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entrancelogs2014-07-23 11:31 am
glumshoe) wrote in entrancelogs2014-07-23 11:31 am
Entry tags:
[closed] I hide, your eyes turn away, now I roll on by without a word
Who: Will Graham (notyourteacup) and Ned the Piemaker (wordvomit)
Where: The kitchen
When: backdated to July 17th, after the event is over
Rating: R to be safe (discussions of death and gore imagery)
Summary: No event is going to stop the investigation train from rolling, and Will has some questions for Ned.
The Story:
The point of conducting an investigation was to gain a greater understanding of what had taken place. With the perpetrator already known, his roots deeply driven into the fertile, imaginative earth in Will's mind with the intention of taking a part of Will with him if he were yanked out, Will's sessions with Hannibal took on the tone of a private tutor with his favorite student, in some ways.
Interest was difficult to feign even to the imperceptive, and Will's interest was intact, fitted into a mask that had grown close to the skin with daylight between them slipping away. A crime scene was a classroom, an opportunity for ruin, each mistake Hannibal made another nail in his coffin.
Which made stray interlopers all the more unwelcome. There was a thread here woven into the tapestry that altered the design. Will was an investigator, student, teacher, and friend, but he could choose to be all of them at once and tug on the thread until it unraveled, and then he might become something else entirely.
Ned, can I speak with you?
- Will
notyourteacup) and Ned the Piemaker (wordvomit)Where: The kitchen
When: backdated to July 17th, after the event is over
Rating: R to be safe (discussions of death and gore imagery)
Summary: No event is going to stop the investigation train from rolling, and Will has some questions for Ned.
The Story:
The point of conducting an investigation was to gain a greater understanding of what had taken place. With the perpetrator already known, his roots deeply driven into the fertile, imaginative earth in Will's mind with the intention of taking a part of Will with him if he were yanked out, Will's sessions with Hannibal took on the tone of a private tutor with his favorite student, in some ways.
Interest was difficult to feign even to the imperceptive, and Will's interest was intact, fitted into a mask that had grown close to the skin with daylight between them slipping away. A crime scene was a classroom, an opportunity for ruin, each mistake Hannibal made another nail in his coffin.
Which made stray interlopers all the more unwelcome. There was a thread here woven into the tapestry that altered the design. Will was an investigator, student, teacher, and friend, but he could choose to be all of them at once and tug on the thread until it unraveled, and then he might become something else entirely.
- Will
no subject
The Pie Maker had not meant to interlope. His singular intention on the day that Dean Winchester's remains were found was to stay in his diner, rolling out another lump of dough for another pie for another customer. Apple was his aim, the fruit cut, the mixture prepared with just the right amount of cinnamon and sugar, a sprinkle of flour for thickening. As per the usual, he had been careful to manipulate his alive-again specimens with gloved hands, but the pastry itself never required that kind of care.
It was in the moment that Ned begin reaching for his rolling pin that he found himself at Lucifer's side - a truly unusual circumstance because he was not aware that teleportation was a thing - when he was shown the mutilation, and gently requested to give Dean an audience of one as the Devil stepped into the background to listen.
Unfortunately, Dean Winchester's attempts to tell him the identity of the murderer fell somewhat short, just behind he smelled weird and he stabbed me with with some kinda blade, both of which narrowed the field of suspects down to "men" who were "about as tall as Dean Winchester."
So, useless, more or less.
Ned had thought his job done, he had not considered the repercussions of removing two thumbs to use his power properly and, in his shock, left behind a lump of raw pie dough. He went back to work after washing his hands a dozen times and tried to forget about the man whose body was splayed out like a dissected frog.
For these reasons and others the Pie Maker finds Will's text unexpected, if not completely out of the blue after the recent event, but he wipes his hands clean of flour just long enough to reply:]
Sure. I'm in the kitchen.
[Bet you didn't expect that, huh?]
no subject
That small lump of dough, however, raises questions that Will is not afraid to seek answers for. Ned just has to be willing to give the answers. ]
On my way.
[ Which isn't strictly true because Will is there not a minute later, the picture of level-headed, even-tempered company. And beyond there lies sharp eyes, unclouded by promises of cobbler, taking a seat at a stool in front of Ned's workspace. ]
Have you been following the network recently?
no subject
Will has not come out for idle chit-chat over a slice of Key Lime.]
Um...
[The Pie Maker balls up the leftover dough and sets it aside before lifting the first strip with unconscious delicacy. He suddenly, violently wishes he'd had more time to put a pair of gloves on before handling this over alive-again fruit, but if he's vigilant it shouldn't be a problem.]
Not since the end of our unexpected high school reunion, no.
[The strip of dough meets the pie and is followed by a few of its friends. Very carefully, Ned begins to lace them together.]
