Four Months Ago

POV: Khyle

The anthem was almost over.

Khyle could feel it in the way the crowd was shifting, that collective intake of breath that happened in the last few bars, nineteen thousand people unconsciously bracing themselves for the moment the music stopped and the game began. He'd felt it before, in smaller arenas, in front of smaller crowds, but never quite like this. Never with this much weight behind it.

He kept his eyes forward and his hands still and worked on his breathing.

Beside him, Gunner hadn't moved in two minutes. Hadn't fidgeted, hadn't shifted his weight, hadn't done any of the small involuntary things that even the most seasoned players did when the adrenaline was climbing and the body wanted to move. He just stood there, fully assembled, like he'd been built specifically for this moment and was simply waiting for it to catch up to him.

Khyle had spent the better part of four months trying to figure out how he did that.

Four months. That was all it had been. It felt longer. It felt, in some ways, like the season before this one was something that had happened to a different version of him, someone younger and less complicated, someone who had showed up to his first Soul Reapers practice with a bag full of gear and the reasonable expectation that his biggest challenge was going to be proving himself on the ice.

He almost laughed.

He hadn't known anything yet. Hadn't known what it felt like to play beside someone who made your blood pressure spike just by existing in the same zip code. Hadn't known what it felt like to want someone's respect so badly that the withholding of it became a physical sensation, a specific and persistent ache located somewhere between the sternum and the gut. Hadn't known what it felt like to lie awake at three in the morning running through arguments in his head against a man who wasn't even in the room, winning every single one of them, and still feeling like he was losing.

Four months ago he hadn't known Gunner Jäger's voice from anyone else's.

Now he could pick it out of a full arena.

That was either a sign of how much things had changed between them, or how much they hadn't, and Khyle wasn't entirely sure which answer he was hoping for.

The last note of the anthem swelled and broke over the crowd, and the roar that replaced it was immediate and enormous and pushed everything else out of Khyle's head the way it always did. He straightened. Gripped his stick. Felt the familiar focus drop into place like a key turning in a lock.

He let his eyes slide sideways one last time.

Gunner was already looking at the ice.

Khyle looked back at where they'd come from.

Four months earlier.

As first meetings went, Khyle didn't consider theirs anything extraordinary.

Looking back on it later, that was probably the first sign that something was already wrong with his judgment where Gunner Jäger was concerned.

It was going on ten in the morning inside the Soul Reapers' locker room, and the space was already operating at full volume. Half the team was in various states of undress, the other half was in various states of being obnoxious about it, and the noise level suggested a group of men who had collectively decided that personal boundaries were a concept that applied to other people in other buildings.

Khyle had nine preseason games under his belt now. Nine games, weeks of practice, and enough locker room time to have developed a working tolerance for the particular brand of chaos that twenty-some professional hockey players generated when left unsupervised for more than four minutes. He'd found his footing. Learned the rhythms. Figured out which guys were all bark and which ones you actually needed to watch your back around, and more importantly, figured out that most of them were genuinely decent people underneath the posturing and the filth.

He was the new guy still. He knew that. But he was starting to feel less like a tourist and more like someone who belonged here.

Outside, the wind had picked up to blustery levels, the colored leaves on the trees around the arena clinging to their branches with the desperate grip of something that knew it was about to lose the argument. Fall in Seattle. It had a particular quality to it, cold and bright and slightly threatening, like the city was gearing up for something and didn't particularly care if you were ready.

Inside, the Soul Reapers were doing their own version of gearing up, which mostly looked like grown men taking the piss out of each other at increasing volume while they located their gear.

Khyle had been in the door approximately ninety seconds when Logan found him.

Logan was the team's goaltender. Red haired, loud, and possessed of a sense of humor that existed somewhere on the spectrum between genuinely funny and deeply disturbing, with very little warning about which direction it was going to go on any given morning. He was also, in Khyle's developing opinion, completely feral.

The damp towel came off Logan's waist and hit Khyle in the face before he'd even cleared the doorway properly.

"Ichi!" Logan bellowed, the nickname he'd decided Khyle was getting whether Khyle wanted it or not. "You're late."

