Rentboy On Montague Street [Sherlock fic, NC-17]
Title: Rentboy On Montague Street
Rating: NC-17
Chapter: 1/?
Pairings: None presently, possible S/J later (presently pre-John). Not S/L.
Themes/warnings: male prostitution (therefore dubcon) drug abuse, some violence.
Summary: Twenty-two year-old Sherlock plunges headfirst into the gritty London underworld of prostitution, selling his body to fund his cocaine addiction. His brother Mycroft, distracted by work and his rising power in political affairs, is too distracted to make the proper enquiries, and Sherlock sinks deeper and deeper into trouble, too proud - or ashamed - to ask his family for help.
A/N: Not a Secret Diary of a Call Girl style rentboy!fic; more my exercise in slightly minimalistic writing, with a gritty theme. This fic aims to highlight the dangers of the underworld and substance abuse realistically, though I have no personal experience of these. Also I'm going away tomorrow after a brief sojourn to the stables, so I might have put this up a little faster than necessary. Also A03 account is due this weekend, YAY!
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NOVEMBER, 2002
The first time, he is twenty-two and fresh out of university, so high that his lips vibrate on the other man’s cock with the sheer intensity of the cocaine singing in his bloodstream. It’s filthy and exciting and raw, down on his knees in the dark, dirty alleyway, senses so elevated that the other man’s gasps and grunts rattle like gunfire in his ears.
Sherlock does not need a mirror to know that his pupils are blown moon-wide beneath the black curls plastered to his sweaty brow. The stranger cups a hand behind his head, the broad pad of his thumb pressing against the knobbly bump of Sherlock’s neck vertebrae to keep him there as he comes, spurting the hot, salty mess into Sherlock’s throat.
Sherlock knows they should have used a condom and wants to kick himself, but he can’t rouse himself enough to care. He feels zoned, distant, as though it’s happening to someone else’s body; someone else’s mouth.
He spits anyway, out of some belated display of pride.
The man nods at him awkwardly, buttoning up his trousers and fumbling for his wallet. Sherlock is still riding out the last wave of his high when the man disappears around the corner, and he stares down at the thin wad of wrinkled five pound notes and thinks, oh, and vomits.
But thirty minutes later he is sitting in a warm, all-night café with a steaming mug of black tea and even the crash from the cocaine doesn’t matter, because he’s warm and he can have three, four, five more mugs if he wants them, and he can take a taxi to this week’s bed-and-breakfast instead of walking there in the freezing rain.
He won’t do it again, he tells himself.
*
He does.
It becomes an addiction; a need. It’s not the clients - so dull, so pedestrian - but the allure of afterwards that he loves. He pays off what he owes on the debts and he can still afford to inject himself three, four, five times a week with money for cigarettes. The cocaine leaves his throat sore and his skin flushed with a heat that will not dissipate, but he finds that the best answer is simply to take more, until his arm is covered in tiny pinpricks and he is moaning and convulsing with the pleasure of the high, alone in a squalid hotel room where even the shadows are fiercely bright in their vivid blackness.
He hates the work, but he is good at it. He knows how to lick them until they are gasping; how to hum as he moves his lips, bobbing up and down. He knows just how much pressure to apply so that they feel it even through the thin latex, the limits of dragging his teeth over the condom. He knows when they want him to be sweet and messy and when they want him to be quick and dirty, hot mouth working swiftly to bring them off with the minimum of fuss. He knows when they want him to look them in the eye and when they want him to squeeze his eyes closed as if they’re forcing him, as if he hates it. Those are the days he doesn’t have to pretend.
He learns to disengage his gag reflex. It’s messy the first few times, but he learns with every mistake - data, data, data - and it’s worth it, in the end, when a thickset bouncer tips him twenty quid on top of what Sherlock asks for in the alley behind the nightclub.
The amount he makes in a day can be measured by the rising thread count of his hotel bed sheets. He fucks, sucks and whores himself through several men a week - sometimes more than one a day, if he catches someone’s eye during their lunch break, or manages to catch a quick two or three in the toilets of the London Underground during the afternoon rush hour.
The work is irregular, asymmetrical; he can roll condoms onto three men in a day and then go for a week without finding anyone. Those are the weeks he doubles up on the cocaine and cuts back on food, on hotel quality - on everything, anything but the drugs.
It gets harder after he begins to up his game - he goes after clean-shaven, good-looking men, bankers or financial advisers. They’re rarer, in London, but he’s less worried about the tedium of contracting a disease, though he tries to tell himself it’s an ego-boost. Fucking himself on the cock of Hector Larrington-Clyde is marginally less demeaning than arguing about the necessity of a condom in oral sex with Billy from the council estate while Billy’s four kids are at their mum’s.
