Prologue
One Month Ago

“Oh God…”

I stepped into the sterile emergency suite at Albany Medical instantly regretting my decision to come.

I wasn’t sure if Lucy Wylde was lying there asleep, unconscious, sedated, or dead… well, I knew she wasn’t dead… but she was still somber and uneasy to bear witness to in that condition.

I couldn’t speak. The thoughts from my mind pushed straight to the back of my lips, but I had no breath to share them. I couldn’t even begin to express enough how much I hate hospitals – how much I loathe to hear the rhythmic beeping of a heart monitor or any other machine – but seeing Lucy Wylde of all people in this condition took that to a whole new level. There she was, alone in a state of what I could only hope was painlessly away from consciousness, with those machines presumably keeping her alive… with the intubation tube down her throat… and several more pumping vital fluids into her broken frame…

The closer I moved inward the worse Lucy looked. She looked like someone who had been in a serious car accident… not someone who had just fought her sister on a wrestling show. Her face, her arms… they were all cut to hell… and any place on her exposed skin that wasn’t cut appeared either bruised or swollen.

If I wasn’t a fan of hers… if I wasn’t… her ex-girlfriend… I’m not entirely sure I would have recognized her at all.

*Flash*

…and then, and all of a sudden, I no longer heard the heart rate monitor in the background or the machine forcing fresh oxygen down into her lungs. I looked over toward where the bed just was… and we were back again…

Two years ago.

New Years eve.

It was Times Square… and we were standing there. We were on a rooftop at a party. The people surrounding us were wearing beads and shimmering hats… I turn to see the faint glow of the string lights on her skin. I was seeing it all again for the first time… for the second time… I guess.

Lucy smiled at me. I felt the cold air tease the goosebumps that had been growing on the exposed skin of my arms. The crowd started counting down. 10… 9… 8… I glanced upward and off into the distance where I could see the ball starting to drop. 7…6…5… I looked over at Lucy again. I couldn’t believe that I was actually spending New Years with her… 4…3…2… Suddenly, she moves even closer to me… 1… We were kissing… “Happy New Year!!!”

…for the very first time…

Since that moment, Lucy and I that were an item. But even before that, she was my idol, she was the one who inspired me to get into wrestling. I never expected that after we met that we’d hit it off. I fell… hard.

I melted into the kiss as if time had not passed in the almost two years since that moment… living it again exactly as I had chosen to remember it. But no matter how tight I tried to hold onto that moment…

*Flash*

Now I see JC…

*Flash*

Now I see Lucy walking away…

*Flash*

Now I see the Paper Street Tattoo Company engulfed in flames.

*Flash*

Beep… Beep… Beep…

The heart rate monitor…

I’m back again.

I snapped out of the memory just as quickly as I fell into it. I look down to see Lucy still lying in the bed. Unchanged, unmoved.

I sighed.

If only things could have gone a little bit differently since that moment… If only some different choices were made…

I’m sure a lot of things could have gone differently that could have kept Lucy out of that hospital bed, but apparently the alternatives just weren’t meant to be. Still, I couldn’t help but to think… what could I have done differently? Of course, Lucy eventually moved on from that night and eventually she shacked up with JC. That kinda led to the match at Ultimate Carnage 4 between JC and I… and next thing you know he and I are trying to toss each other off of the second-floor balcony of the Hammerstein Ballroom…

Spoiler alert: we both succeeded.

Now look at us.

I hung my head and placed my hand over hers. I doubt that she felt it, or was even aware of my presence. But there I was, feeling sorry for us… feeling sorry for her, and myself… because I knew… I just knew that choosing him wouldn’t lead to anything good.

But that was such a narrow vision, I thought… and who am I to judge? JC didn’t put her here… even if he’s still partially at fault for this outcome… then how much am I to blame, too? Maybe I’m grasping at straws here, but it still (to me) feels like I’m not 100% blameless… but it is what it is. But speaking of blame, at least I could deny the majority of it… Kyra on the other hand…

She didn’t have to do what she did. Kyra does deserve most of the blame… but in a way… Lucy has to share in that by choosing not to at least defend herself, either.

I dunno. The whole thing is a mess. The only thing that’s certain is that the entire situation was sad and by all means was very… very… avoidable.

