Call me Nightmare (abandoned)

Memories

-Tommy's POV-

Deo laughed as he heard me ask the question. 

"It's been three years already, how time flies" I smiled as I remembered how I met him all those years ago.

I was just 8 years old when I met Deo. My parents had started drinking and really needed money. I needed it to survive, but no one would hire an 8-year-old. Well, no one except those who went against the law. So, my only option was to do some illegal work. 

It started off small. Helping people transport drugs, cigarettes, or other illegal substances. Then it leads to things like being the distraction to help rob someone or a place. I mostly worked for a small gang at the time and that is where I met Deo.  He was 12 back then and I remember looking up to him the most. The gang we worked for had a few kids that did some work for them.

That's where we met Luke and Bitzel who were 7 and 8. Deo being the oldest always tried to take care of us. None of us came from good families, that's how we ended up in that place. I guess growing up surrounded by drugs and eventually violence doesn't do well in a kid's mind. As we grew older one by one the gang started to train us for actual gang violence. When I was 10 I started training, we all did when we reached that age. 

Deo had been with the gang longer than us so he had some training beforehand since he was already 12 by the time I met him. We all stuck together like glue in training. We became known even back then as Business Bay. We were young. People underestimate young people. By the time I was twelve, we had all understood that. Since people underestimated us it meant we could trick them easily.

It was mostly selling teenagers fake drugs or cigarettes and dividing the money between us and the gang, but eventually, we grew tired of giving them stuff. They technically didn't do any of the work, so naturally, we started to do our own things. We had been in the crime world since we were all around eight and had been trained to fight by 10. 

We knew how to lie, and how to act, we had all we needed. By the time I was 12 Deo was already 16. Naturally, the gang had started to force him to do worse things, and that's when we decided we had enough.

We had our own connections and Deo decided he wanted to build his own gang and eventually a Mafia. At first, it seemed like a teenager and some kids doing dumb stuff, but hey 4 years of being surrounded by all types of things gave you lessons nothing else could teach you. 

We learned sometimes killing was necessary or sometimes some worse things. Our roles quickly molded as Deo became the leader, Luke the strategist, Bitzel built all our weapons and I did all the dirt work. We all had blood on our hands, but as Deo used to say I had a bad habit of one-upping people.

As I fought worse people I just kind of became better at fighting, hiding, acting, lying, anything that came with the job. As the gang grew bigger Deo managed to get people who were actually good at fighting to train us, so all of our skills increased. 

The small gang led by a teenager and some kids wasn't so small. It surprisingly quickly became a Mafia. A small one sure, yet a feared one. In the short time period, the Bay existed we were feared not for what we were, but for what we could become. Sadly, in the end, we were all children after all.

We had come from unloving families, all we had was one another. Sometimes that bliss that maybe there were other people like us blinded us. That was our downfall. We believed they were all on our side, we gave them way too much of our trust.

One day it was a meeting and the next, the whole place went up in flames. Police cars surrounded the area. Me and Deo were the only ones to escape. I was the least known out of all of us, after all whenever we met with other people the main faces were those three. All I did was sit there as they spoke. A reminder to those around them that they were not safe.