Most of them don’t complain about the condom - the married ones, he notices, usually insist on it - and some even worry about whether Sherlock is infected, which surprises him.
He quickly realises that these are the men with more to lose.
After the fifth man asks to see some kind of medical evidence - as if rent boys carry paperwork in their boxers - Sherlock throws him out with a snarled insult and goes to the local anonymous clinic for testing and immunisations. His results come back clean, shockingly enough, though when the immunisation nurse tries to ask him about the jab-marks on his arm he says that he’ll tell her if she admits to her husband that she’s sleeping with the female secretary.
She gives the needle an unnecessary twist when she pulls it out, but says nothing more about the marks on his arms.
MARCH, 2003
Five months go by, and Mycroft doesn’t call, which frustrates Sherlock. Half the fun of the drugs, the drink, the endless chain of cigarettes is the knowledge that it infuriates Mycroft to a degree beyond any other; reduces him to a mere man, tearing his hair out and shouting obscenities about nicotine and lung cancer at Sherlock down a phone line. Sherlock likes to let Mycroft rant; occasionally he listens and laughs, but more often he will balance the phone on top of something - a stack of books, a soap dish, the toilet roll-dispenser - and wander off to find a needle or a twist of paper with a few grams left in it, while Mycroft’s tinny voice echoes in the grimy bathroom of whatever temporary bedsit Sherlock has found himself in this week.
But for the first time since he can remember, Mycroft does not notice what he is doing. Mycroft is busy.
Mycroft is a politician on the up, his mother tells him, on the rare occasions he goes home, and she sounds so proud that it makes his chest clench. Mycroft is fat and brainless and dull. Mycroft is vanilla, boring; obsessed with three-piece suits and pretentious Old Boys from Eton. Mycroft does not sleep in alleys and cheap bed-and-breakfasts and tiny rooms upstairs in seedy London pubs.
It’s in one of those seedy pubs - the sort with dust in the glasses and paint jobs at least ten years old - that he meets Michael.
“What’s your name, pretty boy?” murmurs Michael, and Sherlock stops to take the measure of the agent for a split second - blonde, mid-thirties, suave, sophisticated, will want forty percent of the cash - before he’s slipping down from the barstool and murmuring Alexander into the man’s ear enticingly.
“Of course it is,” says the man, eyes glittering, and leads him out to the car.
Inside, in the black leather backseat, it’s all business.
“I want forty percent,” Michael tells him, leaning back and cracking his knuckles.
Sherlock is still holding the bottle from the pub, forefinger circling the damp rim of the cold neck. The advantages - more clients, more money, more drugs - are stacking up against the disadvantages in his mind. More exploitation. More hands, touching him, using him, hurting him, threatening him -
“Fifteen,” he says.
“I will vet your clients,” points out Michael. “I will keep you safe.” He glances at the pin-prick marks on Sherlock’s arm and curls his lip. “I will even find you a new dealer. Cheaper, I promise... For thirty-five.”
Sherlock is feeling heady from the effects of the alcohol and the lingering remnants of heroin he injected as a substitute for lunch. “Eighteen.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Michael glances at his watch - Rolex, expensive, a new model, Sherlock notes. “Thirty-three. Nothing less.”
Sherlock leans into him, half-closing his eyes, so that his black lashes almost kiss his carved white cheekbones. He catches his wrist. “Feel,” he says, guiding him, and when Michael’s hand closes over the swollen half-hard outline of his clothed cock, Sherlock smirks.
“Twenty-five,” says Michael, “and you can have a smoke. Silk Cut.” He pulls a pearly-white box from inside his suit, tapping the purple logo.
No one was ever paid to be proud, thinks Sherlock, and reaches for his lighter.
*
From that night on, he is always Alexander to clients; never a surname, never even Alex; only Alexander, and he plays his part beautifully.
Michael owns a set of middle-sized furnished flats in Montague Street, and Sherlock takes up residence in one on the first floor. Two more of Michael’s boys - a Latvian student from the nearby International Business School and a freckled Scottish kid of barely twenty - already live on the floors above, but he rarely sees them. They have an unspoken agreement, and they are just as keen to avoid him as he is to avoid them.
His bedroom is sparsely-furnished - a single bed in the corner, with a grey blanket and pillow. The floorboards creak and the thin striped rug has seen better days, but the oak wardrobe is clean and sturdy, and the sink runs hot and cold water. Besides, Sherlock doesn’t care. It’s his, and that makes it better than any of the higher-end hotels he has managed to get himself into over the past few months.
If he catches sight of himself in the dusty mirror over the sink when he shaves, and sees hollow cheeks under the white foam and tiny pupils lost in a sea of cloudy grey, it doesn’t matter. He’s always been thin, and if his pale skin stretches over his ribs like wrapping paper over a skeleton then it makes no difference to how well he can suck cock.
Besides, Sherlock is clever.
