more!
heal our losses
for ayrdaomei
Mulder happened first.
It was the worst day of Eric Chavez’s life. He’d signed divorce papers, moved out of his lovely blue house with his dog and two suitcases. It was a Tuesday, maybe. Sometime in April, everything turning green and the streets were shining with rain.
Chavez forcefully removed himself. He couldn’t do this. He couldn’t not be married anymore. His parents kept calling, until Chavez smashed his phone on the sidewalk without quite realizing what he was doing. This stuff was instinctive, like walking or breathing or baseball. Chavez was not even here, so this couldn’t be happening to him.
He found himself at Mulder’s place, where he was going to have to live from now on. Cracks in the walls and rented beds, cereal bowls in a small tower on the kitchen counter, baseballs rolled into the corners, and Chavez was thinking of all this, sitting on the driveway with his back against the car.
Mulder came out, drawn by the motion-sensor lights that fell down on Chavez like a prison break. He stood over Chavez with his hands in his pockets, his shadow twenty feet long down the length of the driveway.
“Are you coming inside, or what?”
Chavez stared at Mulder’s bare feet. His dog whined in the passenger seat, squealing his paws on the window.
“Maybe. Yeah. I guess.”
“Okay, so?”
Chavez looked up at him, Mulder’s long legs and big hands pressing out the pockets of his jeans. His throat closed up, he couldn’t believe this, he wasn’t here.
“Give me a minute.”
Mulder rolled his eyes. “Get the fuck up, man.”
It was impossible. Chavez had been torn right in half, spilling blood on his lawyer’s desk. He tried to swallow, thinking over and over, I’m not here, I’m not here.
The motion-sensor lights went out suddenly, shocking them into darkness. Chavez cried out in surprise, his hands jerking to protect his face. Mulder in shadows looked like a tree, something he could climb and hide inside. Chavez was numb all over, frozen and terrified.
Mulder stepped forward, and the lights sprang back on, washing color in Mulder’s face, his startling blue eyes. He grabbed Chavez’s shirt and pulled him to his feet, his face tense and irritated.
“Total fucking mess,” Mulder muttered, leading him into the house, and Chavez nodded, near tears.
“I, I’m sorry, Mark, I don’t, I wanted-”
“Shut up.” Mulder took him down the short hallway and pushed him into one of the spare bedrooms, the mattress silver and bare. Streetlight burned through the window, and Chavez’s dog was barking from the car.
“My dog. Could you. Get my dog?” Chavez asked, sitting on the bed with his eyes huge.
Mulder looked down at him. His expression changed, became vaguely calculating. When he spoke, his voice was weirdly soft, “Hey. Bad day?”
“God.” Chavez covered his face with his hands. It wasn’t him, they’d forged his name on the divorce papers. He wouldn’t have let her leave him like this. “I can’t. I don’t know what I’m gonna do.”
“Hey,” Mulder said again, sitting next to him on the bed and putting his hand on Chavez’s shoulder, warm and heavy. “You live here now. This is your room.”
Chavez glanced at him, noticed something strange in the set of Mulder’s mouth, his eyes half-closed. Mulder was possibly drunk. He hadn’t taken his hand off Chavez’s shoulder. Chavez lived here now.
Mulder sorta smiled, and went to get Chavez’s dog, let him gallop across the backyard. He set Chavez up with a bottle of Scotch and a coffee mug full of limes, and they drank at the kitchen table, watching Tank bounce like a pinball around the yard.
Chavez had to be carried back to his room, his molecules feeling dense and constricted. He was crying. He wanted to go home.
Mulder laid him down on the bare mattress and said something that Chavez couldn’t hear. His knee was up along Chavez’s side and Mulder’s hand, flat scuffed palm, was drawing across Chavez’s wet face. Chavez tilted into it, shards of his heart now puncturing his lungs, as if to make the point that things can always get worse.
Things can always, always get worse.
He awoke with a hangover that blinded him, his jeans open and his stomach sticky. He barely made it to the bathroom before he threw up, his hands as white as the tile.
Mulder kept catching him off-guard, and maybe it was okay. Maybe Chavez felt something other than complete despair when Mulder touched him, even if only for five minutes or so. Maybe that was good enough.
They lived in this stark echo of a house, coffee in the morning on the patio with Tank chewing on old baseballs, alcohol in the evening with their teammates migrating around them, and Mulder pinned him against the counter, ambushed him in the living room, climbed into his bed in the middle of the night.
Chavez was not really dealing all that well.
Then Zito was there, on an off-day, floating around on the pool raft with his sunglasses on. Chavez was recovering from a concussion, stars exploding when he closed his eyes. Mulder was at a friend’s wedding, his absence a physical space at Chavez’s back. Drinking cold beer against doctor’s orders, Chavez watched Zito drift from one end of the pool to the other, his hand trailing in the water.
When Zito got out, he sat down beside Chavez on the scorched yellow grass, drops of water skating down his shoulders and chest. Zito was clever behind his sunglasses, asking Chavez if he was okay like he actually cared.
Chavez knew better. They didn’t care about him. Mulder was doing this to him because Chavez wasn’t paying rent. Zito was over here because he liked train wrecks. He’d always wanted to see a plane fall out of the sky.
In the sunlight, Chavez was poled and desperate, his life slipping away from him, and he slid his hands into Zito’s soaked hair. He held Zito down against the ground, feeling the shock sink out of him, his mouth biting and quick and cruel. Zito felt like he had the sun under his skin, chlorine burning in Chavez’s mouth, and he ripped Zito’s sunglasses off his face, Zito’s brown eyes and the twisted wet strands of his hair on his forehead. Zito smiled up at him, swear to god innocent on the grass.
Zito didn’t stop him, licking Chavez’s throat, letting Chavez grab his wrists and press them down over his head. Chavez was more than a little crazy, and Zito knew it. Zito didn’t care; Chavez was his falling plane.
It was not Chavez’s smartest plan. He felt something with Zito too, something odd and half-buried pushing at the lining of his heart. Baseball was instinct, and this might be too. If he fucked up bad enough, maybe he’d wake up out of this godawful thing that he’d done.
If he fucked up bad enough, maybe someone would finally notice.
Mulder and Zito split his concentration, kept him in motion. Chavez was fucking trapped like this. Mulder wasn’t ever kind and Zito hardly even seemed to see him. Chavez skulked along the walls, kept his eyes down.
Chavez almost broke down at one point. It was the middle of the night and Mulder was asleep in his bed as Zito’s headlights washed across the window. Chavez shook so hard the bedframe rattled on the wall. He couldn’t do this anymore. It was like swallowing salt, breaking a fall on rusty nails. He would leave, put miles between himself and the two of them, be healed. Nothing lasted forever.
But instead he slipped out of bed and went out to Zito’s car barefoot, walking along the fence so as not to trigger the motion sensors. Zito was buzzed, grinning at him, just in the neighborhood. He unbuttoned his jeans and put his hand on the back of Chavez’s neck.
It wasn’t sweet or pretty or faithful. It was powdered glass replacing his blood, and the moon in the crook formed by Zito’s jaw and throat when he tipped his head back against the seat. Chavez was suffocating, steam clouded on the windows, trying his best to remember that breathing was instinct.