Nameless One, 17/18
Jun. 1st, 2012 02:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackofknavesTitle: Nameless One
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tripatch
Rating: R
Pairing: Hannibal/Face
Summary: Kinkmeme prompt, Face secretly takes meds for bipolar disorder. But for whatever reason, Face is no longer on his meds. Then the manic behavior starts, from getting into a mess of fights to needing to have tons of sex with strangers. Then when the emotional roller coaster stuff starts, Face begins cutting himself during the darkest times. His teammates notice, and try to help but Face is stubborn and refuses help, heavily in denial.
Additional Notes: Title taken from James Clarence Mangan's poem, "Nameless One".
Additional, Additional Notes: I've gone back and included this chart of chapters on previous posts and will update it regularly. I hope this makes things a little bit easier to navigate!
He isn’t going to see Dr. Malhotra again, he knows that, for reasons he hasn’t quite sorted out himself. They’re moving on soon and he doesn’t want to spill his guts to someone who will soon be nothing but a bumpy image in a rear-view mirror. The other reason is hidden at the bottom of his jeans pocket, an innocuous, terrifying piece of paper with a doctor’s lethargic scrawl written at the bottom. None of them ask, and he doesn’t offer, content to hide in the loft with Murdock and bark at the cats who wander too close, bring B.A. lunch when he forgets himself inside the innards of rust and rot, and when night finally sweeps in, sit on the front stoop with his hands braced behind him against the warped boards of the front porch.
“Hey,” Hannibal says softly, the screen door banging lightly closed behind him. Face glances up, pre-occupied, but offers a soft smile in return, moving over to make room when Hannibal sits down next to him. They stare at the evening for a moment, both ignoring the quiet shushing of katydids and frogs crying out for rain.
“Penny for ‘em?” Hannibal says, taking a sip from his mug.
“Nothing much. Just thinking.”
“About?”
Face pulls his arms around himself like he’s cold, even though there is only the barest hint of a breeze rustling through the weeds. “I miss it, sometimes,” he says, so low that Hannibal almost doesn’t catch it at all. He throws a flash-quick glance at Hannibal before turning away again. “I miss the music.”
“Music?” Hannibal asks. Face doesn’t talk much about what exactly goes through his head, just cleans up the aftermath and stubbornly insists that it’s fine. He wonders if Hannibal resents that sometimes.
“I heard music, the first time, before things got—bad,” Face says haltingly. “I was out running and it felt like I was a coil and it kept getting tighter and tighter, so I couldn’t breathe. And then suddenly I heard this music, like a symphony, except it was coming from the sky.” He scrubs his mouth with his sleeve, laughing a little. “I thought—”
He trails off, and Hannibal nudges him with his shoulder, expression open. “You thought?”
“I thought that angels were singing to me,” Face mutters. “It wasn’t like a tune or anything that I can remember, but something that I could feel in my soul. Like they were singing through me or something. Like a song made out of feelings and emotions, not—”
He breaks off, voice harsh, like he’s embarrassed. “I know it sounds crazy.”
“It sounds beautiful,” Hannibal says quietly.
Face looks up instantly, pathetically grateful that someone understands. He spent so much time burying the song under I knew it wasn’t real and it’s crazy and please don’t lock me away that he sometimes forgot the melody that still echoes dully in his bones. “It was.”
He closes his eyes against the heartbreaking, achingly gorgeous sound of it that he can still barely remember sometimes, like a memory playing over a tuneless radio. The distilled glory of a trembling, high vibrato, each delicate strand of the universe singing with his very being; waiting for the grandest prima donna of all to cast out the libretto and execute an aria that was born from the very beginning of the cosmos. All for him, for his soul to sing with. And each psychiatrist telling him that this was something to be taken away, strip him bare, and leave him with an emptiness inside where Heaven once resided. The memory fades, leaving a sharp pang in its absence.
“So that’s why you didn’t want to take the medicine?”
Face smiles wryly without looking up, staring at the weed he’s been busy twisting into shapes between his hands. “I’ve got a million reasons why I didn’t want to take the medicine.”
“Okay, try me,” Hannibal offers.
“Alright,” Face says easily. “How about because lithium makes you fat?”
Hannibal lets out a low chuckle. “Sure. What’s the next one?”
“Also gives you acne.”
“That would suck,” Hannibal agrees, sharing a smile with Face.
