“D” - One Bad Day
Jun 25, 2019 2:19:21 GMT -5
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Mongo the Destroyer, shanemitchell, and 1 more like this
Post by Deleted on Jun 25, 2019 2:19:21 GMT -5
”A famous, and fictional, dark jester once said that all it took was ’one bad day’.”
Laying back against the cool concrete, he sighed placing emphasis on ’one bad day’ as he turned his head to the right. The sun was waning, darkness would soon come. He would be another day closer to the moment of truth.
”One bad day. That was all that separated the sane from the insane, the ’normal’ from the crazy, people like us and everyone else…one bad day.”
The old brick building was faded, but as solid as ever. A drug store sat across the street. This sent him back.
Failing to attract any interest after a luke warm debut to his career, he ended up here. A small two bedroom apartment above a furniture renovation business. He couldn’t help but smile for a moment.
Looking on as orange hues faded and gave way to shades of purple, so too did the smile fade away from his face.
The relationship between darkness and light had always fascinated him. Not simply in the renewed physical cycle of the sun and the moon, but also the cycle within men’s hearts.
”That’s right, people like us. I own my failures in this life, it isn’t easy, is it?” A few moments pass, sound seems to die. When he begins to speak again, he continues with a hushed reverence. “You understand what I mean most intimately, don’t you? One day you had it all, the next? It was all gone. Believe me, I’ve walked that path twice now, I understand.”
Some might disagree, but he had always felt that any extreme was unrealistic. Just as there is good within the depths of the souls of the damned, so too is there evil held within the pits of good men’s hearts.
”You remember the day don’t you? The day it all came crashing down? No, not that one. No, by then it is far too late. Before that, the day the first cracks appeared.”
Yet, as he looked out over his old home of Morgantown West Virginia, as he watched day fade into night, he realized the truth. This second chance wasn’t about what he had already accomplished. No, these past weeks that had bled into months had only served to shine a spotlight upon the usually reclusive challenger, the road that had lead him here, and what would soon come to pass. It was a role it wasn’t sure he was comfortable with, yet the machinations of Chance had brought him here none the less.
”That day. You remember it well. We all do. Any who have walked this path would. It’s the catalyst, the beginning, the spark that sets the mind ablaze! There are moments so etched into our minds that they change who we are, and in some cases, who we were meant to be!”
He had managed to hide behind the mask for much longer than he would have originally thought possible. Event by event, he slowly regained pieces of his former self.
”Here is where we differ though. Whereas, you chose to become bitter and emboldened by your own sense of self-worth, I did what I always do. I persevered. I held out for something more.”
Then he saw her. Alyssa Lucchi had hit a low point in her life and gotten mixed up with a man she was better than. Her poor choices and his influence almost went down a path there was no coming back from.
”I took my pain and channelled it. I wielded it like a weapon. Even in my darkest moments, I was able to focus my bitterness and hate and resentment into something to the benefit of others.” A slight pause leaves an inflection on exactly how one can channel emotions so usually associated with negativity into anything resembling a positive outcome. “You took your pain and locked it up in a compound where you could torture yourself day after day until the time came that you could no longer bear it. I set you free, never forget that. I, and I alone opened the door of your cage. I set you free.”
The certainly in his voice rings true as he sits up, taking an interest in the sun as it slowly dips through the horizon.
“At some point we all are forced to accept that all things come to an end, full stop. No exceptions. But once you have taken a life, seen the light drain from other’s eyes at your hand…once you’ve seen that, the world is never the same. Be it in defence or anger, jealousy or retribution, regardless of justification or enjoyment…you’re never the same again.”
He had spared her that feeling. One both he and Shane Mitchell knew all too well.
”But that’s not what you wanted. You didn’t want to be free, you simply wanted to feel something, anything. I understand, oh how I understand.”
There’s almost a desperation held in his voice, they needed to understand.
