Catalina Cortes Vs. Sebastian Hawke

Cat wasn’t sure how much time had passed since she pinned Silvio Leon and became the Carnage World Champion. Maybe fifteen minutes, maybe thirty. Could it have been an hour already? Her Wario ring gear was soaked through with sweat. One elbow pad was missing, after she used it to dry her post-match tears. Then she got sweat in her eyes, then there were more tears. Though her vision was blurred at the time, she was pretty sure she tossed the pad into the crowd, a one-of-a-kind bodily fluid drenched souvenir for a lucky fan who wasn’t easily grossed out. It sounded like there were still fans in the building, murmuring and yelling and chanting, but her ears rang when the closing bell did, and they hadn’t stopped since. She couldn’t trust her own senses. Even her eyes were suspect.

She sat on a bench at the back of her dressing room. It was adjacent to the wall, and she needed the support to keep herself upright while she waited. Her eyes kept drifting from the door back to the title draped across her lap. Cat wanted to strap it around her waist and see what she looked like as the champion, but her hands were too shaky. The best she could do after the match was a classic over-the-shoulder pose. Her legs were just as unsteady, and she needed the support of the guardrail to get back up the aisle. A few fans got celebratory snapshots with the new champion in all her smelly, disheveled, exhausted glory. Maybe she could get Instagram to take them down if they were too unflattering.

Her mother’s arrival was unexpected, much like her mid-ring tears. Cat hated crying in front of people. She made a vow never to do it again, ever since the incident with her brother’s Zubat and the Confuse Ray and her Piplup that ultimately hurt itself to death(even though those were rage tears and technically didn’t count). But locking eyes with her mom seconds after her greatest accomplishment was more than her heart could bear. Maybe it would become one of those classic moments in Carnage highlight reels for years to come. Maybe it would be just another example of her childish behavior. Patting her newly won championship, waiting for her mother to come congratulate her, Cat decided she was cool either way.

The important thing was her second wind. Finding some reserve of stamina deep within her, so that she could greet her mom with the appropriate energy and showmanship. Something that screamed, “MEET THE NEW CARNAGE WORLD CHAMPION - YOUR DAUGHTER - CATALINA CORTES!!!”

Multiple exclamation points, maybe an anime pose, the belt around her waist. Cat struggled to her feet, still shakily clutching the title. Putting a championship belt on shouldn’t be that hard. Sure, Silvio burned through her second and third and so many other winds, but there had to be a ninth one in there somewhere.

“And new Carnage World Heavyweight Champion,” she mumbled. “Cata--BLAARGH!”

After she vomited onto the floor of her dressing room, she slumped back down onto the bench. Luckily, no puke got on the belt. That would be a bad precedent for her first night as the champion. Though she did notice something surprising about the barf before her. “Granola bar. Thought you would’ve been more digested by now.” She forced herself to laugh. “I’m very funny.”

The floor vomit would probably ruin any grandiose greeting, so Cat decided to lay down. Wiping her mouth on her remaining elbow pad, she used the title for an uncomfortable golden pillow and squeezed onto the bench. Her anxiety and her exhaustion were at odds as she tried to nap, but once her eyes closed Cat found she couldn’t get them back open. She heard the door sometime later. “Mom, I threw up,” she muttered, barely awake.

Her mother didn’t answer immediately, as if she was judging the vomit. “You did,” she agreed, after some deliberation. There was less disappointment in her voice than usual.

Dani Cortes’ proverbial pats-on-the-head were infrequent, but even though Cat couldn’t move, she knew this was probably her best chance to ever get one. “Did I do good?”

Cat’s head was gently lifted, her belt pillow swapped for a hoodie that was much more comfortable. A hand pushed some hair out of Cat’s face. It wouldn’t do for the new champion to choke to death in her sleep. The last thing she heard before finally slipping into unconsciousness was her mom’s voice.

“You did.”

---

“I thought things would be different,” Cat said. She examined her untouched soy mocha. A week after becoming the champion, her stomach was still doing corkscrew planchas. Salad was easy enough to keep down. Anything that tasted good, not so much. Emotional eating, once her greatest strength, had become her greatest weakness.

Dani Cortes sat opposite her daughter at the green patio table. Cat didn’t mention that this was the same Starbucks, even the same table that she and Marlowe frequented during their tenure as the Kit-Kat Connection. Cat flipflopped on whether or not she was OVER-over the loss of her friend, but the location’s familiarity helped to soothe her frazzled nerves. Dani sipped a kiwi starfruit lemonade. Her demeanor was frosty as always, especially when she tried to counterbalance her daughter’s intensity. “How so?”

