Well I care, Neph almost scowls. Hannibal's been through more than his share of shit, and all the money and school in the world won't fix his nightmares. He should have good memories, needs them to brick up the holes she sometimes sees behind his eyes. She wants that for him, not to widen the gaps with her own issues. Her mouth thins unhappily when he discards that priority, but his hand presses down on hers like a coat over her shoulders, like gravity, and he says What matters to me is you.
'I need you'. 'You make me happy'. And now, 'you matter'. Neph never imagined getting used to statements like these, and now she has to wonder if she ever will. She stills under his hand, launch temporarily delayed as she fixes back on this time and place. On this Hannibal Lecter, her Hannibal, and his brandywine brown eyes. They'll wash out a little as he ages, she realizes, and he'll get a little better at veiling what's behind them from anyone trying to get a read. But maybe not from her. Not this time. Right now they burn with black hole intensity, that pull she's noticed before, and Neph nearly forgets her own center.
"I'm okay," she says, soft like snow. If he believes her, he doesn't show it, taking her other hand instead as if to squeeze the seriousness of his intent into her skin. One corner of her mouth hooks up in a crooked little smile. "Really, I...was gonna get my head straight and meet you at home."
It wasn't about running away from him, or Will. She needs to run, sometimes. For herself, for her sanity, for the sake of sharpening her edge. Running, moving, has been her way of coping for so long, of shedding the thoughts, memories and feelings that would otherwise gnaw her down to sinew and bone. Not only does it work, but she loves it. Loves the deafening rush of her blood and the sweet ache in her muscles, the temporary quiet calm in her own head. Nothing else ever flipped her off switch, even if the effects only lasted as long as her fatigue. As she turns her hands under Hannibal’s, brings them palm to palm with her fingers curled around his wrists, she wonders if she could lose herself in his compulsion just as well.
The whole point of being Mistborn is to have more options than other people. Still, she'd miss the wind-whipped freedom if he took it personal every time. If Hannibal could keep up with her, if she could share some of that fierce heart-pumping joy with him, would he understand? Would he let her go and trust her to come back, to come home?
But she's already conceded the run she'd wanted when she'd said she 'was' gonna. Will, perhaps noticing her slip, points out that it'd be smarter if they all went together. There's no warning note in his voice, but Neph still picks up some subtext. Some...worry. Because a strange guy got her alone and threatened her and now she's being twitchy about it? Because for all Will knows, that guy could be waiting to catch her on her own again? Or just because she went past 'twitchy' and straight into 'collapsing on the frosty ground' and he wants to make sure she's okay?
What did he see when he looked at her? What did he read from her? Neph has...so many questions. But he brushes his knuckles against her knee, inches from Hannibal's grip, and she makes an executive decision: she doesn't care. She slips her hand out from under Hannibal's and takes Will's, too. Gingerly, just curling her fingers around the first and second knuckles of his, but definitely a hold. Will would understand about the running, she bets.
"We'll be fine out there," she flashes Will a sidelong grin, in the hopes that his shifting gaze will catch it, "He knows what'd happen if there weren't security guards around to break up a fight."
I'll take you apart, she'd said. The simple words come back to her, along with the rush of anger she'd felt when she'd realized Samson's ploy to control her. Just let him try to catch her in an alley, or on a rooftop. The last Pewterarm to do so got buried under half a tenement building. Neph's not proud of what happened to Ryan, but already she knows she wouldn't spare a shred of guilt for Samson if he tried to blindside her again. And if he went for either of her friends...
He can try. Just let him. Let him put out the word she'd threatened him on behalf of someone he didn't recognize. Let them try to make a weakness of it. She just manipulated the extent of Pewter in another Allomancer's body, she'll find a way to manipulate Iron in their blood if they go for the people around her.
Hannibal leans into these thoughts, so close the steam of his words wreathes their heads. So close she hardly has to tilt her head back to meet his eyes, her own the depthless blue of a glacier crevasse. He's definitely pulling at her, exerting whatever non-mutation magnetism he has to make sure she's listening. Or maybe she's projecting, and it's just the force of those words that lock onto her brain. A promise. No, a vow? A lie, potentially. They've talked about this before, about unlucky and senseless loss, but even then he'd said he didn't think he'd 'willingly' leave her. This is more of the same, just using words that strike like bullets. Words like 'never', and 'abandon'. You don't know that Neph despairs, Don't promise me that. Hadn't she just told herself it was useless to worry about how she'd deal with it if Hannibal ever struck from some unidentified blindspot?
She's survived everyone who's ever left her behind, but she's not sure she could survive that. She's not sure she could survive believing him. Just the thought twists in her chest, bending her over her knees until her forehead leans featherlight on his cheek. "I--" believe you. I want to believe you. I'm afraid of you. I'm with you. I staked this place because you're here.
"Hey!" a sharp, male voice calls from the stone stairs. Neph's head flies up, and there's a security guard standing there with one hand braced on hip-radio. "What're you kids doing?"
A persona spreads over her face like quicksilver, glinting in the sun. She smiles, eyes crinkling, nose-wrinkle out in force. "Just checking the map! We got a little turned around but I think it's suit of armor time." Neph hops to her feet without letting go of either hand. Luckily she's short enough that this doesn't wrench their shoulders much.
The guard nods, probably sold by the map crinkling beside her boot. "That's to your left," he gestures with that radio, and moves along when Neph shouts her thanks. She looks back down at Hannibal, at Will, heart hammering behind her innocuous mask, and says, "I think that's our cue."
If he knew it was a conscious coping mechanism and not some martyr complex gone awry, of course he'd trust her to come back. Hannibal thrives with a codependent independence - a deep entangled root system that still allows for free movement up above the surface. Even his Aunt - the closest Hannibal had come to this kind of closeness after Mischa and prior to Neph - Hannibal had willingly left for months at a time to pursue his schooling.
They're not quite there yet, after all, but Hannibal's own coping mechanism is coming around the corner; losing himself completely to his own preferred fast-paced passion. His residency will have far less forgiving hours than even his current clinic work and schooling does. He'll be gone for literally more than a day at a time, sleeping at strange times (and possibly in strange places). How it'll effect his and Neph's relationship remains to be seen.
If he'll even keep with it - continue following in the prelaid footsteps he'd decided on both a few years before and also decades ago - still remains to be seen. But as he sees his future right now, that's part of it. And so is Neph.
So he gives it a short consideration, when she says she meant to just run off to calm down and then meet them at the apartment. But he's also glad it isn't up for debate. Because this isn't...just Neph getting angry and wanting to blow off steam. This is Neph, threatened by something Hannibal hadn't been aware had ever happened, shaken and surely with no one else she's any more likely to talk about it to.
Not that Hannibal is sure she will tell him. For all their proximity - and it gathers close to them now, Neph bending towards him and he instinctively curling inwards too - there aren't many vocalized secrets between them. Neph is almost always silent about the vulnerable parts of herself. Even the innocuous details from her past life are few and far between.
As nosy as Hannibal is, he's never taken it personally. But now he wishes he had...more. A flash of desire, as she leans forward and lets go of one of his hands. Hannibal watches her wrap fingers around Will's loosely, watches their point-line-point connection become a three-pointed one.
A triangle, perhaps?
Will blinks at Neph with wide eyes, pupils still blown from earlier. He looks startled and uncertain and suddenly very, very young.
Hannibal hasn't ever touched Will in a friendly way, only with the excuse of medical check-ups immediately following his head injury weeks ago, but there is a flutter of some of the protective desire that draws Hannibal's fingers to Neph's shoulder or cheek or knuckles when she looks forlorn - or even when they're both happy. There's a dull glow of inner contentment mixed with the sharp edge of worry, the kind that wants to spill over and touch someone else to reassure both parties.
Hannibal's eyes slide closed for a moment when Neph tilts her forehead against his cheek, and the last thing Hannibal sees are Will's dark blue eyes trained on him in turn, searching and lost and maybe a bit--
It's a word Hannibal has associated with himself for so long he can recognize it immediately in someone else. Is it because of that show of friendship from Neph, no matter how small? When was the last time someone reached out to Will that way, took such a clear chance that could backfire and hurt the newcomer instead of Will himself? Is it a sign at all of what might come if Hannibal decided to take that chance with Will?
Because what Hannibal saw in Will's face for that brief moment was hunger.
And then the security guard. Will snaps straight around, shoulders still hunched but spine erect, and Hannibal turns an annoyed glance back in the same direction. 'Suspicious adults interrupting important activities' is pretty high on his short list of pet peeves, at this point in time.
But Neph reanimates, mask thawing and fluidly taking on an appropriate demeanor for warding off an adult concerned that he's breaking up some sort of teenage shenanigans. Both Hannibal and Will rock a bit towards her when their arms get dragged up, but neither of them move until the guard is already heading back away.
Hannibal stands and strengthens their grip on each other, repositioning fingers so they slot together at this new angle. Will is staring down at the tenuous link between Neph and himself like he's afraid it might break. Hannibal catches his eyes straying to Neph and Hannibal's own hands, then back to his own, and then slowly ticking his wrist to a better angle so he can grip the outside of Neph's palm by wrapping his fingers around it. His own fingers are pressed tight against themselves in a sterile version of holding hands - there'll clearly be no interweaving of fingers - but Will watches this happening like he's giving it real serious thought and can hardly believe what he's seeing.
He doesn't snap out of it in time to offer any commentary on what's just happened, so Hannibal bumps his upper arm gently against Neph's shoulder and does instead. "Shall we, then?" Hand in hand, walking away from a waking nightmare of Neph's.
It's...a strangely appealing and unique birthday present.
She's been in Baltimore long enough, now, to have mapped about eighty percent of the city's rooftops. Neph can close her eyes and visualize the route she'd take as easily as she can call up the contents of their fridge. If she pushed herself, she could beat Hannibal and Will (if he came along) back to the apartment, even if they went by bus or subway.
But as Hannibal slots their fingers together, she lets go of the course she'd half-charted, wiping the slate clean of rooflines and window ledges. Maybe she'll double back some other time, test the feasibility just in case the Walters ever has something she wants. If she ran off now, after they'd both backed her, it'd be nothing but self indulgence. Worse, it might actually spit in the face of what Hannibal's offered.
Neph might not be able to bring herself to believe his promise, but she's pretty sure he meant it. People often seem to, at the time.
She puts that out of her mind, sets aside all thoughts of conditional support and affection to look back down at Will, who's adjusted his grip as though they're both wearing mittens. There's a crinkle on his forehead she hasn't seen before, almost-but-not-quite-worried as he studies their hands. A broiling surge of embarrassment fills her chest and singes her cheeks; should she...not have reached for him when he nudged her? Did she overstep again? Uncertainty bubbles up from under her 'no sir nothing suspicious to see here' mask, singes her cheeks pink, but why wouldn't he have let her hand slip away when she stood up, if he minded? Why would he take a surer grip? It must be...okay?
Hannibal tips into her, jolting her from that well-worn rut in her thoughts. Neph blinks at him, anxious lines smoothing away at the corners of her eyes. When she turns to Will again, her hesitance is more muted, less linked to this one thing. She gives his hand a light tug, silently urging him to his feet. "Yeah, I think so."
They wait for Will to collect the map and get his feet under him, then head for the armory. At first, the silence is wary, cautious, all of them on the lookout for a strike. Neph's pretty sure Samson came alone, knows he wasn't in town long enough to've made any serious alliances of his own, but Will and Hannibal have no reason to think the same. They don't know the guy, they know if he has any cranky friends, and they don't know much about how a blacklist scenario plays out (neither does Neph, really, but only because nobody's ever cut off a Mistborn on purpose). Neph stares straight ahead, past suits of armor and racks of halberds, gratingly aware that her reaction must've given them both a wonky impression of how dangerous Samson actually is.
She should've hit him. Nobody's all that scary with a broken nose and a few less teeth. Or maybe that's all the pointy metal talking. It's hard not to feel braver surrounded by an arsenal.
Will was right that there are fewer people in these galleries, but they still get more than their fair share of stares. Three kids trailing along hand-in-hand, paying little attention the actual exhibits, that's the sort of thing people notice. Neph tries not to think about what they must be thinking. She reaches for that untouchable carelessness Hannibal projects so easily, but it doesn't fit her quite the same. She's much better at being part of the background, or creating a character for the occasion. Layla, maybe? Even Elle can handle the occasional audience. Her grip tightens on the hands in hers, but then they're through the Ancient World nave, then the lobby, past the ticketing desk and back at street level.
Neph breathes out, the din of traffic and pedestrians and city life providing better cover than anything the hushed interior of a museum could offer. She might wonder if Samson came this way, but there are too many conflicting sounds and scents to bother trying, and that's as comforting an excuse as any to just dismiss him from her mind.
Or can she? The further they walk, the more the watchful tension dissipates, the more she figures everyone's minds must be turning back to what just went down. How much did Hannibal and Will overhear, and what did they make of it? Had Samson said anything really condemning? Neph's ability to recall conversations is pretty limited at the best of times, but she can't fish anything from the red haze of those moments. Was there anything there that might tip Will off? Would he say anything if he were suspicious? And--and that's not even getting to what they're probably thinking about how that fight got started in the first place.
Neph fights not to squeeze down or let go of their hands, not to make any outward signs, but her footsteps fall unusually heavy and her shoulders inch up. She doesn't want to answer these questions. She doesn't want this silence. The status quo is unbearable, teetering, but she's terrified of the fall.
Hannibal's blood was already singing with revenge, beating in his ears the closeness of Neph to himself. As they walk across the courtyard, he feels so alive and so warm that he can hardly believe the snow that dusts past them doesn't steam right off of his skin.
The chain of them gets some stares, something Hannibal neither relishes nor hates. He ignores the outside world completely, intent only on looking out for threats - something he can mostly relegate off to his sense of smell. He won't forget the musk-scratched kettle-car backfire scent of that boy. It would wake him out of a dead sleep, the scalp-itching awareness of the danger behind that scent is already so strong in his mind.
Whether or not the boy is dangerous - and Hannibal is aware that, no matter how dangerous he is, Neph simply must be more physically dangerous - he has some other hold over Neph. Or did. Still does, in the sense that she collapsed after he left and her heart is still clearly thud-thudding somewhere high in her throat. An emotional tangle is snarled in their shared past, one that he counted on Neph tripping over when they met up again. That's a barrier. That's...a mine, hidden from view, one Hannibal hadn't even known was in Neph's field.
How many other secrets does she have? Does she even think of them daily, or are they buried from everyone, even her? Does Neph consciously hide them from him? Would she continue to if he asked to learn about her?
He doesn't want to scare her away. As they press through the chilly January air and walk a familiar path towards the bus stop they got off at - even though Hannibal knows they'll be waiting at least twenty minutes for it, assuming it isn't late - Hannibal presses through his options like paging through a notebook.
It's jarring, then, that it's not his own meticulous sketching of the situation that breaks the silence.
"Neph." It's so soft but immediately shatters the silence between them. Once broken, Hannibal finds that even when he tilts just enough to glance across Neph and then Will, it's as if some manner of veil has been lifted.
It's difficult to see both of them at the same time, but Will isn't trying to drag behind. He's level enough that Hannibal can still see his face. His eyebrows are furrowed down, but his mouth softens the frown. There's movement at their hips, and Hannibal realizes that Will is experimentally shifting their joined hands - tilting them up a bit higher, as if reminding them that they're there. "You don't have to talk about it now if you don't want to. In public. Or so soon after." Will's mouth twitches, like he's willing to keep spilling out possible excuses for her, but the tide is kept at bay until he presses his mouth thin and earnest and keeps going.
Will's gaze keeps seeking the side of Neph's chin and cheek and, unless Hannibal's mistaken, her eyes. "But there was something there. If you want to talk about it-- I'll listen."
Will's eyes blink, almost sleepily, like he's coming out of a trance. His gaze catches Hannibal's for just a moment, and Hannibal feels as though he's being judged for worthiness. And then, in another first, Will speaks for Hannibal. "Both of us would, if that's what you wanted."
Hannibal's fingers curl protectively in around Neph's, and he finds with surprise that it's nice, to know that someone he cares about cares about the other. To know that Neph is cushioned on her other side by someone perhaps even better at reading her than Hannibal himself is - Hannibal feels no flash of jealousy, but like his own reach has been augmented. This isn't a contest, it's a-- a team effort.
The word 'family' echoes, turns to smoke, and that veil keeps him from speaking. All Hannibal can do is look at Neph and Will and nod.
The two boys are just tall enough - in different ways, Hannibal's 70% leg where Will's less of a stork - that Neph has to take a step and a half for each of theirs. It results in an awkward bobbing of their joined hands, but neither of them let go. Neither of them speak, either, though she's reasonably sure they're not doing it to torture her. They're not deliberately winding her up, waiting for her to snap...it just feels that way, a little bit.
The beginnings of a tension headache bloom at her temples and the nape of her neck. She's considering whether or not she can discretely pop her jaw when Will murmurs her name.
Neph's not the only one surprised, if the way Hannibal takes an extra-long step forward to look across her means anything (a small victory; he can't just doubletake right over the top of her head. Neither of them can.). Her head jerks toward Will automatically, gaze skittering across his cheekbones and the bridge of his nose. Is she avoiding his eyes to be polite, or to protect herself? She...doesn't really know. The last time he dipped his feelers in her thoughts, he nearly babbled himself into an extra-bad concussion. Neph hastily faces forward, scans the street, kicks out at a wadded up piece of newsprint as it blows by. Will doesn't give any sign that he's upset she's avoiding eye contact, just lifts their hands a little in, what, acknowledgement?
He presses on. Neph feels Hannibal's breath against her shoulder, ruffling her hair, as he keeps his head turned to watch. She doesn't dare try to check his expression. Would it be approving, discouraging, or that blank 'now what' look he sometimes gets when he's content to let baffling events play out? Would it be that hungry, wanting look, the one she dreads and anticipates in equal measure? What had Will called it? A void? And what was it he'd said - implied - about her? That she doesn't ask him direct questions or give him the chance to share, doesn't want to share herself in return.
You don't have to talk about it.
I'll listen. A needle of shame pierces her throat, hitches her breathing. For a wild second there, she hadn't been sure if the 'something' he meant was the story with Sampson or the question of how she has any authority to kick someone out of Baltimore. Neph almost stumbles on her extra half-a-step, then does it again when he loops Hannibal in on his offer. If he were asking about the bigger picture, and not about what happened to her, wouldn't he assume Hannibal already knew? How...unfair of her, underestimating him like that. Will's the one who offered her a quick and quiet way out of the museum. He's earned the benefit of her doubt. She's just so--she's all twisted up around this, now, spinning phantoms from shadows.
Hannibal squeezes her hand in silent agreement. Neph can't help but notice that he let Will speak for him, just now, dictate terms and conditions. If that's what you wanted. Hannibal's getting better, but he's still more likely to press on an opening if it appears, and he doesn't leave easy outs. He goes along with this anyway, either swept along by Will or badly unsettled by her behavior. Neph squeezes back with both hands, blunt nails digging into the outside of Will's palm and between Hannibal's knuckles. Her fingers are plenty long, she's just proportionally that much smaller than either of them.
Funny, Samson's had been just as outsized. Morbid interest drove her to test the spread of her fingertips against the bruises he left on her chest and thigh, a span that came up short. She would never've imagined herself willingly bracketed like this, back then, but she hadn't given it a second thought when they'd all stood up to leave the courtyard hand in hand.
