CHAPTER SEVEN: SUGAR QUILLS: PART TWO
"Do you dream, Will?"
The husky voice, gilt with slumber, drifted in from the passenger side of Will Graham's little car. In the tiny cab, it stirred the air warmer than his chugging air conditioning system that rattled every time he turned the left signal on. Hemlock Potter was like that, though, Will thought. Hot and burning, she filled spaces. Slight, large, cramped and wide, she ostensibly shed her flesh and scattered out like sun streams, filling all niches and cleft's with her glistening presence.
But not that night. Not in that little cab. There was something… Different about her. Cooler. Sharper. There was no glimmer of sunlight leaking out of her, but moon-rays. Hemlock was sitting beside him, buckled into the passenger seat, and yet, she appeared so very far away. Will thought, as the waning sun sank and the looming moon was beginning its climb, it could have been twilight itself that made it feel that way. Night seemed to do that.
Isolate and segregate.
Or, Will supposed, as he shook his head from his rambling, incoherent thoughts, it could have been the eight hour drive it was taking to push back to Baltimore that was playing with Will's sense of space and light. Nothing made someone more poetic, more digressive and pretentious, than lack of sleep, the last of their Advil dissolving in their gut, and three espressos.
Take Will's word for gospel on that one.
However, there was certainly something shifted with Hemlock. In her hands was a single rose, one stolen from the welcoming desk of the hotel they had been staying at while they were trying to sort the Hobbs cabin. Prior to Dante's seventh circle of hell breaking loose and ending with a dead Boyle, an injured reporter and Hannibal, Abigail, Alana and Hemlock in the back of ambulances, wrapped like monks in thin, grey medical blankets, that is. He had watched her nab it as they left for their long journey home. Just one. Something to fiddle with. Hemlock didn't do well sitting still for long patches of time.
He watched as she plucked a petal free, balanced it on the very tip of her forefinger, inspected it closely with those bright eyes of hers, side to side, as if, hidden in the crimson tissue, there be the answers to all her silent questions. Leisurely, she would raise her hand up to her car door window, open just a crack, as the wind sucked the petal out and down the darkening highway.
Perhaps it was not answers the petals held, but secrets. Again and again, petal after petal faded into the distance like the vanishing sun being consumed by the horizon. The dying sun-rays slopping the petals black in the growing dimness outside. Will thought, with those little black petals, scraps of his sanity were being sucked away too.
Maybe, just maybe, something hadn't shifted in Hemlock… But in him.
Why? Because there was just that dying light between them in that small cab now, and one long, pale leg propped up straight on the dash, bandage already looking like it needed to be changed, and all he could fucking think about was moonlight. There was a billion other things to consider. A million more problems to resolve. A thousand and one questions to answer. Yet, here Will Graham sat, wondering exactly when and how, and if anybody else could see, Hemlock had moonbeams gushing beyond her skin, in the very core of her. Where, he supposed further, a more devout man might think a soul would rest.
Don't get Will wrong. It might seem like a pretty metaphor, to say someone was made of moonbeams, but he meant it in no such way. It might seem, under certain angles, romantic or mawkish, or an ode to their beauty written by a preschooler. But Will was not romantic, not in the traditional sense, as Hemlock was not beautiful in the conventional way.
Alana was beautiful, as foxes and robins were. Abigail was beautiful in they way of fresh spring and deer's creeping through forests. Hemlock Potter was not beautiful. No one, he thought, would ever say she was. Beautiful… Beautiful seemed far too much of a passive and docile word to ever fit someone like Hemlock Potter, with her pressing presence that was always ten times her size. No. You didn't call a jaguar beautiful, you called it haunting. There was a fear, ingrained, to be found in that sort of beauty. There was the same fear to be found in Hemlock's too sharp features, moonbeam skin, and piercing, slanting grin.
A well-earned fear.
Contrarily, right then and there, Hemlock still in her pajamas from this morning, a pair of baggy shorts and a t-shirt, the only loose clothing she had packed for their ill-conceived and thought short journey, her small bag packed away in the trunk, and in the backseat, crisscrossed like a pair of fencing swords, a pair of new crutches, Minnesota hospital stickers still affixed to the rubber stoppers, bandaged and bleeding and bruised, there should have been nothing remotely like fear to taste in the air.
Yet, Will nearly choked on it.
Hemlock would need those crutches for the next fortnight, perhaps two. The wound on her leg too severe to walk unaided, should she tear the stitches and permanently damage the muscle. The gash to her head was bruised now, purple and blue and sickly green. More bruises cluttered her cheekbone, down her arm, constellations mapping, from where she crashed into the table. The baggy clothes made her seem small, so very fucking small. There was nothing to fear, and yet, there was everything to fear.
Will had not been there.
Will had done nothing.
Will had been sleeping.
He had been asleep while Alana, one of his oldest friends, got knocked out. While Hannibal was tossed into a table, head bashed in with a vase, injured, dazed. While Abigail had been hunted around her own house, yet again, screaming and fleeing and sobbing. While Hemlock had been bleeding out, stabbed, broken on the floor…
Will had not been there, Hemlock and Hannibal had paid the price, and it terrified him.
