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Our Song #2
Topic Started: May 24 2016, 04:43 AM (33 Views)
Kilminster

《《( ( O ) )》》 《( ( O ) )》》


There’s always that one fight a warrior doesn’t want to take and would rather avoid, even if he knows in his heart that he can win.

There’s always just that one confrontation, dripping with the thick crimson ooze of finality, that the warrior just doesn’t want to face, even if he knows in his heart that he must.

It’s one of the greatest tests, to have that lodged in the back of their mind like a shard of glass piercing the retina, waking each day for each new fight, each new battle, each new war and hoping that today isn’t the day for that one.

When that day does come, as it invariably will, the mettle is tested. The bravery and skills built up through years of hard-fought success meeting the flames once more.

They know they must fight or die.

There is no retreat.

There is no surrender.

There is no margin for error or concept beyond the
red-filtered black and white.

It is the one fight which may end him, which may bring him to his knees and strike steel across his neck, but it is down to the strength of his entire being - heart, body and mind - to turn the burning tide back and survive once more, to come closer to death than ever before and emerge all the stronger for it.

The ultimate fight is for survival, the animal savage at the core of humanity brought to the fore with fiery eyes and bared teeth.

Nobody lays down for this fight.

No true warrior.


《《( ( O ) )》》 《( ( O ) )》》

He throws his tablet down onto the bench next to him, the gadget skidding across the leather surface and sliding off onto the rubberised mat flooring and he expels a long sigh of disappointment and exasperation. Sat on the safety bracket of his walk-in squat rack, his oversized black hoody sticks to his sweat-drenched form and his black shorts ride up slightly as his quads and hamstrings throb from the pump generated by unrelenting and unmerciful, seemingly endless sets of deepy and heavy squats.

Stood to either side of the rack are Jurgen Johanssen and Shaun Sinclair, each dressed in their own training apparel - shorts, trainers, t-shirts - but their colour palettes wildly contrasting from Jurgen’s dark and rich black, amber and almost ruby red to Shaun’s pastel blues and whites.

Osbourne Kilminster is barely aware of their presence, barely aware of anything as his body pulsates with a satisfying and fulfilling combination of pleasure and pain, but his mind resolutely focuses on one simple fact, so bold and uncomplicated that it lures him from his considerations of sets and reps and lodges itself in the firmament at the very forefront of his mind.

Jada hasn’t said a single fucking word.

Even that Az-hole, Goeren, has managed to stick something up on Combat TV and Osbourne had wasted his time and energy watching it just in case there was some hope of a glimpse of her, that she might say or do something, that she might display her subconscious tells and give him something to go on.

Nothing.

Reaching up to rake the sleeve of his hoody across his forehead to clear the drips from his eyeline, he clenches his jaw and turns to duck back under the bar, grabbing it wide, by the collars, as he pops it up and steps back with it, ready to go again.

《《( ( O ) )》》 《( ( O ) )》》


The hard mattress beneath him supports his back effortlessly as he lays down against it, only the thin black cotton sheet separating the scarred skin on his back from its contoured surface. Thick memory foam pillows under his head support his aching neck as he fidgets ever so slightly, adjusting his position for the greatest potential comfort. The high and small window offers little illumination as the moon and stars above withhold it from him in his fortress home, but the light cast upon his heavily scarred and bearded face from the screen of the tablet computing device he holds upright from his chest casts everything in a dim blue-grey.

His chest heaves, his nostrils flaring and his jaw clenching as he throws the tablet across the room. It hits the backrest of the armchair dumping ground for his clothes, tumbling from atop them and clattering to the floor.

The screen turns off.

《《( ( O ) )》》 《( ( O ) )》》


With the building having been a vehicle maintenance and storage warehouse, there were some integral features which had appealed immediately to the keen eye of Osbourne Kilminster - firedoors with easy internal opening but no external point of access save for the one door with a barrel-lock and then the huge roller shutter doors which allowed access for any size of truck.

This had made moving in the larger items like the ring and the racks and bleacher bench much easier to deliver and install and noe makes it all the easier to enjoy both the warm sun and cool breeze afforded by the late spring/early summer as the open doors expose the whole facility to the fresh air and ammenable climate.

Shaun and Jurgen grapple in the ring with a number of newcomers - people there by invite only but who held little current interest for the man working alone in the corner, his mma shorts and 4oz gloves his only attire as he works away on the solitary heavy bag set some way away from the others which bunch tightly together on the other side of the facility.

His beard tied by multiple bands in contrast to his neat high-and-tight haircut, he works his basics on the bag, ensuring the fine-chiselling on the granite building-blocks of his entire system. A straight left punch leads to a straight right with a high right roundhouse kick to finish. A straight right punch leads to a straight left with a high left roundhouse kick to finish.

