There had always been a kind of ritual in the lead up to that first bell. In his solitude, Gladio rebuilt himself on a foundation of hate. He shed useless notions like honor and pride and cultivated in himself the viciousness of a starving animal, one that would taste blood on his teeth or die trying. In the absence of anything to fight for he fought to make them all hurt. To make them cry and bleed and beg, because that was the only shred of victory he could claim for himself. His father was dead, Noct was gone, and after long years at the mercy of Gorgon even Lucis itself seemed more and more like a dreamworld conjured up by his sleep-deprived mind in a desperate bid to stay sane. Maybe there never was a Lucis, never an Insomnia, never a King to die for. He was always here, in the dark and the cold, a creature of violence. Here to give the pigs their blood, their show. There was nobody around to be ashamed of him but himself.

Then Ignis found him in hell, and the ritual fell to pieces.

Gladio stood barefoot at ringside and couldn't feel his toes. The crowd filled in behind the bars encircling the ring, filthy and dead-eyed. The air in the arena was thick with the sour smell of unwashed bodies and diseased teeth, and of iron. The ubiquitous stench of Gorgon concentrated and magnified. Their heckling bounced off the high ceilings in an indecipherable cacophony. Profanity and bloodlust. It condensed on the crisscrossing pipes and fell one drop at a time onto the canvas and the cold ringside concrete. When Gladio looked up at the VIP seats on the topmost level overlooking the ring, he saw a dying incandescent light and a row of empty chairs. The Warden and his friends hadn't yet arrived.

It had been a long while since Gladio opened a card. He tried not to think about it, to count back the fights. When Ignis let slip the question he never meant to ask aloud, Gladio only grunted in response. He couldn't remember them all, anyway. Black holes punched in the fabric of his memory. Not fuzzy or faint. Just gone. Somewhere in the mass of people was Rurik, grinning his shit-eating grin. Gladio tried to grasp at that flare of hate, but it slipped through his fingers as Ignis wove the wrap between them.
The only thing he had in his reach was a vestigial coil of fear winding its way around his insides.

He watched Ignis, the blind man's deft fingers encasing his hands in a shell of gauze and tape. The specter of death was no longer the shield he carried into the ring. Now it dangled like a blade over his neck. As long as Iggy was still stuck in this place, death was no longer an option.

The announcer stepped between the sagging ropes. Red LEDs burned beside the camera lenses trained on the center of the ring. Gladio flexed his fingers once Ignis finished with the wraps, clenched his right fist, and tapped his knuckles into his left palm.

"It'll be the right eyebrow first," Gladio muttered. He could feel the knot of scar tissue sitting over the bone. "Thing splits open if somebody looks at it wrong."

The announcer's carnival barker voice came in over the loudspeakers, cutting through the din of the crowd. The Warden and his cronies filed in. The adrenaline hit and ran a current through Gladio's nerves. The words sailed past, fragments of an introduction he'd heard too many times before.

Rurik's hungry new dog climbed into the ring and vaulted over the top rope, beating his chest. He was shorter than Gladio by a few inches, with wiry muscles and quick feet. One arm bore a sleeve of prison tattoos, their edges gone fuzzy, the makeshift ink already beginning to fade. The announcer introduced him as Murdock, convicted on three counts of murder and six counts of assault. Five-and-oh in the ring. Murdock bared his teeth and dragged his thumb across his throat.

Gladio spat on the floor, clapped Ignis on the shoulder, and climbed up onto the ring apron. The announcer spun on his heel and gestured with an open hand at Gladio, as though the showmanship mattered. As though anyone here cared about the theatrics before the bell. He called out Gladio's sentence.

"...eight counts of murder..."

And Gladio grimaced and stepped over the top rope. Something in his right hip clicked like a stuck hinge. Nothing new. He watched his opponent leering at him from the opposite side of the ring, Murdock with the same empty eyes as so many of Gorgon's inmates. Hollowed out of life, of ambition, of hope, replaced by the one thing that meant anything in this place. Bloodlust. The only thing to look forward to was caving some bastard's face in while a crowd of other bastards chanted for more. Gladio didn't hazard a glance back at Ignis. The answer to Specs' question, straight from the official source, came echoing through the speakers.

"...with a Gorgon record of forty-two wins and thirteen losses..."

Gladio was long past caring about records. Every fight blended into the next. A blur of blood and bone, flying plumes of spit and teeth. Every fight the same, he supposed, except this one. Something fluttered in his stomach. He didn't fear Murdock, but he didn't have the luxury of not worrying anymore. He needed to make it to the next fight tonight. He needed to make it through the next fight. He needed to make it to the morning, to back Ignis up in the chow hall and in the yard, and he needed to make it to the day after, and he needed to get Ignis out of here...

