Post by Downfall on May 7, 2023 13:06:31 GMT -5
The damned ring was burning a hole in Jaime's pocket, it was.
Time to time, he reached down into the lining of his inner pocket, to fidget with it, to ensure that it was still real, still tangible. It was akin to an arm, flailing for a raft to keep from being buffeted during a storm. And yet, all he could think of now is that if, perchance, it was 24k, maybe he could at least get enough for it to make a car payment...
His desperation had brought him here, to a low area of San Diego he wasn't familiar with at 2 in the morning... almost a red light district, almost an alien world. The street was crowded with vagrants and drunks, and his nervous eyes flitted over every pock-marked face, and he clutched it tighter, along with the Mace in his pocket.
He couldn't believe he found himself here. Kicking himself for the shadiness, the seediness of it all. Sneaking out of their bed and going for a drive.
Ever since he had come ashore and been given his papers, there was a distance between him and his wife. And, sick with worry over the future, he had wandered the halls of his house, holding on to the ring in his pocket and feeling like he was falling deep into the depths of the ocean he had fished it out of.
Like tonight, her eyes questioned his over dinner, but he'd just smiled. His daughter had asked him to read her "Goodnight Moon" again (for the tenth damn time), and Jaime had sighed, and he had just begged off, daddy's tired princesa, daddy's just... so tired...
And how he'd trudged back to the bedroom. And how Maria had been sitting up against her pillow, reading a book, and seen him slump past her; She'd tenderly asked, "Jaime? Babe?" and again, unable to meet her eyes, he'd just said he's tired, gunna take a shower.
How could he let them know that Skipper had released him from the San Trieste once they'd gotten back to shore?
Told him, with apologies, that they needed to cut staff and that hauls had been light... And he knew, the unspoken truth, that others, like Iban, had seniority, and that was just bullshit, just politics, man, and...
He swallowed, the anxiety deep down twisting his guts into knots as he searched his phone again for the address of the pawn shop. Begging Santa Maria, anything, just give him enough to make the car note and maybe pay for Mica's chemistry books...
That desperate avarice was all that was keeping his legs moving as he made his way down the unfamiliar block.
He couldn't allow himself to think of going home empty-handed.
What would he say to Maria, or to the kids, if they were awake when he got back in? Or would he just beg off again, tell Maria he was just tired, just so tired... they'd talk about it in the morning...?
At last, he'd found it.
It was nearly missable, being little more than a small kiosk situated on a strip of shops that had seen better days; Boarded up windows and for-sale signs, scrawled over with weatherbeaten fliers and years-old graffiti.
Adjacent was a billiard hall that had people smoking outside of it, and Jaime did not like how the tough-looking patrons tracked him as he walked up to the pawn shop door.
It was open, mercifully, it's sign a grungy, disgusting yellow with bug carcasses inside of it as if fossilized; it's plate glass windows covered in heavy iron bars; It was everything you'd expect from a pawn shop in a bad part of the city at 2 in the morning.
A sickening titter from the left of the pawn shop rattled his consciousness, and Jaime startled; Looking over, he saw a misshapen husk with crusted, dirty clothing, hair so thick with grime that it was crawling and hanging in it's eyes, and a wide grin of disgusting teeth. "Whatchu got there, my man?" said the filthy denizen who'd been sleeping in a heap of trashbags outside of the pawn shop.
"Uh, I, uh..."
He edged back, taking the door of the pawn shop and using it to shield him as he backed inside.
"Awww, man, don't go!!"
Jaime still, was furtively looking over his shoulder an eternity later, as the damnable owner, a slovenly man who looked like the burgomeister of this duchy of filth, sitting behind a glass partition, wearing a Hawaiian shirt straining over his enormous bulk; He leaned over the ring proffered, gazing at it intently with a loupe.
His lip peeled back a bit, sniffing disdainfully. "Give ya twenty bucks for it."
Jaime was startled, as he was still looking at the entrance, to see if the shambling trash golem was out there in the dark, leering through the bars and smiling it's ugly smile. He did a double-take. "Twenty?? No, you - That can't be right. That's gold, man. Pure gold..."
The pawn shop owner sighed a little, as if he dealt with this type more often than not. "Sure. It's gold. Probably took it out ya grandmama's jewl'ry box, amirite? 'Cept what gram didn't tell you is that it's just cheap, could buy somethin' like this at Sears."
Jaime felt the desperation crawl up into his throat like a line of molten lava. Doggedly, he leaned as close in to the pawn shop owner as the partition would allow, trying to spin this, painting a picture with his hands.
"No, you don't understand. This is a special gold ring... I worked on a fishing boat, the San Trieste. We pulled this up in our net... I fished it out of the throat of a - of a shark, man. This right here is just one piece of treasure the San Trieste pulled out of the water, rescued from the wreckage of a Spanish frigate hauling gold doubloons."
That was his best shot. He had nothing left. He hoped the pawn shop owner was a fan of Robert Louis Stevenson.
Nonplussed, the pawn shop owner pursed his lips, wheezing a little due to corpulence+effort as he slid the ring back.
"Buddy, this is California, d'you know how many people try to sell me Spanish gold. I got a whole box fulla rings right here that are all 'Spanish gold' right from the puckered asshole of Hernan Cortez or somethin."
"But - "
The pawn shop owner grimaced as if this was paining him by the moment. "Thirty is the best you get, friendo. My advice, you seem like the type of guy that's looking for money, maybe you get another job driving for Uber."
"But if you're trying to sell me just this one little ring, that's all I got for you."
"..."
"Hey man, I gotta make a profit, too."
Slowly, stubbornly, feeling his soul wither at the denial of any succor but not letting this fucking man take any more of his dignity, Jaime reached into the hole and snatched the ring, palming it.
Walking on legs that felt as if they were the most fragile wooden stilts, Jaime about-faced and began to walk away, thinking of so many things, thinking of chemistry books, thinking of walking papers from the San Trieste, thinking of coming back home to lay next to Maria at 3 am now and not being able to talk to her, just telling her he was so tired, babe, so tired.
He almost didn't register it when the misshapen freak rose up from the trash bags stacked on the street for pickup next to the pawn shop rose up again, coming around. The thickly grimy and vermin-ridden hair slipped away, revealing a mad, balefully burning eye, and those uneven, rotted teeth.
"Sayyy, friend, why don't you show Dave what you gots in your hand there huh?"
Jaime paused, and registered the tip of the knife the garbage golem had produced from the lining of a battered army surplus coat.
"Come on, man, stay back"
He fumbled in an interior lining - where was that damn Mace?? and he thought of Maria, and climbing into bed next to her. Apologizing for being so distant since he came back to the shore.
The trash golem that had identified itself as "Dave" hissed horrifically through it's disgusting teeth, lunging forward, punching the knife underneath Jaime's ribcage. Jaime squawked in pain and surprise, but the creature, showing surprising strength, pushed, and Jaime and "Dave" collided with the wall, legs tangled in bags of heaped trash, nearly going down. "Dave" hissed again, feral.
Jaime's fingers opened upon impact, and the golden band flew from his grasp. A golden band, with the little, interior script written in flowing cursive reading "To my heart". It hit the cobblestone with a dink! and bounced, rolling away.
Jaime burbled as blood began to flow from his ruptured organs. "Dave" was raging as the blade punched in and out with machine-like intensity, roaring "Give its! Give its to Dave! Gives whats in your hand!!"
Jaime couldn't feel his fingers anymore. The world was growing into a deepening-red haze. And all he thought of was his little girl Berquis...
Princesa...daddy's just... a little tired...
"Dave" pulled the knife out with a final, animalistic snarl, throwing a fan of blood across the trash bags. "Where is it??" He whirled around, knowing instinctively that Jaime had been clutching something in his hand like a drowning man. He looked around, as the blood flowed over the curb, the pool spreading farther and farther into the street.
