Author's Note – I'd just like to go on record (before it happens) to say that I think Sting is turning heel soon in TNA. Deep down, I think you know it too.
Also, if you want my notes or alternate scenes for this chapter, go to my LiveJournal. The link is in my profile.
EDITTED Thank you, Fuzzy Elf, for pointing out the little inconsistencies and – more importantly – keeping me in the proper tense. It's a big help!
Hero
--
Chapter II:
Morning Plans
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." - Albert Einstein
--
Not many places were open in the early hours of the morning. Usually he didn't need them to be. Tonight, though, Jarrett felt like going out. He found himself at Denny's, reading the clock's time - 1:19 A.M. – in the glass' reflection next to him, sitting in a corner booth at the back of the restaurant, drinking iced tea sweetened with two sugars and a single squeezed lemon floating on the ice.
Two days ago Jim Cornette gave him the NWA title he won at the pay-per-view. He was no longer celebrating his reign, but savoring it now. He was savoring the feeling of being the champion again, letting the satisfaction one earns from success engulf him. The only person who could have been dangerous to him hadn't said a word. Every time Sting picked up a microphone, Jarrett waited with baited rage for him to reveal all of his plans. He loathed Sting for knowing – or for having some inkling as to – what he was doing, but he never exposed anything. At first, Jarrett had worried, but he had forgotten to take into consideration Sting only thought he knew what he was up to. All Sting knew, all he ever really knew, was that it wouldn't be good for TNA. Being the goody-goody that he was, Sting thought to stop him.
Jarrett smiled into his glass. How close had he come to having his plans thwarted? The answer: closer than Sting realized. Sting alone couldn't have stopped him, but Sting with the entire roster behind him could have. At every checkpoint, he expected everyone to rise up and vanquish him as if he was the villain plotting the world's destruction, but no one did. When he realized no one was coming for him, he drifted away from the protection Team Canada offered him should it have come down to a big battle. Not even the legendary Sting could stop him now, and only because he never asked for anyone's help. He loved it. The person who could have saved TNA was too proud to ask for help.
Jarrett found that people tended to mind their own business, and even when it was their business involved, they looked away and avoided causing a scene. People ignored everything that went wrong in their lives as long as they could. They never started fixing something before it was broken and, after it broke, it took them a while to replace it. He loved the oxymoron of people: they would help others but not themselves, or they would help others only when it helped them. He had counted on both people's selflessness and their greed to get to this point. Now that he was here, he only had to finish his ride on a bull he was moving with in perfect sync.
He stared out the window, through the backwards clock, into the street. Streetlights illuminated the blacktop; yellow reflectors along the road refracted the light; the traffic light blinked on red. Cars passed by occasionally, speeding by so fast that the taillights seemed to be the headlights too.
Four years after he emerged with TNA, he now felt like the smartest man alive. He sipped his tea, holding it on his tongue a moment before letting it fall down his throat. Not only did he feel like the smartest man alive, but he also felt like the greatest. He had power. It hummed within him. Jarrett relished the feeling it brought: a secure sense of self, confidence, and the certainty that he could get anything he wanted – he had only to want it badly enough. But to manipulate other people in order to get what he wanted, that was where the power came from. It felt good to see three years of work come together precisely as he wanted, even if it hadn't always gone as planned. He had the patience of a god.
Inside, with the wooden paneling and the teal vinyl seats, was the late night crowd: lesbian-and/or-bisexuals, street racers, and a pair of cops. Most of them would never live in the daytime. He glared at them.
A man walked in who wasn't part of the late night crowd. Not usually, anyway. He was a grizzly bear of a man, a grizzly bear standing on his hind legs, brown-gray hair as wild as him, and his lips pulled back in a grin for what he thought might be a meal.
Jarrett kept his head down and his eyes up, able to see the inside of the diner without anyone able to see where he directed his gaze. He watched as Nash scanned the faces in the restaurant, disregarding colored hair and blue uniforms. When he saw Jarrett, he immediately headed over. Jarrett picked up his glass and drank a little, wondering how long and why Nash had searched for him tonight.
"Baby, you don't say anything, you leave in the middle of the night… what am I supposed to think? Tell me," he said quietly, sliding into the seat across from Jarrett in the booth and sitting down, "are you cheating on me?"
Jarrett circled his straw around in his glass, spinning the ice around until he made a tiny whirlpool in the center of the liquid. Bubbles formed around the edges. Tiny, white crystals stuck to the ice cubes. He thought he saw his reflection in the whirling tea, a brown-grey shadow in the liquid amber.
