FIC: A New Game Every Day (A League of Their Own, 1/1)

[maidenjedi]

TITLE: A New Game Every Day
FANDOM: A League of Their Own
RATING: PG-13
CHARACTERS: Kit Keller, Mae Mordabito, Original Female Characters
SUMMARY: But it was Kit who was leaving, Kit who was traded

Written for elegantstupidity for everywoman .

Notes: This is slightly AU, just timeline changes from the film.

The fictional Racine Belles aren't given names that I could find, so I pulled up the original roster from 1943. The 1943 Belles' real first baseman was Marnie Danhauser; Marnie's backstory here is totally fictional and not meant to represent the real woman at all. Mumbles Brockman was the name given to a Peaches outfielder played by Kathleen Marshall in the film, and I stole the name for my Belles OF here. If any AAGPBL player was called Mumbles, I am unaware of it, and the backstory created here is meant to be totally fictional.

Also on AO3.

I’ve been traded to Racine.

She spat the words, biting on each one, extracting and spitting the most venom she could from every syllable. The ensuing fight with her sister was so long in coming, so long rehearsed in her head, but she hadn’t counted on Dottie’s fighting back.

I got you into this league, goddammit!

And that look on Dottie’s face. She had no idea why she was still here, either. But it was Kit who was leaving, Kit who was…

Traded.

In the bigs, a mid-season trade meant the team was looking for an upgrade, a way to goose a team toward the biggest win of them all. Or it meant they were shaking off dead weight down the line, preparing for an offseason housecleaning.

The Peaches were doing neither. The Belles didn’t need a pitcher. Kit wasn’t even sure who the Peaches were getting in return. Maybe someone to back up Evelyn, who had missed some games recently when Stilwell had the flu.

Kit wondered about her, the girl who would take her locker. She’d be pretty, probably. She could dance, so she’d be a hit at the road house, probably give Mae a run for her money. She’d make friends easily and she would have all the talent and do only a tenth of the work.

She wouldn’t taunt a teammate, and find herself on the shower floor, sobbing.

She’d fit the uniform well, and her knees wouldn’t hold on to dirt from three games ago. She’d know how to kiss, and maybe she could turn Jimmy’s head away from Dottie for a minute or forever. She’d know things about baseball that still eluded Kit, the mysterious things, the things Jimmy waxed poetic about when he’d had a few.

She could play, that was certain, and no one had to bribe Capadino to get her an invite to tryouts.

All the things, really, that Kit Keller felt like she never had been and never would be.

She wiped her face and put her hand on the Peaches uniform she had carefully folded and placed on the bed.

She was going to miss the train if she didn’t get going. But she stopped and grabbed something out of the bureau, still wrapped in the knitting she often pretended to work on.

Traded. To Racine.

-

Mae sat on the porch, smoking a cigarette, waiting for Kit to come out the door.

No one was truly surprised at what had just happened. The tension between Dottie and Kit was always bound to explode. Any time a tentative peace had been achieved, Dottie would correct Kit’s posture or tell her to smile for a picture, or, the very worst, tell her to lay off the high fast balls. Then the peace would fracture. Sides would be taken, or not taken – a good many on the team had sisters, they knew what it was like.

Evelyn would mumble a prayer of thanksgiving that she hadn’t caught pregnant and Stilwell was an only child. Alice would make a wish on the first star or on a rogue eyelash or whatever the fuck she did – Mae had given up on keeping track – and that wish would be for Dottie and Kit to get along.

Mae took a long drag and blew the smoke impatiently.

Kit stormed out, startling a spider building a web between the pillars.

“Hey,” Mae said, throwing her cig to the ground and grinding it beneath her heel. “I’ll drive you. No point in walkin’ this time of night.”

Kit looked as if she might put up a fight about it, throw a little more vitriol around, maybe accuse Mae of wanting her gone as much as Dottie had. She deflated quickly.

“Yeah, okay.”

