Feels Like Coming Home For the First Time.

[Kyle Shane]

He cradled the mask in his hands, looking contemplatively at it's eyeholes.

There were others in the hollowed out shell of the bunker where the enclave of hackers had been working, but they were mostly on cleanup duty. Thankfully, someone had cut the sparking electrics and downed wires, which had the unfortunate side effect of plunging the bunker into darkness. There were stacks of rubble all around, and two walls had caved in because remote-driven trucks had crashed into them at high speed on kamikaze runs. There were destroyed computer banks, and a few wounded people were in a makeshift triage, awaiting rescue. For the rest, this was the wrap-up. And as they busied themselves with shifting rubble, recovering desktop computers and helping people to their feet, a lot of them looked over to one side, to see the lonesome figure sitting apart from everyone, on a bed of debris, staring down at a mask in his hands. The worst was over, for everyone but him, and he sat there, taking it all in.

This had all been on his head, Patrick had said. Ranted it, over and over.

He was thinking back to the desperate showdown, as transformer relays arced and the ground was rumbling. He had squared his shoulders and put his long legs into a no-nonsense John Wayne stride as he walked down the hall. Kristin may have been there, but it was lost to him, in the rushing of blood to his ears and the pounding in his skull. Just then, the entire building had shook, and he looked back to find a new model of a SUV had just barrelled through the wall, driven by an on-star chip that could be hacked remotely. The entire infrastructure of the city outside was in chaos, and alerts from Wall Street were showing stocks in freefall. The system had been infilitrated in more ways than one, by a man who sat in a little media room like a fat spider on a far reaching, sinister web... he was the one who sent out the Grey to get dirt on the mega-corporations of the world like Shinron. Not because of any mandate to help the 99 percent... but because catching them in a web was so much more satisfying. And it was time to find out, to what end.

He kicked the door in.

Instead of the media room he found himself in a shifting, neurotropic wasteland that looked like a scene from the Divine Comedies. All around him, arms reached out to him from everywhere. Bony, pale, dessicated wights were pulling themselves from mud with the consistency of quicksand at his feet. He had flinched back at first. The sensations were all-encompassing, he was assaulted by scorching heat and a cacaphony of noise all around him... but he remembered the lesson of the card that Krista had put into his palm, dosed with chemicals that, when the glowing eyes of the mask emblazoned on the card were activated by being tapped by one single nail, burned brightly and shifted the world into a holographic nightmare.

It wasn't real. He doubled down on that in his mind. This couldn't be real. No matter what senses were shrieking at him, no matter how he could feel the hands of the damned pulling, scrabbling at his hands and his pants. It wasn't real. It wasn't real!

He looked into the empty sockets of the grinning mask now. Wondering if any of this could be considered real.

"I know you're in here, Patrick," He had thundered. Despite himself he kicked some of the ghoulies away, as the media room continued to shape-shift. At the end of a long cavern, there was an ebony throne, where a dark figure sat. In accordance with the imagination of Dante Aligheri, the giant, three-headed monster sat, his tail flicking around, sneering with glowing eyes, as all around him, the damned shrieked "ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE..."

He felt a touch on his shoulder. After everything he'd gone through in the media room it was tough not to jump out of his skin, but she pulled herself down to eye level. Krista, kindly, handed him a cup of coffee. "Some of the survivors are bringing food and medicine." She said, as if that was some kind of comfort.

He nodded, and looked back at the people working under flashlit gloom to excavate people from under a twisted tangle of rubble and the smashed in front of a car.

"So, tell me what you're thinking?" Krista probed, and Kyle frowned. Krista held her hands up non-judgementally, as if she were back in her practice now and she was simply telling a client that anything that was said stayed in the room. He waved the mask around at the carnage, the destruction wrought on the warehouse when the madman behind the Voice In the Grey turned all of his resources to pulling the building down. "Is there ever going to be a situation that isn't brought on because of me?"

Krista squinched her eyes shut, losing her patience with his self-martyrdom. It's not, unlike how he may think, always about him, but in his mind it always turns that way. That's the central truth of working with Kyle, seems like. "You couldn't have known that Patrick was going to -"

He held a finger up. "You misunderstand. It is my fault, the Grey is all my fault, because he told me it was my fault. He told me -"

"YOU WILL BE MADE TO SUFFER FOR YOUR SINS" the illusions were shrieking, and it was coming from all around, the pulling nails and thousand hands of the draugr's, the mud was sinking in up to his knees, and the devil on his black throne was beckoning him to come forward. He shut his eyes tightly against the blowing, gritty wind that was blasting him like a furnace. Not real, notreal-not-realnotrealnotrealnotreal, he repeated, like a song, a mantra in his head. "WHAT SINS?" He shouted back, defiantly. "WHAT SINS ARE MINE, COMPARED TO YOU, WHO BROUGHT ALL OF THIS TOGETHER TO RUIN PEOPLE'S LIVES?"