No. He didn't think sleep would come easy to him again for some time. Then again, it never had, had it? Will Graham and sleep had never been friends. Some days, he would even call them enemies. Nevertheless, now, anew, there would be new scenes and images to haunt him in the sun set hours. A house in the woods filled with Garret Jacob Hobbs's dead gaze, vase shards in sandy, blood clotted hair, and a long, pale, bleeding leg.
But, he reminded himself, they were alive. Alive, breathing, and, relatively speaking, in one piece. Hannibal himself was currently five cars ahead of him on the interstate, carrying a concussed Alana and a still jittery Abigail. Alana had originally wanted to go with Hemlock and Will, for obvious reasons, but Hannibal had subtly pulled her to the side, hinted that Hemlock might need space away, she didn't do well with crowding after all, and reluctantly, with a kiss to the bruised cheek and demand for Will to call her should Hemlock need her, the younger doctor had acquiesced.
So here they were, Hemlock and him, the girl made from moonbeams and the man with nightmares for lullabies, in a cab paradoxically too big and too small, and one tauntingly long, pale leg glimmering in the dusk. Will pretended he wasn't watching her from the corner of his eye. He pretended he didn't see her blow another petal away, this one needing a little bit of a helping hand. He pretended he didn't notice how his throat constricted, tight, as her lips puckered. He pretended his hands didn't flex on the steering wheel, leather creaking.
Will was getting good at pretending now, because, he told himself, it was guilt over the bandage swathed around her leg that caused this plummeting feeling in the pit of his stomach. Nothing more. And if, as he spoke next, his voice was just a bit rougher around the edges, sand roiling in the tide, it was remorse, for not being there to help her… Help them, lurking in his voice. Nothing else.
Nothing else.
"I do, yes. I believe most people dream, Hemlock."
Hemlock stared down at the half mangled rose in her hand, spinning the stem between her nimble fingers. Around and around it went, and oddly, Will had some sympathy for that tattered, tumbling rose. Another petal gone. Another shred of sanity.
Whatever was affecting him, lack of sleep, the thought he could have lost so many people yesterday, when he had so little in his life already, Hemlocks ceaseless but mindless plucking and blowing, she, herself, did not seem so inflicted. In fact, she seemed remote. Adrift almost. She the petal being caught in the wind, and he the frayed rose left behind, away but… Peaceful. The most peaceful, Will thought, he had ever seen the usually chaotic woman-… Girl, she was only seventeen, since he had met her.
"I dream in pulses. Flickers and bursts. Like one of those old camera's, but the flash doesn't work. Undulating. It's… Bittersweet. To dream like that. I can never hold onto it, no matter how hard I bloody try to. It's there one moment, so vivid, but with a blink, before I can fully take it in, it's always gone. A firework of colour and feeling and beauty… Gone in a wink. I would like to dream like others say they do, I think."
Will glanced over to her fully, saw her face lifted up to the window, temple resting on glass, rose now laying limp in her lap, and he was inexplicably and irreversibly struck with moonlight. Not comet dust or shooting stars. There was no cracked crystal or dangling spectres. That was what was different this day. Hemlock didn't seem so… Volatile. Frenzied. She wasn't hurtling through space, chasing and crashing, but hanging high. Floating. Fixed. Larger than ever before.
Moonlight, sweet and soothing and singular.
They used to believe insanity was caused by the moon and it's different phases. Will had half a mind to agree with them right then, because, suddenly, he's talking. He's talking and he doesn't know why. He has an overpowering sense that he shouldn't be saying a word of it. Something is squirming hot in his gut. But he does. He talks. Worse, as perverse as this too-big-too-small cab, he doesn't want to take a single word of it back.
"Well, whenever you miss dreams, simply ask and I'll share mine. I can't promise they will be interesting. I mostly dream of my dogs and fishing, but… But you can have them."
Suddenly, she's looking at him with those bright eyes. Suddenly, she's smiling. Suddenly, it's all so very bright and blinding. Suddenly. The best things in life, Will knew, were those that came suddenly. Yet, he forcibly reminded himself, so did the worse. Abrupt things were double edged swords. A bit like Hemlock, in truth. A tad more like himself too. You couldn't control sudden things. There was a merited dread to be found there too, in the sudden. The sudden, jaguars, moonbeams and Hemlock, where fear prowled in intuition.
"Really?"
And still, Will found himself nodding along, tearing his gaze away from Hemlock, back to the road, back to where things made sense and weren't so bright or blinding. Sleep. He needed sleep. Or whisky and Winston.
"Really."
The air swung. It was the only way Will could describe it. There was a heaviness to it, weighty like marble, rigid and tense, and like the marble's veins of gold that splintered like spiderwebs in gritty attics, the long space between them too fractured with candour.
"Will… Can I ask you another question?"
Will chuckled, feeling better at being on known ground, away from his scrambled mind, distanced from moonlight, jaguars and sudden things. Hemlock, he knew, would ask whether he said yes or no. Perhaps, he thought with another shake of his head lightened by his still echoing chuckle, she would be more likely to ask if he did say no. She did that, Will noticed. Provoked uncomfortable hard questions just to make it awkward and tricky for a kick. For someone who suffered from social anxiety, it was nice to have someone around who purposefully set out to make things clumsy from the get-go, just because they found it funny.
