bakerstreet | i see trees that are green, red roses too

i see trees that are green, red roses too

soulmate meme ;
▸ post your character ◂
▸ you're now in a universe where destined soul mates exist! ◂
▸ rng for the type of au and for the ~situation~ ◂
▸ tag around ♥ ◂

type of au;

1. tats, your character has a tattoo of the first words the love of their life will say to them
2. familiars, your character has an animal tattoo representing their soul mate on them
3. glow, the first time your character sees their soul mate, their chests glow!
4. world in color, life is literally black and white, until you see your soul mate for the first time
5. choose your own, i'm definitely missing a milly because i'm lazy, pick your own

situation;

1. first meeting, you've never met this person before.
2. childhood mates, you've always known this person -- but on one particular birthday, everything changes.
3. together, you've been in a relationship for awhile now! happily wed or not, you decide.
4. not together, you've known you're soul mates for a long time, and yet have avoided a relationship.
5. choose your own, self explanatory c:

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Will doesn't panic when Rust isn't immediately forth coming. He's a little surprised, because Rust is public about certain aspects but private about others, and the thought of being allowed open access to his home unattended seems strange...

At least until Will's hysterical laughter dies down and his eyes re-track the room. He sees the barren carpet and the counters stretched out spotless from food but flecked with papers and pens, and Will sees a man who doesn't really live in the space he inhabits, just sits on top of it as a place to dump his things. Will has embedded himself into his house, burrowed as far away from people as he can and surrounded by his dogs; this is a different sort of home.

So he's beginning to come to terms with the fact that he's allowed into Rust's house alone, when finally a movement catches the corner of Will's eye. His head jerks up, just in time to see the telegraphed motion of a shapelessly billowing form coming at him. Catching the towel is entirely reflex.

Will blinks down at it in his hands and then begins drying them in the towel. His keys are soaked in his back pocket, everything slick with rain water. Once his hands are dry enough that he doesn't think he'd drop them, Will carefully removes his glasses and begins on them.

"It's been a hell of a night."

Looks like it. Those three words nearly slip past Rust's lips, but instead he stands in the threshold of his living room (bedroom, more or less) and tilts his head a few degrees, reminiscent of a bird on a perch, inspecting something curious.

Whether it's for both of them or himself, it doesn't matter, but Rust's next movements are toward the kitchen, because that's where he's been keeping the whiskey lately.

"And you chose me for counsel," Rust murmurs, softly but not in volume. He seems almost disbelieving. "Must be, then."

The wooden clanking of cabinet doors precedes his return, casual and tired motions animating Rust's form as he steps barefoot from the small but open kitchenette back into the living-bedroom. He doesn't walk toward Will, but into the heart of the room, where there is one chair, his mattress (on top of a boxspring; he's upgraded), and a very modest and small coffee table. Pinched between fingertips are two shallow drinking glasses clutched by their rims, in the other hand, a 750 of Wild Turkey.

"That what got you laughing?" Rust prods, setting the glasses down before sitting on the edge of his bed closest to the chair. The invitation to sit is subtle at best -- the queue to just follow suit -- but becomes a little more apparent when the detective's eyes willingly look up to find Will's. He twists the cap off, security seal recently broken; the bottle has had a glass or two taken from it already.

Chose him for counsel. Rust has a way with words. Will nods to himself, to no one, as he finishes clearing off his glasses enough that he can put them back on and actually see the apartment. Without the fuzzy approximations of objects nearby, he can now tell that the papers scattered around are case notes, victim photos and hand-drawn police sketches and maps and hand-written sprawling ideas.

"No." Will pushes away from the door finally, dropping his head forward so he can hook the towel behind his neck, against the base of his skull. He rubs roughly at his hair, drying it just enough that when he stands back up, it doesn't immediately keep dripping down his forehead. What isn't weighted down with rain now tufts up, curly and wild. Will doesn't bother patting any of it back down yet.

"The bed." He's about to come over, to cross the half-imaginary threshold of kitchen to living room, before remembering his soaked shoes. Rust is barefoot, which is the only reason Will's brain makes any connection. "I mean, uh." He bends down at the waist and knees, crouches to untie the shoes just enough to mash his way out of them, kicking them off right against Rust's counter at the perimeter of the carpet.

"I've got mine here too. In the living room." Wet socks stick oddly to the carpet and to his feet, but Will's already started over for that chair. He lowers himself into it, almost gingerly at first. But Rust's casual air is a welcome breath of relief, helps expand the walls of the room so they don't feel like they could crush him with someone else's awareness and desires and wants.

Will breathes into the space and doesn't feel like proximity is fixing a steel band around his ribs.

By the time Will is approaching, two glasses have been filled halfway with dark amber liquor, and Rust is twisting the cap back onto the bottle. He doesn't sit on his bed with a sideways eye on Will, watching him critically for politeness as he removes his waterlogged shoes -- Rust doesn't give a shit. His sense of ceremony is personal and private and does not extend to those around him. Will could have brought half his dogs into this apartment, for all Rust cares. He can recognize the real intent of disrespect, and Will completely lacks it, in everything he does.

