Back into the action in this chapter then. Welcome to Money In The Bank 2014 so a pretty good week to be posting this chapter...here's hoping our lunatic makes a return in real life this weekend!
Minnie1015, Figured it was the next step on their little journey, the big meet-the-parents moment. Besides, when it comes to their families they're both kind of screwed in this so time to share the love I guess!
ShieldGirlBecky, Aww, thank you so much, I love when people love my little couple. I never in a million years thought I would write this many stories about then but it turns out I can't give them up! Hope you enjoy!
Wolfgirl2013, Thanks! Hope you're ready for another Lauren and Dean rollercoaster ride of a story (this one is pretty nuts!)
Mandy, I'm glad you like their idle couple banter, I love writing it maybe too much?! Good news, Seth is in this one being his weaselly heel self. He was so GOOD being bad! He's coming up a little more in this story too!
Skovko, Haha, maybe a oneshot story of Lauren trying to house train a mini pig while Dean watches with a hankering for a bacon sandwich?! Yep, Dean is insecure and that comes up next chapter too (poor baby).
LunaticxLass, I think if Lauren had her way then their house would be full of waifs and strays. Maybe I should just have them move to a farm to keep the girl happy?! Glad you're back, plenty of madness in this one!
Labinnacslove, Aww, glad you think so and I'm super glad to have you on board for this new crazy ride of theirs. Might be one of the craziest ones yet both in and out of the wrestling ring. But for this chapter we're definitely in the wrestling ring!
Back to the madness then...
Working For The Man
In the near five week stint I had been working on commentary as the first full time female to be handed the role, I had learnt that there were both pros and cons to it and so had mentally been making myself a little list. Positive points included the receival of fan mail, including lots of letters from tiny little girls who suddenly wanted to grow up to be commentators and which honestly made the feminist in me kind of swell. Downsides were the letters from the lonely male viewers whose thoughts were often explicitly less pure and were sometimes even sent through with certain pictorial evidence that for the most part the mail room managed to get to first.
Not always though.
Ick.
Men were pretty weird creatures but on the plus side no one was following me home and so it turned out that the single biggest pitfall of my position was having front rows seats to whenever my boyfriend got beaten up and then having to try and talk my way through it.
I said boyfriend again.
Fiancé.
Damn it all.
From over in the ring there was a sudden loud clatter and I startled in my seat as my senses snapped back and perfectly in time with the packed crowd exploding and a ladder toppling over and hurling a performer from its rungs
I blinked.
Dean?
Michael Cole hastened to fill the gaps in with Jerry 'The King' Lawler not too far behind in the weirdly high pitched shriek that he ever seemed to favor and which made him sound like a housewife chasing birds from her lawn,
"Eek – ,"
"Kofi Kingston off the top rope and taking on the men outside of the ring."
Peering across the ropes and surveying the chaos was the man who had pushed the tall ladder from its feet and who was clad in a grubby and sweat stained grey wife beater and a pair of fantastically too tight blue jeans. Dean was up and evidently uninjured and that was a very good thing for me.
Jerry Lawler chuckled in amazement,
"Did you see that?"
I had been trying not to see, since the entire match seemed like a recipe for disaster to the point that I couldn't believe the thing was real. Because frankly putting more than two wrestlers in the ring together was always a pretty horrible idea and so therefore having six of them brawling with one another and with ladders no less felt like playing with fire.
I resisted the urge to hide behind my fingers.
Go Dean, go.
Evidently he heard my plea, because the next thing I knew he was hauling the ladder upright and hustling it back to the center of the ring and beneath the swinging suspended golden briefcase that they were bickering over –
I still wasn't too sure why.
Dean had grumbled something at me earlier about being able to cash the thing in for a title shot, but had then talked about having to wait for the right moment and keeping it close which had left me a little lost. In my eleventh month stint in sports entertainment, it was safe to say that I had learned a ton of stuff but watching grown men scooting up and down ladders for a garish looking briefcase reminded me of how new I still was and also of how crazy wrestling could be.
I mean really.
Michael Cole kept the commentary up,
"Dean Ambrose beginning to climb up the ladder – ,"
I held my breath as my eyes found out my man, partly because I wanted him to win it and his heavily taped fingers were so very close, but also because I hated him in peril and especially when it came to bone-shattering heights. Frankly I had almost had a total conniption when he had mounted the coffee table to put our holiday lights up and so having to watch him halfway up a twelve foot ladder was by no means my favorite way to get paid.
Blonde and black hair suddenly streaked in towards him,
"Ugh, Seth get out of the way."
