Gilbert’s Memories

With an absent father, kindness wasn’t a man Gilbert knew. His mother, a hard-working tailor who barely managed to get by, was often neglected as her husband indulged in pleasures only grown-ups knew of. Every day was the same old melody, the same old story where their paths wouldn’t meet and their presences neglected - each focusing on what they wished to. Being a complete wreck, his father caught a contagious illness from his nightly visitors and just two months after, he met with the maker of Men.

The young kid should’ve felt sorrow, regret, a pit of sadness in his chest but instead his emotions seemed void of color, of essence. His mother, on the contrary, only found peace in the pleasantries of alcohol, spending a dime a dozen and all she could get her hands on in such an unmerciful foe. When the money ran thin, she had no choice but to become a woman of the night, the kind she used to hate with all her being, cursing them from stealing away the man she’d married that day.

Gilbert had no choice but to resort to distrustful means to survive. From stealing smaller shops on the secluded avenues to the healthier commoners who passed by, bragging about their high income, anything that was caught in his web ended up being put to good use - to be traded for food. Of course, in the beginning, he was caught and his body received a merciful end from God, being tainted with the forgiveness of his painful sins, showered by the hands of justice, of the ones who had done nothing wrong but being born in the right family.

Life was the survival of the fittest, and he knew that. He’d seen how his father grew weak to women, how his mother succumbed to alcohol instead of facing her regret and how such a decision had doomed her soul. But a villain isn’t born wicked, as deep down, his feelings of affection for his mother lingered, right at his core.

Somehow, he managed to get a job at a shady restaurant on the side of the slums. Every day, his hands would be soaked with soap and water until he felt nothing else but the wrinkles on his skin yearning for a moment of dryness. And then, one night, his mother didn’t come back.

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For hours on end, he searched the streets, inquiring any passerby’s, hoping to attain some sort of information about his mother's whereabouts. Such action merely gave him a harsh beating from some punks, leaving him far sorer and more wounded than he’d ever been. The ditch where they threw him in ended up being the one, he was fated to be as his mother’s corpse rested right then and there. Her skinny figure hid between some dumpsters as trash accumulated outside; her cheap dress was completely ripped, exposing most of her body, displaying the blood and sperm exiting her entrance; some of her members had even been pushed aside, almost completely moved out of place. Wild rats and birds had already begun their feast, pecking and munching on the rotting flesh as if they were the ones who had suffered starvation.

At that moment, many questions passed through his mind, yet he couldn’t understand how such could come to be. How could destiny be such a cruel master?

You are destined for someone.

You are destined for something greater.

That was what commoners told to each other, hoping to gather some compassion from another but, such shallow words couldn’t even drown a fly as they possessed but an ounce of truth. But Gilbert was different; he was the sole exemption of this sick rule as he - and he alone - was destined for something far greater than he could imagine.

After his mother’s death, he wasted months of his life investigating the man who had been unlucky enough to steal the only thing he cared about. And such culprit was but a mere Baron, the lowest ranking in the kingdom, a man no better than a commoner like himself.

At the tender age of twelve, he infiltrated that man’s property - if one could call it that - and carefully set up the pieces of his plan. He observed the schedules of the workers; he stalked his prey; he gathered intel on the whole building, until everything had been set into place; all that was left was the trigger.