Chapter Text
“The tragedy is not to die, but to be wasted.”
Thomas Harris
*
He’s tired. So, so unbelievably tired.
It’s the type of tired that seeps deep into bone, eats away at muscle, rubs grit into the eyes and dries out the mouth. He struggles to string sentences together and eye contact is out of the question as it involves effort beyond the bare minimum. He sways where he stands, his hands tremble, and he’s always cold no matter how many layers he piles on. Jack calls, he answers, he goes through the motions and it just makes it all worse. The fire in his house is always lit and he’s taken to curling up on the rug in front of it with a dog or two, trying to sleep there since his bed is too cold, too large, and too lonely. He subsists on a diet of coffee and toast. Whiskey helps, the cheap stuff in cheap glass bottles from the nearest 7/11 - five miles away. And cigarettes, too, although he tries to avoid buying too many of those. The taste they leave in his mouth lingers and only hard liquor chases it away.
Nowhere feels safe. His own home feels too large, his car too cramped, the woods too spooky and Quantico has too many eyes watching his every move. His lecture theatre, his most favoured place outside of Wolf Trap, becomes somewhere he now fears and has to force himself to enter, his lectures now mechanical and wooden and he bolts from the hall the moment he’s finished so nobody has the chance to speak to him.
He wakes in odd places, at peculiar times of the late night and early morning. On the bathroom floor, his thighs soaked with his own cold piss. In the bathtub, fully dressed, although he’s certain he went to bed in his t-shirt and shorts. In the woods, freezing and barefoot, fingers numb and tear tracks frozen to ice on his cheeks. Lying on his back on his own driveway, staring up at the stars with Buster nosing fretfully at his side. Once, twice, three times with his gun in his hand, loaded and with the safety off, which frightened him out of his wits. Once naked in the middle of the nearby field, feet bloody from walking across the frozen ground and he bandaged them with unhappy, jerky movements at the fireside back at home. It’s horrible, ghastly, and brings him to tears more often than he would like to admit.
So he stops sleeping, whenever he can. He keeps himself awake as long as humanly possible, reading or with the radio on so loud it keeps him from dozing off, eventually dropping off only when he’s so tired his eyes refuse to stay open and his limbs stop cooperating with him. And when he does, the nightmares are so bad that he wakes drenched in sweat and, more often than not, his own urine. Images of black feathered stags drenched in blood stay behind his retinas all day and he sees it in between blinks while he works cases. Sometimes it takes a human form, dead-eyed with blackened skin, and that’s worse somehow because it comes with a sense of familiarity that he can’t shake off. Like he knows this creature, has sat down to dinner with it before, as though it knows him intimately…
“Will?”
“Yes,” he answers absently, eyes fixed on the glass paperweight he’s holding and staring straight through it into the smooth grain of the mahogany desk beneath. Hannibal’s office is cold and he moves a little closer to the fireside, just a step. Not enough to be noticeable, he’s sure. He’s still holding the paperweight, a heavy glass globe that he turns over and over in his hands, watching the firelight flicker across the kaleidoscope of colours within it.
“Are you cold?”
“No,” It’s a reflexive response. Show no fear, no weakness, nothing. Pretend everything is fine. Carry on. Carry on.
“You’re standing very close to the fire, Will. Be careful it does not catch your clothing.”
He glances down and sees that the edges of his boots are on the hearth and that indeed his arm is so close to the flames that he can smell the subtle acrid burn of singeing polyester. He steps away, shivers and tries to cover it by rolling his shoulders.
“Our hour is almost up,” Hannibal is sitting in his usual chair, one ankle resting on his other knee and exposing a pinstriped sock. His fingers are steepled, elbows on the armrests, and his expression is colt neutral as always as he regards Will, standing in the middle of his office having said very little at all during their session. “You haven’t talked to me much today. Is there nothing of note you wish to discuss?”
“No,” he lies, eyes downcast as he replaces the paperweight on a pile of pencil drawings protected by a thin layer of tissue paper. Distracted by their presence, he inclines his head and turns one towards him. It’s of a building, Italian Renaissance architecture he thinks, and it’s incredibly beautiful with the finest detail he’s ever seen. He isn’t one for art, hasn’t visited a gallery in his life unless you count visits to crime scenes, yet something in this image moves him and he can’t stop staring at it. He lowers a fingertip until it’s just above the fine pencil lines and traces the shape of a balconette, high above a busy city street.
