Chương 42: Domrek's Past

The first thing Domrek noticed was that Kaito had stopped looking back at the ruins. He'd been looking back every thirty seconds since they cleared the perimeter, the way people looked at things they needed to make sure were still behind them. Now he wasn't. He was looking at the road ahead, or at nothing, which was a different thing but looked the same. Domrek had been about to start twice since they left the ruins. Both times he'd decided it wasn't the right moment. He was patient about moments.

Fifteen years in the pits had given him a thorough education in when to press and when to wait. He decided this was the moment.

'I was born in the pits,' he said.

'Not the commercial circuit. The real ones. The kind your city pretends don't exist until they need to pretend they've always been illegal.' Kaito didn't say anything. He walked and listened, which was what Domrek had hoped he'd do.

'My mother fought in them. I don't know much about my father. In the pits, you don't always know, and the people who do know don't always tell you, and after a while you stop asking because the answer doesn't change the situation.' He kept his eyes on the road. The first sun was gone and the second was low and they needed to move if they were going to make the cart.

'I was eight when they sold me.' He let that sit for a moment. Not for effect — because it was a fact that had its own weight and he'd learned not to rush past it the way people sometimes rushed past uncomfortable things.

'The reasoning was practical. Children cost resources to raise. I was big enough to fight, so I was worth more sold than kept. They got a fair price for me and I went south, to a different set of pits, run by different people.' He paused.

'They weren't worse or better. They were the same. Different faces, same structure. The structure is the structure.' Kaito said, 'How old were you when you first fought.'

'Eight. Some pits don't do that. Mine did.' He didn't say it with bitterness — just as a fact about the specific pits he'd been in and the specific policies they'd operated under.

'The fights were short. At that age you're not a proper draw yet. You're a preliminary act, something to warm the audience. By the time I was twelve I was a draw.' He noticed that Kaito hadn't asked the question most people asked at this point, which was some version of how did you survive it. Kaito had spent time in the pits with Domrek and he'd seen enough of how Domrek moved and thought to understand that surviving wasn't the interesting question. The interesting question was what you did with what you became.

'I was strategic,' Domrek said.

'From early on. I paid attention to what the pit operators wanted from me and I figured out how to give them enough to stay valuable and hold back enough to stay safe.' He walked for a moment.

'Pit operators don't want you to be too good. If you're too good, every match is a foregone conclusion and the crowd stops caring. They want you to be good enough to win regularly, exciting enough to keep people invested, and controllable enough that you don't become a problem.' A pause.

'I learned how to be exactly that. For fifteen years, I was exactly that.' He noticed that Kaito was listening the way he listened to things that mattered. Not the polite listening people did when they were waiting to respond — something more like reading. Tracking. Domrek had noticed it in the pit when Kaito watched the Velk brothers. He noticed it now. Kaito filed information differently from most people. It went somewhere specific rather than just passing through. The cart stop was about four kilometers out.

He could see the waystation light ahead — a registered post with a lamp that the System kept burning through the night for travelers. It was useful.

'The money,' Domrek said.

'Some pits had systems where a fighter could earn a percentage of the gate on certain fights. Exhibition matches, special events. Not the regular fights — those the pit owned. But for the occasions where they wanted something special and the fighter had to perform beyond the usual parameters, there was sometimes a percentage.' He paused.

'I fought every special event I could find. For fifteen years. I saved every coin from every percentage. I kept the books in my head because writing things down in the pits was a way to have things taken.' This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

'How long did it take,' Kaito said.

'Fifteen years,' Domrek said.

'I was twenty-three when I walked out. The price they'd put on me had gone up over the years — I was worth more at twenty-three than I'd been at eight — but by twenty-three I had enough.' He walked for a moment.

'I paid it and I left.' He remembered that day. He remembered the pit master counting the money, which took longer than it should have, and the three fighters he'd considered friends watching from the corridor, and the door that opened onto a Solara street he'd only seen through a window.

'I expected to feel different,' he said.

