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

Date: 2017-06-26 07:21 pm (UTC)
wontgraham: (young / avert)
From: [personal profile] wontgraham
The bag's stuck to Will's face with his own sweat by the time there's the sound of talking up at the front of the van. He tries not to grunt too loud when momentum brings his shoulder to connect with the back door.

He wasn't really expecting to have the bag removed as soon as he can see ambient light through its cloth. It's blinding and disorienting outside the van, even though it isn't high noon anymore. Will's wincing away from the fading sunlight, which is why he doesn't immediately react to hands on his ankles. He freezes, feeling unbalanced but knowing playing along is the best step for now, and then realizes the ties at his ankles are being undone.

He watches the glint of metal at his ankles with wary but useless suspicion, before the man goes and does the same to Hannibal.

Everything is as Will would more or less expect, until the man yanks Hannibal's face cover off as well.

Hannibal and Will didn't exchange a word in the van, both too mutually aware of being closely listened to. Will watches him with concern, though, because Hannibal's breathing had started growing strained shortly before they had pulled to their abrupt stop. Had he been suffocating in the pillowcase tied around his head?

He looks pale instead of flushed, to Will's eyes. There's a sheen of sweat at his temples and dripped sideways across his nose from laying on the ground, and he breathes - weirdly. Will blinks, not sure what the heavy hiss up against the man unveiling him could mean except aggression, and then a horrible suspicion hits at the same time the man's pupils dilate.

Will steps back, adrenaline hitting his already-soaked system, and jostles into the guy guarding right behind him.

"Watch yourself, fucking mutie f--"

"What the fuck, what the fuck, You fucking-- is that you you piece of goddamn shit--"

"The hell?" The one behind Will jostles up next to him, and they both watch the one closest to Hannibal - the one breathing in the air nearest him - scream spittle into Hannibal's face. "Eddie seriously, what the fuck's happening over here--"

"This fucker's dangerous, fuck man we gotta call for backup, maybe they've got another guy somewhere--"

Paranoid ravings. Hannibal's power is suggestive, isn't it? So this guy's attaching his own ideas to the emotions being pumped at him - the 'stay away' vibes surely soaking the air around them?

"Are you doing this, you fucking freak?" A shoulder jostles Will as tall-and-brunette goes to kick at Hannibal's ankles from the side. But his aggravation is nothing compared to his partner's full-blown panic.

He must've gotten a better breath of Hannibal's power.

(Hannibal had explained it to him in full, once, in slow and careful detail. He'd let Will ask questions, even if Will had been reticent at first, too cautious about making Hannibal feel more like a bug under a microscope - honestly, Hannibal had needed to almost hassle him into the conversation to start it up.

But then Will had had plenty of questions, and got answers he hadn't been expecting. Like how Hannibal had had an oversensitivity since he was a child and never known why, how the headaches had gotten worse but less predictable as he passed eleven and then twelve, how at thirteen and fourteen his puberty had brought on the pheromone aspect to his power. How it had taken him months to even be certain what was happening at all, since it was invisible and so vague and so dependent on a lot of uncontrollable variables from the other person involved.)

"We should just kill him now, Tommy."

Hannibal's legs are kicked out from under him, lack of zip ties or not, and his lack of hands means Will watches as he knocks a shoulder rough against the gravel, head jerking down and back up as it bounces on the ground.

'Eddy' stumble-jerks forward, knife flashing, and Will hears himself yell as his legs get into motion.

He barely makes it two strides before the less-drugged one kicks his knee from the side, enough spoiled momentum that without arms to windmill around for balance, Will goes down hard. He sprawls on his side, face nearly touching Hannibal's shoulder, and rolls up to see Eddy clambering at Hannibal, eyes wild.

He breathes like an animal. Will's own breath is ragged and hurts his dry throat.

Knees dropping to the side of Hannibal's hips. Arm pulling back. Knife flashing in the early evening sun.

Will scrambles at the gravel, curls up, and then kicks out what feels, in that instinctive moment, like the most logical part of his body to risk injuring.

The knife sinks into the outside of his leg with the dull thump he would expect from a wooden log. It sounds wet but not hollow. The most important thing for a wavering heartbeat is that it's Will's leg, not Hannibal's chest, that the knife embedded in like a tick.

And then the heated pain begins, the cold panic in his chest of seeing his own blood spurt from the wound like a desperately-leaking pipe. Will's breathing is so loud he loses track of what the other men are saying, but there's a lot of movement right above him and Hannibal.

Tommy peels his friend up and away, the choking panic of Eddy's pupils is no longer pinned on Hannibal and Will, and Will curls tighter into a ball to press a hand to the hole in his leg.

It doesn't immediately press back together like a papercut or a nick from a razor blade. This is deep enough to have lost its connections to the other side entirely, this sags open with the dead weight of skin pulling on either side. Will feels the opposite ends of the cut slide against one another, endlessly slick with blood and too fresh to coagulate, and feels bile creep up his throat.

Hannibal sits up under him, presses him to lay on his back and elevate his legs, while the two men argue above them. Hannibal's face is drawn and pale, mouth open but silent.

Neither of them says a word during the entire wait. Soon, the two men re-group enough to bend down and drag them into the heavy concrete building they're parked next to. Will spends the entire walk convinced he won't make it, biting down out of spite alone and making half a calf muscle not give out underneath him.

*

Will'a breathing keeps being interrupted by his racing heart, pressing against his throat and wasting too much more of his blood onto the concrete floor.

Neph's been caught too. Fuck, fuck fuck, but hadn't everyone's whispers suggested someone more capable than he would've expected? Hadn't the metal-flinging implied that she'd be the last one of them suckered in by an apartment ambush?

That next realization hits about the same time as Neph's pleading eye contact.

He curls inward, bracing against shrapnel and blowback that doesn't come right away. There's movement, yelling, a spurt of blood like a Tarantino movie, and then Will jerks as far as zip ties and rope will let him as a knife lodges itself between Hannibal's ankles.

