Hogwarts Homerun
If there was one thing Sirius, Remus, Peter, and I shared, it was a love for baseball. The rest of the students shunned us for liking a muggle sport where nobody flew, but we loved it. Before the sun rose, I often found myself being shaken awake by Sirius, dressed in muggle jeans and a muggle T-shirt and ready to play, holding his baseball glove. Peter would still be waking up and Remus would be pulling on a pair of socks. We'd sneak out with my dad's invisibility cloak and hold a game with four members, laughing and talking and playing the whole time. Soon, we had a fully fledged team of Gryffindors playing almost every morning.
I held the worn bat in my hands, feeling the warm handle as I waited for Sirius to lob the ball. He stood completely erect, ball and glove pushed right up against his chest, giving me a mean glare out from under the brim of his cap. Turning his head, he spit and leaned back to throw. The pitch came straight at me and I fell backwards before it could knock me in the side of the head.
"Hey, pitcher!"I shouted, climbing to my feet. "Learn how to throw! Even the Babe couldn't have hit that!"
"Just keeping you on your guard, James!" Sirius called back, laughing and chewing on his gum. Babe Ruth was our idol. Sirius had pictures of him all over the lid of his clothes chest and I had a poster hanging from my bedframe. We could tell you anything about Babe Ruth without having to think about it at all.
"Some guard!" I yelled back, raising the bat from my right shoulder and moving it into position, bouncing it against my shoulder lightly. "Trying to kill me, still?"
"Yeah, well you know how we all hate you," Remus called from his shortstop position. "Just pitch the stupid ball, Sirius!"
Sirius paced the "mound" once, spit, and turned back to me with an evil gleam in his blue eyes. "This is going to hurt," I muttered to myself, digging my toe into the dirt. "Give it to me! Come on!"
"You asked for it," Sirius taunted. He drew his arm back and released the ball. I saw it coming closer, a white comet, and swung the bat. With a loud "CRACK", ball and bat met and ball went flying. The bat fell from my fingers as I sped towards first base, an old textbook, a sense of adrenaline and adventure running through me. A speck of white sped towards Joel, and I threw myself forward, sliding on my belly. The dust stung my eyes, but I distinctively heard myself hit the base.
Thud.
Thwap.
Joel's dark brown glove struck my arm just after it had touched to the base. I stood up, foot on the base, waving my arms triumphantly. "Haha, Sirius! Better luck next time!"
"Loser on first base!" Sirius called back, grinning impudently at me as he caught the ball Joel threw to him.
"Watch out - you have the school joke on the mound!" I called to the team. They all laughed at our normal banter and I ducked into position, ready to cut a quick run to second base. It never came, sadly enough.
"Guys! Breakfast!" Peter shouted at us, pointing at his pocket-watch. He had raised his catcher's mask. "The teachers'll kill us if we're late!"
I snapped my fingers in dismay, but Sirius pointed at me and laughed. "Better luck next time,
Loser!"
"Oh, yeah?" I asked, grinning. "Take this!" I grabbed the ball from Joel and chucked it at him. He ducked and leapt at me. Seconds later, we found ourselves wrestling. I had an arm wrapped around Sirius's neck, sitting on his back, but he rolled over and tackled me. Half a minute later, we both leapt to our feet, both claiming victory. Remus and Peter, the only ones left, laughed.
"What do we have first today?" Peter asked as we gathered our bags from the sideline of our makeshift field.
"Transfiguration," Remus recited. He was shoulders taller than Sirius and a head taller than Peter and I, taller than even the lanky Professor Flitwick, Sr. The only one in the school that was taller than him was Headmaster Dumbledore. "I hope you all did your homework."
"Of course, of course," Sirius said immediately. He threw an arm around Remus's shoulders and started talking about the wonderful candies that Honeydukes supposedly carried, an attempt to distract Remus. Remus, however, had been along Sirius long enough to know that we were scamming him.
"I'm not letting you borrow my homework," he said stoutly as we all entered. The rest of the houses rolled their eyes as I shook dust out of my hair and moved to sit at the breakfast table. "It's just cheating, Sirius, I can't do it!"
