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For Will Graham
[Bucky still wasn't entirely sure how it happened.
The two of them had become closer over the months in Quarantine, something about Will's way of approaching a problem from a different angle and always understanding when Bucky needed to flee had helped Bucky feel more and more comfortable with him. Somehow they had developed a friendship, and that's all it was supposed to be for either of them.
Then there was a night, a confusing night with alcohol on Will's part and terrible dreams on Bucky's, and somehow they had ended up in an embrace much more intimate than mere friendship. What they had now would be hard to define, but it was definitely something more, something that had grown into the occasional kiss and a mutual but unspoken understanding of deeper feelings.
It's late at night when Bucky shows up as he always does, unannounced and at random through a window, perching on the windowsill to look in.]
Anyone home?
The two of them had become closer over the months in Quarantine, something about Will's way of approaching a problem from a different angle and always understanding when Bucky needed to flee had helped Bucky feel more and more comfortable with him. Somehow they had developed a friendship, and that's all it was supposed to be for either of them.
Then there was a night, a confusing night with alcohol on Will's part and terrible dreams on Bucky's, and somehow they had ended up in an embrace much more intimate than mere friendship. What they had now would be hard to define, but it was definitely something more, something that had grown into the occasional kiss and a mutual but unspoken understanding of deeper feelings.
It's late at night when Bucky shows up as he always does, unannounced and at random through a window, perching on the windowsill to look in.]
Anyone home?
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[He huffs quietly when he's poked in the ribs, but he doesn't move.]
Not a lot of dames like the grungy and unwashed look.
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[ Will pointed out in a soft tone. ]
However, I'm here to tell you that the grunge look can be like catnip. You reinforce it with a forbidding scowl and a habit of hoping out windows whenever someone looks the other way for a moment.
[ There was no judgement in any of the words, simply a statement of fact. He'd watched James all this time and knew that the man maintained a very strict boundary around himself. Will understood part of why that boundary was in place, but he also suspected that it (more than the grunge look) was what kept people at a safe distance. ]
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[Or, at least, he can remember enough bits of it to know that he had been given his pick whenever he went out. That really wasn't the same now.]
Nobody even looked at me when I went drinking this time. Not that it matters, pretty sure I'm taken.
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Though he sobered with the latter words, because Will wasn't a man who was given to playing coy. He understood what James meant and he understood that this wasn't something to play around about; not given the steamer trunk loads of baggage they both carried between them.
Tilting his head, he looked up towards James' face. He wasn't exactly in the best position to catch the other man's eyes, but -moving carefully- he leaned up so that he could press a kiss to the side of James' jaw, just slightly off from the corner of his mouth. ]
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He's nervous after saying the words, even if he did it as casually as he could, with an easy way out if Will needed it. He's tense by the time the kiss comes, nearly convincing himself to get out of there, but then--]
Thanks.
[He doesn't need words, that's enough for now. Another slow step forward.]
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Namely, he went looking for James.
He knew a few of the other man's bolt holes, but Will didn't delude himself into imagining that he knew all of them. He expected he was aware of the ones that James was comfortable sharing and not a single one beyond that and he respected those boundaries.
But today it made things a little difficult as he was trying to find the man and coming up blank.
It had been a difficult day at the Guard tower. There was an individual who seemed bound and determined to press Will's buttons and today the ex-profiler had snapped. He'd nearly killed the man, only just being yanked off at the last second, it was almost laughable, tiny Professor Will Graham, choking down a marine sort who stood almost half a head taller. The man had close to a hundred pounds on Will, but Will had been in a red zone and determined to kill.
He'd managed to slip away in the general confusion of getting the marine (for lack of a name) to the hospital and had been wandering the city ever since. Night had fallen and were Will's mind in it's right order, he would have been driven back home by the cold (he hadn't taken his coat with him) but he was single minded at the moment and continued to stumble down alley after alley.
The one good thing about being a predator on the edge, other predators tended to notice and give a wide berth. No one was making any effort to impede Will's progress. Well, unless you counted the snow that was now starting to fall quite a bit more heavily since the sun went down. ]
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He knows that he should check in with Will again soon, but he just ends up being busy with other things, it's something he'll come to regret when he finally catches sight of the man wandering the alleys. The sight of Will sets his teeth on edge and his hackles up, one dangerous person recognising another.
Bucky stays where he is on the top of the building, peering over the side of the rooftop down at the top of Will's head. Normally he'd just jump down next to him, but he gets the impression that startling him at the moment is probably not a good plan.]
Above you.
[It's a low call, leaning as far out as he can to make himself as visible as possible in the gloom of the evening.]
