You and I, Harold… we’re not so different, are we?

Two men of science and precision, obsessed with control. We spent our lives building worlds — inventions, missions, legacies — and somehow, somewhere along the line, we forgot to build what mattered most.

A family.

A connection.

A bond.

We were fathers once. Not in the noble, storybook sense, but in the biological one. We brought life into this world… and then abandoned it to pursue whatever hollow truth or redemption we thought we could find in our work.

You became a hitman. I became a supervillain. Two sides of the same broken coin.

And the children we left behind? They paid the price for our brilliance. For our selfishness. For our inability to stop looking forward long enough to see what was right in front of us.

I look at my son now — what’s left of the relationship we have — and I see it so clearly. Every scar I carry, every scar I’ve inflicted… it’s written on him. He didn’t ask for my genius, or my burden, or my enemies. But I gave them to him all the same.

And you, Harold — you know that feeling, don’t you? The weight of guilt that comes with knowing your child remembers you not as a protector, but as a shadow.

You tell yourself you did it for them. That every crime, every bullet, every choice was to make their lives better. But that’s the lie we tell ourselves to survive the silence.

The truth? We did it for us.

We ran from them because it was easier to face monsters than it was to face the people who once looked at us with love. We could stare down death, but not disappointment.

You see, I’ve come to realize that being a father isn’t about legacy or sacrifice. It’s about presence. It’s about showing up — not once, not when it’s convenient — but always.

And we didn’t.

We let them down. Over and over.

We told ourselves there would be time. That one day, after the next mission, the next experiment, the next victory… we’d fix it. But time, Harold, is the cruelest scientist of all. It doesn’t wait for the guilty. It doesn’t pause for regret. It just moves forward — indifferent, unfeeling — until everything we could’ve done is buried under the weight of what we didn’t.

And yet here we are, two broken men, still trying to make it right. Still trying to atone. You with your gun. Me with my machines. Both of us hoping that somewhere in the wreckage, our children might find something worth forgiving.

I see you, Harold.

I see the father buried under the hitman’s mask. The man who lost his family and has been trying, desperately, to build another one out of guilt and grit. And I can’t hate you for it. Because I’ve done the same.

Maybe that’s why we clash — not because we’re enemies, but because we’re mirrors. You show me everything I hate about myself. The cowardice. The failure. The ache of wanting to do right when it’s far too late.

But I want to believe it isn’t too late for either of us.

Don’t you?