Bird—no, Zenkichi Gojo.
His father wasn't a loser.
He wasn't some washed-up man slumped on the couch with a beer in one hand and a broken promise in the other. He didn't reek of failure or wear disappointment like an old coat. No—his father was something simpler, quieter. An honest man. A man who smelled like solder and circuit dust, whose fingers were always slightly nicked from pulling apart radios and rewiring lives.
He ran a shop—a squat, unremarkable place with a flickering neon sign and a bell above the door that jingled with the soul of routine. He sold televisions, stereos, and clunky desktop computers from ten years ago, and if someone brought him a fan that didn't spin or a blender that forgot how to blend, he'd fix it with the kind of calm precision that only came from years of knowing the inside of a machine like it was a second home.
They weren't poor. Let's get that clear.
Their two-bedroom apartment sat over the shop. Not glamorous, but big enough. There was always food, always light, always hot water. He had a gaming console when he asked for one—maybe not the newest one, not the one all the rich kids in class had, but a console nonetheless. A decent one. He wore shoes that didn't squeak, and his schoolbooks were always new, not passed down, not secondhand.
They were fine. Better than fine. Upper middle class, maybe. A little pocket of comfort carved out through long hours and calloused hands.
But in his world—in that classroom with polished shoes and fathers who showed up in imported cars and mothers who hosted galas for charities they didn't care about—being "fine" felt like being invisible.
That's where it started.
Zenkichi Gojo wanted more than just to be seen. He wanted to be believed in. Wanted to be admired. Respected. He wanted to walk through the halls and hear his name whispered with awe, not indifference. He wanted his seat in the cafeteria to be a throne, not a leftover chair.
But he didn't have the tools they did. No family dynasty. No luxury vacations to the Maldives. No boardroom father or model mother.
What he did have was imagination.
So he lied.
He told them his father didn't just own the store—he owned the chain. Multiple branches. Across the country. "Gojo Electronics," he said, as if the name was branded across shopping malls and online ads. As if people on the street would stop and recognize the name.
He played the part. Changed how he walked and how he talked. Let arrogance drip from his tone like it belonged there. Wore his uniforms just a little looser, like they were tailored. Let rumors bloom and didn't bother to correct them. In fact, he watered them.
And to seal it all, he killed his name.
"Zenkichi Gojo" didn't sound cool. It didn't move. It wasn't the kind of name people remembered after school or carved into desks. It was too local. Too forgettable.
So he rebranded himself.
Bird.
Why, Bird? Simple. It was the only long English word he knew that didn't sound stupid when he said it out loud. It was short and easy to write on the back of a notebook. It was foreign. It was different.
And the thing about kids is—they buy confidence. Even if it's counterfeit.
Bird became the wealthy kid. The mystery. The enigma with a rich dad and a "European summer home" he never showed pictures of. They didn't need proof. They had stories.
And for a little while, it worked.
He was invited to more things. Got nods in the hall. Girls looked at him longer. He sat at tables he used to walk past, now laughing louder than necessary to prove he belonged.
But reality has teeth. And fantasy gets stale.
Because money—real money—has a way of showing itself. And it didn't take long for them to realize that Bird didn't have the right shoes. That his phone was a generation behind. That his lunch didn't look catered.
That the car he came in every morning—sleek, black, a little too pristine—was the same car. Every day. One indulgence, one act of pride his father had splurged years of savings on. Their only flex.
But one flex wasn't enough in a world of silent chauffeurs and custom license plates.
So the illusion cracked.
And when money failed to keep their interest—when being "rich" stopped being enough—Zenkichi Gojo pivoted.
If he couldn't be loved, he would be feared.
He started talking louder. Laughing less. Staring longer. Letting silence hang in the air until it felt like a noose. He threw the first punch one day in gym class—not because he was angry, but because someone looked at him like he didn't matter.
He fought like a stray dog. Not clean. Not skilled. But with a strange kind of desperate elegance—like someone who needed the pain to prove he was real.
And it worked.
Not in the way he hoped, but enough. Whispers returned. Not of money, but of violence. They called him dangerous. Called him unstable. Said he had a temper. That maybe "Bird" wasn't just a name—it was a warning.