Face turns back to the weed, not surprised when the stalk finally snaps into jagged pieces. He continues in a quieter voice, “How about I don’t know—I don’t know if I exist.”
“What do you mean?” Hannibal pries gently.
“I mean,” Face sighs with frustration, uncertain how to explain. “This is what I know. I had my first ‘manic episode’ when I was nineteen, but that was just the first bad one. I always had spells, good and bad, and no one ever told me that it wasn’t supposed to be like that. That most people have moods because of something, because they had a bad day or something really great happened. I thought it was just something everyone had.”
Hannibal nods, waiting him out.
“And I don’t know… if this medicine takes that away, I don’t know if there’s anything else left. This is who I am, Hannibal,” he says, locking terrified blue eyes with Hannibal’s. “What if the medicine makes me someone I don’t even recognize?”
“You’re worried that you’re going to be a new person,” says Hannibal.
Face nods, looking at the whorls in the wood planks beneath his feet. “Yeah, I guess.”
They sit in silence for a minute.
“I wish I knew what to tell you, kid,” Hannibal says, rolling the mug between his hands. “I wish I had a plan that would make all this better.”
Face shakes his head miserably and says, “I know. Don’t worry about it. It’s fine.”
“It’s not,” Hannibal corrects him. “It’s just above my pay-grade, kid.”
“So you think I should keep going to doctors? Take the medicine?” His face is neutral, but there’s a sour note in the words.
“If you need to. If you’re scared of what this is,” Hannibal says. He leans back, elbows behind him and legs stretched out in front. The mug dangles easily from his hand, the last dregs nearly staining the wooden porch. “But I’ll tell you one thing, the person I saw? The one who picks fights and sleeps around? Or the one who can’t get out of bed or use any of those twenty thousand moisturizers you got in there—”
“They’re not all moisturizers,” Face mutters, but he’s smiling when he says it.
“Well, whatever they all are, still too many,” Hannibal grumbles the familiar complaint. His voice turns serious again and he puts a hand on the back of Face’s neck, a steady pressure at his nape. “I’m just saying, that’s not the same man who arranges for B.A. to visit his momma, or the one who plays Sorry with Murdock all night long when he can’t sleep.”
Face’s head ducks, but Hannibal’s hand follows.
“That’s not the same man who I picked to be on my team, the one I trust with my life.”
He squeezes a little and returns to his casual pose, neither of them looking at each other. There’s a faint sound of a car passing on the distant road, swallowed up under the trees moaning, the soft shuffling of horses grazing in the pasture, chorusing crickets singing their summer canon to the stars.
“I am that man.” It’s soft, barely there. “That guy and the one who stays up for a week and the one who sleeps all the time and can’t face the world – it’s all me. It’s just different parts of me.”
“Then you need to figure out how to make it work somehow. Maybe the medicine doesn’t take anything away, just puts it together. I don’t know. I just know that one of those parts of you is going to destroy you someday if you keep going like this and I can’t – I don’t know a lot about this stuff, Face,” Hannibal runs a hand through his hair and lets out a frustrated breath. “But you know that expression, ‘you can’t have joy without sorrow’? It works both ways. Sometimes you have to sacrifice something good to get rid of the bad.”
There’s a long silence, eaten up by the fluttering of a moth hitting the patio light over and over again, drawn to it for some inexorable reason and fighting itself to get there. It makes him think of Murdock’s words yesterday about chaos theory, about the way his life is working on proving how close entropy really is, and Face’s thoughts drown out the sound as he wonders about all the things he could say, things he has said, things he wishes he knew how to put into words.
“It’s not that easy,” Face says finally. His voice is tightly strung, like he’s balancing on a wire somewhere in his head and Hannibal looks like he wishes he knew what Face was thinking so he could remind him that he was always going to be there to catch him when he fell. Face knows that, it’s just the believing that’s hard.
Instead, Hannibal settles on a long sigh. “I know, kid. But the things that are worth it never are.”
Author:
tripatchRating: R
Pairing: Hannibal/Face
Summary: Kinkmeme prompt, Face secretly takes meds for bipolar disorder. But for whatever reason, Face is no longer on his meds. Then the manic behavior starts, from getting into a mess of fights to needing to have tons of sex with strangers. Then when the emotional roller coaster stuff starts, Face begins cutting himself during the darkest times. His teammates notice, and try to help but Face is stubborn and refuses help, heavily in denial.
