Post by CM Poor on May 27, 2016 9:38:51 GMT -5
"Step aside, Cam.
This ain't your fight.
Life ain't fair sometimes, brother. Just the way it is - bum roll of the dice, sh*t deal at the table, whatever you wanna call it. You've been thrown dead in the of a real hot sh*t storm that's about to pick up steam real bad, real soon, and I ain't usually a nice enough guy give a f*ck one way or the other, but even us cold sons of b*tches know a good kid when we see one, and brother, you're probably about as good as they come - talented, athletic, smart, all that good sh*t, so it really breaks a chip off the ol' heart to see a smart kid like you get ruined seven ways to Sunday on account of you gettin' yourself involved in somethin' that doesn't very well involve you.
Now, I've worked a lot of jobs in my life and I've been called by the titles of many a trade, but I've never caught myself running any sort of candy shop, and as such, I ain't much for the business of sugar coatin' sh*t. Bad for your teeth, bad for your brain. Better to just lay it out there, make sure everyone's on the same page.
You're an afterthought, kid.
That's not any real sort of detriment to you or anything, it's just a bad break this go 'round, y'know? I mean, if you're really in a dancin' mood, like you've already got your taps on and you're all geared up to tango, then I got no problem lacin' up my boots and tappin' all across your face if that's what's gonna make you happy. I just can't see fussin' over the mackerel when there's a f*ckin tuna bro right over there, right? Why go for the f*ckin' hook when some other dumb sh*t fish is already rippin' cheeks off it?
You're a bright son of a b*tch right? You know that, statistically, we're bound to do this thing one way or the other, one of these days - why bother today. I got bigger fish to fry, you're coming off a hot streak putting the boots to the WFWF's resident paper champion - why mess that up, man? That's change, man, and that ride is rollin' in strong sh*t. Why would anyone wanna get in the way of that sh*t, knowing they're just gonna get bowled over and that the water's a hell of a lot calmer coming off the backside? Tell you what I'd do, kid as bold and as bright as you. I'd sit this one out - chalk it up to the rarest of rare moments of heartfelt sincerity outta ol' David Brennan, tell yourself that even a sh*tty ass broken clock is right at least twice a day - and just take a breather. Loss don't mean much in the scheme of things if a guy can't even been seen getting his ass kicked, right? Let the champ handle this one - he's in for a rough road ahead anyway, and I'm gonna get a lot more kicks out of it if he's the guy taking a drop off of his own momentum and he's gotta do it all by his lonesome, his stupid name society notwithstanding. Figure this - you ride that high, bootin' the Dex so hard that he can't even come out for another whirl this time around, and take that sh*t right up to the SuperBrawl, brother. By then, I'll have myself a shiny new toy that all the kids in the neighborhood'll wanna get their grubby f*ckin' paws on, and you and I? We can have ourselves a little one-two shuffle then. Really give 'em somethin' to talk about, y'know?
I mean, I'll still stomp yards all up and down your face, but sh*t, it should hurt a little less if you've actually got a horse in the f*ckin' race, right Cam?
Think about it, kid. Ball's in your court.
*****
"What'll you have?"
It's been said that life flies by in an instant. Cautionary tales from here to the end of time have been woven to advise those of us too caught up in the day to day turmoils of our lives to take pause and absorb the overwhelming magnitude of the fact that beyond our own windows looking out upon the world around us and the minutia of our lives, an entirely different and yet equally momentous world that we barely get a passing moment to glimpse is passing us by every time we cross paths with another living being. It's rare, to say the least, that any of us bother to step back and wonder, amid the circumstances that already bog us down day to day, be they family, work, personal matters, or otherwise, just what it is that floats in and out of the minds of those that we otherwise see as arbitrary as mere passerby on a city street. Most often, our interactions with the people we may see every day that we perceive to be little more than strangers are so fleeting and brief that the sheer thought that there could be anything more to the nameless faces that come in and out of our world on a daily basis is far and beyond more overwhelming a notion than any of us would ever care to entertain.
As such, to those who in the days, weeks, months, and years to know them as a cohesive unit, the mere chance encounter that led a spirited young bartender by the name of Natalie Collins to happen across a walking vial of anger and sullen volatility by the name of David Brennan was nothing short of the immeasurable substance by which only fairy tales yearning to be animated into hyper driven profit factories could possibly be made of.
"Just a tonic water with lime, if you have it, thanks."
Most any other night, Natalie's patrons were those very same nameless, often times in the dimly lit atmosphere of the hole in the wall dive that so many wasted youth would grow to call home as dejected byproducts of a tumultuous upbringing, faceless strangers that came as quickly as they went into and out of her life, staying only as long it took for the taps to run dry and for the heaps of cash to plunk themselves down across her finely polished counter. In the years since she'd first lied about her age to find her way behind the bar, hoping to find as little a degrading manner as possible to scrap up what little cash she could, Natalie had probably heard the words 'Pabst Blue Ribbon' articulated with just about every waking emotion under the sun, from raucously intoxicated exuberance to harrowingly sullen heartbreak, and all degrees of medium in between. Though marginally young when put up beside the wide berth of clientele who still found their solace in the darkened corners of a seedy, dilapidated punk bar, she figured she's been at this game long to enough have seen and heard just about all of it, and yet, there was something about the way this hardened, seemingly shell of a man placed his order, an anomaly in itself on a night when the music blared to levels nearly inaudible and the taps of cheap domestics flowed like overrun rivers. There was almost an understood defeat to his voice, as if he longed for something sturdier while finding himself unwillingly complacent with the fact that he'd forever be resigned to this altogether more sobering refreshment.
Suddenly, in an instant that felt itself like an eternity as the words crawled out of his mouth and pierced the overwhelmed drone of the music, the hurt emanating from his eyes that told all but the brief summation of the story of a man who actually HAD seen and heard it all, Natalie found herself inexplicably drawn, not so much longing as she was needing to hear everything that troubled the man who sat across the bar from her, dejectedly ordering a perfectly droll, virgin concoction and doing next to nothing to mask his concerted defeat over the matter.
"Sorry to hear it. Which of these sterling beacons of sophistication stuck you with the wheel tonight?"
