alternate spellings accepted
This was a request from jennyagain. Notes are at the end of the fic, to avoid spoilers.
Jon Lester/Josh Beckett
rated R
21,536 words
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. It is in no way a reflection on the actual life, behavior, or character of any of the people featured, and there is no connection or affiliation between this fictional story and the people or organizations it mentions. It was not written with any intent to slander or defame any of the people featured. No profit has been or ever will be made as a result of this story: it is solely for entertainment. And again, it is entirely fictional, i.e. not true.
alternate spellings accepted
Once, when Lester was a very small child, he had looked directly into the sun. It was partly because his mother had told him not to, and partly because Riley Carlson, the coolest boy in Lester's class, had dared him to do it, and moreover implied that Lester would prove himself a booger-nosed coward if he didn't. Lester was used to being called all sorts of things, but he definitely wasn't any kind of coward, booger-nosed or otherwise, and he wasn't going to have stupid Riley Carlson telling the other kids that he was.
He'd seen spots all over for hours afterwards, plus he had had a headache right at the top of his nose that he couldn't tell his mom about because he knew she'd just yell at him for looking in the first place. But for the few seconds he'd been able to stand it, he had seen the sun as it truly was, not as the watery diluted disk he sometimes saw through the clouds, and not at all like the smiley-faced spiky thing all the girls drew in their pictures during art class.
What he had seen was a white-gold saucer, so brilliant, so obviously powerful that he could hardly understand how something that amazing just hung there in the sky every day with nobody looking at it. It was a perfect circle, a lot more perfect than the moon, which wasn't even a real circle most of the time and had all those blotches on it anyways. It was so bright that it made the rest of the sky almost look black, so bright that just directing his eyes towards it made his whole brain hurt. It seemed like the purest white imaginable, the most radiant gold shimmering at its edges, and everything else for the rest of the day looked pale and washed out in comparison to it.
The first time he saw Josh Beckett, it was a lot like that.
----
When he came up, he was expected. There was a locker waiting for him with his name on it, white jerseys hanging inside with no name at all except for the one on the front. They had spare pairs of his favorite Nike pitching spikes and a bottle of the particular brand of neetsfoot oil he'd been using to break in his gloves since Little League. Clubhouse attendants and middle relievers looked at him sideways and muttered, Is that the kid? just loud enough for him to hear. The coaches all knew that he liked to be called Jon, not Jonathan or Jonny or Jay.
Every second or third person who walked by was some kind of future Hall of Fame contender. There was Curt Schilling, who had pitched historic World Series baseball on an ankle held together with stitches and willpower; there was David Wells, who had once thrown a perfect game while drunk just because he could; there was Manny Ramirez, who was, well, Manny Ramirez. And all of them paused to say hello to him, or to nod in a friendly way, or (in the case of Jason Varitek) to actually sit down and talk. All of them except for Manny, but he did a kind of doubletake when he saw Lester sitting there, which Varitek assured him was as good a greeting as anyone could hope for, because it usually took Manny at least a week to even realize there was someone new on the roster.
It should have been overwhelming, but everyone was working so hard to make sure he wasn't overwhelmed. It wasn't standard procedure-- much later on he'd see rookies come through the usual way, guys called up because of necessity and not because the team actually thought they had a future-- but the coaches acted so naturally that at the time he barely registered it.
They were coaches like none Lester had ever seen before, smooth around the edges like riverbed rocks worn down by flowing water, perfectly formed for channeling nervous young prospects down the path to Major League success. He knew, in a vague, intellectual way, that the stakes were near-infinitely higher at this level. He knew that if a prospect made it this far with his burgeoning potential intact there was an enormous profit to be made should he take that last step from potential to realization. He knew that if a prospect made it this far, there had been so much time and money invested in him that to screw him up-- or to let him screw himself up-- would be an almost criminal waste of resources.
The calculated professional ease with which the coaches handled him was still surprising, though, and he was in a kind of dazed, fugue state when Beckett stomped in from the weight room, caught sight of him, stopped dead, and said, "What the hell is this? We're suitin' up orphan children now?"
"This is Jon Lester," Terry Francona said, appearing as if out of thin air at Beckett's elbow. "He's just up from Pawtucket."
"Aw, this's the lefty everyone's been bangin' on about?" Beckett had been staring at Lester before, but now his gaze sharpened and focused.
Lester stared helplessly back. Beckett seemed huge, with a long easy torso leading into rangy legs in rumpled uniform pants. His hair was thick and black and stuck up all over his head like a cross between high style and plant life, its tendency towards the vertical at startling odds with the roundness of his face. He had a scruffy goatee and a sort of miniature goatee patch right under his lower lip, which, Lester would later learn, he often stroked with a callused fingertip when he was thinking. His eyes were big and bright brown and absolutely impossible for Lester to ignore.
Beckett grunted, blinked once, slowly, and shifted into an aggressively casual stance, thumbs hooked in his beltloops, hips cocked. "Hiya, lefty. What'd y'say the name was-- Lister? Jonny?"
Lester swallowed once, then swallowed again, because it wasn't quite enough the first time around. "Lester. Jon. Jon Lester. Hi."
"Yeah, OK, right, Jonny," Beckett said. For the first time in his entire adult life Lester didn't automatically offer a correction. Beckett was the coolest person he had ever seen, one of the top five or six hottest, easily; he had been in Beckett's presence for all of one minute, and was already trying to come up with ways to ingratiate himself. If Beckett wanted to call him Jonny, then Jonny he would be.
"Hey there, new kid," Mike Lowell said, drifting by. Lester nodded vaguely, and only barely heard him.
----
Beckett had quickly learned that he could derail any argument Lester was making simply by reaching up with one big hand and scruffing it through Lester's hair. Beckett's fingers would leave tingling trails of sensation all along Lester's scalp and he would find his concentration utterly destroyed, the thread of whatever it was that he'd been saying completely lost. The brilliantly self-satisfied smile Beckett got every time he did this was not helpful either.
The first time it happened they had been sitting in the dugout, watching a Schilling start and arguing about secondary pitches. Beckett declared that the only secondary pitch worth having was a good curveball, because its speed and action were so different from the fastball that hitters would have no idea what to do with it. Lester insisted that a slider was best, because hitters would expect it to act like a fastball and be caught totally off guard when it broke.
"A slider is a curveball for people who're too chickenshit to throw a real curveball," Beckett said, punctuating this with a sharp twist of his wrist in midair, holding an orphaned ball, too scuffed and dirty to remain in play, in his curveball grip.
"A curveball is just a slider for people who don't have any subtlety." Lester swiped at Beckett's hand, trying to knock the ball out, but Beckett tucked it jealously up against his chest and scoffed loudly.
"Bullshit, Jonny, pure bullshit. Who's been feedin' you these lies?" He extended his free arm, the one not protecting the ball, and vigorously ruffled Lester's hair.
Lester, who had been about to snark brilliantly back about how he didn't need anyone to think about his pitches for him, was left red-faced and gaping instead. In the few weeks that he'd known Beckett, he had become a dedicated hoarder of slight touches, incidental contacts, casual brushes, the feather-light graze of Beckett's fingertips whenever Beckett handed him something. Each one gave him a dangerous, illicitly swooping thrill in the pit of his stomach, making him reckless and cautious in equal measure. He tried to be around Beckett as much as he could, to increase the likelihood of getting to touch him, but he was terrified of initiating contact himself, lest Beckett (or anyone else) somehow catch on to him.
Here was Beckett not just barely touching Lester, but putting his whole hand on Lester's head, of his own free will. Lester got a solid shock of arousal from Beckett brushing up against him in the locker room; this made his cock spring up into hardness so fast that he felt light-headed, like all the blood had drained out of his upper body at once.
Beckett laughed out loud at the unexpected silent shock on Lester's face, and manhandled the top of Lester's head again. Lester hunched up minutely at the waist and thanked God every way he could think of for the long, loose sweatshirts they were allowed to wear on days they weren't pitching.
----
The Fenway dugout wasn't luxurious or shiny or new, but it was his home dugout, and it was also the best view in the ballpark, free to him for every home game that he didn't pitch. Rookies, he knew, generally had to fight for good rail space, but he never did-- not, in this case, because the coaches had decided he was The Future, but instead because Schilling loved having someone young and impressionable who would listen to him, and usually saved him a spot. The endlessly long lectures on pitching technique and politics and the State of Baseball Today were a reasonable price to pay for a small stretch of padded rail.
Often, if he wasn't pitching either, Beckett would join them. At first Lester didn't think anything of it, because Schilling would set up court in nothing less than the best spot, and of course Beckett would also want the choicest of rail real estate, so ending up sandwiched between the two was just a natural consequence of location. Beckett would stare stoically into the middle distance and never responded to anything Schilling said with more than a noncommittal grunt, except when Schilling would say something particularly absurd (Did I ever tell you about how I was instrumental in ending the '94 strike? I was a big deal in the union even back then, you know...), at which point Beckett would somewhat indiscreetly dig his elbow into Lester's side. It was only when he was sitting in David Wells' apartment, half blasted out of his mind on the expensive whiskey that Wells poured out like the cheap stuff, that he realized it might be something more.
Francona was forever encouraging Wells to do things with Lester, because Wells was nearly as veteran as it was possible to be, and a lefty, which in the ancient infallible baseball tradition meant that they were both at least little weird and that they had something fundamental in common. After he'd been badgered for a certain length of time Wells would grab Lester by the collar and, instead of taking him off somewhere to practice pitches, would simply shove him into the apartment, ready to impart what he considered the much more important lesson: how to deal with lots and lots of alcohol. Lester, who had never gone to college, hadn't even spent an entire season at triple-A, and certainly had never gotten significantly drunk off of anything other than cheap beer or wine before, did indeed learn a lot, although perhaps not quite what Francona had intended.
Or maybe that was precisely what Francona had intended. Lester was never entirely sure, with him.
"I see you made friends outta the friendless pitcher," Wells said, in the middle of rather carelessly sloshing whiskey into his glass. He had a habit of dropping statements like that into completely unrelated situations and conversations; Lester suspected that Wells got a kick out of watching him struggle to react to them.
This time he had to spend a minute forcing his brain into reluctant slow motion to see if he was missing something obvious. When he couldn't come up with anything he eyed Wells warily. "The... who? What? What? The... friendless pitcher?"
Wells in turn watched him closely, eyes clearly focused under his beetling brows despite the alcohol he was rapidly and efficiently putting away. "Yuh huh. Little friendless Joshie Beckett, sure seems to've taken a liking to you, ain't he?"
Lester sat back, taking this like a hammer to the front of his soggy brain. Of course Beckett was not little, and Lester thought that he had plenty of friends-- he was close enough to Lowell, anyways, and had some weird pushy big-brother-little-brother thing going on with Papelbon-- but he had a sharply antagonistic relationship with Wells. Wells obviously (and loudly, in the clubhouse) thought that Beckett was an uppity punk while Beckett obviously (and loudly, in the clubhouse) thought that Wells was a disgusting has-been. Wells calling him this or that didn't necessarily mean that he actually was. But it was a weird statement for even Wells to make if there was nothing but his usual Beckett-directed belligerent animosity behind it.
"He doesn't... I mean, he doesn't like me any more'n he likes anyone," Lester said, faltering just a little under Wells' gaze. There was no way Wells knew about Lester's crush (a horrible way of putting it, but there was really no other word for that type of desperate, hopeful obsession), no way anyone did, but he could feel a hot blush crawling up the back of his neck just the same.
Wells stared at him for a bit, swishing whiskey around in his mouth. It was disturbingly like having an older relative, an uncle or something, stare him down after accusing him of breaking a window with a baseball. With his substantial paunch and his bald head and his graying goatee, Wells was something out of a completely different generation, an entirely different type of ballplayer. They had exercise routines these days, trainer-approved diets; there were big guys, but not big like Wells, not anymore.
A deeply concerned trainer had once given Wells a diet chart, back when he was with the Yankees, and ordered him to follow it closely. The story, as related to Lester by Lowell, was that Wells returned the chart three days later, covered in stains of unnameable provenance, with everything sloppily crossed out and the words chips and booze scrawled across the top. The trainer, allegedly, had vowed to never work with baseball players again and had gone to consult for Olympic wrestlers, who would actually pay attention to nutritional regimens.
"You got any idea how much he hates Schilling?"
Lester blinked, slotting Beckett into he, and shook his head. Wells nodded with a kind of grim relish. "Hates him a fuck of a lot. Schill treats him like he's still a rook, see, and little Joshie's convinced he's seen and done it all. Hates it. Useta be you couldn't pay him to spend ten minutes near that blowhard." Wells didn't think too highly of Schilling either. "But when you," Wells pointed a blunt forefinger at Lester, "when you play eager beaver greenhorn, half the time little Joshie's right up there too, puttin' his own ass right in the line of fire. How come? It sure ain't 'cause he alla sudden wants to hear what Schill's sayin'."
