The Mortality of the Thing

by littlelost

Summary:

“Hannibal,” he spoke the name aloud, as if speaking it would conjure him. But no one answered. Will’s throat swelled with grief held back. Hannibal was gone. Hannibal was gone forever, and Will would never see him again.

He stood there, a ghost in mourning for someone else’s life, for long enough that day turned into night, perhaps more than once. It was difficult to say, being dead.

Notes:

"You said it was a ghost story. It wasn't. It's a love story."
"Same thing, really."
-The Haunting of Bly Manor

This fic only exists because I watched the entirety of The Haunting of Bly Manor, cried a lot, and then for some reason my brain went "what if the rules of this world work the same in the Hannibal world?"

I know it's a little outdated to post this sort of disclaimer, but this fic is heavily reliant on word choice, dialogue, and particular scenes from Hannibal, more so than the average fic? So just to be sure, here's my official disclaimer that I don't own any version of Hannibal Lecter or associated works, this is written for fun only, I make no money from this fic, and a whole lot of the word choice in this work should be credited to writers officially associated with the franchise and not me.

Chapter 1: Dark Waters

There was a knocking on the door. Three solid, unselfconscious thumps. When he opened it, Hannibal Lecter was there, smiling like a skeleton. 

Will held up his hand and blinked into the sun, displeasure swelling beneath his breastbone. He wouldn’t have been terribly upset to be woken, though he could have used a few more hours of rest. But there was only so much precious time in between the hours of sleeping and having to venture out into the world, a world full of people who stared too much, insisting on eye contact while firing a thousand questions at him. Forcing him to empathize, forcing him to become them. It was too much, all too much, and Will liked the spaces in between, as much as he could like anything. 

Which wasn’t really a lot. Will wasn’t sure he really liked life in general, if he had to think about it too hard. Life was a big confusing jumble with an unrepentantly ugly period at the end. One composed of the withering away of whatever consciousness made up a person, leaving only putrid, rotting corpses. 

But in the end, the corpses weren’t people, and they didn’t require Will’s empathy. Didn’t force it like a too-large pill down Will’s throat. Sometimes he preferred the corpses. 

Will felt certain that Hannibal Lecter, this strange invader making himself at home in Will’s temporary safe space, would probably have made a nuisance of himself even as a corpse. 

Will had been prepared to dislike the food, what Hannibal called a “protein scramble.” It sounded perfunctory, a necessity rather than a delight. Most meals in Will’s life had been boiled down to only what was necessary; he might have been a better cook once, but now the idea had lost its thrill. 

“Mm,” he found himself saying, begrudgingly. “It’s delicious, thank you.” 

It was enough, he thought, avoiding Hannibal’s eyes just as he avoided everyone else’s. The food was good enough to make this forced interaction almost worth it. 

Will desperately tried to have them “keep it professional.” His one last bastion against the intrusive, unpleasant routine that was psychiatric scrutiny. His curt tone had often been enough to make kinder people back down. Unfortunately, Will admitted to himself, it didn’t always work on assholes. But at least his demeanor ruffled them. Threw them off their game. 

Hannibal took a different tactic. Seemed unfazed by Will’s bluntness. 

That’s not like him, Will thought to himself. Hannibal hates rudeness. Briefly, like a bubble rising through dark waters, he wondered why he’d thought such a thing. Even with his empathy disorder, Hannibal was something of a closed book. Not like most people, flinging their emotions around every space in which they found themselves. Like a dog eternally shaking muddy water out of its coat. 

“God forbid we become friendly,” Hannibal was saying. 

“I don’t find you that interesting,” Will replied into his coffee. 

“You will.” There was something in the breathy, confident way he said it. Something that made Will glance up, unnerved. The words, and the man, felt all at once larger. You will rang like a bell in Will’s mind. His brain interpreted it as a promise. Or perhaps a curse. 

A shiver ran down his spine. 

He looked up, alarmed, and Hannibal’s eyes met his. Serene. Pensive. But something more writhed behind them, something feral. Something... keen. Will wondered how he’d never seen it before. 

“Jack Crawford tells me you have a knack for the monsters.” Hannibal was speaking again, and Will remembered where he was, what he was supposed to be doing and saying. Hannibal was right. He did have a knack for them. 

That’s what it was, wasn’t it? Just a knack? 

“It’s like he had to show me a negative so that I could see the positive.” Will rubbed his hands over his eyes. 

“The mathematics of human behavior.” Will was taken aback at how much he enjoyed the disapproval in the other man’s voice. “All those ugly variables.” 

If Will had been paying better attention to himself, he might have realized that the conversation was, unlike so many conversations he was used to having, going well. Transitioning smoothly from jaded mistrust to a kind of ironic, playful humor. 

“You and I are just alike,” Hannibal said. If he’d been anyone else, or if it had been only a few moments earlier, Will would have scoffed. He would not have, he was certain, felt the first faint spark of something like camaraderie. A thin line of trust, growing in the pit of his stomach. “Problem free.” 

Will chanced a glance up, and Hannibal was looking right back at him, seeing something in Will that Will didn’t know was there. Wasn’t sure he wanted to know. Whatever it was, Will was terrified of it, and even more terrified that Hannibal saw it and didn’t seem to fear it at all. “Nothing,” Hannibal said gently, his eyes never leaving Will’s, “about us to feel horrible about.” 

Will felt something in his chest. Like a bird, trapped, wanting to live, even though it was stuck inside a corpse. The thought was a strange one, even for him. But then Hannibal was speaking again, and the moment broke open like a wound and was forgotten.

“You know Will, I think Uncle Jack sees you as a fragile little teacup.” 

Will couldn’t help the laugh, the chuckle boiling up unbidden from someplace that Will was certain had almost forgotten how to laugh like that. Hannibal smiled back. A shared joke. A shared understanding. 

Will felt it, he realized with a start. However brief and fleeting, however inexplicable, he felt it: Bliss. 

He was about to ask how Hannibal saw him, genuinely curious, all discomfort and mistrust temporarily on hold. 

But there came another knocking at the door. “Hmm,” he said, giving Hannibal a thin smile. But the connection was still there, already established, and now a difficult thing to snap. “Housekeeping? Or maybe Jack’s court session was delayed.” 

*

It was Alana. 

The air around his little house was chill and crisp. They walked the fields like old friends. Will wasn’t sure if they were that, yet. But if they weren’t, one day they would be. Of this, he was certain, and in the knowledge of his certainty, an uncertainty crept in. He shouldn’t want them to be friends, not now, he was supposed to want...

“It’s hard for me to wrangle a wounded animal by myself,” he was saying. Whatever he was and wasn’t supposed to want blended and merged until there was nothing but the smell of old snow and the warmth of Alana by his side. “Did you think it was a date?”

“Honestly it never crossed my mind.” 

Will made an injured sound, and it came out more resigned than he liked. He chuckled, more at himself than anything else. “Why not?”

“You just don’t seem like you date.” This seemed a strange thing to say, a strange thing to think about Will. Alana must know that wasn’t true. She had to know that Will had - his face twisted as his thoughts moved sluggishly around something important he couldn’t quite latch onto - passions. 

“Oh.” He put his hand, self-deprecating, across his chest. “Too broken to date?” 

She laughed. “You’re not broken.” It was something said easily, but there was a truth there, buried deeper, that he heard in her voice. He wasn’t broken, he knew she believed that. But he wasn’t... he wasn’t okay, either. 

“Why are you assuming I don’t date?” she asked. 

“Well, do you?” 

“No.” She paused. “Seems like something for somebody else.” They had been trouncing easily through the frozen fields, side-by-side, but now she stopped, gripped his arm, gently turned Will to face her. He frowned. “I’m sure I’ll become that person someday, but right now, in this moment? I am thinking too much.”

He shifted. He was comfortable with her, he was almost always comfortable with Alana. That comfort only grew the more time they spent together. But something in her words had the opposite effect. It was like an insistent knocking. Trying to get in.

“So,” he asked, shifting on his feet. “Are you gonna try to think less, or are you just going to wait ‘til it happens naturally?” 

He tried to push on, but she held tight to his arm. “Are you seeing anything?” 

He swallowed, looked around at the ground for something that might give a clue what sort of wounded animal they were hunting. “No, actually. I’m not even seeing any...” 

But there were tracks, there on the ground. Something big. Bipedal. Starting right where they were, and making their way back down the hill. “C’mon,” he motioned to Alana. But somehow he was certain she was behind him, standing still, not following.

*

Will found himself in a stream. The most familiar stream, the one he always returned to. He cast his line, the pleasant smells of fresh water and autumnal rot squeezing into his lungs, and looked down, expecting to see the bodies. The great teeming school of bodies floating by, no longer sleeping or awake, disinterested in the lure he’d laid. 

But there were only two. Pale and gray, distorted through the ripples of the pond. He was grateful for the distortion. He didn’t know if he was ready to see the stillness on their faces. 

Will frowned. There should have been more. 

A buzzer sounded, and Will opened his eyes. 

*

He wasn’t in his stream. He never had been. He’d only been standing, staring at nothing as the images of fall leaves played itself out on the back of his eyes. These visions cut a steep contrast with the stark ice of his cell, lost in the bowels of Baltimore’s premiere hospital for the criminally insane. 

“I don’t know you,” he said. But it didn’t feel true. 

“My name is Bedelia Du Maurier.” 

“You’re Hannibal Lecter’s therapist.” He chuckled. “What’s that like.” 

“I’ve heard so much about you I feel I almost know you.” 

“You don’t.” 

No, I don’t, he expected her to reply. 

She didn’t. Will frowned, but she kept speaking, in that quiet, gentle, pitying way that Will had seen only rarely, in their early meetings, and then never again. She didn’t know him now, but she knew him after. They hadn’t been close, and yet she’d seen Will Graham better than almost anyone, seen parts of him that no one else could see, or chose not to. And with her knowledge, came a kind of sardonic contempt that he could never shake. In that contempt, there was a truth that Will could never help but resent. 

And under that resentment, buried deep, deep down, was another truth. Some long-dormant thing with horns and hooves. Something that snorted and stamped at the ground excitedly, thrilling to be seen. 

Will frowned.

This wasn’t right.

It was too soon. He wasn’t supposed to know this, any of these things, yet. 

Bedelia was speaking. “I understand you better than I thought. I wanted to meet you again before I withdraw.” 

“Again? This is supposed to be our first meeting.” He took a breath. Forgot what he’d been about to say. His thoughts were a tangled haze, but he didn't know what to do about it except press forward. “What are you withdrawing from.” 

“Social ties.” 

“With whom?” No, that wasn’t right. He shook his head. “Isn’t our sense of self a consequence of social ties?” 

Bedelia smiled at him sadly. More sadly than he thought she should have. “They are, aren’t they? And all of our social ties are knotted so tightly together it’s impossible to unstring them.” She paused. “Unless you’ve found a way. To untie the knot for all the rest of us. To untie yourself from the rest of us.” Will didn’t know why, but he found it hard to breathe. Like water filling up his lungs. “But yes,” Bedelia replied, back on script for a moment. “Social ties. Sense of Self. They certainly are in your case. It may be small comfort, but I am convinced you have done what you honestly believe is best for everyone.” Will frowned. “For yourself. For your wife. For Jack Crawford and Alana Bloom. For me. And even for Hannibal, in a way.” 

“No, that isn’t small comfort, that would be no comfort,” Will said, because it was what he was supposed to say. But the words came out wrong, more a question than an accusation. This conversation felt wrong, the notes of it grating, like a theremin in the hands of a novice. “I didn’t intend for Hannibal to be caught a second time.” There were tears in the corners of his eyes. He felt very sad, but wasn’t sure why. 

Bedelia stepped over the line and close to the bars. Will expected alarms, admonitions, but they never came. She gave him a small, bracing smile. “The traumatized are unpredictable because we know we can survive. You can survive this happening to you.” 

“Happening to me?” 

“Happening because of you? Does that sound more like the truth you carry?” 

Will swallowed, thick and viscous. “I didn’t want anyone to die for me. Not even-” The words stuck in his throat, and Bedelia reached through the bars, running a gentle hand down his arm. 

“I... believe... you.” 

It shouldn’t have made him feel better. But it did.

It always did. 

*

The klaxon blared, and it turned into a solid, wooden sound, the sound of a door sliding open. Will turned around and stopped, snow still melting in his hair.

On the table before him, Randall Tier lay, eyes open, splayed out like a threat. Or an offering. Or an invitation. 

He could hear Hannibal moving in the room beyond. Coming closer. 

It’s been so long, Will thought, nonsensically. He had seen Hannibal earlier only the previous day. Hadn’t he? It’s been so long since I last laid eyes on you.

Hannibal slid the door open. The first thing he saw was Will. His eyes dropped to the table. Will felt a thrill, a heady swirl of anticipation. He didn’t know what he wanted to happen next, what he expected, but he wanted it, oh he wanted- 

But Hannibal stared at the body on the table. His face fell into an expression of disgust, then a kind of blank, expressionless mask, but behind it, Will knew Hannibal well enough now to know, a storm of unspeakable violence brewed. 

In between, Will couldn't be sure, but there might have been the briefest flicker of something closer to despair than Will had ever seen. 

Will’s pride was quenched when he looked down at the body again, and was shocked to see not Randall Tier, but Hannibal himself. 

Will’s chest heaved, but no longer with anticipation. 

There was a great, bloodless gash in the side of Hannibal’s head; his eyes were open and devoid of color. The skin looked slick and unsolid, like a jello just starting to lose its shape. All around Hannibal, across the wide, noble planes of his cheeks and brow, plotted across his artist’s fingers, were tiny pockmarks, as if a school of something small and harmless had been nibbling at him. 

Will looked up, breath caught in his throat, shame and panic crashing over everything like the pounding of waves. Hannibal, the living Hannibal at the end of the table, was still staring down at the corpse like it had offended him. Like seeing the body sprawled out dead on the table was the very height of discourtesy. 

“Will?” Hannibal’s voice sounded small and restrained. And underneath, eternally sad. 

“Hannibal,” Will breathed. There was too much empathy, too much understanding. He didn’t want Hannibal to look like that or sound like that or feel like that, ever. He tried to rush forward, almost couldn’t help propelling himself toward this other Hannibal, the quickened one. 

But Hannibal twitched, and pulled back into the room beyond, slamming the sliding doors closed in Will’s face. Leaving him alone with no Hannibal but the unliving reminder of what he’d done, laid out accusingly behind him. 

*

Will wrenched the doors open, finally, and stumbled out into the gradually encroaching blue-gray of dusk at the Lecter estate. 

He lowered his binoculars, and let Hannibal’s words fill the spaces in his mind. 

“It’s not healing to see your childhood home,” Hannibal Lecter admitted. Will thrilled to know that he was seeing something behind the veil, something that Hannibal kept personal and secret and safe. Locked in rooms behind solid doors in the central depths of himself. 

“I want to know,” Will said. There was nothing in the world he could imagine taking the place of this burning need inside him, this consuming thing that wanted and wanted and wanted everything that Hannibal was, everything he had. Wanted to know all the ways Hannibal was broken. Still refusing to let himself ask why he wanted. “Is this where construction began?”

“On my memory palace? Or yours?” Will frowned, but Hannibal just continued, bemused, as if he’d not said anything out of place. “Its door at the center of my mind. Which door will open to show the beating heart of yours, I wonder.” He regarded Will with knowing eyes, pushing him to figure out some intricate puzzle that only a mind like Hannibal’s was capable of unlocking. 

The space shifted and changed, and they weren’t sitting in the brambles of the Lecter family childhood home, but rather back in a jagged, crystalline copy of Dr. Lecter’s office. 

Will looked around, unsettled but not yet alarmed. “We’re in the wrong chairs. I’m meant to be in yours this time. I’m the one chasing you.” 

Hannibal looked at him, from the seat he’d sat in every single time they’d met, staring across at each other. Performing their private, intimate dance, the one that Will often didn’t learn the steps to until too late. “This isn’t real, Will.” 

“No. That’s why I’m supposed to be in your chair. I could only ever catch you in my mind. You were always slippery. Like trying to hold onto flesh in water with bare hands.” Will tilted his head. “You always got away.” 

“Did I.” Hannibal linked his fingers and crossed his legs. “If I got away, then why are we back here?”

Will looked at Hannibal, with his pristine ties and perfect suits and the tiny little fringe of hair that liked to artfully fall forward, making him look softer than the predator Will knew him to be. He glanced around the room they were in, with its bright, almost-happy light streaming in through the windows, illuminating the stylish, eclectic blend of antique and modern. Feeling the give of the chair beneath him, watching the fire burn where once Hannibal and Will had burned their pasts together. Watching the stag, still as a statue, cry eternally from its position by the door. 

“This room holds sound and motion,” Will explained, trying to catch the light refracted in Hannibal’s eyes. “Great snakes heaving and wrestling in the dark.” Will felt, as he had innumerable times before, something heaving and wrestling low in his belly, at the way Hannibal’s eyes danced when they looked at him. “I never want to leave this place,” Will whispered, so low that even this mock version of Hannibal, made up in the frightened, embarrassed corners of his own mind, could not hear. 

“There are other rooms, though.” Hannibal leaned forward, trying to convey something with his eyes. “Like painted shards of glass. This place is no more real than they, but there is something deeper still. Layers upon layers of reality.” 

Will couldn't help himself from leaning forward, too. Hannibal was close enough to touch. "Something is wrong." Will took in a shaky breath. “I think it's been wrong for a while now." He swallowed. "Then all this... truly isn’t real?” 

“You are in a unique position, Will. What is real and what is dreaming are not always different. The dreams can be real. What is real can be faint and fading. But to sleep too deeply without finding what you seek? There are several kinds of tragedies. I am not Hannibal. I am you. And I think that would be the worst kind.” 

Will took a breath. “Everything keyed to memories. Leading to... other memories.” Will squinted. “Rooms you can’t bring yourself to go. Nothing escapes from them that causes you any comfort.” Did that mean anything? It was difficult to tell. Everything, everything was a fog.  

Hannibal tilted his head, just slightly. “Is that the stage we’re at, Will? Is that what you’re ready for? To go barging into dreams where even Hannibal fears to tread?” He paused. “Do you hear music, Will?” 

“Music?” 

“There are two songs being sung, I think, and more hidden truths than that. There must be an order to things, or you will not be ready to enter those cruel and terrible rooms.” 

“They’re in your memory palace, not mine.” 

Hannibal gave Will a reproachful look. Will flinched as a gun went off somewhere nearby.

Notes:

1. The entire story is already written, though not all edited. So on occasion I may go back and tweak some stuff or change the number of chapters.
2. I don't have a posting schedule or plan. It could be every few days or every few weeks. Should be over 30k, and future chapters will likely be shorter.

Chapter 2: Dream Haze

Summary:

Will knew that he was in a dream, now. And you could say things that were true, in dreams. 

At least, the things you were willing to admit. 

Time moved strangely. Things didn't happen in the order they should. Each time, it bothered Will for a moment, when he registered the shift. But the world kept turning. Time stitched Will into each mural in such a way that the seams hardly showed at all. It became easy to forget. 

He was walking down a long corridor. Something about it felt lucky. 

“It was done carefully and cleanly, with a very sharp knife. It was not the work of a child.” 

Hannibal stared at the photo in his hand. “It’s a Chinese character which means ‘You hit it.’ An expression sometimes used in gambling.” Hannibal blinked down at the image again. “I was always gambling, Will.” 

Will didn’t know what to make of that, but was used to Hannibal being cryptic. He took a deep breath and walked away. He needed space between them. It was too much, being this close to Hannibal. It was just... too much. “The character also appears on a mahjong tile. Marks the Red Dragon.” 

The corner of Hannibal’s lip quirked, but he didn’t look amused. “‘And behold a great red dragon.’” He sighed, and looked up at Will. “Are you familiar with The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun? Blake’s Dragon stands over a pleading woman caught in the coil of its tail.” He paused and looked up, seeming to drink in everything he saw of Will, standing on the other side of the glass. “Few images in Western art radiate such a unique and nightmarish charge of demonic sexuality.” Hannibal paused. “Would you believe that I said this to be flirtatious? I would never have sullied the unspoken between us by speaking the reality of it, by acknowledging it openly. In truth, Will,” Hannibal said sadly, “I think I could not have borne the rejection of it. To speak of love as more than theory, to put ‘I’ and ‘you’ and ‘we’ into those same sentences. To do so would be to draw back the curtains. Pull back the sheets. Expose it to the glare of the light. And I think we both know that, whatever this was, it could not have survived being seen too directly.” 

Will understood the words. His mind could make sense of the concepts. But everything in him also agreed with the sentiments. “The man who killed the Jacobis and the Leedses saw something in them that drew him and drove him to do it. He chose them because something in them spoke to him.” 

Something in Hannibal’s face fell, and he looked away from Will, staring at something only he could see charging away from him in the middle distance. “The Jacobis were better than anything he knew,” Hannibal said. His voice was the same, but he’d skipped some lines. And something in the way his shoulders slanted ever so slightly downward made him look defeated.

“Until the Leedses,” Will replied, and it came out accusatory, though he was sure this was soon, too soon for Will to begin blaming Hannibal for the Red Dragon’s victims. He hadn’t known he was supposed to do that yet. Not really. 

Hannibal looked back at Will, but it wasn’t the kind of intensive, peeling interest that Will had seen every single moment of every single day that he’d spent in Hannibal’s presence. The way Hannibal used to watch Will like he was an injured stray, or a work of art, or a potential victim. He just looked at Will like he was a prop in an elaborate stageplay. 

Will wished everyone would just stick to their lines. 

“As the Dragon grows in strength and glory, there are families to come.” Hannibal sounded sadder than Will might have ever heard him. 

Will stared back, unsettled. His words had a weight to them, more necessity and strength than the first time he’d spoken them. “I have to believe there is a common factor. And we will find it, Hannibal.” 

Hannibal Lecter looked up, a tiny crease between his brows. “Hannibal? I thought you were more comfortable the less personal we are?” 

Will opened his mouth to speak, but he was afraid of what he would say if he tried. 

