Chapter Text
bloom (verb)
come into or be in full beauty or health; flourish or
(of fire, colour, or light) become radiant and glowing
They are supposed to be dead.
The boat rocks beneath his feet and he winces in the small bathroom, head ducked low over the sink. It is freezing, or maybe Will’s body is shutting down, either way his vision swims and he shivers, flinches when the door opens behind him. Hannibal steps so close.
"Lie down.“, Will says, quiet and throaty, trying not to move his mouth, not to pull at the split skin of his cheek. Blood is all he tastes.
Hannibal approaches until Will feels the absence of his heat. Hannibal has been dying ever since they’d dragged themselves off the small beach Will had gasped himself awake, alive, on. They’d been on the boat for less than half an hour. Will had lain on the deck, staring at the inky blackness above, Hannibal too loud under deck, loud like an animal dragging itself to safety to succumb to its wounds.
This now, in the small bathroom beneath deck, their little boat rocked by waves lapping at the beach, all enveloped by darkness, is no man's land, the absence of reality and vision, Will a shadow of his self, the shell of him dead at the bottom of the sea. He is a shifting, newborn thing, staring at the darkness meeting his eyes in the mirror.
"Show me your wounds.“
Will turns. Hannibal is naked to his waist, wearing blood like haute couture. It’s Will’s claim on him. In their hunt, they’d feasted upon the same savagery and Will had laid waste to his pack mate's order.
"How’s the gunshot wound, doctor?“ The shot at levity falls flat when his voice breaks.
"Treated, for now.“
Will’s gaze falls to the gauze over Hannibal’s abdomen, smeared dark red and rust-brown. It sharply smells of disinfectant.
"I might succumb to infection still.“
Will stares at the wound, hidden. He shakes his head, sharply.
Hannibal steps so close he eclipses everything else.
"You’re not allowed to die by his hand.“
Hannibal makes a deep, soft noise. With a steadiness that betrays his body’s valiant efforts at dying, he cuts Will’s shirt from bottom to collar so fast Will blinks and it falls open.
"Only yours?“ The words wind around him like smoke.
Will nods.
Hannibal places the medical scissors on the sink behind Will and peels the right side of his shirt away from the stab wound, hard and crusted with salt water. It’s bleeding again, ever since Will had dragged himself downstairs. Will doesn’t feel the fingers against his cold, wet skin, but he feels Hannibal’s breath ghost over his burning cheek, his lips. They don’t speak as Hannibal disinfects his wounds, as Will claws at the sink behind him and hisses, his broken body numbed and beaten by the ocean, the sting from the alcohol's fiery tongues lapping at him hungrily. Hannibal procures needle and thread and he stitches Will up, first his shoulder, then his cheek. His movements are slow. His hands tremble, imperceptibly. Will leans against the sink and tries not to lose consciousness. He wants to say something. He can’t speak, his heart pounding in his throat.
Hannibal leaves the first aid kit, scissors, and gauze bloody, strewn all over the sides and it is the absence of his fastidiousness more than his shaky composure that tells Will that he’s not really here, not on this boat with him, but halfway to the seafloor.
"We need to leave.“, Will says.
"Yes.“
Hannibal walks out of the bathroom, staggers and sways, and sits on one of the two small cots crammed under deck, an ice box by his feet. He doesn’t move.
"What do you need?“
"Blood. Type 0.“
Will opens the box with one hand. There are bags filled with clear fluid between dark red ones. Type 0, and type AB.
"I need to lay an IV. Bring the medical bag.“
Will watches Hannibal pierce the needle into his arm and secure it, shadows encroaching on his vision like vultures. He places the bag onto a hook above the cot and sags, almost falls onto the pale man stretched out beneath him. He stares at Hannibal in the darkness and holds onto the sight of him, onto the only thing he can see. His ashen face streaked with black, the shallow movement of his chest. Hannibal looks like he’s already dead.
Will wants to lie down beside him and go away. Together. Away from the pain and the burn of the ocean, away from cages and shredded homes, away from the eyes of every person on this earth, away from himself. He realizes that he does not care to be alive. He stands with naked feet on a white line between life and death and he wants to fall forward into nothing.
A face turned into the sun in quiet ecstasy. A hand with deft, sure movements on a bottle of red wine. A gaze so heavy, so adoring, Will feels pinned like a precious specimen. A beast caging itself for him, prowling for years, alone. A hunter, finally free, glorious in blood.
