The Wounded Wolf. (1993 words)
Nov 23, 2020 20:14:02 GMT -5
“The RevolutiDaddy” Wesley, David Sanchez, and 6 more like this
Post by Downfall on Nov 23, 2020 20:14:02 GMT -5
"You've heard the parable of two wolves, right?"
He's underneath a branching sign dictating animal exhibits.
"Fairly boilerplate visual metaphor used to illustrate the struggles of giving in to your demons or listening to your better angels, it's been thrown out there by every young upstart who thinks they know something. But the wolves that concern me aren't the ramblings of a ubiquitous Cherokee grandpa... the two wolves are the ones inside versus the ones without."
There, behind the railing, in an enclosure of wooded land, rests an alpha female, her coat luminous in the moonlight, surrounded by a group of canines lazing about her in the copse of trees, somnolently dozing.
"Wolf in the wild has lived to grow old despite scrapping with some of the toughest predators in nature; it bears its scars from the times it's had it's throat bit. That wolf's pack is feral, bloodthirsty and always at its back. That wolf's toughened from the elements, from doing what it needed to survive."
"The wolf in the preserve is soft. Weak. Sure, it was bred to thrive in it's little pen, but it never strays from the confines of it. Why should it? It's packmates are just as lazy, indolent as it is. When this wolf is hungry it eats, but it's always fed just enough to keep it content. This wolf won't survive when put against a predator."
He smiles wryly.
"Think you know where I'm going with this, Ashley."
Standing at the railing, he stares intently at the she-wolf, perking her head up in the moonlight.
"Everything I said about you was a direct challenge to who you are as champion and what you want to be as a person. You were so happy to cheese your face in the dish, claim your 79-day record that you took the softest, easiest way out. And I was complicit. I tried to cheat and use brass knuckles because, I thought, I'd give you some measure to preserve your dignity, and give you an easy out. But I assumed that we were cut from similar-enough cloth that I was fighting you on a level that I'd respect."
"I lent you far too much credit."
"But realizing where I erred isn't that I characteristically oversold my own abilities or thought too little of an opponent. The problem there is that you are not the person I thought you were. In telling that story about the Inner Circle, I tried to connect to you, tell you I sympathized, I understood you because I was in that position. But, again, I credited you too much; you weren't and aren't doing the same thing I was to get ahead. And you aren't even the ringleader of your little crew."
"You're fucking middle management."
"You're a paper-pusher in the recruitment department, a mid-level cog in the fucking wheel. I've scouted you enough now that I'm entirely wise to what makes your act work."
"Funniest thing is that you rhapsodized about the moment your title reign became dominant, the moment you went from flash in the pan, to where it became about who is going to beat you."
"Yeah, tell me Ash, when exactly was that moment when you started dominating?
"Your skills have lead you to overcome challenges from men who have since left the company, and sneak out upsets against people with a larger footprint in this company like Hawkins and Devito, outwit destroyers like Corey Bull. You got by them all."
"But to say that you dominated the competition is misrepresenting all the way down the line. Because your narrative against everyone who outmatches you is "I don't need to beat you, I just need to win." And that's all you set out to do."
"So maybe that's why all of your challenges up until you met me, have been one-offs. Ash, the entire problem with you claiming that you've dominated your way into being fucking Tyson, is that not one of the names you've ticked off has really cared enough to try. If they cared about you, beating you or ending your title reign, they would'a been on your ass to try again, to succeed where they failed before, to stand up to your entry-level pop-psych surface readings and tell you to shut the fuck up. But nobody else has been after you. Is that a devastating indictment of your worth, that nobody except me has really cared? Dandy didn't care, he went on to join the Following. Bull didn't care, he's on to the Hardcore title. Not one person you've offered your help and your incisive take on their personality to has been bothered one iota by shit you have to say. Because, ultimately, it doesn't fucking matter."
"You've never had someone put in the work to level up and come after you. But the beating I gave you and the cheap way you got past me was enough to wake me up to the fact that I'm more than capable of it. So then it falls to me.
It fell to me to be the one to end your reign at 78 days... and I failed then."
He exhales, his breath fogging in the dark.
"But, Ash... you failed much more profoundly than I... I didn't win the title, or stop you from claiming what you wanted, but you, Ashley... of the exactly two people in Action Wrestling who've managed to beat me in a straight-up fight, you were not one of them. So, you broke a record, passing 78 days... and you were happy about that? About the way it came across, the way you passed into the history books? Not in a show of force, not in a battle of wits, simply an act of an outright yellow chickenshit. This is what your legacy amounts to."
