"Kid... [It'll] Break Your Heart." (1,999 words)
May 14, 2022 18:49:20 GMT -5
Johnny Bacchus and Gerard Angelo like this
Post by Downfall on May 14, 2022 18:49:20 GMT -5
That night, he was back at the crossroads, again.
His head was pounding as he stood, barefoot on the old, country dirt road, sweat baking off of him. Cicadas singing in the night, the sticky wind plastering his pants to his pale legs; it all brought it into real, nightmarish focus.
No, his mind was squalling, no, nonono... everything about him was begging him to turn back, not to walk down this road.
He recognized it off the bat. Here, twenty-odd years ago, Daniel and Chelle's car hit a tree, and they had walked their happy asses down this dirt road, and he had made a wish...
But if all time was here, right now, maybe he could affect it? Maybe, he could stop it from ever happening?
He looked to his side, and, stepping up like an after-image, so did the figure marching up the road; It was enormous, with a coal-black pelt and luminous, otherworldly eyes.
"Please," he invoked desperation he never would have wanted to let someone hear, "I've had enough of dreams, of riddles... I'm always walking... but where to? What am I chasing?"
"You're asking the wrong questions"
The black stag kicked up, and it's hooves slammed down on the packed dirt, and then it turned its eye.
Danny flinched back as light shone into his face. "Ah!"
" --said can y'hear me?" came the voice, snapping him fully out of his fugue, and he rolled his eye, sweating in the humid Florida night, and panted, as his settings began to sink in, and he fully brought himself down to the road.
But something about the stag was sticking in his mind.
There's a story (albeit somewhat apocryphal), goes that once at a convention, a hopeful young artist came up to industry legend Jack Kirby to show him his portfolio and ask for advice. Kirby's quoted as saying "Don't get into comics, kid... [comics] will break your heart."
I've long meditated on that quote... Jack Kirby, that dynamic innovator of the superhero genre, warned people away from breaking into his trade. I think I know why.
Kirby watched his contemporaries Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman, two young Jewish boys with big dreams and strong moral opinions of right and wrong, get fed into the system that abused their gifts and sucked them into a never-ending assembly line of being forced to make content, ending up selling their most famous creation and the innovation boom of the artform around them for a paltry few hundred dollars.
Just two more idealistic, naive young men that got fed into the machine chewing'em up and spitting them out.
Research how Siegel and Shuster ended up, or even how dirty their industry ended up doing Kirby.
Seems like a digression, but it's not.
I said before that Johnny saves his most cutting, spiteful invective for people that dare to question whether or not he's sincere or doing this for the right reasons.
In all honesty, and in all of my respect for Jack Kirby, I think I do need to refine/redefine the narrative; Because in all honesty, a lot of the snark comes from my kicking dirt on his morality.
But y'know what, I honestly think he is. As much as he's tried to do to rehabilitate Ash Blake from being an unrepentant user who casually discarded all of her own morality to bargain for a bigger seat at the conference table; No, I do believe that Johnny's sincere.
Therein lies crux of the problem... he never learns from his behaviors, so he every time he's run through the thresher, and those he holds hands with him.
In a lot of ways, Johnny embodies the type'a hero Jerry and Joe would want to inspire, a socialist, shit-talking tough that no matter what, stands in front of a victim and lets the aggressor's bullets bounce off his chest.
Except the problem that I've always had with Johnny isn't that he'll go above and beyond to cape for his friends.
It's his single tactic for taking on those he deems irredeemable.
When Johnny can't bait someone into caring enough to come after him, that's when we really see the boy at the other end of the slingshot.
Because that's where Johnny thinks that his errors have come from. He believes that where he's erred against me in the past was that he approached me in too-friendly a manner and that he didn't account for me striking him, his deluded words, "snakemode" right down to his last week's daydream that I'm flailing out of desperation.
Where we've sparked into conflict is that we view this game in dichotomous ways. To Johnny, I'm an insecure, emotionally-stunted narcissist in the twilight of my career trying vainly to stay relevant...
And I see Johnny as someone who's so eager to charge gung-ho to be grist in the mill. And he can rage against it all he wants, but he's never once shown an ability to affect the machine in anyway.
And yeah, I'll own it; I lead with my ego from time to time and I've fallen short. When I got cute, blinded myself to hype, and tried to be something that I'm not anymore. And if for that, I earn his scorn or disdain, so be it...
Because my struggle is more emotionally honest and complex a road than Johnny's ever allowed himself to walk. If I backslide, if I try to be the man I used to be, there's always a chance I'll end up overcompensating...
But... I always push myself harder to get back on the horse, and I change my approach so I don't fall short in the same way next time.
But where we see the best example of how disparate our approaches shake out, let's compare my ceiling to Johnny's. I did better in last year's Havoc where I wasn't trying too hard to be the feared devil inside everyone's head... but Johnny?
