[ closed ] I ran to the devil, he was waitin' all on that day

[glumshoe]

Who: Will Graham (notyourteacup), Hannibal Lecter (avoirfaim), and Evelyn O'Connell (nascensibility)
Where: Will Graham's room (floor 1, room 9), then Hannibal Lecter's room (floor 1, room 669)
When: Saturday evening, February 21st
Rating: R for incoming violence and gore
Summary: Sometimes you construct fairytales.
The Story:


In full view of a perpetually setting sun, Will lets his own young, delighted screams play backdrop to the eerie stillness smoothing out all sign of movement, passion, life from him. The water's ripples smooth back into the lake's surface by the time they reach his bare feet, no tickle but cool water kissing rolled up pant cuffs, eyes scraping over the message as though to scrape it from existence.

I would like to see you if you're available. I'm concerned about Evelyn.

He knows. Doesn't he? Hannibal Lecter does not go off secondhand information. Hannibal Lecter is the apex predator, he follows the trails he finds and winds up at Evelyn's door, the devastation Will wrought. Evelyn isn't that good of an actress; that was the entire, terrible point that drove Will's achingly flawed choice. Every missed opportunity, every too long pause that heralded a subject change had to be in Evelyn's face.

From the boat, young Will's screams sharpen and swell with blood spatter, imagination giving voice to cries he's never heard from Evie but resonate from the rows of occupied morgue slabs in his memory. It remains to be seen whether she's joining them, but Will can't help but imagine an oven preheating, a tartare recipe chosen for a wounded, bleeding heart.

The calm flowing into him is and isn't Will's, thumbs poised over a reply field. With the event thrust upon them, he's almost certainly been thrown into the lion's cage. No safe fort in his mind left. Where can Will hide?

I am too. I'll be right over.

Will swallows his dread, throat clicking, and sends one more message without a guarantee that he'll get a response either way. Call it a dying man's wish.

To: Evelyn O'Connell

I know I said I'd leave you alone, but please listen to me one last time.

Stay away from Hannibal.

Please let his mistakes amount to something good.

Comments

OKAY GO

[avoirfaim]

He hadn't known for sure that the tryst between Evelyn and Will had ended. His powers of perception do not extent into the realm of mind reading, only the observational skills of a hawk in winter. When he visited her, watched her relive her moment of motherly bliss, Evelyn had been less than welcoming. Curt and dismissive, her skin had toughened against his present like quills in defense.

Which could only mean that she knew, without a doubt, which could only mean that Will had told her. There was no evidence outside of Will's testimony, and who would trust the word of a liar but someone blinded by the rose-tint of love. Even if, as was the case now, the liar was telling the truth.

On the topic of truth, he wasn't really concerned about Evelyn. Will had played his move, jumped the piece and removed it from the board. He likes her, sure, and enough to forgive her some degree of transgression, but not that much. Rather, he was far more concerned about Will, and to poke his bruises would illicit the reaction he wanted. He can feel Will's comfort mirroring his own, and he knows that simply asking for his company wouldn't be enough to draw him out of his remembered comfort. (The past is safe, the present stands on the very edge waiting to be pushed.)

He hadn't known for sure that they had split, but it didn't take long for Will's emotions, now in Hannibal's own chest where they didn't belong, to clue him in. Will's dread and sorrow at receiving Hannibal's message, tangled in with that fierce, albeit morose determination said everything that Hannibal needed to know. Will had ended it, to protect her.

A wise choice, one he expected to come sooner rather than later. His faith in Will had grown so strong now, and there was only sinew holding his his desperation for salvation to his blossoming exquisite corpse.

He continues to feel that sinking dread with a smile on his face, standing then to pour them both a glass of wine. He can wait, for as long as Will needs to make his way back into the lion's den.

HUFF HUFF

[glumshoe]

No, Hannibal wouldn't be concerned about minor pieces when the king was all but in checkmate, would he? Evie could be safely swept to the side of the board, no longer an item of interest. Easily ignored in favor of his prize marching to his door freely.

Wan, fading, about to break. Hannibal's pleasure swells inside his chest, a sadist's love for the poisons he's administered. So happy that Will's told another soul the truth and lost another support, hacked off by his own hand. Will is coming home defeated to his peace, his understanding, and encouragement wrapped into one package. Love that is unconditional, delighted by the new and unexpected directions Will grows in.

