Archive of Our Own ^beta

1.

“Tell me what it sounds like,” says Grollis.

Yusef tips eir head back. The clouds bump into one another, countermelodies ambling along together. There is a flute in the feathers of a bird singing along to the windchime of a falling leaf, the insistent timpani of Grollis’s heartbeat, the soothing cello drone of hyr head lying in eir lap, the careless staccato of wind through grass.

“It sounds like everything,” ey says, like always.

And like always, Grollis rolls hyr eyes and says, “Try.”

Ey pauses and then hums something like the sound of the leaves rustling. It’s not right because it can never be right. If there’s one thing ey knows, it’s that ey will never be able to replicate the resonance of the universe, whether that resonance flows from something divine or the immaterial plane itself.

But nobody else can hear any of it, the walls and cities and people and trees and books and air and life all cascading together in cacophonous, brilliant noise. Ey wants to share it, and this is the best ey can do. It’s not exactly right, but ey does it anyways.

Grollis sighs contentedly. “Tree song?”

Yusef smiles. “How’d you know?”

“This one’s my favorite.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because it’s a little different every time, even if it’s the same trees. I think the melody changes with the direction of the wind through the leaves.”

“You’re brilliant,” Yusef says, and Grollis makes a pleased sound. “How did you come up with that?”

“It’s just a guess.” Ze closes her eyes. “Keep going?”

It takes Yusef a second to find the thread of the melody again, but once ey has it ey starts humming. Ey reaches for Grollis’s hand and squeezes. Ze squeezes back and starts humming, and Yusef realizes that ze’s singing along.

2.

The part that’s hardest to explain is the echo. Yusef walks onto a field and the grass sings in time to the drumbeat of the bases, and each pitch thrown resonates and sings out until it becomes a strike or a hit, and the melody carries on until the ball lands, and every footstep feeds into the rhythm, and the tree bark echoes with the sounds of the fans’ cheers and the bats sing their own cadenzas, and it all blurs and blends into something lovelier and bigger than eni can understand.

Immateria doesn’t echo.

It takes eni a while to realize. There’s something wrong about it anyways; being on a flooded field feels like walking through radio static, a gentle, persistent wrongness that swells and swallows enis whole. The first time Yusef gets swept off base, eni comes up gasping, flailing at the base of the dugout. Coolname has to drag them upright.

“Are you okay?” it says, voice low, head bent close to Yusef. “Yus, talk to me.”

“It didn’t make noise,” Yusef says dazedly. “I was under and it didn’t make noise.”

Coolname looks down at the immateria doubtfully. “None at all?”

“It didn’t even sound like running water,” enis says. Eni drags enis fingers through the immateria and enis hand goes pleasantly numb, not quite tingling, not quite real enough for proper sensation. “I didn’t know anything could sound like that.”

“Like nothing?”

“Nothing sounds like nothing.” Eni scoops up a palmful of immateria and looks at it. “Except for immateria.”

Coolname dips a finger in and doesn’t recoil. “Isn’t immateria everything? Immateria, immaterial plane.”

Yusef shakes enis head. “This can’t be.”

“What makes you say that?”

Eni spreads enis fingers, letting the immateria drip through. “I can hear everything itself. And everything can’t be nothing.”

3.

When the immateria takes zir away it doesn’t hurt. It would be better if it had, but instead it’s that pleasant, creeping absence. Yusef is on base when nothing carries them nowhere and ze doesn’t even have time to cry out before ze’s swallowed whole.

Ze has been elsewhere before, but it felt different. It felt like a blip. This, Yusef knows, is not a blip. The season is going to end, and ze won’t be able to return until the next one. Two years from now.

Yusef gets to zir feet. There are waves of immateria lapping at zir ankles, and ze shudders at the waxing and waning loss of sensation. There is no noise from the ground. There is no noise from the immateria, a seashore without a sea, an ocean with only waves.

“Hello?” Yusef says. Ze’s expecting zir voice to hang in the air, if not to echo in the cavern of space all around them. Instead it’s the opposite. Zir voice is deadened almost before ze’s finished speaking. The words leave zir mouth and then, embarrassed at their boldness, refuse to travel any further.

