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[candle_beck]

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Part Three: No Sign Of Land, or How To Stand Up
By Candle Beck

Driving across the Bay Bridge from San Francisco to Oakland, early in the morning, white-collar commuter time, the sky was faded blue, paled by the white light of the sun, washed out, and it made Zito feel weak, like the fact that this vast thing couldn’t even hold on to color made his own corrupted form that much more useless.

Zito was looking for Alcatraz out in the bay, trying to catch sight of Coit Tower, straight as a matchstick and albino white atop brambly Telegraph Hill looking like a kid with his hair uncombed and sleep-wild, Zito was listening to the echoing thrum of cars heading into the tunnel through Treasure Island, and counting the number of BMWs that passed him by. Zito was trying very hard not to think of what was awaiting him when he got to the ballpark, trying with all his strength not to replay in his head the events of the previous night.

It was no good, though, it was a hopeless endeavor. Mulder’s words circled, stalked, terrorized his mind, refusing to give him a moment of peace. Zito would be thinking of seagulls, or the wild card race, or how much he wished he could be surfing, and then out of nowhere, like a thin beam of light, he would hear Mulder’s voice in his head:

‘Fuck you and your fucking excuses.’

‘*This* is what people remember, this is the stuff that sticks.’

‘Fucking faggots.’

‘You were fucking easy.’

‘I’m gonna tell them it’s a fucking lie.’

‘I can’t stand the sight of you.’

‘And now I can never be sure of you again.’

These aren’t things you get over easy.

Zito was on his way to the Coliseum, for the first-thing-in-the-morning meeting that Billy Beane had ordered him to the day before. Zito was on his way to the room in which the rest of his life would be decided, where he would tell the truth and the man he was still desperately, miserably in love would deny every word of it.

Fucking reporters.

Pearl’s story was everywhere now, every newsstand, every television set, every radio call-in program. Zito could see people recognizing him from other cars, could see the flash double-take as the driver’s head flicked around to stare, could see the pointing fingers, the glassed-in mouths behind the windows forming the buzzing shape of his name, the brief stretch of teeth saying the word ‘gay’, the flattening press of lips as they added Mulder’s name. Sometimes someone would knock on their window, waving to him frantically, their hands blurred with speed. Sometimes they shot him a thumbs-up, other times a stiff upraised middle finger, but most often they just laughed, looking like dumb bug-eyed fish in an aquarium, and after awhile he stopped looking at anything except the bumper of the car in front of him, tunnel vision closing him in, determinedly ignoring the cacophony around him.

Zito was disastrously, unbelievably tired, having been unable to get to sleep the night before. Even just lying in bed, pressing his hands to the mattress, assuring himself that he was resting motionless and safe, he was unable to shake the feeling of falling, the roiling wave of nausea, the terror of plummeting downward with no hope of catching hold of anything, no chance for any sort of miracle to snatch him up and place him on solid ground again.

After Mulder had left him alone, Zito had been wrecked, sitting folded up against himself for the better part of an hour, his eyes staring blind, scratchy and dry because he forgot to blink. All the rest of his life stretched out in front of him, days and weeks and months and years surrounding him like an ocean, and he was lost at sea, he was adrift, he was miles away from anywhere with no anchor, no harbor, abandoned on the hard steel-gray water with no sign of land.

Thinking about it was a good way to drive himself crazy. Thinking about it made him want to put a gun to his head.

He was taking things minute by minute, getting through the small tasks, telling himself that if he got through this next hour, this next day, this next week, soon enough his broken heart would be far behind him, and he would be able to breathe again.

It wasn’t really working, though, not when every few seconds he was seeing Mulder’s face superimposed on the backs of his eyelids, and sometimes Mulder was smiling warmly at him, and sometimes Mulder was glaring murderously as he had been the night before, and Zito wasn’t really sure which was worse.

Pulling into the players’ parking lot, Zito saw the mess of reporters crowding around the clubhouse door, the twitching vibration of awareness as they spotted him, their notched-up excitement, the rustle as they prepared their notebooks and cameras, and he wondered if he would ever again be able to go anywhere where that sight didn’t greet him.

