Chapter Text

The first time Fareeha enters the ring, she loses. Badly. A lion gets a good swipe at her, tosses her several feet. She’s rendered a slumped pile in the dirt. Unmoving, and leaving the crowd unmoved, she is removed by bulky slabs of muscle with studded leather masks, tossed unceremoniously down the hallway toward the gladiator barracks as the next round of hopefuls march into the maw of the ludus. (She learns, later, that this is the point. That beastiarii are not usually meant to survive their encounters. This is why she was given no weapon. She still winces at the cruelty.)

Angela almost skips her.

She’s got a teenage boy draped over her shoulder, shivering and stumbling with her, eyes an unfocused stare. The stump where his hand used to be presses against his sternum like his missing fingers are searching for his heartbeat to assure himself he is still alive. She curses herself even as she yells for one of the brutes to come back, to pick up the limp body she herself has stepped over.

Cassius grunts even as he turns, and again when he crouches down to inspect the battered heap of limbs bleeding into the gravel. “C’mon, doc, I got better shit to do’n this—”

“She’s in the fucking way, idiot. Somebody’s gonna trip over her and add an unnecessarily broken bone to my list of shit to do today and then I’m gonna come thump that big empty head of yours about it. Get her up and get her into a bed, at least.”

Looking at her, half an hour later, still stubbornly clinging to life despite the three gashes in her side (nasty, ragged, lethal looking wound it was, and Angela knows for a fact just how filthy those claws are), Angela grimaces. It’s a waste. It’s a waste of resources to try and patch her up now. Of linens and of salves and of my time. I’m not a fucking miracle worker.

And so, Angela saves her life.