All Chapters of Pucking Around with Fate: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

POV: KhyleThe first run through went cleanly enough.Khyle's side had control from the drop, and they moved the puck through the sequence the coach wanted with the mechanical efficiency of men who had run the same plays enough times that their bodies knew the pattern without being told. The opposing group pressed hard, won the puck back in the neutral zone, and put it in the net two minutes later. Clean, functional, unremarkable.Khyle barely noticed any of it.He was tracking Gunner.Not deliberately. Not as a tactical decision. His eyes just kept finding him the way your tongue finds a sore tooth, involuntary and persistent and deeply annoying. Gunner was playing his position with the same focused patience Khyle had observed on the bench during games, not chasing the play, not overextending, just maintaining his presence in a way that made the ice around him feel slightly more dangerous than the ice everywhere else.He hadn't come near Khyle yet.That was the part that had his nerv

POV: KhyleHe took his time getting dressed.It was partly because every movement required a conscious decision from muscles that had filed their formal notice of resignation sometime around the second conditioning set, and partly because he wasn't in a hurry to be anywhere that might involve additional interaction with the blue-haired architect of his current rib situation.He found his black joggers in his bag and stepped into them, then reached for his shirt and worked it over his head with the careful movements of a man managing a shoulder that had opinions about being moved quickly. The locker room was emptying out around him, players heading for the parking lot in ones and twos, the noise level dropping as the space opened up.He was going to do nothing.That was his plan, and he'd arrived at it with the particular clarity that came from being too tired to consider alternatives. Nothing. No confrontation. No retaliation. No corner conversations with his voice lowered and his tem

POV: KhyleThe parking lot was almost empty.That was the thing about arriving early. The lot had a particular quality at this hour, the specific stillness of a space that was designed for crowds and currently held almost none, the overhead lights doing their job anyway, throwing pale circles down onto fresh snow that hadn't been disturbed yet by the arrival of nineteen thousand people and all their accumulated noise and energy.Khyle walked across it and tried to feel something other than what he was feeling.The day had been fine. Nothing bad had happened. He'd slept, eaten, dealt with the ordinary administrative texture of his life outside of hockey, the calls and the errands and the small domestic machinery that kept everything running. It had all been fine. Normal. The kind of day that should have left him in a reasonable baseline state for an evening game.Instead he felt like he was walking toward something he already knew the outcome of, and the knowing was the worst part.He

POV: Dual, Khyle and GunnerThe first period had been a war of attrition and everyone knew it.From the moment the puck dropped, the Hollows had been operating under a mandate that had nothing to do with hockey in the traditional sense. Their new coach Aiden Cross had built something specific in that locker room over the past few months, a team that didn't just want to win but wanted to dismantle. They hit late. They hit dirty. They ran players into corners on plays that had ended two seconds before and smiled at the refs when the whistle blew. They were testing every boundary the officials were willing to enforce and cheerfully crossing the ones that weren't.Shots on net were thirty to twelve by the time the buzzer sounded the end of the first period and none of them felt good.Khyle came off the ice with his temper already past the point of comfortable management. He'd been tagged twice on plays where he hadn't had the puck and the refs had given him the kind of shrug that said the

POV: KhyleIt really shouldn't have surprised him.Looking back on it with the particular clarity that arrived about thirty seconds after the fact, when the immediate shock had faded enough for his brain to start processing the sequence of events, Khyle could see exactly how it had unfolded. He could trace the line from Gunner's threat in the hallway to this moment with the clean, horrible logic of something that had been inevitable from the moment it was set in motion.He was going to stop being surprised by Gunner Jäger.Starting now.The third period had opened with the score tied at two all, Kensei's goal off the power play giving the Reapers something to work with heading into the final twenty minutes. The team had emerged from the locker room with the cautious energy of men who had been given a lifeline and weren't entirely sure they deserved it yet. The Hollows came out the same way they always did, which was like they had a personal grievance against the concept of fair play a