Why?
no subject
Leaning forward to fold his arms against the counter, Will looks over the ingredients slowly being set into the pan. His gaze sticks on the unused dough balled up, an innocuous sight, one that didn't belong next to the internal anatomical model that Dean Winchester was carved into. ]
Upsetting events being aired in public. The details of Dean Winchester's death are coming to light. [ He follows the line of Ned's arms back to his face, world weary and aware. ] What details weren't already displayed, of course. It makes it difficult for investigators like myself when confidentiality is compromised. It can contaminate the scene.
no subject
Avoidance, denial. The latter is not just a river in Egypt.]
Yeah, I remember seeing that transmission.
[Lie Number One. Ned's jaw clenches as he recalls Lucifer's smooth, inquiring tone that denied any protests Ned might have had.]
What- uh, what sort of...contaminations are we talking about?
no subject
He hates to make the sacrifice, but it's at the acceptance that he won't likely have to make a bigger one later. Will's body language hasn't done its usual softening in Ned's presence, also fine because Ned's nervousness is sending spiders across his skin, whatever claustrophobic press is hemming Ned in. Will's hands meet, thumbs making a shrugging gesture in lieu of shoulders. ]
People that shouldn't be there. It's paradoxical because police rely on witnesses to relay what information they can in order to compose a picture of the crime, but we inherently dislike having them there because it usually causes problems. For instance, if it's a relative or close friend that was killed, they can compromise the body before photo documentation is finished, or touch the body and skew the forensics. It is an inconvenience they - I can do without for myriad reasons.
I take it you're curious about what was found?
no subject
It is becoming increasingly clear to him that Will knows someone else was there, his arrival in the kitchen, his speech, is nothing more than a preamble to the inevitable twisting of screws on a piece of machinery that is already wound too tightly. This is nothing. This is nothing compared to the point he is actually dancing around, speaking in pleasant, conversational tones in a way that one would to a child.
All done to soothe, to lull him into a false sense of security before snapping the bear trap around his ankle and dragging the truth from him in no gentle manner. This is not a genteel and friendly visit, this is a means to an end, skinning the animal to find out what's beneath the surface, and Ned's imagination is running rampant with possibilities.
When he finally finds his voice it sounds very small, very distant, and very afraid.]
Sure.
no subject
exhausted. With everything. With having something and then having to break it if the world doesn't break it for him, right in front of him. ]
That.
[ he says softly, pointing to the lump of dough gradually losing its round form. His voice reads Disappointed Dad more than Put On The Cuffs, but there's every likelihood that Ned won't hear that over the panic a fertile imagination can feed. It won't come from Will if he can help it, the future of their relationship tipping precariously on a crumbling cliff with no safe drop.
Why were you there?, while direct, is an axe where a scalpel would do. If he can make it nothing more than a pinprick, so much the better. While he can't back off, Will chooses the hope that he's being understood when he doesn't make demands of Ned, and that terror isn't his goal, only honesty. He licks his lips briefly. ]
Help me understand, Ned.
no subject
Ned feels much like a rickety floodgate now, rusted and dented with years of abuse, waiting for the single crack to be pushed wider before the metal warps and crumples beneath the weight of his secrets. There is no little Dutch boy to plug the hole with his finger while waiting for help to arrive.
It takes him an absurdly long moment to understand what Will is talking about. The dough. The dough. He had been holding dough, hadn't he? He had been baking - or preparing to do so - when Lucifer summoned him, and-
And he had left it behind in his shock.
Hands balled into fists, tucked into the crooks of his elbows as he abandons his lattice crust and folds his arms over his chest, Ned knows the futility of running in a world with no exits.]
...I didn't want to be there. I was...volunteered.
no subject
It has violence and gentility, the power to crack rock and then smooth it into a rounded shape and live harmoniously among countless brethren. Will's intent isn't to crush Ned, needless to say, but watching the man curl in on himself carries a sharp reminder that his and Ned's beliefs on that point are as different as one side of the riverbank and the other. ]
The man that had discovered the body was still there when I arrived at the scene. [ And was incredibly unhelpful when posed with questions, honestly. ] Was it him that involved you?
no subject
And speak with dead people he did.
As a coping mechanism to distract himself from the inherent discomfort he feels in speaking on this subject, the Pie Maker unfolds an arm from his body to reach for a bowl of fresh strawberries, picking the stems off methodically, one by one. It allows him the luxury of not having to make eye contact.]
...You ever feel like there's this- influence in your life that you thought might be a good one at first because it seemed like having some understanding would somehow validate who you are...kinda like a- a guardian angel, but then it turns out that the validation and understanding is just as hollow as you are and what you mistook for an unorthodox bond is actually an uncomfortable amount of manipulation that twisted you into doing things you didn't want to do, and second-guessing yourself when you used to be so sure of your choices and when you finally realize what's been going on you have to pick up all the pieces and deal with the consequences and the regret and- and....
