I don't know how long I have been sitting here, watching the slow rise and fall of his chest. I'm so scared that if I look away it will stop, so I keep on watching and pray to whatever 'greater power' kept him alive for this long to help him hold on and recover. A few times in the past few hours I've felt so … angry! Angry at him for putting himself through all this. Why didn't he let me defuse that foolish human when I had the chance? None of this would have happened! 'Titan' would never have been created, the Down Town would not have been destroyed…..and he and Miss Ritchie…
Oh this is all such a mess! It has been…12 hours since he saved the city and defeated Titan. 11 hours since he passed out. It is some sort of healing sleep… at least I think it is. He has gone through something this before but he has never been this badly beat up before. Titan really did a number on him. I knew Metro Man never really got physical with him and I knew how much damage he could have done but this… this is barbaric. Titan nearly killed him.
Sir nearly died. I mean he could have actually died!
When I was handed to him when he was just a baby I promised myself I would protect him. I didn't even know who he was and he was so young. So was I for that matter. I didn't even grasp the enormity of the situation really, I was too busy worrying about how shoddy the space pod looked. I mean who in their right mind would design a space pod to carry a child and leave exposed wires hanging inside it! Not to mention the engine, I've seen…oh what are they called…'mopeds' with better engines that that! No wonder the other pod, Metro Man's as he would turn out to be, overtook us.
But still I was there for him, with him for everything he went through. Oh I could never really stop him from doing something silly, after all I was a fish in a bubble back then. Restraining a child was never my strong suit. All of the stunts he pulled back then, blowing a hole in the prison wall, causing all of the cell bars to soften to the consistency of clay, turning Warden's car inside out…were all just that, stunts. Lets face it, he never had the best roll models, all of his 'uncles' were convicts…criminally gifted in fact, although you wouldn't be able to tell with most of them.
I was so excited and proud when he was given permission to go outside of the prison to school, I had read that it was there that children would learn how to be responsible adults. Maybe he would have been different if the other children had been nice to him. The children were so cruel, and Wayne Scott was the worst of all. He was the ring leader of the whole group, if he had just told the other kids to play nice with Sir then everything could have been different. Maybe even Teacher would have grown to like him.
I never understood her, Sir was smart! I mean he is really smart! Why couldn't she see that? With the right books he could have taught that class for her yet she never gave him a chance. He was left to try and make something that would impress the other kids and get them to like him. The laser beam inside my first real body suit that should have made delicious pop corn, the dodge ball helmet…he never showed anyone his dehydration gun as he knew it would get confiscated, but nothing he did was ever good enough. I guess he was told he was the 'bad boy' so often that he started to believe it. He told me, when he was…7 years old, that if people thought he was a 'bad boy' then he was going to be the best bad boy he could be. The monolog he launched himself into, about how he was going to be really good at bad and how that was really bad for good…well it made my head spin to say the least. I don't know how he manages to keep it all straight in his head.
He changed so much after the school was taken away. The Warden got some tutors to come in and teach him but mainly he just taught himself from the text books in the prison library. He studied tirelessly for the next few years, he even managed to get himself a diploma and a university degree over the internet, under the name the prison had given him. Oh boy were they imaginative, 'John Doe', was 'john smith' taken? I suppose it makes sense, that is the name the people here give to someone when they truly don't know and cant find out who they are. At least it was a name, I thought at first they were just going to give him a number like on his prison uniform.
I was with him through it all, talking him back down to reality when his imagination really got going. I knew I would never manage to stop him from following this path he had picked out for himself, but at least I managed to stop him from self-destructing along the way. I kept him alive for so very long, now look at him.
I knew it was all getting real when he told me he was going to break out of prison for good. I tried to talk him out of it, the Prison may not have been the happiest place in the world but it was safe. He was safe. Out there, who knows what could happen to him? I would never forgive myself if something happened to him after I could not get him to stop.
We found the 'abandoned' warehouse the day after escaping from the prison , it was completely by accident really. We just ran from the prison and ended up at the sea front. We headed towards the warehouses as it seemed the safer option rather than going into the city centre and the first one we broke into became our warehouse. I don't think it has ever occurred to Sir to wonder why the 'evil lair' has never been discovered. The truth is…we own it. Well, I own it, actually. It was up for sale, the owner's business had collapsed and he was after a quick sale and didn't seem to care who the money came from. I paid with some of the cash that Sir had…generated in his preparations for our escape from jail. It is the only thing of Sir's that I have ever taken without asking him. I hated myself for stealing it for such a long time but I needed him to have a safe place to hide away and that was the only way I could think of getting him that sort of haven.
At last, he was happy. He was doing something he truly loved, inventing things just because he could. Following his destiny. Then 'Metro Man' showed up.
