Post by Downfall on Nov 19, 2023 14:31:12 GMT -5
His eyes burned into the canvas hanging under the spotlight, searching for some deeper meaning, for the longest time. It continued to baffle him.
In time, Hinata came around to his shoulder, smiling, and handed him a finger of whiskey. Danny accepted, but his eyes still stayed on the painting, squinting imperceptibly.
"I'm not sure I understand this one," he admitted, gravely.
Hinata's eyebrows raised, appraisingly. "I thought your entire wrestling gimmick was based around your artistic talent from the beginning, Daniel, painting masterpieces in blood and such?" A slight teasing edge, owing to their antagonistic pasts.
Daniel shrugged it off mildly, "As if I've never been told that I'm pretentious," but his eyes shifted back to the painting on the wall, one of Hinata's private collection that they were studying. "This, I don't get. It's just two blocks of opposing color. It doesn't mean anything."
"Mm," Hinata said, sipping his smokey Suntori, "Rothko is often labelled obtuse, but people don't see the subtle variations. This entire series from 1954, Orange and Yellow, Orange and Tan, Tan and Orange... the same pallet, but subtly different textures and shades. It's mean to evoke a quick, visceral gut reaction."
"Think of Georgia O'Keeffe, and her long series of twenty paintings of the same door..."
Daniel huffed, impatient, "Yeah, Jane and Jessie had this same discussion on Breaking Bad."
"So you agree that the central idea of the theme is to paint the same image over a period of decades to illustrate how it's changed?"
Daniel grimaces, allowing that he can understand the idea. Hinata prods, "After all, see how far we've come in just one year."
"A year ago I woulda been barging in here, attacking your men with a crowbar and trying to burn your operation to a cinder."
"A year ago," Hinata says, eyes beating into Danny's, who refuses to meet his gaze, "You were obsessed with attaining power. Now, you've eschewed much of the trappings of what you have."
"Because," Danny fumes, a bit burned out of having to explain it, "I've realized I was holding on too tightly to a past, and trying too hard. Also, what you asked me..."
"Given that you attained the Hardcore title you lusted after... given everything you wanted, was it still enough?"
"Maybe it wasn't," Danny admitted, softly, and he stared at the Orange and Tan Rothko. "Or maybe I've come to the realization that it had to end. That this all... has to end."
Hinata raises his eyebrows, and leans against his cane. "So that's why you're pulling out stakes, is it?"
Danny looks down, and he bites his lip. It isn't pulling out, so much, but he's pared everything else back. Because his priorities have shifted, lately. He thinks now of a dream, and a brutal, carnal image he can't get out of his mind.
Hinata's voice sharpens, "A warning, though. I've told my men your intentions, and they are not to engage you anymore. You won't have anymore visits, or enforcers testing limits on your block. There should be no more need for bloodshed... but for..."
"But for Miller. Warpath."
Hinata looks uncomfortable. "The war dog has slipped his leash... he's rabid, Daniel. And he's been radicalized against you. In many ways, he represents an ugly, bitter side, egged on by my animosity for you, true... but he will not stop."
"Then I won't stop," Danny says, simply, "Not when it comes to him."
Hinata grips his cane head. "I see... are you that determined to fight him? Are you aware of everything you could lose?"
Danny closes his eyes, as his mind immediately calls the atmosphere of the dream. The nightmare-wolf, sidled around his thigh, it's spiky, bristly mane and it's coal-glowing eyes burning into his as it lifted it's terrifyingly growing teeth in a grin.
"To love... is to be changed," it has said.
Danny blinked back the pain, as the slide in his mind switched to the next image, the gory, slippery entrails of the wolf cubs in their den. "I know what I'm getting into," he muttered.
"Mm."
The two of them stood side-by-side, staring at the painting.
"Amazing what you can do with just two colors, isn't it?"
What I've always found that tends to get lost in the weekly grinds of producing content for wrestling, thinking up mean words to disparage opponents, is that at a certain point, you tend to fall into patterns.
You find what works and you mine it, you get on hot streaks and you bottle that lightning.
I'm self-aware enough to realize this, even on low weeks or against opponents I've nothing but disdain for, that I've fallen into that trap, regurgitating easily palatable-softballs, easily-understood and safe metaphors.
I've even spoken about it before, about how possible it is for your own victories to trap you, to be so beholden to your patterns that they become your cage.
But that's why naming these conventions, highlighting what's changed is important to me.
Your formulas don't have to be what defeats you, or holds you back, if you keep in mind the fact that they are imminently mutable as long as you keep in mind what you want.
The why you're telling this story, the why you're putting this energy out in the world.
