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."
Hannibal has his own theories about what Will is drawn to in him. He also has just enough self-awareness to recognize that he's probably not fully correct. Will has been surprisingly unpredictable and inscrutable, a mirror that's difficult to tell the true color of, no matter how much Hannibal drags at it to see the back.
He's hit on loneliness, though, the same as Neph is beside him, and he thinks that one might be fully correct. It's a trait they all seem to share, in their own ways and for their own reasons. Self-imposed, circumstantial - it all can ache and grate after enough years. They're young still, all three of them, but that doesn't mean the effects of being human islands is lessened. It means exactly the opposite.
"Perhaps I just haven't had proper motivation to lie." Hannibal says, airily, as if that's a reasonable explanation for why he gave such an icy smile to a nurse during a medical examination that she'd dropped her pen (and subsequently had a suspicious amount of trouble finding his vein, later, when collecting samples for blood work regarding him being in the country long-term). His older self might have learned his strengths and weaknesses for guile, might have gotten truly better at exuding enough calm self-assurance that his lies simply felt only as grandiose as his truths, but Hannibal at seventeen hasn't perfected it yet. All he has on his side is a chilling amount of ability to stay cool under pressure, and even then it's reliant on choice triggers not getting mentioned.
It's been...a process.
Will, for his part, looks oddly content to have a friend in teasing Hannibal. Hannibal isn't certain how he feels about that. "What do you have to teach him to lie about?" Is chuckled into his mug.
And Hannibal feels his first glimmer of realization that Will is maybe more capable of tactical conversational steering than he'd credited him for. "My horrifically boring past." He says, absolute dead pan, and this time Will actually snorts hard enough to splatter his nose with coffee.
"That he gives a shit, mostly," Neph says with her widest, bluest eyes, an effect she's pretty sure pajamas only underscore. And, like, that right there is a blatant lie all its own, 'cuz Hannibal either cares about something or dismisses it (or them - she's literally seen him walk away from an uninteresting person mid-syllable) out of hand. That trait took some getting used to, after Lecter's aggressively pleasant civility, but Neph prefers it now; she never has to wonder where she stands with Hannibal, worry that she's reading too much or not enough into his cold or warm spells.
So yeah, she lies through her teeth, but the same way Will's fishing: without any real bait. She doesn't think he's actually trying to slip anything out of them while they're all half-slack with relief, hot water and crashing adrenaline. He's just batting lazily at a secret Neph's holding over her head, a metaphor that'd never work in real life for obvious height-related reasons.
It's a game. A little bit of a challenge, maybe, for Will to try and tease something out of them, for them to test out excuses or hone conversational reflexes. Neph can see the board unfolding already, colored squares and stacks of penalty cards and six-sided dice, and feels a grin bloom behind her mug. Secrets have always been currency and burdens before, never tokens to move around for fun.
Is this how Hannibal sees things all the time?
Yes. Yes it is, and he's just rolled snakeyes. Will spits coffee and Neph has to bend over hers, folding in half til she's giggling at her knees. A little coffee sloshes over her fingers, but it's the sound of her phone buzzing on the counter that pulls her back upright. She'd left it plugged in on the 'insert device here to use for recipes and cooking music' charger on her way to the shower, and now she leans awkwardly behind Hannibal to grab for it. "Hang on, just'a sec--"
There's been just the one text since she came back inside. The contact name is A.N.S. and it reads:
Are you sure about Baltimore?
Neph sips at her coffee and lists into Hannibal as she pecks out a reply.
yes who told you?
The response is instant, but then why wouldn't it be? Anansi just messaged her, after all. He thought appealing to a higher power would help his case.
Her grin returns, a little meaner than before. Samson tried to tattle. And Anansi, who's been established here for longer than Neph's been alive, whose approval was uncertain and kind of key, just showed him the door. Out of the city.
It's not as easy as that. She's still gonna have to have a sit down with Anansi about territory and first rights of refusal and a whole lot of other stuff Neph's only vaguely aware of. But it's a good start, and she quickly sends a thank you before sliding her phone back down the counter.
"Work stuff," she says, reaching for a celebratory fourth scoop of sugar, "I am not fired for getting into it with a coworker at a fancy museum. More coffee please."
That, at least, Hannibal can tell is an absolute fabrication meant to play along. He has his flaws of communication, but they're not a lack of honesty about interest.
So he simply sinks his weight a bit more deeply in place, comfortably rooting to his spot where he gets to watch the two most important people in his life calmly joke across and around him.
Will has wiped the coffee off his chin and the outside of his mug, and he scoots across the kitchen to throw the paper towel away. Hannibal watches him and realizes belatedly that he'd apparently taken his shoes off sometime after following him inside, because Will's just wearing faded black socks. That's...surely a good sign of him being comfortable here, which is unexpected but pleasant, given it's still early on in Will visiting.
But then Hannibal is hawkishly watching Neph and Neph's phone, because while there's a lot of respectful boundaries around secrets between the two of them, he is openly and unendingly nosy and will read over her shoulder unless she specifically turns away to not allow that.
Hard to see when she's tilted away from him halfway to the sugar bowl, though. Hannibal sips at his black coffee and tries not to frown too hard at her scooping more sugar into hers. How can she drink it when it's just a syrupy sweet mess? How is she alive with that much refined sugar in her veins?
"Glad to know your bosses have some standards." Anyone hiring teenagers as their thieves is questionable to Hannibal, but the fact that they're apparently in the know enough to look the other way about this? That's good. Or it just means that mystery boy is just as rude in other situations, and he's turned everyone against him all on his own and it has less to do with Neph, but either option serves Hannibal's purpose of making sure Neph's decisions today get respected by her colleagues, so. Win-win.
"What a piece of shit coworker, though," Will says, and Hannibal has to admit he agrees with that one. "I hope he gets fired."
YOU were one of my bosses! Neph heroically manages not to screech, with Will standing right there in their kitchen. It kills her to swallow down that obvious, perfect zinger, though. It just kills her. Her whole face scrunches up with the effort, but it scrunches in Hannibal's general direction. Displeasure: expressed.
If he takes her seriously, he doesn't show it, but then he'd just been shamelessly reading over her shoulder and she'd made very little effort to stop him. His position in her good graces can't have slipped much, and he must know it. Answering texts in arm's reach of Hannibal is as good as permitting him to scroll through the chain anyway, though he might be distracted by the novelty of Will Graham, here, in their living space.
Neph's thumb taps aimlessly at the now blank screen. Are you sure about Baltimore? She hadn't hesitated to say yes. Hannibal might've seen the question, or the response, or both, but did he realize what it meant? Or why she'd done it? Smacking Samson down carried a ringing satisfaction, an intense self righteousness that's going to carry her for days, yet she could've done that any time in the last year. Before she could order him out, she had to have somewhere to be. She'd needed something to stand up for, a foundation to stand on.
Staking Baltimore had a lot less to do with banishing Samson than staying where Hannibal's putting down roots.
She buries her face in her coffee mug, chasing the last dregs of sugary sludge. There's no way he got that much from two texts, if he saw 'em at all. But, if...
Neph's grunt of agreement ends up amplified by the mug. She pulls it away, a vicious smirk rising over the rim. "Oh yeah, he was," she tells Will, "That's why he showed up today. He thought it was cuz I'd snitched and wanted...I dunno, for me to say I'd made it up, I guess." Some of her hard-earned schadenfreude drops away at the reminder; it's a little easier, now, to talk around what happened to her with the two of them, but she can't bring herself to bring the details into focus for them. And thoughts of Samson's ploy fill her gut with hot, tarry anger. Her eyes narrow, and if there's a petty gleam there, well, Neph's never pretended not to be vindictive or spiteful or, like, a good person. "So fuck that guy, 'cuz now he's extra blacklisted."
