Years and a number of exceedingly expensive therapy sessions later, she’ll remember more of the actual abduction; how light shone into her room like sunbeams through water, how everything went bluegreen and swayed in a nonexistent current, how the normal house sounds were transmuted to the creaking of reeds and mossy boughs, how the horse shone dully, like bottle glass, how its forelock fell into its eyes, almost to its nose, its mane halfway to its knees. She’ll remember the seaweed slickness of it under her hands, the night wind cutting through her pjs as it bore her away, the way its hooves struck thin air like waves against rocks.
In the immediate aftermath, Triss remembers only the smell. Not like that’s hard; it oozes out of her, a rotting-fish reek smeared over her skin, coating the inside of her mouth where she bit the horse—kelpie. That’s what the strange adults call it, a kelpie, a word that means nothing to a shivering, towel-swaddled eight year old standing in the middle of a stranger’s kitchen.
“How could you not know?” hisses the tall thin woman, the one who gutted the kelpie out from under her with a heavy, rusted knife as long as Triss’ whole arm and she’s totally not gonna have nightmares about that for years (yes she is, until other horrors bury them, and the therapy will not help), “You. It’s only your goddamn job, Argus!”
“Language,” the other woman chides. She’s older and heavier set, with a halo of dark curls and smile lines at all corners of her face. She was the one who cried towels and dry clothes! when the tall woman dragged Triss into the house, all the lines tilted down in alarm. The thin woman bares her teeth at the mild rebuke, but subsides into silent scowls at the third adult.
That’d be the tired man, who Triss eyes with extra suspicion because he’s a man and it’s his house and his mismatched towels and the thin woman seems to think the horse was his fault somehow. The horse she can still taste. Her palms sting where they came unstuck from its skin and her knee is one big ache where it turned around and bit her with its big square teeth and it sounds like all that could’ve been avoided if this man had done…something.
“She’s not been actively burning anything, Danae, or I would have,” he says like the words have to trudge up a real long staircase to get out his mouth. He rubs at his eyes and scans Triss with a look that’s both flat and sad all at once. She hikes the towel higher around her shoulders, glares, and drips defiantly on his floor. The older lady tried to offer her dry clothes but no way she’s gonna get naked in a stranger’s house in the middle of the night. “Or…she hasn’t lived here very long. Or isn’t local, though I can’t think why a kelpie would go so far out of its way.”
“I want to know why a kelpie’d fucking bother,” Danae mutters, “When’s the last time you heard of the Courts making a play that obvious?”
The other two exchange an uncomfortable look, while the thin woman smirks unpleasantly and rolls her shoulders. “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” she says. The man, Argus, just shakes his head, but the second woman, whose name Triss still hasn’t caught, seems to remember she’s still standing right there and could, theoretically, answer some of these questions.
“Are you new, sweetie?” her tone is sweet and low, but Triss sets her chin behind the towel. She’s not gonna be tricked into answering just ‘cuz someone’s being nice to her. She went through like four therapists before Hannibal, ask any of ‘em. “Did you move here recently? Where’s your family?”
Triss blinks. Her heart rate spikes and her knees wobble. It’s bad enough she’s got no idea how she ended up on a horse, falling from the sky into Baltimore harbor. It’s worse that she can only make sense out of every other sentence these people shoot at each other, since they put the words together all wrong (of course she’s not burning while also dripping all over and chattering in place, thanks captain obvious). But for them to somehow guess at the whole other situation, how Hannibal decided to up and move his practice from Boston - because of her, to put some distance between them and the trial, her internment in foster care, the bodies she left behind - how she doesn’t know the city well enough yet to even guess where she might be in relation to Hannibal’s house, her house, where she’s supposed to be right now but isn’t and it’ll be morning soon and he’ll notice and what’s he gonna think and what if he wishes he’d never moved here for her, that’s too much.
She bursts into huge, gulping sobs and collapses in a pile of wet towels. Argus and Danae step back, bumping into the table and kitchen counter, but the other woman makes a pained noise and reaches forward. She doesn’t touch Triss, not quite, just tucks the towel around her shoulders a little tighter.
“I know, hon, I know,” she coos, “It’s been a long, rough night. But you did real good.”
“I-I-I-I ha-hafta go h-h—home!,” Triss gasps.
“Oh,” the mean one grunts, “Great.”
~
It’s not like she’d wanted to tell these strangers where she lives, but Triss couldn’t think of what else to do.
“We could put her on a taxi,” Danae’d said, after Triss had refused to answer any questions about herself, not her name, her phone number, or whether strange things like this had ever happened to her before. “Hand over some twenties, let someone else worry about her.”
“The Courts tried to take her from her home,” the other woman, whose name turned out to be Ruth, said, “They could make another attempt. We can’t let her out of our sight until we know for sure why and who to confront about it.”
Danae snorted, “You don’t seriously think she-“
“Someone has to talk to her family either way,” Ruth went on, “She has one, and she’s too young to sneak out for lessons or keep a secret worth a damn.”
Nobody looked very comfortable with that idea, not from where Triss huddled on one of the kitchen chairs. Her head throbbed from that little hysterical fit, her nose was one big stuffed brick on her face, she was still damp and she’d refused to eat or drink anything they’d given her. They’d all looked especially annoyed about that last part. Her need to keep all this weird stuff away from Hannibal and her new place warred with her need to get home before he noticed, and the sky outside the window kept on lightening. Tired, achey and a million percent done with being so lost, she’d blurted the address into the tense silence.
It turned out Ruth owned a car, although she wouldn’t let Triss out of the house until she’d at least pulled one of Argus’ sweaters on over her wet things (Argus brought it back after he went to change out of his own pajamas, cotton pants and a U. of M. t-shirt that couldn’t be further from Hannibal’s matching sets. Her dad used to go to bed in stuff like that.). She ended up in the backseat with Danae, who leaned against the window to keep maximum distance.
By the time they reach the house, it’s true morning, bright and sunny. Danae whistles as they pull up the drive, but Triss is too anxious to catch the looks Ruth and Argus exchange. She’s too busy scanning the sidewalks for cop cars, like the times kids ran away from foster care and had to be dragged back or called in. Half the usual cars are missing, ‘cuz people went to work, but that’s normal. Everything’s normal. And quiet. Was she wrong? Instead of being angry, maybe Hannibal’s just relieved not to have to take care of her anymore. Maybe he’s not looking for her at all.
After that thought, Ruth has to coax her out of the backseat, and she drags behind the adults as they head up the front walk. Even Danae gets in on the baffled looks they pass around at this abrupt change of heart. It’s Argus who rings the bell, Triss hugging herself tightly, holding all the bad-thought shrapnel inside. She rocks herself as footsteps approach - he didn’t go to work, is that good? - holds her breath as the door swings open, and freezes when Hannibal Lecter focuses on the three unknown adults instead of the kid hiding behind them.
He doesn’t look mad. Not that he ever really does, but then again it’s almost 9:00 am and he’s not wearing a tie or anything yet. That’s…off, in a way she doesn’t know how to categorize. Does ‘not normal’ equal ‘upset’?
Her skinny arms aren’t enough to restrain her churning belly anymore. Triss explodes past the line of knees and barrels right into Hannibal, wailing “I didn’t run away!” it’s not like she’s hugging his legs or anything, she just crowded into him and her head doesn’t even clear his hip and, okay, maybe she’s got a hand gripping his pantleg, maybe, “I swear! There was a-a horse? And then—“
“We found her near the harbor,” Argus interjects, and he sounds calm even if Triss has no idea what kind of face he’s making, with her own mashed up against twill, “It’s a…long story, but she was reluctant to talk to us at first. I apologize for what you must have gone through this morning.”
What do you get the guy who either disdains or already has everything for his eighteenth birthday? Neph’s been asking herself this question for weeks, only to finally crack and ask. Hannibal stares at her for twelve long, silent seconds, his face unreadable, before saying, in the flat tone she’d come to associate with utter shock:
“You know my birth date?”
