Post by Sicko on Mar 25, 2019 4:04:06 GMT -5
Hiraeth, (n), homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, or for a home which may have never been; an intense form of longing or nostalgia, wistfulness.
"Get up, clown, you're not done yet," came the sneering, snarling voice of the strutting martinet. And in that instant, taken by the dream, he looked up, and he saw it as if it were 2006 again. He was seeing it through the haze, the pain beating in his head, cotton-fuzzy and the world out of focus. "I said stand up," said the out of focus specter of the past. He was looking up from all fours, seeing the figure standing over him through a rivulet of blood dripping over one eye. "Stand up, Sicko."
"Stand up." The authoritarian handler's voice. Through the fuzzy headed unsteadiness of the memory, the figure standing in front of him in the shower stall loomed like a black shadow. He was brandishing a short, curved steel pry-bar in one hand, tapping it lightly in the flat palm of his unoccupied other hand like a teacher playing with a pointer. His vision, drowned by blood and unstable by the heat of pain and the damage to his head from BFT, registered his tormentor standing in front of him, and put two together that he had given him a lash with the pry-bar, and was egging him to get up and give him another. There was another figure in the shower room, though, that he wouldn't have registered at the time, a taller, more muscular, but far more inobtrusive shade. If it wasn't for his bulk, Jason would have been made for stealth, with his gliding movement and chameleon ability. He stood, propped against the wall, one foot kicked up against it, simply observing. And it was the head tilt that made him marvel. Because it wasn't the mean, malicious look of the little shit "leader" who was giving him a beating. It was the curious look of someone fascinated.
Stand up.
He was there, now. Thirteen years after that long ago punishment-night, the night recorded that the leader of his team had given him a high price for losing a match he should have won. And now, he was in that same place, observing that shower room. Some grotesque part of him had thought, maybe there would still be dried blood in the shower. A swirl of his own lifesblood around the drain like a ring in the tub. There was a harsh, stark bleakness, a washed out green color to the old shower room, a dingy scummy decade old filth. But here, in the house of the Inner Circle, there was no blood.
He felt empty as he stood here. He rubbed those scars on his head; Those, from David Hunter handing him a contrition-shovelling defeat, and those deeper, pitted scars on his face from a long ago meeting of a metal pry-bar against his skull. Scars...
He gritted his teeth. Thinking it at least apropos as he searched for a ghost of his past here, in light of Mass Destruction, because the dead memory that haunted this shower room taught him a lesson he thought he had forgotten. He'd known what it was to suffer a tough loss. And he had known what it was for some little shit that didn't know a fucking thing about him to hurthumble him physically, and the piqued embers that flared when the little shit had tapped the bar in that hand and dared the monster to rise again. Stand up, then and now were whispering, taunting, goading. Stand up, Sicko. Stand up.
He looked, again, one last time, at the scummy drain of that last shower stall of three in the shower room. Decades-thick black grime, toadstools clustered around the base where the tile met the wall, but none of his blood. Like he, and Danny, had never been in this room in 2006, with Jason watching, interested from his spot on the wall. So he stepped out, back into the hallway, scanning the emptied rooms. What had started life as an ambulance company, had become a gym, and then in the middle part of time had been a house for between four and five wrestlers rotating in a stable, was now nothing. It was stripped of everything. It was without all. And as he looked down the empty hallway, he felt that he had never really belonged here.
"So why are you here, Ephrain," asked his demon, and he responded back patiently, as if it didn't already know the answer, "Because, if Jason is alive, then I won't let him stalk me like he did the others in 2014." He sensed Moloch already had the history of when Jason Twisted had gone through his plans to torment his old stablemates in the past, and anyway that wasn't pertinent. What was, was this, "And I'm not going to wait around for him to put his plans in motion. I'm going to hunt him, first."
"But here, in this bombed out ruin of a 'training facility', the demon sneered, "Were things ever so simple in your time, Ephrain? That this nondescript, retro-fitted building would be the place where you all worked, and lived, and conducted all of the business of your meaningless mortal lives?" He wanted to retort back, but as he walked through now, it did feel like this place never had definition. And of course, Danny, Jason, they never REALLY lived here, that was for show. But he had stayed here, because he had little else. He passed a room, and the dead memories swirled up, just for a second, like a swirling sandstorm of ash; he could see Sicko and Hightower, seated on some couch where "reporter" Rebecca Owens had "interviewed" the monsters. He felt a homesickness for the ease of those days where his entire day revolved around some inoffensive waif asking pat softball questions about their matches and their only responsibilty was to talk about hurting their opponents. He felt sorry for those days... But as he passed, and the memory sank down, wordless and mute back into the settled ash on the ground, he knew that he felt sick for a good old day that never really was as good as it was in his mindseye.
