Chapter Text
There is nothing, until an explosion of pain.
Lungs burning, chest seizing, claws deep within his stomach - twisting, scraping, about to burst through each layer of bruised skin. He is heaving, choking on salt water and bile, gasping and sputtering as strong hands roll him onto his side. More liquid, pooling into his hair and eyes as he gags, pushing out the ocean drowning him from the inside.
“I need you to breathe, Will.”
A voice from somewhere, everywhere, above and below. Is he breathing? Is he Will? He can’t be sure, can’t think through hot waves of agony. How can he breathe underwater?
“Breathe, Will,” pressure, a hand against his rib cage, where lines of pain radiate outward, all-encompassing. Another clasping the side of his neck, firm. He thrashes, body jerking, a garbled scream rough within his throat.
“Good, Will,” the voice continues, unfazed. “Can you open your eyes for me?”
He does, squinting through clouded vision, head pounding an uneven rhythm at the assault of light. There is a face above him, a man: wet, bleeding. Will gasps, chokes on his own breath, tries to meet the man’s unwavering gaze but he can’t stop his eyes from rolling, wandering, images of sky and rock pulsing in and out with each painful, frantic beat of his heart.
“Look at me, Will,” measured, calm, the stranger and his voice the only solid things in this confusing, painful world he has woken up in. He tries to ground himself through the pain, tries to anchor himself to the small comfort of the man’s easy cadence, but darkness creeps across his eyes, a heavy blanket of fatigue encircling him.
“Concussed,” Will hears as his eyes slip closed, over the roaring in his ears that could be the ocean or could be his own pulse. “Shock, blood loss. At the very least. We need to - ”
WHWHWH
Flashes of consciousness, disjointed images and distorted sounds. Gulls circling, grey clouds, the distant crash of waves. Will hears snippets of conversation as though carried on a far wind, as though coming through some cavernous tunnel - sounds he lacks the strength to piece together. Pain is constant and everywhere, never-ending, relentless.
The world ebbs and flows with the familiar noise of a boat’s motor, the steady lapping of water lulling him easily back to sweet oblivion.
Suddenly, hands beneath him again, lifting. The world tips and sways and for a moment Will thinks he is back in the water, drifting, weightless. Ropes of fire twist through his limbs as his body shifts, head jostled against a hard, warm shoulder.
Voices murmuring, the sound of heavy footsteps across rough wood, soft dirt. The salty tang of sea spray gives way to the scent of oil, exhaust. He is lowered carefully, folding into soft fabric. The crunch of gravel beneath tyres, radio static, the tick tick tick of a car indicator.
Will feels a groan claw its way from deep within his chest, pushes his face into something warm. A hand rests at the nape of his neck, solid, a reassuring weight. The ocean in his chest must have been expelled, the feeling of drowning replaced with a burning that scorches his veins and nerves, loops through his hands and feet and back to his lungs.
“You are safe,” the voice from before, close, behind him? Around him. Enveloping, circling, dry hand carding now through his hair, another across his back. Will is on his side, head pillowed in the man’s lap. They are in the back of a moving car, he notes foggily.
“Can you look up at me, Will?”
He tries, forces open heavy eyes and finds himself gazing blearily at the white buttons and grey fabric of the man’s shirt. The grey is dark, muted, heavy storm clouds blocking the bright, dazzling sunlight of the world. The pounding in his brain does not grow but remains, pulsating dizzily.
“Almost.”
A hand moves from his spine to his chin, warm fingers tilting his head back gently until he is blinking slowly at a pair of hazel eyes, crinkled in concern. Will thinks of warm honey running through his fingers, too fast for him to catch, impossible to hold.
“Ah,” the stranger smiles, lips twitching. There is blood in his hair, dry, flaky. “There you are.”
Will stares, cannot push his thoughts into any semblance of order. His head feels like a badly tuned television, white noise and electrical hum. Here he is.
The man’s cheeks are mottled with bruises, scrapes down his jaw, a cut across his forehead still oozing red. Were they in a car crash? The idea, once it has floated across the tatters of his conscious mind, makes Will feel panicky, giddy, fingers twitching against cool leather upholstery. Had he been driving?
