Years and a number of exceedingly expensive therapy sessions later, she’ll remember more of the actual abduction; how light shone into her room like sunbeams through water, how everything went bluegreen and swayed in a nonexistent current, how the normal house sounds were transmuted to the creaking of reeds and mossy boughs, how the horse shone dully, like bottle glass, how its forelock fell into its eyes, almost to its nose, its mane halfway to its knees. She’ll remember the seaweed slickness of it under her hands, the night wind cutting through her pjs as it bore her away, the way its hooves struck thin air like waves against rocks.
In the immediate aftermath, Triss remembers only the smell. Not like that’s hard; it oozes out of her, a rotting-fish reek smeared over her skin, coating the inside of her mouth where she bit the horse—kelpie. That’s what the strange adults call it, a kelpie, a word that means nothing to a shivering, towel-swaddled eight year old standing in the middle of a stranger’s kitchen.
“How could you not know?” hisses the tall thin woman, the one who gutted the kelpie out from under her with a heavy, rusted knife as long as Triss’ whole arm and she’s totally not gonna have nightmares about that for years (yes she is, until other horrors bury them, and the therapy will not help), “You. It’s only your goddamn job, Argus!”
“Language,” the other woman chides. She’s older and heavier set, with a halo of dark curls and smile lines at all corners of her face. She was the one who cried towels and dry clothes! when the tall woman dragged Triss into the house, all the lines tilted down in alarm. The thin woman bares her teeth at the mild rebuke, but subsides into silent scowls at the third adult.
That’d be the tired man, who Triss eyes with extra suspicion because he’s a man and it’s his house and his mismatched towels and the thin woman seems to think the horse was his fault somehow. The horse she can still taste. Her palms sting where they came unstuck from its skin and her knee is one big ache where it turned around and bit her with its big square teeth and it sounds like all that could’ve been avoided if this man had done…something.
“She’s not been actively burning anything, Danae, or I would have,” he says like the words have to trudge up a real long staircase to get out his mouth. He rubs at his eyes and scans Triss with a look that’s both flat and sad all at once. She hikes the towel higher around her shoulders, glares, and drips defiantly on his floor. The older lady tried to offer her dry clothes but no way she’s gonna get naked in a stranger’s house in the middle of the night. “Or…she hasn’t lived here very long. Or isn’t local, though I can’t think why a kelpie would go so far out of its way.”
“I want to know why a kelpie’d fucking bother,” Danae mutters, “When’s the last time you heard of the Courts making a play that obvious?”
The other two exchange an uncomfortable look, while the thin woman smirks unpleasantly and rolls her shoulders. “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” she says. The man, Argus, just shakes his head, but the second woman, whose name Triss still hasn’t caught, seems to remember she’s still standing right there and could, theoretically, answer some of these questions.
“Are you new, sweetie?” her tone is sweet and low, but Triss sets her chin behind the towel. She’s not gonna be tricked into answering just ‘cuz someone’s being nice to her. She went through like four therapists before Hannibal, ask any of ‘em. “Did you move here recently? Where’s your family?”
Triss blinks. Her heart rate spikes and her knees wobble. It’s bad enough she’s got no idea how she ended up on a horse, falling from the sky into Baltimore harbor. It’s worse that she can only make sense out of every other sentence these people shoot at each other, since they put the words together all wrong (of course she’s not burning while also dripping all over and chattering in place, thanks captain obvious). But for them to somehow guess at the whole other situation, how Hannibal decided to up and move his practice from Boston - because of her, to put some distance between them and the trial, her internment in foster care, the bodies she left behind - how she doesn’t know the city well enough yet to even guess where she might be in relation to Hannibal’s house, her house, where she’s supposed to be right now but isn’t and it’ll be morning soon and he’ll notice and what’s he gonna think and what if he wishes he’d never moved here for her, that’s too much.
She bursts into huge, gulping sobs and collapses in a pile of wet towels. Argus and Danae step back, bumping into the table and kitchen counter, but the other woman makes a pained noise and reaches forward. She doesn’t touch Triss, not quite, just tucks the towel around her shoulders a little tighter.
“I know, hon, I know,” she coos, “It’s been a long, rough night. But you did real good.”
“I-I-I-I ha-hafta go h-h—home!,” Triss gasps.
“Oh,” the mean one grunts, “Great.”
~
It’s not like she’d wanted to tell these strangers where she lives, but Triss couldn’t think of what else to do.
“We could put her on a taxi,” Danae’d said, after Triss had refused to answer any questions about herself, not her name, her phone number, or whether strange things like this had ever happened to her before. “Hand over some twenties, let someone else worry about her.”
“The Courts tried to take her from her home,” the other woman, whose name turned out to be Ruth, said, “They could make another attempt. We can’t let her out of our sight until we know for sure why and who to confront about it.”
Danae snorted, “You don’t seriously think she-“
“Someone has to talk to her family either way,” Ruth went on, “She has one, and she’s too young to sneak out for lessons or keep a secret worth a damn.”
Nobody looked very comfortable with that idea, not from where Triss huddled on one of the kitchen chairs. Her head throbbed from that little hysterical fit, her nose was one big stuffed brick on her face, she was still damp and she’d refused to eat or drink anything they’d given her. They’d all looked especially annoyed about that last part. Her need to keep all this weird stuff away from Hannibal and her new place warred with her need to get home before he noticed, and the sky outside the window kept on lightening. Tired, achey and a million percent done with being so lost, she’d blurted the address into the tense silence.
It turned out Ruth owned a car, although she wouldn’t let Triss out of the house until she’d at least pulled one of Argus’ sweaters on over her wet things (Argus brought it back after he went to change out of his own pajamas, cotton pants and a U. of M. t-shirt that couldn’t be further from Hannibal’s matching sets. Her dad used to go to bed in stuff like that.). She ended up in the backseat with Danae, who leaned against the window to keep maximum distance.
By the time they reach the house, it’s true morning, bright and sunny. Danae whistles as they pull up the drive, but Triss is too anxious to catch the looks Ruth and Argus exchange. She’s too busy scanning the sidewalks for cop cars, like the times kids ran away from foster care and had to be dragged back or called in. Half the usual cars are missing, ‘cuz people went to work, but that’s normal. Everything’s normal. And quiet. Was she wrong? Instead of being angry, maybe Hannibal’s just relieved not to have to take care of her anymore. Maybe he’s not looking for her at all.
After that thought, Ruth has to coax her out of the backseat, and she drags behind the adults as they head up the front walk. Even Danae gets in on the baffled looks they pass around at this abrupt change of heart. It’s Argus who rings the bell, Triss hugging herself tightly, holding all the bad-thought shrapnel inside. She rocks herself as footsteps approach - he didn’t go to work, is that good? - holds her breath as the door swings open, and freezes when Hannibal Lecter focuses on the three unknown adults instead of the kid hiding behind them.
He doesn’t look mad. Not that he ever really does, but then again it’s almost 9:00 am and he’s not wearing a tie or anything yet. That’s…off, in a way she doesn’t know how to categorize. Does ‘not normal’ equal ‘upset’?
Her skinny arms aren’t enough to restrain her churning belly anymore. Triss explodes past the line of knees and barrels right into Hannibal, wailing “I didn’t run away!” it’s not like she’s hugging his legs or anything, she just crowded into him and her head doesn’t even clear his hip and, okay, maybe she’s got a hand gripping his pantleg, maybe, “I swear! There was a-a horse? And then—“
“We found her near the harbor,” Argus interjects, and he sounds calm even if Triss has no idea what kind of face he’s making, with her own mashed up against twill, “It’s a…long story, but she was reluctant to talk to us at first. I apologize for what you must have gone through this morning.”
Hannibal isn't woken up by the sounds of the abduction. Millennia of practice is on the kelpie's side in its silence of capture. Its proximity alarm is barely triggered - just a faint discord in Hannibal's mind, chiming foreign but not enough to wake him. But the breeze from its opened window makes an eventual alarm, slowly ticking down as the wind carries the scent through the house, towards Hannibal's room.
Hannibal wakes up immediately to swamp grass and cattails and boggy, sinking, greedy mud. The smell is so strong and unexpected that it melds with his just-dreaming mind and, for a moment, he's surprised that his sheets are dry and not swarmed with crayfish. He's at his door in seconds, layering on weapons as he goes - formal pajamas have the benefit of pockets even before any sneaky additions are sewn in. But there he pauses, and listens. The smell lingers, but there's no sound - except of rustling cloth. Heavy, slow, arrhythmic. The breeze at a curtain.
An open window.
Hannibal sneaks down his own hallway with the light, purposeful feet of a predator. In his own home, he at least has the advantage of knowing every single squeaky board. He has no idea what to expect, although his mind is slowly searching through anything connected to this smell. A mutant? A supernatural being? Some strange new specification of Patricia's vague powers?
When he finally gets to Patricia's room, he's almost relieved to see her gone completely and not dead or dying. He assumes kidnapping despite the lack of signs of struggle, because the smell is so...foreign. If it's attachment clouding his judgment, Hannibal doesn't see it; but he'd like to think that if Patricia suddenly matured into marsh-themed powers overnight, that he'd still be able to recognize her in them. These are foreign, more foreign than a crime scene without any scent of fear - if Patricia was coerced, whoever did it had a power similar to his own, because the absence of terror splattering the walls is its own calling card to the supernatural.
--
As the morning lingers on, Hannibal dresses in fits and starts, with the vague intention of being able to search outside without arousing suspicion, should that time arrive. He has on a loose, soft sweater and the loosest, softest khakis he owns - which is to say they're not much of either, but compared to the rest of his wardrobe they might as well have come from an Old Navy catalogue. His hair is uncombed and product-free, and keeps shading his eyes as he pours over another book, hovering at his kitchen table.
So when an unexpected chord rings in his head, he's presentable, but only just. Alert and aggressively suspicious, he replaces the weapons he'd been gathering from his house and his Collection. His mouth is a flat, calculating line as he stands at attention by the dusty book on water demons, waiting to see if this is another ambush--
And then his bell rings.
Hannibal pads over immediately, footsteps purposefully loud. A linoleum knife shifts its weight in a hidden sleeve pocket as he swings the door open.
It brings to view not one, but three foreign adults, two of whom smell incriminatingly like Patricia's bedroom swamp. All of whom smell hesitant. Anxious. Defiant, defensive. Like animals cornered in their den, ready to fight to the death but not in the wrong for starting the scuffle themselves.
Odd. It's not who he expected. Hannibal had been anticipating nothing, or perhaps an owner of the kelpie demanding a ransom, in the best case scenario. Kelpies eat their prey, but Patricia is gifted in some way, and kidnappings of supernatural and mutant children are tragically commonplace. Outside of a normal human committing a hate crime, someone utilizing another supernatural being likely wants her, alive, for money or for magical gain. It's not the worst-case scenario, but it's far from the best. She could be intended as part of some underground, mythical army, for all Hannibal is aware - such things certainly exist.
But no sooner have all the adults begun sizing one another up than movement stirs at the level of the strangers' knees, and Hannibal only has time to glance down before a couple bowling balls worth of weight hits his shins and lower thighs.
She's here. Hannibal breathes in and realizes he didn't notice her right away because her smell is diffused by the kelpie that absolutely oozes from her, but it's definitely her, unless horrible illusions are a part of some long con going on in front of him. With no clear objectives or motivations for him to see, Hannibal feels unbalanced in his lack of certainty about what to suspect.
"I never worried you had run away, Triss." An offensive spell in a vial is squeezed into a deeper corner of his pants pocket when Hannibal squats down immediately. Effectively blocking his doorway, he shifts his legs to one side so as not to force Patricia away with bony knees. His own arms encircle her shoulders even easier than her arms were encircling his legs. With his head bowed into the hug, his next sentence is pressed into downy hair. "I'm very happy to see you're alright."
And then Hannibal looks up past her head at the explanation from the male in the group of strangers.
They didn't call the police. They interrogated a child for information about where to bring her before doing it themselves. If there was any doubt in Hannibal's mind about this being a supernaturally-motivated kidnapping, they've been put solidly to rest. Those on the fringes of society's laws tend to police their own, which means this is likely either a second wave of a con or an honest rescue attempt by a group rightfully wary of law enforcement.
Hannibal is capable of incredible lengths of social niceties, which makes the opposite all the more obvious. His intense focus settles deliberately on the adult who spoke to him - and then, just as deliberately, he ignores all three of them in favor of tucking his chin down to address the child clinging to his khakis. "Now, Patricia." Her full name for (hopefully) her full attention, tone gentle and firm. A solid foundation. One of his hands cups the back of her head, as if shielding her from the strangers.
(She's never clung to him in desperation, and his movements are gentle - she's fragile, but not weak, and his respect for her bodily autonomy comes from a deeper place than either of those concerns could drag up on their own.)
"Please, be honest with me." Patricia is a precociously dishonest child, as it often seems to be dread that holds her back - the sort of conversational fears that only adults should need to worry about so often. Hannibal's face is serenely trusting, even if his disheveled hair might betray his act. "Before I speak with these people, I want you to tell me: did any of them hurt you or threaten you in any way?"
Whatever the word might be for the bastard offspring of a sob and a relieved sigh, that's the noise that cracks out of her when he says he didn't blame her for not being there. It ends up muffled in his shoulder, drawn in as she is by the hug, but the force of it still rattles her thin frame.
"I worried you worried," she says, an admission as groundshaking as it is quiet.
The hug only lasts long enough for her to remember, in the wake of her relief, that this isn't something they really do. Touching for a while, that is. Triss used to, but she feels like she's forgotten how to do it, or let it happen, and now it's like trying to eat with chopsticks instead of a fork. Hannibal projects a no-touching forcefield so strongly it almost makes her wanna mess him up. She hasn't yet, for the same reason she was so worked up in the car - it's all too new, and she can't risk being sent back to CPS.
So they both lean back, Hannibal to look up at Ruth, Argus and Danae, Triss to swallow down all those freefloating pointless anxieties. She's still got a fistful of khakhi pant, though, bunched up next to his knee. She frowns at it until he calls her name.
Half her Christian name, even, yikes. Triss snaps to wary attention, fingers flying straight, but Hannibal just runs a hand down the back of her head like he's testing for gooseeggs and asks her if she's been hurt. If any of them hurt her.
Someone - Danae, probably - snorts. Someone else sighs at that, though she can't guess who. Triss gives the request for honesty a moment of serious consideration, recognizing with the mercurial speed of a practiced liar all the many ways she could make this really unpleasant for the three adults who kept her in a strange house overnight. Like, it wouldn't even be hard. She knows kids whose parents or stepparents got arrested for less. Technically, Danae swearing if you don't stop kicking me in the fucking spleen I'll leave you here to drown I swear to God while towing them both out of the harbor could count as threatening.
"No," she says at length, turning her hands over so Hannibal can see her abraded palms. The first layer or two of skin has just peeled away, leaving them red and raw. The insides of her calves, which were pressed against the kelpie's sides, look about the same, and that's not even starting on her lividly swollen left knee. "The horse thing did that. They were just--" her nose wrinkles as she turns in Hannibal's grip to squint up at them, "Confusing."
Ruth laughs, all the smile lines interlocking. "I'll bet we were," and next to her Danae's rolling her eyes, but Argus' lack of a reaction is the weird thing. He's got his head tilted to the side, like he's listening to them all, but his eyes aren't locked on anybody. They jump around a little, especially over Hannibal, though his attention flicks into the foyer beyond once or twice just while Triss watches.
"There really was a horse," she doesn't mean to sound defensive, it's just...she knows how it sounds, and if it were anybody but Hannibal she wouldn't even've told the the truth about that much, she'd've run away from her rescuers somehow and thought up some other story. But Hannibal knows about the weird. And it's important that he doesn't think she left on purpose. "M'not making it up, she saw it too."
Danae rocks away from the finger Triss points her way, but Argus shifts into the line of accusation and says, still calm as anything, "That's where the story gets long." He's not talking to her, he's talking to Hannibal, which is a familiar if unpleasant sensation that makes Triss sigh out all her frustration and exhaustion. The look she gives her guardian, back safely to the others, says: Now do you see what I've been dealing with?
Hannibal pointedly gives no reaction at all to the responses to his asking Patricia if she's alright. He's not about to have three strangers deposit his adopted daughter back on his doorstep and not assume foul play may still be involved, and he absolutely trusts Patricia - if not to tell him the truth on purpose, then to at least fumble when asked point-blank. She has, after all, far less reason to lie than the motley crew tracking mud and errant cattail seeds onto his porch.
But Hannibal doesn't see or smell a lie from Patricia when she says 'no', and if he's going to keep building her trust as he's been, he'll believe her. He takes her wrists, gently, to inspect her palms - they haven't been cleaned, there's still some dirt shoved in the crevices of skin. They didn't have first aid with them? Or they didn't care? Or they couldn't get close enough? Hannibal has no confusion about Patricia's aversion to strangers. Getting a ride on 'the horse thing' immediately prior couldn't have helped, no matter how friendly or unfriendly her rescuers.
'She saw it too'. The older woman smells like kelpie almost as much as Patricia - Hannibal believes her. It's the first time he looks away from her face, to size up the woman who reeks of water demon and was apparently the only one present when the kelpie was. That would logically mean she gathered the other two afterwards. They're an odd group. Out of necessity, then? What sort of secrets are they hiding?
"I believe you." Hannibal says to Patricia, in a very reasonable tone considering they're discussing a kelpie kidnapping an eight year-old child out of a second story window. When he stands up again, he lets his hand linger on Patricia's shoulder, until it can't reach anymore. His fingertips brush the tangled, damp fluff of her hair, instead, and he takes an unmistakable step forward - defensive and offensive all at once, although his face has melted into a cordial mask.
Patricia ends up behind his left leg as he reaches out a hand. This is, after all, the second time the man has tried to be the only one actually offering up the promise of an explanation. "I apologize. I wasn't expecting anyone to bring her home for me."
And then. Then he turns to the taller woman, while still holding the man's hand. And, certainly not because he slept for only two hours last night and definitely not because he's been up frantically searching through old books for clues as to where his adopted child might have been kidnapped to, and obviously not because she was the one who snorted at him trying to assure that said adopted child hadn't been manhandled by the strangers who dropped her off, he asks: "Should I thank you for getting her away from the kelpie? You certainly smell as though you fought it yourself."
At this point Triss has slept maybe five hours out of the last thirty, she hasn't eaten since dinner the night before, and she hurts. She thinks she can be forgiven for both her wide, watery smile when Hannibal doesn't refute her claim, and for falling back to shelter behind him when he stands up. It's not the first time he's been a wall between her and potentially hostile grown ups; he came to a lot of the State of Massachusetts vs The Boston Diocese trial sessions, and then there were all the custody hearings. Triss doesn't remember the first time she let him walk her out to the waiting social workers, but it became the norm.
She manages not to grab onto any more of his clothes, curling her hands up in the overlong sleeves of Argus' sweater instead. It smells comfortingly of coffee and old books, only familiar 'cuz Hannibal's got a whole library full of antique stuff, too.
The two men shake hands, Argus' attention fully on Hannibal's face instead of some point over his shoulder, though his head hasn't tilted all the way back up yet. Triss lapses back into silence and watches him, unable to put her finger on what, exactly, is so weird about that. There's something about the set of his mouth that makes her think he might be biting down on the side, his cheek or tongue or inner lip, and what's up with that? Whatever it is relaxes as he goes to answer Hannibal's apology, but her guardian's already done that thing where he's steamrolled the conversation over to Danae instead.
Triss catches two things: that Danae's gonna need some aloe for that burn, and that she, Ruth and Argus all jerk in surprise. Their reaction sets Triss into immediate flight-mode, her whole brain lighting up with the instinct to get away from Angry Adults, especially the one who sliced a horse mostly in half right in front of her. She doesn't have the capacity left to wonder why they react the way they do, she's too caught up in what that means for her safety, and maybe Hannibal's.
Except nothing about his posture changes at all.
Danae grins a not-grin at him, lips peeling back to show all her teeth. Unlike some people in this conversation, Triss's never been a medical doctor, but she's pretty sure that's more teeth than most people have? Something ripples over her skin, too, like a band of cloud sweeping in front of the sun, and now Triss does grab hold of Hannibal's sleeve. She can't remember what Danae did with that huge rusty knife she had, it's just another blank space in her memories, but what if she's hiding it under her jacket somewhere or-- "Break out those knives you got up your sleeve, man, and I'll show you how I did it."
"Danae," Argus groans. Ruth, who Triss would've expected to be the one shushing Danae again, only eyes Hannibal speculatively, smile lines no longer in evidence. Whatever she sees, it has her shaking her head and planting her hands on her hips.
"Well, since there's no use closing the stall door now that the horse, or kelpie or what have you, is already loose, why don't we hash it out somewhere with a first aid kit? Maybe she'll let you clean those scrapes, Mister..?"
The dangling question is obviously an invitation for an introduction, but Triss is too busy reeling to notice. Ruth said kelpie but so did Hannibal. He didn't just know she'd been taken away by something, he knew what, and that she must've been rescued, and--
She sorta kinda understands how his powers work. She knows his nose is really sensitive, anyway, but once again he's put all kinds of not-even-there clues together to come up with a true answer. It's creepy when it's directed at her, but kind of neat to watch from the outside. Maybe she doesn't even need to ask these people about what happened, maybe Hannibal can just look at them and know.
The house rings with silence after Argus and the others leave. Not a silence like the ones after Hannibal's big fancy dinners in Boston, after even the catering staff were gone for the night, but something a little warier. A silence like a held breath.
Things've changed again.
Things're still changing, Triss admits to herself as she hobbles up the stairs to shower. Hannibal wouldn't let her help with the teacups, and even though she knows she's tired and sore and clumsier than usual it still stings a little.
But she is so, so tired. Everything's throbbing by the time she reaches the landing; her hands, her legs, her knee, even a weird new rawness under her skin. Triss wonders if maybe that's why Argus said they'd have to wait to test her colors against his sounds, if he knew the magic was starting to hurt. Ruth had agreed that she'd had a very long day even though it's only noon, and even Danae nodded. Triss just wishes they'd said why.
The realization that she's got a lot to learn, and she's never been a smart student anyway, hits as she's unwinding the bandages from her hands. What if she's too stupid to do this Very Important Thing? This thing that's dangerous to others and makes her a big fat target? She's only any good if she can get it under control, but what if she just can't learn how?
If she weren't so tired and wrung out, if her eyes weren't already puffy and itchy from crying, if her head didn't feel like a balloon full of pudding, she'd probably freak out again. But three meltdowns in one day is all her tiny body can process, so instead she coils the gauze up into two little rolls, rips the bandages off her legs, and curls up on the shower floor under the spray. Eventually the steam starts to smell less like a swamp, and she works up the energy to reach for soap.
She can't stop thinking, though. Like, how come the other Allomancers didn't stick around to talk to Hannibal? Adults love sitting up talking after the kids go to bed, even if it's only the middle of the afternoon. It's their favorite thing. Did they not want to talk to him? Were they afraid of what he'd ask? How secret are their secrets and are they gonna ask her to keep secrets from him too? She's got a couple, but it's stuff she decided she didn't wanna talk about.
They better not ask her to take sides. She'll have to tell them so, even if they don't like it. Ruth will probably understand - Ruth was the one who insisted on looping her family in on the weirdness.
But Ruth was also, unquestionably, the scariest person in the room when things looked like they were gonna go bad.
Triss chews that over as she dries off and climbs into a long t-shirt covered in cartoon bees. Danae killed the kelpie and got her away, but she stepped back and let Ruth stare Hannibal down. That is. Something. A little thrill of remembered fear shimmies up her spine as she dries her hair and tries to pinpoint what everybody else was doing while she sat there 100% sure somebody was gonna murder Hannibal's entire face.
Was he...kind of happy about it?
There are many shades of happy-Hannibal, each harder to detect than the last and all of them brought on by really, really weird stuff. Triss kinda doesn't even want to try and figure them out, she's got too many other things to sort out right now, but why would he wanna pick a fight with people he already thought had kelpie-murdering powers?
She's halfway down the stairs already, clumping awkwardly with her sore knee. The sounds of running water and clinking dishes have faded away, but Hannibal's still in the kitchen, collecting the scattered (magic) books. Triss leans against the doorway and stares at them for a second, remembering the vivid colors, before she blurts:
"What'd you call them before? When you were tryin'ta make 'em mad on purpose? Was it something bad?"
Obviously it was, but how bad? N-word levels of bad? Because, Hannibal, aside from setting off a bomb that frightened her as much as it offended them, you can't use anybody's N-word..
Children are very observant, but they often get confused about the meaning of what they see. Their limitations define their perceptions.
Hannibal supposes he should have realized that Triss would be able to detect 'saying something incendiary just to upset someone else'. Foster homes teach you a lot of things quicker than even a school yard can. Hannibal hadn't yet glanced up when he heard Triss padding into the doorway, but now he looks at her. His arms hold a stack of three of the books, all carefully balanced so that none of them press on or rip at the others' delicate bindings. If Triss were an adult, he'd answer her over his shoulder while toting them off, leaving his cleaning uninterrupted.
He still feels equally unapologetic, but Hannibal doesn't brush her off so neatly. After a moment of considering, he very gently places the books back on the table. "It's a title they carried, centuries ago." Even if a lie couldn't be undermined by Triss asking those three potential teachers the same question she's asking him right now, Hannibal wouldn't be bothering to lie to her. He circles around the table but stays near it, pulling out a chair to sit down while facing her. "But they didn't choose it for themselves. It's a term their hunters used for them."