"It's not what you're thinking," Neph winces. In a way, that's the problem. It's never as bad as everyone's ready to suspect, so what actually happened seems less legit, somehow. Then she remembers just who she's talking to, and turns thoughtful eyes on Will. "I mean. Probably. I dunno what you picked up. Maybe it's, um, exactly what you're thinking."
It's as much a question as a caution, and maybe that's why she lets their eyes catch. Will's are dark, heavily lidded, but Neph doesn't think for a second that he's being casual about this. It's just not there in his voice.
They don't really talk about what he can do - I'm not gonna be a goddamn oracle for you - and normally she puts it out her mind. Maybe she shouldn't've said anything; if he knows, if he plucked it out of her head, surely he wouldn't make her say it out loud. But what if it's rattling around in his brain like a wrecking ball? She doesn't want that, not to share it or inflict it.
It doesn't mean the same thing to him that it does to Hannibal. With a mind already so full of everyone else's impressions - their thoughts, their reflections, their disappointments - it's difficult for anything to keep feeling sacred. Hannibal clings to what he wants, lets all dissenting opinions roll off of him like oil over wings, but Will is soil that everyone else's roots grow through.
If there used to be something inside of him that craved anything better to call 'family', it's been eaten right out of the soil after so many years. Or maybe just the name has, just the audacity to call it what it rightfully is, because Will absolutely feels the pull to help others. To reach out for that connection, no matter how many times he's ended up with bitten fingers over it.
He feels Neph's distracted concern almost like a hand warding him off, but Will thinks...that might just be him. Neph doesn't ask him to stop, or lean away, just breathes surprised and stares like she didn't expect someone to comment on the half-healed wound she's been licking since they walked away from that confrontation. When her fingers squeeze into the side of his hand, Will actually lets his shoulders slope back down into something almost relaxed, because that's so clearly a permission.
'It's not what you're thinking.'
Bile-sour fills Will's mouth, and he only looks away briefly to swallow it back down. His eye contact returns, staring at the blue of Neph's, the way they're blown with guilt and uncertainty and the tremors of something Will actually and truly hasn't ever had to face before.
He's never been more aware of the difference between them - the gendered aspect of it, that is. It suddenly looks like a yawning gap, but when he reaches out across anyway he finds it must've just been a mirage, because he touches the other side and can begin clawing at the base of it. He still can't climb it, but he can scope the shape and size.
"I'm not about to argue-- degrees of trauma here." Will says, and even that hurts coming up, burns like getting sick. Her eye contact isn't by accident - it can't be, they're still relatively new to one another but they both know enough, she knows enough about him - and so Will...makes himself look. "That's not what hurting is about. It's not a comparison with other events that didn't happen."
And maybe his breath's picking up a little. Maybe there's shadows of his own experiences - not the same, but the same underlying narrative of not enough to excuse your reaction - that are what help push him to keep pushing for Neph. "It's about what did happen. And how you-- felt about it." His cheeks burn, self-conscious both to be saying those things out loud and at the thought of what he's going to need to do if Neph refuses this or he's entirely wrong. But he just can't--
He can't see what he thinks he's seeing and not say something. He just can't do it. So he squeezes Neph's hand in return, stomach tight and throat half-closed, and waits.
Will grimaces, though whether at her comment or something else he's picking up, Neph doesn't know. She thinks it must be her, because he doesn't confirm or deny any concrete knowledge of what happened to her. He goes for her attempt to shrug it off instead, a tactic Neph--can't say she appreciates. Her mouth flattens as she jerks her face away and forward.
"It is though," she mutters, shoulders bunching. "You gotta recognize the bullets you dodge. And when people get it wrong or think...think something happened when it didn't, that's not something you get to come back from."
Ben. Ben. Is she ever going to have a chance to make that right? He'd had his whole life uprooted 'cuz of her, and she never even got to apologize. The longer anyone goes without hearing news of him, the more convinced she is that the Inquisitors must've found him first. And now there's nobody but her to say what did or didn't happen between them, just a formal dismissal of charges and assholes like Samson snarling shit like Everyone knows you and Argus--
She shoves that away, buries it back under the rubble with all the other things she's done but can't change, way down deep where Will can't dig it up. He's not wrong, exactly, to say she's still hurting. Neph hates to admit it, but if anyone other than Samson had come at her with ugly accusations she'd've handled it differently. There's something wired wrong in her, now, after what happened between them. She doesn't like it but she can't begin to see how to untangle it, either. How is she no better now than when she was six, twelve, fourteen, lashing out with her abilities and complicating others' lives?
Maybe if people would stop coming at her first, she wouldn't have to.
Something did happen to her - Will's right about that, too. He doesn't exactly ask her how it made her feel, but the statement is open ended enough that it could be taken as a question. Hadn't Lecter asked her the same thing? What do you want to tell others? What would make you feel better? Or something like that. She was too tired and freaked out and painfully sore to remember it clearly, aside from the part where she totaled his kitchen in a childish display of temper. Neph cringes a little bit at the memory, but she's surprised to realize that the questions wrapped up inside it never really went away. She's even more surprised to realize that they've been niggling at the back of her mind ever since, accreting layers of thought like pearls.
What happened matters, because it's still affecting her. And how she feels about it matters, too, because those feelings direct her actions, push her to do things like stake territory and wield her Allomancy in new and startling ways. If she doesn't dig down on that, she won't ever be able to predict herself, she'll just keep reacting blindly and fucking things up.
"We worked together," she says, haltingly. "A couple'a times. Usually everybody else was older, so we were...friendly, kinda? That's what I thought, anyway, I guess he read it differently."
That's it, the part she just can't get her head around. How did she miss it? Was she putting something more out there? Is that a thing she does? When did he decide they ought to be something more than that, and why didn't he just try to talk to her about it first instead of tacking that decision onto her, too? Neph's right hand twitches in Hannibal's with the need to scrub at her mouth, rake at her hair. "There was this work party, and we were leaving, and--I din't see it coming so I didn't say 'no' fast enough and then there was a huge fight. That's all. That's what gets me. I should've seen it."
Neph drops her head back with an inarticulate growl of frustration. It's easier, a lot easier, to be angry and tired about this than to remember how scared and small she'd felt. She's Mistborn. It's almost not even allowed.
'That's not something you get to come back from' That...doesn't even make sense, not with what they're talking about right now. So what's Neph thinking about, if not this? Was there a-- a false accusation in her past, about her or someone she knew or--
Not relevant. Not something Will needs to dig at right now, because god knows neither of them needs him with just enough information that he's chasing possibilities into waking nightmares on his way home later.
So he visibly steels himself, draws himself inward as if wringing out the bad thoughts. But he's going to just have to let Neph go ahead and push the conversation back into the present - or the near-past, as it happens - and sure enough, she does. The description comes out in staccato hesitancy, frustration rusting off her words.
This, too, makes Will's stomach churn. Neph doesn't say it - doesn't even really look it, except for when he sees the way her other shoulder tenses like she wants to take that hand back from Marijus, presumably to fiddle with something - but it's not just annoyance. It's not just rage.
It's guilt. Or maybe more accurately, shame. It's a sour and uncertain thing, and it chips away at Will's ribs, makes them feel brittle as he forces himself to keep breathing through this.
It's not even easy to miss, really. Even if you just look at the words, she's dragging at the concept that she should've someone known it was going to happen. Like guys hitting on girls who aren't interested and then getting violent when there's a misunderstanding is just a fact that she should've known better active self-defense about.
It's another squeeze to Will's stomach when he thinks that maybe, that's kinda the impression that rolls off a lot of people in the news when they talk about this, too. The kinda people who talk about 'sexual assault' and 'bad decisions' with air quotes and follow it with concerns about football scholarships.
Marijus is radiating, off to the side, practically steaming with the force of an anger that quite frankly almost distracts Will away from the topic for a split second. But then he digs his heels in, because this is about Neph - Marijus is fine and welcome to have his own reaction, but Will can talk about it with him later (and since when did Will start organizing his friends' problems so he could personally help them with them, anyway?).
It's about Neph, not him or Marijus, and so Will sucks in some welcome icy January air, adjusts his hand in Neph's to hold hers a bit more tightly, and tries. "Has it-- ever occurred to you that if you didn't see his interest, and some ugly misunderstanding grew out of that... That he also fucked up by not seeing your lack of interest? At-- at literally no point in that did it sound like he was entitled to a fucking thing, because no one ever is.
"People get wires crossed all the time when they don't just use their words. Jumping-- jumping all over someone because you think you might've seen some interest, or whatever the hell he did, that's not-- Normal people don't do that, Neph. That's not on you to have gotten ahead of him making a shitty decision. That's on him for being a fucking moron from square one."
There's a blur of motion beyond Neph, Marijus's head ducking down to speak closer to Neph's ear. "'Didn't say 'no' fast enough'." He quotes, voice flat and eyes deadly. Will forgets to breathe, but Marijus isn't even looking at him. "That alone says it all. I've never known you to hesitate to make your interest or lack of interest quite clear, Neph. That he came at you so quickly is enough to say with certainty that he was in the wrong."
Will can't say he disagrees - thinks maybe even that Marijus had a better handle on how to untwist the story back out into a clear line of 'and here is where it got fucked up' - but he also has to look away from Marijus's face. Will settles for watching Neph again, eyes keen on hers.
Edited (woops bit at beginning missed coding) Date: 2017-01-26 11:11 pm (UTC)
This...might've been a mistake. She's not even sure she got the words out right, nevermind that they were understood. It was easier, almost, with Lecter. He hadn't actually been there to see her confront Samson, and he already knew about her abilities and other jobs. There was less tapdancing, except for the part where she came back to herself and realized she'd run to his house in the first place, where he asked her if she wanted to stay.
They never did get around to negotiating what that might mean. Now they never will. He'd been classically evasive about it and she hadn't had the courage or the energy to ask what he was really offering. That might bother her more, if she hadn't ended up living with some version of him anyway.
This version is furious. As she stumbled her way through the events of that night, Hannibal went stiffer and stiffer at her side. His hand in hers might as well be a prosthetic, as cold and motionless as it's gone. Their shoulders bump as they walk, Neph sort of rattling between the two boys, and it's like skidding against a wall. Her heart beats high and fast in her throat, even knowing that anger's not directed at her. It could still take her arm off, when it inevitably goes. She watches him from the corner of her eye, the part of her brain that endlessly spins contingency plans kicks into gear. There must be some way to redirect that rage away from herself, away from--
Will tugs lightly at her hand, gripping tighter despite her clammy palm. Neph turns her face a few degrees back toward him, watching from three-quarters. If he's angry, it's harder to read. She can't help but be wary, she doesn't know what Angry Will looks like or how he's likely to snap, and here she is stuck between him and Hannibal, the ticking bomb. But he only says in a very reasonable tone, That's not on you.
Neph winces, very well aware she'd said something pretty similar to him a couple months ago. It's a lot easier to dish out than it is to take.
"I know," it takes real effort not to say it to the sidewalk, but she manages to lift her head. "I know it's him but I still--it's not just him. There's others, y'know? S'not like it's never happened before, I just always got outta the way in time." With both her hands caught up, she invents a new fiddling method; her thumb taps an arhythmic staccato against Will's knuckles. "If I'm gonna make it out there I gotta be smart and see this stuff and I hate--I hate that I have to and I hate that I didn't that time."
That one slip planted doubt in her, a weed with roots gone too deep to pull up in one neat clump. She's been more paranoid since, quicker to assume ill intent. It's died down a little in the past, what, ten months, but she was still at peak anxiety when Hannibal half-accused her trying to kiss him. No fucking wonder she blew up.
Is he remembering that, too? Is that why he leans down to hiss in her ear? Neph jumps a little, her doubletime footsteps veering toward Will while her chin jerks back in Hannibal's direction. She might've expected the same kind of feral, bared-teeth rage he'd displayed when he thought Will's dad was responsible for beating his face in, but this...isn't that. It's the burn of dry ice, the methodical scrape of a whetstone over a blade, skin parting silently under a keen edge. It's murderously stunning and Neph can only be blindly grateful that it's for her, not because of her. His stare fills her entire field of vision. She has to remind herself to blink.
"I know he was," she says again. Her shoulder jostles Will's, bulkier and softer through their mutual layers, but she twists her wrist to scrape her fingernails down the back of Hannibal's hand. She drifts back to the middle, pupils constricting a little as she forces herself to zoom out on the rest of Hannibal's face. "I...when it happened I was just really freaked out and...tired. 'Cuz I thought I couldn't watch my back every fucking second, y'know?"
Relief, relief, she saw murder in his eyes and her knees went weak with relief. Neph ducks her head and swings their hands - all their hands - a little. "It's better now."
'There's others, y'know?' They'd brushed against this topic, before. When Neph had laid out her lack of interest in sex and still tagged the end of it with the general share that people don't take it well, that she's been hit on enough times to know it as a routine.
What's there to even say to an issue so wide that it can swallow someone's entire world for hours at a time? "I don't think that's something that's just you. Or even just him, or them. It's-- the whole system." The one that tells skinny young girls like Neph to watch over their shoulders when they leave their cars at night, and then puts in sitcom jokes about how women always visit public bathrooms in packs. The one that ends every unattractive-man-becomes-slightly-more-competent comedy film with them getting the girl like it was a vending machine transaction.
Will lets their shoulders bump against one another, everything muffled in winter layers, and keeps an eye on Neph instead of Marijus while she navigates his stiletto-knife anger. The danger radiating off Marijus, the capacity to hurt someone after enough planning to make it count, has images from true crime shows flashing in Will's mind. He sees that boy from earlier, face down with glassy eyes, a line of red coming from his temple, and Will squeezes Neph's hand and leans in closer, a chill shivering up his neck.
'It's better now.'
...Because she doesn't have to watch her back? Because she has other people to help her do that. Will almost sags with relief and embarrassment, nearly giddy with the idea that Neph is friendly enough with Marijus to look at his angry face and see a welcome promise and not a horror show she should back away from fast. His hand moves in Neph's, though, their arms arcing slowly when she swings them, and it slowly enters Will's mind that she might mean-- more than just Marijus, with that statement.
He lets their steps take him a foot's width closer to Neph, enough that shoulders bump again. He's gathering up the words necessary to reassure, or to thank, or to offer that promise officially himself as well - but then Marijus catches his attention once more.
Marijus, whose anger has simmered down enough to reveal a different kind of intensity. His shoulders are tight, his neck tilted forward, and his steps are shorter and more aggressive. He looks like an animal going against all natural instinct. "Would you like to head home on your own, then?"
The non sequitor of it has Will almost tripping over his own feet. It feels like a hunter releasing prey, so no wonder there's a strange dissonance radiating in the very air near Marijus, but what--
"I don't-- want you caged after being hedged in by other people for so long." Will feels the way this rips at something in Marijus, can feel it peel apart the ribs in his own chest, leave behind sticky pain in its wake. Marijus doesn't let go of things. He's unwavering in his desires and his possessiveness, to the point of being overbearing and beyond. Will would never have considered this sort of growth even possible, but here it is.
Potentially even ill-timed - Will has no idea if Neph actually wants space right now. She doesn't feel like she does, she isn't vibrating with flight like she was before, but Will just stares at Marijus without breathing and hopes that Neph gets the underlying message that Will can see, spelled out in the air between them all:
That Marijus cares for her, deeply enough that he's finally realizing the impact of letting people go. Instead of pursuing his own revenge - because Will can still see it, the plans for hurting that boy - he's interrupting everything to try and let Neph do what she needs to cope.
It's love, honestly. That's what Will sees, and it bowls him over. He's never seen anyone look at anyone else that way, in his life, and he knows the meaning of it only from bone-deep genetic memory that apparently a lifetime of neglect hadn't quite managed to leach out of him.
Will's nearly leaning his chin on Neph's shoulder, pulled in by the gravity of the other two, mouth open and unaware.
Lecter had said that, too. That it wasn't about her, wasn't about anything she could or couldn't do, that it was a system of fuckery perpetuated by entitled boys. A system no single person could be expected to dismantle or stop. Neph can acknowledge that, but she doesn't have to like the fact that it's an issue too big to get her arms around, dig her fingers into, and claw apart all on her own. She doesn't have to accept it any more than she resigned herself to shuttling around fostercare. Given the choice between safe acceptance and truly stupid risks, she batters herself against the latter like a moth on a lampshade.
Neph doesn't snap any of that at Will. The cringe that always lingers in his voice is out in full force, as if he know how unhelpful it is to say, to hear. It's not his fault she's been through this enough times to know the script. Maybe, if she hears it repeated often enough, she'll come up with some brilliant response that turns the whole thing over on its head. At least she got someone new thinking about it, looking at the system and reaching out to take her hand instead of turning away from it. That must count for something, she thinks, as Will pulls closer to her side.
Her other arm is stretched out a little further to Hannibal, a strained point of contact anchored by the desperate grip of their hands. She hasn't looked at him since as-good-as-admitting she trusts him at her back. His answering silence is river-dark and cold, rushing around her, pulling at her, but still she doesn't look. Say something, she urges as a muscle works at the corner of his jaw, visible in her periphery. Neph's not sure which of them she means. Say something.
When he does, it's not an acknowledgement. Not exactly.
Except that it is.
Will fumbles at her side, and Neph--stops. Hannibal's momentum and her hold on his hand pulls him around to face her, while Will practically trips into her back. She rocks forward a little, seeking out Hannibal's face, his eyes. Whites flash around the edges and his nostrils flare a little. She can never tell if that's a sign of nerves or active mutation, with him. A little frown crinkles her face, words poised on her tongue, go home? but before you said--, when he unlocks a door she hadn't realized existed.
Neph's face falls open. They're all three of them standing in the middle of the sidewalk, forcing people to part around them, but nobody says anything about the girl with one boy at her back and another staring her down like a reluctant penitent, her hands in both of theirs. That's a minor miracle right there. Another might be the clarity with which Neph hears what Hannibal means.
They've talked around it before. This uncertainty played unwelcome third wheel those first few months, when neither of them knew if she would (or should) stay, or leave him with his money and pick up her own life where she'd left off. How much did she owe him, and was it even about debt at that point? How much of their unity was sheer momentum? Where was the choice in any of it, if at all? If they'd met like this in another timeline, his or hers, peers without any convoluted temporal history, would they have been friends?
Neph, in typical go-with-the-flow, focus-on-the-present fashion, started to enjoy herself too much to question it. And then little changes became big ones, became a joint lease and dishtowels and staking territory and suddenly the beginning no longer mattered. Knowing she could leave at any time didn't mean she wanted to, not at all. But Hannibal--
--she hasn't made him any promises. Not out loud.
"You're not a cage," she says vehemently, a wind beating back the river. Her hand shifts in his so she's grasping it from below, fingers wrapped around his, her thumb pressed against the back of his knuckles. "You weren't ever a cage, you were--you are--"
The trouble with 'you' is, it's both singular and plural, something Neph has never tasted so clearly in her own mouth before. Were. Are. One person and two people who've been very different things to her at very different points in her life. All kinds of possibilities crowd her mouth, conclusions like safe, honest, trustworthy. Like home. All of them too much and not enough.
She is very, very bad at this. "I'm always glad to have you there. Here." Neph says, at length. It's not right. It's not perfect. It's not even really a promise. If she's very, very lucky, it might make sense, in context of what she thinks he's saying, and what he's just offered her.
Nobody's ever trusted her to come back, before. She's never given anyone reason to. It's a limit she finds she's eager to test. Her chin comes up, the hair on the back of her neck lifting and tickling where Will's breath stirs it. Somewhere in all of this he's drawn in close, but it doesn't trigger any crawly feelings. It's a steady press of warmth instead. "I think I'd like to go for a run," she says, threaded through with wonder. "Not, um, not from anybody. Just for me." A grin pops out of nowhere, from the ether, from the thing inside her that keeps putting one foot in front of the other. "I bet I beat you home."
