Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/ works/6284683. Rating: Explicit Archive Warning: Rape/Non-Con, Underage Category: M/M Fandom: Hannibal_(TV) Relationship: Will_Graham/Hannibal_Lecter, will_graham/will's_dad, Will_Graham_& Hannibal_Lecter Character: Hannibal_Lecter, Will_Graham, Will's_Dad, OCs Additional Tags: Underage_Rape/Non-con, Rape/Non-con_Elements, Child_Abuse, self-indulgent characterization_porn, also_regular_porn, Dubious_Consent, Group_Sex, kind_of, punks, Dead_Dove:_Do_Not_Eat Series: Part 2 of i_cannot_see_three_feet_in_front_of_me Stats: Published: 2016-03-18 Chapters: 1/? Words: 4962 ****** here it is again, yet it stings like the first time ****** by cashtastrophe Summary It happens finally on a Tuesday afternoon after a long, long string of bad days and worse evenings, that he reaches his breaking point.   (Or the one where there's way too much backstory for bb!trash!Will and it has to go somewhere besides the ugly depths of my brain) Notes You guys   If it wasn’t evident from my choice in chapter title, i am kind of a scuzzy gross punk kid. i found out recently from some of my crusty friends that New Orleans has been a pretty big hub for traveling kids since the eighties so…   This happened and I, uh...yeeeeeeah. Sorry. This is part of down_on_my_knees_but_not_to_pray—hit_so_hard_across the_skull_it_buckled_my_legs but it veered super off course for a long while and is fairly hannibal-free, so I'm posting an extended version of the chapter as a separate story for anyone curious about how bb!will made it to New Orleans. If there's any actual interest in this, there might be a couple more parts added eventually.   If you’re familiar with that story, you know what sort of garbage to expect here. If not…   Please please please see end notes for trigger warnings See the end of the work for more notes   *       It happens finally on a Tuesday afternoon after a long, long string of bad days and worse evenings, that he reaches his breaking point.   Will is strung tight and tense, has been for three exhausting weeks now. His every nerve is braced for those moments—almost every night now, no break in between to catch his breath, no time to recover —in which his father, flushed with courage that smells an awful lot like Jack Daniels' will reach for him. Will snatch him as he passes in the hallway, hold him by the wrist, by the scruff of the neck as he ducks into the bathroom and, one memorable time, by the back of the skull followed a brutal slam of his forehead into the corrugated metal of the trailer wall.   Will almost misses the days when he was small enough to ball himself up into tiny spaces, small enough to keep himself hidden in the corners of his father's awareness. When he'd been caught it had hurt more then, of course—less surface area to disperse the pain, he supposed, still-developing nervous system and a narrow frame that wasn't suited to the intrusions of his father's blunt fingers, never mind anything else.   That, at least, has eased with age and growth.   Small fuckin' favors.       *       You take it like a pro , Dad had hissed only the week before as he'd shuddered and come on the stripes crisscrossing Will's lower back. His panting bulk collapses boneless against the wounds with little regard to the fact that they were still throbbing and red, some of them weeping where his skin had split.   Will moaned in nothing but sheer animal terror, his mind firing frantic on all cylinders, howling at him to run as far as his shaking legs would take him, run until he collapsed, anything to escape from the weight of the creature on his back. He could only squirm, of course, in absolute overwhelm because it burned like a poker laid flat across his skin, ached like he'd run ten miles in as many minutes, and his father was heavy enough that it was really difficult to breathe.     A big hand wrapped around his cock, sure and stead as if he’d begged aloud for it, coaxing out a bitten cry from the sick place in the pit of his belly where there lurked the urge to sink his teeth into that hand, to bite 'til he drew blood, to fight back.   He came, eventually. Of course he did. He always did. He hated himself for it.   The world kept right on spinning.   After, he lay on his belly, trying his best not to move and asked, “When you said 'like a pro,' did you mean—should I get myself tested?"   His father gave him a black eye for the question and—after his requisite cooldown period, after Will brought him beer after sweating beer, silent except to ask hey, want another? —he handed Will the number of a nearby clinic.   The day of his appointment, before he left for work, Dad grabbed him by the chin, wrenched his head up so Will was forced to look him in the eye, and said, in a tone that brooked no argument, "Straight home afterwards, hear me? I know how long it takes to walk back from the bus stop. If you're not home by the time I call—“ he trailed off with a shrug and let go. "Don't be late."   