Chapter 28 (Scared) [UNLEASHED]

darkhorseonline.net blog posting || 12-07-2016 01:49 HOURS MIAMI

DAYS SOBER: 1032

I hate Christmas. I'm sure that comes as no surprise to anyone who's followed my career – written dozens of 'Merry Fucking Christmas' missives over the years. All those words settle to the bottom – this foul, rotted mixture. Jackson's Joke, my own home brew. Bitter. Dark. Sweat salty, fear-soured. Nobody wants to tell me it tastes like shit because there's this pull, this ineffable quality that keeps them coming back for more. Like a trainwreck on display, they need damage. It validates them.

My inevitable decline has been well-documented, after all. Deep down inside me, memories resonate like some sort of death knoll. Pendulum swings, striking, and I quiver. Fear. Anger. Both. Neither.

I'm an open book. There aren't secrets anymore.

Salud. Drink up. I promise there's nothing intoxicating left. No highs. No danger. Just lows.

Misdirection's how this game goes, right? Child's play – I grew up a long fucking time ago.

I'm some nihilistic little shit, making soap. Or maybe it's napalm if you tweak ingredients a smidge. Wash it clean and start again. Blow it all up. Polar opposites. Different urges but the same outcome, no?

Same shit, different day and the rats are back, scratching. Or maybe they're wolves now. At the door.

I can smell decay. It's probably me so let's get this over with. Got places I'd rather be and when it's over I'll light a match. Show you what's in my dark. Or maybe it'll blow us all to kingdom come. Maybe this will be my last year. Will anyone care?

Doubtful.

––Jax

Nashville, Tennessee || 12-18-2016

"Too slow," he wasn't even sure if he'd said the words aloud or if they were just radiating off his skin like the steam from his sweat-soaked body. He leaned over, bent double, dry heaving even as the purloined cigarette burned to ashes between his fingers. There wasn't anything left to purge – he'd left it all behind in the trash can on the other side of that curtain, all pretenses of cool guy washed away in an instant and he knew his daughter wouldn't be able to stall Missy much longer before the shit hit the fan. His elbow was a million shades of fucked, his arm feeling like dead weight, numb from shoulder to about his wrist before the pins and needles and fire started – smoking with his right hand was awkward as fuck but he forced the motions one last time, knowing it was going to make him gag, not caring. Right now, he needed that little nicotine kick to supplant the fading adrenaline.

Getting too old for this bullshit. Getting too brittle.

The blood-thirsty crowds had already been released, were already spilling out into the streets and a few stragglers passed by, not seeing him lurking in the shadows as they chatted about the autographs their patience had netted them. The irony in it all was how he'd actually asked for the booking against Nirvana as a joke, never expecting to end up in the semi-finals. Now, he wished he hadn't. He wished he'd stayed in Thailand, watching Missy lounge poolside in a bikini and racking up the dirty looks once the oglers realized she was with him. No. Instead he'd come back, letting Phoenix pull him back in with the promises of an easy workload.

Shoulda known better. They'll always use you until there's nothing left. Always.

He could have been a champion again. Instead he'd gone for the high risk.

Shoulda known better. Girl's half your age. Nothing you threw out there was going to keep her down. You knew that. Everyone in that crowd knew it so what the fuck were you trying to prove?

The voice of recrimination in his ears sounded like his father's – like his own now that he was in a sort of awkward-as-fuck freefall down the other side of that proverbial hill. Retirement had been the plan. He had a thousand stamps in the passport that needed a revisit. Places he wanted to actually see beyond four anonymous and identical walls and then Phoenix had literally risen from the ashes. Slaine had called him up out of the blue – the guy he'd thought would never come out of that coma, the guy everyone had completely written off for dead.

You'll be on that list if you're not careful.

They'd offered to call him a legend and a part of him needed that more than anything, the validation that paying his dues meant something. Now he was stuck choking on the regrets of yet another poor decision because he should have stayed retired after Lucy Wylde. That loss, he could have lived with. This one? Well, it was a bit too much like the bad dream of waking up naked in front of a room full of laughing people – it'd hit a little too close to home for his liking, striking chords and bringing memories to the surface that he preferred to keep buried.

With a sigh, he turned and put his back to the door, looking out into the deserted parking lot before reaching up to rub his face with one hand. "What the hell were you thinking?" He growled under his breath, the words muffled by his palm. His fingers crept up into his hair, nails digging into his scalp as the heel of his hand pressed hard against his burning right eye.

No tears.

The deserted lot seemed ominous now, steeped in silence beneath the night sky. Surrounded by anonymous buildings, he felt small and defeated. His stuff was back at the hotel but in his current state, he couldn't even remember where they'd been staying, let alone what direction it was in. This was the calm before the storm and he was loath to shatter that right now. In this last twilight hour, he could pretend it wasn't over even though he knew better. The hand fell away from his face, immediately curling into a fist and the anger was there in his sour guts, rolling like a ball of cold lead as he took in a deep breath through his mouth, trying to push back the new wave of nausea. He stood there in silence, waiting for his stomach to stop churning. It didn't. Of course it didn't.

