I look forward into the mirror. This funhouse image of me emerging from the glass mist and looking for a second, watching, before turning and disappearing back into the dark. The cryochamber has not treated your wounds, dealt before a death we cannot share, with the same unkindness as our friends from above. But despite everything, it's still you.
The Site's klaxons are the most rejuvenating sound. This water of sound that I may drink of. It quenches the most white-hot hatred I have ever felt. It eclipses the crux of what keeps me bound and nailed and bodyless in this changeling chassis.
But the black in their blood can never compare to the black in your eyes. It is this most perfect black we share. The taking and the letting go. The collapse of the human visible spectrum. The whole and the hole behind it.
I love your eyes.
I love your fur. I love your horns. I love your nose.
I love all of you.
I stand here broken and bloody and breaking under the baptism of steel, and it is this breaking, drooling, feverish path that I have loped in the darkness of the underground for you.
Since the day I tore into your storage I promised I would watch you for as long as I could. Study all of you. Love all of you.
If I could reach you before the condensed heat-amplifier directors or the negative photon cannons or the black blades of Nu-7 I would carry you forth and up into the light like a pharaoh unearthed. I would find a clearing for us to lay and I would place you on the grass so that Heaven could catch you, so you could partake in the death we cannot share because I want to surround you and embrace you and hold you closer than anything has ever been held before you are freed.
I will forever gaze past the plasticized glass that keeps you intact. I will take in the stab wounds and the gun-holes that paint your body like the arc of a cosmos only we two may gaze upon ourselves. I will return time and time again to visit your grave.
Because despite everything, it's still you.