“We both know what it’s like a break a bone.”
“Remember back in the skatepark when we were kids? We’d gather the audience around us and get ready to hit the ramps and drop into action at a moments notice.”
“And you know what?”
“We got hurt.”
“Bad.”
“With every trick we ever did there was a chance we’d end up eating shit and smacking the pavement so hard we saw stars. We usually walked away in one piece.”
“But sometimes there’d be that gut wrenching crack that went through the air.”
“Bone sticking through skin, teeth scattered on the ground, and blood pooling from places it definitely shouldn’t be pooling from.”
“Yeah, it fucking hurt, but the kids watching us thought it was the most badass thing they’d ever seen, didn’t they? Cheering and chanting, begging us to get up and try it again because while they liked seeing us succeed…”
“They loved to see us fail.”
“Every wipeout, every bruised back and busted lip? It’s what they lived for.”
“What we lived for.”
“Time after time, trick after trick, we crashed less and less.”
“But we carry those scars, they remind us of how far we’ve come.”
“OSW is just one big skate park, Ether. Every match we do has us getting up on top of the ramp to drop in and show the world what we’re made of. But, just like back home, we got those blood thirsty kids begging to see us crash and burn with every trick we do.”
“Right now? Those kids are named Simon and Pyre.”
“They have us staring down the biggest trick of our lives, and they don’t want us to nail it.”
“They want us to land awkwardly and limp away bloody.”
“But we’ve done it before, right? You and I are gonna have to get crazy for the crowd, we have no choice. If we climb down from the ramp we aren’t just gonna get booed by a bunch of asshole kids.”
“We’re gonna get killed.”
“So we’re going to do what we have to, man. You’re going to beat the living shit out of me, nail every trick you know off of that big bloody ramp and try your god damn best to knock out my teeth, tear my skin, and crack my skull.”
“And in return? I’m gonna truck fuck you until you can’t think straight, throw everything I have at you until your bones break and your eyes go cross.”
“But no matter what, when that bell rings and one of us is standing tall, it won’t matter who won or lost.”
“We’ll get off the pavement and limp out of the skatepark side by side with a whole slew of new scars to show off. We’ll carry those scars forever, babe.”
“And in the future, we’ll look back at the scars, at bones we broke? And we’ll laugh.”
“Because we’ll know how far we’ve come.”
“Now meet me on the ramp, Ether. The crowd’s waiting.”