Alex Faulkner (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
videokilledme) wrote2018-11-17 01:30 am
videokilledme) wrote2018-11-17 01:30 am
“And The Rest Is (World) History.” Alex, Bianca. (Persona Dreamscape) - Chapter Seventeen
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"And The Rest Is (World) History." Alex, Bianca. (Persona Dreamscape) - Chapter Seventeen
[music]
It was on the night following that awkward morning after that Alex had his first uncomfortable dream about Bianca.
It definitely wasn’t his first dream that featured Bianca; she was his best friend, after all, and he thought about her far too much during his waking hours for her to be completely absent from his mind even while he was asleep. It wasn’t his first dream of that sort, either--he was a healthy, hormone-bedeviled, now just-past-teenage boy after all. But it was the first dream like this that featured his lovely blonde friend in a position that could lead to even more compromising positions, especially considering how little her dream-self was wearing.
Being a lucid dreamer, Alex had a fair amount of control over his dreams. Before, he hadn’t fought it when the same sorts of situations came up, letting the dream run its course without really altering it, both out of curiosity and simple horniness. The difference between that and this was, he hadn’t really known any of the other girls featured in any of those dreams: they were movie stars, the occasional pretty upperclassman who’d been extra friendly towards him, or else just faceless nobodies, so he didn’t really find it too awkward or guilt-inducing, though it wasn’t particularly interesting or arousing either, more mechanical than anything, just a physical need being satisfied.
But as usual, with Bianca, things were Very Different.
This time, instead of letting himself be drawn into whatever bad porno-esque scenario his stupid brain had cooked up, Alex concentrated until he could see himself throwing the biggest, fluffiest white down comforter over the skimpily-clad libero, then he flopped down on top of it--not under it--beside her to watch the next space-related documentary in his NextFlik queue. A moment later he envisioned sharing popcorn with her, and allowed himself the sappy, blush-inducing privilege of sharing a drink (with one straw) with her. Before long things had shifted enough that Bianca’s outfit was less Victoria Secret and more L.L.Bean, complete with that worn purple t-shirt with the gold letters on it that she wore way too often and would never really explain, just smirking and side-stepping the question every time he asked. When she’d deflected his inquiry three times, the last time with a banal observation about the thoroughly unremarkable weather, Alex had gotten the picture, and knew to stop asking.
Thanks to his firm guidance, the dream stayed cute and G-rated (maybe PG, actually, since they did cuddle and even hold hands at one point), and when he woke up, it was difficult to leave behind the pleasant, all-too-real memory of the warmth of her hand in his.
Seeing her that day at lunch was still a little awkward--every time their eyes met, he fought the urge to look away, the image of that first outfit she’d been wearing rising, unbidden, to the forefront of his mind--but he hid it well, he thought.
“Alex? Hey, earth to Alex Ace!”
...Or then again, maybe not so well. He looked up from his half-eaten plate of cafeteria fries to find Bianca leaning towards him, expression concerned.
“Are you okay? You looked like you were a million miles away just now.”
“Yeah, I’m fine. Sorry, I kinda...slept funny last night, I guess, so my mind’s been wandering a little today.”
Bianca frowned, still not quite convinced, but Alex forced himself to meet her eyes steadily instead of letting them slide to the side guiltily. After a few seconds of what was almost a staring contest, she seemed to accept his excuse, or at least accept that it was all he wanted to say about whatever was bothering him.
“Well, it wasn’t a big deal anyway. I was just asking if you wanted to play some intramural soccer! My team’s down some players, and Carrington’s intramural rules state that we’ve gotta have at least 9 players to take the field, and you’ve got the rest of the afternoon off, right? Sooo...”
Alex had only ever really played soccer in gym class, and he’d been more or less okay at it. He was too small, too skinny, not solid and muscular enough to have much of a presence on the field, and he hadn’t been nearly aggressive enough to be good--what reason was there to kill himself over kicking a ball away from someone else? Still, if he was going to play a sport that wasn’t racquetball, soccer was probably the next best thing.
“...So you’re asking me? Full disclosure, adding me to your team is not a good idea if you actually want to win the game.”
“Well, of course I want to win! But it’s just intramurals, not anything serious, so the most important thing is to just have fun with it, really.”
