Chapter Text
They say falling isn’t painful – it's the landing that hurts. This is only true if you’re falling alone.
When Special Investigator Will Graham draped his arms around the bloody warmth of Doctor Hannibal Lecter, the embrace was accepted in perfect surrender, tacit and mutual and final. It was a waltz to the pounding of hearts, and Will got to lead for once. He took the first step, and Hannibal followed. The weight of all they’d done pulled them from the cliff with ease.
For one blissful instant, it was over before it was over. The air streamed past, as if they were laying peacefully on the wind and the world was rushing up to greet them. There was a moment of calm, of serene inevitability. Then physics betrayed romance with a crunch.
As they fell, their pure velocity sent limbs flying, one of Will’s arms sliding up and clocking Hannibal in the jaw. The other held frantically to a scrap of shirt, or maybe collar—some part of his mind heard what sounding like a choking. They flipped, once, twice, violently, upside-down-topsy-turvy, a sickening Hieronymus Bosch carnival ride. No brake.
Hannibal instinctively drew his legs up towards his chest in brainstem desperation for survival as they twisted again, his knee slamming forcefully against some bone or other in Will’s hip-rib-leg, and two or three heaving breaths were lost, between the two, in the roar. The dark blur all around them grew increasingly livid, although the flutter of eyelids turned the approaching rocks to a stop-motion horror. One body, falling to one end. Any thoughts between the two were shared, clutched in the tiny space between their flailing bodies- their body. One body, falling to one end. This is it, this is the end, it’s over, I'm sorry, I forgive you, I lov-
A louder crunch, then. A splash. Silence should follow. But God, oh God, great puppet master of cruel theater, seems never given to mercy for crimes of passion. Silence did not come.
Instead there was a gasp of shock. Wetness in the lungs, burning in the throat. Hannibal was wrenched from Will and their pocket of thoughts was dashed to bits against a shard of rock. He’d lost half of himself, his own limbs in Hannibal’s body torn away by the tide. The salt in his mouth was blood or seawater or watery blood or bloody seawater, and the great screaming urge at the front of his skull was to breathe. To turn the ocean into a sigh and let it all go black. He tried, or almost tried. But his arms were so empty, the magic was drowned in this freezing gaping maw.
Hannibal.
The mouth spit him out, sickened by all his dizzy sin. He gulped the air, not treading water but thrashing furiously against it.
Give it back give it back give it back. It was either Hannibal or death, but it didn’t matter. One was nothing without the other.
He spun and everything was searing. He could hear breathing, Hannibal’s breathing, but only from his own lungs. Something hurt everywhere and the cold soothed the burning, but the brine left him one screaming wound.
“Hannibal!” The word was impossibly wet in his mouth, coughing, sputtering, a pathetic prayer at a putrid altar.
He spun and spun, searching and begging, dragged under and spit up and thrown against a sharp edge of stone, ripping open some new agony in his side. He clutched onto the ledge, turning his hands raw in one instant. The sea pulled at him in a divine rage, but he clung, weakly pulling a quarter of himself up from the torrent. He stayed where he was. His head whipped around but his vision was useless. Hannibal was nowhere to be seen, anyway. He was gone, then. Will laid his head against the rock, too fast, too clumsy, not even flinching as it sliced his cheek. It would be easier to wait for dark sleep to take him than to convince his body to let go, so he spit and drooled and let the water thrash him against this shard of earth again and again, aware of the bruising ache but losing most of it to the cold. The cold and the alone.
A hand grabbed his arm.
Darkness.
He woke inside a fever. He remembered ice but there was only fire, although the damp remained. Water and blood had turned to sheets and sweat somehow, and he sat up in a twitch that immediately became a spasm. The force of it flung him back onto the mattress. Why was there a fucking mattress? His eyes were screwed shut by the pain and he twisted them back open with great effort. The room was blurry, but definitely a room. Not a hospital, not a cell, not familiar. Where.
Hannibal.
His effort to speak the name bore little fruit—a crackling groan and the taste of iron. A second attempt was much the same, but more painful, like threads tearing in the back of his throat. He gave up on the vocal chords and spat out a whisper instead, all breath, and his voice echoed back frightened and foreign.
“Hannibal...”
