snowblindrpg | [log] It Goes Like This [closed]

There is a logical reason to do this. It's an experiment. We're trying to see if it's the spiders servicing this area or something else. If it's something else we should see what it is. We should know what it is. I want to know why they keep putting it back. I carved the freaking door up and they put it back. It's these goddamn eyes. They're everywhere. I'm not gonna make more of them. They can't make me anymore. They can't make me.

[He slams the hammer into the wood in front of him again, still not looking at Will.]

Why the hell is it always the attic? Who the hell sets this crap up in an attic? A freaking horror movie set designer. Kill them in the living room. Torture them in the goddamn kitchen. Who wants to drag a screaming asshole up to the attic? Way too many stairs. It's not like you even care what people see. It's for the Prophet. Why the hell hide it all in the attic? What's the point? The blood's just gonna drip down into the floorboards. Paint it goddamn red on the ceiling. Hell of an atmosphere.

It's all set dressing.

[He realizes he's rambling without any real point apart from fear and anger and snaps his mouth closed. His hands are shaking when he picks up the next nail and starts hammering again.]

Edited 2018-01-08 01:41 (UTC)

[ This is perhaps the most he's heard House talk in one rush, ever. Will picked out specific parts, statements that he thought he had a speculative answer for, but for right now he kept his mouth shut.

He didn't need out of control empathy to understand that House was exhibiting the signs of a stress breakdown.

Will could sit and wrestle with wondering why now, what was pushing the man over the edge, but oddly enough he tried to redirect his mind away from the curiosity. Because at the end of it all, House was his friend (shhhh never use the word) not a murder, whos head he needed to climb into.

Slowly, Will approached. He deliberately sank down so that he didn't loom over House as he closed the distance. He didn't say anything. Instead, he began to sort the nails and then lifted them up and held them out towards House as he worked. ]

[House is expecting Will to grab the hammer away from him, and he tenses for the struggle, but when it doesn't come, when it's just the silent offer of nails to keep going, he lets out a shuddering breath, and squeezes his eyes closed. For the next several minutes, the doctor works to get himself back under control as he finds some level of calm in the chaos he's bringing to the bed of nails. While he's not creating a specific grid, House does do clumps of closer nails here and there to better obscure what the eye is.

By the time they're out of nails, House is is sweating, his arm hurts like hell, and he's no longer on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He's calm enough that he feels like he can explain without spiraling this time.]

It's the eye in the attic. There's something like this place over in the Radiation Zone. One of the houses has shackles you can open and close with the Eye App. I shackled myself in the attic and said I was Andromeda's follower. Something started whipping me. I couldn't get the Eye App to unlock them. I couldn't see anyone doing it. It kept going for half an hour.

[He takes a long, slow breath.]

Christ this place needs a bar you can get to easy.

[ Sometimes it was all too easy to gloss over everything House had been through. Will knew that the older man liked it that way, which also made it easy to 'out of sight, out of mind' but it wasn't fair to him.

He listened, moving to sit down and wrapping his arms around his knees. He could feel the blows, taste the helplessness of the situation, the angry confusion over yet something else that hurt, without offering even a hint to the answer. Symptoms without a cause, the bane of House's existence; mental, emotional and physical.

It was tempting to reach out to touch the other man, but Will was not a naturally touchy person. He tried to express his concern by becoming an immovable object; of sorts. ]

Would be nice if instead of wine, they gave us a good hard whiskey to enjoy.

[It's a good thing he doesn't reach out. House isn't much of a touchy-feely person, either.]

Here-here.

[He raises an imaginary bottle of whiskey.]

Anyway, if that was all self-inflicted, I'm impressed with myself and my apparent flexibility with tools I don't have.

[The doctor sits back on his heels and stares up at the ceiling.]

You know what I miss most? I mean apart from the indoor heating and hot showers... and my guitar and baby grand. Stars. I miss the goddamn sky. Who the hell knew?

Edited 2018-01-08 04:09 (UTC)

[ Will nodded his head in response to the faux toast, and then once again he was quiet as he listened to House.

