bloody on the stones
to return
2004
Nothing’s changed.
Zito lays his fingers down on the stitches same as he has since he was seven years old. He can’t help remembering that curveballs are supposed to rip your elbow out and shred the tendons of your shoulder. The human body is not designed to throw a baseball, small trauma every day for twenty years, building up and he fully expects to wake up someday unable to lift his arm. He’ll burn that bridge when he gets to it, though, because he’s not in pain now and he can’t pitch to save his life.
At least injury would make sense. Mulder has spent his career bouncing calmly from the DL to the rotation, but he doesn’t talk in his sleep. He doesn’t see things that aren’t there. He’s not the one tailspinning in front of thousands of people once every five days.
Zito has escaped from the hotel, a block away sitting on the bumper of a car. His thumb is bleeding and the streetlights seem weirdly accusatory, almost judgmental. Zito’s sneakers are in sick-colored gutter water. Everyone wants to know what’s wrong with him. He had to get the fuck out.
It’s been like this for a month, the team starts slow and that’s how it’s always been. Zito dreams of the All-Star break, still two months away, the roll downhill and maybe he shouldn’t think about it in those terms. They go too fast at the end, brakes cut and something eventually gives out. But he would kill for speed right now, for ninety miles an hour to show on the gun, for the black to return to his eyes.
He’s taking a moment, away from his teammates and the press and the way they’re gaslighting him without even being aware of it. He doesn’t want to go back until the lobby is empty, the hallway silent, and he can sneak into Mulder’s room and sleep beside him and pretend the world will be different when they wake up.
Rich Harden appears on the curb, his hands in his pockets. The city’s light pollution has rubbed out even the moon. Harden’s wearing a T-shirt that used to belong to Mulder, mixed up in the laundry at some point.
“They’re looking for you, you know,” Harden tells him.
Zito fists his hands on the metal. “Apparently I’m not that hard to find.”
Harden smirks. “You’d be surprised.” He checks over his shoulder, and Zito follows his eyes, search parties, lanterns, bloodhounds. The sidewalk is barren, untouched; Harden must have materialized.
“Not to be rude or anything, but could you please fuck off?” Zito says sweetly.
Rolling his eyes, Harden sits next to Zito on the car, his shoulders pulled up. Zito scowls at him, but Harden doesn’t seem to care.
“Are you always like this when you’re doing badly?”
Harden has a slight problem with being too straightforward. Zito had appreciated that about him at first, tired of baseball clichés and Mulder telling him to shut up and go back to sleep at critical moments. But Zito had been pitching well when he’d first met Harden, which probably had something to do with it.
He props his heels up on the asphalt, looking down at his laces. “It’s possible this is as bad as I’ve ever done.”
“Really?”
“Fuck you, ‘really.’ Ask around.”
Harden angles him a crooked smile. “Well, I did that. Nobody’s got a fucking clue.”
Zito shifts, thrown because he thinks they might be talking about two different things. A fire engine goes screaming past and saves him from responding for a moment. Harden’s face is sinister in the red light, hollow-eyed and tufts of his finger-combed hair sticking up.
“It’s not gonna last, anyway,” Zito says eventually. “It’s just April, that’s all.”
Harden gives him a sideways look. “It’s interesting that you can say that without even knowing what’s wrong.”
Zito shakes his head. He does know, or anyway he feels like he does, like it’s under his skin and he’s only got to scrape the top layer off, see it okay then, the cause and the cure. He knows, he just can’t get to it right now.
“Did you. Why’d you come out here?” Zito asks him.
Badly lit, edge of his mouth twisted, Harden shrugs. “If you really didn’t want to be found, you would have gone farther than around the block.” He stands, offers Zito his hand. “C’mon. Need to get some sleep.”
Zito follows him back, comforted by the fact that Harden has been in the majors for only a couple of months. It’s easier talking to him than Hudson or Chavez or Mulder, because Harden’s got no frame of reference and he thinks the wreck of Zito’s season so far is an anomaly, not an inevitability.
Mulder’s drunk in the lobby, sprawled out on the long couch near the window. The people at the desk are glaring at him, but not saying anything. Zito stops, looking at Mulder with his legs tossed over the arm of the couch, his arm hanging off so that his hand rests folded on the shiny floor.
Harden puts his hand on Zito’s shoulder. “I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?” Harden leaves, one glance back over his shoulder as he gets to the elevators.
Zito crosses over to Mulder, kneeling beside the couch. “Mark.”
Mulder’s eyes come open and he blinks up at Zito, slow smile on his face. “You’re back?”
Taking his arm and pulling him up, Zito answers, “Yeah. What the fuck is the matter with you?”
“Fuck’s the matter with you?” Mulder slurs, tossing his arm around Zito’s shoulders and leaning heavily on him. “At least I got drunk first.”
“For the whole world to see.”
Mulder almost trips, knocking his head into Zito’s. “What?” he asks in confusion, and his feet are sliding on the marble. The hotel people are watching them go with disgust, but the A’s have a certain reputation for this, or at least, they did three years ago.
Zito gets them into the elevator and props Mulder against the wall. Mulder keeps a hand in Zito’s belt, keeping him close. Dim little pings chime as they climb floors.
“You shouldn’t take it so hard,” Mulder tells him.
It’s stupid. Zito wants to snap back, break a couple of Mulder’s fingers. Mulder’s not allowed to say anything, not pitching as well as he is right now.
Pushing a hand through his hair, Zito gently disentangles Mulder and steps away, leaning against the opposite wall with his arms back, hanging onto the brass rail. The feeling of being in motion is not really what he needs right now, wishes they’d taken the stairs.
“I know.”
“Anyway, I’ve been watching.” Mulder grins, lax and pulled like taffy. “You’re not doing anything wrong.”
“The box scores would seem to disagree.”
“Grip like this.” Mulder’s hand moves and Zito can’t tell what pitch he’s trying to show. “Arm angle right here. Throwing at something that, that doesn’t even move. So. It’s easy.”
Sadly, the doors shush apart before Zito has a chance to hit Mulder. He drags Mulder down the hall, stumbling into his room, three down from Mulder’s. Shadows coat the floors and walls, the curtains drawn, Zito’s stuff spilled all over and making it a dangerous trip to get Mulder to the bed and let him fall. Zito pulls off Mulder’s shoes and Mulder laughs at the ceiling, turning his foot in Zito’s hand.
“Rich found you?” Mulder asks him, up on an elbow and Zito’s eyes are adjusting to the dark, able to pick out the blue.
“I wasn’t that well hidden.” Zito undresses, briefly considering brushing his teeth, settling for water drunk from his cupped hands. Mulder is struggling with his belt when Zito comes back in, so Zito helps him and presses his fingers into the backs of Mulder’s knees, the steep curve of his hip, rise of his collarbones like things buried in the sand.
