Archive of Our Own ^beta

”Fucking Christ, Monika, what the fuck is wrong with you?! Fucking spill already!”

Monika has decided to take Natsuki’s admonishment to heart, knelt in the school’s restrooms with Yuri’s (poorly-concealed) knife in hand. She would like to know what exactly is wrong with her, after all. It’s been a point of confusion, concern, and even anger for her and her classmates for so many years that, well, it would feel rude not to find out. Sort of a refusal to address the issue, and she couldn’t have that.

She’s already peeled away her blazer jacket, leaving it hung on the stall door’s hook - not much she can do about her vest and dress shirt besides roll them up, though. (She couldn’t be half-naked at school!) Not much she could do about her skirt, either, but that’s not going to stop her. Getting a little dirty was the least amount of penance she’d have to bear for getting to the bottom of this ever-present mystery. 

What the fuck was wrong with her, anyway?

Monika sighs, re-adjusts the way her skirt drapes over her knees, and drives the sharp point of the knife under the flesh of her stomach.

She grimaces as she pulls the tip downwards, squirming slightly where she’s sat on her own heels - uncomfortable would be the nicest way to put this feeling, she thinks, but it’s necessary work. It’s not even a very large cut, precisely speaking; barely longer than her own hand, and she even takes a bit too much time to do it, gaze fixed as it is by the near-black, almost viscous liquid exiting the wound like a slit, drooling mouth.

Is that what’s wrong with me?  

No, Monika, that’s blood, she sighs. She’s fairly certain that blood is one of the things least wrong with her, even if it’s dripping into her skirt rather than delivering oxygen to her organs. Continuing to frown, she drags the knife first to one side, then the other - leaving it then, for the time being, and gripping (with some slippery difficulty) the two halves of the cut she’s made. Feeling the pads of her fingers sliding against the inside of her flesh is, again, uncomfortable at best— though, not nearly as uncomfortable as the tension between herself and whatever it was that was wrong with her, inside. 

What was going to come out of her? She can’t hardly bear to look - screwing her eyes shut, she grips her innards harder still (a nasty set of pinches as her nails dig in, trembling) and lifts, tugging her dangling flesh out of the way in an instant and waiting for whatever horrific, disgusting thing—

Or her intestinal tract. That could also very well be the thing landing on her half-covered thighs with an unceremonious, wet plop, coated in a thick layer of blood and shining under the fluorescent light fixtures. Eugh, she thinks, eloquently, These move?

Monika coughs, a thin string of sticky red shooting up the back of her throat and into her reflexively-covering hand as she does so.

Maybe that’s what’s wrong with her. Squirmy intestines. She’s rather aware that, even if this were an odd defect, an unusually physically active digestive tract wouldn’t be something that other people could tell was wrong with her, so. That’s probably not it. But it does feel a bit anticlimactic, going to all this trouble for nothing but a lapful of writhing fleshy noodles. 

She does want to be thorough, so she takes her time lifting them - er, it? Different parts of it? - one-by-one, inspecting it under the light as it wormed about in her hands. Unfortunately, nothing about it seems to be as monstrous or horrifying as Whatever It Is That’s Wrong With Monika. No claws or teeth, no beady little eyes, no slimy clumps of hair or fur. Not even a particularly nasty smell, unless one’s stomach was turned by blood, and hers is not, despite how much it is wiggling around.

How disappointing. She would have thought for sure that’s where it would be. She sits for a moment, pondering, before feeling around for the knife once more.

Perhaps the Thing-Wrong-With-Her is elsewhere, she thinks, fingers wrapping purposefully around the handle of the knife. It’s surely in there somewhere. And her stomach is, after all, an easy target. Where else might it be?

Monika hums softly in thought, before driving the knife quickly into her thigh.

Uncomfortable, yes. But a necessary evil, the alien feeling of the sharpened metal tip grinding against her own bone - pushing it forward to cut it open fully, like one would a long bun, then grasping each side to pull the flesh aside to search for something horrible.

But nothing, outside of the thin, newly-carved line running down her femur, appears to be so amiss.

Confounding. 

She repeats the process with her other leg - no sense in being anything less than utterly thorough, after all - but again, no monster rears its ugly head as she pulls her flesh apart, bloodied fingers digging deep into the meat of her own appendage. How... unfortunate. That was the word she was meant to settle on, wasn’t it? How unfortunate, that all this effort wouldn’t turn up the answers to what her fucking problem was (end quote). Whatever it is, she doesn’t think it would be hiding in any smaller portions of her legs, and her arms likely weren’t large enough to accommodate it either (no matter how tempting the sudden thought to fillet those were) - if it were hiding in her skull, well, good luck to her getting it out of there, though the tip of the knife does find itself dangling invitingly before one of her eyes for a good, long moment.

She supposes it might be in her ribcage - just might. She brings the knife back to the upper limit of her original cut, pulling upwards before she realizes, with an uncomfortable -clack- of the blade catching against her sternum, that there wasn’t really all that much room for something to be living in there, was there? Still, perhaps...

... no, sadly. Curious, probing fingers meeting with nothing but the near-sticky texture of expanding, contracting lungs - the fluttering twitches of a beating heart, fitting in her hand and struggling against it much indeed like the songbirds it’s so often poetically compared to. She is very, very tempted to squeeze it, to crush it in her fist like a fruit, overripe, but abstains. That thing, blood-filled organ, is functioning perfectly fine. It’s certainly not whatever is wrong with her.

Pulling her hand from her chest with a wince, though, that also would mean - despite all this to-do, she hasn’t even managed the goal she’d set out. 

What’s wrong with her?

What the fuck is wrong with her?

Monika sits, shoulders slumped - staring vaguely defeated into the plane of existence between herself and the blank wall of the bathroom.

... I’m going to have to walk home like this...

She grabs for the mass of intestinal tract splayed over her lap, pushing it carelessly back into the cavity she’d created. A few coils didn’t quite fit, not now that they’d been so thoroughly unseated, but there’s nothing she can do about that now besides pull her shirt and vest down over the gaping wound in her belly, using the elasticated lower hem to keep the worst of it from dangling. Her skirt and socks are very dark in color anyway, so surely their being soaked in her own blood isn’t that obvious, is it? No, she thinks - turning this way and that - unless you’re looking closely for the way a wet skirt swings differently in gravity’s pull than a dry one, not so obvious at all. Her thighs...

... well, she was going to be hurrying home, anyway.

It’s a shame she doesn’t have any more answers for Natsuki than she did before the day had ended, or for anyone else, really - a shame. A sort of pain climbs into her chest, sharp, jolting, something distinct from the uncomfortable feeling her fingerprints had left behind. Maybe that’s the Thing-Wrong-With-Her, or. 

Maybe it isn’t.

Shaking off her crimson-soaked fingers, more ceremonially than anything else, she grabs her blazer jacket from the door, picks up her bag, and exits the room - 

Sticky shoeprints trailing behind her all the while home.