Recently she's taken to standing on the balcony and looking out across the water, endless waves of pure, smooth blue that go on for as far as her eyes can see. Somewhere, miles and miles away, it laps up on the shores of a land she's never set foot on, and here, it dampens the air, castoff spray joining with the sweat on her brow and running in rivulets down the sides of her face.
She's cold, frozen to the bone, and she can almost imagine the perspiration turning to ice on her skin, searing the sheer fabric of her dress to her flesh. Then it would only come off with skin, royal blood gushing out of her veins, and what would come of any of this then?
Of course, given what little she's heard, her husband might not even mind.
"Ah, there she is, the bride-to-be!"
Will doesn't turn around at the voice or the approaching footsteps, though she lets herself be led when hands find her arm. In off the balcony, away from the drops of water that might of once been closer to her homeland than she ever has, and then she's being stared at critically by a pair of narrow brown eyes.
"You're a mess," says Frederick, lips pulling back minutely. "Being soaked with sweat will not make an attractive first impression."
She isn't attractive under any circumstances. Her House was known for beauty but that hadn't extended to her—mousey and awkward, bordering on scrawny, with hair that grew in every wrong direction. No refined features on her face, no queenly bearing—she's sure that if it wasn't for the madness, everyone would wonder if she wasn't some misbegotten bastard passed off as a Graham. (Sometimes, she wishes they would think that anyway.)
She voices her thoughts: "I'm not pretty. Maybe . . . he won't be interested?" She hates the note of hope she hears creep into her voice. Frederick hears it, too, and his eyes flash, but he twists his lips into what he must think is a reassuring smile.
"You've a woman's body, Will," he says and his hand creeps up, up, up, hovering over her breast. She can feel the heat off his palm but he doesn't touch, not quite, and eventually he moves on to her cheek. His fingers do brush her there. "I don't think your face will matter much to the savage, do you?"
She tries not to flinch at the slight scrape of his fingernails, at the sheer proximity that hits her skin like a burn. This man has raised her from birth, but she hates being touched by him just as much as anyone else, has hated it more and more the older she's gotten.
He chuckles at her, light and dismissive, and finally lets his hand fall away completely. "Grahams," he says, shaking his head. "So many peculiarities. It's fascinating. But even if your father was still on the throne instead of that fat usurper, you'd still have to be getting over this . . . aversion to touch. You've had your first bleed, Will—right now your mother would've been giving you the same speech her mother gave her, about how you have to marry to ensure the welfare of your House. But this is even more than that—it's to ensure your throne. Do you want to live in exile for the rest of your life, hunted like a dog? A beggar queen, in rags, dependent on the charity of those who should be below you?"
Will doesn't know what she wants, not really. Frederick filled her childhood with stories of that faraway land across the sea that she's never seen, about a throne of swords and the glory of her House, ground into ruin by a rebellion that should've been crushed in its infancy. He's put visions in her mind's eye of power, her mad father's crown ripped from the usurper's severed head to be placed on hers.
And in a way, Will does want that. She's never known anything except what she has right now, but the way she thinks, the way she feels, she can almost know what she could have, experience it vicariously through imagination.
But Frederick isn't half as smart as he believes himself to be. Will is mad, like all Grahams invariably are, but while he thinks that makes her stupid, what it really does is let her see into him, if not through him.
He talks about her throne, but she can help but think that what he means is his. Every time she looks into his eyes, which isn't often, she sees the glint of greed, that same burn for power that he's forced alight somewhere deep in herself.
A part of her doesn't want to believe it. That the only unchanging thing she's ever known—the Maester who delivered her, who raised her almost as his own after her mother succumbed to childbed fever—could be so cruel. Could sell her and pass it off with pretty lies about how it's for her own good.
Maybe that's why she hasn't out and out said she won't do it.
Maybe she knows it'll make no difference anyway and right now, she'd like to hold on to the last thing she has left, as tenuous as it is.
"Start getting yourself ready," he says, with a nod at the sunken bath in the middle of the rooms. "Let the servants help you, if just today. They're all very clean, aren't they?" The last is directed at the other women in the room, who all nod hastily.
She almost laughs, or cries. He never has understood why she hates being touched, that it has nothing to do with cleanliness. It's the same with her refusal to make eye contact.
