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Chapter Text

Cody has wanted to be a ballplayer since she knew how to hold a bat.

Playing baseball with her family – her twin brother Rex, and their four younger siblings – was their main source of entertainment growing up in Moose Jaw. There were plenty of farm chores to go around, but otherwise not a lot of fun to be had. Their mother could pitch like Babe Ruth, or so Cody thought, and there was no one around who’d seen Ruth play to say otherwise. Their father would mostly watch, there being not a lot of baseball where he’d grown up in Aotearoa. But once in a while he could be egged into playing. He could swing a bat, too, would sometimes send the only baseball they could scrounge up flying clear out into the oat fields.

The rest of their rag-tag group would take turns playing the infield, arguing over who got to play shortstop. Sometimes Cody would play first, or center field. But more often than not, she would catch.

By the time she got older, she’d figured out there wasn’t much of a future in it. Especially after Jango died. She still played when she could, between mornings at the feed store and afternoons splitting wood. Moose Jaw had plenty of hard work for a young woman in trousers, with shoulders as broad as her brothers’ and short curly hair she kept up off her neck most of the time. She’d gone to see a barnstorming team play in Sasktatoon once with Wolffe and Rex. The men in their baggy uniforms didn’t do much for her, but she’d loved the silent communication between pitcher and catcher, the swing on dead air when it went right, the crack of the bat when it went wrong.

The few other women in the stands wore flowered blouses and pleated skirts. They looked at Cody from under their wide-brimmed hats and murmured, clutching their husbands’ arms.

Cody doesn’t make it that far from home again until 1943. One Sunday, she sees an advertisement in the Moose Jaw Times-Herald that shouts, “GIRLS’ BASEBALL TRYOUTS – ALL AMERICAN GIRLS PROFESSIONAL BASEBALL LEAGUE – $45 / WEEK IF CHOSEN”.

It’s a fortune. Maybe even enough to send Boba for a proper education. With Jessie and Fox strong enough now for the family to run the farm without her, Cody gets on a train and doesn’t look back.

The tryouts in Chicago are a dream it never occurred to Cody to have. There are hundreds of girls there, from all over the Americas. Plenty of them are in trousers, dust in their hair, dripping in sweat and as at home on the field as Cody is. 

The coaches pair up pitchers and catchers for a variety of exercises. Cody first catches for a young woman named Tina Shaak, who throws fire. Cody’s hand is smarting after twenty of Tina’s pitches. Tina’s control isn’t as good as Cody’s used to, but none of the pitches make it by her, despite half of them coming in nowhere near where Cody’s set up.

A coach blows a whistle and Tina is replaced by Kit, who has long wavy hair and a wide smile. Her curveball is as pretty as she is, but Cody knows better than to get caught looking.

The whistle blows again.

A redhead in a blue and white uniform takes Kit’s place.

She doesn’t stop to introduce herself, just takes her place sixty feet and six inches away. When the coach blows the whistle again, the redhead winds up.

Her motion is tight and contained until it explodes into a sudden burst of power. The ball is in Cody’s glove with a pop before she even has time to process how it got there.

Cody shifts her weight and tosses the ball back. The redhead comes set again, winds, and delivers. Pop, goes the ball in Cody’s mitt.

From where Cody is set up, it looks like a two-seam fastball. Not as hard as Tina’s four-seamer, but whoever this is, she’s still getting impressive velocity, with much better control. And something about her delivery seems to reverberate with Cody’s own sense of rhythm: release, catch, return, wind up, release, catch, return. It feels right.

After ten or so two-seamers, the redhead pauses. She leans in for a long moment, squinting at Cody through the dust as if trying to decide something. Finally, she stands up again. “Going to throw some sliders,” she calls out. “Try to keep up.”

Sliders. Also called slide balls. They’re a new type of pitch, one Cody has heard about on the radio, but probably never seen, certainly never caught. Rex tried to learn to throw one after reading about them in a magazine, but he never quite got it to work.

The first pitch comes smoothly out of the redhead’s hand. It just looks like another fastball at first. But as Cody waits, glove outstretched, she realizes it’s sailing through the air more slowly, though still faster than a curveball. As it approaches the plate, it starts to run horizontally. Cody has to react quickly to reach to her right and haul it in. But she does, too many years of catching her siblings’ wild pitches under her belt to miss a soft pitch just because of a little bit of unexpected break. She tosses the ball back to the redhead… who immediately does it again.

It takes a few pitches for Cody to fully appreciate what she’s catching. These slide balls, they look exactly like fastballs – until they don’t. Because they’re slower and have so much late break, they’ll be the perfect setup for opposing batters to swing on air.

The redhead keeps on throwing, varying her pitches now, keeping Cody on her toes since any given pitch could be a fastball or a slider. The contrast nearly takes Cody’s breath away. If this is what modern pitching is like, Cody wants in.

The whistle blows.

The redhead turns to move on. But Cody can’t let her go without knowing anything about her.

“Wait,” she calls out. “What’s your name?’

The redhead turns back. Cody takes a few steps toward her, finally close enough to really see her face. Dimpled chin, high cheekbones, blue eyes. Her hair unfurls from the sides of her cap in fashionable auburn waves. Despite being a pitcher, her fingernails look manicured.

“Kenobi,” the redhead answers. “Obi-Wan Kenobi.”

“I’m Cody Fett.” Cody smiles hesitantly. “Seems like we make a pretty good battery.”

Kenobi regards her with an unreadable expression. “I’m sorry, but I already have a throwing partner.”

The whistle blows again, and Cody doesn’t argue.

She moves through batting drills next, then fielding: scanning the sky for pop-ups, throwing out imaginary base-stealers. There are about two dozen other catchers alongside her for the drills. It’s not difficult to figure out which one of them is Kenobi’s throwing partner. Annie Skywalker, from Albuquerque, is a too-tall catcher who always swings for the fences. She and Kenobi put their heads together between every exercise. They don’t always seem like they’re on the same page, though – Skywalker gesticulating wildly, Kenobi shaking her head. One thing is for sure, they both have the same batting stance, the same impressive power in the batter’s box. Kenobi looks a few years older than Skywalker. Cody wonders if Kenobi taught her to hit.

After multiple rounds of cuts through the day, with Cody always still standing, the coaches announce that the final decisions will be posted in a half hour. As they wait for the lists to go up, Cody can’t help but second-guess if she plays as well as she’s always thought.

It turns out that hard-hitting catchers who can pop up fast enough to throw out a runner nine times out of ten are a hot commodity. When the infield dust settles, Cody finds herself a Rockford Peach.

Not everyone who catches her eye at tryouts winds up on the same team she does – Annie Skywalker goes to Kenosha. Tina Shaak and her shoulders broader than Cody’s land in South Bend. But plenty of great players wind up in Rockford with Cody. Kit, for one, with her wide smile and memorable curves of multiple kinds. There’s little Ahsoka Tano, whose pigtails will fool you into taking your eye off her and the next thing you know she’s stolen two bases. And Aayla Secura, who can make any catch in the outfield, even if the ball is already over the wall.  And, last on the Rockford list… Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Their new life in Rockford, IL isn’t exactly what Cody expected. But it’s a reality that she can learn to live with. She has to.

One of the first team activities they’re subjected to is deportment class. Cody finds herself leaving the first session with half her eyebrows waxed off. The chaperone reads off a list of rules – skirts at all times in public. High heels at all times when off the field. No alcohol, no smoking, no men without a chaperone.

At least the last one won’t be particularly difficult for Cody.

She dreads the hair and makeup sessions. Though the league is integrated, no one seems to have told whoever’s providing the cosmetics. And Cody, having successfully avoided makeup her whole life, doesn’t have any of her own to substitute. Ahsoka and Kit find a Black beauty shop across town, and Cody tags along, navigating her options with a resigned sort of desperation. She learns to apply foundation and lipstick for the first time in the mirror of their house’s communal bathrooms. Her hair has grown long enough to tuck it into a bun, so she does, as much as she can, to shield her curls from the chaperones’ scrutiny. All in all, the products Ahsoka points her to aren’t quite right for Cody, but they’re closer than anything the league provides. And all Cody wants to do is the bare minimum, to keep herself from being kicked off the team for unladylike behavior.

Coming into the season, Cody owns a total of two skirts. She buys a single pair of low heels to go with them. The chaperones tsk at her at first, but as she manages to follow their rules, eventually they leave her alone. In the house, she can wear what she likes – her usual trousers and comfortable work shirts. But in public, she wears what they tell her to, and avoids her reflection in windows she walks past. The feminized version of herself she sees there makes her stomach turn.

The uniforms, when they first try them on, are a nightmare all of their own. Dresses, for ballplayers. Dresses.

At least they aren’t restrictive to run in. And Cody still feels the most like herself with her catcher’s pads strapped on. They help hide the skirt when she looks down at herself. Her gear is its own type of armor, showing the world that she does her job and does it well. Cody is a catcher, a damn good one, and under her mask she can get away with skipping the make-up on game days.

The other girls on the team take the required femininity with varying degrees of comfort and discomfort. The third baseman, a skinny angular white woman named Siri Tachi, hates it even more than Cody does. She wears trousers nearly every day, never a smudge of makeup, and the chaperones fine her every time she leaves the house. The first baseman, Quinn Vos, racks up a fair number of fines as well, though not as many as Siri. It gives Cody heart – makes her feel less alone. If she could afford the fines, she’d be doing everything Siri does and then some. But every extra penny needs to go home to Moose Jaw for Boba’s schooling. It’s a waste, Cody knows, to jeopardize that over her own backwards version of vanity.

Still… she avoids her reflection in public, and tries to spend as much time with Siri and Quinn on team outings as she can.

And then there’s Obi-Wan Kenobi, the red-headed pitcher from tryouts who turns out to be from Boston. She sails through their deportment classes without a fashionably-curled hair out of place. Her vowels are clipped, her lipstick is flawless, and she’s never said a word to Cody that wasn’t strictly about the game.

It isn’t just Cody. Kenobi is distant with everyone. Never impolite, just coolly aloof. She does her stretches and her warmups alone, and at the house she usually keeps to her room. The rest of the team seems to think she’s just haughty. Pitchers, Cody learns, are allowed their eccentricities.

To Cody, Kenobi seems more mysterious than eccentric. The Peaches all take turns bringing the mail to the post office whenever they’re going into town, and on the days when she picks up the pile, Cody notices a lot of outgoing letters with Kenobi’s name on the return address. When she sorts through the incoming post, though, looking for mail from her own siblings, it’s rare that there’s something in the mail for Kenobi in response to all the letters she sends.

So Kenobi writes letters, and talks to almost no one on the team, especially not Cody. On the field, though… they hardly need to talk. When Kenobi is sixty feet and six inches away from Cody, it’s like their minds become one. Batter after batter, pitch after pitch. Cody calls ‘em, and Kenobi puts ‘em away. As smoothly as she moves in high heels, on the field Kenobi is all angles, sharp elbows and knees as she whips her fastball, mixes in her slider, and then finishes batters off by dropping in her devastating curve.

One night in June, Kenobi takes a no-hitter into the seventh. She and Cody are so locked in, it feels like they hardly need the signs. They’re up 3-0 on the Fort Wayne Daisies. Two of those runs were driven in on one swing of Cody’s bat in the second, and she’s still feeling the zing of it up her arm. Meanwhile, Ahsoka is running circles around the Daisies’ battery, stealing three bases in the first four innings.

Cody jogs out for the eighth inning as a light drizzle blows in over the field.

The ball is clammy in Cody’s mitt. Rainwater trickles off her mask and down the back of her neck every time she moves her head. Kenobi never flinches.

On what should be the third out of the eighth, the rain-slicked baseball slides out of Ahsoka’s mitt and the Daisies’ runner beats her throw to first, and the no-hitter is gone just like that.

Kenobi doesn’t flinch, just puts the next batter away on three pitches.

The mood is relatively somber in the clubhouse after the game, considering it’s a win. Ahsoka looks like she’s about to cry when Kenobi strides into the locker room. She doesn’t make eye contact, just stares into her locker. Kenobi takes the long way around the room toward the showers, stopping by Ahsoka’s locker.

There’s rainwater in rivulets streaming down either side of her face. Her hair is flattened down, stick-straight, and her uniform is sticking to her skin. Cody can make out the seams of her brassiere from across the room.

As the whole locker room watches, Kenobi claps Ahsoka on the shoulder.

“Beer’s on me tonight,” Kenobi announces loudly. “Good win. Let’s do it again tomorrow.”

The tension seeps out of Ahsoka’s body and she sits down on the bench with a thump. Kenobi squeezes her shoulder one more time and heads off to the showers.

Kenobi keeps her promise. It’s the most Cody has ever seen her interact with the rest of the team. By the time Ahsoka goes to bed that night, she’s smiling again.

Kenobi goes back to her hermit-like ways again afterward. No one seems to mind much.

They’re playing well, as June gives way to July. Winning more games than they lose, laughing together and bruising together and hitting home runs halfway to the moon. Cody thinks she could play baseball for the rest of her life and die happy.

They’re playing well. Just not tonight.

There’s a runner on first, and a runner on third, and Kenobi does not have a handle on her curveball.

Cody can see it, the Peaches’ manager, Mace Windu, can see it, and hell, the entire goddamn Racine Belles dugout can see it. What Cody doesn’t know is why.

Kenobi spits. Drags rosin over her hands. Tosses that godforsaken curly hair back out of her face. Purses her bright red lips as she leans in to see the sign Cody’s putting down.

Cody calls for a fastball. Kenobi shakes her off.

Cody calls for a slider. Kenobi shakes her off again.

Cody refuses to call for a curve.

She puts down the signal for a fastball again. Kenobi shakes her head furiously, curls bouncing.

The runner on third – a Belles outfielder named Ventress – creeps a little further down the third base line.

Cody signals for a slider again, and without responding, Kenobi winds up and throws.

It’s a curveball, unannounced, and Cody has just enough time to realize she’s furious before the ball skitters over her head to the backstop and she has to go sprinting after it.

Ventress is hurtling down the third base line by the time Cody gets her glove on the ball. Kenobi is sprinting in to cover home, but Cody is closer, and she already has the ball in her hand. Cody throws herself into the basepath, dropping into a crouch as Ventress hits the ground in a slide.

