they've got nothing to do with each other, they never did
having returned from the last exhibition game (giants at a's, a's took it eight-five in spite of everything), and sleepy and keenly excited with tickets to the next three games already bought, i have not one but two for you. because really, times like this, how could i not?
The reason it took so long is that I was thirty pages into a possible AU before taking a break and trying this, and then the first version of it was twenty pages long when I decided it bothered me and started over again from scratch. The unfinished original has been promptly remaindered. (if you really wanna know: graveyard)
Can probably be read as a standalone, or, if you completely disregard the last sentence (as I so clearly have), a sequel to this.
Poor Killer Boy
Zito’s in a bad place, the old couch that used to live in Mulder’s garage, six years ago. The dryer door brangs open, and Mulder is bending in jeans, barefoot, fishing through the mess of white. He’s shirtless, and Zito’s having trouble remembering if he’s ever wanted anyone more.
Mulder left this couch on the curb when he moved out at the end of the year. Zito’d been aimless and running a fever, four days after getting knocked out of the playoffs. He’d spent a long Indian summer day on the sidewalk, a loose wreck of legs on the couch under the blue sky, reading old National Geographics and Esquires.
That was before.
Mulder chooses a shirt from the dryer, but doesn’t put it on, wrapping it around his arm like a bandage instead. He looks over at Zito, the sock pulled off Zito’s heel, the sideways mash of his hair, twenty-two year old kid and half-hard just from fucking looking at Mulder.
“You don’t look asleep,” Mulder says. His face warps like melted glass.
Zito shakes his head, stares at the slim lines of Mulder’s ribs and the reveal of his hipbone. Mulder in jeans and nothing else, a fucking wish, like stadium lights liquefied and poured into Zito’s veins.
“It’s ‘cause I’m not.”
“You’re talking, though. You never talk in your sleep.”
Zito furrows his brow. “I’m not asleep, Mark.”
Mulder laughs, the white of the shirt stark against his skin. He doesn’t believe Zito, and there’s something wrong with that. Mulder moved out of this house six years ago. Zito misses him, he realizes, stunned. He can feel the loss inside, the absence of Mulder all ragged and unhealed, suture-torn, which is impossible because Mulder is right here looking like Zito’s punishment for being queer.
“What day is it?” Zito asks, suddenly scared.
Tipping his head to the side, Mulder’s collarbone presses out hungrily, a cold wing. “It’s April 32nd, and you’re in trouble, baby.”
Zito wakes up gasping.
Disjointed, he claws at the bedsheets and sits up, shoving his hair back with the heel of his hand. His red devil-face nightlight glows in the corner, blacking the eyes of the photographs on the wall, the hurt orange smog flattening against the windows. He’s home. He’s in Hollywood.
He’s twenty-eight years old, and a free agent.
Recently, this has been happening more often. Mulder tonight and Hudson the night before, Hudson hard and perfect on the centerfield grass, his jeans opened enough to show black briefs and a gray waistband, Hudson calling Zito kid and kicking his legs out from under him. Hudson’s small tough hands clutched around the back of Zito’s neck, somehow cutting off his air. Muscle like shadow and the roll of the sky down over them, flipping spastically from day to night, blue to black.
It’s not a problem. Hudson and Mulder have become his go-to symbol for all things Oakland, Zito’s runaway shorthand. His subconscious is screwing everything up, but really it was only one night.
Zito’s therapist says that Zito romanticizes the past because he’s scared of the future. Zito thinks that’s stupid; the past was romantic. Four, five, six years ago, youth and promise and victory and purpose and brotherhood, like a fucking epic poem, and also baseball. Baseball when there was nothing in the world that Zito did better.
He doesn’t show up for his sessions much anymore, though his therapist amuses him because she’s Amanda Jones like the song, Dr. Jones like Indiana. She keeps asking him about the money, what it’ll mean; Zito gets enough of that at work.
It’s five in the morning but Zito’s up for the count, beat down with his pulse skipping. He makes some coffee and eats cold pop-tarts for breakfast, sits out on the patio until the sun comes up.
Hudson calls him six times over the next week, and Zito lets each call go like pieces of fog caught in a tight wind. Zito dreams about him fitfully, the two of them on the fire escape of Zito’s rookie year San Francisco apartment, pink sky and the building across the street in flames. Hudson’s got his hand down Zito’s pants and his teeth on Zito’s ear, saying, “Lookit that, thank fuck that’s not us.” Zito’s got smoke in his eyes and something thick blocking off his throat.
Hudson’s messages get progressively more annoyed, until finally he’s drunk, telling Zito’s dead phone, “You call me back, you little bastard, or I’ma come out there and bury your ass, you un’erstand me?”
Zito doesn’t, of course, but that’s nothing, and he calls Hudson back, hunched in the front seat of his car, sitting in his driveway. The windows are frosted, cold up here in the hills, and Zito can barely make out the streetlights, fuzzy yellow seeds hanging against the milky silver.
Hudson scorns him and makes fun of him and generally obliterates him. Zito rests his forehead on the steering wheel, breathing out, “Yeah, Huddy. Sure,” a skitter of warmth on the surface of his skin.
Hudson asks him if he got the invitation yet, and Zito remembers something about that, drunk out of his goddamn mind in the garage, slipping on the spill of the mail like walking on ice and cracking his head into the cement floor, losing consciousness briefly. He’d come to with a papercut on his thumb, a crumple of fine cream-white in his hand, a Scottsdale return address in fancy gold calligraphy, red fingerprints obscuring Zito’s name. The poisonous smell of gasoline and oil and laundry detergent choking him and an electric sear in his chest, his head hurting so bad he wanted to cry.
Mulder’s getting married in a week.
And Hudson’s asking, “You’re coming down, man, right?”
And Zito’s crying, “No!”
Zito’s saying, “Wouldn’t miss it.”
Fuck. He lost control of the situation a long time ago, in a hotel room somewhere on the East Coast, liquor that tasted like candy and Mulder’s mouth hot on his shoulder, Hudson’s hand on his stomach. Zito recognizes it immediately, a seventh inning kind of exhaustion, a tail on the end of his movements so that everything breaks right across the heart of the plate. It’s right there in the corner of his mind; it’s in the black.
Hudson tells him, “Goddamn right. Christ knows we wouldn’t know what to do without you,” and that’s such a fucking lie it should burn.
Now he’s going to Scottsdale, chewing up aspirin and feverishly replaying that one night. It’s all twisted, shoulders and knees and Mulder’s head between Hudson’s legs and Zito gasping up pieces of his lungs. He’s getting confused, though he is frightened of nothing more than he is scared that he will forget this someday. They were all three of them so drunk, blurred like wet newsprint pictures, and he’s losing bits of it, unable to remember now which of them had unbuttoned his jeans, which of them had tasted like vodka and which like scotch, Bailey’s sweetness fucking everywhere, the precise crooked way that Mulder had laughed when he’d rolled over onto one of the miniature glass bottles and the little cap had stuck to his stomach.
He’s losing it, day by day. The dreams aren’t helping, because when he’s asleep he fucks Hudson, and sucks Mulder off, and can see himself passed out and tied up with the two of them on the bed, and he can’t get a handle on what really happened and what didn’t.
Hudson’s sitting in the stairwell of the hotel, eating an orange. A small shredded pile of the peel is at his feet, white stuff shoved under his nails. Zito leans next to the fire extinguisher on the wall and thinks about ripping Hudson’s neat-buttoned shirt open, press him down on the stairs and run his hands up the carve of Hudson’s sides.
“You want the over-under?” Hudson asks, absently rolling his wedding ring around his finger with his thumb.
The bright green exit sign is fucking with Zito’s eyes. “On what?”
Hudson shrugs, stuffs a section of orange into his mouth. What’s left in his hand doesn’t seem to be getting any smaller.
“I give it three years. Chavvy says four, but he’s a romantic. Bobby said six weeks and nine days; of course, he’s still in love.”
Zito squints, heavy pressure in his temples. The slick paint of the wall slides him down imperceptibly, his knees buckling. Hudson licks juice off the side of his hand, causing something to clench in Zito’s stomach.
“You ever think about me, Tim?” Zito asks stupidly. Hudson cocks his head to the side, a strangely betrayed look casting over his features. The orange is smearing shiny and sticky on his forearms, over the complex weave of his tattoos and blue scatter of the veins on the undersides of his wrists.
“I put your baseball card in my wallet, but I turned it around so I wouldn’t have to see your face anymore,” Hudson tells him, and.
Zito wakes up. The car is drifting onto the shoulder, crunching through the dry brush, and he shouts in surprise, jerks the wheel too hard, skewing into the other lane. A blare of eighteen-wheeler headlights like a nuclear explosion, a howl that crashes into the space, filling it like a physical weight, like the end of the world.
Zito screams, something tearing free in his throat, and yanks the wheel again, skidding. The truck slams past, maybe inches away or maybe closer, a metallic whine reverberating in Zito’s ears. He comes to a rest, slashed like a scar across the highway, his heart thundering. He’s shaking so hard it feels like there are two of him, and he shoulders open the door, gets violently sick on the asphalt.
Fell asleep at the wheel. Jesus fucking Christ.
There are clear warning signs tailing him, same as the homeless guy on Sunset Boulevard over the weekend, holding a cardboard sign that read, ‘Everybody needs a little help now and then.’ It doesn’t seem fair, that his subtext should become text, that messages should rain down from the sky and appear on the sidewalk before him, because Zito has always cultivated an air of mystery, even from himself.
But this is the truth: In a hotel room somewhere on the East Coast, some number of years ago, Mulder and Hudson and Zito fucked around.
Some number of years ago, fucking around with Mulder and Hudson kinda fucked Zito up.
Under the night sky, as black as a Bible with the stars going on for days, Zito washes out his mouth with Coke and takes deep calming breaths of the thin desert air, a strategy taught to him by the therapist before last. He counts in increments of ten up to five hundred, and then gets back in the car and swears that he will have his revenge for this if it’s the last motherfucking thing he ever does.
Phoenix gouges neatly into him, the streetlight and neon off the pale concrete and solid new-black roads. Too bright outside to be as cold as it is when he gets out of the car, when he gets tackled by Hudson in the hotel lobby, bam.
This, right here. Hudson breaking Zito’s knees and tumbling him towards his own reflection in the marble tile, Hudson on Zito’s back like a blanket. They wrestle, sliding and laughing, until Hudson is pinned underneath. Zito has to stop moving entirely, because Hudson is warm like this city will be when and if Zito comes back for spring training. Hudson is ripped and hard across his chest and stomach, and Zito rolls off, half-panicked, as Hudson says:
“Your reflexes are for shit. Used to be, you’d know I was coming ‘fore I even thought of it.”
This, right here, is why Zito has trouble letting go.
He tries to say something fast and clever, and it’s then that he learns that he’s almost completely lost his voice, probably from when he screamed on the highway. He coughs sadly and Hudson puts his hand on Zito’s back, tells him that he really should take better care of himself.
