Fic: Father and Son (1/1)
Dec. 20th, 2017 06:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
redfiona99Title: Father and Son
Author: Red Fiona
Disclaimer: I don't own the characters, WWE and they themselves do. It bears no resemblence to reality. No money is being made from this.
Fandom: WWE wrestling
Characters: Finlay and Hornswoggle
Ratings/Warnings: PG-13
Warnings: Ableist language.
Notes: Even more so than usual, I am talking about the characters the wrestlers are portraying, not the wrestlers themselves.
Anyone who wants to brush up on the details of the angle, a description is here
Summary: What sort of father pretends his son is Vince McMahon's bastard child?
~~~~
If the stork himself had delivered him, the kid wouldn't have been any less of a surprise. Finlay says kid, thinks kid, but the truth of it was, in front of him stood an adult man. A man with a letter explaining everything, and wasn't it all of Finlay's sins come home at once.
Because once he'd read the letter, Finlay knew why the kid looked so familiar, because of course he was Ellen's son. And Ellen's letter said, so he knew it to be true, that the kid was his son too. All Ellen had written was that she hadn't told him because she'd thought it was for the best. And in that one sentence, Finlay heard and knew all the arguments they hadn't had about it.
Of course, she was right. When he'd been a younger man, he'd been a harum-scarum sort, fire in his heart, not one to settle down, too much fight in his bones for that. Maybe he still was, and it was just that age had dampened down his fire.
The letter also swore him to keep the secret, which he would, if that was what Ellen wanted.
The kid himself supplied some more answers. He’d always wanted to be a wrestler, but his mother had made him swear that he wouldn't wrestle while she was alive, apparently under the same threats as Finlay was under to keep their secret. Ellen had made him promise because she’d said that wrestling was no kind of life for anyone and she didn't want to see her son suffer it. Once again, she probably wasn't wrong. Finlay knew the life he led wasn't healthy or sensible or any kind of good.
Because Ellen was reasonable, more than Finlay ever had been, she’d also added that, if, once she was dead and gone, he still wanted to be a wrestler, to contact Finlay and tell him he had a letter from Ellen. The kid wasn't allowed to read the letter, again on pain of supernatural vengeance, so he hadn't.
Finlay gave the kid a try-out and he wasn't bad. Green as grass of course, but most of his weaknesses were things that could be worked on and fixed.
That left the obvious problem. His kid was a midget or a dwarf, or whatever you were supposed to call it these days. You didn't get midget wrestlers in America, not properly, not regularly. You got them in Mexico, sure enough, but Finlay was too old to learn another language, and he was damned if he was leaving the kid alone in any of the nest of vipers that any wrestling promotion naturally was.
Finlay did have a plan, but it involved convincing McMahon.
~~~~
After many years of working for him, Finlay knew the trick to that was making McMahon think he'd had the idea himself.
"Mr. McMahon," Finlay waited after knocking on the door. McMahon bobbed his head telling Finlay to come in. "Remember how you were saying what my character really needed was a leprechaun." Which McMahon had, several times, and it had taken Finlay all his wits to stop it happening. "Remember how I said the problem was there wasn't a good enough midget." May God forgive him, that was actually the excuse he'd given at the time. "I think I've found one." Which wasn't a lie.
"We'll give him a try out on Saturday. If he's good enough, he starts on Thursday."
Which was that sorted. The only thing left to do was sort out the kid's ringname. He'd refused anything to do with leprechauns, which okay, Finlay could understand. But the kid's own idea was nothing better.
"Hornswoggle, it's classical, I tell you."
"It's lousy, that's what it is." But the kid didn't listen, because when do they ever.
~~~~
Apparently the kid got his skill for ideas from his old man, because even if the privacy of his own head, Finlay knew this was a stupid idea. The three years they'd spent together had been good. He'd enjoyed it, he'd never thought he was cut out for tag-team wrestling, but that must have been because none of his potential tag-team partners had been up to it. This plan risked all that.
But he was still doing it, because if McMahon thought the kid was his own bastard, then Finlay would have found a way to give the kid all the things Finlay had never had, and could never have offered him, and who doesn't want that for their kids?
~~~~
McMahon was pissed that his kid was a midget. He was also pissed that the kid wasn't abusing his new power, or at least not the way McMahon would have done. Finlay would have liked to have claimed credit for the kid’s kind heart, but even if he had been around, that would have all been Ellen's doing. She'd always been a better person than he was.
If McMahon had left it at being pissed it wouldn't have been a problem. The kid had a thick skin, Finlay suspected he'd had to develop that, things being as they are. But that wasn't where McMahon left it, and Layfield never missed an opportunity to hit someone weaker than him.
Finlay kept wanting to intervene, to stop the harm that's coming to his son, but he didn't want to lose this for the kid.