He sorts through the facts, weighing Triss's age and existing fear of her powers against them. "The world is already a much safer place for people like us, Triss. But today, the only written works that have survived about your people - or at least, the only ones that I have found - were written by their enemies." Hannibal inclines his head, as if conceding to a point that they've discussed before. "As you know, the terms that humans pick for people unlike themselves don't tend to be flattering. Jealousy and fear make them defensive."
Triss does not come sit when Hannibal does. There's power in being the person standing, or at least there's power in refusing to let somebody else dictate your actions with theirs. She caught onto that two sessions in with her first therapist.
(Hannibal has never once said anything disparaging about her past therapists, but the few times she's mentioned them he's projected this kinda...Doneness. She always gets the feeling he's working real hard not to close his eyes and sigh.)
She crosses her arms and squints her eyes and stays leaning against the door instead. This is the first anybody's said about hunting or enemies, except for the obvious fae, and she's not sure how to feel that people have written books about how much they hate her. But there's lots of stuff online and in newspapers about mutants, a lot of it terrible, so that's probably not new. She decides that doesn't bother her as much as belong to a 'they'. Well, that doesn't bother her, exactly, it's just a weird feeling. Like staring at a plate of something she's never eaten before - it could be good or it could be terrible and she won't know until she digs in. It's...distracting.
"Then why'd you use it?" she asks. Pushes, really, "You're s'posed to ask people what they wanna be called if you're not sure." Her teacher for the last half of second grade said that, which Triss only really remembers 'cuz she got in trouble for it with the principal later. Her squint pulls lower, into a true frown, "I'm just like them and you used the bad name for it." For us.
Triss enjoys - needs, even - her autonomy, and Hannibal has been very willing to allow her any and all outlets for it that are possible for someone her age to have. This isn't the first time she's refused the clear invitation to sit down with him, but she doesn't look like it's from feeling shy or embarrassed. It doesn't even seem to be that she's worried she's going to want comfort and is upset at showing vulnerability in front of him.
Is she...trying to scold him?
It's not appropriate to laugh. Not even to smile. Luckily, Hannibal has been perfecting his poker face for the last few decades. He leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees, drawing his face even closer to being level with hers.
His voice is still even and calm, clearly not rattled by her pressing him. "I wanted to confirm my suspicions, if that was what they were. And I wanted them to know that I was not as far in the dark as they thought I was." Hannibal's head tilts bare degrees to the left. "Words have the power to hurt, yes, but this word is a secretive one. It's not nearly the same as insults you may hear in the street or at school. There are implications about what one would go through to have learned the word I used. It is no casual term."
Hannibal's gaze doesn't waver from Triss. "If I am to trust them with instructing you, I would rather know now about how they react to unpleasant surprises. A rash temper wouldn't do for teaching a child with telekinetic abilities."
What do you get the guy who either disdains or already has everything for his eighteenth birthday? Neph’s been asking herself this question for weeks, only to finally crack and ask. Hannibal stares at her for twelve long, silent seconds, his face unreadable, before saying, in the flat tone she’d come to associate with utter shock:
“You know my birth date?”
Neph blinks, says, “Of course I do?”
They stare at each other, the silence an awkward variety they haven’t experienced in a while, Hannibal, blank and Neph, stricken, unsure whether he’s more bowled over that she’d known (he never told her, no, she’d forgotten that was privileged information dug up about his future self during her early google searches) or that she wants to do something nice about it.
“It’s…eighteen’s kinda’a big deal over here,” she tries, “I just thought…”
Given the excuse of abiding by some arbitrary American custom, Hannibal reanimates. Or his eyes do, anyway, thoughts beginning to tick away behind them. Neph waits, hands clasped behind her back, head tipping sideways. At last, he says, “There’s an installation at the Walters I’ve been meaning to look into. They offer a student discount.”
“Done!” Neph beams, “And I got the tickets, that’s how birthdays work.” A thing she’s familiar with in theory, if not practice. Hannibal nods at this and then, uncharacteristically, visibly hesitates.
“Might we invite Will?”
Neph’s smile dims down into something a little more indulgent. “It’s your birthday, man, you can invite whoever you want! I’ll call ‘im.”
She does. Well, she texts, because who calls anybody for real these days? M wants to geek out about art for his birthday ru in? she sends, along with a calendar link for the Saturday slot they’d normally spend at the library. Hannibal’s birthday’s a Friday, which doesn’t work for any of them on account of work and school and other crap. Neph waits, and imagines Will’s distracted oh no face if he realizes, as she did, that he never really asked about things like birthdays. She follows up with a no presents just come.
He does. Which is how they end up at an exhibit titled “Ferocious Beauty: Wrathful Deities From Tibet and Nepal”, which makes Will blink and Neph facepalm. Is this about a thing for asian art, or a thing for rage and stabbing? She doesn’t have long to wonder, not when her habitual sweep of Bronze turns up buttloads of old magic under active shielding.
“Don’t touch anything,” she leans in to breathe in Hannibal’s ear as he takes in a statue of a lady with way more arms than socially acceptable. “Like, seriously, half the pieces in here’re cursed as fuck.”
He shoots her a surprised but appreciative look, eyes gleaming with the same eagerness he always lets slip when she shares something of her worldview. “But surely someone would have set that off by now?” he murmurs back, too soft for anyone to hear over the general susurrus of the crowd.
“It’s all under real tight shields,” Neph says, mouth quirking in a pleased smile of her own. “Somebody on staff here really knows their shit.” She hadn’t known that about the Walters museum, hasn’t been here before, but that’s the kind of thing that’s surely going to come in useful down the line. Hannibal makes a thoughtful noise, but whatever else he might have said gets interrupted by Will, who comes up on Hannibal’s other side to ask what they’re conspiring about.
“Nothing,” Neph jerks her chin towards the statue, “Mari was just explaining how come Kali’s a human octopus.”
Which means he has to actually explain that to Will, who seems to find it interesting. For Neph, who happens to know that one of the six other identified Mistborn uses ‘Kali’ as a moniker, the whole thing is extra funny.
They wander the gallery, room after room chaining out through the historic building, each one packed with snarling faces and bulbous eyes. There are other exhibits, of course, and they’ll get there eventually, but this is what they came to see. Neph hangs back a safe distance from all the art, hands stuffed in her pockets to smother temptation. Her slower pace of reading and lack of familiarity with the history that shaped the work means she wanders ahead of the boys, gaze tripping over all the encoded symbolism with a vague kind of interest. Before she realizes it, she’s in another room all together, this one a little less packed.
A flicker of red near the far door catches her eye. It glows the way only magic can, and unlike all the other ruddy lights she’s seen today, this one isn’t filtered through green shields. Neph’s chin jerks up, the pattern-seeking part of her brain labeling the source as a person before the rest labels that person as Samson.
He’s looking straight at her. Watching her, eyebrows drawn in. Their eyes lock immediately, blowing any possibility of this being a chance encounter right out of the water. A startled breath catches in Neph’s lungs, all the moisture in her mouth seeming to draw away with it; her mouth seals shut, her jaw locks, and not even she can say whether it’s startled nerves or a defensive slamming of doors.
Samson holds her gaze for a moment, then cants his head away, indicating the hall behind him. He turns and is gone, just a smear of red on the doorframe where he’d leaned his hand.
Neph stands, statue still, heart hammering against her ribs. What is this? A trap? No, too public for that. Is someone else casing the place, eyeing one of the pieces? Did she just wander through someone else’s reconnaissance? Or is he following her for some reason? She hasn’t seen Samson since—she’s avoided him, or he’s avoided her, not too difficult when they’d only met once before—anyway, she was happy to just never cross paths again, prepared to say ‘no’ to any prospective crews involving him, but mostly hoping it just…wouldn’t come up.
Now he’s here. Why? It’s got to be a work thing, but she hasn’t detected any other non-shielded abilities, no traces of Allomancy. If…if she’s getting in the way of someone’s play, though, she should find out how and assure them she’s not planning anything of her own.
Creakily, like someone lifting themselves out of a hospital bed, she takes a step after him. Then another, following the comet trail of Pewter embers until it spills into an open-air sculpture court at the center of the building. Marble stairs lead down to a small, carefully tended gardens, bare shrubs and branches pruned back around men and women frozen in flowing stone. Samson leans against one pillars, beside a stone bannister, watching the doorway for her. Neph marches over to the opposing pillar, so the two of them frame the stairs like sphinxes. She folds her arms and sets her shoulders against the stone and says:
“What d’you want?”
As opening gambits go, it’s not her most diplomatic. Neph doesn’t care, has no room for delicacy with every organ in her chest rattling like badly latched shutters. Samson’s eyes narrow, mouth twisting, hands curling into fists. Neph watches Pewter eddy around him, a sandstorm lit red by a figmentary sun, but then it stills.
“I want off the blacklist,” he snaps.
And Neph, who has no fucking clue what that's even supposed to mean, gapes, “What?”
Of course. He'd forgotten - the funeral cards had his birthday and 'death date' on them. Obviously she knew. But why had she brought it up? To inquire about presents? They'd just barely navigated Christmas with relatively little fanfare - a tree, some lights, minimal but kind and thoughtful presents - but it feels so different to be asked about his birthday. It's not just an Americanized holiday that everyone has to celebrate. This is about him alone, and she's deferring to him about ideas. That's...
Hannibal isn't ever going to forget the incredibly nice fountain pen Neph bought him (how had she even know which kinds he liked? had she hacked into his laptop? he hadn't bothered following up on it). He's even going to look back relatively fondly on the wine glass she gave him.
It's just that a birthday gift seems so much more personal and specific. It goes out of its way to be kind and make a deal of it, when Hannibal would have been content not mentioning when his birthday was happening until casually mentioning that now he'd be able to go apply for a driving permit without so many hoops to jump through.
So of course he settles on something that he can't keep forever, except in spirit. Of course he suggests an experience instead of a tangible object. When the difference between a Christmas or a birthday present is so nebulous and rooted in the spirit behind them, Hannibal can't help but honor that in his request.
And he gets it. A day for him to spend time with the only two people currently in his life that he devotes any amount of fond thoughts towards, the only two people he would kill for without hesitation, would help shelter or bandage or hide if they asked him to. (He half-expects Neph to eventually need help hiding a body. He's almost disappointed that this hasn't happened yet.) The lengths he would go to, to keep the two of them around, are lengths Hannibal isn't capable of exploring yet in himself.
He's happy, he thinks as they're riding the bus system over to the museum. He reflects back on that conversation he and Neph had before, about the strange nature of happiness and how he'd realized he hadn't been before by realizing the difference between feeling it then. Self-reflecting on his feelings has been happening semi-frequently since that initial revelation.
That happiness isn't like a fragile glass sphere, though if he had to put a word to it, he'd describe it as round. Or simply perhaps that it radiates.
When he leans into Neph's shoulder during a turn and doesn't shift back away, she doesn't shoo him off. She actually ends up digging a bony shoulder back into his slightly-softer upper arm, leaning more heavily against him as she flips through Pinterest on her phone. Will watches them for a moment, his stare a presence Hannibal can feel on the back of his neck, but he doesn't comment.
At the exhibit itself, Hannibal finds it's easy to lose himself. It always is, around art. He explains a few pieces to Neph, a few pieces to Will, but as time wears on and everyone starts discovering what they're most naturally interested in staring at, everyone drifts.
Knowing that these pieces are imbued with powers, even curses, gives them an added depth, but Hannibal would be content even without that knowledge. He's stopped in front of a painting of the one Neph had been so concerned about earlier, Kali. He examines the way she furiously steps across her prostrate partner, demon's head in one hand and a knife in another, blood painting them all.
The way a goddess created simply to kill for vengeance is stopped only by a reminder of those she loves. Of what she's killing to protect.
Hannibal drifts off in search of Neph.
The scent is not terribly easy to follow, what with the air moving from so many guests and so much interference from other smells, but he knows Neph too well to be held back much by any of that. He follows it outside, a little surprised to find himself in a garden. Of the two of them, Neph isn't usually the one needing a break from poorly-ventilated areas, and museums are actually wonderfully not stuffy, what with all the issues of preservation.
He steps onto the stone walkway, not seeing her immediately.
It's a bizarre enough request that Neph hardly even registers his anger. She doesn't move, except to tilt her head and squint one eye. "I have no fucking clue what you're talking about. I didn't." Her voice is even, steady, a regular speaking volume since there's nobody else out in the chilly garden. She hasn't decided yet if that's a plus or a minus - does she trust Samson to control himself when there's no one in direct eyeshot? Will he be smart about anything he says?
No, as it turns out. He comes off the pillar, lips stretched in a snarl, and Neph hitches herself backward even though there's nowhere to go. His rage presses in, palpable on her skin. Instead of advancing on her, which she'd half-expected, Samson tears himself to the side, pacing the width of the colonnade. "You--ever since--Anansi's cut me off. Loki's pretending I don't exist. Benkei broke my fucking nose that bi-"
The rest of his tirade gets lost in a soft hum, a generator kicking in somewhere low in Neph's chest. It vibrates through her bones, buzzing the tiny ones in her ears, until she's buoyed on a gentle swell of sound that completely drowns out Samson's rant. She doesn't need to hear to understand.
Neph told exactly three people about that night in the elevator. Lecter, whose doorstep she'd pitched up on like tidal wrack, Benkei, as a fellow Pewterarm with some small authority to police her own, and Anansi. She hadn't even been that upfront with Anansi, only suggesting, in halting words, that Samson maybe shouldn't be trusted around beer and girls, together, at the same time. He'd looked at her with unusually grave eyes, a frown on his normally laughing mouth, and apologized that she was 'made to feel unsafe within one of my crews'. That was it.
Or so she'd thought. Now, she realizes that her subtext must've read as actual-text, and that Anansi has less tolerance for that kind of bullshit than she ever would have guessed. Or maybe...maybe he just did the math and decided to back the better bet. Pewterarms are a dime a dozen, but Mistborn... Loki must've heard from him, and come to a similar conclusion. Benkei...
Benkei hit him for her.
The humming buzz fills her from toes to fingertips, champagne bubbles in her blood. Neph doesn't actually care why they did it, if it was expedience or disgust or what, only that they did. Someone stepped into her corner without her ever realizing, and now Samson's out of work in most of the northeast! Anansi coordinates crews from Baltimore to DC, and Loki's grip runs from Pittsburgh to Detroit. Samson could try his luck in New York, territory nobody bothers to officially hold on account of it being an epicenter of Weird, but somehow she doubts Benkei stopped (or began) by breaking his nose. Other people may know that Samson's a grabby piece of shit.
The giddiness, the fizziness, spills out of her in a bright peal of laughter. Not for the first time, that reflex backfires.
Samson whirls on her, normally tan face bleaching white with rage. Neph raises a hand to her mouth, fingers brushing her lips in surprise, but it's too late to call it back and the damage is done. "It's funny how you've ruined things?!" He comes at her in a blur, like tail lights streaking through the dark, and Neph reaches for her only active metals - Bronze, Copper, no time to light the others - throws them at him in a bottle-green wall, smooth as glass, and--
It shouldn't work. Nothing she's ever heard or read says it ought to. Copperclouds aren't physical, tangible things; they work only on active magic, concealing, obscuring, smothering. Samson steps through it as easily as fog, but as he goes it presses against the red fire of his Pewter, stops it dead, stripping it from his outreached arms and jutting face.
They both freeze, Samson's hands a foot from her shoulders (or neck? why is it always the neck?), Neph wide-eyed and wondering. For a second they hold that way, with Pewter beating against her shield like moths battering themselves to death on a lampshade, confined to his chest and legs. Then he breaks, staggers back against his own pillar, gasping, "What the fuckhowdidyou-?!"
Let it never be said Nephele's no opportunist. She blinks away her shock and draws herself up, lighting a bonfire arsenal in her belly. If Samson had the sense to perceive, she'd be a conflagration of colors, or sounds, or smells. She blazes.
"You do not, ever, touch me," she grits out. Neph steps off her post, advancing just far enough that her shield presses him flat, then passes halfway through his chest. He chokes as it compresses the swirling energies within him, and Neph wonders if it's as terrible as the crushing press of his body against hers. "Never again. Do you get that? Nod or something."
He does, though his eyes spit hate. Neph takes a breath, finds she doesn't care, and disperses her Copper. Samson sags forward, hands on his knees, panting as though he's just slogged uphill in the snow.
"You...overreact," he manages to grunt, and Neph's lip curls.
"You've met me like twice," she says, flat, "You don't know shit about me."
He coughs a laugh of his own, ugly and low, "I know I'm gonna rip your goddamn arms off f'you don't tell them to lift this ban."
Neph's hands flex at her sides. The cold air scours at her Tin-hot skin, carrying with it the soft sound of footsteps. They are the only reason she manages not to knee his face in, restraining herself to whispering "Man, I really should've just let you fall off that bridge."
It's a gorgeous garden, even if Hannibal can't stop to smell the roses, given that it's January and not south enough for anything to be in bloom in this garden. The fountain doesn't hiss or boil, but it does steam lightly in the chilly air.
He breathes in deeply, the cold cleansing to his sense of smell. It carries away the heaviness of rooms full of old objects and of people and the hundreds of places all those people had been that day and brought with them via scent.
Neph is carried to him on the breeze, though, and with it comes a sudden change in how Hannibal perceives this open but isolated space.
Fear, sharp and bitter and high as a scream, filtering just barely through on the wind. His head snaps back to look down the stone path leading down gently to carved stairs.
He almost doesn't hear the footsteps behind himself, but he can't miss Will's voice suddenly cutting through. "I was by the statue of the goddess with a lot of arms - which doesn't really help, but it had a lot more arms than the other ones? - I saw you go outside. You uh, you okay?" Which he says like he's wondering if the answer might be 'no', as if Hannibal has any negative reasons that might cause him to wander outside.
...Is that related to the way Will had asked Hannibal on the bus earlier if he wanted him to crack open the window? Hannibal doesn't have time to properly sink into suspicion about Will's knowledge or motives, though, because now that he can smell Neph he's listening in on the low buzz of distant voices and thinking he recognizes Neph's cadence.
And then her laugh cracks out through the cold air, sounding just like her scent - brittle and pitched high, a surprised shattering that leaves dangerous shards in its wake - and even Will cocks his head with a concerned pinch between his eyebrows.
"I was following Neph. I'm not sure why she left." Hannibal barely glances at Will, but he sees the way Will's confusion has the cautious air of worry hovering nearby.
"Did she know anyone else here?" They can both hear the voices, plural. They're both moving towards the sound, instinctively as silent as their shoes on stone let them.
"Not that I was aware of. It appears she must have found someone."
'It's funny how you've ruined things?!' Hannibal feels a little bit of himself shift, parts growing colder at the edges of his mind and deep in his chest. Level with him, Will's shoulders turn in and down, a protective slink in the way he moves. Neither of them need to discuss what they're overhearing, although Hannibal can only hear the parts that aren't snatched away on the greedy wind.
'You do not, ever, touch me.' In Neph's voice is unmistakable, an icy shard that matches Hannibal point for point, and his own shoulders straighten and go back, his steps slowing further. Will shadows him, based on an instinct Hannibal can only guess at but is grateful for in the moment, because it means he gets to lead them gradually to the edge of one of the pillars that overlooks the brief circular courtyard at the center of the garden.
The gurgling, half-audible threat from a male voice - distinguishable more by tone than by words - is the final straw for Hannibal, who can't imagine who Neph has that is bold enough to approach her in public but stupid enough not to kill her outright if that's their end goal. How does anyone blackmail someone as strong as she is? Does he not know?
Is it personal and not political, and he's just that stupid?
Hannibal looms from behind the pillar, takes in Neph standing righteous and angry in front of a bent-over male he's never seen before. She looks like one of the paintings behind them, but whatever beauty Hannibal sees in that power isn't enough to quiet his urge to wreck whatever's caused it to happen. "You must be incredibly stupid." Hatred, a low drag of ice across stone, crackles in his voice. "Coming to threaten her in public."
Hannibal doesn't turn, but he can see enough from the corner of his eye to know Will assesses the boy for only a few startled moments before his attention roots on Neph instead. Will presses up close to him, shoulders actually intentionally brushing, but Hannibal still only keeps his gaze on Neph and this newcomer who's threatening her. He gets the impression Will is letting him know where he is in space in case...they need to watch their backs, or otherwise coordinate movements.
Will stays absolutely silent, still hunched defensively forward, and there is a gathered panic in the way his breath is picking up. He's watching Neph as if waiting for a cue.
If Hannibal turned to look at him, he'd see the whites of his eyes and a lot of grim, frenzied determination. Quite frankly, Will looks more outwardly ready to fight than Hannibal does, at the moment.
Some part of Neph, a very large wedge of her mental pie in fact, expected those footsteps to go right on by. People avoid scenes instinctively, domestic spats more than most; people like Lee, people who step up and say are you okay, is he bothering you are a lot rarer than TV would have everyone believe. She registers when they stop a short distance off, shoulders tightening, the other sliver of her brain trying to kick over some sort of excuse, when Hannibal’s voice grates out.
As one (though she’d stab herself before admitting it) Neph and Samson turn startled, hostile stares on the newcomers. Samson’s twists into a deeper scowl, puzzled but more than ready to charge at this new threat, while Neph’s widens in recognition and surprise.
She’d forgotten, in the rush of realizing there are Allomancers who might defend her even when she’s not there to ask, that they weren’t the first or only people to have her back. Shit, she’d forgotten Hannibal and Will were even here, while hopscotching between fear, confusion, elation and fury. But they are, and they found her even though she hadn’t called, hadn’t asked for their help, Hannibal as scathing as a blizzard and Will knotted up like a tree flashing downstream in a river.
Neph’s gaze flicks between them, heart pounding pure, singing adrenaline. She almost misses Samson straightening up to face them.
“Why?” he says with a truly suicidal helping of scorn, “Because you’re here to do something about it, whoever you are?”
Neph catches Hannibal’s eye, blinks once, and slowly cranks her head back around to face this boy, this idiot who decided to break his way into her life and then had the nerve to howl when he cut himself on the way out. Despite his behavior, she doesn’t think Samson’s truly stupid. Short sighted, maybe, and definitely short on temper, but he’s a little bit older than she is and has been in the game almost as long. If he weren’t at least a little bright, slightly savvy, he’d’ve gotten himself killed years ago. And Hannibal, for all that he doesn’t have the full picture on what she can do, is completely right. Why threaten her at all, especially here? Did he think he could just bully her into giving him what he—
“You--” she closes the space between them in two quick steps, hands slamming into his shoulders with just enough Pewter to actually shove him back a step. “That’s--you thought I wouldn’t wanna make a scene, din’t you?! You thought I’d just roll over and do what you say?! Keep the fuckin' peace?!”
As superpowers go, Pewter’s not outwardly obvious. Sure, she’s seen Samson tear the door off a car and haul braided steel cable like hemp rope, but he doesn’t have to be that blatant. He could just as easily dial it back to the force needed to, say, break her arm, or the speed needed to catch her in the first place, without looking like a meta. He’s bigger than her, about Will’s height but half again as broad in the shoulder, barrel chested and heavy. Nobody would bat an eye if he were able to hurt her.
But they’d look twice if she hurt him back. They’d look twice if she blurred with the speed necessary to dodge him. They’d definitely whip out their phones if gilt-edged paintings or wrought iron hurled themselves benches at his head. By catching her here, following her here, he’s deliberately limited her ability to push back. He’s tried to keep her small and scared.
She’s gonna tear his face off with her teeth.
Any doubts Neph might’ve had about her guess blow away as whites flash around Samson’s eyes, which darts between her and the boys. Imminent violence is a tangible thing, and Neph can’t honestly say if it’s rolling off herself, or Samson, or Hannibal, still as a coiled serpent. She can see it, the instant Samson realizes this other guy, with his faint accent and obvious anger, might know more than your average mundie. The instant he thinks does he know what she is, is that why he thinks this was a bad move. It’s the same instant she realizes he’d put his own bullshit on Hannibal when he’d accused him of thinking he could handle a fight better than she could.
“Who’re they?” he demands of her, though this time it sounds more like bravado and less like rage. The proof’s in the way he hasn’t tried to hit her back for shoving him, yet. He’s just a Thug, he can’t tell if Hannibal and Will are bystanders or players, not like she can. For all he knows they’re other Allomancers displeased with his new reputation, or—or some kind of familiars she’s recently bartered out of the Mart.
Neph just smiles, the last of her immediate fear shredding in the cold white flood. “They’re with me.”
Samson turns, angling himself at a corner to them all. His hands curl into fists, otherwise decent face contorting to taunt, "What happened to 'I don't want anybody'?"
Like a sadist’s Netflix recommendations, Neph’s nightmares are a grab bag strung together by the barest of themes. Paralysis. Abandonment. Pursuit. Powerlessness. Invasion. One night she’s running through Ben’s empty house, calling out as its rooms spill away in all directions like a hall of mirrors, and the next she’s pinned to a gurney by disembodied latex hands, antiseptic hospital lights flashing off brandished scalpels. She’s staring from the witness’ stand out at a sea of faces with sharp teeth and spikes through their eyes; or watery fingers press down her throat and nostrils while a kelpie churns away beneath her; or she wakes up in her childhood bedroom with its yellow walls and white bookcases and for half a dozen perfect heartbeats does not know she’s dreaming.
