POV: Khyle
The 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 pulling his jacket on in the doorway of the locker room, still working out the sleeve, when he rounded the corner and stopped.
Gunner was in the corridor.
Not passing through. Not heading somewhere. He was positioned against the opposite wall with the deliberate stillness of someone who had been waiting, arms folded across his chest, winter jacket open over a dark shirt, his damp blue hair doing its aggressive thing in every direction. He looked like he'd showered and changed in record time specifically so he could be standing here when Khyle came out.
He looked like a problem.
His head came up the moment Khyle appeared, and his eyes found him with the immediate, locked-on focus of something that had been tracking a specific target and was now satisfied to have it in range.
Khyle finished pulling his jacket on and kept walking, because stopping would be conceding something and he wasn't in the mood to concede anything to Gunner Jäger tonight.
"You're something else, you know that?"
The voice was low. Not quiet exactly, but contained, like Gunner was making a specific choice about volume that Khyle was meant to notice. He stopped and turned, because that particular tone demanded a response and ignoring it would have felt more like retreat than the alternative.
"Excuse me?" He let the offense into his voice without working to hide it. "I'm something else?"
Gunner pushed off the wall. One step, two, and then he was close enough that Khyle had to make a decision about ground, whether to hold it or give it, and he held it, which meant that Gunner kept coming until the space between them was down to something that stopped being comfortable several inches ago.
Khyle's back found the opposite wall.
He genuinely could not account for the intervening distance. One moment he was standing in the corridor, the next the concrete was cold through his jacket and Gunner was in front of him, and the transition between those two states had happened without him tracking it, which was deeply annoying and also said something about Gunner's ability to move that Khyle filed away for later consideration.
He registered several things at once in a way that felt unreasonably sharp given the circumstances. The cold of the concrete through his jacket. The smell of leather and something warmer underneath it, clean skin and whatever Gunner used in his hair, which had no business being as noticeable as it was. The fact that Gunner was close enough that Khyle had to tilt his chin up slightly to hold his gaze, and the further fact that he was absolutely going to hold his gaze if it killed him.
His heart was doing something loud and inconvenient that he chose not to examine.
"Let me explain something to you, Santos." Gunner's voice dropped another register, the kind of low that wasn't angry so much as certain, a man stating facts he'd already decided were not up for debate. He punctuated it with a finger in the center of Khyle's chest, one sharp jab that was just inside the line of acceptable and just outside the line of something Khyle could reasonably respond to with a fist. "The Soul Reapers are my team. Got it?"
Khyle opened his mouth.
"You think you can drop in from the minors and take over?" Gunner didn't wait for the answer. He wasn't interested in the answer. He was interested in delivering the message, and the message was still coming. "Bullshit. You're not the hero here. You don't go out there giving orders and expecting the rest of us to kiss your ass like you're some kind of big shot."
"I'm not," Khyle started.
"Quit acting like the goddamn team captain. Kensei's the captain. Not you."
"I don't," he tried again.
"I may be stuck out there protecting your ass," Gunner said, the word landing with pointed emphasis, "but don't think I'm going to stand by and let you act like the king of this franchise."
The hallway had gone very still around them. Somewhere in the back of his mind Khyle was aware that this was not a conversation he would want witnessed, that the optics of being pinned against a wall by his own enforcer while he stood there taking it were not great for anyone's professional reputation. But a louder part of his mind was occupied with the specific quality of Gunner's expression up close, the anger there that he'd seen before, but underneath it something else, something crowded and confused that didn't match the certainty of the words.
He didn't get the chance to examine it further.
"Yo, Ichi! Great game, man!"
Logan's voice detonated at the far end of the corridor like a flare going off, bright and completely indifferent to what it was interrupting. Khyle's head snapped around. Logan was coming toward them with Shane half a step behind, both of them wearing the expressions of people who had very much noticed the scene in front of them and had made a group decision about how to handle it.
Gunner's head turned too. His jaw clenched visibly.
"Yeah, way to win it, buddy." Shane was already moving alongside Khyle, one hand coming up to his shoulder, the grip friendly but firm. "Come on. We're going to the Shoten for a pint. You have to come. I'm buying."
Khyle let himself be pulled, partly because Shane's hand was already steering him and partly because he needed three seconds of distance from that particular proximity before his face gave something away that he couldn't afford to give away. He managed one look back over his shoulder as Shane's momentum carried him down the corridor.
Gunner was still standing against the wall. Not moving. Not speaking. Watching them go with an expression that Khyle couldn't quite read from this distance and probably wouldn't have been able to read up close either.
"You coming, Grim?" Shane called back, the question shaped like an invitation but carrying the specific undertone of someone establishing that a line had been drawn and people should go stand on their own side of it.
Gunner shook his head once. Slow and deliberate.
He watched them go. All the way to the end of the corridor and around the corner, his eyes stayed on Khyle, and Khyle felt them there even after he'd stopped being able to see the man, a physical sensation between his shoulder blades that took another full minute to fade.