“Too drunk,” Mulder mumbles when Zito distractedly runs his thumb under the waistband of Mulder’s boxers, the skin there soft and bumpy from the elastic. “Can’t even see.”
“Your eyes are closed, dude.”
Mulder nods. “Yeah. It’s gonna be okay.”
“Sure.”
Zito sets his cell phone for six in the morning, time enough to fuck quickly and get Mulder back to his own room with no one the wiser. He wonders sometimes how well they’ve kept the secret, seeing the way the guys look at him sometimes, the bitter snag in Eric Chavez’s expression following them around, Rich Harden smirking at him when he shows up for breakfast at Mulder’s house. It’s been four years. It’s just habit at this point.
Lying down, slick smooth sheets and the rustle of Mulder breathing from a couple feet away, Zito resolutely turns his mind to other things, swearing that he won’t dream about baseball tonight. Mulder says his name hazily, but Zito feigns sleep, searching helplessly for pain somewhere in his body.
*
2003
By the middle of August, Zito was having trouble paying attention to the outside world.
He’d been pitching (terribly) less than well all season. His thumbnail was still misshapen from when he’d hammered it flat hanging up the Cy Young plaque over his parents’ mantle in the off-season. The things that had happened to him were connected in more ways than just chronology, but chronology was the first thing to go.
There was the team, a smear of familiar faces swimming up to him and asking him things, and Zito blinked, said, “What?” His parents came up for his starts and asked him why he hadn’t been answering his phone. Zito checked and had thirty-six new voicemails.
It was something like a fever. Or half-drunk all the time. Colors and sounds were brief, he’d latch on to something and then it’d be gone. He wasn’t thinking about pitching and that was a relief. Zito didn’t mind the disconnect at all, liking the space around him, surprised by everyday things.
Mulder said, “Hey,” and Zito jerked, looked up at him in surprise. Mulder roughly pushed his hand across Zito’s forehead. “I was calling you for like ten minutes.”
“Oh, I. I didn’t hear.” He looked around, they were in his apartment and he was on the couch and Mulder was standing in front of him. The television wasn’t even on.
“God, what’s with you lately?” Mulder asked, flopping down beside him and wincing.
“I just didn’t hear you, Mark, no big deal.” Zito cocked his head to the side, taking inventory of the situation, black sky out the windows, Mulder turning on the TV, Zito’s stomach rumbling. “Did you order food?”
“Yeah.”
Mulder flipped through channels, blue colors skittering nervously off his eyes, and Zito leaned back into the couch, closing his eyes. He was missing phone calls, crossing against the red, losing his train of thought mid-word. He woke up on the field, he woke up to Mulder saying his name and tugging his hair. Tunnel vision made the world go slow around him, something he vaguely remembered as having happened a long time ago.
There wasn’t much going on, in or out of the apartment. The city was abnormally quiet. Mulder was bored, showing it in his slouch and the irritated patter of his fingers on Zito’s knee. Mulder occasionally questioned Zito’s state of mind, but he was easily distracted, relieved to be, because Mulder didn’t like talking about anything that mattered.
Anyway, Zito was fine, not quite there. Mulder had been pitching like he was channeled, and Zito didn’t want any part of that.
Mulder was saying something. Zito had tranced out again. He rubbed the back of his neck and took a stab. “Um, yeah. Sounds good.”
Mulder’s fingers fell silent on Zito’s knee. Zito sighed. “All right. Obviously I wasn’t listening. Sorry. What’d you say?”
Licking his lips quickly, Mulder shrugged. “Wasn’t important.” He glanced at Zito out of the corner of his eye, popping his knuckles on Zito’s leg.
Zito cleared his throat, overwhelmed the way he got sometimes when he thought about how long it’d been, how Mulder kept showing up. He stood up. “You want a beer?”
Mulder placed his hand on Zito’s stomach, his face tilted up. There was an eyelash on his cheek that Zito brushed away without thinking.
“This space cadet thing is not the most endearing thing you’ve ever done.”
Zito’s mouth curled. “Well, good thing I’m not doing it to amuse you, huh?”
Slow drag of Mulder’s hand across his stomach, Mulder knew exactly what he was doing, digging his fingers hard into the hollow of Zito’s hip to make him jerk. A glaze spread across Mulder’s eyes, watching Zito bite his lip. Zito felt a thread of power go through him at being above Mulder like this, so rare. Mulder used every inch of his height; he always had.
“You know,” Mulder said carefully, edging up Zito’s shirt. “I meant to tell you before. You’re doing this thing. With your two-seam. Like, almost, almost a slider. It’s new.”
He leaned forward and opened his mouth on Zito’s stomach. Zito’s knees buckled and he swore, grabbed onto Mulder’s shoulders. Mulder scratched his teeth and there was a shocking pressure that folded inward, and then he moved back, looking up at Zito with nothing written on his face.
“I think if you just change your grip a little bit, it’d break like you want it to.”
Zito sneered at him, not wanting to talk about pitching with small wet patches on his stomach chilling as they dried. “Okay, we’ll fucking try that, so why don’t you just-”
Mulder hooked an arm around Zito’s waist and pulled him down, painful and clumsy for a moment until his knees were to either side of Mulder’s body and Mulder licked his throat, wide hand on Zito’s back under his shirt.
“Got your attention now, don’t I?” Mulder murmured, and Zito clutched Mulder’s shoulder, annoyed by the ploy and how completely he’d fallen for it. Mulder breathed out a laugh, bit his collarbone and Zito called him a few bad names, shaking, half-listening for a knock at the door.
His hand on the back of Mulder’s neck, Zito bent to kiss him and his weight shifted, heavy to the right and Mulder suddenly jerked backwards, hissing through his teeth. Zito froze, his mouth on Mulder’s cheek.
“What?” he whispered. Mulder shook his head, his eyes shut and he was in pain, fingers in claws on Zito’s shoulder blade.
“Nothing. A little sore. My hip. Never mind, here.” He levered up and opened his mouth against Zito’s. Zito cautiously rearranged until his weight was evenly distributed again, kissed him like he could take the pain out of Mulder that way, swallow it down.
“I’m sorry,” Zito told him, feeling the push of his tongue against the roof of his mouth, feeling Mulder hot as a star beneath him. “I am paying attention, I swear.”
“It’s okay, man,” Mulder said, kissing him on the mouth again. Both his hands were up under Zito’s shirt now, his forearms long and warm pressed down on his back. “It’d be weird if you were normal.”
