Harm/Home (3,997 words)

There was a long, pregnant pause, then, just after you had delivered the news; The woman had stared at you with red-ringed eyes, then there had been a spate of Kanto dialect passed between her and the husband.

The child, sensing her parents' upset, had begun to wail.

Through it all, you'd stood, aloof, an impassive harbinger, as they lamented the fact that in three short hours, they and everyone in this building were condemned.

Rumiko had let out one, single, shocked "Whaaat?" as you'd begun the explanation, but, as she listened, pain etched onto her face from the burns all over her arms, she had retreated to steely silence.

Finally, having heard enough, she had grasped your arm in a vise-grip, leading you out.

It was just the two of you out in the hall, facing each other, leaned against opposite walls as she tried to find the words... and you just watched her, arms folded over your chest, inscrutable as a far-off statue of a forgotten god.

You wished it could be any other way except this.

"Yaichi's sending his men to burn this place, killing everyone inside. You'd be better off being far from here when the sun comes."

She shook her head, bleakly. "I can't believe you. After all of this... you just want us to run." So much hate between them, so much scorn, I can't believe I ever let myself buy into you being a good person it says.

You didn't let it affect you.

She didn't realize it's all been worked out in your mind, the assessed risk of being around you.

This dojo, like everything, had been a dream of yours you'd seized on when you were at a crossroads in your life... as you always did, turning inward, attempting to cleanse its legacy... Only for it to turn to ashes in your hands.

As black and ugly as you are, inside.

No, you thought, mouth forming a bitter line, better this way. More honest.

She didn't accept that unspoken as it hung between them. "Pine Street is their home. It's our home... the Hasegawas have absolutely nowhere to run to... and you'd tell them to -"

"I'd tell them... and you... to get far away from me."

"Daniel... my reaction to... what happened between us earlier... it was in the heat of the moment, but... I don't want you to go."

"While I think we need some boundaries set between us, I recognize that you wanted to start over here... do something good... live up to the potential my brother saw in you..."

"Hinata was wrong about me, kiddo. Always was."

"I'm the sonofabitch that destroyed his knee, took his dream away. I'm the one who sent him back to this neighborhood."

She found herself blurting out, "But you could have something here. You... all of us on this block... This could be your home."

Your shoulders froze in place. "I'm already gone."

"You wanna be gone before sun-up Rumiko. Leave, leave Pine Street, leave Japantown, pack the Hasegawas in my Corvette and drive them far away."

"You be a dentist. You live a life not worrying about your brother's dreams... or his demons... you just live to your potential."

She sighed, a little, sadly. "You could have that, for yourself."

All you could do was raise your eyebrows to the ceiling.

"That isn't for someone like me."

And you extracted a phone from your pocket, as Rumiko had gone back in.

You punched in Dion's number, from memory, and listened to it ring.

---

Have you ever felt lost for an extended period of time?

I mean the bone-deep sensation that you know where you're supposed to be.

You've seen a glimpse of it on the horizon, held the key in your hands... but the path gives you an unexpected twist, and you're not closer than you were before.

There've been long stretches of my life where I quantified the feeling of being lost, and being found, as reclaiming what I used to be. Of recapturing a main event spot I was forced to vacate.

It goes back to that feeling of being lost. Of seeing in your mind that there is a place for you that you feel you deserve, a home.

What is home?

Home isn't a roof over your head. It isn't rooming with people or where you sleep at night. Home is, in the purest sense, what you feel safest being part of... but it's also somewhere, someplace, or something, that embraces you utterly.

I found home on the road to Uprising... it came to me as I was driving a steel crowbar right through the heart of Johnny Bacchus; The grace I gave myself to be as unforgiving and uncompromising as I needed to be.

And now, I'm faced with people that make up the building blocks of this company from top to bottom... a foundation of this company made of parasitic, degrading mites and up-jumped, fourth-rate nothings.

Who gained their All-In privileges in wasted efforts against Elijah Martin, in conciliatory "Everyone's A Winner!" Cruiserclash main events that make All-In just about as prestigious an accolade as handing a kindergartner a congratulatory "You did it" star for taking a nap on time.

The calm I feel... the certainty that I am now, for the first time not looking to the past to be the man I was, is compounded by the fact that these idiots are not looking at the present, either.

To a competitor, they have their eyes on the horizon... that "when I win All-In, it's a matter of time before I'm the main event, star of this company!"

This house is in terrible disrepair... with swift, terrible and mindfully purposeful intention that I'm going to rip the rotting foundation out and bring it all crashing down.

Because I've had it in me all along. The will to get where I needed to be, if I committed enough to the harm I'm willing to do to get there.

History backs me on this over the lists of people in this match who've never even been able to separate themselves from the middle of the pack in rudimentary battle royales like Cruiserhavoc or the Meltdown Tag title match...

