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?"
If asked by anyone else, Hannibal would say he doesn't remember the last time he cried. If Will or Neph asked, he'd say that it was during his first day at the orphanage, about twenty-four hours after he'd been found wandering the woods alone and half-frozen. It's less due to the effort of remaining stoic and more due to the fact that nothing seems to quite reach in close enough to hurt him that way again. Anything short of losing Mischa barely even registers as pain.
If he lost Neph, though? Or if Will had been killed during the initial fight with their captors? As Neph buries her face against his neck and Hannibal doesn't comment on the way her eyes welled up just before she pressed in, Hannibal thinks that that may have done it for him.
Perhaps the relief of not losing him feels similarly for Neph. Hannibal finds he enjoys that thought, just as he enjoys the way Neph clings to him. It's like steel foundations being built next to his own ironclad sense of self - like Neph wanting and needing him makes himself more complete, more important.
'Is it...because you just realized you're in love with Neph?'
Hannibal tilts further over Neph, lets his torso turn towards her at an angle that is absolutely unsustainable for his spine but which finally gives them enough points of contact. "Of course I only meant dangerous people. Will feels removed from the rest of humanity as well, whether or not he meets either of our requirements for being outside that group." Hannibal can't help but feel that catch in the thought though, where Neph's now laid down a snag. Will is used to being alone. It's not unreasonable to think that, enough horrible events witnessed, he might go rogue from all sides and become his own force, going after whoever seems most dangerous.
That's...a threatening thought.
'Could you let him go?' Hannibal stays very, very still at that. He can feel his own pulse elevate, moment by moment, until he forcibly breathes slower and his heart beat has to match it.
"...I don't think I could hurt him to make him stay." Hannibal says, very softly. He says it like that would've been his first thought, before. His grip on Neph's hand has tightened, although he hasn't noticed. "I'm not...sure what I would do." And he's finding, to his surprise, that he doesn't like thinking about it. Hannibal can entertain himself with theoretical scenarios without consequence, most of the time - or so he thought. Or has he just always looked away from the scenarios he didn't like?
"I don't know what I would do if you left me, either." Hannibal says, and that thought has barbs. It's not just words. It's got weight, enough to crush his ribs if he lets it sit there on his chest. He thinks he would kill everyone who he thought had contributed to Neph leaving him, but he can already feel the hole that would leave.
"Why would you ask me that?" There's no accusation in his voice, just blank surprise. Surprise at himself for his reaction, surprise at Neph for her continued insistence that Will won't understand them, won't want them, once he finds out enough of the truth. She's always thought that. It never stopped, apparently, not even after Will proved that the mutant/magic angle wasn't enough to scare him away. "Do you think everyone would leave you, and would leave me, once they find out how high the risk is?"
Mashed against him like this, Neph feels the exact moment her question drops and Hannibal picks it up. He freezes, but his breath hitches. He doesn't blink, but his pulse hammers against her mouth. She's struck by the perverse urge to bite down, as though it might escape otherwise. After a long minute, Hannibal's ribcage expands in a slow, steadying breath. Neph mostly just hangs on for the ride at that point, fascinated in a tired and slightly detached kind of way.
That was way more emotion than she'd meant to trigger, when the question slipped out of her mouth.
In the same distant manner she recognizes that she really oughta be more alarmed that hurting anyone to keep them around is in Hannibal's playbook. Like, at all. But as she just said, they just killed like ten people. How is taking out an external threat any different from hurting the threatened person to keep them close? It's a path of logic that shouldn't be so easy to walk, yet here she is, making her way down it and into his brain. She's not so far gone that she doesn't feel a surge of relief that Will is safe, that he won't ever see Hannibal's white, white teeth gleaming in his bloody, bloody face, not turned against him.
"I'm not gonna leave you," she hisses, fingers digging into his opposite hip. What had she said to him, that night a couple months before Will moved in? That she doesn't want to see him hurt, but she's too selfish to take herself off to a safe distance? Yeah. That. "I'm gonna--we're gonna take care of each other, okay? No matter what."
The enormity of what he's done for her, what caring for her this last almost-week must've looked like, is still sinking in. If she thinks about it too much, looks at it straight on, this tenuous control over her tear ducts is gonna go bye-bye. It's almost overwhelming to acknowledge the obvious stuff, like the pins in her wrist or the stolen IV equipment, like the blanket he keeps stealing off her bed and the fact that the sheets feel clean against her legs. She feels gross but not downright disgusting, not a crusty risen corpse like the last time Burnout took her. Hannibal did all that, and he kept her safe in the process. Neph will return that to him one day, whatever it takes.
She's doing it now, in part, by trying to prepare him for a nasty possibility. "'Cuz I don't want it to break you if he does," she sighs, "And 'cuz he...he's allowed to go if he wants. He deserves that."
Will shouldn't be trapped with people who scare him. Just like Neph doesn't deserve to have her fear of abandonment thrown right in her teeth like this. She full-body flinches under Hannibal's arm, shoulders jerking into his armpit and the hollow of his elbow. Her mouth crimps up in a miserable line. It was one thing for Will to accept Hannibal as a mutant - people at least know they exist. It was another for him to accept her abilities - he was onboard with mutations, magic's really just a step further. He'd even accepted some of the dangers she'd described for him, but now the threats are piling up on Hannibal's side, too. Asking him to stay just means taking on double the risk.