Rust has never been in Will's home, so the shared detail has just enough of his surprise to give him pause, and the hint of a smile in one corner of his lips.

"Our similarities just keep stackin'," he muses, taking a glass for himself. "Which, as you've noted in the past, fails to show for certain whether that's good, or bad."

From just around the bottle standing on the table, Rust can see Will's face quite well, with the single light source in the room being a lit lamp next to his bed, behind him on the farthest corner. Will, on the other hand, may see more a crudely-detailed silhouette, but he will be missing nothing happening on Rust's face. While the light in the kitchen remains on, it feels separate from this space, like a street lamp beyond the striping of cheap vinyl blinds. He takes a sip of whiskey, pauses to swallow, and gazes down into his glass as it hovers just below his chin. "You here to talk about tonight, or are you...tryin' to escape it?"

"Hence the surprised laughing." Chortling? Chuckling? There isn't really a word for laughing that's meant as just a pressure valve release, keeping what contains it from bursting at the seams. Will definitely feels like something bound up too tightly, any moment liable to break its bonds and go do...

What, exactly? Isn't that the question?

Will takes his own unoffered but clearly-dedicated glass of whiskey off the little coffee table. The first swallow burns, the second's only the ghost of a tingle in his mouth but sits like an ember in his stomach. It only takes a third to finish the glass, because if Will's going to be offered alcohol he's got no qualms drinking it every bit as quickly as he'd like to.

He stares ahead, towards one of the three blank living room walls. "Wanted to escape it." There's no social sense of a pull to look at Rust, a continued relief while Will collects what brought him here and looks at it, one hand dragging through his hair.

"Came here because you were the only person I thought of for good advice on doing that. Or giving the fuck up on escaping."

He stares down at the empty glass he's still holding, movements jagged and anxious. The glass rattles in his hand, tremors he hadn't noticed while gripping the steering wheel.

Might as well rip the bandaid off now. "I needed someone who can step outside of society and tell me what they think about Soul Mates."

Will's whiskey is gone quicker than Rust can even consider draining all of his; only one of them is immediately having an existential crisis, clearly. Rust lifts a brow as he watches Will practically shotgun his liquor, not judgemental, but with a gentle air of surprise. With some calculation to his movements, Rust scoots the bottle closer to the other man, glass groaning soft and tiredly against the wood table.

He ran away from something, and right to Rust. It suggests at a couple of things that Will seeks in him, and he wonders which of them are truest here tonight. Is he just a neutral party in his orbit? Or is there some deeper-seeded trust that Will has planted in the garden of their relationship?

Rust is generously silent to give Will the room and air to speak; the whiskey burns on the back of his tongue like cigarette smoke, but instead of being drawn into his lungs, it's siphoned down into his gut. Will takes some time to ready his words, but Rust is patient to a T.

But what Will has on him is the element of surprise, to an almost humorous degree. It has the detective pulling a near double-take at the man, eyes widening from their sleepy droop, planted more firmly on Will's face. It drags a few scarce chuckles out of his chest. "What I think about Soul Mates?" Rust repeats, incredulous, absolutely unable to fight the wince that shimmers across his mouth, pulling his skin back into a cracked smile.

"Shit," he huffs back into his glass, breath fogging the glass as he tilts more whiskey into his mouth. Amusement still shudders through his face as he pinches his mouth shut and gulps the drink down. Rust's bare shoulders roll forward as he rests his elbows on his knees, stretching his arms out in front of him. The amusement seems to quickly dissolve from his face as he stares out past his glass, and to the floor. "I don't think you're gonna like my impression on this subject, very much."

Edited 2016-12-05 22:15 (UTC)

The bottle drags at the table it's on, a scuffed offer that Will only wastes a moment wincing about before he reaches for it. The only reason he pours just a few fingers of whiskey back into his glass is the sense of not wanting to overuse Rust's things. If Will were drinking his own alcohol with Rust present, he'd be in serious risk of draining the bottle, one angrily fearful swallow at a time.

Surprising Rust is always a mutual sensation, and not because Rust bleeds over into Will. It's just not easy to unbalance him in that way, leaving Will always very aware of when it happens. Will's face just pinches into a wordless scoff, sipping at his whiskey only a little slower while Rust talks.

And says his own version of a 'yes'. "Well as it happens, I'm not too fond of my own impression on this subject." There's a moment, a fluttering palpitation of his heart, where the whiskey wants to burn right back up his throat. Nausea clenches his stomach and Will hunches forward, elbows on thighs, folded almost in half in the plastic-coated lawn chair.

"I'm not in the mood for flattering airbrushed stories about Bonded pairs." Will sips at his whiskey, only barely more controlled than he was when he downed his first glass, grip uncertain. "I want someone to be fucking honest about what that sort of shit could mean." Despite the swears, despite the electricity up and down his arms, Will's voice is even.