"I.... uh." Lester hunched forward over the table, thinking hard. He took a big drink of whiskey just to give his hands and mouth something to do while his mind congealed around this information, then continued to clutch the glass, certain that if he put it down, Wells would immediately refill it.
From then on he paid much more careful attention to Beckett's position on the rail. It was true that Beckett normally stayed as far away from Schilling as possible, the only exceptions being those days when Lester found himself the half-willing recipient of Schilling's lectures. It could have been anything-- it could have been something as vaguely ignominious as Beckett taking pity on him-- but he still couldn't stop himself from blushing and smiling and being deeply thankful that Wells, on the mound, wasn't watching the rail the next time Beckett eased up casually beside him.
----
He did not think he had ever experienced a series more grueling than the August Yankee series: five games in four days, all of them in front of the fractious Boston crowd, all of them losses. Lester pitched the second game, the night half of a rare Friday double-header, and didn't even make it out of the fourth inning. He had never felt so bad on a baseball field before, not even during the high school game he had pitched while sick with what would later turn out to have been food poisoning. Neither the equally short outing of the Yankee starter nor the raucous boos that came when Johnny Damon hit a home run off of him were of any consolation.
The very next day Beckett was rocked for nine runs in less than six innings. A gloomy pall was settling over all of them, and even Schilling was quiet on the rail as they watched Beckett grind his teeth and rub the ball like he was trying to take the hide right off of it. When Beckett sat down in the dugout between innings he draped a towel over his head and refused to talk to anyone, including Varitek, who ended up sitting next to him, uselessly muttering about pitch selection to himself.
After the game, Beckett cornered Lester just outside the showers. Beckett's face was terrifyingly blank and his voice, when he informed Lester that they were going out to get drunk later that night, was flat and devoid of emotion. Lester was pretty sure that he had never had a more inappropriate erection, but Beckett was clad only in old, Marlins-teal sandals and a towel carelessly folded around his hips, doing nothing at all to conceal the trail of wiry hair that led downwards from his bellybutton. The hair on his chest was still dotted with stray drops of water.
Lester nervously clutched at his own towel and nodded rapidly at everything Beckett said. He would be completely fine, just as soon as he could get some pants between Beckett and himself.
They took a cab from the ballpark to the bar Beckett had chosen, far away from downtown Boston. They might even have been outside the city; the cabbie drove for a long time, and Lester wasn't familiar enough with the area to know where he was during the day, let alone at night. Beckett didn't say anything at all, staring out the window with his hands clenched into fists in his lap. Lester spent the entire ride trying to work up the courage to reach over and gently touch his arm, but never quite got there.
The bar was a crowded, dark, club-dive hybrid with pounding loud music spilling out into the street and a straggling line out front, which Beckett bypassed effortlessly. Lester hurried to stay within his wake, resisting the automatic urge to show his ID to the bouncer at the door. He was still getting used to being in places like this legally, but if they were waving you in ahead of the line they probably didn't give a shit how old you were.
The noise was a little bit disappointing. Lester wanted to talk to Beckett, wanted Beckett to talk to him. It wasn't that he thought it would lead anywhere-- he was usually an optimist, and even for him some ideas were just too preposterous-- but it would be nice, just the two of them. Teammates, fellow starting pitchers; maybe, if Lester was thinking really optimistically, friends. So it was disappointing: there would be no talking in this kind of din.
Beckett didn't stop at the bar, though, instead pressing forward through the crowd of sweaty people with a single-minded determination until suddenly they were at the back wall, moving along it until they came to a door with another bouncer. This bouncer actually remained unmoved until Beckett pulled out an ID-- not his driver's license, Lester noticed, but the official Red Sox ID that got him into stadiums all around the league, just in case some guard in, say, Kansas City didn't recognize him. Lester reached for his own, but Beckett said something to the bouncer, who waved Lester through with a bored expression on his face.
He's with me, Lester realized. That was what Beckett had said.
The room inside was much quieter once the door had shut behind them. There were tables set into deep booths along the walls, some with curtains pulled across them. Beckett sat down as far away from the door as possible and Lester slid in across from him, his ears still cottonballed from the sound in the main room. A waiter sidled up much more obsequiously than Lester would have expected in a place like this. Better dressed, too. He understood, belatedly, that this was some kind of VIP room.
"Rum'n'coke," Beckett mumbled. "Better make it a biggun." Lester opened his mouth to order a beer, but Beckett tipped his tired face up to the waiter, said, "Him too," and Lester found that he did not have the heart to argue.
They sat in silence for a while, waiting for their drinks, and they sat in silence for a while longer once the drinks got there, Lester sipping and Beckett drinking in big gulps like it was water. It really, really wasn't: the rum-to-coke ratio was definitely skewed in favor of the rum, which was both searing and spicy on the back of Lester's tongue.
The silence eventually started to be oppressive. Lester could hear the muted thump thump of the music out by the main bar, and Beckett still didn't have any kind of expression on his face, just that grayed-out deadness. It was sort of like being trapped in an Edgar Allen Poe story, the telltale heart mixed up with one of those ghost plots that Lester had never quite gotten straight in high school.
"So," he said, tentative, "the Yankees really do suck, like everyone says. Uh, out here." Beckett slowly raised his eyes up from the surface of the table. "They... I. I guess I didn't really get that. Um. Before now."
Beckett blinked at him once, those big brown eyes almost wholly obscured by the black of his pupils in the low light. "My ERA in the 2003 World Series was 1.10," he said.
"I.... what?"
"My Eeee Arrr Aay," Beckett repeated, more slowly, "in two thousand and three. In the World Series. Was one point one oh."
"Oh," Lester said. "Um. OK?"
In 2003 he had been the youngest player on the single-A Augusta GreenJackets, nineteen years old on a team whose oldest player had been twenty-five. They had all watched the World Series in the Denny's closest to the ballpark, bullshitting each other about how they would have executed this play or that differently, almost as far removed from the actual action as the bored waitresses who served them mozzarella sticks and did not hesitate to smack them across the backs of their heads if they smeared sauce on the tables.
In 2003 Beckett had been the World Series MVP, pitching a complete game shut-out on short rest. He had been the one to make the tag for the series-winning final out, the winning pitcher who helped rocket the cheap Little Florida Team that Could to victory over the Big Bad (heavily favored) Yankees.
Lester and the other GreenJackets had watched him pitch on TV while they had argued over who had ordered cherry Coke and who had ordered the regular kind.
"The Yankees only suck," Beckett said, "if you let 'em get to you."
"They're a different team. From 2003," Lester said, feeling his way cautiously.
Beckett scowled down into his drink. "We're lettin' 'em get to us," he muttered darkly. "We-- I'm lettin' 'em get to me. It shouldn't be any different, Marlins or Sox, I should know better. I do know better, but it fuckin' is different."
Lester nodded eagerly; finally something on which he could safely agree. "The rivalry. Yeah. That's what I meant, it's. It's real, it's big, it's."
"Shouldn't let it get to me. Us," Beckett grumbled.
"It's everyone, though. Not just you. It's... these games, they're long and messy on both sides and they're winning 'cause of... of shitty luck, on us, I guess. It's not just you," Lester said, feeling weirdly insistent about it. It wasn't just Beckett. He had pitched like shit too, and so had Jason Johnson, and so had the bullpen.
Beckett shook his head, slow and ponderous. "Yeah, but it is, though. I'm lettin' it psych me out. Playing here.... useta be wouldn't hardly anyone show up to watch us, right? In Florida. Some days we'd get like a thousand asses in the seats, max, and some o'those were comin' to watch the other team. Ain't like that here. They give a shit 'bout baseball, here, and, and--"
"And they give a shit about the Yankees," Lester finished. "Out here. Yeah."
"I been lettin' it get me up here," Beckett said, jabbing a finger at the side of his head. "Stupid shit."
Lester looked down into his rum and coke, mostly full while Beckett's was mostly empty. He dropped one of hands under the table like he was going to wipe his palm on his jeans, and crossed his fingers where no one could see. "Maybe. Maybe you should do something to, to help get your mind off it. Y'know. Like go out and. Go out, get some girls, y'know, or, or something. Clear your head."
"I'm clearin' my head right now." Beckett's face was inscrutable in the low light, but he didn't look quite as flat, as lackluster as he had before. "That's what we're doin'."
"OK," Lester said. Pitchers dealt with bad outings in lots of different ways; what worked for one guy might not work at all for another. It didn't mean anything. It didn't mean anything. It didn't-- no matter how much he might want it to.
----
West coast trips were not particularly fun at any time, but a long trip right after five straight losses to the Yankees was practically intolerable. They made it through a series in Anaheim, then spectacularly bombed what should have been a relatively easy trip to Safeco. Lester was supposed to start the first game in Oakland, but on the flight in from Seattle his back started to hurt.
He had been in a little car accident earlier that month-- a stupid nothing of an incident, some typical asshole Boston driver rear-ending him on his way to the park-- so it was just residual muscle ache, soreness from the accident exacerbated by the stress of a bad series and the reliable annoyance of airplane seating. He got a heat pack from the trainer when they got to the hotel and lay on the hotel bed on his stomach for a while, waiting for it to feel better.
It didn't. In the morning it was worse; sharp, jagged pain overlaying a feeling like a bone-deep full-body bruise. His neck was stiff and sore to the point where he could barely turn his head. Francona took one look at him when they got to the ballpark and immediately called Theo Epstein, the general manager, to say that Lester was going on the DL.
"But I have to make my start!"
"If your back is still fucked up from that crash--"
"Minor fender-bender," Lester insisted.
Francona rolled his eyes. "If your back is still fucked up from that minor fender-bender, that's a risk we're absolutely not willing to take. You know what you're worth to this team, Jonny. We're not putting that in jeopardy. And, to be quite honest, you look like horseshit. Even if it's just a bug y'look like you could use the rest."
"Well, thanks, that's just great," Lester muttered. Everyone had known to call him Jon when he first came up; after a few months of Beckett shouting Hey, Jonny! at him from across the locker room, they had all started doing it.
They flew him right back to Boston and sent him straight to Mass General Hospital in a team car with tint-darkened windows, not even giving him time to drop his bag off at his apartment. He had to lie still under the MRI machine, which made him feel frantic even though he wasn't normally claustrophobic at all, and then he had to get his back and neck palpated, which hurt like hell, and then they had to draw a million different samples of blood, "because it's standard procedure".
He was sitting up in his hospital bed, grumpy because the nurse had taken away his bag so that he couldn't change back into his street clothes the second she left the room like he'd been threatening to do. His hospital gown was flimsy and awful. He was gritty-eyed and exhausted from the flight and he had no idea what time it was anymore, his body running on what felt like five different timezones at once.
One of the doctors walked in, looking solemn.
Oh, fuck, Lester thought. If the doctor's face was anything to go by, he had really done a number on his back. He could only hope that it wasn't some kind of deep muscle thing, or, God forbid, a slipped disk, something for which he'd need surgery. Maybe he would be lucky and the 15-day DL would be long enough to heal up whatever this was. Whatever it was, Francona was probably going to be near-insufferably smug about being right.
"The first thing you should understand is that this is almost certainly treatable," the doctor said, his fingers fiddling nervously around the edges of his clipboard, which was not reassuring. "We've caught it very early. We'll run a few more tests to make sure, and to determine the type, but. Well. I'm sorry, son, there's no easy way to say this." He took a deep breath and waited until Lester looked him in the eye. "You have cancer. A lymphoma, it looks like, from the preliminary tests."
Lester stared at him. "Are you... I'm in here for a back injury. Is this, is this some kind of joke?"
The doctor blinked in open surprise. "Um. This is a hospital, son. We don't generally joke about that kind of thing."
"I'm in here for a back injury," Lester repeated, plaintively. "I'm not. Did you mix up my chart with someone else's? I don't have cancer."
"It showed up-- I'm sorry, son, truly I am, it did show up in your blood tests. Your lymph nodes are enlarged, which is a common symptom. Your white blood cell count... it's a good thing you came in when you did, this early we really have every shot in the world at beating this thing. Every shot in the world." Lester stared at him some more. "I'm sorry," the doctor said, very gently.
"You don't understand. I. I just got called up. I don't--"
"Of course," the doctor said. "I do understand." He looked down at the clipboard, hefted it meaningfully. "Look, would you... would you like to see the test results? It helps some people, to see it laid out, to know... I have the papers here. I can explain the notations and charts to you, and then, if there's anyone you'd like to call... I understand this is all very sudden and unexpected, son, but I think it's also important that we talk about treatment options as soon as possible..."
