nikedrive

[nikedrive]

Chapter 16: Tender Ground

[From Nike Drive, an ongoing crossover fanfiction.]

previous chapter

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.

[nikedrive]

Chapter 15: Ignite

[From Nike Drive, an ongoing crossover fanfiction.]

previous chapter

Where are the most hollow of your bones, those that could snap at a touch? Tell me, and I will fill their airy spaces with oxygen and flame.

Jaegerjaquez’s receive was smooth, but so high. Duibhne hadn’t made him work for it, and he, in turn, was passing like he didn’t want her to work for it either. Might be a bit of condescension there, in that height. Kalypso didn’t care.

She settled beneath the ball, watching it drop toward her. Watching Jaegerjaquez stalk through his approach. Watching, with the very edge of her vision, Yang at the opposite attack line.

Yang left his positioning early, before the set had even reached her hands, gliding back into the dig zone. Prick--not like there was an alternative set for her, not with just the one hitter and him already charging through the most basic possible approach. Still.

Kalypso considered, for an instant, a dump.

Think about each other.

Earn this, she thought, teeth gritted, and set Jaegerjaquez the high outside he clearly loved and that--in fairness--she’d promised him.

He hit it straight at Yang, like he was firing a gun at the other outside’s chest.

Kalypso didn’t see him swing, frankly--she was already under the net, sinking into the setter’s spot on Yang’s side, waiting. High outside sets were going to give her plenty of time to get over here, and plenty of time, therefore, to give Yang all sorts of cheeky little tidbits to chase.

Low arc, tight backspin--it couldn’t be more opposite. She had very little time, and he had even less--

Challenge.

Sure. He wanted a breakneck tempo, she’d deliver.

Kalypso jumped to meet Yang’s pass, and fired a quick shoot set toward him. He was airborne, waiting; if she’d slowed the pace down at all, he’d have landed before the ball reached him.

His hit pounded off Jaegerjaquez’s passing platform, high again, backspun elegantly.

Kalypso slid beneath it and set him another high outside. This one, though, he didn’t smash straight into Yang. He cut, and without a doubt would have taken the rally if Kalypso hadn’t been most of the way to the setter’s spot and therefore been directly in the crossfire.

She took it overhand, ungrounded, off balance because she’d been mostly past the cut’s trajectory when it sliced past. Her own jerking, cancelled momentum nearly put her on the ground, and when Yang came surging after her high recovery in a full approach, she got out of his way by scrambling back under the net.

Jaegerjaquez was caught flat-footed. Yang’s hit pounded off the line behind him.

“Fuck’s sake,” snapped Jaegerjaquez.

“Unlucky,” purred Yang, very clearly not meaning it.

Kalypso shook out her hands and took up the setting spot on Jaegerjaquez’s side again. Duibhne was readying another serve. She put a hand behind her back for Jaegerjaquez again, ring finger and thumb touching to call a 32 set this time. She raised her other hand to her chest to call the same for Yang--

“Hell no,” snarled Jaegerjaquez from behind her.

Duibhne tossed for the serve before she had time to react.

The receive came high again. She had more than enough time for indignation, and then to see him start the same approach she’d seen half a hundred times already. He wanted a hut, again, and if she set him anything else, she’d blow the entire rally.

She set him his fucking hut. He hit it hard and square, not quite straight at Yang but not far enough to make him move more than a step. Kalypso, with all the time from that high floaty set to kill, was already waiting for the pass. Frustration started to boil in her stomach.

She wanted to play. To play, not to stroll through these hollow motions. She wanted to work, to risk something, to feel something. Jaegerjaquez was better off Flaring, better off tilted, if he was just gonna be another Duibhne otherwise.

Yang, on the other hand--

Another low pass from him, so low a taller setter might struggle. It gave her nearly no time to think--but enough time, just enough, to see.

He hadn’t started his approach. She’d called a 32. His pass all but demanded another viciously fast tempo, but--

Kalypso set the 32, and Yang glided into it, hammering the ball into the shallow middle. Jaegerjaquez got there. High, again, out-of-system but very workable…if all he wanted was a hut. It was almost leisurely, getting into position to set him.

His hit was good--but not good enough to justify the uncontested way it slammed into the floor of the court. Yang, opposite, had straightened up out of readiness even before Jaegerjaquez had contacted the ball. His coin-gold eyes narrowed dismissively. The echo of the hit off the floor didn’t hide his scoff.

No, thought Kalypso, desperation churning into bile. No, don’t stop playing!

And with that plea, that panic, came the full force of her Lamb chemistry.

She’d do anything to keep him playing, wouldn’t she? She could give Jaegerjaquez hut sets and Yang anything, whatever he wanted, she’d do anything they asked--

She bit down on instinct. A sharp burst of pain, a wash of metallic wetness in her mouth--Kalypso swallowed, tried not to choke. As she slid under the net, she didn’t look at Yang, and she didn’t give him any set signal either. I’ll do it myself, she thought, in a fury now that wasn’t about the men anymore. I’ll play whether you do or not. I’m going to play. You can’t stop me.

Even if the traitorous Lamb within her throttled her about it, she’d play.

She did not look at Jaegerjaquez, not while she flashed him the two-fingered gun sign of a fast outside call. His Flare in answer hit her like a heatwave, but who fucking cared?

Abarai served.

Yang passed high.

Kalypso snarled as she watched that slow ball descend toward her, as Yang stalled his approach, forcing the high slow set in return. The blue-hot Flare from the opposite side of the court might as well have been her own. She set him the hut, and because she was still playing, she burst under the net as if it mattered that she got there fast, as if Jaegerjaquez wasn’t going to send her the slowest pass in the world.

He didn’t surprise her, tragically.

It was a savage hit from Yang, and Jaegerjaquez barely got under it. A small part of her blinked through the bitterness and recognized that a high in-system pass off of that hit was not really something to be furious about. If Kalypso’s set was just a bit higher, just a bit slower, just a bit wider in response, Jaegerjaquez probably mistook that for gratitude. Appreciation. Submission, even.

More fool him.

The set left her hands, and hunger took over. One step--under the net--one wide lunge to cover the distance, two quick and silent steps together to chamber the upward burst--

It worked because he wasn’t paying attention, because he was hitting mechanically, because he never in a hundred years expected his setter in a pepper drill to shove his hit back down his own throat. The ball hit the ground before they did.

Triumph flooded her, and no one’s chemistry could drown it.

Her momentum sideways hadn’t been canceled, and she landed with a bit of a stagger, heart hammering, half-blind with adrenaline and the sizzling interference of Flares.

“Oy.”

The sound came out of him like a bullet. It hit the Lamb within her in the gut, and Kalypso had to fight a bit for breath. Jaegerjaquez’s huge blue eyes held shock that was seconds from curdling into murder.

“Don’t you want to play?” she demanded.

“Get off my court,” said Yang quietly behind her. Kalypso whirled, thunderstruck--and realized he was talking to Duibhne, who was for some reason halfway to the attack line, looking like he was squaring up for some kind of fight.

“Yah,” she said to him, backing up to duck under the net to Jaegerjaquez’s side. “Serve, go on.”

Duibhne stopped, staring from her to Jaegerjaquez, tension crackling off him in a Flare of his own. Why the fuck that was happening, anyone’s guess. At least Yang wasn’t--

“Are you so desperate to be worked like a dog?”

Kalypso met those narrowed golden eyes and smothered the Lamb’s ‘yes’ that tried to come out of her throat. The answer was ‘yes’, but not that chemical, collared kind.

“Work me,” she said to Yang, and folded over into readiness. Could Duibhne get on with it already? “I get vicious if I’m bored.”

“Tch.”

“Fucking play,” Kalypso snapped, to that snarl behind her and to the whole gymnasium.

For the first time, Jaegerjaquez’s receive came to her low. He bolted past her out of the reception zone before it came off her hands, his Flare tearing at her skin, stinging her eyes.

Across the net, the black serration of Yang’s Flare answered like it never had before.

Yes. Yes. Finally.

next chapter

[nikedrive]

Chapter 14: Oscillation

[From Nike Drive, an ongoing crossover fanfiction.]

previous chapter

If you see me shivering, do not call it fear. This is tectonics, symphonics-- my bones have found a resonance and will not be letting go.

By the end of the half-hour, all three of them were panting. Cu Chulainn bent over when Xigbar’s voice barked an end to their pepper, his head dropping--not his grin though. That stayed--Kalypso could see it, a little crooked thing just for himself, as his ribs swelled with each hard breath.

They had run him pretty ragged. Clearly he did not mind.

Kalypso was half-blind with envy. Please, please could she play now, wailed her bones and her heart. Abarai had his hands on his hips, leaning back, head tipped back to gulp air. Duibhne shoved sweaty curls out of his eyes as he went for water.

“You dead, Cu Chulainn?” Redford called cheerfully.

Cu Chulainn, hands on his knees, looked up and flapped a hand at the setter. His grin still had that mad dog curl to it.

“G’job,” added Abarai, and shocked Kalypso by stepping up to Cu Chulainn and actually shoving his head back down, tousling his hair like he was a dog.

She braced for the insult of that to sear out of Cu Chulainn in a poisonous Flare--a Dominion doing that to another Dominion, that was not gonna go over well…

Nothing happened, except Cu Chulainn shoving his head a bit against Abarai’s hand. The middle followed his counterpart for water, and Redford said, quietly, from much nearer to Kalypso than she thought he was, “You can relax, Kalypso. He’s like that, on the court. Everyone’s puppy.” Before she could respond to that, Redford was stepping past her toward the libero. “Get to the drinking hole yourself, man, before you keel over.”

Cu Chulainn straightened at last. His red gaze caught on Kalypso--they were back to being drill-bits, at least in their kinetic energy. “How’d you like the look of us, gal?”

If he’d said ‘me’ instead of ‘us’, she might have bristled. But his shoulders were open, his chin tilted, his eyes circling the now-empty court before coming back to hers.

She had very much liked the look of them. Well, no, that wasn’t right. She had been frustrated, critical, impatient, jaded, but in the midst of that river of resentful feelings had floated little flecks of gold. She had not liked them much at all, but in tiny little sunburst moments, while they played, she had loved them.

Abarai and Cu Chulainn, at least.

The Lamb thing to do was tell him that. Kalypso felt her chemistry yearning for his face to light up at her praise, for him to stand taller and draw her closer, to be his cause for celebration.

So she certainly was not going to say anything of the sort. “Made me wanna--”

Cu Chulainn’s laugh barked out, echoing through the gym. “Play,” he interrupted--finished, for her. “I fucking thought it might.”

