Flames

Follow the Leader, part 2

As Monday wore on, Becky was certain something was up. She beat Seth's time in several parts of their workout and he barely even complained. When she had suggested buying some mint chocolate chip ice cream, it took him a few moments before he balked. She even got almost all the way to the SUV with the keys before he realized they weren't in his hand. "What's up with you?" she asked when they were back at the hotel. "Sure, Team Red fell flat last night, but it's not like we didn't try. . . ."

Seth shook his head. "It's not that. It's . . . they gave me a sneak peek of tonight's show." He flopped back on the bed and stretched out an arm, his motion for her to join him.

Becky peeled off her socks before curling up beside him. "Not another Lesnar beating. I will go beat the shit out of Vince for real, I swear. . . ."

"No, nothing with Lesnar." Now that she had brought up the possibility, though, it seemed to add to the tension in his shoulders. "They want a Town Hall meeting at the top of the show. . . ."

"For fuck's sake." Becky fought the urge to bury her face against Seth's chest. Creative's decisions were making less and less sense as the year went on. "When have those ever done anything? They make people change the channel, that's all. . . ."

Seth stroked her hair idly, mindful of the extensions. "Well, they've given me a bit of leeway in terms of the speech. The tone has to be accusatory—You sucked, and all that—but I can guide it a bit, and . . . I was thinking about Dusty kept telling us to amplify everything in NXT."

Becky nodded slowly. NXT had been a touchy subject with Seth lately, first because of Finn's move and then because of Becky's not-quite joke about jumping over to get the NXT Women's Title that had eluded her; the invasions had been the last straw. "So what are you thinking?" Her brain began stockpiling ideas to offer, but she wanted to hear what Seth had to say first.

"Well, I keep getting mocked on Twitter for the 'locker room leader' mentality and being loyal to WWE and RAW, so I was thinking I could just maximize that." Seth's hand went still in her hair. "Be willing to do anything to help RAW succeed and all that."

"Art imitating life," Becky agreed with a nod. "It works, and it draws on a lot of the stuff you've been saying on Twitter." Then she kissed his neck. "Does that mean we get to see the return of the heel-black suit?" She might tease him over his reactions to her wearing certain outfits, but she knew she could be just as bad.

Seth laughed, the sound rumbling through her skull. "It's short notice, so I'll have to improvise, but yeah, pretty much. They said I could pick out some muscle too, as long as it wasn't anyone currently involved in a story." Then his laughter ebbed away. "Hunter suggested that you not be at the meeting, though."

Becky rose up a bit at that. Ever since the Corbin–Evans debacle, there hadn't been any major talk of joined storylines for them, and they were both quite fine with that. "Why? Are they going to position me as your ally or an adversary?"

"The snippet I saw didn't say anything about you, actually." Seth eased out from under her to fetch some crumpled script pages from his bag. She hadn't even noticed them last night. "I think it's more that they don't want any backlash to fall on you. If I call out the whole locker room and you're there, then I either have to praise you and bash the others, which does you no favours, or I have to lump you in with everyone else, and that doesn't really fly either, because if I did that, you would sure as hell react."

"Damn right." Becky took the papers from him, wrinkled from multiple readings. "Kinda weird that the Viking Raiders wouldn't pipe up, isn't it? Given that they had RAW's only victory last night." Then she noticed some of the handwritten notes on the side. Most of them were in Seth's writing, the equivalent of him thinking out loud, but some looked like Heyman's. "He's suggesting Authors of Pain?"