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[nepharious]

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[nepharious]

The kidnappers walked her to the middle of the circle before shoving her to her knees, like a slave stumbling onto Colosseum sands. She'd be pissed at the insult to her reputation if she weren't so busy tallying odds and searching for her roommates.

Who are outside the circle, seated against a drum barrel Wait, no, not seated but tied to it, their hands ziptied in front so there's no room between their backs and the rusty metal. That's--she doesn't know what to make of that. She doesn't have time to wonder what to make of that, all her focus locking onto their faces in the dim lantern light.

Neph looks to Hannibal first, past the blood crusting his nose, mouth, and spattered liberally down the front of his shirt. All that red sets off an alarm in her head, but it's background noise compared to the howling rage in his eyes. She's never been able to parse him when he's like this, can't tell if he's furious they've been kidnapped, furious they've been injured, furious they've caught her as well or furious at her for getting caught. Neph meets his eyes and tries to beam competent steadiness over to him, to tell him she's got the outlines of a plan without projecting it for everybody else to see.

I got this she tells him as Knife-bat shoves at her shoulder, forcing her to drop her head and her gaze. We're getting outta here, no matter what it takes.

That promise could be complicated by Will, whose leg is soaked red from the knee down. Neph can't read him any better than she can Hannibal, not past his lightheaded slump. She lifts her chin enough to catch his eye, to really look at him, because it's Will she's about to sacrifice.

Hannibal will forgive her what comes next. At least, Neph hopes he will. But Will...Will has no reason to accept the necessity of it, and every reason to run screaming. He might take Hannibal with him when he does. She can't be sure, so she stares at him and she thinks I'm sorry, I'm sorry but I'm going to do it anyway, I have to, with the resignation of a kid who's played this game before.

A pair of legs block her eyeline, and Knife-bat takes a fistful of her hair and yanks, rocking her back and forcing her to look up at a third man.

He isn't the tallest or heaviest guy in the room. He's all around average, appearance-wise, and Neph's not familiar enough with specops or military assholes to guess at his background aside from his regulation haircut. Nevertheless she knows instantly that she's staring at the ringleader. There's an analytic coolness to his gaze that reminds her of Hannibal, makes her think he's only running with the rest of these chucklefucks because they further his goals somehow.

The grip on her hair loosens as he squats down to her eyelevel, hands hanging over his knees. They watch each other for a moment, him still and uncaring, Neph hunched over her aching ribs and squinting through a slightly swollen eye. She's kept her injuries from doing more than nibbling at Pewter, so while the bleeding's stopped and she can breathe just fine, there's still a monster bruise winging out beneath her eye and the burning itch of split skin over her ear. She must seem small, beaten, scared.

Good.

"It's amazing how human they can look," guy-in-charge says, fascination glittering in his voice. He couldn't be more obviously talking to everyone but her. "That's half the danger." Then his tone shifts and he reaches out and grabs her chin, tilting her face this way and that as if checking for an obvious tell. "Do you human-looking muties band together on purpose? Are even you disgusted by the physical mutations?"

Neph sways in a flood of revulsion at this man and his everything, his beliefs and his friends and his hands. It's so intense she doesn't realize she's meant to answer until the expectant silence drags on.

Fuck it, she thinks, and says with perfect honesty, "I'm not a mutant."

Every man - and the one woman over in the corner, absently shuffling a deck of cards - laughs. "That's what they all say!" someone shouts. Their boss just shrugs and releases her chin.

"Mutant, sympathizer, they burn the same." he says, eyes gleaming with fanatical fervor despite his studied boredom.

Neph's next breath catches in her throat, her gaze darting over his shoulder to Hannibal and Will and the barrel they're propped against. There's a whole stack of similar drums behind them, maybe a dozen piled up in a rough pyramid. What's inside? The man turns his head slightly, far enough to track her eyeline, and smirks at her.

Before his mouth finishes twitching into place, the following happen:

Neph burns Tin and Pewter, the cold altoid burn of Tin waking all her nerves and muscles, the forgefire of Pewter jacking them all to two, three, four times their normal capacity. The ziptie around her wrists snaps like a cheap hairband, and the knife up her right sleeve slips into her palm. She reaches back with her left, grabs Knife-bat's bootknife, and snatches it up with pickpocket surety. Neph twists at the waist, scything her arms around. Her righthand knife plunges into Knife-bat's iliac artery (thank you, Hannibal, for flashcards and textbook illustrations) while the left cuts across the ringleader's throat.

Even with Pewter backing her, his reflexes are sharp enough that he leans away, pulling out of her reach. But Neph's range is not and never has been limited just to her arms. The knife leaves her hand, severs skin and tendons and both jugulars, before Iron Pulls it back to her palm.

A howl bursts from Knife-bat just as his boss topples backward, one hand flying up to his spurting neck. A jet of blood catches Neph across the shoulder and cheek. It scorches like cooking oil, searing her skin, but she's still moving, spinning from her knees to her feet. Her stolen knife flies from her hand again, flipping into her other kidnapper's eye. That one drops silently as Neph revolves, momentum tearing her ceramic knife from Knife-bat's leg. He goes down screaming, blood spilling between his hands. How many heartbeats before it all pumps from that severed artery? Hannibal would know.

In the hovering split second while everyone else processes whatthefuck just happened and reaches for their weapons, Neph Pulls the metal knife from the dead man's eye socket and flings it across the room, where it sinks into the hairsbreadth between Hannibal's bound ankles, severing the ziptie in the process.

"MUTIE BITCH!" one of the other men screams, and then Neph's entire world splits into slivers, carved out by bullet ley-lines. She twists, a half-leap to the side that, backed by Steel and Iron, curves them impossibly around her body and into the stake of crates to her right. Someone who'd been sitting there, raising their own gun, goes down with a gurgling shriek.

