Disclaimer: I don't own the Hardys. They belong to themselves and to the WWE. The kids and Sindel are mine, along with all the other crazy people I pop in here!
Well… If he can trust me, I can trust him.
I looked down at Raymond.
"I am going to be frank with you," I told him. "Jeff's lucky to have you for a brother… I was not near as kind nor restrained as you."
I had his attention now.
"I was jealous of my older brother, a jealousy that gave way to hate in short order," I began. "He, like your brother, was well-liked by everyone and… he had a fiancé."
My voice grew cold.
"How I loathed her. True, she'd done nothing to me, but she was a symbol of my brother's triumphs. I did everything within my power to break them up, everything that would go undetected. I didn't want any fingers pointing at me. I wanted him to feel the stain of betrayal. I wanted to hurt him, to show everyone that he wasn't so perfect."
Then my voice turned to shame.
"Finally, I reached the breaking point. I did a most dishonorable thing… I paid a street-whore to mess with my drunken brother. She did a lot more than I had intended. She unearthed quite the well-hidden history of the fiancé. Turned out that the whore I hired once worked along-side the fiancé. She had a rap-sheet longer than Ted Bundy by age ten. It more than tripled by the time she turned twenty…"
I paused and closed my eyes in self-loathing, which came out in my voice.
"I had… in my hand… all the information I needed to break them up, to end my brother's lucky streak. I could have ended it right there… but I didn't. I wanted him to suffer. She had quite the history of scamming men out of their money through marriage. My brother would be her thirteenth…"
I couldn't look at neither Matt nor Ray.
"I let her go through with the wedding, knowing well what would happen. Sure enough, three weeks after the marriage, they were divorced and my brother was left a penniless, broken man. He moved back home and cried on my shoulder frequently, saying that if he had only listened to me, that would have never happened. I said nothing, but, after a while, what I had done began to eat at me…"
Tears began to make their way down my face.
"I told him what I'd done… I didn't blame him at all for storming out, calling me the biggest traitor alive. We didn't see one another again until four years later when he took a bullet that was meant for me. He died in vain. The men still got me. My entire stay in the ICU consisted of kicking myself for what I'd done, and talking to my best friend, Tiburone."
I wiped my tears and sighed.
"Had I known Tiburone was an upper-level Mala Noché, I wouldn't have told him anything. I made the mistake of complaining about her, saying she started all this, and, the next thing I know, her age-old scams are revealed on the evening news. I learned that a bomb had been planted within her body and that she had been in the center of the Super Bowl Stadium during half-time when the bomb detonated. She was blown to pieces in front of thousands of people. Once the smoke cleared, all of the screens around the Stadium read:
DON'T MESS WITH VIPER OR YOU MESS WITH US
MALA NOCHÉ
"Viper was Tiburone's nickname for me so that cleared up any ideas I had about not being responsible for this crime, even in part. Needless to say, I'm more careful about what I say around Tiburone."
Silence fell and I let Ray pull my hair for a while, up until he tried to put it in his mouth. When denied my hair, he put Matt's old shirt in his mouth instead.
"Wow," Matt said finally, giving a low whistle. "Just so I'm clear, you still talk to this… Tiburone… and haven't turned him in?"
"Yes," I answered, still not looking at him. Truth be told, I was afraid of what I'd see. He was silent for a while.
"Would you ever consider doing it again?" he asked slowly. I shook my head.
"No," I answered. "I could never bring such pain on someone again."
After a few seconds, I got quite the shock at Matt pulled me into a hug. After I recovered, I hugged him back.
"Thank you for trusting me," he said softly. I smiled and buried my head in his chest, letting a few tears fall.
"You're really easy to trust and talk to," I told him.