Post by Brytain Montgomery on Aug 14, 2013 22:55:43 GMT -5
The house was dark and the girl was huddled on the couch, a blanket pulled around her slim shoulders and the haunted look of a war refugee dulling her bright blue eyes. I recognized her and I recognized the house. Not a home. No, never that.
The house sat on the outskirts of Seattle, Washington. A piece of shit, rundown thing with a sagging porch and holes in the walls. From the outside, it could be mistaken for one of the crack houses that dotted this side of the city. From the inside, it may as well have been hell itself.
I watched her, my eyes slowly beginning to focus in the darkness as I tried to place the time... what day was it? What year? The girl-- I couldn’t bring myself to call her by her name-- reached slowly for the bottle of pills in front of her. She uncapped the lid and dry swallowed two of them.
She didn’t even know what they were. I remembered that much. He’d brought them to her, said here... these will help. She didn’t even question it. Working through the pain had become too much and if they helped, they helped. That was her philosophy. But then again, she was a fucking idiot.
Never realizing that that was how he’d gotten to her. The pills, they were some strong shit. Two had turned into four had turned into she needed them to get through the day. Five shows a week, each more brutal than the last left her with wounds that never totally healed. Working six months out of the year with cracked and fractured ribs had become a constant. There were scores of maladies and injuries that went untreated because she couldn’t afford insurance on an indie wrestler’s salary.
I watched her, my hands balling into fists in my pocket. Her eyes closed and she finally slept, fitfully. But still, she slept. You stupid fucking idiot, I thought. He’s got you now.
It had started innocently enough... the girl had been alone. Running away from her problems in Boston and assuming that they wouldn’t follow her to Seattle. He’d offered her a chance to forget.
WWEA... The Asylum, as they’d all affectionately called it... had been a chance to flourish. To become the person she thought she was supposed to be. But doing five shows a week and every single one of those matches more brutal and punishing than the last had worn her down mentally and physically.
The lingering injuries, the pain that never quite seemed to subside... she spent more time lying in an ice bath trying to numb the pain screaming through her muscles than doing anything else. But she wrestled in each and every one of those shows, fighting through injuries and pain and leaving her own blood and the blood of other’s behind on the canvas because it was all she knew. Because she needed it. Because she needed the money that kept her just barely scraping by. Because she loved it.
There was a culture in these tiny, indie-wrestling enclaves. A culture that was as tight knit at it was fractious. They were all young, dumb and poor. None of them had insurance or the money to go to the hospital when they staggered out of the ring bleeding and broken. They’d become adept at patching themselves up backstage or in someone’s bathroom.
They stitched up wounds in a haphazard mess with fishing twine. If you were sick and needed antibiotics you took someone else's leftovers without a second thought. They were doctor and nurse and pharmacist and so when Davie Bennington had offered her the painkillers, she hadn’t thought twice.
Low grade hydrocodone, he’d said.
He’d lied.
They were much stronger than that and she’d gotten hooked on them so easily. Needed more and more to make it through a match. To make it through a day. The feeling of finally escaping all of that pain was intoxicating. The ability to move her broken down body in ways she hadn’t since coming to Seattle had been liberating.
Any thoughts, any hesitations, she pushed from her mind. Because at least she felt better. There were whole chunks of weeks and months that had passed in a haze, blurring together. Pieces of her life that she just didn’t remember. But what she did remember was Davie.
Things had started innocently. Underneath all of her reckless inhibitions in the ring, underneath of all of her cocky bravado, she was still that same naive seventeen year old girl from Wilmington, North Carolina. She hid her soft Southern drawl behind the stilted, harsh Boston accent she’d picked up during the years she’d trained with Tristan Baylor. She’d dyed her light brown hair platinum blonde and hot pink. She no longer looked or sounded like the girl who had caught a Greyhound bus to Boston but deep down, where it mattered, she would always be that girl.
Trusting too easily and not realizing that the world was an awful place with terrible people in it. People who only wanted to hurt her just because they could.
She’d trusted him too easily.
Davie Bennington.
She’d trusted him without a second thought. Because he had a nice smile. Because she was lonely. Because she didn't realize that sometimes wolves wore sheeps clothing. She didn’t realize that some people could only be happy when they were hurting others.
