Las Vegas -
Peppermill Restaurant and Fireside Lounge
Ruairi looked over at Ciarán on the Uber ride over to Peppermill and his heart went out to this best friend of so many years and what he had gone through and what it was doing to him, both mentally and physically. He still looked worn out. There was no getting around that. He was barely even speaking to him, but that was to be expected. He did just arrive on his ‘door step’ from out of nowhere, no warning, nothing. He all but forced him into the shower to wash what had to be days of unwashed grime and stank off of his body, then dragged him out of that room, practically kicking and screaming, and all to play unexpected and unwanted host.
Peppermill glowed ahead of them when the car pulled in, all bright neon and modern excess. It was places like these that warned people that had seizures it might be best to stay away. And one look at Ciarán had him wondering if maybe he had taken things a step too far - but they had come this far so if things went south, Ruairi had only himself to blame for trying.
Inside, it was exactly the kind of place Ruairi had hoped for. Plush booths, low colored lighting, mirrored surfaces, the whole thing practically screamed that Vegas glamour that managed to be both ridiculous and comforting at once.
Ruairi stopped just inside and looked around with deep approval. “Ah now! This is beautiful!”
Ciarán led him toward a booth, grumbling. “You’ve very low standards.”
“I’ve excellent standards! That’s why I’m thrilled.” Ruairi protested. “Seriously, Ci! Go find this in Ireland!”
Once they were seated, Ruairi opened the menu and nearly swore at the size of it. “Fecking hell!” Okay, so he did in fact swear.
Ciarán glanced up, not bored but his facial features somewhat slacked. “What?”
“The portions!” Ruairi looked up in both shock and awe. “Are they feeding us or preparing us for next winter!?”
“That depends.” Ciarán answered. “Are you planning to hibernate?”
“I might have to after this!”
For a moment, it felt easy. Not perfect, not untroubled, just … easy. Then Ruairi, looking at Ciarán properly across the table for the first time since they’d come in, saw the strain beginning to creep back in around the edges. Tiredness. Unease. The effort of being out in public, of being all right enough to pass. It was not hard to spot once you knew him. And Ruairi had known him for over two decades.
Ciarán must have felt eyes on him, because he dropped his eyes to the menu and said lightly, “What? Still trying to revive the dead?”
The words hung there. Ruairi went still. Ciarán did too, as if he had heard himself a fraction too late.
The sounds of the diner carried on all around them, but at their table the air changed. Ciarán’s face emptied out, not into anger but into that terrible blankness Ruairi had begun to fear most.
“Ciarán…” He said quietly.
Ciarán stared at the menu without seeing it. “Don’t.”
“No.”
“I mean it!”
“And I mean no!”
Ciarán shut the menu and set it down, but he would not look up. “Leave it alone, Ruairi. I’m serious.”
Ruairi leaned forward, lowering his voice. “I did not come all this way to watch you talk about yourself like there’s already a gravestone somewhere with your name on it.”
That hit. Ciarán flinched, just slightly, but enough. For a few seconds he said nothing. Then, without lifting his head, he said, “I’m trying.”
Ruairi’s face softened at once, though his voice stayed steady. “I know.”
“No, you don’t.” The words came out rougher than Ciarán intended. “You don’t know what it’s like when it keeps coming back. I can be standing somewhere ordinary, doing absolutely nothing, and it’s there again. The room. Their hands. The laughing…. Every time I think maybe I’m all right enough to get through the day, it starts over. I about had a fecking panic attack backstage when the lady reporter tried talking to me! I still owe her an apology!”
His fingers tightened around the edge of the menu until his knuckles whitened. “Do you know what that felt like when I told you? To say it out loud and make it real? To know people can look at me and know?”
Ruairi let him speak. He did not interrupt. Ciarán had been alone with this too long. If the words were coming, they needed room.
Ciarán gave a bitter, exhausted laugh that held no amusement at all. “It’s pathetic.”
Ruairi’s expression sharpened. “No.”
Ciarán finally looked at him then, and what Ruairi saw in his face made his chest ache. Shame. Anger. Misery. And beneath all of it, the wounded confusion of a man who had been hurt and then somehow convinced it had become a mark against him. Like he had been to blame simply because of his profession at the time.
“What else would you call it?” Ciarán asked. “I let it happen.”
Ruairi slapped his palm against the table hard enough to cut through the sentence before it could settle.
“No!” He said again, fiercer now. “You did not let anything happen! Something was done to you. Those are not the same thing, and I’ll not sit here while you take their filth and try to wear it like it belongs to you!”