"Right," Lester said, dazed. Cancer. Cancer. He was 22 years old, he had just been called up to the Majors. Cancer. It didn't sound real, not like something that applied to his life, to him. "I should. I should call my parents. My coach." The doctor nodded, put his clipboard down-- the numbers and graphs that Lester really did not want to see-- and came around to show him how to get the bedside phone to dial out.
----
The team came back home to Boston a few days later. Lester was still in the hospital, although it wasn't as though he was going to drop dead at any moment; it wasn't that kind of cancer. It was just the Red Sox being paranoid about their property. The doctors ran a few tests per day and mostly left him alone with his thoughts, which was almost exactly where he least wanted to be.
"Heya, kiddo," Francona said. Lester looked up from the old Baseball America he'd been reading, filled with articles about Southern college players and where they were projected to go in the 2002 draft. He had been amusing himself by trying to find names he actually recognized. So far he had Khalil Greene (Clemson) and Lance Cormier (Alabama, gratifyingly drafted several rounds after Lester had been taken).
"Hey. Um. Shouldn't you be at the park?" He glanced up at the clock on the wall. The team-- the team minus him-- had a game against the Blue Jays in just a few hours. Roy Halladay was starting. It wasn't going to be an easy game to win.
Francona shrugged. "Yeah, probably. Just wanted to check in. See how you were holdin' up."
"I'm OK. I mean." Lester rubbed at the bandaid on the inside of his right elbow. He'd asked them to do as many of the blood drawings as they could on his right arm; he wasn't going to be allowed to go out and pitch with cancer, but... just in case. "I'm not, like... dying, um, yet, I guess. I don't feel too bad."
Francona sat down in the little particleboard chair next to Lester's bed. He was wearing his red game sweatshirt and the almost-tapered jeans that made Lester think of Little League dads. His eyes, behind his glasses, were tired.
"I know there isn't exactly much I can do for you, Jonny," he said, tentatively resting a hand on the sheet; not on top of Lester's hand, but near it. "If there's anything at all, though, that'll be a help, I just want you to know that I'll do it, whatever I can, and that goes for the rest of us too."
"Does... does the rest of the team know?"
Francona shook his head. "Me, Theo, I guess the owners know by now. The media doesn't know yet. None of the players do."
"Would you." Lester looked down at the white sheets, his fingers pale on top of them. "Could you. Tell the guys for me?"
"Of course. I. Yes, of course, Jon," Francona said, nudging his hand over so that his fingers could wrap around Lester's. Lester made a tiny noise, a sharply cut-off hiccup, involuntarily wrenched from his throat. Francona immediately got up and wrapped his arms carefully around Lester's shoulders, like he was afraid Lester would break apart if he squeezed too hard. Lester buried his face in the front of Francona's sweatshirt, held on with both hands to the back of it, and mortifyingly soaked right through the fabric with his crying.
----
"What's it like?" Wells asked, dirty shoes up on the side of Lester's bed, the chair straining valiantly under his bulk. Lester was stuck in the hospital for the start of his chemotherapy course, although the doctors kept promising that he might be able to get it as an outpatient procedure later. He suspected that the Red Sox were leaning on them to keep him close at hand.
"What-- having cancer? It's like... it's like having cancer, jeez, what the hell'm I supposed to say to that?"
"I meant what's it like tryin' to fuck little Joshie," Wells said, smiling in complacent triumph when Lester spit out the water he had been drinking.
"I am not trying to... to... to do anything with Josh Beckett," he said, after he had stopped coughing and had fought down the wave of nausea that had engendered.
Wells tipped the chair back on two legs, making it creak ominously. "Liar, liar, pants on fire."
"I'm not even wearing any pants," Lester protested. It was true. There was no point in wearing anything other than the stupid hospital gown if he was just going to lie around under the sheets and feel sick all day.
"Didn't really wanna know that, rook." Wells was the only one on the team who had never gotten into the habit of calling Lester Jonny, but he often called him rook or rookie, which was really just as bad. "And whatever, liar, liar, paper dress on fire."
"It's fabric." Lester sighed, leaning back against the propped-up pillows, suddenly too tired to fight it any more. "What. How did you know?"
Wells just stared at him, an even, considering gaze. 2006 was either his 19th or 20th season, Lester couldn't remember. He had been on the Yankees in two separate eras, and there had been rumors about that team even back when Lester was in middle school. Wells had been around long enough to see plenty.
"OK, OK, OK." Lester flushed, a rush of light-headedness accompanying it. "I don't, it's not going to turn into anything. It's just stupid. He doesn't even like." He turned away to look out the window, which had an inspiring view of another part of the hospital complex. "He doesn't even like guys."
"I don't think he really likes anyone," Wells said thoughtfully.
Lester threw a pillow at him in tolerant annoyance. "You can't even give it a rest for five seconds, can you? He likes plenty of people, he gets along, he has friends--"
Wells caught the pillow and settled it behind his shoulders. "I mean sexually." Lester winced. Wells using the word sexually was like hearing his Dad use it. Wells rolled his eyes. "Seriously. I'm bein' serious. You ever seen him take a groupie out back o'the bar?"
"It's not like I'm with him all the time, I'm sure he--"
"You ask Mikey, he ain't seen it either." Lowell had been on the Yankees with Wells, a rookie while Wells was an eleven-year vet; then he'd been on the Marlins for a number of years with Beckett, winning the World Series together. He was one of the few people on the Red Sox, aside from Lester and Varitek, who was able to be friends with both. And Varitek didn't really count, because he was a catcher even when he wasn't in uniform and there wasn't a pitcher on the team who would ever be able to tell if he didn't like them.
"So, what, he's careful. There's nothing wrong with careful. The coaches are always practically begging us to be careful."
Wells shook his head. "It's more'n that."
"What are you saying?" Lester asked. "He dates. He dates women, I've seen. I mean, the papers."
"Yeah, he gets himself photographed with some country music blondie or whatever, he gets himself seen with the sorority chicks, but I don't think he fucks none of 'em."
"What?" Lester laughed out loud. It hurt his back, and on both sides of his neck under his jaw, but the idea was so ridiculous. "You're kiddin' me, right? I mean... Josh Beckett!"
"I've seen the guys who fuck the girls," Wells insisted. "I've seen the guys who fuck the guys. And I'm tellin' you Joshie ain't fuckin' none of 'em."
Lester rolled his eyes up to the ceiling. "OK. Let's just... let's assume just for a second that you're right. Then... what the fuck, I can't even do that! Why would he not... he's Josh Beckett." Wells raised an eyebrow, which Lester ignored. So he happened to personally find Beckett's stupid botanical hair distractingly hot; it didn't change the fact that Beckett was objectively hot too, and, even if he hadn't been, he was still an All Star pitcher in a city that had torrid collective love affairs with even its crappy players. "Why wouldn't he go out and get laid at least sometimes? I mean, c'mon. David. That's crazy."
"I don't know what goes on in his fucked-up brains," Wells said with an air of injured dignity. "That's how I've seen it and that's how it is." Lester shook his head, smiling down at the sheet. Wells huffed and folded his hands precisely, resting them on his own stomach like a mobster parody. "Believe what you want, rook. I'm tellin' you, that little weirdo ain't fuckin' nothin'."
----
Lester looked hard at Beckett when he came to visit (after Wells, twice, and Varitek, and Papelbon, and Theo, and Ortiz, and Francona three times, but before Lowell and Schilling got around to it). He was just the same as he ever was, maybe a little more quiet and hesitant than usual-- Lester thought that Beckett probably did not handle hospitals very well.
It wasn't that Lester had expected Wells to rat him out, but Wells might have thought it would be fun to tell Beckett about Lester's... whatever, his stupid crush, just so that he could watch Beckett squirm. He was kind of touched to realize that Wells was placing Lester's mostly unspoken confidence above The Beckett Feud.
"Uh. I didn't bring you nothin', I guess. Sorry," Beckett said. The table next to Lester's bed was overwhelmed with flowers: a little pot of violets from Francona and his wife; a bizarre cactus that looked like a brain from Theo; a vaguely inappropriate bunch of red roses brought by Papelbon, who had shiftily claimed that his girlfriend made him bring them; and one enormous, overwhelming bouquet of multi-colored daisies from Ortiz, who had unashamedly announced that he had picked them out himself. There was also a teddy bear in a Red Sox jersey clutching a card, courtesy of Wells. Lester had taped the card shut so that the nurses wouldn't be accidentally scandalized.
"It's OK," he said. "It's fine, really, I have plentya this stuff already. Uh, as you can see."
Beckett sat down gingerly, perching on the end of the chair like he was afraid to lean back and take up even the semblance of comfort. He eyed the flowers. "You, uh, really like daisies?"
Lester lifted one shoulder minutely in a weak parody of a shrug, the best he could manage at the moment. "What'm I gonna do, say, 'No, take 'em back'?" Beckett smirked crookedly. The truth was that Lester actually kind of did like the daisies; they brightened up the hospital room and he tended to smile a little easier when he could see them. It was a bit like having Ortiz grinning at his bedside, which was... well, it was nice. It sounded stupid even in his own head and definitely was not something he was going to explain to Beckett.
They sat quietly for a while, Lester trying to breath slowly and deeply to stave off the nausea that was becoming a stupidly oppressive constant, Beckett teetering awkwardly on the chair.
"Look--" Lester finally said, at the exact same time that Beckett started to say, "Hey, I--" They both stopped and grinned sheepishly at each other. Lester waggled his fingers at Beckett, telling him to go ahead. Beckett looked like he wanted to argue, even opened his mouth to say something contrary, but stopped himself. Maybe he could tell how tired Lester was.
"I just wanted t'say, um." Beckett looked at his knees, then at the edge of the bed, then the windowsill, his gaze finally coming to rest, somewhat reluctantly, on the daisies. "The season. Uh, y'know, without you, um, around, it's. It kinda ain't as fun. That's. That's just. Y'know. I just wanted to say."
"Oh," Lester said, because he could not think of anything else to say.
Beckett nodded at the daisies, turning red only at the very tips of his ears. "You, uh, you better come back. Y'know, next season. Or, whenever you beat this shit. Y'know, even if it takes, um, a while. You just, uh, you better come back to... to the team."
"I. I'm planning on it," Lester said. His face felt hot and his throat felt tight, his stomach jumping in some new way unrelated to the chemo.
Beckett nodded some more. His eyes were darting between the daisies and Lester's hands, which were lying on top of the sheets, slack and immobile because he had so very little energy at all these days. "OK. OK. Good. Um, also, you, uh." He took a big breath, then let it all out in a whoosh, the words rushing out with it in a speedy jumble. "You ain't come out to my ranch yet neither an' you gotta do that 'cause it's a good time an' you ain't done it yet and. You gotta."
Lester nodded, his face absolutely burning. He didn't trust himself to speak; he was sure that his voice would crack, he would burst into tears, he would say something irredeemably embarrassing like I know I don't even know you that well but I think I'm in love with you.
Beckett shifted, standing up, moving closer to the bed. His hand was halfway up before Lester recognized the motion; it was Beckett reaching out to ruffle Lester's hair, like always. He just barely managed to get his own hand up in time, palm out in a universal stop gesture. Beckett froze, his face going blank so fast that it was like a steel cleat spike to the center of Lester's chest.
"It's not," he said, not you, and I wish you could, it's not you. "I, my hair, it's been. It's starting to fall out, kinda, little pieces. You, you don't wanna."
Something complicated happened to Beckett's face. He lowered his hand and balled it up into a fist at his side. He stared at the wall for a minute, his jaw tightly clenched, a muscle on the side of it jumping.
"Fuck," he finally hissed. "Fuck this. Fuck cancer. Fuck it right in its cunt-suckin' face."
Lester laughed; a weak, wavering laugh, startled out of him. "Yeah. Uh, no shit, man."
Beckett sat back down, but on the edge of Lester's bed this time, near Lester's feet. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, he looked right at Lester, his expression easier than it had been. "So. OK. Did I tellya 'bout the Fenway Battle of the Wells we jus' had?" Lester shook his head. "Toronto was in town, y'know, Vernon Wells. So he comes up to the plate, and Wells-- OK, it was Fat Wells and Black Wells, that's how I'll call 'em-- anyway Fat Wells is talkin' all this shit, just every kinda shit you can think of, yellin' it off the mound, total bush league shit. He mighta been drunk up there, 'Tek couldn't do nothin' to make him get movin'. Who knows, with him? Black Wells is standing there waitin' for the pitch just gettin' madder'n madder. So eventually he yells, 'Hey, mothafucka, they payin' you to play ball or they payin' you to flap your mouth hole?' and Fat Wells says..."