For a long breath, he weighed through his responses. Measuring them up against what he knew of House and the older man's comfort levels. He knew the man didn't like the lens being turned on himself for too long, that he offered glimpses into his own complicated mind, but just as quickly shut the door, least anyone get too deep a peek.

It took him a bit of time, but Will circled back to the very beginning of their association. They had come so far from that point, and Will realized he owed House something. Now ... seemed as good a time as any. ]

Blood, lots of it, the type of volume that usually indicates a death, under the light of the moon and the stars, it looks black. Not a matte black, like skulking shadows, but this gleaming and glistening black that reflects up at you with a boldness that expresses no regret.

[ Will looked down at his clasped hands, folding his fingers over each other. ]

Aside from hunting one another, Hannibal and I hunt other predators; and we were good at it. The killer who pulled me out of retirement was named Francis Dolarhyde. He fancied himself William Blake's Great Red Dragon.

He was a family annihilator, someone who slaughters entire family; father, mother, children.

Hannibal pointed him at Molly and Walter. Molly managed to get herself and Walter to safety, but I realized during that period that I was as much to blame for the danger they had been placed in as Hannibal. I realized that Hannibal was in love with me and that I was ... lost to him.

Jack worked to set up a trap, that would allow him to kill both Dolarhyde and Hannibal in the same circumstances. I ... altered events, so that Jack's plan failed and my own was executed instead.

It pit Hannibal and I directly against Dolarhyde and it took both of us to take him down, in every sense of the word. He shot Hannibal, stabbed me numerous times but in the end, it was his blood in the moonlight.

Before it even began, back when I realized I would never be free of Hannibal, and I was at peace with that knowledge. Can't live with him, can't live without him. I knew what my end game was to be. Dolarhyde was dead, Hannibal and I were standing on a the edge of a cliff. I ... embraced him, put my head on his shoulder ... and my arm around his neck, threw us both off that cliff top.

[ Will opened and closed his fingers, then turned his head to look at House. ]

I was at peace with my death, when I found myself waking up here. I can't say I miss anything, the way I know you ... and others must miss your lives and your freedom back in your home ... worlds.

Hang in there, House. It is my intention to do everything I can, to help you and the others get back to everything you miss most.

[House closes his eyes as Will speaks in turn, tries to picture the scene. His experience with blood is nothing like Will's. When he sees it, it's red, bright and fresh against white, clinical walls. There's the scent of antiseptic, the soft whir and beep of medical machines. Stiff, bleached fabrics. Blood comes from the living and his mission is to stop it.

What Will is talking about is strange, an alien landscape in his mind's eye. House knows Hannibal's face now, along with his voice. He can see Will. The man, Dolarhyde, is some sort of dragon thing--a Great Red Dragon--like his chosen obsession. There's a moon and stars, a cliff, blood painting all three men. There's so much blood in the human body. People might be surprised. House had pulled it out of Sherlock 20 mL at a time. Almost three hundred needle sticks and it had all been red. Everything here is red.

Black is an interesting thought, though. Slick, slimming, sensual. Maybe like ice, but no. Fresh blood would be hot. 98.6 degrees of life splashing over you.

He shakes his head after a moment, the vivid vision just a little too real as he feels it hitting him, running through his fingers, down his neck, his thighs. It's his blood running black in the moonlight because unlike Will and Hannibal, he's never been the predator. And hadn't that pissed Dad off like hell?]

I'm not planning on getting out of here. I just wanna know what happened. What's been happening. And why. Help me get answers. The truth. That's the only thing that matters.

That's what we have to keep struggling towards, the truth.

[ Will agreed. He wouldn't patronize House by arguing that of course he would get out of here and go home. Will didn't have the right to insist that House had any more desire for his real world reality than any of them. ]

The truth, and the chance to stop this cycle, so it doesn't reset and begin again, with new victims.

[His real world reality is five or six more years with Wilson, and then everything ending. It's the failed ketamine treatment, the limp, and the pain. It's his team leaving him. It's getting Amber killed and Wilson leaving for some unspecified amount of time. It's a search for meaning he'd been so energized for that apparently comes to jack squat. It's his career and life as he knows it ending. It's Wilson dying. The one relationship he's held onto through everything in his life. Wilson isn't supposed to die first. House is the jackass, the addict who's boxed his goddamn kidneys with drugs, who's almost killed himself a dozen different ways to chase a high or prove a point.

It's not fair.

Knowing the future is horrifying. He should never have asked about it because it's ruined his "present" back home.]

I wouldn't mind kicking Miller and Eve in the ass while we're at it, too. I mean, if the opportunity presents itself.

[ The silence that fell, between his words and House's next statement was the definition of a pregnant pause. Will could tell that the other man's mind was going a mile a minute, even if he couldn't precisely nail down what House might be thinking.

Will did suspect it was rainbows and kittens. Particularly when House retreated to the ground of gruff sarcasm. That, he'd learned, meant that too many bruises were too close to the surface.

Weighing what he'd walked in on and their conversation, against what else might be learned, the ex-profiler gave ground and retreated to sarcastic humor as well. ]

Might not want to say that too loudly, in case one of them take offense and you wake up with your hair turned neon green or something.

[House is grateful that Will backs off instead of pressing forward. He's emotionally wrung out, and he's not entirely sure they'd get through the rest of this conversation without him making good on his threat with the hammer, otherwise. Corner a rat, and it tends to bite when it can't run.]

Now, see, that would be wicked. Found some neon pink hair dye in one of the houses once. I've been thinking about a mowhawk. Pink spikes?

[ Will wasn't really in the mood to get bit, so it would appear that their conversation was going to go the way of pink hair.

...

Why not. ]

Spikes yes. Pink? Not your color.

[House raises one end of his tattered scarf. It is, in fact, pink.]

Are you insulting my fashion choices?

[ Appearing to give it some thought, Will eventually nodded in a slightly overly theatrical and dorkish manner. ]

Yes, fairly certain I was -how do the kids term it these days- casting shade in your direction.

[ Says the man wearing panty hose under his blood stained slacks. ]

Psh! Don't be illin' on my sweet threads, dawg. You're just jealous. What if I dyed your hair pink? [A pause.] How long do you think the torture would last if we dyed Lecter's hair in his sleep or something?

[ The expression on Will's face was one of 'I recognize those words as English but what the fuck??'

Then his eyebrows rose at the suggestion. He took a breath, about to speak but then paused and thought about it for a moment, before he exhaled and looked down. His lips twitched with a slight smile and then he nodded -as if to himself- and moved to respond. ]

Hannibal would find a way to make the pink work. Honestly, you should see the man's wardrobe back home, he was never afraid of bright colors. In fact I think I only ever saw him wear something as pedestrian as a pinstripe ... ah never.

He's also surprisingly clever at adapting in ways you wouldn't expect, even to the horrors of having his perfect coiffed hair dyed pink. Very rarely is he ever ... impulsive.

He'd wait, plan and probably maneuver circumstances until he could feed Wilson to you.

[ It's all fun and games, until someone ends up on a dinner plate. ]

[Something cold settles in House's stomach. Will is making a very strong case for not screwing with Hannibal. The guy coming after him is expected--House is waiting for the other shoe to drop there--but the prospect of Wilson being hurt... horribly is a much more effective leash on the doctor's disrespectful behavior. House knows how to deal with his own suffering and death for his words and actions. Other people is harder. Wilson is especially hard.]

Anybody ever mention to that guy he's maybe a little obsessed with turning other people into cannibals?

Edited 2018-01-12 22:03 (UTC)

[ Will's well aware that House plays for high stakes. The man reads as much an adrenaline junkie as he is a narcotic junkie. In fact, Will suspects that were House clean of the Vicodin, he'd probably be someone who engaged in other risk based, high thrill activities.

The ex-profiler also genuinely likes James Wilson and doesn't want to see him hurt. They really haven't had time to talk about this since Hannibal arrived, so ... no time like the present. ]

When Hannibal was a child, he had a younger sister. Like most big brother / little sister relationships, she was his to protect and look after. He adored her, she was probably his most formative relationship as a child. I don't know the exact details, but he and his sister lost their parents, murders that weren't of Hannibal's doing.

