Joe Hardy hates this plan (ihateyourplan) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2017-10-09 13:52:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, joe hardy |
Who: Joe Hardy
What: Joe is tested
When: Sept. 28; Day 7 of the Great Destroyers Plot
Where: The Jungle Temple
Rating/Warnings: High for blood and violence (PC character death within the vision done so with player approval)
Status: Complete Narrative
Things were just getting weirder.
One moment Joe was in the middle of Anaheim fighting nameless Dream enemies. Kicking ass and taking names. Then there had been a flash of bright light. At first Joe had thought he’d been hit with a flashbang, but when his vision cleared he wasn’t in Anaheim anymore. He wasn’t hip deep in mercenaries anymore either. In fact, Joe had no idea where he was.
He found himself in some kind of chamber. At least Joe thought it was some kind of chamber. It was so dark that he could not see more than two feet in front of him. It was almost as though he’d stepped into some kind of void. And it was silent. So silent. Despite that, though, Joe had a feeling as though he wasn’t alone, as though he were being watched. By what he couldn’t even begin to say. It was as though a presence was all around him. The hair on the back of his neck prickled.
“Hello?” He called out into the darkness. His voice did not echo back to him, as if the darkness had actually swallowed it up. The feeling of another presence remained, silent and watching. Joe’s mouth was suddenly dry and he forced himself to swallow hard. “Hello?” he called again.
This time, he received an answer.
“Joe.” The voice was soft, feeble, moaning his name.
Joe almost didn’t recognize the voice. It was behind him and slowly Joe turned around. And there he was, standing a few feet away in what seemed to be the only light in this entire place.
“Frank,” Joe breathed both relieved and confused to see his brother. He had no idea how Frank had gotten here (wherever here was), but he knew as long as the two of them were together, they’d be ok. Frank was the smart one of the Hardy brothers. He’d have a plan. Frank always had a plan.
But, something was wrong. Frank was just standing there. His head was bent in such a way that Joe couldn’t see his eyes. The way he was standing, with his shoulders hunched and his arms limp at his sides, it was an unnatural posture for Frank, who almost always carried himself properly and with his head up.
“Frank?” Joe called again. He stepped forward. The moment he did, Frank lifted his head and – oh god, Joe’s heart froze at the sight of him. There was blood. Everywhere. All over his neck splattered down his front. But it was Frank’s eyes that made Joe stop right where he was. The soft dark brown that had always been so alive with intelligence and quick-witted comebacks looked so distant, confused. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but what came out was another feeble noise Joe couldn’t understand, choked off by blood bubbling up from within.
“Frank!” Joe lunged forward just as his brother dropped. He caught him under his arms, but the momentum of the fall forced Joe down to his knees with Frank in his arms. “No. No.” Joe felt the quiver in his voice deep in his suddenly tight throat. “You’re gonna be alright. Okay? Look at me. Look at me, Frank,” he got a hand under Frank’s cheek and made those eyes look up towards him. Joe could see the source of the blood. A slice across the throat, deep, crimson and angry. Joe closed his other hand over the wound, praying to God in the first time in years that the cut hadn’t severed the artery underneath. “It’s alright. You’re gonna be alright. I’ll get us out of here. I’ll get help.”
But even if Joe could have found a way out of the unceasing darkness that swallowed his voice, it would not have done any good. He could feel his brother’s blood seeping through his fingers. He watched, helpless to do anything, as the last spark of life faded from Frank’s eyes and left them cold and hollow glassy orbs.
“Frank?” But Frank would never answer. “No,” Joe shook his head, disbelieving at first. “No. No.” Joe clutched his brother’s body close. His shoulders shuddered and hot tears stung his eyes.
There was someone else standing there now, standing just in front of them now. “Hello, Hardy.”
Joe looked up and there he was. Tommy Gilligan. Greasy hair slicked back. A dirty shirt visible under an equally dirty jacket. And the sickest grin – Smug and loathsome. Proud. “I told you I’d get mine.”
Joe stared. He had no idea how Iola’s killer had found his way to Orange County – to this place – but as his eyes moved from that sick twisted grin down to the blood stained knife still in the man’s hand, Joe suddenly did not care.
Red. All Joe could see was red. A rage, boiling hot, surged through his blood. With an incomprehensible scream, Joe was on the man. The force of his tackle sent the two of them end over end, but Joe hung on to his adversary, grabbing at him, determined to rip that smug smirk right off his face and shove it down the hole where his mouth used to be.
They wrestled for the knife, a struggle that earned in a slash across Joe’s right palm when grabbed for it and then having the blade stabbed into his shoulder and yanked upwards. Joe screamed, but he hung on. He used the pain to fuel his rage.
The fight ended with the knife tossed away and Iola’s – and now Frank’s – murderer pinned under Joe with Joe’s arm across his throat. That sick proud grin was gone and had been replaced with fear. Joe had always suspected Tommy Gilligan to be a coward, that at first sign of a real fight he’d crumble. He was whimpering now, begging for Joe not to hurt him in a simpering tone that instead of garnering sympathy just made Joe even angrier. Had Tommy listened when Iola had begged for her life? When Frank had?! Joe hated the sound of it, sick and meek.
With that hateful noise in his ears, Joe wanted one thing: Revenge.
He punched first, right in that mouth. And he punched again. And again. He punched until the man couldn’t laugh anymore, and then continued. His strikes dissolved into simply bashing the guy’s head into the hard floor. Joe did not stop even when a puddle of thick red blood started to form under the head, indicating that the skull had been crushed.
Joe only stopped when a booming voice overhead boomed: “Joseph Hardy!”
The sound was so loud and so deep, it reverberated through Joe’s body, through his bones. His head jerked upwards half expecting to see God looming above him in all His divine glory, but what he saw instead was only darkness. His eyes strained searching that darkness for something, anything.
“You have allowed your rage and hunger for vengeance to consume you and cloud your judgement. Look again and see what your rage will do.”
Joe looked down at the man under him. Instead of Tommy Gilligan, Joe saw the beaten and shattered skull of his own brother. Joe screamed and scrambled away. He stared at the body and then back where he thought he’d left Frank. There was nothing there now. Slowly, Joe turned his eyes back, hoping, praying that it was just a trick. But it wasn’t. There was Frank, beaten to death, his head resting in a thick dark pool of blood.
Joe’s stomach lurched. He clamped his hand to his mouth and turned away to swallow the vomit that had rushed his throat and squeezed his eyes shut. Hot tears leaked out from under the lids and over his fingers.
“Your mind is not clear and you lack strength,” the voice announced. “You have failed this temple’s test. You are not the one.”
A test? “What?” Joe opened his eyes. He was looking again at Frank’s body before there was another bright flash of light.
The darkness was gone and with it the voice and the horrifying image of Frank’s death. Joe found himself again in the middle of Anaheim under siege.