Willie's Wish
Willie had only just turned six, yet he was unbelievably small and thin for his age.
Even so, he was bursting with energy.
Wearing his knitted yarn beanie, Willie stepped into the locker room and looked up at the hulking wrestlers with wide, wonder-filled eyes.
"Whoa……!"
"Hm?"
Bobby Ashley, dressed in a tank top that showed off every line of muscle, spotted Willie and broke into a grin, extending his hand.
"Bobby Ashley."
"W-Willie."
Bobby's finger vanished entirely inside the boy's small hand. Smiling warmly, he shook it all the same.
"Do you think I could get that big someday?"
"Of course you will. You're gonna get way bigger than me."
At that, Sheamus and the other wrestlers who had drifted over offered their greetings as well, one after another.
Everyone treated Willie with gentle warmth. They made their living in the rough-and-tumble world of pro wrestling, but they all held to one unshakable belief: be kind to children.
At the very least, every wrestler in GCW lived by it. I counted myself lucky to work alongside people like them.
……Though Wyatt, fully lost in his character, had given poor Willie a bit of a scare.
Thankfully, Russell stepped in to smooth things over, and the two managed a proper greeting in the end.
So as we gave Willie the grand tour of GCW, Sina approached us.
Dressed in his ring-crew coveralls, he spoke with a face full of agonized doubt.
"Hey, Sin?"
"Yeah?"
"Is it okay that we told Willie pro wrestling is 'fake'?"
"……Ah, hm."
It hadn't even crossed my mind.
Willie almost certainly believed pro wrestling was 'real.' And in that context, Wyatt — a heel — had broken kayfabe just to greet him.
He'd caught me completely off guard.
Truly befitting a future Icon.
"Uh, what if we say that everyone becomes friends once the match is over……?"
"Hmm. You think a lazy bit of retconning like that will convince a six-year-old?"
Sina said coldly.
Bad Sina.
"……I'll go find out."
I walked over toward Willie, who was romping around the ring with Russell.
"Willie."
The moment I called out, he came running up with a beaming smile and grabbed my hand. I feigned ignorance and asked casually.
"Wasn't Broken Wyatt kind of scary earlier?"
"Yeah! But he was actually really nice!"
"Glad to hear it."
"Then why does he become a bad guy in the ring? Russell?"
"W-well, you see…?"
Russell was genuinely flustered.
I thought for a moment, then let out a wry smile and answered.
"Because he wants to win."
"Wants to win?"
"That's right. He wants to win his matches, so he acts like that. But once the match is over, everybody goes back to being friends."
Russell shot me a look that clearly asked whether this slapdash lore I'd invented on the spot was really going to fly.
But Willie lit up with a smile.
He looked like a boy whose nagging question had finally been answered.
"Ohh, I get it! I like that! Being good friends is the best!"
"Right? Russell and I didn't get along at first either, but now look at us."
"Yeah! You two are friends!"
……Somehow, we got through that one.
After that, Russell and I stuck to our schedule, shuttling Willie from place to place and doing everything we could to make his day unforgettable.
We walked out to our entrance music in the same arena he'd only ever seen through a TV screen.
The wrestlers gathered around the ringside area sent up a roar of cheers for Willie.
"Willie!"
"Get up on the ring!"
And just like that, when Willie climbed onto the ring, Wyatt came out to challenge him.
An impromptu match between the two.
Wyatt took one punch from the little boy's tiny fist, flopped flat onto his back, and was counted out cold.
Then came the cover.
One! Two! Three!
"Willie, you won!"
"That was INCREDIBLE!!"
"When you grow up, you're teaming up with me!"
Surrounded by applauding, cheering wrestlers, Willie smiled brighter than the sun.
Clapping along amid the celebration, I found my attention drifting to Willie's parents, who had been following us around all day, and I turned to look back at them.
I caught Willie's mother turning away, unable to hide her tears. His father was shielding her, murmuring comforts into her ear.
"Why are you crying? This is a good day."
"Sob……"
"Thank you, Sin. It's been so long since I've seen Willie laugh like that."
"Please, don't mention it. We're the ones who are grateful — we got to give Willie some wonderful memories."
Feeling awkward, I mumbled my reply and glanced over at Ebony, who stood nearby.
She was silent for a moment before answering with a soft smile.
"That was beautiful."
"Me?"
"The wrestlers."
Her eyes narrowed into a playful glint.
We traded a few more jabs of banter, then burst out laughing as we looked at each other.
"In any case, if anything becomes a problem, tell me right away. Willie's health comes before everything."
"Yes, we'll keep a close eye on him."
Ebony nodded, and her gaze drifted up to the ring where Willie stood.
Watching him laugh, drunk on happiness, I barely even registered the fact that the cameras had been filming us this whole time.
The day after we gave Willie the time of his life.
We gathered in our monitoring room to review the broadcast.
Yesterday's live show had pulled a 6.2 percent rating.
With the show's direction shifting, the upward momentum had gone a bit soft and uneven.
But we projected that starting with today's show, and continuing into next week and the week after, the numbers would climb sharply.
The reason was simple.
From tonight's show through next week, the local stations were set to air a special documentary.
A documentary about GCW and the Sinsell duo inviting Willie — a pediatric cancer patient — into their world and giving him a day of pure happiness.
On top of that, various local newspapers and magazines had agreed to run promotional pieces on the show along with features on Willie's story.
All of it was part of our effort to bring family audiences back into the world of professional wrestling.
The crowd chanted Willie's name. We made our entrance to our music, presented Willie with the newly released Sinsell tag team T-shirt, and then had our match.
The main event of the show.
The match ended, of course, in our victory, and the show wrapped to a thunderous outpouring of support.
