Archive of Our Own

Spring 1983

The clock over the receptionist’s desk doesn’t tick so much as drips, each click landing in the silence like blood on concrete. 

Finn quickly shoves the thought away before it can finish forming.

He’s sitting in a plastic chair that grips the backs of his thighs through his jeans, the kind of molded seat that makes you aware of every inch of your own body. It flexes when he shifts, squeaking faintly, and he hates that it makes so much noise. His knees bounce in small, relentless jolts, no weed haze to soften the edges, no easy fog to blur the room into something tolerable.

His hands are damp. Not with sweat, just that clammy, wrong slickness that’s been hanging on for days. He swallows and his mouth stays dry and sour at the back of his throat like he drank bad coffee. God, I should’ve eaten. He thinks even though the idea of food makes his stomach roll anyway.

The waiting room is lit too bright for a place that expects you to sit still and behave. Fluorescents hum overhead, washing everything into the same tired shade. A corkboard near the water cooler is crowded with curling pamphlets—Anger Management, Job Readiness, Youth Diversion Programs—stapled up like warnings. Behind the counter, the receptionist wears the same look: bored down to the bone, eyes half-lidded as she flips through papers. Her gum snaps once, twice, slow and indifferent, in time with the clock.

There are three other boys his age in the room, all with their arms folded, faces set in the same practiced mask—disinterested, bored, like none of this can touch them. Like they didn’t get dragged here by the consequences of their own actions. Like this is just somewhere to kill time until someone calls their name.

One of them is his dealer, Miles. Curly blond hair that falls to his shoulders, blue eyes that never miss anything, and that stupid little smirk like he’s already decided how this is going to play out. The fact he’s sitting here across from Finn at all is almost funny, in a sick way, like the universe has a sense of humor and it’s trying to get a rise out of him. 

Miles catches him looking and winks, quick and smug, like they’re sharing an inside joke.

Finn rolls his eyes and looks away, fixing his stare on the scuffed tile instead of the kid’s grin. And because his brain can’t leave anything alone, it offers him a picture he didn’t ask for—Robin dropping into the empty chair beside him, eyebrow raised with that disappointed look, the one that says Really? Like the part that stings isn’t what Finn did to get here, but the fact he got caught in the first place. 

The clock keeps ticking. 

“Blake.”

He stands too fast. The chair legs screech.

The probation officer’s office is smaller than he expects. There is too much light for it to be a cell, but the door clicks shut behind him with the same finality.

Mr. Halverson—fifties, thinning hair, tie loosened like it’s been arguing with his neck all day—doesn’t offer a handshake. He just gestures to the chair opposite his desk like he’s directing traffic, and Finn is stupidly grateful for it. One less touch. One less expectation. One less reason for his skin to crawl.

Finn sits. The second he stops moving, his knee starts bouncing on its own. He tries to clamp it still but it twitches like the limb doesn’t belong to him. His eyes keep skimming the room on instinct—door, handle, window, Halverson’s hands, Halverson’s eyes—mapping distances without meaning to, and quickly forces his shoulders down when he realizes what he’s doing. Forces air into his lungs. It’s just an office. It’s not— but his pulse doesn’t listen, thudding hard and impatient like it’s already bracing for the worst.

Halverson flips open a file folder. Paper whispers against paper. A stamp thunks somewhere in the outer office. He reads without looking up at first, like the words matter more than the kid attached to them.

“Alright,” Halverson says, finally lifting his eyes. “Possession. Marijuana. Cited at the Grab-n-Go on Nineteenth Street.”

The memory hits before Finn can answer—flashlight glare on wet blacktop, the cop’s voice hard as a wall. Turn around. Hands on the hood. His body obeying before his brain could catch up. Miles' shoulder brushing his as they got lined up like suspects in a movie—except it wasn’t a movie, and Finn couldn’t stop shaking, breath coming thin and sharp while hands patted him down, relentless, searching and searching, until they found the incriminating little baggie. And Finn wishes he wasn’t crying like a little bitch at every little touch, but he did, and it was embarrassing as hell, standing there under a parking lot light and trying to breathe like a normal person. 

“Yes, sir.”

“You’re on probation,” he says, like Finn might’ve missed the gigantic sign on the building. “Which means you’re in the community under supervision. You follow the rules, you finish the term, and this doesn’t become the story of your life. You don’t, and it will.”

He pauses, eyes on Finn like he’s measuring him. “Seventeen, huh? If this were a different judge, or a different day, you’d be sitting in juvenile detention right now. Consider this your warning. Don’t waste it.”

The threat of being locked away lands in Finn’s body before it lands in his brain. His chest heaves. His throat tightens. He keeps his face flat, but his eyes flick to the door behind him anyway, to the handle, to the thin strip of light under it like he’s taking inventory.

Halverson points with a pen. One item at a time, like reading off a grocery list.

“School attendance. No unexcused absences. You’re not skipping because you had a bad morning.”

Finn’s jaw tightens. For a second he tastes metal like his body is gearing up to fight even though his face stays still. Good morning, his brain supplies, dull and automatic, a phrase it learned back when mornings meant anything. Like those still exist. 

He swallows a laugh that isn’t really a laugh. When was the last time he’d had one that deserved the word good? He can’t even pull up the memory, just blank space and the familiar weight of waking up gasping for air, throat sandpaper-raw from screaming at things that weren’t there, from fighting shadows that never show their faces in the dark.

“Curfew,” Halverson continues. “Weeknights: nine. Weekends: ten. If you’re late, I'll hear about it.”

Yea, sure, like he’s got places to be. 

The pen moves.

“Substance-free. That means no weed, no booze. I’m not interested in your arguments about what’s ‘just weed.’”

Finn keeps his expression blank. Under the desk, his hands curl into fists until his nails bite his palms.

“Random drug screens. If I call, you show. You miss one, I count it as a fail.”

Halverson pauses. He watches Finn in that practiced way adults do when they’re waiting for the flinch, the denial, the attitude. Finn gives him nothing. He’s gotten good at that, giving people nothing to grab onto, nothing to twist, nothing they can use against him. 

The pen shifts again, heavier now.

“And this one is not optional: community service. Forty hours.”

Finn blinks. “Forty?”

“Forty.” Halverson doesn’t look sorry. “Due by the end of May. You’re going to do something useful with your time instead of loitering outside convenience stores.”

Finn stares at the paper. Forty hours is a whole month of Saturdays. Forty hours is a whole month of being seen, of showing up somewhere in daylight while people’s eyes slide over him and try to decide what he is. Forty hours of reflective vests and garbage bags, of strangers’ little looks, of someone’s mom whispering isn’t that the kid— like he’s a story they can pass around.

Halverson leans back, chair creaking. “Now. There’s one more condition.”

Finn’s stomach drops like it knows before he does. His thumb digs into the side of his index finger, pinching down hard with a sharp, familiar pain, something he can control.

“No association with known users, dealers, or anyone under supervision.”

Finn’s face stays still, but his brain flicks, too quick to be innocent, to the boy in the waiting room. To the way his name sits in Finn’s mouth like a secret he shouldn’t have. To the stupid little thrill he hates himself for when he sees him.

Halverson catches the flicker anyway. “You know who I’m talking about.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good.” Halverson sets the pen down. “This is not me trying to ruin your life. This is me giving you a lane. Stay in it.”

Finn’s knee is still bouncing. He forces it to stop, like he can control at least one part of himself.

Because the truth is, it isn’t just the weed. It’s the after. The extra minute that didn’t have to happen. The lingering by the freezer cases like he was picking a soda when he wasn’t. It’s the way Miles looks at him like they’ve got a secret. It’s the little hit of I can still choose something in a life that keeps getting decided for him.

Halverson’s eyes sharpen, like he can hear what Finn isn’t saying.

“Do I need to spell it out?” he asks.

Finn’s throat tightens. “No, sir.”

“Then stop it,” Halverson says, flat. “Whatever you think you’re doing with him, cut it off. Clean.”

Finn keeps his expression blank, but something hot and stubborn curls under his ribs anyway.

“Yes, sir,” he repeats, even as his brain flashes to the wink. The almost-laugh. The way almost had started to feel like something. 