He might be willing to stay for Hannibal, but he didn't choose her. He sort of got her on a two-for-one sale. She can't expect--she doesn't expect. Not anything. Not from Will. In a creaky whisper, Neph says, "Yeah, I do. I'm a--" A flash of Hannibal beating a man's face in with a gun, not once but twice. "We're monsters, Hannibal. And we almost got Will killed. He'd be crazy to stay."
She turns her head away from Hannibal and scrubs her eyes against her shoulder. The cast comes all the way up her arm, but whatever it's made of is wrapped in soft bandages that blot moisture well enough. Neph stares determinedly at the tacky wallpaper until her eyes feel dry, wondering if Will's been considering escape routes on these walks of his.
"Do you think he'll stay?" she doesn't mean to ask, much less sound like such a baby when she does. She hasn't meant for a lot of things to happen.
Neph's promise rings through him. Neph doesn't usually go for direct statements of loyalty, she isn't firmly planted in anything that way. But then there's 'I'm not gonna leave you' while she digs fingers into his flank like a feral thing, someone possessed. It's a language Hannibal responds to immediately, one that snaps through him, breaks right through any other thoughts and leaves them contentedly cut off.
It makes the conversation after, the part where Neph lays out that Will isn't like her, a little easier to bear. And she isn't wrong. Will's not like either of them - Will's extremes are his own, but they don't include killing people in self-defense. They don't include threatening people to stay with him. They don't include this hip-bruising grip on the things he wants.
At least not yet, which is what this blossomed friendship between himself and Neph has taught Hannibal. That he can want things and not lose them, sometimes.
"We're monsters that would protect him, though." Hannibal says, and Hannibal doesn't flinch at the name. "And he knows that now. That will matter to him." But it might not matter enough, it might not be the whole picture. Will's stubborn and Will is...surprisingly moral. Hannibal has already hit up against that wall once or twice, the way Will can see and feel and empathize with terrible things but how hard he fights to swim above their currents.
"...I was very certain he would stay." Which is as sneaky as Hannibal can mention that Neph has got doubts swirling back up from where Hannibal had happily pushed them aside. Will's been sharing a living space with him, but of course, he's had to. He's still healing, he's got nowhere else to go. As Hannibal examines the past five days, he sees more and more how Will has had no choice but to stay in place. What if he could leave?
"I think we should call him." Hannibal says all at once. The certainty that Will won't think it was funny not to tell him that Neph awoke settles on Hannibal's ribs just as surely as Neph's arm does. "Tell him that you are alright." He'll have to move to go get his phone, of course, considering he's naked under that towel. And moving doesn't sound like the most appealing prospect right now, concern or no concern.
Monsters that...protect? Neph's head tips so far to the left her neck pops and her hair brushes her shoulder. She turns the concept over, examining it as intently as she's ever applied her Bronzesight to an enchanted bauble. To say it's a new idea would be assuming she'd ever considered her abilities anything but dangerous or self-serving. She'd always thought she was being self aware. Had she been shutting herself off from other, better applications? All this time?
"Oh," is all she says at first, as her thoughts trip back to that miliinstant when she'd decided to drop down and stop the bullet instead of deflecting it. The gun was so close, a nudge might've only sent the shot into his jaw or neck instead--
That will matter to him. Hannibal says, and the only reason his conviction matters at all is because he admits he's no longer so sure it will be enough. If he can doubt that, then he must be right about their protection having some weight. Neph only realizes her mouth has parted at the thought when she has to swallow and lick suddenly dry lips.
"I hope he does," which is...more than she's admitted to Hannibal out loud, up til now. She's insisted that Will move in with them if he wanted, she's sided with him in arguments and she's spent dozens of frustrating hours chewing through textbooks beside him, but she's never come out and told Hannibal I want your boyfriend around. I like him here. It's a day for declarations.
She's not awake enough yet to handle Hannibal's abrupt 180 on Messing With Will, even with the unsure turn this conversation's taken. Neph blinks and nods slowly, conceding to his read on the situation. She's been unconscious for like a week, what does she know about Will's current mental state? "Okay," she clears her throat, lightens her voice, "Tell him 'bout the Chinese food then."
If sharing the news means he comes back instead of hobbling as far as his leg will take him, who's she to complain?
Hannibal's mouth does that thing it does when he's torn between a couple priorities, such an everyday thing that Neph smiles tiredly and shifts off his shoulder. "Go 'head," she pats at him. "M'gonna take a shower. I prob'ly smell like a housefire." The fact that Hannibal willingly got all up on her anyway says a lot about how freaked out he must've been by her Burnout. Just for that, she won't make fun of him for grabbing his own shampoo from the apartment.
"I will." Hannibal says, and he finds he's getting up despite himself, practiced routine getting him up as soon as he's settled on a task - no matter how much more appealing it sounds to lay down with Neph and not move, not let go of his grip on her.
He's off the bed by the time Neph mentions a shower. He turns back to her, mouth open but silent for a moment while his brain processes what she's just said. "Your cast isn't waterproof." Is what he settles on, as the least-rude possibility. "I could find you a trash bag for it, but I would recommend just using the bath." And bathing one-handed. Which doesn't sound terribly feasible. Hannibal turns that thought over as he approaches the nightstand, picks up his phone.