And then, to his surprise, a voice of the living, joined him in the conversation, as casually as if they were talking about games back at the Game Stop back in college. Hiro was side by side with him in hell. Hiro, as flippant and irreverant as a class clown, threw out his grudge like a jape. "Have you seen the stocks for Shinron today, kid? Yeah, thanks to your group targetting our company and doxxing some deals with Washington lobbyists, a couple of our top execs are going to have to commit business seppuku. And since falling on your sword is no longer in style, it just means that my family had some ties to cut... people are losing their jobs."

Kyle, shocked, looked at Hiro, wanting to protest, but not knowing how to, because the news of the mega-corporation's financial ruin, and what it could portend for the other half of the old partnership, took a backseat to the voice of her whispering in his ear... "The casting director of my last role said I couldn't fit the costume, and they would have to go with their second choice, unless I could get my fat ass into a size 3 spandex bodysuit... Do you know what it feels like when your diet consists of three cups of coffee and cigarettes a day, babe? Or how it feels to binge all that shit out?... Nah, I don't think you care, you never care..." Array, acting as if it were no hard feelings, was snuggled up on the opposite ear from Hiro. She pressed her now ravaged body against his, and he felt sick when he saw her sunken eyes and cheekbones and discolored skin.

And besides his two oldest friends flanking him, there were more, so many more. People he had left out in the lurch. WGWF representatives like Chris Page who were irritated that he walked out on a big money contract and now wouldn't return their calls. Girls he had showed interest and ghosted because he wasn't looking at anything serious with them. And on. And on.

"Hey Kyle..."

"Hey, Kyle, man...."

"Kyle -? Is it something I did to make you act this way?"

"Why won't you just answer, Kyle, what did I - "

"You're such an asshole, you piece of shit... Don't even know why I put my faith in you," that was Brody, Brody was there, glaring at him. Brody, who he saw downstairs before all of this hit. Who was probably front and center when the greatest hack of the modern age began taking place. He was joining in the Greek chorus of everyone telling him that it was his fault.

Krista took a disturbed sip of her styrofoam cup, unable to meet his eyes. "Sounds heavy. But you obviously know it was a mind game. So why the glooms?"

"Any gamer will tell you that when you wanna get in your opponents head, you tell them the most fucked up thing you notice about them, just to throw them off. I mean, that's basic competition 101," he said, snidely, lip pulled back, but he couldn't meet her eyes either. Too much of what he heard was weighing on him. Heavy lies the head. "But just because it's shit talk doesn't mean it's weightless." No, on the contrary, his shoulders had never looked so sloped right now, and all they could do was sit side by side, her with a cup cradled between her fingers, as he stared down.

"I won't listen to this," He had shouted. By force of will he punched back against the cloying voices and prying hands, and the cavern melted back. The haze still hung in the air, and he knew he wasn't finished seeing things. In front of his eyes, the throne that the devil was sitting on was just a high-backed leather chair among a creche of computer equipment with a ring of monitors, and the masked antagonist sitting there was no three-headed serpent, but just a man. He threw his hands forward, and a wind blew. The media room distorted again, the chair rose. It started melding into a new vision of a stone artifice. The steps looked like marble architecture, leading up to an ancient temple, and the chair was a throne for a king. Standing there, at the top of the dais, was another devil entirely. Standing in his way was his father. He felt like he was pressing on against a wind that was made of slivers of glass, cutting him to ribbons, but he put a foot on the first of the flight of steps.

"You stupid boy," his dad, speaking in regal, intoning diction instead of his drunken, aggressive roar. "Don't you see how this all comes back in time to your first sin. You never should have left me behind. You caused this all with your arrogance."

"You're not real, Eric, because I left you behind a long time ago." He snarled at his father.

"I'm real enough because I'm what's in your heart, boy. I'm the legacy of what's left behind in you. Of what you really are." And, so speaking, fountains, geysers of blood began running down the marble steps, a heavy coat that ran and dripped and oozed forward without ever seeming to stop. "You're a beast in human skin, just like you think I was. You're ruin incarnate. You're a death mark for anyone that stands by you, like you did for your mother."

And she's there, too, with her back turned. She can't bear to watch the interaction of her son and his dad. She looks sorrowful, but also as beautiful as he remembers.

