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It hadn’t started with the cancer diagnosis. Despite what people believe, John Kramer was a broken man far before his Doctor had sat him down and told him that. It had started months before, when he’d had his life and future torn from him.Jill’s miscarriage hit him harder than it seemed to hurt her. He was the one who had done the meticulous planning, the weeks of research over health, star charts, zodiacs. He’d been called a particular man his whole life. Many of his past coworkers called him a perfectionist, a workaholic, etc. But it would be worth it. All of it would have been worth it for Gideon, for Jill, for his family. Then came her miscarriage. Then the divorce.Without that driving force, that compelling motivation in his life, the rest of it began to collapse in on itself. It was an almost rushed decent into anger and madness. That energy- once fine tuned into his work and loved ones- had no where to go. It began to fester and rot deep in his gut, till he was sure it would kill him if he didn’t act.Perhaps that feeling was also the cancer that he didn’t know of yet. Perhaps the headaches and sleepless nights were better attributed to the massive tumor in his brain, and not simple heartbreak.Regardless of what caused the pain, he had a foolproof solution. He’d figured it was foolproof, at least. But, as with many of recent plans, it fell apart. When John drove his car off the edge of a cliff that night, he’d hoped it would put him out of his misery. He’d hoped that it would end everything quicker than rotting away in a bed with cancer, alone. He knew that Jill would likely visit him out of pity, but the thought of her seeing him like that- weak and crumbling- it was potent. Potent enough to have him speeding off a cliff and praying for death.It didn’t come, of course. Nothing in his life seemed to be working how he wanted. If he were a little more stable, his problem solving wouldn’t have been so drastic. He’d gotten flack about that in his career as well. His solutions and designs were always extreme, according to… well, just about everyone.John sat in the car wreck on the side of the road for longer than he needed. He wasn’t thinking of Jill or Gideon or his cancer. He was thinking two things.One - ‘I could really use a drink right now’and Two - ‘There is a metal bar in my stomach that should not be there. Why the hell did I do that?’A life of engineering had forced him to be a quick thinker with creative solutions. Unfortunately, in the complete honesty owed to a dying man, he was never good at either. His pain-wracked and tumor-full brain came up with, again, two thoughts.One involved tearing the metal out of his stomach and dealing with the blood later. And the other, more future centric plot- ‘I need to start torturing people in the most elaborate ways possible, then they’ll appreciate whatever’s left of themselves’‘Yes, this was it,’ he thought to himself as he yanked a stretch of rebar out, gritting his teeth in the process. ‘This’ll really show everyone who doubted me. Too extreme, a perfectionist, as if!’The blood loss and end of life crisis may have started the thought process of who would become the infamous Jigsaw killer, but it was John who carried it on. It was John Kramer and his ego, simultaneously bruised and flared at the time. It would only get worse from here.