Will had nodded, dazed. He’d left. Sat through the bus ride and the waiting room and the bloodwork and the prodding and the uncomfortable questions with his head empty and buzzing, feeling for all the world like his skull was stuffed full of cotton. They asked if he was hurt anywhere. He shook his head. He lied and lied and lied in a perfect even deadpan, unblinking, as he wondered frantically if his jeans were dark enough to mask any potential bleeding.   They believed him. They were overwhelmed with patients, so it wasn't as though they had the time not to, and anyways, he was sixteen, not six. He was capable of defending himself if he’d really wanted to. It had all gone quickly enough from there until the nurse with the soft grey eyes gestured to his bruised face and tried to press the number for a local shelter into his hand.   He had promptly started hyperventilating. He thought he might have stammered something indecipherable about needing to be home to walk the dog, maybe, but thank you, see you next time, you have a good day now and fled .   He didn’t remember any of the bus ride home.  He did, however, make it in the door just in time for the phone to ring.   Three days later, it rang again. The test came back clean.   Will tried his best not to be disappointed.       *         Dad has been getting worse over the course of the past few months, in massive increments that he's sort of starting to find alarming.   He’d have to be blind not to make the connection between the sudden shift in temper and the toll his mother's cancer is taking on the man. On some level, he figures, Dad must still love her. He rarely so much as raises his voice to her, these days. He sees the way his father’s face ages ten years in the span of six months as Momma withers away in her bed, drowning herself in cheap gin like she’s not only accepted death, but has decided to race it to the finish line. Some days, she’s so still and quiet Will thinks she might be practicing for the coffin.   He tries to find it in himself to forgive his father. He does. He tries to watch his step, to be careful, tries to placate him when possible and duck when not, but the demands have become so increasingly irrational, so downright paranoid , he’s not sure how he's supposed to keep up.   It’s terrifying.   He thinks it could be the drinking, at least in part. Thinks, too, after a few covert sessions spent holed up in the library after school, struggling to drag his exhausted brain through academic explorations of mania and paranoia and delusions , that his father probably didn't ever come home from war all the way.   It's...not comforting, grasping at these straws. His pelvis still aches dully, enough that he has to kind of limp his way through gym class, and he still throws up every lunch in the cramped hallway bathroom no one uses due to its relative isolation from the cafeteria, so it doesn’t really make him feel any better. He still blanks out during class, still forgets his homework, and his test days and what day of the week it is and to change his shirt sometimes for six days in a row. It doesn’t change anything, exactly.   It just, it soothes him a little to think of it as a disease.   A disease is no one's fault. A disease strikes randomly and without purpose and—and it means that it isn't him . That he somehow isn't worthy only of love at the buckle end of a belt, that there's a possibility that he is the product of a wretched situation, but maybe not the cause.   It's the closest thing he's felt to hope in a long time. Maybe—maybe if his father had treatment, maybe if there was some sort of support system in place, maybe if he got the right medications, and he's ex-military, so surely there are programs to help—   And then...   And then .       *       "He wasn't an educated man. I hope that's clear."   "Abundantly so."   "He thought—I was sixteen, right, and that's the age of consent in Louisiana, so. So he wanted proof."   "Proof of—?”   “My—I don't know. Proof that I was into it? That I consented? He had this whole thing about thinking I was always on the verge of telling the cops. I couldn't join clubs after school because he was afraid I'd tell a teacher. I couldn't go over to any friends' houses, in case their parents asked questions . He was so convinced I’d turn him in, no matter what I said, so...I guess he wanted something to hold against me if I did."   "Were you?"   "Jesus, no . No one gave a shit. This happened all over my town, Hannibal. I mean, obviously not to everyone , but enough. Kid I was friends with in grade school got drowned by his momma in the bathtub for cryin' too loud, you know, and he was maybe eight? You were lucky to make it out alive. Didn't have much time to worry about being intact."   "So he...videotaped you."   "Drugged me and taped...taped us . Yeah. Like I said, he wasn't educated. I mean, I didn't really even think about it until I was in the Academy, how all he'd really done was implicate himself.   "And. I was just, I was stoned out of my mind and scared to death and, and I was crying and bleeding and I—I don't know, I snapped. Broke my mother's bedroom door down and demanded that she do something to help me. My mother, who was bedridden and dying in front of me , and all I could do was scream for her to stop him. I was bigger than she was by that point."   "It is a parent's obligation to protect their young. She had ample opportunity when you were much smaller, I think. You have no reason to blame yourself for the fact that she chose not to take it.”   "It was the last thing I said to her. I stole her wallet and I walked out the door and I just—“   "Kept going."   "Kept going .”           *               It's a girl that finds him eventually, shivering and wandering blank-eyed through the brush towards the sound of flowing water like a selkie instinctively trying to slip back into the sea. He's nearly made it to the river at that point, and he hasn't managed to make up his mind whether he intends to follow it or walk straight into it when, from behind him—   "Hey man, I've been following you for like, ten minutes now? So I'm gonna go ahead and introduce myself before this gets any weirder. Hi," she says, and stumbles down a tangle of roots to the concrete he stands on.   She’s a tiny little thing, a good head shorter than Will himself, positively drowning in oversized layers of black and grey. Her jeans are torn and stitched back together inexpertly, her hoodie faded the sort of grey that speaks of exposure, not age. She stands probably an inch taller than she actually is in a clunky pair of battered combat boots, the laces mismatched and tied together in half a dozen places. A little tawny mutt without a leash trots after her. Neither of them smell great, but she smiles wide when she reaches him and holds out a black-nailed hand for him to shake. Obedient as a dog, automatic, he does. ”I’m Shiloh."   He blinks at her muzzily, still trying to process the following you portion of her greeting. When he speaks, it tastes dusty and sounds worse, like he's been wandering dry-mouthed for hours.   Maybe he has.   "Shiloh. Like the county?"   She bares her teeth at him in a smile. "Shiloh like the battle ," she corrects, tosses her dreads, and barks out a laugh at what must have been a startled expression on his face. "What, your daddy didn't like military history? I thought all southern guys had a thing for it."   Will shakes his head. "My daddy didn't like much of anything. Whiskey, maybe," he hears himself mutter and Shiloh-like-the-battle nods slow like she understands.   (Later, much later, months later, when he strips off her heavy jacket and unlaces her boots and sees the constellations of old cigarette burns littering the brown skin under her t-shirt for the first time, he will realize that she really, really does.)   "Well, this is a shit place to sleep anyways," she says after a moment, her fingers curling absent in the honey-brown fur of the dog leaned against her leg. It closes its eyes, panting happily in a patch of sunlight slotting though the leaves and Will realizes they are somehow in a concrete underpass without his noticing. She jerks a thumb at a bright splash of graffiti on the wall behind her. "Used to be a pick up spot for hookers off the highway, I think. Lot lizards smart enough to stay away from the lots, right? Cops are always up our asses when we stop here, so I wouldn't hang around if I was you." She blinks. "Unless you're a hooker, in which case—I‘m really sorry for being rude and carry on, I guess."   Will snorts. "Do I look like a hooker?" He makes a jerky kind of gesture at his dirty plaid shirt, jeans smeared with engine oil, heavy work boots crusted in red dirt. He's willing to bet his black eye hasn't faded even to a soft green yet, and there's some stripes from Dad's belt blistering across his back miserably still in the relative cool of the spring air that she can't even see.   He smells awful. He looks worse. His pupils are blown, he’s probably sweating. He knows he's shaking.   She tilts her head considering. "In the eyes, yeah, kinda," she says eventually. "You also look like you're coming down from some pretty bad shit."   Will laughs. It feels like he's grinding glass between his teeth. Feels like it's in his gums and in his soft palette and all down his throat, slicing him open again every time he swallows. He wonders absently how much blood he could ingest before it made him sick. "Dunno what," he slurs. "It was in a beer. Can't really walk great though."   "Yeah, I can see that. You look pretty busted up. Whatcha got on you?"   "Uh." He fumbles at his pockets and produces his mother's slim wallet. "Like, twenty bucks." He checks and counts it twice; his vision is stubbornly refusing to stay still long enough to actually read the numbers. “Twenty-six," he corrects.   "Not even a jacket? It's getting pretty cold at night." She's wearing this massive black military affair herself, one that hangs on her razor frame like a tent. She’s rolled up the sleeves enough to keep them out of her way, and decorated it with what seem to be patterns in a rough, unprofessional embroidery interspersed with sloppy white-out.   He blinks a few times and the patterns resolve themselves into letters. They're probably bands, he realizes, though nothing he's ever heard of, aggressive combinations of spiky letters in a clearly-handmade script.  She's wearing a dog collar, pink leather with scuffed silver studs and a heart-shaped tag reading simply fuck!, and he tries his best not to look at it. He tugs up the collar of his own shirt as surreptitiously as possible to cover the wide band of scar tissue. He's pretty sure she notices.   Her dog, by contrast, is wearing a faded red bandanna and a sleepy, pleased expression. Will notes that the animal, though its paws are muddy and its fur studded with burrs, seems to be in good health; its teeth are white, coat thick and glossy, single remaining eye bright and aware.   "No jacket," he confirms when he realizes he's been staring at them for probably longer than is socially acceptable. He hunches his shoulders. "Sorry."   She reaches out and whaps him lightly on the side of the head.   He flinches at the sharp movement and she clearly sees it, but she doesn't pause. Doesn't hurt him, obviously, but doesn't stop herself from making contact, not even when he sucks in a sharp little breath at the blissful chemical swelling at bare skin touching his. He whimpers. He wants, and it’s awful.   It’s followed immediately by a wave of roiling nausea, panic and runrunrun hammering in the dead center of his ribcage. She says, strict, as he shrinks back from her, "Don't fuckin' apologize , come on. Hold your head up. You can't pull that kicked-dog shit out here. You got somewhere to slink back to, mutt?"   Red-faced, he shakes his head.   "Okay. So you've got twenty—sorry, twenty- six bucks and a clear case of the crazies and hey, has anyone ever told you that you could model?" She reaches out for him again and this time, runs a gentle hand down his jaw, slow enough that he has time to pull away. He huffs out a noise of surprise, but doesn't move. "Because you are pretty , my friend. And that'd be just great if you actually were a hooker, but since that's not something you're considering...?" Here she pauses and waits for his jerky agreement before she continues, "right, so that face isn't gonna do you any favors on the tracks. Can you grow a beard? You should really try to grow a beard. Maybe get some tattoos. You don't even have a dog, you asshole."   “I—" he swallows once, hard, and bites back the apology. "Yeah, I, uh—I didn't exactly plan this out."   "No shit." She shoves her hands into her pockets and rocks back on the heels of her chunky black boots. “I’ve…look, I’ve got my crew holed up in a squat about a mile down the creek," she says. She pronounces it crick . "It's safer than being out here on your own, 'specially while you're sweating out whatever you're on. We take turns on watch at night so no one can sneak up on us and snatch our gear. That was my idea." She grins. "Got it from Lord of the Rings . You ever read that?"   He nods. "Yeah, in middle school," he distantly hears himself volunteering. "And The Hobbit . I, uh, I liked them."   She raises both eyebrows and whistles a low note. "Well alright, Mutt, we could use another slightly educated mind knockin’ around. My guys are—they’re sweethearts, I love 'em, but they ain't always the brightest. You're not, like—“ she grimaces. "It's a dick thing to ask, I know, but are you the kind of crazy we're gonna have to keep watch for ?"   It's a fair question. She's come across a strange boy in the middle of nowhere, out of his mind on something he can't name, clearly not even a week out from some kind of encounter that left his eye blacked and his lip split, so it's pretty reasonable for her to want to know if there's a chance he'll slit their throats in their sleep. The thought of touching her beyond seeking that warm spark of actual human contact, though, just the idea of raising a hand with the intent to strike at this little slip of a thing with her bright eyes and all her crooked-sharp animal teeth makes him abruptly queasy. He clenches his hands into fists and tries to choke out something past the shredded lining of his throat.   "Shit," she says, and pats him awkwardly on the shoulder. "Hey, hey, I didn't mean nothing by it. Don't start crying on me now."   "Smart," he husks out, and drops his gaze to the mat of pine needles littering the concrete beneath the soles of his boots. "You're right to ask. I've never—I’ve never hurt anyone. Else."   "Man, I've hurt someone else. Many someones," she laughs. "Long as you have the ability to draw a clear line between friend and enemy , we're solid." She tilts her head again, and her short little dreadlocks flop up in a sort of messy mohawk, the metal beads scattered throughout clicking together gently. She reminds him a little of a bird. ”Sometimes you gotta fight," she offers. "Sometimes, you got no other options." She ruffles the dog's ears and Will notices for the first time the thick bands of scarring striping the dog's muzzle and neck.   (She's a small pit mix, he finds out later, a bait dog in her previous life, and Will wonders for awhile why a girl as tiny as Shiloh wouldn't have a big bruiser of an animal instead. It would make more sense, he's sure, up until he sees her hoist the animal into her rucksack to hop a train marked NBD for Northbound in glaring green on three successive cars.)   Will nods without really consciously choosing to. "Y-yeah. I guess so. I, uh—I won’t hurt you, though. Promise."   She snorts. "Ain't me I'm worried about. What are you, a hundred twenty pounds soaking wet? I got some kids in my crew who aren't so full-sized yet is all." She turns and crooks a hand back at him, waves for him to follow her. "But hey, you seem like an alright dude. Come on. Dinner should be done by now."   He tucks his wallet back into his pocket and his hands into the hollows of his armpits. She doesn’t look back to see if he’s still just standing there.   Hunched against the cold wind blowing off the water, he follows her.       *     “Dinner” turns out to be a couple of half-eaten pizzas liberated from a nearby dumpster, but it’s warmed over a camp stove and, true to Shiloh’s word, her crew are actually sweethearts.   They don’t look it. They turn out to be three skinny kids dressed in the same various shades of faded, unwashed black as her. The youngest, a tornado of a loudmouth maybe six years Will's junior with a buzzed head that, Shiloh explains, rubbing fondly at the fuzz covering the kid's scalp, was the result of one too many bug infestations. "He goes by Flea and he's a total spaz," she says, ducking out of the way of the playful swipe Flea takes at her. "But you put this kid in front of a set of pickle drums and man . He can make the most uptight white bitch dance, lemme tell you. Total idiot savant, so try not to kill him if you can. We need him come busking season."   Flea sticks out his tongue, but grins sunnily up at her anyways.   The guy with the guitar and the sloppy homemade tattoos all down his arms is Mack, and he doesn't seem to have much to say about there being a new addition to their crew. He does offer Will a couple pulls from a joint, though, and asks if he thinks he could learn bass.   "Not, like, well ," he clarifies earnestly. "Just enough to keep up with a beat."  He takes a long draw from the joint and passes it over, lets blue smoke leak between his teeth. Will inhales deeply. It burns.   "Yeah," he murmurs. "Yeah, I probably could. What happened to your last bassist?"   Mack's grin slips a little.   When Will tries to pass the joint back, he waves his hand. "Nah, man, keep it. Consider it a welcome-home present."   Jacob-call-me-Jake is tall and built like an absolute tank, with what looks like a porcupine quill shoved sideways through his septum. He towers over Will without really meaning to, but he's got an easy smile and a molasses drawl. When he corners Will against the crumbling brick not two hours after meeting him, his hands and his mouth are so gentle Will could scream .   He tastes like nothing familiar, like tobacco and cheap weed and the shitty moonshine Mack's been passing around in a water bottle since they sat down. They're holding what could loosely be considered a band practice before it devolves into a drunken argument about a comic book Will's never read and he kind of tunes out.   Will hasn't magically learned how to play bass in half a day, nor do they technically have a bass, so he gets to sit off to the side with Jake passing the liquor between them. Jake doesn’t play anything—“I'm the roadie, I get to lug all their shit around because look at Mack, actually just look at him, he is so small it's embarrassing .”—and he lets maybe half a slurring song pass before he's crawling into Will's lap, tipping the plastic bottle of clear liquor into his mouth.   " Hey ," Will thinks he says but the burn in his throat is good. The burn in his belly is even better.   "Hey yourself," Jake mumbles. "It's been a while since Shiloh brought home someone new."   Will huffs out a laugh. "What, are you not allowed to, to breed outside the pack? Shiloh has to approve?"   