He fixed his eyes on one blurry panel of wall, willing it to sharpen. It obeyed a little, if he forced his eyes wide, but each blink seemed to set him back to looking through a fish tank. He braced himself for another attempt at sitting. It wasn’t easy to talk himself into. But he needed to know where he was. He being him? He being Hannibal.
He scrambled at the sheets a little, moving in shudders—an inch, a pause, a half-inch, pause. He couldn’t seem to breathe and adjust at the same time, like the over-fire of nerves sucked the oxygen straight out of him. After the first few jolts, he allowed himself one longer break to pant and take inventory. The pain was omnipresent in motion but if he kept still (perfectly still, other than the shaking) he could track down the epicenters.
There was a throbbing along the left side of his ribs, punctuated with deep needle stabs at the top of each inhale. The palms of both hands felt raw and burnt, and bending any of the fingers on his right hand might as well be shattering them. The air stung like bile and embers in his throat, and all the way down behind his sternum. The sensation in his right thigh was eerily reminiscent of a toothache he’d had at fifteen after a broken molar. More worrying, in the back of his mind, was the absolute lack of pain below the belt on his left side. Almost total numbness, a discomfort seemingly psychosomatic because the source was unidentifiable and indescribable, only a vague concept of tenderness too far away for his body to manifest. Every other muscle was sore, every other part of him ached, his face stung and his skin was shredded. He’d been peeled back and laid bare beneath his clothes, which, now that he considered them, didn’t really seem to be his clothes. Or Hannibal’s.
Hannibal.
Deep in the heat, older memories flung themselves to the forefront. MRI machine whirring. Flashes of the wrong faces in Hannibal’s dining room. Flickering, waving lights. The needle. The last time he’d been feverish, Hannibal’s hand against the back of his forehead. Hannibal’s hands on his wrist, taking his pulse.
Finally, ignoring all the protests of his body, he forced himself almost fully upright and bit down against the urge to go limp. The bed creaked beneath him, apparently also unready for this. He coughed violently, confetti of spit and blood across milk-white sheets, and the discovery of a few more contusions somewhere deep behind the muscles of his back.
He pushed himself the final few inches, victorious in a pathetic war.
“Will. You need to lay down.”
His head whipped to the doorway, discovered the doorway, discovered Hannibal leaning against the frame. He was hazy and not necessarily real and his face was bruised and his clothes were wrong and he looked like hell and he was so beautiful.
Will flopped gracelessly back down, unable to maintain the conscious effort of verticality while also examining Hannibal.
“Hannibal.” He settled for working to prop himself up on the less brutalized arm, glancing down as he positioned it and noticing bandages for the first time.
“You need to stop moving now,” Hannibal was getting closer. He was limping, but quickly, coming a bit more into focus as he approached. His voice was less vibrant than it could be, tired if not strained, but there was no mistaking the relief in his voice. He was exhausted and he was displeased and he was thrilled. Thrilled to see me, after it all.
Will finished his adjustment, laying his head half against his wrist, and half against what felt like wall, or maybe headboard, until he felt capably face to face with Hannibal, then stilled as best he could. The pain was getting worse, but it was dust on his bones. The sudden rain of euphoria washed it away.
Hannibal lowered himself slowly into a chair at the bedside. His face leaned in until Will realized his vision wasn’t so fuzzy up close. He could see butterfly stitches along the cheek and brow. He could make out gentle smile lines and the curl of each individual eyelash. Hannibal was mere inches away. Hannibal seemed pretty fucking real.
“I need you to smile for me.”
Will’s flinch was so small it would have been imperceptible to anyone but Hannibal.
Hannibal’s wince in response was so subtle it could only have been noticed by Will.
“You have a head injury; I just need to check your responses.”
Will didn’t hesitate to try a smile. It started out familiar, a sardonic grimace of the highest order, but the second he dragged the corners of his lips up, they took over on their own, breaking out into an uncontrollable manic grin. He felt the madness in his own expression and didn’t mind. He was here and Hannibal was here and here didn’t matter except for that. He felt a tiny tear of blood drip down his cheek where he’d reopened something by smiling so wide, and that pulled the corners of his lips the tiny bit farther they could go.
