A Black House... Or, A Spider Into The Web.
May 4, 2019 4:44:35 GMT -5
The Anarchist, Dominator / Mortimer, and 2 more like this
Post by Sicko on May 4, 2019 4:44:35 GMT -5
He felt the power as soon as his wheels came to a stop. The engine had been running hot; desert sun and low coolant on the rickety old truck. It ticked like an oven as it began cooling down. He leaned forward, peering through the windshield, and his brow furrowed.
It was not the vista of the old, converted mission church in the hidden heart of the city that worried him. Nor was it the ominous storm that was building. Phoenix's heat had risen to a sweltering, untenable 110 degrees, but the arid desert was blooming a storm system unprecedented by the meteorologists. They simply couldn't explain it. From where he had parked the ice cream truck, the eye of the storm seemed to be swirling around over the church, radiating outwards. The clouds were a sickly, otherworldly purple and the sky was reddish. An unusual day. And not just because of the weather. Ephrain closed his eyes, feeling the beat in his head. It was the sick, dark call of an entity that had cast it's eye upon him many years before. It was the pulsating power that radiated from a plane of existence below. It was the fear and anticipation of the man who lay at the center of the church, a fat spider building a deathly web.
And he knew he had gone willingly into the web.
But he was not intending on being a fly or some other meal to slake that spider's thirst.
He stepped a heavy, thick foot out of the ice cream truck's side panel, and as soon as he tromped ground he felt the heavy, hot wind push back, and the purplish, sick storm clouds blew. Disease-green thunder illuminated parts of those clouds.
Ephrain thought about what he had learned about the legend of the "three brothers" from finding Mariah's books - a side trip back to Springdale that was a separate digression. Safe to say, in his right mind, clear headed, he had gone back to Springdale, now long closed after the incidents on Hall C and the murder of several guards came to light, and found stashed away in a particular room a witches' library. Where Mariah had found the names of Moloch, Abnegazar, and Shadrach, about the worship of them that had existed for 1 million years back to primal clans of man. About the oral history, the forbidden cults that still existed as sleeper cells laced in the fabric of civilization, and the sigils of power that bolstered each ancient one. It was a lot to info dump, but he had, in his off time when not on the road, undertaken it. Because while he had felt the call since that night, weeks ago, when he had found Rebecca Owen's cabin and seen the sigil painted on the wall choked with flies, he had wanted to be ready when he went to confront Shadrach's avatar.
When he confronted Jason.
He stepped closer, and he craned an ear, hoping to hear even a blared, garbled warning. Nothing. As he drew closer it felt like he had a black hole in the center of his head, and the assistance and wellspring of power he was drawing on from his chosen avatarship was gone. Somehow, in painting his own sigils and finding his own grimoires, Jason had found a way to block Moloch's voice from filling him, if not stripping him of his power outright. He only had him...
Well, he only had him. His mouth firmed, his lips contorting around his face in a grimace, as he walked towards the mission's steps. The city around him was quiet, stillfull and silent as a crypt, but not one person on the street packed around the mission church was showing signs of occupied. It was just him as he stepped up to the door, scrubbed of makeup and costume, black only in black, the voice of his dark passenger silent; only him, entering the door to the church at the center of the storm.
This is nothing new, despite what Jason may want you to think about yourself, he counselled. After everything he had learned in the past year, all of the strength Moloch had helped unlock, the potential...
The old church was still in a 18th century style, much as it was when Spanish missionaries had raised the church, down to the quaint buttresses. From the windows spilled that awful, maddening purple light, rife with flashes of the sick green lightning.
The voice came cackling, rolling through the rafters as he stepped between the pews. "Didn't think you'd come, Ephrain!"
He looked around, seeing no one. Dark aura permeated the church. It beat, now and then strobing, and the entire church shook with the force of the storm overhead.
"We can end this now, Jason!" He called out. "Like we should have those weeks ago at the Inner Circle hideout!"
"Oh, but that wouldn't have been as much fun." Something flitted next to him, where the supports framed around the pews. A shadow. Jason was playing the horror movie villain of his dreams. "I was only in the beginning of my plans, then, and that night I was just warning you. I wanted you to join me. If you had joined me, we could have shared the power. Now look at you."
