One Page of Fame
4: L
He is the tragic detective with many masks and few of them know those masks and fewer still know the man beneath and that's the greatest tragedy of them all. He's a name that'll live forever and be stained and coloured and it was never pure white or pure black to begin with but that's just a name, a title, a suit of clothes or a crown passed down and down and the world forgets who wore it in the past and only recalls the face of now, if even that.
He's the tragic detective who's a person and that person is forgotten: his beginning and his middle and his end. The entire biography is just blank pages and they'll write falsehoods and tall tales attempting to fill in the blanks and they'll fail because there are far too many blanks when those who replaced him have coloured in the truth for their own means as well and the others are not there. He's the ultimate rival for a killer who is likewise immortalised and forgotten but the killer succeeds him and so he is lost in the spiral of time as the loser of their little game where only the winner stands supreme and even that winner loses later on. It's a tournament setup and there's a king somewhere but they haven't reached that part yet; they're still in the preliminary rounds after all no matter what they thought of themselves: pawns who thought they could be gods and there are no gods in this game, only the winning kind –
And it was a hard-fought match but he lost eventually, he lost anyway and was forgotten along with all the other losers in that place… Or so he should have gone, but to most, he shouldn't have existed at all.