When he dials, he hears a ringing tone...doubled? Not just in his ear? Hannibal pulls the phone away from his head just in time to confirm that, yes, he's hearing a phone near the door--
"Yeah?" That's Will's voice, also doubled. There's the sound of a key turning in the lock.
Oh. "...You're back early."
"Not really." Will says, and now it's his voice in the room that's loudest, Will swinging the door open, Will dragging against the door handle a bit more than he usually would. He's always more sore after a walk. Hannibal thinks that's part of the reason he insists on going out three or four times a day to stretch out his newly-knit muscle. "I told you I'd probably be back by the time you were done with your shower."
Hannibal just brings the phone down away from his ear, hanging it up as he goes. There's not quite any point in trying to salvage this, now, because any second Will's going to look up and see that Neph's--
Will drops his phone. He also swears, a surprisingly soft thing, swallowed against an intake of breath as he freezes in place. Will's eyes don't look over for Hannibal's accusingly, he doesn't ask why Hannibal didn't call him immediately, the way they'd discussed on the third evening, both of them wondering how long this would go on for.
"Y-- You're awake." Will says, staring at Neph. He's got his glasses on from his walk still, and his curls are flatter to his forehead than usual from the sweat that gathered on it. "You woke up." He repeats, and in that is the unspoken 'we weren't sure you really would'. His breathing is suddenly loud and harsh and he stays rooted to the spot.
Across the room, Hannibal just watches, clearly ignored by at least one of them.
As soon as Hannibal stands and the mattress rights itself, Neph reaches for the headboard to pull herself all the way upright. On her inhale, she notes the soreness in her core, the sleepy complaints in her legs. Her body's gotten rusty in the five days she's been out, and now it'll need a couple more days of easy work before it responds the way she's used to.
"The bath?" she repeats, nose crinkling in dismay. She's never met a motel bath she was totally comfortable standing in barefoot, let alone lying down in naked. She's done it but always felt kinda gross later.
Then again, this is a shower Hannibal's been using. If it hasn't been bleached right down to its atomic structure she'll be shocked right back into her coma. "You're prob'ly right," Neph sighs as she shoves the blankets down and swings her legs off the edge of the bed. "I shouldn't be standing on slippery stuff anyway. Or, like, at all." Not at first. Not until her knees come back online.
Her toes brush the carpet, damp where Hannibal stood dripping in his towel, and she carefully eases her weight to the floor. She's just about to go full vertical when the lock clicks and Will shoulders through, one hand on the doorknob and the other holding his phone to his ear. Neph freezes and takes him in, enjoying the rare opportunity to study him while he's totally unaware of her.
Will looks...better than she'd've thought. Better than she remembers, for sure. He's sweaty and clearly tired, but there's color in his face and the dragging exhaustion in his voice is more satisfied than frustrated. He's recovering, she thinks, which is more than she could've hoped for when they were both bleeding all over that stolen car.
What happened to that car, anyway?
Will's phone slips from his hand and clatters to the garish carpet. Neph flinches on instinct, but if it cracked then at least it didn't shatter all over the place. She can't check to see, not with the way Will stares at her in desblief, eyes huge and wondering behind his bent frames.
His glasses survived the warehouse. For a second, she's so hung up on that tiny miracle she hardly hears him. It's not until the second you woke up that she refocuses on his face, on the fear and relief and confusion there. And she smiles in disbelief of her own, because someone was worried about her.
"Just now, yeah," she has to reach for the water Hannibal set aside and take another sip, briefly turning away from Will to do so. When she looks back, he's still staring, like if he blinks she might vanish. "I'm...I've never seen Burnout from the outside, I'm sorry, It must'a been...freaky."
If she says I'm sorry I scared you, she'll spend all day having to sort through all the recent apology-worthy scares, of which there are, uh, at least a dozen. There's a conversation looming on the horizon that Neph's not sure she's really ready to have, but right now Will's standing on his own to feet, no longer bloodlessly white, here in this room with her and Hannibal. With the monsters. Unafraid.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2017-08-08 03:15 am (UTC)It's only when Neph says she trusts him but should have trusted him earlier that he responds. "Yes," he says, because the truth matters more than smoothing it out, here. "You should have." But the entire point that this is useful to say is because: "Maybe we can all become more...proactive. In sharing secrets that might harm ourselves or the others."
Hannibal is reasonably certain he can feel Will's stare from behind Neph, can hear his brain tea kettle shrieking about the mutant secret. How it just almost got them all killed.
Neph turns to him, too, and for a moment Hannibal thinks it's to share a moment mutually hating him for the fiasco that was accidentally revealing the mutant secret to Will. But no - it's a curveball, for Hannibal, who missed their conversation when Neph broke her arm and fingers. He just stares, genuinely surprised.
And grateful. Will had looked terrified enough that Hannibal could fight back at the apartment - by now, his mind must look like...well...
Like a criminal profiler's handbook.
Will is staring at Neph with open-mouthed - emotion. Attachment, Hannibal thinks, and horror. He looks like he's been shown something he loved just in time to see it dropped off a cliff - or perhaps just realized he loved something as it was dropped. He looks ruined, but he takes in one rattling breath and when he lets it out, he sinks towards Neph again. His hand touches hers. Will so rarely initiates touching. With either of them.