The look on Alex’s face made it pretty clear that he didn’t consider himself likely to have fun playing any sport at all, regardless of whether they won or not, but the hopeful light in Bianca’s eyes made it hard--no, impossible--to say no. She already knew that his schedule was empty until that night, which severely limited the number of believable excuses he could give, and he still didn’t want to lie to her about something as trivial as this. Either he had to say no and admit that the reason for his refusal was that he just didn’t want to do it, or...he had to say yes.
The blue-haired teen let his eyes fall closed as he heaved a long, weary sigh, and even before he’d reopened them, Bianca had pulled him in for a half-hug, half-headlock.
“Alex, you’re the best!”
Alex submitted to the embrace, his mouth pulling sideways in a smirk. “I mean, yeah, obviously, but...I didn’t actually say that I was going to do it yet.”
Bianca’s grip tightened for a moment as she gave a playful, mock-irritated growl, and she ruffled his hair hard before releasing him, her tone both pleased and smug as she leaned back in her chair and studied him, a smirk of her own firmly in place. “But you are gonna, aren’t you?”
“If you’re really that desperate for players...then yeah, okay. I can fill an empty space as well as anyone, I guess.”
“Hey, you’re doing way more than that!” Bianca protested, mildly offended for his sake. “There’s plenty of other people I could’ve asked instead, but...I wanted to ask you.”
Why me? The question was right there, curling itself around his tongue, hovering on his lips, ready and waiting to be asked; but Alex wasn’t certain that he really wanted to know the full reason behind it, or even part of it. Wasn’t it enough that she’d thought of him specifically, whatever her justifications for doing so were?
In any case, the time for asking that question had already passed. Right now, Bianca was grinning over at him happily, talking a mile a minute about how he didn’t have to worry about equipment, she’d take care of that, just meet her at the athletic center at 5:30 and he could change and meet the team, and then they could all walk over to the intramural fields together afterward.
“But seriously, thanks, Alex. You’re a lifesaver! It’ll be fun, just wait and see!”
Alex waited, and as promised, he certainly did see. What he saw, however, was the fact that the weather had taken a turn for the worse, and they’d had two hours of non-stop rain that had left the intramural fields wet and just shy of waterlogged.
“Eh, it’s no big deal,” Bianca had shrugged, a study in casual acceptance, when Alex had stared out over the muddy expanse and asked in a hushed voice whether the game would be cancelled. “There’s no lightning, and it’s only raining a little on and off now, so probably not. My team’s pretty serious about this, even if it is only intramurals, and it’s actually pretty fun to play soccer in the mud.”
Alex looked down at his already-dirt-streaked, borrowed cleats, socks, and shin guards, imagined how much time it was going to take him to get all of this clean again afterwards, and wished for the millionth time that he wasn’t such a hopeless sucker where Bianca was concerned.
The rest of his clothes were borrowed, too, and he still couldn’t decide if he should be embarrassed or not over the fact that he was wearing a pair of gym shorts and a jacket borrowed from Bianca and a team shirt borrowed from one of the absent (female) players, a member of the debate team who had a competition out-of-state that day. Despite the fact that she was apparently one of the smallest players on the team, the shirt fit him perfectly.
Then again, that wasn’t saying much, since the rest of Bianca’s teammates--who had dubbed themselves the Purple Pegasuses--were pretty big and tough-looking. He recognized two of the girls as volleyball players, and another as one of the girls who’d been at the party that weekend, Bianca’s former roommate Sam. The other four were tall, muscular guys who looked like they were probably on the football team, and if they weren’t, they should’ve been. Alex vaguely recognized two of them as regular Jackson Challenge contenders, and he was certain that one of them sat at Bianca’s table in the cafeteria pretty often, too, but the other two were total strangers. They all seemed nice enough, but he could definitely see what Bianca meant about how seriously they took things from the way they warmed up, complete with racing each other around the field.
“...Explain ‘off-sides’ to me again,” Alex muttered to Bianca as they finished stretching and waited for the referee and the other team’s captain to head for the center of the field. “It’s been a while, and I’m a little rusty when it comes to some of the rules.”
Alex had used most of the three-and-a-half hours between their late lunch and Bianca’s intramural game the way he usually did, the way he would’ve done if he hadn’t agreed to this undoubtedly Very Bad Idea: studying in the library. Granted, he had spent part of that time looking over the basic rules of the game (it had been a couple years, after all), but not too much, just enough to (hopefully) make it look like he knew what he was doing.
“Just don’t pass the ball forward to one of your teammates if they’ve run past the last non-goalie defender and you’re still in front of them. But you’re playing as a defensive midfielder, so you might not have to worry about that too much. Depends on how everyone else plays today.”