Hannibal just bends forward, calmly calculating as you please, and slices his wrists' ties against that blade during the two heartbeats it sits there. And then it pulls back to its puppeteer and Hannibal's mouth is open again, teeth showing now, eyes wide and face frozen in an engrossed grimace, and Will doesn't know who he should run from, if and when he gets the chance.

Neph catapaults up and away, out of Will's line of sight into rafters as bullets fly, and he's certain he's walked straight into someone else's life because his definitely never included shit like this. Wasn't supposed to, not until he had a badge and a gun and paid police academy training built up underneath him and did he pick the wrong field, is that what his tunnelling vision and roaring ears mean?

Hannibal's getting up and falls, legs clearly too numb from being tied. He lurches sideways for Will, is intercepted halfway there by one of the few people capable of still noticing them when they've got a "fucking telekinetic monster" up on their roof.

Will barely gets to watch how the knife exchanges hands. Hannibal's torso moves like a dancer, even if his ankles drag and tilt too much, and there's blood on Hannibal's face and throat when he pushes the gurgling man away from himself. He doesn't look behind him to check that the man's not getting back up. Will stares at him alone, watches eyes bore hatred into Hannibal's back and watches the inside edge of the man's throat vibrate with air that won't ever reach his lungs.

Hannibal nearly falls into his lap, legs apparently still useless from the past few hours of having his feet's circulation cut off.

"Are-- are you-- you okay--" Will wasn't aware he was shaking so badly until his voice vibrates like that other man's throat cartilage. He shivers against the knife in Hannibal's hands and Hannibal pats him with his free hand as if he were a horse, tapping against his flank to soothe.

His laser focus doesn't budge, though. "I'm fine." Will's knees roll limply apart once his ankles aren't stuck together, and Hannibal's reaching for his own belt.

Will's already watched him work with a quick accuracy that isn't hurried for several more seconds before he processes what it's for. A tourniquet. The belt wraps around Will's thigh just above his knee.

Hannibal looks like calm fury.

"I can see how you'll make a great trauma surgeon." Will says. Hannibal has a pleased glow to him as he finally frees Will's wrists. "Or an assassin." Will adds, colder and flat.

Hannibal examines Will's fingers for circulation problems and then looks at his face, but there is no apology behind the cautious awareness in his gaze. "Yes," he says finally. Somehow his quiet voice carries over the ambient din around them. "I would be excellent at either." With blood still smeared from his nose down to his chin, he reaches forward. His hand, covered in Will's blood now, rests on Will's knee. "And yet you've seen the choice I have made."

Will makes a sound. He thinks it might be a laugh. "Right. I'm so relieved you're using these...skills to only kill the unworthy. What are you, some k-kind of-- of fucking Batman?"

"What do you think these men consider themselves?" Hannibal asks, and now he finally looks back at the man he mutilated on his way to Will. He looks dead by now, throat cartilage as still and quiet as his open eyes. Will's chest feels tight and empty to look at him.

"In the right. Defending themselves." Will feels exhausted. The metal drum behind him is cold and doesn't have the right hand holds as he presses his back into it and uses it to leverage himself into standing. Hannibal holds his arm, lifts him the rest of the way. Will doesn't protest that help, and he feels the lie of the rest of his protests for just that - lies. Is he really, actually bothered that he isn't dead right now? That his two closest friends apparently have the sort of training required to jointly take out a room full of enemies?

...Would Hannibal even have been captured, if Will hadn't been home with him at the time?

He'd lost his glasses when the pillowcase was dragged off his head the first time, but now even his distance vision is blackening and blurring. Everything looks charred, and softened in the aftermath of burning down to its essentials.

He feels like he needs to sleep.

"Will." Hannibal's voice comes slower than his lips move. "Will. I need you to sit back down. Behind this oil drum. Don't let anyone see you."

"Oil. Right. Of course that's what's in there." Will's teeth clack together. Is he cold? It interrupts his speech. He doesn't fight against the two hands on his wrists, doesn't fight Hannibal half-dragging him to a hiding spot. "They wanted to watch the heretics burn." Visions of paintings, both tasteless and serious, of witches at the stake flicker and flame across his mind.

It's hard to say, with how his mind is fading, but Will's pretty sure he feels Hannibal press lips to his forehead and say, "I would only ever want to burn with you," before he ghosts away into the gathering black.

Date: 2017-07-05 02:26 am (UTC)
operapaintingandmurder: (☢ stab)
From: [personal profile] operapaintingandmurder
Outside the gathering boil of Will's fear and contested morals, Hannibal rises. He steps outside the circle of Will's hidden spot behind the oil drum, flicks his stolen knife into a better grip in his hand, and slips towards the sea of hatred boiling in front of him.

Mercury lights through Hannibal's veins, cold and heavy poison that he has every intention to take out on the enemies around them. Concerns for Will and Neph don't leave, but they harden and grow lighter, ready weapons for him to use as he instinctively slides along shadows. He needs a better vantage point to make sure he heads off anyone coming for Will, ensures he's able to interrupt anyone coming at a blind spot of Neph's--

Neph's landed in front of him, a flash of metal and polished stone the only signals before blood glugs out of the man underneath her, the angry power of neck arteries emptying onto the warehouse floor.

Neph is a fighter like him. The thrill of being metaphorically back to back against an enemy that she can excuse killing with him is a strong draw. He smiles, in that moment where she makes eye contact, his own eyes black with pupil and heart rate steady.

He'll take out the ones she leaves behind.

There is a real pleasure in the way his mind becomes fortified, a thousand cogs and lattices and bulwarks all swiping into new formations as quickly as he flicks through plans. Focused and punishingly fast, Hannibal's mind thrives under time constraints and pressure.

He still finds himself watching the way Neph twists metal around two of them, gets to see firsthand and for the first time the utter loss at which anyone not like herself is in the face of her powers. It's like looking at God, merciless and final.