Will clutches his middle, stomach lurching with all the meals he knowingly ate, the love he chose not to let go to waste. Disgust stirs in him the closer door 669 looms, choked with what he's done and its futility. There was no cavalry coming, no law that would convict Hannibal. He'd been wasting his time and varnishing bridges with gasoline, waiting for the day he'd burn them for nothing.

The least he could do is die for his mistakes. Maybe it'd even cement the warning to Evie.

Will raises his hand and knocks three times, waiting for death to come.

[avoirfaim]

Emotion, on it's own, follows no narrative. Emotion is merely bursts of feeling, flowing through your veins and settling in your muscles. Emotion offers no explanation for it's presence. The frontal cortex rushes to explain, to put those emotions in their rightful places where they make the most sense to the logical mind, but emotion itself says no words. It merely leeches in agonizing silence.

If Hannibal were less of a narcissist, he might have realized what was made so obvious. He had asked for Will's company, and with every second that passed, he could feel Will's dread and disgust grow. It curdled into loathing as time passed; Hannibal should have seen it for what it was. Instead he was so sure it must be anything other than the obvious. He was going to see Dean first, clearly, for a reason he would surely ask about later (Hatred is an emotion reserved for the unapologetically grating). Willful blindness is a burden of the emotional, and it was one thing he couldn't claim to have much experience with (another lie to himself, self-love blurring his fault lines). He couldn't recognize his own brand of blindness until it was too late.

Three knocks on the door too late.

Rose tinted glasses cracked from the crushing weight in his stomach. His heart-beat doesn't raise, not ever, and not now. His pulse will not be disturbed by the likes of him. Instead it jumps once and then slows, released from the grip of endorphins. He watches the door for a moment, wrestling with his insides, and that first taste of dread to match Wills. Has he ever had a moment of dread before this?

Dread for knowledge beyond all doubt, confirmation of what in this moment he suspects, from the vitriol he feels that doesn't belong. Empathy's a bitch of an unwelcome house guest.

"Come in."

[glumshoe]

Empathy is a two way street. He's glad Hannibal's finally joined him at the table.

"Thanks," he says, ungrateful tones showing through his paper thin mask, a hateful hardness behind his eyes the only thing keeping Will upright as he passes. Satisfaction pushes for breathing room in the maelstrom of emotions spinning every which way, a grim content clawing inside him flush with the dread that, for once, is not his. Betrayal chills the bones and it's about time that Hannibal feels its bite.

Will's own chill is mollified by the warm summer air filtering in through the open window, the perfect metaphor for glimpsing into Hannibal's past and not having to trade his own past. For once, Will gets to take from him, absorbing the fine details of the folding screen, soft lighting, somewhere obviously foreign, but not just foreign: two different kinds mixing in one place, fighting for dominance, the outside world peering into a personal interior of sharper, different taste.

So peaceful, and not a harsher contrast to the chaos and rope-tight tension stringing the two of them together could be conjured save for Will's own memory room. There is beauty and august stillness, like a great drawing of breath before a violent exhale.

In his fascination, Will is completely vulnerable by design.

[avoirfaim]

No more than a few minutes ago, Hannibal had wanted Will to see this room. It was peaceful, the birds chirping outside and Murasaki was only a room away, her elegance encased in hot water and bath oils. He wanted Will to enjoy it as he had so many years ago, and to see a softer part of his life that he dreamed they could have together. They could have returned to France eventually, the two of them and Abigail.

It hardly mattered that she was still in his basement at home now, did it? Her worth had, in that instant, turned to dust.

He's angry and so very hurt, because he can feel that ungrateful hatred that Will had hid so very well, pricking and poking at his ego and making that burgeoning bruise flourish. It will turn purple and yellow before it heals. It will linger.

Eye contact is communication enough for them on a normal day, but today, in this moment trapped under a bell jar, eye contact is a substitute for words. They both know everything they could possible want, and so many things no one wanted.

He hands Will his glass of wine, never breaking that eye contact that challenges his very existence.

"Do you know where we're standing, Will? I never told you about this place, but your powers of perception never fail to amaze me."

Calm sits over his voice like his own rice paper mask, translucent and thin, woven tightly in it's strength. It's irrelevant; he knows that Will can feel exactly what he feels, and he hopes Will can feel it burn his stomach lining like cold poison, heavy and bitter.

[glumshoe]

They could very well have had it but for one glaring omission from the family portrait. Hannibal painted over it as soon as it'd become too inconvenient for him, hurting his chances to entrap Will and serving the absolute rule: remaining free and incognito. When Will became uncontrollable, he'd been put in a cage. When Abigail had, she lost her life. Inessential. Unforgivable. Hannibal's plans could rot.

