Slow News Day [Hannibal; mostly Will Graham and Freddie Lounds]

[evermissing]

I was thinking about trying out the drabble challenge, just to give myself a space to write stuff that's fun and low-pressure and self-limiting and not dependent on plot. This story started out as a response to the "Mistake" prompt.

…aaand then it ended up being >2,000 words, and having a title and requiring a section break and everything. So I resigned myself, once again, to failing at short and sweet.

* * *

Slow News Day

[Hannibal; Will Graham and Freddie Lounds, with Zeller & Price cameos]

Will had suspected that visiting Abigail in the hospital alone, especially while doped up on Sudafed for the raging cold he's been nursing all week, was a mistake. But he doesn't realize exactly how much of a mistake until he gets out of his car and hears a familiar voice.

"Agent Graham!" He turns, suppressing a groan, to see Freddie Lounds crossing the parking lot toward him. "Oh, I'm sorry," she says, as she catches up with him: "I mean Special Agent Graham." She looks delighted to see him. "Come here often?"

Will lowers his head and stalks past her, but of course she's undeterred. A step behind him, she answers her own question.

"No, of course you don't, do you? You visited Abigail Hobbs far more often when she was comatose than you do now that she's awake and talking. Why do you think that is? I can't decide if it's because psych wards are a little too close to home or if it's just a commentary on your interpersonal skills."

With an effort, Will keeps his mouth shut, even as she pulls even with him again.

She nods decisively. "A little of both, then. My readers will be very interested to know."

After a night of coughing, congestion, and even less sleep than usual, Will has very little self-control left. If Dr. Lecter were here, he might be able to restrain himself, or at least rely on having a buffer. But, as stupid as it is in retrospect, he chose to come here by himself after work. He rounds on Freddie abruptly, intending to deliver some scathing reply (hopefully one that doesn't make him sound like a sociopath, this time).

But as soon as he opens his mouth, he feels a familiar twinge as the constant vague burning in his sinuses sharpens and peaks yet again. He has no time to do anything but stop in his tracks and clap a hand over his face.

"Wh-- huh-- HNNNNNNGGXT!"

Gratifyingly, he sees Freddie take an instinctive step back. He wonders if sneezing on her will dampen her journalistic ardor a bit.

"Bless you!" she says.

Will shakes his head irritably, but he's not done.

"Heh, eh, hehh-ekkktchh!" He fishes in his pocket for one of the ever-present tissues, unfolds it, and buries his chapped nose in it. "'Scuse be," he says by reflex, then mentally kicks himself. Asking Freddie Lounds to excuse anything he does is humiliating.

"Bless you." Freddie eyes him appraisingly. "Coming down with something?"

"Already dowd with id. Obviously."

"If you're here to see Abigail Hobbs-- I mean, I don't want to assume anything, but if you're here as a visitor rather than as a potential client--"

"Fugk off," Will growls wearily.

Freddie shrugs this off. "Anyway, you should know that it'll be a while before you can see her. She's in group therapy now. She went there straight after I finished talking with her about the book."

Freddie's saying "the book" now like it's an established fact. It drives Will cra-- no, poor word choice, but it annoys the hell out of him.

"Thagks for the… the h-heads-ub," Will says, with as much withering sarcasm as he muster in the middle of another torturous buildup. "Uhhh-heh… heh… hh-hnnnngt-- heggghtt-- heh-eh-ESSHOO!" The last one gets away from him, and the force of it nearly makes him stumble.

"You know, that sounds pretty nasty." Freddie's positively beaming. "You should take better care of yourself, Agent Graham. I mean, if you're supposed to be a protector of the public. You know what they say about putting on your own oxygen mask first."

Will knows that she's baiting him, that he shouldn't engage, but he's too tired and drug-muzzy to make the effort to ignore her.

"Fugk off." He blows his nose; squints and waits; stifles another sneeze; snufflingly blows again. "This is low eved for you, Louds. Dod't you have adythig beh… heh… bedder to do?" Another blow finally clears the congestion a little.

"Sure," she says brightly. "I have another chapter to draft when I get home. Abigail's been very helpful, very forthcoming. She has a lot to say about you, actually."

Will doubts that. He may be in the dark as to Abigail's personal feelings about him, but he doesn't think she's likely to go badmouthing him to the press. But it still stings.

"Funny how your most cre-hehh… credible source in years is a traumatized teenager in a psychiatric hospital," he observes, and then immediately feels awful about using Abigail to score a rhetorical point.