Heart hammering, shoulders burning with the effort of redirecting speeding-bullet momentum, Neph launches herself off the ground and toward the depot's rafters. The corrugated metal roof overhead is as wide and solid as the earth, enough to belay herself onto a wide wooden beam. Shots from below send splinters exploding through the air as she runs along its length, hopefully leading them away, away from the boys and the barrels.

[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.

[nepharious]

The thing is -- a bullet strikes a crossbeam, darting splinters into her cheek -- the thing is Neph's not an assassin. This, killing people, thinking about how to kill people, it's not something she does. The deaths on her hands have always been, if not accidental, then at least unanticipated self defense. Even the four still-warm bodies on the depot floor technically fall into that category.

(Technically.)

But now she's skimming across the underside of a corrugated metal roof, planning the deaths of half a dozen people shooting at her, grasping for a plan of attack that won't get her or her boys killed...and coming up blank. Every thought ricocheting around her brain ends with collateral damage, every strike-back exposes her to retaliation. She's only gotten this far by being reactionary and fast.

So don't think. Do.

The bullet spray's gone wide, maybe a sign that they don't know exactly where she's gone. A catwalk runs all the way around the top of the depot, piled here and there with equipment and repair supplies. Lots of metal. Lots of loud, heavy metal.

Neph tucks herself around a beam and Pulls at a fistful of leylines. Crates stacked on the opposing catwalk tip, spilling pipes and fittings to the floor twenty feet below. Shouts come hard on the heels of the cacophonous clanging, then bullets bullets bullets. Neph peeks over the beam under the cover of this distraction.

There's a man directly below her, gun braced to his shoulder, hunched into a half crouch. Four others are spread out in a messy half-circle, all at least ten feet distant, all trained on the tumbling pipes. Without pausing to question the possible outcomes, Neph drops down.

Her feet land squarely on his shoulders, her weight bearing him to the ground. Her knives flash before he falls any further than his knees, glinting metal in her left hand and matte ceramic in her right. They dip past the collar of his heavy woven tactical vest and slice neatly through the big artery below the shoulders (subclavian reads her own handwriting in green glitter gelpen), one on either side of his neck. He doesn't even have time to shout before she's flattened him, bleeding him out into the floor.

Neph gathers her weight to spring back into the ceiling shadows, but something familiar catches her eye as she lifts her head. It pings a template stored somewhere in her mind, the slope of a shoulder and the plane of a cheek under loose bangs. It's enough that she pauses long enough to recognize Hannibal watching from behind one of the stacks of crates their kidnappers had been using as seating earlier. It's hard to tell from this angle, but she thinks he might be holding something.

Knowing him like she does, she's got no question it's something he can use against the surviving militants.

Her chin jerks, a motion that could mean got it or wtf dude get outta here. There's too much zinging around Neph's brain for her to be sure which she intends, even as she cuts her ties to gravity and alights back on the beam. The whole thing took maybe six seconds, long enough that the shooters have noticed she's not buried under that pile of piping, long enough for someone to howl an alarm as they notice the new body.

But not Hannibal. They haven't noticed Hannibal. And as much as she wants his squishy, shootable body nowhere near any of this, Neph knows there's no extracting him without literally scruffing him by the collar and hauling. She knows this viscerally and from personal experience.

This could even the odds. She could--she could make this even the odds.

Neph leaps halfway across the span of the depot to land behind the boxes she'd overturned, an inhuman distance for anyone that isn't a goddamn TK jesus fuck nobody said there'd be a TK. There's more materials down below, day to day stuff the depot managers need for upkeep and maintenance. Stuff like--

--rolls of chainlink fencing, stacked against the wall near the door she was dragged through. A coil of barbed wire sits nearby, hidden in shadow but bristling with blue-tinged glory to her Steel and Iron senses. Neph almost laughs in sheer bloody minded joy, but so far she's managed to successfully keep herself out of anybody's rifle scope. Best it stays that way.

The militants have fanned out from the body, and Hannibal's shifting behind those crates like he's thinking of making a move, or maybe just waiting for one of them to circle back around his way. The remaining four split into groups of two, the first pair heading for the catwalk stairs (SHIT), the second doubling back towards the first pile of bodies. Past Hannibal.

Yes!

The chainlink rolls unspool through the air like bolts of cloth, rattling as they entangle both men. The barbed wire takes a little more finessing, snarled as it is around itself, but after a little fumbling Neph finds one end and focuses her Pull there, whipping it through the air with an angry hiss. At this angle, she threads the needle between their bodies, so as they try to thrash their way free they end up piercing limbs and drawing blood.

A harsh cry from her left keeps her from closing the trap any further; she's been spotted, maybe her hair gave her away, all that matters is the bullet that bounces off the catwalk by her knee. Neph shoves off her hands and scrambles away.

[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.

[nepharious]

A second bullet grazes her ribs. The force and angle of the impact should send the slug right through her side, possibly skim a kidney along the way. But Pewter hardens her skin, increases the density of her bones, renders her...not bullet-proof, but bullet-resistant. Somewhat. The shot still splits her skin and strikes off a rib with bruising force. All the breath in her lungs goes out on a pained yelp, muffled between clenched teeth.

Neph barely catches herself on the catwalk railing. It's the loss of balance more than anything else that calls back her earlier terror, that breaks her momentum. She stops tracking the furor on the floor and wheels around, swatting through the leylines in search of the gunman--

--and Hannibal's already there, knife twisting in one man's side, the better to angle him as a meatshield. Her lips part but she does not breathe as he gets a a handle on his victim's gun, fires a bullet into the other's belly, knees his shield to the ground with an extra stab for good measure, and cuts the throat of the man who'd bruised her ribs.

Neph touches fingertips to her bloodied side and just stands there for a moment, chest heaving between her need for air and her blooming bruises. She watches Hannibal look up and around, perhaps remembering the man and woman she'd left tangled up in chainlink and barbed wire. She'd pulled them down for him, to give him an easier target. Instead he came after two armed men with a knife and a little bit of cover. Because they were a bigger challenge? Or because they were coming up behind her?

