OOC: Finally continuing a story arc proper that has been waiting for a conclusion for over a year now. Will provide a recommended(not required) reading guide soon-ish.

September 6th, 2023 Federal Supermax Prison – Location Delta

His eyes watched the wall, words trapped beneath the gravel of his throat. The cell he’d been kept in was anything but well-maintained, its floors covered with a film of filth, much of which had been shed from his very body. A mockery of his intense pursuit of perfection. A single bed, sheets swarming with stench and decay, specs of food sprinkled, caked across the tiles beneath him where the slop splattered upon serving. He had, in vain, attempted to clean and attend to this space of his for the duration of his stay, but will slipped away from him as the emptiness overtook him. He once had a life. Comforts. A purpose. A mission. The man simply had not been afforded anything of the sort since being stricken to this place where the government cast aside its deepest, ugliest secrets. The pieces that belied the whole.

Dante Cormack was a man of secrets.

”Eat up,” one of the guards mockingly called out, nearly singing with the taunt. The tray flung through the shoot in the large metal door that sealed Dante within it, the lid to the casket he’d been hastily buried in before his heart could cease beating. The platter of food, unrecognizable from real cooking, sustenance in its rawest, crudest form, tumbled to the ground, messily sending bits of gruel flinging outward, joining the long dried brethren that preceded it. Dante, stomach thinned from lack of nutrition, stood carefully, peering out the reinforced glass as his keen eye instantly recognized an issue with this “meal.”

“No fork,” he said, voice scraping the walls of his throat.

“We’re out,” the guard replied with a smile, eyebrow cocking in cruel victory at the display he had earned.

Dante despised cruelty for its own sake. Not on a moral basis. Truly, he couldn’t care one bit less about what others assumed to be correct. It was the inefficiency of cruelty that spat in Cormack’s face. The desperate pangs of humanity seeping through while trying to achieve its inverse. Like copying a useless device for the sheer act alone. With a face unchanging, hardly hiding the contempt flowing through his veins, Dante lifted the tray, his filth-covered fingers gripping onto the loose gruel and shoving it into his maw, fighting the urge to gag.

In a life prior, he had been The Custodian of a major project: The Chameleon. An experimental procedure that would’ve revolutionized human interaction, carving the ills out of humanity’s core and instilling a blank slate. A clean, suggestible emptiness for perfection to be written onto. Yet his specimen couldn’t take that final step away. He clung to his former identity until he threw away all the hard work of The Chameleon project and merely became one person again.

Ned Kaye.

Dante didn’t bother to think of the name often. He was an artist and witnessing his masterwork resist its own birth was a torture words could simply not do justice. He was an artist. Now, he was simply this caged animal, thrown away by some of the same donors who had eagerly provided capital in hopes of a perfect weapon, praying that his secrets would rot away alongside him.

He stared at the wall again after forcing the slop down his gullet. Hours passed. Familiar, clawing hours.

And then, a noise.

Dante’s head swiveled towards the reinforced door, hearing the muffled pleading of the guard from earlier, cut out by the silent thud of a suppressed gunshot, sprinkling crimson on the reinforced glass like dots of gruel. No alarms had sounded and the blood adorning his one view from outside his casket made matters even more difficult to parse. Suddenly, the door began to unseal. He stepped back, sitting on his bed, attempting to reclaim some small bit of dignity should death’s hand have finally arrived for him.

The whir of motors lifted the several ton door and a cloaked figure walked through, a pale face with auburn hair, a pair of glasses draped over his nose.

“Hello, Mr. Cormack,” the figure spoke, as calm as Dante would in his former life, “this meeting has been a long time coming.”

He reached out to Dante, palm and smile warm, awaiting a handshake.

“...Who are you?” Dante inquired, reserving any movement for after explanation had arrived.

“Now,” the man responded, ”we haven’t much time to make acquaintances. Disposing of feds isn’t a matter that goes over lightly. I can explain further lat-”

“You explain now,” Cormack interrupted, hoarse voice crackling with the demand.

Slightly frustrated, the figure adjusted his cloak, his tongue swirling over his lips.

“I am the man who saw your research initially and sent you the plans for the project you sacrificed everything for.  I commissioned The Chameleon,” he answered.

“You can either take my hand and assist me in its completion or waste away with the muck and grime in here. You know better, Custodian.”

Dante looked up, face worn from months of bitter reality and reached his hand out, grasping onto the figure’s. Grasping onto a hope to see his project completed.

“We have work to do.”

