Abigail Hobbs (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
versusnurture) wrote2014-01-02 07:38 pm
versusnurture) wrote2014-01-02 07:38 pm
Entry tags:
- & i want & i want & i want,
- & sometimes she doesn't lose time,
- ] or did you hunt,
- a hundred motherfuckers,
- always the possibility of murder later,
- ben & the blue lady,
- ben is hers now,
- can't tell me nothing,
- full-on straightjacket-&-chains loses,
- hannibal bannanibal is watching,
- here are my scars,
- i have been very wicked,
- i have seen sights & been scared,
- i hope i shall be better,
- i will speak the truth,
- oh god alana,
- shoot him every minute of his life,
- thank you dillon,
- the brave face
eleven ♢ spam, private + open
spam } open
[The mask is secured in her room before she goes anywhere. She goes back to check on it frequently, bordering on obsessively, straightening it in its place of pride hung above her desk. She wonders what it's like to live life, day in, day out, in a few square feet, never allowed to breathe free air but through that grille. It's so much easier to imagine through Hannibal's eyes than Will's. She never imagined it would be.]
[She knew there was another man here who went by his name, but he never seemed real. Now - even though this artifact was never his - now it feels like a real, possible future.]
[What she doesn't do is lose time. She walks with even breath and utter confidence, anywhere and everywhere, feeling the simple joy of movement. She is afraid of nothing. She looks people in the eye, even if only for fleeting moments as she passes, and she doesn't even consider pulling a scarf on over the scar on her neck.]
spam } alana
[There's no way Alana doesn't have questions. Abigail doesn't feel obliged to protect many people, but Alana - she's been lied to all this time. Longer than Abigail was lied to. Hannibal was a colleague. And now . . .]
[There are probably worse ways to find out, but Abigail can't think of any. Besides death at his hands, anyway.]
[After a silent struggle with her conscience, she grabs the keys to Alana's room and hurries there, letting herself in before she can change her mind.]
spam } ben
[Eventually, she finds herself in the chapel. She has no question that Ben knows what's happened, or at least that something's happened. There was that brief moment of breathlessness, open for all to see on the network, and he'll have seen that even if he didn't watch her go with Dillon later.]
[She sits cross-legged in the pew and looks clear-eyed at the opposite wall. After quite a while - an hour, she thinks, maybe a little bit more - she sends him a message.]
Need your help with something. Not an emergency. You can walk.
[Then she turns the communicator off, lays it beside her, and waits.]
[The mask is secured in her room before she goes anywhere. She goes back to check on it frequently, bordering on obsessively, straightening it in its place of pride hung above her desk. She wonders what it's like to live life, day in, day out, in a few square feet, never allowed to breathe free air but through that grille. It's so much easier to imagine through Hannibal's eyes than Will's. She never imagined it would be.]
[She knew there was another man here who went by his name, but he never seemed real. Now - even though this artifact was never his - now it feels like a real, possible future.]
[What she doesn't do is lose time. She walks with even breath and utter confidence, anywhere and everywhere, feeling the simple joy of movement. She is afraid of nothing. She looks people in the eye, even if only for fleeting moments as she passes, and she doesn't even consider pulling a scarf on over the scar on her neck.]
spam } alana
[There's no way Alana doesn't have questions. Abigail doesn't feel obliged to protect many people, but Alana - she's been lied to all this time. Longer than Abigail was lied to. Hannibal was a colleague. And now . . .]
[There are probably worse ways to find out, but Abigail can't think of any. Besides death at his hands, anyway.]
[After a silent struggle with her conscience, she grabs the keys to Alana's room and hurries there, letting herself in before she can change her mind.]
spam } ben
[Eventually, she finds herself in the chapel. She has no question that Ben knows what's happened, or at least that something's happened. There was that brief moment of breathlessness, open for all to see on the network, and he'll have seen that even if he didn't watch her go with Dillon later.]
[She sits cross-legged in the pew and looks clear-eyed at the opposite wall. After quite a while - an hour, she thinks, maybe a little bit more - she sends him a message.]
Need your help with something. Not an emergency. You can walk.
