Archive of Our Own ^beta

“-- and here she comes, the team’s ace pitcher, back in fine form. The crowd has certainly missed her from the sounds of it!” 

Robin smirks, the stands cheering appropriately around them as she follows the team out onto the diamond. She swings over to the pitcher's mound, pulling her mask up and slapping her gloved hand on Stevie’s shoulder. 

“Right to me, remember?” 

Stevie sighs, a long drawn out breath before her lips curve up in a smirk. There’s a glimmer in her eyes, though– grateful, warm and trusting the way that makes Robin choke up when she thinks too much on it, the way she always looks at Robin. 

“Yeah, the usual.” She rolls her bad shoulder, slaps the ball neatly into her glove with a pop. “They won’t see us coming.” 

Robin grins, slides her mask back down. “They never do, ‘Vee.”

Robin liked to pretend she didn’t remember how they met. She spun it like they’d always been in each other's back pockets, like there’d been no before– gave people blank stares for mentioning that they had entirely different home states, and by all intents and purposes would have never crossed paths until university. 

She did remember, though. Not with the climactic melodrama that it deserved in hindsight, but it was still tucked away in a pocket of her mind. A folded up well worn thing– Stevie walking into the dugout with her hair thrown up in a perfectly curled ponytail, barely even glancing around at anyone before claiming a spot in the bag line up and declaring that she only did starter. 

It’s funny to think about now, the way Robin had immediately disliked everything about how ‘down the nose, holier than thou’ Stevie had been about the whole thing. They’d gone off for scholarships and full rides at fancy schools to get away from the hierarchy bullshit, she’d thought. No one needed a Queen Bee on the diamond, it made the team dynamics insufferable. Besides, she’d reasoned, anyone with that kind of bitchiness probably wasn’t even that good. Probably had a dad that coached and told her that her shit didn’t stink, money to pay for a spot– she’d seen it before. She probably wasn’t worth starting pitcher at all. 

Then Stevie Harrington had walked out onto the shitty half grass grown in diamond they’d been using at the time, and threw the fastest pitch Robin had ever seen outside of TV with exactly zero warm up right into the backstop. The clang of metal echoed for a long moment, hanging in the air over all of them.

“I only do starter,” she’d said again, to the group of them all scrawny, nervous first year tryouts, and that had been that, really.

The story of how Robin had started catching for her went much the same way, which was to say that Robin had never been a person to stand for blatant showboating – gag me, really, with a spoon, thanks – and had slammed her glove on, slapped a helmet over her eyes and walked right out there with her. 

“Cool, but can you actually throw a pitch?” 

Stevie’s eyes had twitched, she remembers, her perfectly blank and bored expression shifting for a half a second. 

She scoffed. “Of course I can?” 

Robin slapped the inside of her thigh, popping up into a high crouch. “Put your money where your mouth is, then. High inside.” 

Stevie frowned, nodded once, and shuffled her stance. 

“She’s not wearing her gear!” One of the girls to the side called. 

Robin shook her head. “It’s fine. If she can pitch I won’t need it, right?” 

Then– a shift, something sharp. Stevie smiling back at her, a thread of lightning out there between them, an intangible something that Robin had never seen directed her way before. 

“You won’t,” she agreed, and wound up. Like they weren’t standing down across from each other, like they hadn’t met twelve seconds before. Like Robin hadn’t known the name Stevie from the roster, from the rumors around tryouts and how little she’d cared about any of the other girls on the field, from the way her perfect hair flounced around every corner after her during freshman week with a trail of boys already lining up after her. Like Stevie Harrington could have possibly ever heard anything about Robin Buckley with her head so high up in the clouds on her perfect pedestal. She said you won’t and it sounded like trust me .

Robin planted herself more firmly, pulled her free hand behind her back, and waited. 

Robin had never been on the inside of a joke until Stevie. Never been someone’s go to, or default, or even top pick for dodgeball. There was something about Stevie, though, in the stubborn way she decided things. It read as entitlement to a lot of people, sort of like Stevie thought the world owed her something, like it bent and boiled over at her command– Robin knew better though, from that first moment. Stephanie Harrington was a girl who liked a good fight, and she’d decided at that moment that Robin was worth fighting for.

It helped that in the tryout, with the crack of the ball in her glove, they’d both felt it. The way it was like puppet and string, Robin moved her glove and Stevie met it. It helped that they kept doing it, game after game. It helped that Robin had caught her on her bad nights and had called her out on her shit instead of going sweet and gentle, and caught her and caught her. 

She wasn’t entirely lying when she said she couldn’t remember how they’d met, because it had sort of felt like they’d already known each other the first day on the field. The rest was just timing. 

‘Inside high’, she thought to herself, Stevie didn’t even blink. Readying up with a nod. It was what made Stevie a little insane to most people, the absolute fearlessness. Inside pitches were tricky, too close to the batter– high meant right by their hands, too. A lot of pitchers had shaken her off when she called for them, which, annoying in general because it was simultaneously the pitch a lot of batters sucked at hitting.

The thing was, being a catcher, you had to take stock of things quickly. Remember batters on different teams and what they couldn’t hit for shit and what they’d swing for the hills on. Being a catcher meant analyzing weakness, measuring out the risk, lining it all up perfectly and counting on your pitcher to land the shot.The thing about a pitcher like Stevie, is that she was judgemental as fuck, too. Liked to pick out which pitches would rattle a poor girl's nerves when they stepped up to the plate. 

So: Stevie loved throwing inside highs, brushbacks, high and tights. Loved throwing risers the way no one else in the league could get quite right, loved low drops and inside curves. Trusted Robin to call them when they mattered, never doubted enough to miss. 

All in all, a bit sadistic, maybe. When it worked though, they were untouchable. Three up, three down, Nancy strolling in as their absolute gunner of a closer to finish it all off with a nice little bow. 

The ball whistled towards her, dropping perfectly at the last second– inside high to low, the bat slicing through the air with a hiss right as the crack of her glove reverberated around them. “Strike two!” 

Stevie from six months ago would have been all vinegar, all lightning shock in her eyes and smirks. Every bit their infamous ‘Queen Vee’, icing everyone out at the plate. She would have also twitched, that imperceptible draw of the brows that meant she’d noticed the way the ball hadn’t dropped all the way– the fact Robin’s glove had ended up more in the middle of the box, framing her glove to pull it inwards more towards the actual strikezone. 

She gives Robin a small uptick of a smile, ‘good call, Bee’. 

Robin rolls her eyes back. ‘Duh.’ 

This Stevie smiles, and genuinely looks like she means it.

The game is going well, despite being their first back and climbing out of last year's horrible loss– the stands are for once teeming with people, probably half because of the rumors of Stevie’s epic fall from the throne, looking to see if it’ll happen twice. Vultures, mostly. Robin should be worried, maybe. Stevie used to let this kind of thing get to her. The whispers and the snide comments shouted from faceless no-ones and the way they all wanted her to slip up and make a bad play just so they could be the ones recording when it happened.

Robin had gotten good at pulling her back, though. In their second year on the team, when they were resting Stevie’s arm and had her playing outfield instead, Robin had bullied their coach into letting her play center, too. Winked and whispered absolutely unhinged play ideas into Stevie’s ear in the dugout just to get that whip fire grin back, the way she wouldn’t even hesitate before saying something equally as deranged with a straight face back. 

They’d ended one game with Robin on Stevie’s shoulders, careening half over the fence to catch a near homerun like they’d somehow rehearsed it. Crashing down as the entire field erupted, laughing so hard she could barely breathe and the yellow ball snugly in the palm of her hand. 

Stevie never went too far that Robin couldn’t tag team along with her, they fed back and forth off each other like a feedback loop, ramping up more and more as time went on. Vickie had started a joke that they’d been created in a lab somewhere underground, two parts of the same brain– Robin analyzing and making split second decisions, Stevie powering through and nailing the finish. 

Maybe a bit codependent, the way she refused to catch for anyone else in games. The way Stevie refused to let anyone catch for her anywhere else, but– it worked. It was them. 

“One more, babe! She’s got nothin’ on ya!” A voice crows over the lull, as the batter readies up in the box. Charlotte isn’t a bad player, honestly– Robin knows in her old league she’d been somewhat famous, a slap hitter that always got the ball exactly where it needed to be. Robin also knows she twitches when she’s feigning a bunt, and that she gets nervous when she has two strikes and swings at anything. 

Stevie’s intense gaze goes warm for a second, pink on her ears. Robin can see the way she glances over at Eddie for a split second, the way she wants to be annoyed. She pulls her hat down lower over her eyes, and Eddie wolf whistles louder from the stands. Robin rolls her eyes.

“Can it, Munson,” she yells back. “Trying to play a game here, thanks!” 

Eddie just cackles, Jeff shoving at the guy good naturedly beside him.

Stevie slides her toe across the shale, leaning back with her hands at the ready. Robin taps her right thigh, throws three fingers down, slides her glove up. ‘Give me an outside curve, she’ll whiff it.’ 

Stevie from before might have shook her off, wanting to go for the fastball just because she knew no one could hit it. Might have wanted to throw it right down the middle, too, just to prove some unnamable point. Instead, she nods. Once, quick, and her eyes narrow in. 

The ball slides through the air, inside to center to outside, high and ever so slightly outside of the strike zone– it doesn’t mean anything, though, because the point is to get Charlotte to swing at something she could never hope to hit well. At most she’d round it off into a grounder, and Nancy would gun it straight down to first base anyways. 

Charlotte swings, because of course she does, even though she shouldn’t– the ball slaps loudly into Robin’s glove. 

“That’s three!” The ump calls, and Eddie whoops from the sidelines.

Robin arches an eyebrow, meeting Stevie’s smirk as they get close enough to slap her free hand against her arm– inning changing over, up to bat next. “Told you,” she says just to be annoying. 

Stevie snorts, “Anyone ever told you you’re a little bit evil?” 

Robin pretends to hum, tapping her masked chin. “This one pitcher I know, maybe. Can’t usually give me too much shit though, since I’m always right and all.”

