Work Text:
The bell sounded.
Igor's fist moved before the sound finished ringing through the small room, and the glove hit Rock’y under the eye - the leather gone soft and dark with other men's sweat, the seam imprinting itself briefly into his skin - and his head snapped to the side before the rest of him followed.
The crowd made its sound, the good sound, the sound Rock’y had been taught and trained to strive for.
Somewhere above the ropes the lights were very white and very far away, hazy around the edges in a way that reminded him of a light he used to sleep under as a boy, in a room he could not remember much else of.
He went down.
Going down was not so bad, an art in its own right. One of the few he had never needed to practice.
The canvas he landed on was made of old resin and rosin dust and the ghost-sweat of every man who had ever bled there before him, salt gone into the fibers so deep it would outlast the match, the building, the lives of the very men who left their mark. Under that, fainter, he could smell the disinfectant they mopped the ring with between fights, sharp and medicinal, not quite covering what it was meant to cover.
Rock’y breathed it all in the way another man might breathe in the scent of a well-cultivated garden. For one full moment - his to keep, unhurried, no one asking anything of him - there was nothing but the floor of the ring and the smell of that floor, and the taste starting to flood his mouth.
Copper.
Blood was thickening already at the back of his tongue, coating his teeth the way frost coats a window in winter.
The red, bright red, was threading down Rock’y's own chin and dropping in a clean straight line to the canvas, one drop, and then another, each one landing with a small flat sound that only he could hear, nearly drowned out beneath the crowd.
Rock’y watched the drops land with something like tenderness. It was blood, his blood, hitting his canvas. There was not much else in the room that belonged to him, and he watched his blood fall the way another man might watch snow fall on a lake he had once loved as a child.
He could smell it too, underneath the copper: something almost sweet, almost like a coin held too long in a closed fist. He thought of days long past, that familiar smell from sweet shops on the street corners of his youth.
Get up, the people beyond the rope were shouting, though the words themselves were lost, only the shape of the noise reaching Rock’y, urgent and bright against the dull haze he was used to. Fight for the free world!
Rock’y had never been to the free world, if such a thing even existed. But what a world it would be, such an idyllic dream.
He imagined it was probably nicer than this.
🥊
He got up.
Perhaps there was a version of this, somewhere, where the crowd loved him for enduring, where they admired his belief in his foolish dream.
This was not that version.
What the crowd loved was not his endurance. What they loved was the short interval between the expected fall and the unexpected getting-up - the small death and the smaller return to life performed three, six, nine times in a single evening, free of charge, no reservation required, coat check at the door.
It was easy entertainment, bought with the blood, sweat, and tears of the desperate.
Rock’y was fighting for his dream, or so the posters said. The crowd was fighting for a first-row seat to watch the dream get punched out of him.
Each time Rock’y went down, their voices climbed a register he associated, absurdly, with church.
Each time he rose, they climbed further still, the gathered masses celebrating a miraculous resurrection.
He had never been particularly religious.
At the end of the day, Rock’y did not resent the crowd for how they acted. He had tried, standing under the shower after other fights, water running rust-pink off him and swirling down the drain, to locate the resentment, and he never could find it. He couldn't find his resentment in the way you could not find a coin you were certain you put in a coat pocket. What he found instead, turning the tap until the water went from lukewarm to nothing, was a kind of gratitude so private it embarrassed him.
Besides, Rock’y understood the crowd. If someone else was bleeding for his entertainment, he could not promise he would behave differently.
🥊
He got up.
Round unknown.
He heard the bell again, or maybe the memory of a bell, or possibly it was just the ringing that had taken up permanent residence in his left ear since the second year of his career, a bothersome tenant who had stopped paying rent and could not be evicted.
Igor's face swam into the correct distance, close enough that Rock’y could smell him - sweat, of course, sour and honest, but under it was something else. Alcohol. Faint, sweetish, grain-based. It clung to Igor's breath the way the disinfectant clung to the canvas, not quite hidden by what it was meant to hide behind.
Igor's hands came up.
Rock’y thought, briefly, of his room. The ceiling he knew all too well, after so many long and restless nights beneath it. The chair he owned that no one had ever sat in but him. The days that arrived to him already used, secondhand, worn soft in the same places every other day was worn - Monday indistinguishable from the Monday that had come six weeks prior, indistinguishable from the one that would come six weeks after, a single Monday repeating itself with the endless patience of the tides, smelling of yeast and flour and the particular nothing of a life that held no particular appeal.
The only difference between Rock’y's bad and good days was the color of the water in the shower. On the bad days, it ran clear. On the good days, it ran red.
Igor's left hand found Rock’y's ribs.
For one clean second the whole room arrived in his senses at once, unfiltered, too bright, too much.
Everything was there.
Rock’y could see the flickering yellow of the lights, the soft grey of the cigarette smoke drifting somewhere behind the second row, the red, white, and blue upon his skin, taste the sharp copper in his mouth, feel the wet slap of glove on skin still ringing in the bone of his cheek, reverberating throughout his body, hear Igor's breathing gone ragged close to his ear. In that single second, Rock’y thought that it was the most alive he had felt in weeks. Everything was there, and, for once, so was he.
He went down.
The canvas again, resin and rosin and old salt along with new salt. The crowd's noise climbed its register. Church again. He could hear, under the general roar, one man - always at least one, in every hall, in every city - laughing at the spectacle of him.
Rock’y did not blame the man. He would laugh too, if he were on that side of the rope.
🥊
He got up.
Rock’y did not fight to win. He fought the way another man might press a thumbnail into his own palm during a meeting that will not end - not to damage himself, exactly, but to prove, empirically, privately, that there was still a hand attached to the arm attached to the shoulder attached to whatever was left of him. It was a simple thing, proof of receipt that there was a body that was alive, a body that could still feel even if the mind could not.
Here, under these particular lights in a nowhere town, amidst this particular noise, the receipt came free with every round. Here he did not need a thumbnail. Here he had Igor, sweat and alcohol and unhurried patience, who was, in his own flat way, the kindest thing that has ever happened to him. Punch after punch, Igor kept handing Rock’y back to himself and asked for nothing in return except the right to keep doing it until the job was finally finished.
Each time Rock’y took a hit, the smell of the hall got sharper, more specific, more entirely his: blood and rosin, sweat gone cold and then hot again, the sweet rot of spilled beer somewhere near the ropes, the animalistic fear that was not fear so much as its cousin, wanting.
🥊
He got up.
Rock’y could taste his own blood settling into something almost familiar now, almost comfortable.
The flag hung on the wall behind the crowd was bright and impossible to ignore, a reminder of a dream that had never been his to begin with, only borrowed for the evening.
Rock’y had been thinking about the dream for a long time. He could no longer remember exactly what it was supposed to be. It was difficult to tell whether the flag was meant to represent the dream or replace it.
The crowd made its church sound again, already preparing to be disappointed in the only way that satisfied them.
Rock’y raised his hands.
Tomorrow would be Monday.