Hi all, I've signed up for FTH this year if anyone is interested in bidding for a fic by yours truly. I'm offering a fic in Sherlock, Check Please! or Harry Potter fandoms - will post a link to the bidding page when it's live.
Another @fandomtrumpshate fic cover I finished and forgot to post - this was for my 2nd highest bidder Rizikah, who commissioned it for ange__enchante’s Teen Wolf/Shadowhunters crossover WiP: The Marks We Bear. I hope they find this inspiring for their continued writing!
My Fandom Trumps Hate artwork by the glorious @ilyone! Post-WS Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes dancing with all the joy and happiness we all wish for them! IMHO, you can't look at this art and not share their joy at being alive, and being together.
The art is three panels of three wonderful drawings each, and I thought it would be nice to compile them into an animated gif so you can see just how dynamic and exciting the art pieces are. They are magnificent, far more than I ever expected or could have hoped for!
The Nature Conservancy was the original charity that benefited from this auction. You can learn more at https://www.nature.org.
As a thank you for the amazing above and beyond work Ilyone has done, per their request, I’ve also made a donation to AllOut. Go to AllOut.org to do what you can to help protect gay rights – and gay people – around the world. Right now, help is needed especially in Chechnya, and AllOut is on the ground with the Russian LGBT Network to evacuate gay men at risk in Chechnya. Learn more and donate at https://go.allout.org/en/a/chechnya/.
To see more of Ilyone’s wonderful art, check out their Tumblr at http://ilyone.tumblr.com/ and their AO3 account at http://archiveofourown.org/users/Ilyone, where they’ve added some lovely illustrations to some wonderful fic. You owe it to yourself to check it out!
Can you tell that I’m just completely over the moon about this? Wow, wow, wow, and thank you!
And you can find more about Fandom Trumps Hate at https://fandomtrumpshate.tumblr.com, along with the finished fanworks at https://fandomtrumpshateofferings.tumblr.com, and ways you can make a difference at https://fandomtrumpshateaction.tumblr.com.
We are at our greatest when we come together and create!
@nerdherderette won me in the @fandomtrumpshate charity auction and sent me this as a prompt: From the AO3 story Written on the Heart by who_la_hoop
“It’s beautiful. Somehow, despite seeing Ron and Hermione’s delicate, intricate marks, he hadn’t expected Malfoy’s to be beautiful. It spans the whole width of his chest, swirling along his collar bones in tones of silver-grey. As Harry looks, tiny forest animals gambol along Malfoy’s skin, and the silver tones fade in and out, twinkling like stars. Harry’s name written in gorgeous, copperplate script, marks out the forest path, and it curls and twines as miniature butterflies dance above it. “
@fandomtrumpshate @fandomtrumpshateofferings
Many thanks to @nerdherderette for supporting Planned Parenthood and for being so patient while I figured this piece out.
This is a mixed media piece, seriously there is everything in here, charcoal, marker, paint, pastel.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
My very, very, extremely belated offering for the wonderful @fataldrum for Fandom Trumps Hate. The request was for some Marlana, and then I was stupid enough to try adding... plot? Kinda? So.
Summary:
“Shut up,” Hannibal asks with infernal innocence, eyes twinkling, “or tell you? I cannot reasonably be expected to simultaneously accomplish both.”
The revolver's double-action, so cocking back the hammer is a convenience, not a prerequisite, to firing. Margot therefore only needs to bother with slipping her index finger in place against the trigger before she's advancing with swift, menacing strides, halting and visibly refraining from committing violence upon Hannibal's person only because she's neared too close to the table to comfortably retain her strategic advantage. And because Will just as swiftly yanks Hannibal's chair back from the other side so as to give himself enough room to bodily insert himself between Hannibal and Margot's line of fire, the maneuver brisk and businesslike and hard enough to make the candles gutter and to seemingly give Hannibal whiplash, Will's mouth a sour, resignedly put-upon line.
Or: Alana and Margot's domestic bliss in their scenic Spanish getaway is rudely interrupted. Will just wants to clear things up without Hannibal getting them both shot.
It’s also under the cut!
Margot, Alana thinks, is careful not to know her own strength. She never finds the end of it.
This is a dry heat. Maryland would always seem to have more humidity the higher the mercury climbed, sometimes so thick it felt like the weight of damp feathers on the skin, but here every microscopic drop of moisture feels sucked out of the air beneath the blinding swelter of the midsummer sun and its bald blue sky. It shines through the wide wicker brim of Alana's sunhat in dazzling dapples, UV rays seeking warm skin, sweat making her sunglasses slip a little down her nose with the rolling steps of the horse beneath her. It's a good day, good enough to risk tackling the rigors of a saddle so she can accompany Margot on her afternoon ride; the twinge in her spine isn't agonizing but merely sharply uncomfortable.
It's for this reason that Margot put her on the steady chestnut gelding, the one with the smoothest gait, and kept the feistier gray stallion for herself. He has as many muscles as a Michelangelo painting and likes to break into a jarring trot without warning, all arching neck and stomping hooves, a failed dressage horse with all the talent but none of the discipline. Margot always eases him back with a calm, authoritative hand, unyielding as iron but never cruel, never even startled. She said once that she likes a little headstrong liveliness in her mount. Nurtures it as proof of spirit, unbroken. Soul untamed.
