“I want to be your wife,” Finn says one morning, middle of season seven, sunlight coming through the kitchen window strong enough that she has to squint her eyes to get a good view of Kennedy. She’s curled in the armchair in the corner; she pretends she doesn’t notice the way his steps falter for a moment as he processes what she’s said, before he regains his footing, brings their matching mugs of coffee to the table and nudges her to the side so he can sit beside her.
“Is that a proposal?” His eyebrows are raised. It’s like a staring contest; she can’t look away from him, wants to catalogue every reaction, store it in her memory forever.
“It can be, if you want,” she says. “Or not! I can do something bigger — I don’t have a ring, or anything, but I figured, well, we’re already pretty much there, right? And I’d like to call you my wife, and have you call me your wife, even if we don’t have time for a big wedding, or anything — I don’t think I’d want anything big, anyways, you know? Just —” and she picks up one of Kennedy’s hands, twines their fingers together as much as she can without squashing the webbing between hers. “I love you.”
“I love you, too.” Ken’s smiling, eyes crinkled at the corners. Finn looks and looks and looks, doesn’t dare blink and miss a moment. “Obviously I’m saying yes,” he says, and that was never really in doubt but Finn still breathes a sigh of relief, half-giddy at hearing it. “Obviously. I’d be honored to call you my wife, Finn.”
It’s one thing to think about it, conceptually; to roll the idea around in her mind at night or to blurt it out in the morning. It’s another thing to hear the words in Ken’s voice. Finn is breathless for a moment; she leans forward, her forehead pressed against Kennedy’s, his glasses knocked askew by her nose. “My wife, Kennedy,” she says softly, the joy of it overwhelming her. “My wife, my wife, my wife.”
Kennedy leans in the remaining centimeters, presses his lips to the corner of her mouth, to her cheek, to her forehead. He’s smiling too much for them to properly land, and she laughs. It’s been a hard season, and it isn’t even halfway over, but this is good, this is nothing but pure ocean breezes against bare skin and fish swirling around feet in the shallows — happiness, to put it simply.
“Should we tell the rest of the Crabs?” Finn asks, after a while.
Kennedy thinks for a moment. “Let’s see how long it takes them to figure it out,” he says, grinning.
13. the first glass of fresh water (+ crime au! cw for attempted murder & gunshot wounds)
Finn should be dead.
Finn should be dead several times over, dead and dead and drowning down to the bottom of the bay. She might still be hurtling towards death; she’s unconvinced, even as she winces herself awake, that she isn’t dreaming in some limbo-space. It’s a more reasonable explanation than the bursts of memory she has from before falling asleep — Debrah calling her in after a job Finn’d failed to complete, Finn having no time to react before the sound of a gunshot sent her ears ringing, and Finn remembers thinking oh, this is it, before Debrah had called the woman who cleans up messes and Finn had been, against all odds, saved.
Finn knows who Kennedy is. Kennedy gets rid of the bodies. Kennedy is Debrah’s favorite. Kennedy was brought to dispose of Finn, because Debrah was sure she was dead, sure enough to sweep out of the room with terrible grace as Finn stained the warehouse’s floor with blood and failed to scream. Instead, Finn remembers leaning against him as they’d stumbled somewhere, Kennedy murmuring every so often, “It’s okay, there’s first aid kits at my place, just a little ways more, it’s alright,” and the words slowed into something as unfathomable as whalesong by the time they hit Finn’s ears, but she recalls being comforted by them nonetheless.
Now, who-knows-how-long later, she’s laying on some soft surface, light filtering through her closed eyelids. She breathes slowly, slowly, slowly. There is, apparently, no breath minute enough not to make the wound in her side shout its discontent; Finn hisses at the feeling, and the charade of sleep is up.
“You awake?” It must be Kennedy’s voice next to her, low and nervous.
Finn cracks an eye open, then the other, and waits for her vision to stop spinning in front of her. The ceiling is one of those awful popcorn ceilings, all violent texture interrupted only by the unexposed lightbulb in the middle, dimmed. Sunlight pushes past the thick curtains to make its way into her eyes, dark spots dancing across. The room is empty the way a hotel is empty; dust on the top of the dresser, a lamp that looks like it’s never been turned on, no pictures on the walls.
Kennedy sits on the edge of the bed, gripping a cup of water so tightly Finn wonders if it will burst and leave glass shards embedded in his skin, stain the blankets artlessly draped across her body with blood other than her own.
Finn goes to shrug, and then considers all the ways her shoulders connect to her abdomen and all the ways such a simple motion could tear her apart, and stops herself. “I think so,” she says, slowly. Her voice is hoarse, thinned to the point of ghostliness. “Am I?”
“Are you what?” Kennedy’s fingers drum against the side of the glass now.
