The Snake, Still Venomous.

[Kyle Shane]

10x4

It emerged from it's burrow underneath an upturned root a bit at a time.

The scale (pardon the expression) of it as it peeked first it's flattened snout and it's cold, reptilian eyes out, tongue flicking the air, and it continued to come out. More than the rusty metallic triangular head or the gold eyes, the snake continued to extend, beggaring belief. The two men watched it. Kyle was the first to note that as it emerged, a layer of skin was sticking to thorny brush grass and peeling away. As the serpent undulated forward an inch at a time, more skin was peeling off of it. It worried not as it left the grey, wasted gossamer matter. It just kept coming. And James noted to him that he'd always found it amazing how nature crafted such a beautiful and terrifying metaphor.

A metaphor that, I hope, isn't so obtusely complex that Grimm is going to ask what is the DEAL with Kyle Shane and snakes.

They were going down inside the split of the massive ash tree, where the root systems were formed into a cave, oppressive and claustrophobic as the sides of the tree closed around them. Roots formed nature's steps, leading them down, not just into the center of the actual plant structure, but also down into the earth. And as they stepped down in, Kyle asked what he meant.

"An animal that size has to have been around a long time, Kyle. You saw it's movements, slower and more deliberate due to age; it's mass, having been around longer and outlasting all of the predators that tried to get it and feeding on those that it can." James laughed, easily. Kyle smiled back at the old coot, "Didn't take you for much of a nature admirer."

"I observe patterns, because we're all connected. In a way, it's what will make the beauty of the White Event so transcendant."

Kyle nodded, feeling the peace those words brought him wash over him, then looking back up the natural root stairs to the tangles of vines and moss, and the shining entrance back to the outside. "And?"

"And that snake is a remarkable qualifier for the human condition, because we are all going to be going that way."

"And you're sure it's coming, James? On the date that was foretold?" He wasn't asking to express disbelief, but still after all of this time and all of the things that had been shared between them, there were times he needed the unshakeable faith that James evinced to center his world.

"A beautiful, once in a lifetime transformation, a shedding skin for all of us," his eyes twinkled in that way they did, and he smiled mysteriously. Then he looked at Kyle, gauging him calmly. "We all change, in that way. What we witnessed with the snake just now was perfect because it illustrates breaking free of patterns that restricted it. That skin it inhabited was too small, too limiting, that staying in it would only harm the snake, even as the skin became more and more damaged. We all... change, Kyle. You," he gestured back, "You are my prime example of that, to my followers. To the Witwer twins, to David and Chris, to all of them. You are the purest example of a soul undergoing such radical change, and shedding skin."

He bristled a little under James' direct gaze, "Come off it, James..."

"No? Think about it?" He persisted, "Think of how I first came to know you, when you were trying to think of how to start your career again - start your LIFE again, in the wake of the accident, Kyle. Do you not wonder why I ask you so much about your times in Pure Class Wrestling and how you felt about the people who disrespected you, and whether your feelings have changed now? How you feel about Gerard Angelo now? Grimm, Holden Ross, Stormm, any of the people who clouded your mind and choked your voice with rage?" He stopped stepping down for a second, and Kyle regarded him somberly. How did he feel? Well, as time had worn on, he'd become... more bored, than he was angry at them.

Take Grimm for example, all of his message literally boiled down to, once you cut through the Appalachian blandness and the family backstories of Westworld extras, was a pedantic dickhead telling a frankly and shockingly boring parable that stated, "At the end of the day don't be too proud of your accomplishments because the reaper comes for us all", like literally how in all the decades Grimm has been around have more people not sighed, rolled their eyes, and just sort of patted him on the shoulder and thanked him for his meaningful insight but told him to go back to writing Poe fanfiction at his shift for Hot Topic. But angry? No...

"Because as you describe your previous decade to me more and more, I see a pattern you were stuck in. And I see a skin that was no longer comfortable for you." And that much was true. Kyle knew he had to give it to him for that. So much, especially of his 2019, was given to increasingly mounting anger that it felt like it was becoming unproductive. And people's taunts against him, even when he had a perfectly reasonable answer to counter, never seemed to matter because the criticism was so galling.