Hannibal’s eyes were wet as he looked back and forth between Will’s eyes, checking the pupils— and that’s for me, that look is for me, it’s for my survival, it’s all for me here in this room.
“What’s the last thing you remember?” Hannibal’s voice crackled a little more with this question. From effort? From emotion?
“A lot of rocks,” Will didn’t try speaking above a whisper; he’d learned his lesson, “I remember... it was the end of the world... and then it wasn’t.” His smile fell a little as he spoke, but it stayed on his face enough to throw the words off-kilter.
“And then?” Hannibal was smiling too—much smaller, much softer, just as wildly.
Will winced at his own furrowed brow and put the smile mostly to rest. He let his eyes fall closed to think, but fluttered them back open immediately, needing to keep Hannibal in his vision to keep him from slipping away. The pause was long and there were crickets chirping somewhere beyond the walls. The room was warmed by the light of several short candles. There was a window out into the darkness. It was night. Was it still night or was it night again?
“And then nothing,” Will said. Correction. “And then you.”
Hannibal was concerned, in that specific way Hannibal could be concerned. “Do you remember the climb? A grass path? The first night?”
It was night again, then.
Will considered shaking his head but wasn’t ready for the sting of it. “What happened to us, Hannibal?”
Hannibal brushed damp hair out of Will’s eyes and there was a sudden relief, a realization that it had been in his way the whole time. The touch crept up on him several seconds later and he shivered through Hannibal’s response.
“Nothing happened to us, Will. We happened.”
Darkness.
Several days passed like this. Will slept more than he didn’t, and every time he woke there was panic until Hannibal proved himself both real and present. Then they would sit together, swap a few questions, tend to wounds, and usually Hannibal would serve canned soup, mouthful by mouthful; and every time he would apologize, over and over. Will didn’t really understand all the apologizing, but it was Hannibal. Canned soup was below dog food to him, probably. Whatever Hannibal was eating in between visits, it wasn’t the soup. He never shared it even when Will tried making a point of it.
The room was inside a summer camp cabin, of all things. They’d dragged their broken bodies here, after the fall.
They’d both taken to calling it the fall. Not to make it accidental, but to make it inevitable. Like autumn leaves, like Lucifer, like rain. The fall.
On the beach that first night they’d held each other, close and cold and wet and dying, and they’d waited. The sun rose and they waited a little longer before they realized it had risen on the pair alive. Two more days were spent crawling up the tiny path in hopeless bursts, wondering if someone would find them, debating if they should lay down and wait again. If it hadn’t kept raining, some simple death of thirst might have claimed them both. They spent another foolish night outside the camp, enveloped in a mutual delirium that made it impossible to choose whether life was worth the risk of encountering another person. Eventually Will went back to sleep and wouldn’t wake. Hannibal had dragged his living corpse to the nearest cabin and raided for supplies. Pillager of a ghost town. He cleaned their wounds, changed their dressings with dusty first-aid kits between his own frequent bouts of unconsciousness. Eventually he’d managed to clean up a little, washed sheets and abandoned clothes in a nearby stream, swept away some of the spiderwebs. He’d even organized the pantry. All before Will was awake.
Will did not remember this, but it was what Hannibal told him, and he believed Hannibal entirely.
Hannibal remembered everything. He had fared better than Will by fate and happenstance, or perhaps by a constitution governed by one or the other. Not that much better, admittedly. There was a new room in the palace of his mind, a trap door beneath the Palermo, and when he visited to watch himself nurse Will back to health, every moment was peppered with doubts of whether his efforts were a coward’s waste. He didn’t visit the room often; the blood that seeped into the wood carried the possibility of giving up on Will, and it disgusted him, if not enraged him.
There was a bizarre domesticity in the first week of Will’s half-consciousness. Moreso, there was an unexpected peace. Neither would have dared to imagine, if they’d imagined surviving the fall, that they would have left their resentments in the sea. But there was something to be said for the purity of baptism. And there is very little space left for bitterness between two people huddling for warmth.
Hannibal didn’t allow Will out of bed other than to change the soiled sheets, to bathe once, and to use the bathroom thereafter. Bathing being an assisted dip in the stream, and the bathroom being outside, just off the porch. There was an outhouse on the premises, but it was abandoned for the season and both too far and too awful to consider.