They’re going to dinner with the boys, and Zito badly wants to take a nap, having left Los Angeles without having bothered to sleep to get here now, his thirtieth hour conscious, save relapses at eighty miles an hour. There’s no time; he’s only just gotten out of the shower when Mulder shows up.
Zito can’t believe how hard it hits him, Mulder shined up like a penny, spiked and blued and lazily angled. Maybe he’d been hoping that Mulder would be some remarkable shadow of his former self, the strip-down from what they had been in Oakland so ever-present all around them and in the mirror when Zito shaves in the morning, when he brushes his teeth. Mulder should be dark-circled, razor-hipped, desperate and lonely. But instead he looks like that old dream.
Zito is unprotected, wearing nice black slacks and nothing else, his hair damp over his forehead. He can see the skim of Mulder’s gaze, down and back up, and feels himself flush. It always seems to surprise Mulder to find that he is attracted to Zito, his eyes widening slightly, hopeful crimp of his mouth. God knows it surprises Zito.
They make horrific small-talk while Zito gets dressed, Zito rasping each word like he’s on the edge of tears, breathing easier with every layer of clothing that he puts between Mulder and himself. Mulder stutters on every fifth word. He lounges across the bed, back on his elbows, legs over the edge, and follows Zito back and forth across the room. The thing that Zito remembers most about Mulder is length: his arms, his legs, his slender chest. Mulder’s a Ken doll that’s been put on a rack, but for Zito, the thing is, it’s just.
That night, in the hotel room somewhere on the East Coast, the fuck-up night, they’d passed out for awhile, the three of them like hooks and starfish, sprawled and curled on the big bed, and Zito had woken up with the world still perfectly blacked, tucked up against Mulder’s back. He remembers shifting up so that his chest locked into the space between Mulder’s shoulder blades, and pushing his hand down Mulder’s stomach with an inviolate sense of urgency. Hudson was breathing deeply on the other side of Mulder, who awoke with a moan and a jerk, cuffed Zito’s wrist and pushed back against him. Zito remembers all that height, that length, running his fingers up the endless slant of Mulder’s sides, hooking his feet around Mulder’s ankles, the broad of Mulder’s back more stable than flesh and bone had a right to be, braced and earthquake-proof.
Mostly sober, that was what was wrong with that. Mostly sober, half-asleep, knowing entirely what he was doing when he wedged Mulder’s legs apart with his knee and licked across the back of his neck and angled Mulder onto his stomach. And when he’d folded himself down around Mulder’s back, his arms wrapped tight around Mulder’s stomach and his cheek against Mulder’s sticky-soft mid-sleep hair. Looking over to see the silvery flash of Hudson’s eyes, watching, bright and aware and, fuck, sober.
Zito resolutely squeezes that into a little ball and shoves it way down deep. He buttons up his shirt and brushes his hair down with the flat of his hand, giving Mulder a skeptical look under which Mulder shifts uncomfortably.
“So what’s she like, Mark?” Zito asks. Chavez had said, like you’d expect. Pretty blonde chick who laughs at all his jokes, though, in the course of Mulder and Zito’s history, Mulder has made maybe six jokes worth laughing at. There but for the grace of homosexuality goes Zito.
Mulder doesn’t seem to have expected that question, and he sorta laughs it off, pushing his fingers compulsively at the design in the bedspread. “She’s cool, but you’ll probably hate her.”
Zito nods; that would be a pretty fair assumption anyway. “I was a little surprised that you invited me.”
Mulder’s face gets unreadable. “Why? We’re friends, right?”
“Oh, the best,” Zito half-sneers, but he catches himself and forces a sick little smile. He sits down on the bed near Mulder’s legs to pull on his socks, thinking that he shouldn’t have come down here. What made him think that spending the weekend with the remnants of his broken heart was a good idea?
They leave the hotel room together and the layered click of the door closing, Mulder standing in the hallways with his hands in his pockets and his face tilted towards the floor, strikes Zito like a brushback, the thousands of times that they’ve done this, stood in a hotel hallway and checked the door to make sure that it’s locked, hearing the murmur and hum of the television through the door, because Zito’s mom had taught him to always leave it on when leaving hotel rooms, so that thieves would think there was somebody inside.
They could be twenty-two again, Zito realizes, and almost panics. They could still be teammates. It’s terrifying in a totally unpredictable way; this kind of displacement should be welcome, like having sex in the back of a car, in the parking lot of a park where, only three years earlier, he’d played Little League baseball, but instead it’s impossible to swallow.
Among other things that have changed, Mulder is now a fucking World Series winner, and that’s kinda rough as well, the idea that Zito could be looking at maybe the biggest contract ever given to a free-agent pitcher (the thought of that! so strange and ill-fitting, such an odd thing to be known for), and despite all these best efforts of his, he’s still never won a pennant. Mulder’s got a ring somewhere, though he can’t lift his arm above his shoulder even now, two nights before his wedding.
Zito’s gonna be stupid rich pretty soon, and for awhile in the early part of the millennium, it seemed that that would be the final decision between the three of them, who came out best after Oakland, because you couldn’t properly rate them when they were on the same team. It was just a blessing; it defied accepted knowledge. Now they’re all on their own and things are falling as they may. Mulder has proven to be easily broken, uncourted here in his own winter of free agency, but he’s somehow still beaten Zito in the worst way.
They meet up with Hudson and Chavez and Harden and Crosby, who are all but in each other’s pockets, already drunk with a glass flask in the back of Crosby’s jeans, under the untucked tail of his shirt. Zito wants twice what they’ve had, watching Mulder talk to Hudson with tense concentration.
The night doesn’t go well. Zito’s tolerance is shot to shit for some reason, the change in sea level, the different time zone in which Phoenix inexplicably exists. Anyway, he’s making mistakes, letting Crosby order him complex drinks that the bartender has never heard of. He’s not going to want to remember any of this.
Chavez starts making toasts after the ice cream. They’re all wrecked, the table cluttered with glassware, a spilled wine bottle dripping red onto a white linen napkin. Chavez says, “To Mark, who’s a son of a bitch,” and then starts laughing, candle light in his eyes.
Zito’s got his foot hooked around Mulder’s ankle under the table, anchored there. He’d forgotten what it’s like when they’re in the same room, the beating heart of the Oakland Athletics for half a decade, the staticky drum of energy, the quick fall-offs of inside jokes, the silverware cartwheeling gashes of light across their faces and all this fucking chemistry.
Chemistry is what got them in trouble in the first place. Chemistry and liquor, an uncertainty of place and time, an alignment like the three of them were planets, stuck by gravity on paths that circled around each other.
Crosby shouts, “To Mark who still owes me the fucking security deposit,” and Harden covers up his face with his arm, his shoulders shaking. Mulder is grinning hugely, and Zito’s head is spinning. This is what he left behind, and maybe he’s not okay with that.
He’s so drunk. Hudson tells Mulder that he (Mulder) doesn’t know what he’s getting himself into, leaning on his elbows on the table. Hudson has always seemed preternaturally content to be married, but then, he did have sex with two of his teammates, once upon a time, so who knows what’s going on underneath.
Zito stands, wavering, Hudson’s hand hooked in his belt, keeping him steady. Zito can’t stand this, Mulder with his pretty wet-blue eyes and Hudson’s neck flushed, the two of them occupying all his attention, and the heavy ache of this one night resurrection of their team. This is what Zito’s life is supposed to be, his romantic past; they’ve ruined him for anything else. It’s enough to make a man abandon morality.
“To Mark,” Zito says in his scrape of a voice, his mouth feeling unwieldy. “Who’s gonna be a terrible husband.”
Harden hoots and bangs his spoon on his glass until it breaks, and now the place is dangerous, glinting sharded invisible pieces of glass all over the table, Crosby smearing blood onto Harden’s face.
Mulder’s looking up at Zito, confused and worried. Zito smiles messily at him, his back teeth clenched tight. He’s close to tears.
“To Mark who’s champion of the fucking world,” Zito said, swaying. “Who doesn’t deserve it. To Mark and his motherfucking fiancée and their motherfucking future and I hope you’ll never know a day of sorrow, you cocksucking piece of shit.”
It’s just. Amazing.
Mulder’s face falls starkly open, a scar-bright vein of something wicked running through it, and Crosby drops his glass onto a plate and both break and everybody jumps. Zito immediately turns away and covers his face with his hands, nearly losing his balance before Hudson rises and catches him around the waist. Which, really. Only makes a bad situation worse.
“Hold on, son, you’re fucked up,” Hudson says into his ear, and Zito grays out a little bit, marveling over the art of understatement.
It’s old news, anyway. They’ve all got holes in their defenses; Chavez says too much to reporters and Zito says too much to those he loves. Particularly when he’s drunk, no friend is safe from him, no secret. And now he’s said this awful thing, his breakdown at once evident and pitiless, and Mulder’s face recurs, bloodshot eyes wide, and holy fuck, he’ll never be forgiven.
Hudson wrestles him into the little hallway where the phones are and Zito’s legs give out, sickly happy to rest his weight on Hudson for the second that Hudson allows it before dropping him cold on the floor. Zito digs the heels of his hands into his eyes, and swears to Hudson that he didn’t mean it, it’s some kind of mistake.
Hudson pushes a hand through Zito’s hair absently, sitting cross-legged beside him, and says, “It’s possible that you coming down here was a bad idea.”
Zito coughs against his wrists. “What makes you say that?” he manages weakly.
Hudson sorta laughs. “You’re really not doing so good, kid.”
Miserable, Zito nods. He concentrates on Hudson touching his hair, like he’s forgotten that he’s doing it, held warm and still and goddamn it, Tim Hudson. Tim Hudson when Zito can’t get over how fucking decent he is, once-best friend, tipping fifty percent and carrying Zito out of harm’s way when Zito’s embarked upon something disastrous.
Like that night, when Zito kissed Mulder on the bed and was hazily frightened for a moment, seeing quite clearly that he and Mulder would certainly immolate each other if they tried this alone. Zito and Mulder encouraged each other’s bad habits, more alike than either of them cared to admit, and it would be a quick way down. Hudson had been there, though, able to fit on Zito’s other side and snap into place, the three of them as always working better together.
Hudson pushes him up, wipes at the salt on Zito’s face with the side of his hand. There’s a chance that Zito’s crying, kinda. Hudson sighs and says, “You wanna get out of here?”
Zito can’t find the words, speechless with remorse, but he butts his head into Hudson’s shoulder until Hudson hauls him to his feet and takes him to get a cab.
Blurred, Zito clutches Hudson’s shirt, ducking away from the smear of neon and palm trees out the window. Phoenix has been his home for six weeks of every year, but it’s always alien the first night back down, and Zito’s hands are under Hudson’s shirt suddenly.
“I’m sorry,” he says immediately, but doesn’t move away. His face feels hot as Hudson slants a look down at him, his eyes shining.
“It’s not so much the betrayal as that it took you this long to finally pull it off,” Hudson tells him, and Zito flattens his palms on Hudson’s stomach, feeling the warm shudder of muscle.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
Hudson takes Zito’s head in his hands, startling Zito into looking up. He tucks his thumbs into Zito’s temples and says, “You built this up for years. Years is all you’ve got and you’re wasting them on this.”