He was only happy when he was hurting her.
I turned away from the girl on the couch, the pain killers allowing her some measure of peace. I knew that earlier that night she’d fought two matches in one night. I knew that she had a jagged cut on her left hip that would get infected a week later. I knew that she had a low grade concussion, even if she herself didn’t know it yet.
Turning, I kept to the shadows and moved through the hallway. Five steps to the bedroom. Three to the kitchen. The kitchen was small and the peeling linoleum on the floor hadn’t been replaced since sometime in the mid seventies. The appliances were outdated, rusting at the corners and rarely used.
Davie’s fingers drummed a staccato rhythm at the scarred table top. A hand rolled cigarette dangled from his lips and he smoked it down to a nub, ground it out and lit another one.
The back door cracked open and the girl stumbled inside. I wouldn’t say her name. Not yet. I couldn’t do it. She smiled when she saw him. She didn’t see his eyes, not yet. Not like I could see them from where I was standing.
They were hard and cold.
I remembered this night. This was the night that she caught her first glimpse of his true nature. What hid behind that easy smile that never quite reached his eyes. She should have known... but then again, she was a fucking idiot.
He was methodical in the way he executed his plan. He’d singled her out... she was weak, already emotionally beaten. The pace she was keeping was unsustainable and she was exhausted, emotionally and physically. She was an easy choice for a man like Davie Bennington.
That she needed the pills that only he could supply just made it easier. The painkillers made her malleable. Impressionable. They cut down on her will to fight back. It had been almost too easy. To isolate her, to take her free will away. To take her. All so that she wouldn’t run when she saw him for what he really was. So that she wouldn’t be able to run.
I rolled my eyes, half tempted to turn away and refuse to watch. I’d seen this all happen before and I didn’t want to see it again but I couldn’t. I watched.
They fought. Davie wrapped one hand in her hair, yanking her head back so hard that she’d been forced down to her knees. I watched, my heart hammering in my chest. But I made no move to stop him. It wouldn’t have mattered if I had.
History couldn’t be interfered with. It couldn’t be changed.
He twisted her hair around his fist like a vice, bringing her face up to look into his. Her eyes were round and wide, confused and scared. Her lips were tight with pain. He yanked her back up to her feet and snarled at her. Called her stupid. Called her a slut.
He threw her back against the wall and advanced like an animal. He backed her into a corner. She begged him not to. Her eyes were wild with fear. I could practically smell it. The fear. Rolling off of her in waves. And the more afraid she became, the more he liked it. The more he wanted it. The more he wanted that fear.
He’d was the kind of man who had tortured neighborhood pets as a child. The kind of man who had no conscience, no empathy. He toyed with her as though she were prey and he was a predator. Davie gently pushed her hair back off of her face before he let his fist connect with her cheekbone.
She slumped to the floor, he pulled her back up.
He hit her again.
I watched all of it. Impassive. Unmoving. I watched it as though I were made of stone. I watched as she sobbed, the kind of messy cry that left her face blotched and red. That left snot and blood pouring down her face when his next blow connected with her nose.
The blood was what he needed.
Davie was like a shark that way. Instead of pacifying him, the blood made him wild. Made him need more of it. He grabbed her by the back of the neck and pulled her close. He kissed her roughly, her blood staining his lips. His teeth.
He dragged her by the back of the neck to the bedroom and she stumbled along helplessly. The pain blinded her. It caught her off guard. The suddenness of it all, although really... she should have seen it coming. She should have known that this was the kind of man that he was.
But she was a fucking idiot.
I followed, not because I wanted to but because something was dragging me there. Something was pulling at me. Like someone who witnesses a terrible accident, I knew I should look away but I couldn’t. I wanted to look away, but I couldn’t.
He threw her down onto the bed and collapsed on top of her. She fought him but it just made him want it more. I watched as she begged him to stop. I watched as she cried through the tears and the blood. I watched as he slid a blade from his pocket and pressed it against her throat. He dug the blade in and a trickle of blood spilled down her throat and across her collar bones.
She could see what I could see, then. Could see it in his eyes. He would have killed her. Slit her throat open and watched her bleed out. He wouldn’t have cared. He was a man who thought that society’s rules didn’t apply to him. Davie Bennington was a man who thought that laws and right and wrong didn’t apply to him.
