Oh, everything is just
a game to you, isn't it
A game where you think you win
and I do.
"...lainn's our libero-"
"Tch." The tiltable hitter with the murderous jawboned face had that libero-the drill-bit-eyed one-in an unfriendly grip, shirt clenched in his fist, and was yanking him toward the nearest door.
Experience predicted that any seriously self-respecting Dominion-which was, by and large, all of them-would react to that by planting a fist in the other man's audacious face, but this one did not do that. Instead, he threw a salute to the room at large before allowing the clearly-tilted hitter to drag him away. His smile was slightly crooked, the left side curving just a bit higher than the right. One incisor caught the light, gleaming.
The other one with them had a tense wariness bolted through his shoulders. Poison, Kalypso thought, quickly, as his gaze caught on her. Poison, that thick tumble of dark hair. The velvety dark of leaves whose tea turned lips black and seized up lungs with wet death. She knew that particular intensity of look from the Garden-he was either choosing either his allegiances…or his victims. When his focus stuttered on her, Kalypso felt her pulse spike, and dug her fingernails into her palms.
He left, the poison one, following behind the other two. Redford had told her their names, but she hadn't heard any of them. The hand on her shoulder was deafening.
Left at the table, three redheads. One of them, half-pivoted in his seat, kicked out the chair on his left. "C'mon and sit. We can do our own cute little intros, Redford."
Kalypso was absolutely not going to sit down, but it gave her a way to escape the tyranny of that hand. She wasted no time moving forward, out from under him.
Approaching that table was not fun. A particularly unfun eye was glittering at her from over a shoulder, and before she'd moved two paces Kalypso realized that most of the unabated Dominion Flare that was twisting her gut into knots was coming out of that one, that silent knife-thrust of a person who sat on the other side of the chair being offered her.
Within her, Lamb chemistry rioted. That place between two Dominions, beneath both their eyes, within both their reach, dragged at her like a riptide. This is a dream come true, said her biology. This is what you were made for. This is your purpose. This is rapture, and all you have to do is let it make you who you are.
Kalypso bit the inside of her cheek, hard. Nasty deconstructive internal narration helped, but pain helped more, generally. When reason wavered, wash out the chemical flood with fresh, different chemicals. God, she needed to train, or play, or barring that, to get hold of either something quite hot or quite sharp. Quickly.
Tasting blood, she grasped for more cruel little boxes, one for each of them. On the right, his hair was fire creeping free of the safe cozy confines of a hearth. Warm and soothing and safe until it was eating through your walls and wrapping smokey fingers around your throat. His smile was probably not genuine. It had the sort of artful twist to it that meant he was used to smiling whenever it suited his tastes. Kalypso was not going to sit in the chair he'd kicked out for her, and to help her hold that position and discourage his invitingly tilting head, she put her hands on top of its back and tightened her grip there, pointedly. The eyebrows above his green eyes arched-she couldn't tell what that meant. Amusement, or interest, or irritation, could have been anything.
On the left-he had turned to follow her movement, this terrifying Flare of a person, god it was hard to breathe-eyes like gold moons. No, gold coins. Riverman's coins, the toll of a dead man settled within a merciless skull.
She was almost grateful when Redford stepped once more up beside her, because he had planted himself between her and the coin-eyed hitter. That one was, very clearly, the other outside hitter. Disengages with setter, that second outside's critique had read. Yeah, that-that tracked. Redford's Flare had bloomed right back to full sickening flower when he'd stepped between her and this languid tiger pit masquerading as a man. The two of them were going to give her a migraine at this rate.
He didn't put his hand back on her shoulder, though. Small blessings. It was probably because that hitter might go for his throat if he did. Half-veiled by red curtained bangs, those coins had not left her for an instant since she'd arrived, and Kalypso knew exactly what the sparks crackling against her skin meant about his intentions.
Directly across the table, the redhead with the bloodthirsty ponytail cleared his throat. "Renji Abarai," he said, jabbing a thumb at his chest. His narrowed eyes snapped across her chest, shoulder to shoulder, before flaring back to her face. "Middle blocker." Black tattoos stood out from the sides of his neck as he pointed at her with his chin. "Didn't see a ton of blocks in your stat sheet."
It was said with a dry sort of drawl. Kalypso didn't bristle, because she couldn't tell if that was meant as an insult or not. It almost certainly was, but why make any assumptions when they were all likely to prove themselves assholes without her help? "Pleasure," she said, choosing to ignore that last sentence.
That was the wrong word to say. On both sides of her, she felt the tautening of already taxed restraint.
"You a leftie?"
Kalypso blinked. Nodded.
Abarai's eyes slid from hers to the housefire on her right. "Guess you've got competition."
