Ex Nihilo

The 

Squared

Circle

I hear the bell ring over the sound of the crowd, their displeasure with my actions moments ago clear as crystal, but instead of removing my fingers from the sides of Ria's mouth – I lean back to apply more pressure to her neck. Out cold, there's no fight as I stretch a smile onto the face of the Psychoberry. I'm tempted to rip apart her flesh like a bag of chips, give her a permanent smile of her own.

Turnbull is screaming in my ear now to release the hold, slapping me on the shoulder as if that is going to change anything. Jimmy has as much chance of getting me to stop as Anna Daniels does at winning the Tag Team titles later tonight. Ria herself has been a little delusional lately as well, thinking that she could constantly disrespect me without any sort of recourse.

I feel her body tense up a bit as Bobby pushes Turnbull away from me, so I pull back even harder to the point that there is no more give in her flesh. I can feel her trying to fight her way out of the hold, but her struggle only fuels my desire to rip through her cheeks. Focused on the thoughts of hurting Ria that are running through my mind, I hardly notice the crowd's shift in emotion.

It isn't until I feel something hard and heavy hit the back of my head that I release the hold. I roll out of the ring by instinct alone, noticing Sean O’Neill swinging the wrench I had used on Ria at Bobby's knee. The rescue had come a little too late, the damage had been done and the match was already over. Bobby was wise enough to roll out of the ring as well, standing by my side we both raised our hands in the air

The eGG Bandits had won again.

The only tag team in PRIME without a loss, Bobby and I turn to head up the ramp as Sean checks on Ria. The tag league had brought unlikely allies together to chase a new opportunity, and maybe against another team things could have…

“What the hell are you doing,” I barely miss Bobby's hand when I swing at it, unsure why he was reaching for my tights.

“I don't have any snacks,” is his reply, the innocence in the eyes of the Honaleean as a smile stretches toward his ears is childlike.

“There's no snacks in there for you, Bobbo.”

“Are you sure,” Bobby asks me, his smile slowly fading.

“Yes, I am,” not one to disappoint, I try to cheer up my partner. “But on the bright side, we won again so we can go get ice cream again!”

Not sure why his face turned green, but if we can keep winning and manage to win the tag team titles…I'll buy him a five gallon tub he can have all to himself.

_-_-_-_-_

The

Strained 

Bean

“You embarrassed me,” Eddie Cruz had a crooked smile on his face, his left arm draped across the back of the chair he sat in as his right hand rested on the table a few inches away from a cup of coffee. “Then assaulted me a week later, Tony.”

“We both know that's not true,” Tony Gamble leaned forward in his seat, forearms resting on the table as his voice rose slightly. “I don't know what kind of game you're playing, Eddie, but I don't have time for this shit.”

“Games?” Eddie scoffed, rolling his eyes slightly as he shook his head. “I have witnesses and injuries to back up my claims, while you have what…your word?”

“I have the truth.”

Cruz stifled his laughter, the crooked smile now wide and toothy as Tony's comment amused him more than he expected. “Do you really expect anyone to believe you?”

“You don't have much credibility yourself,”  The Grin fired back, eyes focused on the man seated across from him.

“Who needs credibility when you have proof,” he allowed the question to linger in the air in front of Gamble for a moment. Eddie knew he was right, knew that everything he had pointed in one direction. “Look, I agreed to see you against my better judgment and my lawyer's advice, because I really don't think you want this to drag out in court. So tell me, Tony, why are we here?”

“I want to know how much it's going to cost me for you to drop your bullshit lawsuit and walk away,” Tony's eyes narrowed, his brow furrowed, and he straightened his grin as much as he could. “That's what this is all about, isn't it?”

Eddie smiled.

_-_-_-_-_

The

Henderson

House

She sat at the edge of the tub, hands on her lap as she thought back to the day she watched her father turn and walk away. It was her own fault, she was the one who had told him that she never wanted to see him again, that she wished he had never found her in the first place. She remembered Nick had made it a point to rub her nose in the fact that she was the one who got expelled for hitting him, while all he had received as punishment was a stern talking to about how words could hurt people before they sent him back to Mrs Saunders’ Geography class.

