Glory Braddock vs. Shaun Cruze vs. Kemal Yilmaz vs. Amelia Nevado

[Wisteria Waltz]

OOC: Chronologically, Amelia and Luz's CDs for this PPV take place at the same exact time and converge right at the very end. I would say maybe read Luz's CD first, though, just to understand what Amelia finds once the two stories converge and how it got to that point.
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There's no place like home.

Or, at least, as close as SCW would ever really get to her birth home, anyway.

Located roughly an hour and a half away from Oxford, Amelia was intimately familiar with London. It had been the main city she found herself wrestling in, not just during the early days of her career but also during the period between runs with SCW. Just like with the city where she was born and raised, she knew these streets like the back of her hand, and London had often been the sight of some of her greatest achievements as a professional wrestler.

Which made the fact that it would play host to the one SCW pay-per-view that had always been the proverbial albatross around her neck even more concerning, considering where she was at right now.

She had been fully prepared to leave Panama City Beach in her deepest frustration yet, and it was hard to blame her. Despite their best efforts, she and Luz had come up short against A/C Unit... probably better in the grand scheme of things as Cid hoped to go out on a high note facing Asher at Retribution, but another loss was not what Amelia's rattled confidence needed right now. True, Luz had been the one to eat the fall this time, and that thought only made Amelia feel guilty for entirely different reasons, but a loss was a loss and the longer this losing streak continued, the worse that voice in her head became. She was resigned to a fate of not even being considered 'good enough' to compete in front of her fellow countrymen, as much as the thought made her sick.

And then came a phone call that changed everything.

Amelia still wasn't sure how to feel about it, even if the rolling cameras only captured her end of the conversation as she intentionally tried to keep her responses as vague as possible. As thrilled as she was about the news she had received, she still had her reservations... regardless, her efforts were being acknowledged at last, and now she found herself seeking one single win that could truly turn everything around. All she had to do was win a fatal four way at Retribution, and she would truly, legitimately earn another shot at the SCW World Championship.

Easier said than done in the grand scheme of things, which is why Amelia was hoping that today would go a long way in trying to help her truly sort out everything going on in her head.

One benefit to being in London was that she no longer had to wait for a clear enough hole in the schedule of Dr. Celine Bolton, the NCA-sponsored therapist who'd been trying to help her and Luz as best as she could through everything, so she could fly out and visit amidst SCW's hectic touring. Thankfully, Darius had already thought ahead and booked a session, and as much as part of her hated to admit it, Amelia desperately needed to talk to someone who she felt wasn't going to judge her about the things that had been plaguing her mind lately.

Not that Luz would ever judge her for anything, and she knew this full well, but her frustrations and the complications they were bringing to the couple's relationship were a part of the problems. If she was going to turn things around at this point, she felt she needed to win this match and then go on to finally be able to call herself World Champion, but to do that, she needed a clear head so she could focus and not fall prey to this mental plague that had been eating her alive for months now.

“Amelia, it's nice to see you again,” Dr. Bolton greeted as Amelia was finally called into her office. “Please, take a seat and we can get started.”

Amelia sat down on the couch opposite the chair Celine was getting settled into, before deciding that she felt more relaxed laying down right now. To distract from the brewing storm of negative thoughts that she knew was going to lead to “Other Amelia,” as Amelia had begun to coin her for the sake of simplicity, making whatever snide comments she had locked and loaded about how 'weak' she was for needing a therapist to help her, she looked around the cozy office space, deliberately designed to make sure patients like her could stay calm and composed no matter what ailed them. Shelves full of books, a wall lined with frames of various degrees and doctorates as well as what she could assume were family photos Celine brought with her, curtains hiding a sunlit view of the historic city.

Amelia found her eyes lingering for a moment on one specific frame that seemed to depict Dr. Bolton and who she could only assume was her husband, as well as a cheerful little girl happily posing in front of them. The heartwarming image ignited old desires in Amelia's heart, but part of her smothered those embers quickly. As badly as she wanted to think that far ahead, to a life where she and Luz could perhaps raise children of their own, there was far too much to resolve first before any of that could even be on the table in the first place.