She’s buried beneath several tons of stone, timber and roofing slate, unable to wiggle free of the heavy wooden chair that’s shielded her from the debris. Her parents' frightened sobs filter through the piled bricks, frantic prayers that strike her like spells. With the perversity of dreams, the pitch darkness does nothing to keep her from seeing Father Campbell’s outflung arm, shoulders and head protruding from the collapse. His face is a ruin, a rotted jack o'lantern of splintered bone and cartilage caved in on itself. She screams and screams until the air grows thin and burns her lungs to ash. I’m sorry I’m sorry help me help me help me help me.
They shuffle, playlist-style. Neph would never tell Hannibal, but she almost envies him the predictability of his nightmare.
~
It's the church again. Of course it is.
The memories are so near, so crystal sharp and polished to a razor’s gleaming, it’s easy to accept that she’s never left this place. Patricia lets her parents walk her between the pews, hand in hand in hand, trailing behind Father Campbell. As he lights thousands of candles, they help her into the massive chair that usually sits behind the nave. Dad kisses her temple, Mama brushes her hair back, and everything is gonna be okay.
Buried deep inside where Patricia usually lives, Nephele screams: Get up! Get out of that chair and run, run, run!
Patricia does not. Events play out, inexorable as clockwork, until the panic strikes and the bomb goes off in her belly. Her head snaps back and Nephele surges to the fore just in time to count every single nail they’ve pulled from the ceiling, every rivet and joist and staple. They shower around her like fairy lights, electric blue, trailed by streamers of dust and wood shavings. She has time for one good breath before the beams splinter like the bones of an arthritic giant, time she uses to look at Father Campbell, submit herself to the judgement on his face.
The priest, in all his dark robes, is gone. Hannibal stands there, horrified understanding dawning, and everything in Neph gives a tortured metal shriek.
She’s never known for sure if she Pushed herself off the dais or if Father Campbell shoved her to safety. Her nightmares vary on the subject. This time, as the first beam groans its way free and plummets to earth, dropping at them, she Pushes. She saves herself.
The chair topples backwards, crashes off the steps and onto its side. Neph loses sight of Hannibal’s pale, shocked face as the roof comes down like the end of the world.
As the last tiles fall and the roars die away, she’s not a child buried alive. She is eighteen years old and whimpering in her monstrous throne, eyes screwed resolutely shut.
“Neph.”
No, no no. She bangs her head against the chair back, turns her face resolutely away. Dirt trickles into her mouth, her nose, pastes onto her sweaty face and neck. I won’t look I won’t.
“You have to.”
No. Stop.
“It’s a question of responsibility.”
He uses his there’s no such thing as ‘soaking’ dishes, Nephele voice, and so she looks, because he’s right. The nightmare dials back the pressing blackness of memory and there’s Hannibal, pinned and crushed in Father Campbell’s place, blood seeping slowly from beneath the piled stones.
Neph thrashes against the ties at her ankles and wrists. She tries to bend her neck to chew at them, but they remain just out of reach of her snapping teeth. Her blood wets the rope, soaking it, mashing the fibers tighter together. If she can just slip a hand loose, just reach out to him--his one intact eye stares glassily, half popped from its socket by the press of a granite block. Teeth litter the ground, blood pooling in his open mouth, bone everywhere she looks and Neph digs her nails into the arms of the chair so hard they peel away and--
~
She kicks herself awake, the sick sensation of fingernails bending chasing her back into her body. The pillow clutched to her face is twisted and damp with tears and sweat and saliva. Her pjs aren’t much better, wet and quickly cooling. Neph lies still for dozens of juddery heartbeats, staring into the dark, relieved by its very darkness.
Eventually she reaches out, fingers stretching across cotton instead of rubble, until her knuckles brush the smooth paint of her wall. No buried bodies. No sticky blood. No Hannibal.
You can’t do this. She tells the universe at large, hand recoiling into a shaking fist. You can’t change the rules.
Except of course it can. It can do anything it wants, and fuck her. Fuck everyone. Neph rolls onto her back to face the glow-in-the-dark stars stuck on her ceiling, dimmed by at least six hours of solid dark. If she wants them back, she’ll have to turn on a light. Maybe she should, she’s never had Hannibal’s knack for just rolling over and collapsing back to sleep.
Hannibal. Alarm plucks a wire in her chest, draws her tight until she’s sitting upright. Whatever her other gifts, Neph’s not prone to prophetic dreaming. Not her wheelhouse. But those things have been known to happen to total mundies now and then. Don’t moms sometimes have warning dreams when their kids are in danger? Don’t twins do that? Married couples? What if something’s seriously wrong, and that wasn’t just her subconscious having another laugh at her expense?
What if everything’s fine, and she busts in on him for no reason?
Neph runs her hand down her face, a cursory wipe against the tears and sweat there. Everything’s not fine, not with her. Could that be enough to shove back the ghost of his face when he realized she was about to crush them both?
The darkened apartment is no obstacle; Neph habitually learns her way around her places in the dark, mapping them within the first couple days. She’s standing outside Hannibal’s room almost before she realizes it, before she can even think I should’ve changed into clean pjs. These ones are cold down her back, behind her knees.
The door opens silently under her hand, and closes just as well behind her. Deep, even breathing fills the room like a bellows, like the rush of blood in her head. Neph makes out the boy-lump in the middle of the bed even as she moves close enough to get a knee up on the mattress.
“Hannibal?” her voice is a little thready, fraying, “Um…”
Hannibal used to think that he'd get better sleep if the scents were right. Back in the orphanage, in rooms that were disinfected once and then left to simmer in the sweat of their occupants; in notoriously-unsatisfactory Easter European foster homes, with their cold-factory backdrops and stale water; in the train ride over to France, surrounded by foreign people who smelled of aftershaves and perfumes and handsoaps he wasn't familiar with.
But it didn't improve much, living in the same safe place every night. It didn't improve a lot having even Murasaki's scent nearby, no matter how much he could concentrate on the orange rind-cinnamon of the mansion and let it lull him to sleep.
The nightmares couldn't be kept back by anything he'd been allowed to stumble into. So he'd taken matters into his own hands.
Killing some of the men felt like it ought to have helped. In many ways, it had - he didn't dream about it as frequently. But it was still unpredictable, affected by nothing he did during his waking hours - except for the few stressors in his life that reliably made it worse.
But then he'd met Neph, and she'd been remarkably unfazed by the screaming nightmares, or his blank stares when woken, or even the one time he'd propelled himself out of bed away from her and needed a full two minutes to breathe himself back to full consciousness so he could come back onto the mattress. She never left afterwards, either - they'd collapse back onto his bed, and he was allowed to be as clingy as he liked. In fact, to that end, she was just as willing and eager to lay across one another and not budge except for sticking knees and elbows in questionably-comfortable places as the night wore on. Hannibal never had a repeated nightmare on the evenings when Neph joined him.
As accidentally passing out on the couch together became common enough to notice patterns, too, Hannibal noticed something new.
For the first time in his life, he seemed to have discovered something that actually kept his nightmare from finding him.
*
Whether or not the scent of her is actually enough to abate it, Hannibal has been remarkably agreeable about letting Neph leave her blankets in his room after a joint night. In fact, he'd taken to offering up increasingly implausible reassurances not to bother herself taking them out when she left in the morning, that he'd get it for her later, and then leaving them in his bedroom on purpose - she'd taken the hint and now he generally gets one of her blankets wordlessly left on his bed per laundry cycle.
Which is only fair, really, considering Hannibal has several jackets and undershirts he needs to keep an eye on or else they might disappear on the day he was intending to wear them.
Tonight, he's roused from the dreamless catch of sleep by sound and movement. He's never been particularly hard to wake up, always a light sleeper, but Hannibal is slower to react when it's Neph's scent so close to him. He rolls over, left arm caught in the very star-covered blanket Neph had shared with Will just a spare few weeks back, and blinks through near-pitch darkness in the direction of her voice and more Neph-smell.
But it's not just her shampoo and his soap, it's the acid bite of fear, catching at the base of his tongue and cranking his brain the rest of the way into wakefulness.
Hannibal goes from slowly rolling over to sitting up with force, leaning for her immediately. His voice is pitched low in case there's an intruder. "What is it?" He can barely see her, nightvision or not - Hannibal had been meticulous about buying blackout curtains and getting the rods that allow it to wrap flush to the wall on either side, so they're going with the blueish LED clock display from half the room away - but her shape is already encroaching up onto the bed, which is good. He reaches a hand out for her arm, touches a sleeve that's damp at the pit of her elbow.
Neph has only regular nightvision at her disposal just now; Allomancers are no more immune to heavy metal poisoning than the next person, so conventional wisdom dictates they burn off their day's supply of metals and sleep on an empty stomach, rather than risk digesting them. There's no Tin in her belly to light, nothing but the clock to see by. It's enough to make out shapes and movement - the bed, the nightstand, Hannibal's head lifting off the pillow as he disengages from whatever he was dreaming.
It's not enough to make out his face. She can't be sure it's whole and not--not bashed open. Neph leans forward, planting her hands on the mattress for balance. Something about her approach flips him wide awake. And why shouldn't it? She's never snuck into his room without a reason, before. If he did the same, she'd immediately assume they were in danger.
"What is it?" he asks, quiet like somebody might overhear. The low, sleep roughed urgency in it is nothing like the matter-of-fact tone from her dream. Now that he's sitting up, the ghostly light shows the flat angles of his cheek, jaw and nose. Unbroken. Neph lets out a breath, relaxing so abruptly her ribs rattle around her deflated lungs.
Hannibal doesn't take that as an answer, asks her what happened as he reaches for her arm. For a lightheaded moment, Neph's not sure he'll actually be able to make contact. She couldn't rip loose in her dream, no matter how hard she tried. Then his hand is on her elbow, warm and heavy from sleep. The touch slides down her forearm to settle around her wrist and Neph finds the muscle memory to inhale again.
"Nothing." Apparently. He's fine. There's nothing to worry about except for this sudden change in nightmare programming. She could turn around and go back to her room and find something to do until morning, if she wanted.
She does not want.
Neph pulls her other knee onto the bed, weight rocking forward onto her hands as she folds her legs under her. "I just," the dry click of her swallow is mortifyingly loud in the muffled room. Neither of them can see her flush but it burns her face and neck, feverish under the sheen of drying sweat. "Can I stay? Here?"
Nothing in her head, heart or gut screams that he might turn her away. Not after all the nights they've navigated his nightmares together. Nope, instead those battered organs whisper about the risks of being seen, of becoming dependent on others for comfort, of how much worse this may make her own dreams.
She clenches her fingers in his ridiculous threadcount comforter and resolutely does not care.
'Nothing' is a relief. 'Nothing' from Neph means no intruder, no sudden text about a territory threat or a warning about her muscle-bound attacker coming snooping around.
But 'nothing' also means he now has an entirely different problem to deal with, one that still was enough to make Neph reek of terror. It's enough to have the hair at the back of his neck raising, a visceral response Hannibal's never really had around other frightened people. Is it because this is Neph?
(Isn't that always why: because it's Neph? They've transcended so many boundaries, some of which Hannibal had drawn himself and others he hadn't consciously realized existed around him, that he hardly thinks of them as separate people anymore. For a lot of his waking hours, he-and-Neph are a fuzzy-bordered amoeba of joint household chores and decisions and grocery lists and waking up in tangled-sheet dogpiles.)
The sour tingle of fear contracts and pinches, a bite that reminds Hannibal of students in class when they dropped their textbooks or the one man he'd been near while he fumbled through getting turned down by the woman who was at the park with him. Embarrassed?
Neph's weight is moving towards him, the combined heft of them making the mattress sink in and gradually pulling them towards each other even more. She doesn't tunnel under the covers, just kneels on top of them, but Hannibal is pushing his sheets out of the way with his knees so he can press the outside of his thigh against the point of Neph's kneecap.
She doesn't elaborate. Or excuse herself. Instead, she asks to stay.
He stands at the edge of that cliff for a moment, watching the expanse underneath them, before he trails down her sleeve until he can find her hand. "I would never send you away. Not if you asked to stay." Up this close, Neph feels flushed, but there's a fine shiver to her normally-still hands.
It's late at night. The digital clock, the only reason he has enough light to catch a flash of reflection off of Neph's eyes, reads 2:54. There's only so many possibilities.
Her key turns too easily in the lock, and Neph pauses. None of them, not Will or Hannibal and definitely not her, leave the front door unlocked, not even when they’re home. They value their privacy, the novelty of a space they can control, too much for that.
The only time Neph can remember anybody failing to lock the door was when the boys had the ol’ homosuperior talk. There’d been some shouting and some snapping and Will stormed out in frigid silence. He hadn’t paused to lock up, and Hannibal immediately closed himself off in his room, leaving Neph to discover the security breach when she dared to stick her head out of her own room twenty minutes later.
(When she ragequits roommate conversations, she leaves by window. Not too many people are gonna breeze into their apartment if she doesn’t stop to lock it.)
“Ugh please no,” she mutters. It’s been a longass day already, spent walking Thoth’s new protégée through advanced Copper techniques. Her shields feel all crispy and a bone in her neck keeps popping. Those two better not be fighting. She briefly leans her forehead against the door, gathering her strength, and that’s when she sees them: scratches around the keyhole. Little scuffmarks.
Somebody’s picked the fucking lock, and it wasn’t her.
Neph straightens slowly, the column of her spine slotting into a rigid line. She thumbs the doorknob and comes away with fine metal shavings in the whorls of her fingerprint. Now, it’s possible that one of the guys forgot their key and had to force the lock to get in. They’re both stubborn and proud enough not to want to call for help, or to pay the super’s $15 lockout fee. But everybody in that apartment is as paranoid as they are private, and Neph might just be the worst of the bunch. She breathes out against the knot of ice in her gut and turns the knob.
“Hey, I’m home!” a flicker of Steel brings the hallway into focus but there’s nothing much to see; the studs in the walls make for a confusing net of leylines, and the kitchen’s crammed full of enough metal to blind any Allomancer. None of the threads overlapping her vision move like something carried by a person.
Inquisitors can shield against Steel or Ironsight. Her stomach churns with the thought, especially when nobody calls back to her. Neph pulls up Bronze just to be sure, but nothing glows that shouldn’t, and there’s none of the wild spattering of magic she’d expect if there were a—
A fight, like the one that looks to’ve wrecked the living room. She stops in the entryway, bag hanging off her shoulder like it’s any other day, like the coffee table isn’t cracked in half and her chair hasn’t been thrown against one of the walls. Glass glitters across the floor, catching light at odd angles from capsized lamps. Hannibal’s laptop sits wrenched open like a clam, screen spiderwebbed with cracks.
Even though she’d half-expected something like this, the sight locks her joints. This wasn’t just a robbery, they’d’ve taken the laptop and there oughta be more damage to the door and one of the guys should’ve been home and—
She ducks on instinct, rolling over the glass to come up behind the couch. A bat whistles through the air where her head had been – wood, no wonder she hadn’t seen it – followed by a soft ‘oof’ as the man wielding it overbalances and stumbles out of the darkened hall. He looks up, scowling, as Neph rises from her crouch.
“Come quiet, mutie,” he says, flat and annoyed. The lack of anger freaks her out more than snarling insults ever could, and the slur draws goosebumps down shoulders.
“Why? You literally just tried to bash my head in,” As usual, her mouth moves faster than her thoughts and does her no favors in the process. Bat-guy lunges and she burns Pewter, darting aside with blurring speed. She dodges around the coffee table, dancing backward, staying out of corners, trying to get the space to think, think, think.
Mutie. If that’s why he’s here…who is this? Who’s he with? He can’t be working alone; the boys could handle one asshole with a bat, no problem. She can handle one asshole with a bat, no problem. She has her knives, and even tapped out on Copper she’s still fresh enough on the other metals. Piece of cake.
But.
Neph swivels and reverses mid-step, diving for the guy, rolling between his legs and kicking out the back of his knee. He goes down with a grunt, bat pressed to the floor for support and she slams her foot squarely into his spine. “What’d you do with my friends? Where are they?!”
She jumps back as his hand twitches and a knife springs from an ankle sheath, swinging wide at her shins. It’s metal, she could take it away from him and plant it in his throat easy as breathing, but the lack of an answer keeps her magic in check.
Hannibal. Will. Where are you where are you? Not here. Who took you? His friends? And he stayed behind, why—waiting for me?
Knife-bat drives her back toward the hall, where a soft thunk from Hannibal’s room sets her nerves screaming. The footsteps that follow aren’t familiar, and it’s then that she realizes she’s been pinned. Or they think so, anyway, this guy and the partner coming up at her back. In a few seconds he’ll be in range to grab her, and she’ll have a choice:
Let him, and hope they take her wherever they’ve taken her friends. Or stop pretending she can’t feed them their own weapons, and waste time dumping their bodies. Waste time working contacts and combing Baltimore to find her boys.
“If you’re real good, they might still be alive when we get where we’re going,” the man behind her says, just before he grabs her upper arm and hauls it backward. Neph stomps at his feet, throws her head back into his mouth and pulls against him with an edge of Pewter, her frenzy only sorta feigned.
The bat whumphs into her middle, folding her over in his grip. The next hit cracks against her ear and cheek, force blunted by Pewter and the narrow windup space in the hall. Her vision goes leyline-blue anyway, and when it swims clear she’s folded over her knees on the floor. Curled up like that, they don’t notice the sleight-of-hand as she unclasps her wrist sheaths and shoves them further up her sleeves.
“—some kind of speedster,” the first man is saying to the other.
“Less of a fight than I expected,” he agrees as he pulls her other arm behind her back. Neph stays limp as he zipties her wrists together then shoves her over to do the same to her ankles. She means to fake unconsciousness, but they slip a bag over her head and she can’t help but thrash. Panic earns her a kick to the ribs and a rush of nausea as she’s picked up and thrown over someone’s shoulder.
Yes. This was a brilliant plan. She has no regrets about this at all.
How they get out of her building, she has no idea. There’s a bit where her ride gets really lurchy (she manages not to throw up inside her bag, but it’s close), which were probably the stairs. Before too long she’s unslung and dropped like a sack of potatoes on rough carpet. Then the trunk slams shut, leaving her cocooned in metal.
It’s not so bad at first. The car rumbles to life beneath her, a solid metal shell that blocks out all other anchor lines. Neph tries to take comfort in the knowledge that she could flip the whole thing if she wanted, but she can’t make out anything beyond that blue wall to know how fast they’re going, or in what direction. Eventually she drops Steel and just listens, taking in the sounds of traffic (heavy), how many times they roll to a stop (frequently at first, then not so much), and the conversation in the cab (limited).
Dampened by her breath and tacky with her blood, the bag starts to stick to her face. She puffs at it, wriggling her shoulders to test the zip ties. They bite into her wrists, but won’t last long once she applies a little Pewter. She could heal up her aching ribs and work on the split just above her ear, but it’s probably best to save her metals for later.
Then there’s nothing else to think about but her pains, her gnawing worry, and the fact that she’s tied up on her side in a lightless box.
The panic closes like a bear trap, piercing lungs and splintering bones. Her breath hitches against it, and all at once she’s buried under rubble, tied to a chair. A memory hammers home, not of the church but of her nightmare, of Hannibal crushed to death but still whispering. Take responsibility.
Neph thrashes, kicking out against the back of the seats. I am, I am, she sobs as someone shouts at her to shut the fuck up, I’m coming, I’ll find you, please don’t be dead, please be okay, I’m coming.
She’s terrible at marking time, but eventually her body wrings itself dry of panic and she lies still. Hours could pass for all she knows, and at some point the quality of the road under the car changes. It gets crunchy. Small rocks ping the undercarriage. She focuses on the random clunks to calm down, but has nothing to brace against when the car slams to a sudden stop. With a startled umph, she’s rolled against those seats, and there she huddles until the trunk cracks open.
Fresh air floods the compartment, bringing with it the nightsong of crickets and a total lack of anything else. The sound of her kidnappers’ boots crunching gravel is obscenely loud, as are their grunts as they heave her out of the car.
“On your feet,” one says, and there’s a flash of blue as he draws his knife and cuts the tie at her ankles. She’s been careful to flex her fingers and toes, but they still burn as blood rushes back where it belongs. Without a thought for numb feet or the fact that she’s still basicly blind, they haul her upright and frogmarch her away from the car.
Neph gets her first good breath in what feels like days and sweeps the area with Iron. Parallel lines of blue trail away into the distance, perpendicular to a huge rectangular shape. A building, mostly sheet metal if she doesn’t miss her guess. With…a couple other cars parked outside of it, and one lone streetlight. A few other squares might be outbuildings, but there’s nothing else in any direction. She can’t smell anything past the bag and her own breath, but there’s a sound like plants rustling together, like grass hissing in the wind. It reminds her of camping with Will, but even more hushed without the crackling of a fire.
They’ve driven for hours to get to the middle of nowhere, the perfect place to shoot somebody in the head and dump their body. For the first time Neph considers that her boys might already be dead. Her senses strain for the knife in the first man’s boot, for the gun tucked into the waistband of the second’s pants. Something bleak hooks behind her scapulae and pulls her upright.
Whatever happens next, she’s going to survive this. They won’t. It’s that simple.
A door swings open on grouchy hinges and the air changes, becomes much warmer, as she’s walked through. New anchor lines open up, some moving around, some not. It’s all a confusing tangle until one of her kidnappers kicks her knees out (like she’d done to Bat-knife. She bets that was him) so she drops awkwardly, then yanks the bag off her head.
“Got the last one,” he says, “We think she’s got enhanced speed, if you want to fill in that blank.”
Neph’s not listening. She’s blinking stars from her eyes as they adjust to the light of LED lanterns set up on crates and barrels in a rough circle. Men lounge beside them, cleaning weapons or swigging at bottles, playing cards or poking at their phones. One, two, three…eight of them, ten counting the two assholes behind her. Neph takes that in in a sweep before dismissing what looks like a militaristic anti-mutant hategroup clubhouse. They don’t matter yet. She needs to find—
It's not hard to lose track of time in his new setting.
Will's not used to feeling so genuinely safe in a house while other people are still in it. He's always enjoyed being at home when he could manage it - it's more private, more contained - but his dad would always have the other key. His dad would wander in and out, a quiet huff of a man, and weight down the air.
Hannibal and Neph don't make him feel like he has to shove aside all aspects of himself to get along. They don't make him feel on edge and defensive to be breathing in the same area.
"What are you reflecting on?"
Will jolts up from laying across two and a half of the couch cushions, arms unfolding. The back of one of his hands peels off the cover of his forgotten book. "Uh." He sighs into a stretch, plants an elbow up on the couch's armrest and drags himself up and backwards, until he's sitting up.
And facing Hannibal, who sits politely coiled into his lone half a couch cushion, laptop open but ignored across his thighs. "You look distracted." Hannibal sounds bizarrely smug for that observation. Will does a quick mental inventory of recent in-jokes, threats, and secrets and comes up blank.
"Dunno. Just thinking about-- this place." Will marks his spot in the book with the library rental receipt and tucks it in against his stomach. "Sounds like you had an idea about what I was thinking about?"
Hannibal hums, turning back to his laptop screen. "I was thinking about last night."
Will's pretty sure he didn't actually time taking a sip of his soda poorly enough to aspirate it, but he coughs nonetheless. "You what?" He wipes his mouth, tacky cola smearing on the back of his hand. "I thought you said you were doing your essay about your internship."
Hannibal looks back up, mouth a cross line. "I finished that two hours ago, Will. When you first fell asleep."
"Of course you did." Will watches him, shaking his head and failing to squash back down a smile. He takes another drink of half-flat soda to hide it. "Glad to know last night came in a close second after your internship on 'things you're going to brag about today'."
Hannibal smirks, and Will chuckles, and then the room presses quiet against them once again.
Will slowly turns around, book tugged along with him. Tentatively, he leans their shoulders together as he re-settles with his book inside Hannibal's space. Hannibal isn't watching the computer screen anymore, and as Will adjusts against him Hannibal's face ends up turned in towards his hair.
"I don't know how you can breathe in there." Will says. His cheeks feel warm despite the AC. Hannibal's nose is directly behind his ear, buried in what Will knows are wild curls that are probably doing their best to blind him.
"It's a mystery how I don't lose my breath more often when you're in the room."
"Oh please." Will's blush blooms down his neck. He elbows Hannibal softly in the ribs and Hannibal moves a few centimeters, radiating fond smugness. "Go back to reading your romance novels and leave me out of it."
"I really think you'd enjoy this era of literature if you tried, Will. Perhaps starting with Mary--"
Will and Hannibal both shift as the barest, familiar creak sounds from the front hall. There's a trick to opening the door soundlessly, one that no one adheres to because announcing your presence, in this home, is the most polite thing you can do when entering or exiting.
It's silent after, which is odd even for Neph, and Will cranes his neck and moves to sit up straighter, expectantly waiting for her to yell out. He's about to himself when Hannibal's hand is suddenly over his mouth.
"There's a stranger in our apartment." Hannibal's nose in his hair no longer feels warm and intimate. He whispers so quietly Will can feel the vibrations more than he hears his words. "Do you know how to fight?"
Will's heart is already pounding away in his chest. Hannibal sounds so deadly serious, and Will's mind is a blur of veiled insinuations and some of the rare frank talks about Hannibal's and Neph's respective pasts and skills.
If it picked the front door, at least, Will feels reasonably sure it isn't a kelpie that's come to call.
Hannibal is moving off the couch, cold air swallowing Will's side where he had been, and Will instinctively follows him. Now, when he strains to listen above the rush in his ears, Will can hear - or perhaps feel - even and careful movements from the hallway that runs parallel to their living room.