He learns to gauge what a punter wants and how much he will pay and adjusts his price list accordingly. He can tell which ones are single and which ones have just hidden their wedding rings. He can tell from the way they walk whether they prefer to take control or be seduced; he knows their limits and how far he can push his sly comments and observations before they turn on him.
It’s not usually very far.
JUNE, 2004
It’s hard to process that he has been doing this for over a year.
He takes the money before they even pass his door, in an unmarked envelope, as pre-arranged with his agent - Sherlock hates the word pimp - and leaves them in the bathroom to “prepare”. Then Sherlock calls Michael, who is usually at a party or lounging in his penthouse or playing golf with investment bankers - and they agree a time for Sherlock to call back.
Sherlock is under no illusions about any of these rules. Michael is not sentimental; he does not care whether ‘Alexander’ lives or dies. It’s a cold, hard rationality; Sherlock’s body is a commodity, a service, one outlet in his chain of supply. Damage to Sherlock is a break in the cash flow; a red cell on a spreadsheet, a dip in the graph. It’s why Sherlock has a constant supply of fresh needles; why his cocaine is always cocaine and never half-salt and fine sawdust. It’s why he continues to take routine STD tests and has a constant supply of thin ribbed condoms - though Sherlock has to order the lube himself. He doesn’t mind, much; at least if he slicks up the mens’ latexed cocks with Durex Play it makes it easier to bear the merciless thrusting when the punters fuck his skinny arse, his cheek pressed into the mattress or scraping against the wall while he moans fake obscenities and thinks about the high that he can get out of this; how much he can inject himself with when they leave.
Sherlock knows perfectly well that Michael would have him off the drugs in a heartbeat if either of them believed that the agent had any power without them. The drugs are why he puts up with it, with the endless degradation, the squalor, the claustrophobia of Montague Street.
“You are a good whore, my little Alexander,” says Michael, peaceably, when he calls around for Sherlock’s twenty-five percent. He glances around the scrubby kitchen, curling his lip in distaste. Sherlock has given up entirely on the potted flowers and resorted to two large spider plants and a Venus flytrap on the tiny kitchen windowsill. The effect is rather Spartan. The sink is barely used, though the bin is overflowing with three weeks’ worth of takeaway food. Michael’s eyes linger on it for a moment before he says, “People phone me and ask for you, you know. The pretty one with the pale face, they say; the one who looks like a prince.”
Sherlock says nothing. The punters do like him, but he knows full well that his cheekbones aren’t what interest them; they’re just the packaging, the advertisement. It’s been steadily worsening, he knows; he can afford to shave at proper barber shops and have his hair cut short - the punters love him after a haircut; he looks eighteen again and all the more debauched for it, when they fuck him - but nothing can disguise the grey hollows under his eyes, or the raw skin where he has clawed at it out of some panicked hour of withdrawal when his dealer is late to the meeting. In the beginning, men talked about his eyes; now they’re rarely mentioned, cloudy and lifeless.
Michael presses on, oblivious to the inward track of Sherlock’s thoughts. “I want to start sending you some of my…special…clients,” he says. “They’ll pay more highly, of course.”
Sherlock looks down on the pretence of inspecting the set of clean syringes Michael has brought him this time. “Oh?”
“They’ll want more…unusual…services,” says Michael. “Though perhaps less bohemian surroundings.” He eyes the grubby wall tiles. “Occasionally they will ask you to visit them, instead of letting them attract attention by coming here.”
“London?” Sherlock asks, mostly because the fares for the Underground are quite enough without being sent outside the city on some overpriced Arriva train. He wonders if ticket-collectors take oral as currency. “What do they want?”
“Of course,” says Michael. “And nothing too dramatic, I assure you. Some domination, perhaps. You know the sort of thing.”
Sherlock hesitates and stares at the syringes. He wants to fill one of them now and press it to his arm, but Michael is talking again.
“I hope you’re not worrying about your dignity, Alexander,” he says. “You’re an intelligent boy; you know your body isn’t important. It’s just transport, isn’t that what you always say?”
“Yes,” says Sherlock dully.
“It’s what’s inside the transport that counts,” Michael goes on. “Except that your body runs on cock, doesn’t it? Cock and cocaine, that’s what’s inside you. That’s what matters. So what does it matter what they’re doing to you, as long as they pay you? You get the money, don’t you? You get your fix?”
“Yes,” says Sherlock again. He clenches the barrel of the empty syringe so tightly he thinks it might snap.
Suddenly Michael knocks it from his hand and shoves him against the kitchen unit, pinning him with his body.
Sherlock’s breath catches in his throat. Michael has never used him, never even touched him. It’s one of the reasons he stays.
