Work Text:
Love is such a fragile word.
Spoken in soft tones, rolling off the tongue, curling up in the ear, it breaks under the slightest strain. Set it amongst other, sharper words, and it shrinks from sight, bricked up by harder consonants. Speak it harshly and it truncates, clipped of its wings, flightless and floundering like a broken bird.
Yet once it meant the world to Tony. Once it made him give up everything that made him himself, everything that defined him, to remake him as someone new. And he was happy being remade, happy being another, even if the glitter of blades, the sharpness of knives invaded his dreams every night.
When those knives became real, everything he loved was sliced away. Filleted to the bone, he lost himself, shredded to nothing on a shattered word, left empty of all vowels but "I."
He's come to understand how Marwan and Bierko could hate so intensely. That sort of hate can only come from a loss of love. God knows Tony knows loss; it's all he has left to offer, all he has left to build on.
But now all the consonants and vowels have started to click back in place, like a knife in its sheath, a bullet in a gun. And just as surely as Tony is finally writing his own story, he knows it is only a matter of time before Jack enters the scene. Hero of the piece, jack-of-all-tortures, he'll either be a good boy and add to the plotline, or Tony will carve all his losses into his flesh.
Love is such a fragile word.
But hate, oh, hate has the strength to build bombs.