It's not that she was at all unfamiliar with the very notion that some men simply chose to opt out of the lubricants that kept this little nothing dive alive and breathing seven days a week for any number of reasons on a sliding scale of severity. It just wasn't the norm here. Years later, as Natalie wallowed in the depths of outright agony that serving that fateful seltzer would come to impart upon her, she tried with every ounce of her being to convince herself that it was simply that, and little more, that made David stand out among the crowd that night - not his eyes, or the wash of forlorn sadness or even the defeated slump of his shoulders, but merely, his societally unusual beverage order. It was, of course, a fool's errand - she knew herself well enough to be the very empath that those eyes, that face, and those shoulders would overwhelmingly resonate with, so loudly on fact that it damn near drowned out all other distractions that would otherwise bog down another night at the bar. On most any given night, Natalie could rattle of which bands played what songs and when, a full list of inventory movement, orders that would need to fulfilled the next morning, and the entire night's take, right down to the last penny, but the next morning, off just one night, really only a couple of hours, of what, at the time, felt like idle chatter between two strangers, all she could muster in her mind with any sort of clarity was the image of David Brennan, hunched over the quieter side of the bar, sipping off his seltzer and lime.
"Heh. Just me, I'm afraid."
"Just me", she would come to learn, was an incredibly loaded answer to an otherwise casually simple question. For days, she questioned in her head the implications of that night. Natalie had little patience for theories of divinity or the notion that everything happens for a reason, but it was plainly evident, to her, at least, both by the way David had carried himself that night and how forthcoming he'd become as Natalie pressed on and on, seeking to sate her all encompassing curiosity, that he'd been yearning for the constructive opportunity to unload all his troubles, everything that plagued not just his mind but his very being. In just a few short hours, he'd gone from a complete nameless, faceless to the sole occupant of her thoughts, a man she'd already come to know so much about and yet, yearned still to try and understand more.
There was a time, he'd explained, when he'd be perfectly content to come in and suck down shots of whiskey until he'd run the bottle dry or until he'd found himself no longer able to stand - whichever came first. He wasn't proud of it, not by any stretch. Those were dark times, dark times that he was perfectly content to try and leave behind, but in order to do so, he figured, he'd have to first be able to confront his environment, the surroundings that facilitated his coping mechanism, face to face, which, incidentally, he remarked with almost a tinge of self realizing humor, was what had ultimately brought him out tonight. It was really an intermediate step in this self devised process of accepting his newfound sobriety, something he'd built down to, from a macro level down to this more intimate setting - first the Commonwealth, then Boston, then the streets, and now the dives. The people. The real life, environmental settings that had allowed him to so easily find himself wound up in an endless sea of booze and excessive indulgence.
"That's not mandatory, though, right? Like, why not find your bearings - your new bearings - somewhere else? Something like, I don't know, sort of removed from what it is that brought you down that road to begin with?"
"That's what you'd do?"
"I think so..."
"What's that? 'I think so'?"
"I don't know! I guess...shouldn't...I don't know, if this is some new lease on life, shouldn't what comes next be more akin to what you want? I mean, I'm just guessing, but the war...the force...your dad...just doesn't seem like Boston is what you need to stay better, right?"
He smiled. It was a smile that the tides of change would come to afford her many opportunities over the coming years to stop and appreciate, a rarity it would seem to all but her. He talked about the embankments along the coast of Maine - a place called Bar Harbor that she was fairly certain her grandparents once vacationed in but she'd never seen for herself. There was a warmth that seemed to radiate from him as he went on and on about the rocky embankments and the independent seafood shacks and the don of the fishing vessels setting out into the fogged unknown every morning before dawn. It was a dream he'd clearly held close to his heart for a long time but never quite articulated before due to the circumstances that he felt made him who he was. It was a dream that they'd come to share as the days turned to weeks, weeks turned to months, and months turned to years. It was their rock. Their hope. Their beacon of light whenever the torment of city living and the forces that pulled them in all directions but that of lasting happiness cast a pall of darkness upon their world, that dream of a house set upon the rocks looking out across the endless sea kept them alive through all that would come their way in the years that would pass.
To Natalie's end, she kept David on the straight and narrow. Four years of contiguous sobriety never came easy to a man who chose to traverse that road alone, and many nights she was all that stood left in the world to keep him on his feet. David afforded her a satiation for her lifelong lust for adventure. Even in their darkest hours, she was living a life on the fringes of what society had deemed conventional, and that, along with many sleepless nights spent bickering over what their first meal would be when they'd finally settled in the far reaches of Maine, kept her going, even as job after job slipped through David's fingers and the bar that Natalie first conned her way into tending nearly six years prior burned to he ground. Even as the world seemingly crumbled around them, Natalie pressed onward, determined to keep what little niche they'd carved out for themselves amid their own personal hell as bright as the ever changing colors of her luminescent hair, though years later, even she would finally come to admit that she'd broken down in a fit of rage the night David flew out to Los Angeles on what she was certain, though she'd never say it, was another wild goose chase toward some prospective job that was almost certainly too good to be true.
"This is barbaric."
David looked up from the mess of paperwork scattered out across his lap and the tattered couch which they shared, waiting for an opportune moment to indicate a towering beast of a man, his long hair adhered to his forehead and shoulders by the very presence of his own sweat and blood, raining blows down upon his opponent within the confines of a steel cage. He glanced over at Natalie, cringing and peering over her knees, hugged closely to her person in a sort of crouches huddle on the other end of the couch.
"That guy there, with the hair? He probably pulled an easy five, maybe ten grand, just on this one alone."
She huddled herself even tighter. These were desperate times, indeed. It would seem that the industries that couldn't have cared less whether David had any family to speak of at all had fallen upon irreparably hard times, and any other job otherwise was hesitant to bring him in at all, fearing any sort of possible tangential connection to his father's business by proxy. It did wonders to cement the fact that Natalie had been on to something when she'd first suggested uprooting himself in the name of laying a new claim to his own life, free of any beholden ties that would otherwise rain an undue burden upon his shoulders, but that option, unfortunately, was simply not in the cards given their financial standings at the time.
He'd stepped off the plane that night boasting that their ship had finally come in. These people, these employers, had taken quite the shine to him, and wanted him on board almost immediately. She approached with reserved trepidation - David had never been the secretive type, at least not with her, but she wasn't, even then, entirely sure what this gig entailed. She thought he must have been joking when they settled in that night to allow him to pore over the final details of the packet of documents he'd come home with, one of the DVDs they'd sent him on his way with glowing in the background.
He couldn't have been serious.
The men on the screen howled in agony, resorting to all measure of methodology to inflict unthinkable amounts of pain on one another. Chairs struck skulls, skewers pierced temples, and grown men plummeted from the sky to unforgiving landings of concrete below, as thousands upon thousands of ardent spectators cheered them on from a distance, growing ever thirsty for more as the bouts wore on.
"David, this...there's more to life than money!"
"Made you a promise, Nat."
A promise. The tears welled up behind her eyes, and it took every last iota of that old Collins stubbornness to quell them back down. Inside, she was seething - he had made a promise. Back when they each began to recognize the magnitude of the need they both had for one another, when the days were just as hard but the strains of time had yet to cast a pall upon even the brightest sunrise, when the house in Bar Harbor seemed like a distant but still altogether obtainable end to justify whatever hellacious means they'd endure, he'd promised her all of it and more. The ocean, the rocks, the harbor, the house, and when all that was signed into their names, stamped and delivered so that no man alive could take it from them, the name upon the decree would read Mr. and Mrs. David Brennan.
