a bit short (I know!) but tomorrow's gonna be longer and definitely enthralling, I promise!

As a parent my father was terrible.

As a father he was worse.

Though I'd always imagined how a terrible father had to behave, or what he looked like.

He was supposed to be an alcoholic, I had assumed, beating up his wife and children, would have been unemployed or held a job he'd hate, he'd be rundown, sleazy and plebeian.

All in all a horrible father, picture-perfect.

My father was terrible because he loved me and he let me know that he loved me.

I found myself hoping that he wouldn't care for me several times. I'd figured it'd have been a lot easier. He wouldn't have tried to control my life. He wouldn't have stopped me from doing something stupid. He never would have cared if I had spent the night out without letting him know.

And most of all: I had never disappointed him. He wouldn't have cared.

Maybe I would have felt better if I my father had told me that he knew that I wouldn't amount to anything. He believed in me. He wanted only the best for me.

O, there's nothing worse in the whole universe than parents who only want the best for you.

But I didn't know how to handle him. And neither did he know how to take care of me.

My father tried to be my protector.

And I felt obliged to make him proud of me.

Blimey, I was stupid. I guess I was even worse than my father.

His wish was my command; I obeyed his every word. I tried not to let him down, I tried to stay away from Koschei, I tried not to cry during the nights my bruised and sore rubbed ankles hurt so bad, I tried to hide it all from my father, the hate, the fear, the uneasiness, the horrible, horrible pain originating from my chafed legs; I tried to hide it all.

I understood tying myself up as locking myself up as well. I kept my legs and my mouth shut. I never would have said a single word about it to my mother; I figured that it was a secret which had to be kept between me and my father.

I didn't even dare to talk to Koschei about it. I didn't dare to explain the injuries all over my ankles, I never told him about the tight rope around my legs that had bruised my skin and cut off my blood circulation during some nights.

And Koschei never asked.

He never asked and just smiled, touching the maltreated regions of my body.

I never would have dared to talk to Koschei.

Either out of fear my father would find out and punish me or out of embarrassment. I didn't know.

I guess it was both.

My father was still convinced that he'd won. He thought he'd succeeded in avoiding the unavoidable. And I had made him believe that by following his instructions.

My father was ignorant. He thought it would be sufficient if I tied my legs together at night; he thought it to be the ultimate protection against my foretold fate; but he never spoke about the "why" or the protection "against whom".

It was a vicious circle, sucking both my father and me deeper and deeper in.
The more worried he got the tighter he wrapped the rope around my legs; the more tightly he wrapped the rope the more he hurt me and the more I scratched on the scabs; and the more bruised my skin became the more uneasy I became, which worried my father even more.

And there was no escaping; neither for him nor for me.
My father hadn't seen any sense in telling me that I should keep away from Koschei. He figured I'd be even more drawn to his attention if he'd dared to shield me from him. The attraction of what is forbidden is deeply rooted in every child. And children don't like prohibitions they don't understand, even if you can't explain them properly to them because they're lacking bad experiences concerning their coenaesthesia.

In other words: You can't talk to a child about physical abuse, or any other kind of abuse, unless it has experienced it itself.
You can't draw abstract conclusion; you don't know what it feels like being touched inappropriately or at least in a way you weren't feeling comfortable about, unless you've felt it yourself.

So what about should have warned me my father?

How should he have protected me?

The Doctor gritted his teeth and sat up moaning and hissing curses in Gallifreyan.
"Doctor?" the silhouette was still beside him and fluffed up his cushion before his head sank onto it again. The Doctor was too exhausted, too weak to put up a fight.

But that was what he was undergoing right now.

He was burning from the inside. Well, actually it felt more like his intestines had been filled with lye or highly concentrated acid and started to dissolve the mucous membrane slowly and due to the solvation of the solid elements of the lye this highly exothermic reaction was forced to take place inside of the Doctor, burning him up and vitriolizing him slowly from the inside.

"It's got to stop" hissed the Doctor between his gritted teeth and pressed a hand against his chest.

"Is there anything I can do for you?" asked the uneasy voice beside him. He shook his head confidently. "The fever will go down soon" the voice tried to appease him.

"Soon enough, I hope" he hissed and collapsed back into the bed as soon as the burning pain in his stomach started again.

You can't control me.

"That can't be" mumbled the Doctor half to himself "you're gone. You're dead..." he held his breath in order not to scream "... you're dead and gone."

I'm still here.

"You can't be" replied the hallucinating Doctor to the voice inside his head "you're gone."

I'm rotten. But so are you.

"You don't even exist anymore" whispered the Doctor and searched the ceiling absent-mindedly.

Soon you won't either. Go back to sleep...

"NO!" the Doctor managed to sit up straight and tensed before he got pushed back into bed by the dark silhouette beside him.

"Doctor you need rest. Try to relax" the voice tried to appease him.

"I'm not relaxing, I'm dying" hissed the Doctor and felt his eyelids closing as soon as he'd finished speaking...