Title: Nine

Summary: AU baseball Brittana. Top prospect Brittany Pierce begins her first season with the San Francisco Specters hoping to play up to expectations. Veteran second baseman Santana Lopez, recovering from an off-season car accident, is hoping to play at all.

Disclaimer: I don't own Glee or any of the other copywritten/trademarked items that will be appearing in this story.

A/N: Two things about this fic. First, it's a slow burn. And by slow, I mean slooow. You won't even meet Santana for a chapter or two. Second, this is a world in which women's professional sports exist on the same level as men's (they even have their own network); as such, the structure and rules of major league baseball are essentially the same for the fictitious Women's Baseball League. I watch a lot of baseball (go Giants!) but I don't play, so please forgive any technical errors as the story progresses. Thanks for reading!

Prologue: I don't have a choice, but I still choose you

There are a lot of things Brittany loves about baseball, but center field is not one of them.

Hitting is awesome, running the bases is great, being outside is a blast, putting on the uniform and the hat and pulling her ponytail through the hole in the back is fun, and the most fun of all is catching a ball in the pocket of her glove and closing her fingers around it and throwing it hard to the next player or her coach or her dad.

Center field only has some of these things, like being outside and wearing hats, but not enough catching the ball and throwing it in. Also, too much standing around waiting for something to happen.

Standing is boring, so Brittany practices the new spinning move she learned in ballet on Wednesday. It has a French name that sounds like a fancy cookie—like, maybe in France it means spin but also means elephant ear, which is her favorite fancy cookie because it's flaky and cinnamon-spicy and has an animal name.

Up on her toe, arms out, spin spin spin spin, four times so she ends up where she started. The hardest part is getting to her tippy-toe, since the pointy parts on her shoes want to stay stuck to the grass and dirt and not in the air, for reasons that don't make any sense yet because all she's doing is standing out here.

Coach said the pointy bits—cleats, gotta remember that; all the grown-ups are crazy about real words even though they aren't nearly as fun—are good for not slipping when she runs, because the grass is wet and slippy out here. But the girl on the big dirt bump all the way in the middle has to wear them too, and the dirt there isn't wet or slippy, but hard and so packed down she could barely kick at it like they do on TV.

Mound. The big dirt bump is a mound. Which is also the name of that candy bar that's the same thing as an Almond Joy without the almonds. Almonds sounds like mound, too, especially after she says it a bunch of times. Almond almond almond, mound mound mound. From here, it sort of looks like an almond, although almonds don't usually have people standing on them.

Standing is so boring.

Coach said she would start out here, since she's tall for her age and can run fast, which is awesome at recess when they play tag because she can outrun everyone and also tag them on the head, even the boys, but in baseball, tall and fast is a secret code for lonely and bored.

There's so, so much space between her and the girl on her left and the boy on her right, and so much space between her and the mound and the one-two-three-four-five-six kids around it. Coach must like them better, or they're all friends, since they all got to stay together and close to Coach.

Or maybe they're all a bunch of babies, since they also have to stay close to their moms and dads, who don't get to sit all the way out here.

(Maybe they're not babies. She wants to play closer to her dad, because he probably can't even see her all the way out here, and her spins are so awesome he should be able to see them up close.)

Up on her toe, arms out—but not too much; the glove on her left hand is heavy and throws off her perfect arm posture—and spin, spin, spin, spin. Nailed it.

She drops back to the ground, lets her cleats bite at the grass and the dirt. Standing is also super-boring because the kid with the bat can't hit the ball and everyone has to get a hit before they can switch sides and she can stop standing and hit. If he doesn't hit the next one they're going to have to get the tee out, and the tee is for babies, like her sister who just came home last month and cries all the time and even though she can't even stand yet or do much other than cry and eat and sleep, could probably hit a baseball without a tee.

(If she can't yet, which she can because Pierces are full of baseball skills, just ask her dad, Brittany will show her how.)

The only good thing about being all the way out here is that grass smells way better than her new baby sister, and it is also a lot quieter than her new baby sister, but just about as warm standing here in the sun as when her mom handed her the baby and said "be careful" and "put your hand under her head" and she got to feel just how warm a baby is.

Holding her was almost like snuggling with Lord Tubbington, only Ashley isn't furry and doesn't purr. She thinks it would be really great if babies purred, and also if they used a litter box.

Here comes the tee. Time for another elephant-ear-spin. The tee should be illegal. Spin spin spin spin. They're seven. Big kids. Spin spin spin spin. Not as big as Little League kids, but soon enough this doofus-dork-face-teeball-baby is going to have to figure it out.