Still, she fought in little ways as his hand went roughly to the waistband of her jeans. Yanked them down over her hips. She tried to squirm away but his hand wrapped tight around her throat and squeezed until she was gasping for air.
She pleaded with him to stop. Told him she was a virgin, tripping and stumbling over the word. He didn’t care.
When he was done, his hand print was bruised into the tender skin of her throat. He fell asleep with the knife still clenched in his fist. She cried, bruised and broken and bloody until the sun peaked through the windows.
I turned my back on her, on him, and slipped unnoticed back into the hallway. There was one more room I hadn’t been in. One more room at the end of the hallway. Seven steps and I pushed open the door.
She was sitting inside, her back to me. She had a black hoodie on, pulled tight around her because she was always cold. Always. Her hands twirled a paintbrush absently and I glanced around at the canvases that filled the room.
Dark, disjointed images. Torn limbs, broken eyes. Images that were unsettling and painful to look at. When she turned, her eyes focused on me in dull confusion. Between the pills and the pain, her senses were painfully dull, her eyes haunted and hollow. She’d lost weight and I could see the sharp ridges of her collarbones. The concave valley’s of her cheekbones.
“Brytain,” I said, softly. Hollowly. I could finally name her. I was could do that for her now.
She didn’t speak but her eyes never left mine and for a long moment, I wondered what she must think of me. This beaten down, broken girl. What did she think about me? My eyes raked over her coldly as she slowly stood and faced me.
“You’re a fucking idiot,” I said, calmly. My voice never betraying the anger underneath of my words. I stared at her, as though this were the most simple concept in the world and I couldn’t understand why she didn’t grasp it. “You let him do this to us for nearly two years,” I said, my tone almost conversational. “You were too weak, too fucked up to put him down. You couldn’t do what you needed to do. You couldn’t fix shit. No, you left all of that to me,” I sneered. “I had to clean up your mess... nearly three years later.”
She stared at me in confusion and I tilted my head, eyeing her like a cat eyes a mouse just before the kill. “You were pathetic. You let him destroy you, beat you down. He tries to kill you in... oh, about six months,” I told her, circling her like prey. “You have a chance to do something about it then, but again... you’re a fucking idiot and you do nothing. You let him beat you down. You let him use you.
You spend two months in the hospital... useless to protect the only person who gives a fuck about your worthless ass.”
My voice softens. “Jordy.”
Her eyes widen slightly and I sneer at her confusion. “He breaks her neck while you’re in the hospital. In a match that was meant for you. She took the hit... for you. She never steps foot in a wrestling ring again. Because of you. And finally? Finally he destroys you. He breaks you down until you can’t get back up. He sends you out of the ring a broken, pathetic mess.
Blacklists you. Your career is shot and you’re too busy making a mess of everything to care. You let him destroy us, Brytain. You took everything we worked for you and you trashed it”
Her head was down, hair hanging around her face and I had no sympathy for her. No empathy for this pathetic shell of a person.
I shook my head, “It doesn’t end there, you know...” my voice was calm. Casual. Cold and detached. “Eventually, you stop failing so badly at being a goddamn human being and you get back in the ring. He follows you. He follows you all over the goddamn country and he does everything he can to take away everything I built back up. Not you. Me. He followed me to PDW but he was expecting you. He was expecting this broken mess of a human being.
I finally did what you couldn’t do, Brytain,” I sneered. The anger crept into my voice like spanish moss creeping along the tree trunks of the pine trees in my front yard as a child. “I ended it. For good. I destroyed him just like he’d destroyed you. But I didn’t do it for you. I did it for me.”
She looked up at me, then. Her eyes wide and I realized that somewhere along the way, I’d pulled the knife from my pocket. I recognized it. It was the knife that Syn had slipped into my hand the night I had left the bar we were in to “talk” to Davie. It was the knife that I had used to carve his signature Glasgow Smile into his own flesh. The smile he’d left behind as a calling card on all of his opponents save one. Save me. It was the knife I had used when Syn and I had visited Davie’s mother, the nasty, piece of trash who had made the boy into the man. It was the knife I had held to her throat when I had learned that psychological warfare can be just as effective as a right hand to the face.
