Kim Pine's

PRECIOUS LITTLE KNIVES



An Ill-Advised Scott Pilgrim Fanfic

By Jessica X

NOTICE: Scott Pilgrim and related characters are ©Bryan Lee O'Malley. Story/plot content is © me!

Based mostly off the graphic novels but some stuff from the movie and game. There are other Kim/Knives fics but I haven't read them; I wanted to come at this completely based on the source material. Any similarities to those fics is purely coincidental.

Rated M for adult topics (including one brief not-quite-explicit flashback with a 17-year-old), and some sexual content in later chapters. You know, the L word. No, not "lesbian" — the OTHER L word: lesbians.

"... It's something else" - flyafar

CHAPTER ONE

And so, as our band of ragtag heroes exited from the Chaos Theater, Scott Pilgrim was reunited with his great love - well, other than himself. He and Ramona Flowers, the random American rollerblading groupie, went prancing off into Subspace together. Happily fucking ever after.

Both "fucking happily" and "happily fucking", to be honest.

What did I get? The same thing as usual. Nothing. Bitterness and emptiness. Well, I guess that's not completely accurate: Scott said he was sorry. Too little, too late, but hey… at least he tried. A for Effort. He gets Ramona, Stephen gets my old roommate, Wallace gets just about every piece of hot gay ass in Toronto besides Joseph and Stephen. Knives and Young Neil get each other, sort of, kind of. I guess. Who cares? And I'm left with a big bag of nothing.

I'm not Scott, obviously. I'm Kim. I play drums. That's all the introduction you get.

Fine, I'll be nice. You came here for this story, so I'll tell you the rest of the history first. Kim Pine. Red hair and freckles, pointless existence. Born and raised in Ontario, though I've skipped from town to town. Scorpio. My turn-ons are death and destruction, and long walks on the beach.

If you don't know anyof the history, then you're probably better off. It's a long, sad story full of sighs and facepalms. But some of you probably have that morbid curiosity you can't shake, so unless you already know this and can skip it, or just care even less than me, here we go: I used to play drums for Sex Bob-omb with Scott and Stephen. Also of importance is the fact that Scott left a string of broken hearts in his wake a kilometer and a half long, with mine thrown in there somewhere. Just because he and I patched it up enough to be civil didn't mean we were "all good", but I sure as fuck wasn't going to be the one to explain it to the manchild. Anyway, we all thought for sure that Knives and Ramona were just going to be his latest casualties, or one of them would Yoko him into quitting the band. And we were right about that last part; the band fell apart, but at least not in a literal sense like The Clash At Demonhead, when their bassist was headbutted into coins and the drummer lost her cybernetic arm before disappearing completely. Not too long after the big showdown with Gideon at the Chaos, Ramona and Scott poofed into the ether and haven't been heard from since.

There, happy?

Anyway, this takes place a year after all that went down.

~ o ~

I don't even know why I was still in Toronto. After Sex Bob-omb exploded and Shatter Band shattered, there really wasn't much else for me to do. Boredom, maybe. At least Stephen was still around, making music with his boyfriend, but they didn't seem to need my drums anymore. Dynamite Headdy sounds better without me. Sure, there are days I still miss Sex Bob-omb. Not so much Shatter Band, which stank on ice. But the Bob-omb had potential, we just had Scott's lack of focus holding us back, and Stephen's too-much-focus sucking all the fun out of everything. So maybe, over the course of this paragraph, I talked myself out of missing either of those bands.

Anyway. Toronto, Delicious Cup.

Nobody wants to hear a drummer all by themselves. So I started doing this thing with Steph Nordegraf after she moved back to Toronto. Stephen introduced us; I'd met her through her brother Neil before though. It's… experimental and stupid, and I hate it. I'm on bongos while she sings and plays the zither. We sound like new age music being recorded by kindergartner, which is why we couldn't book any realcoffee houses, like Second Cup or Aroma; only knockoffs like that one.

That's what we were doing in Delicious Cup the day my life stopped being pointless and colourless. So colourless that I didn't even fully realise it was summer until I saw Knives Chau walk in.

"What are you doing?" Steph hissed at me. Didn't even notice my bongos were on the floor until that point.

"What?"

"You went totally dead, like some kind of locust."

"Do locusts go dead? Is that their thing?"

"Just…" She sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose. "We'll take five."

Frowning up at her, I slipped my bongos into the backpack I normally kept them in. "Chill, Nordegraf. You're going to develop kidney stones."

Okay, so that wasn't really her fault; I was being my usual salty self to cover for the fact that I fucked up our set. Not that anyone in the coffee house was paying the slightest attention to the two weirdos who thought they were musicians; they were all chatting, drinking, and reading through magazines. When one of our ten-minute epics ended, one polite older woman clapped. That was it. We might as well have been ghosts for all the notice we got coming and going.

