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White Eye hadn’t meant to collect a team. He’d meant to coach one.
There was, as far as he could tell, a difference.
A team showed up to training on time, listened to advice, and went back to their own lives afterward. A collection, on the other hand, appeared wherever you happened to be, as though summoned by a rule you hadn’t agreed to.
It started as a pattern he pretended not to notice.
Red Eye slipping into step beside him after meetings, hands in his pockets, whistling off-key in a way that somehow synced with White Eye’s walking pace.
Blue Eye drifting to his side, greeting every passing marble like they were a long-lost cousin, matching White Eye’s stride the moment the conversation ended.
Yellow Eye hovering just behind, wanting everyone to know he was too cool to walk beside his coach, of all people.
Green Eye, quiet and steady, taking everything in with the calm, fixed attention of someone who had once watched the world fall apart and was now checking it for cracks.
They began to appear where he was before he was sure he’d decided to be there.
White Eye would duck into an empty corner of the Athlete Village to review notes in peace and look up ten minutes later to find Red Eye balancing on the arm of a sofa, Blue Eye half-asleep in a chair, Yellow Eye pretending to scroll his messages instead of staring at the ceiling, and Green Eye leaning against the wall like the room’s structural integrity depended on him.
He never said, “You know this is a 9-5 job, right?”
He tried saying, “Don’t you have somewhere else to be?”
Red Eye: “Nope.”
Blue Eye: “Not really.”
Yellow Eye: “Please, you’d miss my company.”
Green Eye: after a thoughtful pause: “…Here is fine.”
White Eye looked at them, four absurdly talented catastrophes orbiting his gravity, and recognised the moment a porch officially becomes a home for strays.
He sighed, long and theatrical.
“Fine,” he said. “Stay.”
They did.
---
The thing about Red Eye was that the universe had given him speed, charisma, and just enough self-awareness to be dangerous with both.
He understood he was being watched.
He liked being watched.
He would deny this, of course, with a smile that absolutely proved the opposite.
The Snowballs were running starts, and the air around their lane had that glittering chill Snowy carried with him when he was focused. It would have been very easy for Red Eye to mind his own business on his own side of the stadium.
Naturally, he didn’t.
He sauntered over to the shared railing like the world’s most casual hazard sign, propped an elbow on the metal, and waited until Snowy glanced up.
Then he unfurled.
The stretch went on long enough to be classified as a short performance piece. Shoulders rolled back, chest opening, spine bending in a smooth, unhurried arc that could have been set to music. The smirk didn’t arrive until the end, and that was almost worse—that soft, satisfied curve that said, oh, I didn’t see you there; how embarrassing for you.
Snowy’s water bottle clattered to the floor.
Across the way, White Eye pretended to be blind and also deaf.
Yellow Eye slapped a hand over his face. “Ban him. Someone ban him from stretching in public.”
Red Eye dropped his arms, glanced lazily toward the Snowballs’ lane, and gave Snowy a tiny nod that was barely there, just enough to register as acknowledgment rather than mercy.
It was appalling.
It was effective.
It was extremely Red Eye.
---
Blue Eye didn’t so much walk into the sunbeam as he did recognise it as a long-lost relative.
The Athlete Village corridor outside the Raspberry Racers’ locker room was, on most days, aggressively beige. But when the light hit the high windows at the right angle, one perfect rectangle of warmth slid onto the carpet, like the building had suddenly decided to be kind.
Blue Eye stopped mid-thought, turned his head, and beelined.
He lowered himself into the patch of sunlight with slow, deliberate satisfaction, stretching out until he had maximised surface area like a very content solar panel. His eyes half-lidded. A soft sound escaped him that was too low to be a laugh, too steady to be a sigh.
Ruzzy arrived to find a very relaxed Blue Eye lying across their doorway as though he’d fallen from an advert for “relaxation” and missed the set.
“You’re blocking the entrance,” Ruzzy said.
“Am I?” Blue Eye asked, without moving a millimetre.
“Yes.”
Blue Eye considered this valuable new information. “You can go around.”