Halverson slides a second sheet across: a log. Blank lines for date, hours, and supervisor signatures.

“Do you have a plan for those hours?” he asks.

Finn’s mouth opens. Nothing comes out. The only plan he’s had lately is get through the day without totally losing it or making it worse.

Halverson’s eyes narrow a fraction. “If you don’t pick something, you’ll end up doing city cleanup on the highway with a reflective vest. That’s a fine plan, too, if you want every passing car to stare at you.”

Finn’s skin prickles at the mental thought. Being on the side of the road feels like being pinned under a spotlight. Like being trapped. Like—

He presses his thumb hard into the side of his index finger until it hurts in a real, controllable way.

Halverson sighs and opens a desk drawer and pulls out a brochure. White. Crisp. He sets it down between them like a bill.

Finn’s eyes drop to it and his breath hitches.

CAMP ALPINE LAKE sits at the top in friendly blue letters, like the paper doesn’t know what it’s saying, like it doesn’t know the history, the blood, the way that name still tastes like panic in the back of his throat.

Underneath it, BASEBALL WORKSHOP in big block letters over a drawing of a glove and a kid in a cap. A schedule. A list of stations. A little cheery paragraph about teamwork and sportsmanship that reads like it was written by someone who’s never had to fight for air.

Halverson taps the brochure once with his finger. “They’re hosting a community event this weekend,” he says. “Counts for hours. The director’s a by-the-book church man. He’ll sign the log.”

Finn’s throat goes dry so fast it’s like someone turned off the faucet. He keeps his eyes on the brochure because he doesn’t trust his face to behave. Doesn’t trust his voice not to snag on something and give him away.

“Yeah,” he says anyway, too quick. “Sure.”

He tells himself it’s fine. It’s baseball. Baseball is simple. Baseball is easy. Even if he hasn’t played in four years, his body should still remember the basics—grip, stance, release—muscle memory like a prayer you don’t forget. It’s just a ball. Just a throw. Just a field.

Right?

He keeps staring at the picture of the glove like if he looks long enough, it’ll turn into something harmless.

Baseball is grass and sun and bruised palms. Baseball is Gwen’s voice on the sidelines cheering for him. Baseball is Bruce—laughing, bright, alive—spitting sunflower seed shells and saying watch this like the world couldn’t touch him. 

And baseball is also the way his arm lifts, the way his hand rises, and the way his body remembers holding something else, something heavy, something—

Halverson keeps talking in that steady, tired tone adults use when they’re trying to make consequences sound like a to-do list. “You show up, you work the day, you get credit. You bring the signed sheet back to me within forty-eight hours.”

Finn nods like he’s listening. Like his stomach isn’t tightening around the image his brain keeps trying to shove in front of his eyes: a hand raised, a receiver in his grip, the split second that cuts his life into before and after.

Halverson taps the brochure once with his pen. “And before you start complaining about the drive, the workshop is local.”

Finn’s thumb stops pressing for half a second.

Halverson flips the brochure over and points to the bottom line. “Northwest Middle school,” he says. “Gym and the field out back.”

The tightness doesn’t vanish, but it shifts, loosening by a fraction.

Of fucking course. 

Not the lake.

Not Camp Alpine Lake with its glittering snow and its trees and the memory of Gwen vanishing into the night. Not the place where he had to go into that fucking phone booth and find his kidnapper again like nightmares could walk around outside. 

Still, it’s where a different kind of nightmare lives. His middle school. The halls where he learned how to keep his head down. The corners where boys found him anyway. The bathroom where—

But at least, in a sick way, he knows this place. 

He knows where the exits are.

He knows which doors stick.

He knows he can leave.

His thumb presses into his finger again, but slower now, more habitual than panic.

“Okay,” Finn says, and this time the word lands a little steadier. “I can do that.” He says it like he’s trying to convince himself first.

Halverson nods like that was the correct answer. Like he’s checking a box on a form somewhere inside his head.

“Good,” Halverson says. “Be there on time. Be respectful. Do your hours. Get it signed.”

Finn keeps his eyes on the brochure. 

It’s just a school.

Just a field.

Just baseball.

He keeps saying it to himself like a promise. Like a set of fundamentals. Like if he repeats it enough times, his arm won’t flinch when it’s time to throw. Like if he stays inside the foul lines, he can make it to the end of the inning without anything blowing up. 

The brochure stays in his pocket the whole walk home, its edges softened and ragged from the way his fingers can’t stop worrying at it, gnawing the paper down like he can chew through what it means.

He tells himself he won’t go.

Then he tells himself he will.

Then he tells himself he’ll decide in the morning, then the next day, then the day of, like it won’t arrive no matter how many hours he stares at the ceiling.

It arrives anyway.

By the time Finn gets to the middle school parking lot, his watch says he has less than a minute. Not early. Not late. Just close enough that his body can pretend it doesn’t have time to panic until it’s already here.

Early spring air hits him like it’s making a point. Cold that’s been warmed by sun just enough to feel insulting. It smells like wet blacktop and thawing dirt, like the ground is waking up reluctant and sore. Somewhere, a hedge is budding too soon, tiny green fists pushing through. The wind skates across the lot and slides straight up under his hoodie, needling the skin at his wrists and neck.

Kids are already spilling toward the field out back, gloves flapping, voices bright and sharp. Parents cluster by the chain-link fence with coffee cups and folded arms. Someone laughs. Someone yells a name. The sound bounces off the brick like the building is happy to have life again.

Finn’s chest tightens at the sight of the place. There’s a dull pressure behind his eyes that won’t budge, no matter how much he blinks.

The ugly brick. The scuffed doors. The familiarity of the side entrance that always stuck. The corner of the lot where he used to wait for his sister. The outfield beyond the school where he and his teammates used to cut across the grass like it belonged to them.

He keeps his head down as he walks, hood up, shoulders hunched against the wind. The brochure is folded in his pocket, the words CAMP ALPINE LAKE pressed against his thigh like a brand. Every few steps his thumb finds the side of his index finger and digs in, just to keep the world in one piece.

His Walkman is blasting, tinny and too loud through foam headphones, sound pressed straight into his skull like it can drown out everything else. The tape hisses under the music, that constant ribbon of static, and he turns it up anyway until the beat becomes something he can march to instead of think to.

Part of him wants to bolt. Just turn and run until his lungs burn and his thoughts can’t catch up. But running would mean getting home faster, and home means seeing his dad all silent, hovering in doorways, never stepping in, never stepping up, just walking on eggshells around him like any wrong word might set him off. That quiet makes him feel worse than yelling ever did, like his existence is something to tiptoe around. And then there’s Gwen. Gwen can’t know that her almost-eighteen-year-old brother can’t even make it through a kids’ baseball workshop without falling apart. She can’t know he’s still that boy in the dark the second a door clicks shut, that he can look fine right up until he isn’t. That he’s weak.

So he doesn’t run. At least not today. He keeps walking, steady and controlled, like pace is the only thing he can still control.

Out by the baseball diamond, a table is set up near the backstop. Cones in bright plastic stacks. Buckets of scuffed balls. Clipboards. A cheap banner cinched to the chain-link that snaps and flutters in the wind:

CAMP ALPINE LAKE OUTREACH — BASEBALL WORKSHOP

His breath hitches again anyway. ​​The words blur for a second, the way they do when something reaches inside him and twists. A phone rings in his ears, shrill and sudden, and with it the memory of a voice that still crawls under his skin. Hello, Finney. His stomach turns cold. His fingers flex like they’re looking for something to grab, something to swing, even though he keeps his face neutral and his feet planted like he’s not haunted and one wrong sound away from bolting.

Then he sees Mando.

He’s posted up by the table, shrugging into his camp jacket like it’s just another job, sleeves shoved up his forearms. The wind keeps bullying his hair out of place and he lets it, like he can’t be bothered to waste energy on a fight that doesn’t matter. For some reason, that tiny detail hits Finn harder than it should. Must be nice, his brain offers, sour and tired.

Mando looks up the second Finn gets close enough to hear him, and something in his expression shifts to something like recognition, immediate and easy, like Finn belongs here without having to earn it first. No hesitation. No careful measuring. Just: Oh. You.