Hannibal looks around, blood dripping from his chin and ear, eyes dark pits under heavy brows. His hands don't tremble the way hers do when she pauses over a body. He looks like something she'd see at the 'Mart, passing through after a Hunt.

She forgets, sometimes, that he's no more human than she is. She's never allowed to forget she isn't, but that's always meant watching her own back, before. Neph watches Hannibal scan the rest of the depot like an overstimulated velociraptor and stops seeing the bodies at his feet and the blood on his face. There's only the person she came here to find, alive and whole and exactly where she'd want him to be if she ever gave herself that choice: with her.

A wave of staggering pain rolls up her side, setting her head swimming. Neph bites down on Pewter and Pulls herself up and over the railing, arcing along the ceiling to land on another beam. There's still the two militia members tangled up in fencing on the floor. One of them's managed to get her gun loose, and from where she's lying flat on her back she has an excellent view of Neph passing overhead. She lets out a shout and tries to raise it, scoring herself on barbed wire as she struggles. Neph's hand tightens on her stolen metal knife. Stabbing someone who can fight back is one thing, but--no, no if she gets out she'll absolutely try to kill them all. Or go for help.

Her mouth is dry and sour as she flicks the knife down and back, the force of her Pull wrenching it cleanly from the woman's eyesocket. The man with her lets out a hoarse cry, but Neph's already passing on. She'll leave him for Hannibal, she hasn't had eyes on Will in four whole minutes. That's more than enough time for him to get into trouble.

Like, on-his-knees-next-to-a-body-with-a-gun-pointed-at-his-head kind of trouble. For the first time Neph notices his bloodsoaked leg, the way it's splayed awkwardly under him, the wide smear he's left on the floor. Her stomach flips and all clinging moral misgivings shred away. The guy with the rifle settles into the perfect stillness of a trained marksman about to take a shot.

Neph's bullet-resistant. Will isn't.

She hits the floor faster than gravity, propelled by the wide metal plane of the corrugated roof. Her side shrieks and spasms but knees barely bend, all her weight distributed through the scattered nails and tacks and metal filings strewn across the floor. They blow back, pinging off the barrels and crates, a thousand distracting skitters that do nothing to distract the gunman. His eyes blow wide through the rifle's sight and his finger, already half-curled on the trigger, squeezes.

A double-barreled roar shakes the depot.

Neph throws her right hand out on instinct, every last microgram of Iron fizzing in a blue maelstrom of a Push. In that moment she's not thinking about the gun, or the gunman, just the bullet and what it could do to Will. The slugs exit the rifle even as Iron turns to rocket fuel.

In the next blink:

She shoves. Fixes on those two leylines and sends everything she has through them them, straight back down the barrel. Her whole body jerks with a milisecond's effort Pushing harder than speeding bullets, straining to pass some of the force into the ground, the support beams, something bigger and heavier and truly immobile and--

The first two bullets strike the next, chambered, shots, sending the whole rifle up as though she'd jammed it with a stick of dynamite. It bursts apart, hot metal spraying the air and--

The the gunman falls flat on his ass, screaming, clutching the bloody ruin of his hands to his chest. Neph flinches her face into her shoulder to shield her eyes from shrapnel and--

The squarely-centered focus of her Push slips sideways and just like that she might as well've tried to catch a bullet barehanded. Her arm jerks so hard she nearly spins, pinky and ring finger snapped backward over the knuckle. A series of wet pops scale her arm, fractures bursting bone like wet wood thrown on a fire.

The gunshot echoes die on the militiaman's hysteric howls and Neph's own high-pitched scream as she stumbles back into Will.

[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.

[nepharious]

Her scream cuts off as her heel hits Will's thigh, her hip checks his shoulder, and she goes down. Again, the loss of balance triggers a panic spike that - almost - overrides the splintering pain. Neph's good hand goes out, hooking at leylines, but then there's an arm around her middle and she's only half-falling over Will's legs. Are they his legs? She's not real clear on where his limbs are. Or where her limbs are. Except the one.

Will's grip tightens, clamping down on her swollen ribs. Neph tries to bleat a protest, but she clutches instinctively at her bad arm with her good hand and ends up squeezing down on a fracture--

Everything goes swimmy.

When she refocuses, they've moved. The oil barrels loom large at Will's back, and she's sort of wedged against his hip, her spine against the side of his ribcage as though she were drowning and he's trying to one-arm swim them both to safety. That's enough of a shock to drag her wounded animal thoughts from the safe den of her brain; he pulled her away? He's touching her? On purpose?

Neph's head lolls back so she can stare at him in proper shock. His mouth moves, but she can't hear anything over the harsh hhah hhah hahh of her own stuttered breath. Her arm lays across her lap, a frayed wire that dangles from her shoulders, spraying sparks everywhere. She can't look at it. She doesn't want to know the damage. It's easier to look at Will, to wonder how he's not recoiling after what he's just seen. What he just got dragged through.

"I'm sorry," she pants, maybe she's babbling over him, she can't tell. "I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sor-."

Oh, wait, no, panting hurts. Panting stabs right at her ribs. Neph cuts herself off with a hiss, tries for longer, shallower, more careful breaths, but that kind of muscle control slipped away when she wasn't looking. It's all she can do not to shake, nevermind monitor her mouth.

"Don't," her uninjured hand clutches at the arm holding her up, fingers digging urgently into his sleeve. She tries to focus on his face, hovering over hers. "Don't--don't be mad, don't--please--don't go--"

Whether he made any sense of that will have to wait; Will looks up and away from her. He shouts something, and it sounds more alarmed than frightened or mad, though her ability to parse words is still floating somewhere in the ether. He wobbles, his arms tighten around her again, and then he's twisting away to reach for something. Before Neph can wonder if she oughta worry, there's a gunshot. She jolts up, or tries to, falls back with a bitten-off cry, and then Hannibal's there.