“Florence.” Hannibal is at his side, leaning in close and looking at him rather than the painting. “A city I feel a tremendous pull to. A beautiful place, should you ever consider visiting.”
Will pulls his finger back as though burned, his trance-like state of admiration interrupted. He shoves his hands in his pockets instead to remove the urge to touch.
“I’ve never left the country.”
“Travel is very soothing, Will. It broadens the mind and opens us up to new experiences, fresh challenges. It can be very cathartic.”
“I don’t think my mind needs broadening any more, particularly at the moment.” He thinks of the stag and fixates on the paperweight again. “Besides, if I ever tried to take a vacation Jack would be hauling me back the second the airplane doors open to work a murder investigation with him or tend to some cold case that just has to involve the in-house FBI freakshow.” His words are so bitter they almost sting his lips. “My life isn’t my own, not these days.”
“That is worrisome, Will. You feel as though you are not in control of the events in your own life?”
He snorts, louder than he intended, and turns away so he doesn’t have to see Hannibal’s offended expression. “My life hasn’t been my own for a long time, Hannibal. Ever since Jack Crawford materialised in my lecture hall. I’m the toy that he brings out to play with when none of his others are working properly. Wind me up, watch me go.”
“I do not believe that’s how he sees you. He sees you as his pièce de résistance, the man who can help him when all others have failed.”
Will manages to keep the scorn out of his tone but not his expression - turned to the fireplace again as he is, he doesn’t think Hannibal can see him. “I think you’ve been spending too much time reading your own work, Doctor. Not everything comes up shiny under psychoanalysis. Some things are just the way they are.”
His eyes then flick up to a framed photograph of the Eiffel Tower on the mantelpiece and Hannibal’s amber eyes, staring at him in the reflection. He’s momentarily disarmed, especially when he realises how close Hannibal is to him; he’s followed him the few steps towards the fireplace. He certain, for a moment, that he sees Hannibal incline his head, still holding his gaze, and inhale deeply.
Will turns, thrown, to find Hannibal where he left him beside the desk, watching him with a concerned frown, his eyes shining amber in the lamplight.
“Did you… I thought I saw…” he rubs his eyes beneath his glasses, knocking them askew. “I think I should go home.”
“If you’re certain you feel well enough to drive. You look ill, Will. Try and get some rest at home.”
Slightly hysterical laughter threatens from behind his teeth and he drops his gaze to try and will it away, unable and unwilling to catch or keep Hannibal’s eyes. He’s worried that if he does the older man will see straight through him and know that Will is breaking. The strain of life in every form is wearing him down and he can feel himself unravelling. To what end, he doesn’t yet know.
“I will.”
“I’ll see you next week.”
“Alright.”
The door closes behind him, Hannibal’s private exit for his clients blissfully quiet and free of company. It’s snowing again outside and he lifts his collar against the cold.
That evening he makes scrambled eggs and toast and sits outside on the porch to eat, the dogs playing by his feet and chasing sticks that he throws for them. On his thigh rests his handgun, just in case. The food tastes like cardboard, clogs his throat and weighs down his stomach and he wishes he hadn’t eaten at all. His eyes close of their own accord and he tries valiantly to keep them open, afraid of what he’ll see as he falls asleep yet lulled towards dreamland by the cold and his uncomfortably full stomach.
He’s drifting again, he can feel it. The stag moves in the woods, feathers instead of fur, human eyes watching him from behind the frozen branches. At his side sits a blackened human-shaped creature with great antlers stretching out towards the sky like arms praying to a god that refuses to listen. The tip of Will’s cigarette glows in the darkness and his gun feels cool under his palm.
It isn’t a conscious decision, what he does next. It’s an almost familiar movement, as though he’s done it a hundred times before and more. The cigarette finds his lips and is held there as he mechanically folds back the sleeve of his shirt, noting the patch of sweat at the elbow crease. His forearm is smooth and pale from lack of sunlight, from months spent hidden beneath shirts and sweaters and jackets and coats. The hair is dark but not thick and vanishes to almost nothing as he turns his arm to look at the inside of it, focusing in on a section of skin just below the strap of his watch. Easy to hide. Easy to access.