When I've called my shot and committed to it, I've stuck the landing.

I'm calling it now... I'm coming around the plate to swing. And I'm going for home.

---

"Dion, it's Danny... I don't have a lot of time. I'll probably see you at the arena for Uprising, but if I don't I... have to get this out, just one time, in case I - " (In case I don't come back.)

"For the longest time, I was drifting... But when I started tagging with you, I don't know... I started learning about myself and examining why I do things the way I do. And maybe I didn't like it..." (Except that I do, deep down.)

"But the success that I started this year with taught me, that there were going to be times where I needed to be who... I am. And that was reinforced, even more."

"You think I'm moving backward. But the truth is..." (breathe. Just breathe.)

"The truth is maybe all this time... I was just wearing the skin of someone honorable, someone good."

"...But maybe I'm just someone who only comes to life when he feels the thrill of overcoming those tests, and standing tall."

"So maybe there isn't a place for me at the table with you, and if not, I understand."

(But you could have something here, she'd said. You could have a home.)

"Maybe..."

"Maybe deep down this's who I am. Maybe I'm someone who will willingly, calculatingly and with full knowledge, always choose the path that leads to causing the most harm, to get what I want."

"Maybe I just committed to the harm I'm willing to do."

"I only... regret... the fact that people like you get sucked into my wake."

"See, Dion, in the time we've spent together, I've gr -"

"I'm sorry, the mailbox is full, and cannot accept any more messages! Goodbye!" Click.

"...Hm. Doesn't... doesn't matter now..."

---

If I was to start in on someone, it'd be the lowliest worm that I'd crush because it was the least amount of threat, turning his targeting of me last on it's head and showcasing his lack of importance; Good morning, Kemp.

I'm actually sure you bought in to the announcers trumpeting that your laying everyone out with a chair Monday was the clearest sign that you were going to be a two-time All-In winner... allow me to violently disabuse you of that notion as I rip you from pillar-to-post you absolute, Flowers-for-Algernon-brained troglodyte.

You've as much chance of winning in this match as you do stringing together three words that make a coherent thought.

Y'think a chair kept any of us down? Kemp, you couldn't swing hard enough to do lasting damage on your best day. If you're wielding weapons, you dropped yours at my feet.

I beat you myself, weeks ago... when it was you that went in saying I was less than nothing, I came from underneath and crushed you into the mat.

And now, when you're out there attacking everyone with a chair, you save me for last.

Cute, Kyle.

You won't be repeating this year because you don't have a rank file of nobodies to climb over to grab the briefcase... you do have Jill Park, still...

But you have me in your way.

It isn't just Kemp I harbor the most Brobdingnagian disrespect for after Monday, Sam Kidsgrove also deserves an equal amount of my wrath.

Because... after two fucking years we've been fighting the same, unwinnable conflict, Sam Kidsgrove continues to spout off about how much of a lowlife I am... because I betrayed him in Trios 2020.

Sam... shut the fuck up.

I can't say it any plainer... can't couch it in witticisms that'll fire your aristocratic synapses or engage you in polite banter.

You're beyond beating horses now, you're just straight up whipping leather asking why it doesn't respect you.

When every single word out of your mouth when you're asked to speak about Downfall is ANGRILY declaiming how I turned against you, two years ago... how you don't CARE to know what my real name is, because my real name is garbage...

Here's a line you should run through a script doctor to see if it lands... "Sam Kidsgrove: I can come up with new material from time to time!" Ah, sorry, too unbelievable, right?

There's those in this match... who deserve to be... where if it was any other time, any other place, would be the dark horses that might have an outside chance to push that last mile.

But Teo Blaze has spent too long being reactive on Cruiserclash. If there is one, central failing within him, it's that he has spent the last year, between the CW Tag and the Cruiserweight belt... winning titles, yes.

Always, perennially at the mercy of those who are more committed. Men like me, who see what they want and take it from him.

Alice Gemini, meanwhile... has the attitude to be a success... but she hasn't done enough to separate herself from the crowd. The "Brutal Bitch", when push comes to shove, isn't doing or saying anything that Addy or Jessie Lee aren't already filling the air with... so what's different about Alice?

If there's one person in this match, who shows the resilience, the heart it would have needed to get to the top and claim the briefcase, it'd be CJ.

But the problem I have with CJ is, ultimately, what's going to lead to him having a long fall off the top - both from the ladder, when I'm hurling him off, and the fall from the top of the Tag mountain, eventually... he can't sustain his success.

AW management feeds CJ because they feel bad for someone who tries so hard to fight off the darkness, giving him a fortunate-son complex handing him ball after ball to fumble. World title shot against Dandy, he dropped it. His own tournament of Despair, the winner knocked him off.

His demons, his depression, his self-doubt, he wears them like a shirt.

