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.
Edited (I cannot BELIEVE I missed the obvious parallel!! I am ashamed. Please enjoy flashback feels.) Date: 2017-07-12 05:49 am (UTC)
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.
"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.
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."
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.
"Not me." Will protests, and he isn't entirely sure which part he's protesting more. The concern being lobbied at him? The idea that his injuries trump Neph's? That he's the excuse they need to finally actually leave their newly-carved mausoleum?
"Yes, you." Hannibal watches Neph like he thinks she may still try to run, but he lets go of her to come down to Will's height. Hands sink under his armpits, fingers almost painfully strong against the wirey muscles of Will's shoulders, and Will is suddenly being heaved bodily off the ground.
"I didn't think you could lift me." Will says, honest and dazed. Hannibal gives a soft sound of derision, like he can't possibly imagine why anyone would ever assume he isn't used to lifting an entire person's worth of dead weight, and then suddenly it's not that funny to Will anymore.
"Neph." Hannibal says, and then Will is being manhandled in a different way. Only instinct from seeing it on TV and reading about it in emergency response books has his body responding at all, when the hands on him shift. One under his knees, the other around the backs of his shoulders.
At least while suspended in this type of carry, Will's leg is elevated to almost his heart level. He has a feeling that's why Hannibal picked this. Will still makes a squawked sound of protest.
"I spoke too soon. If you could find a lighter and a bottle, I can take Will out of here."
And then they lurch in closer to Neph. Will can smell fear without needing any of Hannibal's power - it's sour and soaks him, all of them, as they huddle. Hannibal's mouth touches Neph's hair. His eyes never close, even though Will couldn't guess what it is they're seeing. "Don't stay behind. I will not leave without you."
And then they are doing just that. Leaving, one surprisingly deft step at a time. Hannibal moves like a machine - purposed, careful, regimented. Will might have found it soothing in another setting. Right now, it's eerie, to see so much humanity inside of Hannibal and then see how completely he can pull armor over it, like his entire body and mind is made of something reflective. Like he's voluntarily bulletproof.
In the wild moments while Will is hanging suspended above the warehouse floor, before they've quite reached the freedom of the door, it makes Will want to see Hannibal irrecoverably moved.
"I don't know when I'll forgive you," Will gasps into Hannibal's shirt, and all at once he feels nauseous. Hannibal's heart is steady and loud in his ear.
"I know."
And Will is quiet after that, because he thinks he's already part of the way there.
They breach the doorway in silence. The long summer day is stretched thin into evening, stars dotting a dark blue sky. There's enough light to see cars scattered across a gravel parking lot, once Will blinks his sight clear. "Either of you." Will's shaking. He can't feel it, but he hears it in his voice.
"I know." Said into his hair. "But I am not letting you stay behind, either."
Will turns away from Hannibal's chest as much as he can, as if he could possibly help pick the getaway car right now. He leaves one numb hand around the back of Hannibal's neck.
He keeps tilting back to look for Neph, or for a spark, back in the warehouse.
Edited (added more, apologies ) Date: 2017-07-22 01:18 am (UTC)
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.
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.
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."
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?"
"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.
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."
"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."
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.
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.
Edited (minor addition for maximum throatpunch) Date: 2017-08-08 07:09 am (UTC)
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.
"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."
When they pull up to their apartment building, the dashboard clock reads 11:54. It's a nice area of town, so no one is around lurking. Hannibal sees no one as he strips off both his shirts, balls them inside one another, and tucks them behind the car seat.
His nose is still bloody, there's coagulation across his ear and hair, but at least without a red-splotched shirt he stands out slightly less. Shirtless, bloody pants still visible, he goes into the lobby and calls the elevator.
Their door is still forced open, unlocked. Hannibal stashes all the cash from his room and Neph's into Neph's bug-out bag. He finds Will's backpack and shoves clothes in there. He changes into the softest pants he owns and a casual shirt of Will's.
He methodically wipes down every non-porous surface with alcohol, though he thinks it might be too late to worry about anti-mutant groups finding their prints.
Fifteen minutes after he went in, Hannibal is coming down their stairs with three bags. He leaves the door locked. They may want to come back, eventually, before their lease ends.
The motel is one he selects based on the fact that it has its own doors directly to the outside, so Will and Neph won't set anyone's suspicions raising by being dragged through hallways. Hannibal pays, acting sleepy and anxious to rest after a long day of road-tripping to the front desk help - a teenager probably not much older than himself, who probably didn't even need the act as an excuse for this.
Will's woken up a bit, by the time Hannibal is back to the car.
"Are we okay?" Is what he says when Hannibal hooks him by the armpits and begins dragging him out of the car. And then "Shit, my leg!" He grabs for it and Hannibal simply holds more of his weight, then all of it, as Will flounders against him.
"We have an audience. Please." Hannibal whispers, and Will goes quiet.