If Grollis were here ze would be walking already. If Coolname were here it would be taking stock of its surroundings. But the silence is paralyzing, an anathema to Yusef’s entire existence. Ze can’t move through the silence. Ze has never had to before.

Ze closes zir eyes and imagines Grollis in front of zem. Imaginary Grollis says, brisk and gentle, “If you can’t move without the music, then make some music.”

Yusef’s heart aches. It’ll be two years before ze sees Grollis again.

Ze taps zir hands against zir thighs. It’s a poor substitute for a drumbeat, but it’s as close as ze can find to a song right now.

4.

Yusef walks.

She picks a direction and goes, because there’s not much else to do. There’s no horizon, no endpoint in mind or in sight. She wonders faintly if she’s going to be walking for two years, or if it’ll even feel like two years. The last time she was elsewhere she could feel the days passing, a ticking calendar of each missed at-bat, but this time there’s nothing.

She walks until she finds a place where the immateria is rushing downhill, an oil slick of silence, and then she walks until the down becomes an up again. She walks through plains and deserts and places that are barely places at all. She walks long past when her muscles should be sore and she walks further still.

She finds the fire eventually. She doesn’t see the smoke or feel the heat or even hear its glittering tambourine song. There is no reason that she should know about it, but she turns to follow it anyways. Perhaps because it’s like her, something real in this yawning lack of reality. Perhaps it’s just a guess.

But Yusef walks, and walks, and walks until she’s ready to cry with frustration, and—

A hand lands on her shoulder. She turns to see Jaxon Buckley smiling broadly. “Need somewhere to stay?”

Yusef nearly sobs. “Please,” she says, and then frowns at the quietness of it.

“Just raise your voice a little,” Jaxon says encouragingly. “Like you’re yelling at first base from the outfield.”

“Like this?” Yusef yells. Her throat protests but Jaxon’s face lights up. “You can hear me?”

“I can hear you.” Jaxon squeezes her shoulder, and Yusef doesn’t gasp at the warmth of his skin or the strangeness of his solidness. “Welcome to our little settlement. Why don’t you come and sit down?”

5.

Jaxon says by their best guess there should be a dozen odd people there, but Yusef is only the third at their encampment. The other, Yusef Puddles, is a quiet man who helps Jaxon tend the fire and doesn’t do much else. Jaxon is the socialite of the two of them, and they’re full of stories of horses and adventures and dreams. Jaxon sings while he works, and Yusef isn’t sure how to ask him to stop.

Fleur’s been quiet lately, something that Jaxon surely notices but doesn’t ask about. Fleur spends most of fleurs time with Puddles, the two of them looking out at the immateria together.

“Do you think it’s better?” Puddles asks one day.

Yusef frowns. “Do I think it’s better being here?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

Puddles looks at fleur askance. “You said that confidently.”

“I have things worth going back for.”

“So do I.”

Yusef doesn’t know much about Puddles. He has a mask. He almost never speaks to fleur directly, preferring to go through Jaxon. He has been here barely longer than fleur has. He murmurs prayers in Hebrew every now and again. On the one occasion that Yusef laid down fleurs scarf and tried to figure out which direction Mecca was, something fleur hadn't done in years, Puddles had said that the direction didn’t matter and helped fill in the words of prayer that fleur had forgotten.

“What’s worth staying for?” Yusef asks.

Puddles looks straight ahead, eyes fixed on something Yusef can’t see. “The quiet.”

Yusef opens fleurs mouth to say that fleur doesn’t understand, but pauses. “Is that more important?”

“Maybe,” Puddles says. “For me.”

Yusef nods. Fleur doesn’t ask about it again. Most of fleurs humming is barely audible even to fleurself, but it gets quieter after that. It only seems polite.

6.

Despite everything, there is music.

It begins with a slow trickle of new arrivals. Nandy Fantastic and Riley Firewall stumbling together. Pedro Davids carrying a fox in his arms. Schneider Bendie cursing up a storm. Not the dozen people that Jaxon predicted, but enough for them to be a proper group instead of a triad.

