If you're enjoying these stories, consider leaving a comment, review, or vote.
Support me by leaving a comment, review and vote
visit my *at**on at belamy20
September 5, 2001. Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones officially wrapped principal photography.
The final scene shot was Anakin and Padmé saying goodbye at the Coruscant landing platform. In the script, they still weren't officially together, but the audience would be able to see that everything between them had irrevocably changed.
After Lucas called cut on the final take, Raphael stood alone in the center of the massive green screen stage as the grips began tearing down the set around him.
Natalie walked over from the direction of the makeup trailers, coming to a stop on his right. Ewan strolled over and stood on his left.
The three of them stood shoulder-to-shoulder in front of the endless green expanse, watching the crew dismantle the last prop starship and pack it into wooden crates.
"I'm heading back to Harvard," Natalie said quietly. "Classes start next week."
Raphael nodded.
"What about you?" she asked.
"Back to LA," he replied. "I've got some business to handle."
"And after that?"
"After that..." Raphael looked up at the blank green screen, imagining the fictional galaxy it would eventually become. "I wait for the next job."
Ewan looked at Raphael, then at Natalie.
"Do you two need me to give you a minute, or...?"
Natalie ignored him completely. So did Raphael.
"Raphael," Natalie said softly.
He turned his head.
"Thank you."
She didn't specify what she was thanking him for. Was it for the snake? Was it for the coffees? Was it for patiently answering every single one of her questions over the last month? Or was it just for standing next to her under a fictional sky on their last day?
Raphael looked at her.
"Goodbye," he said. "Natalie."
It was the first time he had actually used her first name.
Ewan let out a low, impressed whistle.
"I've known her for four years," Ewan told Raphael. "It took two years before she let me call her Natalie."
Raphael ignored him again.
Natalie ignored him too. The corners of her mouth just curled up into a faint smile.
"Goodbye, Raph."
She turned and walked toward the exit.
Ewan watched her go, then clapped Raphael on the shoulder.
"You're screwed, mate."
Raphael finally looked at him. "What?"
"I said you're screwed," Ewan said, trying not to laugh. "Once the Harvard genius locks onto you, there's nowhere to hide. No one ever gets away."
"...It's not that I can't get away."
"Then what is it?"
Raphael didn't answer right away. He watched Natalie's silhouette disappear through the heavy soundstage doors.
"I just haven't decided if I want to run yet."
Ewan laughed out loud and gave his shoulder one last squeeze.
"Then I guess you'll just have to wait to be caught." With that, Ewan turned and walked away.
---
After returning to Los Angeles, Raphael practically vanished. He didn't leave his apartment.
He pulled the blackout curtains tight, letting himself sink into the absolute darkness. It wasn't depression, and it wasn't exhaustion—he was actively purging his system.
The last two and a half months in Sydney felt like one long, incredibly vivid fever dream.
After a full day of isolation, Raphael finally opened his laptop and logged into his brokerage account.
It was September 2001. The NASDAQ had plummeted from its peak of 5,000 points the previous March down to a miserable 1,600. The dot-com bubble had violently burst, and the market was a graveyard of aggressively discounted corpses.
Cisco had crashed from $80 down to $15.
Amazon had cratered from $100 down to $6.
Qualcomm was bleeding out, dropping from $100 to $40.
Wall Street was howling in agony. Analysts were going on television every day declaring that the tech sector wouldn't recover for a decade.
Raphael didn't hesitate. He went all-in on Amazon.
In his past life, he hadn't known the granular details—like how close Amazon actually came to bankruptcy in 2002. But he did know one absolute fact: twenty years from now, Amazon would be a $1.5 trillion behemoth.
Fifteen million dollars—the combined, upfront payouts from Star Wars and the Calvin Klein contract—was wired into a heavily shielded offshore investment account he'd set up specifically for this.
He left the $90,000 from the first Fast and Furious and the $500,000 from Dior in his standard checking account for walking-around money.
The fifteen million hadn't touched Ari or Philip's hands.
It wasn't a matter of distrust; he just didn't want them asking questions, and he definitely didn't want to explain his psychotic-looking investment strategy.
Then came September 11.
Raphael stood by the window in his apartment, watching the smoking Twin Towers on his television screen.
He remembered this day.
In his past life, he had been just a regular guy living ten thousand miles away, watching the horror unfold through a screen. He had felt the shock of it, but no profound grief, no visceral empathy.
In this life, it was the same. Even his mother, Madeline, felt somewhat detached from it. It was a common symptom among immigrants—a lingering sense of not fully belonging to the national trauma.
But now, he was in Los Angeles. Five thousand miles from New York, but the sound of those towers collapsing echoed through the entire country.
The stock market closed for four days.
The first week it reopened, the Dow plunged 14%. The NASDAQ drilled even closer to the center of the earth.
Raphael's account was immediately deep in the red by hundreds of thousands of dollars.
He shut his laptop. He didn't look at the numbers. They were just noise.
He was holding for the long term anyway; obsessing over the daily ticker would only mess with his head.
He pulled up his system panel. It flickered to life.
[Current Debt: Dominic Toretto's Complete Skillset + Anakin Skywalker's Force Affinity + Complete Jedi Knight Training Memories + Jedi Mind Trick = $12,000,000]
[Total Balance Due: $12,000,000]
Raphael stared at the massive number and let out a slow exhale.