Cody reaches down, and through the flying dirt, Ventress aims her spikes up, and then Cody’s mask is gone and her face is on fire.

She squeezes the ball in her mitt as she hits the ground, vision red.

Sound starts to bleed into her consciousness first. The crowd, roaring like she’s never heard them. Someone calling her name. Windu’s deep voice cutting through the higher pitched shouts of her teammates.

There’s a sudden pressure on the side of her face that still feels like it’s aflame. She blinks open her right eye to see their thousand-year-old chaperone, Miss Nu, crouching over her, eyes wide. Behind Miss Nu’s shoulder – a blur of red curls. Ventress, bleeding from her nose. A sprawl of limbs.

Cody grabs blindly at her face, where Miss Nu is holding what must be a handkerchief over her left eye. She pushes away reaching hands and sits up, holding the hanky in place. The world swims again.

When the vision in her right eye clears, three members of the grounds crew are pulling a snarling Kenobi off of Ventress. Kenobi kicks out with her pale legs, red bloomers flashing as she flails. There’s a knot of Peaches and Belles gathered around them, shouting invectives. In the distance, the bullpen approaches en masse, skirts flapping.

The Belles’ coaches seem to be inserting themselves between the teams, trying to prevent them from coming to further blows. Windu bellows at the head umpire, face close and spit flying.

Cody’s face throbs.

Kenobi looks her way and her eyes widen. In a sudden wrenching move, she frees herself from the men trying to hold her back. Then she’s at Cody’s side, crouching down.

“Are you all right?” Kenobi asks urgently. She has lipstick on her teeth, a split over her right cheekbone.

“You tell me,” Cody says dully, and lifts away the already-sodden hanky. Kenobi’s ensuing gasp tells her everything she needs to know.

Kenobi joins Windu in shouting at the ump, and Cody can just make out “She needs to go to hospital!” in between the ump’s furious pronouncements that both Kenobi and Windu are ejected from the game.

With Miss Nu at one elbow and Kenobi at the other, Cody finds herself lifted to her feet and walked off the field. There’s a surge of crowd noise as she goes, and Cody can only hope it’s sympathetic.

In the locker room, Cody can feel herself swaying. Kenobi stands by her, keeping an iron grip on her elbow, as Miss Nu pulls out a first aid kit.

“I think this will need rather more than I can do here,” she says grimly, swapping out the saturated handkerchief for a wad of cotton bandage. Kenobi reaches up and presses it in place as Miss Nu continues, “I wonder if Mr. Windu might have his car handy?”

Windu clatters into the locker room behind them. “He might,” he snaps. “And since he’s been ejected from this goddamn game, he has nothing better to do. Miss Nu, you’re in charge while I’m gone. Kenobi, get out of my sight.”

“I will not,” Kenobi says hotly. “If you’re taking her to the hospital, I’m coming with you.”

Windu regards the two of them for a long moment. Cody looks back at him with her good eye. She frankly doesn’t care who goes with her as long as they go now.

Cody sits in the back seat of Windu’s car, holding her own bandage on. At first she sits up, Kenobi a few feet away and clearly watching her. But when they go around their first curve and Cody, half blind and more than a little dizzy, almost goes flying into the front seat, Kenobi grabs onto her and forces her to lie down.

There are probably worse place to bleed to death than with your head in a gorgeous redhead’s lap. But it’s possible that’s the blood loss, putting ideas in Cody’s head.

When they reach the hospital, the nurse takes one look at Cody, clicks her tongue, and forces her to lie down on a gurney. Windu leaves at that point, but Kenobi stays, hovering. She doesn’t seem to know where to look.

The nurse – a businesslike woman who introduces herself as Vokara – cleans the blood off Cody’s face, which stings to high hell.

“You’re very lucky,” Vokara says finally. “Whatever this was, it missed your eye.”

“A cleat,” Cody says dully.

Vokara’s eyebrows go up to her hairline. She has to have noticed their uniforms, but she doesn’t ask. Cody assumes she’s seen everything at least once before.

She calls in one of the doctors – he introduces himself as Dr. Trevor – and the two of them set to work stitching up Cody’s face.

If Cody had thought the cleaning part had hurt, that was nothing on the sewing.

She grits her teeth, but can’t entirely suppress the yelp that makes its way out with the first pass of the needle. A warm hand slides into hers. Cody doesn’t think, just squeezes hard as the needle comes through for another stitch. It must be Kenobi’s hand, and why she’s still there, Cody doesn’t know. But she stays the whole time, and doesn’t protest, even when the bones in her hand must be grinding together.

Afterward, the doctor bustles out, and Vokara holds up a hand mirror so Cody can see her face again for the first time.

There’s a neat line of black stitches that curve above her left eye, around it, and down her cheek. Her eye is swollen nearly shut. With the blood washed off, she can see out of it just well enough to agree with Vokara: She is lucky.

Through it all, Kenobi keeps hold of her hand. Her face is white as a sheet and her mouth is pinched. But she doesn’t say anything. Not when Vokara leaves to tell Windu they’re ready to go. Not even when Cody turns her face toward the wall, so her tears will run away from the stitches, and finally lets herself cry.

They hear the final score on the radio on the long drive back to the team’s house. Belles 5, Peaches 1.

Kenobi helps her up the porch steps, though Cody feels a lot more steady by then. Drained, more than anything, but less dizzy. They’re still in their uniforms and dusty cleats.

“I’m sorry,” Kenobi says quietly into the darkness of the front hall.

Cody looks at her, puzzled. “What for?”

“If I hadn’t thrown that wild pitch, Ventress never would’ve been stealing.” She looks ashen as she says it. “This is all my fault.”

In all that’s happened, Cody had completely forgotten about the wild pitch. “I was angry you shook me off,” she says at last, “but it isn’t your fault Ventress slid dirty. That’s no one’s fault but hers.”

Kenobi seems determined to argue. Her forehead creases. “I should never have shaken you off. I didn’t have a feel for the curve.”

“You shouldn’t have, and you sure didn’t. And don’t think I’ll forget it. But you still weren’t the one who cut my face up.” Cody squints at her. “But what the hell did you do the rest of it for, anyway?”

“Do what?” Kenobi asks, looking lost.

“Go after Ventress. Get yourself suspended. Come to the hospital with me.” Cody gestures uselessly between the two of them. “You don’t even like me.”

Kenobi shoots her a sideways look, not quite a glare, but almost. “Is that what you think?” Her tone is bitter.

Cody doesn’t know what to say to that. As her face gives a throb, suddenly she’s too tired to ask. Shaking her head, she trudges up the stairs to bed, leaving Kenobi behind.

The next day, Cody and Kenobi watch the game from the dugout. It turns out Kenobi is suspended seven games for breaking Ventress’ nose. As for Cody, she can’t even put her catcher’s mask on again until the stitches come out in ten days’ time.

Cody supposes she’s grateful they’re allowed to watch. Her eye is even more swollen today, and her face aches every time she tries to smile. And she absolutely hates being benched.

It takes approximately one day in the dugout together to realize that Kenobi hates it even more. While Cody spends every inning leaning on the dugout rail, charting pitches and updating her scouting cards, Kenobi sits on the bench, legs crossed at the ankle and a bored expression on her face. Every so often she’ll make a little “tch” noise under her breath.

Kit’s pitching. In the third inning, when Kit allows the game’s first run on a safety squeeze, Kenobi uncrosses her ankles. She sits with her legs sprawled out, ignoring the scandalized glances Miss Nu sends her way.

In the sixth, when Ahsoka gets thrown out at third for her first caught-stealing of the season, Kenobi joins Cody at the rail.

“Her timing there was awful,” Kenobi says crossly.

Cody glances over her way. Other than the deep furrow between her brows, Kenobi looks exactly as she usually does: uniform perfectly pressed, immaculate pin curls, arched eyebrows and red lipstick. Of course, by this point in a game, she’s usually a little dustier and a lot sweatier.

“Would you have had her stealing there at all?” Cody asks curiously. With the Peaches down 3-2, they need to manufacture runs any way they can. On the other hand, they don’t have outs to waste on the basepaths.

“Yes, I would have. But she was going on the fastball.” Kenobi gestures toward the opposing pitcher. “Look at how long it takes this pitcher to get out of her curveball follow-through. That’s the pitch to run on.”

Racine’s pitcher throws a curve. Sure enough, she finishes the motion with her legs completely at loose ends and her face practically in her shoulder. Cody’s never been much of a base-stealer – squatting for nine innings makes that difficult – but she has to have an eye for it to manage the pick-offs, and she’s glad she doesn’t have to catch that curve.

Siri comes up to bat with the bases empty and two out.

Kenobi sighs. “I hope Siri isn’t in swing-at-anything mode. If she can work the count and flip over the order, we have a chance at redeeming the inning.”

Cody privately agrees. But this is the longest casual conversation she and Kenobi have ever had. So more to be contrary than anything, she jumps to disagree. “Siri almost squared up the fastball twice in her last at-bat. If she goes up hacking, she might take the advantage.”

Then, of course, Siri takes the first three pitches. Two outside curveballs and a strike down and away – nothing worth nibbling at.

The fourth pitch comes in fast, high-middle, and Siri gets just under it. Did she get enough of it…? Cody holds her breath, leaning over the railing even as Kenobi does the same thing to her right.

Get out, get out, get out –

The ball sails over the wall in straightaway center, and Cody lets out a whoop as Siri rounds the bases, beaming.

Kenobi stays uncharacteristically chatty through the whole rest of the game. When Kit strikes out the side in the seventh. When Ahsoka redeems herself in the eighth, advancing on a passed ball and then a hit and run. Cody doesn’t know what’s gotten into Kenobi today. But she keeps a running commentary going until the very last out, and a few times when Cody points out an aspect of the game that she hadn’t noticed herself, she even looks Cody’s way and smiles.

The Peaches win the rubber match, 4-3, on the run Ahsoka slides headfirst into.

The mood in the house is high afterward, everyone who played looking to burn off adrenaline from a chippy win. Cody would love a drink, but honestly, she already has enough of a headache. So she settles for a smoke, hiding on the back steps in the quiet.

The back door creaks open when she’s barely halfway through her cigarette. It’s Kenobi, because of course it is. She sits down next to Cody without a word and lights up.

Finally, impulsively, Cody breaks the silence.

“Have you always pitched? You know a lot about fielding.”

Kenobi takes a long drag, holds it, then blows the smoke out through her nose. It surprises Cody a little, that she would do something so unladylike.

“I played first base when I was a kid.” Kenobi laughs. “I wanted to be just like Lizzie Murphy.”

Cody’s never heard the name before. “Who?”

“Oh…” Kenobi sighs. “She was a bit of a local hero, I suppose. The only woman on the Providence Independents. She played exhibition games in Boston. My father used to take me and Annie.”

“Annie?” Cody echoes. “Annie Skywalker?”

“Oh, did you meet her at the tryouts?” Kenobi turns toward Cody for the first time. She taps the ash off the end of her cigarette, narrowly avoiding her blouse. “Yes, Annie Skywalker. My half-sister. She came to live with us when I was sixteen and she was fourteen. She had played catcher on her old team, and had no one to throw with, so…” Kenobi shrugs. “I learned how to pitch.”

Cody stares at the casual statement. As if learning how to pitch, particularly the way Kenobi does, is something that can be done on a whim. “How long did it take you, to change positions that way?” Granted, Cody’s played all over the field. But she’s always known how to catch – since the very beginning.

“I was lousy at first. I learned to be better when I went to college. Smith,” Kenobi adds casually, as if that should be obvious. “Annie came up after me, and we weren’t half bad, as college teams went. Though I hear the club was disbanded the year after she graduated. It’s a shame.”

“So she was the throwing partner you meant,” Cody says slowly. “At the tryouts.”

“Well – yes.” Kenobi is more chewing on the end of her cigarette than smoking it, now. “Of course. She’s my sister. We tried out together.”

“Didn’t it occur to you they might split you up?” Cody asks, more incredulously than she means to. “Or that you might not both make it. We’re lucky to even be here.”

Kenobi gives her a long look. “Obviously,” she says coolly, “it occurred to us they might split us up. But we thought they’d be smarter than to actually do it.”

“How are the Comets doing, anyway?” Cody hasn’t been watching the standings much – doesn’t know where Annie’s team, the Kenosha Comets, falls in the league right now.

Kenobi clearly has reasons to be paying attention, since she doesn’t even have to pause to think about it. “They’re two games ahead of us.”

Cody wonders if Annie is too busy winning games to write back to her sister. But the outgoing letters Cody’s seen from Kenobi are addressed to more just Miss A. Skywalker. She’s seen a variety of names – maybe other family members, maybe not. And very few of them ever seem to reply. With a slight stab of guilt, Cody thinks of the thick packet of letters from Rex in the top drawer of her dresser. Her family has never been anything but involved, even from afar.

“You must be proud of how well Annie’s playing,” Cody says, hoping Skywalker is, in fact, playing some role in the Comets’ success.

“I’m always proud of her,” Kenobi says fiercely. Then she turns away from Cody abruptly, as if she’s said too much.

Cody watches the stars and finishes her cigarette. Eventually Kenobi goes back inside.

The next game they spend in the dugout together, Kenobi doesn’t mention her sister at all. But she’s not distant any more, either. As if a dam has broken, she suddenly won’t shut up. It turns out she’s got strong opinions, a quick wit, and an even quicker tongue – at least around Cody. The few times other players try to jump in, Kenobi retreats back into herself. Cody isn’t sure whether to be flattered or alarmed that their oddest pitcher has apparently chosen her and only her as a dugout conversation partner.

Just the two of them, Kenobi and Cody debate pitch selection, hot dog toppings, favorite music, best men’s baseball players. Cody still thinks Babe Ruth is the best player of all time, whereas Kenobi, being from Boston, holds a bit of a grudge against him for his defection to New York.

“Ted Williams,” Kenobi pronounces in a firm rebuttal, “is the best all-around player the league has ever seen, and will ever see again. If I ever meet Joe DiMaggio, I’ll ask for his autograph first, and then slug him in the jaw for stealing Ted’s MVP award.”

They’re in a break between innings at that point, the rest of the team milling around getting ready for their next at-bats. Windu meanders over from the opposite rail on his way into the clubhouse.