Yusef doesn’t know when ce first notices that it’s getting easier to speak to one another. Ce still spends most of cir time with Puddles, even though they don’t talk much. Ce also spends plenty of time alone, running Grollis’s voice through cir mind, trying to capture every syllable with the most clarity ce can find.

But eventually ce notices that ce doesn’t have to shout anymore. The space between them feels smaller every day. Ce can hear words spoken instead of shouted, whispered instead of spoken. Ce can hear clothes rustling together, first cir own and then everyone else’s, and ce’s surprised by what an irritant it is.

“I used to like the noise,” ce tells Riley. “I don’t know how to like it anymore.”

Yusef likes Riley. They’ve spent time here before, and they’re a musician, and Yusef’s hoping they’ll understand. Yusef needs them to understand.

“It’s not as tactile here,” they answer slowly. “The sound doesn’t bother me, but it feels like I can’t really touch anything.”

“Would you want to?”

“Wouldn’t you?”

“I wanted to hear things,” Yusef says. It comes out more plaintively than ce intended. “I used to hear everything.”

“That sounds hard,” Riley says, threaded with sympathy. “Even if you didn’t realize it till now.”

Yusef never thought it was hard. Yusef always thought it was a duty, something ce had to do, something ce couldn’t take for granted. Ce feels like ce took it for granted anyways.

7.

Yusef spent six days in elsewhere, a lifetime and a half ago. Ir doesn’t remember much about it other than that ir was there and then ir wasn’t. Ir doesn’t remember coming home or how it happened, whether it was a gush of immateria whale-spouting them out of elsewhere or if ir just opened ir eyes and was back in Tokyo.

Ir doesn’t know how to get back, but the games start again. They all know it: they all wince whenever it’s their turn to be at bat, not quite making eye contact with each other anymore.

Yusef doesn’t exactly want to go back. It’s hard to imagine playing again. Hard to imagine seeing anyone other than the half-dozen people ir has been spending time with. But Grollis’s voice is still in ir head, gentle but insistent, and Coolname’s, and the memory of the perfect resonance of the world.

Ir says ir goodbyes and then leaves. Ir closes ir eyes and picks a direction and goes and hopes, and hopes, and hopes.

There are hills. There are valleys. There is immateria, always, incessantly. Yusef follows the stream and tries to imagine the Legscraper, tries to imagine a field.

Ir starts humming under ir breath. Ir doesn’t know exactly what the song is, but the cadence of it provides a gentle rhythm as ir walks. Ir doesn’t notice at first when the ground gives up the ghost of ambiguity and becomes grass, or when the immateria trails off into dust. Ir doesn’t even notice when ir walks to the very edge of the dugout.

But then the stadium announcer says, “Yusef Fenestrate has returned from elsewhere after one season,” and Yusef takes a breath.

And then the symphony begins, the loudest thing in the world, and it doesn’t make sense anymore.

8.

It’s too loud.

Which is unthinkable, criminal, impossible, but fae had a long time to get used to the starkness of elsewhere. The way that shouts take on the half-life of whispers. The way that melodies become reproachfully dissonant as soon as they enter the air.

The immaterial plane is nothing like that. Yusef’s own voice makes faer wince, too sharp in unfamiliar ways. Bats smack against balls and that escalates into balls in gloves and feet on the ground, a constant pounding that fae can’t get away from, crescendos building upon crescendos.

The rest of the Lift are worried. Yusef can’t blame them. Fae remembers loving the music the way fae remembers childhood dreams of sitting on rooftops and watching the stars fall. It’s probably hard for them to understand why Yusef suddenly wants the music to stop, at least for a while.

Coolname is quiet when the two of them are at home, a kindness and a concession that Yusef is grateful for. It doesn’t speak unless absolutely necessary. It takes the time to figure out which pens and which paper are the quietest: a cheap notebook from a convenience store paired with a nearly unreadable pale blue colored pencil, but Yusef learns to read it.

