Post by Raenius on Aug 28, 2009 16:27:42 GMT -5
‘These fuckin’ guys,’ sighs our hero, looking at the piece of paper that Nyx has just handed him. ‘Brown and fucking Kiseragi again?’
Nyx simply nods, her liquid lip upturned.
‘Becoming quite the hair across my arsecrack, these two.’
Raenius throws the piece of paper, containing the card for his next show, to the ground with an insouciant grunt and lifting the dumbbells before him once again.
‘Maybe this time you can, uh, y’know…’ Nyx says, watching the weights go up and down, ‘beat them?’
A glower sneaks out of our hero’s languid countenance, beads of sweat stuttering down across his raised eyebrow.
‘You still don’t get it, do you, Nyx?’ replies Raenius curtly. ‘The reason why I do all of this, hmm?’
‘Well then,’ Nyx says, a condescending smile growing across her perfect features. ‘Enlighten me.’
‘See, I get why you do what you do. Why you think the way you think. You promised Kiri that you’d manage me thinking, naively, that it meant steering me to victory at every challenge. But what Kiri understood and you do not is that it’s never been about winning or losing. Never been about titles or about success. The journey is more important than the destination.’
‘Is that so?’
‘It is,’ he states matter-of-factly. ‘I am who I am and I do what I do, but just like every other person on the planet, my life amounts to war. Against my enemies, certainly. But more importantly, against myself. Everyone has demons that they need to best, Nyx, and it just so happens that mine have become manifest in a different way than most. All boils down to the same thing, though. Knowing myself. Getting better. Stronger. Faster. Tougher. All that good shit. It’s about growing as a human being.’ He sets the dumbbells down and grabs a towel from the rack beside him. ‘That, and kicking the shit out of people while I do it.’
Wiping the sweat from his brow, he reaches for his White Zombie t-shirt that lies morosely across the chair.
‘Do you know about Osiris?’
Nyx’s head cocks to the side, a confused and unimpressed frown appearing upon her visage.
‘…That he needs a machine to poop?’
The Resident Evil scoffs.
‘Not the fucking Osiris that we bum-fucked. The fucking Egyptian god Osiris.’
‘What about him?’
‘When Set, his brother and killer, discovered his body in the desert he got pretty pissed off, what with the hating him and all. So he tore the body up into fourteen pieces and scattered them throughout the land. Isis, the missus, gathered up the pieces, stuck him back together with her chewing gum or whatnot and hey fucking presto, a god is resurrected.’
‘And the point of this wondrous tale, Raenius?’
‘There are lots of re-enactments, myths and religious horsewank about this,’ he says, sliding his shirt on. ‘About man’s obligation to retrieve all the parts of this fallen god on the road back to spiritual wholeness. Since, with faith so scattered and weak, mankind needs to discover all the pieces of itself in order to be whole again. Some believe that in order to do this, we can deny ourselves nothing. Now, I don’t believe in gods or any of that, but I do see the point to this. No experience should be denied. No infatuation restrained, no vice unexplored and no horror to be shied away from. After all, how can one know himself without experience? How can one attain wholeness, spiritual or otherwise, if he has hidden himself from the world and shunned that which would better him? Most people search for knowledge in all things. Or they search for riches and successes. For self-indulgence. For happiness. Denying themselves, from the get-go, all that comes from the other end of the scales. What use are any of these things, after all, if you still don’t know for certain that any of them will make you happy or whole?’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning, dear Nyx, that the experience of ultimate pleasure and the experience of ultimate agony are the aim and end of all life.’ Raenius opens a small cooler beside him and grabs a beer, opening it with that perfect “tsss” sound that can only come from a fine, cold, alcoholic beverage. ‘Meaning also, dear Nyx, that Brandon fucking Brown and Alex fucking Kiseragi can, in fact, suck my balls.’
Nyx releases a little laugh while Raenius drinks.
‘So you don’t give a fuck that they shafted you out of the titles?’