Then, the urges subsided into miniscule reason as "Dave" couldn't spot his quarry, but only saw the spreading pool of blood, the one eye visible beneath his thickly matted hair widened. "SHIT."
Unnoticed as "Dave" scampered off into an alley to commune with the trashbags, the spreading tide of claret began flowing from the body laying against the pawn shop.
The river of blood flowing from Jaime pushed the lightweight woman's band further and further away from the pawn shop.
Were it's owner of a mind to check outside for the noise, perhaps he would have heard the scuffle, and traversed outside to find Jaime, gurgling his last, weakened "Maria......" and seeing the trail of his blood running off of the curb, across multiple garbage bags, and down into the gutter.
But he did not exit the shop, or even, come from behind the counter, and Jaime closed his eyes on his own.
The scarlet rivulets of lifesblood pouring, emerging from the scores of wounds of the cooling body, pushed the ring down into the gutter, where it bounced and fell.
And lay there, shining in the darkness, underlying a steel grate.
"Hey!"
"Hey! Are you awake? Please, please, mister, you gotta wake up, please wake up,... I don't know wh-why we're here or why they brought us here, you gotta wake - Yes!"
He shifts, his head filled with broken glass and coffin nails, sticky perspiration and blood running down from a nasty wound on his temple, the haze over his vision as his head lolls and he can't figure out why it's so hard to lift telling his hindbrain that he should check for a concussion... but then his other various aches assert themselves, and the scream between his shoulder-blades lets him know how tightly his wrists are trussed behind him, and he gradually began to take in the world around him; The first thing that struck him was that he was tied in a chair, opposite another human being, eyes bugging with panic.
As he lifts his throbbing head and tried to fix on a central point to keep the room from blurring, he has time to think wait why is warpath here as the big man looms over the corpulent lump sitting next to him, screaming with sudden bursts of pain; The squeal splits through his eardrums, making his head feel like a shattered teacup inside of a ziploc bag.
Adam Miller, a mercenary, businesslike expression on his face, looked up over the victim's shoulder, gauges his reaction.
Despite all of the pain echoing through his head from the scream, Danny's eyes slit with profound and immediate rage. He strains against the handcuffs he can feel biting into his wrist. "You. You sonofa - all this time? All this time, you were working for him?"
Adam cocks an amused eyebrow at him. "Yeah, it took you long enough to figure that part out. And here, the boss thought it was too obvious."
"You came to me months ago. Tried to talk me out of leaving. I should have seen the hidden hand in it."
"Yeah, well, Danny," Adam shrugged, and straightened to his full height. In his right hand, he had clenched the pliers which he had just used to crush a human being's fingers. "I did ask you straight up if you had any idea what you were getting into here in Japantown."
The chubby bastard tied to the other hand groaned, lifted his head, "Please... please I g-got nothing to do with this... please lemme go..."
"Now that's true," Adam allowed, "Bradley Jutensai, has an apartment on the second floor, 4400 block of Pine Street, above a laundromat with his mother..." Playfully, Adam reaches down and squishes the fat man's cheeks, making him fish-face. "And, as of a few months ago, was going to take a long walk off a short platform. Yeah, you're innocent."
Adam brings the pliers down, cruelly, behind Bradley's broad back, and his shoulder muscles tense with the effort of closing the pliers as hard as he can on an extremity behind his back. Bradley's ear-splitting howl was world-shaking to a concussed head.
Not betraying his displeasure or motioning for Adam to stop, Danny snarled at him. Adam looked up again, eyebrows expectant for him to step in. "Why are you doing this?"
"Because I want him to prove a point," cut in another voice, cold and rapacious as a shark. A door to the side opened and closed, smoothly. And, although older by a decade and limping more noticeably, leaning against a cane, did Danny ever know the man stepping out of the shadow;
"So. It was you," Danny reacts without surprise, eyes searching every inch of Hinata's currently dispassionate face. Hinata looks down his nose at him.
The action of the wolf erupts from him; He pulls forward, despite the awkward positioning of the cuffs behind his chair, straining. "If you come any closer to me, I'll grab your other leg and twist until it turns into rubber."
Hinata's mouth draws upwards in a distant smile, reading yes, you would, wouldn't you.
Danny nonetheless tries to break the cuffs behind his back, twisting his shoulders, before glaring up at Hinata.
Hinata moves, despite the pain in his leg, with a slow, savoring, as he circled around.
Danny cuts his eyes from Adam to him, "That fat idiot I can understand. We've been allies, but we've both screwed each other over enough times that I know what the score is between us. But you?..."
"Hinata, we were friends, damn you. Brothers. We - "
"Were we, Daniel? I didn't know that you held any covenant to family bonds. I didn't know you had any room for affection in your heart. Tell me then, brother. When you heard I went missing, did you search for me? Did you view the body? Or did you even stop your journeyman existence once in twelve years to ever check again?"
Danny went silent, fuming. For his part, Hinata looks, almost pointedly, in the direction of a two-way mirror; Danny wonders who's on the other side.
"So, tell me, Danny. The last time I saw you, your IEW career... your mainstream wrestling career, in a nutshell, had just imploded due to your own hubris. You challenged Adam here to a match with your job on the line, and you lost. Shattered, a broken man, you came to me, searching for succor and to be made whole."
"You came to the one person who trained with you, roomed with you, learned your arrogant mind and looked after you... Who played and trained and fought with you side by side... until such time as your petty jealousy would not allow the idea that someone could possibly be your equal. That, you would, could not allow. So you destroyed my leg. And I didn't see you again... for seven... long... years."
"And you told me, to my horror, that the career you had sacrificed mine for the first time around? You had thrown it away. For petty pride. For hubris. Because you could not allow the idea that someone," his eyes flicking over to Adam, who stood, impassive, "Could be your equal."
Then, Hinata looks back to him, before asking the question he obviously had come here for.
"So, tell me, Danny. It's been so long since we've caught up. And you've undergone a renaissance since then. You've grown into a new role. You've found a home. You've taken up a spot in my dojo, and in all of these changes, you have found a second life, a renewed career."
He spreads his hands out, inviting discourse.
"So. What have you done with it?"
His eyes beat into Danny's upturned face, and Danny considers him for a long time. Seeing him, fully. The rage boiling just under the surface, that hadn't appeared to have been there twelve years ago. But... seeing Hinata gripping his cane, favoring the leg he'd destroyed... very possibly, the rage and the spiteful hurt that'd been there all along.
"You've kept up with my career," he said then, irony and amusement.
"Oh, I've followed your wrestling career with great interest," Hinata says, turning his back to him.
"Your other business endeavors are of little interest to me, except that they paint a compellingly complete portrait. Once the gangs under my supervision began to provide a target for you and you saw that there was a kingpin on this block you made a home in, your pride, your ego would not let anyone else hold a power over you. That's what your entire life has been about, Daniel Fehl. You are a man who hates to be powerless, and hates even more that someone, somewhere could have power that you don't, in any form it would take."
"It would lead someone with no business being in crime to declare themselves a kingpin of the block, and raise armies of teenagers to act as street enforcers, and even sell drugs on turf to claim it... just so that I don't have access to it."
Danny rolled his eyes, "Thanks for the analysis, Doctor Joyce. Got anything stiffer? I've had people picking at that same scab for the last few years." Then, mockingly, "'Downfall hates to be seen as weak, he won't allow any action that makes him look weak, you sound like Dionysus.'"
"It is very interesting that you bring up Dionysus, and I'll tell you why in a minute, but still... do you disagree? Tell me I'm wrong."
Bradley Jutensai winces in pain, "Hey, hey guys, this sounds like it doesn't have anything to do with me..." Adam looks serious, cuffing him over the back of the head.