And, wading ankles deep through the flowing blood coming down the steps, something in him has firmed up. "You're wrong." Seeing her there, in white robes like some kind of angel... the illusion lost it's potency. If there was one thing that would make him tempt the fires of hell, it was his mother's name being brought up. Emboldened, he set his mouth in a firm line. "You're wrong, Patrick, and speaking through our dad's mouth isn't going to work anymore, you hear me?" And he stepped within arm's length of his father and grappled on to him. His dad bucked and struggled, but he was weak, atrophied, and the image began faltering as Kyle fought off the effect of the psychotropics, the masked face with the light-up eyes burned through the facade of Eric Shane.

He dug his fingers into the eyeholes of the mask and pulled.

The mask of the Voice came off in his hands, and, like the power was cut, the illusion began to fade, to power down. If he had to guess, his brother was activating some chemical in the air through his mask and it was beginning to dissipate. Same principle as with the drugged cards, only... He shrugged off the why's and the wherefores. He looked at the mask, and then down at the gasping, panting phantom in the black suit that lay supine at his feet. His brother... As the illusions began to fade, his head snapped up, just in time to see her fading, the gossamer thin robe becoming transparent. She smiled... and he smiled too... until the coughing and gasping cut through the air.

"You... you asshole... You had to do this, didn't you... you had to be the big hero, because... " Patrick was a mess. He hadn't seen him without the mask, even in their chats, but he had listened to the rhetoric. He had thought about this controntation from the time he was recruited into the Grey... but now, seeing Patrick, stripped of his fearsome identity, all he saw was his weaknesses. His eyes were red and shot with veins. His skin was ash pale, and he had the wasted look of someone fighting cancer in their last legs of chemo. He was bone thin, and so, so frail. If he wanted, he could end all of this right now by standing, placing a boot on his jawline, and stomping down.

Patrick panted so deeply it sounded like he was fighting for air, every breath coming out as a starkly ragged "Huh!" But he pushed himself up on his elbows, glaring at him with naked hate.

"You think you're so special and good... you only came when I called because you wanted to be a hero... a man of the Underground, a folk figure to the populace..." He said between pants.

He wearily shook his head in response. "Believe it or not, I primarily came because of you. When I heard this was your creation... but all you did... All the damage you caused, to the cities where your hacked driverless vehicles went off... to the stock market, and companies like Hiro's... you ruined a lot of people, you hurt so many lives... just, to get to me?"

"To prove a point," He rasped in return, "To show you for the cancer you are. You may think you're so altruistic, but you're not... All of these people got close to you, thinking you would be a hero. I had surveillance on your little slut girlfriend, on the Japanese kid, on your fat friend in MIT, all of them, ready to trigger results as part of my second wave. Because you brought them in to this..."

"Patrick," and when he said his brother's name, the wasted ghoul winced, feeling humanity and hissing back from it; but he pressed on, picking him up by the back of the head. "Why did you do this?"

He squeezed his eyes shut, gritted his teeth. "Thought you were so special... it's always about you, everything always IS about you, the most important person in your universe... In our world..." Gasp, cough. "You were the son of Eric Shane that he claimed, while I spent my childhood on the other side of town with one of his side bitches, disdained, alone, sneered at because I was sicker and weaker. You were the golden child, the handsome, articulate one that had so much potential, even if all you wasted it on was pot and video games. He loved you, you were the son that he wanted."

"I was the son of Eric Shane that grew up in a trailer," he gently reminded his brother, "That he beat every single time he got a mean drunk on, who he always criticized and corrected, who was never good enough for any kind of show of pride."

Patrick's answer broke his heart, "Well, at least he cared enough to give you that... Center of the universe... you and your daddy issues have to be the center of the universe... but he gave you what he could never give me. That's the way of the world," his voice became so inexplicably empty, and sad, and lost. "It always came to you so easily... what the world could never give me..." His breathing was growing more labored and gurgling.

He had lifted his brother's fragile shell out of the chair, feeling tubes pull free with sick pops as he did. Patrick had scrabbled madly with weak, near atrophied limbs, but his breathing was too harsh to fight effectively.

They had walked out of the media room, with only the sound of Patrick's breathing in his ears...

There was a long, pregnant pause after he finished relating his abbreviated version. Kristin had to check his face to make sure there was nothing left unsaid, but he was just gazing wistfully at the ceiling, not following up or giving a denouement to the story. "Kyle," she probed, "Where did you put Patrick after that?"

The look he gave her was so stern and unflinching that she decided not to pursue it.

