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.
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timeasmymeasure
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.