August 28th, 2024 Martin’s Coffee

Alarm bells. That’s how it felt.

The acrid fragrance of coffee clutched Ned’s nostrils, squeezing at them forcefully. Martin’s wasn’t the busiest place in Brooklyn, but it didn’t require much activity for Ned’s anxiety to go off. Just enough stimulation to feel overwhelming in a way that struck the only chord that played on Ned’s heartstrings these days. He was actually surprised to hear from Darcy again so soon. Ever since the split, they had established a firm distance in-between their lives. Like watching a gate to an adjacent path shut close. Stress nipped at Ned’s fingertips, biting with every tap of his nails against the cup of coffee in front of him. He lifted it up, taking a swift slurp, hoping to feel it scorch slightly against the insides of his mouth. Nothing. Numb. He fidgeted with the Cube Watch he had recently won, hoping its levity would transfer to the present.

It didn’t.

The door opened. Bells chiming to serenade the entrance. She was bright, even as concern covered her eyes, the soft shine of daylight reflecting off the glass behind her. It was almost more difficult to have to look at her again.

Almost.

Darcy smiled politely at the barista before finding her way to the table Ned had secured for them. She had a specific expression whenever her mind raced. A quirk he had noticed from months of being with her. He’d never mentioned it, but it provided a dread he attempted to swallow before it arose too distinctly.

“Hey you,” Darcy greeted, her voice slightly raising in register as she spoke.

“Hey,” Ned replied, voice as flat as ever.

They shared a silence, as mournful as it was uncomfortable.

”How have… you been?” She asked, rather pointedly.

“Fine,” Ned answered, like a leg reflexively kicking to the tap of a mallet, ”I’ve been fine. You?”

“Oh, you don’t wanna know.”

She chuckled, her nerves floating to the top like grounds in swirled coffee.

“It’s nothing I couldn’t handle,” Ned reassured, ”so, why the urgent meeting?”

Darcy hesitated, struggling to think how best to say it.

“You know my old coworker who was looking into all the weird Chameleon loose ends? She reached out again and…”

Ned’s eye raised, leaning forward slightly, “Is something about to happen?”

“She thinks it’s been happening, Ned,” Her words stood still even among the casual noise of the coffee shop. Ned could barely understand what Darcy was getting at, his face contorting in confusion.

“You… you remember that crime lord that you and King dethroned?”

“Jeremiah, yeah. Clear as day,” Ned confirmed, trying to block out some of the memories.

“Well, he was connected to… to the body we found in the desert last year,” Darcy fought back some trauma of her own, squeezing her nails in her palm, “and then you have all of the strange killings and gang warfare you were looking into. And the one constant has been staring everyone in the face and they just… they didn’t know how to address it.”

“What’s the constant?” Ned asked, his drink feeling cold in comparison to the question.

“You.”

“What?”

Darcy inhaled deeply, holding the little amount of strength she could muster as she explained further, “All of this weird shit has been going around the subject of The Chameleon experiments after the data was stolen and given to Jeremiah through Amelia and after Dante broke out of prison. Ned, you’re in serious danger and you’ve been running yourself ragged, barely accepted any help, and you’re getting more vulnerable and isolated by the day!”

“You…” she paused.

“You need to give up the Uni and at least take some time off. You could be in serious danger.”

“What are you talking about?” Ned inquired indignantly, ”I told you I’m fine and I finally rectified one of the things that I failed at and you think I should just throw that away?”

Darcy’s eyes rolled, ”After the stunt you pulled at Leap of Faith? Yeah, I kinda do, Ned!”

He ceased speaking, letting the heartache squeeze as tightly around his neck as it did his chest.

“That wasn’t… that wasn’t like you! You’ve been desperate and angry and hurt and I get that entirely-”

“Oh, do you?” His interruption made her stumble, staring back with an equally hurt gaze.

“Don’t shove that on me. You have been going through all this. You’ve been skipping therapy. You’ve been killing yourself and just slotting into whatever shape might make you seem useful to other people and you justify it by saying its for others!”

“It is for others!” Ned firmly shoved his index finger into the table.

“Then where the hell are they?” She leaned over the table with an angered expression.

Another round of silence. Another mournful glare shared between the two.

“I didn’t- I didn’t want to show up to talk about this. Just- someone had to let you know that you’re just doing everything to change yourself in whatever way the world expects of you. It’s like you never stopped being The Chameleon.”

Ned’s eyes drifted downwards towards the table as Darcy slid an envelope across.