“You’ll have to enter more houses and see what the Dragon has left for you,” Hannibal said instead. “I imagined it to be a wonderful thing, Will. To see the world through his red haze.” Hannibal slid the photos back through the slot in his cage. 

Will looked up at the image before him, his own reflection superimposed over Hannibal’s. But instead of smugness in Hannibal’s eyes, he saw only regret, and instead of loathing in his own eyes, he saw only fear. 

*

Will walked out and suddenly he was on his front lawn, in sleep shirt and boxers. Alana was wishing him a good morning. Abigail Hobbes had woken up, and Alana insisted they have a cup of coffee. 

The phone rang. And rang. “Is he going to keep calling?” 

“Jack wants you to go see him.” 

“And you don’t?” Will frowned. “Wait. Him? I thought this was about Abigail.” 

Alana sighed. “You’ve been luckier than you expected to be. You’ve loved a lot of people, Will, and been loved by just as many. But this isn’t about any of us. And I think, deep down, you understand why it’s not. Why it’s only, at its core, about two people. One of them is you. And the other-” 

“I like you as a buffer,” Will said, trying to get things back on track. But things were off, and they’d always be off, and they always had been off, since the first moment of the first day that Hannibal had knocked on his door, invaded his room, offered him protein scramble and made Will laugh. 

Alana smiled knowingly. “And you take advantage of that.” 

Will looked out the window. “Abigail Hobbes doesn’t have anyone.” Alana just looked at him. Will raised an eyebrow. “Isn’t this the part where you tell me I can’t be a murderous child’s everyone?” 

Alana smiled. “When I said what I was going to say in my head, it sounded really insulting, so I’m going to find another way to say it.” Will wanted her to stay on script, but they were already off-script, really, and at this point he’d rather she just didn’t say anything. But she smiled at him again, laughingly, and in the end, she kept speaking. “No. You know what, I will say it the insulting way.” She leaned forward and lay her hand overtop of his. “You’re not a dog, Will. No matter what you may still think of yourself in the insecure parts of your consciousness you’ve locked away and ironed over and made normal to fit in with your cute wife and stepson. No matter that you’ve settled in with yourself as only a grown-up who’s seen his share of horror is bound to do. You still see yourself as something less than human, and in that fear, you hoped you could make yourself closer to one of the dogs you rescue than the stag that haunted your nighttime dreams. 

“But you’re not a dog, Will. You don’t have to live up to any unspoken promises of loyalty and affection to be loved. That’s not who you are, and that’s not who he is. And you can have a love more complicated than that of a pet, with someone who sees the scary, ugly side of you better than a sweet single mom with a lonely child can do. You spent three years yearning and wanting and punishing yourself for it. You don’t have to do that here.” 

Will’s nostrils flared. “If I wanted a therapy session, I’d have called Dr. Lecter.” She smiled at him, like he was starting to figure something out, smiled like an accusation. “I’m not collecting another stray,” he said, and his voice wobbled. 

“Do you know why you’re talking to me here and now, Will?” He shook his head. “Do you remember what I told you about Abigail, about why you couldn’t see her yet, that the first person she talked to about what happened couldn’t have been there when it happened.” She paused. “So that means no Dr. Lecter, either.” 

“Much less the guy who killed...” The sentence started off strong, but then it caught in his throat again, and he couldn’t finish it. “Jack’s wrong about... You’re wrong about... I was wrong about...” 

Alana’s face was kind, eyes eternally too blue to be believed. “We’ll get through this together, Will. I’m going to help you.” 

Again, there came a knocking on the door. 

*

The door swung inward, a voice was saying “You’re in very good hands,” and Hannibal Lecter was a comfortable, hovering presence at his back. 

“Doctor Lecter here is one of the sanest men I know.” 

It was an unpleasant office. Modern aesthetic and low ceilings everywhere, devoid of any of the softening, comfortable touches present in Hannibal’s. “Another life ago,” Hannibal was saying, smiling at Will as he removed his jacket. “Back when I wasn’t afraid to get my hands dirty a little.” 

Will should have been uncomfortable, but it was hard to be when Hannibal was there. “I should be afraid of you,” he said, returning Hannibal’s smile with a shy one of his own. “I should have seen what you were doing to me.” 

He was vaguely aware of how the other doctor watched, confused, as the conversation took this odd turn, but Will didn’t care. Will knew that he was in a dream, now. And you could say things that were true, in dreams. 

At least, the things you were willing to admit. 

“Why shouldn’t you have trusted me, Will? I’ve only ever wanted what was best for you.” 

Will shook his head, shook the cobwebs out that had been strung across his brain, blinking like fairy lights every time Hannibal smiled at him like that. “I shouldn’t have trusted you,” Will said, and some of the viciousness was back in his voice and in his chest. He was glad. He needed it. It was safer to be angry than anything else. “I should hate you. You deserve it.” 

Hannibal’s face never changed. He kept that small smile, like Will was saying something adoring instead of accusatory. 

“Stop that,” Will said irritably. “Look at this, Hannibal!” he yelled. “Look at what you’ve done to me! Trapped me in my own mind! Made me see things that weren’t there, made me think I was a killer! A murderer!” 

“Was it only I that made you think that?” Hannibal asked, teeth showing in a grin. 

Will grasped him by the collar and pushed Hannibal back against the ugly, blockish wall of the other doctor’s, the dead doctor’s, office. He pressed his face close to Hannibal, trying for threatening. Hannibal’s lips parted and Will lost what he was about to say. 

“Will,” Hannibal said, irreconcilably hawkish and soft. “I was always drawn to how the mind works. None moreso than yours.” 

“The projected image is often more interesting than the projector,” the other doctor added. “Until of course the projector breaks down.” He watched them both with clinical amusement. “In my professional opinion, your projector has broken down, Mr. Graham. But even so, your interest hasn’t seemed to wane. There’s one image you just can’t quite shake.” 

Will stared into Hannibal’s eyes, and Hannibal stared back, and they were too close, and Hannibal was a killer, and a monster, and if he let himself get too close Will would drown in Hannibal. So he wrenched his hands free and pushed himself back, chest heaving, standing in the middle of the room. 

“So Will, these headaches,” continued the doctor, as if nothing much at all unusual was happening in his office. “When did they begin in earnest?” 

Will scoffed, and shook his head, running a hand across his face. 

“About the time Will went back into the field,” Hannibal said, sitting down in his designated chair. He turned around and beamed at Will. “Which is when I met him. I’m afraid I may have always been the cause of some of Will’s headaches. Though I believe I was the cause of many more responses than headaches alone.” 

Will noticed that the particular way Hannibal had his hair parted today suited him, and had a wild, animalistic urge to launch himself forward and run his hands through Hannibal’s hair, mussing it beyond recognition. 

“And the hallucinations?” the doctor asked pointedly. 

Will glowered. 

“Will,” Hannibal said, still twisted in his seat to face him. “You’re supposed to say that you just slowly became aware that you might not be dreaming.” 

Will glared. “But I am dreaming. This is all a dream. And anything...” Hannibal was still staring at him, with all the fond intensity of a cat who’d caught a mouse between its paws and was looking forward to a bit of fun. Will looked away. “Anything else I might have felt was all part of the spell. It wasn’t real. It’s not allowed to be.”

“And why not?” Hannibal asked. 

Will had a dozen retorts on the tip of his tongue. All of them were far too banal and far too true for him to admit. 

Hannibal and the dead doctor exchanged a look that made Will see red. So he whirled around and grasped at the door handle, violently wrenching it open and stepping through. 

*

He stalked out and found himself splashing into the stream again, wending wire around a lure to show Abigail. “Tighten... and... trim,” he said, smiling up at her. “It’s called a blood knot.” 

Abigail returned his grin. “Blood is thicker than water, or so I hear.” 

Will returned his attention to his hands. “These are not the kind of blood ties those who coined the phrase had in mind.” 

“Why not?” Abigail asked, and it sounded so matter-of-fact that it was difficult to argue. Her hair shuffled in the breeze, and Will tossed his line. 

“Your father taught you how to hunt. I’m going to teach you how to fish.” 

“You don’t have to do that anymore,” Abigail said softly. “You’ve dropped the last lures you’ll ever have. The fish have their dinner, Will. And you’ve been the lure in other ways, too. Now it’s my turn to give you advice. It’s your turn to learn how to hunt.” 

Will set his jaw. “It’s safe to say I already know how to hunt. Whether I wanted to know how or not, I had to know.” 

“You had to hunt him down to find him. But it wasn’t hunting, he was just the lure.” 

“I don’t want to hunt Hannibal. Not... not like how you’re implying.” 

Abigail made a short, disbelieving sound and rolled her eyes. “‘One you stalk, the other you lure?’ But you’re lying to yourself, Will. It’s only ever been two lures. And in the end, you were just as invested as he was.” 

“One you catch, the other you shoot,” Will mumbled sourly. 

“Oh, Will,” Abigail sighed. “Do you even know what you’re trying to catch then?” 

“The one who caught you,” Will said, rote, thinking other thoughts and only realizing the line he’d said after he’d said it. “But that’s just what I would have said then, back before-” 

“The one,” Abigail whispered, and there was creeping, pitying knowing in her eyes. Eyes that were paradoxically so alive. “That got away.” Will swallowed and avoided her gaze. “I’ll say the rest for you, so you don’t have to, Will. ‘Catch a fish once, and it gets away, it’s a lot harder to catch again.’ And you knew that. You knew you never wanted to give him the opportunity to disappear forever.” 

“I wanted to protect people-” 

“And you wanted there to be a universe where he could be yours, and only yours, forever and ever. Where you could ensure that, in the end, you were known for all the parts of you there were. That even if it went unspoken, it would be the last thing that existed in your world.” 

“I don’t know what you mean.” 

She reached out and pulled the rod gently from his hands. “This is just a dream, remember? You don’t have to be afraid of what the others do or don’t know. There’s no one and nothing left to judge.” Will felt a flare of panic, but let her position herself in the middle of the stream. “What’s the last thing you taught me, Will? Name the bait on your hook after somebody you cherished?” 

“To say goodbye?” Will asked, even though he knew that wasn’t what it was for. There was a great lump in his throat. Something about the idea of goodbye was too much. He hadn’t thought that far. He didn’t want to. 

“No,” Abigail repeated his words back at him. “As the superstition goes, if the one you cherish cherishes you? You will catch the fish.” She gave him a happy, childish grin. “So what did you name it?” 

Will swallowed. “Abigail,” he whispered. 

Abigail looked pitying again. “No, Will. That’s not it. That’s not the right name.” 

Will mouthed like a dead thing. “I- I don’t-” 

“You’re stuck inside a dream within a dream, Will. You have to take a step back.” 

Notes:

When I originally wrote this story, I wrote it in 7 distinctive parts, not 22 chapters. I think each part had a more natural stopping point than these smaller chapters. But if I posted this as 7 parts, they would have been pretty massive - a whole lot of this kind of rambling, dreamlike prose to digest at once. So thanks, if you're hanging with me through the abrupt chapter breaks!

Chapter 3: Private Sin

Summary:

“I’m not asking you to believe anything you can’t prove,” Beverly said mockingly. “I’m just asking you to prove it.”

Suddenly, Will was in his cell again. Beverly Katz was standing outside the bars asking him about the man in the photo. 

“Who stitched him into the mural?” he asked, but it was half-hearted. This case had been solved, and long ago. 

Beverly gave him an exasperated look. “The artist clearly had a partner or admirer.” She raised a brow. “Hard to imagine a serial killer would let another kill him unless they had compassion for them.” 

“I never said that Hannibal lacked compassion for me,” Will bit. “If I could’ve remained ignorant of Hannibal’s infatuation, I wouldn’t have been interesting enough to warrant it.” 

Beverly’s lips spread into a smirk. “Most people who know Hannibal as well as you do wouldn’t be as proud of that as you are.” 

“I’m not proud.” 

“You’re oozing satisfaction, Will.” 

“He’s a cannibalistic, manipulative serial killer who has tried with varying levels of success to kill me and people I care about countless times. He has a frighteningly intuitive mind and an unfortunately useful insight, which continually puts me at the mercies of his manipulations. But that hardly endears him to me.” 

Beverly crossed her arms. “Uh, huh.” 

“There was no partner. This artist worked alone until he was stitched into his own creation.” 

Beverly made a dry, disbelieving sound. “If by alone you mean two halves conjoined.” Will glared. “No signs of a struggle,” she pointed out with cheek. “The second muralist knew the artist well enough to convince him to become a piece in his own mural.” 

“Understanding Hannibal has been a matter of life and death for me and those closest to me.” 

“Right. And that perfectly explains why you needed to immediately seek out Hannibal Lecter when you were brought in on the Red Dragon case. Did you even wait twenty-four hours?” 

Will grit his teeth. “Hannibal-” 

“I’m not asking you to believe anything you can’t prove,” Beverly said mockingly. “I’m just asking you to prove it.” She smirked again. “So. Can you prove it, Will? Can you prove that you don’t lo-” 

Will grasped the door to his cell and pulled it open. It was a dream, and he knew it was a dream, so the bars pulled open easily at his touch. Beverly looked annoyed rather than frightened. 

“I don’t need this.” 

He stepped through the bars...

*

... and found himself standing once again in Hannibal Lecter’s dining room. 

Hannibal entered with a tray of something covered in fire and an equally warm gaze, and Will remembered the intoxicating aroma of the ortalans burning, remembered the way Hannibal’s mouth had opened, the sublime pleasure writ blissful across Hannibal’s face. The way he’d trusted Will with this, another private sin, a moment of singular euphoria. 

He remembered the way Hannibal’s eyes had rested on the bob of Will’s throat as he swallowed his own offering down. 

Will glowered in disbelief at the ceiling, at whatever god was clearing Will’s path on this strange dreaming journey. Hannibal stood in the doorway, tray still in hand, watching him with hopeful expectancy. 

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” Will cried, turning violently toward the door, cheeks flaming. 

Notes:

Sorry this is short! I hope to get another chapter out by the end of the weekend or beginning of next week which should be meatier (no terrible Hannibal-esque pun intended).

Chapter 4: Antler Velvet

Summary:

“Could he daily feel a stab of hunger for you? And find nourishment at the very sight of you?” Yes, reverberated in Will’s head like the peals of a collapsed church’s bell. “But do you...” Will waited for the rest. “Do you love him, Will Graham? Are you in love with Hannibal Lecter in return?”

He was sitting in Hannibal’s office again. The lights were low, and they both held glasses of something strong. Instead of sitting in their normal arrangement, it was one of those other times, the times when they strayed from the routine of patient and therapist. Where Will wandered where he wished, and Hannibal let him, or joined him, and they would end up in some configuration more comfortable, less ordained, and perhaps more intimate because of it. 

The intimacy was a ruse, Will forcefully reminded himself. A ruse that had to have some truth behind it to work, but a ruse still. They weren’t really friends, or... anything else. Will was just the bait set to catch the predator. They were both hiding behind veils. There was no true intimacy here. 

But Hannibal was speaking, and it was hard for Will to focus on any of his certainties when Hannibal was speaking. 

“How quickly we form attachments to something that does not yet exist.” 

“I’m not attached,” Will denied. “I’m only... playing at attachment.” 

Hannibal smiled at him, and it was the same smile he’d favored Will with that night. Something altogether too soft, too pleased. As if Will was something delightful, as if they were sharing something delicate, intimate. Some thread drawn between them that shivered with pleasant aches and the comfortable embrace of warmth that came from more than just the fire. 

Will’s breaths came shallower and faster, and he wanted to look away, but found he could not. 

“We have a deep-seated need to interact with our children,” Hannibal was saying. “It helps us discover who we are.” 

These dreams had gone on long enough that, whatever their cause, Will was certain he wouldn’t learn any more about himself by being a father. But he couldn’t help asking, even though he knew the answer, even though they’d had this conversation before.

“Have you ever been a father?” 

Hannibal’s expression was softer than Will had ever seen it. He thought it might be softer than any time since, too, though he caught a flash of images that only partially made sense to him here: a seat before a large painting; Hannibal cleaning wine glasses with short, wet hair. Both times, watching Will. 

“I was to my sister. She was not my child, but she was my charge. She taught me so much about myself. Her name was Mischa.” 

Will knew this was a dream, he should have known. It had all been dreaming. But the moment drew him. These whispered half-truths which were more real and raw than Hannibal's murders, than his manipulations. Than his promises and lies and seductions and everything in between. “Was?” 

“She’s dead.” Said matter-of-factly. Death was never something to give Hannibal pause. “Abigail reminded me so much of her.”

Hannibal’s face was unmasked, and Will was entranced. Lost, for the first time, truly lost, in empathizing with Hannibal. It didn’t feel like a bad thing. It didn’t feel like losing himself. “Why did you kill her?” he almost whispered. 

But that wasn’t right. Abigail wasn’t dead. Not yet, anyway. 

Hannibal paused. “What happened to Abigail had to happen,” he replied, his mask shuttering over his face again. 

But it was too late. Will knew it was always too late now. He’d seen the human being behind the wendigo’s lifeless eyes, behind Hannibal’s meticulous shell. Whatever facets of Hannibal he’d layered on the surface, whatever games Hannibal had been playing to set the lure for Will, this was the moment that it had gotten too real. 

“There was no other way,” Hannibal said ruefully. 

“There was,” Will replied. “But there isn’t now.” 

“Isn’t there?” Hannibal leaned forward, just a little. His eyes were glistening, but Will was the one who was crying. 

Will couldn’t raise his voice above a whisper. “There could have been, Hannibal. If you’d done things differently. If I’d done things differently.” 

“But mostly me.” 

“Yes.” 

“I’m sorry I took that from you,” Hannibal said, smiling sadly. 

Will wanted to affirm it, wanted to say it was so, that if there had ever been any moment that could have turned it into something else, it had been Hannibal’s teacup to cherish or to shatter.

“Wish I could give it back,” Hannibal said, so low it was almost a mumble. “Wish I had never taken it in the first place.” 

“You didn’t-” Will didn’t know what he had been going to say. Only that he didn’t like this look on Hannibal’s face now, dejected and lacking hope. Staring blankly at the desktop between them. “Hannibal, it... We... I took something. We both took something. Even-steven, right? It doesn’t matter now, Hannibal, there’s nothing more to take-” 

But to Will’s horror, a tear dripped, heavy and anticlimactic, down Hannibal’s face. “Occasionally I drop a teacup to shatter on the floor. On purpose. I’m not satisfied when it doesn’t gather itself up again.” He paused, and his mouth twisted into something resembling grief. “I had thought that it would. There had always seemed to be enough time. You had always seemed to have enough interest. Or, at least, enough patience. And I’d always thought myself to be the master of my fate. The captain of my soul.” He huffed a breath, scoffing. Stood up slowly, without looking at Will, turned and made his way to the door.

“No,” Will muttered, confused, and in his confusion, afraid. “This isn’t how it’s supposed to go. Hannibal. Hannibal, wait-” 

But Hannibal had left out the exit door, and closed it with a soft snick behind himself. 

Will blinked a moment, then pushed himself up and strode toward the door, not sure what he was going to ask for, or offer. Only knowing that this moment had been A Moment, an important one, one of the most important ones. His heart was a surplus of chords on a harp, and this moment, this scene, had run hard nails across all of them until he thrummed and ached. 

He reached for the door. “Hannibal-” 

*

But instead of Hannibal, he only found Chiyo, highlighted by the glow of the last train car. 

Will looked around frantically. “Chiyo, where- where is he?” 

“I like the night,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard him. “It’s more than a period of time; it’s another place.” She turned away from the moon and stars to face him. “And I hear that blood looks black in the moonlight.” 

“We’re different from who we are during the... No.” He shook his head, curls falling into his eyes. “Chiyo. Where is Hannibal? ” 

“Why are you looking for him?” 

“I-” 

“I remember what you said. What your answer was. But do you?” 

Will regarded her with narrowed eyes. “You push me off this train.” 

“I did, once. But that wasn’t really me. Or rather, I’m not really her.” 

“I know this is a dream.” 

“And everyone in a dream is you.” She touched a hand to the side of her face and turned back to the moon. “Well. Almost everyone.” 

“Maybe we’ll make it tit-for-tat if I don’t start getting some answers around here,” Will muttered, but they both knew it was toothless and useless to threaten her, because she was just a part of his dream. 

“I told you that there were means of influence other than violence. Did you ever even believe that?” 

Will pursed his lips. “I figured out a long time ago that Hannibal was interested in more than just us killing together, if that’s what you’re insinuating. I told you... you dream shadows before. I know how to do it, I know how to manipulate him.” 

“A role you played preternaturally well. Almost as if you meant what you said, what you did. The shared glances, the shared spaces. The little secrets and intimacies and vulnerabilities.” 

Will looked out over the nighttime forest zipping past, the trees little more than shadows. “It was all just... A performance. A dance.”

“When life is most like a dream,” Chiyo nodded, but it was the wrong part. 

Will frowned. “If I go back through this door, will I find Hannibal again?” 

“Why are you searching for Hannibal?” she asked. “What are you hoping to find?” Will didn’t answer. Chiyo’s lips quirked into a cruel smile. She leaned in for a kiss, and Will felt his pulse speed up, even though he knew what came afterward. Even though she wasn’t the one he was chasing. Chiyo stopped before her lips brushed his. “You’re a fool, Will Graham. If you can’t admit what you want even now, at the end, then you may never find it.” 

And with that, once again, Will found himself tumbling off the back of a train. 

*

He slumped down into a chair, momentarily disoriented at the bright yellow light flooding his eyes. 

“It’s hard to predict when brittle materials will break,” Bedelia was saying. 

Will sat up straighter and looked around Bedelia’s space. He waited for her to speak, but she didn’t. 

Will stood up and began pacing. “Isn’t this the part where you admit to Hannibal’s continued manipulations?” he asked with bile. “Where we talk about how he tried to have another deranged psychopath murder my wife and stepson?” He set his teeth on edge, and kept up the pacing. “How could I forget, I shouldn’t forget. This is who he is, this is what he does. He’s not someone worthy of my pity, he’s worthy of my hatred, and my scorn, and my violence!” He took one of Bedelia’s decorative side tables, the one framing the window, and turned it over. It didn’t have very much on it, and Will felt bad the minute he’d done it. 