And again, he rubbed his forehead.
As he walked the emptied walls of the old, whatever, "hideout", "headquarters", he reflected that he did everything that was ever asked of him in this place. He had played a loyal soldier. He had let Danny's prickish, angry dictatorship, but also Jason's subtle, manipulative handling and solicitousness slot him into a place where he felt like he was valued as part of a team. And even when Danny had beaten him that night, he had stood up and rose again indoctrinated, broken to the whims, with only that little flare up of anger in his heart yearning for something that wasn't status quo. Was that, he wondered idly, as he came around to what had been a rec area, was that why he felt an odd kinship with his opponent on Trauma, Rick Majors? In that very sense, yes. Rick Majors himself, had just now broken free of the same conditioning, the same indoctrination and view of himself that Sicko had been trying to abandon for the longest time. Rick Majors was now attempting to return to the man he was before he had ever met Seromine, had ever let go of his own free will, had ever tamped down his desires for his career so he could spout religious dogma and repeat the phrases of the will of his Lord.
As with all of the rest of the building, in the decade since the housing fell into ruin, it became a shelter for vagrants, and their leavings were evident, piled up everywhere, and here in the room where there was a TV set up "So they could watch their opponents promos and respond to them" there was only ripped out wires trailing from a spot on the wall, and droppings, food wrappers and debris piled around the bare bones furniture nobody would have touched. As he ran a finger over the remains of a moldering couch, he thought then that Rick Majors woulda loved it in the Inner Circle, then. It was the same basic deal. He closed his eyes and the dead memories rose again, forming out of dust motes and tears and blood, as Jason handed him pills, saying, "All you need to do is be smarter, Ephrain. You need to follow my lead, don't listen to what Danny is telling you. I wouldn't steer you wrong..."
So did he not WANT to hurt Rick Majors, because in that, he had found possibly the unlikeliest kindred spirit?
But on the other hand, he felt like he had put all that work into building himself up as a force in the Underground, had destroyed all the competitors in line to get a title shot, and then degraded it's champion badly by badmouthing his skills and the abilities that got him there, and then fallen short. So now the threat of Sicko, it seemed to everyone, was over. Hunter had overcome, Hunter had slain his demon, and Sicko was defanged and robbed of all menace. And now he was expected to engage with Rick Majors on an even playing field, when two weeks prior to this he had felt nothing but confidence as he ascended to take the Underground, HIS home. A home that maybe didn't exist. So, when he felt that shame, did it make him want to hurt someone? Did it make him want to lash out, break something, get back to doing what had brought him to the dance with Muscles Malone and stretch a limb until he felt a snap? Well, yes, it did. He could, and would have to overlook a kinship with Rick Majors former status as gofer of a stable for that.
He exited the empty rec room with its squattings and it's ghosts. And he frowned. "Tell you what I think," said his demon, not that he'd asked, "I think you DO want to hurt Rick Majors, and it is precisely because he reminds you of what you were. Be honest with yourself, Ephrain. You came here, to the Inner Circle quarters, after your loss, because this place is where the strongest connection to your time as a slave was. That shower room was the exact spot of where Sicko was at his lowest, a kicked dog that stood up when it's master called to it. You think about who you were and it makes you so angry, because it dredges up all the self-loathing and hatred you felt at yourself then. So yes, Ephrain, you DO want to hurt Rick Majors." He felt heat on his face, but he pushed it back down. He wanted to deny it, but he found that he couldn't. It was true. He hated that part of himself, so he kind of hated Rick Majors. Stand up? He fucking would. He would stand after the beating the little shithead had dealt. And unlike in the shower, he would not crawl to his masters side, a beaten dog, a defanged monster. Because that place at his side...
"But the promise of this place, the feeling of being their soldier, it was never real, it was just a false promise," He told the demon and himself. "Because it never was and never will be."
