I sit in my room. My cell. My cage.

I have been here for twenty-five years, six months, and four days. Counting every second of every day as unimportant moments of my unendable life pass me by. They want to kill me. But they cannot. They should kill me, because I am a monster. I know this. They know this. But still they cannot.

They have shot me. They have beat me. They have stabbed me. They have even buried me alive. They cannot kill me.

I know how they can. Victoria knows how they can. I am most certain that they know how they can. I may harbor a seething hatred for each and every one of them, but they are most certainly not stupid. I wish they would do it. I have wanted it to happen for a long time, even before I was here. Even thought about doing it myself.

But I could never bring myself to cut off my own head.

The door creaks open. They firefly is coming. Her blonde head peaks in. She smiles sweetly. Insanely.

I am a monster. I am insane, and have been for many years. I know this. But the firefly is madness incarnate.

She sits next to me. Her hand extends seeking contact with my own.

"Go away."

She will not. She believes she will get what she wants. She is a child. I had lived a hundred lives and more before she was a twinkle in her father's eye.

Her father. Robert Bishop. Bob. I hate him more than the rest. She was innocent when he brought her here. She does not remember, she will not remember.

But I do.

I remember her screams. I remember the screams of a child so lost and afraid and in pain. She called for her father. He would not come. If I am a monster, Bob is a demon.

I do not move, and finally she gives up. She pauses at the door. "You'll miss it."

As if she knows me. She thinks she does. She does not and she never will. There are very few people in the world who have ever truly known me. Perhaps only one.

He taught me what it meant to be a hero. He showed me that I could not come to harm. Then he took it all away. I was very angry when he did that.

She was mine, I had thought. But it had always been him. Somewhere in my mind I had known that, if I had not realized it until years later when she was dead and he was gone.

I saw her again years later. She was old and dying. I told myself I did not care. That did not stop me from finding her. She thought I was a dream. She spoke to me of times past. When it was me and her and him. She told me what he said to her after they escaped.

Pain has made him cruel, but inside he is still good.

Hiro. It was her last word, said with her last breath. I closed her dead eyes and I left. She could not have given me a greater gift.

I was old by then. Wiser than I had been. The years had dulled my anger and my pain, but that was the day I forgave him.

He stole my girlfriend. I tried to kill him and conquer his country. In my advanced years I felt that my response had been slighlty disproportionate to his crime.

But he never stopped believing in Takezo Kensei. The hero of his childhood. He never stopped believing that I was good. That was the first time I thought of him as my closest friend. I still do.

When I leave this place, and I will leave this place, I will kill his father. Not because of the oath I swore.

I will do it because his father is the man who locked me in this box, who had me beaten and shot and buried alive for four years, unable to breathe yet unable to die.

I am sorry for what I must do, because it will bring him pain. I never want to hurt him. Never again. If he wishes to kill me afterwards, then so be it. It will be fitting.

My greatest friend will fulfill my greatest desire.