Post by Loki on Sept 22, 2020 22:17:38 GMT -5
FIVE YEARS AGO
“I know it’s still very painful, Mr. Noble but we need you to hold as still as you can.”
Brandon wanted to scream at the twenty-something X-Ray tech, he wanted to curse and rail that of course it hurt. His entire career, much like his collar bone, was shattered beyond recognition. If he had had any energy left, he might have. As hellfire raged from his neck, down his arm, and all through his chest Brandon did his best to lie still as he had been instructed.
Several loud noises later and the plucky young technician came back into the main room, offering his help. Brandon waved him away and rolled to his uninjured side, pushing up with the one good arm he still had. The door to the X-Ray suite opened and a nurse, a different one from the one that had originally brought him down came in with a wheelchair. Brandon slumped into the chair. He could feel the pity and concern radiating from their eyes. He hated them for it.
Brandon was taken to a private room and hooked up to an IV. Anxiety gripped him as he watched the attending nurse set a small vial on a tray and begin to prepare a syringe.
“What is that?” He demanded, “What are you trying to give me?”
“This is Fentanyl, the attending Doctor ordered it to help you manage the pain since you’re still taking the Oxycodone.” the Nurse explained.
Brandon shook his head violently; the action caused a fresh wave of pain to explode in his shoulder. His vision swam, “No, no narcotics. I’m an...” pain stole the words from his mouth.
“It’s okay, Hun,” the Nurse tried to reassure him, “this will help with the pain.” She leaned over to grab the mainline.
For a gloriously moment, the panic exploding in Brandon’s lizard brain overrode the pain response. He swept his arm up, knocking the syringe out of her hand. The clarity did not last as the sudden movement caused his weight to shift, putting pressure on his injured shoulder. He thrashed in pain as the nurse jumped back.
“I need some help in here!” she called urgently.
Strong hands tried to press him back into the bed as his back arched in agony. Every time he moved it made the pain exponentially worse. Every time the pain worsened, his body spasmed. Through blurry eyes, he saw two more vaguely person-shaped forms run into the room, and suddenly two hands became six. A third human-ish blur entered the room holding something in their hand. They stood to the side and Brandon vaguely felt the line in his arm gently pull. He wanted to fight back, to pull away but the pain left him a gibbering mess, unable to form a coherent thought let alone a coherent sentence.
Brandon was still trying to form the words to object when the pain finally short-circuited his brain. The last thing he felt before slipping into the merciful blackness of unconsciousness was a hauntingly familiar warmth spreading through his veins.
TODAY
I grunted with exertion as gravity fought against me. Well, gravity and the six hundred plus pounds I had loaded onto the bar. I rolled the bar forward and brought it back to my shins, braced my abs, and pulled the slack out of my arms. In one slow, but relatively smooth motion I pulled all six hundred and twenty-five pounds up and held it at the top. Working back from a count of twenty, I got about halfway through when I felt my grip give out and weights crashed to the floor.
I looked around sheepishly but either no one noticed, or no one cared. Not that it mattered but I was betting on the latter. This tiny, out of the way, shoebox of a gym was a favorite for people who lifted serious weights. The kind of people who looked at my six twenty-five and thought that’d make for a good warm-up. I set about unloading my weights and reracking them, after all, happiness is a properly racked weight set.
The iron plates felt good in my hands. They were like me; old, solid, and a little bit rusty. I could have easily afforded the membership at some shiny new corporate gym that was filled with endless miles of the latest and greatest fitness equipment, spunky young personal trainers, and a fully stocked juice bar. Hell, I could have just worked out at home; my building had a perfectly respectable exercise room.
No, I liked this place specifically because it was an out of the way, shoebox. No one here recognized or cared who I was outside of did I wipe down my bench and put my weights away? No one interrupted me mid-lift to ask for autographs or selfies. Granted those were getting rarer outside of the gym as well. One other reason I vastly preferred this place to any corporate globo-gym I’d ever been in was the lack of screens. Pure Class Wrestling might have a global audience, but at its core it was still a local promotion. As such, advertisements for Deadly Intentions were all over the airwaves. I wasn’t so arrogant as to believe I didn’t need to think about it. I just didn’t want to think about it right this minute.