Alana's always been a creature of evolution. Adapting to stressors. Even when hardening her heart and cladding herself in the cold armor of ruthlessness it was a reaction to betrayal. An excising of her own compassionate gullibility, a calculated rebirth, whereas Margot seems as though she's always remained fundamentally unchanged, a surface riddled with brittle cracks keeping safe an indomitable core buried unreachably deep within, adamant endurance holding her together right from her very conception in a womb already poisoned by the miasma of her predecessor. And yet they are, the both of them, survivors. Ineffably identical.
“Head in the clouds?” Margot calls, pulling up alongside her. The massive gray gives her almost half a foot on Alana, and she sways in easy synchronization with him, long braid swinging free down her tanned back, sharp, knife-sculpted shoulder blades and the straight line of her spine bared by her halter top. A fine layer of dirt is just beginning to collect over the high shine of her black riding boots, and Alana allows her gaze to linger a touch along the flex of Margot's thighs beneath the sinfully sleek, formfitting cloth of her breeches on the way back up to her face, and then further up, to the sky.
“It would be if there were any clouds to be had,” Alana says.
Margot tips her head back to likewise consider the spotless blue above them, raising a hand to shade her eyes and peering between the cracks of her fingers, sunlight falling in warped stripes over her face as she squints. This is her relaxed, with neither threat nor expectation trapping her beneath the boot heel of a predetermined, oppressive role. She seems more saturated with color than when they first met, out here in the open air, magnetically hale and vibrant, the pinch of her large, expressive eyes and the new tawny undertone to her complexion, the unguarded looseness to her limbs and the casual slept-in sloppiness of her braid, all imparting a nagging impression of feral confidence.
“Would you look at that. Not a one,” Margot drawls thoughtfully, before drawing herself back down and taking up the reins with both hands again as the gray tries to take advantage of her preoccupation to speed up. Alana laughs at the seeming jauntiness of his attempt, the snort and shake of his head as his rider effortlessly regains control.
It's something to behold when Margot dons her helmet and takes him through the course at full speed, lifted off the saddle and bent over his neck, petite and dark against the pale, dappled bulk of her eager would-be warhorse, poised so lightly it seems as though she may take flight at any moment. One time the gray's neck rammed into her chin as she had him make a leap and Alana's heart stopped until the gray came to a halt and she saw Margot uncurl from her defensive position of pain, gingerly palpating her chin as she dismounted. She'd had a livid, puffy splotch of a bruise which didn't fade for weeks and she would grin every time Alana stared at it for too long in concern, would gasp when Alana kissed and bit at it. Refused to cover it with makeup, as though she were proud.
An old baby-blue pickup trundles rounds the bend ahead of them and Alana falls behind Margot as they sidle single-file to the right side of the dirt road, leaving the left clear for the truck to pass. It's the same color as the sky, like a piece of it broke free and transformed from two-dimensional into three, the interior a cockpit of amber shadow. There's a familiarity which strikes Alana out of nowhere when she sees the driver's arm draped out the open window, the particular angle his hand lifts at when he sends them a polite, perfunctory wave of acknowledgment, but then he's passing them and the cloud of dust and hot wind in the vehicle's wake has risen over her, pushing it out of her mind.
She pulls a crisp cotton handkerchief from her pocket and covers her mouth and nose until the air is clear again.
“A little farther?” Margot asks, bringing the gray over to pace in a circle around Alana's chestnut, grinning hopefully.
“Shark,” Alana remarks, laughing, twisting in the saddle to watch her and then pressing her knuckles into the stab of pain in her lower back as if to push it back in and hold it in place. “I'll last at least another quarter mile before I'll have to head back.”
“Homebody,” Margot volleys back, because she craves the openness and solitude of the outdoors with a strength Alana can't always understand, probably has ever since long horse rides were the only thing which would let her stay out for hours in the quasi-safety of the wooded side of the Verger estate and away from the toxic bosom of her family's mansion, and they've talked with each other, about how Alana wants Margot to disregard the limits her body's injury puts on her, how she'd rather Margot tease her than flutter over her in concern.
“You're free to go on alone, you know,” Alana says.
“No I'm not,” Margot says, affectionately dismissive, and nothing else.
Morgan runs up to them after Applesauce when they finally get back, his clumsy sprint easily outstripped that of their overexcited dog's, a sheet of paper flapping in his hand and the tutor trailing sedately after them both.
He's drawn them a family portrait, all three of them together in crayon and watercolor, holding hands and smiling. Margot hoists him onto her hip and exclaims in suitably impressed tones as she pores over every detail of his art, bouncing him higher every now and then to keep him from slipping as Applesauce circles around them, tongue lolling and claws clicking as she slowly settles down. Morgan's getting too large to hold up for long, now, his legs dangling down almost to Margot's knees and the hems of his pants hiked up to reveal his meticulously turned-down socks, rolled carefully in half above the matte salmon-pink Mary Janes he'd selected himself after wandering into the girl's aisle of the shoe store and which they'd bought despite the apparently offended sensibilities of the clerk and her sputtering defense of gendered clothing, her argument swiftly and mercilessly overturned.