“Hah.” It did not even occur to Kalypso to be bothered by Redford’s little breath of amusement, no matter how he meant it. She was busy being…slightly…

Everyone’s puppy. Was that what he was being? Her chest felt strange. The torrent of Lamb-driven dopamine did not feel quite so hateful, at the moment.

Kalypso broke eye contact, pointed herself at the court and at the ceiling, shucking the distraction of Cu Chulainn and his startling insight into her feelings. He was right. She was more than ready to play. “Put me in, Coach,” she called, to wherever the speaker was.

“Aye,” agreed Redford behind her.

“It just so happens, that’s the plan. Ixora, hit the court. Duibhne, Abarai, you might as well stay in here off-court. Maybe you’ll even take notes.”

“Oy, Abarai,” called Cu Chulainn from behind her. “I’ll spell you. I know the iron’s calling you--”

“Get your ass to the conditioning gym, Cu Chulainn. Redford, you with him.”

“Eh?” Something flinty in Redford’s tone made Kalypso both distance herself and face him, ducking under the neck so she had space and didn’t have her back exposed. “You can’t be serious.”

“Out, Redford. Don’t waste my time.”

Kalypso took several more steps backward as Redford’s Flare roared back to life. Served her right for taking half a second to maybe, actually consider enjoying some of these people.

When that amber eye slid onto her, Kalypso bit her cheek. Against the electric burn of his chemistry catalyzing hers, she couldn’t even feel the pain. A bad, bad sign.

That eye narrowed. His Flare abruptly retreated, sliding off her skin like mercury--and then he was striding out of the gym, vanishing through the locker room door.

Awash in a cold sweat from that sudden assault, Kalypso felt the other three Dominions now. They had all gone tense, she realized, all Flaring, but all keeping themselves leashed--or maybe exertion dulled their output, like it dulled her sensitivity? Either way, Redford had drowned them out, but now that he was gone, she could feel Abarai and Duibhne crackling with tension, and Cu Chulainn was wrapped in a smooth mantle of Dominion intent that was utterly at odds with the amicable good cheer he’d shown to the room at large just a moment ago.

She didn’t know why, at all.

Think about each other, in the context of each other. Every time she tried to do that, it just confused her more. Well, she knew herself, at least--and there was one person she could put in the context of herself right now from which she could draw a satisfying conclusion.

At least Redford wanted to play today. That was great.

***

They crossed paths in the locker room--and Gilbert cast his eye past one and seized hard upon the other. “Right. Jaegerjaquez.”

“What?” The response came out terse and tense. He wasn’t quite listening--the outside was shoving on his shoes, his focus clearly on the door to the gym, beyond which the court and his setter-of-the-moment waited.

“Fuck this one up, and God help you.” Looming over Grimmjow, Gilbert did not so much as spare Yang a glance, despite the way the other outside was watching him, golden eyes glittering. That threat got a low hiss and a flash of white teeth.

“Have a little faith.” An arm slung over Gilbert’s shoulders, a playful punch in the direction of Grimmjow’s, a red-eyed grin arcing down between them like a guillotine. “Ixora can take a couple fuck-ups in stride.”

***

She had a feeling who to expect, from those reactions--and yep, the door to the locker room banged open at Jaegerjaquez’s kick, and behind him glided Yang, much quieter and no less absolutely devastating on her freshly frazzled chemical receptors.

“Five minutes to warm up,” came Xigbar’s voice, and Kalypso turned toward the ball cart. Shagging was no replacement for warm-ups with a live ball, and she could use five minutes to shake the biological consequences of all those Flares.

Abarai was at the ball cart already, palming one from the top. “Gotchu,” he told her. Before she could respond to that in any way, he’d underhanded the ball high in her direction.

Asshole didn’t even ask, huh?

Then she heard the ‘tch’ behind her and put two and two together. He was stopping Jaegerjaquez from trying to warm up with her. For fuck’s sake, the politics in this place. How did Dominions find the energy for it all the time?

The set came off her hands light and soft. Abarai’s hit was smooth, moderately powerful, and precisely aimed, everything a good player’s warm-up pepper should be. Her pass was the same, liquid absorption, nothing but a rocking platform that sent the ball right back toward him.

Abarai--didn’t set her. He stepped back, squaring up with almost cartoonish deliberation, tightened himself into what he clearly thought was a clean, compact passing surface, and returned an awkward, wobbly forearm pass to her.

Oh.

“Save you some time,” he said, with a bit of tension behind his half-grin.

Okay, then. Kalypso set him again, and as before, his hit was excellent. She pulled a bit more from her pass this time, so the arc was a bit short for an overhand.

“Heh, cheers.” A forearm pass from him again, a bit less stilted since he hadn’t had to back up for it, but still a far cry from clean. Kalypso let the ball tell her where to put her feet, and that brought her shoulders where they needed to be.

Set into hit into pass into pass into set into hit. “Jaegerjaquez likes it wide,” he told her in the middle of his transformation from awkward pass into immaculate swing.

“Gathered that.”

“Right, from yester--day--” Concentration on completing his forearm pass cut him off for a moment. “He can hit anything. Just don’t push him if he misses, even--if--you think he oughta get the next one.”

Kalypso recalled that Abarai was part of Redford’s apparent scheme to drop one of the outsides. Presumably he didn’t want her getting too shaken up by Jaegerjaquez in the interim.

Well, good news. As long as the guy played, they could muscle through whatever tantrum he threw when he tilted. She’d seen one start and she’d seen it finish. She wouldn’t enjoy it, but damned if it would keep her from playing.

Yang, on the other hand--

“Whatever you do, don’t--take Yang personally.”

There it was. “No tips there, huh?”

“Nah. Sorry. Shit--” Kalypso had to scamper to keep the ball that had somehow whiffed off the side of his forearm in play. “--Nice save.”

“Time’s up. Court. Ixora, setting. Remember, kids,” said Xigbar’s voice overhead, “the point of this one is to go hard, not clean.”

Neither Abarai nor Duibhne asked if the outsides wanted downs or serves. They just went to the serving line. “Luck,” muttered Abarai as he passed Kalypso, without looking at her. Could have been for her, could have been to the room at large. Could have been a little prayer for Redford’s scheme to pull through, or for his own serves, who knew.

She settled at the net, facing Duibhne, whose eyes met hers briefly before searing past her, toward where Jaegerjaquez was prowling into reception position. Across the net, wreathed in quiet malice, Yang waited.

His eyes didn’t linger on hers. They fastened.

Kalypso lifted her right hand, and set it against the small of her back where Jaegerjaquez could see it, thumb tucked, four fingers spread. Holding Yang’s golden-coin gaze, she laid her left hand across her chest, shaped like a gun.

Then she turned her full attention to the ball that was leaving Diarmuid’s hand, to the turn of his chest, to the shift of energy across his body as he chambered his serve.

Now. Time to play.

next chapter

[nikedrive]

Chapter 13: Kindle

[From Nike Drive, an ongoing crossover fanfiction.]

previous chapter

Do not mistake this for ashes. Do not think the motes of me will lose their gold to gray before catching something that has been waiting forever for this.

After a few stolen minutes struggling to empty herself of the morning’s misery, Kalypso drew a fierce bracing breath and surged back out into the communal area. She looked neither right nor left, and made it to the training room’s locker room before anyone could stop her, and never mind the hot tongues of Flares nipping at her heels.

Within, four Dominions in various states of undress very immediately began minding their own business.

Once more, Kalypso very carefully avoided looking at anyone as she opened her locker for her court shoes. In the sudden deliberate hush of the room, the so-faint spring-launch of the needle in the blood test was painfully audible. She was the first into the gym, lurching out of the locker room with her right shoe only half on in her rush.

She was pounding out warm-up strikes against a wall when the men finally trickled out of the locker room. Xigbar’s harsh voice came from some overhead speaker as the three who were going to be peppering stepped onto the court. “Get yourself warm. Five minutes.”

A wall was less ideal a partner than a human, so when Redford approached her with a ball in hand and an inquisitive quirk to his eyebrow, Kalypso tossed her ball into the cart and passed his toss back to him.

It was just a warm-up, and yet sinking back into the rhythm of a back-and-forth pass soothed her immensely. A minute of forearm, and then Redford switched to overhand. She mirrored him, and they moved into a smooth pattern of short, short, long passes, gliding toward and away from each other like they’d done this a thousand times before.

It was a lovely feature of these little meditative moments before the playing really got started. Any two people who played could do this, could know exactly how to move, what came next, how to step into the exercise without any extraneous explanation or introduction. Redford’s sets were lovely, as they should be--the ball rose in fell in nigh identical arcs from each of their hands, soft and inviting.

Two minutes of that and Kalypso was aching with a hunger that wasn’t going to be sated, not by shagging or feeding free balls while other people got to play. “Pepper?” she asked, as his overhead pass floated up from his soft hands.

“Sure,” he answered, and in a wash of gratitude, she set him back instead of hitting, giving him the first swing.

He took the courtesy. Kalypso didn’t have to move in either direction to pass it--she only had to sink beneath the ball, draw the power out of it into herself. Controlled, firm, clean--very much a warm-up strike. Her pass arced back to him. It would have bounced clean off the top of his head if he hadn’t set it back to her.

She gave him back the same sort of hit he’d given her, measured and precise. They ticked through another minute of this smooth pepper before once again, Kalypso was riddled with hunger for something more. This time, she didn’t say anything--but the ball left her hand with more sting behind it than any time previously.

Redford passed it. “Oh?”

“Can’t forget the ‘up’ part of ‘warm up’.” Kalypso set him, then pressed her toes hard against the inside of her shoes, feeling for the floor. What would he--

His hit matched hers, scaled up in power just like hers had been. Kalypso took it, arms pulling much more heat off the ball than before.

When they were playing, Dominion chemistry felt…good was the wrong word. It felt correct. It was the difference between watching a flood obliterate a bridge and a waterfall careen down a canyon. One of those was terrifying, while the other was beautiful. As she put more and more strength behind her hits, Redford matched her, and as his intensity and his exertion grew, she basked in the banked fire of their mutual chemical glow.

Carefully. She basked very, very carefully. No need to broadcast anything.

“Right, go time. Cu Chulainn, setting. Duibhne, Abarai, opposing, half courts.”

“Hitting focus?” asked Duibhne, looking up at the speakers as he ducked under the net.

“Whatever you want, so long as you work at it.”

“Helpful as ever,” muttered Redford. “Downs or serves, boys?”

