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1.
Wylan is six years old and the world is a strange place. He likes the colour blue, the lemon cakes the cook makes and the songs his mother plays on the piano. He doesn’t like cauliflower and he definitely doesn’t like his tutor, especially not when she’s trying to force him to read books. He likes books plenty when his mother tucks him into bed at night and curls up next to him, a picture book on her lap. She reads the words on the page and points them out to him, but they just don’t make sense, meaningless black squiggles that dance all over the paper, but his mother says it’s okay, because he’s clever in so many other ways.
It’s a shame his father doesn’t feel the same.
Wylan is six years old when he stands in his father’s office for the first time. He’s barely taller than the desk he’s standing in front of, head hanging low as he picks at his nails.
“The other councilmen’s children are learning to read now, Wylan,” his father says, and his voice is cold and hard. “Don’t you think it’s time you grow up and join them?”
“I’m sorry papa,” Wylan mumbles. “I tried to tell Mrs De Kuiper, the letters… they just move around too much…”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Van Eck snaps. “Look at me when I’m talking to you.”
Wylan can’t help it - he flinches, feeling the hot sting of tears prickling at the corners of his eyes. Nevertheless, he manages to raise his gaze enough to look at his father, meeting a stony expression glaring back.
“It’s laziness, that’s what it is.”
He doesn’t know how to tell his father that he’s not lazy, and he really does try to read. He tries with Mrs De Kuiper and with his mother, he tries so hard his eyes go blurry and his head starts to hurt, but no matter what he does, the squiggles on the page never get any clearer.
“You’re the heir to the Van Eck fortune, it’s time you start acting like it.”
He doesn’t know what the Van Eck fortune is, but he can tell it’s important. His father continues to speak, and Wylan lets the words wash over him, not really hearing them. He bites his lip to try and fend off the tears. Out of the corner of his eye, he spots a butterfly through the window and lets his mind drift.
“Your mother coddles you far too much. I’ve told that woman so many times that she’s not doing you any favours, letting you cling to her skirts the way she does.”
He imagines what it would be like to be a butterfly, spending his days flitting from flower to flower, fluttering his wings and soaking in the sunshine. It would be much nicer than this.
2.
Wylan is eight years old and he likes the piano and the flute. Music makes sense where words do not, these squiggles on stave paper he can read just fine. He likes spending afternoons with his mother in the music room, or out in the garden where he can sketch the plants. He’s good at maths and chemistry because equations are not words.
He still can’t read or write no matter how hard he tries.
Wylan is eight years old and his mother is dead. She’d been away because she was ill, and now she was gone. His father’s voice is as hard as always as he delivers the news. The pain is like nothing he’s ever felt before, like someone has torn into his chest and plucked his fragile heart right out. Already the world seems like a darker place without his mother in it.
His eyes blur with tears as he blindly reaches for his father, searching, seeking… what? He hasn’t received any shred of empathy from his father for almost two years, and he finds none now, just a sneer as he’s pushed away.
“Father…” he starts, lower lip trembling. He wipes his eyes with the back of his sleep. Father hates it when he cries, but it’s not his fault he just feels so much.
“It’s your fault that she died,” his father says. “She couldn’t bear to live with the disappointment of a son who can’t read or write.”
Wylan chokes on a sob, pressing his hand to the place where his heart used to be. “It’s not!”
“Of course it is. What good are you to anyone if you can’t do even the most basic of tasks?” His father’s lip curls with distaste. “Go to your room, I’ve heard enough from you.”
Stumbling, Wylan is quick up the stairs to his bedroom. The door closes behind him and he falls onto his bed, curling as small as his body will allow. He wants to fist his hands into his hair and pull as hard as he can, wants to scream until his voice turns hoarse, but his father hates it when he cries. Instead he buries his face in his pillow and cries as silently as he can. His fingers cut crescent moons into his palms with how hard he’s pressing in an effort to keep quiet. He cries until his eyes are raw and red, until his pillow is soaked with tears and snot and his head is pounding.
Exhausted, the tears finally ease. If he thinks about it hard enough, he can imagine that this is just another night, that his mother has tucked him into bed and is settling down next to him ready for his bedtime story. He closes his eyes and feels the phantom touch of her hand in his hair, gently stroking through his messy curls. He can hear the gentle cadence of her voice as she reads to him, some story of pirates or adventurers, of magical lands and mythical beasts. Maybe his favourite story that he’s heard so many times he knows it by heart.
“Long ago, in a land far away, there lived a prince…”
He isn’t allowed to go to her funeral.
3.
Wylan is ten years old and his latest tutor is mean. He’s the latest in a long line of tutors and doctors who have tried every form of treatment to get Wylan to read, from a ruler to the back of his hands, to hypnosis, to mysterious tonics that tasted bitter and left him woozy.