Alana cards her hand through Morgan's hair and he tips his head back to look at her upside down, making sure that she's paying attention, seeking approval and beaming when he sees it in her face. Bright and uncomplicated. He takes after Alana, an intelligent, sensitive, and somewhat serious child, and whenever he sees either of them after they've been gone even a short time he seems to glow with enthusiasm. Always creating, always reaching for connection.
The day Morgan was born and she handed him to Margot for the first time, and Margot stared and stared, reverent tears welling in her eyes as if she were witness to a miracle, was the happiest moment of Alana's life.
“I can't help but half-believe we've planted the seed of our own destruction,” Margot had said one night, soon after the insemination, her head resting on the as-yet flat plane of Alana's stomach, the fall of her hair tickling Alana's side and her ear to Alana's flesh as though listening for the fitful slumber of blossoming fetal life.
“Destruction isn't so far off from salvation,” Alana mused, not quite reassuringly. “Just look what we did to get here.”
Margot scraped her nails up in a curve along Alana's ribs, a little harder with each pass, going from ticklish to stinging. “I'll never regret having done it. I'd do it again. I will do it again, if I have to.”
“And if it comes to that I'll help you. But it won't.” She stilled Margot's hand, lacing their fingers together and pulling them over to rest beside Margot's cheek. “Because this child is ours. Not Mason's. Not anyone's but ours, our baby, our little boy, and he'll never, ever get ahold of him now.”
Margot's breathing was a damp fluttering of soft heat against Alana's wrist, and though she couldn't see it Alana knew that Margot was staring off into the dark, unblinking, with that peculiar crocodilian opacity glazing the sea-glass green of her eyes. It seemed a long time before Margot moved to mold her lips against Alana's knuckles and then release her hand so that she could slide her palm flat against Alana's stomach, fingers outstretched, pressing slightly as if she wanted to sink into Alana's body, wanted to touch the pulsing, velvety-wet viscera packed so neatly within.
“I trust you,” Margot had murmured, and from that Alana was made to understand that Margot had never trusted anyone else as she did Alana, and that, before Alana, she'd thought she never would.
Trust. That's what she sees so unwaveringly in their son whenever he sees them and smiles. That's what her and Margot's relationship is built on, its foundation that first leap of faith, their alliance in the face of shared danger. Trust in each other and in the future. In the belief that they have a future, that their sins and past missteps won't catch up to them and cut the threads of their fate short with an indifferent snip of golden shears.
Existence, love... all tenuous, sometimes fleeting things. But, Alana thinks, studying the crude but whimsical simplicity of Morgan's domestic tableau... well worth the hope.
She wakes to Applesauce barking stridently from the garage and Morgan's small hand insistently shaking her shoulder and his face very close to hers as he whispers over the hypnotically echoing music of the ambient electronica sleep CD drifting softly from the master bedroom's sound system, a harsh urgency in his high, piping voice, “Mom, there's someone in the dining room.”
Alana's blood instantly runs cold with adrenaline, a sensation like ice water rushing through her veins all the way from her prickling scalp to her toenails, and in a burst of movement she kicks the covers from the bed entirely, fumbling for the smartphone on the nightstand and shoving it against Margot's chest as she rouses beside them, still flailing after the sheets, half-asleep. Alana also summarily shoves Morgan against Margot's chest as soon as she's upright and has caught the phone, blinking owlishly in the dim near-dawn light, but even as she clutches Morgan to her she does not scream, doesn't make any sound of terror at all. Fear is too familiar a companion to disrupt her composure.
“Call help and get to the panic room,” Alana orders, a sharp hiss with barely any breath behind it, and then Margot does try to say something, makes a grab for Alana's arm but Alana tears herself free and slips from the bed and out the door, her feet light over the carpet and her fingertips buzzing. She has to remind herself not to hold her breath, sprints on her tiptoes to the entryway to retrieve Morgan's metal baseball bat when she realizes the handgun is still locked in the safe in the master bedroom. She should go back and get it. Should go lock herself in the panic room with her family after getting it, wait for the policía in relative safety.
But she knows who it is. The only person it would be. And her traitorous feet carry her without conscious will to the doorway of the dining room, palms sweating around the grip of the baseball bat as she lifts it over her shoulder, ready, her steps faltering as she rounds the corner and comes to a dumbfounded stop right there, in full view, no advantage of surprise and no attack, because there he is. Back from the dead after all, straightening from the row of white candles he's finished lighting on the dining table and smiling warmly at her as he shakes out the match with a graceful, absent flick and sets it down. Marking her focus, he extends his arms parallel to the table, hands palm-up and his elbows crooked down so as to hold them slightly bowed in a calculated pose of benevolent iconoclasm, the graciously inclined carriage of his head a perfect mimicry of a humble saint's.