He reaches for her face. His hands are sticky. He's probably talking at her, too, but none of the sounds come together right. It's all just syllables, nothing that fits together into sense. Neph watches the rest of his red, red face while his mouth makes shapes. His eyes are a little more human now, crackling with rage like a summer sky. She decides she likes that better than the dispassionate feyness from earlier. She loosens her grip on Will's arm and reaches for him, clamps onto the back of his neck.

"You're okay," she might have enough oomph left to pull herself up, or maybe he leans down to her. Either way, her face ends up in his shoulder. Hannibal literally smells like death, but it's whatever. He's not hurt. If only her other arm weren't in pieces; she needs to wrap him up close for an indeterminate amount of time to let that reality sink in properly. "You're okay we're okay it's--it's fine, I'm fine, I just can't, um, um, stop bullets?" Not enough mass, not enough muscle. Somebody like Benkei or Samson or Atlas could manage it, but that's never been her forte. She was stupid to forget that. "S'not like ricochetin' 'em I'm not--I'm not strong enough it's fine it's gonna be okay."

Everything hurts a little less when she's talking, enough that she risks a look at her arm. It's badly swollen, bruises already rising to the surface of her skin like ink in water. Seven, eight bad ones, likely marking the breaks. At the end of it all there's her hand, the inverted arc of her fingers, bone showing white at the joints where skin split and cartilage burst.

Neph whips her face away a full 180 degrees, practically grinding her eyes into Will's shoulder. Just seeing it makes the pain real and alive again. "Ohhhhh no, no nope I take it back it's not fine wow that's bad that's bad okay, okay, okay," she breathes through her teeth, puffing out her cheeks against vomiting her panic all over the depot floor.

An injury like this would've meant the end of her career and all her tentative plans, just a year or two ago. Even now it's hard not to feel the world tilting off its axis beneath her. In reality that's just Will (alive and here and not-shot), adjusting his hold. In reality she has Hannibal and his medical knowledge, a bathroom full of stolen supplies and--

--and a scavenged stash of Lecter's elixers in her closet.

[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?"

[nepharious]

It'll be fine, she tells herself. A couple shots of Pewter, a bottle of elixir, and she might even recover grip strength and full range of motion in those fingers. It's just a matter of staging the magic; should she burn Pewter now to clear up the smaller hurts, making the elixir more effective, or should she wait, in case Pewter cements some of the damage done to her hand?

She can't think past the image of it, even with her eyes screwed shut against Will's shoulder. It's several heartbeats before Neph even registers Hannibal's voice, and half his words slip past before she recognizes his I Am A Medical Doctor Mostly No Really tone.

"--think applying too much pressure to your fingers is a good idea, regardless of their bleeding. They need to be set. But here" he's saying. Neph turns her face back to him, expression screwed up between pain and concentration. Sorting his accent doesn't usually take this much effort, but her brain's an overturned bookshelf right now: words and fragments and knicknacks everywhere. "'kay," she gasps. Who's she to refute a mostly-medical opinion?

Reality stutters when he begins to swaddle her hand. Do you remember? she almost says. You were so short and little and mad. And now he's tall and sharp-edged and mad. The more things change.

Will breathes in to speak, and Neph tilts her head back to try and get a look at his face. His whole face, not just his mouth. He's chalk white, lips tinged blue at the edges, eyes shriveled up in his skull. He clutches her like a pillow to his chest, brandished against the dark after a nightmare.

"We should burn this place," There's a tremor to his breathing that isn't usually there, and a southern slur to his words he normally suppresses. It'd frighten her, if she didn't agree with him down to her last atom. Left alone, these bodies -- the bodies she dropped -- are a terrifying show of power, metanatural or just pure violence. If the news connects the dead men and woman with whatever anti-mutant group they belong to, the whole east coast'll go up in a witch hunt.

Her only hope of keeping tonight from blowing back on other innocent mutants is to confuse the trail. Hannibal's not wrong that fire might seem even more violent, but that's a lot of oil at Will's back.

"Burn it down," she doesn't even hesitate. "Look, it--right now it's mostly just, just stabbings and bullets. Except for--" Neph jerks her chin at the body behind Hannibal, at the bloody stump of a wrist lying at its side and the red wrack of its face. The sight of it sets off a tiny flinch in her core, has her twitching back against Will. He'd be a reassuring bulk if he weren't trembling like a live speaker. "There's so much fuel here, I bet they always meant to set the whole depot on fire. One'v'em must'a worked here to keep it alll and let everyone else in an' out."

Like a security guard or site manager, maybe? The scenario unspools in her minds' eye, so clear she has to close her eyes against it and breathe out to keep it from swimming to life. "Lemme...lemme go real high an' drop a molotov on it. Through the roof. It'll go up like a bad movie. It'll take forever t'get the bodies all sorted out, and I bet whoever owns this place'll...they'll want it under the rug. They won't wanna be linked to any hate groups"

She's worked for enough wealthy or corporate clients to know how quickly ties get cut when something goes wrong. Serious money's on the railroad or shipping company or whoever rushing the investigation along to cash out on insurance before anybody can ask what all the oil drums were doing there in the first place.

When she blinks her eyes open again, Hannibal's watching with thoughtful intensity. Neph gives his shoulder a parting squeeze and lifts her hand to scrub her knuckles against his jaw. "Set my hand, okay? I gotta--I can't look at it, it'll get in the way anyway. Just--get the fingers straight, please? Then you guys can get inna car and I'll catch up."

It's a better deal than leaving their own blood splashed all over the place in big, congealing pools anyway. Fire oughta take care of DNA. She hopes. Will would know best, and he's the one who suggested fire.

[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.