There's one of the points they're always going to fall out of sync for. Hannibal just isn't his older self, and with the twists unraveling before him in this new timeline, it's possible - likely - that he never will be. Hannibal Lecter, M.D., licensed psychiatrist and psychotherapist, is spiritually deceased - that funeral was maybe more than just smoke and mirrors to appease the legal issue of reclaiming or dumping all his stuff.
But it also seems to be working out for the better, Neph's irony-induced aneurysms aside. (And Hannibal's own nasty surprises of realizing that secrets had been shared that he'll never remember handing over.) Hannibal twice saw firsthand the tall, oppressive house he lived in as an adult. He'd felt the empty echo that had been muffled by rich fabrics and statues and paintings, and he hadn't been fooled.
He thinks his older self had been fooled, most of the time. That he'd bought his own lie, somewhere along the line between seventeen and forty-two.
If Hannibal is already on track to avoid some of his older self's mistakes, he won't mourn it a bit.
He will, however, read over Neph's shoulder to see something about being sure about Baltimore. Sure about what about Baltimore? Is that about the primitive territory-staking that Allomancers have?
He can't ask in front of Will, so he doesn't, but Hannibal's forgetting to pretend to sip at his coffee in his haste to try to bore the answer out of Neph's head just by staring hard enough.
'For me to say I'd made it up, I guess.' These are the sorts of headgames that Hannibal would endorse in just about any other scenario, involving anyone not-Neph, but the calculated manipulation from this boy just sends all sorts of alarms ringing in Hannibal's head. He's never been less pleased to find out about the existence of another meta.
Will has come back to lean against the counter perpendicular to theirs, shoulders hunched and knuckles going pale against his mug's handle. He stares at Neph with a slack jaw until he shakes himself visibly out of it, gaze stuttering back across the room and settling on a vase that very possibly cost more than his phone. "Yeah. Fuck that guy." Is said with an exhausted conviction, like Will can't believe the hole that's been burned in him about this today. He looks...well. He looks nearly as tiredly petty as Neph does, honestly, which gets separated gears in Hannibal's mind churning about how Will's abilities actually work and what he might've gotten doused in as a result.
Is Neph worried about that, too? Was she perhaps hoping Hannibal would have dropped Will off somewhere else, so he couldn't accidentally spy? Hannibal glances across at Neph, trying to gauge what she thinks of this. But again - he can't just outright ask, not with Will there.
All of these secrets aren't as carelessly easy fun to untangle when Hannibal cares about the puzzle pieces involved. He feels unfairly vexed about that realization.
If Tin worked more like Hannibal's mutation, she'd probably use it more. Imagine being able to literally sniff out somebody's feelings - and, by extension, their thoughts? - instead of just getting overpowered by coffee and shampoo? That'd be super helpful right now, with Hannibal doing his best unblinking mannequin impression at her temple. Neph turns her head to meet that stare while Will discards his napkin and looks around for a patch of counter realestate.
They can't actually communicate via telepathy, no matter what Will mutters now and then. They've known each other a little less than a year, not quite long enough to develop an entire silent language of eyebrows, squints and pursed lips. That's coming along, particularly Neph's ability to read shades of true-annoyance and faking-for-effect and hiding-something-worse in Hannibal's irritated posturing, but growing to understand a whole person takes time. Time, and...maybe a willingness to talk about things they haven't, yet. Their mutually searching stares end up canceling each other out as a result.
Tabled for later, Neph thinks, not for the first time. When she pauses to think about all the things stacked up on that metaphorical table, she's a little surprised its legs haven't given out. Who, exactly, is 'later' waiting on anyway?
Will picks out a spot on the shorter side of the L-shaped counter top, between the sink and the dishwasher. Is it just easier to face them both from there, or is he feeling a little awkward in a space that isn't his? Neph's not sure she's ever seen Will completely at ease anywhere, not even his own house (but then she happens to know he's got a sheet for a bedroom door and a dad with shitty taste in friends, so she can't blame him there). What would a comfortable, unguarded Will even look like?
Today is not the day she finds out. Today he's staring at her in something too sharp-edged to be dismay. She tilts her chin over her mug, not quite making the leap from yeah I got that asshole fired on accident whoopsifuckingdo to this white knuckled gaping look. It's not until he not only refuses to meet her eyes, but actively looks away that realizes how loudly she must've been thinking. Feeling. Whatever. Either way she sucks in a sharp breath, presses her lips so hard against the mug they may puff up later, and thinks reining-in-thoughts. Staticky thoughts. Single snowflake in a blizzard thoughts.
With everything that's gone on today, she hasn't given much thought to what she might've been shoving into Will's head. Was his sympathy for real, or just a mirror turned to face her? She'd held onto his hand and he hadn't let go, but how much of that was a choice?
Any other day, thoughts like that would trigger another run, a more punishing one. But today, just an hour ago, she discovered that two people outside of this room stood up for her when they heard about the Samson thing. One of them even got punchy. The novelty leaves Neph a little more inclined to believe that people might see something wrong with what happened and get angry on her behalf than she normally would. She might let herself believe that Will means it.
(Should she apologize for the handholding? She should, shouldn't she? It's one thing to spray feelings everywhere like an out of control sprinkler system, but if she accidentally pushed him into letting her touch him, she'd have to commit ritual suicide or something.)
((Then again, how much of anything she did or didn't do even registered? Hannibal must've been blaring Emotions like a foghorn if he spilled his name.))
(((This is all a lot. It's clearly time for a change of topic, before things get unrecoverably weird. Because, somehow, they haven't yet.)))
"So the museum was a bust, which, my bad," Neph sighs, both hands once again wrapped around her empty mug, fingertips drumming on the ceramic. "And Will's not wearing any shoes and I'm not putting real pants back on, so does Netflix sound good? I bet we could find some art-based documentary thing, or a heist movie..." Paradoxically, she kinda hates heist movies. It's impossible not to pick them apart. "Or, oh!! I think they put up all the Bob Ross ever a while ago."
Will might not be looking at her, but Neph doesn't bother to conceal the note of glee in her voice. Is it her imagination, or does Hannibal shudder slightly at her side?
Both of them are sharp-edged. Both of them are segmented so that they can track a few things at a time with an ease that still startles Will sometimes. Both of them have a lack of regard for people outside their circle.
'Heist movie'. Neph's thief job.
Both of them have a specific skill set and tenacity. Will's never quite made the connection to how useful those would be in criminal settings, and yet...
He drains the rest of his coffee in three deep swallows, and he'd get more if he didn't already know that he's got a serious caffeine limit if he doesn't want to be a jangling wreck the rest of the afternoon. Will's just unfamiliar enough with their home, but just familiar enough with the two of them, that he's considering asking for a regular glass to use for collecting water from their tap, when Neph - who looked away from him in a hurry, which he can't blame her for, for enough reasons that he doesn't even want to examine them right now - speaks back up. About the schedule for the rest of the day.