"I don't have to tell you anything," Danny says, sullenly. "I'm not playing these head games. Let go of me."
"What else is your career, then, if not for you craving control, Daniel? I've pondered this for a long, long time. Believe me. And when I look at you, I see that, despite your ideology to the contrary, there is very little about you that isn't an incessant need to control everything."
"If it's me," Adam says, leaning against his charge with a nonchalance, "I tried to tell you, you should get out of the crime shit. Stop pushing yourself in directions like this. Stop trying to go places you have no business. Just do ordinary wrestler shit and cut promos talking about your opponents in gyms and bars. Where's the match relevance? Where's the relatability?"
Hinata's look thanks Adam for his input, then tacitly tells him to stay at his post and keep his mouth shut.
"But Dionysus," muses Hinata, "Dionysus brings up the repeating pattern of your life."
He is careful as he searches Hinata's face. "What about Dion?"
Hinata's smile is thin, incisive. "Tell me, what do you think of the new, mysterious faction that have begun sending messages to Dionysus? Telling him to walk through open doors, telling him to unlock his true potential amid a series of flowery motivational messages about the self?"
Danny snorts, derisively, "I'd say that Elysium is a pathetic, shallow cult spouting garden, basic pop psychology and preying on someone in an insecure state."
"Mm," Hinata muses, steepling his pointer fingers over the head of his cane, "So... in your assessment... Elysium is, to Dionysus, just a camp run by a narcissist, preying on someone weaker-minded, using their insecurities to push them around like a puppet, just so that they can have... power? Control over someone?"
Danny's eyes narrow into slits. He doesn't answer, obstinately.
Hinata points those steepled fingers, together, forward, in the understood "got you" gesture, "...Something like an... Inner Circle, wouldn't you say?"
Adam snorts, "Don't deny it, it's all right there in your history. You're a user, Danny." Of course, the other one who was there for the Inner Circle in the room, would speak up.
Danny cuts his eyes, laser-intense, at the in-another-lifetime Warpath, "And you're the would-be neverwas that tried to usurp that position," then, turning back to Hinata, "and so are you. You take in rejects like this, who gave up on their dream, and you do the exact same thing you accuse me of."
Hinata puts a hand to his chest, eyes widening as if wounded to the quick, "...But we aren't talking about me, Daniel. This is just about you. What you've made of yourself with the time allotted, in your second chance at life. What you've accomplished, in your name... and the people you've willingly stepped on to attain what you want." And, pointedly, Hinata once again glances over his shoulder, to the two-way glass and whoever is standing behind it, watching this whole scene play out.
"Please... please let me go... I won't tell anyone about... any of this, please..."
All players involved ignore Bradley's blubbering. Danny chews this all over. He is stuck on how to respond to this. Partly, he bristles, why does he have anything to explain about himself? But something dark, deep within him, feels the anger building deep inside of his gut; That thing, just wishes to see this entire room burn.
"How about this Hardcore title you've inherited?"
The sudden train-track switch rouses him, and again, he's struck by how astutely Hinata has been watching. For decades, it seems. "....What about it?"
"You lost several bids to regain the AW World Championship early last year... and, without that, you decided to focus your effort on the Hardcore title. In your reasoning, you wanted to make the Hardcore title mean something. You wanted to make it equal the World Title, and, in your infinitely Icarusian hubris, you proclaimed that only you were meant to restore it to a glory it was missing. So...?" Again, Hinata spreads his hands, asking well, how did that work?
He refuses to rise to the bait, but the implication of the words hits him nonetheless.
"Did you? Or did the membrane of Action Wrestling, push back on your arrogant belief? Did you restore the Hardcore title to a glory never seen? Or... did the endless need for booking content just feed you cheap, meaningless wins that you didn't deem satisfying, did the machine roll right on ahead and give you nothing matches against the Joey Scalas, Robbie Bigg Dicks and Billy Ray Cashes of the world? A main event title? Danny, the Hardcore title is your albatross... because it signifies that no matter how high your standard... it will never satisfy you."
He doesn't answer. He's doing his best to shut Hinata out, focusing on the pounding, roaring blood in his concussed head. Jaw set. Hinata, though, is arriving at his point.
"Given everything you want... given license to be as brutal as you want and to crush all who step in your path... you'll only ever be given Joey Scala or Robbie Bigg Dick to toy with."
"Given everything you asked for... you still will never be satisfied."
"So take that to it's logical conclusion, Daniel. Give yourself everything you've ever wanted... give yourself finally, the triumphant, shining moment in the sun. Say you win Havoc. Say you win the World championship again, and it lasts. Will that be enough for you? Would you be... happy? Satisfied?"
Danny's eyes are cold, flinty and beating right into Hinata's. "Go fuck yourself."
Hinata nods, mouth firming as he looks to the ceiling, then, again, into the two-way mirror and the person on the other side. "I thought not."
Now Danny shoots a glare over at Adam, "Look. You've heard the blubbering moosey begging to be let go. Let's just have done with this, unless you're arriving at a point."
Hinata totters over on his cane, the weakness of his limbs from the expenditure of effort secondary to the bracing thrill of his presentation. He stands beside Adam, behind Bradley, putting a hand on a slumped shoulder. "This is the point. This is where everything comes home to roost. This is where I pull the rug out from you, and give you in return the gift you showed me fifteen years ago."
"On Christmas Eve, you encountered Bradley on the very bridge I jumped off of. The bridge that I went to, in my blackest night of despair... where you came to my home, and told me as much that it was all for nothing."
"You found him, and you talked him into walking away from the bridge. You did for him, what you never did for me... didn't even think of doing, did you? Because I wasn't a player in your world, I was just a set-piece?"
Danny meets Bradley's eyes, which are weeping and afraid. Danny's eyes are simply flat, emotionless, as he admits, "I did."
"Did you save Bradley that night because you were thinking of me? Did you attempt to rectify all of the harm that's weighed on your soul, Daniel, for twenty-three godforsaken years, the ruin of a promising start, the decimation of my dreams, not once, but again, and again? Did you... do for him... what you wished you could have done from the beginning?"
Danny fumes. And, as much as he's able, his eyes searching over Bradley's face, it's an admission but not an apology. To either side. At all. "I didn't."
"...I didn't even think of you."
Hinata leans against his cane, chest swelling, vindicated. "Not once? Aside from the lowest moments, where you determine you want to begin again, where you reached out for me as part of some sophomoric wish to start anew where things were simplest, just two young men at the beginning of their journey? Aside from that... you never even thought of me?"
"I never did... because I thought... our bond didn't need that," he says, no shame in his voice, but some other emotion echoing it that he can't define. "I thought... Hina. All this time, I thought I knew you like we were brothers..."
"...But I see now I never knew you at all."
"No. No, you did not," Hinata's voice mused. Lips pursing pensively, he looks down at Bradley, his hand lifting, brushing the younger man's shoulder ponderously. "It was an uncharacteristically selfless act you did for young Bradley, convincing him he should live, encouraging him to try to live a better life."
He nods assent to Adam, who lifts his hand with intention. He isn't wielding pliers now. The mercenary, grinning wildly, lifts a chromed silver cannon, thumbing back the hammer. "Adam, please, shoot him in the head."
In the seconds following the registering of Hinata's clipped command, a frenzy of action. From the other side of the obscured two-way glass, for the first time, a woman's voice cries out in protest, and thuds of dull impact against the glass as if someone is punching it; Simultaneously, Danny snarls, tugging at the handcuffs with enough force to draw blood from his wrists, tearing and trying to wriggle his shoulders, shouting almost incoherently at Adam, "Warpath you son of a BITCH don't you DO IT" Adam paying no mind, putting the barrel of the gun right against Bradley's head. Bradley letting out a small, whimpering "hie!" as the cold metal touches him, snot and tears running down his face.
