Will Graham (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mirrortouch) wrote2014-06-06 12:02 am
mirrortouch) wrote2014-06-06 12:02 am
Entry tags:
01 | 🕐 | audio
[ It's not something that really ever becomes routine, it doesn't matter how often he wakes up someplace strange and uncharted. The voice on the line sounds about as scattered as he feels. ]
My name is Will Graham, it's- [ He's pulling back his sleeve to look for a watch that's not there. ] I don't have the time. I don't- I don't have the time.
[ Hang on, don't get too lost. ]
It's not clear to me exactly where I am, but- [ a dry laugh ] you probably already knew that. This isn't even my phone. But you probably knew that too.
[ He's missing details. He's missing plenty. His voice trails off for a short while before he can get his bearings enough to speak again, and even then it's almost unconsciously. ] I don't know. I don't know.
[ It's as if the fact that he has no idea sparks him back into the present. His voice grows more composed, if somewhat cracked. ] So if you're hearing this, if anyone is hearing this - [ is anyone hearing this? ] - any singular indication will be key.
[ Another beat. ]
I feel as though I've strayed a long, long way from home.
[ The air goes dead, and then so does the line. ]
My name is Will Graham, it's- [ He's pulling back his sleeve to look for a watch that's not there. ] I don't have the time. I don't- I don't have the time.
[ Hang on, don't get too lost. ]
It's not clear to me exactly where I am, but- [ a dry laugh ] you probably already knew that. This isn't even my phone. But you probably knew that too.
[ He's missing details. He's missing plenty. His voice trails off for a short while before he can get his bearings enough to speak again, and even then it's almost unconsciously. ] I don't know. I don't know.
[ It's as if the fact that he has no idea sparks him back into the present. His voice grows more composed, if somewhat cracked. ] So if you're hearing this, if anyone is hearing this - [ is anyone hearing this? ] - any singular indication will be key.
[ Another beat. ]
I feel as though I've strayed a long, long way from home.
[ The air goes dead, and then so does the line. ]
no subject
You scared me. But you didn't kill me.
Fear isn't as bad as death. It hides behind your eyes and leaps out at things that remind you of it, but it doesn't keep you tied up and paralyzed the way death does. It doesn't hurt. Not physically.
[A roundabout, convoluted way of saying she forgives him. Which might be a lie. Maybe she hates him - or maybe she'll hate him tomorrow. Right now, she loves him and wants to peel the layers off his skull until he shows her what he's thinking.]
Don't scare me anymore, though. This place - this is a different kind of place. We can't afford to scare each other. Just because you know what I did . . .
[She trails off. The weight of guilt comes down on her shoulders again. What I did, what he did, what we did. Does Will still condemn her? Still hate her? Still fear her for her lies? She doesn't want to know. But she does. But she can't.]
[If he lashes out, she'll lash back. She is a mirror of emotion. She cares too much to stand, and will be happy to burn herself out to a calloused shell if that's what it takes. Hannibal has convinced her, leading by awful example: she will be an empathetic monster, which is the sort that precludes weakness. Not like him, but not unlike him, either.]
[Or else she will be just a girl.]
[Or else something else entirely.]
Please tell me what happened, Will. Don't lie to me. I'm not - I can't know unless you tell me.
[Helpless and lost for information until he has mercy on her. She is practically begging. She wants to know what happened, needs to know, how the dominoes fell, what blood was spilled.]
[What was their design?]
no subject
[ It comes out quick, seething between his teeth before he can contain it - his hands grip, spontaneous and momentary at her own as if testing just how solid once more. A vivid reminder before him. The feast, the pudding, he took the roast beast. Bestowed it upon him again as though a benevolent god, another altar he doesn't pray at (but he lingers at it, mesmerized by the lit candles - )
He feels as though he is once again the unreliable narrator, the man with the fragmented story he's only just scotch-taped back together. There is a tight feeling in his throat that he thinks it best if he tries to avoid. Abigail is so beseeching, a desperate tone that beckons him as though lifted upon high - not by clouds, as one might expect, but it's spider legs that he feels instead. That feeling you get after you swat a bug on you, that crawling sensation, amplified. He needs to stop thinking about it but he can't stop thinking about it.
