Rise from ashes

Flight home

The flight home landed in Columbus a day later than planned, delayed by weather over the Midwest, and by the time Zed walked through his own front door the ache in his ribs had settled into something duller, more familiar, the kind of pain that told him healing had already begun rather than damage still spreading.

Lila was waiting in the kitchen when he came in, a pot of something simmering on the stove that smelled like the kind of meal she made only when she wanted the house to feel a certain way. Steady. Ordinary. His, still.

"You're limping less than yesterday," she said, looking him over the way she always did, cataloguing without commenting further.

"Darius says another week before the swelling's fully gone," Zed said.

"And the rest of you?"

Zed thought about the question longer than it probably required.

"Still catching up," he said. "The body healed a version of itself. The rest of me is still walking around like I'm in round eleven."

Lila almost smiled at that, turning back to the stove.

"Sit down," she said. "Eat something. The rest can catch up on its own time."

The days that followed had no shape to them at first, the strange, formless quality that always seemed to follow the end of a camp, when twenty weeks of rigid structure suddenly gave way to nothing scheduled at all. Zed found himself waking early out of habit, sitting in the kitchen at five-thirty in the morning with nowhere he needed to be, the quiet almost unfamiliar after months of six o'clock mornings at Iron Harbor.

He called Darnell on the third day.

"You up," Darnell said, by way of answering.

"Habit," Zed said. "Woke up early. No reason to."

"Give it a week," Darnell said. "The body doesn't know camp's over just because the calendar says so."

"You up too, then."

"Same as you," Darnell admitted. "Sat in the gym for an hour this morning. Didn't train anything. Just sat there."

Neither of them said much else. It wasn't a conversation that needed more than that.

The offers started arriving within days, exactly the way Ashe had warned they would. Interview requests, mostly, along with two production companies asking about a documentary, and one call from a magazine that wanted to put Zed on a cover in a way that made Ashe's voice sharpen slightly when he relayed the details.

"You don't have to answer any of it yet," Ashe told him, on a call a week after the fight. "Take the time. Nothing's going anywhere."

"What does Mary think," Zed asked, half joking.

"Mary already sent me three pages of notes on which offers look legitimate and which ones look like they're trying to lock you into something you'd regret," Ashe said. "I told her she should have gone to law school instead of whatever she's actually studying."

"She'll get there eventually," Zed said. "Give her time."

Ten days after the fight, Zed drove out to Regal Pharmacy on a quiet weekday afternoon, the kind of ordinary errand he hadn't had much room for during camp. Salib was behind the counter when he walked in, and the older man's face broke into a smile the moment he saw him.

"There he is," Salib said. "The champion."

"Not yet, officially," Zed said. "There's paperwork. Sanctioning bodies. All of that."

"Paperwork," Salib said, waving a hand as if brushing the word aside entirely. "I watched it. I watched every round. You think I need paperwork to know what I saw?"

Zed laughed, something that still felt slightly foreign this soon after the fight, laughter that didn't pull at anything sore.

He walked to the back of the store, to the small frame on the wall that held the notebook page Salib had kept for two years now, the page from the very first week, the handwriting rougher than it had become since. He looked at it for a while.

"You still keep that up," Zed said.

"I'll keep it up until you tell me to take it down," Salib said. "Which I don't think is happening anytime soon."

Two weeks after the fight, Iron Harbor opened its doors again, not for training exactly, not yet, but for the kind of loose, unstructured gathering that happens when a team has been through something together and needs to be in the same room again before moving forward.

Priya had flown back from Cleveland. Rowan and Darius were both there. Garrett stood near the office door the way he always did, and Darnell stood in front of the whiteboard, which still had ASANTE written across the top, all twenty boxes shaded in beneath it.

"We leaving it up," Zed asked, nodding at the board.

Darnell looked at it for a long moment.

"For now," he said. "There's something useful in looking at it. Twenty weeks. Every box a Tuesday, more or less. It's a good thing to remember, what twenty weeks of real work actually looks like when you write it down."

"You going to erase it eventually," Zed said.

"Eventually," Darnell said. "When there's a new name to write at the top."

That evening, back at the apartment, Zed sat with Lila on the couch, the television off for once, the two of them simply sitting in the quiet that had become rarer than it used to be.

"What happens now," Lila asked. "Really. Not the interviews and the offers. What actually happens now, for you."

Zed thought about the question seriously before answering.

"Rest, for a while," he said. "Real rest, not the kind Darnell talks me into thinking is rest. Then, eventually, back to Iron Harbor. Someone new, at some point. Darnell already said as much."

"You ready for that already," Lila said. "Someone new."

"Not yet," Zed said. "Not today. But eventually, yeah. That's just what this is now. What I do."

Lila leaned against him carefully, mindful of the ribs still healing beneath his shirt.

"Thirteen and zero," she said quietly, more to herself than to him.

"Thirteen and zero," Zed agreed.

"The parking lot feels very far away," she said.

Zed sat with that for a moment, looking at nothing in particular, the way he sometimes still did when that specific memory surfaced uninvited.

"It does," he said. "Further every year. But it's still there. It's part of how I got to the couch, and the ring, and everything after."

Lila didn't say anything else. She didn't need to. She simply stayed where she was, and Zed stayed where he was, and for a while that was enough no camp, no whiteboard, no six o'clock Tuesday waiting on the other side of sleep. Just the apartment, and the quiet, and the ordinary evening of a man who had built something real, one Tuesday at a time.