She never pretended to understand what was going on in society, how victims were never heard or paid any attention to until they walked down a crowded hallway with an assault rifle, or they had used it on themselves. The information was just a google search away, but she wasn't interested in becoming a part of that World. The insults and constant bullying had not pushed her down that road, but she wanted them to stop and now realized that violence had only aggravated the hornets – awoke them from their slumber.

Nick and his friends had doubled down on the bullying, taken the insults to the next level, and the advice given on how to deal with it was to ignore it and it would eventually go away. It did not work, had never worked, so she just allowed the frustration and the anger to build within her until she could no longer keep it bottled up. So she ended up taking it out on her father.

Did that make her the bully?

She knew what she said would hurt him, knew exactly what button to push in order for him to feel the same type of pain she had felt when Nick told her that she didn't need a scar to make him want to vomit when he looked at her. Unlike Nick, she wanted to apologize for what she had said. She wanted to tell her father that she loved him, and explain to him how the pain had slowly begun to give her panic attacks. She needed someone to know that her stomach felt like it twisted into knots every morning that she woke up, because she knew what awaited her when she arrived at school.

She wiped the perspiration from her palms on her shorts, as the war in her mind continued to rage on.

She needed to distract herself, but no amount of music she had listened to had helped to quiet the storm. She tried to listen to music that would uplift her, watch a television show that brought her joy when she was younger, but none of it seemed to work. The only thing that seemed to work, was to inflict more pain. So she reached to her side with one hand, and used the other to lift her shorts up a little further on her thigh. She looked down at a few feint scars, then traced the tip of her finger across one of them as she held a razor blade between the tips of the thumb and forefinger of her other hand.

It only stung for a few seconds, but the relief she felt as the sanguine teardrop trickled down her thigh made the voices in her head quiet down long enough for her to get a little sleep.

“Just one last time,” she whispered to herself.

Just like last time.

_-_-_-_-_

The

Minor

Detail

“When's the last time you've been in the ring, old man?”

Miguel Minorez cracked a smile as Tony Gamble and Domingo Cruz approached him. Cruz had a white towel draped over his bald head to soak up the perspiration, his black wrestling trunks were darker around the waist after soaking up a bit of what covers the rest of his body. Tony is the one that seemed to have jumped into a pool with all of his clothes on the way his shirt clung to his chest, his disheveled hair glistened, and the sweat on his brow resembled a puddle rather than beads.

“Professionally,” he thought about it for a moment, eyebrows raised as he shook his head. “Damn, not since the NWC closed down. What was that, like twenty years ago?”

“So long that you don't even remember,” Domingo chuckled, as Tony shook his head before he wiped his brow with the towel he grabbed off the bench next to his gym bag. “Damn, you're older than dirt, aren't you?”

“You want to get in the ring with me,” the man known as Mikey Minor during his National Wrestling Council run motioned toward the ring with a nod of his head. “See how much dust we can knock off.”

“Nah,” Dom waved his hand to dismiss his mentor and trainer. “I don't want to be held responsible for this place shutting down for a few months while you heal that old raggedy hip of yours.”

“Chicken shit,” Mikey replied with a chuckle of his own, before he lightly punched Cruz on the shoulder.

“Thanks again for letting me use your gym,” Tony tossed the towel back on the bench and grabbed his water bottle. “I've got a few things going on that are going to keep me here in San Antonio for a while so my time on the Octane is going to be limited for a bit.”

“Mi casa, es tu casa,” Mikey responded, as he motioned around the gym with his hands while Tony took a long cut off water. “Come down whenever you need to, there's plenty of necios here that could learn a thing or two from a vet like you. I could tell Cruzito picked up a few things since the last time he was here.”

Gamble shook his head as he swallowed his water. “That's all Frank, I had nothing to do with it.”

“I doubt that,” Minorez disagreed. “When you work with someone on a regular basis, habits and impulses rub off.”

“I sure hope not, I worked with Marty pretty damn close before he walked away and came back as Zippy.”

“I still don't get the whole twins bullshit,” Domingo's brow furrowed in confusion as he shrugged his shoulders. “It is bullshit, right?”

“I'll make sure and ask him during the match,” The Grin replied jokingly. “Anything else you want me to ask while I'm there?”

“Yeah, ask him if he's ready to lose those tag titles.”