On the worst days Yusef is angry about it. Coolname takes those days in stride too. It gets Yusef noise cancelling headphones, and they don’t fix everything but they make it easier for faer to scream without the sound deafening faer. They make it easier for faer to go outside without wanting to sprint back into the welcoming absence of elsewhere.

“You’re on your way back,” Coolname says. Yusef isn’t supposed to hear it through the headphones but fae looks over anyways. Coolname just looks back, half-smiling. “It’ll just take a minute.”

9.

An incomplete of sounds that Yusef cannot hear anymore:

Immateria.

Fire crackling, dulled by the vacuum.

The squeaks of the rubber mask Puddles wore.

Nandy and Bendie arguing about something that happened in the Mills’ apartment.

The color grey, but only a particular shade, the pearlescent edges of clouds. It used to sing out the way that crystal glasses resonated, but now there is nothing, a patch of silence in the musical spectrum of greyness.

Jaxon’s breath hitching as he laughed.

Immateria.

Certain small birds.

The ocean — not its song, but the waves themselves.

The rug in Grollis’s apartment that always hurt stars feet.

Cell phone chargers.

Immateria, but star doesn’t miss it.

Stars own thoughts, beneath everything else.

The precise tone of Stijn’s voice.

Individual blades of grass. They used to each have their own sparkling melody, a glockenspiel or handchime or… or something like that, something that rang out, and if Yusef listened closely enough star could hear each one, but not anymore. Now it’s just noise, a gentle and constant and unstoppable clanging that whistles with wind and melts in the rain and doesn’t go away, none of it goes away, none of it ever goes away—

Immateria, but that’s good, that has to be good.

Crushed velvet.

The number fifty-seven point eight.

Immateria.

The obtrusive brassiness of Grollis’s closet door handle.

Yellow food dye.

Immateria.

The actual sound of a home run. Star has only ever heard the way it resonates but star keeps imagining hearing it in elsewhere, the sound of the hit without the echo and the melody. What does wood sound like, anyways?

Immateria, but that’s not it, not quite.

5x7 inch picture frames.

Metal aglets.

Immateria.

Belt buckles.

Vanilla lattes.

Immateria.

Rhododendrons.

Immateria.

Immateria, no—

Silence. That’s what Yusef misses. Silence.

10.

Grollis is armed with three types of chocolate, two blankets, a white noise machine, another pair of noise-cancelling headphones, a new set of pajamas, a book, an audiobook, a CD-player that also gets FM radio, kinetic sand, a fidget cube, sushi, extra wasabi, a pre-loaded dessert delivery order, Pocky—

“You fit that all in one duffle bag,” Coolname says, voice flat with disbelief.

Yusef looks at the contents of the duffle bag, spread out across mir living room floor, and then at the two more still-unpacked duffel bags sitting by the doorway. “Are you sure we need all this?”

“Yes,” Grollis says patiently. “We’re experimenting.”

“This is kind of a lot,” Coolname warns. “It could be overwhelming.”

Grollis shrugs. “Everything is overwhelming.”

“True,” Yusef mutters, which is enough to startle laughs out of both of them. Mie looks at everything and then plucks a blanket out of the pile. It’s simple, cotton, soft, a pleasant light green that sounds like a viola. “This.”

“What next?”

“Both of you.”

Coolname and Grollis look at one another and then shrug in unison. Grollis sits on the couch first, Yusef sits next to hyr, curling tight against hyr side, and ze loops an arm around mir waist. Coolname drapes the blanket over the two of them, taking care to tuck it in, before sitting next to Yusef. The pleasant viola of the blanket envelopes mir, but it’s not enough, everything is still so loud, and—

“Are you humming?” Coolname says.

Grollis stops, which is when Yusef realizes ze was humming at all. “It’s a lullabye my mom used to sing.”

“Oh,” Yusef says, surprised. “I’d like to hear it.”

Ze starts again immediately. Coolname leans its head on Yusef’s shoulder, and Yusef closes mir eyes and listens to Grollis’s voice, and nothing else.