He Did Ballet |Virgato|

Chapter 1: Can I make it anymore obvious?

Joel looks at himself in the wall of glass mirrors as he stretches, lengthening his sweatpant covered legs out in a straddle and leaning his body forward to lay his torso flat on the wooden floor. He holds the position, feeling the familiar and almost welcome burning stretch along his hamstrings contrasting with the cold wooden floor underneath him, and exhales for fifteen seconds. He drops his head between his arms, reaching a little bit further and feels the strain a little bit more, his muscles screaming at him as he pushes past the point of comfort.

Erick always calls the ballet dancers of the Royal Ballet masochists, and Joel can't help but think there might be some truth in that. He wouldn't say he loves pain, more that it means that he's working, achieving, improving. Every ballet dancer has to like pain a little, endless days, hour after hour pushing your body to the absolute limit just to make the way it moves in the most unnatural ways look effortless. Blood, sweat, and tears and more blood for two hours of looking elegant and weightless under bright lights and a mainly clueless audience. It takes a huge and possibly stupid amount of dedication, commitment in droves, and Joel knows he has both.

There's nothing that Joel had ever wanted to do more than dance. His mom sent him to dance lessons at age five, mainly just to get him out of her hair so she could clean the house, and to everyone's surprise he had taken to it like a duck to water. A small boy in a room of girls in tutus, already hyper-focused on emulating the simple movements the teacher demonstrated correctly. Ever since then he'd lived and breathed ballet. Impervious to the comments of the other boys around him who played football or swam, he would spend his afternoons when he wasn't at class dancing in the park, in the driveway, in the street. Where most children's hobbies would peter out as they became a teenager, interest waning in favor of more exciting things, Joel's passion for dance had only increased. As he grew, so had his ambition.

He'd moved to London at sixteen on his own on a scholarship for the Royal Ballet School that no one but him believed he could get. Said goodbye to his parents and brothers and started a new life in a new country with nothing but his grandmother's spare suitcase and ambition like nothing else to be better, to be greater. He'd breezed through his two years of dance lessons, the most difficult part of his teenage years being the A-Levels that it was mandatory that the Royal Ballet School students take. But he'd managed it, he'd graduated straight into becoming an artist in the Royal Ballet, never a question that Golden Boy Joel would be given a role in the company, the jewel in his cohort for most of the trainers and choreographers. He'd moved fast then, each year being promoted up through first artist, soloist, first soloist, and now he was twenty-two and staring down the barrel of being one of the youngest ever dancers to become a Principal dancer.

He takes a deep breath and stretches his body over his right leg, checking in the mirror that he's keeping his spine straight even though he doesn't need to, he can feel exactly what his body is doing. Joel is never out of control of his own body, long past the days of gangly limbs getting in his way, everything he does is perfectly placed with absolute finesse, each step flawlessly positioned with appropriate turn out, each leap the ideal height with toes extended, and every arm position accurate every time. That's how Joel performed, that's how he'd gotten to this point and that's how he would reach the final step, his ultimate goal. Principal dancer of the Royal Ballet.

He tucks a stray curl behind his ear, a piece of hair that would resolutely escape from the bandana that Joel wore to keep his hair out of his face during practice, and stretches along the other leg, trying to empty his noisy head and keep the echoing voice of the guest choreographer they'd had in for workshop that day from ringing in his ears.

"Excellent technique," she murmured, watching Joel when it had been his pair's turn to perform the pas de deux. "Perfect lines, exquisite extension."