5. SUNDAY — SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO
SUNDAY — SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO
Now playing: Death March - Motionless In White
I stepped out from behind the curtain and onto the ramp to a deafening crowd. The roars and cheers always sounded otherworldly when it came to main event matches, and I had become intimately familiar with the noise over the years.
The crowd was always a mix for me during my entrance.
I wasn’t a typical babyface, never had been.
I was the antihero, the one people either loved-to-hate or hated-to-love.
I appealed to the fringes of both admiration and hatred, so walking out to a sea of people and hearing more boos than cheers didn’t faze me.
Tonight, it actually made me smile. Because tonight, they hated me while absolutely worshipping my man, and a beaming ray of pride flared deep in my chest.
As I stood at the top of the entrance ramp, the heat of the pyrotechnics warming my back, I pulled my spiked leather jacket to the side, flashing the title belt at the cameraman.
My Deadlock persona was in full swing: cocky, wearing a sly smile, overly confident.
I exuded all the arrogant characteristics I didn't naturally possess, a fact only Silas truly knew.
Walking down the long ramp, I pretended to be an untouchable god, but I noticed even more signs than I had seen on the monitors.
Hundreds lined the crowd, all for Silas.
I knew without a doubt this place was about to show up in full force for him.
This beautiful island, a piece of his very being, was welcoming him home without hesitation.
It brought a sudden sting of tears to my eyes.
He deserved it. Every. Single. Bit of it.
I knew Silas better than I knew myself, and I knew he had never felt like he belonged anywhere.
It was no secret. He’d told me so on more than one occasion.
Not in wrestling because of the botch, or on the Reed land because he felt he had failed their legacy.
But the entire time we had been in Puerto Rico, I hadn't heard those words escape him once.
My man felt a sense of home here, and that made me feel complete, too. It was a form of healing, which I recognized. As someone who knew the agonizing pain of a fractured identity, watching him piece his together was profound.
At the ring, I slid inside, taking my corner to wait for Silas’s entrance.
I stripped off my jacket, unbuckled the belt, and removed the heavy denim kilt, handing them all to the ringside attendant.
They delayed his entrance. I knew Creative was doing it to build the anticipation and secure the biggest pop possible.
This place was about to sound like an atomic bomb detonation.
A wave of low rumbles was already starting. Chants, claps, and heavy stomps shook the stadium seating. The crowd came to life right before my eyes, all for Silas. They wanted him, summoning him with the rhythmic thud of their boots echoing through the sold-out arena.
Then, the lights cut to pitch black.
The opening notes of Silas’s music hit the PA system, and the arena literally shook. It was, without a single doubt, the loudest pop in UWF history. A building-shaking, earth-shattering, chaotic-eruption of cheers that vibrated my bones.
The spotlights flared, hitting the top of the stage, and there he was.
Draped in the regal robe, he clutched the heavy Puerto Rican flag in his hands, waving it high above his head as the Taino Sun necklace rested against his chest. He stopped at the top of the ramp, teary eyed as he stood there taking it all in.
The fans were singing every word of his music, a low hum of something else running like an undercurrent to the lyrics.
A chant started in the lower bowl and immediately caught fire, spreading uninterrupted, until twenty thousand voices screamed in unison.
“WELCOME HOME! WELCOME HOME!”
My emotions swirled at the sight and sound.
Pride, love, a twang of jealousy perhaps.
I bit the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste copper.
I turned away, pretending to stretch, taking in the ring layout instead of letting my tears take root.
Weapons were scattered along the outside: ladders, tables, steel chairs.
A thick metal chain lowered from the rafters as the referee took my title belt, attaching it to the hook so it could be hoisted twenty feet above us.
No matter how hard I tried, my eyes kept drifting back to him.
I watched Silas walk down the ramp, high-fiving fans, his large hands grasping theirs.
He scanned the signs in the crowd, reading the messages written in Spanish with a heaving chest. This was everything Silas had ever dreamed of, and it would heal an ache in his soul he’d been carrying his entire life.
Once in his corner, he carefully stripped out of the sleeveless robe.
He took off the Taino Sun necklace, kissing the stone before bundling it into the flag to hand off to the referee.
