Anna Summers has trained her whole season for this moment.

Days of practice and hours upon hours of workouts…it's all lead up to this one championship game. Because for the first time in forever, she isn't watching from the sidelines.

For the first time in forever, she's actually getting a chance to play.

Anna had been accepted on the team as an alternate earlier in the year, and all season she's been putting in the work without ever really getting the reward…but stepping up to the plate today to stand in for an injured teammate is going to be her first shot at proving she belongs with the Summit University Suns for a reason. It's her chance to show everyone that she truly should be here among the other members of her university's women's baseball team; to prove that her name written on the back of her jersey can live up to the red and white team colors it's been embroidered in, despite the fact that she had been the clear underdog on the day of tryouts.

Because while it may be true that Anna is the clumsy girl who oftentimes trips over her own shoelaces off the field, she can damn well hit any curveball thrown at her when she bats. And she can also—somehow, anyway—get her otherwise uncoordinated limbs under control for just long enough to run once she's successfully hit the ball.

That's why the root of Anna's nervousness as she walks to the plate with her bat in hand lies not in doubts of her own abilities, but rather in the fact that the one thing standing in her way of proving herself is, perhaps, the biggest obstacle the Suns have faced all season.

North Royal University.

A prestigious team known very well throughout the division, the North Royal University Queens have been undefeated champions for the past six years. And while the Suns have ranked quite well in the past years, no prior performance has ever been enough to surpass that of the Queens'—even before it had become a goal to dethrone the small but mighty rival university from its champion position.

Due largely to the reputation of their dominating record, the Queens have always stood proudly in their blue and white jerseys, and it proves to be no different on the field today. Anna immediately notices their challenging stares and their chin-held-high postures as she steps up to the plate and positions her bat. But what she quickly finds as she does so is that most interesting gaze of all among the sea of blue and white is that of the opposing team's pitcher, Elsa Arendelle. Anna has never before seen her in person, but with her sharp blue eyes and signature platinum blonde braid, she can be mistaken for no one else. Elsa is known as well as—if not better than—her team, and so even as a freshman Anna has heard countless stories about the notoriously fierce baseball prodigy.

Elsa has played for the Queens for all four years of her time at North Royal University, and was nicknamed the 'Ice Queen' by multiple players in the division for her rather cold demeanor and her merciless pitching. Humble far from a word in her vocabulary, the ruthless pitcher knows how to win a game and take a victory like she's deserved it the entire time…but she is also easily the Queens' most valuable star player (maybe in the entire history of the team) and so she can oftentimes get away with her conceited and standoffish attitude.

Given the information Anna has, she's been mentally preparing for how she would talk herself out of being intimidated by the blonde's cold gaze, but…unless Anna is seeing wrong, Elsa's normally icy and devoid-of-all-emotion stare isn't quite all it's made out to be.

Or at least—not when it's now aimed at Anna.

The prestigious pitcher seems to be regarding Anna with a curious—maybe almost even interested—look as she twist the ball in her glove, and Anna notices not how icy her eyes are, but how wonderfully bright blue they appear beneath the rich, royal blue hue of the cap she wears. And coupled with the sharp cheekbones and the muscles of pale arms that flex subtly as she draws the ball further from her glove…

Damn, all those stories and pictures and I never realized how gorgeous she really is.

Anna finds that this thought brings any other rational ones to halt, which is only proof that, much like her clumsiness, Anna's other downfall is her tendency to be distracted easily. And she is only brought out of her daze by the slicing whoosh of the ball as it hurtles through the air at warp speed and comes in contact with the catcher's mitt before Anna even has the chance to swing.

"Strike!"

Anna thinks her face must be as crimson as her red hair in its twin braids, and she tries to ignore the unsettled words of her teammates as she swings her bat a few times and reposition her feet—gives herself more time to figure out how not to be so entranced by the elusive pitcher before she has to look in her direction again. But Elsa seems to know that she's the cause of Anna's distracted state, because this time, the look in her eyes is amusement instead of curiosity, and below that gaze is a small smirk—a subtle little upturned twist of her lips that is playing with Anna's emotions just right the longer her eyes linger there, when, in fact, they shouldn't be lingering at all because…

"Strike!"

Now her teammates and her peers in the stands are quite riled—and rightfully so, Anna knows. Because no one can possibly realize the true cause of her distraction (it is far too subtle, and now most certainly and deliberately meant for Anna alone), and so they must think that Anna is simply not proving herself to be capable of handling the pressure of a game so important.

Well, not this time, Anna thinks. Because I know what's coming.

And she mentally prepares herself, in a completely different way this time—for the gorgeous eyes and the sexy smirk and the way Elsa snaps her gum before she draws her arm back and then—

Crack!

