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She was fast. But he'd been faster.
He stood above her now, bruised. Every breath brought a twinge in his ribs like a cracked piece of superheated glass. Formless but not molten. His sword tip trembled over her green throat, his hands shaking with exhaustion. She lay beneath Shiro's feet, still. The only movement she made was to gasp for air, her eyes closed in resignation.
She was stocky and sturdily built, forty winning matches in the arena, he'd been told. And here she was. He didn't even know her name, unusual for a prolific gladiator such as herself. It was because she didn't go by one. In the gambling circles she was called Nameless. But even that itself was something given to her by others, and standing over her Shiro could tell in her defeat that failure was the only thing she was going to accept today.
"What are you waiting for," she growled, deep voice rumbling. "Take your victory."
"I can't," he told her. It was the truth.
"It's better for both of us if you do."
"I know."
"Then why are you waiting?"
"Because today is not the day you die," Shiro stepped to the side, dropping his sword on the ground. He sat on the sand beside her, impervious to the howls and boos of the shrieking spectators.
"Taking a breather, small one?" she asked, eyes still shut. "I can feel your stillness."
"We've been at this a while," he said, looking to the lights of the arena high above his head. His retinas burned in protest, but if he stared into them long enough it almost felt like looking at the setting sun from a car window.
"You're impressive," she grumbled. "I've never been beaten before."
"There's a first time for everything."
"If you don't get up and fight soon, they'll come for you."
"I don't care."
"You're a new kind of crazy, aren't you, small one?" she chuckled in a cracked, wheezing way. "I look forward to fighting you again."
The sentries had been deployed in the lull, and Shiro numbly watched their advance towards where the two opponents sat in the center of the arena.
"I don't," he said, standing up, dusting himself off, and bracing for the first shock of the closest sentry's electric baton.
...
"I'm going to skin you," the Galra hissed, circling Shiro, who stood in a battle-ready stance. "I'll lay your hide at his lordship Zarkon's feet, a gift for our glorious emperor."
Shiro raised his eyebrows as he parried a fairly well-placed blow from his opponent. Their match had been marketed as “The Traitor versus The Champion”. It had been highly anticipated by both gambler and gladiator alike. The stands were filled with energetic patrons, as was becoming par for the course concerning Shiro's matches. Despite his best efforts, he was popular.
"I didn't know Zarkon accepted gifts from traitors," he baited the other fighter.
"Do not speak his name, scum," the Traitor spat. "Do not slander me! The emperor knows I am innocent, he knows! But first I must prove it to everyone else."
Shiro rebuffed an advance that targeted his feet. Still, the Traitor circled. The man was not well, anyone could see. His purple fur was mangy and tufted, his yellow eyes almost silty looking. The scars from other battles marked everywhere from the Traitor's face to his hands. His bat-like ears were gone, sliced off in combat. He was missing fingers, teeth.
Shiro couldn't help but wonder how long it was until he looked like that, too. It seemed all too real. Pity gripped him, despite the Traitor's considerable prowess with a blade. He was good, but Shiro was more confident and refined in his attack style.
"Die!"
The Traitor shrieked as he rushed Shiro, sword held high, and it was in this moment Shiro took his opportunity. He deftly turned to the side, out of the way of the Traitor's blade, and drove the full force of his elbow into where the Galra's solar plexus would be, if he were human.
Shiro watched as the Traitor fell and hit the ground at a slide, gasping and clawing at the air. He writhed on the ground, trying to drag himself over to where his sword lay despite his lack of oxygen.
The Traitor needed a rest.
Shiro gripped his hilt, feeling its slickness from his sweat. He willed himself away, far, far away. This next part required as much delicacy as he could manage.
He didn't hear the crowd. He didn't even hear his footsteps. Just the scuffling sounds of the crazed Traitor's breathless struggles. Shiro drew closer and knelt down where his grounded opponent thrashed.
"I'll finish you!" the Traitor wheezed, trying vainly to sit up and claw at Shiro's face. "I'll destroy you!"
