Everyone wanted a piece of A.J., it seemed.

From the moment he walked into the locker room on that first day, he felt eyes on him. And not just your casual glances, acknowledgements, not even curious-bordering-on-rude stares. Eyes, all over him. On every part of him. If it were possible to grope someone through sight alone, that was what it was.

He was weirded out by it, at first. He hadn't experienced anything like it before, at least not on such a large scale. Everywhere else he had gone before, he had come in as something of an established player, or at least an equal; never a 'rookie', really, never someone you would stare down like that. It was something he wasn't sure if he liked, or supported, or was okay with, really. After a while, though, he started to accept it. Sure, it wasn't the most pleasant thing, and it still made his skin crawl a little, but was it really that bad? At least he was getting noticed, not lost in the shuffle like so many others. At least he was talked to, and invited to sit with others in catering, and allowed in the dressing rooms and not kicked out into the hallway. There were worse things, he had decided.

Now?

Now, he enjoyed it.

Despite how it had made him feel in the beginning, A.J. Found that all the attention gave him a certain level of...control. They would talk to him, do things for him, pay attention to him. He guessed that made him an attention whore, didn't it? (Emphasis on the whore part, here.) He figured, too, that it was probably wrong in some way, probably going against some (or a handful) of morals, and that he was probably going to suffer some divine punishment for it at some point. But the thing was - he enjoyed it. It was easy, and he enjoyed it. All he had to do was given them attention, and they'd give it right back. It was a game, and he loved to play it.

Besides, you had to live while you were (somewhat) young and still could, right? So, what the hell.

Chris was the easiest to play, purely because he was just so needy. Unsurprising, if you looked at how he did...well, everything, and treated everyone. He was like an alley cat always looking for milk, whining and pawing at you for as long as it took, no matter how long that was, until you finally gave in. Except Chris had more of a temper than an alley cat, which A.J. Found out when he started playing hard to get with him, but that just made it even more fun. A.J. Would step back from him a little, spend some time with others, ignore a text or three, and Chris, after trying and failing with his usual tricks, would lose his temper, storming off in a huff, only to return a little while later (sometimes literally) begging and pleading, willing to do anything for forgiveness. And when A.J. Would finally give it to him, he would treat him like some sort of deity, sent down direct from the heavens for him, just for him.

He fucked like A.J. Was a God and it was their last night on Earth together, too.

But Chris really was needy, and he always wanted more, and so he got bored, eventually, and A.J. Let him go on his way to bother whoever his next fixation was. Though, he would occasionally pull on his strings, tug on his leash, and Chris would come wandering back again with eyes like the moon.

He ran into Christian a couple of times, who he hadn't seen in...god, he had forgotten how long. And who he hadn't slept with in even longer. It was a relief, really, to see him, not just because he was an old friend but because he was one of the few who didn't look at him like that (even despite their history). Christian had found Edge again, and they were...well, it was complicated (to say the least), but complicated in the way you knew not to mess with it, or even touch it. But it did make him think about their past, and A.J. Decided that maybe the whole attention whore thing wasn't such a new development after all.

When Karl and Doc arrived, they noticed the stares straight away, and A.J. Thought, as they shot ice cold glares at anyone who was a bit too obvious about it, it was kind of hypocritical of them, given that they stared at him in just the same way. If anything, they were worse, because they thought they had some sort of claim over him and so they barely tried to hide it. Not that he was complaining - he had fallen asleep on or with Doc far too many times, and had taken advantage of the fact that at the drop of a hat, Karl would do anything for him, from let him live in his own home to blowing him in the showers (that last one, especially). He just wished they were a little less jealous. They needed to learn to share.

It wasn't like A.J. Really minded being shared around, after all.

Roman was his latest choice. He was different from the others, more subtle, nonchalant. He wasn't as desperate as the others, not as possessive as Doc or Karl, nowhere near as needy as Chris. It was probably because he knew he could have his choice of anyone he liked, really. Of course, this was when he wasn't playing angsty, love-hate with Seth Rollins or us-against-the-world with Dean Ambrose (yes, A.J. Knew their history - he wasn't deaf, blind or dumb). But Seth had been gone for a while and things had got rough with Dean, who was caught up with someone else (was he Chris' latest fixation?), and he looked at A.J. Just like all the others did, even if he tried to pretend otherwise. He was hard at first, though, hard to crack, and sometimes it felt like A.J. Was putting in far more effort than he was getting back (which frustrated him, because that wasn't how the game worked). But eventually he started to crumble, melt away, and A.J. Didn't even really mind that Roman viewed him more as somebody below him than as an equal or someone to worship. That wasn't a bad thing, sometimes.

And god, when Roman had him pinned down, with his big hands on his shoulders and his hot breath in his face (and was A.J. Always this small in comparison?), and everything that came after that, he could understand why others got so caught up in him.

A.J. Had fought almost his whole life to get to where he was now. And he had wholeheartedly expected to have to fight some more, to maybe even lose, to have this final battle be the one he finally lost. To throw his body out there and come back beaten and battered and bruised, crawling back down to where he was before.

But now he had found that, yes, he was still using his body, but it was less of a battle, and more of a give and you will receive situation. (That was probably some form of prostitution, but he had already decided to throw morals out the door here.)

And he had everyone around him right at the tips of his fingers.