It's not that he's not playing his home field advantage right now, it's that the game has up and changed its rules entirely - he has to re-learn them among those who have been playing it for months, years. He doesn't quite know where to plant the first footstep.
He doesn't feel merciful anymore. He feels as though the mercy's been bled right out of him and replaced with something horrifyingly new. He breathes, regardless, and he starts over. ]
Today, I woke up in a cell that never belonged to me, [ a hesitance, ] yet it held me in its full embrace as it had already before. I didn't ask for it back. It just found me. I remember that mattress as though a very old, very lumpy friend. Abigail -
[ The same excuses that made him feel crazed carry all too much relevance here and now, various fishing lines lashed to Abigail Hobbs' greater extremities and he doesn't know which string he should start plucking at. Another cautionary tale is hardly something she needs, albeit something she wants very desperately. His fingers squeeze once more, gentler this time as his thumbs start to press methodically across her palms, mapping out the lines. A memorization exercise, a practice in recent sensory deprivation. ]
I feel as if you should know it all, I've told you - [ The her that was not-her, an echo at best of Abigail's tenacity that he spoke to during his wearier times, and the idea even has a half of a fond smile tugging tiredly up at the side of his mouth. ] You can ask me anything you want.
[ The open invitation lies, and he can nearly hear the river's water running about his kneecaps, sloshing invitingly with the current. Beside him stands Abigail, still bound in her fishing line. ]
no subject
[No less likely to be caught in the web, in the jaws of a monster. She is not weak, or if she is, he's just as weak or maybe weaker. She is vindicated. She practically glows.]
[I've told you, he says, and this confuses her but doesn't distract her. She knows what she wants to know, it's been shadowing her mind since he first spoke on the network.]
Did you kill him?
[A question she speaks with a trill, with a thrill. Wouldn't it be nice if-- wouldn't it be right if-- And she isn't sure if she believes it's possible, but wouldn't that be a solid tying-up of that chapter of this story, if Will Graham put a knife to Hannibal Lecter's throat and slit it ear to ear. Wouldn't that be something.]
[And yet if he had, she would be jealous. Jealous that Will took the opportunity when she didn't. Jealous that he got that last, victorious moment. Jealous that she was not included in the good feeling of killing. Jealous that Will was the last thing Hannibal saw, not her. Jealous all in theoreticals, fractal patterns and offshoots of reality. But envy is strong in her.]
[She wants to be as important to Hannibal as Will is, and knows she never will be. It makes her bloodthirsty.]
[Tell me you killed him. She is so much realer here than in his mind, so much crueler, so much more than a memory. So much more flawed.]
[She squeezes his hands, arches toward him, breathless for answers. Breathless to be disappointed or elated. She wants to know every bloody detail.]
no subject
It sends an instantaneous surge through him is all, a flash of eye white before his thumbs bear down into the sockets - eyeballs pop like grapes, and red sluices upward and paints his palms something terrifyingly sweet. The problem is that he's killed Hannibal Lecter in so many strangely, violently intimate ways inside of himself already, none of them quite fitting. None of them quite good enough.
Any 'yes' that's anything less than instantaneous, frenetic, victorious tastes like a betrayal in his mouth; he won't lie to Abigail and he won't hand himself that victory ('victory' is, in that moment, such a strange word) until it's due, it doesn't matter how close he gets. The 'no' feels possibly more stale in his teeth, treasonous in a way that he hasn't acquired whatever kind of macabre avenging that he wants to promise her.
He hesitates and that's probably answer enough, his brows carefully knitting. ]
I tried. [ He admits that freely enough, wets his lips. ] Oh, I tried.
[ Did he? He thinks of a gun barrel pressed into a temple and a rudimentary inaction to follow with it. A bullet to the head, how very unimaginative in that comeuppance if he'd decided on actively pulling the trigger.
