back to my usual trouble
going to wichita
for lira, brianna, and shannon
Zito never got over it. It’s not something you get over.
Mulder can look sad all he wants, and yawn in the middle of the afternoon like he couldn’t get to sleep last night, Mulder can stare at him whitely as if he’s gonna take it all back, but there are five stages of grief and denial’s only the first.
Zito doesn’t look at him much. He doesn’t want to hear anybody else talk about the winter, or Cal Ripken, or fireworks. Or anything, really. He wishes everyone would just shut up for a moment and leave him to his visions of earthquakes and brushfires. He can’t be so fucking charming anymore, he’s not okay.
Mulder takes what he gave them up for, and makes the most of it. Mulder can pitch, the first half of the season, like maybe nobody’s ever pitched as good as this. Like the world is nothing but a series of records to break. Zito wants to wrap his hands around Mulder’s arms and drag him into the light, claim him as his own, because Zito was the price Mulder paid.
Zito cannot believe it. He’s so messed up, he’s been fucking crippled and Mulder is starting the All-Star Game.
So it must have been worth it.
Wide-eyed in a hotel room one night, Zito throws Mulder against the door and pushes his fists into Mulder’s chest, his chest scoured by steel wool and his voice weak, “you broke my fucking heart, man, it’s not gonna go away.”
Mulder knows everything. He knows how bad it’s been. He knows that Zito hasn’t slept in months. He rests his hands on Zito’s face and doesn’t apologize, because Mulder doesn’t work like that, and anyway, he’s got nothing to be sorry for. He didn’t do anything except leave. He was allowed to leave.
Mulder touches his open mouth to Zito’s cheek between his fingers. Billboard sky and television blurring in the background, slippery maroon comforter pulled tight enough to bounce a coin, and Zito wants Mulder to shove him backwards, wants his legs to hit the bed and give out under him. Zito wants motion, all that lovely fucking adrenaline ripped like a hotwire in his veins. Zito wants Mulder’s mouth to slide lower and Mulder’s hands to rattle until Zito’s belt is open and Zito’s jeans are parting like a sea.
It must be July. Mulder keeps telling him that it’ll look better in the morning, tells him that nothing lasts forever. To which Zito can only spit, “yeah, fuckin’ tell me about it.”
They weren’t supposed to last forever. It was just the off-season, this year’s shot at self-destruction. And Mulder’s hand is curled around Zito’s hip, Mulder is telling him not to cry. Mulder doesn’t want to see him cry. Zito wants to hit him.
Somehow Zito’s arms are around Mulder’s neck and his knee knocks the wood of the door, making him jump, but Mulder just hisses against his face, “nobody’s there, don’t worry.”
Mulder can’t seem to let him go. His thumbs are hooked in Zito’s belt loops and his fingers spread out, curling around the back pockets of Zito’s jeans. He’s talking about how it’s okay and they’ll get over it and it won’t always feel like this and they knew it had to end, it never meant anything, anyway, but he’s saying it with his lips moving on Zito’s face, and Mulder’s licking carefully under his jaw and tugging Zito closer, sucking in a breath because his shirt’s rucked up and the cold buckle of Zito’s belt is on bare skin.
Zito can’t live like this. He can’t have one night or five or twenty. He can’t listen to Mulder tell him in the morning, never again. His life has been a fucking house of cards since the night before they went to Phoenix, and this is the stiff wind his suicidal tendencies have been waiting for.
“Let me,” Mulder whispers, his teeth on Zito’s ear and his hand slipped into Zito’s back pocket. “Been so long, man.”
But Mulder doesn’t know shit about time. Mulder’s gonna be perfect tomorrow just like he always is, and Zito’s gonna be the comic relief.
Zito wrenches away, Mulder’s hand tearing the pocket with a soft denim sound, and Mulder is kinda dazed and stupid-looking, blinking slowly, licking his lips, everything forever and ever. Zito’s hand flies without warning; he backhands Mulder across the face.
If nothing else, it gets Mulder out from in front of the fucking door. Zito goes back to his own room and spends all night staring at the blood on his hand.
There was always edge with them, tightness in the way they held on and the pressure they took from each other. Mulder on Zito’s back or Zito on his knees with Mulder’s hand on the top of his head. Zito thinking absurdly, ‘head down, head down,’ Little League advice. Mulder gets sex mixed up with violence; okay, Zito does too. Broken skin is broken skin, but Mulder’s split lip doesn’t mean they fucked that night.
They don’t fuck all season. Zito decides he’s probably a little angrier than he’s been letting himself believe. Maybe sadder too, because there’s this bright empty place inside him like a room made of windows, and it seems to be growing by the day.
Mulder could say again, “Let me,” he could take back everything, especially and most of all the killing dream that he left behind him like a cancer, and Zito still wouldn’t be able to sleep. It’s growing increasingly likely that he’ll never sleep again.
They try very hard, but they fall short of the playoffs. Mulder implodes in the second half of the season, and Zito watches with a hysterical kind of glee, thinking crazily, ‘I could fix you but you never fixed me, so fuck you, fuckyoufuckyou.’ Zito can pitch, through August and into September, and he can put his arm around Rich Harden’s shoulders, like, behold the young kings. All Mulder can do is hold his left elbow and swear in every direction that he’s not hurt.
Anyway, they fall short. Zito figures at least he won’t have to look at Mulder’s face every day for four months, though within hours he misses the watercolor blue of Mulder’s eyes with such a resonance he has to sit down and catch his breath.
The autumn is a smear. Neon lights and brittle asphalt in the parking lot of the 7-11 down the hill from his house, the graffiti braided onto the huge letters of the Hollywood sign, and Zito’s sister wants to know why he looks so wrecked all the time.
Zito tells no one. It’s the last thing he’ll ever do for Mark Mulder, aside from perhaps setting his house on fire if things keep going this badly.
The worst part about November is Zito’s inability to keep from thinking, ‘it’s the off-season, nothing to be distracted from, maybe we can try again.’
Mulder doesn’t call him. Not when Hudson is traded. Not when, two days later, Mulder is traded too. Zito is lying in the sun when Eric Chavez calls to tell him, and Zito remembers heat and wet cement, his swim trunks crinkling as they dry. Zito remembers the feel of pure shock like salt in his throat, a baffling, debilitating fear coring into him.
Eric Chavez says his name five or six times before giving up, and then the world is silent.
That night, Zito dresses for the cold and packs the green shirt that Mulder tore almost exactly a year ago, and drives north and east, believing somehow and against all evidence that they will find each other again and live up to all that they might have been.
It takes him a day to get there, and the only thing he finds in Wichita is snow.