Freddie's smile acquires an edge. "You know, aside from rehabilitating Abigail's image, I think the most rewarding part of this whole project is going to be writing the sections about you. There's just so much material. You're going to help us sell a lot of copies." She switches her purse to her other shoulder with an air of finality and says, "Get yourself over that cold and learn some basic social graces, and maybe we'll invite you along for the Southern leg of the book tour."

Will is too busy trying--and ultimately failing--to postpone another attack of sneezes to think of a rejoinder as she walks away.

*

The next day at the Academy, Will delivers a hazy lecture, then spends rest of the day working in his office with the door closed. In other words, he slumps, half-dozing, across his desk amidst a growing pile of Kleenex, rousing himself only to catch another sneeze or swallow another aspirin. Jack's in DC but emails throughout the day with questions about progress on the Ripper. After the fifth message, Will replies, "gone fishing. --W" and closes his laptop. He'll catch hell for it the next time he sees Jack, if not sooner, but for now it's a relief.

In the late afternoon, he gives up on napping. He's starting to feel overheated and claustrophobic, he can't breathe through his nose, and his headache is exacerbated tenfold by the sinus pressure. After taking a few minutes to pull himself into some semblance of order, he decides to head down to the morgue. He suspects that this wouldn't be most people's choice of haven, but at the moment it's the best option available. It's cool down there, and quiet; everyone is engrossed in the task at hand, and if you don't have a case there, no one asks anything of you. No one comes looking for you. Plus, Katz might be there, and she's just about the only person here that Will can trust to distract him without hovering or being condescending.

Price and Zeller are working at one of the slabs farthest from the door, but Katz in nowhere in sight. They don't look up as Will enters, though, and there's still something comforting about the hush broken only by the low rhythm of their voices. They seem completely absorbed in their body. Pocketing his glasses, Will leans against the wall and listens for a while, staring at the ceiling with his head tilted back. His eyes drift shut.

He's not sure how much time passes before, with almost no warning, his breath catches and his nostrils flare. He sneezes with such force that he snaps forward, off balance, and bangs the back of his head on the wall as he rebounds.

"Huh-ughESSSHEW!"

He scrabbles for a tissue, and doesn't have time to check Zeller and Price's faces before another sloppy, unquenchable sneeze takes over.

"Uhhh-EGGGXXSHH!"

He suppresses the tired moan that rises in his throat and tries to clean himself up. He can't believe that he just fell asleep standing against a morgue wall. When he finally glances over, his face hot, both men are watching him. Zeller has an eyebrow raised; Price just looks startled.

"Sorry," says Will, still groggy. "I-- sorry."

"Bless you," says Price. "Are you all right?"

"Did you need something?" asks Zeller, more coolly.

WIll's been trying to speak in monosyllables all day, but there's no way to get around this. He looks at the floor so he doesn't have to see their reactions to his hoarse, congested voice.

"Doh. I'b fide, I dod't… there wasn't a-adythig I-- hih-gnnnxxxt!"

Price half-turns back toward the corpse, as if to give him some privacy. Wretched and embarrassed as he is, Will appreciates that. Even when the tickle recedes a little, he can't seem to stop sniffling; his nose keeps running, and his throat is clogged with post-nasal drip.

"Sorry," he says again. "I was just… passig through." He rubs hard at his nose and eyes with the heels of his hands, scowling at the persistent prickling everywhere like a hum of static interference.

In a conversational tone, Price says, "Did you know there's a window of time when you can actually catch viruses from a dead body? It happened to me a few years ago. Worst cold I've ever had."

Zeller is still eyeing Will with an odd expression; a mixture of impatience, wariness, and-- amusement? After a moment, he asks, "Slow news day yesterday, huh?"

Price digs him in the ribs with an elbow. Will's guard goes up immediately. He eases his glasses back on, trying not to wince at the pressure on the bridge of his nose, and doesn't respond.

Zeller elbows Price back and says, "No, I mean, you should take it as a compliment. Freddie Lounds is obviously obsessed with you." Will finally identifies the slight tremor in his voice: incipient laughter.

Will blows his nose and, ignoring the protests of his aching body, pushes himself up off the wall. He can feel the itch gathering force again, but he wills himself not to sneeze.

"If you're jealous of the attention, you should j-just… say so." He clears his throat froggily and fights to get his voice under control. The temperature of the morgue is starting to get to him, and he shivers helplessly. "I'll be sure to talk you up the next time I see her. Make sure she knows your name, at least."

Price gives a muffled chuckle, but Zeller looks more hurt than Will expected. Will had just been flailing around in the dark, hoping to land a blow somewhere, anywhere; but it seems as though he's hit Zeller right in the gut. Will's own stomach aches; he feels suddenly very small and dirty. Starting to pant against the need to sneeze, not knowing what else to do, he leaves the room without another word. He manages to round the corner of the hall before he sighs in release and doubles over into a tissue, not even really bothering to stifle anymore.

