Summary: Killian has never seen his face. At least, not that he has memory of. Rescued by his adoptive father, Lord Rumple Gold, when he was a mere four years old, Killian has always been told that his heartless mother abandoned him on the steps of Misthaven Cathedral because of his monstrous deformity. A deformity that must be hidden away behind a mask. He is forced to suffer a life of abuse as Lord Gold's son's whipping boy until he comes of age at 18. Misthaven Bishop, Nemo, offers him a place as groundskeeper at the cathedral where for the past six years, Killian has longed for a life among the people of Misthaven. In a moment of bravery he chances being a part of the crowds during the annual Feast of Fools celebration and meets a woman who is able to see past his mask to the man underneath. With her help, perhaps Killian can begin to discover what lies beneath the mask.
Notes: Killian is not deformed under that mask (as you learn early on, but wanted to assuage your concern in case it was a sticking point for you to even begin reading this tale). More notes at the end...
Warnings: Rated Mature for darker themes, depictions and references to violence, and possible sexy times ;o)
Mentions of child abuse and cruelty; public humiliation; public lashing; panic attacks; hurt/comfort
Prologue
The hushed blackness of night weighed down on the float that transported the frightened gypsies as they attempted to slip unnoticed into the province of Misthaven. Their caravan had been raided by Lord Gold's men after the death of his wife had been laid at the feet of their matriarch, Mother Ruth, who had been unable to heal the ailing woman.
Gold had issued an edict calling for the death of their entire gypsy clan - men, women, and children. Ambushed just after dawn, the once peaceful clearing that the caravan had inhabited ran with blood while the air had become choked with the smoke of burnt out wagon homes in less time than it took for the gypsies to take up arms. Those lucky enough to escape the slaughter made haste for the woods in an effort to wait out the carnage.
The primary target of the massacre, Mother Ruth managed to flee the campsite with several others, but, unfortunately, she was not unscathed. An arrow had managed to fly true from one of the archers' bows, embedding itself in the elderly woman's chest.
Despite its removal, and the care she received from her apprentice (the wife of a visiting gypsy family, Amelia Jones), Ruth succumbed to her injury, but not before urging her son and the Jones' to seek out refuge from Lord Gold's wrath. Now Ruth's son, David, along with his expectant wife and the Jones family were making their way to the only sanctuary available to them - Misthaven Cathedral.
The oarsman had offered them safe passage into the province at a steep price, and the two couples, along with the two young Jones sons, held silent as they made their way along the canal that led to the Misthaven docks.
Stopping short of their destination, however, the float came to rest at a small pier as the oarsman turned and demanded they pay him three times the originally agreed upon amount.
"But... but, sir," David pleaded. "We cannot pay that sum. We can barely pay your original price."
"If you cannot pay for your safety," the oarsman sneered, "then you will pay for your crimes. Guards!"
The gypsies watched in horror as an ambush of armored men, led by Lord Gold himself, emerged from the shadows.
Desperate to save his friends and family, David knocked the treacherous oarsman into the frigid waters of the canal and cast off the float, steering it to a landing on the other side. Gold and his soldiers hurried toward the bridge connecting the two sides of the channel as David and Brennan Jones instructed the women to take the children and flee.
While the men fended off the soldiers, David's wife, Snow, took the hand of seven-year-old Liam as Amelia scooped four-year-old Killian into her arms. Pursued relentlessly by Lord Gold on horseback, the women dashed through the narrow, convoluted streets, but eventually became separated from one another.
With the towers of the cathedral in sight, Amelia Jones held tight to her young son and continued to run as fast as her feet would carry her, even as she could feel the hot breath of Gold's horse upon her back. Providence provided her a blockade from the pursuit as she scaled a low railing leading to a narrow alley through which the war horse could not follow.
Bursting from the end of the alley, Amelia found herself within the cathedral courtyard. She launched herself at the large wooden doors of the cathedral, but found them barred due to the lateness of the hour.
"Sanctuary!" she cried out as she banged her fist upon the entry. "Please! Give us sanctuary!"
The thundering of hooves caught her panicked attention as she turned to see Lord Gold advancing. Placing her young son on the ground behind her, Amelia braced herself to protect him as the horse reared back and caught her temple with its hooves - killing her instantly.
The woman crumpled to the ground as Lord Gold dismounted his steed; a satisfied sneer twisted his lips.
Paralyzed by the shock of seeing his mother felled before him, the boy, no more than a babe, stood helpless as Lord Gold drew his sword from its scabbard.