Ciarán stared at him.
The waitress arrived then, completely oblivious to the dramatic friction between the two men, and the interruption saved them both from the moment tipping too far. She even seemed slightly flustered by the thick Irish accents of both men and Ruairi had to do everything seemingly possible to refrain from falling into his flirtatious stage. Ruairi ordered for himself, then waited while Ciarán chose something like a man who could not have cared less what was on the plate in front of him.
Once she’d gone, the silence returned between them but it had changed in the air. It was not a dead silence, just … subdued.
Ruairi sat back and rubbed a hand over his jaw. “I know I can’t fix it mate.” He said after a moment. “I know that. If I could, I would. I’d go back and tear the whole rotten thing apart with my bare hands. But since I cannot do that, I’m here. And I’ll stay as long as I need to.”
Ciarán swallowed hard.
Ruairi held his gaze. “You are still you. Not just what was done to you. Not just the worst night of your life dragged on repeat. You’re still here, whether you believe that or not.”
Ciarán’s eyes had gone bright, though the tears did not spill. “You shouldn’t have had to come all this way.”
Ruairi gave him a tired, fond look. “Who else was going to drag you into daylight and force you to share a meal with his bestie?”
That pulled the ghost of a smile out of him. He shook his head. “Please, never say ‘bestie’ again.”
“Would you prefer sexless lover?”
“Ruairi… yer going to make me taste bile here in a moment.”
“Non-romantic life partner it is then!”
Ciarán nodded, “And there’s the bile.”
The food arrived in absurdly generous portions, and Ruairi stared at the plates with open awe. It was pretty well known in international culture that portions in America were absolutely huge by comparison to most of the rest of the world. He shook his head and said, “Well now! If this doesn’t heal us, it’ll kill us!”
That got another laugh from Ciarán, quieter this time but easier.
They thanked the waitress with honest appreciation and the two men proceeded to eat.
Not elegantly, and not quickly, but properly. Ruairi kept the conversation moving in small, manageable ways and Ciarán listened. To everything and that part was vital. Sometimes he answered. Sometimes he only shook his head. But he stayed with him. He ate more than Ruairi had expected, and some of the strain in his face eased with the simple relief of no longer having to pretend he was fine.
After a while, Ruairi set down his fork and said, “I’m only going to say this once because I know you’ll start snarling if I get too emotional over me mate hurting.”
Ciarán glanced up from his half finished steak, wariness etched on his features but still, he said nothing in protest.
“You telling the truth did not make you weak.” Ruairi’s voice stayed low and steady. “It made you brave. Braver than most men I know. And if anybody has made you feel ashamed for that, they can fecking answer to me!”
Ciarán looked down at his hands for a moment before saying quietly, “You’re a stubborn bastard.”
Ruairi smiled. “You love me.”
For a little while after that, neither of them said much. They did not need to. The two men settled into a gentle, quiet routine over the next several minutes. Eating, drinking … Ruairi people watching as if he didn’t make a living taking his clothes off in places just like this. The waitress made her rounds, refilling drinks and constantly asking them how their meals were. Ruairi strongly suspected she was flirting but Ciarán brought that theory crashing down when he pointed out she was probably being overly friendly in hopes of a larger tip.
The quiet stretched on seemingly without end until at last Ciarán said, “I don’t know how to stop feeling filthy.”
Ruairi’s face changed. Not with pity. He would never insult him with pity. With grief, perhaps. With fury on his behalf.
“You start by not being alone with that thought all the time, yeah?” He said. “You start by letting someone else be in the room when it comes on you. You start small. Eat your dinner. Open the curtains tomorrow. Get outside again the day after. Answer your phone when I ring. Say nothing if you’ve nothing to say, but don’t vanish.”
Ciarán’s gaze stayed on the table.
Ruairi went on, gentler now. “You don’t have to climb out of it all at once, Ci. You just have to stop digging the hole deeper.”
That landed between them and stayed there.
When they finally got up to leave, night had taken full hold of the city. Ciarán stood beside him outside of the restaurant, still tired and hurt, but no longer looking quite so much like some Irish ghost of his usual self. Under the neon, there was a little more color in his face. A little more steadiness in the way he held himself.
Ruairi glanced at him. “Back to the hotel?”
Ciarán was quiet long enough that Ruairi thought perhaps the day had caught up to him all at once. Then he looked out toward the street, toward the lights of the city.
“Walk a bit first.” He said.
