Chapter 36
Chapter Thirty-Six
Sulla
Over the next three weeks, the episodes continued.
The bathroom scene with its mysterious eighteen-minute blackout that had everyone at the sanctuary teasing me mercilessly.
Then the rock climbing scene where, again, the whole room gasps when my hand slips and I’m dangling while Reid holds me secure.
The nightmare episode where Reid grounded me the same way I’d grounded Trevor, and Diana observed that I’d let someone help me, something the old Sulla would never have done.
The admission scene where I told Reid I wasn’t a good man, and Cassius quietly noted that at least I’d tried to tell her something, even if it wasn’t enough.
Each week, more people showed up to watch. The empty chairs around me gradually filled. Not everyone, and not sitting close, but present. Witnessing.
We all knew what was coming in week ten. The network teased it mercilessly.
The documentary episode.
Episode Ten
I stand outside the common room for a long time before going in.
Through the windows, I can see everyone gathering.
No empty chairs tonight. They all know what tonight’s episode contains.
The promotional clips have been running all week, glimpses of the sanctuary, interview footage, the narrator’s voice promising “the truth about Sulla’s past.” Even Draco and Charity made the trip from New York.
I see them through the window, Draco’s arm around his wife, both of them settling into chairs near the front. They didn’t have to come. But they did.
I could leave. Walk back to my cabin. No one would blame me for not watching this.
But I’m trying to be different. Trying to face things instead of running. And if I’m asking these people to see me differently, I owe them my presence for this.
So I walk in.
The room goes quiet when I enter. Everyone watching me. I make my way to my usual seat at the back. Laura catches my eye and raises an eyebrow. You sure? I nod.
The episode begins.
No Scottish Highlands this time. No survival challenges.
Instead, the screen fills with aerial footage of this place, Second Chance Sanctuary.
The gardens I walk every morning. The main building where Laura’s office sits.
Flavius’s healing pavilion. The dining hall where I’ve eaten alone for months.
Varro shifts beside me. “Well. This is going to be interesting.”
The narrator’s voice is clinical, detached. “Before Sulla became a contestant on Elite Crucible, he lived here at Second Chance Sanctuary in southern Missouri—a place for Romans frozen in time, trying to build new lives in the modern world.”
More footage. The grounds. The cabins. People I know walking paths, tending gardens, living their lives.
Then the interviews begin.
Thrax appears on screen first, his face serious and guarded.
“Sulla was the ludus master. That means he controlled everything—training, discipline, punishment. He had absolute power over us.” The words are in Latin with subtitles below.
Present-day Thrax, sitting not ten feet away, is staring at his own face on screen.
The narrator continues. “The role of ludus master in ancient Rome was to prepare gladiators for the arena. This often involved brutal training methods, physical punishment, and psychological control designed to break men into weapons.”
Varro’s interview follows. “He was cruel. Efficient. Made us fear him because fear and pain were the tools he knew how to use. That was his job, and he was very good at it.”
Quintus appears next, his face harder than I’ve seen it in months.
“Fear-based training means you beat someone until they’re more afraid of you than death.
You break bones, dislocate joints, make examples out of anyone who hesitates.
Sulla excelled at it. He’d whip you bloody in front of everyone, then make you fight the next day with your back still raw.
You learned fast, or you learned broken. ”
Historical context follows: footage of ancient amphitheater ruins, scholarly commentary about gladiator training, animated diagrams showing the ludus hierarchy. All clinical. All factual. All damning.
Then Cassius.
His face fills the screen. Those gentle eyes that somehow still hold kindness despite everything.
“Sulla damaged my brain.. I questioned an order and he smashed a clay jar against my head.” His voice is matter-of-fact, but the pain underneath is unmistakable.
“I still don’t remember all of my life before the ice.
Barely remember my family, my childhood, the person I was.
Every day I wake up not knowing everything of who I used to be. That’s Sulla’s legacy.”
Beside me, Cassius is watching himself on screen. I can’t look at him. Can’t breathe.
