Chapter Text
“Same kind as always, sir?”
Will isn’t paying very close attention, so he startles when the clerk asks. There’s always a lot to be distracted by, not least of which being the reason that he is here at all.
—
The venous blue of a soul mark - two ears of wheat, laureled, intertwined at their grassy stems.
Will catches sight of it accidentally. It’s the way he sees most things, but gives this particular instance the distinction of accidental, because he wishes he hadn’t seen it at all.
Alana’s forearm slides neatly hidden into her sleeve again, wet from the sink in the communal breakroom at Quantico. She’ll be talking today on mark mutilations while Will runs through cold case files for the Behavioral Sciences Unit, which is no loss to Will - he hates this unit segment. He’s happy to let her walk aspiring agents and law enforcement through their assumptions about marks and the people that would remove them.
Maybe that’s why hers is out where she can think about it.
No, Will corrects himself, watching the sleeve cuffs darken from where Alana hasn’t dried her skin well enough - she doesn’t pay much attention to whether it is hidden or not. Her movement is perfunctory. A blinking glance towards his face is unbothered, smoothing into a smile. She seems amused.
“Can’t be recognized if it can’t be seen,” Alana explains, in a rare moment of shared trains of thought. He imagines them ramming together loudly - the engine parts destroy the room around them. He blinks, and the room is unharmed.
Will shakes the image from his head. So maybe not consciously leaving the mark out the way he assumed, but it’s on her mind nonetheless.
“Happens instantly, if all the first-person accounts of the phenomena are to be believed," she continues, oblivious to the picture of one of the imagined train bell knocking her marked arm clear off her body at velocity. "'Set me as seal upon your heart,' right? That's what my mother says all the time, anyway."
Will offers a weak smile. He recognizes it. “Of course the Bible likes to get in on the predestination gig," he says.
"It's funny," he adds, considering, "how covering it up can upset something so powerfully consequential that ancient kings write poetry about it that we still talk about."
“If it does,” says Alana, cheerful. "Maybe I'm just hedging my bets."
Will snorts. He considers saying that he supposes they’ll never know if she keeps it out like that, that they can make a proper test of it with another fifty to sixty years of being alone, but that’s unkind. He looks down instead at his pile of files, his own elbows resting at his knees, the lazy speckle of the vinyl floor beneath them looking inscrutably off-white and peppered grey. Familiar - something the two of them have looked at a hundred times.
It's not that he’s disappointed per se that he doesn’t recognize the symbol written at the soft inner hinge of the elbow, or inappropriate that he’s seen it. He’s disappointed that she has one at all.
“Here I was thinking you were preparing your thoughts for class,” says Will to a spot that is more blue than the others. He tries at casual. People like casual. “Exhibiting while the rest of the intellectuals are in town, then?” he says, and thinks that’s not very casual at all. “Looking for love, or whatever it is that they promise in the books and commercials?”
Alana hums, toweling her hands dry.
“Hopefully something like that,” she replies perfectly pleasant, accustomed to his pessimism. She’s in a good mood anyway, worrying the button of her sleeve cuff out from underneath the fabric.
“It’s kind of wild that some of us are so wholly meant for someone that they burn a thought into you,” she continues with another amused look. “Intimidating, but fantastic.”
“Fantastic? More like terrific in the biblical sense,” says Will, and rubs an arm until the cloth of his own sleeve doesn’t hurt against the hairs, skin, nerves hiding underneath. He considers that he is still tidy and dry sleeved, that he needs to stop scratching. He considers that he hasn’t eaten yet, worrying at his lip until he reminds himself to not.
“I dislike the implication that people are made to any specific purpose…” he explains as she watches. “Much less to the specific purpose of a single person. Judging from your lesson for the day, that’s probably a good instinct to have.”
She still smiles, looking him over. Will knows there’s nothing she can see that he doesn’t want her to, but that he’s being overfamiliar, and that breeds a certain curiosity.
“What do you like, Will?” she asks, closing the lid of a glass container, the sound of it feeling like holding a breath.