Culturally speaking, cannibalism is often synonymous with immortality. ]
I have found myself imagining more times the sharp, pained gasps for breath beneath my fingertips, [ as though a blood geyser systematically staining the floor of the Hobbs' kitchen, ] the pulse of a collapsing trachea and its final death spasms. Limbs jerking, as if trying to wake a mind that desperately needs its - [ distaste colors his tone: ] beauty sleep.
[ The wet pack of flesh beneath his fists is something intoxicating, Randall Tier's very visage still emblazoned within him, and his hands quake and grasp and readjust against her own, both a comfort and a controlling sort of grip. ]
no subject
[Not so different after all. Neither of them can pull the trigger, not yet; neither of them can manage to do the deed. He is too important, to central, to both of them in different ways. He is the sun, and they orbit around him, cursing his heat but unable to push him to nova for fear they'll go dark themselves.]
[Or else maybe it's something simpler. Maybe they would just miss him.]
[She sways slightly in the sinuous wake of his words. There is a poetry to death in his speech - like Ben's stories, but less allegorical, more floral. If this was a sermon, she would be offering praise. This is a church she would join. This is the place she belongs.]
I tried, too.
[Quavering. She tried.]
I would have made him suffer. I would have made him lose control of himself. I had a way, I had a plan, but I . . .
[She lost her nerve. She didn't want to go out. She didn't want to miss him.]
I didn't.
[If only Will would fill the silence with bloody words again, maybe she wouldn't feel like such a failure.]
He would just have come back anyway, here. But it would have been--
[The best right perfect delicious honorable thing.]
Satisfying.
no subject
Nicholas Boyle has not whet my stranger appetites, nor has he wronged me so vehemently as this man and his pretty, twisting words.
There will be a space where he is gone, the paled portion of a wall where a favorite painting once hung. I would bleach myself of him, and revel in the scent of sickly, pungent satisfaction upon my hands.
This is my design.
He can see Abigail's shaking hands clutched around a weapon, uncertainly certain of what it is she must (but more so wants to) do, as vividly as if they were his own. It makes his fingers go a bit deadened, loose on her own hands when they tremble (empathetically, and unconsciously). He smooths them out over hers instead. ]
Killing Hannibal won't solve much of anything.
[ He, too, has missed more than one opportunity, when he wasn't blinded by emotion, overwrought and jumping to the extremes that would suit him best rather than fully hatched, detailed schematics. He's unable to think of Hannibal Lecter's death in a purely clinical light. He has, however, learned to hone his plans, so far as the long run is concerned.
Perhaps with bumps and bruises along the way. ]
Especially here. [ For reasons he still and cannot fully comprehend. ] Here where nothing is corporeal, solidified enough that you might touch and know. [ Nobody knows here, and they've all stopped asking the same questions. ]
That's abstract wisdom, in not having killed him.
[ He thinks of a cocky, crooked smile that he sent after the man. He thinks of guns; he thinks of bloodied, pulpish faces that are and aren't Hannibal's. He thinks of a stag, large, tall, muscled, intimidating, and he has to dream (maybe, sometimes, with embellished detail) of how Hannibal Lecter might look mounted atop its antlers.
'Satisfying' is a good word. ]
Hannibal Lecter uses his freedom, by his jurisdiction, wisely. Carefully crafted, as though a working clock face. Remove some of the parts and it won't tick, the clock won't be right again. Denying his life denies that freedom. [ And Will knows, instinctively rather than knowledgeably, that this man will value his own choices above all else. ] It's not without consequence.
[ He raises Abigail's hands in his own, their hands clasped as in shared prayer, and he presses his own knuckles (wrapped reverently around Abigail's hands) to his chin, tucking them underneath and resting his head atop of them both. His eyes read pride, his mouth speaks differently. ]
What stopped you?
no subject
[But she wants the first kill, at least, for herself. Will could be competition for her now, for first blood.]