Stevie bumps their shoulders together, and they meet their team at the dugout gate, hi fiving everyone as they pass. Eddie is waiting behind the fence, fingers hooked into the chain. He’s wearing Stevie’s old uniform, the way he always does when there’s an important game (today isn’t important, league wise. It’s their first game of the season, they could lose and it wouldn’t affect their standings much at all. Stevie looks faintly awed when she sees the jersey anyways, in the rounds of her eyes. Eddie’s a good one, Robin knows).

“Way to make the other girls look bad,” Eddie teases, grin wide in the sunlight. Stevie leans in closer, shoulder towards most of the team like she can block out the world for the two of them. She huffs a laugh. 

“Just a strikeout, Eds, used to do that all the time.” 

“Just nine strikes in a row, yeah, no big deal,” Eddie scoffs, leaning closer and rattling the fence a little. Robin’s sort of waiting for the rebuttal, the comment Stevie used to always make about the fastballs not being fast enough, or about throwing other pitches being like cheating somehow. 

She just sighs, happy sounding, for once. “Yeah, well. When it’s forty in a row then we can talk.” 

Eddie waggles his brows back, delighted, probably not getting the significance of pulling something like that off at all. “That’ll make the school headlines for sure.” Luckily, Robin’s here, though. Robin knows how much of a dream something like a perfect game is to any pitcher, to Stevie in particular, too. She also knows Stevie can pull it off, always been able to. 

“Let’s do it, then,” Robin adds, shoving her shin pads under the bench. “I can make that happen.”

Stevie glances over at her, surprise maybe– no, settling into something more solid. That same challenge she’d seen on the grassy field between them day one. Their type of insanity, pushing the bar and not caring about anything else. The smirk says it all, pure trust. That feedback loop ramping to a new gear. 

“Yeah,” she says, “you know what? Fuck it, let’s do it.” 

Eddie whistles, eyes shimmering. “And I’m the guy lucky enough to see it, huh?” His voice has gone all soft and gooey, the way Robin hates witnessing. Painfully in love, embarrassingly in love. The right amount of in love that Stevie deserves. 

“You and the other thirty people here, yeah,” Stevie sniffs back, arch and fake-bitchy. Eddie cackles, linking their fingers through the fence for a second. 

They hadn’t been friends, at first. Despite how easy it had been to fall into a circadian rhythm around each other– felt like Robin was resisting a current half the time, fighting uphill against some natural settling point, but they hadn’t been friends at all, really. 

Robin had known girls like her in the past, she’d thought. Ones who played sports like a shark, vicious and with a singular self-focused goal in mind, and shit talked in the dugout whenever they could. She’d also gone to high school, and been the weird kid and the band freak and something else she never let herself put into words too loudly even in her own mind. Stevie would be the type of girl to smell blood in the water the second Robin stopped being useful to her, and run whatever dirt she had up the flagpole just to prove a point. 

She’d thought she’d had her all penned down and figured out. Stevie continued to show up to practices insanely early, get to stretching and warm ups with some kind of singular focus that was like watching a wildfire hit the field, and collect a fan following of other girls who were interested in parties and boys and using Stevie’s giant apartment for both of those things. Annoyingly popular with most of the girls on the team despite the giant ego complex fanning her through all of it in a way that meant Robin was a one man island in her inherent mistrust. 

Stevie bought everyone milkshakes when they won, threw team parties at her apartment and let whoever stay over after if they wanted, bought pizza and fancier nets for practice, and had the fanciest gloves and cleats, and Robin watched all of it with a sharp eye, waiting for the other shoe to fall. For the facade to crack all the way through, and for everyone else to see it happen. 

Robin had always prided herself on having pinpoint accuracy in intuition, knowing exactly who her enemies were before they said a word. She’d fallen into a truce with Stevie, but it didn’t mean her guard wasn’t all the way up. It didn’t mean she wasn’t going to fight whatever magnet pull kept making her want to smile back at all the other girls' awful jokes. 

“Their shortstop can’t catch for shit,” Stevie would grumble, “Hit it her way you’re guaranteed first. Duct-taped cleats keep tripping her up.” 

“Not all of us have infinitely deep pockets with our parents' trust funds, you know,” Robin would reply, narrowing her eyes. 

Except, instead of glaring back, getting bitchier or meaner, it’s like Stevie’s expression would flip. Drop. Eyes rounding out with something like realization.

One day she’d said something particularly nasty, running off Jacqueline’s (their default second base player in first year mainly because she refused to play elsewhere) equally shitty remarks about the other teams catcher. Something about her glasses or her front teeth maybe, something about how she’d probably only joined the team so she could pretend she had friends, Robin didn’t remember, except for the way she’d turned around and bit back at Stevie to consider shutting the hell up sometimes or being surprised Stevie could see jack shit from all the way up her own ass. Maybe something less clever since her words had a tendency to jumble out when she was nervous, and god, she’d been terrified, except– 

Where she’d maybe been expecting a derisive sneer back, some attempt to ruin her or kick her off the team, or replace her as her go to catcher, she’d gotten nothing. Silence, a glance away. Then, the next day, Stevie showing up at her dorm room. Robin didn’t even realize she’d kept the address from the one time she’d given Robin a ride to an out of town game.

“Hey, uh– sorry, are you busy? Can we talk?”

Robin had just stared, moved on auto pilot and unthinkingly let her in. Stevie had her hair down, flatter and as far from perfect as she’d ever seen it, furtively glancing around the room like she was nervous. Like Stevie had something to actually lose if Robin said no. So far out of the norm Robin wasn’t sure if this was some shitty horror film B plot and she was just the first person to get killed before the real main character jumped in. 

Stevie had sighed, rubbed at her arm. “I just– look, I’m sorry. I think I’ve– okay, I know I’ve been an ass. Like, the world’s biggest one. I’m trying not to be that person anymore.” 

It was a little cramped; Robin’s roommate was out at her nightmarish eight AM classes luckily, but even with Stevie standing in the center of it while Robin hovered near the door it felt– overwhelming, somehow. Out of place, like a crop-paste job from a teenagers bedroom wall collage. Robin’s collection of proto-goth-punk posters on the wall, her messy counter of half spilt nail polish and wall of sticky notes because she always, always forgot something, and then flash cut. The picture perfect model of a sports star right there in front of them. 

Stevie’s eyes drifted up to meet hers, heavy and hazel and shockingly sincere. Robin wanted to sigh, curse herself for being just generally infinitely curious about everything, for that damn current that kept directing her back Stevie’s way regardless of anything she tried. 

“Okay?” She said, maybe with less snark than she wanted. Stevie winced anyways, looked down again. 

“Yeah, that’s fair,” she’d mumbled, breathing out again. “If you want to catch for someone else, I get that. I, uh, I told Jacqueline she was out of line though. I’ll shut that shit down next time.” 

Robin blinked, paused. “What? Why would I want to do that? Don’t you want to replace me ?” 

Stevie’s gaze shot back up, with a frown lacing her brows. “No? You’re the only catcher worth half a shit out there– I mean, sorry. That’s… shit, I keep doing that.” She pushed a hand through her bangs. “I meant. You see things, like– you push for inside pitches and glare me down and call me out on my form and. It’s good. No one does that, it’s good. I don’t think I even want to pitch at all if it’s not you catching.” She looked vaguely surprised by her own words for a moment, before it solidified, rolling through her shoulders with a tiny nod. Like it was true, like it had been made more true by admitting it. 

That was– oh . Robin swallowed. 

“Good, because. Well, you’re the only pitcher that actually lets me do my job right, so.” 

That heavy gaze melted a little, softened. A faint quirk of a smile. 

“You can’t do that though,” Robin forced herself to say, pointing a finger at her. “Tear people down or whatever. It sucks, I’ve been that girl you know? People saying whatever horrible thing their tiny minds can conjure just because they think you can’t hear. And, you know, we’re not in High School anymore. Whatever popularity contest you probably waltzed through the halls with isn’t worth that.” 

Something flashed in Stevie’s expression, lightning fast and absolutely devastated, and it might have been a nanosecond but Robin faltered anyways. Same recognizing same, maybe. Some fraction of herself held up in a glass in front of her. Oh , she thought again, sadder.

“Yeah,” Stevie said, quiet. Angry like a spotlight turned inwards, scalding and overbright. “I know.” 

“Why do you do it, then?” Robin couldn’t stop herself from asking, panic lancing through her the moment her mouth opened. Stevie just huffed a laugh, it wasn’t a pretty sound. 

“Old habits, I guess? Dumb excuse, I know. You’re right– really fucked up with a lot of people before. Didn’t get my own shit sorted out and– you don’t care about any of that though. Just, okay. Robin? I’m sorry, I’ll knock it off.” 

Robin bit her lip, thoughts racing and tripping over each other and stumbling around. “Great. Yeah, cool. Do that. You want to get ice cream?”

Stevie’s brows furrowed. “It’s like, eight thirty in the morning.” 

“Yes,” Robin rolled her eyes, playfully for once. “And you’re the maniac who knocked anyways, and I’m up because–” Stupid Stevie tides be damned, she thought. “I’m also a maniac I guess. RA keeps a stash in the back of the freezer and thinks I don’t know about it. If we’re doing this big heart to heart girl talk thing, I’m going to need ice cream.”

Mysteries upon mysteries, Stevie had squinted at her a little, like maybe she thought Robin was making fun of her or pulling an elaborate prank, but gave her a cautious smile anyways. 

“Fine. Better not be strawberry, though.” She made a face. “Trash flavor.” 

It had pulled a surprised bark of laughter from Robin, “What the fuck, yes , I always say that.” 

Stevie gave her another cautious look, that tiny smile hesitating. “Yeah, I know. S’why I always get you cookie dough when we win.”

She paused. It was true, was the thing. A wave of something too large to wrap around her heart and fit into words hit her– Stevie, passing her a milkshake and watching for a second longer than she needed to, Stevie pulling up to practice with nets that would mean the girls didn’t have to run ragged picking up stray balls, the way she’d casually decide she needed to work on her wrist flicks after they’d been at it for a while and the sun was a little too full in the sky. When she’d told the coach she’d injured her elbow the one weekend Robin had been trying to push through a sprained ankle so they’d both sit out. The way she’d always get into the faces of umpires and girls on the other team who tried to body slam Robin to make it to home plate. The fact her favorite takeout place was an obscure joint on the other side of town that Stevie always suggested they go to anyways.