The anger and hurt pulsing into Will spurs Will's own venom onward, reminding him just what Hannibal's done to him. Have to keep wounds fresh, wouldn't do to become complacent with the ache of Abigail's absence. Remember what you were doing it for. Remember again. Carve her name into your flesh so you'll never forget.

"You overestimate my geographic knowledge," he starts, dry, and waters his throat with the wine after a long assessing smell, green eyes to red.

Indulgence becomes him though; Will walks the room, smells the floral oils wafting throughout and touches the fine embroidery on tapestries, a bathrobe. Culture, aged wood, fine, high quality fabrics and a flair of the Asian that Will has thus far not seen in Hannibal's abode aside from a few minute decorations. Nothing to suggest a bigger influence.

"Affluent friends. Likely relatives. Personal, so you wouldn't have told many of them past the superficial: that they existed and you lived with them. Not your parents. Important. Formative, or you wouldn't have wanted to show me."

[avoirfaim]

For as deep as Will had gotten into Hannibal's mind, he just hadn't sunk his teeth in deep enough. There is a level of expectation and anger that comes with betrayal, and it blinds just as strongly as love. The risk of becoming just like him it seemed had been enough to hold Will back from one very important, defining truth of Hannibal's life. One that he might have seen if he hadn't been so afraid of the potential of his empathy.

Hannibal Lecter isn't unfeeling, unattached. He doesn't kill family. Not unless they prove that they are not (and she's not, Will has proven that himself in just this moment, with bright, unfettered honesty).

Abigail is very much still alive and the irony will blister.

"This is my aunt's apartment in Paris, or it was."

He knows she moved, he knows exactly where to, but he has left her alone. She is a past-tense in his life, another who hadn't earned the sweet release of death.

He does break eye contact then, and a sense of calm settles over him, because he knows what he has to do. Even in a land of impermanence like Wonderland, there is something cathartic about tearing off a bandage so quickly that it takes hair and bits of skin away with it. He turns his back to Will and walks over to the window, resting his glass against the windowsill to look out at the Luxembourg Gardens and the unremarkable day long ago. It seems fitting, that calm begets calm, in one way for another.

"I lived here, with her, while I was a student. Who I am as a man solidified through her company, and her guidance. She was, at the time, the only family I had."

[glumshoe]

Just because there is potential doesn't mean it should be realized. Will's incomplete metamorphosis, the instrument of revenge that Will must abandon in the midst of loading the chamber because it is no longer an effective one aside from this. A bitter pill to swallow, a final look behind the curtain only to have fingers driven into your eyes. If Hannibal had wounded Will and not expected a return he appears not to have known Will at all.

How could he turn and present such a beautiful target?

Playing down the curl of tension, the thrill of opportunity, Will, too, paces, measuring how best to hollow the bullet head, widen the exit wound. It goes through Will first, of course, he is not without love for Hannibal even now, but there is daylight shown through him that cannot be repaired. Broken bits that will further shatter, whether by him or someone else.

"She didn't make you what you are," Will interjects after a moment, eyes slanted, dark. "She refined it."

[avoirfaim]

With his back turned to Will, Hannibal's small, fleeting smile is just for himself, and the blur of a world outside that window that he knows isn't really there. He hears what sounds like his own words fall from Will's tongue and it is a bittersweet sort of pride. They are laid bare by Wonderland; the love pulses weakly but is clear as day, drowning and bubbling in a shallow puddle.

"She tried. She succeeded, though perhaps not to her design."

And what was Hannibal's design? To keep Will as his own, to shape him in his own image? Two contradictory concepts, he should have acknowledged before now. Beasts aren't kept. He shaped Will in his own image with too great a precision to have both. Will had won.

With all my knowledge and intuition I could never predict you.

His hand rests against the trimming sheers that Murasaki left upon the windowsill forty years ago, next to her ikabana. Perhaps Wonderland is a blessing after all, he can have his cake and eat it too. The finality of a decision is nullified by their new reality.

And it is a decision he's made with signature steadiness.

He knows what his design was, and it stands behind him waiting when it could just as easily kill him with his back turned. He won't. That would be rude; that would be impersonal.

"I wonder, why did you lie to me? what were you hoping would happen?"

That is the question of the hour, isn't it? What was will hoping would come of the long game he played? That's the only question, really, when the facts are presented so bare. What, and why?

[glumshoe]

"I wasn't given a lot of choice."