...Because it's Hannibal's birthday, right, and this was a terrible excuse for a party. Will shifts his weight, guilty and awkward, as he thinks of the light backpack that he'd dropped unceremoniously in their hallway. There's a small package in there, one he hadn't worked up the nerve to hand over earlier. It's been...what, two years since the last time Will went through the motions of buying a present for someone? And when that happened, it was the first time in nearly a decade?
He should bring that up. He's going to have to, unless he plans on keeping the damn thing for himself, and he really doesn't.
But...later. Worrying over all those thoughts keeps Will quiet long enough that Hannibal is the one who speaks next, though.
Once he's done shuddering about Bob Ross, of course. "'The True Nature of Time'. It's a documentary I hadn't managed to fit into my schedule yet." Hannibal is smirking to himself, just a shadow of it winking across his gaze, and Will has a feeling it's about the irony of not having been able to make time for it yet. Thank god Hannibal usually just quietly gets gleeful to himself about stupid jokes like that and, honestly, it's one of the more human things about him.
"...I guess I never really thought about what you do in your downtime. I didn't realize you like pop science documentaries." Will says, because he's realizing he's surprised that that's a topic Hannibal would invest any effort into. He's also cutting out the middle man and just rinsing out his mug to then refill it with water straight from the tap, a process Hannibal is watching with a single, pained wrinkle forming on his forehead.
"It's an efficient way of learning about new concepts I don't get exposure to in school." Hannibal says, and to his credit he doesn't sound defensive. He's also going into a nearby cabinet, and silently removing three glasses. Will stands his ground while Hannibal crosses the room to the fridge and then begins pouring out water from a pristine-looking filter that doesn't say 'Brita' on the side, determinedly drinking out of his coffee-flavored mug of tap water.
He's never been much good at lying to himself about being embarrassed, though.
With dawning clarity, Neph understands that this is how it's gonna be from now on; Hannibal telling horrible inside jokes behind the cover of WIll's ignorance, trapping her in a situation where she can't react. Her eyes focus on that tiny smirk and narrow to slits, mouth crimping up in a furious sideways bracket.
"Why do I even like you?" The True Nature of Time, Hannibal? A vein jumps in her temple, which only serves to deepen that dumb smirk. Neph makes a grumpy pigeon noise and sets her mug down, pushing off the counter to go dig around in the pantry.
Will takes it all in stride, putting it down to Hannibal's Weird Genius interests (and maybe Neph's own lack of patience with his nerdery?) and commenting on his Netflix queue. His voice is weirdly distorted, and when Neph backs out of the cabinet with a box of PopSecret in hand, she finds it's because he's facing away over the sink. Mostly he doesn't interact with their apartment, just hands things he's given. The last time he actually helped himself to anything, even the tap, he was halfway high on painkillers and wrapped up in a starry blue toga. The memory triggers a giggle, which skitters out of her before she can stop it.
"They're also pretty handy for picking up English words that, y'know, don't really come up when you're learning a language out'a a book," Neph grins. Documentaries actually do make up a pretty hefty chunk of their respective queues for that reason. She'd tried to expose Hannibal to reruns of VH1's "I Love the Insert-Decade-Here" series, but he'd practically broken out in hives. "I really liked 'Cosmos'."
Before Hannibal can waste a glass of water on her, she darts under his arm and snags a Coke from the side door, then wheels away with the cold can tucked into the crook of her elbow, hands busy prying the plastic popcorn wrapper apart. "You go pull it up, I've got snacks."
The language barrier wasn't a consideration Will had hit on, yet. He was too busy unraveling a surprisingly-dense web of connections about the idea of Hannibal sitting rapt and absorbing science on the larger, broader scale of things like time. Does he watch videos on quantum mechanics and make all sorts of imagined interconnections? Hannibal's bend in their discussions had always been on making cause and effect out of things, of chasing down and then destroying any confusion or random chance that comes up naturally when studying something as complicated as human medicine.
He seems to at once hate and be fascinated by chaos, an oddity that Will always thought...really fit someone as calculated as Hannibal.
But yeah, picking up more appropriate contractions sounds like a reasonable addition to that list of 'why Nova documentaries'. "Is it working, though? He actually used the word 'ignominy' out loud last Saturday."
Hannibal makes a soft sound of scorn, standing in his pristine kitchen with his button-up shirt on. Sometimes Will wonders if his life for the past several months has just included a lot of fever dreams, and that eventually he's going to wake up and realize he never made friends with two teenage runaways and their suspiciously-vast fortune.
Hard to say if Hannibal's scoffing at Will, though, or at Neph letting her coke can glug into the glass Hannibal had clearly gotten for water for her. He stares at her in pained consideration - Will can nearly hear the way he's weighting arguments against effectiveness in his head - before just returning the filter to the fridge, only two glasses filled.
"I liked that one, too." Because PBS is easy to get even in shitty cable situations, and Will isn't immune to being home late on a Saturday and channel-surfing. And because Will is going to make a concerted effort to actually converse with the two of them, especially after-- everything earlier. It's not pity, just an...awareness.
Do they have a TV, though? Will's never actually seen one, but at this point he would take it in stride if Hannibal lead the way into his bedroom and pressed a button and a wall panel fell down to reveal a flatscreen tucked away.
As it turns out, following Hannibal out of the kitchen while Neph gets the microwave happily popping their food, Will ends up tagging along to a-- surprisingly eclectic bedroom.
Hannibal's furniture is reasonable, if expensive-looking - bed and desk and wooden, non-swiveling chair. There's not knick knacks, or at least not the kind Will's ever seen in a home outside of grandmothers - there's a few small-scale statue mockups, and some prints of paintings on the walls, but the main thing coating the corkboard near his desk and the walls all across where his closet stretches is--
"Are these yours?" Will touches the nearest one, a blue-penciled, lineless sketch of the shapes and shadows of a dress. There's a person wearing it, but the sketch ends at her knees and the face is turned away, only hair fuzzing across the nape of the neck.
"Yes." Hannibal is taking a laptop off his desk and is already leaving the room, although he stops in the doorway when he seems to realize how much Will is staring. Will lets go of the paper he'd been pressing more flat, cowed, but he can also tell he's not about to get a reprimand. Hannibal has his pre-preening look on, flattery clearly sparking in the air around him.
How is he so easily satisfied with the barest amount of attention, and yet he self-isolates so much?
(How is it fair for Will to even think that sentence, when it describes himself pretty damn accurately too?)
"I just...didn't know you drew. Or painted." Will says lamely, glancing at the rest of them - he's no expert in recognizing different mediums, but the texture varies enough that he assumes there's pastels in there as well, something thicker than the colored pencils and paints, nearly textured right off the page.
"Since I was a child." Hannibal says, and his voice warps. In anyone else, Will would call it nostalgia.
"They're nice," Will shrugs, hands shoving into his pockets. He presses forward out of the room, although Hannibal does his best attempt at making it awkward and standing his ground - eventually he relents and they both go down the short hallway, clearly heading for the living room. "I don't think I've drawn anything since I was using crayons."
Hannibal doesn't look dismissive, clearly considering that. "I've never used crayons."
"Yeah." Will snorts, as he helps move what appears to be half a constructed pillow fort off the living room table. "Somehow that doesn't shock me."
The microwave buttons beep a flat counterpoint to Neph's sudden ringing laughter. "I don't even know what that means!" she slaps a hand against the counter and covers her eyes with the other. Ignominy. If Will hadn't said it like it was a for real word, she'd've called bullshit. To Hannibal and his disparaging sigh, she asks, "Where'd you read that one?"