"The environment was toxic," he finally admitted, "The culture of Pure Class Wrestling, and the insular, gatekeeping, stuck in their own ways people who stuffily and smugly lorded their successes over me bristled me to the bone."

"And," James hand came up in the understood one moment gesture, "You were toxic, too. Part of growing comes from admitting when you were part of a toxic cycle, and you fed in negativity and hostility between parties where there didn't need to be. You likened it to a stray dog biting the hands stretched out to it; another apt analogy. But now, you can look back on those people from that decade, and just let it wash away. Because it no longer matters to you, and it never was enough to cause such bad feelings in the first place. Correct? Things escalated in your worst year, but you can look back at your errors now and apologize for your part in it; you can vow in who you are here and now and while you can't change who you were, you can always be better now. So... are you feeling better now, than you did then?"

For all of the peace and the calm in his heart, Kyle's brow furrowed as he looked inside of himself, and he looked at James, voice higher, "I think so..."

"And that's good enough for right now," James said, smiling and taking another root step downward, "Because none of us is ever completely finished pulling out of those uncomfortable skins..."

And then, with one last grunt, the older man stepped onto the dirt floor. The cave beneath the ash tree hollowed raised over them unbelievably, comfortably several feet over their heads, the ceiling carpeted by roots and sediment, the interior of the cave dank and fetid and marshy. Bioluminescent mushrooms laced corners, giving the dirt cave in some pale green glow.

It was all still here. Just as it had been before.

"So, what did you expect to see down here, Kyle?" his companion said, calmly. And he didn't have a straightforward answer, because he could just say the truth and say that he had seen past, present and future all at once. "What was this place to you?"

He thought again of James' snake as the chrysalis, that despite it's age and the wear and tear on it's body, the massive triangled head still emerged, peeling skin from it's damaged frame a painful square at a time until it came forth, completely reborn anew.

"This is the nest in which the snake first began to shed his old skin," he said back, looking around them at the dirt walls for the first time in years.

29.5 - 29.8

There was a long period, when walking for those extended walkabouts was just in it's infancy, that he would need to come home and sit down after about, an hour.

Sitting proved it's own ordeal. When you can't bend double at the waist without causing the iron band that's fixed itself around your midsection to flash white-hot with excruciating pain it tends to make sitting a cumbersome ordeal involving turning around, gingerly doing a squat and placing yourself with the ease of a crane. But standing, and walking, on wasted muscles not used for five weeks post accident was exhausting and the damned if you do of atrophy became the latest little frustration. He needed a distraction to keep him from his thoughts turning towards why didn't he just kill himself since he had so little left. His usual coping mechanisms of gaming, getting high or going out clubbing were not in the scope of his new normal, since the acquisition of them all encompassed using muscles either physical or mental that were currently exhausted and fried.

But that something tugged at him. The need to do... something. It is what drew him, that first month, to looking out the bay window of his across the lake and over the woods at the periphery of his property.

He watched Pure Class Wrestling's product sometimes but... hell, he remembered waking up from a sweaty, fitful sleep of feeling his bones itching in the hospital bed, and watching last year's Return to Glory, only to watch Gerard Angelo lose the World Championship he had taken from Kyle on his very first defense to Grimm, failing utterly in his proposed mission statement to change the culture of PCW for the better. Just stewing on that bitterly was enough to make Kyle crazy in his self-imposed, not doing PT on his back exile. Thinking about that, Gerard had spoken at such length about how good he was for the product, how much ratings he moved and how much Hollywood A-list influence he brought and yet when push came to shove, Gerard Angelo could not even live up to his end of the bargain. He actually let the company actively backslide, letting it retreat to safe main events between Grimm and Stormm that had probably been going on back in 2005 instead of challenging the form and upsetting the status quo. Which, he reflected even more sourly, is EXACTLY WHAT KYLE HAD BEEN TALKING ABOUT. Gerard had spent more time crying that he never received the favors Kyle had and saying things would be so different when he was on top.