“It is good to see your bravery is as unhampered by wisdom as ever, Alana,” Hannibal says, and even with bleached hair hacked close to his scalp and a full, grizzled silver beard obscuring his jaw, the cold, deep pits of his eyes are exactly the same, as is his voice, a deep tide of thunder poetry resonating in the worn and torn calcifications of her battered battle-scarred bones.
He's on the other side of the room, the table between them. She raises the bat, swiveling to present a smaller target area as she chokes up on the grip and scans for any sign of a weapon on his person and finds none, sucks in air to say something.
“Backhanded compliment, much?” Will chides from Hannibal's side, and Alana flinches, hard, words dying in her throat at his voice as well, at how she hadn't seen him behind Hannibal at all until he spoke, swathed as he is in the tremendous cloak of Hannibal's shadow. He's turned away, tracing the shape of the bronze stag statue gleaming on the side table beside him, his fingertips pattering in a little nervous dance over the antler tines. His hand is just far enough out beyond Hannibal's shadow to catch the candlelight, and it suddenly seems like those, the very tips of his fingers, are the only parts of him which are solid, the only things anchoring him here. An apparition so tenuously tethered to the realm of the corporeal that he threatens to slip silently away with nary a sigh of effort at any moment.
Rather like the dubious persistence of Alana's continued wellbeing in Hannibal's presence.
The bodyguards have yet to appear, and while the private security they employ is valued for discretion this would be pushing it. Either they've been paid off or they're dead.
Probably dead.
“You didn't call ahead,” Alana says.
“Sorry,” says Will, actually managing to come across as somewhat abashed. Hannibal lowers his arms, leans forward to splay his fingertips on the table and rest his weight on them. This, worryingly, puts him in position to vault straight over the table towards her should he so desire. Alana decides to visualize his smug face as a baseball should worst come to worst. “We just wanted a chance to talk to you.”
“And that's all you want to do?” Alana asks. She's trying not to let her knees lock in case she needs to run but they feel shaky already, unsteady as a newborn fawn's. Her sweaty hands are starting to itch from how tightly they're clenched, the way dead, moist things deprived of air dream of rot. “Talk?”
Will tilts his head, and then turns it sharply, zeroing in on Margot as she comes through the doorway with her arms up in a textbook-perfect isosceles stance, on the flashy, malevolent gleam of the nickel-plated revolver coming up to aim at Hannibal.
Alana sees Hannibal tense in preparation, readying himself to leap, and the gun seems very close by, so close that she can note with an oddly detached hyper-clarity that the hammer is cocked, that Margot's knuckles are standing out against her skin, that she's squeezing the trigger, millimeters away from firing into Hannibal's chest. In the strained corner of her eye Will moves, grabbing the neck of the stag statue and hefting it in a brutally short, economic arc.
Alana makes another instinctive, foolhardy decision.
She drops the bat and takes urgent hold of Margot's wrist, transferring her moment of restraint into Margot, and Margot hesitates just enough to ease up on the trigger as the base of the statue connects with a solid thunk to the back of Hannibal's head.
The bat hits the fine hardwood floor with a hollow clang, Hannibal crumpling into an ignominious heap immediately afterwards. There is no gunshot.
Margot, otherwise completely still, uncurls her finger from the trigger to instead rest it straight alongside the guard.
Applesauce has fallen quiet, listening to their voices.
“Again, sorry for dropping by unannounced,” Will says, into the stiff pall of silence. He lowers the stag onto the table, lining its thick pedestal base up carefully with the discarded match. Its high bronze head gazes out at the dining room with dumb serenity. After a moment of consideration Will picks the charred match up and slides it into his shirt pocket for absolutely no discernible reason. He can't be that low on fresh matches. “Do you have any duct tape? Maybe in the kitchen under the sink?” His speculation as to where the Verger-Bloom household may store their duct tape carries a strong intimation that he has, on prior occasions, had cause to go rooting through strangers' homes in search of something with which to tie people up. Best not to dwell.
“Silk rope in the bedroom,” Alana offers.
“Silk rope?”
“We're a young, affectionate couple with a dynamic and fulfilling love life,” says Alana, without missing a beat, brain-to-mouth filter nowhere to be found. She doesn't... think she meant that as a joke, but she's reverted into some kind of professorial oversharing, nothing to hold back her analytical intellect from spilling brute honesty from an unguarded tongue, defenses razed. Her brain feels like it wants to leak out her mouth, her heart likewise liquefied, a magma jumble of intense not-quite-relief, dire dread transmuted into a no less debilitating, shivery sort of suspense. She doesn't know how she's standing.
“Silk. And... no duct tape?” He sounds more disbelievingly scandalized at the lack of the tape than at the presence of the rope.
“Silk,” Alana confirms.
Will makes a flicking gesture of either apology or dismissal. Hannibal groans from beneath the table, sign enough of trouble to incentivize Alana's swift retrieval of the rope.
She knocks on the hidden panic room door at the back of the closet before she leaves the bedroom, rapping out the pattern for Caution, stay hidden.