Anna's bat collides easily with the ball—which hasn't even been pitched in a challenging way because Elsa has made the mistake of expecting Anna to falter once more.

And it's a very satisfying feeling when the ball sails entirely out of the field and the crowd erupts encouragingly and her teammates are cheering and she's running—solitary white and red around the condescending stares of white and blue—and the only thing she regrets is not being able to see the pitcher's expression when she'd hit that home run.

Because two can play this game, Elsa Arendelle.

And so now, even if the Suns don't bring home the championship win today, Anna thinks she's still going to make it her mission to knock the Ice Queen off of her own throne…

Nine innings can last quite a while when two teams are playing so fiercely, and, as it would seem, the Suns have indeed come more prepared than ever before to fight the defending champions. So not only does this give Anna more of an opportunity to prove to her team that she can play well, but it also gives her more time to study Elsa, who is not so emotionless after all.

Full of herself, yes. But unfeeling?

No—there is definitely something going on inside that head of hers because throughout the entire game, those blue eyes only change from their icy state when Anna is in front of her.

The Queens' esteemed pitcher regards Anna more carefully each time, and seems to really contemplate her every move before she throws her pitch. And when Anna gives a little smirk of her own around the third or fourth time she's stepped up to the plate to bat, she revels in the fact that Elsa seems to freeze slightly—like she's surprised, but less in the sense that she's taken aback and more in the sense that she can't quite find an adequate means to respond. Because her lips part a little, and it kind of makes her look like she's gotten the wind knocked out of her for a brief moment, and Anna can't help but love that—love that she, too, can hold that kind of power when she wants to use it.

And it's all so subtle—something that, to anyone else, could be mistaken for a mere momentary lapse in focus. But the tension and the exploring and the cautious dancing they're doing around each other, even from yards away, can only be broken by the obligation they both have to the game: Elsa continues to throw her complicated pitches that she's calculated carefully based on how Anna has hit the ones prior, and Anna continues to hit each one, no matter how difficult or complex.

None of Anna's hits other than her first are a home run, but Elsa does not succeed in striking her out—not by the time they are halfway through the game and not by the time it is over, when the Suns actually manage to defeat the Queens by a very small margin.

What's not so small, however, are the shouts of commotion from the stands, both in excitement from Summit University and in disappointment from North Royal University. Anna's teammates are cheering profusely, too, and are still congratulating her on her home run from the first inning, which they think really set them up for success for the rest of the game. Anna is elated beyond words that the Suns have won and taken down a team that has stood too haughtily for far too long, and she's even more thrilled that she has been able to make her teammates see that she does, truly, have what it takes to belong here.

And despite the silent contest that's transpired, unnoticed, between Anna and the Queens' star pitcher, the Suns have still won through completely fair play; Anna has a pretty good feeling that she and Elsa are definitely even, now.

But that, of course, doesn't mean that the blonde is no longer a mystery to Anna. In fact, she's even more of a mystery now, sparking new questions in Anna's mind when she notices that the pitcher is standing among blue and white with the same crossed arms as her teammates, but not joining in on their rather impetuous and irate conversations. Elsa is instead seeming to take her fall in stride—in a way that she likely never has before. And just as Anna keeps looking over at Elsa, the blonde keeps looking over at Anna…

The redhead's gaze is drawn away from the senior pitcher, then, as her teammates continue to celebrate, which only increases tenfold when the championship trophy is brought out. So it is only when things start to settle down again that she hears something that makes her spin on her heels. Something that Anna would have, she is positively certain, noticed even amid all of the excitement that had erupted directly after the end of the game—

"Hey, Summers!" the voice is authoritative in a way that is meant to draw her attention, but at the same time, it's kind of light, "Catch."

The first thing Anna sees when she turns is a baseball headed at her in a perfectly aimed arc. And she catches it easily because, as it would turn out, it hasn't been thrown from a very far distance at all, and therefore has required much less force than that of what a pitcher would normally put behind a throw. But once the ball is in Anna's hands she almost laughs, because there against its stark white surface are ten individual numbers—a phone number—written in black ink. A message as smooth as the throw itself.

And of course, it's from none other than Elsa Arendelle—the previously untouchable star pitcher whose attention Anna has managed to capture in a very unexpected way, and whose amused little smirk is one that Anna would suddenly very much like to kiss right off of her lips.

A/n: Just a little AU I felt like writing, and I don't know much about baseball but I thought I'd try something a bit different. I'm still working on The Perfect Distance, but writing new things every now and then is a nice change of pace. Other than that- normal disclaimer that I don't own Frozen or its characters.

Thanks for reading!