The Job (Part I)
Will has lost sense of himself by the time the plane lands — unraveled. And it's hot.
He remembers a book he read while at the academy that had explained a process of unraveling that happened sometimes during and after traumatic events. And, while Will would brook a few arguments about his trauma, he's not too proud to admit that his strings may be coming a little loose.
There's a friendly-looking man waiting for him when he lands. Andrea, he finds, is a stout clerk with an embroidered shirt that spells his whole life out for Will, who is very busy trying not to read it. ( I had someone at home to wash and press this for me but they have recently left in a way that was out of my control. I am sad and you shouldn't ask me about it. )
Most people probably wouldn't know it by looking at the man, but Will does in the time it takes to unload the second bag and shake his hand.
"Signor Chilton takes care of everything," Andrea tells him, still holding his hand. "You relax. Andrea has you now." The man flashed a mustachioed grin at him and Will did his best to smile back and nod.
The hangar is small and blindingly white. Andrea leads him to a side room where he signs form after form. They aren't in English and as he manages a thought about the legal implications of that, he's being edged back out of the same door again, catching every third word Andrea is telling him about needing to leave now and Signor Chilton's plans. Before he's ushered into a waiting cab at the end of the tarmac, he stops at a rack near the door.
The signage above it is handwritten and in English, but only barely. A wooden overhang reads, Italy Mapping!, and below it he finds two foldables caked in dust and congealed lemon Pledge. When he looks back, Andrea just smiles.
His palms sweat a lot in the cab. To be fair, it's a miracle Will has made it as far as he has in the first place. The farthest he'd ever made it outside of the States before was on either side of the Canada or Mexico borders for case-related business, and then, he hadn't paid any more attention than necessary to the intricacies of international travel. ( He doesn't think the back of an un-air-conditioned SUV contains many intricacies, but he's been wrong before. ) Even then, he'd been with somebody and had a clear set of protocols in place for what he was going to be doing. There was no gray area: get in, do your job, get out. Now, there was nuance and room for error and Will had enough specific, recent history with both of those to suggest they were among the last things he needed.
Will does his best to stay calm. He tries to busy himself with the practice of "turning his mind off" and "enjoying the countryside, Will, I mean it's Italy who would turn that down!"
( Will would turn that down. He tried several times. )
In the end, though, it had been Italy or a hospital, and though no one was willing to frame it that way for him, if he wanted to keep his job, the choice was clear.
Instead, he turns his mind to the scene passing outside his window. There's almost no one on the road, save for the occasional biker or delivery van. The countryside is largely painted in yellows and oranges and the few scattered houses that there were, were stone or pastel-colored leaving the whole scene muted and impossibly vibrant at the same time.
Between the directions in one of Alana's emails and the maps (dated before the Years of Lead, nice going Will), he deciphered that the airport was four hours away from Chilton's and six hours to the nearest major city.
They make it all of two before the cabbie stops the car abruptly.
There's a girl in the road.
It didn't start this way.
He'd spent the last year letting his brain simmer on medium-high in an immunological soup. He'd spent the last month in a Rube Goldberg continuum of rebuilding and re-rotting whatever mental defenses he thought he had hidden away in some corner of his mind. He'd spent the last week avoiding relentless send-offs and awkward back-pats commemorating his "healing leave of absence," and the last few days rehoming what little worldly connections he had left in the world. The morning was spent navigating the busier parts of the Heathrow airport parking lot.
So, yeah, the fact that Will gets this far? Astounding.
His pride tells him he can definitely make it the three more city blocks he's estimating he has left and, damnit, he's going to.
Or, he would have, if he hadn't found himself bodily removed from that path by being thrown into that of a panting teenage girl.
Some Tuesdays are easier than others, he surmises as he does his best to get out of and walk around the car with as little movement as possible. He almost wants to laugh when he realizes his hands are raised and neither of them is armed.
She looks scared. "Who are you?"
Correction: she looks pissed off. She's coiled like something cornered and her teeth immediately bare at him. Her head would peak just over his shoulder if he got closer and the freckles scattered across her wind-chafed face don't help the animalistic effect she's clearly trying to project. Despite the rapid-angry mouth, she looks like something he would find at an outlet mall in a fly-over state in the middle of the continental United States. Were it not for the overt aggression and threat of mortal danger, Will might find comfort in the familiarity her face offers him.