For all that he goes on about how interesting her mind is, most of his ideas about it are wrong.
"They'll be here soon," he continues, "and I expect you to be completely ready when I call for you." With one last look, he turns on his heel and starts towards the doorway. She stares at the back of his head for a long moment, and calls out before she can stop herself.
"Are they really cannibals?" She doesn't know why she asks, why she wants confirmation of something she hopes is just a rumor. It'll just upset her more, but on the other hand, the more she knows, the better off she may be. Knowledge is the only power Will has ever had.
Frederick turns slowly. He looks like he's debating what he's going to say, and that's answer enough.
"Lord Crawford tells me they are," he finally admits. "It's a part of their . . ." He sneers. ". . . culture. Ritualistically devouring their enemies and the like. They're a brutal people, but then again, that's why we want them."
Her knuckles have gone white around the fabric of her dress. She can hear it begin to tear, as if the sound was coming from somewhere far away.
"I wouldn't worry," he says, and there's that smile again, the complete opposite of reassuring. "You're a Graham. They may all be mad, but . . . so are you."
She watches him go like her vision's become a tunnel. Behind her, servants are talking to her or each other, voices a high, annoying buzz in the back of her skull. Her mind is splashing up over itself and all she can feel is the cold, on her skin and around her bones and in her veins.
She turns and steps, staggers, until she registers steam around her head and resistance against her legs, soaked material clinging again to her skin. She stares at the water lapping the edge of the marble and thinks once more of the sea, of a distant shore that blood dictates belongs to her.
"—too hot, milady!" a voice finally breaks through, anxious and concerned.
Is it?
Yet she is still cold.
.
At some point, though she can't remember when, the servants got the dress off of her. After that, there are flashes, small intervals when something in her recedes and her senses come back for an instant. There's soap on her skin and suds in her hair and fingers, hands, everywhere on her, and then she's out of the tub and her skin is red from heat at one moment and suddenly back to it's usual sickly pale the next. She feels a brush catching on tangles and powder on her body, all over, because sweat isn't attractive, is it?
Perfume behind her ears and files grating against her nails and lotion and makeup and finally another dress pulled over her head and adjusted against her body, just in time for the knock at the door.
She expects another servant, or possibly Frederick, but instead Lady Crawford steps into the room. She's the last person Will would've expected but at the same time, she's not surprised.
Lady Crawford is sick—actually dying, Frederick had whispered to her once, eager to gossip behind their hosts' backs. It's some ailment of the lungs, and yet Will has never heard her cough. If not for the devastation plain in every line of Lord Crawford's body, she might not have even believed it was true.
Lady Crawford is still as proud and beautiful today as she was when they first arrived a year ago. She seems unbreakable, and yet Will can imagine what's coming as clearly as if it were happening to her, tissue and fat wasting from the bone and eyes sinking into the skull and lungs agonizing to draw in what little air they can past bloodless lips.
And no amount of pride will stop it from happening, one day.
Lady Crawford looks at her, eyes just as critical as Frederick's, and nods curtly. Her lips move, though Will can't hear a word she says, and she then turns back the way she came. She understands that she should follow her, reluctantly moving to trail a few paces behind.
She leads her through the winding, grandiose hallways of the building, past lavishly decorated rooms that Frederick had privately scoffed at, deemed lacking.
Will's senses begin to come back slowly, one at a time. First she realizes she smells overpoweringly of fruit and flowers, sickly sweet and nauseating. Then it gets worse when she notices the way it seems to cling to the stickiness of her skin, the powder and lotion and makeup feeling like a thick layer of grime sitting heavy on top of her. She felt cleaner before the bath.
Finally, Lady Crawford's words begin to penetrate and register.
"—isn't as uncivilized as you would assume. He was rather eloquent, in fact."
She almost laughs at that, loud and hysterical. The vegetarian noblewoman calling the cannibal warlord eloquent.
"When did you meet him?" she asks instead, the words hoarse, drawn out with effort from between lips that barely move.
She hesitates. "Among his people, he is . . . a healer, of some renown. It's not our medicine, but it's supposedly effective."
"And did he help you?"