Two years in a row, he placed in the exact same middle of the pack; After months of the little shit namedropping Dandy like he's Tatiana Jolee, he couldn't back his mouth up if his life depended on it.
So no, I've realized I can't play the game on Johnny's terms.
Can't match him on his perceived moral superiority; I comfortably speak in terms that have me listed as ninth-grade reading comprehension, don't have the patience for clever cutesy bullshit landing deep-cut slowburn intellectual hit-pieces or crafting listicles to rile up the people...
I've come to the realization that I don't gotta play this game his way, at all.
There's not one person he's shit-talked in the past year who matters that's been so rattled by Johnny Bacchus that they haven't just walked away from a match with him and tipped a nonchalant shrug at anything he's said. Who's been roasted by the ever-so-witty Rascal King that's even let him ruffle their feathers.
Y'think Dandy or Carter lost sleep after he dogged them?
Carter went on to flip his "rat king" call-out, made it his mantra, and won Havoc with it. Johnny's just out here cheerleading Ash losing returns against Jill and Regan every week.
He even leads the people he's teaming with into these obvious failures, instilling them with falsely-placed confidence that he knows what he's talking about: I've teamed with Johnny. Johnny based our meeting around an overly thought-out metaphor about Philidor being a cancer-riddled body using a cadaver as a visual aid.
Johnny doesn't know shit about leading a team to victory.
Last week an entire stable of main-event caliber talent went down in flames because they assumed he was right in how fractitious we were. That he had such keen insight into my failings, and beliefs over whether I'd be man enough for the good of the team above my own ego.
Your own teammates couldn't stop bickering for twenty seconds, Johnny, but you truly believed that Dion can't trust me, the man he's held Tag gold with for nine months.
Again, why does anyone make the mistake of letting you lead their team?
You had the match lost twice and it was only Regan blind-tagging in to steal the glory that doesn't have my record over you doubled up. Ain't been a damn thing Johnny's said to me, about me that's stung so bad it put me off my game... but if you remember, Johnny went into a match against me and when he lost, he spent the next six weeks tweeting from the couch.
And he'll brag about how it was his short-sightedness that didn't take it seriously.
He'll say that he didn't fight me as hard as he could because he was "too friendly" and that he didn't expect me to strike him down so remorselessly, comparing me to a snake when the Gospel-truth is that I told him before the match even started that I was coming at him with that energy.
He didn't get fangs sunk into his Achilles by a viper, he charged arms flinging wildly straight into a fucking buzzsaw.
And he's doing it again this week, how's the definition of insanity looking right about now Jonathan?
He'll be proudly blaring his triumph over the petty, bullying, sociopathic forces of maleficence that he's long declared anathema, cancerous, rot yet never managed to affect in any way, shape or form.
He, and his collaborator, will dedicate their shared ideals to a tale of the triumph of the human spirit, of a shining example of underdogs pushing back against aggression, and righting a wrong... and instead, he's condemning them to shrink back down, cowed and beaten into submission, the bark taken out of his voice by a sharp rebuke from someone who bites harder than he can yip.
With Ash watching on, Johnny is going to get a glimpse firsthand of the process which has pounded weaker teams into rubble, and see that when it comes down to it, there isn't much separating him from Dangerous Gents or House of Wolves.
I hope you're prepared, Bacchycat...
I'm coming with twice that amount of remorselessness. Uncaring, unfeeling coldness that you cried foul on.
As before, you're going to hulk up, beat your chest and yell to the heavens that you're coming...
But you are going to get put the fuck down. Harder than before.
Oh kid... it's gonna break your heart.
Down the road, policecars were parked on the side of the road, talking to Danny, who was sweating, drawn and pale, incredibly fatigued and out-of-sorts by the violent nature of the fugue, and not sure how he had walked all the way to the mainland and was now, barefoot on the side of the road, missing time.
The eyes that watched him, unseeable by the officers, nonetheless turned to each other as they watched the tableau play out; The Guardian's voice, lilting and high as a teenaged girl's, sounded first, "We've just watched long enough, Glow."
The red star-orb gleamed, speaking in tinkling, bell-like tones, "He knows he isn't alone. But he's confused."
"If he can't ready himself... he isn't gonna be able to do what he's been asked of," Guardian said, troubled, her brow creasing.
The goblin titter of Beast loomed behind both of them, eyes shining from the bushes. It's fangs tipped upwards in a smile. "He has t'be the one that does it... nobody can but him, alone..."
"That's just it, Beast," said Guardian, brattily, "He's no good to anyone alone. We're pledged to protect him..."
"So you be the one to tell him," snarked the Beast...
"I'm afraid when we do, it's going to break his heart either way," said Glow, not the usual luminescent it was, every word it spoke making it's core shine dimmer in disappointment.