But I digress. Back in the emergency suite, I held Lucy’s hand as if we were standing in her condo, ready to eat a peaceful dinner at her cozy little table again. For a moment it was just the two of us again… One of those moments where she’d try to talk about anything but wrestling and I’d be picking her brain on what I needed to do to get up to her level. I remember very vividly her always insisting that I needed to take wrestling off of my mind because ‘life outside of the ring was just-as, if not more important’ than any accomplishment I could ever make inside of it. I never really understood why she always made such a big deal about it… but in that moment I kinda did-

“Hey!”

My eyes darted open, my head shot up.

“Who are you? What are you doing in here? I’m about to call security-”

I stood up and looked as unthreatening as one could with bloodstains all over her clothes, looking pretty beat up myself. The woman, by her appearance, was probably one of Lucy’s doctors: White lab coat, laminated badge, hair yanked back into a tight ponytail.

“It’s not what you think… I-I… I’m just a friend.”

“There aren’t any visitors allowed back here. This woman will be going into surgery and the last thing she needs right now is-”

“I know.” I replied as carefully as I could. My hands half-raised, I carefully slipped by her on my way to the door. “I’m really sorry. I didn’t know that I wasn’t allowed back here. I just wanted to see my friend… to make sure she’s alright… you know?”

As I passed the doctor, she went right towards Lucy to check on her, I guess to make sure that I didn’t mess up any of the medical instruments… unintentionally or otherwise.

“Don’t worry, your friend is in good hands. Please leave. Someone will alert you in the waiting room of her progress after the surgery has been completed.”

“Thank you,” I replied with my back already against the door. I took one last glance over at Lucy laying there about as helpless and as broken as I’ve ever seen another human being. I shake my head and turn to let myself out of the room… but before I left I couldn’t help but to utter one last thing: “She better be.”

 

 

Square One

 

 

“Do you think time travel is even possible?”

Business at the new Paper Street Tattoo company in Inwood, New York was starting to pick up again. Not that I’m willing to take a whole lot of credit for it, personally… but still… it’s been nice to see the girls hours increase as more and more customers keep rolling in.

What that’s meant for us is more full-on, full-group conversations prattling alongside the constant buzzing of machined needles digging flesh.

“What, do you mean like… Back to the Future time travel? Or more Endgame…”

“I haven’t seen Endgame.”

“Oh, come on, Ros. Everyone’s seen Endgame.”

The customers sometimes chime in with their two cents; and that’s fine as long as they save the rest of their allowance for our register. Nadette will seemingly pick her spots to walk the length of the floor just to give us all a nugget of her wisdom.

“Bah,” she scoffed with the corners of her lips curled upward, a sure sign that she was in good spirits for the day. “You children and your heroes movies. I cannot wait until they are done with such things.”

Nani didn’t take it real well, and neither did Fayth… if only Dette knew how many ‘hero’ logos we’ve been tattooing lately she wouldn’t complain.

“No, I just mean time travel in any sense-” I said, trying to get back to the topic that at least was on the top of my mind at the time. “Like, I know there’s a lot out there that we still don’t know. I’m just wondering if it’ll ever… you know… like one day be a thing that’s available to do or whatnot.”

“Who’s to say that there aren’t time-travelers among us now?” My girlfriend, the incomparable Amber Caldwell glanced up at me with a gleam in her eye at the exact moment that she initially posed the question. She knew exactly where I was getting at with this one… or at least why I was thinking about it. “…and for the record, it would be exactly like it is in Star Trek.”

“Whoa whoa whoa…”

“Hold up!”

“Star Trek?”

The girls responded in unison. Amber just grinned and went back to her work.

“…and Dette thinks we’re the nerds,” Nani shot back across the floor. “I hope they come up with time travel for Am cause she’s still stuck in the 60’s!”

Amber rolled her eyes.

“I dunno Maggie, what do you think?” Ros asked me bringing the question back around full-circle.

“I uhh,” I had to pull myself away from my computer station. “I really don’t know. Like, it doesn’t seem possible. But you never really know I guess. I just think that if it were real then probably the past would have already been fucked up quite a bit by people changing shit-”

“Or maybe the past has already been fixed?” Fayth added.

“Maybe.”

“Or perhaps the past does get changed all of the time… but like… we never really think that it does because our memories of the past change every time the past itself gets changed…” Rosalyn replied.