I will never forget the look of Sir's face when he realised who the hero was. Wayne Scott. The brat from school that had instantly turned everyone against us. Well there was no talking sir down after that. He had to defeat the hero. He just had to. So we set about on our quest to take over Metro City and life was never the same again.
Sir threw everything he had into the battles. His inventions were always so promising yet nothing could stand up to the pure brute force that Metro Man possessed. Sir kept on going, rolling out invention after invention, each one more spectacular than the last yet he never seemed to be able to get past the physical barrier. He was always trying to better Metro Man's strength, maybe he could have won sooner had he used his intellect a little more. For all of Metro Man's strength he wasn't exactly the sharpest tool in the box. Still, sir did it in the end. Didn't he.
It was when Miss Ritchie appeared on the scene that things changed. Her name and face were plastered all over the newspapers as Metro Man's girlfriend and sir instantly took an interest in this nugget of information. He had found Metro Man's weakness. The bait to lure the hero to his doom as sir once put it. It was certainly an…interesting day when Sir first kidnapped Miss Ritchie. Even I was scared for her on that day, I had never seen Sir act like that before. Everything up until then had been just about defeating Metro Man, now an innocent was involved. It all seemed so much more…real. I can remember the sound of her scream now, the horrible noise bouncing off the buildings surround us. So full of fear, she truly believed Sir was going to kill her, so much so that I began to believe it too. I…I couldn't move. I couldn't do anything because I didn't know what to do! I had never seen sir act like that before and it just wasn't him. I was actually pleased when Metro Man came swooping in and just grabbed the device she was tied to with one hand and the back of Sir's collar with the other and flew them both off.
That was the first time we had ever been separated.
…
Oh we have definatly come a long way, him and I. After a few more 'kidnapping' attempts everything settled back down again. Things were…fun. During all of the times when Sir had kidnapped Miss Ritchie, he ended up enthralled in some conversation with Metro Man. I on the other hand, alwaysused the time to try and make sure Miss Ritchie was ok. Yeah sure, she was our 'captive' but that didn't mean that she had to have a bad time of it. We had quite a few chats, all be it small ones but still. I liked her. She was smart and kind and never really held anything against Sir. She was never one to hold a grudge and to be honest I think she felt sorry for Sir. I'm sure she could see in him what I could.
Then Sir finally did it. He defeated Metro Man. The Death Ray actually worked and the hero was dead. Miss Ritchie looked like her world had just fallen apart and for the most part it had. I think the entire city stopped at that moment to witness what had just happened. No one truly believed it, not even Sir.
We had taken over the city.
For the weeks after that Sir was so…unpredictable. His mood was up one moment and down the next, I just never knew what he was going to do! Then I found out why. It was her. She had somehow managed to get under his skin and he had fallen. Hard. I truly never expected him to…fall in love. Especially not with her. Why would he? He never expressed an interest in anyone before so why did he start then? Not that I'm sorry for it, I think she is the best thing that has ever happened to him. She makes him happy, it seems. I'm just not sure if he is so good for her.
The moment I freed her off the top of the falling tower I could tell she felt the same way about him. I felt so guilty for not being him and just being myself in an advanced version of the watch that sir had used so often. When I crashed the bike and ended up with my suit broken, suffocating in the dry air, she spilled her heart out to me! I couldn't bear it so I deactivated the watch, she is so smart though, she figured the truth out instantly. That it wasn't Metro Man back from the dead to save her but was indeed Sir, risking his life to save her by physically fighting Titan. To her credit she didn't run away. She stayed and put herself in danger to try and help him.
All of the pain, al of the heartache was well worth it just to hear him say those words. After he defeated Titan. He told her that she was his reason for winning. His whole heart was poured into that one sentence, it nearly broke my heart. Here was the child I had tried to raise to be a good person despite his badness and he had fallen in love with a woman that was as innocent as anyone I had ever met. And she loved him too.
It had taken a lot to convince her to go back to her own apartment after the fight. She had wanted to come with us and make sure that he was ok. It was only when he assured her that he was ok and that he didn't want her to be caught up in what was about to happen, the media frenzy that would descend on him soon, that she agreed. After the brain bots brought one of my spare bodies I managed to convince the Mayor to send her home in his car with one of his security guards. The bots had managed to fix the door back onto the invisible car and I just about got Sir into the back when he collapsed from his injuries.
Everything else was a blur until I managed to get him into his bed and hooked up to the monitoring instruments that he had scattered around the lair. I have never dealt with injuries this bad before. Multiple broken ribs and fractured bones everywhere. He is in a real mess and all I can do is sit here and watch.
But with every rise and fall of his chest he grows slightly stronger. His heart beat is steady and the erratic pattern of his brain waves are settling down. The pain is subsiding. He may be out like this for a while but I will still be here. Watching over him.
He is my best friend and I will promise to every deity that may be watching that if anyone ever tries to hurt my master like this ever again, they will truly have to go through me first!
And I will not be so easy to get through!