This has depth. Cold rushing water beneath it, pitfalls and slippery sections Will hadn't been aware of until now, even with his 'gift'. Every word that Marijus ground out, every word that Neph manages to chip off herself to hand over, has a duality to it. The shine is too bright for Will to make out the shapes clearly, but he sees the shimmer, feels the smooth surface, tastes the promise behind everything.
They've gone through something, and maybe that's why they're both alone together, here in a part of the world neither of them is really from - Marijus from across an entire ocean, Neph apparently from different parts of the US.
Will feels like he can't quite do it justice, describing just what he sees in Marijus's eyes, but he's compelled to try.
Marijus is watching Neph like she's the only thing he's aware of, like his entire life has been eclipsed by this moment in time shared with her. All the ludicrous focus of Marijus's interest is contracted in Neph's direction, timeless and limitless and so heavy Will feels its pull like gravity, and it's not even for him. Will's mouth falls open, something too scared to feel hungry answering the call from Marijus's gaze, and Will is simultaneously glad for Neph and unsure how she can handle this.
It should feel far more foreign to watch a scene this intense unfold next to him. Being in forced close proximity to people's dramas has always been taxing at best, mortifying or terror-soaked at worst.
But this is like watching a natural landscape come into focus from the fog, or a storm coalesce. It's huge. Nearly limitless. Almost promises danger, but you lean in anyway, just to say you witnessed it.
Marijus is the one that looks caged right now, rigid and thrumming with energy, like he'd be pacing back and forth if he had the room at the end of his tether via Neph's hold on his wrist. Will thinks of a tiger in a zoo. "Alright." Marijus is clearly wrestling with something terrifying and unknown, and then all at once he just - steps forward and hugs Neph.
Will rocks back instinctively, giving them room, because now Marijus's arms are coming around Neph's thin shoulders, and Marijus is slim but not so much that it doesn't encroach on the lack of space that had existed a moment ago between Will and Neph. They make brief eye contact over Neph's shoulder, Marijus's face a hurricane, and then he tilts down into the downy parts of Neph's hair and mutters something into her ear.
Will's pretty sure he says "I don't think anything could ever cage you again, Nephele." He hadn't realized her name was short for anything similarly strange, had just assumed it was a brief nickname from nothing.
"I'll see you at the apartment." Marijus looks like he's holding himself together by threads. As Marijus pulls back away, holds Neph at a determined arms length, Will tilts back in, taps his free hand to Neph's wrist as a silent encouragement. But otherwise, this is-- this is about them, right now. Will's never been so content to be a silent observer.
Hannibal Lecter is a predator. Neph has always known this; she has a rabbit's keen sense of these things, a trait that's kept her alive more than once. She has never, in all the time or times she's known him, felt so certain that he would eat her alive if he could. He may not want to cage her, but the yawning whirlpool of his gaze says he wants to keep her, an undertow drawing inexorably at her ankles.
But Nephele is Mistborn. She's fog. She's a haze. She's the whole sky full of clouds, there's too much of her for even the deepest, angriest sea to contain except for the fragments she rains down at whim. It's not, she realizes, that she has her own deep well of gravity, it's that she's lighter than gravity. He can try to exert it, but she'll only slip through his fingers and envelop him, cool and calm or icy and stinging. She thinks he might know that, too.
A tiny smile shapes her mouth, crinkles her eyes, her only outward response to all that howling intensity. If she's affected by it, and she is, well...isn't that how it works? Ocean and sky, locked together, passing back and forth? Even her eighth-grade education covered the water cycle.
If Hannibal sees what she sees, if she's mirroring anything back at him, it sets him on edge. His mouth flattens out, his arm is extended almost as far as it can go without straining away from her, and she can feel tendons bunching under his skin. For a wild second she thinks he might tear away and storm off, counter to everything he's just said to her, but then he lunges in - 70% leg! - and folds her into a hug.
There's a scuff of sneakers on pavement as Will dodges out of the way, but Neph notices the sudden cold at her back more clearly. It only lasts a second, as she rocks onto her toes to stretch into the hug, her arms wrapping around Hannibal's ribs beneath his jacket. He'd stormed out of the museum without buttoning it up, overheated by nature and anger, and now she tucks herself into it by invitation. His scarf is a warm swath of truly hideous plaid against her cheek.
"I don't think anything could ever cage you again, Nephele," he says against her temple. Neph shivers and curls her hands over his spine as though she could grip it like bars on a window. He never calls her by her full name, not even when he's really pissed. That was always--
Hannibal pulls away as though yanked by force, before she can finish that thought or come up with anything in response. She doubletakes at him anyway, half-expecting to see someone else standing there, a little taller, a lot more plaid. It's only when she doesn't that her heart rate starts to dip towards normal.
He says he'll see her at the apartment (not home, never 'home' with him, which would sting if she didn't know they have totally different concepts of the term) but doesn't let go of her shoulders. His knuckles stand out white in her periphery, and there's still a flicker of it around the edges of his irises. It's an uncertainty of self she hasn't seen in him since he was little, when she'd told him he was a mutant. She does now what she might have done then, if she'd known him better - she rises back up on her toes and presses a quick, dry kiss to his cheek. The cold tip of her nose bumps his cheekbone. "Yeah you will," she says, all cocky certainty as she drops flatfooted again.
The warm to cold ratio flip flops again, her front all chilled but her back shielded from the winter breeze when Will steps in. She's turning even as he touches her wrist, belatedly realizing she had to drop his hand to hug Hannibal. It hadn't even occurred to her, then. Now she opens her mouth to apologize, but finds Will looking at her with an unusual...solidity. She catches his hand, and what falls out of her mouth is: "Thank you, Will. For--saying something, back there." For snarling at Samson for no reason other than he'd set himself up against her and Hannibal. "I'm sorry stuff got all weird."
It's a rueful apology, delivered with a sad and lopsided smile. The Weird is 100% her fault, even if he doesn't know it. Not even Hannibal really knows, for all that Neph's not sure why she's keeping it quiet. It just hasn't come up? There's never been a good time to say I'm one of seven people who can do what we do, whatever that means. Soon, maybe.
She doesn't try to hug Will or lean in to plant one on his cheek, but she squeezes his hand and wrinkles her nose at him and says, "Try not to let him do anything too suicidally stupid?" Because, look, she's not an idiot, she knows Hannibal has a dying man's thirst for revenge and a mind that tends toward elaborate games of Mousetrap. She wants them to get home safe, and that means no unnecessary dramatics. This is an unfair thing to put on Will Graham, but he's driven Hannibal to unusual behavior with the force of his stare alone, so Neph's willing to risk it.
Then she breaks away, not touching either of them for the first time in at least twenty minutes. What a weird thing to suddenly tally up in her head. Neph takes a step backward, toward the museum, a topographic map of Baltimore's rooftops rising in bumps and ridges on her mind. It'll be quicker to doubleback, and she was serious about beating them there. She wants dibs on the shower.
"Don't be late!" she grins, and then hop pivots and breaks down the sidewalk at a fast clip.
Will blinks at the kiss, sees it in startling echoed negative every time he closes his eyes, but it... It doesn't not fit, does it? Marijus looks alarmed for a heartbeat, like someone had just shown him a door where there had been only wall before, but in the aftermath he settles in a way Marijus hasn't since that boy showed up in the courtyard.
Neither of them relax - Neph is closer to it, but Neph has a razor-edge of attention that's all her own, too - but both of them seem more certain, like self-knowledge and some interpersonal bonds are all they need to patch themselves back up and keep going, keep going, until an uncertain future point when everything in the entire universe has been tugged to a stop.
--Now that he sees it in someone else, has to try to name it, Will realizes that it's not just his 'empathy disorder' or a surplus of mirror neurons, that this is actually an accurate reflection he's staring down.
Neph catches his hand and-- thanks him, actually thanks him, and Will finds his certainty for watching Neph and Marijus interact doesn't extend even slightly to what on earth anyone could ever see in himself. He's too stunned to deny anything coherently, too touched to jerk back away from her, just lets his fingers spasm against hers and stammers out. "I'll-- always say something. You're-- you're welcome. And it's fine." A flicker of real smile, a flash fire across his face. "I'm so used to it, I think I kinda prefer the weird shit, at this point."
It's clearly meant to be light-hearted, but Neph also isn't dumb to innuendo. Will knows there's a solid foundation of something very serious under that layer of jokingly asking him to keep an eye on her closest friend in the world. Will just nods, face falling into honest surprise and warmth. "I'll make sure he waits til we're back at your guys' place before he starts doxxing that kid, yeah. Promise."
He and Marijus turn as one unit to watch Neph flee down the street after that, back the way they came.
Which leaves Will and Marijus on the sidewalk, standing on either side of a sudden chilly gap.
Will surprises himself by moving first. His arm twitches and then falls back at his side, useless for reaching out physically, but the intensity of the two of them sings in his blood, vibrates under his skin. He can't remove the imagery of a hawk gently letting something slip back out of its talons, of Marijus taking that unexpected step towards trust.
What ends up spilling from Will's mouth, while his eyes are focused on the ground in front of himself, is a phrase he's never heard from anyone for himself. But it keeps ringing in his ears like struck metal. "I'm-- proud of you."
Marijus is an immovable post next to him for two, three heartbeats, and then he's lurching forward. A palm catches against the back of Will's head, fingers threading through his hair with familiarity Will can barely process, let alone explain. There's a thumb behind his ear across a pulsing vein, and their noses nearly touch. Their temples do touch, in fact that's the point of contact that seems to be why Marijus has tilted forward so far. Will thinks of Neph kissing Marijus's cheek just moments ago, and feels himself undeniably caught - a rushing tide dragging him back out to sea, with some hint as to direction but no way of knowing the depths he might be sucked down towards.
He's holding his breath. Will is holding his breath and he's letting this happen because he has no idea how to convince himself he isn't getting anything from the howling force that's demanding him, with more sincerity than anything Will's ever had directed at him before.
"Hannibal." At first, Will doesn't know how to place the whisper that makes the curls of hair by his right ear flutter. "My name is Hannibal."
Oh. Oh.
The hand across the back of his head doesn't twitch, Marijus - Hannibal - doesn't budge an inch, teeth nearly grazing the tip of Will's ear as he speaks. "I can't explain why you can't call me that in public, but I want you to know my name."
Will's hand comes up without thinking, knuckles going white immediately in his grip on Mar-- Hannibal's forearm. They stay like that, a tense and unsustainable statue, Will holding the arm of the hand that's gripping his head, the street traffic parting around them and giving occasional exasperated looks. Will ignores all of them, just trying to steady his breathing back into his own pattern instead of taking Hannibal's as his own.
They're on a cliff, and Will isn't sure what he could possibly offer - for escalating or de-escalating - without knocking them both off of it. He stays put, gradually feeling the tension tug at his bones, feeling desperation ring through him but with nowhere to put it. Hannibal makes a soft sound and, on instinct, Will turns to look at him, their noses barely brushing--
"Let's go."
Cold air rushes to the spot on the back of Will's head where Hannibal's hand was a moment ago. Hannibal is pulling back, firmly in his own circle of gravity all at once, and Will sways on the spot with dizzy relief.
"Okay," Will says, and then they're off, instinct letting them fall in step with each other but a new distance slowly settling in. They don't hold hands. Neither of them falsely reach or check for the other, they both just force forwards. Will wonders if Hannibal's ears are ringing as much as his own.
It's not until they've turned two corners that Will finds his voice fully.
"How the hell's she gonna beat us home by running?"
No one thinks to salt or sand the tops of buildings, transforming the winter roofscape into an obstacle course of sooty snow and slick ice. The combo slows her progress, especially since it's still full daylight and she can't go overboard on the Allomancy. Her new winter jacket - a navy wool peacoat with black fleece on the inside of the turned-up collar - doesn't allow her the range of motion she's used to from hoodies and windbreakers, and she doesn't want to ruin it by rolling her falls properly. So she's a little limited, here. She'd dressed to fit in at a museum, not for acrobatics.
Neph enjoys every second of it anyway. Her thin-soled sneakers grip shingles, concrete and tar-paper equally well, and Tin spots the telltale gleam of ice even in deep shadows. The cold air chaps her cheeks and scrapes away at her lungs, hollowing out all the things she might've wished to shout at Samson and leaving her free to fill up with something better. Every jump jars her knees and the palms of her hands are scraped pink and red from gripping ledges and eaves. She does not stop, propelling herself forward and over with her own strength and judicious dabs of Iron and Steel. Her blood roars through her body, pounding against the barrier of her skin, until she's so rooted in her own capacity that there's no need to think about judging steps, leaps or distances. Neph swings off pipes and hurtles over ten-foot gaps between alleys without ever thinking about any of it at all.
In fact, she manages not to think about anything until her toes touch down on the brick that makes up all the buildings in their neighborhood. Her innermost shirt is soaked with sweat, her exposed skin is simultaneously flushed and chilled, and her nose is a little drippy. Neph scrubs at it as she cuts her pace to an easier lope.
Actual thoughts start to seep in around the edges of physical discomfort, thoughts like how she doesn't know the first thing about holding down a territory, how she's never made a point of standing her ground before. Thoughts like whether or not to put that word out, or let her continued presence do the talking for her. Thoughts like making sure Samson abides by her edict and gets the fuck outta Baltimore in the next, oh, week. Thoughts like how she'd expected to feel slimier after dealing with him, but how the simple physical grossness of being sweaty and a little smelly just wiped that all away.
Thoughts of Samson, however, drag her back to what he'd said to her about Anansi and Loki, about Benkei.
Neph skids to a final stop on her own rooftop, breath coming hard, sweat dripping down the back of her neck. Someone once arranged a folding chair, a round glass-topped table, and a bucket full of gravel up here, and Neph's gotten in the habit of using them. She drops into the chair, wincing as her cold-and-damp sweater sticks to her skin, and fishes out her phone. She thumbs up Whatsapp.
did u seriously break samsons nose?
She doesn't really expect a reply right away. Allomancers keep weird schedules, and last she heard Benkei was also bouncing at a strip club outside of Bethesda. This time of afternoon, she could be asleep or just getting up. But a bubble filled with ellipses pops up almost immediately, prompting Neph to settle back in the chair in tense anticipation.
I fucking well did and I'd do it again. Comes the answer, closely followed by another ellipses-bubble. Why who told you? I thought he'd be too embarrassed to let it slip.
Neph chews on her lip, still breathing hard through her nose. Of course Benkei would assume this was grapevine stuff. Why would she ever think a Pewterarm would threaten a Mistborn twice? Because Samson thought he could bully Neph, because he thought she'd let her fear cage her. He was almost right. Neph picks at the keyboard with less than her usual nimble speed, but it's cold and her fingers are kinda numb.
he did. he tracked me down today
The response is almost instantaneous: I'LL BREAK HIS GODDAMN NECK. I WAS PRETTY CLEAR WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF HE FUCKED WITH YOU AGAIN THAT LITTLE COCKSTAIN.
Capslock all kinda blurs together in that quantity. Neph grips her phone and rereads it twice, something warm stirring inside that has nothing to do with physical exertion. Benkei's always been nice to her, she's always asked if Neph's doing okay, and they work well together. But she's also a bit older, four or five years, enough that her obvious concern had been unwelcome for a long time. Neph had felt like Benkei didn't think she could make it on her own, she'd resented that, but now...well, there's a lot of things out there to watch out for. Things Neph wouldn't wish on a younger girl, either.
thanks B but its fine. i guess A and L both cut him off too and he thought i made them do it
Benkei, having been in this game longer than Neph, immediately gets it. Damn, good for them. Even if they were just watching out for #1, that's decent of them.
Which were basically Neph's thoughts, too. decent of YOU to hit him for me
I am ALWAYS down for punching whiny boys who don't understand the word 'no'. Neph thinks, all in a flash, that those are some very lucky strippers in Bethesda, and then Benkei sends: Do you need backup? Or help hiding a body?
It really says something about her friends that that's everybody's first offer. Lecter'd asked her the same thing. She snorts, hesitates, then writes, no i just told him to gtfo Baltimore
She doesn't think Benkei will need that spelled out for her either, but the ellipses blink for a long stretch of minutes before the reply comes. Holy shit. You sure?
That's a question Neph suddenly suspects she's going to be asking herself a lot in the next few...whatevers. Weeks, months. Years? She can't even imagine herself at twenty, twenty one, never dared think more than a job or two ahead. But now, huddled in her nice new coat, sitting on the roof above her startlingly fancy apartment, with one of her aliases on a lease that could stretch all the way through Hannibal's residency, the future is a slowly whirling galaxy starred with too many possibilities to number. She could get lost in the thought, but she's an open sky. She encompasses, damn it.
yeah, long enough for it to count, anyway, she types.
Good for you too, then.
The smile that breaks over Neph's face almost splits her dry lip. She rubs a line of sweat off her forehead before replying, thanks Benkei. i'll be in touch. Then she pockets her phone, picks the roof door lock, and heads down the stairs. She could swing through one of their windows, but their apartment faces the street and, again: broad daylight.
With her snow delays and her text conversation, Neph's a little surprised to find that she did beat Hannibal (and maybe Will?) back to the apartment. It's a relief to have the place to herself, familiar surroundings promising safety and comfort and support in a way only a private space can. Neph hangs up her jacket, collects some clean clothes from her room, and heads to the bathroom so she can strip out of her sweaty layers and take advantage of the building's hot water supply.
She steps out twenty minutes later in a cloud of vaguely herbal steam (on the off chance Hannibal's still feeling huggy, she figured she'd use his soaps instead of her own aggressively candy-scented stuff), wearing an anonymous white tee that could be either hers or Hannibal's, she honestly doesn't know, and a pair of pajama pants that puddle around her heels. Neph ruffles a towel over her hair before draping it around her neck and cocking her head to listen for the sounds of someone else being home.
Hannibal doesn't do well with letting attachments go.
He has to frame it in a more palatable manner to accomplish it at all, in fact. While Will and he walk to the bus stop another nine blocks away, he tries to breathe around the panicked vacuum in his chest. While they pay and sit down (Will offers him the window seat, Hannibal takes it), he starts looking for anything available to patch up that hole with. While the bus rocks around corners and eases past pedestrians crossing the street at unwise moments, Hannibal decides he's going to look at this as a longer tether. Not the cutting of ties, but perhaps just more flexible ones.
Like a cat being tricked into eating vitamins by tucking them inside treats, Hannibal has to slowly chisel away what he's done until it's softened to a size and shape that doesn't interrupt the beating of his heart.
"I had this dog once."
Hannibal looks across at Will, who's been leaning fully into the back of his seat like he's tired, except Hannibal can see the antsy energy in his tapping right foot, the way he's checked and re-checked all his jacket pockets three times since they sat down ten minutes ago. "He ran off every other week. We got him a collar, but we couldn't afford to chip him, and he'd come back after a few days every time anyway."
Hannibal lets the pause sink in between them. "What happened to the dog?"
Will's staring down at his shoes, glasses pulled by gravity to the very end of his nose. They're balanced so precariously that Hannibal almost leans over to pull them back up when they hit a bump and he watches them shudder in place. "Didn't come back one week. Thought he got hit by a car."
"Did it?" The pronoun's reflexive for animals. Will might be frowning from that, or from the memory itself.