Lester pretended to resettle himself in the bed, using the motion to shift his foot up against the side of Beckett's thigh. Beckett didn't move, kept right on talking, and Lester relaxed, about as content as he possibly could be, given the circumstances.
----
Two doctors, one young and one old, gave him a big list when he was (provisionally) discharged from inpatient care. If he developed uncontrollable nosebleeds, he had to call the hospital. If he was unable to keep down even the blandest, most inert foods, he had to call the hospital. If he had dizzy spells bad enough to make him actually fall over, he had to call the hospital. If his lymph nodes enlarged any further, he had to call the hospital. If he got a bruise that kept getting bigger instead of fading, or if he started bruising much easier than usual, he had to call the hospital.
He was under no circumstances allowed to drive himself to the hospital for his chemotherapy sessions. If he was unable to reach a friend or family member, he had to call the hospital, which would send a driver to pick him up. If he felt even the least bit disoriented, he should call the hospital and then lock his car keys in a drawer. If he felt like he was coming down with a cold, no matter how mild, he had to call the hospital. If he was at any point in time upset, curious, depressed, not sure what he should do or just overly bored, he had to call the hospital.
"Man," he said, flipping through the thick stack of pages, "how much money do the Red Sox give this hospital?"
The older doctor frowned disapprovingly. The younger one shrugged and said, "A whole lot."
----
September was a bad month to be a part of a struggling baseball team; it was exponentially worse for a player who could not even sit in the dugout. Lester had been out of the hospital for most of the latter half of the month, but the chemo had thoroughly compromised his immune system. The clubhouse was such an effective incubator of easily-passed-around diseases, the stomach bugs and flu-like nothings that were a fact of life for a ballplayer in the fall-- they were something much more sinister, now, to Lester, and he didn't dare go to the ballpark even to just sit on the bench. The team doctor had explained it in big words to Francona, who had explained it in smaller words to the team.
Lester appreciated it. Of course he did. He didn't want to contract a stupid infection that at the best might set back his chemo schedule and at the worst had the potential to be deadly, but the simple fact of it was that it drastically reduced the number of visits he got, and it wasn't as though he could go out. He was so listless, so quick to tire, and the number of public places that were breeding grounds for bacteria was startling once he actually had to stop and think about it. The Boston subway system would have killed him in an hour. The Fenway stands would have struck him down before the end of a clean-pitched game.
Francona called every few days, Lester's main lifeline to the real world, a world not boxed into a narrow hall of pain and pain management, injections to heal him that made him feel even sicker. Lester usually didn't have much to say, but that never seemed to bother Francona at all. Lowell called, and Varitek, and Ortiz had a habit of calling at odd hours when the team was on the road, leaving rambling messages that Lester could understand only half of the time.
The only one to actually venture over, though, was Wells, who showed up wearing a surgical mask and rubber gloves and (for some reason) a clear plastic shower cap with translucent flowers printed on it stretched over his bald head. He changed into an enormous set of pale green scrubs right there in the hall outside of Lester's apartment, stuffing his regular clothes into a duffel bag.
"They're sterile," he explained, when Lester, completely baffled, let him in. "Leastaways they were before I put 'em on in your nasty fuckin' hall. Get your landlord to break out a paintbrush now'n then, huh?"
"Ummm. I have a bathroom?"
Wells shot him an exasperated look over the top of the surgical mask and heaved the duffel into a corner. "The point is to not contaminate your place with my biohazard street duds, rook. D'you even know what I ate for lunch today? I got it offa cart. On the street. It came on a stick. It got all over my shirt."
At first he thought that Wells was making fun of him, somehow, or that the whole thing was some kind of elaborate joke at his expense. But the hours passed and Wells stuck around, bullshitting, putting his feet up on all of Lester's furniture (sneakers off, fresh sterile socks on). He gradually realized that it wasn't a joke, that Wells wanted to spend time with him and was sincerely trying to avoid making him any sicker than he already was. The fact that his attempt resulted in something so over-the-top and ridiculous was just, he supposed, essentially David Wells.
After Wells had gone over all the late season gossip and the more ridiculous bits of idle speculation about the postseason, he got up and, with no sort of preamble at all, started to clean up Lester's apartment. It was pretty bad; Lester was just too tired, most of the time, to put things away, to stack things neatly, to clean things or throw them out. But Wells, he knew, was not one to talk: Wells would be living happily in a pile of his own empty alcohol containers and take-out boxes if he didn't pay for a cleaning service.
"What're you doing?" Lester asked, vaguely horrified. "You don't have to... you're not my mom."
"Shut the fuck up, rook," Wells said, bright and cheery and muffled behind his mask, turning an empty pizza box around in his hands with a kind of professional curiosity before breaking it up and stuffing it into a trash bag. He picked up a fast food bag and hmmed in quiet approval.
Lester wanted to argue. Wanted to tell Wells that he didn't need someone to take care of him, didn't need someone to clean up his mess, was doing just fine-- for some relative value of fine-- on his own. Because, maybe contrary to all appearances and expectations, he was. He was keeping himself alive, anyhow, in the ways that mattered. But he was so, so tired, and arguing about it seemed like such a chore when he did, after all, have the option of keeping his mouth shut and just sinking back into the cushions of his couch, letting his eyes track Wells around the room, in and out of doorways, until his eyelids grew too heavy to hold up any longer.
----
When he woke up, Wells was sitting on the couch next to him, watching a Dodgers/Padres game on ESPN and drinking from a can of beer, the surgical mask dangling loosely around his neck. The apartment did not exactly look like a bunch of magical fairies had whisked away all the evidence of dirt and grime and sickness, but at least it looked marginally cleaner, with the surfaces mostly clear (if not dusted) and the window shades open to let in the last of the pale Boston daylight.
"Isn't that flat?" he asked, looking sidelong at Wells. He hadn't even remembered that he had beer in the apartment.
Wells shrugged, not taking his eyes off of the TV. "Fuck do I care?"
They watched the Dodgers beat up on Jake Peavy for a while. People were wearing t-shirts and tank tops in the stands, and Peavy kept pausing to wipe the sweat out from under his hat. It was kind of amazing to Lester that it was still warm and summery somewhere in the world; Boston was already sliding inexorably towards the icy grip of winter.
"Garciaparra," Wells said, practically spitting. "Fuck that guy."
Lester blinked. Nomar Garciaparra was indeed on the screen, innocently doing his obsessive little pre-at-bat glove adjustments. "What? You never even played with him."
"I was on the Yankees somea the time he was in Boston," Wells rumbled. "Trust me. He's a wuss-ass pansy fucker." He glanced over at Lester. "No offense to pansies, 'course." While Lester was sputtering over that, Wells took a long swig of his flat beer, swallowed, and glanced over again. "Speakin' of. Joshie stop by yet?"
Lester's mouth opened and closed silently. He was fully aware that he looked like some kind of bony fish and he was wholly unable to do anything about it. Wells snorted softly. "No worries. I'll talk to him."
"David. No. Uh, no." Lester might not know everything there was to know about team dynamics just yet, but he knew that Wells talking to Beckett about... about whatever it was Wells intended to talk about would be a very, very, very bad idea.
Wells smirked and finished off his beer, crumpling the can up in his fist. "Arright, so I'll have Mikey talk to him."
"How about we have nobody talk to him--"
"Look, I think he's a slack piece o'shit," Wells said, talking right over Lester. "Not even. He's the piece o'corn stuck in the middle of a piece o'shit. I wouldn't mind one bit if I never hadda think 'bout him again. But you like him--" Lester made a weak noise of protest, which Wells waved off, "--you like him however it is you like him, and he, despite usually havin' more hair than brains, likes you however it is he likes you. And I'm not gonna have you sittin' 'round all sad from not talking to him just 'cause he's too goddamn horsefuckin' cowardly to deal with someone he likes bein' sick."
Lester shook his head, but it was mostly for show: he had spent enough time with Wells, by now, to recognize when Wells was going to dig his heels in about something. "Just, don't. Don't be too..."
"No worries," Wells repeated. He had a little smile twitching at the sides of his goatee, like he already had an idea and was just thinking about the best way to implement it.
Lester sighed and scrunched down further into the cushions, trying (and failing) to find a position that wouldn't make his back and his neck hurt. He listened to Wells make fun of the National League relief pitchers (Can you believe this? This freak woulda been pulled two batters ago in the real league) and gaped in amazement with Wells at the late slugging Dodger comeback and rolled his eyes as Wells raged over Garciaparra's walk-off tenth inning homer.
"Wish we could get some'a that," Wells grumbled, the Dodgers jumping all over each other in a blissfully happy pile of white and blue at home plate. Lester, who would have settled for being a poorly-regarded middle reliever on the losing team so long as it meant he was on the field, closed his eyes and nodded.
----
The sicker Lester got, the more Beckett existed around the edges of Lester's consciousness, a ghost whose presence was always felt but never seen.
After Wells talked to him-- or berated him, or got Lowell to talk to him, or whatever it was that Wells did; Lester was too terrified to ever ask for details-- Beckett called infrequently, saying hey, Jonny with a kind of desperate cheerfulness, talking for a short time, letting his end of the conversation lag more and more as the phone call wore on until, invariably, something would come up all of a sudden and he would have to dash off. After a while he stopped calling at all.
"Josh was asking how you were doing," Lowell would say, casually mentioned like it was just the natural course of the conversation. Lowell had an idea of what Lester was going through, having gone through some of it himself, years ago, and he called to talk more often than his incidental, mostly second-hand friendship with Lester might have otherwise suggested.
"He could always call and hear for himself," Lester would say, trying and failing to keep the hurt out of his voice.
"Hmmm," Lowell would say in response, and the conversation would move on to other things.
----
The last game of the season was a joke, no other word for it: five innings, cut short by the cold Boston rain, just about as lame a denouement as anyone could imagine. Lester watched it masochistically from his couch, every TV camera shot of the guys lined up on the dugout rail wrenching at something deep inside his chest. Boston won, although it hardly mattered. It was only against Baltimore, they weren't going to the postseason, and Lester didn't even know the kid they had starting. Beckett had been referring to him as Hackeysack since he'd been called up, and Lester had learned that before he ever learned the kid's real name. Devvy Handsack, or something.
Normally this time of year he'd be heading back home to Washington, if he wasn't playing winter ball, but there was no better place for treatment than Boston, especially with the team-influenced doctors taking such careful care of him. The breaks between chemo cycles were not long enough to let him travel anyways; not even if he'd had the energy, which he didn't.
Everything else slowly fell away. Wells' offseason home was in California, and without his occasional visits Lester's human interaction was basically reduced to the nurses and doctors at the hospital, other tired and unwell people in hospital waiting rooms, and whoever the hospital sent to pick him up for his chemo sessions and checkups. The sight of their scrubs never cheered him like the sight of Wells' had, and he felt an absurd disappointment each time he went to the hospital and failed to see anyone wearing a flowered shower cap.
He was never hungry and he was often nauseous, so eating became a chore. He couldn't bear to look at or smell most food, let alone put it in his mouth, chew it up, and swallow it. He knew-- the doctors all told him-- that losing so much weight would only make it harder to come back when (if) he got back on the pitcher's mound, but maintaining his playing weight was an impossibility. He had been exercising every single day, putting a pro pitcher's strain on his body once every five days, and eating like a horse to make up for it all. He could barely remember what that kind of normal ballplayer's existence was like.
His summer tan had long since faded, the browned lines his jersey sleeves marked on his biceps and the curve his jersey collar drew across the back of his neck having faded into near-chalky white. He had been playing baseball as long as he could remember; he had never spent this many weeks and months indoors, not even as a kid at the height of the Pacific Northwest rainy season, and he didn't think that he had ever been this pale before. The backs of his own hands were foreign to him, the skin flimsy-feeling and translucent over the blue veins, bruises splotched livid from where the peripheral IV lines went in and out every week. What the central IV lines had done to his chest didn't even bear thinking about.
His hair thinned and weakened. It receded along his hairline and grew patchier and patchier until he finally gave up and shaved it all off, because that was easier than watching it fall out bit by bit. Even his eyebrows thinned out. He was exhausted all of the time, but sleep mostly eluded him, the grayed bags under his eyes darkening almost by the day. His body hurt too much to move but at the same time the constant grating pain forced him up, so that he paced with exhausted shuffling steps in slow circuits around the inside his apartment, sticking close to the walls for balance, breathing deeply and consciously to ward off the nausea. He had lurid technicolor waking dreams about a Beckett who wasn't there stroking the hair that no longer existed, and he felt the tingle along his scalp even though he knew it was something approximating a wishful hallucination.
Every time he caught sight of himself in the bathroom mirror he twitched a little in surprise. He did not automatically recognize the gaunt, sunken-eyed ghost staring back.