He stopped and rubbed a hand across his mouth. “I can’t even turn over a table in my own dreams without feeling guilty.” 

“As if guilt has stopped you from knocking over all the pins that Hannibal has lined up for you. And enjoying it every time.” 

“What’s he going to take from you? What would he have taken from you, if I hadn’t...” Hadn’t what, though? He was having a hard time remembering. 

Bedelia shook the curls away from her face and stared down her nose at him, amused. “It was more fun to goad your jealousy when we were actually doing this in real life.” 

“I’m not jealous.” 

Bedelia deadpanned. “Will.” 

“I have no reason to be jealous.” 

“You don’t. And yet, you are.” Will ignored her as best he could, sitting in the same room as him. “Don’t you think it’s interesting,” she said, picking up a glass and swirling the contents absently, “that we both know, we both knew back during the first go around of these... passive-aggressive therapy sessions? Frenemy visits? Two-person gossip circles where we commiserate about the same terrible ex? That you had nothing to be jealous of, ever. That Hannibal would, at any moment, have cut my throat and watched me bleed with only a mild bit of sadness at best. But that he never even wanted to kill you, Will, except to exorcise the intensity you birthed in him.” She tilted her head, showing her teeth. “And yet. You came. To me.” Will turned away. “You could always be yourself with me, even when you loathed me. Even when you couldn’t help yourself imagining us, Hannibal and I, sequestered away with fake names, and fake lives, in gilded rooms, eating the fanciest of guests. Hannibal pouring my champagne and confessing all his secrets and striding about our apartments indulging his talents for art and music and languages and murder, all in varying states of undress. And letting me see all of it.” 

Will’s face burned and his nostrils flared, but he said nothing. “He wouldn’t have come back for you,” she said, sipping from her glass. “I’m convinced of it. Which, since I am your dream self, means that you’re convinced of it, too. If you had never come to Europe, never sought him out, he would have let you go. Let you move on.” Her eyes made him chilly as she watched him over the lip of her cup. “You chose not to. We both knew it. Even when he couldn’t stop thinking of you, even there, you were back home. In Virginia. Unable to stop thinking of him here.” 

“He had killed Abigail, nearly killed Jack and Alana! And, oh yes, practically disemboweled me!” 

“You could have moved on. Jack was moving on. Alana had her own concerns, but they weren’t yours. You imagined Abigail with you because you couldn’t face the idea down, not entirely, that you were chasing him on entirely your own volition, for entirely your own sake. That you were-” 

Will grimaced. “Don’t say it.” 

Bedelia’s lack of pity was somehow worse than Abigail’s or Alana’s pity had been. Because Bedelia alone understood both how easy this was, and how difficult. “If you play, you pay. And, as I said before, you have paid dearly. It excited him to know you were marked in this particular way.” Will felt the scar across his forehead, the one splayed across his belly. The thousand other places where Hannibal had marked him. “And you’ve marked him, too. Marked him for your own.” 

“Why?” Will asked, sitting down once more. He put his head in his hands, over his ears as if he could tune it all out. 

“I let you dance around it all before, Will. But, truly, why do you think?” Will didn’t answer, so Bedelia skipped to the next part. “Could he daily feel a stab of hunger for you? And find nourishment at the very sight of you?” Yes, reverberated in Will’s head like the peals of a collapsed church’s bell. “But do you...” Will waited for the rest. “Do you love him, Will Graham? Are you in love with Hannibal Lecter in return?” 

Suddenly, from nowhere, the stag was there, in Bedelia’s space, and it was on a rampage. Lowing and lashing its antlers, beating them against the windows and shattering the glass, crashing through the tables and kicking over furniture. Will ducked, looking around for cover, but Bedelia stayed seated in her chair, sipping her drink, watching Will with passive eyes. 

“Shhh, shhh,” Will tried to hiss at the stag, but it just stared him down with a monstrous gaze, full of anger and violence and pain. It lowered its head at Will, ready to charge. 

Panic beat a pulse in his skull, and he looked to Bedelia for something, some guidance or help. “I can’t do anything,” she offered. “I’m just a figment of you, of your dreaming. Just like the stag. Only you know what can calm it.” 

The stag lunged, rushing at Will. Somehow, perhaps because it was his dream and dream logic being what it was, Will was able to grip it by both horns and press the razored tips away, One prong still glanced off his shoulder, cutting into the flesh and breaking bone, and he screamed. Bedelia stayed seated, her eyes glittering with hunger, as Will wrestled with his demon. 

They were rolling on the ground, and the stag was making a terrible screaming. Its hooves and antlers cut at Will’s legs and head, and there was blood, so much blood, an ocean of blood, and they were sinking into it. Will tried to wrap his hands around the stag’s throat, to gouge out his eyes. He couldn’t tell whose blood was whose, but it had reached the ceiling now, and Bedelia’s blonde hair floated up in loose, oversized coils, though they looked more red now than gold. 

“Enough, Will.” He could hear her through the bloody water, her voice a series of musical notes played over the crashing of some far-off waves. “You’ve been fighting this creature too long. Give up the ghost.” 

One of the stag’s hooves lashed out and caught Will in the stomach, and his scar cracked open and the blood poured out, and one of the horns took him again in the shoulder. The old gunshot wound ripped open, and then another tip scratched him across the head, and the old wound tore open there. If he hadn’t already been submerged, Will would’ve been blinded as the head wound bled. 

The stag knew all his vulnerable spots, his histories and insecurities and terrible intimacies squirrelled away and unspoken, unexplored except when Will was alone. 

The stag knew all his vulnerable spots, and Will was bleeding out. The stag was stronger. It was winning. 

“I can’t,” Will sobbed, but Bedelia only watched him from beneath her bloody halo hair, and the stag never let up it’s frenetic scrambling, trying to get to the core of him, trying to pin him down. 

Finally, he was caught against the wall, his own curls swirling in his face and obscuring his view of another room filled with blood and longing and things left too long unsaid. He would be crushed to death under the weight of it if he didn’t cry uncle. If he didn’t give the stag what it wanted. 

“Fine,” he cried. “Fine, I loved him. Love him. He made me feel normal even when I was the least normal I’d ever been. He made me feel accepted and excited and alive, and no one else, no one, has ever made me feel like that. He made me feel things inside that scared me. That terrified me, and I didn’t want it to be true, because he’s a serial killer and a cannibal, and he’s not safe for anyone, and it’s not safe to be loved by him, and worse, he made me realize that I didn’t want to be safe. That I never have. That safety was the door I hid behind to make myself palatable for a world that I never imagined I could live without.” 

The stag stepped back. All Will’s injuries screamed, but he was used to that. He slid down to the floor. The blood in the room began to recede. 

Will met Bedelia’s eyes, and they were full of sympathy now. Sympathy and pride. 

Will tried to return the smile, but it wavered. “And for every moment I spent loving him, I spent two more afraid of what that could mean. What I would be capable of with him, what he would ask of me. What I would give, without him even having to ask. And I worried that I wouldn’t be enough for him, in the end, that I wouldn’t want what he wanted, that I never really could.” He rubbed a hand across his eyes as the room kept draining, leaving him a soggy mess on Bedelia’s rug. The stag lay on the floor beside him, breathing raggedly. “I was afraid that I still just wanted the simple things, the most impossible things of all. Domesticity and dogs and dessert. The very first things in the very first moments, before I knew what he was, I already wanted.” Will met Bedelia’s eyes and didn’t care that his own were watering. “And I couldn’t. I couldn’t have come so close to something that... that beautiful, that all-consuming, that impossible, without knowing it would burn everything around me to the ground if I didn’t stop it.” Will put a hand on the stag’s heaving side. “That he would burn everything. I love him more than anything, Bedelia. And I don’t want to admit it, because there are other people I care about, too, and I’m not so selfish that I want them to burn for the sake of my happiness. And I’m not so lacking in self-awareness that I think there’s no possibility I’d let them.” 

The stag lapped at his fingers. 

Bedelia stood, her hair dripping red but returning to blonde again, her cup filled now with blood. She crouched down in front of Will. “I know,” she said simply. 

Will leaned his head back to thump against the wall. “I know you know,” he said, smiling ruefully. “So what happens now?” 

“I think that’s a question only you can answer.” 

Will pushed himself up, and looked around. He got to his feet. The stag, instead, settled more deeply into Bedelia’s rug. Will noticed all his wounds had closed back up, reverted back into the scars he’d known them to be.

Bedelia rose with him, and he realized he wasn’t angry at her anymore. Not in this moment. 

“I’ve been dreaming for a while now,” he told her. She nodded, but offered nothing more. “Maybe Hannibal’s given me something. Or I’m under anesthesia. Or maybe someone knocked me unconscious out there. Or maybe it really is just an elaborate dream.” He pinched himself, but nothing happened. “Maybe it’s a flare up of encephalitis.” His lip quirked. “Should I draw you a clock, Bedelia?” 

“I’m just a figment, Will. I wouldn’t know any better than you would if the clock is real.” 

“But you know what’s happening to me.” 

“I do.” 

“And you’re not going to tell me.” 

“It seems a bit of a shock. Too much to be borne all at once.” 

Will gestured at the wall behind him. “If this was a therapy session, I’d say we’ve had a breakthrough.” He thought about Hannibal, with his shining eyes and tiny smile, and the way his fingers brushed against Will at the slightest provocation. Will had to steady his breathing. “I’d say that’s a big thing. I’ve been cut, shot, disemboweled, had someone try to carve my face off.” He gave a wry chuckle. “I’ve eaten human flesh, and I can’t even say I’m squeamish anymore. People I love have been attacked and nearly killed. I’ve ended up in physical altercations with multiple murderers. Oh, and I just admitted I’m in love with one of them. It’s just about the biggest thing I’ve ever admitted in my life.” He tilted toward her. “You think there’s anything more that I couldn’t handle?” 

He expected a scoff or a smile, but Bedelia’s face was serious. 

Something cold and wet sloshed in Will’s gut. “That’s a depressingly cryptic look. You expect me to keep going, after that?” 

“I expect you to do what you have always done in one manner or another, Will,” Bedelia said, settling comfortably back into her chair. “Go searching for Hannibal.”

Notes:

tysm for continuing to follow along :)

Chapter 5: Psychic Driving

Summary:

“You need to wake up, Will.”

He looked around. “I’m trying.”

“Not very hard.”

He was back in Maryland. Sitting on a couch, in a hospital room, staring at a figure in a bed. No, he was in a lowlit hallway, watching his stag traipse placidly toward him. The sight didn’t fill him with anything he once would have felt. It dipped its head and nosed at his hand. Will smiled, and let himself be coaxed into petting the giant ethereal monster. 

When he woke up, he was on the couch again. Alana’s voice had the calming, melodic cadence of someone reading. She turned to look at him without prompting. 

“They were really stupid birds,” she said, smiling. It was a smile like she used to have, before. Alana didn’t smile like that anymore. 

Will shifted uncomfortably. “Are you angry with me?” He scoffed, rolled his eyes at himself, and pushed into a sitting position. “Nevermind, I don’t know why I’m asking. You’re not her.” 

Alana shrugged, made a maybe-maybe-not expression. “I’m not her, you’re right. But I’m not sure you’re right about the other thing.” 

“Alana always wanted to believe in the best of me. Alana wanted to believe everything with Hannibal was just manipulation. Empathy disorders and forced cannibalism and psychic driving.” He heaved a sigh. Looked at her. “You look pretty,” he admitted. “You’re still pretty. Out there. But you looked pretty back then, in this hospital room, in a way that seemed... possible.” 

“I’m going to pretend that sounds flattering. For the record, it doesn’t, though.” 

“Never was very good at flirting. But it seems strange to worry about that when I’m stuck in my own dream.” He squinted at her. “Speaking of which, do you know how soon I can wake up?” 

She sighed. “I’m about to broach the subject of that ‘Takes One to Know One’ article?” 

Will’s mouth turned down. “I knew you wouldn’t approve.” 

“Of?” 

“Me. And Hannibal.” He gulped, looked anywhere but her eyes. “And all the things we did. To each other, and... with each other.” 

“The killings, you mean. The manipulations and mutilations.” 

“I’m not proud of it. Not all of it, anyway.” 

Alana smiled into her book. “Will. Alana? The real Alana, out there? She’s not always proud of what she’s become, either. You have to remember, whatever your relationship with him, you’re not the only one whose life is cleanly divided into ‘before Hannibal’ and ‘after Hannibal.’”

“Hannibal threatened to kill her. To take everything from her. Because of some messed up code.” 

“Admittedly, that is problematic,” she said, laughing. Her lips were pink and her teeth very white. “I’m not trying to let you off the hook here, Will. I’m just saying that Alana, of all people, knows what it’s like to get wrapped up in Hannibal. Alana of all people knows what it’s like to become someone other than the upstanding, law-abiding, bloodless thing you were before him. And Alana, almost more than anyone, would have more reason to forgive you, to thank you, than anyone.” 

Will frowned. “To thank me.” 

She opened her mouth to reply, then thought better of it. “You need to wake up, Will.” 

He looked around. “I’m trying.” 

“Not very hard.” 

Will’s eyes landed on Abigail and lingered. “She looks so alive.” He swallowed the lump in his throat. “The teacup had just been molded and painted. It was a new and hopeful thing.” He wanted to stand, move to the bed, rest his hand gently on her forehead.

But he didn’t. He’d had Abigail. Moreso in memories and dreams than in life. “She was more Hannibal’s daughter than she was ever mine,” he murmured, and knew it was true. 

“Abigail Hobbes is a success for you.” 

Will’s lips quavered. “She doesn’t look like a success,” he whispered. 

A strange thought crossed his mind as he sat, watching her. He looked up at Alana sharply. “Is this what you’re trying to tell me? Am I in a coma?” 

Alana pursed her lips. “Don’t feel sorry for yourself because you saved this girl’s life.” 

It was a strange thing to say. “I don’t. I don’t feel sorry for myself. I feel...” 

But he couldn’t think of what he felt. 

*

And then he was following Jack, snow crunching thickly into the layer of ice beneath it, to a house with a stained glass door left partially ajar. 

Jack wrapped his knuckles against it. 

“It’s open, come in.” 

“So you were expecting us,” Jack said, removing his hat, a dangerous smile playing around his mouth that echoed the one trying to shrug itself across Will’s face. 

The old man sat in his thick leather chair: bland, bored hostility as he watched the two of them. “I had faith you’d find me.” He looked at Will. “I have faith you’ll find your way where you need to go.” 

“And why is that, Mr. Wells?” 

Wells smiled. There was nothing kind in it. Only mockery and predation. “Let’s just say it’s a good thing it was the last one.” Will frowned but Wells kept going. “I had every reason to kill the others. They just had no reason to die.” 

Will looked at the old man. Even as he knew that this was all a dream, that this was all so unreal, he couldn’t contain the thrill. The heady anticipation of being able to feel contempt. He exchanged a look with Jack, one that said, I’m sharing in your pleasure. The pleasure of disdain for one whose belly drags low to the ground. 

“You’ve skipped some parts,” Will said, voice sharp and mocking. 

Wells smiled all the wider, pulling at the corner of his mouth like a jackolantern. “You’re getting lost. Stuck in the weeds again. We all know your keenest pleasure is the reckoning of the unrighteous.” He leaned forward. “But that’s not why you’re here today. Is it, Mr. Graham?” 

“Will,” Jack said, and the words came out sour, like a concession. “I don’t like to admit this, but he might be right. You’ve got other places to be, Will.” He turned back to the monster in the shape of a man before them. “There’s something beautiful about knowing that you’ll spend the rest of your life in prison.” 

Wells looked up at Will. “Does he? Does he know that? I’m you, and you’re me, and he’s you, too. You gonna stay here forever?” 

“Prison is going to be a luxury,” Jack replied. Will frowned. It was the right words, in the wrong mouth. “And I certainly won’t be forgotten there.” 

Will tilted his head. “I’m securing my legacy?” 

Wells settled into his chair. “That’s one way to be remembered. No children to tell your story.” 

Will frowned. Thought of Abigail. Of the child Margot never had. Of poor Walter. You should kill him, Wally had said. 

Will clenched his teeth. “I’m going to get out of here.” 

Beside him, Jack made a complicated, inexplicable face. Wells laughed. “Maybe Molly saw what was in your heart.” He grinned as wide as a cheshire cat. His next words were said in a whisper. “You didn’t secure your legacy, Mr. Graham, you-” 

But Will wasn’t ready to hear whatever vitriol came flying out of his mouth next. “I’m getting out of here. I’m going to wake up.” Jack watched, sad and helpless, as Will strode back to the painted glass door, wrenched it open, and slammed it behind him. 

*

“It seems you have an admirer.” 

“You think someone sent me an ear because they admire me?” Will found himself replying, then shook his head and pushed himself off the dirty, inhumane metal cot. 

Hannibal was staring at him, expression soft and a little sad. Something inside Will melted to see it. 

“The boundaries of what’s considered normal are getting narrower. Outside those boundaries, this may be intended as a helpful gesture.” 

Will licked his lips, an involuntary movement. “I thought it was you, last time we had this conversation. At least, I thought it was you at first. I couldn’t read you quite the same as I can now, but I could still read you enough. Enough to know that you weren’t entirely lying when you said you wanted me exonerated.” 

Hannibal smiled ruefully. “It hadn’t occurred to me to send you an ear. But I’m grateful someone has.” 

Will let the grin wash over his face, slow as snow melting. “Because you missed me. You had your reasons for wanting me in here.” He paced in front of the bars and chuckled. “But you played yourself, Hannibal.” 

“I have new thoughts about who you are,” Hannibal began, but promptly closed his mouth again when Will gave him a quailing look. “Sorry. Just following the script, Will.” 

Will walked to the bars. Tried to rattle them, but they held fast. Hannibal watched Will come closer, bemused and delighted. “I need to figure out how to wake, Hannibal.” He took in the elegant way Hannibal folded his jacket over one arm, the tiny shifts in expression which meant he was pleased. “Don’t look at me like that. I know you’re not really here with me.” Will pushed away from the bars and huffed a laugh. “For all that I know, for all I can remember, you could be the one who’s ended me up here. If we’re judging by precedent.” 

“Some part of you still suspects me.” 

“I know, I just said that. Look, I know you’re a subconscious version of me dressed up in a distressingly appealing Hannibal suit, but can we cut to the chase and you just tell me what I need to know?” 

Hannibal’s expression turned troubled. He leaned forward. “You aren’t insane. Not anymore. But I may not be guilty.” Will bit back a dull roar of frustration. “This ear you were sent may be an opportunity. If someone else is responsible for your crimes, he may want to be seen.” 

The water was rising, and Will’s focus was fading. He tried to fight it off, but heard himself saying, “Why would he want to be seen now?” 

“He cares what happens to you,” Hannibal replied, and for a moment Will was swept away, swept into the moment as it had happened.

“I remember this,” Will muttered, tiptoeing back to the bars, moving slowly so as not to spook him. “This moment, this small, little moment. I doubted. I did doubt. For a brief moment, I thought everything I’d known and believed may not have been true, after all. I could tell you weren’t the killer, even as I was confused and hoping that you were. All I could tell was that you genuinely didn’t want me stuck in a cell.” His lip quivered, though he tried to thrust it back. “I felt safe, Hannibal. Like I’d felt safe with you before. I wanted,” he whispered, “to feel safe with you.” His eyes were wet and blurry. “Why weren’t you safe for me?” 

Will swerved away from the bars, covered his eyes with a trembling hand. 

*

When he turned back around, Randall Tier’s corpse lay on the dining room table and Hannibal was sliding the doors shut. 

“Does this make us even, Will?” But Will didn’t understand the question. “Is this enough reciprocity? ‘I send someone to kill you, you send someone to kill me’? What was that phrase? ‘Even-steven?'” 

Will’s heartbeat was slow; his head felt full of cotton. It was hard to think through the adrenaline come-down of a well-designed death. He looked down at Randall Tier. My design.  

“You’re beautiful, Will,” Hannibal whispered. Suddenly he was too close, or maybe just close enough. “Did you kill him with your hands?” Will was swept away by the look in Hannibal’s eyes. 

“It was... intimate,” he whispered and their mouths were close, closer...

Hannibal put a hand up, caressing Will’s jaw, holding him in place, away. “This isn’t it, Will. I’m not really here.” Will swallowed. “If you want to find me, you’ll have to keep going. Don’t get lost in the dream.” He stepped back and took Will’s hand, like he had that time in Baltimore, the real Baltimore. “It deserves intimacy. You were his final enemy.” 

Will’s heartbeat was an unlikely thing. A bird trapped in a cadaver’s chest. “Wherever I am... We’re not in Baltimore. I’m not in Baltimore.” 

“No,” Hannibal agreed, and pulled him away, toward a bowl with clear water turning cloudy with red, and gauze for wrapping. 

This dream was a hard one, difficult to wake from. He remembered how it’d felt that night, the knowledge that he’d been a different person at the beginning of the evening than he was now. The sick thrill, the hollow realization. A moth cracking the cocoon, a next stage in Becoming. “Stay with me,” he found himself whispering. 

“Remember what I told you?” Hannibal prompted, voice impossibly soft as he worked on Will’s knuckles. “Don’t go inside, Will. Don’t go inside.” 

“Where else would I go?” 

Hannibal looked a little sad. “You have everywhere to go, in here. In this revolving door of a memory palace. But there is only one place to go out there. And that’s where you need to be, to break out of here.” Hannibal paused. “When you killed Randall, did you fantasize you were killing me?” 

Will didn’t have an answer. Or he did, but this Hannibal wasn’t real, he forced himself to remember. This was just another version of himself. “Why are you asking me these questions you already know the answer to? Shouldn’t you be helping me?” 

Hannibal pursed his lips, appeared to think. “I know the answers, but not you. I am doing what I can to help, what you’ll let me.” He tilted his head and looked at Will sadly. “Most of what we do, most of what we believe, is motivated by death.” 

