The sky darkened over Ty. The dome was sucked away into nothingness; not even the stars remained. The stands, and all who filled them swiftly followed. A black hole yawned above the gridiron, removing the coliseum from it. Everything had been sucked away until only the grass and cold remained.
Death. That's what it was. Of course, Ty was lying in the heart of it all. Yet he wasn't alone.
'Pathetic. You call yourself the greatest?'
Ty couldn't raise his head. In the darkness, he saw cleats. So Skywalker…Kentavious wanted to gloat? Ty should've been angry but his fire was dead, as cold as the grass clinging to him, holding him down.
'Fuck you,' he mumbled.
The Other laughed, their voice bouncing around the void. It wasn't Kentavious. 'You already have,' it said. 'You've already fucked EVERYTHING.'
Moving his head was like moving a mountain, but Ty forced himself to look up. He stared into his own, dark, cold eyes, empty of everything except hate and disgust. Ty didn't freeze; he didn't get angry either. It was a shock, finding himself standing over his own body, glowering down at him. The sight made him feel empty, as if he wasn't actually a person anymore, just a soul, staring at his body—now a vengeful husk. Had the world actually opened up beneath him and swallowed him whole? Was this hell?
Now weightless, floating almost, he tried to rise. Something crushed him back down, flattening him like a pancake. The Other crouched in front of him.
'Pathetic,' it repeated.
A sadistic grin twisted its features—Ty's features… was that how everyone saw him?
'Of course it is,' The Other said, as if reading his mind. ITS mind. 'When someone looks at you, all they see is a twisted little freak. A freak who convinced people he was good at football, just so they'd put up with him. Now you can't even do that.'
Ty opened his mouth but nothing came out. His lungs felt like they were trying to smash through his ribs, and his tongue was made of cement.
'You did win one thing at least. You're the biggest disappointment in the world. You tricked ALLL these people.' The Other twirled around, hands outstretched. The lights flashed back on, revealing the stands had returned, and were full of people, packed together like sardines. Except, even the stands were people. They were stacked atop one another like pyramids, contorted painfully so that no matter how they were stacked, every face—indistinct and unmemorable as they were—was pointed at Ty, stuck in expressions of rage.
Ty didn't turn and look around at them all, but the stadium spun, showing him a never-ending spiral. Hundreds, thousands, tens of, dozens of, even hundreds of thousands. A million. He'd had his audience—his admirers, his believers—and he'd failed them all.
The stadium—the universe—stopped spinning, and new faces came into focus. The Dons were standing there amongst the masses. All the staff—all his teammates—each was more disappointed than the last. Even his family were beneath them, forming the foundation that propped up those Dons at the top.
'I should've fuckin' killed you, bro,' Devon said. His voice was quiet, but filled with contempt as it echoed and reverberated within the black hole. 'You think anyone would've missed you if I did?'
'Nobody cares about you, baby brother.' Precious said. She idly rubbed her stomach, already rounded with child. 'Why would they? I'm the only sibling who's made something with their life.'
'You're just lucky we're too dumb to know how pathetic you are,' the twins said together, 'but even we don't care about your meaningless games.'
Victoria didn't even look at him. Her silence was message enough—it was bad enough she had three useless brothers already, why would she care about a fourth?
'You thought you were special, Tyrese?' his father said, voice booming. 'You ain't shit. Ain't none of you shit, but at least they don't get our hopes up just to always disappoint… I wish I'd never had any of you brats.'
'Finally we agree on something,' his mother said, pushing the dagger deeper into his heart. 'I wish I'd never had you, Tyrese.'
He looked past her, scaling up that pyramid. Past his teammates, like Benny, Sonny, Cole, and Chris. Even Coach Norman. Faces blurred by. They shouted and snarled at him. "Freshy." "Coward." "Useless." He hogged all the spotlight all year, and this is all he could accomplish?
There was Deshaun, Stephen, Zayden, and Donte. Even Rabbit was looking down at him. They had propped him up for so long, gave him all the support they could, and this is how they repaid him? They should've known he was nothing more than a worthless freshy.
Standing at the peak of the pyramid, were five people—Coach Long, Bella, JJ, Coach Hoang, and Megan.
'Every boy who's ever worn that jersey, I've loved like they were my own,' Coach Long said. 'You're the first I've ever regretted, Tyrese.'
'This is how you treat me after everything I've done for you?' Bella screamed. 'You take all my love and my luck, and you throw it all back in my face like its nothing? YOU'RE NOTHING!'
'Dios mio,' JJ said. 'I thought you were my hermano, Ty. I could never be hermanos with something as pitiful as you. You're like a pet, or the retarded kid everyone makes fun of when they're not around.'