[Ned's mound of strawberry leaves stops its slow growth as he falters, fingers twisting on a stem. He exhales shakily.]
...and then you're here. In the hurricane again. After you thought- you thought you might have found the eye of the storm.
no subject
Who prays over us when we sleep? a forked tongue asked, and Will willingly, blindly turned his face up to God-Hannibal and prayed that it was him watching over Will. As board by board, nail by nail, storm shelters were ripped from their moorings and flew thrashing into gale force winds that gusted from Hannibal's own lungs, fickle and selfish God that he is, reforging another's work to his satisfaction. ]
I'm still there. In the storm.
[ With Ned and not, two storm systems that sit separately and mirror one another. Will's eyes haven't left the middle-distance they'd sunk to. ]
Hannibal Lecter put me there.
no subject
For all of the metaphor that Will and Ned have entertained in their conversations the Pie Maker sensed the creeping darkness curling its tendrils around the ex-cop, he knows that feeling, he lives it. The consequences of his actions play on a constant loop in his head, the results of his choices, good and bad, knowing or uninformed, have been scratched into the inside of his skull.
Lucifer is his Devil. The placid reminder of the mistakes he has made and the arbiter of his actions while Ned stumbles through the dark and hopes there is a light on the other side.]
The psychiatrist?
[He exhales a sharp laugh, bracing his hands on the counter's edge and shaking his head. Ned considers himself a good judge of character, and every encounter he has had thus far with Hannibal Lecter - who names their kid Hannibal, anyway? - has left him feeling nauseatingly anxious. Hanging around decent people doesn't just give Ned's indigestion a swift and discomfiting kick, and there were no lozenges that could control the acid reflux burn he struggled to swallow when he left the kitchen that day.
Ned reins in the I knew it victoriously banging pots in his brain. If Dr. Lecter is the one feeding Will's storm, and Will's storm is still present even here-]
...what did he do.
no subject
Whatever Ned knows is what made that man draw him to Dean's body. Whatever Ned knows attracts its own darkness and people like that man, like Hannibal, and shape it with unseen hands. The light isn't put out yet, but it is fading, maybe bright enough for Ned to reach if he strains and pulls free, if a friend moves in the dark and holds it back for him.
There's a little answering laugh, a gasping, strangled thing of loss. And disbelief that he'd see the day that someone would want to know because he seemed to agree that, yes, a psychiatrist is in a fine position to abuse his power, and that is a far and away the better explanation than a man just happened to go insane and lose all credibility in the process. ]
Oh, do you want to hear the part about him withholding the diagnosis for a serious neurological disease from me first, or the five murders that he framed me for and landed me in a state psych hospital with?
[ That's a broadside into the iceberg, but there's plenty of treacherousness left floating in the sea. Will, he's mildly in shock that he's said the words aloud after months of silence, all in a bid for Ned to trust him. The faith he has is not inexhaustible, but looking to Ned, the enormity of what the subject of Hannibal Lecter means to his condition rises out of Will like smoke in a building that's still burning. ]
no subject
It is that same fear that made him so vulnerable to Lucifer despite knowing what could happen - as a man with an overly active imagination, the number of assumptions and conclusions he can come to generally cover all possible scenarios.
Especially the bad ones.]
Maybe the part about why you haven't said anything until now?
[Arms folded across his chest again Ned is acutely aware how difficult it is to share, particularly when the likelihood of someone believing you is so slim. He is, of course, utterly unsurprised by the revelation that Hannibal Lecter is a manipulative psychiatrist as well as a pretentious chef, who has done what any manipulative psychiatrist (slash pretentious chef) would do: carefully setting things up for others to fail. There's a German word for deriving pleasure from that sick practice, but Ned can't remember it right now.
It doesn't matter either way, Will stepped onto hot coals and he's waiting for Ned to join him. The Pie Maker works himself up to it, taking a deep breath before the plunge.]
........I can touch dead things and bring them back to life.
no subject
[ Ever kept silent about something because of what it might do? Will wouldn't be here if Ned didn't. Ned's accusation even comes out like a self-recrimination of a kind, wedged between two unthinkable courses of action and seeing the mountain of shit that would rain down on everyone he cares about. There is no winning. Will can salvage something from all of this, because it's too late to right a wrong but an ending is absolute. Will will personally raise the juries and ready the coals to be raked.