The documentary continues. Victor. Others whose names blur together. All saying variations of the same thing—cruel, brutal, terrifying.
Draco appears on screen. “He broke my jaw once for talking back. Another time, dislocated my shoulder for a training mistake and made me fight with it hanging wrong. That’s how he taught, through pain and fear. You didn’t question Sulla. You survived him.”
From the front row, present-day Draco says dryly, “I forgot how handsome I look on camera.”
A few nervous laughs. Charity elbows him. But the tension breaks slightly.
Then the footage shifts to me. I don’t know where they got it—months before I applied to the show, apparently, because I didn’t know these moments were being filmed.
Me eating alone while others laugh together at different tables.
Walking the grounds by myself. Sitting isolated during a group session, physically present but emotionally distant.
Standing at the edge of a gathering, watching families interact while my face remains completely empty.
The narrator’s voice, “Sulla lives at Second Chance Sanctuary, but he is not part of the community. The men he brutalized for decades cannot forgive him. He exists on the margins of a place called ‘second chance’ because some sins are too great to absolve.”
It’s true. All of it. The isolation, the ostracism, the impossibility of belonging when your past defines every interaction.
The documentary cuts back to show footage, jumping to Episode Five.
Reid’s confessional, bright-eyed and hopeful.
“Sulla is complicated. Guarded. But I’m starting to think there’s more to him than he shows.
I saw him with Trevor, the way he helped.
I saw how hard he works at these challenges. There’s something deeper there.”
If only she’d known.
More footage of us together. Working in sync. The body heat scene. The rope bridge. Me looking at her like she hung the stars while she had no idea what I was.
The narrator, “Reid Donahue had no idea who her partner truly was. And Sulla had no intention of telling her.”
My own confessional appears, recorded back in week three. “Some things are better left buried.”
The screen fades to black. White text appears: NEXT WEEK: THE TRUTH COMES OUT.
Credits roll.
The common room is silent. No one moves. No one speaks. The weight of what we just watched presses down on all of us.
Finally I stand. “I’m going for a walk.”
“Sulla—” Laura starts.
“I need air.”
I’m out the door before anyone can argue. Outside, the night is cool and clear, stars overhead, indifferent to human pain. I walk without destination, just movement, trying to outpace the image of my own face on screen—empty, isolated, alone.
I end up at the bench outside my cabin. Sit. Staring at nothing.
Footsteps approach after maybe ten minutes. I don’t look over. Already know who it is by the rhythm of the steps.
Cassius sits beside me. We’re quiet for a long moment, both looking out at the dark trees.
“That documentary was true,” he finally says. “You did give me brain damage. You were cruel. I can’t remember much of my life before the ice because of you.”
“I know.”
“But it was also incomplete.” I look at him.
“It didn’t show you helping Trevor through panic,” he continues, his voice thoughtful rather than accusing.
“Didn’t show you standing witness for that woman when she handled Blake herself.
Didn’t show you running across a failing bridge to save Reid.
” He turns to face me. “It showed what you were. Not what you’re becoming. ”
“Cassius, that doesn’t undo—”
“No. It doesn’t. Nothing undoes it.” His voice is firm. “I nod, throat tight.
“But you’re different now,” he says quietly.
“Diana saw it first. Then I started seeing it. Everyone watching that show has seen it.” He pauses, choosing his words carefully.
“When you helped Trevor, that wasn’t performance.
When you ran across that bridge for Reid, that wasn’t strategy.
Those were real choices. Better choices. ”
“I’m trying,” I manage.
“I know. We can all see that you’re trying.” He’s quiet for another moment. “I’m not saying I forgive you. I don’t know if I can. The damage is too deep, too permanent. But I’m saying I see you trying to be different. And that matters.”
“Does it?”
“Yes.” Simple. Certain. “Because the Sulla I knew wouldn’t have tried.
Wouldn’t have cared enough to try. The fact that you do care now, that’s different.