'Look at you, already thinking about putting your future children through the same hell you endured to become wrestling perfection,' Other Amelia finally decided to make her presence known. 'Maybe they won't abandon everything that made them truly great like you chose to.'

“Alright, so...” Celine began to get the ball rolling before she noticed Amelia's eyes flickering, being lost in thought one moment to practically bearing her teeth in frustration and anger the next. It wasn't directed at her, though... in fact, it looked to her like it wasn't directed at anything in particular. She had already planned on starting off very lightly anyway to try and set the tone, but this only confirmed to her that it was the right call. “Amelia? How have things been since we last spoke?”

Hearing her name called seemed to snap Amelia out of it, and she felt mortified for a moment before taking a deep breath to try and relax once more.

“I'm... fine?” she found herself trying to lie, but she quickly scolded herself for it. She knew she couldn't lie to this therapist who was going above and beyond to help her out. Celine didn't press her about the way she'd ended that statement like a question, letting her feel comfortable enough to try again. “No, I can't say that. I'm far from fine, Dr. Bolton... and I'm worried that if I can't figure out a way to turn things around, I'm going to lose everything.”

“Well, hopefully I can help you figure things out, then,” Celine responded. She didn't judge, nor did she outright promise a solution... Amelia had mentally prepared for the likely possibility that there were some things she'd have to resolve herself, but she wanted to hope she could be guided in the right direction before she found herself traveling into a familiar fog. “Why don't you explain to me what's going on so I can understand what's bothering you.”

“I feel like I've been nothing but a failure lately,” Amelia bluntly started before she explained her struggles for the past few months. The wrestling losses that kept piling up and rotting away her self-confidence, the resentment she's felt towards Luz because she's been on such a hot streak lately...

“I know the easy answer would be to just talk things out with her. We've been in this situation before, sometimes with the roles reversed, but I just... I don't know. Any time I even think about trying this time I just get angry, I convince myself that she's only going to try and cheer me up because of pity. I know Luz better than that, I know she means well... even if she does accidentally make me feel worse sometimes. I can't hold that against her, I know how her brain works... I just want to earn the same respect and recognition she's got right now.”

Dr. Bolton hummed to herself for a moment as she jotted down notes. “OK, let's rule out your wife for a moment since she's a source of these problems, unintentional or not. Have you tried talking with anybody else about this before today?”

“Darius, kind of...” Amelia admitted. “But even his advice, while sound and logical, still felt like pity to my brain.” After a moment of thinking it over, before Celine could respond, she decided to bite the bullet. “There is... someone else, I guess, kind of. I don't really know how to describe them... I've just started calling them 'Other Amelia.'”

“And who is Other Amelia?” Dr. Bolton gently nudged.

“She's... she's a voice I've been hearing lately,” Amelia admitted, turning her gaze to the floor in shame. “I've started calling her that because she sounds exactly like me, but she has the attitude of who I used to be. Arrogant, entitled, belittling me no matter what I do because she's the 'real' me, the 'superior' me. She's got me questioning if I even should have listened to Luz all those years ago and abandoned everything my parents built me into just so I could be who I truly wanted to be... happy.”

“I see...” Celine remarked, clearly biting the cap of her pen as she pondered this admission. “And does anybody else know about Other Amelia?”

Amelia shook her head in response. “I've been afraid to say anything about her to anybody else, fearing what they'd think. It doesn't help that I... I have been a bit moodier lately because of how frustrated I've been. Or the fact that she picks the worst times to chime in and trying to rebuke her just comes off as a harsh response to something someone else was trying to say to me.”

'Sure, blame me for ALL of your problems when I'm the only one who's actually been trying to help you,' Other Amelia, coincidentally, felt the need to say right now. Amelia let out an involuntary growl from low in her throat at a response, which did not go unnoticed by Dr. Bolton.

“By the sound of things, this Other Amelia has been preying on your setbacks and pushing you to be extremely hard on yourself, to the point where you believe the only way you can salvage everything is though finally succeeding,” Celine offered. “Does that sound about right?”