Finn’s chest tightens, the hitch of his breath turning into something else, something warmer that makes him want to flinch away.

“Hey, kid,” he calls, like they ran into each other at a gas station. “Long time no see.”

Finn’s throat tightens around something that wants to be a laugh and won’t. The sound dies before it’s born. He makes his feet keep moving anyway, like momentum can carry him through the weirdness in his chest. “Yeah.”

Mando closes the distance without crowding him, stopping a comfortable arm’s length away, close enough to talk, far enough that Finn’s skin doesn’t start screaming. His gaze flicks over Finn the way you’d check a bruise: quick, quiet, pretending it’s casual. Then his eyes drop to Finn’s empty hands.

“You got a glove?” Mando asks.

Finn shakes his head. “Not anymore.”

His brain flashes to the day he dumped his glove and bat into a donation box with his hands shaking like he was trying to get rid of a body. Better it went to some kid who only swung at baseballs and not anything else. Not at shadows. Not at a masked man with an axe in his hand and a face smeared with blood. 

Mando doesn’t push, doesn’t ask why. He just nods once, like he’s filed it away under okay.

“I got spares.”

No why not? No you used to play? No about the thing you did. No I told you so. Nothing about weed. Nothing about probation. Nothing that makes Finn feel like he’s standing in court, getting interrogated by adults who already decided what he is and what to do with him. 

Mando reaches under the table and tosses him a lanyard. Finn catches it out of reflex.

“Put that on,” Mando says. “Makes parents less weird.”

Finn lets out a small snort, the kind that barely counts, more air than humor.

Mando points a thumb toward the sign-in sheet. “You checking in or you just materializing?”

Finn digs the folded mess from his pocket—service log, brochure, all of it crushed together—and peels the log free like it’s the only piece of paper in the world that doesn’t bite. He holds it out, careful, like offering proof of existence.

Mando takes it, skims once, and writes a start time without making it a thing. No questions. No pause. He hands it back with the same neutrality you’d return a receipt.

“There,” Mando says. 

Something in Finn’s chest unclenches by a fraction. He hates that he feels it. Hates that relief still sneaks up on him like it has permission.

Mando claps his hands once—sharp, clean, loud enough to slice through the chatter and the thud of baseballs in gloves. “Alright, quick rundown.”

He doesn’t step up like a preacher. He just talks fast, like they’re late for a bus.

“Three stations,” Mando says, ticking them off on his fingers. “Grounders, pitching, tee work. Fifteen minutes each, then rotate. Parents stay behind the fence. Kids don’t swing bats unless they’re at the tee. If somebody gets mouthy, they sit. I don’t argue with ten-year-olds.”

Finn nods, absorbing it like rules are something he can hold onto.

Mando gestures toward the mound. “You’re on pitching with Jamie.”

Finn’s stomach drops.

Mando keeps going like he didn’t just say the worst possible word.

“You’re not out here to put on a show,” Mando says. “Keep it simple. Show ’em the grip, show ’em where to put their feet, short tosses. Make it something they can actually do.”

Finn swallows. The brochure in his pocket feels heavier.

Mando points past the outfield fence, toward a side door of the school. “Storage is in there. There’s a maintenance room at the end of the hall. We got extra balls, helmets, ice packs, you name it. Door’s a pain, though. You gotta yank it like you mean it.”

Finn’s eyes flick to it automatically, mapping exits and escape routes because old habits die hard. 

Mando doesn’t follow the look with a question. He steers Finn toward the signup table where a few older volunteers are gathered. High school seniors, the kind who already move like the building belongs to them, and they’re all wearing varsity baseball jackets. Navy and gold, stitched names on the chest, sleeves scuffed from dugouts and swagger. Finn’s stomach gives a small, mean twist. In another life, one where everything didn’t go off the rails, one where he never became a headline people lowered their voices for, he thinks they might’ve been his teammates. He might’ve been standing there laughing with them instead of being introduced like a liability.

Finn recognizes them anyway. Not friends. Never friends. Faces he’s passed in hallways. Faces he’s seen watching his fights like it’s entertainment. Faces that know his name even if he doesn’t know theirs.

Mando doesn’t seem to clock the history. He just talks like it’s normal. “These guys are helping me run stations.”

“This is Finn,” Mando adds, brisk. “He’s helping today.”

The tallest one—broad shoulders, letterman jacket half-zipped—looks Finn up and down without bothering to hide it.

“If it isn’t Finn Blake,” he says, slow, like he’s tasting it. “Looks like we got ourselves a celebrity.”

The one beside him chews gum hard, jaw working. He doesn’t offer a hand. He just smirks.

“Damn,” he says. “Small world.”

The third senior—lean, sharp-eyed—doesn’t smile at all. His gaze flicks to Finn’s hoodie, then to his hands, like he’s searching for something to confirm whatever story he already believes.

Mando keeps it moving before any of them can linger on Finn.

“Kyle’s on grounders,” Mando says, pointing. “Ricky’s on tee. Dean’s floating and helping where needed.”

Kyle gives a shallow nod that isn’t quite acknowledgement.

Ricky’s smirk deepens. “Yeah, we’ll take good care of him,” he says, voice sweet in a way that isn’t.

Finn’s stomach tightens.

Mando’s eyes cut to Ricky. “You’ll take care of the kids,” Mando corrects. “That’s what you’re here for.”

Ricky lifts his hands like he’s innocent. “Sure, sure.”

Kyle leans in toward Dean and mutters something under his breath. Dean’s mouth twitches like he’s suppressing a laugh.

Finn doesn’t look up. Doesn’t give them the satisfaction of a flinch, a glare, anything. Because reacting is an invitation. Reacting is blood in the water. He keeps his eyes on the sign-up table instead, on the neat stack of waiver forms, on the clipped pens, on anything with edges and order that isn’t their faces.

It doesn’t matter, he tells himself. They don’t matter.

But the back of his neck prickles anyway with an old, familiar sense of being sized up, filed away, judged.

A whistle shrieks from somewhere near home plate where another volunteer is corralling kids.

Mando winces. “Christ.”

Then, like flipping a switch, he raises his voice to the group with the easy authority of someone who’s run too many summers and winters to be fazed by chaos.

“Kids! Gloves on! Line up by the cones! Parents! Behind the fence line!”

He turns to Finn again, voice dropping back to normal, rough and simple.

“You good to start?” Mando asks.

Finn’s mouth dries out. His arm feels like it’s already bracing for impact, like his body is getting ahead of him the way it always does. He wants to say no. He wants to say I can’t. He wants to say what if I freeze, what if I freak out, what if they see it on me.

Instead he nods once, sharp. “Yeah.”

Mando’s gaze holds him for half a second—no pity, no pressure—just a decision made.

“Alright,” Mando says. “Grab a bucket. Let’s work.”

Finn bends, picks up a bucket of baseballs, and the weight of it pulls his shoulders down in a way that feels almost grounding. He walks toward his station with the wind in his face and the school brick at his back, trying not to think about the moment he’ll have to raise his arm, the moment his body will remember something it isn’t supposed to.

The kids start jogging over, eager and loud.

Finn plants his feet on the dirt.

He tells himself: Just baseball.

Just a school field.

Just—

For a few minutes, it works.

Jamie demonstrates. Kids throw. Finn catches. The sound of the ball hitting leather starts to stitch a rhythm together—pop, pop, pop—small and normal. Finn can breathe in the spaces between pitches. He can almost pretend his arm isn’t a loaded gun, and he’s not in a dark basement trying to stay alive. 

Then Ricky’s voice cuts across the field, loud enough to travel, playful in that way that’s only meant to be heard.

“Hey, Blake!” Ricky calls, like they’re friends. “Try not to take anybody’s head off, alright?”

Finn’s stomach drops like an elevator cable snapped. Heat flares behind his ribs. He doesn’t look over. Looking over is how you give them a win. Instead he keeps his eyes on the baseball in his hand like it’s the only thing tethering him to the field and not whatever’s clawing at the back of his throat.

Mando’s head snaps up from where he’s helping a kid adjust a helmet. His gaze cuts across the field and lands on Ricky.