A diminutive fist taps more quietly back: Okay. Be safe.
Love you, Alana adds, knuckles stinging against wood paneling, layered as it is over several inches of tempered steel. She rips herself away before she can listen for Morgan's reply.
Upon her return Will is fiddling uneasily with the tie holding his hair up in its haphazard bun and Margot has not moved an inch, her arms corded and quivering with strain. Though she finally uncocks the hammer and keeps her finger from the trigger as Alana moves into range she does not her eyes off of their intruders, seems barely even to blink, her stare wide and hard and empty as a doll's even as Will helps Alana to hoist Hannibal into a chair and hold his drowsy body in place as she secures him to it, hands, wrists, arms, legs, and torso all webbed in expert, intricate knot work, wrinkling his suit. She's half-certain he's started playing possum at some point, and she fumbles numbly over the rope in anticipation of a sudden burst of force, dreading an inevitable counterattack, but, wonder of wonders, Hannibal is either truly unconscious or complying with Will's not-so-subtle wishes and allows her to tie him down.
“You didn't call for help?” Alana asks Margot as she's finishing up. She starts to check that the bindings are loose enough not to chafe or cut off circulation on autopilot care but recoils when she feels the first static-electric shock of Hannibal's skin beneath her fingers, revoltingly normal, human. She's not ready to acknowledge the offensive reality of his palpable physical presence yet.
Margot takes a long time to answer, and when she finally does her voice is detached, remote. “I figured it'd be easier to dispose of any corpses without law enforcement sniffing around.”
“Ah,” Alana says.
“Smart,” Will adds approvingly, leaning an unsympathetic arm on Hannibal's shoulder to support his weight as Hannibal groans with ceremonial piteousness and begins to make a punctilious show of rousing.
“Your swing was perhaps a tad harder than necessary, was it not, my dear?” he asks Will after a few labored moments, wincing, his chin still drooping onto his chest and his brow furrowed with pain. It is possible he may not be entirely faking his distress.
Will scrubs a rough hand over Hannibal's cropped hair, ruffling it over his injury and causing Hannibal to flinch away. Will's touch immediately goes softer in response, combing almost apologetically over his scalp. The easy physical contact is almost unnerving, instigated as it is by Will, a person Alana had only ever known to be repulsed by human nearness unless under extreme emotional duress, but here he is treating Hannibal like an unavoidable symbiotic entity, an extension of his own body too inextricably close and melded to himself to have any boundaries to respect or any otherness to defend against. “Snap decision. Darling.” The endearment thrown in as a call-and-response rebuke of Hannibal's own. “The important thing is to prove we're not a threat.”
“An impossible aim,” Margot says venomously. Still statue-still; Margot Verger-Bloom, Resolute Woman In Silk Slip With Handgun, 2017, marble, 64 inches, On loan from Valhalla.
“Fair,” Will concedes. “But. Like I said, we're here to talk. Not to kill you. We want to clear things up and put your concerns to... rest.”
“The way you put Dr. Du Maurier to rest?” Alana asks, as she meant to earlier. The woman had dropped of the face of the planet, house spotless of forensics, belongings all scrupulously in place, clothes in drawers and food in the fridge and doors locked. Her disappearance had prompted a brief resurgence in Lecter-related conspiracy theories and had put Alana and Margot on guard for a while, but months passed and the furor died down and Alana and Margot relaxed, laid their fears to rest.
Graham and Lecter were doubtlessly dead, after all. And what need have the living for fear of the dead?
Zombies, chirps some obnoxious, intruding little voice in the back of her mind. She duly strangles it.
“Bedelia was a different case,” Will says.
“How?” Alana demands levelly.
“I wanted her dead,” Will replies, just as levelly.
As one, Alana and Margot look at Hannibal.
He looks back with a beatific smile upon his lips, and, after a moment, his eyebrows twitch upwards with salacious, meaningful precision.
Alana feels her own lips twist in revulsion.
She'd tried for so long to uphold the highest possible standard of ethics. Her field, she'd felt, required a barrier of morality to keep oneself in check, to protect one's charges against exploitation, to help oneself to fight off the temptation to dig a little too deeply into another's mind or willfully misinterpret facts and wrongfully influence subjects, needed a code keep oneself from the sort of oily, self-aggrandizing intellectual corruption which Chilton so heavily favored in every garishly daring line of his journal publications and later, lurid books. She'd fancied herself a bastion, her gut feelings of right and wrong her lodestone as she viewed the world through optimistically rose-tinted lenses while pragmatically holding tight to reality, a balancing act at which she strove to excel. She'd been adamant in this pursuit, outraged when others strayed from the path of the just on which she walked, but forgiving of those who realized they erred, and sorrowful, not spiteful, of those stubborn souls who failed to repent even in the face of all her efforts.
She'd been a force for change. Righteous, yet loving. Good at reading people. Her first impressions were rarely far off, and she found it easy to bond with others. Too easy, sometimes, as it was with Will, but she always considered herself objective and practical enough to distance herself again if needs must. Able to keep things cordial. Professional. Pleasant.