"Not to worry, dearie," Gold snarled. "You'll be reunited with your filthy gypsy mother soon enough." He raised the blade high in the air as snow began to swirl around them.
The blow was stayed by the creaking sounds of the heavy oak doors to the cathedral finally being opened. Gold lowered his sword and resheathed it before the exiting monks could take notice of his evil intent.
"What has happened here?" the Bishop questioned as he knelt down next to the fallen woman.
Confirming that the poor soul had indeed passed on he turned his attentions to Lord Gold.
"What have you done?"
Gold raised his chin and puffed out his chest as he condescendingly answered, "I am guiltless. She ran, I pursued."
The Bishop assessed Lord Gold with a critical eye. "And the boy?"
Both men turned their attentions to the child who had silent tears streaming down his little cheeks, his brilliant blue eyes never left the face of his mother who was now cradled in the Bishop's arms.
"An orphan now, poor soul," Gold replied, unable to mask his insincerity at the pitiful child's plight.
"Then you shall take him," the Bishop decreed, "and raise him as your own."
"What?!" Gold exclaimed. "I am to be saddled with this wretched excuse for a-"
"You are to make right the wrong you have committed," the Bishop answered firmly. "Or shall we see what the king has to say about the blood spilt at the cathedral doors?"
Both men knew that the king was a deeply religious man, holding the cathedral and sacred ground around it in reverent esteem. Such an act of violence, no matter how justified, would be seen as blasphemy on hallowed ground, and Gold's blood ran cold at the consequence that could follow.
"Fine," Gold relented. "Draw up the necessary documents and have the boy brought to me in the morning." Without a backward glance at the child, Gold mounted his horse and set off into the night.
"Come my child," the Bishop instructed as he reached out for the boy's hand. "Let us go say a prayer for your departed mother." And another for you, the Bishop thought with heavy sadness.
Scrubbed clean and with a belly full of food the babe began to come out of himself over the sleepless hours of that long night. The Bishop and cathedral monks were all taken by his charm and spritely nature, and offered up prayers for the boy's future.
While the monks had tended to Killian that night, they eventually learned the boy's name; the Bishop had been adamant that after all Killian had lost he should at least be able to keep his given name. So when the adoption papers were crafted, he was christened Killian Gold. He would be delivered to Gold Manor the next morning, which resided in the countryside just outside Misthaven Province.
Though the papers made the gypsy child a legitimate heir of Lord Gold, the man had no intentions of treating him as such. Gold already had a son of his own, and he instructed his household that this son, Neal, would alone be shown the deference of such station, and commanded that the gypsy child would serve as Neal's whipping boy from hence forth.
But just as he had with the monks, little Killian enchanted all those around him with his puckish looks and charm. Tutors and servants lavished more attention on him than Gold's son and the punishments he was suppose to bear in Neal's sted were meted out with little conviction.
It wasn't long after bringing Killian into his household that Gold devised a cruel solution to the favoritism the young gypsy was receiving. Pulled from his bed one night, the near babe was fitted with a hateful mask that hid away his fair features. The servants were all dismissed and replaced with new attendants who had no knowledge of the child's origins and were simply told that he'd suffered a monstrous deformity since birth; a lie that was echoed again and again about the boy until it was accepted as fact by all - including the boy himself.
As the years went on, new masks were commissioned to accommodate the boy's growth, but none, save Gold himself, was ever allowed to look upon the gypsy boy's face. Punishments for Neal's disobedience become harsher and more severe as the boys matured, and Lord Gold took delight in employing the most sadistic of tutors and instructors who delivered said punishments with cruel creativity on the young man who believed such treatment was a penance he deserved to bear for being born an abomination.
Though Killian benefitted from the same education and instruction in the various matters that befitted a high born station, he learned early on to walk the tightrope between not outshining his adoptive brother, and not insulting his tutors' abilities to educate by feigning too much ignorance in the course of their subjects. For either affront could cost him time under a lash.
However, Neal was cut from equal cloth as his father, and he willfully caused no end of trouble and torment for his father's household with the purpose of seeing the freak suffer on his behalf. An agenda that was not lost on Killian, and one that spurred him to give his brother little satisfaction during the administering of the punishments, withholding his cries of pain and rarely allowing the evidence of such suffering to compose itself within his eyes or along his mouth - the only features visible beneath his mask.
