Chapter 4: The Armor We Wear
The old seminar room smelled of dust and disuse, with an underlying note of lemon-scented cleaner that failed to conquer the past. Faded anatomical charts, vessels and nerves blooming like strange flowers, yellowed at the edges where they were pinned to corkboards. The chairs were a mismatched set, some with the tubular steel of the sixties, others with the molded plastic of the nineties. It felt like a forgotten classroom, which it was.
Roz took a seat at the back, near the door, placing her laptop and a fresh notebook on the desk. The ‘observer’ role was a cloak she wore tightly. She arrived early, but others filtered in soon after. A few younger players she recognized from the treatment room—Cam, a flanker with a perpetually worried brow; Euan, a massive prop who moved with surprising delicacy. They nodded at her, a mixture of respect and curiosity in their glances. Then Ally entered.
He came in with Davide, the Italian psychologist. Davide was all sharp angles and intense focus, his salt-and-pepper hair swept back, his gaze missing nothing. Ally was listening, but his eyes scanned the room and found hers immediately. The connection was a brief, quiet circuit. He gave a small, almost imperceptible nod. No smile. Today wasn’t for smiling.
He chose a seat in the middle of the room, not with his teammates, but not alone. He placed a simple Moleskine notebook on the desk, his pen parallel to it.
Davide took his place at the front, not standing behind the lecturer’s podium but leaning against the edge of the desk, crossing his arms. “Good afternoon,” he said, his English precise, coloured by a Roman inflection. “This is not a lecture. This is not therapy. It is a space. Think of it as a… neutral zone. Off the pitch. The rules are simple: listen. Speak if you wish. What is said here, stays here. The only report will be that we met. The content is yours.”
He let the silence hang. The hum of the old heating pipes grew loud.
“We will talk about many things. Pressure. Identity. The transition, eventually, to life after the game. But today, I want to start with something simple. Metaphor.” Davide pushed off the desk and began to walk slowly along the front row. “You are experts in the physical. You know about armour. The shoulder pad, the headguard, the mouthguard. Layers you put on to go into battle. They are visible. They have a purpose.”
He stopped, his eyes travelling across the faces before him. “But there is other armour. The kind you wear off the pitch. The kind you maybe wear in here, right now. The smile for the fans. The joke for the dressing room. The stoicism for the press. The… expected performance.” His gaze settled, not aggressively, but with pinpoint accuracy, on Ally. “This armour is often invisible. Even to the wearer. It becomes the skin. And the problem with armour is that it is heavy. It restricts circulation. After a while, you forget what it feels like to be touched without it.”
Roz saw Ally’s shoulders tighten. His hand, resting beside the notebook, curled slowly into a loose fist.
Cam, the flanker, spoke up, his voice hesitant. “Isn’t that just… being professional?”
“Professional is a behaviour,” Davide countered softly. “Armour is a defense. They look similar. They are not the same. One is a tool. The other is a cage.” He turned his attention back to the group. “I am interested in the cages. The ones built from expectation. From fear. From the idea that what you are on the field is all you are allowed to be.”
Euan shifted in his chair, the plastic creaking in protest. “Sounds a bit wanky, if I’m honest.”
A few nervous chuckles rippled through the room. Davide smiled, a thin, understanding curve of his lips. “Yes. It does. Vulnerability often does. It feels like weakness because you have been trained to see it as such. But to know your own armour, to choose when to wear it… that is a strategic strength. It is the difference between being trapped in a role, and playing a role.”
He was speaking to everyone, but his energy was directed, like a beam of cold light, at Ally. It wasn’t accusatory. It was excavational. Roz felt a prickle of professional alarm. This was too much, too soon. Hammy had vouched for Davide, but this felt like surgery without anaesthetic.
Ally hadn’t moved. He was staring at a fixed point on the scarred wooden floor. His breathing was controlled, too controlled. Roz recognized the pattern—the deliberate, measured inhale of someone trying to master a rising panic attack.
“Consider,” Davide said, his voice dropping to a conversational tone that somehow carried further, “the last time you did something, read something, enjoyed something, that had nothing to do with rugby. That you did not post about. That you did not use as part of the story of ‘Alistair the Rugby Player.’ That belonged only to you. How did it feel?”
The room was utterly still. The question hung, barbed and intimate.
Ally’s jaw worked. He blinked, slowly. Then he reached for his pen. He didn’t write. He just held it, his knuckles white. Roz saw the faint tremor in his fingers.