"Relax, buddy!" Sirius told him, laughing. He pulled a scroll out of his pocket, tapping Remus with it. "All done!" It was slightly squished from when he landed on it, but it was okay.
He picked up the milk jug and poured himself a glass.
"Mail should be here in three...two...one..." Peter ticked off. Surely enough, windows flew open and I saw the blur of many wings. One dropped a package of sweets onto Peter's head, but I got a small box as well.
"Oh, good, cookies!" Peter cried gleefully, removing a small package of homemade chocolate chip cookies. As Remus tore through a letter from home, I opened my package. "Oh..."
Sirius glanced over at the awe in my tone and gaped. "They got you a new glove?" he asked, his voice no louder than a whisper.
"It'll take a while to beat in," Peter remarked.
I held the shiny leather glove in my hands, my first new glove, turning it over and over. It was a full-fledged adult-glove. I had been playing with a plastic glove for a couple weeks upon reaching Hogwarts until Sirius had let me borrow one of his old ones. The glove had practically become my glove, but we all knew it was Sirius's, so I never grew really close to it.
"Your first real glove, man!" Sirius cried, pounding me on the back. "This calls for a celebration! I say we..." He stopped abruptly.
"Hey, midget!"
I knew instantly who the voice was by the palpableness of the sneer inside it. Dreading what I would find, I lifted my head, adding just a degree of defiance in the height of my chin. The glove firmly clutched in one hand, I asked, "What do you want, Snape?"
Severus Snape was Sirius's height. He wore loose black robes, while the rest of us just stayed in our muggle baseball playing clothes. His hair, slicked with grease, was always combed and he was always simpering. Today was no exception.
"Did your daddy finally send you a new glove?" he sneered, knocking it out of my hand with a casual flip of his own.
"My uncle sent me this glove, so back off," I snapped, my euphoria in receiving the glove draining away in the light of a new challenge. My fingers found the glove and tightened slightly and unnoticeably about it.
"What do you want?" Sirius growled.
"A game Potter, a simple game," Snape replied smoothly, not bothering to look at Sirius. You see, Severus and I had been friends until coming to Hogwarts, where he picked up the Slytherin mentality against Gryffindors. So he tended to tolerate me a little more than anybody else. He turned to his cronies and grinned, obviously thinking that he was pulling in a sucker. I wasn't going to fall for it.
"What sort of game, Severus?" Remus asked, his eyes narrowed. He gave Snape a piercing look, stabbing him with grey dagger-like eyes.
"You know what sort of game. Baseball," Gerald Goyle sneered into his face. Remus pointedly wiped an invisible speck of dust off of the sleeve of his shirt and stood up.
"Why should we bother?" Sirius asked, rolling his eyes. "We'll beat the pants off of you Slytherins anyway. I think you're getting yourself into a world of hurt."
"Oh, it's not only baseball," Tybalt Crabbe added, rolling his eyes in turn. "Baseball and Quidditch. There'll be a lot of people watching, too. Just to watch you all make fools out of yourselves."
The rest of us, who had never heard Crabbe string together a full sentence, gaped.
Sirius was the first to recover from the shock. His chair scraped loudly as he pushed it across the floor, climbing slowly and deliberately to his feet. Sticking out his hand, he said, "James and I are the captains of our baseball team. We'll give you bums five days to train. It'll be a double hit. Baseball starts with a 'B', for you Slytherins, so it comes before Quidditch, which, in fact, starts with a 'Q'," he added helpfully.
Snape's eyes narrowed. "Your impudence'll one day get you killed, Black," he whispered. Sirius grinned haplessly. "Deal, then. Five days to pull into shape and the match happens on Saturday. We play Quidditch on Sunday afternoon. Normal rules."
"Fair," I agreed, climbing to my own feet. We all shook hands on the deal and wiped them off on our T-shirts or robes. "Now get out of Gryffindor Territory, will you?"
* * *
"Hey, guys, listen up!" I shouted to the Gryffindor Lions, our baseball team. Our last class had let out and we had two hours to play baseball before dinner. Of course, we were using every available minute. "Our first game is on Saturday!"
"First game?" Bobby Rinoa echoed me. A lot of people picked on him because of his American accent, but then he would imitate an English accent and put us all in our places. He was short and blond, a first year with a lot of spunk, as Sirius would have put it.
