This was written for the Dreamwidth Hannibal kink meme in 2013.
Prompt: "Angst, fluff Will/Abigail, Hallelujah (Rufus Wainright cover) songfic"
Odd how someone who had been through so much worse, who had lived only half his years, could ground him and clear the fog from his mind. She is resilient, she is pragmatic, she can still smile a genuine smile, one that lights up her eyes and tints her pale cheeks peach pink. She wants nothing more than to move on from all of this. She is exactly what he needs. Maybe there is a God, maybe things really do happen for a reason; maybe the sick game that had brought them together was just the black, black darkness before the light. The fall before the lift. Somehow it all fell into place.
She is gorgeous, but that's stating the obvious. Her skin as bright and pale as the moon, her eyes a brighter blue than robin's eggs. She is proof that a pearl can be wiped clean of blood. She is hope.
His hands are behind his back, looped through the slats in the back of the chair and tied with rope. His legs are free but he doesn't dare kick. That is not how the game plays out.
She's sauntering toward him in a powder-blue sun dress. She's straddling him. She's running her fingertips along his shoulder before they find purchase in his thick curls. She is backlit by the setting sunlight spilling through the kitchen window. She is pulling a knife from behind her back to give him a scar that matches hers.
They both still need it. The pain to remind them they're alive. It's not a constant need, and there are long periods of normalcy and joy, running barefoot in the moonlight shrieking with laughter until they collapse on top of each other, but some nights are too quiet and some rooms are too suffocating and sometimes they miss the warmth of blood on their hands. Blood of a gutted deer. Of a gutted girl. Of Nicholas Boyle. Of her, sputtering on the kitchen floor ten seconds after he first laid eyes on her.
They don't talk about it. On the mornings when she is silent at the kitchen table, eyes focused on something past his shoulder or down the hall, her pupils mere pinpricks, her knuckles turning white around her coffee mug, he wonders if she sees her father as often as he does. As he did. She told him everything that night in the antler room and she will never go back, never go back to such a conversation, never go back to the fear that filled their lungs with every breath and made them hate themselves and each other. Pups in a dogfight through no fault of their own.
Half of the time they fuck like tender teenagers and half of the time they fuck like animals. They try so hard to fuck the memories out of each other but can still feel them settling back in like a soul returning to its dead and battered body. Eventually they make peace with it. It is not about pursuing the light and willing yourself to forget the horror. It is not about succumbing to the dark, either. Serenity is grey.
He has no idea what love is supposed to feel like. The one time he was dumb enough to think he had come close to it - the thoughts still make him nauseous now - he was only a fly in a web. He should have learned to be jaded, to be more withdrawn than he already was. But he is stubborn when he wants to be and he will try this again.
He quits his job. Gets another in a different state, at a mediocre college teaching freshman-level criminology. It is what he wants. There is no intensity, there are no stakes, no pressure, no surprises. He can run on autopilot. But first, when the boxes in Wolf Trap are being packed, she asks to go back to Minnesota. To say goodbye to that house that no real estate agent has managed to sell.
They stand in silence in the kitchen, imagining the pool of her blood that has long since been cleaned. They both know this room like the back of their hand, have relived their meeting thousands of times and come to the conclusion that they wouldn't change a thing. He can almost feel the cold weight of the gun back in his hand, the tremors, the recoil of every one of the nine shots he fired.
Never in his life had he even had a roommate before, but here she is. In his bed. In their bed. The ghosts and the nightmares still plague the both of them but he's the only one who wakes up screaming. She's there to sit up in bed and hold his face in her hands, less fragile than they look. She's there to hold him together. There's snow falling outside and he is still shivering in sweat-damp sheets and they are still broken but they fit together like shards of shattered china.
She is his saving grace and he will sing her praises to the walls in this house, in the halls of his mind, and to anyone who will listen.