My Life As A Weapon. (2,999 words)
May 20, 2024 22:41:20 GMT -5
“The Saint” Johnny Eden and Addy A like this
Post by Sicko on May 20, 2024 22:41:20 GMT -5
Who am I?, the question forms on his lips; it's as if he's just now stuck his head up out of the frigid waters for the first time in weeks, maybe months. He's cold, he knows that, this is not his sunny, suburban home. This is not his beautiful house, this is not his beautiful wife. As he lays, convulsing, and naked, on the small galley in the back of the ice cream truck, his lumpy, misshapen body is covered in blood, squelching sickly. All is body horror, uneasy to lay eyes on.
Panic starts to sink in, as he sweeps his eyes around the scene splayed in front of him. No, no, no no no. This isn't real, this can't be happening... he had left this life behind last he'd remembered. He had buried the keys to the ice cream truck in the desert. He had turned himself in to Doctor Daniel Shomron, LCSW at Springwood Sanitarium, and -
And nothing, the rest was a blur.
His massive, keg chest heaves, and he can't think through the haze, can't remember a moment of what he's been doing, and there's that moment, just one, where he wants to submerge. To dive back down. In his mind's eye, he sees it, diving into an inky, black, pool and sinking down.
No, says a voice below all, hitting bedrock, stay in this space with me. For right now, he's slumbering. Hey, he has to sleep sometime.
His breathing slows to a rasp, his spike of panicked pain at sitting on the diamond-stamped plates washed with a tincture of sticky, old blood, fresh, juicy claret, and gristly offal he hoped wasn't... human.
"I can't," he tells that voice, wincing, "I'm not strong enough..."
"Ephrain, you're stronger than you give yourself credit for. Think, Ephrain! All of those years you spent as a protege of Jason Twisted, what were you?"
"I - "
"That's always been the question, really, hasn't it? Everywhere you go, no matter what you do, in the end, you were forged by the chains that bound you, and you never let yourself be free of them. Even in Pure Class Wrestling, or WGWF, your tenure was tainted because it had to be tied to your history with Jason Twisted to be given context of what made the burned man, the scarred man, into the killer clown."
"Ephrain -"
"LOOK. AT. ME", the voice roars into his head, and while he's expecting to see the Spokesman's grinning face, after all, wasn't it the appearance of the nattily-dressed thin man with the cigarette ever-smoldering, forgotten between his fingers, who had shown up again and again, exhorting Ephrain to reject the safety and comfort of his prison inside his own psyche?
Wasn't it the Spokesman who had slyly put the idea into him, that this was his body?
But as he goggled at the face presented to him in the dully reflective surface of a metal locker, it's tarnished surface showing the face of a little boy. The young Chicano had his eyes, and fat, puffy cheeks, but he was glowering into his own expression in the mirror.
"This isn't the first time you've surfaced, Ephrain... it's been coming out in bits..." he says, worldly intelligence coming out through a child's lisp, an inner child that's had to endure a lifetime of being beaten down and broken and is so, so, irrevocably tired, "but you always flee. And you let HIM take control."
"We - we know who he is... The Jester is the first of us. He was with us when we cowered, licking our wounds, after our fath- after Rafael hurt us, time and time again."
"He is the part of us that split first," the inner child agrees, "The part that conflates father's love with wrath, protecting you and keeping you safe as a paramount with dishing out unrelenting pain."
"But he is not stronger than you, Ephrain. Deep down, you know that. He: the Jester, was the first one of us to be exploited by Jason, who saw him in us all along. And look what he was turned into."
This plays in his minds eye, as he remembers the coercion, the cajoling, but also the beatings to make this body a submissive shell, answerable only to one.
"He doesn't give a shit about building the show up, becoming it's star attraction and leading it to glory, he cares about one thing and one thing only... a relief from the itch that's gnawing at his guts... a vent for his insatiable rage which was implanted in him from the very start. He would never stop. Fact is, that he's a weapon that's been unlocked from deep within the armory, surpressed from deep inside. Other Aspects, such as The Clown had their turn."
"I understand the whys and wherefores," he patiently tells the inner child. "But I don't know how long I can stay in control - I'm not in control. When I feel him stir, I'm voided back into the recesses of the Mind Palace."
The inner child Aspect sighs, in it's little portal, turning it's shoulder. "Then you've given up, You're allowing yourself to be aimed at whatever needs to be eliminated and set loose."
He felt his cheeks flush, what more did he want from himself?
"How do you want to be remembered, Ephrain, as a man who let others move him around with their words, who let himself be put out of his own body? Or do you want to fight for it?"
"I... I want," peace, he finished, that's all, to be beholden to no one. To be no one's weapon. He thought his quiet little life in a sunny California hacienda poolside with his wife Mariah sounded wonderful.
