And how about Abigail, who Hannibal tries to keep around to attract Will.
And how about Will flipping a coin before the "family dinner".
And how about Abigail surviving that coin flip. Abigail, who Will eventually starts to like.
She's still afraid of him, and that clouds the whole understanding between the victim who grew into a fanged creature and the empathetic monster.
Still.
Will brings her pieces of wood to carve the figures with her father's knife that Hannibal got for her.
She can't eat meat, and Will doesn't point out that the fish on their table is his catch, and Hannibal smiles, clearing a shelf for wooden deer, birds, and fish.
Oh, how about Hannibal's ultimate victory?
How about Abigail completely winning Will's heart.
A downpour has taken over Baltimore for a couple of days as he steps into the homely comfort of Hannibal's house. No one is in the hallway, the sounds of the house muffled by the drumming of rain on the windows. Will passes into the kitchen, unnoticed by Abigail. He watches them quietly.
When Abigail hisses softly, twitching her cheek in pain. When Hannibal's hands gently wash the blood from her face. When Will sees her wounds after fighting over a small Rottweiler puppy.
When the rescued puppy, dirty and wet, squirms against her. When Abigail is just as battered but pleased with herself.
I think in the concept of light!Hannibal and dark!Will, people overlook that Hannibal is originally an asshole. That's a fact.
He used to be a doctor, then retrained as a psychiatrist. People haven't gotten any more interesting since he took them apart countless times inside and out.
Now in sessions, he just mocks people he doesn't like, forcing them to stay in their problems.
And into the neat, bright office one afternoon comes HE. A renaissance ray, dressed in earthly form.
His blue eyes and the sharp lines in his lips have so much aristocratic arrogance that Hannibal almost doesn't appear to him by his title (though he doesn't like to remind anyone of it).
Will isn't in a plaid shirt, jeans, and lotion with a ship on the label.
He's in a dark brown suit, dark blue shirt, and dark hazard perfume. Oh, my God.
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Don't pet the flea cat
Price×f!reader
Tags: slight description of reader (chubby, muscular, strong, denying gender as a concept), possibly slightly sociopathic/autistic reader, profanity, denial of authority, evil scientist on the way to becoming. Johns pov included
tags and warns are the same as in the last post, srry, I don't have time to make it more civilized and readable.
THEY FINALLY TOUCHED LADIES!!!
Enjoy
Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5.
The whole day has been going wrong.
Right from the start.
You met at five in the morning, as arranged for the days you dig through the database. He was waiting for you in his office, fresh looking, only a little more closed off. You thought to write it off on the early hour. But it certainly wasn't a physical consequence of sleep deprivation.
Emotions, damn it.
John was furious.
You didn't say anything to him about it. The normally scowling expression never left your face, the emotionless, chaotically appearing teasing only twice caused him to smirk. But you wanted to shake him, ask him what you'd done wrong. Why he's like this. All the time before working out you could feel that tension. A dark, thick lump of promised fear.
Swallowing your breakfast in almost two bites, you didn't consider your surroundings much. There was something strange in the air. The way the huge room was quiet, full of those normally chatty people.
Even Soap only chuckled quietly.
Before you left to print out the allowed information, you casually switched to reality, aware of the proximity of the nearby warmth. Your and Price's thighs had been touching all along.
What on the computer had only been a couple dozen pages, images, copies, notes, was turning into an endless mountain of real paper that you were typing in two goes.
To keep your head on your shoulders, rather than being ripped off by a secretary who (temporarily, you swear) had a busy printer, you brought a whole stack of paper.
You talked, you played spy, getting more and more information out of the little gossip girl. You ate lunch at her place, never letting yourself take more food from her than you could fit in half your palm. She called you a bird and you laughed in agreement, drinking her instant coffee to notfeed your hunger.
Not the first time.
As you made your way to your office in the main building that evening, you didn't look round. Moving carefully, only forwards, trying not to drop a pile of printed documents.
One of the soldiers held the door for you. Then another one, then again, then another one, but offered help, which you declined. You clenched your jaws.
Too many interactions. Fuck away!
Your back was in a terrible state from overexertion you wouldn't let anyone know about, your mood at its very point from lack of sleep and the constant uncomfortable existence with stupid people in the same space. But you still stared sullenly at the dumbest soldier while you held a pile of papers with one hand and opened the office with a magnetic key with the other.
Finally sinking down behind your chair, preparing for another round of proofreading, searching for correlations and missing elements, you let yourself exhale. And think.
It was Price, wasn't it? Yesterday, when you told him about the soldiers' behaviour and he reacted so calmly, you gaslight yourself, doing someone else's job. They not even called you a slut in your face and they're animals and you're not special and nothing terrible happened only name calling... And it was expected, wasn't it?