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Not exactly the most frightening of figures at the moment. ]
James.
[ He breathed the word out, reaching up to push his snow covered fingers through already wet hair. He really did resemble a bedraggled rat at the moment, even his glasses were speckled with moisture. ]
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It's a little strange, feeling how his own heartrate picks up in concern, just a reminder of how much this odd profiler has come to mean to him.]
You gonna be okay if I come down to you?
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But just as quickly, he flashed back to just hours ago when he'd taken a much larger man down to the ground, beat him, choked him and had his head and chin in his hands, ready to snap his neck. If Will looked at his knuckles, he'd find them bruised and split, but at the moment his hands were too numb for him to feel it.
Still the muscle memory of the violence was enough to convince him that James was right to be cautious. Even if all Will felt was exhausted.
He nodded. ]
Yeah. [ He said softly, knowing James could hear him; somehow. ] It's safe ... safe-ish.
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But when he gets the go-ahead, he's quick to drop down into the alleyway next to Will, keeping a careful distance while not going too far away, leaving it in Will's court how close he wants to be.]
Your hands look pretty beat up.
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Black in the moonlight.
He didn't turn towards James, but he also didn't flinch or twitch away as the man's voice came closer, accepting the approach. ]
Tends to happen when you try to beat a man to death.
[ Will said, his voice mechanical. He'd spoken about the marine a couple of times to James, usually with his arms flailing as he recounted some confrontation or another with the guy. The sort of venting someone might do about a personality they were in conflict with. ]
That "co-worker" of mine.
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He's seen his nightmares and his sleepwalking, his lack of self preservation instincts and his fatalistic world view, but not his violence. It itches at the back of his skull and he has to fight down his own instincts to stay where he is, visible and unarmed.]
What happened?
[He doubts Will jumped in without provocation, and he hopes that someone managed to stop him before any permanent damage was done.]
cw: fictional monster young murder
Truth was, Will was used to people giving him a wide berth when he was like this. He slowly curled his legs upwards, folding his knees to his chest and wrapping his arms around them. ]
I've told you about this guy before. [ He said quietly. Truth was, to anyone paying attention and capable of understanding Will, this explosion had been building for a long time. The man in question was a brute, a bully. Effortlessly cruel, but cunning enough to always keep to the right side of regulations, he was exactly the sort of abuser that Will's 'righteous violence' tended to seek out. ]
He was back from a recent patrol, and crowing about ... [ Will began, stopped and then continued. ] They'd come across a den of Umpogs. [ A mid sized monster type, not overly interested in bothering the population of Riverview, but violent enough when provoked that they were labeled as mid-level dangerous.
They resembled a cross between dogs and small komodo dragons, the biggest danger being that their bites often proved fatal due to infection. But Will had studied them closely and used them as an example, in his occasional arguments that not all the monsters on this planet deserved to be eradicated, just because they weren't human. The Umpogs, for instance, had a very strong family and social structure, like wolves but even stronger and exhibiting more self-awareness.
Will looked down at his hands as he continued in a whisper. ]
He was sharing how they had pulled the pups out ... slaughtered them in front of the parents ... I didn't hear much after that.
[ He'd snapped. ]
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He thinks this as someone who has slipped for less reasons than that, and done much worse, but it doesn't mean that he can't see when things are justified. Perhaps a single punch and then handing him over for discipline elsewhere, but-- ifs and buts can't help, what's done has been done.]
There's always gonna people who don't see those creatures as worth protecting.
[It's carefully non-judgemental in tone, just soft and soothing.]
You're a smart guy, you should try and help change the law, so people who do that can be punished properly.
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It was appropriate and correct. There was a justice system, there were laws to follow, just as there had been when he was hunting Hannibal, or any of the other predators he'd taken down.
Will had followed that justice system faithfully, up to the point where it had failed him, turned on him and broken him. The cracks along his fault lines weren't as obvious as James and what had happened to him; but they were there nonetheless.
He could still feel the rush of power, the surge of satisfaction as he'd taken the man down, gotten his vulnerable throat beneath his palms and ...
Taking a deep breath, Will inhaled and exhaled slowly before lowering his head to press his face against his thighs. He knew the appropriate noises to make to James, but he couldn't say what he didn't believe. Some people just needed a good murdering. ]
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I'm glad you didn't do it.
[He said 'try' to murder a man, after all, not succeeded.]
If you get that sort of blood on your hands, it never washes out.
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When he spoke next, the words he shared were ones he had considered for quite some time. If for no other reason than he recognized that, because of them, James might just kill him. ]
I have that sort of blood on my hands, James.