“I’ve never felt as alive as I did when I was killing him,” Will said, because it was what he was supposed to say here. But the words felt wrong, so wrong, all wrong. The cold seafoam insides of his stomach roiled with the wrongness of it. He pushed himself to his feet, and jerked his hand away. “I want to leave. I want to leave!” He took the bowl of water and smashed it against the far wall. Hannibal didn’t blink at the damage. Which only drove home the point: This Hannibal wasn’t real. 

And neither was anything else.

Notes:

Thanks for reading!

Chapter 6: Churning Seas

Summary:

Don’t look down, said a voice in the back of his brain. It sounded like Hannibal.

Will was on a boat. The waves were churning beneath him, the wind was whipping through his hair, and he was on his way to Hannibal. He was happy.

Don’t look down, said a voice in the back of his brain. It sounded like Hannibal. The voice in his head always sounded like Hannibal now, but this time it sounded urgent, more afraid than he’d ever remembered it. Hannibal didn’t get afraid. Don’t look down, Will!

But Will was already starting to turn, to look. There was something moving down there, something floating, figures beneath the waves, and this wasn’t right, this wasn’t it, his heart was pounding in his ears, he was going to Europe, Hannibal was supposed to be in Europe- 

*

Will blinked in the semi-dark of Hannibal’s antechamber. He’d lost his train of thought for a second, just an instant. But it was back now. Sanity returned to him, slow and languorous, as he watched Hannibal stand there, shading his eyes. Serene and untroubled. The stark hospital uniform did nothing to dim Hannibal, to fool anyone watching into thinking him anything less refined and dangerous. 

Will had to turn away; it was either turn away or be forced to put his own hand before his eyes, a horizontal mimic of Hannibal’s own gesture. 

It would give Hannibal entirely too much pleasure, he knew, to see Will so blindsided. So Will turned away. 

“I’m not fortune’s fool. I’m yours. The Brooklyn Museum is closed to the public on Tuesdays, but researchers are admitted, you knew that’s when we’d both be going.” 

Hannibal dropped his arm and looked at Will, his mouth twitching in disappointment tempered by fondness. “A sophisticated intelligence can forecast many things, but that’s not why you came to see me.” 

Will scoffed. “What now, Dr. Lecter. More riddles? Let’s put the games aside. He’s contacted you,” he finished, accusing. 

Hannibal smirked, the kind of little grin that once Will had only ever interpreted for pure, friendly enjoyment, but which he’d grown to recognize could also show catlike amusement at a game of Hannibal’s own making. Played out using pieces in his head. “Will. You’re the one being dull now.” 

Will barked a laugh, but the insult stung. “Well I’d hate for you to have destroyed your reputation and given up your freedom for someone dull." 

“Fear makes you rude, Will.” Hannibal’s lips still quirked, but then turned down. “You let yourself get lost again. Because of the fear.” 

“There’s a family out there who don’t know he’s coming.” 

“I think we should both be more worried about the family in here.” 

“Is that a threat?” 

Hannibal’s eyebrows raised. “An observation, and a reminder. Will, you must free yourself from these delusions. At least for a moment. Let yourself be intimate with your urges, and the consequences of them.” 

Something tapped uncomfortably at Will’s skull. Trying to warn him of something bad, trying to hollow him out. 

He refused. “Tell me who he is.” 

Hannibal took a breath. “When you close your eyes, Will, what do you see now?” 

Will scoffed again. “How’s he choosing them?” 

“How did you choose yours?” 

“Hannibal.” 

He grinned. “I thought you were more comfortable the less personal we are.” 

The silence stretched between them. “And you’re willing to let them die.” 

Hannibal looked sad, so sad, but he still kept smiling through it. That wasn’t a face Will liked. It wasn’t a face he saw when things were going well between them. Not that that mattered. Or should have, he reminded himself firmly. “I’m not letting them die, Will. You are.” He opened his mouth like he was going to speak again, but Will found himself suddenly afraid, terrified, of what Hannibal was going to say. 

Will turned on his heel angrily, flinging the doors open, Hannibal calling his name behind him. “Don’t go inside, Will!” he thought he heard Hannibal call. 

But there had been something awful and evil and terrible in Hannibal’s words, some truth that even Will himself wasn’t ready to look too closely at. Something worse than all the murder, all the grief, all the pain and the horror and the desperate, dangerous love he should never have allowed himself to feel. 

So Will stalked down the hallway, and let himself sink deeper inside, where no terrible truths could get to him. 

*

He was outside his little house. With his dogs. He had the strangest sense that he’d missed it, that he’d been gone for a long time. But that didn’t make any sense. He let the cool, quiet air of the night calm him, let his mind go flat and blank, let the soothing canine musk of his animals wash over him. 

This was nice. This was peace. 

No one to bother him. No one to disappoint. No one trying to crack open his head and get at the spoiled meat inside, housing the haunted and pathetic mind of Will Graham: Academy teacher and killer consultant. 

It takes one to catch one floated idly in the quiet of his mind, but he pushed the thought away. No one could get him here. Not Freddie Lounds, not Jack Crawford, not even... not even... 

Whatever thought was trying to peck its way free, Will wasn’t a fan. It was an interloper, wasn’t welcome. He took one last cleansing breath of country air. Whistled for his dogs. Turned around, to tuck himself and his strays back inside the safety of his little house, adrift on the sea.

He shut the door behind them, locked it tight, and tried to ignore the accusatory gaze of the antlered creature watching over him as he slept. 

Notes:

Thank you to everyone following along, and to everyone who's left me kudos :) I meant to be updating more often, so I'll try to do better about that!

Chapter 7: Unimaginable Decay

Summary:

Will couldn’t let himself imagine it. 

He was back in the frozen snow. Except this time, it was earlier in the day. There were lights blaring, an empty truck, and organs hanging from the branches of trees. 

He did his reconstruction. It felt nice. Not the killing of the nurse and the guard. He felt Gideon’s enjoyment of the act, but that wasn’t what felt good about it. 

What felt good was the click, the certainty, the knowing. The knowledge that still, standing there in the cold losing his own sense of self, he was hanging on to who he was better than the escapee they were currently hunting. 

“Abel Gideon is having a difference of opinion about who he is,” he found himself telling Jack, grateful for this little patch of solid ground beneath his feet. “The man who escaped from that van was not in the same state of mind when he did this.” He addressed Jack, but also the other three.

Beverly was there. It made Will feel. Just a little sad, but happy, too. “I’m glad you’re here.” It slipped out, before he could stop himself. 

The others didn’t act like he’d done anything strange. Beverly smiled back at him, but it was hard to describe her expression as happy. “Will, you can’t run from this.” 

Will chose to ignore that. “Well it’s what he didn’t take.” 

Beverly gave Will an exasperated look. 

“He even tied little bows with them,” Jimmy was saying. 

“Yeah, it’s really impressive,” Zeller replied. “Doesn’t have anything on Hannibal, though. Or,” he looked up at Will, snapping his fingers to remember, “what was that one thing you did. With the museum guy and the cave bear.” 

Will rubbed a hand across his face. “Could you all maybe cut me a little slack? I’m barely clinging to my sanity here, y'know.” 

He knew what they were saying was true, but he also knew it wasn’t supposed to have happened yet. Which meant that none of this was real, exactly, and while the autoimmune encephalitis (that he wasn’t supposed to know he had yet) had certainly plunged him into the hallucinogenic deep end by now, he wasn’t any more fond of the slow realization that he might not be dreaming. 

Or, in this case, that he might still be. 

“Come on, Will,” Jack said, hands folded into his pockets. “This song and dance is getting pretty old now.” 

“The Chesapeake Ripper would not have left the organs behind,” Will announced blandly. 

“No, he would have eaten them,” Zeller threw back. “Seriously, Will, this isn’t funny anymore. You need to figure this out, or you’re going to be caught in a loop. And not the fun kind.” 

Jimmy squinted. “Are there fun kinds of loops to be caught in?” 

“Well, yeah... I mean, sure, if you consider that...” 

Will was glad to tune them out, turning back to Jack, who said, “Well if this whole thing really isn’t about Gideon, then I’d say your subconscious is certainly trying to get your attention.” 

Will shook his head, almost violently. “This is just a dream. None of this is real, and absolutely none of this matters or has any deeper meaning whatsoever.” 

Beverly rolled her eyes, but pointed out the hours-old foot trail heading off into the woods. Wiithout preamble, Will crashed through the underbrush, following the tracks. 

“Well. There he goes,” he heard Jimmy’s voice behind him, but it sounded like a long way off. 

*

The branches grew thicker and thicker, scratching at his face and tugging at his clothes, until finally he emerged, stumbling into the dim gray light-

Of his cell, back in the bowels of the Baltimore State Hospital. A sick, terrible, wonderful, euphoric sense of righteousness erupted inside him, curling itself low in his belly. 

He imagined the blood in the sink running red. 

But then the words, It really does look black in the moonlight sang in his head, and the swelling balloon of his happiness deflated so rapidly it knocked the wind out of him. 

This was wrong, something was very wrong here. If this version of himself succeeded, if he got what he wanted- 

Will couldn’t let himself imagine it. 

But the thought, the knowledge of something that had happened, something that he’d done, stalked closer on clipped, unforgiving hooves. He pressed his hands to his head, squeezed his eyes shut, and a horrible, inhuman moaning bubbled out of him, something that sounded like a wounded animal trying to scream, water rushing in as it drowned. 

“I don’t want this! I don’t want it!” he cried, uncaring of who might hear. Because none of this was real, so the only person listening was himself. And he had to take control of this before it all got away from him, before he was stuck with the dark and terrible truth-

*

He jettisoned awake, prone on a platform, the squeal of satisfied pigs and the smell of copper both clogging the air. 

He was disoriented, and groggy still, and he pushed himself to his feet. There was blood everywhere, and everyone was gone. “Hannibal?” he wanted to ask, but it was clear he was alone. He spun around. There was a sense of clammy dread, a sense that he’d done something wrong, so wrong. That he’d made the wrong choice, or only realized too late. 

Will remembered staring up at Hannibal, the blade pressed against his throat, and the way Hannibal had looked down at him, full of curiosity, and trust. Will had wanted to do it. He’d wanted to do it so badly. 

But he’d wanted not to do it more. A realization that blossomed, fervent, immediate, and all-encompassing, as he’d spun Hannibal around and cut him loose. 

Now Will stumbled over to the switch and flipped it. The pulley slid upwards at a slow, unyielding pace. 

Dread gripped his chest, forced all the air out like a sudden plunge to icy depths. He had feared it would be Hannibal. He had expected it would be Carlo. 

The thing that emerged was far worse. 

Dead and gray and decaying, covered in seaweed, slick with water and filmy viscous. Topped with hair that might once have been curls. 

Will felt a surge of horrified disgust like nothing he’d ever known. Bile rose in his throat. His thoughts, and the room around him, blinked off like a light.

Notes:

I might revamp the number of chapters and start posting future updates in larger chunks. Consider this a courtesy heads up just in case, but don't hold me to that!

Chapter 8: Dull Ache

Summary:

When Will was finally ready, Hannibal rose to his feet, and stood looking down at him, a gentle invitation. “Now is the hardest test.”

Will closed his eyes and nodded.

The first time he’d seen Hannibal working on the Primavera, Will had moved slowly, favoring his leg. He’d had time, or maybe no time at all, but he’d wanted to savor what he was left with. Didn’t want to rush. 

Now he pushed himself, half-running despite his limp, tears streaming down his cheeks and mouth pulled back in a grimace. 

Instead of setting himself down gracefully on the bench, he stumbled, tears blurring, on the ground at Hannibal’s feet. “I don’t- I can’t -” 

Hannibal smiled at him like nothing was the matter, contented and fond. “If I saw you every day, forever, Will, I would remember this time.” 

“Hannibal, I- It’s too much. I can’t take it. I can’t see it.” He pressed his face into scabbed fingers. 

Hannibal put the pad and pencil aside. Slid down on the floor with him. Will felt Hannibal’s finger, cool against his face, a slow slide against his hair. “You’ve been looking at afterimages of me in places I haven’t been in years. But more importantly, you’ve been looking at afterimages of yourself.” 

Will swallowed great gulps of air. The horrible knowledge pressed itself against him, putrid, and far too close. “That’s all that I have left, isn’t it?” he asked, and it managed to sound like a plea. “Afterimages. That’s the only thing that’s left to have.” He whispered, “I think I made a mistake.” 

Hannibal laughed. “To market, to market to buy a fat pig. Home again, home again, jiggity, jig.” 

“There’s nothing else to buy, Hannibal! No more grand plans to make, no more coy and reckless bargaining with smoke and getting away with it! The pig has been bought, paid for, and slaughtered, and the butcher with it! And-” He covered his face with his hands, and sobbed as he couldn’t remember ever sobbing in his life. “And I can never go home again. I just want to go home again,” he whispered. 

“It’s all right, Will. You just needed it to be clear, what you were seeing.” 

Will grit his teeth, tasting salt. “I don’t want this to be clear, I don’t want this to be true.” He grasped Hannibal by the lapels, clung to him, angry and desperate. “You’re the one who always had power over life and death. Where is your monstrous magic now!? I don’t want this to be true, make this so it’s not true!” 

Hannibal gripped Will’s hands, but did not remove them. “This ending wasn’t my magic, Will. It was always yours. See?” 

Will dipped his head into Hannibal’s shoulder, squeezed his eyes tight, and let the tears flow, silent now. “Where does the difference between the past and future come from?” he murmured against Hannibal’s jacket. 

“Yours?” Hannibal asked, cradling Will’s head and rocking him gently, like a child. “You’re all out of futures, Will. But it’s all right. Everyone runs out of futures, eventually. Your past is what will sustain you now. And I helped you build a memory palace that’s full of strange and wondrous things. Your rooms are full to bursting, not just with terrors. You are not flesh, but light and air and color now. All the colors of your life will dance before your eyes for lifetimes still to come.” He paused. “Your rooms are lovelier, lighter, and brighter than some.” 

“Mine?” Will paused. “Yours?” 

Hannibal let Will pull himself back, and brushed the tears away from his face. “I’m not him, you understand. But I am what you need me to be.” He smiled, and looked around, glanced up at the Primavera, then down at the sketch he’d been making. Will looked over and saw Bedelia’s face transposed against the work, and his own. “You need a way out of dark places when hard truths send you there. That’s what I am now. This room is one of your best memories - a moment where you had everything you wanted, untainted by problems and fears of the future. You can live in this space, forever, Will.” 

Will closed his eyes. “We’re conjoined. I’m curious whether either of us can survive separation.” No, that was out of order again. Will scrubbed a hand across his face. “It’s all starting to blur.”

“That will happen, I’m afraid.” He brushed another gentle hand down Will’s head. “At least, it will be a mostly positive blur, if you let it be. You needn’t worry about feeling guilty for crimes anymore. Mine, or yours, or any of the other monsters you gave space in your head. You can’t hurt anyone anymore, and neither can...” Will looked up, wondered what he had to say. He took a breath. “Well. That’s a thought for another day. One deadly revelation at a time.” 

Will was curious, but also comfortable with that. He’d had enough of revelations for today. Whatever the concept of “today” meant here, and however long it lasted. 

They sat there, on the floor, Will never letting go of Hannibal. Always connected. Will and this unreal version of Hannibal stared at the Primavera in somber, mute admiration, for a very long time. 

When Will was finally ready, Hannibal rose to his feet, and stood looking down at him, a gentle invitation. “Now is the hardest test.” 

Will closed his eyes and nodded. 

*

He stood on the patio of a charming little seaside hideaway. And he knew, without needing any sort of proof, that he was really here. That this was more than just a dream. 

He knew he’d been here before, but he couldn’t remember when or why. The sky was dark, the moon was blinding, and the Dragon lay still and dead nearby, gushing great gouts of blood. 

Will was the only other figure there. He knew someone else had been here, but it was still hard to remember. The lights from inside shone through the floor-to-ceiling windows, strangely broken, and Will felt glass and gravel crunch beneath his feet as he made his way to the edge. 

Blood might have looked black in the moonlight, but so did the sea. It was difficult to make out anything below. 

He slid to the ground, wrapped arms casually around his knees. Will sat there, watching the ocean for a long, long time. Waiting. 

At some point, night became dawn, and dawn became day. Or maybe time didn’t exactly work like that for him anymore. When he turned back around, It wasn’t a bloody corpse he saw, but a skeleton, picked clean. Some of the limbs had been torn off, and dragged away. Even the blood had been lapped up. 

Everybody gets eaten, in the end, Will thought, returning his gaze to the cliffs below. It wasn’t a thought that bothered him. 

The sea was a long way down, and the roiling Atlantic had never been clear. It did not give up its secrets easily, choosing to obscure the awful truths that lay buried beneath its waves. 

But if Will looked very close, he could see a body there, beneath the stormy green, slimy and pecked clean. The hair was still a mass of curls, not yet towed away by creatures who could use it to burrow. There wasn’t much in the way of a face left. 

He thought Chilton would approve. Mason, too. 

Will wondered, as he watched the water swirl up and embrace his bones, what he’d done to get himself thrown down there. He saw the telltale sign of the scar across his forehead, carved into the skull. And a new cut, stark, against his cheekbones that he couldn’t fully remember. He supposed this all must be the work of the Dragon, and could only be proud he’d given as well as he got. 

He wondered what his final moments were like. He wondered if Hannibal had killed him, after all. If, in the end, even Hannibal had developed a sense of self-preservation when it came to Will Graham.

Will hoped so. 

He trudged into the house. The door had been left wide, and it was clear some animals had made their way inside but didn’t decide to stay. 

There was a grand piano. Big windows. He sat down on one of the chairs, let himself slide down against the back. Took in the beauty of the ocean. 

It was no little cabin, but Will realized it might actually be better. Almost as if someone had known what kind of place he’d like to spend the rest of his days. What kind of place would work well, for his final rest. Cool. Isolated. Close to the sea. The breeze blowing in through the open door ruffled his hair in a way that felt almost... heavenly. 

He stood up and plucked at the piano. This would have been an oddity, if this had been heaven. The piano in his little house had come with it, left behind by the previous owners. Will didn’t play. 

But Hannibal did. 

And suddenly Will was filled with such a deep, dull ache that he was surprised it didn’t double him over. 

“Hannibal,” he spoke the name aloud, as if speaking it would conjure him. 

But no one answered. 

Will’s throat swelled with grief held back. Hannibal was gone. Hannibal was gone forever, and Will would never see him again. 

He stood there, a ghost in mourning for someone else’s life, for long enough that day turned into night, perhaps more than once. It was difficult to say, being dead.

Eventually, he was able to swallow the grief down. 

Because he, Will, was dead. 

Because he, Will, could see Hannibal every day. He had means to sate the hunger, even if it was a pale reflection. But life felt surprisingly real, he realized, even now that he was dead. 

He closed his eyes, and plunged back into his dreams. 

Notes:

Thanks to everyone who's left comments and kudos! Sorry about the delay, I'm still working on redoing how I'm organizing chapters, so that's slowed me down. But I'll try to get back to posting more often! There's really not much editing needed at this point besides chapter pacing.

Chapter 9: Chasing Shadows

Summary:

He cleared his throat. “Jack. I’m looking for Hannibal?” 

Jack gave a single, monosyllabic chuckle that held not even the ghost of humor. “Of course you are.” 

He found himself standing awkwardly in the entrance to Jack’s office. It took him a minute to find him; Jack was sitting, heavy-lidded and pensive, but not at his desk. 

“What do you want, Will?” he asked, conveying all the weariness of someone who’d just learned his wife has terminal cancer. 

Even knowing this was a vision, Will tread, light and slow, as he moved to take the seat beside him. Even knowing this was a vision, the question he needed to ask stuck in his throat a moment, felt like it would be salt in a thousand wounds, to ask this of Jack now. 

He cleared his throat. “Jack. I’m looking for Hannibal?” 

Jack gave a single, monosyllabic chuckle that held not even the ghost of humor. “Of course you are.” 

Will looked away. “I know what you wanted me to be, I know I’m a disappointment to you, but it doesn’t really matter now.” And as he thought about it, he got angry. Not angry in the way that the younger man he’d once been would have, who would yell and stammer and lash out with the feeble power of his words. Will realized how disconnected he felt from that person. You’re more in control now than you’ve ever been rang in his head. He was dead now. It cost him nothing to acknowledge that as truth. He continued on, looking back up at Jack. “I’m dead, Jack. You squeezed blood from this stone a bit too long. You always believed the angels of my better nature would win out, but I don’t think they did. And now I’m dead, and it doesn’t matter if I spend an eternity chasing shadows of a monster. Let me out. Let me go. Tell me where Hannibal is." 

Jack sighed - a deep, bone-weary sigh. “You’re not a disappointment to me, Will. Or, the me who lives out there.” He pointed a careless finger at the ether. “You never have been. I doubted you once, and only once. And it was a mistake. And you proved yourself more than capable of rising to the occasion when it came to Hannibal, each and every time. The angels of your better nature might have broken bodies and bloody wings, Will. But they always won, in the end.” 

Will didn’t know what to make of that. For the first time in a long while, he found himself stunned into silence. Jack Crawford... believed in him? 

“You really don’t know why you’re here with me now, Will?” Jack asked. “This day, this moment, of all moments?” 

Will glanced around the office. It had been a quiet moment. Nothing was happening. The case was solved. It had been a blessing and curse, to figure out before Jack needed to say anything, to understand what was going on with his wife. But Will wasn’t able to figure out what his subconscious was trying to tell him now. “I already know I’m dead,” he said, rankled. “I don’t think there are any more lessons to learn, here. Just... let me see Hannibal.” 

Jack kept his hand hovered over his lips. His eyes took on the haunted, faraway look again that the real Jack had worn that day. “I’m gonna sit here until you’re ready to talk.” 

“I am ready to talk.” Will cocked his head. “Jack?” 

But Jack ignored him. 