Something whished behind his back. He turned. The tension built, but of course, manipulative scumbag Jason Twisted was getting off on abusing his power like a cheap antagonist. He got off on it. Ephrain turned his head, frowning, catching sight of a shadow in a familiar shape before it dissipated. Undaunted, he took another step forward. Then, it materialized over his shoulder. Twisting, the bigger man grabbed the offender in his powerful hands, slinging it over his shoulder, smashing a large figure (though dwarfed by Sicko) and putting him through the wood of the pew. But as he stared down at the smashed pew seat, the broken sticks of wood and the indented cushion, his hands were covered by smoky residue, and his prey was not there. More damn games.
"So this was about me joining you, was it, Jason?" He called, frustrated and his voice letting it show, kicking himself after each clipped word. "Because I'll be honest, I thought it was always about you having something under your thumb, you always had an obsession going back to the IEW with manipulating people and forces stronger than you could ever be until they did your work for you."
The listening shadows seemed to scoff, and the dark aura pulses, strobes, but no flashes of movement. He steadfastly moves forward.
"Is that what you think, Ephrain?" Jason asks him from somewhere above, his amplified voice trying to sound like Moloch's, or even God's. "No, I helped you. I always helped you."
"When I was your henchman, you kept me pilled up. You kept me on a leash of chemicals that YOU were the sole supplier of and pushed the narrative that I should listen to you only, and when I failed in my role as your monster you were telling Danny he should do his duty as leader and punish me. Now you tell me, what does that sound like?"
"That never happened, it was all in your head, Ephrain," his voice was smug, cloying, and it had dropped into it's low register and even monotone that Jason turned on. It was a verbal hypnotism act. By speaking in a certain manner and projecting confidence and calm as he gaslit, it was enough to make you question reality. In concert with the pulsing strobe of darkness, it was making Ephrain's head swim, and his stomach feel sick. He battled on. "How can you be sure that those pills weren't keeping you - "
"ENOUGH, JASON!" he boomed, and the purple light brightened outside, mingling with the dark aura inside. "We aren't doing this again."
"Fine, Eph," Jason sighed, stepping out of the dark, inky black. He wore a long, black waistcoat, almost a formal cloak with a gold chain clasped, and he stood across the long stretch of pews. For the first time, Ephrain saw the sigil on the dais behind Jason, 8 feet tall in it's own right, taking up an entire stretch of the wall. It was painted in blood over the windows, over the crucifix, over the choir section in a blasphemous arc.
"All I've done -" Jason said, stepping forward, "Is make you. I made you everything you ever were, Ephrain Ortiz. I created the Sicko identity. And yes, I kept you on those pills. Yes, I fucking pushed Danny to discipline you sternly, I pushed you to the breaking point because I was interested in what a monster would do when pushed that far."
"I wasn't always a monster," Ephrain said, eyes narrowing.
"No? You weren't?" Jason said, and gestured. Out of the darkness swirling on the walls, two faces swam out of inky blackness fully formed, a woman and a little girl.
Ephrain had nothing to say to that.
"You were fractured. You were splintered. You were shards of scrap metal... I forged them into a freaking golem." He laughed shortly, "Or a monster truck. It's all the same. I MADE YOU."
"You didn't," Ephrain looked up, stubbornly, "Everything you did, I pushed against. Every attempt at discipline from Danny's hands, I took it in and bred my own rage, formed my own will, grew my own soul."
"Souls," Jason says, not talking to him. "He's talking about souls now, Shad."
"And you - " Ephrain's finger pointed like a spear, "You watched it and coveted. You coveted what I was becoming, because I wasn't yours anymore."
"I found something better," Twisted's smile across the distance between them was akin to a Cheshire Cat's. "Had to hand it to Mariah, she had the right idea, but she backed the wrong horse. Moloch was a brutal warlord, a slaver, a defiler, and a beast, but he only ruled over the petty and wicked, the clan chieftains that killed hundreds. My God, Ephrain, he ruled over the Khans, the Pol Pots, the Khmer Rouge, his cult that lived and died and breathed in the background of human civilization for untold eons worshipped the wholesale slaughter and death of millions. Moloch gave you power for, what? Breaking some shithead's leg in a fight?" And he spread his arms, theatrically, telling him to look around.
"If your dark passenger is so much stronger than mine, why did he spend thousands of years locked up and unable to get out?"