Zito gets scared, twisting his fists in Hudson’s belt and seeing church signs fly by outside the cab. It could get so bad so fast, just a bit rougher on the first word, and Hudson’s scraped palms on Zito’s face.
“What am I supposed to do?” Zito asks helplessly, because really that’s all he’s ever wanted to know. He doesn’t want to deal with this stuff anymore, he wants to be guided and led, he’s too fucking tired to figure it out on his own.
Hudson kisses him briefly on the mouth, and says, “Break my heart when you leave, man,” and Zito.
Well. He wakes up.
He’s fallen over sideways in the back of the cab, his cheek on the vinyl and his back protesting. Hudson’s talking on his cell phone, telling someone, “It’s just a fucking mess, basically. Gettin’ too old for this shit.”
Zito groans and pushes his head into the seat, still drunk and set down hard by the mistakes that he’s made. Hudson rests a distracted hand on the side of his face, and Zito feels himself start to cry again, just like a fucking faggot, poor killer boy so fucked up. He can’t stand himself like this.
Hudson says into his phone, “Yeah, love you too,” and hangs up, taps his fingers thoughtfully on Zito’s cheek. “Well.”
Zito doesn’t want to talk about it. He can’t say why this is happening to him, why leaving Oakland is damaging him so badly.
“Little emotional tonight, aren’t we?” Hudson says easily.
Scrunching his face, Zito thinks that this is bad part of family. They call you on fucking everything. “Maybe I’m having more trouble than I thought.”
“No shit.” Hudson flicks Zito’s ear. “Mark’s gonna beat you ‘til you’re dead, you know.”
“Fuck, Timmy.”
“It’s okay. Hey. You just need to not so much talk without running it by me first.”
And Zito half-laughs, curling his fists under his chin. Sometimes he can’t stomach how hung up he is on these guys.
Hudson gets him through the lobby and into the elevator, and Zito sits on the floor as the doors shut, staring at Hudson’s reflection, his collar thumbed open one past the place where his throat meets his chest, cuffs unbuttoned to show a lick of black ink. Honestly, it’s not right, what Hudson does to him.
After Hudson deposits Zito on the bed, he makes them both a drink, which Zito has to laugh at, remembering that just a little trouble has never been enough for any of them. Hudson sits cross-legged on the bed and Zito gets a weird rush of déjà vu, clutching the glass in his hand.
“Eric’s talking about strippers for tomorrow night.”
Zito tucks his chin against a pillow, closing his eyes. “Naturally.”
“Which is obviously a disaster in the making, but, hell. Strippers.”
“I think I’m gonna go home.”
Hudson pauses, and if Zito listens real closely, he can hear the tick of Hudson’s wedding ring against glass.
“You don’t want to wait around to see how the dust settles?”
“It’s been settling for two fucking years, Tim,” Zito says, sharp with his throat slickened by alcohol.
“Yeah, and you’ve skipped the fuck out on most of it,” Hudson tells him. “Once you sign somewhere, we’ll never hear from you again, and that’s fine if that’s how you want it, but what the fuck was tonight, then? One for the fucking road?”
“You. You’ll hear from me,” Zito answers haltingly. “I’ll be around.”
“Sure. I hate to be the one to tell you this, kid, but you’ve got talent for fucking up in every way available to you, and maybe it’s time to find a new hobby, huh?”
Zito sits up, stomach crawling hotly, snatching guilty looks at Hudson, who can see everything, because Zito is stupid and found the least likely guy on the planet to be his best friend.
“I’m sick of this,” he says, trembling, standing up falling down drunk. “I can’t be around you guys anymore, it’s doing something awful to me.”
Hudson’s metallic eyes flash, and he pushes the back of his hand across the scruff on his jaw. “It’s not as if we do this every week, man.”
“Tim, jesus.” Zito puts his hands up over his face. “You’re here all the time.”
“What-” Hudson starts to say, but he doesn’t get a chance because Mulder is slamming on the door, shouting Zito’s name in a way that makes the walls shake. It’s crazy perfect.
Zito blinks wide at Hudson through his fingers. “If you ever loved me at all, you won’t let him in.”
Hudson looks shocked for a moment, then smirks. “Finish your drink. We’re gonna see how this plays out one more time.”
Zito bares his teeth, thinking viciously, betrayer. Tim Hudson was for five years his best friend in the world. A teammate, nonetheless. They’re supposed to have each other’s back. Two years apart and Zito wonders, if he’d returned Hudson’s calls on anything like a regular basis, would his life be better right now?
Mulder comes in and he’s a trainwreck, and that’s oddly comforting. His shirt is pulled out on one side, a pair of parallel lines in grease on the tail, like he got it caught in the elevator. Salt in his hair, and mad spinning blue eyes, and this is one more injuriously familiar thing, Mulder three hours drunk on wine and so angry he’s stammering.
“What the fuck is your problem?”
Pushing his knees up to his chest, Zito shakes his head, turning his face down and away. “This is really not a good time, Mark. Can you come back in the morning?”
Hudson snorts a laugh, leans back against the door. “And after all this, he’s still got his sense of humor.”
“You can shut the fuck up, Timothy,” Mulder says over his shoulder, keeping his eyes on Zito.
“Listen,” Zito tries. “I’m honestly drunk as shit. I didn’t mean it.”
Mulder doesn’t want to hear it, which isn’t really fair because Mulder knows what drunk does to Zito. It works so perfectly on him, kills every last stop between his brain and his mouth, his hands. Zito sorta hunches and lets Mulder rail at him.
Hudson breaks them off, “Okay, enough,” after Mulder calls Zito a bitter fucking sell-out, and shoves Mulder to the side, standing in the middle of the room.
“You’re being an asshole,” he tells Mulder. “And you, pick your fucking head up, you make me want to slap you.”
Zito forces his shoulders back, fisted hands against his ankles. He glances sharp at Mulder, the rip of his mouth, foggily weaving in place. Can’t stop trying to remember, suddenly, if this is the first time the three of them have been alone together in the same room since that night.
“Say you’re sorry, kid,” Hudson says. Zito rubs at his eyes and obeys him, his voice breaking. “Now fucking accept his apology, Mark.”
Mulder won’t; Hudson’s misjudged the situation. Zito and Hudson are best friends, which means that they can forgive each other certain things, practically everything, but Mulder’s never really been overly fond of Zito, or at least, not in a way that typically shows. Zito effectively ignoring him for two years can’t have helped matters.
Staring at the carpet, Mulder doesn’t say anything. Zito sighs. “It’s okay, man.”
“No,” Hudson says, and Zito flinches, catches Mulder’s slanted eyes for a brief moment. “This is supposed to be our fucking vacation, and y’all aren’t gonna fuck it up.”
Mulder gives Hudson a pretty rough glare. “I want to know what the fuck he was trying to do.”
“Jesus, Mark!” Hudson loses his balance momentarily, listing and righting himself. “He wasn’t trying to do anything. You think he’s got that kind of control over himself?”
“Um,” Zito says from the bed.
“I can’t believe you’re still fucking defending him, man.” Mulder’s head is up because they’re into it now, and Zito is reminded of one of the dreams, Mulder turning up in the back of Zito’s car, in the rainbow midday light of Southern California, squinting up at him through the dusty window stretched out all long across the seat, telling Zito that they’re never gonna get anywhere if this weather holds.
“Oh, like I’d waste my fucking breath,” Hudson snaps. “But I’m sick of this drama queen shit. It’s been a terrible winter and I don’t wanna worry about the two of you all weekend.”
“Then go home, Huddy, for christ’s sake.”
“Yeah,” Zito says suddenly, throwing himself headlong into the fray, because it’s the three of them, one more time, and he doesn’t understand self-preservation anymore. “What’d you come out here for, otherwise?”
They both look over at him with unsteady surprise on their faces, and something tightens in Zito. He gets off the bed, shaky and ripped up like you wouldn’t believe.
“What else was gonna happen?” he continues, a slur on the edge of things. “Put us in a room again. Got me drunk again.”
Hudson looks almost frightened for a second, half-stepping back. Zito shows a crazed open-mouthed smile, the breaks and disfigurements of the past two years rising fast to the surface. He thinks hysterically, it’s no different, I’m fucking losing them again.
“Don’t,” Mulder whispers, and Zito bites the inside of his lip, shakes his head.
“I’m sorry. I can’t help it. I can’t. Can’t even fucking sleep anymore, and seriously, if you could just-”
Zito’s legs fold right then, and he sits back down on the bed hard, a small cry. Hudson’s eyes widen and he checks for something in Mulder’s face, crosses his arms over his chest. Neither of them trusts Zito at all. They’ve seen him like this more than once.
“I can’t for the life of me figure out what’s wrong with you,” Hudson says, which is pretty on the money. “Coulda swore you told me you were over this two years ago.”
Zito coughs on a laugh and says, “Yeah, Timmy, that was a lie.”
He looks up at them, straight lines on the carpet, fazed light on glass in the corner of his eye, Mulder and Hudson in the rags of their nice-restaurant shirts, casualties of the night. He considers the fact that he’s still drunk, and maybe, dream of dreams, they are too.
“I don’t like it as much when it’s just me,” Zito tells them, and lowers his head in shame.
They’re quiet for a moment, and then Mulder asks, “What?”
Leaning forward over his knees with his elbows on his knees and his hands over his ears, Zito is stricken with the thought that this is where his seven years in service to the same team have brought him. It’s like something in the blood.
“Everything was better when you guys were around,” he admits carefully. “And now I gotta go someplace totally new, where I’ll be the only one, and that’s. Not really gonna be good for me.”
Mulder exhales in astonished disgust, “Fuck,” and Hudson’s eyes are bullet-bright, his hands in fists in the dents of his elbows. Zito sorta shrugs and angles his face down in a way that makes him look sad and young.
“You can fuckin’ pick your moments, man,” Hudson says. “All the shit you put us through, and now this?”
“Oh, is my nervous breakdown a little too emotionally complex for you?” Zito snarks, and sees Mulder flash a grin and then bury it down again.
“It’s a little fucking useless. We’re not around anymore, and you’re gonna sign your fucking contract, and there you go, kid. Nobody stays in Oakland forever.”
Zito shakes his head. “It’s not about the team.”
Hudson starts to say something, then stops. Mulder’s staring big at Zito, almost like a warning, but Zito’s running hot under skin and he can do this, one more time, he’s got nothing to hold onto and nothing to hold him back.
“I’m fucked up over the two of you. I’m. In something like love. With both of you.”
And though he is trying to keep himself still, he is not looking at them, just a tear of blue and the white card of Hudson’s shirt in his peripheral vision. Mulder will have that dumb wordless expression on his face, made abruptly ten years younger by the drop of his eyes and mouth, and even Mulder at nineteen is something known to Zito. Hudson will be smirking the way he does when he thinks someone’s fucking with him, barely restrained tolerance at Zito trying to push through the drunk, ready to abandon him to his paranoias and fantasies.