Neph blinks, says, “Of course I do?”
They stare at each other, the silence an awkward variety they haven’t experienced in a while, Hannibal, blank and Neph, stricken, unsure whether he’s more bowled over that she’d known (he never told her, no, she’d forgotten that was privileged information dug up about his future self during her early google searches) or that she wants to do something nice about it.
“It’s…eighteen’s kinda’a big deal over here,” she tries, “I just thought…”
Given the excuse of abiding by some arbitrary American custom, Hannibal reanimates. Or his eyes do, anyway, thoughts beginning to tick away behind them. Neph waits, hands clasped behind her back, head tipping sideways. At last, he says, “There’s an installation at the Walters I’ve been meaning to look into. They offer a student discount.”
“Done!” Neph beams, “And I got the tickets, that’s how birthdays work.” A thing she’s familiar with in theory, if not practice. Hannibal nods at this and then, uncharacteristically, visibly hesitates.
“Might we invite Will?”
Neph’s smile dims down into something a little more indulgent. “It’s your birthday, man, you can invite whoever you want! I’ll call ‘im.”
She does. Well, she texts, because who calls anybody for real these days? M wants to geek out about art for his birthday ru in? she sends, along with a calendar link for the Saturday slot they’d normally spend at the library. Hannibal’s birthday’s a Friday, which doesn’t work for any of them on account of work and school and other crap. Neph waits, and imagines Will’s distracted oh no face if he realizes, as she did, that he never really asked about things like birthdays. She follows up with a no presents just come.
He does. Which is how they end up at an exhibit titled “Ferocious Beauty: Wrathful Deities From Tibet and Nepal”, which makes Will blink and Neph facepalm. Is this about a thing for asian art, or a thing for rage and stabbing? She doesn’t have long to wonder, not when her habitual sweep of Bronze turns up buttloads of old magic under active shielding.
“Don’t touch anything,” she leans in to breathe in Hannibal’s ear as he takes in a statue of a lady with way more arms than socially acceptable. “Like, seriously, half the pieces in here’re cursed as fuck.”
He shoots her a surprised but appreciative look, eyes gleaming with the same eagerness he always lets slip when she shares something of her worldview. “But surely someone would have set that off by now?” he murmurs back, too soft for anyone to hear over the general susurrus of the crowd.
“It’s all under real tight shields,” Neph says, mouth quirking in a pleased smile of her own. “Somebody on staff here really knows their shit.” She hadn’t known that about the Walters museum, hasn’t been here before, but that’s the kind of thing that’s surely going to come in useful down the line. Hannibal makes a thoughtful noise, but whatever else he might have said gets interrupted by Will, who comes up on Hannibal’s other side to ask what they’re conspiring about.
“Nothing,” Neph jerks her chin towards the statue, “Mari was just explaining how come Kali’s a human octopus.”
Which means he has to actually explain that to Will, who seems to find it interesting. For Neph, who happens to know that one of the six other identified Mistborn uses ‘Kali’ as a moniker, the whole thing is extra funny.
They wander the gallery, room after room chaining out through the historic building, each one packed with snarling faces and bulbous eyes. There are other exhibits, of course, and they’ll get there eventually, but this is what they came to see. Neph hangs back a safe distance from all the art, hands stuffed in her pockets to smother temptation. Her slower pace of reading and lack of familiarity with the history that shaped the work means she wanders ahead of the boys, gaze tripping over all the encoded symbolism with a vague kind of interest. Before she realizes it, she’s in another room all together, this one a little less packed.
A flicker of red near the far door catches her eye. It glows the way only magic can, and unlike all the other ruddy lights she’s seen today, this one isn’t filtered through green shields. Neph’s chin jerks up, the pattern-seeking part of her brain labeling the source as a person before the rest labels that person as Samson.
He’s looking straight at her. Watching her, eyebrows drawn in. Their eyes lock immediately, blowing any possibility of this being a chance encounter right out of the water. A startled breath catches in Neph’s lungs, all the moisture in her mouth seeming to draw away with it; her mouth seals shut, her jaw locks, and not even she can say whether it’s startled nerves or a defensive slamming of doors.
Samson holds her gaze for a moment, then cants his head away, indicating the hall behind him. He turns and is gone, just a smear of red on the doorframe where he’d leaned his hand.
Neph stands, statue still, heart hammering against her ribs. What is this? A trap? No, too public for that. Is someone else casing the place, eyeing one of the pieces? Did she just wander through someone else’s reconnaissance? Or is he following her for some reason? She hasn’t seen Samson since—she’s avoided him, or he’s avoided her, not too difficult when they’d only met once before—anyway, she was happy to just never cross paths again, prepared to say ‘no’ to any prospective crews involving him, but mostly hoping it just…wouldn’t come up.
Now he’s here. Why? It’s got to be a work thing, but she hasn’t detected any other non-shielded abilities, no traces of Allomancy. If…if she’s getting in the way of someone’s play, though, she should find out how and assure them she’s not planning anything of her own.
Creakily, like someone lifting themselves out of a hospital bed, she takes a step after him. Then another, following the comet trail of Pewter embers until it spills into an open-air sculpture court at the center of the building. Marble stairs lead down to a small, carefully tended gardens, bare shrubs and branches pruned back around men and women frozen in flowing stone. Samson leans against one pillars, beside a stone bannister, watching the doorway for her. Neph marches over to the opposing pillar, so the two of them frame the stairs like sphinxes. She folds her arms and sets her shoulders against the stone and says:
“What d’you want?”
As opening gambits go, it’s not her most diplomatic. Neph doesn’t care, has no room for delicacy with every organ in her chest rattling like badly latched shutters. Samson’s eyes narrow, mouth twisting, hands curling into fists. Neph watches Pewter eddy around him, a sandstorm lit red by a figmentary sun, but then it stills.
“I want off the blacklist,” he snaps.
And Neph, who has no fucking clue what that's even supposed to mean, gapes, “What?”
Like a sadist’s Netflix recommendations, Neph’s nightmares are a grab bag strung together by the barest of themes. Paralysis. Abandonment. Pursuit. Powerlessness. Invasion. One night she’s running through Ben’s empty house, calling out as its rooms spill away in all directions like a hall of mirrors, and the next she’s pinned to a gurney by disembodied latex hands, antiseptic hospital lights flashing off brandished scalpels. She’s staring from the witness’ stand out at a sea of faces with sharp teeth and spikes through their eyes; or watery fingers press down her throat and nostrils while a kelpie churns away beneath her; or she wakes up in her childhood bedroom with its yellow walls and white bookcases and for half a dozen perfect heartbeats does not know she’s dreaming.
She’s buried beneath several tons of stone, timber and roofing slate, unable to wiggle free of the heavy wooden chair that’s shielded her from the debris. Her parents' frightened sobs filter through the piled bricks, frantic prayers that strike her like spells. With the perversity of dreams, the pitch darkness does nothing to keep her from seeing Father Campbell’s outflung arm, shoulders and head protruding from the collapse. His face is a ruin, a rotted jack o'lantern of splintered bone and cartilage caved in on itself. She screams and screams until the air grows thin and burns her lungs to ash. I’m sorry I’m sorry help me help me help me help me.
They shuffle, playlist-style. Neph would never tell Hannibal, but she almost envies him the predictability of his nightmare.
~
It's the church again. Of course it is.
The memories are so near, so crystal sharp and polished to a razor’s gleaming, it’s easy to accept that she’s never left this place. Patricia lets her parents walk her between the pews, hand in hand in hand, trailing behind Father Campbell. As he lights thousands of candles, they help her into the massive chair that usually sits behind the nave. Dad kisses her temple, Mama brushes her hair back, and everything is gonna be okay.
Buried deep inside where Patricia usually lives, Nephele screams: Get up! Get out of that chair and run, run, run!