“I have better things to do than argue with the two of you,” he says, in the kind of voice that says he’d actually like to do nothing better. “But if you’re talking about best ballplayers in history and haven’t mentioned Josh Gibson yet, then you’re both dead wrong.” With that, he vanishes down the tunnel.

Kenobi peers after him. “He would know,” she whispers to Cody when she’s sure he’s gone. “He played with Gibson one season, you know.”

“Wait, what?” Cody cranes her neck to catch another glimpse of their manager’s retreating back. “Windu played with Josh Gibson?” Though they don’t get much Negro Leagues news up in Moose Jaw, Cody knows Gibson by reputation – he’s a legendary catcher for the Homestead Grays, good enough that even the white newspapers in town occasionally take notice.

Kenobi nods. “In the Mexican League. In forty-one. It was Windu’s last season as a player. Busted his knee, went into coaching after that.”

Cody has wondered before, given that the Negro Leagues haven’t been nearly as decimated by the draft as the white Major Leagues, what Windu is doing here managing a team of girls. Surely there are plenty of men’s coaching positions that would welcome his expertise. But she’s never had the nerve to ask.

As Windu strides his way back into the dugout with a sack of baseballs in one arm and a new rosin bag in the other, Cody reflects that she probably won’t be working up the nerve any time soon.

With a more interested conversation partner all of a sudden, the games Cody’s benched start to slip by more quickly. Side by side in the dugout, she teaches Kenobi her reference system: index cards with shorthand scouting reports on all the opposing players they’ve faced so far. In exchange, Kenobi clues her into how several of the Daisies’ starters are tipping their pitches. Kenobi has a keen eye and a quick mind for strategy, and between the two of them, Cody feels like they could dominate the league, if they only had the chance.

The Peaches take a three-day road trip to Kenosha without Kenobi; suspended players don’t get to travel. Cody passes three very boring games in the dugout without her. When they get back to Rockford, it’s time for Cody to get her stitches out.

The nurse she met at the hospital, Vokara, makes a house call to check on her healing and, once she’s satisfied, snip the tiny threads out of her skin one by one. It turns out the whole team wants to watch. Despite Miss Nu’s disapproval, Cody winds up lying down on the living room couch with a towel under her head. Siri and Quinn try to stand up and look over the back of the couch. They have to beat a strategic retreat when Vokara sends them away with a click of her tongue – “You’re in my light.”

Ahsoka sits on Cody’s feet, as if she’s planning on going anywhere.

Kenobi looks in when she first sees Vokara, but at the sight of half the team assembled, she disappears up the stairs. Cody holds Kit’s hand, instead, gritting her teeth against the odd pulling sensation next to her eye. It doesn’t hurt, exactly. Certainly nowhere near as much as having them put in. But she keeps looking up and expecting to see red curls peeking over Vokara’s shoulder.

When she’s finished, Vokara wraps gauze around the side of Cody’s face and pins it tightly in place. “Keep it on for twenty-four hours,” she instructs, “and keep it dry until then. After that you can take it off without any more restrictions.”

Cody sits up abruptly. “And then I can play again?”

Vokara gives her a long look before she finally concedes. “Yes. And then you can play again.”

A cheer goes up among those assembled that goes on for so long, Miss Nu pokes her head back in to hush them, she’s listening to the radio.

Getting back on the field makes Cody feel like she can breathe first the first time in ten days. In her first game back, she goes three-for-four with a ringing RBI double to the left field corner and a solo homer that just makes it over the wall in right. At home that night, Siri and Quinn ply her with whiskey sours until she giggles herself to sleep.

With the off days and travel days mixed in with game days, Kenobi finishes her suspension to return the day after Cody does. They’re playing a day game against South Bend, whose lineup has been hot. It’s clear from Kenobi’s first inning on the field that the seven-game suspension – which, with their schedule, has taken eleven days to end – has gummed up the works in her delivery. Her fastball is fine, and so is her slide ball, but the curveball she was having trouble with on the day of Cody’s injury just isn’t there.

Even with two working pitches, she’s still fine. Solid. But Kenobi, usually, is nowhere near fine. She’s exceptional. And without the curveball, she isn’t. Cody tries to talk to her about it when her start ends with the score tied. But Kenobi just disappears down the tunnel to the showers. She doesn’t even come out to cheer when Quinn bats in Ahsoka for the game-winning run. And when the team bus comes to bring them all home, Kenobi isn’t on it; she’s found her own way back for the day.

Cody’s writing a letter to Rex in the bedroom she shares with Siri that evening when she hears a repetitive thumping sound coming from the back yard.

She can’t see where the sound is coming from out her window, but she has an idea. So she sets down her pen and heads downstairs.

The back door is closed. A few of the others are clustered around it – Ahsoka, Kit, Bree. They all turn when they hear Cody approach.

“She’s just out there throwing,” Ahsoka says, worried. “And she wouldn’t talk to any of us.”

That worries Cody. Though Kenobi still largely keeps to herself, she’s at least polite, typically, and she seems to have developed a soft spot for Ahsoka since the no-hit attempt. Taking a deep breath, Cody yanks the back door open and heads down the porch steps to the source of the sound.

Kenobi is out behind the equipment shed, a bag of baseballs next to her, throwing pitch after pitch at the side of the shed. She’s still in her uniform from the game. Even with the relatively low speed of her curveball, she’s already made a mess of the shed wall. There are pockmarks in the wood everywhere from six inches to three feet off the ground.  If this is the way she’s trying to get her delivery back, it clearly isn’t working.

Cody ducks into the shed to retrieve a spare glove. Then she steps out again, assesses the situation, and sticks her fingers in her mouth to let out a shrill whistle. Kenobi drops the baseball she’s holding and turns toward her in shock.

Cody holds up her glove. “You want to throw? Let’s throw.”

Kenobi scowls. “I’m not looking for a partner.”

Cody huffs. “Too bad. You’ve got one.”

She crosses over to the back fence, close to sixty feet from the porch, and conveniently facing Kenobi a different way so she won’t be staring at the irregular impact marks she’s left on the shed.

Barefoot in her loose pants and blouse, Cody squats in the grass and holds up her glove. “Fastballs first.”

“But I – ”

Cody cuts her off. “Fastballs. First.”

Kenobi takes a deep breath, and throws.

After pitching in the game today, she’s not pitching at full strength. But her fastball is still a pretty, zippy thing, landing in Cody’s glove with the same satisfying pop it always does. Cody counts ten fastballs before she holds onto the ball.

“Sliders now,” she calls out, then tosses the ball back.

Kenobi looks calmer now than she did when Cody first stepped out of the house. The sliders come out of her hand easily, that uncanny deception Cody had been so impressed with when at the tryouts still intact. The slide ball is her signature pitch, and there’s nothing at all wrong with it.

Cody lets her get through a dozen before she stops.

“Curveballs, please.”

Kenobi tenses up all over again. She overthrows her first curve, spiking it into the grass five feet in front of where Cody’s set up. Cody doesn’t flinch.

“Try again.”

The next one at least makes it to Cody, though it’s far outside. The third one is high. So is the fourth. Cody squints at Kenobi thoughtfully instead of throwing the ball back. She pops up out of her crouch and pads across the grass to where Kenobi is standing.

“Show me your motion,” she directs, “without the ball in your hand. And make it slow.”

Kenobi wrinkles her nose at Cody, but complies. She goes through her curveball motion twice before Cody can pinpoint the issue.

“You’re leading with your upper body instead of your hip. Show me your fastball delivery.”

Kenobi looks incredulous, but does. And there it is – for some reason, on a fastball, she’s leading with her front hip the way she always does. But when she sets up to throw a curve, her hip is lagging.

Cody steps up behind her. “Do it again slowly.” She sets one hand on Kenobi’s left hip, the other on her left shoulder. Kenobi’s cap-less, and her hair is wilder than usual. It tickles Cody’s cheek until she turns her face away.

Infinitely slowly, Kenobi rocks onto her back foot. Pulls her knee up. Starts to separate her hands. Rears back with her right arm.

Even as she balances on one leg, Cody catches her left shoulder when it starts to dip forward. “Right there. Lead with your hip. Let your shoulder follow.”

Cody lets go. Kenobi finishes the motion, landing on her stride foot, empty pitching hand flying out in front of her. It’s awkward and lopsided, and Cody has no idea if she just made things better or worse. But there’s only one way to find out.

She hands Kenobi back the ball. “Let’s try it again, half-speed.”

Kenobi stares at the ball in her hand, then looks up at Cody. “All right.”

Cody sets up again at the back fence. Kenobi immediately throws a curve that she leads with her shoulders, and spikes it in the dirt again.

Cody sighs. “Try again.”

The next one is the same. But the one after that is better.

Cody catches fifteen good curveballs before she decides it’s enough and pops up out of her stance. “Well done. That’s a lot better. Now go change before Miss Nu fines you for creating a public nuisance.”

She makes a beeline for the bag of baseballs. She’d rather have that put away so that Kenobi will quit while she’s ahead, rather than pick up again on her abuse of the equipment shed as soon as Cody goes back inside.

There are baseballs littered all over the yard, to boot, but there’s no way Cody is chasing after them all. Kenobi can clean up her own mess.

“Cody, wait!” Kenobi catches up with her at the doorway to the equipment shed.

Cody turns toward her, one foot already inside the dim shed. The heavy bag dangles from her right hand. “What?”

Kenobi stops about a foot away. Whatever she was going to say seems to have escaped her. Instead she just stares at Cody. There’s sweat dampening her temples, and her collar is twisted. Cody resists the urge to fix it.

“Thanks,” Kenobi says finally. “For your help. I appreciate it.”

“You’re welcome,” Cody answers, and puts the bag away. Then she goes back inside to wash the soles of her feet.

Cody is walking back from the bathroom, towel in hand, when she hears muffled voices coming from Quinn and Kit’s room. There’s a laugh, and a mattress squeaks, and then the door clicks open. Cody nearly walks into Siri.

Siri, whose shirt is half-buttoned, red marks visible at her collar. Her lips look pinker than usual, and she’s flushed and smiling. Her smile fades when she sees Cody.

Cody glances over Siri’s shoulder and sees Quinn behind her, stretched out on her bed. In her underclothes.

It isn’t a surprise. Cody keeps walking, back to her and Siri’s room.

“Cody, wait!” Siri exclaims. “Shit.” Quinn’s door slams closed again. Siri dashes after Cody, buttoning her shirt as she moves. “Can I talk to you?”

Cody grabs Siri by one arm and pulls her into their shared bedroom. “You should be more careful,” she snaps.

“I know,” Siri says guiltily. “We got sloppy. It won’t happen again.”

Cody glares. “I could’ve been anyone. Miss Nu.”

“I know.”

Cody turns away, to hang up her towel and return, finally, to her letter to Rex. Which certainly won’t include any of this.

“Wait, Cody.” Siri sounds less breathless now, more determined. Cody turns back. In her white button-up and gray trousers, hair straight and face bare, Siri looks exactly like herself. The way she always does. “Cody… you won’t tell anyone, right?” She pauses. “You’re one of us. Aren’t you?”

Cody breathes. In and out. There are old fears that sometimes rear their heads inside her, but there’s also a certain comfort in knowing who you are. She knows who she is. Has for a long time.

Cody lifts her chin. “I won’t tell anyone.”

When she lies in bed that night, Siri’s quiet breathing a few feet away, Cody can’t help but relive what she’d seen. Quinn, stretched out on the bed, miles of brown skin on display. Siri, mussed and satisfied. Cody’s thought – she’s looked, here and there, since they’ve all been in such close quarters. At Kit, mostly, all curves and muscles and dimples, but a little bit at Siri and Quinn too. Their wiry strength and flat chests. The way they carry themselves with such swagger. It’s hard not to notice.

But as she falls asleep, the vision in her mind’s eye isn’t of Kit or Siri or Quinn.

To her relief, Cody doesn’t catch Siri and Quinn together again. Though she does take notice when they room together on the next road trip. She’ll admit grudgingly that it’s not a bad idea.

Kenobi pitches well on the road trip. They spend four games in Kenosha. Annie Skywalker hits an RBI triple off her older sister in the second inning, then proceeds to strike out for the entire rest of the game. The Peaches win 5-1.

After the game, Cody goes through her usual routine of showering, dressing, packing her gear, then steps out of the locker room to head to the bus. When she does, she’s greeted with the sight of Annie Skywalker up close, leaning against the locker room door frame. Out of uniform, she somehow seems taller.

Cody smooths her skirt reflexively.

“So you’re the catcher my sister keeps talking about in her letters,” Skywalker says in lieu of hello.

Cody slings her gear bag over her shoulder. “If you’re looking for Kenobi, I think she’s still packing up.”

Skywalker’s eyebrows shoot up, and she looks thunderous all of a sudden. Cody has no idea why. “Listen here, Fett. If you think – ”

“Annie?” Kenobi’s voice comes from behind Cody. “What on earth is going on?”

Cody steps aside gratefully. She glances from Skywalker to Kenobi in consternation. Kenobi, she notices, looks more dressed up than usual, in a ruffled white blouse and a red skirt. She looks like she’s going out. So does Skywalker; she has on a blue polka-dot dress, and her hair is pinned up.

“Your sister was waiting for you,” Cody tells Kenobi. “I hope you have a nice time.” Then she turns and makes a beeline for the bus before she can find out exactly why Skywalker was so cross.

Kenobi gets dropped off at their boarding house by taxicab ten minutes before curfew. Cody glances up from her book when Kenobi walks in to the front room and takes her coat off. She looks more relaxed than Cody has seen her in all the months they’ve been playing together.

When she sees Cody look up, Kenobi smiles and comes to sit next to her on the couch. “My sister sends her regards.”

Cody has no idea how to interpret that, in the context of her brief conversation with Skywalker earlier, but she’s happy to see Kenobi in such a good mood. Cody wants to ask more about how Skywalker is doing, but given how private Kenobi can be… Cody glances around the room, but only Ahsoka is nearby, and she looks like she’s nodded off in her armchair.

“It must’ve been nice to see her,” Cody says sincerely. “How long had it been?”

“Two months.” Kenobi winces. “The last time the Comets came to us on a road trip, she was out with her sprained ankle. And the last time we came here, I was suspended.”

