Go on, try to oxidize me
See if you can reach the iron of my heart
Pit me, pit the metal of me!
Will you even feel it, when you start to steam
As I plummet toward the sun?
In the dark of the gym, the cold wind of Kalypso Ixora's departure passed over banked, dim-glowing embers. In that darkness, a few dry, dead pieces of soul caught fire.
"Nuh-uh." They could not see each other, but their chemical rivalry made them beacons. That was doubly true without a Lamb amidst them to drag their focus inexorably toward herself.
"We can't let her leave like-"
"We damn well can. That's a locker room, Duibhne."
"Ah-" Sightless but electrifyingly aware of each other, one Dominion brushed off the other's grip on his shirt. "Right. Why would they-shouldn't she have her own?"
"Can't guess?" came the dry drawl of retort. A recoiling at those words, and several beats of thudding, tense, hyperaware silence.
"Jaegerjaquez." The door she'd left through was forbidden them, so the squeal of a shoe on the gym floor meant movement in a different direction now. "What did you do?!"
"Nothing."
"That's a lie," observed the Dominion who was slipping slowly, quietly, toward the locker room door while the other two sent waves of chemistry crashing against each other, the stormfronts of their tension crackling and cold.
"She wanted to kill you. What the hell did you do to her?"
"Fucking nothing. Kept her from sprinting for the net and taking herself out. You got a fucking problem with that?"
"I do, yeah." Footsteps, soft unless you were a Dominion honed into the sound of your rival stalking through the darkness. "She wanted you dead for it. So Jaegerjaquez, what did you do."
"Ask me that one more time, motherfucker. Go ahead."
The door to the locker room slid open, briefly blinding them-the lights inside were not dimmed, and bright yellow light seared out over Diarmuid ua Duibhne and Grimmjow Jaegerjaquez standing inches apart from each other's face, cutting through the murder in both their eyes and making them startle and squint.
"What are you-?!"
"Calm down. She's long gone."
"How the fuck did you know-"
"I listened, heard her go out, right quick-like."
They trooped into the locker room. A body thunked hard against the bench in front of the lockers, and a hand ran through dark hair. Meanwhile, someone else was wrenching open all the shower curtains, one after another. "She didn't shower."
"Course not, idiot. She probably thought you'd come charging in here after her and-"
"I'll fucking end you, Duibhne. One more word, go on."
A long, shaken breath. "We're distracted."
"I'd hazard that's the point, wouldn't you?" The crooked grin with those words wasn't quite as wide as normal.
"No, it's clearly not. It shouldn't be. She's supposed to be the…"
"The bar we're reaching for. S'what we thought, but dunno, man." Blood-red eyes, pupils tightened to pinpricks in this new bright room. That Dominion reached behind him, pulled his shirt off, and bent for his shoes.
"She's better than you."
At that gravelly growl, stillness in the locker room. "Think so, do you?"
"Ain't ever seen you cover a whole court with nothing but a cardboard cutout of a blocker."
"Rude. Eh, Duibhne? Rude, no?"
"If she's truly an all-rounder, it's not the libero who should be worried."
"Hah-don't worry, pal. I figure you're safe. Even if Abarai wasn't such a sad sack in the back, she's all of what, 160 centimeters? That said…how you feeling, outside? I know I'm hankering to see how she hits."
"Tch."
"Whaaat, don't tell me, now you're wishing you'd let the net take her out."
"Fuck off."
"...Could you feel her moving, back there?"
Back there, coiled for defense. Back there, in the dark. He did not say which he meant. It didn't matter which, really.
It was quiet for a moment. For long seconds, they all just focused on undressing and habit to keep that question from swelling into too potent a moment.
"Ain't ever played with any Lamb before. Been with 'em, sure. My takeaway, it sure ain't the same."
"You think it's the court, makes her different?"
"Dunno."
"If…If she was getting that to the same degree that we were…would she, you think?"
"Dunno."
"You are very helpful."
"My pleasure."
"Yang's gonna try to break her."
Diarmuid, who had been pulling off his right shoe, froze mid-yank. Cu Chulainn, stretching, paused, tipped his head back, his red eyes searing toward Grimmjow through dipped lashes. "Uh-huh. Thoughts?"
The hitter did not look at him. "Not my problem." He wrenched on the shower knob, and the hiss of hot water killed the rest of the conversation.
She'd successfully escaped the locker room without any of them following her in-doing nothing more than yanking off the court shoes and jamming them back in her locker, seizing her own, and fleeing. The blood test to open that locker had been agony. During every second of waiting for that damned machine to finish blinking its yellow 'testing' light, she'd been expecting the door to the gym to hiss open, for three Dominions to stalk in from the darkness and close ranks around her.