Additional Notes: Title taken from James Clarence Mangan's poem, "Nameless One".
Additional, Additional Notes: I've gone back and included this chart of chapters on previous posts and will update it regularly. I hope this makes things a little bit easier to navigate!
He isn’t going to see Dr. Malhotra again, he knows that, for reasons he hasn’t quite sorted out himself. They’re moving on soon and he doesn’t want to spill his guts to someone who will soon be nothing but a bumpy image in a rear-view mirror. The other reason is hidden at the bottom of his jeans pocket, an innocuous, terrifying piece of paper with a doctor’s lethargic scrawl written at the bottom. None of them ask, and he doesn’t offer, content to hide in the loft with Murdock and bark at the cats who wander too close, bring B.A. lunch when he forgets himself inside the innards of rust and rot, and when night finally sweeps in, sit on the front stoop with his hands braced behind him against the warped boards of the front porch.
“Hey,” Hannibal says softly, the screen door banging lightly closed behind him. Face glances up, pre-occupied, but offers a soft smile in return, moving over to make room when Hannibal sits down next to him. They stare at the evening for a moment, both ignoring the quiet shushing of katydids and frogs crying out for rain.
“Penny for ‘em?” Hannibal says, taking a sip from his mug.
“Nothing much. Just thinking.”
“About?”
Face pulls his arms around himself like he’s cold, even though there is only the barest hint of a breeze rustling through the weeds. “I miss it, sometimes,” he says, so low that Hannibal almost doesn’t catch it at all. He throws a flash-quick glance at Hannibal before turning away again. “I miss the music.”
“Music?” Hannibal asks. Face doesn’t talk much about what exactly goes through his head, just cleans up the aftermath and stubbornly insists that it’s fine. He wonders if Hannibal resents that sometimes.
“I heard music, the first time, before things got—bad,” Face says haltingly. “I was out running and it felt like I was a coil and it kept getting tighter and tighter, so I couldn’t breathe. And then suddenly I heard this music, like a symphony, except it was coming from the sky.” He scrubs his mouth with his sleeve, laughing a little. “I thought—”
He trails off, and Hannibal nudges him with his shoulder, expression open. “You thought?”
“I thought that angels were singing to me,” Face mutters. “It wasn’t like a tune or anything that I can remember, but something that I could feel in my soul. Like they were singing through me or something. Like a song made out of feelings and emotions, not—”
He breaks off, voice harsh, like he’s embarrassed. “I know it sounds crazy.”
“It sounds beautiful,” Hannibal says quietly.
Face looks up instantly, pathetically grateful that someone understands. He spent so much time burying the song under I knew it wasn’t real and it’s crazy and please don’t lock me away that he sometimes forgot the melody that still echoes dully in his bones. “It was.”
He closes his eyes against the heartbreaking, achingly gorgeous sound of it that he can still barely remember sometimes, like a memory playing over a tuneless radio. The distilled glory of a trembling, high vibrato, each delicate strand of the universe singing with his very being; waiting for the grandest prima donna of all to cast out the libretto and execute an aria that was born from the very beginning of the cosmos. All for him, for his soul to sing with. And each psychiatrist telling him that this was something to be taken away, strip him bare, and leave him with an emptiness inside where Heaven once resided. The memory fades, leaving a sharp pang in its absence.
“So that’s why you didn’t want to take the medicine?”
Face smiles wryly without looking up, staring at the weed he’s been busy twisting into shapes between his hands. “I’ve got a million reasons why I didn’t want to take the medicine.”
“Okay, try me,” Hannibal offers.
“Alright,” Face says easily. “How about because lithium makes you fat?”
Hannibal lets out a low chuckle. “Sure. What’s the next one?”
“Also gives you acne.”
“That would suck,” Hannibal agrees, sharing a smile with Face.
Face turns back to the weed, not surprised when the stalk finally snaps into jagged pieces. He continues in a quieter voice, “How about I don’t know—I don’t know if I exist.”
“What do you mean?” Hannibal pries gently.
“I mean,” Face sighs with frustration, uncertain how to explain. “This is what I know. I had my first ‘manic episode’ when I was nineteen, but that was just the first bad one. I always had spells, good and bad, and no one ever told me that it wasn’t supposed to be like that. That most people have moods because of something, because they had a bad day or something really great happened. I thought it was just something everyone had.”