Perhaps above all, she'd been loyal.
Loyal to those first, and in one case, fatally mistaken, impressions. Loyal to her own sense of enlightenment. Loyal to her hubris, to her misplaced trust, to the concept of a good and honest friend; loyal, almost, unto death.
One constructive thing to have come out of utter disillusionment: she was a free agent now, a clear-eyed mercenary serving only herself and her immediate beloveds and whatever incarnation of justice best suits her whims. There's no longer any need for her to curb her silent censure or her morbid fascination, to keep the temperature of her heart solicitously heated to at least lukewarm and her curiosity conscientiously confined to first gear as she floats down from on high to dispense her insistent, one-track wisdom and while holding herself back from shaking the ignorant by the shoulders and screaming in their faces as they disregard her, as she is dismissed despite all her politeness and confidence and intelligence, all that shit she told herself to cling to again and again proven all for naught.
Fuck it. Sometimes she's wrong, and some other times people aren't worth convincing.
Or, in other words: Alana is not nice anymore.
“So Will's the one wearing the pants in the relationship,” she says, scornfully sharp, a baited hook.
Hannibal affects patronizingly lofty disappointment. “Being a woman in a relationship with another woman yourself, Alana, as well as being highly educated in social mores and pejoratives pertaining to gender and sexuality, I would have hoped that you would know better than to indulge in the application of false heteronormative standards to queer relationships which are by their very nature and definition exempt from such. This is, of course, not even taking into consideration the sexism and cissexism inherent in an idiom which implies that traditionally masculine clothing and by extension behavior determi—”
New tack. “Shut up and tell me exactly why Will doesn't wish us dead and why you'd listen to him or Margot is going to shoot you.” Margot dips her chin at Alana's clipped interruption of Hannibal's attempted soapboxing, sharp and assenting.
He regards them thoughtfully for a long moment, tormented by some powerful, petty inner temptation, lips pursing slowly in the manner of a man whose restraint is about to fail him in favor of being a smugly obtuse little shit.
“Shut up,” he asks with infernal innocence, eyes twinkling, “or tell you? I cannot reasonably be expected to simultaneously accomplish both.”
The revolver's double-action, so cocking back the hammer is a convenience, not a prerequisite, to firing. Margot therefore only needs to bother with slipping her index finger in place against the trigger before she's advancing with swift, menacing strides, halting and visibly refraining from committing violence upon Hannibal's person only because she's neared too close to the table to comfortably retain her strategic advantage. And because Will just as swiftly yanks Hannibal's chair back from the other side so as to give himself enough room to bodily insert himself between Hannibal and Margot's line of fire, the maneuver brisk and businesslike and hard enough to make the candles gutter and to seemingly give Hannibal whiplash, Will's mouth a sour, resignedly put-upon line.
“He'll do the shutting up,” he says, half promise and half threat, “I'll do the telling.”
“Yeah, that sounds best,” Margot agrees tersely.
Hannibal tips his head back and rolls his neck with a rueful smirk and an audible crack of vertebrae, his Adam's apple standing out like a knot of wood from the sinuous chestnut arch of his throat.
Alana becomes acutely and sickeningly aware that she's felt that Adam's apple beneath her lips, the bobbing undulation of it when he swallowed. The memory, as it always does, inflames her with subzero fury, her gorge rising.
It had taken every last ounce of her willpower not to strap him into an electric chair for that once he'd been given over to her loving custody at the BSHCI, for the tender, attentive ministrations he'd lavished on her, the long, fluid, knowing thrusts of his hips, for having the cunning temerity to touch her with the irrevocably sullied, blood-wet stain of his lying cannibal's mouth. But by then she'd already had her revenge; him, bereft of freedom, at her mercy. That was all she'd fought for, stooped so low for: recompense by way of power, as personal and intimate a violation as had been inflicted upon her, the security in knowing the key to her nightmare monster's pretty little cage was in her own capable hand.
Until he'd had the gall to slip away and “die.”
The twisted tangles of attraction and manipulation and consent bind all four of them together, chafing and ugly.
She still remembers how sweet and desperate Will had been when they'd kissed, frayed down into nothing but soft, exhausted edges and frazzled static-electric sparks of neuroticism, the night he'd heard a nonexistent animal scratching and crying inside his chimney and thought to call her, and how close she'd been to giving in and taking what he offered, letting him use her as a crutch if only for the fleeting reward of pleasure and connection. In the end she'd cared for him too much for that.
She remembers Margot confessing to her that she'd used Will in her first attempt at a child, sought him out and commiserated with him and allowed him to believe that she wanted him for himself and not for her own basic and basically duplicitous reproductive aims, sexless sex, a subliminally calculating means to an end which she'd told Alana she hadn't premeditated, hadn't planned... she'd just been flailing in the dark for any feeling, any possibility, of hope, and had blindly struck upon Will, a fellow resentful victim, in all his thorny, vulnerable, plaid-patterned glory. Remembers Margot admitting, quietly, that she hadn't regretted it, despite Will's initial bitterness, his buried hurt. She only mourned her unborn baby's disturbing, drawn-out death and all the other obscene injuries she'd suffered to appease Mason's bottomless hunger to bring her under his control, to glut himself on her humiliation and pain.
