Kings of Capitalism
From the stands, fans waving Georgia state flags sent a roar of cheers our way.
And it wasn't just them.
The people of Georgia—that is to say, the vast majority of everyone in this arena—were cheering for us.
The "hometown heat" strategy had worked like a charm.
I'd delivered a polished ring segment built around the map of Georgia engraved on the championship belt, playing straight into the fierce pride Americans take in their country and their home states.
The so-called "hometown champion" gambit.
It was a trick used constantly back in the eighties, and here it was, coming full circle to serve as seasoning for our era.
The crowd's reaction was fantastic.
"Georgia! Georgia! Georgia! Georgia! Georgia! Georgia!"
A sea of machos, proudly declaring their love for the state of Georgia. Your classic redneck crowd, in other words.
These are the same guys who were cursing me out not that long ago.
They were such a small sliver of GCW's audience that it never made much noise, but the racism from these rednecks had been anything but mild. When an outsider suddenly showed up—an outsider from the East, no less—every last one of them had eyed me with open suspicion. They'd never quite worked up the nerve to jump a guy pushing six-foot-three, though, so it had stayed at the level of jeers and boos.
Now those same men were cheering for a Canadian and an Asian guy (I'm American, for the record).
Well, apparently I've been adopted as an honorary Georgian.
With that thought, I climbed into the ring, grabbed the mic, and shouted.
"Georgia! Are you ready?!"
The crowd roared back.
Corny? Sure. Who cares.
As long as they were having fun, that was all that mattered.
"The women are beautiful. The cars are beautiful. You gentlemen out there—it's true you drive the finest trucks in the world, isn't it?"
The flag-waving rednecks went wild. They chugged their beer, slapped their hairy bellies, and chanted my name over and over. I pointed at the map etched into the title plate, feeding off their energy, and they fed it right back.
And then, the next moment—the entrance music of the tag team coming out after us filled the arena.
Only to be completely buried under the wave of boos that followed.
"Boooooooooooooooooo!!!"
Dun—da-da-dun!!
Comically enough, the team trotting out behind us belonged to 'Adam', who had joined GCW's roster only recently.
Yes, that Adam.
The Adam who betrayed me in my past life—and who, this time around, got betrayed instead.
He came out waving a Canadian flag alongside his teammate, the man who'd passed tryouts in the same class as him. His name was Cri... what was it again? Criring, I think.
The fans clutching their Georgia flags booed at the top of their lungs.
Adam was Canadian. So was Criring, supposedly.
Which meant they were precisely the kind of people Americans loved to sneer at.
...In fairness, Russell is Canadian too. But in their hearts he's a Georgia boy, so apparently that made it okay.
Up on the ring, Adam shot me a glare absolutely brimming with personal hatred.
I smirked.
The match was over in a minute.
After the match.
"Hey! Jun, you little bastard!!"
Adam came storming toward me, his glossy blond hair flying.
I'd been changing my clothes in the locker room, where I was—momentarily—alone, and I looked up at him with a puzzled expression.
Huh. How he even got signed here was kind of funny—a scout had apparently stumbled across him and picked him up on a whim. But the guy who'd been rampaging around like Napoleon on the outside was, in this company, nothing more than a rookie. A jobber.
"Oh, hey, Adam."
"You son of a bitch! I told you to hand the initiative over ONCE, and you just ignore me?!"
"If I had, the crowd reaction would've died on the spot. And besides—what makes you think I'd hand the initiative to a scrub like you?"
I still hadn't forgotten what that man had done to me in my past life—the sandwich laced with laxatives. It had been fear of my talent, nothing more. And now I was in a position to pay it all back, with interest.
He was still a rookie. Still a jobber.
Me? I was the pretty little ace carrying the company's entire box office. There was no comparison.
But Adam, still living in the reality of nine months ago, kept fuming.
"Hey, are you seriously gonna do this?!"
He grabbed me by the collar.
I rose to my feet before I knew what was happening and stared at him, genuinely startled.
"If you're the one who 'luckily' got here first, then the decent thing is to push ME! That's how it works!"
"Uh... Adam?"
