Weekly Drabble #394: Legacy

This week's prompts are 'how slowly time goes' and 'a life remembered' from Xpholia and Accipter_Ater, and during redrafting we ended up with a bit of 'when your name is spoke for the last time' from uberdrops.

This originally started out as a vampire story, but... things happened. Enjoy!

~

Legacy:

Cyrus felt each blast reverberate down through the walls of the bunker. Dust shook loose from the walls and filtered through cracks in the ceiling. Overhead, artillery and relentless aerial strikers pounded the city, obliterating centuries of culture and history with every passing second. Not too long ago, Cyrus would have enjoyed seeing such a thing and considered it justice. Now, he knew the only true justice was killing the man he’d pursued down into these tunnels. Despite every trap and ambush sprung on him, he’d closed the distance. There was nowhere to hide, no one standing between him and what he’d spent eight years chasing.

He turned a corner, and there he was. Radimir Selenko, sitting on a crate out in the open, not even making an effort to hide. Not that there was anywhere he could have in this dead end.

He was a nondescript man or average build, and average looks. If you’d passed him in the street, you wouldn’t have looked twice. He didn’t even have a trademark moustache, birthmark or scar. You couldn’t tell that he was responsible for more death and destruction than any other human in history.

“Well,” Selenko said as Cyrus confronted him, paying no attention to the young being pointed at him. “It seems I took a wrong turn.”

“I want to know,” Cyrus panted. He didn’t mince words. “I want to know why.”

Radimir chuckled. He didn’t play dumb. He knew what his pursuer wanted, had known for a long time. “Have you been in a cave for the last ten years, boy? Everyone knows why I’ve done this. I’ve been restoring pride and power to Europe.”

“No,” Cyrus said. “No, you are lying.” The ground shook under their feet as the city above their heads was levelled block by block.

“Lying, is it?” Selenko laughed. “If that’s so, why don’t you tell me what my motivations are.”

“I don’t know,” Cyrus. “But you’ve been lying to everyone and for a lot longer than the last ten years.” He paused, catching his breath. He wasn’t out of shape, but it had been many sleepless days of getting through the city, culminating into the push on the command center and now chasing Selenko through these tunnels. “I know all about you. I know you better than you might know yourself, and I know that the facade of nationalism is just that. So you tell me, and you tell me now – what was all this for?!”

“I was nine years old when my father died,” Radimir said, unfazed by the vitriol in the younger man’s voice. “Run down by a drunk driver.”

“I know this story.” The driver had been an illegal immigrant being pursued by police. He was responsible for several other crimes and panicked when they tried to pull him over for his erratic driving, leading to the lethal chase. Whether the collision was an accident caused by drink or a deliberate attempt to get the police to stop and tend to the victim, no one knew but it had become part of the myth of Radimir Selenko and a stark example of the threat that immigrants posed to ‘honest citizens’.

“You think you do,” Selenko replied. “It’s true it was the flashpoint for my career, but not in the way you’re thinking. My father was a good man. He took care of his family. He worked hard. He believed that the government would protect us, just like every good citizen. He deserved to be remembered, but people only know his name because he was my father. How many other good men and women have vanished, swallowed whole by time over the course of human history? How many of them do we remember?”

He paused, his eyes looking past Cyrus. “At the funeral, my uncle Gregori said that every man died twice. Once when his life left him and again when his name was spoken for the final time. In that moment, I came face to face with the realization that not only do we die, but we are forgotten. We can live our best lives, but death and time take us all. No one remembers our joys, our sorrows, the loves we’ve had and lost, the accomplishments and failures we’ve had. I don’t remember where I heard it, but this was a question that changed my world. ‘Is it better to be forgotten or hatefully remembered?’ My father was a good man, but what did that gain him? When my mother dies, when I die, he will die again. My children will not speak of a man they never knew, nor will their children. I resolved that that would never happen to me.”

Cyrus barked a laugh. “That’s why you did this?” he said in utter disbelief. “To be famous?”

Radimir shook his head, chuckling scornfully. “You still do not understand, boy. ‘Fame’ is fleeting, as ephemeral as our existence. Celebrity buys us a second life, but how many people still remember the giants of their age? The good men and women? Too few. We remember the titans – Edison, Tesla, Einstein – but only because they were titans. For the rest of us, the fame we chase kills us only a little slower than anyone else. No, immortality – true immortality – is found in infamy. Bloody Mary. Alexander the Great. Hitler. Stalin. Those names will ring long after we forget the Teslas and Einsteins of the world, their discoveries surpassed by others. But infamy cannot be overcome. The man behind the Third Reich killed tens of millions with his war and his name has held for centuries. How many more has Radimir Selenko killed?”