I threw my hands up and then banged them on the announce desk loud enough to carry the sound through the microphones but sadly not loud enough for the turncoat to hear me since he grabbed Dean by the belt loops and pulled him back down.
"Now Seth Rollins looking to climb up the ladder –,"
"Whoa, whoa, whoa," Jerry Lawler threw in before chuckling a little at the pushing and shoving as Dean and the brother who had utterly betrayed us swapped places several times on the bottom few rungs, which then ended up with my man introducing the metal of the ladder to Seth's cranium.
I grinned a little smugly,
"Scumbag, ladder, ladder, scumbag."
Michael Cole grunted but kept forging on,
"Remember Seth Rollins wanted Ambrose in this match up, he wanted to keep an eye on his former teammate and make sure he couldn't come out of the shadows and end up costing him his title shot."
I snorted,
"Well then maybe he shouldn't go swinging chairs at people,"
Back in the ring Dean was setting the ladder up and propping it in place on the second ring of the turnbuckle in a position that already looked painful and raw. Seth was rolling on the ground like a limp fish and so Dean stalked across and quickly hauled him up, before trying to get him into position for a suplex which the younger man squirmed from,
"Oh no," Jerry cut in, "Yeah, you'd better try to block that – ,"
From beside them I looked on with my heart in my windpipe and not simply because they kept trading places but because I still wasn't used to watching them fight and couldn't help but flash back to the long hours spent together with the four of us making towns and bickering in the car.
How could that have changed so completely?
How could they be trying to kill each other now?
Dean landed the hold and flipped Seth up and over and the impact on his spine crunching into the ladder made me actually shudder in response and took away any sort of sense of satisfaction even though he had earned every second of the pain. He rolled out onto the floor writhing in agony and I huffed in response to it,
"Huh, serves him right."
"Remember," Michael Cole offered up imperiously like the people at home watching were totally brain dead or else had the recall of a carnival goldfish, "Rollins is the man who stabbed Dean in the back and brought a chair down on the head of his girlfriend – ,"
I groaned in response to him,
"Don't remind me, ugh."
Dean was continuing to scramble up the ladder like some sort of totally cute monkey up a tree and had his fingers practically on the prize a second time when Jack Swagger unwelcomingly came ploughing back in and then proceeded to hamper my boyfriend at near enough every turn.
Boyfriend?
Holy crap.
In many ways I was beginning to actively worry about my sheer inability to call him my fiancé, because I thought it meant that there was potentially something wrong with me, which I was still thinking through as Dean rolled from the ring.
"No, no, no – ,"
But he was gone from the picture and so instead I had to watch the other players flood back in and then enter themselves into the same painful cycle of nearly climbing the ladder but then being knocked back down. But only when they weren't being body slammed or suplexed and then falling face first in a pile of bruised limbs.
Ouch.
I genuinely felt for every single one of them.
Possibly even including Seth, who clambered back into the ring looking bewildered but then promptly began tangling with Rob Van Dam, who put his impressive kicking skills into action in targeted strikes to both body and head. Michael Cole continued like he was reading out crossword puzzles on a lazy afternoon picnic in the sun,
"All the superstars chosen for this match up were hand selected by COO Triple H."
Dad.
I grumbled on instinct merely thinking about it because that was the way my father's name made me feel and which hurt like hell since not three months before that, it would have warmed me to hear people talking with reverence for my old man. But then again that had been before he had drugged me and then kept me locked up for nearly a week.
Father, Dad, Triple H, Hunter –
Every last one of them felt like a bad word.
Back between the ropes Rob had planted a rolling thunder right on the ribs of a ladder prone Seth, the force of which pulled a hiss from the arena and then a series of chuckles as he slid from the ring. Predictably perhaps one of those included Michael in his usual wry timbre,
"Welcome to Money in the Bank Seth."
Dean charged back into the fray at that point and my heart lifted up about ten foot in the air, because even slicked with sweat and with his blue eyes bulging in fight mode, he was still the most impressive specimen of a man I had ever seen.
"Yay, he's back."
My happiness was short-lived though as Rob promptly send him back out onto the floor and with a kick that I hoped hadn't knocked any teeth loose since I frankly preferred my man with a smile.
"So," John Bradshaw put in suddenly, "Tell us what's it like living with the lunatic fringe."
"Huh?"
I had pretty much forgotten that he was even sitting next to me since the outspoken man had been uncharacteristically quiet and which based on the tissues sat littering the desktop was because he had been hit with a man flu bug.
In spite of that though, he was pretty insistent,
"Is he this crazy at home or – ,"
I bristled,
"No he's not, in fact he's normal and sweet and very sensible."