It took some of the heat of him when he did it by mistake.
Hemlock, Will knew, saw that too. Perhaps that is why she did it. Perhaps not. You could never tell with Hemlock.
"I'll try my best."
She licked her lips in a fast sweep of pink tongue, he could see from the corner of his eye, but her own gaze never trailed away from her dark window. She was watching something. Intensely. She didn't make him wait long to understand precisely what that, or should he say who, that was.
"Do you trust doctor Lecter?"
Will blinked and frowned from behind his thick rimmed glasses. He darted a glance to the half-hidden car pulling even further ahead five cars in front. The lorry passing them would completely cut off doctor Lecter's car from sight soon.
"I-… Yes? As much as I trust any psychologist whose job is to dig around my head, I suppose. So, perhaps, not very much."
She didn't laugh at his poor joke, and it translated his ensuing snicker out of place and in bad taste, like glee at a funeral. Hemlock merely sat there, staring, watching, pin-pricked pupil, even as the lorry hauled in front, as if she could see through the metal and rubber right to Hannibal's skull. There was a ripple to her taut, angled cheek, teeth working at supple flesh.
"Hemlock? Did he… Did Lecter say something? Do something that made you… Uneasy?"
The question sipped like battery acid. Blistering and artificial. Will didn't think Lecter would do anything, say anything… But, Will was not blind. Of course he had seen how close the two had become. Effortless smiles and easier words from a typically belligerent and explosive Hemlock. The relaxed touches to shoulders. More crucially, the way Hemlock let Lecter place a hand on her shoulder without shirking it off.
The way Hannibal watched her.
In reality, it was the sole peek into the guarded doctor's mind Will had come across so far. Those moments when he watched Hemlock. When he thought no one was watching him. But Will watched. Will saw. Lecter was interested, and Will used that word lightly, for it was the only word vaguely comparable to the curiosity he saw skulking in the doctor's eyes when he watched Hemlock in those few seconds he let himself.
Yet, that was all it was. Curiosity. Well… Will had thought that was all it was. It was naturally explained away. Lecter was a psychologist, a man who loved to know how minds worked. Hemlock was a sauntering, chattering incongruity. Curiosity was a naturally by-product of those two opposing forces clashing. But what if it, that flashing glint, as quick as lightning, in Lecter's eye, wasn't just curiosity? What if that vaguely comparable word wasn't all the more so loosely fitting? What if there was more?
Rapidly, something sparked in Will's chest. Anger, he thought. Excitement, he hoped not. No, absolutely not. It wasn't. His fingers tingled on the steering wheel, his foot pressed down a little harder on the gas pedal, and there, growing in the too-big-too-small space between them was a blackened beast Will didn't want to confront. Didn't want to see. Didn't want to acknowledge its existence.
It's anger he feels. Nothing more.
"No. Nothing like that. Just…"
It took Will a decent few seconds to realise it wasn't himself speaking in that rebuttal tone, but Hemlock. It took him much longer to comprehend she was now gazing at him. Dead on. Pupils still thin and alert. For an absurd instant, Will thought she might be reflecting again. Reading him, all those shadowy slight creatures running rampant in his fissured mind, and replying, in his own voice, to his innermost struggles he outrightly rejected were even there.
Nonetheless, she was not.
"There's something not right with Hannibal Lecter."
For it looked like she was battling her own internal skirmishes. Funny, in a way that was not funny at all, really, how they both, his and hers little beasts, seemed to wear the doctor's face. Will didn't know what that meant. He doubted he wanted to right now. He didn't think Hemlock did either. Yet, she was struggling with something. He could hear it in the hushed rush of her words, as if it was all spilling out before she could catch it back into the teacup it had fled from.
"What do you mean?"
The silence that came linked them in a way words never could. There was no expectancy, limitation or captivity in silence as there was with words. It was boundless, infinite, free, like moonbeams, and it was there Will thought he understood Hemlock better than he ever had or would again. Hemlock Potter was precisely like silence and moonbeams.
When described, when confined to something so mundane and common like words, you missed something, dropped more, and what you got from the string of garbled words was something lesser than Hemlock herself. And when Hemlock was whittled down, contorted to this lesser state, so were her thoughts and feeling and maybe, just maybe, that was why she was so irritated all the time. Why she was so antagonistic. Why she was unpredictable.
No one could understand her language that had no words.
If Will was in her shoes… He would be angry too.
Unfortunately for them both, words were necessary and essential to everyone else, himself included. So, she talked, rushing, flowing, pouring, her tiny teacup barren, and, as Will had found, it was vital to hear what she didn't say, what she couldn't find the words for, to see the leaf stains at the bottom of her cup, what she found precious enough to keep to the silence.
