Post by Kyle Shane on Feb 26, 2018 5:38:11 GMT -5
The year is 2002 and the watch is being thrown into the wall. He watches it's short arc, thrown with scorn and when it hits, he has enough time to think it spreads just like the wings of a bat; When it hits, it hits hard enough to crack the cheap, Dollar General casing, and the clock-face comes askew inside it's little dome. "She's gone, you little idiot. Stop pining over some stupid birthday present, Karen is gone."
The year is 2018 and on an episode of Trauma, a very petty, very egotistical man is sneering into a microphone, "You can have it back so we can stop making you look like the child you still are every week," followed by, a few moments later, a muffled, taunting "Look out below," and the golden title belt he had worked an entire calendar year towards comes falling towards the firmament below without much attention paid to it's trajectory.
Look out below.
She's gone, you little idiot.
Falling...
He sits up, groggily as he untangles his head from the jumble of arms. He'd fallen asleep over top of the belt, which was laid on oilcloth, broken pieces, removed sideplates and a leather strap, disassembled like a watchmaker's craft. As he ran a hand over his face he noted the stubble, and he felt the bags under his eyes in his soul more than with fingertip; he was exhausted. Running ragged.
He looked bitterly at what had become of the Pure Class Wrestling World Championship belt, his lower lip pooched out. He knew that the two fucksticks who had done this would delight in his fatigue. Cheesing their faces in the dish. They'd attribute it to them driving him insane with their (quote unquote) mind games ever since Collision Course, that depriving him of his belt had been a show of such disdainful gamesmanship that they'd run him ragged, despite the fact that they bragged about spending every week from now until Doomsday playing their little Carmen Sandiego guessing game with the title and when he'd shown the least bit of interest in playing along, they had broken the belt in a tantrum. And then spent an approximate eight minutes calling HIM childish. No, Notorious would take the least bit of credit, any they could, and they'd see it as sticking it to him in a way neither Johnny Matthews or Justin Michaels could ever do physically. They'd broken the belt, and so broken his illusion of strength. They'd say, over and over again, that he was in denial, that they had put Pure Class Wrestling on notice and them stealing the belt from him really got in his head.
The truth was that it did. That's why he made a conscious act of showing them because he wasn't going to let it happen any more after that, because he was physically rejecting playing their game.
He thought he explained that perfectly clearly to Justin Michaels but apparently that dumbass just wanted to stand above him, frothing at the mouth, telling him that no matter what he said that Kyle was being childish.
He shut his eyes, letting his fingers run over the removed plates. He could have had some jeweler fix this, hand it over to PCW corporate so they could have one of the stooges that handles the belts fix it as good as new. Except... and he shuts his eyes, feeling the metal underneath his fingertips, cold and ridged. He thinks about putting things back together. And his eyes are shut, and it's 2018, and the title is just beginning it's descent from the rafters. And his eyes are shut, and it's 2002, and he is 12, and he is holding in his hand a broken watch that had been snatched out of his by the cruel hand of a drunk and dashed against a wall, and the little fake leather band slapped against the wall just like the wings of a bat and it slid down and then as he had scooped it up in his little hand he saw the cheap metal clock face was knocked off it's moorings inside the domed watch face and the hands of the watch lay against the cracked plastic dome and Eric was still goddamn yelling at him because he had seen his son smiling at something his mother had given him and that reminded Eric of Karen too and so in his drunken rage he had thrown the watch and you know on some level Kyle understood that he was compensating for the pain of loss that he felt from outliving his wife but on another macro level he had taken it out on a small innocent gift and shattered it for no reason other than pure assholeishness and when it hit the wall Kyle had felt his heart crack and -
He blinked his eyes open, coming back to the here, albeit with the groggy resistance of the truly tired. He reached out vaguely to the left of the belt on the oilcloth and grasped at the tea cup he'd had sitting since whatever god-awful time he'd made tea ago; only for the back of his knuckle to hit the cup pushing it over the side of the kitchen bar. The teacup seemed to fall in slow motion. And then it crashed, leaving a spill of old liquid to soak fragments of ceramic.
