The Five Nightmares. (3,994 words)
Mar 5, 2021 18:54:31 GMT -5
Roy Speede, 𝗖𝗢𝗥𝗘𝗬 𝗕𝗟𝗔𝗖𝗞, and 4 more like this
Post by Downfall on Mar 5, 2021 18:54:31 GMT -5
I have five nightmares that keep me up at night.
Five darkest-timeline scenarios that inform every single decision in my waking world.
Just now, one of them's occurring to me in this trailer-park in Kissimmee, Fl; As I walked up the weeded cobblestone and the jungly lawn in front of the trailer's plot, each footfall carried the finality of a prisoner walking the Green Mile. Carrying me, inexorably to stand at the doorway. Carrying me, step by bleeding step, to confront a fate as relentless as the tide.
Didn't bother knocking; he never locked it. I pushed the door.
He laid there, pitifully. Surrounded in a morass of beer, puddled blood, and tears. He squeezed his failing eyes, squinting at me, with more of those tears staining his cheek. Shame.
Whimpering, "Couldn't call anyone else...,"
I can't even stand to look at the cramped little trailer's adornments. A mausoleum to moments forty years-gone, black-and-white dirtsheet clippings, pictures of himself as a young man, playing the part of a German Nationalist named Erich Von Himmel. It chilled me to look at him because... in those pictures, I saw myself.
The first nightmare is that I become my father.
I pick him out of his fetid-smelling mess, sit him back against the couch. His voice is raspier than it has been before, and he hacks out a cough that worries me. I assess whether it's too much of the creature got him, or if his insistence on going out to the bar paid off with a case of the Florida Stupid-19, but he's just looking at me through red, rheumy eyes. His words are an apology.
"I've never been there for you, Daniel."
Lips pursed as I poke at him, trying to feel his ribs through his pale flesh. "Shut the hell up, Donald, I'm trying to see if you broke anything."
"The only kind thoughts I ever spared you were dropping you off at my mistresses' houses so you could have some kind of guidance... Cause I knew I was never gonna be around..."
I've never heard him like this. Besides when he's critiqued what I've gotten wrong along the way, I've never had an honest conversation with my father. I don't tell him to shut up again.
"When-when I saw you training as a Lion in the dojo, when you were 19, do you remember that story?"
"I find it hard to forget my time in the dojo," I say, tersely. The training regimen in Japan's notoriously tough, rife with hazing, and my masters had not taken kindly to the prospect of a young, pretty-blond gaijin come to them chasing a dream and emulating another man. I could have described to him the afternoons spent running sprints while balancing jugs of piss on my shoulders. But the specific incident in the dojo he was referring to... yes, that was seared into my mind.
"I was in debt to them, Daniel, the Black Dragon cartel." He swallows painfully, eyes searching my face. "Real criminals. Monsters."
I hesitate, not quite seeing why he chose now to bare his soul. The lump in his throat moves up and down.
"And I asked them a favor, to warn you away from Japan. To push you away from me. I - I sold myself even further into their graces... and I... I asked them to hurt you."
"Ma-Maybe I... I told myself, at the time, that I was causing you such pain for a greater good."
Trauma flashback blowing through my mind like a shotgun-shell; surrounded on all sides by men in the dojo, wearing black masks. They raised tire irons, brought them down. I remember the one. With the ice-blue eyes behind the mask.
"Fuck you, Donald," whispered.
His grip on my shoulder is a drowning man's clutching claw.
"It's the same for you, Daniel... these Lost Breed you're with, they're the Black Dragon, come again! They're monsters, who are dragging you deeper into their debt!"
"They're making you push everyone away... for their own good, you'll reason..."
"And we'll continue this... this cycle... of making the same mistakes..."
I stand so suddenly that it's as if I'm throwing him off. Not wanting to look into his pleading eyes. Not wanting to look around and see myself in all of Donald's memories plastered on the wall of his tiny metal prison, where he wiles away his days, alone, dying and trapped in "the Good'Ole Days".
My first nightmare is that I become my father.
"The Lost Breed is a cancer that'll-that'll eat everything inside you alive, and leave you empty. They'll just use you for their ends and throw you aside." And as he's saying that, it prickles the back of my neck, because he's hit on the second nightmare as well. That no matter how good I am, that my efforts won't be recognized, that I'll be pushed aside in favor of others that, by my standards, don't do the kind of work I do.
That I become replaceable is my second nightmare.
"Why... did you choose tonight, as a long-dark night of the soul?" I ask, softly, looking into the middle distance out of his window. "Why now, Donald?"
His eyes widen with religious fervor, "Because, the devil told me."
"The devil."