Patricia does not. Events play out, inexorable as clockwork, until the panic strikes and the bomb goes off in her belly. Her head snaps back and Nephele surges to the fore just in time to count every single nail they’ve pulled from the ceiling, every rivet and joist and staple. They shower around her like fairy lights, electric blue, trailed by streamers of dust and wood shavings. She has time for one good breath before the beams splinter like the bones of an arthritic giant, time she uses to look at Father Campbell, submit herself to the judgement on his face.
The priest, in all his dark robes, is gone. Hannibal stands there, horrified understanding dawning, and everything in Neph gives a tortured metal shriek.
She’s never known for sure if she Pushed herself off the dais or if Father Campbell shoved her to safety. Her nightmares vary on the subject. This time, as the first beam groans its way free and plummets to earth, dropping at them, she Pushes. She saves herself.
The chair topples backwards, crashes off the steps and onto its side. Neph loses sight of Hannibal’s pale, shocked face as the roof comes down like the end of the world.
As the last tiles fall and the roars die away, she’s not a child buried alive. She is eighteen years old and whimpering in her monstrous throne, eyes screwed resolutely shut.
“Neph.”
No, no no. She bangs her head against the chair back, turns her face resolutely away. Dirt trickles into her mouth, her nose, pastes onto her sweaty face and neck. I won’t look I won’t.
“You have to.”
No. Stop.
“It’s a question of responsibility.”
He uses his there’s no such thing as ‘soaking’ dishes, Nephele voice, and so she looks, because he’s right. The nightmare dials back the pressing blackness of memory and there’s Hannibal, pinned and crushed in Father Campbell’s place, blood seeping slowly from beneath the piled stones.
Neph thrashes against the ties at her ankles and wrists. She tries to bend her neck to chew at them, but they remain just out of reach of her snapping teeth. Her blood wets the rope, soaking it, mashing the fibers tighter together. If she can just slip a hand loose, just reach out to him--his one intact eye stares glassily, half popped from its socket by the press of a granite block. Teeth litter the ground, blood pooling in his open mouth, bone everywhere she looks and Neph digs her nails into the arms of the chair so hard they peel away and--
~
She kicks herself awake, the sick sensation of fingernails bending chasing her back into her body. The pillow clutched to her face is twisted and damp with tears and sweat and saliva. Her pjs aren’t much better, wet and quickly cooling. Neph lies still for dozens of juddery heartbeats, staring into the dark, relieved by its very darkness.
Eventually she reaches out, fingers stretching across cotton instead of rubble, until her knuckles brush the smooth paint of her wall. No buried bodies. No sticky blood. No Hannibal.
You can’t do this. She tells the universe at large, hand recoiling into a shaking fist. You can’t change the rules.
Except of course it can. It can do anything it wants, and fuck her. Fuck everyone. Neph rolls onto her back to face the glow-in-the-dark stars stuck on her ceiling, dimmed by at least six hours of solid dark. If she wants them back, she’ll have to turn on a light. Maybe she should, she’s never had Hannibal’s knack for just rolling over and collapsing back to sleep.
Hannibal. Alarm plucks a wire in her chest, draws her tight until she’s sitting upright. Whatever her other gifts, Neph’s not prone to prophetic dreaming. Not her wheelhouse. But those things have been known to happen to total mundies now and then. Don’t moms sometimes have warning dreams when their kids are in danger? Don’t twins do that? Married couples? What if something’s seriously wrong, and that wasn’t just her subconscious having another laugh at her expense?
What if everything’s fine, and she busts in on him for no reason?
Neph runs her hand down her face, a cursory wipe against the tears and sweat there. Everything’s not fine, not with her. Could that be enough to shove back the ghost of his face when he realized she was about to crush them both?
The darkened apartment is no obstacle; Neph habitually learns her way around her places in the dark, mapping them within the first couple days. She’s standing outside Hannibal’s room almost before she realizes it, before she can even think I should’ve changed into clean pjs. These ones are cold down her back, behind her knees.
The door opens silently under her hand, and closes just as well behind her. Deep, even breathing fills the room like a bellows, like the rush of blood in her head. Neph makes out the boy-lump in the middle of the bed even as she moves close enough to get a knee up on the mattress.
“Hannibal?” her voice is a little thready, fraying, “Um…”
Her key turns too easily in the lock, and Neph pauses. None of them, not Will or Hannibal and definitely not her, leave the front door unlocked, not even when they’re home. They value their privacy, the novelty of a space they can control, too much for that.
The only time Neph can remember anybody failing to lock the door was when the boys had the ol’ homosuperior talk. There’d been some shouting and some snapping and Will stormed out in frigid silence. He hadn’t paused to lock up, and Hannibal immediately closed himself off in his room, leaving Neph to discover the security breach when she dared to stick her head out of her own room twenty minutes later.
(When she ragequits roommate conversations, she leaves by window. Not too many people are gonna breeze into their apartment if she doesn’t stop to lock it.)
“Ugh please no,” she mutters. It’s been a longass day already, spent walking Thoth’s new protégée through advanced Copper techniques. Her shields feel all crispy and a bone in her neck keeps popping. Those two better not be fighting. She briefly leans her forehead against the door, gathering her strength, and that’s when she sees them: scratches around the keyhole. Little scuffmarks.
Somebody’s picked the fucking lock, and it wasn’t her.
Neph straightens slowly, the column of her spine slotting into a rigid line. She thumbs the doorknob and comes away with fine metal shavings in the whorls of her fingerprint. Now, it’s possible that one of the guys forgot their key and had to force the lock to get in. They’re both stubborn and proud enough not to want to call for help, or to pay the super’s $15 lockout fee. But everybody in that apartment is as paranoid as they are private, and Neph might just be the worst of the bunch. She breathes out against the knot of ice in her gut and turns the knob.
“Hey, I’m home!” a flicker of Steel brings the hallway into focus but there’s nothing much to see; the studs in the walls make for a confusing net of leylines, and the kitchen’s crammed full of enough metal to blind any Allomancer. None of the threads overlapping her vision move like something carried by a person.
Inquisitors can shield against Steel or Ironsight. Her stomach churns with the thought, especially when nobody calls back to her. Neph pulls up Bronze just to be sure, but nothing glows that shouldn’t, and there’s none of the wild spattering of magic she’d expect if there were a—
A fight, like the one that looks to’ve wrecked the living room. She stops in the entryway, bag hanging off her shoulder like it’s any other day, like the coffee table isn’t cracked in half and her chair hasn’t been thrown against one of the walls. Glass glitters across the floor, catching light at odd angles from capsized lamps. Hannibal’s laptop sits wrenched open like a clam, screen spiderwebbed with cracks.
Even though she’d half-expected something like this, the sight locks her joints. This wasn’t just a robbery, they’d’ve taken the laptop and there oughta be more damage to the door and one of the guys should’ve been home and—
She ducks on instinct, rolling over the glass to come up behind the couch. A bat whistles through the air where her head had been – wood, no wonder she hadn’t seen it – followed by a soft ‘oof’ as the man wielding it overbalances and stumbles out of the darkened hall. He looks up, scowling, as Neph rises from her crouch.
“Come quiet, mutie,” he says, flat and annoyed. The lack of anger freaks her out more than snarling insults ever could, and the slur draws goosebumps down shoulders.
“Why? You literally just tried to bash my head in,” As usual, her mouth moves faster than her thoughts and does her no favors in the process. Bat-guy lunges and she burns Pewter, darting aside with blurring speed. She dodges around the coffee table, dancing backward, staying out of corners, trying to get the space to think, think, think.
Mutie. If that’s why he’s here…who is this? Who’s he with? He can’t be working alone; the boys could handle one asshole with a bat, no problem. She can handle one asshole with a bat, no problem. She has her knives, and even tapped out on Copper she’s still fresh enough on the other metals. Piece of cake.
But.
Neph swivels and reverses mid-step, diving for the guy, rolling between his legs and kicking out the back of his knee. He goes down with a grunt, bat pressed to the floor for support and she slams her foot squarely into his spine. “What’d you do with my friends? Where are they?!”
