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artificialqueens · 2 years ago

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🏳️‍🌈 Bitch Fight Ch.18 (Multi; JeLa) - Lita

Welcome to the world of Femme Fatale Wrestling. The future is female, and we’re here to prove it.

A/N: Heyyyyy….So, I’m still alive. Sorry about the nearly-a-year posting break, I changed jobs irl, got side tracked with an original fiction project, and have been generally super busy - but both I and this fic are very much still alive. I’m aware that it’s been a minute, so if anyone needs a refresher, the fic in its entirety can be found here.

Anyway - this is the long-awaited Jinkx Chapter™ and the point at which the story (imo) reeeaaalllyyyy starts to get good. So I hope you all enjoy, and to those of you who are still here and sat through the nine month hiatus: Thank you <3

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CHAPTER 18: YOU’VE STILL GOT IT

Dela had already left the house before Jinkx woke up. That was weird. Usually she didn’t leave to do anything without pestering her to get out of bed first. That did drive her a little insane - not that she’d ever say that out loud. Dela was trying. The fact that Jinkx hadn’t come with some kind of post-injury instruction manual made things difficult for the pair of them - she felt guilty about it. But acting on that guilt required effort that she didn’t have the capacity for.

She’s been bizarrely cagey and quiet since the show on Saturday, honestly - reluctant to talk about work, distant, inside her own head. Jinkx wants to help, but the part of her that knows how to is miles away; trapped behind some impenetrable wall held in place by surgical screws.

Regardless, Dela is god-knows-where, and Jinkx is alone, which she doesn’t deal well with. Being awake when she’s by herself is unpleasant - seconds drag on forever into minutes, and she feels agonizingly conscious of the time that she’s wasting. She’d set up camp in the living room, and more than likely wasn’t going to move until it was an acceptable time to go back to bed - coffee on the table, and Macho sitting on the couch a few feet away from her, stirring from his nap every few minutes to claw at the couch or glare at her like he wants her dead. The TV is on, but she isn’t exactly watching it. She scrolls through her texts, blankly waiting for Dela to respond to her and tell her what exactly she was doing, and trying her best to ignore the litany of unread messages from Bill. She’d deal with him later.

‘Later’ was becoming an increasingly nebulous concept. She missed him, in a way - it was like he’d stopped caring when she got hurt. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen him face-to-face, and the text correspondence she got from him to report back from the events of shows tended to be curt and impersonal - a couple of words, nothing more. Well, he was busy. And he was serving his purpose, she guessed. She hoped. In all honesty, she wasn’t really sure. She felt guilty about that too.

She feels like her body is constantly heavy; doing anything is difficult, in a way that she struggles to justify. On the days where she’s physically in pain, it makes sense at least. Or when she’s depressed - when something’s happened, when she’s actually struggling. She hates feeling like this - like a shell of a person, but without an excuse. On paper, she should be okay.

She’s spent the bulk of the last year mentally torturing herself like this. Being angry with herself when she feels like shit, and equally angry when she doesn’t and yet still can’t bring herself to function. The promotion had become a real point of shame. A few months of absence felt understandable - but a fucking year? She knew that she was letting people down, and in some way or another she’s lulled herself into thinking that maybe they’re better off without her. She didn’t have much faith left in her abilities as a promoter, or a booker - and if she couldn’t wrestle, then what was the point in her? She’d fucked up before.

She didn’t know how she felt about Manila being back, even if it was just for a night. Her gut said she didn’t like it.

That night barely held a coherent shape in Jinkx’s memory - the blood pooling on the mat, Raja’s seizure in the hallway, the unblinking terror on Manila’s face. Jinkx had gotten home from the emergency room at four in the morning, after spending all night picking up the pieces as best she could. She’d sat staring at the living room wall until the sun came up - still in her ring gear, blood that wasn’t hers drying in her cuticles, feeling like the walls were closing in around her. She recalled this horrible sense of foreboding overtaking her, like she knew that this was only the shitty start of something that was about to get much, much worse.