"You're right," said Guardian... "but what other way forward is there?"
None of them had a good answer to that one.
His head was pounding as he stood, barefoot on the old, country dirt road, sweat baking off of him. Cicadas singing in the night, the sticky wind plastering his pants to his pale legs; it all brought it into real, nightmarish focus.
No, his mind was squalling, no, nonono... everything about him was begging him to turn back, not to walk down this road.
He recognized it off the bat. Here, twenty-odd years ago, Daniel and Chelle's car hit a tree, and they had walked their happy asses down this dirt road, and he had made a wish...
But if all time was here, right now, maybe he could affect it? Maybe, he could stop it from ever happening?
He looked to his side, and, stepping up like an after-image, so did the figure marching up the road; It was enormous, with a coal-black pelt and luminous, otherworldly eyes.
"Please," he invoked desperation he never would have wanted to let someone hear, "I've had enough of dreams, of riddles... I'm always walking... but where to? What am I chasing?"
"You're asking the wrong questions"
The black stag kicked up, and it's hooves slammed down on the packed dirt, and then it turned its eye.
Danny flinched back as light shone into his face. "Ah!"
" --said can y'hear me?" came the voice, snapping him fully out of his fugue, and he rolled his eye, sweating in the humid Florida night, and panted, as his settings began to sink in, and he fully brought himself down to the road.
But something about the stag was sticking in his mind.
There's a story (albeit somewhat apocryphal), goes that once at a convention, a hopeful young artist came up to industry legend Jack Kirby to show him his portfolio and ask for advice. Kirby's quoted as saying "Don't get into comics, kid... [comics] will break your heart."
I've long meditated on that quote... Jack Kirby, that dynamic innovator of the superhero genre, warned people away from breaking into his trade. I think I know why.
Kirby watched his contemporaries Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman, two young Jewish boys with big dreams and strong moral opinions of right and wrong, get fed into the system that abused their gifts and sucked them into a never-ending assembly line of being forced to make content, ending up selling their most famous creation and the innovation boom of the artform around them for a paltry few hundred dollars.
Just two more idealistic, naive young men that got fed into the machine chewing'em up and spitting them out.
Research how Siegel and Shuster ended up, or even how dirty their industry ended up doing Kirby.
Seems like a digression, but it's not.
I said before that Johnny saves his most cutting, spiteful invective for people that dare to question whether or not he's sincere or doing this for the right reasons.
In all honesty, and in all of my respect for Jack Kirby, I think I do need to refine/redefine the narrative; Because in all honesty, a lot of the snark comes from my kicking dirt on his morality.
But y'know what, I honestly think he is. As much as he's tried to do to rehabilitate Ash Blake from being an unrepentant user who casually discarded all of her own morality to bargain for a bigger seat at the conference table; No, I do believe that Johnny's sincere.
Therein lies crux of the problem... he never learns from his behaviors, so he every time he's run through the thresher, and those he holds hands with him.
In a lot of ways, Johnny embodies the type'a hero Jerry and Joe would want to inspire, a socialist, shit-talking tough that no matter what, stands in front of a victim and lets the aggressor's bullets bounce off his chest.
Except the problem that I've always had with Johnny isn't that he'll go above and beyond to cape for his friends.
It's his single tactic for taking on those he deems irredeemable.
When Johnny can't bait someone into caring enough to come after him, that's when we really see the boy at the other end of the slingshot.
Because that's where Johnny thinks that his errors have come from. He believes that where he's erred against me in the past was that he approached me in too-friendly a manner and that he didn't account for me striking him, his deluded words, "snakemode" right down to his last week's daydream that I'm flailing out of desperation.
Where we've sparked into conflict is that we view this game in dichotomous ways. To Johnny, I'm an insecure, emotionally-stunted narcissist in the twilight of my career trying vainly to stay relevant...
And I see Johnny as someone who's so eager to charge gung-ho to be grist in the mill. And he can rage against it all he wants, but he's never once shown an ability to affect the machine in anyway.
And yeah, I'll own it; I lead with my ego from time to time and I've fallen short. When I got cute, blinded myself to hype, and tried to be something that I'm not anymore. And if for that, I earn his scorn or disdain, so be it...
Because my struggle is more emotionally honest and complex a road than Johnny's ever allowed himself to walk. If I backslide, if I try to be the man I used to be, there's always a chance I'll end up overcompensating...
But... I always push myself harder to get back on the horse, and I change my approach so I don't fall short in the same way next time.
But where we see the best example of how disparate our approaches shake out, let's compare my ceiling to Johnny's. I did better in last year's Havoc where I wasn't trying too hard to be the feared devil inside everyone's head... but Johnny?