Ricky lifts his hands like he’s joking. “What? I’m just sayin’—”

Mando doesn’t yell. He doesn’t need to. He lifts two fingers to his own eyes—I’m watching you—then points them at Ricky. A beat later, he taps his wrist.

Ricky’s grin falters. He turns away, suddenly very interested in tee height.

Finn lets out a slow breath through his nose. It comes out shaky anyway, like his body didn’t get the memo that the danger passed.

Jamie glances at him. “Ignore him,” he mutters.

Finn nods like he can.

Jamie tosses him another soft ball. Finn catches it, tosses it back. They keep it boring on purpose.

The whistle shrieks.

Rotate.

Kids scatter to the next cones in a bright blur of caps and sneakers. Finn’s heart jumps like the sound hit him in the chest. He hates how his body reacts, how it treats any sharp noise like a warning.

Jamie jogs closer, wiping sweat off his brow. “Switch?”

Finn nods but his mouth goes dry again.

He can feel them without looking, Kyle’s attention from the infield, Dean’s from wherever he’s hovering, Ricky’s smirk at the back of his head like a heat lamp.

Finn tries to tell himself it’s fine. He’s already survived worse than a few assholes on a school field. He’s already done worse than throwing a harmless baseball.

He steps into position the way his body remembers—feet set on the dirt, front toe angled toward the glove, shoulders squaring, then tilting as he shifts his weight back. A pitcher’s stance. Familiar. Automatic. Like slipping into an old jacket that used to fit. But it doesn’t fit right anymore. It hasn’t fit right for years.

So he pretends he’s back in 1978. Pretends he’s just a kid again, sun in his eyes and dirt on his knees, and nothing bad has ever grabbed him by the throat and made his world go dark.

His fingers close around the ball. The seams bite into his skin, a tiny, honest pain.

And his brain, traitor that it is, starts lining up the motion with the wrong memory, fitting it into the same grooves like it never learned a different track.

Arm up. Hand raised. Weight in his grip. His shoulder rolls. His elbow lifts. The ball rises with his hand and something in him goes tight, thin and overstretched, like a wire being pulled too far.

Take a fast step back. Step forward. Step back. And swing!

He looks at Jamie’s glove and sees, just for a blink, the strip of light in the basement doorway. The shape of a man lunging. The axe handle. The hole he’d spent a whole week digging until his fingernails split and his hands didn’t feel like his anymore. The splatter of blood on the concrete—too bright, too real—proof that he got out but he didn’t get to come out clean.

Finn’s stomach pitches so violently it feels like his insides come loose. Acid surges up his throat. He swallows it down hard, jaw locked, fighting the desperate, humiliating urge to throw up right there on the mound in front of everyone. 

Sound drains away and then rushes back wrong. The kids’ chatter turns thin and tinny, like it’s coming from a radio in another room. Somewhere a ball thumps on the grass. Somewhere a parent claps. None of it lands right.

He hears Ricky laugh again, distant, and it turns into the Grabber’s breath in his ear.

You… are special, Finney. 

Finn’s arm starts to rise again, and catches.

It doesn’t lock like a cramp. It locks like a trigger. Like his body has hit the exact frame of the memory and can’t go forward without finishing it.

He’s frozen in that sick half-lift, caught between a pitch and a strike, between now and then. His wrist trembles. The ball feels heavier by the second, like it’s filling with lead.

Everyone is staring at me.

He doesn’t even have to look to know. He can feel their eyes like hands, fingertips pressing into the back of his neck, pinning him in place. The field is nothing but open sky and chain-link and nowhere to hide. And then the exits he’s mapped—fence gap, dugout, parking lot—blur like someone smeared grease over the world. Distances warp. Landmarks flatten. The safe paths in his head fold in on themselves until every direction looks the same: too far, too exposed, too late.

He’s unwell.

He’s unstable.

He’s a murderer.

The words don’t sound like thoughts. They sound like other people’s voices, whispering, certain, already decided.

His breath snags. He tries to inhale and it stops halfway, shallow and sharp, like the air itself is resisting him. His heart kicks too hard, too fast. Cold sweat breaks at his hairline even though the sun is on him.

The ball sweats in his palm. His fingers clamp down until it hurts, nails digging into leather, and the pain is almost a relief because it’s real and it’s here.

Jamie’s voice softens, careful now, like he’s approaching a wounded animal that might bolt. “Finn?”

Finn can’t answer. His tongue feels thick. His throat feels sealed shut.

The world narrows to his raised hand. To the angle of his elbow. To the terrible fact that if he moves wrong, he’ll be back there again. If he moves at all, he’ll fall apart.

His vision pulses at the edges. The grass blurs. The sky goes too bright. Time slips. A second. Ten. A whole minute he can’t account for. He can’t tell how long he’s been frozen, only that he’s still stuck there, arm half-raised, breath caught, and everyone has had plenty of time to decide what they’re seeing.

Footsteps crunch in the dirt.

Mando’s shadow slides into his peripheral vision. Not in his face. Not boxing him in. Not grabbing him. Just there, close enough to block the worst of the staring without making Finn feel trapped.

“Jamie,” Mando calls, even and loud, like this is just logistics. “Take pitching. Finn, catch.”

Jamie blinks. “What—”

“Switch,” Mando repeats, calm and final.

Jamie obeys. The kids’ attention shifts with him, chasing the new thing.

Mando steps closer to Finn, voice lower now. “You with me, Finn?”

Finn swallows. His throat feels raw, like he’s been yelling even though he hasn’t made a sound. He nods—jerky, embarrassed by how obvious it is.

Mando doesn’t ask why. He doesn’t ask what Finn saw. Doesn’t make Finn explain himself in the middle of a field full of witnesses.

He just nods back like Finn passed a test nobody else can see.

“Alright,” Mando says. “Stay low. Stay behind the glove.”

Finn goes back into position and drops into the catcher's squat again like it’s cover. Like it’s a foxhole. The glove opens wide in front of him. A shield that’s big, stupid, but necessary.

He keeps his eyes down and makes his hands behave, because if he thinks too hard he’ll fall apart. He tries not to replay it: his arm stuck in the air, his face blank, the whole field watching him glitch like a broken tape. He tries not to imagine what they’ll call it later. Weird. Psycho. Freak.

And he tries—God, he tries—not to think about how the basement still has its hands on him. How it can reach right through sunlight and chain-link and drag him back without even trying. Years later and it still gets a vote in what his body does. Years later and he’s still living around it, like the dark is a room he never really left. 

Jamie tosses. Finn catches.

Pop.

Normal sound. Normal world.

The sting in his palm is real and simple. The ball is just a ball again, leather and weight and seams, nothing else. Air finally pushes all the way into his lungs, a full breath that doesn’t snag halfway like it’s afraid.

Again, Jamie tosses, Finn catches. Again. Again. The kids start taking turns, little arms winding up with too much confidence, lobbing soft, crooked throws that wobble through the air.

Each pop is a reset. Each reset is proof he’s still on the field, still in daylight, still alive. 

Some hit the pocket clean. Some smack the heel of the glove and sting. A few bounce in the dirt and he scoops them up without thinking, like muscle memory can outrun his mind.

Still the rhythm holds. The noise stays normal. And every time the leather meets the ball, it drags him back another inch into the present.

And for a moment, Finn can breathe again.

Across the field, Mando runs the tee work station like nothing happened, like Finn didn’t just stop mid-throw in front of a dozen kids, like the day didn’t wobble for a second.

Like Finn is allowed to wobble and still stay standing.

And Finn clings to that, because he can’t cling to anything inside his own head.

Finn tells himself the storage run is a relief.

No eyes. No fence line. No ball in his hand long enough for it to turn into something else. Just a simple errand with a beginning and an end.

Mando points toward the side door by the outfield. “We’re low on balls and helmets,” he calls. “Grab a bucket and a couple lids. Maintenance room is down the hall.”

Finn nods too fast. “Yeah.”

He takes the empty bucket and heads for the school like he’s being sent to fetch water in a war movie—head down, moving quickly, pretending speed is the same as courage. 

Inside the building, the air changes. Cooler. Stale. It smells like floor wax and old mop water, like the whole place has been shut up too long. There’s a bite of disinfectant that sits in the back of his throat. The fluorescent lights buzz overhead—thin and constant—and his sneakers squeak on the tile loud enough to make him want to apologize to the hallway.