From their arrangement on the court, Duibhne and Cu Chulainn both looked toward Abarai. Kalypso remembered his supposed weakness. Worthless reception. “Downs,” said Abarai, bent over in half-readiness, his hands on his thighs.

No one said anything to that, Kalypso noticed. This was apparently not the group for cutting commentary; she would’ve thought maybe Cu Chulainn might throw a jab, but no. She and Redford went to opposite poles, opposite sides of the net. Redford would be hitting down balls over the net at Renji, Kalypso at Duibhne.

Duibhne, wordlessly, took a few steps back. Yeah, yeah, her down balls were not going to clear the net quite as cleanly as Redford’s. At least he hadn’t offered her a chair.

Redford slapped his ball. She wasn’t even playing, and yet the sound set a little thrill over her skin. Dammit, she wanted to.

Abarai braced for the pass. It was awkward--his broad, powerful body hunched inward toward the point of contact in a way that it shouldn’t. A good pass should take energy away, not funnel more into it. Nonetheless, it did work on a down ball--the ball bounced off his arms toward Cu Chulainn, who had lolled back away from the net a lot farther than a setter ought to be.

Because he wasn’t a setter, of course. Cu Chulainn’s set was the libero’s leaping set. He was in the air before the attack line, tossed up a standard little 2 set--

Abarai transformed the second the ball left his arms. He roared through his approach and hit that set like a hurricane. The sound of the impact cracked through the gym, but Duibhne was there. The pass was high, and didn’t travel far, and Cu Chulainn had slid under the net the moment his feet had touched the floor again. He set from well behind the attack line, thanks to that iffy pass--another high 2--and this time it was Duibhne searing up to fire it like a bullet back over the net.

Abarai tried for it. The plane of his arms clipped the ball, and it careened off to hit the wall.

So it was gonna be like that, huh. Kalypso slapped her ball while Redford went to shag. Duibhne took her down ball with more grace than Abarai had. “Two,” he called, and once more Cu Chulainn’s jump set fed the middle a high ball.

He was lighter on his feet than Abarai, and his hit had all the same precise finesse that his blocks yesterday had had. He hit at Abarai, not at any part of the open net but directly at where the defense was waiting. Ugh, thought Kalypso--but then again, if they wanted this drill to actually last long enough to make the rallies worth anyone’s time--

Abarai barely got a hand on it. Rather, he had no choice but to get a hand on it, given the way Duibhne had targeted him, but all that tension knotting him up--Kalypso could feel his chemistry hissing and spitting and flooding him with entirely unhelpful stimulation--made his pass wild.

It went up, at least, which was better than rocketing off sideways again. Cu Chulainn got to it, probably because he was expecting as much. The libero got himself a solid two-thirds of the way around the ball before getting off a forearm set. Good boy. It was out-of-system, obviously, and off the net, and nonetheless Abarai hit it like a train.

Duibhne’s high pass gave Cu Chulainn just enough time to get back to it. Once again, Duibhne hit directly at Abarai…who promptly blew the pass.

Yep. That was gonna be the pattern for this. Kalypso went running for the loose ball. Behind her, she heard Redford’s slap, then strike. Then a “Fuck,” from Abarai, and Redford calling, utterly without inflection, “Ixora.”

Visualizing frame-by-frame in her mind what had just happened--Abarai did not make that difficult--Kalypso spun around to toss Redford the first ball she’d gone to shag, and then went for the one Abarai had just gotten embarrassed by.

Another rally of similar caliber. Cu Chulainn was working hard, Duibhne was functioning, and Abarai was not giving up for all the good it did him. It wasn’t exactly inspiring, but there was grit there, in two out of the three at least. What would it take to get Duibhne out of his well-oiled rut?

Lacks initiative on offensive, overreliance on set plays.

Cu Chulainn could force him into it if he set creatively, but the passes he was dealing with from Abarai’s end were not really giving him time for that. He was the best part of this drill, Kalypso thought, watching the libero land from his jump set straight into a fluid slide beneath the net, into a mad agility trial in pursuit of yet another wobbly Abarai pass. Unflappable, indefatigable, dealing with whatever was thrown at him with--well, he wasn’t transforming the drill into anything, but he was sustaining it. Basically single-handedly. What he might do with somebody who made plays--

And just as she thought that, Cu Chulainn set Duibhne from behind the attacking line, and as the middle’s gaze flashed up and back to track the set coming from behind him, Abarai moved.

He burst forward out of his defensive crouch smooth and silent as a hunting cat, reached the net, and exploded upward just as Duibhne went airborne.

Too late for the middle to change his course--was it? Perhaps not, but this was Duibhne--the middle could only make the smallest adjustment to his hitting angle. He made the right change to avoid getting stuffed, but not quickly enough to get a clean bounce back and reset. Instead, the ball cracked off the top of Renji’s block into a high deflection.

Cu Chulainn went from a defensive ready crouch on Diarmuid’s side, waiting for the block to come back, to an absolute laserburn sprint beneath the net toward the falling ball. “Ay,” Kalypso heard him growl as he flashed past, his Flare firing like afterburners.

He caught it with a fist, sending it high behind him. High, and far--very nearly to the net.

Abarai landed--and burst upward again, his shoulders opening and his Flare boiling off him with visceral triumph. Duibhne had started to fall back to defend as he had before, and didn’t have time to get back up for the joust.

The ball hammered down into the floor at the attack line, uncontested.

“All right,” Kalypso hissed, electrified.

For half a second, Abarai’s eyes slid toward her. She was at the pole nearest him, his side of the net--his Flare was light and rippling, like a warm wind off fresh water.Now, she thought to herself, anticipation its own sort of Flare inside her chest. Now we’ve got ourselves a drill.

next chapter

[nikedrive]

Chapter 12: Precipitance

[From Nike Drive, an ongoing crossover fanfiction.]

previous chapter

Do not trust your eyes-- they have lost my lines to the lidded dark, to your latticework of veins. Fish for me. Cast out your hands. You will know me, for my shell is wet with the fine fret of dreams.

Kalypso woke to darkness. Utter darkness--the hologram blue was gone. So, too, was the hot press of Yang on her senses.

Clumsy with sleep and with the sort of cotton-ball fog that followed a Dominion-induced migraine, she wormed her way out of her scrunch under the table, feeling around in the darkness until she got that table back on, for light.

It glowed a sort of empty gray, casting no recording. Redford had said it got wiped daily--apparently that had happened while she slept. The tray of breakfast debris was gone. Yang was nowhere to be seen.

She was torn between feeling grateful and irritated by that. He’d said he’d let her back into her room in two hours. Instead, he’d left her on the floor. Then again, the thought of him waking her was miserable to contemplate. Even if he wasn't a monster about it, her chemistry might take advantage of her before she could get it under control--and that would set a terrible precedent.

There was really nothing for it but to go find out what time it was. Kalypso gathered her bedding up, squared her shoulders, and walked toward the door.

Outside was barely any brighter, but when she stepped into the room, the lights did hum on, dimmed to a sort of afterhours glow that told her it wasn’t yet an hour when most people would be up. She’d left her room at nearly midnight, and--yes, there was a wall clock here, on the wall behind her--it was 5:30 am now.

This was as good a time as any to go see what was in the other rooms. Kalypso dropped her bedding pile on the most out-of-the-way couch, and went scouting.

A conditioning room, divided between weights, mats, and cardio. A bath--separate from the bathrooms, though the same door did branch into both. A…chapel? Or a meditation room? A medical wing--Kalypso took one step inside this one and backed out again immediately. If she never went into such a place again it would be too soon, and nevermind that it appeared at the moment to be autonomous. Doubtless Nike Drive staff would flood it the minute something about their resident Object Zero deviated from the norm.

The conditioning room had its own locker room, set up the same way that the training room’s was--with a blood test lock on the ‘O’ locker. Just as clothes had been waiting for her in that other locker yesterday, so were some already awaiting her in this one today.

And this time, they were long-sleeved and with full pant-legs. Somebody was paying attention.

After half an hour on a treadmill, she was interrupted by a flat, robotic voice from some speaker overhead.

Good morning. Training begins in one hour. Alternate conditioning facilities will be shut down in thirty minutes.

Kalypso exhaled, hard, and turned up the resistance on the rowing machine.

Cu Chulainn kicked out a chair from the table and straddled it, his forearms braced on its top. Sipping his coffee, he regarded that pile of bedding with narrowed, thoughtful eyes.

That’s how he was sitting when Renji came out of the door to the bedrooms, bed-tousled and rolling his shoulders. The Dominion stopped in the doorway like he’d been hit by a bus, stared, and then looked slowly at Cu Chulainn, eyes wide.

“Couldn’t tell ya,” said Cu Chulainn over the top of his coffee mug.

“She’s…not…in there?” Renji’s voice was a slightly choked whisper.

“Nah. Kicks you right in the face, don’t it?”

“...Sure does. You sure she’s not--?”

“Go on, sit on it and find out.”

“Shut up.” Renji shook himself, went to the kitchen for his breakfast with half an eye over his shoulder at the couch as he did so.

The door to the bedroom hallway opened again--but where Renji had gone still, Jaegerjaquez charged through. Instinct got him halfway to the couch before his brain switched back on and he came to with a grunt and a lurch, bashing a bit into a corner of the table.

“Morning,” said Cu Chulainn, eyeing him.

Completely ignoring the libero, Grimmjow stood there, rigid and staring at the crumpled duvet for several more seconds before exhaling hard, turning on his heel, and stalking toward the kitchen.

The rest trickled in slowly over the next half hour. Not one of them made it into the room without a hearty Dominion response to the rumpled pile of bedding on the couch. Diarmuid, clearly uncomfortable sharing the room with either it or the rest of them in various statements of rile, went straight from the kitchen to the training locker room with a set face and braced shoulders. “Guess we’ll know if she’s in there if he comes flying straight back out,” Abarai muttered. Diarmuid did not reemerge, so wherever she was, it wasn’t that locker room.

Gilbert settled himself on Cu Chulainn’s right, his chair half-turned so he could keep both the libero and the couch in range of his eye. “You didn’t go looking?”

“Felt more like a watchdog than a hunting hound this morning.”

“I’d have thought you’d be curious.”

“Oh, I am,” said Cu Chulainn, his crooked grin curling up off his teeth.

Grimmjow had taken up a pointed position against the wall beside the couch, his eyes roving dangerously over all the present men in turn. It was very similar to the way in which, after her departure from the meeting room last night, he’d gone to stand right next to the place she’d been sitting.

“Like we needed another fire started,” muttered Renji, who at this point was the only one sitting at the table normally, his back to the couch while he ate. Pointed body language--dismissing Grimmjow’s nonverbal message while also making it clear he wasn’t a threat.

