Story:Kings of Strife/Part 28

Part Twenty-Eight
The more time passed after he accepted the mission from Draizen, the less control over himself that Luther had.

After all these years, he thought he had let go of the lingering regret that had plagued him for so long after Silverius left the military. The marriage he had before the Nneonian Civil War broke apart within months after the operation that saved his life, and the two daughters he had were disgusted by what the doctors had done to keep him alive. Just by not dying, he had alienated his greatest pupil and his closest family.

The months after that were hard for him. For his service in the War and as a sort of compensation for Silverius’ rogue behavior, the Inusian government had gifted him an early retirement and a fat paycheck to stay out of any bureaucratic career. They wouldn’t want him spreading the word about what really happened in Nneoh, after all. It’d be bad for morale, they said. Of course it would.

He wasn’t the only war veteran who’d been gracefully fired this way, nor was he the only one who survived with grievous wounds and a new outlook on life. But he was completely sure that he was the only one who had lived at such costs – with such a broken heart – and to this date he went uncontested by this belief. Luther Vinahkman was, for all intents and purposes, a changed man.

The monotonous days blurred into weeks, which soon became months and years. The time and date long ago ceased to matter to him. There was never any purpose in keeping track of what time it was, or what he would do for the rest of the day, nor even how long it had been since he had shaved. He did what he wanted whenever the impulse to do so came to him. Who was going to stop him anymore? What was going to hold him down to the ideals of a proper life in which he was useful to society? Although he thought the opposite, truly the government’s relinquishment of his job had freed him, and with the amount of money they paid him, living comfortably was easy. He was free, and life was his own to experience, and there was no living person in the world who could say otherwise.

But that was never what Luther Vinahkman wanted.

It didn’t take long for him to realize just how tired he was. Every movement came with it a slow withdrawal of breath and a sigh. Every morning and night he spent watching sunrise and sunset came accompanied by a feeling of melancholy loneliness. Any news headline he read elected a shake of the head and a tsk from his teeth at the foolishness of the new generation. Waking up in the morning, long ago a sensation that filled him with excitement and anticipation, now only instilled in him a feeling of weakness and shame that he had not died in his sleep. Walking around the cities he wandered near gave him no entertainment at all. Even the alcohol he indulged in constantly did nothing to ease the dull pain he felt in every muscle, every morning and every evening. He even began to tire of drinking after a while, but he couldn’t stop. Not now. Addiction, especially when introduced in the throes of sorrow and rejection, was a powerful thing.

Rejection. That was what honestly plagued him, and he knew it. The Inusian military rejected any sovereignty its hunting dogs requested and ordered them to partake in a brutal civil war, and executed any who defied them. The very country the Inusians fought for rejected them for the deeds they had no choice in committing. Silverius, his pupil and closest friend, rejected him at the peak of the effort he was making to reach out to the youth. His family rejected him when he survived Silverius’ misplaced anger and the terrible civil war. The government that used him for their dirty work rejected him when all he did was what they asked of him. And now the world rejected him as just some cybernetic war veteran alcoholic junkie with nothing to his name and nothing to amount to.

Before long, he began to reject himself. Luther Vinahkman hated himself, and everything besides him, and the world itself. He wanted to die, so very badly, and he also wanted to kill everything that had ever rejected him. That was what he lived for all this time, and so strong were his beliefs that he couldn’t bear to kill himself until they were fulfilled, even if it contradicted his deepest desires. However, after a while, he realized just how foolish he was being, and how he was lieing only to himself. The truth was that he was too afraid to kill himself, and after what he had been through in the trenches of Nneoh, he couldn’t bring himself to kill anyone ever again.

Still, the feelings never extinguished within him. The only thing that built up beneath Luther Vinahkman was sadness, rejection, and hatred. The hatred constantly grew, like a weed in his mind’s garden, making him resent everything and himself for not having the power or the gumption to just end it all himself. The only thing the alcohol did was give him liver problems and a bit of a bloat to his large muscles. He began to doubt that anything could make these feelings go away.

Eight long years he lived like this, dreading every morning he awoke and trying to waste his life away by drinking and smoking. He used to travel constantly, and that served as a good way to kill time, but he stopped after he had an epiphany that he didn’t enjoy anything anymore, especially not seeing people who were enjoying themselves. Time meant nothing to him, and he knew it never would. After years of struggling under duty, mental stress, and the expectations of others, Luther was somewhat amazed to admit that his fall from glory was liberating, somewhat. Before, when he worried about time and its limitedness, he would stress and plan but it would all be for naught. But now, after holding onto the weight for so long on his shoulders, knees buckling and threatening to collapse, he was finally able to let go of the weight and fall to his knees.

Sure, the effort had only managed to make his life a living hell one step away from death, and had completely damaged his mental state, but at least he wasn’t holding onto the weight anymore. He had let go of the life vest, and was ever so slowly drowning in an ocean of despair. After holding his breath for so long, he let all of the oxygen go with a sad smile, and was now only waiting to see how long it would take for the water to fill his lungs and drag him to his grave.

Silverius had changed everything, once again.

Luther wanted to refuse Draizen’s request with every bone in his body. He could tell, as soon as he felt the man’s presence enter that bar, that whatever he would bring up would only drag him back out of his abyss. It would give him a new purpose in life, and would probably lead to him becoming a dog for the Inusians once again, doing what they found unsightly – yet necessary – and being thrown away in the end for his work. It was a hell, living like that and accepting the inevitable rejection, and it was a hell worse than the one he was in now. But when he heard Silverius – had gotten confirmation that the boy was still alive and roaming – his heart hurt and sorely pounded with a new frenzy. What had been shackled in despair and uselessness was revived with a nostalgic sorrow, a thought of what once was and what could be. He wanted to see the boy again, to tell him to cut his hair one last time, to slap him around and hug him and cry and wonder about what could have possibly scarred him so. Luther wanted to see his son again, not the real one that had died in childbirth, but the one he had found in the darkest confines of Inusian black ops and had pulled out to see the light of the day and of life. Now the pupil had escaped into the light, and Luther had fell into the darkness, and he knew that he would be helpless to his self-preservation instinct. He wanted, above all, to see Silverius again, and to grab the boy’s hand, and to hope that he pulled his old mentor out of the dark pits of despair like had once been done to him. Luther knew this probably would not happen, especially since he had ostensibly been ordered to kill Silverius and retrieve the extremely valuable Crystal, but a small chance was better than no chance.

If anything, he wasn’t even sure that he would be able to kill Silverius. Luther hadn’t raised a blade or gun to anyone in the eight years that had passed since the Civil War, but he would probably be able to go through with a murder if he let go of himself and let his body act on instinct, like he did all those years ago. It hadn’t failed him then and he doubted that the art was forgotten. Killing was something that a man could never forget.

But to kill Silverius – the very person he thought of as his son? Was that what God had in store for him after these long years of suffering? Would he have to crush the very dream that had sustained him for so long? He couldn’t tell, and he wouldn’t know. Just as he did all those years ago, Luther let his mind fall silent, and stopped thinking about the atrocities that he was about to commit, and let his body run on auto-pilot. If it were any other way, there would have been no way he would have lived with himself for eight years like he did. He would have surely remembered all the people he killed, heard their screams whenever there was silence, and seen their corpses whenever he closed their eyes.

That was something Silverius had never learned to accomplish. The boy always acted out of intelligent instinct, close to animal motor skills but not far enough that he was detached from what he did. Luther always regretted that he had never stamped that out of the youth. Sleep was something Silverius had never been able to take back from the dark abyss of his subconscious.

*****

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