Someone's stalking towards them.
Hannibal reaches the doorway first, flattened against the wall like he's got any right to look like he's ambushed someone before. Hannibal turns back to look at him, mouths 'three of them' and then picks up a pen off the end table. In that moment, Will isn't sure if he's more afraid of the abyss in Hannibal's eyes or the fact that they're about to get jumped in their own home.
It happens quickly after that. The breath of footsteps at the entryway to the living room, Hannibal striking forward like a snake, a grunt and shout from a man with a bat.
Will leaps forward as footsteps suddenly pound from the entryway, and all hope of stealth is abandoned.
There's already blood. On the first man's thigh, a glint of metal and dull shine of plastic in the middle of his upper leg - the pen. Will ducks a fist from someone who surges past the doorway and straight at him. His heart knocks against his lungs as he runs backwards, remembers the coffee table at the last moment and scrambles over it as the man charging him down has to break concentration to climb it too.
"Get the fuck over here, mutie." And suddenly it all coalesces into an awful picture for Will, and he knows what's happened here. What's happening here.
Are they here to kill them? Publically? Are they going to throw their bodies out the window or sneak them away in trucks to dump them in the city center?
Will grabs a lamp on instinct, wings it at the man's head and misses that but connects with his shoulder. The lampshade is disappointingly soft, halts the swing of it, and Will drops it in his panic afterwards trying to get away from the arc of a bat.
He dodges one more swing, hits the wall behind him, and then ducks right into the grip of the bat hitting his stomach.
"There's a fourth person." Hannibal says, or Will assumes Hannibal says. It's in French and clearly a warning, but it doesn't do anyone much good. Will staggers sideways, ducks the next swing of the bat, and considers his odds on getting to the window to crawl from their balcony to the one below and get a head start running to a phone.
Would the police even come? Would a mutant hate group being arrested at Hannibal's home get him kicked out of medical school?
"Tommy!"
The room stops. Will looks over at Hannibal, stomach still in pain and worried about how that feels. Hannibal has a knife against one of their throats. His eyes are black and deadly and for a moment, Will is absolutely frozen looking at him.
It makes it easier for the next swing from the man with the bat - presumably Tommy - to connect with Will's head. Will grunts, staggers, and is caught against someone's chest. Will's breath strains as he's held from behind and something sharp appears at his own throat.
"I'll kill this one right now if you fucking try anything, kid."
Will thinks, for a second, that this man just got supernaturally lucky. Will still isn't sure if or how anyone could value him enough to care about this kind of threat, but he also knows Hannibal's pride - that flint in his eyes - wasn't going to stop for anything else.
It turns out this was enough.
Hannibal's face is fury etched in stone, cold hard edges that don't budge an inch even as he drops the knife and is unceremoniously punched down onto the floor. Will watches him be ziptied up until he's shoved against the nearest wall himself.
The ziptie's so narrow and right under the jagged bone at his wrist. Will reminds himself not to squirm or make a sound. His heart's still slamming against his ribs, but his mind is starting to drift out and above him. He feels numb despite the shaking in his fingers.
"Anyone else here?"
One of the men who wasn't needed to subdue Will and Hannibal is coming out from the hallway. "Unless one of them's a cross dresser, there's a girl here too."
"Wait for her. You two." They're getting tugged towards the door. A bag goes over Will's head, and he can no longer keep track of Hannibal. All the footsteps crunch together.
Whatever car they're tugged into several minutes later must be parked in an alley, right? How did they even get them out of that building without nosy neighbors calling the police? Will's head hurts, and worrying at the logistics isn't helping.
Everything is dark, and cold, and uneventful with one sitting in the back of the van with them the entire ride over.
It's not until they're about to be removed from the vehicle that Hannibal apparently decides it's worth one last effort to escape.
*
Will's never felt an injury like this before.
In a lot of ways, it's less painful than his head injuries from months prior. It doesn't interfere with his hearing or his vision, for one. It doesn't throb whenever he thinks to hard.
But walking with a stab wound in his calf turned out to be way more difficult than he'd even imagined. Like stepping out onto hardwood and it suddenly bends and breaks like straw.
Hannibal's leg is pressed up against it, hard. Too hard, but Will hadn't needed a medical student to explain to him the danger presented by bleeding out. They're being ignored just enough that Will has enough free time to worry about if he'll die from blood loss or an infection first.
Will notices her before Hannibal.
He ducks a shoulder down, taps into Hannibal, who's been studying everyone's movements in the room too much to care for the door opening practically behind them. "Neph," he barely whispers, but that's enough to get Hannibal's attention cracking around to look for her.
They probably don't look too bad while sitting. Will has a bruise on his temple, or so he assumes, and Hannibal has a godawful-looking nose that's dripped blood down across his lips and chin, but his eyes are so alert and his mouth so hard that Will sincerely doubts he even feels it.
Will's pale under his tan, though. Half his pant leg is red, his jeans soaking it down his leg and saturated nearly to his knee. His sock feels sticky and anytime he moves his foot he feels the way the wet fibers catch on his skin. His heart feels no less pounding than it did before - if anything Will would swear it's going faster.
Neither of them are the loudly taunting kind. Neither of them have a physical power to suddenly unveil and help out with.
So neither of them say a word. Just stare across the room full of people who hate them and seek out the eyes of their friend.
The kidnappers walked her to the middle of the circle before shoving her to her knees, like a slave stumbling onto Colosseum sands. She'd be pissed at the insult to her reputation if she weren't so busy tallying odds and searching for her roommates.
Who are outside the circle, seated against a drum barrel Wait, no, not seated but tied to it, their hands ziptied in front so there's no room between their backs and the rusty metal. That's--she doesn't know what to make of that. She doesn't have time to wonder what to make of that, all her focus locking onto their faces in the dim lantern light.
Neph looks to Hannibal first, past the blood crusting his nose, mouth, and spattered liberally down the front of his shirt. All that red sets off an alarm in her head, but it's background noise compared to the howling rage in his eyes. She's never been able to parse him when he's like this, can't tell if he's furious they've been kidnapped, furious they've been injured, furious they've caught her as well or furious at her for getting caught. Neph meets his eyes and tries to beam competent steadiness over to him, to tell him she's got the outlines of a plan without projecting it for everybody else to see.
I got this she tells him as Knife-bat shoves at her shoulder, forcing her to drop her head and her gaze. We're getting outta here, no matter what it takes.
That promise could be complicated by Will, whose leg is soaked red from the knee down. Neph can't read him any better than she can Hannibal, not past his lightheaded slump. She lifts her chin enough to catch his eye, to really look at him, because it's Will she's about to sacrifice.
Hannibal will forgive her what comes next. At least, Neph hopes he will. But Will...Will has no reason to accept the necessity of it, and every reason to run screaming. He might take Hannibal with him when he does. She can't be sure, so she stares at him and she thinks I'm sorry, I'm sorry but I'm going to do it anyway, I have to, with the resignation of a kid who's played this game before.
A pair of legs block her eyeline, and Knife-bat takes a fistful of her hair and yanks, rocking her back and forcing her to look up at a third man.
He isn't the tallest or heaviest guy in the room. He's all around average, appearance-wise, and Neph's not familiar enough with specops or military assholes to guess at his background aside from his regulation haircut. Nevertheless she knows instantly that she's staring at the ringleader. There's an analytic coolness to his gaze that reminds her of Hannibal, makes her think he's only running with the rest of these chucklefucks because they further his goals somehow.
The grip on her hair loosens as he squats down to her eyelevel, hands hanging over his knees. They watch each other for a moment, him still and uncaring, Neph hunched over her aching ribs and squinting through a slightly swollen eye. She's kept her injuries from doing more than nibbling at Pewter, so while the bleeding's stopped and she can breathe just fine, there's still a monster bruise winging out beneath her eye and the burning itch of split skin over her ear. She must seem small, beaten, scared.
Good.
"It's amazing how human they can look," guy-in-charge says, fascination glittering in his voice. He couldn't be more obviously talking to everyone but her. "That's half the danger." Then his tone shifts and he reaches out and grabs her chin, tilting her face this way and that as if checking for an obvious tell. "Do you human-looking muties band together on purpose? Are even you disgusted by the physical mutations?"
Neph sways in a flood of revulsion at this man and his everything, his beliefs and his friends and his hands. It's so intense she doesn't realize she's meant to answer until the expectant silence drags on.
Fuck it, she thinks, and says with perfect honesty, "I'm not a mutant."
Every man - and the one woman over in the corner, absently shuffling a deck of cards - laughs. "That's what they all say!" someone shouts. Their boss just shrugs and releases her chin.
"Mutant, sympathizer, they burn the same." he says, eyes gleaming with fanatical fervor despite his studied boredom.
Neph's next breath catches in her throat, her gaze darting over his shoulder to Hannibal and Will and the barrel they're propped against. There's a whole stack of similar drums behind them, maybe a dozen piled up in a rough pyramid. What's inside? The man turns his head slightly, far enough to track her eyeline, and smirks at her.
Before his mouth finishes twitching into place, the following happen:
Neph burns Tin and Pewter, the cold altoid burn of Tin waking all her nerves and muscles, the forgefire of Pewter jacking them all to two, three, four times their normal capacity. The ziptie around her wrists snaps like a cheap hairband, and the knife up her right sleeve slips into her palm. She reaches back with her left, grabs Knife-bat's bootknife, and snatches it up with pickpocket surety. Neph twists at the waist, scything her arms around. Her righthand knife plunges into Knife-bat's iliac artery (thank you, Hannibal, for flashcards and textbook illustrations) while the left cuts across the ringleader's throat.
Even with Pewter backing her, his reflexes are sharp enough that he leans away, pulling out of her reach. But Neph's range is not and never has been limited just to her arms. The knife leaves her hand, severs skin and tendons and both jugulars, before Iron Pulls it back to her palm.
A howl bursts from Knife-bat just as his boss topples backward, one hand flying up to his spurting neck. A jet of blood catches Neph across the shoulder and cheek. It scorches like cooking oil, searing her skin, but she's still moving, spinning from her knees to her feet. Her stolen knife flies from her hand again, flipping into her other kidnapper's eye. That one drops silently as Neph revolves, momentum tearing her ceramic knife from Knife-bat's leg. He goes down screaming, blood spilling between his hands. How many heartbeats before it all pumps from that severed artery? Hannibal would know.
In the hovering split second while everyone else processes whatthefuck just happened and reaches for their weapons, Neph Pulls the metal knife from the dead man's eye socket and flings it across the room, where it sinks into the hairsbreadth between Hannibal's bound ankles, severing the ziptie in the process.
"MUTIE BITCH!" one of the other men screams, and then Neph's entire world splits into slivers, carved out by bullet ley-lines. She twists, a half-leap to the side that, backed by Steel and Iron, curves them impossibly around her body and into the stake of crates to her right. Someone who'd been sitting there, raising their own gun, goes down with a gurgling shriek.
Heart hammering, shoulders burning with the effort of redirecting speeding-bullet momentum, Neph launches herself off the ground and toward the depot's rafters. The corrugated metal roof overhead is as wide and solid as the earth, enough to belay herself onto a wide wooden beam. Shots from below send splinters exploding through the air as she runs along its length, hopefully leading them away, away from the boys and the barrels.
The bag's stuck to Will's face with his own sweat by the time there's the sound of talking up at the front of the van. He tries not to grunt too loud when momentum brings his shoulder to connect with the back door.
He wasn't really expecting to have the bag removed as soon as he can see ambient light through its cloth. It's blinding and disorienting outside the van, even though it isn't high noon anymore. Will's wincing away from the fading sunlight, which is why he doesn't immediately react to hands on his ankles. He freezes, feeling unbalanced but knowing playing along is the best step for now, and then realizes the ties at his ankles are being undone.
He watches the glint of metal at his ankles with wary but useless suspicion, before the man goes and does the same to Hannibal.
Everything is as Will would more or less expect, until the man yanks Hannibal's face cover off as well.
Hannibal and Will didn't exchange a word in the van, both too mutually aware of being closely listened to. Will watches him with concern, though, because Hannibal's breathing had started growing strained shortly before they had pulled to their abrupt stop. Had he been suffocating in the pillowcase tied around his head?
He looks pale instead of flushed, to Will's eyes. There's a sheen of sweat at his temples and dripped sideways across his nose from laying on the ground, and he breathes - weirdly. Will blinks, not sure what the heavy hiss up against the man unveiling him could mean except aggression, and then a horrible suspicion hits at the same time the man's pupils dilate.
Will steps back, adrenaline hitting his already-soaked system, and jostles into the guy guarding right behind him.
"Watch yourself, fucking mutie f--"
"What the fuck, what the fuck, You fucking-- is that you you piece of goddamn shit--"
"The hell?" The one behind Will jostles up next to him, and they both watch the one closest to Hannibal - the one breathing in the air nearest him - scream spittle into Hannibal's face. "Eddie seriously, what the fuck's happening over here--"
"This fucker's dangerous, fuck man we gotta call for backup, maybe they've got another guy somewhere--"
Paranoid ravings. Hannibal's power is suggestive, isn't it? So this guy's attaching his own ideas to the emotions being pumped at him - the 'stay away' vibes surely soaking the air around them?
"Are you doing this, you fucking freak?" A shoulder jostles Will as tall-and-brunette goes to kick at Hannibal's ankles from the side. But his aggravation is nothing compared to his partner's full-blown panic.
He must've gotten a better breath of Hannibal's power.
(Hannibal had explained it to him in full, once, in slow and careful detail. He'd let Will ask questions, even if Will had been reticent at first, too cautious about making Hannibal feel more like a bug under a microscope - honestly, Hannibal had needed to almost hassle him into the conversation to start it up.
But then Will had had plenty of questions, and got answers he hadn't been expecting. Like how Hannibal had had an oversensitivity since he was a child and never known why, how the headaches had gotten worse but less predictable as he passed eleven and then twelve, how at thirteen and fourteen his puberty had brought on the pheromone aspect to his power. How it had taken him months to even be certain what was happening at all, since it was invisible and so vague and so dependent on a lot of uncontrollable variables from the other person involved.)
"We should just kill him now, Tommy."
Hannibal's legs are kicked out from under him, lack of zip ties or not, and his lack of hands means Will watches as he knocks a shoulder rough against the gravel, head jerking down and back up as it bounces on the ground.
'Eddy' stumble-jerks forward, knife flashing, and Will hears himself yell as his legs get into motion.
He barely makes it two strides before the less-drugged one kicks his knee from the side, enough spoiled momentum that without arms to windmill around for balance, Will goes down hard. He sprawls on his side, face nearly touching Hannibal's shoulder, and rolls up to see Eddy clambering at Hannibal, eyes wild.
He breathes like an animal. Will's own breath is ragged and hurts his dry throat.
Knees dropping to the side of Hannibal's hips. Arm pulling back. Knife flashing in the early evening sun.
Will scrambles at the gravel, curls up, and then kicks out what feels, in that instinctive moment, like the most logical part of his body to risk injuring.
The knife sinks into the outside of his leg with the dull thump he would expect from a wooden log. It sounds wet but not hollow. The most important thing for a wavering heartbeat is that it's Will's leg, not Hannibal's chest, that the knife embedded in like a tick.
And then the heated pain begins, the cold panic in his chest of seeing his own blood spurt from the wound like a desperately-leaking pipe. Will's breathing is so loud he loses track of what the other men are saying, but there's a lot of movement right above him and Hannibal.
Tommy peels his friend up and away, the choking panic of Eddy's pupils is no longer pinned on Hannibal and Will, and Will curls tighter into a ball to press a hand to the hole in his leg.
It doesn't immediately press back together like a papercut or a nick from a razor blade. This is deep enough to have lost its connections to the other side entirely, this sags open with the dead weight of skin pulling on either side. Will feels the opposite ends of the cut slide against one another, endlessly slick with blood and too fresh to coagulate, and feels bile creep up his throat.
Hannibal sits up under him, presses him to lay on his back and elevate his legs, while the two men argue above them. Hannibal's face is drawn and pale, mouth open but silent.
Neither of them says a word during the entire wait. Soon, the two men re-group enough to bend down and drag them into the heavy concrete building they're parked next to. Will spends the entire walk convinced he won't make it, biting down out of spite alone and making half a calf muscle not give out underneath him.
*
Will'a breathing keeps being interrupted by his racing heart, pressing against his throat and wasting too much more of his blood onto the concrete floor.
Neph's been caught too. Fuck, fuck fuck, but hadn't everyone's whispers suggested someone more capable than he would've expected? Hadn't the metal-flinging implied that she'd be the last one of them suckered in by an apartment ambush?
That next realization hits about the same time as Neph's pleading eye contact.
He curls inward, bracing against shrapnel and blowback that doesn't come right away. There's movement, yelling, a spurt of blood like a Tarantino movie, and then Will jerks as far as zip ties and rope will let him as a knife lodges itself between Hannibal's ankles.
Hannibal just bends forward, calmly calculating as you please, and slices his wrists' ties against that blade during the two heartbeats it sits there. And then it pulls back to its puppeteer and Hannibal's mouth is open again, teeth showing now, eyes wide and face frozen in an engrossed grimace, and Will doesn't know who he should run from, if and when he gets the chance.
Neph catapaults up and away, out of Will's line of sight into rafters as bullets fly, and he's certain he's walked straight into someone else's life because his definitely never included shit like this. Wasn't supposed to, not until he had a badge and a gun and paid police academy training built up underneath him and did he pick the wrong field, is that what his tunnelling vision and roaring ears mean?
Hannibal's getting up and falls, legs clearly too numb from being tied. He lurches sideways for Will, is intercepted halfway there by one of the few people capable of still noticing them when they've got a "fucking telekinetic monster" up on their roof.
Will barely gets to watch how the knife exchanges hands. Hannibal's torso moves like a dancer, even if his ankles drag and tilt too much, and there's blood on Hannibal's face and throat when he pushes the gurgling man away from himself. He doesn't look behind him to check that the man's not getting back up. Will stares at him alone, watches eyes bore hatred into Hannibal's back and watches the inside edge of the man's throat vibrate with air that won't ever reach his lungs.
Hannibal nearly falls into his lap, legs apparently still useless from the past few hours of having his feet's circulation cut off.
"Are-- are you-- you okay--" Will wasn't aware he was shaking so badly until his voice vibrates like that other man's throat cartilage. He shivers against the knife in Hannibal's hands and Hannibal pats him with his free hand as if he were a horse, tapping against his flank to soothe.
His laser focus doesn't budge, though. "I'm fine." Will's knees roll limply apart once his ankles aren't stuck together, and Hannibal's reaching for his own belt.
Will's already watched him work with a quick accuracy that isn't hurried for several more seconds before he processes what it's for. A tourniquet. The belt wraps around Will's thigh just above his knee.
Hannibal looks like calm fury.
"I can see how you'll make a great trauma surgeon." Will says. Hannibal has a pleased glow to him as he finally frees Will's wrists. "Or an assassin." Will adds, colder and flat.
Hannibal examines Will's fingers for circulation problems and then looks at his face, but there is no apology behind the cautious awareness in his gaze. "Yes," he says finally. Somehow his quiet voice carries over the ambient din around them. "I would be excellent at either." With blood still smeared from his nose down to his chin, he reaches forward. His hand, covered in Will's blood now, rests on Will's knee. "And yet you've seen the choice I have made."
Will makes a sound. He thinks it might be a laugh. "Right. I'm so relieved you're using these...skills to only kill the unworthy. What are you, some k-kind of-- of fucking Batman?"
"What do you think these men consider themselves?" Hannibal asks, and now he finally looks back at the man he mutilated on his way to Will. He looks dead by now, throat cartilage as still and quiet as his open eyes. Will's chest feels tight and empty to look at him.
"In the right. Defending themselves." Will feels exhausted. The metal drum behind him is cold and doesn't have the right hand holds as he presses his back into it and uses it to leverage himself into standing. Hannibal holds his arm, lifts him the rest of the way. Will doesn't protest that help, and he feels the lie of the rest of his protests for just that - lies. Is he really, actually bothered that he isn't dead right now? That his two closest friends apparently have the sort of training required to jointly take out a room full of enemies?
...Would Hannibal even have been captured, if Will hadn't been home with him at the time?
He'd lost his glasses when the pillowcase was dragged off his head the first time, but now even his distance vision is blackening and blurring. Everything looks charred, and softened in the aftermath of burning down to its essentials.
He feels like he needs to sleep.
"Will." Hannibal's voice comes slower than his lips move. "Will. I need you to sit back down. Behind this oil drum. Don't let anyone see you."
"Oil. Right. Of course that's what's in there." Will's teeth clack together. Is he cold? It interrupts his speech. He doesn't fight against the two hands on his wrists, doesn't fight Hannibal half-dragging him to a hiding spot. "They wanted to watch the heretics burn." Visions of paintings, both tasteless and serious, of witches at the stake flicker and flame across his mind.
It's hard to say, with how his mind is fading, but Will's pretty sure he feels Hannibal press lips to his forehead and say, "I would only ever want to burn with you," before he ghosts away into the gathering black.
“Listen, you gotta stop starin’ at’im like that,” Neph hisses to Hannibal, “You’re freaking him out.”
The ‘him’ in question is an aisle and a half away, looking at Iron Man action figures with his hands clasped behind his back. Neph focuses the full force of her attention on Hannibal partly to make sure he understands the seriousness of her instruction, but also because watching this tiny version of Will carefully not-touch things he can’t have wrenches at her heart.
“I know it’s weird,” she continues under her breath. The squeaky wheel on the shopping cart she pushes before her should keep Will from overhearing. “Trust me, I do, but it’s only for ten days.”
Probably, she does not add. Hannibal himself is proof that the timewarp magic might not abide by the rules they think they know. Neph can’t blame him for wondering if he’s ever going to get his Will back, or if this might happen again and strand them with a twelve-year old version. She’s been thinking the same thing since she went to hassle Will about breakfast and found an eight year old sleeping in his bed, wearing his White Stripes T-shirt.
Mik might be willing to make a housecall for something this weird, and he might be able to tell them if this is only temporary, but Neph’s had other priorities. Like: convincing a suspicious mundie kid that his dad dropped him off the night before ‘cuz he’s looking for work in the area and knew Neph from a worksite down south. She doesn’t think he’s totally on board yet, but the fact that she knew his dad’s name and where they were living when Will was actually eight seems to’ve helped.
So did the way she’d said “I dunno kiddo, he just showed up and handed you off, said he’d be back in like a week” as though it were totally normal. He seemed to accept it as such, which put the first crack in her heart. Neph’s always understood why Will thinks so little of his worth to others, but to see it reinforced in a kid this small…
She made some similar grumbles about his dad not even packing him a bag, as any put-upon acquaintance might. Neph hadn’t meant to embarrass Will with it, had only thought it’d sell the story better, but he’s been pretty quiet since she suggested hitting up Target for some child-sized basics. Anything to get out of their house while Hannibal processes this (temporary) new reality and Will gets used to the two of them.
“Hey Will, you wanna come pick out a shirt?” she calls down the aisle. They’d dressed him in a mishmash of things from her drawers, but he’s swimming even in her shops-in-the-juniors-section-ass handmedowns. “And, like, some pants?”
Hannibal has not been the most discrete. He never really is, a fact Neph reminds him of often. A fact Will would remind him of just as often, if Will wasn't currently inhabiting a different...frame of mind.
"...I will try." Hannibal says, in what he thinks is an even tone of negotiation. It comes out more in what his Aunt would have called 'childish displeasure'. Sulky, is perhaps what a normal human might say.
Will hears Neph from down the aisle, turns back towards them in a slow half-circle. He brings a hand up towards his mouth on clear reflex, flinches away at the last second and keeps it going until he's worrying it through his curly hair instead. It's been a while since Hannibal took a child development class, but he's reasonably certain that thumb sucking at age eight is not a good sign, regardless of whether or not Will's doing that in public. A flicker of memory about neglect victims lights up in Hannibal's mind, almost unbidden, and he thinks again of Will's father rotting alone in that terrible apartment.
It's too good a fate for him.
"Only if you're sure it's not too much money." Will says by way of final protest. Simply getting him in the store had been enough of a battle that Hannibal is not surprised that he's still giving out token resistance. Hannibal is starting to direct their cart, though, urging Neph along who immediately follows suit, and Will does trundle along after them.
He looks ridiculous in Neph's borrowed clothing. But Hannibal can't help a part of him enjoying the sight of a child in them at all - at what it implies for family.
Will's younger than Mischa would have been by now, but older than Hannibal ever got to see her at. Hannibal's never interacted with an eight year-old before. He still watches him curiously as they push along the aisles, Will watching him back with suspicious eyes.
They're almost at the correct section - so says the sign hanging above the aisle - when Hannibal thinks he's catching something in Will's returned stare, the one that meets him every time Hannibal turns back to check that he's still watching them. "What is it?" Hannibal and Neph each have a hand on the cart, Neph truly pushing it and Hannibal absently taking an excuse to walk closer to her. Will stares at the space between their hands on the cart, then back at Hannibal.
"...Aren't you really young to be married?" Will asks, and Hannibal's brain nearly catches whiplash with the force of his beaming smugness.
Hannibal glances back at Neph, expectant delight in his eyes. "I suppose we are." Is all he agrees to.