“It can feel… lonely,” Davide answered his own question, the word dropping into the silence like a stone. “Because that part of you is not shared. It has no audience. It exists without validation. And that is terrifying for a person whose worth is measured weekly by ninety thousand voices.”
Stop, Roz thought fiercely, her observer’s neutrality crumbling. You’re cornering him.
As if he’d heard her, Davide finally moved his gaze away, releasing the pressure. “This is just an introduction. A concept to sit with. Next week, we talk about practicalities. Managing media. Family dynamics. Lighter stuff.” He clapped his hands once, the sound sharp. “Thank you for your time.”
The spell broke. Chairs scraped. A collective, subdued exhalation filled the room. Conversations started, low and mumbled. Euan muttered to Cam, “Told you. Wanky.”
Roz slowly packed her laptop away, watching. Ally hadn’t moved. He sat, head slightly bowed, still gripping the pen. Davide was speaking to another player by the door, his intense focus elsewhere now.
She should leave. Her role was over. But her medical training screamed at her—elevated distress, visible physical tension, potential for dissociation. He was a participant in a welfare session, and he was in distress.
She stood and walked toward the front, as if heading for the exit, but slowed as she passed his desk. She stopped, pretending to adjust the strap of her bag.
“The bookmark,” she said softly, the words barely a breath directed at the floor between them. “That wasn’t lonely. It was shared.”
He flinched as if she’d touched him with a live wire. His head turned. His eyes, when they met hers, were a stormy, shattered blue. The charm was utterly gone. In its place was a raw, exposed nerve. The armour was off.
“It was a mistake,” he whispered, his voice ragged.
“No,” she said, with a certainty that surprised her. “It was data.”
A flicker of confusion, then understanding. She was speaking his language now. The language of assessment, of observation. It was the only safe dialect they had.
He looked down at his notebook. His free hand, the one not clutching the pen, lay flat on the open page. As she watched, his fingers curled inward, his nails digging into the paper. There was a soft, tearing sound. He was ripping the page, slowly, deliberately, from the spiral binding.
He didn’t look up. “Davide’s wrong. It’s not a cage. It’s a citadel. And it’s under siege.” He said it with a quiet, grim finality.
The torn page came free. He crumpled it in his fist, a tight, papery ball. Then he stood abruptly, the chair legs shrieking against the linoleum. He shoved the ball into his jacket pocket, gathered the rest of his things, and walked out without another word, moving past Davide with a stiff nod.
Roz was left standing by the empty desk. On the floor, where his chair had been, lay his pen. It had rolled from his grip. She bent and picked it up. It was warm.
Davide appeared beside her. “He is a complicated young man,” he said, following her gaze to the door where Ally had disappeared.
“That was aggressive,” Roz said, her tone carefully neutral.
“It was necessary. He is the most armoured of them all. And the most talented. The pressure within him will find a release. Better here, in words, than elsewhere.” Davide looked at her, his dark eyes knowing. “You are observant. You saw it.”
“I’m a medical student. It’s my job to see.”
“Of course.” He smiled again, that thin, analytical smile. “He trusts you. That is good. He needs anchors in the world outside the citadel.”
Roz didn’t answer. She tucked the warm pen into her own bag. An anchor. That’s what she had become. The thought was terrifying.
She walked out into the bright, cold afternoon, the stadium looming over her. The session had lasted an hour. It felt like a lifetime. Her phone buzzed in her pocket. A message from Hammy: My office. Now.
When she entered, he was staring out the window at the training pitch. “How was the touchy-feely session?”
“Intense.”
“Aye, Davide doesn’t believe in gentle warm-ups.” He turned, his expression unreadable. “I’ve just had the team neurologist on the phone. They’re fast-tracking the implementation of the new concussion protocols. Wants a presentation to the full coaching and medical staff next Friday. You’re leading the data portion.”
The world snapped back into clinical focus. “Next Friday? That’s—”
“Seven days. You’ll have to condense your review. Focus on the key recommendations for in-game assessment and the return-to-learn protocols for the academy lads.” He eyed her. “This is your chance, Roz. This is the real work. Not strapping ankles. This changes how they operate.”
It was everything she’d wanted. A professional pinnacle. “Thank you. I won’t let you down.”
“I know you won’t.” He paused. “How did MacLeod seem?”
The question was a trapdoor. She kept her voice flat. “Quiet. He participated.”
“Good.” Hammy sighed, a rare sound of weariness. “The board is all over this wellbeing push. Image-conscious. If he’s engaged, it gives the whole thing credibility. He’s not just a player to them anymore. He’s a… symbol.”
A symbol. An anchor. A citadel under siege. The weight of everyone’s expectations settled on her shoulders, a different kind of armour.
