Nico Gray (Draft)

(Crime, Noir) Introduction of a new character.

Before.

You cannot legislate morality. Sure. That's... one way of putting it. And if morality is alike a publication's medium, like say a Star Tribune or a Sojourners, Nicholas Graham subscribed to Hugh Hefner's platform. But If that indicated something about the young man, you couldn't, and rightly so, tell, if he were to grace you with his presence. But that was the ploy, though inadvertent at the onset, the subterfuge with which he played his hand of cards in the game of blackjack that is life. 

 From a very young age Nicholas had suspected his survival hinged on three things. The first of those was that anybody, everybody really, could be manipulated. The second was that he knew he was a bit more handsome than the normal margins that up-held the standard. But It wasn't until his mid-teen that he'd worked a third variable into the mix, that he'd arrived at the coup de gras which played perfectly to his advantage. 

 An above-average-handsome manipulator could, if not get away with anything, put himself in a position where there always existed the likelihood. And In either case, it was certain to him the variables would prove advantageous. 

 But...in contrast to the aforementioned, Nicholas Graham was not vain. Not as in Caravaggio's famous portrait, or in any other way a person could be. The blue-print of his ploy was merely a silent rebuke of the fault in mankind. He was sure that such arbitrarily blind assumption in people that a good looking person was inherently good, and thus deserving and worthy, proved detrimental to countless souls if whoever did the looking care to. Of this he was sure. In several cases, in fact. 

 'People have only the capacity for change, they never actually change...,' he'd recalled saying the first time he held a loaded gun to the head of the first life he'd erased. A posh type, with a Leigh Anne Tuohy complex, who had convinced herself that by her account there would be one less unfortunate soul in the world, and so on a snowy day had picked him up on the roadside like the stray he was and had took him home. The irony of it though was that those were the same words his psychotic father had used in the moment he held a knife at Nicholas mother's throat minutes before he butchered her, with a younger Nicholas peaking through the crack of a cupboard in which he hid. From there he would watch his mother take her final breath on the kitchen floor. But while he wasn't wise to the ways of the adult at four years old, or at least not to all that had culminated to such tragic denouement, he somehow instinctively understood the true meaning behind the last exchange between the two people that had engineered him into the world. Especially in his father's stead. 

 "I said i didn't love you anymore, I know, and I truly wanted to believe that, but I love you. I still do. And I know you love me too, you've changed! I can tell you've changed! Please!" Nicholas mother had pleaded as Graham Sr. cupped her juggler with unsheathed steal gleaming in his right hand. "People have only the capacity for change, they never actually change. I warned you, but you don't listen," he'd replied, sliding the knife's cutting end across her neck, as she attempted to speak, and then plunging it into her jugular. 

"You can't possibly hope to know a person's true self by only looking at them," Graham Sr. had said as he stood above the woman's near lifeless body. He was gone shortly after. While I warned you, but you don't listen had then been the synopsis of this grim tale, It wasn't until his teen years that Nicholas would arrive at the real meaning hidden in his father's final words--a realization he held with both despondence and contempt in regards to his mother. And in the case of "Leah Anne Tuohy," he'd tried in his way to forewarn her. Or maybe he was the one who needed to be cautioned.

Author's Note

Unedited. Tell me you opinion.