Two years in a row, he placed in the exact same middle of the pack; After months of the little shit namedropping Dandy like he's Tatiana Jolee, he couldn't back his mouth up if his life depended on it.
So no, I've realized I can't play the game on Johnny's terms.
Can't match him on his perceived moral superiority; I comfortably speak in terms that have me listed as ninth-grade reading comprehension, don't have the patience for clever cutesy bullshit landing deep-cut slowburn intellectual hit-pieces or crafting listicles to rile up the people...
I've come to the realization that I don't gotta play this game his way, at all.
There's not one person he's shit-talked in the past year who matters that's been so rattled by Johnny Bacchus that they haven't just walked away from a match with him and tipped a nonchalant shrug at anything he's said. Who's been roasted by the ever-so-witty Rascal King that's even let him ruffle their feathers.
Y'think Dandy or Carter lost sleep after he dogged them?
Carter went on to flip his "rat king" call-out, made it his mantra, and won Havoc with it. Johnny's just out here cheerleading Ash losing returns against Jill and Regan every week.
He even leads the people he's teaming with into these obvious failures, instilling them with falsely-placed confidence that he knows what he's talking about: I've teamed with Johnny. Johnny based our meeting around an overly thought-out metaphor about Philidor being a cancer-riddled body using a cadaver as a visual aid.
Johnny doesn't know shit about leading a team to victory.
Last week an entire stable of main-event caliber talent went down in flames because they assumed he was right in how fractitious we were. That he had such keen insight into my failings, and beliefs over whether I'd be man enough for the good of the team above my own ego.
Your own teammates couldn't stop bickering for twenty seconds, Johnny, but you truly believed that Dion can't trust me, the man he's held Tag gold with for nine months.
Again, why does anyone make the mistake of letting you lead their team?
You had the match lost twice and it was only Regan blind-tagging in to steal the glory that doesn't have my record over you doubled up. Ain't been a damn thing Johnny's said to me, about me that's stung so bad it put me off my game... but if you remember, Johnny went into a match against me and when he lost, he spent the next six weeks tweeting from the couch.
And he'll brag about how it was his short-sightedness that didn't take it seriously.
He'll say that he didn't fight me as hard as he could because he was "too friendly" and that he didn't expect me to strike him down so remorselessly, comparing me to a snake when the Gospel-truth is that I told him before the match even started that I was coming at him with that energy.
He didn't get fangs sunk into his Achilles by a viper, he charged arms flinging wildly straight into a fucking buzzsaw.
And he's doing it again this week, how's the definition of insanity looking right about now Jonathan?
He'll be proudly blaring his triumph over the petty, bullying, sociopathic forces of maleficence that he's long declared anathema, cancerous, rot yet never managed to affect in any way, shape or form.
He, and his collaborator, will dedicate their shared ideals to a tale of the triumph of the human spirit, of a shining example of underdogs pushing back against aggression, and righting a wrong... and instead, he's condemning them to shrink back down, cowed and beaten into submission, the bark taken out of his voice by a sharp rebuke from someone who bites harder than he can yip.
With Ash watching on, Johnny is going to get a glimpse firsthand of the process which has pounded weaker teams into rubble, and see that when it comes down to it, there isn't much separating him from Dangerous Gents or House of Wolves.
I hope you're prepared, Bacchycat...
I'm coming with twice that amount of remorselessness. Uncaring, unfeeling coldness that you cried foul on.
As before, you're going to hulk up, beat your chest and yell to the heavens that you're coming...
But you are going to get put the fuck down. Harder than before.
Oh kid... it's gonna break your heart.
Down the road, policecars were parked on the side of the road, talking to Danny, who was sweating, drawn and pale, incredibly fatigued and out-of-sorts by the violent nature of the fugue, and not sure how he had walked all the way to the mainland and was now, barefoot on the side of the road, missing time.
The eyes that watched him, unseeable by the officers, nonetheless turned to each other as they watched the tableau play out; The Guardian's voice, lilting and high as a teenaged girl's, sounded first, "We've just watched long enough, Glow."
The red star-orb gleamed, speaking in tinkling, bell-like tones, "He knows he isn't alone. But he's confused."
"If he can't ready himself... he isn't gonna be able to do what he's been asked of," Guardian said, troubled, her brow creasing.
The goblin titter of Beast loomed behind both of them, eyes shining from the bushes. It's fangs tipped upwards in a smile. "He has t'be the one that does it... nobody can but him, alone..."
"That's just it, Beast," said Guardian, brattily, "He's no good to anyone alone. We're pledged to protect him..."
"So you be the one to tell him," snarked the Beast...
"I'm afraid when we do, it's going to break his heart either way," said Glow, not the usual luminescent it was, every word it spoke making it's core shine dimmer in disappointment.
"You're right," said Guardian... "but what other way forward is there?"
None of them had a good answer to that one.