He turns his advocacy, his Despair outward, trying to make the world better by giving people a Luminary to look up to...

He's the type to give the people that commit to follow him everything he can't face to give himself, while he offers to fix broken people like me and make them better.

There's no need to fix me. There's no redeeming me, or bringing me out of my despair.

With a smile on my face, I'm coming to run right through you.

Because, I'm exactly who I wanna be, for the first time.

---

And you, Rumiko Fugikawa. You heard him hang up his phone, you felt him take another deep hit in his soul.

You watched from the hall as he gritted his teeth and walked downstairs.

Like a man walking to the gallows.

Part of you is asking why didn't you follow his advice and run?

Your innate sense of responsibility (came honestly by, being the dutiful child to course-correct from Hinata's dreams) dictated that you couldn't just leave Keiko and Mat, they had a child.

But your heart was beating out of your chest, you couldn't stop your hands from shaking, feeling the excruciating pain of the burns run up them.

And as the light filtering through the window, the neons started to filter into the purple of San Fransisco dawn...

The world filled with noise as tires screeched up outside, followed, in a beat, by someone yelling "GET THAT SECURITY GATE DOWN!" and a crashing, battering.

Gathering your courage, you cried "Mat, get Keiko and Tomie out the back way, I'll watch the stairwell!" Mat took his wife and child, frightened... but you, Rumiko... you stayed.

Fingers the size of bars pried the shutters of the gate open, and, almost forced to squeeze through in clumps, a cavalcade of men in dark clothes entered the landing from the street.

That was when you looked down, seeing that he had cannisters on either side of his feet, and a third one in front of him he sent careening down with a shove of his foot.

The force of the kick sent the cannister end over end, banging to the bottom of the stairs.

"Yaichi should've bargained."

"I wanted to spare him this."

"But you're in my house now. And I."

"Won't."

"Run."

The lighter flicks.

And the line of amber dripping down the stairs ignites, catching. It bursts into high heat, and spreads to the wall. And, catches on the garments soaked in the kerosene from the cannister he'd spilled.

The large men scream highly, as their pants begin to catch flame. And the fires start creeping up the wall of the dojo, higher... turning the air into scorching, black smoke and oppressive heat.

In the middle of the flames, he stands. And he looks over his shoulder at you... and your breath catches in your gullet; That look, glaring and warning, was chilling you to the bone.

You see the curved, metal, black crowbar, a wicked implement of nothing but harm in his hands, extended like a sword as he leaps in to knock the flaming men to one side.

"Only way out of the fire is through the gate now! Go! GO!"

You look, again, at him, and you're spellbound...

He tears into the men, laying into them with violent shots with the crowbar, it's like you're witnessing a destructive whirlwind inside the blazing building... a natural disaster come to life...

Like a dragon, unleashed, belching fire and raining destruction.

You run past him, then pull back, yelping, as the fire roars in front of you.

Behind you, you hear the satisfied grin in his voice as he says "Ahhh, Tetsuya... never got a chance to thank you for your welcome to the neighborhood..." and a wet thump of the crowbar hitting flesh, and a shriek of pain.

"Y-you crazy!! Mister Yaichi will skin you for this! Why you - AIIIIEIEEE"

"No, you" - another thump - "Listen to me... You are done in Japantown... all of you. You're going to be the message that gets taken back..."

Your coughing out on the street now, close to vomiting and feeling as raw as a nerve, your burns singing as the rest of your skin felt like crackling bacon... and then...

He stepped out onto the front steps, dragging a body behind him. Mutilated, the limbs swollen and the hands smashed, the face was... dear god, seeing Tetsuya's face almost brought the full wretch up.

Daniel, singed, hair burnt and blackened, yet fierce and seemingly breathing out the smoke from his nose, deposits Tetsuya on the doorstep and his voice roars out to the neighborhood.

The few gangsters that survived the hit squad watch, as does a lone black SUV, which rolls a window down.

The dojo burns behind him in the doorway, but he raises his voice to the rooftops.

"THIS MAN IS AN EMISSARY OF THE KINGPIN THAT'S BEEN RUNNING YOUR LIVES FOR TOO LONG."

"BURNING YOUR BUILDINGS WHEN YOU DON'T PAY. SELLING HIS DRUGS ON YOUR CORNERS, TO YOUR CHILDREN."

"I SAY NO MORE."

With a violent, final kick as he would a dog, he shoves Tetsuya over, so he can face up. People are coming out of their apartment buildings, gaping, looking at the bloody mess.

"FROM THIS MOMENT ON!!

YOU WILL NOT EXTORT!

ROB!

OR WHORE!

ANYWHERE ON MY BLOCK!"

The man watching calmly pushes his glasses up as he gazes out of the SUV window.