"He showed me what was inside of you, Daniel... what you're struggling with, what's eating you alive... and he showed me, that I'm dying. I'm sick." He speaks, spittle forming and flying, madness.
Grunting long, want to smash his face in, my hand tenses, knuckles itch.
I give him my shoulder, turning to go instead.
"You have to be better than me, you have to turn away from the road you're traveling."
What you know about it, I want to mumble, but seeing him now, seeing... myself-as-him after three more decades, I'd say he knows plenty...
"He told me all this and more... whispered it in my ear with his barbed tongue - " his body wrenches as he sits up, veins sticking out of his neck. "Told me that he's coming to collect your heart and watch you be left with nothing..." His voice panting, the wind leaving him. "Beware the devil, Twisted...!"
My eyebrows shoot up, "Twisted?
I turn my back on Donald, intending for it to be for good. To leave him here in his mausoleum, with his ghost monuments and memories. To refute the portent he presents.
"Don't shut me out too, son!"
"Don't chase the demons by yourself!"
The Corvette is parked at the edge of the trailer-circle.
It's time to conference. I'm not doing this alone. I won't let the nightmares win.
But they're always there.
Corey Black once started a Trios promo about my team admonishing that we never forget where we come from.
And I have not.
For all the tribulations I've gone through to get here. Cutting myself to bleed on the metaphorical page, and give you people every single facet of me. I've been so completely open about it that some, took my self-awareness of my flaws as devaluing the strength of my words. And looking at what people still say. Paper champion. Beaten nobodies. Disrespected the TV title. Getting all my ideas from Nightengale. And on and on and on. But all of these are just meaningless words, that I've silenced one-by-one.
Corey Black sees that lesson in himself.
We are, after all, cut from the same mold.
He admitted it himself, that he saw in my early startings in AW a mirror to his own tenure. How many times in your early days, Corey, even when you'd won the Hardcore Title and embarked on what would become a record-setting reign, did people look down their nose at what you'd done? 'Oh wow, some legends winning titles of places I've never heard of... well, you're nobody until you've beaten ME." And how you had to choke that down, not getting it done when you'd gotten shots at big feats like All-In, Trios, or Havoc? How you had to agonize over whether your twenty-two year career was for nothing? And how, brick-by-blood-soaked-brick... you picked yourself up, began stacking a body at a time until you'd built a damn empire from the people who doubted you? How you led the MMG to the Tag Titles, how you #PUTDOWNTHEMONGREL and finally claimed your place as the King of All Wrestlers?
We're more alike that you want to admit Corey, even if I'm just starting out on the same run that led you to where you are. I've been experiencing those same fears manifest.
But here's the thing about your fears, weaknesses, and failings.
Strength isn't charging ahead with no mortal fears, mistakenly confident is your unearned omnipotence.
Strength is seeing those fears, those flaws and pushing past them. Strength is recognizing your own position, your own weakness, then adjusting so that this weakness... becomes your power.
I know you see that, Corey. And I see in you a version of myself with some of the same flaws and fears limiting him.
You are, after all... so afraid of being alone that you surround yourself in your village, you dally with Taylor Swift, and you've teamed with enough people like FPV and Baker that people forget this isn't all a means by which they serve under you. Your aim isn't to create a brotherhood. The aim of your village, of your stable was always presented as enough people to hype you up to put you over as greater than you were. But, you too, know the fear that I've profoundly struggled with... the more people you keep around you, the more what we do will push them away.
When things got grimdark and you had to take the fight to Philidor dirty, you acted questionably. Everyone hits on your teaming with WALTER, but it's because it was such a breech of your code and your brothership. And to what end? What did it ever get you?
The problem is that Philidor became the devil in your ear, and it blinded you so much that you played their game. You never fought Philidor on your terms, not once... from the moment they interrupted your celebration, you always stayed two steps behind Black and her henchmen. Just because you invaded their offices, yet Ash Blake was at home playing coy. You never rattled her. But you tried everything you could to sublimate your fear. And you choked on it.
Your fears led you to fracture your own group and to give your enemies endless ammunition to make you look bad, just for a pyrrhic victory in one battle of a war... one you didn't even end up victorious in.
So you can't look me in the eye and tell me that you are in any way superior to me, Corey Black.
You said before you saw me as someone who thought I came here for an easy paycheck, and "I'm in the thick of it", playing with big boys.
If we're being honest, I see you as a manifestation of all of my demons, a literal shadow-self that I'm going to take great pleasure in destroying.
The third nightmare is that I burn out.