Her last exchange with Manila had been awful - Manila had been angry with her, and she had every right to be. She’d been on her way out the door regardless, but that didn’t change how terrible Jinkx felt about the way it ended. The situation with Magnolia was an embarrassing, shitty mess. Going off-script like she had was a problem on its own, even without the state she’d left Raja in. And yet a month down the line, she’d still been under contract.

Moreover, Magnolia had been holding the title - a position that Manila was furious about. She had made an absolute point of refusing to listen to any excuses Jinkx tried to give. They’d been flimsy at best - maybe it was a good thing that she’d been unable to get a word in edgeways. Anything she could have said would have been far too easy to poke holes in.

Jinkx has been put in a shitty position; being strongarmed by her talent, apparently incapable of growing a backbone and doing the right thing. She didn’t have any concrete proof that what Magnolia had done to Raja was deliberate, and Magnolia had made it crystal fucking clear that if Jinkx fired her, pulled a screwjob, or interfered in any other way, she’d go straight to every dirt-sheet that would listen to her and drag both her and the promotion’s names through the mud. That had terrified Jinkx to her core.

About five years ago, someone had put it together that the Jinkx Monsoon who now had tits and ran an all-women’s promotion was the same one who’d appeared as an acne-ridden sixteen-year old boy in an ancient TLC documentary about pro wrestling bootcamps. Maybe using the same ring name since she was a teenager had been a bad idea after all. There’d been a minor shitstorm on R/SquaredCircle - apparently it had been a slow news week, because then Pro Wrestling Insider ran a story about her. That had sent a few assholes in her direction but equally gave the promotion some free publicity. Then WWE had fired Jim Ross two days later, and everybody moved the fuck on.

It hadn’t been a big deal - she couldn’t exactly be outed if she’d never been in the closet in the first place. Her being trans had always been something of an open secret. For fuck’s sake - she’d used ‘Dude Looks Like a Lady’ as entrance music for years, she’d never exactly been subtle.

And then some mid-tier ex-WCW guy had started a Twitter rumor that she was lying about her gender identity, and she’d only founded FFW to enable her to perv on women. The allegation effectively ruined three months of her life. Some of the things she’d read about herself were downright fucking vile - they’d been forced to cancel two shows; she’d had to shut down all of her social media, and even then found herself getting death threats sent to her business email. Femme Fatale had been in its infancy, up and running for a little under three years, and it had nearly killed the entire promotion.

She’d had an awful, terrifying gut feeling that it would only have taken one bit of crappy press to reignite that level of public hatred, towards both the promotion and her personally - crappy press that Magnolia was clearly more than happy to provide. If it came straight from the mouth of someone who’d worked with her, rather than unsubstantiated crap from some bastard she’d never met with too much time on his hands, then Jinkx would have been definitively screwed. She’d learned the hard way how fragile her standing was. The threat had gotten to her, in a really fucking horrible way. She wasn’t sure if that had been Magnolia’s intention, but it had definitely worked.

So, she’d spent weeks handling the situation with kid gloves and waiting to see if a solution jumped out. It didn’t - and in the end, she’d fired her anyway, and lived to tell the tale.

Not that there hadn’t been consequences. Bianca, Morgan, and Detox - the three people originally tasked with trying to get the belt off of her before Courtney eventually succeeded - had all threatened to quit; her relationship with Manila had been irrevocably damaged. Raja’s career was over, and Jinkx hadn’t been able to look Courtney in the eye for weeks after that fucking massacre of a match. She couldn’t unsee the blood trickling from her nose, or the missing front tooth. It only twisted the knife in further.

Not to mention the guilt over feeling relieved that Magnolia had been stupid enough to shoot on someone twice. Maybe on some subliminal level, that had been her intention in letting the whole mess fester for as long as she did. Jinkx had known it would only be a matter of time before she tried it again. Firing someone over a botch wasn’t the done thing; deliberately injuring an opponent was entirely different. It was an easy out; one that didn’t put her neck on the line.

