Prelude to a Mime

They were celebrated tag-team champions going into that match. André Bruleé and his partner “Crème” René LaFlame, ‘Crème Bruleé’, were the most feared tag team to lace up the boots. Together they’d amassed a stunning series of victories that had catapulted them to the apex of French Sports Entertainment.

Until that day.

As André extended his arm across the ropes in a frantic search for a tag that wasn’t coming, he could see in his partner’s eyes a look of sheer terror he’d never seen before. The French Mime Assassin had trapped him in a backbending camel clutch and looked to be toying with René, a man lauded for his escape artist qualities, ‘always rising to the top’ so went his reputation, and there he was… trapped with no place to go with a mime taunting him evilly.

And the match had just begun.

“Stop the fight!” André exclaimed in slow motion, and also in French, to the referee who looked at him like he were joking, like he was displaying that classic Crème Bruleé bluster that had won the hearts of so many, and cemented their current status as French wrestling gods. Maybe it had gotten to their heads? Too much too soon? André would readily admit that he and his tag partner hadn’t trained to their fullest leading up to that match.

“They’re just mimes,” André and René had sneered and mocked thumbing their noses at the silent, ghostly mimes staring back at them at the weigh in. “They are too scared, they say nothing!”

Prior to the match, as René chatted up and made plans with a valet for after the event, Picard, the head trainer, pulled André aside with a serious look.

“Those mimes…” He whispered, old and worldly wise, and speaking in French so this is translated, and his voice trembled as though from experience, “…those mimes aren’t human.”

“They’re street performers, Picard,” André snickered, and waved him off. But Picard issued the grim warning down the corridor after André as he strode cockily off:

“You’ll be sorry!”

And André was. As the paramedics carted René off in a stretcher with expressions that said all André needed to know about the fate of his partner. The systemic targeting of René’s spinal column was precise and grisly. André lamented his partner’s broken back and wearily, angrily, vengefully glared at the ring where the French Mime Assassins celebrated their championship win. André later learned that wasn’t their first, and wouldn’t be their last.

“Tell me their secret, Picard.” André whispered conspiratorially to the head trainer months later, “how do I fight like those mimes?”

“You don’t, André,” Picard said woefully, “You fight, and you die like everybody else.”

But André persisted until Picard agreed to tell him the history of the mimes.

“No one knows exactly where they came from, André, or how they got here. They travel from federation to federation, and bring with them a blight of destruction.”

“But who are they, Picard? Why do they do it?”

Picard shook his head grimly, having witnessed the carnage of the mimes on countless occasions, and to this day still found it unthinkable that a couple of innocent-looking mimes could be capable of the bloodshed. He shook his head finally.

“No one knows who they are, André, or why they do what they do, but I can tell you the mimes you faced aren’t the original French Mime Assassins.”

André frowned as Picard would say no more,

“Leave it alone, André. If you dig too deep, you might not like what you find.”

And with that, Picard left André to himself, to pick up the pieces of a tag career the mimes had shattered.

Not days later, in the locker room, André witnessed the French Mimes walk past with their tag belts, laughing silently to one another and chose courageously to confront them.

He caught the mimes unaware with no one watching. André found himself outnumbered fighting for his life in an impromptu backstage brawl. He miraculously held his own… until one of the mimes broke him through some glass and prepared for a killing blow.

As one mime stood over the two fighting on the floor and looked on with a horrific, miming gloat of laughter, the other mounted him and pushed a glass shard down towards André’s neck. Their two bodies entwined in a life and death struggle that saw that glass shard embed into someone’s throat…

The standing mime’s jaw dropped in shocked silence, two gloved hands on his cheeks watching as André stood up from the scuffle with the other mime’s blood spilled onto his shirt still clutching the glass shard looking down on Comme Çi, or Comme Ça, whoever it was, dead on the floor.

With newfound purpose, and in pure silence, André hid that body while the other mime watched bemused as André discovered whilst stripping the mime’s body during disposal that he and the mime wore the same size. Periodically afterward, André wondered if Picard were looking in on him as he second-naturedly applied the face paint to his own face in the mirror, and felt his tongue dying inside of his mouth.

A new Comme Çi, or Comme Ça, whichever, was born…

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Francis Ford Cuppola: Annnnnnd scene.

Rodney P: … This is exactly why I’m the one training the mimes, Francis.

Francis lowered his arms from their previous imitation of a video screen as though he’d just watched the movie of the French Mime Assassins and turned to his assistant who’d been laying down from the persistent headache that was his boss.

Francis Ford Cuppola: I’m gonna make these mimes legendary, Rodney. You’ll see.

Rodney stood, exhausted.

Rodney P: Okay. You keep working on their origin story. I’ll keep helping them train.