"That's why I came here."

'Fucking honest.' Well, that's not something people ask Rust for very often. Instinct of interest has him looking for Will's face again, because now he's starting to put things together. Rust knows that Will has worked a case before involving, apparently, Soul Mates -- so this can't be the shock of victims in a case. No, this has got him all rattled.

Rust doesn't take steps outside of thinking within reason, not without more information to work on, but he wonders if he can guess where this is going. He licks his lips, shifting his mouth before it can go completely dry.

"What it could mean," Rust parrots, tone even, before he knocks back the last of his whiskey. There's a soft growl as he exhales on the tail-end of the swallow. "It's a cruel fuckin' joke, played on us by the universe."

Soul Mates. His eyes slide closed even as he grabs for the bottle of Turkey. "Simultaneously teasing you with too much information, and not enough. Okay, here y' go: here's your receipt for a white picket fence and dog in the front yard. You want it so bad? Good fucking luck findin' them 'fore you die."

The venom in Rust's voice is clear, even staining his face as he scowls over at Will when he returns the bottle to the table, his glass freshly refilled. "Or on the flip side of the coin, you've got yourself all tied up in a cosmic shotgun marriage, arranged by some other-worldy parentage that has done fuck-all for you thus far...and you get to spend your whole life wondering which one it's gonna be, how you're gonna reconcile every relationship you ever have, wondering if they're 'marked' same as you...

"T' hell with that, man." Rust clears half his glass with the next gulp.

Will can tell he's in for an avalanche of negativity as soon as Rust repeats what he said. But that's why he came.

Will doesn't want Alana's well-intentioned platitudes or the way she'd look at Will with betrayed suspicion, knowing that he's apparently destined to steal her new lover from her. Will absolutely doesn't want Jack's stony, supportive horror and the way he would bargain against fate with him. And aside from those two...

There's no one else to even consider telling.

There's an element of gratitude, tucked away in there. Even though this conversation is going to hurt, it's the procedure Will sought out willingly, and he finds himself almost desperate for a viewpoint outside of society's norms. He's sick to death of the romance behind Soul Mates and the Marked.

Tonight, in this deluge and feeling like he might drown, Will needs to know if anyone else sees the nightmare he's walked straight into.

He needs to know that he's not crazy.

Will listens to all of it, not looking at anything but carpet until Rust gets really going towards the end. Cosmic shotgun marriage doesn't quiet align with the slow plodding drag of Hannibal towards Will, doesn't encapsulate the way the doctor's lurking has been something Will had apparently misinterpreted this entire time.

But it's a far fucking cry from being told that a Mark should be something celebrated or even respected. Will lets out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding. It clears out his chest enough that the rest of his second glass of whiskey goes down quick and easy. "Or." Will's still sitting far forward on the chair, elbows covered in damp jacket sleeves resting on rain-streaked thighs.

"You end up growing a Mark like a weed, choking you from the inside out. Pushing aspects of yourself to the edges until you worry you're going to burst apart and just be this other person, this other being. And that Mark keeps darkening every day and you know that anyone else looking in would be congratulating you." A terrible smile is coming to Will's face, uneven and toothy, a wincing pain in his eyes.

"Yeah." Will laughs, harsh and quiet, not enough air behind the bitter twist to his mouth. "To hell with that, huh?"

The whiskey sits burning in his belly, heating up through his chest while he stares at the floor.

Rust just watches Will's hair, spiraling tendrils on a head buckling under a neck and set of shoulders made even more rounded by the towel wrapped around them. He swallows against the tickling feelings of ivy arms slithering up out of his chest as the imagery takes him suddenly; that's always been a subtle danger while talking to Will Graham...the hidden traps that Rust feels catch and give way under his footing from time to time.

His eyes darken in a daze, but he blinks back to wakefulness as Will laughs sharply. Instead of continuing to focus on Will, Rust's attention falls into his drink, idle in both of his hands.

"...You're marked," Rust begins, like launching a dart into a circle-stripped board; he knows he's hit the bullseye. What keeps the detective from looking Will dead-on is an unprecedented apprehension that he feels at the thought of seeing what it is Will's feeling right in his eyes. "And you know who you're mated to, I take it..." Must be one son of a bitch, Rust muses internally, but keeps that's locked in for now.

"We're not mated." Will's voice cracks out of him, angry and low. But even just that sentence spends all of his righteousness at once, Will's shoulders and chest bowing back down.

He can't apologize right away. He can't pull together the explanation, too concerned with searching out the correct pieces to share from the shattered scene in front of him.

The trust that Rust will still be there by the time he's ready to talk is a low instinct, one that Will can't fully believe in yet but that he finds himself relying on. He steals a glance at the other man bowed on the bed, his own eyes averted.