“Zito! Zito! Barry! How long’s it been going on? What’d the team say? Did Mulder know about the story before it came out? Zito! Are you guys gonna stay in baseball? Is it true that Mulder lost his start last week because of you? Barry! Hey, Barry, over here! Come on, Zito, tell us your side!”

Which was a little ridiculous, seeing as how he had already obviously told his side, his side was plastered all over every sports page in the country.

The assault of the reporters was fierce, but mercifully brief. Zito kept his eyes down, watching his feet pace quickly across the concrete, and soon enough he was in the clubhouse, the door clicking shut behind him and deafening the frenzied yells.

Exhaling a deep sigh of relief to be in the safe confines of a ballpark again, Zito was immediately reminded by his treacherous brain that the reporters weren’t the worst of it, not by a long shot.

In a few minutes, he would have to face Mulder again.

And that really didn’t seem like something he was physically capable of doing, not at the moment. Maybe not ever.

‘Be kinda hard to make it to the playoffs if two of the starting pitchers refuse to have any contact with each other,’ Zito admonished himself, before realizing that the playoffs were the last of his concern, his primary worry was whether he would even have a job in the next hour or two.

The A’s, along with most every other team in organized ball, had a morals clause in the players’ contract, and while Zito had never heard of it being enforced in a case such as this, it wasn’t entirely out of the realm of possibility that a personal relationship between two players that jeopardized their quality of play could be cast in such a light. Certainly, that was the opinion of many of the radio show callers and sports editors, not so much across the bridge in the rainbow-striped tolerance of San Francisco, but here in the East Bay, tough and proud and working class, the idea that the star pitchers of their beloved franchise were engaged in something more than friendship was hitting pretty hard.

“They’re perverts and I don’t want to bring my kids to watch them play,” had been one erudite opinion that had managed to slip through Zito’s defenses that morning before he barricaded himself in the haven of his car, and he feared that the club’s organization would follow much the same train of thought.

Zito tried to pull himself together, imagining his spine as a rod of steel, his face a stone mask, his heart cold and stagnant. Walking down the concrete tunnel, his footsteps echoing, sounding like someone was chasing after him, Zito tried to empty his mind and be impassive, unaffected, protecting himself from the possibility that Beane or, worse, Mulder, would see how far down his destruction reached.

The last thing that whipped through his torrential mind before he stalled his thoughts completely was a quick prayer that he wouldn’t burst into tears in front of them.

* * *

The first thing Mulder thought when he saw Zito walk into the GM’s office was how young he looked.

‘Jesus, he’s just a kid,’ Mulder’s mind flashed before he clamped down impatiently on the tug of compassion. He reminded himself of the obscene, anonymous messages left on his answering machine, the way his housemates the night before had all retreated into their bedrooms the second they got home from the game, the snick as they locked their doors behind them. He reminded himself of the humiliation, the stunned mortification at seeing the most private moments of his life recapped in a newspaper, he kept on a loop in his head all the times he’d heard ballplayers say that they would never play with a gay teammate, they would never want to be in the same locker room, or on the same field, as ‘one of those’. He reminded himself that all of this was Zito’s fault, and he let the swift wash of his anger flood through him again, urging it to bring him confidence and strength.

This was Zito’s fault.

And the fact that Zito looked unspeakably, impossibly young, looked like someone who should be shielded from all ugliness and pain, that changed nothing.

Mulder glared at Zito, saw something flicker in Zito’s eyes before the other man pulled his gaze away, the up-down duck of his throat as he swallowed hard.

Mulder balled up his hands and shoved them in the pockets of his coat, scowling and trying to banish the odd throb of sadness that beat within him.

Neither Mulder nor Zito looked at each other, both of them staring at Beane’s empty chair, waiting for the GM to show up. Mulder could feel the heat pulsing out of Zito like a force field, and he remembered suddenly, with perfect clarity, that Zito’s shirt collar hid a mark on the man’s shoulder, a small darkly shadowed interruption on the smooth skin, a memory of the pressure of Mulder’s mouth, a souvenir from, what, only two days before, the last time he wanted to taste Zito so badly he ended up leaving a bruise behind.

Why the fuck are you thinking about that now?

Mulder shook his head, grimacing at the unwanted thought of Zito’s skin, Zito’s body, the way they had been only two days ago, the span of which now felt like an ice age.