Behind the door, the field noise collapses into a muffled blur. Kids’ voices, a whistle, a distant cheer, softened and far away. In here it’s just him, the lights’ steady hum, and the too-clean echo of his own footsteps chasing him down the hall.

He remembers these hallways. The same beige tile, the same trophy cases, the same smell of wax and old lunches trapped in the vents. The recognition comes in quick flashes as he walks, this corner where he used to linger, that doorway he used to avoid, the spot where he once pressed his back to the wall and waited for trouble to pass.

He’s taller now. His shoulders nearly brush the bulletin boards. The ceiling feels lower than it should, like the building didn’t grow with him. And the worst part is the feeling doesn’t change. The hallway still makes him aware of himself. Still makes him careful. Like the school knows him anyway. Like it remembers exactly where to press.

He keeps moving. Doesn’t slow down. Doesn’t look too hard at anything.

End of the hall. Maintenance. Mando had said the door sticks and to pull hard.

Finn grips the handle and yanks.

For a second it holds like it’s deciding whether to cooperate. Then it gives with a sudden jerk, the door popping open so fast the bucket bumps his shin. Finn flinches anyway and steps into the darker room like he’s crossing a line.

The room is a box of concrete and metal shelving, folding chairs stacked like ribs, a chalk-liner machine, coils of rope. At the back, a chain-link cage with a padlock holds the gear: helmets, bats, buckets of balls. A place built out of hard edges.

He finds the key ring on the hook. The keys jingle sharp in the quiet and his shoulders twitch.

Just keys, he tells himself. Just noise.

He unlocks the cage, hauls out a full bucket of balls, then reaches for two helmets—one red, one black—tucking them under his arm. He adjusts his grip, shifting the bucket so it won’t bang his knee, takes one last glance at the shelves to make sure he didn’t miss anything—

And that’s when the door eases shut behind him, quiet as a held breath. Not a slam. Not even a creak. Just the soft, inevitable draw of it meeting the frame, the hallway light thinning and disappearing as if someone turned it off.

The latch settles with a small, normal thunk.

A heartbeat later, the knob turns from the other side—slow, deliberate—and the lock catches like a decision.

Click.

Finn goes still.

Time doesn’t slow so much as it cuts out, like a tape snagging in a player. One second he’s seventeen in a maintenance room that smells like wax and dust, too big to freak out over closed doors, and then he’s thirteen again, heart in his throat, every instinct screaming don’t move, don’t breathe, don’t make noise. 

His fingers clamp around the bucket handle until the plastic creaks. His mouth goes bone-dry, the kind of dry that tastes like fear. His body understands immediately, long before his brain can bargain its way into a different story. 

Then he’s moving, lunging for the door and wrenching the handle down. Panic surges his throat, stealing breath. 

Nothing.

He tries again, harder, the metal digging into his palm like it wants to punish him for needing it.

Nothing.

For a beat he just stands there with his forehead almost to the door, listening, chest so tight it hurts, because sometimes a stuck door is just a stuck door and he can still talk himself down. Sometimes the world is boring. Sometimes—

Outside, down the hall, he hears it.

Voices.

Low, muffled, pressed tight like hands over mouths. Close enough that he can make out the shape of the words even when they blur at the edges.

“…told you he’s a freak—” someone whispers.

“…he’s gonna—” another voice answers, half a laugh caught in their throat.

A soft sneaker squeak. Then a shush. Like they’re trying to keep it private.

Finn’s stomach turns. Heat floods up his neck and face, hot with shame, then drains out so fast it leaves him cold to the bone. His skin prickles under his hoodie like the fabric is suddenly wrong. His heartbeat lands once, hard enough to ache, and then takes off, sprinting, wild and useless.

He yanks the handle again, panic surging up his throat like bile. “Hey!” he calls, and his voice cracks on the first word. “Open the door!”

Silence answers him for a beat—too clean, too intentional—then a stifled snicker, like a hand clamped over a mouth. The knob doesn’t move. The latch doesn’t give. The hallway stays on the other side, out of reach, full of air he can’t get to.

Finn slams the door with his shoulder, not hard enough to break it, just hard enough to make it feel like he’s doing something. The bucket rattles, the baseballs thumping against plastic like impatient knuckles. His fingers fumble for the lock without thinking, like there’s a version of this where it opens if he finds the right angle, the right trick, the right prayer.

Nothing.

The voices shift again, drifting closer, then stopping. They are just out there, just beyond the thin barrier of wood and paint and an old brass latch, as if they’re listening to him breathe.

Then the room changes.

Not physically, not yet, but in his head it shrinks by inches, air turning heavy, walls edging closer. The fluorescent light feels too bright and also not bright enough. The smell of wax and rubber turns sour in his nose.

Concrete. Metal. Chain-link.

A cage.

A door that won’t open.

The basement.

It isn't memory like a story you can tell yourself with a beginning and an end. It’s memory like a trapdoor under his feet, giving way before he can brace. He’s back in that razor-thin moment before panic even has a name, when his body only knows one truth: there is no way out.

You’re trapped. You’re trapped. You’re trapped.

The dark is there immediately, pressing in. The stink of damp concrete. The wrong air. His own arm lifted in that darkness with something heavy and obscene—

Hit him. Now. Don’t stop. If you stop, you die.

Finn’s lungs lock mid-breath. He sucks at air and gets thin, shredded sips. His heart starts punching his ribs hard enough to hurt. His vision tunnels to the seam of the door, the thin line where the world should be.

His hands shake so hard the helmets bump together under his arm with a hollow clack. He flinches like it’s a blow. One helmet slips free, hits the tile and skitters away. Then the other goes, rolling in a slow, loud circle that feels endless in the tight room.

Finn’s throat makes a sound that isn’t quite a sob and isn’t quite a laugh.

He rams his shoulder into the door again. The jolt rattles up his bones and makes his teeth click. He does it again, breath tearing in and out of him, and again, until his shoulder aches and the bucket jerks in his grip and the door still doesn’t give.

He drops the bucket and switches to his hands, palms flat against the wood, pushing like it might change its mind if he begs hard enough through pressure alone.

Then, footsteps sound in the hallway.

Not the soft shuffle of kids or teachers. Fast. Heavy. Coming straight toward him.

The sound drags his spine tight. His whole body braces on instinct, as if the air has suddenly turned into a countdown.

The knob starts to turn.

Finn doesn’t get to think. His muscles move first, memory firing down the same old track. His hand lifts—too quick, too practiced—readying itself for the only kind of motion that ever worked down there.

Not a pitch. Not a reach.

A strike.

The door swings open and a figure fills the doorway—broad shoulders, a dark shape cut out against the harsh fluorescent light—before Finn can stop his arm from finishing what his body has already decided.

Finn’s hand moves before he can call it back.

It’s not a choice, not really. Just a reflex firing down an old track, muscle memory pretending it’s saving him. His fist drives forward and connects with something that gives in the worst way: the hard ridge of bone, the softer collapse of cartilage, the ugly, damp sound that follows like punctuation.

Mando’s head jerks with the impact. He stumbles back a step, swearing as his hand shoots up to cover his nose.

Finn stays half-lifted, caught in the follow-through, like his body doesn’t know what to do now that the motion is finished. His fist hangs there in the air, trembling, and his brain scrambles to catch up, to reel in the moment, drag it out of the basement and into the fluorescent hallway where it belongs.

Mando. It’s Mando.

Blood gathers bright at his nostril, shining under the harsh light. His eyes water instantly, his face tightening with pain, and for a second the expression he wears is all startled humanity. No authority, no easy confidence, just a man who got hit and didn’t expect it.

Then he takes a breath and steadies himself. He doesn’t rush in. He doesn’t reach for Finn. He holds where he is, letting the space stay open, voice dropping into something firm but careful, like he’s talking to a skittish animal he doesn’t want to spook.

“Hey,” Mando says, and then again, quieter. “Hey. Kid, it’s me. You hear me?”