Will tried a few more times to call his name, but it was as if Will wasn’t even in the room, as if Jack was so lost in his grief he’d somehow learned how to tune people out entirely. 

Will sat quietly beside him for a while, feeling that he was failing a test he didn’t remember signing up for. When it became clear nothing else was forthcoming, he closed his eyes, and felt himself start to drift... 

*

When he opened his eyes, he was sitting in another chair, in another place. Pure, green light was filtering in through big windows, and he and Abigail were leaning forward, keeping their voices low so as not to be heard by the facility’s other residents. 

Abigail’s voice was tremulous as she said, “You told me that killing someone was the ugliest thing in the world.”

“One of them,” Will found himself saying, falling into the routine too easily, forgetting for just a moment the path he’d been on. 

“I finally get it,” she continued. “I thought there was something wrong with me because I didn’t feel ugly when I killed Nick Boyle. I felt good.” 

Will took a deep, quick breath. Breathed in all the memories of all the times he’d held life and death in the palm of his hands. Garrett Jacob Hobbes first, of course, but then the others. Randall Tier. The man in the cage at the Lecter estate. Others. Someone... someone else... 

And in the grasp to restore these memories, he woke up suddenly again, remembered where he was and what his dreams meant. Smiled at Abigail, slow and sad and fitful. 

“That’s why it was so easy to lie about it,” she went on, biting her lip. 

“Like you didn’t do anything wrong?” He shook his head. “No, wait, Abigail-” 

“Did you feel like you did something wrong when you killed...” She paused, and Will wondered if he was about to be privy to some new diatribe or riddle or guilt-trip. But she just continued on as normal: “My dad?” 

Will had other things he wanted to say, wanted to do. But this conversation was mesmerizing, intoxicating. There were so few people he could talk to about this. “I felt terrified. And then...” he said, Abigail’s eyes watching him, big and shocked and alert. “I felt powerful.” It had been wrong to talk to Abigail about this, back then, for a thousand reasons. But he’d been drunk on another kind of power, lost in his own self-congratulation, in a way he only just now realized was a funhouse mirror version of Hannibal. He had been self-congratulatory, that he’d figured out the pattern. That he’d seen the copy-cat, that he’d found out more than he was ever expected to know. He laughed aloud, and this one-dimensional template version of a girl he’d cared for and terrified and barely known stared at him with wide, frightened eyes. “I always felt powerful, Abigail.” 

Then something in her face changed, and Will knew he wasn’t dealing simply with an echo, but with a part of himself sick of playing reindeer games. “Will. There are no deaths you regret? No notches on your knife handle that you wish you could take back?” 

Will’s lips turned down, and he shrugged. “No?” He laughed. “No.” He frowned across at her. “Why this line of questioning now? Dead men don’t need crickets on their shoulder.” 

“Did it feel good,” she said, like she was prompting him. Like they were at a party she was ready to leave, and trying to send him a signal, “to get to end it, to stop it all?” 

Will frowned.

Abigail shook her head. “God. I wish I’d killed him.” 

“Your father?” 

Abigail rolled her eyes and tilted her head up. It was an expression he didn’t see on her often, but one that felt right. He knew he’d seen a very different side of her than Hannibal had, than even Alana had. He wondered if he was the first man in history to underestimate the emotional capacity of teenage girls. To see them as innocent, and by refusing to let them be anything else, forcing them to wear masks to fit other people’s paradigm. “It’s an interesting line of inquiry,” Abigail said, her voice clipped and dry. “But it would have served us better if you’d pondered it when we were both still alive. You should focus.” 

“Did you really want to kill your dad?” 

She raised an eyebrow. “That’s not really who we’re talking about here.” 

“Then who’re we talking about?” 

“The one who made me a part of it. Part of any of it,” she spat. “This? This wasn’t supposed to be my life.” She reached out and took his hands, suddenly gentle. “This wasn’t supposed to be yours, either, Will. That’s why I wish I’d killed him. One of several reasons.” She looked up and leaned closer. “It feels like he’s still out there,” she said, expectantly. 

Hannibal, Will suddenly remembered, and couldn’t believe he’d forgotten. “In a way he is,” he said, smiling sadly, pushing himself to his feet. He was supposed to find Hannibal. Or the echoes of Hannibal. That was all he would ever be able to grasp.

Abigail laughed. “You mean the copycat. You think you can catch him?” 

“Can you help me this time? Can anyone help me?” 

She gave one curt, final nod. “You’re on your path, Will. You already know the way.” 

*

When he released the bars, he was in a cage. “Hello, Hannibal.” 

Hannibal moved slowly, taking a minute to look at him. “I feel like I’ve been watching our friendship on a split screen. The friendship I perceived on one side, and the truth on the other.”

“Hannibal,” Will said, not even bothering to be surprised at the pleading in his voice. He tried to reach out through the bars of the inhuman cages favored by the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. “Hannibal, let me out. I just want to reach you.”  

Hannibal’s expression was dour. “It’s a terrible feeling, isn’t it.” 

Will groaned with frustration. “This is it!” he yelled at the ceiling. “This is what I want, this is what I need, and what I deserve. Everything is over, the past is dead! Let me out,” he said, looking back at Hannibal longingly. “It’s torture enough to know it will never be real. Don’t torture me by not letting me enjoy my own fantasies.” 

“You’re lying to yourself, Will.” 

“Well,” Will huffed, grinning at the irony, “I guess it should be fair to say I don’t have a gauge for reality that works well enough to know if I’ve been lying. Except, no, that’s actually not true. I know the truth. I know I’m dead. I even know how it happened, or mostly so, and what my rotting corpse looks like. Just... let me out of the cage, Hannibal.” 

“But you understand the reality of this death. You understand your role in that.” 

Will frowned. “And what was my role?” 

“This death occurred at your behest, Will,” Hannibal said, taking a step closer. He was still too far to reach; Will knew because he tried, fingers outstretched toward Hannibal’s meticulous overcoat. “You must understand that you are as angry with yourself as you are with whoever... No.” Hannibal shook his head, and he looked angry now, truly angry, in a way that Will had rarely seen in any genuine capacity. Will absently wondered what it would feel like to have his belly splayed open in a dead man’s dream. “No,” Hannibal hissed, lips curled and dark eyes flashing. “You are singularly angry with whoever this murderer was.” 

Will managed not to recoil. It’s only me, Will reminded himself. Everything in here is only myself. Hannibal wouldn’t have been this angry. Not back in the real world. “There’s no more anger left for Dolarhyde. Ding dong, the Dragon’s dead,” he reminded this Hannibal-who-was-him. “If we were each other’s final enemies, then it’s pointless to be angry. It’s pointless to be angry at myself for killing a monster who killed me. Right?” he asked, feeling that somehow he’d lost the plot of the conversation. 

“You tried to kill me, Will,” Hannibal said simply, suddenly and jarringly back on script. The hairs on the back of Will’s neck stood up, but he ignored it. “It’s hard not to take that personally. However, if I was you... I’d applaud your effort.” 

“I don’t understand,” Will said, withdrawn and cagey. 

Hannibal smiled. “Oh. I’m no more guilty of what you’ve accused me of than you are of what I’ve accused you of.” 

“I didn’t accuse you.” 

Hannibal stepped forward, smiling. Whispered, “I shouldn’t expect you to feel self-loathing or regret, or shame, should I? You didn’t the last time we had this conversation, why should you now?” 

“Hannibal... what-” 

“You knew what you were doing, Will. You knew.” He smiled, a dangerous Cheshire grin, looming up close to the bars in a way that made Will backpedal against the far side of the cage. “And you made your own decisions, decisions that were under your control.” 

“Apparently I’m not as in control as I thought I was,” Will whispered back, shuddering as a sudden chill swept through the cadaverous cage room. 

“No. But you could be. All you have to do is accept the truth.” 

Will’s voice was small. “I thought I had,” he replied, brows pursing together. 

“You found a way to hurt me,” Hannibal said blithely, taking a step back. There was more to be said, but Hannibal didn’t say it. 

“Hannibal. What are you saying?” 

Hannibal turned on his heel and began walking toward the exit. Will rushed to the bars, pushing on them, desperate to follow. But they didn’t budge. 

“I think you know what I’m saying,” Hannibal called, without turning around. Will watched his straight, impeccable posture moving away from him. “I think a part of you is beginning to understand.” 

“No,” Will whispered to himself, even as the pleasure from another lifetime's confrontation sang in his veins at the acknowledgement of his power. 

Notes:

Thanks again for reading, and to everyone who left kudos and comments!

Chapter 10: Silver Lining

Summary:

"Wrath and ruin. Justice and vengeance. Righteousness is your favored flavor, Will. And you were indulgent at the last.”

The bars began to drift, and sink, and come apart around him, and his eyes went unfocused. When he opened them, he was surrounded not by bars, but by loose pieces of paper, floating in swirling circles to meet him. 

Hannibal tossed down a book and Will caught it, but didn’t turn it over to look. He was too afraid of what his dreams could show him now. Too afraid of what they meant. 

Except he thought he knew. He was starting to understand. 

He strode to the fire, violently tossing the heavy leather-bound journal into the flames without opening it. 

He felt more than heard Hannibal come up behind him. “The FBI will pore over my notes if I left them intact. I would spare my patients the scrutiny.” Will turned, a feeling in his gut like a raw and rotten wound. Hannibal was looking back at him. “But the FBI isn’t coming here, and we’ve only ever just been having conversations. I’m sorry you cannot spare yourself from the self-knowledge you possess. But I can promise you that there is a way out of these dark places when you go there. Or, that this particular shattered teacup is not altogether as lost of a cause as you think. It’s been patched together again. Like kintsugi, but with a silver lining instead of gold.” 

Will’s eyes were wet, his teeth set in a grimace. “I’m dismantling who I was and moving it brick by brick,” he said, choking with laughter. “I can’t claim unconsciousness on this one, can I? I know who I am now. Irrevocably. I can only ever know who I am and who I have been.” 

Hannibal stalked easily toward the fire, ripping out pages and seasoning the flames with them. He struck a lean, elegant figure, enwreathed by burning light. Damned, Will thought. And then realized, Because of me. I’m the one who damned him.  

“I remember,” Will whispered, trembling. “I remember what I did. The blood in the moonlight. The cliff.” 

“Save yourself, kill them all,” Hannibal said easily, his voice pitched with wry, mild humor. “Did it feel good, to kill me?” 

Will stumbled back, leaning on the desk, gripping the edges for dear life - or what had once been. The desk had always been a comfort to him. A little piece of Hannibal he got to own. Will would have expected the other man to purse his lips and begin plotting a six-course meal based on the way Will so often made himself at home there. Sitting in Hannibal’s chair like he owned it, lounging against the lip of it, piling his stuff on top. Dragging another chair over, so he could be closer when Hannibal was seated there. 

“I killed you,” he whispered, numb with the knowledge of it, the sick horror swirling nauseously inside of him. “I murdered you.” 

This echo of Hannibal, here and now, turned and watched Will lying on his desk, hands gripping the sides, breathing shallowly through peeled lips. Hannibal regarded him with the same kind of fond amusement and comfortable acceptance his living counterpart had all those years ago in this same room. Not as if Will was a dangerous creature, a fickle inhuman monster. Nor as if Will was an ill-mannered interloper, disregarding the agreed-upon norms of ownership and social boundaries as he sprawled, drunk and careless on Hannibal’s pristine, particular desk. More like a man returning to a well-used bed, delighted to find that his partner had slipped on one of the man’s own shirts. 

“Stop looking at me like that,” Will demanded, a whine sneaking in as an undernote. “I killed you, you’re not allowed to look at me like you’re... like you’re happy with me.” 

The lines at the corners of Hannibal’s eyes crinkled. “You should be pleased. I am.” 

“Hannibal,” Will cried, devastated. “I killed you.” 

“I know. I knew you would. You know I knew you would.” He tilted his head. “Why aren’t you pleased, Will?” 

Will’s head slumped back to the desk. Dead or not, it hurt. He flung an arm across his eyes. “I don’t have your appetite.” 

“Not exactly my appetite, no. But you have an appetite all your own. Wrath and ruin. Justice and vengeance. Righteousness is your favored flavor, Will. And you were indulgent at the last.” 

Will felt the truth of it - a deep sting, a sickening hollow echo. It pulsed in the empty spaces where his stomach used to be, before becoming turf for creatures of brine, predators and prey alike. “My last act was killing myself and the person I loved.” The sound he made was barely a laugh. A tear trickled down his cheek. “A subtly-acknowledged murder/suicide pact with my cannibalistic almost-lover. And you expect me to feel good about that.” 

“I am you. You do feel good about that. At least, a part of you does.” 

“I lost everything. I lost everything, because of you- No. Because of him. Because Hannibal and his sick obsessions were never going to stop.” 

“Because you never wanted them to. Because you had a dozen opportunities to walk away, and you never could fully commit to it. You had walked away, with Molly. You’d gained distance. You blamed Hannibal for the loss of your family, for the loss of your innocence. But you didn’t have to say yes to Jack. You didn’t have to leave the room, to leave Jack alone with Molly so he could convince her, to let Molly invite Jack to stay for dinner. You didn’t have to keep the letter, or wait until you were alone, with your passions and longings and intimacies, to rip it open and ignore its advice. You certainly didn’t need to visit him at the Baltimore State Hospital so quickly after taking the case, if you had to return at all. Just like you didn’t have to run off to Europe to find him, to forgive him. You didn’t have to let him leave after Muskrat Farm without calling it in to the FBI, or without seriously trying once again to end it, to end him. You didn’t have to make the choice, the very worst choice, to call him and tell him they knew.” Will swallowed. Hannibal’s echo continued. “You told yourself before that you were in control of what was happening. And it was true. You were never more in control than you were when you were killing us.” 

“I didn’t want to die,” Will lamented. And he knew it was true. “I didn’t want Hannibal dead.” 

“You wanted his influence exorcized, and you wanted him to know you’d done it. And, at the same time, you didn’t want him to die alone. Or to find out if you could truly survive separation.” 

“It wasn’t the first time I considered killing him.” 

“No. Only the first time since you realized that there could be no decisive victory. Because you couldn’t live with him, but also because you couldn’t live without, as Bedelia first said.” 

Will stared at Hannibal’s ceiling. Imagined the paint of pre-Renaissance Italy cracked and glorious above him. In his dream, the vision changed to become his reality, and bits of dust drifted down onto his cheek. “I killed him. I killed him. I killed him.” If he kept repeating it, maybe it would feel more real. If he kept repeating it, maybe it would seem less likely. “I didn’t really want to kill him,” he whispered. 

“You wanted to kill him because you wanted to let yourself blur with him.” 

“This is Hannibal’s doing. He fostered codependence.” 

“And you were aware enough to avoid it. If you wished.” 

The silence stretched out, luxurious and ominous. 

“If I’m dead, and so is Hannibal... Does that mean that he’s... in his own world, now? Does he exist, at all? Does he live with some version of me, in the echoes of what used to be his mind?” Will’s mouth turned down, sour. “In those dreams, am I a comfort, or a villain?” 

Hannibal smiled at him, almost back in character again, just as he once had been. “I will always have this place.” He breathed a sigh. “My palace is vast, even by medieval standards.” 

Will sat up and leaned forward. His whisper came out raw and earnest. “Could Hannibal be happy there? Truly?” 

“All the palace chambers are not lovely, light and bright. In the walls of our hearts and brains, danger waits. There are holes in the floors of the mind.” 

Will looked at him. “You’re beautiful, you know. I wanted to tell you that, then. I was afraid. I hope you’re happy, the real you, wherever you are out there.” 

Hannibal smiled, bright and genuine, even as he wasn’t real. He reached out a hand, and brushed it against Will’s face. “Lay your head back, Will. Wade into the quiet of the stream.” 

Will let his eyes slip closed. 

*

Behind his eyelids, time reversed. The teacup came together. Will was prone, lying in his bed, back in his little house in Wolf Trap. The sheets were soft, the blankets cozy. The pillows just right. But everything was coated with a little extra dust, and the smell of dogs was an old one. 

Will sat up. The light outside was bright and white, reflecting the snow and making everything look like angels. The door creaked when Hannibal opened it, his face passive and covered with wounds. 

Will groaned as Hannibal picked up a book and took his seat by the bed. Will wanted to ask the questions he’d wanted to ask last time, but the situation had been too dire and deep then. How did he get here? What happened back at the Farm?

Was Hannibal sitting there, watching Will sleep, all night? 

But this Hannibal wasn’t him again. Will knew that now, could tell just by looking. This wasn’t the real Hannibal anymore than the last dozen Hannibal ghosts had been, and this Hannibal wouldn’t know those answers. 

“Well,” Hannibal said, tilting his head. “I’m you, as you’ll recall, and I know what you know of the real Hannibal. It’s safe to say we have some educated guesses.” He paused. “Will, why are you here? To talk about teacups and time, and the rules of-” 

“Stop it.” 

Hannibal’s brows raised in response, expression mild instead of offended. 

“Just...” Will ran a hand across his face, before whipping the covers back and struggling out of bed. “I don’t want to talk anymore. Not to you, not this... fake you. I want to talk. To him.” Will paused, a little afraid of the answer. “Can I do that?” 

“In your mind?” 

“No.” 

“Your memory palace is building, it’s-” 

“Hannibal.” 

This Hannibal, this false idol, huffed a wearier sigh than the real Hannibal would ever allow himself. “I’m supposed to say that I’ve found you there, victorious, in the memories your palace shares with mine. But it’s not a lie, not really. Memory is vague and hazy, and lives in the spaces between us. We are more than our memories, and also not. The living can never leave the dead, because the living and the dead share spaces, in memory. As Abigail once still lived in the red and bleeding kitchens of your mind, so you, too, live in his.” 

“How do I get there?” 

“‘All sorrows can be borne if you put them in a story.’ That’s what Chiyoh would say. But you’re not living in a story, Will. You’re not living at all. There are no rules beyond what you wish and what you realize. There is no limit, Will. Thinking too hard doesn’t help you here.” 

Will stared at him for a long moment. “That doesn’t actually mean anything.” 

“Haven’t you noticed, Will? This place is not just memory. It is creation, or recreation to be more precise.” 

Will glared. “So I can make all this... what I want?” 

Hannibal smiled. “You already did.” 

Will laughed, scoffing. 

Hannibal stared up at Will, one leg still folded over another. “Have we - Alana, Jack, Abigail, myself, and all the rest - not been here to help you when you needed it? Have you not found ways into the memories that provided you with the most comfort, the most safety, even at the darkest of times? You always were a good fisherman, Will, and we have been your lure. You’ve been baiting yourself, inch by inch, piece by piece, toward everything you needed to understand to stand before me, here and now.” Hannibal smiled, a real, open, genuine smile. “He will find you there, victorious.” 

Will’s expression twisted. He tried to imagine where Hannibal would be, what rooms of his and Hannibal’s would have twisted together between them. “Is he... is he safe?” 

Hannibal raised a brow, and Will flushed. “From me, or for you?” He twisted a bit, tipped his head at the empty dog bed in the corner. “You miss your dogs, if I recall. Why not call them to you?” 

Will was skeptical, but hopeful. Tepidly, he made his way to the door and slipped it open, half expecting to see Chiyoh patrolling outside. But there was no one, and his heart leapt strangely. He didn’t know if this would work. It seemed strange to think it would, and ridiculous to think it wouldn’t. 

He pursed his lips together and clipped out a series of high pitched notes. Before he’d had time to linger on either anticipation or dread, there was a cheerful resounding bark and then a whine. And then a brownish-blond flash of dog was racing around the corner of his cottage and straight toward him. 

“Winston!” Will cried, laughing. He fell to his knees, letting Winston circle him happily, grappling with tufts of fur and twisting, licking dog. Will’s chest was light, lighter than it had been in so, so long. He’d never meant to have a favorite. But the minutes ticked by without his notice or care as Will petted and grappled and played with his long-lost dog, in the bright snows in front of the little house where he’d always felt safe. 

And then when Will was ready, Hannibal was beside him again, though he hadn’t heard him come outside. But it wasn’t him, not really. And, Will realized, that was the only thing that could have made this better. Murderer though he was, cannibal and killer and conniver and liar. 

Friend and enemy, Alana had said. Conjoined, Will should have replied. He stood up, Winston sitting placidly at his feet, with a giant doggish grin. 

Will looked at Hannibal. Not his Hannibal. But soon. 

“I have missed you,” Will said to Hannibal. Taking one step toward him, and then another. Hannibal watched Will with a placid face, but approving, gleaming eyes. “I’m going to find you, Hannibal,” Will said, taking another step, letting the snow crackle and crunch beneath feet. “I’m going to look for you. I want to know where you are. And everything you do.” In the end, he was standing right in front of him, and Will was tempted, oh he was tempted, to let himself forget and fall into the dream here and now. But... “I could never stop thinking about you. If I let myself go here, I still wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about you. The you that’s somewhere out there. Maybe dreaming about me, too.” 

Hannibal smiled and squinted up at the sun. “Then you’d better get started. Time rolls over everything. Even the dead and their memories are not ultimately immune.” 

Will smiled in return. “Teacups and time and the rules of disorder?” 

“That’s what all of our stories have always been about, in the end.” 

Will looked up at the sun and willed himself away. “Goodbye, Hannibal,” he said to his echo. 

And then Will was gone. 

Notes:

I hope this goes without saying (and that anyone reading this knows the source material/has a good grasp of the fact that real-world violence should be approached very differently than stylized symbolic fictionalized violence). But just to cover the most extreme off-chance that this chapter hits some reader in a particularly evil mood, consider this your sign to NOT do any sort of domestic partner murder-suicide. Unless you're in love with a serial-killing cannibal who you somehow cannot stop yourself from repeatedly helping avoid capture. Otherwise, maybe try like, therapy.

Lol thanks for reading! Things might still change, but for now I'm thinking there are ~5 chapters left plus an epilogue. Hopefully I'll be able to get them out relatively quickly.

Chapter 11: Inelegant Justice

Summary:

If this is what the afterlife was like, Hannibal was certainly not afraid of eternity at all.