“She dug him outta his mess yesterday,” Cu Chulainn replied, his voice pitched low so it wouldn’t carry.

“Not sure how I feel about that.” Gilbert rubbed the back of his neck.

“Aw, c’mon. Would a Claim be so bad?”

Before Gilbert could answer, the door to the dormitory wing opened again, and the final two Dominions entered. “Rise and shine, sleepyheads,” call Cu Chulainn cheerfully, his smirk expectant. “Somebody spiked the morning for us, eh?”

Axel’s emerald gaze lit on the Lamb bedding first thing, predictably, Flaring with startled intensity--but Yang’s eyes slid past it with little more than a cursory glance. His stride never paused in its trajectory toward the kitchen.

Jaegerjaquez and Gilbert both tensed.

“Oho,” murmured Cu Chulainn under his breath.

“Something the room should know?” Gilbert asked, in a flat voice that was absolutely not asking politely.

As if he did not hear the question, Yang vanished through the saloon doors.

Axel, on the other hand, walked to the door leading to Kalypso’s room. The muscles in Grimmjow’s jaws worked more visibly with every step the redhead took, until finally he snarled “Fuck you doing?”

“Down, killer.” Axel was inspecting the Dominion blood test unit--not the palm pad that would trigger the needle, but the sides. He pressed something. The LOCKED message on the door flickered out.

DAILY ACCESS HISTORY: N/A

“She came out before midnight, then,” said Axel. “Huh.”

“And what, slept out here? Why the hell--”

Yang exited the kitchen, his expression no different from its usual sleek, sinister disinterest, but with an undeniable extra bit of Flare rippling out of his wake. He prowled to the meeting room door, looked inside, and then turned on his heel and returned to the kitchen again, all without a word.

“Tch.”

“Don’t you start,” Gilbert growled at Grimmjow.

With a little spit of static, the wall opposite Kalypso’s door came to electronic life, just as two doors opened: one from the training room, revealing Diarmuid dressed for practice, and one from the conditioning room, from which stepped their missing teammate.

“Impeccable timing,” drawled Xigbar from the screen. “Try not to make us cut power to your machine next time, Ixora--it’d be an embarrassment to all involved, losing you that way.”

Deliberately avoiding eye contact with everyone else in the room, Kalypso loitered by the door she’d just entered through, rather than approach the cluster of Dominions at the table. The exertion high from that cardio was girding her against the nastier effects of their chemistry, but that wouldn’t last long.

“Morning instructions are as follows.” The sarcastic drawl left Xigbar’s voice. He sounded clipped and efficient now. “Three of you will be on the court, running half-court pepper. Setter shuttles between sides. Two of you will join off-court, tossing and shagging. The rest of you, conditioning regimens. Half an hour rotations--I’ll call the next three up when it’s time. First three, Cu Chulainn, Abarai, Duibhne. Ixora, you’ve logged warm-ups so let’s get you off-court. Somebody follow her there.”

“Calling it,” said Redford, waving a few fingers.

“Right then. Snap to it. Thirty minutes until go time, kids.” The screen went dead.

“Ixora,” Abarai said instantly--Kalypso sighed internally, bracing herself for whatever was coming. “You good?”

A silly question, but what did he even mean by it? “In what context?” she asked, feeling the slow build of Lamb chemistry already starting in her veins.

He looked at her with a bit of disbelief, like he couldn’t believe she’d ask, and jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the couch behind him.

Kalypso followed that gesture in the direction indicated--accidentally caught Jaegerjaquez’s eye, who offered a startling assist in the form of a sharply tilted chin--and looked at the pile of bedding there. After a moment, she said, “Yes, I am good in, uh, that context.”

“He phrased it like an idiot,” said Axel. “Let me try. Why did you come out here to sleep?”

“I didn’t come out here to sleep.” She hadn’t at all wanted to explain this to an audience, but she supposed it was inevitable. “I wanted to use that table again.”

“Eh--in the middle of the night?”

“I’m a nightowl,” said Kalypso, sarcastically.

Axel, slightly to her surprise, shut up at that.

Belatedly, she recalled him seizing hold of the attention last night to bail her out of it, and felt a bit guilty for that snap. But come on. Could any of them blame her for wanting some time to think without the smothering weight of Dominions?

“So you planned to sleep out here, though?” Cu Chulainn’s eyebrows were quirked. He was leaning forward over the arms he’d folded overtop the back of his straddled chair, looking at her keenly.

“You might have noticed I’m not allowed back in my bedroom unless I’ve been a very good girl,” she drawled.

And immediately mentally kicked herself. That had spiked the Dominion temperature of the room, which in answer had caused the little knot of tension at the base of her skull to bloom painfully.

“Pardon,” she added, irritably. “Phrasing.”

“Shut up. Get me.”

After the Flare that accompanied those words finished bashing her in the face, Kalypso tried to process them. Fumbled it, apparently, because they were completely absurd, at least the way she was currently understanding them. “Eh?”

“Come get me next time.”

Kalypso stared at the Dominion whose face she’d half-muzzled with the jawbone of a predator. She still saw those awful oversharp teeth grinding against each other, lined sharper than ever with shadow. Her defensive mechanism was in overdrive because for some fucking reason, this was a much stronger chemical response than the situation merited at all, from all of them. Flares were beginning to uncoil in every direction, Jaegerjaquez’s with insistent, intensifying heat. Why were they so wound up? What had she done?

“Be more self-aware, Ixora.” Yang’s voice was, superficially, calm. As he had last night, he was keeping his Flare close, rather than letting it swell out at his target. Still, she saw malicious glitter in his eyes. “A sleeping Lamb is a goad that…lingers. Did you not know this?”

Epiphany hit her like a suckerpunch.

Oh. Fuck. It was the duvet.

Kalypso slapped a furious hand hard to her forehead. “Son of a bitch bastard idiot. Christ. Jackass. Goon.”

“Uh--”

Kalypso strode across the room to the couch, giving herself a second blow with the heel of her hand for her brainlessness. Scooping her bedding into her arms, she growled, “Can somebody--”

She didn’t stop to examine the dynamics of the moment when Axel lifted his hand toward the Dominion blood test pad and Grimmjow dropped a shoulder to muscle him out of position so he could open the door for her instead. She was too busy trying not to speculate exactly how wretched it must feel to be one of these Dominions right now, ambushed in their early morning by a whole beddingful of sleeping Lamb pheromones when they were just trying to have breakfast, and also, consequently, too busy perishing from embarrassment.

It was not until she was back in the safety of her own room that she realized she’d subjected Yang to the full force of said Lamb-sleep chemistry last night.

Kalypso slowly tightened her shaking fingers into fists.

Be more self-aware.

Come get me next time.

You good?

Think about each other, in the context of each other, and figure out how you can use your accursed chemistry for something beyond bickering and heart attacks.

We all have our pride, Ixora. She really, really needed to play volleyball. She wasn’t doing any other part of this right--and it was incredible how certain she was about that, when she wasn’t even sure what right was in the first place.

next chapter

[nikedrive]

Chapter 11 - Brittle

Available on FFN and AO3

[some chapters of Nike Drive will not be available on Tumblr. this is one such chapter.]

previous chapter

The skin of Theseus has folded into a cartography. The bones of Theseus have broken into mongrel catacombs.

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[nikedrive]

Red Poison

some food for Yang fangirls, being in Yang's route is definitely a mine field - I'd love to walk again

my twitter for otome rants~

[nikedrive]

Chapter 10: Aftershock

[From Nike Drive, an ongoing crossover fanfiction.]

previous chapter

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.

next chapter (post will provide link to AO3 and FFN)

[nikedrive]

Chapter 9: Broken Table

[From Nike Drive, an ongoing crossover fanfiction.]

previous chapter

In you, in me, the gray detritus withers on the fingers. It lies, every effervescence lies-- what is on your lips is not what started in your spine.

“Seriously?” Abarai’s voice broke the silence of the team meeting room. “We’re supposed to do something with that?”

“He’s just toying with us.” Axel leaned his head back against the locked door behind him. He was still not smiling. Kalypso was realizing he must not wear that expression as constantly as she’d assumed. “Hoping we start psycho-analyzing each other, give him more ammo.”

“Ammo for what?” Duibhne had taken a step closer to the screen, his eyes scanning over the faces and their mysterious classifications, but now he shot a wary look toward Axel. Wary? Maybe not. Disapproving, more like. “This is volleyball, not some kind of psych experiment.”

“Hah.” Okay, now the smile was back, in its twisted, darkened variant. “Keep telling yourself that.”

“Even if it is just mind games,” Cu Chulainn interjected, stretching on his stool, “I don’t see the harm in chatting it up. Gotta admit, he’s got me curious.”

“Such a well-trained pup.” That purr from the opposite side of the room was layered in poison.

Kalypso’s chemistry tripped a wire in her brain she could not resist, and which, once her conscious mind caught up with her action, she actually approved of--as all the attention in the room swung toward Yang, she rolled her weight forward onto the heels, then the balls of her feet, and rose out of her tense little knot on the floor. The better to fight, or flee, or if nothing else, at least be on her feet for when whatever dread moment was coming came.

“Still,” continued Yang, with a sort of disinterested lazy drawl that was completely opposite his apparently eternal state of murderous Flare, “wisdom lies in choosing one’s battles. I’m sure the Lamb can attest to that.”

“Don’t speak for me.” Kalypso spat the words out through nausea and migraine aura.

“Then speak for yourself, Kalypso Ixora,” Yang said smoothly. “Tell me what is meant by ‘Rubicon’ as your ideal, and I’ll tell you where you are weakest.”

“Very generous.” She didn’t like that, not any of this, not every Dominion’s eyes on her, nor this demand that she explain Xigbar’s stupid epithet, nor this oh-so-kind offer to tell her which of her fifty glaring problems Xigbar had decided was the most egregious. “Maybe someone else will take you up on it.”

Yang’s golden-coin eyes sank into her like knives. It took everything in her not to take a step backward and press herself against the wall. Never show a predator you’re afraid. You might not be able to do a damn thing to protect yourself, but you certainly weren’t obligated to make it any more fun for them.

“Good answer.” Redford straightened from his lean on the table. “Back off, Yang. If we’re doing this, it won’t be by dissecting Ixora.”

It was a very stupid hypocrisy. A conflict of two wretched impulses: a Lamb’s sickly, worshipful gratitude and Kalypso’s absolute disgust at that selfsame feeling. Because Redford had stepped up like the Dominion he was and defended her, she did not want to be defended, even with Yang’s hungry intentions spreading like toxins through her blood and lighting up his eyes.

