nepharious: (Default)
[personal profile] nepharious
 Collapsable as we go:

Date: 2017-02-17 02:42 am (UTC)
operapaintingandmurder: (Default)
From: [personal profile] operapaintingandmurder
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.

Date: 2017-02-22 03:23 pm (UTC)
operapaintingandmurder: (Default)
From: [personal profile] operapaintingandmurder
'That he gives a shit.'

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."

Date: 2017-02-24 03:12 am (UTC)
operapaintingandmurder: (Default)
From: [personal profile] operapaintingandmurder
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.

Date: 2017-02-27 02:06 am (UTC)
wontgraham: (Default)
From: [personal profile] wontgraham
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.

Date: 2017-02-28 05:22 pm (UTC)
wontgraham: (Default)
From: [personal profile] wontgraham
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."

Date: 2017-03-01 02:51 am (UTC)
operapaintingandmurder: (Default)
From: [personal profile] operapaintingandmurder
'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.

Date: 2017-03-03 07:40 pm (UTC)
operapaintingandmurder: (Default)
From: [personal profile] operapaintingandmurder
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.

Profile

nepharious: (Default)
allovertheplace

June 2021

S M T W T F S
  12345
6789101112
131415 16171819
20212223242526
27282930   

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jun. 9th, 2025 07:04 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios