A Brother Turned Back Into A Stranger.
May 6, 2019 3:30:55 GMT -5
The Anarchist and Darren Hughes like this
Post by Kyle Shane on May 6, 2019 3:30:55 GMT -5
The awkward lull in the conversation hung in the air between them, thick as the ionized air of the storm outside.
It got like that whenever the two old Game Boyz caught up nowadays, ya know. There was a decade of history and friendship between them. In 2009's landscape, after they had emerged from IEW developmental and hit the main roster they had a bond between them, a chemistry and a flow that was natural. The two disparate boys from the dorms of MIT; look where they'd come from and look at them now, right? Hiro checked Kyle from the side eye as they stood on a catwalk overlooking the Fujikawa Corp R & D. They were both dressed, Hiro still in his immaculately cut suit, minus the tie, Kyle wearing a dress shirt and suspenders, the embodiment of hipster that once the Game Boyz would have mocked. But Hiro just assessed, silently judging.
It was storming outside. Strange, sick green lightning was crackling, and a bolt shook the windows on one side of the lab. It lit the lab up.
Kyle raised the flask they were passing back and forth, took a nip. He passed it over wordlessly. Hiro took it, feeling the embossing; this old talisman, passed through the ages from the Myspace days before Kyle had come to college, when he was still dressing like a fucking Panic At The Disco bassist. It even bore a faded AFI logo.
One or both of them were becoming aware the silence was becoming oppressive. Hiro took a belt, but he couldn't help looking at Kyle and wondering how they'd gotten there.
"Hey, you remember that time we had that hardcore match against Trevor Adams, and we came out there with a pirate theme for some reason,"
"We called ourselves The Salty Dogs, yarrr," Kyle said, amiably, smiling at the distant memory, and taking the flask back, "And I remember you shoved a peg leg up his ass."
They both gave short chuckles, and the good feeling of the memory sparked a hit of warmth in the conversation, but Kyle's face grew troubled and distant. Because the truth with Hiro was that as much as he used to like these sessions; used to forward to them, they had drifted hard. Kyle had left MIT when he was barely 21, fresh off a scandal, and Hiro's path had taken him through a degree, a position at his father's company, a rise up the ranks as a power player in said company, and a wife and child. And Hiro had left wrestling behind, of course he did. His big nadir in 2010 of pinning Trevor Adams (even in a pirate themed outfit) and winning the IEW's Intercontintental championship was long forgotten for him; an entirely different life, one he felt no more base in. But they shared their bond, they had to, I mean, they were Hiro and Kyle, right, they had to do this. So if it devolved into this it was surely the price to pay. But then the time came to hang out and it was... this. They ran through inside jokes from a decade ago, and reminisced over memories they literally had reminisced about fucking fifteen times now.
It was kinda all they had. It felt bleak and lonely, always, but it was what happened when time made a brother turn back into a stranger.
Hiro was looking at him like that again. Kyle looked back, and Hiro, pretending now to be scanning the walls of the lab above him, said nothing. Finally, Hiro did look at Kyle, with a wild hair itching in his voice. He leaned in, took the flask from him, and said, "Hey, I know you're back with Array now - "
"Happily, two months," Kyle said, but something in the edge of his voice made Hiro tilt an ear about that. Hiro had had little to no interaction with Array, it was odd to him. The stupid underage girl had cost Kyle his ride at MIT and Kyle would never fill him in on the deets of if Kyle even bagged her the night of the party. Still, Hiro brushed it off. He smirked a little, his voice taking on a teenage cadence as he slipped into the kind of giddy locker room excitement as when they had found a good celebrity nude. "Does she wear thongs or boy shorts?"
Kyle sighed, his face falling a bit, and he pinched the bridge of his nose, saying "Hiro, dude... you are somebody's father..."
Hiro chose to ignore that, wheedling him, "Wasn't there a girl before Array not long ago too, some older white chica - your therapist? You dirty dog, you got her to lay on the couch instead, didn't you? When was the first time you had sex with her?" Kyle, growing more annoyed by Hiro's regression, shoved him a little, firmly saying "Dude, you're a FATHER."
