PARADIGM SHIFT XXXIII // DETHRONE
DID YOU THINK YOU COULD DIG DEEP ENOUGH TO BURY ME? IT’S OVER WHEN I SAY AND YOU’RE NOT GETTING RID OF ME. SO WALK INTO MY FIRE OR STEP INTO MY LIGHT, EITHER WAY IT’S GONNA BURN IF YOU DON’T MAKE THIS RIGHT.
BAD OMENS .
••••••
“Are you sure you want to do this?”
The Dassault Falcon landed smoothly on the tarmac runways of Newark Airport in New Jersey, barely jostling anything upon landing. The plane had been purchased when Dickie and Finn both realized that they would still be travelling between New York and Colorado, and to both of them, the investment was critical. Dickie sat across from Finn at the table, leaning forward as he stared at his brother. Since their return from the most recent Climax Control, Finn hadn’t uttered many words.
Not that he spoke a lot anyway, but when he didn’t speak at all, that was when everyone knew something was seriously wrong with the Seattle Saint.
Finn hadn’t invited Kayla along this time, choosing to wake up his little brother earlier than the sunrise and drive to Denver International Airport with him in tow. He didn’t explain, he didn’t give any indication of any plans that had been drawn up in his mind. He just said “get the fuck out of bed” and now, three hours later, they were landing to visit New York.
It didn’t take long for Dickie to figure it out, but even now, Finn still didn’t answer.
They disembarked the airplane and headed into the private concourse. Finn had a determination in his steps that hadn’t been seen in him for quite some time, to be honest, and Dickie, despite being only a few inches shorter, was finding it difficult to keep up with the lanky Irishman’s pace. They exited the airport, hailed a taxi, and slid into the backseat of the vehicle.
“Where are we off to gentlemen?” The cabbie asked as the door slammed shut behind Dickie.
“Lower Manhattan. Wolfslair.” Finn uttered, and Dickie was surprised that his voice wasn’t filled with crackles and pops from not using it at all. Dickie side eyed his brother, furrowing his brow. Whatever Finn was thinking, Dickie couldn’t ascertain, and that was nerve wracking. For a man who was usually so calm and composed, the fact that there was a furious look in his eyes despite the level exterior was concerning. At least, to someone who’d known him since he was twelve.
The ride was uneventful, and that was okay. When they arrived, Finn stepped out of the vehicle and stopped, staring up at the nondescript location. The logo for the facility was on the doors, but otherwise, it wasn’t marked. Dickie paid the cabbie and stood behind him.
“I owe everything to Woflslair.” Finn muttered. He stood in the wind, which was chilling enough to the bone with the humidity in the air. He wasn’t phased. Dickie wrapped his arms around himself and looked up at the door too. “When I didn’t know if I wanted to continue in the business, Sonja offered me a position, despite the fact that her husband would have been furious about it. It was being here that reminded be that I was that fucking good, and that I was wasting my time doing nothing.”
“So what are you going to do? Just stomp in there and demand that your position is given back to you?”
“No.” Finn was firm in his response. “I’m going to stomp in there and destroy it.”
“You’re wha- Finn?!”
Dickie raced after Finn, who grabbed his keycard from his pocket and swiped it against the door. With a click, they were able to enter, and they wasted no time walking across the gym floor to his New York office. It was left untouched, his things still present. Finn opened the cabinet door, reaching in and pulling out a black, metal bat wrapped with barbed wire. Ellie, his sister had named it, used it frequently. It would be a nice touch, considering the fact that she’d fucked both Alex and Finn over time and time over.
Finn twirled it, turned around and found a slight roadblock. Dickie stood in the doorway, his feet planted hard into the center, his hands against the door jambs. “Mate, no one else in this gym did anything to you, and you know it.”
A moment was all that he gave his brother. A blink, a slight tilt of his head. Dickie thought for a second that perhaps the words he said were enough to get through his brother's stubborn skull, but he found out all too clearly the opposite when the tip of the baseball bat was pressed into his chest. Dickie took a step back as Finn advanced. He raised his hands upwards in surrender and backed all the way onto the small, metal walkway.
