Fic: Take Me Out to the Ballgame
Title: Take Me Out to the Ballgame
Author: G
Characters: Luke/Reid
Genre: Romance, hopefully a bit of humor
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: I own nothing of ATWT, the Chicago Cubs, or the iconic song from which this fic gets its name. No profit; just having fun!
Summary: Luke and Reid take in a day game, not without some adventure.
Author's Notes: This fic was written in the summer of 2010, and was completely inspired by true life events. I have personally experienced (in some way, shape, or form) everything that takes place in this story, and I have loved it all. :-P Everything about the Cubs is fictional; as a Mets fan, I know nothing about Chicago, so I made everything about the team up (except for the name, of course :-P). Hope you enjoy!
Reid glanced sideways at his companion with an amused expression on his face.
Luke stood next to him, his eyes focused on the megatron screen directly across from them, which was situated out over center field. He sang off-key heartily, swaying with his neighbors, paying absolutely no attention to Reid. His backwards baseball cap with the Chicago Cubs symbol emblazoned across it made him look five years younger than he was, and he might as well have had kid in a candy shop tattooed across his forehead.
Buy me some peanuts and crackerjack…The song echoed throughout the stadium. I don't care if I never get back...
Reid slipped his hands in his pockets and sighed, but most of his concentration was dedicated to not grinning like a loon at his boyfriend. Luke was the heir to Grimaldi Shipping, the CEO of his own Foundation, and Bob Hughes considered him a formidable business associate whose views and considerations about Memorial Hospital demanded respect.
But give the kid a day out in the July summer sun and turn on the cheesy ballpark music, and all that was easily forgotten. Despite the extreme ups and downs he’d encountered in his daily life, Luke was quite possibly the most normal person Reid had ever known.
And sharing his life with this man was something he'd never realized he'd wanted until he had it.
For it's one! Two! Three strikes yer out at the old…ball…game!
*
Five innings into the game, Reid began internally questioning why he'd agreed to take in a day game when the temperature in Chicago had risen to almost a hundred degrees.
Reid liked baseball just as much as any man. But he wasn't particularly fond of enduring the swamp ass that the heat and humidity so lovingly bestowed on the back of his cargo shorts the moment he sat down, and sticking to his chair in every way humanly possible for the majority of the game wasn't high on his list, either. Attending a game had sounded like a good idea a week ago when Luke had proposed it, but now…
Just as Reid grumbled something under his breath about the heat - to no one in particular, just a grumpy man with sweaty shorts needing to say it and get it out of his system - Luke shifted in the seat next to him and dug around in an overly-stretched outside pocket of his shorts.
"Gimme your water," Luke said, gesturing to the bottle Reid had just lifted to his lips.
After taking a sip, Reid handed it over wordlessly, and watched as Luke pulled some kind of plastic gadget from his pocket that had the head of a fan but the body of a bottle. Luke unscrewed the top part off, poured some of Reid's water in, and recapped the bottle. Before Reid could ask how in the hell Luke had fit that thing into his pockets without any noticeable and decidedly unsightly bulges, Luke flicked a switch on the bottle and the fan began to turn.
"See?" Luke explained with a grin, even though Reid hadn't asked anything. "It mists you--" He squeezed a trigger located underneath the fan. "--and it cools you off." He closed his eyes against the fine mist as it gently rained over his face.
At this, Reid almost let loose with a spit-take on the spot. He had unfortunately returned his water bottle to his lips, and was suddenly finding it difficult to swallow properly. After he managed to get the water down successfully, he immediately felt compelled to scowl, laugh, run away, or perform some strange combination of all three. Luke opened his eyes as Reid settled on glaring at him, and immediately question marks adorned Luke’s expression. "What?" he demanded, still innocently holding the bottle up, completely nonplussed.
Reid loved this silly kid, but this was too much. "It's me or the fan," he warned Luke. He felt the beginnings of a smile that he wasn’t sure he could bite down completely. "One of us has to go."
"What? Why?" Luke asked in shock. He glanced at his hand, as if the plastic between his fingers could explain Reid’s thought process.
"One of the best things about you, Luke,” Reid said, clearing his throat, “is that you're gay. That means you're all mine." Reid set his water bottle in the holder in front of him. "But that...contraption…is the gayest thing I have ever seen."