“Time for the coin-toss!” hollered a tall, rangy woman in a flashy magenta and turquoise tracksuit, whose short, fluffy grey-blonde hair seemed utterly unaffected by either the rainy weather or even by gravity itself. “I need the team captains for the Hungry Hornets and the Purple Pegasuses-”
“PegasI!” shouted back one of the should-be-football-player strangers, who had been introduced to Alex as ‘Dashner’. Aside from the referee, he was the only one on the field wearing glasses, and he pushed them farther up on his nose pointedly, earning himself a withering look from the ref and an eye-roll from everyone on his team.
“Pegasuses,” the ref said again, with an equal amount of deliberateness, and beckoned for the captains.
“Back in a sec,” Bianca said, flashing them all a bright grin, and the rest of the team chuckled to themselves.
“Bee always wins the toss,” Sam explained on seeing how Alex had glanced around at all of them, wondering what joke he’d missed. “I don’t know how she does it, but sometimes I think she can see the coin in the air somehow.”
That sounded pretty impossible to Alex, but sure enough, when a beaming Bianca came bounding back to the group, she’d won the toss and they had their choice of which goal they wanted to attack for the first half.
“Let’s start with the goal that’s less waterlogged,” she proposed, and everyone except Alex was nodding almost immediately, already grasping her reasoning.
"Agreed," said one of the volleyball players, a senior who Alex had been surprised to see playing intramurals, especially since she'd gotten tapped for a spot on the US Women's Volleyball Team in the next Olympics: the super-strong super-tough senior wing spiker Zoey DuBois. “That’ll give us a chance to get an early lead. By the time we’re in the second half, the whole field will be so muddy and churned up, having to aim for that goal won’t be much of an advantage any more.”
Alex was already at something of a loss, not that it was a difficult strategy to understand, but that kind of thing, taking into account how messy the field would be at that point in the game due to extended usage, was just so far outside his realm of experience that he hadn’t thought of it, wouldn’t have thought of it in a million years.
Things didn’t get any better once the game started. Alex still felt extremely out of place, like he really was just filling an empty space, because it seemed like the rest of the team was perfectly capable of scoring points and defending their goal without him. He wasn’t slow, but he wasn’t super fast either, and since he had only ever played in P.E. class, he wasn’t good at reading the intent of whoever wandered into his zone, whoever he was supposed to be marking, and they kept faking him out and getting past him. It was frustrating, almost enough so that he actually started to wish that he was good at a sport for the first time in his life, but at least he managed to feed that frustration into physicality, digging in and forcing himself to keep running even after he’d gotten a stitch in his side.
One thing Alex was good at, as it turned out, was passing: he seemed to instinctively know where his teammates were going to be moving, and while he didn’t have enough experience to have the best aim or range, he still got the ball where it needed to go the majority of the time. But for the most part he hung back, standing aside and letting his teammates get in there and really fight for the ball...in part because, if about half of Bianca’s team looked like they should’ve been football players, more than half of the Hungry Hornets looked like they were either pro bodybuilders, or on the wrestling team. Alex didn’t have to do the math to figure out that if his scrawny 5’5, 115-pound-ass seriously tried to go up against one of the six-foot-plus, 200 pound Hornets, one of them was going to be eating mud, and it wasn’t going to be the Hornet.
In the end, he ended up eating mud anyway.
It was almost halfway through the game, and Dashner, who was playing sweeper, stole the ball from an attacking Hornet and passed it back towards Alex, though the blue-haired teen was sure that he’d 100% intentionally aimed a good ten feet away from him, meaning that Alex had to really run to make sure he’d get to it first. With a low huff, he moved to collect the ball, then turned and started moving it up the field--though he’d only taken three steps when one of the Hornet players, a solidly-built redhead with a piggy nose and frizzy hair, suddenly appeared as if out of nowhere and slammed into him sideways, hard enough to knock him clean off his feet and send him sprawling.
Right into the biggest, sloppiest mud puddle on the field.
Alex went down with a soggy-sounding splorch!, his hands, most of his chest, and all of the left side of his body immediately coated in cold, wet mud...but he’d only gotten as far as thinking, of course, before the Hornet girl who’d knocked him down let out a mocking, tooth-grindingly insulting, two-syllable “Ha-ha!” It wasn’t even real laughter, she’d actually said the words ‘ha-ha.’
At that, Alex saw red, and for the first time since they’d taken the field, for the first time ever in all his twenty years of life, he wanted that ball more than life itself.
