Chapter Text
Grating just to be alive. When Will wakes, he becomes aware of his body in increments. Of stinging and aching pains before they morph into the familiar white noise he’s learned to cope with.
He tries to shuffle up onto his elbows in bed to support himself and, as a grand finale, gets the twanging reminder of his gunshot wound. Now that’s… less easy to tune out.
Bed creaks and pained hisses are loud in his empty home, all windows and hardwood. Even the chilly morning light that once could have been lovely falls on this place in a soulless way, out through the angry mouths of his uncovered windows.
[Speaking of soulless.] Hannibal approaches with an inappropriate amount of warmth on his face. Will wants to spit. He knows he’s stitched and safe and warm because of this man in front of him, but there’s not an act of service on Earth that could bring Hannibal Lecter out of the net negatives. Tornado Alley can’t feel fully like home after a bad one, even if you’ve lived there all your life.
“I am glad that you slept,” Hannibal says, voice clipped and faked over with razor thin loveliness.
Will’s surprised to hear the flat affect in his own voice when he responds, “shame you were interrupted. Sticking around for a second chance at me?” He would gesture at his skull, but his hands feel heavy and magnetized to the mattress.
Hannibal subtly slides his index finger out from between the pages of his notebook and takes a seat in a chair by the bed. “A second chance of sorts, yes, but not to revisit our disagreement.”
[Our disagreement.] Will scoffs. “Nothing you could say will ever ring of honesty, Dr. Lecter. Even if you believe it yourself.”
Hannibal does little to hide the way his eyes beg to be believed. “It didn’t take me long at all to find myself relieved by the interruption.”
“Yeah? I’m not sure I was,” Will says, quick and quiet.
Hannibal’s eyebrows flicker microscopically in disappointed surprise. “Craving an end?”
The thought is on the peaceful side of tragic. “Craving an out,” Will replies, patronizingly adding, “blood sport, Dr. Lecter. No one stays clean enough to wear the winner’s crown.”
“I was not under the impression we were in a battle of wits,” Hannibal says, punctuated by crossing his legs.
“What would you call this game we’re playing?”
“It’s not felt like a game to me for a very long time, Will. A cycle of betrayal only made possible by the recognition of an equal.” Hannibal purses his lips, pinching away the ghost of a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. “We are both in need of an ‘out’, but perhaps we could first try to challenge our pattern before we welcome death.” He looks down at his hands and then up at Will’s bandaged, incredulous face.
[Ha.] “You’re poking at me for accepting the punishment you saw fit. Your manipulations depend on a more forgetful, more… suggestible subject,” Will responds, barely able to open his mouth to speak through his clenched jaw. He tries to keep the shake out of his voice when he adds, “I’m no longer soft clay. I have been through the kiln.”
“Yes you have,” Hannibal concedes after a moment.
When his eyebrow twitches under another suppressed emotion, his gaze slanted to the quilt, it’s a tell. A clarity for Hannibal’s internal world that Will has been given on very few other occasions. This time, though, the man won’t have Will bleed in order to make his point. He has finally, finally bled enough.
Or maybe, now, Hannibal would climb onto Will’s coffin like a lost widow, still too high on narcissism to connect his grief to regret.
Forgetting where the division is tucked between cruelty and what’s deserved, Will explains, “you pushed me until breaking but didn’t think our friendship would also be a casualty?” When he gets no reply, he clenches and unclenches his hands then continues. “Maybe you knew I would sew it all back together after you tore through my life, but you can’t have believed that I would sew… us back together.” He hears himself, knowing already that the force that tied them couldn’t have been severed in simple betrayals, if at all.
[We hardly needed the thread.]
“Why did you come to me, Will?” Hannibal sounds passably civil, which only serves to agitate Will more.
Hannibal continues, somehow maintaining a sweet-tasting venom in his tone, “to cling to the same familiar that suffocates you?”
Will slams his head back where the bedframe meets the window, sighing heavily. “Things are different than they were a month ago. Two days ago.” [72 hours of hellfire will change the shape of any metal.] “You didn’t want me to be anywhere but with you,” Will says defensively, feeling both fully seen and fully unheard. “Yet – in contempt of knowing I followed when you left – you had to end my life?” His voice pitches higher, almost manic. “Would that have been it? Would you have stopped being so… cavernously hungry?”
The blow lands. It sounds accusatory, where the crime is incurable loneliness.
The doctor’s head practically twitches as he’s asked the questions he couldn’t look at yet. “Perhaps I might have remained trapped in the call and response. If your story ends, my story must also end. Your wound reminds me that it did not.”
