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It’s the third round, and White Eye has stopped pretending he’s sipping. Across from him, Coach Rango from the O’rangers is doing a dramatic retelling of a pile-up at the 2016 Elimination Race, complete with sound effects and re-enactment using the salt and pepper shakers. Coach Celeste from Team Galactic is giggling into her sleeve. Coach Blizzard from the Snowballs looks like he’s already halfway home in his mind.
White Eye swirls his drink and says, mostly to the table, “What am I supposed to do with them?”
Them. His team. The newest addition to the league.
“Now that’s the question,” Celeste says, eyes sharp with alcohol and interest.
“They’re fast,” White Eye says. “I mean—they’re so fast. They move like wind over ice. No one sees them coming. It’s beautiful. It’s chaos. It’s—” He makes a helpless little gesture with his glass. “But you so much as look at them wrong and two of them are suddenly passive-aggressively doing synchronized floor stretches instead of drills.”
Blizzard snorts. “Welcome to coaching.”
White Eye shakes his head. “It’s not the same. They’re ex-models. All of them. Glamour kids. Precision-trained to walk a runway in six-inch coils of plastic and make it fashion. But no one ever taught them how to brake. Or fall. Or even how to breathe like athletes. They just go until something tears.”
There’s a small pause.
“And gods help me,” he adds, voice lowering, “if I mention weight ratios. Ever. Even once.”
Celeste winces in solidarity. “You’ve got a team of body dysmorphic speed demons.”
“Yes,” White Eye says. “And they're so light. Lighter than anyone else on the circuit. That’s why they’re so fast. It’s physics. But it also means when they crash—” He exhales. “They crack.”
Rango, suddenly serious, asks, “How’s Blue-Eye’s shoulder doing?”
White Eye tilts his head. “Ask me after his next qualifying run. And don’t you dare tell him I said that.”
He pauses, then adds, a little softer, “He keeps brushing it off. Says it’s fine, says he’s fine. But he winces when he thinks no one’s looking. He hates being seen as fragile, feels he should shoulder more of the burden than Yellow and Red because he’s sturdier, better built for it. It makes him push too hard. Makes him brilliant, too, but—” He shakes his head, jaw tight. “I just hope he makes it through this season in one piece.”
Blizzard raises a brow. “And Red-Eye? How is he?”
There’s a pause long enough to feel like someone’s checking the exits.
Celeste takes a slow sip. “You mean since he did the apex jump off the curved panel in qualifiers?”
Rango groans. “I still don’t know how he stuck the landing.”
“He shouldn’t have,” Blizzard says evenly.
White Eye leans forward, rubbing his temple. “We know.”
There’s a short silence. Then Blizzard adds, almost casually, “I asked Snowy to meet with him. Thought Red might listen to someone who’s been in the circuit longer.”
It had been a good idea on the surface. Snowy was showy, yes, but steady. Safe.
“How’d that go?” Celeste asks.
White Eye answers, voice dry. “Well. Someone had taped one of Red’s underwear ads all down the corridor leading to the meeting room.”
Rango exhales like a deflating balloon. “Of course they had.”
“Snowy didn’t blink,” Blizzard says. “Just stripped to his briefs before Red walked in. Said, ‘It’s only fair you see me in mine since I’ve seen you in yours.’”
There’s a startled pause, then Celeste cackles into her drink.
White Eye smiles faintly. “Red grinned. Properly, too. Which is rare. Then he sat down and asked how to take a corner at seventy percent tilt.”
“They were spotted two hours later trying to recreate the same damn manoeuvre I was hoping Snowy would talk him out of,” Blizzard adds. “In the rain.”
“Terrifying,” Rango mutters. “Don’t let any of them near my team. It’s bad enough Yellow Eye once convinced my entire backline that glitter improves drag.”
“Only because he believes it,” Celeste says.
White Eye doesn’t laugh. He looks down at his glass, thumb circling the rim. “Red doesn’t open up easily. Not unless it’s about angles or balance or body control. He’s too used to being shaped by what people want to see.” A pause. “He gets quiet when someone sees him for real.”
Another silence. Then Rango nudges the table with his knee. “And?”
White Eye exhales through his nose. “And I’m glad it was Snowy.”
The table goes still for a beat too long.
They’re all aware of some of the alternatives.
