Elena asked. She didn't look up, but her tweezers stuttered, snapping a piece of wood she hadn't meant to touch.
The Fighter's jaw tightened. He was slumped on the sofa, his long hair partially obscuring his face. He was tracing the faint, jagged scar above his eyebrow—the one the cameras usually missed under the ring lights.
His voice was a low rasp.
Elena didn't walk; she drifted, her oversized black hoodie acting as a portable shadow. She was a silent frequency in a room full of shouting, her thumb tracing the spiral binding of her sketchbook until the wire bit into her skin. Her earbuds were jammed in tight, the manic, soaring energy of Panic! At The Disco's "Lying Is the Most Fun..." or "King for a Day" thumping against her eardrums; a frantic contrast to her own stillness.
Sloane wasn't the kind of girl who made a scene. She was a master of the "micro-aggression" before the term had a name. She sat three rows behind Elena in History, a girl with a sensible ponytail and a flat, midwestern stare that felt like a judgment.
Her bullying was a low-frequency static. It was the way she'd pull her desk three inches away whenever Elena sat down, as if Elena's oversized black hoodies carried a contagion. It was the whispered, "Bless her heart," she'd toss out when Elena tripped over a localized idiom in English class. It was the "Check out the freak" posts on a private finsta; the kind where she never named names, but everyone knew exactly who the "pale vampire" was.
Elena would just shrink. She didn't have the words to fight back in a language that still felt like a puzzle at that time, so she became a master of disappearing while standing still.
The breaking point happened behind the gym.
Elena was sitting on a concrete step, sketching a bird that had been crushed in the parking lot. Sloane and three of her friends; none of them "popular," just bored, approached.
Sloane's voice was sweet, which made the words hurt more.
Elena clutched her sketchbook, didn't look up.
The Fighter; then just a scrawny kid with a sharp tongue and an oversized personality, rounded the corner. He wasn't a boxer yet, just a boy who loved Britney Spears and had a mouth that moved faster than his brain.
He sauntered up with a look of pure, bored disdain.
Sloane's face didn't turn red; it turned cold.
She snapped, stepping into the space Sloane thought she owned. She didn't look at the girls behind Sloane with a witty observation; she looked at them like they were something she'd found on the bottom of her shoe.
It was the "Gelatin" comment that had stung, but being told her power move looked like a community theater rehearsal was the breaking point. Sloane didn't punch her. She pushed her; hard. And then the guys who hung out with them, the ones who had been watching from the fence like vultures waiting for a carcass, decided to step in.
It wasn't a "fair" fight. It was a mess of flailing limbs and the screech of sneakers on grit. The Fighter was sassy, but she was light—a featherweight trying to stop a landslide. She got in a few good lines, even as a heavy hand caught her shoulder and a knee found her ribs.
Her voice rang out over the sound of the scuffle, even as her head snapped back from a blow.
But she ended up on the pavement. She took a knee to the stomach that stole her breath and a fist to the eye that turned the world into a blur of purple and red. The guys didn't stop until they'd left their marks, but they weren't unscathed: one was clutching a shin where she'd kicked him, and another was holding a bleeding nose, looking surprised that the "freak" had actually connected.
The girls got bored of the dirt and the blood once the novelty wore off, walking away with high-pitched, shaky laughs about how "pathetic" the siblings were.
When the gym teacher finally skidded around the corner and pulled them apart, the Fighter was a wreckage. Her flannel was shredded at the shoulder, her lip was split into a crimson ruin, and her eyes were wild, flickering with a terrifying sort of adrenaline.
Sloane was already on her knees, the "victim" act starting the second she saw the teacher's whistle. She was sobbing into her hands, pointing at the blood on the ground. But the Fighter? She just stood there in the middle of the debris. She wiped a streak of blood across her cheek with the back of her hand, her teeth stained red as she flashed a grin that looked like a jagged rip in the universe. She looked like she'd won the lottery, standing over the two guys who were still doubled over, groaning and holding their faces.
The Fighter leaned back against the sofa, a ghost of that blood-stained grin flickering across his face. He looked at his reflection in the dark glass of the window, his eyes focusing on the phantom version of himself—the one who stood in the Detroit grit while the "Heathers" retreated.
The Fighter muttered, his smirk widening.
He let out a short, sharp laugh, a sound full of the old sass that had carried him through the lockers and the ring alike.
But the smirk didn't reach Elena's eyes.
Elena's voice cut through his bravado like a cold wind.
The smirk faltered, then died.
The Fighter's thumb stopped tracing the scar on his brow. He looked down at his hands.
Her eyes were fierce.
She stood up, the gold flakes falling from her lap like shimmering dust.
The Fighter let out a breath, a short, sharp sound.
Elena whispered, stepping closer to him.
He looked at her, the "Glitter King" mask finally slipping. For a second, he wasn't the man who owned the MGM Grand; he was just the kid in the torn flannel, bleeding in a dark garage so his family wouldn't have to see the mess.
His voice lacked conviction.
She reached out and touched his hand; the heavy, scarred hand of a pro.