Will turns around, fights his way onto deck. The boat is prepared for departure. He doesn’t question it. Will steers them out to the open sea. That night, he is sure he steers them into hell.
Distinctly he thinks that it feels a little like coming home.
Two days disappear within the void between worlds. Will sails them for short increments of lucidity, before staggering to his cot and passing out for indiscernible amounts of time. Shadows, so corporeal he feels their watery cold touch, pursue him uncaring whether he’s awake or asleep. They speak in droning voices, muffled by the water and the salt in Will’s ears, dance across the boat and the inside of his eyelids. With the weight of an ocean, they stand on his lungs when he lies down. He gasps awake into darkness more absolute than the one of his dreams, heaves to dislodge saltwater that isn’t there, curls a hand into his bandaged shoulder and lets the pain press him into his cot. The shadows howl their fury and Will stares at the gentle, shuddering rise of Hannibal’s chest in the darkness and grinds his teeth and holds on.
"Will.“
Will stands gripping the edge of the sink and he barely hears Hannibal over the wailing, the crushing waves, the pounding of his heart.
"Will.“, Hannibal says again, stronger this time.
Turning, Will finds his eyes open, hazy. He makes his way over like someone moving at the bottom of the sea.
Hannibal’s gaze is agonizingly soft. He lifts a hand, slowly, and places it around Will’s cheek when he sits on his cot.
"Will.“
Will turns his head into a feverishly warm palm and closes his eyes.
"Brave, wonderful boy.“
A soft, choked-off sound tears from Will’s throat and he grips at the wrist by his face, holding on tightly, pressing his fingers into a slow pulse.
Will struggles to monitor the passing of time, hours dripping by in a blurry, indistinct rhythm of pain and oblivion. After respective blood transfusions, Hannibal demands morphine, and Will is high on pills, just enough for the screaming agony in his body to dull into a hazy, simmering fire, just enough he can still direct them south, while Hannibal sleeps on his cot below and barely moves.
These first days, they don’t speak. Mostly, they sleep. They make little progress on their wild escape, but Will can’t find an ounce of worry in his chest, not a single flutter of fear of being found. He suspects the Will Graham they thought they knew isn't to be found any longer.
The shower helps. After days adrift and sinking, Will feels anchored within his body again for the first time.
Hannibal demands for it with one word and a gaze that brooks no arguments, even as drugged as he is. Will strips him on the cot. Every inch of skin revealed is a step away from the world of horrid shapes and screaming voices and rushing water, a step towards Hannibal. Hannibal lets him touch him as if his body was Will’s.
He comes to a little more when Will helps him stand, a hand clasped around Will’s uninjured shoulder, his eyes on Will. He pushes a hand into Will’s hair and doesn’t get past the solid mess of crusted salt and dirt and grime. Will huffs a laugh that bubbles up from somewhere very deep and sways against Hannibal’s broad chest, shaking fingers struggling to pull off the jumper he’s been wearing, the one he’d found in the drawer under his cot. Hannibal leans back against the wall separating the bathroom from the rest of the boat’s interior, a pleased hum escaping his throat, watching him fight with his clothing.
"Bastard.“, Will swears, tripping over his shoes.
He doesn’t think about their nudity. He pulls Hannibal into the shower, that dark and all-seeing gaze subdued, but more real than anything Will has seen these last few days combined. The relief it brings is visceral. Pushing Hannibal against the shower wall and his own hands into dirty grey hair happens without thought. Hannibal doesn’t touch him but Will needs nothing more than the solidness of Hannibal’s body beneath his hands to feel held, secure. Alive.
More than anything else, washing Hannibal stitches every wound within Will’s physical form together again, every wound within his mind and his heart. He drags his hands over the so easily broken skull, over the tendons in his neck, lays his hands around his throat and imagines killing him now, with one swift movement, and that he could and that Hannibal would let him and it fills him with serenity.
They are here. Together, finally. This is real.
He wants to feel this way forever. Moving his hands over coarse chest hair and washing his armpits, his chest, the thin skin over Hannibal’s heart, he groans softly and Hannibal makes a quiet noise.
His eyes closed, he says, "Will.“, like a disciple in the presence of their God.
With their healing bodies, the inevitable burn of life returns. Hannibal returns.
"No attempt at our lives again?“, he rumbles and barely opens his eyes. Without his stripping gaze, he looks more human, the window to the abyss within him shut. Will thinks there’s mirth in his words.
