Chapter Text
Kichiro got her last name from her father, and from her mother she got a pen pal’s address. Maybe it was wrong to call her grandmother a pen pal but that was what she was most saliently. That and an excuse to hold onto her third most fluent language. There were promises that they’d fly across the ocean as a family to meet her in person someday. When Kichiro was young the excuse was money, when she was older the excuse was time, scheduling. It was always something. It always would be something.
She didn’t know if her father had family. That information was never offered, and she’d meant to ask, someday but-
It was always something. It would always be something.
Of course everyone knows it’ll be too late someday, but no one’s ever prepared for the day that someday carcrashes from nebulous future to the too-soon past.
It would always be something. Kichiro Guerra dreamed of leaving, and would, before too long, replace that dream with one of returning.
For now, she would play little league and hang out with Parker Meng.
***
In hindsight it was probably inevitable that Kichiro would end up in a power couple before she was ready. You don’t know you’re pretty until people start treating you that way. When she realized, her first feeling was resentment, resentment at not having been given a choice in the matter. It never left her, never really would. Years later, as she struggled against nonliquid waves, that resentment would remain even once her name had been erased. What do you do when something bites so deep?
Kichiro figured she might as well get something out of it.
She met Parker after moving out to one of several indistinguishable Bay Area-offshoots, one that Parker had already had the run of for years. They weren’t friends until they met each other at school, had privately considered the other weird until the context of the educational system provided the enlightenment that, being lesbians adrift in a sea of affluence, they were weird in mostly the same ways.
Two drowning figures cannot save each other, but they can be in love. And Kichiro would rapidly learn what love felt like.
Drama club, GSA, writing on each others’ converse shoes; these were learned rituals made personal. Kichiro on the softball team, speedy and dextrous, a natural shortstop. Parker in the stands waiting patiently until after the game to compliment her clumsily, earnestly, on how she looked in the uniform (and it hurt, but it felt good more than it hurt, and Kichiro liked outfits, liked the variety and the expression so she could write it off as that-)
Parker at debate club, student council speeches, official and officiating, and Kichiro in the audience yelling QUEEN and SLAY and other words she’d learned from drag race reruns, making sure everyone knew that was her girlfriend and that the both of them were alive and they weren’t going anywhere, weren’t going anywhere-
If the two of them weren’t wanted, that was fine, Kichiro decided. That was everyone else’s problem. She would make it their problem. She’d get kicked out of auditoriums, kicked out of events, sent to detentions, feel sneers and derisions behind her back from people she told herself over and over again would stop mattering someday, the kind of someday you were glad to realize was behind you now.
She wasn’t going anywhere.
Not yet.
***
We, of course, know how the story of the Alternate Kichiro Guerra goes, the one who’s not a five star batter, the one who’s not the season 3 league OPS leader, the one without bloodlust, but let’s pretend we don’t for a moment. Let’s indulge ourselves and follow her and Parker Meng to college.
After all, we have another team of Lovers to meet.
Kichiro’s surprised when Parker decides to try for art school. It doesn’t seem to suit her much, really if Kichiro’d had to guess she would have imagined Meng shipping off to Harvard to become some lawyer or politician, and she’d honestly been fully prepared to pull some legally blonde (legally pink?) shenanigans to follow her there.
But what else could Kichiro do? They applied to the same schools, both got in, decided together. Once they arrived, Kichiro found that it made more sense than it’d appeared, sense even beyond the cliche of finding a safe gay space as theater kids. Parker Meng had ideas about how things should be, but not grandiose ones. The scale of a play or a project or a demonstration suited her much better. And Kichiro had found a love for a sewing machine hum all those long-sunned late afternoons laid in waxed school hallways combining fabrics to pieces to outfits to “moments”.
And so the college grass stretched beneath them, Meng reading something for dramaturgy and Kichiro sketching clothes, and they’d split a soda and it would feel nice for everyone around them to be gay and weird and to abandon that need to force their existence down the collective throat of the world. Their relationship casually opened up, neither of them the jealous type, neither committed to one vision of love, and one night, red solo cup in hand, a perfect complement to her red dress and red converse and pink hair, Kichiro Guerra would be introduced to the imposing gender neutral figure of Knight Triumphant at a basement party like any other. They were flanked by Parker and two twinks.
“I hear you play Blaseball.”
“Used to.”
Their first exchange, slipped in between plays of defying gravity and mr. brightside. Their voice was sonorous, ringing and metallic, and when Parker clues Kichiro in to Knight’s larping habit (hence the name, she assumes) it comes as little surprise. Parker had excellent taste, as always, Kichiro flattered herself, and Knight won her over quickly.
The five of them: Kichiro and Parker, Knight, and Milo and Theo, the twinks (although Theo wasn’t really a twink, not that Kichiro knew too much about the male portion of homosexual taxonomy, it was just that Milo was well past twink enough for the both of them) spent the rest of the party working each other into a vision of the future, their positions on the field and the glory they’d win, a new league and new friends and flames.
Kichiro found herself falling in love with something larger than a person.
***
In season 18, Kichiro wastes no time trying to endear herself to the Millenials.
“Word of advice,” she says, to laughter from the room, “never simp so hard you join a polycule AND a Blaseball team. Worst mistake of my life.”
She makes friends, but isn’t long for the team.
It would always be something.
end of chapter one