Finn’s mouth opens on instinct, but shame floods in so fast it chokes him. The apology he tries to force up sticks somewhere behind his teeth, turning into nothing. His stomach rolls. His face burns. His whole body feels exposed, like the door didn’t open onto the hallway at all but onto a crowd.

“I—” he manages, barely a sound.

“Later,” Mando says, cutting it off before it can become a spiral. There is no anger in it, just triage. “We’ll talk later. Right now I need your hands down, alright?”

Finn tries. His arm doesn’t want to listen. It shakes as he lowers it, slow and reluctant, as if he’s prying it loose from a lock. His fingers uncurl one by one, stiff and aching, like they’ve forgotten how to be anything but a fist.

Mando pinches his nose and winces. “Christ.” He wipes under his nostril with the back of his wrist, smearing red. His gaze flicks down the hall.

“Who was out here?” Mando calls, voice carrying now, the camp-director tone that makes kids line up and adults stop talking. “I know you’re out here.”

Nothing answers. Just the fluorescent buzz. Just the stale, waxy air.

Then, faint but unmistakable, a quick scuff of sneakers on tile. A breath of movement retreating fast, too fast to pass for innocent.

Mando’s jaw sets. He doesn’t chase, not yet. He turns back to Finn instead, and the edge in his face shifts into something controlled.

“You can walk?” he asks.

Finn nods too quickly, and the motion makes him sway. His stomach is still pitching, his head still full of static, like the room hasn’t finished letting go of him.

“Okay,” Mando says, and he steps aside, planting his foot against the storage room threshold so the door can’t swing, so the doorway stays wide open. An exit that won’t vanish. “Come on. Outta there.”

Finn moves past him and into the hallway like he’s breaking the surface after being held under. Air actually moves out here. Space exists. His lungs drag in a breath that still feels jagged and incomplete, but it’s breath, and it doesn’t taste like panic the way it did in that room.

Mando stays careful with his distance, careful not to crowd Finn or brush his hands. His eyes flick to Finn’s fingers, still curled too tight, still shaking.

“You’re gonna bust your knuckles if you keep clenching like that.”

Finn tries to relax them. They don’t listen right away. His hands hang empty at his sides, useless and humiliated, fingers twitching like they’re still expecting to have to fight for a door that won’t open.

“I hit you,” Finn whispers. The words come out wrecked, scraped raw on the way up, like admitting it hurts worse than the punch did.

“Yeah,” Mando says, blunt, no sugarcoating it, no pretending it didn’t happen. Then his tone shifts, gentler, because he’s not here to make this worse. “You didn’t mean to.”

Finn shakes his head hard, like he can shake the truth loose. “I did. I— I—” His mouth keeps trying to form a sentence and failing. The guilt swells until it crowds his ribs. He can still feel the impact in his knuckles. He can still see Mando’s face snapping back.

“You panicked,” Mando corrects, steady as a hand on a railing. “That’s different.”

Finn’s eyes sting. He hates it, hates the heat behind his lids, hates that he’s standing in a hallway like this, hates that his body keeps betraying him in public.

Mando jerks his chin toward the water fountain and the bench beside it. “Sit. Two minutes.”

Finn opens his mouth to protest. Pride flares up hot and stupid—I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine—even while his knees feel like they might fold.

Mando doesn’t budge. His expression stays firm, not angry, not cruel, just nonnegotiable. “Kiddo. Sit.”

Finn obeys. It’s not graceful. He drops onto the bench like his bones give out the second he’s allowed to. His elbows land on his knees. He stares at the tile and tries to breathe, but every inhale comes in splinters, sharp and shallow. His hands shake in his lap like they want to crawl off and hide somewhere else.

Mando stays a few feet away, enough space to keep Finn from feeling trapped, still pressing at his nose, wiping at the blood that keeps threatening to come back. His eyes keep sweeping the hallway, patient and predatory, like he’s daring whoever did it to show their face.

Then, quieter, aimed only at Finn, rough but real:

“You’re not in trouble,” Mando says. “You hear me?”

Finn swallows. The shame sits in his throat like a stone, heavy and immovable. He manages a nod anyway.

Mando’s voice softens by one notch. “Good. Just breathe till it eases up.”

And then, as though this is just another problem he knows how to handle, he turns and collects the helmets Finn dropped. He picks up the bucket, too, taking the weight without making it a favor. He heads back toward the field like the world didn’t just tilt, like Finn didn’t just unravel in a school hallway, like he’s refusing to let anyone turn Finn into a story they can pass around.

The clinic noise keeps going without him: kids yelling, parents laughing, the whistle snapping, life continuing the way it always does when Finn is falling apart.

Eventually the buzzing in his teeth dulls. The hallway stops tilting. His heartbeat drops from a sprint to something closer to a run.

When Finn finally stands, his legs feel thin, but they hold.

He steps back into the sun like he’s crawling out of a hole. The wind hits his face, cold and spring-clean, sharp with thawing dirt and cut grass, and it doesn’t smell like concrete. It doesn’t smell like the basement.

He walks back onto the diamond with his shoulders tucked in, expecting eyes, expecting whispers, expecting the shape of a joke thrown like a rock. But the kids don’t care. They’re already on to the next thing, fighting over whose turn it is, arguing about who can throw the farthest, tugging on helmets that sit crooked on their heads. The world hasn’t paused to make room for his panic. The world has simply… moved on. As it usually does. 

A small kid at his station—freckles, too-big cap—looks up at him with wary curiosity. “Are you okay?” he asks, like it’s a question he learned from an adult and doesn’t quite know what to do with.

Finn’s throat tightens. For a second he wants to lie. For a second he wants to vanish. Instead he crouches so he’s closer to the kid’s level, so the kid doesn’t have to crane his neck to see him.

“Yeah,” Finn says, voice rough but steadying as it comes out. “I’m okay. Just got startled. Happens sometimes.”

The kid considers that, eyes serious. “Like when my dog barks and I drop my juice.”

Finn almost smiles, surprised by the comparison. “Yeah,” he says, nodding. “Exactly like that. You did good asking, though.”

The kid’s shoulders loosen a little, like he’s been given permission to stop worrying about the grown-up. He holds the ball out with both hands. “Can you show me how to throw it right? Mine goes sideways.”

Finn takes the ball. It’s warm from the kid’s palms. Real. Light. He turns it so the seams sit under the kid’s fingers, adjusting them gently. “Okay,” he says. “Two fingers across here. Thumb underneath. Like you’re holding an egg. Firm, but not crushing it.”

The kid mimics him, concentrating hard.

Finn guides his elbow, angles the wrist. He hears himself talking in calm instructions, boring in the best way, and with each sentence the present firms up around him. The dirt under his shoes. The sun on his neck. The scuffed white lines on the field. The simple fact that this is a baseball and not anything else.

“Now step,” he tells the kid. “Point your front shoulder where you want it to go. And just throw. Don’t think too much.”

The kid winds up and releases. The ball wobbles, then arcs toward the cone. Not perfect, but forward.

The kid’s face lights up like a lamp. “I did it!”

“You did,” Finn says, and this time the smile is real, brief but there. “Again. Same thing.”

They do it again. And again.

With every ordinary throw, with every small correction and bright little success, something in Finn settles. The shame in his stomach doesn’t vanish, but it quiets. The basement feeling loosens its grip by a fraction. His hands stop looking for a fight.

For a moment, he has a job. A purpose. A kid trusting him with something uncomplicated.

He stays until the last rotation ends and parents start herding kids away, calling names and chasing runaway gloves. At some point he realizes he’s been here the whole time. Not floating above his own body. Not skimming along the edge of panic. Actually in it, present for longer than he’s managed in… he doesn’t even know. Long enough that the minutes add up without him counting them like threats.

Cleanup happens on rails, like everyone’s done this a hundred times.

Cones get stacked. Buckets clunk into the bed of a truck. The cheap banner comes down with a snap of plastic ties against chain-link, and Finn’s shoulders jerk before he can stop it.

Mando walks past, slaps the tailgate shut, metal thunks, and Finn flinches again, small and vicious, the reflex sharp as a nerve.

This time, Mando notices.

Not the way an adult notices to make you feel caught. Not the way people stare. The way someone notices a bruise and quietly decides not to touch it.