“There is a wall around.”
“Oh,” Blue Eye said. “Then no. You can’t.”
From further down the hall, Yellow Eye stage-whispered, “He’s gone full lizard. This is it. We’ve lost him to the sun.”
White Eye appeared, took in the scene, and briefly closed his eyes.
“Blue Eye.”
“Yes, Coach?”
“You can’t lie in front of another team’s door.”
Blue Eye thought about this, then rolled sideways three inches—just enough to technically clear the entrance, without sacrificing even a scrap of sunbeam.
“There,” he said. “Diplomacy.”
White Eye decided that was probably as good as he was going to get.
---
Yellow Eye considered himself a very dignified marble.
Reality disagreed.
The press tent was a chaos of cables, lights, and people who treated microphones as an excuse to behave badly. Yellow Eye had arranged himself into a respectable posture, angled so the camera caught his good side—he would deny having one, as that implied the existence of a bad side, but he’d absolutely found it—and was halfway through a sentence about “bouncing back stronger” when a photographer tested a flash a little too close.
The reaction bypassed language, decorum, and conscious choice.
Yellow Eye hissed.
It wasn’t a polite hiss, either. It was a full-body, spine-jolting, startled-cat noise that seemed to echo off the metal poles of the tent and lodge itself permanently in everyone’s memory.
Conversation stopped. Cameras froze. Somewhere, a Wisp dropped their coffee.
Blue Eye, who had heard many sounds from his teammate over the years, stared at him like he’d just grown wings.
Yellow Eye’s eyes went very wide. Colour rushed up his neck like it was fleeing the scene of the crime.
“I didn’t— that wasn’t—” He cleared his throat, trying for dignity and landing somewhere closer to strangled. “The tent hissed. That was… an environmental noise. Could’ve been the lights. Or the wires. Definitely not me.”
“Sure,” Red Eye said, off to the side, absolutely no help whatsoever. “Could’ve been the ghost of sportsmanship.”
White Eye wrote something on his clipboard that might, if one looked closely, have been the words hissy fit underlined twice.
---
Green Eye had the air of a marble who noticed everything and commented on almost nothing, which made it especially alarming when he walked up to Minty Fresh in the middle of the lobby and said, with complete seriousness:
“This is for you.”
It was a pinecone.
A very nice pinecone. Symmetrical, glossy, the sort of pinecone that would absolutely be the protagonist if pinecones had main characters.
Minty took it with both hands, because something about Green Eye’s face suggested this was not a joke.
“Thank… you?” they said.
Green Eye nodded once, satisfied, and wandered off.
Later, White Eye passed the Minties’ common room and saw the pinecone sitting in a place of honour on the shelf, right between a second-place trophy and a framed team photo. It had been dusted. There was, unless he imagined it, a tiny paper star balanced on top.
He hid a smile.
Green Eye, catching his eye from across the hall, pretended to be deeply fascinated by the vending machine.
---
The panic didn’t look like panic, at first glance.
It looked like Red Eye sitting on an upturned mop bucket in a quiet equipment room, elbows on his knees, studying the floor with the intense concentration of someone doing complex math in their head. His posture was fine. His expression was fine. His breathing, however, had gone rogue.
White Eye only found him because a Hazers rookie came up in that guilty, hesitant way that meant they were about to tell on someone by accident.
“I think one of yours is… maybe… rebooting?” they said. “In there.” They pointed to the door like it might bite.
Inside, the air felt thinner.
Red Eye didn’t look up when the door clicked shut.
“I’m good,” he said immediately, the words clipped and polished by years of overuse. “Just resetting. Gotta, you know, re-centre. Athletes do that.”
White Eye sat down beside him without asking, because asking would have given Red Eye the option to say no, and they both knew he would take it.
They sat in parallel lines: two sets of elbows on two sets of knees, two sets of shoulders braced as if holding up slightly different universes.
“You can reset,” White Eye said after a moment. “You just don’t have to do it in a storage closet by yourself.”