Jason crossed the distance between them so fast he was a blur, and he bulled Ephrain into the pews, knocking them aside and pushing Ephrain into a support beam. Old hymn books flew asunder, and cracking green lightning shook the building. It was the inverse of their last fight, his power was unimaginable.
"You have nothing," Twisted's voice wheezed, and here up close he saw the draining, the degradation that was beginning to show as Shadrach's avatar sneered at him; the drawn circles under his eyes, the hollowing cheeks, the desiccated skin. But still, Jason was triumphant and defiant, "Those damn books showed me the theories on how to break the seal the two brothers put, and how to seal Moloch's access off. Now your god may as well be in a bottle in his home dimension, and mine - flows through ME. You have NOTHING."
But then, as the intent avatar of the dark passenger of death was frenzied, intent, pinning Ephrain against the beam with his forearm, he looked down. With surprising strength his quarry was moving. Pushing back. He grabbed the arm that pinned him and moved it, a fraction at a time, grunting with effort.
"No - this is - how are you still accessing his - This isn't - "
"I have ONLY - ever - NEEDED ME, JASON," the monster snarled at his opposite, through gritted teeth, the avatar of pain and suffering.
He flung the wraith the length of the aisle.
And so as he stood, he straightened. It was true. This was the well of strength he had never managed in the IEW, the self respect to be his own monster, not to be a lackey. He didn't even need guidance now, and despite not having a connection to his old one, he didn't feel weakened.
Jason had teleported away again, going back to his quick movements.
Ephrain roared at him, "COME OUT, YOU COWARD!"
Jason folded when he saw the real strength of Sicko coming out, though. They always did. Weak and egotistical, needing to be the center of attention but not knowing any productive ways to get it, fell slackjawed when Sicko picked himself up after being put down because they wouldn't have expected it. Reminded him of David Hunter. But where Jason was sneering manipulation and only ever about procuring items more powerful than him to use as toys, somehow David Hunter remained even more empty. David Hunter, as proven on Trauma, was a fucking child, spurned perhaps by the daddy he talked of in his second or third interview with that woman, he lashed out at his favorite trinket being taken from him childishly. David Hunter filled all of his promos with impotent, arrogant juvenile rage that was directionless and pointless, none of his promos ever lined up with each other because he was making it up as he went along, fitting together any egotistical thing he thought sounded good in the moment. It was a wonder that he loved the lavished attention of being called a King, it appealed to the twelve year old in him.
And Holden Ross never thought of any of this, Holden Ross was too much of a meathead to ever comprehend Sicko. Holden Ross couldn't stop being a lackey on his best day, he continued to try and curry the favor of Seromine as his priest/cult standby long after Seromine had abandoned that well. And so Holden Ross continued to do the bidding of a long ago master by taking on the dregs of his former stable, and what was sad is that people would probably equate Ross' attacks on Tyler, Corey and Alexa as comparable to what Sicko had done a month beforehand without ever appreciating the nuance. Holden Ross had beaten those people in another pathetic flag for attention, the same way David had flooded the locker room. It wasn't purposeful, it wasn't meaningful, and it wouldn't make a difference that he had beaten Tyler Scott and Corey Steel one week at all since they'd be out there right then the next Trauma trying to get their match started. Come to think of it, exactly how many people had Holden Ross ever beaten that didn't come back the very next show smiling. Exactly.
But no, what Jason had overlooked when he was coming up, and what David would never have believed if he saw, was the strength in him to rise.
What Jason was refusing to understand, what the David Hunters and Holden Ross'es of the world may never get is that there is something stronger there in Sicko. It was what two of the three brothers had seen in him when he was at his darkest place, shattered mentally and institutionalized. And now, he stood there, free. Ephrain Ortiz was a phoenix egg that was found in the ashes of a black house.
He thought this as he continued hunting toward the back. He had stepped onto the altar now, looking at the podium and the backdrop, with it's giant blood painted sigil of the dark passenger of death.
And then, swirling out of the darkness, Jason appeared, melting through the shadowy aura on the wall.
His hand pistoned out, grabbing Ephrain, as if placing a brand by marking his palm on his forehead. It burned, and Ephrain let out a yell.
"You think you've proven yourself stronger than the Oldest One, the harbinger of the end," he said in a voice that was only half his, "You were the one that should have been mine. My eye opened to you so many years ago, but that little brat with her books about my Brother filled your head with lies."
