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So Don't You Play With Me, Cuz You're Playing With Fire

Summary:

"In Toronto, there was zero chance you were going to put me in a coffin. The game was rigged. That was never gonna happen. THIS game was rigged in both directions. You will never quit. I'm certainly not going to quit. So what are we gonna do, man?"

The stage is set. The game is rigged. The end is nigh.

[Kinktober 2025 Day 16: Fire Play]

Notes:

(See the end of the work for notes.)

Work Text:

Wrestledream is coming soon… The day that Jon Moxley has sworn to make Darby Allin quit. The problem is that Darby Allin has never met the word quit as far as anyone can tell, and if he didn’t quit climbing to the top of Mount Everest, didn’t quit going in the ring after breaking his leg, didn’t quit after being quite literally hit by a bus… Darby’s not too worried about anyone – even Moxley – being able to make him quit.

Moxley thinks he’s the toughest man in professional wrestling. Darby just has to prove him wrong.

He’ll make the self-righteous prick quit and he’ll do it with style – or with a level of pain that a mere man was not meant to endure – far more likely the latter than the former.

As he stands over Moxley, flamethrower in hand, watching the bigger man scramble to get away? Darby knows that he’s going to win this match.

Darby brings the flames so close to Mox’s face that he’ll probably have blisters to show for it, but the older man grits his teeth and growls somewhere deep in his chest, before he screams with fury.

He rolls out of the way, catching Darby off guard when he dives to spear him, trying to put himself too close to his body for him to use the flame thrower on him, and Darby tumbles backward. Mox’s cheek is red with the blisters rising, and he looks half amused, half homicidal. “You son of a bitch,” he says with the kind of low, terrifying laugh that you never want to hear from Mox.

“You should’ve killed me when you had the chance. You won’t get it again.” He puts Darby into a rear naked choke, and Darby reaches over, his nails finding the hot flesh of Mox’s cheek, and making him let go. Mox screams, throwing elbows in the direction of Darby’s head. “You can’t fucking win this, Darby! You think your death wish is going to save you?”

My death wish?” Darby asks, almost incredulous. “Says you?”

Darby manages to roll away from Moxley, who is pushing himself back up onto his feet. “You just want to die. I want my death to mean something. It ain’t the same thing!”

“What’s the difference then, Jon? Please enlighten me with your decades of experience and knowledge.”

“The difference between me and you? What we’re fighting for. You want a thrill. You want the next adrenaline rush. I want to leave a legacy behind me of making this place better… making All Elite Wrestling exactly what it says it is. If I have to sacrifice myself on the altar of perfecting this place, holding it back from the edge? I’m gonna fucking do it.”

“Oh, right,” Darby says with a laugh, his eyes looking crazed behind his ruined face paint. “My reckless self destruction versus… what? Your holy masochism? Is that what this is? Jon Moxley wants to be a martyr to the cause?”

Mox stalks back toward Darby, and stops just short when he sees the already lit rag in the mouth of a bottle. “Come on then, Mox,” he taunts, raising the bottle over his head. “Let me make your dreams come true.”

Notes:

Thank you, Stinkbuggery for the "reckless self-destruction vs. holy masochism" line.

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