Yes. It was years ago, you remember; when you were just starting to take the world by storm. When “The New Life” was more than just a nickname. Back then, it was hope: to wrestling fans, to a company, to people who hadn’t yet learned Jonathan Rhine was just one of the guys.
And back then, he was two of the guys. There was a schism that existed, and you would look at the mirror every morning and wonder exactly which Jonathan Rhine was staring back.
But this is an entirely different situation.
Back then it was the good Rhine vs. the bad Rhine. The Rhine would walked into the ring, said all the right things, and made the fans cheer; or the Rhine who lacked happiness with his normal civilian life and had to look in another woman’s bedroom to find it.
Now, though, it’s the good you vs. the defeated you.
You still go to shows, and participate in tournaments, and while it would be untrue to say you were giving your best effort, you certainly weren’t mailing it in. Maybe some of that shined through in your non-effort against Kennedy. For the most part, though, when the cameras are rolling, you’re the same Rhine that has always been there.
When they stop, though, is when the new Jonathan Rhine appears. And he isn’t the one that fights for what’s right.
He’s the one who really doesn’t do anything at all.
Unlike the last time, however, you aren’t deceiving anyone. It’s painfully obvious to the people that care for you, and it’s also obvious the reason for the division.
But that doesn’t mean they’re just going to let you waste your life away.
Jonathan Rhine is pretending to sleep.
The only reason he’s pretending, of course, is because he can’t, and he would like nothing more than be able to. Sleep isn’t a particularly attainable commodity recently, and as he lay in his hotel room, his eyes remain blank and blink rarely. It could be interpreted that his mind is similarly blank, but that would be a faulty interpretation.
The door quickly opens, and Jonathan Rhine pretends to sleep for a different reason. His eyes close as his co-manager, the spindly Shweta Kallemullah, slips through the door.
“Rise and shine, Jon! Inquisition time!” Her voice is cheery, and a bit of it reminds Jon of the person she used to be; how she used to delight in causing misery, and her voice would always reflect such delight. He closes his eyes tighter and remains still.
“No, really,” she says, thumping her hand on the bed. “I kind of want answers. I’m sure Foster would want them too.” Jon tries not to react, but he can’t stop a sigh from escaping. Shweta takes that as fuel and moves onward. “He’d probably ask the same questions as well. That is if, you know, he weren’t all catatonic in the hospital right now.”
Eyes still shut, Jon grabs a pillow and puts it on his head. Seeing this, Shweta clucks her tongue and grabs the pillow forcefully. “You do remember that, don’t you?” she asks, tossing the pillow on the far side of the room. “I think you would. Seeing as you were sitting there at ringside and didn’t lift a finger.
“I get that I’m the brains, and you’re the muscle, and all of that stuff I told you in the e-mail initially is all true. But that doesn’t mean, Jon…” she sits on the edge of the bed, speaking louder as she gets closer and closer to Rhine’s head. “…that you have to wait for me to tell you what to do in every case. I’d assume that it would come naturally to defend your best friend.”
Jon instinctively puts a hand up to defend his ears, but Shweta is once again too fast for him. She pries the hand away and speaks in her ear again, this time louder: “Foster is valuable to our cause. I demand a reason for why you did what you did. This isn’t from a friend, or the friend of a friend: this is from your business partner. What you did was bad for business. And I’m not going to let you lay there and use your dead girlfriend as an excuse while you whittle your career away to—”
Shweta stops because at the word “girlfriend,” Jonathan Rhine snapped up from bed and fixed Shweta with a stare, a move that sent her up from the bed and three steps towards the door. She has only seen this stare twice, and once it was directed at her: when she was in Ottawa at Rhine’s last match of his first SCCW tenure. He had found out she was a Strand in Desade’s web, and he looked at her with the same look then.
Now, like then, she wilts. “Jon, I…I shouldn’t have said…I’m sorry. That was unprofessional. Please forgive me.”
