Tainted Minds

It was funny how quickly things had changed in the life of River Styx.

Not even two years ago, she didn’t have a dollar to her name. She was just out of the road, wandering from fight to fight, hitching and touring America. She went where she pleased and did what she wanted, when she wanted, how she wanted. It was a good, simple life with zero complications.

Now, things had changed. Since she’d come up in the AFW, she’d taken on some of the biggest names - Angel. Adrian Kytes, Brittany Luuve, Rebecca Tomko, even Taylor Parker. Bare minimum, she’d held her own against all of them. She was pissing off people worldwide now, and after the MSG show, you’d have to walk a long, long damn time before you found someone who hadn’t at least heard the name River Styx. She even had a belt. Granted, it wasn’t the one she’d wanted in the first place, but it was growing on her.

It was a new feeling, and it brought new opportunities. She was making money. Decent money. Enough money to do things like own an apartment and legally attend a concert, the latter of which she had just got through enjoying.

Styx filtered out of the stadium along with the rest of the crowd, leaving the Therion concert around midnight. It had been a good time - she didn’t keep up with music as much as she’d like these days, but she was looking for a way to unwind after the war with Rebecca Tomko, recharge her batteries before Adrian inevitably came looking for some payback. Therion was in town, a symphonic metal band she’d heard some good things about, so she decided to give them a shot. She hadn’t regretted it. Even if she couldn’t understand most of what they were saying, she did love a little symphonic music on occasion, and they did a great job mixing it with badass metal. All the Norse mythology was sweet, too. It was epic stuff, and she’d definitely be checking more of them out.

For now, though, she intended to hit the subway, go home and sleep off the rest of her pains with a bottle of whatever was tasting fresh in her refrigerator. She walked down the street with her usual baggy pants and a Therion shirt she’d picked up, with a black jacket over it all to keep her warm in the cool night air. And, of course, she had the ICW/ICWA Tri-State Television Championship belt slung over her shoulder. Because why the fuck not? Any chance to further aggravate the people of Japan was always worth it.

It was late, and so it made sense that the subway would be a little less crowded than usual, but as Styx descended the stairs and made her way towards a platform, it seemed particularly sparse.  Only a few passersby were waiting for the train to get there, and they glanced nervously around as the hulking gaijin brawler roamed into their midst, then edged away from her just a bit.  Standard procedure, given how intimidating she was.

...although it was possible they were moving away from something else altogether, because a second later, a familiar rasp echoed directly behind Styx, almost in her ear.  "Hey."

There was absolutely no explanation for it.  Abattoir hadn't been on the stairs, and how she'd known about this particular event was entirely unknown.  She'd simply materialized, and was now hovering behind Styx and causing a group of salarymen to edge even further away and sweat profusely.  It was obvious why; the steady evolution of her fashion sense, having been obvious since her return to AFW, had begun to take a rather ominous turn.  On top of her mask, the nak muay now had a hooded sleeveless overcoat with a crimson sigil of some kind emblazoned on the back.  That was definitely a chain ratting somewhere in there whenever she took a step, too.

As per usual, there was no explanation of why, exactly, she was here, or how she'd known to be here.

"LA.  When we fought."  Straight to the point.  "Do you remember anything afterwards?  Anything."

Styx was used to - and frankly, preferred - people giving her a wide berth. Especially in Japan, where she typically towered over the men and you could see her coming from a mile away on a clear day. When the crowd started to disperse and given her the room she deserved, she didn’t put much thought into it.

Styx wasn’t used to people sneaking up on her, mostly because they rarely had the balls to even try it. So, when Abattoir materialized out of the ether beside her, she responded in about the way you would expect. ”Jesus fuck!”

She jumped away and nearly fell on the tracks, before she quickly hopped back and spun around. She looked over Abattoir with a wide gaze, one that held a dash of confusion, a slight hint of range, but mostly just surprise. She was more than a little creeped out, too, but she was trying really hard not to let that slip.