“Say that again,” Hudson says, almost a sneer, Mulder flinching.
“I’m not happy about it, Huddy, for christ’s sake.” Zito folds his arms on his chest and swallows fast and works up a glare.
“Why.” Mulder struggles. “What’re you. How is that even possible?”
Zito moves his shoulders, biting his tongue. “I have really bad luck.”
They’re silent, watching each other. It’s a desert night out there, Zito remembers, and strange for it to be December, fall-away month with the season sixty days in either direction, the heartless center of the year.
“This is about what happened?” Hudson says eventually. Zito eyes him uncertainly.
“When-”
“That night. That one time.”
“Don’t fucking encourage him, Tim,” Mulder says, but he sounds scared. Hudson looks immovable.
“I just wanna be sure I know what we’re talking about.”
Zito lifts his chin, clutches his elbows. “It’s kind of a highlight of my life.”
“It was one night. We were drunk.”
And, oh brave new world, here they are again. No longer teammates and maybe only forty percent friends, after two years and the five before that. It’s hard for Zito to tell if this evens things out at all, if it’s good that they’re not the same as they were back then. More has come between them than Zito would have thought possible, ripped out the bolts that used to cinch them to each other.
But the three of them are so drunk that it doesn’t matter. They’re kids again, still in the fire together, and they’re got better ways to prove themselves.
“I really can’t tell you how sorry I am, dude,” Zito says sincerely. “But I live and breathe that fucking night. It’s as good as my life has ever been.”
“Mary mother of God, you’re fucking unbelievable.” Hudson turns away in disgust, his hand going to the back of his head in an old gesture of loss and confusion.
It probably isn’t safe to be so easily affected. Zito’s been working on not being so dependent on others for his quality of life, but he thinks he should be cut a break here. Mulder and Hudson are more than just his past. As perfectly happy as Zito’s ever been, he’s been with the two of them, in that hotel room or any of the hundreds that came before and after it, and now he can’t go quietly down alone.
Mulder’s face is bent towards the floor and shadowed, and Zito can tell that he’s still pretty angry underneath. When things get chaotic, Mulder pulls back and shuts down, only so he can get his feet under him before he decides how to respond.
“All this time,” he says eventually, slowly. Zito nods, fixed on him. “You never even talk to us anymore.”
That would be the avoidance, but it’s obvious without Zito having to say it.
“And now, what?” Mulder’s eyes widen slightly, his mouth taut. “I’m getting married day after tomorrow.”
“I already am,” Hudson says, pissed-off, but Zito’s staring at Mulder and Mulder’s staring back.
“You came down here for this?” Mulder asks. “Like, one more time?”
Zito swallows against a sudden blast of sight and taste. He hadn’t come down here thinking that anything would come of it; honestly, it was just that strain of self-destruction that infects him during the winter, driving him into the wasteland. But he can feel it now, the haze between the three of them like the potential of a perfect game, Hudson’s open collar and Mulder’s rolled sleeves, the low magnetic tip in Zito that leads him unfailingly back to his crime scenes.
“I’ll do anything,” Zito answers hoarsely, thinking that it’s gonna be these same fucking guys until the end of time.
Mulder’s eyes shine briefly and he looks over at Hudson, who’s motionless and brilliantly stricken. Zito sees the give of muscle in Mulder’s shoulders, his mouth softening and Zito’s heartbeat ratchets up.
“Tim,” Mulder says low. Hudson sorta jerks and looks over at him, then back at Zito. “Weigh the fuck in, will you.”
Hudson doesn’t take his gaze off Zito, answering, “I don’t know how you can think this is an okay thing to want.”
Shivering, Zito rolls his eyes. “I don’t think it’s okay at all, man. I wish to god it hadn’t gone like this for me. But how’m I supposed to stop it?”
“And this is gonna help?” Hudson asks, gesturing between the three of them. “Because it really, really seems like it’s gonna make things worse.”
Zito exhales, winding his fingers together between his knees. “The way I figure it. I’m already fucked up forever. So what’s one more night?”
The problem, though, that occurs to Zito as he’s watching Mulder rub a hand across his mouth distantly and Hudson swallow a couple times, the problem is that it was never just one night. They’re years in and with some small piece of himself, he holds out hope that they have years ahead, judgment this poor at all milestones. He’s been gone on the two of them for so long that he doesn’t know how to be any other way. He’s grown up with this inside him, and he will lie cheat steal, whatever it takes, to get one more night out of them, a hundred times over.
Hudson glances at Mulder and Mulder looks back, an almost imperceptible shrug. Hudson looks back at Zito and there’s movement in his eyes.
“It could be nothing outside of here. There’s no way this can even exist.”
Zito goes as still as possible, humming under his skin because they’re both looking at him, and this, this right here is why. Hudson with something clean rising in his face, and Mulder licking his lips, and Zito is bizarrely relieved to find that he is such a mess, because they’re here now and maybe they’ll fix him up, if only out of pity.
“I know,” he says as evenly as he can.
“And it’s, like, between the three of us and that’s it,” Hudson goes on, his hands shaking a bit.
“We’ve done that before,” Mulder says, and Zito catches the bend of his mouth, the brightness of his eyes, the way he has always looked right before something good, and Zito kinda loses his breath for a minute.
“And tomorrow you go home,” Hudson says at last, and Mulder’s face twitches, glancing quick from Hudson to Zito.
Zito nods, trying to swallow past through something huge in his throat. “I never should have come down in the first place.”
“Yeah. Now you fucking know better.” Hudson looks over at Mulder. “Mark.”
Mulder starts, taking his eyes off Zito and blinking at Hudson. “I’m okay. I think maybe. If it’s just one more time, we’ll be all right.”
And that trips a wire in Zito’s chest, explodes all through him. Mulder’s got the most to lose, though Zito is teamless and Hudson’s bait. Mulder is thirty-six hours away from the rest of his life, which leaves him far more vulnerable, untenable. But he’s rubbing his hand on his side absently, pulling out his shirt, and he always looks so good. Zito is almost frightened by the anticipation he feels at this moment, watching Hudson’s eyes half close, the ghostly knife-cut of Mulder’s hip.
Maybe the misdirection and wicked dragnets of the past seven years of his life will pay off tonight. Zito is badly lost, a gash down the heart of him that he can’t cover with his hands alone, and Mulder is almost smiling, saying:
“My bachelor party’s gonna suck anyway.”
Hudson makes a noise like a laugh and then Mulder kills the lights, and in the orange fade of the city through the open curtain, Hudson takes off his shirt and steps forward. He bends to place his forehead on Zito’s and kisses him on the mouth. Zito can see Mulder as a shadow in the edge of his vision, feel the bed give as he kneels and puts his hand on the back of Zito’s neck and Zito keeps waiting to wake up.
Things fall apart with unsurprising speed. Zito loses track, his mouth shaping Mulder’s collarbone and Hudson’s hand sliding down his back under his shirt, because Mulder tastes like wine and Hudson like rum and coke, and he remembers thinking something almost identical about the meaning of that, some number of years ago.
Two fucking years that Zito has never seen them longer than a couple of hours after a game, and never both of them together, and it makes him press down so hard. The blank stupid shock that he can do what he wants, tongue his way down Mulder’s chest, roll over with his arms around Hudson’s neck, inhale sharply when he sees Mulder’s fingers on Hudson’s belt, when Mulder pushes up Zito’s shirt and ties it around his wrists. Two years without poorly timed jokes and arguments about beer, ambushes and pranks, without Mulder’s blue eyes and Hudson’s accent, and Zito’s crazy for missing them.
At some point, his teeth in the hollow under Mulder’s hip, Hudson’s hand inside his shorts, Zito can see, clearly for once, that it really makes no difference where they play or how much money they make. He’s gonna fuck Mulder in a little bit, and see what else Hudson can do with that fucking mouth of his, and it’s about more than baseball now.
It’s just another hotel room, halfheartedly lit with crooked shadows, and in here Zito can’t read their faults, can’t see the dangerous tracks that they have followed since leaving Oakland, even him. He can’t even tell that Hudson’s right-handed and Mulder’s left, in the dark like this. Right now they’re just old friends who occasionally mistake each other for something else.
Mulder pushes his fingers at Zito’s mouth and Zito leans back against Hudson’s chest, closing his eyes. He can’t believe he gets to have this twice. He’s going to be completely undone in the morning, and that will last for a very long time, through the season probably, which is terrifying in and of itself, but Zito’s more worried about five or ten years from now when he’ll wake up stuck on the fold of Mulder’s leg over his shoulder, Hudson’s hand spread flat on Mulder’s stomach. Even once he’s recovered from this, it’s gonna catch him unexpectedly and he’s gonna have to remember that whatever happens next, this will never happen again.
It’s gonna cripple him.
So he hangs on. Hudson says strange things, muttering Mulder’s name and “so fucking pretty,” into Zito’s shoulder, and Zito’s got Mulder’s hips in his hands, staring at Mulder’s open mouth. Notching into Zito’s back, Hudson bites at the nape of his neck and Zito half-shouts, wrenching his fingers so hard that Mulder grabs his hand and puts it to better use, slick-hot and beating deep in Zito’s palm.
Really, he can’t be expected to move on from something like this.
In the sallow light, strung out across the mattress, Zito watches Mulder and Hudson sleeping amid a firebombed skyline of sheets and blankets. Hudson’s on his back with his face etched as though in silver, and Mulder’s shallowly hooked like a moon, one of his fisted hands fit into Hudson’s ribs. Warm-colored and well-fucked, they look very young, almost like brothers.
“It’s not that I don’t understand how wrong it is,” Zito says, traveling the line of Hudson’s chest and Mulder’s smooth arm. “And it’s not, like, I don’t think you should give up anything for me.”
They’re asleep. The bruised patches under Mulder’s eyes make a certain amount of sense, as does the nightmare pirating across Hudson’s face. Stuff like this breaks Zito’s heart.
“You guys are just really confused about a lot of things, and it’s not only getting married. This is, okay, it’s for life.”
Zito pushes at Hudson’s shoulder, sweeping his thumb across his clean forehead. There is something out of place, a vague dislocation and the alarm clock on the night table counting down like a bomb timer.
“It’s because we got to each other young,” Zito says, checking for a pulse on Mulder and not finding anything. He’s crying a little bit, just fucking devastated all of a sudden. “’Cause I lived to see you. And I don’t know what the fuck you’re thinking, trying to leave.”
Zito touches Mulder’s mouth and Hudson’s eyes. They’ve taken it this far, past the feints and dodges, the minor league buses and hotel diners in Detroit, the ring on Hudson’s finger and the one that Mulder never wears, neveragain teammates, neveragain sharing air in quite the same way.
“Wake up,” Zito says quietly, and when they refuse, he says it louder, and rattles them, and throws himself against them as he would a wall, and he’s screaming when he wakes up.
