All Chapters of Pucking Around with Fate: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

POV: KhyleSantos Khyle couldn't believe his eyes or his ears as he stepped off the padded walkway and glided onto the ice at Seattle's Sokyoku Hill Arena.The place was sold out.Over nineteen thousand people had packed themselves into every available seat, standing room, and railing, all of them loud, all of them hungry, all of them draped in black, blue, and gold. The energy inside the building wasn't just noise. It was physical. A living thing with its own pulse and its own agenda, pressing down on Khyle's chest from every direction at once as the team filed out onto the ice one by one.The music thundered. Advertisements strobed across the massive overhead screens in dizzy loops of color. Lights swept the crowd in long dramatic arcs, catching upturned faces and foam fingers and spilled beer and not a single person who looked like they were anywhere other than exactly where they wanted to be.It was almost too much. A near visceral overload that hit him somewhere behind the sternu

POV: GunnerHe 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

POV: KhyleGunner Jäger moved through the locker room the way certain animals moved through their natural environment. Not fast, not slow, but with the complete physical confidence of something that had never once had to consider whether it belonged somewhere. He slipped through the cluster of jostling players near the door without breaking stride, finding the gaps between bodies with an ease that looked instinctive rather than calculated, and came out the other side without having touched anyone or asked anyone to move.Khyle felt a pang of envy so immediate and specific that it surprised him.Within seconds of laying eyes on the blue-haired enforcer, he couldn't look away. There was something about him that didn't quite compute as ordinary. Something underneath the surface of the way he moved and held himself that read as older than twenty-five, heavier than muscle and bone, like the man had been assembled from something more fundamental than the standard materials. Primordial was t

POV: KhyleThe corridor outside the locker room was the kind of quiet that only existed in arenas after the crowd had gone home. Not true silence, because buildings like this never went completely silent, there was always the hum of ventilation and the distant clatter of staff doing their jobs and the residual energy of nineteen thousand people that seemed to linger in the walls long after they'd emptied out. But it was quiet enough that footsteps echoed, and quiet enough that Khyle heard Gunner coming before he saw him.He'd been the last one out. Or close to it. The bulk of the team had already moved through, running home to wives or hot dates or just the relief of their own couches, and Khyle had taken his time in the shower, letting the hot water do what it could for the particular combination of physical and psychological damage the evening had produced. They'd won. A lone goal, late in the third, and it had been his. He should have felt better about that than he did.He was pull

POV: GunnerSome sort of spiritual assessment. That's what it felt like.Like whatever force ran the universe had looked at Gunner Jäger, taken stock of his general track record, and decided that before it let him anywhere near the afterlife it was going to put him through one final test to see if he had the basic moral and psychological infrastructure to handle eternity without causing a incident.And the test was Santos Khyle.Every conversation they had detonated. Every interaction on the ice turned into a war of wills that neither of them could walk away from without having left something burning. Gunner had stopped looking for resolution weeks ago. There was no resolution to be found. You couldn't resolve something that kept generating new fuel every time you got within twenty feet of it. All you could do was manage the damage and try not to let it take out anything structural.The problem was that Khyle was genuinely, specifically, infuriatingly difficult to ignore.Not just his