“Listen,” she said, regretting this already.

The amber trap of Redford was, in her mind’s eye, seeping out along the floor with his Flare, but she tried for once not to lean on the crutch of her coping mechanism. Instead, swallowing against her seizing throat, she met his gaze and tried to see him.

“Nobody’s looking forward to this, so dissect me if you want. I don’t care. Twenty minutes. Just can you try not to--look at me, or be so… I, I have,” Kalypso was fumbling, grasping now at humiliating straws and hoping they were at least coherent, “quite the chemical headache, and may throw up, possibly. If you’d rather I didn’t, then--”

“The hell?” said Jaegerjaquez, from her left.

“You wanna sit back down, then,” said Cu Chulainn. He’d pivoted completely on his stool to look at her--clearly either completely disinterested in or unable to follow her request, which was a disappointment, honestly, she’d been so very polite about it--and then actually started to stand up, at her, horror of horrors. “Head between knees, eh?”

“No, thank you.” Because moving would maybe mean her knees would remember how to work, and because who knows, there might be some sharp edge of that table she could use to distract herself, Kalypso stalked forward, past Cu Chulainn, and planted her hands firmly on the edges of the hologram table. She leaned on them, closed her eyes for a moment, braced herself. “Okay. I dunno about Rubi--”

“No idea what ‘narrative’ is supposed to mean,” said Axel loudly from his place by the door. “I just told them in that interview that I thought I’d do good if the folks either side of the net went into it like it was personal.”

All attention slid to Axel, startled by his interjection. Kalypso experienced an instantaneous easing in her thudding veins, in her throbbing head. The gyroscopic aura crowding into her vision slowed their sickening shimmer. Relief slackened the tension tearing at her shoulders.

Duibhne said, “Personal? You’d play better if everyone, what, held grudges, is that it?” There was a sort of rush behind the question that didn’t harbor any hostility. Kalypso licked dry lips, realizing he was jumping after Axel’s change of focus with both feet. She tried not to feel too grateful. It was hard.

“Nah, like--if this guy wanted specifically to block that guy, if a couple were trying to make some play work and were getting there, that kinda thing.”

“That’s just volleyball,” said Abarai.

“Sure, except it’s personal.”

“You like the story.” God, Kalypso hated it when one of them snuck up behind her--but even as her heart rammed hard against her ribs and her stomach lurched threateningly, Cu Chulainn wasn’t behind her anymore. He’d moved from his stool to stand opposite Axel, to lean against the massive wall monitor, in fact. It made him hard to see with that electronic light pouring past him and throwing his face into shadow. Not his eyes, though. Not bloody drill-bits, maybe--red-hot ones, with their own light source. “A hero story, a tragedy, a revenge story, what have you.”

A…story?

Despite her misgivings and her headache, Kalypso glanced toward Axel now, with the rest of them. His arms were crossed, his face set and stripped of that smile. When she looked hard at him, through the veneer of the hearthfire disaster her mind had boxed him into, she saw the two little tattoos on his cheeks and the way his still-vicious Flare cracked along its edges, curling back in toward him.

He thought of playing, his best playing, like a story. Like…being part of a story? Was he the story, or was it the whole court, the whole thing, the ball and its accidents, the lines and their ruthless arbitration, every failure, every lucky turn?

He liked it personal. Kalypso could, bitterly, grudgingly, understand that. Hadn’t it been different than anything else, playing with--

“You give us your schtick, then,” said Axel, before that white-hot thought could coalesce in her. He was looking narrowly at Cu Chulainn, expectation written in the arch of his brow. 

“Ehhh,” said the libero, his shoulders lifting in a slow, lazy shrug. Kalypso found her gaze pulled to him now, as if caught by chemical gravity. Those red eyes swept upward, away from her and all the rest of them, as though he were reflecting on a memory. “I figure I’m one of those answers that didn’t really give ‘em much. ‘Stimulus’--c’mon. We’re all organisms, the hell else we gonna care about?”

“Rank evasion,” said Yang silkily.

“I don’t hear you volunteering,” Abarai growled at the distant redhead.

“I told ‘em straight that I figure I play my game the same no matter the sitch.” Cu Chulainn spoke across Abarai’s glare, ignoring Yang’s accusation. “Lessee--I think I said something about how sure, it’d be nice to find folks who matched energy, but ehh, as long as they gave me something to work with, I was gonna be fine.”

“...And Xigbar took that and said ‘Stimulus,’ huh?” Redford sounded like he was feeling dubious on some aspect of Cu Chulainn’s answer, whether it was the libero’s truthfulness or Xigbar’s faculty for assessment.

“He sure did. Beats me how, or why.”

“Somebody explain what the fuck ‘rubicon’ means,” interjected Jaegerjaquez, gravelly with poorly-leashed irritation.

Unhappy though she was to have focus return in any way to her, Kalypso was nonetheless a bit more stable now that some of the Flares had subsided and the Dominions had something for their attention to chew on that wasn’t entirely her. “It’s a river,” she said, dropping her eyes back to the blank surface of the table. “I think he’s just being a melodramatic prick.”

There was a pause, and also a hefty spike in the timbre of her headache. No Flare boiled over her, but her blood seethed hot beneath her skin, and the flood of unfair and distasteful dopamine made her bite her cheek again. She focused on her breathing, trying to force it to stay slow and even.

“That sentence will comfort me in dark times,” said Axel, after a moment. She didn’t really want to look at him, but it sure sounded like a smile, of one kind or another, was back on his face. “Cheers, Kalypso.”

“I’m guessing it’s from the expression, about crossing the Rubicon,” said Duibhne, clearly speaking with care. “Meaning something like, ‘going past the point of no return.’ Ah--why?”

Kalypso spread her fingers wider on the tabletop, stretching them until it hurt. “Dunno. I told him my ideal playing condition was a 6-2 rotation.”

“Eh?” She wasn’t quite sure who made that noise, but it came from several directions.

“Ah.” That one she could identify--that was Yang.

“Vicious,” said Cu Chulainn, and she could hear his toothy grin.

“So, three attackers, all rotations.” Redford was hard for her to block out, because of his sheer proximity. She felt the way he shifted to lean forward, toward her, a little, like they were both koi stirring up their shared, too-small pond and making each of their movements the other’s problem.

“Five,” she corrected. “Six potential I guess, but five always swinging. That’s my ideal condition.”

“Five? Always? The libero shouldn’t be setting that of--”

“No libero.”

A silence, and with it, the hair on her arms and the back of her neck rose, and her headache pulsed across her scalp, pressing nauseating fingers to the base of her skull. Someone--or several someones--were taking issue. Great.

“Huh,” offered Cu Chulainn, into the gathering threat of Dominion thunder.

“Good luck with that,” Axel said.

Kalypso raised a hand damp with cold sweat to toss him a blind, sarcastic salute, still leaning on the table.

“Won’t be happening here.” Duibhne sounded apologetic about it, which made her rather wish to throttle him.

A faint pattering ran through the table, up through her hands; Redford was drumming his fingers. “Hmm. If we did run a libero for the middles, we’d have some options. That’s still three in front--”

“Pulling fangs already, Redford?” Absurd, how Yang could sharpen a purr to cut through any moment like butter. “She’s only been here a day.”

That low-burning Flare, that soft carpet of heat, that chemical threat that Redford had been keeping banked and ready, bloomed upward. It took Kalypso’s oxygen and her vision as well. Amber swept up her, choking and hot as tar. “And yet you still need a muzzle on you, don’t you?”

A tiniest of clicks, and the sound of a motor--oh, maybe there was a merciful god--and the door to the team meeting room opened. Either Xigbar was taking distant pity on her, or twenty minutes were up.

Kalypso was lurching through that door with the rush of that Flare roaring at her back, and if anyone tried to stop her, she did not hear them, or feel them, or care.

next chapter

[nikedrive]

sluttiest thing a man can do is be gilbert redford 🤭🫰🏼

uhuhuhuohoHOHOHE let’s have a round of applause for gilbert redford everyone 🤌🏼✨

[nikedrive]

Chapter 8:  Strange Marrow

[From Nike Drive, an ongoing crossover fanfiction.]

previous chapter

Would you be a moon for me, if I found the perfect place to stand? Inhale--could it be my blood would answer? Could it abandon me, as I turn?

“Right.” The door to the meeting room closed, sealing Kalypso in with all seven Dominions. The massive screen with Xigbar’s face was the only light source in the room, but it was plenty. She’d tried to tuck herself into shadow, but there wasn’t much to hide in. “Now that a particular laggard has finally seen fit to join the rest of the class, let’s lay out the obvious, shall we?”

Kalypso did not bristle. It wasn’t like she’d laid in bed and atrophied.

“There’s more of you than fit on a court. Nothing strange about that, on a team--but you lot aren’t a team, as far as I can see. You’re an eclectic mess of narcissists that can’t seem to figure out what you’re doing here. It’s sad.”

Oomph. She couldn’t help a quick sidelong glance around the room to see how these men would take that.

They didn’t like taking it, obviously, but none of them had gotten their hackles up. No furious Flares came surging out of anyone, which was a relief to her already pounding head. On the opposite side of the room, the murderous miasma with Yang’s coin eyes at its center didn’t get any more murderous than its apparent default. No ‘tch’ came out of Jaegerjaquez. Still at the same seat at the now-powered-down hologram table, Redford’s chin didn’t move from his hand, nor did his low-grade smolder of a Flare intensify.

In fact, the only one who reacted at all was Duibhne. He nodded, his face a study of stern agreement.

So either Xigbar’s assessment was so true none of them were even mad about it, or Xigbar had choke chains on them all. Kalypso assumed it wasn’t the latter, because surely even outwardly subordinate Dominions would still be having chemical tantrums, no matter how powerful the foot on their throats. Kalypso couldn’t speak to Xigbar’s own capacity for Dominion ball-crushing; she’d never met him in person. A lovely turn of fate, that--chemistry couldn’t wreak havoc on her through a screen.

“Here’s the good news. You don’t have to be a team. Ain’t the point. So, kids, I don’t care if you fuse into a cute little polycule or if we have to carry half of you out in body bags. No skin off my back either way. The point is to see if we can leverage you against each other and get better volleyball out of you for our trouble. So you have choices: you can work out a way to work together, or you can play like selfish assholes, or you can pick a victim and pull their spine out through their mouth--just get better at the goddamn game. That’s the point here.

