Chapter Text
“Oh my God,” Stiles pants, sprawled out in the blistering Tucson sun, one arm flung over his sweat-streaked face. “Oh my God.”
“That was twenty pitches, you’ll see more than that in a real game,” Jackson scoffs, foot contracting gently with his shoulder. It’s late May and already suffocatingly hot, the dirt of the field burning his skin the longer he lays on the ground.
“And I hit all of them, so it’s more like twenty at-bats,” Stiles argues, pushing himself up to his elbows and glaring. A bead of sweat drips down his nose and he swipes at it in disgust, then flings his sweaty hand out in Jackson’s general direction.
“Mature,” Jackson says drily, tapping his foot with the bat. “Get the fuck up.”
“Fuck you,” he says. He flops back down and immediately regrets it, because now he has to come up with a way to get up without looking like he’s listening to Jackson. “Haven’t we done enough?”
“This is just the warm-up,” Jackson informs him, and Stiles immediately starts plotting his revenge. He wonders if a scorpion in Jackson’s shoe would be overkill and decides he doesn’t really want to have to catch one, but the tarantulas should start creeping out of their hiding places soon so that’s always an option. Nothing makes Jackson shriek like a little girl more than a spider in his bed, and Stiles has over a decade of friendship to back that fact up with. “Isaac will be here soon for live batting practice, so get your noodle arms over here and hit some more.”
He groans dramatically and hauls himself upright, sagging against the chain link fence. “I’ll be dead before then.”
“God, hopefully,” Jackson says, shaking his head, but he looks slightly concerned when Stiles pushes off the fence only to immediately stagger and crash back against it. It wasn’t just the batting; it was the fact that they’d run from campus to the baseball field, four miles in 100 degree heat. “Just sit down, I’ll go grab you Gatorade. Text Scott and whine to him, I don’t want to hear it when I get back.”
The gatorade helps; so does Allison, who shows up with Isaac a few minutes later and immediately chastises Jackson for ignoring any sign of dehydration, although it’s not so fun when she turns and starts in on him for not drinking enough water. He can’t bring himself to care much when she insists that they relocate to the locker room to stretch—the air-conditioned locker room,where he happily plasters himself against the cool tile floor and breathes a sigh of relief as Isaac wanders away to get warmed up.
“We’re doing this again tomorrow,” Jackson says, and Stiles groans and flaps a hand at him. “I’m serious. I’m not leaving you behind because you were too lazy to learn to swing properly.”
He peels his cheek up off the floor and squints. “What do you mean, leaving me behind?”
“No one is drafting a pitcher who bats .184,” Jackson says. When he spreads his legs out and starts to stretch, Stiles pulls himself to sitting and follows along, despite how good becoming one with the floor sounded. “I didn’t choose to go to this college for the education, dumbass, and I’m not following you around just for you to wash out.”
Stiles stares at him. Scott and Jackson had been offered so many baseball scholarships they could hardly walk under the weight of them, but Stiles had only been offered two—one in Florida, and here, at the University of Arizona. He knows the majors are a longer shot for him than for the others and he’d sworn to himself that he’d do everything he could to improve those chances; he just hadn’t realized that Jackson was counting on it, too.
“I love you,” he says, sincerely, and Jackson makes a face at him. “You can have six hours of my week. Make them count.”