Baku switched off the TV and spoke.
"That's the recap."
"Not bad."
Harley grinned.
We had stuck rigorously to the show's structure, and just as we'd hoped, the family audience went home satisfied.
The deeply trusted Sinsell tag team had won the day.
But there was a problem.
"That's where the good news ends."
Harley's smile turned thin and sour.
Just as he said, the trouble had come after the show went off the air. I pulled up yesterday's memories in my mind.
The original plan was for us to call Willie up into the ring in front of the live crowd and celebrate our victory together.
And then we would ask him:
And Willie, according to the script, was supposed to answer: "Please win the tag team championship match against the Wyatt Family!"
But swept up in the electric excitement of the show, the boy forgot the whole plan and said something else entirely.
"So that's what it was."
Having relayed the details, Baku scratched his cheek like the whole thing gave him a headache.
Under normal circumstances, we would have fed that moment into the news coverage and the documentary to build our next storyline.
Good publicity for the pay-per-view, too. But Willie, bless him, had gone completely off-script.
"What if we just change it? Take what Willie actually said and……"
"And you want to do that? The kid made a wish straight from his heart."
"Can't be helped — the audience was right there. They'd think we didn't mean any of it."
"I don't want to change it anyway."
At my words, following on Harley's, the team leaders shut their mouths.
Afterward, I met with Willie privately and asked why he'd wished for that.
The boy had realized his mistake and grown a little frightened; I had to spend some time reassuring him that everything was fine.
Then Willie answered, with great difficulty.
[……I like it that you two are friends.]
[I like being friends with Russell too.]
[There's Danny. Danny's my friend. He, um… one day we fought over a toy, and after that he was gone. I wanna make up with Danny.]
And in those words, I understood.
I understood why Willie cheered for Russell and me — and why a boy named Danny had disappeared from his life.
Being an adult means learning the things you'd rather not learn.
Willie had looked at Russell's friendship with me and mapped it onto himself and Danny.
That was why he couldn't bear the thought of our bond ever breaking.
A wish spoken from the honest heart of a six-year-old.
"If we just brush that aside, then inviting Willie here was nothing but pure, cold business, wasn't it?"
"Hmm……"
"I won't do that. And I don't believe the rest of you will, nor anyone else in GCW."
"Then what do we do?"
"We air it exactly as it happened."
"No problems with that?"
"One thing's been proven, at least."
"What's that?"
"That if the Russell-and-me tag team ever breaks up, countless boys and girls won't be able to stop crying?"
"……Sounds like we just picked up a rather heavy constraint."
"When have we ever not?"
I laughed it off as if it were nothing and cheered the room on.
Either way, it looked like Russell's and my tag team would be staying together for the foreseeable future.
Unless some unforeseen accident came along, that is.
Time flowed on once more.
To state the conclusion up front: our revolution was a complete success.
Target the family audience.
Bring back the age of Captain Logan.
The plan above was carried out using my knowledge of the future, executed in a far more refined fashion.
We were nothing like the 'hero' Captain Logan of old, who sang about how America was the greatest and told kids to say their prayers and eat their vitamins.
We wove detail into the spaces between the simple script, sustaining a subtle undercurrent of tension at all times.
For instance: Russell and I acknowledging each other as equals while each privately believing he was the stronger man.
The adults who picked up on it would savor that delicate friction, while the children would simply delight in watching our friendship bloom.
The results arrived almost immediately.
Boys and girls wore Russell's T-shirts while their parents wore mine, cheering us on together.
Bobby and Wyatt were the ones carrying the show as main eventers, but their popularity still couldn't touch the Sinsell tag team.
The crowds sent up frenzied support as if possessed by something. As GCW's standard-bearers, Russell and I personally introduced the rest of the roster to the audience —
always through the process of a good, old-fashioned 'rivalry,' of course.
Thanks to that, even the 'Adam & Cring' tag team — previously buried under boos — found popularity as a lovably dim-witted duo.
Harley watched the metrics climbing at an unnatural pace and issued an extraordinary measure.
"This pay-per-view will be held at the Atlanta Cream Pretzel Center."
Everyone froze.
The Atlanta Cream Pretzel Center was a ten-thousand-seat arena.
Word around the office was that unless we sold at least seven thousand seats, we'd be running at a loss.
Granted, we had the ability to pull it off. We'd already proven ourselves more than capable.
But whether the conservative upper management would actually sign off on it was another question entirely.
……So I asked, and Harley gave me his answer.
"Amazingly, they approved it. But if we lose money, they'll have my shirt."
"Are you going to do it?"
"I have to."
"If your livelihood's on the line, maybe talk it over with your family first……"
"Wife's dead. Kids are all grown. They do nothing but wait around for the old man to kick the bucket so they can spend his money… and yet, funny thing — the hunger's still there."
Harley flashed me a grin.
Looking into those eyes, I saw nothing less than a living legend who had come up through the very dawn of professional wrestling.
"I want to set a record in this GCW that no one else ever has."
"Most people call that a dream."
I had that same dream too.
It was the reason that, even after regressing, I never dreamed of any other life and threw myself back into this wrestling business.
And now we stood on the very doorstep of making it real.
Once everyone understood that, they worked harder than ever — for Harley's sake, and for their own confidence that they belonged on a stage that big.
The shows kept building toward the pay-per-view, and in the end we pulled off the feat of selling out a ten-thousand-seat arena outright.
But the problem, as it turned out, came from somewhere none of us had ever thought to look.
It was the night I returned to the dorm, giddy with the news that we'd filled the ten-thousand-seat arena.
Noticing a missed call, I dialed my voicemail — and heard Ebony's voice, trembling in spite of every effort to hold it steady.
Willie had left this world.