What else do they have that's ready-edible? Much as he bitches, Hannibal doesn't restrict her shopping habits. It's Neph herself who holds back from buying All The Seasonal Oreos. Old habits die hard, and old habits dictate non-perishables and coupon clipping. Cookies were for shoplifting. Rice, beans, bread, peanut butter, jelly, pasta and cans of sauce or veggies, all the stuff that didn't need a fridge for storing or anything more than a hotplate for cooking, that's what she's used to spending her grocery money on. Lecter's prepaid cards broadened her range a little to deli fixings and meat cooked same-day, partly because she could afford them but mostly 'cuz she happened to have a minifridge at the time.
"It was really...he just explained everything real well," she nods to herself, and to Will, half muffled by the open cabinet door. "And you gotta appreciate all the shade at the anti-science caveman crowd."
Hannibal had been so disappointed, if ultimately unsurprised, to hear that people still persisted in believing in a 6000 year old flat earth, she hadn't had the heart to tease him.
As the boys duck out to find a laptop, Neph goes spelunking in the actual pantry, pushing aside carefully organized dry goods for a tightly rolled, half-empty bag of Chips Ahoy. There's crackers, too, probably meant to be eaten with cheese, but which Neph tends to mindlessly munch over her transcription work. She dumps both on a plate and leans back against the microwave, listening to it hum behind her head.
This is...good. Not being alone right now. Not having the space to sit and think. Activity to keep the panic at bay until she can rationally consider her next steps, that's what she needs. Briefly alone in the kitchen with the comforting white noise of popping kernels, her thoughts drift not toward the dizzying list of shit to arrange now that she's called dibs on Baltimore, but to Will's growing familiarity. He knows Hannibal's name, now. Hannibal gave it to him.
Neph folds her arms over her stomach, shifting her weight as she turns that fact over to examine it from another angle. Hannibal wants Will to know him, wants to keep him close. His feelings for Will complicate everything, and not just because they're a massive security risk; Will's not into guys, so what will Hannibal settle for if he can't have his romantic interest returned? What other secrets will he trade away to keep Will around?
If things keep on, they're gonna come down to the M-word eventually, she feels it in her belly like a flicker of Electrum. Neph breathes in against it, reminds herself that's Hannibal's secret to share however he wants, just like his real name. She just...needs to talk to him before it comes to that, 'cuz if she were Will, she'd immediately figure Hannibal's roommate was a mutant too. Neph's hidden behind that assumption before and she'll do it again, but there's a creepy crawling feeling that comes with the thought of pretending to be a mutant while Hannibal's standing right there. Just picturing it has her running her tongue over her teeth, scraping off a patina of imagined guilt. If they discuss it first, and he says it's okay, then maybe...
The microwave shrieks and Neph shakes those thoughts away. Without the mechanical background hum, she can make out the low murmur of the boys' voices down the hall, drawing closer. She dumps the popcorn into a large mixing bowl, balances her glass of Coke on the plate, and emerges into the living room just as Will says something dry.
"Just shove that on the floor," she jerks her chin at the blanket she'd draped over the table, the better for reading under by flashlight. "I'll use it again."
True to her word, she sets down the food, whisks the blanket around her shoulders, and seats herself on the floor with her chin propped up on the table while Hannibal fiddles with his laptop. "You got the charger?"
'Romantic' is such an ultimately useless word. It feels powerful, at first, and it can be to an individual, but this is one instance where perhaps collective intelligence fails to come up with the best average.
Hannibal has an interest in Will. He has an interest in several things, and he attaches to each one aggressively. His classmates as well as strangers seem to quietly assume he and Neph are a couple. (Sometimes not so quietly, as was the case with a particularly chatty neighbor one morning.) Hannibal might be entirely content never having any term for what he wants to have with Will - he only knows that he wants it, and he wants it dearly.
If they ever get to the point of navigating Will's interest, it's likely that their entire relationship will be guided by Will's expectations of what a 'relationship' is. Until then, Hannibal will content himself with this - drawing Will in closer, seeing him in his own spaces more. Hannibal only wants proximity, to be as near to behind the ribs of someone else as he can conceivably be, and he's alright with the concept of Will determining what that means, later.
The image of Will, not drugged this time, helping himself to tap water is a powerful one. He's usually so careful to make himself a stranger everywhere he goes - the complete opposite of Neph, who Hannibal has seen sit on top of restaurant tables and pet strangers' dogs.
Hannibal himself has just touched the concept of his most closely-guarded secret - after the time travel, of course, since now he has two secrets from everyone but Neph - when Neph whirls in behind them. She drops to the floor, a decision that falls oddly flat for Hannibal, because:
1) He doesn't want to sit on the floor, but
2) He does enjoy sitting next to Neph, occasionally, when they're home at the same time. Which seems unfair of her to lose sight of, since
3) It's his birthday, and
4) He might earlier have stated that didn't matter, but quite frankly, anything that gives Hannibal more right to demand things is something he'll eventually take advantage of.
Will, who is awkwardly waiting out of the way to Hannibal's other side, still standing by the table, is eyeing him with what appears to be concern. Or suspicion. It can be hard to tell.
"Yes." One end of it is in the laptop, and the other end Hannibal glances at and then hands to Neph. "If you could." Maybe if he sits down in the center of the couch, and very pointedly leaves space on Neph's end, she'll sit back down next to him.
Assuming, of course, that she doesn't just crawl/roll over to where the wall outlet is, just narrowly covered behind the couch's arm.
Maybe Neph will get the idea better if Hannibal pointedly stares at her and then pointedly glances at the empty couch cushion to his left.
"Yesyes," Neph shrugs her swaddling blanket to the floor and takes the plug from Hannibal, who's far too dignified to bend over the arm of the couch and stretch for the outlet. If Neph were a different person (or a better wingman) she might point out that doing so would probably show off his ass even in those semi-formal slacks, but she's neither of those things and so the pitch doesn't occur to her. Besides, she's got the skinnier arms.
"We gotta do something about these old outlets," she grumbles as she wedges the charge pack between the wall and the back of the couch, "They're so loose, everything just falls right out."
When she straightens back up, Hannibal's not in his usual spot on the end of the couch. That might not be so weird - it's his laptop, and if they're all gonna watch then it makes sense he/it oughta be in the middle - if Will weren't hovering tensely and Hannibal weren't practically pointing at the couch cushion beside him while staring at her, unblinking. He's about as subtle as a housepet standing over an empty food dish.
Neph would snort, but she's pretty sure she's wearing one of his shirts (she fished it out of the dryer because all her tees are wadded up in her laundry basket; she hasn't broken the habit of putting off a trip to the laundromat until the last possible second, even though the apartment came with a washer-dryer) and anyway Will might be deferring to her preference, here. So she slips over the arm of the couch as though it were the hood of a car, leans forward to grab the bowl of popcorn, and deposits it in Hannibal's lap.
"Middle seat holds the popcorn," Neph declares, like she couldn't have poured it into more than one bowl in the first place. With her legs folded sideways, her knees press into the side of his thigh
Luckily, Hannibal is precisely the sort of person who would be less than offended by the suggestion of shamelessly showing off for a prospective partner, because that's essentially his MO anyway with people he's attempting to woo platonically. But maybe it's best that Neph doesn't make that suggestion, because then they not only don't have to deal with Will's inevitable heart attack at Hannibal doing something so undignified as leaning upside down off the arm of his own couch, but it means Neph does, in fact, notice Hannibal staring.
