They would swear it was talent, as if he’d been born with choreography stitched into his bones and rhythm threaded through his veins. They’d slow his fight footage down, frame by frame, searching for the trick: the way his hips turned a fraction earlier, the way his eyes read a shoulder twitch like a shouted warning. They missed the nights he bled on studio floors, repeating the same spin until his vision blurred and the room tilted.
In the ring, the past never left him. The piano’s steady pulse lived in his footwork; the discipline of barre work held his guard in place when panic clawed at his throat. Where others swung to survive, he moved to express. Victory was never the point. The point was proving that the softest parts of him—grace, patience, obsession—could be sharpened into something unbreakable, and still remain his.