But it was her failure that had gotten them there in the first place, and her price to pay to fix it - not anyone else’s. It should have been Jinkx in that match instead of Court. It should have been her blood on Magnolia’s hands - her tooth on the ring canvas. Her pound of flesh.

Jinkx been reckless, and stupid. She’d endangered her talent by putting them in the ring with someone who had shown their capacity to be deliberately fucking evil, and for what?

Every stupid mistake she’d made in that couple of months had been haunting her for the last two years. It was undeniable proof - she sucked at her job. She’d put people in harm’s way to save her own skin. And if that was how she’d been before everything had happened, she didn’t even want to think about all of the ways in which she’d probably fuck it up now. Back then, she wasn’t a miserable shell of her past self. She’d still had passion; she still cared.

She glances over at the TV, trying her level best to fucking distract herself. UFC. The fight looks pretty bizarrely matched, a dark-haired beast of a woman with a shaved head getting the shit knocked out of her by some skinny kid with bright green hair. Buzzcut is bleeding all over the place; there’s barely a mark on Green Hair. Jinkx winces.

MMA had never made a lick of sense to her; she’d been in her share of messy matches, but that damage was always superficial. Busting someone’s face open with your bare hands is a completely different ballgame, and it’s always made her feel a little bit sick to watch. Plus it just seemed boring - maybe that was the sports-entertainer in her. What’s the point of having a cage there if nobody is gonna jump off of it? Where the fuck was all of the pomp and circumstance? What she was getting here was glacially-paced punching and kicking - no flair, just blood-sport.

Buzzcut takes a kick to the head and immediately hits the deck. Jinkx shuts the TV off.

Legitimate knockouts scared the shit out of her. She hated watching them happen; hated thinking about what kind of state they left people’s brains in. Jinkx had suffered through two concussions in her career - one when she was a rookie; the second the night she broke her neck. Dela had had four. Every time it was terrifying, and thinking about it for too long kept her up at night.

Watching Dela get hurt had been a kind of pain that Jinkx hadn’t been fully prepared for. Every time anything happened, she found herself wracked with a sense of sickening guilt for being the one that led her down this path in the first place. The night she’d come home after the hardcore match with Morgan - broken nose, swollen lips, tears cutting streaks through the dried blood all over her face - Jinkx had barely been able to look at her.

Jinkx had been in the ring with Dela the night she broke her leg - she’d watched it happen, horribly aware of exactly how bad it was, but glued to the spot, unable to do anything. Everything about it - the sound of snapping bone; the twisted, terrified look on her face as Bill trying to cinch in that stupid fucking ankle-lock - had haunted her for weeks. The sound of her voice was what had cut her the deepest; the pain and the panic behind her words, thumping the mat with the palm of her hand, screaming ‘I quit, I quit’ over and over.

Jinkx hadn’t spoken to Bill for almost a month after that. Dela had been the one to insist that they patched things up - she was okay, it had been an accident, he didn’t realize. Given that she’d been the one that had to go through three hours of surgery and six months of recovery because of his stupidity, she’d been the authority. Jinkx had been furious; after watching him treat Dela like an inconvenience at best and a personal affront to him at worst for as long as they’d been together, her patience for his shit had worn thin.

Bill and Jinkx had turned up at the same run-down training school for the first time on the same night, and had been joined at the hip for about four years as perennially single high-schoolers. He was a little abrasive, and had a tendency to talk over her - but underneath it all, Jinkx had sensed a kind of insecurity in him, veiled by this performative, hypermasc bravado. He’d clung onto her from the moment that they met and refused to let go. She didn’t mind - he’d never cared about the fact that she was a little weird, and he didn’t make her feel like an outcast the same way that other guys did back then.

He’d been the person responsible for the chip in her front tooth; a slightly overenthusiastic superkick during their first match in front of a crowd had taken a diagonal chunk out of it, which she’d then proceeded to accidentally swallow. She’d refused to get it fixed - in the first instance because she hadn’t had the money, then later because her response to Bill ribbing her for her fucked-up smile had always been to remind him that it was only like that because he was a shitty wrestler. It was a part of their personal history.