Jake doesn't dignify that with an actual answer. He does, however, shove one enormous hand into Will's jeans and begin (with a hugely satisfied smile) to jack him off so goddamn slow and sweet and tight it's actually unfair .  Three strokes in, he pauses. “This okay?”   It takes him a few moments to realize why he’d stopped in the first place, why he seemed to be waiting for the all-clear to continue. When he does, he keens low in his throat and tries desperate to muffle it in the palm of his hand, because there is still a band practice happening not thirty feet away and also one of them is, like, ten.   Jake shakes his head. He tugs Will’s wrist away from his mouth, pinning it to the brick above his head and when Will’s eyes drop to half-mast at that, he adds Will’s other wrist to the hold, chuckling fondly. "Nah, c'mon, Mutt. Let 'em hear you. Part of the pack now, yeah?"   It takes another few long shots from the plastic bottle and smoking his welcome joint down to a smoldering roach, but Mack's still noodling away at a tricky solo when Jake tugs Will's jeans down and swallows his half-hard cock. He does it eagerly, with embarrassing focus, a loudly appreciate noise and a total disregard for the other people in the room.   Will whimpers. His hips buck up helpless into the warm slick of it, into the broad hands wrapped carefully around his thighs. If this has ever been done to him before, he can't remember it, but he thinks he sort of understands now why it makes his father claw at him the way he does—and surely this must be better , Jake's slow enthusiasm, the way he rubs gentle circles into the hollows of Will's hip with his free hand.   Will fought, usually. Spit and scratched and made such a fuss that he forced his father to hold his head still, braced in the vise grip of broad fingers on his jaw.  They’d press in cruelly, biting so hard into his skin that he'd have to get up a full twenty minutes early and steal his mother's foundation the next morning before school. He can’t imagine the occasional rebellious scraping of teeth was much fun either.   Nothing like that happens here. Jake looks up at him with these sweet, wide brown eyes and he smiles like the goddamn sunrise when he pulls off Will gently with a soft pop to throw back another shot.   “Please, fuck, please, ” he pants without any concrete idea what he's asking for. Over Jake's head, Mack locks eyes with him. He winks.   Jake wipes his mouth, sets the bottle down and murmurs something ridiculous to him, something along the lines of are you good, yeah, you gotta tell me if you need me to slow down, gotta tell me if you wanna stop, but Will just nods without really processing it and Jake grins, crooked. He shifts back between Will’s splayed legs with a low, “Okay, okay, needy,” and gets back to work.   This time, he bypasses the thick line of Will’s cock entirely. This time, he gently nudges Will’s legs further apart to suck gently at his balls. This time, instead of the blooming warmth in Will’s stomach at the slide of a tongue against him, his stomach plummets with a cold, dead weight like he’s just been ducked into an ice bath.   Will slams his eyes shut with a choked sound that should probably have been embarrassing. No , he tries to stammer out as Jake peels his jeans down his thighs, past his knees, off entirely, dropping onto the bare concrete floor, no, hey, not there, he tries to say, but his jaw may as well be wired shut.   He shakes and he shakes and he shakes and he only looks up when Shiloh pushes the bottle of moonshine into his grasping hands.   Will slugs it down gratefully. Shiloh kicks at Jake's thigh, and nods when he gives her a thumbs-up in reply. “Dude, relax" she says to Will and pushes the bottle at him again. "You're still rolling, right? So just...go with it. Let him make this feel a little better. Let us take care of you for a bit. That's the whole goddamn point ." She crouches down next to him and she doesn't touch him anywhere sexual, doesn't touch Jake at all, just cards her fingers through Will's tangled hair, tips another shot to his gasping mouth and murmurs, "Let go , kid."   He pushes into her touch and comes down Jake's willing throat barely half a heartbeat later with a wrecked little groan. He tries to say something, tries to protest as Jake swallows him down, pulls off and lets that clever tongue trail down the tight pull of skin just behind his balls.   Please don't , he tries to choke as the tongue swipes against him and his hips spasm uselessly into empty air.   "Hey," Jake says, lifting his head. His mouth is swollen, slicked red and wet, brows knotted together. “You’re—yo, man, you're bleeding."   And that's the last thing Will really remembers for a while.         End Notes runaways, traveling kids, kids making poor decisions, unsafe sex, underage drinking, underage drug use, Will's dad bad touches him a bunch and Will is Done. 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