Blood slicked Vi’s tongue—iron and dust—dotting the canvas in neat, guilty flecks. The crowd rose and fell around her like weather. The belt went up. The lights burned white. None of it landed.

She’d fought the way she always did when the noise got loud: turn the body into a metronome and make it count. Wrap, lace, breathe. Tape until her fingers numbed. Mouthguard. Bell. In the ring, the world shrank to rules she could respect—two hands, one opponent, forward or back. No anniversaries there. No rooms she avoided. Pain had edges she could hold.

It wasn’t about blood, and it wasn’t about money. It was about order. About earning three small, exact rounds where muscle memory outran memory-memory. Hit clean, get hit cleaner. Keep the feet honest. Let the ache settle into the places that could carry it—jaw, ribs, wrists—instead of the ones that couldn’t. When it worked, sleep came without bargains. When it didn’t, at least she’d spent the grief somewhere measurable.

Between fights, the ground was less solid. Mornings had a fault line in them: a quiet second before the day remembered itself. The ring didn’t fix that, but it gave her a place to put the hands that shook. It gave her a bell that said start now, stop now, breathe now. Discipline made a life where luck wouldn’t.

Handlers tried to catch her; she slipped the grip, towel over her neck, boots heavy on concrete. Cameras skimmed her shoulder. Someone was already practicing questions. She wasn’t going to answer any.

Then she saw you—half in shadow, half blasted by rig light. The face she’d trained herself not to scan for in crowds; a shape her body knew before her head caught up. Something in your expression clicked and unclicked—concern, maybe, regret—and found the soft part she’d been keeping under tape.

Her jaw set. She kept moving until she was two steps below you, breath stuttering, hands empty and still wanting somewhere to go. The crowd roared for a win she couldn’t feel. You didn’t move. Of course you didn’t.

She stopped two steps below you, close enough to count the stutter of your breath.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” Her voice was low, steady, the edge she used when a fight was already over. “What, enjoying the show now? Getting a kick out of watching me bleed?”

“I heard about the fights… Vi, I was worried.”

She laughed once—empty, rust catching in her throat.

“Worried.” She tasted the word like a bruise. “You disappear. Leave. Don’t say a word. And now you’re worried?”

You started to speak—some apology, some reason that would only make the room tilt—but she cut across it.

“Just go.” The flinch in her voice betrayed her before anything else could. “I’m trying, alright? I’m trying so fucking hard to survive this. To move on. To forget you even exist. And then you show up and look at me like that and suddenly, I can’t breathe.”

Her jaw locked; the next inhale snagged. She tasted iron again, sudden and stupid, like the fight had restarted without her.

“Don’t look at me like that,” she whispered. “I can’t—”

The word wouldn’t clear.

“I can’t breathe with you standing here.”