Oh, Cody realizes guiltily. It hadn’t occurred to her at the time how Kenobi’s suspension would keep her from seeing her sister. Unconsciously, she raises one hand to run it over the scar where it curves down her left cheek. Kenobi’s eyes follow the movement until Cody stops.

“I was worried about her,” Kenobi continues lowly. “She hadn’t written. Hadn’t called. Annie can be – moody sometimes. Some people find her difficult to work with.” Kenobi makes it clear from her tone that she herself is not one of those people. “When I hadn’t heard from her, I feared the worst.”

“And?” Cody asks gingerly.

Kenobi breaks into a grin. “And it’s the opposite. She loves her teammates. And they love her. I don’t think Annie has had this many friends since before her mother died.”

“That’s wonderful,” Cody says, meaning it. She tries to imagine not hearing from any of her siblings for two months. Rex, Jessie, Fox – they all write to her regularly, particularly Rex. Echo and Boba, less so, but her youngest siblings have been known to append little notes to the ends of Rex’s letters instead. Echo will sometimes draw cartoons of herself and Jessie, and Boba likes to scribble half-remembered jokes. “Knowing she’s happy, it must be such a weight off your shoulders.”

“Truly.” Kenobi tilts her head back, leaning against the back of the couch for a long moment. “You don’t even know how much. I had been thinking of asking for a trade to Kenosha. Now… I don’t even think she needs me to stay in the league.”

“Are you thinking of leaving?” Cody asks, shocked. “In the middle of the season?”

Kenobi turns toward her quickly. “No, no. I wouldn’t do that. I have thought about it,” she adds under Cody’s sharp gaze. “Mostly at the beginning of the season, when Annie and I were first split up. And again recently,” she admits, “when I couldn’t get my curveball right.”

Cody leans forward. Reaches out and wraps her hand around Kenobi’s wrist. “Not over something like that. Please. We need you.”

“I won’t leave in the middle of the season,” Kenobi says softly. She looks up at Cody through her eyelashes. “I promise. I’m here to see it through with the Peaches. All I mean is… next year, Annie might not need me to come back with her. And in the offseason, when she goes home to Boston… I could go anywhere – do anything.” She sits still for another moment, then sighs and pulls away from Cody’s grip. “It’s just a thought. Good night, Cody.”

She disappears up the stairs. Cody tries to go back to her book, but after reading the same page three times, realizes she’s still processing their conversation. Particularly the part about Kenobi being able to go anywhere if Skywalker doesn’t need her.

Cody has never felt that way – that her family not needing her would be a kind of freedom. Although she feels a duty to the younger children, it’s never been the type of obligation she felt stifled by. Cody thinks of Skywalker’s quickly rising anger, the way she loomed over Cody outside the locker room, where Cody still doesn’t know what she said wrong. Thinks of Kenobi’s carefully phrased “some people find her difficult to work with.” What have Kenobi and Skywalker’s prim Boston lives been like, after all?

Ahsoka lets out a snore from her chair across the room. Cody glances at the clock. It’s late enough, she may as well go to bed.

As she rises, the light catches something small and glimmering on the couch cushion. Cody reaches down and picks up – an earring, surely Kenobi’s. It’s a little gold bauble with a pearl on the end. The sharp end presses into Cody’s palm.

She weighs it for a moment in her hand, then makes up her mind. Kenobi is still awake – she went upstairs not ten minutes ago. And she definitely has the single room at the top of the stairs, because she gave Kit an almost-full pack of chewing gum for it on the bus from Rockford.

Most of the other rooms are dark, but the narrow door at the top of the stairs still has a stripe of light under it. Cody knocks softly.

“Who is it?” comes Kenobi’s voice.

“It’s Cody.”

There’s a pause. Then, “Come in.”

The door swings open at Cody’s touch. Kenobi is seated at a vanity on the far side of the room. She’s wearing her dressing gown. Her hair is loose, combed out, but not yet set in rollers for the night. It falls in burnished ripples over her shoulders. When she turns, Cody realizes she’s taken her makeup off. It’s the first time Cody’s ever seen her without it. Her bare face looks younger – more tired, but somehow more alive at the same time.

Cody steps into the room and shuts the door behind her. She holds up the gold bauble in her hand. “I found this on the couch – I thought it was yours.”

“Oh – yes, thank you.” Kenobi stands up. She crosses the room toward Cody and reaches out for the earring. As she does, her dressing gown falls open. Cody glances downward unconsciously.

She’s expecting to see a nightgown beneath the robe – something overly feminine, with lace or ribbons, maybe. What she’s not expecting is the exact opposite.

Kenobi tugs her dressing gown closed quickly, but not before Cody registers that she’s wearing a ribbed white tank top and a pair of white cotton men’s boxer shorts.

“How did you get those?” Cody asks incredulously.

Kenobi snatches her earring from Cody’s hand and turns her back, busying herself putting it away in her jewelry box. “I told the shop clerk they were for my brother.”

“Do you have a brother?”

“No.”

“Kenobi…” Cody says slowly. That gets a reaction, at least – Kenobi turns around, face pale and eyes wide.

“So Annie was right. You really did call me by my last name to her.”

“What?”

Kenobi sits back down at the vanity, still holding her dressing gown together tightly. “I thought we were friends.”

“Aren’t we?” Cody asks, feeling lost. She’s still standing awkwardly by Kenobi’s bed. Still absorbing the sight of her in men’s underwear. The way the thin shirt she wore had pulled tight across her breasts.

“Then won’t you call me Obi-Wan – at least after…” Kenobi – Obi-Wan – looks down at herself. Relaxes her grip on her robe. “Well. Now, at least.”

“Obi-Wan.” Cody says it out loud for the first time. It’s an odd name. She’s never asked. “I didn’t mean – I just. Everyone else calls you Kenobi.”

Obi-Wan turns and looks up at her shyly. “Cody. You aren’t everyone else.”

She stands up and lets her dressing down drop to the chair. Her arms are tanned from all their days of playing, up until just below her shoulder, where she goes abruptly pale. Her shoulders are rounded, sturdy, her right arm even stronger than Cody’s. The white fabric of the shirt she’s wearing skims over curves Cody is trying not to stare at. And those shorts – men’s underwear, on Kenobi, of all people – perch at her waist and cover her to mid-thigh.

Nothing about the way she looks should make sense. And yet Cody doesn’t think she’s ever seen anyone look so compelling.

“Obi-Wan – why are you wearing that? Is it – what you normally sleep in?” Cody thinks back to whether she’s ever been in Obi-Wan’s bedroom at their house. Realizes that the rest of them double up, but Obi-Wan always has a space to herself. Even here. Even when it costs her most of a pack of chewing gum, or a new pair of stockings, or a six-pack of ginger beer.

Obi-Wan sighs. Steps closer to Cody, still frozen between the bed and the door. “Yes, it is.”

“Why?”

The question escapes Cody before she can stop herself. Because she wears trousers and men’s shoes, herself, whenever she can, and avoids her reflection when she can’t. But that’s. That’s Cody. Not Obi-Wan Kenobi. Obi-Wan Kenobi, with her red lipstick and her immaculate pin-curls, her perfect pleats and stockings that never have runs in them.

Obi-Wan stops just inches from Cody, looks her in the eye, and murmurs, “Because there is more than one kind of armor, my dear. Because even I can’t wear mine all the time. And because you and I… you and I are much more alike than you think.”

This close, her eyes are very, very blue. Cody waits a breath to make sure she isn’t misreading the whole situation. Then she leans in.

Obi-Wan’s lips are just as soft as Cody’s imagined.

Her hair brushes against Cody’s neck as the kiss deepens. Obi-Wan opens her mouth against Cody’s, pressing in with her tongue as soon as Cody opens for her in return, and oh, that’s. It’s been a long time since Cody was kissed like this.

Cody’s arms come up and around Obi-Wan, hands smoothing over the fabric at her hips. The cotton of her boxers is soft – clearly well-worn. Cody has a sudden vision of her in those and nothing else, spread out on her back, gorgeous and warm and all Cody’s.

Obi-Wan slides her hands into Cody’s hair, and Cody’s done thinking about anything except what’s right in front of her.

Not surprisingly, Obi-Wan tries to be bossy in bed. She laughs and bites when Cody refuses to just let her take the lead. In return, Cody pins her down and kisses her breathless. They find a rhythm, eventually, a give and take not so different from the way they communicate as a battery, and Obi-Wan whispers a lot of promises about what she can do with her tongue that it turns out she can very much keep.

Later, much later, Cody slips down the hall to the double room she’s sharing with Kit this road trip. The boarding house is quiet, the rest of the team asleep. Kit doesn’t stir across the room as Cody climbs into bed.

The sheets are pleasantly cool against her overheated skin. Still feeling as though she might float away, Cody closes her eyes.

Chapter Text

July 23^rd, 1943

Racine, Wisconsin

ROCKFORD 6; RACINE 0

PEACHES SHUT OUT BELLES AS KENOBI TWIRLS TWO-HIT GEM

Obi-Wan hip checks Cody as they sidle into the locker room after the game, sweaty but victorious.

“Did you see Ventress’ face when you struck her out in the ninth?” Cody crows.

Obi-Wan smirks right back. “She’ll be getting on the bus and still trying to figure out where that pitch went.”

“Half an hour till the bus leaves!” Miss Nu hollers, and Cody turns quickly to her locker.

July 30^th, 1943

Rockford, Illinois

ROCKFORD 8; SOUTH BEND 4

FETT, TACHI, AND VOS HOMER; PEACHES WIN SLUGFEST IN RAIN AGAINST BLUE SOX

What a day to be wearing their white uniforms.

Every player on the field is soaked to the skin. Ahsoka, given her particular way of running the bases, is muddy from head to toe. Only Obi-Wan, who pitched the day before and spent today’s game in the dugout, has survived unscathed.

At least until Siri and Quinn start chasing her around the dugout, dripping and bellowing, loopy with the cold and the win and their faith in their own invincibility.

Mud streaming from her socks and a grin on her face, Cody squelches her way to the showers.

August 10^th, 1943

Kenosha, Wisconsin

KENOSHA 3; ROCKFORD 2

PEACHES FALL TO STREAKING COMETS AS OFFENSE COMES UP SHORT

“I’m sorry, Obi,” Ahsoka says glumly over her shoulder as she climbs the stairs onto the bus. After Obi-Wan had allowed three bad-luck runs early, the Peaches had brought the tying run to the plate in the ninth, but hadn’t been able to deliver. “We should’ve had that for you.”

Cody privately agrees, but she isn’t going to have a word with the batters at the bottom of the order about it. At least, not until they get home.

“That’s all right.” Obi-Wan shrugs as she tosses her gear bag onto the rack overhead. “Win some, lose some. That’s baseball.”

“Will you sit with me on the ride back to Rockford?” Ahsoka asks timidly as she slides into a seat a few rows back. Cody glances around quickly, trying not to be conspicuous. Obi-Wan prefers to sit by herself on the bus – always has. Though she tolerates Cody occasionally these days, she’d still clearly rather have her space.

Except – “Sure, kid,” Obi-Wan says amiably, and swivels into the seat next to Ahsoka as if it’s nothing.

Smiling to herself, Cody sidles her way down the aisle to her customary seat by Kit.

August 16^th, 1943

Rockford, Illinois

ROCKFORD 4; GRAND RAPIDS 1

PEACHES SEND CHICKS PACKING, GAIN A GAME IN PLAYOFF RACE

“How many games behind are we now?” Bree asks Ahsoka breathlessly in the locker room.

“Three,” Cody, Obi-Wan, and Miss Nu respond in unison.

All heads turn toward Miss Nu, who blushes. “Well, a playoff race is exciting, isn’t it?”

“We’re three games behind Fort Wayne,” Cody tells Bree, “and they’re one behind Kenosha.”

“And Kenosha’s two behind South Bend,” Obi-Wan interrupts, “who’s one behind Racine.”

“With thirteen left to play, and Fort Wayne coming to town for three tomorrow,” Siri chimes in.

“Which means – ”

“If we sweep Fort Wayne this weekend – ”

“We’ll have the fourth playoff spot, and then we just have to – ”

“Play well enough and hope Fort Wayne plays badly enough to keep us in the playoffs!” Bree exclaims. “I see, I see, I get it.”

“With a little luck – ” Cody starts. Obi-Wan tsks loudly.

“Luck has nothing to do with it.”

“Luck has everything to do with it!” Kit shouts. “That’s why I haven’t changed my socks in two weeks. And if you know what’s good for you, you won’t either.”

“Miss Fisto,” Miss Nu protests, “that is not in keeping with the league’s hygiene standards, section fourteen, clause three – ”

“Then I guess the league’s hygiene board wants Fort Wayne to win!”

After the game, while the house is still buzzing with activity, Cody meanders into Obi-Wan’s room. Obi-Wan has been less aloof lately – these days, after dinner, she’s almost as likely to be downstairs with the group as she is to be squirreled away by herself. But tonight, Cody isn’t sorry to find her behind a closed door.

Obi-Wan is stretched out on her bed, half-dressed, reading a book. Cody locks the door behind her as Obi-Wan looks up with a smirk. Cody kneels up onto the foot of the bed and shuffles upward until she’s straddling Obi-Wan’s thighs. Delicately, she reaches out and takes Obi-Wan’s book away.

“You’d better not lose my place,” Obi-Wan warns, though she’s not hiding the warmth in her voice. Cody flips the book over, spine side up, and sets it down well out of the way.

“Would I ever do a thing like that?”

“Yes,” Obi-Wan huffs, laughing, until Cody leans in and stops the sound with her mouth.

They kiss lazily for a while, Cody pressing Obi-Wan down into the pillows, Obi-Wan’s skin – her cheek, jaw, shoulder, the tops of her arms – soft under Cody’s hands. The feel of her is starting to get familiar after the last couple of weeks, but Cody doesn’t think it’ll ever get less exciting. The way Obi-Wan kisses like her life depends on it. The coiled strength of her. The way she holds onto Cody carefully like she’s something breakable. Something worth protecting.

Afterward, Cody winds up on her side, Obi-Wan facing her. Their legs are tangled together. The familiarity of it has something hesitant but warm starting in the depths of Cody’s chest. With the arm that’s not tucked underneath her, Cody traces lazy circles up and down Obi-Wan’s back.

Obi-Wan breaks the cocoon of quiet between them by asking, “Do you think we’re ready for tomorrow?”