Celeste breaks the silence with a swig. “Speaking of Yellow Eye…”
“I can neither confirm nor deny,” White Eye says immediately.
Rango snorts. “You didn’t even let Celeste finish.”
“Doesn’t matter. Blanket statement. I am under strict legal and emotional advisement not to answer questions about Yellow Eye.”
Blizzard leans in. “So it’s true he—?”
“Neither confirm nor deny.”
Celeste grins. “Okay, but what about the time he—?”
“Neither confirm—”
“—was seen doing karaoke and smoking and making out with someone in a cardboard fruit costume outside the qualifiers hotel?”
“—nor d—wait, what?!”
Rango nearly falls off his stool laughing.
White Eye groans into his hands. “Okay. Look. The kid—he’s trying all the vices at once. Smoking, drinking, partying, kissing girls, kissing boys, kissing fruit. I don’t know.”
Celeste wheezes.
White Eye keeps going, long-suffering. “He was the good boy next door. Mr. Lollipop Smile. Half his contracts said he couldn’t be seen holding a cola in public. Now he’s out here trying to speedrun puberty and rebellion in the same week.”
There’s a pause.
“I’m happy for him,” he says, more softly. “Everyone deserves a few vices. Just… maybe not all at once. And preferably not on camera.”
Blizzard nods. “He’s got spirit.”
“He’s got a death wish,” White Eye mutters.
“Or a marketing strategy,” Celeste offers.
“Same thing,” Rango says.
There’s a brief lull, and then:
“Let’s talk about Green. How’s your resident elder-infant doing?”
White Eye blinks. “He’s twenty.”
“Exactly,” Celeste says. “A child.”
“He’s the oldest in the team.”
“In modeling years,” Blizzard says sagely, “he’s eighty-five.”
“Eighty-seven if you did underwater spring catalogues,” Rango adds.
White Eye rubs his temples. “He’s the calm one. The reasonable one. The one who’s supposed to balance the team. Which he does, except when he decides to have a quarter-life crisis on a Tuesday morning and questions the entire sport’s moral foundation during warm-ups.”
“Philosophical,” Blizzard says.
“Existential,” White Eye replies. “One time he said, ‘Isn’t this all just a metaphor for capitalism?’ and then spent forty-five minutes arranging the team water bottles into a Marxist diorama.”
They let that sit for a moment. A few nod, a few blink, nobody questions it.
Then Celeste tries to lighten the mood. “Well, at least you’re not chasing records—oh wait.” She pulls out her phone. “Didn’t the Cat Eyes just break the sprint start and the lap time at qualifiers last week?”
White Eye gives her a dry look. “I’m aware.”
“And they did it wearing eyeliner and three matching bruises.”
Rango cackles. “Style and substance. I repeat: terrifying.”
“They’re not trying to be terrifying,” White Eye says. “That’s the worst part. They think they’re just… showing up. Being marketable. They don’t know they’re blowing holes through five years of performance data.”
“Sounds like you’ve got a curse and a miracle wrapped in silk,” Blizzard says.
White Eye lifts his glass. “They’re chaos gremlins in thousand-dollar crop tops. They’re brilliant. They’re unpredictable. I care about them more than I should. And I am so tired.”
“To the Crazy Cat’s Eyes,” Celeste says, raising her own drink with a grin. “May they never develop impulse control.”
“To their coach,” adds Rango. “May he survive.”
They all laugh, but it softens at the edges. Blizzard nods toward White Eye. “You’re doing good work. We all know what you inherited.”
White Eye doesn’t smile, but he drinks to that.
Everyone knows they started as a team of five, and White Eye can tell that his fellow coaches see the ghost of Black Eye in Blue’s anger and Green’s doubt, in Yellow’s rebellion and the way Red wears his uniform like a shield, barely a sliver of skin exposed.
When they leave the bar later, Celeste gently elbows him. “You’ve got something real there. Raw and strange and sharp. They’ll need a captain, eventually. You’ll know when it’s time.”
White Eye watches the lights flicker on the sidewalk. “Maybe.”
She tilts her head. “What’ll it take?”
He thinks of Red-Eye and the way he moves without asking, the way the others have started to follow anyway.
No one’s said it. But they’re watching.
Waiting.
He shrugs, hands in his pockets. “A spark, I guess.”
She eyes him. “Or a match?”
Time, he thinks. They all need more time.
He doesn’t answer. But far off in the dark, something flickers.