[Then she turns the communicator off, lays it beside her, and waits.]
spam
[She knows it's Abigail - she's the only other person with keys - but Alana still has a look mixing surprise and confusion all in one go all the same. Abigail is, more or less, the last person she would expect to see.]
Abigail, hi.
[She doesn't bother with asking if everything is alright. There are quite a number of things that are not alright right now.]
spam
[It'd be a lie to say she had a speech prepared or anything like that. How do you explain this? How do even the most sane and stable of people explain something like this? How do they lay it out all in a line: this is how I was lied to, and how I lied to you in turn; this is how I was locked in place like a cog into another, how I was betrayed, this is how I died. How do you tell someone that you knew, you knew, and you didn't tell them? You let them lie for you.]
[She doesn't know. What she does know is that Alana should not have had to fight against Hannibal. Nobody fights Hannibal and wins.]
[Not yet, a little voice whispers. But someday. Someone will. She thinks of the mask.]
[She finds her voice.]
He was the man on the phone, Alana.
spam
[He lied about what happened with Nick Boyle. It hadn't really occurred to Alana as a negative thing though. He felt protective of her - or so Alana thought - why wouldn't he want to try and cover it up? He just did what he thought was best. He's human. He makes mistakes.]
[He used to be human to Alana. He used to make mistakes sometimes.]
[But now he lies and Alana doesn't know who or what to trust right now. She has Abigail Hobbs in her room ready to tell her whatever she wants to know most likely. It should be a truth that lightens the way Alana feels because it means Will is innocent. But that's not enough. This is so much worse.]
You killed Nick Boyle. But it wasn't Nick Boyle that hit me on the head, was it?
spam
[She swallows. She will not cry. She's cried enough. It's not her time right now. Alana - Alana's all alone, or thinks she is, and everything is a lie, and Abigail can't cry in front of her. Her eyes are wet but she's not going to cry, she swears, God, if she can just keep calm - she can.]
[She swallows again. Shakes her head.]
No, it wasn't Nick Boyle who - it wasn't. It was him. He did it. I needed help, and he -
[She pulls her hair over her shoulder instinctively, to cover up the scar, running her hands through it and through it until it doesn't even feel like a real texture anymore.]
He said no one would believe me. [She hadn't known what was happening. Everything was - red. Under her nails. In her hair. There was some on her cheek that she almost forgot to wash off because she thought it was a freckle. But she never threw up like they said you did in movies because she gutted him, she meant to do it, it was him or her, it was self-defense, but it wasn't.]
[It wasn't.]
[It was Hannibal.]
[She doesn't say I'm sorry.]
spam
[Hannibal was the man on the phone. He attacked Alana, covered up a murder. Those two things alone weigh so much heavier on her than knowing what he did to people here. She believed him to be a respected colleague, a close friend. Someone that she could rely on and trust with anything. That's why she gave the recommendation for Will to be under his care. Because she cared about Will and though she couldn't put herself in that position to watch over him in the way he needed to be, she thought she could trust Hannibal to do just that, professional agreements aside.]
[He lied about the call. He lied about Nick Boyle. There's one last piece of truth still left buried though Alana knows what it is without having to look it in the eyes.]
[Alana's knees start to buckle and she falls heavily into her chair again. She closes her eyes, resting her forehead on clasped hands a moment. Winston trots over and sticks his head in her lap and stays there for a few seconds before anxiously moving back to Abigail. Eventually, she opens them and looks up, but she doesn't look anywhere near Abigail, keeping her back to her.]
Who killed you, Abigail?
spam
[Hesitantly, she steps forward - not touching, but close enough to be reached out to if she's needed. Winston leans on her leg, but she doesn't lean down to scratch behind his ears. It's not her who needs comfort now.]
[Her voice is a brittle rasp, but she knows who and what and where she is, and she still isn't crying.]
Hannibal killed me.
spam
[Everything in her doesn't want to believe this. She wants to just write it off as another lie from Abigail, an attempt at manipulating her and distracting her from what she's really hiding. She would even settle for being angry that Abigail never said anything until now. But she can't. She knows from the sound in Abigail's voice that it's the most honest she's ever been with Alana about anything. And she knew that Hannibal had pulled all the strings. Fear, coercion, charm. Whatever it was, Abigail could hardly do anything he didn't approve of first.]