He gritted his teeth, angry at his carelessness, and he rubbed his hand over his face again. He projected all the hate into his core and through force of will, squinted, and as he watched, the teacup rose, unshattering, refilling, and came back to it's resting space.
And as he projected that force of will, he squinted at the disassembled strap laid out before him, and as the belt fell from the rafters, the stream reversed and it too, stopped it's descent.
But no. A blink and they were still there. A disassembled belt, and a broken teacup.
The boy had piqued up when he heard the teacup break and had padded into the room. Helpful kid that he is, he tore some paper towels off a roll as he passed the counter and got to work sopping up cold tea. Kyle got down to help Johnny, saying as not-roughly as he could, "Hey, give me that, you should be in bed."
"Heard something break," Juanito said, communicating in their growing shorthand that he was worried. It pained him that the kid was so self-aware that he gleaned into Kyle's mental state by hearing things break and it again made him fret that he wasn't the best place for the kid. He just shrugged it off, keeping an ambivalent and positive note in his voice. "I was just falling asleep, knocked it off the counter. You know. Sometimes things break. You know, I was screwing and regluing some of the studs that came off the belt. Maybe I can make me a new teacup with some glue, huh?"
Johnny smirked at him, roughhousing a little to elbow him out of the way. "How is it that I'm gonna turn 11 this year and you're still more more childish than me."
"Ooh, you wound me, Stormm, I have been called childish, oh god, oh no," he said, rolling his eyes. But then Johnny drew back as he held his finger out, having been cut on a sliver of ceramic. Johnny hissed between his teeth, uttering a small Spanish curse word that he was shocked he knew. But he wasn't injured, aside from a large bead of blood.
"Looks like I wounded you too." He said softly, with tenderness and a little parental guilt, and he ripped off another paper towel, for Johnny to wrap around the finger.
"S'okay," Johnny said, sucking at the blood. "But that's the thing, dad, it broke, you know? And because it broke, it won't ever go back the way it was. It's missing too many little pieces of itself that got smashed in the break. Without those pieces it may be a cup if you glue it, but it won't ever be the same cup, ya know?"
He couldn't discount the simplistic yet ringing truth in the kid's reasoning. But the idea of things not fitting back together struck a deep pang in his heart, and he knew that once the mess was cleaned up, he was going to have to find some other distraction or he'd fall into his dark place. With all that had come through the past few weeks, with the theft and then intentional fucking of the belt, the test place in front of him in his number one contender, a thousand and one other professional related woes and... her... there were so many dark places for his mind to start turning.
He didn't let any of these read on his face. He grinned as the kid looked up at them, and they swept a handful of towels and ceramic fragments into the bin. If the dark places were being ventured into in the back of his mind, he wasn't going to let Johnny see them written on his demeanor... Johnny clearly did anyway, looking at him from the side. The boy stood up, "Can you try and get some sleep? You can take that belt to someone who can fix it, but it's important for you, you know, to rest up." He looked up at Kyle with big, sad, world weary eyes for a ten year old. It hurt him to know where Johnny came from, that they bonded over the exact same childhood, and that at such an age a kid had to deal with loss. And having to worry every time something wobbled on it's tracks that he was going to see the only parent figure he had left crash. It was a motivation, if there was any. To not give the kid the kind of childhood where he had to be aware of where things broke.
He pushed the kid's shoulder, playfully, but lovingly, "get to bed, you. I'm gonna go out on the veranda and smoke." And he turned, extruding a lighter from his pocket. And if he missed Johnny as he walked down the hall pause, he didn't see it. Johnny gave a boyish, eyes uplifted look from his dad as Kyle pulled open the screen door and exited to light up a joint, and then a look at the door to the little studio where his dad "Did his work". But the person in question just stood, taking in the air off the harbor coming in as he breathed out smoke, feeling his chest tighten, feeling the dark creeping in at the edges, and before he knew it he had pitched over the side of the railing and begun his descent. Falling. Falling...
"Because it broke, it won't ever go back the way it was," is what he was afraid of. That despite his best efforts, his maiden voyage as Pure Class Wrestling World Champion was broken beyond repair because two fucking pieces of shit wanted to act like they were revolutionizing the company by acting like they were; that the lost belt and the wonky booking in tag team matches where he had NO fucking control over the quality of his partner and the first defense against an impossible foe were tailor made to write the entire thing off as a loss. That when the Pure Class Wrestling World Title belt fell from the ceiling and "broke" that he was looked at as a damaged champion and he knew he knew goddammit he knew that anxiety was the chink in the armor but he couldn't help letting it out And-
That wasn't the only place where he felt in free fall.