Just adhering to type is akin to trotting out your one trick, pulling out the darkest, grittiest performance from storage and hanging it out on a random week for everyone to glimpse, and get a reminder, oooh and ahh at what you're capable of as they stroke their chins at the one painting you've wheeled out on the easel, marveling at the thick brushstrokes and bold colors.
When your formula shifts over time, not a march to perfection but a home you return to again, and again, but paint in subtly different shades every time.
Were you to look back at a beginning- or middle-point, it wouldn't even seem as if you'd done any work, but when you stretch further out, over weeks, over months, over a three-year trilogy...
I make this distinction with full self-awareness, because I want to use that to illuminate a marked difference in approach from the jester I'm holding to court this week; And it's in that vein that I want him to clear his throat and repeat his same energy from our meeting in last year's quarter-finals.
How'bout it, Teo?
Ya still punching the air after reading the sheet of updated brackets taped to the wall, like when you saw you'd be facing Corey?
You still wanna think of me in your reductive terminology as someone who's so dull that you'd give anything in your power to avoid becoming another me. When I can feel the trepidation, and the indignant, piquant rage in how you view your own station baking off of your heated words to "Deathproof" like a god damn kiln.
You ready to tell me just how desperate, how unhinged being used-up like a napkin year after year in Turmoil and folded up expediently in the second or third rounds, how we've never considered what it does to a man?
Because it isn't a surprise to see you eke out past Corey Black in yet another uninspired second-round performance, in fact, it's become something of a meme for you in Turmoil hasn't it, Teo?
You "shock the world" every year it seems, you fight your hardest and there's always that one... brief moment... where you're pit against someone so dominant that when Teo Blaze drops the chuckle-worthy everyman bit, actually removing the mask, we're reminded that you're termed the greatest Cruiserweight of All Time.
I called you out for much the same things last year. The surprise is more where we find ourselve, an entire 526,600 minutes removed and for you, it's as if nothing at all changed.
Because you've been pulling some big wins lately, bud!
Son a nothing scramble match at XIII against a field where your stiffest competition was somewhere between TJ Alexander and Jody Madrox.
Continually defending the Cruiserweight Tag belts against randomly-paired opponents that hate each other every three weeks because Cruiserclash has run out of actual tag-teams.
You slayed the King In Black in a wasted, throwaway television affair where the announcers gob about how "They go back and forth with momentum!"
You've accomplished so much, for none of it to matter, that you epitomize the idea that victory has softened you, that a pointed lack of having to push yourself has made you weak.
What you'll find is that I'm not as easily upset as Corey Black, who, after all, you're right, has degenerated into self-parody, a defanged, stripped-of-menace slasher film villain wielding his machete; a Jason long past the point where he's daytripped to Manhattan and been decimated by a psychic teenaged girl.
But your projections on him extend well beyond superficial, they're an obsidian abyss you gaze into and find yourself in.
They just won't work on me. I'm not Corey Black, Teo.
You aren't gonna shock me anymore than you're going to ruffle me by insulting my legacy, which you haven't the faintest god damn idea of, or calling me out my name by ridiculing me for being pretentious, boring, long-winded or dull.
Once ya cut past the mean words and the indignation, and see the content you were actually spewing last week, Teo, it's where it gets interesting.
You were snarling at Corey, but your eyes were fixed on me the whole time, weren't they?
To quote you yourself, "Every year I have entered Turmoil, and every year I have been turned away by people like you, Corey, wrestlers who tell me that I’m not good enough! That I don’t care enough! [...]! Telling me that I can’t do it! That Cruiserclash is a B show!"
"I am sick and tired of assholes like you telling me that my home doesn’t matter!”
I'm calling for willful misremembering, if not outright strawman representation on that one, Teo.
'Cause I was the last one who ignominiously scrubbed you out of Turmoil; and I never said a word to that effect.
The year before that, the one who brought you down when you got to this point was Regan Voorhees. who at the time WAS a former Cruiserweight champion, so I doubt either that she looked down on you as an underachieving B-show player.
Why would I do that? I was once looked down on as a scrappy lil' cruiserweight.
I was once told, to my face, that scrawny little 205-buck me was too slight to hold the World Title in the company of bruisers.
Lemme tell you something, my entire career I've thrived on making people eat their words, proving them wrong about me.
I've never once disparaged Cruiserclash, cruiserweights or even your standings as the stalwart on your show. No, I can respect what you wanted to do, but look where things stand with it, Teo.
You fire yourself up, foaming and spewing vitriol, misremembering all the times you were denied further advancement into Turmoil, by everyone who looked down on you for your weight class, but you missed the entire point behind what I'd said.
That highlights the entire reason why you're a "best-kept secret", Teo, why after all this time you're only good for those shocking week-two eliminations, those one-off shows of competency.