The office was bright and warm, though not so bright as to be garish. The chill of winter nipped outside, but the heat from the fireplace made the room cozy and appealing. It was a familiar place, this room. All of his things set gently in their proper place and every piece charming and complementary.

Hannibal should have been comfortable. It was a comfortable scene in a comforting place. Everything as it should be. 

Things going well, mostly. With Will. With Abigail. With Jack Crawford and his trainee, and the unique if unpleasant way Hannibal was using Miriam Lass to try to snap Jack out of his depressive malaise and help his intriguing wife. He hoped a reminder of Miriam Lass’s supposed mortality would make Jack back off pushing their mutual friend too hard. Will’s pathology was unique, and useful to be sure, but Jack didn’t understand it the way Hannibal did. Jack was liable to break Will if he kept pushing. And Hannibal very much did not want to see Will Graham truly broken. 

Hannibal blinked, and remembered. 

Ah. Of course. 

This particular train of thought was just an echo of another life. Here was not really here, and now was not really now. Hannibal had spent enough time living in his own mind palace while locked in the detestable bowels of the Baltimore Asylum. He was able to distinguish dreams from waking. Usually.

Hannibal swallowed uncomfortably as he took in the room. He was used to having spaces he could not enter, not without unpleasant side effects. He was used to spending long hours lost inside familiar places that he could inhabit only inside his mind. 

What he wasn’t used to was the way he could get lost, sometimes. In the reconstruction, Will’s words echoed back to him from another place and time and setting. 

Hannibal did not miss Will. Or, rather, he was not supposed to miss Will. But Hannibal had learned, long before his own death, that even the victorious figure which existed in his memory could not bring him the sort of muted, inexorable ecstasies prompted by Will’s literal presence. 

Hannibal let his mind wander as it willed. But the realization sat, dry and desiccated in his mind, gnawing and offensive in its putrescence, that Hannibal was not in his memory palace. And there was no hope forthcoming. Every Will Graham that Hannibal would ever see again was a mere hollow representation. Because, against all odds and rationalities, Hannibal was dead. Hannibal’s passions had pushed them both to the edge, and then pushed them over. 

As it turned out, there was an afterlife. Because God - the god he’d marveled at as much as he enjoyed spiting - seemed to have a streak of inelegant justice in him after all. 

It was all right, Hannibal told himself. There were more terrible rooms than this. This one was not so bad. 

His hand was gripping something tight, and Hannibal looked down. Was almost surprised to see his tablet open, screen blaring, Abel Gideon’s picture underscoring Freddie Lounds’ byline. 

Maybe, just maybe, Gideon is the most sought-after serial killer at large, a killer who’s eluded the FBI for years and has baffled their most gifted profilers. That serial killer? None other than the Chesapeake Ripper.  

It was not so bad, Hannibal cautioned himself, against the rising tide of affront and scorn billowing inside him. This insult happened long ago. Gideon was dead, eaten like the insipid, undomesticated creature he was. Freddie Lounds, Hannibal was certain, still functioned as a tabloid reporter, chasing salacious and unremarkable scraps. 

Everyone knew who the Chesapeake Ripper was now. Everyone knew Hannibal for what he was. 

You’ve been overshadowed. By another... creature. 

Everyone knew, but Chilton’s words still resonated. Still cut Hannibal to a prideful quick he didn’t relish knowing he had. 

He dropped the tablet to the desk and pushed back his chair, standing and striding to the window. 

It was snowing outside, just now. Or maybe - here - it was snowing outside forever. Hannibal had been in enough rooms, enough dead rooms, to know. They all itched under his skin, made him feel sick, like something small was pecking at his stomach lining from the inside out. 

Took a deep breath. Closed his eyes. In... and out. 

This was his space. He had found a respite. He was a respite. He was the master of himself. Hannibal might not have been able to control his surroundings. That truth had been seared into him long ago. But he could always control himself. 

The snow fell noiselessly in the dark outside. The fire blazed across the room. 

And the tablet sat still upon his desk, glaring with frightful and unflattering light. Making a mockery out of his elegance. Ascribing his actions to another. To Abel Gideon, if it was to be believed. Hannibal thought thoughts, taking up a slow, loping pace around the room. Not going anywhere in particular. 

Abel Gideon. Hannibal's lips turned down with distaste. A man so crude in his technique he thought a Columbian necktie made him worthy of Hannibal’s attentions. A man so malleable he thought it put them both on the same level. 

Hannibal stopped at his drawing board. Fingered the scalpel he’d left out upon his sketches. Gripped it tight in angry fingers as he continued his circuit around the office. 

On the way past his desk, he picked up the tablet, closed the app, and shut the flap on it for good measure. Then he slid it perfunctorily inside a drawer. 

He continued on his path around the room. 

Not because he was anxious about how long this peace would last. Nor how long eternity might feel, trapped inside his own mind. And not because he was angry, angry at Abel Gideon for thinking himself the Ripper. Nor at Freddie Lounds for writing such clearly offensive falsehoods. Nor at the idea that anyone from the FBI could have ever entertained the idea. Alana Bloom, or Jack Crawford. 

Or Will. 

The idea that Will might have thought Abel was the Ripper was an injustice too terrible to be borne. Hannibal’s mind clicked through a hundred trains, tripped through a thousand different possibilities. But it was whimsy and vanity and impulse, at last, which drove him to the nearest door, handle on the knob, ready to sweep his way into the world and irrevocably into Will Graham’s better understanding. 

His hand was on the knob. He barely had time to remember he’d forgotten his jacket, and only half an instant more before he remembered both that he was dead and no longer needed to worry about jackets, and that he also no longer needed to worry about Gideon. But the door was already cracked. Muscle memory was in effect as he swung the door outward and found himself staring at...

A human skeleton, picked clean, lying with arms outstretched upon the flagstones. Gray skies over the place he’d made for Will and Abigail, a place rendered meaningless, both purposes largely unfulfilled. 

And a cliffside, eroding. Water cutting a knife’s edge in rock, tumbling earth onto two bodies sunken in the waves below. 

Buried, Hannibal thought. They were buried together. 

It was not the grim and darkly beautiful story he’d thought it would be. 

Whatever sense of humor God had, Hannibal knew he alone was the punchline. 

One hand still held the scalpel, the other gripping a handle to a door that wasn’t there. He used it to swing himself back into the relative safety of his quaintly stern office, slamming it shut behind him. But not before he tossed the blade, tiny and sharp, into the seaside tableau behind him.

He blew out a staid breath and straightened his tie, stealing a moment to compose himself. 

Then he resumed his pacing around the room. 

It wasn’t so bad here. Not really. This was far preferable to the alternative. Having to sit in an empty house, absent the people he’d made it for. The only people he had allowed to get close enough to know him. A broken glass house full of failures. Francis Dolarhyde’s bones, which should have been a triumph, the only company he could keep. A mockery of the kind of companionship Hannibal longed to have. 

Perhaps it’s what you deserve. The voice sounded like Will, where it drifted up from inside. It was not Will, though. It had not been Will in a long time. 

Hannibal was loath to admit many things. Things like the fact that Will’s face, his every expression, made Hannibal’s body vibrate, more alive and real and out of control than he’d felt in a lifetime. Things like how much he’d allowed himself to hope that Will would say yes, a hundred different instances where Hannibal had let himself believe, despite every ounce of his cooled, rational mind knowing better. Things like how Will wasn’t the only one who’s inner voice had seen a breach of individual separateness. Because the voice inside Hannibal’s head had long since started sounding like Will’s, too. 

You were a fool to think you were different from someone like Dolarhyde. That Will thought you were different. He came here to kill you both. Kill them all, wasn’t it? And he did. In the end, the only friendship you deserve is from someone like yourself. 

You’re destructive. 

That voice Hannibal could hear clearly, lost in his thoughts as he paced. 

The voice sounded very loud, in a quiet room that was very empty.

He wanted to argue back that destructive and evil were not the same. But then he thought of that house, lying empty except for echoes. Of Will Graham’s inhumanly beautiful face, now rotten and buried on the bottom of the ocean floor. 

And for the first time in so long that he genuinely questioned if it had ever happened before, Hannibal wondered if he himself was, in fact and after all, evil. 

The next time he circled back to his desk, the tablet was back on the desktop. Flipped open, turned on, and blaring that same sad picture of Abel Gideon. As if Hannibal had never put it away. Once again, the scalpel lay by his portraits.

Hannibal paused, mid-step. Considered picking the tablet up and putting it away again. Realized it was pointless. Put his hands in his pockets, and resumed his circuit around the room.  

He was not frustrated. 

He was not angry. 

He was not lonely. 

He did not miss Will Graham. He thoroughly enjoyed being in this clean and comfortable office he could always call his own. 

If this is what the afterlife was like, Hannibal was certainly not afraid of eternity at all.

Notes:

Starting this chapter, I was thinking of taking the story in a very different direction, which is why it took longer than promised for this update. In the end though I just decided to stick with the original vision. Sorry for the wait!

Chapter 12: Brutal Space

Summary:

Perhaps knowing what life is for is something that only exists for the living.

Some small eternity later, when he’d had enough and the silence had become maddening, Hannibal found himself in a darkened room, eyes glimmering with tears. 

“Seems hard to find words today,” he was trying to say, because that’s what his line was, and that’s how these disjointed and unpredictable memories appeared to work. But to his shame, the words caught in his throat, and he couldn’t get them out without betraying just another thing he was too proud and isolated to acknowledge. 

He swallowed, took a few moments to compose himself, and tried again. “Despite the overwhelming evidence, I find myself searching for ways that we both, I and Will, could still be alive.” 

He was glad Bedelia had pulled the curtains so close. It helped to shroud his pain. 

“Grieving is an individual process with a universal goal: the truest examination of the meaning of life and the meaning of its end.” 

Hannibal managed a rueful smile but nothing more. 

Bedelia returned his smile, small and unknowable. “You’re supposed to say ‘I know what life means.’” 

Hannibal took a breath. Removed his handkerchief and blotted the tear tracks from his face. “Perhaps I did. Perhaps knowing what life is for is something that only exists for the living.” 

“And now that you know yourself to be dead?” 

Hannibal stifled a sigh. “Now I only know that I would give anything to have it back. I thought that, while I valued my life and its inevitable frailty, I had made my peace with mortality.” 

“But you haven’t.” 

Hannibal closed his eyes. “I thought of my earliest memory and projected forward to what I imagined to be my death. A death I most certainly had not considered at the time of this original conversation. I never thought about living beyond that span of time.” He gave a quick, slight shake of his head. 

“Except by reputation.” Hannibal grimaced, but Bedelia continued. “And after this loss?” 

“I once told your living counterpart that gratitude has a short half life.” The taste in his mouth was bitter, and the smell in the air was stale. “I did not anticipate...” He trailed off. Or rather, cut himself off, before he said too many truths that were unkind to himself. 

Bedelia sucked in a deep breath, and let it out slowly. He detected frustration in the act, but did not lower himself to acknowledge it. “Will Graham is a loss, too. You might grieve him as a loss.” 

Hannibal said nothing.

“If I have to keep prompting your lines, Hannibal, this conversation will become rather more dull for the both of us than I’m used to from you.” He managed to grace her with a flat look. She held his gaze for a moment, but at last conceded. “So that’s it, then? You have given up on Will now?” 

Hannibal thought a few dozen thoughts it would be too truthful to say aloud. Like that Will was dead now, too. And that if God had any forgiveness or goodness or righteousness in him, he would know that Will was an innocent. That if there was a heaven, or an afterlife, Will was long gone from here. Far away from Hannibal, and all the other monsters who’d haunted his dreams. 

But really, what Hannibal thought most was that this was just another way to torture him. His own personal hell. Bedelia’s question itself was the height of cruelty. 

Because Hannibal could never give up on Will. Even as it seemed almost impossible to find any echo of Will, locked away in this chaotic kaleidoscope of memory. 

In the rare moments that he had found Will here, it was wrong. Hollow. A searing, burning reminder of everything that had been ruined by letting passion override compassion. Nightmares of rotting corpses he’d never wanted to see. Banal tortures of seeing Will, always and forever, through inescapable bulletproof glass.

Always seeing. Never touching. 

And never real. 

The tears flowed freely again. 

“I was so confident in my ability to help him. To save him. To solve him.” 

“Was that really what you were confident about, in the end?” 

Hannibal could smell the salt in his own tears. He gave a dry chuckle. “No. In the end, I was confident that if I called, he would come. I was confident that if I wanted him, there were ways I could have him, even if he wouldn’t give me everything. I was confident that I could have him in death.” 

“You were confident that he would save you.” Hannibal made an aborted sound. It was such a thing to say; there was no reply that would temper it. “And in asking him to save you, you lost him. You lost the both of you. 

“Hard to accept,” Bedelia continued,  watching as the tears slid quietly down Hannibal’s face, “that you could fail you both so profoundly.” 

Hannibal made one last, valiant stab to get things back on track. To reestablish some kind of control. Some normalcy. “We’ve existed for a hundred thousand years. In that time, a hundred billion human lives have had beginnings and ends.” He swallowed. “All love is doomed to end. As are all lives. Strange then, to bemoan a single love lost. To mourn two lives, and call it tragedy.” 

“What else would you call it then?” 

Hannibal pressed his lips together. “Inevitability. Time. The absence of inertia is what life is.” 

Bedelia cocked her head. “And I’ll give you the same reply I gave before. A hundred billion lives haven’t impacted yours, Hannibal. You have only ever had, and lost, a single love.” She leaned back in her seat. “Teacups and time. Both have shattered.” 

She did not need to say the rest. The implication lay bald between them. Just as Hannibal was not satisfied when the teacup didn’t come together again? He would not be satisfied that time had stopped. 

This was the retribution he’d secured for himself. 

Unbidden, Hannibal had a thought he’d not entertained before. He wondered if Abigail was somewhere, trapped in the dark halls of his old house in Baltimore. Living and reliving the horror of her short life, in dreams that never ceased. He hoped she was not. Hannibal was not a man prone to moral discomfiture. But the thought sent a chill down his spine. It lodged, cold and clammy, in his bowels. He did not have Will’s imagination, but Hannibal did not need to “see” the blood upon his own hands to feel the weight of it. 

Bedelia looked at her watch. An unsubtle action. Hannibal was glad for the distraction. “How long do you plan to stay here, Hannibal? It makes little difference to me, but I fear we’ll soon run out of conversations we can easily wrap around your crocodile tears and childish assertions.” 

Hannibal pulled himself together enough to shoot her a cold look, but it didn’t quell the boredom on her face. Which was unsettling. Hannibal was used to being many things, to invoking many reactions. But rarely boredom. 

Especially not from an archetype that was more or less himself. 

“It doesn’t really matter, does it?” he asked. Here or elsewhere, it seemed relief was fleeting. Any solid ground was cursed. 

“No. It doesn’t.” 

And with that, she and her home office were bleeding away. 

*

Alana sat down before him, her eyes piercing and her mouth turned down. Hannibal mimicked her expression effortlessly, folding his jacket and taking his seat on the cold, harsh metal across from her. Behind the glass, Hannibal knew Jack waited and watched, half hoping that Miriam would identify Hannibal as the Chesapeake Ripper. Half hoping that she wouldn’t. 

Alana’s expression was dour and disapproving. “They found no survivors. Not even a body. The very last victim of the Chesapeake Ripper didn’t live to tell.” 

This was a dangerous situation, and a dangerous place for surprises. Hannibal frowned. “Then who is watching us now?” Something ached in his chest. He didn’t let his mind become distracted by wants and maybes. Maybe the person behind the glass was his last victim. Maybe he longed for the fog of the bold, uncomplicated tool behind Alana to fade away, and let him see. 

Please, a voice whispered in his mind. 

Don’t, his own mental timbre cautioned. 

“It seems I am the usual suspect,” Hannibal murmured. 

“Don’t.” Alana echoed the voice in his head, her tone stark and cold and unforgiving the way he’d only ever known her in another room, where the glass had been between them. “Don’t deflect. There’s no need, and I think we’d both prefer this place was filled with a few less of your lies.”

Hannibal leaned forward, just a little. Paused. “Last time we were here, you said you wished you could tell me why this was happening.” He tilted his head, ran a tongue against his lip. It was infuriating to beg. “Can you tell me why this is happening now?” 

Alana tilted her head, too, a mirror image of Hannibal. Her smile was mocking, and she breathed the ghost of a laugh. 

Hannibal stiffened. He had promised her horrors and delivered her ruins. Yet, even here, she still stood tall and unbroken. Wielding grace like the Furies of old. A timeless inability to be crushed, in ways unexpected and unsettling. 

Hannibal stood and paced. It was not, he told himself, because she unnerved him. Not because looking into her eyes made him realize all his grand dreams of control and dignity and dominion over his little realm were made of air. Nothing more than the notes of a theremin: Beautiful, haunting. But too niche to be anticipated, too strange to be understood. And vanished too soon, without a legacy. 

His gaze drew to the mirror. Out of the corner of his eyes, he thought he’d seen an oily figure, crowned in horns, with his face. But when he turned fully, it was only himself. Hannibal. 

The man. The monster. 

An immaculately tailored suit hid the one he wore beneath. His real one: The cultured, regal, well-shaped person suit which so often he had hidden behind, showing the world only versions of himself. 

He saw this version of himself in the mirror, layers and layers of lies, standing in a Beltway-typical brutalist space. Utilitarian. Blank. Preferring function over form, cold lines severed the room into pieces and the man from his humanity. No art here. No poetry. No light and breath. 

No... passion. 

Just Hannibal. Alone, with an unsympathetic enemy behind him, and a mirrored image obscuring a mystery. Cutting Hannibal off from a world of hearts undimmed by death. 

He wished Will were here. 

Hannibal closed his eyes and blew out a breath. How trite. How predictable. This was his place, this was his mind, and he ought to be the master of it. He only had to regain control. He opened his eyes and tried to peer through the glass, willed himself to. He was emperor of this world, and he could make it bend to his whims. He need not be forced to wonder what ghosts gawked at him or lured him from behind the mirror. 

“It won’t work Hannibal.” Alana’s voice wafted over his shoulder, bemused. “You’re trying to play the same old game. Trying to play at control. At dignity. At innocence.” 

Something about the word, the way she said it, made Hannibal flinch, made his shoulders nudge up toward his chin ever slightly. “I’m not innocent,” he said, turning around to face her. 

Her lip curled. “No. And for once in your long miserable life, it’s killing you to know that.” 

Hannibal stiffened but found himself, oddly, with nothing constructive to say. He twirled back around, to face the mirror, but instead of his face there was a murky figure, shadowed. He could see it watching him. Something angry, and fierce, and wild. Something that should be thrilling, but was instead terrifying. 

Something crowned with Will’s curls. 

The beautiful monster in the mirror, the one of his own making, backed away, fading into opacity. 

“Will?” Hannibal asked, half-frightened of the desperation in his voice, half-uncaring. He could not stop himself from charging forward, ready to press himself against the glass, ready to run through it, to tear his own flesh to pieces in his bid to break through.

But instead of the painful stop or the shattering give, Hannibal found his vision soaking in a deep, charcoal gray effluvience, gaining traction all around him. This shadow magma buoyed him and carried him. Clogged his eyes with tar. The thick, slick cling of it sucked uncontrollably up his nose, filling his mouth, tasting like blood. 

Drowning him in the weight of his sins. 

He had only one thought, before the light was pressed away completely. A desperate, hopeless prayer he knew that no one would hear except angry, unforgiving gods. 

Will...

Chapter 13: Stoic Plea

Summary:

Perhaps... perhaps Hannibal had made an error.

The door was opening. It was he who opened it. The delicate brass knob was in his hand, and he was pushing it open. 

Bedelia’s bags were packed. Behind him, Mr. Dimmond swept easily into the foyer. 

Hannibal was good at hiding his feelings. Such a skill came with the landscape of who and what he was. But the sight of Bedelia’s shocked and frightened face, contrasted with the smug, seductive look on Anthony’s, made Hannibal’s blood pressure spike. 

These people. These insects. 

None of them were Will. 

The statue was in his hand and he was bringing it down on Anthony’s head. It was all too quick and sudden, a dance that Hannibal usually preferred paired with more control and elegance. 

Anthony stumbled, fell, and shook blood from his face.

Hannibal stepped over him, placed the bloody bust down. “Observe or participate?” he asked. The words felt hollow, like an echo. Robbed of their original sting. 

Hannibal turned, removing his jacket, thrilling with anticipation of viewing the distress on Bedelia’s face. But instead, she looked as severe and unyielding as marble. 

Ah. “Observing then,” Hannibal all but snarled, folding his jacket with barely contained rage. 

Dreams again. 

Between them, Anthony should have been dragging himself toward the door. A futile attempt to survive a whirlwind of wrath and grief he could never have hoped to understand. 

Instead, that same flirtatious grin split the other man’s face, and he unfurled like smoke from the floor. Stoic, doll-like, Dimmond stepped back to stand beside Bedelia. He smiled. Bedelia sneered. Both expressions made a mockery of Hannibal’s loneliness. 

Dimmond’s grin only increased. He looked like a funhouse-mirror version of Will, with his floppy hair and knowing eyes. Eyes that knew and saw too much, but not enough, because they would never be and could never be the eyes that Hannibal loved. 

Hannibal wanted to gouge them from his skull. So he did. 

When it was over, the ghost of a long-dead man once again stood between them. The ghost of a still-living Bedelia should have looked shocked and horrified. But she merely arched a brow, set down her bags, and sauntered to the bar to pour herself a drink.

“Did you know what he would do?” she asked, the tumbler in her hand. “I would prefer you answer honestly.” 

“I believe you’re stealing my lines.” 

“You were curious,” she blazed ahead, ignoring him. “Or, no. That’s not quite right. You and Will have known each other too long for you to wonder what he’s capable of.” 

“He’s always surprised me.” 

“Until he didn’t.” She reclined, her hip pressed against the edge of divine Florentine furniture. “He is what you wanted him to be. What you wanted him to become.” 

