Chapter Text
Music had always touched Will, brought out emotions, entire scenes behind his eyes that no one else shared. When he had learned how to put movement to those notes, those wordless voices that called to him, how to turn and bend and arch his body to narrate to others what only Will could see, he felt like he was flying.
At the ballet school, one of his teachers had called him ethereal; as though something supernatural possessed him when he moved, elevated him to a level of beauty few human beings could reach. It was impossible to take one’s eyes off him when Will was dancing, in practice or on stage, in between classes in the hallway, at night when he couldn’t sleep and practiced alone before the mirror.
The other students had called him a freak. Where tutors saw dedication bordering on obsession, other boys and girls saw a thin young thing, far too poor and wide-eyed to be as good as he was. They taunted him, claimed he had summoned a ghost during a seance and sold his soul to the devil for his skill.
Jealousies ran hot in youth, pride ran even hotter.
What had been meant as a mean prank turned into something far crueller. Will had fallen on the street, when one of the other boys had pushed him. He’d landed in the filthy puddle, clothes soaked and hair a mess, and he’d managed to sit up. But the muck had camouflaged him against the roadway, and the carriage that struck him, crushing the delicate bones in his left foot, did not even stop at his anguished cry.
The doctors had tried to mend him, setting the bones, plastering it still. But day by day the toes grew darker, the skin slick, the nerves within sparking. Will had pleaded, he had bargained, he had outright demanded, but in the end his fate was severed under a heavy doctor’s saw and the thick haze of opium.
He was no longer a freak, then. He was a cripple. No longer ethereal, but ghostly.
He refused his meals, he refused his bath. He lay awake and kept sky-blue eyes on the flaking ceiling above his tiny cot and waited for the rest of his body to follow its part to the grave. His patience, however, won him another kind of mercy.
A travelling doctor, from somewhere in America Will could hardly pronounce let alone remember, had come through the pauper’s hospital one evening. He was due to leave that week, his days taking notes and following mentors come to an end, but something about Will had paused his quick steps through the wing. He’d considered the boy, pale and lovely like marble come to life, he’d asked after him from the nurse in charge, and Will’s story and circumstances kept the young doctor at the hospital just two days more.
Before he left, he offered Will a gift; a limb carved smooth from a dark wood, the ankle and ball of the foot articulated by metal bolts. It was heavy, and cumbersome, and strange, hung with leather straps to tether it to Will’s leg and up over his knee, but Will adored it.
The doctor left for America with the taste of Will on his lips.
Will discharged himself a few days later, once his body was properly fed, and watered, and washed.
He practiced every day, and anywhere he could. Up and down the cobbled streets, arms out for balance; over the gutters, poised on this toes; through muck and mud and grass and sand; on the reeking banks of the Thames; on stairs, on wooden floors, on rugs. He practiced shoed and bare. He practiced with his eyes open and closed. He practiced until the limb so cruelly taken from him was restored.
The streets were simultaneously kind and cruel to beautiful things. Work was available under shadowed overhangs and in the depths of crooked alleys. Experience was unnecessary, sometimes even a boon. It was hardly a life, but Will was determined to survive, to thrive beyond where his circumstances, and others’ envy, had thrown him.
Within a year, a man who paid him well and hurt him little invited Will to attend a party with him. He had provided Will a space to bathe and comb his hair, had brought him a mask of the thinnest leather to press over his eyes and nose, had offered him a silk robe to clothe himself. He had paid Will a pound, an unspeakable amount, to do anything he said that night. And Will took it without question.
That night had proven pivotal, teaching Will at once that kindness on the streets became cruelty behind closed doors, and offering him an exclusive client base for his particular talents.
The club - a Hellfire club, Will was told - provided the rich and bored with the same twisted alleys and shadowed overhangs that the poorer classes took such advantage of at the far end of Fleet Street. Here, men were anonymous; they arrived clothed, in carriages, with money and desires and a desperate hunger for the obscene. In secret rooms they undressed, took up white robes, filigree masks, cloying opium cigars, and became no one. The club provided wine and liquor, exotic fruits and rich meats, and an array of beautiful bodies to torment with pain and pleasure.
Boys with bodies like Will’s, limbs changed or missing, eyes bright and angry and wide. Boys with bodies unmarred until the club marked them. Boys with nowhere to go.
Crooked corridors veined out into dens of iniquity, rooms filled with an array of objects in leather and metal and glass and wood. Rooms with large beds and soft sheets with strong tethers on each post. Rooms where sounds carried but only to the door. In a small atrium, the room between where the men came named and went nameless, a harp was played by an open fire, and sometimes boys danced to the tune. Some boys drew glances and little else. Others were claimed by hungry hands before one song could end and another begin.