That night, the concussion data glowed on her screen, but her mind was elsewhere. She opened her bag and took out the pen. A simple black ballpoint, chewed lightly near the cap. She placed it beside T.H. White’s book on her bedside table.
Two objects. One a shared secret, a piece of his interior world. The other a discarded tool, evidence of a fracture.
She opened her email and began drafting the presentation structure for the coaching staff. The work was a lifeline. But in the quiet of her flat, she could still hear the soft, deliberate sound of paper tearing.
But in the quiet of her flat, she could still hear the soft, deliberate sound of paper tearing.
The next morning, the memory of it was a cold stone in her pocket as she walked the clinical corridors to Hammy’s office. She’d spent hours on the concussion protocol presentation, the data a clean, rational refuge from the messy humanity of the seminar room. She pushed the door open, already forming a question about scan accessibility.
Ally was sitting in the chair opposite Hammy’s desk.
He was hunched forward, elbows on his knees, staring at the floor. He looked up as she entered, and the raw exposure from the seminar was gone, replaced by a focused, simmering irritation. The armour was back on, but it was battle-worn, scuffed at the edges.
“Roz, join us,” Hammy said, gesturing to the other chair. His voice was unusually careful.
She sat, placing her bag between her feet. The air in the room was thick, charged with an argument paused mid-flow.
“Ally was just saying that he was disappointed that Davide was at the forum,” Hammy continued, his eyes moving between them. “It’s supposed to be player initiated and led. And he’s quite right.”
Ally’s gaze was fixed on a point on Hammy’s desk. “It was meant to be us talking. Not being… analysed. Picked apart with metaphors.” His voice was low, controlled, but a vein of real anger ran beneath it. “It felt like a setup.”
“Davide, Dr. Fortuna, can be a wee bit put out if he’s not involved with everything,” Hammy conceded with a sigh, rubbing his temple. “Likes to get his nose where it’s not wanted.”
Ally murmured, almost to himself, “He doesn’t just get his nose in. He brings a whole toolkit. Starts dismantling things without asking if they’re broken.”
Roz stayed silent, listening to the subtext thrumming beneath the words. This wasn’t just about protocol. This was about the violation of that private citadel.
“Okay, Ally,” Hammy said, his tone shifting to placating. “I’ll speak with him. Frame it as a clarification of the forum’s remit. Player welfare means player voice. I hear you.”
Ally gave a single, tight nod. The tension in his shoulders eased a fraction, but the energy in the room didn’t dissipate; it just changed shape, becoming something heavier.
“Look after yourself,” Hammy said, standing, a clear signal the meeting was over. “Big game Saturday.”
“Aye,” Ally said, pushing himself to his feet. He finally looked directly at Roz. The storm in his eyes had banked to a grey, weary intensity. He didn’t smile. He just held her gaze for a second too long, a silent acknowledgment of the shared moment the day before—the bookmark, the torn page, the pen now in her possession.
Then he was gone, the door clicking shut softly behind him.
Hammy sank back into his chair, the leather creaking. He looked suddenly older. “The lad’s not wrong. But he’s under a microscope. Everything he does, everything he says, even his discomfort, gets noted. The board loves Davide’s ‘rigorous approach.’” He said the last two words with a faint, derisive twist.
“Is he okay?” The question left her before she could filter it.
Hammy’s shrewd eyes settled on her. “Physically? He’s prime. Mentally?” He shrugged, a gesture of professional frustration. “He’s carrying the hopes of a nation on that back of his. He reads poetry. He thinks. That’s a dangerous combination in this environment.” He tapped a finger on the desk. “Your job is the head. The brain. The tangible. Concussion protocols. Stick to that. It’s complicated enough.”
The warning was clear. She was here to compile data, not to diagnose souls.
But as she walked back to the library, the cold stone of memory in her pocket had transformed. It was warm now, like the pen, and it had a weight she couldn’t ignore. She had seen the crack in the citadel wall. And Hammy, for all his bluster, had seen it too. They were both just hoping it would hold until Saturday, until the next game, until the next thing.
She pulled out her phone and stared at the blank screen. The professional thing was to do nothing. The human thing was to send a line, a single thread of connection. Her thumb hovered.
She typed three words and deleted them. Then she typed two different ones and sent them before she could think, the message flying into the digital void between them: Good luck.
The reply came not a minute later, not with words, but with a photograph. It was a page from a book, the same edition of T.H. White. A passage was circled in faint pencil. It read: “We are all of us, in some part of ourselves, exiles.”