Luke scrunched his nose at Reid, but he was grinning. "Look!" he said then, trying to defend himself. He pointed two rows down to the left. "That guy has one, too!"
Reid looked. A burly, bouncer-type dressed in red and white was misting himself contentedly even as the pools of sweat soaked through his shirt.
"And do you notice who he's with?" Reid asked, jerking his chin in the direction of the man next to the bouncer.
Luke looked. The man's companion leaned over for his own mist-bath and smiled widely when his request was honored.
Reid switched his gaze triumphantly back to Luke, and the words were practically written on Luke’s face. Yup. Totally gay.
But Luke wasn’t going down that easily. He knew Reid’s weak spots, and he played on them daily. Luke leaned into Reid's shoulder and purposely misted his own face again. "Afraid to be judged while you're in public with me, doctor?" He batted his eyelashes sweetly, looking up at Reid from under half-closed lids.
Reid rolled his eyes. Luke had him there. "No," he muttered. “Fine. The damn thing can stay.” He wasn’t angry, but he could do with some reciprocity. "I'm hungry,” he said pointedly.
Luke set his fan down on the cement floor in front of his chair and said, "Okay. Be right back." He grinned at Reid before he left.
While he was gone, Reid idly wondered if Luke would believe him if, upon Luke's return, he said he'd "accidentally" stepped on his fan and then happened to "accidentally" kick it five rows down in front of them, thus making it impossible to salvage the fallen object. After a minute of playing the scene in his head, Reid figured he'd most likely end up with a lapful of perfectly good food burning holes in his shorts and a nice, long walk home to Oakdale waiting for him after this confession. He weighed the pros of getting some much-needed exercise with the cons of having a scorched crotchal region during his hike home, and ultimately decided it wasn't worth it, especially if the food was the real victim of it all.
Luke returned then with a sweet Italian sausage drowned in onions and peppers for Reid. He plunked the container in Reid's lap with an accomplished smile, then turned to watch the game. Reid grinned back at Luke, feeling content. If their lives were baseball, Luke would be the General Manager and Reid merely a baseman. Luke owned the Reid Oliver Franchise, but in all the ways that made Reid's life enjoyably worth the dedication, strenuous hard work, and heart.
At the bottom of the fifth, when Reid was no more than two bites into his sandwich, Luke glanced over just in time to watch Reid's food go to hell. As Reid took his third bite, the bread lost its shit and the meat completely fell through the two halves of the bun, thunking against the tissue paper lining the container on Reid's lap. Fried onions accompanied by red and green bell peppers flew like fireworks on the fourth of July, following suit.
Luckily, the container that was now anchored by fallen sausage on the tops of his thighs caught most of the renegade food. But it took Reid a moment to adjust to what had just happened, and Luke took one look at him holding his broken bread with that Reid-style half-dazed, half-pissed expression and immediately doubled over laughing.
It took Reid till the seventh-inning stretch to finish his sausage, and by that time he had grease, onions, peppers, and bread flaked everywhere from under his fingernails to the backs of his hands to his forehead. But the damn thing had been totally worth the effort, if for nothing else than for when Luke would casually reach to his lap and pluck a fallen pepper off the cardboard, grinning at Reid as he slurped it happily into his mouth.
When Reid had finally relinquished the empty container, Luke misted Reid with his ridiculous fan/water bottle atrocity, a smug smile plastered to his face. With a napkin, Reid wiped the contents of his lunch from every surface he could reach, pretending he didn't notice that the water from the fan/bottle actually felt good. Bastard, he thought with a glance at Luke, but as the opening whistle of Take Me Out to the Ballgame rang out into the stadium, he forgot all about the plastic in Luke's hand and stood to watch as Luke's face lit up in glee.
*
At the top of the eighth, the wonderfully polite man and his equally considerate wife who had been sitting behind Luke and Reid left their seats and didn't come back. Their presence was quickly replaced by an older man with graying hair who wore socks with his sandals and clutched a clipboard in his lap like it held the secrets of the universe.
Reid wouldn't have noticed him if he hadn't made himself known. Johnson, the reliever for the Cubs, was on the mound. The count was full, and people were cheering. Just as the slider sliced by the batter and thumped into the catcher's glove, the man behind Reid began to wail.