"Oh, I wouldn't say that," came another voice, not inside of his head. He whirled, and he was taken aback. There, standing in the same motorcycle jacket and black ensemble he had worn the day he had walked side by side with a freed Ephrain Ortiz in the sunny park. He removed a helmet, and a predatory, shark-like smile spread over his pale face. "I thought we had something real, here..."
"Jason- you - How did you know I was here-?" He snarled, eyes narrowing.
Jason, nonchalantly, plucked at a torn old poster for an event with disinterest as he avoided looking him in the eye, but he drew closer. "You have been on my radar since you came back, Ephrain. Did you think that you could ever resurface without me knowing about it?"
"Danny told the world you died," he said, but suddenly cast into doubt. Jason just laughed it off, "Danny saw what I wanted him to, when my game with him concluded, besides it got... uninteresting by the end of it - No Eph, what I really wanted, was to meet up with you again. You were, uh, you were in Springdale when I was playing my game, right? Hall C. I had someone keeping tabs. Even when that little chickee was slipping into your unit at night." He tutted, smirking and playing around like an older brother. "Moriah. Sweet little thing."
"So, you're here, and I'm here," Jason started, and across the hall, the big man's fists were clenching. "And I should beat you into a pulp, you maggot."
Sternly, his finger comes up, his word is like a whipcrack, "NO." and Ephrain stays his hand.
Jason sighs, "Just - walk with me, will you? I have something I want to discuss with you." And despite the enmity between them, despite the fact that some time ago, Jason had bound Ephrain, tortured him with meds, electric shocks and repeated clip viewings of a crime scene walkthrough... when Jason turns his shoulder, and begins to leisurely tour down the halls they had once coexisted within... in a few beats, the big man, asking himself what he's doing, walks along to catch up.
"So, explain to me what your deal is now, it's - vague..."
"The deal is, I am the vessel of an elder demon from a Hell dimension, and I feed him human suffering and misery in exchange for him providing me strength."
"Uh huh... and, Ephrain, I'm sure you believe that. But you are a sick man, Ephrain. You were hospitalized in 2013 after someone traumatized you into a mental break, left you catatonic. According to what I've heard, on this Hall C in Springdale, you were further manipulated by this girl, a diagnosed sociopath with Messianic delusions, and she fed you a lot of stories. You killed her, Ephrain. Do you remember doing that? Chopped her body up."
He looks sidelong at the slick man, shoulder to shoulder, "We had to disassemble her body into parts, because Moloch would reconstitute her body as an immortal Tulpa, with blood magic feeding it power to - "
He raises a placating hand, "I know it may seem like that, but Ephrain - this I'm saying to you, all of this Moriah, Tulpa, Moloch in your head stuff, it's not real. This is the result of your breakdown, it's all in your head."
"He's lying, Ephrain, rip his esophagus out," encouraged the demon, hissing in his ear, "Base defiler, blasphemer, he doesn't know what old power is."
"When I saw you were out there, in the wild, and like... this... Ephrain, buddy... you aren't well. You need medication. And you remember how in the day, I used to hook you up with it. Kept you on an even keel." Jason's words are sober, his face earnest, his eyebrows raised and his hand out. "And you're my friend, Ephrain. You always were. I want to help you. If you'll let me. We can work on this together, and you won't need your demon voices to get by."
He squinched his eyes shut, shook his head, and looked at Jason, agitated. "You - You were the one who put me in Springdale, Jason. You were the one who tortured me until I had a break."
"No," came out smooth as butter, trying to gaslight the history away, and the word hit in his head and made it as fuzzy as a steel bar in a long-ago shower room. "You only imagined I did, that never happened." Jason smiles, a devils' smile masquerading as a friends. "Look at what we had here, Ephrain. Look. We're standing in front of your room right now." And he gestures into the room with no door. It has an ancient mannequin with a prototype clown costume, and, in the darkness, he can see crude finger paintings on the walls. Stick figures, representing three figures, a stick figure man, a stick figure little girl with pig tails, and a stick figure wife. "This was home, Ephrain. As much home as I could make it, since you came to us because of the loss of your family. I helped you put the pieces together. I helped you try to find the man who did that to your family. Don't you remember?"
"YOU LIE! YOU FUCKING LIAR!" Sicko, the monster Sicko, roared fully to life, lifting Jason Twisted up. Twisted, a heavyweight, was nonetheless taken off his feet as massive, ham-sized fists grabbed him by the throat, pushing them both out of the threshold of that room and acros the hall.