The joint doing nothing to ease his state of mind this night, he stubbed it out. He sighed, took out his phone and checked it for notifications.
He supposed the reason that that damn little watch from when he was 12 was so fresh in his mind as he sat there re-plating the belt was because it reminded him of his current situation with... her... and the connection there is that he had treated Array too much like a revered prize, a possession. Even when sometimes he had been the one who'd dashed it against the wall, metaphorically. He saw her as something to make Kyle happy only, and when she had broken, he was just concerned with how it made him feel. In all of the ways he was Eric, the way he treated her off and on made him ashamed. If he could just go to her now and tell her how he felt, this feeling of falling, of breaking, might not feel so thunderous. But, he couldn't.
He looked over the railing, at the cars below. From this height, they were just yellow blurs.
As he fell over the rail, he closed his eyes, and thought of her. Her laugh. Her smile. And the stream reversed, and he wasn't falling anymore. And dammit, he knew what he had to do. It would be easy.
As he skipped down the flights of stairs it was a blur, and as he got to his car he was aware of the loose thread of his cognitive thinking but he felt desperate, desperate to repair just one thing in his life, and start getting back on track. As he was driving across town, checking his phone against the street signs illuminated under ochre lampposts he had cause for the thought to flit through his mind that he could show Johnny, the teacup COULD go back into the same shape it was, before it broke. He could fix it.
So that's how he found himself in Brighton, the gentrified area that always reminded him of Rent where Array had moved into an upstairs loft while she commuted by bike to auditions. And that's why at 2 am he found himself throwing rocks up to one of those upstairs windows, pelting them against the glass madly and madcap. Trying to wake her up. Trying to get her to come down and talk. Trying to mend a fractured cup.
A pebble plinked off the glass and bounced off, but he didn't care. Didn't even care when a car alarm started whooping, that loud, endless loop of five different sounds, waking the neighborhood. Or when a grouchy asshole stuck their bull neck out from a window and shouted "Will you shut that shit up, people are trying to sleep?!"
He was so intent on this new thought that he didn't register it when a figure came from the lofts to confront him, pushing him back by the shoulders. But when he came up to eye level, then Kyle took notice, and he saw the chiseled jaw and sculpted shoulders of a David, a Narcissus even come to life from white stone and flaxen hair. Under the glow of the street lamp, the Aussie glowered at him, looking bewildered at being coaxed out of his sleep. "Oi, mate, why are you hanging around out here."
"This has got nothing to do with you, Alistair," he told the boy Array had met on the scene of a movie about Tyler Zane, the Game Boy. The starring attraction. His eyes locked upwards, scanning the windows he knew to be hers. "I just want to talk to Array. That's all."
Alistair pushed down on his shoulders again, and Kyle, still not registering Alistair in his path, continued to mumble, "I just wanna talk, I'm just gonna talk to her, we're just talking..."
"Listen to me, she don't wanna talk to you, asshole, get yourself sorted and don't come around here in the morning or I'll have to fuck you up!" said the actor. Alistair didn't get it... he didn't understand... he was trying to fix things... if he could just - Too late. He gave Kyle a particularly hard shove that got him falling ass over teakettle.
That did it. He came roaring to life, any training forgone in favor of connecting solidly with the midsection of the tall blonde bogan. They went down, crashing over a trashcan into the street, and the din of people waking up raised as more onlookers, attracted by noise, twigged to the fact there was a fight. Fevered, on a mission and at his last ebb for the night, he lashed out, his fist connecting solidly with a cheek as he held the blonde mate straddled beneath his thighs. It was only when he heard her shriek that he felt the break, like the shattering of a plastic dome as it connected with heated force against the wall of a trailer. "KYLE!!" Array shouted, from an upstairs window. He looked up as Alistair lay panting beneath him, and he felt that sense again.