Like an air-raid siren. Or like he was doing his best impression of what he thought an air-raid siren should sound like, with maybe a tinge of dying cats on the outer notes. The sound - if contained in a four-walled room with windows - would have shattered all the glass in the vicinity in mere seconds with next to no trouble at all. After a time Reid wished he could conjure a dull fork from thin air, so he could jab it into his eye to detract from the pain the man was inflicting on his ears.
Mercifully, the wail began to wind down, and the man finished it off by screeching, "Struck. Him. Ouuuuuuut!"
Reid and Luke looked at one another, bewildered, but neither said a thing. A quick glance at Luke showed that his ears weren't bleeding, so Reid relaxed a bit.
But it happened again two at-bats later in the inning, when the opposing team's DH waved at a fastball and twisted himself around in the batter's box. By the time Reid had endured another rendition of the man's impressive lung capacity, Luke was physically holding Reid to his chair with soft reminders that killing someone was the opposite of what Reid strove for in his professional life. Reid chalked Luke's compassion up to the fact that he must have gone deaf the first time around.
But then something happened that changed Reid's mind about the older man.
In the top of the ninth, when the Cubs were barely hanging on to their two-run lead, they executed a perfect double play that had everyone in the stands on their feet.
The man behind them began to shout, to no one in particular. "Is he out at first?!" the man bellowed. "Is he out at second?!"
Luke and Reid made the mistake of making eye contact with him, and he continued on, yelling, "He out! He out!" With each "he out", the man jabbed the air with his finger, indicating first and second base respectively. "Double play!" The man clapped the two of them on the shoulder and began to laugh.
Luke looked at Reid and busted out laughing. There was nothing else he could think of to do. And when Johnson (who had put up a good fight and therefore reserved his right to stay on the mound to try to save the game) struck out the very last batter he faced, Luke began to howl with the older man, and Reid found himself chiming in for the last "Struck. Him. Ouuuuuut!" High fives were shared, and Luke began to bop to the music that started blaring out of the speakers across the field, signaling the end of the game.
The crowd began to file out of their seats, and Luke reached back to take Reid’s hand for the journey to the car. The day had been flawed, but it was the type of imperfection that made Reid's life a little sunnier, and he loved it. All of it.
Minus the swamp ass.
Author: G
Characters: Luke/Reid
Genre: Romance, hopefully a bit of humor
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: I own nothing of ATWT, the Chicago Cubs, or the iconic song from which this fic gets its name. No profit; just having fun!
Summary: Luke and Reid take in a day game, not without some adventure.
Author's Notes: This fic was written in the summer of 2010, and was completely inspired by true life events. I have personally experienced (in some way, shape, or form) everything that takes place in this story, and I have loved it all. :-P Everything about the Cubs is fictional; as a Mets fan, I know nothing about Chicago, so I made everything about the team up (except for the name, of course :-P). Hope you enjoy!
Reid glanced sideways at his companion with an amused expression on his face.
Luke stood next to him, his eyes focused on the megatron screen directly across from them, which was situated out over center field. He sang off-key heartily, swaying with his neighbors, paying absolutely no attention to Reid. His backwards baseball cap with the Chicago Cubs symbol emblazoned across it made him look five years younger than he was, and he might as well have had kid in a candy shop tattooed across his forehead.
Buy me some peanuts and crackerjack…The song echoed throughout the stadium. I don't care if I never get back...
Reid slipped his hands in his pockets and sighed, but most of his concentration was dedicated to not grinning like a loon at his boyfriend. Luke was the heir to Grimaldi Shipping, the CEO of his own Foundation, and Bob Hughes considered him a formidable business associate whose views and considerations about Memorial Hospital demanded respect.
But give the kid a day out in the July summer sun and turn on the cheesy ballpark music, and all that was easily forgotten. Despite the extreme ups and downs he’d encountered in his daily life, Luke was quite possibly the most normal person Reid had ever known.
And sharing his life with this man was something he'd never realized he'd wanted until he had it.
For it's one! Two! Three strikes yer out at the old…ball…game!
*
Five innings into the game, Reid began internally questioning why he'd agreed to take in a day game when the temperature in Chicago had risen to almost a hundred degrees.