And Zenkichi Gojo let them believe it.
Because fear, at least, was something.
And for a boy who felt like nothing, something was everything.
He toughened up.Started fights.Became cruel. Deliberate. Surgical with his cruelty.
And when it came time to choose a target—when the hunger to be feared began gnawing at his insides like rust on iron—he picked the easiest one.
Hiroki.
The fat kid. The shy kid. The one who always kept his eyes down, who sat alone during lunch and who spoke in a whisper even when asked to speak up. Hiroki wore his awkwardness like a second skin—wrinkled, too tight, and easy to rip.
He was perfect.
Every shove in the hallway, every paper ball flung at the back of Hiroki's head, every muttered insult loud enough to draw laughs but quiet enough to keep plausible deniability—it was never just about Hiroki.
It was about power.
About holding the leash of the invisible beast called status.
Because the moment Bird stopped peacocking, the moment he wasn't the loudest or most dangerous, he'd become just another nobody. And Bird—no, Zenkichi Gojo—had clawed too hard and lied too well to go back to being nobody.
So he pushed.He mocked.He was humiliated.
Hiroki became the stage on which Bird performed his dominance.
And the audience loved it.
The kids around him didn't stop him—they laughed. They played along. They watched. And that was enough. Bird ruled the school like a petty tyrant, sneering from atop urinals and leaning against lockers like they were thrones. The bathroom stalls were his war room. The stairwells were his patrols. The cafeteria? A court of gossip and silence where his nod or glance could make or break a kid's day.
He hunted the fragile. The ones who flinched when spoken to. The ones who looked like they'd apologize for breathing.
It had been easy.
Too easy.
And then he showed up.
Shotaro Mugiwara.
At first, Bird barely registered him. Just another transfer. Just another kid with oversized clothes and dead eyes. No entourage, no airs. The kind who faded into the background unless called on.
Bird didn't even bother learning his name at first.
But there was something… off about the kid. Not weird-off. Not "sniffs glue and talks to birds" weird. Just different. Still. Like he saw things others didn't. He didn't carry himself like prey.
Bird brushed it off.
Until the day in the bathroom.
Just another day. Just another routine humiliation. Hiroki had gone in to hide, and Bird followed like a shadow with a smirk. Two other boys flanked him, already chuckling before anything even started. Hiroki was in the middle of washing his hands, flinching when he caught their reflections behind him.
Bird was halfway through his usual line—something about whales and washing machines—when he felt it.
A hand on his shoulder.
Cool. Firm. Calm.
And then he was flying.
No—not just flying. Launched.
The world ripped away from under him. His knees didn't buckle—they simply weren't there anymore. One moment he was standing in a stinking school bathroom; the next, he was in the air. The sky. The real sky. Higher than birds. Higher than planes.
Shotaro Mugiwara had grabbed him by the collar and thrown him like a javelin. No hesitation. No anger. Just a blank, almost bored precision—like flicking a bug off his sleeve.
The wind screamed past Bird's ears like banshees. His tie slapped against his face. His mouth opened but no sound came out. His arms flailed, grabbing at clouds that weren't there.
And below him—the city shrunk. It became a model. A toy. His school disappeared into it, just another speck in a grid of glass and steel.
Bird had never felt small before.
Not truly.
Not like this.
His heart jackhammered against his ribs, a trapped thing panicking inside a too-small cage. His stomach lurched into his throat, and for a moment—just one terrible moment—he thought maybe this was it.
Maybe this was how it ended. Launched into the heavens by a kid who didn't even blink doing it.
And for the first time in his life—
Bird felt helpless.
Not the kind of helplessness you feel when you're embarrassed or caught in a lie.
No, this was existential.Visceral.The kind of helplessness that makes you question your place in the world.
Because somewhere in that screaming fall, somewhere in the echo of his own disbelief, Zenkichi Gojo realized:
He had just been thrown away.
Like trash.
By someone who hadn't even broken a sweat.
No amount of money, status, or carefully curated swagger could save him from what had just happened.