[Resting her forehead back down on her knuckles, Alana goes still and lets the words sit there in silence because she knows where this is leading her. She knows what it means and in some ways, this is so much harder to accept than Will. She cared about Will, she trusted him to a degree, she even had feelings for him. But her relationship to Will didn't have the years behind it, the blind trust. Will wasn't potentially feeding his victims to people he lead to believe he respected. Will also wasn't purportedly toying with and destroying human life as though everyone around him was hardly more than an ant.]
[Alana suddenly gets up from her desk and moves through her cabin to the kitchen. Opening up the fridge, she takes out each and every bottle of the beer Hannibal brewed for her. She wanted to just throw them on the ground and smash them. Anger at pain has that way of erasing some rational. But she won't do that in front of Abigail. It's not to set a better example or concern of what Abigail will think. Abigail is, mostly, forgotten while she's in the fridge. Alana just wants a clean break from all of this. She doesn't want to let Hannibal let her lose control any more than he's already taken from her. Starting now. She just lines them up on the counter and closes the fridge.]
[Opening the first bottle, she upends it down the drain.]
spam
[There's no way Abigail could know the significance of the beer in the fridge, but it seems to mean something important to Alana, so she doesn't interrupt. Not at first. She just watches, remembering the woman who read to her in her coma, who did her utmost to protect her despite her own disinterest in being protected, and comparing her to this woman here. Betrayal is an ugly thing, she thinks. She can't go near Hannibal anymore.]
[It feels, weirdly, like her parents are fighting.]
[She leans her head against a chair leg and sighs.]
spam
[Winston trots over to Alana, looking up with his sad eyes and Alana's happy for him that he doesn't understand most of what's going on. He just knows that two people in a room are upset and the man who took him in when others abandoned him was gone. She doesn't reach down to pet him, instead leaning back against the counter and folding her arms.]
I'm sorry, Abigail.
[For nothing in particular and for everything specific all at the same time. Alana's sorry for not seeing the truth, for not protecting her better. She's sorry that she has to see Alana like this. She has to decide whether or not she's sorry that Abigail has to be the one to tell her the truth. In the end, she decides she's not. It's better for Abigail that she be allowed to tell her side, to have her voice for a change.]
spam
[Her voice is soft, tentative. She's forgotten a little bit how to be genuinely gentle, which is what she wants to be with Alana now. But she's trying, at least. She doesn't think she's ever really considered Alana's feelings when they've spoken before. It's pretty messed up that this is what makes it feel right.]
I should be sorry. I should have trusted you instead of him. I know that now.
[Not that it makes as much of a difference as it should. SHe's still drawn to Hannibal. She still wants him to be proud of her. But she knwos the smart choice would have been to stick with Alana. She knows.]
spam
It can never be said he isn't persuasive.
[How was Abigail supposed to survive that? Or to see through it? She's young, inexperienced, and vulnerable. Hannibal preyed upon that because he knew Abigail didn't stand a chance. She would be easily manipulated and be whatever he wanted her to be in the exact moment he required her to be just that. Maybe he was creating a protege. Maybe he'd always intended for her to be the death knell in the case against Will. There's no telling.]
[Alana sets the second empty bottle down and looks over her shoulder at Abigail.]
Don't blame yourself, Abigail. He fooled everyone.
spam; wow those sure were some typos up there. heavens.
That's true, I guess. He did fool everyone. But he only ever fooled me halfway. The rest of the way, I fooled myself. At least at first.
I just wanted an ally. I should have picked a better one.
[Now she glances at the empty bottle. Does that make it feel better, she wonders, to have something concrete to get rid of? Some evidence of evil and wrongdoing to destroy?]
. . . Do you need help?
spam; idk what you are even talking about. /cough
[Help? Alana feels like she needs a lifesaver. She needs to scream. She needs someone to tell her this is just a bad joke. She needs to get away from here. But none of that will happen.]
Sure.
[She sets the empty second bottle beside the first.]
spam; thank you, benevolent crystal-god, for ignoring my failings
[But then again, she's been too cowardly to stand by Alana's side before - to let Alana stand by hers. Squaring her shoulders, she steps up to the counter and grabs the beer bottles, one in each hand. Then she moves around the kitchen, looking for the trash can. When she pulls it out from under the cabinet, she stares at it intently for a second, like if she blinks she loses. And maybe she does.]