"I sought you out - so I could help you, Ephrain - Like we - like we used to be!" Jason got out, as they crashed into a room, parting the ghosts of the Inner Circle, at a "meeting" where they discussed "the strategy of their upcoming tag match" or some other generic old time promo setting. All that was left was an empty conference table in a disused room. The two of them crashed through it. The ghosts went away, falling back into dust and mites. The two of them rolled around on the pieces of the broken table. "Why aren't you understanding what I'm trying to do?!"
Because like we used to be never existed, Sicko thought balefully, because the home you spoke of wasn't like that, because it was not and never was like that. And - "Because, you are not my friend."
Twisted got up, tackling the bigger man, but even with his arms wrapped around Sicko's belly, the big man refused to be moved, and he took hold of the leather jacket and pants and swung Jason hard into the side of the wall with a roar. Plaster rained down and left a broken crater behind, and more pieces of the old Inner Circle "headquarters" rained down. Jason was pulling himself up. Jason coughed, and spit out, and looked up at Sicko, the raging, red eyed beast, and smiled. "There's my boy... how did we ever keep you on a leash? Heh, how did that Hunter boy ever put you down? Wouldn't have happened if you were under my direction, Sicko..."
"Shut up."
"Wouldn't have happened if you were clear headed, Sicko!" Twisted was standing up, emboldened, using his words to poke and prod at him, "If you weren't distracted, off your game, talking to" - He came in with a violent punch to the bigger man - "DEMONS -" Another punch, and the force of their fight was starting to cause more of the building to crumble, " - Wouldn't be happening, Sicko! - "
Sicko was gasping, and Jason's next kick to the side doubled him over. "You WILL obey me, Ephrain - " And he stood, triumphant over the monster. He searched around, and then, with a smile, he found a tool. Amazing both of them for it's irony and symbolism, after all these years, among the rubble and the detritus of a decade's worth of disuse, Jason pulled out a metal piece of rebar. He held it in one hand.
He tapped it in his palm.
" - You WILL obey me, and you are going on the meds and you're going to do what I say. Now, STAND UP."
Stand up.
Jason was swinging the bar, going to give him a lick.
In the dead memories Jason stood against the wall, his head tilted, curious.
He brought the twisted bar around. But then, a massive paw snatched the incoming wrist in midair. A monster, looking up, seething with rage. He stopped the incoming hit, his entire body shaking.
He stood up this time.
Twisted's face changed like the sea as the bulk of monster rose, gripping his wrist and shaking with effort and with intense, black purpose. Jason's face was like a dawn, breaking across a horizon, his eyes widening with awe. And then, as Sicko stood in front of him, to his full height, Twisted's face changed again, into a wicked, confident smile. "So. The clown has some spine..."
Ephrain slammed him so hard into a wall that a glass pane broke, pinning him against it with his meaty forearm choking off his old friend's windpipe. But still, despite his breath rasping, despite them both being beaten down from the violent burst, Twisted was smiling. "I remember everything, Jason... and you aren't going to get into my head again."
"I am in your head already," Jason said with a gasp, and a little laugh, "And I will tear down everything you have. I'll cut you off from all of your voices until it's just Jason, and little old Ephrain, the forty year old dad. And I'll leave you with no choice but to listen to me, Ephrain." Sicko squinted at him, eyes narrowing, and so he didn't get a peripheral look when Jason drew a weapon from the back of his waistband, a small black gun that he stuck into his neck. The pneumatic pfft of the dart went off, and Sicko's eyes went wide. Dizzy, and fatigued suddenly, he began to falter.
Jason's voice followed him down.
"I'll leave you to the old Inner Circle haunt, Eph, let you sit here and converse with the roaches, ha..."
"But don't worry..."
"...I'll be coming for you soon..."
The taunts came from farther and farther away until blackness swirled into his vision. And he dreamed. The dreams were too fragmented and tonally clashing. He dreamed of sunlight. And a mother and daughter in a kitchen. And a shower room stall, and a steel bar being tapped in an open palm. And Jason's smile. All of these scattered images, somehow, despite their jarring meanings, gave him connected feelings... all of them attached by some mixture of longing and dread.
When he came back to consciousness, and sat up, hours later, the sun had gone down, and the entire old complex was fallen into gloom. And there was none of those connected feelings, the mixture of longing and dread here, he thought, not at all, as he looked at empty rooms that never really meant anything.