"...A hotel." Will says wonderingly once they're inside, and Hannibal decides not to correct him that it's a motel. "Good thing you're fucking rich."
The shower is going to look like one of those murders actually took place here by the time everyone's gone through it, but at least they'll all be able to get clean. At least Neph and Will can convalesce somewhere safe.
"You okay?" Will asks. Hannibal doesn't want to ask what expression he was wearing to warrant the way Will watches him.
"Yes. I'm going to get you a glass of water, and then I'm going to bring Neph in here as well. Then I am going to leave. There's only one key to this room. I will leave it with you in case you need it. I'll pick the lock to come back in, if you're not awake."
Will stares at him, face waxen and pale. He looks even worse in here, in the yellow lighting from the terrible bedside lamp, than he did in the car while Hannibal drove them under scattered street lights.
"What?" Hannibal breaks the silence. He can't leave the room with Will's stare on him like that, without an explanation.
Will shifts on the bed, starts laying down. "Felt like meeting your doppelganger, earlier. Now I can see that it's all you."
Hannibal doesn't ask again. Will rolls over towards the back wall, and Hannibal leaves.
Hannibal never got to carry Mischa's dead body while it still had flesh on it. He imagines it might have felt like picking Neph out of the car, a boneless neck and a mouth that hangs open with gravity, eyes closed only because she'd been exhausted when she lost consciousness. He places her on the same bed as Will without explanation and Will doesn't ask him why, just shifts a hand over to feel for Neph's pulse at the wrist.
Hannibal thinks about pressing dry lips to Will's hair, to Neph's, and does neither. He leaves with just the taste of blood in his mouth, heading to the teaching hospital.
*
He comes back in two hours and with more than he left their apartment with. He needs two trips to bring everything into the room, and he has to pick the lock to get in, although Will wakes up during his final trip inside and Hannibal ends up having to help him back onto the bed, startled and aggressive in confused exhaustion.
"It's just you," Will says on a ragged sigh, while Hannibal props his leg up on the pillows from the second, unused bed. "Thought it was someone breaking in."
"Both of the things you just said are correct." Hannibal allows, and Will snorts.
Will doesn't respond much to Hannibal dressing his leg. He watches with dull eyes when Hannibal cleans off his arm with iodine. He only appears to register what's about to happen when Hannibal unfolds the IV stand and sets it up next to him. A bag of blood and a bag of fluids gets hung, Will's eyes wide on it.
"I'm very good with needles." Hannibal says, earnestly. "You may not feel anything at all, and I doubt you will bruise."
"I can't believe you're a real person." Is all Will says for the next ten minutes. His face barely winces when Hannibal pricks him for his blood transfusion, although he hisses in pain at the one on the back of his palm for the fluids.
Will is asleep by the time Hannibal is working on Neph. She has no reaction to anything, and Hannibal has the IV in her good hand when he wonders if he should just set all of her bones now. Should he move her to the other bed so Will won't wake up if the bed bounces with the pressure needed?
In the end, Hannibal piles all of their belongings next to the small dresser in the room, takes a shower, ices his nose with one of the instant cold packs stolen from the hospital, and then crawls into bed between them.
*
The next morning, he wakes up first and, in the half-light through closed curtains, he feels like his family has passed through some liminal barrier, coming out the other side as something more or less than human. He thinks of the Mart, of having to crane his neck to look Neph in the eye, and now - now he presses a dry kiss to her hairline, touches her wrist to check for a pulse.
He manages not to wake Will up while moving Neph over to the other bed, and starts the process of setting her mutilated arm in complete silence.
Late on the fifth day Neph's breathing changes from its so-slow-and-shallow-as-to-be-unnoticeable cadence, shifting back into the rise and fall of normal, restorative sleep. Her pulse strengthens and her fingers twitch, eyelids flickering as her brain comes back online and starts producing proper dreams.
Ten hours after that, she snuffles into her shoulder and blinks open dry, gummy eyes. Her whole face falls into creases at the sight of this unfamiliar ceiling with its abstract water stains, at the sound of car doors slamming just on the other side of a wall. The smell is the only reassuring thing about these strange new surroundings. Rather than the antiseptic sterility of her worst fears, she breathes in soap, french fries, cigarette smoke and scent cheap fabric softener. Where...how...?
Neph tries to sit up against the weight of gravity and the landslide of her exhaustion. This...she knows this awful wrung-out feeling, this chill deep in her gut. This is Burnout. She must've pushed herself too hard and gotten herself to a safehouse before she crashed. She's gotta call Hannibal, he must be losing his mind right n--
Out of habit, she goes to plant her elbows to lever herself up, but two things happen: warning flares go off all down her right arm, culminating in a terrible throbbing in her hand that she'd somehow managed not to notice until just now. Her left arm moves, but a sharp stinging tug on the back of her hand warns her not to go far. Neph lets out a confused, wounded mewl and drops back against the lumpy mattress. She tips her chin down to scope out the situation and finds an IV line feeding into her left hand and a cast, a cast with pins sticking out of it, immobilizing her right arm.