And again.

And again.

And again.

Faster, harder, more focused - each impact resounding throughout the facility like a pulse, beating away with a set rhythm, deep and unabating… until, finally, it stops.

Shaun and Jurgen peer over silently, breaking their own rhythm and that of their training partners as they find their gazes drawn by their mentor, their tutor and their friend as he crouches down and reaches for his tablet from the matted floor and works his fingers across the plastic screen, dancing across its surface until they stop.

Shaun and Jurgen exchange glances before returning to their own training, wincing as they hear the bang and clatter of tens of pieces of metal and plastic hitting a steel support girder with an ear-rattling DONG.

《《( ( O ) )》》 《( ( O ) )》》


His thick black coat with even thicker plush black fur collar keeps the cold night breeze from touching almost all of him, his black Adidas track-pants and trainers doing the rest. Despite the dark, his eyes remain shielded behind great mirrored aviator sunglasses, but what he stares at it well-illuminated by a series of overhead lamps which cast aside all shadow and doubt, leaving the focus of the room standing proud and unashamed.

Tilting his head back, he sucks in a deep nasal breath and casta his blue eyes over the majesty of the structure, standing like a twenty foot top-less cube of destruction, a cage like no other - a cage of his own design. It fits flush around a ring, containing it completely and with no doors. The top is lined by a rolling double-helix of barbed wire, but as his gaze falls upon one section of it, his back tingles and silently cries out to him in almost the same pitch as the inward primal scream - a recollection of his own screams as a section of that barbed wire was used to flay him.

He still bears the scars upon his flesh and in his mind, scars forged in the same way as the cage itself - under light, in heat, beaten mercilessly. He’d been thrown into the mesh, cut by it, bled upon it, been whipped by the wire until he bled and the puncture wounds scarred him for life. A twitter poll had ranked it one of the EWA’s most violent matches and another had ranked it one of his greatest victories.

It was the arena within an arena, the great stage set for a battle which needed to be contained thoroughly, the two combatants isolated from everyone and everything else until only one remained and it had been him.

It was always going to be him.

He had effectively ended the career of Chip Masters, lauded All-American wrestling “expert”.

Now, he was set to enter that cage again, that beautifully constructed manifestation of malevolence to face down a natural-born and yet altogether unnatural manifestation of malevolence, albeit tempered by a penchant for the pleasures of the flesh.

She was hard, stone-like, cold and sheer and yet, to him and him alone, she was soft and warm and compassionate. She violently railed hepp and attention, seeking only the spotlight in an arena and shunning it elsewhere, and yet he found her craving his touch and his affection. She was a dichotomy, proud and pure, living to be a paradox and a contradiction and revelling in the confusion of a world trying to understand her as much as she tried to understand it. It was her against the world, but where others always considered themselves to be on the back-foot and the persecuted, she was the ambush hunter, using her many charms to reel in an unsuspecting humankind and writhe in close and invited before ripping her teeth through the jugular.

She is sensitive, a soul encased in a concrete of her own making, malleable to no-one but her chosen invited. She is soft and warm and her raven hair like silk between the fingers of a fist, her hips the perfect home to steady, restraining palms, her legs long and toned but easily bruised by the keen grinding of fingertips.

This cage was not designed for her as home nor resting place. It was not a gift created for her nor a stage set for her greatest performance and yet, that is the choice she has made.

A razor sticks in the back of his throat as he studies the structures minutest details, his mind struggling with the juxtaposition of it and her, not quite able to fathom how and why she decided that this is how she wants to do it, to test herself for the final time.

She knows to lose is to leave, to take her physical presence from that which her heart left months ago. Maybe it had, maybe it hadn’t, but for him to function on a daily basis, he had to believe that she had nothing for him, that she was an empty vessel tugging on his remaining heartstrings to get her own way and not to indicate her own struggle with the absence, the half-heartedness of even the most basic tasks.

Things were different without her, harder, more effort. Things were different but he didn’t feel free of her and he hadn’t been sure he ever wanted to be, but she had taken that away.

She chose this cage.

She should have been more careful what she wished for.

《《( ( O ) )》》 《( ( O ) )》》


By flickering flamelight, we hear the heavy footsteps long before we see him, boot heels grinding tiny stones and fragments of ground glass into the dusty concrete floor. As he appears, he shakes off his black fur coat and throws into onto the lone, solitary folding steel chair, effectively stripping down to his black vest top, black jeans and matching boots. The scarring around his left eye is visible to us, our view of his face unhindered by his usual sunglasses as he casts his eyes about him at the ramshackle old place, plaster falling from the walls, rain water leaking in through enormous cracks in the ceiling, but his attention soon turns to the fire-pit in front of him, huge flames dancing about the logs like lavish entertainment.

