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[The sun is setting behind the treeline of a wooded area. The image pans down to a clearing. We watch, from behind, as a man digs a hole. His back is familiar to many, and the camera cuts to a close up shot of each of those identifying marks that reveal his identity.
- The thick, curly hair barely tamed into a bun at his nape
- The denim jacket pulled taut across a strong back and shoulders
- The knife at his hip
The man’s voiceover plays atop this series of cuts.]
JACK PERRY
Do not go gentle into that good night.
[There is another series of close up cuts, this time of JACK’S face as he digs.
- Grimacing as he hefts a heavier shovel of dirt out of the hole
- Wiping his brow with one dark denim sleeve
- Pausing to slam his spade into the earth and lean against the handle]
JACK PERRY
Old age should burn and rave at close of day…
[The camera cuts to a full shot of the scene. JACK is standing in a hole that is hip-deep. It is clear, from his place in the earth, that he is digging another grave. His hand still rests on top of the handle as he surveys the clearing around him.]
JACK PERRY
...rage. Rage, against the dying of the light.
[JACK resumes digging. Several shots cut around to observe him as the hole grows deeper, as the sun continues to sink lower in the sky.]
JACK PERRY
Though wise men at their end know dark is right…
[The shot cuts to an overhead view. JACK heaves one last shovel full of dirt out of the hole, and visibly exhausted in body, and in soul, sets his shovel on the edge of the grave and very slowly pulls himself out of the earth’s cold embrace.]
JACK PERRY
...because their words had forked no lighting they do not go gentle into that good night.
*****
SOME TIME EARLIER
In the end, he laughs about it: the Scapegoat, unwilling to make a sacrifice. The sacrifice, the one that will give all others value. The sacrifice that will change everything...the last sacrifice he has to make.
He waits, though. He’s not ready, not when that sensation of something coming loose in his chest still happens when a certain ringtone goes off on his phone about twice a week. Not when those ringtones bring pictures of sprawling, wild property that lodge in the empty places inside of him, holes he tries to fill by forging knives out of driftwood and pinecones. Not when the dreams of trees and sunlight still come for him in the night, and he wakes up in a cold sweat with tears drying on his cheeks.
When he gets the call, he knows it’s time...and he’s still not ready. Not when that ringtone will sound again, not when he needs to be there to hear it.
Still, he agrees. He agrees, because he can’t let it happen again. He never made this sacrifice, and it’s not one he can justify.
Even if it means that the next time Darby sends a message, the man who hears that ringtone might not care.
He says yes, he makes the arrangements...and he digs up a body.
He thinks about the coffin match as he pulls the carcass from the dirt. He thinks about skin sliding against skin, the crackle of living energy balancing the scales of life and death, of love and hate. He thinks of Darby’s haggard blue eyes peering over a cup of coffee with a gleam of light that looks like hope.
He made a knife for just this purpose. He was ready. Ready to bleed, ready to die...ready to recall the dead to life.
Last time he had to lay himself open, carve him out piece by piece. Now, he just needs one to balance the scales and make the rebirth of Luchasaurus possible. It’s not hard: he made the knife. It’s sharp enough to tear through muscle and bone. To trade his living, beating heart for the black, dead thing he left in the desert to rot.
As he places it inside his own open ribcage, he wonders what it means when he squeezes the heart between the open bones, and it oozes not the ichor of decomposition, but the brilliant living red of the rest of his blood before everything goes black.
*****
[As JACK PERRY gets to his feet, a scraping sound in the distance draws his gaze. The shot cuts to one of LUCHASAURUS in silhouette, dragging a battered casket behind him. He stops directly in front of JACK, and drops the end of the casket in his grip.
As the two face each other, the voiceover continues in LUCHASAURUS’S voice.]
LUCHASAURUS
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright ttheir frail deeds might have danced in a green bay…
[JACK looks past LUCHASAURUS at the coffin, then back at LUCHASAURUS. Reaching up to smooth some curls that escaped their elastic back off his sweat and dirt-streaked face, he smiles.
LUCHASAURUS smiles back.]
LUCHASAURUS
Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.
[JACK finally turns to pry the lid of the casket open with a creak. The shot cuts to one, just over JACK and LUCHASAURUS’S shoulder, focused on the casket as various objects are tossed in through more of the voiceover.]
LUCHASAURUS
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight…
[A fistful of thumbtacks goes into the coffin.]
JACK PERRY
...and learn, too late, they grieved it on its way…
[A fistful of broken glass goes into the coffin. A leather belt follows, bearing the name of Killswitch.]
LUCHASAURUS
...do not go gentle into that good night.
*****
“You’re gonna have to talk to me, Jack.”
He walks away.
A plan forms in the trailer, after All Out. It sends the trio back to Atlanta, to Darby’s place for a few days of work that will be interrupted once by Darby’s appearance at a Dynamite taping. It’s good, too, it’s...incredible.
“Jack!”
He turns his back on Darby.
It creeps in, the silence. Words he can’t get out, sentences that get too large and unwieldy to fit across his tongue. The worst part is that it doesn’t even feel wrong, but it’s also not what Darby or Lucha signed up for when they agreed to be a team.
“Don’t do this, man.”
He walks out of the room and down the hallway of Darby’s house.
Jack makes it ten steps before he’s caught by the back of his collar and slammed against the nearest wall. He shuts his eyes and braces for it, for the moment he knew was coming when he said yes to the Waynes and sacrificed himself to make up for--
The fact that Darby’s hand curled around the back of his head to keep him from slamming it into the plaster escapes him. The kiss doesn’t.