The sun pours through the window, dust and steam clouding it before it reaches the ruined lunar surface of the bed, and Zito is sore, bent into a painful new shape, looking up into the whitewash glaze of morning and finding himself totally alone.
THE END
The reason it took so long is that I was thirty pages into a possible AU before taking a break and trying this, and then the first version of it was twenty pages long when I decided it bothered me and started over again from scratch. The unfinished original has been promptly remaindered. (if you really wanna know: graveyard)
Can probably be read as a standalone, or, if you completely disregard the last sentence (as I so clearly have), a sequel to this.
Poor Killer Boy
Zito’s in a bad place, the old couch that used to live in Mulder’s garage, six years ago. The dryer door brangs open, and Mulder is bending in jeans, barefoot, fishing through the mess of white. He’s shirtless, and Zito’s having trouble remembering if he’s ever wanted anyone more.
Mulder left this couch on the curb when he moved out at the end of the year. Zito’d been aimless and running a fever, four days after getting knocked out of the playoffs. He’d spent a long Indian summer day on the sidewalk, a loose wreck of legs on the couch under the blue sky, reading old National Geographics and Esquires.
That was before.
Mulder chooses a shirt from the dryer, but doesn’t put it on, wrapping it around his arm like a bandage instead. He looks over at Zito, the sock pulled off Zito’s heel, the sideways mash of his hair, twenty-two year old kid and half-hard just from fucking looking at Mulder.
“You don’t look asleep,” Mulder says. His face warps like melted glass.
Zito shakes his head, stares at the slim lines of Mulder’s ribs and the reveal of his hipbone. Mulder in jeans and nothing else, a fucking wish, like stadium lights liquefied and poured into Zito’s veins.
“It’s ‘cause I’m not.”
“You’re talking, though. You never talk in your sleep.”
Zito furrows his brow. “I’m not asleep, Mark.”
Mulder laughs, the white of the shirt stark against his skin. He doesn’t believe Zito, and there’s something wrong with that. Mulder moved out of this house six years ago. Zito misses him, he realizes, stunned. He can feel the loss inside, the absence of Mulder all ragged and unhealed, suture-torn, which is impossible because Mulder is right here looking like Zito’s punishment for being queer.
“What day is it?” Zito asks, suddenly scared.
Tipping his head to the side, Mulder’s collarbone presses out hungrily, a cold wing. “It’s April 32nd, and you’re in trouble, baby.”
Zito wakes up gasping.
Disjointed, he claws at the bedsheets and sits up, shoving his hair back with the heel of his hand. His red devil-face nightlight glows in the corner, blacking the eyes of the photographs on the wall, the hurt orange smog flattening against the windows. He’s home. He’s in Hollywood.
He’s twenty-eight years old, and a free agent.
Recently, this has been happening more often. Mulder tonight and Hudson the night before, Hudson hard and perfect on the centerfield grass, his jeans opened enough to show black briefs and a gray waistband, Hudson calling Zito kid and kicking his legs out from under him. Hudson’s small tough hands clutched around the back of Zito’s neck, somehow cutting off his air. Muscle like shadow and the roll of the sky down over them, flipping spastically from day to night, blue to black.
It’s not a problem. Hudson and Mulder have become his go-to symbol for all things Oakland, Zito’s runaway shorthand. His subconscious is screwing everything up, but really it was only one night.
Zito’s therapist says that Zito romanticizes the past because he’s scared of the future. Zito thinks that’s stupid; the past was romantic. Four, five, six years ago, youth and promise and victory and purpose and brotherhood, like a fucking epic poem, and also baseball. Baseball when there was nothing in the world that Zito did better.
He doesn’t show up for his sessions much anymore, though his therapist amuses him because she’s Amanda Jones like the song, Dr. Jones like Indiana. She keeps asking him about the money, what it’ll mean; Zito gets enough of that at work.
It’s five in the morning but Zito’s up for the count, beat down with his pulse skipping. He makes some coffee and eats cold pop-tarts for breakfast, sits out on the patio until the sun comes up.
Hudson calls him six times over the next week, and Zito lets each call go like pieces of fog caught in a tight wind. Zito dreams about him fitfully, the two of them on the fire escape of Zito’s rookie year San Francisco apartment, pink sky and the building across the street in flames. Hudson’s got his hand down Zito’s pants and his teeth on Zito’s ear, saying, “Lookit that, thank fuck that’s not us.” Zito’s got smoke in his eyes and something thick blocking off his throat.
Hudson’s messages get progressively more annoyed, until finally he’s drunk, telling Zito’s dead phone, “You call me back, you little bastard, or I’ma come out there and bury your ass, you un’erstand me?”
Zito doesn’t, of course, but that’s nothing, and he calls Hudson back, hunched in the front seat of his car, sitting in his driveway. The windows are frosted, cold up here in the hills, and Zito can barely make out the streetlights, fuzzy yellow seeds hanging against the milky silver.
Hudson scorns him and makes fun of him and generally obliterates him. Zito rests his forehead on the steering wheel, breathing out, “Yeah, Huddy. Sure,” a skitter of warmth on the surface of his skin.
Hudson asks him if he got the invitation yet, and Zito remembers something about that, drunk out of his goddamn mind in the garage, slipping on the spill of the mail like walking on ice and cracking his head into the cement floor, losing consciousness briefly. He’d come to with a papercut on his thumb, a crumple of fine cream-white in his hand, a Scottsdale return address in fancy gold calligraphy, red fingerprints obscuring Zito’s name. The poisonous smell of gasoline and oil and laundry detergent choking him and an electric sear in his chest, his head hurting so bad he wanted to cry.
Mulder’s getting married in a week.
And Hudson’s asking, “You’re coming down, man, right?”
And Zito’s crying, “No!”
Zito’s saying, “Wouldn’t miss it.”
Fuck. He lost control of the situation a long time ago, in a hotel room somewhere on the East Coast, liquor that tasted like candy and Mulder’s mouth hot on his shoulder, Hudson’s hand on his stomach. Zito recognizes it immediately, a seventh inning kind of exhaustion, a tail on the end of his movements so that everything breaks right across the heart of the plate. It’s right there in the corner of his mind; it’s in the black.
Hudson tells him, “Goddamn right. Christ knows we wouldn’t know what to do without you,” and that’s such a fucking lie it should burn.
Now he’s going to Scottsdale, chewing up aspirin and feverishly replaying that one night. It’s all twisted, shoulders and knees and Mulder’s head between Hudson’s legs and Zito gasping up pieces of his lungs. He’s getting confused, though he is frightened of nothing more than he is scared that he will forget this someday. They were all three of them so drunk, blurred like wet newsprint pictures, and he’s losing bits of it, unable to remember now which of them had unbuttoned his jeans, which of them had tasted like vodka and which like scotch, Bailey’s sweetness fucking everywhere, the precise crooked way that Mulder had laughed when he’d rolled over onto one of the miniature glass bottles and the little cap had stuck to his stomach.
He’s losing it, day by day. The dreams aren’t helping, because when he’s asleep he fucks Hudson, and sucks Mulder off, and can see himself passed out and tied up with the two of them on the bed, and he can’t get a handle on what really happened and what didn’t.
Hudson’s sitting in the stairwell of the hotel, eating an orange. A small shredded pile of the peel is at his feet, white stuff shoved under his nails. Zito leans next to the fire extinguisher on the wall and thinks about ripping Hudson’s neat-buttoned shirt open, press him down on the stairs and run his hands up the carve of Hudson’s sides.
“You want the over-under?” Hudson asks, absently rolling his wedding ring around his finger with his thumb.
The bright green exit sign is fucking with Zito’s eyes. “On what?”
Hudson shrugs, stuffs a section of orange into his mouth. What’s left in his hand doesn’t seem to be getting any smaller.
“I give it three years. Chavvy says four, but he’s a romantic. Bobby said six weeks and nine days; of course, he’s still in love.”
Zito squints, heavy pressure in his temples. The slick paint of the wall slides him down imperceptibly, his knees buckling. Hudson licks juice off the side of his hand, causing something to clench in Zito’s stomach.
“You ever think about me, Tim?” Zito asks stupidly. Hudson cocks his head to the side, a strangely betrayed look casting over his features. The orange is smearing shiny and sticky on his forearms, over the complex weave of his tattoos and blue scatter of the veins on the undersides of his wrists.
“I put your baseball card in my wallet, but I turned it around so I wouldn’t have to see your face anymore,” Hudson tells him, and.
Zito wakes up. The car is drifting onto the shoulder, crunching through the dry brush, and he shouts in surprise, jerks the wheel too hard, skewing into the other lane. A blare of eighteen-wheeler headlights like a nuclear explosion, a howl that crashes into the space, filling it like a physical weight, like the end of the world.
Zito screams, something tearing free in his throat, and yanks the wheel again, skidding. The truck slams past, maybe inches away or maybe closer, a metallic whine reverberating in Zito’s ears. He comes to a rest, slashed like a scar across the highway, his heart thundering. He’s shaking so hard it feels like there are two of him, and he shoulders open the door, gets violently sick on the asphalt.
Fell asleep at the wheel. Jesus fucking Christ.
There are clear warning signs tailing him, same as the homeless guy on Sunset Boulevard over the weekend, holding a cardboard sign that read, ‘Everybody needs a little help now and then.’ It doesn’t seem fair, that his subtext should become text, that messages should rain down from the sky and appear on the sidewalk before him, because Zito has always cultivated an air of mystery, even from himself.
But this is the truth: In a hotel room somewhere on the East Coast, some number of years ago, Mulder and Hudson and Zito fucked around.
Some number of years ago, fucking around with Mulder and Hudson kinda fucked Zito up.
Under the night sky, as black as a Bible with the stars going on for days, Zito washes out his mouth with Coke and takes deep calming breaths of the thin desert air, a strategy taught to him by the therapist before last. He counts in increments of ten up to five hundred, and then gets back in the car and swears that he will have his revenge for this if it’s the last motherfucking thing he ever does.
Phoenix gouges neatly into him, the streetlight and neon off the pale concrete and solid new-black roads. Too bright outside to be as cold as it is when he gets out of the car, when he gets tackled by Hudson in the hotel lobby, bam.
This, right here. Hudson breaking Zito’s knees and tumbling him towards his own reflection in the marble tile, Hudson on Zito’s back like a blanket. They wrestle, sliding and laughing, until Hudson is pinned underneath. Zito has to stop moving entirely, because Hudson is warm like this city will be when and if Zito comes back for spring training. Hudson is ripped and hard across his chest and stomach, and Zito rolls off, half-panicked, as Hudson says:
“Your reflexes are for shit. Used to be, you’d know I was coming ‘fore I even thought of it.”
This, right here, is why Zito has trouble letting go.
He tries to say something fast and clever, and it’s then that he learns that he’s almost completely lost his voice, probably from when he screamed on the highway. He coughs sadly and Hudson puts his hand on Zito’s back, tells him that he really should take better care of himself.
They’re going to dinner with the boys, and Zito badly wants to take a nap, having left Los Angeles without having bothered to sleep to get here now, his thirtieth hour conscious, save relapses at eighty miles an hour. There’s no time; he’s only just gotten out of the shower when Mulder shows up.