“It doesn't matter if he's ready or not,” Gamble smiled under his grin, a future tag team title match for him and Bobby was surely around the corner. Management could only avoid it for so long, and he needed to prove it against Zapp. “ReVival is just a sneak peak of what's to come for the Twins?.”

_-_-_-_-_

The

Strained

Bean

“How is she doing?”

Victoria Henderson looked down at her hands, which rested comfortably on her lap. The two sat in a sparsely occupied coffee shop, but neither had really drank much from the cups in front of them on the table.

“She tries to hide it,” Victoria finally answered, though her attention never turned to her daughter's father. “But I know she is going through something, and I don't know what I need to do to help her through it.”

“I don't know what to tell you,” Tony held his cup in both hands, though he never bothered to lift it up from the table. “This is all new to me, and honestly I have no clue if I've even done anything right since I showed up in your lives. Maybe Olivia is right, maybe it would've been better if I never would've found out you two were alive.”

“I never should've cut you out of her life to begin with,” a tear creeped out from the corner of her eye, then made its way toward her chin at a snail's pace. “I put my job before my own happiness, and no matter how much I lied to myself I knew even then that I had made the wrong decision.”

It was the first time she had said out loud for anyone to hear, and for him to be the one she told had taken more courage than anything else she had ever done in her life. The way she had walked away back then, faked her own death to cut him out of her life, it was cowardly and she was ashamed about what she did.

Another tear managed to find it's way out from the pool of them that had formed in the corner of her eyes, though this one had managed to find its own way down her cheek.

“I'm sorry,” she wiped away the tears that had made their way down her face with the back of her hand, lips curled into a slight smile as she remained focused on her thighs.

She could not see his face as he stared at her, notice how he struggled to swallow from how tight his throat had become. They were there to talk about their daughter, about how she had changed in the last two months since she had returned to school, and right now all he could think about was ways he could comfort her. He wanted to let her know that it withhold be okay, but he didn't have the words to do so.

He watched as his hand reached for her cheek, and for a moment he did not believe it was true. Surely it was just a thought of something he wanted to happen, a scenario he had dreamed about on more than one occasion. No, he had reached over and wiped away a tear that had started to trickle down her cheek before it had completed its journey, and she hadn't pulled away. Instead, she stared back at him with silent eyes.

Everything seemed to stop at that moment, as if nothing else in the World mattered. The light that poured through the windows made her skin appear to glow, as the back of his fingers traced their way down her neck and toward her shoulders. Everything he had thought about, from the first time he had seen her again over a year ago, flooded his mind all at once as he moved closer to her.

He hesitated.

In that brief moment, everything changed and she leaned away. Time that had seemed to stand still suddenly began to move along once more, and a chill had filled the air between them.

“I'm sorry…” Gamble began to speak, but stopped short and ended up saying nothing that flooded into his mind.

“We can't do this.”

He knew she was right, but he wanted it to happen.

Since when had anything he ever wanted actually happened though…story of his life.

_-_-_-_-_

The

Yellow

Pages

“Well isn't this just the epitome of everything coming full circle.”

I wish I could tell you that things in my life had changed.

“This time though, you're not the one with something riding on our match.”

I wish I could tell you that people didn't just look at me as some side character.

“No, it's my turn to go into this match with something to lose.”

There is no doubt that I have been the star of this show since day one.

“You are one half of the PRIME tag team champions.”

A Stool is the reason people even bother to watch Tony Gamble run his mouth.

“You are the one who teamed up with the Anglo Luchador and pretty much ran through every team in the Tag League to win a title many have been waiting to return like kids waiting on Santa on Christmas.”

Is he the one that was able to not only carry his massive ego, but also Bobby freaking Dean.

“You definitely have a target on your back now, but if people are going to take Bobby and I seriously…”

I did that.

“If they're going to consider us a threat to win those titles from you and your twin…”

And yet here he is again standing in front of me, blocking the real reason anyone cares.

“Then I need to beat you.”

It's okay though.

“I need to go out there and push you to your limit, that way the next time we meet we're going to have partners in our corner and the titles will be on the line.”

I'm secure enough to know who I am, and how important my presence is.

“I wish it didn't have to be this way, and when it's all said and done I hope we can go back to being friends.”

I am the Stool after all.

“If not, so be it.”