The stare lingers on for a second before Jon slumps back into bed, closing his eyes once more. And as quickly as her ire expired, it has returned, although slightly reserved. “Fine, Jon. Intimidate me. Put off dealing with this. You’ll have to eventually. You can’t hide here forever.”
He doesn’t respond again, and she sighs. Sitting down, she puts her hand on Jon’s exposed calf and squeezes lightly. “You have to fight back eventually. And this week…this week is the perfect opportunity. You might get a chance to face Kennedy, and even if not you can show you still deserve to be at the top of the fed. This is your chance to rebound, Jon. Can you do that for me?”
Again, no answer. Shweta squeezes his calf one more time, stands up, and shakes her head. “I guess not. I sure hope that the same Jon Rhine who blazed a path through GTT and took down any and all challengers from earlier this year is back. Because this Jon Rhine here? I don’t think he could beat anybody. Not when he gives up like this.”
She walks towards the door and opens it, but turns around before leaving. “By the way, Jon. I don’t know if you noticed, but the show is in Ottawa. Location sound familiar?”
As she shuts the door, Jon’s eyes snap open.
What you remember most about Ottawa, oddly enough, were the cheers.
It’s sort of silly to think about now. Your entire life had crumbled down. You were stunned by the fresh sting of betrayal at Shweta’s hands, at Charlotte’s hands. And you had just watched everything you put every ounce of energy into fade away into nothing.
But when you think back to those memories, one stands above the rest. And it isn’t the way Jason Meyers mumbled the decision, or how Dave Gibson slammed his headphones down in disgust. It isn’t Katie’s face, a mixture of pity and relief.
It’s the crowd.
“THANK YOU JON! THANK YOU JON!”
You watched the scene unfold slowly, slower than anything you’d ever experienced. But even as slow as it happened, the transition is always impossible to spot. How that one moment changed from something as empty and disheartening as the end of an era to one of the most rewarding experiences you’ve ever had. You still have no idea how it happened or when it happened, but it did.
You remember those chants, and you can’t help but smile.
“THANK YOU JON! THANK YOU JON!”
Maybe it’s because your forced sabbatical from SCCW was overruled. Maybe it’s because you were able to put your life back together. And maybe it’s because you’re the kind of twisted megalomaniac who just likes to hear people chant your name. It might be all of those things.
But somehow, you can’t think back on Ottawa as a dark cloud without thinking of the silver lining of those pervasive, extended chants. The only time you’ve ever seen every single person in an entire arena stand up and accept you into their hearts.
Even if you were still looking for revenge, Ottawa would hold significance. But now it holds even more significance to you: you want to fight in front of these people not because a terrible thing happened to you there, but because these fans gave you their unyielding support. You want to fight in front of them to show them thanks, to show them you haven’t forgotten, and to make sure they aren’t let down this time.
Can’t do that from a hotel bed.
Five minutes after Shweta left, Jon has his workout clothes on and is getting ready to get to work. Something isn’t ready to let him, however.
“So she just says one word and you jump out of bed like it was on fire. I wish I had the same sort of success with you.”
Jon sighs and turns around, knowing exactly who he will see. Still, the sight of his deceased girlfriend standing in front of him brings a snarl to his face. “No.”
“You’re denying the fact that you snap to her command after ignoring me for the better part of two
years?” Katie Malick asks, scowling.
“I’m saying, ‘No,’ as in, ‘No, you aren’t real,’ ‘No, we aren’t doing this every time I get a second of free time,’ ‘No, I refuse to fight with myself over trivial details of my relationship.’ No to all of it.” Jon walks into the bathroom, shutting the door.
Naturally, Katie is on the other side of the door, and her scowl has become a smirk. “Well if it’s all in your head, just stop it. Stop thinking of me. Stop bringing me here all the time. And stop feeling so guilty about bracing at the touch of some other woman.” Jon suddenly looks down, and Katie continues. “Or did I imagine that rigor mortis your body went through as soon as her palm touched your flesh?”