Finn’s eyes caught those of Alicia Lukas’, who was watching like a hawk from the crossfit area of the gym. Austin, too, was perched on the weights, his eyes also focused on the man through the mirror he stared through. Finn swung the bat in a circular, vertical motion, watching the others with intent in his eyes. He did not break that gaze, even as he walked to the front of the window of Alex’s office and swung the bat into it with as much force as he could muster.
The glass shattered everywhere, and Dickie took a step back. Alicia and Austin both reacted, but they stopped in their tracks just as quickly. Finn wasn’t specifically hurting anyone, though he looked like he wanted to destroy everything in sight. And really, what could they do? This wasn’t a wrestling match, and with the way he looked, he might be willing to destroy all of them.
So they stopped, they looked at each other, and they disappeared. No doubt, of course, to go and tell their commander-in-chief of Finn’s misdoings.
Finn smirked slightly, and turned. Alex’s office was open game now, and honestly, that’s all that mattered to him. He used the tip of the bat to clean off the remainder of the glass and then slid into the office through it.
Destruction was key. And by the time Finn was done with his office, it was unrecognizable. Championship belts strewn on the floor, shattered computer screens, overturned desks. The Seattle Saint didn’t really care either that his mark was left on the vandalism – at this point, in his mind, Alex deserved the destruction that came with the station – dating Aaron Asphyxia was allowing a tornado to glide right over this grave, and this?
Nothing more than a symbolic gesture of his future.
••••••
Are you mad?
You should be.
Sin City Wrestling, please stand up and tell me what the hell are you doing? In an ever fluctuating business, tell me…what are you doing to make change? What are you doing to push the envelope? The build this company to the brink of bursting out of the seams with talent that wants to join its ranks? I don’t see anyone trying to step in and try their luck like I have – and lucky have I been, certainly. Every so often, a new name graces the roster in some kind of convoluted attempt to be perceived important and they’re either gone in the span of a few days or they simply come back with a new name.
It’s allowed people like me, who are that good, to sit at the echelon of your company for more than four hundred days in a single reign. One reign. Not two, not multiple. One. I have ended your gods and felled your monsters for the opportunity to sit here and be that bastard who has done the unthinkable in not one, but two divisions. It’s allowed Kayla and I to go virtually unchallenged for months save for a small hiccup. And the most that you can do is compose a match of seven men in an Elimination Chamber – a brutal, bloody chamber…to face me.
Or Alex.
Look, I’m not discounting Alex. He’s hungry for championships…again, after he decided to fuck off and do nothing because of a supposed injury that was supposed to sideline him for the forseeable future. It’s the curse of being a wrestler, isn’t it? Injury after nagging injury eventually leads us to retire until we get that urge and we fight for it again. Or maybe we simply get bored and then like an addict, fall off our sober journey for a crack at gold.
After all, isn’t that what this roster is filled with? Isn’t that what the Chamber is filled with?
Helluva Bottom Carter, a man so improved and vicious with the desire to stand on the top of pyramid he’s never been able to get it. Attacked relentlessly by men who think they’re better than him, only to rise on top. Our previous Internet Champion, who was unable to retain against the Lesser Carter. Aspirations of greatness continue to bring him back, even when the going gets tough.
Miles Kasey, a man who traded his soul for a chance to fell the great monolith of Finn Whelan. The dictator, the supposed man who thinks he’s god. Miles Kasey, who is the worst of the worst for not being a man with balls to face the man who moved the world for him to come back into a fold of people who don’t want him. Miles Kasey, who shitposts and wins couple of the year simply because we’re meeting a quota and the only way to be interesting was to float both ways instead of being a vanilla bitch.
Bill Barnhart, who should have retired, somehow made his way into this match and will leave the rest of the competition feeling like they’ll need to take several showers.
Eddie Lyons, whose only injury is his own family that he keeps trying to climb out of the hole from and his own false confidence.
Senor Vinnie, a former World Champion of this company who has returned to try and dilly dally with a roster of unfamiliar faces. A man with a cactus and a cat, and is a caricature of a man that hasn’t quite remembered that this isn’t the SCW of old that found campy gimmicks classic and behavior unbecoming of an athlete appropraite.