Khyle peeled the towel off his face with two fingers, held it away from himself with the careful disgust of a man handling biohazard material, and dropped it on the nearest bench.

"I'm four minutes early," he said.

"Four minutes early is late." Logan spread his arms wide in a gesture that seemed to encompass the entire locker room as evidence. "Some of us have been here since eight."

"Some of you need help," Khyle told him.

Logan pointed at him with both hands like this was exactly the right answer, then turned and went back to whatever he'd been doing, apparently satisfied. Khyle watched him go and shook his head slowly.

He dropped his hockey bag in front of his locker and started unpacking, tuning into the ambient noise of the room the way you learned to tune into crowd noise during a game, letting it wash around him without trying to follow any single thread of it. Conversations overlapped from every direction. Someone was telling a story about a bar they'd been to the previous night that involved a mechanical bull and a level of personal decision making that Khyle chose not to evaluate. Someone else was arguing about a penalty call from their last game with the passionate certainty of a man who had clearly been arguing about it since the final buzzer and had no intention of stopping.

Shane was somewhere to his left making a sound that suggested he was either laughing or dying. With Shane, the distinction wasn't always clear.

Khyle peeled off his white long-sleeved shirt and loosened the drawstring on his grey sweatpants, the ones with the blue arrows running up the sides of the legs that he'd had since college and refused to retire on principle. He stepped out of them and tossed them onto the bench, then crouched to dig through his bag for his gear.

He was comfortable here. That was the thing. He'd never been particularly self-conscious in a locker room environment. You couldn't be, not if you played team sports from the time you were old enough to lace your own skates. The nudity, the noise, the complete absence of privacy, it was all just part of the landscape. He was an athlete. He worked hard to stay in shape and he wasn't going to apologize for being aware of that fact.

That wasn't arrogance. It was just accurate.

He pulled out his shin pads and set them aside, then reached deeper into the bag for his elbow pads, sorting through the organized chaos of his gear with practiced efficiency while the room continued its morning symphony around him.

Logan's voice punched through the general noise at increased volume, something about a road trip and a hotel room and an incident involving a fire alarm that Khyle was fairly certain he'd already heard three versions of this week. Sam was laughing his creaky, distinctive laugh from somewhere near the far wall. Someone dropped something metal and everyone within range offered an immediate and creative assessment of their competence.

Khyle straightened up with his shoulder pads in hand and glanced down the long row of lockers, doing the casual survey he'd gotten into the habit of doing each morning. Taking stock. Who was here, who was still missing, what the general temperature of the room was before practice. It was the kind of situational awareness that his old coach had drilled into him years ago and that had become reflex by now.

He was mid-scan when another voice cut through.

He didn't recognize it.

Not from practice. Not from the film sessions or the team dinners or the endless overlapping noise of the past several weeks. It was deeper than most, with a particular gravelly quality to it that didn't smooth out around the edges the way most voices did. It hit the air differently. Like it had more mass than sound technically should.

And it did something completely unreasonable to the back of Khyle's spine.

He went still for half a second before he caught himself, shoulder pads still in hand, and turned his head toward the sound with what he hoped looked like casual curiosity and absolutely nothing else.

A chorus of greetings was already going up from around the room.

"Yo. Sexta!" That was Logan, predictably loud.

"Grim baby! How the fuck are ya?" Shane, from his left.

"Nice of ya to grace us with your presence, yer highness." That was Sam, which surprised Khyle slightly because Sam was usually the quieter one.

"Yeah man. We won three straight games. Glad yer back before we got too used to it." Logan again, because Logan always got a second turn.

The man with the sky blue hair acknowledged all of them with a tolerant grin and flipped them the bird in one smooth, unhurried motion as he moved through the room. It was so casually done, so completely devoid of actual malice, that most of the guys it was directed at laughed.

Khyle stood at his locker and watched.

They called him the Sexta. He was the Soul Reapers' top enforcer. Number six. The name on the back of the jersey was one Khyle had seen on highlight reels and stat sheets and the occasional disciplinary report filed with the league office.

Gunner Jäger.

Even the name had teeth.