“Yes,” Cody answers honestly. She doesn’t have to think about it.

Obi-Wan laughs under Cody’s hand. “That was decisive.”

Cody shrugs. “We’re better than the Daisies. What happens, happens, but at least the parts we can control… we’re ready.”

“And the rest is up to the baseball gods?” Obi-Wan teases. She prides herself on not being superstitious. Not that that stops her from bringing hell to anyone who disrupts her finicky warmup routine.

Cody smiles. “Exactly.”

As the moment stretches between them, Cody starts to feel daring.

“So the regular season ends this month. Then the playoffs go through September…” Cody counts mentally. “No matter what happens, we’ll be done by October 1^st.”

Obi-Wan hums non-committally.

“Have you made any plans for the offseason?” Cody ventures. “Or not yet?”

Obi-Wan sighs and rolls onto her back. Her bare skin ripples into goosebumps away from the warmth of Cody’s body, but she doesn’t move to cover herself. “Not entirely. I’ll go back to Boston, I suppose. Figure things out from there.”

“I know you were thinking about going somewhere else – not just home.” Cody’s not sure what’s gotten into her, but she continues doggedly. “If you wanted to travel a bit, you could always come and visit me in Moose Jaw. My family has plenty of space. And there are other people…” Cody hesitates. “Like us.”

Obi-Wan sits up abruptly and reaches for her shirt. “I should get washed up. It’s late.”

It’s an obvious dismissal, and it stings like one. But maybe Cody’s getting ahead of herself, she thinks as she dresses. This fragile thing between them, whatever it is, is still new. With the way Cody’s feeling about Obi-Wan, it’s easy to forget that.

And Obi-Wan has feelings for her, too. Cody is certain of this, staring at herself in the mirror as she brushes her teeth. With her free hand, she traces the length of her scar, pale and jagged. Obi-Wan has feelings for her. She’s sure of it.

Cody lies awake for a long time that night as Siri snores across the room. She tells herself it’s nerves about the Fort Wayne series.

The following day dawns hot and muggy. The mercury is pushing 85 when Cody drags herself into the kitchen at 7am. At this hour, only Kit is there, drinking coffee and staring out the window.

She’s not starting today – Obi-Wan is – but on the days before her starts, Kit likes to run early in the morning. She’s usually still at it when Cody gets up.

“It’s too hot,” Kit says in response to Cody’s unasked question. “And humid. Shame you all have to play today.”

“And some of us have to squat in leather,” Cody says feelingly, sticking her head out the back door. Her hair immediately starts to coil around her ears.

“Ooh,” Kit says, high pitched. Her eyebrows waggle. Cody sends a glare her way and goes in search of cold cereal.

It’s only gotten hotter by their 2pm gametime – close to a hundred in the sun, and humid as all hell. Obi-Wan throws her warm-up pitches in a flurry of rosin. She doesn’t have much to say to Cody, other than to review their approach against the top of the Fort Wayne batting order.

In the first inning, Cody keeps having to call time to blink the sweat out of her eyes.

Given that the potential consequence of not being able to see is getting clobbered by Obi-Wan’s two-seamer, calling time is an annoyance she’s willing to live with, though the batters seem to disagree. In between complaints, though, the Daisies go one-two-three, satisfyingly baffled by Obi-Wan’s slider.

Cody takes her seat in the dugout shade with relief.

The top of their order makes a little bit of noise to start off the game. Ahsoka bunts for an infield hit – her specialty – and Bree moves her over on a deep fly to left that’s caught for the first out. Then Siri singles, and Ahsoka seems to be seriously considering trying for home, though she wisely stops at third when she sees the ball in the first baseman’s hand.

Unfortunately, Quinn grounds into a double play to end the inning. Cody reluctantly straps her gear on again. It occurs to her as she does that she probably has a headband in her locker that would keep the sweat out of her eyes. But it’s too late to go back for it now – her teammates are already taking the field – so she makes a mental note to grab it before the next half-inning.

She doesn’t have to call time quite as many times this half inning as in the first – the sweat is starting to pool, which feels worse but is at least more convenient – but she and Obi-Wan do have a brief argument about pitch selection. An argument carried out over hand signs and headshakes, but an argument nonetheless, until Cody finally gives in and puts down three fingers. Obi-Wan whips in a fastball. The batter pops it up, sky-high above the infield. Cody throws her helmet off, shifting her feet to get under it. She eventually does, squinting, and the ball thuds into her hand satisfyingly for the third out.

Obi-Wan’s come in toward the plate to back her up. She gives a nod when Cody holds up the ball, and they turn to walk back to the dugout together.

From behind them cuts the voice of the disgruntled Fort Wayne batter. Sharp, but pitched just low enough that it doesn’t carry. “Hey, Kenobi. Can’t you get your bulldyke catcher to speed it up a little? Some of us have places to be. Like the playoffs.”

Cody grits her teeth, but keeps walking – no use turning around and giving her the reaction she wants – at least for a few more steps, until she realizes Obi-Wan is no longer at her side.

She turns just in time to see Obi-Wan slug the batter in the jaw with her left hand.

The batter goes down, satisfyingly, like a felled tree. But most of the Daisies’ dugout is already on their way out, with their terrifying first baseman, Merrin, leading the pack. Cody sprints back to try to get to Obi-Wan first. Dimly, she’s aware of shouting from behind her.

Merrin beats her to Obi-Wan, but just barely. Cody tries to pull Obi-Wan back from where she’s spitting and screaming, but she won’t go. Merrin backhands Obi-Wan across the face, but it hardly sets her back. Suddenly Windu is there, and Quinn and Kit and Siri. Then the Daisies’ coach is between the two knots of furious ballplayers. With Cody on one side, Kit on the other, and Siri and Quinn in front and behind, the four of them manage to part drag, part herd Obi-Wan back to the Peaches’ dugout.

Obi-Wan breaks away when they get there, knocks over a rack of bats, and storms down the tunnel into the clubhouse.

On the field, the umpires, coaches, and chaperones have made quick work of the chaos. The bullpens trot sheepishly back to whence they came, having missed all the action anyway. Miss Nu, of all people, does seem to be arguing with the head ump, though Cody can’t hear what it’s about. And frankly, she doesn’t much care.

She turns to head down the tunnel after Obi-Wan. But Siri catches her arm.

“Hey. No. You’re up. You have to bat.”

“But she – ”

“Let me,” Siri says firmly. She crosses her arms and sets herself resolutely between Cody and the tunnel. Her hair is escaping its customary tight braid, and there’s a scrape down her arm where Cody thinks Obi-Wan might’ve caught her with a jagged fingernail during the dragging phase of events.

Cody turns to look over her shoulder. The Daisies are starting to take the field for the next half-inning. She sighs. “Fine. But I’m coming as soon as my at bat is over.”

Except that when she does – after striking out swinging on three pitches – Obi-Wan is gone. Suspended five games. Barred from the dugout for the rest of the series against Fort Wayne.

Kit gets warmed up in a hurry, and Cody bets she’s glad she didn’t run this morning after all. But she’s ready, and she’s angry, and Kit angry is a particular kind of brutal calm. She strikes out the side. The line-up, constructed against Obi-Wan’s pitching style, flounders against hers, and the Peaches are more than ready to press their advantage.

Cody takes a fair number of fastballs high and tight as the game progresses into the middle innings. But she doesn’t say anything, just trots to first base when her patience with the aggressive pitching translates into free bases. And she doesn’t say anything when the batter who had insulted her kicks dirt her way the next time she comes up to bat. None of these assholes are worth it. And Cody is better than they are, in every way that counts.

The Peaches win, decisively, without their original starting pitcher.

Cody doesn’t even bother to shower, just changes into street clothes. She’s the first one off the bus at the house, and tears her way through it in a fury. Obi-Wan isn’t in the living room, or the kitchen, or her bedroom. She’s not in the bathroom or on the porch.

Cody shoulders open the heavy door of the equipment shed, and there she is. Sitting on the dirt floor, bat in her hands, surrounded by the shards of what might’ve once been a flowerpot left over from the shed’s previous use.

“What the hell’d you do that for, huh?” Cody shouts, and then Obi-Wan looks up and Cody sees her face.

Her left eye has swollen spectacularly. There’s angry, dark red bruising all around it, which Cody is sure will be brilliantly purple by the next morning. Her uninjured eye is red-rimmed, too, although her face is dry.

She is also, Cody notices, wearing trousers.

Cody walks, carefully, to the edge of the halo of broken ceramic. Holds out her hand.

Obi-Wan takes it, and allowed herself to be pulled up.

“I’m sorry,” Obi-Wan says hollowly. “For all of it. I’m so sorry, Cody.”

Cody sighs. “Why don’t we talk inside.” It isn’t a question.

The chatter in the living room stops abruptly as they make their way through the house to the stairwell. Obi-Wan’s room is on the third floor, but as they pass the bathroom on the second, she stops and eyes Cody, clearly noticing that she’s still covered in infield dirt.

“Why don’t you run a bath,” Obi-Wan suggests in a low voice, “and I’ll bring you in some clean clothes. And we can talk.”

Cody shrugs – she really is still filthy – and goes into the bathroom. She turns on the tap, but doesn’t shut the door or strip down. Not until Obi-Wan reappears with clothes from Cody’s dresser.

Cody can’t help but notice that Obi-Wan is carrying Cody’s favorite pair of slacks.

Obi-Wan sets the pile of clothes down on the vanity and locks the door. As Cody undresses, Obi-Wan sits down on the closed toilet, slumping in a way that isn’t like her. The bath is only about a third of the way full, but Cody gets in anyway, checking that her hair is still pinned up securely.

“I’m sorry,” Obi-Wan says again, voice partially obscured by the sound of the running water. “You were walking away. I saw red, and didn’t let you. I was wrong.” She hands Cody a wash cloth. Her hand is shaking.

Cody wets the cloth, rubs it with soap, and starts running it up and down her arms. She chooses her words carefully. “I was angry, too. But it’s nothing I haven’t heard before. Why did it matter to you so much?”

Obi-Wan runs a hand through her hair, setting it all on end. There’s a long pause before she finally says, “Because I used to dress a lot more like you than I do now. And because too many people I care about have been hurt.”

Cody turns off the tap. Dips the washcloth under the warm water again. Meets Obi-Wan’s eye. “Tell me.”

The story spills out in fits and starts.

College Obi-Wan, short-haired and wisecracking, finding like-minded friends on the baseball team and off of it. And, as she neared graduation, finding a lover.

“Her name was Satine.” Obi-Wan laughs bitterly. “And she was nothing like you or me. Sometimes I feel like I’m dressing up as her now.”

Satine was an English major from a wealthy family. They had moved back to Boston together after finishing their degrees and lived as roommates.

“It was like a dream. We were near my family, so I could see Annie whenever she was home on breaks. And then she graduated and moved back in with our father. Everyone I cared about was in Boston, together. I was working a job I didn’t hate, doing the books for a theater company, where no one cared how I looked. It lasted for two years.”

The water around Cody is starting to turn cold as she asks, “And then what happened?”

“Annie happened.” Obi-Wan swallows hard. “She’s like us, Cody. And my living with Satine, acting the way I did, dressing the way I did… I wasn’t exactly role modeling subtlety. And subtlety has never been Annie’s strong suit in any part of her life.”

Annie, playing baseball by day and drinking and roughhousing by night, had managed to attract law enforcement attention more than once. Their father threatened to send her to live with her mother’s family in Albuquerque if she didn’t tone her behavior down. Worse, the police threatened to charge her with unnatural and lascivious acts the next time they caught her wearing men’s clothing in public.

“Of course, she didn’t care.” Obi-Wan shakes her head. “She always thought she was invincible. And maybe she was right. It was on a Friday a week or two later that Satine got a tip about raids that were planned in the South End that night. Of course, Annie was already out.”

Obi-Wan and Satine had rushed out after her and split up to cover more ground.

Obi-Wan found Annie. Satine found the police.

Obi-Wan stares down at her lap. “I put Annie on a trolley – kicking and screaming – and went back to look for Satine. They ended up bringing the both of us in. We spent the night in jail. I’ve never been more relieved – or more terrified – to see someone as I was when her mother showed up the next morning to bail us out.”

Satine’s family had paid handsomely to have the whole scandal covered up. But that wasn’t enough.

“They sent her to live with her grandparents. I don’t even know where.” Obi-Wan leans her head back until it thuds against the wall. “San Francisco. London. Prague. She had relatives all over. We never even got to say good-bye. I came home one day and all her things were just gone.”

“How long ago was this?” Cody asks. The story is – she doesn’t think she’s quite processed it yet.

“Five years.”

“Have you heard from her since?”

“Never.”

Cody reaches for the drain plug. As the water starts to whoosh out of the tub, she wonders –  “What happened to Annie?”

“Father sent her to Albuquerque. Her aunt was supposed to teach her how to be a lady.” Obi-Wan’s mouth twists. “She came back in skirts, all right. But angrier than ever. She’d lash out at anyone over anything. The only thing she really wanted to do was… play ball.”

“And, Obi-Wan…” Cody catches her gaze again carefully. “What happened to you?”

Obi-Wan straightens her spine. Lifts her chin. “I moved back in with my father. Grew my hair out. Got a job in a department store. And swore I’d never be the reason anyone got hurt that way, ever again.”

“Obi-Wan.” Cody leans forward. “It wasn’t your fault. Any of it. What happened to Annie and Satine, you weren’t responsible. It hurt you, too.”

Obi-Wan shakes her head. “But what kind of an example was I setting for Annie, all that time? Who else did she learn it from? And if it weren’t for me, Satine would never have been out that night – would never have been arrested.”

“Obi-Wan…” Cody’s voice gives out. She tries again. “You didn’t make either of them the way they are. Any more than you made yourself that way. Or me. You’re not responsible for every queer person you’ve ever met, Obi-Wan, that isn’t how it works.”

“But when I see you…” Obi-Wan is shaking again. “I see you and Siri and Quinn. How you dress and how you act and the way you refuse to hide. And a part of me is so jealous. Because I miss feeling like myself every day. I miss who I was. But it scares the life out of me. Especially when it’s you. I worry about you every day. I worry about how the world will treat you.” She swallows. “I care about you, Cody.”