On to part two.
Jon Lester/Josh Beckett
rated R
21,536 words
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. It is in no way a reflection on the actual life, behavior, or character of any of the people featured, and there is no connection or affiliation between this fictional story and the people or organizations it mentions. It was not written with any intent to slander or defame any of the people featured. No profit has been or ever will be made as a result of this story: it is solely for entertainment. And again, it is entirely fictional, i.e. not true.
alternate spellings accepted
Once, when Lester was a very small child, he had looked directly into the sun. It was partly because his mother had told him not to, and partly because Riley Carlson, the coolest boy in Lester's class, had dared him to do it, and moreover implied that Lester would prove himself a booger-nosed coward if he didn't. Lester was used to being called all sorts of things, but he definitely wasn't any kind of coward, booger-nosed or otherwise, and he wasn't going to have stupid Riley Carlson telling the other kids that he was.
He'd seen spots all over for hours afterwards, plus he had had a headache right at the top of his nose that he couldn't tell his mom about because he knew she'd just yell at him for looking in the first place. But for the few seconds he'd been able to stand it, he had seen the sun as it truly was, not as the watery diluted disk he sometimes saw through the clouds, and not at all like the smiley-faced spiky thing all the girls drew in their pictures during art class.
What he had seen was a white-gold saucer, so brilliant, so obviously powerful that he could hardly understand how something that amazing just hung there in the sky every day with nobody looking at it. It was a perfect circle, a lot more perfect than the moon, which wasn't even a real circle most of the time and had all those blotches on it anyways. It was so bright that it made the rest of the sky almost look black, so bright that just directing his eyes towards it made his whole brain hurt. It seemed like the purest white imaginable, the most radiant gold shimmering at its edges, and everything else for the rest of the day looked pale and washed out in comparison to it.
The first time he saw Josh Beckett, it was a lot like that.
----
When he came up, he was expected. There was a locker waiting for him with his name on it, white jerseys hanging inside with no name at all except for the one on the front. They had spare pairs of his favorite Nike pitching spikes and a bottle of the particular brand of neetsfoot oil he'd been using to break in his gloves since Little League. Clubhouse attendants and middle relievers looked at him sideways and muttered, Is that the kid? just loud enough for him to hear. The coaches all knew that he liked to be called Jon, not Jonathan or Jonny or Jay.
Every second or third person who walked by was some kind of future Hall of Fame contender. There was Curt Schilling, who had pitched historic World Series baseball on an ankle held together with stitches and willpower; there was David Wells, who had once thrown a perfect game while drunk just because he could; there was Manny Ramirez, who was, well, Manny Ramirez. And all of them paused to say hello to him, or to nod in a friendly way, or (in the case of Jason Varitek) to actually sit down and talk. All of them except for Manny, but he did a kind of doubletake when he saw Lester sitting there, which Varitek assured him was as good a greeting as anyone could hope for, because it usually took Manny at least a week to even realize there was someone new on the roster.
It should have been overwhelming, but everyone was working so hard to make sure he wasn't overwhelmed. It wasn't standard procedure-- much later on he'd see rookies come through the usual way, guys called up because of necessity and not because the team actually thought they had a future-- but the coaches acted so naturally that at the time he barely registered it.
They were coaches like none Lester had ever seen before, smooth around the edges like riverbed rocks worn down by flowing water, perfectly formed for channeling nervous young prospects down the path to Major League success. He knew, in a vague, intellectual way, that the stakes were near-infinitely higher at this level. He knew that if a prospect made it this far with his burgeoning potential intact there was an enormous profit to be made should he take that last step from potential to realization. He knew that if a prospect made it this far, there had been so much time and money invested in him that to screw him up-- or to let him screw himself up-- would be an almost criminal waste of resources.
The calculated professional ease with which the coaches handled him was still surprising, though, and he was in a kind of dazed, fugue state when Beckett stomped in from the weight room, caught sight of him, stopped dead, and said, "What the hell is this? We're suitin' up orphan children now?"
"This is Jon Lester," Terry Francona said, appearing as if out of thin air at Beckett's elbow. "He's just up from Pawtucket."
"Aw, this's the lefty everyone's been bangin' on about?" Beckett had been staring at Lester before, but now his gaze sharpened and focused.
Lester stared helplessly back. Beckett seemed huge, with a long easy torso leading into rangy legs in rumpled uniform pants. His hair was thick and black and stuck up all over his head like a cross between high style and plant life, its tendency towards the vertical at startling odds with the roundness of his face. He had a scruffy goatee and a sort of miniature goatee patch right under his lower lip, which, Lester would later learn, he often stroked with a callused fingertip when he was thinking. His eyes were big and bright brown and absolutely impossible for Lester to ignore.
Beckett grunted, blinked once, slowly, and shifted into an aggressively casual stance, thumbs hooked in his beltloops, hips cocked. "Hiya, lefty. What'd y'say the name was-- Lister? Jonny?"
Lester swallowed once, then swallowed again, because it wasn't quite enough the first time around. "Lester. Jon. Jon Lester. Hi."
"Yeah, OK, right, Jonny," Beckett said. For the first time in his entire adult life Lester didn't automatically offer a correction. Beckett was the coolest person he had ever seen, one of the top five or six hottest, easily; he had been in Beckett's presence for all of one minute, and was already trying to come up with ways to ingratiate himself. If Beckett wanted to call him Jonny, then Jonny he would be.
"Hey there, new kid," Mike Lowell said, drifting by. Lester nodded vaguely, and only barely heard him.
----
Beckett had quickly learned that he could derail any argument Lester was making simply by reaching up with one big hand and scruffing it through Lester's hair. Beckett's fingers would leave tingling trails of sensation all along Lester's scalp and he would find his concentration utterly destroyed, the thread of whatever it was that he'd been saying completely lost. The brilliantly self-satisfied smile Beckett got every time he did this was not helpful either.
The first time it happened they had been sitting in the dugout, watching a Schilling start and arguing about secondary pitches. Beckett declared that the only secondary pitch worth having was a good curveball, because its speed and action were so different from the fastball that hitters would have no idea what to do with it. Lester insisted that a slider was best, because hitters would expect it to act like a fastball and be caught totally off guard when it broke.
"A slider is a curveball for people who're too chickenshit to throw a real curveball," Beckett said, punctuating this with a sharp twist of his wrist in midair, holding an orphaned ball, too scuffed and dirty to remain in play, in his curveball grip.
"A curveball is just a slider for people who don't have any subtlety." Lester swiped at Beckett's hand, trying to knock the ball out, but Beckett tucked it jealously up against his chest and scoffed loudly.
"Bullshit, Jonny, pure bullshit. Who's been feedin' you these lies?" He extended his free arm, the one not protecting the ball, and vigorously ruffled Lester's hair.
Lester, who had been about to snark brilliantly back about how he didn't need anyone to think about his pitches for him, was left red-faced and gaping instead. In the few weeks that he'd known Beckett, he had become a dedicated hoarder of slight touches, incidental contacts, casual brushes, the feather-light graze of Beckett's fingertips whenever Beckett handed him something. Each one gave him a dangerous, illicitly swooping thrill in the pit of his stomach, making him reckless and cautious in equal measure. He tried to be around Beckett as much as he could, to increase the likelihood of getting to touch him, but he was terrified of initiating contact himself, lest Beckett (or anyone else) somehow catch on to him.
Here was Beckett not just barely touching Lester, but putting his whole hand on Lester's head, of his own free will. Lester got a solid shock of arousal from Beckett brushing up against him in the locker room; this made his cock spring up into hardness so fast that he felt light-headed, like all the blood had drained out of his upper body at once.
Beckett laughed out loud at the unexpected silent shock on Lester's face, and manhandled the top of Lester's head again. Lester hunched up minutely at the waist and thanked God every way he could think of for the long, loose sweatshirts they were allowed to wear on days they weren't pitching.
----
The Fenway dugout wasn't luxurious or shiny or new, but it was his home dugout, and it was also the best view in the ballpark, free to him for every home game that he didn't pitch. Rookies, he knew, generally had to fight for good rail space, but he never did-- not, in this case, because the coaches had decided he was The Future, but instead because Schilling loved having someone young and impressionable who would listen to him, and usually saved him a spot. The endlessly long lectures on pitching technique and politics and the State of Baseball Today were a reasonable price to pay for a small stretch of padded rail.
Often, if he wasn't pitching either, Beckett would join them. At first Lester didn't think anything of it, because Schilling would set up court in nothing less than the best spot, and of course Beckett would also want the choicest of rail real estate, so ending up sandwiched between the two was just a natural consequence of location. Beckett would stare stoically into the middle distance and never responded to anything Schilling said with more than a noncommittal grunt, except when Schilling would say something particularly absurd (Did I ever tell you about how I was instrumental in ending the '94 strike? I was a big deal in the union even back then, you know...), at which point Beckett would somewhat indiscreetly dig his elbow into Lester's side. It was only when he was sitting in David Wells' apartment, half blasted out of his mind on the expensive whiskey that Wells poured out like the cheap stuff, that he realized it might be something more.
Francona was forever encouraging Wells to do things with Lester, because Wells was nearly as veteran as it was possible to be, and a lefty, which in the ancient infallible baseball tradition meant that they were both at least little weird and that they had something fundamental in common. After he'd been badgered for a certain length of time Wells would grab Lester by the collar and, instead of taking him off somewhere to practice pitches, would simply shove him into the apartment, ready to impart what he considered the much more important lesson: how to deal with lots and lots of alcohol. Lester, who had never gone to college, hadn't even spent an entire season at triple-A, and certainly had never gotten significantly drunk off of anything other than cheap beer or wine before, did indeed learn a lot, although perhaps not quite what Francona had intended.
Or maybe that was precisely what Francona had intended. Lester was never entirely sure, with him.
"I see you made friends outta the friendless pitcher," Wells said, in the middle of rather carelessly sloshing whiskey into his glass. He had a habit of dropping statements like that into completely unrelated situations and conversations; Lester suspected that Wells got a kick out of watching him struggle to react to them.
This time he had to spend a minute forcing his brain into reluctant slow motion to see if he was missing something obvious. When he couldn't come up with anything he eyed Wells warily. "The... who? What? What? The... friendless pitcher?"
Wells in turn watched him closely, eyes clearly focused under his beetling brows despite the alcohol he was rapidly and efficiently putting away. "Yuh huh. Little friendless Joshie Beckett, sure seems to've taken a liking to you, ain't he?"
Lester sat back, taking this like a hammer to the front of his soggy brain. Of course Beckett was not little, and Lester thought that he had plenty of friends-- he was close enough to Lowell, anyways, and had some weird pushy big-brother-little-brother thing going on with Papelbon-- but he had a sharply antagonistic relationship with Wells. Wells obviously (and loudly, in the clubhouse) thought that Beckett was an uppity punk while Beckett obviously (and loudly, in the clubhouse) thought that Wells was a disgusting has-been. Wells calling him this or that didn't necessarily mean that he actually was. But it was a weird statement for even Wells to make if there was nothing but his usual Beckett-directed belligerent animosity behind it.
"He doesn't... I mean, he doesn't like me any more'n he likes anyone," Lester said, faltering just a little under Wells' gaze. There was no way Wells knew about Lester's crush (a horrible way of putting it, but there was really no other word for that type of desperate, hopeful obsession), no way anyone did, but he could feel a hot blush crawling up the back of his neck just the same.
Wells stared at him for a bit, swishing whiskey around in his mouth. It was disturbingly like having an older relative, an uncle or something, stare him down after accusing him of breaking a window with a baseball. With his substantial paunch and his bald head and his graying goatee, Wells was something out of a completely different generation, an entirely different type of ballplayer. They had exercise routines these days, trainer-approved diets; there were big guys, but not big like Wells, not anymore.
A deeply concerned trainer had once given Wells a diet chart, back when he was with the Yankees, and ordered him to follow it closely. The story, as related to Lester by Lowell, was that Wells returned the chart three days later, covered in stains of unnameable provenance, with everything sloppily crossed out and the words chips and booze scrawled across the top. The trainer, allegedly, had vowed to never work with baseball players again and had gone to consult for Olympic wrestlers, who would actually pay attention to nutritional regimens.
"You got any idea how much he hates Schilling?"
Lester blinked, slotting Beckett into he, and shook his head. Wells nodded with a kind of grim relish. "Hates him a fuck of a lot. Schill treats him like he's still a rook, see, and little Joshie's convinced he's seen and done it all. Hates it. Useta be you couldn't pay him to spend ten minutes near that blowhard." Wells didn't think too highly of Schilling either. "But when you," Wells pointed a blunt forefinger at Lester, "when you play eager beaver greenhorn, half the time little Joshie's right up there too, puttin' his own ass right in the line of fire. How come? It sure ain't 'cause he alla sudden wants to hear what Schill's sayin'."