It's what's kept this engine running, even though some would have said that since I was publicly fired from one company thirteen years ago I ain't been shit, but what do they know about the grit it took to keep working, taking jobs where I could ("in bingo halls") until I had a contract to get back on TV. What does anyone know about the fortitude it took to start again after some promotion had knuckled-under or been absorbed - the real drive that meant that no matter what happens or how hard I'm hit, I slide behind the wheel of this matte-black monstrosity and gun the gas, peeling off to my next destination.
No matter how hard I'm reeling. How hard I'm hit.
You slide behind the wheel.
And you keep going.
Yet that motivator persists. Perhaps that's why I look back in the rear-view so much as I pull away from places. Because the truth is, my end is always chasing me, the fatal forever-flameout.
That hellhound is at my heels.
But I'm going fast and hard, rubber scorching now. And no matter how close in the mirror... it isn't getting me tonight.
The revelation that Jason has something to do with my father has me tearing off in fight-mode.
We will not do this again, Jason.
I won't allow it.
Jaw set grimly as I dial Alec. We need to circle the wagons if there's gonna be another one of "the devil's" tricks.
He picks up, and I don't waste any time. "Alec, Jason's back."
Alec groans and I can hear him anxiously touching his face. "God, I thought I - why are we never done with Inner Circle business, Danny?"
I can't answer that, really. It plays at the periphery of my fourth. But I'm angry when I answer. "Dummy up. Go to Chelle's house and make sure Jason hasn't contacted her."
Alec responds by turning squirrelly, "She's in the city, and I - Danny, after everything that, ah, passed between me and her, I think it'd be more appropriate if you - "
"We don't have time," I snapped, "Jason has already seen Donald tonight and he has hours on me. It's gonna take me time to get from Kissimmee. Do as I fucking ask."
His voice hardens, but he directs it at me. "You ever take the time to think about how much of this is your fault, Danny."
Not the time, my terse grunt says, but he continues on, "If you, at a stupidly arrogant twenty-three years old hadn't decided the answer to getting ahead in your career meant recruiting actual psychopaths' to be your heaters, you wouldn't be here... You invited a vampire inside the house, and made Jason... all of our problems, forever."
"Shut up, Alec," I say, not with as much force, concentrating on the road.
"No I gotta say this once. It isn't right... Jason's never going to stop trying to mess with you, and you dragged me into this... Fuck, if he came to torment Donald, he might be coming here, threaten my family, my kid."
"You think you're the only one with something to lose, you pathetic worm," I snap at my nebbish friend across the line. Something deep-black is flitting at the edge of my vision as the bile enters my voice. "You don't know the first thing about it."
"Man, I've had enough of your shit, Danny. Me and Michelle, we try to get you to work towards something good for once in your life."
"Yeah, well, I'm rotten to the core. Shocker, pal. Now get the fuck over to Michelle's house - Now! Don't make me hurt you worse than Jason ever could."
"Da -" I click the phone off, and I can almost see him seethe as he looks at the call ended screen. But I don't care. Tonight is a manifestation of all of my worst traits and fears manifest, and I've just hit on the fourth.
The fourth nightmare is that everywhere I go in my life, I spread nothing but damage; my brutal defense mechanism is a stony shore that people I loved routinely break themselves on.
It works when I'm working because I'm not used to caring about the feelings of people I get paid to make look bad. But it doesn't turn off, because it's just me. And in that way, the nightmares work in concert, married, intertwined. It'll always be that way until the day I'm alone. After I've burned through everything that gave me a reason to go on. When the work isn't enough.
There's one more person to call.
She doesn't pick up, and as I'm entering the city limits, I know I still need to get there. Maybe it's my nightmares, maybe just the general sense of foreboding anxiety. Goddammit, Michelle...
I drive through that tense silence, trying to make it in time. As if it senses my anxiety, the phone rings, from a blocked number, minutes later.
"...Jason," I answer it, without much surprise.
The ice-cold, hissing voice comes from across the line. "'Lo Danny... I figured, you're looking for me right now..."
"Sure, pal. Tell me what's on your mind."
"It's time we had a chat, you and I."
We all carry our devil in our ear, the Jungian shadow that whispers our darker impulses.
Right now, Corey, you're confronting those demons and asking whether you want to unleash your anger over losing yet again to Ash Blake on me, but that would be a mistake.
Really, any typical way you want to approach this match is a mistake. Because it's not gonna go the way you think.
If you wanna come at me, full of wrath and vengeance because the Lost Breed destroyed your erstwhile comrade (who again, you made distance himself,) FPV, I'm sorry, that isn't going to work.
If you think that running roughshod over me to earn your ticket into the Chamber, so you can have another World Title shot against Ash, it isn't going that way either.
If you go into this match thinking about anything except the fact that you're facing a world-class athlete with unique insight into how to defeat you, you're in a zero-sum game, King.