Pinpoint intuition, she’d always thought. A current she had to fight against that she didn’t understand. Imagine that. Robin Buckley being picked by someone first. 

“You–” Stevie looked away, smile falling and radiating discomfort. Robin changed gears. “You’re telling Angela it was your idea if we get caught. You don’t live on campus so she can’t do shit to you.” 

The smile came back, brighter. Grateful, and a little shocked around the edges in a way that made her heart clench. I see you, too , she thought. I make sure you get the spot you want on the bench, and that I have extra elastics because yours always break, and I came up with different signals because you need glasses but won’t get them and can’t see shit. I’ve been seeing you, too. 

“Deal,” Stevie had said, and that was sort of that.

The story wasn’t something she knew all the way through. Not because Stevie hadn’t told her, but because she had a way of missing the important parts. Something about a kid whose parents were never home and had too much money to throw around, something about mantles and trophy shelves and baseball being the only thing they’d had in common. A Stevie who’d spent too long in a too quiet house, who’d once gone by a different name and been a star player in a different league, but had always been better at underhand pitching. A Stevie who’d always had too much money– enough to do anything, really– but no one to care how she spent it. A Stevie who’d spent a long time as someone else, who didn’t want to be that anymore either.

The one and only person Robin had ever talked to about who she was, at her core. Funny, how it had happened too, falling immediately after one of the most intense tournament slash midterm weeks of their lives, entirely because she didn’t have any other way of explaining how mad it made her that Tammy in their first year (pre-school tryouts) had been more interested in trailing Stevie to her house parties to meet boys than anything Robin did or said. Because she’d known, some secret unnamable way deep down that Stevie would just nod and say ‘okay’, and it would change exactly nothing between them. 

(Maybe she hadn’t expected the way Stevie’d turned on her and gone ‘Tammy? The girl with the most dogshit taste in music I’ve ever heard?’, all genuinely affronted, which had made Robin laugh so hard she’d nearly thrown up.)

Sort of impossibly easy, the way Robin saw it. Then, later: Eddie. 

It’s the bottom of the fourth inning, Stevie’s on a goddamned roll. It’s a masterpiece to watch, Robin’s sure– the sort of cocky thought she inherited from Stevie, probably, but it felt right – the way Robin places her glove, taps down a finger or two with bright bandaids for Stevie’s shit vision, and slaps a thigh. The way Stevie nods, once, sharp, and sails the heater of a pitch directly where Robin planned it. Orchestrated; ball pulled back to her glove right on a wire. 

Stevie’s playing good, is the thing. Better than normal. Damn good, actually. Robin made a point of telling Eddie as much in between innings, because as much as the guy came out to most of these things he still seemed to glean onto exactly jack shit. All dopey look in his eyes and a ‘of course she plays good, she always does’. No, Robin had explained, this is good for Stevie. This is good for the league. 

They finished up their thirty-sixth straight strike like it was nothing. Not even one foul, a hint of a connection. Stevie’s pitching drop balls and risers like she invented them– Robin would get choked up if she knew it wouldn’t make Stevie aware of how well things are going and potentially spook her.

“Don’t choke, Bobbin,” Stevie grins at her as Robin slaps her bat against her cleats. 

“Watch it, Stevie,” she snarks back. “I know where you sleep.” 

Stevie’s grin widens, eyes sparkling at her. It’s a sight that lances something larger than affection straight through her, batters her heart around a little in her chest. Stevie enjoying the damn game, she thought she’d never see the day again. 

“You got this, Rob,” Nancy adds, holding her hand out for Robin to bump their fists together. “She likes to throw low.” 

Perfect, Robin thinks. The other team was getting a little desperate, having no runs on the board– too risky to throw anything they might be able to beam out of the park. Which meant, potentially, a lot of absolute wild pitches. 

Luckily for them, where Robin lacked speed, she evened out with having generally just an incredible eye. 

Robin steps up to the plate, slides her foot across the shale to even out the batter’s box and looks over at their coach. Murray’s a funny guy, the school picked him up to coach somewhere around their second season together– none of them had been quite sure what to make of him at first. He’d planned an elaborate team bonding event that primarily involved him intuiting insanely specific things about their playing style, personal strengths and failings included, that had given one girl on their team an entire existential crisis. But, when the guy was focused on winning, his strategies were bar none. 

Murray taps his ear, pulling down on it and then slides a hand across his chest. The team’s signal for ‘go nuts, but better be a good one’. 

“Send ‘er, Buck!” Eddie crows from somewhere behind her, which makes her snort. 

“That guy never shuts up,” the other team’s catcher grumbles. 

Robin readies up, squaring her feet. “Tell me about it.”

The way Stevie tells it, she’d sort of known Eddie back at her hometown. They’d been on opposite ends of the social ladder in many ways; Eddie the weird metalhead nerd, Stevie the popular jock. Circles that didn’t intersect– according to Stevie, though, she’d still paid attention. 

They’d stumbled into each other again out in the middle of nowhere, two lines that had never meant to cross but then sort of just stuck fast along the same tracks. Eddie, chasing a dream to have a regular band gig with his friends, getting an offer at the bar nearby which slowly turned itself into a manager title, too. Robin wouldn’t call it fate, exactly, just something quietly incredible. 

Stevie had walked into the bar on a bad day, and Eddie– well, she’s heard the story from both sides at this point.

Stevie says she looked like shit, it had been a long week of frustration. Losing their last game of regular season, sealing the deal that they weren’t even in the running for Nationals, due to a string of triples Stevie hadn’t avoided with the drops like she’d wanted. Stevie says she’d wandered in because it looked quiet and empty for a Thursday, and she’d wanted a drink just to clear her head. Eddie had been this guy behind the bar that looked sort of familiar, who asked a lot of questions and kept offering drinks on the house, enough that she’d kind of given up the ghost and said if Eddie was going to ask her out he might as well do it the right way. 

From Eddie’s perspective, unsurprisingly, he’d seen the most beautiful woman breeze right in through the door and lost his mind quietly, and then loudly. Absolutely desperate just to know her name, he’d tried every stupid maneuver he could think of, just to get a laugh. The fact that Stevie had said yes was a mystery to him. 

There are a few facts Robin knows, though: 

One, Eddie didn’t understand nor care for any remotely athletic event known to their entire University campus, and made this fact known loudly and often, yet arrived in the stands happily like clockwork to any of Stevie’s games. Had started doing so for the weirdest of excuses before they’d even admitted they liked each other, despite how transparently obvious the whole thing had been to everyone else. 

Two, he regularly wore one of Stevie’s uniforms from past seasons as well, and made a show of ensuring everyone saw the stitched HARRINGTON across the back.

Three, Stevie had a tendency to slide her eyes over to wherever Eddie was in the stands whenever she was nervous, magnetic pull to point– dot to line. They hovered around each other constantly before officially getting together, too. Hands brushing when they’d walked back to Stevie’s BMW, knees knocking when they sat all crammed in at the local burger joint. 

Four, Eddie watched Stevie like she’d ascended from the skies themselves just to grace the world with her brand of obnoxious jokes and frowns. Stevie watched Eddie like a mirage, like she’d blink and realize he was just a fever dream. 

Five, and finally: Robin also knows, storybook fairytale all in that they’re meant for each other.  She’s seen the pictures of wedding rings on Eddie’s phone, too, even if he won’t even think about buying one until they’ve graduated.

It hadn’t been easy the whole time, though. 

There was an invisible line with her, some division of what made things good and then better, and above both ‘acceptable’. She sorts everything with a sort of nonchalance that Robin knows means it’s ingrained deep, like the statements about never having a curfew, or being really good at forging signatures. A normal that shouldn’t be normal, a type that maybe Robin understands too, but differently. 

For Robin, her mother’s obsession with her succeeding meant anxiety and a lot of critical self talk she’d had to struggle to unlearn for years. A terror around bringing tests home lest an 86 not be good enough that week. Her mother loved her, she knew, just in a way that meant she was terrified of Robin being exactly like her, which sort of meant Robin was, too. For Robin her issues stemmed from being under a microscope, from being seen far too often and far too unkindly. 

With Stevie, it was like she’d grown up in a big house by herself in the silence, surprised by her own voice whenever she dared to share it. 

Robin had caught her a few times, before the accident, booking out the gym they always used for practice by herself. She’d go in there while Robin was still in her evening classes, and pitch against a wall for hours, despite how hard she threw. She had bruises on her shins from the bounce back, callouses upon callouses, and scars where the seams eventually ripped the skin on her fingers. She went through ice packs like candy, her water heating bill was always insane. The worst part was that she couldn’t even talk her out of it, because some part of her understood.

The last time came after an argument with Eddie, the only one she knows that they’ve ever really had. Stevie had canceled their dinner plans because she’d thrown a ball into the dirt that game and walked someone else, and it was too close to their final season games to be messing up in her mind. 

Eddie wasn’t really even mad, just worried. Stevie knew that, Robin knew that. She still told Eddie to kick rocks though, because that’s what best friends did and because the guy had implied that his fantasy games were more important than the sport Stevie lived and breathed in some convoluted unintentional way, which deserved calling out, thanks. 

Robin had found her anyway, though. 

Stevie, alone in a gym that nearly swallowed her whole, curling forward and back and snapping a ball into the wall across from her. Robin watched her sigh, drop her head and push her sweaty bangs off her forehead, smacking the ball repetitively into her glove (she did it three times after catching the ball, three times before readying up for the next pitch, every time). She watched Stevie wind up for the next pitch, that squint of pain in her eyes that meant she was well past the point of stopping but not at the point yet where she would, and made up her mind. 

She let the door close loudly behind her, snagging the empty bucket of balls from the corner and striding over to the wall across from Stevie. 

“What– Robs what are you–” 

She turned the bucket over, sat on it. Held her glove up in front of her. “Come on, throw it to me.” 

Stevie stared, mouth twitching in some confused frustration attempt at neutrality. “You don’t have to do this, I’m fine.” 

Robin rolled her eyes. “Are you gonna throw it or not, Vee?” 