"Okay. Fine. No jokes. I'm putting my funny bones up on the table," he said slowly, placing his elbows on the table. "I'm putting on my serious face." Nash was smiling. He then waved his hand across his face and suddenly the smile was gone, replaced by straight lips. "And we're going to talk, man to man. Is that all right with you, Mr. Jarrett?"
"All right. I'll start the talk. Why did you follow me to a half-assed restaurant at one in the morning?"
"Well, I've been meaning to talk you, but I never seem to get a chance. You know how it is. I'm doin' my thing, you're doin' your thing. It's your thing I'm interested in, actually."
"I thought you said 'no jokes?'"
"Innuendo doesn't count as a joke. Besides, I said it with a straight face, and I am interested in what you're doing."
Nash grabbed the plastic container that held the various brands of sugar. He spun it in circles with his thumbs around the table. His eyes never left Jarrett's.
Jarrett leaned away and draped his arms over the back of the booth. His index finger began tapping the vinyl cushion.
"What is it I'm doing?" Jarrett asked.
"I'm not sure exactly, but I can guess what Sting thinks you're trying to do. I bet he thinks you're trying to take over TNA. Maybe he's right. I don't know." Nash swatted the plastic back and forth with his hands. "Me, I think you're up to something else. Bigger."
The condensation on the glass started to trickle down. It left behind a moist trail.
"Yeah?"
"I don't know what it is. I can guess, but I don't know. Just tell me: am I right?"
"Maybe," he said guardedly.
"Then I want in on the action!" Nash declared as surely as if Jarrett had said yes. "Now before you say no," Nash held up his hands, talking faster, "I want you to know I'm not a freeloader. I'm going to have something to contribute."
Jarrett sat forward, putting his hands on the table.
"What?"
"The X-Division Championship. I'm going to win it soon and I think, you know, maybe you could use another champion," Nash said. He wagged his eyebrows.
The plastic holder continued to move in his hands.
"Why would I want you? And what exactly do you think would be in it for you?"
"Power. Everyone wants it, but they don't admit it. I'll admit it: I want power. And I think you're going to have all of it soon. So you bet your sweet ass I want in on this. And let's cut the games. I know you need the gold, but if the wrong guy's wearin' it, well, that sucks for you. You and I both know I'm the guy you want to be wearin' that belt most because I'm the guy that's going to have the most power with it. And isn't that what you want?"
"Okay, no more games. Yeah. Yeah, that's what I want. And just so we're clear, I am going to use you," Jarrett said.
Nash spread his arms and shrugged. "That's fine because I'm gonna use you too. And let me be clear: I'm not your friend. I just like being on top. Your plan falls through, I find a new mountain to climb."
Jarrett tilted his head back and laughed. He liked men like Nash. He didn't come across them often. Most people were busy trying to do right in the world, and then they were getting hung up trying to differentiate between right and wrong. People were repenting for sins they thought they'd committed, people were guilty for not being good enough, people were giving without asking for anything in return. They apologized for having a shadow during the day. They feared the daytime as much as they did the night. Not Nash, though. No, Nash was a businessman like him. Nash traded value for value. They would both benefit equally from their deal. Jarrett liked a good deal. He also found that a man who had something to gain would be far more loyal than one who just wanted to help out of the goodness of his heart. A certain kind of camaraderie formed between men like Nash and him when they made deals. These deals inexplicably but invariably bound them together and created a trust between them, if not a friendship. Each man knew exactly where the other stood, and each man could trust that the other would remain there until the tradeoff was either complete or no longer mutually beneficial. Then they parted ways peacefully but with the understanding that they might be enemies the next time they met, which was okay with them. Men like Nash and him didn't want friends, much less long-lasting ones.
The waitress who had seated him earlier returned with a pitcher of iced tea. He gently touched her wrist as she refilled his glass.
"Excuse me, could you get this gentleman here something to drink?" he drawled.
Jarrett nodded at Nash. Nash nodded back. He broke out into a smile and clapped his hands, rubbing them together excitedly.
"All right! We are in business. Let me have what he's having, sweetheart."
--
Usually Raven was going to bed at six in the morning. This time he was crawling out of bed instead. He'd gone to bed a couple hours ago. His eyes were dry and burned as long as he held them open. He stumbled around like a drunk waking up from the previous night without a hangover only to discover that he was still drunk and the consequences were on their way. All of his weight leaned against the wall; he walked along it, friction burning the skin of his shoulder. He fell against the sink and twisted the left knob. He cupped his hands underneath the faucet and let them fill with water, water that he then splashed into his eyes. It didn't help much. Raven put his entire head in the sink, his forehead resting uncomfortably on the drain. Cold water ran over his scalp, down his back, down the sides of his face, down his neck, and down his chest. He hit his head hard on the faucet when he straightened up, flipping his hair back and flinging water onto the mirror. He grimaced. His fingers felt around for blood and found none. For a few minutes, his head throbbed.
