I was a black sword, a katana, strapped to the back of a kid in an all black sheath. He was a good kid, but the city wasn't: small groups of people from gangs were all over town and they saw my kid as a perfect target for their thirst for amusement.

I don't remember how or when the kid found me, but i think it was by chance, like he saw me abandoned on the side of the street or leaned against the wall in a dark and damp alley. He was a diamond in the rough, a shining beacon in a sea of darkness, all he wanted to do was make his city less full of all this blackness.

I was just a sword, i couldn't do much to help, but i could talk to him. I told him that if he thought he picked a fight too big for him, he just had to put his hand on my handle and i will do my very best to be as dangerous and menacing as my shining black blade looked.

He didn't always know when he was facing opponents too strong for him, so i often ended up telling him "show me" or "let them take a good look at me, see if they still want to fight". He could tell i knew when things were too much for him, so he listened to my advice every time i gave it. He was a smart teenager who somehow managed to remain clean of the shadows and hate around him, i wanted to keep his light alive. I didn't act very kindly towards other people, always relying on whispering threats to my kid to say to others or doing my very best to make us look more dangerous than the dark alleys we often hid in to spend the night, but he knew i was good, i took care of him, protected him from being hurt. Of course, he would have liked to be kinder to people, but no one in this city would've really accepted it, if even deserved it. He was young but he knew very well how the world worked.

He took me out of my sheath a few times, but never swung me. We didn't go out of our way to look for trouble, so we didn't really get in a lot of fights, but it was only because he didn't know how to fight with his bare hands, let alone a sword almost as long as he was tall.

One night we met a group of four other teens, a bit older than mine, that really wanted to pick a fight. My kid didn't want to take me out to threaten them and he stayed silent when i provided verbal threats to at least get out of the situation calmly. Maybe he knew these people or the guy that was getting in his face was once his friend or family. The point is that my kid wasn't reacting and the guy was getting too close for comfort and i couldn't do anything. Except i suddenly could. The guy started the fight by pushing my kid against a parked car, making it sway with the force of the push and in the blink of an eye i wasn't in my sheath, but in front of my kid, ready to throw hands. So that's what I did. Took down all four of them, without giving them anything more than a few bruises that would hurt in the morning. I took my kid's hand in mine and ran away to someplace safer.

We hid in another alley, one we often came back to since it was dryer than most others and had a wooden roof we built over time with what we could find. I went back to my sheath on our way there, so when the teen sat down he took me out of my shell and looked at my blade for answers. Kept me in his hands like i was some kind of delicate flower, even though he knew very well that I wasn't. He looked down at me without a word, but with his feelings clearly showing on his face. I was then kneeling in front of him with my hands in his, trying to find the words to explain something i didn't know the meaning of, but it turned out that wasn't what he was looking for. He held on to me like a lifeline, hiding his face between the crook of my neck and the collar of my leather jacket, without sign of wanting to let go. "Never do that again" was all i said to him, to which he only answered by holding me tighter.