‘Couldn’t give a monkey’s juicy haemorrhoid.’
‘You think that’s really the attitude to have, do you?’
Raenius looks his manager up and down.
‘Who the fuck asked you? Why the fuck are you even here? Where’s-?’
As he asks the question, his phone rings.
‘Hello? Gravy. Bout ye, son? What? Salem? Christ, this should be good. I’ll be there shortly.’
‘What’s going on?’ asks Nyx quickly.
‘That was Grevane. Apparently Dirge’s family have been threatened by Salem, and Dirge is indisposed, so there’s no one to go over there. So they asked me.’
‘Be careful, hmm?’ she says to him as he glides out of the door, paying no attention to her whatsoever.
Calmly, Nyx lifts her phone.
~
In the dark confines of his office, Dirge signs contracts, dotting I’s and crossing t’s.
Frowning, he looks around the quiet space, wondering why it seems to be too quiet in Elite Offices tonight. Though, with a slight shake of his head, he removes the notion from his mind and continues to his work.
Sliding his final piece of paper into a folder and storing it in a drawer next to him. Then, he hears it.
Tap, tap, tap.
His head darts up to look at the door.
Tap, tap, tap.
‘Erik?’ asks Dirge towards the door loudly.
Tap, tap, tap.
He rises cautiously from his seat, walking up to the door.
‘Who’s there?’
Tap, tap, tap. Following the little sound, he hears a tiny voice say, ‘Candy gram?’
‘Huh?’ says Dirge, reaching for the door handle.
‘Candy gram,’ repeats the theatrical, womanised Irish accent. ‘Girl scouts of America…you wanna buy some cookies?’
Trusting in his security, Dirge unlocks the door slowly. ‘Well, I’m not sure how you got in here, but if it’s for a good cause…’
Opening the door, Dirge’s jaw drops upon the sight of Shucky, the leprechaun. Reeking of whiskey, holding a box of cookies, the miniscule Irishman looks up at the monster Dirge, his little green skirt lifting unceremoniously as he begins scratching his crotch.
‘A really good fuckin’ cause!’
‘The fu-?’ begins Dirge as he is struck from behind, sending him head first into the door.
Growling with anger, he stands back up, glaring into the office.
Standing in the doorway, Salem stares out from behind his mask, snarling.
~
‘Raenius?’ says Carolyn, more a statement of surprise than wondering why he’s shown up at her door.
‘I hear you’ve got a pest problem,’ replies Raenius, inviting himself into Dirge’s home. ‘A six foot eight, three hundred and thirteen pound fucking pest.’
‘Well, yes, I did get a phone call, but they didn’t tell me that you’d be coming over…’
‘I know, I know,’ he says, raising his hands. ‘Not enough time to get the blindfold and chastity belt out because you can’t trust yourself around such a beautiful man as myself. It’s ok. I understand.’
Rolling her eyes, Carolyn scoffs.
‘Drink?’
The Resident Evil simply nods while he looks into each room in the house as he passes through. As Carolyn steps into the kitchen, Raenius makes his way through the house.
Several minutes later, another frantic knock at the door brings her back out of the kitchen, and after looking through the peephole; she opens the door once again.
‘Erik? I-’
‘I got the call, are you ok?’ asks Erik quickly.
‘I am, I just-’
Hearing a noise, Erik jumps into panic mode.
‘Someone’s here!’
‘I know,’ replies Carolyn. ‘I-’
Not letting her finish, Erik bounds into the next room and jumps on the intruder, grabbing him by the neck from behind. But the man lifts his back leg up, mule-kicking Erik in the balls.
‘Fuck off!’
Shouts the man and Erik, looking up, sees Raenius.
‘I knew not to trust you!’ he cries, climbing slowly back to his feet, gagging for breath. ‘Salem and you were always close.’
‘Oh, fuck up-’ begins Raenius, before being cut off by Erik throwing a chair at him of a sudden. ‘Fuck!’