Mulder had to say something then, had to fill the air with words so he could chase away his traitorous thoughts, which whispered to him about the feel of Zito’s hips under his palms, the high splintered glass cries that got ripped from both their throats at the same moment, the pull of his fingers through Zito’s sweat-soaked hair, and how Zito smiled against his mouth.

“Have you decided to stop being a goddamned idiot and tell them the story’s bullshit?”

Zito’s head jerked, quick enough to look painful, and his wide, pleading eyes met Mulder’s, who almost took a step backwards at the anguish that poured out of the other man’s face.

Zito only looked at him for a moment, but it was long enough for Mulder to see the blackness in his eyes, the petrifying glint of something devastated, something that was broken beyond any point of repair.

The sounds of an instinctive apology were halfway up Mulder’s throat, and he had almost begun to respond to the automatic pull of his muscles to go to Zito, put his arms around the other man, do whatever needed to be done to make this better, before Mulder remembered himself and slammed his regret back down, bitterly reproaching this weakness of his, this inability to hang onto his rage.

Zito half-coughed weakly, and rubbed his hand over the back of his neck, replying woodenly, his voice hollow, “I’m gonna tell them the truth.”

Now the anger came back, and Mulder welcomed it. “You’re gonna screw me over again? I’m sorry, you didn’t do a good enough job the last time?”

He expected that to spark a rise in Zito, expected the other man to respond sharply, anger matching anger, and Mulder waited for it eagerly, wanting the snap back-and-forth of a blood-fueled argument, looking forward to the opportunity to take on Zito, because even fighting with Zito had always been more fun than just about everything else.

But Zito was blank, all monotone and muscles held resolutely still, like he was keeping himself upright through sheer force of will. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. And if this is going to make it worse for you, then I’m sorry. But I can’t tell them it’s not true. It was . . . it was the truest thing that’s ever happened to me.”

He looked like he was going to say something more, but then his mouth closed and stayed that way, his eyes staring unseeing at the autographed picture of Dennis Eckersley on the wall behind Beane’s desk.

Mulder scratched at the fabric of the inside of his pockets, feeling frustrated and unruly, wanting to tear away at Zito’s carefully constructed façade, wanting to force some emotion out of the other man. “Fuck, Zito, do you realize how easily we could get past this? You tell them the reporter made up every word of the story, you tell them it’s total bullshit, and I back you, then that’s it, man. It’s over, and we can go home.”

Zito smiled without mirth, the expression like a ghost on his face, somehow making him look more annihilated than ever before. “I don’t got a whole lot to go home to, anymore.”

Mulder felt a deep, clawing headache begin to sink into his brain, and he shot back savagely, “Well, that’s your own fucking fault, isn’t it?”

Zito raised a hand to his head, and Mulder wondered if he had a headache too. He wondered if Zito had slept that night, or if he had been wretchedly awake all through the dawn, same as Mulder. There were tender bad-sleep bruises under Zito’s eyes, and he looked so terribly tired.

Zito placed his hand up against his eyes, and made a noise that was halfway between a sigh and a moan, and he said, his voice flagging like a dying flame, “Listen, could you just . . . could you not yell at me anymore today? I know you got a right, and I promise, you come by sometime over the weekend, I’ll stand there and let you say whatever you want, I’ll let you beat the crap out of me if you want, but . . . not today, okay, man? I really didn’t think I could feel any worse than I did last night, but now I think if you yell at me anymore . . . I don’t think I’ll be able to take it.”

Christ, why’d he have to go and say something like that?

All at once, all of Mulder’s good cleansing anger was gone, replaced by nothing but guilt, and the sick stupid knowledge that he was kicking a man while he was down, and suddenly Mulder was disgusted with himself, and this cruel heartless thing that he’d become.

“Hey, look, man-” he began, trying to soften the words so they wouldn’t accidentally hit anything in Zito that he had already broken.

Zito cut him off, his voice going stark again, free of any inflection, the robot voice that answers calls at banks. “Maybe you’re right anyway. What’s the point of standing up for something that’s over? If I can’t have you, then maybe I shouldn’t want the memory of you, either. Maybe it’s better to just get rid of everything, the future and the past.”