He heard someone who sounded like Dashner shouting at the ref, saying something like, “Hey, that was totally reckless play! Excessive force! Hey, ref!” but it might as well have been static for all of it that he really processed in that moment.
Slamming his hands down on the sodden ground, Alex lunged back to his feet and was off like a shot, coming up from his prone position like a runner leaving the starting block. The red-headed Hornet girl was bigger than he was (not like that was hard), but she was solid, built like a tank, and not particularly fast, so within seconds he’d caught up to her. He had just enough presence of mind to remember not to shoulder-tackle her from behind, coming up alongside her instead before ramming his shoulder against hers as he tried to get his foot on the ball. The Hornet girl clearly hadn’t expected to see him back on his feet so soon, much less that he would be smashing himself into her at top speed in a far fiercer attempt to get the ball than he’d shown the whole rest of the game--and the element of surprise worked in his favor, as did the fact that he’d crashed into her while she was mid-stride, with only one foot on the ground.
There was no huge puddle here for him to topple her into, but by then the whole field was close to being sludge, save for a few grassy patches, so she still hit the ground with a satisfying splash and squelch. Alex spared a moment to turn a cold glare down at her, all but saying that’s what you get for being an asshole, asshole, before taking possession of the ball and sending it shooting up the side of the field to Bianca.
Bianca absolutely made the most of that opportunity: she faked out a defender, spun another in a circle, then shot a beautiful cross to Zoey, who ended up heading it into the goal just seconds before the ref blew the halftime whistle.
Since it was only intramurals, they just took a quick five-to-ten minute break between halves, depending on what the teams wanted, how tired they were and how much they wanted to strategize for the second half. Bianca waved them all in, and they all sloshed their way off the field and onto the sidelines to listen to whatever she had to say. Sam handed out sports drinks from a cooler as they formed a circle. “I know you probably don’t feel very thirsty since it’s raining,” she said, tossing a light blue Crocerade Alex’s way, which he caught fairly easily despite how slippery it was, “But do yourself a favor and stay hydrated.”
“Yeah, it’d be pretty dumb to pass out from dehydration in weather like this,” Alex began, twisting the lid off and raising the bottle to take a long drink--when a big, beefy arm suddenly clamped down around his neck and shoulder, jostling him hard enough that he spilled some of the Crocerade down the front of his shirt. Oh well, he thought darkly as he reflexively ducked out of the would-be friendly headlock, I’m already a muddy mess, it’s not like this is any worse than that. Instead, he angled a scathing look up at the offending party. “Dashner, what the f-”
“ALEX! DUDE!” Dashner crowed, his face alight with childish glee and not a little respect. “You shoulder-tackled a girl!”
“So what?” Alex shot back, his scowl enough to indicate that he was still feeling pretty hot under the collar about the way the person in question had plowed him over. “That kind of thing doesn’t matter on the field, everyone should be treated equally. And anyway, she started it.” He gave a lopsided, very self-satisfied smirk, quirking an eyebrow as he gave a careless little shrug. “I just finished it, that’s all.”
That was met with laughter all around, and after Bianca laid out the rest of the plan for the game, they returned to the second half in good spirits, despite the cold, intermittent rainfall that had started up again.
The second half was a lot rougher, in just about every way possible; the field was a mess, and both teams really buckled down and played hard. Despite Alex’s best efforts, he just wasn’t skilled enough or physically strong enough to actually steal the ball most of the time, though he managed to interfere tenaciously enough that they had to pass to someone else. Even so, before long the score was tied 2-2, and the Hornets’ best player (who was a huge showboat) had the ball. Alex had tried and failed to take the ball away from him a dozen times already, so this time he decided to try to use his previous failures to his advantage. When the showboat got close, Alex made a half-hearted attempt to get the ball, letting the other player do a fancy spin--and while he was in the middle of it, Alex suddenly snapped into serious mode, hooking one foot around the ball and pivoting on the other, wobbling and only just managing to stay on his feet in the mud, and sending the ball sailing up the side of the field to Sam. The showboat stumbled in surprise, tripping himself and nearly ending up face down in the mud (which would’ve been intensely satisfying, since somehow he hardly had a speck on him); by the time he recovered his balance and turned around to look for the ball, Sam had already passed it to Bianca, who made a single-touch shot on the goal--and scored.
Half a minute later, the ref blew her whistle, and she had to shout to be heard over the rain, which was falling harder by the second.