“You’re not wearing your pads,” Stevie said. Robin could have picked her up, shaken her. Screamed at her that it didn’t make any sense for her to worry about everyone else constantly but never herself, that if she cared about Robin getting hurt why wouldn’t she care about hurting Robin’s best friend also. It wouldn’t help, though. 

“Never stopped you before,” she said instead. “Come on, if you’re here pitching then I’m here catching. That’s the rules.” 

“Since when,” Stevie glared. 

“Since I decided I’m tired of you doing this without me, that’s when. So, are you going to throw or are we going to go home?” 

Stevie glared harder, jaw tensing. Something dark flickering across her eyes before her mouth flattened and she nodded. 

‘Low outside’, Robin signaled. 

Stevie smacked the ball three times into her glove, paused. Reached up to push back her bangs, flicked the ball three more times. Robin waited, watching. 

The thing about Stevie was that she never expected anyone to be watching, for anyone to lead her out of that big empty place. She always expected to find herself there, at the end, by herself. Unless she was somehow better than good, the type of good that got things to stick around, maybe.

The thing about Stevie was that she collected people around her that did stay, just because of exactly who she was anyways.

I’m here, Stevie , she said with her glove low by her shin, eyes heavy on her across the linoleum over waxed floors. 

Stevie wound up, snapped the ball and squeaked her sneaker toe across the floor. Low and outside, Robin curving her glove to pull it more in the strike zone she always had in her mind. 

“Okay,” Stevie breathed. There it is , Robin thought. “Let’s go home.” 

When the accident happened, she thought, there were two paths. She could see the tide of all of that empty space pulling her under, knocking her straight back down into the shadows and into the box of things that needed to be sorted. A Stevie that gave in, made her peace and resented everything for what led her there. A Stevie that never existed, though, and wouldn’t exist. 

The second path meant getting back up, meant listening and trying– being brave. If there was anything Stevie was, it was infallibly, infuriatingly always brave.

A fact that Robin knows: 

Stevie had gotten her heart broken once, some friend she’d grown up with who’d always been mean and only gotten meaner with time. Tried to go out together, apparently. It had ended brutal and messy and in a big shit show for both of them– Tommy had always had a vicious streak a city wide, and Stevie had looked at herself one day, and the people she wanted to be around, and called him out on it. 

He’d called her awful things apparently, tried to take her whole social standing down with him. Stevie had walked out of that, and straight into being friends with Nancy Wheeler and Jonathan Byers, because if Tommy was being awful to them it meant they were alright. She’d sacrificed a whole ten year friendship over it, because it was the right thing to do and never looked back. 

Stevie fucked up. Said and did things she shouldn’t, was stubborn and lashed out when cornered, spat words back at people that she didn’t mean. She also fixed them, went out of her way to make them right. 

Went to some girl’s dorm first thing in the morning because she’d said something mean and gotten told off for it to apologize, nothing at all to gain. Stevie got the shit kicked out of her, and she got better. She got back up. 

(The world has not been kind to them, their parents have dug hooks in and taken pounds of flesh without ever realizing. They’ve been alone in a thousand fractaled ways in a million empty moments. She knows that neither of them have stopped trying, though. She knows that she’s holding Stevie’s hand just as hard as Stevie’s holding hers, and she’s calling a high inside that Stevie will always, always match.)

Eddie wishes he could say what was going on– well, no, he doesn’t, but it would help explain the way most of the other girls around Stevie in the dugout seem to be half avoiding her. It’s sort of like when he’d first met her, the way the hallways would part around her self assured stride, awed eyes and nervousness in a wake behind her. He figures whatever it is must be good though, because Robin had said so and Robin would tell him straight up if they were playing like shit. None of them look mad or nervous either, they’re kind of moving around Stevie like she’s pure gold they’re afraid to touch. 

He can get the obvious things, like a missed ball or a pitch that hits the backstop, but the nuances fly mostly out the window. All he knows is that Stevie was lining them up and shutting them down, three for three every round, and she looks absolutely incredible doing it. 

“Strike three!” The ump yells, and Eddie whoops and hollers along with the other folks in the stands. The energy is ramping up, a lot more silent eyes and murmurs– Robin must mean it then, that this isn’t just good. He watches Stevie grab her water bottle, the sway of her ponytail– checking for any signs of the old tells. 

She doesn’t seem to be avoiding everyone’s eyes, though, or obsessively checking her laces. There’s no insistence on putting her hat back on three times until it’s just right, either.

“Hey,” Eddie calls, grinning. “Any chance the pitcher’d be up for dinner and a show after the game?”

Stevie’s eyes shoot up to meet his, no confusion, like she’d pinpointed exactly where he’d been the whole time. She glares at him a little, no heat in her eyes– her ears pinkening adorably. 

“I got a boyfriend,” she says back, smirking. “You might know him. This obnoxiously loud guy who keeps calling the wrong plays?” 

The people in the stands laugh; Jeff shoves him gently as Eddie squawks, delighted. “Sounds hot!” 

Stevie rolls her eyes, pulls her hat down lower over her eyes to hide the way she’s smiling. 

“She seems better,” Jonathan says, over on Eddie’s right. There’s a warm pocket of light in Eddie’s chest, he feels it growing more and more. He nods, “Yeah, huh? I thought so, too. Not that I know jackshit about any of this…sports stuff.” 

Jonathan shakes his head. “I don’t mean just the game. She’s– you know, joking around. I’m really glad, Eddie.” 

Eddie watches Stevie– he’s always watching Stevie– she bumps her cleat against Robin, doing their goofy handshake thing they always do, but this time Stevie sort of trips her shoulder into Robin’s at the end. Leans back laughing, flicking her hat so it falls off her head. 

“Oh, you’re a little shit today huh? Throw a couple of zingers and it goes right to her head,” he can hear Robin say, cackling like she can’t help but be happy about it, too.

There’d been a long, long stretch of time where it was like all the joy had been sucked entirely out of the marrow of her bones– a single minded focus on winning and doing better, whatever better meant. 

“Yeah,” Eddie says, faintly, overwhelmed. “She really is amazing.”

Eddie had always been dedicated to proving a point, the kind of kid someone could double dog dare and he’d be ass over head in trouble before they’d even finished speaking. Once he set his mind to something, he’d get it right– call it anti-authortarian, or contrarian to a dangerous level maybe, but he never backed down from a chance to show expectations up. Underdog, let ‘em believe what they wanted and all. 

He’d eaten worms, gotten into fights, climbed up trees and broken his wrist falling back out; anything people told him he couldn’t do, he’d try to make sure he could. He trailed his rap sheet and scars around to prove it like they were trophies half the time. Most of it had been stupid stuff, or all of it, honestly. Born entirely out of people thinking they could put him in a box, just the need to stretch beyond how people viewed him, maybe. Meaningless, just to make someone think twice before assuming jackshit about him, thanks. 

The biggest point he’d ever wanted to prove wrong, however, the most important one, had come a few years back at a bar he now managed. With a girl and her perfect ponytail, dimmed lights, and an eye roll as she said ‘I don’t think you’re exactly my type.’ 

Eddie had sort of decided in between the way her perfect pink lips had pulled up in a smirk, the way she’d held the whiskey glass in her fingers with her whole pinky out like a damn model, the sports jersey with dust half caking the side, that she was wrong. I can be, he’d thought, dazedly, the craziest thing.

The rest of the night might have been a blur– partially him trying to make as many jokes as possible in a wild attempt to get her to crack a grin (he could see it in her eyes, the way they warmed over like molten gold, she was keeping it locked down just to fuck with him, she told him later), partially trying to ask questions and make a goof out of himself to make her less guarded. He told her about his career, how he’d ended up doing this instead of up on a big stage, that he was from a small town where the townsfolk had all but chased him out, made her a drink on the house and told her she had to buy his next one with a wink. 

Somehow it worked, miraculously. Somehow she’d said yes to dinner with him the next day. And to hanging out after that. 

There was a strange skip-step into friendship in the middle there; some sideways free fall into late night texting, then something maybe more real and genuine. He thinks the switch flipped from a hopeless one sided crush, into a real, deep and honestly overwhelming moment of ‘this is it, I think’ the first time she’d gotten mad at him. 

He remembered the day, permanently stamped into his brain– Eddie dragging himself out of a week-long fever, scraggly and looking for all the world like he was two parts dead and halfway there, sniffling and miserable on his way to the employee back door for his shift. 

Suddenly, Stevie. Staring at him from the back door alley way entrance, hands on her hips. “Where the fuck have you been, asshole?” 

Eddie had blinked, wondering if maybe the fever was still ravaging somewhere in the backdrop of his brain. A copy and paste gone awry, plopping Stevie out here like this with no warning.

“Uh, my house?” 

Stevie rolled her eyes. “Did you forget something?” 

Eddie frowned, glanced around the empty lot. It was fading into the evening, dingy and speckled with light reflecting off the strange puddles of liquid that always coagulated by the trash cans. “Going to be honest, no-ot sure what’s happening. Am I forgetting something?”

She’d thrown her arms out wide. “Me, asshat! Did you think maybe I’d want to know where you were? Couldn’t text me back any of the four hundred times I tried to call?” 

He pulled out his phone, which was dead of course because he’d been so focused on Campbell’s soup and using the can opener in a way that didn’t chop off all his fingers instantly. “Shit.”

“Yeah,” Stevie had said, aggrieved. “I was worried , you dick. I kept coming around and Laurie had no idea where you were and–” 

“You came around?” Eddie’d whispered, cutting her off accidentally. “Why?” 

She’d stared at him, brows furrowed as if he was the stupidest person alive. As if she was so fond of all the stupid thoughts living in his stupid brain, regardless. “Aren’t we friends? We’re friends, right?” 

Okay , he’d thought. Hands twitching, some instinctive need to ball up his fists and run. 

“We are,” he said carefully. 

“So?” 

“Uh, so… I’ll… text you the next time I fall deathly ill? So you can worry at me?” 

She nodded once. “I make a really great chicken noodle.” 

He hadn’t known what to say to that, or what to do about the way she’d rolled her eyes and sighed again, grabbing him by the arm to frog march him back to his car. “Hey– what are you– I have a shift, Harrington!” 

