For He So Loved The World. (2,999 words)
Jul 24, 2022 13:50:01 GMT -5
Johnny Bacchus, Holden Ross, and 3 more like this
Post by The Vanguard on Jul 24, 2022 13:50:01 GMT -5
Now, I know what you're thinking.
"Ooo, look at the two former champions coming back with their tail between their legs!"
Hey, sometimes when opportunity knocks, you go and answer the door. This isn't like playing ding dong ditch with a Jehovah's Witness, waitin' to see how long it takes them to get the fuck off your porch; no, this is a genuine opportunity. We've always said that whether we had the belts or not, we'd be around to make sure the division is at its best. And frankly, it still is. But a gardener doesn't just plant a bed of flowers and leaves them to fend for themselves, right? You still need to water, feed, and clear away any invasive life from your garden.
This division is the Eden we have reconstructed into its current form. Win or lose, no one will forget what we have been able to do.
Of course, that does leave a few try-hard gap year teams that really want to stay rooted. I mean really, The Painkillers? I need an advil just reading that name. Yet another team best described as "MEAN MEATY MEN SLAPPING MEAT." Come on, if I wanted the meats, I'd go to Arby's. At least there I'll get something with good taste. And are we really going to do this shit with The Heritage again? They're gonna be waaay too busy playing "will-they-wont-they" with Jolee to even make any difference here. I'm not even going to bother with the random pairings; every battle royal needs a few and hey, there they are. Enjoy having the constant comments of "CAN THEY CO-EXIST" lingering around the ring when they describe the lot of you.
But hey, at least there are a few established guys out here. Especially considering that we've got a "Not quite at 100% but he may or may not tell you that himself" Jason Cashe to look out for. Hope you're healing well, buddy. Sorry you're saddled with All-Slumping Eye. I mean what happened Odin? Is age starting to catch up with you? Don't get me wrong, you're still an intimidating guy, but to have gone this long without ANY kind of movement? That's just bizarre to me. So we've got two guys that are broken down in some way; Cashe at least has a reason for not being at 100%. Hopefully that won't continue to get worse. I certainly wouldn't want our upcoming match to get rescheduled again, right? Also nice to see wrestling's best couple here; like Beauty and the Beast, only you can't tell which one is more ferocious and there's much more ink. Congrats are in order, Holden: At long last you can live out your dream of being in a contendership match for the tag titles instead of, y'know, having copies handed to you on a silver platter. Maybe that was for Scala's benefit, who knows, but hey, at least you can say you've earned it should you two come out on top here.
And then there's King Shit.
I get to ask my favorite question to CJ now. What happened, man? You were sittin' pretty with the US title, the world as your oyster, bringing your brand of despair to the masses...and now you're in lock step behind Spencer? I get it; you want to be a winner, and you can be. You have it in you to be a success all on your own, and dammit I want that from you. But it isn't like you needed The Following either. Hell, you excelled when they decided time was done. But here you are again, falling into the trap of relying on others. Oh sure, helping knock CCPE down a peg was cool, but since then I can't help but think where your story goes from here. Will the consequences be grizzly? Are you bear-ly able to hang by a thread? Or is it the polar opposite? Where you will come forward being the koala-ty performer I know you can be? We'll never know unless you stand up to Spencer and show how you guys are equals.
Hell, it worked for Downfall and I.
His brush stopped mid-stroke, and he turned to look over at Dion, eyes squinting, "Say what?"
"I said, I'm looking forward to the match against Cashe most of all, did you not watch that clip of Clash of the Immortals?"
He hesitated, and once more ground his teeth. There were times when it felt like their approach to this was as far as the earth from the moon.
Blinking, he inhaled through his nose and gave it a beat before trying again. "Dion, Cashe is one'a the eighteen other men who've hopped in this battle royale."
"And I'd be happy to have my food eaten by him," Dion joked.
Putting the renovation of Hinata's... Rumiko's... well, his new dojo aside, Danny turned, stone-faced on Dion. "Can't tell when you're being serious or memeing sometimes... we don't go into matches taking it soft because we like these guys. I don't enter into anything thinking I'd be so happy for King Shit if they won. The fuck's going on with you?"
"Why would them succeeding take anything away from what we're working on, Danny? Or diminish what we've done?"
"Because I don't want to rest on what we did, this match is about proving we're still the best goddamn team there is."
"And why do you need to prove that?"
Unspoken things he couldn't say, because I'm trying to give something back to you... Instead, his bristly demeanor asserted itself, and he just stubbornly turned back to painting the wall.
Dion's smile soured, and he shook his head a little. "You're still the same asshole, sometimes. Same arrogant ass who came in two years ago and picked a fight with me."
