Here’s a wip for @blaseballwipamnesty !! it’s an unfinished and really untitled tbh 12x100 of mike townsend going to 12 different funerals (cw death, loss of a loved one, loss of a parent). one day i will finish this but for now i am stuck on shaq torres’ dave and busters wake.
i.
His shirt is too big, his tie lopsided. He tries to sink behind the glare of his glasses in the all-too-brightly-lit room. Mike Townsend drums his hands awkwardly on his knees, staring at the open casket 5 yards in front of him.
Soft feedback whines from the microphone. He turns to it and watches his college roommate clear her throat and take a deep breath. Mike’s only here for her. He knows he doesn’t belong here. He only met Jaylen’s mom once, during move in at the start of the semester. This is the first time he’s seen her since.
ii.
Mike’s reflection distorts in the polished brass of the urn. No open casket this time. The book opened and all it left behind was ashes. He remembers being frozen in place while he watched the groundskeepers sweep up what was left of Jaylen. He remembers how much he wanted to look away.
“You sure you can take it?” someone asks. Mike doesn’t look to see who.
He keeps staring at himself. “Yeah. Allie shouldn’t have to be the one to handle this.” He can see behind himself in the urn where Jaylen’s girlfriend since sophomore year tries not to crumble.
iii.
He can feel Derrick tense when Tiana shows up at Bennett’s service. Mike understands. Derrick knows what it’s like to be at the funeral of someone you replaced. But unlike Derrick at Jaylen’s funeral, Tiana seems like she’s supposed to be there. Mike puts a hand on his teammate’s shoulder while they watch a sapling lowered into the Earth.
Bennett was always close with nature. This time, the Garages are at the edge of a forest, their teammate’s ashes being turned into a tree. Mike wonders if he should have done something special, something more like this for Jaylen’s funeral.
iv.
A band grieves a timpani player, gone too soon. They stare at ashes waiting for her to rise again, just like she did last time. But Tiana Cash does not rise. The Garages mourn, and they cry, and they treat her like they’ve lost someone they’ve known all their life, not someone they’d known for just forty days.
Mike sits in the back, his pinky intertwined with Derrick’s. The longer the service goes on, the more he tightens his grip. Would they grieve for Derrick like this if he were gone too soon? Would they even mourn Mike like her?
for @blaseballwipamnesty: 1.4k of a Sutton Dreamy study, immediately post-ascension. i may come back to it someday--would’ve been eventual sutton dreamy/juice collins, with background nagomi mcdaniels/mrs silk, and nagomi & sutton friendship. warnings for description of a panic attack/breakdown, with some slight descriptions of depersonalization, and not the most healthy handling of intense emotions, and non-maincord-friendly swearing.
The problem was that Sutton didn’t know she had had a home until it was taken away from her. She didn’t know that home could be the gas station fried chicken the team would share before practice at unholy hours. She hadn’t known it could be sitting in the stands with Parra and talking about extradimensionality, or Kennedy calling her “kiddo,” or finding impossibly long strands of Combs’ hair in everything she owned even after they were gone. Her home had been splurging on overpriced aquarium tickets and caramel-and-Old-Bay ice cream, and falling asleep to the scuttling whispers of the MotherCrab every night. It hadn’t occurred to her that Baltimore had been her home, but it was. And then it was gone.
Ascension was like having a limb ripped away from her. No--Ascension was like being the limb that was ripped away. Being the part that gets left behind, unnecessary and useless. Unable to function on its own. An arm without a body, displaced. One second she is with her team, and they’ve won, and they had tried to be as prepared as possible for what would come next, but nothing could have prepared them for this. And then, loud and sudden and all-encompassing, they are somewhere else, somewhere so wrong that, even for Sutton, it’s nightmarish. They’re losing like they’ve never lost before--but isn’t it an honor, to have a god come after you personally? And it’s all over so suddenly that none of them have the chance to say goodbye. Between one blink and the next, her family is one. Another breath, and Sutton is swept away, too--not to follow them, but instead washing up on the soft, unfamiliar sands of Hawai’i. It is only the second time in her life that Sutton regrets teaching herself how to feel. She feels broken-open, realizing only belatedly that her face is wet with more than just ocean spray. She’s crying, violently so, and doesn’t understand at first that she’s furious. It’s the most emotion she’s ever felt at once, and it’s horrible--everything so intense that it comes back around to feeling distant and numb. She’s gotten herself out of the water, somehow, curled up on her side as she heaves with what must be inhumanly ugly sobs. Everything around her blurs, until she is aware of the sand in her fingernails and the salt drying in her eyelashes and her rage and nothing else. After maybe an eternity she hears a voice from somewhere, somewhere nearby, maybe. It’s a distinctive, rasping voice, a familiar one, but it still takes Sutton a moment to place it.
“Sutton,” Nagomi is saying. “Breathe, come on, Dreamy. Damn it, can you hear me?” Nagomi’s mandibles click anxiously. Sutton chokes on her own breath.