[She doesn't want to think about that. Instead she looks at the pride in his eyes and takes it in greedily, like a starving child. This is what she has wanted for so long. Pride, love, a father who will hold her tight and love her unconditionally and keep her safe--]
[But there is danger that way. He didn't keep her safe, did he? He just frightened her, and then she died.]
I don't know. [Whispered; hoarse.] I mean - I, someone was helping me, and she would only help if I really wanted it, and then I . . . didn't. She could tell I was lying.
I got angry. So I.
[She licks her lips. He will know, he will know eventually. He will find out. She has to tell him.]
I killed someone else.
[Someone who reminded me of you.]
[She does not say she's sorry.]
no subject
At once, Will pictures Randall Tier beneath his own two hands, the satisfaction of bleeding knuckles and the distinctive snap of a zygomatic bone beneath his fist. There had so rarely been a sound so rewarding than the snap of bone, a burst of blood, and knowing - in the way that gods know they can crush humans between their teeth if they so please - that you were the cause of it.
His fingers abruptly leave her own, but not for the reason she'll likely suspect. They're just covered in blood, but so are hers. There's something that feels decidedly - off about that mingling. Though, at the same time, a comfort, a sort of shared intimacy between them.
'Who did you kill?' sits just underneath his tongue, ready to be born through grinding teeth. ]
How did you kill him?
[ It's what comes out instead, a curiosity he can't shake, a picture he needs - needs - to paint within his mind. ]
no subject
[He has no right to judge her. No ground to stand on. She will not be cast aside by him, not anymore. She's all wrath, all sharp edges, fire in her eyes.]
His name was Ryan Hardy. [Her tongue twists like a snake in her mouth, prodding at the inside of her cheek as she doesn't say He was just like you or Hannibal wanted him or Killing him felt good.]
I tricked someone into giving me a taser. And I . . . had a knife. I knocked him out, and I gutted him.
[She taps her sternum, then drags her finger down her belly. Like gutting any animal.]
[Her eyes are cold and hot all at the same time.]
no subject
His name was Ryan Hardy, and she knocked him out and gutted him. Like a fish, like - a deer, a crippled stag.
Will can feel his own gaze darken, and for as much as she wants to cut him with her words and flash her pride before him, just so much as he had the same, it's all Will can do to just reach out and tuck some of that long hair behind her ear. His hand curves against her cheek, and he carefully lifts her chin a tick, so that he can properly see her better.
Maybe he means to cut her just as she has him. Or maybe he's just disappointed once again that she's no better than the rest of them.
His tone has an edge of sardonicism to it: ]
How far you've come in your recovery, Abigail.
no subject
[Her eyes well with tears, but they don't fall. His fingers are warm on her face. She lets them sit for moments, just moments, and then pushes them violently away.]
How far have you come? [she spits, snarls, a brittle animal backed into a corner. He has no right. He has no right to judge her. And yet she's always feared he would.]
[They are neither of them any better than Hannibal in the end, she thinks, when left to the devices of their worst impulses. But she has done better. She has been better. She possesses better in her heart and soul.]
[She doesn't expect Will to believe this. He's always believed that she is what he wants her to be; she has occupied a mythical space in his mind, and now she's shattered her own perfect image.]
[Well, fine. She doesn't want to be a perfect monster anyway. She wants to be a human one.]
no subject
How far has he come? He's backslid, heels dug deeply into the mud, like a one man army trying to push his car out of the trench. His feet sink, the wheels can only stagnate in the sludge, and eventually, he will run through his strength. It's a rudimentary metaphor, but an appropriate one regardless. He doesn't feel particularly strong, some days. He feels like he's been bent to his knees.
Just how far has he come from that day he met Abigail, spilt blood pooling beneath his fingers, her father's body beside them, riddled with bullets and soaking into the kitchen floor just with his daughter?