“Awake?”
“Unless you’re really good at sleeping with your eyes open and sleeptalking,” Kennedy says. A smile starts to stretch across his face, but stops maybe ten percent of the way, frozen barely-there.
Finn lets her eyes drift closed, if only so she doesn’t have to see the smile drop and his brow furrow again. She’s silent long enough that she expects to feel the bed shift as Kennedy leaves, but it doesn’t; the seconds tick by slowly on a clock somewhere in the building. “Why?”
“Why... are you awake?” Kennedy sounds genuinely confused, and if it’s an act, it’s a good one. Finn is not a good actor, and knows this about herself; she’s never been good at detecting lies in others, either, and maybe that’s what’s brought her here, what got her wrapped up in the Crabs’ dirty work and what got her shot and —
“Why am I not dead? I should be. I should be dead.” Her voice runs out halfway through the last sentence, and she feels Kennedy shift beside her, finally — but he doesn’t leave the room, just moves closer, picks up one of her hands and wraps it around the glass alongside his own.
She opens her eyes again and, written clearly across his face, finds the kind of worry it’s impossible to fake.
“Just water,” he says, and she decides if he wanted her dead he would have thrown her into the bay when ordered to, so she takes slow sips as he keeps talking. “I just — well, I don’t always agree with what Deb tells me to do, and — I guess — I don’t know.” He sighs out a deep breath. “She missed the mark. Should’ve shot you in the heart, or the head, but she’s getting older, and her hands shake, now. Went clean through your side and didn’t hit any organs, and I saw you and — well. I knew I could help.”
It makes about as much sense as everything else, which is to say none at all. But Finn drinks water from a cold glass and it tastes nothing like the Chesapeake Bay, and it’s enough to convince her that she is alive, really alive, under a pile of quilts in a safehouse somewhere, not at the bottom of the sea and dreaming of safety.
“She’ll kill you,” Finn says when the glass is empty, Kennedy’s hands reaching out and putting it on the dresser. “She’ll find out, and she’ll kill me, and she’ll kill you.”
“Maybe,” Kennedy says. He sounds like a woman who has considered this outcome and determined it a worthy risk to take, and Finn can’t fathom why.
“But,” Finn says, unsure of what’s coming next until it’s already bubbling out of her mouth: “She won’t, if we kill her first.”
Kennedy’s leaned in close, voice a whisper against Finn’s ear. He’s still the more cautious of the two of them; Finn is only marginally less trusting than she once was, even after near-death experiences by the dozen, and she knows Ken alternates between finding this endearing and deeply, deeply worrying. (He worries at everything, anyways, all the time. Finn finds this endearing nearly all the time.)
She sips at her wine. Lipstick stains the glass and wine stains her lips; an even exchange. She takes three sips because she likes the cadence of the number, the way it feels rolling around in her mind, and then she looks up at Ken, smile tugging at her lips.
“Bar’s a neutral space, Dee,” she reminds him, keeping her voice soft. “Besides, we’ve got lots and lots to celebrate, don’t we?”
Her voice tips, high-pitched and sunny, into a giggle at the end. It’s a sound much too innocent to come from anyone who’s a patron of Margo’s speakeasy, and she’s sure it’d get her some looks if word hadn’t already spread of what she, Ken, and Combs had accomplished. No one’s looking directly at the two of them. It’s all corner-of-eye glances from across the room, and she thrills in it, even knowing it’s temporary — they hardly have the same reach as someone like Jaylen or Jessica, the Crabs are not anywhere near so powerful, but Debrah is dead and everyone knows it, and for a moment that means safety.
“We should be planning, getting things in order,” Ken says. Practical to a fault. “I know Combs said they’d handle the actual leadership, now, but — we should be helping.”
“Kennedy,” Finn says. She tries to school her expression into something serious, but the relieved joy that’s been thrumming through her all day bursts forward, and she can’t help but smile again. “We killed a god.”
Kennedy wrinkles his nose. “Deb wasn’t a god, just a woman.”
Finn reaches down, takes Kennedy’s hand in her own. Squeezes. “If you really want, we can leave and drive back to Baltimore. If you want. But, I think we’ve earned a night of no worrying.”
“I always worry,” Ken says, but he leaves it there. It isn’t a yes, please, we should leave.
Finn is quietly glad; she’d go with him if he asked her to, would go with him anywhere he asked her to, but she’s been in hiding for almost a year now, making sure Debrah didn’t find out she was still alive and send someone to finish the job. Finn isn’t a person who seeks out the attention of crowds, isn’t someone who enjoys the spotlight at all, under normal circumstances — but she has missed existing in public, knowing people could see her. It’s a relief to no longer be a ghost.