Raenius gets the chair to the side of the head and goes down. Erik having valuable time to catch his breath. Slowly, he walks over to our fallen hero and snarls, grabbing him by the back of the coat to lift him up. But the one he lifts is not the one he put down.
Spinning with inhuman speed, Raenius clubs Erik across the jaw, making him stagger backwards enough to see the Kabuki mask glaring at him.
‘Heh,’ says Raenius in a new, hoarse voice. ‘Erik. You cunt.’
He walks over to Dirge’s fallen bodyguard and gives him a stiff kick to the ribs.
‘What the fuck are we doing here, hmm? And if you don’t give me a good enough answer, well. I’m afraid it’s going to be a very long, grim night for you.’
‘You don’t scare me, Raenius,’ states Erik defiantly. ‘And there’s no way I’ll let you hurt my employer.’
‘Dirge?’ The Kabuki mask cocks the one side. ‘Why would I want to hurt Dirge?’ Erik, unable to answer, simply glowers back at Raenius. Who, maniacally, laughs loudly. ‘I get it. I can see from the confusion and frustration in your eyes, you silly Russian huer. I wouldn’t have a reason to hurt Dirge. But someone else? Oh. Someone else would. And if you’re here… then who’s protecting the golden fucking goose?’
~
Dirge, lacerated and broken, lies on the concrete outside, pieces of broken glass still glinting in the moonlight as they fall from the broken window above from which he fell. Shucky, the leprechaun, stands at the window frame looking down at the Perfect Asshole’s body after his two-story fall. Shucky, giggling, tucks into the cookies in the box that he holds.
With a sickening crunch of glass on asphalt, Salem walks over to the quivering body of Dirge. Nodding to two large, masked men that stand over the bodies of a dozen or so Elite security guards, Salem looks back down to the fallen monster.
‘Would be better for you to watch the company you keep, son,’ growls Salem, putting his boot on Dirge’s throat and watching him cough blood. ‘Just a thought.’
Dirge’s world goes grey, and then black.
The last thing he hears is Salem’s laughter.
Nyx simply nods, her liquid lip upturned.
‘Becoming quite the hair across my arsecrack, these two.’
Raenius throws the piece of paper, containing the card for his next show, to the ground with an insouciant grunt and lifting the dumbbells before him once again.
‘Maybe this time you can, uh, y’know…’ Nyx says, watching the weights go up and down, ‘beat them?’
A glower sneaks out of our hero’s languid countenance, beads of sweat stuttering down across his raised eyebrow.
‘You still don’t get it, do you, Nyx?’ replies Raenius curtly. ‘The reason why I do all of this, hmm?’
‘Well then,’ Nyx says, a condescending smile growing across her perfect features. ‘Enlighten me.’
‘See, I get why you do what you do. Why you think the way you think. You promised Kiri that you’d manage me thinking, naively, that it meant steering me to victory at every challenge. But what Kiri understood and you do not is that it’s never been about winning or losing. Never been about titles or about success. The journey is more important than the destination.’
‘Is that so?’
‘It is,’ he states matter-of-factly. ‘I am who I am and I do what I do, but just like every other person on the planet, my life amounts to war. Against my enemies, certainly. But more importantly, against myself. Everyone has demons that they need to best, Nyx, and it just so happens that mine have become manifest in a different way than most. All boils down to the same thing, though. Knowing myself. Getting better. Stronger. Faster. Tougher. All that good shit. It’s about growing as a human being.’ He sets the dumbbells down and grabs a towel from the rack beside him. ‘That, and kicking the shit out of people while I do it.’
Wiping the sweat from his brow, he reaches for his White Zombie t-shirt that lies morosely across the chair.
‘Do you know about Osiris?’
Nyx’s head cocks to the side, a confused and unimpressed frown appearing upon her visage.
‘…That he needs a machine to poop?’
The Resident Evil scoffs.