"I'm glad I wasn't the one to break your streak at 78 days... I'm glad that you've gotten to 100 days with that title."
"You've built up a towering monument to nothing."
"A string of empty victories and hollow bullshit spouted by a cipher. You're a black hole behind a paper mask, and you think playing the part of a ditzy little girl hides how soft, empty, bereft of self or purpose you are."
"The more wins since then you have under your belt, the more of a testament to that nihility. Your safe little bubble. You never have to stretch beyond a few sentences, you never have to show any personality, you never have to give us an inkling of what you stand for. You don't have to stand for anything, cause' you don't have to beat your opposition, you just have to win, right."
"And finally we come to the crux of the problem with you as a person, Ash. You've actually built your entire persona around not just the TV title reign, but around your undefeated streak. You've built your entire aura around winning and the conceit that nobody has been able to figure you out and be the one that ends your reign, so much so that when you fall apart, you are going to be left with nothing. You haven't shown you know what it takes to lose, to fall short, and to pick your ass up and rise again. You're all disingenuous life-coaching and vapid criticism, but you don't know shit about anything, Ashley."
Looking on, his eyes beading in intensity, the tempo in his voice rising.
"In point of fact, you actually suck at motivating people to turn their fortunes for better. Let's turn that judgmental gaze 180 degrees and assess the company you keep."
"Despite your repeated attempts to high-hat me and push your team into the main event against MMG and Walter, they were stomped flat. Noris Cranley lost the second piece of gold Philidor had to a man who couldn't even make a cup of coffee in WGWF, he failed. Your boys tried to get into the Tag title race, they failed. Carter tried to get past the first round of WOTY, he failed. Despite your coaching, not one person who's lives you touched has done jack shit."
"But none of that matters to you as long as you kept your record-setting title, right? The one you so happily took a cheap DQ win to keep, so that you could stand on the stage later in the night and pose with the fucking belt while your stablemates were doing all of the work brawling with the MMG. That's all it's about with you, being able to stand there and pose with your cardboard championship in the air."
"And you dare to condescend to me and write me off. You think you deserve so much bigger fish, don't you."
"You seem to think comparing me to your frame of reference with Hawkins or insulting the Lost Breed means anything. You ultimately retreated to the same facile judgments of my record and measured my success on the same timeline as what you've accomplished without giving credence to the fact that you admit I'm capable of more when I'm sufficiently motivated."
"You said it yourself, if we'd faced before Uprising, I would have had you."
"But that doesn't quite jibe with your narrative of me being incompetent or the Lost Breed not being worth your time because you were after bigger game... you tacitly acknowledge the fact that there was a point in time where our meeting would've been difficult for you, so you admit that I was always the one who was destined to give you trouble. And that bears out..."
"Because out of all of your title defenses, the mark on your record is that I was the one person you weren't able to pin."
"So If I was capable of beating you then, I'm capable of beating you now, now that you've pissed me off, now that you've brought a hungry, scarred, wounded wolf into a fenced-in area."
"That wolf is gonna lash out. "
"That wolf is gonna tear through the safe little habitat that's been set up for the alpha to succeed in."
He's a ball of righteous fury and bristling, trembling muscle.
"If you said one - just one - thing that struck me as true, it was that my self-awareness does undermine my confidence, I do spend too much time explaining myself to nitpicking little career therapists like you to defang their arguments. I don't feel the need to do that this time around, because you've awoken something in me you damn sure shoulda left alone. I'm not some weak little coward hiding behind a callow doctrine of compromise for my success."
"I am the best in the world."
Exhaling some of the tension in his shoulders, he wipes the sweat from his upper lip.
"And now I'm putting you in a position where you can't just squeak out a cheap win because 'You don't need to beat me', you do. There will be no running away the way you did the last two Clashes. Nobody in that cage but the two of us. There will be no excuses when I use the steel to pummel, slice and grind you into fucking shreds. And there's no excuses for me either. I need to beat you. And I - WANT - nothing less."
"You can feel me coming, Ash. You were already always afraid of the moment that someone saw through your game and brought this empty mummer's farce to it's conclusion. I've already exposed you."
"Now I'm going to be the death of you."
"So thanks for the fruit basket. But I'm afraid I'm not hungry for that."
His smile springs out of the darkness, hungry and lupine and wild.
"I'm coming right for your throat."
Because we all live in a wounded house
And living here will be the death of me
Someone's got to be the death of me
And living here will be the death of me
Someone's got to be the death of me