Your fetish for chaotic evil drove us slowly both insane.
I’ve played the magnificent bastard before, but never, I think, put so much effort into the role. I have been Moriarty to your Holmes, Gisbourne to your Robin; the Goblin King to your sweet Sarah, ruthless Javert to your Valjean – even Q to your principled Jean-Luc, though I think you failed to properly appreciate that one, darling. Sociopaths, chess masters, rakes and roustabouts, I enacted whole rogues' galleries for you and let you dance like a marionette on my fingertips.
I am exhausted from living up to your expectations.
You love me, you hate me; I’m a bastard, then a knight; your best friend, then your hot slashable nemesis. I have been cold, cruel and calculating by turns, dealt pleasure and pain on your command, turned love into sin and titillation into abuse. I burned myself in the fires of that wretched alchemy.
You never understood this: for me to be the villain, you have to be at least something of a hero.
Protagonist and antagonist, striving against each other, locked in a battle for power and control – that’s a story. Two little schemers jabbing at one another in the darkness – that’s just sordid and weary. If I must pull you toward corruption, you should compel me to redemption. The Joker must have his Batman. It twists my soul to play the heartless debonair for you; at least you could heal me with an occasional stroke of virtue. It would hurt just as much – believe me.
If I must be the villain, you have to be the other one. And you have to do it with dignity, with stoicism, with at least an outward showing of moral conflict and tension. You didn’t understand stories any better than you understood sex. (I suppose that’s how I ended up doing all the work, in both cases.)
You were never Batman. I am the goddamn Batman. You, with your Joker-fetish, you were never more than Harlequin, and Batman has no use for Harlequin. And I have no use for you.