Cat thought it over. “Nonstop high-fives,” she decided. “Actual high-fives and figurative ones. People stopping me for pictures, all of Baltimore wearing t-shirts with my face, that ever elusive Twitch partnership. Everybody celebrating… Me.”

“Narcissistic,” Dani said. “Seems like the crowd enjoyed it.”

Cat swirled her coffee cup. “Legion,” she corrected. “We call them the Legion. Branding and all that. Guess I gotta get better at that representing the company thing. Especially with the managerial shake-up and crossover show piled on top of my regular schedule. Winning was…” She trailed off, searching for the right words. “Um, pretty cool. But now I’m officially Catalina Cortes, Carnage World Champion and I have no idea what I’m doing.”

Dani chuckled like a person who never found anything funny. “Neither did Silvio Leon.”

Cat shrugged. “Maybe he got too ahead of himself. Looked past me. Maybe he was distracted. Or maybe I just had a better night.”

“Maybe,” Dani said. “Seems you two have already made a habit of this. Fiendishly clever, that one. You’ll see him again.”

“Him,” Cat agreed. “Or Ken Davison or Kyra Johnson or Mitch Heart or Trent Steel or anybody good enough to climb to the top. No gimme defenses. From here on out, it’s me against the best in the company until one of them beats me. Pretty overwhelming. I’m technically in the same league as every Carnage World Champion, but I really don’t feel like I am.”

Keeping silent, Dani let the words hang in the air. It was a trick she always used to make her children think deeper about their own words, until they deeply regretted them. “Welcome to the hard part,” she said, with a deadpan sigh. “Winning’s fun and exhilarating and unforgettable. Defending, though, that’s where the real work starts. The day-to-day trials of the champion, the standard bearer, the figurehead. Face of the company, all eyes on you. Everyone watching, looking for the slightest weakness to capitalize on so they can take your title and have their moment. That’s what you have to look forward to. Physically, mentally and emotionally daunting in a way you’ve never experienced before.”

“Ten-out-of-ten pep talk,” Cat sulked, rubbing the quill tattoo on her left wrist. “Would recommend.”

A groan escaped Dani’s throat, a sound full of more frustration than she was usually willing to show. For a normal person, it would’ve been a 0.5/10. “You kids and that tweet-speak.”

“Did you google ‘what is the Twitter?’” Cat asked, taking her phone from her purse. She scrolled while she sulked.

“Catalina, stop deflecting,” Dani said. “I know that between corporatizing a ninja clan and mastering the ancient art of the Frozen Fist, my mothering skills were a bit lacking. Interpersonal communication isn’t one of my strengths, unless you count punching someone’s heart into sorbet. That presents a problem when you want your children to be happy, but you can’t ice-kick all the messy, awful experiences that they have to suffer through. You watch them struggle and hope they’ll come through with minimal damage.”

This time it was Cat that chuckled, a great value version of her mother’s own. “I feel pretty damaged.”

Dani gave her the slightest shrug. “Everyone is, dear. And yet, you’re the one I don’t worry about. That defiant streak of yours never wears out. After a month in Baltimore, we thought you’d beg to come home. You pressed on, probably out of spite as much as anything else. I never thought anyone would care about your video games and your relationship with a Victorian poet.”

Cat jumped at the chance to correct her mother. “Elizabethan.”

“But,” Dani continued, plowing through the interruption in a not un-Cat-like way. “Somehow you made people care. I certainly don’t get it, but I’m over forty and the world has conspired to forget me. Your friend left, you were crushed, and then you rebounded spectacularly. Honestly dear, I never expected to watch you win a world title with an arena full of cheering fans. Do you think that it was just the best night of your life?”

Cat conceded at the pep talk’s improvement. “This is better.”

“You’ll find your way,” Dani said, pausing to finish her lemonade. “You always do. For all your melodrama about living up to the family name, you’ve carved a fine niche for yourself that doesn’t involve being an evil luchador. Maybe it took some nudging to keep you from your worst impulses, but in the end, you made it. And I have no doubt you’ll continue to make it. I’m immeasurably proud of you, Catalina. How’s that for a pep talk, you unappreciative little shit?”

Her scrolling ceased, Cat stared at her mother in wide-eyed disbelief. “Holy shit, Mom,” she said, finally letting a breath from ten seconds ago out. “You fucking rule.”

“Yes,” Dani agreed. “Really, dear, if you’re in a funk then you should find something to get mad about. That always seems to make you productive. Once you push past the preliminary tantrum and get to the seething rage, of course. Catalina, are you listening to me?”