Will supposes that is better than the sounds of trains colliding, or the wet, sucking sound of ball joints torn from their sockets. He looks back down at his case files, feeling unpleasantly somewhere between nauseated and hungry.
—
I like plenty of things, he thinks petulantly an hour later from his desk, trying to connect the files in a meaningful way beyond that everyone pictured in them is dead, and that most of them are at the hands of the same person.
Which is the part that Director Crawford doesn’t like, and tells Will to convince him.
Will studiously rubs his arm again - an itch asking to be scratched.
—
It’s not a perfect fifty-fifty split.
Soul marks, that is.
It’s not very egalitarian of mankind to only make a minority, if sizable minority, of the population subject to one-way possession. Unkind of it to do so with no known cause for it, other than an oppressive necessity. Someone for everyone, if you are the kind of person to want or need a someone. A great deal of literature and discourse is made on the subject - even now, a great deal of his week is about to be eaten up by it in convention halls, professionally obligated to hear it even if he doesn’t necessarily agree. Most of it is trash, some of it is interesting, as it often is when people as a concept are involved, rather than people he knows.
Interesting, Will thinks now, that Alana is one of these distinguished few - people he knows, people that are marked by someone and now at the mercy of that person to recognize them and make the connection complete. Interesting in that he has always thought of her as too self-possessed to require someone to step in and name her anything, much less theirs.
Will rubs at his face briefly when he sits in the car to go home when it itches - flinches - rubs at the side of his arm again - flinches away from that too.
The suburban-rural divide of Wolf Trap is a thin one, written in little copses of trees and creek-filled firths. The leaves are yellowing these days, businesses and neighbors beginning to put out their haybales and back to school signs. There are specials on apples and potatoes promised from storefronts. The last of summer tomatoes are rotting on their vines between front gates and single family homes that play at farming. On a hand painted board beside his immediate neighbors and their molding zucchini: If you aim at nothing, you’re bound to hit it.
Will smiles. A charm of owning a house, he supposes as he rattles up the slightly overgrown edges of his driveway, having the right to waste your land on your own wasted produce because of the novelty of it.
Possession, noun, thinks Will, kicking his shoes off at the entry to his house, dogs milling about. The state of having, owning, or controlling something.
Food bowls hit the ground gently, rattling with kibble and little shreds of tuna fish and carrot. Noses press affectionately to Will’s knees and calves, the dog tags winking in the dull overhead light of the kitchen, clinking against the bowls.
Visible power or control over something, as distinct from lawful ownership, thinks Will.
He considers opening the front door and letting them all run off into the dark despite feeling sick at the idea of them being anywhere other than underfoot and in his home.
Hypocrite, he calls himself when he gets halfway through taking the collar from one of the larger dogs, and she just stares like she cannot fathom that he wouldn’t want her.
He clicks it open.
He clicks it back closed.
He reminds himself in no uncertain terms that the dog doesn’t understand anything about the collar at all other than she might get a bath, or not be allowed outside if he removes it, and that it’s mostly bad things that happen to dogs without one, and that they love him, so the collar is no problem at all.
—
When the time comes, in the yellow light of the front porch, and all the dogs are returned to it from their last circling of the house, Will locks the doors. Through the screen, he can see the weak thin branches and leaves of the tree line, holding a high fence up to the street light and orange city glow rising beyond it. He wonders how much the lock actually keeps outside if it had a mind to be inside instead, and listens to the deadbolt find its bed in the doorframe.
When he is sure that is done, he closes the blinds. They clack loudly into place, pull cord swinging where he drops it, ticking like a metronome against plaster and wallpaper.
When he is sure that is done too, he closes the bathroom door to keep the steam from the hot water thick over his mirror and the skin of his arms.
He washes his face with fierce strokes, squeezing the washcloth until his fingers whiten. It hurts as much as it feels good, lulling him into the tingling, sleepy rhythm of the routine. Exfoliation, he thinks, the constant flow of the water a pleasant drone beneath him. Something he can do for himself, or to himself. Flaying. Flagellating.