That was a transparently backhanded compliment, but Zito was really in no position to complain. He ground down into Mulder, feeling the twist of his sides against Mulder’s upper arms. Everything had been coming to him in swatches recently, car alarms shrieking at him, blades of grass on the palms of his hands, startled into awareness in unpredictable places.
Mulder thumbed open Zito’s jeans and Zito’s spine cracked. His shirt was rucked up and he could feel everything as it happened, a linear sequence of events and Mulder’s mouth moving on his chest.
*
Zito comes over to the East Bay on an off-day, which is a regular thing. The morning is astonishing, messy hills, wide highway, billboards hung up like postcards against the sky. His plan for the day is to think about nothing for as long as possible, and Mulder’s usually pretty good for that.
They’re still asleep when he lets himself in the house, Bobby Crosby’s door open so that Zito can see his sloped back, his head under a pillow. Zito makes himself some breakfast and steals a Coke.
He’s on the porch, liquid in the sun and reading a magazine, and the sliding door squeals as it opens. Harden staggers out, his eyes shut, his cheeks drawn hollow. He’s got a pair of sunglasses in his hand and he’s not wearing a shirt.
“You’re parked on top of a rose bush, you know,” Harden informs him, gracefully taking the lawn chair next to Zito’s and chunking the back all the way down.
“I thought they were all dead.”
“Certainly are now.” Harden flicks his sunglasses open and puts them on, lying down. He’s been trying to even out the shade of his skin, eradicate the pale on his chest and stomach. He never seems to find it strange when Zito ends up at their house, ten a.m. on a Monday in June.
Zito glances reflexively at Mulder’s window. It’s open, though the shades are pulled. The window’s almost always open, so that Zito can climb in and back out again a few hours later. Sometimes, he wonders why Mulder even bothered to make him a key.
“He was up pretty late last night,” Harden says. “Probably be awhile before he gets up.”
The sunglasses are perfect black cover, not that Zito’s ever had any luck reading Harden’s eyes.
He swallows hard. “What?”
Harden gestures lazily at the house. He looks carved, strength in his shoulders and chest even though he’s really not big enough to throw as hard as he does. “Mark.”
Zito makes his face still, clinging to the metal of the chair. “Okay.”
The corner of Harden’s mouth curls up. “Just, you know. In case you were wondering.”
It’s too early to be dealing with this. Zito takes the sunglasses on Harden’s face and is rocked back by Harden’s eyes, which are about five times bluer than Mulder’s.
“If you’ve got something to say, dude, fucking say it.”
Harden studies him for awhile, then shrugs, the bumps atop his shoulders sliding under his skin. “Whatever.” He holds out his hand and Zito reluctantly gives him his sunglasses back. They don’t talk for a long time. It’s a pretty open secret, anyway.
Zito adjusts his chair down and lets the sunlight coat his closed eyelids, maroon and gold in the front of his mind. His arm aches dully, memory of three days ago, like he was dismantled and put back together improperly. There are no plans for the off-day; they’ll be lucky to get farther than the end of the driveway.
It’s rough and he can’t keep his thoughts in a straight line. He ends up on the field again, leaving his fastball up, hanging the curve, tipping the change, and it’s batting practice. The sky is poised to crash down on him, the chattering animalistic sounds of the crowd, Mulder waiting for him in the dugout. Mulder looking frustrated and pissed off, as if he were the one suffering, as if Zito had been body-swapped and wasn’t worth anything anymore.
Zito’s sick of this. Baseball has lost its appeal again, and Mulder has been pitching better than anyone else in the league. Impossible not to feel a measure of resentment, mixed in with pride and desire, because Mulder is a solid thing even if it took two years for Zito to accept that, and sometimes he wishes Mulder would break, just a little, bring them down to the same level again.
Harden scratches at his stomach, rasp of his fingers, subtle red lines in the tracks of his nails. Hanging out with Harden is difficult, a lot of the time, because Harden is as young as Zito was when they first came up. Zito has an itemized list of all the things that have changed since he was twenty-two years old, remembers a rookie year like unmanned flight, and Mulder, sinking deeper every day.
“Richie?”
“Hmm?”
“Have you noticed, like. Me doing anything different from last year?”
Letting his head roll to the side, Harden regards Zito through his sunglasses. It’s a comment on Zito’s mental state, or maybe the sky in Canada, but he thinks he can see the color through the black.
“I’m not really the guy to ask about that stuff,” Harden tells him.
“Sure you are. You’re, like, new. You haven’t known me since I was fucking nineteen years old.”
Harden laughs. “Who the fuck has known you since you were nineteen, man?”
Zito flushes, shakes it off. “Never mind, I’m just saying. You’ve got the fresh perspective. You know. No history to mess you up.”
A white butterfly alights on Harden’s stomach. He doesn’t feel it, lifting his eyebrows. “Anyway, that’s not why. I mean, like, I don’t really know much about it. Pitching. Baseball.”
Watching the butterfly inch its way down the dip between muscles, Zito snorts a laugh. “Right. If you don’t want to get into it, you can just say so. No need to make shit up.”
Harden shrugs. “I’m not. I don’t know anything about baseball. My dad signed me up to keep me busy between hockey seasons. I can pitch, but that’s all. I look at you when you’re out there and I can never tell when you’re tired or when you’re doing something wrong or when your release point’s all fucked up.”
Zito looks at him in shock. Harden smirks. “Don’t tell me that surprises you.”
Zito shakes his head. The butterfly crawls over Harden’s belly button briefly, sensitive spot and he brushes his hand absentmindedly, sending it to flit like a piece of flame through the air. He half-expects Harden to be struck down for blasphemy, checking the sky worriedly for lightning.
“You’re insane,” Zito says flatly. Harden shrugs again, looking entirely unconcerned. Zito wants to take the sunglasses off, hold Harden down, force him to admit that it matters, it’s everything.
“I’m, like, the least insane person you know.” Harden grins, strange on his face, wide open and almost boyish.
The sliding door squeals again, and Zito shoots his eyes over, blank relief to see Mulder standing there, rubbing his shoulder and yawning. His face is narrow against the sunlight.
“Hey,” Mulder says, staying in the shade of the overhang because he’s barefoot and the cement is melting hot. “Didn’t know you were here.”
“He’s always here,” Harden mutters, and Zito glares, not trusting him. Harden doesn’t believe in baseball, doesn’t believe Zito’s collapse means anything, and friends don’t do that to each other. Mulder would never do that to him.
Zito stands, crossing the smoked land. He puts his hand on Mulder’s stomach and Mulder throws him off without thinking about it, but Harden is reclined again, his scattered gold hair and ivory-colored arm the only things showing. He’s not looking at them. He doesn’t care.
Zito slips past Mulder, taking hold of his shirt as he passes, and leads Mulder staggering back through the dark house.