She couldn't help but notice that Abattoir was looking more hardcore than she remembered, though. Good look.

”I-” She rapidly blinked and shook her head, as the question started to register. ”No. Fuck, no, I don’t remember anything, I barely remember the chick I fucked last week, why would I-” She ran a hand through her non existent hairs. ”I remember you looked dead as shit, but you still looked dead as shit when I left, so…” She shrugged. ”What about?”

There was a strange snarling noise - Abattoir was apparently sighing through her teeth in frustration, and the mask modulated it into some sort of bizarre wheezing sound.  "I was dead," she hissed, holding Styx's eyes in an unblinking stare.  "You killed me.  Something like ten and a half minutes, everything was shut down."

She was pacing back and forth now, and the platform was steadily starting to vacate.  Not that a reasonable person could blame them, it was swiftly becoming a hostile commuting environment.  There was something distinctly agitated about Abattoir, and none of the bystanders needed to know English to recognize it.

"And then I came b--" She shook her head abruptly, a staccato motion like she was trying to bite her own earlobe, and switched directions altogether.  "--I was sent back.  And I don't know why, or how, or by who, or...it's all missing.  Like, hours, an entire day, just gone, and it's just now starting to come back to me.  Bits and pieces, while I'm fighting.  Flashes."

There was something wild in her eyes.  Normally she didn't have much resembling an expression at all, but above that mask, they were shining with an ominous gray splendor.

"Nothing?  You didn't see anything?"

Styx went quiet for a long, awkward moment, before she finally blurted out. ”What?”

Styx rubbed her eyes as the frustration started to sink in. She could tell where this was going, and it was a conversation she didn't much care to be in. But Abattoir was here, this was happening. She had to deal with it.

”Look,” She reached out and grabbed her shoulders, stopping the pacing. Even she was starting to get uncomfortable with all the looks they were attracting here. ”I didn't kill you. If I killed you, you'd be dead, and we wouldn't be talking about this. That's how death works. You don't get better. What do you expect me to say?”

She pushed her off and stepped back to push the belt higher up her shoulder. ”Stop being weirder than usual. You just have memory loss. It happens. It's a thing. There's no woo-woo spirit bullshit to it.”

Styx's summary of the situation was accurate.  It was not something any normal person should ever have to deal with, but here it was, and nothing about it was going to go away on its own.

Abattoir squirmed in the bigger woman's grasp, but at least for the moment, she was still-ish.  "It's not---that wasn't how it happened," she stammered, twitching and unusually inarticulate for once.  "I saw the records.  I was clinically dead, Styx, and I should've stayed that way but I didn't and I don't know why and---"

She trailed off in frustration, and a few seconds went by in silence before she tried again.  "Okay.  Listen.  Silver Ace kicked me in the head last week," she continued, clearly a bit tentative and probably starting to realize how utterly batshit all of this sounded - she was wringing her gloved hands together at her waist, which was a very uncharacteristic nervous tic, "and I saw...something, I don't know.  I mean I kind of....I don't have enough information to be comfortable guessing.  I think it's starting to come back to me."

Another pause.  Abattoir blinked once, then four times in rapid succession.

"....You think I'm crazy."

Hoo boy, this was a loaded gun of a question. Or, well, statement, technically.

"Pfft." She had a little chuckle and spat off to the side. ”I don’t think you’re crazy, no.” Styx finally tired of holding the belt on her shoulder and just let it drop to the floor. Not like it would matter if it got dirty or anything. ”Maybe they fucked up the report, ever think of that? I mean, it’s unlikely, yeah, but is it any less likely than you coming back from the dead? People make mistakes all the time, people came back from the dead never.”

Styx reflexively reached into her pocket for a pack of smokes and came up empty, forgetting that she’d kicked the habit a few months ago. She was seriously considering a relapse. She didn’t care whether Abattoir believed she came back from the dead or not - it wasn’t any skin off her nose so long as she could fight, which she damn well could. But that didn’t mean she was going to stand around just about the bullshit, either.