Edited (i'm sorry i promise i'll proofread BEFORE hitting post comment next time OTL) Date: 2017-08-26 03:14 am (UTC)
Because she does, in fact, understand how weird this is and how bewildering it can be to lose a...partner, Neph reaches up and smooths Hannibal's hair away from his face. Her mouth twists to the side, trapping redundant reassurances. They'll fix this. They will.
And if the process of fixing it raises questions about why they haven't done the same for Hannibal, well...
Will comes back to them on silent sneakered feet and, look, Neph knew a lot of kids in foster care, but you could sort most of 'em into two general categories: the ones who coped by making themselves quiet, and the ones who coped by being impossible to ignore. No question as to which one Will is, was, or always has been. Her hand falls back to her side as she turns to him, looking down not-quite-as-far-as-expected. He wasn't a big eight year old, but she's not a very big eighteen year old. So, hey, it all works out.
"M'sure," she says, with a nod that adds I checked the budget. "Your dad left some money for food and stuff, said he didn't expect us t'feed you for free, but you don't look like you eat a lot and this one--" a thumb jerks at Hannibal, who's momentarily traded in his creepy stare to glare at the squeaky cart wheel. "--cooks, like, all the time. So we can put that money to gettin' you some clothes an' call it Back To School Shopping."
Summer's spiraling the drain, she feels it every time she slips out her window. The night bites more than it did just two weeks ago. Hm, Will might need a jacket, or at least one heavier layer...
She has one hand on the cart and the other reaching for a child-sized hoodie with appliquéd shark heads for pockets, when Hannibal speaks directly to Will for the first time.
It goes about as well as she probably should've expected.
"...Aren't you really young to be married?" says the eight year old, skeptical in a way Neph never realized only children could be. She'd be annoyed if she weren't so aware of Hannibal's clockwork brain popping a spring and flying into maximum gear right next to her. He looks at her with victory shining in his eyes and poised in his freakin' dimples, and Neph--
--breaks into a wide grin in response. This is gonna mess with Will so hard when he gets back, which is only fair if they're gonna babysit him for the next week and a half. And anyway, 'married' is as good an explanation as any for what he's likely to see all week, the way they share each other's space and how she curls up with her feet thrown over his lap on the couch.
She's not grinning because it's nice for someone to notice they're close, to comment on it in a way that isn't suggestive. It certainly doesn't spark a little ball of sunlight in her ribcage, not at all.
"Yeah but we're not married," she sniffs as she turns the cart towards a rack of shirts. "We're engaged. That's, like, marriage with takebacksies."
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timeasmymeasure
Adopted-younger AU: closed to itrhymes
Date: 2016-06-03 06:57 am (UTC)In the immediate aftermath, Triss remembers only the smell. Not like that’s hard; it oozes out of her, a rotting-fish reek smeared over her skin, coating the inside of her mouth where she bit the horse—kelpie. That’s what the strange adults call it, a kelpie, a word that means nothing to a shivering, towel-swaddled eight year old standing in the middle of a stranger’s kitchen.
“How could you not know?” hisses the tall thin woman, the one who gutted the kelpie out from under her with a heavy, rusted knife as long as Triss’ whole arm and she’s totally not gonna have nightmares about that for years (yes she is, until other horrors bury them, and the therapy will not help), “You. It’s only your goddamn job, Argus!”
“Language,” the other woman chides. She’s older and heavier set, with a halo of dark curls and smile lines at all corners of her face. She was the one who cried towels and dry clothes! when the tall woman dragged Triss into the house, all the lines tilted down in alarm. The thin woman bares her teeth at the mild rebuke, but subsides into silent scowls at the third adult.
That’d be the tired man, who Triss eyes with extra suspicion because he’s a man and it’s his house and his mismatched towels and the thin woman seems to think the horse was his fault somehow. The horse she can still taste. Her palms sting where they came unstuck from its skin and her knee is one big ache where it turned around and bit her with its big square teeth and it sounds like all that could’ve been avoided if this man had done…something.
“She’s not been actively burning anything, Danae, or I would have,” he says like the words have to trudge up a real long staircase to get out his mouth. He rubs at his eyes and scans Triss with a look that’s both flat and sad all at once. She hikes the towel higher around her shoulders, glares, and drips defiantly on his floor. The older lady tried to offer her dry clothes but no way she’s gonna get naked in a stranger’s house in the middle of the night. “Or…she hasn’t lived here very long. Or isn’t local, though I can’t think why a kelpie would go so far out of its way.”
“I want to know why a kelpie’d fucking bother,” Danae mutters, “When’s the last time you heard of the Courts making a play that obvious?”
The other two exchange an uncomfortable look, while the thin woman smirks unpleasantly and rolls her shoulders. “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” she says. The man, Argus, just shakes his head, but the second woman, whose name Triss still hasn’t caught, seems to remember she’s still standing right there and could, theoretically, answer some of these questions.
“Are you new, sweetie?” her tone is sweet and low, but Triss sets her chin behind the towel. She’s not gonna be tricked into answering just ‘cuz someone’s being nice to her. She went through like four therapists before Hannibal, ask any of ‘em. “Did you move here recently? Where’s your family?”
Triss blinks. Her heart rate spikes and her knees wobble. It’s bad enough she’s got no idea how she ended up on a horse, falling from the sky into Baltimore harbor. It’s worse that she can only make sense out of every other sentence these people shoot at each other, since they put the words together all wrong (of course she’s not burning while also dripping all over and chattering in place, thanks captain obvious). But for them to somehow guess at the whole other situation, how Hannibal decided to up and move his practice from Boston - because of her, to put some distance between them and the trial, her internment in foster care, the bodies she left behind - how she doesn’t know the city well enough yet to even guess where she might be in relation to Hannibal’s house, her house, where she’s supposed to be right now but isn’t and it’ll be morning soon and he’ll notice and what’s he gonna think and what if he wishes he’d never moved here for her, that’s too much.
She bursts into huge, gulping sobs and collapses in a pile of wet towels. Argus and Danae step back, bumping into the table and kitchen counter, but the other woman makes a pained noise and reaches forward. She doesn’t touch Triss, not quite, just tucks the towel around her shoulders a little tighter.
“I know, hon, I know,” she coos, “It’s been a long, rough night. But you did real good.”
“I-I-I-I ha-hafta go h-h—home!,” Triss gasps.
“Oh,” the mean one grunts, “Great.”
~
It’s not like she’d wanted to tell these strangers where she lives, but Triss couldn’t think of what else to do.
“We could put her on a taxi,” Danae’d said, after Triss had refused to answer any questions about herself, not her name, her phone number, or whether strange things like this had ever happened to her before. “Hand over some twenties, let someone else worry about her.”
“The Courts tried to take her from her home,” the other woman, whose name turned out to be Ruth, said, “They could make another attempt. We can’t let her out of our sight until we know for sure why and who to confront about it.”
Danae snorted, “You don’t seriously think she-“
“Someone has to talk to her family either way,” Ruth went on, “She has one, and she’s too young to sneak out for lessons or keep a secret worth a damn.”
Nobody looked very comfortable with that idea, not from where Triss huddled on one of the kitchen chairs. Her head throbbed from that little hysterical fit, her nose was one big stuffed brick on her face, she was still damp and she’d refused to eat or drink anything they’d given her. They’d all looked especially annoyed about that last part. Her need to keep all this weird stuff away from Hannibal and her new place warred with her need to get home before he noticed, and the sky outside the window kept on lightening. Tired, achey and a million percent done with being so lost, she’d blurted the address into the tense silence.
It turned out Ruth owned a car, although she wouldn’t let Triss out of the house until she’d at least pulled one of Argus’ sweaters on over her wet things (Argus brought it back after he went to change out of his own pajamas, cotton pants and a U. of M. t-shirt that couldn’t be further from Hannibal’s matching sets. Her dad used to go to bed in stuff like that.). She ended up in the backseat with Danae, who leaned against the window to keep maximum distance.
By the time they reach the house, it’s true morning, bright and sunny. Danae whistles as they pull up the drive, but Triss is too anxious to catch the looks Ruth and Argus exchange. She’s too busy scanning the sidewalks for cop cars, like the times kids ran away from foster care and had to be dragged back or called in. Half the usual cars are missing, ‘cuz people went to work, but that’s normal. Everything’s normal. And quiet. Was she wrong? Instead of being angry, maybe Hannibal’s just relieved not to have to take care of her anymore. Maybe he’s not looking for her at all.
After that thought, Ruth has to coax her out of the backseat, and she drags behind the adults as they head up the front walk. Even Danae gets in on the baffled looks they pass around at this abrupt change of heart. It’s Argus who rings the bell, Triss hugging herself tightly, holding all the bad-thought shrapnel inside. She rocks herself as footsteps approach - he didn’t go to work, is that good? - holds her breath as the door swings open, and freezes when Hannibal Lecter focuses on the three unknown adults instead of the kid hiding behind them.
He doesn’t look mad. Not that he ever really does, but then again it’s almost 9:00 am and he’s not wearing a tie or anything yet. That’s…off, in a way she doesn’t know how to categorize. Does ‘not normal’ equal ‘upset’?
Her skinny arms aren’t enough to restrain her churning belly anymore. Triss explodes past the line of knees and barrels right into Hannibal, wailing “I didn’t run away!” it’s not like she’s hugging his legs or anything, she just crowded into him and her head doesn’t even clear his hip and, okay, maybe she’s got a hand gripping his pantleg, maybe, “I swear! There was a-a horse? And then—“
“We found her near the harbor,” Argus interjects, and he sounds calm even if Triss has no idea what kind of face he’s making, with her own mashed up against twill, “It’s a…long story, but she was reluctant to talk to us at first. I apologize for what you must have gone through this morning.”
muffled wailing in the distance
Date: 2016-06-03 11:14 pm (UTC)Hannibal wakes up immediately to swamp grass and cattails and boggy, sinking, greedy mud. The smell is so strong and unexpected that it melds with his just-dreaming mind and, for a moment, he's surprised that his sheets are dry and not swarmed with crayfish. He's at his door in seconds, layering on weapons as he goes - formal pajamas have the benefit of pockets even before any sneaky additions are sewn in. But there he pauses, and listens. The smell lingers, but there's no sound - except of rustling cloth. Heavy, slow, arrhythmic. The breeze at a curtain.
An open window.
Hannibal sneaks down his own hallway with the light, purposeful feet of a predator. In his own home, he at least has the advantage of knowing every single squeaky board. He has no idea what to expect, although his mind is slowly searching through anything connected to this smell. A mutant? A supernatural being? Some strange new specification of Patricia's vague powers?
When he finally gets to Patricia's room, he's almost relieved to see her gone completely and not dead or dying. He assumes kidnapping despite the lack of signs of struggle, because the smell is so...foreign. If it's attachment clouding his judgment, Hannibal doesn't see it; but he'd like to think that if Patricia suddenly matured into marsh-themed powers overnight, that he'd still be able to recognize her in them. These are foreign, more foreign than a crime scene without any scent of fear - if Patricia was coerced, whoever did it had a power similar to his own, because the absence of terror splattering the walls is its own calling card to the supernatural.
--
As the morning lingers on, Hannibal dresses in fits and starts, with the vague intention of being able to search outside without arousing suspicion, should that time arrive. He has on a loose, soft sweater and the loosest, softest khakis he owns - which is to say they're not much of either, but compared to the rest of his wardrobe they might as well have come from an Old Navy catalogue. His hair is uncombed and product-free, and keeps shading his eyes as he pours over another book, hovering at his kitchen table.
So when an unexpected chord rings in his head, he's presentable, but only just. Alert and aggressively suspicious, he replaces the weapons he'd been gathering from his house and his Collection. His mouth is a flat, calculating line as he stands at attention by the dusty book on water demons, waiting to see if this is another ambush--
And then his bell rings.
Hannibal pads over immediately, footsteps purposefully loud. A linoleum knife shifts its weight in a hidden sleeve pocket as he swings the door open.
It brings to view not one, but three foreign adults, two of whom smell incriminatingly like Patricia's bedroom swamp. All of whom smell hesitant. Anxious. Defiant, defensive. Like animals cornered in their den, ready to fight to the death but not in the wrong for starting the scuffle themselves.
Odd. It's not who he expected. Hannibal had been anticipating nothing, or perhaps an owner of the kelpie demanding a ransom, in the best case scenario. Kelpies eat their prey, but Patricia is gifted in some way, and kidnappings of supernatural and mutant children are tragically commonplace. Outside of a normal human committing a hate crime, someone utilizing another supernatural being likely wants her, alive, for money or for magical gain. It's not the worst-case scenario, but it's far from the best. She could be intended as part of some underground, mythical army, for all Hannibal is aware - such things certainly exist.
But no sooner have all the adults begun sizing one another up than movement stirs at the level of the strangers' knees, and Hannibal only has time to glance down before a couple bowling balls worth of weight hits his shins and lower thighs.
She's here. Hannibal breathes in and realizes he didn't notice her right away because her smell is diffused by the kelpie that absolutely oozes from her, but it's definitely her, unless horrible illusions are a part of some long con going on in front of him. With no clear objectives or motivations for him to see, Hannibal feels unbalanced in his lack of certainty about what to suspect.
"I never worried you had run away, Triss." An offensive spell in a vial is squeezed into a deeper corner of his pants pocket when Hannibal squats down immediately. Effectively blocking his doorway, he shifts his legs to one side so as not to force Patricia away with bony knees. His own arms encircle her shoulders even easier than her arms were encircling his legs. With his head bowed into the hug, his next sentence is pressed into downy hair. "I'm very happy to see you're alright."
And then Hannibal looks up past her head at the explanation from the male in the group of strangers.
They didn't call the police. They interrogated a child for information about where to bring her before doing it themselves. If there was any doubt in Hannibal's mind about this being a supernaturally-motivated kidnapping, they've been put solidly to rest. Those on the fringes of society's laws tend to police their own, which means this is likely either a second wave of a con or an honest rescue attempt by a group rightfully wary of law enforcement.
Hannibal is capable of incredible lengths of social niceties, which makes the opposite all the more obvious. His intense focus settles deliberately on the adult who spoke to him - and then, just as deliberately, he ignores all three of them in favor of tucking his chin down to address the child clinging to his khakis. "Now, Patricia." Her full name for (hopefully) her full attention, tone gentle and firm. A solid foundation. One of his hands cups the back of her head, as if shielding her from the strangers.
(She's never clung to him in desperation, and his movements are gentle - she's fragile, but not weak, and his respect for her bodily autonomy comes from a deeper place than either of those concerns could drag up on their own.)
"Please, be honest with me." Patricia is a precociously dishonest child, as it often seems to be dread that holds her back - the sort of conversational fears that only adults should need to worry about so often. Hannibal's face is serenely trusting, even if his disheveled hair might betray his act. "Before I speak with these people, I want you to tell me: did any of them hurt you or threaten you in any way?"
man I'm gonna have to go expand these kid icons, I've only got 2 leftover from before...
Date: 2016-06-04 12:24 am (UTC)"I worried you worried," she says, an admission as groundshaking as it is quiet.
The hug only lasts long enough for her to remember, in the wake of her relief, that this isn't something they really do. Touching for a while, that is. Triss used to, but she feels like she's forgotten how to do it, or let it happen, and now it's like trying to eat with chopsticks instead of a fork. Hannibal projects a no-touching forcefield so strongly it almost makes her wanna mess him up. She hasn't yet, for the same reason she was so worked up in the car - it's all too new, and she can't risk being sent back to CPS.
So they both lean back, Hannibal to look up at Ruth, Argus and Danae, Triss to swallow down all those freefloating pointless anxieties. She's still got a fistful of khakhi pant, though, bunched up next to his knee. She frowns at it until he calls her name.
Half her Christian name, even, yikes. Triss snaps to wary attention, fingers flying straight, but Hannibal just runs a hand down the back of her head like he's testing for gooseeggs and asks her if she's been hurt. If any of them hurt her.
Someone - Danae, probably - snorts. Someone else sighs at that, though she can't guess who. Triss gives the request for honesty a moment of serious consideration, recognizing with the mercurial speed of a practiced liar all the many ways she could make this really unpleasant for the three adults who kept her in a strange house overnight. Like, it wouldn't even be hard. She knows kids whose parents or stepparents got arrested for less. Technically, Danae swearing if you don't stop kicking me in the fucking spleen I'll leave you here to drown I swear to God while towing them both out of the harbor could count as threatening.
"No," she says at length, turning her hands over so Hannibal can see her abraded palms. The first layer or two of skin has just peeled away, leaving them red and raw. The insides of her calves, which were pressed against the kelpie's sides, look about the same, and that's not even starting on her lividly swollen left knee. "The horse thing did that. They were just--" her nose wrinkles as she turns in Hannibal's grip to squint up at them, "Confusing."
Ruth laughs, all the smile lines interlocking. "I'll bet we were," and next to her Danae's rolling her eyes, but Argus' lack of a reaction is the weird thing. He's got his head tilted to the side, like he's listening to them all, but his eyes aren't locked on anybody. They jump around a little, especially over Hannibal, though his attention flicks into the foyer beyond once or twice just while Triss watches.
"There really was a horse," she doesn't mean to sound defensive, it's just...she knows how it sounds, and if it were anybody but Hannibal she wouldn't even've told the the truth about that much, she'd've run away from her rescuers somehow and thought up some other story. But Hannibal knows about the weird. And it's important that he doesn't think she left on purpose. "M'not making it up, she saw it too."
Danae rocks away from the finger Triss points her way, but Argus shifts into the line of accusation and says, still calm as anything, "That's where the story gets long." He's not talking to her, he's talking to Hannibal, which is a familiar if unpleasant sensation that makes Triss sigh out all her frustration and exhaustion. The look she gives her guardian, back safely to the others, says: Now do you see what I've been dealing with?
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Date: 2016-06-04 12:57 am (UTC)But Hannibal doesn't see or smell a lie from Patricia when she says 'no', and if he's going to keep building her trust as he's been, he'll believe her. He takes her wrists, gently, to inspect her palms - they haven't been cleaned, there's still some dirt shoved in the crevices of skin. They didn't have first aid with them? Or they didn't care? Or they couldn't get close enough? Hannibal has no confusion about Patricia's aversion to strangers. Getting a ride on 'the horse thing' immediately prior couldn't have helped, no matter how friendly or unfriendly her rescuers.
'She saw it too'. The older woman smells like kelpie almost as much as Patricia - Hannibal believes her. It's the first time he looks away from her face, to size up the woman who reeks of water demon and was apparently the only one present when the kelpie was. That would logically mean she gathered the other two afterwards. They're an odd group. Out of necessity, then? What sort of secrets are they hiding?
"I believe you." Hannibal says to Patricia, in a very reasonable tone considering they're discussing a kelpie kidnapping an eight year-old child out of a second story window. When he stands up again, he lets his hand linger on Patricia's shoulder, until it can't reach anymore. His fingertips brush the tangled, damp fluff of her hair, instead, and he takes an unmistakable step forward - defensive and offensive all at once, although his face has melted into a cordial mask.
Patricia ends up behind his left leg as he reaches out a hand. This is, after all, the second time the man has tried to be the only one actually offering up the promise of an explanation. "I apologize. I wasn't expecting anyone to bring her home for me."
And then. Then he turns to the taller woman, while still holding the man's hand. And, certainly not because he slept for only two hours last night and definitely not because he's been up frantically searching through old books for clues as to where his adopted child might have been kidnapped to, and obviously not because she was the one who snorted at him trying to assure that said adopted child hadn't been manhandled by the strangers who dropped her off, he asks: "Should I thank you for getting her away from the kelpie? You certainly smell as though you fought it yourself."
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Date: 2016-06-04 02:01 am (UTC)She manages not to grab onto any more of his clothes, curling her hands up in the overlong sleeves of Argus' sweater instead. It smells comfortingly of coffee and old books, only familiar 'cuz Hannibal's got a whole library full of antique stuff, too.
The two men shake hands, Argus' attention fully on Hannibal's face instead of some point over his shoulder, though his head hasn't tilted all the way back up yet. Triss lapses back into silence and watches him, unable to put her finger on what, exactly, is so weird about that. There's something about the set of his mouth that makes her think he might be biting down on the side, his cheek or tongue or inner lip, and what's up with that? Whatever it is relaxes as he goes to answer Hannibal's apology, but her guardian's already done that thing where he's steamrolled the conversation over to Danae instead.
Triss catches two things: that Danae's gonna need some aloe for that burn, and that she, Ruth and Argus all jerk in surprise. Their reaction sets Triss into immediate flight-mode, her whole brain lighting up with the instinct to get away from Angry Adults, especially the one who sliced a horse mostly in half right in front of her. She doesn't have the capacity left to wonder why they react the way they do, she's too caught up in what that means for her safety, and maybe Hannibal's.
Except nothing about his posture changes at all.
Danae grins a not-grin at him, lips peeling back to show all her teeth. Unlike some people in this conversation, Triss's never been a medical doctor, but she's pretty sure that's more teeth than most people have? Something ripples over her skin, too, like a band of cloud sweeping in front of the sun, and now Triss does grab hold of Hannibal's sleeve. She can't remember what Danae did with that huge rusty knife she had, it's just another blank space in her memories, but what if she's hiding it under her jacket somewhere or-- "Break out those knives you got up your sleeve, man, and I'll show you how I did it."
"Danae," Argus groans. Ruth, who Triss would've expected to be the one shushing Danae again, only eyes Hannibal speculatively, smile lines no longer in evidence. Whatever she sees, it has her shaking her head and planting her hands on her hips.
"Well, since there's no use closing the stall door now that the horse, or kelpie or what have you, is already loose, why don't we hash it out somewhere with a first aid kit? Maybe she'll let you clean those scrapes, Mister..?"
The dangling question is obviously an invitation for an introduction, but Triss is too busy reeling to notice. Ruth said kelpie but so did Hannibal. He didn't just know she'd been taken away by something, he knew what, and that she must've been rescued, and--
She sorta kinda understands how his powers work. She knows his nose is really sensitive, anyway, but once again he's put all kinds of not-even-there clues together to come up with a true answer. It's creepy when it's directed at her, but kind of neat to watch from the outside. Maybe she doesn't even need to ask these people about what happened, maybe Hannibal can just look at them and know.
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Date: 2016-07-20 07:14 am (UTC)Things've changed again.
Things're still changing, Triss admits to herself as she hobbles up the stairs to shower. Hannibal wouldn't let her help with the teacups, and even though she knows she's tired and sore and clumsier than usual it still stings a little.
But she is so, so tired. Everything's throbbing by the time she reaches the landing; her hands, her legs, her knee, even a weird new rawness under her skin. Triss wonders if maybe that's why Argus said they'd have to wait to test her colors against his sounds, if he knew the magic was starting to hurt. Ruth had agreed that she'd had a very long day even though it's only noon, and even Danae nodded. Triss just wishes they'd said why.
The realization that she's got a lot to learn, and she's never been a smart student anyway, hits as she's unwinding the bandages from her hands. What if she's too stupid to do this Very Important Thing? This thing that's dangerous to others and makes her a big fat target? She's only any good if she can get it under control, but what if she just can't learn how?
If she weren't so tired and wrung out, if her eyes weren't already puffy and itchy from crying, if her head didn't feel like a balloon full of pudding, she'd probably freak out again. But three meltdowns in one day is all her tiny body can process, so instead she coils the gauze up into two little rolls, rips the bandages off her legs, and curls up on the shower floor under the spray. Eventually the steam starts to smell less like a swamp, and she works up the energy to reach for soap.
She can't stop thinking, though. Like, how come the other Allomancers didn't stick around to talk to Hannibal? Adults love sitting up talking after the kids go to bed, even if it's only the middle of the afternoon. It's their favorite thing. Did they not want to talk to him? Were they afraid of what he'd ask? How secret are their secrets and are they gonna ask her to keep secrets from him too? She's got a couple, but it's stuff she decided she didn't wanna talk about.
They better not ask her to take sides. She'll have to tell them so, even if they don't like it. Ruth will probably understand - Ruth was the one who insisted on looping her family in on the weirdness.
But Ruth was also, unquestionably, the scariest person in the room when things looked like they were gonna go bad.
Triss chews that over as she dries off and climbs into a long t-shirt covered in cartoon bees. Danae killed the kelpie and got her away, but she stepped back and let Ruth stare Hannibal down. That is. Something. A little thrill of remembered fear shimmies up her spine as she dries her hair and tries to pinpoint what everybody else was doing while she sat there 100% sure somebody was gonna murder Hannibal's entire face.
Was he...kind of happy about it?
There are many shades of happy-Hannibal, each harder to detect than the last and all of them brought on by really, really weird stuff. Triss kinda doesn't even want to try and figure them out, she's got too many other things to sort out right now, but why would he wanna pick a fight with people he already thought had kelpie-murdering powers?
She's halfway down the stairs already, clumping awkwardly with her sore knee. The sounds of running water and clinking dishes have faded away, but Hannibal's still in the kitchen, collecting the scattered (magic) books. Triss leans against the doorway and stares at them for a second, remembering the vivid colors, before she blurts:
"What'd you call them before? When you were tryin'ta make 'em mad on purpose? Was it something bad?"
Obviously it was, but how bad? N-word levels of bad? Because, Hannibal, aside from setting off a bomb that frightened her as much as it offended them, you can't use anybody's N-word..
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Date: 2016-07-22 03:28 pm (UTC)Hannibal supposes he should have realized that Triss would be able to detect 'saying something incendiary just to upset someone else'. Foster homes teach you a lot of things quicker than even a school yard can. Hannibal hadn't yet glanced up when he heard Triss padding into the doorway, but now he looks at her. His arms hold a stack of three of the books, all carefully balanced so that none of them press on or rip at the others' delicate bindings. If Triss were an adult, he'd answer her over his shoulder while toting them off, leaving his cleaning uninterrupted.
