Although the words are the same as they were yesterday. They feel different now.
I kick off the sheet and sit up. My muscles protest slightly—I didn’t realize how much I’d walked yesterday—but it’s a grounded ache, not the wired, crawling exhaustion of panic. My brain feels… ordered. Not quiet. It’s never quiet. Just less like a swarm of bees and more like a well-behaved classroom.
I tell myself I’m awake because my circadian rhythm is messed up, because my brain is still metabolizing stress, because I should probably work on cross-referencing my documentation before the day gets away from me.
My thoughts bump up against the actual truth like a Roomba hitting a wall.
I’m awake because I don’t want to miss him.
Dawn training, he said. Before the gates open.
Not tourist Flavius. Not Jester Flavius. Not the carefully modulated version who sits across from me at conference tables and tells me his healing secrets so I can document them for his later use. Nor the huge, muscled gladiator who lets me help him struggle through his English primers.
This morning I will watch the Flavius who survived the arena.
My stomach does a strange swoop that feels like the drop on a roller coaster. I’ve watched footage of modern fighters before—MMA, boxing, even documentary reenactments of gladiators. This is not that.
Today, there are eight men in the training yard. Men who were actually shaped to die for spectacle, trying to make sense of that in a world where people buy tickets to watch a safe version.
I swing my legs over the side of the bed and stand. The floor is warm under my bare feet. Outside, a bird calls once, twice, then falls silent. The sanctuary is in that transitional state between night and morning—no tourists yet, no staff voices, just a soft background of animal sounds and the distant hum of the highway.
I dress more carefully than the situation warrants. Jeans. Sports bra. T-shirt. Thin hoodie I can peel off when the sun gets brutal. I twist my hair into a low knot, then undo it and redo it twice because the part isn’t straight and the lopsided pull of it will distract me. Boots, not sneakers—the sand around the training yard gets hot later, and I don’t want it sneaking in through mesh.
There’s a little voice in the back of my mind that sounds suspiciously like my dissertation chair.
Are you sure this is a good use of your time, Sophia?
I hear another voice over it, the echo of yesterday in the garden.
Displeasure is not ruin. Punishment is not destiny.
I inhale through my nose, slow and even. Last year, I would have stayed in the cabin. Pulled up another article. Reworked another section of my research, trying to anticipate every criticism before it was voiced. Molded myself a little smaller, a little neater, a little safer.
Today, my hand settles on the doorknob instead.
The framework matters, yes. The details of these men’s memories matter. Seeing real gladiators in action matters. But that’s not the whole of it.
What I want is to understand him.
All of him. The parts he thinks are dangerous. The parts I’ve only seen in fragments and shadows.
The realization cuts cleanly through my rationalizations, leaving honesty in its wake.
I care about the research. I care about the complaint. I care about what this could mean for every student who comes after me.
But the thought of watching him move in his own world—unmasked, unperformed—does something to my chest I don’t have a clinical term for.
I open the door and step out into the blue-gray light. Dawn in late July. The air is warm and damp, clinging faintly to my skin. By mid-morning it’ll be sweltering, but right now the heat is still gathering itself, humid and patient.
The air is soft and damp, clinging faintly to my skin. The sky is the color of a low-resolution photo—details still blurred, edges not yet defined. A thin line of brightness is just beginning to show along the horizon beyond the tree line.
The path to the training ground is familiar; I’ve walked it dozens of times in full daylight, with tourists and staff filling the space. This is the first time I’ve done it like this. Alone. Early. Intentionally.
Gravel crunches under my boots in a regular pattern. Thirty steps between my cabin and the turn by the main building; forty between the corner and the first glimpse of the arena’s safety rails. My brain automatically counts and stores the sequence, filing it with the thousands of other tiny maps I carry.
I pass the main hall—dark, except for a low light over the back door. No breakfast smells yet. No clatter of dishes. Somewhere a horse stomps and snorts, the ring of hoof against stall floor sharp in the quiet.
My inbox tugs at the edge of my awareness like a gnat. No new emails. No updates. Blackwell and the university exist in aseparate, digital world—lines of text, Zoom windows, signatures at the bottom of PDFs.