Only the dust and the dead memories.
"Get up, clown, you're not done yet," came the sneering, snarling voice of the strutting martinet. And in that instant, taken by the dream, he looked up, and he saw it as if it were 2006 again. He was seeing it through the haze, the pain beating in his head, cotton-fuzzy and the world out of focus. "I said stand up," said the out of focus specter of the past. He was looking up from all fours, seeing the figure standing over him through a rivulet of blood dripping over one eye. "Stand up, Sicko."
"Stand up." The authoritarian handler's voice. Through the fuzzy headed unsteadiness of the memory, the figure standing in front of him in the shower stall loomed like a black shadow. He was brandishing a short, curved steel pry-bar in one hand, tapping it lightly in the flat palm of his unoccupied other hand like a teacher playing with a pointer. His vision, drowned by blood and unstable by the heat of pain and the damage to his head from BFT, registered his tormentor standing in front of him, and put two together that he had given him a lash with the pry-bar, and was egging him to get up and give him another. There was another figure in the shower room, though, that he wouldn't have registered at the time, a taller, more muscular, but far more inobtrusive shade. If it wasn't for his bulk, Jason would have been made for stealth, with his gliding movement and chameleon ability. He stood, propped against the wall, one foot kicked up against it, simply observing. And it was the head tilt that made him marvel. Because it wasn't the mean, malicious look of the little shit "leader" who was giving him a beating. It was the curious look of someone fascinated.
Stand up.
He was there, now. Thirteen years after that long ago punishment-night, the night recorded that the leader of his team had given him a high price for losing a match he should have won. And now, he was in that same place, observing that shower room. Some grotesque part of him had thought, maybe there would still be dried blood in the shower. A swirl of his own lifesblood around the drain like a ring in the tub. There was a harsh, stark bleakness, a washed out green color to the old shower room, a dingy scummy decade old filth. But here, in the house of the Inner Circle, there was no blood.
He felt empty as he stood here. He rubbed those scars on his head; Those, from David Hunter handing him a contrition-shovelling defeat, and those deeper, pitted scars on his face from a long ago meeting of a metal pry-bar against his skull. Scars...
He gritted his teeth. Thinking it at least apropos as he searched for a ghost of his past here, in light of Mass Destruction, because the dead memory that haunted this shower room taught him a lesson he thought he had forgotten. He'd known what it was to suffer a tough loss. And he had known what it was for some little shit that didn't know a fucking thing about him to hurthumble him physically, and the piqued embers that flared when the little shit had tapped the bar in that hand and dared the monster to rise again. Stand up, then and now were whispering, taunting, goading. Stand up, Sicko. Stand up.
He looked, again, one last time, at the scummy drain of that last shower stall of three in the shower room. Decades-thick black grime, toadstools clustered around the base where the tile met the wall, but none of his blood. Like he, and Danny, had never been in this room in 2006, with Jason watching, interested from his spot on the wall. So he stepped out, back into the hallway, scanning the emptied rooms. What had started life as an ambulance company, had become a gym, and then in the middle part of time had been a house for between four and five wrestlers rotating in a stable, was now nothing. It was stripped of everything. It was without all. And as he looked down the empty hallway, he felt that he had never really belonged here.
"So why are you here, Ephrain," asked his demon, and he responded back patiently, as if it didn't already know the answer, "Because, if Jason is alive, then I won't let him stalk me like he did the others in 2014." He sensed Moloch already had the history of when Jason Twisted had gone through his plans to torment his old stablemates in the past, and anyway that wasn't pertinent. What was, was this, "And I'm not going to wait around for him to put his plans in motion. I'm going to hunt him, first."
"But here, in this bombed out ruin of a 'training facility', the demon sneered, "Were things ever so simple in your time, Ephrain? That this nondescript, retro-fitted building would be the place where you all worked, and lived, and conducted all of the business of your meaningless mortal lives?" He wanted to retort back, but as he walked through now, it did feel like this place never had definition. And of course, Danny, Jason, they never REALLY lived here, that was for show. But he had stayed here, because he had little else. He passed a room, and the dead memories swirled up, just for a second, like a swirling sandstorm of ash; he could see Sicko and Hightower, seated on some couch where "reporter" Rebecca Owens had "interviewed" the monsters. He felt a homesickness for the ease of those days where his entire day revolved around some inoffensive waif asking pat softball questions about their matches and their only responsibilty was to talk about hurting their opponents. He felt sorry for those days... But as he passed, and the memory sank down, wordless and mute back into the settled ash on the ground, he knew that he felt sick for a good old day that never really was as good as it was in his mindseye.