Except God has left the flanking pair to creep at the catwalk stairs, and so Hannibal is flush against the shadows in their wake. Which one has the best reaction time, looks the most calm? Hannibal comes in for him first, knife slotting in horizontal between ribs. It's a heavy spot to place it, runs the risk of sticking his blade for too long, so Hannibal doesn't wrench it back out right away.

The man he's stabbed from behind is already gasping and breathing wet and doomed. Hannibal is flush up against his back in an instant, shoulder touching the hilt of the knife he's just shoved through to the man's lung, and Hannibal's hands go for the gun.

The man's already holding it, as he sputters a warning to the third man with them. That one has a gun, too, and a quick trigger finger, but he hits only the air and then his friend's arm as he circles back. Before he's swung that arc in tighter, Hannibal's squeezed off one bullet, and a puff of ripped fabric and then oozing blood appears on the third man's shirt, near his belly button.

Not fatal. While he's staggering from the pain and blowback, though, Hannibal plants a knee against the stabbed man's hip, leverages the knife out in two wet jerks, and shoves him the rest of the way forward. He crumples into the stairs.

The knife never gets caught in the third man's body. It comes right through, from beside the esophagus out through muscle and arteries at the side of his throat. Hannibal takes some of the spray to his hair, ear, and the edge of his face, and as the force dies off it arcs slower. His pants below the knees get drenched a dark maroon as he stands back up.

That's Neph assisted. But how's Will faring?

*

Will's pulse is rabbit-quick. Hannibal had briefly explained it was a result of blood loss, but that blossoms across from physiological response to psychological one. Will finds that the more his breath picks up, the more his heart flutters high up on his ribs, the easier it is to look across his mind to the abyss opening up.

It's a cavernous gap, between himself on one side and Hannibal and Neph on the other. They're holding hands and watching him - not with mocking, but concern and genuine pity. They want him to cross the thin, wavering rope bridge over to their side. Will stands at the edge of the cliff and feels rocks crumble away from his feet.

Each of them holds in their free hand a human head, dangling from blood-matted hair.

Will rubs fingers and then his palms against his closed eyes, willing the phantoms away.

He rolls over. He's not entirely sure when he ended up on his back, but he rolls to his side and grabs one of the milk crates that was being used as a seat and heaves up to sit. Hannibal's out there. Neph's out there. Both of them are risking their lives to help make sure everyone survives.

Fuck. Fuck, this is hard.

Will scoots along to the dead body Hannibal left earlier. He's still warm, eyes still open. Will presses fingers against his lids, drags them down - with more sticky resistance than the movies show - and takes the gun holstered at his side.

He can do this. He's fired guns plenty of times.

Just never at anything more human than a range's paper target.

"Drop it, freak."

Will freezes as best he can, entire body still vibrating with energy and effort. His hands are both on the little handgun. It's loaded; he just fumbled through checking.

His periphery shows another one of the militia men, something metallic and too large in his hands. Rifle. Will feels like he's drowning, like each new breath leaves him more light-headed and closer to death.

He could try to fire off his own stolen gun before he's shot.

But he catches the man's eye as he turns, and even with hatred and fear choking him, Will can't raise his gun.

Date: 2017-07-07 02:32 pm (UTC)
operapaintingandmurder: (☢ stab)
From: [personal profile] operapaintingandmurder
Hannibal doesn't catch sight of her again until she's leaping back off of her railing. Neph is amazingly quiet - Hannibal considers himself excellent at moving silently, but she has an otherworldly weightlessness to her when she's cloaked in her powers. It's beautiful, the way the sunset before a hurricane is. He stands and watches her navigate the cross beams by the roof as if it were a well-mapped road, blood dripping off his ear onto his shoulder.

He only starts moving again when he hears a scream on the ground below Neph, prowls back down the catwalk stairs and begins crossing the wide building much more slowly than Neph is able to. He skirts around more oil drums, equipment both clearly the militia's and clearly belonging to the original depot owners, milk crates and even one shoddy office chair that someone had dragged in.

There's the dead woman left tangled in the wire and fencing, her eye too bloody to see the knife wound directly. Hannibal examines the man caught beside her for a minute, watches the exact moment the man recognizes him and begins struggling with renewed vigor to get to his gun.

Hannibal finds the non-barbed parts of the wire to grip in his hands, carefully slots it around towards the man's throat. The more the man struggles, the more he seems to catch himself on the rest of the wire. That fact doesn't seem to slow down his fight, but blood starts oozing from ripped skin on his arms and legs.

At about the same moment that the wire has successfully caught against the man's throat, he gives enough of a heave to get a hand on his holstered gun. Hannibal yanks down on the wire towards the ground, hard. Air whooshes out of his lungs, teeth tightly grit behind closed lips in his effort. And as he grinds the wire to the right, it carves in at a better angle to the jugular veins. It's a slower drag of blood out, to be sure. It doesn't have the power behind it of the deeper arteries.

Hannibal watches the way the man's eyes, already so much pupil, seem to widen further. He wonders if he's seeing the exact moment when he realizes he's going to die, that medical help would never get there in time.

He still has to reach into the barbed wire prison and redirect that potential gunshot, though. Hannibal jerks the gun away, dumps the clip and stands up.

Here's a conundrum. Should he leave the body there to bleed out? Or should he kill him now so he's safer to leave behind, even after all that setup?

There's the sound of a gun firing and then something more, a roar Hannibal can't quite place, across the warehouse. And then Neph's voice, over the voice of an unknown man.

Hannibal lets that last chambered bullet bury itself in the man's forehead before he takes off running towards the sound.

*

Will yells too, a brief yelp of alarm and sympathetic pain blinding him even as he throws an arm up to protect from shrapnel. Neph, Neph was who jumped in front of him, what's she doing why'd she do that Will's not worth potential injuries and now look what his own fear just caused--

Will braces the hand with the gun back down on the ground, Neph's body weight colliding with his shoulder and then his chest as she stumbles back against him. She's screaming and he isn't sure what's happened, at first, thinks it went wrong and she got shot - her body blocked his sight of the man about to shoot him - and so Will is scrabbling at her with his free hand. He tugs her in close, imagines they're both about to get mowed down, now. But as he can blink up at something that isn't Neph's already-paling face, he realizes the man is screaming in pain.