Lightning flashed between them, bathing the entire lab in white/green, and when it faded, they were looking at each other tracked by the sound of thunder.
Hiro's eyebrow pushed up, his tone frosty and arch. "Yeah. And Kitsune is busy with the baby and isn't in the mood for sex a lot, and I'm always tired after working fifteen hours a day. What's wrong with you, man. You used to enjoy telling me stories of your conquests of those ring rats. And I was happy for you because when we were coming up together you had nothing. Now that I'm married and it's different - "
"It's different because," Kyle turned towards him, exasperated, " - Hiro, we aren't the same, man." How could he possibly explain it? Hiro's regression aside, his giddy tittilation spoke to a widening gulf between them. They maybe didn't have a lot in common anyway, coming into the ages of 18 at different backgrounds in financial and mental health. But Kyle stood there, struggling with how to explain to his "brother" that Hiro wanted stories of sexual conquests because he was trying to live vicariously through a life that made Kyle feel empty? Some of those girls he had really liked, and it seemed like every shot he'd ever had at happiness he'd blown and now it’s just him and the void forever and a shithead friend asking him about girls he got off is just reminding him of that.
Instead, he took his friend by the shoulder, and said, "You want the experiences I've had, but there are a million people who would kill for what you're doing here."
Hiro blinked, and a cut and roll of his eyes said that he knew that, it was boring and obvious to him. Kyle pressed, "I mean, aren't you proud of it, Hiro?"
Taking the flask, Hiro buried his lead in a slug of the vodka, his lips forming bitterly around the rim, "Are you happy you stuck with wrestling?"
Kyle's eyes narrowed, piqued, "What's that supposed to mean? You don't?"
Hiro's eyes did their tell of scanning the rim of the lab's walls, but his smile was froggy, his voice a rasp. "Having to protect yourself every day, having to constantly defend yourself against attacks, having some shitheap stranger that knows nothing about you come and make wildly inaccurate remarks about you? Wow who could ever not miss that. How's that promo coming against Darren Hughes, Kyle? Can you think of something different to say to him you didn't say to Gerard Angelo?"
Kyle ripped his flask back from Hiro, and the lightning flashed again, closer, more insistently, the boom of thunder more instant. It lent a sense of danger between them. "I'm proud of what I'm doing, Hiro." Kyle said, clipping off each word.
"But are you happy?" Hiro said, his tone and phrasing a sword.
"Are you?" Kyle riposted back. "I mean, look at what you have, Hiro, this lab is creating sci-fi devices that - What did you tell me this does?"
"They made a real life AI human download," Hiro said, and he was looking down at the metal chair, frowning at the curved mollusk shell, the unwieldy headset and wires leading up to machines in the ceiling. "Linked to the machines, you can download yourself into the mainframe of a computer yourself, interact with it in realtime, become a ghost in the machine. Transfers brainwaves."
"And you're in charge of that project," Kyle said with a beat of a smile, trying to placate, holding his arms out, "Something that nineteen year old program dev Hiro Sasuke would have shit his pants over."
Hiro, too, seemed to be struggling with a way to explain his own ennui, his own dissatisfaction. But Kyle was not getting it. He was marvelling at the machine, but after he put that flask back in the pocket of his ridiculous skinny hipster pants and drove his Vespa home, he would crawl into bed with a firecracker model/actress sexpot. Not return home after a long day's worth of bullshit meetings about going over budget, five angry voicemails from a cold father working in capacity as a CEO threatening to slash a division, and a frumpy, chubby wife and a fucking baby that needed more shots than - it didn't matter. Kyle couldn't understand. He squinted at the pointy haired fuck now, resentment in his eyes as Kyle was coming down the steps to look at the interface unit and the helmet. He leaned against the railing instead, looking down.
"You know you're nobody to judge me, trailer trash." Kyle looked up. "You washed out of school, you didn't even try. You threw it all away for some underage skank."
"Don't - highroad me, Richie Rich," Kyle said, his voice rising. He was playing with the helmet like a toy. "All of your schoolwork and your degrees to get daddy's approval and you were still right there selling weed in the dorms and playing COD with me."