"Lecter's smart. Exceedingly so. More so then he lets on, I think. He knows exactly what to say, how to say it, and when to say it. There's never a wrong word, or a misspoken moment with him. Everything's… Measured. Precise. He's seemingly there, right when and where he needs to be, just when you need him most. Nothing seems to unsettle him. Nothing at all. No matter how much or how hard I try to ruffle his feathers, no matter what I throw at his fucking head, he doesn't even stumble. He's observant. I don't think anything goes under his radar. He's eloquent and charming. Witty. He's-"
Will heeded that silence, to the words Hemlock wouldn't, or couldn't, say, and Will cut her off, grinning.
"It sounds like his only crime, Hemlock, is that you like him."
She didn't grin back. Will had not expected her too. As Hemlock got a kick out of unseating people, unbalancing things and putting them all on edges and cliffs to somersault off, Will got an almost sick sort of delight from showing Hemlock that he could read her just as well as she could read him, that he could understand her silence, those words she would never say, and he wasn't afraid to do what she couldn't. Speak them into existence and make it all the more real.
However, she didn't get annoyed. She didn't get offended. Not like she would have been if Alana, Abigail, Jack or Hannibal had said what he just had. They would have made it all sound more severe than what it was. They would have celebrated, in some small way, at getting a peek at something deeper in Hemlock that she didn't want, or was ready, for them to see. That would have pissed her off. Being shaved down to something to contemplate and puzzle and applaud.
It sure as hell pissed Will off when they did it to him.
But, with Will, she knew he could read her as effortlessly as she did those around them. She knew, and she wagered on it, for him to fill in the blanks she couldn't, as she did for him when it was his turn. So, when Will said it, there was only relaxation, a sort of respite from having someone finally understand.
"And that's the problem, Will. I don't like normal people. I don't get along with normal people. Normal people, Will, don't understand me."
Will cocked a high brow at her. She wouldn't be able to see it, not with his face bowed to the road as it was and night settling about them, but he possessed no doubt she knew that was exactly as his face was. That was the problem with Hemlock, with her gift of charting behaviors as if they were turbulent seas she was sailing. She knew what you were going to do a whole act before you, yourself, had decided to do it. Possibly that was why she was bored all the time. Nothing came as a surprise. God knew that would bore Will stiff too.
"What about me? I thought we got along?"
There was a smoldering twisted knot in his gullet that makes the words hard to form, and harder to get out. There's a lump in his throat, and Will won't dissect why it was there to begin with. Perhaps that makes him a hypocrite. He doesn't care. It's there, and as he had become so good at doing, he pretended it wasn't. Yet, Hemlock likely knew it was there. She probably got a kick out of it, as she did most all other involuntary reactions she can tussle out of people, because an involuntary reaction is a behaviour she couldn't see coming.
For a flicker, just one, Will Graham hated Hemlock. He hated the way she could see him. All of him. He hated the way she could understand him like no one else could. He hated the way they, him and her, her and him, didn't need words. He hated the way it was easy. Too easy. Most of all, he hated the way he didn't hate any of it at all. Not really. And, that too, scared him. A lot of things terrified him lately, and most had Hemlock's moonbeams disfiguring their expressions.
Because it was all so entirely out of his control.
"You're different. You don't count like everybody else."
Hemlock said it dismissively, punctuated with a cavalier flap of her thin boned hand. It wasn't a taunt. It wasn't an observation. It wasn't even a question. Fact. Just fact. You're Will. I'm Hemlock. The sun rises. The sun sets. You don't count like everybody else. Another man might take that as an insult. Another man might ask why they didn't count as everybody else did. Another man might shy away from such a resolute box being placed over their head.
Will Graham wasn't another man.
Will soaked it in, deep within, and let it thaw him from the inside out. Unlike when other people pointed out his difference, made highlight of it in an almost mocking 'you're not like the rest of us' manner, he felt no sting or bite to Hemlock's affirmation. There was no malice to be found there, hiding in her silence. It felt strange, so very fucking strange, to be called different, something he had been fighting against his entire life, and, for once, to feel good about it.
"Well, perhaps Hannibal is different too."
Hemlock flopped back into her seat, head lolling on the neck rest, she was so short, and those vigilant, vivid eyes of hers hooded themselves underneath a harsh scowl. Will didn't like that frown. Will wanted it gone. Will was beginning to think he really was insane, and if he was, Hemlock was either the cause, or just as fucking barmy as himself.
"I don't know whether that makes me more concerned, or if I, alarmingly, like that prospect more."
The congestion on the road was dropping, and Will found reprieve in the distraction driving offered him. Soon, they would be stopping at a service station, within the next half-hour he would guess, to fill up on gas. They would likely meet Hannibal, Abigail and Alana there. Maybe he could finally catch his breath in the dingy toilet, pop another Advil, and for the first time since his mad dash to the Hobbs residence, in this very same car, thinking Hannibal and Hemlock were dead, or dying, he would be able to get his thoughts in order.
"It's the latter. You have an instinctive need to seek thrills. I'd be careful with that trait if I was you. It doesn't lead to happy places."
And didn't he fucking know it. Look at his job, look at the muddle of his life, look upon all this enmeshed bed of weeds and marvel. Oh, he could lie, he believed. He could say he had to do what he did. There was no other job for him. Not in this life. He could cry Crawford harassed him into it, coming back, doing what he did, chipping off pieces of himself with each new killer, and slowly, so painfully slow, losing his mind each day. Garret Jacob Hobbs. The Copycat. The Veiled Rider. He was being pulled in five hundred different directions and somehow, someway, all roads, like Rome, lead back to the girl with moonbeams for blood. Will couldn't make sense of it.