Understand what made each of them go to such lengths to defeat the other. Each had ended lives, and I think we can all agree that only a certain kind of person can function at any level approaching normalcy after that. The ability to justify one’s actions went a long way in this endeavour. Another thing they had in common.
Though he didn’t have numbers, time spent digging through the ’heavily guarded’ files of Arcadia’s finest had shown one thing; where Shane Mitchell went, death followed close behind.
Though never officially linked to any deaths, the tiny speck of a town in the middle of nowhere Oklahoma had seen a marked increase in morgue activity once the then Reverend had settled into town to settle down and raise a daughter with his beloved Tiffany.
The home to former four time World Champion Morcant Davis, visited upon by Riot, Mitchell and the enigma himself; Arcadia may very well be the epicentre of deplorable behaviour per capita.
The tragic loss of the infant daughter despite the depths to which he’d gone, had emptied Shane Mitchell’s soul. It all made sense after reviewing the case files. Somehow managing to avoid capture, everything but the ‘smoking gun’ pointed to Shane Mitchell being capable of actions that were beyond cruel.
“You see, you don’t get like me without understanding just how it is for people like us…”
Sucking his teeth, the sound echoes just a touch, this was where most people felt the first match was decided. In the moments of desperation. Who was willing to go further?
If his conclusions could be believed, he would bet on Shane. Shane was willing to kill innocents, the defenseless. No matter how far he had fallen, that was the one line he wouldn’t cross.
“…I wonder to myself if I would have had the strength to do what you did. To take matters into my own hands like that. Could I do it? Can I do it?”
But those moments, the moments in which Shane Mitchell snuffed the life from infant after infant before tossing them aside in an ultimately vein attempt to save one fragile little angel, those were the moments he lost what remember of his morality.
”The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
The Call of Cthulhu
By H. P. Lovecraft
They were opposites ends of the same spectrum, the chief difference was Mitchell revelled in playing god in his own way, whereas he’d always seen it as a burden. Something not to be taken lightly.
Closing his eyes as night sets in fully, a deep breath brings some much needed steadiness to his voice, “I mean, can J do it again? That’s the question here. Go back to Masquerade! Take out the interferences, the referees, peel it back to when it was just you…and me. In those moments you saw what they all see. And you tried to run away.”
There’s a bitterness beneath his words that lends them gravity. “By the end, I lost count of how many people took it upon themselves to ruin the opportunity I’d worked the better part of two years for.”
“Then, was I granted a rematch? Yes…yes, but not right away. An immediate rematch benefited no one but me, so naturally being the number one contender, I was left off the card for two straight events. Killing any momentum I could possibly have, adding another hurdle to the already uphill race I was running…forcing me to go to extremes just to maintain a presence.”
Clearly, Masquerade was something of a sore point for him. But was he really claiming that his period of inactivity following that narrow loss was, strategic?
“But half of this fool’s errand is my own fault, because here I stand ready to do it all again. So when I say, what does it matter if you bring out the sad and pathetic Eddie Williams, or Nocturnal and his family. Hell, bring half the roster, three or four different referees…bring Esmeralda and every dirty trick you both can muster. You did everything you could to hold me back. Every possible disadvantage was handed to me, every conceivable obstacle was placed before me and still I came within a hair’s length of becoming champion. This time I see what I have to do. That why I’m not coming simply to take a Championship this time, I made that mistake already. There will always be something or someone to stop me…so this time I’m coming to make you feel my pain! To rend flesh from your body. I’m coming to claim my pound of flesh.”
Turning to step down from the ledge both physically and metaphorically the manic nature of his racing thoughts had led to a moment of self realization.
“Last time I wanted to prove to myself that I had what it took to still be relevant after all these years, after everything that happened. Now? Don’t worry about what happens if I beat Shane Mitchell at Pandemonium…Worry about what happens if I don’t…”
Advancing upon the source of the recording quickly, he leaves his ominous threat hanging on the air just a moment before sending it to a crushing black ending and queuing it up for posting.