He still feels equally unapologetic, but Hannibal doesn't brush her off so neatly. After a moment of considering, he very gently places the books back on the table. "It's a title they carried, centuries ago." Even if a lie couldn't be undermined by Triss asking those three potential teachers the same question she's asking him right now, Hannibal wouldn't be bothering to lie to her. He circles around the table but stays near it, pulling out a chair to sit down while facing her. "But they didn't choose it for themselves. It's a term their hunters used for them."
He sorts through the facts, weighing Triss's age and existing fear of her powers against them. "The world is already a much safer place for people like us, Triss. But today, the only written works that have survived about your people - or at least, the only ones that I have found - were written by their enemies." Hannibal inclines his head, as if conceding to a point that they've discussed before. "As you know, the terms that humans pick for people unlike themselves don't tend to be flattering. Jealousy and fear make them defensive."
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Date: 2016-07-23 03:28 am (UTC)(Hannibal has never once said anything disparaging about her past therapists, but the few times she's mentioned them he's projected this kinda...Doneness. She always gets the feeling he's working real hard not to close his eyes and sigh.)
She crosses her arms and squints her eyes and stays leaning against the door instead. This is the first anybody's said about hunting or enemies, except for the obvious fae, and she's not sure how to feel that people have written books about how much they hate her. But there's lots of stuff online and in newspapers about mutants, a lot of it terrible, so that's probably not new. She decides that doesn't bother her as much as belong to a 'they'. Well, that doesn't bother her, exactly, it's just a weird feeling. Like staring at a plate of something she's never eaten before - it could be good or it could be terrible and she won't know until she digs in. It's...distracting.
"Then why'd you use it?" she asks. Pushes, really, "You're s'posed to ask people what they wanna be called if you're not sure." Her teacher for the last half of second grade said that, which Triss only really remembers 'cuz she got in trouble for it with the principal later. Her squint pulls lower, into a true frown, "I'm just like them and you used the bad name for it." For us.
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Date: 2016-07-23 01:35 pm (UTC)Is she...trying to scold him?
It's not appropriate to laugh. Not even to smile. Luckily, Hannibal has been perfecting his poker face for the last few decades. He leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees, drawing his face even closer to being level with hers.
His voice is still even and calm, clearly not rattled by her pressing him. "I wanted to confirm my suspicions, if that was what they were. And I wanted them to know that I was not as far in the dark as they thought I was." Hannibal's head tilts bare degrees to the left. "Words have the power to hurt, yes, but this word is a secretive one. It's not nearly the same as insults you may hear in the street or at school. There are implications about what one would go through to have learned the word I used. It is no casual term."
Hannibal's gaze doesn't waver from Triss. "If I am to trust them with instructing you, I would rather know now about how they react to unpleasant surprises. A rash temper wouldn't do for teaching a child with telekinetic abilities."
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From:AU2: Inherited Fallout
Date: 2017-01-16 03:29 am (UTC)“You know my birth date?”
Neph blinks, says, “Of course I do?”
They stare at each other, the silence an awkward variety they haven’t experienced in a while, Hannibal, blank and Neph, stricken, unsure whether he’s more bowled over that she’d known (he never told her, no, she’d forgotten that was privileged information dug up about his future self during her early google searches) or that she wants to do something nice about it.
“It’s…eighteen’s kinda’a big deal over here,” she tries, “I just thought…”
Given the excuse of abiding by some arbitrary American custom, Hannibal reanimates. Or his eyes do, anyway, thoughts beginning to tick away behind them. Neph waits, hands clasped behind her back, head tipping sideways. At last, he says, “There’s an installation at the Walters I’ve been meaning to look into. They offer a student discount.”
“Done!” Neph beams, “And I got the tickets, that’s how birthdays work.” A thing she’s familiar with in theory, if not practice. Hannibal nods at this and then, uncharacteristically, visibly hesitates.
“Might we invite Will?”
Neph’s smile dims down into something a little more indulgent. “It’s your birthday, man, you can invite whoever you want! I’ll call ‘im.”
She does. Well, she texts, because who calls anybody for real these days? M wants to geek out about art for his birthday ru in? she sends, along with a calendar link for the Saturday slot they’d normally spend at the library. Hannibal’s birthday’s a Friday, which doesn’t work for any of them on account of work and school and other crap. Neph waits, and imagines Will’s distracted oh no face if he realizes, as she did, that he never really asked about things like birthdays. She follows up with a no presents just come.
He does. Which is how they end up at an exhibit titled “Ferocious Beauty: Wrathful Deities From Tibet and Nepal”, which makes Will blink and Neph facepalm. Is this about a thing for asian art, or a thing for rage and stabbing? She doesn’t have long to wonder, not when her habitual sweep of Bronze turns up buttloads of old magic under active shielding.
“Don’t touch anything,” she leans in to breathe in Hannibal’s ear as he takes in a statue of a lady with way more arms than socially acceptable. “Like, seriously, half the pieces in here’re cursed as fuck.”
He shoots her a surprised but appreciative look, eyes gleaming with the same eagerness he always lets slip when she shares something of her worldview. “But surely someone would have set that off by now?” he murmurs back, too soft for anyone to hear over the general susurrus of the crowd.
“It’s all under real tight shields,” Neph says, mouth quirking in a pleased smile of her own. “Somebody on staff here really knows their shit.” She hadn’t known that about the Walters museum, hasn’t been here before, but that’s the kind of thing that’s surely going to come in useful down the line. Hannibal makes a thoughtful noise, but whatever else he might have said gets interrupted by Will, who comes up on Hannibal’s other side to ask what they’re conspiring about.
“Nothing,” Neph jerks her chin towards the statue, “Mari was just explaining how come Kali’s a human octopus.”
Which means he has to actually explain that to Will, who seems to find it interesting. For Neph, who happens to know that one of the six other identified Mistborn uses ‘Kali’ as a moniker, the whole thing is extra funny.
They wander the gallery, room after room chaining out through the historic building, each one packed with snarling faces and bulbous eyes. There are other exhibits, of course, and they’ll get there eventually, but this is what they came to see. Neph hangs back a safe distance from all the art, hands stuffed in her pockets to smother temptation. Her slower pace of reading and lack of familiarity with the history that shaped the work means she wanders ahead of the boys, gaze tripping over all the encoded symbolism with a vague kind of interest. Before she realizes it, she’s in another room all together, this one a little less packed.
A flicker of red near the far door catches her eye. It glows the way only magic can, and unlike all the other ruddy lights she’s seen today, this one isn’t filtered through green shields. Neph’s chin jerks up, the pattern-seeking part of her brain labeling the source as a person before the rest labels that person as Samson.
He’s looking straight at her. Watching her, eyebrows drawn in. Their eyes lock immediately, blowing any possibility of this being a chance encounter right out of the water. A startled breath catches in Neph’s lungs, all the moisture in her mouth seeming to draw away with it; her mouth seals shut, her jaw locks, and not even she can say whether it’s startled nerves or a defensive slamming of doors.
Samson holds her gaze for a moment, then cants his head away, indicating the hall behind him. He turns and is gone, just a smear of red on the doorframe where he’d leaned his hand.
Neph stands, statue still, heart hammering against her ribs. What is this? A trap? No, too public for that. Is someone else casing the place, eyeing one of the pieces? Did she just wander through someone else’s reconnaissance? Or is he following her for some reason? She hasn’t seen Samson since—she’s avoided him, or he’s avoided her, not too difficult when they’d only met once before—anyway, she was happy to just never cross paths again, prepared to say ‘no’ to any prospective crews involving him, but mostly hoping it just…wouldn’t come up.
Now he’s here. Why? It’s got to be a work thing, but she hasn’t detected any other non-shielded abilities, no traces of Allomancy. If…if she’s getting in the way of someone’s play, though, she should find out how and assure them she’s not planning anything of her own.
Creakily, like someone lifting themselves out of a hospital bed, she takes a step after him. Then another, following the comet trail of Pewter embers until it spills into an open-air sculpture court at the center of the building. Marble stairs lead down to a small, carefully tended gardens, bare shrubs and branches pruned back around men and women frozen in flowing stone. Samson leans against one pillars, beside a stone bannister, watching the doorway for her. Neph marches over to the opposing pillar, so the two of them frame the stairs like sphinxes. She folds her arms and sets her shoulders against the stone and says:
“What d’you want?”
As opening gambits go, it’s not her most diplomatic. Neph doesn’t care, has no room for delicacy with every organ in her chest rattling like badly latched shutters. Samson’s eyes narrow, mouth twisting, hands curling into fists. Neph watches Pewter eddy around him, a sandstorm lit red by a figmentary sun, but then it stills.
“I want off the blacklist,” he snaps.
And Neph, who has no fucking clue what that's even supposed to mean, gapes, “What?”
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Date: 2017-01-17 02:49 am (UTC)Hannibal isn't ever going to forget the incredibly nice fountain pen Neph bought him (how had she even know which kinds he liked? had she hacked into his laptop? he hadn't bothered following up on it). He's even going to look back relatively fondly on the wine glass she gave him.
It's just that a birthday gift seems so much more personal and specific. It goes out of its way to be kind and make a deal of it, when Hannibal would have been content not mentioning when his birthday was happening until casually mentioning that now he'd be able to go apply for a driving permit without so many hoops to jump through.
So of course he settles on something that he can't keep forever, except in spirit. Of course he suggests an experience instead of a tangible object. When the difference between a Christmas or a birthday present is so nebulous and rooted in the spirit behind them, Hannibal can't help but honor that in his request.
And he gets it. A day for him to spend time with the only two people currently in his life that he devotes any amount of fond thoughts towards, the only two people he would kill for without hesitation, would help shelter or bandage or hide if they asked him to. (He half-expects Neph to eventually need help hiding a body. He's almost disappointed that this hasn't happened yet.) The lengths he would go to, to keep the two of them around, are lengths Hannibal isn't capable of exploring yet in himself.
He's happy, he thinks as they're riding the bus system over to the museum. He reflects back on that conversation he and Neph had before, about the strange nature of happiness and how he'd realized he hadn't been before by realizing the difference between feeling it then. Self-reflecting on his feelings has been happening semi-frequently since that initial revelation.
That happiness isn't like a fragile glass sphere, though if he had to put a word to it, he'd describe it as round. Or simply perhaps that it radiates.
When he leans into Neph's shoulder during a turn and doesn't shift back away, she doesn't shoo him off. She actually ends up digging a bony shoulder back into his slightly-softer upper arm, leaning more heavily against him as she flips through Pinterest on her phone. Will watches them for a moment, his stare a presence Hannibal can feel on the back of his neck, but he doesn't comment.
At the exhibit itself, Hannibal finds it's easy to lose himself. It always is, around art. He explains a few pieces to Neph, a few pieces to Will, but as time wears on and everyone starts discovering what they're most naturally interested in staring at, everyone drifts.
Knowing that these pieces are imbued with powers, even curses, gives them an added depth, but Hannibal would be content even without that knowledge. He's stopped in front of a painting of the one Neph had been so concerned about earlier, Kali. He examines the way she furiously steps across her prostrate partner, demon's head in one hand and a knife in another, blood painting them all.
The way a goddess created simply to kill for vengeance is stopped only by a reminder of those she loves. Of what she's killing to protect.
Hannibal drifts off in search of Neph.
The scent is not terribly easy to follow, what with the air moving from so many guests and so much interference from other smells, but he knows Neph too well to be held back much by any of that. He follows it outside, a little surprised to find himself in a garden. Of the two of them, Neph isn't usually the one needing a break from poorly-ventilated areas, and museums are actually wonderfully not stuffy, what with all the issues of preservation.
He steps onto the stone walkway, not seeing her immediately.
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Date: 2017-01-17 05:14 am (UTC)It's a bizarre enough request that Neph hardly even registers his anger. She doesn't move, except to tilt her head and squint one eye. "I have no fucking clue what you're talking about. I didn't." Her voice is even, steady, a regular speaking volume since there's nobody else out in the chilly garden. She hasn't decided yet if that's a plus or a minus - does she trust Samson to control himself when there's no one in direct eyeshot? Will he be smart about anything he says?
No, as it turns out. He comes off the pillar, lips stretched in a snarl, and Neph hitches herself backward even though there's nowhere to go. His rage presses in, palpable on her skin. Instead of advancing on her, which she'd half-expected, Samson tears himself to the side, pacing the width of the colonnade. "You--ever since--Anansi's cut me off. Loki's pretending I don't exist. Benkei broke my fucking nose that bi-"
The rest of his tirade gets lost in a soft hum, a generator kicking in somewhere low in Neph's chest. It vibrates through her bones, buzzing the tiny ones in her ears, until she's buoyed on a gentle swell of sound that completely drowns out Samson's rant. She doesn't need to hear to understand.
Neph told exactly three people about that night in the elevator. Lecter, whose doorstep she'd pitched up on like tidal wrack, Benkei, as a fellow Pewterarm with some small authority to police her own, and Anansi. She hadn't even been that upfront with Anansi, only suggesting, in halting words, that Samson maybe shouldn't be trusted around beer and girls, together, at the same time. He'd looked at her with unusually grave eyes, a frown on his normally laughing mouth, and apologized that she was 'made to feel unsafe within one of my crews'. That was it.
Or so she'd thought. Now, she realizes that her subtext must've read as actual-text, and that Anansi has less tolerance for that kind of bullshit than she ever would have guessed. Or maybe...maybe he just did the math and decided to back the better bet. Pewterarms are a dime a dozen, but Mistborn... Loki must've heard from him, and come to a similar conclusion. Benkei...
Benkei hit him for her.
The humming buzz fills her from toes to fingertips, champagne bubbles in her blood. Neph doesn't actually care why they did it, if it was expedience or disgust or what, only that they did. Someone stepped into her corner without her ever realizing, and now Samson's out of work in most of the northeast! Anansi coordinates crews from Baltimore to DC, and Loki's grip runs from Pittsburgh to Detroit. Samson could try his luck in New York, territory nobody bothers to officially hold on account of it being an epicenter of Weird, but somehow she doubts Benkei stopped (or began) by breaking his nose. Other people may know that Samson's a grabby piece of shit.
The giddiness, the fizziness, spills out of her in a bright peal of laughter. Not for the first time, that reflex backfires.
Samson whirls on her, normally tan face bleaching white with rage. Neph raises a hand to her mouth, fingers brushing her lips in surprise, but it's too late to call it back and the damage is done. "It's funny how you've ruined things?!" He comes at her in a blur, like tail lights streaking through the dark, and Neph reaches for her only active metals - Bronze, Copper, no time to light the others - throws them at him in a bottle-green wall, smooth as glass, and--
It shouldn't work. Nothing she's ever heard or read says it ought to. Copperclouds aren't physical, tangible things; they work only on active magic, concealing, obscuring, smothering. Samson steps through it as easily as fog, but as he goes it presses against the red fire of his Pewter, stops it dead, stripping it from his outreached arms and jutting face.
They both freeze, Samson's hands a foot from her shoulders (or neck? why is it always the neck?), Neph wide-eyed and wondering. For a second they hold that way, with Pewter beating against her shield like moths battering themselves to death on a lampshade, confined to his chest and legs. Then he breaks, staggers back against his own pillar, gasping, "What the fuckhowdidyou-?!"
Let it never be said Nephele's no opportunist. She blinks away her shock and draws herself up, lighting a bonfire arsenal in her belly. If Samson had the sense to perceive, she'd be a conflagration of colors, or sounds, or smells. She blazes.
"You do not, ever, touch me," she grits out. Neph steps off her post, advancing just far enough that her shield presses him flat, then passes halfway through his chest. He chokes as it compresses the swirling energies within him, and Neph wonders if it's as terrible as the crushing press of his body against hers. "Never again. Do you get that? Nod or something."
He does, though his eyes spit hate. Neph takes a breath, finds she doesn't care, and disperses her Copper. Samson sags forward, hands on his knees, panting as though he's just slogged uphill in the snow.
"You...overreact," he manages to grunt, and Neph's lip curls.
"You've met me like twice," she says, flat, "You don't know shit about me."
He coughs a laugh of his own, ugly and low, "I know I'm gonna rip your goddamn arms off f'you don't tell them to lift this ban."
Neph's hands flex at her sides. The cold air scours at her Tin-hot skin, carrying with it the soft sound of footsteps. They are the only reason she manages not to knee his face in, restraining herself to whispering "Man, I really should've just let you fall off that bridge."
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Date: 2017-01-18 01:24 am (UTC)He breathes in deeply, the cold cleansing to his sense of smell. It carries away the heaviness of rooms full of old objects and of people and the hundreds of places all those people had been that day and brought with them via scent.
Neph is carried to him on the breeze, though, and with it comes a sudden change in how Hannibal perceives this open but isolated space.
Fear, sharp and bitter and high as a scream, filtering just barely through on the wind. His head snaps back to look down the stone path leading down gently to carved stairs.
He almost doesn't hear the footsteps behind himself, but he can't miss Will's voice suddenly cutting through. "I was by the statue of the goddess with a lot of arms - which doesn't really help, but it had a lot more arms than the other ones? - I saw you go outside. You uh, you okay?" Which he says like he's wondering if the answer might be 'no', as if Hannibal has any negative reasons that might cause him to wander outside.
...Is that related to the way Will had asked Hannibal on the bus earlier if he wanted him to crack open the window? Hannibal doesn't have time to properly sink into suspicion about Will's knowledge or motives, though, because now that he can smell Neph he's listening in on the low buzz of distant voices and thinking he recognizes Neph's cadence.
And then her laugh cracks out through the cold air, sounding just like her scent - brittle and pitched high, a surprised shattering that leaves dangerous shards in its wake - and even Will cocks his head with a concerned pinch between his eyebrows.
"I was following Neph. I'm not sure why she left." Hannibal barely glances at Will, but he sees the way Will's confusion has the cautious air of worry hovering nearby.
"Did she know anyone else here?" They can both hear the voices, plural. They're both moving towards the sound, instinctively as silent as their shoes on stone let them.
"Not that I was aware of. It appears she must have found someone."
'It's funny how you've ruined things?!' Hannibal feels a little bit of himself shift, parts growing colder at the edges of his mind and deep in his chest. Level with him, Will's shoulders turn in and down, a protective slink in the way he moves. Neither of them need to discuss what they're overhearing, although Hannibal can only hear the parts that aren't snatched away on the greedy wind.
'You do not, ever, touch me.' In Neph's voice is unmistakable, an icy shard that matches Hannibal point for point, and his own shoulders straighten and go back, his steps slowing further. Will shadows him, based on an instinct Hannibal can only guess at but is grateful for in the moment, because it means he gets to lead them gradually to the edge of one of the pillars that overlooks the brief circular courtyard at the center of the garden.
The gurgling, half-audible threat from a male voice - distinguishable more by tone than by words - is the final straw for Hannibal, who can't imagine who Neph has that is bold enough to approach her in public but stupid enough not to kill her outright if that's their end goal. How does anyone blackmail someone as strong as she is? Does he not know?
Is it personal and not political, and he's just that stupid?
Hannibal looms from behind the pillar, takes in Neph standing righteous and angry in front of a bent-over male he's never seen before. She looks like one of the paintings behind them, but whatever beauty Hannibal sees in that power isn't enough to quiet his urge to wreck whatever's caused it to happen. "You must be incredibly stupid." Hatred, a low drag of ice across stone, crackles in his voice. "Coming to threaten her in public."
Hannibal doesn't turn, but he can see enough from the corner of his eye to know Will assesses the boy for only a few startled moments before his attention roots on Neph instead. Will presses up close to him, shoulders actually intentionally brushing, but Hannibal still only keeps his gaze on Neph and this newcomer who's threatening her. He gets the impression Will is letting him know where he is in space in case...they need to watch their backs, or otherwise coordinate movements.
Will stays absolutely silent, still hunched defensively forward, and there is a gathered panic in the way his breath is picking up. He's watching Neph as if waiting for a cue.
If Hannibal turned to look at him, he'd see the whites of his eyes and a lot of grim, frenzied determination. Quite frankly, Will looks more outwardly ready to fight than Hannibal does, at the moment.
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Date: 2017-01-18 05:25 am (UTC)As one (though she’d stab herself before admitting it) Neph and Samson turn startled, hostile stares on the newcomers. Samson’s twists into a deeper scowl, puzzled but more than ready to charge at this new threat, while Neph’s widens in recognition and surprise.
She’d forgotten, in the rush of realizing there are Allomancers who might defend her even when she’s not there to ask, that they weren’t the first or only people to have her back. Shit, she’d forgotten Hannibal and Will were even here, while hopscotching between fear, confusion, elation and fury. But they are, and they found her even though she hadn’t called, hadn’t asked for their help, Hannibal as scathing as a blizzard and Will knotted up like a tree flashing downstream in a river.
Neph’s gaze flicks between them, heart pounding pure, singing adrenaline. She almost misses Samson straightening up to face them.
“Why?” he says with a truly suicidal helping of scorn, “Because you’re here to do something about it, whoever you are?”
Neph catches Hannibal’s eye, blinks once, and slowly cranks her head back around to face this boy, this idiot who decided to break his way into her life and then had the nerve to howl when he cut himself on the way out. Despite his behavior, she doesn’t think Samson’s truly stupid. Short sighted, maybe, and definitely short on temper, but he’s a little bit older than she is and has been in the game almost as long. If he weren’t at least a little bright, slightly savvy, he’d’ve gotten himself killed years ago. And Hannibal, for all that he doesn’t have the full picture on what she can do, is completely right. Why threaten her at all, especially here? Did he think he could just bully her into giving him what he—
“You--” she closes the space between them in two quick steps, hands slamming into his shoulders with just enough Pewter to actually shove him back a step. “That’s--you thought I wouldn’t wanna make a scene, din’t you?! You thought I’d just roll over and do what you say?! Keep the fuckin' peace?!”
As superpowers go, Pewter’s not outwardly obvious. Sure, she’s seen Samson tear the door off a car and haul braided steel cable like hemp rope, but he doesn’t have to be that blatant. He could just as easily dial it back to the force needed to, say, break her arm, or the speed needed to catch her in the first place, without looking like a meta. He’s bigger than her, about Will’s height but half again as broad in the shoulder, barrel chested and heavy. Nobody would bat an eye if he were able to hurt her.
But they’d look twice if she hurt him back. They’d look twice if she blurred with the speed necessary to dodge him. They’d definitely whip out their phones if gilt-edged paintings or wrought iron hurled themselves benches at his head. By catching her here, following her here, he’s deliberately limited her ability to push back. He’s tried to keep her small and scared.
She’s gonna tear his face off with her teeth.
Any doubts Neph might’ve had about her guess blow away as whites flash around Samson’s eyes, which darts between her and the boys. Imminent violence is a tangible thing, and Neph can’t honestly say if it’s rolling off herself, or Samson, or Hannibal, still as a coiled serpent. She can see it, the instant Samson realizes this other guy, with his faint accent and obvious anger, might know more than your average mundie. The instant he thinks does he know what she is, is that why he thinks this was a bad move. It’s the same instant she realizes he’d put his own bullshit on Hannibal when he’d accused him of thinking he could handle a fight better than she could.
“Who’re they?” he demands of her, though this time it sounds more like bravado and less like rage. The proof’s in the way he hasn’t tried to hit her back for shoving him, yet. He’s just a Thug, he can’t tell if Hannibal and Will are bystanders or players, not like she can. For all he knows they’re other Allomancers displeased with his new reputation, or—or some kind of familiars she’s recently bartered out of the Mart.
Neph just smiles, the last of her immediate fear shredding in the cold white flood. “They’re with me.”
Samson turns, angling himself at a corner to them all. His hands curl into fists, otherwise decent face contorting to taunt, "What happened to 'I don't want anybody'?"
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From:AU2: Bury It
Date: 2017-04-02 02:27 am (UTC)She’s buried beneath several tons of stone, timber and roofing slate, unable to wiggle free of the heavy wooden chair that’s shielded her from the debris. Her parents' frightened sobs filter through the piled bricks, frantic prayers that strike her like spells. With the perversity of dreams, the pitch darkness does nothing to keep her from seeing Father Campbell’s outflung arm, shoulders and head protruding from the collapse. His face is a ruin, a rotted jack o'lantern of splintered bone and cartilage caved in on itself. She screams and screams until the air grows thin and burns her lungs to ash. I’m sorry I’m sorry help me help me help me help me.
They shuffle, playlist-style. Neph would never tell Hannibal, but she almost envies him the predictability of his nightmare.
~
It's the church again. Of course it is.
The memories are so near, so crystal sharp and polished to a razor’s gleaming, it’s easy to accept that she’s never left this place. Patricia lets her parents walk her between the pews, hand in hand in hand, trailing behind Father Campbell. As he lights thousands of candles, they help her into the massive chair that usually sits behind the nave. Dad kisses her temple, Mama brushes her hair back, and everything is gonna be okay.
Buried deep inside where Patricia usually lives, Nephele screams: Get up! Get out of that chair and run, run, run!
Patricia does not. Events play out, inexorable as clockwork, until the panic strikes and the bomb goes off in her belly. Her head snaps back and Nephele surges to the fore just in time to count every single nail they’ve pulled from the ceiling, every rivet and joist and staple. They shower around her like fairy lights, electric blue, trailed by streamers of dust and wood shavings. She has time for one good breath before the beams splinter like the bones of an arthritic giant, time she uses to look at Father Campbell, submit herself to the judgement on his face.