Ruairi did not grin, because that would have ruined it. He only nodded once, easy and matter-of-fact. And together they started down the pavement into the neon glow of the city.
“Haven’t we already done this, Brayden?”
“That’s not even me trying to be clever. That’s not me reaching for some grand opening line so the people at home can all nod along and pretend they’re hearing something profound. No, that’s a genuine question, because I could swear I’ve stood across from you before with people saying the exact same shite that they’re saying now.”
“ Ciarán Doyle’s first match. Ciarán Doyle’s debut. A newcomer. An unknown. And over in the other corner, poor Brayden Williams, with all the expectation and all the desperate hope piled onto his back, because surely, surely this would be the night he finally got it done. Surely this would be the night the third-generation wrestler finally found his footing. Surely this would be the moment where the story changed for you and all the talk stopped being about what you might become and started being about what you are.”
“And then the bell rang and I beat you and then the streak rolled on.”
“What was it, Brayden? 0-12?”
“That’s not me being cruel. That’s me being accurate. That’s me reminding you, and maybe reminding myself as well, that the very first time I stepped into an SCW ring, they put me across from you because they thought they were doing you a favour. They thought you were getting handed a win that night. They thought you were getting a lad making his debut, maybe a bit green, maybe a bit nervous, maybe a bit overwhelmed by the lights and the moment and the occasion.”
“Instead, what you got was me.
“And what I got was a lesson in who Brayden Williams is. A man with a famous surname an’ lineage. A man who keeps being introduced like greatness is inevitable, like it’s hereditary, like all you have to do is turn up and eventually the bloodline does the heavy lifting for you. Only that’s never really happened for you, has it?”
“That’s the bit I cannot get past with you, Brayden. It’s not even the losses. Christ, everybody loses! Everybody gets beaten. That’s wrestling. That’s sport. That’s life. What I cannot understand is why you keep insisting on being the locker room punchline. Why do you do it?”
“Why do you keep dragging yourself out there, wrapped in all that family history and all that expectation, only to keep giving people one more reason to laugh behind your back? Because don’t mistake silence for respect, laddie. A lot of the people around you have made peace with what you are. They don’t even say it with malice anymore, which is nearly worse.”
“They look at Brayden Williams and they think, there he is. There’s the lad with the great wrestling bloodline and none of the bite to match. There’s the lad born into a legacy he cannot carry. There’s the lad who keeps turning up with his chin high and his chest out, only to walk back through the curtain having done absolutely nothing to change the topic of conversation.”
“You’re a third-generation wrestler, aye. We all know it. We’ve all heard it. It gets repeated often enough. But has it ever occurred to you, even once, that maybe the greatness of your family skipped your generation? That maybe all that history behind you is just that? History?”
“That maybe you’re not the next chapter in a proud line of warriors. Maybe you’re jest the answer to the question nobody wants to ask out loud. What if the name is the most impressive thing about you?”
“That’s the thing that should keep you awake at night, Brayden. Not me. Not this qualifier. The thing that should haunt you is the possibility that you’ve already shown us exactly who you are, and it simply is not enough.”
“Now as for me, this is where things get interesting. Because this is not just some ordinary match tucked in the middle of the card, forgotten the second it’s over. This is a King for a Day Qualifier. This matters. Win here, and you move on to Into the Void XV. Win here, and you keep marching toward the chance to become King of SCW.”
“King. There’s a word that means something where I come from. Ireland knew kings long before this company ever thought to drape a crown over somebody’s skull and call it destiny. We had kings men still talk about. High Kings. Warrior kings. Men whose names outlived their bones because they conquered, because they endured, because when history came calling, they answered it with steel in their hands and fire in their hearts.”
“And now here I stand, an Irishman in a qualifier with a chance to move one step closer to a crown of my own. You want poetry in it, do you? There’s your poetry. The old kings of Ireland belong to history. The next one, Brayden, the world is looking at right now.”
“And that is the difference between you and me. You walk into this match hoping. Hoping the story changes. Hoping people finally see you as something more than the bloke who never quite got there. Hoping that maybe this time, maybe this one time, the name on the back of your gear becomes more than borrowed prestige.”
“I walk into this match knowing exactly what I am. I am the man who already beat you once when everyone thought you were due! I am the man who did not need a famous bloodline to make a name for himself like it was owed to me! And I am the man who intends to walk through you on the way to Into the Void XV!”
“ So aye, haven’t we already done this? Because from where I’m standing, it looks an awful lot like history getting ready to repeat itself!”