"It's been leeching further into my skin since about a month before I was officially arrested." He doesn't think he actually needs to explain it all to keep getting input, but Will's starting to shake again with the energy that brought him to drive almost two hours in a flash flood. "I had...a shadow behind me that kept whispering who it might be. I kept ignoring it."

His mouth is so dry. Will swallows and tastes ash. "Got an answer I didn't want today."

That's enough to have Rust lifting his head back up a little, throat arching for the leverage, and nothing more. He doesn't stare challenging at Will -- merely to demonstrate his attention. Okay, boss, whatever you say.

Because Rust thinks the Mated thing is complete bullshit, so he's not about to argue with that sentiment. If anything, the fresh response to the concept is really a fucking relief. He often skips the subject all together to avoid the sick and acidic taste it all leaves on the back of his tongue, like bad coffee. Rust won't accept the idea that he can't control something like that; discovering a 'soul mate' in any form shouldn't be like like a scheduled driver's test...it should be a discovery, like every-fucking-thing else in the world.

Rust's eyes flick down, gaze arched over thoughtfully pursed lips, then return to Will's face. "My experience in surprise plot twists would have me ask if it isn't who you thought it would be..."

But that's too obvious, and come the fuck on, Will isn't so obsessed with this idea that he would let himself be heartbroken from discovering that some beau of his doesn't happen to have a matching Mate mark. "...But it is, innit."

Will can still see Rust when they make eye contact. It isn't that Will looks at Rust and sees only walls up, and that's why he can stomach occasional direct gazes with him a little better than with strangers or other acquaintances. It's just that the lack of fencing doesn't feel like Rust is immediately moving into his turf, doesn't feel like a wave of enforced and prayed-for social rules is washing over him and dragging Will back out with the tide.

He doesn't feel like Rust seeks to alter him. Not the way that others accidentally want to alter everyone around them to reflect themselves more, and certainly not the way that Han--

A cold stone sinks to the bottom of his stomach, Will's shoulders hunching further. Not from Rust, but from the nameless horror that apparently has lived inside of Will all along. His mouth is splitting open into a grin, again, teeth showing in the light from the lamp behind Rust. "Of course it was." His eyes on Rust's are angry above his chuckling mouth, laughter cracking out of Will and tearing up his throat.

"It's been all about him for months, and I hadn't seen that." Will is static, he can see each frame of himself stark and alone for minutes before he keeps moving back. His shoulders creak against the back of the plastic chair, tendons in the back of his hands bunching in stark relief. "I'd been in denial that I wasn't ever going to become the killers I keep looking at."

He can't look at Rust. He can't look at anything, gaze dead and empty straight ahead of him. "I might have gotten acquitted of his murders, but I guess I've got a memento forever from the Chesapeake Ripper."

Edited 2016-12-06 02:08 (UTC)

Sounds like a souring marriage already, resentment potent in Will's shaking voice. This, whoever it is, seems to have consumed much of Will's waking hours.

'He,' apparently, and...that pings a little bell strung up somewhere in the forest of Rust's mind. His eyes on Will sharpen and deepen their hold on the man's image, attention honed in on him like a weapon. 'Killers.'

It's that man, that Will went to jail over, isn't it? He says it before Rust can even ask. Chesapeake Ripper.

The room goes firmly silent, eerily still for the volatile weather causing such a ruckus outside. The light emitting from the lamp behind Rust seems to, in all its subtlety, have more animation and life than Rust for a hot ten seconds.

Rust needs a cigarette. His movements are not sudden, but the reanimation feels sudden enough when he moves to stand. He moves away from Will and toward the nightstand with the stout lamp, where, within its immediate downcast halo, sits a pack of Camels and his zippo.

"That killer who got you locked up." A cigarette becomes wedged gently between his teeth, lips resting around the soft paper. The metallic flick of his lighter and the hissing of the wheel take up the momentary silence as Rust ignites his cigarette.

A burst of smoke into his lungs later, and Rust is turning back to saunter toward Will again. "Does he know?"

Will's eyes dart over to Rust when movement starts back up again. He'd started to sink into the silence, the stillness, had begun tunneling so far back into the regret encased in his own head that he nearly forgot where he was.

There's the fear from missing a step on a staircase when Will thinks that it reminds him of his missing time from when he was sick. From when Dr. Lecter had gone ahead and let him grow his encephalitis for his own amusement.

Will remembers convincing Chilton to use hypnotherapy to help him recall what Dr. Lecter had done, remembers the times when he'd been docile but terrified and incapacitated around Lecter and he'd been able to drug him, manipulate him, try to condition him to be even more like himself.

And apparently during all that, their Marks had just been burning deeper into their skins--

Will jumps up out of the chair so suddenly he knocks it over. He barely registers what he hears, looks back and stammers something like an apology as he shakily removes the towel from his shoulders. He drops the towel over the tipped-back chair, unsure where else to put it but suddenly not wanting anyone else's things touching him.