Red Eye let out a sound that began as a laugh and cracked on the way out, trailing into something closer to a gasp.
“Bad for the brand,” he muttered, staring at his hands. “Hero marble has pre-race meltdown in front of coach. Very off-message.”
“And yet,” White Eye said dryly, “here we are. World continues to spin.”
They stayed like that until the announcement came over the speakers, tinny and too bright, calling the teams to staging. Red Eye’s breathing had found a rhythm again by then, still a little quick but no longer fraying at the edges.
He pushed himself up, rolled his shoulders back into their usual line, and glanced sideways, something almost like gratitude flickering past the bravado.
“Walk me out?” he asked, somehow making it sound casual.
White Eye stood. “You know I will.”
From the arena, when Red Eye streaked through the course like he’d never known fear in his life, no one watching would have guessed he’d been folded around his own heartbeat fifteen minutes earlier.
That was fine.
Because White Eye knew, and that was enough.
---
The first time Blue Eye’s temper showed itself away from the sports track, it arrived so quietly that everyone felt it before they understood it.
The comment was nothing new; they’d all heard variations on it before. A smug voice near the drinks table, a shrug in the tone: “Crazy Cat’s Eyes, huh? Always choke when it matters.”
Usually, Blue Eye would have laughed it off, turned it into a bit, deflected with something charming enough to leave the offender unsure whether they’d just been scolded or complimented.
This time, he turned.
The smile stayed on his face, but it sharpened at the edges. His gaze locked on the speaker with an intensity that felt a few degrees too hot.
“Come again?” he asked, pleasantly.
The other marble faltered. “I just meant—uh—pressure, you know, it’s tough—”
“Right,” Blue Eye said. “Because you’ve got so much experience with that. Must be exhausting. All those high-pressure runs you’ve done. On what team is it you race for again?”
The silence that followed was not friendly.
The marble muttered something that might have been an apology and retreated, knocked sideways by the force of Blue Eye’s attention.
When they were gone, the anger left him all at once, like a tide pulling back too fast. Blue Eye exhaled hard, scrubbing his hands over his face as if wiping away the leftover heat.
“Wow,” he said, half to himself. “That was… aggressive.”
“Correct,” White Eye said from beside him, where he’d appeared without fanfare. “Also overdue.”
Blue Eye glanced at him, a little startled, a little sheepish. “Didn’t know I had that in me.”
Green Eye bumped his shoulder, subtle, steady. “We did.”
It was hard to argue when someone said it like a fact instead of a compliment.
---
The storm rolled in the way disasters in Yellow Eye’s life usually did: loudly, inconveniently, and with no respect for snack schedules.
The first crack of thunder rattled the tent poles. The second did something to Yellow Eye’s nervous system that resembled unplugging a lamp from the wall. By the third, he was gone.
White Eye didn’t panic. He had met Yellow Eye. He knew the places he went when the sky got too loud.
He lifted the edge of the long interview table’s cloth and found exactly what he expected: one (1) Yellow Eye, folded into a surprisingly compact shape among the tangle of wires and spare microphones, trying to appear as though this had been a choice.
“Hey, Coach,” Yellow Eye said, smiling in the extremely unconvincing way of someone who has just been caught hiding in a cupboard. “I’m, uh, checking the acoustic properties down here. Great echo under this table. Very science fair. I like it.”
Thunder cracked again. Yellow Eye flinched so hard he bumped his head. The table trembled in sympathy.
White Eye slid under the cloth with a sort of resigned grace, sat down beside him, and handed him a folded blanket he had not been carrying a minute ago. This was one of the mysteries of White Eye: he could produce comfort out of nowhere like a magician who only did practical tricks.
They listened to the storm growl around the tent. Yellow’s breathing gradually shifted from “cornered animal” to “chronically embarrassed but coping.”
“Sorry,” he said eventually, voice small. “I know it’s stupid.”
“It’s not,” White Eye replied. “It’s a brain being rude to its body. Happens all the time.”
Yellow Eye snorted. Outside, someone announced that the event would be delayed. Under the table, two marbles stayed put, invisible and, for the moment, safe.