"I promise." Will looks like he had to swallow glass to get that out. It comes easier the second time: "I will. I'll stay." His face stretches into a grin that might look happier if he wasn't the same sick-yellow pallor as the moon rising behind them. "Not like I could really run off on anyone for a few days, anyway. Better wake up quick?" He shrugs through the joke, eyes squinting closed, and for a brief moment it's as if he hasn't lost over a pint of blood.
no subject
Date: 2017-08-08 06:55 am (UTC)Was it so wrong to keep her Achilles heel under wraps?
The light dims further when she scowls at Hannibal. It's the kind of deep seated pique only a sibling or an old married person can feel for another. Really, Hannibal? After she hinted and nudged and outright told him to come clean and the mutant thing still blew up in all their faces? After she'd said hey maybe you oughta tell Will about the screaming nightmares now that he lives here and he hadn't done that, either? After it turned out he had an aunt stashed away somewhere in France?
She practically turns to Will out of self defense, 'cuz otherwise she's gonna let gravity win long enough to fall headfirst onto Hannibal's broken nose.
Will does not look annoyed. Will looks...bleak. As though he realized, too late, a trap closing around him. Neph's fever-dry mouth goes even more papery. She strains for the air to say just kidding or it's fine, but her battered ribs refuse to budge. His face is rejection made plain, the agonized embarrassment of someone searching for the least damaging way to say 'no'.
Neph can't run away from this car, so she collapses into herself like a coal. Will--follows after, reaching for the hand she'd settled on the armrest. Like this, with him hanging off the back of her seat, it's almost like a hug from behind. With a carseat in the way. Her shoulders unfurl the tiniest bit. I'll stay, he says.
"You don't--not forever, just--" he promised. He just promised, and she scrambles to give him an out. She hadn't asked for it but he just...threw it out there. "When I wake up I can...I can explain. F'you want."
Once she would've gnawed her own leg off for the chance to explain for a family that never cared to ask. After that, what was the point in sharing with anyone else? Maybe Will won't want to hear it either, why she did what she did. But on the off chance that he'll hear her out, that he'll stay past their recovery, she has to offer.
If offering means he hangs around long enough to say goodbye before he goes. Well. Maybe she'd like to know what that's like. Maybe she deserves that at least once.
Neph drops her head onto the seat shoulder and tilts a smile up at Will. "Don't say that," she wheezes. It was supposed to be a chuckle, but she can't have everything. "He'll pull a Kathy Bates on the both'a us."
It's a measure of her trust in Hannibal that she's actually, honestly, 100% joking.
no subject
Date: 2017-08-11 01:48 am (UTC)Will they ever feel for each other what Hannibal feels for both of them? ...Do they feel for Hannibal what Hannibal feels for both of them, is perhaps an even larger question. Would it matter to him if they didn't? ...It would. It certainly would, Hannibal confirms rapidly. He could stand everyone else hating him, if only Neph kept looking at him and saying she trusts him to watch over her while she can't, if only Will kept looking Hannibal in the eye.
Will stares at Neph, and Hannibal watches the pale blue lights reflected in his eyes. "...Yes. I want--" He swallows hard. His voice is wavering, and Hannibal doesn't think it's entirely emotions. Hannibal needs to find him blood. "I want to know. What happened." Those eyes find his, and with Neph's eyes reflected in them, Will's ability feels eerily present. "From both of you."
Hannibal nods. "We'll have plenty of time. If I am pulling a Kathy Bates on both of you." Hannibal only knows that reference because of Neph, which is perhaps why she mentions it at all, which is just another reason why Hannibal stretches himself out on the limb of making a joke.
In front of them is a great cracking, echoing down - a structure collapsing somewhere in the building. Flames lick at the high windows.
"We should probably get going." Says Will, though he doesn't let go from trying to starfish himself against Neph's headrest. "Before you have time to search the trunk for hammers."
"You should probably lie down." Hannibal says, shifting the car into drive. It is, perhaps luckily, an automatic, even if that results in Hannibal checking and double-checking it as he doesn't need to fiddle with it as they pull out across gravel. "Before you pass out in Neph's arms."
Will shifts around behind him, presumably lying down. Softly, possibly because he's too far gone to realize he isn't just thinking it, Will says, "Doesn't sound terrible."
"And you should recline your seat all of the way back. For when you do pass out." Hannibal glances across at Neph when he can, as the moonlight creates shadows roving across the dashboard as they pull out of an unknown parking lot and start west on the nearest, thin industrial road.
no subject
Date: 2017-08-12 02:49 am (UTC)Maybe she can ask, if they're gonna be talking this over like adults.
"I vote to be unconscious for the stuff with the hammer," Carrying this joke further while a burning building collapses behind them has got to be some kind of unhealthy coping mechanism, but ask her if she cares right now. She winces at the sharp cherrybomb crack of beams collapsing, distinct even across a parking lot and through a closed car door. "We should--yeah, before the fire department shows up."
Their kidnappers probably turned off the alarms, if there were any, to ensure themselves adequate escape time after their planned witchburning. Still, better safe than sorry, and she's been hugely unsafe tonight.
Will releases the back of her seat as Hannibal shifts gears, a combination that leaves Neph feeling light and untethered. She floats for a second, eyes drifting shut as gravel crunches under the tires. Does Hannibal even know how to drive? His older self had a car, she remembers, but where'd he pick up the skill, and did meeting her throw that event out the window too?