“What’s going on?” Mulder asks, his voice blurred and sleepy. “Did you fuck up?”
But Zito doesn’t answer, wanting to get Mulder and all his simple non-answers behind a locked door, and he’ll worry about the repercussions after he’s improved the morning.
*
Something important had happened.
Zito was down in the clubhouse, his headphones in and the television on, drifting mildly. Eric Byrnes was abnormally quiet, lying on the couch playing Gameboy, low whistling and his hair crushed in flat gold curls.
Mulder appeared, flanked by the trainers. There was a break between songs and Zito heard him saying, “I don’t need to go, I won’t,” and then guitars crashed and Mulder was vanishing.
Zito sat up straight, pulled his headphones off. “Is the game over?”
Byrnes didn’t bother looking at him. “Not unless it broke a record. It’s not even eight o’clock.”
Zito’s watch was said ten minutes to five, but they were probably just on the East Coast. He changed the channel away from Cartoon Network and the game’s broadcast was at commercial. If the clocks were right, Mulder couldn’t have lasted longer than the third, and Zito feared the score, seven runs maybe, eight, and their offense hadn’t been doing much lately.
The ceiling shook and rattled. Old ballpark with thin barriers. Zito got up and washed his face, water turning his hands blue. As he walked the incline of the tunnel, the sound swelled and rolled down at him. Coming into the dugout, the world was Christmas green and red, Fenway in the drench of the August heat.
Chad Harville was warming up, and the Red Sox were only up by two runs. Zito, still half-asleep, found Hudson on the bench.
“Dude?” he asked, immediately twisting his hand in Hudson’s jersey sleeve.
“Don’t hang on me, kid,” Hudson said, impatiently shaking Zito off. His eyes were fixed on the field, Chavez and Tejada talking anxiously behind second base, the wild flailing crowd and their gray team enemies on the grass.
“What. Why’s Mark out of the game?”
“Jesus, weren’t you watching?” Hudson darted him a disbelieving glance, anger and vague fear adding freakish color to slate.
Zito shrugged helplessly. “I, I just looked away for a minute.”
He’d been watching cartoons. Listening to a shamefully bad pop singer that he secretly loved. Trying to figure out how Byrnes was doing on the Gameboy by the tapping pattern of his thumbs. He’d barely been conscious.
“What’s wrong with him, Huddy?”
Hudson shook his head, his mouth a wire. “Hurt. He was breaking his motion. He was limping when he came off.”
Zito refused it automatically, recalling Mulder down there in the clubhouse, strict and well-formed, moving easily, he hadn’t been limping. But Zito couldn’t be sure, he might have missed it.
“Is he okay?” Zito asked, fitfully scanning his piecemeal memory, trying to remember, how far out were they, was it the wild card or the division tonight, was he the team’s best pitcher (impossible) or was it Hudson, was it Mulder? Day-to-day or six weeks? What was the fucking date?
“How’m I supposed to know? Fuck.”
It couldn’t be good. Hudson was mad at him, and Hudson was almost never mad at him. The game started up again, and Zito heard the coaches talking about tendinitis and Mulder not backing up the plate, losing the fundamentals that were more fused than taught.
Zito watched an inning or two in silence. Mulder had been hurt before, but never this late in the season, not in a season like this. The crowd roared, subsided to individual voices.
Chavez came into the dugout, taking off his cap like a penitent, a grimy brown line of dirt on his forehead and a shine of sweat on his neck. “How is he? Any word?” he asked the world in general, and nobody answered. Zito didn’t like Chavez asking after Mulder, and he stood, external forces drawing him back underground, into the clubhouse.
Byrnes was right where Zito had left him, one leg hung over the back of the couch. Half-closed blue eyes touched Zito’s momentarily over the game.
“Still losing?” Byrnes asked.
“Yeah. Where’s Mulder?” Zito put his hand on Byrnes’s ankle, just to have something to hold onto.
“Took him to the hospital for X-rays,” Byrnes answered. Zito pressed hard on the underside of Byrnes’s anklebone, making his face scrunch. “Dude.” He kicked Zito’s hand away, looking irritated.
“X-rays?”
“Yes, Barry, X-rays. We’re fucked.” Byrnes blew his hair upwards. “So totally fucked.”
Zito imagined running out of the clubhouse, hail a cab while still dressed in his uniform. Fly through the city with the buildings from history books and end up at the hospital, his shirt torn across the heart. Very melodramatic like that, like three days awake and two days drunk, running hard on coffee laced with speed.
Byrnes was playing his fucking Gameboy as if nothing else in the world existed. Zito didn’t know what to do, Mulder vanished, Mulder sketched in radioactive green in an examination room somewhere. He didn’t even know what hospital they would have gone to.
Incredibly, they won the game that night, came on strong, late, and the charred sky above Fenway Park reflected quiet back down, white paper littered in foul ground. The cost of victory was too high, and no one much talked in the clubhouse, or on the bus back to the hotel.
It was past curfew when a rumor snaked its way down their floor, room to room, infielders caballing, outfielders drunk in the hallway. Something irreparable had shown up on Mulder’s X-ray, something unexpected. He had been put on a plane to Arizona to see a specialist. It was possible that they’d never see him again.
Zito tried to call him for three straight hours, straight to voicemail and his hands fuzzed in his vision. After months of caroming without intention off the struts and obstacles of his mind, he was locked in again, focused like three-and-one with the bases loaded, throwing nothing but pitches in the zone.
Mulder picked up at four in the morning, Eastern Standard Time, and Zito was too tired to do the math for Arizona. His eyes scraped with beach sand.
“Tell me,” he said to Mulder, heard Mulder’s slow breath.
“Stress fracture in my hip,” Mulder told him plainly. “Worst of all possible worlds.”
That wasn’t right, there were worse things. Zito couldn’t think of any at the moment, but that was probably just the late hour. He could barely breathe.
“Are you sure?” he asked stupidly.
Mulder almost laughed, saying with his voice badly roughed up, “No, I’m making shit up to scare you. God.”
Zito stayed quiet. The red minutes on the alarm clock flipped over. Eventually, Mulder sighed.
“Look. Go to sleep. I’ll see you when you get back to Oakland. And don’t, don’t let it fuck you up. More important things to worry about, okay?”
“Okay,” Zito whispered. He wished savagely that he’d kept his eye on Mulder the way he’d promised, hadn’t let his mind wander. If he’d been in the dugout, if he’d been watching.
“Go to sleep,” Mulder said again, broken on a long vowel. “Call me when you wake up.”
Zito nodded, letting his eyes fall closed.