And the empty couch cushion. And more importantly, she notices the problem with the empty couch cushion.
Will makes a sound of strangled surprise to Hannibal's right, but for a few suspended moments while Neph settles in, Hannibal doesn't bother glancing over at anyone else. He's smiling at his laptop while he sets it up and gets it running, the casual familiarity with which Neph just tucks her knees against his thigh something he enjoys but hardly even remarks on. They've become part of the landscape for each other, a possession, and keeping physical distance seems like such an unnecessary lie by now.
If Hannibal tilts so that his shoulder more firmly presses against hers, well. It's not as if Will's standoffish slouch to his right seems particularly jealous.
Hannibal would be a lot more suspicious about Neph's designs in putting the popcorn bowl in his lap if she was a different kind of person. Luckily, as stated earlier, she isn't, and so he doesn't, but he does feel the slow-burn pleasure of knowing that people he likes are going to be in close proximity for the next hour-minus-removed-commercials.
"Do you even eat popcorn?" Is apparently the safest topic Will can still find to address. All in all, it's nice to hear him make the effort at all. Earlier Will was taciturn to the point of seeming sullen, although Hannibal knows well that he's bristly and quiet because of something more like dread-filled shyness.
"Only when required by certain company."
As Neph digs into the bowl of popcorn, he thinks about said current company. He'd never put it in such terms, but if he recalls that boy earlier, and what he'd been planning to do--
Hannibal realizes that he's now found a third person he's willing to kill for. And that's enough to have him giving a short, content noise while letting the side of his head rest against Neph's, Nova documentary playing background noise to the chatter in his mind.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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."
no subject
Date: 2017-02-17 02:42 am (UTC)He's hit on loneliness, though, the same as Neph is beside him, and he thinks that one might be fully correct. It's a trait they all seem to share, in their own ways and for their own reasons. Self-imposed, circumstantial - it all can ache and grate after enough years. They're young still, all three of them, but that doesn't mean the effects of being human islands is lessened. It means exactly the opposite.
"Perhaps I just haven't had proper motivation to lie." Hannibal says, airily, as if that's a reasonable explanation for why he gave such an icy smile to a nurse during a medical examination that she'd dropped her pen (and subsequently had a suspicious amount of trouble finding his vein, later, when collecting samples for blood work regarding him being in the country long-term). His older self might have learned his strengths and weaknesses for guile, might have gotten truly better at exuding enough calm self-assurance that his lies simply felt only as grandiose as his truths, but Hannibal at seventeen hasn't perfected it yet. All he has on his side is a chilling amount of ability to stay cool under pressure, and even then it's reliant on choice triggers not getting mentioned.
It's been...a process.
Will, for his part, looks oddly content to have a friend in teasing Hannibal. Hannibal isn't certain how he feels about that. "What do you have to teach him to lie about?" Is chuckled into his mug.
And Hannibal feels his first glimmer of realization that Will is maybe more capable of tactical conversational steering than he'd credited him for. "My horrifically boring past." He says, absolute dead pan, and this time Will actually snorts hard enough to splatter his nose with coffee.
no subject
Date: 2017-02-17 07:53 am (UTC)So yeah, she lies through her teeth, but the same way Will's fishing: without any real bait. She doesn't think he's actually trying to slip anything out of them while they're all half-slack with relief, hot water and crashing adrenaline. He's just batting lazily at a secret Neph's holding over her head, a metaphor that'd never work in real life for obvious height-related reasons.
It's a game. A little bit of a challenge, maybe, for Will to try and tease something out of them, for them to test out excuses or hone conversational reflexes. Neph can see the board unfolding already, colored squares and stacks of penalty cards and six-sided dice, and feels a grin bloom behind her mug. Secrets have always been currency and burdens before, never tokens to move around for fun.
Is this how Hannibal sees things all the time?
Yes. Yes it is, and he's just rolled snakeyes. Will spits coffee and Neph has to bend over hers, folding in half til she's giggling at her knees. A little coffee sloshes over her fingers, but it's the sound of her phone buzzing on the counter that pulls her back upright. She'd left it plugged in on the 'insert device here to use for recipes and cooking music' charger on her way to the shower, and now she leans awkwardly behind Hannibal to grab for it. "Hang on, just'a sec--"
There's been just the one text since she came back inside. The contact name is A.N.S. and it reads:
Are you sure about Baltimore?
Neph sips at her coffee and lists into Hannibal as she pecks out a reply.
yes
who told you?
The response is instant, but then why wouldn't it be? Anansi just messaged her, after all. He thought appealing to a higher power would help his case.
Her grin returns, a little meaner than before. Samson tried to tattle. And Anansi, who's been established here for longer than Neph's been alive, whose approval was uncertain and kind of key, just showed him the door. Out of the city.
It's not as easy as that. She's still gonna have to have a sit down with Anansi about territory and first rights of refusal and a whole lot of other stuff Neph's only vaguely aware of. But it's a good start, and she quickly sends a thank you before sliding her phone back down the counter.
"Work stuff," she says, reaching for a celebratory fourth scoop of sugar, "I am not fired for getting into it with a coworker at a fancy museum. More coffee please."
no subject
Date: 2017-02-22 03:23 pm (UTC)That, at least, Hannibal can tell is an absolute fabrication meant to play along. He has his flaws of communication, but they're not a lack of honesty about interest.
So he simply sinks his weight a bit more deeply in place, comfortably rooting to his spot where he gets to watch the two most important people in his life calmly joke across and around him.
Will has wiped the coffee off his chin and the outside of his mug, and he scoots across the kitchen to throw the paper towel away. Hannibal watches him and realizes belatedly that he'd apparently taken his shoes off sometime after following him inside, because Will's just wearing faded black socks. That's...surely a good sign of him being comfortable here, which is unexpected but pleasant, given it's still early on in Will visiting.
But then Hannibal is hawkishly watching Neph and Neph's phone, because while there's a lot of respectful boundaries around secrets between the two of them, he is openly and unendingly nosy and will read over her shoulder unless she specifically turns away to not allow that.
Hard to see when she's tilted away from him halfway to the sugar bowl, though. Hannibal sips at his black coffee and tries not to frown too hard at her scooping more sugar into hers. How can she drink it when it's just a syrupy sweet mess? How is she alive with that much refined sugar in her veins?
"Glad to know your bosses have some standards." Anyone hiring teenagers as their thieves is questionable to Hannibal, but the fact that they're apparently in the know enough to look the other way about this? That's good. Or it just means that mystery boy is just as rude in other situations, and he's turned everyone against him all on his own and it has less to do with Neph, but either option serves Hannibal's purpose of making sure Neph's decisions today get respected by her colleagues, so. Win-win.
"What a piece of shit coworker, though," Will says, and Hannibal has to admit he agrees with that one. "I hope he gets fired."
no subject
Date: 2017-02-23 02:12 am (UTC)If he takes her seriously, he doesn't show it, but then he'd just been shamelessly reading over her shoulder and she'd made very little effort to stop him. His position in her good graces can't have slipped much, and he must know it. Answering texts in arm's reach of Hannibal is as good as permitting him to scroll through the chain anyway, though he might be distracted by the novelty of Will Graham, here, in their living space.
Neph's thumb taps aimlessly at the now blank screen. Are you sure about Baltimore? She hadn't hesitated to say yes. Hannibal might've seen the question, or the response, or both, but did he realize what it meant? Or why she'd done it? Smacking Samson down carried a ringing satisfaction, an intense self righteousness that's going to carry her for days, yet she could've done that any time in the last year. Before she could order him out, she had to have somewhere to be. She'd needed something to stand up for, a foundation to stand on.