She sniffed. “No, you don’t. I saw you in the parking lot and told Laurie if you came in I’d file a health and safety complaint. Germs in the food. Salmonella, whole nine yards.”

Eddie had stared at her, slack jawed and a little sick with affection. “You are,” he said, slowly morphing into something akin to awe. “Single handedly the most insane person I have ever met.” 

“Thank you,” she rolled her eyes a third time.

It was just that Stevie was… She was the type of girl to walk into a room, and light up everyone in it. She had this way of snarking the roof entirely off the building, but making sure the people in her corner were safe behind her. She saw right through the stupid antics he always pulled around people, grabbed him by the scruff of his collar until he stopped trying to run away. A morning person and yet the grumpiest person alive before twelve PM all in one, constantly picking up queues and learning from her mistakes and yet so ready to be down on herself anyways. Vain and gorgeous and so sickeningly self conscious– a constant rotating wheel of contradictions. 

Eddie had never known anyone to throw herself constantly at problems for other people, and yet sit back and let herself be steamrolled by her own. She wasn’t a dream come true because he could never dream anything quite like her– and the monumental part was that she somehow saw something in him back that she decided had to stick around. 

There had been a dance they’d played– mostly Eddie. Afraid on some hindbrain level that he wouldn’t measure up one day, that she’d forget him in her whirlwind of practices and parties and later, babysitting. He’d show up to most of her games (if not all, he’d nearly gotten fired once for trying to switch too many shifts until he’d laid out his availability better), casually bring over her favorite intensely caffeinated drink when her test season ramped up, bully his weird neighbor into trying out for the team, too, just for an excuse to drive her in. 

(Max was incredible, which absolutely helped. Pitches lightning fast if a little chaotic, Stevie joked that she was going to give her a run for her money one day– he could see the way she shined behind the eyes when she said it, though.) 

Eddie’d always been the weird one. Didn’t have many friends back at his home town– none when the stupid rumors about him being responsible for some drug bust turned fall from grace for the towns Golden Boy Jason Carver had really kicked off. He didn’t even have the grades to apply for any kind of college didn’t really want to either. His brain wasn’t wired much for the listening and regurgitating life, anyways. Didn’t help that he couldn’t seem to catch a break with his band anywhere big time beyond their Friday night gigs at the bar he now managed. 

It didn’t make sense, was the thing. Someone like Stevie going for a guy like him. He’d known that the whole time, been terrified of the moment she realized she could pick any of the scholarship track upstanding young men that wanted invites to her parties, too. Kind of like a dog chasing a car, maybe, that’d been his mentality. He wouldn’t even know what to do if she stopped and looked at him the way he always looked at her back. 

Simple, easy truths: Stevie was his friend, maybe his best friend. His day rose and set with every sarcastic joke or painfully basic text reply she sent his way. He’d have staked his entire self, his entire worldview on the fact that he hated all jocks and everything they stood for, once. Knowing Stevie had meant a restructuring of every part of that. 

Eddie was also a manager at a dive bar, a guy who would never make anything out of his guitar or his lyrics, who drove across state to visit his uncle whenever he had a free weekend because outside of his band and Stevie, Wayne was the only person out there who thought Eddie was worth half a damn most days. 

And, crucially, despite all the ways he’d never measure up, despite all the some days and incredible things Stevie was, Eddie’s doctrine had been rewritten without him realizing. A needle point shifting to a new North. Point A meet point B. The sky was blue, the earth orbits around the sun, Eddie was in love with her. Maybe one day he’d try to say it better, too. The way he loved was too heavy and aching in his chest– it wanted simple things. Stevie to be happy, for her to smile with the sun the way she did when she laughed, for her to always have somewhere to go. He just wanted every scrap of her attention he could get for as long as he was allowed to have it, as long as she wanted to give him it. 

Maybe one day there’d be a well that had dried up left behind, a post it note about an address change or a text to say delivery was unsuccessful. Some redefined way to say goodbye in slow crawls forward until the end— it’d ruin him but, he was probably already broken up over her. Maybe in the kind of way that meant he was glad to have known there was more to how he could feel than he’d have ever realized, maybe in the way he’d be glad he got to see her figure her shit out from day one. 

“Damn, Stevie!” He’d cheer, cupping his hands around his mouth and skipping down off the bleachers after her after she rounded home plate. She shrugged off her team’s hi-fives, she always shrugged them off when she thought it wasn’t worth celebrating (when she thought she was supposed to do better, but he didn’t know that yet). 

Her hazel eyes flashed towards him, and then straight forwards. Her mouth quirking up on one side was the only acknowledgement he got most of the time mid game, in her serious focus mode or whatever. 

“That was a nice hit,” he’d grin as she walked past on the other side of the chain links back to her default bench spot. “Nearly had it over the fence.”

She’d give him a waspish look, kind of smug behind the eyes as she took a drink from her Gatorade. “What, like it’s hard?”

Eddie’d blink, grin back wider and more thrilled by her sass than anything else, “I dunno, is it? Haven’t seen you nail one over just yet but I know it’s going to happen.”

Stevie would roll her eyes and look away, something tensing in her shoulders maybe. Eddie hadn’t noticed back then, he wished every day he had.

“Yeah, well,” she’d say, quieter than before, “Keep watching, I guess.” 

“Happy to,” he’d wink, missing everything, holding nothing, heart in his throat and between his molars. “I’m just here for those baseball pants, you know me.” 

Sometimes his flirting would get her ears to go bright red, even if her eyebrows scrunched in annoyance, sometimes– even rarer– she’d crack a soft smile. The kind he never saw anywhere else except for towards Robin and sometimes Max, and the troop of overly loud freshman that seemed to hang off Stevie constantly in the hallways. Fond, almost. He liked that smile the best. 

This time, she’d just sort of looked at him. A side glance, assessing in some way he couldn’t parse. “I like when you’re here,” she’d said, like it was obvious.

He’d stopped, fingers hooked into the chain on either side of her a good few feet apart. “Oh,” he cleared his throat. “Well, good. Because if I give up my spot on the stands for too long that old guy starts trying to steal it, and my plan is to wear down the wood into exactly the shape of my ass. It’s a long term commitment.” 

“You mean Hopper?” Stevie quirked a brow at him, tilting her head to the side.

“Wait, you know him? Tell him he’ll have to fight me before I give up that spot. Me and left-row-three-levels-up seats are forming a serious bond he can’t mess with. And I bite.”

She shook her head. “You and Buckley are the same kind of weird, I swear.” 

“I resent that remark,” Robin piped up. “As a once band kid turned semi sporty weirdo, it’s entirely different than whatever the hell Munson has going on.” 

Eddie winked, “One of a kind baby.” 

“You stole my black nail polish last week,” Robin huffed. “We are not on speaking terms.”

Stevie looked soft, strangely sad around her eyes. Eddie didn’t know yet that she saw all of this like it was a revolving door half the time, that as much as Robin was a constant and a glue and an orbit, Stevie thought there was an end date to all of it. That she carried it around with her in the same way Eddie did.

“Back me up, Stevie,” he complained. “She always gets the good stuff and won’t tell me where.”

“Yeah, I don’t give out trade secrets to the enemy!” 

Stevie snorted, a quiet hum of acknowledgement. “Can’t side against my ride or die, sorry Eddie.” Stevie shrugged. “She’ll probably forgive you, though, if you stop smoking when you come over.” 

Eddie threw a hand against his chest with an overly dramatic gasp. “You cut me to the quick, the both of you.” 

Robin stuck out her tongue. “We’re up, Stevie. That was the last out.” 

Stevie cut another look Eddie’s way, faux- apologetic. Still vaguely somber in a way that had hit Eddie strange, even then. They were playing well, Stevie had only gotten a handful of base hits and a double off her, just made a run herself– it wasn’t good enough was the thing. The crucial part– it was never good enough, back then. 

The thing was, Stevie was a ball of molten fire. A rocketship, a fucking whirlwind of power and focus and killer instincts, and she was good. Eddie didn’t need to know jack shit about any of the game to know she could be on the Olympic team or wherever amazing college softball players went when they rocketed past the moon. The problem had never been that Stevie wasn’t good enough, teams fought over her half the time, wanted her pitching on whatever all star league she wanted. 

The problem was that there was always a spot in the stands during important games that Eddie caught her eyes flicking to, an extra glove in her bag she never used. That there was a space in her that could only have been carved out with time and intention, and it stuck. And she took it all in like it meant something else, something more than a shitty absent fucking father, like it said something about her. 

The problem was that Stevie would throw a pitch that went a little wild, that hit the backstop and had Robin knee sliding into it to flick the ball back towards the plate– that they’d get the play and it would be incredible because Robin and Stevie were twins in every way which meant she was damn good too– but all Stevie would see is the pitch going wide. The tally being up one ball to two strikes, the fact there had almost been a run against them at all. She’d trudge her way out to any open gym or abandoned field and just. Throw, against the wall or the backstop for hours, run through the smaller wrist flick moments and full pitches and push ups and everything, until she couldn’t anymore.

Eddie had caught her once, afterwards, trailing back into her apartment when they’d planned to hang out. Stevie was late, but Eddie had been worried because Robin wasn’t anywhere with her, so he’d pulled up shop outside her door and waited for her to stumble back into his life. She had, a heart thick and heavy with grief type of arrival. Fingers practically bleeding, exhausted in the kind of way that made her eyes look glazed over and blank. Okay, he’d thought, gathering all the threads and fractions of himself in his hands, and pulling her quietly into her guest bathroom where she kept her first aid kit.

“Give me your hands, Stevie,” he said, soft and filled up with all the things he couldn’t say out loud to her, not like this. Things that vibrated clear through with want and needs and things Stevie shouldn’t have to shoulder along with everything else. 

“Why,” she said back, flat and tired. “Just leave it.” 

He’d been frustrated, he remembers. Mainly at the way he couldn’t ever seem to say the right thing, or get the right thought to her out. The way he was normally impulsive and brash and said things that stung just to get a rise, but she’d worn down all his prickly edges just by existing as herself near him for as long as she had. 

“Just let me put a bandaid on it, okay? Jesus, Stevie,” he’d sighed. Wrong move, the wrong step. 