"IF YOU WANT PROTECTION, YOU COME. TO ME.

YOU WANT A KINGPIN... I'M IT.

BECAUSE PINE STREET, IS MY HOME."

Defiant, he bends down, savagely yanking Tetsuya's body up by the hair, scowling fiercely. Tetsuya, barely recognizable, gurgles.

"IF YOU HAVE A PROBLEM WITH THAT... LOOK WHAT I DID TO THE REPRESENTATIVE OF THE LAST KINGPIN."

LOOK AT HIM!!

The sprinklers in the old building are going off, ringing a fire alarm as they try their hardest to tamp down the blaze... but he wearily, steps down the front stairs, and looks back at Hinata's dojo... there's a twinge of sorrow in his eyes.

The SUV's window rolls back up, and, almost surreptitiously, drives away... and he stands there in the street, watching it go...

If there's a moment where he's alone, he suddenly, unexpectedly, finds a small head at his knee.

Surprised, he looks down... Tomie, babbling happily to see him, grips his leg, so happy he's okay. Mat and Keiko, relief washing over them, join their daughter, thanking him, quickly, in Japanese.

The look on his face shows confusion, denial... but more people start coming out of their doorways, expressing their words, which all rise to a jumble, of admiration for his stand.

It's only you, Rumiko, hanging back, as the morning sun rises over Pine Street... and you glance, concerned, at the still-burning dojo, then look over at Danny.

Because for the life of you, as you recollect that nihilistic stare that looked back at you over it's shoulder through the belching flame...

You can't get it out of your mind who it is that's, improbably, found a new acceptance and home here.

Who, or what.

---

It's you two, Jill and Regan, that I've saved the best for last, because in many ways, you've called this reckoning down on your own heads...

Regan, it was your dogged insistence that you overcome me, erase the blemish on your perfect year, finally claim my head that kicked this off...

Because ya had many chances, Regan... but they weren't good enough, were they?

No, there was always an asterisk...so time and again, you had justification for why you never were able to get rid of that thorn in your side.

After all, according to you, I'm past my prime, a rag-tag punk with fading skills... Surely a victory over me, one-on-one, would be an easy affair, and you'd finish me off brutally, with an Abattoir sealing the deal...

Except you couldn't do that, Regan.

It took everything you had, plus the interference of Jill... and yet, you jumped on that pin, and you wear my scalp as if it netted you blissful retribution.

Your low standards make me smile.

Because it got you nothing, Regan.

You won past me, but in the time it took you, Jill has begun outstripping you, taking the place you wish you were at and oh, don't think we haven't seen the jealous discord that grows between you...

How you won't return the favors and assist her to win the way she needed to assist you.

That jealousy, that envy, says you ain't letting her climb that ladder and pull down the briefcase she thinks is hers.

And Jill, probably the odds-on favorite, right? After all, this is your year... You have everything that I have, you have the grit to make it through the main event stormy weather and you've come through it a double champion, a feat only echoed this year by... yours truly.

You've got the frenzied, stubborn refusal, that hungry wannabe fameseeker insistence that it doesn't matter what you have to do, you're gonna get on top...

You're completely blinded to the fact that you're balanced so precariously you've only just begun to start the same descent that hit me in January.

You're at the top, yes... but balancing all of that, holding on to two divisions and taking that into a multi-man match where every single person there is going to make sure you aren't the winner...

If there's one single, telling point... it's that you proclaim that you are reality, you are media and you are the future of this company.

Jill, if you're reality, then it's as curated and calculated to hide all of your flaws and show only the narrative you want, until the right moment arrives to bring drama.

When you really look at it, what's changed with you from last year?

You're still saying the exact same things... proclaiming from the rooftops like this is your yard now, that you ARE the future of AW, that this is your time.

You said that last year... and you were usurped by Kyle Kemp. Now you start hitting a few nat-20's, tasting a little gold, what was just bluster last year is now the reality finally coming to fruition?

No.

If you want my indictment it's this... your eyes are perennially on a future, on what is to come for you, that you think you can will into being just by you saying it. You don't live in the now... despite what you think, you are not fully committed to doing whatever you can, to be the present.

I am what this entire match centered around, from the moment Chris Avery predicted that whoever won between me and Bacchus was going to win All-In.

I made this my story. I decided then and there, by crushing Johnny and shutting his mouth, I was taking that potential, that future away from him, away from you...

Because I was bringing it, fully in line, with who, where, what I wanna be.

I'm burning the house down when I win this.

I will tear everything down to foundation... and if all that's left is blackened rubble so be it.

I bet on myself to get me here... that is the epitome of what going All-In means.

At Uprising, you all aren't entering your future... you aren't charting a path through the wilderness to get to your predestined promised lands.

At Uprising, you are all walking into my house...

At Uprising... I'm bringing it all home.