Chapter Text
Will and Hannibal are running.
It’s not an unusual state of being for them, of course. As long as Will can remember, he’s been running: away from his parents, away from his boss, away from his abilities, away from Hannibal, away from the universe. It’s the instinctive reaction of any animal, and Will’s been doing it so long that flight is far more natural to him than anything else.
Hannibal is quite the opposite. Hannibal fights: he bares his teeth, he rolls up his sleeves, he hides his feelings and thoughts behind masks and suits, he slithers and whispers and guides, he prowls and chokes and pounces.
If anything, it at least makes for a very interesting sex life.
Then again, right now, sex is the probably the last thing on Will’s mind.
Because right now, they are running from Intersol’s fleet of the very best, their little ship is half on fire and half in pieces, and Hannibal is bleeding out on the floor next to him, trying valiantly not to make any noise whenever a shot connects.
“Will,” Hannibal says, in a tone of voice that means he’s been saying it for a while.
Will whips around the nearest piece of debris and ignores the sweat beading into his eye. Pain just makes the world go sharper and brighter, and Will needs all the adrenaline he can get if they’re to survive this. Hannibal and the Mischa have been Will’s entire life for almost three and a half years now; maybe he can’t fly her better than Hannibal can, but he can damn well maneuver her through this debris field better than any snot-nosed pilot Jack Crawford can throw at them.
“Will.”
It’s also incredibly motivating to know exactly what will happen if they’re caught. Perhaps Will might be caged in an asylum or, if Jack takes pity, he might be placed for rehabilitation like a wild animal being domesticated, but Hannibal . . . for Hannibal there will be no mercy. Jack will have him flayed alive, or perhaps boiled, or perhaps merely starved and then flayed and then boiled. Jack’s been chewing on revenge for Hannibal for a long, long time, and when it’s the sentence of the most infamous serial killer in the entire universe, the public will be hungry for a spectacle of a death.
“Will.”
There’s an enormous crack and Will winces as the Mischa picks up speed. It’s a really good thing he moved all the essentials into the cockpit when he first got the alert that Intersol fighters were on their tial.
And, well, Hannibal might kill him for this, but . . .
Will yanks the controls and sends the Mischa into a roll that points him in the direction of the cabin that just fell off. One well placed shot, and the entire thing explodes in a brilliant orange-white-blue flame that sends the Intersol pilots scattering, although two go careening straight into an asteroid in their haste.
Two down. Only thirty or so more to go.
A sharp pain makes Will yelp and look reflexively at his stomach, expecting a bit of the ship to have pierced the cockpit, but no – it’s just Hannibal, being a stubborn bastard as usual.
“Will,” Hannibal says sharply.
Will sighs and swings the Mischa behind the nearest, biggest floating piece of junk. He might as well use the breather to actually breathe, since Hannibal seems determined to talk even though he really should have passed out three minutes ago. Will definitely gave him a big enough dose – but then again, Hannibal has a pretty high tolerance even for their kind of lifestyle. He definitely freaked Will out at least two times when Will thought he had Hannibal down for the count and Hannibal popped up behind him like some kind of demented unkillable zombie.
“Four minutes and we’ll be on the nearest hyperspace lane heading straight out of here,” Will says.
Hannibal shakes his head. “They’ll shut it down and you know it. Standard procedure to lock down a hyperspace lane has it down to two minutes or less.”
“Yeah, well, these don’t exactly seem like the best and the brightest of the bunch.”
“They don’t need to be. If dear Uncle Jack is watching, he’ll shut every hyperspace lane within a twenty minute radius.”
Will tightens his hands on the controls until his hands begin to scream. Hannibal’s not wrong; Jack can be fooled, but only once. And he’s not stupid or overconfident enough to give them anything they can use as an advantage.
“Will,” Hannibal repeats, and this time he lifts his hand off the giant bleeding hole in his abdomen to press it heavily against Will’s arm.
“I will not abandon you. We’ve had this argument.”
Hannibal arches an eyebrow. “No, we did not. The first time I attempted to have this discussion, you punched me in the face. The second time, you bit me. And the third time, you – ”
“Can we not discuss that right now?”
“ – you proposed marriage,” Hannibal continues, because he is a stubborn bastard, and this, this is why Will laughed so hard he nearly fainted when the topic of “obey and honor” came up in the wedding vows. They were Earth-standard, of course, but Will hasn’t lived on Earth since he was six and Will’s pretty sure Hannibal’s set foot on Earth exactly zero times in his entire life. They’d instead substituted with “listen and talk to” and, yeah, they don’t do a great job of that vow either.
The bit about devotion until the end, though – that, they actually do pretty good at.
“I swore an oath,” Will says quietly. “I swore an oath in my blood to cherish you until the end of my days.”
Hannibal’s eyes flick down. It’s a subtle concession to Will’s low blow, to the forearm where shimmering words in old Earth script glimmer on Hannibal’s skin, Will’s blood forever as red and gleaming as the day it was drawn on Hannibal’s flesh to mark them bound until the end of days. Will has a matching mark on his stomach, where Hannibal once slid a dagger in, little red words dancing around a scar that Will chose not to heal, even though the doctors offered three times.