I mean, c'mon, Corey, you did enough research on me before to find the name of my effin' finisher from 2008, did your deep-dive clue you in to the fact that nobody in my career has ever managed to beat me the same way twice? I'll even point out that you got put down two consecutive times by a woman who I managed to topple. You can quibble about the how... but it doesn't matter, does it.
I may not have taken your approved path to success, but I'm still rising. And I've come out victorious with my head held high more often than not, Corey... to this day, only two people have managed to pin me here. You won't be third... not after I break your goddamn jaw with a Godkiller and go on to walk into the Chamber.
You are just stirring the ashes, trying to stoke a fire again. You've been running on sparks since the day you didn't shoot QDT down hard enough... yes, you put down WALTER, win a crown for yourself... but you were a weak fucking ruler.
You didn't do anything with the titles you won. You hardly even defended them. Do I need to point out that defending this crown I'm wearing is all I've been doing, doing more and establishing credibility for a number of days passing even the mighty World Champions?
I may not have conformed to your success just yet, but conversely, you have little to sneer at anyone's record about. All you did after you claimed your title was fail. Trios. Wrestler of the Year. Revolution. All of it.
Now everyone in your settlement can just see their jarl is a weak old man sitting in a chair with bad posture.
And I? Corey, if you learned anything from reading into my history, you'd know, that I branded myself an anarchist because I had a distinguished knack for bringing thrones crashing to the ground.
So you'll charge ahead, thinking that you're too high-up, that you're one of those big boys you talked about. You think this whole struggle to regain your title is just a lapse in judgment, and you'll never see the one person who's most locked into the darkness in your heart, the fear gnawing in your gut. You are projected invulnerability, man-made God, self-made devil. But I'm not giving you the chance to talk me down from taking the rightful place I came here for. I know full well who I am and what I'm capable of.
I've become a nightmare scenario that this company can't wake from. I am the voice of dissension that cuts deep into the subconscious and lets you know how inadequate you have become.
And when I beat you, and go onto the Chamber, Corey...
It'll be your wakeup call.
"If you're running off to meet the missus, I think you should know that she's... in a state tonight. But you helpfully supplied a check-in for her. I'm sure that her reunion with Alec is going swimmingly," his voice has the cheeky playfulness of the Cheshire Cat.
"Jason, you pathetic piece of garbage - Michelle was your friend. She cared about all of us, and you - Why, for the love of - "
"Sort've a 'scorpion-and-the-frog' metaphysical question, idn'it? I do these things, because it's my nature, and nature is the one thing we can't deny. Just like you can't deny yours."
"I'm two miles away from her house," my voice has a warning note, "If you're there when I get there, I'm ending this."
He continues on as if he could careless, presuming that he isn't there, but this is all part of the game, "Ever since we started this when we were kids... your influence loomed over the entire experiment. You molded all of us in your image, to be your servants."
"And now look where you are, Danny. You get to continue on, living the same old life, with a new crew to replace us. That's why the Lost Breed is so familiar to you - because they're disposable, made to be thrown away, and they've already come just as corrupt as you are to match how rotten you are inside."
I want to keep him talking, so I feign interest. "And Michelle?"
"Michelle's the prime example of this, because she's your," mockingly, "North star, you've idealized the love you wasted and when push comes to shove, she's just as broken inside like you."
"No." I deny that. But the devil I know, chattering in my ear, is telling me otherwise. It's why I keep them at arm's length so much. "No, you're wrong."
"Am I though?"
I'm standing outside of her house; Alec's car's parked, brake lights on, still running... and the door to the house is wide open, with only low light on inside.
"Consider this the opening salvo, Daniel... when this's over, I show you that your nightmares are just beginning. That this life you've built for yourself... is a lie. Everything you touch is ashes."
"You think that Jason... but you've fucked with Michelle and Alec in the past... and me, I've lost everything and bottomed before. There's no nightmare scenario you can concoct that I can't come back from."
He laughs. I'm walking into the house. "These aren't my thoughts, Danny. They're yours."
And he hangs up on me.
I don't give the phone more than a second's sour grimace before I step towards the house. Cautiously, peering into the low-lighting of the foyer. A sinking feeling dropping into my gut. He said this was just beginning.
When I step into the foyer and look into the living-room, the first thing my boots crunch on is broken glass. And then I smell the copper tang of blood.
Michelle's sitting next to a broken-open china cabinet, with a figure slumped beside her, bloodied and cut all over from the glass. Michelle is weeping, but her eyes, reddened by some kind of drugging, are wide with frenzy.
My jaw falls open, and again, I can hear Jason's voice taunting me, telling me this is only the beginning. And I come face to face with my ultimate fear.