He wasn't a gambler.
But sometimes, the only correct move looked exactly like the play a degenerate gambler would make.
He remembered something Master Yoda had told him.
Look forward, you must. To look back is to sink.
Raphael swiped the panel away.
Outside the window, the Los Angeles traffic bled into an endless, pulsing river of headlights.
He needed to do more.
This was a once-in-a-lifetime market crash, and he was painfully short on capital.
The Jedi Mind Trick was incredibly useful, but it was fundamentally rooted in the Light Side of the Force. Using it excessively for personal, material gain directly violated Jedi teachings, and he could already feel it slowly greasing the slope toward the Dark Side.
He needed to make a massive pile of cash, fast, and completely within the bounds of the law.
An idea struck him. He picked up his phone and called Philip.
"Feel like taking a trip to Vegas?"
"...Excuse me? Is this your idea, or did someone put you up to this?" Philip asked suspiciously.
"I've never been. I want to see the sights. Don't you?"
"I'd love to say yes, little brother, but federal law states you have to be twenty-one to step foot on a casino floor. So... do the math."
"Shit!"
Raphael swore and hung up the phone.
How had he forgotten that?
America was a land of bizarre contradictions. You couldn't drink until you were twenty-one—as if the endless supply of blackout-drunk high schoolers didn't exist. And the same rule applied to casinos.
Raphael was a highly recognizable public figure now. The last thing he needed was to get aggressively bounced from the Bellagio and end up on the front page of the tabloids.
His plan to fleece the casinos was dead on arrival.
Just as he was trying to brainstorm another angle, his phone rang again. It was Ari.
"Are you ready for this, golden boy?"
"Do not call me that," Raphael grimaced.
Ari barked a laugh. "Just keeping you humble. Seriously though, do you have any idea how many people are begging for a meeting with you right now? My desk is structurally unsound from the weight of all these scripts. What's the play? You want to take a vacation, or...?"
"Bring me the scripts," Raphael answered instantly. "If the role is right, I don't care how many there are. Where are you? I'll come to the office right now."
"I'm out of the office today... but head over anyway. Emily will pull the shortlist for you."
...
Forty-five minutes later, Raphael was sitting in Ari's office at WME.
Emily, Ari's assistant, laid out a stack of neatly bound scripts.
"X-Men 2—they want you to read for Iceman or Pyro. The Matrix Reloaded—they want you for Seraph. Also... Neal Moritz wants to grab lunch."
"Neal? Alright, I'll give him a call."
A sudden realization hit Raphael.
As the inaugural film of the Fast franchise, his character, Brian O'Conner, was technically the protagonist, but he wasn't the true soul of the series. The gravitational center of that universe was Dominic Toretto.
Starting from the fourth movie, the entire franchise mutated from a mid-budget street racing flick into a billion-dollar, A-list global juggernaut.
Which brought up an interesting piece of trivia: Why had Vin Diesel refused to return for the second movie?
Producer Neal Moritz had practically begged him, offering him a staggering twenty-five million dollars to come back.
Diesel had turned it down because he hated the script. He felt the character lacked depth and that the sequel was a soulless cash grab. Instead, he went off to shoot The Chronicles of Riddick to chase his own artistic vision. He wouldn't fully return until the fourth installment, and when he did, he came back as a producer with absolute creative control over the franchise.
Thinking about this, Raphael's heart started to hammer against his ribs.
If he stepped up and carried the second Fast movie entirely on his own shoulders... could he effectively usurp Vin Diesel? Could he position himself as the undisputed anchor and creative shot-caller for the rest of the billion-dollar franchise?
Raphael had nothing against Vin Diesel personally, but he wasn't about to let a golden opportunity slip through his fingers.
As the variables clicked into place in his mind, he looked up at Emily and realized she was staring at him, completely transfixed.
"Is something wrong?"
Emily jumped, her cheeks flushing. "No! I just... sorry. I zoned out for a second."
Raphael smiled easily.
He knew exactly how lethal his face was to women in their twenties; he just hadn't expected it to work so effectively on Emily. They'd been dealing with each other professionally for over a year.
But he brushed it off.
If Emily ever actually made a pass at him, Ari would fire her before she finished the sentence. As Ari loved to remind him: You can sleep with every available woman in Los Angeles, but you do not touch the women who work for me. Don't shit where you eat.
Raphael had no intention of crossing that line, even though Emily was objectively gorgeous.
He spent the next hour digging through the pile of scripts. He quickly realized that the pickings were actually pretty slim. X-Men 2 and Matrix Reloaded were easily the best options on the table.
Then, he reached the very bottom of the stack and pulled out a thin binder.
"Honey? What the hell is this?"
Curious, Raphael flipped it open. It only took him a few pages of reading the dialogue to recognize the movie.
It was a dance movie starring Jessica Alba.
Raphael couldn't care less about dance movies. But he definitely cared about Jessica Alba.
Specifically, the 2003 version of Jessica Alba, who was currently at the absolute, untouchable peak of her physical prime.
"What did Ari say about this one?" Raphael asked, holding up the script for Honey.
Emily squinted at the cover, trying to recall her boss's exact words.
"Ari said... 'It's a braindead teen dance flick with a basement-level box office ceiling. It's designed entirely to boost the female lead's profile. Unless Raphael has three massive flops in a row, I will never, ever let him near this piece of garbage.'"