He breathes in, holds it, releases the cigarette from his mouth to his fingertips. Then, on the exhale, he presses the glowing end to his own skin, watching as the red glow slowly, slowly extinguishes itself into his flesh. It doesn’t hurt for a second or two, even though he watches as his skin reddens, blisters, darkens with ash. A tightness in his chest eases. His eyes no longer burn. Everything around him goes still and quiet.
Then a low, hurt sound is dragged from his lips only to be whipped away into the trees by a cold, cruel wind.
*
That night, nothing. No sleepwalking, no nightmares that wake him up screaming and clutching at thin air, and although he does stir and sit up in a puddle of sweat and urine somewhere around sunrise it’s a reasonably peaceful way to wake up in comparison to his mornings of late. His wrist stings, smarting horribly under the bandage he had wrapped around it, and he rests his thumb lightly over the covered injury. Winston jumps up on the bed and noses at him, sitting hunched over in his own filth. Light is filtering into the room, dust particles swirling up into the air around him, and the room is barely above freezing. The fire has died sometime in the night and the dogs are huddled together in a pile on the floor, sharing body heat. Will shivers. Winston whines.
He presses his thumb down into his wrist, agony lancing at once up his arm and he hisses, shocked at how much it hurts. The pain is worse than when he did the act and it steals his breath from his lungs as spots dance in front of his eyes. Winston whines and presses his wet nose to Will’s fingers and he draws his hand back as though shocked. The pain continues and he stares down at his arm, as though he can see beneath the bandage to the wound festering beneath it.
He sleeps again, some time later, and it’s empty, hollow, and he wakes up exhausted.
The days drag, his lectures passing by in blurred fragments, and he drags himself home exactly seven days later just before dinner time, his stomach aching with hunger but so tired he can do nothing more than strip down to his undershirt and boxers and collapse on his bed. He should call Hannibal, cancel their session, or perhaps an hour’s sleep will deliver to him enough energy and motivation to dress again and drive into Baltimore.
Two of the dogs leap up and curl at his feet and he reaches a shaking hand out to stroke them, pain lancing through his hand as the muscles beneath the burned flesh tense and flex. He feels nauseated by the thought of what he’s done to himself. In the cold light of the early evening, curled up alone in his isolated house, he feels more lonely than he can ever remember feeling in his entire life. He normally relishes solitude, uses it as a retreat and a safety net, only allowing a few people to get close and even then he keeps a wall up to make sure they don’t stray too near. But now, just once, he wishes he had someone here to help chase the nightmares off, to take his hand and tell him that what he did to himself was foolish but that they understand. Closing his eyes against the pain of loneliness, he allows himself to drift off, and the stag comes.
He dreams of fishing, of the river running red with blood and catching rotten fish at the end of his rod, the flies he crafts so carefully disintegrating to dust between his fingers as he tries to tie them. He dreams of walking, walking so far that his feet bleed and weight drops from his frame until he can see the bones of his hands and his ribs through his t-shirt. He dreams of finding his dogs dead in their beds, eyes eaten away by blowflies, maggots causing the remains of their flesh to pulsate grotesquely beneath their pelvic bones, jaws rotting and skin sloughing off in great wide flaps. The stench is vile, sweet and cloying. He touches them all, tries to stroke them but his hands come away slick with blackening blood. He tastes bile in his mouth, swallows it down with wide eyes as his breath burns in his lungs.
He dreams of starlight and shadow, distant howls across the fields and the woodland beyond the house crawling with death and decay. The wind bites at his skin, sifts through his hair, turns his tears to ice on his cheeks. It feels as though his blood is freezing in his veins.
He blinks, blinks again, a sudden sense of vertigo tugs at him and he cries out in shock as the sky opens up before him, dead light from the stars gazing back and the black silhouettes of trees on the night time horizon seeming too far below him; he looks down, frightened. He’s on the roof outside his bedroom window, barefoot, pyjama pants soaked with snow at the hem, and he’s so close to the edge that his toes curl over into blank space.
His equilibrium shaken by his sudden return to consciousness he twists violently, reaching blindly behind him for something to grab onto to steady himself, but his hands close on nothing at all and he sways precariously. Looking back, it was too late even before he woke. He was too close to the edge and too fatigued to draw himself back.
Will falls.
He staggers, steps off into the empty air and his body goes rigid as he goes over the edge of the rooftop, the frozen ground coming up to meet him at an alarming rate. In the distance, a dog howls and he parts his lips to cry out. The force of the impact knocks the air from his body and sends him spiralling down into a deep, blank unconsciousness.