She’d pinched behind the eyes, tensed. “I’m not your problem, asshole. Go home.” 

“No, Stevie, that’s– what do you even mean, you’re not my problem? You’re– my friend. Course it’s my problem when you hurt yourself.” 

Wrong again. 

“Fuck off, Eddie. It’s just practice.” 

He remembered looking at her, in the too bright too white light of her bathroom, her ponytail sliding vaguely lopsided behind her, the way her mouth pressed flat and mean. The spark of panic somewhere in her flickering gaze and the flinch of her brows. She’d been beautiful then, bitter and angry and hurting, because she was trusting him, he realized. She was trying to trust him. 

Eddie breathed in, tried again. “Does Robin know where you were?” She’d been worried, she’d told Eddie that Stevie was doing this more and more often after the bad tournament– even in the winter, that she’d started going when Robin was in classes or sleeping instead of waiting for her, too. Robin not knowing what Stevie was up to felt antithesis, made her big eyes all misty and red rimmed in a way that rocked the orbit of everything as far as Eddie was concerned. 

A glare. “She’s not my keeper.” 

“No,” he conceded. “But I thought that was the whole thing, she gives you a target and all. A type of pitch. Doesn’t seem much like practice if it’s just you.” Seems like a punishment, he didn’t say. 

Stevie didn’t say anything, frowned harder and looked away. 

“Can I see your hands? Just wanna make sure it’s nothing bad.” 

She didn’t look over at him, shoulders still high, but relented. Her hand was cold in his, twitching slightly like shivers. Stevie , he thought with a drawn out sigh. He picked out her Polysporin, smoothing it carefully across the pads of her fingers with a Q-tip, peeling a bandaid around each one gently. 

“There,” he said, mostly to himself, with a forced sort of levity he didn’t feel. “All better, I can kiss ‘em if you want too. Like we’re in pre-schoo–” 

He looked up, words trailing into dust, into nothing when he saw the trails of tears on Stevie’s cheeks. 

“Oh– Stevie, hey –” 

She bit her lip hard, shaking all over. He couldn’t help but put his hand on her knee, dragging his thumb back and forth– a paper thin barrier between the wild thing in him that wanted to lean up, cradle her cheeks, make whatever this was better immediately, turn the sun directly on its axis– whatever she needed. Whatever she needed.

“I just– I need to be better, Eds.” 

He flickered his eyes between hers, trying to see what road he could take. There was a weight to this, he knew. Something careful and wispy– Stevie trusting him, it was important. A triple dog dare to do this fucking right, Munson. 

“Better how, Stevie?” 

She shuddered a breath, hunching in further and hiding her eyes. “I– baseball’s the only thing that matters to him. If I get this right, then. It’s the only thing he cares about, so.” 

Pieces, parts of a puzzle Eddie only sort of understood. Her father, maybe. He knew the man was distant as hell, that he hadn’t cared at all what school she went to, just that she had to go to one for the family reputation or something. That Eddie, after being friends with her for going on three years, didn’t even know the man’s first name, had never met him. Robin hadn’t either. 

It stung as a concept, made Eddie wince and his hand flex on her knee anyways. Stevie, picking up a hobby they shared and trying so desperately to be good at it just so maybe the man would pay attention. Would care, even. It was so achingly devoid of any of the confidence Stevie usually trailed with her, hollowed out at the center and Eddie fucking ached for it. 

“You know what I see? Every game I drag my sorry ass out there?” He swallowed, roughly. “I see the stands full of people who are there for you , Stevie. Hopper and Jonathan and the little hellions that follow you around like a mother duck, and I see a team of girls who think you’re kicking ass every day just by being there.” 

This mattered, he’d thought. This needed to matter. “Stevie, I see your family. Right where you need them to be, every time. It’s,” He sucked in a breath, hissing on the inhale. “I think it sucks, that you keep trying so hard, ‘cause everyone there knows how good you are. I– Look, I know, how good you are, and I don’t know shit about any of this.”

Stevie looked at him, eyes twinkling in the white tile bathroom lights. Shocked, bleeding all over the edges and her cold hand still in his. He soothed his thumb across her knuckles. “Is softball what you want to do, Stevie? Is it… you know, is it your music?” 

A flicker, barely there. She bit her lip again, “It’s the only thing I’m good at.” She laughed, wet and high like it hurt. 

Eddie shook his head slowly. “It’s not, you know it’s not. Honestly, look at me, genuinely, if you were terrible at something that made you happy I’d be fuckin’ cheering for you just as loud. They’d kick me out, you know they would.” 

The way she looked at him was— up close and intense, pressing a thumb into a bruise and liking the sting. Sad eyed and fucking wonderful, staring back like he was the mystery between the two of them. “You actually would, wouldn’t you?” 

He didn’t say he’d probably do most things she asked, that he was so in over his head about her that Jeff couldn’t stand it, that he’d been fully sick in the chest over the first time she’d ever said she missed him. That it still bowled him over that she could exist in the same space as him, and not think herself lovely in a million impossible ways. 

“Honey, if you told me your passion was fuckin’ minigolf, I’d be right there. I’d be the damn mascot. I’d make signs.” 

Her mouth quirked up on one side, like it always did when he was being ridiculous. Something still tragic about her, but wider. Clearer. 

“You’re something else, Munson.” She practically whispered. “I’ll think about it.”

“Minigolf?” He couldn’t help but ask. Her hand was still in his, even as she wiped her face with her other one she didn’t pull it back. 

She snorted. “Yeah, better work on your glow in the dark shit.” 

She hadn’t stopped, she was a girl built out of things like forward momentum and determination, and all the things her absent parents had filled the outline of her up with, and maybe she hadn’t known how to at all. 

The next week, she’d had the injury– tore her ACL in her shoulder mid game, because she’d been playing too hard and practicing even harder. It had been fully horrifying to watch, Eddie had climbed over the fence and thrown himself down on the shale beside her before the medic nearby had even heard the news. 

She’d ended up outside of Eddie’s apartment door again, and he’d bundled her up in a blanket and let her stare blankly into space while he called Robin from the other room and heard the news. No playing for the rest of the year, no practices for most of the next. Potentially no pitching again at all, if she didn’t rest right. 

“She wasn’t good, at the doctor. I can bring her to my dorm. My roommate won’t mind,” Robin offered, voice hushed through the phone. 

Eddie looked over at Stevie, across his living room. Piled high with comforters and a stupid rerun filling up the static between them. “I got her,” he said back, even quieter. “I won’t let her drown, Buck.” 

“I know,” she said back, confident and warbling all in one. “I’m not playing until she’s back either, the dean can stuff it. So, if she needs me.”

“You should play, Rob. She’d want you to.” 

Robin sniffed. “I’m not catching,” her voice cracked clean through the middle. “Not without her.” 

Eddie watched Stevie shift, barely there movement of blankets like she could sense Robin’s distress somehow without  hearing any of it. “Yeah,” he hummed back. “I think she knows.” 

There was an uphill climb, then. Stevie, being forced to sit and think about the trajectory of things, about who was there and which outlines remained unfilled. Eddie made her soup and tea, and sat quietly on the other end of the couch watching awful reruns and home reno channels. Making jokes when she needed, listening when she talked. 

Robin was over more than she wasn’t, in between classes. Whispering with their heads touching all leaned over towards each other like a pair of semicolons, sniffling and laughing in their own made up language. 

There were bad days and hard talks, but the ending was simple: Stevie loved ball, she loved playing when she wasn’t putting on the voice of her father in the background and taking notes internally to run through a million times later. She just. Didn’t want it to be everything. 

“I like, uh,” she’d said, holding Robin’s hand like a lifeline and leaning her head onto Eddie’s shoulder on his cramped balcony chairs. “The physical therapy lady? She does a good job, even though it's hard. I think I could do that, maybe. Help people get back up after things.” 

Robin beamed, Eddie reached up carefully to trail his hand across her shoulder comfortingly. “I think that you’d be the best damn physical therapist anyones ever seen.” 

She sniffed. “You’d say that about anything I did.” And she reached her free hand over to toy with Eddie’s, sliding her fingers in between his rings. 

“I think she’s actually gunna do it,” Dustin says, eyes huge in his face. He’s tilted back and upwards towards Eddie, practically vibrating. 

“Course she is,” Eddie says back easily, not knowing at all what ‘it’ is. 

Dustin shakes his head, curls flying all over. He’s replaced his usual hat with the team’s logo, the way he always does when he comes out to these things. Lucas leans in, too. 

“No, Eddie, the perfect game.”

Eddie’d kind of assumed a perfect game was like, a fun phrase. Like Robin and her were going to have the best time and play well– a perfect picnic or a perfect summer day kind of thing. Lucas’ eyes sparkle with a nervous awe that is echoed, Eddie realizes, across the entire diamond. Everyone holding their breath with each pitch. 

“What… what is a perfect game, explain it to me like I’m the guy who knows nothing about any of this,” he says, mouth dry suddenly. 

Lucas snorts, but doesn’t dig in thankfully. Too tense, wound up in the way his fingers clench on his knees. Mike actually looks enraptured too, for once. Usually the kid complains any time Jane isn’t on the field and wanders off to bother quarters off people for sodas and things. 

“A perfect game– all strikes, no one on base, no hits. It’s really, really hard to pull off.” 

It’s over halfway through the game by now, Eddie thinks. She’s thrown nothing but strikes since they started– the way the girls are careful around her in the dugout like she’s famous. They’re trying not to throw her off, any of the superstitions she’d carried the past few years were always so specific but entirely out the window by now. Stevie didn’t even look like she noticed, she was teasing Nancy and Max, swinging easily in the drawn in next up to bat circle like it was a regular game and not– 

“So this is a big deal then?” Eddie manages. 

Lucas nods. Dustin leans even closer, stage whispering. “This is that dream she had, the one she never talked about? It was to pitch a perfect game.” 

And now it was happening, out here in the midday sun with everyone waiting around to be delighted for her, on her first game back since the injury. 

“I gotta– I gotta get down there,” he’s scrambling down the seats before he’s finished speaking. Ignoring Mike’s hisses and Dustin’s frantic hands. They don’t know she’d given that whole thing up, that she was switching majors and loved her classes already. They don’t know that Stevie is actually enjoying this, for once, and it’s her best game ever. 