And again, he rubbed his forehead.
As he walked the emptied walls of the old, whatever, "hideout", "headquarters", he reflected that he did everything that was ever asked of him in this place. He had played a loyal soldier. He had let Danny's prickish, angry dictatorship, but also Jason's subtle, manipulative handling and solicitousness slot him into a place where he felt like he was valued as part of a team. And even when Danny had beaten him that night, he had stood up and rose again indoctrinated, broken to the whims, with only that little flare up of anger in his heart yearning for something that wasn't status quo. Was that, he wondered idly, as he came around to what had been a rec area, was that why he felt an odd kinship with his opponent on Trauma, Rick Majors? In that very sense, yes. Rick Majors himself, had just now broken free of the same conditioning, the same indoctrination and view of himself that Sicko had been trying to abandon for the longest time. Rick Majors was now attempting to return to the man he was before he had ever met Seromine, had ever let go of his own free will, had ever tamped down his desires for his career so he could spout religious dogma and repeat the phrases of the will of his Lord.
As with all of the rest of the building, in the decade since the housing fell into ruin, it became a shelter for vagrants, and their leavings were evident, piled up everywhere, and here in the room where there was a TV set up "So they could watch their opponents promos and respond to them" there was only ripped out wires trailing from a spot on the wall, and droppings, food wrappers and debris piled around the bare bones furniture nobody would have touched. As he ran a finger over the remains of a moldering couch, he thought then that Rick Majors woulda loved it in the Inner Circle, then. It was the same basic deal. He closed his eyes and the dead memories rose again, forming out of dust motes and tears and blood, as Jason handed him pills, saying, "All you need to do is be smarter, Ephrain. You need to follow my lead, don't listen to what Danny is telling you. I wouldn't steer you wrong..."
So did he not WANT to hurt Rick Majors, because in that, he had found possibly the unlikeliest kindred spirit?
But on the other hand, he felt like he had put all that work into building himself up as a force in the Underground, had destroyed all the competitors in line to get a title shot, and then degraded it's champion badly by badmouthing his skills and the abilities that got him there, and then fallen short. So now the threat of Sicko, it seemed to everyone, was over. Hunter had overcome, Hunter had slain his demon, and Sicko was defanged and robbed of all menace. And now he was expected to engage with Rick Majors on an even playing field, when two weeks prior to this he had felt nothing but confidence as he ascended to take the Underground, HIS home. A home that maybe didn't exist. So, when he felt that shame, did it make him want to hurt someone? Did it make him want to lash out, break something, get back to doing what had brought him to the dance with Muscles Malone and stretch a limb until he felt a snap? Well, yes, it did. He could, and would have to overlook a kinship with Rick Majors former status as gofer of a stable for that.
He exited the empty rec room with its squattings and it's ghosts. And he frowned. "Tell you what I think," said his demon, not that he'd asked, "I think you DO want to hurt Rick Majors, and it is precisely because he reminds you of what you were. Be honest with yourself, Ephrain. You came here, to the Inner Circle quarters, after your loss, because this place is where the strongest connection to your time as a slave was. That shower room was the exact spot of where Sicko was at his lowest, a kicked dog that stood up when it's master called to it. You think about who you were and it makes you so angry, because it dredges up all the self-loathing and hatred you felt at yourself then. So yes, Ephrain, you DO want to hurt Rick Majors." He felt heat on his face, but he pushed it back down. He wanted to deny it, but he found that he couldn't. It was true. He hated that part of himself, so he kind of hated Rick Majors. Stand up? He fucking would. He would stand after the beating the little shithead had dealt. And unlike in the shower, he would not crawl to his masters side, a beaten dog, a defanged monster. Because that place at his side...
"But the promise of this place, the feeling of being their soldier, it was never real, it was just a false promise," He told the demon and himself. "Because it never was and never will be."
"Oh, I wouldn't say that," came another voice, not inside of his head. He whirled, and he was taken aback. There, standing in the same motorcycle jacket and black ensemble he had worn the day he had walked side by side with a freed Ephrain Ortiz in the sunny park. He removed a helmet, and a predatory, shark-like smile spread over his pale face. "I thought we had something real, here..."