[nepharious]

"The point is a broken arm's gonna flap around when I'm two hundred feet up," now she's slurring a little, exhaustion and pain and shallow breaths all weighing on her tongue. Neph scrapes her thumbnail idly against a clot of something drying on Hannibal's neck, maybe a bit of face cartilage pasted on with blood. "Might make it worse if s'not wrapped up and tied down."

Her eyes slide away from the gore when he moves to study her hand. He has to lift it a little, and even that small motion scrapes bone against bone. Worse, it shifts her broken fingers into the lower edge of her vision. Hannibal uses words like screws and sew and she wishes her ears hand't come back online after all. Sour saliva fills her mouth, a warning tide against the heaving queasiness in her belly. If she looks, she's gonna throw up all over Will. She might anyway, if Hannibal accepts her request.

Neph rolls her head back to look at Will instead. Worry and strain tighten his face, but there's still a little shiver of irritation when Hannibal dismisses his question. "It's the good shit," she manages a wan, upside-down smile for him. "Better'n those painkillers. Oughta fix your leg up, too. You'll like 'em."

As far as she's concerned, the elixirs and her other tools are the only reason to go back to that apartment at all. This cell of anti-mutant militants might be dead, but there could be others, and those might have Hannibal, Neph and Will all flagged too. A delayed flight response bubbles somewhere in her chest, subsumed by other priorities. But. Soon.

She refocuses on Hannibal, drawn by the pointed tone he uses whenever he's hit on some new line of questioning. "Not...not on purpose," she frowns, tries to think it through. "But f'I don't burn Pewter, I'm not gettin' back up, so some healing's gonna happen anyway." She can only hope that won't mean irreversible stiffening of her fingers, but that's another problem for later.

Hannibal nods and Will shifts so she's settled against his chest instead of his side. Neph turns her face away, free hand curling up behind his arm to grip at the back of his shoulder. She swallows another mouthful of nausea and breathes out, hard.

Empty lungs don't stop her from screaming, high and sharp, into Will's shoulder. Hannibal doesn't hesitate, but the seconds spent cracking her fingers straight one after the other are the longest of Neph's life. She bucks against the pain, but her broken arm and bruised ribs protest the flailing and shut her down hard.

She blacks out.

Not for long. It can't be more than a couple seconds, since she comes to with her hand still between Hannibal's. If he'd had time to notice, he surely would've been all up in her face. Neph pants into Will's shirt and slowly, creakily pries her nails loose. They probably went right through that cheap cotton and drew blood, but what's a little more at this point?

"Awesome," Neph croaks. "Okay. Now f-find a bottle and let's...let's do this thing."

Big words, considering she takes another thirty seconds to ease up off Will's chest. A little shuffling and one-handed propping gets her to her knees, and from there she's able to lean against an oil drum to stand. Once upright, she has to pause and catch her breath, which provides a great opportunity to study the ceiling.

The roof's corrugated metal. Held together with fat studs. She squints along their leylines and smiles grimly to herself. Nails were her first trick, and wrecking roofs her second. The squint deepens into a tired scowl and thumb-sized bolts hail down, pinging off the barrels but managing to miss Will and Hannibal entirely.

[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."

[nepharious]

Hannibal catches her with the ease of a parent snagging a child by the back of their jacket. Neph frowns muzzily; was he always that fast? "But--it's better if the car's far away when the fire starts," she points out. The logic of this, so clear in her mind just a minute ago, slips away as she tries to shape it for him to understand. "We don't--we don't know where we are or how close the nearest station is or what their dispatch time looks like and we all look like horror movie extras and--"

Important details! All of which scatter like a handful of marbles as Hannibal improvises a sling and eases her arm into it. Broken bone grates under bruised meat and Neph sways on her feet, vision whiting over once again. Will's voice winds through the suddenly thick air like bubbles through syrup. She thinks he might be on Hannibal's side in this, but can't be sure without picking out the words. The world refocuses as Hannibal ties off the improvised sling and lets her arm hang, settle.

It narrows again when Will's eyes flare wide and he flinches away from the hailing metal. What're you doin'? Did one hit him? Is she that tired, that sloppy? But, no, Will's just eyeing her and the ceiling with equal trepidation, a slack wariness that makes her stomach twist.

"I was just gonna--" she starts to say, turning towards him. He's barely out of arm's reach now, clutching at his wounded leg. Neph stares at his red-slicked hands and loses track of her explanation just long enough for Hannibal to turn her back around by the shoulders. One hand loosely curls around her uninjured wrist.

On the ground he insists as he maps out their next few steps. He looms so close his words press against her with a real physical weight. Neph looks back at him and blinks, slowly, one eye out of synch with the other. The fingers around her wrist tether her to the ground, fragile as trust. She could break both with Pewter, make sure the boys are both safely down the road when the molotov goes off--

--except Pewter's no longer the comforting strength of banked coals, it's acid in her belly that eats up her esophagus. Steel and Iron cast ley lines around the depot, but the opposite ends are hooks in her flesh. Her metals are just a few more pulses away from transforming into razor wire and snaring her like the militants she trapped earlier. Burnout is just a few more inhuman feats away.

Does Hannibal see that? Or does he just want her close for the next part of this catastrafuck of a night?

Don't get hurt again Will says, and his hands aren't just red they're fresh and bright in a way they weren't when he dragged her away from their shooter. Is he newly hurt? Is he asking her for himself, or translating Hannibal for her? Neph gapes between them for a second before reaching up to scrub tiredly at her forehead. Hannibal releases her hand, and it comes away smeared with half-dried blood.

"Okay," her whole body sags, all but the last little bit of fight seeping away. "Okay, but let's--we gotta get Will out to the car. He's--Hannibal, his leg. Will what the fuck."

This time she does reach him, leaning unsteadily over the oil drum to pluck at his shoulder with her working hand until he'll raise his arm enough that she can catch his elbow. She might be teetering on the edge of Burnout, but she's got enough juice left to Pull him to his feet by the zipper on his jeans if it comes to that.