Hiro came down a step, moving towards him. The air outside the lab was sizzling with energy. "Yes, I was motivated, I never saw any of our money making endeavors as anything but a means to an end, to push myself and pay for more classes and more degrees. You're the one who gets off on validation, so much so that you have to constantly push yourself for strangers."
"You think that that's the difference between us?" Kyle said incredulously, putting the helmet back on the arm of the chair as he turned and faced Hiro, and then firing up. "The difference between us is that you delude yourself into thinking that you're better than everyone."
Hiro, getting in Kyle's face, spit out "Man is, on the whole, less good than he wants himself to be, Carl Jung." Digging the quote out from the ethers of AP Psych, but using it to shield himself stubbornly.
"You peaked in college, rich boy, Kyle Shane," Kyle shot back, venomously.
"Yes I fucking did!" Hiro's voice was a roar, not even hidden by the sound of thunder. The lab lit up white/green again, but Hiro's voice, framed by the light, was fury. "And you peaked at another point! And you got to experience things I can never understand, and even if they're silly and childish, they were your life! And you get to be happy, and go out there on live TV and say whatever you want, and these people just - respect you, and you have - you have - "
"Why don't you look at what you have!" Kyle snarled, and the thunder came closer, more rapid. "Why don't you turn that lens back 180 and see the accomplishment of what your people are creating right here, the fucking life you made in the - "
"BECAUSE NONE OF IT IS MINE!!" Hiro's shrill cry and shove of Kyle against the bank of the equipment was desperate. "I MADE NOTHING PURPOSEFULLY FOR ME, AND I DON'T GET TO TAKE ANYTHING FOR ME, AND YOU GO AROUND GETTING ANYTHING YOU WANT - "
Kyle shoved him back, so hard that Hiro knocked the helmet off the arm of the chair, and some of the hanging wires from the ceiling pulled from their socket. "OH, FUCK YOU, PAL. FUCK YOU. STOP WHINING."
The lightning hit the building then, and the entire room bathed in white. A power coupling went, and a coil connected to a thick cable burst from a sudden surge in power coming from the roof. Sparks showered down around them. Both men yelled as the power surges continued. The white/green light faded, and the room plunged into darkness as everything cut off due to the power surge. After a second, red emergency lights and klaxons lit up the lab.
Hiro and Kyle's eyes were both screwed tightly shut and Hiro had frozen in a cringe position. Comically, Hiro's eye opened, and poked around, exploratory. When they realized there was no more danger, they both looked up, assessing.
Sparks were falling from the charred connection in the wire leading from the AI mind interface and the curved mollusk chair was blackened. Kyle put a hand to his chest, breathing hard.
"Damn, Hiro, man... I..." Kyle breathed, then laughed.
"Some scary shit, gotta have maintenance check the roof. I think that really fucked the power converters..." Hiro said automatically, analytically. Then, he let the division head mask slip, and he laughed, cursing under his breath in Japanese.
"We were getting pretty heated there before it hit..." Kyle said, looking at Hiro. Now that the tension was broken, Hiro was just looking at the cables running to the machines on the ceiling.
"Yeah... it wasn't our finest moment..."
"Hiro, I just wanted to say, though..."
Hiro turned to face him, a small, polite smile touching his lips, and saying, "Nah, ya know what. Let's leave it. Alright."
"Of course..." he said, carefully, "But... if you ever want to talk about it or anything."
"Nothing to talk about," Hiro said with a shrug. Kyle searched his face, unsure, but Hiro just stared. And smiled at him.
There was little else to be said. Hiro excused and said he had to call his lab techs. And they hugged, and did the Game Boyz handshake and two-finger press together, but rhythmically, robotically. And Kyle left him there, standing by the mollusk chair, holding a charred and sparking helmet in his hands, looking at his friend.
The lightning was still dying down, and Array was curled up on the couch, watching the news with her knees up to her chest and in one of Kyle's hoodies wrapped around her petite body. She freaked out, "Holy shit, they say this weird storm in the upper atmosphere came from somewhere in the Southwest, the lightning is causing all sorts of damage, it's like nothing they've ever seen..."