"Huh-ughhhsh! ETCHuhhh! Ehhh… hehhehHESHH-EGKKKSHuhh! Gnnnnhhh."

When the messy fit ends, he makes his way back to his office, ears ringing, head buzzing. He doesn't really want to know, but he has to. At his desk, he re-opens his laptop and does what he always swears to himself he'll never do again... and then always does again--he goes to TattleCrime.com. He has to scroll a little way down the page, but it's there, all right.

The headline is "FBI's Go-To Profiler: Sick in Body and Mind." Will skims the text, which is mostly filler, just a rehashing of old rumors about his emotional state and/or psychiatric history, plus the few crumbs of actual information that Freddie has gleaned about him. (Was filtered out, for reasons not entirely clear, of the pool of potential FBI trainees; "suffered a traumatic knife assault" as a cop in New Orleans; seems to have a very close personal and professional [emphasis Freddie's] with one of the DC area's most highly regarded mental-health practitioners; and so on.) There's a bit about his "unprovoked, excessive hostility toward this reporter" yesterday, "and indeed toward the press as a whole and anyone else who dares to ask too many questions."

It's the accompanying photo that catches Will's attention. He doesn't know when or how Freddie managed to get a shot of him. In typical Lounds style, she's caught him against the backdrop of the "Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane" sign. He's walking across the parking lot, hands jammed in his coat pockets, approaching the camera but heading slightly to the left, which affords a three-quarters view of his face. His hair is more disheveled than usual, his nose is noticeably pinkened and swollen, and if you know what you're looking for, his eyes are glassy and his lips slightly parted--the only way he can reliably breathe, lately. He doesn't look insane, exactly, but he also sure doesn't look like someone who has his shit together. Why didn't he just glance at a mirror before he left home today? (But he knows the answer to that. Mirrors are increasingly unsettling to him.)

His nose is running, yet again, so he sits back with a wad of tissues to try to clear himself out. All he manages to do, though, is reignite the burn into an unbearable itch. He shudders, his eyes watering, and jerks forward with several wet sneezes. Clearly, at the moment he doesn't have his shit together.

Now he's dreading the next time he has to check his email, because now there's more fuel for Jack's ire--of course Jack has already seen or been notified of the article, because Jack is omniscient--and Will suspects that somehow he's going to wind up getting blamed for being featured again on TattleCrime.com.

He sneezes again, and right on cue his cell phone starts to buzz. He drops his head into his hands, and can't help letting out a pitiful sound that might be described as a whimper.

He really, really hates Freddie Lounds.

* * *

[Garnet]

I like your idea of doing the drabble challenge, I did it for a while in my drabble thread, but I have some different sets of fetish prompts I got from brigid a while back. I think I may run through them while sticking to the Hannibal fandom :q

Will has very little self-control left. If Dr. Lecter were here, he might be able to restrain himself, or at least rely on having a buffer.

I love this, that he counts on the freaking serial murderer to be his social "handler".

"'Scuse be," he says by reflex, then mentally kicks himself. Asking Freddie Lounds to excuse anything he does is humiliating.

Ahaha, I love this effect she has on people. So crass and brash and shameless, but she still ends up getting the upper hand half of the time.

"If you're here to see Abigail Hobbs-- I mean, I don't want to assume anything, but if you're here as a visitor rather than as a potential client--"

"Fugk off," Will growls wearily

I'm dying. MROWWW, fsst!

Will doubts that. He may be in the dark as to Abigail's personal feelings about him, but he doesn't think she's likely to go badmouthing him to the press. But it still stings.

Nnnggh baby I love how he feels immediately terrible afterwards for stooping to her level and "using" Abigail too.

After taking a few minutes to pull himself into some semblance of order, he decides to head down to the morgue. He suspects that this wouldn't be most people's choice of haven, but at the moment it's the best option available.

Well, if that doesn't say a lot... although the Forensics Trio would probably agree with him, so at least he's not entirely alone.

Also, fff, Will, not sure whether to sympathize or be exasperated about what a freaking mess he is (which about matches my alternating feelings of affection and "WOW, YOU DICK" about Hannibal, so that's not a bad thing).

At his desk, he re-opens his laptop and does what he always swears to himself he'll never do again... and then always does again--he goes to TattleCrime.com.

Love this line.

Mirrors are increasingly unsettling to him.

