Hello, welcome to my nightmare…

“*snrk*I’m choking on latex!!”

How many of you regularly wake up with those words on your lips? Not many, I’d wager. But not many of you dream of your younger self… ripped and ready, in his prime… cramming himself down your throat while you sleep.

Sharp crawled out of bed, away from his serviced and satisfied wife, and crept out of the room…

What in the world was happening to him? He’d pushed himself to the limit, battling two opponents in the qualifier of the tourney, then gets diagnosed with a ridiculous brain injury of some sort… He then was visited by some apparition claiming to be the author of his life-story, and after shrugging that off and blowing off his follow up appointment with that quack doctor, he’d finally achieved his goal of becoming the King of Violence, and CRUSHING Shawn Collins for all his bullshit…

How dare that little shit get in his way again… How dare Collins try to stop him after he’d already tossed that little split-tail in his path years ago…

Why was he so angry all of a sudden? What was up with that bizarre dream?

He just needs some water, and some time to clear his head. He was going to be okay. Nothing to be frightened of.

Just as he thought this, he comes to the first floor landing, and stands there listening to the rain on the expansive picture window, and the distant thunder. Something felt alien about his home, however.

He turns slowly in the darkness, until a flicker of far-off lightning illuminates the figure of a tortured, lifeless figure hanging from his wall… Sharp gasps and recoils, stumbling off the landing and falling past the last three steps with a brutal thud on the hard wood floor.

Less than a second passes before he hears his children begin to mewl somewhere above him, and his wife moans…

“Stephen!” her voice creeps up from slumbering silence to angry shout. “You woke the children!! What are you doing?!”

He casts his gaze up at the obnoxiously oversized crucifix his mother had left for them. He glares at it, and trembling slightly as he attempts once more to breathe, raised an arm defiantly, and staring into the downcast eyes of the crucified savior… chucks the wooden Christ the bird.

This, somehow, did little to suppress the alien feeling that crept over him. He peels himself off the floor with a moan and a grunt…

‘Did I just make an old man sound?’ he asks himself as he rises, and then it hits him.

His wonderful, pimped out home, with its hard wood floors, giant fireplace, and posh, expensive furnishings… had been baby-proofed.

Fucking…

Baby proofed. He was thirty-one years old, and all the pointy edges and pokey-things in his house had been padded, pushed aside, and privied away.

Privied, meaning hidden. Alliteration is pretty swank, but it can be a bitch at times.