"I.... uh." Lester hunched forward over the table, thinking hard. He took a big drink of whiskey just to give his hands and mouth something to do while his mind congealed around this information, then continued to clutch the glass, certain that if he put it down, Wells would immediately refill it.
From then on he paid much more careful attention to Beckett's position on the rail. It was true that Beckett normally stayed as far away from Schilling as possible, the only exceptions being those days when Lester found himself the half-willing recipient of Schilling's lectures. It could have been anything-- it could have been something as vaguely ignominious as Beckett taking pity on him-- but he still couldn't stop himself from blushing and smiling and being deeply thankful that Wells, on the mound, wasn't watching the rail the next time Beckett eased up casually beside him.
----
He did not think he had ever experienced a series more grueling than the August Yankee series: five games in four days, all of them in front of the fractious Boston crowd, all of them losses. Lester pitched the second game, the night half of a rare Friday double-header, and didn't even make it out of the fourth inning. He had never felt so bad on a baseball field before, not even during the high school game he had pitched while sick with what would later turn out to have been food poisoning. Neither the equally short outing of the Yankee starter nor the raucous boos that came when Johnny Damon hit a home run off of him were of any consolation.
The very next day Beckett was rocked for nine runs in less than six innings. A gloomy pall was settling over all of them, and even Schilling was quiet on the rail as they watched Beckett grind his teeth and rub the ball like he was trying to take the hide right off of it. When Beckett sat down in the dugout between innings he draped a towel over his head and refused to talk to anyone, including Varitek, who ended up sitting next to him, uselessly muttering about pitch selection to himself.
After the game, Beckett cornered Lester just outside the showers. Beckett's face was terrifyingly blank and his voice, when he informed Lester that they were going out to get drunk later that night, was flat and devoid of emotion. Lester was pretty sure that he had never had a more inappropriate erection, but Beckett was clad only in old, Marlins-teal sandals and a towel carelessly folded around his hips, doing nothing at all to conceal the trail of wiry hair that led downwards from his bellybutton. The hair on his chest was still dotted with stray drops of water.
Lester nervously clutched at his own towel and nodded rapidly at everything Beckett said. He would be completely fine, just as soon as he could get some pants between Beckett and himself.
They took a cab from the ballpark to the bar Beckett had chosen, far away from downtown Boston. They might even have been outside the city; the cabbie drove for a long time, and Lester wasn't familiar enough with the area to know where he was during the day, let alone at night. Beckett didn't say anything at all, staring out the window with his hands clenched into fists in his lap. Lester spent the entire ride trying to work up the courage to reach over and gently touch his arm, but never quite got there.
The bar was a crowded, dark, club-dive hybrid with pounding loud music spilling out into the street and a straggling line out front, which Beckett bypassed effortlessly. Lester hurried to stay within his wake, resisting the automatic urge to show his ID to the bouncer at the door. He was still getting used to being in places like this legally, but if they were waving you in ahead of the line they probably didn't give a shit how old you were.
The noise was a little bit disappointing. Lester wanted to talk to Beckett, wanted Beckett to talk to him. It wasn't that he thought it would lead anywhere-- he was usually an optimist, and even for him some ideas were just too preposterous-- but it would be nice, just the two of them. Teammates, fellow starting pitchers; maybe, if Lester was thinking really optimistically, friends. So it was disappointing: there would be no talking in this kind of din.
Beckett didn't stop at the bar, though, instead pressing forward through the crowd of sweaty people with a single-minded determination until suddenly they were at the back wall, moving along it until they came to a door with another bouncer. This bouncer actually remained unmoved until Beckett pulled out an ID-- not his driver's license, Lester noticed, but the official Red Sox ID that got him into stadiums all around the league, just in case some guard in, say, Kansas City didn't recognize him. Lester reached for his own, but Beckett said something to the bouncer, who waved Lester through with a bored expression on his face.
He's with me, Lester realized. That was what Beckett had said.
The room inside was much quieter once the door had shut behind them. There were tables set into deep booths along the walls, some with curtains pulled across them. Beckett sat down as far away from the door as possible and Lester slid in across from him, his ears still cottonballed from the sound in the main room. A waiter sidled up much more obsequiously than Lester would have expected in a place like this. Better dressed, too. He understood, belatedly, that this was some kind of VIP room.
"Rum'n'coke," Beckett mumbled. "Better make it a biggun." Lester opened his mouth to order a beer, but Beckett tipped his tired face up to the waiter, said, "Him too," and Lester found that he did not have the heart to argue.
They sat in silence for a while, waiting for their drinks, and they sat in silence for a while longer once the drinks got there, Lester sipping and Beckett drinking in big gulps like it was water. It really, really wasn't: the rum-to-coke ratio was definitely skewed in favor of the rum, which was both searing and spicy on the back of Lester's tongue.
The silence eventually started to be oppressive. Lester could hear the muted thump thump of the music out by the main bar, and Beckett still didn't have any kind of expression on his face, just that grayed-out deadness. It was sort of like being trapped in an Edgar Allen Poe story, the telltale heart mixed up with one of those ghost plots that Lester had never quite gotten straight in high school.
"So," he said, tentative, "the Yankees really do suck, like everyone says. Uh, out here." Beckett slowly raised his eyes up from the surface of the table. "They... I. I guess I didn't really get that. Um. Before now."
Beckett blinked at him once, those big brown eyes almost wholly obscured by the black of his pupils in the low light. "My ERA in the 2003 World Series was 1.10," he said.
"I.... what?"
"My Eeee Arrr Aay," Beckett repeated, more slowly, "in two thousand and three. In the World Series. Was one point one oh."
"Oh," Lester said. "Um. OK?"
In 2003 he had been the youngest player on the single-A Augusta GreenJackets, nineteen years old on a team whose oldest player had been twenty-five. They had all watched the World Series in the Denny's closest to the ballpark, bullshitting each other about how they would have executed this play or that differently, almost as far removed from the actual action as the bored waitresses who served them mozzarella sticks and did not hesitate to smack them across the backs of their heads if they smeared sauce on the tables.
In 2003 Beckett had been the World Series MVP, pitching a complete game shut-out on short rest. He had been the one to make the tag for the series-winning final out, the winning pitcher who helped rocket the cheap Little Florida Team that Could to victory over the Big Bad (heavily favored) Yankees.
Lester and the other GreenJackets had watched him pitch on TV while they had argued over who had ordered cherry Coke and who had ordered the regular kind.
"The Yankees only suck," Beckett said, "if you let 'em get to you."
"They're a different team. From 2003," Lester said, feeling his way cautiously.
Beckett scowled down into his drink. "We're lettin' 'em get to us," he muttered darkly. "We-- I'm lettin' 'em get to me. It shouldn't be any different, Marlins or Sox, I should know better. I do know better, but it fuckin' is different."
Lester nodded eagerly; finally something on which he could safely agree. "The rivalry. Yeah. That's what I meant, it's. It's real, it's big, it's."
"Shouldn't let it get to me. Us," Beckett grumbled.
"It's everyone, though. Not just you. It's... these games, they're long and messy on both sides and they're winning 'cause of... of shitty luck, on us, I guess. It's not just you," Lester said, feeling weirdly insistent about it. It wasn't just Beckett. He had pitched like shit too, and so had Jason Johnson, and so had the bullpen.
Beckett shook his head, slow and ponderous. "Yeah, but it is, though. I'm lettin' it psych me out. Playing here.... useta be wouldn't hardly anyone show up to watch us, right? In Florida. Some days we'd get like a thousand asses in the seats, max, and some o'those were comin' to watch the other team. Ain't like that here. They give a shit 'bout baseball, here, and, and--"
"And they give a shit about the Yankees," Lester finished. "Out here. Yeah."
"I been lettin' it get me up here," Beckett said, jabbing a finger at the side of his head. "Stupid shit."
Lester looked down into his rum and coke, mostly full while Beckett's was mostly empty. He dropped one of hands under the table like he was going to wipe his palm on his jeans, and crossed his fingers where no one could see. "Maybe. Maybe you should do something to, to help get your mind off it. Y'know. Like go out and. Go out, get some girls, y'know, or, or something. Clear your head."
"I'm clearin' my head right now." Beckett's face was inscrutable in the low light, but he didn't look quite as flat, as lackluster as he had before. "That's what we're doin'."
"OK," Lester said. Pitchers dealt with bad outings in lots of different ways; what worked for one guy might not work at all for another. It didn't mean anything. It didn't mean anything. It didn't-- no matter how much he might want it to.
----
West coast trips were not particularly fun at any time, but a long trip right after five straight losses to the Yankees was practically intolerable. They made it through a series in Anaheim, then spectacularly bombed what should have been a relatively easy trip to Safeco. Lester was supposed to start the first game in Oakland, but on the flight in from Seattle his back started to hurt.
He had been in a little car accident earlier that month-- a stupid nothing of an incident, some typical asshole Boston driver rear-ending him on his way to the park-- so it was just residual muscle ache, soreness from the accident exacerbated by the stress of a bad series and the reliable annoyance of airplane seating. He got a heat pack from the trainer when they got to the hotel and lay on the hotel bed on his stomach for a while, waiting for it to feel better.
It didn't. In the morning it was worse; sharp, jagged pain overlaying a feeling like a bone-deep full-body bruise. His neck was stiff and sore to the point where he could barely turn his head. Francona took one look at him when they got to the ballpark and immediately called Theo Epstein, the general manager, to say that Lester was going on the DL.
"But I have to make my start!"
"If your back is still fucked up from that crash--"
"Minor fender-bender," Lester insisted.
Francona rolled his eyes. "If your back is still fucked up from that minor fender-bender, that's a risk we're absolutely not willing to take. You know what you're worth to this team, Jonny. We're not putting that in jeopardy. And, to be quite honest, you look like horseshit. Even if it's just a bug y'look like you could use the rest."
"Well, thanks, that's just great," Lester muttered. Everyone had known to call him Jon when he first came up; after a few months of Beckett shouting Hey, Jonny! at him from across the locker room, they had all started doing it.
They flew him right back to Boston and sent him straight to Mass General Hospital in a team car with tint-darkened windows, not even giving him time to drop his bag off at his apartment. He had to lie still under the MRI machine, which made him feel frantic even though he wasn't normally claustrophobic at all, and then he had to get his back and neck palpated, which hurt like hell, and then they had to draw a million different samples of blood, "because it's standard procedure".
He was sitting up in his hospital bed, grumpy because the nurse had taken away his bag so that he couldn't change back into his street clothes the second she left the room like he'd been threatening to do. His hospital gown was flimsy and awful. He was gritty-eyed and exhausted from the flight and he had no idea what time it was anymore, his body running on what felt like five different timezones at once.
One of the doctors walked in, looking solemn.
Oh, fuck, Lester thought. If the doctor's face was anything to go by, he had really done a number on his back. He could only hope that it wasn't some kind of deep muscle thing, or, God forbid, a slipped disk, something for which he'd need surgery. Maybe he would be lucky and the 15-day DL would be long enough to heal up whatever this was. Whatever it was, Francona was probably going to be near-insufferably smug about being right.
"The first thing you should understand is that this is almost certainly treatable," the doctor said, his fingers fiddling nervously around the edges of his clipboard, which was not reassuring. "We've caught it very early. We'll run a few more tests to make sure, and to determine the type, but. Well. I'm sorry, son, there's no easy way to say this." He took a deep breath and waited until Lester looked him in the eye. "You have cancer. A lymphoma, it looks like, from the preliminary tests."
Lester stared at him. "Are you... I'm in here for a back injury. Is this, is this some kind of joke?"
The doctor blinked in open surprise. "Um. This is a hospital, son. We don't generally joke about that kind of thing."
"I'm in here for a back injury," Lester repeated, plaintively. "I'm not. Did you mix up my chart with someone else's? I don't have cancer."
"It showed up-- I'm sorry, son, truly I am, it did show up in your blood tests. Your lymph nodes are enlarged, which is a common symptom. Your white blood cell count... it's a good thing you came in when you did, this early we really have every shot in the world at beating this thing. Every shot in the world." Lester stared at him some more. "I'm sorry," the doctor said, very gently.
"You don't understand. I. I just got called up. I don't--"
"Of course," the doctor said. "I do understand." He looked down at the clipboard, hefted it meaningfully. "Look, would you... would you like to see the test results? It helps some people, to see it laid out, to know... I have the papers here. I can explain the notations and charts to you, and then, if there's anyone you'd like to call... I understand this is all very sudden and unexpected, son, but I think it's also important that we talk about treatment options as soon as possible..."
