Archie is forty feet away, his stick raised in the specific, punctuating gesture he deploys when delivering feedback to players whose drill execution has not met his standards. He has been scolding the group that failed to complete the final lap sequence in the designated time frame, his captain's voice carrying across the ice with the measured, authoritative cadence that makes my hindbrain produce responses I am too tired to suppress and too stubborn to acknowledge.
He frowns at Ronan's call. Skates toward us with the fluid, unhurried stride that covers ground faster than its pace suggests, the deceptive acceleration of a center whose body generates speed through efficiency rather than visible effort.
He is clearly ignoring the fact that I am among the players who did not finish the drill sequence.
He noticed. His eyes tracked my departure to the boards. His jaw tightened by a fraction. And he chose to address every other underperformer while exempting me from the criticism because his captain brain and his Alpha brain are apparently operating under different rulebooks regarding the Omega on his roster.
"What?" he asks, arriving at our position, his green eyes shifting from Ronan to me.
The shift produces a frown that deepens by three visible degrees.
"Sage. You're pale as fuck."
"See?" Ronan announces with the vindicated satisfaction of a man whose diagnostic assessment has been independently verified by a second observer. "And she mistook me for Rowan. She's really good at differentiating us. Better than even you."
Archie rolls his eyes.
"I don't want to hear that."
Rowan arrives from the opposite direction, his broader frame cutting a wake in the ice shavings as he stops beside his brother. His amber eyes find my face and the concern that settles into his features is immediate and unfiltered.
"Damn. Sage? You look like you got hit by a truck. You feeling good?"
No.
I feel like I got hit by a truck that reversed over me and then parked on my chest. My head is pounding. My joints are screaming. My skin alternates between feverish and frigid with the unpredictable rhythm of a thermostat being operated by a drunk electrician. And the sneezing has graduated from intermittent to percussive, each one arriving with enough force to make my abdominal muscles protest a contraction they did not volunteer for.
"I'm fine." The words exit carrying zero conviction and maximum stubbornness, the verbal equivalent of a woman attempting to lift a car off herself by insisting the car is not heavy. "Maybe I'll just go sit for a sec."
I attempt to move.
My legs receive the command, evaluate it against their current capacity, and return a failure notice that my body translates into a sudden, comprehensive loss of vertical stability. The ice rushes upward. The specific, tilting, ground-approaching trajectory of a person whose balance has surrendered without filing advance notice, the world rotating from upright tohorizontal in the fraction of a second that separates standing from falling.
Two arms catch me.
Simultaneously. From opposite sides, the twin intervention arriving with a synchronized precision that tells me Rowan and Ronan both read the collapse in my posture before it reached my knees and positioned themselves accordingly. Their dual grip finds my arms, my waist, arresting the descent before the ice can claim me, their combined strength converting my fall into a suspension that holds me upright through borrowed architecture.
Curses ignite around us.
"Fuck? Our girl is down?!"
The team's response is immediate, players abandoning their drill positions and converging on the boards with the frantic, protective urgency of men whose competitive instincts have been redirected from the play to the person. Their scents flood the immediate area, fifteen Alpha pheromone profiles spiking with the specific, territorial, pack-adjacent protectiveness that male Alphas produce when a female in their orbit displays vulnerability.
I try to pull out of it.
Try to reassert the independence that has governed every crisis of my life, the specific, practiced, I-do-not-need-help reflex that my mother's indifference and my father's passivity and fifteen years of institutional rejection have hardened into a load-bearing wall of my personality.
The wall collapses.
My body surrenders the pretense with a completeness that my pride cannot override. One moment I am attempting to stand, the next I am weightless, lifted by hands that are not asking permission because the situation has progressed past the point where permission is relevant. The sensations arrive inoverlapping waves that my brain cannot separate into coherent streams: hot, then cold, then floating, then the overwhelming volume of voices and scents and the ambient noise of an arena full of people whose attention is focused on the Omega who just collapsed at the boards.
The sensations dance.
Hot. Cold. Floating. Noise. The cycle repeating with a frequency that makes each iteration feel both instantaneous and eternal, my consciousness unable to anchor itself to any single input because every input is arriving at the same priority level and my processing capacity has been reduced to a bandwidth that cannot accommodate the traffic.
This is not a cold.
This is not allergies.