Oh.
Right.
That's not the smell of cigarette smoke clinging to her hair after all.
But how did she end up wherever this is, and where's--where're--
She doesn't have the energy for true panic, but the sudden uptick in her heart rate pounds through her whole wasted body. Neph's just contemplating pulling that IV out with her teeth and lurching off the bed when she notices something. Spread over her body, tucked under her arms, is her fuzzy star blanket. Its pale blues and yellows pop against the cheap polyester comforter, which is printed with the kind of loud, swirling pattern only ever found in roadside motels. Neph spreads her fingers against the soft microfiber and breathes out her alarm.
It's okay. She's okay. Hannibal brought them somewhere he thought would be safe, and he had the time and freedom to grab non-emergency supplies. Her nose burns like she might be about to cry, but her body's been running on just enough fluids to survive for the better part of a week. It has nothing to spare for a sudden surge of tears.
Carefully, soooo carefully, Neph wriggles against her pillow until she's propped up on her shoulderblades with the back of her neck against the headboard. It's not much, but it provides her with a better vantage point of the room (which could be any of the dozens of motels she's camped in over the years) and the signs that other people have been/are living here. She swallows and tries to call out.
"Han--" a sandpapery whisper emerges. Better try again. "Hannibal?"
It could have been either of them, or both of them, ready to greet her. It wouldn't have been neither of them. One of them always stayed, even when getting continental breakfast from the alcove of an office at the front of the building, even when considering just how crowded that motel room started feeling as emotions steamed under the heat of injuries and fear keeping everyone right on top of each other.
...Not everyone. Neph's been asleep.
The both of them, then. Just the two of them.
(Not that Will hasn't tried speaking to Neph, when he thinks Hannibal can't hear him from the bathroom, when he doesn't think Hannibal might be listening at the door before coming back inside the room. He's talked to her about innocuous enough things, but his tone is something Hannibal has trouble placing. It sounds like it belongs in a nursing home, and he doesn't like it, even if he thinks he might have liked the gesture itself.
Will has not taken Neph's coma as well as Hannibal has.)
But as it happens, it's Hannibal - just Hannibal - who's home when Neph wakes up.
The shower squeaks off abruptly. Hannibal stares at the fake-tile wall of the shower, listening intently - there it is again.
That's Neph's voice.
Hannibal is not the sort of person who yells 'I'm coming!' in a panic when someone is trying to get his attention but he'll be a moment. But right then, he finds himself saying loudly "I'm here!" even as he's sliding out of the narrow motel shower.
"Neph." Towel around his waist, hair just barely long enough to plaster down his forehead to his eyebrows, he's still dripping water from the fingers of his free hand. He pauses for a moment when he sees her.
He had pulled one of her eyelids up, after the surgery to set her arm, just to check for burst veins. The lack of reaction in her pupils, the nothingness in her stare, had been haunting. Now she's clearly awake. Alive.
And then he's coming over to her, one still-very-damp hand coming down to reach for hers, fingers snaking around for her pulse as if that makes this anything less than a desperate grab at a friend who's just woken up. "You weren't wrong when you said it might take a while."
Nobody, but nobody, has ever seen Hannibal Lecter burst out of a bathroom, hair dripping, wearing nothing but a towel. Before today Neph would've bet real money nobody ever would. Faced with this new reality, she can only stare. Her mouth twitches into a smile, small and tired but disgustingly fond.
She's gonna live forever. There's no way she's dying until she figures out how to use this material to mess with him.
"Hi," she croaks. Her throat may as well be lined with gravel, but it's a sound. "You did it."
He set them up somewhere safe. He got her through Burnout. They're not locked up in a lab or held without bail on murder and arson charges. Under those circumstances, this is the most beautiful motel room she's ever seen. Hannibal comes around her side of the bed and catches her hand, looming over her as he takes her vitals in stoic doctor fashion. It'd be a real convincing act if he didn't grip her fingers so hard, if there weren't a bead of water threatening to drip from the end of his nose.
Neph watches it, fascinated, her shoulders sliding back down those hard-won inches as her head falls back. He doesn't look like he had his nose broken recently. There might be a little crimp there that wasn't before? A bump of newly healed bone in the arch? Her fingers twitch with the urge to reach up trace the line of his nose to find out, but she hasn't got the strength yet. Besides, Hannibal's shower-amplified body heat seeps right through her dry skin and between the small bones of her wrist and hand. She'd forgotten how achingly cold the aftermath of Burnout could be, how it transforms her chest into a dead hearth.
"Sorry," a yawn splits her jaw, leaves her blinking, "How long wuzzi out?"
"Of course I did." Hannibal says. The fond curl to Neph's smile, the way her eyes come alive so soon after being dead to everything in the world, is enough to have contentment rolling off him like fog.