A giggle slips out of her at his ongoing efforts to get Will to lie the fuck down. It's not funny, except for how it kinda is, and Will's response is just innocent enough that it slips past her alarms, tickling the edges of her own boundaries as it goes. "I have very strong arms," she says as she pulls the lever on her seat and clonks backward. Like this, her head is practically laying across Will's knees, with his head and shoulders behind Hannibal's seat. She can turn her face sideways and study him in the light from her own eyes. "I'd catch you. Not like Hannibal. One time he did a mutant Burnout an'he fell gettin' outta bed an' broke his nose. He needs'ta go easier on the nose or he's gonna ruin it."
Wait, that was a different Hannibal. Neph grimaces and lets her head fall forward, debating talking at all. The Burnout claws away at her, hollowing her out from the inside, but she refuses to just let it drag her under without a fight. They could pass a cop any second, she might need to...to do something. She oughta finish stripping off her bloody shirt, oughta hide her hand--
"Hey, Hannah," there's a definite slur to her words, now, a ghost of an accent rising from the grave, "While I'm undah you...you can mess with my hand. I won't feel it. So anything you gottah do, just...yeah. Don't go amputating anything though, m'serious."
no subject
Date: 2017-08-18 01:31 pm (UTC)His nose is still bloody, there's coagulation across his ear and hair, but at least without a red-splotched shirt he stands out slightly less. Shirtless, bloody pants still visible, he goes into the lobby and calls the elevator.
Their door is still forced open, unlocked. Hannibal stashes all the cash from his room and Neph's into Neph's bug-out bag. He finds Will's backpack and shoves clothes in there. He changes into the softest pants he owns and a casual shirt of Will's.
He methodically wipes down every non-porous surface with alcohol, though he thinks it might be too late to worry about anti-mutant groups finding their prints.
Fifteen minutes after he went in, Hannibal is coming down their stairs with three bags. He leaves the door locked. They may want to come back, eventually, before their lease ends.
The motel is one he selects based on the fact that it has its own doors directly to the outside, so Will and Neph won't set anyone's suspicions raising by being dragged through hallways. Hannibal pays, acting sleepy and anxious to rest after a long day of road-tripping to the front desk help - a teenager probably not much older than himself, who probably didn't even need the act as an excuse for this.
Will's woken up a bit, by the time Hannibal is back to the car.
"Are we okay?" Is what he says when Hannibal hooks him by the armpits and begins dragging him out of the car. And then "Shit, my leg!" He grabs for it and Hannibal simply holds more of his weight, then all of it, as Will flounders against him.
"We have an audience. Please." Hannibal whispers, and Will goes quiet.
"...A hotel." Will says wonderingly once they're inside, and Hannibal decides not to correct him that it's a motel. "Good thing you're fucking rich."
The shower is going to look like one of those murders actually took place here by the time everyone's gone through it, but at least they'll all be able to get clean. At least Neph and Will can convalesce somewhere safe.
"You okay?" Will asks. Hannibal doesn't want to ask what expression he was wearing to warrant the way Will watches him.
"Yes. I'm going to get you a glass of water, and then I'm going to bring Neph in here as well. Then I am going to leave. There's only one key to this room. I will leave it with you in case you need it. I'll pick the lock to come back in, if you're not awake."
Will stares at him, face waxen and pale. He looks even worse in here, in the yellow lighting from the terrible bedside lamp, than he did in the car while Hannibal drove them under scattered street lights.
"What?" Hannibal breaks the silence. He can't leave the room with Will's stare on him like that, without an explanation.
Will shifts on the bed, starts laying down. "Felt like meeting your doppelganger, earlier. Now I can see that it's all you."
Hannibal doesn't ask again. Will rolls over towards the back wall, and Hannibal leaves.
Hannibal never got to carry Mischa's dead body while it still had flesh on it. He imagines it might have felt like picking Neph out of the car, a boneless neck and a mouth that hangs open with gravity, eyes closed only because she'd been exhausted when she lost consciousness. He places her on the same bed as Will without explanation and Will doesn't ask him why, just shifts a hand over to feel for Neph's pulse at the wrist.
Hannibal thinks about pressing dry lips to Will's hair, to Neph's, and does neither. He leaves with just the taste of blood in his mouth, heading to the teaching hospital.
*
He comes back in two hours and with more than he left their apartment with. He needs two trips to bring everything into the room, and he has to pick the lock to get in, although Will wakes up during his final trip inside and Hannibal ends up having to help him back onto the bed, startled and aggressive in confused exhaustion.
"It's just you," Will says on a ragged sigh, while Hannibal props his leg up on the pillows from the second, unused bed. "Thought it was someone breaking in."
"Both of the things you just said are correct." Hannibal allows, and Will snorts.
Will doesn't respond much to Hannibal dressing his leg. He watches with dull eyes when Hannibal cleans off his arm with iodine. He only appears to register what's about to happen when Hannibal unfolds the IV stand and sets it up next to him. A bag of blood and a bag of fluids gets hung, Will's eyes wide on it.
"I'm very good with needles." Hannibal says, earnestly. "You may not feel anything at all, and I doubt you will bruise."
"I can't believe you're a real person." Is all Will says for the next ten minutes. His face barely winces when Hannibal pricks him for his blood transfusion, although he hisses in pain at the one on the back of his palm for the fluids.
Will is asleep by the time Hannibal is working on Neph. She has no reaction to anything, and Hannibal has the IV in her good hand when he wonders if he should just set all of her bones now. Should he move her to the other bed so Will won't wake up if the bed bounces with the pressure needed?