My fifth nightmare: that I'd finally find everything I wanted in someone special, pure and beautiful as anything I've ever seen in my life and ruin it by making it as corrupt and dark as I am.
I can still hear Jason's mocking laughter in my head.
And it echoes on.
Five darkest-timeline scenarios that inform every single decision in my waking world.
Just now, one of them's occurring to me in this trailer-park in Kissimmee, Fl; As I walked up the weeded cobblestone and the jungly lawn in front of the trailer's plot, each footfall carried the finality of a prisoner walking the Green Mile. Carrying me, inexorably to stand at the doorway. Carrying me, step by bleeding step, to confront a fate as relentless as the tide.
Didn't bother knocking; he never locked it. I pushed the door.
He laid there, pitifully. Surrounded in a morass of beer, puddled blood, and tears. He squeezed his failing eyes, squinting at me, with more of those tears staining his cheek. Shame.
Whimpering, "Couldn't call anyone else...,"
I can't even stand to look at the cramped little trailer's adornments. A mausoleum to moments forty years-gone, black-and-white dirtsheet clippings, pictures of himself as a young man, playing the part of a German Nationalist named Erich Von Himmel. It chilled me to look at him because... in those pictures, I saw myself.
The first nightmare is that I become my father.
I pick him out of his fetid-smelling mess, sit him back against the couch. His voice is raspier than it has been before, and he hacks out a cough that worries me. I assess whether it's too much of the creature got him, or if his insistence on going out to the bar paid off with a case of the Florida Stupid-19, but he's just looking at me through red, rheumy eyes. His words are an apology.
"I've never been there for you, Daniel."
Lips pursed as I poke at him, trying to feel his ribs through his pale flesh. "Shut the hell up, Donald, I'm trying to see if you broke anything."
"The only kind thoughts I ever spared you were dropping you off at my mistresses' houses so you could have some kind of guidance... Cause I knew I was never gonna be around..."
I've never heard him like this. Besides when he's critiqued what I've gotten wrong along the way, I've never had an honest conversation with my father. I don't tell him to shut up again.
"When-when I saw you training as a Lion in the dojo, when you were 19, do you remember that story?"
"I find it hard to forget my time in the dojo," I say, tersely. The training regimen in Japan's notoriously tough, rife with hazing, and my masters had not taken kindly to the prospect of a young, pretty-blond gaijin come to them chasing a dream and emulating another man. I could have described to him the afternoons spent running sprints while balancing jugs of piss on my shoulders. But the specific incident in the dojo he was referring to... yes, that was seared into my mind.
"I was in debt to them, Daniel, the Black Dragon cartel." He swallows painfully, eyes searching my face. "Real criminals. Monsters."
I hesitate, not quite seeing why he chose now to bare his soul. The lump in his throat moves up and down.
"And I asked them a favor, to warn you away from Japan. To push you away from me. I - I sold myself even further into their graces... and I... I asked them to hurt you."
"Ma-Maybe I... I told myself, at the time, that I was causing you such pain for a greater good."
Trauma flashback blowing through my mind like a shotgun-shell; surrounded on all sides by men in the dojo, wearing black masks. They raised tire irons, brought them down. I remember the one. With the ice-blue eyes behind the mask.
"Fuck you, Donald," whispered.
His grip on my shoulder is a drowning man's clutching claw.
"It's the same for you, Daniel... these Lost Breed you're with, they're the Black Dragon, come again! They're monsters, who are dragging you deeper into their debt!"
"They're making you push everyone away... for their own good, you'll reason..."
"And we'll continue this... this cycle... of making the same mistakes..."
I stand so suddenly that it's as if I'm throwing him off. Not wanting to look into his pleading eyes. Not wanting to look around and see myself in all of Donald's memories plastered on the wall of his tiny metal prison, where he wiles away his days, alone, dying and trapped in "the Good'Ole Days".
My first nightmare is that I become my father.
"The Lost Breed is a cancer that'll-that'll eat everything inside you alive, and leave you empty. They'll just use you for their ends and throw you aside." And as he's saying that, it prickles the back of my neck, because he's hit on the second nightmare as well. That no matter how good I am, that my efforts won't be recognized, that I'll be pushed aside in favor of others that, by my standards, don't do the kind of work I do.
That I become replaceable is my second nightmare.
"Why... did you choose tonight, as a long-dark night of the soul?" I ask, softly, looking into the middle distance out of his window. "Why now, Donald?"
His eyes widen with religious fervor, "Because, the devil told me."
"The devil."
"He showed me what was inside of you, Daniel... what you're struggling with, what's eating you alive... and he showed me, that I'm dying. I'm sick." He speaks, spittle forming and flying, madness.
Grunting long, want to smash his face in, my hand tenses, knuckles itch.