Would that spontaneous deceit, that formlessly conceived falsehood, sex with undisclosed motivations lurking beyond the heaving flesh of the physical, be considered rape?
And if not, then what was to be made of the wrong Hannibal had committed against Alana?
What the fuck was Will thinking, opening either his heart or his legs or, as was apparent, fucking both to such a man when such tragic travesties lay between... between her and him, between him and him? What the fuck.
She shies away from this convoluted mire of remorse and desire and disgust and refocuses on Will, here in the present, standing steadfast as Hannibal's willing human shield, the angle of his shoulders canted like even now he's feeling a solacing pull, like Hannibal is his center of gravity, like they're celestial bodies caught in the spiraling wells of each others' influence. He holds himself, Alana realizes, as she holds herself around Margot.
He's watching her. Guileless yet unreadable as he ever is. Drinking in all her secrets, her shames and her horrors, following her train of thought and passively observing the glimpses which can be caught through every flashing window on every passing railway car and then reflecting it all back.
He opens his mouth, eyes fixed on hers, and begins his sentence with a calm and weary sigh which breaks into a smooth, solid monotone as shale cleaves from a sheer rock face, the scales of slate clattering far below. “I wanted to see you and your son.”
They stare at him. Margot has gone glacially hostile with alarm, beginning again to quiver with a rigidly contained tempest of enormous emotion, but Alana feels as though the pool of Will's stillness has expanded to envelope her, and looking into his shadowed eyes across the room it is as though, in this moment and this alone, she, too, can so deftly divine others' truths.
In him she sees only wistfulness and honesty, agonized as all Will's emotions are agonized, a smothered, hollow miscarriage of an experience which overtakes him and sends him stumbling to in turn take over his own apathy with some bereft approximation of motivation. He would be an utterly static being without this ouroboros of dispossession, even interspersed as it is with occasional eye-for-an-eye surges of spite, and it makes an odd sort of sense that, eventually, his cyclical evolution would have circled him back to this particular aspect of his past, back to Alana and Margot and his nascent parental longing. Back to the ever-elusive concept of family.
The problem with this odd little quest of his is that there's something he's still left unsaid, another layer lying obscured beneath his too-concise explanation, and, additionally and of greater importance, that he's chosen Alana's family to fixate on, and has swept an indulgent serial killer with a penchant for grudges along with him.
“Why can't you and Hannibal adopt?” she quips, because really now. If they'd just deigned to pick up some homeless orphan off of the street and contented themselves with sending a nice postcard in Hannibal's distinctively elegant handwriting then all of this could have been avoided.
Someone might still fucking die.
“We presently have a nomadic and occasionally risky lifestyle not suited to the needs of a growing child,” Hannibal says, all chidingly aloof disapproval. “Additionally, Will very much wished to see how you and your lovely wife were getting along since you elected to set aside your distinguished position at the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.”
“I was also reminded of missing you when we streamed your TED Talk,” says Will diffidently.
“You made some incisive points on sexism and victim blaming in media coverage. I especially appreciated your foray into widespread sensationalism and romanticization of trauma and abuse, and the direct harm these normalized portrayals subsequently cause to individual victims. An excellently urgent, humanizing delivery,” Hannibal commends her. “Although there could have been more time allocated to the discussion such detrimental cultural influences play in supposedly unbiased news reporting.”
“He wanted you to rail CNN for bringing on Lounds' tabloid-trash ass as an expert consultant,” Will translates. “He also liked your aubergine pantsuit. Said it was of 'exquisite tailoring' and that he happened to have 'an especial partiality for the color.'”
Margot, infinitesimally less uneasy given Alana's confident flippancy and the ensuing redirection of Hannibal and Will's attention towards Alana, rolls her eyes.
Alana is never doing another TED Talk again.
“What is it you want out of seeing us?” she presses. “Out of seeing our son.” A protective finality is contained within her use of the possessive.
“Does everything have to be an accomplishment?” Will asks.
“If you're here to take him, or to hurt her, then by God either you'll tell me now or I'll find out anyways and I. Will. Kill. You,” Margot snarls, sudden and savage.
Hannibal is leaning precariously to the side, trying to frown at her from around Will's torso. The ropes and the chair strain audibly, a drawn-out, preposterous creaking which increases petulantly as he tips further over. Margot twitches the barrel of the gun towards him, causing Will to notice and wave Hannibal fully back behind him. Hannibal rights himself with an aggrieved air, trying to catch Alana's eye so as to beg her sympathy or something else which would be completely and horrendously out of the question. Alana ignores him. The aggrieved aura strengthens.
“He was messing with you,” Will says, and it takes a moment for Alana to hear what he's said, to realize he's said it to her. For her to process what this might mean. “He never outright promised to kill you. Just implied it, let you jump to conclusions. That's also why I wanted to do this in person, and why it had to be you we came for, your family. So you'd know we meant it. We're going to leave, and leave you alive. All of you. You'll make it out of this alive, Alana.”