Yet, Will Graham was a poor liar.
Deep down, graver and more visceral than anything else, Will knew some small part of him, his budding beast, all his own, enjoyed all this. He liked breaking. He was changing, he knew. To what? He didn't understand. Not yet. Perhaps he had been changing for a while now.
"Hannibal told me happiness is subjective. Maybe what you find disturbing, I would find delightful."
Will chuckled, and shoved and stomped down all those horrid thoughts. Still, he did find himself switching lanes, over to the faster one.
"Yeah, he would. To Hannibal Lecter, everything is subjective. It's part and parcel of being a psychologist."
Hemlock shrugged, back to gazing out the blackened window. In the blur of traffic and dying light, her reflection shimmered red and blue and black and white and red again. It made Will feel a bit nauseous, as with it, he spotted that fiery halo once more, heard the clomping of incensed hooves, and Hemlock, the girl hewn from moonbeams, was sitting beside him, but her reflection was not her own. Glowering back from dull glass, smirking right at him, pulsing in crimson flashes, Will could see the Veiled Rider engulfed in flames.
I see you; can you see me too?
He jerked, the car veered an inch, just an inch, but with a blink, the image was gone and Hemlock was frowning at him. He righted the car quickly enough, and thankfully, whatever Hemlock thought had caused his sudden startle was overlooked as she, too politely perhaps, adamantly stuck to the topic at hand.
"I don't think that fits Alana. She's rather… Inflexible in her world view. Everything and everyone has a place and a time. She has strong moral convictions. Oh, she's good at keeping quiet on those pesky morals she has, especially with patients, but that doesn't mean she doesn't have them and doesn't try to, as good as her intentions might be, push her patients to those very same morals. Trouble is… Everyone to Alana is a patient."
Will breathed gently. Purposefully. He shouldn't be seeing that, the Rider, here. Not here. Never here. Not so close to Hemlock. Maybe he was tired. Maybe he was worried. Hemlock had killed, had she not? She had killed Tom Riddle. Perhaps that would draw the Rider's eye. Perhaps she could be a target. Perhaps it had been a long, torturous weekend and he was just fucking tired.
"Even us?"
Hemlock laughed richly, head thrown back on the seat, loudly. Uninhibited. Will liked that about Hemlock Potter, he would admit. When she did something, anything at all, it was with everything she had, and she was never ostensibly concerned it might be construed the wrong way. Rightly, she didn't seem to care about being perceived at all. She was as she was. Will, that same small part of him that relished things it never should love, wished he too could be that way.
"Especially us."
Will's voice turned soft.
"Your aunt means well."
Will knew that personally too. It seemed he knew a lot of things that night, and none of them the key answers. He knew how damaging, especially to ones ego and sense of self, Alana's need to be a doctor to everyone around her could be. Hemlock didn't need a doctor. That's where Hannibal had gotten it right. Hemlock would fight a doctor. She would bite and claw and scratch, and you would never get an inch close to her. Not the real her. She needed people to listen to her silence. She needed people to understand and not doubt. Hemlock needed friends. She needed intimacy without motive.
Just like Will.
"I know. Poor bugger. Good intentions pave the road to hell. Someone should really tell her."
They sit there then. They sit there in silence, in intimacy without intention, and they simply… Be. With Hemlock, the silence isn't a deafening siren of his social inadequacies, it's not Hemlock trying to secure herself in its alleged safety, it's a moment where they can just be, and it doesn't hurt, it doesn't itch, there's no need to fill it mindlessly. It's more beautiful than Will can articulate. It's wonderful. Too wonderful to last.
"You can trust doctor Lecter."
Once more, he didn't know why he said it, but he did, and he meant it. He didn't understand it, but he meant it, and that, if you have ever had an instant just like that, then you would know how very perplexed and stunned it can leave you. Confusion that Hemlock emulated, swelling his way as her eye slipped back to him. He can almost feel the plethora of questions she was etching onto his skin.
"He… I really do think he only has what he believes best for you at heart. You can see it when he looks at you… I see it when he looks at you."
The admission makes him uneasy. Prickly. Disjointed. He felt as if he was sealing immense iron gates around himself, locking the padlock, throwing away the key. Secluded and alone. Outside. Always outside looking in. Hemlock, as she always did, span the tables on him in a massive toss and, as he had done to her, used the words he couldn't say, wouldn't say, his silence, against him.
"He's your friend too, Will. We both are. You know that, right? We're like… Like Taco Bell on a Tuesday."
Will spluttered.
"Taco Bell?"
Hemlock smiled at him, dimples and all.
"A trio of double stuffed Taco's for the price of one on Tuesday. You buy one, you get the other two free, whether you want them or not."
Will… Will howled, laughing as freely as Hemlock did. It felt good. So good.
"You-… That's a terrible allegory Hemlock. Terrible. Are you sure you're thinking of us, or are you just hungry?"
Hemlock shrugged in her over-sized shirt, there was a flash of pale shoulder from fallen collar, and her smile never diminished.