“I hope you won’t be difficult,” says Michael. “You’ll be a good little whore, won’t you?” He leans in, face dangerously close to Sherlock, body pressed against him, chest to chest, bending him backwards over the unit. It digs into the small of Sherlock’s back.
Sherlock considers telling Michael that he knows he has a wife, though he’s never mentioned her and doesn’t wear his ring to meet him. He considers telling him that he knows he has a circle of Thai boys imported from abroad, and that the police are looking for them.
“Say it!” thunders Michael, spit flying from his lips, and for the first time, Sherlock realises just how powerful this man is. Not even Mycroft -
He shuts that thought off. He doesn’t need Mycroft to protect him.
“I won’t be difficult,” he says. His heart is pounding. “I’ll be a good little whore.”
Relief floods through him as Michael steps back, smirking. Sherlock stays where he is, blood still hammering in his ears, waiting.
“Good.” the blonde man says, smoothing his suit. “After all, what else are you good for?”
AUGUST, 2004
In time, he learns to give them the things they do not dare to ask for. It makes them feel less guilty, less unclean, when he settles their hands on his hips and rides them like a jockey whilst they lie there with ball gags in their mouth, or when he presses whips into their hands and raises a dirty eyebrow. There is a regular that he mentally nicknames Handcuff who likes to be tied up whilst Sherlock licks his entire body; the cocaine abuse has limited his saliva productivity, and Sherlock’s throat and tongue feel swollen and rough, afterwards.
Handcuff is by no means his strangest customer; there are men who like to fuck him in nothing but a school tie he picks up in a Hackney charity shop, and there are one or two who like him to wear lacy underwear and grind against them with it on, the material soft and slippery between their cocks. There are men who simply like to watch him jack off and men who prefer to turn him over and fuck him while he moans in a deliberately high-pitch and lets them call him names like Lucy and Rose.
He pretends he enjoys what they do, what he gives them, because that gets them off faster; he charges by the act and not the hour, after all, and the sooner he can shoot himself into oblivion again the better. He tells them, too, that he does it because he is a good little whore, a willing slut, a toy to be used. In reality, he does it for the tips; the extra note thrown at him as they tuck themselves in and smooth their hair, ready to go to their next conference or business meeting or networking event.
Sherlock is all too aware of what he is. He sees girls on the street, in car parks and on swings and knows that many - if by no means all - of them came to it the way he did; a quick one off the wrist or on their knees in a dirty alley and now they can’t escape the cycle of drugs and debt and endless, endless filth. He has no time for them, chiefly because when he looks at their dead eyes he sees himself.
He thinks back to Oxford, back to Harrow, back to the time Mycroft took his tricorn hat away and told him gravely that Sherlock could be anything he wanted, and that pirate was aiming a bit low.
Sherlock sits on his mattress, naked and sweating from his latest client, and wonders whether he could possibly aim any lower than this.
DECEMBER, 2004
“You’re looking much…wealthier…these days,” says Mycroft, piercingly, though the pink paper crown from his Christmas cracker spoils the effect slightly. “Remind us all what you do, dear brother, since you won’t take money from the family?”
“I told you,” says Sherlock, helping himself to a piece of turkey, mainly because he can see Mycroft eyeing it. “I work in a hotel.”
It’s not a lie; he does in-calls as well as out-calls. He hates work in the hotel marginally less than in Montague Street, if only because he can leave the next morning.
“But you won’t tell me which one,” says Mycroft. His eyes bore into Sherlock.
“Of course not, I don’t want you visiting,” says Sherlock, smooth as silk. “Although…” He tilts his head to the side. “The door is quite wide, but even so…I don’t imagine you’d fit.”
“At least I eat,” snarls Mycroft, reddening. “You look like-”
“Boys,” warns their mother, and they both shut up - at least until after dinner, when Sherlock wanders off to the family library and Mycroft follows him, talking all the while. Sherlock occasionally takes in the odd word; “drugs…positively ridiculous…potential…wasted…criminal…”
“It’s my life,” Sherlock says, eventually, when he is sick of Mycroft’s incessant drone, and snaps the book closed. “I make my own choices.”
“Yes,” says Mycroft, bitterly, “but you’re not very good at it.”
Sherlock doesn’t deny it.
“Let me help you,” says Mycroft, gently. “Please, Sherlock. I’m your brother. Tell me what’s happening.”
Sherlock catches his eye, and for a brief second he wants to say yes.
“No,” he says instead, forcefully, because Mycroft will not win this, will not reel him in and let him down again. "No."
He won’t ask Mycroft for help. He won’t.
*
The next day, a tsunami hits the Indian Ocean, and in the midst of dealing with co-ordinating sixteen different operations and arranging a meeting with the leaders of several major NGOs, Mycroft’s secretary forgets to pass on Sherlock's three-word message; delivered with desperate gasps; call me back.
Sherlock does not try again.
Chapter Two