They both walked over to where Brody was being put onto a makeshift trestle to be pulled outside. He had a nasty cut on his face and some bruises, but half of his mouth turned up in a smile. Kristin kneeled by him, petted his arm with her fingers tenderly. She looked back up at Kyle. "So, where are you going from here?" When he didn't answer, she pressed forward, brusquely. "Going to throw your belt in that car and drive on to make the next town, Game Boy? Or back to your apartment to sell some weed?"

The truth was he didn't know. But more than a few people's eyes were turning towards them, medics and the hacker group alike, and he squirmed in self-conscious. "I can't stay with you all. I don't know the first thing about being part of an Anonymous group."

"You think we need you because you can punch commands on a keyboard?" Kristin snarled, "Kyle, I wasn't in their world either. Until I was pulled into it. We all got recruited, blackmailed in many cases, put together as a weird extended family by Patrick, because of you. And he brought you in as the centerpiece of that family." She gritted her teeth. "The way Patrick exposed a lot of our secrets, there's still damage to be mitigated, for all of us. There's people you haven't even met or talked to in this group that were brought together by blackmail and fear and pain, but they were promised that the ends would justify the means, and that they would be delivered a better life. And that's what you gave this group. You mean something to all of us just by being who you are, and who you are is - you don't even see it."

She pointed right in his face, and he looked down, shamed momentarily. "You were meant to be larger than life, out in the open, fighting for the little guy, because when you went out there, representing us, even in small ways, it gave us hope."

Brody reached a trembling hand up and took Kyle's wrist. "You've been drifting for so long, man, without knowing where to go. But think about what we're offering here. You don't have to be one of us," he waved a hand at the ruined warehouse, "To be one of Us. We came to you. We can help you find whatever you need. Take it in... You can stop running away... you can stop drifting... you can stop searching... you still have time..." He wanted to choke up at Brody's words as he let the hand fall away. He looked around the warehouse where a dozen remote cars had kamikazed' through the walls and brought the place down. He looked at the pockets of people, some hackers, some tech support, some just vagabonds looking for community. And Brody was right. It had been a long..... long, time, since he'd known what home really was. Since he'd felt like there was a place he belonged.

Except his brow darkened as he thought back to the hellscape illusions in the media room, to the apparition of his father, saying "You're a death mark for anyone who stands by you... like you did with your mother..."

They seemed to be waiting for his response. He put on a Shane, irreverent smirk, the kind that told them they didn't know what they were getting themselves into. "Let's get to work here, huh?" And he let the mask drop out of his hands.

Turning their back on its eyes as it began to flare to life. But yeah, they had to get to work.

I've had it pointed out to me lately that I've run for too long. Run from responsibility. Run from the bigger challenges. Not even in a cowardice type of way, because I can't say that I've ever really felt fear. When Hiroshi Yukio knocks you flat on your ass after you hit him with your hardest shot, and you back down, it's running, but it's not because I was afraid of him. In many ways, the only mortal fear I've ever known is the fear of falling short. I'm such a perfectionist type'a person that if there's even a slim chance I'll get an 75% instead of 100 percenting it, I'll start the entire game over. The possibility of failing isn't the issue. The possibility of not giving my absolute best is the breaking point. But, as pointed out, that is running. It's running, too, when I don't want people to see the darker sides of me, so I turn my back on them and walk away rather than let them see something ugly. I don't have to do that anymore. I'm home in the PCW, and when you're home, you can let the artifice fall away, you can put your blocks down and you can be who you really are.

So in many ways, I've avoided this for too long. The big fight is approaching. I fell short against Grimm, as I said, because I wasn't made for the hesitant, low-key approach. Now I know that nothing less than my absolute best is going to get me the achievement for this game. Hiroshi Yukio and me will, in all likelyhood, meet in the next round, and that is the fight I've been gearing up for since he decided to get in my face. So there won't be any more running. Not from giving the best I can at that particular moment, and not from showing the darker sides of myself if that's what it takes. I can truly (and violently) welcome Hiroshi Yukio, to step in between those ropes, knowing that he is coming into MY goddamn house. Something I will not run from saying any longer. That's right. That ring is MY house. And I'm not the one that's going to be trudging away sadly, hiding my light from the world. I will own it with everything I am. And if it means taking the big man, or even my next random opponent in the Icemann Invitational Tournament into the darkest corner of the cellar to unleash some of the most fucked up and brutal torture, then they're going to learn, they stepped into the wrong neighborhood when they decided to poke their noses in. In case it's gotten too meta, this is me putting this tournament on notice. But, to get to Hiroshi, I know that I can't overlook my challenge this week, in WASP. So I'd like to firmly welcome him... home.