"I'm doing well," he wants to say, and also, "I have every good intention." Perhaps not every 'right' intention. ]
I'd have done anything to stop him. [ Anything, anything, anything in the world. Even now, he feels righteous, empowered by his actions anew - they're still fresh in his memories, stark and vivid like the final snap of a neck between his white knuckles. ] I've let the devil inside of my house, and he has taken up permanent residence. Ruthlessness is bred out of ruthlessness.
[ It's here he's standing, looming over her as though in a position of power, though he refrains from touching. ]
I beat a man to death with nothing but my hands, I felt the crack and crush of his trachea beneath my thumbs. I felt the slick feeling of blood between my fingers, sticky copper and fluidity. Hard to get a grip, with so much blood. Hard to keep your hands from sliding, harder still to gain any sort of leverage.
[ His face contorts, and his expression becomes virulent. ]
He was going to kill me and I let myself become something rather than a victim. I ascended [ in his eyes, though not Will's necessarily ], I saved myself, I tore a beast to shreds and I made a mockery of him in the village square, as you do.
[ His jaw squares and clicks, and his breath heaves as though he's just sprinted for his life - fervent, heavy, alive. He shouldn't be saying this, but he kind of wants to scare her in return. He shouldn't be saying this, but he's going to find out anyway. ]
Is it the recovery you always wanted, Abigail? Is it the pedestaled figure for which you'd always hoped?
[ Like father, like daughter, he supposes. ]
no subject
[But she doesn't want to be anybody's goddamn symbol anymore, either. Never again.]
I used to wonder what I'd have become if my father hadn't done what he did with me. For me. Because of me. But I don't wonder that anymore. I know I am what I am in part because it is what I am. He has fault, and Hannibal has fault, and I - have fault, too.
[The implication being that Will can place blame wherever he wants - even on her - but he has to carry it, too. Eventually. Even if not now.]
[All of a sudden she feels weary. She doesn't want to fight him. She wants to be held, but here and now it doesn't feel safe. So she just slumps, a soft and broken figure.]
It's not what I wanted. But it's still good. I mean, it still - feels good. To me.
I should tell you I'm sorry for what I did, but I'm not sorry. Not about anything but that he isn't dead.
no subject
[ Abigail's weariness permeates the air, and Will can feel it by proxy, passing onto him and sinking heavy into his bones. He doesn't want to flaunt himself, peacocking his achievements - achievements? - in her face as though waving about a crimson-stained paintbrush.
And he doesn't want to fight either; they've fought before, they argued last he saw her, and he scared her then as well. It's not the goal. Scaring her. Fighting with her. Why would he want to? He's just gotten her back.
Here and now she looks no longer like he's remembered her, but she's been gone so long that it's an elevation of sorts - he referred to himself as pedestaled, but Abigail certainly sits on a throne of her own in his mind. Something perfect and fragile that he couldn't - wouldn't - let go of. There's a ragdoll in front of him, stripped of some of her stuffing and sewn back together in places (by whom, he can't regard entirely, though he has some solid suspects, one in particular).
It angers him, in a way, that he had no part in this. That she spent a year of her life without him and he knows nothing of it, as if she's a part of him that has been and always will be there, whether she be alive and breathing or a mere echo of herself manifested within his best daydreams. ]
My memories no longer serve the same accuracy as they should, with the girl - [ woman, really ] sitting in front of me. It seems a thoughtcrime now, to reduce Abigail Hobbs to something so simplistic.
[ It's not much, the condolences he offers her: a fond shuck of a finger under her chin. Despite everything, he feels a singular responsibility for her, still. A sense of paternity reawakened after a long dormancy. ]
Why did you kill him? Why him in particular?
[ There's always a reason. Nothing is random. ]
no subject
[How would she say that to him? How could she? It all seems like such a foreign concept now, and yet right there at her fingertips, too. She can't imagine being that angry at him, that she could kill a proxy for all the things he did and didn't do for her, and yet she can imagine it more clearly than she can remember the shape of her own hands.]
