If we press upon each other,

palms to eyes,

could we change the impact

of that shadow, of our shape?

Away from them, out of the meeting room, into the bright lounge, straight for her door…the door she couldn't open alone.

Kalypso raised her fists and, slowly, set them against the cold metal between her and solitude, then pressed her forehead against the knuckles of her thumbs.

In a second, she'd slink back like a beaten dog and ask somebody to open this door for her. There wasn't a choice. It was that or sleep on the bench in the locker room, where any of them could burst in on her at any time. She had to. She'd do it, in a second. In a minute. When she could conjure the spine to turn around and withstand them again.

Her head hurt. Her stomach heaved. Her skin prickled with chills, then heat.

"Don't freak out."

Something settled in between her shoulder blades.

There wasn't any Flare steaming from him, but nonetheless Jaegerjaquez cut through her with his presence, shuddered her lungs and made fresh sweat start at her temples.

When she started to turn, though, that faint pressure left her back-and he was standing not quite behind her, angled away, his scowl directed at some other corner of the room. His blue eyes did not move toward hers. He was holding out a volleyball, which he'd just lifted from the cradle of her back where he'd set it.

It was the ball she'd taken from the gym. She'd forgotten she'd had it. At some point, in that meeting or maybe even before, it had dropped from her hands and been wiped from her mind.

He was palming it, his arm fully extended to hold it out to her. He was as far away from her as he could be while still keeping that ball in her reach.

Kalypso lifted two tremulous hands to cup it, and he dropped it into her palms. Then he stepped forward-she flinched automatically-but not at her. He was stepping up to the Dominion blood test lock, still not looking at her. "The net was gonna take you out. 'S all," he said, shoving his hand against the palm sensor.

Biting her lip against the moan of relief that threatened to spill out, Kalypso stumbled back around and pushed on the Lamb lock with one hand, pressing the ball hard to her chest with the other. "Thanks."

"Bullshit. I still owe you."

The yellow testing light switched to green.

UNLOCKED.

She flung herself into the blessed relief of her lonely room. The door rumbled closed behind her.

In the team room, after her tsunami of an exit, Axel had backed slowly away from the motion-activated door, watching as it slid closed on Kalypso Ixora's distant hunch against her locked exit and Grimmjow's careful pursuit.

"Is she…okay?" said Renji, into the teetering quiet.

"Could not tell you," answered Cu Chulainn, his arms dropping out of akimbo.

"I don't think she should be here." Diarmuid's soft words had a certain ring of helplessness to them. "That's no insult to her playing. Just-if Dominions hit her that hard, then-"

"Given the nature of this initiative, it's not surprising they selected one so…potent." Yang's golden eyes had turned to her picture, still illuminated at the end of the bottom row on the screen. "The more reactive, the better, was probably their reasoning."

Renji shook his head hard, like he was trying to fling free some lingering irritant. "Reactive is a word for it. I feel like I gotta go lift for another hour, work this outta me."

"Thus," said Yang, with a bit of derision curling through the word.

Gilbert leaned back from the table. "So we all got slammed with that, then. You two, you've played with her. How was the court?"

"Better," said Diarmuid immediately. "Much better than this." He gestured to the room. "Until the-" He stopped abruptly.

"The?"

"Soon as the drill stopped, she curdled." Cu Chulainn lifted a shoulder. "Felt good, playing with her. When the lights went out, went straight to whatever the hell this was in here."

"Good, like…"

"Good like Lamb good. You know the way, chemical highs, blood's up, foreplay's pushing the right buttons."

"Sounds like more of a distraction than anything," Renji said, shaking his head again with that same waterlogged instinct.

"It was," said Diarmuid, slowly, "except maybe…ah, never mind. It was."

"Nah, you're right," Cu Chulainn told him. "Made me want to get in there with her and play for real, not spin my wheels in a drill."

The door opened again. Grimmjow slouched back into the room, looking even more thoroughly wracked with pent-up aggression than usual.

They could all smell the Lamb on him. It was a purely chemical reaction, a fizz of awareness that was fading already, but-

"Fuck me," said Cu Chulainn, leaning back against the screen again, "if she ain't entirely too much when she gets riled. Hell."