In the end, Hannibal piles all of their belongings next to the small dresser in the room, takes a shower, ices his nose with one of the instant cold packs stolen from the hospital, and then crawls into bed between them.
*
The next morning, he wakes up first and, in the half-light through closed curtains, he feels like his family has passed through some liminal barrier, coming out the other side as something more or less than human. He thinks of the Mart, of having to crane his neck to look Neph in the eye, and now - now he presses a dry kiss to her hairline, touches her wrist to check for a pulse.
He manages not to wake Will up while moving Neph over to the other bed, and starts the process of setting her mutilated arm in complete silence.
no subject
Date: 2017-08-19 12:51 am (UTC)Ten hours after that, she snuffles into her shoulder and blinks open dry, gummy eyes. Her whole face falls into creases at the sight of this unfamiliar ceiling with its abstract water stains, at the sound of car doors slamming just on the other side of a wall. The smell is the only reassuring thing about these strange new surroundings. Rather than the antiseptic sterility of her worst fears, she breathes in soap, french fries, cigarette smoke and scent cheap fabric softener. Where...how...?
Neph tries to sit up against the weight of gravity and the landslide of her exhaustion. This...she knows this awful wrung-out feeling, this chill deep in her gut. This is Burnout. She must've pushed herself too hard and gotten herself to a safehouse before she crashed. She's gotta call Hannibal, he must be losing his mind right n--
Out of habit, she goes to plant her elbows to lever herself up, but two things happen: warning flares go off all down her right arm, culminating in a terrible throbbing in her hand that she'd somehow managed not to notice until just now. Her left arm moves, but a sharp stinging tug on the back of her hand warns her not to go far. Neph lets out a confused, wounded mewl and drops back against the lumpy mattress. She tips her chin down to scope out the situation and finds an IV line feeding into her left hand and a cast, a cast with pins sticking out of it, immobilizing her right arm.
Oh.
Right.
That's not the smell of cigarette smoke clinging to her hair after all.
But how did she end up wherever this is, and where's--where're--
She doesn't have the energy for true panic, but the sudden uptick in her heart rate pounds through her whole wasted body. Neph's just contemplating pulling that IV out with her teeth and lurching off the bed when she notices something. Spread over her body, tucked under her arms, is her fuzzy star blanket. Its pale blues and yellows pop against the cheap polyester comforter, which is printed with the kind of loud, swirling pattern only ever found in roadside motels. Neph spreads her fingers against the soft microfiber and breathes out her alarm.
It's okay. She's okay. Hannibal brought them somewhere he thought would be safe, and he had the time and freedom to grab non-emergency supplies. Her nose burns like she might be about to cry, but her body's been running on just enough fluids to survive for the better part of a week. It has nothing to spare for a sudden surge of tears.
Carefully, soooo carefully, Neph wriggles against her pillow until she's propped up on her shoulderblades with the back of her neck against the headboard. It's not much, but it provides her with a better vantage point of the room (which could be any of the dozens of motels she's camped in over the years) and the signs that other people have been/are living here. She swallows and tries to call out.
"Han--" a sandpapery whisper emerges. Better try again. "Hannibal?"
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?"
no subject
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
Date: 2017-08-29 10:50 pm (UTC)If he lost Neph, though? Or if Will had been killed during the initial fight with their captors? As Neph buries her face against his neck and Hannibal doesn't comment on the way her eyes welled up just before she pressed in, Hannibal thinks that that may have done it for him.
Perhaps the relief of not losing him feels similarly for Neph. Hannibal finds he enjoys that thought, just as he enjoys the way Neph clings to him. It's like steel foundations being built next to his own ironclad sense of self - like Neph wanting and needing him makes himself more complete, more important.
'Is it...because you just realized you're in love with Neph?'
Hannibal tilts further over Neph, lets his torso turn towards her at an angle that is absolutely unsustainable for his spine but which finally gives them enough points of contact. "Of course I only meant dangerous people. Will feels removed from the rest of humanity as well, whether or not he meets either of our requirements for being outside that group." Hannibal can't help but feel that catch in the thought though, where Neph's now laid down a snag. Will is used to being alone. It's not unreasonable to think that, enough horrible events witnessed, he might go rogue from all sides and become his own force, going after whoever seems most dangerous.
That's...a threatening thought.
'Could you let him go?' Hannibal stays very, very still at that. He can feel his own pulse elevate, moment by moment, until he forcibly breathes slower and his heart beat has to match it.
"...I don't think I could hurt him to make him stay." Hannibal says, very softly. He says it like that would've been his first thought, before. His grip on Neph's hand has tightened, although he hasn't noticed. "I'm not...sure what I would do." And he's finding, to his surprise, that he doesn't like thinking about it. Hannibal can entertain himself with theoretical scenarios without consequence, most of the time - or so he thought. Or has he just always looked away from the scenarios he didn't like?
"I don't know what I would do if you left me, either." Hannibal says, and that thought has barbs. It's not just words. It's got weight, enough to crush his ribs if he lets it sit there on his chest. He thinks he would kill everyone who he thought had contributed to Neph leaving him, but he can already feel the hole that would leave.
"Why would you ask me that?" There's no accusation in his voice, just blank surprise. Surprise at himself for his reaction, surprise at Neph for her continued insistence that Will won't understand them, won't want them, once he finds out enough of the truth. She's always thought that. It never stopped, apparently, not even after Will proved that the mutant/magic angle wasn't enough to scare him away. "Do you think everyone would leave you, and would leave me, once they find out how high the risk is?"