He grabbed Jason's wrist again, prying it away from his forehead, with a yell. The trail of burning energy was searing his bald pate. They both screamed.
"If you think yourself strong enough to overcome, then I'll give you something to overcome. You will have to relive your darkest day. The day that brought you to our attention." The avatar's eyes narrowed ever so slightly.
And then the aura, swirling around them, began to close in like an inky blob, and Ephrain felt himself being sucked down into it, like being pulled down a drain.
When he awoke it was pure black. He blinked, thinking that nothing had changed, and he was still in the church, but as he moved his arm he found himself flat on his back. His big frame and huge stomach was covered in different fabric, and he felt a strange sensation, a warm feeling at his side. It took him only a second to work out that it was a woman's shapely figure laid next to him. His jaw fell slack. He wasn't in the church with Jason at all, and the sky outside wasn't the purple, sick lightning storm.
He sat bolt upright, and his thick, corded elbow caught a lamp sitting on the end of the nightstand. The resulting crash made the woman laying in the bed next to him stir, sleepily, mumbling "Babe?"
"No," he said to himself, sitting up in the bed. He looked out the window, at the early morning dawn, the rosy fingers of sunlight in the southern California air. "No, no, no," he shook his head fervently.
The woman's fingers crawled over his shoulder, grasping with concern, "Babe? You're scaring me,"
He flung his arm, a bit panicked, he shouldn't be here, he couldn't be here. "No! This is a trick, Shadrach couldn't send me here, he didn't, didn't..."
The woman, much shorter than him, with a thick and sturdy body and a broad face, had her eyebrows knit in concern. She wrapped around him in a hug. "Are you having those dreams again, aw babe I told you to go see Doctor Bowler," this half suppressed, nightmare of a previous life was talking to him, no fear or flinching from his appearance, it was as if to her he was as natural as a dad in a sitcom. Her tone was loving, but direct. "And we still needed Stephanie's hospital bill, so maybe when you go into work tomorrow -"
"Stephanie? - Lourdes, no, I, this can't be - " he stood, bolt upright, nothing the pajama pants and strappy t-shirt over his thick gut. "You can't be here!"
A chirpy, happy little voice piped up from the doorway, she was rubbing her eyes as if she had been woken from a sleep but she placed no blame. A cute, innocent little girl with dark hair. "Can't be where?"
They were here. Both here.
"Mommy?" Stephanie piped up, her little mouth turned in curiousity, "Is daddy okay?..."
It was not the vista of the old, converted mission church in the hidden heart of the city that worried him. Nor was it the ominous storm that was building. Phoenix's heat had risen to a sweltering, untenable 110 degrees, but the arid desert was blooming a storm system unprecedented by the meteorologists. They simply couldn't explain it. From where he had parked the ice cream truck, the eye of the storm seemed to be swirling around over the church, radiating outwards. The clouds were a sickly, otherworldly purple and the sky was reddish. An unusual day. And not just because of the weather. Ephrain closed his eyes, feeling the beat in his head. It was the sick, dark call of an entity that had cast it's eye upon him many years before. It was the pulsating power that radiated from a plane of existence below. It was the fear and anticipation of the man who lay at the center of the church, a fat spider building a deathly web.
And he knew he had gone willingly into the web.
But he was not intending on being a fly or some other meal to slake that spider's thirst.
He stepped a heavy, thick foot out of the ice cream truck's side panel, and as soon as he tromped ground he felt the heavy, hot wind push back, and the purplish, sick storm clouds blew. Disease-green thunder illuminated parts of those clouds.
Ephrain thought about what he had learned about the legend of the "three brothers" from finding Mariah's books - a side trip back to Springdale that was a separate digression. Safe to say, in his right mind, clear headed, he had gone back to Springdale, now long closed after the incidents on Hall C and the murder of several guards came to light, and found stashed away in a particular room a witches' library. Where Mariah had found the names of Moloch, Abnegazar, and Shadrach, about the worship of them that had existed for 1 million years back to primal clans of man. About the oral history, the forbidden cults that still existed as sleeper cells laced in the fabric of civilization, and the sigils of power that bolstered each ancient one. It was a lot to info dump, but he had, in his off time when not on the road, undertaken it. Because while he had felt the call since that night, weeks ago, when he had found Rebecca Owen's cabin and seen the sigil painted on the wall choked with flies, he had wanted to be ready when he went to confront Shadrach's avatar.
