Chapter Text
It’s hard not to run away.
Running away doesn’t solve anything. It’s a cowards solution. The only thing a person who chooses to run away can hope for is temporary reprieve.
It was hard to resist that temporary reprieve.
He told himself, over and over and over, that it was a pointless act.
He just needed to stick it out for a bit longer. Endure a bit more. Tolerate it and get every bit of benefit he could from the situation.
It wasn’t good will that made him grit his teeth.
There are many popular maxims that are attributed to the cliche concept of there are two types of people in the world , often in an effort to boil down the infinite possibilities of human expression into two neat little boxes.
Are you a pessimist or an optimist? An extrovert or an introvert? Fight or flight? As though an individual could be defined by such simple terms. The nuance of individual situations is lost in the effort to stereotype a person and contain them into an easily understood box.
However that doesn’t mean that there isn’t some truth to those maxims. The popularity of them is largely due to those tiny truths that people latch onto. Some people might actually fit into those boxes, or at least be like a cat that molds their fur to fit inside of a box much smaller than their size in an effort to sit comfortably.
Some people are born with a natural inclination towards cynicism and some people gain cynicism through experience.
Cale Barrow was a boy born with a larger than normal dose of cynicism filling his soul.
He was by no means a cruel or malicious child but he had the natural inclination to look at situations with a far more critical eye than was typical for his peers.
It wasn’t necessarily pessimism or even realism. He was just cynical.
For a child who was only four years old, it had a tendency to disturb the adults around him who craved him to be more ‘normal’. They would whisper in voices they thought he couldn’t hear about how abnormal he was. Discuss how there must be something wrong with his head. Sometimes they would assign him different psychological disorders in their efforts to categorize him in a better to understand box.
Cale had lost count of the number of diagnoses he’d overheard. He used to make a hobby of looking them up online, just to see what they were talking about, but he eventually got bored of the repetitive nature of it. The favorites were sociopath, narcissist, and autism spectrum disorder.
After watching some videos on youtube with regards to the disorders, Cale had felt that the assignments and motivations behind them were cruel in nature. The three disorders listed described legitimate issues that people struggle with, two that were most frequently caused by trauma and one that was just a slightly different way of processing the world.
The way they had whispered those words, Cale had initially thought they were cursing at him. They said them quietly the same way that adults tended to whisper curse words. But ultimately, he really couldn’t see anything so demonic about any of those disorders and it just seemed to be a pointless extension of their desire to fit people into boxes that they had created.
Cale didn’t hate them though.
That was the thing about cynicism.
It wasn’t a hateful thing.
He believed in the self interested nature of humanity. He too knew that he was selfish and he craved his own survival. So he tried to learn everything he could in order to maximize his chances of survival and take reasonable advantage of those around him.
Cale’s parents weren’t bad people. They were typical adults consumed by a capitalistic society without much time for their son.
In truth, when Cale attended their funeral at the age of five, he felt like he was looking at strangers.
He was sad, how could he not be sad, but he couldn’t see the advantage in showing that sadness. Exposing weakness to the strangers around him felt like exposing himself to unnecessary danger.
Many of those people were the same ones who whispered about him too loudly not to be heard.
They did it at the funeral as well.
Cale could recognize malice.
He wasn’t a genius by any means but his critical thinking skills were advanced for his age. He was also vaguely aware of that as well.
In the hours and days spent alone in the apartment while his parents were away at work, Cale had learned how to take care of himself. It gave him a lot of time to think. And with those thoughts, he began to broaden his understanding of the world.
It wasn’t an excess of intelligence, he was just prone to cynicism and rumination.
Cale said goodbye to his parents with sadness because a part of him really wished he could have known them.
They seemed like nice people.
The funeral was the first day he met the man who shared his name.
His fathers younger brother, Cale Barrow. A man who looked so much like Cale that people could easily presume they were father and son. Cale could remember being told that he was named after his uncle but he’d thought it was a bit strange at the time.
They shared the same name but his uncle never once visited.
Still, Cale understood that people were inherently selfish and they had their own matters to attend to. His uncle had no reason to like him just because they shared the same name. In fact for some people that would be a good reason to hate him.
Cale hadn’t felt much of anything when he met his uncle.
Now he knew that he should have felt fear.
It was funny. All of those videos about mental disorders that he looked up to satiate his own curiosity about the words others held for him wound up serving a twisted use for him.
Sociopaths were a much maligned group of people. Lots of people, even those within the mental health community, hold them in fear and contempt. It’s a cruel thing because sociopathy is not an inherently violent or malicious disorder. It was commonly triggered by trauma at a young age and it was merely the case of a person lacking in empathy.
There were other details but that was the basic synopsis that Cale understood.
He really couldn’t understand what was so awful about lacking empathy. Cale didn’t feel what other people were feeling but he still chose to treat them with kindness and dignity. Emotion or the lack thereof wasn’t the ultimate determining factor of what made a person good or bad. It was the decisions that person made.
However there was another maligned disorder that was normally brought up alongside sociopathy.
Psychopaths.
While Cale could make a spirited defense of them as well, he at least understood why there was such distorted hatred and fear towards them. One of the primary differences between the two disorders was that a sociopath is a condition that can express itself in a variety of ways, a psychopath requires certain twisted behaviors to be diagnosed.
One needed to actually do the heinous cruelties that could bubble up in the human mind to be considered a psychopath.
It wasn’t a useful diagnosis. The same way that others diagnosing Cale had never helped him or them. But it helped him to understand, just a tiny bit, why his uncle did those horrible things to him.
Cale wanted to run away.
He wanted to run away everyday.
He had chosen to stay because he was cynical. He knew that he was only seven years old and he needed an adult to survive in this world. There was no guarantee that any of his other relatives would be willing to take him in and there was no guarantee that they weren’t worse than his uncle.
They had all unanimously chosen to leave Cale in his uncle's care and they surely had to know what kind of man he was. After all, Cale was only a child and he wasn’t that smart and he had been able to quickly recognize what his uncle was. To understand the danger inherent in that man's existence.
Sometimes it made him hate his name.
Cale had never minded his name before but knowing that it was the exact same as that man made shivers run down his spine.
He just needed to take advantage of his uncle for long enough to get through school.
Just enough to be financially stable.
He just needed to endure.
He just needed to endure.
He just needed to…
Cale saw his smile.
His uncle smiled at him before leaving for the day and everything inside of Cale burned with fear.
He’s going to kill me.
It wasn’t rational. People were self interested. It was easy to hide cuts and bruises on a child but it was hard to hide a body's corpse.
But Cale was sure of it. As sure as he had ever been of anything else.
He’s going to kill me.
Fear gripped him into the core of his heart.
Cale wanted to live.
He wanted to live .
His legs were moving before he could properly comprehend it all.
Cale ran away from home, hating himself with every footstep and knowing, knowing that he was a coward for doing it. That he was a fool. That he should have just endured a bit longer.
But he couldn’t endure anymore.
He was too weak.