Very Mall of America. He chokes back a smirk in the hopes of looking more comforting.
"My name is Will," he tells her instead. "Are you hurt?"
She shakes her head slowly, continuing to eye him but softening her features some. Though out of breath and red-faced from running, the girl looks startingly composed for having almost been flattened by the car and in the middle of whatever it is that is happening to her.
"Nobody is supposed to be out here," she tells him, decidedly less acidic. "Why are you here?"
Her eyes flit back to the cab and his follow. He can't see the cabbie's face as she can, but judging from the man's lax posture and scrolling through the dash-mounted phone, he is clearly uninterested in the exchange happening outside the car. Whether the man has become accustomed to this sort of ordeal by rote or circumstance, Will doesn't know, but he wonders (not for the first time) just what the hell he's gotten himself into.
Their eyes meet again for a moment before Will has to look away. "Do you know my dad?"
And her voice is so hopeful Will has to look at her again. "I don't even know who you are," he tells her. "Are you in danger?"
As the words leave his mouth, several things happen in quick succession: a loud, all-too-familiar pop! echoes across the plain, especially shattering in the absence of any other sound in the endless beige field; the girl's eyes widen more than before and Will can immediately see a new plan of action stitching itself together in her head (run run run); a lingering puddle over the loose dirt-gravel catches a sunbeam just right and twinkles in the corner of Will's eye. Will can see it all happen, more or less, before it actually does, not unlike—
It's too late even before he throws an arm out in an attempt to catch her about the waist. He barely touches her shirtsleeve before he hears her skull ping against the far headlight of the car.
When he finally bothers to look, the cabbie — Sabastian — gets it almost immediately.
"That is Miss Lecter," he told Will. French, vaguely, which he didn't expect, but the sleeping girl with a head wound in his arms monopolized a bit too much of his attention to focus on that. "She lives on the way to Doctor Chilton's if we would be stopped?"
The drive to the new place is short and smoother than the rest of it had been, gravel giving way, first, to asphalt and then cobblestones, after. Will's entire center of gravity moves with the midline of the car and he does his best to keep the girl as still as possible. The car makes three turns and cruises around a wide bend until they finally cross through an arch and cobbled courtyard. Sebastian stops short, and Will hefts himself and the Lecter girl out of the car before it's put in park.
There's no mistaking the place for what it is: a castle. Fit entirely with aging stone, sheets of greenery, and curved doorframes, the place appeared to be authentic and ancient at first glance — which was all Will got before his eyes landed on a woman in what appeared to be the main entrance.
Her eyes find him lazily and she remains more or less impassive as he approaches. She's bored, Will realizes belatedly. She's done this before.
Blonde, bored, and still dressed in her bathrobe, she nods her head and almost smiles at him, clearly in no hurry to let him in. “I don’t think we’ll be able to thank you enough, Mr. ...?”
You're not local either, then. Wonderful. “Uh, Graham," he grunts, shifting the girl. "Will Graham.”
The blonde woman’s half-smile quirks and her face shutters for a moment, like her body skids to a full stop and her mind switches gears. She doesn’t speak as she leads Will through the door and up a grand set of stairs in the foyer. She wordlessly directs him through a series of halls and archways until they finally make it to what's clearly the girl’s room.
It's nearly bare, save for the few personal items on display: small trinkets littering a nightstand, soft quilts piled at the foot of an even softer looking bed, a pastel pink lamp that Will suspects to be a leftover from the remnants of an isolated childhood in this place, a space heater.
He can’t help but see more than he means to as he helps tuck her in.
You’ve done something like this before, many times. You’re an only child, precious to whoever is caring for you, though you don’t know it. You hang on to the souvenirs from the last time you felt loved, seen, but it only serves to make you feel sad and overgrown. You are lonely, and desperately alone. You will keep trying to run away until this is no longer true.
The woman only nods when Will asks after a doctor for the girl, doesn’t speak to him when they leave the room, when they walk through more of the darkened hallways, and then finally make it to another door she politely invites him inside. This room is much warmer than the rest of what he's seen of the house, both in temperature and color palette. It's carpeted, for one thing, and two generously upholstered chairs sit in the middle facing each other.
"Please," and beckons him to sit.