The priest, in all his dark robes, is gone. Hannibal stands there, horrified understanding dawning, and everything in Neph gives a tortured metal shriek.
She’s never known for sure if she Pushed herself off the dais or if Father Campbell shoved her to safety. Her nightmares vary on the subject. This time, as the first beam groans its way free and plummets to earth, dropping at them, she Pushes. She saves herself.
The chair topples backwards, crashes off the steps and onto its side. Neph loses sight of Hannibal’s pale, shocked face as the roof comes down like the end of the world.
As the last tiles fall and the roars die away, she’s not a child buried alive. She is eighteen years old and whimpering in her monstrous throne, eyes screwed resolutely shut.
“Neph.”
No, no no. She bangs her head against the chair back, turns her face resolutely away. Dirt trickles into her mouth, her nose, pastes onto her sweaty face and neck. I won’t look I won’t.
“You have to.”
No. Stop.
“It’s a question of responsibility.”
He uses his there’s no such thing as ‘soaking’ dishes, Nephele voice, and so she looks, because he’s right. The nightmare dials back the pressing blackness of memory and there’s Hannibal, pinned and crushed in Father Campbell’s place, blood seeping slowly from beneath the piled stones.
Neph thrashes against the ties at her ankles and wrists. She tries to bend her neck to chew at them, but they remain just out of reach of her snapping teeth. Her blood wets the rope, soaking it, mashing the fibers tighter together. If she can just slip a hand loose, just reach out to him--his one intact eye stares glassily, half popped from its socket by the press of a granite block. Teeth litter the ground, blood pooling in his open mouth, bone everywhere she looks and Neph digs her nails into the arms of the chair so hard they peel away and--
~
She kicks herself awake, the sick sensation of fingernails bending chasing her back into her body. The pillow clutched to her face is twisted and damp with tears and sweat and saliva. Her pjs aren’t much better, wet and quickly cooling. Neph lies still for dozens of juddery heartbeats, staring into the dark, relieved by its very darkness.
Eventually she reaches out, fingers stretching across cotton instead of rubble, until her knuckles brush the smooth paint of her wall. No buried bodies. No sticky blood. No Hannibal.
You can’t do this. She tells the universe at large, hand recoiling into a shaking fist. You can’t change the rules.
Except of course it can. It can do anything it wants, and fuck her. Fuck everyone. Neph rolls onto her back to face the glow-in-the-dark stars stuck on her ceiling, dimmed by at least six hours of solid dark. If she wants them back, she’ll have to turn on a light. Maybe she should, she’s never had Hannibal’s knack for just rolling over and collapsing back to sleep.
Hannibal. Alarm plucks a wire in her chest, draws her tight until she’s sitting upright. Whatever her other gifts, Neph’s not prone to prophetic dreaming. Not her wheelhouse. But those things have been known to happen to total mundies now and then. Don’t moms sometimes have warning dreams when their kids are in danger? Don’t twins do that? Married couples? What if something’s seriously wrong, and that wasn’t just her subconscious having another laugh at her expense?
What if everything’s fine, and she busts in on him for no reason?
Neph runs her hand down her face, a cursory wipe against the tears and sweat there. Everything’s not fine, not with her. Could that be enough to shove back the ghost of his face when he realized she was about to crush them both?
The darkened apartment is no obstacle; Neph habitually learns her way around her places in the dark, mapping them within the first couple days. She’s standing outside Hannibal’s room almost before she realizes it, before she can even think I should’ve changed into clean pjs. These ones are cold down her back, behind her knees.
The door opens silently under her hand, and closes just as well behind her. Deep, even breathing fills the room like a bellows, like the rush of blood in her head. Neph makes out the boy-lump in the middle of the bed even as she moves close enough to get a knee up on the mattress.
“Hannibal?” her voice is a little thready, fraying, “Um…”
no subject
Date: 2017-04-02 08:47 pm (UTC)But it didn't improve much, living in the same safe place every night. It didn't improve a lot having even Murasaki's scent nearby, no matter how much he could concentrate on the orange rind-cinnamon of the mansion and let it lull him to sleep.
The nightmares couldn't be kept back by anything he'd been allowed to stumble into. So he'd taken matters into his own hands.
Killing some of the men felt like it ought to have helped. In many ways, it had - he didn't dream about it as frequently. But it was still unpredictable, affected by nothing he did during his waking hours - except for the few stressors in his life that reliably made it worse.
But then he'd met Neph, and she'd been remarkably unfazed by the screaming nightmares, or his blank stares when woken, or even the one time he'd propelled himself out of bed away from her and needed a full two minutes to breathe himself back to full consciousness so he could come back onto the mattress. She never left afterwards, either - they'd collapse back onto his bed, and he was allowed to be as clingy as he liked. In fact, to that end, she was just as willing and eager to lay across one another and not budge except for sticking knees and elbows in questionably-comfortable places as the night wore on. Hannibal never had a repeated nightmare on the evenings when Neph joined him.
As accidentally passing out on the couch together became common enough to notice patterns, too, Hannibal noticed something new.
For the first time in his life, he seemed to have discovered something that actually kept his nightmare from finding him.
*
Whether or not the scent of her is actually enough to abate it, Hannibal has been remarkably agreeable about letting Neph leave her blankets in his room after a joint night. In fact, he'd taken to offering up increasingly implausible reassurances not to bother herself taking them out when she left in the morning, that he'd get it for her later, and then leaving them in his bedroom on purpose - she'd taken the hint and now he generally gets one of her blankets wordlessly left on his bed per laundry cycle.
Which is only fair, really, considering Hannibal has several jackets and undershirts he needs to keep an eye on or else they might disappear on the day he was intending to wear them.
Tonight, he's roused from the dreamless catch of sleep by sound and movement. He's never been particularly hard to wake up, always a light sleeper, but Hannibal is slower to react when it's Neph's scent so close to him. He rolls over, left arm caught in the very star-covered blanket Neph had shared with Will just a spare few weeks back, and blinks through near-pitch darkness in the direction of her voice and more Neph-smell.
But it's not just her shampoo and his soap, it's the acid bite of fear, catching at the base of his tongue and cranking his brain the rest of the way into wakefulness.
Hannibal goes from slowly rolling over to sitting up with force, leaning for her immediately. His voice is pitched low in case there's an intruder. "What is it?" He can barely see her, nightvision or not - Hannibal had been meticulous about buying blackout curtains and getting the rods that allow it to wrap flush to the wall on either side, so they're going with the blueish LED clock display from half the room away - but her shape is already encroaching up onto the bed, which is good. He reaches a hand out for her arm, touches a sleeve that's damp at the pit of her elbow.
"What happened?"
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Date: 2017-04-02 10:06 pm (UTC)It's not enough to make out his face. She can't be sure it's whole and not--not bashed open. Neph leans forward, planting her hands on the mattress for balance. Something about her approach flips him wide awake. And why shouldn't it? She's never snuck into his room without a reason, before. If he did the same, she'd immediately assume they were in danger.
"What is it?" he asks, quiet like somebody might overhear. The low, sleep roughed urgency in it is nothing like the matter-of-fact tone from her dream. Now that he's sitting up, the ghostly light shows the flat angles of his cheek, jaw and nose. Unbroken. Neph lets out a breath, relaxing so abruptly her ribs rattle around her deflated lungs.
Hannibal doesn't take that as an answer, asks her what happened as he reaches for her arm. For a lightheaded moment, Neph's not sure he'll actually be able to make contact. She couldn't rip loose in her dream, no matter how hard she tried. Then his hand is on her elbow, warm and heavy from sleep. The touch slides down her forearm to settle around her wrist and Neph finds the muscle memory to inhale again.
"Nothing." Apparently. He's fine. There's nothing to worry about except for this sudden change in nightmare programming. She could turn around and go back to her room and find something to do until morning, if she wanted.
She does not want.
Neph pulls her other knee onto the bed, weight rocking forward onto her hands as she folds her legs under her. "I just," the dry click of her swallow is mortifyingly loud in the muffled room. Neither of them can see her flush but it burns her face and neck, feverish under the sheen of drying sweat. "Can I stay? Here?"
Nothing in her head, heart or gut screams that he might turn her away. Not after all the nights they've navigated his nightmares together. Nope, instead those battered organs whisper about the risks of being seen, of becoming dependent on others for comfort, of how much worse this may make her own dreams.
She clenches her fingers in his ridiculous threadcount comforter and resolutely does not care.
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Date: 2017-04-03 12:08 am (UTC)But 'nothing' also means he now has an entirely different problem to deal with, one that still was enough to make Neph reek of terror. It's enough to have the hair at the back of his neck raising, a visceral response Hannibal's never really had around other frightened people. Is it because this is Neph?
(Isn't that always why: because it's Neph? They've transcended so many boundaries, some of which Hannibal had drawn himself and others he hadn't consciously realized existed around him, that he hardly thinks of them as separate people anymore. For a lot of his waking hours, he-and-Neph are a fuzzy-bordered amoeba of joint household chores and decisions and grocery lists and waking up in tangled-sheet dogpiles.)
The sour tingle of fear contracts and pinches, a bite that reminds Hannibal of students in class when they dropped their textbooks or the one man he'd been near while he fumbled through getting turned down by the woman who was at the park with him. Embarrassed?
Neph's weight is moving towards him, the combined heft of them making the mattress sink in and gradually pulling them towards each other even more. She doesn't tunnel under the covers, just kneels on top of them, but Hannibal is pushing his sheets out of the way with his knees so he can press the outside of his thigh against the point of Neph's kneecap.
She doesn't elaborate. Or excuse herself. Instead, she asks to stay.
He stands at the edge of that cliff for a moment, watching the expanse underneath them, before he trails down her sleeve until he can find her hand. "I would never send you away. Not if you asked to stay." Up this close, Neph feels flushed, but there's a fine shiver to her normally-still hands.
It's late at night. The digital clock, the only reason he has enough light to catch a flash of reflection off of Neph's eyes, reads 2:54. There's only so many possibilities.
"Did you have a nightmare?"
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From:Aaaand scene?
From:AU2: Our Teenage Bullshit Has a Bodycount
Date: 2017-06-02 05:34 am (UTC)The only time Neph can remember anybody failing to lock the door was when the boys had the ol’ homosuperior talk. There’d been some shouting and some snapping and Will stormed out in frigid silence. He hadn’t paused to lock up, and Hannibal immediately closed himself off in his room, leaving Neph to discover the security breach when she dared to stick her head out of her own room twenty minutes later.
(When she ragequits roommate conversations, she leaves by window. Not too many people are gonna breeze into their apartment if she doesn’t stop to lock it.)
“Ugh please no,” she mutters. It’s been a longass day already, spent walking Thoth’s new protégée through advanced Copper techniques. Her shields feel all crispy and a bone in her neck keeps popping. Those two better not be fighting. She briefly leans her forehead against the door, gathering her strength, and that’s when she sees them: scratches around the keyhole. Little scuffmarks.
Somebody’s picked the fucking lock, and it wasn’t her.
Neph straightens slowly, the column of her spine slotting into a rigid line. She thumbs the doorknob and comes away with fine metal shavings in the whorls of her fingerprint.
Now, it’s possible that one of the guys forgot their key and had to force the lock to get in. They’re both stubborn and proud enough not to want to call for help, or to pay the super’s $15 lockout fee. But everybody in that apartment is as paranoid as they are private, and Neph might just be the worst of the bunch. She breathes out against the knot of ice in her gut and turns the knob.
“Hey, I’m home!” a flicker of Steel brings the hallway into focus but there’s nothing much to see; the studs in the walls make for a confusing net of leylines, and the kitchen’s crammed full of enough metal to blind any Allomancer. None of the threads overlapping her vision move like something carried by a person.
Inquisitors can shield against Steel or Ironsight. Her stomach churns with the thought, especially when nobody calls back to her. Neph pulls up Bronze just to be sure, but nothing glows that shouldn’t, and there’s none of the wild spattering of magic she’d expect if there were a—
A fight, like the one that looks to’ve wrecked the living room. She stops in the entryway, bag hanging off her shoulder like it’s any other day, like the coffee table isn’t cracked in half and her chair hasn’t been thrown against one of the walls. Glass glitters across the floor, catching light at odd angles from capsized lamps. Hannibal’s laptop sits wrenched open like a clam, screen spiderwebbed with cracks.
Even though she’d half-expected something like this, the sight locks her joints. This wasn’t just a robbery, they’d’ve taken the laptop and there oughta be more damage to the door and one of the guys should’ve been home and—
She ducks on instinct, rolling over the glass to come up behind the couch. A bat whistles through the air where her head had been – wood, no wonder she hadn’t seen it – followed by a soft ‘oof’ as the man wielding it overbalances and stumbles out of the darkened hall. He looks up, scowling, as Neph rises from her crouch.
“Come quiet, mutie,” he says, flat and annoyed. The lack of anger freaks her out more than snarling insults ever could, and the slur draws goosebumps down shoulders.
“Why? You literally just tried to bash my head in,” As usual, her mouth moves faster than her thoughts and does her no favors in the process. Bat-guy lunges and she burns Pewter, darting aside with blurring speed. She dodges around the coffee table, dancing backward, staying out of corners, trying to get the space to think, think, think.
Mutie. If that’s why he’s here…who is this? Who’s he with? He can’t be working alone; the boys could handle one asshole with a bat, no problem. She can handle one asshole with a bat, no problem. She has her knives, and even tapped out on Copper she’s still fresh enough on the other metals. Piece of cake.
But.
Neph swivels and reverses mid-step, diving for the guy, rolling between his legs and kicking out the back of his knee. He goes down with a grunt, bat pressed to the floor for support and she slams her foot squarely into his spine. “What’d you do with my friends? Where are they?!”
She jumps back as his hand twitches and a knife springs from an ankle sheath, swinging wide at her shins. It’s metal, she could take it away from him and plant it in his throat easy as breathing, but the lack of an answer keeps her magic in check.
Hannibal. Will. Where are you where are you? Not here. Who took you? His friends? And he stayed behind, why—waiting for me?
Knife-bat drives her back toward the hall, where a soft thunk from Hannibal’s room sets her nerves screaming. The footsteps that follow aren’t familiar, and it’s then that she realizes she’s been pinned. Or they think so, anyway, this guy and the partner coming up at her back. In a few seconds he’ll be in range to grab her, and she’ll have a choice:
Let him, and hope they take her wherever they’ve taken her friends. Or stop pretending she can’t feed them their own weapons, and waste time dumping their bodies. Waste time working contacts and combing Baltimore to find her boys.
“If you’re real good, they might still be alive when we get where we’re going,” the man behind her says, just before he grabs her upper arm and hauls it backward. Neph stomps at his feet, throws her head back into his mouth and pulls against him with an edge of Pewter, her frenzy only sorta feigned.
The bat whumphs into her middle, folding her over in his grip. The next hit cracks against her ear and cheek, force blunted by Pewter and the narrow windup space in the hall. Her vision goes leyline-blue anyway, and when it swims clear she’s folded over her knees on the floor.
Curled up like that, they don’t notice the sleight-of-hand as she unclasps her wrist sheaths and shoves them further up her sleeves.
“—some kind of speedster,” the first man is saying to the other.
“Less of a fight than I expected,” he agrees as he pulls her other arm behind her back. Neph stays limp as he zipties her wrists together then shoves her over to do the same to her ankles. She means to fake unconsciousness, but they slip a bag over her head and she can’t help but thrash. Panic earns her a kick to the ribs and a rush of nausea as she’s picked up and thrown over someone’s shoulder.
Yes. This was a brilliant plan. She has no regrets about this at all.
How they get out of her building, she has no idea. There’s a bit where her ride gets really lurchy (she manages not to throw up inside her bag, but it’s close), which were probably the stairs. Before too long she’s unslung and dropped like a sack of potatoes on rough carpet. Then the trunk slams shut, leaving her cocooned in metal.
It’s not so bad at first. The car rumbles to life beneath her, a solid metal shell that blocks out all other anchor lines. Neph tries to take comfort in the knowledge that she could flip the whole thing if she wanted, but she can’t make out anything beyond that blue wall to know how fast they’re going, or in what direction. Eventually she drops Steel and just listens, taking in the sounds of traffic (heavy), how many times they roll to a stop (frequently at first, then not so much), and the conversation in the cab (limited).
Dampened by her breath and tacky with her blood, the bag starts to stick to her face. She puffs at it, wriggling her shoulders to test the zip ties. They bite into her wrists, but won’t last long once she applies a little Pewter. She could heal up her aching ribs and work on the split just above her ear, but it’s probably best to save her metals for later.
Then there’s nothing else to think about but her pains, her gnawing worry, and the fact that she’s tied up on her side in a lightless box.
The panic closes like a bear trap, piercing lungs and splintering bones. Her breath hitches against it, and all at once she’s buried under rubble, tied to a chair. A memory hammers home, not of the church but of her nightmare, of Hannibal crushed to death but still whispering. Take responsibility.
Neph thrashes, kicking out against the back of the seats. I am, I am, she sobs as someone shouts at her to shut the fuck up, I’m coming, I’ll find you, please don’t be dead, please be okay, I’m coming.
She’s terrible at marking time, but eventually her body wrings itself dry of panic and she lies still. Hours could pass for all she knows, and at some point the quality of the road under the car changes. It gets crunchy. Small rocks ping the undercarriage. She focuses on the random clunks to calm down, but has nothing to brace against when the car slams to a sudden stop. With a startled umph, she’s rolled against those seats, and there she huddles until the trunk cracks open.
Fresh air floods the compartment, bringing with it the nightsong of crickets and a total lack of anything else. The sound of her kidnappers’ boots crunching gravel is obscenely loud, as are their grunts as they heave her out of the car.
“On your feet,” one says, and there’s a flash of blue as he draws his knife and cuts the tie at her ankles. She’s been careful to flex her fingers and toes, but they still burn as blood rushes back where it belongs. Without a thought for numb feet or the fact that she’s still basicly blind, they haul her upright and frogmarch her away from the car.
Neph gets her first good breath in what feels like days and sweeps the area with Iron. Parallel lines of blue trail away into the distance, perpendicular to a huge rectangular shape. A building, mostly sheet metal if she doesn’t miss her guess. With…a couple other cars parked outside of it, and one lone streetlight. A few other squares might be outbuildings, but there’s nothing else in any direction. She can’t smell anything past the bag and her own breath, but there’s a sound like plants rustling together, like grass hissing in the wind. It reminds her of camping with Will, but even more hushed without the crackling of a fire.
They’ve driven for hours to get to the middle of nowhere, the perfect place to shoot somebody in the head and dump their body. For the first time Neph considers that her boys might already be dead. Her senses strain for the knife in the first man’s boot, for the gun tucked into the waistband of the second’s pants. Something bleak hooks behind her scapulae and pulls her upright.
Whatever happens next, she’s going to survive this. They won’t. It’s that simple.
A door swings open on grouchy hinges and the air changes, becomes much warmer, as she’s walked through. New anchor lines open up, some moving around, some not. It’s all a confusing tangle until one of her kidnappers kicks her knees out (like she’d done to Bat-knife. She bets that was him) so she drops awkwardly, then yanks the bag off her head.
“Got the last one,” he says, “We think she’s got enhanced speed, if you want to fill in that blank.”
Neph’s not listening. She’s blinking stars from her eyes as they adjust to the light of LED lanterns set up on crates and barrels in a rough circle. Men lounge beside them, cleaning weapons or swigging at bottles, playing cards or poking at their phones. One, two, three…eight of them, ten counting the two assholes behind her. Neph takes that in in a sweep before dismissing what looks like a militaristic anti-mutant hategroup clubhouse. They don’t matter yet. She needs to find—
--oh. There. There you are.
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Date: 2017-06-14 12:23 am (UTC)Will's not used to feeling so genuinely safe in a house while other people are still in it. He's always enjoyed being at home when he could manage it - it's more private, more contained - but his dad would always have the other key. His dad would wander in and out, a quiet huff of a man, and weight down the air.
Hannibal and Neph don't make him feel like he has to shove aside all aspects of himself to get along. They don't make him feel on edge and defensive to be breathing in the same area.
"What are you reflecting on?"
Will jolts up from laying across two and a half of the couch cushions, arms unfolding. The back of one of his hands peels off the cover of his forgotten book. "Uh." He sighs into a stretch, plants an elbow up on the couch's armrest and drags himself up and backwards, until he's sitting up.
And facing Hannibal, who sits politely coiled into his lone half a couch cushion, laptop open but ignored across his thighs. "You look distracted." Hannibal sounds bizarrely smug for that observation. Will does a quick mental inventory of recent in-jokes, threats, and secrets and comes up blank.
"Dunno. Just thinking about-- this place." Will marks his spot in the book with the library rental receipt and tucks it in against his stomach. "Sounds like you had an idea about what I was thinking about?"
Hannibal hums, turning back to his laptop screen. "I was thinking about last night."
Will's pretty sure he didn't actually time taking a sip of his soda poorly enough to aspirate it, but he coughs nonetheless. "You what?" He wipes his mouth, tacky cola smearing on the back of his hand. "I thought you said you were doing your essay about your internship."
Hannibal looks back up, mouth a cross line. "I finished that two hours ago, Will. When you first fell asleep."
"Of course you did." Will watches him, shaking his head and failing to squash back down a smile. He takes another drink of half-flat soda to hide it. "Glad to know last night came in a close second after your internship on 'things you're going to brag about today'."
Hannibal smirks, and Will chuckles, and then the room presses quiet against them once again.
Will slowly turns around, book tugged along with him. Tentatively, he leans their shoulders together as he re-settles with his book inside Hannibal's space. Hannibal isn't watching the computer screen anymore, and as Will adjusts against him Hannibal's face ends up turned in towards his hair.
"I don't know how you can breathe in there." Will says. His cheeks feel warm despite the AC. Hannibal's nose is directly behind his ear, buried in what Will knows are wild curls that are probably doing their best to blind him.
"It's a mystery how I don't lose my breath more often when you're in the room."
"Oh please." Will's blush blooms down his neck. He elbows Hannibal softly in the ribs and Hannibal moves a few centimeters, radiating fond smugness. "Go back to reading your romance novels and leave me out of it."
"I really think you'd enjoy this era of literature if you tried, Will. Perhaps starting with Mary--"
Will and Hannibal both shift as the barest, familiar creak sounds from the front hall. There's a trick to opening the door soundlessly, one that no one adheres to because announcing your presence, in this home, is the most polite thing you can do when entering or exiting.
It's silent after, which is odd even for Neph, and Will cranes his neck and moves to sit up straighter, expectantly waiting for her to yell out. He's about to himself when Hannibal's hand is suddenly over his mouth.
"There's a stranger in our apartment." Hannibal's nose in his hair no longer feels warm and intimate. He whispers so quietly Will can feel the vibrations more than he hears his words. "Do you know how to fight?"
Will's heart is already pounding away in his chest. Hannibal sounds so deadly serious, and Will's mind is a blur of veiled insinuations and some of the rare frank talks about Hannibal's and Neph's respective pasts and skills.
If it picked the front door, at least, Will feels reasonably sure it isn't a kelpie that's come to call.
Hannibal is moving off the couch, cold air swallowing Will's side where he had been, and Will instinctively follows him. Now, when he strains to listen above the rush in his ears, Will can hear - or perhaps feel - even and careful movements from the hallway that runs parallel to their living room.
Someone's stalking towards them.
Hannibal reaches the doorway first, flattened against the wall like he's got any right to look like he's ambushed someone before. Hannibal turns back to look at him, mouths 'three of them' and then picks up a pen off the end table. In that moment, Will isn't sure if he's more afraid of the abyss in Hannibal's eyes or the fact that they're about to get jumped in their own home.
It happens quickly after that. The breath of footsteps at the entryway to the living room, Hannibal striking forward like a snake, a grunt and shout from a man with a bat.
Will leaps forward as footsteps suddenly pound from the entryway, and all hope of stealth is abandoned.
There's already blood. On the first man's thigh, a glint of metal and dull shine of plastic in the middle of his upper leg - the pen. Will ducks a fist from someone who surges past the doorway and straight at him. His heart knocks against his lungs as he runs backwards, remembers the coffee table at the last moment and scrambles over it as the man charging him down has to break concentration to climb it too.
"Get the fuck over here, mutie." And suddenly it all coalesces into an awful picture for Will, and he knows what's happened here. What's happening here.
Are they here to kill them? Publically? Are they going to throw their bodies out the window or sneak them away in trucks to dump them in the city center?
Will grabs a lamp on instinct, wings it at the man's head and misses that but connects with his shoulder. The lampshade is disappointingly soft, halts the swing of it, and Will drops it in his panic afterwards trying to get away from the arc of a bat.
He dodges one more swing, hits the wall behind him, and then ducks right into the grip of the bat hitting his stomach.
"There's a fourth person." Hannibal says, or Will assumes Hannibal says. It's in French and clearly a warning, but it doesn't do anyone much good. Will staggers sideways, ducks the next swing of the bat, and considers his odds on getting to the window to crawl from their balcony to the one below and get a head start running to a phone.
Would the police even come? Would a mutant hate group being arrested at Hannibal's home get him kicked out of medical school?
"Tommy!"
The room stops. Will looks over at Hannibal, stomach still in pain and worried about how that feels. Hannibal has a knife against one of their throats. His eyes are black and deadly and for a moment, Will is absolutely frozen looking at him.
