#adamskel

tw // suicide mention

Once upon a time, in a city not too far from Hermosa, not that different from any other - there was a husband and wife. The husband had vowed to do good things for the community, helping the less fortunate and assisting those who could not help themselves. As an architect, he wanted to use his position to build places that could becoming homes for those who didn’t have one. And for a while, he accomplished his goal. But just like in every story, the hero has a weakness that can prove to be his downfall - and for this so-called hero, the weakness was greed. As the money began to flow in, it was hard to ignore the potential to increase the wealth, and slowly, gradually - the goal at hand was no longer about helping others. It was about helping himself, and taking advantage of others to reach his goal. Gone was the hopes of working to create a better community, but rather he focused on taking homes that people couldn’t afford to pay for, and getting them evicted in order to build the lot up and charge obscene amounts of money for it. It was said that the practice that the man fell into increased homelessness in the city, and made the divide between the rich and the poor even worse. Did he care? Not in the slightest. His house was luxurious, filled with the most beautiful riches - and if those people could not fend for themselves, then why should it have been his job?

At this time, the wife had just given birth to the couple’s first child - a baby boy with a head full of dark curls and a smile that could rival the sun. Adam, they named him - a strong name to drive him towards a strong future. Even though he had just been given the greatest gift of all - the father did not stop when it came to his work. His career always came first, as he would tell his wife, because who else would be able to provide for the family? And so, Adam spent most of his childhood with his mother, reveling in her beautiful voice as she’d sing to him, or following after her as she’d walk through her rose gardens. They were her most prized possession, a passion that was handed down from her father to her, similar in the way his father had handed it down to him. The garden laid just a few feet from the entrance of the estate, a thick bramble of the reddest roses he’d ever seen. She’d carry him through the garden as a child, showing him the blooms as she warned him about the thorns. His mother cared for him, showering him in love and affection, and always speaking to him of the importance to love others, and to love himself. Perhaps that was why the young boy had been happy for most of his youth - a dark and twisted irony to what laid ahead in his future.

When Adam reached adolescence, his father decided that he needed to have an education that was worthy of their name - and so he went to the same prestigious boarding school that his father had attended. It was far away from home, and he didn’t want to leave the comfort and familiarity of the family - but it was one of the first times that his father had truly seemed to pay attention to him, - and so he sucked it up and did as he was told. He missed his mother terribly, missed being mischievous and annoying the servants in the kitchen, missed the fragrance of roses that would rush through the house anytime a window was opened in the slightest. He had a difficult time making friends in school, and often was on the receiving end of teasing from other classmates - so he focused on his studies and would count the days until he was going to be able to return home. Right before he turned thirteen, however, he was asked to return home unexpectedly. Home was somewhere that was always filled with positive memories - but not on this account, as he’d quickly learn that his mother was gravely ill. She’d been under the weather for a long time, blaming it on the seasons - but she never seemed to get better, just getting weaker and weaker. When he returned to the family estate, he never would think that it’d just be another day and his mother would be gone.

Buried right beside the rose garden on the estate, it seemed that without her positivity and light Adam’s life began to take a turn into darkness. His father was now the only person he could rely on, and from his youth, Adam had always seen him as a cold person - the exact opposite of who his mother was. But the more time his father would spend with him, the more Adam began to see the benefits of not being someone who was ruled by their heart. His father had reached his status through working hard and being unswayed by people looking for his help, looking for pity, looking for assistance. Adam worked closely with his father over the next few years, his father showing him the way that his architecture firm ran, and how it would one day be Adam’s responsibility to oversee it. It seemed that within an instant, his mother’s presence in the home and in his life was gone - her rose garden wilted without anyone to attend it, her belongings were packed up and put into storage - and in exchange of them, his father had become the dominant person in his life.

Once Adam had graduated from school and taken a role within the firm as his father’s partner, his outlook on the world had become completely jaded. Humanity gave him nothing - only taking from him and knocking him when he was down. There was no point in working to give back to the world when it refused to give back to him. And so, he became a shadow of his father - cold and cruel and uncaring about others that didn’t benefit him. When his father announced the biggest undertaking the firm had seen - an overhaul of a well-known yet rundown neighborhood - Adam was there at his side, head held high as they cut the metaphorical ribbon. The street was filled with abandoned buildings, and had quickly become a frequent place for the homeless and poor to stay within - and the firm planned to completely demolish everything, and create a luxury avenue of sky-high apartment buildings and shopping plazas. There was little backlash, as it was positioned as giving back to the community - but was truly so that Adam’s father could charge insane rental costs and pad his own wallet. The poor couldn’t do that for him, so there was no point in keeping those buildings.

However, on the first day of demolition, everything fell apart. The firm hadn’t adequately surveyed the properties, making sure that all of the squatters had been relocated. They simply went ahead with the wrecking of the buildings - only to find out a day later that there had been a few people inside of it at the time, and they’d all been killed when the building came down. The architecture firm was disgraced, published on every headline of every paper within the entire city, crucifying them and everything that they’d done. The spotlight was appropriately placed onto the leaders of the endeavor - Adam, and his father - and how they’d heartlessly done this. Adam, on one hand, was shaken - that was never the intention, and to think that he’d had a hand in it was upsetting. His father, though, took the easy way out of the damning spotlight - a rope tightly around the neck, not even leaving a note behind.

And so, the disgrace was Adam’s, and Adam’s alone to bear. He dissolved the entire firm as soon as he could, hoping that by doing so, it’d provide some relief to the incessant attention. Whatever assets were left to the company were given to the city and the families of those who were affected, hoping to avoid a lawsuit. The money was gone, the popularity was gone - everything was gone. But rather than trying to take a step in a new direction, Adam became bitter and angry. The world had taken everything from him - chewed him up and spit him out without any sort of regard. He closed himself off from the rest of the public, preferring solidarity over the possibility of being recognized and having to answer to what he’d done. He took a lowly job that would allow him to not have to deal with anyone, and quickly and effectively removed himself from the world as he knew it.