"Can't I be both? And as your dearest, most daring, most loyal friend, I have a favour to ask of you."
The lump in his throat was back, burning, and there was a swift tension to his abdomen. Will didn't think Hemlock meant that the way it sounded, saying she felt hungry when she thought of him, of Hannibal. But Will did. Will thought of it. He thought of it and he despised himself.
"Oh? And what is that?"
He finally succeeded in asking. No. His voice wasn't craggy. No. His stomach didn't squirm. No. there was no hitch to his heartbeat. Will had been wrong before.
He was a good liar.
"I want to meet your dogs."
Was Hemlock's great favour. Nevertheless, promptly, she was diverting course again, shaking her head, loose curls stirring the air until Will thought he could taste her on his lips. Huh, who knew? Moon-dust and madness tasted like lemon sherbet.
"Actually, no! I want a calm night in. I want to cook a meal, burn some trout, because I'm a real fucking bad cook, so we have to order take in. I want to force Hannibal to drink that horrid cheap wine, you know the one? The one that comes in bloody boxes with a shitty plastic tap? Yeah, I want to serve that and see his face. We'll play horrendous seventies rock music, so by the end of the night everyone has a migraine. You can bring your dogs around, and Alana will complain Winston's ate her pricey Louis Vuitton shoes. We won't tell her I'd used them to play fetch with him. I'll laugh at all the misery. Hannibal will look around him at this poor, tasteless party in despair. You can feign moping in the corner, pretending you don't find it all as funny as I do. And, for one night, just one, we can all pretend this had been the worse night of our lives. I'm not dead, shot, stabbed or bleeding out. Hannibal isn't… Doing whatever the fuck it is Hannibal does. And you, kind sir, can imagine you're not seconds away from a mental breakdown, and a padded cell with your name scribbled in crayon on the door."
Hemlock chuckled and Will, very much again out of his control, found himself laughing too. It did that, Hemlock's laughter. Every time he heard it, anytime anyone heard it he thought, it brightened the light, lifted night from day, and made the world fairer.
"How can I possibly say no to that?"
Hemlock nodded sharply, a whiff of delight still prancing in her voice. Up. Down. Done.
"Good. A week a Wednesday it is. Five o'clock. I'll let the good doctor know."
It might have been her mirth, so aglow and cheerful. It might have been the way the stars were coming out in the murky sky. It might have been Will, whenever he had something good, even if it was just a moment of merriment and lull, he had to ruin it because he felt as if he didn't spoil it, something crueler would. It could have been observing the smile on Hemlock's face, he was belted with guilt again, guilt as his eyes dropped to the bandage with a spot of blood blooming on its white fold.
Nonetheless, that little bubble they were in, full of Taco Bell and bad dinner parties and ways to drive Hannibal up the wall, popped as Will became deadly serious. This was why he couldn't have nice things. He only ever wrecked them.
"Hemlock… I'm sorry about your leg. I'm sorry-… You shouldn't have been hurt. I should have been there and-… I'm sorry. You're my-… and I-"
She blinked, and winked, and twinkled at him. Will realised, with more satisfaction then he ever should have, particularly right now, that she was surprised. Will had surprised her.
"That's-… That's the first time someone has ever said their sorry I'm hurt. I-… I… Pull over."
Abruptly, she was stretching over him, hands on the wheel, hair in his face, so close he could feel the heat of her, the kiln, and she spun the car, steeply, right on into the hard shoulder of the interstate. The car behind them honked obnoxiously, they barely missed a full-on collision, and Will slogged his foot down hard on the break, just as the bumper of his car cleared the lane and rolled into the hard shoulder.
Will's mouth set off, his breath was coming quick, adrenaline punting fiercely in his blood, and he thought he might have been asking her what the hell she thought she was doing, what was wrong, what the fuck was happening, but she pleated back into her side of the too-big-too-small cab and she was looking at him, eye to eye, with those damned eyes of hers and he lost it all.
There was an honesty to her face, shining from the slopes and lines of her skin that was equal parts ruthless as it was helpless.
"I'm not a good person, Will."
Will blundered, but Hemlock wasn't finished.
"I'm not a good person, but you are. You care more than anyone else I've ever known. And it's real care. Real sympathy. Real empathy. Not for show. Not because you think people are watching, or doing it because that's what society says you should. Everything about you is so awfully real. So real it hurts to be around you sometimes. You care and you are a good person."
Her pitch plunged and that slight sliver of control Will still had shattered on the floor between them with it. She was no longer rushing, no longer flowing. Instead, she leaked and oozed, like the wound on her thigh. Unwittingly. She, Will thought, might have just been as out of self-control that night as he was.
"This is the most honest I'll ever be, Will. I'm not a good person. Maybe I was once, but I-… She seems like someone so very far away. Too far for me to reach and I don't think I want to either. I'm not sorry about it. She-… She was weak. She's dead. I haven't been that person for a long time. I know that now, and I won't go back."