And he needed to focus on now.

Gladio rolled his shoulders to loosen the ever present stiffness in his upper body and paced back and forth in his corner, gripping his toes into the canvas with every step. The canvas was old and slick with the accumulated grime of decades of fights, spotted with rust-dark stains of old blood. The plywood beneath creaked. The announcer stepped out of the ring. The referee eschewed the formality of explaining the rules because there weren't any to explain.

Then the bell rang.

There was no feeling out, no finding range. Murdock barrelled forward and fought like a bull, he and Gladio trading punches in the pocket. A mist of sweat and spit flying with every connecting blow. Murdock clipped Gladio with an overhand and his knuckle split the skin open over Gladio's right eyebrow. The blood flowed freely, a warm red river of it following the contour of his eye socket, down over his cheek. The crowd erupted at the first sight of blood, but the sound of them dimmed to nothing. The prison itself melted away into some vague darkness at the edges of his vision. It was just him and Murdock. Him and that stupid, thuggish grin.

Gladio squinted against the stinging in his eye and blinked the blood away. Murdock circled to Gladio's right, two shuffled steps, weight lifted for the third, sliding rightward by inches-- Knuckle met bone with a sound like a gunshot. Gladio caught him with a thunderous rear hook. Those hollow, bloodthirsty eyes went glassy. Murdock's knees wobbled and he staggered, rubber-legged, to the left. Gladio hunted him, cracked a straight left through Murdock's weak guard. His nose caved in like cheap drywall and blood cascaded down over his mouth. Murdock's hands dropped. Gladio slammed an uppercut through his chin and a tooth went flying out of the ring as his head snapped backwards. His limbs turned to jelly, like his strings were cut, and Murdock fell to the mat.

He was out. Gladio understood this, distantly. The fight was over by any metric except Gorgon's, and four years within its walls did nothing if not condition Gladio to brutality.

He descended upon Murdock's limp body and slammed his fist into the defenseless man's skull again and again, to the delight of the crowd and of the Warden and of the gangsters watching with money riding on his victories. He broke Murdock's jaw and he shattered both of his eye sockets and he coated his bright white hand wraps in a thick layer of blood until the referee decided that was enough and pulled Gladio away.

There was a moment's hesitation before Gladio's senses returned to him, a half step and a twitch of the shoulder and an instinct to dive back in and finish the job.

Finish. Now who's metric was that?

Gladio walked back to the corner while the announcer verbalized the result to which everyone had just bore witness and Murdock's corner dragged his body out of the ring. Murdock was done, but Gladio's night was far from over.

-----
Ignis Scientia

Gladio sat down on the stool in the corner and stared past Ignis’ shoulder. His fingers curled reflexively around the bottle of water and the condensation mingled with the sweat soaking into his hand wraps. The ring announcer swept one of Murdock’s teeth out of the ring with his shoe while the cornermen hauled Murdock’s limp body out of sight with all the urgency of overworked garbagemen. The adrenaline hadn’t faded and he didn’t notice the way he bounced his heel while Ignis worked on the cut over his eye. He didn’t notice much of anything; not the sound of the crowd, or the sweat beading on his face, or the welts where Murdock had landed a good shot or two. All the aches and pains would wait for him after the final bell.

For a moment he was elsewhere. The world receded from the scope of his awareness and he was staring through the blur of dull colors into nothing, into a moment that stretched through time like a smear of glue across a sheet of paper and where every breath he took spanned a thousand years. The sharp sting as Ignis pressed the swab into the cut over his eye pierced the haze of his mind and reality snapped back like a rubber band. The damp filth of the prison. The jackhammer in his chest. He lifted the water bottle and filled his mouth, swished it around between his aching teeth, spat it out onto the canvas beside him. Ignis seemed to be grasping the gravity of the situation, if he hadn’t already. Gladio thought a moment before responding. Now wasn’t the time to make it worse.

“More or less,” he replied tonelessly, and took a drink.

The announcer leaned over the ropes and spoke to somebody out of Gladio’s line of sight. Nodding, grinning, mouthing words Gladio couldn't read on his lips. He stepped back towards the center of the ring, thumbing a switch on the microphone. Two men in fighting gear climbed on to the ring apron and stepped through the ropes. The lean builds of Gorgon oldtimers with the muscle of Rurik's well-fed inner circle. One half a head taller than the other, near enough to Gladio's height. They both eyed him up, cold stares carrying a deep rooted malice.