Compare and contrast even what we'd done with the divisions we championed in the past year, Teo, because I went in to last year dedicated to elevating the Hardcore brand and bringing it up from the doldrums that held it back.
I can proudly say, I tried to a point.
But as months wore on, and the competition coming for it stayed static and I realized it really wasn't living up to what I imagined, I had courage to do something you never have.
Everyone gets it wrong, the reason I discontinued the Hardcore division, the reasons that I killed something I vowed to spend so much time reviving.
It actually wasn't because of my ego that I let it go... Taking the Hardcore title off the board was a necessary step in the evolution, a step in moving on and moving forward rather than continue to feel stuck in a rut which helped nothing.
Look at where you're sitting currently, with those Cruiserweight Tag titles securely around your waist in a division that's petered down to the lowest guttering ember.
All you've done is just to hang on to pointless belts on a spare, thin roster just because you fool yourself that you're doing it out of pride, out of honor, out of respect.
You don't have the self-awareness necessary to see that you're accomplishing nothing by holding on.
The difference in our approach lies past the fact that you continue to cling to your status as a stalwart defender of a brand that provides you nothing but diminishing returns and waning interest.
The fact is that you are content.
Complacent.
Soft.
I'd like to think your frustration bleeding through, your heated berating of Corey last week was if anything, a momentary flash of insight.
That you woke up, that you saw that you're just repeating a pattern, but... I doubt it will. It wasn't symbolic of a man seeing his limitations and where he's failed to progress.
You took your anger out on him in petty revenge, for him previously beating you up in a Turmoil quarter- in years past, or an XIII/WCF reprisal, or some other such time when you're summoned from your comfy little cage and asked to show us your war-face.
Doesn't last. It never does.
You tried it last year, and you looked down on me who's ego had tipped him into a precarious position where all it would take was the addition of one outside X-Factor to send me into freefall, and I savagely destroyed you even worse than you did Corey. I crushed you without mercy then, sent you packing from yet another semi-final and that is exactly what is going to repeat itself this year.
Because you still haven't learned the lesson, you're like a man with an addiction to porn that just can't quit dropping his money on Onlyfans subscriptions even when he gets hit with that overdraft fee and has to reevaluate his life every six months.
That's what you should be mad about. You should be kicking yourself, not hurling your misspent aggression at Corey Black or projecting how angry you are at me.
"You aren't good enough?" "You don't care enough?"
Why would people have given that impression, Teo, because you forever push just hard enough that you are given these tournament spots and put up just such a good showing, but when it's over, you go right back to your silly antics (Boy, talk about diminished returns) with Andre long past the shelf-life expiration.
You trade around CW Tag belts a few times per year with the only other team that ever enters the division, and you expect to still be taken serious as a world-beating threat?
Your uninspired Gents brand is such a hollow shill at this point that it didn't surprise me in the least when I went to do research on what you're actually hawking now, and finding it's burger-themed bitcoin.
Because that's you. That's all you are.
Going through the motions, trading on cryptocurrencies long past the dying of that fad, and clinging to irrelevancy.
All you know how to do with the Gents brand is sell the fans more of what you think they want to see, when you can't convincingly sell yourself 100 percent of the time.
That's why people think of you as unserious, why the people that took you out of Turmoil in years past wrote you off.
So tell me what's changed, and what's just adhering to the formula Teo, because you can spent your rage on me.
Throw your punches to shatter against the stone of my chin, take out all of your outrage on me for how edgelord dishwater-dull you think I am; The entire issue between us is that I take what I do seriously as the way I frame my entire reputation, and you're only sporadic.
You thrive on being an occasional X-factor, a surprise knockout, while I have never promoted myself as anything less than being an inevitability.
Because that's what every logical progression leads to, Teo. Finding the end-point, finding the space where you can look back on your works and be satisfied, rather than just continue to devolve into further silly drivel.
So I want you to get really driven this week, Teo.
Take that fire that burned last week and redouble it, show the world the blazing intensity that lies beneath the feared heart of Teo Del Sol...
Watch for it yet again not to matter as I stomp it right the fuck out.
This here, has been an arc I've embarked on for three full Turmoils, Teo, and it doesn't end on a shocking, wild upset to someone who's not going to spend the momentum and do anything meaningful with it.
This grand work I've been building to for some time and I am not going to let it be put aside by anyone, least of all you.
You're just going to be the minor detail I work into the colors, the artistic flourish as I leave the mat itself painted with your fucking blood.
The entire cycle has been centered around the theme that you paint again, and again, with subtle variations, sharpening the image and honing the technique, and only stepping away from it when you're done, not when anyone else says.
This is my Last Door, Teo. My Orange and Tan. This is nearing the culmination of the finest performance of my series, but it isn't there yet. That one, I'm reserving for the finals.
You're just the warm-up for my real masterpiece.