He misses his mother every day, the ache in his chest dulled but no less persistent, like a wound that didn’t properly heal. He still plays piano and flute, and his music tutor seems pleased with him, even calls him gifted and ruffles his hair the way his mother used to.
Wylan is ten years old and he finds himself in his father’s office once again, standing in front of his cherry wood desk as his tutor tells his father that he’s a lost cause, that he’s tried everything in his power but Wylan just refuses to read. He wants so badly to argue, to beg his tutor and his father to understand that it’s not like that at all, but he knows it won’t do any good.
The tutor leaves with a hefty sum of kruge in his coin purse, no doubt payment for his silence. The Council can never know that the Van Eck heir is an illiterate idiot. Wylan remains opposite his father, anxious and waiting.
“Every time I think you can’t disappoint me further, you prove me wrong,” his father says eventually.
Wylan says nothing. His eyes are fixed on his father’s desk, tracing the swirls and whorls in the wood, his face and mind carefully blank in the way they always are when he’s around his father.
“You leave me no choice.”
His father crosses the room and opens a cupboard, pulling out a wooden cane that Wylan has never seen before. He has a horrible feeling about where this is going.
“Turn around and lower your trousers.”
Wylan whimpers, eyes going wide as he slowly complies. His hands shake as he undoes the buttons of his trousers and pushes them down. He can’t help but cry out at the first stinging strike against his bare skin.
“Be quiet!” His father snarls. “If you cannot make the effort to read then you can at least stay silent.”
He braces himself for the next hit, biting his lip so hard he tastes blood. His knuckles are white where they clutch at his father’s desk. The strikes keep coming, and Wyan loses count, each one making him flinch and jump as they land on raw and burning delicate skin. He squeezes his eyes shut as silent tears drip down his cheeks.
Eventually his mind drifts away. Wylan thinks of music, of scales and arpeggios, of waltzes and sonatas and the feeling of the keys under his fingers, the weight of his flute in his hands. He imagines an entire auditorium, full of people who want to listen to him play. If he tries hard enough, the sound of the cane against his skin almost sounds like applause.
4.
Wylan is eighteen years old and is being replaced. Alys is pregnant with a new heir to the Van Eck fortune, and Wylan is being sent away. He is damaged goods, a disgrace to his family, and so useless that he requires two escorts to travel with him to Belendt. He may no longer be a Van Eck, but at least he’ll be studying music. Maybe he’ll even make something of a life for himself.
Given the late hour, the browboat is almost empty, with people picking at their dinner or attempting to sleep in the stuffy cabin. Wylan is too restless to sleep. He leaves the cabin and steps out into the cold winter air, the smell of the slaughterhouses so strong it makes his stomach turn, but they’ll be reaching the fresh countryside soon enough.
Wylan is eighteen years old when Miggs and Prior corner him at the prow of the boat and grab him by the throat. He tries to shout, tries to claw at Prior’s iron-like grip, the lack of oxygen already making him feel light-headed. Distantly, he thinks he hears music.
A voice in the distance provides enough distraction for him to shove at Prior with all his might, not stopping to think twice as he leaps over the railing and plunges into the canal. The frigid water makes him gasp, quickly turning his aching body numb. Maybe it would be easier to just slip away, to let the water pull him under and fill his lungs. It’s what his father would have wanted.
Nearby, there’s a splash and a shout from the browboat.
“Van Eck will have our heads if he finds out we didn’t finish the job.”
It’s enough to spur Wylan into action. If he gives up now then his father wins, and he’ll never give him that satisfaction. His mother would want him to fight. He swims as quickly as he can, using a market barge as cover to hide the noise as he puts as much distance as possible between himself and his father’s thugs, eventually dragging himself from the canal under the shadows of a bridge. He coughs up lungful after lungful of filthy water, his whole body trembling and his throat bruised and aching.
He has no idea what to do now.
With only a few kruge in his pocket, Wylan ends up at the only boarding house he can afford, dripping icy water up the stairs as he’s shown to his room with a grunt. He lies on his back on the bed and stares at the mouldy ceiling as the shivers slowly subside and thinks of absolutely nothing at all.
5.
Wylan is nineteen years old and getting skinnier every day. His ribs are far too prominent, his skin pale and sickly. The stench of the tannery clings to his clothes and hair no matter how hard he tries, but at least he’s alive.
His job is hard, gruelling work, but at least he has one. He doesn’t make enough money to afford both rent and food, so he spends most of his days and nights so hungry he feels sick, the tannery fumes only fuelling the issue.
Wylan is nineteen years old and he can’t afford rent for his shitty room in a shitty boarding house because the tannery is late paying his wages again. He’s managed to scrape together a few kruge by busking on the streets in the evenings, but it’s not enough.
This winter is particularly brutal. Biting winds and icy rain. He’s not sure he’ll survive if he gets kicked out onto the streets.
“What’s this?” His landlord, Pieter, asks when Wylan hands over his measly amount of kruge. Each coin is counted out on the desk in his office.