Anyway, he and Mischa ended up with an uncle and an aunt, his family is actually Lithuanian aristocracy. A man came on the property, brutalized her and murdered her in front of Hannibal, and he was helpless to stop it.

[ Will paused, fiddling with his fingers, before he continued. He wasn't making an excuse for Hannibal, that was clear in his tone, but rather trying to explain the evolution of the psyche that drove the man. ]

In the wake of these violent losses, his parents and now his beloved little sister, Hannibal's mind ... well it did a lot of things. With the lack of a stable adult figure in his life, he coped with these horrors by learning to find beauty in them, it was a survival mechanism for his brain that kicked over during an incredibly formative period for him. Also in his mind, the only way he could keep his beloved sister, secure her within as well as honor her, was to consume her.

She was his first.

He continued to evolve, from that young age forward, finding beauty in destruction. We see horrific murders, he sees art. Along with this, his narcissism continued to grow. People, for Hannibal, began to fall into categories of various levels of "lesser" than him.

[ This might be getting weird, but Will sat forward, motioning with his hands. ]

If you were to ask Hannibal, he'd tell you that what he does is not cannibalism, because cannibalism infers consuming one's equal. Hannibal, for the most part, doesn't see the people he kills as people; he has had some sort of experience with them that has left him seeing them as ... pigs.

Eat the rude, and most of the world is rude.

Additionally, his feelings towards those he cares for, are also ... wired towards consumption. I have been a threat to him, a weakness due to his "inconvenient compassion" for me and I have no doubt that there will come a time where he will feel compelled to consume me.

[ Will paused and tilted his head. ]

I really hope he won't insist on feeding me to myself, the way he did Gideon.

[On the list of things House never wanted to hear about, this is pretty high up there. He's dealt with a number of horrifying situations in his career, his life back home, and his life here in Norfinbury, but a kid eating his own sister after she was assaulted and murdered is... bad. It's bad in a way that makes him viscerally uncomfortable with the automatic spike of sympathy for Hannibal. Because he really shouldn't be feeling that. The guy's a sociopath. And maybe he was born that way, maybe he turned that way, but it's who he is now. He's done horrible things all on his own and from Will's descriptions, he's thoroughly enjoyed them.]

Wilson isn't rude.

[Just going to put that out there.

He's not rude to anyone except House, really. Wilson is a man hardwired for manners and acting polite and professional and empathetic at almost all times. House enjoys seeing the hidden side of him, the exceptional level of sass that comes out when Wilson feels like he can let his guard down. House likes to think of it as his part of the other man that no one else really gets except in fleeting glimpses.]

If he really wants to eat rude people, I'm pretty sure I'm the filet mignon of the yard. Or whatever fancy-ass pieces pigs have. [He wants Will to say that Hannibal would come after House first for the crime instead of going after perfectly innocent and decent people.] Are you seriously gonna stick around him long enough to have him try eating you? Or are you gonna find another cliff first?

Who's to say we survived the first cliff? [ Will pointed out. ] As for what Hannibal and I might do to each other in this place ... [ he trailed off pensively, before shrugging. ] we may kill one another, but it's not time for him to consume me.

[ There is a calm, almost peaceful acceptance of the idea that the man he's sleeping with will one day try to kill him; with the likely probability that Will might be just as moved towards homicide.

But they aren't going to go any further down that trail, because this is about House and Wilson. ]

He wouldn't kill Wilson because he's rude. He might not even kill him at all. Back home, he held Jack Crawford's trainee Miriam Lass for almost two years, before he cut off her arm and used it to torment Jack. Even me ... he didn't kill me, but he twisted my head inside out and destroyed me, as a way to punish Jack. Everything Hannibal did to me, in the beginning, was as much about Jack Crawford as it was about discrediting me to get me off his scent.

[ Giving a small shrug, Will opened his hands and then closed them around one another again. ]

Hannibal doesn't kill people he finds interesting, even if they piss him off. He knows that death is simple. If he decides he wants to punish you, House, Hannibal would use Wilson; just as he used Lass and me against Jack.