"No," she says briskly. "Nothing can help me. But I can help you. Take this advice to heart: do not offend him. He doesn't take insult lightly. Be polite."
That does, finally, startle a laugh out of her. The sound is just as ugly as she'd feared.
"A cannibal who values politeness?"
Lady Crawford stops by a set of double doors and shoots her a glance over her shoulder. "Maester Chilton oversimplifies things. Savage doesn't mean uncomplicated."
The doors open out onto the front of the house. Frederick and Lord Crawford are already there, the former shifting anxiously as they look out over the path that winds its way through the property's acreage.
Frederick spares her a glance but doesn't comment—evidently, he finds what the servants did satisfactory.
They descend into an awkward, drawn out silence. It only breaks when he all but hisses at Crawford: "It's getting close. There's no sign of them."
"They'll be here," says Crawford, self-assured as usual. "I've never known them to be late."
Frederick sniffs. Will fidgets.
And then comes the sound, muffled by distance: horse hooves beating against the ground.
As they get louder, Will thinks they sound like the executioner's ax meeting the flesh and bone of the neck, over and over and over. Or maybe, maybe they're more like war drums—a rhythm to break the peace, a rhythm to spill blood on foreign land.
They finally appear in a cloud of gray-brown dust, three of them emerging from the copse of trees at the far end of the path. They seem so far away and yet they're through the gates almost before she can blink or breathe, pulling their horses to a stop. The animals shift their feet and flick their tails, huge black eyes unblinking between the straps of their bridles.
Crawford rushes forward to say something, voice booming across the yard, and Frederick takes the opportunity to grab her wrist and pull her to his side.
"He doesn't speak the Common Tongue," he whispers, eyes fixated on the man in the middle of the group, on the black horse. Will's eyes pass over all of them, but she doesn't really see, doesn't really look. "So don't waste your breath. But smile."
"What?"
"Smile at him and meet his eyes."
His grip tightens to bruising before he lets go. Then he steps back and she's left frozen and exposed, like a deer in the sights of a crossbow.
Crawford is talking to everyone now, she thinks, given the movement of his eyes and his body language, but she's only catching bits and pieces.
"—this is Willow of the House of Graham, the first of her name and the rightful Queen of the Seven Kingdoms across the Sea—"
Finally, she takes a step, then another. Again and again until she's standing close enough for the black horse to lean down and put its nose on the top of her head.
"—Hannibal," says Jack with finality.
Hannibal, thinks Will.
Her gaze travels up, up, over boots and legs and clothing that's finer than she would of expected. When she reaches the shoulders she pulls her lips back into what she hopes is a passable smile and then, finally, she's looking at a face.
Under different circumstances, she might've called it handsome. It certainly doesn't look like a savage's, or a cannibal's. Her gaze flits around, taking in each individual feature without ever quite meeting the eyes.
She can almost hear Frederick's teeth grinding in the background but what he still doesn't understand after all this time is that it's nothing about shyness or even madness—it's about looking and seeing too much, or sometimes, more frighteningly, not enough.
She wonders, in the instant before she shifts her eyes down from his forehead, which she'll find in Hannibal's.
His eyes are brown, but an odd shade, running almost . . . reddish at certain points. There are no veins visible in the whites and the pupils are narrow in the sunlight. They're focused singularly and intensely on her and she . . . can't direct any of that scrutiny back at him. It's like he's in a blind spot—she can't see him or feel him, become him just by looking and imagining. As he is right now, she can't tell a thing about him.
This has never happened before. Maybe she should be happy about it, but instead she feels almost . . . challenged. She should be able to read this man, and yet there he sits right in front of her, inscrutable and blank, slipping easily through her fingers.
So she grasps at him in a new way. There is one thing she already knows about him, so she takes the word cannibal and runs it over and over through her mind, distilling it into something real and applying it to him. She thinks about him killing, about human blood running over his hands and down his chin, about his teeth tearing into human flesh, grinding it into bits his throat works to swallow. She can't know what it tastes like so she thinks of the blood itself, hot and thick and tangy with iron, sliding down her throat and warming her belly.
And finally, finally, the feelings begin to come, vague and misshapen. She gets the impression of being malformed, ingrown, shrieking and base and twisted, an abomination that someone should've left to die. But it doesn't die. Instead, it festers.