“What the hell is this…” Gladio hissed through his teeth. The anger rose like a column of fire up his spine.

The announcer quieted the crowd and gleefully declared the next fight to be a ‘special exhibition’ and through the gap between the canvas and the bottom rope Gladio could see Rurik’s smug face. He wanted nothing more than to rip it off the bastard's skull.

Gladio, the announcer bellowed in his carnival barker voice, will take on Cell Block D’s finest - with combined charges of fourteen murders, twenty-two assaults, and eight robberies, and a combined Gorgon record of twenty-three wins, eleven losses - Vicks and Wedge!

He agreed to two fights. That much was true. But they never agreed on the number of opponents.

A low growl resonated deep in Gladio's chest.

“That son of a bitch.”

The referee approached the corner to clear Ignis out of the ring and Gladio rose from the stool, muttering just loud enough for Ignis to hear: “Listen, Iggy, the second this fight is over, be ready to haul ass out of here, alright?”

-----
Ignis Scientia

The cameras loved drama.

They swiveled on their tripods and focused in on Ignis getting unceremoniously dragged from the ring, on Gladio bellowing for the ringside guards to get their 'goddamn hands off him'. Warden Demichev and his guests watched the proceedings with mild amusement, discussing bets in low voices, and drank expensive alcohol from ornate glasses. Demichev spit the shells of sunflower seeds between the bars of his private box seat.

The bell rang.

Vicks and Wedge closed on Gladio at angles with the low guards of a couple of headhunters. He circled out and kept distance. Had to. If they flanked him he was done for, and so the opening minute of the fight might well have been a dance. Shuffling feet, the slip of callused soles on dirty canvas, the rattle and bounce of the plywood. The two worked in tandem to press him into a corner, but Gladio ducked under a rangy jab and circled out again. He stepped on a wet patch of Murdock's blood. The crowd murmured their collective discontent. A dissonant sound punctuated by heckling. They wanted blood and it didn't matter whose. Whatever goodwill Gladio had earned with his destruction of Murdock lasted only as long as he continued to destroy. Survival wasn't worth the spit on the floor.

"F---ing KILL him!" someone deep in the mass of bodies shouted.

Wedge stepped wide to cut Gladio off and before he could pivot, Vicks closed in with a long hook. Gladio covered high and took it on the arm but Wedge immediately dug his knuckles into Gladio's exposed body. He felt the impact all the way through to his spine, nausea in its wake. He swung back, missed. Vicks chopped at the meat of his thigh with a stiff leg kick and Gladio's knee buckled. The ache spread across the whole of Gladio's muscle like floodwaters. He stumbled backwards until the ropes chafed at his back. Vicks and Wedge wouldn't give him a second to breathe.

Vicks rattled his skull with a right cross. The deep cut on his eyebrow reopened and the warm trickle of blood ran down the contours of his face. He tasted the iron, and the salt of his own sweat. When he moved to parry the followup, Wedge again hammered the body, and the followup connected anyway. The impact was sharp and bright and he felt numb behind the eyes. His vision went dim at the edges, spotted with white stars. Gladio brought his forearms up in a pillar guard, a desperate shell. Vicks hammered him. Wedge dug at the body with shovelhooks. Gladio crunched down, clipping a fist with his elbow. Sweat and blood stung his eyes.

If he didn't move now he was dead.

Gladio peered through the inch gap in his guard. Vicks' weight dropped, shoulder began to turn. Gladio dropped his hands to guard his midsection and threw himself back against the ropes until they ran out of slack. Vicks' fist went wide and Wedge's followup bounced off his forearm. Gladio weaved under Vicks' arm and slipped out of their trap, circling out into the open canvas. He threw a parting lead hook to the back of Vicks' skull that stumbled the man.

For a moment, Gladio was back in a brightly lit gymnasium somewhere in Insomnia, on clean mats that smelled like rubber and bleach. There was no reason to panic. Gladio inhaled deeply until his head cleared, until the ring and the two men trying to take his head off came into full focus, until his heart no longer felt like it was going to crack his ribcage from the inside. Sweat beaded on his skin. He marched forward and went to work.

He fed Vicks a quick one-two, cartilage crunching under his knuckles, pausing to kick Wedge in the stomach before the latter could close in and flank him. He found their rhythm and their range, and he exploited it until Vicks' face was a mottled mess of swelling and bruising and blood, his eyes ballooned up, the skin taut and shiny under the halogen light. The canvas was dotted with a fine spray of blood and sweat and spit. He had Vicks near to unconsciousness when Wedge closed in once again. Gladio threw a kick, but Wedge caught it and drove an elbow into his knee. Something snapped. There was a bright, burning burst of pain and he couldn't bite back the sudden cry in his throat.