"First game!" Remus yelled triumphantly. "Against the Slytherins!"
That itself brought a few laughs. "The Slytherins? Baseball?" Aubran Sapling asked, holding his side as he struggled to gasp out the words between roars of laughter. Joel Mamara was on the ground, wheezing, his laughter spent.
"Hey, scruffs, get off the diamond!"
Joel hastily climbed to his feet, wiping away the tears of mirth. Slowly, we turned to see the Slytherins, already adorned in green baseball jerseys and pants, holding gloves and looking formidable. My expression hardened into anger and I glared. Sirius, Peter, Remus, and I stepped forward, backed by the rest of our team.
"We've got full rights to this field right now! We were here first," Sirius growled, holding his fists up. Remus shot him a look.
"We got permission from Professor Kettumn himself," Nott bluffed.
When I look back on it now, I suppose that it was a funny sight. The Slytherins, clean-cut and sophisticated, standing in a group, facing down the Gryffindors, mismatched, indifferent, and
almost scruffy. Neither of us refused to yield.
"Get off of the field!" Crabbe ordered.
"We were here first," Sirius repeated, lowering his fists and clenching them in anger. His eyebrows were so low under his eyes that I could barely see the blue in them.
"Yeah, so back off!" Remus agreed, glaring.
Snape walked forward, intending to split the crowd, but I stepped in his way. "Get out of my way, punk!" he snapped, looking annoyed.
"No!" I shouted, crossing my arms over my chest. He was standing a mere foot away from me and I was having to look up to look at his face, but I didn't care about dignity. We had gotten there first, so we got the field. That was the way it was supposed to go and I was NOT going to let some dumb Slytherins change that!
He began walking again, but I shoved him before he could reach me. I don't think he expected practical joker James Potter to be so strong for one so small and that was his mistake. Anyhow, he found himself on the grass, sprawled out. Everybody laughed and the Slytherins growled.
"You'll pay for that, you jerk!" Snape lunged at me and we were both down. My anger at him, welling up after three years at Hogwarts being tormented by him unleashed itself. I heard shouts but ignored them. Snape and I wrestled, banging each other against the ground, punching and kicking and biting, trying to gain the upper hand.
Hands grabbed me around the middle and pried me away from Snape and flung me to the side. I lunged in Snape's direction, but Remus and Sirius grabbed me by the arms and held me back until I calmed down. I had a bloody nose and tears of anger had been flowing down my cheeks, but Snape looked worse. He was being held back by Crabbe and Goyle, looking like he'd gone through a day as a punching bag.
"Boys!" Professor McGonagall, who'd separated us, admonished, looking shocked that we could fight so viciously. "What is going on here?"
"He started it," Snape muttered sullenly, wiping at his own bloody nose.
"It's our field!" I shouted at him, not bothering to deny the fact. "You keep off of it! We were here first!"
"Fighting is absolutely not allowed! You two are to see the headmaster immediately! He shall do with your punishment suitably. Sirius, Remus, escort James to my office. I shall deal with him personally." She swept off, her shoulders tight with anger.
Remus and Sirius exchanged looks of doom. The Slytherins left in a mass, muttering sullenly and glaring with hatred in their faces. The Gryffindors exchanged uneasy looks. "I'll see you later," Bobby tossed at us before heading off.
"We'd better get going. You're in real trouble," Sirius said to me, looking uneasy. "You might want to drop by a bathroom though, to clean that up."
I just nodded and marched towards my doom.
* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *
A/N: Sorry that was so short, but I have SO little time, making it practically difficult to write anything long without losing the subject. I'd appreciate all comments. This is a weird fic, I know. Never thought there'd be baseball at Hogwarts, did you? *grin* It's official, I've watched "The Sandlot" too many times. This is going to be either a two-part or three-part series. I'm not sure. I'll try to get the next part up soon.
Disclaimer: Standard for most characters. As for the rest of it, I own Bobby, Joel, Professor Flitwick, Sr., Proffesor Kettumn (thanks, Liggy, for that name, as well as Aubran). As for me, my parents own me until I'm eighteen....