Will paces away from Rust and his cigarette, then decides he doesn't like the idea of being in a kitchen, even if it's nothing like the sleek metal planning of Hannibal's. He slingshots back to the carpet, aggravatedly pacing back and forth in front of the far wall, hands rubbing at his face and then his arms. He feels cold and wet from the rain all at once, but he knows the shivering is from his own head.

"He must." It's the realization that sent Will out of the chair, that nearly clenched his stomach hard enough to heave. The whiskey burns, his cheeks warm even as his fingers grow cold with dread. "That's-- he-- drugged me. While I wouldn't remember it. I remember him--" Will grimaces, laughs so bitterly he's surprised rust doesn't flake from his lips. He grabs his inner elbow, tapping where the veins are. "Rolling my sleeve up to get at it. He must've...seen it then. He's known since fucking before I got arrested, fucking dammit."

Will thought it was just Hannibal's smugness that let him show Will, intending to bait him and watch Will squirm as always.

No, another calculated plan to lay more self-doubt across Will's healed mind.

Will answers Rust's question with a leap out of his chair -- which goes falling backward, tumbling to get out of Graham's way. Rust watches with cautionary pause, cigarette hovering before his lips, wedged between a thumb and index finger. Steady, he watches Will zip around his apartment like an uncaged bird.

Until words finally come, yet not as confident of an answer as he expected for the reaction. 'He must have seen it,' like everything in the world has tried to insist on it, but 'must' is just a really pretty way of saying 'probably.'

The intimate detail -- Will being drugged, taken advantage of, being trapped by this cannibal killer -- is enough for Rust to turn his eyes away, as if trying for wordlessly being polite. Respectful. He brings the cigarette back to this mouth, taking a long drag through tightly-pursed lips, before chasing the smoke with an inhale of the air around them.

"'Must,' like you don't have concrete knowledge," Rust muses, smoke sputtering out of him with every syllable. "But you do know, so how is that?"

Will is assuming that Lecter has seen his mark, but how does will know about his mark? Rust looks at Will again. "You've seen his."

What does that even matter, though? They know about each other -- shit, it sounds like Doctor Lecter has had his sights on Will despite the idea of being mutually Marked. All of this drugged up hypnotism shit was probably happening independent of the concept... "So...what, then?" Aside from the whole situation being an obvious shitstorm in the nearing distance, what is it that specifically has Will so devastated about it? Rust could make a list, bullet points, and everything, but he wants to hear it from Will himself.

Will can barely pay attention enough to anything outside of him to avoid tripping over the empty carpet, so he doesn't catch the way Rust averts his eyes. He doesn't see anything until Rust starts talking. The sound of another human being offering insight into what's happened is enough to drag Will back out of his own head, pulled by another tide - not into Rust's mind, but just back into reality, into the present moment.

Will still feels unmoored, like he's at risk any second of drowning, but there's a light in the distance that must be a shore. He tries to point himself in its direction.

His face falls into an open expression of surprise, of resignation, both startled and relieved that Rust hit on it so quickly. "Yes. I did. He rolled up his sleeve today and showed me his Mark." His eyes scrunch closed, one hand panning across his forehead and dragging damp hair back away from his face. "It's exactly the same as the one I've been watching darken on my skin. It's in the same place." His mouth is unscrewing back into its lopsided smile, pained shivering rolling up and down his arms. Will gives an aborted grab at the spot where he knows his Mark is - right on the very bottom edge of his right bicep. Right where you can reach down and feel for a pulse, feel what makes him tick.

The planned cruelty of the placement makes him taste bile.

'So what, then?'

Will stops moving. He turns and really looks at Rust, sees the way shadows hang in the crevices under his cheek bone and in the hollows where his eyes sit. "So." Will's arms swing, ending up catching on his hips. "I just had to spend the last month and a half convincing everyone I personally know, and many more people I'd never met, that I wasn't a serial killer." He snorts. "And I wasn't really that successful. I only got let out because Hannibal must have-- I can only assume he realized he was bored without me around to play with, so he let the 'copycat killer' take another victim so that I would have to be released, because the real killer was clearly still out there."

His lower lip gets pulled between his teeth. "There were times I wasn't that fucking sure either, though. I spend so much time--" His hands are up, gesturing at chest-level like he's pulling invisible forces towards himself. "--soaking up all that, all that anger and manipulation and all the possible reasons people have for killing other people. I was dreaming about it, I could feel their blood on my hands and the way heart tendons caught on my teeth.

"And now that it should finally be over, I can't-- I can't just pretend I don't have that possibility sitting in me all the time. Because some fucking force in the universe apparently thinks I am a soul match for Hannibal Lecter."

Ahh, so that's it. Rust stands and sucks on his cigarette and watches calmly as Will spills it all out. Well, the way Rust sees it, he's watching Will shackle himself to the likeness of another human being. He has to hold his knee-jerk irritation back, and is willing to, given how on-edge the other man has been from get-go.