"Outside," murmured Axel, as Grimmjow passed, "what's it like squaring up with her, mm?"

Blue eyes seared toward him with instant, vicious hostility. "The fuck you implying?"

"Whoa," interjected Gilbert, straightening in his seat. "Okay, whoa there." It was half for Grimmjow, who had gone from stable to Flaring in a heartbeat, and half for the room at large, who'd all been flooded instantly with adrenaline in answer. "Oy, Jaegerjaquez. He means the drill."

"Does he?" probed Yang quietly, but other than a single flickering green glance from Axel, no one rose to that taunt.

There was a long silence while everyone watched Grimmjow prowl to…not quite the same spot against the wall she'd been crouched at, but very near to it. "She's good," he finally said, roughly.

"Yes, thank you," drawled Gilbert, sharing an exasperated glance with Renji. "I saw. And you were less shit than this morning. Her doing, right?"

"Oh?" Axel's head tilted. "Now we're talking."

"Give the man some agency," said Cu Chulainn, his grin flashing wickedly. "Takes two to tango, after all. Hey, Yang, you oughta take a peek before they wipe the recording. Bet you'll be tickled."

"Quiet," snapped Diarmuid, because now there were two Flares kicking everyone's fighting instincts into overdrive-Grimmjow's and Gilbert's. The latter was turning, very slowly, very slightly, in his seat, his single eye seizing on Yang.

"Baiting does not become a hunter, Cu Chulainn," was Yang's reply.

"Who's baiting? Thought you might be hungry, is all."

"Buddy," said Renji, tightly. "Shut up."

"You two aren't in any danger from each other, idiots," said Axel, with apparent disregard for all the Flares currently licking at the walls of the room. "And if you don't figure out how to dial that down-you too, setter-she's never gonna stay in a room with you for longer than she has to, much less want to work with you on the court. She meant that, about us making her sick."

"I don't understand," Diarmuid murmured. "I agree, but I don't see how it could work that way. Dominions don't sicken Lambs."

"Might be they sicken that Lamb. She said something interesting to me about pride," Gilbert mused. He had clearly clamped down on himself, controlling his Flare again. "Gave me a pretty feisty lecture for sitting on my ass while there was a drill needing a setter too."

"Daw, adorable."

"If you don't stop pressing buttons, someone is going to put you through the floor, Cu Chulainn," said Renji, a bit loudly.

"Her, probably," muttered Grimmjow.

Diarmuid rubbed his face. "So we need to figure out a way to use her chemistry that doesn't hurt her."

"Or," suggested Yang, "accept that she's going to be hurt."

"You would say that," growled Gilbert.

"In her words: dissect me if you want. I don't care. Clearly she is accustomed to being hurt and surviving it."

"That doesn't give you the right to-"

"Apparently, she cured that one-" a gesture at Grimmjow- "of his morning idiocy, Abarai. If it meant solving your glaring problem, would you still choose the high road?"

Renji grit his teeth. From the opposite side of the room, though, a Flare was still crackling madly. "Tch."

"Quiet, Jaegerjaquez," Yang made a lazy gesture of dismissal in his direction. "You are Lamb-smitten, and so there is no point discussing her with you."

"Me," said Cu Chulainn, "I'm gonna take her at her word."

Yang's thin smile gleamed in the dark at that, a sharp white sickle delighted at the harvest.

"Don't," said Diarmuid, a note of dismay in the soft word.

"Oh, I'm not agreeing with the sadist over there." Cu Chulainn stretched his arms lazily over his head. "She said it like fifty different ways, didn't she? We can all do our thing-she just wants to play."

Kalypso lay on her back on her bed in the dark, setting the ball to herself mechanically, eyes squeezed shut.

She had turned the shower water scaldingly hot, which had helped briefly, while it lasted, and had shoved the boxed dinner they had dispensed to her right back through the slot it had come through, which would help in a few hours. Pain helped, hunger helped-anything that made her body kick out a chemical response that wasn't Lamb chemistry helped. She loathed sedatives, but if they'd been on offer, she'd take that right now, too.