The bat pings as she starts her spins again, so she stops, but it wasn't four spins, it was only two and a half, so now she's facing the wall. But it doesn't really matter, since when she turns around, the ball isn't anywhere near her. Lame dorkface only hit it foul.

What is near her is a really big daisy, like super-big, with a hundred million white petals that would look really good tucked in her ear against the one-size-fits-all red cap. She is so glad she noticed it before boring standing turned into running and she crushed it with her pointy shoes.

The daisy is not attached to the ground as tightly as her cleats are and it pops right off, just enough stem to fit behind her ear. She tucks it in, smoothing away a loose strand of hair, and turns to go back to her position.

And something lands on her head, connecting with the button at the crown of her cap softly before bouncing away. Ouch. She rubs at the spot and twists to see what hit her. A bird, probably, and maybe if it's close enough she can catch it for Lord Tubbington. He loves birds, sits in the window all day and watches them, and makes this cool chattering meow that's so close to bird calls that he must be trying to trick them into coming closer so he can eat them. But then Coach is standing in the way, and also her dad, which is cool, because she didn't know he could teleport, but also not cool, because he's in her face, all scrunchy-eyed and concerned.

"Are you okay?"

She nods. "Did a bird land on me?"

"No, sweetie, it was the ball."

Coach is kind of stupid, not that she will say that because stupid is a mean word, but really, if she got hit on the head with a ball, wouldn't it hurt more? "No, I think it was a bird."

"Brittany, did you see the ball?"

Another silly question. Her glove is like a ball magnet (part of her Pierce magic baseball skills) and she can't think of the last time she missed a ball, so obviously, if she'd seen it, she would've caught it. She tosses her head no, but carefully, so the daisy doesn't fall out.

Coach exchanges a look with her dad, who shrugs, and she doesn't know what it means but adults are always having silent eye-talks around her, so there's a fifty-fifty chance she's in trouble Also a fifty-fifty chance this is a good thing. That's the best thing about fifty-fifty chances; like a switch hitter (like she is already), they can go either way.

"Britt, are you having trouble concentrating out here?" Her dad asks the question, since he knows that sometimes, or always, she loses focus when things slow down or stop being interesting.

She isn't, she explains, it's just that standing is boring, and spinning is fun and also French, and daisies are really pretty, and that maybe she would've noticed the ball better if center field wasn't so dull and far away from all the fun.

Her dad and Coach start another eye-talk session, so she sits down and waits, pulling grass out stalk by stalk, and poking them on her cleats, so that each spike will have a pom-pom of grass like a Koosh ball, or maybe a hula skirt.

"Listen, I'm not telling you how to manage your team, I'm just saying she'll do better with a little more action."

"Where am I supposed to play her? The infield spots are filled."

Making hula skirts is pretty easy. Yank, poke, that's all there is to it. The spikes are pretty small, so she only needs a few blades of grass for each one.

"That kid playing shortstop is way better on pop-ups than ground balls. Stick him out here. He's pretty quick and he always just sticks the glove up every time a ball comes at him." Her dad makes a funny impression of Logan, who does just stick his hand up in the air every time the ball is near him and misses everything on the ground. She giggles to herself and tugs at the grass.

"You know Brittany is fast enough, and she's got the arm for it. Give her a shot. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. What can it hurt?"

"Okay," Coach says. "Let me see if we have a smaller glove for her."

He trots off and her dad kneels down. Wordlessly, she shows him her hula skirts, and he smiles. "You want to try a different spot?"

She nods, and the petals of the daisy rustle against her ear. He helps her up and they walk in, stopping halfway between third base and second base. "Brittany S. Pierce, meet your new position," he says, gesturing grandly around them. "Shortstop, Brittany, Brittany, shortstop."

She likes it already.

Later, much later, Brittany finds it pretty funny that the rest of her life took form the day a fly ball popped her on the head.

Before that revelation, there are three other managers, too many coaches to mention, baseball camps, state championships, national rankings, All-American teams, college championships, scouts in the stands, more rankings.

(Lots of choosing, too—choosing baseball over ballet, choosing OSU over Florida State, choosing bats and gloves and shoes and sponsors. Choices suck. She disappoints more people than she pleases, and she hates that.)