(Pruning, don’t you think?)
He blinks soap out of his eyes with a hiss, chasing the sleepy feeling away. The suds slosh into the steam and spiral downwards into the drain.
Once he can’t feel the ghost of the dog collar buckle pinched between his fingers, or see much of his face save the redness of irritation and bristling new growth from his beard, Will wrings the cloth clean. He lets the steam rise again into his face where it soothes the irritation.
He sleeps poorly, clutching at himself. In the corner of his large bed, he is tucked tight and round into his own arms, chewing at the inside of his mouth. He dreams he has thorns for teeth and fingernails. He dreams of the smell of fresh herbs crushed between fingers, feels the burn of salt rubbed into meat, sticky with egg yolk and the particular tack of muscle warming from cold storage. He is watered by the spray of a kitchen sink, warmed by a casserole dish which is rich with fat.
Will wakes up with a horizontal tally of nail scratches where he has scratched at himself too hard. He is ravenous.
He checks that the curtains are closed.
He checks that the doors are locked.
He eats a simple egg breakfast over his case files again, watching the yolk messily run down the tines of his fork and takes a practiced, clean bite.
He washes his face and showers, and checks under the cabinets for soft towels to begin covering up the night’s hungry insistence.
He thinks of ownership again.
—
Conferences are professional affairs, thankfully.
Whatever marks people as belonging to each other in the work place is expected to be more plebeian. Handshakes and rings, mostly. Maybe amongst the familiar, side embraces and kisses that greet more than they consume. Everything is covered up. Everything is mid-to high end sportswear and suiting that is forgetably tasteful. The only acceptable marks here are projected onto screens by the conference speakers, and everyone’s sleeves go to the wrist, legs covered to the ankle.
Four days of it feels burdensome nonetheless. Today is only the first of them.
Will pulls at the tight press of his collar and tie at the afternoon meet and greet, frowning and thirsty and careful to not lick too often at his lips and the corner of his mouth. The catering staff offers him a glass of white wine that he holds as a ward against being asked again, and studiously drinks none of it. His mind is still caught somewhere between it and a carefully considered presentation on distinguishing personally and externally-borne intrusive thoughts.
Will dries his hand on the side of his jacket when the drink sweats over his fingers. He frowns at the blotch of condensation it leaves just beneath the shoulder.
Alana wears a blazer with her dress this time when she finds him, each white wrist tucked tightly against wool and plum colored blouse cuffs. It feels pointedly covered because it is, and because she has gone out of her way to pointedly find him.
“Speak of the devil,” she says with a genuinely pleasant laugh, pulling him gently to her side to introduce him to her colleagues. “This is the same Will that I was talking about,” she says, nodding, eyes passing over Will’s in what he’d call a non-apology outside of the company of others.
He allows it - he likes Alana. He guesses that counts as familiar.
“The one that suggested you were peacocking recently?” asks one of the entourage, a rumble of amusement. Will feels it in his scalp, across his cheeks, down his neck. It makes small little sharp waves with sound. “Or the one doing the profiling?”
“One and the same,” says Alana, giving Will a fond nod, “and I haven’t been able to shake a jacket off my shoulders since.”
Will looks at the rim of his unused wine glass in lieu of looking at faces once he meets hers. He doesn’t like that something reacts in him, and he doesn’t want to give it a place to grow.
It's a little ungracious of an introduction, but it is for Will, so maybe that makes it appropriate if not gracious, and Alana is at least smiling like it’s funny.
Empathize, Will tells himself. Try to laugh. Isn’t it funny?
“I see news of my conversational prowess has traveled,” Will says with what he hopes is socially acceptable flippancy. “I’ve been told to keep my inside thoughts to myself when I’m not in front of a slide deck or an evidence box - unfortunately, Alana caught me thinking about some of hers.”
He’s probably frowning - he’d try smiling, but that feels like an obvious mask, and he doesn’t like to use that any more than he already does, so he doesn’t try.