The problem I see with WASP isn't that he's holding back, like me. It's that he has a palpable envy for someone who is like him, but better in every way. Someone who had more gifts in their life handed to them, or had more opportunities of fortune. This holds him back because he's never truly found a home to put his head in, he just mooches off the couches of others. You're talking about a guy who is the tag team partner of High Tide, the idiot who's been dressing like a pirate and trading wins with Tyrone "Crazy Boy" Smith for roughly the last several years, and yet WASP is the less successful of that half, to where both announcers were playing up the fact that this man had previously NO singles success. And yet, he did knock off Olivia Xavier, who, before her slump, was enough to give me a minor bit of trouble. Is that a sign of him being underrated, not to be trifled with, a fact that he could run me for my money? Or, even more likely, does it harken back to me holding back, to me just not participating in something if it wasn't going to get 100% effort from me. Point blank, does WASP truly think in his tiny, beard hair tangled mind, that just because he got a fluke win over a girl who's spirit I utterly crushed into defeat equates that he's going to walk in like he owns the place and take on the God of Game? The one who's held up this Underground championship for nearing on half a year, defended it against some of the legitimately toughest competition, actual legends in this company... and WASP, somehow thinks, that earns him a seat at the table.

I welcome WASP to come in with open arms. I want him to walk in, wipe his feet, smile comfortably. I urge him to smirk at his host, act smug, get into the mindset that his one little chip that earned him entry will parlay into any staying power. I want him to prop his feet up on the furniture, get as comfortable as he can in this lair until I step in and utterly fucking destroy him.

This pathetic little man, this average, middle aged man. This nothing and nobody. He goes by the name WASP, why? Far as I knew White Anglo Saxon Protestant was a pet name for the most vanilla, boring, whitebread country club fuckers, the pampered and soft, weak types that get upset when their cups don't have their Christian values on 'em. The name WASP here doesn't conjure up images of a sleek, aggressive insect. I don't care how many sting puns this fool lays out. The fuck does an old white man with a beard that looks like it was grown on a Chia Pet have in common with that. Nothing. He can't even win awards for best beard, because I swear that thing has vermin crawling in it. The point remains, if HIGH TIDE of all people was the successful one, what good can that possibly say? They didn't even seem to be good enough to win the Tag titles, or maintain a strong enough presence in the Tag division for that to stick around. So exactly what was the point of even keeping WASP around? Fuck. I feel indignified using the name WASP over and over again, but his real name is so forgettable that it passed right through my mind like whenever Linkin Park releases music nowadays.

It would be easy to stay here, take potshots at WASP, his goofy moniker, his ratty beard and noodle arms for days. But it validates him in ways I don't even care to. WASP is coming in off the high of his life. He's coming in on a magic success story. And it's great. It's intoxicating to think that this could be a resurgence of importance for him. But he made the bad, baaaad move of setting his Rocky V comeback trail story during a tournament I am set to own, in the space where he would be put up against me. It's not going to happen for him, son. And really, it's hard to even call it a revival even if he wasn't facing me. One win in an opening round after a career of failure did not prep him for what is to happen, and my disdain for him isn't even due to the fact that he's a career nothing. It's that it cheapens the tournament and the belt by him winning. I wish Olivia Xavier had been stronger and lived up to her potential, because she should have could have beaten him and gone on to get her desired rematch. I wish the brackets had been drawn better so that I wouldn't have to follow strong performances against Eira and Grimm up with smashing this idiot flat.

But I won't run from giving this my best despite all of that, I won't let the perfectionist in me kill this piece or hold back on saying what I want to say because it isn't 100 percent the way I want it.

Men like WASP will always hunger for what they don't have, for what the world didn't give them, cringing and whining that they weren't made better. But I am not walking away from everything I've earned, not when I have found my place, I have found where I am at home.

If I have to take this pathetic little man, who's lucked into the lottery ticket and lightning strike .0001 in a million chance of a lifetime slot in TIIT, that he never would have gotten at any other time... and I have to take him on a guided tour of my world to retain my Underground title and get to the next round of the show, then I will.

I am going to grab him by the scruff of his neck, carry him right through the gates and punt him out of my yard, depositing him like the trash he is. So he can look back with a wistful glance at what he only wished he could have had. Walled off from him, behind chain link fences, barbed wire, a hefty glass ceiling, and the warning signs not to ever try to step foot and match up with me in my domain. "NO TRESPASSING", these signs will say.

"BEWARE OF GOD."