Of course, there had been benefits. He wasn't sleeping in a ramshackle room with a bunch of smelly rock stars anymore, and no-one was coming from Outworld to backstab him for betraying Shao Kahn, all of which were huge bonuses. He was wearing the finest-pressed suits, eating food so rich it would make a shepard's pie ashamed of itself, and he was sleeping in a bed that Raiden himself would kill to sleep in. In short, he was living the high life.
But he'd sided with the Tridens to get it.
And that wasn't even the worst part. Having to sit at the same table as that smarmy git Alex and that corpulent blob that had the nerve to even call itself "Sarah" was bad enough, and the demigod felt sick to his stomach whenever what could have been an otherwise noble and aspiring knight snuggled up to that giggling mass of fat and started rattling off how much his "boys" had made his side of town such a safe and respectable place, always adding a snide remark about the marines and their slap-dash, caveman ways or Jaxx and his mutant rabble. And the salt in that particular wound was that he had to applaud along with all this nonsense along with the other stuck-up suits at the table, under the full knowledge that they, too, had gangs at their beck and call and would probably cap him if he even so much as raised his voice in question.
Having to get undressed to the noise of a city gone to hell wasn’t the worst bit, either. Although it would certainly qualify, given the murderous new tune the streets sang at night. When children weren’t screaming hysterically for their parents, or men in balaclavas weren’t bawling racial epithets in each other’s faces, the night was punctuated with the metallic rattling of rifles fighting to be heard over the shriek of alien lasers, as the only other gangs that could possibly rival his caretakers crossed paths for the umpteenth time that month. It made him wonder how the Major himself slept knowing all that violence was going on mere miles from his front door, and that no-one was even watching the Zoofights anymore. Maybe, the Edenian had reflected at one point, he’d gone as mad as the rest of them, and was trapped in a world of burgers and beefy arms where no man dared venture.
Then Stella had called him to bed, and he had remembered, with a sinking heart, why being mad was often the better option.
Stella had just not been prepared for the downfall of a once happy community. Caught right in the whirlpool of madness, betrayal and outright war, the once cheery, fun-loving orator/ninja had descended into a spiral of insanity that would have promised a big Christmas bonus for any psychiatrist. Everyone she had been friends with or had even remotely cared about had either used her for their own twisted gains, abandoning her once they had grown bored, or had simply pushed her away with disdain, and the net effect was akin to throwing bricks at a spider’s web. In the end, Nick had found her in a bathroom, ramming a butcher’s knife again and again into a corpse only barely recognizable as the tiger-masked wrestler who came in off the streets, laughing like a circus clown.
With their old, cosy home close to the bar reduced to rubble by Optimus’ robots, and the Major implementing the quarantine on the King of Beasts area, the only refuge Nick could think of was the mansion into which the Tridens had retreated. That was his first big mistake – jaded by the destruction and backstabbing, Alex had made various demands to make sure that the Edenian remained co-operative and didn’t try anything funny, like siding with the rival gangs. Most of them involved preposterous sums of money being paid out his account – the former knight was loathe to splash out in any way, especially after the rusty failure that was Tridenland. In the end, what inheritance Argus had left behind had simply been sucked away by the ever-hungry Triden empire.
So much for royal privileges. In fact, he didn’t even have those, either. Alex was quick to remind him of that fact, to illustrate that even though he had the pressed suits and fine dinners, he was just a useless hanger-on with no real power or say in how the Tridens ran things. At the dinner table, that robed blob sneered at him as though she was something she’d just scraped off her shoe, or something she’d found under the sink. Even the thugs, the armoured workforce of the Levian machine who survived on the rock-hard canteen food, mocked him, calling him “Son of Argus” in the same way they would call someone a retard – a back-handed insult that implied he was no better than what he was when he first came to the bar. The worst part of it was that they were right – he’d gone full circle and ended up back where he’d started, as an entitled little shit without a proper leg to stand on, pretty much the chew-toy of everyone present.
He'd come to that realization one night as he lay in bed, holding his beloved Stella close with one hand and applying soothing cream to the red lash-marks of a leather belt with the other. It had been another one of those nights – the sort of night where he’d had to grit his teeth and think of something not connected to whatever painful implement had been chosen. In a way, Stella still loved him, but it was the same sort of psychotic affection that he’d have expected from someone like Mileena. The old, cheery, romantic love was still there, no doubt, buried deep away, but it was smothered by a cackling thing that probably didn’t even remember the old times anymore, and was built on a world of delusional fantasies. She’d even started calling Alex “Mr. Triden”, and Rain had read enough comics to know that was a bad sign.
Eddie still visited, sometimes. How he’d not gone as crazy as everyone else, Nick never knew, but the roadie was obviously made of sterner stuff than the rest of Ironheade, who had either been killed or defected to the mutants out of a crippling self-loathing. Of late, his visits through the big bedroom window had become less and less frequent, owing to his newfound occupation with tracking the drug shipments from the harbour area, but it was still a relief to see his stubby chin peering through the window pane, even if he smelt like he needed three showers at once. Every time, the greasy-haired vigilante, in between updating his old friend with the current crime news, would repeat the same advice he gave before: Get out, dude. Get the fuck outta dodge, if you know what’s good for ya. Those Tridens aren’t any good anymore.
But he couldn’t. He couldn’t leave Stella behind, and that was the truth. She was too broken to drag along anymore – she’d never survive out there, with Delmond’s marines and Optimus Prime and Fujin knows what else roaming the streets. Not to mention that his powers were beginning to wane with neglect, day by day, until even conjuring a simple thunderbolt would make him totter about in a daze until a glass of water was brought to him. But it would have been crueller to leave her to Alex, for who knows what the greedy fucker would do to her if he left her behind. He could have made her into one of those degrading maids with the bunny ears, or worse. And so Nick had to stay behind, to protect Stella from that man. She meant too much to him.
In a way, it was like being with Shao Kahn all over again. For one thing, they always called him by his old code name. The name he had come to hate as much as the people who housed and fed and mocked him, because it reduced him to the nothing he had been once before. The name that was always bellowed in command, or sneered in disdain.
They called him Rain.
That was the worst bit.
(This took way longer than it should have done. Fuck you, writer's block. And don't think the grimdark's gonna stop there, either - I still have a character teaser to write. So much to do...)