“What I am going to nip in the bud right now, Ixora--” Kalypso startled, shocked into an instant cold sweat by seven heads swiveling toward her, “--is this avoidance shit. We’re here to see if your proximity matters. The whole project is dead in the water if you ice over on the court and then skitter back into your separate warren immediately. That goes for all of you,” Xigbar added, unexpectedly. “The Lamb in the room isn’t the only one with an exploitable chemical response. Every one of you has a reaction when any of the rest of you step into a room. That’s an edge, whether it’s an edge up or an edge you slice yourself open with. Lea.”

“What.” That flat response was utterly devoid of the practiced smile Axel had kept so immaculate during her first encounter with him. He was leaning against the closed door, looking at Xigbar expressionlessly.

Kalypso, hopefully surreptitiously, pressed the back of her hand to her mouth. She had never seen a Dominion keep such an even expression while Flaring like that. He had gone from neutral to vicious so fast, and if her chemistry hadn’t clued her in, she’d have had no idea just how dangerous he’d gotten from one heartbeat to the next. Her legs started to shake. She pulled them tighter to her chest. At least he wasn’t looking at her anymore. That Flare was directed entirely at the screen in front of them.

“You wanted in here, so show the fuck up. Yang.”

The redhead in the opposite dark corner from Kalypso did not move or speak to acknowledge his name. For once, Kalypso had a hard time picking out his golden eyes through the darkness--Axel was kicking off enough chemistry to fog her vision.

“Doubtless you’re finding just as much satisfaction in your wasted time as Lea is. I’m delighted for you.”

Christ, thought Kalypso hysterically. Was this what team meetings meant? This guy flips Dominion switches from a distant safe room and sees who goes on a rampage first?

For a mercy, Yang did not blossom into new heights of asphyxiating hostility. Either Xigbar had missed the mark, or Yang had his teeth too deep in some other Dominion tantrum to care about fresh taunts.

“Duibhne.”

Kalypso could not help but shoot wide-eyed apprehensive glances toward each of these men as Xigbar called them out. It was a sort of gallows fascination, irresistible for reasons completely beyond chemistry, a will-they-won’t-they sort of anticipatory dread.

“I appreciate that you’re trying, but for pity’s sake, try with your brain.”

“Sir.” Duibhne’s mouth tightened. Kalypso battled back a wince.

“Much as we all appreciate your zingers,” said Redford, his loud drawl an abrupt shock to the room, “this really could have been an email, man.”

Kalypso’s body went slack with relief. Thank god, the tension was--well, not broken, never broken, but at least back to the usual kind of snarling circling fangs-out Dominion tension to which she was accustomed.

“Cute,” said Xigbar drily. “I tried that route, if you’ll recall. All that’s come of it so far is sulking.”

Grimmjow’s signature sound of fury came from his corner, which was nearer to Kalypso than she’d have liked.

“If you’re talking about that little list of weak spots,” said Cu Chulain--he was closer to her than any of the rest of them, having settled onto the stool nearest her, close enough that she could see the red gleam of an eye but far enough into the room that he couldn’t look back at her without being obvious about it, “they didn’t really give us much to go on, in most cases. And anyway, ‘s a name missing, ain’t there?”

“I gave you plenty to go on, dolt. As for who’s missing off it, if any of you are half the players you think you are, you won’t need to be told what it is that’s holding you back. And if you are that clueless, all you have to do is ask.”

Kalypso recalled that list, yes. No, she hadn’t been included on it. That appeared to go for everyone--they’d all gotten a checklist of everyone else’s major flaw, sans their own.

She hadn’t, in idleness, been able to guess what hers might be. That made her clueless, and half the player she thought she was, apparently. Well, she could agree with one of those two points, no problem and no offense taken. For one of them.

“M’kay, then,” Cu Chulainn said, his head tilting slightly, his grin glittering blue-white from the light of the screen. “Hit me, Coach. I’m asking.”

“Nice try, but I’m not telling. Ask somebody else, bub. They all  got your number.”

Xigbar waited. Cu Chulainn’s grin eroded at its edges, ever so slightly. He did not repeat the question, nor did he look around the room.

“See, idiots, this is my point. You aren’t thinking about each other enough. Not enough to be real teammates, real rivals, real enemies, nothing. You need to think about them, Ixora.”

Kalypso flinched, then dug her fingers painfully deep into her thighs, staring hard at Xigbar and refusing to even consider all the other eyes that flashed to her in that moment.

“Ain’t just your job alone, either,” Xigbar told her, “but in theory, you’re the first domino to fall here. Pick a favorite, Ixora. Or a couple favorites. Let the lizard brains do the rest.”

Bile rose in her throat.

“Ick,” murmured Axel from the doorway.

There were several seconds of silence. Xigbar clearly wanted her to fill them, but no power on earth could make Kalypso offer anything to this room for free. Especially after that.

Finally, he sighed, looking irritated but unsurprised.

“Nothing for it but to keep drip feeding you conversation starters, or non-starters, as the case may be.” Xigbar’s face vanished from the screen, replaced by eight photographs--each of their faces, now. They were arranged in two rows across the screen, along with their Subject numbers; Kalypso’s own face was there at the end, on the rightmost side of the bottom row, with a fat block ‘O’ beneath her image. Kalypso recognized them as photos taken during admission to the Nike Drive program. They looked rather like mug shots, if mug shots were taken in the moments before a crime instead of afterward. There was a very definite reckless hunger in every face, including her own. “You were asked a series of questions during the admissions testing. One of those questions asked you to describe the conditions in which you could visualize yourself performing at your personal best. Some of you,” Xigbar added, in a tone of mild disgust, “are terrible communicators. Nonetheless, we made do.

“In the interest of making you lot pay attention to each other, we have crystallized what you each expressed into a single ideal. We have oversimplified you. We have sanded off your nuance and made you nice and digestible for the other seven idiots to swallow.”

A word flickered into being below Redford’s picture at the leftmost place in the top row, just below his “S01” label.

Magnetism.

Below Axel’s picture and the “S06” classification, another word appeared.

Narrative.

“Is this a fucking riddle?” said Jaegerjaquez, blankly.

The rest of the words blinked into place, in no identifiable order of blinking, as if half a dozen people were all plugging in power cables and weren’t quite in sync with each other.

Magnetism. Dominance. Challenge. Function.

Reciprocation. Narrative. Stimulus. Rubicon.

“You’ve got twenty minutes left of meeting time. Yes, Ixora, the doors are locked until then. Twenty measly minutes,” Xigbar repeated, rolling his eye as he did so, “and then you’re free to go off to whatever waste of everyone’s time you like best. Talk about your ideals. Ask about your weakness. Play duck duck goddamn goose. I don’t care. Do something so you’ll think about each other, in the context of each other, and figure out how you can use your accursed chemistry for something beyond bickering and heart attacks.”

The camera on Xigbar blinked out, leaving only silence, eight photos, and those utterly unhelpful ‘ideals’.

next chapter

[nikedrive]

Nike Drive is now being posted on both FFN and AO3. New chapters will still be posted to this blog, pending further announcements. Links to both the FFN and AO3 publications can be found on the sidebar.

[nikedrive]

Chapter 7: Scission

[From Nike Drive, an ongoing crossover fanfiction.]

previous chapter

We see our empire breaking and run from its sharp edges. We are a thousand little lifeboats and a thousand little kings.

In mostly silence, they watched the drill play itself out before them. Kalypso, watching Redford, learned how to spin the projection of the court, and tilt it, and just generally manipulate it on every axis. Sometimes he would pause it, slide it all around, slow it down even further, rolling the ball in and out of the shadow of Jaegerjaquez’s holographic palm. Sometimes she would too, but while he stayed largely still and turned the sluggish replay over and over in his hand, Kalypso would pace the table, sometimes around to one side, leaning over, crouching down to view the diorama of the court from the level of the floor.

“You could do this all day, couldn’t you?”

“No,” she answered, honestly. “I’d get restless.”

She still had the ball she’d taken from the gym, and sometimes she lifted it up to consider its curves or raised a hand to mirror Jaegerjaquez’s angle or contact. Redford would watch her do this. She felt his gaze like a touch, but he never moved from his stool.

The banked heat of his Flare did not roll out between them to scald her. Kalypso kept waiting for it to lash outward, kept bracing for the chemical reaction that was guaranteed to flood her the moment that it happened, but it stayed quiet, inarguably present, but--contained.

Maybe it was the same characteristic of spirit that rendered him content to sit in here watching rather than meeting the challenge presented by his struggling hitter. A weakness in him, Kalypso thought, but…a weakness she could appreciate, off court. A Dominion who did not desire quite so potently was a Dominion with whom it was much, much easier to share a table in the dark.

Was that comfort worth having an unmotivated setter, though?

No. Honestly, no. It wasn’t.

Kalypso ground her teeth.

A swift hiss of a little motor, and then light flooded in from the doorway. Redford glanced in that direction. Kalypso, for her part, froze, tensing, remembering all the moments previous when she could have rejected the seduction of the hologram table and just told Redford she needed his help to get back to her room. Now the die was cast again--another Dominion was entering the small, dark room, looming between her and the door.

“Ah--this is where you went, huh?”

Renji Abarai’s shadow fell over the table as he came to stand opposite Kalypso at the end closest to the door. His words were apparently for her, much to Kalypso’s chagrin. She had nothing to say to that question--its answer was obvious, after all. Because some kind of acknowledgement was clearly expected, she gave him a nod and pointedly returned her attention to the table.

“How’s it looking?”

Happily, this one didn’t appear to be directed at her, because Redford answered immediately. “Better than this morning. You caught up with all of ‘em?”

“I mean,” said Abarai, rather pointedly.

Redford waved a dismissive hand at that. “Yeah, you got a click of the tongue and maybe some muttered filth outta that one, sure--the other two, then.”

“Duibhne’s ready to kill…somebody. Not sure who. Jaegerjaquez is the fairest bet,  but…”

Kalypso did not need to be here listening to this. They were talking like she was invisible, which was preferable to talking to her, all told. She took a slow, unobtrusive step back from the table, running through her options. Redford was clearly playing nice--which made her really not want to owe him. Abarai had business on the mind, though, and might be bitter about being interrupted, especially if--

“Cu Chulainn had good things to say about you.” Goosebumps broke out along her arms as Abarai’s words and attention slid back to her. “You angling for libero, then?”

“You should watch this before it gets wiped,” Redford said to him, tapping the table to pause the current drill, the set hanging halfway to Jaegerjaquez’s chambered approach. “Duibhne’s mad, huh? Thoughts on why, Ixora?”

