Right Before My Eyes
I used to think it was always this way. You, setting a trap just large enough to lure me in, but always with a flaw, some space to escape. More of a game than anything else. You enjoyed it, too, don't deny me that much. The two of us, tumbling through space and time, our timelines drawn across the vortex by shaky hands, converging and diverging seemingly forever.
But you've changed. It seems I've left you for too long by yourself. It was too long for both of us, this separation. We are different only in that I believed I could survive alone. The last of my kind. You never were so foolish.
It used to be a game to us. To me, at least. Our petty disagreements turned to fights I would always escape from. Perhaps to you it was never a game. Perhaps once or twice I should have stopped running from you and reminded you of our days at the Academy, that I still loved you in a way only the best of enemies ever could.
And now, even though you stand no more than two meters from me, it seems I have lost you forever. Now that I cannot escape from you, there is no way to find the person I used to love. I can see it in your eyes, even now. That glimmer of madness, like a flame or a spark. Seductive and repulsive in the same instant. I knew it was there before, like a tiny pinpoint of light. That was the one part of you I always hated. It seems that when left untended, such a spark becomes a blaze.
But even now I cannot come to hate you. Because through the pain, the degradation, the endless string of tortures you put me through, I still have the presence of mind to see that all this, this madness, this chaos, this insanity that you now embody is because of me. I should have seen that all you wanted from the start was to be my equal. The cheating in the Academy, the Sea Devils, all of it. But now it is too late. You have transformed, right before my eyes. I can see the same bloodlust in your eyes that is perceivable in the glint of a Cyberman's armor, in the twisted face of a weeping angel, in the metallic shriek of a Dalek's war cry. You are, at a glance, no different from them now.
But you are different in one respect.
You have me—to torture, to shame, to treat like an object, to keep at your mercy and to punish with all of your anger for all the times I thought this was a game. And even now, even as I groan and bite my lip as the whip bites into the scarred flesh in my back as you release all of the pent-up fury from years past. But in all reality, I can take it. All of it. Because I am a creature who is just.
And I deserve this.