His hands are a ruin. That's-- that's what the shrapnel and sound was. His gun jammed? That...that has to have been Neph's power. But then what happened to her if she wasn't shot? Over-exertion?

Will is scooting back towards the stacked milk crates behind them to lean on it, half-dragging Neph, clinging onto her with an instinct he's never used before. Her hand looks - horrifying. Bloody and with white jagged edges quickly getting soaked in pink streaks, those last two fingers are mangled.

"Are you okay? Where else're you hurt? What the fuck." His voice sounds almost manic to his own ears, panicked and thready.

My fault, my fault wars with the fact that he can't focus on helping Neph if he's too busy feeling bad about causing this. Will had mistakenly thought earlier that this couldn't get any worse, that he couldn't be more afraid on his own behalf about what was happening.

Well. That part wasn't wrong. Because now he's terrified for Neph, because he isn't sure what else is happening or might happen, if this is some sort of...powers-turning-on-the-owner complication. Physics? Does her telekinesis come with some sort of price of sharing the force of what she directs and redirects?

Will jerks back upright, from coiling in around Neph in panicked instinct, when he hears a gurgle.

Clearly the only reason blood spray doesn't reach him and Neph is that they're already several feet away, because it's messy. Will gapes for half a second before spitting out, "Hannibal, he's fucking-- He's dead, get off of him!"

"Not yet, he is not." Hannibal is bent over the man with the ruined hands, a gun in his own hand. "He's still breathing." Will doesn't want to know exactly what parts of the man's now-ruined face comprise the chunks of skin stuck on that gun. Hannibal is presumably out of bullets or out of his mind, or both. Will isn't sure how many seconds he was pistol-whipping that man before Will noticed.

Will feels sick, despite the man's legs blocking about half his face from this angle. "Then please just--" Will can't say it.

Hannibal looks at him, wide-eyed and otherworldly, but he glances between Will and Neph and then just walks over to Will, takes Will's gun right out of his hand, and turns around to obligingly shoot their attacker.

"But Neph," Hannibal is already saying as he turns back around, like what's behind him is perfectly fine. He's shoved the gun into the back waistband of his pants, where Will can't imagine it will easily stay without his belt to cling to it. Will's head is spinning. "What happened to her? --What happened to you, Neph?" Directed at each of them in turn, Hannibal crouching and his eyes still hard but with cracks appearing in them. One of his hands goes to Neph's chin, the other drifts across Will's knee where it's bent up against his chest and pressed near Neph's shoulder.

There's utter silence in the depot now, aside from them. Huddled together on the floor, Will can't tell if his renewed lightheadedness is from relief or not.

Date: 2017-07-11 10:59 pm (UTC)
wontgraham: (young / brood)
From: [personal profile] wontgraham
Get Neph away. Get Neph and himself far fucking away from everything that's happened here. Back home, back where Will can think in private, back where they're safe and people can't bother them--

(They broke into their apartment. They knew where they lived and knew how to break in. That violation sinks right through Will, makes him queasy.)

Will's never heard someone beg before. But that's the first word that comes to mind for what Neph does, for the terrified babble that raises the hairs on the back of Will's neck.

And it's happening here, about them, not earlier when she'd been threatened with guns and knives by strangers. Will understands that in a visceral way, even as its foreign - the disconnect from the unknown, the lack of threat from weaker physical dangers...and the welling emptiness that no one can actually effect.

No one except the people who've helped heal it.

Fingers dig into his arm. Will's own grip tightens in response, little barbs digging into them from both sides. It's not a comforting way to connect, to feel a pull; it's desperate and scared and Will looks Neph directly in the eyes as she does something no one else has ever directly requested of him--

Asks him not to leave. Directly, no implications. Asks Will for...himself.

Will stares at her, dazed. "I w--" He can't make a promise he can't keep...but he has to promise something in return for that. "I don't want to leave," he says, even as he feels that I won't leave you, either of you press against his lungs, desperate to need and be needed.

But there's blood soaking his jeans and blood in Neph's hair and dripping from her ruined fingers and Hannibal, Hannibal is coated in it like an Eldritch monster, and Will knows he can't promise his loyalty out loud just yet.

Neph touches Hannibal, and Will lets them reconnect after a battle they fought entirely alone, together.

Will isn't sure Hannibal realizes Neph can't hear him. All Will watches is the two of them staring at each other with an intensity that blinds Will.

Hannibal's stare at Neph captivates Will, especially as he's easier to see. His look crests over and breaks into a foam that Will then realizes he instinctively knows. Even though he doesn't think anyone's ever looked at him with that intention, even though he's rarely seen it in others, it's just so clear and strong that Will tastes it in his mouth. As easily recognized as salt spray.

Love. Will swallows, parched, and shivers with the force of that stare.

He would never have expected that when the pain surprises Neph back out of herself again, that she'd dig her face instead into his shoulder. Hannibal watches, no jealousy on his face, just that same rapt intensity.

When that gaze moves back up to him, it changes ever so slightly. Will doesn't feel rejected, but he has never so clearly seen the way their respective histories color how Hannibal sees them. Even with Will's instincts, he can't quite map it out, only that Hannibal's constant boredom at the general population masks a boundless ability for becoming attached to others, in ways Will's never really seen anyone need anyone else.

"Your arm's broken. In multiple spots. But we should leave before I make you a sling or try to set anything." Hannibal supplies, and while it's obvious it's probably necessary to state, so they can move on and plan. "And I don't think applying too much pressure to your fingers is a good idea, regardless of their bleeding. They need to be set. But here." And Hannibal is taking off his button-up shirt, white undershirt underneath even more drastically stained with someone else's blood.

