Chapter 98 – Into the Rhythm
The days no longer dragged like they had at first.
Thiago’s first week at Borussia Dortmund settled into a rhythm that, while still foreign, had begun to feel less like stumbling through the dark. His body had started adjusting to the brutal schedule—waking before dawn to the shrill beep of his alarm, forcing down breakfast while his stomach still protested sleep, making the quiet trek through streets still slick with morning dew to reach the training ground as the sun crept over the industrial Dortmund skyline.
The cold still gnawed at his fingers and turned his breath to fog, but it no longer shocked his system the way it had that first day. He’d learned to layer up properly—thermal base layers beneath his training gear, gloves with grip for ball work, a beanie tugged low over his ears during warm-ups. The sharp bite of winter air still stung his lungs during full-pitch sprints, but he’d stopped gasping like a fish out of water after every drill.
By the third morning, Marina stopped accompanying him to the training ground entirely. She still checked in daily—sometimes in person with coffee and that scrutinizing look of hers, other times via terse texts that simply read "You alive?"—but she’d begun trusting him to navigate this new world on his own. And to her quiet surprise, he did.
The sessions with the reserve squad—dubbed the "transition group" by the coaching staff—were relentless. It wasn’t just the physical demands that wore on Thiago, though those were punishing enough. It was the mental toll of constantly recalibrating—the way every drill required split-second decision making at a pace he’d never encountered in Brazil. The other players moved with an ingrained understanding of space and timing that Thiago had to consciously think through, his brain working overtime to translate instinct into action within Dortmund’s system.
But slowly, almost imperceptibly, things began clicking into place.
He didn’t dominate sessions. Didn’t dazzle with flashy stepovers or thirty-yard screamers. But he found ways to contribute—a perfectly weighted through ball during possession drills that split two defenders, a clever dummy run that opened space for a teammate, a tenacious tracking back to dispossess an opponent twice his size. Small moments that added up to something larger.
"Good. Keep going," one of the assistant coaches grunted after Thiago executed a slick give-and-go during a transition exercise. The praise was delivered without fanfare, tossed over the shoulder as the coach moved to the next station, but it landed all the same. It was real. Earned.
That afternoon, as Thiago sat in the recovery room sipping a chalky protein shake, he caught his reflection in the floor-to-ceiling mirrors. Same messy dark curls, same lean frame, same faint scar above his eyebrow from a childhood tumble. But something in his posture had changed—the way he carried himself, the set of his shoulders. He looked... settled. Like he wasn’t just visiting this world, but learning to live in it.