I give him my shoulder, turning to go instead.
"You have to be better than me, you have to turn away from the road you're traveling."
What you know about it, I want to mumble, but seeing him now, seeing... myself-as-him after three more decades, I'd say he knows plenty...
"He told me all this and more... whispered it in my ear with his barbed tongue - " his body wrenches as he sits up, veins sticking out of his neck. "Told me that he's coming to collect your heart and watch you be left with nothing..." His voice panting, the wind leaving him. "Beware the devil, Twisted...!"
My eyebrows shoot up, "Twisted?
I turn my back on Donald, intending for it to be for good. To leave him here in his mausoleum, with his ghost monuments and memories. To refute the portent he presents.
"Don't shut me out too, son!"
"Don't chase the demons by yourself!"
The Corvette is parked at the edge of the trailer-circle.
It's time to conference. I'm not doing this alone. I won't let the nightmares win.
But they're always there.
Corey Black once started a Trios promo about my team admonishing that we never forget where we come from.
And I have not.
For all the tribulations I've gone through to get here. Cutting myself to bleed on the metaphorical page, and give you people every single facet of me. I've been so completely open about it that some, took my self-awareness of my flaws as devaluing the strength of my words. And looking at what people still say. Paper champion. Beaten nobodies. Disrespected the TV title. Getting all my ideas from Nightengale. And on and on and on. But all of these are just meaningless words, that I've silenced one-by-one.
Corey Black sees that lesson in himself.
We are, after all, cut from the same mold.
He admitted it himself, that he saw in my early startings in AW a mirror to his own tenure. How many times in your early days, Corey, even when you'd won the Hardcore Title and embarked on what would become a record-setting reign, did people look down their nose at what you'd done? 'Oh wow, some legends winning titles of places I've never heard of... well, you're nobody until you've beaten ME." And how you had to choke that down, not getting it done when you'd gotten shots at big feats like All-In, Trios, or Havoc? How you had to agonize over whether your twenty-two year career was for nothing? And how, brick-by-blood-soaked-brick... you picked yourself up, began stacking a body at a time until you'd built a damn empire from the people who doubted you? How you led the MMG to the Tag Titles, how you #PUTDOWNTHEMONGREL and finally claimed your place as the King of All Wrestlers?
We're more alike that you want to admit Corey, even if I'm just starting out on the same run that led you to where you are. I've been experiencing those same fears manifest.
But here's the thing about your fears, weaknesses, and failings.
Strength isn't charging ahead with no mortal fears, mistakenly confident is your unearned omnipotence.
Strength is seeing those fears, those flaws and pushing past them. Strength is recognizing your own position, your own weakness, then adjusting so that this weakness... becomes your power.
I know you see that, Corey. And I see in you a version of myself with some of the same flaws and fears limiting him.
You are, after all... so afraid of being alone that you surround yourself in your village, you dally with Taylor Swift, and you've teamed with enough people like FPV and Baker that people forget this isn't all a means by which they serve under you. Your aim isn't to create a brotherhood. The aim of your village, of your stable was always presented as enough people to hype you up to put you over as greater than you were. But, you too, know the fear that I've profoundly struggled with... the more people you keep around you, the more what we do will push them away.
When things got grimdark and you had to take the fight to Philidor dirty, you acted questionably. Everyone hits on your teaming with WALTER, but it's because it was such a breech of your code and your brothership. And to what end? What did it ever get you?
The problem is that Philidor became the devil in your ear, and it blinded you so much that you played their game. You never fought Philidor on your terms, not once... from the moment they interrupted your celebration, you always stayed two steps behind Black and her henchmen. Just because you invaded their offices, yet Ash Blake was at home playing coy. You never rattled her. But you tried everything you could to sublimate your fear. And you choked on it.
Your fears led you to fracture your own group and to give your enemies endless ammunition to make you look bad, just for a pyrrhic victory in one battle of a war... one you didn't even end up victorious in.
So you can't look me in the eye and tell me that you are in any way superior to me, Corey Black.
You said before you saw me as someone who thought I came here for an easy paycheck, and "I'm in the thick of it", playing with big boys.
If we're being honest, I see you as a manifestation of all of my demons, a literal shadow-self that I'm going to take great pleasure in destroying.
The third nightmare is that I burn out.
It's what's kept this engine running, even though some would have said that since I was publicly fired from one company thirteen years ago I ain't been shit, but what do they know about the grit it took to keep working, taking jobs where I could ("in bingo halls") until I had a contract to get back on TV. What does anyone know about the fortitude it took to start again after some promotion had knuckled-under or been absorbed - the real drive that meant that no matter what happens or how hard I'm hit, I slide behind the wheel of this matte-black monstrosity and gun the gas, peeling off to my next destination.