"Right," Lester said, dazed. Cancer. Cancer. He was 22 years old, he had just been called up to the Majors. Cancer. It didn't sound real, not like something that applied to his life, to him. "I should. I should call my parents. My coach." The doctor nodded, put his clipboard down-- the numbers and graphs that Lester really did not want to see-- and came around to show him how to get the bedside phone to dial out.
----
The team came back home to Boston a few days later. Lester was still in the hospital, although it wasn't as though he was going to drop dead at any moment; it wasn't that kind of cancer. It was just the Red Sox being paranoid about their property. The doctors ran a few tests per day and mostly left him alone with his thoughts, which was almost exactly where he least wanted to be.
"Heya, kiddo," Francona said. Lester looked up from the old Baseball America he'd been reading, filled with articles about Southern college players and where they were projected to go in the 2002 draft. He had been amusing himself by trying to find names he actually recognized. So far he had Khalil Greene (Clemson) and Lance Cormier (Alabama, gratifyingly drafted several rounds after Lester had been taken).
"Hey. Um. Shouldn't you be at the park?" He glanced up at the clock on the wall. The team-- the team minus him-- had a game against the Blue Jays in just a few hours. Roy Halladay was starting. It wasn't going to be an easy game to win.
Francona shrugged. "Yeah, probably. Just wanted to check in. See how you were holdin' up."
"I'm OK. I mean." Lester rubbed at the bandaid on the inside of his right elbow. He'd asked them to do as many of the blood drawings as they could on his right arm; he wasn't going to be allowed to go out and pitch with cancer, but... just in case. "I'm not, like... dying, um, yet, I guess. I don't feel too bad."
Francona sat down in the little particleboard chair next to Lester's bed. He was wearing his red game sweatshirt and the almost-tapered jeans that made Lester think of Little League dads. His eyes, behind his glasses, were tired.
"I know there isn't exactly much I can do for you, Jonny," he said, tentatively resting a hand on the sheet; not on top of Lester's hand, but near it. "If there's anything at all, though, that'll be a help, I just want you to know that I'll do it, whatever I can, and that goes for the rest of us too."
"Does... does the rest of the team know?"
Francona shook his head. "Me, Theo, I guess the owners know by now. The media doesn't know yet. None of the players do."
"Would you." Lester looked down at the white sheets, his fingers pale on top of them. "Could you. Tell the guys for me?"
"Of course. I. Yes, of course, Jon," Francona said, nudging his hand over so that his fingers could wrap around Lester's. Lester made a tiny noise, a sharply cut-off hiccup, involuntarily wrenched from his throat. Francona immediately got up and wrapped his arms carefully around Lester's shoulders, like he was afraid Lester would break apart if he squeezed too hard. Lester buried his face in the front of Francona's sweatshirt, held on with both hands to the back of it, and mortifyingly soaked right through the fabric with his crying.
----
"What's it like?" Wells asked, dirty shoes up on the side of Lester's bed, the chair straining valiantly under his bulk. Lester was stuck in the hospital for the start of his chemotherapy course, although the doctors kept promising that he might be able to get it as an outpatient procedure later. He suspected that the Red Sox were leaning on them to keep him close at hand.
"What-- having cancer? It's like... it's like having cancer, jeez, what the hell'm I supposed to say to that?"
"I meant what's it like tryin' to fuck little Joshie," Wells said, smiling in complacent triumph when Lester spit out the water he had been drinking.
"I am not trying to... to... to do anything with Josh Beckett," he said, after he had stopped coughing and had fought down the wave of nausea that had engendered.
Wells tipped the chair back on two legs, making it creak ominously. "Liar, liar, pants on fire."
"I'm not even wearing any pants," Lester protested. It was true. There was no point in wearing anything other than the stupid hospital gown if he was just going to lie around under the sheets and feel sick all day.
"Didn't really wanna know that, rook." Wells was the only one on the team who had never gotten into the habit of calling Lester Jonny, but he often called him rook or rookie, which was really just as bad. "And whatever, liar, liar, paper dress on fire."
"It's fabric." Lester sighed, leaning back against the propped-up pillows, suddenly too tired to fight it any more. "What. How did you know?"
Wells just stared at him, an even, considering gaze. 2006 was either his 19th or 20th season, Lester couldn't remember. He had been on the Yankees in two separate eras, and there had been rumors about that team even back when Lester was in middle school. Wells had been around long enough to see plenty.
"OK, OK, OK." Lester flushed, a rush of light-headedness accompanying it. "I don't, it's not going to turn into anything. It's just stupid. He doesn't even like." He turned away to look out the window, which had an inspiring view of another part of the hospital complex. "He doesn't even like guys."
"I don't think he really likes anyone," Wells said thoughtfully.
Lester threw a pillow at him in tolerant annoyance. "You can't even give it a rest for five seconds, can you? He likes plenty of people, he gets along, he has friends--"
Wells caught the pillow and settled it behind his shoulders. "I mean sexually." Lester winced. Wells using the word sexually was like hearing his Dad use it. Wells rolled his eyes. "Seriously. I'm bein' serious. You ever seen him take a groupie out back o'the bar?"
"It's not like I'm with him all the time, I'm sure he--"
"You ask Mikey, he ain't seen it either." Lowell had been on the Yankees with Wells, a rookie while Wells was an eleven-year vet; then he'd been on the Marlins for a number of years with Beckett, winning the World Series together. He was one of the few people on the Red Sox, aside from Lester and Varitek, who was able to be friends with both. And Varitek didn't really count, because he was a catcher even when he wasn't in uniform and there wasn't a pitcher on the team who would ever be able to tell if he didn't like them.
"So, what, he's careful. There's nothing wrong with careful. The coaches are always practically begging us to be careful."
Wells shook his head. "It's more'n that."
"What are you saying?" Lester asked. "He dates. He dates women, I've seen. I mean, the papers."
"Yeah, he gets himself photographed with some country music blondie or whatever, he gets himself seen with the sorority chicks, but I don't think he fucks none of 'em."
"What?" Lester laughed out loud. It hurt his back, and on both sides of his neck under his jaw, but the idea was so ridiculous. "You're kiddin' me, right? I mean... Josh Beckett!"
"I've seen the guys who fuck the girls," Wells insisted. "I've seen the guys who fuck the guys. And I'm tellin' you Joshie ain't fuckin' none of 'em."
Lester rolled his eyes up to the ceiling. "OK. Let's just... let's assume just for a second that you're right. Then... what the fuck, I can't even do that! Why would he not... he's Josh Beckett." Wells raised an eyebrow, which Lester ignored. So he happened to personally find Beckett's stupid botanical hair distractingly hot; it didn't change the fact that Beckett was objectively hot too, and, even if he hadn't been, he was still an All Star pitcher in a city that had torrid collective love affairs with even its crappy players. "Why wouldn't he go out and get laid at least sometimes? I mean, c'mon. David. That's crazy."
"I don't know what goes on in his fucked-up brains," Wells said with an air of injured dignity. "That's how I've seen it and that's how it is." Lester shook his head, smiling down at the sheet. Wells huffed and folded his hands precisely, resting them on his own stomach like a mobster parody. "Believe what you want, rook. I'm tellin' you, that little weirdo ain't fuckin' nothin'."
----
Lester looked hard at Beckett when he came to visit (after Wells, twice, and Varitek, and Papelbon, and Theo, and Ortiz, and Francona three times, but before Lowell and Schilling got around to it). He was just the same as he ever was, maybe a little more quiet and hesitant than usual-- Lester thought that Beckett probably did not handle hospitals very well.
It wasn't that Lester had expected Wells to rat him out, but Wells might have thought it would be fun to tell Beckett about Lester's... whatever, his stupid crush, just so that he could watch Beckett squirm. He was kind of touched to realize that Wells was placing Lester's mostly unspoken confidence above The Beckett Feud.
"Uh. I didn't bring you nothin', I guess. Sorry," Beckett said. The table next to Lester's bed was overwhelmed with flowers: a little pot of violets from Francona and his wife; a bizarre cactus that looked like a brain from Theo; a vaguely inappropriate bunch of red roses brought by Papelbon, who had shiftily claimed that his girlfriend made him bring them; and one enormous, overwhelming bouquet of multi-colored daisies from Ortiz, who had unashamedly announced that he had picked them out himself. There was also a teddy bear in a Red Sox jersey clutching a card, courtesy of Wells. Lester had taped the card shut so that the nurses wouldn't be accidentally scandalized.
"It's OK," he said. "It's fine, really, I have plentya this stuff already. Uh, as you can see."
Beckett sat down gingerly, perching on the end of the chair like he was afraid to lean back and take up even the semblance of comfort. He eyed the flowers. "You, uh, really like daisies?"
Lester lifted one shoulder minutely in a weak parody of a shrug, the best he could manage at the moment. "What'm I gonna do, say, 'No, take 'em back'?" Beckett smirked crookedly. The truth was that Lester actually kind of did like the daisies; they brightened up the hospital room and he tended to smile a little easier when he could see them. It was a bit like having Ortiz grinning at his bedside, which was... well, it was nice. It sounded stupid even in his own head and definitely was not something he was going to explain to Beckett.
They sat quietly for a while, Lester trying to breath slowly and deeply to stave off the nausea that was becoming a stupidly oppressive constant, Beckett teetering awkwardly on the chair.
"Look--" Lester finally said, at the exact same time that Beckett started to say, "Hey, I--" They both stopped and grinned sheepishly at each other. Lester waggled his fingers at Beckett, telling him to go ahead. Beckett looked like he wanted to argue, even opened his mouth to say something contrary, but stopped himself. Maybe he could tell how tired Lester was.
"I just wanted t'say, um." Beckett looked at his knees, then at the edge of the bed, then the windowsill, his gaze finally coming to rest, somewhat reluctantly, on the daisies. "The season. Uh, y'know, without you, um, around, it's. It kinda ain't as fun. That's. That's just. Y'know. I just wanted to say."
"Oh," Lester said, because he could not think of anything else to say.
Beckett nodded at the daisies, turning red only at the very tips of his ears. "You, uh, you better come back. Y'know, next season. Or, whenever you beat this shit. Y'know, even if it takes, um, a while. You just, uh, you better come back to... to the team."
"I. I'm planning on it," Lester said. His face felt hot and his throat felt tight, his stomach jumping in some new way unrelated to the chemo.
Beckett nodded some more. His eyes were darting between the daisies and Lester's hands, which were lying on top of the sheets, slack and immobile because he had so very little energy at all these days. "OK. OK. Good. Um, also, you, uh." He took a big breath, then let it all out in a whoosh, the words rushing out with it in a speedy jumble. "You ain't come out to my ranch yet neither an' you gotta do that 'cause it's a good time an' you ain't done it yet and. You gotta."
Lester nodded, his face absolutely burning. He didn't trust himself to speak; he was sure that his voice would crack, he would burst into tears, he would say something irredeemably embarrassing like I know I don't even know you that well but I think I'm in love with you.
Beckett shifted, standing up, moving closer to the bed. His hand was halfway up before Lester recognized the motion; it was Beckett reaching out to ruffle Lester's hair, like always. He just barely managed to get his own hand up in time, palm out in a universal stop gesture. Beckett froze, his face going blank so fast that it was like a steel cleat spike to the center of Lester's chest.
"It's not," he said, not you, and I wish you could, it's not you. "I, my hair, it's been. It's starting to fall out, kinda, little pieces. You, you don't wanna."
Something complicated happened to Beckett's face. He lowered his hand and balled it up into a fist at his side. He stared at the wall for a minute, his jaw tightly clenched, a muscle on the side of it jumping.
"Fuck," he finally hissed. "Fuck this. Fuck cancer. Fuck it right in its cunt-suckin' face."
Lester laughed; a weak, wavering laugh, startled out of him. "Yeah. Uh, no shit, man."
Beckett sat back down, but on the edge of Lester's bed this time, near Lester's feet. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, he looked right at Lester, his expression easier than it had been. "So. OK. Did I tellya 'bout the Fenway Battle of the Wells we jus' had?" Lester shook his head. "Toronto was in town, y'know, Vernon Wells. So he comes up to the plate, and Wells-- OK, it was Fat Wells and Black Wells, that's how I'll call 'em-- anyway Fat Wells is talkin' all this shit, just every kinda shit you can think of, yellin' it off the mound, total bush league shit. He mighta been drunk up there, 'Tek couldn't do nothin' to make him get movin'. Who knows, with him? Black Wells is standing there waitin' for the pitch just gettin' madder'n madder. So eventually he yells, 'Hey, mothafucka, they payin' you to play ball or they payin' you to flap your mouth hole?' and Fat Wells says..."
