That One Time We Kissed // Bishova College AU

Ultimate Fucking Kickball

"What the fuck is even the point of this game." Yelena stared at the field before her with contempt, perfectly painted eye black gleaming in the sun.

Kate, who had somehow convinced all of her friends to join her intramural kickball team, cheerily replied, "It's like baseball, babe."

"That doesn't help."

"No," said Pietro, rolling up with a blue sweatband to keep back his platinum hair. "It's really more like dodgeball."

"Are you even allowed to be on the team?" Yelena asked. She spotted Steve and Carol walking up together and pitied any team unfortunate enough to face them. "Are they?"

"Are we what?" Steve asked, setting his bag on the ground and immediately launching into dynamic stretches. "Can we be on the team? Yeah, as long as it's not the sport we play for the school."

Yelena nodded with a sigh. She gazed across the field to the other team warming up, hoping there would be fewer Steves and Carols and more Peters and Yelenas. Next to her, Peter stretched with the tiredness of someone who had seen this film before, been roped into a Kate scheme one too many times. Perhaps this was why MJ politely declined the invitation.

The team was mostly full of familiar faces— an anxious Wanda, a typically indifferent Natasha, with the exception of one girl Yelena did not recognize. The woman, fairly tall and very buff, seemed to stick closely to Carol, who was more bubbly than Yelena had ever seen her.

"That's Val," Kate whispered, following Yelena's eye. "Carol's rebound- sorry, crush."

"She's very..." Yelena studied her, from the axe tattoo on her bicep to her singular focus on Carol. "Intense. You guys could bond over your weapon tattoos."

"You should complete the set, babe. Get a a bow. Or a centaur," Kate commented, arms crossed in her purple and white baseball tee.

Yelena, always surprised by how toned Kate was, took a moment to blatantly admire before replying, "Wait, a centaur?"

"Yeah, like the sword. The curved swords."

"Yeah, babe. Mhm. Centaurs."

Yelena took a deep breath, refocusing on the game currently playing out on the patchy grass field with squiggly foul lines akin to that of an elementary school hopscotch. The participants of the current kickball game were significantly more worn than Yelena anticipated, with bloody knees and bruised elbows. She thought this would be a glorified gym class, but it was looking more like a gladiator battle fought fearsomely with a rubbery sphere of destruction.

As she surveyed the opposing team meandering around, Yelena spotted Daisy, informing Kate that she was going to go say hello.

"Babe, you can't fraternize with the enemy," Kate called as Yelena bounced off. Daisy was not someone Kate expected her to greet enthusiastically, but maybe they had mended the bridge. Or maybe Yelena just hated Steve's bootcamp-style warmup regiment.

"I'm not fraternizing," Yelena insisted, hands in her pink hoodie pocket. "We're in a sorority."

"Right..."

With a small smile, Kate watched her go, left once again with the only the trill of the freshman referee's whistle and the crushing loneliness she had been trying to avoid. The kind of loneliness that sucked the air out of her lungs like she had been on a swift run. The kind of loneliness that made her think about everything going wrong.

When putting together this All-Star caliber kickball team a week ago, Kate had done so with the chipper intent of one last college hurrah. Her friends, all otherwise occupied with capstone projects, track, running a sorority, jobs, and whatever Wanda did in her free time, would likely be too busy in the coming weeks for childish things such as this.