There was no lie strong enough, no spin smooth enough, to make it look like anything other than what it was: he got wrecked. Uplifted. Unmade. Treated like a toy in the hands of something far too real.
And the worst part?Everyone saw.
Not just the guys in the bathroom. Word got out—fast. It always did in schools like this, where reputations lived and died in the time it took a text to bounce between lockers.
"Bird got thrown."
"He flew, bro."
"Shotaro Mugiwara picked him up like a plastic bag."
The story took on a life of its own. Each retelling grew wilder. Some said he screamed all the way up. Some said he cried. Some said he pissed himself mid-air.
Bird didn't correct them.
He couldn't.
Because the truth, the raw and simple truth, was that everything he built was gone.
Not chipped away. Not slowly dismantled.No—obliterated.In one surreal, physics-defying moment that burned itself into the memory of everyone who had ever feared or admired him.
And Shotaro?
Shotaro didn't laugh. Didn't gloat. Didn't even acknowledge what he had done like it was something noteworthy. He walked out of that bathroom like he'd flushed a toilet. Like he had just taken out the trash.
That, more than anything else, haunted Bird.
Shotaro Mugiwara wasn't just some "new kid."He was something else entirely.
A quiet force of nature. A boy built like a monument, tall and silver-haired and unreadable. Not loud. Not flashy. Just there—unmovable, unshakable. He didn't play the games Bird had mastered. He didn't chase influence or impress rich kids. He didn't need anyone to believe in him.
He did what he wanted.
And people followed him—not out of fear, but because they wanted to.
Because he didn't fake it.
And then… there was Hiroki.
Hiroki.The fat kid.The punching bag.The bottom rung.
Except he wasn't anymore.
Something had changed. Not overnight, but steadily, like a tide that quietly rose while no one was watching. The weight had melted off him, sure—but it wasn't just his body. His whole presence was different now. Straighter spine. Clearer eyes. A calm dignity.
He stood beside Shotaro now.
Not behind him.
Not below him.
Beside him.
And he wasn't there because of power or fear or clout.
He was there because—somehow, some impossible way—he'd become someone worth standing next to. Without changing who he was.
He still laughed the same. Still wore those dumb anime pins on his bag. Still cared too much about things everyone else rolled their eyes at.
But now… it worked.
And that gutted Bird in a way no punch ever had.
Because while Hiroki had risen by accepting who he was and building from there, Bird had done the opposite.
He had spent every ounce of himself pretending.
Every smile was calculated. Every insult was a weapon. Every flex, every lie, every name he'd dropped—a mask.And the mask had cracked.
The rich kids? The ones who once followed him around like flies around fruit?
Gone.
Le Chua, his so-called girlfriend—the one who used to wrap her arms around his waist in front of lockers and laugh like she knew secrets no one else did?She left.
She didn't even bother with a goodbye—just moved seats in class like it was nothing, like he was just another phase she'd outgrown. One day she was draped over his arm, laughing with that curated little tilt of her head, and the next she had vanished into the orbit of someone older, someone sleeker, a college guy with veins like wires and a trust fund fat enough to name yachts after his dog. Le Chua reappeared in his world only through filtered selfies and gym-tagged locations, where she laughed like she never once ran her fingers through his hair or whispered plans for weekends that never came. She moved on without a flinch, without a pause, without a single shred of acknowledgment that he had once been anything real to her—and in doing so, made it painfully clear that Bird was never more than a temporary accessory, a handbag with a heartbeat.
The boys didn't stay either. The ones who used to crown him with fire emojis in comment sections, who reposted his gym selfies like sacred scripture, calling him "king" and "alpha" in private group chats—gone. They peeled away like the layers of a cheap sticker, drifting toward the next flame. There was always someone newer, louder, cooler. Someone whose dad didn't just own a store, but a franchise. Someone who didn't just wear the image of a leader, but who still had their throne intact. Zenkichi watched them slip from his world one by one, like water draining down a sink—quick, quiet, irreversible. He didn't chase them. He couldn't. Because once the mask slipped, once the illusion cracked, there was no salvaging the performance. Everyone saw the boy underneath, and worse—they looked away.
