My ears are ringing.
“What the fuck just happened?”
I can’t move.
Something heavy weighs on my chest. I try to push it aside, but it won’t budge.
All I can think of… is my failures. It’s funny that, isn’t it? As your life flashes before your eyes, it isn’t your successes or the odds you’ve overcome that stain the inside of your weary mind. It’s the failures.
“H… Help?”
No-one is coming.
I failed again.
Just like my failure to even come close to an OSW World Heavyweight Championship.
Years I’ve been wrestling and not once have I ever put my grubby little mitts upon it. I always thought that doing the right thing and being a good man was a recipe for success. I always believed that one day, by being a good person, I’d get the glory and success that came with it.
But Jasper Redgrave disproves that, doesn’t he?
He’s not buried beneath rubble, gasping for air as the weight of his home crushes him. He’s not scorched from the fire and flame of everything he loved being burned to the ground. No. He’s the World Champion. He has the success I could only ever dream of.
Jasper Redgrave is a bad man. Worse than that, he’s a murderer. He’s evil personified and he truly believes that in Arcadia, evil always wins. I want so badly to argue that. I want so badly to believe he’s wrong, but here I lay beneath tons of concrete, a failure, a nothing, a nobody, and he’s probably led in his comfortable bed at home with that Championship for company.
Meanwhile, I’m struggling to breathe.
Pull it together, Felix.
Come on.
What Jasper Redgrave doesn’t realize is that the only way evil wins is if the good let it. If the good stand down when it arises, if the good back off, if the good refuse to get back up after they’ve been knocked down… only then does evil truly win. Evil doesn’t win by simply existing. Evil wins when Good refuses to fight back.]
“Arrrgghhhh!”
The weight has finally been lifted. I did it. I’m free. I need to take a second. It hurts.
Men like you and Doom can knock me down time and time again. You always have. Tombstone just spent the better part of six months torturing me for fun but when I rose, when good fought evil, do you know who actually won?
It wasn’t Tombstone.
I may be a failure right now. I may be covered in soot, dust and the remnants of my domicile, but the only way evil defeats good is if I led there and died like it wanted me to. I will become OSW World Heavyweight Champion one day. I will not fail forever.
“Mom?”
Where is she?