Reid liked baseball just as much as any man. But he wasn't particularly fond of enduring the swamp ass that the heat and humidity so lovingly bestowed on the back of his cargo shorts the moment he sat down, and sticking to his chair in every way humanly possible for the majority of the game wasn't high on his list, either. Attending a game had sounded like a good idea a week ago when Luke had proposed it, but now…
Just as Reid grumbled something under his breath about the heat - to no one in particular, just a grumpy man with sweaty shorts needing to say it and get it out of his system - Luke shifted in the seat next to him and dug around in an overly-stretched outside pocket of his shorts.
"Gimme your water," Luke said, gesturing to the bottle Reid had just lifted to his lips.
After taking a sip, Reid handed it over wordlessly, and watched as Luke pulled some kind of plastic gadget from his pocket that had the head of a fan but the body of a bottle. Luke unscrewed the top part off, poured some of Reid's water in, and recapped the bottle. Before Reid could ask how in the hell Luke had fit that thing into his pockets without any noticeable and decidedly unsightly bulges, Luke flicked a switch on the bottle and the fan began to turn.
"See?" Luke explained with a grin, even though Reid hadn't asked anything. "It mists you--" He squeezed a trigger located underneath the fan. "--and it cools you off." He closed his eyes against the fine mist as it gently rained over his face.
At this, Reid almost let loose with a spit-take on the spot. He had unfortunately returned his water bottle to his lips, and was suddenly finding it difficult to swallow properly. After he managed to get the water down successfully, he immediately felt compelled to scowl, laugh, run away, or perform some strange combination of all three. Luke opened his eyes as Reid settled on glaring at him, and immediately question marks adorned Luke’s expression. "What?" he demanded, still innocently holding the bottle up, completely nonplussed.
Reid loved this silly kid, but this was too much. "It's me or the fan," he warned Luke. He felt the beginnings of a smile that he wasn’t sure he could bite down completely. "One of us has to go."
"What? Why?" Luke asked in shock. He glanced at his hand, as if the plastic between his fingers could explain Reid’s thought process.
"One of the best things about you, Luke,” Reid said, clearing his throat, “is that you're gay. That means you're all mine." Reid set his water bottle in the holder in front of him. "But that...contraption…is the gayest thing I have ever seen."
Luke scrunched his nose at Reid, but he was grinning. "Look!" he said then, trying to defend himself. He pointed two rows down to the left. "That guy has one, too!"
Reid looked. A burly, bouncer-type dressed in red and white was misting himself contentedly even as the pools of sweat soaked through his shirt.
"And do you notice who he's with?" Reid asked, jerking his chin in the direction of the man next to the bouncer.
Luke looked. The man's companion leaned over for his own mist-bath and smiled widely when his request was honored.
Reid switched his gaze triumphantly back to Luke, and the words were practically written on Luke’s face. Yup. Totally gay.
But Luke wasn’t going down that easily. He knew Reid’s weak spots, and he played on them daily. Luke leaned into Reid's shoulder and purposely misted his own face again. "Afraid to be judged while you're in public with me, doctor?" He batted his eyelashes sweetly, looking up at Reid from under half-closed lids.
Reid rolled his eyes. Luke had him there. "No," he muttered. “Fine. The damn thing can stay.” He wasn’t angry, but he could do with some reciprocity. "I'm hungry,” he said pointedly.
Luke set his fan down on the cement floor in front of his chair and said, "Okay. Be right back." He grinned at Reid before he left.
While he was gone, Reid idly wondered if Luke would believe him if, upon Luke's return, he said he'd "accidentally" stepped on his fan and then happened to "accidentally" kick it five rows down in front of them, thus making it impossible to salvage the fallen object. After a minute of playing the scene in his head, Reid figured he'd most likely end up with a lapful of perfectly good food burning holes in his shorts and a nice, long walk home to Oakdale waiting for him after this confession. He weighed the pros of getting some much-needed exercise with the cons of having a scorched crotchal region during his hike home, and ultimately decided it wasn't worth it, especially if the food was the real victim of it all.
Luke returned then with a sweet Italian sausage drowned in onions and peppers for Reid. He plunked the container in Reid's lap with an accomplished smile, then turned to watch the game. Reid grinned back at Luke, feeling content. If their lives were baseball, Luke would be the General Manager and Reid merely a baseman. Luke owned the Reid Oliver Franchise, but in all the ways that made Reid's life enjoyably worth the dedication, strenuous hard work, and heart.