When he confronted Jason.
He stepped closer, and he craned an ear, hoping to hear even a blared, garbled warning. Nothing. As he drew closer it felt like he had a black hole in the center of his head, and the assistance and wellspring of power he was drawing on from his chosen avatarship was gone. Somehow, in painting his own sigils and finding his own grimoires, Jason had found a way to block Moloch's voice from filling him, if not stripping him of his power outright. He only had him...
Well, he only had him. His mouth firmed, his lips contorting around his face in a grimace, as he walked towards the mission's steps. The city around him was quiet, stillfull and silent as a crypt, but not one person on the street packed around the mission church was showing signs of occupied. It was just him as he stepped up to the door, scrubbed of makeup and costume, black only in black, the voice of his dark passenger silent; only him, entering the door to the church at the center of the storm.
This is nothing new, despite what Jason may want you to think about yourself, he counselled. After everything he had learned in the past year, all of the strength Moloch had helped unlock, the potential...
The old church was still in a 18th century style, much as it was when Spanish missionaries had raised the church, down to the quaint buttresses. From the windows spilled that awful, maddening purple light, rife with flashes of the sick green lightning.
The voice came cackling, rolling through the rafters as he stepped between the pews. "Didn't think you'd come, Ephrain!"
He looked around, seeing no one. Dark aura permeated the church. It beat, now and then strobing, and the entire church shook with the force of the storm overhead.
"We can end this now, Jason!" He called out. "Like we should have those weeks ago at the Inner Circle hideout!"
"Oh, but that wouldn't have been as much fun." Something flitted next to him, where the supports framed around the pews. A shadow. Jason was playing the horror movie villain of his dreams. "I was only in the beginning of my plans, then, and that night I was just warning you. I wanted you to join me. If you had joined me, we could have shared the power. Now look at you."
Something whished behind his back. He turned. The tension built, but of course, manipulative scumbag Jason Twisted was getting off on abusing his power like a cheap antagonist. He got off on it. Ephrain turned his head, frowning, catching sight of a shadow in a familiar shape before it dissipated. Undaunted, he took another step forward. Then, it materialized over his shoulder. Twisting, the bigger man grabbed the offender in his powerful hands, slinging it over his shoulder, smashing a large figure (though dwarfed by Sicko) and putting him through the wood of the pew. But as he stared down at the smashed pew seat, the broken sticks of wood and the indented cushion, his hands were covered by smoky residue, and his prey was not there. More damn games.
"So this was about me joining you, was it, Jason?" He called, frustrated and his voice letting it show, kicking himself after each clipped word. "Because I'll be honest, I thought it was always about you having something under your thumb, you always had an obsession going back to the IEW with manipulating people and forces stronger than you could ever be until they did your work for you."
The listening shadows seemed to scoff, and the dark aura pulses, strobes, but no flashes of movement. He steadfastly moves forward.
"Is that what you think, Ephrain?" Jason asks him from somewhere above, his amplified voice trying to sound like Moloch's, or even God's. "No, I helped you. I always helped you."
"When I was your henchman, you kept me pilled up. You kept me on a leash of chemicals that YOU were the sole supplier of and pushed the narrative that I should listen to you only, and when I failed in my role as your monster you were telling Danny he should do his duty as leader and punish me. Now you tell me, what does that sound like?"
"That never happened, it was all in your head, Ephrain," his voice was smug, cloying, and it had dropped into it's low register and even monotone that Jason turned on. It was a verbal hypnotism act. By speaking in a certain manner and projecting confidence and calm as he gaslit, it was enough to make you question reality. In concert with the pulsing strobe of darkness, it was making Ephrain's head swim, and his stomach feel sick. He battled on. "How can you be sure that those pills weren't keeping you - "
"ENOUGH, JASON!" he boomed, and the purple light brightened outside, mingling with the dark aura inside. "We aren't doing this again."
"Fine, Eph," Jason sighed, stepping out of the dark, inky black. He wore a long, black waistcoat, almost a formal cloak with a gold chain clasped, and he stood across the long stretch of pews. For the first time, Ephrain saw the sigil on the dais behind Jason, 8 feet tall in it's own right, taking up an entire stretch of the wall. It was painted in blood over the windows, over the crucifix, over the choir section in a blasphemous arc.