That was the indomitable bullheadedness of David Brennan, for certain. He swore to her, his lone beacon in a life of otherwise pitch darkness, that he'd one day give her the life that he felt she rightfully deserved - a reward, he said, for being one of the last sterling paragons of good left in the world, and dammit, he'd do it, giving no thought to the toll it would take on his well being. He had a propensity for pursuing employment which placed him in precariously dangerous situations - Natalie often wondered if he had some sort of underlying death wish, and simply lacked he wherewithal to complete the task himself. The thought tormented her - the court of public opinion would one day come to a vastly conflicting verdict, but Natalie knew, in her heart of hearts, that David Brennan was a good man, who deserved just as well all the spoils of the world that he often went on and on about being rightfully owed to her.
"Whole lot of good a fairy tale ending does me if you're not around to share it."
He could sense the hurt in her words - he was just good like that. He tossed whatever clutter separated their respective ends of the couch, sliding over with one arm to lock her in a comforting embrace, the lone light flickering from the images that seemed to foretell his immediate future as they played out on the television in front of them.
"C'mon - it's only for a little bit. Short term, y'know? Think of it as another temp gig."
"I thought we were done taking temp jobs..."
"Temp jobs at the paper mills don't pay out four figures a batch. I mean, this could be it, Nat. You seen this paperwork? I spend the rest of the year hittin' a couple guys who've spent their entire lives dreamin' of gettin' hit for a livin'? That's our ticket out of Boston right there."
"You have to promise to come home..."
"Nat, c'mon...this isn't me reenlistin' for another four years. Six months of this, and you and I can finally start livin' the way we're supposed to, y'know?"
"Six months?"
"Six months."
We all know how that went.
Devotion is a funny thing. It can alter the way we think, drastically influence our actions, and make is behave in contiguous manners entirely inconsistent with our true inner selves. To some, like Natalie Collins, that sort of devotion can manifest itself in behavior as harmless and inconsequential as tuning in each week to a program she otherwise had little taste for, to stand tall for a man she'd spent the last four years falling more and more in love with each day, so that if all others betrayed him, he could step into the ring each and every night knowing that somewhere far beyond any conceivable human reach, one voice called out above all others, cheering him on. She spent many sleepless nights wondering how life may have changed for the better if she'd simply gotten on board and taken to the great unknown alongside him, so that maybe, in his darkest hours, that ultimately led him back to the bottle, back into the clutches of his father, and back into the company of deplorable acquaintances, even if she were the only voice cheering him on from beyond the velvet curtain, he'd have reason to come back and face his demons with the strength of sobriety on his side.
She'd been a fool, of course - too little, too late - in finally making the decision to uproot her life and chase him out into the wild. This, too, kept her awake at night - the ill advised approach of allowing Jack and Clark to get involved destroyed her cause before it ever had a chance to germinate. Jack, of course, took the lead, so that when Natalie finally came into the picture, David was certain she'd been turned against him. It was a disaster from the moment she'd picked up the phone - a classic fool's errand.
She'd lost him.
It was all she could tell herself in order to come back home, give up the ghost, and step into the motions of trying to emulate anything resembling a normal life. She was empty. Half. Beaten, broken, utterly destroyed by the promise of a man she so desperately needed in her life and whose actions put on display for the entire world to see his mutual need for her. They were a cohesive unit, and somehow, she'd allowed them to part, blinded by the prospect of a brighter future and a better tomorrow.
If she'd kept the company of others (she didn't), she might find herself subject to criticisms, claims of desperate attachment bordering on obsession. She'd found work - petty, unremarkable work that offered a pittance, just enough to keep up their shared apartment which looked not too unlike the very way that it did the night she last saw the man she knew to be David Brennan depart a city that had given him so much torment in life in search of a better future for the two of them to share. She'd lost that lust for adventure, a fire that was healthily stoked by her shared dreams of what tomorrow could bring with David by her side, and what little time she took for herself was now spent idly alone, following along with a product she'd grown to hate but found herself entirely unable to drag herself away from, fiddling each night with David's old gaming console, a rare luxury they'd shared, desperately hoping for any sign or mention of him on the WFWF Network as he seemingly floated without design or desire in and out of he clutches of the job that was supposed to bring them the life he swore they'd so ardently earned.
"Live! From the sold out TD Garden in Boston, Massachusetts"
The banner tormented her for weeks. Wherever it was that he'd landed in the years since she last saw him, strewn about a sea of empty bottles, passed out on the floor of some high rise luxury hotel in the heart of Tokyo, tonight, he'd be here. Home. Boston, Massachusetts. The internal agony was almost too much to bear. For weeks, she'd toyed with the idea of going down there. She'd never be able to afford entry, but maybe, just maybe, amid the elevated ramps and rails that bore old familiarity, she'd find him and...well, that's the part that kept her home.
Do what?
Say what?
Once upon a time, passerby saw Natalie Collins and a radiance emanated that told even a stranger all they needed to know about this spirited, lively, spitfire of a woman, but now? Now, all she could do was watch - resigned to nothing more than an idle observer, as unremarkable and forgettable as the next - as David made his triumphant return before his hometown crowd, not a single hint of the disdain that she knew the man beneath the social lubricant held for this place that had damn near broken him. She watched as he systematically and all too consciously took apart his opponents, a victorious smirk across his face as he hauled back and put the boot to the back of Ante Whitner's head, driving him face first into the mat and covering him for the count. Even then, as his hand was raised in victory, a stream of cheap beer guzzling down his chin, she felt her heart leap with a sort of almost involuntary pride. She knew that the man on the screen, though triumphant in his momentary task, was absolutely tarnished, beyond three sheets - a wreck of a shell of his true self - but she'd watched fervently since he first took off to begin his quest, and as much as the hated the eventual toll she was certain this business would take on his body, even she could not deny that he was damn good at it. He deserved this - this victory, this contendership, the title he'd never been party to chase - but her heart swelled at the same time with broken sympathy, because the man who reveled in these triumphs was not David Brennan, and for all his faults, for all his shortcomings, and for all his efforts, he deserved to relish in his accomplishments, consciously aware of all that he'd achieved, and his swagger and state as he strolled toward the back, was all evidence to support that in his frame of mind, he was decidedly not basking in his rightful glory.