She jumps back as his hand twitches and a knife springs from an ankle sheath, swinging wide at her shins. It’s metal, she could take it away from him and plant it in his throat easy as breathing, but the lack of an answer keeps her magic in check.
Hannibal. Will. Where are you where are you? Not here. Who took you? His friends? And he stayed behind, why—waiting for me?
Knife-bat drives her back toward the hall, where a soft thunk from Hannibal’s room sets her nerves screaming. The footsteps that follow aren’t familiar, and it’s then that she realizes she’s been pinned. Or they think so, anyway, this guy and the partner coming up at her back. In a few seconds he’ll be in range to grab her, and she’ll have a choice:
Let him, and hope they take her wherever they’ve taken her friends. Or stop pretending she can’t feed them their own weapons, and waste time dumping their bodies. Waste time working contacts and combing Baltimore to find her boys.
“If you’re real good, they might still be alive when we get where we’re going,” the man behind her says, just before he grabs her upper arm and hauls it backward. Neph stomps at his feet, throws her head back into his mouth and pulls against him with an edge of Pewter, her frenzy only sorta feigned.
The bat whumphs into her middle, folding her over in his grip. The next hit cracks against her ear and cheek, force blunted by Pewter and the narrow windup space in the hall. Her vision goes leyline-blue anyway, and when it swims clear she’s folded over her knees on the floor. Curled up like that, they don’t notice the sleight-of-hand as she unclasps her wrist sheaths and shoves them further up her sleeves.
“—some kind of speedster,” the first man is saying to the other.
“Less of a fight than I expected,” he agrees as he pulls her other arm behind her back. Neph stays limp as he zipties her wrists together then shoves her over to do the same to her ankles. She means to fake unconsciousness, but they slip a bag over her head and she can’t help but thrash. Panic earns her a kick to the ribs and a rush of nausea as she’s picked up and thrown over someone’s shoulder.
Yes. This was a brilliant plan. She has no regrets about this at all.
How they get out of her building, she has no idea. There’s a bit where her ride gets really lurchy (she manages not to throw up inside her bag, but it’s close), which were probably the stairs. Before too long she’s unslung and dropped like a sack of potatoes on rough carpet. Then the trunk slams shut, leaving her cocooned in metal.
It’s not so bad at first. The car rumbles to life beneath her, a solid metal shell that blocks out all other anchor lines. Neph tries to take comfort in the knowledge that she could flip the whole thing if she wanted, but she can’t make out anything beyond that blue wall to know how fast they’re going, or in what direction. Eventually she drops Steel and just listens, taking in the sounds of traffic (heavy), how many times they roll to a stop (frequently at first, then not so much), and the conversation in the cab (limited).
Dampened by her breath and tacky with her blood, the bag starts to stick to her face. She puffs at it, wriggling her shoulders to test the zip ties. They bite into her wrists, but won’t last long once she applies a little Pewter. She could heal up her aching ribs and work on the split just above her ear, but it’s probably best to save her metals for later.
Then there’s nothing else to think about but her pains, her gnawing worry, and the fact that she’s tied up on her side in a lightless box.
The panic closes like a bear trap, piercing lungs and splintering bones. Her breath hitches against it, and all at once she’s buried under rubble, tied to a chair. A memory hammers home, not of the church but of her nightmare, of Hannibal crushed to death but still whispering. Take responsibility.
Neph thrashes, kicking out against the back of the seats. I am, I am, she sobs as someone shouts at her to shut the fuck up, I’m coming, I’ll find you, please don’t be dead, please be okay, I’m coming.
She’s terrible at marking time, but eventually her body wrings itself dry of panic and she lies still. Hours could pass for all she knows, and at some point the quality of the road under the car changes. It gets crunchy. Small rocks ping the undercarriage. She focuses on the random clunks to calm down, but has nothing to brace against when the car slams to a sudden stop. With a startled umph, she’s rolled against those seats, and there she huddles until the trunk cracks open.
Fresh air floods the compartment, bringing with it the nightsong of crickets and a total lack of anything else. The sound of her kidnappers’ boots crunching gravel is obscenely loud, as are their grunts as they heave her out of the car.
“On your feet,” one says, and there’s a flash of blue as he draws his knife and cuts the tie at her ankles. She’s been careful to flex her fingers and toes, but they still burn as blood rushes back where it belongs. Without a thought for numb feet or the fact that she’s still basicly blind, they haul her upright and frogmarch her away from the car.
Neph gets her first good breath in what feels like days and sweeps the area with Iron. Parallel lines of blue trail away into the distance, perpendicular to a huge rectangular shape. A building, mostly sheet metal if she doesn’t miss her guess. With…a couple other cars parked outside of it, and one lone streetlight. A few other squares might be outbuildings, but there’s nothing else in any direction. She can’t smell anything past the bag and her own breath, but there’s a sound like plants rustling together, like grass hissing in the wind. It reminds her of camping with Will, but even more hushed without the crackling of a fire.
They’ve driven for hours to get to the middle of nowhere, the perfect place to shoot somebody in the head and dump their body. For the first time Neph considers that her boys might already be dead. Her senses strain for the knife in the first man’s boot, for the gun tucked into the waistband of the second’s pants. Something bleak hooks behind her scapulae and pulls her upright.
Whatever happens next, she’s going to survive this. They won’t. It’s that simple.
A door swings open on grouchy hinges and the air changes, becomes much warmer, as she’s walked through. New anchor lines open up, some moving around, some not. It’s all a confusing tangle until one of her kidnappers kicks her knees out (like she’d done to Bat-knife. She bets that was him) so she drops awkwardly, then yanks the bag off her head.
“Got the last one,” he says, “We think she’s got enhanced speed, if you want to fill in that blank.”
Neph’s not listening. She’s blinking stars from her eyes as they adjust to the light of LED lanterns set up on crates and barrels in a rough circle. Men lounge beside them, cleaning weapons or swigging at bottles, playing cards or poking at their phones. One, two, three…eight of them, ten counting the two assholes behind her. Neph takes that in in a sweep before dismissing what looks like a militaristic anti-mutant hategroup clubhouse. They don’t matter yet. She needs to find—
“Listen, you gotta stop starin’ at’im like that,” Neph hisses to Hannibal, “You’re freaking him out.”
The ‘him’ in question is an aisle and a half away, looking at Iron Man action figures with his hands clasped behind his back. Neph focuses the full force of her attention on Hannibal partly to make sure he understands the seriousness of her instruction, but also because watching this tiny version of Will carefully not-touch things he can’t have wrenches at her heart.
“I know it’s weird,” she continues under her breath. The squeaky wheel on the shopping cart she pushes before her should keep Will from overhearing. “Trust me, I do, but it’s only for ten days.”
Probably, she does not add. Hannibal himself is proof that the timewarp magic might not abide by the rules they think they know. Neph can’t blame him for wondering if he’s ever going to get his Will back, or if this might happen again and strand them with a twelve-year old version. She’s been thinking the same thing since she went to hassle Will about breakfast and found an eight year old sleeping in his bed, wearing his White Stripes T-shirt.
Mik might be willing to make a housecall for something this weird, and he might be able to tell them if this is only temporary, but Neph’s had other priorities. Like: convincing a suspicious mundie kid that his dad dropped him off the night before ‘cuz he’s looking for work in the area and knew Neph from a worksite down south. She doesn’t think he’s totally on board yet, but the fact that she knew his dad’s name and where they were living when Will was actually eight seems to’ve helped.
So did the way she’d said “I dunno kiddo, he just showed up and handed you off, said he’d be back in like a week” as though it were totally normal. He seemed to accept it as such, which put the first crack in her heart. Neph’s always understood why Will thinks so little of his worth to others, but to see it reinforced in a kid this small…
She made some similar grumbles about his dad not even packing him a bag, as any put-upon acquaintance might. Neph hadn’t meant to embarrass Will with it, had only thought it’d sell the story better, but he’s been pretty quiet since she suggested hitting up Target for some child-sized basics. Anything to get out of their house while Hannibal processes this (temporary) new reality and Will gets used to the two of them.