Bill and Dela had never exactly gotten along. Well, Bill had never exactly gotten along with Dela, and had never tried to. He’d never really learned how to share Jinkx - he got jealous and clingy in the locker room when she tried to talk to other people for god’s sake. Dela gatecrashing their little bromance had seriously rubbed him the wrong way.

Dela hadn’t been a wrestler when they first met - a recent college graduate, she’d worked in the bar that Jinkx and the other guys frequented after shows, since the staff seldom kicked them out for being too rowdy. They’d both crushed on her for weeks, from afar - Jinkx had been the first one of the two of them to make a move, and it was like Bill resented Dela for picking the wrong guy. Not that he’d ever said that out loud; not that he’d even really tried to pursue her. She’d just been supposed to telepathically know that he’d wanted her too - he was the better man, or rather the only one that succeeded at being a man. It was like he hadn’t even viewed Jinkx as competition.

Once he got to know her, besides thinking she was hot, he couldn’t stand her, or at least he claimed he couldn’t. Her voice was like nails on a chalkboard; she was too fake, too immature. Before she became a wrestler herself, she didn’t understand ‘their’ world - he called her a ring-rat more often than he used her actual name - but when she started, she sucked at it and wasn’t trying hard enough. She was pretty much incapable of doing anything right. For fuck’s sake, he even hated the fact that she didn’t argue back when he tried to start shit with her. It had always driven Jinkx quietly insane, but Dela insisted that she didn’t mind.

Jinkx feels bad for Dela more than anyone through all of this shit. She tried - she fucking tried, so hard. With everything; with him, with the promotion, with her. Jinkx still felt just as consumed by that incredible, overwhelming love for her as she had back when they first got together, and that made the guilt and the pain so much worse. Dela was suffering because of her - she could see it. Knowing how much of a horrific, draining burden she’s become on everyone she cares about disgusts her.

Five-percent survival rate. That sentence had haunted her since she got injured. Why did she get to be one of that five percent? It doesn’t feel fair. Better people have fucking died because of the same shit, and the ones that lived didn’t waste the time they’d stolen by rotting away in their own misery and self-pity.

Jinkx’s phone starts vibrating in her hand, jolting her back into the real world. The name on the caller ID makes her stomach drop. MANILA LUZON.

“Manila? What’s going on? Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Manila’s voice on the other end of the line is clipped and guarded. Jinkx feels uneasy. “Look, I’m gonna cut to the chase - Mateo got a developmental deal with WWE, so it’s looking pretty likely that we’re gonna be moving back sometime soon. I need somewhere to work, and I-“

“That’s kind of not my area anymore. Dela said you were at the show on Saturday, did you talk to Bill?” Jinkx says. Her voice feels like an answering machine; verbally shitting out the exact same thing she has to tell Dela, or any of the girls, when they try to come to her about shit, without any kind of conscious thought. Talk to him, I can’t deal with this right now

“No, I didn’t - why the fuck would I? I’m not asking a referee about a new contract deal. It’s your promotion,” Manila’s tone spikes.

“It is, but-“

“Jinkx, come on.” Jinkx can practically hear Manila rolling her eyes. “I didn’t see you around once the other night. What the fuck is going on?”

“What?” Jinkx says absently, barely paying attention. She doesn’t want to deal with this right now. Manila had always been spectacularly talented at being a bitch when the situation necessitated it, even before the whole horrific mess with Raja. That had just honed her ability to focus said talent in Jinkx’s direction.

“You were at the show, right?”

“No,” Jinkx says flatly.

“What the- why?” Manila sounds astonished. Did she really not know? How the fuck did she not know?

“I’m retired, Manila,” Jinkx feels like she’s stating the obvious. Manila pauses for a second. Jinkx hears her swallow.

“As of when?”

“I…Shit happened last year,” she doesn’t feel like explaining herself right now. Manila doesn’t respond, leaving a pause in the conversation that begs for an explanation. Jinkx grits her teeth. “Botched piledriver - I broke my neck, triple fusion surgery, whole career down the toilet in five minutes.”