'What a brilliant observation,' Other Amelia snarked, but Amelia tried to ignore her as she simply nodded.

“Before I continue, I want to make it clear that what you're going through doesn't make you 'broken' in any way, Amelia,” Celine stressed. “Instances like this 'other Amelia' in one's head are more common than you think. We call them 'critical inner voices,' or negative auditory hallucinations if they result in anything more severe like an anxiety attack.”

“I, um... I had one of those,” Amelia admitted, which increased the concern in Celine's gaze. “It was back at the Shattered Reality pay-per-view... after I lost to Glory Braddock, one of the people I'll be facing this Sunday over at Wembley. It was the first time I heard Other Amelia... she was so loud on that night. I swear I even saw her becoming my own reflection in a mirror to mock me... Luz found me lying naked on the floor surrounded by broken glass.”

Dr. Bolton audibly exhaled through her nose as she made note of this. The question hung heavy in the air... why didn't she say anything sooner? But Celine restrained herself from asking, not wanting to steer this in any direction that was going to make Amelia feel exactly the way Other Amelia wanted her to.

“I didn't know what to say about it...” Amelia admitted of her own accord after a moment. “It's not the first time I've heard a voice in my head criticizing me, and those voices are no secret among us. They've always sounded like my mother or father... remnants of how they raised me whenever the doubt started to creep in after any setbacks. That's what Luz assumed when she found me... I didn't have the heart to tell her that it was my own voice I was hearing this time, especially when I could feel my blood boiling just at the thought of Luz succeeding where I've been failing.”

“If I'm allowed to be honest for a moment, Amelia?” Dr. Bolton said, waiting until Amelia gave her the go-ahead before continuing to make sure it was alright. “I feared this might be something you'd experience, and I'm a little surprised it took until just a few months ago to manifest. One of the triggers for such a critical inner voice is internalized experiences, often from childhood, and given what you've told me about yours...”

“It was much easier to ignore when that voice sounded like one of my parents,” Amelia huffed.

“Well, you've already taking one step forward by acknowledging an identity for this voice,” Celine claimed. “In doing so, you've given yourself the power to properly respond when it starts-”

'Listen to her, droning on and on and thinking she's helping you in any way,' Other Amelia tried to cut in, making it hard for Amelia to make mental notes about the help she came here for. 'You can stand in front of a mirror and tell yourself all the positive affirmations in the world until you lose your voice, you know as well as I do that the only real way you're going to become the World Champion that Glory, Shaun, Kemal, Syren, and especially Luz all bow down and truly respect is to make them see just what Amelia Blythe is all about.'

“No!” Amelia suddenly sat up, hands moving to tug at her hair almost on instinct. “I'm not Amelia Blythe anymore, and being back in England doesn't change that! I know I'm good enough to succeed without needing to act like you!”

'Is that so?' Other Amelia questioned in that smug tone Amelia always hated using because of how much it sounded like her mother. She saw Dr. Bolton leave her chair and kneel down in front of her, she could hear the therapist trying to help and encourage Amelia to keep telling her inner voice off, that the power was truly hers and hers alone, but it sounded like Amelia was underwater as Other Amelia refused to be drowned out. 'Is that why you had to wait until you saw a therapist before finally revealing my existence in your head? Face it... you know you can't trust Luz anymore. Hell, her belief that there's good in everyone led an Empire spy into the closest thing you think you have to a family and you're still afraid to say a word to anyone, all because you've prioritized Luz so much over your own well-being that you've made yourself completely and utterly worthless!'

A shock ripped through Amelia's entire being in that moment. It wasn't the absolute viciousness of the comment from her inner critic that did the damage... it was the reminder of the other secret she'd been fighting with, lost in the fog that had been choking her wrestling career lately. She'd struggled to figure out how to even talk about Other Amelia before this session... but the knowledge that Paul was an Empire spy in some fashion? She'd been willingly withholding that information to the detriment of everyone, all out of fear for Luz's mental well-being.