But my proud fiancée answer then promptly fell flat as the familiar wife beater slid back between the ring ropes and then proceeded to scamper his way up the rungs, where Seth had managed to haul his battered body to the top of the mountain.
I gaped at him,
Dean, no.
"Wait, wait, wait," Jerry barked abruptly, having devolved to where he could only call out base words and which seemed like an unfortunate trait in a commentator who went into full meltdown in times of tension or high stress.
Hold up, he was stressed?
It wasn't his partner up there evidently about to make the biggest bump of the whole night and as Dean manhandled his former brother into position, I toyed with ripping my headset clean off and then following them up there to beg him not to do it but moving too slowly because he pulled the move anyway –
"Eek."
For a second I wasn't entirely sure who had whimpered since it was pretty much a toss up between King and myself and hardly mattered as we watched in slow motion while the form of my boyfriend flew smoothly through the air and then landed with such a phenomenal impact that it flipped his body over and then thumped it back down. Seth went too but could have broken into pieces for all that I cared since I only had eyes for my man.
"Superplex from the top of the ladder, you gotta be kidding me."
Nope, no kidding.
Both men were down and apparently out or at the very least exhausted and probably befuddled since I could only assume that falling twelve feet backwards knocked the wind from the proverbial sails quite a lot.
Jerry gaped,
"Dean Ambrose must be plain nuts to do that."
"He's doing it because he's getting payback for me."
"By trying to kill himself?"
I shrugged back numbly blinking at my boyfriend who was prone in the ring but blinking at least so therefore not unconscious and in the grand scheme of things, I could get on board with that,
"Um, it's cheaper than flowers and chocolates?"
"I'm not sure the human body was designed to take this," JBL commented through a wadded up tissue as he watched several angles of never ending replay.
Who even cut the footage that quickly?
Dean somehow managed to haul himself back up and was in the process of setting the stupid ladder right a final time, when Dolph Ziggler was promptly catapulted back at him at which point the metal rungs bounced in off his forehead and succeeded in almost knocking him out.
Crap.
It was honestly one of the more brutal sort of match ups that I had ever been given the opportunity to see and yet while I was horrified and very mildly nauseous, there was also a massive part of me that simply couldn't look away and was the reason I watched mesmerized through the next haphazard segment as Jack Swagger and Rob Van Dam went at it in the ring but both of them looking completely exhausted like they barely had the strength to even hold up their heads.
Evidently the briefcase was very important –
I would have to get Dean to explain it to me again.
Dean.
I smiled a little on instinct and then subconsciously wiggled the third finger of hand, where my beautiful engagement band usually sat pretty but which I tended to take off when we were at work. Frankly the last thing that either one of us needed was the powers that be knowing we had taken the big next step, because while we didn't know precisely what would happen, we knew that being promised would have some form of clapback. Probably from my father and vicious stepmother, who I couldn't imagine wanting to see us happy at all and potentially from Randy who had made it blindingly evident that he had some weird obsession about me and him being a thing.
No way.
In fact I wasn't even sure that Vince wouldn't get in on it and try to make some weird story angle from it all and so in the end it had simply seemed easier and safer to pretend that nothing had happened to rock the boat and that Dean and I were still a regular couple –
Regular in that one of us was halfway up a ladder.
Perfectly normal.
"Come on you handsome hunk, go."
Michael Cole peered across in amusement as my nickname laden burst of encouragement fluttered loose and then coughed into his hand before picking back up the action in a way that I knew I would hear about later on.
"Ambrose and Rollins at the top of the ladder, one of these men could be mister money in the bank."
Jerry Lawler chuckled,
"Look at 'em, here they go folks."
Dean and Seth were trading punches at the top and even though I was possibly biased, it was clear that my man had the upper hand all sewn up as he rained down a mixture of slaps and roundhouse body blows in the hopes of knocking his former brother off and each one of which got him closer to that moment and therefore potential victory –
Jack freaking Swagger messed it up.
"Oh for the love of all things good and holy," I yelled into the microphone as the big wrestler hauled Dean back but then swiftly morphed it into a cheer of elation as my boyfriend countered it beautifully with a top rung DDT.
Nope.
Fiancé.
Because that was my future husband from his crazy sweaty hair to his chiselled but sticky abs and particularly the sweet little ass tucked so neatly into the specially made and scandalous jeans which emphasized that tiny, ridiculous little waist of his but also his pretty impressively sized thighs.
"Looks like Dean Ambrose might have hurt his shoulder."
Huh?
I snapped out of my trance and looked at my man including the way he was shuffling about and the arm that he was keeping in close to his middle like moving it in any way was proving too much.
"Oh no," I whispered brokenly, "Baby."