At the bottom of the fifth, when Reid was no more than two bites into his sandwich, Luke glanced over just in time to watch Reid's food go to hell. As Reid took his third bite, the bread lost its shit and the meat completely fell through the two halves of the bun, thunking against the tissue paper lining the container on Reid's lap. Fried onions accompanied by red and green bell peppers flew like fireworks on the fourth of July, following suit.
Luckily, the container that was now anchored by fallen sausage on the tops of his thighs caught most of the renegade food. But it took Reid a moment to adjust to what had just happened, and Luke took one look at him holding his broken bread with that Reid-style half-dazed, half-pissed expression and immediately doubled over laughing.
It took Reid till the seventh-inning stretch to finish his sausage, and by that time he had grease, onions, peppers, and bread flaked everywhere from under his fingernails to the backs of his hands to his forehead. But the damn thing had been totally worth the effort, if for nothing else than for when Luke would casually reach to his lap and pluck a fallen pepper off the cardboard, grinning at Reid as he slurped it happily into his mouth.
When Reid had finally relinquished the empty container, Luke misted Reid with his ridiculous fan/water bottle atrocity, a smug smile plastered to his face. With a napkin, Reid wiped the contents of his lunch from every surface he could reach, pretending he didn't notice that the water from the fan/bottle actually felt good. Bastard, he thought with a glance at Luke, but as the opening whistle of Take Me Out to the Ballgame rang out into the stadium, he forgot all about the plastic in Luke's hand and stood to watch as Luke's face lit up in glee.
*
At the top of the eighth, the wonderfully polite man and his equally considerate wife who had been sitting behind Luke and Reid left their seats and didn't come back. Their presence was quickly replaced by an older man with graying hair who wore socks with his sandals and clutched a clipboard in his lap like it held the secrets of the universe.
Reid wouldn't have noticed him if he hadn't made himself known. Johnson, the reliever for the Cubs, was on the mound. The count was full, and people were cheering. Just as the slider sliced by the batter and thumped into the catcher's glove, the man behind Reid began to wail.
Like an air-raid siren. Or like he was doing his best impression of what he thought an air-raid siren should sound like, with maybe a tinge of dying cats on the outer notes. The sound - if contained in a four-walled room with windows - would have shattered all the glass in the vicinity in mere seconds with next to no trouble at all. After a time Reid wished he could conjure a dull fork from thin air, so he could jab it into his eye to detract from the pain the man was inflicting on his ears.
Mercifully, the wail began to wind down, and the man finished it off by screeching, "Struck. Him. Ouuuuuuut!"
Reid and Luke looked at one another, bewildered, but neither said a thing. A quick glance at Luke showed that his ears weren't bleeding, so Reid relaxed a bit.
But it happened again two at-bats later in the inning, when the opposing team's DH waved at a fastball and twisted himself around in the batter's box. By the time Reid had endured another rendition of the man's impressive lung capacity, Luke was physically holding Reid to his chair with soft reminders that killing someone was the opposite of what Reid strove for in his professional life. Reid chalked Luke's compassion up to the fact that he must have gone deaf the first time around.
But then something happened that changed Reid's mind about the older man.
In the top of the ninth, when the Cubs were barely hanging on to their two-run lead, they executed a perfect double play that had everyone in the stands on their feet.
The man behind them began to shout, to no one in particular. "Is he out at first?!" the man bellowed. "Is he out at second?!"
Luke and Reid made the mistake of making eye contact with him, and he continued on, yelling, "He out! He out!" With each "he out", the man jabbed the air with his finger, indicating first and second base respectively. "Double play!" The man clapped the two of them on the shoulder and began to laugh.
Luke looked at Reid and busted out laughing. There was nothing else he could think of to do. And when Johnson (who had put up a good fight and therefore reserved his right to stay on the mound to try to save the game) struck out the very last batter he faced, Luke began to howl with the older man, and Reid found himself chiming in for the last "Struck. Him. Ouuuuuut!" High fives were shared, and Luke began to bop to the music that started blaring out of the speakers across the field, signaling the end of the game.
The crowd began to file out of their seats, and Luke reached back to take Reid’s hand for the journey to the car. The day had been flawed, but it was the type of imperfection that made Reid's life a little sunnier, and he loved it. All of it.
Minus the swamp ass.