Have you ever had someone tell you not to think about pink elephants? What happens? You immediately start thinking about pink elephants. I didn’t want to think about PCW right now. Because I thought about not wanting to think about it, I of course ended up thinking about it? Rick Majors put me through my paces less than a week ago. No, he’d beaten me, completely and utterly.
It had been all I could do to get some minor strikes in while Major’s had floated from move to move with impunity. Only sheer stupidity, pronounced stubbornness, had kept me from being pinned until even that hadn’t been enough. Of course, Major’s hadn’t beaten me on his own, I’d given him plenty of help over the course of the match. A diving elbow from the apron? Did I suddenly think I was some kind of god damn spot monkey?
“Stupid,” I muttered to myself.
I guess I ought to send a thank you text to Holden Ross. Thanks to his interference I could still boast that I was unpinned since coming back. Yay, me. I wasn’t operating under any kind of delusion that he’d done it as some kind of favor to me. He had issues with Majors and I was just kind of there. I’d been caught in the middle of enough ring clearing brawls to know when a hasty retreat was in order.
I’d also been involved in enough ambushes on the ramp to have a sense of when they were coming. And I’d been right, sort of. Shane was an opportunist, that much was obvious to anyone who watched the man. I’d fully expected him to make his presence felt at some point during my retreat up the ramp. Of course, I’d also expected that to be done via fisticuffs. That hadn’t happened.
I’m sure if we’d stayed in each other’s faces it probably would have ended in a fight, as it were it’d been mostly pointed threats and a little shoving. I didn’t fully understand how this new breed of PCW Wrestler thought or how they’d react in a given situation. It was times like this I missed monsters like Billy Sadistic and Eira, at least I’d known how they would generally react.
Of course, some of the old-timers were still around; Christ, two of them were fighting for the World Title on Sunday right after Shane and I. But as much as I wanted to think this was still my PCW of yesteryear, it wasn’t and it never would be again. So I guess I had two choices. I could either get hip to the youth or I could leave that big hunk of gold with the front office and sail off into obscurity again.
“Or there’s always option three,” I said to no one but us chickens.
Option three was I kept on keeping on, but I did things my way. It worked for guys like Grimm who hadn’t changed since the day he shambled out of the void and into PCW.
But would old school work against a guy like Shane? He had nearly as many accolades in PCW as I did. He was a Grand Slam Champion in his own right, even if he hadn’t held the International Title. Hard to hold a belt when they keep merging it or retiring it. He also had one thing I didn’t have, something that had eluded me several times in my career. The guy had an Icemann Invitational win. The best I had to show in that regard was two runner up spots.
Let it be known that I’d never once claimed Shane wasn’t competent because he was. More than competent, the kid was damned good at what he did.
But the question remained, rattling like a marble in an empty skull, would an old school approach work against someone like Kyle Shane? Was there even room in PCW for that approach anymore? My brain marbles rattled back to thoughts of Grimm. Earlier my internal monologue had used him as an example of never changing but that wasn’t true. Grimm had always been a tough, scary, bastard. But over the years he’d morphed from Kentucky Wildman to cult leader to pure eldritch horror to whatever he was doing now.
Shane was unquestionably new school. He’d rather push your buttons and goad you into making the first move than make it yourself. At least that was the read I’d gotten off him. I’d gone up against people who could offer a Master Class in getting inside your opponent's head and manipulating them. But every single one of them could still be counted on to behave a certain way At Trauma he’d made his point against Texas Tim and Razor Blade in a tag promised to do the same to me and fucked off to the back leaving Crazy Boy in a handicap match. It was an attitude I couldn’t really comprehend.
I finished reracking my plates and put the now empty bar back in the hooks. Around me, various pieces of sentient beef went about their business, unbothered by the internal musings of an aging professional wrestler. I kind of envied them for it. Old school? New school? Was there even room in this new generation of PCW for someone like me? Apparently, I get really existential when I deadlift.