'For as stubborn, argumentative, and downright unbearable you are, Samuels, you'd think you'd have something to show for it,' Coach Hoang said. 'Why did somebody like me, with all the potential in the world, have to break their spine? It should've been you.'
All light faded from elsewhere, and shined solely on Megan as she stared down at him. Ty couldn't breathe. Her gaze was like a boulder crushing him into nothing.
'You're not my brother,' she said, voice as cold as ice. 'The only reason I care about you is because there's nothing else in this miserable world. Your bravado, your promises, you captured and tricked me with them. But it was all an act. You're all talk. As soon as I'm in college, I'll move away from this place, and forget all about my miserable excuse of a big brother.'
Ty closed his eyes, but couldn't block out the heartbreak in her face. It was burned into his retinas. The Other laughed, its shrill voice bouncing around in Ty's skull like a wrecking ball. The ground trembled, and fell away, and the earth swallowed Ty again… and then it spat him out.
'You don't get to run away that easily!' the Other said. 'You think you can just hide from their disappointment? No. You're going to look at them, stare them all in the eye, and know that you'll NEVER be able to make it up to them.
'LOOK AROUND YOU!' it shouted. It grabbed Ty's head, yanking him around, forcing him to look all around the stadium again. 'All these people believed in you. They believed your lies. You told them you were the greatest, but you're NOTHING. Less than nothing. You're a fucking leech, stealing your teammates' glory and using it as your own. You're scum. You should kill yourself!'
'KILL YOURSELF! KILL YOURSELF! KILL YOURSELF!' The whole stadium chanted. Their voices grew so loud the void rumbled, as if it was the whole universe demanding Ty's death.
'YOU'RE NOT REAL!' Ty shouted, finally finding his voice. Each word squeezed his lungs tighter, made the weight on his back heavier. 'You don't exist. You're not real. Just a delusion. I hit my head; this isn't real.'
The Other laughed. 'I'M the delusion? Are THEY the delusion?' It pointed all around. 'You LIVE in delusion. I'm the TRUTH! You exist ONLY in delusion, shielding yourself from the real world with it like a suit of armour. You're a snail, crawling around in shit and filth, and delusion is the shell you can't live without. The one you pretty up to make it seem like you're something special, to distract yourself from reality. You haven't lived in reality since you stepped foot on a gridiron.'
Again Ty couldn't speak. Not because his tongue was too heavy, or because he couldn't breath, but because his mouth no longer existed. There was only a smooth, blank surface. Just like any part of his outer layer, a hard, polished shell.
'You want to know WHY I'm real and you're not?'
The light dwindled until only a ghostly pale glow surrounded Ty, leaving the rest of the world—and most of the Other—shrouded in darkness. But nothing was as dark as the Other's eyes. Those were two unending pools of nothingness.
'Because I'm what everyone believes. And if everyone believes something, it becomes reality.'
Tears stung Ty's eyes. He couldn't even blink them away. The world was so heavy he couldn't even twitch.
A hand burst from the turf, throwing up grass and dirt, clutching onto Ty's leg. As cold as he felt, this hand made of bone and rotted flesh was even colder. A face soon followed, lurching up from the black depths to stare into Ty's soul.
Black and grey flesh peeled away from a dirt-stained, worm-riddled skull. Clumps of a once fine afro barely clung on. Thick glasses had melted into what remaining skin there was. One eye socket was empty, the other held no lid, and just a bare, bloodstained eyeball, the golden iris tumbling around before settling on Ty.
'You!'
'YOU!' A second head sprouted, coming from the same zombie's skeleton. This one's skin was more pale, its short buzzcut was shaved into its skull, and it wore an eye-patch.
'Why did you do this?' they asked Ty. 'What did we ever do to you?'
Ty had forgotten these victims names, though knew them for the Pirates the Dons had vanquished near the start of the season.
'You killed our dreams.'
'And for what?!'
More hands burst from the ground. Dead cold claws sunk into Ty, piercing through his outer shell, stabbing into the soft, vulnerable boy beneath. Other faces emerged, a sea of them. There were even faces so young to have been from his middle-school days. Amongst them was an Asian boy with spiky green hair, and a boy with hair so fine and shaved so short he looked almost bald, with amber eyes so dull they were like sap filling his sockets.
This nameless horde called to him, demanding he answer for his crimes and join them forever in this void.
More faces appeared, more recent foes like Marshall Ward of the Vikings, Coby Naismith of the Bears, looking tired even as his face sloughed from his skull. There was Vance, Justin, Isiah. Richaun Howard's snarling face was there, looking more beast-like than human.
'You killed my dreams for THIS?!'