He was quiet as he sat down next to her, watching the 24/7 newscasts covering this bizarre weather. But he felt sleepy, and so tired. He excused himself, trudging into the bathroom and feeling like he had weights shackled to all of his limbs. "Babe? You okay?" He didn't affirm, he just stared curiously at himself, turning his cheek this way and that.
It was much later, as we see a house in the 1% area known as Jamaica Plain. Where houses go for over 3.45x the national median and household incomes are 1.62x the national median. Even at two stories, it feels both lavish, and trying hard to put a front of something it's supposed to be, perhaps like the man who owns it. In the bed, a still young Japanese man lays next to his wife, Kit. And she had indeed packed on some baggage. The frigid distance between their sleeping arrangements may as well be two twin beds on either side of the room, as they both lay there turned away from each other. A crackle comes across the baby monitor, a fraction second's warning before the ear-splitting wail. "Baby's crying," says his wife, waking instantly but making no move to get out of bed, her cold voice coming across to slap the husband with his duties, "You're not too tired because of work, go change the baby."
His eyes open, staring fearfully into the dark, his eyes shrinking to a pinpoint as he confronts the madness. "Oh, no."
Back in Kyle's loft...
He's back at the mirror. He has a lather of foam build around his beard, and with a stroke of a razor he clears a path. He vainly, perhaps even preening for someone like him, looks himself over. Sure, there is wear, crows feet where there wasn't back in 2010, but it's in such good shape, and it's handsome. He takes another stroke of the razor, eliminating another patch of stubble. "There are two people in every mirror," he says, recalling his Carl Jung.
He finally wipes the foam from his chin with a towel, and admires his abs. No slight pouch caused by too much coffee and stress. Firm. Kept in shape. Maybe what Hiro had said had merit, and there was a reason to keep wrestling after all. He did love the attention. And he loved having something he had won on his own.
Something he could treasure forever...
He was ruminating as he entered the bedroom. Array lay there, softly snoring, the covers up to her chin. He couldn't help himself, as he stood, looking down at her. He even plucked the comforter off of her, and smiled as he looked up her expanse of leg. Jung occurred to him again. But he shook his head.
"I'm a good man." So he told himself, and so he thought.
It got like that whenever the two old Game Boyz caught up nowadays, ya know. There was a decade of history and friendship between them. In 2009's landscape, after they had emerged from IEW developmental and hit the main roster they had a bond between them, a chemistry and a flow that was natural. The two disparate boys from the dorms of MIT; look where they'd come from and look at them now, right? Hiro checked Kyle from the side eye as they stood on a catwalk overlooking the Fujikawa Corp R & D. They were both dressed, Hiro still in his immaculately cut suit, minus the tie, Kyle wearing a dress shirt and suspenders, the embodiment of hipster that once the Game Boyz would have mocked. But Hiro just assessed, silently judging.
It was storming outside. Strange, sick green lightning was crackling, and a bolt shook the windows on one side of the lab. It lit the lab up.
Kyle raised the flask they were passing back and forth, took a nip. He passed it over wordlessly. Hiro took it, feeling the embossing; this old talisman, passed through the ages from the Myspace days before Kyle had come to college, when he was still dressing like a fucking Panic At The Disco bassist. It even bore a faded AFI logo.
One or both of them were becoming aware the silence was becoming oppressive. Hiro took a belt, but he couldn't help looking at Kyle and wondering how they'd gotten there.
"Hey, you remember that time we had that hardcore match against Trevor Adams, and we came out there with a pirate theme for some reason,"
"We called ourselves The Salty Dogs, yarrr," Kyle said, amiably, smiling at the distant memory, and taking the flask back, "And I remember you shoved a peg leg up his ass."