FIVE YEARS AGO
Everything was fuzzy when Brandon finally woke up. He ran a sandpaper and cotton covered tongue over his dry, cracked lips. It didn’t help. After half a century his eyes started to focus, bringing a technicolor rainbow of stimulus screaming at him. It was all so overwhelming. Fighting back his rising gorge, Brandon blinked away the rainbow assault and as the world faded into a more manageable color pallet of browns and greys, he took stock. The arm rested limply against his chest in a padded sling, a marked improvement, from the previous evening.
One shattered collarbone that mercifully did not cause his brain to short circuit at the moment. It still hurt but the fading narcotic warmth in his system still had enough of a kick to dull it from roaring hellfire to manageable inconvenience. That would change very soon. He needed more of that wonderful venom they had pumped him full of. He knew why he needed it and made a mental note to beat himself up over it later.
One crushing sense of ennui as he realized that his career was most likely over. A broken collar bone was a very recoverable injury, it wasn’t even the first time he’d suffered one. In high school, a million years ago, he’d suffered a similar injury wrestling in his Junior year. It was healed in time for him to make the varsity baseball team the following Spring.
A lost sense of purpose took significantly longer to recover from. That was the secondary pain he was fighting. It was one that could not be dulled by sweet, sweet opioids. How did you bounce back from something like that? Could you bounce back from that?
Brandon leaned back into the raised bed, closing his eyes. “Have your existential crisis later,” he grumbled to himself, “instead of worrying about what might be and what you don’t have, focus on what you do have and build from there.”
Brandon was creating his mental checklist when he noticed the weight against his legs for the first time. He looked to the end of the bed and his heart simultaneously leaped into his throat and plummeted to the floors below. There, asleep, at the foot of his bed was his former apprentice.
“Oh,” he started, “oh no, no no”
Brandon swallowed hard, fighting back tears of panic. She could not see him like this, not after everything they had been through. He brought his good arm across his body and using the injured arm, slowly, excruciatingly extracted the needle from the top of his hand. He had to go, there was no other choice.
“I know it’s still very painful, Mr. Noble but we need you to hold as still as you can.”
Brandon wanted to scream at the twenty-something X-Ray tech, he wanted to curse and rail that of course it hurt. His entire career, much like his collar bone, was shattered beyond recognition. If he had had any energy left, he might have. As hellfire raged from his neck, down his arm, and all through his chest Brandon did his best to lie still as he had been instructed.
Several loud noises later and the plucky young technician came back into the main room, offering his help. Brandon waved him away and rolled to his uninjured side, pushing up with the one good arm he still had. The door to the X-Ray suite opened and a nurse, a different one from the one that had originally brought him down came in with a wheelchair. Brandon slumped into the chair. He could feel the pity and concern radiating from their eyes. He hated them for it.
Brandon was taken to a private room and hooked up to an IV. Anxiety gripped him as he watched the attending nurse set a small vial on a tray and begin to prepare a syringe.
“What is that?” He demanded, “What are you trying to give me?”
“This is Fentanyl, the attending Doctor ordered it to help you manage the pain since you’re still taking the Oxycodone.” the Nurse explained.
Brandon shook his head violently; the action caused a fresh wave of pain to explode in his shoulder. His vision swam, “No, no narcotics. I’m an...” pain stole the words from his mouth.
“It’s okay, Hun,” the Nurse tried to reassure him, “this will help with the pain.” She leaned over to grab the mainline.
For a gloriously moment, the panic exploding in Brandon’s lizard brain overrode the pain response. He swept his arm up, knocking the syringe out of her hand. The clarity did not last as the sudden movement caused his weight to shift, putting pressure on his injured shoulder. He thrashed in pain as the nurse jumped back.
“I need some help in here!” she called urgently.
