#dollverse

I love drawing Jim Seeing us

No. 442

(Prompt: Write a description of them from the point of view of their best friend or a person who has a crush on them)

Opal is one of the nicest people I have met, like. She’s a good kid, she is, but she’s about as skittish as a rescued horse.

It’s always like that at school, out in public, and at home. Like, she’s always looking around for danger and constantly clings to us. I reckon she’s still shaken about the Shrinking Doll incident, which brings me to my next point.

Brittney.

To put it bluntly, she’s nasty. She’s one of the chopsiest people I’d met, and that’s saying something. She has said that she likes hiding Opal’s inhaler, which literally could kill her—though she’s told me Brittney doesn’t do that anymore. Brittney has practically insulted every aspect of Opal that makes her Opal. Her weight, her hair, her freckles, which is quite hypocritical because Brittney has freckles too—just not as many as Opal.

I just wish Brittney would stop doing that. There is no good reason for constantly bringing down a sweet girl like Opal. She doesn’t even go near her when we go out. Sometimes, I worry about her. At lunch, she doesn’t eat very much, and she told me it has nothing to do with her body, but rather the fact that she constantly feels like vomiting whenever she looks at food. It’s happened before. I once had to walk her down to the nurses because she was retching in a rubbish bin after lunch. She was fine the next day, but it was pretty scary.

Speaking of which, that Shrinking Doll incident must’ve been pretty scary for her. I’ve heard that it affects people with high amounts of stress, and the risk is higher if they’re special needs, and who knows how much stress Opie had been under before the incident?!

Quantico. Late autumn. The light was grey outside, but glaring and yellow in Jack’s office, where the doctor stood tall in his expensive suit and watched Will with the searching eyes of a predator. They were lion’s eyes, enough so to make it surprising his pupils were dots and not slits. Will hadn’t liked him then, though he doesn’t like Hannibal much now either. Hannibal sat there and talked to him like he was a child. He talked about Will’s thoughts, his mind, and it had been terrifying. 

Exhilarating, too, to be known. But terrifying nonetheless. Will hated him right away and vowed to hold onto it from the moment he demanded of Jack to know whose profile Hannibal had been brought in to work on. The answer was never given, but he knew. Will has known since the beginning that it’s Hannibal’s job, and now his pleasure, to crawl inside Will’s head and make him wonder where the line between reality and Hannibal’s words becomes sharp. He doesn’t know. Even worse, he’s not quite sure that he wants to. 

It’s easy to be a doll. 

He finds it much less difficult to simply give Hannibal the things he wants, and ride along with this or that. It’s not the man he once was, certainly not when the two first met. He was rude and irritable, and angry at Hannibal over profiling him. He mostly hated him on principle. Will cannot imagine how Hannibal would react to such a thing now, when he governs with a strict hand on the back of Will’s neck in a scruff.  He thinks about telling Hannibal no when the next exotic dish is placed on their table and he’s expected to eat it, knowing it belonged to the nice grocer who was always so nice to Will when he went out on Hannibal’s behalf.

Tonight will be something elaborate as always. And it will be the one person Will was starting to trust. He forgot he must remain isolated to remain so complacent. Outside voices means outside help, and Hannibal simply won’t risk Will getting away from him now. The lion has already sunk his claws into the mouse. 

When they met, Will could never have imagined the reality that has been carefully constructed around him. He quietly does Hannibal’s bidding and falls asleep held in those strong arms. One day, he will be asked to participate in the hunt. Hannibal says he would make such excellent bait, drawing in those desperate for his cash reward and making easy targets. Creeps too, said with more malice, would be drawn to his delicate, mutilated body. 

“I’ll cut out their tongues before they put their greedy mouths to your skin.”

Then Hannibal had nuzzled into Will’s neck and kissed the back of it before falling asleep. 

It is true, he looks more waifish than the day they met. While Will never filled out in the way most men did, he wasn’t too scrawny, either. He had some muscle, but a lean frame that suggested weakness but had power. His muscles have since lost their definition, and his belly has become soft with Hannibal’s rich foods. One of the surgeries Hannibal put him through made his waist more defined via removal of his ribs. That had been painful, and he threw up when Hannibal cooked them and fed Will spoonfuls of his own marrow. 

Even now, he doubts his memories of ever having looked any different. Hannibal hasn’t mentioned the surgery since Will was healed enough to ignore it. He could ask, but the probability of a true answer is so low that the thought barely crosses his mind before he dismisses it as ridiculous. 

He cries at night over it all. He feels lonely and sad and just desperate for anything else in the world besides a servitude that refuses to call itself as such. 

He cries today, too, because he thought he had found some solace in the deep dark world Hannibal has constructed for him to live in. He liked Randall well enough, and had liked being able to talk about the cruelty of man. Randall was an old play thing of Hannibal’s, kept around as more of a guard dog than a purse-sized thing, and Will always felt safe with him around. No one would hurt him. Will could complain about the pain of his procedures. 

“He is at peace now,” Hannibal reminds sternly, serving Will’s plate. His left hand is bandaged and bloody now, added to the carefully constructed sausage rather than left alone on his body. “Do not waste a perfectly good meal, darling.”

Will tries to stop himself from sobbing in pain and grief, and instead stabs at the casing of the sausage until it leaks oil onto the plate. He doesn’t want to eat Randall. He doesn’t want to eat himself. This is not a choice, however, so he reluctantly cuts himself a bite. He knows it’ll taste good, like everything Hannibal makes, which is somehow worse than it tasting bad. 

“I wish you would understand, dear Will, that this is for the best.”