Zito can’t believe how hard it hits him, Mulder shined up like a penny, spiked and blued and lazily angled. Maybe he’d been hoping that Mulder would be some remarkable shadow of his former self, the strip-down from what they had been in Oakland so ever-present all around them and in the mirror when Zito shaves in the morning, when he brushes his teeth. Mulder should be dark-circled, razor-hipped, desperate and lonely. But instead he looks like that old dream.
Zito is unprotected, wearing nice black slacks and nothing else, his hair damp over his forehead. He can see the skim of Mulder’s gaze, down and back up, and feels himself flush. It always seems to surprise Mulder to find that he is attracted to Zito, his eyes widening slightly, hopeful crimp of his mouth. God knows it surprises Zito.
They make horrific small-talk while Zito gets dressed, Zito rasping each word like he’s on the edge of tears, breathing easier with every layer of clothing that he puts between Mulder and himself. Mulder stutters on every fifth word. He lounges across the bed, back on his elbows, legs over the edge, and follows Zito back and forth across the room. The thing that Zito remembers most about Mulder is length: his arms, his legs, his slender chest. Mulder’s a Ken doll that’s been put on a rack, but for Zito, the thing is, it’s just.
That night, in the hotel room somewhere on the East Coast, the fuck-up night, they’d passed out for awhile, the three of them like hooks and starfish, sprawled and curled on the big bed, and Zito had woken up with the world still perfectly blacked, tucked up against Mulder’s back. He remembers shifting up so that his chest locked into the space between Mulder’s shoulder blades, and pushing his hand down Mulder’s stomach with an inviolate sense of urgency. Hudson was breathing deeply on the other side of Mulder, who awoke with a moan and a jerk, cuffed Zito’s wrist and pushed back against him. Zito remembers all that height, that length, running his fingers up the endless slant of Mulder’s sides, hooking his feet around Mulder’s ankles, the broad of Mulder’s back more stable than flesh and bone had a right to be, braced and earthquake-proof.
Mostly sober, that was what was wrong with that. Mostly sober, half-asleep, knowing entirely what he was doing when he wedged Mulder’s legs apart with his knee and licked across the back of his neck and angled Mulder onto his stomach. And when he’d folded himself down around Mulder’s back, his arms wrapped tight around Mulder’s stomach and his cheek against Mulder’s sticky-soft mid-sleep hair. Looking over to see the silvery flash of Hudson’s eyes, watching, bright and aware and, fuck, sober.
Zito resolutely squeezes that into a little ball and shoves it way down deep. He buttons up his shirt and brushes his hair down with the flat of his hand, giving Mulder a skeptical look under which Mulder shifts uncomfortably.
“So what’s she like, Mark?” Zito asks. Chavez had said, like you’d expect. Pretty blonde chick who laughs at all his jokes, though, in the course of Mulder and Zito’s history, Mulder has made maybe six jokes worth laughing at. There but for the grace of homosexuality goes Zito.
Mulder doesn’t seem to have expected that question, and he sorta laughs it off, pushing his fingers compulsively at the design in the bedspread. “She’s cool, but you’ll probably hate her.”
Zito nods; that would be a pretty fair assumption anyway. “I was a little surprised that you invited me.”
Mulder’s face gets unreadable. “Why? We’re friends, right?”
“Oh, the best,” Zito half-sneers, but he catches himself and forces a sick little smile. He sits down on the bed near Mulder’s legs to pull on his socks, thinking that he shouldn’t have come down here. What made him think that spending the weekend with the remnants of his broken heart was a good idea?
They leave the hotel room together and the layered click of the door closing, Mulder standing in the hallways with his hands in his pockets and his face tilted towards the floor, strikes Zito like a brushback, the thousands of times that they’ve done this, stood in a hotel hallway and checked the door to make sure that it’s locked, hearing the murmur and hum of the television through the door, because Zito’s mom had taught him to always leave it on when leaving hotel rooms, so that thieves would think there was somebody inside.
They could be twenty-two again, Zito realizes, and almost panics. They could still be teammates. It’s terrifying in a totally unpredictable way; this kind of displacement should be welcome, like having sex in the back of a car, in the parking lot of a park where, only three years earlier, he’d played Little League baseball, but instead it’s impossible to swallow.
Among other things that have changed, Mulder is now a fucking World Series winner, and that’s kinda rough as well, the idea that Zito could be looking at maybe the biggest contract ever given to a free-agent pitcher (the thought of that! so strange and ill-fitting, such an odd thing to be known for), and despite all these best efforts of his, he’s still never won a pennant. Mulder’s got a ring somewhere, though he can’t lift his arm above his shoulder even now, two nights before his wedding.
Zito’s gonna be stupid rich pretty soon, and for awhile in the early part of the millennium, it seemed that that would be the final decision between the three of them, who came out best after Oakland, because you couldn’t properly rate them when they were on the same team. It was just a blessing; it defied accepted knowledge. Now they’re all on their own and things are falling as they may. Mulder has proven to be easily broken, uncourted here in his own winter of free agency, but he’s somehow still beaten Zito in the worst way.
They meet up with Hudson and Chavez and Harden and Crosby, who are all but in each other’s pockets, already drunk with a glass flask in the back of Crosby’s jeans, under the untucked tail of his shirt. Zito wants twice what they’ve had, watching Mulder talk to Hudson with tense concentration.
The night doesn’t go well. Zito’s tolerance is shot to shit for some reason, the change in sea level, the different time zone in which Phoenix inexplicably exists. Anyway, he’s making mistakes, letting Crosby order him complex drinks that the bartender has never heard of. He’s not going to want to remember any of this.
Chavez starts making toasts after the ice cream. They’re all wrecked, the table cluttered with glassware, a spilled wine bottle dripping red onto a white linen napkin. Chavez says, “To Mark, who’s a son of a bitch,” and then starts laughing, candle light in his eyes.
Zito’s got his foot hooked around Mulder’s ankle under the table, anchored there. He’d forgotten what it’s like when they’re in the same room, the beating heart of the Oakland Athletics for half a decade, the staticky drum of energy, the quick fall-offs of inside jokes, the silverware cartwheeling gashes of light across their faces and all this fucking chemistry.
Chemistry is what got them in trouble in the first place. Chemistry and liquor, an uncertainty of place and time, an alignment like the three of them were planets, stuck by gravity on paths that circled around each other.
Crosby shouts, “To Mark who still owes me the fucking security deposit,” and Harden covers up his face with his arm, his shoulders shaking. Mulder is grinning hugely, and Zito’s head is spinning. This is what he left behind, and maybe he’s not okay with that.
He’s so drunk. Hudson tells Mulder that he (Mulder) doesn’t know what he’s getting himself into, leaning on his elbows on the table. Hudson has always seemed preternaturally content to be married, but then, he did have sex with two of his teammates, once upon a time, so who knows what’s going on underneath.
Zito stands, wavering, Hudson’s hand hooked in his belt, keeping him steady. Zito can’t stand this, Mulder with his pretty wet-blue eyes and Hudson’s neck flushed, the two of them occupying all his attention, and the heavy ache of this one night resurrection of their team. This is what Zito’s life is supposed to be, his romantic past; they’ve ruined him for anything else. It’s enough to make a man abandon morality.
“To Mark,” Zito says in his scrape of a voice, his mouth feeling unwieldy. “Who’s gonna be a terrible husband.”
Harden hoots and bangs his spoon on his glass until it breaks, and now the place is dangerous, glinting sharded invisible pieces of glass all over the table, Crosby smearing blood onto Harden’s face.
Mulder’s looking up at Zito, confused and worried. Zito smiles messily at him, his back teeth clenched tight. He’s close to tears.
“To Mark who’s champion of the fucking world,” Zito said, swaying. “Who doesn’t deserve it. To Mark and his motherfucking fiancée and their motherfucking future and I hope you’ll never know a day of sorrow, you cocksucking piece of shit.”
It’s just. Amazing.
Mulder’s face falls starkly open, a scar-bright vein of something wicked running through it, and Crosby drops his glass onto a plate and both break and everybody jumps. Zito immediately turns away and covers his face with his hands, nearly losing his balance before Hudson rises and catches him around the waist. Which, really. Only makes a bad situation worse.
“Hold on, son, you’re fucked up,” Hudson says into his ear, and Zito grays out a little bit, marveling over the art of understatement.
It’s old news, anyway. They’ve all got holes in their defenses; Chavez says too much to reporters and Zito says too much to those he loves. Particularly when he’s drunk, no friend is safe from him, no secret. And now he’s said this awful thing, his breakdown at once evident and pitiless, and Mulder’s face recurs, bloodshot eyes wide, and holy fuck, he’ll never be forgiven.
Hudson wrestles him into the little hallway where the phones are and Zito’s legs give out, sickly happy to rest his weight on Hudson for the second that Hudson allows it before dropping him cold on the floor. Zito digs the heels of his hands into his eyes, and swears to Hudson that he didn’t mean it, it’s some kind of mistake.
Hudson pushes a hand through Zito’s hair absently, sitting cross-legged beside him, and says, “It’s possible that you coming down here was a bad idea.”
Zito coughs against his wrists. “What makes you say that?” he manages weakly.
Hudson sorta laughs. “You’re really not doing so good, kid.”
Miserable, Zito nods. He concentrates on Hudson touching his hair, like he’s forgotten that he’s doing it, held warm and still and goddamn it, Tim Hudson. Tim Hudson when Zito can’t get over how fucking decent he is, once-best friend, tipping fifty percent and carrying Zito out of harm’s way when Zito’s embarked upon something disastrous.
Like that night, when Zito kissed Mulder on the bed and was hazily frightened for a moment, seeing quite clearly that he and Mulder would certainly immolate each other if they tried this alone. Zito and Mulder encouraged each other’s bad habits, more alike than either of them cared to admit, and it would be a quick way down. Hudson had been there, though, able to fit on Zito’s other side and snap into place, the three of them as always working better together.
Hudson pushes him up, wipes at the salt on Zito’s face with the side of his hand. There’s a chance that Zito’s crying, kinda. Hudson sighs and says, “You wanna get out of here?”
Zito can’t find the words, speechless with remorse, but he butts his head into Hudson’s shoulder until Hudson hauls him to his feet and takes him to get a cab.
Blurred, Zito clutches Hudson’s shirt, ducking away from the smear of neon and palm trees out the window. Phoenix has been his home for six weeks of every year, but it’s always alien the first night back down, and Zito’s hands are under Hudson’s shirt suddenly.
“I’m sorry,” he says immediately, but doesn’t move away. His face feels hot as Hudson slants a look down at him, his eyes shining.
“It’s not so much the betrayal as that it took you this long to finally pull it off,” Hudson tells him, and Zito flattens his palms on Hudson’s stomach, feeling the warm shudder of muscle.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
Hudson takes Zito’s head in his hands, startling Zito into looking up. He tucks his thumbs into Zito’s temples and says, “You built this up for years. Years is all you’ve got and you’re wasting them on this.”
