Archive of Our Own ^beta

i.

You leave. That’s how the story was always going to go with you. Girls whose parents don’t love them don’t stay put for long, not if they can help it.

But you can remember the first time the reality of it sunk in - that you were leaving, eventually, that you wouldn’t grow old in the place you’d been born the way your grandparents had. You were fifteen. Someone had hit you. You won’t remember who, but it isn’t like it matters.

You spill your guts in the bathroom, heart racing, and you think to yourself I can’t take this forever.

ii.

It takes you a couple years to get around to it. Running away from home is harder than people expect.

The night you finally do it is shortly after your eighteenth birthday. That makes some things easier. At the very least, it’s unlikely that anyone other than you or your parents will drag you back home.

But you’re never sure. You’re jumpy the whole ferry ride from Barcelona out to Palma, as if your mom or aunt or someone will be catching a late night ride over to Mallorca. You expect it to fade when you’re there, but it doesn’t.

iii.

The island of Mallorca isn’t too different from your home in Barcelona. You’re used to the stunning brightness of the summer days, and the swarming tourists speaking English and French and German and getting underfoot. That sounds like home, if only like all the bad parts of it.

You’re not too far, after all. Maybe too close for comfort. Your jitters never quite fade. You get hired at a bookstore and spend your shifts with your head on a swivel. Some nights you convince yourself it’s pointless, that they wouldn’t even bother looking for you, but you’re never totally sure.

iv.

“This might be for you.”

The bookstore owner knows you’re running from something. She doesn’t ask, and you certainly don’t volunteer it, but she can tell.

This is a flyer, torn down from somewhere on the street outside, advertising tryouts for the island’s blaseball team. “I’m not very athletic,” you reply, which is code for I don’t want to.

“I’ve heard things,” she continues. “Not everybody plays. The people who don’t, well, something happens. People forget about them. Might be helpful.”

She doesn’t press it when you brush her off. You think about it, though, on and off for days.

v.

The Mallorca Whales are a joke. Tourist shit. You’ve barely heard a good word about them in the couple weeks you’ve spent in Palma, and the couple you have weren’t spoken in Catalan or Spanish.

That means you feel a little embarrassed walking into open tryouts. That means the other people there are mostly entertainer types and obvious transplants. When the phone call comes telling you you made it, it's into the reserve players, not the actual roster. That’s what you wanted, thankfully.

The rosters are public, so when you sign the contract it’s with a name that isn’t yours.

vi.

When you next go to work, you have to remind the owner of your store who you are. You do it again the next day, and the next. When you oversleep a couple days later and she doesn’t think to call you, you finally start to relax.

You go out a little more. You don’t make friends, but you wander the streets. You go into work most days, if only for want of something to do, and you take advantage of the situation to read through everything in the store that you can manage. It’s nice, nicer than feels real.

vii.

Something you regret about those years in Palma: never befriending any of the other Whales’ shadows players. By the time the loneliness really sinks in, heavy around you like a winter coat, you don’t know how you’d even find them.

That’s most of it, but not all. When things start getting bad, when blaseball starts looking more dangerous than all the shit you’ve survived already, you don’t even know. You don’t pay attention to the game - it’s never impacted you before.

The Whales have time to expect that they’ll burn eventually. You burn too, but you don’t get the privilege.

viii.

You die while you’re at work. Burst into flames, to be precise. When you do, you don’t last long enough to see if the bookstore goes up with you. One agonizing instant, then you’re gone into nothingness.

When you’re pulled from it, it feels almost like nothing has passed. if you didn’t find yourself somewhere completely different you could have just been startled out of a daydream.

But you’re in a dugout, the kind you haven’t been in since your tryout. Your body screams out in pain. People are panicking around you, but someone comes to your side to explain.

ix.

“Archie Lampman?”

It’s been a long time since you were called that. Since you were called anything, to be fair, since you apparently died a few decades ago. “That’s the name I put down on the paperwork.”

“Like the poet?” Tyler asks with a smirk.

She’s the first person to ask. You nod. “A fan?”

“Fuck no. I had to read his stuff in high school.” It continues before you can bother defending him. “Something you’d rather be called?”

You consider it. “Archie is good.” The name doesn’t fit quite right in your mouth, but starting over appeals to you.

x.

There are three other ambushes. They’re welcoming, and less uncomfortably cavalier about death than the rest of the Tigers are.

Two seasons pass in a sleepless haze. Tom helps you figure out paperwork, and Cedric tells you long sports stories in Spanish, and when Tyler asks you if you have any family to call and you say hell no it laughs and fistbumps you.

You like Tyler. She’s a dick, and you like her. They take to trying to make you laugh, and when you tell it to be nicer to people, it tries, to the shock of everyone else.

xi.

It’s hard to think of a time you felt this together. You don’t know if you ever have.

You and Tyler start dating. You were already fairly well incorporated into the other ambushes’ little unit, but that cements it. The shadows are less hidden now, you learn, but that doesn’t change that your parents are on the other side of the world if they’re even still alive.

But things are changing. The Tigers seem anxious, despite being the safest team in the league. That’s a bad sign if you ever saw one. So, you try to enjoy what you have.

xii.

This time, when things get bad, you hear about it. You aren’t spared the anticipation, or seeing people cry about the deaths when they happen.

And you leave. Again. Once it starts to seem like being in the shadows of a Fireproof team won’t matter, you pack your things and go. With Tyler and Cedric and Tom, at least, but still.

This time, it catches up to you. The Tigers don’t burn, but they do die, and you go along. One second, the four of you are in a car, the next, you’re somewhere dark that they seem to recognize.