And didn't that contribute to the bad feelings? Didn't that make the entire Pure Class Wrestling experience turn into bitterest ash? What, exactly, was his 380 day run at the World title amount to, when it was lost to a man who clearly wasn't ready for it? What did his continued push to innovate and try new things matter, if it was only ever going to fall on deaf ears, and the company was just going to push the same boring old bullshit? No, the more he watched Trauma in the fifth week and beyond the angrier he got, at Gerard, at David Hunter, at Holden Ross, at the new guard who consistently and ultimately wasted all of their potential with empty-ass words and not enough nerve to back up their hard work. He watched as Gerard Angelo won his second Deadly Rumble in a row, and that was almost enough to get him up off the couch and into the gym for the first time. He remembered standing, broken back forgotten, and his heart beating in excitement, only to see Gerard Angelo come face to face with Justin Michaels.

And the angry, shattering comedown that winter as he watched Michaels put Gerard down easily.

And so, as he began his walks, that was always in the back of his mind. That Gerard managed to get the spotlight he always craved, and even made his case that he was eclipsing the reign of Kyle Shane and taking the company to a new era and yet at every single opportunity to back his words up he had fucking failed. No excuses. No controversies, no referees getting knocked out or turnbuckles breaking to give him an out.

Several weeks worth of watching Trauma into it, and he found himself again feverishly walking in the woods, the scents of autumn in the air, and his ragged breath coming out in puffs of fog, yet sweat formed a tree down his back underneath his hoodie. But he walked forward on tottering pins like a madman, reflecting bitterly on the way this all shook out. Kyle Shane was able to beat Grimm decisively in his first World Title defense but Gerard Angelo-trying-to-be-a-Better-Kyle-Shane fucking failed. Kyle Shane put Stormm down a lopsided five to two times, but Gerard Angelo wins a Rumble and gets a second chance to step up and back up everything he talked about and he couldn't do it. Gerard Angelo had to recruit David Hunter and Holden Ross, two men who had been in a never-ending toilet flush circle of betraying each other and breaking up only to get back together, and they bandied about under the mission statement that they were "Overlooked" and "tired of being pushed aside".

It really is hard to take them seriously at that when they continued to win championships, receive title shots and even win Rumbles, and yet when push came to shove for them to back their words up and show why they deserved a spotlight they fell short, in places where he never did. And it was just more of the same shit Gerard was always complaining about when Kyle was there, just with extra steps, waaaah waaaah why is nobody looking at me.

That fit him right back into the state of mind he was when Chad had asked him if he intended to return. He could never find an answer. He knew no way to answer anything... but maybe the answers would come if he could just get to the itch behind his eyeballs driving him forward. If he could just find what called him out in the woods.

Weeks more passed. He had just left the house again, boots crunching into a day's old snow, thinking about Gerard and David coming out there on Trauma and cutting some irrelevant ass promo from the night before.

He was feeling hot, in fact. Despite the bite of the wind off the lake blowing into his face, pelting him with cold flakes off the trees as he trudged around it. All he could think of was the eternal merry-go-round, the never changing, toxic culture of PCW, the way they pretty much boxed out new people with a dickheadishness that baffled him, the way... didn't want to embrace new promo styles, the way Kyle's best efforts were pretty much ignored and the way misguided idiots like Gerard tried to latch on and coopt the message he started. He felt bile rising up in his gullet. And he knew, that part of the reason he kept doing it the way he liked it was because it suited him to spit his venom and drain his anger. And yet... why did that not feel... the same, anymore, as it did when he was younger?

He pulled on his sweater collar, feeling oppressive heat baking underneath it, his painfully burning injury site, that iron collar scorching underneath the scratchy fabric. He kept walking.

He wasn't even aware how dark it was until he was at the tree. It had been close to ten PM when he had clicked off Trauma in disgust at seeing his own ideas and his dissatisfaction with the PCW machine being played out by a high school drama club. It was now close to midnight, and the woods were darkened as if a shroud had dimmed even the moonlight. The snow over the underbrush looked blue, and otherworldly. And as he thought of his anger, and his failures, and PCW's unwillingness to hear what he said, and Gerard and Holden's inept and abject failure to pick up the torch and accomplish what he had managed to, their lack of ability to even shine his Chuck Taylors. He was thinking of all of this.

