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the trench is cold, and it is dark, and it is almost-but-not-quite empty. jaylen never sees another soul, but she spends seven years (ten years, thirty years, half a century, forever) swinging at pitches that come towards her from the darkness, running bases she cannot see for a game with no score.
someone is throwing the ball. the pitcher must throw the ball.
she never sees them. the pitchers. but somewhere through the monotonous haze of it all, she learns the distinctions between their pitching styles; she'll get someone who throws the same knuckleball over and over for what must be the length of the game (and it reminds her of practicing against mike and she gets so afraid for a second that mike is here, too, invisible but here, that she misses a dozen throws in a row. never strikes out, though. the balls just keep flying towards her) and then someone who always curves their throws just so, distinctive. it's not the percussive thunk of a pitching machine, aiming straight forward.
jaylen tries to talk to them at first, but within a year (a decade, a lifetime) her voice is hoarse, and then it doesn't come out at all. it isn't like anyone ever talked back. or, if they did, it isn't like she could hear them. it's her and a pitch-black field full of ghosts, overhead lights buzzing but not reaching far enough to illuminate anything but the pitches being thrown at her.
***
the vault is cold, and it is eye-searingly bright, and it is claustrophobic the moment she's locked inside.
plastic chairs line the walls. some of the vaulted legends sit, casual, like they're used to it, and she supposes they must be — some of them have been here forever (since pre-history, since before she was born, since before anyone was born, since yesterday), and seem unfazed by being sent back. relieved, even.
jaylen stands in the center of the room like she is waiting for something to happen. her bat is still clenched in white-knuckled hands; she waits and waits and the pitch never comes.
"fucking do something," she shouts.
***
"fucking say something," she says into the empty darkness after a month (a year, thirty-something games in a row, an eternity).
her words echo around and around, coming back laced with oceanwater and the sureness that there is nothing here, not even herself.
***
the words go dead in the air. there's too many people here (plus a goose, a melon, a pitching machine, a commissioner); the room is too small. the walls are bright, marble, but they soak up the sound as effectively as a padded room might.
***
there are times she doesn't play.
it's not a choice, exactly; if she is batting, she can't just tell her feet to take her off the field and somewhere else. the pitcher must throw the ball, and the batter must be there to swing. these are the tenets of the splort.
sometimes, though, she blinks herself awake someplace new. a room with sofas, mismatched, blankets strewn overtop. rumpled, as if someone had just woken up from a nap.
or a bedroom, empty, all too reminiscent of her freshman year dorm room before she and mike had filled it with their belongings and made it a home. the plastic bed too low to the ground. the blank walls, dark gray. the layer of damp fog swirling around her feet.
or a long hallway lined with statues. she cannot look at most of them directly, but her own is clear as day: her face carved in marble, staring not back at her but up at the sky, newly-forged eclipse reflected in the careful sculpting of her pupils. the first few strands of flame lick off her back; she feels her shoulderblades ache in the same spot, and knows exactly what she would find if she were to twist herself around to see it in a mirror.
***
there's nowhere to go, here.
she gives up on looking for a hidden door relatively quickly — it's been a day, maybe. (or maybe three days, maybe a year, maybe seven.) the walls are flawless, not a crack nor a seam to be found.
it reminds her of a coffin. they'd buried her ashes somewhere when she'd burnt up, forty-nine years ago. the ashes under her tombstone technically do not belong to her, anymore — they're some other jaylen's, a jaylen who's place she has taken.
she's not sure she could say the contents of her own universe's urn belonged to her, either. how much of her remained the same when she was brought back? she is, undoubtably, a replacement for another jaylen now, but maybe that's always been true.
she sits in the corner of the bright marble room and screams. nobody looks up at her. the sound dies before it reaches their ears.
***
at some point, she blinks herself free of batting, and finds that she is floating in an endless expanse of water.
her thoughts reach her body too belatedly to hold back a gasp. she tries to clamp her hands over her mouth, prevent any more water from entering her lungs — good to put out the fire, though, something distant in her thinks, and she nearly laughs — but her arms don't move. she floats, and floats, and —
eventually, a shape in the darkness.
huh. big changes coming, a voice says. not out loud, but directly to her, vibrating through her burnt ribcage like a kickdrum at a concert. hope you're ready.
***
"fuck off," jaylen says. she tries to put some heat behind it, but getting people to leave her alone is a skill she has lost/abandoned over the years. she's never much liked being alone, after all. eventually, that couldn't help but become obvious.
