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A few things are immediately obvious.
First, the man walking onto the field in Rex’s jersey is not Rex. Second, he looks enough like the jersey’s actual owner that they must be related. And third, he’s trying so hard to not draw attention to himself that he clearly thinks there’s a chance he might get away with it.
Rex's familiar features peek out from behind the laced shadow of a catcher's mask, but the man's slower, longer gait and the curve of his hunched shoulders are his own. And sure, he might fool someone who hasn’t known Rex on and off the field for more than a year now, but he wouldn’t fool anyone who has—and he certainly isn’t fooling someone whose job involves studying people sixty feet and six inches away for minute psychological tells.
Obi-Wan gives the man who must be Rex’s twin a small wave and tries to hide his smile, wondering what his favorite catcher got up to last night. He watches from the corner of his eye as Rex’s twin—Cody, Cody Fett, it must be—starts doing his own round of hip openers, and Obi-Wan wonders what’d it take for Cody to let him in on the secret. The way Rex talks about his brother, Cody seems like the kind of man who would watch the rest of the season in the nosebleeds before ratting out his family.
…But, Obi-Wan thinks, there are always exceptions to be made when you get the opportunity to make a little brother squirm.
He’d know.
“Kenobi,” his coach snaps, and Obi-Wan pulls his attention back to the field. “You with me?”
“Of course,” he says.
He packs away his curiosity and settles into his usual focus with the familiar ease of pulling on his glove. Side sessions aren’t just about practicing his pitches; more than half the battle on the field is mental, and he has to practice that part, too. He forces himself to ignore the dark brown curls inching out from under the catcher’s helmet in the corner, and he forgets, for a moment, the hesitant, hopeful way Cody’s borrowed cleats had sunk into the turf.
His coach rehashes today’s goals while Obi-Wan continues his dynamic stretches, and the words slot into Obi-Wan’s near-meditative mindset with ease. They’d developed their strategy in the video room, in the archives, and walked out with a bulleted list peppered with anatomical diagrams covered in highlighter yellow circles.
He has the plan; this is the execution.
“The tip of your index finger,” his coach reminds him yet again. At this level, improvements are 95% mental, but the basics never stop being physical. “Ok, let’s begin.”
Obi-Wan nods before rolling his shoulders and turning to where Cody—it must be Cody, who else could it be—has settled with comforting familiarity into a catcher’s stance. As Obi-Wan walks up to the angled pitcher’s mound, he spares a single second for concern. Rex knows how important these side sessions are, and he knows from firsthand experience how difficult a catcher’s job can be.
And as much as Obi-Wan trusts Rex, he’s also well aware of the dangers of putting more faith than you should in family.
“Warmup tosses first,” he calls out, and he puts a bit more power behind the pitch than he usually would for a warmup. If Cody can’t catch a little warm-up like that—
But he does, beautifully. A clean target, catch, and quarter turn on the mitt. Cody throws it back with ease and settles into position once more, ready for the next one. He moves quietly and never before he needs to, intent and focused, and Obi-Wan feels a spark of interest warm his belly before he throws the next pitch.
It is different, though. Cody isn’t his brother. Obi-Wan nears the end of his warm-up set and tries not to smile, thinking about how Rex would’ve quipped something about Obi-Wan getting more sleep or offering some of the simple encouragement he always offers Anakin. Cody keeps his head down and his eyes on the ball, maintaining the charade, and Obi-Wan wonders what Cody might say if he weren’t trying not to give himself away.
When it’s time for his full set to begin, Obi-Wan doesn’t spare another thought for concern. It’s him and the game, now. His body is only an arm and the muscles that move it; his mind is only a map that tracks every nerve the ball skates across as it moves; his eyes see only the catcher’s mitt wanting, waiting: open, then closed, then open again.
Distantly, outside of himself, he notes the ease that Cody moves from heels to toes to one knee, bouncing slightly as he keeps himself loose and limber. He switches from primary to secondary position every third pitch with the instinct of old habit, his unconscious clearly still training to up a more athletic position for when runners are on base or two strikes are on the board.
He doesn’t look like someone trying and failing to belong in Rex’s clothes. Not any more.
Stars, he must’ve been good when he still played. And some of that skill, some of that reach, some of that flexibility has stayed with him, Obi-Wan thinks. He wonders how long it’s been since Cody played, how much he’s kept—
But now isn’t the time to get distracted by little things like reach and flexibility.
Obi-Wan lets the thought go and sinks further into his routine. Physical distractions aside, he can feel a thrumming connection between his arm and Cody’s mitt. There’s a synergy between pitcher and catcher that he usually has to work up to, to build brick by brick with mortar smoothed by hand, and he’s surprised to feel it come naturally to him now.
Too naturally, if he’s being honest. The bullpen slides away until it’s just him and the strike zone and the mitt on the other side of it. His mind sinks into the crystal clarity he finds only sometimes in the center of the diamond, when the center of the diamond feels like the center of the whole damn world. His whole purpose in those moments is finding the hitter’s timing, disrupting that timing, keeping the ball away from the bat, and he’s so far in the zone that he shifts from sinkers to curveballs almost without meaning to.
He knows Cody was set up for a sinker, and he watches the ball float towards Cody, startled out of his focus into concern. He’s crossed up his catcher a fair few times over his career, and it’s never pretty—with results from missed balls to hit balls—but somehow, Cody manages to haul the errant pitch in anyways.
When Cody tosses it back, almost as cool and nonchalant as he was trying to be when he first walked onto the field, Obi-Wan can’t quite swallow his smirk. Reach, he thinks, using the thought to overwrite the sweat dripping into his eyes and the ache in his arm. Flexibility.