“I want you to get help, Ned. I… I even want to be a part of your life. But you don’t even know what that is right now. You put yourself through so much and don’t even consider that everyone who dares so much as love you is forced to be along for the ride.”

She stood up, saying one final thing before departing, leaving the cold, metallic gray of the entrance door behind her, sealing shut softly.

“I hope you can want more for yourself.”

He looked down at the envelope, carefully pressing his thumbs in to unfurl the top and peek at the contents.

A wedding invitation.

He waited for the moment when it would hit. When the wave of despair would overcome the all-encompassing nothing raging inside of him.

He waited until he left.

---

The constant droning of reflection dragged on at AA. Typically, the meetings didn’t crawl across the clock quite like this, but it seemed that was merely the kind of day Ned was meant to have. The envelope hugged his leg inside of his pocket, pressed sharply throughout the entirety of the meeting. Ned was keenly aware of the things he was supposed to feel. This was a huge occasion for Amelia, the young woman he had sponsored. Her first 90 days sober chip ever.

“Well, it sure as hell was no cakewalk,” she said, with a bit of smugness, Ned offering a plastic smile in return.

She ran her fingers across the ceramic, feeling the etching and detail over the tips of her thumbs. Even as she remained aloof, there was a humility to the situation. A powerlessness rejected. Agency regained. Despite her immaturity, the poignancy bled through. She looked to Ned, who seemed somewhere else.

The invitation dug in deeper.

Kelly, the stand-in to lead meetings, looked on with warmth and pride. Her hands pressed together as she explained.

“Obviously, Amy, you’ve got more than a few steps to keep going, but you’re doing great. So much of what we do is momentum based. We fall into a habit and we cling to it. You;ve chosen a better habit. A routine more than worth keeping. You ought to feel proud of that!”

Amy smirked, attempting to find some snarky reply, but only managed, “I guess I do.”

Kelly turned to Kaye, his vacant smile still barely past the point of breaking and asked the question he had been dreading for the entire sordid affair.

“Would you like to add something, Ned? You did help her get here after all.”

“No thanks,” he said, forcing his smile to stay even as Amy’s faded.

“Seriously?” She said, baffled at his lack of enthusiasm, “I go through all of this shit just to get to here and… “no thanks?” That’s all you got? My dad said more to me than that, Ned!”

“Amy,” his teeth slid against one another, desperate to keep the tone lighter,
”today is not the day for that.”

“Really?! So when is that gonna be exactly? When you get the stick out of your ass and stop being so butthurt because “wahhh! a buncha hillbillies don’t like watching me smack people anymore!” Give me a fuckin break!”

“You two,” Kelly attempted to intervene as Ned stood, his smile going from fake to angered, “we really just need to calm things down.”

The invitation seemed to slice Ned’s leg.

“You want me to say something?! You want some advice from your sponsor, Amelia? I’ll let you in on a little fact: that empty feeling you keep trying to drive away stay stapled to your soul permanently! You can’t rip it off or find some way to make it hurt less! It just eats at you forever! And maybe, just maybe, you find one person who puts tha darkness to the side for a brief moment in your life, bu you can count on them finding the nearest exit because you had to put your trust into some girl who would rather ruin a guy’s relationship instead of telling him to go fuck himself!”

“There’s no better path! There’s no happy ending! It just hurts! Good job on the first three months of it!”

Amelia’s head swung down, holding back tears as Kelly’s gaze shot daggers through Ned.

“Amy, I-” He said as the anger faded like mist, leaving only a tearful girl looking for support from the person she had trusted to provide it.

“You need to go,” Kelly declared.

She didn’t need to elaborate.

Ned fled from the building, the growing storm inside of him nearly breaking through. He didn’t try to walk anywhere, simply away. Away from another disappointed pair of eyes. Away from further pain. The pavement of Brooklyn, typically inviting and comforting, gazed back at him with the intensity of everyone who had ever stepped on the streets prior. The eyes of millions all set on him and him alone, sparkling with small glimmers of light. He looked up after however long it must’ve been to see his own face staring back at him through the blurry reflection of a window.

The Golden Goose. The same bar that he had to find Pip Collins in.

Is that all he was destined to do? To rise and fall like a sea’s tide overturning every ship that dared sail in it? There was a seat open, just past the hazy image of himself, just next to a red headed fellow. An open stool.

A place to belong.

Somewhere that wanted him.

His hand hovered over the door’s handle, desperately weighing the possibility of entering. Wanting permission to fail. He thought of Amelia. Of Darcy. Of Pip and Mark. All people who wanted to see him do better and to keep watching as he failed. That’s when it hit him. The dread that few go to sleep with and even fewer wake knowing.

