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They call Krim Steinbelt a hero, the former-man who worked from the shadows to allow the Kamen Riders to do their work, even now that Roidmudes are no longer the enemy. They say his sense of integrity, of justice, knows no bounds, that he is dedicated beyond measure. That he should be thanked for protecting humanity just as much as the man who actually put on the suit and fought.
Heart wants to kill him all over again.
Krim Steinbelt was no hero, not as a man and not as a belt. It is too easy to inflate the good in a man you never knew, and who but Heart is left that truly knew him, before his 'untimely' death? But no one asks him- and he wouldn't care to volunteer the information if they did, not with any great detail. So with every Kamen Rider Report that praises him, every magazine article that digs into his so very clean past, Heart clenches his fists and clenches his teeth and says nothing.
Some nights when he lays alone, his constant companions distracted or having succumbed to sleep, he unclenches his teeth and tests out all the words he's been fighting back. "Krim was never a hero" and "he is a monster just like us," don't hold the same weight at night, don't weigh heavy on his chest, don't draw disapproving and disbelieving stares.
And some nights, he digs deeper, to the words he will never say to the man himself. "You left us," always comes first, and he hates how impossibly small his voice sounds, the suddenly oppressive night closing in tight around the words. "You knew what was happening, you saw, and you just left us there. Did you think he would stop?"
Other things he won't say out loud even in the deepest dark, even at his most alone. Saying them would be like giving them a power he doesn't want them to have. But he thinks them nonetheless. That he'd thought for a brief moment that Krim was there to save him, to liberate them. That he'd spent the next month believing, somewhere deep inside, that he would come back, that good and righteously furious man, and right this wrong.
Of course, he never did. He allowed it by simply walking away, and choosing instead to spearhead the destruction of the race his actions had created. But humans are like that, he knows, and what rare few would condemn his actions do not measure up to those that would jump to his defense.
And so it continues.
They call Krim Steinbelt a hero, and Heart wishes for a world where it had been true.