Shiro paid him no mind. Instead, he stilled one of the Galra's humanoid feet. He didn't hear the crowd. He heard two heartbeats. The Champion and the Traitor. Shiro took his blade, and with one quick motion he cut through the tendon that enabled the Traitor to walk. The Traitor screamed. Shiro did it again, this time on the other ankle. He gently set down his sword, stood up.
He walked to where the gladiator handlers were waiting to receive him. Silently, Shiro wished his opponent a long and lax recovery period.
He didn't hear the crowd. He didn't hear his heartbeat. All he heard were the furious, raving curses thrown at his back as he made his way towards the brief reprieve of victory. The Traitor knew anger, and the Traitor knew curses. The Traitor had never known defeat.
"LOOK AT ME, CHAMPION! I'LL KILL YOU SOMEDAY, I SWEAR IT!"
…
The alien was a small and shaken thing, their limbs too frail-looking to swing the sword they gripped in their hands. Their other set of arms were held tightly at their sides, fists clenching and releasing in a visual demonstration of their nervousness. It had taken three robotic sentries to drag them from the holding cell, and even now the same sentries stood at the edges of the arena to ensure their cooperation.
Shiro could tell they weren’t formally trained in combat. Their insectoid face was harder to read than others he'd encountered, but he could feel their frightened uncertainty. The smell of their anxiety - it was almost like the grassy summer scent of a trapped firefly.
The crowd screamed for violence, howled for death, cheered for blood. Even after so many matches in the arena, the sound still set something inside Shiro off-center. He squared his feet, tested the weight of his bladed weapon in his hand. While he waited for the buzzer to signify the beginning of the match, he evaluated his opponent.
This fight obviously favored him. Shiro took a deep breath, trying to get as much oxygen as possible. He didn't like this.
The alien was making some kind of chittering noise, their feet shifting uncertainly in the sand. Their eyes were wide and afraid.
This wasn't right. Shiro made his call.
He tapped his sword discreetly against the side of his calf, a signal in the secret gladiatorial language of Zarkon's arena. A sign of reassurance - Shiro was not here to kill or die to please the onlookers, he was here to make sure they both got out alive.
But the alien, they must have not seen it. They might have been too afraid to notice, going up against someone who was undefeated like Shiro was. Because when the buzzer sounded and the match began they came scuttling across the sandy floor faster than he anticipated.
Still, though, it was too early to tell. Perhaps they would show their understanding as the fight went on. Shiro easily blocked their first attack, and it was so poorly attempted he thought perhaps they did make an unspoken agreement after all.
He went through the motions, suspending his emotions and going to the place he usually went to when he fought. All he heard was the scuffing of his feet on the floor, and the rush of blood in his ears. All he felt was his weapon, an extension of his body.
Block, parry, fake a strike. Parry. Block.
It wasn't until his opponent's blade nicked the side of his thigh and narrowly missed the inside of his knee that Shiro came to the conclusion this alien actually was trying to fight for their life. When they came back for another paltry attempt at an attack, Shiro firmly slapped the flat of his blade against the alien’s fingers which held their weapon, and with a gasp that was more surprise than pain the alien dropped their sword onto the gritty sand.
"Please," their voice hummed, literally, with desperation. "Please, I want to live!"
Shiro tuned back into the chaotic sound of those watching the match - they wanted to see death. They were chanting in a language unknown to him, and he felt a distant sense of disgust. What he felt more prominently was sympathy, and kinship for the opponent who stood shaking no more than an arm’s length away.
"Please," they buzzed again, ducking their head in a gesture of what must have been submission in their culture. "I had to fight, or they - they have my children - please..."
Shiro closed the gap between them, taking fistfuls of the other's tunic. The crowd screamed. The alien choked out a singular sob, their eyes glittering and wet.
"Please..."
"Don't worry," he said under his breath.
"W-what?"
"You're not going to die," he told them as he threw them forcefully to the ground.
The alien scrambled as Shiro climbed on top of them, obviously confused.