“Hey Will, you wanna come pick out a shirt?” she calls down the aisle. They’d dressed him in a mishmash of things from her drawers, but he’s swimming even in her shops-in-the-juniors-section-ass handmedowns. “And, like, some pants?”
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timeasmymeasure
Adopted-younger AU: closed to itrhymes
Date: 2016-06-03 06:57 am (UTC)In the immediate aftermath, Triss remembers only the smell. Not like that’s hard; it oozes out of her, a rotting-fish reek smeared over her skin, coating the inside of her mouth where she bit the horse—kelpie. That’s what the strange adults call it, a kelpie, a word that means nothing to a shivering, towel-swaddled eight year old standing in the middle of a stranger’s kitchen.
“How could you not know?” hisses the tall thin woman, the one who gutted the kelpie out from under her with a heavy, rusted knife as long as Triss’ whole arm and she’s totally not gonna have nightmares about that for years (yes she is, until other horrors bury them, and the therapy will not help), “You. It’s only your goddamn job, Argus!”
“Language,” the other woman chides. She’s older and heavier set, with a halo of dark curls and smile lines at all corners of her face. She was the one who cried towels and dry clothes! when the tall woman dragged Triss into the house, all the lines tilted down in alarm. The thin woman bares her teeth at the mild rebuke, but subsides into silent scowls at the third adult.
That’d be the tired man, who Triss eyes with extra suspicion because he’s a man and it’s his house and his mismatched towels and the thin woman seems to think the horse was his fault somehow. The horse she can still taste. Her palms sting where they came unstuck from its skin and her knee is one big ache where it turned around and bit her with its big square teeth and it sounds like all that could’ve been avoided if this man had done…something.
“She’s not been actively burning anything, Danae, or I would have,” he says like the words have to trudge up a real long staircase to get out his mouth. He rubs at his eyes and scans Triss with a look that’s both flat and sad all at once. She hikes the towel higher around her shoulders, glares, and drips defiantly on his floor. The older lady tried to offer her dry clothes but no way she’s gonna get naked in a stranger’s house in the middle of the night. “Or…she hasn’t lived here very long. Or isn’t local, though I can’t think why a kelpie would go so far out of its way.”
“I want to know why a kelpie’d fucking bother,” Danae mutters, “When’s the last time you heard of the Courts making a play that obvious?”
The other two exchange an uncomfortable look, while the thin woman smirks unpleasantly and rolls her shoulders. “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” she says. The man, Argus, just shakes his head, but the second woman, whose name Triss still hasn’t caught, seems to remember she’s still standing right there and could, theoretically, answer some of these questions.
“Are you new, sweetie?” her tone is sweet and low, but Triss sets her chin behind the towel. She’s not gonna be tricked into answering just ‘cuz someone’s being nice to her. She went through like four therapists before Hannibal, ask any of ‘em. “Did you move here recently? Where’s your family?”
Triss blinks. Her heart rate spikes and her knees wobble. It’s bad enough she’s got no idea how she ended up on a horse, falling from the sky into Baltimore harbor. It’s worse that she can only make sense out of every other sentence these people shoot at each other, since they put the words together all wrong (of course she’s not burning while also dripping all over and chattering in place, thanks captain obvious). But for them to somehow guess at the whole other situation, how Hannibal decided to up and move his practice from Boston - because of her, to put some distance between them and the trial, her internment in foster care, the bodies she left behind - how she doesn’t know the city well enough yet to even guess where she might be in relation to Hannibal’s house, her house, where she’s supposed to be right now but isn’t and it’ll be morning soon and he’ll notice and what’s he gonna think and what if he wishes he’d never moved here for her, that’s too much.
She bursts into huge, gulping sobs and collapses in a pile of wet towels. Argus and Danae step back, bumping into the table and kitchen counter, but the other woman makes a pained noise and reaches forward. She doesn’t touch Triss, not quite, just tucks the towel around her shoulders a little tighter.
“I know, hon, I know,” she coos, “It’s been a long, rough night. But you did real good.”
“I-I-I-I ha-hafta go h-h—home!,” Triss gasps.
“Oh,” the mean one grunts, “Great.”
~
It’s not like she’d wanted to tell these strangers where she lives, but Triss couldn’t think of what else to do.
“We could put her on a taxi,” Danae’d said, after Triss had refused to answer any questions about herself, not her name, her phone number, or whether strange things like this had ever happened to her before. “Hand over some twenties, let someone else worry about her.”
“The Courts tried to take her from her home,” the other woman, whose name turned out to be Ruth, said, “They could make another attempt. We can’t let her out of our sight until we know for sure why and who to confront about it.”
Danae snorted, “You don’t seriously think she-“
“Someone has to talk to her family either way,” Ruth went on, “She has one, and she’s too young to sneak out for lessons or keep a secret worth a damn.”
Nobody looked very comfortable with that idea, not from where Triss huddled on one of the kitchen chairs. Her head throbbed from that little hysterical fit, her nose was one big stuffed brick on her face, she was still damp and she’d refused to eat or drink anything they’d given her. They’d all looked especially annoyed about that last part. Her need to keep all this weird stuff away from Hannibal and her new place warred with her need to get home before he noticed, and the sky outside the window kept on lightening. Tired, achey and a million percent done with being so lost, she’d blurted the address into the tense silence.
It turned out Ruth owned a car, although she wouldn’t let Triss out of the house until she’d at least pulled one of Argus’ sweaters on over her wet things (Argus brought it back after he went to change out of his own pajamas, cotton pants and a U. of M. t-shirt that couldn’t be further from Hannibal’s matching sets. Her dad used to go to bed in stuff like that.). She ended up in the backseat with Danae, who leaned against the window to keep maximum distance.
By the time they reach the house, it’s true morning, bright and sunny. Danae whistles as they pull up the drive, but Triss is too anxious to catch the looks Ruth and Argus exchange. She’s too busy scanning the sidewalks for cop cars, like the times kids ran away from foster care and had to be dragged back or called in. Half the usual cars are missing, ‘cuz people went to work, but that’s normal. Everything’s normal. And quiet. Was she wrong? Instead of being angry, maybe Hannibal’s just relieved not to have to take care of her anymore. Maybe he’s not looking for her at all.
After that thought, Ruth has to coax her out of the backseat, and she drags behind the adults as they head up the front walk. Even Danae gets in on the baffled looks they pass around at this abrupt change of heart. It’s Argus who rings the bell, Triss hugging herself tightly, holding all the bad-thought shrapnel inside. She rocks herself as footsteps approach - he didn’t go to work, is that good? - holds her breath as the door swings open, and freezes when Hannibal Lecter focuses on the three unknown adults instead of the kid hiding behind them.
He doesn’t look mad. Not that he ever really does, but then again it’s almost 9:00 am and he’s not wearing a tie or anything yet. That’s…off, in a way she doesn’t know how to categorize. Does ‘not normal’ equal ‘upset’?
Her skinny arms aren’t enough to restrain her churning belly anymore. Triss explodes past the line of knees and barrels right into Hannibal, wailing “I didn’t run away!” it’s not like she’s hugging his legs or anything, she just crowded into him and her head doesn’t even clear his hip and, okay, maybe she’s got a hand gripping his pantleg, maybe, “I swear! There was a-a horse? And then—“
“We found her near the harbor,” Argus interjects, and he sounds calm even if Triss has no idea what kind of face he’s making, with her own mashed up against twill, “It’s a…long story, but she was reluctant to talk to us at first. I apologize for what you must have gone through this morning.”
muffled wailing in the distance
From:man I'm gonna have to go expand these kid icons, I've only got 2 leftover from before...
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From:AU2: Inherited Fallout
Date: 2017-01-16 03:29 am (UTC)“You know my birth date?”
Neph blinks, says, “Of course I do?”