But when Will danced, the entire club stood still, transfixed, hypnotized by him.
With translucent silk against his hips, painted hieroglyphs upon his arms and strong thighs, bracelets of gold and silver and gemstone above his elbows and at his ankles, he danced as though in a trance. Will brought nightly a seance to the club as spiritualists called clients to their table. He danced with eyes bound in red, moved as the music moved him, the only sound beyond the harp and his soft breathing was the quiet click of metal against his wooden foot.
Sometimes Will danced all night, from dusk til dawn, until exhaustion took him and he slept by the fire. Sometimes, Will was asked after, men willing to pay exorbitant amounts to learn the taste of his skin as he moved beneath them. After those evenings, he would not dance for several days, and the men would grow restless. Eventually, his purchase was forbidden, his form allowed to be seen only in the atrium.
If he wished to seek wine or food, men would accommodate him, but he would not follow them into the crooked corridor. If his body ached, craved the heat of the more secret spaces, his debt to the club grew, but he was permitted to take an hour, or two, for a man of his choosing to use his mouth. They could touch, but they could not mark. Will could take his pleasure so long as he returned and danced after, until the sun seared the sins from the front door and the space grew still with the sighs of sleeping boys.
And he did, once in a while, relishing the power his beauty held over others. He danced blind and turned away from those who spread his lips with tongues and fingers and cocks, but he saw so much when he rested with the others, when he took time to breathe between one dance and another, arms wrapped around his knees, watching anonymous men watch him back.
During certain festivals, dedicated to Venus, to Bacchus, those who often sought refuge in secret rooms came together in the atrium, bodies shifting and moaning and sweating together, sticky with semen and spit and wine. The boys not chosen as sacrifices for the evening relished those nights, able to slip away as soon as the men grew drunk and weary. Will would always stay, pressing his form against the cold stone as he watched with clever eyes and reddened lips the high society of London become the gutter of it.
One day he would leave this place, his debts fulfilled and talent honed, and find the boys who had hurt him. One day, he would dance and eyes would not leave him, and those boys, those jealous, whole boys, would weep at the sight of it.
One day.
But not this evening. Not as Will spun and curled and twisted, his wooden foot set against the back of his knee as he arched back and caught himself against outstretched arms, bridged over the stone floor as the harp’s soft notes echoed into silence. Not then. Because when he stood, instead of a new tune, a hand touched his shoulder, slipping free the crimson silk from his eyes.
“You are wanted,”
Sweat curled Will’s hair into fleece, silk clung to his legs, hiding nothing of his form, and he raised his eyes to the Brother who spoke to him.
“By you, sir?” Will asked, voice rough from not using it for hours, breathy from exertion. When the other shook his head, Will had to work to keep the relief from his features. The man was corpulent, had cruel eyes. He had been one of the first to suggest to the Abbott that Will should offer his mouth, if his body was so precious.
Will watched as the Brother gestured towards another who stood still and stately at the mouth of the corridor. A mask clung to his face, light hair held at the nape of his neck by a velvet tie. His features were sharp, his posture suggested nothing less than royalty, and his form… his form Will found very pleasing.
This man had caught Will’s eye before, had bought him wine, had had the young man straddle his lap as he fed him grapes and spoke fond whispers in foreign tongues against his throat. He had never used Will’s mouth, or his hands. He had watched, he had devoured and claimed that way only.
Will remembered him well. And so he went, slow steps away from the harp and the fire, away from the eyes that hungered for him and towards those that wanted him.
“Fais ce que tu voudras,” Will murmured, chin ducked in supplication, eyes sharp and bright and outlined in kohl. He stopped near enough for the man to touch him, should he wish, but did not reach out himself. His muscles ached, his body trembled. Will stood on his good foot, with wooden toes against the stone, knee bent to take the weight from his prosthetic. The only time Will didn’t hurt was when he danced.
The man regarded him, took his fill of Will’s presented and bared form, as Will cast his eyes over his shoulder, into the corridor beyond that he had not entered with another for several months.
“Will you come with me?” The man’s accent was warm, heady, it dizzied Will every time he heard it. When Will returned his gaze to the other, the man’s eyes looked red beneath his mask.
“Where?”
“Away.”
Will shook his head, a smile pressing dimples to his cheeks. “I do not go away.”
“You dance beautifully.”
“Thank you,” coy, lovely, voice pitched higher to suggest youth even more illicit than Will’s true age. “Have you watched before?”
“Every night.”
Will blushed, delighting in their game, and tilted his chin up in pride. “And now you seek to steal me?”