Cyrus felt the blood drain from his face. “Eight...” he stumbled over the words. “Eight hundred million.” Wholesale extermination. Genocide. Slaughter of entire countries and ethnicities. His own family, crushed and burnt within the remains of their Yazd home. His entire country devastated and reduced to ruin, spawning the obsession that had brought him halfway across the world through a continent-sized warzone, to have led him down into these tunnels to find the man responsible for it all and deliver justice. “You can’t be serious.”

“I am, boy. My name will live forever now. Long after people stop caring why I did what I did, they’ll still speak of me. I’ll outlive every other tyrant, king and butcher. A thousand years from now, people will still curse me. As long as humanity lives, Radimir Selenko will never truly die.”

“You’re insane.”

“Perhaps,” the man raised his head. “But you know I’m right. You say you know might know more about me than I do, so tell me – am I lying?”

Cyrus stared at him. “No,” he said, his voice coming out as horrified whisper. “No, you’re not lying about this. But everything else... that was the lie. The talk of restoring Europe’s pride, protecting your people, stopping foreign invaders... it was all for this.” Insane or not, Selenko really had made himself a monster in the search for this perverse immortality. He shook his head, trying to come to terms with the twisted obsession, the decades of deceit, the horrific drive to butcher entire continents just for... just for this. Not even for a cause, but for his own selfish need to be remembered. “It won’t work.”

“You don’t think so?”

“I know so.” Cyrus looked down at the gun in his hands. He’d charged down here before anyone else, determined to mete out justice on Selenko himself, to avenge his dead parents and sister, but now that the moment had come, now that he was confronted with the truth behind the myth of Radimir Selenko, he found he didn’t want to pull that trigger. The man’s death, no matter how slow or torturous, wouldn’t bring them back. Though he’d made peace with that, he’d had to know – to make sure – that the man who’d split the world in half wouldn’t escape.

Now he knew that killing Radimir down here in the dark would only give the man what he sought. A death at the hands of one of his enemies would cement the lunatic’s legacy. He would never be exposed for what he was. His name truly would go down in infamy. “I won’t let this happen,” he said, the hate leeching from his voice, leaving only an icy resolve behind. “I’ll tell everyone what you really are. Your ‘legacy’ will crumble and you’ll be stricken from history.”

“Do you think your single voice will outweigh the death cries of eight hundred million, boy?”

“No, but yours will. You’re not dying down here as a martyr to your fake cause. You’re coming back with me.” For the first time Cyrus saw a flicker of fear in the other man’s eyes. “Come on,” he told Selenko. “Come, or I’ll shoot out your knees and drag you back to the surface. Everyone will learn what you really are.”

“They already know what I am, or at least they believe they do. Enough to give me an eternal legacy. Even you didn’t believe it until you came face to face with me. Part of you still doesn’t.” Radimir laughed again. “I will live forever and you... will not.”

Cyrus didn’t even know Radimir was armed. The older man drew the pistol from its hiding place and fired so fast that the younger man nearly didn’t have time to react. He twisted, enough that the following head shot missed, but he felt something cold slam into his chest once, twice, like the kick of a mule. He felt the gun in his own hands bark, fired from instinct rather than conscious thought and then he was on the floor. Numbness was spreading through his body and he couldn’t rise.

Radimir had been caught by Cyrus’s shot. It had gone through the meat of his thigh and stuck the bone. The femoral artery was intact. He’d live, but now he was crippled. Cyrus laughed. He tasted blood when he did. “Now you really won’t get away. The others are coming. They’ll find you.” Lucy was with them. She’d always been adamant that Radimir face a court. Public justice, she’d told him more than once, outweighs one man’s revenge. Knowing what he knew now made him laugh again. He’d never thought they’d be able to have both.

“Do you think they’ll remember you?” Selenko asked, looking down at the younger man. “You think you’ll be more than a whitewashed hero in a direct to streaming movie, or the feature of a documentary or two? If you’re lucky, you’ll be a trivia answer. ‘Who was the last person Radimir Selenko killed?’, but even that will affirm my legacy.”

“You’ll be found,” Cyrus spat. Blood bubbled over his lips. His vision was turning grey. “Even if you get out of these tunnels, no matter where you go or how far you run, the world will never stop looking. They’ll find you. Here, or in a month, a year or half a century. They’ll find you and they’ll get the truth from you. You’ll be dragged in front of a court and exposed for what you really are. A sad, scared little boy who murdered millions for no reason at all. Once they know that, they’ll forget who you were. The history books will wipe you away. That will be your legacy, Radimir. A nameless butcher that the world will choose to forget.”

“No,” the other man said with a smile. The last thing Cyrus saw as his world faded into darkness was Radimir Selenko putting the pistol against his temple. “I’m going to live forever.”