#compressweek2021

Sometimes he stands in front of the mirror, trying to make stern faces and look like the newspaper clippings he’s seen throughout his short life. 

Other kids don’t like it. 

No one likes the idea of villains, even if they do more good than harm. The winners are the ones that get to tell the story, and knowing that there wasn’t enough left of his grandfather to even cremate him, he knows who won the fight. 

Today he doesn’t look very fierce. 

Black eye and a bloody nose that drips. A stained his shirt. The blood has already seeped into his mouth with the metallic, almost penny-like taste of it lingering even as he tries to spit it all out. 

Looking like a villain isn’t something that society likes. 

Most people don’t even know about his villainous relative, he isn’t exactly popular anymore - but it only takes one kid to go around telling everyone else. 

No one cares that he was trying to help people. 

Walking home through the alleys of his city, Atsuhiro just stares at the ground and tries not to think about how much his face throbs. His nose will end up crooked, he just knows it. 

Something in his peripheral vision catches his eyes and he lifts his head a bit again. 

There’s something sticking out of one of the trash cans, just on top. When he comes a little closer he sees that it’s a mask, perfectly clean, like someone left it there for him to find. 

There’s an allure to it, something that pulls him to it as if there’s a tether in his stomach, and he finds himself creeping closer to give it a look. 

What a simple thing it is. 

His hands hesitate for a moment when he goes to reach for it, but he’s never been very good at resisting the things that he wants. After checking the inside of it just to make sure that it’s clean, he puts it on.

The mask rubs at his broken nose and Atsuhiro doesn’t make a noise. 

Looking into the dirty window close by, he doesn’t recognize himself. Of course he doesn’t, that’s the point of a mask. 

That’s something that his mom used to say when she got ready in the evening to go to work. It would always take upwards of an hour, him needing to stand there in order to hold the mirror and tell her that she looks good before she would actually leave the house, and him by himself. 

It’s one of those things that just were, one of the things that he knows he couldn’t have changed by himself. He was just a kid, and who knows where his father was at the time. 

Those aren’t the memories that he likes to think about. 

He doesn’t know what happened to his mother, and he doesn’t think that he wants to either. For now he would rather just focus on what he thinks it’s going to be like when he admits who he is. When he takes off the mask and lets them know that he is who he is, related to the one and only Oji Harima. 

Though he himself never quite pulled off the Robin Hood thing, he’s working on it. Sometimes these things are slow. 

Not for the first time, standing in front of this cracked and dirty bathroom mirror, he slides the cool mask over his face. He needs to go over it again because it wasn’t as smooth as he wanted it. 

He has a few words that he repeats to himself while he goes through it again. The words of the speech that he’s been trying to write for decades, now. Everything about the speech has changed once or twice, something about it never feels right. 

Nothing is ever going to be good enough, he knows that now. 

All he can hope to have is to have something that feels like the best. Something that isn’t too far from the announcement that lives in his head, the thing that he thinks about before he goes to sleep. 

One of these days he knows that he’s going to have a dream about it. 

It is I, the grandson of… 

Nothing ever sounds right.