Flames

She's a God, part 2

Wrestling was a business built on storylines. Even the smaller regional outfits had angles of revenge and underdogs and all the rest, just on a smaller scale. There were some storylines, though, that Becky never quite felt comfortable with, and pregnancy was one of them. It was just too touchy a subject, and she had known a few women who had inadvertently lost a pregnancy because they were wrestling unaware.

Maria and Mike Kanellis seemed keen on it, though, and they had approached Becky and Seth as soon as they arrived at RAW. "We're pregnant!" Maria beamed, throwing her arms wide. "We're going to announce it on the show tonight, and the brass said we could have a mixed tag match to do it!"

Becky shared a quick glance with Seth. "Uh, if you're pregnant, shouldn't you be . . . not wrestling?" She knew some women who had managed it, like Paige's mother, but it came with a lot of risks.

Maria shook her head. "I won't actually wrestle. Mike will tag me and then I'll refuse to get in the ring, and that's when I'll announce it," she explained. "And you'll get to tap out Mike and then we'll have a huge blow-out."

Seth frowned too. "But mixed-tag rules say men versus men, women versus women. . . ."

But Maria and Mike were already continuing on down the corridor, eager to share their good news. "Talk to Creative! It's covered!" Maria called out, waving happily.

"Well, at least they didn't try to give us a pregnancy storyline, I guess," Becky said, watching Mike and Maria spread their pregnancy news far and wide. There had been something of a baby boom in WWE in the past few years, or at least it felt like it. Sometimes she thought she was hyperaware of things like that because she didn't have kids, but now she had a different reason. She and Seth still hadn't discussed the issue of kids at length. She had made it clear that she didn't want any right now because her career was going so well, but other than that, it seemed to hint at a future that wasn't a foregone conclusion in their line of work. John and Nikki's very public break-up was only the most recent example of how mixing love and work didn't always turn out well.

"They sorta did by roping us into theirs," Seth shrugged, "but I guess they want us to have some mixed-tag experience before Extreme Rules. Let's go to Creative. Maybe Maria's exaggerating."

But she wasn't. If anything, she had been playing down the more ludicrous parts. As Becky listened to the plans for the interview that would spark the match and then the match itself, she wondered how she was going to keep a straight face through it all; it was veering dangerously close to bizarre soap opera territory. "I guess coming from a company that had an elderly woman give birth to a hand, I shouldn't be surprised."

Seth just shook his head. "Well, if Maria and Mike are cool with it, then I guess their kid gets one hell of a pregnancy announcement."

The inciting interview still felt surreal, and Becky wasn't keen on the idea of going out to the ring to ultimately do nothing more than pat Maria's belly. The women's division was floundering because of repetitive matches, and here was a prime opportunity to showcase two women. Naomi and Jimmy would have been amazing opponents, but instead it was like Seth said: basically a glorified pregnancy announcement. For her part, Becky tried to inject some humour into it, but the whole thing was the epitome of What the fuck? She might actually stay off Twitter voluntarily just to avoid the cringe factor; she certainly avoided the monitors backstage.

When she and Seth were doing their RAW rewatch, Becky almost felt bad for Mike. Not for tapping out to her arm bar, of course; he had botched it a little, but otherwise that part had gone smooth enough. Maria's tirade in the aftermath, though, made both Seth and Becky wince with sympathy. "If we did anything remotely like that," Becky noted, "I'd be getting called every name in the book. Since it's Maria, people will laugh it off as a nagging, neurotic wife."