“That’s a good point,” I said, then pursed my lips and let out a soft hmm. “Or maybe it’s some kind of paradox where if you build a time machine then you can never travel back to a moment before the time machine itself were built… thereby inhibiting future time travelers from ever changing the past as we know it but when the time machine of the future does get built… everything after that is fair game?”

“Or-” Amber chimed in, “You’re not telling the girls that you’re bringing this up because the guy you’re facing this week gets high all of the time and thinks he’s a time traveler.”

Gasps befall the Tattoo Parlor.

I looked around to the other girls to see each one of them staring back at me. I shrugged.

“Whaaat?”

“No. Absolutely not.” Fayth said.

“It’s definitely the drugs.” Ros added.

“Definitely, one-hundred percent, positively the drugs.” Amber replied.

“Hey Maggie-” Nani finally said.

“Yeah?”

“When you go face that guy this week, could you uhh, maybe ask the dude to bring me some of what he’s been having?” She chuckled. “I want to be a time traveler, too.”

We all shared a good laugh at Zed Hotley’s (and Christopher Marlowe’s) expense, though I never really meant for it to come off that way.

In reality, Zed Hotley (to me) fell on the list under one of my strictest self-imposed rules: never question the heart of any of my opponents. And in further reality, I still didn’t know that much about him, personally or otherwise, to judge. So I kinda felt a little bad. But hey, at least it was Zed Hotley I’d be facing this week and not Christopher Marlowe… and if the girls knew about what he claimed to be, they’d have a field day.

“That’s the last thing you need, Kaipo.” I said back to Nani with a little smirk of my own. “You’re already far enough out there as it is… what the hell do you need drugs for?”

Nani stuck her tongue out at me and it only made me smile more. I turned back to my new laptop and refocused my attention on what still is my latest project in photoshop… a new logo for the parlor. At the time I was a little bit frustrated with it… but it was just starting to somewhat resemble a rough copy of what I wanted the final vision to me. A few clicks of inspiration later, and I was just starting to feel pleased.

Amber walked up from behind and threw her arms around me, planting a kiss on my cheek.

“Ooh, I like that.” She said, as I could almost feel her eyes scanning it for the fine details that I like to add in my art.

I turned my head to kiss her back before looking back at my handiwork.

“Yeah,” I replied. “You know I used to be a real good artist myself back in the day.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Mhmm.”

“Are we talking years, decades, centuries even?”

“You know-” I gave her a playful shove. “If I wouldn’t have smoked that fat blunt during the Renaissance… who knows how things would have turned out?”

“Oh stop it.” Amber said. “Get back to work.”

“Yes Ma’am,” I replied with a grin, watching Am as she walked back to her station, swaying her hips. “You know if I would have stayed, no one would even know who Mona Lisa was… Da Vinci was an amateur… he really didn’t have shit on me!”

 

 

You know, it’s funny…

All this work just to get back to being the UltraViolent Champion… all this work just to reign supreme in the UltraViolent division once more…

I don’t resent it. Never. Quite the opposite, actually. The journey has been well worth it ‘in the end’, though even I recognize that this is not the end by any means.

I’ve talked about it before, how I’ve compared all of the posturing and positioning and how sometimes it can be gruesome just to get back to ‘Square Zero’… so please, understand that I’m beyond overjoyed to be at what I feel is Square One again… to look across the bed and see the Carnage Wrestling UltraViolent championship gold staring back at me on the nightstand. Even though I was there (and you were there, too) throughout the entire quest to recapture it… I just can’t seem to find the right set of words to sum it all up in a pretty package with a neat little bow.

All I can do is to say that, my focus is on moving on. Moving forward. Taking that next step. Ultimate Carnage 5 looms and so does my opponent and my first defense… and trust me… there’s plenty of thoughts to be shared on that when the time is right. On a more grander scale, there’s the Override vs. Paragon and even grander still there’s the fight for what I feel is Carnage Wrestling’s soul… and at the center of it all remains one man…

Jason Bridges.

So where does that leave me?

You know, everytime I look at the UltraViolent championship… everytime I pick it up and hold it… or even wear it around my waist… I can’t help but to take that trip back in time… mentally speaking… to relive all of those moments from losing to Myra Lynwood at Underground: Destiny all the way up to finally beating her at Season of the Witch, but then also I remember seeing Lucy lying in that hospital bed that same night, too. I couldn’t help but to think that there are things in this world that we want to have, people in this world that we want to be with, feelings in this life that we want to feel and the level of sacrifice that it takes to obtain each goal that we may have.