Raven turned and staggered sleepily into the bathroom, positioning himself in front of the toilet. Mostly he peed in the toilet. The rest of it ended up on the white rim or on the ivory floor. When he was done, he thought about flushing, but lifting his heavy arm that high at such an early hour was just too much.
There was a pair of jean shorts on the floor beside the bed, frayed and torn from frequent wear, which he put on. He wore them yesterday, but they were probably still relatively clean. If they weren't, well, they had his wallet in the pocket, and if he couldn't flush a toilet then he couldn't pull his wallet out and put it into a cleaner pair of pants.
The walls of his stomach growled, rubbing against one another. He had leftovers in the refrigerator from his dinner last night, but again, too much exertion too early in the morning to not only get it out, but eat it too.
He left his hotel room in his pants from yesterday and the white t-shirt in which he'd slept, dragging his feet along the carpet to the elevator and falling against the wall tiredly. He lifted his hand just high enough to push the button with the triangle pointing down. The metal doors opened and he got in, sliding into the corner. The walls held him up on the ride down. The elevator reached the lobby quickly - Damn relativity. Damn Einstein, Raven thought – and he heaved himself out. His bare feet plodded along the chilled, patterned tile in the lobby, making a sticking sound when it took him too long to pick his foot up for the next step, until he made it to the coffee station.
Colored light infiltrated the windows. He turned his back on the sun as he focused on picking up a full pot of coffee to pour it into a Styrofoam cup. His fingers curled around the cup, waiting for it to burn his fingertips away. The cup heated slightly, but not painfully. Raven tilted his head back and drank. The coffee scalded the insides of his lips, torched his taste buds to ash, and lit the entire length of his esophagus on fire. Even though he couldn't taste it anymore, he kept drinking. It felt like drinking liquid embers.
The coffee pot wasn't as heavy the second time he picked it up, and he refilled his cup with greater ease. He held his eyelids half-closed because it soothed his burning eyeballs. Through his half-lidded eyes, he saw someone else awake this morning, someone who looked as if he and the early morning were of frequent acquaintance.
Sting sat by the window, holding a book in front of his face so that the sunrise illuminated the pages. He dressed casually, but unlike Raven, his clothes were fresh, rumple-free, and he was clean-shaven. He wore a baseball cap with the billfold pulled down, hiding what anyone might have seen of his face.
As Raven scorched the soft insides of his mouth, his gums, and his salivary glands, he tried to see what Sting saw. Something about Jarrett bothered him, perhaps even frightened him. A man like Jarrett, with an ingenious mind, a deep understanding of the rules, and a disregard for morals, was dangerous. A man like Jarrett, who had gained and lost, would hold onto the championship more fiercely now that it belonged to him again. He would be even more conniving and malicious in order to possess it indefinitely this time. Was Sting worried about how far Jarrett would go to keep it?
Later, Raven would strategize, and fabricate a plot to rip the title Zbyszko had stolen from him away from Jarrett.
Someone like Sting, overly righteous and too zealous about protecting others from the agony in the world, wouldn't allow someone like him to seize the belt.
He padded over to Sting's table with his half-drank coffee in his left hand. With his other hand, he pulled out a chair. The metal legs scraped across the ceramic floor. Sting looked up from his novel as Raven seated himself, briefly registering who was joining him, and then resumed reading. Raven slouched into the chair, sitting with his legs spread while holding his cup with both hands between his thighs.
Two empty packets of sugar and a drained creamer lay on the table in front of Sting.
Raven struggled to say something both polite and appropriately aloof, but the right words mixed with the wrong ones until he couldn't decipher a single, coherent sentence from the wordy mess. He sucked at pleasantries and meaningless chitchat anyway.
"What are you doing here?" he asked. Raven repeated the sentence in his mind, concentrating on each word, until he was sure that what he'd heard himself say was actually what came out of his mouth.
"Reading a book," Sting answered without looking up. "What are you doing here?"
Sting's voice sounded too loud in his ears. Raven reviewed his memory of yesterday, reassuring himself that no, he had not been drinking. There were other noises too: the whir of the coffee machine, a repetitive clicking (also from the machine, he guessed), scraping and banging coming from behind the wall, and muffled voices. It all filtered through his ears as background noise, but he'd never noticed those sounds so acutely before. He'd never noticed them at all before.