“All right, that’s time! And with a score of 3-2, the winners are the Purple Pegasuses-”
“PegasI!”
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"And The Rest Is (World) History." Alex, Bianca. (Persona Dreamscape) - Chapter Seventeen
[music]
It was on the night following that awkward morning after that Alex had his first uncomfortable dream about Bianca.
It definitely wasn’t his first dream that featured Bianca; she was his best friend, after all, and he thought about her far too much during his waking hours for her to be completely absent from his mind even while he was asleep. It wasn’t his first dream of that sort, either--he was a healthy, hormone-bedeviled, now just-past-teenage boy after all. But it was the first dream like this that featured his lovely blonde friend in a position that could lead to even more compromising positions, especially considering how little her dream-self was wearing.
Being a lucid dreamer, Alex had a fair amount of control over his dreams. Before, he hadn’t fought it when the same sorts of situations came up, letting the dream run its course without really altering it, both out of curiosity and simple horniness. The difference between that and this was, he hadn’t really known any of the other girls featured in any of those dreams: they were movie stars, the occasional pretty upperclassman who’d been extra friendly towards him, or else just faceless nobodies, so he didn’t really find it too awkward or guilt-inducing, though it wasn’t particularly interesting or arousing either, more mechanical than anything, just a physical need being satisfied.
But as usual, with Bianca, things were Very Different.
This time, instead of letting himself be drawn into whatever bad porno-esque scenario his stupid brain had cooked up, Alex concentrated until he could see himself throwing the biggest, fluffiest white down comforter over the skimpily-clad libero, then he flopped down on top of it--not under it--beside her to watch the next space-related documentary in his NextFlik queue. A moment later he envisioned sharing popcorn with her, and allowed himself the sappy, blush-inducing privilege of sharing a drink (with one straw) with her. Before long things had shifted enough that Bianca’s outfit was less Victoria Secret and more L.L.Bean, complete with that worn purple t-shirt with the gold letters on it that she wore way too often and would never really explain, just smirking and side-stepping the question every time he asked. When she’d deflected his inquiry three times, the last time with a banal observation about the thoroughly unremarkable weather, Alex had gotten the picture, and knew to stop asking.
Thanks to his firm guidance, the dream stayed cute and G-rated (maybe PG, actually, since they did cuddle and even hold hands at one point), and when he woke up, it was difficult to leave behind the pleasant, all-too-real memory of the warmth of her hand in his.
Seeing her that day at lunch was still a little awkward--every time their eyes met, he fought the urge to look away, the image of that first outfit she’d been wearing rising, unbidden, to the forefront of his mind--but he hid it well, he thought.
“Alex? Hey, earth to Alex Ace!”
...Or then again, maybe not so well. He looked up from his half-eaten plate of cafeteria fries to find Bianca leaning towards him, expression concerned.
“Are you okay? You looked like you were a million miles away just now.”
“Yeah, I’m fine. Sorry, I kinda...slept funny last night, I guess, so my mind’s been wandering a little today.”
Bianca frowned, still not quite convinced, but Alex forced himself to meet her eyes steadily instead of letting them slide to the side guiltily. After a few seconds of what was almost a staring contest, she seemed to accept his excuse, or at least accept that it was all he wanted to say about whatever was bothering him.
“Well, it wasn’t a big deal anyway. I was just asking if you wanted to play some intramural soccer! My team’s down some players, and Carrington’s intramural rules state that we’ve gotta have at least 9 players to take the field, and you’ve got the rest of the afternoon off, right? Sooo...”
Alex had only ever really played soccer in gym class, and he’d been more or less okay at it. He was too small, too skinny, not solid and muscular enough to have much of a presence on the field, and he hadn’t been nearly aggressive enough to be good--what reason was there to kill himself over kicking a ball away from someone else? Still, if he was going to play a sport that wasn’t racquetball, soccer was probably the next best thing.
“...So you’re asking me? Full disclosure, adding me to your team is not a good idea if you actually want to win the game.”
“Well, of course I want to win! But it’s just intramurals, not anything serious, so the most important thing is to just have fun with it, really.”
The look on Alex’s face made it pretty clear that he didn’t consider himself likely to have fun playing any sport at all, regardless of whether they won or not, but the hopeful light in Bianca’s eyes made it hard--no, impossible--to say no. She already knew that his schedule was empty until that night, which severely limited the number of believable excuses he could give, and he still didn’t want to lie to her about something as trivial as this. Either he had to say no and admit that the reason for his refusal was that he just didn’t want to do it, or...he had to say yes.