This plays out tensely, for eternally torturous milliseconds, until Hinata motions to Danny. "Just tell me this one thing, then."
Danny's face is murderous, but he says nothing, yet.
"All of this. If it means nothing to you. Then it never meant anything to you."
"Not even when we were just starting out. Nothing ever would have been enough, would it have?"
"Not fulfilling your dreams of main-eventing the Tokyo Dome like we talked about. Not being given the validation of your father that you grew up craving."
"Tell me true, Daniel. Even if you had all of that, the girl, the title, the fame and more... it wouldn't have satisfied you, would it?"
The empty void inside of his chest, that dark, bleak thing exulted in being recognized. But Danny just looks down at his lap. His voice, faraway, carries to the two men staring at him, holding a gun to Bradley's head.
".......No. It wouldn't."
Gnashing his teeth nastily, Hinata's eyes bored deep into Danny's. "Then what. Was any of this. For."
Face-to-face with the monster that lay bare in front of him, looking deep into the heart of himself, he doesn't answer at first. Then, finally, almost to himself, an admission.
"I needed someplace to put the anger."
Having finally arrived at the truth, Hinata closes his eyes, breathing it in. "Thank you, Daniel." A pregnant beat, as he glances into the two-way glass, glorying in his moment of triumph.
All other eyes are on Danny. Who, with this admission from deep within the pit of his soul, feels growing disquiet. Adam watches him, smiling, his eyes saying that is the Downfall I know while Bradley looks absolutely lost.
The gun reports in Adam's hand, once, cacaphonously, catastrophically loud, loud enough to reverb through the closed little office, loud enough to send a shrill ringing of tinnitus that hit him like a secondary gunshot; Loud enough and devastating enough that it sent Bradley, still trussed up, his rounded shoulders slumped in the chair, and knocking him over like an inflated bowling-pin. Blood immediately begins pouring from his head.
A muffled wail goes up from the adjacent office, a scream that is as wrenching as it is too late.
The pain, outrage and heartache of someone who doesn't know this stranger to mourn, but quails at the act of them being assassinated for no reason. The woman's voice, screaming over and over again on the other side of the glass, shrieks Hinata's name, pounding the glass again.
Hinata looks at Adam, who is smiling triumphantly. There is something in Adam's expression, a hungry, bleakly nihilistic craving that cares for nothing but watching the world burn, that Hinata recognizes, and curls his lip at. Were he unaffected by the close-range blast, it would be a look Danny would have understood.
"You... son of a... You didn't have to do that!"
Hinata glances at him, offhandedly. "I didn't, Daniel."
"But this is, as I said, the gift I return to you. As you went out of your way to help a stranger, to do the right thing in someone's moment of weakness, I just showed you the same mercy you did me... fifteen years ago. I showed you that it means nothing. That nothing you do..... matters."
"That, my friend, is how you give someone the gift of clarity."
"You -"
Adam comes over, using the butt of the pistol to smash him across the jaw, rocking him dangerously over to his side. "Show some respect."
Again, showing restrained annoyance at the quality of his help, Hinata favors the in-another-life Warpath with a look, before looking sternly down at Danny, "So this is where we stand on Pine Street. Do what you want. Defy my lieutenants. Brutalize any of the Death Rider bangers that ride around doing daily operations. Hell, allocate product from the streets with your children in your dojo and sell it on the corners if you wish. You have not taken over from me. None of it will matter. None of it... matters."
"It never will."
Blood runs down his chin from the ground as he still struggles to get up, still trying to fight against his bonds.
"I don't need to get you out of my turf. I don't need to start a war. I just need to remind you, of what you taught me... so very long ago."
"Have a nice day, Daniel."
His head bursting with renewed pain and jagged, broken-glass sensation, his ears ringing loudly with tinnitus... finally, Danny's eyes fix on Bradley Jutensai, opposite him on the same floor, eyes glazed over and mouth agape in a forever expression of shock, thickly-black blood flowing from the wound on his temple, and he looks at Hinata's shoulders as Hinata turns to the door, exiting. His voice as loud as a hurricane, he calls after them.
"This isn't over between us, Hinata! There's a debt between us! Did you hear me? This isn't over! This..."
Hinata is already leaving, taking Adam with him, and leaving him in the room with the body. And now, in the room alone, his voice falters.
"...This isn't over..."
He lays there on his side, face-to-face with a dead man's eyes, and he can't tell what disturbs him more, the question that's asked of what this means to him, or the answer.
As Hinata comes back into his elaborately ornate office space, decorated with all of the expected trappings of a crime lord of his status, there is a moment where she realized just what a mask it all was. A carefully constructed persona, all of it, to cover his anger at the world, that slipped away the second he came into contact with Daniel Fehl. Hinata, sighing, feeling the weight of it all, comes to his desk, loosening his tie and looking down at his leg and the cane he leans against. It was a small, humanizing moment, where Rumiko is able to see her brother.
He looks over at Adam, then; "I'll be retiring to my apartment, give it ten minutes and untie him."
"Sir," Adam says, a smile on his face. You really do get the sense that this man has his own plans, his own designs in life... but also that, like the Saturday night quarterback who threw the winning touchdown twenty years ago, he can't stop himself from reliving his old days.
Hinata sighs, and assumes his cold crimelord demeanor, glancing at Rumiko. He canes over to her, hobbling due to the weakness in his leg and the fatigue. "Sister..."
As soon as he comes close, she hauls back and slaps him, hard, across the face.
He stays frozen for a moment, holding his cheek, stricken. Then, he turns to look at her, his eyes widening with genuine hurt.
"You aren't the Hinata I knew," Rumiko says, voice husky. "He died when he jumped in the river. He died when I got the phone call in my college dorm saying that the police had dredged up a body. Whatever swam, crawled, hobbled away from the water is... is.... sick. Diseased."
Hinata's eyes beat into hers, "If I'm a monster, I'm a creation of Daniel Fe-"
"NO," Rumiko snaps, shaking her head and blinking back rage-filled tears, "No, you do not say that. You don't compare the two of you."
"And why not?" he responds, archly, "Why would you side with him, the petty, narcissistic sociopath? Do you know how many people he's willingly stepped on? Do you think that he'd hesitate to kill if it really struck him?..." He leans closer to her, insinuating with deeply menacing leer, "Do you think he's capable of loving you?"
She refuses to look at Hinata, but she shakes her head, "I don't know."
Hinata's expression softens, and despite all of it, his concern, his brotherly love for her comes through. That much, is not his mask. "Rumiko..."
Rumiko pushes his hand away. "But I do know that, between the two of you... I'd side with him."
He pauses, taking her words in, and there is a stilted expression that reads as shock, before other emotions sea-change over his face, pain to anger to his cold, remorseless stare. "So be it."
"Goodbye, sister. You won't like what we make of Pine Street. But remember, you had a choice. It was the wrong one."
Adam comes back in the room, and Hinata motions for him to take his sister away. Rumiko has to look back over her shoulder at the side office, behind the two-way glass, though. There's a silence to it, sober and slow. She wants to go back, to go to him, and help him up off the ground. But she's already being led away from it and out of the office by the arm.
The audience is at an end.
Beneath the city of San Diego, in a sewer space underneath a grate, a rat nibbles at a small, circular shiny that had fallen through the grate and landed on a waterlogged old Grainger catalog and a greasy, half-finished Starbucks sandwich still in a wrapper. The rat, squeaking and cheeping, uses it's claws to tear at the Starbucks wrapper; Extracting a sliver of meat, and picking at the processed food; A feast fit for a rat-king.
"God damn rats," complains a voice of one of the big-things, and a large, booted foot comes in, brushing them aside. "Bad enough the mix flush valves on the 3068 keep failing down here, the access panels always gotta be down in the nastiest, shittiest, most rat-infested holes, I -"
A pause, then "...Oh damn. How did this get here?"