He goes to ball it in around Neph's hand like the bulk of a boxing glove. And for a few moments the room goes quiet, dead all around them, Neph breathing loud into Will's shoulder before Hannibal actually touches anything sensitive.

"We should burn this place," Will says slowly. "Did you do to the other bodies what you did to that one? The news'll have a frenzy. Anti-mutant propaganda everywhere." Will's chin tucks in protectively over Neph's head, gaze shifting behind him to what he's leaning against. What he was tied to before. "We can burn it with these." His knuckle raps against the oil drum, loud and expansive.

Hannibal gives him a look of genuine incredulity. "Or they will be alarmed at the act of violence against a pro-human group." But he looks sorely tempted. There's still hell in his eyes. "Neph," Hannibal says, firm but gentle, in a way Will's never really seen him. It feels almost like he's done this before, like the way Hannibal might speak to a child - though Will's never seen him near one. It's a Hannibal way of speaking to a child, if that's what it is - not patronizing or simplified, just earnest but softer than he bothers to be with most.

No surprise, Will thinks, that Neph ends up being the fulcrum of a tie breaker. "What do you think? Burn the warehouse down? Or leave the bodies to be found?"

Date: 2017-07-12 06:50 pm (UTC)
wontgraham: (young / avert)
From: [personal profile] wontgraham
Neph agrees. Will slumps in relief, up against the barrels that were meant for his and Hannibal's and Neph's deaths and which will now be used to cover up the latter's bloodshed.

Even in his head, even guilty and nauseous at what he's seen, Will still can't quite call them murders. All three of them had been in immediate danger of being killed, suspicion about how prepared the two of them were be damned.

Will wouldn't be alive right now if they hadn't been that prepared. And that's the sticking point that his moral spiral keeps sucking down towards, every time he tempts that whirlpool again.

"They'll hide it. It wouldn't-- I don't think they'd get any good press out of making a scene about what happened here. And linking it to their hate group." Assuming there's any of them left. Will's stomach is clenched tight, against both fear and dehydration as his bloodloss keeps drying him out, but he feels firm in this decision. It's their best bet. They can't leave this sort of evidence, this scale of brutality around for anyone to inspect at length. That's... No. Not good.

"Alright." Hannibal says, watching Neph carefully. "We will find a car and stay parked nearby until you join us."

His head tilts back like a cat's when Neph taps at his jaw, eyes wide on her face. "There's little point in doing it without equipment to screw it in place or sew your tendons back where they belong," he says slowly, like he wasn't expecting to need to explain this. "The elixirs are at the apartment." He takes a breath, this time really sits up and looks at her hand instead of just trying to stuff his shirt in around it to sop up some of the blood.

Will can...kind of see his point. It looks awful. Ground up, a bit. Will doesn't know a lot about different kinds of fractures, but he thinks it's more than two pieces per finger bone, in there. But: "What elixir?" Is this a goddamn magic thing again?

"Later, Will." He's shushed like a small child, and then Hannibal is taking Neph's hand with the sort of purpose that can't be mistaken. "I will...adjust the break. But it won't connect properly without..." He pauses, poised to move her ring finger. "I think the pain involved in moving it all the way back now will not reflect a faster healing time." He pauses. "Unless you were going to start healing it?"

Will's brain is spinning. He hangs on tighter to keep steady, squeezes maybe too hard when he sees Hannibal sizing up Neph's ring finger with serious intent.

"On the count of three, Neph. One, two."

Will finds he feels too guilty to look away. He also finds he's tugging Neph's head back in under his chin, which is maybe a step too far but also not a conscious movement. He still remembers the way she'd flinched back into him the first time she'd looked at her hand.

Date: 2017-07-19 03:05 am (UTC)
wontgraham: (Default)
From: [personal profile] wontgraham
As his head sags with exhaustion and his eyesight gathers warning sparks at its corners, Will is realizing he's stopped looking to lay blame for what happened today. Not beyond the men who attacked them. Isn't it easier to focus on that, to let it be as simple as 'once you cross me, I can do anything to make sure I win instead'? Isn't it easier to let that explain it rather than try to measure out extremes and compare one atrocity to another?

Atrocity. Will thinks of the flapping esophagus of the man he first watched Hannibal kill. He thinks of the arterial spray from the first ones he'd seen Neph kill.

Will thinks of a literal warehouse full of evidence about to go up in flames as per his own suggestion, and he swallows back confused nausea. He tries to smother his relief equally hard.

"If it means I won't just bleed out in the apartment, alright." Hannibal gives him a searching stare, pupils too wide to look away from, and Will has a sudden suspicion he's considering stealing blood from a hospital on the way back home.

(Why is it that Will's so easy with assuming they can't actually go to the police? Why does it feel so instinctual not to call attention to his own injuries and dangers, not to drag in more outside adults? Maybe he's lucky he's around two kids more competent in a fight than he is.)

Neph's turned in towards him as Hannibal goes to work, which makes it easier to fold around her like she's even smaller than she is, as if they aren't both willowy seventeen year olds with a lot to prove and not many people worth proving it to. She screams without air and Will fears for a moment that his own lungs will burst with the vibrations. His back, right outside the flat jut of his scapula, stings with the raw-edged pain of dull nails still managing to tear skin. Will's breath hitches, he bears down, and he grunts against Neph's hair, but he only squeezes her in tighter against himself.

When it ends and she's trying to stand up away from him, the gasp of cold air on his chest hurts. He lurches to stand but his leg slips in its own puddle of blood, the pain is a siren of warning, and even as he tries to lean up through that there's a flagging weakness that makes his muscles feel like rubber.

He flounders against the oil drum, useless, and watches Hannibal catch at Neph instead.

"Or you could be a reasonable person and we could throw in the Molotov from one of the windows." Hannibal is already unraveling his balled-up shirt from earlier, re-folding it into tight controlled lines. "It's not as though oil is going to actually explode like in American movies." He's dragging his shirt across Neph's shoulder, tucking and tying it around just below her elbow, clearly scanning for a non-bruised spot to rest the sling on.