Mulder couldn’t tell if that was Zito convincing himself, trying to force his mind to accept something that would never be true. Mulder couldn’t even tell if he himself was convinced that what Zito had said was true.

Mulder was about to say something, something that maybe wouldn’t fix this, but surely would make it a little better, even just a little better, but then Billy Beane was striding into the office, the door clapping a single round of applause as it slammed back against the wall, and Mulder shut his mouth quickly, turning to face front, feeling like he should be standing at attention, his body military-strict.

“All right, I want to know what the hell is going on here, and I want the truth, and believe me, boys, you try to lie, I’m gonna see it, and I’m gonna have your asses,” Beane laid out without preamble, sitting behind his desk and leveling a hard gaze at the two pitchers.

Mulder snuck a glance over at Zito, and if he hadn’t known the other man as well as he did, he would have thought that Zito was perfectly calm, unperturbed and ready to clear the air. Because Mulder *did* know Zito as well as he did, however, he could see the tic of Zito’s mouth, the quick flutter of his eyelids over the sparkle of his too-bright eyes, the wiry muscle tensing in his jaw, and he knew that Zito was trembling on the edge of collapse, the world closing in around him, he knew that Zito couldn’t breathe, his vision going blurry, his mouth dry, same as what happened when the ballgame had suddenly gotten out of control, his pitches refusing to find the plate, or finding too much of the plate, the slow-motion of everything slipping away from him, and then Mulder wondered which of the two of them he was describing, Zito or himself.

“Well?” Beane demanded, his eyebrows going up. Mulder opened his mouth, having absolutely no idea what he was going to say, but Zito beat him to it, the other man’s voice coming out smooth and easy, entirely believable to everybody in the world except Mulder, who knew Zito better than anyone else in the world.

“It was a joke, sir,” Zito answered, his head up, his back straight.

Beane leaned forward over his desk, planting his elbows on the coming month’s travel schedule. “Excuse me?”

Zito shrugged bashfully, just the right amount of self-chastisement in his pose. “Pearl came up to me in the bar, he was a kid reporter, I was having some fun with him. I could tell he thought I was drunker than I was, and he was trying to get a story while my defenses were down, so I . . . I gave him a good one. I never thought he’d run with it. Especially not without calling back to confirm it with me.”

Beane rolled his eyes. “Well, when you think a drunk man is telling you secrets he would never admit to soberly, you don’t tend to remind him of it in the morning.”

Zito nodded, a half-smile on his face, “No, sir.” Mulder noticed that Zito’s hands were shaking, and wondered how much this little charade was costing him.

Beane switched his focus, pinning Mulder with his gaze. “What about you, Mulder?”

Before Mulder could say a word, Zito said quickly, “Mulder didn’t know anything about it. I told him the next day, and he thought it was pretty funny, but he didn’t think Pearl would write it, either.” Zito slid a quiet, aching look his way, saying low, “Right, man?”

Fumbling into his cue, Mulder nodded stupidly, stammering, “Uh . . . yeah. Yeah. I . . . you know, I thought Pearl would see right through it.” He began to grow into the story, finding his footing in the other man’s lie. “I mean, I’ve played poker with Zito, he can’t bluff to save his life.”

Mulder tried to shoot Zito a grin, both to nudge Beane further along the path of believing them, and to honestly thank Zito for doing this, but Zito wouldn’t meet his gaze, and his whole face was shuttered, like there was something horrible happening behind his eyes.

Beane huffed an exasperated breath, tipping back in his chair, saying to Zito, “Well, you played Pearl pretty well. Well enough for him to convince his editor to publish it without a hint to me or anyone else in the organization.”

Zito nodded, his shoulders curving inward apologetically. “Yes, sir, and I’m sorry about that. About everything. I just . . . I never thought anyone would take it seriously. I thought it was way too ridiculous for anyone to believe.”

‘Zito is an amazing actor,’ Mulder thought pointlessly.

Beane slanted Zito an askance look of disbelief. “You live in San Francisco and collect stuffed animals, Barry.”

Zito affected the most perfect playing-dumb expression Mulder had ever seen, dead-panning, “What’s your point?”

At that, Beane burst into laughter, the broad relieved laughter of a man who’s just dodged a bullet and had his worldview righted in the same moment. Mulder grinned along goofily, until he sketched a look over in Zito’s direction and saw that, despite his beam of a grin, the other man’s eyes were somewhere epically far away, lost in some unfathomable sadness.