And this one. There's so much symbolism about mirrors in the Red Dragon universe, even before Dolarhyde is on the scene.

Such an alternately hilarious and "aww god, feelings!" ficlet, I'm so glad you got overenthusiastic with your drabble prompt!

Edited January 28, 2014 by Garnet

[AngelEyes]

Great story. As Garnet said, I love that Will thinks Hannibal is his best social example. Cracks me up. You've made him very in character. Love it.

[Bruyere]

So I resigned myself, once again, to failing at short and sweet.

I'm glad that you totally failed(!) as this was wonderful.

"No, of course you don't, do you? You visited Abigail Hobbs far more often when she was comatose than you do now that she's awake and talking. Why do you think that is? I can't decide if it's because psych wards are a little too close to home or if it's just a commentary on your interpersonal skills."

The more awful she is the more I love her. I am a terrible person!

Gratifyingly, he sees Freddie take an instinctive step back. He wonders if sneezing on her will dampen her journalistic ardor a bit.

Ha!

"You know, that sounds pretty nasty." Freddie's positively beaming. "You should take better care of yourself, Agent Graham. I mean, if you're supposed to be a protector of the public. You know what they say about putting on your own oxygen mask first."

Oh poor Will, but I do love that Freddie gets all the best lines.

"Funny how your most cre-hehh… credible source in years is a traumatized teenager in a psychiatric hospital," he observes, and then immediately feels awful about using Abigail to score a rhetorical point.

Freddie's smile acquires an edge.

I love how good Will is at getting these little jabs in (and later with Zeller) but that he always feels awful about it afterwards.

He's not sure how much time passes before, with almost no warning, his breath catches and his nostrils flare. He sneezes with such force that he snaps forward, off balance, and bangs the back of his head on the wall as he rebounds.

"Huh-ughESSSHEW!"

He scrabbles for a tissue, and doesn't have time to check Zeller and Price's faces before another sloppy, unquenchable sneeze takes over.

"Uhhh-EGGGXXSHH!"

Obligatory Oh Will.

In a conversational tone, Price says, "Did you know there's a window of time when you can actually catch viruses from a dead body? It happened to me a few years ago. Worst cold I've ever had."

Ha, I actually read a book a few years ago where the main character caught a cold off of the murder victim as they breathed their last. I can't remember how crucial it actually was to the plot but it's about the one thing I took from the book.

and Will suspects that somehow he's going to wind up getting blamed for being featured again on TattleCrime.com.

He sneezes again, and right on cue his cell phone starts to buzz. He drops his head into his hands, and can't help letting out a pitiful sound that might be described as a whimper.

He really, really hates Freddie Lounds.

Aww, Will.

Edited February 11, 2014 by Bruyere

[evermissing]

Garnet: Yay, glad you liked!

I think I may run through them while sticking to the Hannibal fandom :q

YES PLEASE.

I love this, that he counts on the freaking serial murderer to be his social "handler".

Haha, this is a good way of putting it. I always laugh at that bit where Jack tries to blame Hannibal for not preventing Will from saying something stupid when they ran into Freddie outside the hospital, and Hannibal's all "Whatever, I am not my patient's keeper," but you know that deep down he loves it.

(which about matches my alternating feelings of affection and "WOW, YOU DICK" about Hannibal, so that's not a bad thing)

Yeeeaaah. Hannibal inspires some confusing feelings in us all.

AngelEyes: Thank you! I'm really glad to hear that it seemed in character to you; I <3 these people enough to want to do them right.

Bruyere: Thank you!

The more awful she is the more I love her. I am a terrible person!

You and me both, man. I can't even decide if I love to hate her or actually just love her. And I do think that part of that is that she gets off quite a few zingers on the show, so I definitely wanted to mirror that here.

Ha, I actually read a book a few years ago where the main character caught a cold off of the murder victim as they breathed their last. I can't remember how crucial it actually was to the plot but it's about the one thing I took from the book.

Hahaha. I'm pretty sure I've read a book where this happened too--I assume that's what first made me aware that it could happen--but, like you, I remember nothing else about said book, heh.

[beatlelover22]

"Heh, eh, hehh-ekkktchh!" He fishes in his pocket for one of the ever-present tissues, unfolds it, and buries his chapped nose in it. "'Scuse be," he says by reflex, then mentally kicks himself. Asking Freddie Lounds to excuse anything he does is humiliating.

* * *

Oh my god. I might be later in replying to this, but I couldn't just let this go ignored; it was fantastic! Wow, you write Will and everyone else totally in character, it's perfect. Thanks for writing!

[evermissing]

There's no such thing as a late reply. Thank you for letting me know you liked it!