It’s only a problem if you acknowledge it
The bar was nearly empty. A forgotten corner of New York far from the glitz and neon of Times Square, where tourists wasted fortunes on overpriced knickknacks and bullshit. This was quieter, dimly lit, the kind of place where people came not to be seen but to disappear.
Aiden Reynolds sat at the far end, his cap pulled low, a half-empty bottle of whiskey in front of him. He rolled the glass between his fingers, eyes fixed on the amber liquid like it held all the answers to questions he couldn’t bring himself to say out loud.
He’d told Kallie he was staying late at Wolfslair. He told Alex he needed extra ring work. He told Austin he was running drills on his own.
He’d lied.
The truth sat right here in front of him.
The first sip burned, the second numbed, and by the third he felt a strange mix of comfort and guilt washing over him. He wasn’t a drinker. Not really. The boys would crack open beers after a show, share stories and laughs, and Aiden would be right there in the middle of it. But this was different. This wasn’t about celebration or camaraderie. This was about silence. About shutting down the voice in his head that wouldn’t stop whispering:
You’re not good enough. You’ll never be good enough. They’ll always be better. You’ll always be the shadow.
He pressed the glass to his lips again.
The next morning, Wolfslair was alive with the sounds of training. The smell of sweat and chalk hit his nose the second he walked through the doors. Aiden forced a grin, forced the same swaggering energy that everyone expected from him. ”Morning kid,” Alex called from across the mats.
“Morning, mate,” Aiden replied, his voice just a touch too loud, too forced. He clapped Austin on the shoulder as he passed, cracked a joke about Alicia tearing apart another unlucky opponent in film study, and made his way toward the ring. No one looked twice. No one saw the tightness in his jaw, the redness in his eyes. He told himself that was good. He needed them to believe nothing was wrong. Because if they didn’t believe, maybe he could keep pretending too.
But his body knew. His stomach churned from the whiskey, his head throbbed, and every bump in the ring rattled him harder than usual. He pushed through it. He had to.
That night, he lingered in the driveway again.
Kallie was inside, curled up on the couch with their son. The same warm glow of the house that always felt like home, always felt like safety. But tonight, the warmth felt suffocating. He didn’t deserve it. Not when he was carrying secrets.
He sat in the car, reaching into the glove compartment where a small flask was hidden. He unscrewed the cap, letting the fumes hit his nostrils before he took a long pull. The guilt struck instantly, but so did the relief. For a few moments, the pressure faded.
When he finally stepped inside, Kallie smiled at him, her hand resting on her stomach.
“You’re late again,” she teased lightly. ”Hard day at the gym?”
Aiden forced a grin. “Yeah, just extra work, you know how it is. After losing to Carter I’ve gotta put those extra reps in.”
She believed him. Or maybe she wanted to. He kissed her on the forehead, kissed his daughter goodnight, and told himself tomorrow he’d stop. Tomorrow he’d do better.
Tomorrow never came.
Days blurred together. Training, family, lies, whiskey. The bottle became his secret companion. He kept it hidden under the seat in his car, in his gym bag, in the back of the kitchen cupboard behind canned goods he knew Kallie never touched. Each sip was another promise broken. Each empty bottle was another weight on his chest. But still, no one saw.
Until one night, Austin lingered at the gym with him.
“You good, kid?” Austin asked, watching him closely as Aiden stumbled slightly climbing through the ropes.
“Yeah, mate, just tired.” He laughed it off, but his voice cracked just enough for Austin’s eyes to narrow.
Austin didn’t press, though. He nodded and let it go.
Relief and shame hit Aiden in equal measure.
It all came to a head one weekend, the night before a big match.
He stood in the bathroom, staring at himself in the mirror. The whiskey flask sat on the counter, half gone already. His face was pale, his eyes bloodshot. He looked nothing like the man who was supposed to walk into an arena tomorrow and convince the world he was a future champion.
He slammed his fists against the sink.
”Who the fuck are you?” he whispered as his eyes blurred.
The voice in his head answered immediately. You’re a coward. A joke. A disappointment. You’ll never live up to them. You’ll never escape their shadows.
He grabbed the bottle and threw it against the wall. It shattered, shards flying across the tiles, amber liquid dripping down like blood.
A knock came at the door. “Aiden? You good?”
It was Alex.
”Yeah, mate, all good,” Aiden shouted back, his voice uneven. He waited until the footsteps faded before sliding down against the wall, pulling his knees to his chest.
The truth was, he wasn’t good. He hadn’t been good in weeks. Maybe months. He was drowning. And the worst part? He didn’t want anyone to save him. Not yet. Because the alcohol was the only thing that made the noise stop.
“I’m not okay. But maybe being broken is what makes me dangerous.”
We all fall down
”Why am I here?”
Aiden reached up, his hands cupped the side of his face as they slid through his hair to the back of his head.
”I literally just had an opportunity at the world championship. I won a battle royale, a stupid battle royale with a stupid premise at a stupid show. Ha ha, we get it. It’s on a cruise ship so let’s throw everyone overboard. Just like we go on these club tours and we have matches and fights on dance floors. It’s so funny. So creative. It’s not stupid at all. It doesn’t make a mockery of professional wrestling. No, it’s just a bit of fun. But that’s the thing. This isn’t fun for me anymore. That’s what this business was. It was something I loved, but it was also something I loved because it was fun. I would fly around the world and I would have matches with people who I looked up to. I would hear fans cheering and being in awe of the things that I was able to do.”