“Yes.”
Will’s laugh poured warm like caramel and he brought a hand to his lips, teeth teasing against the side of his thumb as he considered the man before him.
“I would be missed.”
“You will return,” the other promised, tone warm. “Adjusted, exceptional.”
The heat in Will’s cheeks now took a different tint, one of shame and displeasure, and he turned petulantly away. A set jaw, and narrowed eyes and a fist curling softly in the crimson fabric in Will’s hand.
“Adjusted.” He breathed, shifting deliberately to set his weight fully on his wooden foot. “I need no adjustment, I am already whole.”
When a warm hand set to Will’s chin he shivered, but did not move away. He allowed the touch, turned his head when he was guided to, parted his lips for the thumb that sought to rub flush against the bottom one.
“You are remarkable,” the man whispered, and the word drew Will’s eyes up to his once more, seeking a lie there, seeking cruelties and finding none. “All parts of you, everything you are.” When he leaned nearer, Will closed his eyes and let him.
“I would build you wings,” he breathed, tickling against Will’s ear, “see you soar with them before you cast them aside, outgrown and useless. I would build you up into myth. I would make you more than a man.”
“More than a man,” Will repeated, the words hypnotic, cloying, tempting. He was warmed flush with the man’s voice and his promises. “And then?”
“And then,” a sigh, hands releasing Will where he was held, the man pulling back to stand as he had been. “And then you would tell me what more a creature beyond a man could want, and I would become that, too.”
Will’s smile pulled languid, eyes still closed before he allowed them to open slowly. He felt worshipped. He felt powerful. He considered the man’s cock, semi-hard between his legs from just looking at Will, and considered the pulse of his own growing desire against the debt he owed the club.
“Would that I were free,” he sighed, offering a soft pout. The man merely blinked at him.
“I offer freedom,” he said.
“A debt changing hands remains a debt,” Will pointed out bitterly, shifting his weight to his right foot again. “I cannot pay the club, I cannot pay you. Where would my freedom be?”
“Payment need not be monetary,” the other shrugged. “I am a man of science and reason. Medicine. Invention. You are a boy of extraordinary talent. Collaboration may lead to mutual benefits.”
The corner of Will’s lip caught beneath his teeth. He had always carved his own way through life, clawed up against the filth and muck to bring himself up, pristine. But Will had to admit that the foot he loved so dearly was aging faster than he was, oil no longer helped the delicate joints, parts of the heel had started to splinter.
“I can see how I would benefit,” Will said after a while, allowing his gaze to return to the eyes behind the mask. “How would you?”
The eyes blinked, once more red in the firelight before returning to a deep brown. “Sweet boy,” was all he said.
Will swallowed, the sound thick in his ears, heavy in his throat. The offer was tempting. The man proposing it was far from frightful. But Will had found himself at the club by assuming kindness on the street meant kindness elsewhere, had suffered cruelties for another’s sexual pleasure. The hair on the back of his neck stood stark, warning of a threat, urging Will to consider over time and not be hasty.
But the night was still early, now, and then tomorrow would be the same. And the day after. And the day after that. Over and over, the silk and sweat and skin, familiar stone floors, young bodies in a sleepy pile on the large beds during the day, recovering like puppies after a meal. An endless repetition blurring to a mundane future. Will could not waste his youth here. And he had learned from his first mistake, he would not make another like it.
“And once I have repaid my debts?” Will asked, tilting his cheek against his shoulder.
“Once you have,” the man replied, “then we shall discuss, as men, whether our journey moving forward will be together or alone.”
Will’s pulse hummed, cheeks flushed with it from the dance as much as the possibilities this man was offering. Freedom, true freedom, for a month, perhaps two, or being a pretty kept thing. Surely Will could stifle his pride for that long. In the unfolding scroll of his life, what was a submission or two when compared to his independence?
“I will ask one thing,” Will murmured, stepping near, poised, now, on his prosthetic, perfectly balanced as though the foot were flesh and bone. “Your answer will determine my own. Give me your name.”
Will understood the consequences of his words, the power he held between them now. The club had no names, within, anyone was everyone, and everyone was no one. Names did not exist. Rank did not exist. All power without, did not carry within.
And yet.
If a man were willing to risk such a thing, offer this boy, this truly insignificant boy, his real name…
“Hannibal,” the other said, clear, soft. “Doctor Hannibal Lecter.” He did not hesitate. He did not flounder. And Will’s breath caught in his throat as he set his feet parallel once more, standing close enough to feel warm breath against his hair. He looked up, made sure the man met his gaze.
“Take me away, Hannibal,” Will told him. “I’ll go with you.”