I see flashes of things he’s told me in session—disconnected images that suddenly have context.
The way he learned to read crowds and opponents at the same time, assessing where to play up drama and where to keep his head attached to his shoulders. The way he used jokes as feints. The way entertainment bought him microseconds of hesitation in his enemies.
None of that is visible right now. There is no Jester here. Just a man whose body has been taught, over and over, that failure means death.
Cassius drives in hard on his shield side. Flavius drops low, pivoting under the swing instead of meeting it. His body moves like water—fluid, inevitable. They break apart, sand spraying around their boots.
A flicker of something hot and ugly edges into the way Cassius moves—old rage, old fear, old muscle memory. I’ve seen it before in the tilt of his mouth when he talks about the arena, the way his hands sometimes flex against his thighs like they’re remembering the weight of a weapon.
Flavius sees it too. I can tell by the micro-pause in his next attack, the fraction of a heartbeat where he moderates the force behind his strike, turning what could have been a punishing blow into a glancing one.
He is walking a razor’s edge—giving Cassius enough intensity to make this real, to satisfy the part of him that still needs to hit something hard, but never so much that it stops being sparring.
It’s… astonishing.
And terrifying.
If these weren’t wooden blades, if this weren’t sand in a fenced-off yard behind a sanctuary, if the wrong people were watching—they would be killing each other right now.
My stomach flips. Not with revulsion. With the weight of understanding.
This is what he came from.
Not just stories on a whiteboard. Not just scars cataloged in a file. This. The violence in his muscles, the calculus in his eyes, the bone-deep familiarity with danger.
And he has been using that same body, those same instincts, to make me feel safe. To stand beside me. To hold a pen and a mug and a Tupperware container instead of a sword.
Cassius feints high. Flavius doesn’t fall for it. He ducks inside the swing instead, slams his shield into Cassius’s chest, and sweeps one of his legs just enough that Cassius stumbles.
It’s the kind of opening any gladiator would be trained to exploit mercilessly.
For a breath, I see it in him—the twitch of muscles coiled to follow through, to knock Cassius flat and press the advantage until the crowd screams for blood.
Flavius checks himself mid-motion.
He pulls the blow, turning what could have been a finishing strike into a tap on Cassius’s shoulder. Contact, not damage.
Cassius freezes. Their eyes lock. Something unspoken passes between them—acknowledgment, maybe, or an old conversation repeated without words.
Then Cassius snorts, steps back, and grins—a rare, almost feral expression that loosens the tightness in my chest.
“Point,” he says.
Flavius lets out a breath and drops his shield a fraction. The shift in him is subtle but real. He doesn’t stop being dangerous—no one could watch him and think that—but the edge of it smooths. The blood-deep readiness to kill recedes, leaving alertness that feels… human. Liveable.
“Again?” Cassius asks.
Flavius glances toward the fence.
For the first time since I arrived, his gaze finds mine.
The world narrows to that line of sight.
He goes completely still.
Surprise flickers across his face as his gaze scans my posture, my expression, the way my hands are gripping the rail. The calculations he’s probably not even aware he’s making—am I afraid, am I overwhelmed, do I need him to perform, to joke, to pull back.
I make myself not move. Not apologize. Not look away.