She must have stayed awake for days, moving in an almost trance like fog through the motions of her day, seemingly existing only to work, eat, stare, and wonder - wonder what could have been, what SHOULD have been. In a moment, she felt the brisk ocean breeze on her face, a swath of grass cushioning her steps as she strolled along the yard, the mist of the morning tides blanketing the summer morning in an almost dew like freshness. On the porch - a porch, perhaps her own - David stood, groggily staring out over the horizon, sipping his first cup of coffee as his eyes adjusted to the sun rising in the distance. She smiled - her first in close to a decade, it seemed - as she took in her surroundings, which all too soon became marred by a commotion that disturbed the tranquil peacefulness she was certain she'd finally discovered. In a moment, the crashing waves faded, the squawk of the gulls drew further away, and all that was left in the illuminated darkness was the groggy, graveled, Boston bred drawl of David's intoxicated voice.
"I'll be damned, Crowe. Good show. Really, well done, you fantastic son of a b*tch.
God, you're gonna live to regret that.
I dunno, Luke - I can't decide between obfuscatingly boar headed or just sh*t eatingly stupid. I mean, you saw the card, right? You're not....gah...you are, aren't you? You're the guy, that self centered, blinders on both sides piece of sh*t who figures to hell with everything around me, the only target what matters is my next target. You didn't even stop to think, didn't even give a f*ckin' glance over the sh*t show layin' the ground work for you and Stone to come in and muck up the place.
Least, that's as far as I see it, you bein' the undisputed International Champion and all, puttin' a nice finishing touch on Cameron Stone's little swan song there. Figure if you had an ounce of rocks up top that oversized dome you call a head, you might have been pride off to the side and let Cameron get the one up on you. Y'know, let him take the beatin' you're settin' yourself up for, give a little time and pick up your precious strap somewhere down the road? Sounds a whole sack of sh*t less painful then the alternative, right? I mean, I get it. Every good plan has a weak point, and I imagine that maybe your boy - whether the one with the stupid name or the other one with the stupid name - put the bug in your ear that you go ahead and let Cameron bowl you over, then I'm just gonna end up holdin' up the belt that much easier and takin' a big ol' sh*t over any chance you might have of gettin' it back.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't, I guess. I'm takin' that belt home with me come Superbrawl, whether you want me to or not. That's one of those little things in life we call an inevitability. I guess them's the breaks, sorta, you havin' to decide whether you let Stone embarrass you now or havin' me embarrass you later, albeit on a slightly bigger stage, right? Personally? Stupid f*ckin' choice. I dunno why you're lettin' Justan Assh*le pull your strings like that, pushin' you this, that, and the other way on some wild goose chase tryin' find the balls and the glory he left behind here so many years ago, but it's a right f*ckin' disservice you're doin' to yourself there, chief. Think about it - you just let that stupid son of a b*tch put you into some no-win situation, 'cept now you get to down in the history books as the other guy who didn't get sh*t done on the big stage. You, and Josh Dean, and the kid in the mask...not even a bunch of has beens in trainin'. Just a buncha never weres.
And I know what you're thinkin', you're thinkin' it so loud that it's resonatin' out in all the stupid sh*t you're doin' on TV - 'oh, if I suck Drakz's d*ck, he'll suck mine.'
Kid, I done some crap in life that I ain't proud of, but lemme tell ya - any payoff you get from THAT sorta approach ain't worth the load down the back of your throat, if you...well, y'know.
Nobody ever comes out of that tunnel of sh*t, cavortin' in bed with those two thumb suckers tryin' to find the easy way up into the big spoon position, smellin' like anything but filthy, rotten, day old, sun soaked sh*t. Now, I'm not sure what card it is you managed to play or how far Trace made you bend over in order to get your stab at the gold so quickly, but you know somethin'? Go with that - 'cause beddin' those two in hopes of a payoff ain't gonna turn into some feel good Dex moment for you, kay? Malakai's dead and dirted, and neither one of those guys is the type to just hand you the prize on account of you signing their petition or whatever nancy errand they've got you runnin'.
See, I dunno why, you bein' 'The Motor City Mercenary' and all that, but for some blinkin' reason, you got this way about you that says in spite of the big guy, tough talk act, you care about this sh*t. That title over your shoulder means a little somethin' to you and it would chap your ass good and hard to lose it to a piece of sh*t like me.
So how you goin' about preparin' for that one, Luke?
I ain't gonna lie and say I hate to be the bearer of bad news, 'cause that sh*t's usually funny as hell, but the truth is, you and me? These next few weeks? I'm sure we're gonna be layin' the potshots into one another like a couple of old women chuffed over the outcome of a little ol' bridge match or somethin', seein' as how that's just the way things seem to work around here, and I'm sure you'll be skippin' right past the Asian kid at Joe Bishop's New Haircut or whatever the f*ck it's called, but it's kinda silly all the same, you stop and think about it. I don't give a f*ck who's wearing that belt come Superbrawl, seein' as they're just keepin' the seat warm for me. Only thing I got out for you is the fact you're the unlucky son of a b*tch in my way this time around. See, I never came to the WFWF to make a buck or make myself famous or win all the belts or any of that sh*t. I came here to take the money, take the fame, and take those f*ckin' belts because that's what I do, on account of my last being Brennan. Ain't no glory or prestige or any of that sh*t behind that belt you're wearin', kid. Just a hunk of metal on a dead animal's skinned backside, but you know what? I think it'll look pretty f*ckin' boss around my waist, and losin' it's sure as sh*t gonna piss you off as much as losin' the shot in the first place pissed little ol' Penny off, so I figure, y'know what?
Why the f*ck not?!"
It's funny, how quickly emotions can fade and change and swing. Overwhelming sadness had occupied the better part of Natalie's life for nearly a decade, ever since David departed that fateful evening in hopes of a better life and a brighter tomorrow, and yet, all the sudden, all that seemed to take a backseat. For the first time, well, ever, she found herself not overwhelmingly sad, but rather, angry. She'd heard, sure, the stories that David would tell of his time 'off the wagon', but never in a million years could she have imagined the audacity he'd had to put the pen of revisionist history to his very reason for being. Here she was, even in his inebriated waste of state, silently cheering him on, hoping that somewhere beneath it all, some semblance of the man who left so many years ago was still alive in there, waiting to be plucked from the wastes and brought back from the black, and he's citing the very name that has caused him every bit of agony as his right to the gold.
A woman of lesser conviction would do well enough to just leave the man be, but there simply lay too much love in Natalie's heart to let David continue living this public travesty of a farce. A fire had been sparked in her heart that hadn't burned as brightly since the day David first went toe to toe with Randel Benjamin nearly a lifetime ago. Scrambling for the phone, she dialed, long distance, ten digits she'd come to begrudgingly know all too well, and waited, seething, grateful that the ongoing dial tone afforded her any time at all to collect herself enough to speak intelligibly at all.