"I don't understand-"
"Keep your voice down, and do what I tell you," Shiro put his hands loosely around what he assumed to be their neck, and tensed his arms and shoulders like he was squeezing. But his fingers were lax. "This is the show they want. We're giving it to them. Act like you're struggling. It's okay if you hurt me a little."
The alien's eyes darted between Shiro and the sentries still standing alert at the edges of the arena. They gave a small nod, and began clawing with their barbed hind legs at Shiro's back, twitching and writhing under his faux grip. It wasn't pleasant, Shiro could feel the barbs leave shallow lacerations in his skin. But it wasn't the worst thing in the world.
"What's your name?"
"...N-Nizx."
"Is this your first match, Nizx?" he asked.
"Yes," they buzzed quietly.
"Do you need to win?"
"No, no, I don't think I do."
"Alright," Shiro said, formulating the beginning of a plan. "Do you want to go to a mining colony?"
"Will my children be safe?"
Shiro pressed his lips into a thin line. He was still internally detached. But in his mind he saw Matt Holt, hugging his injured leg to his chest, his young eyes trapped wide with shock.
"I don't know," he admitted. "But you'll live longer there than here. You might even be able to escape." The scrape and pull of the alien's barbed legs was starting burn now, but their conversation wasn't finished. The crowed still screamed.
The alien blinked their eyes in understanding, maybe even hope. For the first time Shiro got a glimpse of what they were like outside of the arena - the love they held for their people and their children, their wisdom and their gentle nature.
"How do I get there?" they asked.
Shiro grimaced, "Would you be willing to lose an arm?"
They didn't even need time to think it over.
"Make it clean," they said quietly. "Quick as you can."
"Do you have a preference on which?"
"The left ones, please."
Shiro made it quick. He made it clean. The crowd screamed in frenzy as greenish-orange blood seeped into the sand. Their champion stood, catching his breath, staring at the fluid on his hands and sword, feeling his own blood drip slowly down his back. The wound on his leg stung, irritated by the grit that had entered it.
As the alien was carried out, he could have sworn he heard a small, buzzing, "Thank you."
…
It wasn’t long after that when "The Traitor versus The Champion: Rematch" was advertised. The gambling circles were already taking bets. Shiro's handlers praised him for his cool execution of the finishing move.
"Excellent technique!" they told him. "Great entertainment, so dramatic! It'll be so fantastic to watch a second time."
"I just wanted him to rest," Shiro told them, but they pretended they didn't hear.
The event opened with much pageantry, and many pre-match skirmishes. Shiro watched from his side of the arena as corpses were carried off, the bloodied sand drying black and tacky to the floor.
He made himself empty, as he usually did. Empty of fear. Empty of malice. Everything that happened in the arena needed to be logical and calculated. His body was a tool, his weapon another limb. Just like in training. How was it he fell in love with space for the sake of betterment and discovery, yet he'd found nothing but this hard and forsaken place?
Shiro held his sword loosely as he walked to the center of the arena. He anticipated another short match. All this build up for such a brief show - the crowd might be disappointed.
The Traitor waited, as fevered as ever, but somehow looking even worse than before.
"Ready to die, Champion?" the Traitor snarled, gnashing his teeth. "His highness Zarkon surely looks well upon me this day! Prepare yourself to meet your end."
Shiro took his defensive stance. If things were going the way they did last time, he would just need for the Traitor to deliver himself onto his sword. But it did not appear to be that easy.
"You mock me," the Traitor made no such move. "You think I would fall for the same maneuver twice?"
"Well, it worked so nicely the first time," Shiro responded flatly.
"You'll have to come and get me," the Traitor said. "None of your cheap tricks. This time, you die."
"If you say so."
Shiro took the first step, his opponent soon mirroring his movements. They circled each other in time to the thrum of the onlookers, slowly drawing closer and closer until they met in the middle.
The Traitor drew first blood, howling in victory as he watched it drip from Shiro's shoulder. The wound wasn't deep or a hindrance, but the sight of it invigorated the disgraced Galra.
"Soon, you will fall!" he crooned.
"Don't get ahead of yourself," Shiro said, easily blocking a blow aimed at the same spot.