~~~~
It was Khali that finally got him to act. Khali wasn't evil, not like Layfield, but your intentions don't matter much when you're that big.
Finlay couldn't stand it anymore, waiting in the back, not doing anything and hoping that this time, the damage wouldn't be too bad. He knew that the kid couldn't keep being lucky while he was being thrown around like a ragdoll. He had to do something.
~~~~
It was easy to forget that Layfield wasn't an idiot, he just looked and acted like one. If he smelled a rat he knew enough about bureaucracy to hunt it down, and McMahon had made it in Layfield's interest to find out everything that could be found out about the kid.
It would have been simple enough to trace the kid, everyone's got a social security number, even people who work under assumed names. Once you knew that, identifying Ellen as his mother would be easy enough, as would be gathering the information from calendars and McMahon's diary to show he'd been nowhere near nine months, or thereabouts, before the kid's birth. And since Layfield wasn't an idiot, he could put two and two together given that Finlay was the one that brought the kid into the company.
Of course he could.
And then he'd tell McMahon.
And he had.
Finlay couldn't regret admitting the truth on live TV. All of it was the truth too. McMahon didn't deserve a son like the kid.
He can't help but feel though, that he probably should have had the talk with the kid first.
~~~~
The kid was still in hospital, thanks to Layfield, but he was sitting up under his own steam and they'd taken away most of the tubes and wires. He was dealing with the news better than Finlay deserved.
"Oh, I'm pissed off at you, but more at me for not guessing. I mean, my name, David? I should have guessed. I assumed that I was named for the saint because I was born in March."
"Davey boy," there was no way for the kid to have known that David was Finlay's given name too, because the last person who'd called him that retired ten years ago. He was Finlay to most, Fit to his friends, and far ruder things to people who'd crossed him.
"Don't Davey boy me! You could have said something before McMahon made you." That was true enough. Finlay couldn't even say he would have done if Ellen's letter hadn't forbidden him. He's not sure how you tell a grown man that you're his father. He knows the way the kid found out isn't the right way, but he doesn't think the other ways it would have been all that much better.
"Why didn't you say something?" asked the kid, who Finlay knew he really ought to start calling David now that the cat was out of the bag.
"She made me promise not to." Finlay didn't have to specify who she was, there was only ever one 'she'.
"All right," spoken like someone who'd lost enough arguments with Ellen to know why there was no point in arguing with the lady, "why did you leave?"
And wasn't that just the heart of the matter.
"I didn't know."
"You'll have to forgive me if I can't tell if you're telling the truth or not, you've lied to me for three years without me knowing." It's an insult Finlay deserves.
"Honest to God, kid ... Davey ... David, I didn't know." How to explain to the kid that things now aren't what they were then. He gave David the letter, hoping that it would help David to understand why he'd done what he done, and not said the things he should have said. "It's different now. You've got the Fed, and that's it. With the territories back then you moved round a lot more. You stayed till they didn't want you or until someone made you a better offer." Finlay had been fresh off the boat, willing to work for anyone who'd have him, and bookers liked people like that, who were easy to gimmick and could stand the living.
"I never even meant to go to the hooley where I met her." It was true. He'd meant to go home, say his prayers and go to bed early like a good boy, but the booker's son wanted to go out and party and agreeing to go out in those circumstances counted as standing the living. Once they got there, if there'd been another woman in the place, you'd have had to ask the other guys for the details, because he'd seen Ellen, and he didn't notice anyone else.
"I stayed in that territory for 8 months. New Japan called, and I couldn't say no." No one could have said no to the offer he'd got from them. "I left and she didn't say a word." Because Ellen knew him as well as anyone ever had, as well or better than he knew himself. If she'd said anything he would have stayed. They'd have got married and he'd have tried to carry on wrestling. But there's risks you can't take when you're a married man and a father, not just in the ring. He'd never have got as far as he had done, even if that far wasn't quite the top of the mountain, if he'd stayed.
Staying would have made him miserable, he would have made her miserable and they would have made the kid miserable.
Even if there'd been times in the past three years that he'd wished he'd told him, because the kid was amazing, he knows she'd done the right thing.
"The only piece of fatherly advice I will ever give you, 'cause I long ago lost the right to give you any," he'd lost it when he'd obeyed Ellen's letter, "if you ever meet a woman half as good as your mother, don't let her go." 'Cause nowadays it might be possible. Sure, they might spend even less time at home now, but at least they all had somewhere to call home, and weren't having to move house with each new territory.
"Where do we go from here?"
"You get better. We beat up Layfield and anyone he brings with him. I try and fulfill my threat to shove a shillelagh where the sun doesn't shine." It's not what the kid meant to ask, but that that was Finlay's answer probably told him what he needed to do. They'd carry on as before, fumbling their way through, two of them against the world.
