Fine Line || MHA x Male OC

𝟢𝟧. 𝘐𝘤𝘩

(A/N)

Bwaaaaah, this is a long one! ~5.6k words. At least that's what google docs tells me. Anyways!!! This is a flashback chapter, lolsies. Can you tell I love the VRP AU I've created? As always, thank you for reading, and special thanks to my pookie!

(Man, I really wish Wattpad had a notes feature like Ao3...)

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The cold grey walls were tight, and they felt like a tomb. Suffocation was a feeling that Roman was very familiar with. Intimately familiar, if you would, but the suffocation that came with his first few nights in the HPSC-VRP's Facility Alpha was a new kind that he couldn't imagine himself forgetting any time soon.

While the staff got all of his papers together, Roman was left alone for the most part, Commission employees only coming in to drop off food and water for him. They'd had to swap to paper plates after he broke the ceramic one he was given on his first night and took one of the shards to his neck.

Loneliness had a stranglehold on Roman even through his first week with the Commission. The language barrier didn't help much either. Fresh out of the courthouse and chained by the wrists and feet to the floor, Roman was given an entire speech by one of the VRP's psychologists.

His only response? "Was?"

Roman remembered the defeated look on that poor underpaid and overworked psychologist after he realized that he wouldn't get too far with Japanese. They ended up getting a translator, and another after that.

For the first six years of his life, Roman was exposed to almost only German and English. His father hadn't bothered to learn any Japanese before marrying his mother and having him, and unfortunately his mother could only speak Japanese, and maybe enough English to understand demands and requests.

Their marriage wasn't one of much communication.

Even then, his father didn't bother to teach Roman, his own son, how to properly speak. The man would often switch between languages to get his point across to his wife, and she would bite back in Japanese.

Sometimes his mother would speak to him, point to objects and say their names, but she soon lost interest in any attempt to raise Roman. In a way, he didn't blame her. He was sure that he was partly to blame for ruining her life, and his appearance, chock full of his father's features, made him all the more hateable.

As he got older, the sharpness and harshness of his father's features—mostly just his eyes, nose, and lips, his bone structure remained the same—faded and gave way to a face closer to his mother's, giving him a look of gentleness he was almost sure his mother would've had if it weren't for his father.

Despite his physical changes, his language skills saw no improvement, and by the time he was six years old and enrolled in elementary school, he still couldn't form a single sentence in just one language.

The other kids ignored him and steered clear away, what with his matted hair and smell from not being bathed. His teachers seemed to avoid him as well. He never knew if it was because of the way he talked, the way he looked, or maybe the way he acted.

Roman was a heteromorph. Granted, he didn't have as severe of a mutation as others with quirks like his, but that didn't change his biology. Oftentimes especially those who had animal based heteromorphic quirks, their user would have traits that carried over from whichever animal they took after. Roman had a tendency to chew up the wooden pencils his teachers gave him when he was stressed—which was nearly all the time.