I stared at it for a moment, wondering what it had been doing in my pocket.
But then, I realized.
It took only a few seconds but it felt as though time stopped, expanded. Grew heavier. I stepped close, one hand on her frail shoulder and I stared right into her empty blue eyes as I plunged the knife into her stomach.
Her mouth opened and closed in a silent scream and her knees began to buckle. She slowly sank to the ground and I followed her, kneeling over her as I twisted the blade in and her blood made my hands a slippery mess. I pulled it back, staring down at the blood rapidly soaking the front of her tank top. Her mouth opened and closed in a silent scream. Deftly, I used the blade to slice her from hip bone to hip bone. To drive it between her ribs.
The entire time I never took my eyes off of hers. Not until her eyes dulled. Not until they faded.
Only then did I stand up. Covered in her blood. My blood. Our blood.
“Brytain Montgomery is dead,” I whispered softly. “Long live Brytain Montgomery.”
xxx
Brytain paced slightly, her movements more similar to a caged tiger than the once energetic, smiling girl she’d been. Her long pink hair casts shadows on her face and tension thrums through every muscle in her body. “Maybe I’ve kept my mouth shut too long... maybe that’s why I still have people like Smith fucking Jones and Yoshiru Long overlooking me. Putting me in the same class of idiots who only blindly feel around a wrestling ring, hoping for a win. They seem to think that a five month and almost eight match winning streak is a fluke. Lightning in a bottle. What I’ve done is diminished, unrecognized and forgotten about.
This shit right here? It’s not going to make me any friends... but I don’t care. If I wanted friends I’d be in the wrong business. And as Jesse Lewis, who is more of a father to me than my own ever was, once told me: It's better to let everyone hear your voice, rather than empty silence from your conscience. So this? Consider it whatever you want. Consider it a manifesto. Consider it a declaration of intent. Consider it fucking Mein Kampf for all I care.
But you will consider it. Because these past five months? These seven straight wins? They aren’t a flash in the pan. They aren’t a fluke. They are what I’m capable of. What I can do and what I will continue to do. When will you notice? Once you realize that I’ve laid waste to half the roster? When you realize that nothing and no one can stop me?
Continue being preoccupied with your darlings, your favorite playthings... keep your attention on them so that you won’t notice me. See, I like that. It means I can do what I do... and that by the time you do notice? By the time I’ve run through everyone on the roster like water? By that point, it’s too late.
By that point I’ve laid waste to everything that stands in my way. Mya Denton couldn’t beat me on my worst day... half of the work already done for her. She had me in the ring half-dead and she still couldn’t get the job done.
Do you think you’ll be able to do it on my best, Smith?
You’ll be number eight and Yoshiru Long will be number nine. He seems to think that he’ll be the first hall of famer to fall to me but he forgets Curtis Wilkes. Curtis, another man who doubted me. Another man who assumed that I would be an easy notch to add to his expansive list of victories. A man who thought that he couldn’t be beaten. A hall of famer. And I brought him down. I humbled him. I ended his precious little winning streak just as Smith Jones aims to try to end mine.
But Smith, like everyone else, underestimates me. Thought we’d play his game until he grew tired of it. But instead, we have played mine. We are playing mine now.
Doesn’t feel too good being the prey instead of the predator, does it, Smith?” Brytain shrugs, staring into the camera with a cold smirk on her face. “How does it feel always looking over your shoulder, wondering if I’m going to be there? How does it feel not being on the offensive anymore? Those stupid fucking flowers that escalated into your little parlor trick... that was cute. What was your desired affect? Did you want me to be so cowed and beaten down that I would just hand you the Broadcast Title? Did you expect me to run in fear whenever I saw you turning a corner or tremble with fear whenever someone said your name?
That was amatuer shit, Smith. Truly. I expected better from someone like you. I’ve seen all of that before... but how quickly people want to forget that I’m not some stupid rookie lacing up my very first pair of ring boots. You can delude yourself... you can tell yourself that you’ll hold this championship again. But at the end of the day we both know why you were delaying the inevitable.
It’s because you know just like I know that while I hold this belt you will never get your hands on it again. Why? Because I won’t let you. Because you can’t beat me. Because no one can.