Damn, he thinks, that warm appreciation sinking in like a pleasant soreness.
By the time his coach claps him on one shoulder and tells him to stretch out, that he’ll see Obi-Wan in the gym tomorrow morning, the sun has shifted considerably higher in the sky. It beats down on the field, unmerciful in its totality, and Obi-Wan settles back into being a person instead of a pitcher to find his body hungry and thirsty and hot and exhausted.
“I still think there’s something off about my splitter follow-through,” he tells his coach before he leaves.
“We’ll go through some range of motion exercises in the morning. I’ve got a hunch,” he says, tapping a finger on his chin, and that’s good enough for now.
Obi-Wan smiles, waves, and grabs an ice pack before turning to pursue a different kind of hunch—
—and a different kind of follow-through.
Cody stiffens when Obi-Wan comes near, his fingers frozen in place on the clasps of his chest protector. He leaves his helmet on as if he’s worried anyone else will notice he isn’t Rex, and Obi-Wan has to stop himself from telling Cody to never play poker.
“Help me stretch?” he says instead, and he’s a little surprised when Cody says yes. He must be worried primarily about the coaches noticing, then. Plenty of the bullpen catchers Obi-Wan’s met have had dreams of coaching, and he can understand why Cody might want to keep his brother’s reputation pristine in front of them.
Or maybe, he hopes, Cody wants to talk to him, too.
Obi-Wan starts moving through his routine, and they trade off acting as counterweights to the other. Then, when Obi-Wan pulls his knee to his chest in a figure-four, he catches the soft peach red of a blush through the shadow of the catcher’s mask. He turns his head to the side to stretch his neck and hide his smile, and he feels a different kind of adrenaline overwrite the tiredness in his veins. It’s time, he thinks, to introduce himself.
“So,” he says when he straightens, turning to Cody with perfect nonchalance, “where was Rex today?”
A lot of his success has been knowing how to time a surprise, and he’s been very patient with this one. Cody’s reaction is a joy. He reacts like Obi-Wan’s curveball earlier had hit somewhere sensitive instead of Cody’s mitt, and Obi-Wan grins at a joke well-played until he sees the white around Cody’s eyes.
A sharp intake of breath, a seizing of the muscles. Cody’s afraid.
“Are you going to tell on us?” Cody asks, pulling his mask off, and his voice would sound just like Rex’s if not for a terrified shake in it that Obi-Wan doesn’t think he’s ever heard in Rex’s cool, even voice.
Obi-Wan realizes too late that he’s crossed up his catcher once again.
“Of course not!” he says, trying to put out the fire. “No, of course not. My dear, are you alright?”
Cody doesn’t answer, and Obi-Wan untangles his limbs from the stretch and reaches out to ground Cody with a hand. on his shoulder. He doesn’t know what he’s done wrong. He’d assumed that Cody would know that Obi-Wan would appreciate the clever changeup, but that clearly isn’t the case. He tries not to frown at the idea that Rex hadn’t reassured Cody that this would be fine—or at least thought to mention that Obi-Wan isn’t a monster—and Obi-Wan realizes too late that this might not be Rex’s twin.
“It’s Cody, isn’t it?” he asks, unsure, and relief soothes like ice water after a hot day on the mound when Cody looks up with wide eyes and asks how he knows.
The story isn’t difficult to piece together from there. Cody doesn’t rat out his brother, but it’s even easier to read his face without the mask in the way, and Obi-Wan had known Rex’s teammates would be in town last night. It doesn’t take a master detective to deduce why Rex is ‘under the weather’, and Obi-Wan hopes he’s staying hydrated in bed with a bottle of ibuprofen.
It’s harder to know why Cody is here, though. Rex could have called in a substitute instead, but he didn’t. He asked his brother.
His brother Cody, who stopped playing years ago and who walked onto the field like a man in a desert approaching an oasis, waiting to find out it was just a mirage.
Obi-Wan looks up to find Cody staring at Obi-Wan the same way.
Ah, Obi-Wan thinks, and he can’t help but wonder if Rex knew about this, too.
He catches Cody’s eye when Cody sneaks another glance his way, and he deliberately signals his next pitch. He drops his gaze to the bow of Cody’s mouth, raises his eyes, and then slowly, pointedly bites his lower lip.
It throws Cody a little off-balance at first. He flushes a deep red, and his warm brown eyes flicker gold in the sun as they dart over Obi-Wan’s shoulder to linger on the dugout. And then, just like before: he catches it, and he pulls it in. The tension between them ratchets up another notch, and Obi-Wan doesn’t try to hide his smile this time.
The sunlight is a cheery egg yolk yellow on the field around them, the turf springy beneath their feet, and the air is warm and buzzing between them, full of potential.
So when he asks Cody to review his slider—when he helps Cody off the grass, electricity zinging through the rough slide of the calluses on his palm across Cody’s smooth skin—and when he steps in close and invites Cody out for a beer, all he feels is the same anticipatory current that always runs through him when he steps up to start a game.
He doesn’t know if this makes his plans to come out at the end of the season more or less complicated. He doesn’t know if Cody would want to get involved with all of that drama, and, honestly, maybe he shouldn’t be asking at all. No one’s ever come out in the majors; he doesn’t know what horrors await him, or them, on the other side of the season.
But he leads the way nonetheless, a smile hiding in the corners of his mouth.
The future holds infinite unknowns, but somehow, he knows with the same bulletproof certainty he brings to the pitcher’s mound, with the clarity of focus that comes to him when his feet first hit the green, that, together, he and Cody will be able to catch whatever gets thrown their way.