"Yeah, it's me. You know as well as I do that you blew this sh*t last time. I'm calling in a favor.
This ain't your fight.
Life ain't fair sometimes, brother. Just the way it is - bum roll of the dice, sh*t deal at the table, whatever you wanna call it. You've been thrown dead in the of a real hot sh*t storm that's about to pick up steam real bad, real soon, and I ain't usually a nice enough guy give a f*ck one way or the other, but even us cold sons of b*tches know a good kid when we see one, and brother, you're probably about as good as they come - talented, athletic, smart, all that good sh*t, so it really breaks a chip off the ol' heart to see a smart kid like you get ruined seven ways to Sunday on account of you gettin' yourself involved in somethin' that doesn't very well involve you.
Now, I've worked a lot of jobs in my life and I've been called by the titles of many a trade, but I've never caught myself running any sort of candy shop, and as such, I ain't much for the business of sugar coatin' sh*t. Bad for your teeth, bad for your brain. Better to just lay it out there, make sure everyone's on the same page.
You're an afterthought, kid.
That's not any real sort of detriment to you or anything, it's just a bad break this go 'round, y'know? I mean, if you're really in a dancin' mood, like you've already got your taps on and you're all geared up to tango, then I got no problem lacin' up my boots and tappin' all across your face if that's what's gonna make you happy. I just can't see fussin' over the mackerel when there's a f*ckin tuna bro right over there, right? Why go for the f*ckin' hook when some other dumb sh*t fish is already rippin' cheeks off it?
You're a bright son of a b*tch right? You know that, statistically, we're bound to do this thing one way or the other, one of these days - why bother today. I got bigger fish to fry, you're coming off a hot streak putting the boots to the WFWF's resident paper champion - why mess that up, man? That's change, man, and that ride is rollin' in strong sh*t. Why would anyone wanna get in the way of that sh*t, knowing they're just gonna get bowled over and that the water's a hell of a lot calmer coming off the backside? Tell you what I'd do, kid as bold and as bright as you. I'd sit this one out - chalk it up to the rarest of rare moments of heartfelt sincerity outta ol' David Brennan, tell yourself that even a sh*tty ass broken clock is right at least twice a day - and just take a breather. Loss don't mean much in the scheme of things if a guy can't even been seen getting his ass kicked, right? Let the champ handle this one - he's in for a rough road ahead anyway, and I'm gonna get a lot more kicks out of it if he's the guy taking a drop off of his own momentum and he's gotta do it all by his lonesome, his stupid name society notwithstanding. Figure this - you ride that high, bootin' the Dex so hard that he can't even come out for another whirl this time around, and take that sh*t right up to the SuperBrawl, brother. By then, I'll have myself a shiny new toy that all the kids in the neighborhood'll wanna get their grubby f*ckin' paws on, and you and I? We can have ourselves a little one-two shuffle then. Really give 'em somethin' to talk about, y'know?
I mean, I'll still stomp yards all up and down your face, but sh*t, it should hurt a little less if you've actually got a horse in the f*ckin' race, right Cam?
Think about it, kid. Ball's in your court.
*****
"What'll you have?"
It's been said that life flies by in an instant. Cautionary tales from here to the end of time have been woven to advise those of us too caught up in the day to day turmoils of our lives to take pause and absorb the overwhelming magnitude of the fact that beyond our own windows looking out upon the world around us and the minutia of our lives, an entirely different and yet equally momentous world that we barely get a passing moment to glimpse is passing us by every time we cross paths with another living being. It's rare, to say the least, that any of us bother to step back and wonder, amid the circumstances that already bog us down day to day, be they family, work, personal matters, or otherwise, just what it is that floats in and out of the minds of those that we otherwise see as arbitrary as mere passerby on a city street. Most often, our interactions with the people we may see every day that we perceive to be little more than strangers are so fleeting and brief that the sheer thought that there could be anything more to the nameless faces that come in and out of our world on a daily basis is far and beyond more overwhelming a notion than any of us would ever care to entertain.
As such, to those who in the days, weeks, months, and years to know them as a cohesive unit, the mere chance encounter that led a spirited young bartender by the name of Natalie Collins to happen across a walking vial of anger and sullen volatility by the name of David Brennan was nothing short of the immeasurable substance by which only fairy tales yearning to be animated into hyper driven profit factories could possibly be made of.
"Just a tonic water with lime, if you have it, thanks."
Most any other night, Natalie's patrons were those very same nameless, often times in the dimly lit atmosphere of the hole in the wall dive that so many wasted youth would grow to call home as dejected byproducts of a tumultuous upbringing, faceless strangers that came as quickly as they went into and out of her life, staying only as long it took for the taps to run dry and for the heaps of cash to plunk themselves down across her finely polished counter. In the years since she'd first lied about her age to find her way behind the bar, hoping to find as little a degrading manner as possible to scrap up what little cash she could, Natalie had probably heard the words 'Pabst Blue Ribbon' articulated with just about every waking emotion under the sun, from raucously intoxicated exuberance to harrowingly sullen heartbreak, and all degrees of medium in between. Though marginally young when put up beside the wide berth of clientele who still found their solace in the darkened corners of a seedy, dilapidated punk bar, she figured she's been at this game long to enough have seen and heard just about all of it, and yet, there was something about the way this hardened, seemingly shell of a man placed his order, an anomaly in itself on a night when the music blared to levels nearly inaudible and the taps of cheap domestics flowed like overrun rivers. There was almost an understood defeat to his voice, as if he longed for something sturdier while finding himself unwillingly complacent with the fact that he'd forever be resigned to this altogether more sobering refreshment.
Suddenly, in an instant that felt itself like an eternity as the words crawled out of his mouth and pierced the overwhelmed drone of the music, the hurt emanating from his eyes that told all but the brief summation of the story of a man who actually HAD seen and heard it all, Natalie found herself inexplicably drawn, not so much longing as she was needing to hear everything that troubled the man who sat across the bar from her, dejectedly ordering a perfectly droll, virgin concoction and doing next to nothing to mask his concerted defeat over the matter.
"Sorry to hear it. Which of these sterling beacons of sophistication stuck you with the wheel tonight?"
It's not that she was at all unfamiliar with the very notion that some men simply chose to opt out of the lubricants that kept this little nothing dive alive and breathing seven days a week for any number of reasons on a sliding scale of severity. It just wasn't the norm here. Years later, as Natalie wallowed in the depths of outright agony that serving that fateful seltzer would come to impart upon her, she tried with every ounce of her being to convince herself that it was simply that, and little more, that made David stand out among the crowd that night - not his eyes, or the wash of forlorn sadness or even the defeated slump of his shoulders, but merely, his societally unusual beverage order. It was, of course, a fool's errand - she knew herself well enough to be the very empath that those eyes, that face, and those shoulders would overwhelmingly resonate with, so loudly on fact that it damn near drowned out all other distractions that would otherwise bog down another night at the bar. On most any given night, Natalie could rattle of which bands played what songs and when, a full list of inventory movement, orders that would need to fulfilled the next morning, and the entire night's take, right down to the last penny, but the next morning, off just one night, really only a couple of hours, of what, at the time, felt like idle chatter between two strangers, all she could muster in her mind with any sort of clarity was the image of David Brennan, hunched over the quieter side of the bar, sipping off his seltzer and lime.