It wasn’t that Mae really wanted to talk or anything, she thought as Kit threw her bag in the car.  She wanted to get out of the house, away from that still-fraught air and the low buzz of gossip snagging on all one hundred and eight stitches of every baseball in every room. It was nice to believe that out here, in the summer sun and between innings, they’d solved the problem that every group of women inevitably had, but they were a bunch of ballplayers, not saints.

No, certainly not that.

Kit huffed under her breath about nosy biddies, then said quite loudly and to no one at all that “all this shit better not end up in the sports pages tomorrow.”

Mae had no response to that.

-

They’d sat on the porch, weeks back, nursing a flask passed between them and carefully hidden in their skirts whenever the door opened.

Enjoying her buzz, and getting a bit maudlin at that late hour, Mae asked, “Why do you play baseball, Kit?”

Kit shrugged. “I was never good at anything else.”

Mae took that in, tried to imagine that. She herself had been good at plenty. Thing was, none of it had been very good for her.

“I had to get out. Home was….” Kit trailed off and shrugged again.

Yeah, now that Mae understood.  Home was.

Silence prevailed for several beats, then Kit spoke up again.

“I guess I love it. I…baseball is what I know. I don’t know, Mae, why do you play?”

Mae took a healthy swig from the flask and wiped her mouth, as unladylike as possible. She thought of Ol’ Gordo Mordabito’s face when he heard the smack of a good hit over the radio, Johnny Moretti telling her she threw better than even Vito Amalfi around the block, and everyone knew Vito was going to play real ball one day. The club where she’d met Doris, the moment she’d met Doris, that slouch with his hands and his breath and then Doris’ fist in his face….

“Oh, you know. I’m here for the money.”

Kit laughed and Mae handed her the flask. The stars shone and the moon was out; they’d been on the road for a week and sitting here, it was a homecoming.

Some of the girls had an air about them, even when they were playing. This is temporary, this is a bit of fun before I settle back down. Mae had arrived at tryouts feeling that, until she’d heard one of the major leagues scouts whistle low when she dived for a particular catch. She had bristled, ready to turn and smack him; she backed down when he leaned over to his buddy and said, “holy shit, I’ve never seen that kind of movement in center field from the guys.”

Mae knew she was doing something special, something amazing.

Kit knew it, too. 

“Mae.”

“Hmm.”

They were stretched out now, the hour and the booze having finally made them a bit careless.  The house was dark except for a light or two upstairs.  They had a day off the next day; everyone was worn to the bone.

“What if. Um. What if one of us is traded?”

Mae didn’t quite snap to attention, but she heard and felt the anxiety in Kit’s voice.

“I don’t wanna play somewhere else. I want to play here. What if the league….”

“No,” Mae said, trying to catch Kit’s eye. “Baseball is baseball. If there’s a trade, there’s a trade. Kit, the league is what’s special. This team, these girls – it could all change tomorrow.”

Kit sighed. “Betty….”

“Betty isn’t playing anymore. She’s gone. That’s her choice.”

“She was good.”

“Yeah. So are you. So is Doris, and Marbleann, and Alice, and….” She came up short, knowing the mistake it would be to say Dottie’s name and break whatever spell had calmed Kit’s nerves tonight. “Thing is, this team worked with Betty, yeah. And it works without her. We made it work. And there’s no sense worrying over a trade.” She sat back, letting her muscles relax once again. “Not gonna happen, and if it did, we’d still be in the league. We’d still have this.”

Kit closed her eyes and stretched her arms above her head. “You’re right, Mae. Not gonna happen.”

They sat there awhile longer, each thinking about the other teams in the league, and praying in her own way that they could just stay right there in Rockford.

-

“This,” Kit whispered. “It’s all I ever….I mean, I never knew I could have this, but I wanted it.”

She was in tears.

Mae had known to expect it, but had no plan for it. This sucked, and she knew it.

 “Kit, Racine’s a good team.”

A sigh from the passenger seat.

“Uh-huh. I know. But it isn’t Rockford. It’s not…I had to work for this. I had to…back home, Mae, they all….if Dottie was there, no one else was, especially me. But in Rockford, you all….”

Tears choked off whatever else Kit was going to say.