Time to time, he reached down into the lining of his inner pocket, to fidget with it, to ensure that it was still real, still tangible. It was akin to an arm, flailing for a raft to keep from being buffeted during a storm. And yet, all he could think of now is that if, perchance, it was 24k, maybe he could at least get enough for it to make a car payment...
His desperation had brought him here, to a low area of San Diego he wasn't familiar with at 2 in the morning... almost a red light district, almost an alien world. The street was crowded with vagrants and drunks, and his nervous eyes flitted over every pock-marked face, and he clutched it tighter, along with the Mace in his pocket.
He couldn't believe he found himself here. Kicking himself for the shadiness, the seediness of it all. Sneaking out of their bed and going for a drive.
Ever since he had come ashore and been given his papers, there was a distance between him and his wife. And, sick with worry over the future, he had wandered the halls of his house, holding on to the ring in his pocket and feeling like he was falling deep into the depths of the ocean he had fished it out of.
Like tonight, her eyes questioned his over dinner, but he'd just smiled. His daughter had asked him to read her "Goodnight Moon" again (for the tenth damn time), and Jaime had sighed, and he had just begged off, daddy's tired princesa, daddy's just... so tired...
And how he'd trudged back to the bedroom. And how Maria had been sitting up against her pillow, reading a book, and seen him slump past her; She'd tenderly asked, "Jaime? Babe?" and again, unable to meet her eyes, he'd just said he's tired, gunna take a shower.
How could he let them know that Skipper had released him from the San Trieste once they'd gotten back to shore?
Told him, with apologies, that they needed to cut staff and that hauls had been light... And he knew, the unspoken truth, that others, like Iban, had seniority, and that was just bullshit, just politics, man, and...
He swallowed, the anxiety deep down twisting his guts into knots as he searched his phone again for the address of the pawn shop. Begging Santa Maria, anything, just give him enough to make the car note and maybe pay for Mica's chemistry books...
That desperate avarice was all that was keeping his legs moving as he made his way down the unfamiliar block.
He couldn't allow himself to think of going home empty-handed.
What would he say to Maria, or to the kids, if they were awake when he got back in? Or would he just beg off again, tell Maria he was just tired, just so tired... they'd talk about it in the morning...?
At last, he'd found it.
It was nearly missable, being little more than a small kiosk situated on a strip of shops that had seen better days; Boarded up windows and for-sale signs, scrawled over with weatherbeaten fliers and years-old graffiti.
Adjacent was a billiard hall that had people smoking outside of it, and Jaime did not like how the tough-looking patrons tracked him as he walked up to the pawn shop door.
It was open, mercifully, it's sign a grungy, disgusting yellow with bug carcasses inside of it as if fossilized; it's plate glass windows covered in heavy iron bars; It was everything you'd expect from a pawn shop in a bad part of the city at 2 in the morning.
A sickening titter from the left of the pawn shop rattled his consciousness, and Jaime startled; Looking over, he saw a misshapen husk with crusted, dirty clothing, hair so thick with grime that it was crawling and hanging in it's eyes, and a wide grin of disgusting teeth. "Whatchu got there, my man?" said the filthy denizen who'd been sleeping in a heap of trashbags outside of the pawn shop.
"Uh, I, uh..."
He edged back, taking the door of the pawn shop and using it to shield him as he backed inside.
"Awww, man, don't go!!"
Jaime still, was furtively looking over his shoulder an eternity later, as the damnable owner, a slovenly man who looked like the burgomeister of this duchy of filth, sitting behind a glass partition, wearing a Hawaiian shirt straining over his enormous bulk; He leaned over the ring proffered, gazing at it intently with a loupe.
His lip peeled back a bit, sniffing disdainfully. "Give ya twenty bucks for it."
Jaime was startled, as he was still looking at the entrance, to see if the shambling trash golem was out there in the dark, leering through the bars and smiling it's ugly smile. He did a double-take. "Twenty?? No, you - That can't be right. That's gold, man. Pure gold..."
The pawn shop owner sighed a little, as if he dealt with this type more often than not. "Sure. It's gold. Probably took it out ya grandmama's jewl'ry box, amirite? 'Cept what gram didn't tell you is that it's just cheap, could buy somethin' like this at Sears."
Jaime felt the desperation crawl up into his throat like a line of molten lava. Doggedly, he leaned as close in to the pawn shop owner as the partition would allow, trying to spin this, painting a picture with his hands.
"No, you don't understand. This is a special gold ring... I worked on a fishing boat, the San Trieste. We pulled this up in our net... I fished it out of the throat of a - of a shark, man. This right here is just one piece of treasure the San Trieste pulled out of the water, rescued from the wreckage of a Spanish frigate hauling gold doubloons."
That was his best shot. He had nothing left. He hoped the pawn shop owner was a fan of Robert Louis Stevenson.
Nonplussed, the pawn shop owner pursed his lips, wheezing a little due to corpulence+effort as he slid the ring back.
"Buddy, this is California, d'you know how many people try to sell me Spanish gold. I got a whole box fulla rings right here that are all 'Spanish gold' right from the puckered asshole of Hernan Cortez or somethin."
"But - "
The pawn shop owner grimaced as if this was paining him by the moment. "Thirty is the best you get, friendo. My advice, you seem like the type of guy that's looking for money, maybe you get another job driving for Uber."
"But if you're trying to sell me just this one little ring, that's all I got for you."
"..."
"Hey man, I gotta make a profit, too."
Slowly, stubbornly, feeling his soul wither at the denial of any succor but not letting this fucking man take any more of his dignity, Jaime reached into the hole and snatched the ring, palming it.
Walking on legs that felt as if they were the most fragile wooden stilts, Jaime about-faced and began to walk away, thinking of so many things, thinking of chemistry books, thinking of walking papers from the San Trieste, thinking of coming back home to lay next to Maria at 3 am now and not being able to talk to her, just telling her he was so tired, babe, so tired.
He almost didn't register it when the misshapen freak rose up from the trash bags stacked on the street for pickup next to the pawn shop rose up again, coming around. The thickly grimy and vermin-ridden hair slipped away, revealing a mad, balefully burning eye, and those uneven, rotted teeth.
"Sayyy, friend, why don't you show Dave what you gots in your hand there huh?"
Jaime paused, and registered the tip of the knife the garbage golem had produced from the lining of a battered army surplus coat.
"Come on, man, stay back"
He fumbled in an interior lining - where was that damn Mace?? and he thought of Maria, and climbing into bed next to her. Apologizing for being so distant since he came back to the shore.
The trash golem that had identified itself as "Dave" hissed horrifically through it's disgusting teeth, lunging forward, punching the knife underneath Jaime's ribcage. Jaime squawked in pain and surprise, but the creature, showing surprising strength, pushed, and Jaime and "Dave" collided with the wall, legs tangled in bags of heaped trash, nearly going down. "Dave" hissed again, feral.
Jaime's fingers opened upon impact, and the golden band flew from his grasp. A golden band, with the little, interior script written in flowing cursive reading "To my heart". It hit the cobblestone with a dink! and bounced, rolling away.
Jaime burbled as blood began to flow from his ruptured organs. "Dave" was raging as the blade punched in and out with machine-like intensity, roaring "Give its! Give its to Dave! Gives whats in your hand!!"
Jaime couldn't feel his fingers anymore. The world was growing into a deepening-red haze. And all he thought of was his little girl Berquis...
Princesa...daddy's just... a little tired...
"Dave" pulled the knife out with a final, animalistic snarl, throwing a fan of blood across the trash bags. "Where is it??" He whirled around, knowing instinctively that Jaime had been clutching something in his hand like a drowning man. He looked around, as the blood flowed over the curb, the pool spreading farther and farther into the street.