But no, Price clearly went to deal with it.
As much as you disliked the whole hierarchy thing, it was hard not to want punishment for those who branded everyone names for one possession of a vagina.
You prayed to all the gods that your expectations weren't just a rethinking of the situation into a more palatable direction.
Finally everything was falling into a cycle. You worked with the files already printed out, pulling everything together in an encompassing way for the mind, concentrating on behavioural changes. You stopped by your secretary's office before lunch, giving your energies to small-talk and charming smiles.
Your sleep patterns corrected, you smoked less because you didn't have the time anymore.
Completely absorbed in your work, focused on your real goal, you didn't notice anything anymore. And a couple of times in a fortnight… Ghost helped with hints.
Ask that soldier, help that soldier, turn round there, yeah, just stand there.
Always managed to pick up a piece of information, form an understanding.
The victim was always visible, no matter how well disguised.
You made friends with a couple of girls and boys from different departments and backgrounds. Different temperaments, different humour and looks, but you felt that note of vulnerable distrust every time you pushed a little harder on your leadership.
. . .
She had a gaze. Fucked up one.
His first almost-wife had looked at him like that, during their first fight. And the last, to be precise.
Pupils small, long angry lashes, always frowning. Ooh, stern.
When she brushed off his question about her name, he wasn't offended in the least. Something familiar about her… there was, no doubt. A piece of a familiar pattern. Potential for a good soldier, human, that was it.
There was no criticism or problem in this closed cocoon from which she'd burst into the thick of it. Dry research, ready-made theory.
That was why she was so confident in her audacity.
John might have wanted to break her, just out of spite. He didn't usually do that, but here the kitten was attacking adult predators, and seriously hoping to win.
Thinking she couldn't be seen, sneaking around in the grass with her little paws.
But in a couple of hours of interaction, John saw. Noticed scars here and there, patches of faded fur, and the sharp grin of a smile. She looked like something he'd caught.
In training, she'd held up well. A mission, a fulfilment. A soldier with no command.
He could help.
Help himself find a therapist.
Sighing once again for the evening, he adjusted his reading glasses. Whiskey in one hand, a small collection of short stories in the other. John read the one book he'd managed to "accidentally" grab from her desk.
Ray bradbury. Lots of circled passages, comments and jokes.
...You're the crowd that's always in the way, using up good air that a dying man's lungs are in need of, using up space he should be using to lie in, alone. Tramping on people to make sure they die, that's you...
In pencil frame and a little note, "should I call a lawyer?"
Other. With some pencil dots and lines on the pages, as if she wanted to but didn't dare leave any words out.
The scythe that gives power....
A family stuck between life and death because the father of the family didn't go to chop the ripe in the field....
A character who sleeplessly accepts his burden.....
...He didn't say good-by to his family. He turned with a slow-feeding anger, found the scythe and walked rapidly, then he began to trot, then he ran with long jolting strides into the field, raving, feeling the hunger in his arms...
The farmer in the field is too busy, even after all these years; too busy slashing and chopping the green wheat instead of the ripe...moves on with his scythe, with the light of blind suns and a look of white fire in his never-sleeping eyes, on and on and on...
He flipped back the page. Where there was only one word, exactly halfway down the circled lines.
...You worked the field all your life because you had to, and one day you came across your own life growin' there. You knew it was yours. You cut it. And you went home, put on your grave clothes, and your heart gave out and you died...
You?
John memorised the page number and put the book back in his desk drawer.
Fuck.
Why couldn't she read something nicer. A children's Bible? No, that was worse. More sins, more circled words. More similarities. And yet, he wanted to finish, wanted to reread everything that had ever graced her attention.
But only those living books that had been marked by her pencil and pen and word. To piece together this puzzle, frank and unmarred by a thick layer of wariness. To let it pass through him, to run his fingers over the traces scattered on the pages. To look in the mirror and see himself years ago. As if everything she'd accused herself of would find the same facet in him.
FUCK.
Angrily setting the empty whiskey glass aside, John walked out and down the stairs.
They'd grown closer over the past fortnight. As close as you could get with a set of human functions. She hadn't relaxed. Not for a second in his presence, not even in the presence of Ghost, who, surprisingly, had become a calming factor for her.
Something was happening. Some weightless bridge of communication. Invisible and solid.
Like when Ghost looked at her, shifted his gaze to someone else for a second and five minutes later she was there.
Like when she didn't turn up for training, showing drafts of already existing research to her Institute's committee. The discussions dragged on, she didn't show up for breakfast, and Ghost looked more sombre than usual.