He runs his fingertips along the length of his beard and shakes his head, his brow furrowed and heavy.


I thought you’d have more to say about this, Jada. I really, honestly, thought that you’d be rattling off at the mouth like a Gatling gun because THIS, if nothing else before it, is a work if passion for you. It’s burned inside you so brightly and for so long that you want and need me one more time… You put in all the effort to bait me and provoke me, to push me into finally relenting and then you give me the silent treatment?

The thing is… the thing with YOU is… I know what that means because, for all your shouting about knowing me better than anybody, I know you better than you probably even know yourself. I know what your silence means and I know why it’s good and why it’s bad.

People keep talking about the Queen Bitch and that’s all well and good, she has her little niche and she’s carved out a little role for herself, but the original royalty is the Killer Queen, the Slayer of Giants and Men… but you and I both know that at the core of that hard-nosed super-bitch is just a scared little girl who gets from day to day by looking for the next adrenaline fix. You could have gone full Amy Winehouse and filled yourself up on the biggest cocktail you could imagine, but you chose something much, much more dangerous, didn’t you?


Snarling, he shakes his head and clenches his jaw, his teeth grind together and his traps flexing slightly.

You never thought it’d happen this way, did you? You thought we’d have a little one-off match and you might beat me or even just about pull off a half-decent performance, enough to get the crowd cheering for you and get your blood pumping and that’d be enough. Maybe you thought I was angry enough at you that I’d jump at a chance to crush your pretty little face, but I wasn’t.

I never thought it’d happen this way either. I thought our story was written and done as far as being in the ring together. I thought threatening your very career would have you running for the hills and I was surprised you didn’t. I guess it took some time to really sink in because this whole silent treatment reeks of you being scared, doesn’t it? You’re so damn scared that you can’t even talk yourself into bravery and you’ve slipped away into your own little world where a bottle of Stoli and Stacey’s talented little fingers are your only friends.


Raising his eyebrows for a moment, his brow soon finds again it's deeply-ploughed furrows, pain and confusion etched across his countenance as the tip of his tongue searches for and rakes itself across the sharp points of his incisors

I didn’t want to have to end you, but now it’s worked its way around to one of us never being seen again, never competing again, never knowing the heat of the lights and the roar of the crowd and you should know better than anyone that I’m not going to let ANYONE take that from me - not even you.

I don’t fight because I need the money because, to be honest, I have more than enough. I don’t fight because I need the attention because, in all honesty, it doesn’t bother me if one person or one billion people are watching. I fight because I love to fight - I was born to fight and I will fight to the day I die.

That day will not be at Battlelines.


Smiling, he holds his hands out to warm them by the fire.

I have things to do, Jada. I have things I want to do and things I want to achieve and I have a legacy that I want to build so that my name stands as a pillar upon which countless future generations of warriors can stand. I have dreams and ambitions far above and beyond what you remember of me, goals that simply transcend everything we ever discussed or spoke about or shared in even the quietest moments when we could pour our hearts out to eachother. I want so much and I need for this plague of hounding you’ve unleashed upon me to be at an end once and for all.

It’s going to take me ending you to end that, I see it now, and that’s a bitter pill to swallow because, in another lifetime, I truly believed that you’d share in everything with me and that my successes would be our successes, my victories our victories.


He looks down toward his feet as he crosses his arms over his chest, nodding as he studies nothing in particular, lost deep in swirling oceans of thought before slowly turning his head up just enough that we can see his contrasting eyes, both bright blue but one housed in perfect pink flesh with the first hints of crow’s feet indicating his age and one housed in reddened, dry and almost scaley flesh, burned and battered.

I didn’t want it to be this way, past tense. Now, I wouldn't have it any other. All or nothing - that’s the way I like it, baby, I don’t wanna live forever. But you will… in Valhalla. Give my greetings to Odin when I send you to him.

Let him have his Valkyrie returned to him.


《《( ( O ) )》》 《( ( O ) )》》

Hate (hate)
I'm your hate
I'm your hate when you want love
Pay (pay)
Pay the price
Pay, for nothing's fair

Hey (hey)
I'm your life
I'm the one who took you there
Hey (hey)
I'm your life
And I no longer care

I'm your dream, make you real
I'm your eyes when you must steal
I'm your pain when you can't feel
Sad but true

I'm your truth, telling lies
I'm your reason, alibis
I'm inside, open your eyes
I’M YOU!

Sad but true


《《( ( O ) )》》 《( ( O ) )》》
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