Then, the urges subsided into miniscule reason as "Dave" couldn't spot his quarry, but only saw the spreading pool of blood, the one eye visible beneath his thickly matted hair widened. "SHIT."
Unnoticed as "Dave" scampered off into an alley to commune with the trashbags, the spreading tide of claret began flowing from the body laying against the pawn shop.
The river of blood flowing from Jaime pushed the lightweight woman's band further and further away from the pawn shop.
Were it's owner of a mind to check outside for the noise, perhaps he would have heard the scuffle, and traversed outside to find Jaime, gurgling his last, weakened "Maria......" and seeing the trail of his blood running off of the curb, across multiple garbage bags, and down into the gutter.
But he did not exit the shop, or even, come from behind the counter, and Jaime closed his eyes on his own.
The scarlet rivulets of lifesblood pouring, emerging from the scores of wounds of the cooling body, pushed the ring down into the gutter, where it bounced and fell.
And lay there, shining in the darkness, underlying a steel grate.
"Hey!"
"Hey! Are you awake? Please, please, mister, you gotta wake up, please wake up,... I don't know wh-why we're here or why they brought us here, you gotta wake - Yes!"
He shifts, his head filled with broken glass and coffin nails, sticky perspiration and blood running down from a nasty wound on his temple, the haze over his vision as his head lolls and he can't figure out why it's so hard to lift telling his hindbrain that he should check for a concussion... but then his other various aches assert themselves, and the scream between his shoulder-blades lets him know how tightly his wrists are trussed behind him, and he gradually began to take in the world around him; The first thing that struck him was that he was tied in a chair, opposite another human being, eyes bugging with panic.
As he lifts his throbbing head and tried to fix on a central point to keep the room from blurring, he has time to think wait why is warpath here as the big man looms over the corpulent lump sitting next to him, screaming with sudden bursts of pain; The squeal splits through his eardrums, making his head feel like a shattered teacup inside of a ziploc bag.
Adam Miller, a mercenary, businesslike expression on his face, looked up over the victim's shoulder, gauges his reaction.
Despite all of the pain echoing through his head from the scream, Danny's eyes slit with profound and immediate rage. He strains against the handcuffs he can feel biting into his wrist. "You. You sonofa - all this time? All this time, you were working for him?"
Adam cocks an amused eyebrow at him. "Yeah, it took you long enough to figure that part out. And here, the boss thought it was too obvious."
"You came to me months ago. Tried to talk me out of leaving. I should have seen the hidden hand in it."
"Yeah, well, Danny," Adam shrugged, and straightened to his full height. In his right hand, he had clenched the pliers which he had just used to crush a human being's fingers. "I did ask you straight up if you had any idea what you were getting into here in Japantown."
The chubby bastard tied to the other hand groaned, lifted his head, "Please... please I g-got nothing to do with this... please lemme go..."
"Now that's true," Adam allowed, "Bradley Jutensai, has an apartment on the second floor, 4400 block of Pine Street, above a laundromat with his mother..." Playfully, Adam reaches down and squishes the fat man's cheeks, making him fish-face. "And, as of a few months ago, was going to take a long walk off a short platform. Yeah, you're innocent."
Adam brings the pliers down, cruelly, behind Bradley's broad back, and his shoulder muscles tense with the effort of closing the pliers as hard as he can on an extremity behind his back. Bradley's ear-splitting howl was world-shaking to a concussed head.
Not betraying his displeasure or motioning for Adam to stop, Danny snarled at him. Adam looked up again, eyebrows expectant for him to step in. "Why are you doing this?"
"Because I want him to prove a point," cut in another voice, cold and rapacious as a shark. A door to the side opened and closed, smoothly. And, although older by a decade and limping more noticeably, leaning against a cane, did Danny ever know the man stepping out of the shadow;
"So. It was you," Danny reacts without surprise, eyes searching every inch of Hinata's currently dispassionate face. Hinata looks down his nose at him.
The action of the wolf erupts from him; He pulls forward, despite the awkward positioning of the cuffs behind his chair, straining. "If you come any closer to me, I'll grab your other leg and twist until it turns into rubber."
Hinata's mouth draws upwards in a distant smile, reading yes, you would, wouldn't you.
Danny nonetheless tries to break the cuffs behind his back, twisting his shoulders, before glaring up at Hinata.
Hinata moves, despite the pain in his leg, with a slow, savoring, as he circled around.
Danny cuts his eyes from Adam to him, "That fat idiot I can understand. We've been allies, but we've both screwed each other over enough times that I know what the score is between us. But you?..."
"Hinata, we were friends, damn you. Brothers. We - "
"Were we, Daniel? I didn't know that you held any covenant to family bonds. I didn't know you had any room for affection in your heart. Tell me then, brother. When you heard I went missing, did you search for me? Did you view the body? Or did you even stop your journeyman existence once in twelve years to ever check again?"
Danny went silent, fuming. For his part, Hinata looks, almost pointedly, in the direction of a two-way mirror; Danny wonders who's on the other side.
"So, tell me, Danny. The last time I saw you, your IEW career... your mainstream wrestling career, in a nutshell, had just imploded due to your own hubris. You challenged Adam here to a match with your job on the line, and you lost. Shattered, a broken man, you came to me, searching for succor and to be made whole."
"You came to the one person who trained with you, roomed with you, learned your arrogant mind and looked after you... Who played and trained and fought with you side by side... until such time as your petty jealousy would not allow the idea that someone could possibly be your equal. That, you would, could not allow. So you destroyed my leg. And I didn't see you again... for seven... long... years."
"And you told me, to my horror, that the career you had sacrificed mine for the first time around? You had thrown it away. For petty pride. For hubris. Because you could not allow the idea that someone," his eyes flicking over to Adam, who stood, impassive, "Could be your equal."
Then, Hinata looks back to him, before asking the question he obviously had come here for.
"So, tell me, Danny. It's been so long since we've caught up. And you've undergone a renaissance since then. You've grown into a new role. You've found a home. You've taken up a spot in my dojo, and in all of these changes, you have found a second life, a renewed career."
He spreads his hands out, inviting discourse.
"So. What have you done with it?"
His eyes beat into Danny's upturned face, and Danny considers him for a long time. Seeing him, fully. The rage boiling just under the surface, that hadn't appeared to have been there twelve years ago. But... seeing Hinata gripping his cane, favoring the leg he'd destroyed... very possibly, the rage and the spiteful hurt that'd been there all along.
"You've kept up with my career," he said then, irony and amusement.
"Oh, I've followed your wrestling career with great interest," Hinata says, turning his back to him.
"Your other business endeavors are of little interest to me, except that they paint a compellingly complete portrait. Once the gangs under my supervision began to provide a target for you and you saw that there was a kingpin on this block you made a home in, your pride, your ego would not let anyone else hold a power over you. That's what your entire life has been about, Daniel Fehl. You are a man who hates to be powerless, and hates even more that someone, somewhere could have power that you don't, in any form it would take."
"It would lead someone with no business being in crime to declare themselves a kingpin of the block, and raise armies of teenagers to act as street enforcers, and even sell drugs on turf to claim it... just so that I don't have access to it."
Danny rolled his eyes, "Thanks for the analysis, Doctor Joyce. Got anything stiffer? I've had people picking at that same scab for the last few years." Then, mockingly, "'Downfall hates to be seen as weak, he won't allow any action that makes him look weak, you sound like Dionysus.'"
"It is very interesting that you bring up Dionysus, and I'll tell you why in a minute, but still... do you disagree? Tell me I'm wrong."
Bradley Jutensai winces in pain, "Hey, hey guys, this sounds like it doesn't have anything to do with me..." Adam looks serious, cuffing him over the back of the head.
"I don't have to tell you anything," Danny says, sullenly. "I'm not playing these head games. Let go of me."