He lets go of her wrist and moves to the beside table, though. The past five days have been a series of finding chores despite the late nights, of placing actions in front of more actions.
And Neph's throat sounds dry, and that's another problem he's capable of fixing.
"About--" His wrist tips up instinctively. He frowns at his lack of a watch. He's not used to rushing out of a shower that fast, not used to interacting in a foreign space while undressed.
It almost makes it feel like a slow morning back at their apartment, though, and Hannibal glances at the motel clock and hazards a guess while pouring Neph some water. "About one hundred and ten hours." The water is from a grocery store nearby, bought by the gallon by someone too picky for drinking the tap water.
Will's adapted a lot better than Hannibal has to life temporarily without a fridge.
He brings the water back, moves it almost to her hand before reconsidering.
He presses it gently against her lips, instead, and waits.
Of course he did. As if hauling two bloody and mostly dead people around past nosy neighbors and emergency response vehicles is no big deal. He says it with such confidence she could almost relax, even knowing how close he must'a cut it in in places.
"Mm," she hums agreeably, head falling to watch him rummage around. Her little smile widens as he checks for a nonexistent watch. Hannibal is, like, the only person their age who wears one. He'd probably agree with those 'millenials are killing X industry' articles, if she ever turned him onto them.
"A hundred and--" Who counts time like that!? Who? Now she has to do math. Neph's eyes squeeze shut in a grimace, but before she can scrape together the wherewithall to divide twenty four into a hundred and ten, something cool touches against her mouth.
It's just water in one of those cheap glasses cut to look like a whiskey tumbler, but it's cradled between Hannibal's hands. She blinks at him; she'd told him to pour water into her every so often, hadn't she? How many times in the last...five or so days has he lifted her head and tipped water down her throat? Or did the IV handle all that for him?
Neph raises her left hand to curl around his, fingers gripping between his knuckles as she sits up on her elbow and opens her mouth to the water. It's a sour splash in her empty stomach, but it revives her throat along the way.
"Y'know most people'd just say 'five an'a half days'. No wonder I feel all gross," she says after she's drained the last drop. Her thumb taps against the pulse in Hannibal's wrist. Five and a half days is so much time. Anything could've happened. She needs to know about their injuries, what the news has been saying, what they're going to do about their apartment, if Hannibal's been going to class, and a million other things.
She tugs at his hand, urging him to sit down with her. It looks like she's had this bed all to herself (though there's a dent in the pillow next to her, so maybe someone's been curling up on her injured side now and then) but the other's been remade with Hannibal's careful hospital corners. She can't tell how many people have been sleeping there.
"I'm sorry I was out so long. Are you--were things--where's--where's Will?"
"Hours are important. Medically." Is all he'll say. He doesn't mention that he methodically adjusted her, every two hours, as protocol dictates for comatose patients. Doesn't tell her he actually had to look up a few details because it's actually nurses who would be working long term care floors, not medical doctors. Doesn't mention that Will, after the third time Hannibal got up that second night to adjust Neph, gave Hannibal the most unreadably distressed look he'd gotten since the warehouse.
He just watches Neph hook moving, living fingers against his hand and basks in this, right now. He sits down when she taps at the bed, moving the emptied glass to sit back on the nightstand while barely glancing at it.
"...Will." He's not offended. It's thrilling, actually, that she's asking after him so immediately. Will had explained those moments in detail for Hannibal, in the days between the warehouse and now. How Neph had jumped in front of him, in front of a bullet. The tension and brevity of such a deciding moment.
So maybe he shouldn't even be surprised, that she's asking after him so quickly. He keeps a hold on her hand, settling in next to her, sitting up as far up the bed as he can without sitting on the pillows. "Did you think he would have left? He did promise."
Hannibal allows a pause, but he does continue without needing to be needled: "He's gone for a walk. His stamina is not quite where it was, he should be back--" His wrist tips up.
Oh. That does make sense. If he was medicating her. Was he medicating her? Or, wait, maybe just monitoring how often he dosed her with Pewter? The concept of bedsores doesn't even occur to Neph, as Pewter's always healed abrasions faster than they can open up. This time, with her healing abilities preoccupied by her fucked up arm and bruised ribs, there might not have been any energy to spare.
She doesn't answer Hannibal, because she's too busy watching Hannibal. He doesn't flinch when she says Will's name, doesn't tense up or scowl the way she'd expect if Will had broken up with him and limped back to their busted apartment. He just tidies up the nightstand and finds a space on the mattress beside her. He ends up sitting near her shoulder, which Neph decides she doesn't like. It's not what she wants. She lets go of his hand, plants her palm by his hip, and heaves. The sudden motion yanks the IV and rattles its stand. Her arm shakes, lax muscles trembling as they re-engage after a long rest, but they're enough to get her up far enough to lean her head on Hannibal's shoulder. Then she takes his hand back. A dribble of blood seeps out from beneath the IV tape, ignored.