“Worry tomorrow,” Finn says. She leans in to kiss him, sweet and slow and tasting of three glasses of the second most expensive red wine Margo’s got in stock. She kisses him for probably longer than is decent in public, but nobody here will tell them to stop.
There will be things to worry about tomorrow. There’ll be endless, countless, unimaginable problems to discuss as they make the drive back to Baltimore; neither of them know what the now what after killing Debrah really entails, and neither of them have any idea how to help run an operation as big as the Crabs, and neither of them have a single clue what the future has in store.
Neither of them are thinking about those things tonight. They’re celebrating.
In an old-fashioned clawfoot tub found down a series of endless hallways connected to more endless hallways, Finn James contorts herself to be completely underwater, eyes closed, breathing through her gills. She hears Kennedy knock on the door as if in a dream, distant and hazy and muffled by the inches of water over her head; she thinks about not replying at all, staying underwater as long as she’s able — until the end of siesta, until games start again, until they are finally, finally, finally brought back Down and she can swim in the Bay again — but she lifts her chin above the water and echoes Kennedy’s knocks against the tile of the wall, inviting him in.
“Hey,” Kennedy says, shutting the door behind him and sitting down on the damp tile floor, leaning against the side of the tub. “Haven’t seen you in a while. I know it’s been rough for everyone up here, but I — well, I wanted to make sure you were okay?”
Finn lets herself sink again. Her eyes stay above water, watching Kennedy’s hand tap-tap-tap against the tub’s porcelain. “I just miss it,” she says, though her voice is muted and it sends air bubbles to the surface. “I miss it and miss it and miss it.”
“Baltimore?”
“The Bay — the water. There’s no water up here, Ken, not like that, and I know — I know — I know I probably shouldn’t miss it so much, after drowning for so long. But it was peaceful. Everything was just... so peaceful.”
She knows Kennedy can’t understand, not quite — no one can, not really, the feeling of being miles beneath the sea and wrapped in the pressure of all that ocean, lulled off to sleep by a warm blanket that contains such endless life. (There’s a shade of that peace in being held by Kennedy, sometimes, but other times she doesn’t want to be touched at all, and other times, still, the mere act of being in open air dries out her skin and makes her want to scream, if only she could get enough water in her lungs to do so.)
Kennedy turns his hand palm-up against the side of the tub, and Finn thinks for a moment before placing her hand in his, squeezing it gently.
“What can I do?” Kennedy asks. He’s so earnest in his need to help everyone, in his love, and sometimes it makes Finn feel like she’s undergoing open heart surgery, like he’s peering into something inside her no one else could ever see. There is a comfort there, much like drowning.
Finn breathes, quietly, in through her gills and out through her mouth, watching the air move through the water. “Just stay?”
“Of course,” Kennedy says, without a moment’s hesitation. “Always.”
It’s the night of elections, and Finn’s had to pull Kennedy by the hand into bed to stop his pacing around the townhouse. The illusion that either of them will be able to sleep is easy to see through; there’s too much wrong, and she thinks briefly of the old days, the excitement and terror that were impossible to untangle in the face of oncoming deicide, that kept them both awake long into the night, watching the sun rise outside their window with Ken’s hands brushing through Finn’s hair or his head in her lap.
They’d been younger then. The excitement is outweighed by the fear, now. Finn’s voice does not shake, but it is quiet, almost drowned out by the sound of the city she loves so much outside their window.
Kennedy turns to face her, blankets tangling around them both as he does. “What we always do. We’ll — we’ll keep going. We’re good at that.”
“We are,” she murmurs. “Don’t give me the pep talk, though; that’s for the rest of the team. Not me.” She reaches out, brushes some hair out of his face; his eyes close against the cold of her hand. “How’re you feeling, Ken? Really.”
“Honestly?” He smiles, but it’s bittersweet at best. “Not sure yet. This one’s been... a lot to take in.”
“You could say that again.”
“Are you scared?”
“God, I’m terrified, Ken. It’s, well — the fans were going to do the necromancy thing again, obviously, but — I didn’t think it would be us. And Nagomi was part of it, and — and I don’t know what to do about that. About any of it, really.”
Ken hums, pulls the blankets up tighter around them both — it isn’t as good as being underwater, but the pressure is almost the same, the weighted blanket on top of the pile a good enough simulation. Finn focuses on breathing for a few moments, then speaks again, even quieter: “What do we do when he starts killing people?”
“I don’t know,” he says, slowly. They both like solving problems; she knows how it hurts, not having any kind of solution, here. They can’t take care of their team, their family — Luis and Parker are safe, now, but they aren’t here, and that’s another thing to fret over. “We have two years to figure it out.”
“Not enough time, I think.”
“No,” Kennedy says. “But no amount of time would be.”