Strong hands tried to press him back into the bed as his back arched in agony. Every time he moved it made the pain exponentially worse. Every time the pain worsened, his body spasmed. Through blurry eyes, he saw two more vaguely person-shaped forms run into the room, and suddenly two hands became six. A third human-ish blur entered the room holding something in their hand. They stood to the side and Brandon vaguely felt the line in his arm gently pull. He wanted to fight back, to pull away but the pain left him a gibbering mess, unable to form a coherent thought let alone a coherent sentence.
Brandon was still trying to form the words to object when the pain finally short-circuited his brain. The last thing he felt before slipping into the merciful blackness of unconsciousness was a hauntingly familiar warmth spreading through his veins.
TODAY
I grunted with exertion as gravity fought against me. Well, gravity and the six hundred plus pounds I had loaded onto the bar. I rolled the bar forward and brought it back to my shins, braced my abs, and pulled the slack out of my arms. In one slow, but relatively smooth motion I pulled all six hundred and twenty-five pounds up and held it at the top. Working back from a count of twenty, I got about halfway through when I felt my grip give out and weights crashed to the floor.
I looked around sheepishly but either no one noticed, or no one cared. Not that it mattered but I was betting on the latter. This tiny, out of the way, shoebox of a gym was a favorite for people who lifted serious weights. The kind of people who looked at my six twenty-five and thought that’d make for a good warm-up. I set about unloading my weights and reracking them, after all, happiness is a properly racked weight set.
The iron plates felt good in my hands. They were like me; old, solid, and a little bit rusty. I could have easily afforded the membership at some shiny new corporate gym that was filled with endless miles of the latest and greatest fitness equipment, spunky young personal trainers, and a fully stocked juice bar. Hell, I could have just worked out at home; my building had a perfectly respectable exercise room.
No, I liked this place specifically because it was an out of the way, shoebox. No one here recognized or cared who I was outside of did I wipe down my bench and put my weights away? No one interrupted me mid-lift to ask for autographs or selfies. Granted those were getting rarer outside of the gym as well. One other reason I vastly preferred this place to any corporate globo-gym I’d ever been in was the lack of screens. Pure Class Wrestling might have a global audience, but at its core it was still a local promotion. As such, advertisements for Deadly Intentions were all over the airwaves. I wasn’t so arrogant as to believe I didn’t need to think about it. I just didn’t want to think about it right this minute.
Have you ever had someone tell you not to think about pink elephants? What happens? You immediately start thinking about pink elephants. I didn’t want to think about PCW right now. Because I thought about not wanting to think about it, I of course ended up thinking about it? Rick Majors put me through my paces less than a week ago. No, he’d beaten me, completely and utterly.
It had been all I could do to get some minor strikes in while Major’s had floated from move to move with impunity. Only sheer stupidity, pronounced stubbornness, had kept me from being pinned until even that hadn’t been enough. Of course, Major’s hadn’t beaten me on his own, I’d given him plenty of help over the course of the match. A diving elbow from the apron? Did I suddenly think I was some kind of god damn spot monkey?
“Stupid,” I muttered to myself.
I guess I ought to send a thank you text to Holden Ross. Thanks to his interference I could still boast that I was unpinned since coming back. Yay, me. I wasn’t operating under any kind of delusion that he’d done it as some kind of favor to me. He had issues with Majors and I was just kind of there. I’d been caught in the middle of enough ring clearing brawls to know when a hasty retreat was in order.
I’d also been involved in enough ambushes on the ramp to have a sense of when they were coming. And I’d been right, sort of. Shane was an opportunist, that much was obvious to anyone who watched the man. I’d fully expected him to make his presence felt at some point during my retreat up the ramp. Of course, I’d also expected that to be done via fisticuffs. That hadn’t happened.
I’m sure if we’d stayed in each other’s faces it probably would have ended in a fight, as it were it’d been mostly pointed threats and a little shoving. I didn’t fully understand how this new breed of PCW Wrestler thought or how they’d react in a given situation. It was times like this I missed monsters like Billy Sadistic and Eira, at least I’d known how they would generally react.
Of course, some of the old-timers were still around; Christ, two of them were fighting for the World Title on Sunday right after Shane and I. But as much as I wanted to think this was still my PCW of yesteryear, it wasn’t and it never would be again. So I guess I had two choices. I could either get hip to the youth or I could leave that big hunk of gold with the front office and sail off into obscurity again.