"Bet you can throw far enough to get it in while standing with us outside." Will says. And while he's pretty certain he's also seeing stars and he isn't sure if him being certain counts anymore. How much blood has he lost?

Down come fat black raindrops, clanking and pinging against the ground after falling faster than gravity. The unnaturalness is a primal sense, something Will didn't realize he was capable of catching until right now as it sends goosebumps up and down his arms.

Nails. Screws and bolts, all raining from the ceiling.

"What're you doin'." Will blinks, and the moment the world turns black seems to linger and warp like coffee swirling with cream.

"I will find a bottle, and a lighter, and while it's throw in we can all be outside. On the ground." Hannibal is still hovered close to Neph, no nearer to looking for a bottle. Will blinks sweat out of his eye and presses a hand to his warm, warm pant leg, and he lets realizations just press right back into him, too. Hannibal isn't hovering because of Neph's injuries so far. He's hovering because he's worried she's going to get more hurt if he lets go of her and lets her fling herself off past the roof she's clearly about to rip off.

"Don't get hurt again," Will croaks, still hunched over his own thigh on the ground. "We'll need someone else to help pay rent on the new apartment."

Date: 2017-07-22 01:09 am (UTC)
wontgraham: (Default)
From: [personal profile] wontgraham
"Not me." Will protests, and he isn't entirely sure which part he's protesting more. The concern being lobbied at him? The idea that his injuries trump Neph's? That he's the excuse they need to finally actually leave their newly-carved mausoleum?

"Yes, you." Hannibal watches Neph like he thinks she may still try to run, but he lets go of her to come down to Will's height. Hands sink under his armpits, fingers almost painfully strong against the wirey muscles of Will's shoulders, and Will is suddenly being heaved bodily off the ground.

"I didn't think you could lift me." Will says, honest and dazed. Hannibal gives a soft sound of derision, like he can't possibly imagine why anyone would ever assume he isn't used to lifting an entire person's worth of dead weight, and then suddenly it's not that funny to Will anymore.

"Neph." Hannibal says, and then Will is being manhandled in a different way. Only instinct from seeing it on TV and reading about it in emergency response books has his body responding at all, when the hands on him shift. One under his knees, the other around the backs of his shoulders.

At least while suspended in this type of carry, Will's leg is elevated to almost his heart level. He has a feeling that's why Hannibal picked this. Will still makes a squawked sound of protest.

"I spoke too soon. If you could find a lighter and a bottle, I can take Will out of here."

And then they lurch in closer to Neph. Will can smell fear without needing any of Hannibal's power - it's sour and soaks him, all of them, as they huddle. Hannibal's mouth touches Neph's hair. His eyes never close, even though Will couldn't guess what it is they're seeing. "Don't stay behind. I will not leave without you."

And then they are doing just that. Leaving, one surprisingly deft step at a time. Hannibal moves like a machine - purposed, careful, regimented. Will might have found it soothing in another setting. Right now, it's eerie, to see so much humanity inside of Hannibal and then see how completely he can pull armor over it, like his entire body and mind is made of something reflective. Like he's voluntarily bulletproof.

In the wild moments while Will is hanging suspended above the warehouse floor, before they've quite reached the freedom of the door, it makes Will want to see Hannibal irrecoverably moved.

"I don't know when I'll forgive you," Will gasps into Hannibal's shirt, and all at once he feels nauseous. Hannibal's heart is steady and loud in his ear.

"I know."

And Will is quiet after that, because he thinks he's already part of the way there.

They breach the doorway in silence. The long summer day is stretched thin into evening, stars dotting a dark blue sky. There's enough light to see cars scattered across a gravel parking lot, once Will blinks his sight clear. "Either of you." Will's shaking. He can't feel it, but he hears it in his voice.

"I know." Said into his hair. "But I am not letting you stay behind, either."

Will turns away from Hannibal's chest as much as he can, as if he could possibly help pick the getaway car right now. He leaves one numb hand around the back of Hannibal's neck.

He keeps tilting back to look for Neph, or for a spark, back in the warehouse.
Edited (added more, apologies ) Date: 2017-07-22 01:18 am (UTC)

Date: 2017-07-23 02:47 am (UTC)
wontgraham: (Default)
From: [personal profile] wontgraham
Night sky, stars, gravel crunching. Sound and light. Will's eyes drift closed and he floats on a sea of other people's affections, only buoyed back in by his own adrenaline.

"Your heart's so loud. In my ear." Will's head knocks against Hannibal's arm with every even step he takes.

Hannibal doesn't speak, but this close, Will can feel his agreement. Calling it 'pleasure' sounds obscene. It feels like a purr, low in Hannibal's chest, subvocal.

"Is it--" Will has to cough, throat dry. Even above everything else his body and mind are protesting, his thirst distracts him. "Is it because of killing half a warehouse of outlaws?" Will's head is swinging nearer to the cars. He thinks they might've stopped, that maybe Hannibal has chosen a vehicle. "Or because you just realized you're in love with Neph?"

Upside down, his head draped against Hannibal's arm, Will watches Hannibal's face. Hannibal doesn't look alarmed or offended. But he stops, gives it clear and serious thought like they're not in the middle of enemy territory and moments away from burning down a building full of dead bodies. "Yes."

Will breathes loud in the gathered dusk. Hannibal breathes like even Will's weight isn't enough to tire him. "That's. That's it. I saw it-- in there. You're in love with her."

"Yes." Hannibal sounds more intentionally reasonable this time, leans on the word. His eyes are seeking Will's. "Yes."

Will feels the way Hannibal avoids repeating the word himself, just allows the intention to be spilled into the open by someone else's voice. Is that what Will can be good for? Giving voice to the unvoice-able?

"Are you upset?"