"We’re already dead.“
Hannibal is hooked up to bags of saline solution and Will feeds him cold canned soup when he vaguely proclaims a high chance of his intestines being uninjured. They share the can. They share the spoon. Will feeds him like Hannibal fed him before he set the bone saw to his skull, a gentle hand around his jaw, a strong thumb in the deep divot underneath sharply protruding cheekbones. Hannibal eats like a child with a fever.
The first time he thinks that Hannibal may survive is the day he goes below deck after having stared at the dark grey surface of the sea for half of the morning, worrying at the stitches in his cheek with his tongue, watching the boat slink away from the dragon and his claws, from Jack and Molly and the person Will had so desperately tried to be, to find Hannibal seated at the small table by the window, body crammed onto the creme leather covered booth that envelops the seating area on both sides, looking shockingly small. Then he lifts his head and his gaze meets Will’s. Will feels it in his chest like a bolt of lightning. The body may be susceptible to injury, but the man is not.
"Will.“
Hannibal has said little else, drugged and healing, or drugged and dying, Will doesn’t know.
"Doctor Lecter.“
Hannibal’s eyes are fixed on him with an intensity that is flaying, but his gaze is warm and amused. "No familiarity in death?"
You have always been most familiar to me. The only thing I ever truly knew.
"How are you?“
Hannibal tracks his eyes over Will’s cheek. Will, seeing Hannibal lucid and upright, feels sick to his stomach with something urgent and heady.
He slides into the booth opposite the older man, movements careful, aborted. He’s a veteran of his very own war now. So is Hannibal. He has never felt closer to him. Never less separate.
"There is no infection. I imagine neither you, nor the dragon, has managed to kill me this time.“
"So, no peace of death yet.“
After all, there isn’t. Not hell, no fire. Just water.
Hannibal’s maroon gaze tracks over Will so slowly he feels it physically, stripping him bare. With it, Hannibal strips himself. Will sees tenderness, adoration, all spilling over the table between them from the well within the other man, the veil entirely dissipated for now.
"No.“, Hannibal says, softly. A small smile plays around sharp lips. "I suppose it’s something other altogether.“
Will finds himself incapable not to smile back. He releases a breath and leans forward. "You knew we would end up here.“
Hannibal’s gaze slides to the side, to the small, chrome fridge, the steps leading upwards, the cots just visible from where they are seated, in the bowels of the boat. There’s blood smeared on most surfaces. Will didn’t clean, doesn’t care to. Hannibal hasn’t been able to.
"A man of hope and rationality, if burdened with a somewhat creative imagination, prepares for many eventualities. Still - I may have, I admit, miscalculated our means of arriving here.“
Will breathes. Eyes trained on Hannibal’s neck, he looks at the soft thudding of his pulse and breathes.
"How do you feel, Will?“
"Hollowed out.“, Will exhales. „Powerful. Alive.“
One with you.
"Hollowed, because you have emptied yourself of all illusions, and deceptions and left them to sink to the bottom of the sea?“
Will nods. He wrings his hands in his lap, a familiar watery panic rising in his throat. "These last few days…I felt stuck in the darkness, gasping for air that wasn’t there.“, he whispers. "When you-.“
Hannibal watches him silently, tipping his head in acknowledgement.
"You can’t die.“, Will says, his voice hoarse like saltwater.
Not while I live.
Hannibal leans forward and places a large hand over the mess of Will’s. He moves thin, long fingers over Will’s knuckles. The caress is brutal in its intensity, more painful than pleasant, but then again, Hannibal has always touched Will with the gentlest of violence. Will shivers and turns his hand, palm grazing palm, a low fire finding life within his lower spine, pulsing outwards like a flower blooming.
"My dear boy. How could I ever leave you?“
"Do you think I will try to kill you again?“
Will lies on his cot, staring at the gauze over Hannibal’s bare stomach.
Hannibal, on his own cot, looks at him, eyes open like black holes. His gaze is growing ever sharper. "I have learned it vital never to presume to be able to anticipate what you will do, Will.“
"You would let me.“
Hannibal hums, as always enjoying musing over his own murder. "Dying by your hand, as you must know, is vastly preferable to dying by any other means. Although, now that we might survive your first valiant attempt, I do hope you decide to wait a little with the second.“
Will grins, reflexively, digging sharp little teeth into his lower lip.
He knows the haze is lifting, reality looming like a pitch-black specter on the horizon, the day he goes below deck and finds Hannibal on his feet. He stands at what could possibly pass for a stove. The boat is uncomfortably luxurious, but the kitchen is a pale shadow of Hannibal’s preferred arena of beauty and death. He makes do, it seems, unsurprisingly, so wholly involved that Will startles when he speaks.