The last of the water drains from the tub. “I care about you, too.” Goosebumps are starting to set in on all of Cody’s exposed skin. But she isn’t finished yet. She leans forward.

“And it’s horrible what happened to you. Unthinkable. I’m so, so sorry for what you went through. But Obi-Wan – you don’t have to teach me what the world is like. I’ve been me my whole life. And Moose Jaw may be what you’d consider the middle of nowhere – it may not be Boston – but people are still people. Sure, most of the time it matters more how strong I am around the farm. And sure, my family knows what I am, and doesn’t care. But don’t you think I had to fight for that?”

She grips the edge of the tub. “The first time I kissed a girl, I was fourteen, and I got caught. We both got beat up. So the next time, I didn’t get caught.”

Obi-Wan looks stricken. “I didn’t mean – I never meant to say you didn’t know.”

“And lastly…” Cody’s almost out of steam, but she plows on, because at this point, she has to. “If you think I feel like myself every day, Obi-Wan, you’re wrong. I may not take it as far as you do. But I’m still playing dress-up just to be here. Sometimes so much it makes me sick.” She pauses for breath. “And I know how it feels to worry about someone every day. Because I worry about you, too. But that doesn’t mean I go around slugging people over it and making everything worse.”

Obi-Wan drops her face into her hands. Given her bruises, it looks like it hurts. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“I know.” Cody turns the hot water tap on again. “Now get in here.”

Obi-Wan looks up, shocked. “What?”

“I said, get in here. Before the hot water runs out.”

Obi-Wan strips down in record time. But when she goes to step into the tub, she hesitates.

“Could I maybe – just get in behind you, and hold you for a little while?”

The warm water feels like it’s unfurling something in Cody’s chest. “I’d like that.”

They stay that way, Cody’s head leaned back onto Obi-Wan’s shoulder and her body cradled between her thighs, until Kit bangs on the door and hollers, “Would you two kiss and make up already? Some of us have been waiting for the bath!”

Siri rolls her eyes when Cody eventually makes her way back to their shared bedroom, fingers and toes pruny. “Who was telling who to be careful, again?”

She’s not wrong. Cody throws a pillow at her, anyway.

Obi-Wan sees them off the next morning on their way to the ballpark. Cody is the last one out the door. She has the sudden, wildly inappropriate urge to peck Obi-Wan good-bye in the doorway, as countless husbands do their wives as they head off to work every day.

Well. Nothing for it. She settles for a pause in the doorway, instead, to inspect Obi-Wan’s flourishing black eye. It’s as purple as Cody expected it to be this morning, and swollen shut. Even if Obi-Wan weren’t suspended, she definitely couldn’t pitch for a day or two anyway.

“Kick their asses for me,” Obi-Wan says breezily. She’s dressed in yesterday’s trousers and a checked shirt, though her hair is still just-so in its customary pin curls, and Cody thinks she has lipstick on. “I’ll be cleaning up the mess I made in the shed.”

Cody raises one eyebrow. “You better. Ahsoka goes in there looking for new bats barefoot.”

“Yes, dear,” says Obi-Wan drily, a faint smile playing on her lips. And there’s that urge again, to kiss her here in the sunlight where anyone could see.

Cody pushes it down firmly. “I’ll see you tonight. Be good.”

“Who, me?” Obi-Wan’s laugh follows Cody all the way down the front walk and onto the bus.

Kit’s pitching again today, and the Daisies have their line-up constructed for her this time, unfortunately for her. She gets knocked around a bit in the early innings. But Cody manages to control the running game – it’s her specialty – and thanks to the outs on the basepaths, they make it to the bottom of the fourth only down two runs.

Pitching for the Daisies today is Eleni Syndulla, one of Cody’s fellow Canadians in the league, though she’s from Quebec. They’ve chatted a couple of times, but they don’t have much in common, it turns out. Syndulla has a good sense of humor, though, and a devastating palmball that looks just like her four-seamer. Except Cody’s noticed today she’s tipping it.

Cody points it out quietly to one batter at a time. She doesn’t want to give away the game too quickly and have Syndulla realize. But it’s there once you know where to look: a slight waggle of the glove, just before she rears back to throw her palmball.

Once they take the lead, the Peaches don’t look back. They win the game handily and head home victorious, Kit beaming from the first row of the bus over her second win in two days.

Obi-Wan is sitting in the front room when they get home, a magazine in her lap that Cody doubts she’s been reading. “I listened to the game on the radio,” she says as Cody walks in. “That sounded like some nice hitting.”

Cody shrugs modestly. “Syndulla was tipping. Anybody could’ve caught on to it.”

“Yeah, but anybody didn’t. You did.” Obi-Wan eyes her deliberately. “I did a really good job cleaning the shed. Wanna see?”

Cody follows her out the back door obligingly. The shed is – for a backyard shed – indeed quite clean. Cody and Obi-Wan spend a while inspecting its horizontal surfaces, just to be sure.

For the last game of the series against Fort Wayne, Windu decides to start Tala Durith, a late-season acquisition from Peoria who the Peaches have mainly been using in relief. She hasn’t thrown more than 60 pitches since the trade, so Cody is a little bit dubious. But without Obi-Wan on the field, Tala is their best option to finish the weekend.

Tala pulls Cody aside a few hours before the game and says, “I want to show you something.”

“What’s up?” Cody asks absently, mind already halfway into the Daisies’ lineup.

“I’ve been working on a knuckleball.”

That gets Cody’s full attention. “How’s it working?”

Tala lifts her chin slightly. “It’s working.”

Cody narrows her eyes. “Windu know about this?”

“He knows I’ve been working on it.” She winces slightly. “Not that I think it’s ready. Figured you should have right of first refusal.”

Since Cody would be the one catching it, and all. “You figured right. Can I see it?”

They set up under the bleachers on the home dugout side, hoping it’ll keep the Daisies from seeing them. Under the circumstances, Cody brings all her protective gear with her. Straps it on before she squats down.

The thing is, Cody’s never actually caught a knuckleball. She’s only even seen one a few times. Once in an exhibition game in Pilot Butte, from the stands, and once as a batter earlier this season – Kenosha has a pitcher who throws one. Cody had struck out swinging twice, and been grateful she didn’t have to catch the damn thing.

Well, here goes nothing.

Tala winds up and sends her first pitch Cody’s way. It looks – like a knuckleball. It floats toward Cody, fluttering and dipping, ending up somewhere near Cody’s right knee. She barely gets a glove on it in time, because she can’t predict where in the hell it’s going.

The key is, the batters won’t be able to either.

“Well?” Tala calls anxiously. “What do you think?”

Cody tosses the ball back. “Throw me another one.”

By the time they approach Windu, Cody’s caught about forty knuckleballs, missed about six, and been beaned by three. As far as she’s concerned, that’s a winning percentage.

They find Windu in his office and explain. He furrows his brow, listening, then looks from Cody to Tala and back to Cody.

In the end, he only asks one question. Of Cody. “You think the pitch is ready?”

“Yes, sir,” Cody answers honestly. Yes, the pitch is ready. What Windu isn’t asking her is whether she’s ready to catch it. And coming from him, that isn’t ignorance – if half his stories about Satchel Paige are true, he’s seen plenty of knuckleballs in his time. No, what Windu is showing is his faith in Cody, and Cody desperately hopes she deserves it.

Windu shrugs. “It’s only a playoff race. What the hell. Go for it.”

From the get-go, the Daisies have no idea what hit ‘em. They swing early, they swing late, some of them don’t swing at all. Cody has to block with her body a lot, but she keeps almost all of Tala’s pitches in front of her. Of the inevitable passed balls, only one of them happens with a runner on base. Tala successfully strands her at second by enticing the next batter into a bouncing grounder for a double play.

In the end, they shut out the Daisies to complete the sweep, and all for the low price of a few bruises on Cody’s stomach. And one on her thigh. And one on the right side of her chest.

But just like that, they’re sitting in the fourth playoff slot.

They get rowdy at the house that night. Miss Nu, for once, turns a blind eye, claiming a headache and going to bed early, though Cody could swear she winks at Siri on her way up the stairs. Three beers in, Quinn is doing her best impression of the Daisies’ hitters trying to square up Tala’s knuckleball. She squints, waggles an invisible bat, swings… and topples over onto her backside, to loud jeers and applause from her intoxicated audience.

Obi-Wan is mostly quiet through it all, sipping a gin and tonic from the armchair in the corner. But before she goes up to bed, Cody sees her pull Tala in for a tight, back-thumping hug.

Obi-Wan returns to the field with eight games left on the season. Her black eye is still shades of yellow and green, but the swelling’s gone down enough that she can see just fine. Well enough, even, to shut out the Muskegon Lassies for nine innings.

The Lassies are not playoff bound. They go out with a bit of a whimper.

Across the Indiana state line, the Daisies make a valiant effort to take the fourth playoff spot back from the Peaches. But they end the season against Kenosha, and get clobbered in their final road trip.

The Peaches, meanwhile, coast through their closing series against Peoria, and end the season still holding tightly to their playoff spot.

“Remind me,” Cody says to Obi-Wan over Rice Krispies on the last day of the season, as they pore over box scores from the Fort Wayne-Kenosha games, “to thank your sister for me.”

Obi-Wan smirks. “She actually called yesterday, if you can believe it. Says she’s looking forward to all the hits she’ll get off me in the playoffs.”

For the first round of the postseason, the league is pitting first seed against third, and second against fourth. That means the Peaches will play the South Bend Blue Sox first, and Annie – with the rest of the Kenosha Comets – will face off against the Racine Belles. Obi-Wan is moderately put-out that she won’t be able to cheer her sister on in person. She brightens, though, when she gets word that their father will be attending the Kenosha-Racine series.

“Isn’t he coming to any of our games?” Cody asks, mildly disgruntled. Her own family can’t afford the trip, but have been following avidly in the newspaper – the Moose Jaw Times-Herald has been printing the Peaches’ scores every day in Cody’s honor.

Obi-Wan shrugs. “He’ll see us play if we make the championships. Honestly, Cody,” she adds when she sees the look on Cody’s face, “Annie needs him in the stands more than I do. I mean that. It’ll mean a lot to her.”

The first day of their series against South Bend dawns cool and hazy. Cody gives Obi-Wan a quick good-morning kiss against her bedroom door, and then they go their separate ways. They’ve decided together: no distractions during the playoffs. They have to focus on the game.

First pitch is at 3:00 sharp. At 2:40, Windu bangs on the locker room door.

“Everybody decent?” he calls. After a momentary shuffling to make sure that, yes, everyone has on at least most of a uniform, Miss Nu calls out an affirmative. Windu strides through the door. His uniform looks crisper than usual, like maybe he ironed it.

“All right, gather round, gather round.”

They form an unwieldy circle around him. Miss Nu shoots a glare Siri’s way; she’s been hanging around in a baggy white t-shirt, her uniform unbuttoned and hanging from her waist. With a roll of her eyes, Siri shrugs her uniform up over her shoulders, though she doesn’t button it.

“I know this isn’t really my style,” Windu goes on, “but I wanted to say a few words.”

“That was a few words!” Quinn calls from the back, to scattered chuckles. Windu swats a hand toward her.

“Shut it, Vos. Look,” he shifts his focus back to the room at large. “Nobody’s ever done this before. A women’s baseball post-season – it’s historic. Every single one of you has already guaranteed yourself a place in history. But the thing is…” He frowns. “I don’t give a rat’s ass about history. Not today. Today we are here to win.”

There’s muffled laughter and a few cheers, but Windu isn’t done. He paces in a slow circle, looking each of them in the eye in turn. “You are better than South Bend. You are stronger and faster and smarter. And you are going to go out there and show them that. Do you hear me? We are here to win!”

That gets a fair amount more applause. Windu turns to go, clearly having said what he came for, when a voice pops up from one of the bullpen girls. “Excuse me, Mr. Windu. But shouldn’t we have a prayer?”

Windu’s eyebrows shoot up. “A prayer?”

The relief pitcher nods earnestly. “Would you lead us in one?”

Cody can see Siri and Quinn exchanging looks, but no one laughs. If not religious, they are all, at least, superstitious enough not to make light.

“Well, all right,” Windu says, and he takes his cap off.

He knees down with a wince – keeping one leg off the ground – and gestures for the team to do the same. Cody doesn’t think much of kneeling on tile floor before she has to squat for nine innings, but she crouches down.

“Uh, Lord,” Windu begins, clearly off the cuff. “Hallowed be Thy name. May our feet be swift. May our bats be mighty. May our… balls… be plentiful. Oh, hell,” he complains as Siri starts to snicker. His eyes land on Obi-Wan across from him. “Kenobi, you finish it.”

“Me?” Obi-Wan mouths in panic as all eyes turn to her. Cody shrugs when Obi-Wan looks her way for help.

“All right. Uh.” Obi-Wan takes a deep breath in and out. “Lord… if You’re listening. Help us to stay focused on our fundamentals, and not give away outs on the basepaths. Protect us from the glare of the sun when we go after pop-ups.” There are a few giggles, and Obi-Wan cracks a smile before continuing more solemnly, “And… grant us the strength to trust in ourselves and each other. Help these ballplayers to believe in themselves the way I believe in every single one of them, so that we can earn the win we deserve. Amen.”

The responding “Amen!” echoes through the locker room with a reverberation Cody feels in her chest.

Maybe it’s their months of practice as a team. Maybe it’s Obi-Wan’s prayer. But whatever it is, their bats are swift, and their balls are plentiful. Behind first Obi-Wan and then Kit, Rockford wins the first two games decisively.

Tala pitches game 3. By now word has spread about her knuckleball, and the Blue Sox have come prepared. They eke out a win, beating Rockford 3-2.

In the locker room afterward, Tala sits on a bench, looking despondent. Obi-Wan sits down throws an arm around her. “Never mind,” she says consolingly. “You pitched a hell of a game.”

Tala sniffles and wipes her eyes. “Sorry,” she mutters. “I need to get it together. There’s – no crying in baseball.”

Kit, nearby, whoops out a laugh. “Durith! Not a chance. There is so much crying in baseball.”

Obi-Wan pitches game four. It’s close again, but South Bend’s offense just has a little more pop than theirs. When game five rolls around with the series tied at 2, all eyes are on Kit.