"Heh. Just me, I'm afraid."
"Just me", she would come to learn, was an incredibly loaded answer to an otherwise casually simple question. For days, she questioned in her head the implications of that night. Natalie had little patience for theories of divinity or the notion that everything happens for a reason, but it was plainly evident, to her, at least, both by the way David had carried himself that night and how forthcoming he'd become as Natalie pressed on and on, seeking to sate her all encompassing curiosity, that he'd been yearning for the constructive opportunity to unload all his troubles, everything that plagued not just his mind but his very being. In just a few short hours, he'd gone from a complete nameless, faceless to the sole occupant of her thoughts, a man she'd already come to know so much about and yet, yearned still to try and understand more.
There was a time, he'd explained, when he'd be perfectly content to come in and suck down shots of whiskey until he'd run the bottle dry or until he'd found himself no longer able to stand - whichever came first. He wasn't proud of it, not by any stretch. Those were dark times, dark times that he was perfectly content to try and leave behind, but in order to do so, he figured, he'd have to first be able to confront his environment, the surroundings that facilitated his coping mechanism, face to face, which, incidentally, he remarked with almost a tinge of self realizing humor, was what had ultimately brought him out tonight. It was really an intermediate step in this self devised process of accepting his newfound sobriety, something he'd built down to, from a macro level down to this more intimate setting - first the Commonwealth, then Boston, then the streets, and now the dives. The people. The real life, environmental settings that had allowed him to so easily find himself wound up in an endless sea of booze and excessive indulgence.
"That's not mandatory, though, right? Like, why not find your bearings - your new bearings - somewhere else? Something like, I don't know, sort of removed from what it is that brought you down that road to begin with?"
"That's what you'd do?"
"I think so..."
"What's that? 'I think so'?"
"I don't know! I guess...shouldn't...I don't know, if this is some new lease on life, shouldn't what comes next be more akin to what you want? I mean, I'm just guessing, but the war...the force...your dad...just doesn't seem like Boston is what you need to stay better, right?"
He smiled. It was a smile that the tides of change would come to afford her many opportunities over the coming years to stop and appreciate, a rarity it would seem to all but her. He talked about the embankments along the coast of Maine - a place called Bar Harbor that she was fairly certain her grandparents once vacationed in but she'd never seen for herself. There was a warmth that seemed to radiate from him as he went on and on about the rocky embankments and the independent seafood shacks and the don of the fishing vessels setting out into the fogged unknown every morning before dawn. It was a dream he'd clearly held close to his heart for a long time but never quite articulated before due to the circumstances that he felt made him who he was. It was a dream that they'd come to share as the days turned to weeks, weeks turned to months, and months turned to years. It was their rock. Their hope. Their beacon of light whenever the torment of city living and the forces that pulled them in all directions but that of lasting happiness cast a pall of darkness upon their world, that dream of a house set upon the rocks looking out across the endless sea kept them alive through all that would come their way in the years that would pass.
To Natalie's end, she kept David on the straight and narrow. Four years of contiguous sobriety never came easy to a man who chose to traverse that road alone, and many nights she was all that stood left in the world to keep him on his feet. David afforded her a satiation for her lifelong lust for adventure. Even in their darkest hours, she was living a life on the fringes of what society had deemed conventional, and that, along with many sleepless nights spent bickering over what their first meal would be when they'd finally settled in the far reaches of Maine, kept her going, even as job after job slipped through David's fingers and the bar that Natalie first conned her way into tending nearly six years prior burned to he ground. Even as the world seemingly crumbled around them, Natalie pressed onward, determined to keep what little niche they'd carved out for themselves amid their own personal hell as bright as the ever changing colors of her luminescent hair, though years later, even she would finally come to admit that she'd broken down in a fit of rage the night David flew out to Los Angeles on what she was certain, though she'd never say it, was another wild goose chase toward some prospective job that was almost certainly too good to be true.
"This is barbaric."
David looked up from the mess of paperwork scattered out across his lap and the tattered couch which they shared, waiting for an opportune moment to indicate a towering beast of a man, his long hair adhered to his forehead and shoulders by the very presence of his own sweat and blood, raining blows down upon his opponent within the confines of a steel cage. He glanced over at Natalie, cringing and peering over her knees, hugged closely to her person in a sort of crouches huddle on the other end of the couch.
"That guy there, with the hair? He probably pulled an easy five, maybe ten grand, just on this one alone."
She huddled herself even tighter. These were desperate times, indeed. It would seem that the industries that couldn't have cared less whether David had any family to speak of at all had fallen upon irreparably hard times, and any other job otherwise was hesitant to bring him in at all, fearing any sort of possible tangential connection to his father's business by proxy. It did wonders to cement the fact that Natalie had been on to something when she'd first suggested uprooting himself in the name of laying a new claim to his own life, free of any beholden ties that would otherwise rain an undue burden upon his shoulders, but that option, unfortunately, was simply not in the cards given their financial standings at the time.
He'd stepped off the plane that night boasting that their ship had finally come in. These people, these employers, had taken quite the shine to him, and wanted him on board almost immediately. She approached with reserved trepidation - David had never been the secretive type, at least not with her, but she wasn't, even then, entirely sure what this gig entailed. She thought he must have been joking when they settled in that night to allow him to pore over the final details of the packet of documents he'd come home with, one of the DVDs they'd sent him on his way with glowing in the background.
He couldn't have been serious.
The men on the screen howled in agony, resorting to all measure of methodology to inflict unthinkable amounts of pain on one another. Chairs struck skulls, skewers pierced temples, and grown men plummeted from the sky to unforgiving landings of concrete below, as thousands upon thousands of ardent spectators cheered them on from a distance, growing ever thirsty for more as the bouts wore on.
"David, this...there's more to life than money!"
"Made you a promise, Nat."
A promise. The tears welled up behind her eyes, and it took every last iota of that old Collins stubbornness to quell them back down. Inside, she was seething - he had made a promise. Back when they each began to recognize the magnitude of the need they both had for one another, when the days were just as hard but the strains of time had yet to cast a pall upon even the brightest sunrise, when the house in Bar Harbor seemed like a distant but still altogether obtainable end to justify whatever hellacious means they'd endure, he'd promised her all of it and more. The ocean, the rocks, the harbor, the house, and when all that was signed into their names, stamped and delivered so that no man alive could take it from them, the name upon the decree would read Mr. and Mrs. David Brennan.