The blue-haired teen let his eyes fall closed as he heaved a long, weary sigh, and even before he’d reopened them, Bianca had pulled him in for a half-hug, half-headlock.
“Alex, you’re the best!”
Alex submitted to the embrace, his mouth pulling sideways in a smirk. “I mean, yeah, obviously, but...I didn’t actually say that I was going to do it yet.”
Bianca’s grip tightened for a moment as she gave a playful, mock-irritated growl, and she ruffled his hair hard before releasing him, her tone both pleased and smug as she leaned back in her chair and studied him, a smirk of her own firmly in place. “But you are gonna, aren’t you?”
“If you’re really that desperate for players...then yeah, okay. I can fill an empty space as well as anyone, I guess.”
“Hey, you’re doing way more than that!” Bianca protested, mildly offended for his sake. “There’s plenty of other people I could’ve asked instead, but...I wanted to ask you.”
Why me? The question was right there, curling itself around his tongue, hovering on his lips, ready and waiting to be asked; but Alex wasn’t certain that he really wanted to know the full reason behind it, or even part of it. Wasn’t it enough that she’d thought of him specifically, whatever her justifications for doing so were?
In any case, the time for asking that question had already passed. Right now, Bianca was grinning over at him happily, talking a mile a minute about how he didn’t have to worry about equipment, she’d take care of that, just meet her at the athletic center at 5:30 and he could change and meet the team, and then they could all walk over to the intramural fields together afterward.
“But seriously, thanks, Alex. You’re a lifesaver! It’ll be fun, just wait and see!”
Alex waited, and as promised, he certainly did see. What he saw, however, was the fact that the weather had taken a turn for the worse, and they’d had two hours of non-stop rain that had left the intramural fields wet and just shy of waterlogged.
“Eh, it’s no big deal,” Bianca had shrugged, a study in casual acceptance, when Alex had stared out over the muddy expanse and asked in a hushed voice whether the game would be cancelled. “There’s no lightning, and it’s only raining a little on and off now, so probably not. My team’s pretty serious about this, even if it is only intramurals, and it’s actually pretty fun to play soccer in the mud.”
Alex looked down at his already-dirt-streaked, borrowed cleats, socks, and shin guards, imagined how much time it was going to take him to get all of this clean again afterwards, and wished for the millionth time that he wasn’t such a hopeless sucker where Bianca was concerned.
The rest of his clothes were borrowed, too, and he still couldn’t decide if he should be embarrassed or not over the fact that he was wearing a pair of gym shorts and a jacket borrowed from Bianca and a team shirt borrowed from one of the absent (female) players, a member of the debate team who had a competition out-of-state that day. Despite the fact that she was apparently one of the smallest players on the team, the shirt fit him perfectly.
Then again, that wasn’t saying much, since the rest of Bianca’s teammates--who had dubbed themselves the Purple Pegasuses--were pretty big and tough-looking. He recognized two of the girls as volleyball players, and another as one of the girls who’d been at the party that weekend, Bianca’s former roommate Sam. The other four were tall, muscular guys who looked like they were probably on the football team, and if they weren’t, they should’ve been. Alex vaguely recognized two of them as regular Jackson Challenge contenders, and he was certain that one of them sat at Bianca’s table in the cafeteria pretty often, too, but the other two were total strangers. They all seemed nice enough, but he could definitely see what Bianca meant about how seriously they took things from the way they warmed up, complete with racing each other around the field.
“...Explain ‘off-sides’ to me again,” Alex muttered to Bianca as they finished stretching and waited for the referee and the other team’s captain to head for the center of the field. “It’s been a while, and I’m a little rusty when it comes to some of the rules.”
Alex had used most of the three-and-a-half hours between their late lunch and Bianca’s intramural game the way he usually did, the way he would’ve done if he hadn’t agreed to this undoubtedly Very Bad Idea: studying in the library. Granted, he had spent part of that time looking over the basic rules of the game (it had been a couple years, after all), but not too much, just enough to (hopefully) make it look like he knew what he was doing.
“Just don’t pass the ball forward to one of your teammates if they’ve run past the last non-goalie defender and you’re still in front of them. But you’re playing as a defensive midfielder, so you might not have to worry about that too much. Depends on how everyone else plays today.”