They both gave short chuckles, and the good feeling of the memory sparked a hit of warmth in the conversation, but Kyle's face grew troubled and distant. Because the truth with Hiro was that as much as he used to like these sessions; used to forward to them, they had drifted hard. Kyle had left MIT when he was barely 21, fresh off a scandal, and Hiro's path had taken him through a degree, a position at his father's company, a rise up the ranks as a power player in said company, and a wife and child. And Hiro had left wrestling behind, of course he did. His big nadir in 2010 of pinning Trevor Adams (even in a pirate themed outfit) and winning the IEW's Intercontintental championship was long forgotten for him; an entirely different life, one he felt no more base in. But they shared their bond, they had to, I mean, they were Hiro and Kyle, right, they had to do this. So if it devolved into this it was surely the price to pay. But then the time came to hang out and it was... this. They ran through inside jokes from a decade ago, and reminisced over memories they literally had reminisced about fucking fifteen times now.
It was kinda all they had. It felt bleak and lonely, always, but it was what happened when time made a brother turn back into a stranger.
Hiro was looking at him like that again. Kyle looked back, and Hiro, pretending now to be scanning the walls of the lab above him, said nothing. Finally, Hiro did look at Kyle, with a wild hair itching in his voice. He leaned in, took the flask from him, and said, "Hey, I know you're back with Array now - "
"Happily, two months," Kyle said, but something in the edge of his voice made Hiro tilt an ear about that. Hiro had had little to no interaction with Array, it was odd to him. The stupid underage girl had cost Kyle his ride at MIT and Kyle would never fill him in on the deets of if Kyle even bagged her the night of the party. Still, Hiro brushed it off. He smirked a little, his voice taking on a teenage cadence as he slipped into the kind of giddy locker room excitement as when they had found a good celebrity nude. "Does she wear thongs or boy shorts?"
Kyle sighed, his face falling a bit, and he pinched the bridge of his nose, saying "Hiro, dude... you are somebody's father..."
Hiro chose to ignore that, wheedling him, "Wasn't there a girl before Array not long ago too, some older white chica - your therapist? You dirty dog, you got her to lay on the couch instead, didn't you? When was the first time you had sex with her?" Kyle, growing more annoyed by Hiro's regression, shoved him a little, firmly saying "Dude, you're a FATHER."
Lightning flashed between them, bathing the entire lab in white/green, and when it faded, they were looking at each other tracked by the sound of thunder.
Hiro's eyebrow pushed up, his tone frosty and arch. "Yeah. And Kitsune is busy with the baby and isn't in the mood for sex a lot, and I'm always tired after working fifteen hours a day. What's wrong with you, man. You used to enjoy telling me stories of your conquests of those ring rats. And I was happy for you because when we were coming up together you had nothing. Now that I'm married and it's different - "
"It's different because," Kyle turned towards him, exasperated, " - Hiro, we aren't the same, man." How could he possibly explain it? Hiro's regression aside, his giddy tittilation spoke to a widening gulf between them. They maybe didn't have a lot in common anyway, coming into the ages of 18 at different backgrounds in financial and mental health. But Kyle stood there, struggling with how to explain to his "brother" that Hiro wanted stories of sexual conquests because he was trying to live vicariously through a life that made Kyle feel empty? Some of those girls he had really liked, and it seemed like every shot he'd ever had at happiness he'd blown and now it’s just him and the void forever and a shithead friend asking him about girls he got off is just reminding him of that.
Instead, he took his friend by the shoulder, and said, "You want the experiences I've had, but there are a million people who would kill for what you're doing here."
Hiro blinked, and a cut and roll of his eyes said that he knew that, it was boring and obvious to him. Kyle pressed, "I mean, aren't you proud of it, Hiro?"
Taking the flask, Hiro buried his lead in a slug of the vodka, his lips forming bitterly around the rim, "Are you happy you stuck with wrestling?"
Kyle's eyes narrowed, piqued, "What's that supposed to mean? You don't?"
Hiro's eyes did their tell of scanning the rim of the lab's walls, but his smile was froggy, his voice a rasp. "Having to protect yourself every day, having to constantly defend yourself against attacks, having some shitheap stranger that knows nothing about you come and make wildly inaccurate remarks about you? Wow who could ever not miss that. How's that promo coming against Darren Hughes, Kyle? Can you think of something different to say to him you didn't say to Gerard Angelo?"
Kyle ripped his flask back from Hiro, and the lightning flashed again, closer, more insistently, the boom of thunder more instant. It lent a sense of danger between them. "I'm proud of what I'm doing, Hiro." Kyle said, clipping off each word.
