resurrection

Golden California in March was an affront to his senses on a day like this. It was literally perfect outside. The sun was high, you could almost smell the sea despite the distance, the air held the perfect humidity. The only thing that dared mar the beauty of the day? A tumbleweed of tangled single-use plastic shopping bags, which skittered in his wake on the wind like a heeling dog.

I'm already six feet low

He didn't like being outside here, which begged the question-- why live here? Well, it was close to the fights. Why did the fights have to be here? Shouldn't this sort of ramshackle carnie fighting with very little rules that they did be somewhere dimmer? Somewhere where nothing could grow, and thus no one had anything to do to try to make a living other than stir up some trouble?

Waitin' for a miracle

"Well isn't this deja vu," he spat at nothing in particular as the wheels of his luggage captured the stray edge of the plastic mass and snarled into immobility. And the last thing he'd think he'd have deja vu of-- escaping Ava's lovely little torture guest room after months locked up in there detoxing on heroin. It'd been too fucking Golden California that day in Los Angeles too, when he'd slid out of the building and onto a bus with a flask of whiskey on him to try to numb all the raw damage that still haunted him to this day. He'd killed a man in cold blood, looked him in the eyes while that spark faded, and that moment stayed with him more than he'd ever told anyone.

His Los Angeles escape had been smoother than this. It hadn't mattered where the bus was going when he'd stepped on it that day, just that it was going somewhere away from HER. And wasn't now the same in that respect?

Feels like we're frozen in time

He fumbled with the fob on the latest rental car. As hard as he'd tried to build a home in this place for him and Sin over the last year of wasted time, and he hadn't committed to buying a car here? And wasn't it funny how easy it was to pick up the signs like this in retrospect? Even when he said forever, even when he bled and died and gave everything, EVERYTHING, down to his guts and all the ugly parts that you'd never want anyone to ever see... practically carved her into his flesh to prove his love and permanence.

And yet, here he was, in the parking lot, dealing with the hassle of moving out, doing the one thing he'd sworn on his life he'd never do-- leaving her.

Just pass me the bitter truth

But after the Ancient Way match, she'd changed. The damage had been too bad. It'd destroyed her prior career as a model. It'd shattered her self image, built far more than he realized on her own beauty-- who was she without this?

This was a world

All of the nightmares stayed in the dark

He'd given everything to try to rebuild that with her, walk the path to recovery alongside her, take the discoveries as they came-- except she didn't walk. She just sat in place, dumb and mute as a doll in their dimly lit little bubble of rooms in the Baker Hotel that'd been designed specifically for them. When he'd prod her for what she planned to do with her time in the future-- wrestling, fashion designing, hell, running a dispensary with how much pot she smoked to cope-- he got vague unformed nod-and-smile ideas that obviously went nowhere. Instead, she gamed, losing herself in some fictional reality to avoid the truths of the one she had to exist in.

And you become the enemy

And how he tried. Even through the mess that had been the arson of his gym and apartments in New York, he tried to still hold onto those connections to her. He could go out into the world and come back to her after, right? It wasn't stretching those fragile tethers all out of shape when he escaped to deal with Legion and Reno, right?

Drowning slowly

Just to stay true

It was fraying the very fabric of their relationship to bits when he wanted to move, to live... the friction created by his lungs continuing to expand and contract sawed away at the last emotional nerve like a file to a prison bar. And as futile as that effort seemed in the movies... in the real version, the last strands breaking through was inevitable as his heartbeat.

In the end, he wouldn't die for her.

And that.. that was his greatest sin.

Come too far to slip away

But it's killing me to go on without you

A throwaway comment in an interview of Layne Staley haunted his mind. I guess I can go anywhere I want... If only I knew where to go.

And when anyone was without a place to be... where did they always gravitate? Towards the place they came from to begin with, of course. The tickets were bought on his phone in what felt like a fit of impulse compared to all the carefully chosen moves he'd made for the last year. There'd been a goal, a plan, and now... there was nothing, once again.