Such constant cruelty and abuse would most assuredly have extinguished Kilian's spirit had it not been for the intervention of providence when the boy turned twelve. For in that year, Lord Gold was named Governor over Misthaven Province prompting a move of his household to the capital city with an expectation that he, and all those within his care, would attend weekly mass at Misthaven Cathedral. An expectation that was outlined to Gold when the current Archbishop, Nemo, had come to call that first week of their relocation.
Only a year into his new post, Nemo had not been among those who had cared for the young gypsy boy that fateful night all those years ago, nor did any of their number remain, leaving the connection between that charming and fair-faced child, and the masked boy now presented to the Archbishop lost to time and fate. Even still, Nemo had seen at once what so many others had overlooked when they ogled at the lad, not a monstrous aberration, but a bright and noble young man who still regarded others with deference and kindness despite his own ill treatment.
It was at Nemo's insistence that Killian first garnered reprieve from the onslaught of punishment he incurred on a daily basis. Though the practice of keeping a whipping boy was sanctioned by the kingdom, Nemo had contended that a day of rest each week would be prudent and even advisable under royal decree (a decree that he himself had petitioned the king for on the boy's behalf), and so it was, that each Sunday after mass, Killian was given the freedom of a day's rest without fear of punishment or cruelty at the hands of his masters.
Skeptical that Gold's household would honor the boy's day of rest, Nemo invited the lad to spend Sunday's at the cathedral after mass. For six years Nemo took full advantage of that single day in order to attempt to combat the poisonous words and harsh treatment that plagued Killian's existence within the Gold household. The Bishop did all he could to bolster the young man, to encourage him and invest in him a truth that he held a worth far beyond that of a whipping boy - a mere conduit for other's transgressions to be purged upon.
A truth that was difficult for Killian to fully embrace, though it did serve as a source of hope when circumstances threatened to overwhelm him completely. Circumstances that became more and more ruthless and inhumane until finally, at the age of eighteen, Killian came of age and Nemo was able to present a permanent liberation for him.
Neal's future had been secured with admission into Misthaven's University, and prospects of connections with other noble families that would only serve to propel his station, but Killian had no prospects outside of his adopted father's home. Not with the stigma his mask presented. So Nemo beseeched Gold to secure Killian a place within the holy order at Misthaven Cathedral, a place that Killian did not feel worthy of holding, and therefore refused the offer before his father could accept. Eventually, an arrangement was settled upon for Killian's future, one that did not include his continued torment under his father's care.
Gold agreed to release Killian to Nemo's authority and allow him to live and work at the Cathedral as groundskeeper in exchange for Nemo accepting a young postulant from Gold's household (a young man by the name of Felix, the son of Gold's manservant), into the Misthaven holy order. With a final stipulation that Felix alone would handle all matters of care that pertained to Killian's face and mask, for in order to ensure that the metal did not permanently adhere to his flesh, the mask had to be removed for a time each week, which also allowed for washing and grooming to occur. A task that Killian himself, had never performed on his own, as the mask was secured to him with a locking mechanism that required a key. A key that Felix would be in possession of, along with the hateful secret that Killian had no need for the mask at all, but being so burdened by the belief that he was a monster Killian had never dared to question it.
Freed from the hell of Gold's house, Killian began to heal under the care and affections of Nemo's mentorship, but some wounds are too agonizing to even allow the application of such soothing balms, and are then left to fester. For even though Nemo and many of the cathedral monks were accepting of Killian, there were some within the order and many among the congregation and citizenry who were not as welcoming to him by nature of his mask and all that it represented: freak, monster, abomination.
So, Killian sequestered himself within the cathedral and its grounds for the next six years, even as he longed to be a part of the life he could only gain glimpses of from the height of the cathedral's bell tower.
A life where he might be seen as more than just a monster within a mask; a life where someone, someday might see beyond static, metallic features displayed for the world's judgment, and, instead, see the man that existed beneath it.
Notes: This fic is an interpretation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame in a Captain Swan AU with elements of The Man in the Iron Mask and The Whipping Boy added in. References will be sourced from the Disney Hunchback movie and not the Victor Hugo book (which I have read all of once and it was a LONG time ago). While I will be utilizing some scenes and dialogue (and lyrics) from the feature film, I won't be following the format exactly. I have set the story in a non-magical Misthaven in order to to establish a world with its own set of laws, hierarchy, and social mores.
Shout outs: Mad props to my amazing beta ilovemesomekillianjones (to whom I owe copious amounts of chocolate for betaing outside of her fic comfort zone) and to my cheerleaders and enablers kmomof4 and winterbaby89 - I love you both so, so much! Also, juliakaze on Tumblr created an amazing piece of artwork that you should go and check out!