That was the indomitable bullheadedness of David Brennan, for certain. He swore to her, his lone beacon in a life of otherwise pitch darkness, that he'd one day give her the life that he felt she rightfully deserved - a reward, he said, for being one of the last sterling paragons of good left in the world, and dammit, he'd do it, giving no thought to the toll it would take on his well being. He had a propensity for pursuing employment which placed him in precariously dangerous situations - Natalie often wondered if he had some sort of underlying death wish, and simply lacked he wherewithal to complete the task himself. The thought tormented her - the court of public opinion would one day come to a vastly conflicting verdict, but Natalie knew, in her heart of hearts, that David Brennan was a good man, who deserved just as well all the spoils of the world that he often went on and on about being rightfully owed to her.
"Whole lot of good a fairy tale ending does me if you're not around to share it."
He could sense the hurt in her words - he was just good like that. He tossed whatever clutter separated their respective ends of the couch, sliding over with one arm to lock her in a comforting embrace, the lone light flickering from the images that seemed to foretell his immediate future as they played out on the television in front of them.
"C'mon - it's only for a little bit. Short term, y'know? Think of it as another temp gig."
"I thought we were done taking temp jobs..."
"Temp jobs at the paper mills don't pay out four figures a batch. I mean, this could be it, Nat. You seen this paperwork? I spend the rest of the year hittin' a couple guys who've spent their entire lives dreamin' of gettin' hit for a livin'? That's our ticket out of Boston right there."
"You have to promise to come home..."
"Nat, c'mon...this isn't me reenlistin' for another four years. Six months of this, and you and I can finally start livin' the way we're supposed to, y'know?"
"Six months?"
"Six months."
We all know how that went.
Devotion is a funny thing. It can alter the way we think, drastically influence our actions, and make is behave in contiguous manners entirely inconsistent with our true inner selves. To some, like Natalie Collins, that sort of devotion can manifest itself in behavior as harmless and inconsequential as tuning in each week to a program she otherwise had little taste for, to stand tall for a man she'd spent the last four years falling more and more in love with each day, so that if all others betrayed him, he could step into the ring each and every night knowing that somewhere far beyond any conceivable human reach, one voice called out above all others, cheering him on. She spent many sleepless nights wondering how life may have changed for the better if she'd simply gotten on board and taken to the great unknown alongside him, so that maybe, in his darkest hours, that ultimately led him back to the bottle, back into the clutches of his father, and back into the company of deplorable acquaintances, even if she were the only voice cheering him on from beyond the velvet curtain, he'd have reason to come back and face his demons with the strength of sobriety on his side.
She'd been a fool, of course - too little, too late - in finally making the decision to uproot her life and chase him out into the wild. This, too, kept her awake at night - the ill advised approach of allowing Jack and Clark to get involved destroyed her cause before it ever had a chance to germinate. Jack, of course, took the lead, so that when Natalie finally came into the picture, David was certain she'd been turned against him. It was a disaster from the moment she'd picked up the phone - a classic fool's errand.
She'd lost him.
It was all she could tell herself in order to come back home, give up the ghost, and step into the motions of trying to emulate anything resembling a normal life. She was empty. Half. Beaten, broken, utterly destroyed by the promise of a man she so desperately needed in her life and whose actions put on display for the entire world to see his mutual need for her. They were a cohesive unit, and somehow, she'd allowed them to part, blinded by the prospect of a brighter future and a better tomorrow.
If she'd kept the company of others (she didn't), she might find herself subject to criticisms, claims of desperate attachment bordering on obsession. She'd found work - petty, unremarkable work that offered a pittance, just enough to keep up their shared apartment which looked not too unlike the very way that it did the night she last saw the man she knew to be David Brennan depart a city that had given him so much torment in life in search of a better future for the two of them to share. She'd lost that lust for adventure, a fire that was healthily stoked by her shared dreams of what tomorrow could bring with David by her side, and what little time she took for herself was now spent idly alone, following along with a product she'd grown to hate but found herself entirely unable to drag herself away from, fiddling each night with David's old gaming console, a rare luxury they'd shared, desperately hoping for any sign or mention of him on the WFWF Network as he seemingly floated without design or desire in and out of he clutches of the job that was supposed to bring them the life he swore they'd so ardently earned.
"Live! From the sold out TD Garden in Boston, Massachusetts"
The banner tormented her for weeks. Wherever it was that he'd landed in the years since she last saw him, strewn about a sea of empty bottles, passed out on the floor of some high rise luxury hotel in the heart of Tokyo, tonight, he'd be here. Home. Boston, Massachusetts. The internal agony was almost too much to bear. For weeks, she'd toyed with the idea of going down there. She'd never be able to afford entry, but maybe, just maybe, amid the elevated ramps and rails that bore old familiarity, she'd find him and...well, that's the part that kept her home.
Do what?
Say what?
Once upon a time, passerby saw Natalie Collins and a radiance emanated that told even a stranger all they needed to know about this spirited, lively, spitfire of a woman, but now? Now, all she could do was watch - resigned to nothing more than an idle observer, as unremarkable and forgettable as the next - as David made his triumphant return before his hometown crowd, not a single hint of the disdain that she knew the man beneath the social lubricant held for this place that had damn near broken him. She watched as he systematically and all too consciously took apart his opponents, a victorious smirk across his face as he hauled back and put the boot to the back of Ante Whitner's head, driving him face first into the mat and covering him for the count. Even then, as his hand was raised in victory, a stream of cheap beer guzzling down his chin, she felt her heart leap with a sort of almost involuntary pride. She knew that the man on the screen, though triumphant in his momentary task, was absolutely tarnished, beyond three sheets - a wreck of a shell of his true self - but she'd watched fervently since he first took off to begin his quest, and as much as the hated the eventual toll she was certain this business would take on his body, even she could not deny that he was damn good at it. He deserved this - this victory, this contendership, the title he'd never been party to chase - but her heart swelled at the same time with broken sympathy, because the man who reveled in these triumphs was not David Brennan, and for all his faults, for all his shortcomings, and for all his efforts, he deserved to relish in his accomplishments, consciously aware of all that he'd achieved, and his swagger and state as he strolled toward the back, was all evidence to support that in his frame of mind, he was decidedly not basking in his rightful glory.