‘Not the fucking Osiris that we bum-fucked. The fucking Egyptian god Osiris.’
‘What about him?’
‘When Set, his brother and killer, discovered his body in the desert he got pretty pissed off, what with the hating him and all. So he tore the body up into fourteen pieces and scattered them throughout the land. Isis, the missus, gathered up the pieces, stuck him back together with her chewing gum or whatnot and hey fucking presto, a god is resurrected.’
‘And the point of this wondrous tale, Raenius?’
‘There are lots of re-enactments, myths and religious horsewank about this,’ he says, sliding his shirt on. ‘About man’s obligation to retrieve all the parts of this fallen god on the road back to spiritual wholeness. Since, with faith so scattered and weak, mankind needs to discover all the pieces of itself in order to be whole again. Some believe that in order to do this, we can deny ourselves nothing. Now, I don’t believe in gods or any of that, but I do see the point to this. No experience should be denied. No infatuation restrained, no vice unexplored and no horror to be shied away from. After all, how can one know himself without experience? How can one attain wholeness, spiritual or otherwise, if he has hidden himself from the world and shunned that which would better him? Most people search for knowledge in all things. Or they search for riches and successes. For self-indulgence. For happiness. Denying themselves, from the get-go, all that comes from the other end of the scales. What use are any of these things, after all, if you still don’t know for certain that any of them will make you happy or whole?’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning, dear Nyx, that the experience of ultimate pleasure and the experience of ultimate agony are the aim and end of all life.’ Raenius opens a small cooler beside him and grabs a beer, opening it with that perfect “tsss” sound that can only come from a fine, cold, alcoholic beverage. ‘Meaning also, dear Nyx, that Brandon fucking Brown and Alex fucking Kiseragi can, in fact, suck my balls.’
Nyx releases a little laugh while Raenius drinks.
‘So you don’t give a fuck that they shafted you out of the titles?’
‘Couldn’t give a monkey’s juicy haemorrhoid.’
‘You think that’s really the attitude to have, do you?’
Raenius looks his manager up and down.
‘Who the fuck asked you? Why the fuck are you even here? Where’s-?’
As he asks the question, his phone rings.
‘Hello? Gravy. Bout ye, son? What? Salem? Christ, this should be good. I’ll be there shortly.’
‘What’s going on?’ asks Nyx quickly.
‘That was Grevane. Apparently Dirge’s family have been threatened by Salem, and Dirge is indisposed, so there’s no one to go over there. So they asked me.’
‘Be careful, hmm?’ she says to him as he glides out of the door, paying no attention to her whatsoever.
Calmly, Nyx lifts her phone.
~
In the dark confines of his office, Dirge signs contracts, dotting I’s and crossing t’s.
Frowning, he looks around the quiet space, wondering why it seems to be too quiet in Elite Offices tonight. Though, with a slight shake of his head, he removes the notion from his mind and continues to his work.
Sliding his final piece of paper into a folder and storing it in a drawer next to him. Then, he hears it.
Tap, tap, tap.
His head darts up to look at the door.
Tap, tap, tap.
‘Erik?’ asks Dirge towards the door loudly.
Tap, tap, tap.
He rises cautiously from his seat, walking up to the door.
‘Who’s there?’
Tap, tap, tap. Following the little sound, he hears a tiny voice say, ‘Candy gram?’
‘Huh?’ says Dirge, reaching for the door handle.
‘Candy gram,’ repeats the theatrical, womanised Irish accent. ‘Girl scouts of America…you wanna buy some cookies?’
Trusting in his security, Dirge unlocks the door slowly. ‘Well, I’m not sure how you got in here, but if it’s for a good cause…’
Opening the door, Dirge’s jaw drops upon the sight of Shucky, the leprechaun. Reeking of whiskey, holding a box of cookies, the miniscule Irishman looks up at the monster Dirge, his little green skirt lifting unceremoniously as he begins scratching his crotch.
