, keep your fucking metal down next time.
Happily, Scotty picked the short hop and the inning’s over. Chavez offers Crosby a hand up and swipes some dust off his sleeve.
“Sexy.”
Crosby gives him a distrustful look, and Chavez grins, tugs at Crosby’s jersey, which is now sporting a tight slash in the fabric on the left side just under the letters. His dark green undershirt is visible, and there’s a shorter tear, a sliver of skin.
“Fuck! Motherfucker ripped it!” Crosby wiggles his fingers disconsolately in the tear, ducking into the dugout. He orders Zito to knock the guy down next time he’s up, and Zito looks at him nonplussed, as if waiting for a punchline to a joke that wasn’t funny the first six times he heard it. Crosby goes down to the clubhouse, muttering about his luck.
He takes off his jersey and undershirt and considers just tossing them, but then decides to autograph the jersey and give it to one of the bars back home. It’ll look good, all shredded and dirtied and framed with his picture stuck in the corner of the glass.
He really hopes they’ll want it.
The skin right there, just under his ribs, is abraded but not quite broken, sensitive and coloring deep pink. He presses his fingers at it curiously, hisses through his teeth.
“You actually managed to hurt yourself?”
Crosby jerks his head up, his mind lighting. Mulder, quiet as an Indian, has materialized across the room, an expanse of blue carpet dotted with white towels and green Gatorade cups between them. His expression’s unreadable, but that might be because he’s not meeting Crosby’s gaze-he’s staring at the shallow scraped place on Crosby’s stomach.
Crosby holds completely still, answers slowly, “It’s okay, it’s nothing.”
Mulder shoots a cursory glance at Crosby’s face, and then looks back at his stomach. Crosby says his name without really being aware of it, thinking of Mulder’s foot around his ankle this morning, sitting there blushing and not having the first idea what it was supposed to mean. Mulder goes about everything in such a maddeningly convoluted way.
But maybe that’s only Crosby’s damnably poor perspective; he knows as well as anybody that he’s an unreliable narrator. Mulder’s starting to look pretty straightforward, eyes flashing suddenly like wet diamond, clearing his throat and saying:
“Here, you should take a look at that in better light.”
Bobby tries to say, really, it’s not even bleeding, but Mulder’s on him at that point, and taking his arm and pulling him back down the hallway and through the bathroom, into the showers where the fluorescents bound off tile and Crosby’s spikes make an incredible racket.
Crosby barely keeps his feet, stumbling and skidding and crashing into Mulder’s back, the hard scythe of Mulder’s hip, imagination running wild. He doesn’t notice it, but he’s grinning like crazy.
“Wh-what-” he attempts, and Mulder crowds him back into the wall, white tile freezing on his bare back and Crosby yanks up with a startled cry, right into Mulder, and Mulder just presses him down again, using his whole body this time. Ice on his back, heat blanketing his front, and Crosby’s shaking already.
“Yeah,” Mulder says casually (casually!), running his hand down Crosby’s chest to skate around the edges of the scrape. “It’s definitely clearer in here.”
He goes to his knees.
Crosby makes a strangled shocked noise, his hands clawed on the sides of Mulder’s head, in his sticky gelled hair. He’s afraid he might start hyperventilating, not helped by Mulder smiling up at him like they do this every day and have for years, like it’s his favorite part, before lowering his head and licking down the edge of Crosby’s rib, mouthing raw and wet across the exposed nerves, a blast of red behind his eyes and a corrupting inversion of pleasure and pain.
Crosby’s head snaps back into the wall so hard he expects a dent, and that hurts too, grays him out for a moment all hazy and euphoric, and this is gonna seriously fuck him up pretty soon. Mulder makes short work of his belt and pants, rasping the rough side of his face in the hollow of Crosby’s hip, and Crosby stops worrying about being fucked up and starts concerning himself with bare survival.
He’s babbling, talking in circles that echo off the tile, something about fuck and yes and god, each sharp consonant scouring his throat, and Mulder’s mouth is shining as he pulls off Crosby’s dick and tells him to keep it the fuck down. Crosby scoffs on a disbelieving laugh, ask me to fly why don’t you, and laces his fingers on the back of Mulder’s head, staring and fighting for breath as he sees Mulder’s mouth open obediently when Crosby presses him back in, Mulder’s eyes drifting shut.
It takes almost no time at all, Bobby coming like a full-body punch, an electric current jerking through his chest. He cries out, his own voice bounding back at him, and slumps, his palms dragging through Mulder’s hair, bending his ears forward. A thin scrim of sweat slicks his shoulder blades on the tile, and he lets his legs give out, lets himself crumple. He feels Mulder’s face, smooth edge of his forehead and sandpaper cheek and occasional wet brush of his mouth, slide up as Crosby comes down, from his hip over his ribs to the dent under his collarbone.
Crosby leans into Mulder, his arms around Mulder’s back, trying to catch his breath, trying to work out what happens now.
“I didn’t think you remembered,” he says eventually, his pulse approaching proper speed.
Mulder breathes out on a laugh against Crosby’s shoulder. “I did.”
Crosby swallows. “I didn’t think that you’d be into it.”
“I am.”