"But are you happy?" Hiro said, his tone and phrasing a sword.
"Are you?" Kyle riposted back. "I mean, look at what you have, Hiro, this lab is creating sci-fi devices that - What did you tell me this does?"
"They made a real life AI human download," Hiro said, and he was looking down at the metal chair, frowning at the curved mollusk shell, the unwieldy headset and wires leading up to machines in the ceiling. "Linked to the machines, you can download yourself into the mainframe of a computer yourself, interact with it in realtime, become a ghost in the machine. Transfers brainwaves."
"And you're in charge of that project," Kyle said with a beat of a smile, trying to placate, holding his arms out, "Something that nineteen year old program dev Hiro Sasuke would have shit his pants over."
Hiro, too, seemed to be struggling with a way to explain his own ennui, his own dissatisfaction. But Kyle was not getting it. He was marvelling at the machine, but after he put that flask back in the pocket of his ridiculous skinny hipster pants and drove his Vespa home, he would crawl into bed with a firecracker model/actress sexpot. Not return home after a long day's worth of bullshit meetings about going over budget, five angry voicemails from a cold father working in capacity as a CEO threatening to slash a division, and a frumpy, chubby wife and a fucking baby that needed more shots than - it didn't matter. Kyle couldn't understand. He squinted at the pointy haired fuck now, resentment in his eyes as Kyle was coming down the steps to look at the interface unit and the helmet. He leaned against the railing instead, looking down.
"You know you're nobody to judge me, trailer trash." Kyle looked up. "You washed out of school, you didn't even try. You threw it all away for some underage skank."
"Don't - highroad me, Richie Rich," Kyle said, his voice rising. He was playing with the helmet like a toy. "All of your schoolwork and your degrees to get daddy's approval and you were still right there selling weed in the dorms and playing COD with me."
Hiro came down a step, moving towards him. The air outside the lab was sizzling with energy. "Yes, I was motivated, I never saw any of our money making endeavors as anything but a means to an end, to push myself and pay for more classes and more degrees. You're the one who gets off on validation, so much so that you have to constantly push yourself for strangers."
"You think that that's the difference between us?" Kyle said incredulously, putting the helmet back on the arm of the chair as he turned and faced Hiro, and then firing up. "The difference between us is that you delude yourself into thinking that you're better than everyone."
Hiro, getting in Kyle's face, spit out "Man is, on the whole, less good than he wants himself to be, Carl Jung." Digging the quote out from the ethers of AP Psych, but using it to shield himself stubbornly.
"You peaked in college, rich boy, Kyle Shane," Kyle shot back, venomously.
"Yes I fucking did!" Hiro's voice was a roar, not even hidden by the sound of thunder. The lab lit up white/green again, but Hiro's voice, framed by the light, was fury. "And you peaked at another point! And you got to experience things I can never understand, and even if they're silly and childish, they were your life! And you get to be happy, and go out there on live TV and say whatever you want, and these people just - respect you, and you have - you have - "
"Why don't you look at what you have!" Kyle snarled, and the thunder came closer, more rapid. "Why don't you turn that lens back 180 and see the accomplishment of what your people are creating right here, the fucking life you made in the - "
"BECAUSE NONE OF IT IS MINE!!" Hiro's shrill cry and shove of Kyle against the bank of the equipment was desperate. "I MADE NOTHING PURPOSEFULLY FOR ME, AND I DON'T GET TO TAKE ANYTHING FOR ME, AND YOU GO AROUND GETTING ANYTHING YOU WANT - "
Kyle shoved him back, so hard that Hiro knocked the helmet off the arm of the chair, and some of the hanging wires from the ceiling pulled from their socket. "OH, FUCK YOU, PAL. FUCK YOU. STOP WHINING."
The lightning hit the building then, and the entire room bathed in white. A power coupling went, and a coil connected to a thick cable burst from a sudden surge in power coming from the roof. Sparks showered down around them. Both men yelled as the power surges continued. The white/green light faded, and the room plunged into darkness as everything cut off due to the power surge. After a second, red emergency lights and klaxons lit up the lab.