‘A really good fuckin’ cause!’
‘The fu-?’ begins Dirge as he is struck from behind, sending him head first into the door.
Growling with anger, he stands back up, glaring into the office.
Standing in the doorway, Salem stares out from behind his mask, snarling.
~
‘Raenius?’ says Carolyn, more a statement of surprise than wondering why he’s shown up at her door.
‘I hear you’ve got a pest problem,’ replies Raenius, inviting himself into Dirge’s home. ‘A six foot eight, three hundred and thirteen pound fucking pest.’
‘Well, yes, I did get a phone call, but they didn’t tell me that you’d be coming over…’
‘I know, I know,’ he says, raising his hands. ‘Not enough time to get the blindfold and chastity belt out because you can’t trust yourself around such a beautiful man as myself. It’s ok. I understand.’
Rolling her eyes, Carolyn scoffs.
‘Drink?’
The Resident Evil simply nods while he looks into each room in the house as he passes through. As Carolyn steps into the kitchen, Raenius makes his way through the house.
Several minutes later, another frantic knock at the door brings her back out of the kitchen, and after looking through the peephole; she opens the door once again.
‘Erik? I-’
‘I got the call, are you ok?’ asks Erik quickly.
‘I am, I just-’
Hearing a noise, Erik jumps into panic mode.
‘Someone’s here!’
‘I know,’ replies Carolyn. ‘I-’
Not letting her finish, Erik bounds into the next room and jumps on the intruder, grabbing him by the neck from behind. But the man lifts his back leg up, mule-kicking Erik in the balls.
‘Fuck off!’
Shouts the man and Erik, looking up, sees Raenius.
‘I knew not to trust you!’ he cries, climbing slowly back to his feet, gagging for breath. ‘Salem and you were always close.’
‘Oh, fuck up-’ begins Raenius, before being cut off by Erik throwing a chair at him of a sudden. ‘Fuck!’
Raenius gets the chair to the side of the head and goes down. Erik having valuable time to catch his breath. Slowly, he walks over to our fallen hero and snarls, grabbing him by the back of the coat to lift him up. But the one he lifts is not the one he put down.
Spinning with inhuman speed, Raenius clubs Erik across the jaw, making him stagger backwards enough to see the Kabuki mask glaring at him.
‘Heh,’ says Raenius in a new, hoarse voice. ‘Erik. You cunt.’
He walks over to Dirge’s fallen bodyguard and gives him a stiff kick to the ribs.
‘What the fuck are we doing here, hmm? And if you don’t give me a good enough answer, well. I’m afraid it’s going to be a very long, grim night for you.’
‘You don’t scare me, Raenius,’ states Erik defiantly. ‘And there’s no way I’ll let you hurt my employer.’
‘Dirge?’ The Kabuki mask cocks the one side. ‘Why would I want to hurt Dirge?’ Erik, unable to answer, simply glowers back at Raenius. Who, maniacally, laughs loudly. ‘I get it. I can see from the confusion and frustration in your eyes, you silly Russian huer. I wouldn’t have a reason to hurt Dirge. But someone else? Oh. Someone else would. And if you’re here… then who’s protecting the golden fucking goose?’
~
Dirge, lacerated and broken, lies on the concrete outside, pieces of broken glass still glinting in the moonlight as they fall from the broken window above from which he fell. Shucky, the leprechaun, stands at the window frame looking down at the Perfect Asshole’s body after his two-story fall. Shucky, giggling, tucks into the cookies in the box that he holds.
With a sickening crunch of glass on asphalt, Salem walks over to the quivering body of Dirge. Nodding to two large, masked men that stand over the bodies of a dozen or so Elite security guards, Salem looks back down to the fallen monster.
‘Would be better for you to watch the company you keep, son,’ growls Salem, putting his boot on Dirge’s throat and watching him cough blood. ‘Just a thought.’
Dirge’s world goes grey, and then black.
The last thing he hears is Salem’s laughter.