The End of Prince Dakkar.
He had known he could likely die ever since the day he began the rebellion to free his beloved India from the cold steel claw-like grip England had gently placed on his home country, slowly tightening its grip around his homeland until they had bled it dry. And he had accepted the risk, despite the consequences.
It had been so simple. One of the benefits of his complete education his father had wanted him to possess - many a time, the Prince had wondered even long before it had all gone terribly and hideously wrong, and later when he had decided to just leave the world behind and make a new existence for himself - was it had given him a phenomenal grasp for tactics.
The Prince had not merely just learnt about art, mathematics, and engineering. He had also studied under some of the living tacticians and strategists and he had learnt his lessons well. For a long time Dakkar had been planning out the rebellion; he had gotten a dim idea long before he had returned to India.
Hatred towards the English had become so deeply rooted in Indian culture, finding support for his uprising was very simple. It hadn't taken the young Prince long to find the support he needed, the contacts for arms, spies to discover the secrets of the British and to sabotage and assassinate key British officials and military officers to throw the occupational forces into disarray.
If he had lost, there was the chance his family - his wife and children, his mother and father, both rulers of their part of India - would be rounded up and executed; that was one of the reasons why Dakkar had worked so long, and so hard, to protect his loved ones. For a long time, the rebellion had won a lot of ground, within a couple of months the English began losing its grip, but they refused to give up without a fight.
That was one of the things the prince had envied about the English, really; Dakkar had visited nearly every single country on the planet, but he had refused to visit England. He had grown up with the hatred deep in his heart as he had been forced to watch the English enslave Indians to this day.
But he had visited dozens of other countries where their empire touched. It was the same thing; the English occupational forces oppressed the country under a veneer of civilisation, but behind the scenes, many of them tortured their slaves and got away with it because they genuinely believed the slaves were their property.
But just because he hated them so much, Dakkar did admire them.
He admired their strength and how they had gained the power to spread across the globe and maintain their grip.
He admired the way they had grown over the years, but Dakkar hated them for what they had forced him to become in his youth. He hated their arrogance, their belief they were masters of all they saw.
But he hated them for killing his family. Dakkar had not told himself the fault was not resting solely on the shoulders of the English, but he had put them in that position in the first place. The spies who sold his family out to the English for gold were dead, he had made certain of that, but it would not bring his family back.
Prince Dakkar had quickly become the worst threat to the British occupation of India. Yes, the occupational forces and the English authorities had received plenty of trouble from other Indians over the years. But Prince Dakkar had brought with him something worse. He brought his intellect and used it to challenge the English warmonger. Many English soldiers and politicians in India had died either at his hands or as a consequence of one of his plans.
But Dakkar was not infallible. Nobody was. He had made dozens of mistakes, one of the worst was he trusted the wrong people, and his family had paid the price.
And when his family were killed, Dakkar had withdrawn from the rebellion although it was already eroding by that point anyway. In the mountains, the prince had brooded in horror and he had realised the civilised world was pure evil, and he wanted to leave it forever.
Dakkar remembered how he had gathered everything he had left and he gathered his few remaining friends and they had travelled to an island after he had thrown himself into the field of marine engineering. On that island, Dakkar had designed and built the Nautilus, an unprecedented and unparalleled submarine boat where he hoped and prayed he would never have to set foot on land ever again.
The prince had been a student of studying submarine history, and he perfected what worked and went further, pushing the technology until he had the Nautilus. For years afterwards, Prince Dakkar and his crew took to the open seas where they vanished beneath the waves. He had renamed himself so he could forget his old life except in private...
After his success in the designing of an all electrically powered submarine, he had felt perfection. He had separated himself from the rest of humanity, and if they died out, so be it.
