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."
Hannibal would be a hypocrite if he looked at the blood lazily seeping from her IV after Neph drags herself closer to him and thought to himself that she's being a bit dramatic. And yet he's never really not been a hypocrite. He'd also been expecting her head in his lap, where he can easily pet her hair and pull it back from her face - they've done that often enough when she's gotten her period, with him slowly breathing out that mint-cool soothing that seems to wind her right back down into napping for a few hours through the worst of it - but this is nice, too.
Quite frankly, knowing that she crawled up to his shoulder with a burst of energy after having been in a coma for the better part of a week is nothing but nice. Hannibal tilts his head towards hers, because it feels different to rest near her when she's conscious, when she has all the little movements and changes in breath that someone who's awake does without thinking.
"I could ask him." Hannibal says, and suddenly there is a hint of deviousness in the stare he's directing down at her hair. "But then he'd be expecting you awake when he arrives back." Which is only a problem if Neph, say, didn't want him to have a heart attack. "Did you not want to surprise him?" That. That right there. That is why Will doesn't fully trust them together. It's this thing that's happening right now.
The burst of warmth Hannibal feels for her eclipses even the comfort of messing around with his other friend's head, however. "I missed you." He says all at once, matter of fact and staring at her face.
Coma or no coma, it takes Neph .04 seconds to catch Hannibal's drift. Much easier and more fun than catching bullets, as it turns out. He probably feels her answering grin, the uneven line of her teeth, against his shoulder. "We gotta," she agrees, wriggling a little with excitement. Chinese food's great, and she's about to need a massive carboload, but shit the look on Will's face!
(She doesn't know how she scared him. She doesn't know he sat vigil as though she were slipping away. She knows only that Hannibal is here and seems to be taking things in his stride, and that they've deemed things safe enough for Will to go for walks, so it's easy to fall out of cautious survival mode. Hannibal short circuits her usual procedures like that. It's nearly pavlovian by now.)
Neph turns her face up to beam at Hannibal, eyes crinkling and nose scrunching in the first purely happy surge she's felt since she left their apartment that morning a week ago. She expects to see Hannibal's conspiratory face and, yeah, she catches the edge of it as it's whisked away, but what's left behind weighs on her like an arm around her shoulder. Her smile falls away, her fingers tightening around his.
"I'm sorry," she tells him. "I didn't mean t'leave you alone that long. I overdid it." Then, of course, she remembers how that came to be, and her eyebrows pinch together. "When they took the bag off an' I saw you an' you were already messed up--" Neph sucks her bottom lip into her mouth to keep it from wobbling. Much like with her period, her emotions are all over the place after Burnout. "--let's both try not ta'do it again, okay?"
For the first time, Hannibal is truly surprised by what she says. He wouldn't label the feeling self-conscious, but his head tilts down in acknowledgement and his tone grows more severely thoughtful. "I did not mean for us to be captured. I am sorry you needed to come for us."
It was Will's fault. Hannibal has gone over the encounter multiple times and he thinks, were he alone, he would not have been taken. He would have killed everyone or escaped out the window to someone else's patio. It's possible he's wrong - but he may very well be correct.
And if it had been him and Neph? Well. The warehouse itself is proof that the men would not have even touched them. Hannibal has even less attachment to social rules than Neph, has even less tethering him back to earth, and when Neph gets caught up in his nonsense, well - it's easy to let thoughts string together that he should perhaps know better than to say out loud.
"We should teach Will how to defend himself, the way we can." He says, reasonably, with passion, even. Like this is just another bonding activity, a reasonable one and a good way to solve the problem Neph's brought up, the 'getting into trouble' problem.
"No, I mean," Yeah, this arm situation is getting real old real fast. Neph wants nothing more than to throw both around Hannibal and crush him close, but she physically cannot. Fuck her entire life. "That's not your fault just...don't get beat up. Will either. I'll come get you. We handle things better when it's all'a us. Or both'a us."
He had her back. She'd laid out two people for him, easy peasy, and he went after more dangerous targets because they'd followed her. Since she can't physically squeeze him, Neph hooks her chin over his shoulder and rolls her eyes up to meet Hannibal's serious gaze. Her nose practically butts the corner of his jaw. "And I'll avoid comas."
On second thought, maybe she ought to avoid impossible promises. Sure, she can still count her Burnouts on one hand, but the number of actual physical confrontations she's been involved in has skyrocketed these last few years. With no indication that trend will reverse, and combining anti-mutant sentiment with her own risky business, things may only grow more dangerous around her. Around them both.