As I ditched her with the equipment and went up to the counter, slipping in behind Knives in line, I tried not to think too much. Sure, we had a thing once… it's barely worth mentioning. But yeah, it was oddly nice to see a familiar face. Especially with Scott and Ramona off in the ether somewhere.

She looked good. At least, I thought so; she stopped doing that thing where she dyed part of her hair, which I always thought was just a way to compete for Pilgrim's attention, anyway. And a year of college really seemed to have given her something… not that I could tell what it was, but something more. Her adorable face was turned mostly away from me, so I couldn't tell much else. Just that she was wearing clothes a little more grown up than when I last saw her, and that she didn't seem as nervously-excited. That's a good thing: I hate excitable people.

"Green milktea?" she asked when she got up to the counter.

"What… is that?" Julie asked her. "This is a coffee house, not a tea house." Typical Julie. Yeah, I knew the barista, but we don't really talk. She's even more unpleasant than I am.

"Oh… but you have green tea and chai tea on the menu. Right there."

Julie didn't even bother to look over her shoulder. "I think I would know the menu better than you would."

"But I'm serious, it's right-"

"Do you have a problem with the way this business operates? Are you blind or something?"

"No, I'm not blind," Knives said, slowly sounding a little less sure of herself. "My eyes work fine."

"Then why can't you read my lips? No. Milk. Tea."

This was going nowhere. Even though this wasn't how I wanted to reinitiate contact with either of them again, I strode up to the counter and stood next to Knives.

"If you have milk, and you have tea, you can make her fucking milktea. Besides, you know her, so stop being such a rotting tampon."

"What?" Knives breathed, taking an instinctive step away — probably just from my tone.

"Excuse me, carrot top?" Julie snapped. "You don't tell me how to-"

"And you don't own this café, Powers, even if you do seem to work in all of them. Just make the drink. I'll cover whatever extra you want to charge." Digging into my pocket for my meager amount of money that I own, I produced a couple of toonies. "Make it. Now."

"This isn't even enough for a normal cappuccino, or whatever a 'milktea' is supposed to be."

"She can pay for the actual tea herself; I'm just paying for your added mental energy, which you seem to be rationing very carefully due to a tremendous shortage."

By that point, Julie's glasses were literally steaming. Either from her face heating up with rage, or the coffee machines behind her. Knives had been shrinking away from the whole confrontation, but then she blinked a few times, leaning back toward us.

"Kim?"

My cheeks probably would have turned red at the way she breathed my name. What a dumb reaction. But I made myself focus on what I was doing, stepping forward to add another fiver atop the coins on the counter. "And this is for my espresso. Hurry it the fuck up or I'll do that ask-to-see-a-manager thing we all hate." My work done, I turned and went back over to Steph.

It only took her a minute or so to see that I was back without any drinks. "What happened to my soy latte?"

"Sorry…" All at once, I realised I forgot about that. Or about waiting around for my own drink, either. But she noticed I was out of sorts.

"What happened?"

"To what, your face? I've been wondering that for years."

"No, at the counter." She was used to my attitude by now, and could tell when I was deflecting. A skill I loathe in my friends, because it bypasses my defenses. "You look all shook up."

"Thanks, Elvis." Clearly, she wasn't going to let this go. "Okay… I ran into somebody. From the old days."

Her lip curled slightly. "From the Pilgrim Era, or like even earlier?" My face must have said it all because she winced. "Yikes…"

"I don't care," I told her flatly. "This doesn't matter. Tomorrow, I'm going to wake up and go back to No-Account, punch the clock, and stare into space for six hours until Comeau gets in. Probably drink a bunch of Coke and feel myself contracting diabetes."

"Why don't you just drink Coke Zero?"

My scowl said enough. Still, for good measure, I snapped, "Never… mention Coke Zero… in front of me."

"Okay, Hagrid," she snorted as she finished packing up and we headed for the door. Again, she doesn't respect my grumpiness properly. "But I hope you know this isn't the end of thi-"

Before we could escape Delicious Cup, a pair of crossed blades were blocking our path. Behind their gleaming steel was a pair of dark eyes, blazing with intensity.

"I can't let you leave."

To Be Continued…

[9/27/2017 - EDITED THIS CHAPTER TO IMPROVE THE FIRST BIT]

FURTHER NOTES: I know this one kind of comes from nowhere, but I've actually been wanting to do something in the Pilgrimverse for a long time. Ever since I first saw the movie in theaters. Then a couple of weeks back, I was playing through the game again out of boredom (trying to get some elusive achievements) and I just felt this strong impulse to give Kim and Knives the ending they deserved.

If you haven't read the comics but HAVE seen the movie, I wouldn't be surprised if you view this as a crackship. It still kind of is in the comics to be honest! But don't worry, you don't have to read them to enjoy this fic; I'll cover what happened in later chapters. Plus a lot of little surprises that make up my take on them.

Hope you like this one! It's about medium-length for me, definitely no oneshot but in total it's not even as long as "Bind Us" is so far. And it's only getting started!

Jessex