*
Mulder’s driving, bent arm on the window and the dashboard is hot enough to sear off Zito’s fingerprints. Harden and Crosby are in the back, bickering so fervently Zito expects them to tape a line down the middle of the seat and order each other to stay on their side.
The windows are all down, negating the air conditioning, a hundred and five degrees in the valley. Hills crowd the rearview mirror, and Zito is downing Gatorades, leaving his hand in the cooler of ice for long minutes. They’re going golfing.
“That is not what happened,” Crosby says in outrage, and pokes his head between the seats. “Dude, tell him that’s not what happened.”
His forehead leaves a damp spot on Zito’s arm, Zito drawing back against the door. “I don’t even know what you guys are talking about.”
Crosby scowls. “You’re a big help. Mark-”
“Shut up, Bobby,” Mulder says cheerfully. Earlier this morning, he was named the starter for the All-Star Game, getting the call from Joe Torre with Zito’s arm across his stomach, the two of them sweat-stuck together and amazed in the heat. He’ll leave for Houston tonight and nothing can change that.
Crosby fades back, muttering. Harden is ignoring him, permanent flush on his cheeks. Zito can see him in the side mirror, angled slice of scary blue eyes, staring out at the fields.
“I think it’s too hot to be outside.” Zito turns to Mulder hopefully, seeing the skin of his arm redden and burn. “I think this is a sign. We should stay indoors. With air conditioning. And ice cubes. Popsicles.”
“Oh, but going outside during a snowstorm was the best idea ever, huh?” Mulder retorts.
Zito feels blood rise to his face and he would give just about anything to be in Chicago in the wintertime right now. The car is silent for a minute, and then Harden asks casually:
“When were you guys in a snowstorm together?”
Mulder’s hands tighten minutely on the wheel, muscle in his jaw jumping. He darts a look at Zito and Zito lies automatically.
“I got stuck in Chicago ‘cause of a blizzard. What was that, Mark, two-three years ago?” Mulder shrugs, clearing his throat. “Thirteen fucking hours in the airport. Called everyone I knew to kill the time. We. We were talking on the phone. He told me not to go outside.”
“You would have died,” Mulder says quietly. Zito swallows, checks to see Harden’s eyes in the mirror, blank and watchful.
History efficiently rewritten, Zito wipes his eyes and says, “I think my brain is melting.”
Harden snorts, scuffing a hand across his cheek. Mulder half-smiles at Zito, they’re in this thing together. Zito watches Mulder’s fingers sliding on the wheel, the flicker-flash of sunlight on his face, broken up by telephone poles, sleek running power lines.
They break over a rise and the golf course is kelly green, pearled and jarringly incongruent in the middle of the dry land. Mulder hums quickly under his breath, the car picking up speed. Zito sighs to himself, wondering why he let himself get talked into this again.
“What’s it like?” Crosby asks from the back. Mulder glances at the mirror.
“What?”
“All-Star Game.”
Zito and Mulder exchange another look, one that can be left out in the open for once. Zito thinks back to Mulder’s bed that morning, damp sheets, torn foil, lost shirts. He isn’t supposed to spend the night in Mulder’s room, he’s supposed to go out the window and drive home, or at the very least, sneak to the couch before the sun comes up. But it was too hot to move. When Torre had called, Zito had felt a manic urge to yell, “Hi Joe!” crawling up his throat.
No one had seen him in the morning. They’d gotten lucky. For four years now, they’d gotten lucky.
“Well,” Mulder says, almost drawling. “Talk to Barry. He’s gone more than me.”
“We’re tied now,” Zito reminds him.
“Not until after Tuesday.”
“Anyway,” Crosby says sharply. Zito grins, wanting to touch the flushed side of Mulder’s neck.
He turns to look at Crosby, added bonus of his arm pressing up against Mulder’s. Crosby is underdressed for a country club, tattered board shorts and a yellow frayed collared shirt. Harden is staring out the window again, his arms crossed over his chest. His forearms are smooth and colored bronze and it distracts Zito for a minute.
“It’s like how you’d expect. It’s cool. Lotsa people. More press than even New York. Everybody wants to talk to you all the time. It’ll be worse for Mark, since he’s starting.”
“Don’t hate, man,” Mulder answers lazily, his eyes locked on the golf course, growing in the windshield until the green looked almost real. Zito smirks, pushing his elbow into Mulder’s arm subtly, feeling Mulder push back.
“It’s stupid,” Harden says suddenly. Crosby flinches as if struck. “We play every day for six months. One break and it’s only three days and you have to spend it talking to the fucking press?”
No one says anything, shocked tension clouding the air. Even knowing that Harden doesn’t care about baseball the way he should, Zito still feels ashamed, like he’s run headlong into a wall.
“Fuck you, Richie,” Crosby bites off, true believer confronted with blasphemy.
“Fuck you right back, Bobby.” Harden’s eyes crash into Zito’s, making something chill and frightening snap in his stomach. “Like I’m not allowed to want to stop and fucking breathe for three days?”
“Keep your mouth shut,” Mulder says, his face hard. “We’re here.”
They get out of the car and the heat falls down like a veil. Zito thinks that there’s possibly nothing in the world he wants to do less than play golf right now.
Mulder outpaces him across the parking lot, and Crosby scampers to keep up, shooting furious betrayed looks back at Harden. Harden unbuttons the top few buttons of his shirt and leans against the car, looking at Zito steadily.
“You shouldn’t have said that,” Zito tells him. Harden lifts his eyebrows.
“No?”
“Jesus, Rich. He’s supposed to be your friend. This is supposed to be the best thing that’s ever happened to him.” Zito doesn’t really believe that, but it sounds pretty good.
Harden just laughs. “That’s actually depressing, you know?” Sweat gleams in the hollow of Harden’s throat. Zito’s mouth is dry. “And what about you? The year you’ve had, you really want to talk about Mulder starting the All-Star Game?”
Zito’s lip curls. He wants to put his fists against Harden’s chest and hold him down. Show him the scar on his knee and the bruises on his arms and make him understand that this is not a temporary thing for any of them. The year he’s had, the gravitation pull of Harden’s thoughtlessness, dumb and addicting because maybe Zito doesn’t want to care so much anymore.
Mulder is a thin slash of white shirt, disappearing into the pro shop. Steam ghosts up from the black asphalt, blinding white off the chrome.
“Just. Don’t say it in front of him, okay?”
Harden nods slowly, dense shadows under his eyes, something sheer in the set of his mouth, the cut of his shoulder into his collar. Zito is at once painfully, physically aware of him, like the weather on his back, the plummet of his first half, like when Mulder comes into the dugout breathing hard, his mouth open.
“This was a bad idea,” Harden says absently. He rubs his fingers at the place where his neck meets his chest. “I’m so fucking tired.”