In 2002 the watch was just beginning to fall to the floor, it's faceplate and hands coming apart inside the plastic bubble.
In 2018 the teacup had just been brushed off the kitchen bar by the edge of his knuckles, and the first drops of cold tea rained out of it onto the floor as it began it's fall.
The year is 2018 and on an episode of Trauma, a very petty, very egotistical man is sneering into a microphone, "You can have it back so we can stop making you look like the child you still are every week," followed by, a few moments later, a muffled, taunting "Look out below," and the golden title belt he had worked an entire calendar year towards comes falling towards the firmament below without much attention paid to it's trajectory.
Look out below.
She's gone, you little idiot.
Falling...
He sits up, groggily as he untangles his head from the jumble of arms. He'd fallen asleep over top of the belt, which was laid on oilcloth, broken pieces, removed sideplates and a leather strap, disassembled like a watchmaker's craft. As he ran a hand over his face he noted the stubble, and he felt the bags under his eyes in his soul more than with fingertip; he was exhausted. Running ragged.
He looked bitterly at what had become of the Pure Class Wrestling World Championship belt, his lower lip pooched out. He knew that the two fucksticks who had done this would delight in his fatigue. Cheesing their faces in the dish. They'd attribute it to them driving him insane with their (quote unquote) mind games ever since Collision Course, that depriving him of his belt had been a show of such disdainful gamesmanship that they'd run him ragged, despite the fact that they bragged about spending every week from now until Doomsday playing their little Carmen Sandiego guessing game with the title and when he'd shown the least bit of interest in playing along, they had broken the belt in a tantrum. And then spent an approximate eight minutes calling HIM childish. No, Notorious would take the least bit of credit, any they could, and they'd see it as sticking it to him in a way neither Johnny Matthews or Justin Michaels could ever do physically. They'd broken the belt, and so broken his illusion of strength. They'd say, over and over again, that he was in denial, that they had put Pure Class Wrestling on notice and them stealing the belt from him really got in his head.
The truth was that it did. That's why he made a conscious act of showing them because he wasn't going to let it happen any more after that, because he was physically rejecting playing their game.
He thought he explained that perfectly clearly to Justin Michaels but apparently that dumbass just wanted to stand above him, frothing at the mouth, telling him that no matter what he said that Kyle was being childish.
He shut his eyes, letting his fingers run over the removed plates. He could have had some jeweler fix this, hand it over to PCW corporate so they could have one of the stooges that handles the belts fix it as good as new. Except... and he shuts his eyes, feeling the metal underneath his fingertips, cold and ridged. He thinks about putting things back together. And his eyes are shut, and it's 2018, and the title is just beginning it's descent from the rafters. And his eyes are shut, and it's 2002, and he is 12, and he is holding in his hand a broken watch that had been snatched out of his by the cruel hand of a drunk and dashed against a wall, and the little fake leather band slapped against the wall just like the wings of a bat and it slid down and then as he had scooped it up in his little hand he saw the cheap metal clock face was knocked off it's moorings inside the domed watch face and the hands of the watch lay against the cracked plastic dome and Eric was still goddamn yelling at him because he had seen his son smiling at something his mother had given him and that reminded Eric of Karen too and so in his drunken rage he had thrown the watch and you know on some level Kyle understood that he was compensating for the pain of loss that he felt from outliving his wife but on another macro level he had taken it out on a small innocent gift and shattered it for no reason other than pure assholeishness and when it hit the wall Kyle had felt his heart crack and -
He blinked his eyes open, coming back to the here, albeit with the groggy resistance of the truly tired. He reached out vaguely to the left of the belt on the oilcloth and grasped at the tea cup he'd had sitting since whatever god-awful time he'd made tea ago; only for the back of his knuckle to hit the cup pushing it over the side of the kitchen bar. The teacup seemed to fall in slow motion. And then it crashed, leaving a spill of old liquid to soak fragments of ceramic.
He gritted his teeth, angry at his carelessness, and he rubbed his hand over his face again. He projected all the hate into his core and through force of will, squinted, and as he watched, the teacup rose, unshattering, refilling, and came back to it's resting space.
And as he projected that force of will, he squinted at the disassembled strap laid out before him, and as the belt fell from the rafters, the stream reversed and it too, stopped it's descent.