They stare at each other, the silence an awkward variety they haven’t experienced in a while, Hannibal, blank and Neph, stricken, unsure whether he’s more bowled over that she’d known (he never told her, no, she’d forgotten that was privileged information dug up about his future self during her early google searches) or that she wants to do something nice about it.
“It’s…eighteen’s kinda’a big deal over here,” she tries, “I just thought…”
Given the excuse of abiding by some arbitrary American custom, Hannibal reanimates. Or his eyes do, anyway, thoughts beginning to tick away behind them. Neph waits, hands clasped behind her back, head tipping sideways. At last, he says, “There’s an installation at the Walters I’ve been meaning to look into. They offer a student discount.”
“Done!” Neph beams, “And I got the tickets, that’s how birthdays work.” A thing she’s familiar with in theory, if not practice. Hannibal nods at this and then, uncharacteristically, visibly hesitates.
“Might we invite Will?”
Neph’s smile dims down into something a little more indulgent. “It’s your birthday, man, you can invite whoever you want! I’ll call ‘im.”
She does. Well, she texts, because who calls anybody for real these days? M wants to geek out about art for his birthday ru in? she sends, along with a calendar link for the Saturday slot they’d normally spend at the library. Hannibal’s birthday’s a Friday, which doesn’t work for any of them on account of work and school and other crap. Neph waits, and imagines Will’s distracted oh no face if he realizes, as she did, that he never really asked about things like birthdays. She follows up with a no presents just come.
He does. Which is how they end up at an exhibit titled “Ferocious Beauty: Wrathful Deities From Tibet and Nepal”, which makes Will blink and Neph facepalm. Is this about a thing for asian art, or a thing for rage and stabbing? She doesn’t have long to wonder, not when her habitual sweep of Bronze turns up buttloads of old magic under active shielding.
“Don’t touch anything,” she leans in to breathe in Hannibal’s ear as he takes in a statue of a lady with way more arms than socially acceptable. “Like, seriously, half the pieces in here’re cursed as fuck.”
He shoots her a surprised but appreciative look, eyes gleaming with the same eagerness he always lets slip when she shares something of her worldview. “But surely someone would have set that off by now?” he murmurs back, too soft for anyone to hear over the general susurrus of the crowd.
“It’s all under real tight shields,” Neph says, mouth quirking in a pleased smile of her own. “Somebody on staff here really knows their shit.” She hadn’t known that about the Walters museum, hasn’t been here before, but that’s the kind of thing that’s surely going to come in useful down the line. Hannibal makes a thoughtful noise, but whatever else he might have said gets interrupted by Will, who comes up on Hannibal’s other side to ask what they’re conspiring about.
“Nothing,” Neph jerks her chin towards the statue, “Mari was just explaining how come Kali’s a human octopus.”
Which means he has to actually explain that to Will, who seems to find it interesting. For Neph, who happens to know that one of the six other identified Mistborn uses ‘Kali’ as a moniker, the whole thing is extra funny.
They wander the gallery, room after room chaining out through the historic building, each one packed with snarling faces and bulbous eyes. There are other exhibits, of course, and they’ll get there eventually, but this is what they came to see. Neph hangs back a safe distance from all the art, hands stuffed in her pockets to smother temptation. Her slower pace of reading and lack of familiarity with the history that shaped the work means she wanders ahead of the boys, gaze tripping over all the encoded symbolism with a vague kind of interest. Before she realizes it, she’s in another room all together, this one a little less packed.
A flicker of red near the far door catches her eye. It glows the way only magic can, and unlike all the other ruddy lights she’s seen today, this one isn’t filtered through green shields. Neph’s chin jerks up, the pattern-seeking part of her brain labeling the source as a person before the rest labels that person as Samson.
He’s looking straight at her. Watching her, eyebrows drawn in. Their eyes lock immediately, blowing any possibility of this being a chance encounter right out of the water. A startled breath catches in Neph’s lungs, all the moisture in her mouth seeming to draw away with it; her mouth seals shut, her jaw locks, and not even she can say whether it’s startled nerves or a defensive slamming of doors.
Samson holds her gaze for a moment, then cants his head away, indicating the hall behind him. He turns and is gone, just a smear of red on the doorframe where he’d leaned his hand.
Neph stands, statue still, heart hammering against her ribs. What is this? A trap? No, too public for that. Is someone else casing the place, eyeing one of the pieces? Did she just wander through someone else’s reconnaissance? Or is he following her for some reason? She hasn’t seen Samson since—she’s avoided him, or he’s avoided her, not too difficult when they’d only met once before—anyway, she was happy to just never cross paths again, prepared to say ‘no’ to any prospective crews involving him, but mostly hoping it just…wouldn’t come up.
Now he’s here. Why? It’s got to be a work thing, but she hasn’t detected any other non-shielded abilities, no traces of Allomancy. If…if she’s getting in the way of someone’s play, though, she should find out how and assure them she’s not planning anything of her own.
Creakily, like someone lifting themselves out of a hospital bed, she takes a step after him. Then another, following the comet trail of Pewter embers until it spills into an open-air sculpture court at the center of the building. Marble stairs lead down to a small, carefully tended gardens, bare shrubs and branches pruned back around men and women frozen in flowing stone. Samson leans against one pillars, beside a stone bannister, watching the doorway for her. Neph marches over to the opposing pillar, so the two of them frame the stairs like sphinxes. She folds her arms and sets her shoulders against the stone and says:
“What d’you want?”
As opening gambits go, it’s not her most diplomatic. Neph doesn’t care, has no room for delicacy with every organ in her chest rattling like badly latched shutters. Samson’s eyes narrow, mouth twisting, hands curling into fists. Neph watches Pewter eddy around him, a sandstorm lit red by a figmentary sun, but then it stills.
“I want off the blacklist,” he snaps.
And Neph, who has no fucking clue what that's even supposed to mean, gapes, “What?”
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From:AU2: Bury It
Date: 2017-04-02 02:27 am (UTC)She’s buried beneath several tons of stone, timber and roofing slate, unable to wiggle free of the heavy wooden chair that’s shielded her from the debris. Her parents' frightened sobs filter through the piled bricks, frantic prayers that strike her like spells. With the perversity of dreams, the pitch darkness does nothing to keep her from seeing Father Campbell’s outflung arm, shoulders and head protruding from the collapse. His face is a ruin, a rotted jack o'lantern of splintered bone and cartilage caved in on itself. She screams and screams until the air grows thin and burns her lungs to ash. I’m sorry I’m sorry help me help me help me help me.
They shuffle, playlist-style. Neph would never tell Hannibal, but she almost envies him the predictability of his nightmare.
~
It's the church again. Of course it is.
The memories are so near, so crystal sharp and polished to a razor’s gleaming, it’s easy to accept that she’s never left this place. Patricia lets her parents walk her between the pews, hand in hand in hand, trailing behind Father Campbell. As he lights thousands of candles, they help her into the massive chair that usually sits behind the nave. Dad kisses her temple, Mama brushes her hair back, and everything is gonna be okay.
Buried deep inside where Patricia usually lives, Nephele screams: Get up! Get out of that chair and run, run, run!
Patricia does not. Events play out, inexorable as clockwork, until the panic strikes and the bomb goes off in her belly. Her head snaps back and Nephele surges to the fore just in time to count every single nail they’ve pulled from the ceiling, every rivet and joist and staple. They shower around her like fairy lights, electric blue, trailed by streamers of dust and wood shavings. She has time for one good breath before the beams splinter like the bones of an arthritic giant, time she uses to look at Father Campbell, submit herself to the judgement on his face.
The priest, in all his dark robes, is gone. Hannibal stands there, horrified understanding dawning, and everything in Neph gives a tortured metal shriek.
She’s never known for sure if she Pushed herself off the dais or if Father Campbell shoved her to safety. Her nightmares vary on the subject. This time, as the first beam groans its way free and plummets to earth, dropping at them, she Pushes. She saves herself.
The chair topples backwards, crashes off the steps and onto its side. Neph loses sight of Hannibal’s pale, shocked face as the roof comes down like the end of the world.