[He says things now, that she has changed, that she's more than he remembers, and she's simultaneously thrilled that he sees and frustrated that he didn't see before. See? She's just as alive now as she ever was, no freer in prison - except maybe she is, a little, if you look at it sideways and have a moment to laugh at the irony. Why didn't he see her before?]
[Nothing is random. There is always a reason. She shakes her head, wipes at dry eyes.]
I've changed a lot. Before that, and after that. I -
Hannibal wanted him.
[That much she can admit to. She was jealous. And it implies, at least, the rest of the truth: that she is jealous of Will, that she hates him for his place in Hannibal's hollow heart as much as she hates Hannibal for loving them. When she is loved, she wants to be loved alone, to be the ideal, the only. She doesn't like sharing.]
[She doesn't like being lesser. She will always, forever, be less than Will Graham in Hannibal's eyes.]
no subject
The words hiss in his head between seething teeth, clenched tight and private and he could rub a tired hand at his face if it wasn't such a familiar sort of thought process to him, something so strangely and intimately similar to how the deeper and darker corners of his mind seem to rumble. It's already in there, why wouldn't he hear it in Abigail's voice as well?
There's something more to this here, something she's hemming and hawing around. He'll leave her the secret, at least for now. The reason she's given him is more than good enough.
He finds himself studying his hands with this, the way they bend and flex, how the knuckles wrinkle, the lines in them, the callouses and the familiarity of his own ten working digits. It seems redundant to imagine them with blood sluicing down his fingers. ]
And what is that like?
[ His voice is a hush, curiosity coloring his tone if not a wide streak of bitterness. ]
Taking something from him that he wants.
no subject
It would have been more satisfying if he hadn't come back to life.
Hannibal asked me why I didn't come to him. Why I didn't try to kill him. Whatever satisfaction I had, he took away by asking. You know how easily he can make everything nothing. Or nothing everything.
[She reaches out tentatively for Will's hand again. Notice me. Notice ME.]
He killed me and I still can't stay away from him. He fed me, here, and I lied for him. He didn't have to ask me to, I just did it automatically.
Someday I'm going to get him back, Will. [She says this with the certainty of mountains, of oceans, of gravity. She will get him back. Hannibal will suffer for what he's done to her.]
[But then, after a pause, more tremulously, like the little girl she still sometimes is:]
I'm a hunter now. Does that mean you hate me?
no subject
How could he hate her? How could he even begin to bring himself to? He treasured - treasures - her more than anything he's ever had in his life; it's not like a humble little abode in Wolf Trap, cozy and warm, dogs scattered lazily over piles of pillows. It piques at something very particular in his heart, that something that's always been missing, past camaraderie - he'd identify it more as 'family'.
And she's a hunter, not a fisher. She's a hunter but he's a hunter too, because he cannot lie to himself about the satisfaction with which he struck Randall Tier's face, Hannibal's face, the lines blurred and grew grotesque along the way - often, they do - but also the crack with which the bones in his neck resonated when Will grasped those antlers - his neck - he doesn't know - and he twisted, with a sharp and staccato sound of finality that came with it.
He's a hunter too, when he thinks of the voracious pursuit of Freddie Lounds that he'd taken, the craving he had to get his fingers in her hair, to drag her across the drive and away from his prophetic chest of treasures. She wasn't allowed.
And he'd played into Hannibal's charades just the same. Chilton - it was so much easier to pave the way for his plan, wasn't it?, so intricately woven, his very own spider's web, much like the one he'd imagined Hannibal crafting for him before.
It's after a few very long moments that Will crouches and takes Abigail's hands into his own, his fingers curling and scraping lightly along the backs - a tickle, almost - before he clasps them warmly between each of his own.
A hunter, not a fisher.
Like father, like daughter. ]
It's not by killing him.
[ He realizes that in a certain sense, in a different and smaller way that he enjoys imagining it; it sings him to sleep, some nights, like an operatic orchestrated event in his mind. ] Here, I suppose it's even more pointless.
[ But. ]
It would still be nice to, it would feel - righteous.