He's warm as a sunbaked rock from his shower, skin still a little sticky with heat. She's so cold, she just wants to plaster herself to his back and doze back off. Neph presses her cheek against the bony spur of his collarbone and sighs through her nose. Did he--wait--she knows that smell. That green, herbal smell. He totally grabbed his own soap from their bathroom, didn't he?
The familiar scent, the seeping warmth and her own burst of energy combine to leave her all pliable and dumb. That's what she'll tell herself later, when Hannibal prods at her about Will, and she lets the most painful truth slip in answer: "You're pretty much the only person who's ever stuck by what they promised me," she mumbles against his skin. "I don't--I don't blame him, s'prob'ly smarter an' safer for him not 'ta be 'round us, but..."
But he'd promised. And then he'd joked with her until she'd passed out. He was probably in shock at the time. Promises made when a person's lost that much blood don't count, and he's had five whole days to realize that. He must'a left really early on for Hannibal to be this chill about it--
"He's gone for a walk," Hannibal says, snipping clean through that choking vine of thought. Neph tips her head up, mouth falling open, as he calculates the time left on Will's outing. She can't decide whether to scream We were kidnapped like A WEEK AGO by crazy racists who KNOW WHAT WE LOOK LIKE and you're just letting Will wander around ALONE or He seriously stayed here for almost a WHOLE WEEK all on his own and you didn't have to handcuff him to a bed or leave his leg all messed up to do it? The two sentiments sort of cancel each other out, leaving her gaping in silence.
"Oh," she manages, instead of Why would he do that? He saw. He saw for himself and he stayed? Neph ducks her head back down, her good shoulder rounding in to squeeze against Hannibal's side. She doesn't--she can't--but why--she just--needs a minute. On autopilot, she says, "Call him and ask him ta bring back like eight pounds of Chinese? I forgot to tell you 'bout that part'a Burnout."
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2017-07-12 01:57 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2017-07-12 06:50 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2017-07-13 02:27 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2017-07-19 03:05 am (UTC)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."
no subject
Date: 2017-07-20 04:46 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2017-07-22 01:09 am (UTC)"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.
no subject
Date: 2017-07-23 12:04 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2017-07-23 02:47 am (UTC)"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.
no subject
Date: 2017-07-24 10:22 pm (UTC)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."
no subject
Date: 2017-08-02 01:41 am (UTC)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?"
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Date: 2017-08-02 11:34 pm (UTC)"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.
no subject
Date: 2017-08-07 12:58 am (UTC)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."
no subject
Date: 2017-08-07 07:06 am (UTC)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."
no subject
Date: 2017-08-08 03:15 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2017-08-08 06:55 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2017-08-11 01:48 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2017-08-12 02:49 am (UTC)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."
no subject
Date: 2017-08-18 01:31 pm (UTC)His nose is still bloody, there's coagulation across his ear and hair, but at least without a red-splotched shirt he stands out slightly less. Shirtless, bloody pants still visible, he goes into the lobby and calls the elevator.
Their door is still forced open, unlocked. Hannibal stashes all the cash from his room and Neph's into Neph's bug-out bag. He finds Will's backpack and shoves clothes in there. He changes into the softest pants he owns and a casual shirt of Will's.
He methodically wipes down every non-porous surface with alcohol, though he thinks it might be too late to worry about anti-mutant groups finding their prints.
Fifteen minutes after he went in, Hannibal is coming down their stairs with three bags. He leaves the door locked. They may want to come back, eventually, before their lease ends.
The motel is one he selects based on the fact that it has its own doors directly to the outside, so Will and Neph won't set anyone's suspicions raising by being dragged through hallways. Hannibal pays, acting sleepy and anxious to rest after a long day of road-tripping to the front desk help - a teenager probably not much older than himself, who probably didn't even need the act as an excuse for this.
Will's woken up a bit, by the time Hannibal is back to the car.
"Are we okay?" Is what he says when Hannibal hooks him by the armpits and begins dragging him out of the car. And then "Shit, my leg!" He grabs for it and Hannibal simply holds more of his weight, then all of it, as Will flounders against him.
"We have an audience. Please." Hannibal whispers, and Will goes quiet.
"...A hotel." Will says wonderingly once they're inside, and Hannibal decides not to correct him that it's a motel. "Good thing you're fucking rich."
The shower is going to look like one of those murders actually took place here by the time everyone's gone through it, but at least they'll all be able to get clean. At least Neph and Will can convalesce somewhere safe.
"You okay?" Will asks. Hannibal doesn't want to ask what expression he was wearing to warrant the way Will watches him.
"Yes. I'm going to get you a glass of water, and then I'm going to bring Neph in here as well. Then I am going to leave. There's only one key to this room. I will leave it with you in case you need it. I'll pick the lock to come back in, if you're not awake."
Will stares at him, face waxen and pale. He looks even worse in here, in the yellow lighting from the terrible bedside lamp, than he did in the car while Hannibal drove them under scattered street lights.