Cody finds her in the kitchen early that morning, in her dressing gown, chewing on her thumbnail and drinking her second cup of coffee.

“I keep thinking it shouldn’t be me,” Kit confesses, eyes on her mug. “I’m not the #1 starter. I’m not a superstar. I’m just – Kit, the trick pitcher from New Orleans.”

Cody takes away the coffee mug and sets it in the sink. “You are a superstar,” she says slowly. “How many little girls have you signed baseball cards for this season? How many of them have gone running back to their mamas saying they want to be a ballplayer just like you?”

Kit sighs. “A lot,” she admits grudgingly.

“And anyway,” Cody goes on, “Sure, Obi-Wan is our #1 starter. But she lost yesterday. So what does that mean? Nothing. You led us to a win in game two, Kit. That was all you.”

“I think your pitch calling had a little something to do with it,” Kit mutters.

“It’s a team sport.” Cody shrugs. “But that’s the beautiful thing about baseball. Anybody can be the hero on any given day. It doesn’t have to be the #1 starter, or the hitter who won the batting title. It can be anybody. So how about today, it’s Kit, the trick pitcher from New Orleans, winner of game 2 and role model to little girls everywhere?”

Kit sighs again. “Thanks, Cody. I better go get dressed.”

“Any time,” Cody says, and puts the kettle on.

Kit is magnificent that night, striking out eight and facing the minimum through seven. She starts to falter a bit in the eighth, but when Windu comes out to take the ball from her, he’s smiling.

Cody jogs out to the mound to meet them in time to hear him say, “Great job, kid.”

Kit grins, then turns toward Cody. “Tell the bullpen they better protect my lead, all right?”

“I’ll tell ‘em,” Cody promises, clapping Kit on the back with her mitt.

The bullpen gets five quick outs, and just like that, the Peaches have won the first round of the playoffs.

Obi-Wan – who’s been pacing in the dugout since the third inning – greets Cody on the steps with open arms, and they go down in a heap, surrounded by their shrieking sweaty victorious teammates in all directions.

With three days of recovery time before the championship series, the party at the house that night is legendary.

Obi-Wan had gone up to take a bath, assuring Cody she’d join the party shortly. In the meantime, Cody’s rather enjoying the sight of Siri and Quinn taking whiskey shots out of Kit’s belly button on the kitchen table. She turns around, though, when she feels a tug at the belt loop of her slacks.

Obi-Wan, flushed and bare-faced, in a white t-shirt and baggy denim pants Cody’s never seen before.

“Little gods,” Cody breathes, and pulls her into the pantry. The door slams behind them.

The shelf of canned goods gives a halfhearted clunk as Cody shoves Obi-Wan up against it. Her mouth is hot and wet, panting against Cody’s as they meet in the middle. Cody digs a hand into her hair, smooth and straight and still damp at the roots. Obi-Wan gives a satisfying full body shiver when Cody tugs hard.

Cody could stay here for hours, licking into Obi-Wan’s mouth and rocking her thigh between Obi-Wan’s legs. She slides her free hand around to the back of Obi-Wan’s waistband, dipping her fingers in search of the soft skin of Obi-Wan’s ass.

And finds it more easily than she expects to. There’s nothing between the layer of denim and Obi-Wan’s skin.

Cody pulls away to gasp, “Are you not – ”

Obi-Wan grins wickedly. “Didn’t see the point. You were only going to take it off me again anyway.”

Cody bites down, hard, at the place where Obi-Wan’s neck and shoulder come together, to keep herself from making the noise she wants to. “Little gods.”

She’s just reaching for Obi-Wan’s button fly when a wave of laughter from the other side of the pantry door reminds them where they are.

Cody looks up. “Bed?”

“Bed,” Obi-Wan says decisively.

Afterward, Cody dozes for a while. When she wakes up, Obi-Wan is across the room at her vanity, still naked. With the ease of years of practice, she’s methodically dividing her hair into sections and twisting them up, to set in curls for the next morning.

Cody watches her for a few minutes in silence. Then she slips out of bed and crosses to Obi-Wan’s chair. She leans over and presses a kiss to the jut of her shoulder.

“You don’t have to, you know,” Cody murmurs against Obi-Wan’s skin.

Obi-Wan turns to face Cody, pins in her hand. She sighs and presses her forehead against Cody’s temple. “I’m not ready to stop,” she confesses into the space between them. “I don’t know if I ever will be.”

Cody turns her head to capture Obi-Wan’s lips with her own for a bare moment. Then she pulls away. “That’s all right, too. Any way you are, Obi-Wan… you’ll always be you. And that’s all I want.”

She pretends not to hear Obi-Wan’s slightly watery inhale as she turns away to gather up her clothes.

The off days pass quickly as hangovers give way to hitting drills. The series will be held in Kenosha, so on the morning of the first game, the team and all of their gear and Kit’s lucky socks (“Have you still not washed those?! Eeeeeeeeew!”) pile onto the bus and drive the eighty-odd miles up into Wisconsin.

They go straight to the park when they get there, not stopping at the boarding house they’ll stay in later. In front of the stadium, there’s a bit of a crowd gathered already. Cody figures it’s Kenosha fans, come to buy their tickets for later, until Ahsoka shouts, “Mama!” And sure enough, a tall woman with Ahsoka’s exact smile is standing to one side of the crowd.

Cody smiles and lets the others go first, listening to the squeals of re-united families as she thumps down the bus steps. Hefting her gear bag over one shoulder, she turns to head into the visitors’ clubhouse.

“Cody – wait!” It’s Obi-Wan’s voice, and Cody turns automatically to see Obi-Wan standing between a tall bearded white man and –

“Rex!” Cody shouts, drops her bag, and barrels toward her brother. He laughs and scoops her up – for all that they’re the same height, the same weight, the same everything – and spins her around like they’re kids, until Cody is dizzy and laughing and has to cling to him to get her balance back.

“Don’t break her,” Obi-Wan protests, “we need her rather badly for the championships.”

But for once, Cody ignores Obi-Wan entirely. “Rex, how? For how long? I can’t believe you’re here!” She steps back to look at him. He looks well, pale hair neatly trimmed, in a blue suit she doesn’t remember. He’s wearing a Rockford Peaches souvenir ballcap.

“Everybody wanted to come and see you, Codes,” Rex explains, reaching out and squeezing her arm. “All the neighbors pooled their funds. We only had enough for one train ticket, and I had to arm-wrestle Jessie for it. She almost won, Cody, she wants to come down to tryouts with you next season and pitch.”

Cody throws her head back and laughs. “Jessie pitching! The league isn’t ready!”

Rex leans in and runs his thumb down her face. It takes Cody a second before she realizes he’s inspecting her scar.

He lets out a whistle. “You weren’t kidding about this. I like it, though. Makes you look tough. Well. Tougher.”

“Cody, Rex,” Obi-Wan interrupts, a little shyly. “I’d like you to meet my father, Qui-Gon Jinn.”

“How do you do,” Cody says politely, and stretches out her hand.

Mr. Jinn reaches out and shakes it. “A pleasure to meet you,” he replies in what Cody thinks is an Irish lilt.

“Father,” Obi-Wan adds, “Cody is my… catcher.”

“I’ve heard all about Cody, Ben, I do read your letters,” Mr. Jinn smiles faintly. “Lovely to put a face to a name. And this is your brother, I presume?”

They have about twenty minutes before Miss Nu claps her hands and declares that if they don’t go inside, they’ll be late for their own warmup. In that time, Cody gets to meet Ahsoka’s parents, Siri’s mother, Quinn’s father, and – much to her surprise – Kit’s husband, home on leave from the Army.

“Why didn’t you tell any of us you were married?” Siri demands, sizing him up.

“Well,” Kit says, grinning. “He didn’t know I was playing at first. So I didn’t tell any of you about him. But it turns out he’s thrilled for me, so it all turned out all right in the end, didn’t it?”

“Shame,” Cody mouths to Quinn as they file into the locker room afterward, pointing unobtrusively to Kit. Quinn snickers and nods back.

Tala starts the first game. Cody knows she’s worried about how her knuckleball will play in Kenosha, the Comets being the one other team in the league with a knuckleball pitcher. But apparently they don’t routinely face it in batting practice. Rockford takes game one.

Windu has waited until game two to start Obi-Wan. There’ve been whispers about why – is she hurt? What’s wrong with Kenobi?

Nothing’s wrong with Kenobi. Except that every pitch she throws, it’s like Kenosha knows it’s coming.

The crux of it is, they can pick up the difference between her fastball and her slider. Cody can, too, so she knows it’s possible, but – she’s used to being the only one who can. Annie Skywalker has clearly taught Kenosha a trick or two since the last time they’ve played her team.

So Cody calls for Obi-Wan’s fastball and her curve, more and more, as they battle through the middle innings. And Obi-Wan adapts, mostly, varying her timing and her windup to keep the Kenosha batters guessing. It’s a gritty performance, every pitch a battle. Cody reflects between innings that you learn more about a pitcher by how they handle a game when their arsenal isn’t working than when it is. The last time this happened, Obi-Wan had pummeled the bejeesus out of Asajj Ventress over Cody’s honor. Today, she just puts her head down and throws, and throws, and throws.

Windu comes to get her at the end of the sixth with the score tied, 3-3.

The bullpen can’t hold on.

Cody squeezes Obi-Wan’s hand on the bus afterward. “We’ll get ‘em tomorrow.”

“I know you will.”

“And you can I can do some side sessions,” Cody adds. “Try to hone in on the slider.”

Obi-Wan gives her a look, but smiles faintly. “Yes, dear.”

Kit starts game three, and she picks up right where she left off in South Bend. Her fastball sizzles, her curveball drops, and Kenosha flounders in the face of it. Rockford takes game three to edge ahead in the series again, 2-1.

Windu gives the ball back to Tala for game four. It doesn’t go quite as well as game one.

With everything on the line in game five, Windu turns back to his ace: Obi-Wan.

She and Cody have made some adjustments since their less-than-ideal game two. Her slider’s coming out of her hand well, and the Comets are missing it, so they stick with the plan – to use her full three-pitch repertoire. The defense is tight, and they keep Kenosha’s offense under wraps.

The problem is, Kenosha’s gone back to their ace, too.

Depa Billaba, the game two winner, who has a completely shut-down arsenal and a quick movement that effectively hamstrings even Ahsoka’s running game.

The game is scoreless through six.

At the stretch, Cody joins Obi-Wan at the rail, spitting into the dirt. She squints up the third base line, looking for where Rex is sitting – and there he is, four or five rows back, waving a Rockford pennant.

Gods, Cody wants to win.

She wants to win for Rex, who came all this way, and for Obi-Wan, whose name will forever be inscribed with either a W or an L next to it for this game, and for the rest of the team, who has worked so hard.

But really… Cody wants to win for herself. To have something that’s all hers, that no one can ever take away.

As the last strains of the organ fade out, Obi-Wan nudges their shoulders together, then turns to face Cody with a smile. “Ready?”

“Always.”

They take the field.

Obi-Wan pitches another clean inning to close the seventh.

Despite a bunt single from Ahsoka, a double from Quinn, and a loud flyout from Siri, the Peaches still can’t get on the board in the eighth. It’s starting to gnaw at Cody as she heads out to squat in the dirt again for the bottom of the inning. But she can’t dwell on the offense when every pitch Obi-Wan throws is do or die, when she has to call them and set up for them perfectly, as every pitch misses a bat or finds a fielder and the score stays zero, zero, zero.

Windu pauses at the top of the ninth, lineup card in hand. The bottom of the order is up.

Cody trots over to see what the problem is. She can guess.

“Are you gonna pinch hit for Bree?” Cody asks in a low voice. Bree was injured in August and never quite got her bat back to full strength – with the season on the line, it makes sense to pinch hit for her. At least, Cody thinks so.

Windu glares at the lineup card. “I haven’t decided.”

“You should use Adi here,” Cody says before she can stop herself. “She’s always hit Billaba well.”

“But if I have to pull Kenobi in the next inning,” Windu points out, “I’ll have burned Adi already. I’ll be down to Aayla and nobody else. And she can’t play the outfield. If we go to extras, the bench is shot.”

“But if you don’t use Adi here, and then the Comets score on us,” Cody argues, “there might not be any extras to worry about.”

Windu stares at the lineup card another long moment. Sighs. “Look, Fett. When you’re managing this team in a couple of years, you can pinch hit who you want. But today, we need to protect the bench for extras.” He waves to the home plate ump, and sends Bree out to bat.

The bottom of the order goes down, one-two-three.

Cody and Obi-Wan take the field again for the last of the ninth, for what Cody fervently hopes won’t be their last time.

Allie Stass comes up for the Comets first.

Cody puts down the sign for a slider. Obi-Wan comes set, winds, and delivers.

Stass pops it high up over the shallow center. Ahsoka gets under it, waving off Siri and Quinn wildly, and makes the catch.

Next up is Luminara Unduli, Kenosha’s quick second baseman. Cody knows her as a patient batter with a keen eye.

Cody calls for a slider, low and away.

Unduli lays off. Cody does it again, inching her glove slightly closer to the strike zone this time.

When Obi-Wan delivers, Cody pulls the ball towards her, framing it up, and the umpire calls it a strike.

Cody tosses Obi-Wan the ball back, to scattered boos from the Kenosha crowd. She can’t disagree with them.

Unduli works the count after that, nibbling but never biting, fouling off two good fastballs to bring the count full. Finally, looking to induce a groundout and willing to do almost anything to avoid a walk, Cody calls for a fastball low in the zone.

Obi-Wan sends one right where Cody’s set up. Most batters would’ve rolled over on it, with where the pitch is headed. Unduli is smarter than that. She hits a rocket down the third base line, putting her head down and running before she’s even seen it land.

Siri launches herself after the ball. She lands sideways, skirt up by her navel, and gets a glove on it, but not before it’s skipped off the grass once. From the ground, she lifts up on one arm, cocks back with the other.

Obi-Wan realizes what’s happening a split second before it’s too late and hits the deck. Siri makes the long throw across the diamond, arcing right where Obi-Wan's head just was, and Quinn is ready at first to haul it in, foot sure on the base an eyelash’s width before Unduli steps on it.

“Out!” bellows the first base umpire, and Siri hauls herself to her feet, grinning.

Cody lets out a long breath in a whoosh.