Bad move. They smelled blood, now.

Vicks staggered up behind Gladio and grabbed his arms behind his back. Gladio struggled against the grip like an animal caught in a trap. Wedge dropped Gladio's hobbled leg and started laying into him with punches, whipcrack strikes audible over the frenzied braying of the crowd. His lip split open. His nose was a fountain of blood. The darkness came seeping into his vision again like a slow oil spill. He saw Ignis at ringside, the dim shape of him. Another hook rattled his brain in his skull. What would they do to Ignis if they knocked him out here? A left straight snapped his head back. His eye was swelling shut. Iggy'd be a sitting duck if he fell now. He ate a cross and stars burst in his eyes. He slumped in Vicks' grip, gobbets of blood leaking from his nose and mouth, spattering on the canvas at his feet. The crowd demanded an execution.

Gladio refused to lay his head beneath the blade. He planted his one good leg, threw his weight forward, then shot back and up and drove his skull into Vicks' chin. The grip on his arms slackened and in that split second he freed himself, grabbed Vicks by the arm, and threw him over his shoulder. As Vicks turned end over end in the air his heel came down and struck Wedge on the crown. Both men hit the canvas. Gladio, too, followed them to the mat, losing his balance on his one good leg. He landed with a forearm across Vicks' brow, the entirety of his bodyweight behind it. Wedge started to scramble back to his feet. Vicks didn't move.

A deep burn developed in Gladio's left shoulder as he pushed himself to his feet. His right leg was useless, the knee ablaze with pain. Blood coated his face in a crimson mask, soaked his beard, smeared across his chest and his arms. The ring looked like the scene of a murder. It might well be, when all was said and done.

Gladio closed the distance between himself and Wedge at a limp. With one arm and one leg there was no place for finesse or technique. He threw right hands to take Wedge's head off. Like a drunk in a bar fight, he had a puncher's chance and he took it. They traded punches. A looping hook landed on Wedge's jaw first, then another, then an uppercut, again and again, never giving Wedge a second to recover. It was an overhand that finally dropped him, and as Wedge's head bounced off the canvas and the crowd erupted, Gladio stumbled over to the ropes. The only way he could stay standing was to loop his arm around the top rope. A deep red trail marked his path around the canvas.

He didn't hear the referee call the fight, or the bell, or the announcer. All he heard was the blood pounding in his ears, his own ragged breathing. He wiped the blood out of his eyes and tried to find Ignis at ringside. He didn't see Rurik step through the ropes. He didn't hear the mocking applause, or Rurik's sarcastic praise. When he finally noticed movement out of the corner of his eye it was too late.

Gladio turned his head enough to see the flash of a foot before Rurik's hook kick landed with a sickening crack against his skull. The lights went out. Gladio instantly went limp and slumped to the canvas. His head bounced off the mat, and his blood splattered like spilled paint.

-----
Ignis Scientia

The floor of the cell was ice against the throbbing ache in his skull. Consciousness seeped into his mind like an oozing wound and with that awareness of the world around him came awareness of the pain consuming every inch of his body. Something crawled across his hand with a dozen chitinous legs. He didn't move. He opened his eyes through the resistance of a congealed crust on his eyelids and even the dim light of the cell was a knife in his brain. He grimaced and exhaled a feeble grunt. He tasted iron in his mouth.

Gladio's mind was a murky haze and it held no answers for why he was on the floor of the cell, why his skull felt caved in, why there was fire running the length of his nerves. It hurt too much to ask the questions in the first place. He grasped blindly for something and his hand found the metal frame of the bunks. He pulled himself up by inches, skin scraping over the layer of grit and grime coating the stone. A wave of nausea hit him as soon as he lifted his head from the floor. He settled for sitting vaguely upright. Someone had replaced all the cartilage in his right knee with acid.

Too long ago to think about, Gladio would wake from the nothing space of unconsciousness and before his senses returned to him he would search the darkened cell for Noct. In the depths of the Hole, shivering and delirious, he would call out for his father.

He did neither of those things anymore, because he could not forget where he was. Nothing existed beyond Gorgon's walls.

"Iggy," he grunted. His bleary eyes searched out the blue-grey shape of his friend in the shadows of their cell. His speech was a hair above mumbling. "The hell happened?"

-----
Ignis Scientia