Below it, he had typed: For your data.
Roz stopped in the middle of the busy corridor, students flowing around her like water around a stone. She stared at the screen, at the confession camouflaged as literature. The emotional stakes of the game on Saturday felt suddenly insignificant. A different, quieter, more profound game had already begun, and she had no idea of the rules, or if she was a player or just another piece on the board.
A different, quieter, more profound game had already begun, and she had no idea of the rules, or if she was a player or just another piece on the board.
The week unspooled in a blur of annotated journals and slide decks. The concussion protocol presentation took shape, a fortress of statistics and best-practice flowcharts. It was solid, unimpeachable work. It was also a refuge. Every time her mind drifted to a torn page or a circled passage, she opened another PDF. The pen sat on her nightstand, a silent interlocutor.
Hammy cornered her on Friday. “Presentation’s locked. Good. Now, Saturday.” He grinned, a rare, full expression that cracked his usually stern features. “Big day for you, too. You’re with the pitch-side medical team.”
“I am?” Her stomach flipped.
“Aye. Baxter’s got a stomach bug. You’re up. You’ll be in the transit, right there on the touchline.” He leaned in, his enthusiasm palpable. “NOW SATURDAY,” he said, as if announcing it to the heavens. “Roz, this will be exciting for you. You are gonna be pitch-side. With me. You on the telly when they rush on! The transit with ‘MEDIC’ on the back—that will be you. He said tell your friends, tell your family. You’ll be on TV.” His face beamed.
Inwardly, she cringed. The exposure was visceral, a layer of privacy stripped away. Her role, her quiet observation post, was being broadcast to millions. “That’s… great,” she managed, forcing a smile that felt brittle.
“It’s more than great, it’s the shop window! Just do the job. Watch the contact zones. Look for the stumbles, the lost focus. You’re our first set of eyes.” He clapped her shoulder, a gesture so heavy it jarred her teeth. “Don’t overthink it.”
Saturday arrived as a sharp, crystalline autumn day, the kind that made every breath feel scrubbed clean. Murrayfield hummed with a primal energy long before kickoff. In the medical room, Roz pulled on the high-visibility orange vest over her kit, the word ‘MEDIC’ stark and bold across her back. It felt like a target.
“Right, team,” Hammy barked at her and two other physios, Gareth and Lin. “We’re shadows. We see everything, we react to nothing unless called. The TV cameras are a nuisance. Ignore them. Your only focus is that rectangle of grass.”
The roar of the crowd as they stepped into the tunnel was a physical force, a pressure wave of sound and anticipation. They took their position beside the electronic substitution board. The transit, a small electric buggy, sat nearby like a waiting steed.
The teams erupted onto the pitch, a tsunami of colour and fury. Ally was near the front, his face a mask of ferocious concentration. He didn’t look toward the touchline. He was already somewhere else, deep inside the citadel.
The game was a brutal, beautiful collision. Roz’s world narrowed to the choreography of impact and recovery. She tracked a winger favoring his left leg after a tackle, noted a prop shaking out a numb hand. Her medical mind catalogued it all, a silent, running triage.
Then, in the 62nd minute, a scrum collapsed on the far side. It was a messy, grinding pile-up. The whistle blew. Players untangled themselves. Most got up.
Ally didn’t.
He remained on his knees, head bowed, one hand pressed to the turf for balance. The referee was signalling for medical attention. Hammy was already moving, grabbing his kit. “Roz, with me. Now.”
Her feet were moving before the command fully registered. They sprinted across the pitch, the roar of the crowd muting to a dull, throbbing rush in her ears. Time compressed, then stretched. The lush grass, a brilliant green under the floodlights, felt spongy and treacherous underfoot.
They reached him. Ally was blinking rapidly, trying to get up. Hammy put a firm hand on his shoulder. “Stay down, Ally. Just for a second. Talk to me.”
“I’m fine. It’s just my shoulder,” Ally grunted, his voice slurred, trying to shrug Hammy off. His eyes were unfocused, gazing past Hammy’s ear.
“Look at me,” Roz said, the words leaving her with an authority that surprised her. She crouched directly in his eyeline. His pupils were slightly unequal. He was looking at her, but not seeing her. It was the dissociation from the seminar room, amplified a thousand times by trauma.
“Alistair,” she said, clear and slow, cutting through the stadium din. “What day is it?”
He stared, his brow furrowing in immense effort. The crowd’s noise swelled, impatient. “It’s… Saturday.” The words were thick.
“Who are we playing?”
Another agonizing pause. A flicker of panic in his blue eyes, the citadel walls crumbling under direct assault. “The… the Italians.”