"All I've done -" Jason said, stepping forward, "Is make you. I made you everything you ever were, Ephrain Ortiz. I created the Sicko identity. And yes, I kept you on those pills. Yes, I fucking pushed Danny to discipline you sternly, I pushed you to the breaking point because I was interested in what a monster would do when pushed that far."
"I wasn't always a monster," Ephrain said, eyes narrowing.
"No? You weren't?" Jason said, and gestured. Out of the darkness swirling on the walls, two faces swam out of inky blackness fully formed, a woman and a little girl.
Ephrain had nothing to say to that.
"You were fractured. You were splintered. You were shards of scrap metal... I forged them into a freaking golem." He laughed shortly, "Or a monster truck. It's all the same. I MADE YOU."
"You didn't," Ephrain looked up, stubbornly, "Everything you did, I pushed against. Every attempt at discipline from Danny's hands, I took it in and bred my own rage, formed my own will, grew my own soul."
"Souls," Jason says, not talking to him. "He's talking about souls now, Shad."
"And you - " Ephrain's finger pointed like a spear, "You watched it and coveted. You coveted what I was becoming, because I wasn't yours anymore."
"I found something better," Twisted's smile across the distance between them was akin to a Cheshire Cat's. "Had to hand it to Mariah, she had the right idea, but she backed the wrong horse. Moloch was a brutal warlord, a slaver, a defiler, and a beast, but he only ruled over the petty and wicked, the clan chieftains that killed hundreds. My God, Ephrain, he ruled over the Khans, the Pol Pots, the Khmer Rouge, his cult that lived and died and breathed in the background of human civilization for untold eons worshipped the wholesale slaughter and death of millions. Moloch gave you power for, what? Breaking some shithead's leg in a fight?" And he spread his arms, theatrically, telling him to look around.
"If your dark passenger is so much stronger than mine, why did he spend thousands of years locked up and unable to get out?"
Jason crossed the distance between them so fast he was a blur, and he bulled Ephrain into the pews, knocking them aside and pushing Ephrain into a support beam. Old hymn books flew asunder, and cracking green lightning shook the building. It was the inverse of their last fight, his power was unimaginable.
"You have nothing," Twisted's voice wheezed, and here up close he saw the draining, the degradation that was beginning to show as Shadrach's avatar sneered at him; the drawn circles under his eyes, the hollowing cheeks, the desiccated skin. But still, Jason was triumphant and defiant, "Those damn books showed me the theories on how to break the seal the two brothers put, and how to seal Moloch's access off. Now your god may as well be in a bottle in his home dimension, and mine - flows through ME. You have NOTHING."
But then, as the intent avatar of the dark passenger of death was frenzied, intent, pinning Ephrain against the beam with his forearm, he looked down. With surprising strength his quarry was moving. Pushing back. He grabbed the arm that pinned him and moved it, a fraction at a time, grunting with effort.
"No - this is - how are you still accessing his - This isn't - "
"I have ONLY - ever - NEEDED ME, JASON," the monster snarled at his opposite, through gritted teeth, the avatar of pain and suffering.
He flung the wraith the length of the aisle.
And so as he stood, he straightened. It was true. This was the well of strength he had never managed in the IEW, the self respect to be his own monster, not to be a lackey. He didn't even need guidance now, and despite not having a connection to his old one, he didn't feel weakened.
Jason had teleported away again, going back to his quick movements.
Ephrain roared at him, "COME OUT, YOU COWARD!"
Jason folded when he saw the real strength of Sicko coming out, though. They always did. Weak and egotistical, needing to be the center of attention but not knowing any productive ways to get it, fell slackjawed when Sicko picked himself up after being put down because they wouldn't have expected it. Reminded him of David Hunter. But where Jason was sneering manipulation and only ever about procuring items more powerful than him to use as toys, somehow David Hunter remained even more empty. David Hunter, as proven on Trauma, was a fucking child, spurned perhaps by the daddy he talked of in his second or third interview with that woman, he lashed out at his favorite trinket being taken from him childishly. David Hunter filled all of his promos with impotent, arrogant juvenile rage that was directionless and pointless, none of his promos ever lined up with each other because he was making it up as he went along, fitting together any egotistical thing he thought sounded good in the moment. It was a wonder that he loved the lavished attention of being called a King, it appealed to the twelve year old in him.