“You must have,” he grunts, looking under the sink and sighing. He leaves the bathroom and begins looking under the bed, under the desk, and in the closet. After a second, he throws his arms up in the air out of frustration.
'Where the hell is my gym bag?' He sighs, then looks over at Katie, who busts into a fit of giggles.
'Please tell me you aren't accusing me of stealing your bag. I'm really like to know how that's possible.'
'And simultaneously talking to me and being eaten by worms is completely logical?' he asks, shooting her a stern look.
Katie's expression softens and she steps towards him, extending her arms. Jon tries to shy away, but he eventually backs into the wall, and Katie nestles close to him. Shivering, he mutters, 'I'm sorry.'
'I know it's tough,' she says. 'And I know you're trying to get out there to distract yourself. I can't imagine how much pain you're in. I'm just trying to get you to think for once. All of this running away from your grief won't do you any good.'
Jon nods, looking down at her hair. He thinks about after long days, when Katie would lie down next to him in bed and he would run his fingers through her hair. She would purr like a cat and say, 'My mom always told me that I would marry a man who ran his fingers through my hair.'
A single tear runs down his face, but then he shakes his head. 'Thanks for the advice, but I actually have been thinking. And I'm not working out to distract myself.'
'No?'
'No.' He gently moves her away, then begins to walk past her. 'I'm working out because I have thought too much. I've let my thoughts dominate me to the point where I haven't been acting. I turned down a match, something I've never done.'
Katie rolls her eyes. 'Don't talk about wres...' she starts, but Jon isn't listening.
'I watched my best friend get destroyed by someone who should have deserved my ire before, and if not definitely does now. And I felt nothing. No desire for revenge, no anger, not even a shred of sympathy for my friend, or guilt for what I subjected him to. I've stopped feeling anything because I've been thinking too much about how hurt I am.'
Jon takes a few steps towards the door, then turns around. 'Until now. I refuse to put my thoughts over my actions anymore. I am going to go and work out, and concentrate on my match, and try to win this title opportunity. And I'm going to do what I'm supposed to, not sit in my room crying. Because I can't just avoid human emotion and lay in a hotel bed just because it's my only opportunity to see you...in whatever capacity.' Katie doesn't respond, looking down instead. 'I love you, Katie. You were everything to me, even if I didn't know it. And now that you're gone, there is a hole inside my heart that I will never be able to fill. But eventually I have to patch it up, or try. So I'm going to exit this hotel, and I'm going to live my life, and if I don't see you anymore, even in this accusatory, fucked up way, part of me will die along with you...but it will be necessary. Because I will be living.'
Walking back to the door, he sees his gym bag lying right next to the door and sighs. 'Goodbye, Katie,' he says, then grabs the door and slams it.
Your mind is a rather silly thing.
You’ve never doubted for a moment that seeing Katie every time you’re alone is a psychological thing. You don’t believe in ghosts, and you aren’t in denial.
Katie’s dead and you’re fucked up. Simple as that.
But even as you dismissed the accusations she (or you) threw at you, you knew they must have had some merit. Because at the end of the day, you weren’t talking with Katie. You were talking with yourself. And any reactions to your interactions with Shweta are coming from your own mind, which means there might be something there.
Whatever it is is irrelevant. So are the outside factors: that she worked for Desade once, that she was with Foster once, that your girlfriend is still fresh in the ground. All of these things don’t matter at all.
What matters is you felt something. And that’s more than you felt since Katie died.
So you walk outside and call Shweta, and you begin to plan. How to get back at Kennedy, how to refocus the efforts of the Soldiers, and how to get yourself back to where you need to be. And by the time you first hit the ropes in the gym, you feel something else.
You feel young.
It’s small, and it hasn’t completely conquered the feelings of depression that have plagued you for the past month. But in some small way you feel energized, ready to take on the world. You no longer feel like an old man burdened with depression or indecision. You’re a rookie again, eager to take the world by storm.
For one moment, you feel like the Jonathan Rhine you used to be. One person. Just a man and a wrestler.
And in that moment, you are ready for anything.