“Provided everybody continues to treat each other with civility,” Hannibal amends facetiously, and Will actually swivels halfway around to smack Hannibal's shoulder with the back of his hand.
“Not funny,” Will scolds, very firmly and without hope.
Hannibal shrugs, unfazed.
“Do you believe him?” Margot asks her. Leaving the final call up to her judgment.
It makes sense, now, with all the pieces revealed and in place. It was a confluence of reasons which led them here, not just Will's paternal pangs and any vestiges of fondness he'd once held for Alana, for either of them, but also his sense of restitution, his distaste for leaving others to labor under the burden of such a misapprehension. Especially since they are parents, with a child whom they cherish and who would be harmed by their deaths.
She's not certain how Hannibal could have been convinced to tell them, or even if he had not, in fact, been planning to enact violence upon her before Will was able to change his mind. Both possibilities aligned with Hannibal's dear love of playing with people, dropping them like rats into a maze to see which path they'd take. He has nothing so great to lose by letting Alana live. He would gain Will and Margot's regard, Margot's specifically meaning that she would not then bring all of the vast Verger resources bearing down on Hannibal's head in vengeance, and Hannibal would not have to kill Margot, whom he harbors no ill will towards, to prevent such.
For her part Alana has never treated Hannibal poorly or, god forbid, rudely. Not before she knew, and not after; and though she'd allied herself with Mason to drag Hannibal all the way back into the states and to justice, Margot, the necessary killing of Mason, had superseded all of that, and she had let Hannibal go in its favor. It was Hannibal who had given himself up to the law, and therefore to the BSHCI, which Alana had run with nothing less than professionalism, giving him a lavishly comfortable, even a privileged environment, magazine subscriptions and mail correspondence and phone calls, softcover books and felt-tipped markers and graphite and crayons, loose sketch paper and even fine ingredients and plastic cookware at times, and she had only ever taken it all away when he had transgressed in some distinct, tangible manner, when he was withholding information, or sending a murderer to darken the Foster-Grahams' door.
There was little respect possible to accord in such a setting as the hospital, unavoidable, clinical indignities par for the course for the incarcerated, but she'd still gone out of her way to provide him his due, taken pains to remove her own petty anger out of any equation used to calculate his care and treatment. Even if she had at times allowed herself the satisfaction of condescension, of a brand akin to that which she'd been subjected to by him, the type she'd once seen as suggestions of common sense and leniency, as how he'd urged her to forgive Will's deluded proclamations of innocence in the face of his seemingly incontrovertible guilt, the way he'd said “Don't be brave, Alana,” after having already taken the bullets from her gun. A courteous facade of agency.
She thinks for a moment that it is this kind of facade, this kind of lie, which is being presented to her now. Just another illusion, misdirection to hide the knife coming for her back.
Except: this is Will saying this, Will's doing. Will's design.
He knocked Hannibal out so they could tie him up, and they accepted this immediately and unquestioningly as an honest action, as something he would do and which they could go along with; even if it was merely a tactic to assuage their hostility it had been a move which prioritized their concerns over Hannibal's short-term wellfare.
He is untrustworthy, and far from innocent. She's allowed hurt to befall him, has in the past failed him both inadvertently and deliberately. There is no real way to know that he won't decide to withdraw his mercy, or whether he is already so changed that he has none now, no way to know that he won't ever betray her as others have.
And yet. It was not for Margot alone that she loosed Hannibal upon Muskrat Farm, and while Will is not one to keep a lasting account of slights and debts, he has never met kindness with cruelty. Even corrupted as he is, as they all are, he has his shred of decency; he is not a man who would make a widow of her wife nor an orphan of her son. He can't be.
Faith is such a pernicious, vicious thing.
“I believe him,” Alana says.
It is a time before Margot releases a long, steadying breath, before she looks over, studying Alana's face, her posture, looks back at Will, staring her down in all his defensive earnestness. She speaks into the silence, to Alana. “I trust you.”
Surprise(!): another manip for my @fandomtrumpshate winner @jonibeloni, for their incredible (and incredibly intense) fic Spare Parts.
I got the sweetest email from Joni, thanking me and also mentioning how nice it was to have art for Suits, which is a relatively small fandom. It made me realise how spoiled I am in the Sherlock fandom, and I wanted to give a little something extra to my bidder & their fandom.
THIS FIC! I don’t watch Suits, I had never even heard of the show before getting this commission, so I don’t know these characters at all, BUT THIS FIC. I was browsing Joni’s fics last night and started reading Spare Parts and then somehow it was 2 am (0_o) I knew I had do a cover of this one. If you’re in the Suits fandom, I hope you check it out because it is A Lot.
FINALLY posting my @fandomtrumpshate commission for @jonibeloni ~ a cover for their fantastic period Suits fic A Discerning Eye ♥ So sorry it took me an age ~ I hope the Suits fandom enjoys the manip, and checks out this epic 19th century post-Civil War fic (talk about suit porn!!! *^_^*)