It'd be alright.
Author: Red Fiona
Disclaimer: I don't own the characters, WWE and they themselves do. It bears no resemblence to reality. No money is being made from this.
Fandom: WWE wrestling
Characters: Finlay and Hornswoggle
Ratings/Warnings: PG-13
Warnings: Ableist language.
Notes: Even more so than usual, I am talking about the characters the wrestlers are portraying, not the wrestlers themselves.
Anyone who wants to brush up on the details of the angle, a description is here
Summary: What sort of father pretends his son is Vince McMahon's bastard child?
~~~~
If the stork himself had delivered him, the kid wouldn't have been any less of a surprise. Finlay says kid, thinks kid, but the truth of it was, in front of him stood an adult man. A man with a letter explaining everything, and wasn't it all of Finlay's sins come home at once.
Because once he'd read the letter, Finlay knew why the kid looked so familiar, because of course he was Ellen's son. And Ellen's letter said, so he knew it to be true, that the kid was his son too. All Ellen had written was that she hadn't told him because she'd thought it was for the best. And in that one sentence, Finlay heard and knew all the arguments they hadn't had about it.
Of course, she was right. When he'd been a younger man, he'd been a harum-scarum sort, fire in his heart, not one to settle down, too much fight in his bones for that. Maybe he still was, and it was just that age had dampened down his fire.
The letter also swore him to keep the secret, which he would, if that was what Ellen wanted.
The kid himself supplied some more answers. He’d always wanted to be a wrestler, but his mother had made him swear that he wouldn't wrestle while she was alive, apparently under the same threats as Finlay was under to keep their secret. Ellen had made him promise because she’d said that wrestling was no kind of life for anyone and she didn't want to see her son suffer it. Once again, she probably wasn't wrong. Finlay knew the life he led wasn't healthy or sensible or any kind of good.
Because Ellen was reasonable, more than Finlay ever had been, she’d also added that, if, once she was dead and gone, he still wanted to be a wrestler, to contact Finlay and tell him he had a letter from Ellen. The kid wasn't allowed to read the letter, again on pain of supernatural vengeance, so he hadn't.
Finlay gave the kid a try-out and he wasn't bad. Green as grass of course, but most of his weaknesses were things that could be worked on and fixed.
That left the obvious problem. His kid was a midget or a dwarf, or whatever you were supposed to call it these days. You didn't get midget wrestlers in America, not properly, not regularly. You got them in Mexico, sure enough, but Finlay was too old to learn another language, and he was damned if he was leaving the kid alone in any of the nest of vipers that any wrestling promotion naturally was.
Finlay did have a plan, but it involved convincing McMahon.
~~~~
After many years of working for him, Finlay knew the trick to that was making McMahon think he'd had the idea himself.
"Mr. McMahon," Finlay waited after knocking on the door. McMahon bobbed his head telling Finlay to come in. "Remember how you were saying what my character really needed was a leprechaun." Which McMahon had, several times, and it had taken Finlay all his wits to stop it happening. "Remember how I said the problem was there wasn't a good enough midget." May God forgive him, that was actually the excuse he'd given at the time. "I think I've found one." Which wasn't a lie.
"We'll give him a try out on Saturday. If he's good enough, he starts on Thursday."
Which was that sorted. The only thing left to do was sort out the kid's ringname. He'd refused anything to do with leprechauns, which okay, Finlay could understand. But the kid's own idea was nothing better.
"Hornswoggle, it's classical, I tell you."
"It's lousy, that's what it is." But the kid didn't listen, because when do they ever.
~~~~
Apparently the kid got his skill for ideas from his old man, because even if the privacy of his own head, Finlay knew this was a stupid idea. The three years they'd spent together had been good. He'd enjoyed it, he'd never thought he was cut out for tag-team wrestling, but that must have been because none of his potential tag-team partners had been up to it. This plan risked all that.
But he was still doing it, because if McMahon thought the kid was his own bastard, then Finlay would have found a way to give the kid all the things Finlay had never had, and could never have offered him, and who doesn't want that for their kids?
~~~~
McMahon was pissed that his kid was a midget. He was also pissed that the kid wasn't abusing his new power, or at least not the way McMahon would have done. Finlay would have liked to have claimed credit for the kid’s kind heart, but even if he had been around, that would have all been Ellen's doing. She'd always been a better person than he was.
If McMahon had left it at being pissed it wouldn't have been a problem. The kid had a thick skin, Finlay suspected he'd had to develop that, things being as they are. But that wasn't where McMahon left it, and Layfield never missed an opportunity to hit someone weaker than him.
Finlay kept wanting to intervene, to stop the harm that's coming to his son, but he didn't want to lose this for the kid.