Luminara jogs back to the dugout. And out of the on-deck circle comes Annie Skywalker, bat on her shoulder.

“Hey, Cody,” Annie chirps, just like she has every other time she’s come up to bat in this series. Cody ignores her, just like she has every other time.

Annie steps into the box.

Cody signals for a fastball. Obi-Wan shakes her off.

Cody signals for a curveball. Obi-Wan shakes her off.

Cody signals for a fastball again. Obi-Wan tilts her head, as if to say, “Really?”

Not bothering to put down the sign, Cody sets up for a slider. What she gets is a beautiful pitch, but a dangerous one – a high slider, right in the middle of the plate. It breaks at the last second, and Annie swings over it for the first strike.

Cody glares. Signals for a fastball. Obi-Wan shakes her off.

With a sigh, Cody sets up in the same place again.

Obi-Wan sends the same pitch. And just like she always does – can’t hit ‘em, can’t lay off ‘em – Annie swings right through it.

Obi-Wan comes set with a pointed look at Cody.

No one would swing at three Kenobi sliders in a row. Would they?

Cody sets up low, then higher, as Obi-Wan shakes her head minutely. She’s showing a lot of confidence in herself, that her high sliders will behave exactly how she wants them to. Because if they don’t, there is an awful lot of plate on them. Cody has a lot of confidence in Obi-Wan. But it’s been a nail-biter of a game, in a gritty series, in a long season. And Annie Skywalker knows Obi-Wan’s pitching better than anyone in the world. Even Cody.

Obi-Wan sets, winds, and makes her pitch.

She lets fly what should be another slider, middle-middle until it runs off the plate. But this one doesn’t run.

Cody reaches for it, heart in her throat. But Annie, impatient impetuous Annie, is already swinging. She makes contact, good contact, and the reverberation from her bat sends a shockwave through Cody’s bones.

Cody doesn’t have to watch to know the ball is heading over the fence.

Annie’s sprinting, arms outstretched to either side, as the Kenosha crowd explodes. Siri throws her cap in the dirt. Ahsoka, out in center, drops to her knees.

Cody’s frozen for a long moment, glove still outstretched.

The game… is over.

The dirt is solid under her feet.

Cody is still breathing, the sky hasn’t fallen, and Obi-Wan is watching her younger sister run the basepaths.

Cody pushes herself up and goes to meet Obi-Wan, in the middle of the sixty feet and six inches that divide them.

They trudge back to the dugout in silence. At the top step, Obi-Wan stops and turns to look back at the field. Cody looks, too, and there’s – Annie, beaming, surrounded by a ring of her teammates, all jumping up and down and hemming her into a group hug.

Obi-Wan’s expression is wistful, but mostly… Mostly, she just looks proud.

The locker room is quiet afterward as they all pack up. Cody is surprised no one is crying. But then, there’s something about a hard-fought loss that can feel too empty for tears.

Miss Nu comes in after a few minutes, a pink Rockford ballcap replacing her chaperone uniform hat for the first time in living history.

“I’m so proud of you girls,” she sighs, one hand on Ahsoka’s shoulder and one hand on Bree’s. “What a season.”

Ahsoka hugs her. “Thank you, Miss Nu. I really thought we had it until the end there.”

“I thought you did, too,” says Miss Nu, eyes crinkling. “But it’s only the first season. And you, Miss Tano, will be a champion many times over before your career is finished. I can feel it.”

In spite of herself, Cody smiles.

She says goodbye to Rex outside the back entrance to the locker room. He’s still holding his Rockford pennant carefully, like he doesn’t want anything to happen to it.

“You called a hell of a game,” he says fiercely as he gives Cody a squeeze. “What that girl of yours was thinking, shaking you off in the ninth, I don’t know.”

Cody laughs a little wetly, taking in the confirmation that Rex has read between the lines of all her letters about Obi-Wan – that he knows.

“Well, we all have trouble with judgment sometimes when it comes to our siblings. She thought she could beat her sister with the high sliders. I bet you still think you could beat me in a race, huh?”

“Hey!” Rex cries, reaching to grab Cody by one ear, and Cody dodges, laughing.

“You’re coming home, right, Codes?” Rex asks, sobering. “For the offseason, at least?”

“Of course,” Cody says, and means it. “I’ll be home next week. I’ve missed you all so much, Rex, you can’t even imagine.”

Rex pauses. “Is Obi-Wan coming for a visit?”

“I’m not sure,” Cody admits. “Probably not. She has some family things to work through. Or… well, maybe more like some personal things. Or maybe both.”

“As long as you’re coming home, Cody. We’ve missed you, too.” Rex gives her one last hug, then steps back. “I’ll see you next week. Don’t forget to call if you’re delayed for some reason – Dad worries.”

“Just Dad?” Cody teases, and Rex waves her off.

“See you soon. Stay out of trouble.”

The next couple of days are a flurry of packing, telegrams, and cabs to the train station. Siri and Quinn are the first to leave, hugging everyone goodbye in the foyer. Siri is moving to New York to live with Quinn, and there’s a part of Cody that’s achingly jealous. They’re not the only ones moving in with teammates. Annie Skywalker, Cody hears, is moving to Chicago with three of the Comets.

Quinn pulls Cody in for a squeeze, ruffling her hair. “If you come visit, we’ll show you all the bars. You’ll love it.”

“Maybe someday,” Cody hedges, and Quinn laughs, not meanly.

“Just think about it.”

Obi-Wan takes Siri’s place in Cody’s room that night, though they don’t use the second twin bed. They curl against each other on Cody’s narrow mattress. There’s a chill in the air in late September, and maybe that’s the reason they lie so close together.

Cody takes a deep breath and asks the question that’s been burning in her mind since they lost the championships. “Will you come back next year?”

Obi-Wan shifts, just enough that she can look Cody in the eye, but not far enough that they have to untangle their arms or legs. Instead of answering, she asks Cody a question in return. “Are you really going to Moose Jaw for the whole offseason?”

“Yes,” Cody says, a little helplessly. “There’s work to be done, and if I’m not earning, they need me back.”

Obi-Wan looks down. “What if you were earning?” she asks quietly. “What then?”

“Obi-Wan. I have to and I want to. It’s home.” She brushes their noses together. “I wish you would come with me. Meet the rest of my family. You’d understand.”

Obi-Wan worries at her bottom lip. “I’m not going back to Boston,” she says finally. “But I don’t think I can come to Moose Jaw with you this year, either.”

This year, Cody hears. “Where will you go instead?”

“There are a thousand places I’ve never been. Never thought I’d be able to leave Annie to go. And now… I need to see where that takes me, Cody. In case I never have the chance again.” Obi-Wan’s eyes are very, very dark blue in the dim light. “I’ve saved a little money. Enough to get me from place to place. I can pick up work. I’ve waitressed, I’ve danced, I’ve typed. Hell, I’ll clean toilets if it’ll get me to California.”

“California?” Cody echoes. “Will you go to San Francisco to look for Satine?”

Obi-Wan sighs. “I would ask around for her, if I got there. She’s probably in Europe. But yes. If I made it to San Francisco, I would see if I could find her there.” She squeezes Cody’s arm. “But Cody, it would just be to apologize. Nothing more than that.”

“I’ll miss you,” Cody says, low.

“I love you,” Obi-Wan replies, and kisses her.

Later, Cody plays with Obi-Wan’s hair, long and splayed out over the pillow. “You never answered my question,” she realizes out loud.

“Mmm.” Obi-Wan cracks one eye open. “Which question was that?”

“If you’re coming back to play next year.”

Obi-Wan opens her eyes, suddenly serious. “Are you coming back to play next year?”

“Yes.” Cody knows it with a certainty as deep as her bones. She isn’t done here. Cody Fett, ballplayer, isn’t finished yet.

“Then I will, too,” Obi-Wan says, as if it’s as simple as that.

“Obi-Wan.” Cody twirls a strand of soft red hair around her finger. “After all that about not coming to Moose Jaw with me, you’ll come back to play just because I’m here?”

“Not just because you’re here.” Obi-Wan smiles, impish. “But somebody told me back at tryouts that we make a pretty good battery. Turns out she was right.”

Cody stretches out to kiss her, but breaks away before long.

“Do you promise?” she asks in a rush. “Promise you’ll meet me here next year. On the back porch on the first day of spring training.”

“I’ll bring you a dozen roses,” Obi-Wan pledges, and bends down to kiss her again. Cody arches away.

“There’s no need for that. Just say you promise. That once you’ve seen the world, you’ll come back.”

“I promise,” Obi-Wan says, and seals it with a kiss.

Two mornings later, Cody rises early to catch her train. Obi-Wan stirs when she gets out of bed. Despite Cody’s best efforts to be quiet as she dresses, Obi-Wan squints her eyes open when Cody sets down her suitcase.

“Is it time already?” Obi-Wan asks sleepily.

“It’s time.”

Obi-Wan sits up, the sheets pooling around her. She’s been sleeping in the same singlet and white boxer shorts that Cody caught her in, all those months ago. Cody stops for a moment to memorize the sight of her – sleep-mussed, vulnerable. Cody’s.

“I love you,” Cody says, and bends to press a kiss against her mouth. “I’ll see you in April.”

“Do you promise?” Obi-Wan asks, tilting her face upward for another kiss before Cody can reply.

“I promise,” Cody says. And then, just like that, she leaves.

Chapter Text

Epilogue

Winter comes early in Moose Jaw. When Cody gets off the train, half the town has turned out to cheer for her, and that memory – along with quite a few of Obi-Wan – buoy her through the long, cold nights. There’s plenty to do during the day, between milking the cows, caring for the pigs, teaching Boba to throw a curveball, and a thousand other little things around the farm. Home is the way it always is, comfortable and familiar. But Cody’s not who she was when she left – not exactly.

Still. Her family wraps around her, her parents and Rex and Jessie and Fox and Echo and Boba, and it’s good to remember who she is when she’s not playing ball. Good to remember that she is still someone, off the field.

Periodically she gets blank postcards from different parts of the US – first Yellowstone, with a photo of a wolf. Then, yes, San Francisco, with the new Golden Gate Bridge proudly displayed.  Albuquerque, Dallas, Miami, Washington, D.C.

They never say anything except Cody’s name and address. But Cody knows the handwriting, has seen it a dozen times scribbling notes in the margins of Cody’s scouting cards, editorializing in tiny script.

She writes letters to Obi-Wan in return, wordy missives about her siblings and the farm and the news she hears from Siri and Quinn in New York. But since she doesn’t know where to send them, she just tucks them into her dresser.

On the first day of March, 1944, Cody braves the snow to pick up the post in town. There in the pile is yet another postcard, this one from Chicago.

She flips it over, just in case. And for the first time, this one has a note.

“I’ll see you soon,” it says, “I promise.” And underneath, a looping set of initials – OWK.

Cody smiles.

~

Appendix

1. For a brief but detailed history of US women in baseball, the Baseball Hall of Fame has a nice page here.
   
   
2. The queer history of 1940s Moose Jaw is discussed by Kelly McCormack in this CBC article, although I couldn’t find any separate historical accounts corroborating her story about a parade in that era. If anyone knows where to find more info, please let me know!
   
   
3. Obi-Wan mentions seeing Lizzie Murphy play at Fenway Park. Lizzie was a real life first baseman who played for the Providence Independents and then on barnstorming teams and exhibition teams from the 1910s-1930s. She even got a hit off of Satchel Paige! For more on Lizzie Murphy, check out her Wikipedia page.
4. Smith College, the women’s school Obi-Wan and Annie attend, really did have a women’s baseball team! At least in the 1920s – it was subsequently shut down. Legacy.com, of all places, has some amazing historical photos of white, Black, and Native American women playing baseball at different times in history – check that out here. The Smith College photo is the sixth one down, though they’re all worth looking at!!
   
   
5. Though this fic is set in 1943, I used the 1946 roster of teams in order to include multiple playoff rounds. There were only 4 teams in 1943 for the inaugural season, whereas by 1946, the league had grown to include the eight teams whose names you’ve heard in this fic: the Racine Belles, Grand Rapids Chicks, South Bend Blue Sox, Rockford Peaches, Fort Wayne Daisies, Muskegon Lassies, Kenosha Comets, and Peoria Redwings. For more on the 1943 and 1946 seasons, as well as all the others (the league ran from 1943 to 1954), check out the official AAGPBL website.
   
   
6. The South End was a major center for queer life in 1940s Boston.
   
   
7. I spent way too long deciding who should throw what kind of pitch. Sliders are old hat today but were fairly new in the 1940s. Knuckleballs and curveballs are much older, as are two-seam and four-seam fastballs. I didn’t give anybody a forkball or a screwball, but I couldn’t resist giving Eleni Syndulla a vintage palmball! My main reference for when each pitch came into vogue was this Fanatics article.
   
   
8. The Library of Congress has some gorgeous old railway maps in their online archives. This one of the Canadian Pacific Railway and connecting lines, from c.1912, shows how Cody and Rex might’ve gotten from Moose Jaw to Rockford on the train (albeit 30 years later).
   
   
9. Some of the greatest ballplayers in history were Black women who played for the men’s Negro Leagues before, during, and after the AAGPBL. Three of the most notable were Toni Stone, Mamie “Peanut” Johnson, and Connie Morgan. Of the three of them, only Toni Stone has a historical biography written. It’s called Curveball, by Martha Ackmann, and I highly recommend it. There’s also a lovely children’s book available about Mamie Johnson called Mamie on the Mound.
   
   
10. In addition to Curveball, some of my other favorite books about women’s baseball (though not focused specifically on Black women in baseball) are: Stolen Bases, by Jennifer Ring; A Game of their Own, also by Jennifer Ring; and Making My Pitch, by Ila Borders (a queer woman pitcher who was an active player in the 1990s-2000).
    
    
11. The US has a women’s national baseball team! Now! Today!!! Several of their real-life players, particularly Kelsie Whitmore, Megan Baltzell, and Tamara Holmes, influenced the way I wrote Obi and Cody as ballplayers. The USAWNT (and many remarkable women’s teams from all over the world including my faves Japan, Canada, and Venezuela) will be playing in the next Women’s Baseball World Cup in 2024, which I expect will be streamed online and has historically been extremely fun to watch! You can find out more about Team USA here, and the Women’s Baseball World Cup here.