personalapocalypse | A Knife In His Heart [CtL, M]

Title: A Knife In His Heart
Author: Wallwalker
Fandom: Changeling the Lost
Rating: M
Characters: Original characters
Word Count: 824
Content Notes: Implied consent issues (kidnapping and body modification)
Notes:

kink_bingo fic, Blades square. Backstory for a Razorhand OC.

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Iron Hand Jack had a humble job in the kitchens at the Blue Elephant. Chef Tory said that he was the best damned prepper he'd ever worked with. He could take a pile of vegetables and a knife and in a few moments, they would be ready for the kitchens. He had a gift for it, they said.

Jack didn't pay much attention to that sort of talk, though. He hadn't honed those skills with practice and hard work. It was just what he did, now. No - it was more than that, deeper. It was who he was.

He was so damn good with knives, now. He could look at one and know exactly how sharp it was. He knew how much pressure he would need with any given knife to cut through whatever he was cutting, and he knew which ones to avoid and which ones to use for any given situation. He had an extensive collection of the things at home - he couldn't resist buying a new set of fine-quality knives whenever he saw them. Normal people wouldn't have understood, of course. They couldn't see the subtle differences, the things that made them unique. They probably would've looked at the inside of his house - decorated with as many different knives, swords and other blades as he had been able to find - and figured he was at best a kook, and at worst a homicidal maniac that was going to stab them as soon as they looked away.

That was just another reason why he didn't invite people over too often. The few that he did invite were his fellows, others who had sworn allegiance to the Silent Arrow. They understood his fixation; they all had fixations of their own.

They all understood, too, that he hated his knives almost as much as he loved them. That if he had been given the choice, he would take them all and throw them into the hottest furnace he could find. He would stoke the furnace until even the metal was ash, if such a thing were possible. They all knew what it was like to be so completely and utterly dependant on a thing that they had grown to hate, to have something grafted onto and into them so thoroughly that they couldn't escape from it.

That was why Jack had never thrown his blades away. He couldn't escape from them that way - not when he could caress a lover's cheek with one outstretched finger and draw it away bloody. What could would destroying his knives do, when he was a knife himself? They'd made him into a weapon, sent him out to take bits and pieces from the unwilling so that they could work their wicked magic and weave them together. And when he'd thrown the knives they'd given him away so that he couldn't do it anymore, they had strapped him to a table and forced the knives into his hands. They - he never knew exactly who they were - had not meant to harm him; they had said that they were helping him. Such a steady hand with a knife should never lose the tools of his trade.

They didn't understand. They would never understand how people were, and if Jack hadn't found his way out he would have been dead by now. He'd seen it happen - people went mad, there, threw their lives away to escape. He was one of the lucky ones. He had escaped without having to throw his life away. But he had taken a part of them with him, and the blades they had forced into his body weren't content to sit and be hidden. He needed to use them. There was nothing like the feeling of the sharp steel cutting through whatever it could, the slight resistance overcome by its sharp edge, yielding to the most gentle pressure. It was the closest he could come to feeling real pleasure now, after he had been through so much.

The lords of the Onyx Court wanted him to turn that ability to other uses. They wanted him, the most unassuming man that anyone could ever imagine - a man who seemed to blend with the night - to strike at their enemies from the darkness, to pierce their hearts with blades that could not leave fingerprints and hide in the shadows from retribution. But John still remembered killing for the Others; he had been made to be very, very good at it. And he wasn't willing to do it again, not even to protect himself and his friends. He wanted to, but he wasn't. He couldn't take that step back down.

For now, the prepwork and the vegetables would be enough. They would have to be. Maybe someday he would give in, do what they wanted. For now, though, he would stay strong, and he would resist. He would not give up that last bit of who he had been.