Work Text:
A wise poet, now long dead, remembered more by the pen and poems he once held, had once asked a simple question, ‘What is in a name?’ For is a rose by any other name not still a rose? Is it not just as sweet? Are its thorns not just as sharp were you to paint it blue and call it a violet instead?
This was the question Chuuya Nakahara was asking himself as he stared at his hands. Are hands any less human by how they are created? Are their stinging blows any less harsher if one were to call them claws? Monstrous? Inhuman? Was he, like the poet, fated to only be remembered by the songs of violence he called along the streets of what was meant to be his home? Was that not what he was created for?
And yes, the word created tore from his throat, an acrid poison burning away all the hopes that he still desperately held for being what he longed for the most, human.
A fallible, imperfect human.
Those words had always stood out to him as unattainable goals. Fallible. Had he ever been permitted to revel in such a human right? He knew the answer to that question, of course, knew it as well as he knew the routine of the dance of death his feet had been borne to step. He was not fallible, he was certain in his knowledge, every move a carefully calculated decision taken so quickly he had the audacity to name such fabricated knowledge intuition.
A holy man had once said, ‘Pride cometh before the fall,’ and Chuuya really ought to stop reading if these thoughts are what’s borne from it. And perhaps quoting scriptures to place a name and label to feelings he was so sure were caused by the monster in his chest was sacrilege. But Chuuya had already committed so many atrocities he could permit himself one more.
‘Pride cometh before the fall.’ Wasn’t that a sordid prophecy. Because Chuuya had been proud, damn it, of course he’d be proud. He had found somewhere he felt like he’d belong, had stayed there a year without scaring them all off. He’d been proud to have found friends, or at least the closest he’d ever come to that word, a calculated give and take that he had dared to believe left them as warm as he had felt. But no, such things could never last, not for him, because with every high came a low and here Chuuya was, standing amongst the fractured walls that had once been the start of a home. Facing the same damnable word that his very life had started with.
Monster.
He had tried to outrun it, small legs which had only just been made running through the halls of locked, pain-painted laboratory doors. Trying to outrun the meaning behind the dark from which he’d just woken.
Monster.
Because Chuuya has finally realised that it is impossible to hide from the monster under the bed when it stares back at you from every mirror of the bathroom. Impossible to escape that grip when the hands keeping him trapped were his own.
Of course he was a monster, that’s what he’d been created to be.
And so as Chuuya pulled on his coat and gloves, readying himself to dance one more dance macabre, he asks himself,
‘Is a rose by any other name still a rose?’
And the inhuman wreckage his hands cause screams back the answer he’s always known.
No.