Hannibal knew, from the moment the idea was presented to him, that there was only one person whom he could imagine dancing opposite him in this ballet. It was darker than anything New York had seen since, well, the last time he had nearly killed himself on the stage. There had only ever been one dancer who threw himself into a role this tragic and danced it to its fullest—only one who had broken himself against the jagged edges of the role’s claws without ever flinching from his own destruction.
Hannibal straightened his tie and smoothed a hand down the front of his suit jacket. He felt as out of place on the weathered front porch as a Ming vase, but the address was correct. Inside, the dull barking of dogs on high alert had barely settled since his car had pulled into the driveway.
If there was any man who could convince Will Graham to step once more into the spotlight, it had to be him. Hannibal opened the screen door and rapped his knuckles firmly on the faded white wood one behind it.
People made their own mistakes. But when they were young enough, wounded enough, they also let other people make them for them: allowed a stranger’s hand to craft the tempo of their body, and then the intimate gestures of their mind, into what the papers had called a beautiful disaster.
Will Graham’s first season had been his last season, never to be repeated, and ended three days after his seventeenth birthday in a cacophony of camera-flare that still bled into the strobe of ambulance lights in his memory. After the final performance he hadn’t been seen in public again, and in the grainy ‘90s footage from the press interview seven months later, Gauthier Lefévre’s hand had been wrapped tightly under his narrow elbow. The director smiled his practiced reassurance into the waiting microphones, and beside him Will’s image turned his cheekbone into the clamor of questions, watching something far away. His hair had been longer then – easier to hide the flight of his eyes.
In the thirty minutes the interview lasted, Will Graham only spoke twice, quiet and to no-one specific. Once to confirm that he’d been formally discharged from hospital – and once to announce his retirement from the stage.
When the news cameras were all packed away, the ballet signed his small insurance settlement, and let him disappear.