Alana’s three colleagues all smile with the same benign intensity. The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, Will recites to himself, and wonders who would be who. Considering the venue and the insistent appearance of harmlessness, likely to be fellow psychiatrists, then, and all of the first kind.
Will risks a quick look at them, and a wince afterward that he hopes doesn’t catch anyone's attention. He wonders if there’s a term for that - a murder of crows, a charm of hummingbirds - perhaps a crises of mental health professionals.
The one that Alana describes Will to turns his head slightly, like he is listening over the loud visual of his dark red blazer, striped and notched in black velvet lapels - very much not one of the nondescript costumes of the conference. Will wonders if he is ever distracted by his own clothes, even as he admires the sharp curvature of the man’s cheek to match them, and the glinting dark of the eyes behind them.
“Alana is an excellent observer,” says the man with a warm flippancy of his own. It is him that Will feels amusement from like a shallow tremor. He doesn’t flinch away from Will’s scrutiny or frown. “It’s good to keep your thoughts locked up tight if she has a mind to see them,” he adds, proud but appropriately subdued. Professional in behavior if not entirely in appearance, it would seem.
Alana demures in her usual fashion to match.
“I learned from the best,” she redirects with a nod back to him, eyes caught on the sheen of the fabric lapels beneath his neck.
Will - fingers pinched at the stem of his untouched wine glass, free hand clasped and pulling at the fabric of his tweed sleeve, damp above, too short below, itching again-
-the man curiously glancing between the clean rim of it and Will’s studiously pursed mouth-
-has no doubt that it’s true.
(Be sociable, says the itch, and you bow your head to the suggestion because it is reasonable, and you feel good doing the correct thing.)
“Will’s the one that keeps me on my toes these days,” Alana adds brightly.
Will demures in his own fashion by saying nothing.
She introduces them. Will is, as usual, correct in that they are all of the same trade and discipline, a riot of letters chasing their well-bred names. He would argue two of them polish up to a higher standard. A great number of titles and degrees between the three colleagues, but only one of them brings the kind of happy candor and respect that suggests Alana actually likes him.
So that whittles them all down, until there is only the exceptional.
“Doctor Hannibal Lecter” she says, saving best for last.
Will shakes hands with each, and only notes Doctor Lecter with any interest. Partially for the pointed eye contact that Doctor Lecter tries to make. Partially because Will gives into the urge to return it, if only for a few seconds, frowning and telling himself it will be a short week and he can go back to not being very sociable at all.
Partially because he feels the eye contact, and underneath that, the rumble of something shifting, and just wants to run away.
—
When the white wine goes warm in Will’s hand, Doctor Lecter offers on two careful occasions to get something to drink more to Will’s liking. He knows the people at the service station, he says. It’ll be no trouble at all to find something better, he insists, Will fisting the stem of his glass like a guard rail. Each time, he takes Will’s hesitant refusals and nervous scratching at the side of his arm like data on a scatter plot.
Will listens to the low tenor of his voice, and hears it like fingers scratching softly behind his ears. He closes and opens his eyes, sending the sensation away.
“This isn’t my first happy hour, Doctor Lecter,” says Will. He finds himself torn between wanting to leave and wanting to take a drink just for the sake of ruining whatever data set he imagines is being populated.
“Only polite to make sure you are taken care of,” says Doctor Lecter. “I’d like to think as well as I know them that they know me too...an unofficial host of sorts, I think is an appropriate title.”
Will takes a shallow sip from the middle of his mouth when the gentle needling becomes a worry that he is doing something wrong. Is it rude to refuse? Is it rude for Doctor Lecter to be aware that Will doesn’t actually want to be hosted, or to have a drink, and to continue to needle at that?
Will rubs again at his arm - hesitates - rubs at the back and side of his neck. He frowns and bites at the side of his mouth, jaw tight at each corner, teeth bricked together. He pushes past the impulse to take another sip, and switches his grip from one side to the other, the cylinder of the stem pressed into one palm and then the other, white skinned where the blood is pushed out of it.
This all too is charted.
Will leaves before he or Doctor Lecter can offer anything else.