She's not smiling anymore. Her throat's gone dry and tight, trapping the bile inching its way up from her stomach. She's locked in place, pinned by her own perception. She feels the insanity like a wave, rushing over and dragging her under.
Hannibal tilts his head, slowly, thoughtfully. Then his lips twitch and he's kicking the black horse in the sides, pulling the reins and leading his companions off the way they came.
"What was that?" Frederick's voice rings out, nearly shrill. "He didn't—did he like her?"
Crawford laughs heartily. "Oh, if he didn't like her, I think we'd know."
Her stomach clenches, churns. She's sweating again, past all the powder and perfume, and her limbs feel weak beneath her prickling skin. It's like she has a fever, her delirium rattling with the hollow cries of that thing that's taken up residence deep in her psyche.
She doesn't know how long she stands there. At some point Lady Crawford's presence begins to slowly filter in, hovering behind her but not touching, not crowding. Further behind, Frederick and Crawford are talking, eagerly discussing the future, plans for conquest with her new army, the savages she's about to marry herself to.
And she can't take it.
"I don't like him," she hisses, low but still loud enough to be heard.
The conversation stops immediately and the silence is icy; she can feel Frederick's eyes on her back.
"What?" he demands.
"He might like me," she bites out, swinging around, "but I don't like him. I don't want to marry him."
"'You don't want . . .'" he echoes, stalking forward. "'You don't want'? This isn't about what you want. This is about more than you. This is about your family, your House, its honor, its throne!"
"And I can bring so much honor to my House by becoming some, some cannibal's whore?"
"The road to any throne is long, and dangerous, and brimming with little indignities to be suffered." He's up on her now, breath just reaching her face. "And if you were any kind of Queen, you would suffer them, and suffer them gladly. If that savage demanded that you let all of his men, all forty thousand, and their women, and their horses, and their dogs, fuck you, you should not only agree but smile as you do so."
She flinches away as he reaches up, his fingers brushing the hair out of her eyes. "But you have a lesser indignity to suffer, Will. After all, you were born to be a queen. And so you shall be."
He leans in, presses a feather light kiss to her brow.
"Queen of the savages."
.
That night, Will stands on her balcony, stares at the black rolling water of the sea.
Thinks about jumping into it.
Thoughts of a throne of iron swords keep her feet planted on the floor, her hands clenched around the balustrade. The season's first snow appears in flurries, invisible in the dark until they come to cling on her hair and skin.
She doesn't notice.
She doesn't know what time it is when she finally turns and goes to her bed, or even what makes her do so. She slides under a blanket stiffened by the cold and stares at the ceiling as warmth slowly accumulates around her.
She doesn't expect to sleep that night, but the air is so frigid it magnifies the effect of the warmth, lulling her off and off until the dark of the room turns into the dark of her mind. It's something much blacker, much deeper.
She dreams of a stag, huge and horrible and covered in a raven's feathers.
.
.
Author's Note: So I first posted this on archiveofourown back at the beginning of the year and I've been wanting to put it up here too but I'm a lazy bitch.
I now have a much better grasp on the Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones universe than I did when I wrote this, so some of the finer details are a bit skewed. Beyond that, however, it's become a pretty much straight fusion of Hannibal characters in the GoT setting.
I genderbent Will because while I could've made this A/B/O Verse (and I do love abo verse), I was already overwhelmed with my GoT ignorance and I really wasn't confident enough to add that to it, too.
This was a fill for my own prompt on the Hannibal kink meme, which went:
"I really hope this hasn't been requested yet-I did see one GOT AU but not this particular prompt.
So, I want the Dany/Drogo scenario: Young, introverted, virgin Will's jerkass relative/guardian (Jack? Chilton? idk) marries him off to Hannibal, the leader of a tribe of seriously hardcore cannibals as part of a political alliance.
+128947083745 if Will gets pregnant (it can be A/B/O verse or even fem!Will) and has to eat a human heart raw to make the baby strong/prove his worth to the tribe
+my various fresh organs if Hannibal starts manipulating Will out of his shell and together they deliver a painful end to the asshole relative
And if you could throw in a happy ending, I'd love you forever, as I'm a sucker for them."
-Anna