“Gomi,” she gasps. A thud, like someone dropping to the ground next to her, and the weight and warmth of Nagomi’s uncarcinized hand rubbing circles on Sutton’s back.
“Yeah, Dreamy. You gotta breathe with me, okay? You can freak out all you want, but let me at least get you inside, first.” She keeps talking, even when Sutton’s perception goes all fuzzy, and eventually the familiar creaking of her voice soothes her back into something approaching coherence. Nagomi helps her stand, hand still steady on her back, and for the first time, Sutton can take in her surroundings. They’re on a small beach, enclosed and private, with no one but herself and Nagomi in sight. There’s a house, maybe 50 yards away from the beach, with white siding and soft blue curtains in the windows. There’s a vegetable garden in the yard, and a path of uneven stone leading to the house.
“Where are we?” Sutton manages to ask, voice hoarse. In response, Naagomi beams, her mouth stretching impossibly wide. They approach the back door, and Nagomi slides it open with enough familiarity that Sutton doesn’t think to question her.
“Dreamy,” Nagomi says, as a dark haired, oddly familiar-looking woman turns to look at them, “I’d like you to meet my wife.”
Mrs. Silk, unsurprisingly, is a lovely woman, and, more surprisingly, Sutton absolutely does not want to talk to her. Sutton thinks that she might stumble through some pleasantries, but between everything that’s happened to her wife and her son, Sutton is pretty sure that Mrs. Silk won’t judge anyone for being inconsolable over blaseball. Nagomi presses a glass of water into Sutton’s hands and Sutton drinks it, although she remains only distantly aware of her body. She might drink more water, or someone might ask if she wants anything to eat, but time seems to stretch and compress oddly and the next thing Sutton knows, she’s curling up to sleep on the living room sofa. She might lie awake, staring at the ceiling, or she might fall asleep in moments, and either way she is glad when sleep takes her.
It’s still dark when Sutton wakes, and for a few moments she doesn’t know where she is. What she does know is that she’s tired of feeling numbly miserable. Players get traded all the time, she tells herself. So what if her entire team is gone somewhere she can’t follow? She was bound to leave the Crabs someday, so she might as well get ahold of herself and learn to deal with it. So she heaves herself off of the couch and leaves Mrs. Silk’s house. The night sky sheds deep blue light over the sand and the water. It’s an entirely different sort of night than Sutton is used to, no humming yellow city lights or sirens or omnipresent eldritch whispering. It’s quiet, and Sutton hates it. She wants to scream and shatter the night like glass, but she doesn’t. Instead she walks, along the beach until she finds a road, and along the road until she finds a town, and through the town until she finds a bar. It’s still open, which surprises her, but after a moment of staring up at the neon sign, she goes in. The space is quiet, its walls made of dark wood, with soft, warm lighting throughout. To Sutton’s relief, she’s not the only one there--several patrons sit in booths or at the bar, where a single bartender is serving drinks. The bartender is wearing a blue patterned button down with the sleeves rolled up, her dark hair held up in a loose bun with a cocktail umbrella stuck into it. She has warm, dark skin and a warmer smile that she’s directing at the customer she’s talking to. When she catches sight of Sutton, the bartender smiles--she has dimples--and waves to her.
“Hi! We close in about an hour, but you’re welcome to stay until then.”
“Oh,” Sutton says, “sorry, I--I don’t even know what time it is,” she admits.
“No worries!” says the bartender. “It’s--” she checks her watch, “--just after eleven. We close at midnight.”
“Thanks,” Sutton says. She’s off-put by the woman’s demeanor, a sudden reminder that not everyone had their world end earlier today. But that’s not her fault, Sutton tells herself. She takes a seat at the bar.
[Plot notes: Sutton wanders and eventually ends up at Juice’s bar--doesn’t know what to order, because she doesn’t drink, and the only thing she remembers other Crabs drinking is like, shitty beer is making it natty boh too cliche?? im never around baltimoreans drinking. Juice won’t give Sutton alcohol because it’s pretty clear that Sutton is fucked up, but they talk. Juice remembers Sutton, but Sutton had a kind of insular attitude to making friends and doesn’t really know Juice. This is a little bit of a meet-ugly, because this is the literal worst day that Sutton has had, ever, in her life. Juice is really sweet, though, and doesn’t hold a grudge because she saw Sutton’s worst day of her life televised, as did pretty much everybody. The rest of the plot would be about Sutton learning to Vibe™ with the help of Juice, Nagomi, and Mrs. Silk (who would probably need a first name at some point….). (Where is York at this point? Can he visit?? Actually that’s probably more angst than I’m prepared to deal with.) (ALSO re: Mrs. Silk’s house being right where Gomi and Sutton washed up, maybe her house is where new/traded players always show up, and she built her house there bc of how often Gomi gets traded, so she’d always be the first person to see her when she shows up??) Anyways, Sutton has to learn how to be a person on her own, and also how to chill the fuck out. If this follows her through the end of the siesta it’d probably involve her having some kind of culture shock going from hypercompetitive, structured crab life to the fridays Literally Just Hanging Out.]