As he breathed out slowly as he felt the life ebb away from his once strong, robust, and athletic body, the concerned eyes of the Lincoln Island colony as Cyrus Smith and his party had named the island they'd become stranded on following their trip across the world in a hot air balloon (a part of him wondered how Robur would have felt if somebody had managed to survive a long trip in a balloon, but if there was one thing Dakkar had learnt from his fellow engineer after the Nautilus travelled to Island X, and stumbled across Robur's experiments to construct an aircraft, it was the French engineer did not hide his contempt for lighter than air) watching him.
It had been a long time since somebody other than his crew/companions had cared for him; he had never developed a bond like the one he seemed to have with the castaways with Professor Aronnax, Land and Conseil. It was actually refreshing.
"It's alright," he said quietly; they heard him easily enough since he was the only voice in the silent saloon of the Nautilus. "I was just thinking of the past…"
"Anything special?" Neb asked.
Captain Nemo chuckled darkly. "I was just thinking of my family. How good it would be to see them…"
"It doesn't have to be this way," Pencroff protested.
"Pencroff," Cyrus began warningly, but Captain Nemo looked at the sailor and one of the most practical men in the group quizzically.
"What do you mean by that?"
Pencroff suddenly seemed to realise he might have overstepped his boundaries, but Captain Nemo softened his look.
"Please, tell me."
"We could take you up on the island; the fresh air and the sun might do you the world of good."
Although he was annoyed with the implications his work into the Nautilus life support was not doing its job, Captain Nemo knew this man wasn't being offensive intentionally.
"It won't; don't get me wrong, it's a nice thought, but I have been dying a long time. Simply put I've been dying of old age and my body has been shutting down. There's nothing that can be done. In any case, I have been walking around the island in the sun and the fresh air long before you arrived."
"And you were able to do that without us knowing about it, how?" Spillett asked with all the curiosity of a good journalist.
Captain Nemo chuckled, this time in good humour. "It's not as difficult as you can imagine. You occupy a small part of the island, so did I. When I knew you were here, I took long walks along the pebbled beaches; no way or chance of footprints for you to find should you arrive, and I didn't need the resources of the island as you did, so venturing around was not necessary. And I used the caves and caverns honeycombed throughout the island to reach various places if I needed to like I did with the pirates."
"Why did you choose this island specifically?" Young Herbert asked curiously.
"It was one of the closest island bases I had near the Coral graveyard. A part of me, a very large part, was tempted to take the Nautilus on one final journey so I could take the beauty of the oceans with me into heaven; the Nautilus can be operated by one person. I made the controls and the engineering systems that sophisticated. But my heart wasn't in it. I almost did it, though. I was at the controls, ready and willing with a course planned out, but in the end, I could not go through with it. I had lost the last of my friends and I was alone. But I did decide on visiting India, just one last time. I even walked among its people for the final time before I returned to the Nautilus. By that point, I came back here. And I placed the Nautilus in this cave."
"You've just wanted to die…," Herbert whispered, looking down at his feet sadly. Captain Nemo's heart went out to this young man. He still saw the world innocently despite the horrors he had likely seen…
"I've been dying for a long time, my dear boy. At least…with you…. All of you, I feel like….I've repented."
"You haven't needed to repent for anything," Cyrus Smith's words made the dying Prince turn to him in surprise, "You were always a good man underneath; your family died not because of you, Captain Nemo. They died because of an oppressive regime which they refused to accept. You wanted to help people, and from what we've heard about your past, you genuinely wanted to help everyone in your home country. That's the sign of a good man. You also provided gold and treasure to those who were desperately trying to fight oppression in their own lands because you felt you had failed in your own. Think of it, Captain; if you had found us here, while you had the Nautilus, and we were hopeless, would you have left us here to die?"
"No. I wouldn't. But there was a chance I would have press-ganged you into serving on my ship."
"But we would have been alive," Cyrus Smith and his people didn't look horrified about the revelation.
Captain Nemo studied every face in the saloon, and he realised they would have accepted anything just to live. But what shook him the most was they believed their leader's words that he was a good man. The thought made him close his eyes as he remembered every single fateful decision he had made, all the deaths that were laid at his door.
He hoped his family believed the same thing.
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