But he was still walking forward, to the tree. Carried here with legs on their own accord as if by muscle memory. Drawn here as if mentally guided by an unseen force.

He looked up at the tree, and he came to another conclusion.

It never was going to be the same again.

Because he was broken.

He could shit on Gerard and Holden and David all he wanted. He could shred Grimm and Stormm and Corey and High Tide for not changing with the times... for some of them literally not changing a thing about themselves or experiencing a personality update in all the intervening years but it didn't matter anymore did it? He had lost it. He had lost everything that made him who he was, and now he had lost even the ability to perform at his level. He had hit the wall. He had flamed out.

And now, here he was. Here came the self pity, that made him think this was going to end in him sucking on a tailpipe when all was said and done...

He couldn't come back.

He never could.

Because he had fundamentally destroyed everything worthwhile, he had broken it beyond repair. He'd even left himself a joke in the breaking, an afterthought, a trivial pursuit question, a "Used to Be". He wasn't the present of PCW, if Gerard and Holden weren't the future either, he definitely was not who he was. Broken. Dusted. Finished. Done.

The tree defied him, though.

He squinted his eyes at the blued ash, narrowing his gaze at it in the curiously overcast darkness. The beating heart within the great split blazed at him like a pinprick of light in a faraway dark ocean, daring him. Asking him. Are you? Are you?

If that was true, why did you walk all this way?

Why did you come out of your comfortable house?

Why do you venture out night after night, haunted and grasping for something on the tip of your tongue?

Why can't you just forget it all and languish inside, in self pity, wasted away to nothing?

Why have you been watching the words of these people of the past if you feel like you can not compete with them anymore? Why do you think of this pastime if you don't think you can do it? Why does it never leave your mind if you have no intention of coming back? Why do you crave it?

He felt these questions in his chest, and he felt his lip peeling back from his teeth, baring a determined, feral grimace, because the questions managed to be both objective and removed and yet tauntingly direct, daring him to step forward. The heavy parka was soaked with sweat, his long hair plastered against his forehead, and he gritted his teeth. As he stepped into the split of the tree, his coat sleeve caught on the jagged, mossy spears that formed it's maw, tearing the nylon, and Kyle finally felt the restriction of the coat more than he could bear. As he cautiously stepped in, he stripped the first layer, the parka off, and threw it behind him, finding that there were a series of descending roots forming a ladder step, leading down not into the center of the tree but into the center of the earth, and as he removed his layers, he shed, slithering through the narrow walkway and descending into the belly of the beast.

He shed layer by layer. Shirt, boots. Snow pants. The sheen of sweat coursing down his back chilled as the cool, damp cave air touched it... and his own weight lightened as he went down into the cave.

And as he shed the skins he'd ventured out in, in his anger and self pity and pride, the cave conjured a memory he'd thought long buried, of a part of his past that few ever got to see, a time before when he had felt broken and unable to get up and try again.

The image coalesced into his mind as it did around the dirt walls around him.

10x2

A much younger man was sitting in the uncomfortable chair next to a hospital bed. Stick thin, pimply, his auburn hair a messy near Jewfro of waves, he was wrapped in a HORSE the Band hoodie and a t-shirt with a Galaga pixel ship, and his youthful face was puckered in a tormented, emo tremble. The young man, Kyle Shane before he became Kyle Shane, was sitting in Mercy General yards from MIT, currently recuperating from his own injury, and looking at the face of the young man currently laying supine across from him. He hung his head, looking at Manuel Ortez, the poor lost and forever would be forgotten third Game Boy. Erased by time, written off with a quippy joke in a Game Boyz promo, the reality of the third member of their troupe lay here, a breathing tube down his throat, from a bed he hadn't moved from weeks in. And there, beside him, was Kyle. Completely at a loss. In this spring of 2010, the Game Boyz were in a state of constant flux; Hiro was being booked as a singles competitor, and even in the mix for the Intercontinental title more than not, and on the very last show before the final Warriors Pride event, they had introduced Manuel to pop the boys.

