Summary:
“Everything goes quicker in dreams.” The woman sits back down at the pool, sandaled feet dipping into the water. They hold a hand out. “Steals Mondegreen. It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”Warily, Gerund shakes her hand. “Hell of an introduction.”
Fandom: Blaseball
Published: 24 September 2022
Word count: 1758
Ao3 link: a topographic study of a dream
A/N: An exchange gift for the incomparable @cyberdefender, who asked for Steals and Gerund. Here they are! I hope you enjoy.
Content warnings: dream-logic and accompanying semi-unreality, and a brief nongraphic description of drowning.
“You’re shorter than I thought you’d be,” says Chihiro.
Which doesn’t make a lot of sense, because Chihiro and Gerund have known each other for two years. They met over the Grand Siesta, and now here they are, floating on their backs in a swimming pool together. Gerund can swim, technically, but she doesn’t like to. It’d taken a lot of convincing for Chihiro to get her into the pool.
“My mom said that too,” answers Gerund. “That she thought I’d be taller.” What her mother had also said, in the end, was that Gerund was stronger than expected, and that was good enough.
Chihiro laughs, but it’s not her normal laugh. It’s too delicate, too unlike the sunlight that spills out of Chihiro’s mouth when Gerund tells a good joke. It’s not her friend.
Gerund tries to turn to look at Chihiro, but her foot kicks through the water too fast and she tilts sideways and suddenly she’s underwater, properly underwater, face-down in the blue chlorine and her eyes are stinging. She tries to gasp and—
“Whoa,” says Chihiro, putting a hand on Gerund’s shoulder. “Hey, relax. I thought you knew, I’m sorry.”
Gerund stares at Chihiro. The chlorine sting is already fading. Chihiro doesn’t have gills, Chihiro is just a normal woman who shouldn’t be able to breathe underwater, but here she is talking to Gerund.
“Here,” Chihiro says, and drapes a towel over Gerund’s shoulders. Gerund looks down at the surface of the pool, at the sun-warm concrete beneath where they’re sitting, at Chihiro’s eyes, not quite warm enough. “Better?”
“This is a dream,” Gerund says.
Chihiro nods. “Sure is.”
“And you’re…” she feels around in the back corners of her brain, hoping something will catch on her memory to remind her. “The one who replaced me.”
“Right again.” Chihiro-not-Chihiro tilts their head. “Who told you?”
“I’ve talked to Yusef.”
“Yusef’s great.”
“I know Yusef’s great,” Gerund snaps. It’s less than completely mature, and she knows it, but she doesn’t need anyone to tell her about what Yusef’s like. She’s been friends with Yusef longer than she’s been friends with Chihiro. Which reminds her: “Why do you look like Chihiro?”
“I just walked into your dream. You were already dreaming about her.”
“Could you look like yourself?”
Chihiro-not-Chihiro looks at Gerund for a moment as though she’s said something particularly odd. “I don’t like to do that.”
“Why not?”
“Why do you need to see me?”
“You came to find me in a place where I’m vulnerable.” Gerund gestures around. It’s Chihiro’s apartment complex pool. Chihiro used to ask her neighbors to let them be so Gerund could practice swimming in peace. “I’d like a little vulnerability in return.”
Not-Chihiro gives Gerund a long look and then sighs. They get to their feet, shaking out their muscles as they do. “This is going to take a couple of tries.”
“I have time.”
Not-Chihiro exhales, and takes a step forward. “Not quite,” says a goat that Gerund saw in a field once, “almost there,” says Val Hitherto, “oh, that’s a little further,” says a drawing of a bird that Gerund made as a child, and then a tall, slender Black woman with an Afro the color of Gerund’s first heartbreak and a smile like a scythe takes a step forward. They look down at their hands and nod approvingly. “There.”
“That didn’t take that long,” Gerund says. She’s watching the woman avidly, because if she’s learned anything from her family it’s that you don’t turn your back on people who can do things like that.
“Everything goes quicker in dreams.” The woman sits back down at the pool, sandaled feet dipping into the water. They hold a hand out. “Steals Mondegreen. It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”
That name means something. Silvaire used to talk about a Steals. There’s a Steals in the Firefighters’ shadows.
Warily, Gerund shakes her hand. “Hell of an introduction.”
Steals shrugs. “It’s where I’m most comfortable. And the most corporeal, for that matter.”
“How do you play if you’re not corporeal?”
“I don’t. I didn’t for long.” They skim the toe of their sandal along the water, kicking up a small splash. “Voicemail, and all.”
Gerund looks away. It might be Steals’s foot, but it’s still Chihiro’s sandal. “Look, I’m sorry to do this, but—”
“But you’d rather we were somewhere else.”
“Do you get that a lot?”
Steals laughs that same brook-babble laugh as before. It seems more natural coming from them than it did from Steals-as-Chihiro. “Sometimes. Most people, if someone sentient shows up in their dream and says that they’re being visited, they just accept it.”
“You replaced me,” Gerund says. She stands to her feet, and Steals does the same before she can offer them a hand. “You’ve probably heard a lot about me. Does it seem like I just accept much?”