Jayden Harris is the youngest and the newest re-addition to the company, but his words and work ethic ring true of a man who retired not long ago. Competence found, but only when it’s certain persons within the company. After all, isn’t that what happens when all of your programming runs with the same people time and time again? From what I hear, despite all the nasty words towards Alexander Raven, he is still more celebrated and more accomplished than this twerp who sounds, walks, and acts just like Daddy from 2007. I’m not impressed.
And that leaves us with J2H. James. I’m going to be pretty blunt and honest here – since you don’t know how to be – and call it out. I don’t like you. I don’t respect you. I know you think you’re a godsend and that you’re a damn good wrestler, but I looked at your records. I’m gonna be very blunt here: your records show you lived a wonderful life in 2017 or 2018…whatever it was, I’ll look in the future, and that you’ve hopped in and out over the last seven years, coming in to win the championship and then fucking off a month or two later because you got bored. Complacent. Irritating. You’re exactly the kind of man that everyone hates, and it’s not because you’re good. It’s because you sit on pedestal that you don’t deserve. And now here I am, destroying everything you had of worth.
Look, I see it. I see the attempts, but they’re not good enough. How much of the Blast From the Past tournament is made up of wrestlers who already sit in these halls, when it’s supposed to be an opportunity to garner talent from outside this company alone? How many times are we going to try to reinvent the wheel and get someone else instead of changing the narrative that everyone matters in this company?
I know I don’t say that very often, but every soul matters in this company. But I look at the Elimination Chamber roster and I look at who I’ve defeated in this company, and they don’t completely align, but give it a few months and it will.
Over and over, the same people.
Something has to change, guys. Something has to be different for the masses to come forward. Is that me stepping away and letting the vultures take my championships? Is that letting someone like Alex Jones do better than me? Maybe.
But that’s not today and it’s certainly not now.
No matter what happens in the Elimination Chamber, I know that they’re going to bring their best, and they’re going to try and try again. That’s what we do as wrestlers, isn’t it? Keep going for the throat, keep pushing to do more and more? Even when our bodies give out and our minds begin to wane, we keep coming back to the ring because its a place of safety, security, and what we know. The ring has never failed a person, it has never reached out and lied to gain notoriety or clout. The ring is always there.
Wrestlers can be dirty cheats and they can be poor friends and even worse enemies. I’m not going to lie and say that I wasn’t fooled by Alex these last few weeks. You know, he sat there and time and time again told me that he wasn’t a part of this, that he hadn’t allied with the devil herself.
But he did.
He and Aaron masterfully pulled off a coup that left me humiliated in multiple turns. I shouldn’t be surprised – in fact, I’m not. Because that’s what Aaron does to people. She crawls into people and she finds their worst qualities, bringing them out into the light and into the open. I remember a conversation I had a long time ago with my cunt of a sister, when we were amicable, and I told her then that I thought Alex was a snake. I tried, over and over, to let that thought go. I honestly thought that we were at a point where we would be good business partners.
Jokes on me, right?
I should be angrier about it, but at the end of the day, I have every opportunity to do the same thing here as I did months ago with Miles. As much as everyone wants to say it, I have a piss poor attitude and I don’t like people – and there’s reasons for that. Too many times have I been goaded into alliances and friendships only to have them go up in flames when gold or whores come into play, and to be perfectly honest, I don’t have time for that anymore. So this betrayal? Honestly, all it has done is made me want this more. It has made me desire to lay waste to Alex Jones so he can’t have some optional, clinical trial research settled into his bones to repair him and let him come back to this business.
It has made me want to annihilate him from SCW’s radar.
I love Wolfslair. I’ve never turned my back on it. I gave my all to the company and I looked to expand it into Denver. This was the agreement. This is what we discussed and I made it a reality. I have opened my arms to expand what he created and instead, I’m greeted with betrayal of the worst kind. So I destroyed his solitude. I destroyed what was his, and I will continue to grow my little section of Wolfslair with or without his permission.