How had that gone? Oh, right, Lion had chokeslammed him off the stage.

The sickening angle that Manuel had laid in at the foot of the stage haunted young Kyle. He was still not used to seeing human carnage, flesh bent at the angle Manuel's leg had been turned as he laid among the rubble of tables. And Hiro had fought Lion to the back, but Kyle was reduced to little more than the fodder for jokes in their promos.

He fingered the crutches propped against his uncomfortable chair silently. The real truth is that Kyle had torn his ACL weeks back, and Hiro, with nothing else to do, had gone on.

But Hiro moved on without him.

He thought, bitterly, about that. How wrestling... moved on, kept moving, when Kyle was injured, and all they could do was come up with a storyline reason to paper over it and move on, hoping people forgot.

"C'n you get me some water..." Manuel croaked, and Kyle startled, not even aware his young friend was awake. Coming to himself, Kyle put the crutch under his armpit to support him awkwardly as he poured the younger kid something to drink. Manny accepted the cup under his chin gratefully, and Kyle tipped it back with care.

"What are you doing here? I thought tonight was the airing of Warrior's Pride..." the last ever IEW pay-per-view, billed then as a hiatus as the president did some restructuring... according to the bill on the message board, it was only going to be a few months, but everyone who had shown up backstage had given it so much of a funeral dirge atmosphere; they knew it was the end. Kyle shrugged, and said, "It's over, man... curtain closed. It's over for the IEW." Did Hiro win through to the main event for the Game Boyz, did he claim the last prize, well, Kyle had not elected to watch. He didn't know what to say, even. He just looked off into the middle distance, then when he turned back to Manuel, he just unfolded his hands, held them out like I don't know. Don't know where we should go from here, don't know if I should hang it up, don't know any of it.

They were silent, and there was no sound in the room except the machine assisting the crippled boy breathing. "Manuel... I'm... legit, so sorry, dude..."

"Sorry for what?" He scoffed, "Dude, for one night, I got taken out of working fries at Jack in the Box and I got to be one of the Game Boyz, that's more than anyone can say in a lifetime..." Manuel was beaming for those few seconds, and then he began coughing. Kyle's hurt expression crumbled and he wanted to say, but dude, you were only a Game Boy so Hiro could make a shitty joke about how we were going to be like the Captain Planet group; you literally got injured because of us and we covered it up in the next promo by having you "get shot out of a cannon into a pile of Ultimate Warrior dolls" so Hiro wouldn't have to speak about you again... you were only ever a joke in the endless Game Boyz machine... but Manuel's kind, friendly eyes remained fast on Kyle, and he weakly patted Kyle with the only fingers he could get to work.

"I know... that I must have seemed... like a joke..." Manuel said, laboring through the shortness of breath that not being able to feel his lower half was bringing. "But doesn't... isn't the entire dream... of us... of anyone..."

"For us to be able to say... I was here..."

"That I mattered... that people will remember me?"

The smile, the fond, slightly deluded confidence that broke through that wounded smile brought Kyle's heart shattering around him. Because that was all Manuel wanted... but... he wasn't created to be remembered... how could he ever hope to mean something to a legacy, how could he hold out hope that anyone would remember him? As Kyle sat back in the seat, at a loss for words, he held the crutch, looking at his braced knee... and realizing there, but for the grace of God, went him. And his own desire to be remembered in the long run was mirrored, right there, in that smiling, paralyzed boy.

"So now what will you do?" Manny asked.

"Me?" He was flabbergasted, "Manuel, I'm... done. I tore my ACL, and I've become... a second to Hiro's singles promos like... I have nothing I can contribute, I have nothing I can say anymore... even if IEW opened back up next week with another Mayhem, what good would a pathetic, wasted nothing do? I'm... 20 years old and I'm at the end of my career, I - "

"Hey..." Manuel's voice took on a concerned edge, "Hey... stop that... you aren't done just... because the IEW is done... you aren't done... because of a bum knee... you're hurt, and... you're at a crossroads..."