As the last tiles fall and the roars die away, she’s not a child buried alive. She is eighteen years old and whimpering in her monstrous throne, eyes screwed resolutely shut.
“Neph.”
No, no no. She bangs her head against the chair back, turns her face resolutely away. Dirt trickles into her mouth, her nose, pastes onto her sweaty face and neck. I won’t look I won’t.
“You have to.”
No. Stop.
“It’s a question of responsibility.”
He uses his there’s no such thing as ‘soaking’ dishes, Nephele voice, and so she looks, because he’s right. The nightmare dials back the pressing blackness of memory and there’s Hannibal, pinned and crushed in Father Campbell’s place, blood seeping slowly from beneath the piled stones.
Neph thrashes against the ties at her ankles and wrists. She tries to bend her neck to chew at them, but they remain just out of reach of her snapping teeth. Her blood wets the rope, soaking it, mashing the fibers tighter together. If she can just slip a hand loose, just reach out to him--his one intact eye stares glassily, half popped from its socket by the press of a granite block. Teeth litter the ground, blood pooling in his open mouth, bone everywhere she looks and Neph digs her nails into the arms of the chair so hard they peel away and--
~
She kicks herself awake, the sick sensation of fingernails bending chasing her back into her body. The pillow clutched to her face is twisted and damp with tears and sweat and saliva. Her pjs aren’t much better, wet and quickly cooling. Neph lies still for dozens of juddery heartbeats, staring into the dark, relieved by its very darkness.
Eventually she reaches out, fingers stretching across cotton instead of rubble, until her knuckles brush the smooth paint of her wall. No buried bodies. No sticky blood. No Hannibal.
You can’t do this. She tells the universe at large, hand recoiling into a shaking fist. You can’t change the rules.
Except of course it can. It can do anything it wants, and fuck her. Fuck everyone. Neph rolls onto her back to face the glow-in-the-dark stars stuck on her ceiling, dimmed by at least six hours of solid dark. If she wants them back, she’ll have to turn on a light. Maybe she should, she’s never had Hannibal’s knack for just rolling over and collapsing back to sleep.
Hannibal. Alarm plucks a wire in her chest, draws her tight until she’s sitting upright. Whatever her other gifts, Neph’s not prone to prophetic dreaming. Not her wheelhouse. But those things have been known to happen to total mundies now and then. Don’t moms sometimes have warning dreams when their kids are in danger? Don’t twins do that? Married couples? What if something’s seriously wrong, and that wasn’t just her subconscious having another laugh at her expense?
What if everything’s fine, and she busts in on him for no reason?
Neph runs her hand down her face, a cursory wipe against the tears and sweat there. Everything’s not fine, not with her. Could that be enough to shove back the ghost of his face when he realized she was about to crush them both?
The darkened apartment is no obstacle; Neph habitually learns her way around her places in the dark, mapping them within the first couple days. She’s standing outside Hannibal’s room almost before she realizes it, before she can even think I should’ve changed into clean pjs. These ones are cold down her back, behind her knees.
The door opens silently under her hand, and closes just as well behind her. Deep, even breathing fills the room like a bellows, like the rush of blood in her head. Neph makes out the boy-lump in the middle of the bed even as she moves close enough to get a knee up on the mattress.
“Hannibal?” her voice is a little thready, fraying, “Um…”
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From:Aaaand scene?
From:AU2: Our Teenage Bullshit Has a Bodycount
Date: 2017-06-02 05:34 am (UTC)The only time Neph can remember anybody failing to lock the door was when the boys had the ol’ homosuperior talk. There’d been some shouting and some snapping and Will stormed out in frigid silence. He hadn’t paused to lock up, and Hannibal immediately closed himself off in his room, leaving Neph to discover the security breach when she dared to stick her head out of her own room twenty minutes later.
(When she ragequits roommate conversations, she leaves by window. Not too many people are gonna breeze into their apartment if she doesn’t stop to lock it.)
“Ugh please no,” she mutters. It’s been a longass day already, spent walking Thoth’s new protégée through advanced Copper techniques. Her shields feel all crispy and a bone in her neck keeps popping. Those two better not be fighting. She briefly leans her forehead against the door, gathering her strength, and that’s when she sees them: scratches around the keyhole. Little scuffmarks.
Somebody’s picked the fucking lock, and it wasn’t her.
Neph straightens slowly, the column of her spine slotting into a rigid line. She thumbs the doorknob and comes away with fine metal shavings in the whorls of her fingerprint.
Now, it’s possible that one of the guys forgot their key and had to force the lock to get in. They’re both stubborn and proud enough not to want to call for help, or to pay the super’s $15 lockout fee. But everybody in that apartment is as paranoid as they are private, and Neph might just be the worst of the bunch. She breathes out against the knot of ice in her gut and turns the knob.
“Hey, I’m home!” a flicker of Steel brings the hallway into focus but there’s nothing much to see; the studs in the walls make for a confusing net of leylines, and the kitchen’s crammed full of enough metal to blind any Allomancer. None of the threads overlapping her vision move like something carried by a person.
Inquisitors can shield against Steel or Ironsight. Her stomach churns with the thought, especially when nobody calls back to her. Neph pulls up Bronze just to be sure, but nothing glows that shouldn’t, and there’s none of the wild spattering of magic she’d expect if there were a—
A fight, like the one that looks to’ve wrecked the living room. She stops in the entryway, bag hanging off her shoulder like it’s any other day, like the coffee table isn’t cracked in half and her chair hasn’t been thrown against one of the walls. Glass glitters across the floor, catching light at odd angles from capsized lamps. Hannibal’s laptop sits wrenched open like a clam, screen spiderwebbed with cracks.
Even though she’d half-expected something like this, the sight locks her joints. This wasn’t just a robbery, they’d’ve taken the laptop and there oughta be more damage to the door and one of the guys should’ve been home and—
She ducks on instinct, rolling over the glass to come up behind the couch. A bat whistles through the air where her head had been – wood, no wonder she hadn’t seen it – followed by a soft ‘oof’ as the man wielding it overbalances and stumbles out of the darkened hall. He looks up, scowling, as Neph rises from her crouch.
“Come quiet, mutie,” he says, flat and annoyed. The lack of anger freaks her out more than snarling insults ever could, and the slur draws goosebumps down shoulders.
“Why? You literally just tried to bash my head in,” As usual, her mouth moves faster than her thoughts and does her no favors in the process. Bat-guy lunges and she burns Pewter, darting aside with blurring speed. She dodges around the coffee table, dancing backward, staying out of corners, trying to get the space to think, think, think.
Mutie. If that’s why he’s here…who is this? Who’s he with? He can’t be working alone; the boys could handle one asshole with a bat, no problem. She can handle one asshole with a bat, no problem. She has her knives, and even tapped out on Copper she’s still fresh enough on the other metals. Piece of cake.
But.
Neph swivels and reverses mid-step, diving for the guy, rolling between his legs and kicking out the back of his knee. He goes down with a grunt, bat pressed to the floor for support and she slams her foot squarely into his spine. “What’d you do with my friends? Where are they?!”
She jumps back as his hand twitches and a knife springs from an ankle sheath, swinging wide at her shins. It’s metal, she could take it away from him and plant it in his throat easy as breathing, but the lack of an answer keeps her magic in check.
Hannibal. Will. Where are you where are you? Not here. Who took you? His friends? And he stayed behind, why—waiting for me?
Knife-bat drives her back toward the hall, where a soft thunk from Hannibal’s room sets her nerves screaming. The footsteps that follow aren’t familiar, and it’s then that she realizes she’s been pinned. Or they think so, anyway, this guy and the partner coming up at her back. In a few seconds he’ll be in range to grab her, and she’ll have a choice:
Let him, and hope they take her wherever they’ve taken her friends. Or stop pretending she can’t feed them their own weapons, and waste time dumping their bodies. Waste time working contacts and combing Baltimore to find her boys.