"No. Saw him again a year later, right before we moved. Bit thinner, but not hurt. Looked happy to see me. I didn't bother trying to get a collar back on him that time, he followed me home anyway. Stayed there in the yard for two weeks straight because my dad didn't want to let him back in the house after all the trouble last time from him." Will wipes the end of his nose, jostles his own glasses and ends up nudging them back up to a safer spot. "We ended up taking him to Montana with us."
Hannibal makes a soft sound, inquisitive. Will's face twitches with that pained, apologetic smile that comes out so often in conversations where comfort's been scraped off the walls.
"He never ran off again. Lived with me - us - til he died, three years later. Think he needed the reassurance that we'd let him be free when he needed to be."
Hannibal leans his temple against the window in the silence that follows. Halfway back to the apartment, Will leans across him to open it, with a muttered comment about needing fresh air. Hannibal spends the rest of the ride thinking of Will burying his old dogs alone in his backyards, of Neph flying over rooftops without him.
*
Neph beat them home, and she showered already. The steam-scent of hot water carrying soap perfumes laps against Hannibal when he opens the door, soft as ocean waves. His head tilts down the hall instantly, following the smell. "She beat us home."
Will blinks down the corridor with far less comprehension. "Did you hear her?"
"No." Will just stares at him, confused but not alarmed. Hannibal is far more interested by what could possibly cause the 'dawning comprehension' that slowly blossoms across his face as he kicks off his shoes onto the mat.
Hannibal, who sits down to methodically untie everything and hangs his jacket and scarf up in the closet before moving beyond the doorway, is what holds up a surprisingly-impatient Will. He's pacing in place, hands in pockets, wind breaker open but still hanging off his shoulders like he's got no intentions of removing it anytime soon.
A few steps further in, and it's clear that she's actually still showering - the soft pounding of water, changing pitch as someone moves underneath its stream, can be barely heard from around the bend and in the bathroom. So Hannibal leads them both into the kitchen, mind buzzing.
His hands are steady on the coffee machine, a silver-and-black contraption that likely cost more than all of Will's wardrobe combined. "Would you like any?"
"Uh, yeah." Will doesn't sit down. The silence is interrupted only with a bag rustling, the grinder buzzing, and then eventually by Hannibal taking a small risk. "Would you get mugs from that cabinet there?" He points, but doesn't move from his spot, as if he's far too busy fiddling with the water in the machine to budge.
It is a strange, energetic satisfaction to watch Will search through the cabinet and pull down three matching mugs. After a small pause, he actually takes a guess and opens two drawers without asking, pulling out three spoons when he successfully finds them.
It's Will whose head cocks first when the shower water stops being a background hum. He grows antsy again, as if unsure what will come through that door, and shifts the identical mugs and spoons around at least twice before Hannibal hears the bathroom door even open.
Hannibal's space-age coffee machine has a very distinctive gurgle. It just takes Neph a few beats to pick it out, against the steady drip-drip of water eking out of the showerhead behind her, the creaking of the pipes in the old walls. The fixtures are all new in this place, but the building's bones go back a ways.
There's at least one person in the kitchen. Two, maybe, with the drawers rattling counterpoint. Neph swabs the towel around inside her ear and follows the sounds. Her feet, overheated from the shower, leave steamy little footprints on the refinished hardwood.
"You're back," she says as she rounds the corner. That 'you' transforms into a plural mid sentence, when she clocks that it's both Hannibal and Will poking around the counters. Neph's only surprised that she's not surprised; she doesn't exactly have a frame of reference for this stuff, for the points in a friendship where it's normal to start hanging out in each others' spaces for non-emergencies. She thinks it might be a case-by-case thing, since she can't imagine wanting to chill at Will's apartment, especially not if his dad's gonna be around. Here, at least, the only awkwardness that might pop up is the stuff they carry around with them every day already. She quirks a smile at Will, a thank you and a good job not letting him get punched or initiate punching all in one. It's possible he won't catch all the subtleties, there.
Ear sufficiently dry, the towel flops back down around her neck. Neph steps onto the tile, grimaces at the cold, and hastily tip-toes her way over to the little rug in front of the sink. "There's coffee?"
Obviously there's coffee, but there's an equally palpable uncertainty in the air. Hesitation, hovering over everybody's shoulders. If she's learned anything from the past almost-year of living with Hannibal (proof she lacks that frame of reference: she went from babysitting the guy to moving in with him in the span of a year, and it's been like eight months since the living together thing started) it's to put on blinders and bull ahead through the Awkward. He appreciates it more often than he doesn't.
He knew she was here. He knew she was here literally this entire time, since he walked in the door.
So there's no reason for him to freeze in the middle of putting the half and half on the counter. There's no reason for everything in his body to stop for a moment when her voice rings out through their (!) kitchen.
But apparently there is still an ease to imagining things as opposed to actually experiencing them, and Hannibal wasn't as prepared as he thought he was for being confronted with the fact that he addressed such a wide, unspoken issue between Neph and himself and she's now...just back in their apartment. Not as if nothing happened - she's coming in with an air of enforced normalcy hanging just as heavy as the shampoo-steam cloud, but she's coming in as if it's something they can get past.
Hannibal remembers her pressing dry, chilly lips to his cheek, and the fact that he's done something she appreciates rings...surprisingly strange. He knows she likes him - they live together, he'd gotten the gist of what that meant somewhere between her spending two weeks of late nights arranging his paperwork with him and between their lease getting signed - but intentionally, knowingly giving her something that she needed is...different.
It's Will who breaks the silence, only looking over at Neph once he's done staring a bit openly and concerned at Hannibal's frozen posture. "Yeah. I didn't know you could need that many settings for coffee, but I'm assuming that's what came out of that machine." For all his fidgety pacing, now that he's gotten a good look at Neph - and he does actually spend a moment looking her up and down, not hiding it at all - he visibly relaxes against the counter.
Will nudges the mugs over a bit further, as if it wasn't clear what they're on the counter for, about the same time as Hannibal reanimates and finds he's capable of finally putting that half and half down near them.
"Did you have a nice run?" Hannibal asks, and he surprises himself that his voice doesn't feel stiff or forced. He's relieved, and it shows, even though his fingertips feel strangely numb and his ribs ache. He feels like he just ran the few miles back to their apartment and he's only just colliding with the exhausted endorphin rush at the tail of it.
Will just squints at them, like he's aware he's on the outside of an in-joke but he knows enough not to ask. He helps himself to the finished pot of coffee first, eyeing Hannibal with a telegraphed suspicion that has Hannibal smirking over at Neph.
The memory of hauling Hannibal, twelve years old and frozen mid-swing, off an older teen punches Neph right between the eyes. It's the sudden robotic shutdown, the way his whole body locks up halfway between one motion and the next, as though his clockwork springs ran down. He comes to a stop with hands and creamer a good six inches off the counter, and Neph can't help but stare.
(Mostly. After a quick beat, her eyes flick to Will, who is also definitely taking all this in. They don't make eye contact, but somehow Neph knows he noticed her looking, that he's acknowledging her, and that they're both a little worried. She wasn't aware it was possible to do all that without exchanging looks, but it's been a day for discoveries.)
Neph bites her lip. Should she not have taken him up on his offer? It wouldn't've cost her anything to ride the bus home with them and slip out for a run after dark. Nothing but this immediate heavy satisfaction sinking into her bones. She would have jittered her way through the rest of the day, she knows that. Does Hannibal? Can he possibly know what he made possible? If he hadn't said anything, she would've stayed. Would have let her guilt for involving them and leaving them in the dark tie her there, without ever thinking about it. The eddies of group dynamics have steered her life for so long, she's prone to letting them set her compass points.
She should explain all that to him. Later, after Will's gone, maybe. It's...not for Will, yet.
"It makes cappuccino, too," Neph says, falling into the rhythm of the tease with thoughtless ease. "If you want a mug that's half foam and seventy percent milk."
Will looks at her, and it's so openly gauging that she shuffles in place, tucking one ankle behind the other. Her pj pants swamp her legs, but she still feels like he's x-raying her scraped knees. Neph resists the urge to tuck her hands, palms clean but pink with abrasions, behind her back. She reaches out for one of the mugs instead, like he won't immediately notice. Hannibal whirs back to life, very probably saving her from a raised eyebrow at least.
"Yes!" she chimes, the uncomplicated glow of a good endorphin rush beaming from her face, from her whole body. Neph doesn't mean to unleash it all on Hannibal with her smile, but she...does, she absolutely does. It's a thank you and a I'm better now and a situation optimal all in one. "Much better'n bus funk!" His eyebrows tilt that fraction of an inch that she's learned means relief, or possibly acceptance, wistfulness without sadness. Neph presses her stinging palms against the cool ceramic and wonders what she ought to make of that.
She'll just have to ask him.
After coffee. Will makes a dubious noise over the pot, though whether at the brew or the two of them, Neph's not sure. It's enough to draw a glint of smug humor from Hannibal, who probably ground the beans by handcrank first and is breathlessly waiting (on the inside) for Will's reaction to the difference. Not that she'll admit there is a difference, but it's possible she might've, maybe, made a weird noise of her own the first time she tried fresh-ground beans. It's possible he won't ever let her live that down. Neph sniffs, but can't hide her own wriggling smile, so she turns hastily away with her cup held out for a pour.
He's glad he offered. He's glad she accepted, took that offer and used it right away. Hannibal wants to use the word challenged, instinctively thinks of someone seeing a new widened boundary and rushing into that portion as testing the resolve of whoever moved the fence, but as his heart climbs back out of his throat and feeling returns to the tips of his fingers, he can see that isn't it. That's not the entire picture.
Because Neph always could have just leapt over that fence. But she'd waited until Hannibal - said it was okay? He knows it's pretense, them staying together. It could be shattered by either of them at any moment, just like anything else in life, and now that it's been tested safely it's oddly comforting to know that she can run off and...
And come back home.
Will is watching the two of them, so relaxed that it's nearly suspicious - until Hannibal realizes it's his mirroring. Hannibal is relaxed, and Neph is beaming, and Will is seeing all of this and instead of turning tail and hiding himself away from all the emotions bleeding across the room, he's calmly stepping through that mess and - if appearances can be believed - enjoying himself.
Hannibal tilts in towards Neph, then, confident in that thank you in her smile, relieved at the fact that she looks uncomplicated in her own relief. For the moment, he can leave thoughts of revenge to the side.
Will is the one holding the coffee pot, and he pours out some for Neph next, leaving his own mug steaming on the counter. When he leans further across to pour some into Hannibal's mug - although Hannibal isn't holding it, seeing as Will and Neph are both arranged on the mug-portion of the counter - Will's mouth opens and his eyebrows meet. He watches Neph with confusion for a moment before his attention flickers to Hannibal and back again.
"Are you--" Will clears his throat, eyebrows raising back up as if he'd just startled himself. "You use the same shampoo." He says with forced calm, as if that, of all the things he's seen between Hannibal and Neph, is the one that doesn't make sense.
Or is he just surprised that he recognizes what Hannibal's shampoo smells like, when another person is wearing it? Hannibal now has to decide which one of those options he likes best, whether it feels nicer to be amused or flattered. "Sometimes." Hannibal had noticed Neph was wearing his - it's its own sort of flattery, but in a deliberate and kind way. They've discussed his aversion to certain strengths of scents often enough that he thinks he knows what that choice means, and he smiles as he reaches between Will and Neph to get to his coffee.
And then slots himself directly between them fully, leaning back against the counter despite the lack of room to do so. It's Will who moves, with a little sound of surprise, although he gets very far out of the way, under pretense of getting the half and half for his coffee.
Hannibal gives a small sigh, hip just barely touching the extra fabric of Neph's shirt. "Having it plain allows you to appreciate the flavors much better, Will."
"I'll take my chances." Said flatly while Will pours in enough cream than his coffee turns only a few shades darker than his own skin. And then, pointedly, no eye contact until the heartbeat afterwards, "Hannibal."
He hadn't said it on the bus ride back, as per Hannibal's request. Now, hearing his real name for the first time, Hannibal feels something warm rush down through the rest of him that has nothing to do with his coffee.
The mug heats rapidly between her hands, until it's too uncomfortable to hold by its body. She shifts her grip to the handle, one hand cupping it from underneath so as not to strain her wrist. There's a twinge there, from a flat-palmed landing that should've been a shoulder roll. Nothing a night of Pewter won't fix. Neph looks up as Will aborts a question and a coughs to himself. Their eyes don't catch, but her split-second impression of his face, before he starts over, is of twisted confusion and abrasive shock. He doesn't give her a chance to register more than a flicker of alarm before he calls her out for stealing Hannibal's soaps.
Which. Okay. That looks weird. Neph can see how that looks weird. Or smells weird, whatever, but she'd just like to point out that this means he's been in sniffing distance of Hannibal's hair and, like, took metal notes. That fact snags her attention like a burr, working into a tangle she'll have to tease out later, its very presence distracting enough now that she's reduced to blinking at Will for several long seconds before saying, "Not, like, always. Mine's running low and I'm cheap."
A safe excuse, but one that kinda undermines what she was aiming to do for Hannibal. Neph traces her thumb over the rim of her mug and doesn't look at him, in case there's any hurt to be seen. If he's bothered to hear the gesture waved off as a minor theft, he doesn't show it, just fits himself against the counter between them to reach his own cup. It's Will who backs down, almost flinching away in his haste to get to the creamer.
Interesting. If she looks at this another way, there's a second snarl to pull apart - Will recognizes Hannibal's shampoo, but not her own day-to-day smell. Is that significant, or have the two boys just spent more time together in a climate controlled library?
"Having it plain means it tastes like coffee," Neph wrinkles her nose and reaches around Hannibal for the sugar container. She pops the seal with her thumb (they found out about the building's minor ant problem over the summer) and scoops three spoonfuls into her mug before lifting it to her mouth. Neph likes half and half sometimes, but sugar all the time, and Will's fussing around with the carton like he won't wanna give up the prop anytime soon. He stirs it into his coffee, spoon jangling against the ceramic as he shrugs off Hannibal's overbearing advice and--
--throws his name back in his teeth. His name
Neph spits her first too-hot mouthful of sweetened coffee back into her mug. Most of it, anyway. Some dribbles down her chin. She dashes it away, chest jerking with a suppressed cough. Did he just-? When did-? Why did-?!
"Hannibal!" she sputters, pure accusation, and if he didn't want her elbow in his ribcage he shouldn't've stood so close.
Will doesn't think about smells the way Marij-- Hannibal does. He doesn't intentionally file them away or comment on them unless they're loud, abrasive, noticeable to absolutely anyone with a functioning nose. So he's surprised to realize that he even recognized something was strange when he learned toward Neph, surprised further still that he managed to diagnose the 'why' as being because she didn't smell quite right, even further when Will realizes it's because he associates that smell with something else, and then the inevitable conclusion--
Which is why he frowns and tucks his free hand closer to his body once he's put the half and half down. He spoons sugar into it, not counting consciously but not wholly unreasonable either, stirs it aggressively and briefly enough that it sloshes over the edge and he has to suck at the side of his mug to keep it from burning his thumb.
He just ends up spilling some again anyway, when Neph inhales some of her own coffee. Will shivers with poorly-suppressed laughter, aware of the paranoia that floats off them - mostly her - like mist wherever their real identities are concerned. Will doesn't know why, but he doesn't have to know why to understand the what, to try to be compassionate towards it.
"He told me after you-- left." 'Ran away' is wrong, wrong associations, even if 'left' doesn't cover it either. Will lets himself flounder after other possibilities for only a moment before he keeps going forward. "Unfortunately I don't have my own secret name to unmask to make it even. Sorry."
Is it him, or bleed over from Neph, or just an understanding of the dynamics she'll accept, that has him joking about it? Even Will isn't certain.
"Will can keep secrets." Hannibal says, with such calm certainty that Will's heart does a strange somersault up towards his throat. Their eyes meet, Hannibals' suddenly inscrutably blank behind the calculations running at the forefront of everything, as if this was a considered risk and not the emotional kneejerk reaction Will's pretty sure it damn well was. He's probably scrambling to explain it away to himself right now.
Will....wonders if Neph knows that just as well as he does. She must. He glances over at her, for-- he's not entirely sure. Confirmation? Reassurance? ...Solidarity?
Being Hannibal's confidante doesn't feel like something that you get to take lightly. Or even get to pick for yourself, considering how stubborn he is.
Maybe Will's just that desperate for his own connections, because he can't will up the energy to feel offended about that.
In the end, there's no way to agree with Hannibal's trust without sounding patronizing or overstepping invisible boundaries that he's still trying to measure the scope of, between himself and Neph, so Will just nods.
Neph's finely honed nonverbal communication skills enable her to make a pained, guttural noise that somehow says are you fucking kidding me and very funny, assholes and this right here is why neither of you have other friends and uuuuuuuuuuuuugh all at once. She narrows her eyes at Will, at his shaking shoulders and badly hidden smile, a squint that speaks of future payback, 'cuz she knows he did that on purpose. Waited til she had a mouthful of coffee and everything.
The fact that Hannibal blurted it out after letting her go gives her pause. Ditching his old identity didn't come easily to Hannibal; they fought over it more than once while they figured out the paperwork, the will and his medschool admission. His older self had an ego barely contained by his fancyass house, and the teenage version wasn't much less burdened by pride. Convincing him to be someone other than Hannibal Lecter, longterm, publicly, took some real doing. Neph can't dig up any surprise that he'd jump at the chance to tell Will, to exert a little bit more of himself and be seen for who he really is, but...
...maybe she's reading too far into things, only the timing tastes significant. He slips his hold on her while drawing Will in closer with shared secrets. Neph, who grew up in a loose network bound by nothing else, knows those constraints very, very well.
Her only question is whether Hannibal meant to do it, or if he acted on panicked impulse. She remembers how the offer to run had grated out of him, the whites of his eyes flashing in what might've been badly-concealed terror, his shocked stillness when she turned up just now despite how obvious the shower must've been, and can't credit him with calculating any of it.
Loneliness makes people do really dumb shit. Take stupid gambles. Nine times outta ten, it blows up in your face, but the tenth time...she's sitting in Exhibit A right now, so she can't judge him too harshly for it. He could've risked someone a lot less trustworthy than Will, or her, when he went around fixating on people.
"I know he can," Neph scowls at Hannibal and shoulders into his arm. Will kept his mouth stubbornly shut about someone breaking his face, a truth that could've gotten people arrested (and himself killed, if the angle had been slightly different). He's a pretty inscrutable guy when he wants to be. Even moreso when you know how he reads people; it's easy to get hung up on that and forget what he might actually be thinking. He keeps himself to himself, a trait she's noticed in people who move around too frequently to make close friends. Who would he even tell? Who would care? Who would listen? More than that, why would he make a Thing out of it at all? "It's your secret identity, Hanners. It's your call."
She manages not to make that sound like it's your funeral, a victory all around.
She already jostled an elbow into his ribs, an abuse Hannibal took like a champ only because he was riding high on the delighted surprise of watching her aspirate his coffee. Now, as they settle back into real and serious conversation about Will knowing something more about him - and, by extension, them, if he really decided to peel away layers and start snooping around - Hannibal pouts at the shove into his arm. Not because it hurts, in fact Hannibal isn't even entirely sure he wants her to stop, but because it's part of the game.
A game Will would...probably appreciate a bit less than secret-keeping. Hannibal was only loosely privy to details about them hiking away into the woods somewhere to build some sort of cheap building, and he's only seen photos of it because Neph snapshots a variety of things on her phone to show him when they can finally see each other between his classes and her jobs, but he still gets the impression that Neph and Will are not, in fact, on shoulder-punching terms. And might never be, if only because Will doesn't seem as if he'd enjoy it much.