Mae knew all of this, though Kit had never said any of it aloud. Growing up, Mae had been the only girl, and then that kind of girl. Softball set her apart, and then baseball…whatever else Jimmy Dugan was, he was right about baseball getting into a person’s soul. It changed her and it turned her world inside out. In Rockford, in the league, she was one of many – and what she’d done before, who she’d been, none of it mattered at all.

“Kit, listen to me,” she said, pulling up at the station and putting the car in park. The train was already there, and Kit would probably have to run to catch it, but screw it. The girl was a sobbing mess and Mae considered her a friend.  “Listen to me,” she repeated, turning and holding Kit’s hands. “There will be all of that in Racine, too. Maybe more, because you won’t be looking to see where Dottie is, and the press won’t always ask you about her. She’s a star in Rockford. Racine can be yours, Kit.”

“You don’t know that,” Kit whispered.

“I do. I do know it. You have talent, you have moxie. You’re meant for this, you know.”

All things Doris had said to Mae, a hundred times on the way to tryouts, and probably more.

The things all the girls said to themselves, really.

Kit looked at Mae, eyes wet, face splotched. Mae waited for the determination to set in, for resolve to spell out across her friend’s face.

Uncertainty remained, grief overruled everything, and Mae was going to have to push Kit out the door so she’d make it on time.

“Okay, Kit. Here’s the thing. This time tomorrow, you can be on your way back to Oregon. Or you can be learning the first names of all those Belles in Racine, over bootleg flasks of whiskey on the front porch or at a roadhouse in Wisconsin, fresh off the victory you’re going to help lead them to against Kenosha. You pick.”

The look Mae wanted her to have never materialized, but Kit got out of the car and went into the station. Five minutes later, she was swinging up to the train car as the whistled blew, and she waved to Mae from inside.

Mae was satisfied, and finally let herself have a brief, angry cry over sibling rivalries, and the thought that she herself could be traded to a team without her friends, without Doris, just because.

-

The next day, Kenosha lost to Racine, 2-0, on the strength of Kit Keller’s complete game shutout for Racine. Rockford was pummeling South Bend at the time and no one heard about it until much later, and carefully, away from where Dottie might hear, several Peaches both cheered Kit’s victory and sighed over losing her to Racine.

Jimmy was overheard telling Dottie she should have found a way to work with Kit, or that’s what the gossip maintained when Dottie was giving him the cold shoulder on their next bus trip.

Kit sent Mae a telegram a few days later, a hasty one that meant very little to anyone else who ever read it.

“I still have it.” 

-

The nights in Wisconsin were even better, Kit had to admit, than those in Illinois.

The land stretched out, even here in the town; she felt open, endless.

Again, it may have been the booze or the exhaustion, but there it was. Kit Keller felt infinite, looking up at the sky full of stars and feeling the wind on her face.

The front door opened and the wood creaked, and Marnie, the Belles’ first baseman, came out into the night air, followed by a girl called Mumbles who played in the outfield.

Kit hid the flask in her knitting, casually strewn in her lap.

The girls sat down, and Kit waited.

“Jeez, I need a drink,” sighed Marnie, stretching her legs out in front of her and leaning back.

“Here,” said Mumbles. “Don’t be too obvious, though, Mrs. Anderson already thinks I was drunk on that trip back from Kenosha last week.

“Well, you were.”

“True, but she doesn’t know it.”

“You mind?” said Marnie, tipping the flask at Kit, who shook her head.

They sat there quietly for a while, before Kit decided to get over herself and just do it.

“So how’d you end up playing baseball, Marnie?”

Marnie told her a story about playing sandlot ball with her brother, and Mumbles – whose nickname, Kit discovered, was well-earned, told her own story, about growing up in Cincinnati watching the Reds with her mother. 

Kit told her own story, leaving out Dottie, when she realized neither Marnie nor Mumbles knew anything at all about “Dottie’s sister.”  And they wanted to know about Kit Keller, with no agenda in mind.

It was a beginning.  When the night ended, Kit knew, whatever it was that had held her heart in Rockford, she might find it here in Racine, too.

She fell asleep with a full heart.

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