Staking Baltimore had a lot less to do with banishing Samson than staying where Hannibal's putting down roots.
She buries her face in her coffee mug, chasing the last dregs of sugary sludge. There's no way he got that much from two texts, if he saw 'em at all. But, if...
Neph's grunt of agreement ends up amplified by the mug. She pulls it away, a vicious smirk rising over the rim. "Oh yeah, he was," she tells Will, "That's why he showed up today. He thought it was cuz I'd snitched and wanted...I dunno, for me to say I'd made it up, I guess." Some of her hard-earned schadenfreude drops away at the reminder; it's a little easier, now, to talk around what happened to her with the two of them, but she can't bring herself to bring the details into focus for them. And thoughts of Samson's ploy fill her gut with hot, tarry anger. Her eyes narrow, and if there's a petty gleam there, well, Neph's never pretended not to be vindictive or spiteful or, like, a good person. "So fuck that guy, 'cuz now he's extra blacklisted."
no subject
Date: 2017-02-24 03:12 am (UTC)But it also seems to be working out for the better, Neph's irony-induced aneurysms aside. (And Hannibal's own nasty surprises of realizing that secrets had been shared that he'll never remember handing over.) Hannibal twice saw firsthand the tall, oppressive house he lived in as an adult. He'd felt the empty echo that had been muffled by rich fabrics and statues and paintings, and he hadn't been fooled.
He thinks his older self had been fooled, most of the time. That he'd bought his own lie, somewhere along the line between seventeen and forty-two.
If Hannibal is already on track to avoid some of his older self's mistakes, he won't mourn it a bit.
He will, however, read over Neph's shoulder to see something about being sure about Baltimore. Sure about what about Baltimore? Is that about the primitive territory-staking that Allomancers have?
He can't ask in front of Will, so he doesn't, but Hannibal's forgetting to pretend to sip at his coffee in his haste to try to bore the answer out of Neph's head just by staring hard enough.
'For me to say I'd made it up, I guess.' These are the sorts of headgames that Hannibal would endorse in just about any other scenario, involving anyone not-Neph, but the calculated manipulation from this boy just sends all sorts of alarms ringing in Hannibal's head. He's never been less pleased to find out about the existence of another meta.
Will has come back to lean against the counter perpendicular to theirs, shoulders hunched and knuckles going pale against his mug's handle. He stares at Neph with a slack jaw until he shakes himself visibly out of it, gaze stuttering back across the room and settling on a vase that very possibly cost more than his phone. "Yeah. Fuck that guy." Is said with an exhausted conviction, like Will can't believe the hole that's been burned in him about this today. He looks...well. He looks nearly as tiredly petty as Neph does, honestly, which gets separated gears in Hannibal's mind churning about how Will's abilities actually work and what he might've gotten doused in as a result.
Is Neph worried about that, too? Was she perhaps hoping Hannibal would have dropped Will off somewhere else, so he couldn't accidentally spy? Hannibal glances across at Neph, trying to gauge what she thinks of this. But again - he can't just outright ask, not with Will there.
All of these secrets aren't as carelessly easy fun to untangle when Hannibal cares about the puzzle pieces involved. He feels unfairly vexed about that realization.
no subject
Date: 2017-02-24 07:43 am (UTC)They can't actually communicate via telepathy, no matter what Will mutters now and then. They've known each other a little less than a year, not quite long enough to develop an entire silent language of eyebrows, squints and pursed lips. That's coming along, particularly Neph's ability to read shades of true-annoyance and faking-for-effect and hiding-something-worse in Hannibal's irritated posturing, but growing to understand a whole person takes time. Time, and...maybe a willingness to talk about things they haven't, yet. Their mutually searching stares end up canceling each other out as a result.
Tabled for later, Neph thinks, not for the first time. When she pauses to think about all the things stacked up on that metaphorical table, she's a little surprised its legs haven't given out. Who, exactly, is 'later' waiting on anyway?
Will picks out a spot on the shorter side of the L-shaped counter top, between the sink and the dishwasher. Is it just easier to face them both from there, or is he feeling a little awkward in a space that isn't his? Neph's not sure she's ever seen Will completely at ease anywhere, not even his own house (but then she happens to know he's got a sheet for a bedroom door and a dad with shitty taste in friends, so she can't blame him there). What would a comfortable, unguarded Will even look like?
Today is not the day she finds out. Today he's staring at her in something too sharp-edged to be dismay. She tilts her chin over her mug, not quite making the leap from yeah I got that asshole fired on accident whoopsifuckingdo to this white knuckled gaping look. It's not until he not only refuses to meet her eyes, but actively looks away that realizes how loudly she must've been thinking. Feeling. Whatever. Either way she sucks in a sharp breath, presses her lips so hard against the mug they may puff up later, and thinks reining-in-thoughts. Staticky thoughts. Single snowflake in a blizzard thoughts.
With everything that's gone on today, she hasn't given much thought to what she might've been shoving into Will's head. Was his sympathy for real, or just a mirror turned to face her? She'd held onto his hand and he hadn't let go, but how much of that was a choice?
Any other day, thoughts like that would trigger another run, a more punishing one. But today, just an hour ago, she discovered that two people outside of this room stood up for her when they heard about the Samson thing. One of them even got punchy. The novelty leaves Neph a little more inclined to believe that people might see something wrong with what happened and get angry on her behalf than she normally would. She might let herself believe that Will means it.
(Should she apologize for the handholding? She should, shouldn't she? It's one thing to spray feelings everywhere like an out of control sprinkler system, but if she accidentally pushed him into letting her touch him, she'd have to commit ritual suicide or something.)
((Then again, how much of anything she did or didn't do even registered? Hannibal must've been blaring Emotions like a foghorn if he spilled his name.))
(((This is all a lot. It's clearly time for a change of topic, before things get unrecoverably weird. Because, somehow, they haven't yet.)))
"So the museum was a bust, which, my bad," Neph sighs, both hands once again wrapped around her empty mug, fingertips drumming on the ceramic. "And Will's not wearing any shoes and I'm not putting real pants back on, so does Netflix sound good? I bet we could find some art-based documentary thing, or a heist movie..." Paradoxically, she kinda hates heist movies. It's impossible not to pick them apart. "Or, oh!! I think they put up all the Bob Ross ever a while ago."
Will might not be looking at her, but Neph doesn't bother to conceal the note of glee in her voice. Is it her imagination, or does Hannibal shudder slightly at her side?
no subject
Date: 2017-02-27 02:06 am (UTC)'Heist movie'. Neph's thief job.
Both of them have a specific skill set and tenacity. Will's never quite made the connection to how useful those would be in criminal settings, and yet...
He drains the rest of his coffee in three deep swallows, and he'd get more if he didn't already know that he's got a serious caffeine limit if he doesn't want to be a jangling wreck the rest of the afternoon. Will's just unfamiliar enough with their home, but just familiar enough with the two of them, that he's considering asking for a regular glass to use for collecting water from their tap, when Neph - who looked away from him in a hurry, which he can't blame her for, for enough reasons that he doesn't even want to examine them right now - speaks back up. About the schedule for the rest of the day.