Which question was she supposed to prioritize? This had the feel of some stupid Dominion dick-measuring contest; one asks a question and the other instantly asks an unrelated one, to see which one she turned toward, which one she appeased first. “Doesn’t matter,” she said, answering both, and by sheer luck able to be honest for both, too.

“Eh?”

“Apologies,” said Redford smoothly, and Kalypso recognized that he’d decided to bulldoze through this moment and deny her whatever evasion she was trying to orchestrate. “We don’t intend to make you tense, not about the…interpersonals. Nevermind about Duibhne.” He tilted his head toward Abarai in tacit invitation.

Okay, so this was complicated dick-measuring then. Kalypso elected not to bother trying to decode this particular power struggle, if that’s what it was.

Rather than wait for them to reframe their questions into some new trap, she said, “It doesn’t matter to me what I play.”

Abarai set a hand on his hip, and tapped the table with his other hand to resume the holographic drill. Then he leaned forward onto that hand, watching as Jaegerjaquez hit a hard cross into Kalypso’s waiting arms.  “Nice pass. What’s, uh, what’s Duibhne blocking there?”

“You tell me,” muttered Kalypso, before she could stop herself.

Redford and Abarai both blinked, then glanced at each other. “Well, then,” said Redford, an eyebrow rising. “You said something to him about it, did you?”

“I asked him to run it like a one-man block instead of an imaginary two-man that’s giving up line. He didn’t want to.” Now more than one eyebrow was raised at her. No Flares--but she did take a bit of issue with those looks even if they weren’t raining hungry chemistry on her with them. “I didn’t dress him down about it. He didn’t want to, I dropped it, drill went on.”

“I see,” said Redford.

“So that’s what you were doing? Jumping from side to side while the middle-court was blocked out? Yeesh.” Abarai was studying the table now while Redford’s measured eye lingered stingingly on her.

Kalypso was more than a bit relieved that the other middle on the team could look at Duibhne in this drill and say ‘yeesh’. That meant, hypothetically, if it had been Abarai up there at net instead of that perfect, silky-smooth poisonous automaton, there might have been more dynamism involved.

Careful, now, careful, little lamb-riddled fool. Kalypso checked her hope hard before it could bud into anything she’d soon regret. This man in front of her, tall, broad, hard-eyed and, she reminded herself, wearing the pelt of a thing that died for his sport and pleasure, was just as much a Dominion as the rest of them--and just as likely to make certain she remembered it. If it had been him at the net, then it would have been him stalking closer to her in the lightless black of the dead court afterward. Same for Redford--it could have been him instead of Cu Chulainn gliding toward the net and driving her backward into Jaegerjaquez’s reach.

“Tomorrow,” Abarai was saying, “let’s get Axel roped in and call dibs on extra court time. We can repeat this, opposite side. Rotate roles, if you want, get you and Axel both swinging.”

“You’re really leaning on that, huh?” observed Redford, his eye sliding from Kalypso to Abarai now.

A little bit of chemistry caught on her skin, a little arrhythmic stutter in her chest, when Abarai’s mouth twitched downward. “Too much to hope for otherwise, ain’t it?”

“Dunno,” said Redford, with a certain air of finality. “You’d have to ask her.”

Ooh. She did not like the sound of that. Nope. Whatever it was, no thanks, do not, in fact, ask her, please and thank you.

But clearly Abarai was not someone who stopped short of a hungry thought, not even when he himself was thinking better of the idea and had another Dominion revving up at his back to boot. That’s what was happening, Kalypso saw with mounting trepidation--the tall redhead was squaring his shoulders, and Redford was setting his chin back into the palm of his hand, watching, the low-burn Flare he’d sustained all this time sweeping outward now, a quiet silent heat rolling across the floor like the first wave of fire across an oil-soaked rug.

This was a moment she did not want to happen. Whatever was about to come out of Abarai’s mouth, it would carry consequences that she didn’t even understand yet, that they hadn’t given her time to feel out, to grasp, to calculate.

“How are you at hitting outside, Ixora?”

Tilts.

Easily bored, disengages with setter.

Cu Chulainn trailing after a furious hitter. Duibhne scanning the room and placing his bets. Redford sitting in here, watching them struggle to get their outside to hit in-bounds. Abarai feeling out those two afterward and coming straight to his setter to report. That vicious firestorm of Flares she’d walked into first thing, between Redford and their other outside hitter, the one with the coin-eyes and the presence like murder.

There were, with her, eight of them, after all.

Kalypso was forced to reassess Redford’s choice to sit in here instead of joining that drill. It wasn’t quite as simple as a Dominion’s schadenfreude overtop a lack of ambition. It was a calculated drawing of lines. This team--ha, clearly that was the wrong word for this collection of egos--was fracturing into factions. Everyone was picking sides.

Jaegerjaquez had tilted, and shown he couldn’t right himself without outside intervention. Yang had, apparently, spat in Redford’s face. In response, Abarai was standing here offering her one of their heads on a platter--if, of course, she was equal to the task.

Which would make her at least one Dominion enemy.

Eyes like golden-coins, devouring her on sight. Hot, cruel fingers snarling through her hair. They were, possibly, based on first impressions and yes, on chemical response as well, the two most dangerous choices for her to usurp. That aside, quite frankly, outside was one of her weaker technical positions. Better than middle, perhaps, but all else being equal, she would be a far bigger asset as basically anything else.

“I told you,” Kalypso said. “I’ll play anything.”

It wasn’t like she was picking their side. It was, simply, that whoever was playing, she would be in there, amidst them, playing too. She doubted she’d get a vote on who they carved out of their formation; that neither surprised nor disappointed her. She’d never harbored any illusions otherwise.

Redford’s grin flashed out like lightning, blinding and faster than anyone could brace for. “Then we’ll be seeing you tomorrow on the court, Ixora. You can hit whatever you fancy.”

A satisfied Dominion always grated. It generally wasn’t really their fault; it was just her own stubborn rejection of her chemistry, which was even now rippling through her skin and heating up her blood and insisting that she blush and stare and creep closer to do some worshipful cuddling. When Dominions got what they wanted, she got a flood of involuntary feelings that she hadn’t asked for and they hadn’t earned--not from her, at least--and that made her bitter.

Right now, it grated more than usual. So she’d given him an honest answer, he’d interpreted it in a manner that suited him best, accepted it as his rightful due, and was now offering headpats?

Kalypso clamped down on that resentment before it could creep onto her face. He’d gotten what he wanted, yes, but in so doing she had also gotten what she wanted. Tomorrow, there would be team practice of some kind, and then afterward, there would be more. That’s what she was here for. That’s all that mattered. Sure, yes, whatever, any of them could have her on their cute little faction roster if it meant she could play more.

The sound of the door opening and the sudden assault of fresh light from beyond made her take another cautious step back. Who now? She really needed to get out of here, get away from the suffocating siege of Dominions, especially since she’d locked in extra time on the court tomorrow. If she vanished now, nothing about her presence would complicate that plan, and if forces beyond her control decided to rip it apart--the thought made her bite that sore abused patch of her cheek again--at least she wouldn’t have to ride out the Flares.

“Still out here, Kalypso?” Axel Lea stepped into the room, his green eyes going first to her before anything else, even though she’d slid back into the shadows out of the light from the door and the holograms. Damned Dominions. “Did nobody help you with your door?”

“Eh?”

“Huh?”

Twinned sounds of confusion from Redford and Abarai, and humiliating though it was, Kalypso seized that proffered escape with both hands and all her teeth. “I’ll take you up on it,” she said, and began a march toward Axel and the doorway he was standing in with all the grim intention of a soldier on a suicide charge.

Three things happened at once: the holograms above the table flickered out, a massive wall-screen at her back hummed to life, casting gray shadows of chairs and men and the table and herself on the walls, and a familiar voice spoke from speakers embedded somewhere in high corners.

“You’ve waited this long to shower, Ixora. You’ll wait another half hour. Asses in seats, the lot of you.”

The fourth thing, the real sinking-feeling thing, happened when Axel stepped inside and was followed by all the remaining Dominions in the facility. They came in slow and thunderous, taking up places around the room that had clearly become habit--Cu Chulainn, hands folded on top of his head, crooked grin and drill-bit eyes both gleaming, Diarmuid ua Duibhne, shaking back his darkly poisonous hair and taking in Redford’s cheer with narrowed eyes, Grimmjow Jaegerjaquez, slouching in with hands in his pockets, jawbone mask grinding. And Yang. That’s what they’d called him. Yang came in with his Flare already steaming from his shoulders.

Immediately, sickly auras bloomed on the edges of Kalypso’s vision--forget half an hour, this was going to give her a headache in the first two minutes.

Xigbar’s golden eye regarded them all from the massive screen. The fucking team meeting, that’s what this was. Kalypso could think of very little she’d hate doing more, much less in present company. But fine. That’s what this was gonna be like, huh? Fine.

Kalypso found herself a bit of the wall as far as possible from anyone else, pressed her back to it, and--this was weak, but there were times for pride and this was not one of them--slid down it into a little tight-curled knot on the floor, ready to wait this one out. Just like a good, quiet little Lamb should do.

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[nikedrive]

[nikedrive]

Ink drawing 💙❄️grimmjaw love 💙

[nikedrive]

Chapter 6: Bury It

[From Nike Drive, an ongoing crossover fanfiction.]

previous chapter

Serendipitous, you say, that, falling, you caught something before the black water and its anvil surface. I, who have been scratched and dislocated by many hands, know better.

Presented with the choice of waiting for one of the three Dominions to emerge from the locker room--one of the three who had tightened around her like a net in the dark--and gambling on unknown doors and unknown men, Kalypso chose the latter.

The first door wasn’t one, really--it was instead a set of swinging saloon doors that led to a kitchen. A kitchen, huh? So were they making their own food instead of getting a sealed cafeteria-style meal slid to them through some silent dispenser?

There was no one in the kitchen, so she didn’t linger. The next door hissed open before her, presenting a long, dim corridor lined with more doors. The same black block text from the lockers leered along the hallway: S01, S02, S03, S04…

Kalypso recoiled from that open doorway as if it had shocked her. Sensing her departure, the door leading to their rooms slid closed again.

For a moment, she stood still, battling with herself. Someone might be in their room. She could go knock on doors, and maybe someone would answer, and maybe they’d help her with the blood test lock, and then she’d finally be able to get some peace. She could do that, and maybe, just maybe--

But maybe someone would answer, and not help. And where would that leave her? Where would it leave him?