Hannibal nods, waiting him out.
“And I don’t know… if this medicine takes that away, I don’t know if there’s anything else left. This is who I am, Hannibal,” he says, locking terrified blue eyes with Hannibal’s. “What if the medicine makes me someone I don’t even recognize?”
“You’re worried that you’re going to be a new person,” says Hannibal.
Face nods, looking at the whorls in the wood planks beneath his feet. “Yeah, I guess.”
They sit in silence for a minute.
“I wish I knew what to tell you, kid,” Hannibal says, rolling the mug between his hands. “I wish I had a plan that would make all this better.”
Face shakes his head miserably and says, “I know. Don’t worry about it. It’s fine.”
“It’s not,” Hannibal corrects him. “It’s just above my pay-grade, kid.”
“So you think I should keep going to doctors? Take the medicine?” His face is neutral, but there’s a sour note in the words.
“If you need to. If you’re scared of what this is,” Hannibal says. He leans back, elbows behind him and legs stretched out in front. The mug dangles easily from his hand, the last dregs nearly staining the wooden porch. “But I’ll tell you one thing, the person I saw? The one who picks fights and sleeps around? Or the one who can’t get out of bed or use any of those twenty thousand moisturizers you got in there—”
“They’re not all moisturizers,” Face mutters, but he’s smiling when he says it.
“Well, whatever they all are, still too many,” Hannibal grumbles the familiar complaint. His voice turns serious again and he puts a hand on the back of Face’s neck, a steady pressure at his nape. “I’m just saying, that’s not the same man who arranges for B.A. to visit his momma, or the one who plays Sorry with Murdock all night long when he can’t sleep.”
Face’s head ducks, but Hannibal’s hand follows.
“That’s not the same man who I picked to be on my team, the one I trust with my life.”
He squeezes a little and returns to his casual pose, neither of them looking at each other. There’s a faint sound of a car passing on the distant road, swallowed up under the trees moaning, the soft shuffling of horses grazing in the pasture, chorusing crickets singing their summer canon to the stars.
“I am that man.” It’s soft, barely there. “That guy and the one who stays up for a week and the one who sleeps all the time and can’t face the world – it’s all me. It’s just different parts of me.”
“Then you need to figure out how to make it work somehow. Maybe the medicine doesn’t take anything away, just puts it together. I don’t know. I just know that one of those parts of you is going to destroy you someday if you keep going like this and I can’t – I don’t know a lot about this stuff, Face,” Hannibal runs a hand through his hair and lets out a frustrated breath. “But you know that expression, ‘you can’t have joy without sorrow’? It works both ways. Sometimes you have to sacrifice something good to get rid of the bad.”
There’s a long silence, eaten up by the fluttering of a moth hitting the patio light over and over again, drawn to it for some inexorable reason and fighting itself to get there. It makes him think of Murdock’s words yesterday about chaos theory, about the way his life is working on proving how close entropy really is, and Face’s thoughts drown out the sound as he wonders about all the things he could say, things he has said, things he wishes he knew how to put into words.
“It’s not that easy,” Face says finally. His voice is tightly strung, like he’s balancing on a wire somewhere in his head and Hannibal looks like he wishes he knew what Face was thinking so he could remind him that he was always going to be there to catch him when he fell. Face knows that, it’s just the believing that’s hard.
Instead, Hannibal settles on a long sigh. “I know, kid. But the things that are worth it never are.”
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-01 10:00 pm (UTC)I have just reread the entire thing and it is (still!) totally awesome. Just what I needed after a fairly shitty couple of weeks.
I love in this chapter how hard Hannibal is trying to understand, even though he is so obviously in over his head. He manages to say all the things that Face needs to hear, though, even without consciously planning them.
And to see Face finally opening up a little, after all these years, trusting someone enough to know that they aren't going to run for the hills as soon as he starts talking is beautiful.
You know they will get through this if they work together.
So, SO, pleased you are going on with this!
(And if two comments show up from me, that's cos DW ate the first one! It's just like LJ!!!!)
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-01 11:05 pm (UTC)I'm really glad that it's working for you - Hannibal definitely doesn't know everything that's going on, but he's trying, and that counts for a lot!
Thanks again for the review! ♥ I was actually thinking that everyone would have forgotten about it by now so I'm glad that you found it again!
(No worries!)