“Time for the coin-toss!” hollered a tall, rangy woman in a flashy magenta and turquoise tracksuit, whose short, fluffy grey-blonde hair seemed utterly unaffected by either the rainy weather or even by gravity itself. “I need the team captains for the Hungry Hornets and the Purple Pegasuses-”
“PegasI!” shouted back one of the should-be-football-player strangers, who had been introduced to Alex as ‘Dashner’. Aside from the referee, he was the only one on the field wearing glasses, and he pushed them farther up on his nose pointedly, earning himself a withering look from the ref and an eye-roll from everyone on his team.
“Pegasuses,” the ref said again, with an equal amount of deliberateness, and beckoned for the captains.
“Back in a sec,” Bianca said, flashing them all a bright grin, and the rest of the team chuckled to themselves.
“Bee always wins the toss,” Sam explained on seeing how Alex had glanced around at all of them, wondering what joke he’d missed. “I don’t know how she does it, but sometimes I think she can see the coin in the air somehow.”
That sounded pretty impossible to Alex, but sure enough, when a beaming Bianca came bounding back to the group, she’d won the toss and they had their choice of which goal they wanted to attack for the first half.
“Let’s start with the goal that’s less waterlogged,” she proposed, and everyone except Alex was nodding almost immediately, already grasping her reasoning.
"Agreed," said one of the volleyball players, a senior who Alex had been surprised to see playing intramurals, especially since she'd gotten tapped for a spot on the US Women's Volleyball Team in the next Olympics: the super-strong super-tough senior wing spiker Zoey DuBois. “That’ll give us a chance to get an early lead. By the time we’re in the second half, the whole field will be so muddy and churned up, having to aim for that goal won’t be much of an advantage any more.”
Alex was already at something of a loss, not that it was a difficult strategy to understand, but that kind of thing, taking into account how messy the field would be at that point in the game due to extended usage, was just so far outside his realm of experience that he hadn’t thought of it, wouldn’t have thought of it in a million years.
Things didn’t get any better once the game started. Alex still felt extremely out of place, like he really was just filling an empty space, because it seemed like the rest of the team was perfectly capable of scoring points and defending their goal without him. He wasn’t slow, but he wasn’t super fast either, and since he had only ever played in P.E. class, he wasn’t good at reading the intent of whoever wandered into his zone, whoever he was supposed to be marking, and they kept faking him out and getting past him. It was frustrating, almost enough so that he actually started to wish that he was good at a sport for the first time in his life, but at least he managed to feed that frustration into physicality, digging in and forcing himself to keep running even after he’d gotten a stitch in his side.
One thing Alex was good at, as it turned out, was passing: he seemed to instinctively know where his teammates were going to be moving, and while he didn’t have enough experience to have the best aim or range, he still got the ball where it needed to go the majority of the time. But for the most part he hung back, standing aside and letting his teammates get in there and really fight for the ball...in part because, if about half of Bianca’s team looked like they should’ve been football players, more than half of the Hungry Hornets looked like they were either pro bodybuilders, or on the wrestling team. Alex didn’t have to do the math to figure out that if his scrawny 5’5, 115-pound-ass seriously tried to go up against one of the six-foot-plus, 200 pound Hornets, one of them was going to be eating mud, and it wasn’t going to be the Hornet.
In the end, he ended up eating mud anyway.
It was almost halfway through the game, and Dashner, who was playing sweeper, stole the ball from an attacking Hornet and passed it back towards Alex, though the blue-haired teen was sure that he’d 100% intentionally aimed a good ten feet away from him, meaning that Alex had to really run to make sure he’d get to it first. With a low huff, he moved to collect the ball, then turned and started moving it up the field--though he’d only taken three steps when one of the Hornet players, a solidly-built redhead with a piggy nose and frizzy hair, suddenly appeared as if out of nowhere and slammed into him sideways, hard enough to knock him clean off his feet and send him sprawling.
Right into the biggest, sloppiest mud puddle on the field.
Alex went down with a soggy-sounding splorch!, his hands, most of his chest, and all of the left side of his body immediately coated in cold, wet mud...but he’d only gotten as far as thinking, of course, before the Hornet girl who’d knocked him down let out a mocking, tooth-grindingly insulting, two-syllable “Ha-ha!” It wasn’t even real laughter, she’d actually said the words ‘ha-ha.’
At that, Alex saw red, and for the first time since they’d taken the field, for the first time ever in all his twenty years of life, he wanted that ball more than life itself.
