He noticed it on the third round.
Not immediately; the first two rounds had been fine, or close enough to fine that he hadn't thought about it. The rhythm had come the way it usually did, the body settling into the familiar geometry of the ring, the specific math of distance and timing that he had been doing long enough that it didn't require thought. He had stopped needing to think about boxing the way you stopped needing to think about walking. It was just the thing his body did when it was in this room.
Third round. A jab he should have slipped.
He kept going. He was good at keeping going; had built a career on it, on the specific skill of continuing past the thing that wanted to stop him, on finding the next breath and the next movement when the previous one had gone wrong. He kept going and he told himself it was nothing and the session kept moving and his partner kept pushing and he kept responding and somewhere in the middle of the fourth round it happened again.
A combination he'd thrown ten thousand times.
The first punch landed fine. The second was early. Not much — a margin most people would not have measured; but he measured it, his body measured it, and the measurement was wrong in a way he couldn't account for.
He stepped back. Called time.
His partner nodded, stepped back, shook out his hands. Raul, in the corner, looked up from his phone.
The Fighter stood in the middle of the ring and breathed and tried to find the thing that was off. His hands felt fine. His legs felt fine. The tiredness was the right kind of tiredness, the earned kind, nothing unusual. But there was something; a lag, a delay, something sitting in the space between the decision and the execution that had not been there last week.
That was the part that sat wrong. In thirty years of living in this body he had learned its specific language, its dialects of strain and fatigue and damage, and this was not a language he recognised.
Raul was watching him from the corner.
He wasn't saying anything. He had his arms folded and his phone in his hand and his face doing the thing it did when he was paying attention to something he had decided not to make obvious. The Fighter knew this face. He had known this face for years.
He looked away from it.
He rolled his shoulders. Touched his gloves together. The familiar weight of them, the familiar resistance. Everything felt the same as it always felt and something was wrong and he couldn't find it and that was the worst version of this; not knowing where the problem lived, not being able to point at a muscle or a joint or a specific place and say: here, this is the thing.
He went back to his partner.
They finished the session. His partner left. The Fighter unwrapped his hands at the bench, the tape coming off in slow loops, and he sat with the feeling of the session settling in his body and tried to be precise about what had happened.
He thought about the cabinet above the glasses. The empty space. The pharmacy. He thought about the doctor's number going to voicemail, twice, and the text he had sent that had not been answered.
Raul appeared beside him.
Sat on the bench without asking. Said nothing for a moment, which was unusual. Raul was a person who filled silences, who had an instinct for the right word at the right time, who understood the difference between a silence that wanted company and one that didn't. The fact that he was sitting quietly meant he had decided this one needed company without words.
The Fighter finished unwrapping his right hand.
A pause.
The Fighter looked at him.
Raul looked back. His face was doing nothing in particular, which was its own kind of language.
Raul nodded.
He did not say I know. He did not say are you sure. He just nodded and sat there on the bench and let the silence be what it was, and the Fighter sat next to him with the tape in a loose pile at his feet and the session settling in his body and the thing he couldn't name sitting somewhere in the lag between decision and execution, waiting.