No matter how hard I'm reeling. How hard I'm hit.
You slide behind the wheel.
And you keep going.
Yet that motivator persists. Perhaps that's why I look back in the rear-view so much as I pull away from places. Because the truth is, my end is always chasing me, the fatal forever-flameout.
That hellhound is at my heels.
But I'm going fast and hard, rubber scorching now. And no matter how close in the mirror... it isn't getting me tonight.
The revelation that Jason has something to do with my father has me tearing off in fight-mode.
We will not do this again, Jason.
I won't allow it.
Jaw set grimly as I dial Alec. We need to circle the wagons if there's gonna be another one of "the devil's" tricks.
He picks up, and I don't waste any time. "Alec, Jason's back."
Alec groans and I can hear him anxiously touching his face. "God, I thought I - why are we never done with Inner Circle business, Danny?"
I can't answer that, really. It plays at the periphery of my fourth. But I'm angry when I answer. "Dummy up. Go to Chelle's house and make sure Jason hasn't contacted her."
Alec responds by turning squirrelly, "She's in the city, and I - Danny, after everything that, ah, passed between me and her, I think it'd be more appropriate if you - "
"We don't have time," I snapped, "Jason has already seen Donald tonight and he has hours on me. It's gonna take me time to get from Kissimmee. Do as I fucking ask."
His voice hardens, but he directs it at me. "You ever take the time to think about how much of this is your fault, Danny."
Not the time, my terse grunt says, but he continues on, "If you, at a stupidly arrogant twenty-three years old hadn't decided the answer to getting ahead in your career meant recruiting actual psychopaths' to be your heaters, you wouldn't be here... You invited a vampire inside the house, and made Jason... all of our problems, forever."
"Shut up, Alec," I say, not with as much force, concentrating on the road.
"No I gotta say this once. It isn't right... Jason's never going to stop trying to mess with you, and you dragged me into this... Fuck, if he came to torment Donald, he might be coming here, threaten my family, my kid."
"You think you're the only one with something to lose, you pathetic worm," I snap at my nebbish friend across the line. Something deep-black is flitting at the edge of my vision as the bile enters my voice. "You don't know the first thing about it."
"Man, I've had enough of your shit, Danny. Me and Michelle, we try to get you to work towards something good for once in your life."
"Yeah, well, I'm rotten to the core. Shocker, pal. Now get the fuck over to Michelle's house - Now! Don't make me hurt you worse than Jason ever could."
"Da -" I click the phone off, and I can almost see him seethe as he looks at the call ended screen. But I don't care. Tonight is a manifestation of all of my worst traits and fears manifest, and I've just hit on the fourth.
The fourth nightmare is that everywhere I go in my life, I spread nothing but damage; my brutal defense mechanism is a stony shore that people I loved routinely break themselves on.
It works when I'm working because I'm not used to caring about the feelings of people I get paid to make look bad. But it doesn't turn off, because it's just me. And in that way, the nightmares work in concert, married, intertwined. It'll always be that way until the day I'm alone. After I've burned through everything that gave me a reason to go on. When the work isn't enough.
There's one more person to call.
She doesn't pick up, and as I'm entering the city limits, I know I still need to get there. Maybe it's my nightmares, maybe just the general sense of foreboding anxiety. Goddammit, Michelle...
I drive through that tense silence, trying to make it in time. As if it senses my anxiety, the phone rings, from a blocked number, minutes later.
"...Jason," I answer it, without much surprise.
The ice-cold, hissing voice comes from across the line. "'Lo Danny... I figured, you're looking for me right now..."
"Sure, pal. Tell me what's on your mind."
"It's time we had a chat, you and I."
We all carry our devil in our ear, the Jungian shadow that whispers our darker impulses.
Right now, Corey, you're confronting those demons and asking whether you want to unleash your anger over losing yet again to Ash Blake on me, but that would be a mistake.
Really, any typical way you want to approach this match is a mistake. Because it's not gonna go the way you think.
If you wanna come at me, full of wrath and vengeance because the Lost Breed destroyed your erstwhile comrade (who again, you made distance himself,) FPV, I'm sorry, that isn't going to work.
If you think that running roughshod over me to earn your ticket into the Chamber, so you can have another World Title shot against Ash, it isn't going that way either.
If you go into this match thinking about anything except the fact that you're facing a world-class athlete with unique insight into how to defeat you, you're in a zero-sum game, King.
I mean, c'mon, Corey, you did enough research on me before to find the name of my effin' finisher from 2008, did your deep-dive clue you in to the fact that nobody in my career has ever managed to beat me the same way twice? I'll even point out that you got put down two consecutive times by a woman who I managed to topple. You can quibble about the how... but it doesn't matter, does it.