“I came here because I wanted to talk to you, acceptance or no.” Steals holds out an arm in a measured old-fashioned gesture that, again, reminds Gerund of Silvaire. “Walk with me?”
Gerund takes Steals’s elbow and takes a step forward. The concrete melts beneath her feet, the pool evaporates, and they’re standing in a field that Gerund immediately knows to be outside Sidrap. She had cousins who lived here, who had jobs at the wind farm. If she looks she can see the windmills off in the distance.
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Gerund says, “but do we have to do a world tour through my memories and not yours?”
“Yes,” Steals says. They take another step and this time as they walk the grass dissolves into concrete. They head together through a crosswalk. Steals looks up; Gerund doesn’t bother. She knows the shadow of the Legscraper well enough. “I’m visiting you, so you supply the landscapes.”
“I don’t know you well enough for that yet.”
“We’re teammates. I’ll grow on you.”
Gerund shoots Steals the driest look she can manage. “You think so?”
“I’m allowed to have dreams too,” Steals says, a sardonic lilt to it. “Everyone compares me to you, you know.”
Gerund blinks, thrown. “Why?”
“Because I literally replaced you.”
“Do you mean they compare how good we are at the game?”
“Fans, sure.” They keep walking together, and Tokyo’s streets give way to short grass, and a crisp wind, and a strange sculpture. “Chicago. Neutral territory?”
“Neutral enough,” Gerund mumbles, and lets go of Steals’s arm. “Everyone gets compared in this game.”
“I know,” Steals says simply. “And I didn’t like it.”
Gerund has to admit they have a point. She doesn’t think she would particularly enjoy being constantly compared to someone who came before her. “Do you like Chicago?”
“I don’t like anywhere that asks me to walk on my own two feet.”
“Does Chicago like you?”
“No,” Steals says, with a giddiness that implies that they’re quite happy about that answer. It’s the first thing that they’ve done all night that Gerund wholeheartedly agrees with. “It’s nowhere near as good as Tokyo, anyways.”
“Hear, hear.”
“I wouldn’t have guessed you for a city person.”
Gerund grew up in mountains and valleys surrounded by grass. She grew up with family and villages, no hustle, no bustle. Skyscrapers are familiar only inasmuch as they make her feel small. “I’m not,” she says candidly, “but better Tokyo than Chicago.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because I chose Tokyo.”
“Do you think,” Steals says, and then stops, sighs. “That was a foolish question.”
“We’re in a dream.” Gerund gestures around her, to a small cluster of literally-identical elementary school students in the park, a couple that she used to work with crossing the street together. “Anything that you want me to pretend is imaginary, I’ll do it.”
A smile flits across Steals’s face, one that reminds Gerund of a sunset she saw once over a mountaintop. She misses Sulawesi, with a sudden fervor she hasn’t felt in years. She didn’t feel young when she left Indonesia for Japan, but she feels old now. An old woman, dead once and still so young, in a city that isn’t the city that isn’t home.
Steals shakes their head and looks deliberately away so Gerund can’t see their face. “I was going to ask if you thought we could be friends.”
Gerund mulls that over for a moment. It isn’t a spectacular first impression, but then, neither were her first meetings with Coolname, or Val, and they’re among her best friends now. And Steals does seem strangely lonely.
“You’re taking your sweet time answering,” Steals says dryly.
“I want to be sure I’m being honest,” Gerund answers. “And yes, I think we could.”
“Are we?”
“Absolutely not.”
Steals doesn’t turn back, and for a moment Gerund is halfway concerned that she hurt their feelings. And then she notices a creaking noise, and then a quiet rumble beneath her feet. “Steals?”
“A show of goodwill,” Steals says, audible strain in their voice. “You don’t like that it’s flat.”
“How did you—” Gerund looks out. The horizon is no longer as clear and flat as it was. There are peaks, skyscrapers jutting at strange angles, the pavement bending and warping into gentle hills. “You didn’t.”
Steals flashes them a smile. “It’s not real, I can have some fun with it today. Welcome to mountainous Chicago.”
Gerund opens her mouth to answer, but then there’s another noise, this one louder. She turns east, slowly. “How long have you been in Chicago?”
“Not much longer than you.”
"Do you know what's east of here?"
"Why would I know that?"
“I think you put Lake Michigan at the top of a mountain.”
Steals turns, and their eyes widen as they take in the sight. Lake Michigan, in all of its vast freshwater glory, is beginning to avalanche down a not-quite-mountain towards them.
“Uh,” they say. “Um. Oh, hell. You might want to wake up.”
Gerund wants to say something like I’m trying or I can’t believe you did this, but the only noise she can make is laughter. Loud, hysterical laughter as the water bears down on them, a glorious arcing wave suspended over their heads. She hasn’t laughed like this since she died. She hasn’t laughed like this since Stijn died.
“Oh,” she gasps through laughter, “oh, this is unbelievable.”
When Gerund wakes up, she’s lying in bed in the Firehouse, safe and warm and dry, breathing easy, a grin still stretched across her face. When Gerund wakes up, she can still hear Steals’s answering cackle ringing in her ears.