Beane sighed contentedly, the universe making sense again, and said, “All right, boys, here’s what we’re gonna do. Right after the game tonight, we’re gonna hold a press conference, and you’re gonna tell them just what you told me. Anyone who doesn’t believe you, and trust me, there’s gonna be a few who don’t, you don’t need to go out of your way to convince them, just take their questions, don’t get angry. It’ll take a while for this to die down, and I don’t want either of you getting caught up in a pissing contest with some reporter who won’t let it drop. That’ll just make it worse.”

As one, Mulder and Zito replied, “Yes, sir.”

Beane stood behind his desk, giving Zito a look of exaggerated request, “And, Barry, it would really help me out a lot if you didn’t play any more ‘jokes’ on the sports reporters. You think perhaps you can restrain yourself?”

Zito nodded obediently, still working the puppy-dog eyes for all they were worth, looking like a kid who’d just cracked a baseball through his neighbor’s window, the good-hearted boy nobody could stay mad at.

“Okay. You guys can head home, I’ll see you tonight.”

With that, Beane left, leaving Zito and Mulder standing alone in his office, Mulder looking at Zito, Zito looking at nothing.

“Thanks, man,” Mulder said, genuinely grateful, already well on his way to imagining that things were fixed, they could go about the business of being friends again.

“Yeah,” Zito replied tonelessly, the word dropping like a stone.

Mulder raised an eyebrow. “You all right?”

Zito gave him an incredulous look, his voice darting with pain as he said, “No, Mulder, I’m not ‘all right’.”

Zito moved for the door, but Mulder caught his arm, wrapping his hand around the other man’s elbow, feeling the shift of the bone and the strong moving line of the muscle. “Hey-” Mulder began, feeling irrationally upset that Zito was ruining his vision of a repaired life.

Zito snatched his arm away from Mulder, blinking fast, his throat bobbing compulsively. “You’re gonna . . . you’re gonna have to give me a little time, okay. You’re gonna have to maybe not touch me for a little while. Maybe not talk to me so much, either. I don’t know for how long, but . . . I can’t handle being around you right now.”

They were standing in the same room and Zito was somehow a world away from Mulder. Something hard with the dull copper taste of pennies or blood pressed up against Mulder’s throat, something that tasted like panic, the scratching sense in the back of his head that maybe this wasn’t going to get better, maybe they’d gone too far to ever get back home.

He tried to ridicule the idea, tried to make himself believe that anything that can be broken, can be fixed. Mulder scoffed, unease shivering along the corners of his words, “Don’t be so melodramatic, man. This isn’t some big tragedy, we knew it’d have to end sometime. So now we can go back to being friends. What’s so terrible about that?”

All at once, Zito broke down, his body shaking hard for a moment before he fell into the chair behind him, covering up his face with his hands. He spoke from behind his fingers, his words muffled and thick, jagged with barely-restrained tears, “Fuck, Mulder, do you still not get it? This wasn’t some little flight of fancy for me, this isn’t something I can just forget about and move on. I’m . . . oh, I’m real glad to hear that you’re ready to be friends with me again, but I really don’t think that’s gonna work.”

Zito pulled his hands away and looked up at Mulder, who was stock-still and silent. Zito’s eyes gleamed, and Mulder felt something wrench violently in his chest. “I wish I could tell you this isn’t going to be a problem for me, I wish I could tell you that I knew it had to end sometime, too, but I can’t, Mulder. I’ve never felt about anybody the way I feel about you, and it’s not just gonna go away. I can’t just make it stop. Falling in love with you was the easiest thing I’ve ever done, but I don’t know how to fall out of love with you, I don’t have the slightest fucking clue how to do that.”

Zito dragged a wracked sigh out of his body, and said slowly, “I just turned the best thing that’s ever happened to me into a lie. So maybe you can cut me some slack, now.”

Mulder didn’t know what to say, didn’t have any idea how to answer something like that. He felt scarred, frayed and cold like there was a windstorm happening inside of him. “Why’d you do it then?” he asked hoarsely. “Why’d you make all that up just now? If . . . if what we were was some perfect thing to you, the truest thing, why’d you deny it?”