I read his lips over the thunderous volume, telling the ref to ensure those things stayed safe.
To which the ref nodded and carried them to the timekeeper’s area.
We stepped to the center, and the referee checked in with both of us, running through the standard rules of a match that legally had none. We stared each other down, the air between us stiff and electric.
Then the bell rang. The next eighty minutes were pure, unadulterated madness.
We gave it our absolute all. This was the match of our careers, capping off what the dirt sheets had already coined the best storyline since the eighties. Our feud cemented us as future Hall of Famers, and this match would solidify exactly why.
It started fast and only escalated from there.
Within fifteen minutes, the ring was a graveyard of broken wood and dented metal.
We hurled each other into the barricades, slamming each other's bodies onto the steel steps in a brutal, bloody battle.
We knew it would push us to our physical limits, but we were the best people to do that because we would protect one another with our lives.
By minute forty, it was a bloodbath. Silas busted my forehead open with a stiff chair shot, causing blood to run down my face and sting my eyes as it mixed with the eyeliner.
I retaliated by introducing the thick steel chain, wrapping it around my fist and beating him down.
The metal cracked against his broad back, leaving angry raised welts across his skin, but Silas didn’t stay down.
He ripped the chain from my hands, wrapped it around my throat, and pulled tight, choking me over the top rope until my vision swam with dark spots.
The split second he relaxed the tension to gloat was the only invitation I needed to drag myself back from the edge and slip the noose, returning the violence tenfold, giving the crowd an unrelenting brutality rarely seen in this era, amplified by the terrifying element of towering steel ladders.
But beneath the gore and the blood-soaked canvas, we took care of each other.
“You good, baby?” I rasped, hiding the words as I trapped him in a headlock. The cameras focused on our struggling bodies.
“Yeah,” Silas groaned, “Hit me harder on the next spot. Make it look like you’re trying to kill me.” His chest heaved against my arm, his hair matted with sweat and blood.
“Yes, sir,” I purred softly before wrenching him up and throwing him face-first into a propped-up ladder in the corner.
We improvised, going entirely off-script.
At the sixty minute mark, Silas charged me, and instead of taking the standard clothesline, I leaped up.
Mid jump, I caught his head and hit a high-risk DDT that sent us both crashing through a table on the outside.
The crowd lost their minds, screams of “HOLY SHIT” echoing off the arena walls.
It was the highlight-reel moment of the night, a masterpiece of trust and timing.
The true climax was approaching, and I knew how terrified Silas was.
Last night, Evan called me at two in the morning because Silas had been hyperventilating over the final move of the match.
It was the exact type of high-angle spot that had caused the catastrophic botch that broke his confidence and nearly ruined his career years ago, but it was time to face the ghost.
I dragged a massive, sixteen-foot industrial ladder into the center of the ring, setting it up directly beneath the hanging title, and arranged two wooden tables side-by-side on the mat below.
My limbs screamed in agony as I climbed first, blood dripping from my chin.
Silas followed, crawling up the opposite side.
We met at the top, and the arena held its collective breath.
We were so high up that the ring looked like a postage stamp beneath us.
Brutal hands were traded, the smack of flesh colliding echoed in the silence of the crowd’s anticipation. Silas grabbed me, his hand wrapping around the back of my neck to set up the suplex. He was shaking. His breaths were labored, and his eyes were wide as he looked down at the tables below us.
The fighting stopped. I reached up, my bloody hand gripping his bicep. I leaned my face in close, touching our foreheads together to hide our mouths from the hard-cam. “You’ve got this. You’re stronger now. You’re the Heavyweight Champ, Si.”
“Cal, I can’t—”
“I trust you with my life,” I whispered, squeezing his arm and pouring every ounce of love I had into my words. “I love you. Now put me through that fucking table and go be a champion.”
Silas let out a ragged, guttural scream, and the fear vanished, replaced by a surge of pure adrenaline. He hooked my arm, hoisted my entire body weight into the air, and threw us backward into the abyss.
The fall felt like an eternity. We crashed through the tables simultaneously, the wood exploding into a shower of white splinters. The impact knocked the air from my lungs in an agonizing rush.