Hannibal can't even chalk that up to a sibling issue, because he's been without his own for so long. Or perhaps that's why - there's something to have missed, whereas Will has never had that relationship or the drive for it.
Thoughts for later, maybe. Maybe not now, with Will losing some of his smothered cheer in favor of watching Hannibal sidelong as he tunnels too far into his own thoughts.
Clawing his way back out with minimal effort, Hannibal leans a bit more against Neph, even as she's doing her best to be bony and unappealing to do so with. Elbows trying to puncture his lungs or not, he was-- angry for her, earlier. He can't quite say 'worried', even in his own head, but it's not incorrect.
And Neph is handing that permission right back to him, even as he'd been thinking that it was a decision he'd made with a possible joint effect - again, depending on how savvy and determined Will wants to be about tracking down information about him. With just a first name, of course, it won't be simple... But then it's not a common name in America, is it?
"Then I am willing to take any risk it may include." Said while sipping at his own coffee, watching Neph more than Will.
Mostly because he doesn't need to glance over for long to know that Will is draining that coffee like it's the only distraction he has from considering what's happening. "At least now I get to call you something and not see you poorly mask the fact that it's not your real name."
Nevermind. Hannibal was wrong. Will Graham is a terrible choice to put faith into, because what has he ever done to deserve this behavior.
He's not pouting into his coffee. He's delicately frowning into his coffee. There's a difference.
Oh, he's willing to 'take any risk', is he? Well she's willing to roll her eyes at his dramatic turn of phrase! Which she does, the two of them tipping into each other like tent poles. She pops one leg up so the bottom of her foot's pressed against the cabinet and shoots Will a flatly beseeching look. Did you think this through? Are you so sure you wanna sign on for this?
And why? Neph understands Hannibal's motivations well enough - he's lonely and easily bored, but enforces stupidly high standards anyway. Will's smart and cutting and comes equipped with some fascinating maybe-meta capabilities. He's also not inclined to be cowed by Hannibal's money or huge nerdbrain which, if she's any indication, Hannibal finds weirdly compelling. Will's own reasoning makes less sense, unless he's exactly as lonely in his own way.
Or just as into puzzles? No, that's not...quite it. Neph sips more carefully at her coffee, leery of any more precisely-timed bombs. Will isolates himself, but only actual sociopaths start out doing that on purpose. Usually the kids who stand apart got shoved to the fringes to begin with. Will freaks people out, and they shun him for it. But Hannibal, and to a greater extent Neph, are not easily freaked.
(They're freaks, but that's a different conversation. One she doesn't think Hannibal had when he shared his real name. If he keeps leaving out breadcrumb trails like this, he'll be having it sooner rather than later. Somehow, Neph has to get out in front of that, but for now she's confident that he kept anything truly dangerous, anything that might have put her at risk, close to his chest. Jury's still out on how much Samson gave away running his big fat mouth, but she'd rather be furious with him than with Hannibal.)
That's close enough to her own base reasoning for being here that Neph can't fault him for it. She snickers into her mug, fixes a mournful look on her face, and says, "I've been workin' on teachin' him to lie without soundin' like he's daring the other person to call'im on it. It's...wow it's a work in progress."
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2017-01-23 07:46 am (UTC)'I need you'. 'You make me happy'. And now, 'you matter'. Neph never imagined getting used to statements like these, and now she has to wonder if she ever will. She stills under his hand, launch temporarily delayed as she fixes back on this time and place. On this Hannibal Lecter, her Hannibal, and his brandywine brown eyes. They'll wash out a little as he ages, she realizes, and he'll get a little better at veiling what's behind them from anyone trying to get a read. But maybe not from her. Not this time. Right now they burn with black hole intensity, that pull she's noticed before, and Neph nearly forgets her own center.
"I'm okay," she says, soft like snow. If he believes her, he doesn't show it, taking her other hand instead as if to squeeze the seriousness of his intent into her skin. One corner of her mouth hooks up in a crooked little smile. "Really, I...was gonna get my head straight and meet you at home."
It wasn't about running away from him, or Will. She needs to run, sometimes. For herself, for her sanity, for the sake of sharpening her edge. Running, moving, has been her way of coping for so long, of shedding the thoughts, memories and feelings that would otherwise gnaw her down to sinew and bone. Not only does it work, but she loves it. Loves the deafening rush of her blood and the sweet ache in her muscles, the temporary quiet calm in her own head. Nothing else ever flipped her off switch, even if the effects only lasted as long as her fatigue. As she turns her hands under Hannibal’s, brings them palm to palm with her fingers curled around his wrists, she wonders if she could lose herself in his compulsion just as well.
The whole point of being Mistborn is to have more options than other people. Still, she'd miss the wind-whipped freedom if he took it personal every time. If Hannibal could keep up with her, if she could share some of that fierce heart-pumping joy with him, would he understand? Would he let her go and trust her to come back, to come home?
But she's already conceded the run she'd wanted when she'd said she 'was' gonna. Will, perhaps noticing her slip, points out that it'd be smarter if they all went together. There's no warning note in his voice, but Neph still picks up some subtext. Some...worry. Because a strange guy got her alone and threatened her and now she's being twitchy about it? Because for all Will knows, that guy could be waiting to catch her on her own again? Or just because she went past 'twitchy' and straight into 'collapsing on the frosty ground' and he wants to make sure she's okay?
What did he see when he looked at her? What did he read from her? Neph has...so many questions. But he brushes his knuckles against her knee, inches from Hannibal's grip, and she makes an executive decision: she doesn't care. She slips her hand out from under Hannibal's and takes Will's, too. Gingerly, just curling her fingers around the first and second knuckles of his, but definitely a hold. Will would understand about the running, she bets.
"We'll be fine out there," she flashes Will a sidelong grin, in the hopes that his shifting gaze will catch it, "He knows what'd happen if there weren't security guards around to break up a fight."
I'll take you apart, she'd said. The simple words come back to her, along with the rush of anger she'd felt when she'd realized Samson's ploy to control her. Just let him try to catch her in an alley, or on a rooftop. The last Pewterarm to do so got buried under half a tenement building. Neph's not proud of what happened to Ryan, but already she knows she wouldn't spare a shred of guilt for Samson if he tried to blindside her again. And if he went for either of her friends...
He can try. Just let him. Let him put out the word she'd threatened him on behalf of someone he didn't recognize. Let them try to make a weakness of it. She just manipulated the extent of Pewter in another Allomancer's body, she'll find a way to manipulate Iron in their blood if they go for the people around her.
Hannibal leans into these thoughts, so close the steam of his words wreathes their heads. So close she hardly has to tilt her head back to meet his eyes, her own the depthless blue of a glacier crevasse. He's definitely pulling at her, exerting whatever non-mutation magnetism he has to make sure she's listening. Or maybe she's projecting, and it's just the force of those words that lock onto her brain. A promise. No, a vow? A lie, potentially. They've talked about this before, about unlucky and senseless loss, but even then he'd said he didn't think he'd 'willingly' leave her. This is more of the same, just using words that strike like bullets. Words like 'never', and 'abandon'. You don't know that Neph despairs, Don't promise me that. Hadn't she just told herself it was useless to worry about how she'd deal with it if Hannibal ever struck from some unidentified blindspot?
She's survived everyone who's ever left her behind, but she's not sure she could survive that. She's not sure she could survive believing him. Just the thought twists in her chest, bending her over her knees until her forehead leans featherlight on his cheek. "I--" believe you. I want to believe you. I'm afraid of you. I'm with you. I staked this place because you're here.
"Hey!" a sharp, male voice calls from the stone stairs. Neph's head flies up, and there's a security guard standing there with one hand braced on hip-radio. "What're you kids doing?"
A persona spreads over her face like quicksilver, glinting in the sun. She smiles, eyes crinkling, nose-wrinkle out in force. "Just checking the map! We got a little turned around but I think it's suit of armor time." Neph hops to her feet without letting go of either hand. Luckily she's short enough that this doesn't wrench their shoulders much.
The guard nods, probably sold by the map crinkling beside her boot. "That's to your left," he gestures with that radio, and moves along when Neph shouts her thanks. She looks back down at Hannibal, at Will, heart hammering behind her innocuous mask, and says, "I think that's our cue."
no subject
Date: 2017-01-24 01:10 am (UTC)They're not quite there yet, after all, but Hannibal's own coping mechanism is coming around the corner; losing himself completely to his own preferred fast-paced passion. His residency will have far less forgiving hours than even his current clinic work and schooling does. He'll be gone for literally more than a day at a time, sleeping at strange times (and possibly in strange places). How it'll effect his and Neph's relationship remains to be seen.
If he'll even keep with it - continue following in the prelaid footsteps he'd decided on both a few years before and also decades ago - still remains to be seen. But as he sees his future right now, that's part of it. And so is Neph.
So he gives it a short consideration, when she says she meant to just run off to calm down and then meet them at the apartment. But he's also glad it isn't up for debate. Because this isn't...just Neph getting angry and wanting to blow off steam. This is Neph, threatened by something Hannibal hadn't been aware had ever happened, shaken and surely with no one else she's any more likely to talk about it to.
Not that Hannibal is sure she will tell him. For all their proximity - and it gathers close to them now, Neph bending towards him and he instinctively curling inwards too - there aren't many vocalized secrets between them. Neph is almost always silent about the vulnerable parts of herself. Even the innocuous details from her past life are few and far between.
As nosy as Hannibal is, he's never taken it personally. But now he wishes he had...more. A flash of desire, as she leans forward and lets go of one of his hands. Hannibal watches her wrap fingers around Will's loosely, watches their point-line-point connection become a three-pointed one.
A triangle, perhaps?
Will blinks at Neph with wide eyes, pupils still blown from earlier. He looks startled and uncertain and suddenly very, very young.
Hannibal hasn't ever touched Will in a friendly way, only with the excuse of medical check-ups immediately following his head injury weeks ago, but there is a flutter of some of the protective desire that draws Hannibal's fingers to Neph's shoulder or cheek or knuckles when she looks forlorn - or even when they're both happy. There's a dull glow of inner contentment mixed with the sharp edge of worry, the kind that wants to spill over and touch someone else to reassure both parties.
Hannibal's eyes slide closed for a moment when Neph tilts her forehead against his cheek, and the last thing Hannibal sees are Will's dark blue eyes trained on him in turn, searching and lost and maybe a bit--
It's a word Hannibal has associated with himself for so long he can recognize it immediately in someone else. Is it because of that show of friendship from Neph, no matter how small? When was the last time someone reached out to Will that way, took such a clear chance that could backfire and hurt the newcomer instead of Will himself? Is it a sign at all of what might come if Hannibal decided to take that chance with Will?
Because what Hannibal saw in Will's face for that brief moment was hunger.
And then the security guard. Will snaps straight around, shoulders still hunched but spine erect, and Hannibal turns an annoyed glance back in the same direction. 'Suspicious adults interrupting important activities' is pretty high on his short list of pet peeves, at this point in time.
But Neph reanimates, mask thawing and fluidly taking on an appropriate demeanor for warding off an adult concerned that he's breaking up some sort of teenage shenanigans. Both Hannibal and Will rock a bit towards her when their arms get dragged up, but neither of them move until the guard is already heading back away.
Hannibal stands and strengthens their grip on each other, repositioning fingers so they slot together at this new angle. Will is staring down at the tenuous link between Neph and himself like he's afraid it might break. Hannibal catches his eyes straying to Neph and Hannibal's own hands, then back to his own, and then slowly ticking his wrist to a better angle so he can grip the outside of Neph's palm by wrapping his fingers around it. His own fingers are pressed tight against themselves in a sterile version of holding hands - there'll clearly be no interweaving of fingers - but Will watches this happening like he's giving it real serious thought and can hardly believe what he's seeing.
He doesn't snap out of it in time to offer any commentary on what's just happened, so Hannibal bumps his upper arm gently against Neph's shoulder and does instead. "Shall we, then?" Hand in hand, walking away from a waking nightmare of Neph's.
It's...a strangely appealing and unique birthday present.
no subject
Date: 2017-01-24 03:01 am (UTC)But as Hannibal slots their fingers together, she lets go of the course she'd half-charted, wiping the slate clean of rooflines and window ledges. Maybe she'll double back some other time, test the feasibility just in case the Walters ever has something she wants. If she ran off now, after they'd both backed her, it'd be nothing but self indulgence. Worse, it might actually spit in the face of what Hannibal's offered.
Neph might not be able to bring herself to believe his promise, but she's pretty sure he meant it. People often seem to, at the time.
She puts that out of her mind, sets aside all thoughts of conditional support and affection to look back down at Will, who's adjusted his grip as though they're both wearing mittens. There's a crinkle on his forehead she hasn't seen before, almost-but-not-quite-worried as he studies their hands. A broiling surge of embarrassment fills her chest and singes her cheeks; should she...not have reached for him when he nudged her? Did she overstep again? Uncertainty bubbles up from under her 'no sir nothing suspicious to see here' mask, singes her cheeks pink, but why wouldn't he have let her hand slip away when she stood up, if he minded? Why would he take a surer grip? It must be...okay?
Hannibal tips into her, jolting her from that well-worn rut in her thoughts. Neph blinks at him, anxious lines smoothing away at the corners of her eyes. When she turns to Will again, her hesitance is more muted, less linked to this one thing. She gives his hand a light tug, silently urging him to his feet. "Yeah, I think so."
They wait for Will to collect the map and get his feet under him, then head for the armory. At first, the silence is wary, cautious, all of them on the lookout for a strike. Neph's pretty sure Samson came alone, knows he wasn't in town long enough to've made any serious alliances of his own, but Will and Hannibal have no reason to think the same. They don't know the guy, they know if he has any cranky friends, and they don't know much about how a blacklist scenario plays out (neither does Neph, really, but only because nobody's ever cut off a Mistborn on purpose). Neph stares straight ahead, past suits of armor and racks of halberds, gratingly aware that her reaction must've given them both a wonky impression of how dangerous Samson actually is.
She should've hit him. Nobody's all that scary with a broken nose and a few less teeth. Or maybe that's all the pointy metal talking. It's hard not to feel braver surrounded by an arsenal.
Will was right that there are fewer people in these galleries, but they still get more than their fair share of stares. Three kids trailing along hand-in-hand, paying little attention the actual exhibits, that's the sort of thing people notice. Neph tries not to think about what they must be thinking. She reaches for that untouchable carelessness Hannibal projects so easily, but it doesn't fit her quite the same. She's much better at being part of the background, or creating a character for the occasion. Layla, maybe? Even Elle can handle the occasional audience. Her grip tightens on the hands in hers, but then they're through the Ancient World nave, then the lobby, past the ticketing desk and back at street level.
Neph breathes out, the din of traffic and pedestrians and city life providing better cover than anything the hushed interior of a museum could offer. She might wonder if Samson came this way, but there are too many conflicting sounds and scents to bother trying, and that's as comforting an excuse as any to just dismiss him from her mind.
Or can she? The further they walk, the more the watchful tension dissipates, the more she figures everyone's minds must be turning back to what just went down. How much did Hannibal and Will overhear, and what did they make of it? Had Samson said anything really condemning? Neph's ability to recall conversations is pretty limited at the best of times, but she can't fish anything from the red haze of those moments. Was there anything there that might tip Will off? Would he say anything if he were suspicious? And--and that's not even getting to what they're probably thinking about how that fight got started in the first place.
Neph fights not to squeeze down or let go of their hands, not to make any outward signs, but her footsteps fall unusually heavy and her shoulders inch up. She doesn't want to answer these questions. She doesn't want this silence. The status quo is unbearable, teetering, but she's terrified of the fall.
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Date: 2017-01-25 03:31 am (UTC)The chain of them gets some stares, something Hannibal neither relishes nor hates. He ignores the outside world completely, intent only on looking out for threats - something he can mostly relegate off to his sense of smell. He won't forget the musk-scratched kettle-car backfire scent of that boy. It would wake him out of a dead sleep, the scalp-itching awareness of the danger behind that scent is already so strong in his mind.
Whether or not the boy is dangerous - and Hannibal is aware that, no matter how dangerous he is, Neph simply must be more physically dangerous - he has some other hold over Neph. Or did. Still does, in the sense that she collapsed after he left and her heart is still clearly thud-thudding somewhere high in her throat. An emotional tangle is snarled in their shared past, one that he counted on Neph tripping over when they met up again. That's a barrier. That's...a mine, hidden from view, one Hannibal hadn't even known was in Neph's field.
How many other secrets does she have? Does she even think of them daily, or are they buried from everyone, even her? Does Neph consciously hide them from him? Would she continue to if he asked to learn about her?
He doesn't want to scare her away. As they press through the chilly January air and walk a familiar path towards the bus stop they got off at - even though Hannibal knows they'll be waiting at least twenty minutes for it, assuming it isn't late - Hannibal presses through his options like paging through a notebook.
It's jarring, then, that it's not his own meticulous sketching of the situation that breaks the silence.
"Neph." It's so soft but immediately shatters the silence between them. Once broken, Hannibal finds that even when he tilts just enough to glance across Neph and then Will, it's as if some manner of veil has been lifted.
It's difficult to see both of them at the same time, but Will isn't trying to drag behind. He's level enough that Hannibal can still see his face. His eyebrows are furrowed down, but his mouth softens the frown. There's movement at their hips, and Hannibal realizes that Will is experimentally shifting their joined hands - tilting them up a bit higher, as if reminding them that they're there. "You don't have to talk about it now if you don't want to. In public. Or so soon after." Will's mouth twitches, like he's willing to keep spilling out possible excuses for her, but the tide is kept at bay until he presses his mouth thin and earnest and keeps going.
Will's gaze keeps seeking the side of Neph's chin and cheek and, unless Hannibal's mistaken, her eyes. "But there was something there. If you want to talk about it-- I'll listen."
Will's eyes blink, almost sleepily, like he's coming out of a trance. His gaze catches Hannibal's for just a moment, and Hannibal feels as though he's being judged for worthiness. And then, in another first, Will speaks for Hannibal. "Both of us would, if that's what you wanted."
Hannibal's fingers curl protectively in around Neph's, and he finds with surprise that it's nice, to know that someone he cares about cares about the other. To know that Neph is cushioned on her other side by someone perhaps even better at reading her than Hannibal himself is - Hannibal feels no flash of jealousy, but like his own reach has been augmented. This isn't a contest, it's a-- a team effort.
The word 'family' echoes, turns to smoke, and that veil keeps him from speaking. All Hannibal can do is look at Neph and Will and nod.
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Date: 2017-01-25 07:45 am (UTC)The beginnings of a tension headache bloom at her temples and the nape of her neck. She's considering whether or not she can discretely pop her jaw when Will murmurs her name.
Neph's not the only one surprised, if the way Hannibal takes an extra-long step forward to look across her means anything (a small victory; he can't just doubletake right over the top of her head. Neither of them can.). Her head jerks toward Will automatically, gaze skittering across his cheekbones and the bridge of his nose. Is she avoiding his eyes to be polite, or to protect herself? She...doesn't really know. The last time he dipped his feelers in her thoughts, he nearly babbled himself into an extra-bad concussion. Neph hastily faces forward, scans the street, kicks out at a wadded up piece of newsprint as it blows by. Will doesn't give any sign that he's upset she's avoiding eye contact, just lifts their hands a little in, what, acknowledgement?