He seethed at that. "Fuck all the way off."
Throwing the brush down with such force that it banked off the bucket and threw a slash of paint across the air, he stalked off.
"For he so loved the world..."
There was a moment, one month ago... coming down off of our 288-day run with the Tag titles, we thanked Lissie and Addy, wished 'em luck, and said that we were going to focus on separate goals, while the Swallowing held on to the belts we'd spent months putting everything into, hopefully bringing honor to the division.
Rather than show grace in that moment, Addy waited until the second we exited the ring to open her cum-receptacle maw and opine it was a shame we never "faced competition on their level".
There was never a doubt in my mind why we had to enter this match... because we so loved this division that we put it on our backs, damn the criticism, and took on any team that wanted to step up.
If we weren't doing that, then a division where a personal feud between the Swallowing and Insurgentsia wouldn't be on the same card as a multi-man where nine teams vied to be the next in line.
We loved this division so much, we aren't going to let it be decided amongst two serious contenders and a field of also-rans, being contested between castoff teams that can't win a match on fucking Cruiserclash and OCW afterthoughts.
If this match has any serious contenders, it's still uncomfortably filled up with teams on their first time out.
And I look on the horizon and I see other opportunities for us... All-In, and a chance to gun for the World Title again... but I know... that I've fallen short in the past because I've looked too far ahead, starving for the spot I believed was mine and blinded by arrogance...
But I'm not gonna let this shot pass me by, thinking that there's other spots coming.
To me, this's a chance to right wrongs, erase the failures of Havoc and Evolution... where I, especially, went in full of ego, unfocused, personal life scattered, decidedly not acting as a team member.
When Dionysus and I were at our best's when we had the same goal in mind. And we are of the same mind now.
'Cause we so loved this division, we're going to clear through any team that stands in our way until we prove that we are and always will be the stick this division measures against.
He was standing outside of the dojo, a ball of clenched muscle, vainly trying to exhale cigarette smoke and vent the tension from his shoulders when he heard her open and shut the door behind her. "Hello, miz landlady," he grumbled.
"Sounded like a pretty tense blowup with your friend there."
He didn't answer her. Rumiko, still frosty towards him, nonetheless pressed on, curious. "Why the disconnect? Hasn't your partnership been built on bridging your differences before?"
He grimaced, then finally, "He just can't see it my way. He thinks I'm being an asshole 'cause I don't want to throw away what the Vanguard worked for over the past year in a battle royale just because he'd be okay with someone else winning."
Rumiko looked back at the door, then, with dawning understanding. "You're doing this because ya love him."
"With all that encompasses," he said, though uncomfortable about throwing around the word 'love', "I was an arrogant ass, and got laser-focused on the World title, and poisoned our own run with my overconfidence and reliance on myself as being a dominating monster. I just wanna make good."
Rumiko and he stood side-by-side, as he dragged on his cig.
"You will always be an arrogant ass to me, too... and the man who led my brother to his death..."
He didn't have the wherewithal to protest, not even a stuttered "I didn't-" to her, he just ground his teeth.
"But maybe there is something here that makes you better, makes you want to perform better than you did before."
A shrug. "All we can do's move forward tryin' to be our best selves, right?"
Rumiko knocked on the door behind her, "You hear all that?"
He startled, as Dion came out onto the street.
In our absence, there's only been one team consistently showing up, and that'd be King Shit.
For over half of this field, they just seem to be in this match because they need something to do. I don't have time to waste pretending that Havoc+Koenig or FREYA and Lazaro, every one of whom barely musters enough wherewithal to show up for their opening matches on CC, has the strength and vision necessary to be a threat on the supposed level the Swallowing believe they're at.
There ain't a damn thing the Heritage, Painkillers can tell me, 'bout the passion, pushing each other from being held down to the opening match, all the way until you're both competing for the World Title, and you're bringing the Tag belts up with you to main-event prestige.
It's when you look at the other duos that are lumped together for this that you scratch your head and wonder if there is any throughline there.
At least Holden tagging with Serenity makes a modicum of sense... since he's got here has had that creepy, predatory energy, go to the comments of any social media post by any barely legal chick signed to an AW contract, you'll find Holden talking to himself.
I gotta wonder how long you've been offering to "team" with Serenity, should we check her DM's to see if there's a Drake situation and you waited until she turned 18?
This roided-up wannabe hardcore, sadistic wannabe gladiator is such a pathetic simp that it makes sense he'd attach himself at the hip to a teenager... babygirl, run far, far away from bums like that, didn't your dad teach you anything?