A notification pulled the champion’s attention from the conversation. Cat scrolled again, her eye twitched, the grip on her phone tightened. The squeeze was enough to send a crack through the black nail polish on her thumb. Her teeth clenched and unclenched before she could respond. “I’m being trolled.”

Her mother sat back, her face threatened the slightest smile. Dani Cortes rarely did, but the threat alone was terrible to behold. “And does that make you angry?”

“Yep,” Cat said, finally taking a sip of her coffee. It was lukewarm by then, when she needed a scalding hot infusion of caffeine the most. Her eyes finally left the screen and met her mother’s once again, the two sharing a Stare of Ice and Fire on the Starbucks patio.

Dani’s lips curled into the slightest of an approving smirk, her own version of raucous applause. “That’s my girl.”

---

The feed cut to Catalina Cortes’ living room-slash-recording studio. Balloons in gold and orange and yellow cluttered the walls, matching confetti covered her couch and coffee table, where her newly won Carnage World Championship sat proudly displayed, an island of perfection in a sea of disarray. A lopsided banner overhead proclaimed:


Cat sat on the couch, her shoulders slumped, confetti strewn through her hair and across her clothes. The picture of post-victory depression. Her black hoodie read CHAMPION OF WHATEVER in white, a gold tiara sat askew on her head, threatening to topple off at any moment.

“Yay,” Cat murmured, blowing a yellow and blue polka-dotted noisemaker. She followed by giving a cactus maraca a few halfhearted shakes, before tossing it off screen to an accompanying stock crash sound effect. “I did it. I did the thing. Now I can go back to my home planet. Ya-freaking-hoo.” She tooted the noisemaker again, before tearing it in half and pitching the remains at the camera. When she attempted to straighten the tiara, it only became tangled in her hair.

“AH!” Cat bellowed, tearing the tiara from her head, bleach blonde strands ripping out alongside it. She snapped the tiara like a Kit-Kat and dropped it to the floor, giving the title on her table a gesture before continuing. “So at Act of Defiance you saw me at my best and my worst. I was good enough to beat Silvio Leon, but I also started blubbering like a goddamn baby when I did. Dunno if it was one of those sincere moments of real emotion fit for hype packages or if it was the stuff of YouTube cringe compilations. Normally, I’m better at keeping my tears bottled up. Everyone in the theater thought I was a monster for not crying at the end of Coco. But on the biggest night of my life, crowd cheering, mom watching, shit got a little too real. And now the party’s over.”

Fumbling for her phone, Cat hit a button, releasing her CHAMPSTRAVAGANZA banner from the ceiling. It fell with dramatic flair rivaling the Jurassic Park’s WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH. The falling banner accompanied a camera cut. The studio living room was suddenly free of balloons and confetti. Cat was in her standard orange and black ring gear; her hair swept to one side, with a single braid on the other; the title strapped bandolier-style across one shoulder. Her post-victory depression turned to in-promo intensity. “Time to get back to work. Incursion is weeks away and I got some representing to do. My next challenger here has to be determined. Oh, and I got my first match since becoming the champion. Idle hands, right? Glad I got something to focus on, because I’ve had a lot of complicated feels since beating Silvio and Sebastian Hawke is an ideal target for my kick-therapy.”

“Seb, honey, baby,” Cat continued. “Seems like only yesterday I was teaching you to promo and naming your kick and defending the tag belts against you. Where does the time go? You look like a totally different person now. Won a belt, lost a belt. I could just muss your hair, you little scamp. Or knee you in the freaking face.”

She raised her hands, weighing each option as if she were a human scale. “I go back and forth. Congratulations, but also, maybe get your boy the next time he trolls me over winning a match fair and square. Beating Silvio took everything I had. Losing sucks, so I don’t begrudge anyone’s hurt feelings, and I don’t expect a parade from the homeys of the guy I took the title from. I just expect better than getting ratioed by Axton’s dog and something about my tiny head. But I’m sure you were just kidding, because that’s always the explanation, and you weren’t trying to take a shit on my hugest of huge moments. You're all just bros being bros. You’re not responsible for what your friends do, Sebby. Keep being a good boy and maybe Axton will let you up on the couch.”

“There’s a lesson, I guess,” Cat said with a sigh, unstrapping the title. She gave it a look and positioned it over one shoulder. A frown followed, before her eyes went back to the camera. “Things are different now. Being Carnage World Champion officially makes me less of a person to the rest of the roster. Everyone either wants what I have or they want to see me lose it. I’m awesome when I tweet about pizza and stream Smash Brothers, but heaven forbid I have my own goals and heaven-super-forbid that I actually achieve them. Guess I should at least say thanks for the wake-up call. But I really hope none of you were dumb enough to mistake my silliness for weakness.”