You didn't give me a lot of choice. There isn't anything Hannibal wants in Will's life but Hannibal. There isn't anything Will wants to be free of more. Nothing was going to make Hannibal let him go except shattering what kept his faith in Will, and it here it wouldn't cost his life. He'd shed one life like a snake's skin if it meant it would take Hannibal's fangs with it.

Will's eyes gloss over the pruning shears, landing on a short sword sitting in its cradle on a nearby decorative wardrobe.

"Part of me wanted to know what would happen if I kept going."

He goes. Lifts the case off the wardrobe. No guns here.

"What you taught me about myself was invaluable. I wanted to preserve it, explore it. See if I could coexist with it."

NOW IT IS DONE

[avoirfaim]

There aren't many things that Hannibal wants for in his life, much less many things unattainable with focus and work. Everything he has ever wanted he has given himself with blood, sweat and perseverance. He excels at that master's skill of satisfying his own desires. Nothing, he's found, is truly unattainable. He wanted cathartic revenge and he achieved it cheek by nazi cheek. He wanted to be respected and to be adored, and the well-to-do of Baltimore as well as the FBI eat out of the palm of his hand. Should he say jump they would ask how high.

He always wanted to be adored, but to be loved was something new. Will and Abigail had narrowed his focus, given him a taste of something he never acknowledged as worthwhile, and the craving grew. He's never reacted well to not getting what he wants.

The sheers sit under his palm, warm to the touch from the illusion of a sunbeam. He hurts, and his misery grasps at strings to pull the tower down with him.

We both go down together.

"If you wanted to coexist with your new concept of self, you would have. I had every faith in you, don't insult me."

Tell me why rings in the air without words, vibrating angrily.

links TV Tropes for "Shut up, Hannibal!" and "The Reason You Suck Speech"

[glumshoe]

Yeah, insult is the gristle in Hannibal's teeth. Will intends to be a bothersome meal.

I trusted you he wants to hiss, all the deadliness Hannibal had known was in a deep, rich vein and that he'd worked so hard to strike true. But that was old news, wept from behind bars with crocodile tears. He'd wanted to believe in Hannibal so badly, the old Will. The new one believed with the faith of a follower reveling in his god's grace, lessons of use to him while biding time for the day he'd become a godkiller.

Only a narcissist puts someone through what Hannibal put him through and expects admiration. To a degree, Hannibal has it, except for the one thing that put the bullet into the chamber and pointed a loaded muzzle at Hannibal's head.

"Abigail."

This is about her, you son of a bitch.

[avoirfaim]

There it is, the irony that stings like a cut from a sharp knife that had just been used to slice lemons. He might have laughed in a different situation, but this is hardly the occasion. There is no mockery, no detachment. There is only a stare, bare sadness, exposed and now barely beating. Instead he nods, a mere centimeter tilt of his head downwards in acknowledgement. Not of Will, facing his back, but of how they came here.

He made a mistake. Will made a bigger one. Their steps are in-time, even as they step further apart.

His fingers close around the sheers, and he barely glances over his shoulder, with Will's exact location in his peripheral vision.

"Abigail. What do you assume that I did to her? Do you think I cut her down, when she meant as much to me as she did to you? You coughed up her ear, Will."

But what happened to the rest of her?

[glumshoe]

Perhaps against his better judgement, Will whips his head toward Hannibal, hand abandoning its approach to the blade. No, Will doesn't think he's off the mark. He knows damned well that as soon as Abigail becomes inconvenient she's just as expendable as any farm animal. Acknowledgement of the crimes he's committed is far afield an expectation as Will's had, reachable as his fantasy of capturing Hannibal had once been, but how they got here and Hannibal's disappointment sings on the air. It occurs to Will that he is not the only one who's had something taken away from him. He hates that he cares about that.

"You put it there," Will positively spits. "You care about people the same way fire does - we're destroyed because you lay claim with your hands. On her. On me.

Nothing escapes a void. Not even light."

[avoirfaim]

"As usual, your ability to wax poetic exceeds your perception of reality." The words fall from Hannibal's lips with the acidity of rot, like milk out too long in the sun. It will congeals and sour, when once it gave life and strength to bones, but it begins with a sharp kick.

The distance between Will and Hannibal is short, a long stride and a half in one direction.

He breaths out through his nose, resigned. The sound of Murasaki's bath in the distance mocks him, a reminder of disappointment.

"Everything you have chosen to believe about me is colored by your perception of yourself, the idea that you are, in contrast to myself, a moral man. But you're wrong. I never killed Abigail."