Hannibal's remark dovetails right into her thoughts. Neph makes an agreeable noise, blinks, and rears up a little. "Hannibal, he can't defend himself like we can," she points out, equally reasonably. "I'm--y'know and you're--you too." Inhuman. Used to solving their own problems. A little too prone to reaching for knives, first. Neph settles back against his shoulder with a perturbed grunt. "He might not wanna stick around for trouble," she reminds him, a little quieter. "But if he's gonna be a cop, he'll hafta learn his way 'round a fight anyway. Can't go gettin' stabbed'r shot'r whatever happened with his leg all the time."
Oh. That's not - what he thought she meant. That he should just avoid solo encounters from now on. That waiting for reinforcements is an option available to him.
Not that he'd expected her to leave them there. Once they'd been captured, he'd hoped she would come - a vague emotion and desire that Hannibal hadn't realized he was still capable of. It had burned like a coal in his stomach until the moment he saw her, when it flared up and didn't extinguish until he'd had two limp bodies in the back of a car he'd stolen, hours later.
He just hadn't expected to hear it put like this, laid out for future engagements. Hannibal stares down at her raptly, even though it cranks his neck to do so, with her laying on his shoulder. He tilts down and, with a motion he's done several times a day since she slipped away from him and Will to heal herself, Hannibal presses dry lips to her hairline. "A deal for both of us, then." Sealed with a kiss, apparently.
It makes Hannibal only slightly more reasonable in the face of Neph's logical argument, to be in such a good mood. "All the more reason to teach him, if he expects to spend his life capturing people like us." Hannibal says, somewhere at the intersection of smug and thoughtful. "But you're right. He has a different-- reasoning behind his desire to be in the cross fire. Not to survive, but to...serve."
Hannibal's never had to think much on Will's motivations for wanting to join the police force, actually. It's been a great joke, it's been a sign that he has high aspirations for himself, it means motivation and drive and sharp intelligence but a certain lack of self-preservation. It had meant so many good or exciting things that Hannibal has not sat down to pull apart the why from Will's point of view, only the 'why it helps' from his own.
"...He's concerned about where we learned how to fight so well." He adds, perhaps unnecessarily. But it's the one piece of this that Hannibal hadn't been able to steal parts to solve, that first night. He'd save everyone's bodies, he'd hidden them away safely, and Neph is still on his side - feels more strongly tethered to him, and him to her - but Will has remained a stoically emotional mystery. He hasn't been quick to release all of his worries. "And about us."
'Us', which means so much more now that Neph is awake. Hannibal tilts closer to her, greedy for body heat she can't share, too cold from her own long sleep. He tugs the blanket higher up her chest, leaves his arm across her after he's done.
This gesture, this whole 'mouth on her hair, or maybe her forehead' thing, is so new Neph doesn't see it coming, doesn't register alarm or anticipation or anything. One second she's blinking up at him and the next he's ducked down, closed lips a brand against her cold skin.
There'd been no time to react back at the warehouse, no room for anything but a flash of startled confusion amidst the panic and adrenaline. She's had literally no chance since to think about it. This time there's no thought at all, just a flashflood of memories so old they've worn away to sensations - the smell of her mother's hand lotion, the way her wedding ring would snag when she'd comb Patricia's hair, the silk of her father's tie slipping between her hands, the weightlessness drowsiness of someone else putting her to bed and tucking her in. Kisses goodnight, kisses goodbye, kisses just for fun. Family, family, family.
Tears sting her eyes, the first warm thing she's managed for herself. Neph ducks her face into Hannibal's neck. Her hand slips loose from his and snakes around his back, hooking the far side of his ribs. She breathes through her nose, her mouth too firmly wedged against his pulsepoint in something that can't really be called a return kiss. For long seconds, the better part of a minute, she hides there, struggling to control her reaction. Hannibal adjusts her star blanket and puts his arm around her in turn.
Somehow Will's the safest topic available right now. Let's teach him how to capture people like us, Hannibal suggests, and Neph snorts so hard she practically blows a raspberry down his neck.
"I really hope you mean 'dangerous people' and not, like, 'specifically mutants and magic users'," she says as though her voice isn't kinda thick. Has she occasionally had vague nightmares of Will arresting her? Yep. Does she want to imagine a future where he uses his experiential knowledge of them to form some kind of anti-meta taskforce? No. She knows Will, though, and that's been enough to keep those specific nightmares at bay. So far. "I think he just...wants things to be better for people like him." The scared. The lost and ignored. Weird, bright kids. Neph wonders why he's fixated so much on cops and not, like, social workers or lawyers, but maybe that's pure self defense.