Luckily we weren't the only people to have seen the rub, because suddenly both the referee and ringside physician were bent in over him and fighting a losing battle to make him sit still. Dean was like a child who was waiting at the dentist for his bi-yearly check-up at the very best of times and so the fact they thought they could make him see reason in the middle of a match was an optimistic thing and particularly considering the match was for a title shot and also included the man he hated most in the world.
I could hear him bellowing from where I was sitting,
"Pull me back in, pull me back in."
Hands were rolling him out off onto the apron but my poor battered man was fighting them with all he had and frankly short of them physically sedating him like some sort of wild animal, I knew in a heartbeat they would fail.
But what if he needed real medical attention?
I had my headphones off and onto the table pretty much before I could blink and found myself rounding the ring like a racehorse in a fully instinctive need to get to him fast and all the while watching more crew members pour inwards until six authority figures were trying their best to hold Dean back. I sped up my pace but it wasn't that easy considering the matting was littered with broken forms and about thirteen more ladders than I figured were necessary since one of the damn things alone could do plenty damage enough.
"Dean – ," I called out to him as I rounded the corner and then vaulted a body to plough through the bank of shirts and in the process managing to knock them off like skittles as I buried myself with force into the chest of my man,
"Princess?"
In return he seemed a little baffled, like he couldn't figure out why I was suddenly even there, but his shoulders dropped back ever so slightly as I wrapped my arms around him to stop him from hurting himself more.
"Please let them look at you,"
"Can't fuckin' let him win it, he's not gonna win this – ,"
I assumed he meant Seth and so rose onto my tiptoes and did the one thing I could think of, irrespective of the cameramen following us around. I kissed him. Not hard or passionate or lustful but hard enough at least to take him out of himself and he responded by ghosting his hands across my lower back like he wasn't sure whether to hold me or try to push off the embrace.
His lips mumbled against mime,
"What are you – ,"
"Please Dean," I interrupted him pleadingly as I finally stepped back, "Let them look at you."
"Fine."
He waved his hands at me and then turned and stalked up the rampway so fast that I was actually forced to physically trot since there was no way in hell I was letting his ass get checked over without my being there to help temper his mood.
Rounding into gorilla however I froze on instinct.
Crap.
Because all of them were right there –
From Stephanie huddled in a chair in the corner where the monitors were set up for the powers that be to watch, to Hunter standing by the hallway with Randy and talking in whispered tones that then hushed fully up as Dean and I skittered back into the fold of things looking sweaty and stressed and hugely obvious at once. My boyfriend however seemed not to even see them, since his mind and his general focus was on Seth.
"Scum suckin' weasel with his stupid fuckin' blond streak like some crazy ass badger. He likes hittin' his friends with chairs, huh? Bury one right into his ass, see how he likes that – ,"
I kept myself pressed up tight against him anyway and then stayed there while one of the hesitant looking medics stepped in and began to gently probe around at his shoulder while firing out questions that were resolutely ignored,
"Does this hurt?"
In all honesty they could have taken a bat to him and my boyfriend would have simply kept on blinking through the pain since he was pretty much like an intractable bloodhound having picked up the scent of the perpetrator of some crime.
"How about if I press here?"
"Dean?" I prodded gently, but his blue eyes were looking past me to a point on a monitor screen that had been suspended on the wall ridiculously loftily and therefore gave everyone milling around in the backstage area a nearly perfect view of Seth back in the ring and climbing the metal steps of the ladder unchallenged with the crazy golden briefcase a mere hairs breath from his hand.
Uh oh.
Dean was back on the move in a second, in a heady blitz past the medic which tore him clean from my arms,
"Wait – ," I yelped before hearing a snigger and the sound of it filled me pretty instantly with dread. Peering back across my shoulder revealed my stepmother, sitting back with her legs crossed over and beaming up a storm since it obviously looked like I couldn't control my boyfriend and was precisely the situation they had forewarned me about.
Fiancé.
Ugh.
I turned and headed back after him in spite of the fact I was miles too far behind, because running had never particularly been my forte when it came to pursuits of the athletic kind and so therefore by the time I made it out onto the ramping and halfway to the ring, Dean was already inside and hauling Seth back off the ladder by his boot sole as the crowd blew up and predictably went wild.
"Ouch, stitch."
I got to the ring steps in a painful limping shamble as Dean picked up a chair and then proceeded to hammer it into his former brother as the younger man burst and then began to writhe with pain.