But no. A blink and they were still there. A disassembled belt, and a broken teacup.
The boy had piqued up when he heard the teacup break and had padded into the room. Helpful kid that he is, he tore some paper towels off a roll as he passed the counter and got to work sopping up cold tea. Kyle got down to help Johnny, saying as not-roughly as he could, "Hey, give me that, you should be in bed."
"Heard something break," Juanito said, communicating in their growing shorthand that he was worried. It pained him that the kid was so self-aware that he gleaned into Kyle's mental state by hearing things break and it again made him fret that he wasn't the best place for the kid. He just shrugged it off, keeping an ambivalent and positive note in his voice. "I was just falling asleep, knocked it off the counter. You know. Sometimes things break. You know, I was screwing and regluing some of the studs that came off the belt. Maybe I can make me a new teacup with some glue, huh?"
Johnny smirked at him, roughhousing a little to elbow him out of the way. "How is it that I'm gonna turn 11 this year and you're still more more childish than me."
"Ooh, you wound me, Stormm, I have been called childish, oh god, oh no," he said, rolling his eyes. But then Johnny drew back as he held his finger out, having been cut on a sliver of ceramic. Johnny hissed between his teeth, uttering a small Spanish curse word that he was shocked he knew. But he wasn't injured, aside from a large bead of blood.
"Looks like I wounded you too." He said softly, with tenderness and a little parental guilt, and he ripped off another paper towel, for Johnny to wrap around the finger.
"S'okay," Johnny said, sucking at the blood. "But that's the thing, dad, it broke, you know? And because it broke, it won't ever go back the way it was. It's missing too many little pieces of itself that got smashed in the break. Without those pieces it may be a cup if you glue it, but it won't ever be the same cup, ya know?"
He couldn't discount the simplistic yet ringing truth in the kid's reasoning. But the idea of things not fitting back together struck a deep pang in his heart, and he knew that once the mess was cleaned up, he was going to have to find some other distraction or he'd fall into his dark place. With all that had come through the past few weeks, with the theft and then intentional fucking of the belt, the test place in front of him in his number one contender, a thousand and one other professional related woes and... her... there were so many dark places for his mind to start turning.
He didn't let any of these read on his face. He grinned as the kid looked up at them, and they swept a handful of towels and ceramic fragments into the bin. If the dark places were being ventured into in the back of his mind, he wasn't going to let Johnny see them written on his demeanor... Johnny clearly did anyway, looking at him from the side. The boy stood up, "Can you try and get some sleep? You can take that belt to someone who can fix it, but it's important for you, you know, to rest up." He looked up at Kyle with big, sad, world weary eyes for a ten year old. It hurt him to know where Johnny came from, that they bonded over the exact same childhood, and that at such an age a kid had to deal with loss. And having to worry every time something wobbled on it's tracks that he was going to see the only parent figure he had left crash. It was a motivation, if there was any. To not give the kid the kind of childhood where he had to be aware of where things broke.
He pushed the kid's shoulder, playfully, but lovingly, "get to bed, you. I'm gonna go out on the veranda and smoke." And he turned, extruding a lighter from his pocket. And if he missed Johnny as he walked down the hall pause, he didn't see it. Johnny gave a boyish, eyes uplifted look from his dad as Kyle pulled open the screen door and exited to light up a joint, and then a look at the door to the little studio where his dad "Did his work". But the person in question just stood, taking in the air off the harbor coming in as he breathed out smoke, feeling his chest tighten, feeling the dark creeping in at the edges, and before he knew it he had pitched over the side of the railing and begun his descent. Falling. Falling...
"Because it broke, it won't ever go back the way it was," is what he was afraid of. That despite his best efforts, his maiden voyage as Pure Class Wrestling World Champion was broken beyond repair because two fucking pieces of shit wanted to act like they were revolutionizing the company by acting like they were; that the lost belt and the wonky booking in tag team matches where he had NO fucking control over the quality of his partner and the first defense against an impossible foe were tailor made to write the entire thing off as a loss. That when the Pure Class Wrestling World Title belt fell from the ceiling and "broke" that he was looked at as a damaged champion and he knew he knew goddammit he knew that anxiety was the chink in the armor but he couldn't help letting it out And-
That wasn't the only place where he felt in free fall.
