It is so easy to miss you,
to miss you in the churn, in the crash.
It is so easy to miss you,
to tongue the emptiness you leave.
Yang's hit crashed into the line just out of Jaegerjaquez's reach even as Kalypso squared herself, gasping, in the setter's position. Jaegerjaquez's curse hissed across the court, echoed by Yang's soft snarl of triumph. The tides of their chemistry crashed against her, bright and furious and full of color. Other noise, around and above them. Kalypso pressed her hands to her thighs, panted out a hard breath and sucked in a fresh one, and then looked for the serve. Her thighs burned. Her lungs shuddered in her chest. Her heart soared.
No serve came.
"Duibhne, Abarai, to conditioning. Yang, Jaegerjaquez, off-court. Ixora, stay."
Oh. It was…over?
It wasn't really over. Disappointment burned away into red-hot, fresh anticipation. She was staying. She could play more.
A couple minutes to breathe was probably smart, though. Her head dropped to her chest and she folded over to pant. All those days she'd thought she was keeping in shape in her little room-hah. No, the only way to be ready to play was to play. It felt so good, getting back into it.
For real.
"You ain't bad."
Kalypso looked up, and might have crawled out of her skin without the twinned afterglow sensations of exhaustion and satisfaction to dull her chemical response. Jaegerjaquez and Yang were both standing there in front of her, the three of them making a sweaty circle.
Her brain made little hissing spits of static as it tried to remember how to cope with Dominions off the court. Play dead? She'd had some thought about going all limp and floppy with Yang, but… Defend herself? From what, these happy hungry snaps and crackles coming off them? Didn't seem that bad right now, honestly, apart from the standard stupid Lamb brain buzz.
She straightened, looking from one to the other.
She'd wanted to make them play.
Yang melting into a back slide approach nearly as fast as his pass, airborne for the quick set, certain as a tyrant that it would be there in his hand. Jaegerjaquez spinning himself around at a sprint, the recoil from absorbing Yang's hit turned straight into a thunderous approach.
They'd played, all right.
"It does take getting used to," Yang mused. His golden eyes moved to Jaegerjaquez, and the other hitter met his gaze.
"Yah. Smaller window." The look they were exchanging was thoughtful, both their brows furrowed without hostility.
She'd thought her sets were pretty okay, but in fairness, by the end she hadn't been thinking about making them clean and pretty-it'd been all she could do to get under the passes and send these two ravenous hitters their sets in time.
"Oy." Abarai was there all of a sudden, stepping up between her and Jaegerjaquez. It wasn't until his grin split even wider at her that she realized she was grinning, too.
Pull yourself together, before one of them-
Abarai clapped a hand to her shoulder. And to Jaegerjaquez's. The hitter twitched at that, which probably didn't cover the way she'd jerked like she'd just been electrocuted, but at least she wasn't the only one jumping at every little thing. "Good game," he said, and honestly, it sounded like he meant it.
"Git," said Yang, with a touch of irritation but no teeth.
"Don't ruin it," said Duibhne, appearing in order to grab at Abarai by the shirt sleeve. "C'mon. Don't any of you kill each other before Redford gets here."
At the next, far beadier, look Yang and Jaegerjaquez exchanged, Kalypso took those words to heart, and made her meager escape. She skittered for a ball cart and went for the distant wall to warm up her swing, out of conversation range and blast radius.
This was tentatively, tenuously good, this moment and this feeling. If she lingered, things could only go downhill.
Gilbert entered the locker room just as Abarai and Duibhne were about to exit it, with Axel behind him. While Axel slid past them all to get to his locker, the setter's gaze caught on Renji's first thing. "Well?"
Renji lifted his hands in a shrug, still with a bit of a grin on his face.
Gilbert's eye widened. "What's that mean?"
"Bit optimistic," muttered Diarmuid. He was not smiling.
"Mixed messages here," Axel observed, pulling on his shoes.
"Well," started Renji, then shook his head helplessly. "Looked fun, is my take."
Axel looked up from tying his laces. Gilbert blinked. Diarmuid, however, sighed. "Fun, sure. Right."
"No meltdowns?"
Renji and Diarmuid exchanged a look. "Does hers count?" Diarmuid asked him.
"That wasn't a meltdown. More like a…"
"I cannot believe Jaegerjaquez didn't throw her through a wall."
"He's not gonna do that. You saw him this morning."
"If you think that kind of attitude isn't going to backfire, you're insane."
"What'd she do?" Axel asked, leaning forward. "Spit it out."
"Got annoyed at them both, set Jaegerjaquez a real high, real wide one, and by some miracle got up on the opposite side before he did. Stuffed him."
Axel's laugh was sharp, delighted. "Ouch."
"Christ. And…"
"And then they all ran non-stop quicks for twenty-five minutes. Like lunatics."
"They all- "
"Yah. Yang too."