She still had this lovely Lamb-powered migraine pounding away at her, but now that she was away from the constant assault of Dominions, she could try to get her brain to limp through Xigbar's stupid interpersonal obstacle course.

Think about each other, in the context of each other.

She was not great at thinking about others. It did not help that with Dominions, she had to spend a significant amount of her attention boxing them out of her attention, so she could breathe.

Thinking about their play wasn't a struggle, but that was clearly not what Xigbar meant. He wanted them to understand each other, somehow, for each of them to see how the others ticked.

So what did she understand about them, in the context of each other?

Cu Chulainn would go along with anything, was her only take-away there. He'd said it himself, in that meeting, and that tracked with him setting Jaegerjaquez huts without end.

Diarmuid Duibhne, ugh. It was difficult to divorce her impression of him from how irritating he'd been in that drill. His ideal conditions of play had been 'Function.' He'd certainly assigned himself a function in that fix-the-hitter context-one single function, precise, robotic, inflexible.

She couldn't be too bitter, though. He'd jumped to join Axel in shifting the suffocating focus off of her when she'd so pathetically asked, after all. Maybe, in context, he…needed a leader of sorts, someone to take the initiative, who'd give him a job? Odd mindset, in a Dominion. Maybe she was reading him wrong.

Axel Lea, okay, that one had caught her attention a little. Narrative. He needed a story to play his best. That…charmed her. It was, if she was honest with herself, a seductive concept. The accelerating tempo of a long rally as rising action, yeah, she could see it. She could feel it, that appeal. So in the context of the rest of them, he'd want someone who could…build tension? Create conflict? Develop character? Eh, maybe that was stretching the metaphor too far.

Grimmjow Jaegerjaquez, and that wanna-be dominance. He hit well, when he hit well. What else was there to say? Power-focused hitter, with all the instability that came with the stereotype. He hadn't chased off Cu Chulainn or Duibhne with his frustration, but clearly Redford and Abarai had already had enough of him.

Kalypso caught the ball for a moment, shot through abruptly with sensory memory that she had to bite her cheek to ride out. She was not going to get over that hand grabbing her head and forcing her down-but at the same time, she would never in a hundred years have expected the same Dominion to track her down and try to explain himself.

I still owe you.

It unsettled her. Owed her for what? For rendering her half-dead with terror, for manhandling her in such an utterly demeaning way? Okay, but 'owe' was a very weird word for that.

And to say it after he'd let her through her stupid locked door. It'd be easy to loathe a Dominion who had instead said 'I owe you, so here's your ticket to safety, bwahaha don't count on it next time'. Possibly it was still loathsome, his inscrutable angle on it, but she couldn't commit to that without knowing what that angle was.

She resumed her blind sets, yanking herself out of that fruitless thought loop.

Gilbert Redford, who idealized magnetism, and Renji Abarai, who wanted reciprocation. They both were willing to throw Jaegerjaquez and Yang off the bus. Because…they wouldn't, what, fall into the right orbit in the one case, and weren't reliable partners for the other? Redford was painful to examine; he was too many things already, had left too many impressions. He'd gotten her hackles up first thing, but kept pulling Yang off her-appreciated. He backed off sometimes, clearly had unusually conscious control of his Flare, but was more than willing to lay out his Dominion capacity like an ambush and close the trap around a whole room and damn the consequences-not great. Abarai she was unfairly biased towards, currently, because he'd taken one look at that drill and seen how big a headache Duibhne had been, but he hadn't really given her anything to go on in that meeting.

Yang?

Kalypso caught the ball again, opened her eyes, stared at it through the receding flicker of her headache aura.

She had a sneaking suspicion that she knew his type. It was not a nice type, but if she was right, she was…well-equipped to handle him. Blooded already, one might say.

To know, though-to be sure-she'd have to see him play. That would happen tomorrow, apparently, but there was a way to find out in advance, see if she was right. And if she was right, a heads-up might make a difference.

That might mean having a very uncomfortable night, but like pain and hunger, discomfort would be an asset right now.

Kalypso sat up, drew a long, bracing breath, and headed for the door.