Zito blinks fast and says, “Yeah,” and then he wraps his hand in the bottom of Harden’s shirt, slick blazed skin against his knuckles, pulling for a moment before Harden gives in and starts moving under his own power again.
*
Mulder didn’t handle injury very well. He never had, and Zito got to see this new setback laid like film across the old ones. Mulder didn’t seem to sleep anymore. He drank the dangerous kind of coffee, dragged the insides of his wrists hard across Zito’s face so that Zito could feel the nervous strum there, broken up like a half-learned second language.
When Mulder had been hurt in the past, his shoulder, his back, he’d forgotten to be careful, moved too fast, tried to carry his own bags. He got really into bad television shows that played in two-hour blocks of reruns at two in the morning, and Zito slept on the couch beside him, flag-dreaming and training himself to tune out the TV and Mulder talking under his breath.
This time, Mulder stayed away for a couple of days, maybe a week. Zito saw him at the ballpark and in the hallway of his house when Zito came over. But Zito would try to put his hand on Mulder, take him aside to some convenient side room, and Mulder would say something that sounded okay out of context, actually kinda busy, hang on I’ll be right back, dude they need me down in the weight room, and then Mulder would be gone.
It took awhile for Zito to realize that Mulder was avoiding him, and even longer for him to get over his initial reaction of well-then-fuck-you-too. Three years of regular sex, abruptly interrupted, had kinda ruined his ability to hold a grudge.
He went to Mulder’s house, heartless black time just before the morning started to tint the air. The window was still open, and Zito climbed in quickly, not wanting to give Mulder a chance to cut him off. Mulder was at his computer with headphones on, sickly hospital-blue light.
Zito took off his shirt, messing up his hair the way Mulder seemed to like, and soft-stepped across the room. The whole thing seemed impossibly stupid, a stress fracture, the blue-eyed kid from Canada taking Mulder’s spot in the rotation, the pennant race circling them like attack dogs, and Zito had been doing his best to refocus. He’d spent too long in transit, forcefully stuck inside his own head where he didn’t have to worry about his record or any of the things that had gone wrong this year. They were both paying for it now, but none of that would matter in the long run.
Mulder’s shoulder blades were outlined in hooks against his shirt. There were dusky orange prescription bottles ranked like pillars atop a stack of CDs. Zito came up behind him and pulled his headphones off.
Mulder shouted and spun, slamming his elbow into Zito’s sternum. Zito lost his breath and stumbled back, fell onto the bed. There were bright whickers of neon colors behind his eyes.
“Fuck, Barry.” Mulder stood, his face black with the light at his back. “You scared the shit out of me.”
Zito coughed. “Yeah, well, I think you broke a rib, so we’re even, okay?”
Looking cornered, Mulder pushed his hands at his sides in search of pockets that weren’t there. He crossed his arms over his chest instead. “What’s up?”
Zito shrugged, his hand flat on his chest, picturing the bruise rising, messy work of blood vessels broken up under the skin. “Just came by to say hi.”
“Hi,” Mulder echoed flatly. Zito grinned, waved like a dope.
“Hi.”
“Okay.” Mulder made as if to pace, then stopped. He didn’t limp anymore, but he kept his weight carefully balanced on the untouched side of his body when he was still. “Now that that’s out of the way.” He gestured at the window. Zito rolled his eyes.
“You’re not really dealing with this all that well, you know.”
“Really? You got some fucking pointers for me?”
Sighing, Zito leaned back on his hands. “Quit it.” Mulder glared at him, but kept quiet. “Why are you trying to run me off?” Zito asked.
Mulder shook his head. “I’m not. Or at least, not forever. I’d just rather not be, like, distracted right now.”
They’d been telling the press that they didn’t expect Mulder to return this season. There was one last-ditch month to play and then, god willing, October, and Billy Beane said that you can’t just go out and find another Mark Mulder. But Mulder had been in with the trainers and Zito had seen him throwing off flat ground in front of sixty thousand empty seats.
Mulder didn’t sleep because the medication kept him up. He was working in secret to be ready for the playoffs, and it would be the greatest deke of all time if they could pull it off.
Zito had other priorities, though.
“If you think I’m gonna stay away until the season’s over, you’re kinda out of luck,” he told Mulder.
“Whatever,” Mulder muttered. “I’m surprised you’ve even noticed that I’m not around.”
It was a deliberate hit, but Zito had already wrung dry that particular guilt all by himself. He stood, wanting to be on the same level again.
“I’m not, like, fair-minded, Mark. Don’t think that me getting off track this year means that I’m gonna let you do the same thing.”
Zito slipped his hand under Mulder’s shirt, resting lightly on his injured hip. He imagined he could feel the rift, thought that if he pushed hard enough, if Mulder came for him as hard as he always had, the bone might split, snap him into two long pieces.
Mulder looked at him with his eyes hooded. “It’s not like I wouldn’t, you know. Be back after.”
“I don’t doubt it.” Zito found it a bit strange, playing his fingers on the sturdy curve, pushing up to touch Mulder’s ribs and the place between that made Mulder jerk. “I won’t distract you. You can tell me to leave whenever, I don’t care. I might not go sometimes, but you can still tell me.”
Zito smiled, having forgotten in his months-long fugue what it was like to be truly engaged with the viscera of life around him. Like shallow red scrapes on the heels of his hand with dirt ground in, a kind easy sting when he made fists. Like sand under his fingernails, broken glass at his feet. Like throwing rocks. Like the way he wanted to go down on Mulder in alleys and on street corners, for the pain in his knees, small discomfort that made everything else that much better.
“You’ve been hiding,” Mulder told him, and laid the side of his hand down on Zito’s bare chest. “Took something like this to snap you out of it?”
Zito shook his head, moved his hand under Mulder’s shirt until it mirrored the position of Mulder’s, straight line like a shark fin in the middle of his chest. “Kinda hated you, earlier.” Mulder tensed for a moment, and Zito licked his jaw quickly, to show that it had passed. “You were doing so well and I was. Not so much. So I, like, removed myself from the situation. Mentally. ‘Cause I didn’t like being like that.”
Mulder took Zito’s arm and held him off, the tender abraded patches under his eyes even starker in the dim light. “Then I got hurt and now you’re all over me again?” he asked, a sliver of anger in his voice.
Shrugging, Zito let his hand fall to hook in the waist of Mulder’s sweats. “Don’t read into things so much. We go back too far to let this temporary headcase shit get in the way.”
There was a very long moment when Mulder only watched him, and Zito flicked his fingers at Mulder’s skin under the fabric. The outside world seemed paved with landmines, and Mulder was so warm, taste of salt in the back of Zito’s throat.