Eddie clamors over to the fence, the gap between back stop and dug out right there beside her. “Stevie,” he gasps. 

She’s smiling as she turns towards him, eyebrows pulled together like there’s some whip crack tease formulating in her mind already. He schools his expression into something smug, too. 

“Gunna get it over the fence this time?” 

She huffs a quiet laugh, the other team calls a time out so Stevie steps closer. Foreheads practically touching through the links. “See, there’s this guy I really like. And he said if I get a homerun over the fence this season, he might ask me to go steady.”

Eddie’s heart is a mess of pulpy, gooey things. It’s this girl and her smile and the smear of red dust across her cheek from the way she’d slid head first into second base last inning, and the way she’s figuring out how she loves and what she loves. It’s the fact she’s counting him in that, too. 

“Yeah? I dunno, Stevie. Maybe he’s waiting for you to ask.” 

Her eyes soften, crinkling at the edges, mole pulling up on her cheek like a kiss in the center. “Well, maybe he should get on that, then.” 

Eddie pretends to hum, hooks his finger into the fence right over her heart. “Stevie, you hit that ball over the fence and I’ll go looking for a ring.” 

“Can you just play the damn game already?” Erica yells at the other team who’s attempting to strategize against a five-to-zero lead this late in the game and failing miserably. 

“Guess that’s my queue,” Eddie leans back, watching the stunned and perfectly pink blush on Stevie’s ears. The way she doesn’t look surprised, just pleased. The way she knows he’s not really joking, either. 

The way they’d fallen together was sort of an all at once thing, a full body dive into some deep end they’d both been circling around. Stevie, curled up on his awful armchair that he’d made the band boys trek nearly half way to Chicago to pick up just because it was cheap and an ash grey color he’d thought would look cool with all the red posters and shit. Absolutely not worth it at the time, definitely worth it now for how Stevie looked sitting in it. 

She’d started the wheels rolling on this new degree, squared her shoulders and marched into her career counselors office even though the whole thing had been fraught with long conversations and anxiety up to the start. Stevie walking in like it would be a fucking battle, to do the thing she actually wanted instead of what she thought she had to do. That day, with Stevie on Eddie’s armchair, silent evening rolling in around them, marked the end of her first official day on the physical therapy track.

“I think we should order in,” she said, staring straight down at the phone in her hands that she hadn’t actually touched in the last five minutes. 

Eddie flopped, intentionally messy and casual on the couch beside her. “Sure, fuck it. Let’s go wild, pick that high end sushi place you like.” 

“Hm, okay,” Stevie’s phone screen didn’t change. “Hey, um. Eddie?” 

His heart skipped, lodged itself between his ribs. “What’s up? Don’t want sushi?” 

Stevie shook her head, tapping her other hands fingers on the arm of the chair. “I don’t know if I thanked you, for. All of this.” 

“You don’t have to.” 

“No,” she shook her head harder, jaw tightening. There was only one lamp on in the room, made Stevie’s eyes look like a flash fire. “I do. I was– I know how I get. Would have deserved it if you’d been mad.” 

“Nah,” Eddie slouched back further, nerves a live wire through him at all of this, at how tense she was. “Just wanted you to slow down, that’s all. Give some of us asthmatic out of shape assholes time to catch up.” 

Stevie laughed, a puff of a singular ‘ha’ as she looked down at her phone. Her knuckles were tight on it, bone white then red in alternating loops. The way she straightened her hands before batting, the little ritual of lining them up. 

“I think you’ve always been ahead of me.” She looked up, pinning Eddie in place with the sudden intensity in her face. “I think you’ve been more patient than you probably should have been.” 

“Never been accused of being patient before,” he tried to joke, it came out a little strangled. “Should tell that to my high school teachers, they’d be shocked.” 

“Eddie,” Stevie said, heavy and warm. Layered up with more meaning than he knew how to name, how to look at. 

Eddie swallowed, forced his mouth to work. “What are we talking about, Stevie.” 

She didn’t falter, lips quirking up in a tiny smile the way she always did at the dug out– the way she always did around him, he realized. 

“Eddie, I think you know.” 

“I think… I think I need you to tell me, if that’s. If you want to.” 

She nodded, slightly. “Okay.” Stood up, slow and careful like Eddie was a spooked animal, like there was glass and gossamer thin threads between them– kind of felt like there was, the moment expanding so far outward in Eddie’s chest he was terrified of the burst. 

Stevie leaned down towards him, her ponytail falling forward on one side. Moles on her cheek, hazel eyes wide and swimming with– 

“I’m telling you that I’m in love with you, and I think maybe you’re maybe in love with me, too.” 

God , he thought, helplessly. Wholly. Comet crashing down to earth, moment shattering across him like stardust. He reached up, shakily, clumsily. Tracked his thumb across her cheek, right where those two moles kissed. 

“I don’t know if I really know how to be anything else,” he said, too honestly. “It’s probably a lot.” 

She smiled, crinkling her nose and eyes up at the edges. Looking maybe relieved, slightly, leaning her cheek further into his hand. “Good,” she turned just enough to kiss his palm. “I like you weird.”

Pitching was easy, to Stevie. It was all momentum, the turn of the hips and the right wrist flick– gripping the ball between the right fingers, and stepping forward straight and strong. The way she’d pitched before Robin had always been about speed– it didn’t matter if you could throw a good curve or riser if you were slow in her mind. If you threw the fastest pitch in the league, no one would be able to hit it. 

The day Robin had sized her up, gave her an unimpressed head tilt and smacked her glove on her hand, changed things. Made her think about it differently, about what pitch was smarter. She’d never played nearly as good before as she did with Robin. 

Speed mattered, but so did getting the right drop at the right moment, so did trusting the pitch to sail exactly where it needed to be. Getting the cut of speed last minute to throw the batter so entirely off they swung before the ball even crossed the plate was somehow even as satisfying as the pop of a 70 mph pitch directly into the thick of the glove padding across from her. It was even better when she had someone staring back looking just as delighted as she felt, too. 

Softball had always been the thing Stevie had in her corner, the thing she was good at. School was up and down, the future was a terrifying pit of probable business school and math that floated off the page half the time, friends were either nonexistent or expected her to behave a certain way that often meant tearing whoever was closest down. She pictured her life like a teeter totter, if her grades weren’t plummeting, something in her social life certainly was. Softball was just the fulcrum the rest of it sat on, the fall back star player confidence boost with the captain title that made her feel important. Her teammates always came to her parties, and laughed at her jokes, so what happened in the hallways didn’t matter. 

When she got older, it started getting harder to pretend life stopped on the diamond, that the seats where her parents never filled alongside where the other girls’ families were, wasn’t so obvious. It started being less of something she was naturally good at, and something she had to be. 

She had a coach once tell her on a bad day that she was playing down to the other girls’ level, like she was up on a pillar a thousand miles high. Unobtainable and untouchable. Like she wasn’t supposed to care about being their friend, or about being a team, maybe, because that mattered less than maintaining perfection. What mattered was making something out of herself, and if this was all she had to offer then this had to be it. The stardust potential was built out of, or so they say. She’d kind of looked at it like a weight and an anchor, and maybe let it drag her under with it, too. 

When things went wrong, she practiced. Didn’t matter where or how, it was just. Something she could do. A routine and a known outcome, perfect it until it worked the way it was supposed to. 

When she was stressed about that one class with the prof that hated her for no reason? Work on her swing. When she fucked up and said something stupid in front of the kids? Exercise, do some push ups. When Eddie had looked at her that particular way, made the knot in her chest wrap itself so tight around her throat she could barely breathe? Call Robin, and then work on relay drills until her legs shook. 

Maybe a bit about control, maybe a bit about whittling herself down until only the good stuff remained, but it worked, didn’t it? Well. Robin and Eddie didn’t seem to think so, Nancy and Max either. 

Max had actually caught her mid batting practice once – whiffle ball and net set up in the tiny off shoot grassy area behind her apartment that sort of served as a backyard, how Max knew about it at all was a mystery. 

“Anyone ever tell you there’s a limit to how much you can work on things?” She said, hopping up to sit on the low stone barrier and nearly scaring Stevie half to death in the process. 

“No,” she grunted back, listening to the satisfying ting of the ball on her metal bat. Sailed right into the center, shit. She’d been aiming for the left field corner in her mind. 

“Well, it’s true. Think about, like, a watercolor painting, right? You keep trying to work on it, you’ll tear right through the canvas.” 

“Sports aren’t like a piece of shitty paper, Max.” 

She could hear Max’s eye roll from behind her. “You ever heard of a metaphor, smartass? I’m just saying, if you keep working without resting it might fuck you up more than it helps.” 

Stevie glowered at the net, thought about sending that yellow ball on a real diamond straight over the outfield fence and into the next field over. About how her one memory of her father that didn’t sting was the time he’d taken her to a baseball game, talked about this team having the best batting average. The pitcher who’s fastball beat the league. 

“Great, well. If that happens, which it won’t, you can say I told you so. Happy?” 

“No,” she sighed back, neutrally enough. “How long are you gunna do this for, anyway? Pretty sure they could make textbooks out of your form.” 

Jesus. “I dunno, until it’s right.” 

She squinted at her, Stevie could feel it on the side of her face. “And right, to you, is…?”

Stevie sighed, dropped her stance and whirled around. “Right is, you know, right! To anyone. I should be able to direct it to whatever side of the outfield I want, okay? It’s in the hips and the– you know this, why are you bothering me anyways.” 

She shrugged. “Thought maybe you could watch me pitch a few. Tell me how my change up is coming.” 

“You don’t even need a change up, your rise is killer.” Stevie pinched between her brows. She didn’t even really know what time it was, but the sun was still fairly high in the sky at least. 

“Duh.” She rolled her eyes. “It’s not really about that, though. What if my rise is having an off day? Good to have more skills in my Batman belt.” 

“You’ve been hanging around too much with Henderson,” she shook her head. 