And Holden Ross never thought of any of this, Holden Ross was too much of a meathead to ever comprehend Sicko. Holden Ross couldn't stop being a lackey on his best day, he continued to try and curry the favor of Seromine as his priest/cult standby long after Seromine had abandoned that well. And so Holden Ross continued to do the bidding of a long ago master by taking on the dregs of his former stable, and what was sad is that people would probably equate Ross' attacks on Tyler, Corey and Alexa as comparable to what Sicko had done a month beforehand without ever appreciating the nuance. Holden Ross had beaten those people in another pathetic flag for attention, the same way David had flooded the locker room. It wasn't purposeful, it wasn't meaningful, and it wouldn't make a difference that he had beaten Tyler Scott and Corey Steel one week at all since they'd be out there right then the next Trauma trying to get their match started. Come to think of it, exactly how many people had Holden Ross ever beaten that didn't come back the very next show smiling. Exactly.
But no, what Jason had overlooked when he was coming up, and what David would never have believed if he saw, was the strength in him to rise.
What Jason was refusing to understand, what the David Hunters and Holden Ross'es of the world may never get is that there is something stronger there in Sicko. It was what two of the three brothers had seen in him when he was at his darkest place, shattered mentally and institutionalized. And now, he stood there, free. Ephrain Ortiz was a phoenix egg that was found in the ashes of a black house.
He thought this as he continued hunting toward the back. He had stepped onto the altar now, looking at the podium and the backdrop, with it's giant blood painted sigil of the dark passenger of death.
And then, swirling out of the darkness, Jason appeared, melting through the shadowy aura on the wall.
His hand pistoned out, grabbing Ephrain, as if placing a brand by marking his palm on his forehead. It burned, and Ephrain let out a yell.
"You think you've proven yourself stronger than the Oldest One, the harbinger of the end," he said in a voice that was only half his, "You were the one that should have been mine. My eye opened to you so many years ago, but that little brat with her books about my Brother filled your head with lies."
He grabbed Jason's wrist again, prying it away from his forehead, with a yell. The trail of burning energy was searing his bald pate. They both screamed.
"If you think yourself strong enough to overcome, then I'll give you something to overcome. You will have to relive your darkest day. The day that brought you to our attention." The avatar's eyes narrowed ever so slightly.
And then the aura, swirling around them, began to close in like an inky blob, and Ephrain felt himself being sucked down into it, like being pulled down a drain.
When he awoke it was pure black. He blinked, thinking that nothing had changed, and he was still in the church, but as he moved his arm he found himself flat on his back. His big frame and huge stomach was covered in different fabric, and he felt a strange sensation, a warm feeling at his side. It took him only a second to work out that it was a woman's shapely figure laid next to him. His jaw fell slack. He wasn't in the church with Jason at all, and the sky outside wasn't the purple, sick lightning storm.
He sat bolt upright, and his thick, corded elbow caught a lamp sitting on the end of the nightstand. The resulting crash made the woman laying in the bed next to him stir, sleepily, mumbling "Babe?"
"No," he said to himself, sitting up in the bed. He looked out the window, at the early morning dawn, the rosy fingers of sunlight in the southern California air. "No, no, no," he shook his head fervently.
The woman's fingers crawled over his shoulder, grasping with concern, "Babe? You're scaring me,"
He flung his arm, a bit panicked, he shouldn't be here, he couldn't be here. "No! This is a trick, Shadrach couldn't send me here, he didn't, didn't..."
The woman, much shorter than him, with a thick and sturdy body and a broad face, had her eyebrows knit in concern. She wrapped around him in a hug. "Are you having those dreams again, aw babe I told you to go see Doctor Bowler," this half suppressed, nightmare of a previous life was talking to him, no fear or flinching from his appearance, it was as if to her he was as natural as a dad in a sitcom. Her tone was loving, but direct. "And we still needed Stephanie's hospital bill, so maybe when you go into work tomorrow -"
"Stephanie? - Lourdes, no, I, this can't be - " he stood, bolt upright, nothing the pajama pants and strappy t-shirt over his thick gut. "You can't be here!"
A chirpy, happy little voice piped up from the doorway, she was rubbing her eyes as if she had been woken from a sleep but she placed no blame. A cute, innocent little girl with dark hair. "Can't be where?"
They were here. Both here.
"Mommy?" Stephanie piped up, her little mouth turned in curiousity, "Is daddy okay?..."