"What?" Hannibal breaks the silence. He can't leave the room with Will's stare on him like that, without an explanation.
Will shifts on the bed, starts laying down. "Felt like meeting your doppelganger, earlier. Now I can see that it's all you."
Hannibal doesn't ask again. Will rolls over towards the back wall, and Hannibal leaves.
Hannibal never got to carry Mischa's dead body while it still had flesh on it. He imagines it might have felt like picking Neph out of the car, a boneless neck and a mouth that hangs open with gravity, eyes closed only because she'd been exhausted when she lost consciousness. He places her on the same bed as Will without explanation and Will doesn't ask him why, just shifts a hand over to feel for Neph's pulse at the wrist.
Hannibal thinks about pressing dry lips to Will's hair, to Neph's, and does neither. He leaves with just the taste of blood in his mouth, heading to the teaching hospital.
*
He comes back in two hours and with more than he left their apartment with. He needs two trips to bring everything into the room, and he has to pick the lock to get in, although Will wakes up during his final trip inside and Hannibal ends up having to help him back onto the bed, startled and aggressive in confused exhaustion.
"It's just you," Will says on a ragged sigh, while Hannibal props his leg up on the pillows from the second, unused bed. "Thought it was someone breaking in."
"Both of the things you just said are correct." Hannibal allows, and Will snorts.
Will doesn't respond much to Hannibal dressing his leg. He watches with dull eyes when Hannibal cleans off his arm with iodine. He only appears to register what's about to happen when Hannibal unfolds the IV stand and sets it up next to him. A bag of blood and a bag of fluids gets hung, Will's eyes wide on it.
"I'm very good with needles." Hannibal says, earnestly. "You may not feel anything at all, and I doubt you will bruise."
"I can't believe you're a real person." Is all Will says for the next ten minutes. His face barely winces when Hannibal pricks him for his blood transfusion, although he hisses in pain at the one on the back of his palm for the fluids.
Will is asleep by the time Hannibal is working on Neph. She has no reaction to anything, and Hannibal has the IV in her good hand when he wonders if he should just set all of her bones now. Should he move her to the other bed so Will won't wake up if the bed bounces with the pressure needed?
In the end, Hannibal piles all of their belongings next to the small dresser in the room, takes a shower, ices his nose with one of the instant cold packs stolen from the hospital, and then crawls into bed between them.
*
The next morning, he wakes up first and, in the half-light through closed curtains, he feels like his family has passed through some liminal barrier, coming out the other side as something more or less than human. He thinks of the Mart, of having to crane his neck to look Neph in the eye, and now - now he presses a dry kiss to her hairline, touches her wrist to check for a pulse.
He manages not to wake Will up while moving Neph over to the other bed, and starts the process of setting her mutilated arm in complete silence.
no subject
Date: 2017-08-19 12:51 am (UTC)Ten hours after that, she snuffles into her shoulder and blinks open dry, gummy eyes. Her whole face falls into creases at the sight of this unfamiliar ceiling with its abstract water stains, at the sound of car doors slamming just on the other side of a wall. The smell is the only reassuring thing about these strange new surroundings. Rather than the antiseptic sterility of her worst fears, she breathes in soap, french fries, cigarette smoke and scent cheap fabric softener. Where...how...?
Neph tries to sit up against the weight of gravity and the landslide of her exhaustion. This...she knows this awful wrung-out feeling, this chill deep in her gut. This is Burnout. She must've pushed herself too hard and gotten herself to a safehouse before she crashed. She's gotta call Hannibal, he must be losing his mind right n--
Out of habit, she goes to plant her elbows to lever herself up, but two things happen: warning flares go off all down her right arm, culminating in a terrible throbbing in her hand that she'd somehow managed not to notice until just now. Her left arm moves, but a sharp stinging tug on the back of her hand warns her not to go far. Neph lets out a confused, wounded mewl and drops back against the lumpy mattress. She tips her chin down to scope out the situation and finds an IV line feeding into her left hand and a cast, a cast with pins sticking out of it, immobilizing her right arm.
Oh.
Right.
That's not the smell of cigarette smoke clinging to her hair after all.
But how did she end up wherever this is, and where's--where're--
She doesn't have the energy for true panic, but the sudden uptick in her heart rate pounds through her whole wasted body. Neph's just contemplating pulling that IV out with her teeth and lurching off the bed when she notices something. Spread over her body, tucked under her arms, is her fuzzy star blanket. Its pale blues and yellows pop against the cheap polyester comforter, which is printed with the kind of loud, swirling pattern only ever found in roadside motels. Neph spreads her fingers against the soft microfiber and breathes out her alarm.
It's okay. She's okay. Hannibal brought them somewhere he thought would be safe, and he had the time and freedom to grab non-emergency supplies. Her nose burns like she might be about to cry, but her body's been running on just enough fluids to survive for the better part of a week. It has nothing to spare for a sudden surge of tears.