The question is not who will let me. It’s who will stop me?
Not you, Smith. Never you.”
The house sat on the outskirts of Seattle, Washington. A piece of shit, rundown thing with a sagging porch and holes in the walls. From the outside, it could be mistaken for one of the crack houses that dotted this side of the city. From the inside, it may as well have been hell itself.
I watched her, my eyes slowly beginning to focus in the darkness as I tried to place the time... what day was it? What year? The girl-- I couldn’t bring myself to call her by her name-- reached slowly for the bottle of pills in front of her. She uncapped the lid and dry swallowed two of them.
She didn’t even know what they were. I remembered that much. He’d brought them to her, said here... these will help. She didn’t even question it. Working through the pain had become too much and if they helped, they helped. That was her philosophy. But then again, she was a fucking idiot.
Never realizing that that was how he’d gotten to her. The pills, they were some strong shit. Two had turned into four had turned into she needed them to get through the day. Five shows a week, each more brutal than the last left her with wounds that never totally healed. Working six months out of the year with cracked and fractured ribs had become a constant. There were scores of maladies and injuries that went untreated because she couldn’t afford insurance on an indie wrestler’s salary.
I watched her, my hands balling into fists in my pocket. Her eyes closed and she finally slept, fitfully. But still, she slept. You stupid fucking idiot, I thought. He’s got you now.
It had started innocently enough... the girl had been alone. Running away from her problems in Boston and assuming that they wouldn’t follow her to Seattle. He’d offered her a chance to forget.
WWEA... The Asylum, as they’d all affectionately called it... had been a chance to flourish. To become the person she thought she was supposed to be. But doing five shows a week and every single one of those matches more brutal and punishing than the last had worn her down mentally and physically.
The lingering injuries, the pain that never quite seemed to subside... she spent more time lying in an ice bath trying to numb the pain screaming through her muscles than doing anything else. But she wrestled in each and every one of those shows, fighting through injuries and pain and leaving her own blood and the blood of other’s behind on the canvas because it was all she knew. Because she needed it. Because she needed the money that kept her just barely scraping by. Because she loved it.
There was a culture in these tiny, indie-wrestling enclaves. A culture that was as tight knit at it was fractious. They were all young, dumb and poor. None of them had insurance or the money to go to the hospital when they staggered out of the ring bleeding and broken. They’d become adept at patching themselves up backstage or in someone’s bathroom.
They stitched up wounds in a haphazard mess with fishing twine. If you were sick and needed antibiotics you took someone else's leftovers without a second thought. They were doctor and nurse and pharmacist and so when Davie Bennington had offered her the painkillers, she hadn’t thought twice.
Low grade hydrocodone, he’d said.
He’d lied.
They were much stronger than that and she’d gotten hooked on them so easily. Needed more and more to make it through a match. To make it through a day. The feeling of finally escaping all of that pain was intoxicating. The ability to move her broken down body in ways she hadn’t since coming to Seattle had been liberating.
Any thoughts, any hesitations, she pushed from her mind. Because at least she felt better. There were whole chunks of weeks and months that had passed in a haze, blurring together. Pieces of her life that she just didn’t remember. But what she did remember was Davie.
Things had started innocently. Underneath all of her reckless inhibitions in the ring, underneath of all of her cocky bravado, she was still that same naive seventeen year old girl from Wilmington, North Carolina. She hid her soft Southern drawl behind the stilted, harsh Boston accent she’d picked up during the years she’d trained with Tristan Baylor. She’d dyed her light brown hair platinum blonde and hot pink. She no longer looked or sounded like the girl who had caught a Greyhound bus to Boston but deep down, where it mattered, she would always be that girl.
Trusting too easily and not realizing that the world was an awful place with terrible people in it. People who only wanted to hurt her just because they could.
She’d trusted him too easily.
Davie Bennington.
She’d trusted him without a second thought. Because he had a nice smile. Because she was lonely. Because she didn't realize that sometimes wolves wore sheeps clothing. She didn’t realize that some people could only be happy when they were hurting others.
He was only happy when he was hurting her.