He heard someone who sounded like Dashner shouting at the ref, saying something like, “Hey, that was totally reckless play! Excessive force! Hey, ref!” but it might as well have been static for all of it that he really processed in that moment.
Slamming his hands down on the sodden ground, Alex lunged back to his feet and was off like a shot, coming up from his prone position like a runner leaving the starting block. The red-headed Hornet girl was bigger than he was (not like that was hard), but she was solid, built like a tank, and not particularly fast, so within seconds he’d caught up to her. He had just enough presence of mind to remember not to shoulder-tackle her from behind, coming up alongside her instead before ramming his shoulder against hers as he tried to get his foot on the ball. The Hornet girl clearly hadn’t expected to see him back on his feet so soon, much less that he would be smashing himself into her at top speed in a far fiercer attempt to get the ball than he’d shown the whole rest of the game--and the element of surprise worked in his favor, as did the fact that he’d crashed into her while she was mid-stride, with only one foot on the ground.
There was no huge puddle here for him to topple her into, but by then the whole field was close to being sludge, save for a few grassy patches, so she still hit the ground with a satisfying splash and squelch. Alex spared a moment to turn a cold glare down at her, all but saying that’s what you get for being an asshole, asshole, before taking possession of the ball and sending it shooting up the side of the field to Bianca.
Bianca absolutely made the most of that opportunity: she faked out a defender, spun another in a circle, then shot a beautiful cross to Zoey, who ended up heading it into the goal just seconds before the ref blew the halftime whistle.
Since it was only intramurals, they just took a quick five-to-ten minute break between halves, depending on what the teams wanted, how tired they were and how much they wanted to strategize for the second half. Bianca waved them all in, and they all sloshed their way off the field and onto the sidelines to listen to whatever she had to say. Sam handed out sports drinks from a cooler as they formed a circle. “I know you probably don’t feel very thirsty since it’s raining,” she said, tossing a light blue Crocerade Alex’s way, which he caught fairly easily despite how slippery it was, “But do yourself a favor and stay hydrated.”
“Yeah, it’d be pretty dumb to pass out from dehydration in weather like this,” Alex began, twisting the lid off and raising the bottle to take a long drink--when a big, beefy arm suddenly clamped down around his neck and shoulder, jostling him hard enough that he spilled some of the Crocerade down the front of his shirt. Oh well, he thought darkly as he reflexively ducked out of the would-be friendly headlock, I’m already a muddy mess, it’s not like this is any worse than that. Instead, he angled a scathing look up at the offending party. “Dashner, what the f-”
“ALEX! DUDE!” Dashner crowed, his face alight with childish glee and not a little respect. “You shoulder-tackled a girl!”
“So what?” Alex shot back, his scowl enough to indicate that he was still feeling pretty hot under the collar about the way the person in question had plowed him over. “That kind of thing doesn’t matter on the field, everyone should be treated equally. And anyway, she started it.” He gave a lopsided, very self-satisfied smirk, quirking an eyebrow as he gave a careless little shrug. “I just finished it, that’s all.”
That was met with laughter all around, and after Bianca laid out the rest of the plan for the game, they returned to the second half in good spirits, despite the cold, intermittent rainfall that had started up again.
The second half was a lot rougher, in just about every way possible; the field was a mess, and both teams really buckled down and played hard. Despite Alex’s best efforts, he just wasn’t skilled enough or physically strong enough to actually steal the ball most of the time, though he managed to interfere tenaciously enough that they had to pass to someone else. Even so, before long the score was tied 2-2, and the Hornets’ best player (who was a huge showboat) had the ball. Alex had tried and failed to take the ball away from him a dozen times already, so this time he decided to try to use his previous failures to his advantage. When the showboat got close, Alex made a half-hearted attempt to get the ball, letting the other player do a fancy spin--and while he was in the middle of it, Alex suddenly snapped into serious mode, hooking one foot around the ball and pivoting on the other, wobbling and only just managing to stay on his feet in the mud, and sending the ball sailing up the side of the field to Sam. The showboat stumbled in surprise, tripping himself and nearly ending up face down in the mud (which would’ve been intensely satisfying, since somehow he hardly had a speck on him); by the time he recovered his balance and turned around to look for the ball, Sam had already passed it to Bianca, who made a single-touch shot on the goal--and scored.
Half a minute later, the ref blew her whistle, and she had to shout to be heard over the rain, which was falling harder by the second.
“All right, that’s time! And with a score of 3-2, the winners are the Purple Pegasuses-”
“PegasI!”
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