Rating: T, for some language and mild adult content
Disclaimer: If you recognize it, I don't own it. I do kind of blur kayfabe and reality a bit at one point so please remember that this is completely fictional.
It takes Seth more than a few minutes to realize where he's at. He takes in a few labored breaths and blinks several times to clear his line of vision.
And even then, the room's still spinning and he's still teetering back and forth like he's fucking high as a kite.
He doesn't recognize the place. Or maybe he does, but he's too hungover to remember right now. He's been to so many run-down motels, it's hard to keep track of them all.
The room smells like cheap perfume, cigarettes and mold. The musty smell practically makes his empty stomach flip. The wallpaper has tears running from the ceiling to the floor and the scratchy blankets are ripping at the seams. There's an unclothed stranger beside him and a used condom still wrapped around his dick. He just rolls it off and discards it on the floor.
Another Saturday night.
He pushes the covers off and a chill runs through his naked body. He almost falls off the bed as he gets up, but catches himself. He tries to stagger to the bathroom, but his head starts throbbing and he doesn't quite make it there. He reaches out in front of him to steady himself near the lone table in the room. He grabs the half-full bottle of gin and sits down on the stained carpet.
Fucking motel doesn't even have chairs.
He fumbles with the cap, before downing the liquid. He finds warmth – solace – in the burning of the alcohol gliding the back his throat. He's really fucking thirsty, so he licks the rim of the bottle, and then his lips, as he relishes in the last drops of the bottle.
He thinks about Dean and how he would tell him stories like this. Worse than this actually. Stories of places so shitty that all he slept on was a flimsy mattress pad on the floor. Stories of mornings he was so shit-faced that he literally didn't move until the next night…when he dragged his ass out of bed and did it all over again.
Dean.
He'd know. He'd understand.
He reaches his hand up, over the table, to aimlessly feel around for his phone. It falls off the table with a thud and Seth tumbles over as well, trying to pick it up.
Zero messages. Zero missed calls.
He makes a swiping motion on his phone and taps on it a few times in an effort to call Dean, but he hears the automated operator's voice, "We're sorry, your call cannot be completed as dialed-"
He squints really hard at the blurry, constantly shifting screen and tries to use his contacts this time.
"We're sorry, your call-"
Seth irritably, haphazardly, taps on the screen once more.
"We're sorry-"
He slams the phone repeatedly against the ground and buries his face into the carpeting steeped in what he thinks is piss. The carpet is really fucking disgusting, but right now, so is he.
Besides, it's not like anyone's looking for him. Dean would never have picked up anyway. They're not teammates. They're not friends.
They're not anything anymore.
Boy, did he screw that up.
Turning on the Shield was supposed to jumpstart his career. Make him the guy.
But Roman's the one with the one-on-one match against Lesnar – where Seth just knows his former friend will be victorious at. And Dean's the one with the crowd wildly cheering for him every time his music hits.
He has nothing.
His plans have all backfired on him. He got his chance to beat Lesnar and he failed. Just like every attempt before that. He's playing second fiddle to two 40-somethings. Triple H and Stephanie won't even look his way. His so-called security team doesn't even bother to protect him anymore.
The Architect. What a fucking joke. No one respects him. No one cares about him.
The unemotional operator's voice echoes in his ear. He hears it over and over and over again, as the sharp, shooting pains in the middle of his forehead grow increasingly unbearable.
Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.
He hears everyone taunting him. Laughing at him. They're saying he's a sell-out. A coward. A failure.
"Shut up!" he groans, flinging the phone across the room, leaving a small impression in the adjacent wall.
Fuck. He's going to get charged for that.
"Baby," a sleepy, sultry voice starts, "What's the matter?" A buxom brunette rises from under the covers, unashamed. "Come back to bed," she says in her best come-hither voice.
Seth's stomach lurches and he doesn't feel so well suddenly. His headache is seemingly taking a backseat to his nausea right now.
"Jus' gotta use the bathroom," Seth slurs in response, satisfying her curiosity as she's already going back to sleep.
He crawls back towards the bathroom once again, on his hands and knees, stumbling over a few pieces of strewn-about clothes and a couple of empty liquor bottles.
The bathroom is even shittier than the sleeping area. But he's not feeling so hot and even the crummiest toilet seat will look like a throne to him. He lays his head on the cold seat and stares at the cockroaches scrambling up the opposite wall.
What was that thing Dean said that one night? If there were a disaster tomorrow, Twinkies, cockroaches and Dean would be the only survivors?
Seth chuckles to himself.
Roman and Seth used to joke that they'd never survive for one second if the apocalypse happened. Roman was too hygienic and he'd die anyway once his daughter found out all her toys were destroyed. Seth was too dependent on technology and CrossFit that he wouldn't know what to do in the event something major happened besides tweet about it or listen to depressing ballads.
Dean just mocked them and called them straight-up pussies.
Seth just laughs again, but gets a bit ahead of himself and starts coughing and choking on his own sputum. He tilts his head forward into the toilet bowl, but nothing comes out.
Fuck, he really just wants to throw up. If he can get this queasy, unsettling feeling in his stomach out of the way, maybe he can sleep it off. Maybe he can stop reminiscing about people who don't give a fuck about him and stop thinking about everything that's going wrong in his life.
Maybe.
He drags himself up onto the bathroom sink. He leans his forearms against the sink and rests his head on the mirror.
He's lost his value to the company. He's lost his fans. He's lost his friends. He's lost his girlfriend. He's lost his self-respect.
The voices come back to mock him and ridicule him and he briefly wonders if these are the kinds of voices Randy hears in his head.
Voices of friends. Voices of family. People who trusted you. People who loved you.
And maybe that's why it's so hard to drown them out. So hard to pretend they don't matter.
Because they do.
It'd be so much easier to ignore them all. But he doesn't want to forget the sound of Dean and Roman's easy banter with him after a hard-fought victory. He doesn't want to forget the sweet sound of his ex's voice when she soothes him into bed when he's too tired. He doesn't want to forget the pitiful sound of heartbreak in his father's last words before he left him.
So he savors their voices when they do come, even if it's not the things he wants to hear.
His stomach lurches and he finally purges out every poison he's been drinking in the past night. He doesn't have the awareness and coordination to move to the toilet, so the watery projectile lands all over the sink and all over himself. When it feels like his stomach starts to settle down, he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and smears his hand across the sink. He briefly opens the faucet to let some of the vomit run down the drain.
He doesn't feel much better though. His body is still layered in sticky sweat, cum, a good dose of the motel's rank smell, and now vomit. The brutal concoction of odors makes him feel even more repulsive and awful than when he got up.
He needs a shower. But he doesn't make it there and he hits the wall, as he stumbles on his way towards the shower stall. That half-bottle of gin seems to finally be kicking in and he drifts in and out of consciousness. Exhaustion overtakes him, and he collapses onto the cold, hard tiles. His eyes close.
Finally.
Peace.
A/N: So you can interpret that ending as whatever you'd like. Thanks for reading, and reviews are always appreciated!