The joint doing nothing to ease his state of mind this night, he stubbed it out. He sighed, took out his phone and checked it for notifications.
He supposed the reason that that damn little watch from when he was 12 was so fresh in his mind as he sat there re-plating the belt was because it reminded him of his current situation with... her... and the connection there is that he had treated Array too much like a revered prize, a possession. Even when sometimes he had been the one who'd dashed it against the wall, metaphorically. He saw her as something to make Kyle happy only, and when she had broken, he was just concerned with how it made him feel. In all of the ways he was Eric, the way he treated her off and on made him ashamed. If he could just go to her now and tell her how he felt, this feeling of falling, of breaking, might not feel so thunderous. But, he couldn't.
He looked over the railing, at the cars below. From this height, they were just yellow blurs.
As he fell over the rail, he closed his eyes, and thought of her. Her laugh. Her smile. And the stream reversed, and he wasn't falling anymore. And dammit, he knew what he had to do. It would be easy.
As he skipped down the flights of stairs it was a blur, and as he got to his car he was aware of the loose thread of his cognitive thinking but he felt desperate, desperate to repair just one thing in his life, and start getting back on track. As he was driving across town, checking his phone against the street signs illuminated under ochre lampposts he had cause for the thought to flit through his mind that he could show Johnny, the teacup COULD go back into the same shape it was, before it broke. He could fix it.
So that's how he found himself in Brighton, the gentrified area that always reminded him of Rent where Array had moved into an upstairs loft while she commuted by bike to auditions. And that's why at 2 am he found himself throwing rocks up to one of those upstairs windows, pelting them against the glass madly and madcap. Trying to wake her up. Trying to get her to come down and talk. Trying to mend a fractured cup.
A pebble plinked off the glass and bounced off, but he didn't care. Didn't even care when a car alarm started whooping, that loud, endless loop of five different sounds, waking the neighborhood. Or when a grouchy asshole stuck their bull neck out from a window and shouted "Will you shut that shit up, people are trying to sleep?!"
He was so intent on this new thought that he didn't register it when a figure came from the lofts to confront him, pushing him back by the shoulders. But when he came up to eye level, then Kyle took notice, and he saw the chiseled jaw and sculpted shoulders of a David, a Narcissus even come to life from white stone and flaxen hair. Under the glow of the street lamp, the Aussie glowered at him, looking bewildered at being coaxed out of his sleep. "Oi, mate, why are you hanging around out here."
"This has got nothing to do with you, Alistair," he told the boy Array had met on the scene of a movie about Tyler Zane, the Game Boy. The starring attraction. His eyes locked upwards, scanning the windows he knew to be hers. "I just want to talk to Array. That's all."
Alistair pushed down on his shoulders again, and Kyle, still not registering Alistair in his path, continued to mumble, "I just wanna talk, I'm just gonna talk to her, we're just talking..."
"Listen to me, she don't wanna talk to you, asshole, get yourself sorted and don't come around here in the morning or I'll have to fuck you up!" said the actor. Alistair didn't get it... he didn't understand... he was trying to fix things... if he could just - Too late. He gave Kyle a particularly hard shove that got him falling ass over teakettle.
That did it. He came roaring to life, any training forgone in favor of connecting solidly with the midsection of the tall blonde bogan. They went down, crashing over a trashcan into the street, and the din of people waking up raised as more onlookers, attracted by noise, twigged to the fact there was a fight. Fevered, on a mission and at his last ebb for the night, he lashed out, his fist connecting solidly with a cheek as he held the blonde mate straddled beneath his thighs. It was only when he heard her shriek that he felt the break, like the shattering of a plastic dome as it connected with heated force against the wall of a trailer. "KYLE!!" Array shouted, from an upstairs window. He looked up as Alistair lay panting beneath him, and he felt that sense again.
In 2002 the watch was just beginning to fall to the floor, it's faceplate and hands coming apart inside the plastic bubble.
In 2018 the teacup had just been brushed off the kitchen bar by the edge of his knuckles, and the first drops of cold tea rained out of it onto the floor as it began it's fall.
