They see Capitano.
They see a war machine, a commander of countless battles, a Harbinger carved from unyielding steel and silence.
But they don't see me.
They don't see the man who awoke in this body like a dream half-remembered—my soul thrust into armor not forged for me. I was not born in this land of snow and ambition. I was someone else once. Somewhere else.
Sometimes, in the quiet between commands and bloodshed, I remember a sky that wasn't always gray. I remember hands without gauntlets, laughter that didn't echo off cathedral stone, and warmth that wasn't stolen from a dying sun.
I don't know if it was another life, or a punishment.
All I know is that I woke in this body long after it was already feared.
And so I became him.
Capitano.
The title bore down on me like the steel I wear—heavy, suffocating, inescapable. They respected him. They followed him. They feared him. So I played the part, because what else could I do? What use was screaming that I was not him, when the only voice I had came from his throat?
But Natlan… Natlan stirred something in me.
Fire remembers.
It does not judge, it does not ask. It simply burns—and in doing so, it reveals.
When I held the Pyro Gnosis, I felt it. Not power. Not divinity.
Recognition.
It knew me.
Not as Capitano, the Harbinger. But as the man who once walked beneath another sun.
And for a moment, just a moment, I wasn't wearing armor. I wasn't being watched.
I was just me.
But then I returned.
Back to Snezhnaya. Back to this body. This duty.
And they still look at me the same—unshaken, unknowing. They don't see the cracks forming in the mask. The fire still burns in my chest, but it is no longer only the Gnosis.
It is memory.
It is defiance.
It is the question that claws at the inside of my skull:
Who was I supposed to be… if not him?