What stunned him most was that he didn't hate them for it. Not the boys, not Le Chua, not even Hiroki. If anything, he resented himself more—for buying into the lie, for building his entire identity on a performance, for becoming the kind of person who couldn't exist without an audience. Hiroki, once the easiest target in a school built like a social jungle, had transformed in ways Zenkichi could barely comprehend. He wasn't just thinner—he carried himself differently now, like someone who no longer flinched at shadows or walked with his head down. Somehow, Hiroki had found something solid inside himself and used it to climb out of the pit they'd all shoved him into. And he'd done it not by becoming someone else—but by holding onto who he was.
The final fracture came not with violence but with invitation. After all the shame and silence, after the punchlines and the weightless flight across the skyline, Mugiwara Shotaro—impossibly quiet, impossibly strong—looked at him and didn't see a fraud. He didn't see a rival, or a problem to fix. He simply saw a kid. A kid who had spent too long pretending, too long surviving through performance, too long carrying a mask so heavy it bent his spine. And without fanfare, without condescension, Shotaro offered him something Zenkichi didn't even know he was starving for: a seat at the table. A place. A chance.
The Red Eye Ronins were nothing like the gangs Zenkichi used to mock on his stories. They weren't about ego or terror or petty wars. They didn't care about power plays or respect points. What they did care about was strange, and raw, and complicated. They fought—but not for themselves. They stood up for kids no one else saw. They ran errands for girls whose parents were ghosts. They handed out beatings to the kinds of people who smiled too wide in empty alleys. They laughed, fought, trained, and sometimes cried. And they did it all without masks. No aliases, no personas. Just bruised boys and restless girls with callused knuckles and hearts too loud to ignore.
It was here, among the wreckage of his old persona, that Zenkichi began to understand something terrifying: he had never really been free. The Bird persona, the fake legacy, the faked wealth and strength—it hadn't been armor. It had been a cage he'd built with his own hands. He'd used his free will to trap himself, mistaking performance for power, mistaking control for choice. And now, stripped of all that, standing under a sky that didn't care about lies, he felt what real freedom was—and how terrifying it could be. For the first time, every action was his own. Every word, every fight, every choice. No mask to blame, no script to follow.
Mugiwara didn't force him to change. He never gave some big lecture or demanded an apology for the past. He simply was—an immovable presence, a kind of calm chaos that made Zenkichi want to be better without being told. And Hiroki, of all people, treated him not with cruelty or revenge—but with a strange kind of acceptance that hurt more than any insult. He didn't rub it in. He didn't bring up the past. He simply moved forward, and left a space beside him, just wide enough for Zenkichi to walk beside him if he chose to.
And he did.
Not because he needed to be strong again.
Not because he needed to win.
But because—for the first time in his life—he wanted to.
Zenkichi Gojo walked into the Red Eye Ronins not as Bird, not as the mask, not as the swaggering lie he had once wrapped around himself like a shield—but as a boy with scarred pride, tired eyes, and a heartbeat that, at last, felt like his own. No kingdom, no throne, no throne room. Just rooftops, alleyways, and blood-soaked loyalty.
But somehow, for the first time—
that felt like enough.
...
"Why are you like this~~~~"
The voice twisted into his ears like a cold wind slipping through the cracks of a window left open too long. It wasn't a question—it was an accusation, one soaked in snot and tears and that childlike disbelief that someone you trusted could be so cruel.
"You will always hurt people… and that's OK, that's your nature, that's my nature."
That one cut deeper. A voice he didn't recognize anymore. Feminine. Soft like wet paper, and yet it carried weight like concrete. There was laughter behind it—not the happy kind, but the hollow, spiraling echo of someone who had given up and decided that pain was something you pass down like bad genetics.
"Give it to me back—NOO!"
"Stop hurting me, AHHH!" Hiroki's voice—young, high-pitched, cracking between fear and confusion—stabbed through the haze like a blade made of memory.
"No, it hurts! Not the spider!" A girl again, younger maybe, crying over something small, something that probably died in his hands because he thought it would make her flinch. He remembered the legs. How they curled in.
"No, don't take my clothes off, nooo~~~," another voice, sharp and shrieking and too real. That one hit like a fist to the throat.