...Because it's Hannibal's birthday, right, and this was a terrible excuse for a party. Will shifts his weight, guilty and awkward, as he thinks of the light backpack that he'd dropped unceremoniously in their hallway. There's a small package in there, one he hadn't worked up the nerve to hand over earlier. It's been...what, two years since the last time Will went through the motions of buying a present for someone? And when that happened, it was the first time in nearly a decade?
He should bring that up. He's going to have to, unless he plans on keeping the damn thing for himself, and he really doesn't.
But...later. Worrying over all those thoughts keeps Will quiet long enough that Hannibal is the one who speaks next, though.
Once he's done shuddering about Bob Ross, of course. "'The True Nature of Time'. It's a documentary I hadn't managed to fit into my schedule yet." Hannibal is smirking to himself, just a shadow of it winking across his gaze, and Will has a feeling it's about the irony of not having been able to make time for it yet. Thank god Hannibal usually just quietly gets gleeful to himself about stupid jokes like that and, honestly, it's one of the more human things about him.
"...I guess I never really thought about what you do in your downtime. I didn't realize you like pop science documentaries." Will says, because he's realizing he's surprised that that's a topic Hannibal would invest any effort into. He's also cutting out the middle man and just rinsing out his mug to then refill it with water straight from the tap, a process Hannibal is watching with a single, pained wrinkle forming on his forehead.
"It's an efficient way of learning about new concepts I don't get exposure to in school." Hannibal says, and to his credit he doesn't sound defensive. He's also going into a nearby cabinet, and silently removing three glasses. Will stands his ground while Hannibal crosses the room to the fridge and then begins pouring out water from a pristine-looking filter that doesn't say 'Brita' on the side, determinedly drinking out of his coffee-flavored mug of tap water.
He's never been much good at lying to himself about being embarrassed, though.
no subject
Date: 2017-02-27 05:42 am (UTC)"Why do I even like you?" The True Nature of Time, Hannibal? A vein jumps in her temple, which only serves to deepen that dumb smirk. Neph makes a grumpy pigeon noise and sets her mug down, pushing off the counter to go dig around in the pantry.
Will takes it all in stride, putting it down to Hannibal's Weird Genius interests (and maybe Neph's own lack of patience with his nerdery?) and commenting on his Netflix queue. His voice is weirdly distorted, and when Neph backs out of the cabinet with a box of PopSecret in hand, she finds it's because he's facing away over the sink. Mostly he doesn't interact with their apartment, just hands things he's given. The last time he actually helped himself to anything, even the tap, he was halfway high on painkillers and wrapped up in a starry blue toga. The memory triggers a giggle, which skitters out of her before she can stop it.
"They're also pretty handy for picking up English words that, y'know, don't really come up when you're learning a language out'a a book," Neph grins. Documentaries actually do make up a pretty hefty chunk of their respective queues for that reason. She'd tried to expose Hannibal to reruns of VH1's "I Love the Insert-Decade-Here" series, but he'd practically broken out in hives. "I really liked 'Cosmos'."
Before Hannibal can waste a glass of water on her, she darts under his arm and snags a Coke from the side door, then wheels away with the cold can tucked into the crook of her elbow, hands busy prying the plastic popcorn wrapper apart. "You go pull it up, I've got snacks."
no subject
Date: 2017-02-28 05:22 pm (UTC)He seems to at once hate and be fascinated by chaos, an oddity that Will always thought...really fit someone as calculated as Hannibal.
But yeah, picking up more appropriate contractions sounds like a reasonable addition to that list of 'why Nova documentaries'. "Is it working, though? He actually used the word 'ignominy' out loud last Saturday."
Hannibal makes a soft sound of scorn, standing in his pristine kitchen with his button-up shirt on. Sometimes Will wonders if his life for the past several months has just included a lot of fever dreams, and that eventually he's going to wake up and realize he never made friends with two teenage runaways and their suspiciously-vast fortune.
Hard to say if Hannibal's scoffing at Will, though, or at Neph letting her coke can glug into the glass Hannibal had clearly gotten for water for her. He stares at her in pained consideration - Will can nearly hear the way he's weighting arguments against effectiveness in his head - before just returning the filter to the fridge, only two glasses filled.
"I liked that one, too." Because PBS is easy to get even in shitty cable situations, and Will isn't immune to being home late on a Saturday and channel-surfing. And because Will is going to make a concerted effort to actually converse with the two of them, especially after-- everything earlier. It's not pity, just an...awareness.
Do they have a TV, though? Will's never actually seen one, but at this point he would take it in stride if Hannibal lead the way into his bedroom and pressed a button and a wall panel fell down to reveal a flatscreen tucked away.
As it turns out, following Hannibal out of the kitchen while Neph gets the microwave happily popping their food, Will ends up tagging along to a-- surprisingly eclectic bedroom.
Hannibal's furniture is reasonable, if expensive-looking - bed and desk and wooden, non-swiveling chair. There's not knick knacks, or at least not the kind Will's ever seen in a home outside of grandmothers - there's a few small-scale statue mockups, and some prints of paintings on the walls, but the main thing coating the corkboard near his desk and the walls all across where his closet stretches is--
"Are these yours?" Will touches the nearest one, a blue-penciled, lineless sketch of the shapes and shadows of a dress. There's a person wearing it, but the sketch ends at her knees and the face is turned away, only hair fuzzing across the nape of the neck.
"Yes." Hannibal is taking a laptop off his desk and is already leaving the room, although he stops in the doorway when he seems to realize how much Will is staring. Will lets go of the paper he'd been pressing more flat, cowed, but he can also tell he's not about to get a reprimand. Hannibal has his pre-preening look on, flattery clearly sparking in the air around him.
How is he so easily satisfied with the barest amount of attention, and yet he self-isolates so much?
(How is it fair for Will to even think that sentence, when it describes himself pretty damn accurately too?)
"I just...didn't know you drew. Or painted." Will says lamely, glancing at the rest of them - he's no expert in recognizing different mediums, but the texture varies enough that he assumes there's pastels in there as well, something thicker than the colored pencils and paints, nearly textured right off the page.
"Since I was a child." Hannibal says, and his voice warps. In anyone else, Will would call it nostalgia.
"They're nice," Will shrugs, hands shoving into his pockets. He presses forward out of the room, although Hannibal does his best attempt at making it awkward and standing his ground - eventually he relents and they both go down the short hallway, clearly heading for the living room. "I don't think I've drawn anything since I was using crayons."
Hannibal doesn't look dismissive, clearly considering that. "I've never used crayons."
"Yeah." Will snorts, as he helps move what appears to be half a constructed pillow fort off the living room table. "Somehow that doesn't shock me."
no subject
Date: 2017-03-01 01:53 am (UTC)What else do they have that's ready-edible? Much as he bitches, Hannibal doesn't restrict her shopping habits. It's Neph herself who holds back from buying All The Seasonal Oreos. Old habits die hard, and old habits dictate non-perishables and coupon clipping. Cookies were for shoplifting. Rice, beans, bread, peanut butter, jelly, pasta and cans of sauce or veggies, all the stuff that didn't need a fridge for storing or anything more than a hotplate for cooking, that's what she's used to spending her grocery money on. Lecter's prepaid cards broadened her range a little to deli fixings and meat cooked same-day, partly because she could afford them but mostly 'cuz she happened to have a minifridge at the time.
"It was really...he just explained everything real well," she nods to herself, and to Will, half muffled by the open cabinet door. "And you gotta appreciate all the shade at the anti-science caveman crowd."