He didn’t have the luxury of falling.

His hand sank as he stepped away from the door, cursing the dryness of his tongue, the enticing scent of liquor, and the ever closer threat of relapse.

But mostly, he just cursed himself.

---

---

---

“Strength manifests in different forms.”

“We don’t ever get to choose the way we experience strength. We can guide it, but we don’t get to dictate its form or where it leads us. But what we have a death grip on is our failures. The moments of weakness in-between. We have a constant grip on who we are during our lowest points. That’s what made me take this match, Matthias. Not something as simple as a prideful disavowal of your challenge against me or mere hubris towards another champion in this federation. It’s because I see you at your weakest every time you walk into that ring and I need the world to share my eyes.”

“Matthias Syn is weakness personified.”

“He loves to use the metaphor of his Revolutionary Championship as though he stands for something more than the sadomasochistic urge to hurt people. I don’t know how to tell you this, Syn, but I’m not the Universal Champion who I reclaimed this belt from. I don’t have a move in my arsenal waiting to end a career when it's inconvenient for me, like he tried to during my cash-in. I am not like the kinds of people you think you’re facing. See, Matt has a way with words. It might be littered with broken glass and the epithets from someone’s long abandoned LiveJournal from their Linkin Park days, but damn it if it’s not a way. He can almost convince you that all we do is slice and smash and violently try to break one another as much as possible. The way he speaks of wrestling, you’d think it was just pleasant attempted murder. He has no eye for the sport. For the art.”

“For the heart underneath it all.”

“You see, our tin man is so fixated on the pain inside of him that he can’t realize that he’s just emulating the forces that torment him. Always in an adversarial relationship, even with the people supposed to help him. To ease him into a better life. Syn and I both have our sicknesses, but he’s clung to them, thinking there’s a cure hiding in his illness. You’re not some big bad avatar of malice. You’re hurt and all you’ve learned is how to hurt others. I see you and I see myself at my lowest. When I beat my own friends half to death just to keep the emptiness at bay. You are trying to harvest fruit in a barren orchard and it’s one I used to own. And I reflect on that and it makes me feel so ashamed. Ashamed for how I’ve acted. For how I’ve fallen into my own worst habits. But that’s the lesson you haven’t learned.”

“Our ability to regret makes us strong. It shows us the gap between what we strive to be and what we remain. Cruelty is common. Easy. You find so much strength in it because it’s the path most obvious to you and you’re unable to realize that that’s true for everybody! It takes nothing to be a blood-coated douchebag and you can look at literally any company in this business and see the back catalog of your predecessors gumming up the bottom half of any given era!See, you’re not a villain, Matthias, you’re every schoolyard bully, just with a knife fetish. The world was hard on you, so you just took the ball and ran with it. You gave up and submitted to the cruelty of others so readily and handily and you have the audacity to lecture people for not sharing your bargain bin nihilism! Jesus Christ, you tried to say JB had no charisma while unironically talking about wanting to hurt everybody. You’re always two slurs away from a 4chan comment and you think that means something. Like it gives you power over people. You wanna know why you’re Revolution Champion, Syn? Because I didn’t feel like going back to Thursdays and handing you your ass on a blue and black platter.”

“You push your peers down because you can’t comprehend any other way to move forward. You live in a world of binary dominance. If you were only trying a bit harder, I might be able to empathize with you, but you are intent on being pitied. I might have injuries and a fanbase that hates me and a life crumbling apart at the seams, but I still show up. I bested you at Leap of Faith on a nearly empty tank on my road to the Universal Championship and I will gladly defend this belt from the likes of you! You and your useless ego, who would once again turn this championship into a prop for a single person instead of the showcase for the XWF that it is. I did not claw my way to victory so I could lose to someone who’s worldview is as undercooked and hastily thought out as his promos. You can throw Razor under the bus until the cows come home, but he got people to boo me. You’re lucky if you get that hostile crowd to even dislike me in comparison.”

“You wanted the easiest path, but you wanted it to feel brave and subversive. You needed success, but you threw away respect! You wanted me and now your heart is racing to realize that you keep getting what you’re fucking asking for. My body buckles and my spirit takes the reins. My will is an inferno that burns paper tigers like you to ash. So, I want you to not only lose, Matthias, and know that I’ve beaten you, but to see the remnants of the broken life you could fix. You should fix.”

“Because you can’t touch the top of the mountain on a busted ladder.”

"You can't run from yourself."