---
Some marbles slept. Some marbles didn’t. Green Eye fell into the third category: he slept, but not always at approved hours.
At three in the morning, the Athlete Village corridors were dim and too long, designed by someone who thought soft lighting could fix existential dread. The Midnight Wisps were heading back from a late-night strategy meeting when a blur of green shot past them like a thought escaping a crowded mind.
Green Eye’s feet were silent on the carpet, his expression focused in that way that meant the world had narrowed to the length of the hallway and the sound of his own breathing. He vaulted a laundry bag, rebounded off the wall with a controlled turn, and vanished around the corner without acknowledging a single witness.
Eve stared after him. “Do—do you think he needs help?”
Wispy shook their head slowly. “This feels like one of those ‘not for us to intervene’ things.”
The next morning at breakfast, White Eye slid a mug toward Green Eye. “Insomnia again?”
Green Eye shrugged, adding an unreasonable amount of sugar. “Brain wouldn’t shut up. Running helps.”
White Eye hummed, thoughtful. “Next time, knock on my door.”
Green Eye quirked an eyebrow. “You’ll come run with me?”
“No,” White Eye said quickly, horrified at the mere thought. “But I’ll sit in the hallway so it feels less lonely when you come back.”
Green Eye looked down into his over-sweet coffee, mouth twitching once.
“Deal,” he said.
---
The loss was the kind that left no clear villain: no catastrophic mistake, no dramatic crash, just a slow, grinding slide from “maybe” to “not this time.”
The Athlete Village common room felt like a waiting room for bad news: low lights, stale air, a tv replaying highlights no one wanted to see.
White Eye sat on the couch with his clipboard and a book he wasn’t actually reading. The day had left a ringing behind his eyes.
Red Eye arrived first, because of course he did. He didn’t ask; he simply dropped across White’s lap in a full-body flop, one arm flung over his face like a tragic aristocrat fainting on a chaise longue.
“Dead,” Red Eye announced. “Tell my fans I died beautifully.”
“You placed fourth,” White Eye said. “You’re very much alive.”
“Tragic,” Red Eye added, not moving.
Blue Eye wandered in next, looking wrung-out but still faintly luminous. He took one look at the arrangement, then folded himself into the space at White Eye’s right side, shoulder pressing into his arm, legs tucking up under him.
Yellow Eye hovered in the doorway, hands in his pockets, clearly torn between wanting contact and wanting to pretend he didn’t. White Eye caught his eye, lifted his feet without a word, and Yellow Eye took the hint, curling up at the other end of the couch, back against White Eye’s calves.
Green Eye, when he appeared, took in the whole scene with one slow sweep of his gaze. Then he lowered himself onto the floor in front of the couch, leaning back until the back of his head rested lightly against White Eye’s knee, like a cat choosing a lap without actually committing to it.
White Eye looked down at himself: one lap, two shoulders, one set of shins, currently in use as furniture.
He sighed, because that was the role he’d been assigned. “You realise I’m not a multi-level scratching post.”
Red Eye cracked one eye open. “You are now.”
Blue Eye’s laugh rumbled against his side. Yellow Eye made a sleepy noise that might have been agreement. Green Eye said nothing, but reached up to rest his hand, just for a second, over White’s ankle in a quiet, solid thank you.
White Eye opened his mouth to protest further and found that he didn’t particularly want to.
He let the protest dissolve, let his hand settle on Red Eye’s shoulder, fingers idly smoothing out a wrinkle in Yellow Eye’s sleeve with his socked foot, thumb drifting unconsciously through a slow arc in Green Eye’s hair.
The tv played on. Outside, the world moved toward the next event, the next race, the next round of people expecting things from his ridiculous, brilliant strays.
For the moment, though, they were all here, heavy and warm and tangled, deciding without asking that White Eye was the safest place to collapse.
He closed his eyes.
“Fine,” he said quietly, to the ceiling, to fate, to the universe that kept handing him marbles shaped like trouble and calling it a job. “Stay.”
They did.