“We go back too far,” Mulder repeated softly.
Zito nodded, stepping into his space. His hand disappeared into Mulder’s sweats, seeing the lines form around Mulder’s mouth, his half-shut eyes.
“Yeah, we do,” Zito agreed, and kissed him, matching him breath for breath.
*
There’s lightning in the sky for a week, but no rain. It makes everybody jittery, off-balance leaning to look out windows. Zito’s no better, his temper short and the sweat on his hands changing the trajectory of his pitches. He can’t do anything to stop it. The night gets cut up into pieces and it takes him along.
He wakes up on the floor of Mulder’s bedroom, the green plastic face of his wristwatch crushed. His mouth feels thick and awkward, his hands sticky. He has no idea how he got here, but the window’s open.
“You up?”
Zito starts, his fisted hands crashing into his chest. He rolls over and Mulder’s leaning over the side of the bed, looking down at him.
“What happened?” he asks, his throat rusty.
Mulder moves down to sit on the floor beside him, his legs folding up like jackknives against his chest, making him look like a kid. His hands twitch as if he wants to touch Zito’s forehead, and Zito doesn’t know why he won’t.
“Nothing. You were drunk. Crazy. Talking about, I don’t know, all sorts of stuff. Then you passed out.”
Zito tries to remember, sleep-fogged, slow roll in his stomach. Lightning jags between the curtains, the ever-opened window. He can picture suddenly the empty glass flask on the shotgun side floor in his car, sees it perfectly with the electricity sparking across in curves.
“Jesus.” He sits up, cradling his head when it tries to spiral away. “Tell me I’m not starting tomorrow.”
Mulder smirks. “Would if I could, babe.”
“Fuck.”
Zito rubs his face hard, presses the heels of his hands down into his eyes. He can’t pitch like this, he needs to go back to sleep, but no hope of that, the lightning is hotwired in him. His heart is beating so fast.
Mulder’s hand falls on his shoulder. “Settle down. It’ll be okay.”
Zito wrenches away from him, smear of anger behind his eyes. “Just because you keep saying that doesn’t make it fucking true, man.”
Looking stupid with his hand held in the air for a moment before he lets it drop, Mulder shows a line of teeth, sneering. “You’ve never seemed to mind before.”
“Things change, all right?” Zito glares at him hotly. “All you ever say is: it’ll be okay. But you don’t know that, and I’m tired of hearing it.”
There’s a low sense of triumph, seeing Mulder’s jaw tighten and hurt slice across his face. Bad things don’t happen to Mulder, and if they do, he never shows it. Zito wants to crow, having finally forced something other than casual affection into Mulder’s expression.
“You should go,” Mulder says, his voice unremarkable. Zito’s eyes widen, not having expected Mulder to give up without a fight. “Obviously I’m not helping you out right now, so. Go home and get some sleep.”
Zito shakes his head. He’ll never sleep again. Everything happens so quickly these days, blink and be unable to pitch, wake up to a new kind of storm, say something without thinking and realize in the aftermath that he has spent four years of his life right here, on the floor next to Mulder.
He stands, shaken. Mulder looks up at him and of course there’s lightning on his face, there’s lightning everywhere. Zito bites his tongue to keep from apologizing, thinking that it isn’t even that bad, Mulder has done worse and Zito has forgiven him.
The hall yawns in front of him. Headrush from standing too fast, from still being drunker than he wants to acknowledge. In the driveway, fumbling for his car door, headlights splash across his body, making him wince and hiss like an animal. Harden pulls up alongside him and turns his car off, the night collapsing back into darkness.
“Hey,” Harden says, getting out and leaning his forearms on the metal. “You leaving?”
Zito jams with energy at the sight of him, cool clear boy who’s barely been around long enough to know any shortcuts, secret ace pitcher who doesn’t give a shit about baseball. Zito grins big, feeling electrocuted and reckless.
“Yeah. Get in.”
Harden doesn’t hesitate. Zito checks Mulder’s window as they pull out, but there’s nothing in there, there never has been.
Harden does him a favor, not bothering with conversation until they get to the bar. Zito learns from the clock in the dash that it’s only eleven, far earlier than he thought. Brief, ill-thought fights while still shivery half-drunk should only be undertaken when it’s closer to dawn. They’ve never really followed a clear map, though.
The bar is crowded. People are hiding from the strange things that are happening in the sky tonight. Harden found a baseball cap in Zito’s glove compartment and now has it pulled down tight over his eyes; he’s unrecognizable.
Standing at the bar, everything thrums and it’s not evident whether the music is too loud or they’re in the middle of an earthquake. Zito is stricken, thinking that there are so many better things about which he could have picked a fight with Mulder.
Harden leans into him, his cold beer tucking into the bend of Zito’s wrist. “If you’re not coming back to our place tonight, you probably want to go easy.”
Zito flinches, shakes his head. “I’m not coming back to your place.”
Harden regards him, saying too quiet to really be heard over the bass, “Then go easy.”
Zito drains half his beer in response, seeing Harden rolling his eyes in his peripheral vision.
“You really take this stuff seriously, huh?” Harden asks. Zito doesn’t know what he’s talking about, if he’s woven together the not very well disguised threads of Mulder and Zito’s existence, or maybe just Zito’s recent failures, which are writ in billboard black and white for everyone to see.
Zito takes the safe road, scratching at the waxy wood bar with his thumbnail. “It is serious. If I get traded-”
“You won’t get traded.”
Zito glares at him, hating his assurance and his hundred-mile-an-hour fastball that will give him the benefit of the doubt long after he’s stopped earning it. “Your faith in me is much appreciated. Shut up.”
Harden moves his shoulders blamelessly, a curved block of shadow on his face from the cap brim. His eyes glitter in there like quartz on the sea floor. They don’t talk for a few minutes, and Zito feels a new buzz gathering atop the old, overlapping gauze.
“What’d Mulder do to you, anyway?”
Zito looks down at his hands on the bar, tattered and dust-printed from Mulder’s windowsill. “Nothing.”
Harden snorts a laugh, plainly knowing all the stuff that Zito hasn’t bothered to keep secret. “Sure.”
“You don’t know anything about it,” Zito tells him sharply. “So stop fucking acting like you do.”
Harden makes a dismissive noise, pulling his lower lip through his teeth quickly. “You’re gonna get yourself in so much trouble, you know that?”
Zito swallows. “I actually do know that.”
“Good. Let’s do some shots.”
Things fall apart swiftly after that. Every time Harden slams an empty shot back on the bar, Zito’s ears ring. His throat has been ripped open and Harden is grinning, razor-like with his face tilted up, Zito’s cap stuffed in his back pocket. Harden’s cheeks are nicely flushed, his mouth wet. He takes Zito’s hand and licks salt off the back of it, showing lime-peel teeth. The music keeps getting louder and louder.
