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[personal profile] nepharious
 Collapsable as we go:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Are you upset?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will startles himself with the force of his laughter.

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Something's wrong.

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

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

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

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

"Will, lay down. Your leg."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like a criminal profiler's handbook.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Date: 2017-08-18 01:31 pm (UTC)
operapaintingandmurder: (bent over)
From: [personal profile] operapaintingandmurder
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.

Date: 2017-08-19 02:48 am (UTC)
operapaintingandmurder: (bent over)
From: [personal profile] operapaintingandmurder
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."

Date: 2017-08-20 02:26 am (UTC)
operapaintingandmurder: (bent over)
From: [personal profile] operapaintingandmurder
"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.

Date: 2017-08-21 02:47 am (UTC)
operapaintingandmurder: (touch)
From: [personal profile] operapaintingandmurder
"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.

No watch. Ah, right. "...Soon."
operapaintingandmurder: (touch)
From: [personal profile] operapaintingandmurder
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.
operapaintingandmurder: (cherry)
From: [personal profile] operapaintingandmurder
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.
operapaintingandmurder: (shadow)
From: [personal profile] operapaintingandmurder
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.
Edited (Punctuation ) Date: 2017-08-26 01:59 pm (UTC)

...oh my god /i was ten/ what the hell

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