“If you’re real good, they might still be alive when we get where we’re going,” the man behind her says, just before he grabs her upper arm and hauls it backward. Neph stomps at his feet, throws her head back into his mouth and pulls against him with an edge of Pewter, her frenzy only sorta feigned.
The bat whumphs into her middle, folding her over in his grip. The next hit cracks against her ear and cheek, force blunted by Pewter and the narrow windup space in the hall. Her vision goes leyline-blue anyway, and when it swims clear she’s folded over her knees on the floor.
Curled up like that, they don’t notice the sleight-of-hand as she unclasps her wrist sheaths and shoves them further up her sleeves.
“—some kind of speedster,” the first man is saying to the other.
“Less of a fight than I expected,” he agrees as he pulls her other arm behind her back. Neph stays limp as he zipties her wrists together then shoves her over to do the same to her ankles. She means to fake unconsciousness, but they slip a bag over her head and she can’t help but thrash. Panic earns her a kick to the ribs and a rush of nausea as she’s picked up and thrown over someone’s shoulder.
Yes. This was a brilliant plan. She has no regrets about this at all.
How they get out of her building, she has no idea. There’s a bit where her ride gets really lurchy (she manages not to throw up inside her bag, but it’s close), which were probably the stairs. Before too long she’s unslung and dropped like a sack of potatoes on rough carpet. Then the trunk slams shut, leaving her cocooned in metal.
It’s not so bad at first. The car rumbles to life beneath her, a solid metal shell that blocks out all other anchor lines. Neph tries to take comfort in the knowledge that she could flip the whole thing if she wanted, but she can’t make out anything beyond that blue wall to know how fast they’re going, or in what direction. Eventually she drops Steel and just listens, taking in the sounds of traffic (heavy), how many times they roll to a stop (frequently at first, then not so much), and the conversation in the cab (limited).
Dampened by her breath and tacky with her blood, the bag starts to stick to her face. She puffs at it, wriggling her shoulders to test the zip ties. They bite into her wrists, but won’t last long once she applies a little Pewter. She could heal up her aching ribs and work on the split just above her ear, but it’s probably best to save her metals for later.
Then there’s nothing else to think about but her pains, her gnawing worry, and the fact that she’s tied up on her side in a lightless box.
The panic closes like a bear trap, piercing lungs and splintering bones. Her breath hitches against it, and all at once she’s buried under rubble, tied to a chair. A memory hammers home, not of the church but of her nightmare, of Hannibal crushed to death but still whispering. Take responsibility.
Neph thrashes, kicking out against the back of the seats. I am, I am, she sobs as someone shouts at her to shut the fuck up, I’m coming, I’ll find you, please don’t be dead, please be okay, I’m coming.
She’s terrible at marking time, but eventually her body wrings itself dry of panic and she lies still. Hours could pass for all she knows, and at some point the quality of the road under the car changes. It gets crunchy. Small rocks ping the undercarriage. She focuses on the random clunks to calm down, but has nothing to brace against when the car slams to a sudden stop. With a startled umph, she’s rolled against those seats, and there she huddles until the trunk cracks open.
Fresh air floods the compartment, bringing with it the nightsong of crickets and a total lack of anything else. The sound of her kidnappers’ boots crunching gravel is obscenely loud, as are their grunts as they heave her out of the car.
“On your feet,” one says, and there’s a flash of blue as he draws his knife and cuts the tie at her ankles. She’s been careful to flex her fingers and toes, but they still burn as blood rushes back where it belongs. Without a thought for numb feet or the fact that she’s still basicly blind, they haul her upright and frogmarch her away from the car.
Neph gets her first good breath in what feels like days and sweeps the area with Iron. Parallel lines of blue trail away into the distance, perpendicular to a huge rectangular shape. A building, mostly sheet metal if she doesn’t miss her guess. With…a couple other cars parked outside of it, and one lone streetlight. A few other squares might be outbuildings, but there’s nothing else in any direction. She can’t smell anything past the bag and her own breath, but there’s a sound like plants rustling together, like grass hissing in the wind. It reminds her of camping with Will, but even more hushed without the crackling of a fire.
They’ve driven for hours to get to the middle of nowhere, the perfect place to shoot somebody in the head and dump their body. For the first time Neph considers that her boys might already be dead. Her senses strain for the knife in the first man’s boot, for the gun tucked into the waistband of the second’s pants. Something bleak hooks behind her scapulae and pulls her upright.
Whatever happens next, she’s going to survive this. They won’t. It’s that simple.
A door swings open on grouchy hinges and the air changes, becomes much warmer, as she’s walked through. New anchor lines open up, some moving around, some not. It’s all a confusing tangle until one of her kidnappers kicks her knees out (like she’d done to Bat-knife. She bets that was him) so she drops awkwardly, then yanks the bag off her head.
“Got the last one,” he says, “We think she’s got enhanced speed, if you want to fill in that blank.”
Neph’s not listening. She’s blinking stars from her eyes as they adjust to the light of LED lanterns set up on crates and barrels in a rough circle. Men lounge beside them, cleaning weapons or swigging at bottles, playing cards or poking at their phones. One, two, three…eight of them, ten counting the two assholes behind her. Neph takes that in in a sweep before dismissing what looks like a militaristic anti-mutant hategroup clubhouse. They don’t matter yet. She needs to find—
--oh. There. There you are.
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From:I need you to put that icon away pls thx
From:everyone's taking out their cuddling icons, though!
From:put that back where it came from or so help me!!
From:so glad you're not too old to have also watched monsters inc!
From:I was going to rant about how I was still a kid!! but then is he dangling a CHERRY in that icon?
From:I cannot remember when it came out! And maybe!! Most of his icons are unavailable Im trying here
From:google says 2001! And oh no you're stranded with the most recent ones!
From:...oh my god /i was ten/ what the hell
From:No that can't be right!!!
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From:AU 2.ohgodwhy
Date: 2017-08-13 08:15 am (UTC)The ‘him’ in question is an aisle and a half away, looking at Iron Man action figures with his hands clasped behind his back. Neph focuses the full force of her attention on Hannibal partly to make sure he understands the seriousness of her instruction, but also because watching this tiny version of Will carefully not-touch things he can’t have wrenches at her heart.
“I know it’s weird,” she continues under her breath. The squeaky wheel on the shopping cart she pushes before her should keep Will from overhearing. “Trust me, I do, but it’s only for ten days.”
Probably, she does not add. Hannibal himself is proof that the timewarp magic might not abide by the rules they think they know. Neph can’t blame him for wondering if he’s ever going to get his Will back, or if this might happen again and strand them with a twelve-year old version. She’s been thinking the same thing since she went to hassle Will about breakfast and found an eight year old sleeping in his bed, wearing his White Stripes T-shirt.
Mik might be willing to make a housecall for something this weird, and he might be able to tell them if this is only temporary, but Neph’s had other priorities. Like: convincing a suspicious mundie kid that his dad dropped him off the night before ‘cuz he’s looking for work in the area and knew Neph from a worksite down south. She doesn’t think he’s totally on board yet, but the fact that she knew his dad’s name and where they were living when Will was actually eight seems to’ve helped.
So did the way she’d said “I dunno kiddo, he just showed up and handed you off, said he’d be back in like a week” as though it were totally normal. He seemed to accept it as such, which put the first crack in her heart. Neph’s always understood why Will thinks so little of his worth to others, but to see it reinforced in a kid this small…
She made some similar grumbles about his dad not even packing him a bag, as any put-upon acquaintance might. Neph hadn’t meant to embarrass Will with it, had only thought it’d sell the story better, but he’s been pretty quiet since she suggested hitting up Target for some child-sized basics. Anything to get out of their house while Hannibal processes this (temporary) new reality and Will gets used to the two of them.
“Hey Will, you wanna come pick out a shirt?” she calls down the aisle. They’d dressed him in a mishmash of things from her drawers, but he’s swimming even in her shops-in-the-juniors-section-ass handmedowns. “And, like, some pants?”
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From:oh. my. god. did. you. just.
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