Not innocents, the men I killed were killers themselves. But in each instance, I had the opportunity to stop before they died under my hands ... I didn't.
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He's very quiet for a very long time, but he doesn't move away.]
Why?
[When he does finally speak it's just that one word, hoarse and a little pleading, as though desperate for Will to have a good explanation, to have good reasons behind those choices.]
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Will felt like asking if they could take this conversation somewhere more comfortable, but then he figured that a conversation like this didn't deserve comfort. ]
I've told you, that back home I hunted serial killers for the FBI. [ Will began. ] Even though I was evaluated by the FBI and found to be too mentally unstable to become an agent. The head of the BAU, a man named Jack Crawford, used me as his point hound, because I had a way of processing the evidence in a crime scene.
[ They had spoken on bits and pieces of this but now Will attempted to pull the picture together. ]
Because of the way my brand of crazy works, I can put myself in the mind of anyone ... for instance a killer, and walk through the crime as the perpetrator. Feel what they felt, live their motivations, their thoughts.
It allowed me to make leaps along the evidence that then allowed Jack and his team to find, capture and convict the killers. I had a 100% closure and conviction rate on any case he used me on.
But you go that far into the dark, again ... and again you start bringing things back with you. [ He glanced at James, suspecting the other man understood what he was saying. ]
I kept trying to get away from it, but when Jack had a bad one ... the really bad ones that he couldn't break, he'd pull me back and put me into the field until the case was closed.
There was one killer that Jack was obsessed with, a man known as the Chesapeake Ripper. The Ripper would surface, kill in sounders of three and then disappear for months, sometimes years, only to surface again. Jack used a promising young trainee to try to work the Ripper case and she became one of the Ripper's victims.
Jack was ... the Ripper was his white whale.
[ And that was putting it mildly. ]
I tried, again to get out of the field, but Jack put me back in. This time though, he listened to the advice of psychologists and he set me up with a top psychiatrist named Hannibal Lecter. It was Lecter's job to help me stay out of the dark, keep me sane.
Only, unbenounced to Jack, Lecter was the Ripper.
[ Will paused in the play of his fingers and looked over at James, giving that statement a moment to sink in. ]
For months, when I was at my most vulnerable, I had an apex predator in my head ... rearranging the furniture. Literally. Lecter used drugs, various psychological techniques, even let a raging case of encephalitis go untreated, in order to break my mind completely.
And he succeeded. [ There was no point in trying to pretend otherwise. ]
Lecter set me up as the Ripper and by the time I realized who and what he was, it was too late. Jack wouldn't believe me, was disgusted with me and there was no one who would even listen to me. Lecter had planted hard evidence as well as painted me as completely insane so as to ensure that I was isolated. Everyone I trusted betrayed or turned against me.
I ended up locked away in the Baltimore Hospital for the Criminal Insane, while awaiting my trial.
[ Will exhaled a tired breath and reached up to rub at his temple. ]
That's when the mind games, really started.
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Is this why he felt such a connection to Will? They have both been broken down, both been tortured, until there had been nothing left of who they used to be and only the orders of someone else inside their heads. It doesn't absolve Will of his choices and his crimes, just like Bucky will never be able to wash the blood off his hands, but it does explain things.
Perhaps a little too well.
He can't forgive Will for what he's done, but he doesn't have to, it's not his place to forgive crimes that had nothing to do with him. His only choice has to be whether he can still trust him and whether he still wants to be with him, associate with him, or if this is too close to his own experience.]
Come on, let's get you inside.
[It doesn't address any of what he's just been told, but it's what comes out all the same as he offers a hand to Will. Perhaps he'll see some hope for conciliation in that gesture.]
We can talk there.
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Maybe that was alright? Will was the one who kept saying that James could never go back to who he was, but that he could live as the man he wanted to be. But Will also wasn't sure that there was a place for himself in either of those realities.
For now, however, he was exhausted, cold and obedient. He simply nodded his head and moved to gather his limbs, getting up to his feet. Will could feel the beginnings of a fever starting to work it's way just under his skin, he'd have to deal with that when he got home.
He would follow James without comment or question, whether it be back to his own home or to one of the other man's bolt holes. ]
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So it's to one of his rare safe spaces inside the city itself, an empty apartment above a shoe store obviously just waiting to be rented or sold. There's nothing inside that indicates anyone is living there at all, except for a rolled up sleeping bag in the corner of one empty room. But it's warm, and the water runs, so it's better than other places that he's chosen.
He gets them inside, leaving the lights off, and pads quietly across the bare floorboards of the main room to sit Will down by the sleeping bag.]
...you're safe here.