I may not have taken your approved path to success, but I'm still rising. And I've come out victorious with my head held high more often than not, Corey... to this day, only two people have managed to pin me here. You won't be third... not after I break your goddamn jaw with a Godkiller and go on to walk into the Chamber.
You are just stirring the ashes, trying to stoke a fire again. You've been running on sparks since the day you didn't shoot QDT down hard enough... yes, you put down WALTER, win a crown for yourself... but you were a weak fucking ruler.
You didn't do anything with the titles you won. You hardly even defended them. Do I need to point out that defending this crown I'm wearing is all I've been doing, doing more and establishing credibility for a number of days passing even the mighty World Champions?
I may not have conformed to your success just yet, but conversely, you have little to sneer at anyone's record about. All you did after you claimed your title was fail. Trios. Wrestler of the Year. Revolution. All of it.
Now everyone in your settlement can just see their jarl is a weak old man sitting in a chair with bad posture.
And I? Corey, if you learned anything from reading into my history, you'd know, that I branded myself an anarchist because I had a distinguished knack for bringing thrones crashing to the ground.
So you'll charge ahead, thinking that you're too high-up, that you're one of those big boys you talked about. You think this whole struggle to regain your title is just a lapse in judgment, and you'll never see the one person who's most locked into the darkness in your heart, the fear gnawing in your gut. You are projected invulnerability, man-made God, self-made devil. But I'm not giving you the chance to talk me down from taking the rightful place I came here for. I know full well who I am and what I'm capable of.
I've become a nightmare scenario that this company can't wake from. I am the voice of dissension that cuts deep into the subconscious and lets you know how inadequate you have become.
And when I beat you, and go onto the Chamber, Corey...
It'll be your wakeup call.
"If you're running off to meet the missus, I think you should know that she's... in a state tonight. But you helpfully supplied a check-in for her. I'm sure that her reunion with Alec is going swimmingly," his voice has the cheeky playfulness of the Cheshire Cat.
"Jason, you pathetic piece of garbage - Michelle was your friend. She cared about all of us, and you - Why, for the love of - "
"Sort've a 'scorpion-and-the-frog' metaphysical question, idn'it? I do these things, because it's my nature, and nature is the one thing we can't deny. Just like you can't deny yours."
"I'm two miles away from her house," my voice has a warning note, "If you're there when I get there, I'm ending this."
He continues on as if he could careless, presuming that he isn't there, but this is all part of the game, "Ever since we started this when we were kids... your influence loomed over the entire experiment. You molded all of us in your image, to be your servants."
"And now look where you are, Danny. You get to continue on, living the same old life, with a new crew to replace us. That's why the Lost Breed is so familiar to you - because they're disposable, made to be thrown away, and they've already come just as corrupt as you are to match how rotten you are inside."
I want to keep him talking, so I feign interest. "And Michelle?"
"Michelle's the prime example of this, because she's your," mockingly, "North star, you've idealized the love you wasted and when push comes to shove, she's just as broken inside like you."
"No." I deny that. But the devil I know, chattering in my ear, is telling me otherwise. It's why I keep them at arm's length so much. "No, you're wrong."
"Am I though?"
I'm standing outside of her house; Alec's car's parked, brake lights on, still running... and the door to the house is wide open, with only low light on inside.
"Consider this the opening salvo, Daniel... when this's over, I show you that your nightmares are just beginning. That this life you've built for yourself... is a lie. Everything you touch is ashes."
"You think that Jason... but you've fucked with Michelle and Alec in the past... and me, I've lost everything and bottomed before. There's no nightmare scenario you can concoct that I can't come back from."
He laughs. I'm walking into the house. "These aren't my thoughts, Danny. They're yours."
And he hangs up on me.
I don't give the phone more than a second's sour grimace before I step towards the house. Cautiously, peering into the low-lighting of the foyer. A sinking feeling dropping into my gut. He said this was just beginning.
When I step into the foyer and look into the living-room, the first thing my boots crunch on is broken glass. And then I smell the copper tang of blood.
Michelle's sitting next to a broken-open china cabinet, with a figure slumped beside her, bloodied and cut all over from the glass. Michelle is weeping, but her eyes, reddened by some kind of drugging, are wide with frenzy.
My jaw falls open, and again, I can hear Jason's voice taunting me, telling me this is only the beginning. And I come face to face with my ultimate fear.
My fifth nightmare: that I'd finally find everything I wanted in someone special, pure and beautiful as anything I've ever seen in my life and ruin it by making it as corrupt and dark as I am.
I can still hear Jason's mocking laughter in my head.
And it echoes on.