It makes it easier for the next swing from the man with the bat - presumably Tommy - to connect with Will's head. Will grunts, staggers, and is caught against someone's chest. Will's breath strains as he's held from behind and something sharp appears at his own throat.
"I'll kill this one right now if you fucking try anything, kid."
Will thinks, for a second, that this man just got supernaturally lucky. Will still isn't sure if or how anyone could value him enough to care about this kind of threat, but he also knows Hannibal's pride - that flint in his eyes - wasn't going to stop for anything else.
It turns out this was enough.
Hannibal's face is fury etched in stone, cold hard edges that don't budge an inch even as he drops the knife and is unceremoniously punched down onto the floor. Will watches him be ziptied up until he's shoved against the nearest wall himself.
The ziptie's so narrow and right under the jagged bone at his wrist. Will reminds himself not to squirm or make a sound. His heart's still slamming against his ribs, but his mind is starting to drift out and above him. He feels numb despite the shaking in his fingers.
"Anyone else here?"
One of the men who wasn't needed to subdue Will and Hannibal is coming out from the hallway. "Unless one of them's a cross dresser, there's a girl here too."
"Wait for her. You two." They're getting tugged towards the door. A bag goes over Will's head, and he can no longer keep track of Hannibal. All the footsteps crunch together.
Whatever car they're tugged into several minutes later must be parked in an alley, right? How did they even get them out of that building without nosy neighbors calling the police? Will's head hurts, and worrying at the logistics isn't helping.
Everything is dark, and cold, and uneventful with one sitting in the back of the van with them the entire ride over.
It's not until they're about to be removed from the vehicle that Hannibal apparently decides it's worth one last effort to escape.
*
Will's never felt an injury like this before.
In a lot of ways, it's less painful than his head injuries from months prior. It doesn't interfere with his hearing or his vision, for one. It doesn't throb whenever he thinks to hard.
But walking with a stab wound in his calf turned out to be way more difficult than he'd even imagined. Like stepping out onto hardwood and it suddenly bends and breaks like straw.
Hannibal's leg is pressed up against it, hard. Too hard, but Will hadn't needed a medical student to explain to him the danger presented by bleeding out. They're being ignored just enough that Will has enough free time to worry about if he'll die from blood loss or an infection first.
Will notices her before Hannibal.
He ducks a shoulder down, taps into Hannibal, who's been studying everyone's movements in the room too much to care for the door opening practically behind them. "Neph," he barely whispers, but that's enough to get Hannibal's attention cracking around to look for her.
They probably don't look too bad while sitting. Will has a bruise on his temple, or so he assumes, and Hannibal has a godawful-looking nose that's dripped blood down across his lips and chin, but his eyes are so alert and his mouth so hard that Will sincerely doubts he even feels it.
Will's pale under his tan, though. Half his pant leg is red, his jeans soaking it down his leg and saturated nearly to his knee. His sock feels sticky and anytime he moves his foot he feels the way the wet fibers catch on his skin. His heart feels no less pounding than it did before - if anything Will would swear it's going faster.
Neither of them are the loudly taunting kind. Neither of them have a physical power to suddenly unveil and help out with.
So neither of them say a word. Just stare across the room full of people who hate them and seek out the eyes of their friend.
no subject
Date: 2017-06-15 03:52 am (UTC)Who are outside the circle, seated against a drum barrel Wait, no, not seated but tied to it, their hands ziptied in front so there's no room between their backs and the rusty metal. That's--she doesn't know what to make of that. She doesn't have time to wonder what to make of that, all her focus locking onto their faces in the dim lantern light.
Neph looks to Hannibal first, past the blood crusting his nose, mouth, and spattered liberally down the front of his shirt. All that red sets off an alarm in her head, but it's background noise compared to the howling rage in his eyes. She's never been able to parse him when he's like this, can't tell if he's furious they've been kidnapped, furious they've been injured, furious they've caught her as well or furious at her for getting caught. Neph meets his eyes and tries to beam competent steadiness over to him, to tell him she's got the outlines of a plan without projecting it for everybody else to see.
I got this she tells him as Knife-bat shoves at her shoulder, forcing her to drop her head and her gaze. We're getting outta here, no matter what it takes.
That promise could be complicated by Will, whose leg is soaked red from the knee down. Neph can't read him any better than she can Hannibal, not past his lightheaded slump. She lifts her chin enough to catch his eye, to really look at him, because it's Will she's about to sacrifice.
Hannibal will forgive her what comes next. At least, Neph hopes he will. But Will...Will has no reason to accept the necessity of it, and every reason to run screaming. He might take Hannibal with him when he does. She can't be sure, so she stares at him and she thinks I'm sorry, I'm sorry but I'm going to do it anyway, I have to, with the resignation of a kid who's played this game before.
A pair of legs block her eyeline, and Knife-bat takes a fistful of her hair and yanks, rocking her back and forcing her to look up at a third man.
He isn't the tallest or heaviest guy in the room. He's all around average, appearance-wise, and Neph's not familiar enough with specops or military assholes to guess at his background aside from his regulation haircut. Nevertheless she knows instantly that she's staring at the ringleader. There's an analytic coolness to his gaze that reminds her of Hannibal, makes her think he's only running with the rest of these chucklefucks because they further his goals somehow.
The grip on her hair loosens as he squats down to her eyelevel, hands hanging over his knees. They watch each other for a moment, him still and uncaring, Neph hunched over her aching ribs and squinting through a slightly swollen eye. She's kept her injuries from doing more than nibbling at Pewter, so while the bleeding's stopped and she can breathe just fine, there's still a monster bruise winging out beneath her eye and the burning itch of split skin over her ear. She must seem small, beaten, scared.
Good.
"It's amazing how human they can look," guy-in-charge says, fascination glittering in his voice. He couldn't be more obviously talking to everyone but her. "That's half the danger." Then his tone shifts and he reaches out and grabs her chin, tilting her face this way and that as if checking for an obvious tell. "Do you human-looking muties band together on purpose? Are even you disgusted by the physical mutations?"
Neph sways in a flood of revulsion at this man and his everything, his beliefs and his friends and his hands. It's so intense she doesn't realize she's meant to answer until the expectant silence drags on.
Fuck it, she thinks, and says with perfect honesty, "I'm not a mutant."
Every man - and the one woman over in the corner, absently shuffling a deck of cards - laughs. "That's what they all say!" someone shouts. Their boss just shrugs and releases her chin.
"Mutant, sympathizer, they burn the same." he says, eyes gleaming with fanatical fervor despite his studied boredom.
Neph's next breath catches in her throat, her gaze darting over his shoulder to Hannibal and Will and the barrel they're propped against. There's a whole stack of similar drums behind them, maybe a dozen piled up in a rough pyramid. What's inside? The man turns his head slightly, far enough to track her eyeline, and smirks at her.
Before his mouth finishes twitching into place, the following happen:
Neph burns Tin and Pewter, the cold altoid burn of Tin waking all her nerves and muscles, the forgefire of Pewter jacking them all to two, three, four times their normal capacity. The ziptie around her wrists snaps like a cheap hairband, and the knife up her right sleeve slips into her palm. She reaches back with her left, grabs Knife-bat's bootknife, and snatches it up with pickpocket surety. Neph twists at the waist, scything her arms around. Her righthand knife plunges into Knife-bat's iliac artery (thank you, Hannibal, for flashcards and textbook illustrations) while the left cuts across the ringleader's throat.
Even with Pewter backing her, his reflexes are sharp enough that he leans away, pulling out of her reach. But Neph's range is not and never has been limited just to her arms. The knife leaves her hand, severs skin and tendons and both jugulars, before Iron Pulls it back to her palm.
A howl bursts from Knife-bat just as his boss topples backward, one hand flying up to his spurting neck. A jet of blood catches Neph across the shoulder and cheek. It scorches like cooking oil, searing her skin, but she's still moving, spinning from her knees to her feet. Her stolen knife flies from her hand again, flipping into her other kidnapper's eye. That one drops silently as Neph revolves, momentum tearing her ceramic knife from Knife-bat's leg. He goes down screaming, blood spilling between his hands. How many heartbeats before it all pumps from that severed artery? Hannibal would know.
In the hovering split second while everyone else processes whatthefuck just happened and reaches for their weapons, Neph Pulls the metal knife from the dead man's eye socket and flings it across the room, where it sinks into the hairsbreadth between Hannibal's bound ankles, severing the ziptie in the process.
"MUTIE BITCH!" one of the other men screams, and then Neph's entire world splits into slivers, carved out by bullet ley-lines. She twists, a half-leap to the side that, backed by Steel and Iron, curves them impossibly around her body and into the stake of crates to her right. Someone who'd been sitting there, raising their own gun, goes down with a gurgling shriek.
Heart hammering, shoulders burning with the effort of redirecting speeding-bullet momentum, Neph launches herself off the ground and toward the depot's rafters. The corrugated metal roof overhead is as wide and solid as the earth, enough to belay herself onto a wide wooden beam. Shots from below send splinters exploding through the air as she runs along its length, hopefully leading them away, away from the boys and the barrels.
no subject
Date: 2017-06-26 07:21 pm (UTC)He wasn't really expecting to have the bag removed as soon as he can see ambient light through its cloth. It's blinding and disorienting outside the van, even though it isn't high noon anymore. Will's wincing away from the fading sunlight, which is why he doesn't immediately react to hands on his ankles. He freezes, feeling unbalanced but knowing playing along is the best step for now, and then realizes the ties at his ankles are being undone.
He watches the glint of metal at his ankles with wary but useless suspicion, before the man goes and does the same to Hannibal.
Everything is as Will would more or less expect, until the man yanks Hannibal's face cover off as well.
Hannibal and Will didn't exchange a word in the van, both too mutually aware of being closely listened to. Will watches him with concern, though, because Hannibal's breathing had started growing strained shortly before they had pulled to their abrupt stop. Had he been suffocating in the pillowcase tied around his head?
He looks pale instead of flushed, to Will's eyes. There's a sheen of sweat at his temples and dripped sideways across his nose from laying on the ground, and he breathes - weirdly. Will blinks, not sure what the heavy hiss up against the man unveiling him could mean except aggression, and then a horrible suspicion hits at the same time the man's pupils dilate.
Will steps back, adrenaline hitting his already-soaked system, and jostles into the guy guarding right behind him.
"Watch yourself, fucking mutie f--"
"What the fuck, what the fuck, You fucking-- is that you you piece of goddamn shit--"
"The hell?" The one behind Will jostles up next to him, and they both watch the one closest to Hannibal - the one breathing in the air nearest him - scream spittle into Hannibal's face. "Eddie seriously, what the fuck's happening over here--"
"This fucker's dangerous, fuck man we gotta call for backup, maybe they've got another guy somewhere--"
Paranoid ravings. Hannibal's power is suggestive, isn't it? So this guy's attaching his own ideas to the emotions being pumped at him - the 'stay away' vibes surely soaking the air around them?
"Are you doing this, you fucking freak?" A shoulder jostles Will as tall-and-brunette goes to kick at Hannibal's ankles from the side. But his aggravation is nothing compared to his partner's full-blown panic.
He must've gotten a better breath of Hannibal's power.
(Hannibal had explained it to him in full, once, in slow and careful detail. He'd let Will ask questions, even if Will had been reticent at first, too cautious about making Hannibal feel more like a bug under a microscope - honestly, Hannibal had needed to almost hassle him into the conversation to start it up.
But then Will had had plenty of questions, and got answers he hadn't been expecting. Like how Hannibal had had an oversensitivity since he was a child and never known why, how the headaches had gotten worse but less predictable as he passed eleven and then twelve, how at thirteen and fourteen his puberty had brought on the pheromone aspect to his power. How it had taken him months to even be certain what was happening at all, since it was invisible and so vague and so dependent on a lot of uncontrollable variables from the other person involved.)
"We should just kill him now, Tommy."
Hannibal's legs are kicked out from under him, lack of zip ties or not, and his lack of hands means Will watches as he knocks a shoulder rough against the gravel, head jerking down and back up as it bounces on the ground.
'Eddy' stumble-jerks forward, knife flashing, and Will hears himself yell as his legs get into motion.
He barely makes it two strides before the less-drugged one kicks his knee from the side, enough spoiled momentum that without arms to windmill around for balance, Will goes down hard. He sprawls on his side, face nearly touching Hannibal's shoulder, and rolls up to see Eddy clambering at Hannibal, eyes wild.
He breathes like an animal. Will's own breath is ragged and hurts his dry throat.
Knees dropping to the side of Hannibal's hips. Arm pulling back. Knife flashing in the early evening sun.
Will scrambles at the gravel, curls up, and then kicks out what feels, in that instinctive moment, like the most logical part of his body to risk injuring.
The knife sinks into the outside of his leg with the dull thump he would expect from a wooden log. It sounds wet but not hollow. The most important thing for a wavering heartbeat is that it's Will's leg, not Hannibal's chest, that the knife embedded in like a tick.
And then the heated pain begins, the cold panic in his chest of seeing his own blood spurt from the wound like a desperately-leaking pipe. Will's breathing is so loud he loses track of what the other men are saying, but there's a lot of movement right above him and Hannibal.
Tommy peels his friend up and away, the choking panic of Eddy's pupils is no longer pinned on Hannibal and Will, and Will curls tighter into a ball to press a hand to the hole in his leg.
It doesn't immediately press back together like a papercut or a nick from a razor blade. This is deep enough to have lost its connections to the other side entirely, this sags open with the dead weight of skin pulling on either side. Will feels the opposite ends of the cut slide against one another, endlessly slick with blood and too fresh to coagulate, and feels bile creep up his throat.
Hannibal sits up under him, presses him to lay on his back and elevate his legs, while the two men argue above them. Hannibal's face is drawn and pale, mouth open but silent.
Neither of them says a word during the entire wait. Soon, the two men re-group enough to bend down and drag them into the heavy concrete building they're parked next to. Will spends the entire walk convinced he won't make it, biting down out of spite alone and making half a calf muscle not give out underneath him.
*
Will'a breathing keeps being interrupted by his racing heart, pressing against his throat and wasting too much more of his blood onto the concrete floor.
Neph's been caught too. Fuck, fuck fuck, but hadn't everyone's whispers suggested someone more capable than he would've expected? Hadn't the metal-flinging implied that she'd be the last one of them suckered in by an apartment ambush?
That next realization hits about the same time as Neph's pleading eye contact.
He curls inward, bracing against shrapnel and blowback that doesn't come right away. There's movement, yelling, a spurt of blood like a Tarantino movie, and then Will jerks as far as zip ties and rope will let him as a knife lodges itself between Hannibal's ankles.
Hannibal just bends forward, calmly calculating as you please, and slices his wrists' ties against that blade during the two heartbeats it sits there. And then it pulls back to its puppeteer and Hannibal's mouth is open again, teeth showing now, eyes wide and face frozen in an engrossed grimace, and Will doesn't know who he should run from, if and when he gets the chance.
Neph catapaults up and away, out of Will's line of sight into rafters as bullets fly, and he's certain he's walked straight into someone else's life because his definitely never included shit like this. Wasn't supposed to, not until he had a badge and a gun and paid police academy training built up underneath him and did he pick the wrong field, is that what his tunnelling vision and roaring ears mean?
Hannibal's getting up and falls, legs clearly too numb from being tied. He lurches sideways for Will, is intercepted halfway there by one of the few people capable of still noticing them when they've got a "fucking telekinetic monster" up on their roof.
Will barely gets to watch how the knife exchanges hands. Hannibal's torso moves like a dancer, even if his ankles drag and tilt too much, and there's blood on Hannibal's face and throat when he pushes the gurgling man away from himself. He doesn't look behind him to check that the man's not getting back up. Will stares at him alone, watches eyes bore hatred into Hannibal's back and watches the inside edge of the man's throat vibrate with air that won't ever reach his lungs.
Hannibal nearly falls into his lap, legs apparently still useless from the past few hours of having his feet's circulation cut off.
"Are-- are you-- you okay--" Will wasn't aware he was shaking so badly until his voice vibrates like that other man's throat cartilage. He shivers against the knife in Hannibal's hands and Hannibal pats him with his free hand as if he were a horse, tapping against his flank to soothe.
His laser focus doesn't budge, though. "I'm fine." Will's knees roll limply apart once his ankles aren't stuck together, and Hannibal's reaching for his own belt.
Will's already watched him work with a quick accuracy that isn't hurried for several more seconds before he processes what it's for. A tourniquet. The belt wraps around Will's thigh just above his knee.
Hannibal looks like calm fury.
"I can see how you'll make a great trauma surgeon." Will says. Hannibal has a pleased glow to him as he finally frees Will's wrists. "Or an assassin." Will adds, colder and flat.
Hannibal examines Will's fingers for circulation problems and then looks at his face, but there is no apology behind the cautious awareness in his gaze. "Yes," he says finally. Somehow his quiet voice carries over the ambient din around them. "I would be excellent at either." With blood still smeared from his nose down to his chin, he reaches forward. His hand, covered in Will's blood now, rests on Will's knee. "And yet you've seen the choice I have made."
Will makes a sound. He thinks it might be a laugh. "Right. I'm so relieved you're using these...skills to only kill the unworthy. What are you, some k-kind of-- of fucking Batman?"
"What do you think these men consider themselves?" Hannibal asks, and now he finally looks back at the man he mutilated on his way to Will. He looks dead by now, throat cartilage as still and quiet as his open eyes. Will's chest feels tight and empty to look at him.
"In the right. Defending themselves." Will feels exhausted. The metal drum behind him is cold and doesn't have the right hand holds as he presses his back into it and uses it to leverage himself into standing. Hannibal holds his arm, lifts him the rest of the way. Will doesn't protest that help, and he feels the lie of the rest of his protests for just that - lies. Is he really, actually bothered that he isn't dead right now? That his two closest friends apparently have the sort of training required to jointly take out a room full of enemies?
...Would Hannibal even have been captured, if Will hadn't been home with him at the time?
He'd lost his glasses when the pillowcase was dragged off his head the first time, but now even his distance vision is blackening and blurring. Everything looks charred, and softened in the aftermath of burning down to its essentials.
He feels like he needs to sleep.
"Will." Hannibal's voice comes slower than his lips move. "Will. I need you to sit back down. Behind this oil drum. Don't let anyone see you."
"Oil. Right. Of course that's what's in there." Will's teeth clack together. Is he cold? It interrupts his speech. He doesn't fight against the two hands on his wrists, doesn't fight Hannibal half-dragging him to a hiding spot. "They wanted to watch the heretics burn." Visions of paintings, both tasteless and serious, of witches at the stake flicker and flame across his mind.
It's hard to say, with how his mind is fading, but Will's pretty sure he feels Hannibal press lips to his forehead and say, "I would only ever want to burn with you," before he ghosts away into the gathering black.
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From:I need you to put that icon away pls thx
From:everyone's taking out their cuddling icons, though!
From:put that back where it came from or so help me!!
From:so glad you're not too old to have also watched monsters inc!
From:I was going to rant about how I was still a kid!! but then is he dangling a CHERRY in that icon?
From:I cannot remember when it came out! And maybe!! Most of his icons are unavailable Im trying here
From:google says 2001! And oh no you're stranded with the most recent ones!
From:...oh my god /i was ten/ what the hell
From:No that can't be right!!!
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From:AU 2.ohgodwhy
Date: 2017-08-13 08:15 am (UTC)The ‘him’ in question is an aisle and a half away, looking at Iron Man action figures with his hands clasped behind his back. Neph focuses the full force of her attention on Hannibal partly to make sure he understands the seriousness of her instruction, but also because watching this tiny version of Will carefully not-touch things he can’t have wrenches at her heart.
“I know it’s weird,” she continues under her breath. The squeaky wheel on the shopping cart she pushes before her should keep Will from overhearing. “Trust me, I do, but it’s only for ten days.”
Probably, she does not add. Hannibal himself is proof that the timewarp magic might not abide by the rules they think they know. Neph can’t blame him for wondering if he’s ever going to get his Will back, or if this might happen again and strand them with a twelve-year old version. She’s been thinking the same thing since she went to hassle Will about breakfast and found an eight year old sleeping in his bed, wearing his White Stripes T-shirt.
Mik might be willing to make a housecall for something this weird, and he might be able to tell them if this is only temporary, but Neph’s had other priorities. Like: convincing a suspicious mundie kid that his dad dropped him off the night before ‘cuz he’s looking for work in the area and knew Neph from a worksite down south. She doesn’t think he’s totally on board yet, but the fact that she knew his dad’s name and where they were living when Will was actually eight seems to’ve helped.
So did the way she’d said “I dunno kiddo, he just showed up and handed you off, said he’d be back in like a week” as though it were totally normal. He seemed to accept it as such, which put the first crack in her heart. Neph’s always understood why Will thinks so little of his worth to others, but to see it reinforced in a kid this small…
She made some similar grumbles about his dad not even packing him a bag, as any put-upon acquaintance might. Neph hadn’t meant to embarrass Will with it, had only thought it’d sell the story better, but he’s been pretty quiet since she suggested hitting up Target for some child-sized basics. Anything to get out of their house while Hannibal processes this (temporary) new reality and Will gets used to the two of them.
“Hey Will, you wanna come pick out a shirt?” she calls down the aisle. They’d dressed him in a mishmash of things from her drawers, but he’s swimming even in her shops-in-the-juniors-section-ass handmedowns. “And, like, some pants?”
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Date: 2017-08-26 03:12 am (UTC)"...I will try." Hannibal says, in what he thinks is an even tone of negotiation. It comes out more in what his Aunt would have called 'childish displeasure'. Sulky, is perhaps what a normal human might say.
Will hears Neph from down the aisle, turns back towards them in a slow half-circle. He brings a hand up towards his mouth on clear reflex, flinches away at the last second and keeps it going until he's worrying it through his curly hair instead. It's been a while since Hannibal took a child development class, but he's reasonably certain that thumb sucking at age eight is not a good sign, regardless of whether or not Will's doing that in public. A flicker of memory about neglect victims lights up in Hannibal's mind, almost unbidden, and he thinks again of Will's father rotting alone in that terrible apartment.
It's too good a fate for him.
"Only if you're sure it's not too much money." Will says by way of final protest. Simply getting him in the store had been enough of a battle that Hannibal is not surprised that he's still giving out token resistance. Hannibal is starting to direct their cart, though, urging Neph along who immediately follows suit, and Will does trundle along after them.
He looks ridiculous in Neph's borrowed clothing. But Hannibal can't help a part of him enjoying the sight of a child in them at all - at what it implies for family.
Will's younger than Mischa would have been by now, but older than Hannibal ever got to see her at. Hannibal's never interacted with an eight year-old before. He still watches him curiously as they push along the aisles, Will watching him back with suspicious eyes.
They're almost at the correct section - so says the sign hanging above the aisle - when Hannibal thinks he's catching something in Will's returned stare, the one that meets him every time Hannibal turns back to check that he's still watching them. "What is it?" Hannibal and Neph each have a hand on the cart, Neph truly pushing it and Hannibal absently taking an excuse to walk closer to her. Will stares at the space between their hands on the cart, then back at Hannibal.
"...Aren't you really young to be married?" Will asks, and Hannibal's brain nearly catches whiplash with the force of his beaming smugness.
Hannibal glances back at Neph, expectant delight in his eyes. "I suppose we are." Is all he agrees to.
oh. my. god. did. you. just.
Date: 2017-08-26 08:20 am (UTC)And if the process of fixing it raises questions about why they haven't done the same for Hannibal, well...
Will comes back to them on silent sneakered feet and, look, Neph knew a lot of kids in foster care, but you could sort most of 'em into two general categories: the ones who coped by making themselves quiet, and the ones who coped by being impossible to ignore. No question as to which one Will is, was, or always has been. Her hand falls back to her side as she turns to him, looking down not-quite-as-far-as-expected. He wasn't a big eight year old, but she's not a very big eighteen year old. So, hey, it all works out.
"M'sure," she says, with a nod that adds I checked the budget. "Your dad left some money for food and stuff, said he didn't expect us t'feed you for free, but you don't look like you eat a lot and this one--" a thumb jerks at Hannibal, who's momentarily traded in his creepy stare to glare at the squeaky cart wheel. "--cooks, like, all the time. So we can put that money to gettin' you some clothes an' call it Back To School Shopping."
Summer's spiraling the drain, she feels it every time she slips out her window. The night bites more than it did just two weeks ago. Hm, Will might need a jacket, or at least one heavier layer...
She has one hand on the cart and the other reaching for a child-sized hoodie with appliquéd shark heads for pockets, when Hannibal speaks directly to Will for the first time.
It goes about as well as she probably should've expected.
"...Aren't you really young to be married?" says the eight year old, skeptical in a way Neph never realized only children could be. She'd be annoyed if she weren't so aware of Hannibal's clockwork brain popping a spring and flying into maximum gear right next to her. He looks at her with victory shining in his eyes and poised in his freakin' dimples, and Neph--
--breaks into a wide grin in response. This is gonna mess with Will so hard when he gets back, which is only fair if they're gonna babysit him for the next week and a half. And anyway, 'married' is as good an explanation as any for what he's likely to see all week, the way they share each other's space and how she curls up with her feet thrown over his lap on the couch.
She's not grinning because it's nice for someone to notice they're close, to comment on it in a way that isn't suggestive. It certainly doesn't spark a little ball of sunlight in her ribcage, not at all."Yeah but we're not married," she sniffs as she turns the cart towards a rack of shirts. "We're engaged. That's, like, marriage with takebacksies."