He can't find a partner his age... he was literally dropped by Joey Scala, because he saw that Holden wasn't shit, think about that for a second.
But that, sadly, here you are. Filming your awkward, cringey promos where you describe just how much pot you smoke in your hotel room.
Telling us how you're in such high demand in feds more famous for their Twitter-fingers than their quality, or how you're one of Chris Page's biggest converts.
Telling everyone in this match how you got a five-star match against the Vanguard, and you were so close to being Tag Team champions.
At the end of the day, you're a sad, over-muscled mental sophmore who can't stop sniffing around any girl that doesn't immediately block you, going from Tatiana to Serenity to who next?
It's your team with Serenity that begins the tier of competition in this multi-man where you may not just be filling space, Holden... but by god, I don't want anyone as reprehensible or repugnant as you anywhere near a division I spent such time putting work into main-eventing.
Dion and myself already locked you out quite handily when you and Scala were handpicked as Interim Tag champs... But what have you done to deserve this opportunity, either, Holden?
In the final analysis you're as big a mark for subsisting on the fumes of your own career and what you've accomplished as Odin Balfore.
What's hilarious is, you're just as much of a little bitch, that you can easily get rolled by undersized cruiserweights and women when you're supposed to be the one who's uncrowned King of the Deathmatch.
How's it that someone who's legitimately seven foot, four hundred pounds of muscle finds himself routinely lifted onto someone he outweighs by several hundreds and dropped on his head?
I'd love an honest answer from that, from either Holden or Balfore, but at least from Holden he'd have the low sense of sullen stupidity to bite back, thinking up some threat about how he's going to break me in half. For all of Odin's bluster, his bark sounds fainter and fainter as the year goes by.
It doesn't make a successful partnership to decide, in one week's time, that you're "old friends" with someone and want to give tagging a go.
When you look at Dionysus and Downfall, separately or together, you see two men with fire, passion, willpower... the tools to be legit game-changers.
When you look at Odin and Cashe, you squint, and ask yourself if the artist that did the makeup on the Northman shot up on meth before going to work on these jamokes, or distractedly wondering why we should give a single fuck what Odin says.
But that brings me to the last-biggest team here... Spencer Adams and CJ Phoenix, King Shit. Because if there's anyone who's playbook has been furiously copied from it's Spencer's... see Odin Balfore, right now employing the Spencer Adams method of strategy, which has been so predictable it's almost a meme at this point: once you shit the bed in singles, go for a fleeting tag run.
And what's craziest about it is, on paper, this battle royale should serve as a coronation for King Shit, a furious tour-de-force smashing through multiple teams on the way to earning number one contendership just like Dion and I earned in our first month Evolution 2021.
Out of this entire field, your team checks the boxes for being the ones to carry the division forward, to carry the torch we ignited... but are you? Having watched you in action this month, I have my doubts... rather than keep silent and let those doubts remain uncertain, Spencer would open his mouth and confirm them.
Talk any of the shit that you have over the past few weeks, it still hasn't been a long enough period that you've been tested.
And the combination of not just Spencer, but CJ Phoenix casts the image of two men who've maxed out one stat, but still show a shocking tendency to buckle the instant someone fires back on them with more bass in their voice than they were expecting.
So you can look at this as a reversal in our favor, you can think we're crawling back to the division because we haven't achieved what we wanted to do yet, or, pessimistically, you can believe that we're just two greedy gloryhounds opportunistically jumping at any bone thrown to us... but this is where Dion and myself agree:
We aren't done, and there was never a question of us breaking up... I'm going to be standing in Dion's corner when he wins the CBS title from Cashe, when he finally secures his World Title shot the way he held me up when I won my first World Title in ten years.
It was that same level of support that made us the Vanguard, the Two Wolves of the division.
And it's us looking at those little girls holding our belts, holding our heads up and telling them that no, they're the ones who haven't risen to our level yet.
We're gonna be the ones that walk through eight other "teams", an entire array of pushed-together scoundrels, opportunists, and ne'er-do-wells and throw each and every one of them out of the ring, eliminating every lackluster, mediocre pretender until we're the last men standing.
We so loved this division that we're going to stand as the shining example of the best it can be.
It'll be like we never left.
"Can we at least agree that we both love the Tag division, enough to give it our best effort?"
"Yes, Daniel, I can agree to that."
"Cause that's Vanguard shit... it's fine if we don't agree on everything, but god dammit Dion... I'm not ready to give up."
"I never said I was, either. You think you're doing this, winning this for me... but don't give up on your road, either."
He looked past Dion... The foreign feeling of building his own little space began to itch like a seed at the back of his mind, but he shoved it aside, for now.