"How is your shoulder, Will?“
Will rotates his right arm gingerly and winces, leaning against the door to the bathroom. "Not my first shoulder injury.“
"Stabbed, shot, shot again, then bitten by a dragon. A rhythm of deadly intent.“
"Aren’t I popular.“
"Singularity often invites envy.“
Will snorts. "Chiyo wasn’t envious when she shot me. Nor Jack.“
"No.“, Hannibal says and Will hears the invisible smile. "A farmer shooting his lamb instead of the wolf.“
Will, feeling uncharacteristically playful - it might be the painkillers, or the fact that he is recklessly fleeing the country at the side of a notorious serial killer cannibal after joint manslaughter that felt like dancing, and has thus gone insane - moves next to Hannibal at the stove. "Wolf in lambs’ clothing?“, he asks, ducking his head. When Hannibal stops his ministrations and Will can feel his eyes on him, heavy, he lifts his gaze to meet Hannibal’s through his lashes.
Hannibal’s attention on him is sustenance. Will realizes he’s been starving for over three years. He wants to gorge himself on him, feast until all he tastes is flesh, until his stomach bloats. His very own darkness.
"They called to the mountains and the rocks, 'Fall on us and hide us from the face of Him who sits on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb’“, Hannibal hums, low and melodious, eyes moving between Will’s. "For the great day of their wrath has come, and who can stand?’“
"A God and a lamb. You’re no God.“
Hannibal, smiling, turns the stove off, places a lid on a pan and turns towards Will, barely breaking eye contact. He looks better, less pallid, movements fluid once more, and precise.
"You would have a high tolerance for pain.“, Will scoffs when Hannibal lifts both hands and places one on Will’s uninjured cheek, the other under his jaw, palm warm against his neck, to tilt his head to the side with a thumb. Will melts into the touch, carefully watching suspiciously keen eyes. "Are you on any painkillers at all?“
"Pain is subjective, malleable.“
Will snorts. He popped two pills only ten minutes ago. "You were shot and fell off a cliff.“
Hannibal, inspecting his cheek with clinical eyes, releases a soft breath.
"I did not fall off a cliff, Will.“, he admonishes and, satisfied with his inspection, lets his hands travel over Will’s neck onto his shoulders. Will trembles. He knows Hannibal better than he knows himself and he sees the easy carefreeness stretched across Hannibal’s familiar features as if now that they had died without dying, the war had ended, the beast clawing for revenge and pain and blood was finally sated. Will doesn’t let it fool him.
Hannibal is always hungry.
"Are you angry I tried to kill us?“
Hannibal points his eyes at Will’s shoulder in silent command and Will swallows. He doesn’t know why he expected Hannibal to undress him as he did the night they defeated the dragon. Slowly, Will undoes the buttons on his shirt, lets it fall to the floor behind him. Hannibal tuts and it’s so mundane, Will feels the corners of his mouth tuck upwards.
The doctor inspects his shoulder wound with nothing more than the gentle touch of one index finger to the red skin around the stitches. "Acceptable.“, he says. "Albeit not my best work. It’s not infected.“
Will nods. He doesn’t put his shirt back on. It’s warm under deck. The sick need the heat.
Hannibal simply regards him for a quiet moment.
Will, suddenly, ferociously, wants to see the gunshot wound. His very own flesh, for Hannibal is his to injure, defiled. But Hannibal’s eyes on him still his hand.
"Life is precious, but I do not cling to it like lesser creatures. I value certain things higher than an empty existence. You gave me a gift, Will. I could not be angry about that. A life concluded by your design will always be preferable to a life without you in it.“
Will feels his insides awash with acid and fire. He presses a hand to the familiar scar above his navel, hard, and tries to hold himself together.
And a life with me in it?
Hannibal places one warm hand over Will’s on the scar, the other around his nape, holding him close, his soft shirt electric against Will’s bare skin. Hannibal’s cheek brushes against the shell of his ear and Will can not stop the shivers. He shakes like a thing that knows it’s about to be eaten.
"There are very few things you could do, Will, that would incur my wrath.“
What a dangerous thing to say. What a lie.
"That’s not true.“, Will whispers and how stupid to taunt a predator, to poke him where it hurts, to reopen old wounds and salt them, ready for dinner. "I could deny you. Again.“
Hannibal leans his head back to bring their foreheads together, bodies touching from head to toe.
"But you won’t.“, he says.