Will tries to look at his own feelings. He sees exhaustion and pain and the slow, painful birth of pragmatism. They should be choosing a car right now, so they can leave before the bonfire engulfs all stray fuel nearby. "I'm not really sure what I am right now. Or what either of you are."

Hannibal watches him like he isn't sure he's real. Will feels himself being settled on the hood of something, and he doesn't need to ask if Hannibal's tired. There's a hand on his face now that Hannibal's got one free. It touches Will - not like he's delicate. Not like he's glass. But like Will is something metal and sharp that's just been forged in a fire, and Hannibal isn't sure if his hand will burn with the touch.

"It was never my intention to lose you while fighting to keep you."

Will's eyes close. He's surprised to realize that tears squeeze out when it happens. "Maybe now isn't the-- the best time." His chest feels like he took a solid punch to it. Will's next few breaths are strained against the thumb tacks apparently lining his lungs.

"It's both of you." Hannibal says, and Will tells himself he'll close his eyes because he can't do this right now, can't negotiate whatever it is Hannibal needs to claw out of his friends and hold still-beating in his own two hands, but their gazes meet anyway. It's the molten threat of forging weapons all over again, and Will's breath stutters with it. "It's been both of you."

"Is it." Will realizes it was easier to see Hannibal looking at Neph and feel like he could never measure up.

Being told he does measure up, that the snarl-toothed heat Hannibal has for what he owns is not exclusive to what he's just done with Neph, actually hurts more. That promise hurts more, sinks right in tight against the scar tissue Will likes ignoring in his chest and rips it wide open.

Neither of them go to brush the mess on Will's cheeks away. But after a few more seconds of Will making too much noise and both of them pretending that's alright, Hannibal leans in.

The lips against his don't feel dry, but that's only because tears and probably snot are covering Will's. He makes a brief noise of apologetic disgust and then sags into the physical contact. They end up with foreheads together, breathing right against each other's noses.

"But I must confess." Hannibal's hand is soft on Will's cheek, and now is the first time he tries to clean up any of the gross slime that's collecting on Will like a second skin. "I don't know how to hotwire a car."

Will startles himself with the force of his laughter.

*

Technically, Will doesn't know how to hotwire one either.

He'd only watched his dad do it, the one time he'd been too drunk and managed to lose his keys while out at a bar. He'd driven home that next morning with the car wired up, and when they'd gone for groceries later that afternoon, his dad still didn't have keys. Will had watched him do it with the wary fascination of any eleven year old watching an act they'd always assumed was illegal.

But it's not so different. Even separated by years and a pint or two of blood, Will manages to talk Hannibal through it.

Will is sitting across the entire back seat, leg propped up, as per Hannibal's orders and also Hannibal's literal physical placement of him there. Not that Will had wanted to offer much resistance to being told to lie down. His head aches, his throat screams, and while sleeping is a primal fear he's resisting, the call to rest has him wound up so tight he's got all his nails dug into a dead stranger's upholstery.

"Just spark it. Don't tie this set of wires together or anything." The car lights are already on, but it's just that and the radio and the windows working right now. Not a great escape.

The engine revs, and smug satisfaction roils from the front seat, and Will gasps with relief.

Date: 2017-08-02 01:41 am (UTC)
operapaintingandmurder: (☕ no my refrigerator isn't running)
From: [personal profile] operapaintingandmurder
Hannibal has always thought he felt most himself when alone, and he has consistently been proven wrong by this.

Humans are social creatures, he thinks to himself as he opens up the alarmed front door of the car he and Will choose to break into. He pulls open the panel as per Will's instructions, disconnects the clamor as he discovers which set of wires will turn the starter for them.

And humans are social creatures because they can only assess themselves accurately when compared to others, he thinks as he manually unlocks all the doors and then half-drags, half-lifts Will into the back seat. He smells Will's hair, steeped in fearful sweat and droplets of Neph's and Hannibal's blood, and Hannibal vibrates with connection.

Will talks him through sparking life into the engine, coaxing obedience from a connection of parts that Hannibal would have made no headway with, were he alone.

"You're so important." Hannibal says, and the words feel hotter than the fire he sees beginning behind the windows of the warehouse.

Will stiffens, in the backseat. Hannibal can hear vinyl seats crackle against tightening fingers.

And then Neph is joining them, a breathless one-liner letting Hannibal's attention hone in, happy and relieved, on his other friend.

Something's wrong.

He can tell before he looks at her, even if he isn't sure what he's sensing. Ozone, a burning car; smoldered and twisted usable parts, tapped beyond capacity. The scent hits him first, like always, and he's turning to Neph in a flash.

Her eyes. She looks like a monster. Hannibal can't stop staring, doesn't want to, but the glow of her - the way it carries her to a liminal space between human and more - he has a cold feeling about it beyond the beauty.

"Neph," he starts, but doesn't get to continue.

"What's wrong with your eyes?" Will, from the backseat, clambering up for no earthly reason other than clear panic.

"Will, lay down. Your leg."

"Fuck off-- Neph, what's happening?" Will shoves away Hannibal's hand the first time, leaning away the next time he tries to pull himself closer against the back of Neph's seat. "Is it-- your magic?"
Edited (Typos) Date: 2017-08-02 01:42 am (UTC)

Date: 2017-08-07 12:58 am (UTC)
operapaintingandmurder: (☕ pic#4902908)
From: [personal profile] operapaintingandmurder
Once Neph starts, Hannibal goes still.

Not that he's really that prone to interrupting. Hannibal doesn't flare and spark right through the epicenter of events as they happen, like Neph. He doesn't get jittery and prone to grabbing at the edges of the conversation, like Will. He sits and he evaluates and, whenever possible, he knows what he's going to say before he says it.

But this silence is deeper. His concentration is more focused. Hannibal tunnels in on Neph and, as she turns herself away from him, he sits up more in her direction.

When she turns back to him, shading her eyes through her lashes and her hand, Hannibal finally leans forward and presses his fingers against her knuckles.

