[Fic] "Knives" excerpt -- Harry Potter
Jun. 14th, 2005 07:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
edenfallingI called in sick to work today and worked on getting my apartment set up. (Bad Liz, no biscuit.) All my books are shelved -- they are in absolutely no order whatsoever, but I can fix that later -- and I'm now working on my clothes.
Also, I finished "Knives."
The beginning and middle are okay, but I think something went wonky toward the end. It feels unbalanced, like I started telling one story and kind of finished telling a different one. I will have to print it out, let it sit a day or two, and figure out what went wrong.
I think it should be ready for beta by the weekend.
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Knives excerpt
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The first time you cut him, it goes badly. You've never tried inflicting pain before, never tried cutting anything that wasn't already dead. It's hard to judge the right speed and pressure to use. Too fast and you might miss or cut too deep. Too slow and the knife wavers and skin and blood clot the edge.
This isn't like killing. There's a distance, both physical and emotional, when you take a life in battle; it's easier to push the guilt and horror away and tell yourself it was necessary. It's easier to let other people call you a war hero and praise you for doing the right thing. It's easier to shut away the soldier, the killer, and fold yourself downward and inward until you're only a sixteen year old schoolgirl again.
Nobody is going to call torture the right thing, not when the war is over and you aren't even hunting for information. You can't ignore the blood running down the knife onto your hands.
Something is twisting inside you, straining to its breaking point, and if you hurt this much you want him to scream, want the pain to break something in him too. But he just clenches his teeth and waits until you've scored a dozen dripping red lines across his back.
'Is that all?' he asks. 'Is that my great and terrible punishment?'
You step back. Your hand is shaking and you rest it against the wall so he won't notice. You have a sickening feeling that he sees anyhow.
'This is practice,' you tell him.
He smirks. 'You don't have the stomach for torture. Give up. Turn me in. The old dementors may be gone, but the Aurors can deal with me better than you ever could and Azkaban will sprout new horrors soon enough.'
You clench your fingers around the hilt of the knife and refuse to answer.
'Oh, but that wouldn't be personal,' he continues, his voice cold and mocking. 'Poor little Ginevra Weasley, who wants to be a big girl, who wants to play with the dark. You could never handle me. You'll break. I can wait.'
He sighs and adjusts his chains until he can lie on his side, curled elegantly on the pooled heap of his black, black robes. His hair, still light and fine despite grease and tangles, spills in a river of silver and gold, and the red on his pale skin completes the picture.
The carvings on the hilt are biting into your hand, and it's wrong that he should still be like this, that he should take you so lightly, that he should still be beautiful even unshaven, unwashed, and unredeemed. It's wrong and it hurts and he has to hurt like you do.
The twisted, stretched place inside you snaps. The pressure dissolves, and suddenly everything is clear.
So you freeze him in place with a quick spell and you cut off his hair. You hack it away in sections, leaving each a different length. In some places you nearly shave him bald. Other handfuls of silver-gold strands hang nearly four inches long.
You step back and survey your work. He isn't pretty anymore, not like that, not with his scalp oozing where the knife slipped and scraped him raw. You transfigure one block of stone into a mirror, cast a lantern spell onto the ceiling, and turn him so his frozen eyes can contemplate his new appearance.
And you whisper into his ear, 'Draco renounced the Malfoy name. He burned the family manor. He says he has no father.'
This is the first lesson:
To break a person, you find what makes him who he is. And then, piece by piece, you take that away.
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Also, I finished "Knives."
The beginning and middle are okay, but I think something went wonky toward the end. It feels unbalanced, like I started telling one story and kind of finished telling a different one. I will have to print it out, let it sit a day or two, and figure out what went wrong.
I think it should be ready for beta by the weekend.
---------------------------------------------
Knives excerpt
---------------------------------------------
The first time you cut him, it goes badly. You've never tried inflicting pain before, never tried cutting anything that wasn't already dead. It's hard to judge the right speed and pressure to use. Too fast and you might miss or cut too deep. Too slow and the knife wavers and skin and blood clot the edge.
This isn't like killing. There's a distance, both physical and emotional, when you take a life in battle; it's easier to push the guilt and horror away and tell yourself it was necessary. It's easier to let other people call you a war hero and praise you for doing the right thing. It's easier to shut away the soldier, the killer, and fold yourself downward and inward until you're only a sixteen year old schoolgirl again.
Nobody is going to call torture the right thing, not when the war is over and you aren't even hunting for information. You can't ignore the blood running down the knife onto your hands.
Something is twisting inside you, straining to its breaking point, and if you hurt this much you want him to scream, want the pain to break something in him too. But he just clenches his teeth and waits until you've scored a dozen dripping red lines across his back.
'Is that all?' he asks. 'Is that my great and terrible punishment?'
You step back. Your hand is shaking and you rest it against the wall so he won't notice. You have a sickening feeling that he sees anyhow.
'This is practice,' you tell him.
He smirks. 'You don't have the stomach for torture. Give up. Turn me in. The old dementors may be gone, but the Aurors can deal with me better than you ever could and Azkaban will sprout new horrors soon enough.'
You clench your fingers around the hilt of the knife and refuse to answer.
'Oh, but that wouldn't be personal,' he continues, his voice cold and mocking. 'Poor little Ginevra Weasley, who wants to be a big girl, who wants to play with the dark. You could never handle me. You'll break. I can wait.'
He sighs and adjusts his chains until he can lie on his side, curled elegantly on the pooled heap of his black, black robes. His hair, still light and fine despite grease and tangles, spills in a river of silver and gold, and the red on his pale skin completes the picture.
The carvings on the hilt are biting into your hand, and it's wrong that he should still be like this, that he should take you so lightly, that he should still be beautiful even unshaven, unwashed, and unredeemed. It's wrong and it hurts and he has to hurt like you do.
The twisted, stretched place inside you snaps. The pressure dissolves, and suddenly everything is clear.
So you freeze him in place with a quick spell and you cut off his hair. You hack it away in sections, leaving each a different length. In some places you nearly shave him bald. Other handfuls of silver-gold strands hang nearly four inches long.
You step back and survey your work. He isn't pretty anymore, not like that, not with his scalp oozing where the knife slipped and scraped him raw. You transfigure one block of stone into a mirror, cast a lantern spell onto the ceiling, and turn him so his frozen eyes can contemplate his new appearance.
And you whisper into his ear, 'Draco renounced the Malfoy name. He burned the family manor. He says he has no father.'
This is the first lesson:
To break a person, you find what makes him who he is. And then, piece by piece, you take that away.
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