"Well, if that's how you want it t' be." Rust sits back down on the bed, laying his cigarettes and lighter a few inches beside his hip, and takes his glass back. "'Cause," he begins, a soft groan of a word that is isolated by the pause Rust takes to freshen up with another mouthful of whiskey. He stares at Will with unwavering eyes. "I'm sure that's how this shitheel wants you t' see it. If you're content with letting him win and eat you alive, well then..." Rust extends his arms in two sweeping motions, mirroring each other's movements to emphasize his next three words: "By all means."

There's another level of tough love Rust could descend to, but that would do neither of them any good. Once elbows return to their perches on his thighs, Rust's eyes droop and sink down to skate around the edge of his glass, a serene sense of thoughtfulness washing away any malice that could have been detected in his voice. "So what if you're both Marked...you ain't marked with him 'cause you're some psychopath. Shit, everyone's got potential to be a killer...you know it. It ain't our nature that makes us become people like that -- it's our life experiences, and how we handle 'em."

Rust seems to fight off a grimace at something that ghosts across his mind. He washes the taste down with what's left in his glass. "I killed people. I snapped and that fire of rage engulfed me and I had my justifications...but I just happened to do it under other, more forgiving conditions. Like, arranging the right lottery numbers. I was just on the job."

Not that he got away with not being responsible for that. The glass clanks onto the table, and Rust bends his elbow to bring his cigarette within orbiting distance of his mouth. "So, that ain't it, unless you're 'bout to tell me that you're also uncannily partial to expensive wine an' foie gras. I doubt it." No offense, Will.

"So...what else is it?"

Edited 2016-12-06 19:37 (UTC)

"Eat me alive." Will can't help but laugh, a sick metallic taste stuck on his tongue. "It's appropriate imagery, for him." And it is what Hannibal wants. Will knows that for certainty, now.

Will has the urge to interrupt, it burns in his mouth, but he listens to what Rust keeps saying. Because Rust isn't just shoving Will's concerns aside - he's showing where he himself has lived through those same concerns and come out the other side. 'I killed people' he says, and Will's gaze tunnels into him.

"There's a romanticism behind how the public and other cops talk about us killing people. 'In the line of duty.'" Will's voice is bitter, shaking at the edges. If it had been a few weeks prior, before the encephalitis had been fully beaten away, Will knows he'd see Garrett Jacob Hobbs staring at him from beyond Rust's shoulder. "I think we both know it doesn't feel any different just because you're wearing a badge."

But that's a good argument for the similarities between him and Hannibal. Will's face grows brittle, cracks at the edges. What else is it? "Hannibal's spent the last several months systematically breaking any-- any hope of bonds I have with people who aren't him. He's framed me for his murders, and then--"

Will's world seems to slowly be shrinking. He's lost his gaze on Rust, is instead staring straight ahead and seeing nothing but memories, snapshots, nightmares. "He doesn't want me to have anything in my life except for him. He's...probably wanted that before he knew how to word it to himself. Definitely before he knew about the Marks.

"I wanted to talk to someone else who wouldn't think that this...Marked bullshit means he actually has any more claim on me." Even though Will says 'someone else', even though that implies Will doesn't think it gives Hannibal any claim to his soul, there's real fear buried deep in his voice. It shudders in his throat and rattles through his joints and he feels the hair raise on his arms, cautionary and preyed-upon.

"Not that it matters what I believe." Will's voice is so soft, he isn't entirely sure he's speaking out loud. "He's going to try to keep what he views as his. One way or another." A gallows smile stretches across his face, ghastly and pale. "After all... I'm a marked man, now."

Just above the sound of Will's voice is the quiet sizzling of Rust's cigarette. Will takes the piece of Rust that he's given like anything else he's ever learned about him. He understands it and accepts it easily, and it's releases a pressure in Rust's lungs that he didn't quite notice was there, until it escapes with his next exhale of air and smoke.

Will doesn't truly answer the heart of his question, but Rust supposes that is best. Perhaps his intention to pick out what similarities Will has to Hannibal and, therefore, try to humanize the cannibalistic serial killer isn't...the best plan of action. The man is a fucking monster in human skin, after all, and while Rust wants Will to see himself as himself, and not the mirrored image of that asshole...

Rust instead grabs right onto what Will comes to say next. Doctor Lecter picked Will as a target, a victim, before knowing that they were identically marked. "Look, man...that doesn't mean you gotta bend your knee to this...supernatural will, or whatver-the-fuck," Rust insists softly, setting his still-lit cigarette in the plastic ash tray on the table beside him. With a firm, almost strained breath, he hurls himself back onto his feet -- an endeavor that takes a little more energy to execute suddenly, but Rust can feel the whiskey in his blood, in his muscles, making his body feel slightly numb. With an uncharacteristic stiffness, he steps over to the toppled chair, and grabs the discarded towel.