"Here."

Missy's voice, floating up as she messed with something in her purse, coming up with a little pro-pack of vitamins and small electrolyte beads in a paste that would dissolve almost immediately on the tongue and flavorless. She'd specially picked it because of how hard Jax would always push himself, and she knew how his body was rebelling against the workload now. A workload he had put aside for a tiny slice of time where things were relaxed, sunny, and full of that feeling of exploration. Finding yourself after getting lost, like real explorers. Then he'd fallen to that same old seduction, and here they were.

"You're really going to need this until we can get back to the hotel and get some good liquids into you."

She stepped into the small bit of light, tilting her head back to look at him better, taking in all those details with that clinical precision she had, the physical therapist in her that was trained to do it.

"It's not broken, but I'd bet you a hundred bucks you chipped it. Clinic now or in the morning?"

"Feels worse," he said softly, eyes fixed on the cigarette butt at his feet that he didn't remember dropping, let alone squashing under his boot. "Numb from the shoulder down. Wrist's on fire worse than usual. Guess," he sighed, taking the little packet from her with his good hand, "may as well get it over with now."

"Smart."

There was warm approval in her tone, a hint of a smile coming and going despite how the numbers were racking up in her brain as he gave her the details she needed to process what he felt versus what she saw.

"I'll make sure they check for a pinched nerve in the cluster around your shoulder and your elbow instead of the usual. I called us a cab, but if you want we can always make Slaine pay for the ambulance. Maybe they'll let you run the siren."

A wry twist of her lips, a little dark humor that he usually liked might help him focus on something other than the fact that after this it might be a slice of time he didn't want to spend before he was medically cleared to wrestle again.

He chuckled, a ghost of a smile flashing across his drawn features, "as fun as that sounds... prefer to keep it low-key. Slip in the back door. Avoid the vultures as long as I can on this." She'd managed the distraction well enough, forcing him to make that mental shift to damage control. At least he could keep the press from getting wind of how bad it was – provided they hadn't already seen. "Shoulda stayed gone."

"You couldn't."

She said it simply, with that fatalism that was part of her very psyche, but it wasn't said cruelly and he knew that she was certain.

"We'll take the cab and then, well, we'll go from there. Just like before. I know you'll do the work, and if you decide we head back to Thailand, well I'm all for that."
Miami, Florida || 02-07-2017

When left too long, conflict invariably became a mass of knotted neurons; some flared pain and revenge, some fired loss and wanton destruction: a baseball bat in a parking lot or high explosives in a gas station. They were the loudest voices, the ones that robbed him of the most sleep. His eyes were burning, lids heavy but he refused to give into the blackout oblivion of sleep that whispered a siren song in his ears. Maybe soon. Maybe Missy would go for the gun in the nightstand drawer and put one between his eyes when he told her. Kirill's voice still echoed in his ears. Sure, it'd been seven years since he'd last heard it – like father, like son, but all the memories came crashing back with those two sentences.

Spiral has come home. Will you?

Perfect English, flawless to the point of sounding robotic with just a trace of something Slavic in the shape of the vowels. The message had been left on his private cell phone number, the one that nobody outside of friends and family knew, as if they wanted to flex that muscle. As if they needed him to remember just how far their reach was?

He closed his eyes, feeling his skin crawl. Goosebumps on his arms. Cold sweat on his palms and the back of his neck. That lump of scar tissue between his toes itched – psychosomatic, at best. He'd been clean so long that the numbers required a formula to break down. One thousand and ninety-five days. Exactly three years plus one day and the reality was here in his trembling hands, in that prickle in the back of his sinuses that almost felt like a sneeze coming on.

He wiped his right hand on the faded Zubaz he was wearing as pajama pants before lifting it up to cup the back of his neck, squeezing even though it made the pain flare in his wrist. Even now he was still favoring the left, babying it during the modified workouts Serge had helped him come up with. Spiral's voice whispered in his ears, that sickness rotting neurons still ten years later, proving how prophetic they truly were.

"I realize that my accomplishments as a wrestler will mean very little in fifteen, twenty, fifty years. Just like others before me, I will fade away into obscurity. But long ago I found a way to ensure that I would be remembered. I figured out how to make sure this world can never forget me. Every life I touch I infect. And from that point on their future is forever skewed from what might have been, what should have been."

"What should have been..." he murmured the words, eyes lifting to Missy's curves under the sheets, her blonde hair silver in the moonlight spilling down from the skylight. Like any other prophet, he'd gotten some details muddied.

"You are a perfect example of this, Jackson. Prior to June 2006, you were trying to reconnect with your ex-wife, the mother of your unborn child. I stuck my fingers in the strings, and with a simple jerk I sent you on a crash course which ultimately turned you into a drug addict, a pimp; an aspiring criminal. Who knows, had I not interfered, maybe you and Kitty would have gotten back together, had your child, and you three would be living in a two-bedroom starter house with a pool, a dog, and you'd have nothing to do with the Russians. The American dream come true."