“You alright?” Mando asks, lowering his voice as he threads a strap through a buckle. “Still with me?”

Finn swallows. His throat still feels tender, like it remembers every sound he didn’t make. “Yeah,” he says anyway.

“Okay,” Mando answers, simple, like he accepts it at face value. Like he’s not asking Finn to prove it. “Good.”

Finn pulls out his signed-hours sheet and holds it out with fingers that feel stiff and stupid. Mando takes it, scribbles his signature without ceremony, and hands it back like a receipt.

“There you go,” Mando says. Then he pauses just a beat, like he’s choosing his words carefully instead of letting them spill. “You did good today.”

Something tight catches in Finn’s chest. He hates the way it makes his throat feel thick. “I— I didn’t.”

Mando waits.

“I didn’t pitch,” Finn says, like that’s the only metric that matters. Like anything less is failure.

Mando looks at him—tired, steady, kind in a way that doesn’t make it soft. “You came,” he says. “You stayed.”

He nods once, as if that settles it.

“That counts.”

Finn clears his throat, like he can scrape the words loose. “I— I’m sorry. About—” He gestures, useless, toward the school building. Toward his own hands. “I hit you.”

Mando exhales through his nose and winces, more at the sting than at Finn. “It’s okay,” he says. Then, softer—careful with the weight of it—“You didn’t do it on purpose.”

Finn swallows. The next part scrapes on the way out. “It’s still happening,” he admits, staring at the truck tire instead of Mando’s face. “The… flashbacks.”

Mando’s hands still for half a second on the strap. Not dramatic. Just a pause, like he heard exactly what he needed to hear.

Then he nods once, slow. “Okay.”

Something in Finn’s chest tightens at how simple Mando makes it sound, like Finn hasn’t just handed him a live wire.

“I thought it would… stop by now,” Finn says, voice dropping. “Or at least get quieter. But sometimes it’s like I’m there again. Like it’s not even a memory. It’s—” He shakes his head, jaw working, fighting for the right word. “It’s like it’s happening right in front of my eyes.”

Mando watches him for a beat. No pity. No flinch. Just attention, steady as a hand on a shoulder without the touch.

Finn’s throat burns. He forces the rest out before he can swallow it back down and pretend he never opened his mouth.

“I— I hit him,” Finn says. The last word cracks, anger and shame twisted together so tight they make his voice thin. “In the basement. With the phone. I packed it with dirt and I kept—” His hand lifts in a small, helpless motion, like his body is remembering the rhythm even while his mouth refuses it. “I kept going. And I couldn’t stop.” His voice turns smaller on the last word, like he’s ashamed of the air it takes up.

His gaze drops to his hands like they don’t belong to him, then to the gloves stacked neatly in the box at Mando’s feet, leather scuffed, laces fraying. Something safe he doesn’t deserve. He can’t say what came after. Can’t say the end out loud, not here, not ever, like naming it would make it real again.

But it’s real enough already.

He can still hear it—the awful, final sound—sharp in the dark like a branch snapping underfoot. He’s been trying to bury it for years, pressing dirt over it same frantic way he packed the phone, and it still rises up the moment he closes his eyes.

“And when I held the baseball today,” he adds, voice scraped raw, “it was like my arm thought it was that again.”

Mando’s face shifts, tightening at the edges, a flicker of pain that doesn’t belong to his nose. Like something in him takes the hit on Finn’s behalf. He nods once, slow, grounded.

“Finn,” he says, steady, “you did what you had to do to survive.”

Finn’s shoulders twitch like he’s bracing for a fight. “But—”

“No.” Mando cuts him off, not sharp, just absolute. “No ‘but.’ You’re alive. That’s what matters.” His jaw works, words coming a little rougher, like they’ve got gravel in them. “It was you or him. You think I’m gonna sit here and pretend there was some clean, pretty option? That man was a psycho killer son of a bitch.”

Finn’s breath leaves him in a shaky spill. It feels like letting go of something he’s been clenching for years. Like if he loosens his grip, he might finally stop bleeding from the inside.

“I don’t want people to look at me like I’m…” He can’t say it at first. The word sticks. “Crazy,” he finishes, quiet.

Mando holds his gaze, plain, steady, unflinching. “They don’t get to decide that,” he says. Then, after a beat, his voice softens without losing its steel. “And I’m not letting them make a show out of you.”

Finn blinks hard. His eyes burn and he hates it, hates the sting, hates that he’s about to cry in broad daylight over a baseball workshop and a door and a memory that won’t die.

Mando rubs the back of his neck, suddenly a little awkward, like he isn’t built for speeches and doesn’t want to pretend he is. When he speaks again, it’s simple. Practical. Something you can hold onto.

“Listen,” he says. “If it hits you like that again, you tell me. You don’t gotta explain it. You just say you need a minute, and we handle it.”

Finn’s throat works around the lump there. “You’re not…” He swallows. “Mad?”

Mando’s mouth quirks—almost a smile—then he winces because it pulls at his nose. “Kid,” he says, and there’s something gentler in it than Finney expects, “I’m mad at the assholes who locked the door. I’m mad you’ve gotta carry any of this. I’m not mad at you.”

Finn doesn’t know what to do with that. It doesn’t fit anywhere in him yet. It doesn’t slot into the usual shapes: punishment, disgust, somebody looking at him different. So his body reaches for the only exit it understands.

He just nods and starts to back away.

Mando doesn’t block him. Doesn’t step into his space. He just turns and reaches into the pile of gear, and then he pulls something free and brings it into the light.

A glove.

Not new. Not shiny. Worn soft at the pocket, darkened by oil and use. The laces look lived-in. A baseball sits tucked inside it like it belongs there, like someone placed it that way on purpose.

He holds it out.

Finn’s stomach tightens, twisting on itself. His first instinct is to refuse before he can even think, like taking it would make it real, like taking it would mean he’s agreeing to a version of himself he doesn’t trust.

“No.”

Mando’s eyebrows lift, mild but unmoved. “Take it.”

“I don’t need it.” Finn hears how thin the words are the second they leave his mouth.

Mando lets out a small, patient sigh. “Maybe you don’t,” he says. “Not right now.” He shifts the glove in his hand, still offering, not pushing it closer, just keeping it there. “But maybe one day you do, and you won’t have one. And I’m not letting that be the reason you don’t play.”

Finn’s hands hover between them, fingers twitching like they can’t decide whether to reach or hide. They shake, stupidly obvious. He stares at the glove, at the softened leather, the ball nested in the pocket, and feels something in his chest pull tight in a different way than fear.

Wanting, maybe. Or grief.

Or just the unfamiliar weight of being given something without having to earn it through pain.

Mando’s voice softens a notch. “C’mon,” he says. “It’s just a glove. You don’t owe me anything.”

Finn hates how much that helps. Hates how it slides past the part of him that’s always braced for strings, for payment, for the catch.

His hand moves anyway.

The leather is warm where Mando’s been holding it, soft at the pocket from use. The ball presses through the glove into his palm, the raised stitches leaving faint ridges in his skin—little lines of proof that it’s real, that it’s here, that he’s not making any of this up.

Mando nods once, satisfied, like that’s all he wanted. “There.”

Then, like he’s trying not to startle something skittish, he keeps his tone easy. Casual. Like he’s talking about schedule, not ghosts.

“We’re doing another clinic in a couple months,” Mando says. “At camp. We still have one more spot for CTI. If you want to help.”

Alpine Lake flashes behind Finn’s eyes, water and ice gone black in his memory, trees like teeth, Gwen’s scream swallowed by wind. His stomach tightens, hard.

His mouth opens to say no.

Mando adds quickly, as if he can see it coming, as if he knows exactly what panic looks like in Finn’s shoulders. “You don’t have to decide right now. Just… think about it, okay? I’ll pay you and everything.”

Finn swallows. The glove is heavy against his chest, like a weight he can hold onto. Like an anchor.

“Yeah,” he hears himself say, small and rough. “Maybe.”

Something in Mando’s face eases—not a grin, not a victory. Just a quiet relief, like he wasn’t sure he’d get even that much.

“Alright,” Mando says. “You get home safe. And—” He hesitates, then chooses the plain truth instead of anything pretty. “You did good, kid. Seriously.”