"Jason- you - How did you know I was here-?" He snarled, eyes narrowing.
Jason, nonchalantly, plucked at a torn old poster for an event with disinterest as he avoided looking him in the eye, but he drew closer. "You have been on my radar since you came back, Ephrain. Did you think that you could ever resurface without me knowing about it?"
"Danny told the world you died," he said, but suddenly cast into doubt. Jason just laughed it off, "Danny saw what I wanted him to, when my game with him concluded, besides it got... uninteresting by the end of it - No Eph, what I really wanted, was to meet up with you again. You were, uh, you were in Springdale when I was playing my game, right? Hall C. I had someone keeping tabs. Even when that little chickee was slipping into your unit at night." He tutted, smirking and playing around like an older brother. "Moriah. Sweet little thing."
"So, you're here, and I'm here," Jason started, and across the hall, the big man's fists were clenching. "And I should beat you into a pulp, you maggot."
Sternly, his finger comes up, his word is like a whipcrack, "NO." and Ephrain stays his hand.
Jason sighs, "Just - walk with me, will you? I have something I want to discuss with you." And despite the enmity between them, despite the fact that some time ago, Jason had bound Ephrain, tortured him with meds, electric shocks and repeated clip viewings of a crime scene walkthrough... when Jason turns his shoulder, and begins to leisurely tour down the halls they had once coexisted within... in a few beats, the big man, asking himself what he's doing, walks along to catch up.
"So, explain to me what your deal is now, it's - vague..."
"The deal is, I am the vessel of an elder demon from a Hell dimension, and I feed him human suffering and misery in exchange for him providing me strength."
"Uh huh... and, Ephrain, I'm sure you believe that. But you are a sick man, Ephrain. You were hospitalized in 2013 after someone traumatized you into a mental break, left you catatonic. According to what I've heard, on this Hall C in Springdale, you were further manipulated by this girl, a diagnosed sociopath with Messianic delusions, and she fed you a lot of stories. You killed her, Ephrain. Do you remember doing that? Chopped her body up."
He looks sidelong at the slick man, shoulder to shoulder, "We had to disassemble her body into parts, because Moloch would reconstitute her body as an immortal Tulpa, with blood magic feeding it power to - "
He raises a placating hand, "I know it may seem like that, but Ephrain - this I'm saying to you, all of this Moriah, Tulpa, Moloch in your head stuff, it's not real. This is the result of your breakdown, it's all in your head."
"He's lying, Ephrain, rip his esophagus out," encouraged the demon, hissing in his ear, "Base defiler, blasphemer, he doesn't know what old power is."
"When I saw you were out there, in the wild, and like... this... Ephrain, buddy... you aren't well. You need medication. And you remember how in the day, I used to hook you up with it. Kept you on an even keel." Jason's words are sober, his face earnest, his eyebrows raised and his hand out. "And you're my friend, Ephrain. You always were. I want to help you. If you'll let me. We can work on this together, and you won't need your demon voices to get by."
He squinched his eyes shut, shook his head, and looked at Jason, agitated. "You - You were the one who put me in Springdale, Jason. You were the one who tortured me until I had a break."
"No," came out smooth as butter, trying to gaslight the history away, and the word hit in his head and made it as fuzzy as a steel bar in a long-ago shower room. "You only imagined I did, that never happened." Jason smiles, a devils' smile masquerading as a friends. "Look at what we had here, Ephrain. Look. We're standing in front of your room right now." And he gestures into the room with no door. It has an ancient mannequin with a prototype clown costume, and, in the darkness, he can see crude finger paintings on the walls. Stick figures, representing three figures, a stick figure man, a stick figure little girl with pig tails, and a stick figure wife. "This was home, Ephrain. As much home as I could make it, since you came to us because of the loss of your family. I helped you put the pieces together. I helped you try to find the man who did that to your family. Don't you remember?"
"YOU LIE! YOU FUCKING LIAR!" Sicko, the monster Sicko, roared fully to life, lifting Jason Twisted up. Twisted, a heavyweight, was nonetheless taken off his feet as massive, ham-sized fists grabbed him by the throat, pushing them both out of the threshold of that room and acros the hall.