"Drinking coffee at an hour I never knew existed in a day" is what Raven meant to say, but everything else he had thought about saying in that moment where a person processes questions and prepares responses ended up mixed in as well. The phrases that passed through his mind echoed vaguely. His tongue tripped over itself trying to make him sound intelligible, but what came out made him feel like an idiot. He didn't even know what he'd said, but he thought it might have been, "Drinking coffee when I didn't know existed at, uh, and boycotting bed."
"What?"
Again, Sting's voice sounded overly loud. Raven shook his head.
"I fo… don't know."
From somewhere off to the side, he heard someone on the television talking monotonously about Adolf Hitler's reign as dictator and how it came about. He had completely ruined the conversation he'd tried to have. He was uncomfortable now, but he couldn't leave yet otherwise he'd look like an even bigger moron incapable of human interaction. He looked around for the T.V., but he didn't see one anywhere.
Fuck. When was the last time he took his medicine? Fuck, fuck, fuck. The days he took his medication all looked the same in his memory, so it could have been yesterday as easily as it could have been three days ago. He was certain he didn't take it last night, nor did he take it that afternoon. It took him a little longer to recall the morning, but he had forgotten to take it again yesterday. If he could just make it a habit, he wouldn't forget all the time. But he forgot all the time because it wasn't a habit, and he wasn't organized enough to make it into one.
Raven finished his coffee as quickly as he could. He used throwing his cup away as an unspoken excuse to leave and rode the elevator back up to his room. For the entire span of the ride, mechanical sounds assaulted his auditory senses. He walked calmly to his room as smothered voices droned in the back of his head.
After a while, a person got used to hearing voices. It was easy to live with since they sounded like they could be coming from any – or all – of the rooms around him. However, if he didn't take his pills for too long, he would start hallucinating. Hallucinating was embarrassing when people caught him doing it, but he only knew when he was hallucinating when people caught him. Those were the times when he felt truly insane.
He pulled out his wallet. Usually he put his key card in there because, although he regularly forgot to take his medicine, he always remembered to grab his wallet. Raven sifted through the money and random receipts, pulled out his driver's license and various other plastics, none of which would open the door; and then he remembered that he had left his card on the table by the door last night. He hoped he might have stuck it back in his wallet and forgotten, but the card was still in the room.
Raven leaned his back against the door and hit his head against it. He dropped to the ground as easily as if he were in the ring and sat against the door like that, with one leg straight out in front of him and the other one bent up and his arm perched on his knee.
He listened to the hum in his head, picking out the different voices but unable to understand anything they said. They never made much sense anyway. He could still hear Ben, not louder but a little clearer than the others. (One night, while he was out with Sandman, Van Dam, and Rhino – after some heavy drinking – they had named his voices. He had described them and they had named them. Since then voices had come and gone, or maybe changed, but he still used the names. Most of the names were inappropriate now, but Ben was still the same.)
After spending some time with his eyes closed, knowing he wasn't going to fall asleep in that position but trying anyway, he got up to head back downstairs and get a replacement key. He wouldn't make much sense if he got verbose, but if he kept it concise he would probably be all right.
Down he went again. He developed a headache on the way and a craving for a cigarette. The elevator doors slid open at the lobby once more and Raven walked over to the reception desk, itching one bare foot with the heel of the other.
"Do you have cigarettes?" he asked.
The man behind the counter shook his head and apologized.
"I need a room key. New – left mine last night…" Raven trailed off. Stutterers probably felt as frustrated as he did: they knew what they wanted to say, but it came out wrong every time.
"Room 301. I left my key- card key."
He printed Raven a new card, telling him as he did so that he invalidated the old one and to return both when he checked out. Shit, he thought. If they just printed keys for anyone who asked for them, he was going to fuck with Rhino sometime. He put the card in his pocket as he headed back to the elevator, thinking about how he should use the stairs this time and get more exercise like those bastard doctors were always telling him to do.
"Hey."
Raven was going to ignore the voice until he saw Sting next to him, holding his book under his arm.
"Look, sorry if I offended you earlier. I wasn't being serious, but I guess I came off like a jackass," Sting said.
"No," Raven said as he stepped onto the elevator. Sting followed him.
Damnit.
"If you're going to be mad, I'm not going to beg you to forgive me. But you looked like you wanted to talk, so if you still want to…"
"It's not mad – I'm not mad. I haven't… too early. Morning."
Sting's chuckle came out as air through his nose.
"Not a morning person, huh? Another time then."