And Harden is shouting in his ear, “I got an idea, man, c’mon,” and pulling him through the crowd, back and back and back. Zito twists until his hand closes around Harden’s wrist, terrified of losing him.
Harden stumbles them into the bathroom, and Zito’s confused, slightly less so when Harden pushes him into a stall and follows, clapping the door and it bounces back. Zito instinctively locks it, heat closing up his lungs, making his heart beat off-rhythm. Harden’s so fucking pretty.
He puts a hand on Zito’s chest and keeps him still, looks up at him with his forehead slick. “Does he care?” Harden asks him, rough like he’s already survived his whole life.
Zito whips his head to the side, getting the hair out of his eyes. “Who?”
Harden’s teeth snap as he grins, odd patterns of flight and disaster arching in Zito’s mind. “Mark. Does he care if you screw around?” He drags his hand down Zito’s chest, clipping off buttons, wrinkling silk. “Because I’d really like to fuck you, if that’s okay.”
Zito’s head cracks back against the wall. This got out of control so fast, like the fight he started earlier, like the year he’s had. Mulder has won more games than anyone else, but that doesn’t have anything to do with it.
“He doesn’t care.” Zito wraps his hand up in Harden’s collar, feeling the tequila sear under his skin. He thinks in a panic that Harden doesn’t know about baseball, doesn’t understand what it means for Zito to be reduced to this. “You can do whatever you want to me.”
Harden takes him at his word, suddenly pressed full up on Zito’s body, suddenly kissing him and ripping his shirt open. Zito holds Harden’s face in his hand, drunk for the second time in one night, dimly hoping that he at least makes it to his car this time.
When Harden turns him around, his chest scraped on the dirty wall, Zito is aware of the power at his back, the hundred-mile-an-hour hands on his hips. Graffiti scrawls blackly across his body. Harden bites the back of his neck, flattens Zito’s hands on the stone and flattens his own on top.
Neither of them lasts long; it’s too late in the season. Harden draws blood on Zito’s shoulder, shining on his teeth when he turns Zito back around and kisses him. Zito blinks, fuck-dumb, clutching his jeans with one hand and Harden’s face with the other.
Harden picks him up, puts him back together, finds torn buttons on the floor and pushes them into Zito’s pockets.
They find their way out of the bar like children, holding hands. Harden lets him go when they hit the streetlights, but Zito hangs onto his shoulder, not trusting his own legs. His mind skims, not sure which of all the things that have happened to him tonight is the worst.
Harden takes Zito’s keys and levers him into the shotgun seat. Zito watches in shock as the bleary night lights run like fingerprints across the window, the lightning still tearing at the seams. Harden drives them both into San Francisco, prompting Zito to say with his voice weak:
“You can’t stay at my place.”
Harden glances at him. “Wasn’t planning on it.”
Zito digs his knuckles into the heel of his hand, still tasting blood. “Don’t. Don’t tell anybody, okay?”
“Oh, like I even would,” Harden says, fallover of blue and white and Zito wonders where the cap Harden was wearing is, when he lost it. Zito doesn’t say anything else until they’re in the parking garage under his building, and Harden is counting the money in his wallet, muttering about taxis.
Penned in by concrete walls, Zito fixes his hair with trembling hands, not looking at Harden. Harden touches his face, smoothing his palm across Zito’s cheek.
“Doesn’t care, huh?” Harden says softly. Zito winces, folding his fingers around Harden’s arm and pulling his hand down. Harden’s pulse hums and sings and Zito could be okay with something simple like this, something less damaging than his life so far, but maybe he’s not built that way.
Harden half-smiles, slides his hand out of Zito’s grip. “I’ll see you at the yard, Barry.” He walks away, sucking sticky remnants of salt off the side of his wrist.
Seven hours later, Zito wakes up to knocking at his door, his skull caved in and littered with bone fragments. Zito moans and buries himself under pillows and blankets, insisting that the knocking stop immediately, but he has no control over this kind of thing, or anything really.
Staggering, feeling like he’s been beaten, Zito gets to the door and gets it open and Mulder is there. Zito immediately pulls him inside and puts his arms around him, leaning heavily on Mulder’s chest.
“I’m dying,” he mumbles.
Mulder pushes the hair off his forehead. “You look like shit.”
“I’m dying,” Zito repeats petulantly. Mulder walks him carefully back into the bedroom, lays him down. A plastic bag rustles, and a bottle of orange juice emerges, a handful of Jolly Ranchers. Zito closes his eyes against the pain.
“I’m so fucking sorry, Mark,” he whispers. Mulder’s hand cards through his hair.
“We’re not gonna talk about baseball anymore,” Mulder tells him evenly. “It’s stupid, I knew you were drunk.”
Zito nods, gouging his nails into his hands, clasped unseen in the curve of his body. He remembers everything, being certain that the world was near its end, and Harden was supposed to be more crippling, he was supposed to leave nothing behind.
“Temporary headcase shit, right?” Mulder says, near his ear so that Zito can feel his breath and the whole surface of his skin is afire. He manages another nod.
They’re like that for a long time, Mulder’s hand moving easily, Zito overrun with regret, thickening his throat, stealing his oxygen. He turns into Mulder, his face against Mulder’s knee.
“I saw you,” Mulder says eventually. “Leaving with Rich.”
Zito freezes, his hand clenching in the sheet. He feels like he might be about to throw up. Harden held him down, fucked him in a bathroom stall, feigned belief in an obvious lie. Zito isn’t sure that he has any memories left that don’t involve Mulder in some way, like his life has been melted down and poured into something new, like he was hammered out of shape in their rookie year and never regained his true form.
Mulder’s fingers touch the bite on Zito’s shoulder, the disordered hook of teeth and bruised skin. He traces it carefully, like it’s a hieroglyph he’s trying to learn by feel. Zito balls his hands up into fists and fits them against his eyes, breathing in shallow terror. He waits for Mulder to ask, demand, what the fuck did you let him do to you. Waits for Mulder to get up and leave without a word, never look at him again.
But Mulder only exhales, long and low, and takes his hand away. Zito chances a look through his fingers and sees Mulder staring at the wall, his clean profile stiff and motionless. Zito’s heart breaks most of the way, and he pushes up, buries his face in the crook of Mulder’s hip. Mulder gasps, his hands pattering on Zito’s shoulders.
Zito opens his mouth on the healed place, Jolly Ranchers crackling under him, and tells him over and over again, “It’s okay, it’s okay,” as the sun rises in busted jail cell bars across their bodies.
*
*
*
to the end