He presses on. Neph feels Hannibal's breath against her shoulder, ruffling her hair, as he keeps his head turned to watch. She doesn't dare try to check his expression. Would it be approving, discouraging, or that blank 'now what' look he sometimes gets when he's content to let baffling events play out? Would it be that hungry, wanting look, the one she dreads and anticipates in equal measure? What had Will called it? A void? And what was it he'd said - implied - about her? That she doesn't ask him direct questions or give him the chance to share, doesn't want to share herself in return.
You don't have to talk about it.
I'll listen. A needle of shame pierces her throat, hitches her breathing. For a wild second there, she hadn't been sure if the 'something' he meant was the story with Sampson or the question of how she has any authority to kick someone out of Baltimore. Neph almost stumbles on her extra half-a-step, then does it again when he loops Hannibal in on his offer. If he were asking about the bigger picture, and not about what happened to her, wouldn't he assume Hannibal already knew? How...unfair of her, underestimating him like that. Will's the one who offered her a quick and quiet way out of the museum. He's earned the benefit of her doubt. She's just so--she's all twisted up around this, now, spinning phantoms from shadows.
Hannibal squeezes her hand in silent agreement. Neph can't help but notice that he let Will speak for him, just now, dictate terms and conditions. If that's what you wanted. Hannibal's getting better, but he's still more likely to press on an opening if it appears, and he doesn't leave easy outs. He goes along with this anyway, either swept along by Will or badly unsettled by her behavior. Neph squeezes back with both hands, blunt nails digging into the outside of Will's palm and between Hannibal's knuckles. Her fingers are plenty long, she's just proportionally that much smaller than either of them.
Funny, Samson's had been just as outsized. Morbid interest drove her to test the spread of her fingertips against the bruises he left on her chest and thigh, a span that came up short. She would never've imagined herself willingly bracketed like this, back then, but she hadn't given it a second thought when they'd all stood up to leave the courtyard hand in hand.
"It's not what you're thinking," Neph winces. In a way, that's the problem. It's never as bad as everyone's ready to suspect, so what actually happened seems less legit, somehow. Then she remembers just who she's talking to, and turns thoughtful eyes on Will. "I mean. Probably. I dunno what you picked up. Maybe it's, um, exactly what you're thinking."
It's as much a question as a caution, and maybe that's why she lets their eyes catch. Will's are dark, heavily lidded, but Neph doesn't think for a second that he's being casual about this. It's just not there in his voice.
They don't really talk about what he can do - I'm not gonna be a goddamn oracle for you - and normally she puts it out her mind. Maybe she shouldn't've said anything; if he knows, if he plucked it out of her head, surely he wouldn't make her say it out loud. But what if it's rattling around in his brain like a wrecking ball? She doesn't want that, not to share it or inflict it.
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Date: 2017-01-25 04:32 pm (UTC)It doesn't mean the same thing to him that it does to Hannibal. With a mind already so full of everyone else's impressions - their thoughts, their reflections, their disappointments - it's difficult for anything to keep feeling sacred. Hannibal clings to what he wants, lets all dissenting opinions roll off of him like oil over wings, but Will is soil that everyone else's roots grow through.
If there used to be something inside of him that craved anything better to call 'family', it's been eaten right out of the soil after so many years. Or maybe just the name has, just the audacity to call it what it rightfully is, because Will absolutely feels the pull to help others. To reach out for that connection, no matter how many times he's ended up with bitten fingers over it.
He feels Neph's distracted concern almost like a hand warding him off, but Will thinks...that might just be him. Neph doesn't ask him to stop, or lean away, just breathes surprised and stares like she didn't expect someone to comment on the half-healed wound she's been licking since they walked away from that confrontation. When her fingers squeeze into the side of his hand, Will actually lets his shoulders slope back down into something almost relaxed, because that's so clearly a permission.
'It's not what you're thinking.'
Bile-sour fills Will's mouth, and he only looks away briefly to swallow it back down. His eye contact returns, staring at the blue of Neph's, the way they're blown with guilt and uncertainty and the tremors of something Will actually and truly hasn't ever had to face before.
He's never been more aware of the difference between them - the gendered aspect of it, that is. It suddenly looks like a yawning gap, but when he reaches out across anyway he finds it must've just been a mirage, because he touches the other side and can begin clawing at the base of it. He still can't climb it, but he can scope the shape and size.
"I'm not about to argue-- degrees of trauma here." Will says, and even that hurts coming up, burns like getting sick. Her eye contact isn't by accident - it can't be, they're still relatively new to one another but they both know enough, she knows enough about him - and so Will...makes himself look. "That's not what hurting is about. It's not a comparison with other events that didn't happen."
And maybe his breath's picking up a little. Maybe there's shadows of his own experiences - not the same, but the same underlying narrative of not enough to excuse your reaction - that are what help push him to keep pushing for Neph. "It's about what did happen. And how you-- felt about it." His cheeks burn, self-conscious both to be saying those things out loud and at the thought of what he's going to need to do if Neph refuses this or he's entirely wrong. But he just can't--
He can't see what he thinks he's seeing and not say something. He just can't do it. So he squeezes Neph's hand in return, stomach tight and throat half-closed, and waits.
no subject
Date: 2017-01-25 09:07 pm (UTC)"It is though," she mutters, shoulders bunching. "You gotta recognize the bullets you dodge. And when people get it wrong or think...think something happened when it didn't, that's not something you get to come back from."
Ben. Ben. Is she ever going to have a chance to make that right? He'd had his whole life uprooted 'cuz of her, and she never even got to apologize. The longer anyone goes without hearing news of him, the more convinced she is that the Inquisitors must've found him first. And now there's nobody but her to say what did or didn't happen between them, just a formal dismissal of charges and assholes like Samson snarling shit like Everyone knows you and Argus--
She shoves that away, buries it back under the rubble with all the other things she's done but can't change, way down deep where Will can't dig it up. He's not wrong, exactly, to say she's still hurting. Neph hates to admit it, but if anyone other than Samson had come at her with ugly accusations she'd've handled it differently. There's something wired wrong in her, now, after what happened between them. She doesn't like it but she can't begin to see how to untangle it, either. How is she no better now than when she was six, twelve, fourteen, lashing out with her abilities and complicating others' lives?
Maybe if people would stop coming at her first, she wouldn't have to.
Something did happen to her - Will's right about that, too. He doesn't exactly ask her how it made her feel, but the statement is open ended enough that it could be taken as a question. Hadn't Lecter asked her the same thing? What do you want to tell others? What would make you feel better? Or something like that. She was too tired and freaked out and painfully sore to remember it clearly, aside from the part where she totaled his kitchen in a childish display of temper. Neph cringes a little bit at the memory, but she's surprised to realize that the questions wrapped up inside it never really went away. She's even more surprised to realize that they've been niggling at the back of her mind ever since, accreting layers of thought like pearls.
What happened matters, because it's still affecting her. And how she feels about it matters, too, because those feelings direct her actions, push her to do things like stake territory and wield her Allomancy in new and startling ways. If she doesn't dig down on that, she won't ever be able to predict herself, she'll just keep reacting blindly and fucking things up.
"We worked together," she says, haltingly. "A couple'a times. Usually everybody else was older, so we were...friendly, kinda? That's what I thought, anyway, I guess he read it differently."
That's it, the part she just can't get her head around. How did she miss it? Was she putting something more out there? Is that a thing she does? When did he decide they ought to be something more than that, and why didn't he just try to talk to her about it first instead of tacking that decision onto her, too? Neph's right hand twitches in Hannibal's with the need to scrub at her mouth, rake at her hair. "There was this work party, and we were leaving, and--I din't see it coming so I didn't say 'no' fast enough and then there was a huge fight. That's all. That's what gets me. I should've seen it."
Neph drops her head back with an inarticulate growl of frustration. It's easier, a lot easier, to be angry and tired about this than to remember how scared and small she'd felt. She's Mistborn. It's almost not even allowed.
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Date: 2017-01-26 11:10 pm (UTC)Not relevant. Not something Will needs to dig at right now, because god knows neither of them needs him with just enough information that he's chasing possibilities into waking nightmares on his way home later.
So he visibly steels himself, draws himself inward as if wringing out the bad thoughts. But he's going to just have to let Neph go ahead and push the conversation back into the present - or the near-past, as it happens - and sure enough, she does. The description comes out in staccato hesitancy, frustration rusting off her words.
This, too, makes Will's stomach churn. Neph doesn't say it - doesn't even really look it, except for when he sees the way her other shoulder tenses like she wants to take that hand back from Marijus, presumably to fiddle with something - but it's not just annoyance. It's not just rage.
It's guilt. Or maybe more accurately, shame. It's a sour and uncertain thing, and it chips away at Will's ribs, makes them feel brittle as he forces himself to keep breathing through this.
It's not even easy to miss, really. Even if you just look at the words, she's dragging at the concept that she should've someone known it was going to happen. Like guys hitting on girls who aren't interested and then getting violent when there's a misunderstanding is just a fact that she should've known better active self-defense about.
It's another squeeze to Will's stomach when he thinks that maybe, that's kinda the impression that rolls off a lot of people in the news when they talk about this, too. The kinda people who talk about 'sexual assault' and 'bad decisions' with air quotes and follow it with concerns about football scholarships.
Marijus is radiating, off to the side, practically steaming with the force of an anger that quite frankly almost distracts Will away from the topic for a split second. But then he digs his heels in, because this is about Neph - Marijus is fine and welcome to have his own reaction, but Will can talk about it with him later (and since when did Will start organizing his friends' problems so he could personally help them with them, anyway?).
It's about Neph, not him or Marijus, and so Will sucks in some welcome icy January air, adjusts his hand in Neph's to hold hers a bit more tightly, and tries. "Has it-- ever occurred to you that if you didn't see his interest, and some ugly misunderstanding grew out of that... That he also fucked up by not seeing your lack of interest? At-- at literally no point in that did it sound like he was entitled to a fucking thing, because no one ever is.
"People get wires crossed all the time when they don't just use their words. Jumping-- jumping all over someone because you think you might've seen some interest, or whatever the hell he did, that's not-- Normal people don't do that, Neph. That's not on you to have gotten ahead of him making a shitty decision. That's on him for being a fucking moron from square one."
There's a blur of motion beyond Neph, Marijus's head ducking down to speak closer to Neph's ear. "'Didn't say 'no' fast enough'." He quotes, voice flat and eyes deadly. Will forgets to breathe, but Marijus isn't even looking at him. "That alone says it all. I've never known you to hesitate to make your interest or lack of interest quite clear, Neph. That he came at you so quickly is enough to say with certainty that he was in the wrong."
Will can't say he disagrees - thinks maybe even that Marijus had a better handle on how to untwist the story back out into a clear line of 'and here is where it got fucked up' - but he also has to look away from Marijus's face. Will settles for watching Neph again, eyes keen on hers.
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Date: 2017-01-27 02:39 am (UTC)They never did get around to negotiating what that might mean. Now they never will. He'd been classically evasive about it and she hadn't had the courage or the energy to ask what he was really offering. That might bother her more, if she hadn't ended up living with some version of him anyway.
This version is furious. As she stumbled her way through the events of that night, Hannibal went stiffer and stiffer at her side. His hand in hers might as well be a prosthetic, as cold and motionless as it's gone. Their shoulders bump as they walk, Neph sort of rattling between the two boys, and it's like skidding against a wall. Her heart beats high and fast in her throat, even knowing that anger's not directed at her. It could still take her arm off, when it inevitably goes. She watches him from the corner of her eye, the part of her brain that endlessly spins contingency plans kicks into gear. There must be some way to redirect that rage away from herself, away from--
Will tugs lightly at her hand, gripping tighter despite her clammy palm. Neph turns her face a few degrees back toward him, watching from three-quarters. If he's angry, it's harder to read. She can't help but be wary, she doesn't know what Angry Will looks like or how he's likely to snap, and here she is stuck between him and Hannibal, the ticking bomb. But he only says in a very reasonable tone, That's not on you.
Neph winces, very well aware she'd said something pretty similar to him a couple months ago. It's a lot easier to dish out than it is to take.
"I know," it takes real effort not to say it to the sidewalk, but she manages to lift her head. "I know it's him but I still--it's not just him. There's others, y'know? S'not like it's never happened before, I just always got outta the way in time." With both her hands caught up, she invents a new fiddling method; her thumb taps an arhythmic staccato against Will's knuckles. "If I'm gonna make it out there I gotta be smart and see this stuff and I hate--I hate that I have to and I hate that I didn't that time."
That one slip planted doubt in her, a weed with roots gone too deep to pull up in one neat clump. She's been more paranoid since, quicker to assume ill intent. It's died down a little in the past, what, ten months, but she was still at peak anxiety when Hannibal half-accused her trying to kiss him. No fucking wonder she blew up.
Is he remembering that, too? Is that why he leans down to hiss in her ear? Neph jumps a little, her doubletime footsteps veering toward Will while her chin jerks back in Hannibal's direction. She might've expected the same kind of feral, bared-teeth rage he'd displayed when he thought Will's dad was responsible for beating his face in, but this...isn't that. It's the burn of dry ice, the methodical scrape of a whetstone over a blade, skin parting silently under a keen edge. It's murderously stunning and Neph can only be blindly grateful that it's for her, not because of her. His stare fills her entire field of vision. She has to remind herself to blink.
"I know he was," she says again. Her shoulder jostles Will's, bulkier and softer through their mutual layers, but she twists her wrist to scrape her fingernails down the back of Hannibal's hand. She drifts back to the middle, pupils constricting a little as she forces herself to zoom out on the rest of Hannibal's face. "I...when it happened I was just really freaked out and...tired. 'Cuz I thought I couldn't watch my back every fucking second, y'know?"
Relief, relief, she saw murder in his eyes and her knees went weak with relief. Neph ducks her head and swings their hands - all their hands - a little. "It's better now."
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Date: 2017-02-02 04:14 pm (UTC)What's there to even say to an issue so wide that it can swallow someone's entire world for hours at a time? "I don't think that's something that's just you. Or even just him, or them. It's-- the whole system." The one that tells skinny young girls like Neph to watch over their shoulders when they leave their cars at night, and then puts in sitcom jokes about how women always visit public bathrooms in packs. The one that ends every unattractive-man-becomes-slightly-more-competent comedy film with them getting the girl like it was a vending machine transaction.
Will lets their shoulders bump against one another, everything muffled in winter layers, and keeps an eye on Neph instead of Marijus while she navigates his stiletto-knife anger. The danger radiating off Marijus, the capacity to hurt someone after enough planning to make it count, has images from true crime shows flashing in Will's mind. He sees that boy from earlier, face down with glassy eyes, a line of red coming from his temple, and Will squeezes Neph's hand and leans in closer, a chill shivering up his neck.
'It's better now.'
...Because she doesn't have to watch her back? Because she has other people to help her do that. Will almost sags with relief and embarrassment, nearly giddy with the idea that Neph is friendly enough with Marijus to look at his angry face and see a welcome promise and not a horror show she should back away from fast. His hand moves in Neph's, though, their arms arcing slowly when she swings them, and it slowly enters Will's mind that she might mean-- more than just Marijus, with that statement.
He lets their steps take him a foot's width closer to Neph, enough that shoulders bump again. He's gathering up the words necessary to reassure, or to thank, or to offer that promise officially himself as well - but then Marijus catches his attention once more.
Marijus, whose anger has simmered down enough to reveal a different kind of intensity. His shoulders are tight, his neck tilted forward, and his steps are shorter and more aggressive. He looks like an animal going against all natural instinct. "Would you like to head home on your own, then?"
The non sequitor of it has Will almost tripping over his own feet. It feels like a hunter releasing prey, so no wonder there's a strange dissonance radiating in the very air near Marijus, but what--
"I don't-- want you caged after being hedged in by other people for so long." Will feels the way this rips at something in Marijus, can feel it peel apart the ribs in his own chest, leave behind sticky pain in its wake. Marijus doesn't let go of things. He's unwavering in his desires and his possessiveness, to the point of being overbearing and beyond. Will would never have considered this sort of growth even possible, but here it is.
Potentially even ill-timed - Will has no idea if Neph actually wants space right now. She doesn't feel like she does, she isn't vibrating with flight like she was before, but Will just stares at Marijus without breathing and hopes that Neph gets the underlying message that Will can see, spelled out in the air between them all:
That Marijus cares for her, deeply enough that he's finally realizing the impact of letting people go. Instead of pursuing his own revenge - because Will can still see it, the plans for hurting that boy - he's interrupting everything to try and let Neph do what she needs to cope.
It's love, honestly. That's what Will sees, and it bowls him over. He's never seen anyone look at anyone else that way, in his life, and he knows the meaning of it only from bone-deep genetic memory that apparently a lifetime of neglect hadn't quite managed to leach out of him.
Will's nearly leaning his chin on Neph's shoulder, pulled in by the gravity of the other two, mouth open and unaware.
no subject
Date: 2017-02-03 01:29 am (UTC)Neph doesn't snap any of that at Will. The cringe that always lingers in his voice is out in full force, as if he know how unhelpful it is to say, to hear. It's not his fault she's been through this enough times to know the script. Maybe, if she hears it repeated often enough, she'll come up with some brilliant response that turns the whole thing over on its head. At least she got someone new thinking about it, looking at the system and reaching out to take her hand instead of turning away from it. That must count for something, she thinks, as Will pulls closer to her side.
Her other arm is stretched out a little further to Hannibal, a strained point of contact anchored by the desperate grip of their hands. She hasn't looked at him since as-good-as-admitting she trusts him at her back. His answering silence is river-dark and cold, rushing around her, pulling at her, but still she doesn't look. Say something, she urges as a muscle works at the corner of his jaw, visible in her periphery. Neph's not sure which of them she means. Say something.
When he does, it's not an acknowledgement. Not exactly.
Except that it is.
Will fumbles at her side, and Neph--stops. Hannibal's momentum and her hold on his hand pulls him around to face her, while Will practically trips into her back. She rocks forward a little, seeking out Hannibal's face, his eyes. Whites flash around the edges and his nostrils flare a little. She can never tell if that's a sign of nerves or active mutation, with him. A little frown crinkles her face, words poised on her tongue, go home? but before you said--, when he unlocks a door she hadn't realized existed.
Neph's face falls open. They're all three of them standing in the middle of the sidewalk, forcing people to part around them, but nobody says anything about the girl with one boy at her back and another staring her down like a reluctant penitent, her hands in both of theirs. That's a minor miracle right there. Another might be the clarity with which Neph hears what Hannibal means.
They've talked around it before. This uncertainty played unwelcome third wheel those first few months, when neither of them knew if she would (or should) stay, or leave him with his money and pick up her own life where she'd left off. How much did she owe him, and was it even about debt at that point? How much of their unity was sheer momentum? Where was the choice in any of it, if at all? If they'd met like this in another timeline, his or hers, peers without any convoluted temporal history, would they have been friends?
Neph, in typical go-with-the-flow, focus-on-the-present fashion, started to enjoy herself too much to question it. And then little changes became big ones, became a joint lease and dishtowels and staking territory and suddenly the beginning no longer mattered. Knowing she could leave at any time didn't mean she wanted to, not at all. But Hannibal--
--she hasn't made him any promises. Not out loud.
"You're not a cage," she says vehemently, a wind beating back the river. Her hand shifts in his so she's grasping it from below, fingers wrapped around his, her thumb pressed against the back of his knuckles. "You weren't ever a cage, you were--you are--"
The trouble with 'you' is, it's both singular and plural, something Neph has never tasted so clearly in her own mouth before. Were. Are. One person and two people who've been very different things to her at very different points in her life. All kinds of possibilities crowd her mouth, conclusions like safe, honest, trustworthy. Like home. All of them too much and not enough.