Hannibal curled his lip. He twisted, uncertain where to step or where to go. Where he wanted to be in the room. Her words churned and flooded over him like a heavy downpour stabbing at blood-stained clothes. “I didn’t want this.” 

“Did you anticipate his thoughts? Counter-thoughts? Rationalizations?” 

Hannibal set his teeth on edge. With a single, efficient movement, he picked up the bust and threw it. It smashed violently against the far wall, broken pieces indistinguishable from shards of bone in the low, intimate light of their flat. 

“This is what you expected, Hannibal. And you let it happen. So it must mean that this is what you wanted.” 

“I didn’t want...” He shook his head. Stalked through their rooms. The table was set, as if for a full complement of guests. Hannibal’s face didn’t change, but his limbs moved with an urgency he was unfamiliar with. With a great clanging of china and silver, he brushed the contents to the floor. 

“Hannibal,” Bedelia spoke, her voice admonishing. “That’s participation.” 

Hannibal stared at her, furious, chest heaving. The oppressive, endless quiet, the horrible aching loneliness was a living thing. It squeezed in through his ears and up his nose. The taste of grief was the only thing on his tongue. It tasted like unseasoned blood. 

“Oh, Hannibal,” he heard Bedelia’s mocking voice, growing ever distant. “What have you gotten yourself into?”

*

He was alone again. The moonlight was imaginary. The silence, unendurable. 

He sat at his table, the one they’d given him as a courtesy. No one sat with him. No one sat or stood on the other side of the glass. There were no phone calls. No one entering at his side door. No footsteps rang from the hall beyond the glass, past the double doors which served no purpose but to shutter and shield him from a world that did not want him. 

Hannibal had prided himself on his style. His control. His finesse. 

He sat at the table, newspaper in hand. 

Now it turned out he had none of those things. The highlight of his month was a visit from Chilton, that putrid, ridiculous clinger-on. A moth fluttering its wings to reach a killing light, he should have had more reasons than most to fear and respect the cannibal who’d sat across from him. Instead, Hannibal had been subjected to snides and sneers. 

This was to be his life. 

Hannibal felt the panic rise in his gorge. He cut and trimmed and pulled the relevant article from its fellows. 

Perhaps... perhaps Hannibal had made an error. 

Silence shouldn’t echo. It was the kind of florid phrase one might find in a trite book of poetry. Perhaps one composed by his old namesake. Roman Fell was not a man to be envied. And yet Hannibal had a sudden, creeping suspicion that perhaps a droll little man who his students mocked, who commanded fear only in academic circles, might have known something that Hannibal was too foolish to discover until it was too late.

He’d always known life was precious. But he wondered just how much more precious Roman’s and Lydia’s had become once those lives intertwined with one another. Had they loved? Had they touched? Had they had something that Hannibal would never have, because Hannibal had gaslit and butchered and traumatized and killed his only chance at it? 

Hannibal did not cry for himself. It was an old rule, easy to follow. He folded the page, slipped it into an envelope. Pulled out a piece of fine stationery, one he’d been unable to choose for himself. If he’d been allowed, he would have chosen something more suitable. Will deserved only the best. 

With solid, unshaking hands and effortlessly elegant penmanship, he wrote a genial, friendly letter to the love of his life. 

It was all a dream, Hannibal knew. And yet the message behind the message was just the same, but even more hopeless and desperate and pathetically pleading now than it had been then. “I’ve made a mistake,” Hannibal’s letter said, without words. “I’m not doing well here.”

“Please come. I’m begging you.” 

“Please. Save me.” 

Hannibal pretended to lose himself in the dream. He pretended that, unlike before, there was anyone waiting to receive it.

Notes:

If I'm not mistaken, this is very likely the home stretch: three more chapters + an epilogue. And quick note that I'm planning to go back through what's already been posted to clean up some stuff, mostly small formatting changes. Shouldn't be noticeable, but mentioning just in case. Thanks to everyone following along!

Chapter 14: Mirror Image

Summary:

“Even for a hell of my own making, this is a cruel thing to taunt me with.”

Abigail sat across from Will. A body was mounted on a stag’s head between them, while the sky revolved into symphonies of color to match Hannibal’s design. Abigail mirrored Will’s posture. Or perhaps he mirrored hers.

“I’m not the reflection you’re looking for,” Abigail said. “I was more like you than you thought, or maybe you were more like me. But we’re not conjoined, Will. And you’re not supposed to be here.”

Will blinked, and suddenly he was waking up, sat at the low desk in his favorite teaching classroom. A series of Hannibal’s crime photos were spread out in front of him.

Hannibal.

“I’m late,” Will said, a sudden realization.

He wasn’t sure how he made it from Quantico to Baltimore so quickly. Even without traffic, the route should have been long, but his memory was fuzzy on the details. Dream logic was good for some things. Suddenly, he was standing on the chilled sidewalk before a stately old house in Baltimore proper.

When he could no longer bear the mixture of excitement and trepidation churning in his gut like seawater, Will propelled himself toward the door.

He sprinted up the stairs. The door was closed and Will tried to get his breathing under control, but it was ineffectual. Didn’t matter. He grabbed the handle and wrenched open the door to the red-limned office.

Just in time to hear Hannibal ask a patient, one who perhaps looked vaguely familiar, “Do you desire Tobias sexually?”

Will blinked and raised his brows.

The other man, the patient, looked up at Will nonplussed, his lips moving in confusion like a fish.

Slow but urgent, Hannibal slid to his feet. “Will,” he said. Hannibal’s voice held confusion and concern, but never remonstration.

For half a second, Will forgot he was in a world of dead dreams with the ghosts who flitted through them. He was on the verge of babbling out an apology for interrupting another patient’s session, ready to turn tail. But the stag statue caught his eye.

Suddenly everything was flooding back. The stag wasn’t a statue, it was standing in the room with them. Hannibal was staring at it like he’d never seen a stag before. The little man pushed himself to his feet now, too, arms windmilling as he stumbled away from Will’s feral familiar.

“Hannibal,” Will said, hoping against hope. This wasn’t something he, Will, remembered. So it had to be Hannibal’s dream. Didn’t it?

“Hannibal,” he repeated, choking down his fear. “I- It’s me. I’m dead. And you’re-” He found himself tripping over what to say next. He hadn’t planned it. If this was his Hannibal, the real Hannibal, he might not even know he was dead yet. “I’ve come,” he finished feebly.

The patient, the one who may or may not have been desiring someone named Tobias, looked back and forth between the two of them wide-eyed. Occasionally, he’d give the stag a fearful glare.

Will’s stag had settled down comfortably by the window and was staring at the little man right back. And was definitely not chewing contentedly on the curtains.

Hannibal’s chest rose and fell. He reached out, without thinking, to rest a hand upon the back of his chair. His expression was full of something that, for Hannibal, looked wildly and desperately like hope. Before shuttering over.

“This is cruel,” he said. “Even for a hell of my own making, this is a cruel thing to taunt me with.”

Will frowned. “I’m not.” He took in the room, the patient now crouched behind Hannibal’s desk, a vision of fear and banality. “Hannibal,” he said slowly, moving closer to the other man with soft, gentle steps. “Where do you think you are?”

Hannibal’s back straightened, a posture Will had learned to recognize somewhere along their twisted path together as defensive. His face was blank, the corners of his mouth turned ever slightly downward.

Someone in the room started chuckling.

It wasn’t Will, and it wasn’t Hannibal. It wasn’t the stag.

Will turned. The patient, in his too-precise suit with his trimmed full beard and neatly coiffed hair, rose to his feet, A jackal’s grin split his face.

“‘Despite differences, he’s your best friend but you’re not his.’” Will frowned, unsure what to make of this. He cast a glance at Hannibal, to see if he would explain, but Hannibal’s lips had turned farther down, making him look angry. “It really is sad, when I say it like that.” The patient’s face was a mask of false concern. “Wouldn’t you agree, Dr. Lecter?”

Hannibal pulled out a handkerchief and wound it across his own elegant fingers. Wiping away something that wasn’t there. “The point has been made, Franklin. Many times over now. What more can be gained by bludgeoning it?”

The patient, Franklin, slipped back around the desk. He sauntered toward the chair Hannibal had been sitting in and slid into it with a self-satisfied smirk. “There’s nothing to be gained. There’s nothing more to be gained ever again, Hannibal! And it makes me feel good - feel just, feel righteous - to make sure you don’t forget it. It must make you feel good, too. You don’t feel you deserve to forget.”

Will felt an ire growing in him, sharp and dangerous, grotesque as an antler spike. “Hannibal. This isn’t real.”

“Do you often worry about being alone?” Will could place him now. The patient who’d been killed by Tobias, the killer from the Symphony. The one Will had come face to face with, before he’d returned, attacked Hannibal, and killed his only friend.

Will suddenly realized that... probably wasn’t the entire story of what had happened.

Franklin watched realization wash across Will’s face. He leaned in, a parody of Hannibal’s usual posture, fingers interlaced above his knees. “You know what he asked me next?” Will didn’t answer. Hannibal didn’t interrupt. “He asked me if I worried, about being alone.” He chuckled, scoffing. “Such an ordinary thing for a psychiatrist to ask. What a thing, to feel you’ve wormed your way into someone’s trust enough that you can ask them a question like that.” He laughed again, a humorless bark. “What a thing. Especially coming from someone who would snap my neck for me not even a month later.”

Will didn’t dare speak. Hannibal didn’t meet Will’s eyes, and didn’t deny it.

The smile dripped from Franklin’s face and left only accusatory, helpless anger in its wake. “You know what I told him? What I confessed? ‘I worry about hurting,’ I said. ‘Being alone comes with a dull ache, doesn’t it?’”

Franklin stood and stalked toward Hannibal.

It should have been laughable. Franklin’s entire demeanor screamed someone who’d never indulged in violence in his life. Had never encountered anything to prepare him for the monstrous, dangerous, twisted thing that was Hannibal Lecter.

But Hannibal’s face stayed placid, almost aggrieved. He did not back away or stare Franklin down.

Franklin stood before Hannibal, sneering up into his face. “He could kill me. He could kill a phlebotomist, a teacher, a renegade police inspector. But it won’t matter. Because he’s trapped now, with his hurting. He’s trapped now, all alone. Nothing to comfort him but accusatory, hollow memories like me. And like you.”

Hannibal said nothing. He looked tired. Unlike Will’s, Hannibal’s memories did not seem kind.

Will should have hated Hannibal for this revelation. Should have withdrawn in horror.

But if Will was going to hate Hannibal, it was probably for a million other things more terrible and personal than this. Because the real world was too fragile for Hannibal to touch. And Hannibal had been the monster in too many innocent nightmares for Will to ever fully condone him in life. To give into him, the way a dark monstrous part of him trembled to do.

That was one truth. But Will had learned that, in death and only death, it was okay to admit other terrible truths, too. Like that the world was sometimes such a cruel and corrupted place that Will had barely survived it without a demon on his side.

In life, Hannibal had been his devil. And in life, Will would have withered without Hannibal’s tempting, tainted fruit. When the hungry, jagged edges of reality had poked and prodded Will, forcing him to crawl but never walk, Hannibal had been the creature crouched in darkness and corners, baring his teeth at everything more fearsome. Hannibal was the peerless vampire who sucked the world dry. One who had rescued Will from wandering, achingly alone, in a world ravenous for his tender little light.

It was okay to love monsters. If only in death and in dreams.

And Hannibal was his monster. The one that Will loved.

“Hannibal,” he said, trying to be gentle. He stepped forward, and reached out.

Hannibal watched Will with a hopeful, pained expression.

“Remember,” Franklin said, sticking his hands behind his head and stepping back to recline on the desk rudely. “None of this is real. You wouldn’t deserve it if it was.”

And suddenly Hannibal’s eyes closed against something too harsh to be borne. The room was beginning to fade and swirl.

Will was losing him.

“No,” he breathed. “No, Hannibal, wait!”

But the room faded, and Hannibal was gone.

“Fuck!” Will screamed.

Chapter 15: Haunted Ghost

Summary:

“Hannibal.” The voice was echoing and very far away. “Hannibal,” it called again, still far, but closer now.

Hannibal was enshrouded in the darkness of tombs. Beyond him, somewhere in the catacombs, Will stalked him. Hannibal hadn't wanted to be found back then, and he did not wish to be found now. 

“Hannibal!” Will's voice had the quality of a slap. Command and rebuke both. 

Hannibal ran a hand down his face and pressed himself deeper into the shadows. Ah, cowardice. If only he’d been able to see past his own petty remonstrations then, seen beyond his own myopic betrayal. 

Will had been right there. He’d said Hannibal's name. 

What a foolish, vain creature I was in life, Hannibal mused, miserable. To give up even one moment of togetherness. Perhaps, as his past self had feared, Will would not have forgiven him. Perhaps he would have pulled the knife from his coat and slid it into Hannibal’s own belly. Perhaps Will would have done it with his hands. 

Now, Hannibal wished it could have happened that way. If he had let Will kill him then, perhaps Will would be alive now. Sitting beside his cheerful wife, with a child who named him father. Surrounded by dogs, and all the sounds and tastes of quiet. 

Will moved away, but Hannibal could still smell him. Will carried a new scent, a peculiar blend of raw despair and cleaning supplies, from when he’d lain against the marble where they’d removed Hannibal’s heart. The smell of dog still clung to his coat, but beneath that was another scent, of salt and wind and open ocean. Will smelled like the sea because he’d traveled across it. 

Hannibal’s mouth twisted and his heart echoed. 

Or maybe Will smelled like the ocean because he was buried beneath it. 

Will was speaking to Pazzi. If Hannibal tipped his head around the corner, he would see Will. See the tantalizing cut of his jaw, the little half-smile playing across his lips. The way his eyes shone black in the light of a thousand candles, lit for the long-lost dead. 

Hannibal wanted to see. But this was a memory, and Will was a wraith made of vacuum and shadow, no more real than the doomed inspector standing before him. It would be torture to look. So Hannibal abstained. 

“Signor Graham.” 

Will sighed. “Unless you can tell me where Hannibal is, Pazzi, I’ve no time for this conversation.” 

The specter of Pazzi scoffed. “I’m not alone. I’m with you.” 

“Still don’t know whose side I’m on? It was Hannibal’s. Always Hannibal’s.” 

Hannibal winced, gnashing his teeth.

“What are you going to do when you find him, your il Mostro?” 

Will laughed. Soft, subtle, flirtatious. “Wouldn’t you like to know.” Even with his dreams full of fake Wills, Hannibal’s pulse quickened with envy. “Come on, Hannibal,” Will called, his voice echoing around the catacombs, vibrating the bones of dead saints. “If you want to know how this ends, how we get out of this together, you have to stop running.” His voice dropped to a murmur. “If this is Hannibal’s dream,” he must have been addressing Pazzi again, “then you aren’t Pazzi, you’re just a part of Hannibal. And if you’re a part of Hannibal, you must know where to find him. You must want me to find him. Tell me where you are.” 

“You and I carry the dead with us, Signor Graham. We both need to unburden.” 

There was a beat. Only a short beat, where everything spooled out in the air between them. Will’s voice was suggestively soft. “Why don’t you carry your dead back to the chapel. Before you count yourself among them.” 

He sounded so serious. Deadly so. Hannibal would once have sang to hear it, would have composed pieces and written sonnets in the moment’s honor. Will Graham meting threats of violence, measuring them on his tongue, was a thing of ecstatic transcendence. 

Hannibal felt that old flame, the old roar of triumph. The desire to fall at Will’s feet and worship like he’d found a new god. 

But overshadowing that, he felt guilt now. And despair. 

“You are already dead,” spoke Pazzi. “Aren’t you?” 

What have I done.  

The sound of Will’s footsteps were muffled as he slunk into the shadows. Shadows which Hannibal had reached inside and sewn into him. “Buonanotte, commendatore.” 

“Hannibal,” Will called again. A call, like to like. An arrow to Hannibal’s heart, a harpoon of pain and love. Betrayal and secrets and death, all slung between them. 

Hannibal knew what came next. Knew the words, those terrible words repeated. The mockery of forgiveness this fake Will offered. Forgiveness that could never be reached for, because echoes couldn’t absolve sin. Grace was for monsters who could bear what they had wrought, or those who could reverse it. Hannibal could do neither. 

So before this glorious, terrible, twisted version of Will found him, before he could let forgiveness build and spring, torturous and terrible, from his lips… 

Hannibal fled. 

“Stop running, Hannibal!” he heard Will’s voice behind him. 

Hannibal wasn’t sure if he ever could. 

“Every time you run,” Will called, “it just means you want me to chase you!”

Hannibal wanted to be strong. 

But there were some truths that refused to be denied. 

*

Hannibal sliced into meat, red and rare. Inside his chest, a storm howled and raged and wept. It all hurt too much, a wound he could not tend, a fear he could not conquer. He had never thought himself mad, or wondered if he was, but now he wondered if this feeling, this writhing tragedy, might be some distant cousin. 

Of course it was a foolish thought. He was a psychiatrist. Madness was not an emotional state, but a psychological condition. He was a man of faith, yes, but also a man of quiet and logic. Of muted passions and carefully repressed urges. 

So instead of falling to tears, to his knees, to the depths of a broiling hell of betrayal and loss only halfway confirmed, Hannibal sent Abigail upstairs to wait, and set about preparing the meat. 

Will had called. Will had not come. Will would come. 

Wouldn’t he? 

Jack walked in, lips pressed in resignation.

Hannibal felt dazed as he looked at him. And ultimately, relieved. Killing Jack would be a good distraction. Hannibal could cover the mountains of grief in his chest with a snowfall of other feelings, more loosely and chaotically grown. 

He smiled. Jack didn’t smile back. 

Hannibal exhaled slowly. It would hurt to kill Jack. Hurt and feel good, all at once. Fear, exorcized. Truth, known. The secret parts laid proud and plain. Seen.

He would find no such closure with Will, he was starting to fear. The thought pounded like an erratic drumbeat in his soul. 

But closure with Jack? That he could do. He’d prepared for this goodbye. 

Jack reached into his coat. Hannibal let fly the knife. 

He got ready to jump over the kitchen island, but Jack didn’t react how he expected. Jack smiled. “Hollow victories, Hannibal. If victory is even what you’re after, here.” 

Something more insistent was drumming now, pecking at the delicate space behind Hannibal’s ears. Something he didn’t want to know, something somehow worse than the sinking knowledge that Will had betrayed him. That Will had let him go.

Had not loved him.

Something worse than that. 

There was a moment, a crossroads. He could listen to Jack, and remember. Hannibal refused.

He curled his lips and launched himself over the island, and their fight began. 

It was brutal and raw, like the meat. Hannibal was grateful for the simplicity. And sorry for the state of his kitchen. 

The glass cut his hand. He slid it into Jack’s neck anyway. 

Jack tried to lock him out of the pantry, but Hannibal was strong. It was only a matter of time. He lunged at the door, cruel and repetitive. 

“Hannibal.” The voice was echoing, and very far away. “Hannibal,” it called again, still far, but closer now.

Hannibal’s heart lurched with fear. 

“Hannibal!” the voice called again, and it sounded like Will. Hannibal didn’t want to hear it, because the voice was wrong, was making him feel pain, was in pain itself. And that pain was lacerating everything down to Hannibal’s bones. 

He began rushing the pantry door in earnest now. There was no time to spare. 

“Hannibal!” The voice was almost there, about to round the corner.

Hannibal’s eyes welled with unshed tears, panic fluttering in his chest. 

He gave one long, desperate rush to the door, and it burst open beneath his weight. Without noticing where the door had left him, Hannibal reached behind himself and slammed it shut. 

*

When he turned around, Hannibal was hidden behind reflective glass, flanked by Will and Jack. A murderer and Alana sat on the other side. But it was the figure to Hannibal’s right, the jittery one with a rough-shadow beard and unspeakably delicate curls, that made Hannibal unaccountably unsettled. 

“Smart,” Will was saying. “She keeps pushing him on his feelings, not on the facts. She’s trying to gauge how comfortable he is with emotion. If he has any,” Will muttered darkly. 

Hannibal thought he was supposed to feel elated. Here Will was, wearing smart, freshly laundered clothes, a new kind of fire zipping through him. And here, right here, standing right next to Hannibal, just as Hannibal had dreamed and longed for. Hoped and waited. Constantly in Hannibal’s thoughts, constantly making him yearn, like lungs deprived of oxygen, submerged in freshwater. 

He should be overjoyed that Will was here. Hannibal had been overjoyed, last time. 

“He couldn’t bear being touched by her,” Will continued. But when Hannibal looked, there was a bit more of a crinkle between Will’s brows than he expected, something like consternation. 

“Yes, his responses are typical of psychopaths during interviews,” Hannibal said, hearing the strain in his voice, not willing to investigate why it might be there. “But it could also be resentment.” 

Hannibal felt resentment. Not his own. He felt Will’s resentment, coming off in waves. 

“No, his eyes are dead,” Will said. It was a quiet statement, without vitriol. Yet to Hannibal, it felt like a slap. 

Even knowing Will had tried to have him killed, even staring down the barrel of Will’s gun, pointed at his face, Hannibal had still suspected that Will harbored something. Some... pull, the heads to Hannibal’s tails, a mirror of what Hannibal himself was, and was therefore forced to feel. 

But Will’s lip was ever so slightly curled, and his eyes were dagger sharp. 

He was beautiful. He was always beautiful. Suddenly something - some horrifying, dead thing inside Hannibal - whispered a truth Hannibal couldn’t tamp down. Told Hannibal that he would never be able to hold Will, to have him, to be loved by him. Not without manipulation, and decay, and violence. Without becoming the monster Will feared him to be. 

“He’s a predator,” Will said. And although he said it slowly, like a question, shaking his head like a dog trying to rid its ears of water, Hannibal felt himself swept up in the kind of shame he'd thought himself beyond. As if he was being pulled inside himself, toward a center where there was nothing but emptiness. A swirling vortex of guilt, sucking everything it could catch into its event horizon. 

