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It’s times like these where Tenma wonders if the second surgery was a failure. Times where Johan materialises out of thin air in his living room and speaks as if he’s nothing but an excerpt.
“Am I interrupting?”
Tenma sits up from his nap and rubs at his eyes with a heavy sigh. “You can’t keep breaking in like this.”
“Your therapist,” Johan’s voice remains steady, smooth in that way Tenma finds difficulty deciphering. “What was his name? Ah, yes. Reichwein. I paid him a visit the other day.”
It takes time for the words to sink into Tenma’s sleep-addled state, but once they do, he tenses, his thoughts already tripping over themselves in a frenzy with the possibilities of how that could’ve gone down. He was just on the phone with Julius a few hours ago— Johan couldn’t have possibly—
“A diary, he said.” Amusement coats that word. Diary. As if ages have been reversed and Dr. Julius is nothing to Johan but a young novice, barely holding a candle to Johan’s knowledge.
Johan speaks like this often. An experimenting lepidopterist among his collection of bugs. With something akin to amused disdain. Other times, he’s nothing but a passive onlooker. Not a scientist, but something more—
Omnipresent.
Observing. Operating. Never really interfering.
A God in repose.
“Tell me, Doctor,” Johan’s voice tethers Tenma back to the living room he’s seated in. “Do you believe in the power of words?”
“Of course I do,” Tenma responds, his answer at the tip of his tongue. It comes out defensive, so unlike him. “Don’t you? After all, words are what did your bidding.”
Silence.
Not pensive. Not uncomfortable or loud. Simply there.
“He said I should try writing.”
Tenma blinks.
“I ask you again, Doctor Tenma,”
This time, when re-posing the question, Johan turns around slowly and settles his dull eyes on the older man’s face.
“Do you believe in the power of words?”
Stricken silent.
What makes him think Tenma’s answer will be any different over the span of eleven systoles and a blink?
And yet.
There’s something in Johan’s question. A push. An allusion. Tenma isolates it and shelves it away, a process that Johan picks up on. A flicker of delight shines in his eyes, his hands folded neatly behind his back as he awaits the doctor’s answer.
“Well?” Johan murmurs.
“They help,” Tenma manages to say, too much breath in the words. “They can help if you want them to.”
Johan hums noncommittally, and he turns to the books on Tenma’s shelves. His hands release each other. Tenma tracks their movement.
“I burnt so many,” Johan confesses. His finger — the same one that stroked memories and begged their suicide — traces the spine of one of Tenma’s books. “So many words have perished for me.”
For me. For.
Because of.
For.
Tenma’s throat bobs.
With.
“Now he tells me to write. And you tell me it helps. Does it really, Doctor? You say words did my bidding but is that really what you think?”
“It depends.”
“On what?”
“On how you use them, on intention,” Tenma replies. “They’re no different than the scalpel surgeons use in the operating room. The same one I used to save you when you were a child, Johan. And the same one I used to save you again ten years later.”
And.
Once, Nina had trembled and cried as she told Tenma and herself how Johan looked when remembering. He looked like he was crying and he looked like he was laughing and she had never seen anything like it.
Tenma sees it on Johan’s face now. Worn and gaunt and tired. “And what was your intention? What was going through your head the first time you saved me? What flashed before your eyes when you decided to pull that bullet out of me, Doctor? Was it a life or was it a scale?”
He goes on before Tenma can speak.
“Was it moral superiority that operated on me that day?” Johan takes a single step forward, his voice softening into something infinitely crueler. He’s not asking anymore. He’s- spinning a web. “Or was it your heart? Did you really see a life on that surgical table, I wonder…”
The smile that brushes the corners of his lips shoots two bullets in the question and fills Tenma’s throat with bile.
“I…”
“You?” Johan pushes. “You.”
“I think I see it now, how you killed Richard.”
Johan gives him a slow, unconcerned blink. “He jumped,” he says simply.
“I operated on you that day,” Tenma says back. “I admit, it wasn’t a calculated decision.”
Johan’s smile grows kinder. Haughtier. Sadder. Tenma has studied the human body. He spent years upon years studying muscle and tendon and bone. But he’s never seen anything quite like the face Johan covers his facelessness with. Conflict, is the first word that comes to his mind upon seeing it.
And conflict, he’s come to realise, conflict is human.
“But it isn’t one I regret. I operated on you again,” he says, a breathless rush. A desperate jumble of words. “After I found out what you are and what you’ve done, I still did it. If you think the first time was about me, you should know the second time was about you.”
Johan sits.
And what a sight it is. To see corruption at rest.
“You still believe you can save me,” Johan observes.
“I have saved you,” Tenma retorts. “And if it comes down to it, I will do it again.”
“A scalpel only goes so far, my dear doctor.”
“You’re not beyond salvage, Johan.”
“And I’m starting to think you’re fond of me.”
Tenma opens his mouth. Closes it.
“Did words not do your bidding too?” Johan eases forth. “Back then, at my bedside? What was it you said? ‘He’s better off dead’? I remember it like it was just yesterday.”
“I was angry,” Tenma objects. “I didn’t want them dead. If I knew what you would do– If I knew—”
“But look what you have now. Isn’t it nice not to be worked to the bone like a dog? To get credit for the things you do?”
“Why are you here?”
“Isn’t that what you wanted?” Johan questions. Always speaking in questions as if he himself doesn’t have the answers. “When you saved me? For me to be here.”
“Yes. But- why are you here? I don’t understand.”
“I’ve come to hear my name.”
“Your— Your name?”
“Yes,” Johan offers a smile. “Not that one,” he adds before Tenma can even open his mouth. “The one my mother gave me before throwing it away. You see, doctor…
“That therapist of yours spoke of words as if they have hearts, and my name,” he reaches up, and he prods at his throat with a finger. “I’m afraid its heart will die here. That’s why I’ve come to you. I’m here to collect it.”