Zito half-laughed, the rough sound of it endlessly forlorn, and answered, “Well, why the fuck not? If I can’t save myself, at least I can make it easier for you. My own life is fucked, I can’t do anything about that now, but I can do this for you. That’s what you do when you love someone.”

‘I never deserved someone like him, anyway,’ Mulder’s mind suddenly told him, and he was shocked, appalled by the thought, immediately smothering the words, telling himself, ‘I don’t *want* anyone like him, so what the fuck does it matter whether I deserved it or not?’

Zito, crumpled in the chair, his long legs scattered across the carpet, his strong hands hanging onto the disintegrating parts of his body, looked away out the window, out towards the sweet bright green of the field, the ashy gray of the concrete stadium, the football seats way up in the atmosphere, and Mulder remembered Zito telling him, sometime in the sun-drenched past, that Zito had always believed that as long as he could see a baseball field, things couldn’t get too bad.

“You wanna hear something funny?” he asked absently, miles away.

Mulder didn’t answer, scared to death at what Zito might say, his eyes locked on the other man’s face, that face he knew better than his own.

Zito continued despite the lack of response, “That night, in the bar, with Pearl . . . I said all that stuff, I said it because . . . because I was happy.” He smiled sadly, still staring out at the park. “I’d finally told you I love you, and it didn’t particularly matter that you hadn’t said it back to me. I was just so happy to have said it and known it was really true, not just something I felt like I should say, or something I had to say because someone else had said it first.”

Zito rubbed at his shoulder, tugged on his ear, something Mulder knew he did when he was deep in his memory. Mulder was intensely, overwhelmingly aware of Zito, watching his every movement with desperate attention, like he was trying to memorize the other man in case he never got to see him again

His voice wandering and detached, Zito said, “I think maybe I could have been stone-cold sober and I still would have told Pearl the exact same thing. We had come all that way just the two of us, just you and me, hiding it from everybody, and I just . . . I wanted to say it out loud to someone else. Because what if the team plane crashed and we both died, then nobody would ever know . . . it would be like it had never happened. I wanted to make it real, and I didn’t . . . I didn’t care what would happen.”

Zito’s eyes worked over the walls of Beane’s office, tracking across the bookshelf and the photos and the miscellany, an old beat-up glove, a baseball with a dark smudge where it had been struck dead-on-the-button by a bat, a green and gold coffee cup with Stomper, the A’s elephant mascot, grinning out at them.

Zito sighed, the air rushing from him. “And now it’s all gone to hell, and it’s all my fault, and I still can’t be sorry.”

He shifted, his eyes coming around to meet Mulder’s, and the clash of their gazes was like a spark, something electric, a buzz that Mulder could feel in his tingling skin. Zito said clearly, “I’m not sorry for falling in love with you, and I’m not sorry for trying to share it with someone else. All I’m sorry for is lying about it just now. Because I never thought I’d do that.”

Zito’s voice cracked, but he didn’t stop, the words coming out dented and broken, “And I’m sorry I wasn’t enough for you. I’m sorry I thought you felt something you didn’t, and I’m sorry all this has happened to you because of me. But the thing is . . . if I had to do it all over again, I’d do everything the exact same. ‘Cause you were worth it, to me. You were worth anything.”

Zito wiped at his eyes with the back of his hand, and Mulder hadn’t realized that the other man had been crying. Mulder raised his own hand and was surprised to find the tips of his fingers shimmering with wetness when he took them away, and suddenly the world was underwater, suddenly everything was swimming around him.

Zito stood up, ducking his head down, saying desolately, “I gotta go. I’ll . . . I’ll see you later, I guess.”

He moved to the door, and Mulder could see the muscles in his back and shoulders trembling, struggling to remain calm. Just before he walked out, Zito turned, facing the other man one last time, and Mulder was ruined by the riots in Zito’s eyes.

“Good-bye, Mulder,” Zito said softly, and Mulder knew he had never known anyone as good as this man, and he knew that he wouldn’t go after Zito, no matter how much he wanted to.

The door closed behind him with a slow, certain click, and Mulder whispered into the hopeless empty air, “Good-bye, Zito.”

To be continued . . . in part four.