POV: Khyle
Santos Khyle couldn't believe his eyes or his ears as he stepped off the padded walkway and glided onto the ice at Seattle's Sokyoku Hill Arena.
The place was sold out.
Over nineteen thousand people had packed themselves into every available seat, standing room, and railing, all of them loud, all of them hungry, all of them draped in black, blue, and gold. The energy inside the building wasn't just noise. It was physical. A living thing with its own pulse and its own agenda, pressing down on Khyle's chest from every direction at once as the team filed out onto the ice one by one.
The music thundered. Advertisements strobed across the massive overhead screens in dizzy loops of color. Lights swept the crowd in long dramatic arcs, catching upturned faces and foam fingers and spilled beer and not a single person who looked like they were anywhere other than exactly where they wanted to be.
It was almost too much. A near visceral overload that hit him somewhere behind the sternum and refused to let go.
Everywhere he looked, Soul Reaper colors. On the banners that dropped from the rafters. On the jerseys packed shoulder to shoulder in the stands. On the enormous screens that loomed above the ice like the faces of gods who hadn't decided yet whether they were pleased with what they saw below them.
Khyle had never felt so proud in his life.
He had also never felt quite so small.
He'd played nearly every game of the regular season, many of them right here in his hometown arena, and he still couldn't remember feeling this strung out before a drop of the puck. Not even his first NHL game as a Soul Reaper had done this to him. His heart was going at a pace that had nothing to do with the warm up, and his legs felt like someone had quietly replaced his kneecaps with loose gravel sometime in the last ten minutes.
Christ. His knees were actually shaking.
He stared straight ahead and hoped to god the cameras weren't on him right now. He knew better, of course. He was an up-and-comer, one of the team's top scorers in his first season, and this was the playoffs. The cameras were always on him. Every shift, every face-off, every moment where he looked like he might be about to do something interesting or embarrassing or both. The pressure of that scrutiny sat on him like a second set of pads, and he couldn't afford to buckle under it. Not tonight. Not with everything riding on this series.
His team needed him at his best.
His stomach turned over hard, and for one truly humiliating moment he thought he was actually going to be sick on the ice in front of nineteen thousand people and a national broadcast.
Then something nudged his arm.
Khyle turned his head, and walked straight into a set of electric blue eyes that had absolutely no business being that color. The larger player beside him had his mouth pulled into a broad, lopsided grin that showed too many teeth and communicated an amount of casual arrogance that should have been illegal in a professional sporting environment.
"Hey." The voice was low and unhurried, nearly swallowed by the noise of the arena around them. "Don't let it get to ya. It's just another game."
The blue eyes crinkled at the corners. The grin widened.
"'Sides," Gunner added, tipping his head toward the roaring stands with the easy confidence of a man who had never once doubted that the crowd was entirely there for him, "they love us."
A fanged smile. The brief flash of a pink tongue. And something about all of it, the sheer audacity of the man, the ridiculous certainty in his face, the complete absence of anything resembling nerves, landed somewhere in the center of Khyle's chest and knocked the worst of the panic loose.
Something about the easy confidence in that grin made his chest do something complicated and unwelcome. This was the man who had made the first half of his season feel like being fed feet first through a wood chipper. The man who had slammed him into boards, let him take hits, and screamed in his face in front of thousands of people. The man whose name alone, three months ago, had been enough to make Khyle's blood pressure spike into genuinely dangerous territory.
And right now, inexplicably, that grin was the only thing keeping his knees from giving out entirely.
Khyle felt the heat climb the back of his neck. He fought it back down, mostly successfully, and grinned in spite of himself. The taller player raised his glove, and Khyle reached up with his own and bumped their fists together, the thick padding making the contact soft and clumsy and oddly sincere.
"Thanks," he mouthed.
Gunner's grin shifted into something slightly different. Quieter. A smile that felt like it had been calibrated specifically for Khyle and wasn't being shared with the nineteen thousand other people in the building. Then the big man straightened, squared his shoulders, and faced forward as the first notes of the anthem began to swell out of the speakers.
The crowd drew a collective breath and quieted just enough.
Khyle let his eyes slide sideways one last time. Gunner was already facing forward, jaw set, shoulders back, every inch of him locked and ready. Like a weapon waiting to be pointed at something. Like he'd never lost a night's sleep over a single thing in his life.
Khyle looked away first.
He always did.
In just a few minutes, he would be playing in his first NHL playoff hockey game. He couldn't be happier, or more surprised. They were squaring off against their bitter rivals, the Hueco Mundo Hollows. It was going to be a battle royal, and only one team was going to come out on top.
It had been a long, hard, rocky road for the Seattle Soul Reapers, but for the first time in five years, they'd made it to the playoffs.
The real surprise though, was in the contrasting duo that played such a pivotal role in getting them there.
To say there had been friction between them would have been a world class understatement of epic proportions.