Hiro and Kyle's eyes were both screwed tightly shut and Hiro had frozen in a cringe position. Comically, Hiro's eye opened, and poked around, exploratory. When they realized there was no more danger, they both looked up, assessing.
Sparks were falling from the charred connection in the wire leading from the AI mind interface and the curved mollusk chair was blackened. Kyle put a hand to his chest, breathing hard.
"Damn, Hiro, man... I..." Kyle breathed, then laughed.
"Some scary shit, gotta have maintenance check the roof. I think that really fucked the power converters..." Hiro said automatically, analytically. Then, he let the division head mask slip, and he laughed, cursing under his breath in Japanese.
"We were getting pretty heated there before it hit..." Kyle said, looking at Hiro. Now that the tension was broken, Hiro was just looking at the cables running to the machines on the ceiling.
"Yeah... it wasn't our finest moment..."
"Hiro, I just wanted to say, though..."
Hiro turned to face him, a small, polite smile touching his lips, and saying, "Nah, ya know what. Let's leave it. Alright."
"Of course..." he said, carefully, "But... if you ever want to talk about it or anything."
"Nothing to talk about," Hiro said with a shrug. Kyle searched his face, unsure, but Hiro just stared. And smiled at him.
There was little else to be said. Hiro excused and said he had to call his lab techs. And they hugged, and did the Game Boyz handshake and two-finger press together, but rhythmically, robotically. And Kyle left him there, standing by the mollusk chair, holding a charred and sparking helmet in his hands, looking at his friend.
The lightning was still dying down, and Array was curled up on the couch, watching the news with her knees up to her chest and in one of Kyle's hoodies wrapped around her petite body. She freaked out, "Holy shit, they say this weird storm in the upper atmosphere came from somewhere in the Southwest, the lightning is causing all sorts of damage, it's like nothing they've ever seen..."
He was quiet as he sat down next to her, watching the 24/7 newscasts covering this bizarre weather. But he felt sleepy, and so tired. He excused himself, trudging into the bathroom and feeling like he had weights shackled to all of his limbs. "Babe? You okay?" He didn't affirm, he just stared curiously at himself, turning his cheek this way and that.
It was much later, as we see a house in the 1% area known as Jamaica Plain. Where houses go for over 3.45x the national median and household incomes are 1.62x the national median. Even at two stories, it feels both lavish, and trying hard to put a front of something it's supposed to be, perhaps like the man who owns it. In the bed, a still young Japanese man lays next to his wife, Kit. And she had indeed packed on some baggage. The frigid distance between their sleeping arrangements may as well be two twin beds on either side of the room, as they both lay there turned away from each other. A crackle comes across the baby monitor, a fraction second's warning before the ear-splitting wail. "Baby's crying," says his wife, waking instantly but making no move to get out of bed, her cold voice coming across to slap the husband with his duties, "You're not too tired because of work, go change the baby."
His eyes open, staring fearfully into the dark, his eyes shrinking to a pinpoint as he confronts the madness. "Oh, no."
Back in Kyle's loft...
He's back at the mirror. He has a lather of foam build around his beard, and with a stroke of a razor he clears a path. He vainly, perhaps even preening for someone like him, looks himself over. Sure, there is wear, crows feet where there wasn't back in 2010, but it's in such good shape, and it's handsome. He takes another stroke of the razor, eliminating another patch of stubble. "There are two people in every mirror," he says, recalling his Carl Jung.
He finally wipes the foam from his chin with a towel, and admires his abs. No slight pouch caused by too much coffee and stress. Firm. Kept in shape. Maybe what Hiro had said had merit, and there was a reason to keep wrestling after all. He did love the attention. And he loved having something he had won on his own.
Something he could treasure forever...
He was ruminating as he entered the bedroom. Array lay there, softly snoring, the covers up to her chin. He couldn't help himself, as he stood, looking down at her. He even plucked the comforter off of her, and smiled as he looked up her expanse of leg. Jung occurred to him again. But he shook his head.
"I'm a good man." So he told himself, and so he thought.