With the rankings comes talk, so much talk, about her raw talent, and her speed, and her ability to swing the bat, and the way she moves on the field, how she covers every inch of her position and some of the outfield and the two bases framing her. Talk about her glove work and her arm. Talk about her team skills, too, not just about her innate baseball skills but how she plays—unselfish, willing to sacrifice, a good team player (and at this level of the game, this team game, that is a quality both essential and rare), a player who has all of the necessary intensity but still has fun.

(They all seem surprised that she has fun still, but if she wasn't supposed to enjoy herself anymore, why didn't anyone tell her?)

National media are excited about her; she stops watching WSPN after she hears her name mentioned for the four hundredth time that week (plus, for a network devoted to the lady-athlete, they spend way too much time comparing her to dudes). Brittany knows she is good, great even, but the analysts call her 'phenom' and 'future-Hall-of-Famer' and all kinds of lofty things that don't really sound like her, the girl who just loves to play well, who enjoys turning double plays and stealing bases, and likes to win. The rumor mills have her linked to just about every team in the league in the upcoming draft—even teams that are so far back in the first round they don't have a shot.

Draft rumors are kind of annoying; her name has been discussed every year since she made the All-American team as a sophomore—like anyone was really going to draft a fifteen-year-old who can barely understand algebra and doesn't have a learner's permit yet, even if she does play shortstop like no one's ever seen. She gets picked every year through the remainder of her high school and college careers, and every year she turns down the tiny development contract offered. These drafts are rhetorical. Or, well, not rhetorical exactly, but she never remembers what word she really wants.

(Besides, she thinks, how many players get labeled 'highly touted' and never meet the expectation?)

When the real draft rolls around, the one that counts, she gets invited to the televised event in New York but hosts a draft party at her parent's house instead. Her party ends up televised anyway, since the draft is a foregone conclusion—she's going first and she's going to the San Francisco Specters—and the networks want to see her reaction to a pick she can actually accept.

She isn't quite sure how to react. There are stock answers of course, the same answers given in professional sports since the dawn of professional sports, but none of them really apply. She's been working for this her whole life; of course she's happy that she's going to play pro ball but the fact that it's happening is more obvious than San Francisco picking her.

The Specters traded up for her, gave up a couple of good minor-league prospects to get the draft pick. Their decision to drop development on those prospects to give her major-league playing time straight out of college is well-documented on those primetime offseason talk shows she stopped watching. Her dad tells her everything the analysts say; all of the talk that makes her crazy makes him proud.

Brittany's never been to San Francisco, but she follows all of the Women's Baseball League action, and the Specters are good. Well. Were good. Last season they got slammed with injuries and ended up third in their division and smack in the middle of the league—not terrible but not great either. The Specters are one of the original teams in the league, have a gorgeous ballpark on the bay a couple of miles south of the Giants' home field, and up until last season's dance with mediocrity, had been in the postseason more often than not. San Francisco is a great baseball town; the Specters don't sell out their stadium the way the Giants do, but from what Brittany has seen on TV, it's a full house most nights. She's looking forward to playing there. That kind of energy suits her.

(San Francisco suits her in other ways. People in Ohio always talk about the city like it's three-quarters crazy and one-quarter genius, which happens to her, too. And just like her it stores all its restless energy just under the surface.)

Just for fun, when she's practicing her surprised-but-pleased face in the mirror, she throws in a couple of oh-crap-not-San-Francisco faces to prank the cameras. It's part of her reputation they don't talk about on national television—being an awesome teammate means keeping the girls loose, and her non-sequiturs and her dry humor and the legendary shaving cream incident do not leave the locker room.

When Will Schuester, the Specters' general manager, calls her name, though, she's too surprised by her parent's stereo all of a sudden blaring that old hippy song about San Francisco and flowers in your hair to pull the prank, and instead, her actually-surprised-but-pleased face gets broadcast over screens across the country along with her mom's hand putting a big white flower in her hair.

All at once, there is both a microphone in her face and Specters jersey in her hand, and the guy with the camera is asking her how she feels, and that song keeps playing. This moment is not at all how she pictured it two weeks ago and it's exactly how she pictured it on a wooden bunk at that All-American summer baseball league in Iowa when she was fifteen. As it turns out, even foregone conclusions are a little bit chaotic and a lot bit euphoric.

Brittany puts the jersey on, adjusts the flower around the orange-billed gray Specters cap handed to her by one of her college teammates, gives the usual answers about her dreams coming true and hoping she can make a difference on her new team.

He asks her about the presumption that she is making the roster come spring training in February, and isn't she worried about making the transition from college to the majors so quickly?

Brittany shrugs.

February can't come fast enough.