"uh," says the voice of the commissioner.
there were times — a lot of them, really — after her resurrection that she'd imagined herself marching into the offices of the higher-ups, demanding to speak to macmillan, and hitting a blaseball directly through his chest. she wondered: would that be enough to fulfill her debt? one commissioner must be worth a lot to the league. certainly, he'd be less disposable than the players who died for their entertainment.
she'd been a fucking idiot then. parker's just as replaceable as the rest of them. if she's a copy of a copy of jaylen, parker's something much further removed from whoever he was when he signed his name to join the league.
"are you okay?" parker asks. he's leaning over her, hands in his pockets like he wouldn't know what to do with them otherwise. his brow is furrowed.
"do i fucking look okay?" jaylen snaps. parker retreats back to his uncomfortable waiting room chair, makes quiet conversation with someone who's been here nearly as long as he has.
***
the pitcher must throw the ball. the batter must swing.
***
what happens, though, when that's not an option? her bat vanishes from her hands, there one moment and gone the next. she finds it across the room, in a display case anchored to the wall; no matter how much of her weight she slams against it, the glass will not shatter. all she gets for her troubles is a line of bruises on her shoulder. they have a gold sheen to them. she covers them with her jersey and refuses to look.
***
it had been exciting, when the forbidden book had been announced. in the same way she'd reveled in sneaking out of the apartment in high school (down the fire escape, pressing the railing hard to keep the steps from creaking, and out into the wide open world) or smuggling awful two dollar beers into her and mike's dorm in college; jaylen had thrilled at the chance to break a rule, to do something new.
not as if she'd had any real say in it. the fans vote. she'd only been able to watch as macmillan the third had announced the election results, the forbidden book opens, star player jaylen hotdogfingers is —
well. the rest is history.
***
the libraries had appeared in every stadium, starting with records of ruby tuesday.
jaylen'd seen the news, but she'd refused to so much as look at the small bookshelf that had appeared at the edge of the garden. clearly, other people had, and had not burned up for the infraction of touching pages that were not theirs to read, but still she'd kept her distance. league-approved books with her name written in them had never done her any good.
it hadn't stopped her from learning about the books' contents.
when fans began to uncover the censored portions of the books, jaylen had heard the words firewalker and whole teams incinerated and force field and parker, no, the original one, he was just a player, just like us, isn't that fucked up? everyone was afraid, so everyone was talking about it, because being afraid together is, at least, something they could do.
she cannot imagine the parker macmillan she sees here leaving such destruction in his wake. he curls up on a folding chair, head on folded arms on tangled legs, and looks around him with the exhaustion of a man who hasn't slept in a century for fear of what dreams will come.
maybe she can imagine it, actually. she assumes this must be what she'd looked like in season nine, flickering around the league so much faster than she could catch her bearings in any one place, weighed down, her mask slipping to the ground.
"firewalker, huh," she says, low, sitting down in the chair beside macmillan.
"yeah," he says, like he wishes he had a different answer to give.
"your friend took the force field." jaylen's stating the obvious. it's something to say, though, and the others' voices here blur into a rough white noise that becomes sharp in her ears, unintelligible but too loud nonetheless. "you gonna kill us all?"
"i," parker says, then slams his mouth shut. looks away. starts again. "i'm not sure. i don't know."
jaylen looks at him for a long moment. considers, again, whether she could kill him.
"i'd be a hypocrite if i blamed you for it. we do what we have to do to stay alive, right?"
"uh." parker's eyes have gone wide; he looks sideways at jaylen. "thanks?"
"don't thank me. i never said i wasn't a huge fucking hypocrite."
***
the first breath she takes after seven years (lifetimes, enough time for galaxies to die and reform into something new and terrible) is a shuddering, gasping thing, clawing its way into the space between her ribs. her pulse stays gone. it'll be gone until day 32 of the season, a billion fucking years from the day she's carried out of hell.
then it will flicker back to life. three deaths, and her heart beats in triples, waltzing its undead rhythm beneath her fingertips.
***
jaylen sits in the corner she has claimed as hers in this mausoleum, and keeps her hand pressed to the most fragile parts of her neck. she measures time in heartbeats. one, a thousand, sixty billion — or back to one, again, the time here entirely meaningless anyway.
still. it has to move forward somehow. everything does.