That…could have been more hostile, on the whole, but as it was it was still a thrown gauntlet of a sentence. It was met with an arch of a brow, another of those practiced, unreadable smiles, and then the guy who was obviously the opposite hitter, turned that smile back on her again. "Solidarity," he said, in a playful tone Kalypso did not trust a whit. "Axel Lea. Call me Axel, would you, babe."
"Call me by my name, Axel." The words came out merely clipped, not venomous, because it did register to Kalypso as important to keep from totally souring their take on her first thing. Recoiling from that 'babe' like he'd just tried to pass her an egg sack of hatching tarantulas would probably exceed the amount of souring she could get away with in a day.
Still. Fuck. That.
"What are you doing here, Kalypso Ixora?"
The way he purred her name. Kalypso hoped she hadn't shuddered. She had, entirely chemically, entirely involuntarily-she could repress a lot, she could muscle down and soldier through quite a hefty chunk of Lamb chemistry punishments, but shudders had never been one of them-but she hoped they hadn't seen it.
Who was she kidding. They were Dominions. They'd smell it on her. They'd know that her pulse was elevated, that her breath was coming hard, that she'd gotten slick and infuriatingly inflamed at being in the same room as a Flaring Dominion, much less an entire fucking volleyball team of them. They would know the same way she knew, looking at the golden-eyed terror sitting calm and lazy to her left, that his body temperature had risen and his blood was well and truly up, that he was entirely capable of enacting upon the Lamb before him everything Dominions were made for.
Easily bored. Could you please get fucking bored of me already, Kalypso thought, knowing all too well that she was here for the express and calculated purpose of ensuring that he wouldn't. "You read the mission statement, surely."
His eyes narrowed.
The Flare spinning off Redford, between them, diverted abruptly. She felt his attention shear from the coin-eyed hitter-oh, shit-as his attention seized fully back on her. "Are you not here voluntarily?"
She blinked, kept her face still and blank. It was not hard to become that learned sort of safety-still that a Flare aimed her way required. That wasn't chemistry-that was Pavlov. It was survival. "Aren't you?"
Redirect. That was learned, too. Channel the focus back toward the Dominion, away from herself, away from whatever was instigating the Flare. A little stroke for the ego, just the small suggestion that he mattered, that her attention was, of course, on him, as it should be, as was right-Kalypso did not like how deeply she understood that little maneuver, how easy it was to do. She would rather take the Flare to the face, tank it, and bull through with the force of her own reality. But 'would rather' was not 'want', and certainly wasn't 'need'. She wanted to play. She wanted to play for real. Needed to be for real, and she was going to be, once she was playing again.
And to get what she needed, she had to keep these people calm.
The quiet scoff from her right took her by surprise. Axel Lea had mucked up his careful smile, twisted it just a little. Kalypso's startled glance didn't seem to agitate him further-no, that little spit of his own Flare wasn't directed at her.
"Oh, c'mon." Across the table, Abarai clicked his tongue-and again, this was not about her. Kalypso was rapidly realizing that the tension she'd walked in on had not actually been redirected toward her, not really. These men were focused on something else, and Lamb chemistry was not enough to knock that focus off course.
"Yeah, what's 'choice,' really?" drawled the hearthfire back across the table, almost succeeding in righting his smile.
They were holding fast to what mattered to them. What they wanted, what they didn't yet have, how they'd been wronged, how to get back what they were owed-they didn't really care about her, one way or another. She factored into their attention like food did, or temperature. Her being here did nothing whatsoever to their trajectories.
Incredible. Perfect.
"Is that the training room?" She tried to keep her voice calm and the exultation off her face as she pointed with her chin toward the door where the other three had gone.
"Sure is," said Redford. Kalypso could feel him shift next to her, possibly in surprise. "You got food in you already, though?"
Like she would be able to eat here, flanked by idly angry Dominions. "Yep. There just the one?"
"The one court? There's two in there. Weights are next door."
Kalypso had been assuming that the three who'd left had been driven out, overpowered by Redford and the coin-eyed hitter's Flares. Maybe they had been-or maybe they, like Abarai and Axel, were yoked to something more personal than chemistry.
She released her deathgrip on the back of the chair and turned for the door.
"You didn't even get to introduce yourself," said Axel to the hitter now at her back as she made for that training room door. "He's Yang, if you were wondering," she heard him call at her back.
Not at all willing to turn back around, Kalypso lifted a hand in acknowledgement and kept moving.
The door to the training room had no blood test lock. It opened at her approach, and it was all she could do to keep from sprinting through it.
"Cold as ice, huh?"
"You think?"
"Did you expect something different?"
"I mean-she's supposed to be here to help, isn't she?"
"I wonder."
"What were you expecting, Yang?"
"...Yeah, 'course you'd cold shoulder that question. Are you already over her, too?"
"Lea. Don't push it."
"Somebody here needs to start pushing something, or what's the point?"
"You think maybe she will?"
A heavy sigh. "Here's hoping."