The heavy click of the front door echoed through the apartment, leaving a silence so absolute it felt like a physical weight. Elena was gone—likely to the 24-hour hardware store for more wood glue or just to breathe air that didn't taste like old memories.
The Fighter stood in the center of the living room, the city lights of Chicago bleeding through the windows in smears of neon and grime. He didn't turn on the lamps. He didn't want to see his own reflection in the high-end mirrors.
His gaze drifted to the desk in the corner. It was buried. A white mountain of fan mail, some with "Glitter King" scrawled in gel pens, others with high-resolution photos of him mid-punch, waiting for a signature that felt like a forgery every time he signed it. He walked over, his movements heavy, as if his skeletal system had suddenly been replaced with lead.
He picked up a letter at random.
He dropped it back onto the pile. The words felt like static. He didn't feel like a hero. He felt like a hollowed-out shell, a prop in a play that had been running for too long.
He thought about the match last night. The roar of the crowd had been a dull roar in his ears, like the sound of the 'L' train passing five blocks away. He'd moved through the rounds with a sickening, mechanical precision. Jab. Cross. Duck. He'd felt nothing when his glove connected with the other man's jaw—just a faint, vibrating thud that traveled up his arm. It was stupid. It was all so profoundly stupid. He was a grown man getting paid millions to be a "freak" in a costume, while the ghost of a girl in a torn flannel followed him through the locker room.
He sat down in the leather chair, the expensive material creaking under his weight.
Every time his phone buzzed, he expected it to be a leak. A photo of the old house. A quote from Sloane. A headline that finally stripped away the "Glitter" and left the "Gravel." He started wondering if the fans in the front row weren't cheering for him, but waiting for the moment he cracked. Were they looking for the "hero," or were they looking for the "disturbed kid" Sloane had promised they'd find?
He looked at his hands. They were shaking. Just a tremor, fine as a piano wire.
He felt numb, disconnected from the very body that had made him famous. He was a "flare gun," just like he'd told Elena. But flares eventually burnt out, falling back to the earth as cold, charred metal.
He leaned forward, burying his face in those heavy, scarred hands. The apartment was too big. The lights were too bright. And for the first time in ten years, he didn't have a sassy line to save him. He was just a guy in a dark room, waiting for the world to find out he'd never actually left that Detroit garage.
He sat in the dark, the only light coming from the sharp, blue rectangular glow of his phone. He scrolled through her feed again; nothing. One week of radio silence. For a woman who made her living on the relentless churn of "the reveal," this void felt calculated. It felt like she was in a basement somewhere, sharpening a blade he wouldn't see until it was already between his ribs. The pressure of her absence was physical, a tightening in his chest that made every breath feel like he was inhaling silt.
Then there were the others. Not Delaney's team; he'd blocked them all, but the independent vultures. The analysts and the "truth-seekers" who didn't need a press pass to tear a man down.
He didn't click the links. He didn't need to. He'd seen the headlines in passing:
They were picking at the edges of his life, sensing a weakness in the narrative. They didn't see a bored athlete; they saw a target. And that was worse.
He thought about the match last night. It hadn't been boring; it had been a war. But it was a war he'd fought in a fog. His body had known what to do, his muscles firing on a ten-year-old instinct, but his mind had been miles away, back in a Detroit hallway, listening for the sound of Sloane's footsteps. He'd been mechanical, a precise machine of violence, but the spark, the "sassy" fire that used to make the blood taste like champagne, was gone.
He felt stupid. Standing in a ring under a million dollars' worth of lights, wearing a mask made of glitter, while his real life felt like it was being disassembled by a woman he couldn't even find.
He looked at his hands. They were heavy, swollen across the knuckles from the night before.
He walked to the desk and stared at the pile of mail. Thousands of people wanting a piece of a man who was currently disappearing into the shadows of his own living room. He didn't want to be their hero. He didn't want to be the "Glitter King."
He just wanted the static to stop.
He slumped into the chair, the leather cold against his skin. The paranoia was a low-frequency hum, vibrating through the floorboards. Delaney was out there. Somewhere. And the fact that she wasn't talking meant she had finally found something worth keeping secret until the moment it would hurt the most.
He closed his eyes, but all he could see was the bruised purple of a Detroit afternoon and the feeling of gravel under his fingernails.