2. baseball god
Once on a sleepless night, Yuzuki laid him to bed with a story of a nameless god who saved the world with baseball.
"But first, lets make it clear that the God is very particular about the people they loves best, you see..." He remembers nodding eagerly, tucked into the crook of his sister's body and tickled with every steady heartbeat. He goes through the notions like clockwork remembering every detail of that night, "so you can't ever think for a minute that the Baseball-god will leave you because you're what they loves the most. Besides you've got something in common..."
"We do?" The door creaks open slowly, and the two fall into an immediate slumber before it shuts once again and he lets loose a long string of giggles. He can still feel Yuzuki's thin fingers pinching his nose.
"Of course you do," the tale begins with those words. The dream spirals, the rain continues to fall, the two giggle like hearty children under a glowing moon, "you're both baseball-nerds."
He listens, latches on to every word of the God traversing through worlds and overcoming every obstacle with nothing but a baseball bat and a gaggle of baseball-glove-friends. He remembers the feeling of his head being tucked under her chin: listening to her heart play every staccato and watching as she made the story of the god come to life on the shadows that plagued his walls.
"So the Baseball-god swung and swung, they swung so hard that every fire became a star," if he closed his eyes at this very moment, he would probably still see the shadow of a diamond ring on his wall all those nights ago. Still hear his bewildered gasp as his sister turned the ring this way and that, splattering prisms all over his room.
"Was it a homerun?"
"No, not yet. But the God was close to home base. There was still one more star to hang," Yuzuki patiently whispered, setting the ring down and placing a circular orange object in front of the light. "She forgot to hang the Sun."
"The Baseball-god can't forget the sun!" He had protested, obviously miffed. The memory still made him laugh. "That's the most important one!"
"You're right. So you know what the baseball-gloves did?"
"What?"
"They rallied together the best baseball players," she started, twirling the orange object this way and that in between her fingers, "and at first it was hard. But they kept trying. And trying. And trying. And they never gave up, Takeshi. Not even when the other gods came and told the Baseball-God that it was pointless. Because they knew that this counted for something..."
"Why didn't the other gods and the baseball players want to help?"
"Because when the stars fell, so did the rain. But rain is never a bad thing, you know? Some people don't get it, because they don't want to understand."
"So the Baseball-God made them understand, right?"
"Mmhmm," She set the object down here, and for the next few moments all that filled the room was the crumpling of paper as it bounced against the hardwood floor. "Because without the rain, the light can't catch rainbows. But what light is there when there is no sun up?
So the Baseball-god made them understand. And when they saw how the Baseball-god always, without fail, went out to try to swing out the biggest fire, they slowly began to see the bigger picture. And before the fire could even think about spreading, the players and the other gods swung and swung and swung, until plop-
The sky was filled once again with the bright light of a giant glowing baseball."
Yuzuki snorted, the sound still echoing in his ears. Her voice had broken at the end, into something that resembled a sob and they didn't speak for a long time. His memory was filled with the still lull of her steady breathing, and it was a longer wait before she could purely enunciate her frustrations. He remembered, still young and naive, cutting in with a mystified,
"Do you think mom was one of them?"
Her answer, slow and careful, would stick with him for years to come.
"I think Mom was already waiting in the catcher's box."
a/n: if I tried this crap with my cousins, I'd get slapped