Maybe he should thank Gabe Reno for torching his belongings. There was a finality to that, at least. This? Just quietly leaving the hotel? It didn't have the closure he craved.

---

New York felt different. At least it felt more suitable a habitat for his brooding, with the sun rays having to claw their way through overcast clouds here and there in order to offend his senses, practically dripping rainwater in their wake like everything else here was. The cremains, as they were apparently called in the mortuary business, of what had once upon a time been the only home he'd known as a youth were soaked through, water defiant in its own destruction of the scene, as if throwing a tantrum after having shown up far too late to actually save any belongings.

Anything I haven't got

Everything, I want it all

I just can't stop

He'd lived here, and died here, and grown from his ashes to live again on more than one occasion, but now all that was left of the evidence was the scoliosis-riddled cast-iron skeleton, and the ashy sheetrock imprints were too thoroughly destroyed to go over his little hidey-hole he'd carved into the wall behind the bed. A loose floorboard still existed recognizably, and he knelt to wedge it out of its place, the nail that'd been so loose and free once upon a time now cranky and clingy to the moisture swelled wood.

But never finding ways to stay

Or ever feel enough today

Tomorrow must be more

It was one of his kits he pulled out of the floor, the original version of what he'd dubbed Narnia finally giving up its dirty little secrets for the next of kin. He hadn't had to stash porn here like a normal boy, no, not ever in this kind of hovel, but he'd stashed every other kind of illicit thing instead. Ill-gotten cash, stolen goods too hot for open display, literal caches of food even, and oh the amount of drugs this warchest had seen. The last item was what he was seeking now, though not out of any chemical need for the moment. Just for nostalgia's sake, perhaps, he wanted the kit he'd stashed here the last time he'd been here... when had it been? Ages, years back.

more bed, more drugs

More lust, more lies

more head, more love

Fear, more fun

more pain, more flesh

More stars, more smiles

more fame, more sex

Brytain Rollins had run to him and Shane Sanders when they'd been holed up in this building as per his usual style when retired, Once upon a time she'd been in so much pain from her own (albeit temporary) breakup from her husband that she needed the world's finest painkiller to ease it if only for a little while. And to his everlasting shame, he'd given it to her. He'd crossed that strange intimate barrier and slid the needle into his friend's vein, ignoring the lust to penetrate in some other way that had always burned in the background of their relationship too brightly for anyone else to ignore it, all for the sake of the off-the-books psychological anesthesia that was needed to save a life.

I know deep down inside

I'll never really get more hope

Or any more

time.

Any

more

time.

Brytain hadn't been afraid of dying in the golden arms of his only consistent lover at this point, not really, when she'd been so close to taking her own life just to stop the pain. He'd laid her down in his own childhood bed while she rode that warm delicious dragon, though he'd never told her all the secrets of just how closely she'd come to knowing the whole of the unknowable man that he was in those moments. He'd practically laid out the pieces to understand him for her drowsy self to peruse by doping her up in the place where he'd shot the very first load into his veins at the tender age of thirteen.

I want lightning and thunder

I want blood instead of rain

I want the world to make me wonder

Lost in his own world, he'd missed that he wasn't totally alone. He was hearing the thin reedy voice of that junkie poet idol in his head-- I was just gonna sniff a bag, but one guy says if you're gonna sniff you might as well pop it, and another guy says if you gonna pop it you might as well mainline-- when she'd finally stirred.

Take a trip to the moon

Give me all this and give me it soon

Footsteps behind him and for a minute… those big blue eyes and sinful curves belong to her. But then there’s the shock of dark blue hair swinging around sharp cheekbones and an even sharper tongue.

More lust, more lies, more love

“Hey, Squiggles,” she drawled and he can almost hear the Kentucky that she’s beaten out of her mouth. Everleigh Callaway. Half sister to Brytain Rollins but they could have been twins if Ever’s features had been just a little bit softer.

Which was especially interesting considering Brytain had been adopted.