I turned away from the girl on the couch, the pain killers allowing her some measure of peace. I knew that earlier that night she’d fought two matches in one night. I knew that she had a jagged cut on her left hip that would get infected a week later. I knew that she had a low grade concussion, even if she herself didn’t know it yet.
Turning, I kept to the shadows and moved through the hallway. Five steps to the bedroom. Three to the kitchen. The kitchen was small and the peeling linoleum on the floor hadn’t been replaced since sometime in the mid seventies. The appliances were outdated, rusting at the corners and rarely used.
Davie’s fingers drummed a staccato rhythm at the scarred table top. A hand rolled cigarette dangled from his lips and he smoked it down to a nub, ground it out and lit another one.
The back door cracked open and the girl stumbled inside. I wouldn’t say her name. Not yet. I couldn’t do it. She smiled when she saw him. She didn’t see his eyes, not yet. Not like I could see them from where I was standing.
They were hard and cold.
I remembered this night. This was the night that she caught her first glimpse of his true nature. What hid behind that easy smile that never quite reached his eyes. She should have known... but then again, she was a fucking idiot.
He was methodical in the way he executed his plan. He’d singled her out... she was weak, already emotionally beaten. The pace she was keeping was unsustainable and she was exhausted, emotionally and physically. She was an easy choice for a man like Davie Bennington.
That she needed the pills that only he could supply just made it easier. The painkillers made her malleable. Impressionable. They cut down on her will to fight back. It had been almost too easy. To isolate her, to take her free will away. To take her. All so that she wouldn’t run when she saw him for what he really was. So that she wouldn’t be able to run.
I rolled my eyes, half tempted to turn away and refuse to watch. I’d seen this all happen before and I didn’t want to see it again but I couldn’t. I watched.
They fought. Davie wrapped one hand in her hair, yanking her head back so hard that she’d been forced down to her knees. I watched, my heart hammering in my chest. But I made no move to stop him. It wouldn’t have mattered if I had.
History couldn’t be interfered with. It couldn’t be changed.
He twisted her hair around his fist like a vice, bringing her face up to look into his. Her eyes were round and wide, confused and scared. Her lips were tight with pain. He yanked her back up to her feet and snarled at her. Called her stupid. Called her a slut.
He threw her back against the wall and advanced like an animal. He backed her into a corner. She begged him not to. Her eyes were wild with fear. I could practically smell it. The fear. Rolling off of her in waves. And the more afraid she became, the more he liked it. The more he wanted it. The more he wanted that fear.
He’d was the kind of man who had tortured neighborhood pets as a child. The kind of man who had no conscience, no empathy. He toyed with her as though she were prey and he was a predator. Davie gently pushed her hair back off of her face before he let his fist connect with her cheekbone.
She slumped to the floor, he pulled her back up.
He hit her again.
I watched all of it. Impassive. Unmoving. I watched it as though I were made of stone. I watched as she sobbed, the kind of messy cry that left her face blotched and red. That left snot and blood pouring down her face when his next blow connected with her nose.
The blood was what he needed.
Davie was like a shark that way. Instead of pacifying him, the blood made him wild. Made him need more of it. He grabbed her by the back of the neck and pulled her close. He kissed her roughly, her blood staining his lips. His teeth.
He dragged her by the back of the neck to the bedroom and she stumbled along helplessly. The pain blinded her. It caught her off guard. The suddenness of it all, although really... she should have seen it coming. She should have known that this was the kind of man that he was.
But she was a fucking idiot.
I followed, not because I wanted to but because something was dragging me there. Something was pulling at me. Like someone who witnesses a terrible accident, I knew I should look away but I couldn’t. I wanted to look away, but I couldn’t.
He threw her down onto the bed and collapsed on top of her. She fought him but it just made him want it more. I watched as she begged him to stop. I watched as she cried through the tears and the blood. I watched as he slid a blade from his pocket and pressed it against her throat. He dug the blade in and a trickle of blood spilled down her throat and across her collar bones.
She could see what I could see, then. Could see it in his eyes. He would have killed her. Slit her throat open and watched her bleed out. He wouldn’t have cared. He was a man who thought that society’s rules didn’t apply to him. Davie Bennington was a man who thought that laws and right and wrong didn’t apply to him.