Carefully, soooo carefully, Neph wriggles against her pillow until she's propped up on her shoulderblades with the back of her neck against the headboard. It's not much, but it provides her with a better vantage point of the room (which could be any of the dozens of motels she's camped in over the years) and the signs that other people have been/are living here. She swallows and tries to call out.
"Han--" a sandpapery whisper emerges. Better try again. "Hannibal?"
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Date: 2017-08-19 02:48 am (UTC)...Not everyone. Neph's been asleep.
The both of them, then. Just the two of them.
(Not that Will hasn't tried speaking to Neph, when he thinks Hannibal can't hear him from the bathroom, when he doesn't think Hannibal might be listening at the door before coming back inside the room. He's talked to her about innocuous enough things, but his tone is something Hannibal has trouble placing. It sounds like it belongs in a nursing home, and he doesn't like it, even if he thinks he might have liked the gesture itself.
Will has not taken Neph's coma as well as Hannibal has.)
But as it happens, it's Hannibal - just Hannibal - who's home when Neph wakes up.
The shower squeaks off abruptly. Hannibal stares at the fake-tile wall of the shower, listening intently - there it is again.
That's Neph's voice.
Hannibal is not the sort of person who yells 'I'm coming!' in a panic when someone is trying to get his attention but he'll be a moment. But right then, he finds himself saying loudly "I'm here!" even as he's sliding out of the narrow motel shower.
"Neph." Towel around his waist, hair just barely long enough to plaster down his forehead to his eyebrows, he's still dripping water from the fingers of his free hand. He pauses for a moment when he sees her.
He had pulled one of her eyelids up, after the surgery to set her arm, just to check for burst veins. The lack of reaction in her pupils, the nothingness in her stare, had been haunting. Now she's clearly awake. Alive.
And then he's coming over to her, one still-very-damp hand coming down to reach for hers, fingers snaking around for her pulse as if that makes this anything less than a desperate grab at a friend who's just woken up. "You weren't wrong when you said it might take a while."
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Date: 2017-08-19 07:24 am (UTC)She's gonna live forever. There's no way she's dying until she figures out how to use this material to mess with him.
"Hi," she croaks. Her throat may as well be lined with gravel, but it's a sound. "You did it."
He set them up somewhere safe. He got her through Burnout. They're not locked up in a lab or held without bail on murder and arson charges. Under those circumstances, this is the most beautiful motel room she's ever seen. Hannibal comes around her side of the bed and catches her hand, looming over her as he takes her vitals in stoic doctor fashion. It'd be a real convincing act if he didn't grip her fingers so hard, if there weren't a bead of water threatening to drip from the end of his nose.
Neph watches it, fascinated, her shoulders sliding back down those hard-won inches as her head falls back. He doesn't look like he had his nose broken recently. There might be a little crimp there that wasn't before? A bump of newly healed bone in the arch? Her fingers twitch with the urge to reach up trace the line of his nose to find out, but she hasn't got the strength yet. Besides, Hannibal's shower-amplified body heat seeps right through her dry skin and between the small bones of her wrist and hand. She'd forgotten how achingly cold the aftermath of Burnout could be, how it transforms her chest into a dead hearth.
"Sorry," a yawn splits her jaw, leaves her blinking, "How long wuzzi out?"
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Date: 2017-08-20 02:26 am (UTC)He lets go of her wrist and moves to the beside table, though. The past five days have been a series of finding chores despite the late nights, of placing actions in front of more actions.
And Neph's throat sounds dry, and that's another problem he's capable of fixing.
"About--" His wrist tips up instinctively. He frowns at his lack of a watch. He's not used to rushing out of a shower that fast, not used to interacting in a foreign space while undressed.
It almost makes it feel like a slow morning back at their apartment, though, and Hannibal glances at the motel clock and hazards a guess while pouring Neph some water. "About one hundred and ten hours." The water is from a grocery store nearby, bought by the gallon by someone too picky for drinking the tap water.
Will's adapted a lot better than Hannibal has to life temporarily without a fridge.
He brings the water back, moves it almost to her hand before reconsidering.
He presses it gently against her lips, instead, and waits.
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Date: 2017-08-20 06:27 am (UTC)"Mm," she hums agreeably, head falling to watch him rummage around. Her little smile widens as he checks for a nonexistent watch. Hannibal is, like, the only person their age who wears one. He'd probably agree with those 'millenials are killing X industry' articles, if she ever turned him onto them.
"A hundred and--" Who counts time like that!? Who? Now she has to do math. Neph's eyes squeeze shut in a grimace, but before she can scrape together the wherewithall to divide twenty four into a hundred and ten, something cool touches against her mouth.
It's just water in one of those cheap glasses cut to look like a whiskey tumbler, but it's cradled between Hannibal's hands. She blinks at him; she'd told him to pour water into her every so often, hadn't she? How many times in the last...five or so days has he lifted her head and tipped water down her throat? Or did the IV handle all that for him?