She is very, very bad at this. "I'm always glad to have you there. Here." Neph says, at length. It's not right. It's not perfect. It's not even really a promise. If she's very, very lucky, it might make sense, in context of what she thinks he's saying, and what he's just offered her.
Nobody's ever trusted her to come back, before. She's never given anyone reason to. It's a limit she finds she's eager to test. Her chin comes up, the hair on the back of her neck lifting and tickling where Will's breath stirs it. Somewhere in all of this he's drawn in close, but it doesn't trigger any crawly feelings. It's a steady press of warmth instead. "I think I'd like to go for a run," she says, threaded through with wonder. "Not, um, not from anybody. Just for me." A grin pops out of nowhere, from the ether, from the thing inside her that keeps putting one foot in front of the other. "I bet I beat you home."
no subject
Date: 2017-02-04 04:10 am (UTC)They've gone through something, and maybe that's why they're both alone together, here in a part of the world neither of them is really from - Marijus from across an entire ocean, Neph apparently from different parts of the US.
Will feels like he can't quite do it justice, describing just what he sees in Marijus's eyes, but he's compelled to try.
Marijus is watching Neph like she's the only thing he's aware of, like his entire life has been eclipsed by this moment in time shared with her. All the ludicrous focus of Marijus's interest is contracted in Neph's direction, timeless and limitless and so heavy Will feels its pull like gravity, and it's not even for him. Will's mouth falls open, something too scared to feel hungry answering the call from Marijus's gaze, and Will is simultaneously glad for Neph and unsure how she can handle this.
It should feel far more foreign to watch a scene this intense unfold next to him. Being in forced close proximity to people's dramas has always been taxing at best, mortifying or terror-soaked at worst.
But this is like watching a natural landscape come into focus from the fog, or a storm coalesce. It's huge. Nearly limitless. Almost promises danger, but you lean in anyway, just to say you witnessed it.
Marijus is the one that looks caged right now, rigid and thrumming with energy, like he'd be pacing back and forth if he had the room at the end of his tether via Neph's hold on his wrist. Will thinks of a tiger in a zoo. "Alright." Marijus is clearly wrestling with something terrifying and unknown, and then all at once he just - steps forward and hugs Neph.
Will rocks back instinctively, giving them room, because now Marijus's arms are coming around Neph's thin shoulders, and Marijus is slim but not so much that it doesn't encroach on the lack of space that had existed a moment ago between Will and Neph. They make brief eye contact over Neph's shoulder, Marijus's face a hurricane, and then he tilts down into the downy parts of Neph's hair and mutters something into her ear.
Will's pretty sure he says "I don't think anything could ever cage you again, Nephele." He hadn't realized her name was short for anything similarly strange, had just assumed it was a brief nickname from nothing.
"I'll see you at the apartment." Marijus looks like he's holding himself together by threads. As Marijus pulls back away, holds Neph at a determined arms length, Will tilts back in, taps his free hand to Neph's wrist as a silent encouragement. But otherwise, this is-- this is about them, right now. Will's never been so content to be a silent observer.
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Date: 2017-02-04 07:03 am (UTC)But Nephele is Mistborn. She's fog. She's a haze. She's the whole sky full of clouds, there's too much of her for even the deepest, angriest sea to contain except for the fragments she rains down at whim. It's not, she realizes, that she has her own deep well of gravity, it's that she's lighter than gravity. He can try to exert it, but she'll only slip through his fingers and envelop him, cool and calm or icy and stinging. She thinks he might know that, too.
A tiny smile shapes her mouth, crinkles her eyes, her only outward response to all that howling intensity. If she's affected by it, and she is, well...isn't that how it works? Ocean and sky, locked together, passing back and forth? Even her eighth-grade education covered the water cycle.
If Hannibal sees what she sees, if she's mirroring anything back at him, it sets him on edge. His mouth flattens out, his arm is extended almost as far as it can go without straining away from her, and she can feel tendons bunching under his skin. For a wild second she thinks he might tear away and storm off, counter to everything he's just said to her, but then he lunges in - 70% leg! - and folds her into a hug.
There's a scuff of sneakers on pavement as Will dodges out of the way, but Neph notices the sudden cold at her back more clearly. It only lasts a second, as she rocks onto her toes to stretch into the hug, her arms wrapping around Hannibal's ribs beneath his jacket. He'd stormed out of the museum without buttoning it up, overheated by nature and anger, and now she tucks herself into it by invitation. His scarf is a warm swath of truly hideous plaid against her cheek.
"I don't think anything could ever cage you again, Nephele," he says against her temple. Neph shivers and curls her hands over his spine as though she could grip it like bars on a window. He never calls her by her full name, not even when he's really pissed. That was always--
Hannibal pulls away as though yanked by force, before she can finish that thought or come up with anything in response. She doubletakes at him anyway, half-expecting to see someone else standing there, a little taller, a lot more plaid. It's only when she doesn't that her heart rate starts to dip towards normal.
He says he'll see her at the apartment (not home, never 'home' with him, which would sting if she didn't know they have totally different concepts of the term) but doesn't let go of her shoulders. His knuckles stand out white in her periphery, and there's still a flicker of it around the edges of his irises. It's an uncertainty of self she hasn't seen in him since he was little, when she'd told him he was a mutant. She does now what she might have done then, if she'd known him better - she rises back up on her toes and presses a quick, dry kiss to his cheek. The cold tip of her nose bumps his cheekbone. "Yeah you will," she says, all cocky certainty as she drops flatfooted again.
The warm to cold ratio flip flops again, her front all chilled but her back shielded from the winter breeze when Will steps in. She's turning even as he touches her wrist, belatedly realizing she had to drop his hand to hug Hannibal. It hadn't even occurred to her, then. Now she opens her mouth to apologize, but finds Will looking at her with an unusual...solidity. She catches his hand, and what falls out of her mouth is: "Thank you, Will. For--saying something, back there." For snarling at Samson for no reason other than he'd set himself up against her and Hannibal. "I'm sorry stuff got all weird."
It's a rueful apology, delivered with a sad and lopsided smile. The Weird is 100% her fault, even if he doesn't know it. Not even Hannibal really knows, for all that Neph's not sure why she's keeping it quiet. It just hasn't come up? There's never been a good time to say I'm one of seven people who can do what we do, whatever that means. Soon, maybe.
She doesn't try to hug Will or lean in to plant one on his cheek, but she squeezes his hand and wrinkles her nose at him and says, "Try not to let him do anything too suicidally stupid?" Because, look, she's not an idiot, she knows Hannibal has a dying man's thirst for revenge and a mind that tends toward elaborate games of Mousetrap. She wants them to get home safe, and that means no unnecessary dramatics. This is an unfair thing to put on Will Graham, but he's driven Hannibal to unusual behavior with the force of his stare alone, so Neph's willing to risk it.
Then she breaks away, not touching either of them for the first time in at least twenty minutes. What a weird thing to suddenly tally up in her head. Neph takes a step backward, toward the museum, a topographic map of Baltimore's rooftops rising in bumps and ridges on her mind. It'll be quicker to doubleback, and she was serious about beating them there. She wants dibs on the shower.
"Don't be late!" she grins, and then hop pivots and breaks down the sidewalk at a fast clip.
no subject
Date: 2017-02-04 06:16 pm (UTC)Neither of them relax - Neph is closer to it, but Neph has a razor-edge of attention that's all her own, too - but both of them seem more certain, like self-knowledge and some interpersonal bonds are all they need to patch themselves back up and keep going, keep going, until an uncertain future point when everything in the entire universe has been tugged to a stop.
--Now that he sees it in someone else, has to try to name it, Will realizes that it's not just his 'empathy disorder' or a surplus of mirror neurons, that this is actually an accurate reflection he's staring down.
Neph catches his hand and-- thanks him, actually thanks him, and Will finds his certainty for watching Neph and Marijus interact doesn't extend even slightly to what on earth anyone could ever see in himself. He's too stunned to deny anything coherently, too touched to jerk back away from her, just lets his fingers spasm against hers and stammers out. "I'll-- always say something. You're-- you're welcome. And it's fine." A flicker of real smile, a flash fire across his face. "I'm so used to it, I think I kinda prefer the weird shit, at this point."
It's clearly meant to be light-hearted, but Neph also isn't dumb to innuendo. Will knows there's a solid foundation of something very serious under that layer of jokingly asking him to keep an eye on her closest friend in the world. Will just nods, face falling into honest surprise and warmth. "I'll make sure he waits til we're back at your guys' place before he starts doxxing that kid, yeah. Promise."
He and Marijus turn as one unit to watch Neph flee down the street after that, back the way they came.
Which leaves Will and Marijus on the sidewalk, standing on either side of a sudden chilly gap.
Will surprises himself by moving first. His arm twitches and then falls back at his side, useless for reaching out physically, but the intensity of the two of them sings in his blood, vibrates under his skin. He can't remove the imagery of a hawk gently letting something slip back out of its talons, of Marijus taking that unexpected step towards trust.
What ends up spilling from Will's mouth, while his eyes are focused on the ground in front of himself, is a phrase he's never heard from anyone for himself. But it keeps ringing in his ears like struck metal. "I'm-- proud of you."
Marijus is an immovable post next to him for two, three heartbeats, and then he's lurching forward. A palm catches against the back of Will's head, fingers threading through his hair with familiarity Will can barely process, let alone explain. There's a thumb behind his ear across a pulsing vein, and their noses nearly touch. Their temples do touch, in fact that's the point of contact that seems to be why Marijus has tilted forward so far. Will thinks of Neph kissing Marijus's cheek just moments ago, and feels himself undeniably caught - a rushing tide dragging him back out to sea, with some hint as to direction but no way of knowing the depths he might be sucked down towards.
He's holding his breath. Will is holding his breath and he's letting this happen because he has no idea how to convince himself he isn't getting anything from the howling force that's demanding him, with more sincerity than anything Will's ever had directed at him before.
"Hannibal." At first, Will doesn't know how to place the whisper that makes the curls of hair by his right ear flutter. "My name is Hannibal."
Oh. Oh.
The hand across the back of his head doesn't twitch, Marijus - Hannibal - doesn't budge an inch, teeth nearly grazing the tip of Will's ear as he speaks. "I can't explain why you can't call me that in public, but I want you to know my name."
Will's hand comes up without thinking, knuckles going white immediately in his grip on Mar-- Hannibal's forearm. They stay like that, a tense and unsustainable statue, Will holding the arm of the hand that's gripping his head, the street traffic parting around them and giving occasional exasperated looks. Will ignores all of them, just trying to steady his breathing back into his own pattern instead of taking Hannibal's as his own.
They're on a cliff, and Will isn't sure what he could possibly offer - for escalating or de-escalating - without knocking them both off of it. He stays put, gradually feeling the tension tug at his bones, feeling desperation ring through him but with nowhere to put it. Hannibal makes a soft sound and, on instinct, Will turns to look at him, their noses barely brushing--
"Let's go."
Cold air rushes to the spot on the back of Will's head where Hannibal's hand was a moment ago. Hannibal is pulling back, firmly in his own circle of gravity all at once, and Will sways on the spot with dizzy relief.
"Okay," Will says, and then they're off, instinct letting them fall in step with each other but a new distance slowly settling in. They don't hold hands. Neither of them falsely reach or check for the other, they both just force forwards. Will wonders if Hannibal's ears are ringing as much as his own.
It's not until they've turned two corners that Will finds his voice fully.
"How the hell's she gonna beat us home by running?"
no subject
Date: 2017-02-04 11:50 pm (UTC)Neph enjoys every second of it anyway. Her thin-soled sneakers grip shingles, concrete and tar-paper equally well, and Tin spots the telltale gleam of ice even in deep shadows. The cold air chaps her cheeks and scrapes away at her lungs, hollowing out all the things she might've wished to shout at Samson and leaving her free to fill up with something better. Every jump jars her knees and the palms of her hands are scraped pink and red from gripping ledges and eaves. She does not stop, propelling herself forward and over with her own strength and judicious dabs of Iron and Steel. Her blood roars through her body, pounding against the barrier of her skin, until she's so rooted in her own capacity that there's no need to think about judging steps, leaps or distances. Neph swings off pipes and hurtles over ten-foot gaps between alleys without ever thinking about any of it at all.
In fact, she manages not to think about anything until her toes touch down on the brick that makes up all the buildings in their neighborhood. Her innermost shirt is soaked with sweat, her exposed skin is simultaneously flushed and chilled, and her nose is a little drippy. Neph scrubs at it as she cuts her pace to an easier lope.
Actual thoughts start to seep in around the edges of physical discomfort, thoughts like how she doesn't know the first thing about holding down a territory, how she's never made a point of standing her ground before. Thoughts like whether or not to put that word out, or let her continued presence do the talking for her. Thoughts like making sure Samson abides by her edict and gets the fuck outta Baltimore in the next, oh, week. Thoughts like how she'd expected to feel slimier after dealing with him, but how the simple physical grossness of being sweaty and a little smelly just wiped that all away.
Thoughts of Samson, however, drag her back to what he'd said to her about Anansi and Loki, about Benkei.
Neph skids to a final stop on her own rooftop, breath coming hard, sweat dripping down the back of her neck. Someone once arranged a folding chair, a round glass-topped table, and a bucket full of gravel up here, and Neph's gotten in the habit of using them. She drops into the chair, wincing as her cold-and-damp sweater sticks to her skin, and fishes out her phone. She thumbs up Whatsapp.
did u seriously break samsons nose?
She doesn't really expect a reply right away. Allomancers keep weird schedules, and last she heard Benkei was also bouncing at a strip club outside of Bethesda. This time of afternoon, she could be asleep or just getting up. But a bubble filled with ellipses pops up almost immediately, prompting Neph to settle back in the chair in tense anticipation.
I fucking well did and I'd do it again. Comes the answer, closely followed by another ellipses-bubble. Why who told you? I thought he'd be too embarrassed to let it slip.
Neph chews on her lip, still breathing hard through her nose. Of course Benkei would assume this was grapevine stuff. Why would she ever think a Pewterarm would threaten a Mistborn twice? Because Samson thought he could bully Neph, because he thought she'd let her fear cage her. He was almost right. Neph picks at the keyboard with less than her usual nimble speed, but it's cold and her fingers are kinda numb.
he did. he tracked me down today
The response is almost instantaneous: I'LL BREAK HIS GODDAMN NECK. I WAS PRETTY CLEAR WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF HE FUCKED WITH YOU AGAIN THAT LITTLE COCKSTAIN.
Capslock all kinda blurs together in that quantity. Neph grips her phone and rereads it twice, something warm stirring inside that has nothing to do with physical exertion. Benkei's always been nice to her, she's always asked if Neph's doing okay, and they work well together. But she's also a bit older, four or five years, enough that her obvious concern had been unwelcome for a long time. Neph had felt like Benkei didn't think she could make it on her own, she'd resented that, but now...well, there's a lot of things out there to watch out for. Things Neph wouldn't wish on a younger girl, either.
thanks B but its fine. i guess A and L both cut him off too and he thought i made them do it
Benkei, having been in this game longer than Neph, immediately gets it. Damn, good for them. Even if they were just watching out for #1, that's decent of them.
Which were basically Neph's thoughts, too. decent of YOU to hit him for me
I am ALWAYS down for punching whiny boys who don't understand the word 'no'. Neph thinks, all in a flash, that those are some very lucky strippers in Bethesda, and then Benkei sends: Do you need backup? Or help hiding a body?
It really says something about her friends that that's everybody's first offer. Lecter'd asked her the same thing. She snorts, hesitates, then writes, no i just told him to gtfo Baltimore
She doesn't think Benkei will need that spelled out for her either, but the ellipses blink for a long stretch of minutes before the reply comes. Holy shit. You sure?
That's a question Neph suddenly suspects she's going to be asking herself a lot in the next few...whatevers. Weeks, months. Years? She can't even imagine herself at twenty, twenty one, never dared think more than a job or two ahead. But now, huddled in her nice new coat, sitting on the roof above her startlingly fancy apartment, with one of her aliases on a lease that could stretch all the way through Hannibal's residency, the future is a slowly whirling galaxy starred with too many possibilities to number. She could get lost in the thought, but she's an open sky. She encompasses, damn it.
yeah, long enough for it to count, anyway, she types.
Good for you too, then.
The smile that breaks over Neph's face almost splits her dry lip. She rubs a line of sweat off her forehead before replying, thanks Benkei. i'll be in touch. Then she pockets her phone, picks the roof door lock, and heads down the stairs. She could swing through one of their windows, but their apartment faces the street and, again: broad daylight.
With her snow delays and her text conversation, Neph's a little surprised to find that she did beat Hannibal (and maybe Will?) back to the apartment. It's a relief to have the place to herself, familiar surroundings promising safety and comfort and support in a way only a private space can. Neph hangs up her jacket, collects some clean clothes from her room, and heads to the bathroom so she can strip out of her sweaty layers and take advantage of the building's hot water supply.
She steps out twenty minutes later in a cloud of vaguely herbal steam (on the off chance Hannibal's still feeling huggy, she figured she'd use his soaps instead of her own aggressively candy-scented stuff), wearing an anonymous white tee that could be either hers or Hannibal's, she honestly doesn't know, and a pair of pajama pants that puddle around her heels. Neph ruffles a towel over her hair before draping it around her neck and cocking her head to listen for the sounds of someone else being home.
no subject
Date: 2017-02-07 05:22 pm (UTC)He has to frame it in a more palatable manner to accomplish it at all, in fact. While Will and he walk to the bus stop another nine blocks away, he tries to breathe around the panicked vacuum in his chest. While they pay and sit down (Will offers him the window seat, Hannibal takes it), he starts looking for anything available to patch up that hole with. While the bus rocks around corners and eases past pedestrians crossing the street at unwise moments, Hannibal decides he's going to look at this as a longer tether. Not the cutting of ties, but perhaps just more flexible ones.
Like a cat being tricked into eating vitamins by tucking them inside treats, Hannibal has to slowly chisel away what he's done until it's softened to a size and shape that doesn't interrupt the beating of his heart.
"I had this dog once."
Hannibal looks across at Will, who's been leaning fully into the back of his seat like he's tired, except Hannibal can see the antsy energy in his tapping right foot, the way he's checked and re-checked all his jacket pockets three times since they sat down ten minutes ago. "He ran off every other week. We got him a collar, but we couldn't afford to chip him, and he'd come back after a few days every time anyway."
Hannibal lets the pause sink in between them. "What happened to the dog?"
Will's staring down at his shoes, glasses pulled by gravity to the very end of his nose. They're balanced so precariously that Hannibal almost leans over to pull them back up when they hit a bump and he watches them shudder in place. "Didn't come back one week. Thought he got hit by a car."
"Did it?" The pronoun's reflexive for animals. Will might be frowning from that, or from the memory itself.
"No. Saw him again a year later, right before we moved. Bit thinner, but not hurt. Looked happy to see me. I didn't bother trying to get a collar back on him that time, he followed me home anyway. Stayed there in the yard for two weeks straight because my dad didn't want to let him back in the house after all the trouble last time from him." Will wipes the end of his nose, jostles his own glasses and ends up nudging them back up to a safer spot. "We ended up taking him to Montana with us."
Hannibal makes a soft sound, inquisitive. Will's face twitches with that pained, apologetic smile that comes out so often in conversations where comfort's been scraped off the walls.
"He never ran off again. Lived with me - us - til he died, three years later. Think he needed the reassurance that we'd let him be free when he needed to be."