[ Judicially, maybe.
Or maybe more godly. ]
It would feel satisfying.
[ His hands raise her own, and he sets them against him, chin tucked and his mouth in a tight line, his nose pressed against their knuckles. Just for a moment, his hands slide away to grasp either side of her face, and on a knee, he presses himself to her forehead instead. ]
We've done right. [ Like he wanted to before, his hands clasp, both ears, solidly, and his eyebrows furrow and he has her back and she's right there with him and he could laugh and kiss her if it wasn't this broken little moment between them. Commiseration and celebration, intertwined. ] But we've also done right by him.
[ When referring to Hannibal, Will always feels the sense of pronouns becoming capitalized, as though elevated to a new level of being. ]
How much it is that he has will never truly, truly reveal itself.
[ Not with Hannibal. ] Not with those carefully constructed, pretty, pretty words.
[ Kind of like Lucifer. But it doesn't stop the being from being angelic, liken unto something higher, above everyone else. Angelic, in the way that, well - ] I feel the fiery sword in my hands, just, ruthless, and unrelenting.
I guess we are both hunters.
no subject
[But there are some things he'll never own. Abigail knows, the way she knows her own hands, the ones Will is holding now between his own callused ones, that Hannibal will never be able to take the relationship between the two of them for his own. Because he can't understand love like this. Some days she hates Will, some days she wants to protect him, some days she wants to change him, and sometimes she just wants to sit with him, quiet and calm, watching the bob of a lure in tumultuous waters. Some days she wants to kill him. Some days she wants to kill with him.]
[But always, always, she loves him. She realizes this as she looks at him now, that no matter what, their connection is unique and untaintable. He killed her father. Hannibal set it up, but he did it; Garret Hobbs's blood is on his hand. That makes them blood, her and him; that makes them family.]
[She presses her forehead to his and cries again, just a little, a couple tears to let the feelings out. By the time the last tear has fallen to the ground, her eyes are dry again. Someone else might say she was faking; she wasn't. Her feelings just change like the weather, quicker, because she has had to learn to compartmentalize everything. She might not have the energy to fight, to fly, if she doesn't feel things quickly. Even with Will.]
If we promise each other not to kill him, we still might break that promise. It would feel too good. Too right.
That doesn't make us ugly. It doesn't make us wrong. It just makes us animals. Animals don't like being weak, Will.
I don't like being weak. I don't like being prey. I don't like what he did to me, or to you.
[But she loves him all the same.]
[Abigail Hobbs has seen the devil, and has made a covenant or bargain with him.]
no subject
Will's cards were nonsensical before, in all the wrong colors and languages and symbols. He has a clarity now, what he presumed to be a good hand to play - the Barge has jumbled that all up again now. Everything's out of order, and plenty of things are in places he wasn't expecting. This face held so desperately between his fingers is one of those happy surprises, helplessly warming but not without a telltale chill up his spine.
After all, he, too, has seen the devil in all of his pointed glory. He still hasn't quite won that fiddle of gold.
She doesn't like being prey. ]
I won't let you.
[ 'Won't', he says, as if he can promise, as if he can protect anyone in this lifetime - Beverly still aches in his chest, but not the way Abigail did - does. He corrects himself, a dip to his voice and a shudder in it as he brushes his thumbs against her temples. ]
I can't. Again.
[ He can't let himself again, he can't make the same mistakes he has in the past that he can't see himself crossing into, can't see them twisting and bending around his own morals and taking him somewhere completely new, with a besotted and misleading hand. ]
Animals - We're not animals. Animals hunt for prey, from meal to meal. [ He sets his forehead back and away from hers, just so he can look at her properly; rare eye contact. ] The thrill of the hunt's in their blood, but when it's for sport -
[ He bites at his bottom lip, weighing his options and deciding on the same train of thought, what he means to say. ]
That's definitively a human trait. We are unfortunately, completely, and inarguably human, Abigail.
[ We're just fucked up. ]