“Stay here with me, Will,” gentle but firm, with the lilt of a distant accent - Nordic, or Baltic, maybe - the command makes Will want to obey, to respond. He hadn’t realised his eyes had closed again, and struggles to push them back open.
I’m here, he wants to answer, but can’t unstick his tongue from the roof of his mouth, can’t work his lips around the words.
There comes the sound of another voice - the driver? - in a language Will doesn’t understand. The words are blunt and clipped, feminine, and Will startles, unbalanced again. His shaky hands push, caught between the man’s trousers and the car’s backseat, in an attempt to - what, he’s not sure. Sit up?
He feels untethered, the weak grip he’d had on reality disturbed. Looking around dizzily for the source of a high, keening noise, he realises that it is coming from between his lips, and nearly throws himself backwards onto the floor. The stranger beneath him holds him steady, warm hands firm against his waist, his shoulder.
“You have a good deal of fresh stitches,” the man has not responded to the driver’s interruption, eyes steadfast and calm as he speaks directly to Will once more. “In your neck, your abdomen and your cheek. You had already lost a great amount of blood before we managed to close your wounds. I must insist that you do not tear yourself open again just yet.”
Will manages to maintain unsteady eye contact, shocked into stillness. The words slide around the inside of his skull, and he raises a hand slowly to probe at the side of his neck. His fingers meet the rough edges of a gauze pad. His entire body throbs with pain, but he’s having a hard enough time focusing to differentiate specifics.
“Fortunately a shallow wound, but a wound nonetheless,” the man nods, indicating the person to the front of the car. “Were it not for Chiyoh’s quick reconnaissance, I’m afraid the Dragon would have had his fill of you after all, dear Will.”
Will is sure there’s a metaphor there he’s supposed to grasp, but it lays beyond his reach. Dragons and knights, a great clashing of swords. Not a car crash, he thinks muzzily. Maybe some kind of fishing accident, which would explain all the water. Had the man beneath been a witness, come to help?
No, Will decides, he feels too familiar for that. There is comfort in the warm fingers holding him, the lilt of his speech like a balm across the raw, jagged wound of Will’s psyche. Will hadn’t known his own name until he’d heard it from the other’s mouth. While he can’t remember much else right now, surely the memories will come.
Until then, he lets his eyes flutter closed again, pushing out a shaky exhale as he leans forward and lets himself be held, allowing himself the small mercy of falling back to sleep.
WHWHWHWHWH
The next time Will swims back to murky consciousness, the car is stationary and he is alone, curled across the back seat. He straightens, feeling wobbly, out of place and strangely bereft. He drags himself to look out the closest window, wincing at each pulse of hot pain that follows the movement.
The world outside is less blinding than the last few times he’d been awake, the day’s final waning rays of sunlight diffused by a copse of tall trees. The car is parked at the end of a long, winding dirt driveway, beside a secluded timber lodge. By the stairs, a large stack of firewood. From within a squat stone chimney thin tendrils of smoke rise, curling through the air like Will’s thoughts, fading.
He squints in an attempt to stop the image swaying before him, focusing as much as he can on the two people standing on the porch. The man from earlier leans his weight forward with his arms against a wooden railing. From this distance, Will can see dark bloodstains down the side of his shirt, smeared across the front of his cream trousers. His own, or Will’s?
He is talking quietly with a pale, dark-haired woman. Chiyoh, Will remembers, stretching and moulding the name in his mind to see if it triggers any further memories. It doesn’t. The world remains bewildering, and the pair of them strangers.
He cannot see any signs of injury on the woman, though. She is neatly but casually dressed; dark jeans, cropped jacket, hair pinned to one side. She frowns as the man talks, and between them is a careful stillness, expectant, as though the very air around them is holding its breath.
The two of them had stitched Will’s wounds, the man had said. Groggily, Will considers that maybe he and the stranger had been injured together, and been helped by Chiyoh. How far away from civilisation are they, that there had been no time to reach a hospital, no way to call for help?