Tomorrow, York will arrive in Baltimore. The Crabs’ tradition for new additions is to throw a welcome party, make them feel at home right away, but that doesn’t feel right, knowing what they all know — and it doesn’t feel right to not do it, either, ostracizing York before he’s done anything wrong. Just because Jaylen took such blatant terrible joy in killing doesn’t mean York will, Finn reasons to herself — but does it change anything, if he’s unhappy about it but must do it anyways, again and again and again? Her thoughts spin around in endless circles, dizzying her.
“Two years,” Finn says. “Two years, but he’ll be here tomorrow, and the clock will start ticking down and down and down.”
“We’ve dealt with worse,” Kennedy says. He leans forward to kiss her forehead, right below where the anglerfish light casts a soft glow over everything; he stays there, leaning his head against hers. “We’ll be alright, love.”
She thinks of the Mother Crab, how they’d been together through that right up until they weren’t, up until Finn had drowned and Kennedy had been left alone, above water, unreachable. She thinks of the incinerations she was not there to hold him through. She thinks of the Up, the ways it had fractured them; the days and days and days she’d spent under the lake, him too busy trying to turn a hostile place into a facsimile of Baltimore to notice her absence. They’ve talked about it since, fallen back into a rhythm as comfortable and familiar as a heartbeat, but still, she thinks, and she wonders.
Their safety is a promise neither of them can keep. She doesn’t know if this will be something that tears them apart, one way or the other — but she moves further into Kennedy’s space, pressing her face into his shoulder, and tries to content herself with not knowing, for a while.
in my head there’s an important distinction between the way kennedy takes care of the rest of the team (yes, out of genuine care, but also out of obligation; he feels like he has to overwork himself constantly to be the best team captain to fill the void combs left when they died, and he’s consistently ignoring his own problems in favor of desperately trying to solve the problems the crabs have) and the way kennedy takes care of finn (very pointedly mutual — not that the crabs in general don’t try to take care of kennedy too, but kennedy and finn have had multiple conversations about yes i know you care about me but i care about you too and i need you to tell me when you’re stressed or hurt or having a bad time, not just push me away — it’s about love, first and foremost, and trust, and both of them trusting the other completely to tell them when they need help, and trusting the other to be a person they can lean on when they need to lean on someone)
whatever here that’s left of me is yours (just as it was)
words: 1746
fandom: blaseball
relationship: kennedy loser/finn james
summary: It’s not that Finn expects them to leap back into… whatever it was they were, before. It’s difficult to expect something as undefined as that. But there’s still something there; beyond the simple consistency of Kennedy being Kennedy, beyond the gentle way he’d asked her if she wanted to come back to his house after the game. The war against the Crab Mother had been long, longer than she’d been there for, but wherever Kennedy was was always a safehouse; him with his medic’s kit and his brave face and his seemingly boundless love for the people around him. It hasn't changed in the decade-plus in between then and now.
She feels safer here than she thought she would anywhere above water, after so long below.
Finn’s whisper ripples out into the darkened air of Kennedy’s room — Finn’s slept there since she climbed out of the bay six years ago, so really it’s their room now, but she never really appended her name onto the possessive of it, hasn’t made it Kennedy-and-Finn’s. She wonders if she’ll get a chance to, now. Nobody knows what ascension means; everyone, especially the Crabs, have taken their turn to guess and be inevitably proven wrong, but Finn knows better than to wonder about these things — she’ll just spiral if she does, and who knows if she’ll be able to sink under the bay to calm her thoughts come morning?
The Crabs were bested viciously and swiftly by the Peanut’s team; it left them all struggling to catch their breath, all exhausted down to the bone, even hours later when Kennedy and Finn had stumbled their way back to Kennedy’s house and crawled into bed together — but even with that terrible tiredness and the hours that have passed since then, the moon’s reflection inching steadily across the water outside their window, Kennedy is awake when Finn finally speaks. He shifts so he’s halfway-sitting, and Finn echoes the movement, looking at him through the near-pitch-blackness of the room.
Kennedy doesn’t have to ask what she means; the Crabs have been working towards ascension for years, and only now, when it’s too late, have they stopped to wonder if that was a mistake. “Sure did,” he says softly; she can’t read the tone, whether he’s glad or terrified or remorseful or some shifting-swirling combination of all of them. (She can’t tell what she’s feeling about it all, either; her heart changes and changes and changes every time it beats, goes swiftly from fear to joy and back around again.)
He loops an arm around her shoulder, pulls her close. “Big day tomorrow,” he says, and she still can’t tell what’s behind it, but he holds onto her tightly and kisses the top of her head and she thinks, well, whatever it is, at least we’ll be together this time. “Should try to get some rest.”