“But I won that match to earn a shot at Carter and the world championship. And then what? I put everything on the line. Everything into that match. And I failed. I didn’t just fail. I failed fucking spectacularly. All of my talk about not being a joke, all of my talk about being taken seriously, all of it was for nothing.”
NOTHING!”
Aiden stood up suddenly, his body hitting the table and causing everything on it to fall and tip over. An empty beer fell from the table and hit the floor with that familiar aluminum clank.
”You think I like being like this? You think I like feeling like this? I feel like this because I care. I care about professional wrestling, I care about this company, this business. I watched as a cancer infected SCW. I watched as it was cut out and extinguished from history. And then I lined up my shot. Like a fucking sniper in the woods, I held my breath. I lined up my shot and I had it. I had my target. I had my time. I had everything. And I closed my eyes, I took a deep breath and as I exhaled, I pulled the trigger. And you know what happened?”
“I missed…”
“I missed and completely fucked up. And after losing that match I’m rewarded by being put in a tournament. A high-stakes tournament where the winner gets to face Carter one on one. And I have to ask all of you, why would I want that? Why would I want to be put in this position? I look at that world championship and I want it, I do, I want it. But I don’t deserve it. And winning this tournament, winning this tournament is not going to change that. Beating people like Liam Davis, who I am facing in the first round, won’t earn me that right.”
“I shouldn’t be in this tournament. I shouldn’t even be in this company right now.”
“I should be at home, I should be spending time with my son, my pregnant wife. I should be rebuilding everything at home. I should be rebuilding my life. I should not be in this company, in this business, and I certainly should not be in a professional wrestling ring. But I am. And I’m going to be. Because I can’t stop. I love this business so much. Behind my wife, behind my kid, behind my unborn child, professional wrestling is next on that list. It is everything to me, and being the best is everything to me, and the fact that I had that opportunity at my fingertips and I let it slip through just makes me sick to my stomach and makes me not want to do this anymore.”
He takes a deep breath and shakes his head, calming himself down. He slowly lowers himself onto the chair. His elbows balance on his knees as his hands go back up to his face, cradling either side.
”I’m supposed to be sitting here selling you all on this match against Liam Davis. I’m supposed to be congratulating Carter on beating me and promising that I’m going to climb that mountain and face him again. But I can’t do that anymore. I can’t just go through the motions and sit here and look into this camera and lie to everyone. Carter McKinney should not be the SCW world champion right now. It should be me, or it should be Alex, or it should be Finn, any of them. Finn never got a rematch, Alex never got a rematch, and I’m going to tell you this right now, Carter, because I know you’re watching. And this has nothing to do with you as a human being because I actually do like you.”
“But I’m better than you.”
“I’m better than you and I should be sitting here as your world heavyweight champion. And that love that I had for this business and that happiness that I had being involved, and the fact that I always looked at this as fun, has now faded away. Now I’m just angry. I’m angry all the time. I’m angry when I wake up, I’m angry when I go to sleep, I’m angry when I am in the ring and I’m angry when I’m at home, and I’m angry when I’m drinking….”
“…I’m angry all the time…”
“So I have to silence all those little voices that keep on telling me that I shouldn’t be here. I have to look past all of the feelings that I have where I feel like a fraud. Because the other side of me, that angry side of me, all it’s telling me to do is walk into Climax Control and destroy Liam Davis. And here’s the thing, I don’t have a problem with Liam Davis. I don’t. I don’t have a problem with his former career, I don’t have a problem with who he is, I don’t have a problem with him being in this company.”
He shakes his head and closes his eyes.
”What I do have a problem with is the fact he’s standing in my way. That’s it. This is round one of a tournament, winner goes on, loser goes home. And even though my impostor syndrome is screaming at me right now, telling me that I shouldn’t even be in this match, the other side of me is just saying the same thing over and over and over again. Dismantle Liam Davis. Break him down, destroy him, send a message. And then go after Carter McKinney. Get that world championship. Hold it over your head and prove everyone wrong.”
“And that isn’t healthy. How would that ever be healthy? I’ve never wanted to be like that. And Liam, I hope you realise that. This isn’t me, this isn’t what I’ve been about my entire career. I’ve been about smiling and laughing and making sure every single fan who sits in a seat and watches me perform goes home happy. At the beginning of my career, when I was on cards with people who were huge stars and no one knew who I was, my goal was to make sure they went home talking about me and not those well-known stars. Then, as I started getting more well-known, I wanted people to buy tickets to see me and go home feeling like their money wasn’t wasted. That’s what I wanted, that’s what I needed.”
“But that isn’t how I feel anymore, Liam.”
“This match is going to be the first one that I consider to be the start of my manifesto. A manifesto dedicated to my love of professional wrestling but also pointing out the hypocrisy of everything I hate about this business. Not taking it seriously, doing stupid things that no one cares about. Letting people have infinite championship matches without them actually earning anything. Earning things in this business is important. And whenever I see someone lose a big match and they don’t end up feeling this way about it, it pisses me off. If you lose a big match and it doesn’t make you feel something deep inside you and break you, then I don’t think you really love this business. So tell me, do you love this business, Liam? Or are you just another name in a long list of people who have no idea what it’s about? I guess we’ll see, won’t we? Because at Climax Control you’re on the clock.”
