POV: Khyle
Gunner 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 the word that floated up from somewhere in Khyle's brain, which was not a word he used about people as a rule.
He was clearly built for a sport that promised pain and blood and asked you to show up for it anyway. Every part of him said so.
He was also, and Khyle's higher cognitive functions were deeply unhappy about this, a genuinely extraordinary physical specimen.
And that was a problem.
Because Khyle did not make a habit of standing half naked in a locker room cataloguing another man's physical attributes like he was pricing art at a gallery. He did not do that. He had never done that. The fact that he was apparently doing it right now, with considerable involuntary enthusiasm, was something he was going to need to examine later when he was alone and had time to be properly horrified about it.
Later. Not now.
He filed it aggressively under none of your business and looked away.
He looked back almost immediately, because Gunner had just pulled up beside Kensei Mcguire at the far end of the room and the two of them were talking, and Khyle was observing the room generally, that was all. That was a completely normal thing to do.
Kensei was one of the people Khyle had identified early as genuinely worth paying attention to. The team captain. White haired, broad shouldered, and carrying himself with the particular brand of authority that came not from rank but from being the kind of man other men defaulted to when things got complicated. He was slightly broader than Gunner across the shoulders, which was saying something, and he had the relaxed manner of someone who had long since stopped needing to prove anything to anyone.
He and Gunner looked comfortable together. Easy. Kensei knuckled him in the shoulder and Gunner took it with a grin that showed teeth and didn't look even slightly domesticated.
Khyle knew who Gunner was, of course. He'd followed the careers of every player on this roster before he'd been drafted. Jäger was a rough player, dirty when the situation called for it and sometimes when it didn't, but he was effective in ways that showed up in the team's results rather than the stat sheets. The Reapers had done better in the year since he'd joined them than they had in the four years before that. Khyle wasn't going to argue with that math, even if the methodology made him wince.
"Yo, Ichi."
Khyle's head came up.
Kensei was bellowing at him from the far end of the locker room, one arm already gesturing him over with the casual authority of someone who expected to be heard and generally was. Gunner was standing beside him, having apparently finished removing most of his street clothes in the time it had taken Khyle to think about this, nothing but a dark pair of boxer briefs riding low on his hips.
Khyle picked up the t-shirt he'd set on the bench and held it loosely in front of himself as he crossed the room. Purely because he'd been about to put it on. That was all.
Kensei performed the introduction with a small bow and a roll of his arm that managed to be both formal and completely unserious at the same time.
"Khyle. Gunner. Gunner. Khyle."
Khyle raised two fingers in a wave, a small neutral smile already in place, the standard social equipment he brought to any new introduction.
Then Gunner looked at him.
The eyes were cobalt, so dark and saturated they read almost violet in the locker room light, and they settled on Khyle with a weight that had nothing casual about it. A slow, methodical sweep. Top to bottom. The kind of assessment that didn't bother to disguise itself as anything other than what it was.
Searching for something worth finding.
Apparently not finding it.
"Hn." The sound came from somewhere low in his chest. A single syllable that managed to communicate a complete paragraph of contempt. Then, quiet and deliberate, each word laid down like something being set in permanent record: "I know who you are."
It hit Khyle square in the chest before he could brace for it. Not the words exactly, but the delivery. Flat, certain, and laced with a dismissal so complete it had weight to it, like Gunner had already decided everything about Khyle worth deciding and found the results deeply unimpressive. Like Khyle was already categorized, already shelved, already dealt with.
He'd never been looked at quite like that before.
He didn't like it one bit.
He was about to say something, something measured and pointed that would make it clear that Santos Khyle was not a person who absorbed that kind of tone without responding to it, when it occurred to him, in a cold and sudden rush, that he was standing in the middle of the locker room holding a t-shirt in front of himself like a shield and wearing absolutely nothing else.
The heat that climbed the back of his neck was immediate and thorough.
He opened the shirt out and made a show of folding it, buying himself three seconds of something to do with his hands while he got his face back under control. His eyes stayed on Gunner's. He wasn't going to be the one who looked away first. He'd learned that much already from watching how this team operated. You looked away first and you handed something over that you didn't get back easily.
Gunner's mouth pulled sideways. Not a smile. Something that had considered becoming a smile and decided against it at the last moment, keeping only the sharp edges and leaving the warmth out entirely. He held Khyle's gaze for one more beat, long enough to make his point, and then turned away. Smooth and unhurried. Like Khyle had already stopped being interesting, if he'd ever started.
The air came back into the room all at once.
Khyle realized he'd been holding his breath only when he let it go.
He turned back to his locker and started pulling out his gear, sorting through it with hands that were steadier than he felt. Around him the room had already moved on, the noise and the motion resuming like nothing had happened, because for everyone else in the room, nothing had. It had been ten seconds of an introduction. A grunt and a look and a dismissal. Hardly worth noting.
Khyle noted it anyway.
He told himself it was just what Gunner did. A dominance thing, the same hazing energy that Logan brought with his towel and Shane brought with his relentless commentary. A test. The new guy got sized up and found wanting until he proved otherwise. That was how locker rooms worked and Khyle knew it and he was fine with it.
The shiver that moved down his spine as he stepped into his gear had nothing to do with Gunner Jäger.
For a moment the encounter had left him with the strangest sensation, like he and the bluenet had slipped briefly out of the noise and the crowded room and into somewhere much quieter, a stripped down space where it was just the two of them and something unnamed moving between them like a current. Khyle shook his head as he buckled his shin pads into place. He didn't have time for fanciful thinking.
It was just a test. He was still the new guy here. Gunner didn't know him from anyone.
He finished suiting up and told himself that once they hit the ice and Khyle had shown the bluenet that he'd earned the right to be there, he and Gunner would get along just fine.