Will manages to flicker his hands up to point to his bandages, asking, “so what is this, then? Another gift?”
Hannibal stares back and forth between two blue eyes, as if one will say something different than the other, sounding so proud of his breaks when he answers, “it is to me.”
A grim laugh. “You completely impoverished me, Dr. Lecter. You made it so that I was starved into desperation,” Will says, firmly. He’d rehearsed that in his hospital cell dreams. “We couldn’t be equals until I was demoralized by my own starvation like you were? Why–” Will chokes on the central question, miserable in its simplicity: “why did you do that to me?”
The doctor leans in closer to the bed, but doesn’t reach out. Again, he tries to scramble for the upper hand through evasion dressed as omniscience. “And what is it you starved for, Will?”
“To see you in pain,” he says quietly. It’s an element of a larger appetite, but the element that is easiest to feed.
Hannibal pauses to consider that and shifts from interrogation to analysis again. “It’s easier to face your hunger when it can be disguised as justice. If I held your head underwater, your display in the museum was more than a desperate gasp for breath.”
When Will doesn’t respond, Hannibal prods harder, “you decided Mason’s fate to live impotent in his sin and ugliness. You are most comfortable when your agency in the world passes through my hands at your command, Will. You like my company so that your garments may remain spotless.”
Will tries his own evasive maneuver now at the precision of that last particular wound. “You don’t recognize what it’s like to be liked,” he says, almost conversationally. “People don’t find you interesting. They’re just seduced by their own fear. They thirst after your approval because, in the back of their mind, they know they need it to stay alive.” (It’s a self portrait. It’s a self portrait because it’s all the things Will isn’t.)
“By your own admission, you craved death but also feared it, Will. One can fear something one wants. You know that well,” Hannibal patronizes, his smile lopsided but over-animated – made uneasy at the sense of the coming rejection. “Flirtation with danger is still flirtation. You know that, too.” His face goes blank.
“I think you should leave.” It’s the best Will can do while holding onto his composure. Half the barbs in their arguments are made of dignity, after all.
“You believe that will work? Out of sight, out of mind?” The sound of Hannibal’s voice is made tinny by hurt, its usual decadence lost to the conversation’s unrelenting stings.
“Out of cutting distance, out of skull. Yes, I think that will work,” Will fires back.
Fully shutting off now, Hannibal’s expression is ice cold while he uncrosses his legs and smooths his slacks. “I wish things could have gone differently for us.”
Will wants to laugh, but knows it will sound forced. Instead he says, “I wish you were never put in my path.” The attempt at separation feels less like clipping a string and more like performing his own appendectomy… like that Soviet doctor in Antarctica.
“Nothing you could say could ring of honesty,” Hannibal echos, his eyes hollow as he gets up to leave.
When the door opens, Will sees Chiyoh’s form silhouetted by the numb white hazy daytime – and neither silhouette turns back to look at him before the door closes again. Him on the wrong side. His vision goes bokeh and it takes him full seconds to realize it’s because his eyes are wet.
It’s part exhaustion, part adrenaline rush, having now said the things he’s wanted to say and a few things he didn’t. For a second, there’s no pain in his body. Now being free of Mason’s horrors, of Hannibal’s reign, of the FBI’s grasping hands, it’s as though the emotions that he’d tied to each port in the harbor suddenly can all ride the same wave out of him.
Then Will stands on joints so tired he’d believe the tendons were cut.
The tiles of the bathroom floor are clammy with cold humidity when he makes his way to hang his head over the toilet. The porcelain’s cold, too, and the trash can is just shy of overflowing with blood-saturated paper towels. When the puke doesn’t come, Will has to face the fact that his body has no desire or ability to eject this particular poison from his system. That his stomach will churn with this feeling forever:
A disgusting, festering wound type of heartache that feels something like grief when snow starts to fall so pretty outside.
–
It takes two entire days before he acknowledges to himself that he wishes he followed. By the time Will nods to his reflection in the kitchen window, the entire house smells like alcohol and dirty dishes. Quieter than before, if that’s even possible. He’s been feeling harassed by his own misery, trapped with it when he recognizes he’s found himself, once again, in a world in which he is fully alone. It’s not an immobilizing realization exactly, but a sick one for sure. Searching for easy peace, he closed off his only road to satiety.
(The pleasure and addictive satisfaction that comes from power.)
He prays he knows where to look.
But first, in this life, he has a door to close.