[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.

[nepharious]

Hannibal narrows his eyes as he releases her shoulders. Neph's still sorting out how she feels about his suspicious scrutiny when he scoops Will up into a princess carry, and then her train of thought jumps the rails. She's always known he was stronger than the khakis and button-downs let on - the two of them hauled that antique couch into the apartment - but it hadn't ever really meant anything before. Seeing it now triggers a distracted sense of satisfaction, her lizard brain congratulating itself on choosing an appropriately badass partner. Under less insane circumstances she might even be smug, but the warm rush in her chest is too startlingly alien to flourish.

Since he's got his hands full of bleeding boyfriend, Neph readily nods when he asks her to handle the arson. Her left hand flexes at her side, working fingers stretching against the stiffness of shock and pain. After everything she's already done tonight, of course she can handle a couple of makeshift grenades--

Hannibal steps into her space, Will tucked close to his chest but still bulky enough that his shoulder bumps hers. Neph rocks in place, face crimping. She opens her mouth to remind him the door's over on the other side of the room when he cranes over Will and all but kisses her hair. His words are so warm against her scalp, there may not be anything 'almost' about it.

I will not leave without you.

The sloping lines of her shoulders don't straighten, but they do sharpen to rigid angles. She looks up at him with a face that's 60% widened eyes, skin bone white behind the drying blood. He doesn't look directly at her, not that she'd know what to do with eye contact if he'd offered it. Neph came here willing to do terrible things to rescue or avenge these boys, with unknown odds of success and no odds at all on there still being a we afterward. The screaming six year old inside her expected them to be wrapped up in shock blankets and whisked away in an ambulance, never to smile at or touch her again.

She doesn't have the words to tell him so, or any way to order the words for what that promise means to her. They fill her mouth like naptha, like embalming cotton, like a thousand tiny charms for safe passage through the dark. She swallows them down, where they fill the empty spaces left by tapped Allomantic metals.

"Okay," she says, as he steps back to carry Will toward the exit. "Just--gimme a minute."

The pool of light in the center of the warehouse does not extend to the door, and she's too tired to expend the Tin to watch them through the shadows. Neph can't tell if either of them look back, so maybe someone sees her with her left hand pressed to her mouth, holding in the charms and the knowledge that she'd have done worse than simply 'terrible things' for this. Her actions tonight may slip sideways through her wandering thoughts for the rest of her life, her skin may never cool where blood painted her face, but she'd do it and more over again.

Now, though, there are bodies. An awful lot of bodies, only half of them her doing. The warehouse reeks of blood and opened cavities, of things spilled into the dirt. Neph breathes through her mouth as she returns to the center of the circled boxes, where the first bodies hit the ground. She goes to her knees beside the ringleader, whose staring eyes are already fuzzed over with dust and lint. A quick rifle through his flak vest turns up an extra clip, a multi tool, a cell phone and a roll of twenties. She has to dig for his wallet, reaching under the body to pry it from a back pocket. That she keeps, along with the cell and the cash. The others might've been weekend warriors, but this guy was a fanatic, and it's better she look him up than the cops, who could connect the anti-mutant dots. The more she can muddy that trail, the better.

Another of the dead men wore one of those checked arabic scarves, which Neph tugs loose and winds around her elbow. The guy who kicked her in the ribs has a pack of cigarettes and a lighter in his pocket. She keeps the latter. The makeshift card table provides a couple of beer bottles. She snags three by their necks between her splayed fingers, and carries her findings back to the oil drums.

Nails and bolts pulled from the ceiling make ideal projectiles for puncturing steel oil drums. Viscous brown fluid fountains from multiple small holes, the flow settling from a spray to thin streams. Neph kneels down to fill the bottles one by one, tearing strips off the scarf with her teeth and good hand as oil mingles with the dregs of cheap beer. She drops another stud into each bottle, stoppers the open mouths and gathers her little bombs in the crook of her sling.

The man who'd shot at Will, the one who wrecked her hand, lies on his back nearby. Neph heaves to her feet, looks down at the ruin of his face and risks a look at her own hand. The agony's faded to something like holding a live coal in her palm; maybe her brain shut down to protect itself, Hannibal would know. Her broken fingers bleed even now, blood dripping down the front of her shirt and jeans. Skin swells over splintered bone, so purple as to be black. Her ring and pinky fingers unrecognizable. Kinda like this guy's face. "Wow, Hannibal," she mutters.

Neph shoulders the door open more than just a 'few minutes' later. Unrefined oil fumes billow out around her, overriding the copper-sweet smell of new death. She turns, stolen lighter in her left hand and three molotovs tucked into the bend of her elbow. A flick of her thumb, a touch of flame to the linen, and the last embers of her Iron and Steel levitate and direct the bottles - they hit the slowly spreading pools of oil and burst with a soft whumphf.

Before it can really go up and blind her, Neph reels around to face the parking lot. As heat blooms against her back, all she can think is whether or not Hannibal even knows how to hotwire a car.

She forgot to grab anybody's keys.

[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.

[nepharious]

The first barrel bursts with a pressure that shoves between Neph's shoulderblades. Probably should've closed that door, she thinks as she staggers forward, half-running to get clear of any flying shrapnel. Her legs work just fine, even if her arm goes off like a firework with every step. Pewter keeps her on her feet when the second barrel ignites and sprays its contents across the warehouse interior and batters at the walls; it keeps her on her feet, but abrades her veins and muscles like bile at the back of her throat. She's burned up all her Steel and Iron, but the marionette fishhooks they set in her flesh still twinge as she moves.

Not good.

Headlights flick on across the gravel sea. Neph curls her left hand around her right elbow and marches toward it, paying extra attention to lifting and placing her feet. Better that than considering the distance, or how much easier it'd be to just Push herself off the cars and skim through the air. She allows herself just enough situational awareness to notice that Hannibal's picked a different car than the one she was hauled out of half an hour ago. That's good. Somebody might notice if the same car turned up near their apartment complex twice in one day.