Will saw himself as a young boy, buried beneath his blankets, shivering, hiding from the hallucinations and visions he didn't at the time understand was caused by his empathy. He saw himself with his father, on the shipyard, tying ropes and lifting masts, another classmate's birthday with no invite passing by because, really, who wanted to invite Whacky Will? He saw the same gangly, gawky boy who stopped trying to integrate.
Change was old. It had profound roots. Greater than anyone ever gave it credit for. Will could answer that he had begun to change after he had killed Garrett Jacob Hobbs, and that would be easy. It was definitive. Recent. A clear point in time Will could look back to, point at, and blame when the mood struck. Yet, change was never so clear cut. It was laborious, methodical, with no one fixed point in time.
The truth was, that first seed of change, the one that had led him here, right now, with demons in his head, ghost in his eyes and nightmares for pals, likely got into him young, right underneath those very same blankets that had offered him relief so long ago, with a father who didn't know what to do with a kid who saw things that no one else could.
Will could never go back to being that boy. He didn't even know if he could go back to being the man he was only a month ago. Time and change moved everybody, some more than others, and there was no reversal, no kill switch, and no hopping off the ride. It hit him then. It hit him hard. The fallacy of faces and age.
Hemlock was not just a seventeen-year-old girl. She'd lived more, through more, done more, than men and women three times her age. Ironically, she'd not lived at all, really. She hadn't been a girl for as long as he had not been that boy in blankets. People like them, him and her, they didn't get the luxury of naivety and purity for long. Like the petals of her disfigured rose, the wind snatched those from them unforgivingly. You could fight it, that wind, but it was as pointless as fighting change or time. The best bet was to buckle up and enjoy what little you could in the short time you had it before, anew, time and change stole that from you too.
"So, listen to me and listen hard. I am not a good person. You are. And that is why you need to know that. You and Hannibal… You're my only friends. You both need to know I'm not a good person."
Will tried to break in.
"Hemlock-…"
But Hemlock wasn't having none of it.
"I'm angry all the time. I'm arrogant when I shouldn't be. Petty, unstable and fickle. I lie, deceive and plot just because I can. You know that. I know you do. I know you see it; you just haven't connected the dots yet. But you will. You will. And when you do, it'll break some part of you. Even then, I doubt I'll be sorry. I can't stop myself. You know why? Because I know exactly what and who I am, Will, and it isn't pretty, and first and foremost, I'm selfish. So very fucking selfish. What's mine is mine. Do you understand? Mine. I'm giving you an out here, Will. You're a good person, you deserve that at least, and, I'm afraid, that's all I can give. So…"
She took a moment to wiggle in her seat, leg folding down to the floor, blood on the seat, sitting tall, proud. Yet, Will saw it all the same. The reluctance in far corner of her eye, as if she really didn't want to be saying or doing what she was. But she would. For him.
"Knowing that, knowing I'm not a good person, that I won't ever be one, knowing how selfish and greedy I can be, you have two options. Turn back around, take your foot of the break, say no more, and drive. Just drive. I won't say or do anything more. I won't hold anything against you. In fact, I'm asking-… Pleading for you to do it. Just drive. We can still work together. I'll laugh and joke and… Everything will be fine. Everything will be as it was before this fucking weekend. So, drive."
Turn back. Don't come closer. I'll break you. I just can't help myself, so help me help you, and turn away for the both of us. I'll ruin you. I won't mean to, but I will. I beg you, turn away. It was all there, swinging in the silence like stars, all the things she would never say but told all the same, and again, the lines blurred between who was really speaking. Him or her.
Yet, she was wrong. She wasn't a bad person. Will thought he could never believe she was. She said she was selfish, and perhaps she was, but not here, not now. She wouldn't be doing this, saying all this, believe she had to give Will and escape from herself, if she was selfish. Drive and don't look back…
But he can't.
He doesn't want to.
The grief and fear when he thought she had been stabbed and killed, when he thought Hannibal was gone too… There was no running from that sort of pain, pretending you didn't know why you felt it, why it was there, why it was eating you a-fucking-live. Will held onto that pain then. He held on close and he savored it. He imagined what if that had been true. He imaged being in the world alone, where he had not met Hemlock. Someone so like him, but so different. Two phases of the same moon. He can't do it. He can't.
He's selfish too.
"And the other option?"
It's wrong. He knows that. It's so wrong. There was numerous, countless things wrong with wanting what he wanted, and even more he had not contemplated yet. Alana. His own growing darkness. His thrill at killing and delusions. Will was broken. Broken in a vicious, spiteful way. He tainted everything around him. Wrecked it. Hemlock, moonbeam Hemlock, didn't deserve that. She didn't deserve a damaged, destroyed man like Will Graham.
But he wants it. He wants it badly, and he was moving, closer, nearer, gravitating, dragged in.
"I've been alone my whole life and I don't want to be alone anymore. I want… I want it all, Will. I want to live. The good and the bad. The beautiful and the ugly. I want everything. And I want you. That's all I know. I want it all. Everything you have. Everything you are. Everything you could be."
Her voice cracked.
"I told you I was selfish."