"What else is your career, then, if not for you craving control, Daniel? I've pondered this for a long, long time. Believe me. And when I look at you, I see that, despite your ideology to the contrary, there is very little about you that isn't an incessant need to control everything."
"If it's me," Adam says, leaning against his charge with a nonchalance, "I tried to tell you, you should get out of the crime shit. Stop pushing yourself in directions like this. Stop trying to go places you have no business. Just do ordinary wrestler shit and cut promos talking about your opponents in gyms and bars. Where's the match relevance? Where's the relatability?"
Hinata's look thanks Adam for his input, then tacitly tells him to stay at his post and keep his mouth shut.
"But Dionysus," muses Hinata, "Dionysus brings up the repeating pattern of your life."
He is careful as he searches Hinata's face. "What about Dion?"
Hinata's smile is thin, incisive. "Tell me, what do you think of the new, mysterious faction that have begun sending messages to Dionysus? Telling him to walk through open doors, telling him to unlock his true potential amid a series of flowery motivational messages about the self?"
Danny snorts, derisively, "I'd say that Elysium is a pathetic, shallow cult spouting garden, basic pop psychology and preying on someone in an insecure state."
"Mm," Hinata muses, steepling his pointer fingers over the head of his cane, "So... in your assessment... Elysium is, to Dionysus, just a camp run by a narcissist, preying on someone weaker-minded, using their insecurities to push them around like a puppet, just so that they can have... power? Control over someone?"
Danny's eyes narrow into slits. He doesn't answer, obstinately.
Hinata points those steepled fingers, together, forward, in the understood "got you" gesture, "...Something like an... Inner Circle, wouldn't you say?"
Adam snorts, "Don't deny it, it's all right there in your history. You're a user, Danny." Of course, the other one who was there for the Inner Circle in the room, would speak up.
Danny cuts his eyes, laser-intense, at the in-another-lifetime Warpath, "And you're the would-be neverwas that tried to usurp that position," then, turning back to Hinata, "and so are you. You take in rejects like this, who gave up on their dream, and you do the exact same thing you accuse me of."
Hinata puts a hand to his chest, eyes widening as if wounded to the quick, "...But we aren't talking about me, Daniel. This is just about you. What you've made of yourself with the time allotted, in your second chance at life. What you've accomplished, in your name... and the people you've willingly stepped on to attain what you want." And, pointedly, Hinata once again glances over his shoulder, to the two-way glass and whoever is standing behind it, watching this whole scene play out.
"Please... please let me go... I won't tell anyone about... any of this, please..."
All players involved ignore Bradley's blubbering. Danny chews this all over. He is stuck on how to respond to this. Partly, he bristles, why does he have anything to explain about himself? But something dark, deep within him, feels the anger building deep inside of his gut; That thing, just wishes to see this entire room burn.
"How about this Hardcore title you've inherited?"
The sudden train-track switch rouses him, and again, he's struck by how astutely Hinata has been watching. For decades, it seems. "....What about it?"
"You lost several bids to regain the AW World Championship early last year... and, without that, you decided to focus your effort on the Hardcore title. In your reasoning, you wanted to make the Hardcore title mean something. You wanted to make it equal the World Title, and, in your infinitely Icarusian hubris, you proclaimed that only you were meant to restore it to a glory it was missing. So...?" Again, Hinata spreads his hands, asking well, how did that work?
He refuses to rise to the bait, but the implication of the words hits him nonetheless.
"Did you? Or did the membrane of Action Wrestling, push back on your arrogant belief? Did you restore the Hardcore title to a glory never seen? Or... did the endless need for booking content just feed you cheap, meaningless wins that you didn't deem satisfying, did the machine roll right on ahead and give you nothing matches against the Joey Scalas, Robbie Bigg Dicks and Billy Ray Cashes of the world? A main event title? Danny, the Hardcore title is your albatross... because it signifies that no matter how high your standard... it will never satisfy you."
He doesn't answer. He's doing his best to shut Hinata out, focusing on the pounding, roaring blood in his concussed head. Jaw set. Hinata, though, is arriving at his point.
"Given everything you want... given license to be as brutal as you want and to crush all who step in your path... you'll only ever be given Joey Scala or Robbie Bigg Dick to toy with."
"Given everything you asked for... you still will never be satisfied."
"So take that to it's logical conclusion, Daniel. Give yourself everything you've ever wanted... give yourself finally, the triumphant, shining moment in the sun. Say you win Havoc. Say you win the World championship again, and it lasts. Will that be enough for you? Would you be... happy? Satisfied?"
Danny's eyes are cold, flinty and beating right into Hinata's. "Go fuck yourself."
Hinata nods, mouth firming as he looks to the ceiling, then, again, into the two-way mirror and the person on the other side. "I thought not."
Now Danny shoots a glare over at Adam, "Look. You've heard the blubbering moosey begging to be let go. Let's just have done with this, unless you're arriving at a point."
Hinata totters over on his cane, the weakness of his limbs from the expenditure of effort secondary to the bracing thrill of his presentation. He stands beside Adam, behind Bradley, putting a hand on a slumped shoulder. "This is the point. This is where everything comes home to roost. This is where I pull the rug out from you, and give you in return the gift you showed me fifteen years ago."
"On Christmas Eve, you encountered Bradley on the very bridge I jumped off of. The bridge that I went to, in my blackest night of despair... where you came to my home, and told me as much that it was all for nothing."
"You found him, and you talked him into walking away from the bridge. You did for him, what you never did for me... didn't even think of doing, did you? Because I wasn't a player in your world, I was just a set-piece?"
Danny meets Bradley's eyes, which are weeping and afraid. Danny's eyes are simply flat, emotionless, as he admits, "I did."
"Did you save Bradley that night because you were thinking of me? Did you attempt to rectify all of the harm that's weighed on your soul, Daniel, for twenty-three godforsaken years, the ruin of a promising start, the decimation of my dreams, not once, but again, and again? Did you... do for him... what you wished you could have done from the beginning?"
Danny fumes. And, as much as he's able, his eyes searching over Bradley's face, it's an admission but not an apology. To either side. At all. "I didn't."
"...I didn't even think of you."
Hinata leans against his cane, chest swelling, vindicated. "Not once? Aside from the lowest moments, where you determine you want to begin again, where you reached out for me as part of some sophomoric wish to start anew where things were simplest, just two young men at the beginning of their journey? Aside from that... you never even thought of me?"
"I never did... because I thought... our bond didn't need that," he says, no shame in his voice, but some other emotion echoing it that he can't define. "I thought... Hina. All this time, I thought I knew you like we were brothers..."
"...But I see now I never knew you at all."
"No. No, you did not," Hinata's voice mused. Lips pursing pensively, he looks down at Bradley, his hand lifting, brushing the younger man's shoulder ponderously. "It was an uncharacteristically selfless act you did for young Bradley, convincing him he should live, encouraging him to try to live a better life."
He nods assent to Adam, who lifts his hand with intention. He isn't wielding pliers now. The mercenary, grinning wildly, lifts a chromed silver cannon, thumbing back the hammer. "Adam, please, shoot him in the head."
In the seconds following the registering of Hinata's clipped command, a frenzy of action. From the other side of the obscured two-way glass, for the first time, a woman's voice cries out in protest, and thuds of dull impact against the glass as if someone is punching it; Simultaneously, Danny snarls, tugging at the handcuffs with enough force to draw blood from his wrists, tearing and trying to wriggle his shoulders, shouting almost incoherently at Adam, "Warpath you son of a BITCH don't you DO IT" Adam paying no mind, putting the barrel of the gun right against Bradley's head. Bradley letting out a small, whimpering "hie!" as the cold metal touches him, snot and tears running down his face.
This plays out tensely, for eternally torturous milliseconds, until Hinata motions to Danny. "Just tell me this one thing, then."