"I sought you out - so I could help you, Ephrain - Like we - like we used to be!" Jason got out, as they crashed into a room, parting the ghosts of the Inner Circle, at a "meeting" where they discussed "the strategy of their upcoming tag match" or some other generic old time promo setting. All that was left was an empty conference table in a disused room. The two of them crashed through it. The ghosts went away, falling back into dust and mites. The two of them rolled around on the pieces of the broken table. "Why aren't you understanding what I'm trying to do?!"
Because like we used to be never existed, Sicko thought balefully, because the home you spoke of wasn't like that, because it was not and never was like that. And - "Because, you are not my friend."
Twisted got up, tackling the bigger man, but even with his arms wrapped around Sicko's belly, the big man refused to be moved, and he took hold of the leather jacket and pants and swung Jason hard into the side of the wall with a roar. Plaster rained down and left a broken crater behind, and more pieces of the old Inner Circle "headquarters" rained down. Jason was pulling himself up. Jason coughed, and spit out, and looked up at Sicko, the raging, red eyed beast, and smiled. "There's my boy... how did we ever keep you on a leash? Heh, how did that Hunter boy ever put you down? Wouldn't have happened if you were under my direction, Sicko..."
"Shut up."
"Wouldn't have happened if you were clear headed, Sicko!" Twisted was standing up, emboldened, using his words to poke and prod at him, "If you weren't distracted, off your game, talking to" - He came in with a violent punch to the bigger man - "DEMONS -" Another punch, and the force of their fight was starting to cause more of the building to crumble, " - Wouldn't be happening, Sicko! - "
Sicko was gasping, and Jason's next kick to the side doubled him over. "You WILL obey me, Ephrain - " And he stood, triumphant over the monster. He searched around, and then, with a smile, he found a tool. Amazing both of them for it's irony and symbolism, after all these years, among the rubble and the detritus of a decade's worth of disuse, Jason pulled out a metal piece of rebar. He held it in one hand.
He tapped it in his palm.
" - You WILL obey me, and you are going on the meds and you're going to do what I say. Now, STAND UP."
Stand up.
Jason was swinging the bar, going to give him a lick.
In the dead memories Jason stood against the wall, his head tilted, curious.
He brought the twisted bar around. But then, a massive paw snatched the incoming wrist in midair. A monster, looking up, seething with rage. He stopped the incoming hit, his entire body shaking.
He stood up this time.
Twisted's face changed like the sea as the bulk of monster rose, gripping his wrist and shaking with effort and with intense, black purpose. Jason's face was like a dawn, breaking across a horizon, his eyes widening with awe. And then, as Sicko stood in front of him, to his full height, Twisted's face changed again, into a wicked, confident smile. "So. The clown has some spine..."
Ephrain slammed him so hard into a wall that a glass pane broke, pinning him against it with his meaty forearm choking off his old friend's windpipe. But still, despite his breath rasping, despite them both being beaten down from the violent burst, Twisted was smiling. "I remember everything, Jason... and you aren't going to get into my head again."
"I am in your head already," Jason said with a gasp, and a little laugh, "And I will tear down everything you have. I'll cut you off from all of your voices until it's just Jason, and little old Ephrain, the forty year old dad. And I'll leave you with no choice but to listen to me, Ephrain." Sicko squinted at him, eyes narrowing, and so he didn't get a peripheral look when Jason drew a weapon from the back of his waistband, a small black gun that he stuck into his neck. The pneumatic pfft of the dart went off, and Sicko's eyes went wide. Dizzy, and fatigued suddenly, he began to falter.
Jason's voice followed him down.
"I'll leave you to the old Inner Circle haunt, Eph, let you sit here and converse with the roaches, ha..."
"But don't worry..."
"...I'll be coming for you soon..."
The taunts came from farther and farther away until blackness swirled into his vision. And he dreamed. The dreams were too fragmented and tonally clashing. He dreamed of sunlight. And a mother and daughter in a kitchen. And a shower room stall, and a steel bar being tapped in an open palm. And Jason's smile. All of these scattered images, somehow, despite their jarring meanings, gave him connected feelings... all of them attached by some mixture of longing and dread.
When he came back to consciousness, and sat up, hours later, the sun had gone down, and the entire old complex was fallen into gloom. And there was none of those connected feelings, the mixture of longing and dread here, he thought, not at all, as he looked at empty rooms that never really meant anything.
Only the dust and the dead memories.