It’s brutal and blistering, and there’s a bright flare of copper across his tongue, but Darby corrects the angle and the pressure pretty quickly. He works Jack’s mouth open as his fingers work the elastic out of his hair until he’s branding Jack with the hot sweep of his tongue behind his teeth, over his lip, flicking against his soft pallet. It takes Jack too long to let himself kiss Darby back, curl a hand around his nape and the other against his scalp while Darby tackles him like an opponent in the ring. Dives through the ropes into the kiss, launches himself into pressing his hips into Jack’s until he needs Darby’s greedy closeness to support his weight…
...and all but tears his fly open to wrap his fingers around Jack’s cock until the kiss breaks just because Jack can’t stop the high, ragged moan that’s ripped out of his throat.
“I’m not stupid, stupid. One way or another, you’re gonna have to talk to me.”
Jack is painfully hard shamefully fast, and he’s rocking into Darby’s grip the moment he sets his teeth against the skin of Jack’s neck just below the bristles of his beard.
“Never said you had to do it out loud.”
Jack’s eyes burn, but he finally drags Darby’s mouth back up to his without more than that sting of guilt behind his eyelids. He presses apology and fear into Darby’s mouth as he coaxes his mouth open, frustration into the rake of teeth against his lower lip, and when he tries to reach for Darby’s fly to touch him in return, lets Darby knock his hand aside and have his way with moans promising to try and remember.
That Darby knew him before. That he’s seen the silence, and it didn’t bother him—that this Jack Perry might not have words, and he’s willing to watch instead of listen.
And when he comes, crying out Darby’s name—his first word spoken in days—he feels Darby all but shove absolution down his throat when his mouth swallows down the sounds he drags out of Jack in the throes of orgasm.
*****
[In the distance, behind LUCHASAURUS and JACK, a dark figure is advancing. Its shape is blurry and indistinct, and it is drawing near with a speed and an aggression that’s frightening.
The pair stare into the casket, unaware of the intruder as the voiceover continues.]
JACK PERRY
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight…
LUCHASAURUS
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay…
[JACK and LUCHASAURUS finally turn at the last minute, just as the dark figure reaches them.
The shot cuts to the casket, where a bright red gas can lands inside atop the other items.
It then cuts to all three individuals standing in a line, JACK on the figure’s left, LUCHASAURUS on their right, as the hood covering their head is pushed back to reveal the next speaker in the voiceover.]
DARBY ALLIN
Rage…
[DARBY looks to LUCHAUSAURUS, who nods in acknowledgment.]
DARBY
...rage…
[DARBY looks to JACK. JACK smiles and nods. DARBY turns back to the coffin, reaches out, and slams the casket shut.]
DARBY
...against the dying of the light.
*****
It gets worse when Darby comes back from Dynamite, because Jack watches. He watches, and it slides under his skin like a splinter. The sight of the flamethrower brings with it more dreams of the trees and sun, and it feels awful when he wakes up and he feels safe, comfortable. He’s not the target of the fire this time, and yet the fire brought them both here to this place, this moment.
They doused the flames before they could do lasting harm, but someone still died in the inferno. The sacrificial pyre just burned longer than they thought it would.
Turns out words aren’t so great after all, because Jack finds himself picking a fight before he can stop himself, and thirty four hours after getting back to Atlanta Darby is already manhandling him.
This is it. This is the end.
“Let go of me, you fuck!”
“Shut up, Jack.”
He’s dragged into a copse of trees not far from the house by the scruff of his neck like a goddamn dog, and once Darby releases him Jack is helpless but to do exactly as he’s told.
It shows how little of him is left in the bag of flesh and bone that used to be Jack Perry that he hadn’t even thought about the bus in ages. Now, he’s staring at it and his chest is raw and aching for how much he fucking missed it. Now it’s sitting with the doors wide open to the interior, where Darby’s clearly been busy clearing out the whole damn thing. Ripping out the rest of the insides, replacing the futon, and he’s pretty sure the box sitting against the back of the driver’s seat belongs to a minifridge.
“If this is the wrong thing, I can put a tent up instead.” Darby offers. “But I got a grill coming in, some outdoor heaters for when it gets cold, and I’m clearing out the grass over here for a permanent fire pit if you wanna go full caveman—”
Jack grabs Darby by the scruff of his neck this time, only it’s to kiss his gratitude into every inch of skin he can get his mouth on.
He drags him into the Scapegoat bus, christens the new futon with Darby moaning as his pleasure coats Jack’s tongue. They spend the night outside, and when Jack needs to lay beneath the stars, Darby joins him. Jack builds a fire, and they fall asleep under an open sky.
When they wake in the morning to sun filtering through a different set of trees, Jack is unafraid.
*****
[The shot cuts to one of the casket being lowered into the ground, over the shoulders of all three men. It lifts, and we can see that the grave is not empty.
The casket is coming to nest inside of a much larger coffin. Once the casket is inside, all three men work together to place the coffin lid on top, then move to shovels nearby to fill the grave as a team. The voiceover continues, cutting to close up shots of each speaker’s face in turn.]
DARBY ALLIN
And you, Jon Moxley…
LUCHASAURUS
...Patriarchy…
JACK PERRY
...Young Bucks...there on the sad height…
[The shot cuts to one inside the grave, each shovelful of dirt slowly obscuring the camera as the thuds of earth hitting the coffin lid ring out, deafening.]
DARBY ALLIN
Curse, bless us now with your tears, we pray.
[When the shot goes black, it cuts yet again to an elevated view of the grave, now full of dirt. Each of them drive their shovel into the mound, one at a time.]
LUCHASAURUS
Do not go gentle into that good night.
[The shovels buried in the mound, the trio starts to walk away in unison, Jack now at the center of the line. The closes in on his face as they draw nearer to the camera, and over his shoulder there is a flaming emblem depicting the tapered outline of a coffin. In the center, there is what appears to be the representation of a dinosaur’s skull.]
JACK PERRY
Rage, rage...against the dying of the light.