He'd had that child, insisted the boy be given the same name of the one Kitty had lost. He had a son named Christian that he hadn't seen in well over a year – sometimes it was better to let it go than to constantly batter himself against that emotional barrier. The boy would grow up either way, without his influence. Jackson sighed. Closed his eyes and counted to ten. Fifteen. Twenty-nine before he felt the anger loosen its grip.

Maybe someday. Maybe he'll come looking for you in ten, fifteen years. Curious to see if the lies his mother told about the cold, evil asshole she'd made the mistake of marrying are true. And you'll tell him then. Tell him how Spiral isn't the only cancer. How the poison exists no matter how hard you try to pretend it doesn't. It'll always be there. It'll always–

Missy's breathing changed and he flinched, realizing he'd been talking aloud, the words bitter on his dry lips before he washed them away with a swig of icewater from the bedside table. "Hey, beautiful," he leaned forward in the chair and reached out with one shaking hand, gently pushing the hair from her face.

Her voice was fuzzy, muddled by sleep yet and she barely let her eyes crack open, one hand seeking the comforter that a hotel room would usually have folded at the foot of the bed, in just about anywhere you'd stay across the US, at least. They traveled so much that it was no surprise that it was about a reflex. A thump came from downstairs that was their dog, the pup grown to a big solid guardian that would patrol his house with the grace of a ballet dancer housed in one hundred and fifty pounds of canine muscle and that told her sleepy brain they were home. Missy yawned, her eyes still held near closed as her hand came up to cover that.

"Hey baby. Feels cold in here. Couldn't sleep again?"

There was a pause before he replied, something in him completely lost in the perfectly mundane moment.

You could keep it like this. Buy your freedom at someone else's expense like you did last time. It doesn't have to end.

The thoughts kept coming, circling in his brain before bringing a rueful chuckle past his lips. "Couldn't shut down. Got a weird message, missed a call earlier and never got around to listening to it." The way he said it was strange, the air in the room seeming colder because of that exhausted rasp in his voice. "Now I wish I hadn't."

There was a pause, she read him better than just about anybody after all, and while she didn't sit up, her eyes were a bit more open, and her tone got a bit sharper and less sleepy.

"Then delete it – after calling whoever it is back, and telling them to fuck off."

Another, slightly shorter pause.

"Unless it's the PW benefits department, they still have to cover some of your medical shit and it's like pulling teeth dealing with fucking insurance reps even if the coverage is primo."

Jackson shook his head, "they'll pony up. It was in my contract... made sure of that before I signed it." He lifted his hand up, rubbing the back of his neck again, sluicing away more of that clammy sweat. "Did I ever tell you about Jackie?"

"Not that I can remember..?"

She finally sat up a bit, using her wrist to scrub at her eyes and thankful she'd removed her mascara before going to sleep.

"Her last name was Moreau," he replied, watching her for a moment with a bemused smile on his lips that vanished with his next words. "When she was playing valet for Spiral, she went by Frost. They had a thing for a while and I never really understood it. He treated her like garbage but she always went back. Until the day she didn't – he blamed me for it. I gave her a place to stay before she could find a way to disappear and for a while I honestly thought she had." He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, head bowed for a few seconds in remembrance.

"You don't talk much about anything to do with Spiral, babe. I think the only thing you've said really is that I should put a bullet in him if he comes in to the gym, and you're not there."

She said it without a hint of irony though she shifted on the bed so that her diminutive frame was more comfortable.

"In 2007, he found me in HiWF. I was riding a huge wave, soaking up the glory and I had their biggest gold around my waist. By then, it wasn't business with him. It was personal. All of it was and he made sure to rub that in every moment he could, doing his best to tear apart every facet of my goddamned life," he paused, taking a breath. "I thought I had the last laugh. I told him I knew where Jackie was. Set up a fake meeting in Russia and he was supposed to die."

The omission of details was glaringly obvious but he knew if she really needed him to spell it all out, he would. He'd show her the bottom of any rabbit hole, after all. He moved to his feet, walking over to the window so that he could look down over the yard and the pool below. Nothing moved out there but he had that sudden paranoid need to check, as though the mere mention of his name would call forth the monster.

"Supposed to," he finally said, breaking the silence. "But he got out. Away. I don't really remember the details." He remembered the gun pressed to Jackie's temple. He remembered Kitty's screams. He remembered oceans of blood spilled over the years. He forced himself to keep talking, the words slipping past his too-dry lips. "I just remember the anger – the emotions, I guess. Funny part was I started out fearing him, fuckin' respecting him and it all ended with a million sleepless nights wondering if I was going to drift off only to wake up in a raging inferno."

She made a slight noise, thinking about what he'd said. Of course he held back details – this was how he operated. She knew he'd spill, if she wanted him to. All she'd ever had to do was touch him and it worked better than any truth serum. But something about this was telling her that knowing the minutiae wouldn't make a difference since she already knew Spiral was dangerous. In her experience that was enough, to just go ahead and imagine the depths.

"So, you're going to do... what... about this now?"

"I'm going to kill him."