Cat held up the deuces, her black nail polish repainted to a pristine, uncracked shine. “In the last year, I’ve lost exactly twice. After Silvio ended my undefeated streak, I congratulated him. After me and Marlowe lost the tag belts to Rock Lobster, I would’ve sent Jon and Axton some chocolate strawberries, but I ate them watching Mulan 2020. Side effect of being in a not-great place emotionally after losing my title and my best friend on the same night. But who cares? That didn’t negatively impact any of you guys, so did it truly happen at all? If a tree falls on me in the woods and the Entourage isn’t around to hear me scream, do I make a sound? Shrug emoji. I took both my losses, pardon the phrase, like a champ, and now I’ve learned I’m an idiot for expecting the same treatment when things go my way. Cool beans, fellas. But after hours in the Catalina Lab-alina I’ve reached the scientific conclusion that none of you get to make me feel like crap. And right now, nothing would make me feel crappier than losing to Sebastian Hawke.”

She adjusted the belt again, holding it up to the camera. “Don’t worry, dude. I’ll bring the belt, so you can touch it. And I’ll bring some Listerine so you can wash the taste of gold out of your mouth. This is a big chance for you, Hawky-Hawk, and I know you’re not a silly enough bitch to take it lightly. Pin the champ and you’re Carnage’s new it-guy. Probably the next person in line for a title shot, even. I wonder how that would go over. Pressure, bro, pressure. Last Chaos, I cut my heart out, put it on a platter, and gave it to the Legion. This time I’m gonna give them yours. The people can have my humility. You’re gonna get my knee in your face.”

An attempt was made to lift her knee into the camera shot, but it resulted in a stumble. Cat tried to right herself, shuffling the belt back over her shoulder and giving the camera one final action pose. “Chaos 108 is the opening night of Catalina Cortes: World Champion! Back in the ring and better than ever. Buckle up, boys and girls. Your champion approaches!”

DJ airhorns sounded and After Effects confetti rained. The scream flashed again:


The flashing continued, while Cat took a step toward the camera to end the recording. Her efforts were foiled by a tangle of camera and laptop cords, and she toppled from the frame, ending the promo with an authentic crash sound and not one pulled from YouTube.

---

“I made that promo all by myself,” Cat said, beaming. She and her mother shared the couch of her studio apartment. Turning the screen back to herself, Cat went to work on the touchpad and keyboard, to begin the laborious process of uploading to YouTube. “Written, directed and edited by me. I’m like Greta Gerwig.”

“Should you have edited the fall out?” Dani asked, watching her daughter work.

Fingers still flying over the keyboard, Catalina shook her head. “Nah, I’ve fallen in videos before. Makes me seem more relatable.” In the ring, Catalina moved with speed and agility befitting a bird of prey. Outside of it, that grace seemed to come and go on a whim. “I feel way better though. Needed to get all that out of my system.”

“It just...” Dani started, not sure how to broach the subject of her daughter’s emotional wellbeing, particularly after encouraging Cat to lean into her fury. The generational gap still left her baffled. “Seems like any overreaction. Your head is perfectly normal. Your brother, on the other hand. Well, there’s a reason Leo always wears hats.”

Cat’s ears intercepted all the words that weren’t a disagreement. It was how her brain rebutted more effectively. “Definitely not an overreaction,” she tried to laugh, a scoff to stress the ridiculousness of her mother’s statement. “I was ratioed by his dog, Mom.”

“I have no idea what that means,” Dani said, rubbing the bridge of her nose. Her daughter’s words made her head throb. “But it sounds ludicrously unimportant.”

Cat’s on fingernails dug into her thigh, but this time the nail polish held true. “Let’s agree to disagree,” she offered. “The important thing is that I’ve finally learned to channel that murderous anger I get. The world has seen the last of easily enraged Catalina Cortes.”

“Has it?” Dani asked, headache intensifying. “Did I mention your brother sold your Pokemon cards?”

When Cat turned, her teeth were already biting into her bottom lip. Her eyes burned like cinders, but she stopped herself, carefully choosing her words. “Not a big deal. Just collectibles. Only a few of which I loved dearly.”

Her mother laughed again, that same humorless chuckle. Like any smart competitor, she saved her finishing move. “Even your Mew gold star.” Dani’s eyes danced with the mildest of amusement.

Catalina bit into her fist with a crunch of teeth on bone. Her words were muffled by the meat of her index finger. “I will fucking kill him.”