No that can't be right!!!
Date: 2017-08-30 07:16 am (UTC)That was way more emotion than she'd meant to trigger, when the question slipped out of her mouth.
In the same distant manner she recognizes that she really oughta be more alarmed that hurting anyone to keep them around is in Hannibal's playbook. Like, at all. But as she just said, they just killed like ten people. How is taking out an external threat any different from hurting the threatened person to keep them close? It's a path of logic that shouldn't be so easy to walk, yet here she is, making her way down it and into his brain. She's not so far gone that she doesn't feel a surge of relief that Will is safe, that he won't ever see Hannibal's white, white teeth gleaming in his bloody, bloody face, not turned against him.
"I'm not gonna leave you," she hisses, fingers digging into his opposite hip. What had she said to him, that night a couple months before Will moved in? That she doesn't want to see him hurt, but she's too selfish to take herself off to a safe distance? Yeah. That. "I'm gonna--we're gonna take care of each other, okay? No matter what."
The enormity of what he's done for her, what caring for her this last almost-week must've looked like, is still sinking in. If she thinks about it too much, looks at it straight on, this tenuous control over her tear ducts is gonna go bye-bye. It's almost overwhelming to acknowledge the obvious stuff, like the pins in her wrist or the stolen IV equipment, like the blanket he keeps stealing off her bed and the fact that the sheets feel clean against her legs. She feels gross but not downright disgusting, not a crusty risen corpse like the last time Burnout took her. Hannibal did all that, and he kept her safe in the process. Neph will return that to him one day, whatever it takes.
She's doing it now, in part, by trying to prepare him for a nasty possibility. "'Cuz I don't want it to break you if he does," she sighs, "And 'cuz he...he's allowed to go if he wants. He deserves that."
Will shouldn't be trapped with people who scare him. Just like Neph doesn't deserve to have her fear of abandonment thrown right in her teeth like this. She full-body flinches under Hannibal's arm, shoulders jerking into his armpit and the hollow of his elbow. Her mouth crimps up in a miserable line. It was one thing for Will to accept Hannibal as a mutant - people at least know they exist. It was another for him to accept her abilities - he was onboard with mutations, magic's really just a step further. He'd even accepted some of the dangers she'd described for him, but now the threats are piling up on Hannibal's side, too. Asking him to stay just means taking on double the risk.
He might be willing to stay for Hannibal, but he didn't choose her. He sort of got her on a two-for-one sale. She can't expect--she doesn't expect. Not anything. Not from Will. In a creaky whisper, Neph says, "Yeah, I do. I'm a--" A flash of Hannibal beating a man's face in with a gun, not once but twice. "We're monsters, Hannibal. And we almost got Will killed. He'd be crazy to stay."
She turns her head away from Hannibal and scrubs her eyes against her shoulder. The cast comes all the way up her arm, but whatever it's made of is wrapped in soft bandages that blot moisture well enough. Neph stares determinedly at the tacky wallpaper until her eyes feel dry, wondering if Will's been considering escape routes on these walks of his.
"Do you think he'll stay?" she doesn't mean to ask, much less sound like such a baby when she does. She hasn't meant for a lot of things to happen.
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Date: 2017-09-03 11:13 pm (UTC)It makes the conversation after, the part where Neph lays out that Will isn't like her, a little easier to bear. And she isn't wrong. Will's not like either of them - Will's extremes are his own, but they don't include killing people in self-defense. They don't include threatening people to stay with him. They don't include this hip-bruising grip on the things he wants.
At least not yet, which is what this blossomed friendship between himself and Neph has taught Hannibal. That he can want things and not lose them, sometimes.
"We're monsters that would protect him, though." Hannibal says, and Hannibal doesn't flinch at the name. "And he knows that now. That will matter to him." But it might not matter enough, it might not be the whole picture. Will's stubborn and Will is...surprisingly moral. Hannibal has already hit up against that wall once or twice, the way Will can see and feel and empathize with terrible things but how hard he fights to swim above their currents.
"...I was very certain he would stay." Which is as sneaky as Hannibal can mention that Neph has got doubts swirling back up from where Hannibal had happily pushed them aside. Will's been sharing a living space with him, but of course, he's had to. He's still healing, he's got nowhere else to go. As Hannibal examines the past five days, he sees more and more how Will has had no choice but to stay in place. What if he could leave?
"I think we should call him." Hannibal says all at once. The certainty that Will won't think it was funny not to tell him that Neph awoke settles on Hannibal's ribs just as surely as Neph's arm does. "Tell him that you are alright." He'll have to move to go get his phone, of course, considering he's naked under that towel. And moving doesn't sound like the most appealing prospect right now, concern or no concern.
no subject
Date: 2017-09-04 12:07 am (UTC)"Oh," is all she says at first, as her thoughts trip back to that miliinstant when she'd decided to drop down and stop the bullet instead of deflecting it. The gun was so close, a nudge might've only sent the shot into his jaw or neck instead--
That will matter to him. Hannibal says, and the only reason his conviction matters at all is because he admits he's no longer so sure it will be enough. If he can doubt that, then he must be right about their protection having some weight. Neph only realizes her mouth has parted at the thought when she has to swallow and lick suddenly dry lips.