'I'd been waiting fifteen years. I thought the day I walked out free would feel like something specific. Relief. Triumph. Something large.' He paused, not for effect this time but because he was finding the right words for something he'd only described to two or three people before.

'I was tired,' he said.

'That was what I felt. Tired in a way I'd been tired for fifteen years but hadn't let myself notice.' He walked.

'And the anger was still there. I'd been angry my whole life. You have to be angry to survive that kind of life — the anger is fuel, it's what gets you up when you don't want to get up, it keeps you moving when moving is terrible. I'd kept the anger very carefully. It was useful.' He looked at the waystation light, closer now.

'On the street outside the pits, on the first day I was free, I looked at the anger and I thought: you're trying to come with me. And I realized what that meant. If I took the anger with me — if I walked out of those pits and stayed angry at the people who'd built them and the people who'd run them and the customers who'd come to watch and everyone who'd made the structure that made the pits possible — I'd be carrying them. All of them. Every day. They'd be walking out with me.' Kaito was quiet.

'The anger wasn't wrong,' Domrek said.

'I want to be clear about that. The anger was completely right. Everything I was angry about was worth being angry about. The people who wronged me had wronged me and that's real and it stays real.' He glanced at Kaito.

'But the anger was costing me. Not them. Every hour I spent angry was an hour they'd taken from me after I'd already left. They didn't deserve that. They'd taken fifteen years. They didn't get more.' He stopped walking for a moment and looked at the second sun finishing its descent.

'It wasn't easy,' he said.

'I want to be clear about that too. I made the decision and the anger didn't leave. It came back the next day and the day after that. For months I'd wake up angry about something specific — a face, a particular fight, the price they'd put on me at eight — and I'd have to choose again. Not to feed it. Not to let it take up the morning.' He paused.

'Eventually it stopped coming back as often. Then not at all. But it was a choice I made probably two hundred times before it stuck.' He started walking again.

'So I decided I wouldn't be angry anymore,' he said.

'Not because it wasn't justified. Because the cost was mine and I decided I wasn't paying it.' He started walking again.

'That's when I figured out what I actually wanted to do,' he said.

'Once the anger wasn't using up the space. I wanted to go back and get the people still in there. Not immediately — I wasn't in a position to do anything immediately. But eventually. One by one, when I had the money.' He paused.

'That's been the project since. Fifteen years of earning and spending on that specific thing.'

'If I can stand in front of it,' Kaito said, 'no one else has to be afraid.' Domrek looked at him.

'I said that,' he said.

'When we were at the arena. Before the two-on-two.' Kaito kept walking.

'I didn't know what it meant then.'

'It's what I figured out,' Domrek said simply.

'When you're built the way I'm built and trained the way I'm trained, standing in front of things is what you do. The question is what you choose to stand in front of, and why.' He walked.

'I choose the things that matter. The people who shouldn't have to stand in front of it themselves.' They reached the waystation. The cart that had brought them east was there — the carter had waited, as Domrek had paid him to wait. He was asleep in the driver's box with his coat over his face and didn't stir when they climbed into the back. Domrek settled against the cart's side. Kaito sat across from him in the dark.

'You told me that,' Kaito said, after a while, 'because of today.'

'I told you that,' Domrek said, 'because you're carrying something from today that's going to become a problem if you don't figure out what to do with it.' He was direct. He was always direct.

'You found out the world required you to exist. That's a large thing to carry. You can carry it angry — angry that you didn't know, angry at whoever arranged it, angry that no one asked you. Or you can carry it differently.' He paused.

'I don't know which is right for you. I'm not saying don't be angry. I'm saying figure out what the anger costs before you decide to keep paying it.' Kaito didn't answer. He looked at the dark going past the cart. Domrek closed his eyes. He'd said what he had to say.

'There's a dungeon,' he said, before he fell asleep.

'About a day from here. The Howling Dark. B-Rank. Good reward for a clear, and it doesn't require registration to enter. We need the money.' He paused.

'If you're not too tired.'

'I'm not too tired,' Kaito said.

'Good.' Domrek was already mostly asleep.

'We'll go tomorrow.'