"I don't care what it is that people say they feel when they're Marked, and when they're around their 'Mate'... Fuck, as far as I'm concerned, it's the human disease of over-romanticizing basic, natural instincts at play, an' nothing more."

The towel, in both hands, rests in Rust's grip as he carefully approaches Will, visible the whole time, coming up to his side. "And you're at a unique disadvantage; this man's gotten inside your head, your head, that's so easy to absorb anyone into. You're a sponge for other people's natures, their internal pathology. Where most people accidentally fall in, Doctor Lecter is jumpin' in feet first, like a fuckin' parasite."

Rust seems to stall for the briefest of moments -- barely long enough to see in his body language, but plenty enough to see in his face as he looks the conglomerate of wet clothing over. He seems to come to a decision and wraps the towel back around Will's shoulders, but his hands don't return to their attached source. Instead, they clasp Will's upper arms, in a sense that is physical to kindly but firmly grasp the man's full attention. "He doesn't have any claim on you, 'cause that's not how that should work. A...any relationship, romantic or not, should never be a captive situation. You are not his prey."

Words that confirm his own hatred for what's happened ring in his ears, so loud Will ends up closing his eyes against the clamor. The echo is reassuring and horrifying, because here is a person who won't look at his Mark and see a willing lover and future husband, but the truth.

And the truth of his relationship to Hannibal Lecter doesn't tend to make Will feel strong. It's never made him feel competent.

But as Rust slinks closer, carefully keeping his arms in sight but still on bare silent feet, Will hears a different version of his own story.

One that he stares into Rust's face for. Rust's hands are on his upper arms, just up and lateral from his Mark on the right side, and Will feels the jerk of an anchor catching him in place. There are aspects of his and Hannibal's past that Hannibal will surely get to take to his grave, parts that Will's mind was too broken to even record, let alone allow him to retrieve. There's still other parts that Will might never be ready to share. But now--

'You are not his prey.'

--in a dim living room, the lamp beyond them eclipsed by Rust's shoulders, Will begins to pour out what parts of the story he suddenly needs to address. To acknowledge outside his own head, and make real. "Hannibal-- took me to a neurologist. For my hallucinations. He got another doctor to lie to me about the encephalitis. To say that there was nothing physically wrong with me. The hallucinations, the sleepwalking, the lost time -- it was all just in my broken mind. That I was too weak to look into madness and walk away unscathed. That I wasn't strong enough to accept what was inside of me."

His breaths are coming short and sharp, Will's shoulders rounding under the re-delivered towel. "But he was wrong." Will swallows, eyes on the shapes and shadows of Rust's face instead of his eyes. "I survived."

This is his. This is his and Will's never seen this entire dance as anything except an embarrassment that he fell in the first place. He's never looked at it and been happy that he got back up in the end. "I won."

Will so rarely wants what eye contact brings him - unabashed honesty, an intimacy to knowing what people think during every breath of a conversation. In this moment, he stares directly at Rust. "I wanted to know if anyone would be on my side. If I survived this from him, too." Because now it's coming full circle. Now, in the semi-dark with a man who's just told Will that he's killed someone before in the heat of the moment, too, Will is seeing what might need to happen.

"No matter what the cost is. He can't have me."

Will's dialogue takes a turn that Rust wouldn't have anticipated, even if he could pause the moment and observe it from the outside like a snow globe. Where Will had been putting into words the very idea and feelings of someone who is trapped, he begins to speak words of triumph. Strings of memories of manipulation, of deception, evil and personal crimes posed against him -- suddenly alight with a flame that cuts through them as it declares, 'I won.'

Rust's face softens as he listens, his ferocity toward Will's dilemma cooling when he hears and sees the complete tonal shift in the other man. He doesn't need convincing, just an echo chamber, only an honest one. His hands no longer feel like silent demands for the other man's attention, but now they feel like a cabin in the middle of the wilderness: Rust feels like a shelter.

He hasn't felt like that in a long time. He's always distanced himself from the personal affairs of those around him, turning away sternly any time someone has presented to him their vulnerable underbelly. It's a weight of responsibility that Rust doesn't have the time or patience for, and definitely not for a long haul...not with the weight of his own world on his shoulder.

But this...is different. Rust made a quick assumption that Will came to him for the safety of a neutral party's opinion, because that's exactly the refreshing security of their very airy friendship. Will isn't clamoring desperately for the closest person to him -- he wanted Rust's insight.

So he owes him this much. He nods his head, agreeing and understanding, because make no mistake: Rust can smell the faint burning smoke smell that's hiding underneath Will's words. "That's exactly it, man. That brand is only skin deep. That's the only beauty in this linear existence: the universe is chaos. We invented obedience, but you can break out of it."

From this close, Rust's pale eyes wander over Will's torso like the exploratory beam from a flashlight. He squeezes Will's deltoids, then pats one of them firmly. The shoulders in his grasp shudder and twitch despite his own stable hold, and Rust lets his hands linger to feel the shapes under his palms rattle for another thorough moment, before they drift off and away, wood floating down a stream. "...You should take that jacket off. That towel ain't doing shit for you with you still in it."