It wouldn't be so bad if he used whatever he's learning from them to accomplish that. It wouldn't be so bad if maybe wasn't going to take that information and run. Neph shivers into her blanket, her voice dropping into a rough whisper. "He's not gonna care where we learned how, he's gonna care that we killed, like, ten people."
The deaths bother her more, now, removed from the immediate need. They color her thoughts and perceptions, so that Hannibal's use of 'us' can only mean their collective bodycount. And, maybe, what it means for Will staying with them in the future. "Could you let him go?" she asks. "If he...if he wasn't okay with what we did?"
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timeasmymeasure
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?"
no subject
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."
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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?"
no subject
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."
no subject
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.
no subject
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?"
no subject
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!
Date: 2017-08-23 02:51 pm (UTC)Quite frankly, knowing that she crawled up to his shoulder with a burst of energy after having been in a coma for the better part of a week is nothing but nice. Hannibal tilts his head towards hers, because it feels different to rest near her when she's conscious, when she has all the little movements and changes in breath that someone who's awake does without thinking.
"I could ask him." Hannibal says, and suddenly there is a hint of deviousness in the stare he's directing down at her hair. "But then he'd be expecting you awake when he arrives back." Which is only a problem if Neph, say, didn't want him to have a heart attack. "Did you not want to surprise him?" That. That right there. That is why Will doesn't fully trust them together. It's this thing that's happening right now.
The burst of warmth Hannibal feels for her eclipses even the comfort of messing around with his other friend's head, however. "I missed you." He says all at once, matter of fact and staring at her face.
put that back where it came from or so help me!!
Date: 2017-08-24 04:35 am (UTC)(She doesn't know how she scared him. She doesn't know he sat vigil as though she were slipping away. She knows only that Hannibal is here and seems to be taking things in his stride, and that they've deemed things safe enough for Will to go for walks, so it's easy to fall out of cautious survival mode. Hannibal short circuits her usual procedures like that. It's nearly pavlovian by now.)
Neph turns her face up to beam at Hannibal, eyes crinkling and nose scrunching in the first purely happy surge she's felt since she left their apartment that morning a week ago. She expects to see Hannibal's conspiratory face and, yeah, she catches the edge of it as it's whisked away, but what's left behind weighs on her like an arm around her shoulder. Her smile falls away, her fingers tightening around his.
"I'm sorry," she tells him. "I didn't mean t'leave you alone that long. I overdid it." Then, of course, she remembers how that came to be, and her eyebrows pinch together. "When they took the bag off an' I saw you an' you were already messed up--" Neph sucks her bottom lip into her mouth to keep it from wobbling. Much like with her period, her emotions are all over the place after Burnout. "--let's both try not ta'do it again, okay?"
so glad you're not too old to have also watched monsters inc!
Date: 2017-08-26 01:57 am (UTC)It was Will's fault. Hannibal has gone over the encounter multiple times and he thinks, were he alone, he would not have been taken. He would have killed everyone or escaped out the window to someone else's patio. It's possible he's wrong - but he may very well be correct.
And if it had been him and Neph? Well. The warehouse itself is proof that the men would not have even touched them. Hannibal has even less attachment to social rules than Neph, has even less tethering him back to earth, and when Neph gets caught up in his nonsense, well - it's easy to let thoughts string together that he should perhaps know better than to say out loud.
"We should teach Will how to defend himself, the way we can." He says, reasonably, with passion, even. Like this is just another bonding activity, a reasonable one and a good way to solve the problem Neph's brought up, the 'getting into trouble' problem.
I was going to rant about how I was still a kid!! but then is he dangling a CHERRY in that icon?
Date: 2017-08-26 05:31 am (UTC)He had her back. She'd laid out two people for him, easy peasy, and he went after more dangerous targets because they'd followed her. Since she can't physically squeeze him, Neph hooks her chin over his shoulder and rolls her eyes up to meet Hannibal's serious gaze. Her nose practically butts the corner of his jaw. "And I'll avoid comas."
On second thought, maybe she ought to avoid impossible promises. Sure, she can still count her Burnouts on one hand, but the number of actual physical confrontations she's been involved in has skyrocketed these last few years. With no indication that trend will reverse, and combining anti-mutant sentiment with her own risky business, things may only grow more dangerous around her. Around them both.
Hannibal's remark dovetails right into her thoughts. Neph makes an agreeable noise, blinks, and rears up a little. "Hannibal, he can't defend himself like we can," she points out, equally reasonably. "I'm--y'know and you're--you too." Inhuman. Used to solving their own problems. A little too prone to reaching for knives, first. Neph settles back against his shoulder with a perturbed grunt. "He might not wanna stick around for trouble," she reminds him, a little quieter. "But if he's gonna be a cop, he'll hafta learn his way 'round a fight anyway. Can't go gettin' stabbed'r shot'r whatever happened with his leg all the time."
