InsaneJournal

who. will graham
where. the river
when. today; after the news from the trial leaked
what. a discovery is made
rating. delightfully tame, for a hannibal character. which means vaguely disturbing.

***

"I'm not here to follow that trail again."

It'd been suggested briefly, not by anyone important or with any real magnanimity, that Will Graham should use his talents to plumb the depths of the recent murder in the cells. That statement, however innocent, was met with deadpan derision. Unless their own Counselors held his feet to the fire, he had no intention of exercising any 'gift' to tell them what they already knew.

For Will, after the jagged seam had arisen over his brow, and after he began to dream of falling, the truth ached through his bones and fell out in mincing truths he could only admit to himself with the expanse of river laid out under his gaze. Will's moral compass still spun on a heady axis. All he could trust himself to -- justice is tooth and claw.

And an ice saw; and a hook.

These simple acts of nature which could be coded and quantified within the span of his fragile hunter chest were the absolutes in which Will found himself with space enough to live. But before he could rightly prep the ice, to prep his long afternoon of waiting, he was stilled by an anomaly on shore. As he approached, he fell to a knee and skated his fingertips over frost-edged feathers.

A flock of birds, none too sickened or bloodied, lay frozen as if in perfect flight upon the ground. Wings stretched in perpetual flight, bones expanded and necks stretching until -- snap. It seemed they all fell in a perfectly profiled heap. An old school lesson resurfaced; he remembered how the old Druids would hang birds from the trees to frighten away the evil spirits that plagued the land. And in some profane way, hunters would hang carcasses from the trees to warn off their fellows. Meat's bad. Here; plague.

The reality of which, he was all too certain, meant little and less in a post apocalyptic landscape which made things like 'powers' all too common. Where he was sure Malia would not mind the meat, he could not know if the creatures were plagued or irradiated. That way, it seemed safest to simply make them a grave of pine needles, rocks and ice.

Another cairn. Another memorial. He'd built a thousand.