Rust's cigarette's probably dead by now, but he isn't agitated enough to light up another. He glances back over to the kitchen. "I can make some coffee, if you're cold."

Will is pretty well-read for the son of a small engine repair mechanic from Louisiana. It's something that's bled into his speech since well before he had six years of college under his belt.

It's the same easy vocabulary expansion that he hears in Rust's voice, studied tones of someone who's found out what he wants to learn about and went ahead and unapologetically got it. The words ring through Will, touching on ideas he so often has to keep internal and guarded from others.

He still feels exposed, letting those ideas hit fresh air. But it's an exposure that has a possibility of survival, of forgiveness, and Will finds himself wanting to balance on the ledge and risk it anyway.

Most people don't touch him. Will is a self-contained person in mind and in body, and while he used to regularly spit out terrible yearnings to Hannibal, those were an interaction that took time to establish. Weeks of spilling his soul had still only granted the occasional hand on his shoulder, and yet Will stares back at Rust and doesn't once flinch from the hands on his arms.

Coming back into their own gravitational centers seems only natural, afterwards. Will leans back, shrugs the towel off himself and drapes it on the fold-out table that stands without any accompanying chairs, on the living room side of Rust's kitchen counter. He's nodding jerkily, doesn't give it a second thought before he's getting arms out of his soaked-through jacket.

"Coffee sounds good." The shoulders of his button-up are damp too, and Will starts unbuttoning it with the unapologetic movements of someone used to cleaning himself up after messes. If Rust's alright with the majority of the wet layers coming off, Will isn't going to stand around in soaked clothes longer than he has to.

In just the white undershirt, arms now bare and goosebumps raised up and down them, Will regathers the towel off the table. He tucks it around his shoulders as if he were drying himself off after a nightmare at home, eyes sliding shut as he leans up against Rust's counter, socks still on carpet.

And he just breathes, for a few moments, the unimposing quiet of Rust's apartment thrumming in the darkness around him.

In a kitchen as bare as Rust's, you're sure to find a can of coffee, at the very least.

It's quick and easy work to fill his Mr. Coffee with water from the tap, pop a filter into the brew basket, and scoop an unmonitored amount of coffee grinds in. It's a good break for the both of them -- Will peeling off his wet clothes, Rust able to recede back into the dark and unlit parts of his skull to reset his thoughts. From across the small breakfast bar extended from his counter, he can watch Will in his dining area.

What a fucking mess. Not Will, mind you, but his situation. Some fucking luck -- as if Rust trusts and believes in anything as primitive as a concept of 'luck' -- that he gets marked with a serial killer.

But Rust can't help but wonder...how much of it is the universe playing match-maker, and how much of it is purely the power of the mind, and he means the marked Soul Mates as an entire concept -- but in this case, especially Will and Hannibal. Some of the most tenacious minds Rust has ever observed, and Rust also can't shake his old, stubborn suspicious nature about the whole thing. Hell, how do they know Hannibal didn't fucking put a tattoo there himself, and this is just one more piece of his game to ensnare Will like a desperately sought pet?

Who knows... Doesn't change the fact that it's one messed up situation that Will does not deserve to be in, and Rust takes some relief in the fact that Will sees it the same way, too.

"It'll be a few minutes," Rust assures quietly, setting two mismatched mugs on the counter, next to the coffee maker. "I can grab you something dry to wear." Seriously, Will looks so uncomfortable that even Rust is beginning to psychosomatically feel a chill spill over his own skin.

The quiet isn't patronizing. It isn't strained with the wish for the correct words to say. Will senses no hovering nearby, no nervous mental hand-wringing over how best to console or fix.

Having someone to merely exist around after ripping open an old wound this way is...new. It's like what Will had chased in Hannibal, with none of the searching greedy scalpels following afterwards, keen to take even more flesh than what had been offered.

The sound of mugs clanking onto the counter gets Will's attention even more than Rust's low voice. His eyes open and he looks over, tilting to better face Rust over by the coffee maker. It hisses with the start of its water heating, a little green light on the front of it staring at Will.

"Uh." Will is genuinely surprised, but not at all displeased. His face pinches into a self-deprecating smile. "That'd be-- great, actually." There's still tremors through his hands, a phenomenon that Will is suspecting more and more is due at least partially to the cold and not just his nerves. Now that some of the shattered pieces of his composure have been glued hastily back into place, he's realizing just how cold it really was outside, how soaked to the bone he was and how the damp stickiness of rain water still seems to linger on his shoulders.

"I'll...dole out the coffee while you're gone." Because Will wasn't actually raised in a barn, and absolutely has some sense of manners. He's taking slow, careful steps around the edge of the counter, easing his way into the kitchen as if it may bite him.

i see trees that are green, red roses too

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