Their apartment. If not for the elixirs hidden in her closet, she'd never ever go back there. Her every instinct screams NOPE at the thought, proposes half a dozen alternate bolt holes. But Will's leg, her arm...unless they want to risk an ER or waste time digging up somebody with healing abilities, they're outta choices.

"We'll need someone else to help pay rent on the new apartment."

Will got it right away, Neph remembers with dizzy relief. She can't know if he just wouldn't feel safe in their current place anymore or if he understands the need to hide from whoever made them as possible mutants in the first place, but he made that intuitive jump. And he said we. Like he was already figuring on them staying together after this.

Then Hannibal kissed her hair and--

--and she can't think about that anymore than she can bring her brain to bear on the thousands of little details between them and the apartment. Things like how they're all covered in blood, how they don't actually know where they are and don't have a phone to tell them, like ditching the car once they've made it back to Baltimore, like getting up the stairs without running into any of their neighbors. On and on, all the odds stack against them getting away with this. But they're alive, and Neph has always considered that the most essential victory. Everything else follows after.

Neph falls against the humming car's passenger side door, jostling the sluggishly bleeding gash along her ribs. With a grunt, she gets her stiffening fingers around the handle, pulls, and falls into the seat.

"Hi," she wheezes. A roaring fills her ears, maybe blood or maybe the fire really catching behind her. She quirks a half smile at Hannibal, dried blood cracking and flaking across her cheek. Above the mess, her eyes flicker a pale blue, lambent as a deep sea creature. "I hope this thing's gassed up."

[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?"

[nepharious]

"Neph," Hannibal says, a touch of creaking, rotten ice in his voice. Neph doesn't want to hear it. She did her best with the fire, and they can't wait around to make sure it catches because somebody insisted they all get out together instead of taking a reasonable headstart.

"C'mon why aren't we moving?" she pulls her left-hand knife and tucks the tip of the blade against her collar, slitting her bloody outer layer with one downward jerk. The hilt is alien in her hand, awkward and too-small, as though she were handling it through seven layered mittens.

"What's wrong with your eyes?"

Will grabs the back of her seat, her head bounces off the headrest and the knife goes tumbling into the footwell. "Ff-!" she starts to swear, starts to grab for the blade, but Will's words combine with the weight of Hannibal's stare, and her fingers go to the outside corner of her eye instead. "My..?"

The boys swat at each other, short and heated and totally unnoticed. Light gleams off Neph's fingernails, faint as a check engine alert on the dashboard. She breathes out around the dead coals in her stomach and almost expects to see smoke. Instead there's just...fear and guilt. The usual.

"I'm--" the squabble ends with Will half-hanging off her seat and Hannibal not-scowling at them both. They radiate concern and all she can do is reflect gaping terror back at them. They don't know. She never mentioned Burnout and all its wide open vulnerability to either of them and they don't know and now they're going to find out. There's no stopping this collapse.

She thought she had more time. Enough to make it back to Baltimore and stagger up the steps at least.

"It's, yeah, my--it's a warning," Neph turns the creepy glare of her eyes into her busted shoulder and digs her knuckles into her sockets. "I overdid it. Burnout. I'm gonna--"

Cringing, eyes squinted to minimize the glow as much as possible, she looks over her hand at Hannibal. It's not fair to leave him with two people to carry. They don't even know where they are, and when she thinks about everything he's gonna hafta do by himself...

He's the smartest person she knows. If anyone can do it--that doesn't make it right, but if anyone can do it--

--if she were gonna trust anyone to do it--

"In like half'a hour I'm gonna pass out," she tells him. "I mean like...coma. For a, a couple days, maybe more. It's--don't freak out, it happens, just, um, there're some Pewter vials in my desk? Pour some in me now'n then and I'll...be fine?"

The elixir might speed things along, or it might not. Physical healing's one thing, but she's scorched the path of magic through her body, ripped of callouses and scraped down to viscera. Burnout puts her out of commission so all that rawness can scar over. Who knows if potions help with metaphysical scarring? Not this girl.

"I'm sorry, Hannibal, I'm so..." She's supposed to be stronger. Maybe if she hadn't spend all day running through exercises with Jericho, but. She did, and she isn't.

[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."

[nepharious]

"I know, but...you shouldn't hafta," is pretty weaksauce coming from somebody who let herself be kidnapped in order to stage a rescue. Even if she had a leg to stand on, there, Hannibal's statement - his pledge - would kick it right out from under her.

Neph can count her Burnouts on one hand. Only once was anybody around to nurse her through the aftermath; the first time, when she was thirteen and Ruth had carefully nudged her up to and past that limit, so she'd know the warning signs for herself. Every other incident has been a nightmarish struggle to stay awake long enough to reach safety, back when 'safe' meant 'a shitty apartment with a cheap chain bolt' if she was lucky. No one to trickle Pewter into her, no one to change her bandages, no one to move her if the Inquisitors came...

No guarantee she'd wake up in her own room, instead of strapped to a table in some sterile government facility.

Hannibal brushes at the backs of her hands, urging them away from her eyes, and Neph lets him. The closer she edges to unconsciousness, the brighter and steadier the glow. What started as a foxfire flicker is already evening into a phosphorescent shine. By the time she stops fighting it, the blaze will light up her eyelids from the inside. But Hannibal smiles at her, his teeth the dull gleam of old bone against the bloody mask of his face, and clasps her knuckles. Even Will doesn't flinch away in her periphery, though his breath stutters against the back of her neck. She'll choose to put that down to shock and bloodloss instead of horror.

"I trust you t'do it," Neph doesn't look away. Her eyes are twin points reflected in Hannibal's, lending them a fervent sheen that might or might not be real. "But I should'a prepped. Prepped you. I just--I hate it."