Hannibal leans his temple against the window in the silence that follows. Halfway back to the apartment, Will leans across him to open it, with a muttered comment about needing fresh air. Hannibal spends the rest of the ride thinking of Will burying his old dogs alone in his backyards, of Neph flying over rooftops without him.
*
Neph beat them home, and she showered already. The steam-scent of hot water carrying soap perfumes laps against Hannibal when he opens the door, soft as ocean waves. His head tilts down the hall instantly, following the smell. "She beat us home."
Will blinks down the corridor with far less comprehension. "Did you hear her?"
"No." Will just stares at him, confused but not alarmed. Hannibal is far more interested by what could possibly cause the 'dawning comprehension' that slowly blossoms across his face as he kicks off his shoes onto the mat.
Hannibal, who sits down to methodically untie everything and hangs his jacket and scarf up in the closet before moving beyond the doorway, is what holds up a surprisingly-impatient Will. He's pacing in place, hands in pockets, wind breaker open but still hanging off his shoulders like he's got no intentions of removing it anytime soon.
A few steps further in, and it's clear that she's actually still showering - the soft pounding of water, changing pitch as someone moves underneath its stream, can be barely heard from around the bend and in the bathroom. So Hannibal leads them both into the kitchen, mind buzzing.
His hands are steady on the coffee machine, a silver-and-black contraption that likely cost more than all of Will's wardrobe combined. "Would you like any?"
"Uh, yeah." Will doesn't sit down. The silence is interrupted only with a bag rustling, the grinder buzzing, and then eventually by Hannibal taking a small risk. "Would you get mugs from that cabinet there?" He points, but doesn't move from his spot, as if he's far too busy fiddling with the water in the machine to budge.
It is a strange, energetic satisfaction to watch Will search through the cabinet and pull down three matching mugs. After a small pause, he actually takes a guess and opens two drawers without asking, pulling out three spoons when he successfully finds them.
It's Will whose head cocks first when the shower water stops being a background hum. He grows antsy again, as if unsure what will come through that door, and shifts the identical mugs and spoons around at least twice before Hannibal hears the bathroom door even open.
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Date: 2017-02-08 01:34 am (UTC)There's at least one person in the kitchen. Two, maybe, with the drawers rattling counterpoint. Neph swabs the towel around inside her ear and follows the sounds. Her feet, overheated from the shower, leave steamy little footprints on the refinished hardwood.
"You're back," she says as she rounds the corner. That 'you' transforms into a plural mid sentence, when she clocks that it's both Hannibal and Will poking around the counters. Neph's only surprised that she's not surprised; she doesn't exactly have a frame of reference for this stuff, for the points in a friendship where it's normal to start hanging out in each others' spaces for non-emergencies. She thinks it might be a case-by-case thing, since she can't imagine wanting to chill at Will's apartment, especially not if his dad's gonna be around. Here, at least, the only awkwardness that might pop up is the stuff they carry around with them every day already. She quirks a smile at Will, a thank you and a good job not letting him get punched or initiate punching all in one. It's possible he won't catch all the subtleties, there.
Ear sufficiently dry, the towel flops back down around her neck. Neph steps onto the tile, grimaces at the cold, and hastily tip-toes her way over to the little rug in front of the sink. "There's coffee?"
Obviously there's coffee, but there's an equally palpable uncertainty in the air. Hesitation, hovering over everybody's shoulders. If she's learned anything from the past almost-year of living with Hannibal (proof she lacks that frame of reference: she went from babysitting the guy to moving in with him in the span of a year, and it's been like eight months since the living together thing started) it's to put on blinders and bull ahead through the Awkward. He appreciates it more often than he doesn't.
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Date: 2017-02-08 02:59 am (UTC)So there's no reason for him to freeze in the middle of putting the half and half on the counter. There's no reason for everything in his body to stop for a moment when her voice rings out through their (!) kitchen.
But apparently there is still an ease to imagining things as opposed to actually experiencing them, and Hannibal wasn't as prepared as he thought he was for being confronted with the fact that he addressed such a wide, unspoken issue between Neph and himself and she's now...just back in their apartment. Not as if nothing happened - she's coming in with an air of enforced normalcy hanging just as heavy as the shampoo-steam cloud, but she's coming in as if it's something they can get past.
Hannibal remembers her pressing dry, chilly lips to his cheek, and the fact that he's done something she appreciates rings...surprisingly strange. He knows she likes him - they live together, he'd gotten the gist of what that meant somewhere between her spending two weeks of late nights arranging his paperwork with him and between their lease getting signed - but intentionally, knowingly giving her something that she needed is...different.
It's Will who breaks the silence, only looking over at Neph once he's done staring a bit openly and concerned at Hannibal's frozen posture. "Yeah. I didn't know you could need that many settings for coffee, but I'm assuming that's what came out of that machine." For all his fidgety pacing, now that he's gotten a good look at Neph - and he does actually spend a moment looking her up and down, not hiding it at all - he visibly relaxes against the counter.
Will nudges the mugs over a bit further, as if it wasn't clear what they're on the counter for, about the same time as Hannibal reanimates and finds he's capable of finally putting that half and half down near them.
"Did you have a nice run?" Hannibal asks, and he surprises himself that his voice doesn't feel stiff or forced. He's relieved, and it shows, even though his fingertips feel strangely numb and his ribs ache. He feels like he just ran the few miles back to their apartment and he's only just colliding with the exhausted endorphin rush at the tail of it.
Will just squints at them, like he's aware he's on the outside of an in-joke but he knows enough not to ask. He helps himself to the finished pot of coffee first, eyeing Hannibal with a telegraphed suspicion that has Hannibal smirking over at Neph.
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Date: 2017-02-08 03:52 am (UTC)(Mostly. After a quick beat, her eyes flick to Will, who is also definitely taking all this in. They don't make eye contact, but somehow Neph knows he noticed her looking, that he's acknowledging her, and that they're both a little worried. She wasn't aware it was possible to do all that without exchanging looks, but it's been a day for discoveries.)
Neph bites her lip. Should she not have taken him up on his offer? It wouldn't've cost her anything to ride the bus home with them and slip out for a run after dark. Nothing but this immediate heavy satisfaction sinking into her bones. She would have jittered her way through the rest of the day, she knows that. Does Hannibal? Can he possibly know what he made possible? If he hadn't said anything, she would've stayed. Would have let her guilt for involving them and leaving them in the dark tie her there, without ever thinking about it. The eddies of group dynamics have steered her life for so long, she's prone to letting them set her compass points.
She should explain all that to him. Later, after Will's gone, maybe. It's...not for Will, yet.
"It makes cappuccino, too," Neph says, falling into the rhythm of the tease with thoughtless ease. "If you want a mug that's half foam and seventy percent milk."
Will looks at her, and it's so openly gauging that she shuffles in place, tucking one ankle behind the other. Her pj pants swamp her legs, but she still feels like he's x-raying her scraped knees. Neph resists the urge to tuck her hands, palms clean but pink with abrasions, behind her back. She reaches out for one of the mugs instead, like he won't immediately notice. Hannibal whirs back to life, very probably saving her from a raised eyebrow at least.
"Yes!" she chimes, the uncomplicated glow of a good endorphin rush beaming from her face, from her whole body. Neph doesn't mean to unleash it all on Hannibal with her smile, but she...does, she absolutely does. It's a thank you and a I'm better now and a situation optimal all in one. "Much better'n bus funk!" His eyebrows tilt that fraction of an inch that she's learned means relief, or possibly acceptance, wistfulness without sadness. Neph presses her stinging palms against the cool ceramic and wonders what she ought to make of that.
She'll just have to ask him.
After coffee. Will makes a dubious noise over the pot, though whether at the brew or the two of them, Neph's not sure. It's enough to draw a glint of smug humor from Hannibal, who probably ground the beans by handcrank first and is breathlessly waiting (on the inside) for Will's reaction to the difference. Not that she'll admit there is a difference, but it's possible she might've, maybe, made a weird noise of her own the first time she tried fresh-ground beans. It's possible he won't ever let her live that down. Neph sniffs, but can't hide her own wriggling smile, so she turns hastily away with her cup held out for a pour.
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Date: 2017-02-08 01:49 pm (UTC)Because Neph always could have just leapt over that fence. But she'd waited until Hannibal - said it was okay? He knows it's pretense, them staying together. It could be shattered by either of them at any moment, just like anything else in life, and now that it's been tested safely it's oddly comforting to know that she can run off and...
And come back home.
Will is watching the two of them, so relaxed that it's nearly suspicious - until Hannibal realizes it's his mirroring. Hannibal is relaxed, and Neph is beaming, and Will is seeing all of this and instead of turning tail and hiding himself away from all the emotions bleeding across the room, he's calmly stepping through that mess and - if appearances can be believed - enjoying himself.
Hannibal tilts in towards Neph, then, confident in that thank you in her smile, relieved at the fact that she looks uncomplicated in her own relief. For the moment, he can leave thoughts of revenge to the side.
Will is the one holding the coffee pot, and he pours out some for Neph next, leaving his own mug steaming on the counter. When he leans further across to pour some into Hannibal's mug - although Hannibal isn't holding it, seeing as Will and Neph are both arranged on the mug-portion of the counter - Will's mouth opens and his eyebrows meet. He watches Neph with confusion for a moment before his attention flickers to Hannibal and back again.
"Are you--" Will clears his throat, eyebrows raising back up as if he'd just startled himself. "You use the same shampoo." He says with forced calm, as if that, of all the things he's seen between Hannibal and Neph, is the one that doesn't make sense.
Or is he just surprised that he recognizes what Hannibal's shampoo smells like, when another person is wearing it? Hannibal now has to decide which one of those options he likes best, whether it feels nicer to be amused or flattered. "Sometimes." Hannibal had noticed Neph was wearing his - it's its own sort of flattery, but in a deliberate and kind way. They've discussed his aversion to certain strengths of scents often enough that he thinks he knows what that choice means, and he smiles as he reaches between Will and Neph to get to his coffee.
And then slots himself directly between them fully, leaning back against the counter despite the lack of room to do so. It's Will who moves, with a little sound of surprise, although he gets very far out of the way, under pretense of getting the half and half for his coffee.
Hannibal gives a small sigh, hip just barely touching the extra fabric of Neph's shirt. "Having it plain allows you to appreciate the flavors much better, Will."
"I'll take my chances." Said flatly while Will pours in enough cream than his coffee turns only a few shades darker than his own skin. And then, pointedly, no eye contact until the heartbeat afterwards, "Hannibal."
He hadn't said it on the bus ride back, as per Hannibal's request. Now, hearing his real name for the first time, Hannibal feels something warm rush down through the rest of him that has nothing to do with his coffee.
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Date: 2017-02-08 04:25 pm (UTC)Which. Okay. That looks weird. Neph can see how that looks weird. Or smells weird, whatever, but she'd just like to point out that this means he's been in sniffing distance of Hannibal's hair and, like, took metal notes. That fact snags her attention like a burr, working into a tangle she'll have to tease out later, its very presence distracting enough now that she's reduced to blinking at Will for several long seconds before saying, "Not, like, always. Mine's running low and I'm cheap."
A safe excuse, but one that kinda undermines what she was aiming to do for Hannibal. Neph traces her thumb over the rim of her mug and doesn't look at him, in case there's any hurt to be seen. If he's bothered to hear the gesture waved off as a minor theft, he doesn't show it, just fits himself against the counter between them to reach his own cup. It's Will who backs down, almost flinching away in his haste to get to the creamer.
Interesting. If she looks at this another way, there's a second snarl to pull apart - Will recognizes Hannibal's shampoo, but not her own day-to-day smell. Is that significant, or have the two boys just spent more time together in a climate controlled library?
"Having it plain means it tastes like coffee," Neph wrinkles her nose and reaches around Hannibal for the sugar container. She pops the seal with her thumb (they found out about the building's minor ant problem over the summer) and scoops three spoonfuls into her mug before lifting it to her mouth. Neph likes half and half sometimes, but sugar all the time, and Will's fussing around with the carton like he won't wanna give up the prop anytime soon. He stirs it into his coffee, spoon jangling against the ceramic as he shrugs off Hannibal's overbearing advice and--
--throws his name back in his teeth. His name
Neph spits her first too-hot mouthful of sweetened coffee back into her mug. Most of it, anyway. Some dribbles down her chin. She dashes it away, chest jerking with a suppressed cough. Did he just-? When did-? Why did-?!
"Hannibal!" she sputters, pure accusation, and if he didn't want her elbow in his ribcage he shouldn't've stood so close.
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Date: 2017-02-08 04:51 pm (UTC)Which is why he frowns and tucks his free hand closer to his body once he's put the half and half down. He spoons sugar into it, not counting consciously but not wholly unreasonable either, stirs it aggressively and briefly enough that it sloshes over the edge and he has to suck at the side of his mug to keep it from burning his thumb.
He just ends up spilling some again anyway, when Neph inhales some of her own coffee. Will shivers with poorly-suppressed laughter, aware of the paranoia that floats off them - mostly her - like mist wherever their real identities are concerned. Will doesn't know why, but he doesn't have to know why to understand the what, to try to be compassionate towards it.
"He told me after you-- left." 'Ran away' is wrong, wrong associations, even if 'left' doesn't cover it either. Will lets himself flounder after other possibilities for only a moment before he keeps going forward. "Unfortunately I don't have my own secret name to unmask to make it even. Sorry."
Is it him, or bleed over from Neph, or just an understanding of the dynamics she'll accept, that has him joking about it? Even Will isn't certain.
"Will can keep secrets." Hannibal says, with such calm certainty that Will's heart does a strange somersault up towards his throat. Their eyes meet, Hannibals' suddenly inscrutably blank behind the calculations running at the forefront of everything, as if this was a considered risk and not the emotional kneejerk reaction Will's pretty sure it damn well was. He's probably scrambling to explain it away to himself right now.
Will....wonders if Neph knows that just as well as he does. She must. He glances over at her, for-- he's not entirely sure. Confirmation? Reassurance? ...Solidarity?
Being Hannibal's confidante doesn't feel like something that you get to take lightly. Or even get to pick for yourself, considering how stubborn he is.
Maybe Will's just that desperate for his own connections, because he can't will up the energy to feel offended about that.
In the end, there's no way to agree with Hannibal's trust without sounding patronizing or overstepping invisible boundaries that he's still trying to measure the scope of, between himself and Neph, so Will just nods.
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Date: 2017-02-08 08:35 pm (UTC)The fact that Hannibal blurted it out after letting her go gives her pause. Ditching his old identity didn't come easily to Hannibal; they fought over it more than once while they figured out the paperwork, the will and his medschool admission. His older self had an ego barely contained by his fancyass house, and the teenage version wasn't much less burdened by pride. Convincing him to be someone other than Hannibal Lecter, longterm, publicly, took some real doing. Neph can't dig up any surprise that he'd jump at the chance to tell Will, to exert a little bit more of himself and be seen for who he really is, but...
...maybe she's reading too far into things, only the timing tastes significant. He slips his hold on her while drawing Will in closer with shared secrets. Neph, who grew up in a loose network bound by nothing else, knows those constraints very, very well.
Her only question is whether Hannibal meant to do it, or if he acted on panicked impulse. She remembers how the offer to run had grated out of him, the whites of his eyes flashing in what might've been badly-concealed terror, his shocked stillness when she turned up just now despite how obvious the shower must've been, and can't credit him with calculating any of it.
Loneliness makes people do really dumb shit. Take stupid gambles. Nine times outta ten, it blows up in your face, but the tenth time...she's sitting in Exhibit A right now, so she can't judge him too harshly for it. He could've risked someone a lot less trustworthy than Will, or her, when he went around fixating on people.
"I know he can," Neph scowls at Hannibal and shoulders into his arm. Will kept his mouth stubbornly shut about someone breaking his face, a truth that could've gotten people arrested (and himself killed, if the angle had been slightly different). He's a pretty inscrutable guy when he wants to be. Even moreso when you know how he reads people; it's easy to get hung up on that and forget what he might actually be thinking. He keeps himself to himself, a trait she's noticed in people who move around too frequently to make close friends. Who would he even tell? Who would care? Who would listen? More than that, why would he make a Thing out of it at all? "It's your secret identity, Hanners. It's your call."
She manages not to make that sound like it's your funeral, a victory all around.
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Date: 2017-02-08 09:42 pm (UTC)A game Will would...probably appreciate a bit less than secret-keeping. Hannibal was only loosely privy to details about them hiking away into the woods somewhere to build some sort of cheap building, and he's only seen photos of it because Neph snapshots a variety of things on her phone to show him when they can finally see each other between his classes and her jobs, but he still gets the impression that Neph and Will are not, in fact, on shoulder-punching terms. And might never be, if only because Will doesn't seem as if he'd enjoy it much.
Hannibal can't even chalk that up to a sibling issue, because he's been without his own for so long. Or perhaps that's why - there's something to have missed, whereas Will has never had that relationship or the drive for it.
Thoughts for later, maybe. Maybe not now, with Will losing some of his smothered cheer in favor of watching Hannibal sidelong as he tunnels too far into his own thoughts.
Clawing his way back out with minimal effort, Hannibal leans a bit more against Neph, even as she's doing her best to be bony and unappealing to do so with. Elbows trying to puncture his lungs or not, he was-- angry for her, earlier. He can't quite say 'worried', even in his own head, but it's not incorrect.
And Neph is handing that permission right back to him, even as he'd been thinking that it was a decision he'd made with a possible joint effect - again, depending on how savvy and determined Will wants to be about tracking down information about him. With just a first name, of course, it won't be simple... But then it's not a common name in America, is it?
"Then I am willing to take any risk it may include." Said while sipping at his own coffee, watching Neph more than Will.
Mostly because he doesn't need to glance over for long to know that Will is draining that coffee like it's the only distraction he has from considering what's happening. "At least now I get to call you something and not see you poorly mask the fact that it's not your real name."
Nevermind. Hannibal was wrong. Will Graham is a terrible choice to put faith into, because what has he ever done to deserve this behavior.
He's not pouting into his coffee. He's delicately frowning into his coffee. There's a difference.
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Date: 2017-02-08 11:17 pm (UTC)And why? Neph understands Hannibal's motivations well enough - he's lonely and easily bored, but enforces stupidly high standards anyway. Will's smart and cutting and comes equipped with some fascinating maybe-meta capabilities. He's also not inclined to be cowed by Hannibal's money or huge nerdbrain which, if she's any indication, Hannibal finds weirdly compelling. Will's own reasoning makes less sense, unless he's exactly as lonely in his own way.
Or just as into puzzles? No, that's not...quite it. Neph sips more carefully at her coffee, leery of any more precisely-timed bombs. Will isolates himself, but only actual sociopaths start out doing that on purpose. Usually the kids who stand apart got shoved to the fringes to begin with. Will freaks people out, and they shun him for it. But Hannibal, and to a greater extent Neph, are not easily freaked.
(They're freaks, but that's a different conversation. One she doesn't think Hannibal had when he shared his real name. If he keeps leaving out breadcrumb trails like this, he'll be having it sooner rather than later. Somehow, Neph has to get out in front of that, but for now she's confident that he kept anything truly dangerous, anything that might have put her at risk, close to his chest. Jury's still out on how much Samson gave away running his big fat mouth, but she'd rather be furious with him than with Hannibal.)
That's close enough to her own base reasoning for being here that Neph can't fault him for it. She snickers into her mug, fixes a mournful look on her face, and says, "I've been workin' on teachin' him to lie without soundin' like he's daring the other person to call'im on it. It's...wow it's a work in progress."
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