They watched the rest of the interview in silence. Hannibal stood stock still, the weight of his truth crashing over him like a roaring tsunami. He was aware of Will beside him, as he was never not able to be, though Will seemed confounded by something invisible. Distracted by the scene before them, Alana smiling sweetly at a monster who returned her courtesy in kind. 

“Something’s not...” Will muttered to himself beneath his breath. 

Hannibal stared straight ahead. He imagined his own face, superimposed over Mr. Ingram’s reflection. 

“Let him go,” Jack called. Will and Hannibal both startled. 

“You’re making a mistake, Jack,” Will said, but he was staring at Hannibal. Hannibal wanted to look away, fearing the accusation in Will’s eyes. But Will’s insides were a black hole, too, drawing Hannibal in whether he willed it or no.

Hannibal would not survive them both. Something cold sloshed through his chest. 

“I’ve got nothing to hold him on,” Jack said, exasperated. Hannibal wondered idly how many times over the years Jack had been exasperated with Hannibal and Will, the two of them conjoined, vessels for passionate chaos that upended everything around them.

Guilt rose like bile in Hannibal's throat.

“Peter Bernadone is psychologically disadvantaged,” Will said, emotionless, rote. He watched Hannibal, the dimpled lines between his eyes deeper furrows now. “He’s been manipulated.” Will opened his mouth to speak more, but couldn’t. Hannibal imagined the pain was too much, the betrayal too deep. 

Jack rescued him, taking over the lines. “Don’t forget the best part, Will. ‘This man,’” he said, and Jack too was looking at Hannibal, eyes gleaming with malice, lips upturned to gloat, “‘is in a position of trust, and he has betrayed. that. trust.’” 

Hannibal set his teeth. His eyes watered. 

Hannibal had tried to be removed. Professional. But some things - some passions - he had found impossible to suppress, after all. And Will had only been trying to survive him. Hannibal was Achilles, and Will was Patroclus, yes. But only if the former had clothed the latter in armor himself, force-marched his love to the battlefield, then told Patroclus to survive a world of cruelty and blades if he wanted to prove his devotion. 

“Wait,” Will said, shaking his head again. “This is not my dream.” 

Hannibal let the tear roll down his cheek. He ached to reach out for Will, to comfort. But monsters had no right to comfort the ones they themselves had mangled. 

“Don’t worry, Will, I remember how it goes,” Jack said helpfully, unkindly. “You were going to say you know what it’s like to point at a killer and have no one listen. Because you do. Because he did it, Will. He took your truths and secrets and vulnerabilities and carved them open like they were lumps of dead flesh on his custom cutting board. He was the creature that haunted your nightmares, and now,” Jack said, perilously close to Hannibal, “defanged, declawed. All his knives and strength and dignity, gone. Death has left him nothing but regrets, and memories of flaying alive the ones he loved most. Was it worth it, Hannibal?” Jack sneered. “Was it worth it, to have your freedom, to be so fully yourself, if it killed the thing you love most?” 

Hannibal’s mind was usually a clicking mechanism of gears and teeth, a dozen different trains of thought all threaded through at once. 

And now, in truth, it was empty. A void, a windless plain. Nothing natural grew. Only dead things thrived. “No,” he choked, voice hoarse and cracking through his tears. He looked up at Will and saw things strange and inexplicable in his face, softer than Hannibal deserved. That cut deeper still. “No,” he whispered. “It wasn’t worth it. I’d do anything, everything, to take it all back. To become uninteresting after all. To save you from me.” 

“Hannibal,” Will breathed. Hannibal knew this was only a memory. Like all the other memories before. Will was a corpse at the bottom of the Atlantic. A broken angel, transcended to heaven, denied passage beyond the gates. Rejected saint, tainted sinner, a haunted ghost, no doubt stuck in his own version of hell. 

Because Hannibal had damned him. 

Because Hannibal had loved him. 

Because Heaven, it turns out, would have been nothing more than having you beside me.

But it turns out God has an inelegant sense of humor after all.

“He never. even. apologized,” Jack said to Will, giving his head a little shake. “But monsters don’t do that, do they? Acknowledge that they really were wrong? Not in this lifetime. Not when they think they’re above morality. Dragging everyone else into their depravity with them.” 

Hannibal stood, arms limp at his side. The tears carved endless tracks down his face. He didn’t bother to wipe them away, did not bother to deny it. 

Judgment Day had spoken for itself. 

“He did,” Will said. Hannibal raised his head, confused. “He apologized. Even when he didn't have to.” Will was... Will was laughing, that low, understated chuckle that Hannibal so dearly loved.

Suddenly Will’s hand was on Hannibal’s hand, and he was staring at Hannibal with a sort of fond earnestness that hurt more than all the pain Hannibal had ever felt. Because every time Will had looked like that at him in life, it had been at least half a lie. Every time Will had ever looked at Hannibal like that in life, Hannibal could never come close to deserving it. “That night in your office. When you told me about Mischa. You apologized for what you’d taken from me. Even though you hadn't actually taken it yet. You'd never even meant to take it.”

I took EVERYTHING from you, Hannibal wanted to cry. But for once, as a rarity, he found himself devoid of words. Will’s kindness was worse than his rage. His presence, it turned out, was worse than his absence.

Hannibal could never rest easy in his own personal hell, his prison of a memory palace. Not knowing that the real Will’s life lay in eternal ruins, nothing left but chunks of flesh and bits of bone, and recollections that would fade in others' minds too soon. 

That’s what death was. That’s what Will, beautiful Will, had been reduced to. 

All because Hannibal had loved him. 

“Hannibal,” Will said. His voice was so soft it was devastating. “I forgive you. Really, this time. No tricks, no strings. I don’t blame you anymore than I blame me. We’re conjoined, remember? We’re together now. I came to save you.” 

For just a moment, it was a lovely fantasy: Salvation through love. Purer than any apostle could ever hope for. Not the love of a god - cruel and capricious, distant and unforgiving. But the love of a mortal, equally damned, whose hand lay warm in his.

Hannibal could almost have believed it. 

Jack threw his head back and laughed. “Hannibal, are you really willing to go along with this?” His voice held no trace of mercy. Will frowned again in confusion, or maybe anger. 

Hannibal smiled ruefully. He removed Will’s hand from his own. “I don’t deserve to be saved,” he said simply. 

He turned and walked out of the room, leaving Will blinking and broken behind him.

Notes:

Fingers crossed, I'm hoping to get the rest (1 more chapter + an epilogue) posted by the end of this weekend.

Chapter 16: Quiet Stream

Summary:

“This is real?” he whispered.

“Yes.”

It was raining. Will’s hair was wet. It made his bangs curl around his face, drip trails of water down his neck. 

Will had a gun gripped in his hand, though he wasn’t holding it level. “Hannibal?” 

Hannibal slunk back, tucked himself behind the retracting door to the dining room. 

The table was a mess. Glass peppered the floor, and blood seeped across it. Will’s rain added to the chaos. 

“Abigail?” he heard Will ask. 

Hannibal’s house was broken, a fractured wound. Just like his heart. If his own memory palace had become his hell, Hannibal thought this must be the raw, bruised inner circle. 

This night. 

He could hear Abigail’s voice, hear her tearful excuses. The way she denied him, in the end. 

Hannibal shut his eyes against it, but couldn’t block out the fear and remorse in her tone. 

He wished he would have let her live. He wished he would have fled. 

He wished he would have let Jack choke the life out of him, before Hannibal had been able to hurt either of them. 

Whatever she was saying in the kitchen, Will cut her off. “Where is he?” he asked, and he sounded tired, but not afraid. 

That was new. 

Hannibal’s hands trembled, as they never had in life. 

“Hannibal,” Will called. He was late for his cue. 

Hannibal pressed himself more firmly against the door, clinging to the frame like redemption. He could not bear to live through this night again. He could not. Even to live through the truth of it, just as it was written in life, that was enough to break him. If he was forced to listen to these two ghosts, devils taunting him over his greatest failure with the voices of those he had loved... Hannibal thought he’d become a revenant himself. The weight of his grief and self-hatred and helplessness would likely curse the entire Atlantic. 

“Hannibal,” Will said gently. “Stop running, for once. Just for once. Stop running and come to me.” 

It’s just a ghost, Hannibal thought drearily. 

But Will’s voice sounded too real, and Hannibal was tired of running. 

He stepped out, into the kitchen. Blood stained his shirt, and his lip, and his hands. In his right fist, he still gripped the knife. He didn’t know why. 

“Will,” he said, his voice cracking. He couldn’t meet his eyes. “You were supposed to leave.” He grit his teeth. Unfurled the knife. If he had to cut out an echo’s heart to cut out his own, he would. “I let you know me,” he said, but there was no accusation in his voice this time. “See me. I gave you a rare gift.” He pursed his lips. His eyes were flooding again. “But you shouldn’t have wanted it. I shouldn’t have let you. You should have rejected it, and I should have realized sooner that it wasn’t a gift. It really was - I really am - nothing but a curse.” He stepped forward, ready to raise the knife. 

But Will caught Hannibal’s wrist in his hand. His expression was earnest, a little incredulous, and too filled with fondness. “No, Hannibal.” 

Hannibal wanted to lift the blade. He wanted to slash it against Will’s throat. He wanted to turn tail and flee again. Abigail was gone, he noticed. “I took your life from you.” 

“Yes,” Will said simply. “And I took the same from you. And then we both laid the foundation for another. A new one. One where all the spaces were shared.” 

“It wasn’t the same.” Hannibal mumbled the words like a child. “It isn’t the same, and it will never be the same. I survived on, and you are a reflection of a memory. I took everything from you. From him, the shade wandering lost and alone somewhere beyond the bounds of memory.”   Hannibal clenched his teeth, eyes swimming as the twin pangs of empathy and horror seized in his chest. 

Will’s voice was so soft. “Do you remember what you asked me? Last time, when Abigail was still here?” Hannibal didn’t answer. He’d asked Will a lot of things. “You asked if I thought I could change you, the way you changed me.” Will smiled. “And I told you the truth, didn’t I? I already did.” 

Hannibal pressed his eyes shut. Everything was a million times more painful than he could have ever imagined. Hell was his life, and it was also kindness. And also desire, never to be sated. “It isn’t fate and circumstance that has returned me to this moment now.” The blood felt wet beneath his nose. “It’s damnation. I am damned to see my own failures. I am damned to see my own cruelty. I am damned to see a life full of moments where I could have at least pretended to be other than I was.” 

“Like me?” Will asked. Through Hannibal’s tears, it looked like he was smiling. 

Hannibal shut his eyes again. “I was too proud to even consider it.” He clutched the knife. “I cannot bear this! I cannot stare into an echo’s eyes and play at receiving forgiveness. If my soul floats through this broken world for another thousand years, I’ll never let myself forget.” 

He raised the knife. 

Will caught it once more, and held fast. “Hannibal,” Will’s voice was warm. And a little exasperated. “I couldn’t leave without you. Do you really think this is just another dream? Where do you think you left me?” He gave a soundless laugh. “And once again, you couldn’t leave without me.” He gripped Hannibal’s wrist, pulling it up, and wrenched the knife away. Hannibal wished he had the certitude to resist him. “Hannibal, if you’ve ever trusted anything, if you’ve ever felt like there was a moment you wished you could have turned left instead of keeping to your eternal right, listen to me now.” 

Hannibal listened. He didn’t have the strength to stop himself. 

Will dropped the knife. It clattered on the floor. 

Will’s grip was back on Hannibal’s hand, on both of his hands. They were firm and warm. “Follow me, Hannibal. Let go. Tilt your head back, and wade into the quiet of the stream.” 

Hannibal shut his eyes. 

*

It was day. Far off, gulls were calling. 

There were bones on the ground, and another bit of glass, this time from a broken window. 

Hannibal had no memory of this. 

Will was standing beside him, smiling. “It’s hardly life,” Will said, shrugging. “I’ve walked along the road, and up above the cliffs. Even dove into the water.” Hannibal didn’t need to look to know what was down there. “Something happens, once I’m further out. Get... snapped back here, I guess. Doesn’t look like I can leave, and I’d guess the same for you.” 

Hannibal felt numb. The sun felt real against his skin, even though he didn’t have skin, not really. Everything felt true in a way it hadn’t before, but the truth of it all overwhelmed and left him nearly speechless. 

“This is real?” he whispered. 

“Yes.” 

“You are...” Hannibal's eyes overflowed. He could not stop himself from trembling. “You are here?” 

Will grinned, and stepped closer. 

Hannibal felt powerless, this close to him. Will’s light was always close to blinding. 

“Time did reverse, Hannibal,” Will whispered, soft. Like the lover he had never allowed himself to be. The lover Hannibal was never quite sure he deserved. “The teacup that we shattered did come together. I don’t know if this place was made for us, or if we made it for ourselves. Conjoining, rooms shared between palaces. But we’re together, Hannibal. It’s the end. There’s no need to run.” He reached up, tentative, and then in an instant his hand was pressed against Hannibal’s face. “I told you we had one last goodbye between us. And that goodbye is in the past.” He smiled. Crooked. Happy. “The end was terrible. A rotten, garbled thing. We’ll never gain back everything we lost, but here, now... There’s one thing we can never lose again.” He laughed. 

Hannibal felt like dying. Like death. Like being reborn. 

Will reached up his other hand, and held it against Hannibal’s face. Brushed his thumbs against Hannibal’s cheeks. “The victory was decisive. It was mine. This is my becoming,” he whispered. “And so are you. Until the cliff tumbles into the sea. Until the ocean dries up. Until the earth crashes into the sun. I won you. And you can keep running if you want, Hannibal. But just know: I have all the time in the world. And I’ll never stop chasing you again.”  

Hannibal made a choking sound that was very unbecoming. He didn’t think he minded if Will heard. 

Will’s hands still cupped Hannibal’s face, and now it was Hannibal’s turn, to touch as he had so often forbidden himself. To feel the feelings Will had denied them both. To believe.  

He brushed tentative fingers through Will’s hair. Curled his other hand in Will’s shirt, holding him close. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You deserved better than me. You deserved to live. You deserved to stay innocent.” 

“I did.” Will was crying, and still whispering. Hannibal thought it seemed appropriate, though there was no one to overhear. “I did, and I didn’t. I’m as innocent as you are. And I’m sorry, too.” 

“You have nothing to apologize for, Will, it was me, it was always my-”

“Hannibal,” Will growled. “We have a lot longer than we’ve ever had before. I think we can save up some of these conversations for later.” 

Hannibal had not fully processed the words, before Will’s face was close, closer, and then their lips came together, and Hannibal was closer than he’d ever been, and he wanted to curl up and stuff himself inside Will’s mouth, inside Will’s skin, which still smelled faintly, illogically, of dogs and death and blood and cheap aftershave. Hannibal had pictured this moment a dozen times, or a hundred, or a thousand, or every minute of every day since he’d fallen in love. Every time he’d fallen in love, over a hundred billion different moments. 

When he’d first met Will, a genius mind behind simple frames, irritable and rude and somehow more fascinating than anyone Hannibal had ever met in his life. 

When Will had stepped into his office behind Jack, as nameless others cataloged what was left of Franklin, while Hannibal felt a flood of relief and the first small twinges of change he had yet to understand.

When Will had walked into a church in Italy, chasing Hannibal’s heart halfway around the world. 

When Will had wrapped his arm around Hannibal, covered in blackened blood, and plunged them off a cliff. 

When Will had eaten Hannibal’s peace offering and sneered that he didn’t find Hannibal that interesting. 

Time, it seemed, worked strangely in death. When Hannibal pulled back, it was nightfall again. The stars twinkled and the moon illuminated them. 

And yet it had not felt long enough at all. Hannibal could have gone on kissing Will until the Atlantic swallowed this side of the earth in her great, pitiless jaws. 

“I love you,” Hannibal whispered against Will’s mouth. 

Will made a sound, wretched and aggressive all at once. “Tell me this place has a bed.” 

Hannibal smirked. Perhaps he didn’t have the right to it, to any of this. But he would not deny himself Will. Not in death. Not if Will refused to let him. “Of course.” 

Hannibal had always thought himself a graceful man, and had imagined ghosts to be elegant creatures. Sad wisps of ragged humanity, untethered by the banal miracle of human flesh. Even so, he felt no desire to disengage himself from Will, and Will apparently felt the same. There was a bit more stumbling than Hannibal would have expected as they made their way back into the broken little house. The one where he’d dreamed of Will, beside him. 

“I love you, too,” Will said, and it sounded like glory. Like sin. Like violence. 

He led Will to the bedroom, and let Will drag him inside. 

Maybe Hannibal didn’t deserve Heaven. 

But it seemed God in his elegance had granted it all the same.  

Notes:

It's technically still the weekend in my country, so at least I'm only half a liar :) I'll try to get the epilogue up tomorrow.

Chapter 17: Fed

Summary:

"Humans are organic. We are meant to die. It's natural. Beautiful. And it all breaks down, and rises back up, and breaks down again. And every living thing grows out of every dying thing. We leave more life behind us to take our place... Like this moonflower. That's where all it's beauty lies, you know, in the mortality of the thing."
-The Haunting of Bly Manor

A pair of doors slammed shut behind Will, deep in the bowels of the Baltimore State Hospital. The sound echoed ominously. 

Ah, Will thought. Here again.  

Hannibal’s back was to him. He wore a gray numbered jumpsuit of a kind which Will knew so well from his own time here. 

“That’s the same atrocious aftershave you wore in court.” Hannibal’s voice was warm, fond, jesting. Everything Will had feared and loathed and hungered after once, back then, just a few short sleeps before he died. 

Hannibal turned to look at him. Will’s breath hitched and his mind sang. 

“Hello, Dr. Lecter.” 

Hannibal smiled. “Hello, Will. You came anyway.” 

Will smiled. “You’re skipping some lines, Hannibal.” Will could smile now, here, in this place. Because this was a dream, one now shared between them. There were no more monsters hidden in the dark, no more dragons to slay. No more wounds left to deal each other, in the name of propriety or morality or normalcy. No one else they could harm, and no one else they could save. 

Hannibal smiled. The expression was soft with the surety of unbroken promises. 

A whole universe of memory sprawled out before them, theirs for consuming. A playground of minds, gamboling around each other like stags dancing. 

“I’m glad you came,” Hannibal’s eyes shone as he approached the glass. 

“If you say something about ‘pencil lickers’ I’m calling that grounds for divorce.” 

Hannibal looked delighted. “Are we married?” 

“I’ve been married once, it didn’t last.” Will smiled sadly, but only for a moment. Even in death and dreams, even in paradise, there was always room to mourn what had been broken or lost. But the moment passed, and Will felt his smile grow buoyant again, blossoming in the light of Hannibal’s sun. “I think we’re something beyond titles the living grant to themselves, Hannibal.” 

Hannibal didn’t sigh, but he still somehow gave the impression that he had. “I’m glad that, whatever we may be, it includes us being on a first-name basis again.” 

Will huffed a fond but exasperated breath. “‘I’m more comfortable the more personal we are.’ That’s the line you want me to say, right? Because you are, too. Because you’re,” he set his tongue between his teeth, and watched Hannibal watch it, “in love with me.” 

Hannibal didn’t blush, as a rule, not even in death. But Will could tell the mark hit, and that he was pleased.

It was strange, Will thought. No matter how many games they played, how many conversations they retreaded, moments they revisited, it always felt new. But comfortable. Cozy in their familiarity, in the routine of their afterlife. 

Love was a delicate teacup, shattered and put back together again. But maybe there was also something of the old mug in it, too. Some of the palace rooms were chapels with vaulted ceilings, ecstatic renderings graven in the floor and on the walls. Candles burned. Choirs sang. Some of the rooms were offices with fine leather and thick drapes, dusty tomes haloing the space. 

Some were little cabins with dogs asleep in their beds, a fire in the fireplace, and moonlight glittering off the snow outside. Some were a different kind of cabin, the kind found on boats, adrift somewhere in the Atlantic, wind whipping at their hair. 

Some were terrible rooms with crime scenes discovered, or yet to be. Some rooms had the quality of a memory, the ones not meant to be shared but shared still: old manors, or boatyards, or lecture halls. 

Some even served as prison cells. 

“You just came here to look at me,” Hannibal said. The corners of his mouth tilted up, suggesting. 

Will ran his tongue along his teeth. “Let’s go somewhere else, Hannibal. I’ve had my fill of hospitals for one lifetime.” 

Hannibal smiled. “Maybe in the next.” 

And then they were back, on their little cliff, by their little broken house, with their last terrible victim behind them. They had no idea the date or time, and never would again. The clocks had stopped, the phones had died. And all the calendars were wrong. 

Wherever they went, even the harsh, cold places, they carried paradise with them. Because they were together.

Will let out a comfortable, lazy breath. Listened to the song of the sea. “I suppose a wedding’s not out of the question. If only there was a chapel.” 

Hannibal smiled. He took Will’s hand in his. 

Time meant nothing, but Will thought they had been together for a long while now. And yet, his heart still stuttered whenever they touched. As if they’d been aching for it, as if they’d been denied it. 

In a way, perhaps they had been. Their bodies were somewhere below, the flesh and hair gone entirely now. Most of the smaller bones had been washed out into the fathomless deep. 

In life, they were never to be. Denied, forever. 

Always hungry. 

Will squeezed Hannibal’s hand a little tighter. 

In death, they had this place. And a thousand palaces’ worth of dreams, ones they never need wake from if they didn’t wish it. Dreams that were their own, always and forever. 

“Shall we?” Hannibal asked. He looked at Will like he was the only person in the universe, and always had been. 

In life, they’d been starved.

Will felt his face split into a small, almost-shy smile. The teacup would never break again. “After you.” 

Death, it seemed, had fed them well. 

Notes:

"One day at a time is what we've got. It's what everybody's got, if you get down to it."

“People do, don’t they? Mix up love and possession. I don’t think that should be possible. I mean, they’re opposites, really. Love and ownership.”

“To truly love another person is to accept that the work of loving them is worth the pain of losing them.”
-selected quotes from The Haunting of Bly Manor

Thank you so much to everyone for supporting me throughout this fic. I really hope it was worth the wait and that you all enjoyed the ending :)