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Chrollo has heard people say family deterred them. It hadn’t been his fault he had none.
He was the pretty one. Wasn’t it what they called him in his childhood? Outsiders peered too closely at him, fingers threading through his hair, dark and soft as silk. And the elders had been generous with their praises; an ‘angel’ of body and mind and heart. One or two adults he had regularly seen would insist he sat on their lap when he had been way past a toddler’s age. But Chrollo had been good in his furtiveness, even if guilt came easily to him.
He had once been innocent and weak, but never absent. He didn’t miss, and even less missed, the lingering touches and embraces, and the kisses—warm and wet—that burned, itched like leeches for a long time after their lips left his skin.
It’s easy to tell affection apart from lust, isn’t it? But then it was a harder endeavor to tell an affection apart from another. Even now he was good at reading people, yet way better at second-guessing himself.
There’s an age when you don’t see anything and think everything’s pure, then an age when you hear and notice perversity in every voice and gaze. Then comes an age when you don’t know anymore and prefer burying what takes too much of your mind.
But the little Chrollo who haunts his thoughts, sometimes, knew it was never pure. Simply, they both didn’t know how to put words on it at 9.
Eventually, he grew enough that warm lips hit the ground near his shoes before they reached his neck. When you live up to your name, you’re rarely prey anymore, are you?
But why do they keep coming then?
He was proud to say that for most of his life—from the moment he reclaimed that life—the only lips and bodies who melted against his were those he allowed in the name of making an even greater Spider. What he took in exchange helped him thread deadlier webs.
Something still breaks in him every time the little Chrollo’s crestfallen face flashes in his mind. The one who stood sniffling before the glass, who knew he felt the ghouls’ words and leers in his guts, but who couldn’t tell what was so wrong in them.
And every time, he weeps and wants to kill all over again.
But why does he feel dirty, and empty then, when his fingers dig through a bastard’s throat, drawing blood and ichor from the putrid excuse of a living?
There’s indeed an age when you don’t see anything, and then will come an age when you might prefer not to see anymore.
You chose to not see because what else can you do? In the end, child or adult, you rarely wander too far from square one.