Whumptober 2022 Oneshots + Alt List Oneshots

Prompt 17 : Hanging By A Threat

Subprompt : Breaking Point
Fandom : Johnny The Homicidal Maniac
Chronology : Pre-canon
Headcanon : Johnny is bipolar
Warning : Violence, murder, mental instability
Note : This is not intended to demonize bipolar disorder or any other mental health condition. I hope to convey that in the line about it being manageable and the fact that it's clearly not the only mental health thing Johnny was dealing with, but I just wanted to clarify that

In hindsight, the warning signs were always there.

After all, Nny had been a bit creepy ever since he was little. As early as his parents would let him outside unsupervised, he would kill small animals. It soothed a deep need in his heart, killing those little things. Seeing the life leave their tiny bodies filled him with a sense of joy that nothing else ever quite did. His parents didn't notice most of the time aside from the one time his mom found a decomposing, mutilated squirrel in the yard. She asked him about it, but he dismissed her worries, telling her it had probably been attacked by another animal.

Animal killing aside, he would also have these episodes where he seemed completely full of energy, followed by equally long and intense periods where he lost all will to live. The doctors wrote it off as just bipolar disorder, which was a great reassurance to his parents. After all, that was manageable. They gave him the medications, and that would indeed stabilize his mood until he grew too bored with the pills and stopped taking them.

He'd starve himself but, upon further inspection, one could see it wasn't for the reasons people usually did as such. No, his starvation had nothing to do with the heaviness of his physical form or a need for control. It had more to do with his disdain for consuming. The voices in his head- He kept those to himself- Would yell at him whenever he considered eating to satiate the pain. They would tell him how he simply needed to overcome it. He was better than the others. He didn't need those pathetic little vices like food and sleep.

Still, despite his troubled mental state, he managed along well enough to where no one could really tell. Sure, people thought he was a little odd and he was bullied in school. When he became an adult, he heard his coworkers muttering to themselves about his strange manner of existence. But, no one could've guessed the horrors lying beneath his mask.

One day, this mask cracked.

It was a normal day at work. He was a cashier at the local Mcdonald's. Everything seemed fine, only this day he'd decided to keep his switchblade on him. The plan wasn't to attack a fellow person, no. He'd been eyeing this irritating pigeon that had been hanging out around the restaurant for a week now and he planned on catching and killing it after his shift.

However, before he could do that, one of his coworkers decided to have a chat with him about his odd behavior. This particular coworker had always been bitchy with him- She had no regard for how her flippant remarks about how he was weird and a freak might hurt his feelings and, well... He was rather tired of it.

As she went on and on about her dislike for him, she didn't notice him slowly reaching into his pocket. In fact, she didn't notice anything about what he was doing until the knife was already in her neck and blood started gushing out from the wound like a river of her own, which he found quite ironic considering that the things he did were what she seemed so fucking invested in to begin with.

She was his first human kill, but far from his last and, he told himself that if he ever got caught, he'd blame it on her.