Danny's face is murderous, but he says nothing, yet.
"All of this. If it means nothing to you. Then it never meant anything to you."
"Not even when we were just starting out. Nothing ever would have been enough, would it have?"
"Not fulfilling your dreams of main-eventing the Tokyo Dome like we talked about. Not being given the validation of your father that you grew up craving."
"Tell me true, Daniel. Even if you had all of that, the girl, the title, the fame and more... it wouldn't have satisfied you, would it?"
The empty void inside of his chest, that dark, bleak thing exulted in being recognized. But Danny just looks down at his lap. His voice, faraway, carries to the two men staring at him, holding a gun to Bradley's head.
".......No. It wouldn't."
Gnashing his teeth nastily, Hinata's eyes bored deep into Danny's. "Then what. Was any of this. For."
Face-to-face with the monster that lay bare in front of him, looking deep into the heart of himself, he doesn't answer at first. Then, finally, almost to himself, an admission.
"I needed someplace to put the anger."
Having finally arrived at the truth, Hinata closes his eyes, breathing it in. "Thank you, Daniel." A pregnant beat, as he glances into the two-way glass, glorying in his moment of triumph.
All other eyes are on Danny. Who, with this admission from deep within the pit of his soul, feels growing disquiet. Adam watches him, smiling, his eyes saying that is the Downfall I know while Bradley looks absolutely lost.
The gun reports in Adam's hand, once, cacaphonously, catastrophically loud, loud enough to reverb through the closed little office, loud enough to send a shrill ringing of tinnitus that hit him like a secondary gunshot; Loud enough and devastating enough that it sent Bradley, still trussed up, his rounded shoulders slumped in the chair, and knocking him over like an inflated bowling-pin. Blood immediately begins pouring from his head.
A muffled wail goes up from the adjacent office, a scream that is as wrenching as it is too late.
The pain, outrage and heartache of someone who doesn't know this stranger to mourn, but quails at the act of them being assassinated for no reason. The woman's voice, screaming over and over again on the other side of the glass, shrieks Hinata's name, pounding the glass again.
Hinata looks at Adam, who is smiling triumphantly. There is something in Adam's expression, a hungry, bleakly nihilistic craving that cares for nothing but watching the world burn, that Hinata recognizes, and curls his lip at. Were he unaffected by the close-range blast, it would be a look Danny would have understood.
"You... son of a... You didn't have to do that!"
Hinata glances at him, offhandedly. "I didn't, Daniel."
"But this is, as I said, the gift I return to you. As you went out of your way to help a stranger, to do the right thing in someone's moment of weakness, I just showed you the same mercy you did me... fifteen years ago. I showed you that it means nothing. That nothing you do..... matters."
"That, my friend, is how you give someone the gift of clarity."
"You -"
Adam comes over, using the butt of the pistol to smash him across the jaw, rocking him dangerously over to his side. "Show some respect."
Again, showing restrained annoyance at the quality of his help, Hinata favors the in-another-life Warpath with a look, before looking sternly down at Danny, "So this is where we stand on Pine Street. Do what you want. Defy my lieutenants. Brutalize any of the Death Rider bangers that ride around doing daily operations. Hell, allocate product from the streets with your children in your dojo and sell it on the corners if you wish. You have not taken over from me. None of it will matter. None of it... matters."
"It never will."
Blood runs down his chin from the ground as he still struggles to get up, still trying to fight against his bonds.
"I don't need to get you out of my turf. I don't need to start a war. I just need to remind you, of what you taught me... so very long ago."
"Have a nice day, Daniel."
His head bursting with renewed pain and jagged, broken-glass sensation, his ears ringing loudly with tinnitus... finally, Danny's eyes fix on Bradley Jutensai, opposite him on the same floor, eyes glazed over and mouth agape in a forever expression of shock, thickly-black blood flowing from the wound on his temple, and he looks at Hinata's shoulders as Hinata turns to the door, exiting. His voice as loud as a hurricane, he calls after them.
"This isn't over between us, Hinata! There's a debt between us! Did you hear me? This isn't over! This..."
Hinata is already leaving, taking Adam with him, and leaving him in the room with the body. And now, in the room alone, his voice falters.
"...This isn't over..."
He lays there on his side, face-to-face with a dead man's eyes, and he can't tell what disturbs him more, the question that's asked of what this means to him, or the answer.
As Hinata comes back into his elaborately ornate office space, decorated with all of the expected trappings of a crime lord of his status, there is a moment where she realized just what a mask it all was. A carefully constructed persona, all of it, to cover his anger at the world, that slipped away the second he came into contact with Daniel Fehl. Hinata, sighing, feeling the weight of it all, comes to his desk, loosening his tie and looking down at his leg and the cane he leans against. It was a small, humanizing moment, where Rumiko is able to see her brother.
He looks over at Adam, then; "I'll be retiring to my apartment, give it ten minutes and untie him."
"Sir," Adam says, a smile on his face. You really do get the sense that this man has his own plans, his own designs in life... but also that, like the Saturday night quarterback who threw the winning touchdown twenty years ago, he can't stop himself from reliving his old days.
Hinata sighs, and assumes his cold crimelord demeanor, glancing at Rumiko. He canes over to her, hobbling due to the weakness in his leg and the fatigue. "Sister..."
As soon as he comes close, she hauls back and slaps him, hard, across the face.
He stays frozen for a moment, holding his cheek, stricken. Then, he turns to look at her, his eyes widening with genuine hurt.
"You aren't the Hinata I knew," Rumiko says, voice husky. "He died when he jumped in the river. He died when I got the phone call in my college dorm saying that the police had dredged up a body. Whatever swam, crawled, hobbled away from the water is... is.... sick. Diseased."
Hinata's eyes beat into hers, "If I'm a monster, I'm a creation of Daniel Fe-"
"NO," Rumiko snaps, shaking her head and blinking back rage-filled tears, "No, you do not say that. You don't compare the two of you."
"And why not?" he responds, archly, "Why would you side with him, the petty, narcissistic sociopath? Do you know how many people he's willingly stepped on? Do you think that he'd hesitate to kill if it really struck him?..." He leans closer to her, insinuating with deeply menacing leer, "Do you think he's capable of loving you?"
She refuses to look at Hinata, but she shakes her head, "I don't know."
Hinata's expression softens, and despite all of it, his concern, his brotherly love for her comes through. That much, is not his mask. "Rumiko..."
Rumiko pushes his hand away. "But I do know that, between the two of you... I'd side with him."
He pauses, taking her words in, and there is a stilted expression that reads as shock, before other emotions sea-change over his face, pain to anger to his cold, remorseless stare. "So be it."
"Goodbye, sister. You won't like what we make of Pine Street. But remember, you had a choice. It was the wrong one."
Adam comes back in the room, and Hinata motions for him to take his sister away. Rumiko has to look back over her shoulder at the side office, behind the two-way glass, though. There's a silence to it, sober and slow. She wants to go back, to go to him, and help him up off the ground. But she's already being led away from it and out of the office by the arm.
The audience is at an end.
Beneath the city of San Diego, in a sewer space underneath a grate, a rat nibbles at a small, circular shiny that had fallen through the grate and landed on a waterlogged old Grainger catalog and a greasy, half-finished Starbucks sandwich still in a wrapper. The rat, squeaking and cheeping, uses it's claws to tear at the Starbucks wrapper; Extracting a sliver of meat, and picking at the processed food; A feast fit for a rat-king.
"God damn rats," complains a voice of one of the big-things, and a large, booted foot comes in, brushing them aside. "Bad enough the mix flush valves on the 3068 keep failing down here, the access panels always gotta be down in the nastiest, shittiest, most rat-infested holes, I -"
A pause, then "...Oh damn. How did this get here?"