“Or there’s always option three,” I said to no one but us chickens.
Option three was I kept on keeping on, but I did things my way. It worked for guys like Grimm who hadn’t changed since the day he shambled out of the void and into PCW.
But would old school work against a guy like Shane? He had nearly as many accolades in PCW as I did. He was a Grand Slam Champion in his own right, even if he hadn’t held the International Title. Hard to hold a belt when they keep merging it or retiring it. He also had one thing I didn’t have, something that had eluded me several times in my career. The guy had an Icemann Invitational win. The best I had to show in that regard was two runner up spots.
Let it be known that I’d never once claimed Shane wasn’t competent because he was. More than competent, the kid was damned good at what he did.
But the question remained, rattling like a marble in an empty skull, would an old school approach work against someone like Kyle Shane? Was there even room in PCW for that approach anymore? My brain marbles rattled back to thoughts of Grimm. Earlier my internal monologue had used him as an example of never changing but that wasn’t true. Grimm had always been a tough, scary, bastard. But over the years he’d morphed from Kentucky Wildman to cult leader to pure eldritch horror to whatever he was doing now.
Shane was unquestionably new school. He’d rather push your buttons and goad you into making the first move than make it yourself. At least that was the read I’d gotten off him. I’d gone up against people who could offer a Master Class in getting inside your opponent's head and manipulating them. But every single one of them could still be counted on to behave a certain way At Trauma he’d made his point against Texas Tim and Razor Blade in a tag promised to do the same to me and fucked off to the back leaving Crazy Boy in a handicap match. It was an attitude I couldn’t really comprehend.
I finished reracking my plates and put the now empty bar back in the hooks. Around me, various pieces of sentient beef went about their business, unbothered by the internal musings of an aging professional wrestler. I kind of envied them for it. Old school? New school? Was there even room in this new generation of PCW for someone like me? Apparently, I get really existential when I deadlift.
FIVE YEARS AGO
Everything was fuzzy when Brandon finally woke up. He ran a sandpaper and cotton covered tongue over his dry, cracked lips. It didn’t help. After half a century his eyes started to focus, bringing a technicolor rainbow of stimulus screaming at him. It was all so overwhelming. Fighting back his rising gorge, Brandon blinked away the rainbow assault and as the world faded into a more manageable color pallet of browns and greys, he took stock. The arm rested limply against his chest in a padded sling, a marked improvement, from the previous evening.
One shattered collarbone that mercifully did not cause his brain to short circuit at the moment. It still hurt but the fading narcotic warmth in his system still had enough of a kick to dull it from roaring hellfire to manageable inconvenience. That would change very soon. He needed more of that wonderful venom they had pumped him full of. He knew why he needed it and made a mental note to beat himself up over it later.
One crushing sense of ennui as he realized that his career was most likely over. A broken collar bone was a very recoverable injury, it wasn’t even the first time he’d suffered one. In high school, a million years ago, he’d suffered a similar injury wrestling in his Junior year. It was healed in time for him to make the varsity baseball team the following Spring.
A lost sense of purpose took significantly longer to recover from. That was the secondary pain he was fighting. It was one that could not be dulled by sweet, sweet opioids. How did you bounce back from something like that? Could you bounce back from that?
Brandon leaned back into the raised bed, closing his eyes. “Have your existential crisis later,” he grumbled to himself, “instead of worrying about what might be and what you don’t have, focus on what you do have and build from there.”
Brandon was creating his mental checklist when he noticed the weight against his legs for the first time. He looked to the end of the bed and his heart simultaneously leaped into his throat and plummeted to the floors below. There, asleep, at the foot of his bed was his former apprentice.
“Oh,” he started, “oh no, no no”
Brandon swallowed hard, fighting back tears of panic. She could not see him like this, not after everything they had been through. He brought his good arm across his body and using the injured arm, slowly, excruciatingly extracted the needle from the top of his hand. He had to go, there was no other choice.
