Post by FINN WHELAN on Jun 25, 2022 9:58:44 GMT -5
REINTRODUCTION
ASCENDANCY XXXVIII
••••••
“But…why?”
The questions were endless. What did he do, how did he get to that point, why did he come back – he wasn’t the type to return to places where his feet made a path. He wasn’t the type to look in the rear view, wasn’t the type to do anything but forge ahead the best way he knew how. Finn Whelan was, by all means, not that guy. He didn’t need to relive his past to feel like he was something. He knew his status, he knew what he could be.
But there was always something left…unspoken. Unsaid. Left alone. He couldn’t pinpoint it, couldn’t figure it out inside his head. For whatever reason, Next Level Wrestling left Finn unsatisfied. He’d moved on too quickly, left too much undone. He knew what it looked like: he’d lost the NLW Heavyweight Championship and skipped fuckin’ town.
He wasn’t the kind to bounce, but he also wasn’t the kind to continue floundering in a company like a rotten piece of flesh just waiting to abuse. He needed more, to come back stronger, to throw all of his best right into the mix and ensure that what the fans and his employers had was Finn Whelan, not some knockoff Great Value brand version that did all the same things, but left people unsatisfied.
But she didn’t get it.
Kayla Richards didn’t understand it. She stared at him as his signature was scribbled fluidly on his iPad and quickly sent back. She stared at him as he smiled just a little bit more when the prospect of the company came into their conversation. She would have never given it a time of day, but Finn? He was different.
He’d always been different.
The streets of New York City’s northern border of Central Park rang even as high as his tenth floor flat. He owned the whole floor, a hefty investment, but also a place for the wayward souls that needed help in the sport. He supposed he’d picked that up from the woman he’d broken his sibling bond to and left for dead on the side of his chaotic mind, the caretaking bit. Someone needed to do it.
He sat on the balcony, his foot propped up on the hundred-year-old restored metal banister. Relaxed. Calm. Finn Whelan had been many things over his seven years of professional wrestling. Angry. Frustrated. Aggressive. But he’d learned to cope with all of the shit that the world dealt upon him with a sharp wit and equally sharp proclivity to maim. He didn’t have the idealism of his well-known sibling, but neither was he as jaded as another.
He was calm.
He was calculating.
Maybe it was because he was in the state of constant repression of his own anger, or maybe it was because he’d learned that it didn’t behoove anyone to respond without gathering all the facts. Or maybe it was because it was so easy to catalog what people said in his brain so that he had ammunition to load in his figurative assault rifle and blast people with. He’d been taught and learned thoroughly that it’s a weakness to respond in anger – let that anger consume you, and you make errors that you might not be able to fix in the future. You might burn a bridge that you didn’t want burned and find yourself a hundred miles from the target without a way to get there easily.
Next Level deserved better. He would be the first to admit that he probably shouldn't have thrown his ball and left, but in order to be who he wanted to be, he needed to. He’d so easily gotten to the point where even the slightest provocation pissed him off, and that wasn’t what he wanted to be. He wanted to be better. He wanted to rise above. He wanted to be the fucking man that no one wanted to fuck with, and he would sing that as he swung into his own grave.
They recognized it. They recognized that they had him back on their roster and that he was prepared to do everything in his power to prove he had what it took. He’d earned the shot so quickly last time – now? It was waiting in the wings, waiting for him to grasp and take hold of it. He made his intentions known, and he would settle for nothing less. But he had a test.
Keahi Sparks.
She’d recently had a chance at the gold herself, but ultimately failed…while so many of them also failed. She’d earned the shot, she’d taken herself as high up into the sky as she could, but Seth Dillinger made his path known and true. He suspected that until Dillinger returned, he would be thrust into a gamut of his challengers, including the man he won the belt off of. And it started with The Emerald Blade herself. He would have to make an example of her – this wasn’t a battle on a console that could be the best two of out three, wasn’t something you magically came back from for a second round.
He wasn’t about to let himself go south. Wasn’t about to let himself fail out and not come back without his teeth grit and his stance poised for battle. He was six-foot-four and just over two-hundred combatting his own stature, and he wouldn’t go down as quickly as someone else might have thought. She’d been here, but he’d been elsewhere. Winning championships and fighting some of the best in the business. But it wasn’t here.
He needed to be here, instilling fear as often as possible.
He needed to remind everyone that he was a vicious competitor, ready to snipe and destroy. And he would stop at nothing to rise to the top of NLW again. She was just the beginning.
A reintroduction, of sorts.
Welcome home.
"Why not?"