She hopped off the wall, circling around Stevie until she forced her to make eye contact. Bright blue and strangely serious. “Look, okay? Just– you’re good. You’re really good. If I want to be like you one day I–”

“You don’t want to be like me,” Stevie snapped. “Just, do your own thing. You’re doing fine.” 

“I’m not the starter, though! Everyone wants to be the starter, come on.” 

Stevie tilted her head back, looked up at the tree leaves above, the clouds beyond. Maybe, somewhere out there was peace and quiet and an ounce of patience left. “You want me to help you take my gig?” 

She let out a frustrated noise. “No, jackass. I want you to teach me how you do it , so I can take over when you inevitably go to the Olympics or get a brand deal or something, obviously. Or when you break your whole arm off because you can’t take a break. Team needs someone to take over if you’re off being the worst ever.” 

She paused. Max actually looked a little hunched inwards, when she thought about it. Nervous, in the way she paced. “I’m– hey, Max, I’m not leaving you. Where’d that come from? I got a whole year or two still, what’s– are you worried about that? Really?”

“I’m not– fuck you, I’m not worried.” 

“Sure, course you’re not. How’d you find me here anyways?”

“Robin said you come out here when you get told to stop at the gym and the field.”

“Jesus–” Stevie sighed. “What, is everyone on my case now? I’m fine. ” 

“You’re not !” Max’s lower lip jutted out, wavered. Her voice echoed off the brick wall and the trees, making her eyes widen like the sound of it surprised her too. 

Stevie lifted a hand onto Max’s shoulder, half instinctive, half panic. “Max–”

Max shook her head and glared up at her, watery eyed which stunned Stevie straight through like a knife. “You do this every day. This thing, where you work your ass off and it hurts you, and Robin worries and so does everyone else. And I don’t get it, but I know it sucks for you, and it will suck when it hurts you really bad, too. I just thought, maybe if I could take over some of the time, you wouldn’t need to.” She sniffed. “I’m a reliever. I’m supposed to relieve you, can you just let me do my job?” 

Stevie— there was a fracture, right in her center. Something that widened every day with these people and the aggressive way they loved and didn’t stop loving. She hadn’t considered, though. The way Stevie never seemed to love them the right way back. 

She let out a long breath, dropped her head. “It’s my job to do it right the first time.” 

“Says who,” Max glared. “Pretty sure no one can be perfect all the time, asshole.” 

“Eh, you do a pretty good job,” Stevie smiled. A peace offering. Max snorted, shaking her head. 

“Just take a break, will you? Please?” 

Stevie bit her lip, fighting back a million arguments that would flatten themselves under the force of her glare, just tiny speedbumps that would only make her mad. No, not mad. Upset. 

Not helpful arguments about how it didn’t matter if she got hurt because she’d be done then, and none of this would be for anything, and it would be over anyways. Like how there was a railroad track she’d always been on, and it had always pointed one way and the breaks were jammed and one day it would crash. 

“One condition.” She said, holding out her pinky like the cheesy older lady these kids always made fun of her for being. “Only way I’m walking off that field is if you or Nancy are taking me off, got it? So you gotta be ready for that.” 

“Fine. Yeah. Only because Nancy hates pitching so you’ll be stuck there forever.” 

Love translated in silly ways, absolutely aggravating and quiet ways that sometimes hit her brain wrong. Translated as over protectiveness, condescension laced with patronization an entire skyscraper wide. But at the center, it was just– Max, her big watering eyes she pretended were dry as bone, finding her out behind an old building, telling her to stop trying to leave them. At the center was a young kid she’d only known for a handful of months, worrying. 

“Sounds like a deal, kid.” 

There was this quiet moment, on the pitcher’s mound with her fingers lined along the seams of the ball, where everything shifted sideways. Staring down across the field, right into Robin’s steel trap gaze behind her mask, brain and lungs and heart a full circle of white noise. Right before Robin lifted her glove, slapped a number down with her bright bandaid covered fingers, and smiled just somewhere in the eyes. It was like everything else faded out, the beat of her heart in her ears and Robin’s voice in her mind going ‘same as always; don’t make me block, asshole.’

It was the line between her and Robin, that cosmic twin thing Erica rolled her eyes over. The thread that kept her from spinning out into the inky black of every other part of the damn wormhole in her head– just the glove, just the next pitch, just the next call. 

She could do this forever, she thinks. Just this, just her and Bobbin and the next pitch.

“Three!” The ump calls, right over the thwack of the ball against Robin’s glove. Robin, already standing up, spins around and pulls her mask off before the batter has even left the box. 

“You better be looking up a ring, stupid,” she shouts, pointing at Eddie in the stands. “Stevie’s hitting that fuckin’ homerun next.”

It pulls a laugh out of her, the way Eddie dutifully salutes and pulls out his phone, and the kids crow and screech around him; it makes some part of her chest unlock like fireworks cascading into each other between her ribs. He’s joking, he’s obviously joking. He’d said– not until Stevie graduated, and he’d been joking about that too. Except, Stevie did linger a little too long sometimes on the wedding dress Tiktoks that crossed her feed sometimes. She did look down at her hands and imagine something silver and bright.

She did love Eddie Munson, in a kind of careening, over loud way that was insane and everything she wanted. Seems kind of simple, like that. 

She shakes her head as Robin trudges up to her, slapping her shoulder with her gloved hand. “You gotta get it now after that, or Erica’s never going to let me live that down.” 

“I’ve literally never once gotten a ball over the fence, once.”

“Today is magic,” Robin spins as she says it, arms wide. It’s clunky with her knee savers and the thick pads on her shins. “It’s going to happen. I’m making it happen by thinking it.”

She snorts, high fives Jane on her way back into the dugout, slaps her mitt into Vickie’s. “Why’s today magic? It’s just the first game of the season, don’t get weird on me.” 

“Me? Weird?” Robin scoffs, offended, simultaneously kicking her leg up so her cleats hook on the fence links so she can slap another sticker on the upper thigh part of the pads. It’s a Garfield sticker, they’re all Garfield stickers– she won’t explain the meaning. 

“Right. Don’t know what I was thinking,” Stevie acquiesces, hand to her heart in apology. 

There is an energy, though, now that she thinks about it. Stevie knows she’s playing well, some intrinsic part of her always takes note when she’s playing well. Even though it matters less, now, with the bite of it removed. She’s hedging towards something big like her best game ever, but the other girls are giving her the wide berth she always claimed to want before. Back when it made more sense to not wash her jersey’s for three weeks just to make sure their winning streak didn’t fade. Even though Robin complained angrily about the stench and the caked on layers of shale dust. Eddie had found it hot at least, probably because he was an absolute lunatic on a regular day. 

Nancy’s even giving her space, a point she makes sure to trample over by leaning her shoulder into hers. 

“What do you think? This girls’ pitches good enough for an out of the park homerun?” 

Nancy side eyes her with a smile, taps at her chin thoughtfully. “I think… if you aim for one of the lower ones?” She glances over at Robin and trades a sly wink. “Definitely doable.” 

She feels vaguely ganged up upon, vaguely loved in her favorite silently loud ways. “Heavy bat?” 

Nancy shakes her head. “Want the swing to come around faster, go for the medium one. Longer barrel, it’ll pop in the sweet spot. Trust me.”

“Always do,” Stevie says, warmly. They have one inning left, home team and last up to bat. She’s got one, maybe two chances to try this out. The her from two years ago would be nauseous with stress, shoving it all down behind a brick wall that made her look mean on the outside. The her from last year would be fraying apart at the seams. 

Now, Stevie grabs the bat Max holds out to her, and gives it a twirl that makes Max grin big and wide. 

“Batter up!” 

Stevie steps up towards the plate, sun high in the sky above her. The smattering cheers and calls blend together the way they always do, that pit in her stomach settling into something concrete, cocky and spiteful in the right ways. 

She points the bat out at the stands before stepping into the box. “Better be watching, Munson.” 

Eddie’s thrilled expression is everything, it’s what she wants to see every day, every game. She’s insanely lucky she has. “Always am, hot stuff.” 

“Gross,” Mike complains loudly from behind. 

Stevie settles back in, sliding her feet across the shale. Shoulder length apart, hands resting on the bat, knuckles lined up. She doesn’t obsessively check them, this time, trusting her natural rhythm. Murray gives her a grin from the side lines, a wink and a shrug– ‘you know what you want to do, maniac’. 

Stevie smirks back, snapping her focus to the pitcher. It’s a younger girl, someone who’d worked her way up into reliever somewhere between seasons– hard to do, with this league. Meant she’d practiced long and hard on the off seasons. She also liked to throw low, and her drops didn’t drop enough. 

It had been a running joke, years ago– a homerun out of the park the way the MLB league did. Pointing to a spot over the fence before you swung like you were so sure it would land, leisurely jogging around the bases. She flicks her eyes to the spot between two trees, just over the left fielders hat. 

“Aiming for a perfect game, huh?” The catcher says, leaning down into a crouch. “Never seen anyone do it, gunna be pretty cool.” 

Huh, Stevie realizes. She guesses she was. Thinking back, there hadn’t been any balls called, had there. No fouls or first base hits. They only had 9 more pitches to go to make that possible. A perfect game. That was an insane thought. This was her best game already though, wasn’t it? Whether or not that portion happened, she’d never pitched this many true strikes in a row, never had so many risers crest exactly right or curves swing around the perfect way. 

It’s the kind of revelation that would have meant everything to her, just starting out at a new school– trying to prove something to a ghost of herself that would never matter enough anyways. A younger her might have thought it would mean something, like a cosmic aligning of the stars or a do over button that would make everything seem worth it. Like the bloodied knuckles and broken bones and quiet dislocations were all steps up to this exact moment, like this wouldn’t have happened without them.

Now? 

She tightens her knuckles. Focuses carefully on Robin’s holler of ‘fuck off and crush it already’ and Max’s ‘put your money where your mouth is’, Eddie’s wolf whistle and Joyce’s cheerful ‘you got this, sweetie’. 

Sort of feels like she has everything right here anyways. 

“Would be pretty great, yeah.” She says to the catcher, readying up. It feels good, the electric confidence in her bones. Sits right on her, she thinks. 

It’s going to have to top the home run she’s going to hit next, is the thing. She’s pretty sure it’ll be an over the fence one, too.