by K.A. Rose
Monster characters © and ™ Naoki Urasawa, 1995-2001. Used without permission, for non-profit fan appreciation.
This was an informal fiction piece posted to a Monster fan community on livejournal.com. It slipped into second person without my consent and refused to get out of it, but it seems to work anyway. It's also rated PT:T, meaning it is rated Pre-Teen (content suitable for ages 11 and up) for issues of topic.
Spoiler warning. Do not read unless you have finished reading the entire manga.
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You breathe.
You breathe and it's the first breath you've taken with a conscious intent in so long that all time scales have stopped being relevant. Your lungs ache, because your lungs have been on a respirator, and have forgotten what it felt like for air to suck in until every space was filled and your ribs creaked.
Your eyes hurt because it's been so long since you've used them.
And your skin's taken on a dry quality you can't remember, and you feel lines on your face you have no memory of earning. And your body seems washed out, wrung out and let to dry in a hot summer gale, limbs scrubbed of grime and dust by too many nurses' hands. Stale sheets like sandpaper on your legs.
There's a way that you know, just by the feel of the air, by the sounds outside your curtained window, that this isn't the world that you left. That 1997 is a dim and distant concept now. That your place is a footnote in a stream of history that's gone on without you. That this hospital bed has long since been marked yours and these walls your walls, and others have archived here all matter pertinent to you.
Pale flowers slightly withered on the bed stand. No cards, but many letters, in your sister's neat and lovely script, and the doctor's rigid cursive, addressed to you in the only name burned into their brains to call you. There are books, and crisp-cut newspaper articles pinned up on the walls yellowing and crackling in an air conditioner breeze, and photographs framed and standing, and boxes where more of these same things are stored. Except the flowers, which are ever routinely replaced.
In a nose oversensitive in disuse, the room's a myriad of carnation and lily and daffodil. So many scents they all blend together and mask out the dust and frailing newsprint.
When you slide out the tubes and stand up your feet don't work at first, but you make them. And the first thing your hands find is the table, with more of the letters and dry presents and postcards and paintings. And a box that slides open to reveal a stack of legal ledger, and the only name that's ever been burned into people's brains to call you, mentioned in every other line.
This was the court trial carried on in your absence. This was the testimony, the deliberation, the numbered and dated evidence and outpouring of witnesses and psychological examination of a man then comatose. This was the judge's guilty verdict, that if you should live and awaken, you would see the rest of your life spent in the strictest prison Germany can provide.
That part doesn't interest you. The testimony and deliberation and numbered evidence and witnesses and psychological examination interest you. The theories. The hypotheses. The projection of motives and Freudian insights. Pretentious rambling so longevous it becomes Ouroboros swallowing his own tail, in effect. Until at the end of this long snarled mess, to some relief, a conclusion is able to be made.
Years asleep, you breathe and awaken to find that in your absence, people gathered around and mulled and debated and decided at last that,
"Johan has Gender Issues."
...What?
end
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Finished at 07:57 24 February, 2005.
No countless innocents or slightly psychotic bred killers were harmed in the making of this fanfic.