“Fuck.” Crosby pushes Mulder’s head up, his hands wrapped warm on Mulder’s neck. Mulder looks sleepy and kinda smug, kinda like his knees might be starting to hurt. “You’re not fucking with me?”
Mulder grins suddenly, crazy pure happy grin that wrenches Crosby’s heart sideways, makes up for everything. “Would I do that?”
“You do that in your sleep.”
“Bobby.” Mulder turns his head so that his jaw scrapes on the underside of Crosby’s wrist, and Crosby jumps, bitter taste of adrenaline on his tongue. “Shut up for a second so I can try this one thing.”
Crosby starts to say, don’t tell me to shut up, but Mulder’s mouth is on his, a deep and stabilizing kiss that turns kinda frantic at the end, with both of them pushing up on their knees, Mulder’s hands angling Crosby’s face and licking against his tongue. Mulder’s noticeably hard against Crosby’s hip and it shakes him how bad he wants to do something about that, it just blows him away.
Mulder breaks away, gasping, “Okay, okay.” Crosby immediately arches up to close the space between them, tugging at Mulder’s shoulders, but Mulder holds him down, his eyes dark dark blue and hot. “You gotta get back.”
Crosby shakes his head without thinking, rocking against Mulder and watching him bite his lip, force himself back.
“Bobby, seriously,” Mulder says, sounding pained. Crosby reluctantly lets him go, and Mulder gets to his feet, pulls Crosby up and fixes his pants for him, standing so close that it’s almost inevitable when they end up necking against the wall again, this time kinda slow and aimless like they have whole days to kill with this.
Making out with your best fucking friend! the hysteric cries out in Crosby’s mind, but Crosby’s decided to stop listening. He’s not worried about being gay so much as he is about the fact that screwing around with Mulder is gonna absolutely consume him.
Someone comes through the clubhouse calling Bobby’s name and they peel off each other, short of breath and flushed. Mulder pushes him at the door and Crosby stumbles, looking back over his shoulder to see Mulder regulating his breathing, the heel of his hand pressed down over his fly, and Crosby walks directly into the wall.
*
Mulder sticks around the dugout until the very end of the game, up on the shelf at the far end with Zito, flicking sunflower seeds at a cap on the steps. Crosby thinks it’s encouraging that Mulder’s tolerating Zito for this long; it shows that he’s in a good mood.
Bobby’s never felt better in his life.
That’s stupid, he immediately corrects himself. Don’t trust your mood right after you’ve gotten off. He rolls a bat handle between his hands, grinning quietly to himself. This whole thing is incredibly stupid, never woulda happened if he hadn’t found liquor so cheap. Worse than starting on a dare, they started blackout drunk, confused by their own dirty jokes and not really intending to sabotage their neat little lives. It’s almost like it happened in spite of them, and Crosby glances down the bench at Mulder, thinking, remarkable.
Down in the clubhouse after the game, Crosby loses track of Mulder in between beers, during a commercial, and he gets antsy, trying his best to act like someone who’s never even considered getting a hummer in the showers. He stays only long enough to keep up appearances, and then takes off towards home, a nervous weight relieved once he’s in the cover of the hills again.
He still feels pretty good, which is fucking with his perception of the situation. What he wants to do right now is climb on top of Mulder and push his shirt up all the way to his shoulders, and he doesn’t want to think beyond that. He wants no part of anything complicated or epic or doomed to fail, and he won’t let it get that far. This is just for now.
The neighborhood kids have struck again, every tree on their block strung up with long white toilet paper ribbons, hooking gently in the faint wind and casting skinny rope-like shadows across the lawn. Bobby finds a half-full roll in the grass and he weighs it in his hand, considering.
“You fucking delinquent.”
Crosby grins big and involuntarily before he schools his face and glances over casually. Mulder’s leaning in the doorway, bare shoulders and chest because he is in no way wearing a shirt, and Crosby’s mind sorta sticks on that for a minute, staring at him. It cannot be gay to want to fuck somebody who looks like that, he thinks half-heartedly, it’s got to be part of the human condition.
He clears his throat. “The damage has already been done, man.”
Mulder crosses his arms over his chest and tips his chin up, smirking a little bit and making Crosby forget that he’s supposed to be cool and also maybe his own name for a second.
“As long as you’ve got a good excuse,” Mulder says, the streetlight on his face like he was born for the moment. “Go ahead, then, and hurry. I’ve been waiting for your ass to get home for like an hour.”
So, okay, Crosby thinks, stricken. Okay, you’ve kinda already fallen for this fucking guy.
He sighs. He shoulda known that would happen. He lets the roll fly, watching the white flare out as if from the center of his palm, arching over the treetop and deep against the night sky. Heart in his mouth, Crosby turns back to the house, Mulder in the streetlight whistling and mock-applauding, calling Bobby’s name like he’s some kind of hero, the kind of ballplayer everyone wants to be.
THE END
Endnotes: So, in ‘Token Freakshow Prodigies’ there was this stupid thing that Crosby did last year. Just took me two years to work out the details.
Hairy bobbin’ man ass hotel porn was not coined by Zito so much as Bill Hicks. Like a wax dart, buddy.