She must have stayed awake for days, moving in an almost trance like fog through the motions of her day, seemingly existing only to work, eat, stare, and wonder - wonder what could have been, what SHOULD have been. In a moment, she felt the brisk ocean breeze on her face, a swath of grass cushioning her steps as she strolled along the yard, the mist of the morning tides blanketing the summer morning in an almost dew like freshness. On the porch - a porch, perhaps her own - David stood, groggily staring out over the horizon, sipping his first cup of coffee as his eyes adjusted to the sun rising in the distance. She smiled - her first in close to a decade, it seemed - as she took in her surroundings, which all too soon became marred by a commotion that disturbed the tranquil peacefulness she was certain she'd finally discovered. In a moment, the crashing waves faded, the squawk of the gulls drew further away, and all that was left in the illuminated darkness was the groggy, graveled, Boston bred drawl of David's intoxicated voice.
"I'll be damned, Crowe. Good show. Really, well done, you fantastic son of a b*tch.
God, you're gonna live to regret that.
I dunno, Luke - I can't decide between obfuscatingly boar headed or just sh*t eatingly stupid. I mean, you saw the card, right? You're not....gah...you are, aren't you? You're the guy, that self centered, blinders on both sides piece of sh*t who figures to hell with everything around me, the only target what matters is my next target. You didn't even stop to think, didn't even give a f*ckin' glance over the sh*t show layin' the ground work for you and Stone to come in and muck up the place.
Least, that's as far as I see it, you bein' the undisputed International Champion and all, puttin' a nice finishing touch on Cameron Stone's little swan song there. Figure if you had an ounce of rocks up top that oversized dome you call a head, you might have been pride off to the side and let Cameron get the one up on you. Y'know, let him take the beatin' you're settin' yourself up for, give a little time and pick up your precious strap somewhere down the road? Sounds a whole sack of sh*t less painful then the alternative, right? I mean, I get it. Every good plan has a weak point, and I imagine that maybe your boy - whether the one with the stupid name or the other one with the stupid name - put the bug in your ear that you go ahead and let Cameron bowl you over, then I'm just gonna end up holdin' up the belt that much easier and takin' a big ol' sh*t over any chance you might have of gettin' it back.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't, I guess. I'm takin' that belt home with me come Superbrawl, whether you want me to or not. That's one of those little things in life we call an inevitability. I guess them's the breaks, sorta, you havin' to decide whether you let Stone embarrass you now or havin' me embarrass you later, albeit on a slightly bigger stage, right? Personally? Stupid f*ckin' choice. I dunno why you're lettin' Justan Assh*le pull your strings like that, pushin' you this, that, and the other way on some wild goose chase tryin' find the balls and the glory he left behind here so many years ago, but it's a right f*ckin' disservice you're doin' to yourself there, chief. Think about it - you just let that stupid son of a b*tch put you into some no-win situation, 'cept now you get to down in the history books as the other guy who didn't get sh*t done on the big stage. You, and Josh Dean, and the kid in the mask...not even a bunch of has beens in trainin'. Just a buncha never weres.
And I know what you're thinkin', you're thinkin' it so loud that it's resonatin' out in all the stupid sh*t you're doin' on TV - 'oh, if I suck Drakz's d*ck, he'll suck mine.'
Kid, I done some crap in life that I ain't proud of, but lemme tell ya - any payoff you get from THAT sorta approach ain't worth the load down the back of your throat, if you...well, y'know.
Nobody ever comes out of that tunnel of sh*t, cavortin' in bed with those two thumb suckers tryin' to find the easy way up into the big spoon position, smellin' like anything but filthy, rotten, day old, sun soaked sh*t. Now, I'm not sure what card it is you managed to play or how far Trace made you bend over in order to get your stab at the gold so quickly, but you know somethin'? Go with that - 'cause beddin' those two in hopes of a payoff ain't gonna turn into some feel good Dex moment for you, kay? Malakai's dead and dirted, and neither one of those guys is the type to just hand you the prize on account of you signing their petition or whatever nancy errand they've got you runnin'.
See, I dunno why, you bein' 'The Motor City Mercenary' and all that, but for some blinkin' reason, you got this way about you that says in spite of the big guy, tough talk act, you care about this sh*t. That title over your shoulder means a little somethin' to you and it would chap your ass good and hard to lose it to a piece of sh*t like me.
So how you goin' about preparin' for that one, Luke?
I ain't gonna lie and say I hate to be the bearer of bad news, 'cause that sh*t's usually funny as hell, but the truth is, you and me? These next few weeks? I'm sure we're gonna be layin' the potshots into one another like a couple of old women chuffed over the outcome of a little ol' bridge match or somethin', seein' as how that's just the way things seem to work around here, and I'm sure you'll be skippin' right past the Asian kid at Joe Bishop's New Haircut or whatever the f*ck it's called, but it's kinda silly all the same, you stop and think about it. I don't give a f*ck who's wearing that belt come Superbrawl, seein' as they're just keepin' the seat warm for me. Only thing I got out for you is the fact you're the unlucky son of a b*tch in my way this time around. See, I never came to the WFWF to make a buck or make myself famous or win all the belts or any of that sh*t. I came here to take the money, take the fame, and take those f*ckin' belts because that's what I do, on account of my last being Brennan. Ain't no glory or prestige or any of that sh*t behind that belt you're wearin', kid. Just a hunk of metal on a dead animal's skinned backside, but you know what? I think it'll look pretty f*ckin' boss around my waist, and losin' it's sure as sh*t gonna piss you off as much as losin' the shot in the first place pissed little ol' Penny off, so I figure, y'know what?
Why the f*ck not?!"
It's funny, how quickly emotions can fade and change and swing. Overwhelming sadness had occupied the better part of Natalie's life for nearly a decade, ever since David departed that fateful evening in hopes of a better life and a brighter tomorrow, and yet, all the sudden, all that seemed to take a backseat. For the first time, well, ever, she found herself not overwhelmingly sad, but rather, angry. She'd heard, sure, the stories that David would tell of his time 'off the wagon', but never in a million years could she have imagined the audacity he'd had to put the pen of revisionist history to his very reason for being. Here she was, even in his inebriated waste of state, silently cheering him on, hoping that somewhere beneath it all, some semblance of the man who left so many years ago was still alive in there, waiting to be plucked from the wastes and brought back from the black, and he's citing the very name that has caused him every bit of agony as his right to the gold.
A woman of lesser conviction would do well enough to just leave the man be, but there simply lay too much love in Natalie's heart to let David continue living this public travesty of a farce. A fire had been sparked in her heart that hadn't burned as brightly since the day David first went toe to toe with Randel Benjamin nearly a lifetime ago. Scrambling for the phone, she dialed, long distance, ten digits she'd come to begrudgingly know all too well, and waited, seething, grateful that the ongoing dial tone afforded her any time at all to collect herself enough to speak intelligibly at all.
"Yeah, it's me. You know as well as I do that you blew this sh*t last time. I'm calling in a favor.