He does, only too aware of the mud drying tacky on his jeans, praying it’s not currently rubbing off on what he expects to be obnoxiously expensive velveteen. In his discomfort, Will barely notices the woman sweeping in and out of the room a number of times. His palms start to sweat and he registers a terse phone conversation happening over a deafening buzz in his ears.
It’s not until a damp towel finds its way into his lap that Will is able to focus again.
“Your reputation precedes you, Agent Graham,” the woman says, dropping into the opposite seat. She looks exhausted and Will can tell from the way she settles that his earlier assertion was correct — they've done this before.
Will’s teeth grind together as he starts to clean his hands, his eyes catching around her jawline when he bothers to look up. “Not an agent, ma’am,” he grits. “‘Professor' would be the most appropriate title, but please, just call me Will.”
“Will,” she says. “I'm Doctor Bedelia du Maurier, to be precise. Bedelia, if you please.”
“Are you the girl’s mother?”
He knows the answer is no before she chuckles and shakes her head. Your exhaustion is too superficial to come from a mother. You hesitated too long when you reached her room, unfamiliar with the terrain. You haven't even glanced at her since we crossed the threshold.
She sniffs. “I’m nothing more than the head of the household while Doctor Lecter is away.”
Will nods, distantly familiar with the concept. A neighbor with a housekeeper when he was a child, a role in a film, a well-founded stereotype in his mild disdain for inherited wealth. He does his best not to label her Jeeves and keeps scrubbing.
“I was just passing by when she ran in front of my cab,” Will tells her. “I'm going to be staying with one of your neighbors up the road."
This seems to stump her momentarily. “You don’t seem like a friend of the Vergers.”
“I’m not. I’m, uh, heading to Dr. Chilton's?”
A pause. “You must be brave."
This startles a laugh out of Will. A thin line between bravery and insanity and Even so, I must admire your skill. You are so gracefully insane.
He has a feeling she wouldn't get the joke.
“Believe it or not, you’re not the first person to tell me that,” he says. “Is there something about Frederick Chilton, specifically, that inspires the trepidation or is it an occupational hazard?”
Her eyes crease. "So you do know me."
Do you know my dad? but less hopeful, less sure.
"Sorry, uh, no actually." When she tilts her head to the side and says nothing, he elaborates. (He lies.) "The chairs," he gestures about the room. "And the books. Not too many housekeepers delving into 101 Trauma-Informed Interventions for light reading."
She nods, and a grimace working it's way into smile appears. “In that case, I feel as though I am required to say both. Or, more honestly, that it depends on who you ask.”
That's fair. “And if I were to ask you?”
“I would say it's bad form for those in my field to profile colleagues, formally or informally,” she says evenly. “However, I will say I hold a very singular pleasure in not having made the acquaintance of Dr. Chilton on many occasions."
He laughs at that for a while, finding his mouth unused to the action. His mind is still buzzing with leave, leave, leave and he still sees, but there's something tethering him here, duty-bound and stupid.
He swallows, wringing the nearly dry cloth out between nervous fingers. “W-would you allow me to check in on Abigail once she’s awake?”
At this, she does smile. “I can say I'm honestly surprised you had not asked sooner, considering your background." She stands, gesturing him to follow when she leaves the room. She leads him back to the foyer where his bags stare back at him. "Your driver was more than happy to play linguistic gymnastik while laying out his job description for me. Specifically, I might add, that this is not a part of it." She seems almost fond. "As it stands, I wouldn’t call Dr. Chilton’s villa ‘up the road’ — he’s nearly an hour or so out of the way.”
Will cringes. Italian Mapping! had failed him, then. Shocking.
You make friends wherever you go, Graham.
Dr. Du Maurier seems to sense Will’s minor crisis. “You may imagine that we have more than enough vacancies to accommodate for the night, at least, until the cabs are up and running again in the morning,” she offers, and then takes a long pause. “I hate to impose on your leave, Will, but perhaps I could make a counteroffer that might appeal to you?”
'Ms. Lecter presents with distress, mild concussion, deep neck laceration [distal right], hairline superficial laceration [medial right]. Treatment: stitches for lacerations, mild sedatives. Recommendations: 48 hr observation w/ light restraints [24 hr rec] as patient history includes mild self-harm routine.'
And scrawled below it:
'PATIENT PROVES SERIOUS FLIGHT RISK + SHOULD BE CONSIDERED A DANGER TO SELF AND OTHERS.'