Get fucked, Alex. It’s only just begun.
••••••
Dickie had been weary of Finn since the Wolfslair incident, but there wasn’t must that he could do once they’d returned to Colorado. His eyes had been more observant, his cognizance more alert. He’d wanted to work with Finn still, but he liked being a part of Wolfslair with Aiden, and he was slightly in fear that Alex would kick them all.
Nevertheless, he hadn’t seen Finn get upset since that time. Hadn’t seen him lose control like he had the day or two after Climax Control. Instead he had seen Finn stoically silent, but nothing more than normal. Which was why he thought how was a good idea to give him information rather than later.
They sat in his coffee bar, Death Before Decaf – the new front for the Yakuza business that he’d brought to Colorado from New York. To be specific, they sat in his office, overlooking the mountain range while also looking over the patrons of the shop. Working in the open, so to speak. Finn sat on the window sill, his eyes reading over the note written in Serbian.
“I had Yoshiro reach out for a translation…looks like it’s from Romani group closer to Fort Collins. They said that the groups were warned we were here and that if they wanted to stay safe, they wouldn’t be trading or setting up any form of agreements with us.”
“Jace’s group?” Finn asked.
Dickie nodded, “I think so.”
“Did you get any deals regardless?”
A snort issued from Dickie’s mouth, “Of course. I basically said we were more dangerous anyway.”
Finn rolled his eyes and flicked he paper from him back towards Dickie. “Fine, but let’s make sure that we’re watching out for any movement from the New York group, okay? I don’t want to get caught unaware.” He glanced up at his younger brother, who fiddled for a second with his hands and then titled his head. “You want to lead that portion, be my guest. Just be careful. I don’t want anyone caught in the crosshairs meant for myself and Kayla.”
“Noted,” Dickie nodded again, and then smiled slightly to himself as he turned away. His head snapped up when he heard a knock at the door. Both of them froze. Very rarely did any of the employees of the coffee shop come up here, and they also had no clue about the Yakuza themselves. A blonde haired woman stood in the frosted glass, and they both instantly recognized her when she stepped in. It was Kallie.
They relaxed.
Kallie bit her lip as she looked at Finn directly, and glanced at Dickie briefly. “Can I talk to Finn, Dimitri?”
Dickie winced as he was called his birth name, and then nodded once more and left the room, muttering something about getting coffee.
Kallie bounced her son Dax in her arms, waiting for the door to close before she looked at Finn with earnest – and guilty – eyes. “I…wanted to apologize. I knew Aaron was up to something, but I didn’t know what it was. I’m sorry. If I’d known what she did, what she was going to do, i would have tried to stop her or I would have warned you. I already apologized to Kayla…but I just…it was harder talking to you than it was Kayla. You’re just…”
“Scary?” He supplied.
“Yeah,” she chuckled, her lip trembling. She looked down at the ground. “Aiden says he knows I would have done something, and I would have. I just wanted you to know that I should have and would have. You’ve always been super nice to me and Aiden, and you let us live with you even when you obviously didn’t want to.”
“Kallie.”
“Mhm?” A small tear dropped down and Kallie swiped at it.
“You don’t need to apologize. You’re not responsible for Aaron. No one is responsible for Aaron or for Alex, except for Aaron and Alex. They’ll get what’s coming to them eventually, I just would like you to be you and not to worry so much. Okay? You’re not getting kicked out. You’ve got a good heart, and you guys always do the best that you can. You’re basically family at this point and you know me.”
Finn stood and walked towards Kallie, pressing his hand to her shoulder.
“I don’t turn my back on family.”
••••••
We talk a lot about history between you and me. You, with your beliefs that I hated you from the get go because you were fucking my sister. Me, with the mere fact that I didn’t give a flying fuck what you were doing with Elena, I just didn’t like you. Elena had this ability back then to charm everyone, and to be perfectly honest, I didn’t know that she was my blood whatsoever. But she was my best friend, a person I had learned to be protective over, and I wasn’t about to stop doing that simply because she liked it when you twiddled her cooter cat.