Neph raises her left hand to curl around his, fingers gripping between his knuckles as she sits up on her elbow and opens her mouth to the water. It's a sour splash in her empty stomach, but it revives her throat along the way.
"Y'know most people'd just say 'five an'a half days'. No wonder I feel all gross," she says after she's drained the last drop. Her thumb taps against the pulse in Hannibal's wrist. Five and a half days is so much time. Anything could've happened. She needs to know about their injuries, what the news has been saying, what they're going to do about their apartment, if Hannibal's been going to class, and a million other things.
She tugs at his hand, urging him to sit down with her. It looks like she's had this bed all to herself (though there's a dent in the pillow next to her, so maybe someone's been curling up on her injured side now and then) but the other's been remade with Hannibal's careful hospital corners. She can't tell how many people have been sleeping there.
"I'm sorry I was out so long. Are you--were things--where's--where's Will?"
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Date: 2017-08-21 02:47 am (UTC)He just watches Neph hook moving, living fingers against his hand and basks in this, right now. He sits down when she taps at the bed, moving the emptied glass to sit back on the nightstand while barely glancing at it.
"...Will." He's not offended. It's thrilling, actually, that she's asking after him so immediately. Will had explained those moments in detail for Hannibal, in the days between the warehouse and now. How Neph had jumped in front of him, in front of a bullet. The tension and brevity of such a deciding moment.
So maybe he shouldn't even be surprised, that she's asking after him so quickly. He keeps a hold on her hand, settling in next to her, sitting up as far up the bed as he can without sitting on the pillows. "Did you think he would have left? He did promise."
Hannibal allows a pause, but he does continue without needing to be needled: "He's gone for a walk. His stamina is not quite where it was, he should be back--" His wrist tips up.
No watch. Ah, right. "...Soon."
I need you to put that icon away pls thx
Date: 2017-08-22 05:17 am (UTC)She doesn't answer Hannibal, because she's too busy watching Hannibal. He doesn't flinch when she says Will's name, doesn't tense up or scowl the way she'd expect if Will had broken up with him and limped back to their busted apartment. He just tidies up the nightstand and finds a space on the mattress beside her. He ends up sitting near her shoulder, which Neph decides she doesn't like. It's not what she wants. She lets go of his hand, plants her palm by his hip, and heaves. The sudden motion yanks the IV and rattles its stand. Her arm shakes, lax muscles trembling as they re-engage after a long rest, but they're enough to get her up far enough to lean her head on Hannibal's shoulder. Then she takes his hand back. A dribble of blood seeps out from beneath the IV tape, ignored.
He's warm as a sunbaked rock from his shower, skin still a little sticky with heat. She's so cold, she just wants to plaster herself to his back and doze back off. Neph presses her cheek against the bony spur of his collarbone and sighs through her nose. Did he--wait--she knows that smell. That green, herbal smell. He totally grabbed his own soap from their bathroom, didn't he?
The familiar scent, the seeping warmth and her own burst of energy combine to leave her all pliable and dumb. That's what she'll tell herself later, when Hannibal prods at her about Will, and she lets the most painful truth slip in answer: "You're pretty much the only person who's ever stuck by what they promised me," she mumbles against his skin. "I don't--I don't blame him, s'prob'ly smarter an' safer for him not 'ta be 'round us, but..."
But he'd promised. And then he'd joked with her until she'd passed out. He was probably in shock at the time. Promises made when a person's lost that much blood don't count, and he's had five whole days to realize that. He must'a left really early on for Hannibal to be this chill about it--
"He's gone for a walk," Hannibal says, snipping clean through that choking vine of thought. Neph tips her head up, mouth falling open, as he calculates the time left on Will's outing. She can't decide whether to scream We were kidnapped like A WEEK AGO by crazy racists who KNOW WHAT WE LOOK LIKE and you're just letting Will wander around ALONE or He seriously stayed here for almost a WHOLE WEEK all on his own and you didn't have to handcuff him to a bed or leave his leg all messed up to do it? The two sentiments sort of cancel each other out, leaving her gaping in silence.
"Oh," she manages, instead of Why would he do that? He saw. He saw for himself and he stayed? Neph ducks her head back down, her good shoulder rounding in to squeeze against Hannibal's side. She doesn't--she can't--but why--she just--needs a minute. On autopilot, she says, "Call him and ask him ta bring back like eight pounds of Chinese? I forgot to tell you 'bout that part'a Burnout."
everyone's taking out their cuddling icons, though!
From:put that back where it came from or so help me!!
From:so glad you're not too old to have also watched monsters inc!
From:I was going to rant about how I was still a kid!! but then is he dangling a CHERRY in that icon?
From:I cannot remember when it came out! And maybe!! Most of his icons are unavailable Im trying here
From:google says 2001! And oh no you're stranded with the most recent ones!
From:...oh my god /i was ten/ what the hell
From:No that can't be right!!!
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