It was correct, but the delay was textbook. Hammy’s jaw tightened. He flashed four fingers in front of Ally’s face. “How many?”
“Four,” Ally said instantly, then winced, a sharp, involuntary reaction. “Lights. They’re too bright.”
“Okay, lad. That’s you done.” Hammy’s voice was final, gentle but absolute. He gestured to Gareth and Lin, who were already bringing the stretcher over.
“No!” The protest was raw, animal. Ally tried to rise again, but his coordination was off. “I’m fine. Put me back. I need to go back.”
Roz placed her hand lightly on his uninjured arm. The muscle beneath the jersey was rigid, trembling with adrenaline and denial. Her touch was cool through the fabric. “Ally. Look at me.” He did. This time, he saw her. The fear there was terrifying. “The data says you’re done. You know the protocol.”
The fight left him in a shuddering exhale. He nodded, once, a defeated, miserable gesture. As they helped him onto the stretcher, his hand groped blindly for a moment and found her wrist. His grip was too tight, desperate. He didn’t say a word.
He just held on as they lifted him, the cameras zooming in, broadcasting his ruin in high definition. She walked beside the stretcher, her own hand covering his, shielding the desperate grip from view until they reached the touchline and loaded him into the transit. He released her only when the doors closed, his face turning away from the crowd, from her, from everything.
The buggy whirred off toward the tunnel. The game resumed, the void he left already filling.
Hammy let out a long, slow breath, watching it go. “Good call. Textbook.” He looked at Roz, her own heart hammering against her ribs. “You’re okay?”
She nodded, numb. The spot on her wrist where he’d held her burned.
“Right. Back to work.” Hammy turned his attention back to the pitch, but the atmosphere had shifted. The triumph of her correct assessment was ashes. She had been inside the citadel for a moment, and it had been full of panic and shattered light.
In the silent, sterile treatment room under the stands, away from the crowd's roar, a different reality took hold. Ally sat on the edge of a treatment table, still in his mud-smeared kit, shoulders slumped. The team doctor, a brisk woman named Anya, was moving a penlight across his eyes. “Pupil reaction is normalizing. Headache?”
“A thumper,” Ally muttered, his voice hollow.
“On a scale of one to ten?”
“Seven. Maybe an eight when you shine that thing.”
Anya made a note. “And the shoulder?”
“It’s fine. Just a stinger.” He rotated it, wincing only slightly. The physical pain was a secondary concern, an acceptable distraction from the primary failure.
Roz stood near the door, a clipboard in her hands, logging the observations for the record. Her role had reverted to observer, but the memory of his grip on her wrist was a brand. Hammy was on the phone in the corridor, his low, urgent tones discussing “return-to-play protocols” and “mandatory stand-down.”
Ally’s eyes found hers in the reflection of a glass-fronted medical cabinet. “Did we win?” he asked, the question directed at the room.
“It’s still playing,” Anya said, not looking up from her tablet. “Ten minutes left.”
He gave a short, bitter laugh that held no humor. “They don’t need me, then.”
“That’s not the point and you know it,” Anya chided gently. “The point is your brain just rattled inside your skull. It needs quiet.”
The door opened and Hammy stepped back in, his phone now stowed. “Right. Anya’s running the show. You’re on the 12-day graduated return. No arguments. The press officer will handle the statement—‘failed HIA, precautionary withdrawal.’ Clean and simple.” He approached the table. “How are you feeling, really?”
Ally looked past him, past Roz, at a poster on the wall detailing the stages of concussion recovery. It was a flowchart, neat and logical, devoid of shame. “I feel like I let everyone down,” he said, so quietly it was almost inaudible.
“You followed the protocol,” Roz said. The words slipped out. All three of them looked at her. She kept her eyes on her clipboard. “You answered the questions. You stopped when told. That’s the job. That’s what the data is for.”
He held her gaze then, a long, searching look. He was looking for pity and finding none, just a clinical assessment that felt, strangely, like absolution. “The data,” he repeated, a faint, tired echo.
“Aye, well,” Hammy interjected, breaking the moment. “The data also says rest. Anya will see you home. No screens. No reading.” He threw a pointed glance at Roz, a warning and a dismissal. “Roz, with me. The match is nearly over. We’ve still got a job on the pitch.”
As she followed Hammy out, she glanced back. Ally was still watching her, a solitary figure in the bright, cold room, the roar of the unseen crowd a distant mockery. The citadel was breached. And she, armed with nothing but data and a cool touch, had walked right through the gate.