Zito gets scared, twisting his fists in Hudson’s belt and seeing church signs fly by outside the cab. It could get so bad so fast, just a bit rougher on the first word, and Hudson’s scraped palms on Zito’s face.
“What am I supposed to do?” Zito asks helplessly, because really that’s all he’s ever wanted to know. He doesn’t want to deal with this stuff anymore, he wants to be guided and led, he’s too fucking tired to figure it out on his own.
Hudson kisses him briefly on the mouth, and says, “Break my heart when you leave, man,” and Zito.
Well. He wakes up.
He’s fallen over sideways in the back of the cab, his cheek on the vinyl and his back protesting. Hudson’s talking on his cell phone, telling someone, “It’s just a fucking mess, basically. Gettin’ too old for this shit.”
Zito groans and pushes his head into the seat, still drunk and set down hard by the mistakes that he’s made. Hudson rests a distracted hand on the side of his face, and Zito feels himself start to cry again, just like a fucking faggot, poor killer boy so fucked up. He can’t stand himself like this.
Hudson says into his phone, “Yeah, love you too,” and hangs up, taps his fingers thoughtfully on Zito’s cheek. “Well.”
Zito doesn’t want to talk about it. He can’t say why this is happening to him, why leaving Oakland is damaging him so badly.
“Little emotional tonight, aren’t we?” Hudson says easily.
Scrunching his face, Zito thinks that this is bad part of family. They call you on fucking everything. “Maybe I’m having more trouble than I thought.”
“No shit.” Hudson flicks Zito’s ear. “Mark’s gonna beat you ‘til you’re dead, you know.”
“Fuck, Timmy.”
“It’s okay. Hey. You just need to not so much talk without running it by me first.”
And Zito half-laughs, curling his fists under his chin. Sometimes he can’t stomach how hung up he is on these guys.
Hudson gets him through the lobby and into the elevator, and Zito sits on the floor as the doors shut, staring at Hudson’s reflection, his collar thumbed open one past the place where his throat meets his chest, cuffs unbuttoned to show a lick of black ink. Honestly, it’s not right, what Hudson does to him.
After Hudson deposits Zito on the bed, he makes them both a drink, which Zito has to laugh at, remembering that just a little trouble has never been enough for any of them. Hudson sits cross-legged on the bed and Zito gets a weird rush of déjà vu, clutching the glass in his hand.
“Eric’s talking about strippers for tomorrow night.”
Zito tucks his chin against a pillow, closing his eyes. “Naturally.”
“Which is obviously a disaster in the making, but, hell. Strippers.”
“I think I’m gonna go home.”
Hudson pauses, and if Zito listens real closely, he can hear the tick of Hudson’s wedding ring against glass.
“You don’t want to wait around to see how the dust settles?”
“It’s been settling for two fucking years, Tim,” Zito says, sharp with his throat slickened by alcohol.
“Yeah, and you’ve skipped the fuck out on most of it,” Hudson tells him. “Once you sign somewhere, we’ll never hear from you again, and that’s fine if that’s how you want it, but what the fuck was tonight, then? One for the fucking road?”
“You. You’ll hear from me,” Zito answers haltingly. “I’ll be around.”
“Sure. I hate to be the one to tell you this, kid, but you’ve got talent for fucking up in every way available to you, and maybe it’s time to find a new hobby, huh?”
Zito sits up, stomach crawling hotly, snatching guilty looks at Hudson, who can see everything, because Zito is stupid and found the least likely guy on the planet to be his best friend.
“I’m sick of this,” he says, trembling, standing up falling down drunk. “I can’t be around you guys anymore, it’s doing something awful to me.”
Hudson’s metallic eyes flash, and he pushes the back of his hand across the scruff on his jaw. “It’s not as if we do this every week, man.”
“Tim, jesus.” Zito puts his hands up over his face. “You’re here all the time.”
“What-” Hudson starts to say, but he doesn’t get a chance because Mulder is slamming on the door, shouting Zito’s name in a way that makes the walls shake. It’s crazy perfect.
Zito blinks wide at Hudson through his fingers. “If you ever loved me at all, you won’t let him in.”
Hudson looks shocked for a moment, then smirks. “Finish your drink. We’re gonna see how this plays out one more time.”
Zito bares his teeth, thinking viciously, betrayer. Tim Hudson was for five years his best friend in the world. A teammate, nonetheless. They’re supposed to have each other’s back. Two years apart and Zito wonders, if he’d returned Hudson’s calls on anything like a regular basis, would his life be better right now?
Mulder comes in and he’s a trainwreck, and that’s oddly comforting. His shirt is pulled out on one side, a pair of parallel lines in grease on the tail, like he got it caught in the elevator. Salt in his hair, and mad spinning blue eyes, and this is one more injuriously familiar thing, Mulder three hours drunk on wine and so angry he’s stammering.
“What the fuck is your problem?”
Pushing his knees up to his chest, Zito shakes his head, turning his face down and away. “This is really not a good time, Mark. Can you come back in the morning?”
Hudson snorts a laugh, leans back against the door. “And after all this, he’s still got his sense of humor.”
“You can shut the fuck up, Timothy,” Mulder says over his shoulder, keeping his eyes on Zito.
“Listen,” Zito tries. “I’m honestly drunk as shit. I didn’t mean it.”
Mulder doesn’t want to hear it, which isn’t really fair because Mulder knows what drunk does to Zito. It works so perfectly on him, kills every last stop between his brain and his mouth, his hands. Zito sorta hunches and lets Mulder rail at him.
Hudson breaks them off, “Okay, enough,” after Mulder calls Zito a bitter fucking sell-out, and shoves Mulder to the side, standing in the middle of the room.
“You’re being an asshole,” he tells Mulder. “And you, pick your fucking head up, you make me want to slap you.”
Zito forces his shoulders back, fisted hands against his ankles. He glances sharp at Mulder, the rip of his mouth, foggily weaving in place. Can’t stop trying to remember, suddenly, if this is the first time the three of them have been alone together in the same room since that night.
“Say you’re sorry, kid,” Hudson says. Zito rubs at his eyes and obeys him, his voice breaking. “Now fucking accept his apology, Mark.”
Mulder won’t; Hudson’s misjudged the situation. Zito and Hudson are best friends, which means that they can forgive each other certain things, practically everything, but Mulder’s never really been overly fond of Zito, or at least, not in a way that typically shows. Zito effectively ignoring him for two years can’t have helped matters.
Staring at the carpet, Mulder doesn’t say anything. Zito sighs. “It’s okay, man.”
“No,” Hudson says, and Zito flinches, catches Mulder’s slanted eyes for a brief moment. “This is supposed to be our fucking vacation, and y’all aren’t gonna fuck it up.”
Mulder gives Hudson a pretty rough glare. “I want to know what the fuck he was trying to do.”
“Jesus, Mark!” Hudson loses his balance momentarily, listing and righting himself. “He wasn’t trying to do anything. You think he’s got that kind of control over himself?”
“Um,” Zito says from the bed.
“I can’t believe you’re still fucking defending him, man.” Mulder’s head is up because they’re into it now, and Zito is reminded of one of the dreams, Mulder turning up in the back of Zito’s car, in the rainbow midday light of Southern California, squinting up at him through the dusty window stretched out all long across the seat, telling Zito that they’re never gonna get anywhere if this weather holds.
“Oh, like I’d waste my fucking breath,” Hudson snaps. “But I’m sick of this drama queen shit. It’s been a terrible winter and I don’t wanna worry about the two of you all weekend.”
“Then go home, Huddy, for christ’s sake.”
“Yeah,” Zito says suddenly, throwing himself headlong into the fray, because it’s the three of them, one more time, and he doesn’t understand self-preservation anymore. “What’d you come out here for, otherwise?”
They both look over at him with unsteady surprise on their faces, and something tightens in Zito. He gets off the bed, shaky and ripped up like you wouldn’t believe.
“What else was gonna happen?” he continues, a slur on the edge of things. “Put us in a room again. Got me drunk again.”
Hudson looks almost frightened for a second, half-stepping back. Zito shows a crazed open-mouthed smile, the breaks and disfigurements of the past two years rising fast to the surface. He thinks hysterically, it’s no different, I’m fucking losing them again.
“Don’t,” Mulder whispers, and Zito bites the inside of his lip, shakes his head.
“I’m sorry. I can’t help it. I can’t. Can’t even fucking sleep anymore, and seriously, if you could just-”
Zito’s legs fold right then, and he sits back down on the bed hard, a small cry. Hudson’s eyes widen and he checks for something in Mulder’s face, crosses his arms over his chest. Neither of them trusts Zito at all. They’ve seen him like this more than once.
“I can’t for the life of me figure out what’s wrong with you,” Hudson says, which is pretty on the money. “Coulda swore you told me you were over this two years ago.”
Zito coughs on a laugh and says, “Yeah, Timmy, that was a lie.”
He looks up at them, straight lines on the carpet, fazed light on glass in the corner of his eye, Mulder and Hudson in the rags of their nice-restaurant shirts, casualties of the night. He considers the fact that he’s still drunk, and maybe, dream of dreams, they are too.
“I don’t like it as much when it’s just me,” Zito tells them, and lowers his head in shame.
They’re quiet for a moment, and then Mulder asks, “What?”
Leaning forward over his knees with his elbows on his knees and his hands over his ears, Zito is stricken with the thought that this is where his seven years in service to the same team have brought him. It’s like something in the blood.
“Everything was better when you guys were around,” he admits carefully. “And now I gotta go someplace totally new, where I’ll be the only one, and that’s. Not really gonna be good for me.”
Mulder exhales in astonished disgust, “Fuck,” and Hudson’s eyes are bullet-bright, his hands in fists in the dents of his elbows. Zito sorta shrugs and angles his face down in a way that makes him look sad and young.
“You can fuckin’ pick your moments, man,” Hudson says. “All the shit you put us through, and now this?”
“Oh, is my nervous breakdown a little too emotionally complex for you?” Zito snarks, and sees Mulder flash a grin and then bury it down again.
“It’s a little fucking useless. We’re not around anymore, and you’re gonna sign your fucking contract, and there you go, kid. Nobody stays in Oakland forever.”
Zito shakes his head. “It’s not about the team.”
Hudson starts to say something, then stops. Mulder’s staring big at Zito, almost like a warning, but Zito’s running hot under skin and he can do this, one more time, he’s got nothing to hold onto and nothing to hold him back.
“I’m fucked up over the two of you. I’m. In something like love. With both of you.”
And though he is trying to keep himself still, he is not looking at them, just a tear of blue and the white card of Hudson’s shirt in his peripheral vision. Mulder will have that dumb wordless expression on his face, made abruptly ten years younger by the drop of his eyes and mouth, and even Mulder at nineteen is something known to Zito. Hudson will be smirking the way he does when he thinks someone’s fucking with him, barely restrained tolerance at Zito trying to push through the drunk, ready to abandon him to his paranoias and fantasies.