Hannibal had been so disappointed, if ultimately unsurprised, to hear that people still persisted in believing in a 6000 year old flat earth, she hadn't had the heart to tease him.
As the boys duck out to find a laptop, Neph goes spelunking in the actual pantry, pushing aside carefully organized dry goods for a tightly rolled, half-empty bag of Chips Ahoy. There's crackers, too, probably meant to be eaten with cheese, but which Neph tends to mindlessly munch over her transcription work. She dumps both on a plate and leans back against the microwave, listening to it hum behind her head.
This is...good. Not being alone right now. Not having the space to sit and think. Activity to keep the panic at bay until she can rationally consider her next steps, that's what she needs. Briefly alone in the kitchen with the comforting white noise of popping kernels, her thoughts drift not toward the dizzying list of shit to arrange now that she's called dibs on Baltimore, but to Will's growing familiarity. He knows Hannibal's name, now. Hannibal gave it to him.
Neph folds her arms over her stomach, shifting her weight as she turns that fact over to examine it from another angle. Hannibal wants Will to know him, wants to keep him close. His feelings for Will complicate everything, and not just because they're a massive security risk; Will's not into guys, so what will Hannibal settle for if he can't have his romantic interest returned? What other secrets will he trade away to keep Will around?
If things keep on, they're gonna come down to the M-word eventually, she feels it in her belly like a flicker of Electrum. Neph breathes in against it, reminds herself that's Hannibal's secret to share however he wants, just like his real name. She just...needs to talk to him before it comes to that, 'cuz if she were Will, she'd immediately figure Hannibal's roommate was a mutant too. Neph's hidden behind that assumption before and she'll do it again, but there's a creepy crawling feeling that comes with the thought of pretending to be a mutant while Hannibal's standing right there. Just picturing it has her running her tongue over her teeth, scraping off a patina of imagined guilt. If they discuss it first, and he says it's okay, then maybe...
The microwave shrieks and Neph shakes those thoughts away. Without the mechanical background hum, she can make out the low murmur of the boys' voices down the hall, drawing closer. She dumps the popcorn into a large mixing bowl, balances her glass of Coke on the plate, and emerges into the living room just as Will says something dry.
"Just shove that on the floor," she jerks her chin at the blanket she'd draped over the table, the better for reading under by flashlight. "I'll use it again."
True to her word, she sets down the food, whisks the blanket around her shoulders, and seats herself on the floor with her chin propped up on the table while Hannibal fiddles with his laptop. "You got the charger?"
no subject
Date: 2017-03-01 02:51 am (UTC)Hannibal has an interest in Will. He has an interest in several things, and he attaches to each one aggressively. His classmates as well as strangers seem to quietly assume he and Neph are a couple. (Sometimes not so quietly, as was the case with a particularly chatty neighbor one morning.) Hannibal might be entirely content never having any term for what he wants to have with Will - he only knows that he wants it, and he wants it dearly.
If they ever get to the point of navigating Will's interest, it's likely that their entire relationship will be guided by Will's expectations of what a 'relationship' is. Until then, Hannibal will content himself with this - drawing Will in closer, seeing him in his own spaces more. Hannibal only wants proximity, to be as near to behind the ribs of someone else as he can conceivably be, and he's alright with the concept of Will determining what that means, later.
The image of Will, not drugged this time, helping himself to tap water is a powerful one. He's usually so careful to make himself a stranger everywhere he goes - the complete opposite of Neph, who Hannibal has seen sit on top of restaurant tables and pet strangers' dogs.
Hannibal himself has just touched the concept of his most closely-guarded secret - after the time travel, of course, since now he has two secrets from everyone but Neph - when Neph whirls in behind them. She drops to the floor, a decision that falls oddly flat for Hannibal, because:
1) He doesn't want to sit on the floor, but
2) He does enjoy sitting next to Neph, occasionally, when they're home at the same time. Which seems unfair of her to lose sight of, since
3) It's his birthday, and
4) He might earlier have stated that didn't matter, but quite frankly, anything that gives Hannibal more right to demand things is something he'll eventually take advantage of.
Will, who is awkwardly waiting out of the way to Hannibal's other side, still standing by the table, is eyeing him with what appears to be concern. Or suspicion. It can be hard to tell.
"Yes." One end of it is in the laptop, and the other end Hannibal glances at and then hands to Neph. "If you could." Maybe if he sits down in the center of the couch, and very pointedly leaves space on Neph's end, she'll sit back down next to him.
Assuming, of course, that she doesn't just crawl/roll over to where the wall outlet is, just narrowly covered behind the couch's arm.
Maybe Neph will get the idea better if Hannibal pointedly stares at her and then pointedly glances at the empty couch cushion to his left.
no subject
Date: 2017-03-01 03:23 am (UTC)"We gotta do something about these old outlets," she grumbles as she wedges the charge pack between the wall and the back of the couch, "They're so loose, everything just falls right out."
When she straightens back up, Hannibal's not in his usual spot on the end of the couch. That might not be so weird - it's his laptop, and if they're all gonna watch then it makes sense he/it oughta be in the middle - if Will weren't hovering tensely and Hannibal weren't practically pointing at the couch cushion beside him while staring at her, unblinking. He's about as subtle as a housepet standing over an empty food dish.
Neph would snort, but she's pretty sure she's wearing one of his shirts (she fished it out of the dryer because all her tees are wadded up in her laundry basket; she hasn't broken the habit of putting off a trip to the laundromat until the last possible second, even though the apartment came with a washer-dryer) and anyway Will might be deferring to her preference, here. So she slips over the arm of the couch as though it were the hood of a car, leans forward to grab the bowl of popcorn, and deposits it in Hannibal's lap.
"Middle seat holds the popcorn," Neph declares, like she couldn't have poured it into more than one bowl in the first place. With her legs folded sideways, her knees press into the side of his thigh
no subject
Date: 2017-03-03 07:40 pm (UTC)And the empty couch cushion. And more importantly, she notices the problem with the empty couch cushion.
Will makes a sound of strangled surprise to Hannibal's right, but for a few suspended moments while Neph settles in, Hannibal doesn't bother glancing over at anyone else. He's smiling at his laptop while he sets it up and gets it running, the casual familiarity with which Neph just tucks her knees against his thigh something he enjoys but hardly even remarks on. They've become part of the landscape for each other, a possession, and keeping physical distance seems like such an unnecessary lie by now.
If Hannibal tilts so that his shoulder more firmly presses against hers, well. It's not as if Will's standoffish slouch to his right seems particularly jealous.
Hannibal would be a lot more suspicious about Neph's designs in putting the popcorn bowl in his lap if she was a different kind of person. Luckily, as stated earlier, she isn't, and so he doesn't, but he does feel the slow-burn pleasure of knowing that people he likes are going to be in close proximity for the next hour-minus-removed-commercials.
"Do you even eat popcorn?" Is apparently the safest topic Will can still find to address. All in all, it's nice to hear him make the effort at all. Earlier Will was taciturn to the point of seeming sullen, although Hannibal knows well that he's bristly and quiet because of something more like dread-filled shyness.
"Only when required by certain company."
As Neph digs into the bowl of popcorn, he thinks about said current company. He'd never put it in such terms, but if he recalls that boy earlier, and what he'd been planning to do--
Hannibal realizes that he's now found a third person he's willing to kill for. And that's enough to have him giving a short, content noise while letting the side of his head rest against Neph's, Nova documentary playing background noise to the chatter in his mind.