“And how is that stopping you from being backstage?” Manila asks pointedly, moving straight along from what Jinkx had just said without any kind of feeling. Jinkx feels like she’s smacking her head against a brick wall. She stays silent. “I’m serious, Jinkx. It’s a mess - how did you let things get this bad?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I told you that you had a goddamn laundry list of issues to work out two years ago when I left. It’s bad enough that you let Magnolia stick around after what she did to Raja - it’s bad enough that you let her keep the belt. I’d thought things would have improved by now, and somehow they’re worse.”

“You’re still mad about that?” Jinkx groans, exasperated. She wasn’t about to give away the fact that she herself wasn’t even remotely over it yet - the only person who didn’t seem to be holding onto any resentment or guilt over the whole thing was Raja. Though that was probably because she didn’t remember most of it.

“Raja nearly died, and you let the person responsible get away with it - I care about her, of course I’m still fucking mad. You can’t do that to somebody.”

“How the hell are you guys still not fucking?” Jinkx mutters under her breath. She really hopes Manila hadn’t heard her - that would do less than nothing to help her case.

“You know that Courtney went off-script on Bianca, and that Adore kid, right?” Manila asks, sharp and confrontational.

“I- what?” Jinkx sits up - pretty certain that she’d misheard something. “What the fuck did she do?”

“Ran in during their match - she hit Bea with a chair, slapped Adore around a bit, then demanded a title match. Dela and Bianca tried to convince me it was a work, but it was super obvious.”

“Manila, I- look, are you sure? Like, this was definitely Courtney?”

“I’m not stupid, Jinkx.”

“I never said you were, but Courtney’s the champ. Why would she need to-”

“Uh, no she’s not,” Manila says disbelievingly. She pauses for a second. “Jinkx, do you seriously not know who your world champion is?”

“I thought I did - there was a bit of a hiccup a few weeks ago, Adore botched the finish and accidentally won the belt, but Courtney got it back.” Jinkx pauses. Someone isn’t telling her something. “Are you serious?”

“Of course I’m fucking serious. This is ridiculous, Jinkx. You’re in charge, and you can’t let any of this crap fly. You can’t let people run around shooting on each other, you can’t not pay attention to what’s going on in your own company.”

Jinkx nods along with her. She’s fucking right, and she’s the only person around Jinkx right now who can’t see the ‘HANDLE WITH CARE’ sticker that’s been plastered on her forehead for the last year. Slowly, quietly, she feels that heavy lead ball of depression she’s been carrying around within her chest for the last year starting to crack.

“You need to get your information from someone who wasn’t just there for a night. All I’m saying is I’m looking to re-sign, and I’m there if you want me - but not if something doesn’t change,” Manila sighs. “I know how much all of this means to you, and I don’t wanna see it fail, but this is not the promotion I left two years ago. Half of the locker room is gone - the audience is barely there. You need to fucking do something.”

“You’re right,” Jinkx says. She chews the new information over in her mind; still reeling from the well-timed sucker punch to the jaw that Manila had just landed on her from miles away. “You’re right, and I’m sorry. I’m gonna get this shit in hand. Give me a call once you’re back home and we can talk about you re-signing. I mean, if you decide that things are up to your standards.”

There’s a little hint of the old bite in her voice. Hi, Jinkx Monsoon - nice to see you. It’s been a while.

Manila gives a surprised little laugh.

“Okay,” she sounds taken aback, before adopting that serious, stern mom-tone she’s been using for the rest of the conversation. “But seriously though, figure-“

“You’re laboring the point,” Jinkx says. “Thank you - clearly I needed someone to kick me up the ass.”

Manila chuckles.

“Look, I have to go - I’m in a fucking bathroom stall at Epcot, Mateo is with the kids, but I couldn’t stop thinking about everything, and I had to talk to you,” Manila says. “I appreciate it. And I’m sorry about everything that happened to you. It sounds like it sucks.”

“Yeah, it does.”