"I hope he does," which is...more than she's admitted to Hannibal out loud, up til now. She's insisted that Will move in with them if he wanted, she's sided with him in arguments and she's spent dozens of frustrating hours chewing through textbooks beside him, but she's never come out and told Hannibal I want your boyfriend around. I like him here. It's a day for declarations.
She's not awake enough yet to handle Hannibal's abrupt 180 on Messing With Will, even with the unsure turn this conversation's taken. Neph blinks and nods slowly, conceding to his read on the situation. She's been unconscious for like a week, what does she know about Will's current mental state? "Okay," she clears her throat, lightens her voice, "Tell him 'bout the Chinese food then."
If sharing the news means he comes back instead of hobbling as far as his leg will take him, who's she to complain?
Hannibal's mouth does that thing it does when he's torn between a couple priorities, such an everyday thing that Neph smiles tiredly and shifts off his shoulder. "Go 'head," she pats at him. "M'gonna take a shower. I prob'ly smell like a housefire." The fact that Hannibal willingly got all up on her anyway says a lot about how freaked out he must've been by her Burnout. Just for that, she won't make fun of him for grabbing his own shampoo from the apartment.
no subject
Date: 2017-09-29 07:49 pm (UTC)He's off the bed by the time Neph mentions a shower. He turns back to her, mouth open but silent for a moment while his brain processes what she's just said. "Your cast isn't waterproof." Is what he settles on, as the least-rude possibility. "I could find you a trash bag for it, but I would recommend just using the bath." And bathing one-handed. Which doesn't sound terribly feasible. Hannibal turns that thought over as he approaches the nightstand, picks up his phone.
When he dials, he hears a ringing tone...doubled? Not just in his ear? Hannibal pulls the phone away from his head just in time to confirm that, yes, he's hearing a phone near the door--
"Yeah?" That's Will's voice, also doubled. There's the sound of a key turning in the lock.
Oh. "...You're back early."
"Not really." Will says, and now it's his voice in the room that's loudest, Will swinging the door open, Will dragging against the door handle a bit more than he usually would. He's always more sore after a walk. Hannibal thinks that's part of the reason he insists on going out three or four times a day to stretch out his newly-knit muscle. "I told you I'd probably be back by the time you were done with your shower."
Hannibal just brings the phone down away from his ear, hanging it up as he goes. There's not quite any point in trying to salvage this, now, because any second Will's going to look up and see that Neph's--
Will drops his phone. He also swears, a surprisingly soft thing, swallowed against an intake of breath as he freezes in place. Will's eyes don't look over for Hannibal's accusingly, he doesn't ask why Hannibal didn't call him immediately, the way they'd discussed on the third evening, both of them wondering how long this would go on for.
"Y-- You're awake." Will says, staring at Neph. He's got his glasses on from his walk still, and his curls are flatter to his forehead than usual from the sweat that gathered on it. "You woke up." He repeats, and in that is the unspoken 'we weren't sure you really would'. His breathing is suddenly loud and harsh and he stays rooted to the spot.
Across the room, Hannibal just watches, clearly ignored by at least one of them.
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Date: 2017-10-01 11:01 pm (UTC)"The bath?" she repeats, nose crinkling in dismay. She's never met a motel bath she was totally comfortable standing in barefoot, let alone lying down in naked. She's done it but always felt kinda gross later.
Then again, this is a shower Hannibal's been using. If it hasn't been bleached right down to its atomic structure she'll be shocked right back into her coma. "You're prob'ly right," Neph sighs as she shoves the blankets down and swings her legs off the edge of the bed. "I shouldn't be standing on slippery stuff anyway. Or, like, at all." Not at first. Not until her knees come back online.
Her toes brush the carpet, damp where Hannibal stood dripping in his towel, and she carefully eases her weight to the floor. She's just about to go full vertical when the lock clicks and Will shoulders through, one hand on the doorknob and the other holding his phone to his ear. Neph freezes and takes him in, enjoying the rare opportunity to study him while he's totally unaware of her.
Will looks...better than she'd've thought. Better than she remembers, for sure. He's sweaty and clearly tired, but there's color in his face and the dragging exhaustion in his voice is more satisfied than frustrated. He's recovering, she thinks, which is more than she could've hoped for when they were both bleeding all over that stolen car.
What happened to that car, anyway?
Will's phone slips from his hand and clatters to the garish carpet. Neph flinches on instinct, but if it cracked then at least it didn't shatter all over the place. She can't check to see, not with the way Will stares at her in desblief, eyes huge and wondering behind his bent frames.
His glasses survived the warehouse. For a second, she's so hung up on that tiny miracle she hardly hears him. It's not until the second you woke up that she refocuses on his face, on the fear and relief and confusion there. And she smiles in disbelief of her own, because someone was worried about her.
"Just now, yeah," she has to reach for the water Hannibal set aside and take another sip, briefly turning away from Will to do so. When she looks back, he's still staring, like if he blinks she might vanish. "I'm...I've never seen Burnout from the outside, I'm sorry, It must'a been...freaky."
If she says I'm sorry I scared you, she'll spend all day having to sort through all the recent apology-worthy scares, of which there are, uh, at least a dozen. There's a conversation looming on the horizon that Neph's not sure she's really ready to have, but right now Will's standing on his own to feet, no longer bloodlessly white, here in this room with her and Hannibal. With the monsters. Unafraid.