—
“Oh, he’s awful,” Alana laughs minutes later to Will in the parking garage, when Will asks about Doctor Lecter’s unnerving attentiveness.
She’s done with her heels for the day, she explains when she follows. Will both resents and appreciates the company. It feels less like a retreat if they are done at the same time. And he is - done for the day too with seven dogs at home and somebody’s decades-long resume of mutilations sitting next to the cans of wet food on the counter waiting to be opened.
Will blinks at the blue of her car, and sees the stripes of the suit in negative. “Conventionally or professionally?” he asks. He suspects not the latter.
It’s nice that Alana understands him well enough to know the question is honest, even if she doesn’t think Will is delivering a compliment. She shakes her head. Her attractive loam-dark hair bounces a bit back and forth when she does it. Will watches as she pulls a strand from the corner of her smirking mouth with discomfort.
“You know how humans are evolved to smell rain from miles away?” she asks, and continues when Will nods.
“Geosmin,” says Will.
“You would know something like that, I guess,” she hums. “Hannibal’s like that with secrets. Makes him a tremendous psychiatrist. I think he had the location of my mark figured out a week into my mentorship…didn’t even need me to roll up my sleeves and wash my hands,” she jabs at the end.
“I’d imagine that would be more intimidating than fantastic,” Will says with another blink. “But you seem to be friendly, so maybe not.”
He still doesn’t like thinking about it - that Alana has a mark, that she could be governed by that, and that it means nothing to him other than it’s there, and someone else’s idea of important - but he finds he’s curious if her candor and respect with Doctor Lecter are actually a different kind of familiarity.
He feels the edges of that idea.
There’s something wrong with it - that they might be more intimately familiar. Will doesn’t really have a reason to think so beyond the impression that she likes him, but Alana likes Will too, or so she says from time to time.
His stomach clenches. It unsettles him to think about it.
Will blinks when Alana speaks again in reply.
“It was intimidating at first,” she says. “No one really wants to get off on the wrong foot with their superior, but he was fairly clinical about it. Disinterested in my mark once he figured it out.”
Will can imagine that - the sudden certainty between two people that they are not for each other. Somehow that’s easier to think about than the mark itself. Freedom of a sort.
His stomach unclenches.
He resents that it clenched at all, so he clenches his fingers in his pockets instead.
Alana doesn’t seem to notice, lost in memory. “He said it between filling out charts - that the interior elbow was documented as a manifest point with relative high frequency, and ideal for people who haven’t decided to show their mark or not - like it was no bother,” she says, combing her hair behind her ears. It sounds like something he might say.
Will sees the part that stuck to her mouth is sticky with gloss, and that annoys her too.
“None of that felt very flattering, even if it was said nicely when I asked if he knew,” she adds with a wry look, fingers detangling oily strands between them. “Fantastic afterwards, though - made me think a bit about how I want to present myself rather than worry how I am perceived.”
She shrugs, hands palm up. Will thinks he saw Hannibal do something similar just an hour before, that maybe she picked that up from him. “Also meant I didn’t have to worry about finding a new mentor,” she says.
Will can see it when spelled out like that. Her, relieved to not be so permanently connected. Him, well, Will doesn’t presume to know what Doctor Lecter thought, even if it sounded like something he would say, or looked like a way he would hold his own hands out. Maybe he’s had a dozen interns throw an entire library’s worth of little inky-blue iconography at him, begging for recognition.
Probable but not as likely, that Doctor Lecter has a mark of his own, and he was as unnerved to know Alana has one same as –
“Sounds like the kind of lesson someone who wears a red suit jacket to a conference centered on soul mark psychology would teach,” says Will, neutral, dismissive.
Alana unlocks her car with a click of the key, and taps her fingers on the frame open door. The transfer from the gloss leaves a little fingerprint behind, like a kiss.
“It’s nice to be noticed for the things we can control,” she says and tosses her handbag into the passenger seat.
“I know,” says Will to the rearview mirror of his own car minutes later, and can’t stop tonguing the side of his own mouth, hairless save for his patchy beard, and powdery beneath that.