Will, thank god, is quiet. Hannibal can't tell if it's because he doesn't know what to say or because he's consciously letting the two of them deal with it - if he's bending to the fact that Hannibal is the one Neph has singled out to clean up this mess.

Well. That circumstances have chosen him for it, more accurately.

(Coma. She won't just need Pewter, she'll need fluids. Can he get an IV into where he's already planning to take them after they stop off for elixirs? He's already going to have to steal from the university's hospital... Checklists of preventing bedsores, optimal positioning, how to procure enough pillows for that, all flicker through his mind.

It helps to have something to reliably inventory, when his heart is so distracted by other types of uncertainties.)

When Neph apologizes, Hannibal can feel Will tense in the backseat, still hanging off Neph's headrest, but Hannibal doesn't look at him. Hannibal gives his head one decisive shake.

"I can handle it." And he can. "I saw--" He leans forward towards Neph, not that that can possibly exclude Will from the conversation, where he clings to Neph's seat and breathes against her hair. "What I was capable of while I was alone." What his older self was capable of doing to survive. And his older self, as they established long ago, had had no one. "When I'm working to keep myself safe, as well as someone I care about?"

His smile is like a gash across his face. In the faded sunlight, there's just moon and stars and dashboard lights and now, Neph's eyes, to illuminate all the energy there. Hannibal would stop at nothing - truly nothing, he thinks, with a devotion that he wouldn't have believed possible just a year ago - to ensure his friends either survived or were avenged.

"No one will stop me from taking care of you. Both of you."

Date: 2017-08-08 03:15 am (UTC)
operapaintingandmurder: (Default)
From: [personal profile] operapaintingandmurder
Hannibal doesn't know that he shouldn't have to. He'll miss Neph being around, but in return he gets to see her incredibly vulnerable, and she's willing to be seen that way. That, in and of itself, is a gift, one that seems like it outweighs the inconvenience of caring for a comatose person for a week while also assisting someone with acute blood loss and a now-useless leg.

It's only when Neph says she trusts him but should have trusted him earlier that he responds. "Yes," he says, because the truth matters more than smoothing it out, here. "You should have." But the entire point that this is useful to say is because: "Maybe we can all become more...proactive. In sharing secrets that might harm ourselves or the others."

Hannibal is reasonably certain he can feel Will's stare from behind Neph, can hear his brain tea kettle shrieking about the mutant secret. How it just almost got them all killed.

Neph turns to him, too, and for a moment Hannibal thinks it's to share a moment mutually hating him for the fiasco that was accidentally revealing the mutant secret to Will. But no - it's a curveball, for Hannibal, who missed their conversation when Neph broke her arm and fingers. He just stares, genuinely surprised.

And grateful. Will had looked terrified enough that Hannibal could fight back at the apartment - by now, his mind must look like...well...

Like a criminal profiler's handbook.

Will is staring at Neph with open-mouthed - emotion. Attachment, Hannibal thinks, and horror. He looks like he's been shown something he loved just in time to see it dropped off a cliff - or perhaps just realized he loved something as it was dropped. He looks ruined, but he takes in one rattling breath and when he lets it out, he sinks towards Neph again. His hand touches hers. Will so rarely initiates touching. With either of them.

"I promise." Will looks like he had to swallow glass to get that out. It comes easier the second time: "I will. I'll stay." His face stretches into a grin that might look happier if he wasn't the same sick-yellow pallor as the moon rising behind them. "Not like I could really run off on anyone for a few days, anyway. Better wake up quick?" He shrugs through the joke, eyes squinting closed, and for a brief moment it's as if he hasn't lost over a pint of blood.

Date: 2017-08-11 01:48 am (UTC)
operapaintingandmurder: (Default)
From: [personal profile] operapaintingandmurder
It's difficult, trying to find words to encapsulate how Hannibal feels when he sees Neph and Will interact. It gets even more difficult when he's seeing them sync up, closer and closer. Two large, distinct planets that nevertheless are interacting with each other's gravitational pulls.

Will they ever feel for each other what Hannibal feels for both of them? ...Do they feel for Hannibal what Hannibal feels for both of them, is perhaps an even larger question. Would it matter to him if they didn't? ...It would. It certainly would, Hannibal confirms rapidly. He could stand everyone else hating him, if only Neph kept looking at him and saying she trusts him to watch over her while she can't, if only Will kept looking Hannibal in the eye.

Will stares at Neph, and Hannibal watches the pale blue lights reflected in his eyes. "...Yes. I want--" He swallows hard. His voice is wavering, and Hannibal doesn't think it's entirely emotions. Hannibal needs to find him blood. "I want to know. What happened." Those eyes find his, and with Neph's eyes reflected in them, Will's ability feels eerily present. "From both of you."

Hannibal nods. "We'll have plenty of time. If I am pulling a Kathy Bates on both of you." Hannibal only knows that reference because of Neph, which is perhaps why she mentions it at all, which is just another reason why Hannibal stretches himself out on the limb of making a joke.

In front of them is a great cracking, echoing down - a structure collapsing somewhere in the building. Flames lick at the high windows.

"We should probably get going." Says Will, though he doesn't let go from trying to starfish himself against Neph's headrest. "Before you have time to search the trunk for hammers."

"You should probably lie down." Hannibal says, shifting the car into drive. It is, perhaps luckily, an automatic, even if that results in Hannibal checking and double-checking it as he doesn't need to fiddle with it as they pull out across gravel. "Before you pass out in Neph's arms."

Will shifts around behind him, presumably lying down. Softly, possibly because he's too far gone to realize he isn't just thinking it, Will says, "Doesn't sound terrible."

"And you should recline your seat all of the way back. For when you do pass out." Hannibal glances across at Neph when he can, as the moonlight creates shadows roving across the dashboard as they pull out of an unknown parking lot and start west on the nearest, thin industrial road.
Edited Date: 2017-08-11 01:49 am (UTC)

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