Still, she fought in little ways as his hand went roughly to the waistband of her jeans. Yanked them down over her hips. She tried to squirm away but his hand wrapped tight around her throat and squeezed until she was gasping for air.
She pleaded with him to stop. Told him she was a virgin, tripping and stumbling over the word. He didn’t care.
When he was done, his hand print was bruised into the tender skin of her throat. He fell asleep with the knife still clenched in his fist. She cried, bruised and broken and bloody until the sun peaked through the windows.
I turned my back on her, on him, and slipped unnoticed back into the hallway. There was one more room I hadn’t been in. One more room at the end of the hallway. Seven steps and I pushed open the door.
She was sitting inside, her back to me. She had a black hoodie on, pulled tight around her because she was always cold. Always. Her hands twirled a paintbrush absently and I glanced around at the canvases that filled the room.
Dark, disjointed images. Torn limbs, broken eyes. Images that were unsettling and painful to look at. When she turned, her eyes focused on me in dull confusion. Between the pills and the pain, her senses were painfully dull, her eyes haunted and hollow. She’d lost weight and I could see the sharp ridges of her collarbones. The concave valley’s of her cheekbones.
“Brytain,” I said, softly. Hollowly. I could finally name her. I was could do that for her now.
She didn’t speak but her eyes never left mine and for a long moment, I wondered what she must think of me. This beaten down, broken girl. What did she think about me? My eyes raked over her coldly as she slowly stood and faced me.
“You’re a fucking idiot,” I said, calmly. My voice never betraying the anger underneath of my words. I stared at her, as though this were the most simple concept in the world and I couldn’t understand why she didn’t grasp it. “You let him do this to us for nearly two years,” I said, my tone almost conversational. “You were too weak, too fucked up to put him down. You couldn’t do what you needed to do. You couldn’t fix shit. No, you left all of that to me,” I sneered. “I had to clean up your mess... nearly three years later.”
She stared at me in confusion and I tilted my head, eyeing her like a cat eyes a mouse just before the kill. “You were pathetic. You let him destroy you, beat you down. He tries to kill you in... oh, about six months,” I told her, circling her like prey. “You have a chance to do something about it then, but again... you’re a fucking idiot and you do nothing. You let him beat you down. You let him use you.
You spend two months in the hospital... useless to protect the only person who gives a fuck about your worthless ass.”
My voice softens. “Jordy.”
Her eyes widen slightly and I sneer at her confusion. “He breaks her neck while you’re in the hospital. In a match that was meant for you. She took the hit... for you. She never steps foot in a wrestling ring again. Because of you. And finally? Finally he destroys you. He breaks you down until you can’t get back up. He sends you out of the ring a broken, pathetic mess.
Blacklists you. Your career is shot and you’re too busy making a mess of everything to care. You let him destroy us, Brytain. You took everything we worked for you and you trashed it”
Her head was down, hair hanging around her face and I had no sympathy for her. No empathy for this pathetic shell of a person.
I shook my head, “It doesn’t end there, you know...” my voice was calm. Casual. Cold and detached. “Eventually, you stop failing so badly at being a goddamn human being and you get back in the ring. He follows you. He follows you all over the goddamn country and he does everything he can to take away everything I built back up. Not you. Me. He followed me to PDW but he was expecting you. He was expecting this broken mess of a human being.
I finally did what you couldn’t do, Brytain,” I sneered. The anger crept into my voice like spanish moss creeping along the tree trunks of the pine trees in my front yard as a child. “I ended it. For good. I destroyed him just like he’d destroyed you. But I didn’t do it for you. I did it for me.”
She looked up at me, then. Her eyes wide and I realized that somewhere along the way, I’d pulled the knife from my pocket. I recognized it. It was the knife that Syn had slipped into my hand the night I had left the bar we were in to “talk” to Davie. It was the knife that I had used to carve his signature Glasgow Smile into his own flesh. The smile he’d left behind as a calling card on all of his opponents save one. Save me. It was the knife I had used when Syn and I had visited Davie’s mother, the nasty, piece of trash who had made the boy into the man. It was the knife I had held to her throat when I had learned that psychological warfare can be just as effective as a right hand to the face.
I stared at it for a moment, wondering what it had been doing in my pocket.