Incidentally, their marriage counselor hadn’t even looked up from their slow drawl and even slower scrawl of the necessary documentation.
“An oath can be coerced,” Hannibal says, slowly and painfully. “An oath can be forced.”
“We both know that’s a lie.”
Hannibal looks at him. “Is it? We did not sanctify the knife in the water of our tears or forge it in the fire of our hair. We did not destroy it with our fingers and scatter the pieces with our feet. We did not exchange blood for the vows. An oath can be coerced, Will. There are many secrets you do not know of the old traditions.”
Will sighs. Of all the times for Hannibal to get performance anxiety, it’s now. “Hannibal, seriously. Just because I didn’t come from some old House doesn’t means I know nothing. I sanctified the knife in our blood, because you’re a creeper who has blood around our ship like you’re a vampire. I forged it in the fires of the ship we rebuilt together. And maybe I didn’t destroy the blade myself, but we both launched Mischa the day we got married. To perform the rite in spirit is just as important as performing the rite in tradition. You know this. And moreover,” he says, “I chose this. I chose you. Those words would’ve washed away if I didn’t mean it. No coercion can bind blood freely drawn.”
“They will cage you, Will. I will have a death, but you they will cage. I will not allow it.”
Will rolls his eyes. “Uh, yeah, that’s why I’m trying to fly us out of here.”
“If I surrender,” Hannibal says, “if I surrender, you can tell them you injured me in self-defense. Uncle Jack will ensure a fair trial, if only to cover up his own flaws.”
“I killed three Intersol agents,” Will points out. “Without hesitation. And when you weren’t around. You’re good, Hannibal, but I’ve been playing the game as long as you have, and you aren’t that good. Jack won’t give me squat. And even if he did – even if he did, I wouldn’t take it. To the end of our days; that was the bargain.”
If Hannibal was a good man, this is the time he would say And I regret making it.
If Hannibal was a good man, he’d make Will angry.
If Hannibal was a good man, he’d push and push and push until Will threw him out the airlock himself.
But Hannibal isn’t. Hannibal is selfish and cruel and possessive, just as Will loves him, and so he just closes his eyes and concedes defeat. If Hannibal was uninjured, perhaps he could sweet-talk Will into accepting this mad plan – but Hannibal is bleeding out, and Will is exhausted, and the Mischa is falling to pieces around them. Will cannot leave Hannibal now; he’s tied to Hannibal just as firmly as he was the moment Hannibal first walked up to him and asked to shake his hand, never mind the blood spray on Will’s face and the dirt under his nails.
The Mishca chimes a gentle alert, and Will looks down and feels his heart leap in his chest.
A jump gateway.
It’s not as great as a hyperspace lane, which would have them rocketing away faster than these Intersol pilots can blink, but a jump gateway can still pop them far away in seconds, and wherever there’s a jump gateway, a hyperspace lane isn’t that far away. On top of that, jump gateways can’t be shut down like hyperspace lanes can, because while mankind built hyperspace lanes, they only harnessed the power of jump gateways. It’s their best bet.
“I’m going for it,” Will announces.
Hannibal opens one eye – and then he stiffens. “Will, that is a ravage gateway.”
And, well. That isn’t so great.
“We don’t have another choice.”
“A ravage gateway is pure unharnessed energy,” Hannibal says sharply. “No studies have ever been successfully conducted, no tests successfully ran, no data successfully collected. And there have been no survivors.”
“No recorded survivors. No one knows where ravage gateways lead to.”
“We could land in a black hole.”
Will looks at him – at this gorgeous, half-dead, bleeding man who Will followed into and promptly out of prison, who broke Will into a thousand tiny pieces and put him back together, who Will cut with a knife and then inscribed the age-old vows of marriage upon. There are no words for what he feels when he looks at Hannibal. There is only before Hannibal and now, for Will refuses to ever have an after Hannibal.
“I’d rather die in a black hole than live without you, caged or not,” Will says quietly. “At least there we could have peace from Jack.”
Hannibal sighs heavily. The drugs must be kicking in; Hannibal’s bled so much that the only reason he’s still upright is the fact that Will wrestled him into restraints. He won’t last much longer if Will can’t stop and administer proper medical care.
“Together,” Will says, “or not at all.”
A faint smile quirks Hannibal’s lips. They are the same words Hannibal used the first time they hunted, the first time they feasted, the first time they launched the Mischa into the stars to explore. There is no Will and no Hannibal; there is only Will-and-Hannibal and Hannibal-and-Will. It was once Hannibal’s greatest desire, and Will feels no shame for playing on those feelings. Hannibal got a great deal of fun out of playing with his overheated brain once upon a time, after all.
“Yes,” Hannibal says. “Together.”
And so together, they punch the accelerator that throws them straight into the ravage gateway.
The last thing Will thinks is, Huh. It looks almost like a mirror.
Then there is only darkness, and disorientation, and an awful tearing rending pain, like his very soul is being shattered into a million shards that are slicing their way out of his body piece by piece.
And Death looked into the abyss, and Death said, “Well, $#^*! I didn’t expect anyone to actually be stupid enough to go through that. Much less two of them. I guess it’s time for some popcorn.”