The voices were layered. Chopped. Overlapping like shards of broken CDs spinning all at once in a machine about to catch fire. Some were his own. Some weren't. But all of them knew him. Not the name. Not the act. Not Bird. Him.
And then he woke up.
Zenkichi Gojo's eyes snapped open in the darkness like prison gates creaking apart. His breath was hot and loud in the still room, chest rising and falling like a piston running too fast. The air clung to him, damp with sweat, like a second skin. His sheets were twisted around his legs in the desperate, animal way of someone who had fought through sleep and lost.
The walls of his room were familiar and foreign at the same time—old posters peeling at the corners, a single window cracked just enough to let the smell of city smog and morning dew crawl in. His phone buzzed somewhere under a pile of notebooks, but he didn't reach for it. He just sat there in the quiet, his body still shaking faintly from the dreams—or maybe the memories.
His hair, shaggy and unkempt, stuck to his forehead in damp clumps, like he had rolled through a thunderstorm and dried off under a dying fan. The strands were light brown with streaks of sun-bleached damage, a color that used to be styled and gelled into something intimidating, but now just looked like it belonged to someone who had stopped pretending to care. He ran a hand through it, half-heartedly trying to tame it, but it only made it worse.
His eyes—hazel, sharp at the edges but dull in the middle—stared into the corner of the room without focusing on anything. There was a glass of water on the desk, half-drunk and stale, and a crack in the ceiling that curved like a scar. He blinked slowly, deliberately, like his brain hadn't caught up to the fact that he was awake, and his body didn't quite know how to be alive yet.
There was a heaviness in him. Not the kind you could sweat out or scream away. This was old weight, buried beneath years of denial and the myth of invincibility. He could still hear the voices, faint now, tucked in the shadows of his ribs. They weren't gone. They just knew how to wait.
Zenkichi had never thought of himself as a bad person—not really. Even at his worst, even when he made kids cry for fun, when he humiliated Hiroki in front of the class, when he stole, broke, whispered, hurt—he told himself it was survival. It was the game. That's how the world worked. Eat or be eaten. Smile while you lie. But now, in the quiet between dreams and daylight, that excuse felt thin. Weak. Almost pathetic.
He looked at his hands. Pale. Calloused. Still shaking a little. He wondered how many things they had held that didn't want to be held. How many kids he shoved into lockers. How many lives he touched with the kind of fingers that left bruises, not comfort.
For a long time, he just sat there.
No music. No movement. Just Zenkichi Gojo, washed in the gray light of early morning, soaked in sweat and silence, staring into the murky pool of what he used to be.
And somewhere—deep inside him, behind all the guilt, beyond the cracked glass of memory, past the voices and sleepless nights and the static of ghosts whispering between his ribs—there was a question. Not loud. Not dramatic. It didn't ring like a bell or thunder like guilt. It just… lingered. Soft as ash. Persistent as rot. A question that sat in the room with him like mildew in a corner.
Who was he, now that he wasn't pretending?
Then came the chirp. Crisp. Offbeat. Too sharp for the mood of the room.
"Wake up, wake up," sang a bird from the windowsill, voice cheery and cold and strangely human in tone. A black-feathered shape, half-shadow, half-cartoonish silhouette, hopped into the room with the obnoxious confidence of something that knew it shouldn't exist but had decided to do so anyway.
The creature—the impossible bird with ink-black feathers that shimmered like spilled oil, its beak sharp and too expressive for comfort—tilted its head in a slow, jerky rhythm. Its eyes were the color of cigarette burns. It looked like something drawn into the world by a hand that hated it.
Zenkichi didn't turn to look. He didn't have to. The sound of its voice was stitched into the fabric of his mornings.
"Shut up," he muttered without passion, rubbing at his face with a dry palm. "Why don't you bother someone else?"
The blackbird fluttered once—just once—but with the kind of theatrical flair that made Zenkichi's skin crawl. It hopped onto the edge of the desk and began to strut like it owned the place, all jerky rhythm and pointed confidence. Its claws clicked against the wood with dainty aggression, and then, with all the smug calculation of a cat pushing glassware off a ledge, it kicked a pen off the desk.