But then, I realized.
It took only a few seconds but it felt as though time stopped, expanded. Grew heavier. I stepped close, one hand on her frail shoulder and I stared right into her empty blue eyes as I plunged the knife into her stomach.
Her mouth opened and closed in a silent scream and her knees began to buckle. She slowly sank to the ground and I followed her, kneeling over her as I twisted the blade in and her blood made my hands a slippery mess. I pulled it back, staring down at the blood rapidly soaking the front of her tank top. Her mouth opened and closed in a silent scream. Deftly, I used the blade to slice her from hip bone to hip bone. To drive it between her ribs.
The entire time I never took my eyes off of hers. Not until her eyes dulled. Not until they faded.
Only then did I stand up. Covered in her blood. My blood. Our blood.
“Brytain Montgomery is dead,” I whispered softly. “Long live Brytain Montgomery.”
xxx
Brytain paced slightly, her movements more similar to a caged tiger than the once energetic, smiling girl she’d been. Her long pink hair casts shadows on her face and tension thrums through every muscle in her body. “Maybe I’ve kept my mouth shut too long... maybe that’s why I still have people like Smith fucking Jones and Yoshiru Long overlooking me. Putting me in the same class of idiots who only blindly feel around a wrestling ring, hoping for a win. They seem to think that a five month and almost eight match winning streak is a fluke. Lightning in a bottle. What I’ve done is diminished, unrecognized and forgotten about.
This shit right here? It’s not going to make me any friends... but I don’t care. If I wanted friends I’d be in the wrong business. And as Jesse Lewis, who is more of a father to me than my own ever was, once told me: It's better to let everyone hear your voice, rather than empty silence from your conscience. So this? Consider it whatever you want. Consider it a manifesto. Consider it a declaration of intent. Consider it fucking Mein Kampf for all I care.
But you will consider it. Because these past five months? These seven straight wins? They aren’t a flash in the pan. They aren’t a fluke. They are what I’m capable of. What I can do and what I will continue to do. When will you notice? Once you realize that I’ve laid waste to half the roster? When you realize that nothing and no one can stop me?
Continue being preoccupied with your darlings, your favorite playthings... keep your attention on them so that you won’t notice me. See, I like that. It means I can do what I do... and that by the time you do notice? By the time I’ve run through everyone on the roster like water? By that point, it’s too late.
By that point I’ve laid waste to everything that stands in my way. Mya Denton couldn’t beat me on my worst day... half of the work already done for her. She had me in the ring half-dead and she still couldn’t get the job done.
Do you think you’ll be able to do it on my best, Smith?
You’ll be number eight and Yoshiru Long will be number nine. He seems to think that he’ll be the first hall of famer to fall to me but he forgets Curtis Wilkes. Curtis, another man who doubted me. Another man who assumed that I would be an easy notch to add to his expansive list of victories. A man who thought that he couldn’t be beaten. A hall of famer. And I brought him down. I humbled him. I ended his precious little winning streak just as Smith Jones aims to try to end mine.
But Smith, like everyone else, underestimates me. Thought we’d play his game until he grew tired of it. But instead, we have played mine. We are playing mine now.
Doesn’t feel too good being the prey instead of the predator, does it, Smith?” Brytain shrugs, staring into the camera with a cold smirk on her face. “How does it feel always looking over your shoulder, wondering if I’m going to be there? How does it feel not being on the offensive anymore? Those stupid fucking flowers that escalated into your little parlor trick... that was cute. What was your desired affect? Did you want me to be so cowed and beaten down that I would just hand you the Broadcast Title? Did you expect me to run in fear whenever I saw you turning a corner or tremble with fear whenever someone said your name?
That was amatuer shit, Smith. Truly. I expected better from someone like you. I’ve seen all of that before... but how quickly people want to forget that I’m not some stupid rookie lacing up my very first pair of ring boots. You can delude yourself... you can tell yourself that you’ll hold this championship again. But at the end of the day we both know why you were delaying the inevitable.
It’s because you know just like I know that while I hold this belt you will never get your hands on it again. Why? Because I won’t let you. Because you can’t beat me. Because no one can.
The question is not who will let me. It’s who will stop me?
Not you, Smith. Never you.”