Then it came to him that it was all an illusion; That Mariah was a dessicated, stitched together skeleton even in his mindseye, that he never pulled back the curtain too much out of cowardice. Why? Why did he hold himself back? Was he afraid of standing on his own two feet?
His inner child Aspect sensed these thoughts, of course, and echoed them. "When you really get down to it, aren't you still allowing someone else to dictate your life by letting the Jester puppet you? This Havoc match in AW... he's going to approach it like a tornado. He's going to hurt everyone, and give vent to all of his rage."
"But there's a better way."
"A way to be true to yourself - You have to -"
It started as a tickle, just at the back of his throat, just as abruptly and as terrifyingly as his snap-to consciousness. It felt as if there were fibrous threads snaking up his esophagus, as light as the brush of a feather against his cilia... and then, coming up from his pipe, a bulge.
His eyes began to press outward, swelling sacs grotesquely, like overfilled water-balloons. In the reflection, the inner-child Aspect showed alarm. "Ephrain! No! Hold on!"
"He's - COMINGGGAAARRRRGHHH" Ephrain's body contorted, twisting grotesquely. Bones wrenched and cracked as he writhed, painfully, on his truck's flooring, tendon squelched grotesquely as he heaved, bent over double, wheezing somewhere between a cat throwing up a hairball and a roaring engine, and his eyes were swelling out of his sockets as everything was pressurized; and he felt the relentless, hammerjack pressure of a white-hot piston being pushed up through his throat. He still screamed, but his screams were choked as his throat closed.
Fingers emerged from his throat, as two hands clasped either side of his mouth as if it were the edges of a manhole; The skin stretched.
And the face of The Jester began peering through.
"Ephrain! Fight! Fight him! You have to esc- "
There is no escape from me.
I've proven it in singles contexts, in gauntlet matches, and retained my Omega Championship amid a field of personality-void, brainless opportunists. I've consistently smashed through the obstacles put in place as if a roster composed, vastly, of cruiserweights has any sort of wherewithal to blockade a juggernaut of my speed, strength, power, and will. You put Karlie Nash refereeing in my way. Set the Green against me in a championship eliminator, attempting to give him a chance to deny me a title shot by way of pinning someone on the level of Niobe Martin. You put me at the head of a five person gauntlet, and even, for some reason, allowed Vespertine to take the final slot on the vague premise of she *said* that she'd previously attacked Jay Best backstage, but really, just because she asked for it.
It doesn't matter.
I've succeeded past every obstacle for the simple fact, which will make me the last one standing in Havoc; I'm inevitable.
Every single person set in my way's had the same perception of me, whether they know how to filter it with a modicum of intellect as with Addy or are just spewing verbal diarrhetic and hoping it applies to me like good ol' Vespy, like Jody Madrox. In the end, you think I'm weak.
Ever since my return to the world of wrestling, I've been building a new Sicko, one totally divorced from the prejudices and expectations of anything you've ever known. And in the season of Hell I visited upon the Omega championship, I fought endlessly against the lame title defenses, the meaningless triple threats and fourways where half the field of competition were just filler. I destroyed Jody Madrox, and THEN Vespertine AND Karlie, just for the reason that they were actually serving to weaken the meaning of what being in contention for a title, any title, meant.
What I did, since coming to the front of Ephrain's psyche is embed myself into the bedrock of this company.
For literal months, I was more visible on the cards than half of the people wasting time in the main event. You think Odin Balfore put in work to accrue a fucking World Championship? He doesn't. He'll swear up and down that he deserves to be gifted the title as some sort of Lifetime Achievement, that Action Wrestling owes him a debt because he's the last credible avenger; But his greatest effort wasn't even comparable to the lowest erg of effort afforded by Teo Blaze when he and Andre were hawking cheeseburgers with the Two Gents.
To put it bluntly, cryptic promos teasing apocalyptic ice cream was drawing more eyes to your product than Odin Balfore, Jaice Wilds, and Teo Blaze put into promoting World Championship matches; And the simple fact is, that my peeks into my own mind were incisive. They disturbed and provoked.
There wasn't a single thing I'd done, from the first week to this last, that didn't, at least, draw some reaction. Be it disgust, outrage at this gaudy, circus freak and who does he think he IS, or simply that ripple of fear.
Nobody else went to the lengths to sow fear.
It is with all of that said that I affirm my earlier standing, I am inevitable because nobody in this company has been doing what I've doing, so none can stand in front of what I've done.
After me, who else has put in that weekly work to remain visible, to worm like a virus into the collective minds and hearts and present themselves as unstoppable... Vespertine?
That's the most laughable part of it all, because only Vespertine, and Vespertine alone, thinks of herself as such.
Aht aht, Vespy, no sense deleting now, we all saw that abortion of a promo you tried to run for Havoc first, where your alarm clock and easy chair were voices in your head trying to hype you up for another main event run. The entire problem with your act, Vespertine, is that you're doing what the lowest tier accuse me of... trying too hard, acting out to convince people that you're insane.