Surely if there’s ever a case for time travel, it’s this: sometimes you don’t realize the cost of something until you’ve already paid for it… and by that time it’s too late.

So that leaves me smack-dab in the middle of a cross-road.

What do I have? What do I need? What am I willing to do to get what I want?

What am I willing to give up?

I’ve done a lot of soul-searching since Season of the Witch. I beat Myra… I did exactly what I wanted to do. Jason Bridges turns right around and makes it so that at Ultimate Carnage, I’m going to have to beat her again. I already know that’s what I want… and I already know the stipulation imposed, and probably every match I have between now and then, are designed to make it harder for me to obtain it. Jason Bridges is a shrewd man, a cocksucker, but shrewd. He’s practically looking me dead in my eyes while asking me what I’m willing to sacrifice to remain UltraViolent champion. Oh, and if/when I beat Myra at Ultimate Carnage, I’ll have then earned the ultimate test of what it takes to remain champion… because if Myra can’t do it, then perhaps Brian Crucifix or Jack Michaels will… or so he thinks. Jason Bridges is looking me dead in my eyes and telling me that all I’ve won for myself at Season of the Witch is more suffering and pain…

…and it starts with Zed Hotley.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not taking Hotley lightly. The man is not exactly a household name, but if anything, he and his partner Marlowe have put a spark back into the Carnage tag-team scene, and they’ve done it against men three-times their size. Hotley fights with heart, he fights with passion, he fights with the willingness to make those sacrifices that those big, dumb asshole Monstimals couldn’t even fathom to understand. I know people might think of Zed Hotley as a pushover… but I know better.

The problem here is that I’ve gone too far… worked too hard to do anything less than to show up at Chaos and to give Hotley my best. And time will tell if it’s my best or Hotley’s best that picks up the ‘W’ that night… but by all accounts I think it’s going to be a contest of two of the biggest and most determined hearts clashing head to head in Carnage Wrestling to date. And dare I say, I don’t see this as a match that decides much of anything… more of a test or an acclimation… because I’m sure we’ll meet again soon when all of this mess is sorted out and Johnny Graves and I can challenge for the Carnage Wrestling tag-team championships… I’m sure Hotley and Marlowe will be right in that mix as well… if they aren’t already wearing the tag gold by that time.

But I’ve gone too far in the sense that I understand what my fight means now. I know what I have ahead of me, at Ultimate Carnage and beyond. My sights aren’t on winning the World Title right now, and they aren’t even on defending the UltraViolent championship right now, either. But I know just like before that if I continue to focus on the week-to-week matches… I know if I show up one Chaos at a time and work my ass off that things will work themselves out in the end. In reality, I do want to beat Myra a second time, especially in a ladder match… and I do want to beat the Carnage World Champion just to prove what I’ve been saying all along about the UV title. But I also can’t do these things if Zed Hotley has his way… I cannot allow my mind to travel too far into the future… I’ve got to keep my focus right here in the moment.

So what I say to Zed Hotley is this: what are you willing to sacrifice to get what you want out of this business? In the end… are you sure that it’s going to be worth it? I am the Carnage Wrestling UltraViolent champion for the better and for the worse of it… and for me there is no turning back now. My fight is to prove a lot of things to a lot of people… and yes I pay the price for it.

I have paid it.

I will continue to pay it.

…and I’ll keep paying it until there’s no more sacrifices left to be made.

Because I love Carnage Wrestling. I see it as my future. I see myself as a part of its future. But the people in it right now don’t really seem to give a shit or are too stupid to see the damage that they’re going to cause to try to get their way. If Carnage Wrestling is going to have a future, it needs a new idea, a fresh face, a steady heartbeat instead of a hand grenade. And as I have said so before, Mister Hotley, I am the Future… I am the Artist who can see that future and can understand what it’s going to take to get us there. So when you step into the ring with me, you are, in a way, time traveling. When you step into the ring with me at Chaos…

You’re not going to know what hit you, until it’s already too late.

…we all wish we could have our do-overs.

Sadly, they’re just not meant to be.