[She holds one bottle back over her head. Her voice is quiet, intent.]
Fire in the hole.
[And she throws it into the bottom of the can with all her might. It crashes and cracks, though it doesn't shatter entirely. The noise is enough to make her jump, but she feels satisfied.]
[Even if Alana won't break things, Abigail is more than happy to.]
spam; you are perfect to me in your own way /waves hand
[Alana herself jumps at the first bottle. For just a brief second, the sound of the bottle crashing inside the trash can is the most real sound she's heard in her entire life. It sends a shock through her and makes everything feel more tangible - the good and the bad. She focuses for a time on just pouring the beer out, letting Abigail do what she wants in destroying the bottles, startling less and less with each.]
[Alana turns on the sink on the last bottle, washing down all remnants of the amber liquid before passing it off to Abigail to dispose of. It feels almost conspiratorial, the two of them there, destroying - in their own ways - Hannibal Lecter and his hold over them. Alana recognizes it's not permanent as she watches the water for a little while longer. Hannibal is, unfortunately, darkness. And darkness cannot be so easily staved off even if stepping into the light. She knows there's still the feeling of tendrils reaching and feeling out to pull her back in and suffocate her. But for right now, she's in the light and it's a safe and good place. She's got a small semblance of security and clarity.]
[Alana washes her hands. It's not necessary and she doesn't even particularly want to do it, but it's calming because it's normal. It's normal in the face of everything that isn't. She turns the water off and dries her hands, turning to face Abigail again. She doesn't know what's going through her mind and doesn't even pretend to attempt to right now. She has too much on her plate and she's happy to let Abigail feel whatever it is she wants to without being hindered by Alana's intrusiveness.]
If you ever need to come or stay here, Abigail, you're welcome to. That key isn't just for checking up on me.
spam
[She wants this. More than anything.]
[She glances up when Alana speaks, nods quickly.]
I know.
[She knew before. It's just that, before, she didn't have a reason. Today she did.]
[Tomorrow, the day after, it will be easier to talk herself into coming. But today was for Alana.]
[She cracks a smile, a weak one.]
Don't tell me you didn't need checking up on, though. Even you do, sometimes. Don't you? And I'm not your patient anymore.
spam
[Alana sets down the towel she used to try her hands and looks at Abigail. There's a small pause before Alana reaches out and places a hand on Abigail's shoulder. Her touch is light and gentle, nothing firm or guiding about it. Simply one hurt human reaching out and touching another. It's not exactly the sort of relationship Alana ever expected to have with Abigail Hobbs, but that doesn't make it a bad thing. They can rely on each other here. And though Abigail is not always stable nor the healthiest, even looking out for Abigail is better than nothing for Alana to fall back on right now.]
Thank you.
[Alana smiles a little stronger than Abigail and gives just a small squeeze to her shoulder before letting it go.]
spam
[She weaves her fingers together, wringing them gently to feel sensation.]
I know. But I'm my responsibility, and I still . . . feel responsible. For bad things that happened because of the choices I made. You not knowing is a bad thing happening.
[Will being locked up, that's a bad thing happening. It's not wholly her fault, but sometimes it feels like it is.]
[She shrugs, anyway, and stuffs her hands into her pockets.]
You're welcome, anyway. Sorry you have to depend on crazy.
spam
I'm not sure you can really call yourself crazy.
[And all things considered, Abigail is probably more sane than most people on the Barge.]
spam
I think I can call myself crazy if I feel crazy.
[She will draw a line between what she is and what she feels someday, maybe, but - there's no denying she's damaged. The mental equivalent of bones broken and never set, healed knotty and painful when it rains.]
spam
Fair enough. But you're not alone, Abigail. Not this time.
spam
I wasn't before. But now I know it.
. . . Thanks. I mean. I don't want to sound ungrateful.
spam
spam
[A small smile.]
I remember that about you. You don't get offended easily.
spam
[Get Alana fired up and you best duck and cover. Even Jack Crawford knew better than to push her too hard.]
spam
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