Number Fifteen

POV: Gunner

He was just finishing pulling a loose fitting navy blue crewneck over his head and tucking the hem into the waistband of his black stonewashed jeans when it happened.

The sound reached him before the words did. A swell of crowd noise rolling down the corridor like water finding the lowest point in a room, the kind of roar that meant something had just gone in the net. Gunner had been in enough arenas for enough years that he could read crowd noise the way other people read weather. That particular pitch, that particular sustained note of collective explosion, meant a home team goal. Meant the Soul Reapers had just scored.

Meant the game he'd been thrown out of was still going on without him.

He dragged his fingers back through his damp hair, raking the blue strands away from his forehead in one smooth motion, and stood very still in the middle of the empty locker room.

Waiting.

The arena music hit next, the familiar post-goal blast that the DJ always opened with, distorted and distant through the concrete walls but still loud enough to feel in his back teeth. And then, riding the crest of it, bright and amplified and seemingly designed specifically to find him no matter where he was in the building, the arena announcer's voice came pouring down the hallway like a tidal wave finding a crack in a dam.

"Number fifteen, Santos Khyleooo..."

The sound that came out of Gunner was not a word.

It started somewhere low in his chest and came up through his throat as something between a snarl and a roar, guttural and raw, and it was immediately followed by the sharp crack of wood giving way as his fist found something solid and breakable in the vicinity of the bench. He didn't look down to see what it was. He was already moving, already swearing, the curses coming out fast and colorful and layered on top of each other in a continuous stream that would have impressed even the most seasoned locker room veteran.

The arena music that had been a muffled annoyance for the past five minutes seemed to surge as if someone had opened a valve, flooding down the corridor and crashing into the room all at once. It filled every corner. It saturated the air. It sat on Gunner's chest like a boot.

He could hear the celebration in it. The fans losing their minds. The team out there somewhere on the ice, raising their sticks, converging on number fifteen while the goal horn wailed and the screens lit up and the whole building shook with it.

Santos had scored.

After Gunner left.

Gunner stood in the middle of the locker room and concentrated very deliberately on his own breathing until the urge to put his fist through the nearest wall dropped from a certainty to a strong preference.

It helped. Marginally. The specific desire to destroy anything orange-colored dialed back from immediate to pending.

He grabbed his hockey bag, threw the strap over his shoulder, and walked out.

The corridor was a different kind of quiet compared to the noise bleeding through from the arena, the focused, purposeful quiet of people doing their jobs and doing them quickly and staying the hell out of the way of the large angry man in street clothes coming toward them with a gear bag and a look that suggested eye contact was inadvisable. Arena staff clocked him from a distance and found reasons to be somewhere else. A couple of them actually stepped backward into doorways and waited for him to pass.

Smart people.

He adjusted the bag strap where it pressed into a bruise on his shoulder, a souvenir from earlier in the game that he hadn't properly catalogued yet, and kept moving.

He did his own laundry. Always had. The rest of the team left their gear for the staff to deal with, and Gunner understood the logic, but he had a thing about other people handling his equipment. It was his gear. It went where he went. He'd have to deal with it as soon as he got home or the bacteria situation was going to escalate into something requiring professional intervention.

The thought of home was briefly appealing. Get out of the building. Get the gear in the wash. Call someone, maybe. Have a drink. Let the night dissolve into something easier and less likely to give him an aneurysm.

Except he knew he wasn't in the right headspace to share his space with anyone tonight. The kind of company he usually kept required a version of him that wasn't currently available.

He rounded a corner and stopped walking.

The flat screens were everywhere. He'd forgotten about the flat screens.

They were mounted along the corridor walls at regular intervals, positioned so that arena staff could monitor the game from anywhere in the building. And every single one of them was currently playing the same image on repeat, the kind of immediate replay loop that the production crew threw up whenever something worth watching had just happened.

Gunner stood there and watched.

Number fifteen taking a long pass. Clean reception, no fumble, immediate acceleration. Number fifteen breaking away from the defender who'd been riding him for the better part of two periods, a defender who had visibly given up the chase before Santos was even at full stride. Number fifteen crossing the blue line with the puck on a short, quick leash, the goaltender dropping into his stance and trying to read the shot.

The fake.

It was a good fake. Gunner would give him that through the red haze currently occupying most of his higher brain functions. It was an excellent fake. The goaltender went down, committed, and Santos was already pulling the puck back, resetting, finding the opening upstairs and tucking it in with the kind of casual precision that made it look effortless and probably wasn't.

Number fifteen raising both hands. Turning to the crowd. Taking a moment.

Milking it.

The worst part wasn't the goal. Gunner could lose a battle. He'd lost plenty. He understood the mathematics of competition well enough to know that someone winning didn't automatically mean he was losing.

The worst part was that it was a beautiful goal.

Clean, fast, and precise, executed under pressure with the kind of technical control that Gunner was actively working toward being able to replicate. The sort of goal that didn't happen by accident or luck but by genuine skill applied at exactly the right moment. And Santos had done it after Gunner was already gone, already removed from the equation entirely, like a proof being worked out on a chalkboard. Like the answer had always been there and the problem had just needed the right variable eliminated to reveal it.

Gunner scowled at the bright screen, jaw tight, the image cycling back to the beginning and running again.

The Soul Reapers on the ice were celebrating. Teammates converging, sticks raised, helmets knocked together. The fans in the stands were on their feet. The screens were lit up like a carnival.

Several arena staff who had been navigating the corridor noticed the expression on Gunner's face and chose a different route. A service door opened somewhere to his left and closed very quietly.

A deep, hate-filled sound moved through him and found its way out through his throat, turning into something uglier as he spun on his heel and aimed himself at the nearest exit. The black cloud that seemed to travel with him on nights like this had fully assembled overhead, fully charged, lightning and all.

They could all suck it.

He was so fucking out of here.