They hadn't. That was either a conscious decision on their part, or they were caught up in a three-way Flare of hostility that had sidetracked them. Could be that. Could be that the Lamb chemistry slinking out of reach flicked some switch within them and they were kicking the shit out of each other back there in the dark.
Kalypso rather hoped that was what had happened. If they'd just looked at each other and politely waited for her to get changed…
Poor little Lamb. Poor little girl, in over her head, poor pitiful defenseless creature. We might squish her dead if we don't mind our step. She can't possibly live, breathe, exist unless we very kindly, very generously let her.
She'd rather they beat each other bloody-or her bloody-than that.
There wasn't anyone in that communal lounge and dining area outside the locker room. Kalypso skittered out of the way of the locker room door she'd just exited and fell back against the wall, limp with relief at getting out of those Dominions' proximities and finally being alone again. She'd get back to her room and-throw up, maybe, or see if she could make the shower in there run hot enough to scald. Something, anything. Playing had been good, but that abrupt ending, the horror of those fingers digging into her scalp, the helpless panic as her body bent beneath the pressure of his hand, the way her skin had caught fire and her heart had crescendoed in her chest and her legs had gone weak and her mind had become nothing but a long, thin scream-
She got her shoes on, somehow. Tying the laces was a mighty task, with how her hands had started shaking. Playing was good, she told herself. It had been good. It would be good again. She just, she just had to play, to just play, to come out here to play and grit her teeth through them and then the moment the playing stopped, to get away-
She rose in a bit of a stagger, stumbled toward the door to her room. The prick from the blood test panel stung more than usual. Kalypso could feel herself quivering against the little needle, trembling along the shaft of that tiny insertion. The light blinked amber, then amber, then torturously still amber, then finally green-
The door didn't open.
Kalypso started at the screen across the door. Her test had cleared her; the green light was bright and cheery, impossible to misunderstand. So, too, was the red message still illuminated across that center screen: LOCKED.
"C'mon."
Kalypso lifted her hand off the panel and slammed it back down again. The needle bit anew. Testing, testing, testing, clear.
LOCKED.
PLEASE INITIATE CLASS-D TEST TO PROCEED.
No-no. It couldn't-they wouldn't make her-
There was another blood test panel on the other side of the door, identical to the one she'd been pressing. A long bar of yellow, set below the testing lights, had lit up just above the panel for a hand.
This door wouldn't open without a Dominion. She couldn't get back to her room without one of them opening it for her.
She couldn't leave unless one of them-
"Nice to see you finally showing up, Ixora."
A voice she hadn't heard since signing her contract made her freeze, and then turn, slowly, to face the head of the Nike Drive initiative.
Braig Xigbar was not actually in the room with her. Instead, the wall across from the door had lit up, revealing itself to be a massive screen. He was there, his rugged, scarred face looming large over the room.
Not for the first time today, Kalypso bit the inside of her cheek hard enough to taste blood-but this time, it wasn't to counter any chemistry. It was sheer, undiluted frustration that drove her to it. "Does somebody have to help them open their bedroom doors, too?"
"Think about it, Ixora. The point of the exercise is for the lot of you to jumpstart each other. Hard to do when you ghost them."
"Why'd you kick us off the court?"
He rolled his eye. "If you'd bothered to creep out of your hidey hole for orientation, you'd have gotten the whole spiel. I'm not repeating myself. Ask your teammates. Nicely, would be my advice."
"I don't need some kind of restricted regimen. You'd know that if you paid attent-"
"Shut up, Ixora. Here's how this is gonna go. You show up for morning team training. You can slink away after the team meeting. Don't expect to duck out before that."
An alarm had gone off every morning, from some speaker she hadn't cared enough to locate. She'd ignored it thus far, but clearly that was the summons to the morning training he was talking about. "When's the meeting?"
"Ask your teammates. You're gonna need their help to get back into your cave anyway."
Sadist. "That blocker is awful."
"Oh, yeah?"
"And that hitter couldn't even manage line shots against him."
"That so?"
"You told me they were good." He hadn't-he'd said they were the future. He'd said they were going to change the face of sport. She was understating here, because she wasn't an idiot-she'd never really believed him in the first place.
His smirk was unflappable. His eyes were hard. "Guess you've got your work cut out for you, tiger."
The image flickered, zipped itself into a thin bright line, and vanished, leaving the wall as just a wall again.
"Fuck you," hissed Kalypso, to no one.