Lester pretended to resettle himself in the bed, using the motion to shift his foot up against the side of Beckett's thigh. Beckett didn't move, kept right on talking, and Lester relaxed, about as content as he possibly could be, given the circumstances.
----
Two doctors, one young and one old, gave him a big list when he was (provisionally) discharged from inpatient care. If he developed uncontrollable nosebleeds, he had to call the hospital. If he was unable to keep down even the blandest, most inert foods, he had to call the hospital. If he had dizzy spells bad enough to make him actually fall over, he had to call the hospital. If his lymph nodes enlarged any further, he had to call the hospital. If he got a bruise that kept getting bigger instead of fading, or if he started bruising much easier than usual, he had to call the hospital.
He was under no circumstances allowed to drive himself to the hospital for his chemotherapy sessions. If he was unable to reach a friend or family member, he had to call the hospital, which would send a driver to pick him up. If he felt even the least bit disoriented, he should call the hospital and then lock his car keys in a drawer. If he felt like he was coming down with a cold, no matter how mild, he had to call the hospital. If he was at any point in time upset, curious, depressed, not sure what he should do or just overly bored, he had to call the hospital.
"Man," he said, flipping through the thick stack of pages, "how much money do the Red Sox give this hospital?"
The older doctor frowned disapprovingly. The younger one shrugged and said, "A whole lot."
----
September was a bad month to be a part of a struggling baseball team; it was exponentially worse for a player who could not even sit in the dugout. Lester had been out of the hospital for most of the latter half of the month, but the chemo had thoroughly compromised his immune system. The clubhouse was such an effective incubator of easily-passed-around diseases, the stomach bugs and flu-like nothings that were a fact of life for a ballplayer in the fall-- they were something much more sinister, now, to Lester, and he didn't dare go to the ballpark even to just sit on the bench. The team doctor had explained it in big words to Francona, who had explained it in smaller words to the team.
Lester appreciated it. Of course he did. He didn't want to contract a stupid infection that at the best might set back his chemo schedule and at the worst had the potential to be deadly, but the simple fact of it was that it drastically reduced the number of visits he got, and it wasn't as though he could go out. He was so listless, so quick to tire, and the number of public places that were breeding grounds for bacteria was startling once he actually had to stop and think about it. The Boston subway system would have killed him in an hour. The Fenway stands would have struck him down before the end of a clean-pitched game.
Francona called every few days, Lester's main lifeline to the real world, a world not boxed into a narrow hall of pain and pain management, injections to heal him that made him feel even sicker. Lester usually didn't have much to say, but that never seemed to bother Francona at all. Lowell called, and Varitek, and Ortiz had a habit of calling at odd hours when the team was on the road, leaving rambling messages that Lester could understand only half of the time.
The only one to actually venture over, though, was Wells, who showed up wearing a surgical mask and rubber gloves and (for some reason) a clear plastic shower cap with translucent flowers printed on it stretched over his bald head. He changed into an enormous set of pale green scrubs right there in the hall outside of Lester's apartment, stuffing his regular clothes into a duffel bag.
"They're sterile," he explained, when Lester, completely baffled, let him in. "Leastaways they were before I put 'em on in your nasty fuckin' hall. Get your landlord to break out a paintbrush now'n then, huh?"
"Ummm. I have a bathroom?"
Wells shot him an exasperated look over the top of the surgical mask and heaved the duffel into a corner. "The point is to not contaminate your place with my biohazard street duds, rook. D'you even know what I ate for lunch today? I got it offa cart. On the street. It came on a stick. It got all over my shirt."
At first he thought that Wells was making fun of him, somehow, or that the whole thing was some kind of elaborate joke at his expense. But the hours passed and Wells stuck around, bullshitting, putting his feet up on all of Lester's furniture (sneakers off, fresh sterile socks on). He gradually realized that it wasn't a joke, that Wells wanted to spend time with him and was sincerely trying to avoid making him any sicker than he already was. The fact that his attempt resulted in something so over-the-top and ridiculous was just, he supposed, essentially David Wells.
After Wells had gone over all the late season gossip and the more ridiculous bits of idle speculation about the postseason, he got up and, with no sort of preamble at all, started to clean up Lester's apartment. It was pretty bad; Lester was just too tired, most of the time, to put things away, to stack things neatly, to clean things or throw them out. But Wells, he knew, was not one to talk: Wells would be living happily in a pile of his own empty alcohol containers and take-out boxes if he didn't pay for a cleaning service.
"What're you doing?" Lester asked, vaguely horrified. "You don't have to... you're not my mom."
"Shut the fuck up, rook," Wells said, bright and cheery and muffled behind his mask, turning an empty pizza box around in his hands with a kind of professional curiosity before breaking it up and stuffing it into a trash bag. He picked up a fast food bag and hmmed in quiet approval.
Lester wanted to argue. Wanted to tell Wells that he didn't need someone to take care of him, didn't need someone to clean up his mess, was doing just fine-- for some relative value of fine-- on his own. Because, maybe contrary to all appearances and expectations, he was. He was keeping himself alive, anyhow, in the ways that mattered. But he was so, so tired, and arguing about it seemed like such a chore when he did, after all, have the option of keeping his mouth shut and just sinking back into the cushions of his couch, letting his eyes track Wells around the room, in and out of doorways, until his eyelids grew too heavy to hold up any longer.
----
When he woke up, Wells was sitting on the couch next to him, watching a Dodgers/Padres game on ESPN and drinking from a can of beer, the surgical mask dangling loosely around his neck. The apartment did not exactly look like a bunch of magical fairies had whisked away all the evidence of dirt and grime and sickness, but at least it looked marginally cleaner, with the surfaces mostly clear (if not dusted) and the window shades open to let in the last of the pale Boston daylight.
"Isn't that flat?" he asked, looking sidelong at Wells. He hadn't even remembered that he had beer in the apartment.
Wells shrugged, not taking his eyes off of the TV. "Fuck do I care?"
They watched the Dodgers beat up on Jake Peavy for a while. People were wearing t-shirts and tank tops in the stands, and Peavy kept pausing to wipe the sweat out from under his hat. It was kind of amazing to Lester that it was still warm and summery somewhere in the world; Boston was already sliding inexorably towards the icy grip of winter.
"Garciaparra," Wells said, practically spitting. "Fuck that guy."
Lester blinked. Nomar Garciaparra was indeed on the screen, innocently doing his obsessive little pre-at-bat glove adjustments. "What? You never even played with him."
"I was on the Yankees somea the time he was in Boston," Wells rumbled. "Trust me. He's a wuss-ass pansy fucker." He glanced over at Lester. "No offense to pansies, 'course." While Lester was sputtering over that, Wells took a long swig of his flat beer, swallowed, and glanced over again. "Speakin' of. Joshie stop by yet?"
Lester's mouth opened and closed silently. He was fully aware that he looked like some kind of bony fish and he was wholly unable to do anything about it. Wells snorted softly. "No worries. I'll talk to him."
"David. No. Uh, no." Lester might not know everything there was to know about team dynamics just yet, but he knew that Wells talking to Beckett about... about whatever it was Wells intended to talk about would be a very, very, very bad idea.
Wells smirked and finished off his beer, crumpling the can up in his fist. "Arright, so I'll have Mikey talk to him."
"How about we have nobody talk to him--"
"Look, I think he's a slack piece o'shit," Wells said, talking right over Lester. "Not even. He's the piece o'corn stuck in the middle of a piece o'shit. I wouldn't mind one bit if I never hadda think 'bout him again. But you like him--" Lester made a weak noise of protest, which Wells waved off, "--you like him however it is you like him, and he, despite usually havin' more hair than brains, likes you however it is he likes you. And I'm not gonna have you sittin' 'round all sad from not talking to him just 'cause he's too goddamn horsefuckin' cowardly to deal with someone he likes bein' sick."
Lester shook his head, but it was mostly for show: he had spent enough time with Wells, by now, to recognize when Wells was going to dig his heels in about something. "Just, don't. Don't be too..."
"No worries," Wells repeated. He had a little smile twitching at the sides of his goatee, like he already had an idea and was just thinking about the best way to implement it.
Lester sighed and scrunched down further into the cushions, trying (and failing) to find a position that wouldn't make his back and his neck hurt. He listened to Wells make fun of the National League relief pitchers (Can you believe this? This freak woulda been pulled two batters ago in the real league) and gaped in amazement with Wells at the late slugging Dodger comeback and rolled his eyes as Wells raged over Garciaparra's walk-off tenth inning homer.
"Wish we could get some'a that," Wells grumbled, the Dodgers jumping all over each other in a blissfully happy pile of white and blue at home plate. Lester, who would have settled for being a poorly-regarded middle reliever on the losing team so long as it meant he was on the field, closed his eyes and nodded.
----
The sicker Lester got, the more Beckett existed around the edges of Lester's consciousness, a ghost whose presence was always felt but never seen.
After Wells talked to him-- or berated him, or got Lowell to talk to him, or whatever it was that Wells did; Lester was too terrified to ever ask for details-- Beckett called infrequently, saying hey, Jonny with a kind of desperate cheerfulness, talking for a short time, letting his end of the conversation lag more and more as the phone call wore on until, invariably, something would come up all of a sudden and he would have to dash off. After a while he stopped calling at all.
"Josh was asking how you were doing," Lowell would say, casually mentioned like it was just the natural course of the conversation. Lowell had an idea of what Lester was going through, having gone through some of it himself, years ago, and he called to talk more often than his incidental, mostly second-hand friendship with Lester might have otherwise suggested.
"He could always call and hear for himself," Lester would say, trying and failing to keep the hurt out of his voice.
"Hmmm," Lowell would say in response, and the conversation would move on to other things.
----
The last game of the season was a joke, no other word for it: five innings, cut short by the cold Boston rain, just about as lame a denouement as anyone could imagine. Lester watched it masochistically from his couch, every TV camera shot of the guys lined up on the dugout rail wrenching at something deep inside his chest. Boston won, although it hardly mattered. It was only against Baltimore, they weren't going to the postseason, and Lester didn't even know the kid they had starting. Beckett had been referring to him as Hackeysack since he'd been called up, and Lester had learned that before he ever learned the kid's real name. Devvy Handsack, or something.
Normally this time of year he'd be heading back home to Washington, if he wasn't playing winter ball, but there was no better place for treatment than Boston, especially with the team-influenced doctors taking such careful care of him. The breaks between chemo cycles were not long enough to let him travel anyways; not even if he'd had the energy, which he didn't.
Everything else slowly fell away. Wells' offseason home was in California, and without his occasional visits Lester's human interaction was basically reduced to the nurses and doctors at the hospital, other tired and unwell people in hospital waiting rooms, and whoever the hospital sent to pick him up for his chemo sessions and checkups. The sight of their scrubs never cheered him like the sight of Wells' had, and he felt an absurd disappointment each time he went to the hospital and failed to see anyone wearing a flowered shower cap.
He was never hungry and he was often nauseous, so eating became a chore. He couldn't bear to look at or smell most food, let alone put it in his mouth, chew it up, and swallow it. He knew-- the doctors all told him-- that losing so much weight would only make it harder to come back when (if) he got back on the pitcher's mound, but maintaining his playing weight was an impossibility. He had been exercising every single day, putting a pro pitcher's strain on his body once every five days, and eating like a horse to make up for it all. He could barely remember what that kind of normal ballplayer's existence was like.
His summer tan had long since faded, the browned lines his jersey sleeves marked on his biceps and the curve his jersey collar drew across the back of his neck having faded into near-chalky white. He had been playing baseball as long as he could remember; he had never spent this many weeks and months indoors, not even as a kid at the height of the Pacific Northwest rainy season, and he didn't think that he had ever been this pale before. The backs of his own hands were foreign to him, the skin flimsy-feeling and translucent over the blue veins, bruises splotched livid from where the peripheral IV lines went in and out every week. What the central IV lines had done to his chest didn't even bear thinking about.
His hair thinned and weakened. It receded along his hairline and grew patchier and patchier until he finally gave up and shaved it all off, because that was easier than watching it fall out bit by bit. Even his eyebrows thinned out. He was exhausted all of the time, but sleep mostly eluded him, the grayed bags under his eyes darkening almost by the day. His body hurt too much to move but at the same time the constant grating pain forced him up, so that he paced with exhausted shuffling steps in slow circuits around the inside his apartment, sticking close to the walls for balance, breathing deeply and consciously to ward off the nausea. He had lurid technicolor waking dreams about a Beckett who wasn't there stroking the hair that no longer existed, and he felt the tingle along his scalp even though he knew it was something approximating a wishful hallucination.
Every time he caught sight of himself in the bathroom mirror he twitched a little in surprise. He did not automatically recognize the gaunt, sunken-eyed ghost staring back.
On to part two.