Wylan swallows. “I’m sorry. The tannery hasn’t paid my wages yet. I’ll get it to you next week, I promise.”
Pieter is twenty years his senior and doesn’t give a shit. “Do you know how many people are begging for a cheap place to stay right now? I could have a replacement before you even walk out the door.”
“Please,” Wylan says. “Let me stay. I’ll do anything.” He knows how it sounds, knows what he’s offering, no better than the boys and girls who sell themselves on West Stave, but he’s seen the way Pieter looks at him and hopes it’s enough.
“Anything?” Pieter’s face splits into a lecherous smirk that makes Wylan’s stomach churn.
“Yes.”
Pieter stands up and steps in close to Wylan. He reaches for Wylan’s trousers, pulling them and his underwear down just enough, then spinning him around and forcing him down so his face is pressed against the desk.
He barely wastes any time with prep, spitting into his hand and shoving two fingers into him for just a moment, so Wylan isn’t anywhere near stretched enough. He grits his teeth when Pieter pushes his dick into him, a sharp jolt of pain shooting up his spine. It hurts, possibly even worse than his first time, which is saying something given that he was sixteen years old and it was a quick, rushed tryst with a university student a few years older than him.
Wylan turns his face against the cool wood, lets Pieter grab him by hips and roughly thrust into him, teeth biting into his lower lip in an effort to not make any noise at all. He prays to Ghezen that it’ll be over soon. Eyes scrunched shut, he thinks of whatever springs to mind to help him float away, to not feel anything. He thinks of equations and chemicals, fireworks against the pitch black night. Barium will make the sky light up green. Strontium chloride burns red in the dark.
Behind him, Pieter’s breathing turns harsh, but mercifully he pulls out before he comes. Wylan feels his release hit the backs of his thighs as he finishes with a grunt. He doesn’t bother reaching for his own limp cock, he wouldn’t be able to get himself off anyway, too disgusted with himself to even contemplate it. He isn't offered a handkerchief or a tissue as he reluctantly turns to face Pieter and refastens his trousers.
“Miss another payment and you’re out,” is all he says before opening the door to his office in a clear gesture for Wylan to leave.
His steps are shaky as he heads up to the bathroom, where he promptly heaves up the tiny amount of food in his stomach. He fills the bath with just enough ice cold water to cover his legs and spends far too long in it, scrubbing every inch of his skin until it’s raw.
+1
Wylan is twenty-one years old and might finally have an actual shot at happiness.
He can’t say that living in the Barrel and working for Dirtyhands is how he imagined his life would be, but the pay is better than any other job he’s had, and he no longer spends his nights cold and hungry. He still hates the idea that his chemical creations are being used to hurt and maim people, though. He has a roof over his head - his own workshop and Dregs protection, and the letters from his father are shoved far enough under his mattress that he can almost forget about them.
Wylan is twenty-one years old and has Jesper Fahey in his bed again, sweaty and sated in the aftermath. After their one night together a few months ago, he didn’t expect to run into him again, much less end up working with him, and he definitely didn’t anticipate Jesper’s recent confession of wanting to find out what might happen between them. He’s certainly not complaining.
“No offence, darling, but next time we’re doing this at my place,” Jesper says quietly. His fingers trace an idle path down Wylan’s bare spine. “This bed is shit.”
From his position with his head pillowed on Jesper’s chest, Wylan huffs a laugh. He rolls onto his stomach, propping himself up on one elbow to look up at Jesper. “Apologies that my workshop isn’t up to your high standards,” he says, the corner of his mouth twitching up into a smile.
Jesper rolls his eyes. “Is there even any stuffing in this mattress? It feels like cardboard.”
“It probably is. Better than the floor though, right?”
“Barely.”
Wylan smiles to himself, already far too fond of this ridiculous, beautiful man. He stifles a yawn, afraid that if he falls asleep Jesper will disappear, or he’ll find out that this was all a particularly cruel dream.
Jesper smiles at him, cupping his face with one hand and drawing him down into a chaste kiss. “It’s been a long day. We should sleep.”
“Will you stay?” Wylan asks, the words tumbling out before he can stop them. He hates how vulnerable it sounds.
“‘Course I will,” says Jesper. “But if I wake up stiff tomorrow I’m blaming you.” Wylan raises an eyebrow at him. “All Saints, I didn’t mean like that. Although I suppose it’s not entirely untrue…”
With an inelegant snort, Wylan rolls over onto his other side, dragging his flimsy blanket up over their bodies as Jesper settles behind him, one arm flung possessively over his waist. It’s nice. The heat from Jesper’s body is particularly welcome, the kiss he presses to the back of Wylan’s neck even more so. He can smell the lingering remnants of Jesper’s cologne, the underlying scent of gunpowder that seems to cling to his clothes. Even as he slips into sleep, Wylan drinks it all in, drowns in it.
This is something he doesn’t want to forget.