She hates the tremors crawling up the raw passages of her body, the layers of insulating numbness, the brittle cold that blows off the dead forge in her gut. Even now she has to drop her head back against the seat or risk overbalancing in the wrong direction. Will makes an unreadable noise, enough to draw her attention around to where he's hanging like a half-mauled koala.

His eyes are huge and glassy, his skin waxy in the corpselight she sheds. Neph blinks rapidly to shake that impression, searching instead for the concern she'd heard in his voice a minute ago. He's not afraid. He really, really should be, but maybe he moved past the capacity for fear somewhere back in the warehouse. Maybe he's just trying to drag himself to safety, too. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

"Will you stay 'til m'awake again?" maybe they can both pretend like she didn't beg him for a much more open-ended promise, in the shock of having her hand smashed backwards. Her ears had rung so badly, she can't remember anything he might've said, can't remember anything but the iron band of his arm around her bruised ribs as he dragged them both away on one leg. "Please."

[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.

[nepharious]

There's no hiding Neph's flinch, not with the way the light flickers around her eyelids. She's tried to be better about warning them when her magic (or the world in which it operates) might bite them in the ass. She came clean about the Inquisitors, she explained warding and shielding to Will, she's even explained a little bit about where some of her jobs come from, but...

Was it so wrong to keep her Achilles heel under wraps?

The light dims further when she scowls at Hannibal. It's the kind of deep seated pique only a sibling or an old married person can feel for another. Really, Hannibal? After she hinted and nudged and outright told him to come clean and the mutant thing still blew up in all their faces? After she'd said hey maybe you oughta tell Will about the screaming nightmares now that he lives here and he hadn't done that, either? After it turned out he had an aunt stashed away somewhere in France?

She practically turns to Will out of self defense, 'cuz otherwise she's gonna let gravity win long enough to fall headfirst onto Hannibal's broken nose.

Will does not look annoyed. Will looks...bleak. As though he realized, too late, a trap closing around him. Neph's fever-dry mouth goes even more papery. She strains for the air to say just kidding or it's fine, but her battered ribs refuse to budge. His face is rejection made plain, the agonized embarrassment of someone searching for the least damaging way to say 'no'.

Neph can't run away from this car, so she collapses into herself like a coal. Will--follows after, reaching for the hand she'd settled on the armrest. Like this, with him hanging off the back of her seat, it's almost like a hug from behind. With a carseat in the way. Her shoulders unfurl the tiniest bit. I'll stay, he says.

"You don't--not forever, just--" he promised. He just promised, and she scrambles to give him an out. She hadn't asked for it but he just...threw it out there. "When I wake up I can...I can explain. F'you want."

Once she would've gnawed her own leg off for the chance to explain for a family that never cared to ask. After that, what was the point in sharing with anyone else? Maybe Will won't want to hear it either, why she did what she did. But on the off chance that he'll hear her out, that he'll stay past their recovery, she has to offer.

If offering means he hangs around long enough to say goodbye before he goes. Well. Maybe she'd like to know what that's like. Maybe she deserves that at least once.

Neph drops her head onto the seat shoulder and tilts a smile up at Will. "Don't say that," she wheezes. It was supposed to be a chuckle, but she can't have everything. "He'll pull a Kathy Bates on the both'a us."

It's a measure of her trust in Hannibal that she's actually, honestly, 100% joking.

[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.

[nepharious]

"You don't know already?" Neph says wonderingly. She'd thought--feared, really--that Will could scoop her frenzied motivations up in his hands, even when they were literally tied behind his back. His ability is frustrating in its tracelessness, unknowable unless he opens his mouth and says something mortifying. Maybe he just wants to hear it in their own words, or maybe there was too much freefloating horror in that warehouse for her guilt or grim resignation to register.

Maybe she can ask, if they're gonna be talking this over like adults.

"I vote to be unconscious for the stuff with the hammer," Carrying this joke further while a burning building collapses behind them has got to be some kind of unhealthy coping mechanism, but ask her if she cares right now. She winces at the sharp cherrybomb crack of beams collapsing, distinct even across a parking lot and through a closed car door. "We should--yeah, before the fire department shows up."

Their kidnappers probably turned off the alarms, if there were any, to ensure themselves adequate escape time after their planned witchburning. Still, better safe than sorry, and she's been hugely unsafe tonight.

Will releases the back of her seat as Hannibal shifts gears, a combination that leaves Neph feeling light and untethered. She floats for a second, eyes drifting shut as gravel crunches under the tires. Does Hannibal even know how to drive? His older self had a car, she remembers, but where'd he pick up the skill, and did meeting her throw that event out the window too?

A giggle slips out of her at his ongoing efforts to get Will to lie the fuck down. It's not funny, except for how it kinda is, and Will's response is just innocent enough that it slips past her alarms, tickling the edges of her own boundaries as it goes. "I have very strong arms," she says as she pulls the lever on her seat and clonks backward. Like this, her head is practically laying across Will's knees, with his head and shoulders behind Hannibal's seat. She can turn her face sideways and study him in the light from her own eyes. "I'd catch you. Not like Hannibal. One time he did a mutant Burnout an'he fell gettin' outta bed an' broke his nose. He needs'ta go easier on the nose or he's gonna ruin it."

Wait, that was a different Hannibal. Neph grimaces and lets her head fall forward, debating talking at all. The Burnout claws away at her, hollowing her out from the inside, but she refuses to just let it drag her under without a fight. They could pass a cop any second, she might need to...to do something. She oughta finish stripping off her bloody shirt, oughta hide her hand--

"Hey, Hannah," there's a definite slur to her words, now, a ghost of an accent rising from the grave, "While I'm undah you...you can mess with my hand. I won't feel it. So anything you gottah do, just...yeah. Don't go amputating anything though, m'serious."