I cannot remember when it came out! And maybe!! Most of his icons are unavailable Im trying here
Date: 2017-08-26 01:07 pm (UTC)Not that he'd expected her to leave them there. Once they'd been captured, he'd hoped she would come - a vague emotion and desire that Hannibal hadn't realized he was still capable of. It had burned like a coal in his stomach until the moment he saw her, when it flared up and didn't extinguish until he'd had two limp bodies in the back of a car he'd stolen, hours later.
He just hadn't expected to hear it put like this, laid out for future engagements. Hannibal stares down at her raptly, even though it cranks his neck to do so, with her laying on his shoulder. He tilts down and, with a motion he's done several times a day since she slipped away from him and Will to heal herself, Hannibal presses dry lips to her hairline. "A deal for both of us, then." Sealed with a kiss, apparently.
It makes Hannibal only slightly more reasonable in the face of Neph's logical argument, to be in such a good mood. "All the more reason to teach him, if he expects to spend his life capturing people like us." Hannibal says, somewhere at the intersection of smug and thoughtful. "But you're right. He has a different-- reasoning behind his desire to be in the cross fire. Not to survive, but to...serve."
Hannibal's never had to think much on Will's motivations for wanting to join the police force, actually. It's been a great joke, it's been a sign that he has high aspirations for himself, it means motivation and drive and sharp intelligence but a certain lack of self-preservation. It had meant so many good or exciting things that Hannibal has not sat down to pull apart the why from Will's point of view, only the 'why it helps' from his own.
"...He's concerned about where we learned how to fight so well." He adds, perhaps unnecessarily. But it's the one piece of this that Hannibal hadn't been able to steal parts to solve, that first night. He'd save everyone's bodies, he'd hidden them away safely, and Neph is still on his side - feels more strongly tethered to him, and him to her - but Will has remained a stoically emotional mystery. He hasn't been quick to release all of his worries. "And about us."
'Us', which means so much more now that Neph is awake. Hannibal tilts closer to her, greedy for body heat she can't share, too cold from her own long sleep. He tugs the blanket higher up her chest, leaves his arm across her after he's done.
google says 2001! And oh no you're stranded with the most recent ones!
Date: 2017-08-27 05:56 pm (UTC)There'd been no time to react back at the warehouse, no room for anything but a flash of startled confusion amidst the panic and adrenaline. She's had literally no chance since to think about it. This time there's no thought at all, just a flashflood of memories so old they've worn away to sensations - the smell of her mother's hand lotion, the way her wedding ring would snag when she'd comb Patricia's hair, the silk of her father's tie slipping between her hands, the weightlessness drowsiness of someone else putting her to bed and tucking her in. Kisses goodnight, kisses goodbye, kisses just for fun. Family, family, family.
Tears sting her eyes, the first warm thing she's managed for herself. Neph ducks her face into Hannibal's neck. Her hand slips loose from his and snakes around his back, hooking the far side of his ribs. She breathes through her nose, her mouth too firmly wedged against his pulsepoint in something that can't really be called a return kiss. For long seconds, the better part of a minute, she hides there, struggling to control her reaction. Hannibal adjusts her star blanket and puts his arm around her in turn.
Somehow Will's the safest topic available right now. Let's teach him how to capture people like us, Hannibal suggests, and Neph snorts so hard she practically blows a raspberry down his neck.
"I really hope you mean 'dangerous people' and not, like, 'specifically mutants and magic users'," she says as though her voice isn't kinda thick. Has she occasionally had vague nightmares of Will arresting her? Yep. Does she want to imagine a future where he uses his experiential knowledge of them to form some kind of anti-meta taskforce? No. She knows Will, though, and that's been enough to keep those specific nightmares at bay. So far. "I think he just...wants things to be better for people like him." The scared. The lost and ignored. Weird, bright kids. Neph wonders why he's fixated so much on cops and not, like, social workers or lawyers, but maybe that's pure self defense.
It wouldn't be so bad if he used whatever he's learning from them to accomplish that. It wouldn't be so bad if maybe wasn't going to take that information and run. Neph shivers into her blanket, her voice dropping into a rough whisper. "He's not gonna care where we learned how, he's gonna care that we killed, like, ten people."
The deaths bother her more, now, removed from the immediate need. They color her thoughts and perceptions, so that Hannibal's use of 'us' can only mean their collective bodycount. And, maybe, what it means for Will staying with them in the future. "Could you let him go?" she asks. "If he...if he wasn't okay with what we did?"
...oh my god /i was ten/ what the hell
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