She eyed him, cat like. And it felt like she was seeing, noticing, everything. Analyzing it in that cool way of hers. She and Brytain, they were both fire. But where Brytain burned hot, Ever was a flame made of ice.

“She heard… about all this,” she said, gesturing at the ashes of his former home. “Sent me since y’know. The baby.” A little barb that Brytain was at home raising another man’s child. Her husband’s child. And Ever watched intently to see if it would hit its mark.

It did, of course. The wince was almost imperceptive, right between his eyes, but it was there. That Brytain had chosen to be a mommy had twisted their friendship back in the day. It was a step he couldn't comprehend. But then, whose marriage hadn't failed, and whose had, in retrospect?

"Wouldn't expect different. Funny that we'd cross paths, but then... maybe it shouldn't be funny by now. We always seemed to, back in the day, me and her."

No, this hadn't been a planned meeting. But he wasn't moving in his usual unpredictable ways right now, was he? He was moving like a wounded animal in the brush. "Did she send you with a message, Ever, or are you just playing the voyeur?"

Ever smiled but it could have also been a flash of teeth. She’d always been all sharp edges but those edges had been honed into a blade that could separate flesh from bone in the past couple of years.

He vaguely remembered her when she’d been just a little bit softer, shielded by Brytain’s shadow.

“She wanted me to make sure you didn’t do anything stupid,” Ever said. “She cares. About you. It’s why she keeps an eye on you.”

Dangling it there between them, waiting to see if he would take the bait. Daring him to with those blue eyes that sparked and burned just like hers did.

"So many women trying to keep a runaway train from jumping the tracks," he half-muttered, as his phone burst out in its default text tune from his pocket. He hauled it up and jabbed the button to pacify it temporarily. "You'd think I did something worth a shit for somebody back in the day, but I'm not sure I ever have. It's a thrilling story, I might be bribed out of it by a coffee. At least if the shop a block away is still there and not all like... this," he raised an eyebrow over the sodden ashes of what used to be his life.

Ever smirked, biting her tongue about the likely origins of why her sister kept tabs on the man in front of her. “I’ve never once turned down caffeine, Squiggles,” she said with a shrug. “Lead the way.”

"Sure thing. I'll meet you at my car-- it's the Mercedes-Benz on the corner. I'm just going to handle this call before this phone goes off another ninety times over lattes." He turned away, not watching her trail off towards the vehicle as the screen unlocked, and he saw Jada Kaine's name.

Where are you?
Tarzan, answer me.
C’mon, just reply.
Tell me where you are.
Word travels like wildfire in this place.
Where are you?

She was relentless and would keep it up until he either answered, or she would find him and darken whatever doorstep he was staying. There were a dozen more messages before the screen changed to an incoming call. It rang and rang and rang...until he slid his thumb across the screen to answer.

“Tarzan, where are you?” The concern in her voice was telling. His eyes screwed shut, hand running over them as if it'd have some hope of freeing the tears he should've shed this whole time, but of course not.

Soul-heaving sigh. "I'm in New York, checking my accounts..." As if there was anything as palpable as money involved in this deep dive he'd made.

“There’s nothing tangible left in New York.” Her concern turned to something sharper. “I may be a wreck, but I remember that fucker burned everything. Tarzan, why’d you go across the country?” He heard her exhale a sigh of her own, the tell-tale tapping of those manicured nails on the marble counter. “You could have come right across the hall.”

Another pause, she was waiting for an answer--but interrupted her own silence.

“Don’t fall back onto bad habits, Sweetcheeks. Just come back home. We’ve got the spare room, spare bathroom. You need to process this shit, you know it’s safe to do it here. No one’s gonna demand anything of you here. You know I’ll be your bulwark when you need it--and you need one now, Tarzan.”

She was right, of course. And when Jada fucking Kaine was your voice of reason and moderation, you'd swung far too wildly off course to do anything but heed her warnings. And yet, something in him resisted. "It's too fucking sunny and happy and... whatever Spring Break cliche you wanna fill in there for me when I'm like this."