All of which he's willing to unpack in good time if it weren't reluctantly and meekly obliterated in one sentence. Will's come to expect some fairly extraordinary things in his stint in the land of giant talking animals and real life Oregon Trail, but the urge to ask if this is a new development bobs on the surface amongst the flotsam and jetsam. His lips part, hesitate, are licked, try again. ]
...And you talked to Dean?
no subject
He has come to some conclusions, yes, albeit not regarding the rumors that others might entertain of Hannibal Lecter in separate spheres. Ned keeps to himself, he watches and, more importantly, pays attention. It's Cooking School 101 to avoid the chefs that are overly critical and unkind, particularly when they are on a similar level as yourself. If Le Cordon Bleu taught Ned anything, it was that hyper-controlling, micro-managing cooks tended to be the most mentally unstable.
But that is neither here nor there, since Ned now has the golden opportunity to bask in the whoosh that has overtaken Will's face.]
For a minute, [the Pie Maker confirms with a little nod.] He didn't...have any immediately useful information. Mostly he just...kind of panicked. I had to- I had to clear his throat, um, first. So he could talk.
[Ned chews over this for a moment.]
...I'm sorry. About...touching your crime scene.
no subject
You'd make a better detective than me.
[ Fuck, what in the blazing jesus has he been working for if someone could do his job with a single touch? People - Dean panicked and wasted his time, by Ned's own admission, but as the seconds tick by the momentary verbal obliteration that Ned laid on him has its delayed effects. Wile E. Coyote looked underneath him to find that there was no more road under his feet. Will's chest caves in slowly, and at a point Ned's voice is barely audible above the crumbling, structure failing steadily. ]
It wasn't your intent. [ Will responds faintly, chin dropping to chest, hands laid flat on the countertop like the points of contact are going to help this fly-by-night feeling free itself faster. ] Hannibal Lecter is from my world. I feel responsible for you getting wrapped up in this, Ned. I'm sorry.
1/3
Wh- no, I got myself wrapped up in this. Spend enough time around Satan and of course his ideas start to sound really go-
2/3
-od.
no subject
Most people would chalk it up to a casual preoccupation with a bothersome thought, but a certain knitting detective he knows doesn't believe in coincidences. Just because Will seems overly invested in the idea of Hannibal Lecter as a serial murderer doesn't mean that it's true.
Ned leans across the counter with sudden urgency and hushed words when the truth hits him over the head like a shovel.]
DoyouthinkHannibalLecterkilledDean?
no subject
Will would like to think of him and Ned closer to two rope bridges that don't need a stiff wind, let alone hurricanes like Lucifer and the good doctor. The unique inevitably attract the type who'd exploit it, and if it were a thing of common knowledge, Will doesn't know that Ned would be safe from closer examination. Will would take the burden onto his heart if Ned's brand of interesting wound him up on Hannibal's slab, butterfly-pinned and knifesplit, but the fault would be laid at the correct pair of feet, Hannibal's tribute to himself. In their own ways, Will and Ned speak with the dead. The thought alone buys Will's silence were it not already ironclad.
Somewhere between obsolescence due to Ned's gift and a fierce need to protect the purveyor of that nullifying force is a waking sense that he finally isn't alone with one piece of terrible knowledge anymore. Abigail maybe learned of it before her death and after it would have been any good to her. Will's hands ball into a fist and squeeze at nothing, her life slipped from his grasp even as she walks among the living in Wonderland. ]
"Think" is too light a word.
[ He doesn't know how many more times he could say this without screaming. ]
Stay away from him. And don't think that being killed is the worst thing he can do to you.
no subject
The Pie Maker believes that a certain amount of fear and paranoia is healthy, that it behooves one to be aware, and that trusting his instinct has very rarely led him astray. There is great stock to be placed in the power of terror and unease, a worry most others would dismiss as delusion when they hardly know what it feels like to live in a perpetual state of anxious concern.
Not so foolish as to think horrible men incapable of horrible things, Ned accepts the dearth of details and reads the lack of information like a book. One doesn't have to be an expert in subtext to understand that there are unpalatable implications at work here.
Perhaps it is in recognizing a kindred spirit with regards to influential trauma; the Pie Maker turns to retrieve a slice of Key Lime from the fridge, sliding it across the counter with a fork before returning to his much-kneaded dough.
Will isn't going to talk. Not about him, anyway.]
You're welcome in my safehouse.
no subject
But Will isn't so poor outside of the hospital. He hasn't had to resort to using others as tools because he has his own hands free. Briefly having them bound for days that blended into one another taught him the value of having them free at all. Ned's secret can stay with Will without fear that it will be leverage for something bigger.
Something about being handed a dessert in the wake of an emotional admittance that echoes in Will. He turns the plate toward him, a skin stretching tight over his face in a way that vaguely suggests he's smiling through the pain and can't trust himself to say something back. He hopes accepting the pie says all it needs to. ]