He often marvelled at how different things were now from when he started, in fact, he seemed to notice it a little more with each passing year, with each passing crop of talent he outlived.
When he first started, you still needed a proper camera and operator to set up and film a proper vignette. Today all you needed was time and your phone making it all too easy to become wrapped up in the business, because now it was truly accessible twenty four hours a day. A trap but he and his future wife had fallen into recently.
Pocketing his phone, he makes for the old metal fire escape that led to the alley below. He should get home, maybe even squeeze in one last training session for Alyssa. He had the long walk from his old home to his current one to think about it.
Putting foot to pavement, block after block melded together until he stood at the edge of their home.
Walking up the driveway, he paused, darkness meant only one thing, the security system wasn’t on…
His heart raced as he ran through the former warehouse’s parking lot turned garden, but not from the physicality. Alyssa!
How could he have been this blind? They would stop at nothing to get to him. People like Esmeralda and Shane would always use her to hurt him. He just hoped it wasn’t too late.
Passing through the garden and approaching the building proper, glass littered the ground as his eyes scanned to find a pair of armchairs. A few panicked steps further found a pile of rubble that once was a replica Caesar’s bust.
Bursting through the door, his instincts and training took over. He was up the stairs in an instant, a wraith within the shadows.
His eyes narrowed, there was a faint sound. He couldn’t make it out.
Gliding along the wall, he edges past just enough to gain a viewpoint and sees a silhouette it the moonlight. His defenses shatter.
A stiff night breeze rips through what remains of the blinds and window dressings revealing every pane of glass in the vicinity to have been smashed from the inside. The place had been ransacked.
And at the center of it all, Sobbing for help, lay Alyssa Lucchi.
‘D’ runs instantly to the crumpled form, to her credit she’d knocked her chair over trying to escape following her unwelcome visitor.
Untying her, he holds her close before checking her wrists. “I’ll make Mitchell pay. If I promise nothing else, I’ll make him pay.”
Clutching him like he was all that kept her safe in this world, through tears she manages “This wasn’t Mitchell.”
Laying back against the cool concrete, he sighed placing emphasis on ’one bad day’ as he turned his head to the right. The sun was waning, darkness would soon come. He would be another day closer to the moment of truth.
”One bad day. That was all that separated the sane from the insane, the ’normal’ from the crazy, people like us and everyone else…one bad day.”
The old brick building was faded, but as solid as ever. A drug store sat across the street. This sent him back.
Failing to attract any interest after a luke warm debut to his career, he ended up here. A small two bedroom apartment above a furniture renovation business. He couldn’t help but smile for a moment.
Looking on as orange hues faded and gave way to shades of purple, so too did the smile fade away from his face.
The relationship between darkness and light had always fascinated him. Not simply in the renewed physical cycle of the sun and the moon, but also the cycle within men’s hearts.
”That’s right, people like us. I own my failures in this life, it isn’t easy, is it?” A few moments pass, sound seems to die. When he begins to speak again, he continues with a hushed reverence. “You understand what I mean most intimately, don’t you? One day you had it all, the next? It was all gone. Believe me, I’ve walked that path twice now, I understand.”
Some might disagree, but he had always felt that any extreme was unrealistic. Just as there is good within the depths of the souls of the damned, so too is there evil held within the pits of good men’s hearts.
”You remember the day don’t you? The day it all came crashing down? No, not that one. No, by then it is far too late. Before that, the day the first cracks appeared.”
Yet, as he looked out over his old home of Morgantown West Virginia, as he watched day fade into night, he realized the truth. This second chance wasn’t about what he had already accomplished. No, these past weeks that had bled into months had only served to shine a spotlight upon the usually reclusive challenger, the road that had lead him here, and what would soon come to pass. It was a role it wasn’t sure he was comfortable with, yet the machinations of Chance had brought him here none the less.