While Gilbert rubbed his jaw in thought, Axel leaned back against the locker, chuckling. "Don't tell Cu Chulainn. I wanna see his face when he hears he missed that."
"...Blind, huh?"
The other three fell silent, watching Gilbert now with sudden intensity.
"Blind," confirmed Diarmuid, tersely, and then left for the training room without another word, his Flare crackling in his wake.
"First time I've seen you mean it for more than five minutes."
"First time it hasn't bored me." Yang leaned against the net pole, watching Grimmjow with a bit of a curl to his lip. "Are you finished playing chivalrous? You were terrible at it."
"The fuck you talking about?"
"It went right over her head, you realize. She thought those passes were juvenile."
Grimmjow's jaw tightened. "So why'd you copy me?"
"Why would I decline to work myself into a lather when I could outplay you in my sleep? I wonder."
"It was me that got her fighting. Both times. Me."
"She walked onto the court fighting, fool."
For a second, Grimmjow started to turn, his Flare beginning to lash itself into a frenzy-before he leashed it abruptly. His jaw worked for a moment. "You knew she was up last night."
The curl of Yang's mouth widened, sickle-sharp. "And?"
"You bastard."
"Careful, now. You'll give her a headache."
"Tch." Grimmjow shoved sweat-damp hair out of his face, and turned his back on the other hitter toward the girl pounding spikes against the wall.
"Play nice," Yang purred at his back.
"Hey."
Her chemistry had warned her of his approach. Kalypso shot him a cautious sideways glance in between swings; Jaegerjaquez was scowling pointedly.
"Yah?"
"Gimme. I'll set."
The door to the locker-room opened. She wasn't surprised by who came out. Hungry, eager curiosity warred with trepidation-she was eager to see Redford set in person, and she'd seen very little of how Axel played. Opposite hitter, he was. It was her best hitting position as well.
But there was also the toxic Dominion reality of the room at the moment. Axel Lea had shocked her to her core last night with how quickly he'd gone from calm to murderous-and getting caught between Yang and Redford, no way.
Instead of hitting the ball on its high bounce off the wall, Kalypso set it sideways toward Jaegerjaquez.
He set her back.
Some hitters had sloppy overhand technique; his was fine. Softer than she'd expected. Somehow she'd assumed he'd set like Abarai passed: tense, out of his element, rushing through it to get to the next part. Well, that showed her for stereotyping.
She hit. His pass came clean back to her, temptingly so-so instead of setting, she hit again.
Pass, hit-pass, hit-pass, hit-pass. No angry 'tch's came out of him either. He'd meant it, apparently, when he said he was here to set her. On the fifth ball he passed back, she turned her body away from him, and swung a cut. Perhaps because he wasn't expecting it, or perhaps because her cut wasn't quite as solid as her regular hits, his pass back was shakier, so she finally set him in return.
It would have unnerved her, frankly, if he'd simply set her again.
He pounded the ball down at her. Not a warm-up hit-it was full power, and without the length of the court between them, Kalypso had to drop her hips nearly to the floor and break her platform on impact to keep the ball from rocketing back over his head.
Now he set her.
It was tough to return an equivalent hit-she was a lot shorter than he was. So she jumped.
And then she had to jump again, honestly, because his pass had such lovely spin and was going to be too high for her to hit at standing height. And again.
"Time. Redford setting, Ixora and Lea opposites. Get to it."
Kalypso caught the ball spinning down toward her, bounced it toward Jaegerjaquez, and swiped at the sweat running into her eyes with a shoulder.
He was looking hard at her, his jaw tight, eyes calculating. Like he was trying to decide if he wanted to say something.
It came out of him in a low growl. "You don't wanna set, do you?"
Kalypso, who had started for the court, blinked.
"If you do-"
Fuck. The setter wanted her help booting one of the outsides, and this outside wanted her to usurp the setter. The middle of that fight was the last place she wanted to be. "Don't care if I set or not."
"Then make Redford play."
Surprise stopped her dead. "Eh?"
His gravelly voice was pitched low so it wouldn't carry. Jaegerjaquez took a step toward her, his blue eyes wide now with intensity. "Like you did to me. Make him better."
What the hell?
"Hate to interrupt, but we need our third, please," called Axel from the far side of the net. He had a hand on his hip and that deceptively easy smile on his face. Yang was waiting behind him at the serving line, face unreadable.
Redford was ducking under the net, his eye roving between her and Jaegerjaquez. He didn't necessarily look tense. His Flare gave the lie to that-it was once more that wide-reaching low burn, that heat underfoot that might at any moment, bloom up over them all.
She wasn't here to play politics. She wasn't here to make anyone except herself better at anything. Xigbar wanted them thinking about each other, yeah, but too bad. She'd done enough of that today.
She didn't answer Jaegerjaquez. She walked past him, onto the court, and took up a low, ready serve receive stance. Round two-she was looking forward to it.