“Dr. Bolton...” Amelia found herself choking out, which cast an uneasy silence over the room but didn't change the fact that the therapist was kneeling before her, listening carefully to her every word. “How... how do you deal with something you know that no one else does? Something major that you keep a secret because you're afraid of how much it's going to hurt someone else? Something that you know will make you hated because you were afraid to share it even when you really needed to?”

Celine was taken aback for a moment at the very abrupt shift in everything, but she did her best to try and ground herself for the sake of her patient. With no further context, she wanted to assume Amelia may have been stressing even more about the existence of this inner critic of hers, to the point where she feared revealing it was going to cause some sort of irreparable rift.

Before she could even start to say anything... before Amelia had a chance to clarify the secret she was talking about... they both heard a commotion out in the waiting room. Screaming. Warnings of the police being called. Demands not to go any farther that went unheeded.

Amelia felt her body acting on instinct before the door was even kicked opened.

She heard the slam against the wall, saw the glint of steel from a dagger that was no longer concealed, grasped the familiar red cloak that defined the splinter cell within The Empire. None of it even fully registered to her until she felt the man going limp in her arms, realizing she'd gone on autopilot and snared him in the Blight Choke before he even knew he'd lost the element of surprise. Judging by the tense silence that followed, this assailant had come alone, definitely targeting her and potentially Dr. Bolton as well, but they were both safe.

All because Amelia had subconsciously become that perfect wrestling machine she despised being once again.

That didn't even register in her brain, however... a far more concerning thought took root first. This man had come alone, clearly hoping to get the jump on her and end her before she realized this safe space had been violated. But in the capital of a country where The Empire still lurked somewhere beneath the surface, where their own ranks were seemingly still fractured despite this splinter cell no longer having a leader, there had to be more... and their most likely target was...

“Luz!” Amelia suddenly yelled before throwing the unconscious assailant aside and scrambling to her feet, bolting for the exit.

“Amelia, wait!” she heard Dr. Bolton call, but her adrenaline had spiked far too much to register anything else at this moment. She had been attacked, and the odds of Luz being attacked as well were far too high. Her session with Dr. Bolton, the criticisms of Other Amelia, the chance to finally put everything behind her and prove she was good enough... even the irrational hatred of Luz's recent success was irrelevant against the fear that Luz could be in serious trouble. The agitated looks of people as she shoved past them, the angry honking of horns as she recklessly weaved through traffic, none of it registered to her as she ran like her life depended on it towards the hotel, praying to any God that was listening that she was overreacting and this was an isolated incident.

Unfortunately, her heart sank once she reached the parking lot, and it had nothing to do with how much her lungs were burning.

She saw a sea of red cloaks and plague doctor masks fighting with NCA agents, including the three who were a part of their found family engaged in a shootout. She saw her closest friends and even her siblings using whatever methods they had available to survive. She saw chaos and pandemonium that London did not deserve to see today.

She saw Luz, trying to shield Paul with her body, a gun in her hand pointed towards an Empire turncoat she had clearly disarmed, the man smugly begging her to pull the trigger, preying on the nightmares that had plagued her over a murder she did not commit, even if it would have been in self-defense.

By the time the man had taken advantage and ripped the gun back out of Luz's hand, Amelia was running, overtaken by a raw fury she had never felt before. She could feel herself grabbing the man, violently delivering a german suplex into the concrete, hearing a gunshot ring out right next to her ear.

By the time she finally got her bearings once more, she was holding Luz tightly in her arms, her wife sobbing into her neck and chest about “blood on their hands.” She only figured out what Luz was talking about when she dared to look back at the man who dared to end her, seeing the blood pouring from a bullet wound straight through his own skull. Whether it had been an accident caused by the surprise of her grabbing him or if he'd willingly taken his own life in hopes of some sort of psychological victory, she would never know.

All that fully registered to her in that moment was knowing that, despite their recent issues, Luz was safe, especially as Amelia's sudden intervention caused enough of a shock that anyone else from this splinter cell was immediately taken down and cuffed.

That... and something Amelia caught out of the corner of her eye: the sight of Paul cussing under his breath, as if something hadn't quite gone to plan.