—
Dinner is at home, if not from home - the traffic signals and snaking line of tail lights guide Will back to Virginia down infrequented but known freeways, the sun gone early for the autumn night.
Tiredness drives Will to unremarkable rotisserie chicken from the grocery store, displayed happily next to gallons of premade cider and mulling spice bags clipped in rows to either side. A clerk with her bird’s nest shaped mark worn like a wristband checks him out at the register, and tells him it’s her favorite kind of seasoning.
Will drives the chicken to his house, where it is left steaming in its plastic bag, seasoning sloughing off under its own lipids. The handle holes squeak when he walks it up the stairs of the house to the background hiss of his shoes on cold turf and gravel.
It’s important to eat, he tells himself, or more people will think he needs taking care of. It’s bad enough that he has psychiatric professionals telling him he looks like he needs help having a good time, if not in so many words. There’s no reason to not indulge from the safety of his own kitchen. It’s where hunger is meant to be sated, if not always controlled.
The chicken is messy. Will cringes at the feel of that more than the food itself. His hands slide grossly across the meat of the chicken as he pulls it apart, leg popping wetly out of place, wing cracking at the three articulations. He digs fingernails under its skin, and doesn’t bother with more than a paper towel while glancing over a case file.
This particular file’s carcass–
– body, Will corrects, wondering where that came from –
–bears a mark behind the knee. It is left dirty with mud, stocking torn over the top of it. It looks at home with this, a brilliant little spiral galaxy accustomed to being hidden by the universe’s debris, but not with respect for what Will is looking for.
Will closes the thick manila with the clean tip of a pinky finger, and pushes it away.
He opens another from the top of the pile - there are so many years, marks, locations to choose from that it's the only sort of order he has to start.
Will wonders where he will find the energy to even look at all of these cases before it becomes necessary for him to comment on them officially. What a nice fantasy it is, to be left alone to come to his own conclusions in the safety of academic rigor. How unfair it also is that he has the luxury to not see them as people. He can operate under the assumption that all of them are unconnected reports and autopsies save by the possibility of a common perpetrator and sometimes one small detail, but never be troubled by their personhood.
Will doesn’t deserve to feel tired in that context.
He does anyway.
His phone chimes from next to what Will thinks is meant to look like a fall mortality - meant to in that the level of pulping required to obliterate a kidney and a several foot stretch of intestine doesn't say fall, so much as it says pushed, and well after whatever the accessory crime that prompts it. Alana's name looks wrong next to it. Will has to remind himself not to transpose her into the periphery, that she is alive and well and needling his pride at every opportunity this week so far. She has nothing of note to say, only to ask if he's doing anything in particular tomorrow.
Will doesn't answer - most people are accustomed to that, or him answering at his convenience.
Just three more days of the conference, thinks Will with a sigh, scrubbing his neck and face with a soapy washcloth when he makes it to the sink for the night, each fiber of the terrycloth catching on the stubble. Just three more days of the kind of scrutiny that has no projector between me and all the rest of them.
He makes no eye contact with himself once the suds are sloughed away. He watches them disappear down the drain, a dull frothy peach color, a dozen small jars and bottles watching them circle from the sides of the sink.
Will dreams that he disposes of the chicken out beside the house, turning the soil with a spade shovel. Sometimes it scrapes the concrete foundation with the flat of the blade. Sometimes it unearths other decaying things that haven’t yet disappeared. Sticky somewhere in all that, a piece of Alana’s hair, clumped with gloss.
In the usual logic of dreams, he is certain that he must bury the bones deeply so that the dogs don’t find it, and that if he does it well enough that maybe it will make rich dirt for spring to rise warmly out of. It’s difficult with greasy, muddy hands to keep a hold of the shovel, but Will is deft with most things he sets his mind to.
He wipes at his face, the mud, gloss, and grease a seal across it. War paint. A ritual mask. He tries to picture what shape it will have taken.
—
(Terribly messy things, creating gardens.)