Primal Gambit

Chapter 41: Darwin's Past

Darwin sat in the uncomfortable wooden chair, the far stovetop light hardly bringing illumination to the kitchen table and the old photo albums strewn across it. A snifter rested within arm's length, ice cubes drifting lazily in the viscous liquid.

The pictures that swelled the albums always brought tormenting thoughts to Darwin. Like watching a train derail on it's very first cross-country voyage, he couldn't look away for long. It was commonplace for the photos to cause tears to gather under his eyes; he had no one. He never had. Taking after the abusive father who was never around, Darwin clung to power – the one respite, he felt, from being truly alone. Through power he could have anyone or anything he desired.

The photographs themselves, old and fatigued from years of collecting dust, fed the activist leader. To him, it was a just action to get caught up and entangled with the organization he picketed in protest of, if it garnered the fame he had been growing thirsty of for so long.

His youth was little more than a conglomerate of bad experiences. A father drunk on power and a mother drunk on cheap vodka – he was left to his own devices. Growing up in the slums of a drowning California, his childhood comprised of the simultaneous manipulation of the peers around him and retreating out of the city as melting ice caps slowly engulfed the southernmost region of the state.

A photo rested between his fingers. His eyes glazed in tears; he was lost in it. He was no older than ten. There was no faded date scribbled onto the back, nothing that told him how old he was at the time the photo was taken.

The sole reason he remembered the day that surrounded the photograph and how old he was – it was the day his father died. The day was vivid in his mind: the photo a shot of the family in the front yard of their new home – one mortgaged by his father after coming into some substantial monetary gain from his various business endeavors. At the time a young Darwin was blind to see the lust for money that would cost his father's life that very night. They had finally broken free from life in the tent city beneath the overpass, and the support columns of Darwin's sanity were simultaneously crumbling.

When his father passed, the boy did not grieve. He did not miss his rare presence, his foul actions against his mother, or the lack of lessons he passed down. Darwin learned from the mistakes his parents made. His mother died a short time after the pair's relocation to Pittsburgh, during the beginning of the technological boom. Other young men his age clung to a life in virtual reality or just obtaining the wherewithal of duping colleagues for financial gain; all the while he cared for his mother in the confines of their flat. He spared not an ounce of grief for her once she died. In his eyes, alcohol poisoning took anyone who deserved to die from it.

Left to fend for himself in an increasingly dangerous city, he was quick to find out the root causes for the destruction of human compassion. Darwin learned how to break a man down: make him feel a significant decrease in both his self-worth and his self-esteem so that he would be forced to accomplish whatever Darwin asked to attain the two imperative qualities again.

Perhaps ingrained with his father's genes, the young entrepreneur reverted to subterfuge and intimidation to accomplish his goals – all at the expense of those around him. Though when accusations began to surface, Darwin was nowhere to be found and so, not to blame. He reveled in the nostalgia, all pouring from the one photograph his mind was subjected to.

A bang on the door startled him. He slid the picture into the nearest album and slammed it shut. He wiped the tear off his cheek and grunted to the stranger:

"Who is it?"

"You know who it is." The foreign voice droned from beyond the wall.

Darwin knew who it was solely from the wheeze itself. He had been expecting the warrior.