That’s how you fucks from Texas talk, right? Or am I thinking more Georgia? I’ll reach out to Alicia at some point.
Nevertheless, you abandoned her, and shortly after that, I abandoned her too. We both had duties, we both had things that we needed to do. The difference, however, is that you went on to be a championship-wielding demon of a man, and I became nothing but a drain on society for a time. I knew you and Elena were both great. I knew both of you had done wonderful in that short timeframe. But I didn’t realize is that in one of my first promotions, I would run into the both of you.
Yes. Congrats. You became the Honor Wrestling Champion in a time where I had nothing to my name, nothing to my legacy, nothing to be known for and nothing to give. And still, you said last time that you walked me from post to post – I recall that I did the very same to you. For a nothing wrestler, the fact that I was able to then stand toe to toe with you should have led to your confusion. Instead, you brushed me off.
Then you saddled me with the Wildcard Championship at WWH, but I remember distinctly that you fought me tooth and nail at that point because we still hated one another. Props were given, of course, but you expected the same kind of result that happened in Honor. It’s not how it worked, and I stood with my hand raised and that belt in my hand. You went off to gain – and subsequently lose – the WWH World Championship and me? I did too…and I vacated it and walked away from that pisshole because I wasn’t going to be traded in for some new shiny toy Riley could play with.
Both times you equated me to nothing, and you were surprise by my work ethic and my candor. Both times, I fought like hell and I won. You cannot sit there and tell me that you didn’t break a sweat. You cannot sit there and tell me you dogwalked me across the ring. Because you didn’t and you’re incapable of doing that with me just letting it hang like nothing mattered.
At some point and time in the last couple of years, you must have realized that you would have never been able to face me alone. Your poor injured back wouldn’t let you and while I’ve got a semi-gimp ankle, back trumps every time. I suppose on some wintry little night, Aaron slid up to you in your office and made googly eyes and said she would back everything your little heart desired. It’s nice, isn’t it? Hearing that someone was willing to make sure you were happy and sated, while not even realizing what she’s taking from you? Your dignity. Your happiness. Soon, she’ll be the death of you and you won’t even realize it when she’s denying you hopes and dreams all because she’s not getting her way.
So you guys made a pact and you sat there and thought that between the two of you, you’d be able to fell the big bad Finny-foo who turned their back on Wolfslair. Except I didn’t, and you know it.
You just wanted to get a crack at my head while attempting glory once again.
I’m not always observant, but I’m not stupid, and now you have the burden of proof of showing that you can do this without a cunt at your side. I know Aaron is going to come into the fray and she’s going to do her best to help things go in you favor, but that’s not going to happen again. Not like that. You see, you’ve pissed off Kayla, and I know that while you don’t care for her, you whored about with her sister, and I’m fairly certain she’s willing to take your wildcard out of play as needed for me. She doesn’t particularly like Aaron, and honestly, I don’t blame her.
Neither do it.
So this time, Alex, what are you going to do? Are you going to go to back and find Miles and have him come help you after he’s lost in his own match? Are you going to try to reach out to Aiden, or hell, Dickie, to see who you can find to betray me in name of you next? Or are you going to sit there and tell me, like you’ve told everyone else under the sun for months that you were the only one that would be able to face me, be able to defeat me, be able to stand tall against someone like me?
Or are you going to turn around and slink away like the snake you are when I break your back for the second time and leave you with nothing left?
You think that you’re brave, stepping up to me like you have. And one point, I respected you for that. But now? Now, you’re just the same as every other combatant under the sun – someone who is going to come at me and I’m going to stop in their tracks like I have the six other persons who thought they could fell me. Who thought that just because they might have done it once means that they can do it again.
I’m a different breed of person that the one you met all those years ago, and I am more dangerous, more adept and stronger than I have ever been. You think you’ve got it all figured out Alex, that you have me all figured out, but jokes on you. No one, not one, has figured me out to begin with and it’s not going to start with you.
I would wish you luck, but you needed it last time to face me.
Now?
I wish you good health…because when I’m done with you, you won’t have it. That is the price you paid for glory, Alex.
Yourself.