They went on like this for some time, the Traitor placing blows and Shiro deflecting them. The Galra began to get frustrated. He got sloppy, he got loose. When he finally gave up an opening, Shiro took the opportunity to slide his blade across the backside of the Traitor's knees. The Galra collapsed to the ground gracelessly, felled by almost the same injury as before.
"No!" the Traitor screeched, his words buried by the roar of the crowd. "NO!"
"It's over, Traitor," Shiro told him shortly. "Goodbye."
"COME BACK! Don't you walk away from me! Champion! CHAMPION!" the Galra was practically frothing at the mouth, having finally come fully unhinged after the years of fighting and abuse. "I'LL NEVER STOP! IT'LL NEVER END FOR YOU!"
"You'll have to kill me - I'll never stop!" the Traitor shrieked from his prone position on the sand. "NEVER! NEVER!"
Shiro knew then that the Traitor would never know peace. Shiro would never rest, as long as he was here, fighting for the amusement of the Galra. Injured, the Traitor thirsted for the battlefield. On the battlefield, he thirsted for blood and victory no matter the personal cost. His flesh was cut, his tendons severed, all in pursuit of a redemption that would never come. It was wired into the man now, an inextricable part of him.
The Traitor was Shiro's inevitability.
Shiro could hear the crowd, their shrieks and screams made the world shake. He felt their bloodlust deep inside that unsettled place within him, no matter how hard he tried to banish it. His hands were shaking, his heart racing, his breathing ragged.
There was only one way this would end. He needed to become what they wanted him to be.
He raised his sword in a slight motion, and plunged it into the Traitor's chest in one short but powerful thrust. Bone and flesh gave way when faced with the laser-edged blade. In the Traitor's eyes there was surprise, as if he hadn't expected the end to actually come today - there was also relief. And with a rough, jerking, clock-wise turn of Shiro's hilt, the Traitor's eyes were empty of everything save for death.
The crowd was insane.
"Sleep," Shiro said, and he wrenched his sword free before his legs crumpled beneath him. He knelt at the Traitor's breathless side until the sentries came and dragged him away.
...
He went through matches like a puppet on a string. He gave himself over to his training and his instincts, and they never steered him wrong. When he left the arena he didn't know if his opponent was dead or alive. He just knew that he'd won.
The days blurred together, he didn't sleep when they put him in his cell, and he ate only because they made him. The other gladiators were wary of Shiro, save for the few he knew from the beginning who had managed to make it this far.
"I'm going to throw my next match," he told someone once.
"But if you do, who will be here to protect us from the more powerful gladiators?" they'd pleaded with him.
So, he won his next match. And he kept winning.
Until he didn’t.
...
He was in the arena again. The lights didn't look like the sun anymore, and the crowd was something he heard but paid no mind to. Apparently, it was his forty-first time in battle. When he heard that, Shiro found himself thinking of the nameless gladiator and how hard she fought, how she calmly accepted her defeat. He felt he understood her better now.
He'd become their monster.
Shiro thought he was ready for everything and anything. He felt there was nothing his captors could ask him to do that he wouldn’t be able fulfill. He wasn't expecting his next opponent. How could he? There was nothing in the galaxy that could have prepared Shiro for the sight of a child, no older than eight or nine Earth years, struggling to carry a weapon that was half her size.
The crowd murmured. Apparently, even their bloodlust had its limits. She was small, a dusky purple color, and had a face marked with bright magenta lines that, for being a part of her phenotypic biology, looked so much like the tracks of bloody tears it unsettled him. Her yellow eyes were filled with a fierce and frightened determination.
Immediately, Shiro dropped his sword. Wary, the girl still held hers tightly, but was unable to lift it due to its weighty heft. The sight sat heavily within him, and silently Shiro let the pain and anguish he'd forbidden himself from succumbing to overtake him.
He'd fought, he'd killed. But now they wanted him to harm a child? What had he let them turn him into that they would present him with this unspeakable task?
"It's okay," he croaked. "I'm not going to hurt you."