That’s new.” He stands, puts a hand on my shoulder briefly.
“Next week is going to be hard. Watching Reid find out, watching everything fall apart. But you don’t have to watch it alone. ”
He walks back toward the main buildings, leaving me sitting in the darkness.
I sit here for a long time, processing his words. Not forgiveness, he was clear about that. But acknowledgment. Recognition that change is real, even if it can’t undo the past.
It’s more than I deserve.
And somehow, it’s everything.
The air changes.
I’ve felt presences before—in the arena, in the dark hours before a fight, in the silence after.
The particular quality of being watched by something that isn’t human.
But this is different. This is warmth gathering from nowhere, the night going very still, the sound of the trees fading until there’s nothing but silence and a light that has no source.
I go completely still on the bench.
She appears at the edge of my vision. Golden robes that move without wind.
A face I can’t look at directly—not because it’s terrible, but because it’s too much, the way you can’t look straight at the sun.
I’ve seen her rendered in stone and bronze a hundred times.
I was there at Ostia when the priestess spoke her name over the libation, and something moved through the ritual that wasn’t the priestess.
But I’ve never seen her. Not like this. Not here, three feet away, on a bench outside my cabin in Missouri.
I should speak. Can’t.
“Sulla.” Her voice comes from everywhere and nowhere at once—through the air, through the ground, through my sternum. “Son of Rome.”
My mouth is dry. A lifetime of believing, and now she’s standing in front of me and I have no words. No offering. Nothing.
“I—” I stop. Start again. “I don’t know what to say to you.”
Something in her shifts—not quite a smile, but close. “Honesty is a fine beginning.”
I look at the ground. The grass. The ordinary Missouri dirt. “I’ve called your name,” I say finally. “For a lifetime I’ve called your name and you never…” I stop. That’s not fair and I know it. “I’m sorry. That’s not—”
“You wanted to know why I kept you under the ice.”
I look up at that. She’s closer than she was, though I didn’t see her move.
“Yes,” I say. “I’ve wondered. All of us have wondered. But me especially, because—” The rest of it is harder to say. “Because I didn’t deserve it. The others did. I didn’t.”
“No,” she agrees. “By any ordinary measure, you didn’t.”
The bluntness of it hits me. “Then why?”
She’s quiet in the way that makes the whole night feel like it’s holding its breath.
“Because the wheel doesn’t turn backward,” she says finally.
“What you did is permanent. You stole years from Cassius—years of not knowing who he was, where he came from, what he'd lost. That time cannot be given back. But the question I asked was not whether you deserved another life.” A pause.
“The question was whether you would use one.”
I can’t speak.
“You watched yourself on that screen tonight,” she says. “All of it. Reminder of the whip. The jar. The man eating alone at the edge of everything he destroyed. And you didn’t leave.”
“I almost did.”
“But you didn’t.” The warmth of her attention is almost unbearable—not judgment, something more complete than judgment. Being seen entirely, without mercy or softness, and found something other than worthless. “That’s something, Sulla. Monsters don’t stay to watch.”
Her voice stays firm as she adds, “You will carry that for the rest of your life. But carrying it honestly is not the same as being defined by it. You’ve spent two years learning the difference. Don’t forget it tonight.”
The warmth at the edge of my shoulder, not quite a touch. The closest thing to a hand I think she can manage.
“Keep turning,” she says. “Not for anyone else. Not for anything you hope to earn or win back. For yourself. Because you are worth the turning—not because of what you were, but because of what you’re choosing to be.”
“I don’t know if I believe that.”
“You don’t have to believe it yet. You just have to keep moving anyway.” She steps back, or the light shifts, or the night changes. She’s fading. “I kept you under the ice for a reason, Sulla of the ludus. Don’t waste it.”
The warmth withdraws.
The air goes back to being just air. The trees resume their sound. The ordinary night reassembles itself around me.
I sit alone on the bench for a long time, looking at the stars, which are still indifferent and still present, thinking that maybe those two things are not as opposite as they seem.