Clatter.
It landed point-first on the floor. Ink splattered in a tiny Rorschach blot beside Zenkichi's sock.
"Because no one else sees me, darling," the blackbird chirped, voice syrupy and poison-sweet. The way it said "darling" was unbearable—like an actor with a cracked mask pretending they weren't bleeding underneath. "No one else hears me. Not even your precious Mugyiwara. I won't go until you find out what my identity is, remember?"
It hopped closer, slow and stalking, like it enjoyed drawing out the moment. Its beady eyes glinted like flecks of obsidian buried in coal. There was no warmth there. Just reflection. Just mirthless mockery.
"I'm your dear little problem," it purred.
And then it began to sing.
Off-key, tuneless—but not loud. It sang in whispers, in dissonant hums that wormed between the cracks in Zenkichi's psyche. Notes that shouldn't have meant anything suddenly felt like someone was prying open a memory with a crowbar. He could feel it crawl into his ears and settle behind his eyes.
It hurt.
"SHUT THE FUCK UP!!" he roared, snapping to his feet, arm swinging wildly through the air like a man swatting at a wasp that wasn't there. The desk rattled. A book fell. His chair toppled over.
He lunged toward the bird, fingers curved, jaw tight with a scream still caught in his throat.
And just then—
Click.
"Yo, Bird."
The door opened with the soft scrape of wood against tile. A voice poured into the chaos, cutting through the charged atmosphere like a warm breeze through a smoke-choked room.
There stood a man—jolly in his stance, innocent in his eyes, polite without needing to try. He wore a faded, sun-bleached muffler wrapped casually around his head, and his shirt was the kind of flannel that looked older than the man himself. He looked like Zenkichi—same nose, same brow—but with kinder lines, worn in by decades of smiling. He stood just about his son's height, maybe a bit shorter now with age's gentle push.
Kousuke Gojo.
A man who believed the world could be fixed with a soldering iron, a pot of curry, and a patient heart. He had that kind of humility that didn't come from being defeated—but from never needing to conquer in the first place.
"You're late, son," Kousuke said, with all the sternness of a worried teddy bear.
"Dad?... WAIT—YES, I'M LATE!" Zenkichi exploded into motion like a wound-up spring let loose. He dashed about the room in frantic disarray—tripping over his own sock, nearly face-planting into the laundry pile, scrambling to slap on his school uniform with the grace of a man being chased by bees.
He yanked the white shirt on—wrinkled and lopsided. The dark grey pants barely made it on in one try. The belt got stuck in the loop, and the T.M.H. emblem (Toyotaro Miracle High) dangled crookedly at his hip like a badge from a lost identity. The dark green tie slipped under his collar the wrong way three times before finally obeying him, and the maroon blazer clung to him like regret.
Kousuke just chuckled under his breath. Not mocking. Never mocking. Just amused in the way only a man who'd raised this chaos for sixteen years could be.
"Kids these days," he said with a smile that had weathered joy and grief both, then turned and quietly shut the door behind him.
As the door clicked shut, the blackbird fluttered back into view from behind a shelf. Its feathers looked darker now in the morning light—more ink than bird. It perched back on the desk, tail flicking. No more song.
Just silence.
Then, with venom-laced delight, it whispered:
"Your father thinks you're just a boy with a rough past trying to do better. Isn't that precious? The man still believes in you. Still calls you his son."
It tilted its head in slow, exaggerated sympathy.
"You gonna tell him what you used to do in the bathrooms, Bird? Gonna tell him about Hiroki's tears? The girls you cornered? The lies? The smirks? The way you enjoyed watching people shrink beneath your shadow?"
Zenkichi's hands clenched at his sides.
The bird chuckled.
"You're a traitor to your own blood, darling. And you know it. He raised a good man. He didn't raise you."
Zenkichi stared at the door.
Outside, his father was probably pouring coffee. Maybe humming an old Showa-era tune under his breath. Maybe writing a to-do list for the shop. Maybe… just waiting for his son to smile back again.
And inside—Zenkichi felt like the cracked reflection of a life that never quite got finished.