Then I'll leave. Once we get through to the next area, you two can run away into the sunset on your own. Sex and murder each other or whatever. I don't need to be with anyone, and I'm not the one caught in Lecter's orbit.

[And if he's alone and doesn't show any particular affection toward people publicly, then it becomes harder to gauge who his important people are, right? It's probably not the most effective strategy, but House isn't particularly at his best just at the moment.

He reaches into his pocket and grasps the bottle of Vicodin he has there. As long as he has this, he can manage. He just needs to get more of it. He needs to get his stash back from Stephen.]

[ This time, because he's focused, Will catches the movement to the pocket. It connects that House has been doing that more and more recently, as well as the fact that the man had been swallowing the placebos.

Reaching into his own pocket, Will felt for the bottle there, reaching to draw it out even as he spoke. ]

Don't be melodramatic. There's no point to the gesture anyway, if Hannibal has already decided he's annoyed, he's already plotting and you breaking off on your own just means you'll lose sight of when he's coming.

[ Not the most reassuring of speeches. Will popped the top off the bottle and peered within, before checking the label and ... yep, he's counting as he speaks. ]

At the moment, I genuinely believe that Hannibal finds you more interesting than annoying, and he has this whole sandbox to play in. What we're finding horrific, Hannibal's in an amusement park with this place and you're one of the main attractions. You run? You become prey, only he won't harm you.

You and yours are safer if you stand your ground. [ Hmmm ... the count was off. Will glanced up, as he shook them back into the bottle so he could count them again. ] You'll have to trust me to let you know if that changes.

[House watches Will blatantly count out the pills in front of him. There should probably be a curl of shame that he stole from the other man, but he's never been particularly bothered by thievery when it's not directed at him. No, the shame is in the fact that he'd felt he needed the pills. He's never stolen Vicodin before. He's never had to steal it before. It came to him from the pharmacy or from other people who traded it to him here.

He lets go of the bottle in his pocket and places his hands in his lap. He's not so sure he likes being an attraction in this particular amusement park. Not anymore.]

You're missing eight.

[Let's just deal with this now instead of the passive-aggressive counting. House also doesn't really know what to actually do about Hannibal other than make some moderate effort not to entirely piss him off.]

It's a trade. I used my meds on you, I took a few. You won't miss them. Trust me.

[ 'You're missing eight'.

That lined up with the count he had taken. Will could give good passive-aggressive when the urge took him, but he purposefully put the pills away. ]

You're an addict, House. This had nothing to do with an even steven trade. [ He called it out, but there was no heat in his tone. Instead, he leaned back and watched the other man from under hooded lashes. ]

Do you know why I fought so hard against giving you the drugs? It was something you said, back when we first started traveling together. About how the Vicodin made it so you wouldn't care.

We need you to care, House. [ He put it out there, for the older man to poke at with the end of his cane, so to speak. ]

[House bristles slightly.]

Yeah. You've made that abundantly clear that's what you think. [He consciously sets the hammer down because this is edging in territory that's making him more irritated than agitated and terrified. He's had this war with Wilson and Cuddy more than once.] Nice to know a flip remark rustles your jimmies that much.

You really think I feel nothing on Vicodin? I've been on my full freaking dose for months before you got here. Amazingly, I was still functioning and "caring." The drugs don't make me high they make me neutral. You said it yourself: I'm a raw nerve. You use medicine to treat that where I'm from.

[Caring too much is a problem. The world is noise and emotion battering at him and Vicodin is something like a shield, some sort of haze to dull everything to a level that he can process it all.]

It helps me deal with this place. Personally, I don't like hallucinating and flipping out every other day.

Edited 2018-01-13 18:41 (UTC)

cw: non-consensual drug use

ex_this_ismydesign36 - 2018-01-13 19:04 (UTC) - Expand

cw: drug addiction

rubikscomplex - 2018-01-13 19:21 (UTC) - Expand

[log] It Goes Like This [closed]

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cw mention of suicide

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cw: cannibalism

cw: cannibalism

cw: cannibalism - child rape/murder

cw: cannibalism - child rape/murder

cw: cannibalism - child rape/murder

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cw: non-consensual drug use

cw: drug addiction