With a lost, pleading Lamb begging at his doorstep, a Lamb who’d entered his personal domain, who’d come looking for him, who couldn’t really say no to anything, not when he was her only option, her only choice--that’s where it would leave him.

Kalypso did not, not for a second, trust a Dominion left in such a circumstance. She knew better. She’d learned better.

Call it wisdom, or cowardice, or maybe even pride. Kalypso did not try any of those doors.

She went to the third door. None of them were locked, she’d noticed bitterly--just the one to her room, her locker itself, and that other, mystery door at the back of her room.

This next door opened into a room that was mostly darkness, except for the blue and yellow glow of the holograms projected upward from the wide center table.

Kalypso stared. It was a projection of a volleyball court, with four figures gliding across it in slow motion. She recognized them, and the drill they were engaged in, instantly.

There was Cu Chulainn’s high hut set, and Jaegerjaquez’s approach. There was Duibhne’s smooth jump, and the ball rocketing just outside of the line--and herself, stepping off court to greet it with the flat plane of a forearm pass.

It was a three-dimensional recording of their drill. Not an approximation--an exact recording. There were no details to their faces, but all the rest was captured perfectly. Kalypso remembered that hit and the extra step back she’d taken when she saw Jaegerjaquez rush his approach a bit under the set. Look, there was even that libero’s hand moving to his hip, and Duibhne turning around to lecture her. It was all there.

All thought of getting back to her room vanished from her mind. This was brilliant. This was the perfect way to figure out if Jaegerjaquez had tells she missed, which of her guesses she could crystalize into certainty next time, how she could capitalize, improve, evolve. Kalypso bolted for the table, circling around it to get a better look at the angles--

“Hey there, Ixora.”

She froze.

How the hell had she not noticed him?

Gilbert Redford leaned forward to put an elbow on the table. That lean brought him within range of the soft glow emanating from the holograms; it drew the intensity out from the corners of his eyes, drew him out from behind that facade of cheerful, generous good-nature. The smothering amberglow trap of him was bared, here. That he hadn’t planned this ambush didn’t make it less suffocating.

From where she’d entered the door--with the hologram court as reference, the attacker’s side--he was sitting to the left, where he could watch the set meet the ghost of Jaegerjaquez’s swing. Kalypso had gone charging around the right side. If she’d gone left, she would have bowled straight into him.

Her chemistry should have warned her of his presence instantly, but the shock of this hologram recording and the sheer excitement it sparked in her had happened simultaneously to its reaction to him. Her heart rate had spiked, her blood had started to sing, and she’d mistaken affliction for joy. That had never happened before.

“Redford,” she said, trying her best to strip her voice of everything--startlement, fright, bitterness, thrill.

“Here for cooldown studies?”

No, she was here to get his help. But she didn’t have a hologram table in her room. Jaegerjaquez’s hologram was airborne again--her own had loitered at the attack line, and now sprinted left. Rendered slow, it was easy to see now that she’d only been able to make that read because there hadn’t been a middle blocker. His cut was wickedly sharp; he’d have likely gotten around the middle with it too, and Kalypso wouldn’t have had the early warning flash of his arm to clue her in. If a middle blocker had been there, that middle would have blocked her line of sight.

Kalypso swallowed, squeezed her fists, and finished her route to the far side of the table. “Does everything in there get recorded?”

“Yeah.” Redford reached a hand through the hologram, made a small, backwards-shoving motion. Everything paused, then reversed--Duibhne’s shape pulling his fingers out from their run through his hair, herself peeling up out of her roll and tipping back onto her feet, that pass lifting itself out of the cart, the cut flying back to Jaegerjaquez’s palm, then floating back in a high arc into Cu Chulainn’s hands--until Redford touched two fingers back to the surface of the table, and it all stopped again. “I like slowing it down. Your drill, though, your taste--tap to play. Four fingers, one-fourth speed, three for one-third, you get it.”

Kalypso tapped the table with four fingers. Sure enough, the hologram resumed its motion, at the same quarter-speed it had been set to previously.

“They cut us off in there at weird times,” Redford said.

It was a strange sensation, listening to him while watching this fascinating play of lights recreate every angle of a drill. Her chemistry would not let her ignore him--it latched her brain tight to his voice without her consent, but if she didn’t fight that fixation on the sound of him, she could look at the ball, the moment of contact, the turn of Jaegerjaquez’s shoulders, the spread of her own feet, and ugh, those tiny, surgically precise movements in Duibhne to get him in exactly the same spot of that asinine block every single time. She listened, intently and grudgingly, so that she could look where she wanted without having to fight a war with her own biology, which would otherwise be trying to force her into looking at him instead.

“If it’s all of us in there doing some kinda full-court drill, we don’t get as long before they kill the power on us. Smaller groups, like you four, they give you more time. I think it’s got to do with this thing.”

Interesting. Not as interesting as the volleyball in front of her, but nonetheless. “What, limited storage?”

“That, or processing power, or something like that, yeah. That’s what I figure. Abarai thinks it’s just to keep us from over-training, but I don’t buy it.”

“Does it save these?”

“Not for long. This one will be gone before tomorrow’s team training.”

She heard the implied question there, but was not going to give him anything she didn’t have to. Yes, she would be showing up for that, certain as sunrise. It meant more playing. And no, she was not obligated to file her intentions with him in advance.

She, on the other hand, had another suspicion about this table--and about the setter who’d been sitting in here in the dark, watching his tilted outside hitter fail line shots on repeat. “You were watching us live, here.”

He didn’t deny it. “Why’s that sound like an accusation, Ixora?”

A bit of it was she didn’t like the thought of any of these Dominions watching her like she was a rare captive animal, but that wasn’t quite rational. She hadn’t been able to resist the allure of this table herself--look at her now. No, it was mostly something else.

How could he stand watching when he could just go play?

“You could’ve come set him yourself.”

“Hah.” That soft little exhale of laughter made her bristle, even though it had the same sort of distance from her that she’d noticed again and again with these men. It wasn’t her, not her as a concept and not her words, that had drawn out that laugh. “That wouldn’t have lasted five minutes.”

“So instead you sat in here watching him blow single-blocked huts.” What good would that do? None--but ah, yes, for a rebuffed Dominion, it probably felt good. Watching your rival prove, once and for all, that you weren’t the problem, that he was the fuck-up? Not much would get a Dominion harder.

Scorn rippled out of Kalypso’s gut. She tried to keep it off her face, because she’d endured more than enough Flares already, but for god’s sake. Great show they were putting on today. Tilting, setting two hundred huts, blocking like a robot, sitting in here getting fellated by footage of someone else playing badly--this was not what she’d been told would be happening here. Where was the fearless trajectory toward evolution Xigbar had promised her? Where was the capacity, the hunger, in any of them?

“That was what I started out watching,” Redford acknowledged. “Then somebody showed up and put his head on straight.” He reached out into the hologram again, made a sort of widening motion that cut the court in half just as Jaegerjaquez swung line and Kalypso’s hologram guessed wrong. Kalypso watched the ball hammer down the line, deep in the corner, while her recorded self darted left like an imbecile. “You’re a menace back there. Did Cu Chulainn say anything?”

Mostly he had thrown ‘hooos’ and ‘ayyys’ around when something went terrifically well, or crooked-grin jabs when something went awfully wrong. “He wanted to switch with me.”

“Ah. I imagine Jaegerjaquez wasn’t keen on letting that happen.”

He hadn’t been.

“Jaegerjaquez made you his crutch, Ixora. If you’d switched to setting him, he’d have gone skidding off the rails again and been right back to missing the line every hit.” Redford made a pinching gesture, and the still-in-motion court went back to its previous size, to include the setter again. “Ain’t the worst possible role to be in, but…is that what you want to settle for here?”

That was such an unexpected interpretation that Kalypso actually looked up from the hologram to stare at him.

Did he think she’d be upset that playing the game changed the game? Yes, she had joined the drill, and as a result, there had been a passing defense, and as a result of that in turn, Jaegerjaquez’s hits had changed. Where there had been void, now there was her. If it untilted the hitter, which, yes, it had a bit, so much the better. A crutch? She was a player.

He thought that was her settling?

“Sure,” she said, because it didn’t matter, agreeing with that. The question was nonsense, and she had no regrets about joining that drill at all. Some of her footwork was garbage and some of her misreads were flagrant, as this hologram was hammering home, but all the better to do it, see it, learn from it. Not even the terror of hands in the darkness could make her regret playing.

The sticky amber prison of him should have stopped her from pushing the point. It didn’t, because she just couldn’t believe a serious player could take such a bizarre stance on this.

“You,” she said, and knew the words were a mistake before they even left her mouth, because his attention tightened, that ‘you’ catching and sizzling in his eyes, “settled for coming in here and watching home movies instead.”

The sparks of his impending Flare fluttered out of him, golden motes across her vision. First the light, and the burn--that’s what would come next, once he got over his surprise.

He was surprised. It was there in the widening of his unpatched eye, in the way he rose out of his lean on the table, just a little. “We all have our pride, Ixora.”

“I don’t,” she said. “Not there.” The table read her gesture as a command, and the ball that had just taken a bad bounce from her ghost self’s arms to pelt away like a misfired cannonball came back, slowly, to pound itself back off again toward its origin point. “Pride dies there. If we’re smart, we bury it there, so we don’t trip.”

Two fingers on the table restarted the play. Kalypso watched herself fumble that pass again--she’d still been moving perpendicular to the ball’s trajectory, her arms moving too, which was the bad bit. It made a difficult pass fiendishly so, as the slightest, smallest overextension spoiled the necessary plane of reception entirely. There. Yep. She’d gone too far right. A particularly nimble, lucky teammate might be able to get something on it, send it skyward for a weak recovered return. More likely, the rally would die with her failure.

Alright. Noted. Good hit outta Jaegerjaquez. Next.

She waited for Redford’s Flare to build itself toward a roar and a consequence.

Instead, it smoldered there, low and golden, like a candle in a lantern of amber, and the next ball left her hologram’s forearms with quiet, gentle backspin, soft and fleeting as a dream.

next chapter

[nikedrive]

Nike Drive Chapter Masterlist

Ongoing fanfic - will be updated as new chapters are posted. Alternate places to read: FFN & AO3

Chapters

01 - Injection

02 - Push You, Push Yours

03 - Tilt the Labyrinth

04 - Garotte

05 - Force of Repulsion

06 - Bury It

07 - Scission

08 - Strange Marrow

09 - Broken Table

10 - Aftershock

11 - Brittle (post will provide AO3 and FFN link)

12 - Precipitance

13 - Kindle

14 - Oscillation

15 - Ignite

16 - Tender Ground