“You’re here to… hear your name?”
“Yes,” Johan responds, the word falling from his lips. It hangs between them, and they both watch it flail like a breathless fish until it stills and withers. “I want it back now.”
“What makes you think I can…” he shakes his head lightly. “No.”
“No?” Johan muses.
“I’m not–” Tenma stops to take a breath. To collect himself. “I don’t—”
A doctor. The chief of surgeons. One of the most renowned in his field and he’s sitting here stammering over his words.
“You will save me, but you will deny me the very thing that gives me a place in this world.”
A rush of.. not anger, never anger, frustration, ripples through the older man. “I’m not denying you anything,” he says, the force of his tenacity hardening the words into rock. “That’s not what I’m doing. You need to put your trust in yourself, Johan, and stop…”
His sentence droops with exhaustion.
“Stop existing only through others.”
“Why? Is that not what you do, Doctor?” the epithet is voiced as a jab. An insult. Tenma feels it like a knife to his throat. “Did you not punish yourself by stripping your name of that title?”
Tenma glares at him. Says nothing and simply battles Johan’s blank stare with willful determination. The fight isn’t as reciprocal as he wants it to be.
“You’re quite intransigent,” Johan thrums, voice so dulcet Tenma wonders why he can’t trust it with a name. “Nothing a bit of desperation can’t break.”
Tenma’s posture straightens, his eyes letting up and dropping to Johan’s interlaced hands. Violence seems to be the only thing this boy can ply to get his way.
A ticking time bomb.
The moment Tenma draws the comparison in his head, Johan’s index fingers start tapping a beat against each other. The pulse of a bomb. Or a heart. Tenma isn’t sure, but the muscle in his own chest snags on a breath. It’s an unsettling thing, how Johan seems to read the doctor’s every thought.
He moves, and Tenma waits for a gun. He thinks the younger man might have it in the inner pocket of his jacket.
Johan’s pale hands unwind from each other. Tenma can hear his heartbeat in his ears.
But Johan doesn’t reach into his jacket, and he doesn’t hold him at gunpoint. He leans forward and reaches for the chopsticks in the empty bowl sitting on the table between them, his fingers stroking half the length of one.
“You made these, didn’t you?”
Not a question.
“You see, Doctor,” Johan’s eyes don’t lift from the sunken relief carved into the utensil, thumb tracing its intricacies. “Being resurrected by the same hand twice gave me an eye for everything that’s been touched by it. It’s as if you—”
Intimate. It’s too intimate. Tenma’s breath is stuck in the clench of his fists.
“What do you want, Johan?” he cuts in.
“—breathed life into me. Your breath is in my lungs now. And it’s only a matter of time before your heart is in my ribcage. That’s why I need my name.”
Tick. Tick. Tick.
Johan matches the throbbing of the doctor’s pulse with the clicking of the chopsticks. Proving a point that makes Tenma’s heart crawl up to sit snug in his throat, his ears turning red with heat.
He’s frozen. Then he isn’t. He isn’t but he can’t bring himself to pry the chopsticks out of Johan’s hands. He can’t bring himself to touch Johan without latex separating their skin. And it’s not disgust nor hate nor anything in between. He’s uncomfortable with his uncertainty. He doesn’t know if Johan’s skin will be boiling with life or freezing with nothing. Johan lets go of the wooden sticks.
“Johan—”
“That’s not my name, Doctor.”
“It can be. If you want it.”
“It was stolen for me, from a children’s book,” Johan says, and for once since he appeared in Tenma’s home, the tenderness of his voice is vulnerable. Rawer than anything else he’s ever allowed past his throat. “I want the one that was given.”
“To live a better life?”
“Is that possible for something like me?”
Is that a no? and a correction of Johan’s dehumanisation wrestle at the tip of Tenma’s tongue. He swallows one back.
“Someone.”
Faint mockery pulls at the corner of Johan’s lips and rushes out his nose on a single breath.
He stands up and goes back to Tenma’s bookshelf, his hands holding each other at the small of his back.
“Your doctor told me diaries help immortalise memories. I realise that now, that sometimes words need houses,” he muses. “So I would like you to make me a diary, Doctor Tenma. A coffin for mine.”
Tenma swallows, the muscle in his jaw drawing tight. He says nothing.
Talking comes to him effortlessly. It’s a part of his profession as a doctor. Explaining conditions to the sick, comforting grieving family, nattering with chatty elderly patients. It’s something that carries into his personal life. A part of the reason why he sometimes finds himself approaching Nina’s problems as a doctor — dissect, explain, operate — before she tells him she needs a friend.
Speaking with Johan is different. It’s hard to do without ransacking through his every word in search of deceit. There’s no technique to it, only pure emotion. Panic, suspicion, sympathy, confusion, frustration, anticipation.
The stretching silence doesn’t seem to bother Johan, who stands there waiting for a response from his doctor. Tenma looks at him. Meets his gaze and holds it.
Johan, unaffected, goes on,
“Will you do that for me?”
…
Johan comes to collect the book from the empty house a week later. Finds the supple, leather-bound graveyard on the table, waiting.
He holds it between his hands. It’s a beautiful thing operated on with caring hands, he can admit that. Almost too beautiful to be burdened with what Johan will be giving it. The ribbon marker is a golden silk tucked between two yellowed pages not yet scarred, and,
It’s a foreign thing, the warmth that grows inside him at its touch. One he cannot blame on Doctor Kenzo Tenma’s breath dwelling in his lungs or faint heartbeat residing behind his ribs.
And there, stamped at the bottom corner of the cover, an initial.
Two letters he will bury to make himself one again.