”That day. You remember it well. We all do. Any who have walked this path would. It’s the catalyst, the beginning, the spark that sets the mind ablaze! There are moments so etched into our minds that they change who we are, and in some cases, who we were meant to be!”
He had managed to hide behind the mask for much longer than he would have originally thought possible. Event by event, he slowly regained pieces of his former self.
”Here is where we differ though. Whereas, you chose to become bitter and emboldened by your own sense of self-worth, I did what I always do. I persevered. I held out for something more.”
Then he saw her. Alyssa Lucchi had hit a low point in her life and gotten mixed up with a man she was better than. Her poor choices and his influence almost went down a path there was no coming back from.
”I took my pain and channelled it. I wielded it like a weapon. Even in my darkest moments, I was able to focus my bitterness and hate and resentment into something to the benefit of others.” A slight pause leaves an inflection on exactly how one can channel emotions so usually associated with negativity into anything resembling a positive outcome. “You took your pain and locked it up in a compound where you could torture yourself day after day until the time came that you could no longer bear it. I set you free, never forget that. I, and I alone opened the door of your cage. I set you free.”
The certainly in his voice rings true as he sits up, taking an interest in the sun as it slowly dips through the horizon.
“At some point we all are forced to accept that all things come to an end, full stop. No exceptions. But once you have taken a life, seen the light drain from other’s eyes at your hand…once you’ve seen that, the world is never the same. Be it in defence or anger, jealousy or retribution, regardless of justification or enjoyment…you’re never the same again.”
He had spared her that feeling. One both he and Shane Mitchell knew all too well.
”But that’s not what you wanted. You didn’t want to be free, you simply wanted to feel something, anything. I understand, oh how I understand.”
There’s almost a desperation held in his voice, they needed to understand.
Understand what made each of them go to such lengths to defeat the other. Each had ended lives, and I think we can all agree that only a certain kind of person can function at any level approaching normalcy after that. The ability to justify one’s actions went a long way in this endeavour. Another thing they had in common.
Though he didn’t have numbers, time spent digging through the ’heavily guarded’ files of Arcadia’s finest had shown one thing; where Shane Mitchell went, death followed close behind.
Though never officially linked to any deaths, the tiny speck of a town in the middle of nowhere Oklahoma had seen a marked increase in morgue activity once the then Reverend had settled into town to settle down and raise a daughter with his beloved Tiffany.
The home to former four time World Champion Morcant Davis, visited upon by Riot, Mitchell and the enigma himself; Arcadia may very well be the epicentre of deplorable behaviour per capita.
The tragic loss of the infant daughter despite the depths to which he’d gone, had emptied Shane Mitchell’s soul. It all made sense after reviewing the case files. Somehow managing to avoid capture, everything but the ‘smoking gun’ pointed to Shane Mitchell being capable of actions that were beyond cruel.
“You see, you don’t get like me without understanding just how it is for people like us…”
Sucking his teeth, the sound echoes just a touch, this was where most people felt the first match was decided. In the moments of desperation. Who was willing to go further?
If his conclusions could be believed, he would bet on Shane. Shane was willing to kill innocents, the defenseless. No matter how far he had fallen, that was the one line he wouldn’t cross.
“…I wonder to myself if I would have had the strength to do what you did. To take matters into my own hands like that. Could I do it? Can I do it?”
But those moments, the moments in which Shane Mitchell snuffed the life from infant after infant before tossing them aside in an ultimately vein attempt to save one fragile little angel, those were the moments he lost what remember of his morality.
”The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
The Call of Cthulhu
By H. P. Lovecraft
They were opposites ends of the same spectrum, the chief difference was Mitchell revelled in playing god in his own way, whereas he’d always seen it as a burden. Something not to be taken lightly.
Closing his eyes as night sets in fully, a deep breath brings some much needed steadiness to his voice, “I mean, can J do it again? That’s the question here. Go back to Masquerade! Take out the interferences, the referees, peel it back to when it was just you…and me. In those moments you saw what they all see. And you tried to run away.”