Others were watching, not zombies, but pale ghosts, spirits of vengeance, glowering down at him. Nate Langford laughed loudly. 'You gotta be kidding me, mon. How's it feel, little boy? Not so nice now the injury's on the other foot, eh?'
Fale made the sign of the cross before himself. 'It is only what you deserve. Think of it as divine retribution for spitting in the face of God.'
Elliot Wall stood beside them, shuffling cards. His eyes had been replaced with a pair of glowing dice, which rattled around before coming up snake eyes.
'Your luck was bound to run out just like mine did,' he said. 'The gods give and the gods take.'
A robed figure, dirty, off-white, though it was covered in mould and shit, tried to push through the horde and get to Ty, though the rest piled upon him, shoving the giant skeleton back down into the depths. A hollow wail echoed from beneath the turf.
'It's not my fault,' Ty said, his voice as meek as a mouse's.
'But it is,' the Other said, face still shrouded in darkness. 'It's not my fault,' it continued, mimicking Ty's whine. 'If their dreams can be killed so easily they deserve it.'
The horde wailed and groaned as if their wounds had been made anew.
'You climb so high, strive for greatness, and don't even acknowledge the price that MUST be paid to get there? So selfish you think YOU'RE the only one sacrificing. Everyone gives their lives to the gridiron the moment they step foot on it. That is the nature of our coliseum, and after everything is done, when the dust settles sixty minutes later, only one team remains standing! To be a champion is to be a killer. You've always known that, you've just never cared. Such is the burden of greatness. Yet nowhere is that burden greater than in second place.
'All that sacrifice, stomping over the dreams of others simply to elevate your own. At least the winner has something to show for it! What do you have? NOTHING!'
'I'M NOT NOTHING!'
The ghouls and ghosts faded, leaving just Ty and the Other. Though they no longer stood—and lay—on a field of painted grass, but a mountain of bones, so tall they couldn't see the bottom.
'No; you think you're special,' the Other said, however, it was not with Ty's voice, but Kentavious's.
The Other crouched down, entering the faint, eerie light emanating around Ty again. Half its face—half of Ty's face—was now Kentavious's. It almost looked like Senior, at first, but was that not who Junior would grow up to be? Fury and sadness battled on Kentavious's half face, swirling like a storm.
'You thought you were special, so that gave you the right to trample over all others.' Kentavious said. 'And where did that get you? Now yours is just another broken dream, laying with all the others atop the pile of the unworthy. You're nothing but another name and face in the unending list of MY conquests. Soon you'll be buried and forgotten, like everyone else.'
The mountain of bones rumbled, pouring down, as Ty sunk into them. 'No!' he shrieked, eyes wide and desperate. He scratched and clawed, yet sunk further all the same.
Kentavious and the Other stood watching, impassive. 'How did I ever think you could possibly be the one to stand beside me,' Kentavious said.
'You, who is nothing but a worm squirming in the mud,' the Other said.
Darkness closed in around Ty as he fell deeper into the crushing depths, the weight of the mountain pressing in on him. Through the slowly closing gap at the peak, he saw the Other standing over him, sneering at him. Its face flashed by in blurs that should've been too quick to be distinguishable, but Ty saw them all clearly. His family, his teammates, everyone he'd ever disappointed.
'I thought you were special,' they said, voices smashed together to be unrecognisable, as if the mountain of bones was talking to him. You SAID you were special. You LIED to me.'
In the end, just before everything faded to darkness, he saw his own face again, the most disappointed of all.
'No no no no.' Ty wanted to scream, but the nothingness sucked his voice away. It wouldn't even let him have his tears.
This was wrong. It was all so wrong. He couldn't lose, especially not like this. It wasn't supposed to end like this. He'd made a promise. To all them, yes, but most importantly to himself. He would be the greatest. What did he care if he left a pile of broken dreams and ghosts in his wake? Was that supposed to make him feel bad? NO! It was motivation. Who else but the greatest could make so many give up their dreams?
Tyrese Samuels WOULD be the GOAT!
There was a rumbling noise all around, then a cracking as if the Earth itself was shattering into a billion pieces. A tiny ball of light appeared above Ty. Like a lonely star in the night sky… like the ball on a Hail Mary throw.
Ty climbed towards it, swimming through the darkness even as it ripped at his flesh to drag him back down. The light grew and grew, then finally exploded as Ty surged upwards, gasping for air.
He was back in AT&T Stadium, standing once more. The lights were so bright to be almost blinding, and while there was no burning pain within his leg for the moment… it felt… gone. As if that part of him had been left behind in the void.
All eyes focused on Ty, bewildered, horrified, shocked, but most of all, concerned. He was standing. Now could he walk?