She sighed, crossed her legs, folded her arms, tried to just calm down. It wasn’t like being agitated was helping the situation. ”Take it one step at a time.” Styx rolled her hand around her wrist. “What do you mean, you saw ‘something’? Everything is a ‘something’, the world’s full of somethings. Be more specific.”

This was actually going a little better than Abattoir had envisioned, although that was mainly because she'd envisioned the meeting less as a means of actually getting answers and more as a means of just venting.

Having exhausted her ability to pace for the moment, Abattoir swept her coat out behind her and leaned--well, really pressed up against a pillar.  The tile was cool against her forehead, not that it did anything to soothe her.  Maybe she just had brain damage?  Possibly?  That could account for some things...

"I'm...not totally sure."  She twitched, trying to put the brief flash of clarity into words.  "It was more like a feeling, I guess.  A sense of..."  Alright, Styx was already fairly sure she'd gone out of her mind.  May as well go whole-hog.  "...approaching, I guess.  Something, I don't know, ominous.  I didn't exactly get details, Styx, there's a bunch of pieces missing."

There was a sharp pain behind her eyes.  Turning away from the pillar, Abattoir lifted a corner of her mask, and a lonely rivulet of blood trickled from her nose down to her neck, where she wiped it off with the back of a hand.  After a moment of inarticulate floundering, her eyes wandered down to Styx's new shirt.

"....Les Fleurs du Mal was kind of a self-indulgent album."

It was rather pathetic, as proclamations went.

”“Huh?” The subject change after Abattoir’s rambling hit Styx like a slap in the face, turning her face blank for a moment while the gears turned. She looked down, following Abattoir’s gaze, and put the pieces together soon enough. ”Oh.” She shook her head and gave her shoulders a nice roll, pushing the shirt’s logo out. ”Really? I liked it. So-so. Secret of the Runes is still my favorite, though. Fucking love Norse.”

Talking about metal went a long way to calming Styx down, even if it carried the slight implication that Abattoir had been at the concert and followed her for however long it took her to get to the subway. She raised her arms up for a long stretch and walked over to her fellow wrestling rebel’s side.

”Tell you what - let’s say I accept that you were brought back from the dead by…” Her eyes shot up to the ceiling as she slid through a few names. God? Satan? Anubis? Hel? The Flying Spaghetti Monster?

”...a random magical being of unknown origin and properties. I don’t believe that for one second, but for the sake of argument, I’ll roll. Here’s the question: so what?” Her eyebrows furrowed. ”What does that mean for you? What do you think that means?”

So here was the operative question. What did it mean? Why was she here?

That was, of course, if all of this actually meant anything at all. Maybe she was crazy. Maybe a fracture had healed wrong and a piece of bone was pressing on her optic nerve and giving her hallucinations. It had been a blow to the head that'd triggered her recollection, after all...

Either way, the answer was the same. "I don't know," Abattoir admitted sullenly, her eyes wandering down to the floor. "It's just recently that I started remembering things. I took a few months off and that was when I found out about...y'know. And then I started getting little flashes of insight during my matches..." It hurt behind her eyes for a moment, and she stopped to knead at the bridge of her nose with a hand. This was, by a huge margin, the most Abattoir had talked to anybody in years. Her throat was rusty from disuse, adding an increasingly harsh rasp to her words.

Actually, now that she thought on it...

"I need more, then. More insight. Maybe if I keep fighting, I'll see more of it." She stretched in a bow shape next to Styx, her coat illuminated and shining with the headlights of an approaching train. "That...makes sense, right? It worked the first few times, so I just keep doing it, and...yeah. Should be easy enough."

There was a hint of amusement in her eyes as she glanced up at the bigger woman. "You know, with your track record of making enemies, you could probably use some backup."