"What, now that I'm angry you finally feel the situation? Huh? What do you think's gonna happen to you if you keep this up?!"
"No, I mean..."
"Listen. If you wanna live, speak up. Tell the guys upstairs to start pushing me. Got it?"
If this is what backstage politics in pro wrestling looks like, it's a remarkably petty little world.
After mulling that over for a second, I pointed past Adam's shoulder.
He turned around—and froze solid.
Remember, I said I was momentarily alone.
The seniors who shared this locker room had all heard me mutter, purely by accident, "Hmm, my leg's acting up a bit," and had all gone off together to fetch pain-relief patches.
And now they were back.
The seniors who'd just pushed through the door stood there in silence, watching the two of us with expressions of pure disbelief.
Sheamus's face had flushed a deep, furious red. That was the color of a man whose blood was up.
Wyatt said nothing, but he looked about one twitch away from hurling the lantern clutched in his hand.
And Bobby flexed his muscles—and for the life of me I couldn't tell you why Sin decided to join in with a flexing battle of his own.
Last of all, Baku.
"...Bobby."
He clapped a hand on Bobby's shoulder.
"We're clearing the room. Five minutes. Make absolutely certain that punk learns who the king of this locker room is."
Surely you don't mean yourself, right, Baku?
"You got it, Baku."
Bobby nodded, and the seniors filed inside. I braced myself, afraid actual violence might break out—
"KUHEEEAGH!!"
Crack! SLAM!
Praying a quick word for Adam's soul as the beating commenced, I slid discreetly off to the side.
"You little punk! Where do you think you're going with our treasure?!"
"Die! DIE!! Huh?! Not dying?!"
"Hey! Hey! Are you blocking?! Block it and I break your wrist! Don't block it and I break your ribs!"
"GYAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!"
Adam's screams echoed on.
I gave him a moment of silence.
A few days after Adam died (probably), Russell and I were summoned to the office, where Baku delivered the news.
"Everyone's reached the same conclusion."
"Everyone being...?"
"Harley, me. The team leads."
"What's the conclusion?"
"We're taking your tag team as far as it'll go. All the way to the top. As champions."
"Well, that's good news."
Russell broke into a smile.
Baku, holding a perfectly intact walnut—one walnut—between his fingers, casually cracked it open.
...I'm fairly certain no human being on earth besides Baku can do that.
"You got any idea why, Sin?"
"...Uh. Something about your freakishly monster-strength fingers getting passed down to us?"
"What?"
"N-nothing. Nothing at all."
Incredible strength, that man. A few days ago, even Baku got worked up—if Adam's walnut had been in that grip, it would've ended exactly like this one.
After a brief moment of staring at him slack-jawed, I grinned and gave my answer.
"T-shirt sales are through the roof."
"THAT'S IT!!"
Baku shot up out of his chair and bellowed.
"You two are printing money! You're sitting GCW down on a gold cushion! You are, without exaggeration, the greatest in the history of—!"
"Any idea why that is?"
"Huh?"
"Why do you think?"
At my counter-question, Baku fell silent for a moment.
"...People bought a lot of them?"
"Why did they buy a lot of them?"
"Because..."
"The fanbase grew?"
"Exactly that."
Russell's answer, delivered more like a question than a statement, and I nodded.
It was a simple reason. The duo of Russell and me was steadily pulling in brand-new fans. Which meant, in other words, that my Georgia hometown-hype segment had landed.
Statistics for 2013 didn't exist yet, so I couldn't be certain—but I'd have bet good money it was the rednecks doing the buying.
"They'll be wearing 'em out on the farm, I reckon."
"Hoo. Now that you mention it, there have been an awful lot of deep, gravelly voices in your cheering sections lately."
"An Asian guy and a Canadian being this popular? That's a rarity, isn't it?"
"Wouldn't doubt it."
Baku nodded along.
Either way, I had a decent grasp of what the company was getting at.
"So our next feud will be with Adam and... Criring, was it?"
"...It's Chris."
"Well, if we're free to run the feud however we like, I do happen to have an idea that could pull in even more fans."