Manila ends the call. Jinkx stares at her phone screen, a wry smile on her face. More cracks start to form. She’s not sure what this emotion is, whether it’s good or bad - but she’s gonna ride it out and see where it goes. That sea of unopened texts from Bill catches her attention.

BILL SCARGILL:

UNREAD (14)

Rematch sucked. One with the red hair keeping title. Courtney can’t fucking wrestle

D throwing bitch fit about decision. Tell her to get her shit together.

SERIOUSLY. Get your wife in check

Jinkx???

Adore feuding with Bianca. Rest of show sucked - where tf did you find those jobbers?? Trinity Fame and the other blonde one can’t wrestle. Time to downsize??

Had to talk to Courtney about her attitude btw. Entitled as fuck. None of these girls have any respect for authority.

Show was fine. Good crowd. Courtney no showed btw

Courtney no showed again.

Don’t know what’s going on with her and don’t care. Unreliable bs. No professionalism.

If she doesn’t turn up tonight she’s fired. If you don’t answer this I’m assuming you don’t give a fuck.

Call me ASAP

Jinkx

Jinkx?????

CALL ME

That horrible, heavy ball in her chest explodes.

She needs to talk to Bill. Wait, shit - no, she needs to talk to Dela. Find out what’s really going on, because the picture that this is painting from texts and Manila’s account alone isn’t fucking pretty. She can feel long-unused gears within her brain slowly, stiffly grinding into action again; powered primarily by the white-hot anger that’s sitting between her lungs where the bomb just detonated.

Now that she truly thinks about it, Jinkx can’t say with absolute certainty how Bill ended up in the position of ludicrous roided-up power he’s currently in. Only that, when she eventually awoke from the walking coma of memory loss and painkillers her injury had sent her into, that was just the way of things. And then the depression had kicked in, and so too had her lack of desire to do anything. Dela had seemed to go along with it sans protest, but she’d been going along with his shit sans protest for years - that wasn’t an indicator that he was any fucking good at what he was doing.

She pulls out her laptop, typing out a frenzied plan of action, trying to curate some of the mess in her head into something usable. Talk to Dela. Figure out what the fuck his problem is. And for how long it’s been a fucking problem. And then…

“Everything okay?”

Dela’s voice breaks through the silence - she’s standing in the doorway in her gym gear, bag over her shoulder and stray hairs stuck to her brow with sweat. Her phone is in her hand, and she looks shaken. Macho barrels across the couch, using Jinkx’s chest as a launch-pad to greet his favorite mom at the door, mewing with his tail in the air until Dela picks him up.

“I- uh…what?” Jinkx stumbles over her words after she gets done choking on the lungful of air that Macho had knocked out of her. She half-closes her laptop, putting it down on the coffee table.

“I asked if you were okay,” Dela sits down on the couch by Jinkx’s side, putting a hand on her thigh as she cradles Macho like a baby. There’s a concerned little knot in between her eyebrows.

“Yeah,” Jinkx nods solidly. Dela pulls a face that Jinkx can only describe as alarmed. “Are you?”

“Uh - not really, it’s a long story, I won’t bother you with-”“Please bother me with it.” Jinkx claps Dela’s hand in both of hers. Dela laughs nervously.

“Well, I just narrowly avoided getting murdered by Bianca in the parking lot of the gym for one thing - I’ve never seen her that pissed, it was fucking terrifying. I’m…” she pauses. “Courtney got fired. Supposedly on your orders, which obviously isn’t true but it’s still…” Jinkx clenches her teeth. Dela sets Macho back down on the couch, turning to face Jinkx. “What is going on with you? You seem really…” Dela searches for a word, which Jinkx can only imagine is ‘insane’. She eventually settles on: “…Energised.”

“I, uh…I just got off the phone with Manila. Between everything she told me and now this, I need to take care of some business. The next show is this Saturday, right?”

There’s an unfamiliar kind of certainty to Jinkx’s voice. Dela looks at her with her eyes alight; her mouth hanging just open in surprise.

And then, Jinkx is returning to Femme Fatale.

Pride Challenge Points: 3589

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