Um –
I honestly wasn't sure whether to somehow try to stop it or let it go on for about a year more, since part of me would always hate seeing Seth hurting, while a far larger part than I generally approved of loved every bit of the thing and more, since him getting payback was actually pretty beautiful and likely mean that I had turned into a sadist or something now. Dean continued to beat the living crap out of him until his banged up shoulder couldn't take anymore and then collapsed in a heap against the ropes holding his elbow, before gathering the strength to toss Seth to the floor.
Smack.
I peeked a little apprehensively around the ring steps and then stood watching the person that I used to know so well as he flopped like a lead weight onto the matting before turning in my direction and blinking at me a few times more. Presumably he had no clue why I was at ringside when I probably should have been sat at the announce table with my headphones on, but in the moment I actually liked being back out there in the action and cheering on my man.
Because boy was I cheering,
"Keep going, you're so close, another couple of steps and you've got it – ,"
I was aware that I sounded a lot like a mom, trying to get her baby to toddle across the room to her, but in the moment I figured that nobody would care, besides which it actually seemed to be kind of working since Dean was hauling himself up the ladder towards the hanging prize.
Red lights, fireworks and music then kicked in.
Huh?
For a second the effect was so utterly blinding that I assumed he had grabbed the briefcase and managed to pull it loose and that the sudden explosions were victory pyrotechnics, which seemed a pretty kooky colored hue to go with but then again we worked in a kooky kind of place and so I kept on believing that my man had won the contest right up until the moment somebody shoved me from behind,
"Oof – ,"
I felt myself careening forward hard and clumsily then nearly struck the ring steps but luckily missed them by an inch and instead hit my knees and then sat blinking at the matting, feeling totally bewildered because who had hit me? Frowning up gave me some form of answer since standing freakishly tall at the foot of the ladder and pulling Dean back was an entirely red-clad man, with a mask across his face and long hair slapping across it that I recognized at once and then gaped at fully,
"Kane?"
How and why the hell was he out there?
Maybe he wanted the title opportunity for himself?
It certainly seemed plausible, since he was no longer a main attraction and so was unlikely to be handed a shot any other way and so to my addled mind therefore that had to be the reason that he was tussling in a match he wasn't meant to be in, because he certainly had no other problem with my boyfriend. I mean maybe a couple of months ago sure, back when Kane and The Shield boys had been feuding, but since then Kane had helped them to rescue me from captivity and so I figured we had reached an uneasy truce of sorts right?
Dean flew upwards and then the mat heavily as a chokeslam knocked the wind from him.
"No – ," I wailed,
Maybe not.
But the worst of the sudden and unwarranted intervention was evidently still yet to come, because as I looked on in absolute horror, my boyfriend was pulled upright and then flipped upside down for the worst move of them all and the one that even I knew sent shockwaves through a match up any time the it was pulled out. Instantly I pushed myself up onto my feet again but was far too late to be able to help and so instead I had to watch as Dean was thumped back earthwards in a tombstone piledriver that focused entirely on his head.
"Oh god – ,"
I stumbled back feeling hugely nauseous and shaky, like my world had been turned completely upside down, then surged instinctively towards my fallen fiancé before being held back by unfamiliar hands,
"Whoa."
It was one of the earlier security people that had tried and failed to get Dean to the back but clearly had not led the encounter dim his enthusiasm since he flatly refused to let me take another step,
"Please," I whimpered, struggling against him, "He's not moving."
"Neither will you be if I let you up there."
Back in the ring Kane was holding the ladder and making sure it was stable as Seth scrambled up, looking as bewildered as the rest of us were feeling although the realization was obvious enough. My asshole of a father had intervened in the outcome to make sure that Dean hadn't picked up the big win and the thought of it made me struggle for freedom even harder and then cry hot angry tears as I had to watch the victory dance and then wait another long agonizing minute for the man that I had once thought of as my beloved older brother to strut his smug way right back up the ramp.
"Let go,"
I shucked myself roughly from the fingers and then blitzed across the matting to clamber back into the ring, crawling as I snivelled towards my fallen partner who was blinking towards the ceiling like he had no idea who he was, "Dean?"
Blue eyes fell lazily towards me and he frowned a little,
"Did – did I win?"
My heart broke into a million tiny pieces and I shook my head sadly as I reached out a hand, carding it through his sweaty copper scruff lovingly and trying not to let on how worried I was and how much his total confusion made my body ache,
"No, I'm so sorry,"
"Nuh, fuck."
Dean spoke thickly then shut his eyes sluggishly and rolled into my side as I sat and fought the tears back but then carried on stroking him while whispering soothing words out,
"Sssh, I love you, it's alright."
Aww, poor Dean but on the plus side him being concussed hopefully makes for a very sweet and cute next chapter...I'll see you there!