"But maybe this is an opportunity. Maybe you can find... somewhere else, not IEW... and try it on your own, when your leg heals..."

"But... I have an injury... if I talk about it... if I let people know I'm hurt..."

"Yes... some unoriginal, backwards people are going to sneer that you came back from injury too early. Or they may say some dumb shit about how they're going to cripple you for life. It's just... TALK, Kyle..."

(Sound familiar Grimmy?)

"You can't... get into your own head so far... that you think you'll never recover... you're... HURT", he wheezed, but he turned slightly, using all of the muscle in the part of his shoulder and arm that functioned to flip him and push him onto his side enough that he fixed Kyle with a stare... "But you, are NOT broken. You need... to find... the edge to want to get back up. Every time you're kicked down. You get... back up."

"ALWAYS... get back up."

Manuel returned to his back, breathing heavily. "You work on that, and I'll... work on walking again. We... work together... we can do this. We aren't done yet, Kyle..."

Kyle nodded, and blew out a breath.

He edged himself up on his crutch. He was not done yet. No matter what the rehab on his knee would entail, no matter who threatened to put him back on the shelf. And, what's more, he felt the first kindled fires of a deep seated anger coming back in to his gut. Hurt, but not broken. Second place, but only in his current configuration. He had to step out of that mold. He had to... had to shed that skin, like a snake, and become something else, to become the only Game Boy people remembered, somewhere else.

"You gave me some good insight tonight, my friend..." He leaned in, and touched the top of Manuel's head gently, tenderly. "You rest now, I'll come back and visit you. And I swear, Kyle Shane and Manuel Ortez are gonna pair up and knock this shit out. Nobody is ever going to forget your name as long as I can help it," he told the forever forgotten third member of his college troupe.

"I won't forget you!" he called again, as he pointed excitedly at Manny on his way out the door.

The hospital room was quiet except for the sound and beep of Manuel's breathing machines and heart monitor for the longest time.

Finally, in a voice cracking with pain, he squeaked out "Nurse can you get me some MORPHINE, god DAMN."

10x4

How long they were down in the interior of the cave, he could not have said.

Whether any of the recollections happened to them both, were simply in his mind, or were projected by the cave under the ash tree, he could not have said.

But both he and James picked their way back up the stair-like ascending roots, feeling every bit of their combined 100 years, he reflected much on the things he had flashed back on, the lessons that twenty, that thirty had imparted on him about the importance of shedding who you are. He had to wonder, if maybe James' influence had fueled the flashbacks, had shown him what he needed to see... and therefore if the power lay in this place itself, or in the man breathing by his side as they clambered over vines.

And as they exited, they found, winding through the roots near the base of the tree, loose pieces of dried, white snakeskin, shed all over, beggaring belief in size and mass. Kyle searched the brush nearby, and then he startled when he came across a tail the size of a branch.

The snake began at one end of the deer, and had wrapped itself around it. The deer, itself, was of a decent size, but the massive, near otherworldly serpent dwarfed it. It's gold eyes flashed in the dark. A creature from deep in the tree.

It had sank it's fangs deep into the deer's neck, and was holding on.

"Now, we see the other half of the equation," James mused cryptically. Kyle eyed him, not sure what James was getting at. "James... you said, earlier, that shedding out of your old skin was a symbol of growth, of removing your own toxicity from your life and becoming a more realized person. Doesn't this... contradict that metaphor, if the snake is just going to turn around and bite someone's head off?"

"Oh, make no mistake, Kyle, the snake still has his venom in reserve when he needs to..." James shrugged, and the unspoken declaration was that we all have that in our secret hearts. "The snake did free itself from the skin that held it back, and shed what it needed in order to grow. But at the end of the day, it's nature is still be a snake... and snakes have venom. I see no contradiction."

"Do you?"

Kyle started, but he looked at the animals, wrangling in a nature display of death and violence, thrashing around as the deer was in it's throes. Then his jaw firmed. Because he saw the snake's determination in it's reptilian eye as it held it's fangs in. It was going to hold on until death, too.

"No, I guess I don't, at that."