~~~~
It was Khali that finally got him to act. Khali wasn't evil, not like Layfield, but your intentions don't matter much when you're that big.
Finlay couldn't stand it anymore, waiting in the back, not doing anything and hoping that this time, the damage wouldn't be too bad. He knew that the kid couldn't keep being lucky while he was being thrown around like a ragdoll. He had to do something.
~~~~
It was easy to forget that Layfield wasn't an idiot, he just looked and acted like one. If he smelled a rat he knew enough about bureaucracy to hunt it down, and McMahon had made it in Layfield's interest to find out everything that could be found out about the kid.
It would have been simple enough to trace the kid, everyone's got a social security number, even people who work under assumed names. Once you knew that, identifying Ellen as his mother would be easy enough, as would be gathering the information from calendars and McMahon's diary to show he'd been nowhere near nine months, or thereabouts, before the kid's birth. And since Layfield wasn't an idiot, he could put two and two together given that Finlay was the one that brought the kid into the company.
Of course he could.
And then he'd tell McMahon.
And he had.
Finlay couldn't regret admitting the truth on live TV. All of it was the truth too. McMahon didn't deserve a son like the kid.
He can't help but feel though, that he probably should have had the talk with the kid first.
~~~~
The kid was still in hospital, thanks to Layfield, but he was sitting up under his own steam and they'd taken away most of the tubes and wires. He was dealing with the news better than Finlay deserved.
"Oh, I'm pissed off at you, but more at me for not guessing. I mean, my name, David? I should have guessed. I assumed that I was named for the saint because I was born in March."
"Davey boy," there was no way for the kid to have known that David was Finlay's given name too, because the last person who'd called him that retired ten years ago. He was Finlay to most, Fit to his friends, and far ruder things to people who'd crossed him.
"Don't Davey boy me! You could have said something before McMahon made you." That was true enough. Finlay couldn't even say he would have done if Ellen's letter hadn't forbidden him. He's not sure how you tell a grown man that you're his father. He knows the way the kid found out isn't the right way, but he doesn't think the other ways it would have been all that much better.
"Why didn't you say something?" asked the kid, who Finlay knew he really ought to start calling David now that the cat was out of the bag.
"She made me promise not to." Finlay didn't have to specify who she was, there was only ever one 'she'.
"All right," spoken like someone who'd lost enough arguments with Ellen to know why there was no point in arguing with the lady, "why did you leave?"
And wasn't that just the heart of the matter.
"I didn't know."
"You'll have to forgive me if I can't tell if you're telling the truth or not, you've lied to me for three years without me knowing." It's an insult Finlay deserves.
"Honest to God, kid ... Davey ... David, I didn't know." How to explain to the kid that things now aren't what they were then. He gave David the letter, hoping that it would help David to understand why he'd done what he done, and not said the things he should have said. "It's different now. You've got the Fed, and that's it. With the territories back then you moved round a lot more. You stayed till they didn't want you or until someone made you a better offer." Finlay had been fresh off the boat, willing to work for anyone who'd have him, and bookers liked people like that, who were easy to gimmick and could stand the living.
"I never even meant to go to the hooley where I met her." It was true. He'd meant to go home, say his prayers and go to bed early like a good boy, but the booker's son wanted to go out and party and agreeing to go out in those circumstances counted as standing the living. Once they got there, if there'd been another woman in the place, you'd have had to ask the other guys for the details, because he'd seen Ellen, and he didn't notice anyone else.
"I stayed in that territory for 8 months. New Japan called, and I couldn't say no." No one could have said no to the offer he'd got from them. "I left and she didn't say a word." Because Ellen knew him as well as anyone ever had, as well or better than he knew himself. If she'd said anything he would have stayed. They'd have got married and he'd have tried to carry on wrestling. But there's risks you can't take when you're a married man and a father, not just in the ring. He'd never have got as far as he had done, even if that far wasn't quite the top of the mountain, if he'd stayed.
Staying would have made him miserable, he would have made her miserable and they would have made the kid miserable.
Even if there'd been times in the past three years that he'd wished he'd told him, because the kid was amazing, he knows she'd done the right thing.
"The only piece of fatherly advice I will ever give you, 'cause I long ago lost the right to give you any," he'd lost it when he'd obeyed Ellen's letter, "if you ever meet a woman half as good as your mother, don't let her go." 'Cause nowadays it might be possible. Sure, they might spend even less time at home now, but at least they all had somewhere to call home, and weren't having to move house with each new territory.
"Where do we go from here?"
"You get better. We beat up Layfield and anyone he brings with him. I try and fulfill my threat to shove a shillelagh where the sun doesn't shine." It's not what the kid meant to ask, but that that was Finlay's answer probably told him what he needed to do. They'd carry on as before, fumbling their way through, two of them against the world.
It'd be alright.