Everything you do is contradictory, meaningless fluff selling sides of you that you aren't skilled enough to portray.
You don't know how to sell yourself as arousing, so you slinking around in saunas and asking Tatiana about "nudes", you hope, will titillate.
You don't know how to act insane or talk to yourself and make it land, so your alarm clock grows lips and advises you how to win Havoc.
You don't know how to present yourself as a killer, so you proclaim yourself divinely empowered by a fake fucking "Dark Buddha" you have absolutely no idea how to present, if it's even a physically manifested entity or some formless void from another dimension.
You don't know whether to come and go, and your star's fallen so far from time after time of seeing you shoot into the sky that anything "crazy" you try to do just comes across like disjointed Family Guy cutaway gags that have no throughline. You try to parade around with Sicko's torn-off mask? No, then you try to hop on commentary and start a feud with Tatiana Jolee for no reason? No, now you want to attack the US champion after a match, because if you aren't gunning for SOME title, you have absolutely no fucking idea what to do with yourself.
Your flap with Tatiana fell flat because you mixed things she said with Twitter, with things she said "backstage" with shit she never once said out loud, and you came off both as someone who was trying (too hard) to land some "cutting digs" on an opponent and as someone punching a hundred pounds above their weight class.
That isn't even to say I respect Tatiana for shutting you up, I don't. I find Tatiana's current act of victimhood and martyrdom just most boring, bland shit we've seen out of her for three years at this point with no discernable endgame. What's the get of complaining that "The Bookers" hate her and are using people as poker chips to shut her up and keep her held back, is she bucking for yet another early elimination from Havoc and a feud against an authority figure at Evolution?
This is the field of weak little women, catty school girls, and past their prime, stuck in their ways, self-important nothings that populates the entire field of Havoc, from top to bottom. None of you hang on my level because of the simple reason that I make my goals plain, I hang my disdain for your weakness on main, and I trod you underfoot like the worms you are.
It does not matter who you pit against me. Bring Jody Madrox. I've smashed him. Bring Johnny Eden. Krystal Hale. TJ Alexander. Niobe Martin. Over half of this field not only doesn't put in the work to be visible on the cards, they can't stick a simple landing or be bothered to promo for a weekly show.
But then you have Teo Blaze. Addy A. Draugr. Surely, you think, they're your finals. Surely Addy A is something special, she's been a belt collector this year, she's revitalized the Cruiserweight division, finally freed of her associations with Lissie and unshackled from the weight of her mistakes, Adelaide is free to be the champion, the centerpiece she was always meant to be!
Except that she hasn't.
She's done nothing with those two titles impressive, unless you count beating up never-will-matters like MAD for the Cruiserweight championship and being the first Television champion to host a division so thin that they actually waived off the "TV Title gets defended weekly" clause because it was, frankly, boring, watching Addy beat up Niobe. I commend Addy for placing a ceiling on her titles, much the way I currently have begun with the Omega, but I will not pretend she's done anything half as impressive... I accomplished in one match and retained against five people what it took her weeks to do.
And that's the point.
She will not stop me, none of you, from the smallest to the largest, can stop me, your bodies are papier mache I am going to tear through. Your gullets, I am going to rip asunder, and crumble to dust at my feet, because if there is a weapon I have forged myself into, it is the two hands that have been molded into steel. Into piledrivers, sledgehammers, into bludgeoning, blistering, manifestations of pure devastation. Into the avatars of blunt force. This is my life, as a weapon.
And at Havoc, this weapon is going to be glowing red-hot as I rack up my killstreak.
You cannot stop me as I tear my way up, from within the deepest bowels of AW, and reach down deep to rip out it's beating heart. I am going to commit the utmost, body horror on AW this week. As the epitome of Havoc, I can warn you this one last.
It will not be for the faint of heart.
His bare foot, sticky and covered anew in a bloody offal so thick it's like a milkshake, steps on the discarded skin.
Anyone watching would feel their stomach churn at the sight we behold, of the new body, it's thick cables of muscle clenched in flinching, flexing rage, it's hands opening and closing, standing in the galley of the ice cream truck staring down at it's feet, while a surreal snakeskin is puddled around it's ankles like a shed jumpsuit. The torn skin is pale, and scarred, but the leathered texture as the camera plays upon it is definitely human skin.
He looks down into the pool of blood at his feet, beside the shed skin, and smiles.
The reflection in that pool of blood shows a bald man, crying and moaning for release, his mouth moving silently. But he might's well be banging on plexiglass, he can't be heard anymore.
The Jester, having torn himself free, sickly, smirks down at the reflection in the pool of blood, hearing none of Ephrain's cries, hearing only blissful silence and the chirp of cicadas.
"Ahhhhhhhh..."
"Peacetime."