Work Text:
You are the coal before you are the diamond in the rough.
It takes 725000 pound force per square inch, or psi, or lbf/in2 to form diamonds.
That is 50,000 times the atmospheric pressure at sea level.
Think of the Eiffel tower balanced on your thumbnail.
It also takes a billion years. The business is in your blood.
Hunter makes himself 725000 lbf/in2 in one short year.
He has a plan;
He wants to crush you into the next diamond.
He wants to crush you.
He wants
You.
Diamond cutting is a delicate process; there’s cleaving, positioning, striking, bruting, faceting, polishing, inspection and grading.
He says it sounds scarier than it really is.
I’ll take care of you, kid, he says. I know what I’m doing.
So you ignore the trembling and you accept.
You are waiting to be made pretty. Nervous on the table. He kisses the top of your head and it burns.
You remember being buried underneath the soil, in the rough.
You’ll do anything to keep your head above ground.
Take it like a man.
Cleaving; he scores your surfaces with his. He notes your cleavage planes. These are where your anatomic bonds have the least strength, your soft underbelly, delicate lines where you are most vulnerable. He will use them when he cuts you open.
Don’t look so afraid; This is for the best.
In your nightmares, there is a man wearing a uniform. There is you, also, wearing nothing.
You gasp when you wake up. He asks what’s wrong.
You say it doesn’t matter, you beg, go back to sleep. He says, it does to me.
So you tell him, in the hum of cheap hotel air conditioning, heart beating like racehorse footfalls, you find the words.
You expect him to turn away from you, but he wants to continue.
He says he loves you and you trust him.
Positioning; he presses a steel blade inside the surface he has marked.
Instinct tells you it isn’t supposed to be this sharp.
Instinct tells you to swallow the pain. Be good.
You can take it, he tells you. It's for the best. It hurts, but it's for the best.
Fucking take it.
He promises that you will be all the more perfect for it.
He gets this bit wrong and you’re worthless.
Steady. Hold your breath, kid.
Striking the blow; he smashes the blade with a sledgehammer, splitting you into pieces, down the surfaces he scored.
You don’t feel quite like yourself anymore, scattered all over the table.
Is it over yet? / Did he uncover the bit of you he wants?
He picks up each piece of you and inspects which parts are worth keeping, he says he knows which hold the most value.
You wonder why he can’t take you whole, but keep your mouth shut and ears open like you were always told to do.
Bruting; he sets you in position again to be shaped, elbows pinned onto the table so you can’t struggle.
Steady. This is for your own good.
Diamonds are shaped by other diamonds, there is beauty about that.
Lucky for you, Hunter is a diamond.
One diamond grinds the excess material from the rough, making it the shape he wants. It’s intimate.
It’s agony.
You’re beautiful, kid, he says up close.
When he shows you off, you wish people could see how you got here.
It’s nearly over, he promises you, a thumb wiping tears from your cheek.
Faceting; he maximises your brilliance and the way light reflects off of you.
This part is a blur, you know it decides your shine.
He gives you a syringe to stick in your ass cheek, tells you to figure it out.
You start to look better than you ever have.
Baby oil and sweat smells funny.
Polishing; he finalises your dimensions, the facets he created, siphons a symmetry.
Smoothed and refined, on a spinning wheel coated with diamond dust.
A meticulous sparkle, it rains when you walk down the ramp.
He fucks you every night.
Sometimes you enjoy it.
Inspection; you look nothing like when you started this process.
The others don’t even recognise you anymore. This is supposed to be a good thing.
You’re supposed to be better than the rest, because you’ve been touched by another diamond.
Count your abs on live television; this is what you suffered for?
You don’t speak anymore, you and John, but you wonder what he’d say about it. You imagine he says a joke you don’t fully understand, because you never did, so you pull a face at him and grin anyway.
You miss him like you never imagined.
Well, you were supposed to be better than all but one, you greedy little shit.
Grading; an upside down thumb.
It takes 700°c and the presence of oxygen to ruin a diamond.
He lets you breathe a helluva lot of oxygen the night you win your title.
Hunter is 900°c on August 16th.
And the rest is history, and you will never be pure again.
Repolished, maybe, but you’ll never forget the heat, how you melted for him.
There are still pieces of you scattered across his table where he wore you down.
You often wonder if he kept them, maybe in picture frames on his mantle.
If you sneak back into his house you know you’re not coming back out.
Whatever. He can keep them. You’re not so sure you liked them in the first place.
You’ll have to fix yourself without them.
(Are the drugs working?)
Maybe you should call John. Call Adam.
You were the diamond he cut/ Out of his life/ Out of your own/ Cut/ Another promo about it/ Why is no one listening?/ Look at your reflection again/ Cut/ There is a cut in your forehead/ You hit it against the mirror/ Trying to forget/ (Do you even remember?)
Hold your breath, kid.
You stop breathing one night.
40mg of Ambien, some other shit, and one too many bumps of bad blow.
You nearly died that night.
It means nothing in the end, really, because coal could never be crushed into diamond, the doctor tells you when you come around.
It is full of impurities, for a start.
But there are plenty of reasons you couldn’t be what he wanted you to be.
Part of you wants to crawl back into the soil and pretend he never dug you up at all.
At least he got you where you are today,
right?
Hunter knew all this and he wanted you still/ He looked at you like you were a diamond once/
That must count for something/ You can not forgive him/ You’ll never trust again.