“Say that again,” Hudson says, almost a sneer, Mulder flinching.
“I’m not happy about it, Huddy, for christ’s sake.” Zito folds his arms on his chest and swallows fast and works up a glare.
“Why.” Mulder struggles. “What’re you. How is that even possible?”
Zito moves his shoulders, biting his tongue. “I have really bad luck.”
They’re silent, watching each other. It’s a desert night out there, Zito remembers, and strange for it to be December, fall-away month with the season sixty days in either direction, the heartless center of the year.
“This is about what happened?” Hudson says eventually. Zito eyes him uncertainly.
“When-”
“That night. That one time.”
“Don’t fucking encourage him, Tim,” Mulder says, but he sounds scared. Hudson looks immovable.
“I just wanna be sure I know what we’re talking about.”
Zito lifts his chin, clutches his elbows. “It’s kind of a highlight of my life.”
“It was one night. We were drunk.”
And, oh brave new world, here they are again. No longer teammates and maybe only forty percent friends, after two years and the five before that. It’s hard for Zito to tell if this evens things out at all, if it’s good that they’re not the same as they were back then. More has come between them than Zito would have thought possible, ripped out the bolts that used to cinch them to each other.
But the three of them are so drunk that it doesn’t matter. They’re kids again, still in the fire together, and they’re got better ways to prove themselves.
“I really can’t tell you how sorry I am, dude,” Zito says sincerely. “But I live and breathe that fucking night. It’s as good as my life has ever been.”
“Mary mother of God, you’re fucking unbelievable.” Hudson turns away in disgust, his hand going to the back of his head in an old gesture of loss and confusion.
It probably isn’t safe to be so easily affected. Zito’s been working on not being so dependent on others for his quality of life, but he thinks he should be cut a break here. Mulder and Hudson are more than just his past. As perfectly happy as Zito’s ever been, he’s been with the two of them, in that hotel room or any of the hundreds that came before and after it, and now he can’t go quietly down alone.
Mulder’s face is bent towards the floor and shadowed, and Zito can tell that he’s still pretty angry underneath. When things get chaotic, Mulder pulls back and shuts down, only so he can get his feet under him before he decides how to respond.
“All this time,” he says eventually, slowly. Zito nods, fixed on him. “You never even talk to us anymore.”
That would be the avoidance, but it’s obvious without Zito having to say it.
“And now, what?” Mulder’s eyes widen slightly, his mouth taut. “I’m getting married day after tomorrow.”
“I already am,” Hudson says, pissed-off, but Zito’s staring at Mulder and Mulder’s staring back.
“You came down here for this?” Mulder asks. “Like, one more time?”
Zito swallows against a sudden blast of sight and taste. He hadn’t come down here thinking that anything would come of it; honestly, it was just that strain of self-destruction that infects him during the winter, driving him into the wasteland. But he can feel it now, the haze between the three of them like the potential of a perfect game, Hudson’s open collar and Mulder’s rolled sleeves, the low magnetic tip in Zito that leads him unfailingly back to his crime scenes.
“I’ll do anything,” Zito answers hoarsely, thinking that it’s gonna be these same fucking guys until the end of time.
Mulder’s eyes shine briefly and he looks over at Hudson, who’s motionless and brilliantly stricken. Zito sees the give of muscle in Mulder’s shoulders, his mouth softening and Zito’s heartbeat ratchets up.
“Tim,” Mulder says low. Hudson sorta jerks and looks over at him, then back at Zito. “Weigh the fuck in, will you.”
Hudson doesn’t take his gaze off Zito, answering, “I don’t know how you can think this is an okay thing to want.”
Shivering, Zito rolls his eyes. “I don’t think it’s okay at all, man. I wish to god it hadn’t gone like this for me. But how’m I supposed to stop it?”
“And this is gonna help?” Hudson asks, gesturing between the three of them. “Because it really, really seems like it’s gonna make things worse.”
Zito exhales, winding his fingers together between his knees. “The way I figure it. I’m already fucked up forever. So what’s one more night?”
The problem, though, that occurs to Zito as he’s watching Mulder rub a hand across his mouth distantly and Hudson swallow a couple times, the problem is that it was never just one night. They’re years in and with some small piece of himself, he holds out hope that they have years ahead, judgment this poor at all milestones. He’s been gone on the two of them for so long that he doesn’t know how to be any other way. He’s grown up with this inside him, and he will lie cheat steal, whatever it takes, to get one more night out of them, a hundred times over.
Hudson glances at Mulder and Mulder looks back, an almost imperceptible shrug. Hudson looks back at Zito and there’s movement in his eyes.
“It could be nothing outside of here. There’s no way this can even exist.”
Zito goes as still as possible, humming under his skin because they’re both looking at him, and this, this right here is why. Hudson with something clean rising in his face, and Mulder licking his lips, and Zito is bizarrely relieved to find that he is such a mess, because they’re here now and maybe they’ll fix him up, if only out of pity.
“I know,” he says as evenly as he can.
“And it’s, like, between the three of us and that’s it,” Hudson goes on, his hands shaking a bit.
“We’ve done that before,” Mulder says, and Zito catches the bend of his mouth, the brightness of his eyes, the way he has always looked right before something good, and Zito kinda loses his breath for a minute.
“And tomorrow you go home,” Hudson says at last, and Mulder’s face twitches, glancing quick from Hudson to Zito.
Zito nods, trying to swallow past through something huge in his throat. “I never should have come down in the first place.”
“Yeah. Now you fucking know better.” Hudson looks over at Mulder. “Mark.”
Mulder starts, taking his eyes off Zito and blinking at Hudson. “I’m okay. I think maybe. If it’s just one more time, we’ll be all right.”
And that trips a wire in Zito’s chest, explodes all through him. Mulder’s got the most to lose, though Zito is teamless and Hudson’s bait. Mulder is thirty-six hours away from the rest of his life, which leaves him far more vulnerable, untenable. But he’s rubbing his hand on his side absently, pulling out his shirt, and he always looks so good. Zito is almost frightened by the anticipation he feels at this moment, watching Hudson’s eyes half close, the ghostly knife-cut of Mulder’s hip.
Maybe the misdirection and wicked dragnets of the past seven years of his life will pay off tonight. Zito is badly lost, a gash down the heart of him that he can’t cover with his hands alone, and Mulder is almost smiling, saying:
“My bachelor party’s gonna suck anyway.”
Hudson makes a noise like a laugh and then Mulder kills the lights, and in the orange fade of the city through the open curtain, Hudson takes off his shirt and steps forward. He bends to place his forehead on Zito’s and kisses him on the mouth. Zito can see Mulder as a shadow in the edge of his vision, feel the bed give as he kneels and puts his hand on the back of Zito’s neck and Zito keeps waiting to wake up.
Things fall apart with unsurprising speed. Zito loses track, his mouth shaping Mulder’s collarbone and Hudson’s hand sliding down his back under his shirt, because Mulder tastes like wine and Hudson like rum and coke, and he remembers thinking something almost identical about the meaning of that, some number of years ago.
Two fucking years that Zito has never seen them longer than a couple of hours after a game, and never both of them together, and it makes him press down so hard. The blank stupid shock that he can do what he wants, tongue his way down Mulder’s chest, roll over with his arms around Hudson’s neck, inhale sharply when he sees Mulder’s fingers on Hudson’s belt, when Mulder pushes up Zito’s shirt and ties it around his wrists. Two years without poorly timed jokes and arguments about beer, ambushes and pranks, without Mulder’s blue eyes and Hudson’s accent, and Zito’s crazy for missing them.
At some point, his teeth in the hollow under Mulder’s hip, Hudson’s hand inside his shorts, Zito can see, clearly for once, that it really makes no difference where they play or how much money they make. He’s gonna fuck Mulder in a little bit, and see what else Hudson can do with that fucking mouth of his, and it’s about more than baseball now.
It’s just another hotel room, halfheartedly lit with crooked shadows, and in here Zito can’t read their faults, can’t see the dangerous tracks that they have followed since leaving Oakland, even him. He can’t even tell that Hudson’s right-handed and Mulder’s left, in the dark like this. Right now they’re just old friends who occasionally mistake each other for something else.
Mulder pushes his fingers at Zito’s mouth and Zito leans back against Hudson’s chest, closing his eyes. He can’t believe he gets to have this twice. He’s going to be completely undone in the morning, and that will last for a very long time, through the season probably, which is terrifying in and of itself, but Zito’s more worried about five or ten years from now when he’ll wake up stuck on the fold of Mulder’s leg over his shoulder, Hudson’s hand spread flat on Mulder’s stomach. Even once he’s recovered from this, it’s gonna catch him unexpectedly and he’s gonna have to remember that whatever happens next, this will never happen again.
It’s gonna cripple him.
So he hangs on. Hudson says strange things, muttering Mulder’s name and “so fucking pretty,” into Zito’s shoulder, and Zito’s got Mulder’s hips in his hands, staring at Mulder’s open mouth. Notching into Zito’s back, Hudson bites at the nape of his neck and Zito half-shouts, wrenching his fingers so hard that Mulder grabs his hand and puts it to better use, slick-hot and beating deep in Zito’s palm.
Really, he can’t be expected to move on from something like this.
In the sallow light, strung out across the mattress, Zito watches Mulder and Hudson sleeping amid a firebombed skyline of sheets and blankets. Hudson’s on his back with his face etched as though in silver, and Mulder’s shallowly hooked like a moon, one of his fisted hands fit into Hudson’s ribs. Warm-colored and well-fucked, they look very young, almost like brothers.
“It’s not that I don’t understand how wrong it is,” Zito says, traveling the line of Hudson’s chest and Mulder’s smooth arm. “And it’s not, like, I don’t think you should give up anything for me.”
They’re asleep. The bruised patches under Mulder’s eyes make a certain amount of sense, as does the nightmare pirating across Hudson’s face. Stuff like this breaks Zito’s heart.
“You guys are just really confused about a lot of things, and it’s not only getting married. This is, okay, it’s for life.”
Zito pushes at Hudson’s shoulder, sweeping his thumb across his clean forehead. There is something out of place, a vague dislocation and the alarm clock on the night table counting down like a bomb timer.
“It’s because we got to each other young,” Zito says, checking for a pulse on Mulder and not finding anything. He’s crying a little bit, just fucking devastated all of a sudden. “’Cause I lived to see you. And I don’t know what the fuck you’re thinking, trying to leave.”
Zito touches Mulder’s mouth and Hudson’s eyes. They’ve taken it this far, past the feints and dodges, the minor league buses and hotel diners in Detroit, the ring on Hudson’s finger and the one that Mulder never wears, neveragain teammates, neveragain sharing air in quite the same way.
“Wake up,” Zito says quietly, and when they refuse, he says it louder, and rattles them, and throws himself against them as he would a wall, and he’s screaming when he wakes up.
The sun pours through the window, dust and steam clouding it before it reaches the ruined lunar surface of the bed, and Zito is sore, bent into a painful new shape, looking up into the whitewash glaze of morning and finding himself totally alone.
THE END