Elsa did not scream, which surprised him.
She stood two steps inside the door with her shoes hanging off two fingers and her mouth still open around whatever the rest of that sentence had been, and she did not look at the towel at all.
She looked at his face.
Then she kept looking at it, long enough that Karl actually checked over his shoulder to see if something was standing behind him.
"What," she said.
"What?"
"Your face."
"What about it."
"It’s-" She made a small gesture with the shoes, up and down, taking all of him in.
"You were gone for a long while; i got worried and wanted to just check up on you."
"I had to shower, were we supposed to do something?" Karl asked, a bit confused.
"Kazu, people do not come out of showers like that."
’She’s not wrong,’ Karl thought.
Elsa opened her mouth again, closed it, went a shade of red that started at her collarbone, and backed out into the corridor with the door swinging shut in front of her.
"Get dressed," she said through the wood. "Please. I have a thing to tell you and I can’t do it while that’s happening."
...
He was pulling a shirt down over his head when the door opened again.
She came in properly this time and then stopped just inside it, one hand still on the handle, and stayed there.
The red had gone out of her face.
What replaced it was flatter and much worse, and Karl noticed her thumb working at the edge of the keycard, fast, the way it had worked at the side of a cup in a cafe with a green awning.
"Elsa."
"Right. So." She glanced back at the corridor. "Don’t be angry."
"Why would I be angry?"
Then he saw the shoes.
There were two more pairs standing in the doorway behind her, out in the hall carpet where the light didn’t reach properly, and neither of them belonged to anyone on his team.
Karl sat down on the end of the bed.
"How long have they been standing there?"
"Since the lift," Elsa said quietly.
The first one through was James.
He had a jacket on that wasn’t red for once and he came in the way he came onto a stage, taking up more of the room than he needed to, and behind him, unhurried, hands in his pockets, was a man Karl had watched hold a lane against Dane Ferrow that afternoon.
Bastien Orlov shut the door behind himself with two fingers.
"We’re here to talk," James said. "That’s it. Talk."
"What do you want from me?" Karl hardened his gaze as he spoke.
"Stright to the point, good, i like that."
"Please stop this." Elsa said. "Haven’t you done enough already?"
Karl looked at James for a moment and did not say anything, and the quiet went on long enough that James’s shoulders shifted under the jacket.
Then Bastien spoke, and everything in the room reorganised itself around him.
"You’re not what I expected," he said.
He was looking at Karl’s face. So was James, properly now, and Karl watched both of them arrive at the same place about two seconds apart.
He had spent six years being a name attached to nothing. Four hundred people had screamed that name in a building today and not one of them could have picked him out of a bus queue.
"Why the mask?" Bastien asked. There was no edge on it. He sounded like a man genuinely curious. "I’ve been trying to work that out since our game. You’re not hiding a scar. You’re not hiding a sponsor conflict. You’re twenty-one and you look like that and you play like that, and you’ve spent six years making sure nobody could sell a single poster with your face on it."
"I like being left alone."
"And somehow i find it very hard to believe."
"Wether you believe or not is of very little concern."
Bastien nodded slowly, and let it go, which Karl noticed, because James clearly wanted to pick it back up and wasn’t allowed to.
"Fine. Here’s mine, then." Bastien took his hands out of his pockets.
"Come play for us. Not the Riders. There’s an org putting a roster together for the national circuit and my name is on the contract already, and there’s a jungle slot with nobody in it because I told them to leave it empty until today. Salary. Facility. Coaching staff that has actually won something. You’d be diving six hours a day with people who make you better instead of people you carry."
"He’s on a team alread...." Elsa chimed in.
"I can see that." Bastien didn’t raise his voice at all. "TBD. That’s the name on the board. Four kids and a skull, and a jungler doing a five-man job on his own in a corridor because the other four can’t hold a line. You know it. Everyone in that building knew it by the second turtle. They’re a lovely group of people and they are the ceiling in that room."
Karl kept his eyes on him.
’He’s not even being cruel about it,’ he thought. ’And yet...’
He did not look at Elsa. He didn’t have to.
He could hear her not breathing from four feet away, and he had a fairly good idea what her face was doing, because she had said the same thing herself in a cafe about a different team, and she had been right that time too.
"Both of you could do something enormous," Bastien said. "I’d like to be there when it happens."
"No."
The room stopped.
"No?" James said.
"No," Karl said again, and stood up.
He crossed the two steps to where Elsa was standing between the two of them, took her by the wrist, and pulled her out of it and in against his side, and she came without any resistance at all and made a very small sound with her face somewhere around his shoulder.
"They’re my team," Karl said. "You want me, you come to me. Directly. You don’t threaten a girl in a lobby, and you don’t stand in a hotel corridor listing everything you think is wrong with the four people who won a bracket with me today. If that’s how you recruit, I’m not interested in what you’re building."
Bastien looked at him for a long moment. Something moved behind his face, and it was not offence.
"That’s fair," he said.
James was not fair.
James had gone a colour, and his hand had come halfway out of his pocket, and Karl watched him work through the whole thing in about three seconds.
The girl under Karl’s arm. The girl’s surname. The car outside the registration hall with a driver in it and a man who had read Karl top to bottom in under two seconds.
The hand went back in the pocket.
"Enjoy tonight," James said. "Both of you. That’s genuine. Because I’m going to make you regret every part of it, and you’ll have plenty of time to think about which part started it."
"Noted."
"See you in the bracket, rank one."
The door shut. Then the corridor was quiet, and then the lift was quiet, and then it was just the two of them standing in the middle of room 812 with Karl’s arm still where he’d put it.
...
Neither of them moved for a while.
"You can let go," Elsa said, into his shoulder.
"Right."
He let go. She did not step back.
’Why did I do that,’ Karl thought.
[Charlotte declines to comment.]
[Charlotte declines to comment loudly.]
’I hate people like him. That’s all it was.’
He genuinely believed that for about four more seconds.
"Kazu."
"Mm."
"Look at me."
He looked down. Her face was red from the jaw up and her eyes were wet and she was smiling in a way he had no idea what to do with, and then she put both hands flat on his chest and shoved.
The backs of his knees found the bed.
The room turned over.
He landed on his back with the mattress taking most of it and Elsa landing on top of him with one knee either side, hair falling down around both of them, and he lay there with absolutely no words available to him in any language.
"Elsa-"
"I’m using my wish," she said.
"Your wish."
"Let’s make babies."