He was close now. So close. He wasn't in control. Maybe he never had been. Control was an illusion. Will lived in fantasies and delusions. His hand lifted, palm slipped to cheek, warm, warm skin, too warm, it burned him, branded him. He couldn't help himself. He wanted more. Fingers dipped into the tangled heap of curls, black against his scarred, calloused hand, and those bright, bright eyes are on him, and the pupils are blown wide, and suddenly, he's sinking and flying. He shouldn't. He shouldn't. He shouldn't.
Then he does.
His forehead brushes hers, nose skimming nose, the space between them still too large. Far too small. He doesn't know whether he's breathing or not. He doesn't care.
"We can both be selfish then."
The space separating them collapsed. Gone. Just like that. The kiss was not like those in movies, pristine and pure and chaste, nor in books or T.V. There's no trumpets sounding in the distance, or fireworks blasting behind eyelid. It's real, and painful, and aching. Their lips are dry from the cold wind, there was an impulsive clash of teeth, the best kind of impulsivity, and passion that ignited in hollowed chests like prayer candles lit in abandoned alters. Pleas of the damned.
There was a hand on his jaw, fingers dancing through stubble, into his hair, over his ear, one tug, two. Breath to breath, heart to heart, beat for beat, an ebb and flow and thrust and drag. Tongue met tongue, something inside sizzled and popped, and suddenly, Will was lifting over to the other side of the small cab, invading her seat, her space, no space, pushing and pulling. A tangle of limbs. Interlocking. Joining. Frantic. Something tore. He heard it. Far off. Close. Maybe it was her t-shirt. Maybe it was his chest. Maybe it was their breath, and-
The thunderous bleeping of his cell phone ringing ripped the two apart. Will sank back into his own seat. He dropped his phone twice before he ultimately managed to pick it up with trembling hands. Hannibal's smooth voice scarcely slashed through the rushing in his ears. Will's voice didn't sound like his own.
"Yes… No..I-… Ugh… Fell behind. We're fine. We-… We fell behind. I'll catch up. Yes. Yes. Gas station on the second turn off. Got it. Meet you there."
He hung up and quickly unparked the car. Sped off. Faster than he should. Slower than his spinning mind. He still hadn't caught his breath. He didn't think he would. Ludicrously, the voice besides him made him jump.
What the fuck was wrong with him?
"You can still turn back. Last chance, Will."
Will glanced to Hemlock in the dusk. He was snared. Red lips. Swollen. Messy hair. Bright eyes. Moonlight for skin. Bruised. Small. Alone in the world. But not alone. He was there. He wasn't alone anymore, either. Blindly, he reached over, grappled for her hand, and in the dark of the night, their fingers intertwined.
Perhaps it was wrong. Perhaps there was something gravely awful within him. Perhaps he would hate himself later. Perhaps Alana would kill him when she found out. Perhaps he was broken beyond repair. Yet, he couldn't help himself.
He was selfish too.
He smiled at her through the gloom, and squeezed her hand. For her, or for himself… He didn't know.
"You can't get rid of me so easily. Not now."
Thoughts?
NOTES (Ignore if you don't want to read my rambling on this chapter): Chapter ten, after three months, is finally here, and the Disaster Trio, as I've come to call them, are finally back! I know this chapter might seem a bit filler-ish, and I know it's taken a long time coming, and I'm sure I'm testing everyone's patience lol. No murders, no outward plotting, no blood? In a Hannibal fic? Outrageous! However, I was planning to do this chapter later, after certain things take place, but every time I went to post, I was dragged back to here. It just fits better here, I think, and adds a certain dimension for later happenstances that will be fun to play with. So, I've gone with my gut.
I hope everyone liked it. It's taken a long time to get right, and I hope Will and Hemlock are still in character and not so out of place from a three-month break from writing. Don't worry, Hannibal is back in all his glory next chapter, and although he wasn't personally in this one, his influence and presence is still heavy, I think. Hannibal knows what he was doing by putting Hemlock and Will alone in that car, so if you don't like this chapter, don't blame me, blame him lol.
Most importantly about this chapter is I really wanted a moment where Hemlock outrightly matches everything Will gave in his personality profile of hers, unbeknownst to him, of the Rider in chapter eight. She parrots back, nearly word for word, what he said of her. She plucks a rose, petal by petal, as Will said the Rider does to people for entertainment. She warns him. She knows Will will find out, she knows he's too smart not to, it's just a matter of time, and, for once, she wants to be honest with someone, Will, because she likes him and that honesty, as ambiguous as it is, is pretty much all she can give.
At the same time, it's almost a game, as Will said the killer couldn't help themselves from playing. She's testing him. Seeing if he will connect the dots. As Will said, she likes doing things right under peoples noses just to see if they catch her for the fun of it. She can't help herself. This layered approach of generally caring for Will, warning him, wanting what's best for him, and being utterly incapable to help herself from being the way she is and messing with his head, adds a layer to this chapter that I hope lifts it from filler territory. A lot of things done and said here, on both Hemlock and Will's part, come back later, biting them both on the arse.
THANK YOU, NO, REALLY, THANK YOU to all the follows and favourites and, of course, reviews! They all mean so much, and are the life-blood of this fic. I hope, in some way, be it one line or one paragraph, you liked this chapter. If you could, drop a review! They keep the muses from going on strike lol. And, hopefully, I will see you all soon!