The girl narrowed her eyes in scrutiny, but her lips trembled with fear.
"How can I trust you-," she asked, voice quivering, "-when you've killed so many?"
Her words scraped Shiro raw inside. He couldn't think of a reason.
"Because I don't want to fight for them anymore," he said, and he sat on the sandy ground, much to the shock and mutterings of the spectators.
The girl studied him for a long moment, then she too lay her weapon on the ground and began slowly getting closer to him.
"They'll be sending the sentries, soon," Shiro told her, exhausted but feeling strangely blessed to have this tender moment. "They'll try and make us fight. But I won't. I won't let them hurt you."
Maybe, just maybe, he had something to fight for now. Something to protect inside of the arena other than himself. And if this was his final fight, if they executed him afterwards for this insubordination, so be it. He didn't care if he was more trouble than he was worth. All Shiro wanted now was peace.
The girl was now close enough to touch him. She extended a small hand slowly, and he gently took it. She was warm, she smelled clean and like his childhood. Her posture was relaxed, her face open and hopeful.
"Really?" she asked. "You won't hurt me?"
"Really," Shiro said, and he smiled for the first time in longer than he could recall.
The girl breathed a sigh.
"How disappointing."
"Wha-"
Pain exploded so ferociously, so suddenly in Shiro's head it took his breath away. Blood ran freely from his face, staining his tunic scarlet in a matter of seconds. He scrambled backwards, narrowly avoiding - mostly by chance - another swipe at his face by a small, concealed laser dagger the girl held in her hand.
Only she was no longer a little girl, but an older woman with a throaty, harsh laugh and a posture like that of a bird of prey.
"Fight me now, Champion?" she asked, mockingly brandishing her dagger in Shiro's direction. “So close – I was aiming for your eyes.”
Shiro could barely process what was happening; for the first time in months the shouts and wails of the crowd actually priced his heart. Inside, he felt a growing sense of anxiety. He was broken, his earlier hope and placidity curdled into feelings of betrayal. He hated them all, he hated himself, and he hated what his life had become. He hated himself for having hope.
How could he have been so foolish? How could he have let his guard down so easily? Shiro rolled to the side, avoiding a more pointed and vicious strike from the woman’s dagger. His eyes were watering and his blood still ran, it rolled its way down the back of his throat. He could only breathe through his mouth. But even still, Shiro got to his feet.
The woman smiled hideously, and it made him shudder. Her ill intentions were as bared as her teeth, crooked and sharp. Then, she disappeared.
"Where-"
Shiro's words were cut off by a hot, cutting pain in his back - he whirled around clumsily to see the woman behind him. She took advantage of his uneven footing to sweep his legs out from underneath him, and Shiro hit the ground hard enough to knock the air from his lungs. She was not his opponent, he realized. She was his killer.
He still tried to scramble backwards, but the lazy way she followed him, and how easily she had dispatched him to begin with, made him think she was far more powerful than she was revealing herself to be. Shiro's head was beginning to spin, even with the gradual return of oxygen to his system. He was losing too much blood.
"It's a pity," the woman said. "We thought you were an excellent candidate."
With a wave of her hand, the sword that lay in the dirt twenty feet away was now held firmly in her grasp.
"Goodbye, Champion," she said lazily as she brought the sword down.
Shiro raised his arm to block her blow so quickly he didn't realize he'd done so until the blade settled deep into the flesh of his upper arm. He shouted in surprise and pain. The woman looked at him curiously, making no move to remove the sword.
"On second thought," she practically cooed. "I think I like you after all."
Shiro could feel himself start to slip away, black edges swallowing the scope of his vision.
"I don't think you'll be needing this arm. It’s broken," he heard her say, and then suddenly he couldn't feel it anymore. Shiro couldn't feel anything.
He was dying, and maybe it was just as well. It meant he wouldn't have to fight anymore. Shiro's ability to breathe was getting less and less as he felt his throat clog with partially coagulated blood. This wasn't so bad. He could hardly feel his consciousness drift away, his life ebb.
It was like falling asleep.
He couldn't wait to dream of home.