Just like when she had appeared at lunch that afternoon, angry and barbed. "Those decrepit nerdy fucks have had me since six in the morning." She growls, and Ghost mutters something back about how quickly she's managed to outbite everyone. And the meat is clearly tastier than usual today. And Ghost knows now that scientists are much nicer than recruits. And she grins, just slightly, still wicked.
"You just haven't tasted the babies yet."
And Soap chokes on his tea, Gaz laughs, Ghost looks at her before letting out a deep chuckle. One ha. Not even a ha-ha, but it's something.
And John watches, observes. Marks the lines of communication and the nodes that form new offshoots
John wasn't jealous, there was nothing to be jealous of. Her attention was so entirely on him that she didn't have time to notice the water column diverging in front of her step by step.
It had been two weeks since John had the guys from the newbie group on the playground.
A day's training.
Just what the new recruits dreaded. Not a second of stopping, no food, limited water, total silence. The "24 hours" ended when the fighters started to fall. Sometimes the whole thing lasted for days.
In John's memory, the longest twenty-four hours was a week and a half when someone in his unit made a joke about raping the children of those Nazis who were fighting against them. He was a soldier then, green and unwanted by the leadership.
And the commanders were active and angry.
Steam was blown off on them until the rat came out himself, publicly shamed.
He was dismissed the same day, so that the soldiers did not have time to strangle him for a fortnight of suffering.
It was really horrible. But effective. None of them ever spoke again, even if they didn't want to.
Ghost had already organised something similar on the recruits last year, but they hadn't been smart enough.
John was happy to teach the soldiers to keep quiet. Reputation meant a lot to an organisation. Discipline wasn't just the ability to obey. And, no matter how much she said otherwise, John knew she would have wanted that kind of retribution.
She would find it fair.
The trainers change every three hours, the soldiers are the same. The spaciousness of the gym, the silence and the thick smell of sweat.
Eighteen hours of slaughter meat.
The end of the "day."
But. Someone turned out to be more talkative than the others. As the columns of soldiers left the hall, the two idiots whispered something about an old man chasing a dirty cunt and were forced to stay for another two hours. One on one with John.
"You're going to fall and get out of here in a second." "You'll stop and we would start again."
He had no rest that night. After the individual lecture on what respect was, after the picture of tear-wet youthful faces begging forgiveness not from pain but from the realisation of their own failure, he couldn't shake off the rage completely.
She had certainly sensed it from the morning, had been over-cautious in her rudeness. But she said nothing, and he began to breathe easier.
John lit a cigarette, there was no energy for cigars. The soldiers on night shift were still avoiding him, afraid of saying the wrong thing. Good for them.
Opposite him, smoking dramatically in the shadows of the night, was the wall of the annex occupied by the scientists.
The light in her window is on again. The way it had been for two months since her arrival, but had stopped after their meeting.
And he thought he'd helped her sleep regime.
As if to echo his thoughts, the light goes out, and five minutes later she appears. Sleepy, dark against her white dressing gown, glowing in the light of the night lanterns.
In the silence he can distinctly hear the desperate clicks of the lighter failing to give fire and a quiet "fucking hell" from her harsh mouth.
He stands so that the light of the cigarette doesn't show from the shadows. Observes. Her stomping in one place is depressing. Such an open area, only a wall with one door behind, a long run to the corners, direct light. No cover. No hiding.
They were so close, John didn't need to calculate the trajectory he could take to blast her head off with his sniper.
But he's unable to realise in time that he's spotted. The dusk makes it impossible to make out all the features of her face, but the swift way she was walking towards him spoke volumes.
When John pulls out his lighter, flicking the wheel, emitting only a spark, not a flame, she snorts and slaps his arm. Why?
Her face is close, cigarettes touching at the tips as she holds their cigarettes in her hands to gently light her own. Her careful fingers close to his lips and he inhales the smell of ink and coffee with the smoke.
When her shoulder lightly touches his, her head rests on the hardness of the wall, and the smoke fills her lungs, John notices a certain insufficiency. Unmasked, even more open than usual. But quiet.
So not trusting, just tired.
That's what makes her stand so close. Obviously nothing more.
"I'm going to rest my head on your shoulder, and then you can pretend I didn't do it."
"You're not afraid of groupies anymore?" Why say that? Why? Why? WHY?! Idiot.
She hums and takes a puff, releasing a thin stream of smoke into the night air.
"Since you scared them all away?"
So they stand and smoke, sharing little warmth at the thin edges of contact. Her hand presses against his, John noting every muscle movement as she brings the cigarette to her lips and back again.
In the morning, as promised, he pretends nothing happened.
And the soldiers pretend they are numb, blind, and not watching their pair that night.
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