Fortunate for Will, at any rate, that the two of them had been close by. He attempts, slowly, to fill in the wide gaps in his memory, considers that maybe the three of them had met separately in the wilderness, shared a campsite and the kind of camaraderie that comes from being the only humans in a vast natural landscape.
Will imagines the flames of a crackling campfire, star-filled skies, doesn’t realise he has dozed off with his head against the car window until the door is opening from the outside, and his own forward momentum startles him awake. He jerks back, jittery, off-kilter, until a gentle hand lands on his shoulder.
Those now-familiar eyes assess him from where the man leans forward, head and shoulders inside the car, legs bent outside in the dirt. Between two worlds, just like Will. The idea strikes him as funny somehow, and he doesn’t realise he is smiling until the expression is mirrored back at him.
“Do I amuse you so easily, Will?”
Will blinks, already forgetting in what direction his thoughts had been heading. He wants to explain, somehow, the inside of his mind thick like treacle, his body pulsing in and out, his grip on reality more tenuous with each wave of pain. He wants to ask so many questions that he doesn’t know how to form, can’t think straight for long enough to string together even one.
“You can fill me in on the joke later, perhaps, once we’ve warmed ourselves by the fire and put some food in our bellies,” the man says easily, continuing to watch him. His focus is once more unwavering, resolute. Will feels the rest of the world slide into the background with each small, one-sided conversation, as though existence has narrowed itself to just the two of them, and the pain of living.
“Will?” There is an open palm in front of him, expectant, and he looks up in question. He feels as though he is in slow motion, two steps behind, losing time.
“Do you think you can walk, with my assistance?”
Will doesn’t think he could tell his knees from his elbows, but keeps that to himself and takes the man’s proffered hand on the third attempt. He leans forward, twists his shaky feet out from beneath him and notes vacantly that his legs, at least, aren’t the source of his pain, then. In spite of his wooziness and lack of balance, they appear to be in fine working order.
Once he has shuffled his feet outside the car door, Will leans forward into the man’s outstretched hands and attempts to push the rest of himself out. As soon as he hits the earth and moves to straighten, though, a stabbing, ferocious pain erupts across his left side, and his vision whites out.
Gasping, he collapses with his full weight against the stranger, grasping blindly, unable to breathe again.
A grunt as the man staggers beneath him, a strangled but firm, “Chiyoh, please,” then suddenly another set of hands grasping him by the middle. Chiyoh is on one side of him, the man on the other, and between the two of them they manage to half-carry, half-drag Will forward.
Each step jostles something sharp and awful inside of him, sending waves of searing pain across his chest and torso. The stairs are a blur, old planks creaking beneath his stumbling feet. The door swings open with a groan, hinges protesting, wood scraping against the frame.
A wave of warmth spills out, thick with the scent of pine and something faintly herbal, wrapping around him like a heavy blanket. The damp, metallic sting of blood and sea air fades as the three of them cross the threshold.
As they ease Will down onto a soft couch, he is dimly aware of their murmuring once more in a foreign tongue he is too far gone to place. He is moved gently, repositioned so that his head is pillowed against a plush armrest, and the world tilts. His stomach churns as he hears his name once more.
He cracks his eyes open to find the man knelt before him, a cheerful fire crackling away in the hearth over his shoulder. Around the sharp lines of his face, the ends of his hair shine golden in the light of the flames, giving him the soft, ethereal glow of a renaissance painting.
“Now that we have arrived,” the man says in the same calm, even tone that belies the blood and bruises he is covered in, “I can give you something to mask the worst of the pain. Would that be agreeable?”
Will nods desperately, fingers curling against the worn cushion beneath him. His head pounds with the movement, and he almost misses the tender, indulgent look the man casts his way.
To the right of the fireplace, Chiyoh stands in an open doorway, her silhouette cut against the light streaming in from the next room. She speaks in English now, her gaze inscrutable, trained on Will.
“I hope he is worth this, Hannibal.”