POV: Gunner
Some sort of spiritual assessment. That's what it felt like.
Like whatever force ran the universe had looked at Gunner Jäger, taken stock of his general track record, and decided that before it let him anywhere near the afterlife it was going to put him through one final test to see if he had the basic moral and psychological infrastructure to handle eternity without causing a incident.
And the test was Santos Khyle.
Every conversation they had detonated. Every interaction on the ice turned into a war of wills that neither of them could walk away from without having left something burning. Gunner had stopped looking for resolution weeks ago. There was no resolution to be found. You couldn't resolve something that kept generating new fuel every time you got within twenty feet of it. All you could do was manage the damage and try not to let it take out anything structural.
The problem was that Khyle was genuinely, specifically, infuriatingly difficult to ignore.
Not just his game, though that was its own particular category of aggravation. It was everything else too. The way he carried himself on the ice with the complete confidence of someone who had never once questioned whether he belonged there. The way those brown eyes said things without saying them, defiance and judgment and something else underneath that Gunner couldn't name and had stopped trying to. The way he stood his ground in a corridor against a man who outweighed him by sixty pounds without flinching, chin up and eyes level, like backing down had genuinely not occurred to him as an option.
Gunner had been at odds with plenty of people in his career. He was, by his own admission and the admission of several league officials, not an easy man to share ice with. But this was different. This had a quality to it that he didn't have language for yet, something that sat in his gut and wouldn't settle, that flared up hot whenever Khyle did something particularly brilliant and flared up hotter whenever he did something that made Gunner want to grab him by the collar and shake him until he understood what he was doing wrong.
He pulled on his jersey and risked a sideways glance down the locker room to where Khyle was going through his pregame routine, and caught himself wondering, not for the first time, whether he was more interested in the game ahead or the probability of having a run-in with Khyle before it was over.
He looked away before the question could answer itself.
He'd seen Khyle before they'd officially met. During his recovery, when the ankle was still too unstable for practice and his entire existence had been reduced to physiotherapy and frustrated pacing, he'd come to the arena a few times to watch the team. Sat in the empty stands and assessed. That was all he'd told himself it was. Assessment. Professional interest in his teammates and the new player everyone was so excited about.
The moment he'd laid eyes on him, something had turned over in his stomach. Fast and involuntary, like missing a step in the dark.
He'd filed it under instinct. Under wariness. Under the general category of people who made his hackles rise for reasons that would become clear later. He was good at reading people, always had been. And something about Santos Khyle set off every radar he had.
He knew why now. Or he knew part of it. Santos had a natural gift for getting under Gunner's skin in ways that bypassed his defenses entirely, like the kid had been specifically designed to operate in the one frequency Gunner couldn't tune out. Just the sight of that orange hair, that deliberately chaotic mess that somehow worked on him when it had no business working on anyone, was enough to knock Gunner's composure down several pegs. He didn't even have to try. He had the skill and the body and the instincts and the easy confidence of someone the universe had decided to be generous with, and he walked around wearing all of it like it cost him nothing.
Gunner took the time to organize himself before he left the house. He always had. His hair alone required twenty minutes and a specific product lineup that he was not going to apologize for. And this kid looked like he'd rolled out of bed and put his hand in a socket and somehow emerged looking like that.
It was obnoxious. It was genuinely obnoxious.
And now, because the universe had a sense of humor that Gunner was growing to resent, he was out there on the ice every game running interference so that Santos could keep doing it. Protecting the very person who had decided on sight that Gunner wasn't worth his respect.
A babysitter. The Sexta, reduced to a babysitter.
He could hear the conversation in his head with perfect clarity.
Get out there and make sure Santos doesn't get hurt. Yes, coach. Trail around after him instead of playing your game. Sure, coach. And while you're at it, Gunner, keep your stats in the gutter and your name off the scoresheet so the kid can shine without you cluttering up the frame. Absolutely, coach. Anything else?
He stuffed the internal monologue back down where it belonged and reached for his gloves.
The thing was, he understood, in a clear-eyed and deeply irritating way, exactly why the coach had made the call. Khyle was drawing hits. Had been for weeks, ever since the rest of the league caught on to what he could do and decided that the most efficient solution was to dismantle him before he could do it. The kid had a price on his head, and without someone out there whose presence alone discouraged the worst of it, he was going to spend half his ice time on the boards instead of in scoring position.
Gunner was that presence. He knew it. The coach knew it. Even Khyle, who resented every aspect of the arrangement, knew it somewhere underneath the pride.
It didn't make it less insulting.
He'd worked too hard for too long, had come back from an injury that should have ended his season, had rebuilt himself game by game into something more than just an enforcer, to be parked on the ice as a human shield for a twenty-one year old who didn't even say thank you.
Hockey had been his salvation since he was old enough to hold a stick. His parents had figured out early that he was a kid who needed a place to put things, and the ice had been that place. They'd scraped money together for equipment, for ice time, for every step of it, because the alternative was watching their son burn through his own life from the inside out.
He'd been a happy kid, mostly. Small for his age, which had mattered more than it should have in the particular ecosystem of elementary school, and his hair had not made anything easier. Blue hair on a small kid in a rough neighborhood was a reliable invitation to trouble, and trouble had found him regularly and thoroughly until the day he decided to stop letting it.
He remembered the specific day it changed. He'd been ten. Three older boys had him in the alley behind the arena after practice, the usual routine, take the gear bag, shove him around, see how long before he cried. Except that day something had snapped loose in him, some last thread of the kid who thought if he just waited long enough people would decide to be decent. He'd stopped covering his face. Started swinging instead. He didn't win that fight. Not even close. He'd gone home with a split lip and two black eyes and his mother had made a sound that he still didn't like to think about.
But the three of them had looked at him differently after that.
And that was the only thing that mattered.
By the time he was twelve, the bigger kids avoided him. By the time he was fifteen, most adults did too. He'd channeled everything into hockey and his body and the slow deliberate process of making himself into someone that the world would think twice about before it tried anything. It had worked. It kept working. And he wasn't going to apologize for the methods.
He had a job to do for this team. He knew what it was and he was good at it. The fans who packed the arena to capacity on game nights weren't all there for the scoring, and Gunner knew that too. Some of them came for exactly what he provided, the bone-breaking hits, the fights that broke out when teams pushed each other past the limit, the specific theater of two men deciding with their bodies what words couldn't settle. He gave them that. He'd always given them that.
He wanted to give them more.
That was the part that Santos couldn't see, or wouldn't. The part that the coach was actively suppressing by turning him into a glorified escort service. Gunner was building toward something. Had been for two seasons now. The complete package, not just the enforcer, not just the hired fist, but a player who could do everything the game asked and do it on his own terms.
He just needed the room to do it.
And right now, every inch of room he had was being occupied by one orange-haired, ungrateful, infuriating, magnificent pain in his ass.
He pulled his jersey over his head and headed for the ice.