There’s a bitterness beneath his words that lends them gravity. “By the end, I lost count of how many people took it upon themselves to ruin the opportunity I’d worked the better part of two years for.”
“Then, was I granted a rematch? Yes…yes, but not right away. An immediate rematch benefited no one but me, so naturally being the number one contender, I was left off the card for two straight events. Killing any momentum I could possibly have, adding another hurdle to the already uphill race I was running…forcing me to go to extremes just to maintain a presence.”
Clearly, Masquerade was something of a sore point for him. But was he really claiming that his period of inactivity following that narrow loss was, strategic?
“But half of this fool’s errand is my own fault, because here I stand ready to do it all again. So when I say, what does it matter if you bring out the sad and pathetic Eddie Williams, or Nocturnal and his family. Hell, bring half the roster, three or four different referees…bring Esmeralda and every dirty trick you both can muster. You did everything you could to hold me back. Every possible disadvantage was handed to me, every conceivable obstacle was placed before me and still I came within a hair’s length of becoming champion. This time I see what I have to do. That why I’m not coming simply to take a Championship this time, I made that mistake already. There will always be something or someone to stop me…so this time I’m coming to make you feel my pain! To rend flesh from your body. I’m coming to claim my pound of flesh.”
Turning to step down from the ledge both physically and metaphorically the manic nature of his racing thoughts had led to a moment of self realization.
“Last time I wanted to prove to myself that I had what it took to still be relevant after all these years, after everything that happened. Now? Don’t worry about what happens if I beat Shane Mitchell at Pandemonium…Worry about what happens if I don’t…”
Advancing upon the source of the recording quickly, he leaves his ominous threat hanging on the air just a moment before sending it to a crushing black ending and queuing it up for posting.
He often marvelled at how different things were now from when he started, in fact, he seemed to notice it a little more with each passing year, with each passing crop of talent he outlived.
When he first started, you still needed a proper camera and operator to set up and film a proper vignette. Today all you needed was time and your phone making it all too easy to become wrapped up in the business, because now it was truly accessible twenty four hours a day. A trap but he and his future wife had fallen into recently.
Pocketing his phone, he makes for the old metal fire escape that led to the alley below. He should get home, maybe even squeeze in one last training session for Alyssa. He had the long walk from his old home to his current one to think about it.
Putting foot to pavement, block after block melded together until he stood at the edge of their home.
Walking up the driveway, he paused, darkness meant only one thing, the security system wasn’t on…
His heart raced as he ran through the former warehouse’s parking lot turned garden, but not from the physicality. Alyssa!
How could he have been this blind? They would stop at nothing to get to him. People like Esmeralda and Shane would always use her to hurt him. He just hoped it wasn’t too late.
Passing through the garden and approaching the building proper, glass littered the ground as his eyes scanned to find a pair of armchairs. A few panicked steps further found a pile of rubble that once was a replica Caesar’s bust.
Bursting through the door, his instincts and training took over. He was up the stairs in an instant, a wraith within the shadows.
His eyes narrowed, there was a faint sound. He couldn’t make it out.
Gliding along the wall, he edges past just enough to gain a viewpoint and sees a silhouette it the moonlight. His defenses shatter.
A stiff night breeze rips through what remains of the blinds and window dressings revealing every pane of glass in the vicinity to have been smashed from the inside. The place had been ransacked.
And at the center of it all, Sobbing for help, lay Alyssa Lucchi.
‘D’ runs instantly to the crumpled form, to her credit she’d knocked her chair over trying to escape following her unwelcome visitor.
Untying her, he holds her close before checking her wrists. “I’ll make Mitchell pay. If I promise nothing else, I’ll make him pay.”
Clutching him like he was all that kept her safe in this world, through tears she manages “This wasn’t Mitchell.”