Raven nodded and hastily exited the elevator, his sweaty hands pulling the key card out of his pocket and sliding it through the mechanized lock on the door. It flashed him the green light. He entered as fast as he could while still trying to outwardly appear casual. Inside, with the curtains drawn, he relaxed in the dark. He searched the outer pockets of his luggage bag for his prescription bottle. He found it in the side and shook out a pill, then went over to the sink to fill up a glass of water.
It would take some time for the pill to correct all the chemical imbalances and get his nerves functioning normally, so he turned on the television to the history channel and crawled back into bed.
--
The hallway smelled like old smoke. Sting reluctantly inhaled, breathing in the cigarette smoke lingering in the walls and the carpets. He walked down to the end, to the room he'd seen Raven enter earlier that day. He knocked, wondering if Raven would be there this late in the afternoon.
After waiting a few seconds and hearing nothing, he knocked again, louder. Raven opened the door this time, squinting out of his darkened room into the brighter hallway.
"Did I wake you up?" he asked, gesturing at his wrinkled clothing and mussed hair.
"Yeah. And I need to piss too. Come on in," Raven said, opening the door for Sting before going into the bathroom. "Don't open the curtains and don't turn on the lights."
"Right," Sting smirked. "No problem."
Normally he wouldn't do this. It wasn't like him to come knocking on other people's hotel room doors trying to make friends, but no one would listen to him. They didn't believe him, they didn't trust him, and – being such a young, independent bunch – they wouldn't follow him blindly. Maybe he had their respect; if he did, it didn't mean much.
So here he was, looking around Raven's hotel room while he relieved himself, to start gaining allies one person at a time.
He came because he thought Raven was curious. He'd started to ask this morning, but left just as quickly. Sting wondered if he knew what was going on. He also wondered if he would help if he did know.
Raven came out of the bathroom and washed his hands in the sink, not looking at Sting. Sting watched him with serious eyes. Was he getting a cold shoulder? When Raven pulled a cigarette out of the carton on the nightstand and lit it, Sting realized that he was just going about his usual routine.
"So," Raven began, sitting down on the edge of the bed, "what do you want?"
"What you asked me this morning. Why'd you ask it?"
Raven shrugged. "Just wanted to know what book you were reading."
"No you didn't," Sting said.
"No I didn't," Raven agreed, smiling.
Sting stuck his hands into his pants' pockets. Raven denied being angry, but Sting thought he might still be since he was being difficult.
"Look. All I really want to know is do you believe me about Jarrett?"
"What? That he's a cancer and TNA would be better of without him? Yeah, "Raven said, exhaling smoke.
All the muscles in Sting's body tensed. Then why don't you do something about it?
"Doesn't it bother you?"
"Why does it bother you so much?" Raven countered. He flicked ash from his cigarette into the ashtray on the nightstand.
"Because of something he said. He's doing something. It's big. I don't know what, but it involves everybody, and it won't be good for us."
Ridges formed on Raven's forehead when he raised his eyebrows.
"You don't even know what the hell you're worried about?"
"I have an idea," he said. "Don't you?"
"Not really."
"Do you care?" Sting asked.
Raven took the cigarette out of his mouth and held it between his two forefingers.
"No, I don't. I think you have a messiah complex and you want to play the hero so bad that you're making up the villain. Jarrett's an asshole. Personally, I hate the guy, but he's only one person. He can't do much damage."
Sting nodded. He didn't move, but his eyes fell to the floor. A torch burned within them. His teeth pressed against each other. He wanted to leave them to suffer the consequences of their inaction. He wanted to make Raven understand, but he knew he couldn't.
"Do you want your belt back?"
As the words came out of his mouth, Sting couldn't believe he was so desperate for allies that he would appeal to another man's greed, but he had been a champion once too. He knew what it felt like.
"I can get it back myself," Raven said, starting to get hostile.
"I wasn't offering to help you," Sting snapped. "I don't want the belt, but being involved with Jarrett puts me in the position to get it. You want the belt, but you're nowhere close to it. So, I was going to say, if you want the belt, then maybe you might want to think about getting involved with Jarrett."
Raven glared at him.
"I'd be helping you if I did that."
"Yeah," Sting nodded curtly. "I don't care if you hate my guts. Help me take out Jarrett or try to take him out on your own. I'll still be involved either way."
"I don't want your help," Raven said as he stubbed out his cigarette.
"I want yours," he said bluntly.
Brown eyes, flashing both intelligence and insanity, stared at him. Sting lifted his jaw slightly.
"I'll think about it. Now get the fuck out of my room."
Sting did as he asked. As he headed back down the hallway, he thought about his encounter with Raven. Would he have to discard all of his values in order to get rid of Jarrett? Sting walked away with his shoulders down and his eyes on the ground, wondering if the product was worth the price.