"Oho! What is it!"
"What is it, Sin?"
The two of them, who knew exactly what I was capable of by now, leaned in eagerly.
But I couldn't bring myself to say it right away, and my mouth stayed shut for a moment.
The truth was, I'd gotten the idea at the hospital last time, when a young girl fan had screamed, "Please, you two, just get married!"
...I know it's all for the money, but do we really have to go this far?
And yet, as a professional wrestler, proving your marketability in this particular arena was, admittedly, its own strange honor.
"What is it, Sin?"
Though honestly, with the opponent being Russell of all people, I had a feeling it would feel even worse.
"...Russell."
"Yeah?"
"You're not a homo, are you?"
"I am homo. So are you."
"...?"
"We're all Homo sapiens, buddy."
This homo of a guy...
And so, inevitably, my cursed idea got approved.
Strangely enough, this time the female writers understood it the instant they heard it and started scripting immediately. They spent three days and nights hashing it out, arrived at their conclusion, and brought it to us.
And what was this script, you ask?
Bromance.
"Russell!"
...No. Seriously.
Short for brother romance, or whatever. In any case, there was, in fact, demand for that genre in our industry too.
In the future, to be fair, there would be an entire fanbase of women dedicated to consuming two handsome wrestlers packaged together as a tag called Ambrollins.
And fortunately, Russell and I were both decent-looking.
We weren't bulking masses of muscle to the point of putting women off—we were big in the right proportions, and by wrestler standards, our leaner builds actually resembled the male ideal those female fans were after.
I cradled the fallen Russell in my arms, breathing hard and ragged.
The women in the audience screamed their lungs out—GYAAAAAH!
If making those ladies happy meant making money, I was willing to do just about anything. But even so, I won't lie—this one did rub me the wrong way.
The story went roughly like this:
One. In a backstage promo before the match, Russell and I declare we'd be willing to take the hits for each other.
Two. Two members of the Wyatt Family, our opponents that night, snatch the victory from us by cowardly means.
Three. Russell takes the chair shot meant for me, and I scoop him into my arms, showcasing a friendship that is ever so slightly... clingy.
...Is it really okay to run a script this transparent?
The writers had given us lines beforehand along the lines of "Without you, I'd die," or "Do you want to watch me lose my mind?"
Seriously, is this going to be all right?!
...It turned out to be fine. Better than fine.
I could feel the crowd's reaction. Like Hamlet in the ring, I swept Russell's long hair back from his brow—and the female fans went completely, rapturously insane.
Oh, and for the record? The male fans all wore the same expression: "What in the hell is this supposed to be?"
Which brings me to one crucial point.
Joan A. Hudson, the female writer who scripted our storyline, made sure to flag it for us:
"You must exit the moment the male fans start feeling like they're watching gay porn."
Roughly understood.
In other words: touching Russell's chest is fine, but I should probably refrain from putting my fingers on his nipple and twirling them in little circles.
With that wisdom in mind, I carried Russell out of the ring in my arms.
The women's cheers were thunderous.
But Russell and I were both fighting for our lives, suppressing the sheer revulsion we felt toward each other.
And a few days later.
Our footage was edited and uploaded to the internet, and it seems to have found its way into the hearts of certain folks who lurk in the darker corners of the web.
T-shirt sales quadrupled.
The moment he found out, Baku took the phone book he'd been flipping through mere seconds earlier and ripped it clean in half, lengthwise, bellowing all the while.
"DAMMIT! I believed in you! Sin, Sell! You two are the Kings of Capitalism! You're SHINING right now! GODDAMMIT!!"
"......"
"......"
But between Russell and me flowed an unbearable, delicate tension—something uncomfortable, the sense that the moment either of us crossed the line, things would get very, very awkward.
Even so, it made money.
And there were plenty of people who loved it.
For example:
"I've scripted a full month of storylines."
"Report to the higher-ups immediately!"
There were the female writers, for one, who had begun watching the two of us with warm, dreamy eyes.
God damn it.
But this was business.
When you're a product, you naturally have to be prepared to lose something.
For example...
Yourself?