That nasal yowl of a New Yorker's voice had crept up the back of his throat while he was weakened by his own emotions and he hated it. "Look, Kid Sister might be able to do her Holidays In The Sun recovery in Cali, but I... just needed some space to feel like myself again. Not whatever I'm supposed to be for some woman this week."

Except for the part where he couldn't deny she was right with every word she'd said. "I'll crawl back on the plane tonight and you can pick up my pieces from there if you want to, but we can't--" Fuck. Literally. The word sat unaired over the line, him unable to even go there verbally. There would be no fucking this pain away this time, Jada Kaine was married this time, he wouldn't go there, at least something had to be sacred still. "Yeah. I don't know what to do to make the world stop for a little while this time around. I guess I'll just fight it out in the ring. These fucking battle royals are practically unwinnable, I've never succeeded a single time I've tried in them, but I don't know what else to do right now."

“On the plane tonight. No parkour. Just let me know when you land and I’ll be there to pick you up.” Some spoken reassurances were necessary for the both of them. Besides being married, she wasn’t sure she could keep up anymore--not with what she’d done to herself before permanently retiring. Hell, even the trainer contract for Isle came with a zero-ring-time clause for her own damn safety. “I get the need for space, but you and I both know you fall back onto dangerous habits when you’re stuck in your own head for too long.”

His braintwin heaved another sigh, “You don’t have to be anything for me...for us. You need a safe harbor, Tarzan. You’ve got that here. Just me and Lilah, lots of coffee, books to read, and a hell of a ring workout when you need it. We can’t do what we did last time, but we’ll help you through it just the same.”

He had to pause for a moment in appreciation before he could even gather a response, then, "I'll be goddamned, Jada Kaine, when did you turn into such a functioning adult on me? Much less the best friend someone could ask for in this situation?”

“Yeah well, retirement and sobriety will do that to a person. I hope you won’t think less of me.” She let out a half-exasperated laugh, but he could at least hear the smile in her voice. She had to do something with her free time besides thinking about drinking. “I mean, the wife even likes sober responsible Jada Kaine--so maybe this was the right thing to do. Either way, just get your ass here. I may not be able to go toe to toe with you anymore, but I know a few people that can and will happily jump in a ring with you. Also I caved last week and bought Fruit Loops, so get out here so we can have people soup and Fruit Loop ice cream.”

A sentence that only made sense to them, that. Mushing softened ice cream together with breakfast cereal and refreezing it had been a creation of a former pseudo family member of theirs back in the day. 'People soup' had been an apt analogy for pulling people in a hot tub and simmering them for an extended period of time as a form of therapy-- potentially naked, though less likely to be this time. "Yeah, just felt like as good a time as any to go see if there was anything to salvage from the fire. Just needed some distance to clear my head. I'll be back in California before tomorrow, well in time for this War of Attrition thing. What better to throw all my frustration at than a mob of random wrestlers, I guess?"

“It’s always been my favorite source of stress relief after drinking and orgasms.” Her laugh was infectious. She stopped after a moment, exhaling louding before speaking again. “You just get here. We’ll feed you, get you some decent sleep, and distractions from pain that don’t involve needles. You have the Asylum title, Tarzan. You have to make a good showing--best to redirect that break-up frustration to helping you get through the match.”

"Roger that. Over and out?" he queried, sliding into air force jargon a little too easily. He'd soothed Jada's worry a little, at least.

“Over and out, Tarzan. We’ll see you soon then.” Her voice softened a little more before she ended the call. These women, demanding so much of him—though, at least lately, it was demanding he be safe. Jada, much as she denied having any sort of maternal instinct, had always been a mother bear. That much was evident when he first joined their broken-person commune in Texas a decade ago when his relationship with Shane fell apart. The women in his life circled the wagons and kept him from doing something stupid—or at least they tried. Saving him from himself. Maybe he'd let them this round.

I know deep down inside

I'll never really get more hope

Or any more

time.

Any

more

time.