Finn nods because if he tries to answer, his voice will crack wide open.

He turns toward the lot with the glove hugged tight to his ribs like contraband, like if he loosens his grip even a little the world will remember to take it away.

Finn makes it halfway across the grass before he feels it—that prickle at the back of his neck, the old reflex that says eyes on you. Not the fence line this time. Something quieter. Something that reaches up from under his ribs and squeezes.

The field is emptying. Bases already pulled. Chalk smudged into pale ghosts of lines. The sun has dropped low enough to catch on the chain-link and turn it into bright threads that hurt to look at, like the world is trying too hard to pretend it’s beautiful.

Finn tightens his hold on the glove. The leather creaks under his fingers. He presses it harder to his ribs, as if the weight can pin him here. As if a thing that’s real and warm can keep him from drifting.

Then he sees it.

A silhouette near home plate.

Too still to be a kid. Too slight to be one of the dads. Backlit so the edges blur, like the light doesn’t want to commit to him. Like the day itself is hesitating.

Finn stops so abruptly his shoe scuffs a half-moon in the dirt. His breath catches and doesn’t come back right away. The name is already in his throat before he knows he’s thinking it—heavy, impossible, something he’s been swallowing for years.

“Bruce?”

It comes out like a test. Like a plea. Like if he says it wrong the shape will vanish.

The silhouette shifts. A tilt of the head. A familiar impatience. And suddenly—there he is, as if the light has decided to stop lying: sharp in the wrong places, familiar in the right ones, a boy made out of late sun and absence. The grin is already half-loaded, ready to fire. Like he never left. Like he hasn’t been gone for so long it hollowed out a piece of Finn’s chest.

“You gonna stare me to death?” Bruce says, cocky as ever, and the words land with that same old punch—almost a joke, almost a shove, almost kind in the only way Bruce ever knew how to be.

Finn’s mouth opens. Nothing comes out clean.

His vision blurs so fast it scares him. His chest aches like something is trying to crack him open from the inside—grief, relief, anger, all braided together so tight he can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. The glove is suddenly too heavy. His hands tremble around it anyway, because letting go feels like letting go of everything.

“You—” Finn starts, and his voice breaks on the edge of it. The rest of the sentence is stuck behind years of silence, behind every time he tried not to think about Bruce because thinking about him made the world tilt.

His throat works. His eyes burn. He takes a breath and it’s shaky and loud in the open air.

“You’re… here,” he manages, like he has to say it out loud to make it true. Like if he doesn’t name it, he’ll blink and be back to empty grass and smudged chalk and the ache of missing someone he never got to say goodbye to.

And Bruce’s grin wobbles, just for a second, something almost soft flickering through the cocky. Like he knows exactly what this costs Finn. Like he’s been waiting anyway.

Bruce rolls his eyes like he can’t stand sincerity for more than half a second. “Yeah, yeah. Save it.” But his grin softens at the edges anyway, betraying him. “C’mon.”

He hooks a bat onto his shoulder and steps into the dirt like he’s been standing there the whole time, like the years didn’t happen, like his cleats never stopped biting into the ground. He settles into his stance with that familiar cocky ease—chin up, weight loose, ready.

“Pitch.”

Finn’s hand finds the ball tucked inside the glove pocket. The leather is still warm where Mando held it. The baseball itself is cool, seams biting into his fingertips—real, solid, present. He holds it there for a second longer than he needs to, like he’s afraid if he lets go too fast his body will fill in the wrong object. The wrong weight. The wrong shape.

The phone-flash hovers at the edge of his vision like a dark doorway he’s trying not to look at.

His pulse jumps.

His throat tightens.

For a beat he can taste concrete.

Finn drops his gaze to the ball and makes himself name what’s true, quietly, like a prayer: stitches. leather. dirt under his shoes. wind on his face. open sky. a field that smells like grass, not blood.

He plants his feet on the dirt line, nothing fancy, no show, just balance. He keeps the motion small, close to his body, like he’s afraid of big gestures. Like big gestures belong to the past.

He lifts his arm.

It catches, just a snag, like fabric on a nail, but it doesn’t lock him this time. It doesn’t steal him away.

He exhales and lets the motion continue anyway, gently forcing his body to follow this track, not that one.

The ball leaves his hand and draws a clean little line through the late sunlight.

Pop.

The sound is like leather, but there’s no glove. The ball hangs for a heartbeat by the home plate and rolls in a lazy arc toward the backstop.

Finn’s breath rushes out of him like he didn’t know he’d been holding it.

Bruce swings. And misses.

The bat cuts through empty air with a sharp whiff, all attitude and no contact. For a split second the sound is too close to something else, something heavier, something meant for bone, and Finn’s stomach gives a quick, sick lurch.

But then Bruce huffs like the world has personally offended him. “Are you kidding me?”

He resets his stance, rolling his shoulders, jaw working like he’s chewing on his own pride. The cocky grin tries to come back and only makes it halfway.

Finn’s breath loosens, just a fraction. The miss is stupid and human and so Bruce it hurts. It drags the moment out of the dark doorway and back onto the field where it belongs.

“Shut up,” Finn mutters, and the words surprise him because they almost sound normal.

Bruce points the bat at him like an accusation. “Throw it again.”

Finn nods, fingers finding the seams like they’re rails he can hold onto. He lifts his arm, and this time the motion goes through clean, no snag, no hitch, no flash of dark. Just muscle and breath and a simple follow-through.

Pop.

The sound hits him low in the chest, steady as a heartbeat.

Third pitch.

This one tries to wobble on the way out. His wrist fights him. His brain whispers phone like a curse he can’t quite shake loose.

Finn yanks his attention somewhere safer, somewhere now. He locks onto Bruce’s stance instead. The set of his shoulders. The easy looseness in his knees.

Finn throws.

Pop.

Three pitches. Three clean hits into an imaginary pocket. The last one steadier than the first.

Bruce lowers the bat like it’s suddenly too much work to keep pretending, and he laughs, soft and pleased, like Finn just pulled off a stupid trick at a party and Bruce is impressed despite himself.

“See?” Bruce says, stepping out of his stance. “You still got it. You still got me.”

Finn’s breath catches hard. His throat tightens around something that wants to break loose. His eyes sting, and he blinks fast like that can stop the tears from forming.

Bruce jerks his chin toward Finn’s arm, grin going wider now, all swagger again, except it’s kinder at the edges. “Your arm’s mint. I’m tellin’ you.”

Finn makes a sound that’s half a laugh and half a crack in the dam. “Shut up.”

Bruce’s grin softens for one blink—so quick Finn almost misses it, like Bruce can’t stand to be gentle for too long.

“Keep it,” Bruce says, nodding at the glove. “Don’t be dumb.”

Finn’s throat tightens so hard it hurts.

He blinks.

And the space by home plate is empty again. No bat. No boy. Just chalk dust smeared into pale ghosts and late light pooling on the dirt, wind sliding over the grass like fingers that don’t mean harm.

For a second he doesn’t move. Like if he stays still enough, the shape of Bruce might come back. Like the air might remember.

It doesn’t.

Finn stands there with the glove in his hand and the ball sitting heavy in his palm. His arm trembles, still buzzing with leftover adrenaline, but it isn’t locked. It isn’t trapped in that old frame. It’s just… shaking. Human. Alive.

He closes his fist around the baseball until the stitches bite and leave little dents in his skin—an imprint he can carry, proof of what’s real. Proof he threw it. Proof he stayed.

Then he lets out a long, ragged exhale that feels like it’s been trapped in him for years, and he turns toward the parking lot.

He isn’t cured. He isn’t fixed. The basement is still there in the architecture of his nerves, waiting for sharp sounds and closed doors and the wrong kind of quiet. He hasn’t crossed back over the foul line into what’s “safe,” and he doesn’t think he ever will, but for now he can keep walking along it, toeing the chalk like a promise he’s still here.

But he’s carrying something else with him now, too.

Something warm. Something ordinary. Something that came from sunlight and dirt and a stupid missed swing.

He walks home with the glove tucked under his arm, the ball in his pocket, and the faint, impossible feeling that for once, the past didn’t win the whole inning.