Will needed a great deal of help to stand and walk, at first, but was immensely relieved to feel the electric pain in his left leg when he first tried. The nerves were damaged, certainly, from where Hannibal had set the bone a little late, leaving him with a maddening sense of pins and needles that was present more often than absent. But Hannibal assured him that would lessen over time, and if he was gentle with it, he might regain full use of the leg. Will believed him entirely.
They were both jumpy all the while, pretending not to react to every snap of stick and twig outside the cabin. It clearly wasn’t in use for the season. They guessed it might even be out of commission permanently. But if someone visited for custodial duties, or came to play vandal and saw the pair, they would struggle to overtake anyone in their current state. They hadn’t discussed this—but they knew, if someone came, they would overtake them.
They left a lot of guilt in the sea too.
Things were almost good, otherwise, while dreamlike, as Will’s fever broke and the two crafted a sense of routine in this ridiculous hideout. For once, there was enough time to think, and enough to think about that didn’t hurt too deep. They were in a simple battle, a battle to get to the next battle, and they fought back-to-back in perfect sync.
There were nagging doubts, of course, memories and fears. Things waiting to be discussed after the battlefield.
But one gnawed away inside the skull more than the rest.
As Will grew stronger, he grew worried that Hannibal didn’t. Hannibal wasn’t feverish, he seemed lucid, and his wounds were healing, but they healed so slowly. He stayed pale, his voice didn’t regain its old smoothness and warmth. The sense that he was hiding something snuck up on Will again, just when he’d thought it might finally be banished.
In the time since he'd woken up properly, Will had eaten more soup than he cared to eat. But he wouldn't complain, not under these conditions, and not to Hannibal, who was so clearly mortified by serving Beans and Franks and Noodle O's. Hannibal had taken to making small fires, with as little green as possible to minimize smoke, to heat the food, then serving it with herbs he'd found growing on the overgrown walking paths and the mostly-dead garden beside the cabin. Usually mint, and none of it went very well with mint, but those little leaves seemed to serve as a salve for Hannibal's bruised ego, a balm for having to stoop to such a level.
After a few more days, Will urged Hannibal a bit more harshly to swallow his pride and share some of the food, which was already dwindling. They were picking, realistically, at the remnants of food left behind unintentionally. The pantry wasn't really stocked, and they would have to find new sources soon.
"I grew up on this stuff," Will said, trying to eat his minty beef and barley (with a hint of tin) as enthusiastically as possible, "I know it's not good enough for you, but it won't kill you. When we leave here you'll need your strength too."
"I have my strength,” Hannibal said, looking pointedly at Will. “And I told you, I’m taken care of. Where I go on my walks, the Gods have left Tantalus a feast along the paths. The finches have been sharing the last of the wild berries. You saw the stew I made myself while you rested, and this is your stew. It's best to ration at a time like this."
"What I saw you eat was broccoli in spiced water, Hannibal.” He sighed, or perhaps he moreso huffed. “A body needs protein to heal. That’s a medical fact. I mean, you would know a medical fact like that, wouldn’t you, Doctor?" The humor in his voice was coy and placed in a deliberate attempt not to seem too adamant. Hannibal clearly had a sore spot here, and he was as stubborn as he was beautiful, which was to say, endlessly. Only if Will could convince Hannibal he was doing something of his own volition, out of amusement, might he do it at all.
“There’s protein in broccoli,” Hannibal said. Or snapped. The edge to his voice was much harsher than expected, genuinely sharp, louder than either of them had ever spoken in this room. And Will stared, one eyebrow raised, for several seconds before he decided this would be a ridiculous thing over which to have their first argument since the fall.
“Then eat some more broccoli,” he said, finishing his soup.
Darkness.
The next time Hannibal served Will dinner, however, was the worst time. Worse, significantly, than the Noodle O’s, and worse even than the people, really. Because with the people, at least one of them had always been prepared. This time neither was.
It was corn chowder, one of the last cans Hannibal had managed to scrape up from all seven buildings he had now broken into and searched. It smelled disgusting to him, worse even than any before it, although they’d all had a chemical tang and sickly sweetness to them that lingered long after he wished it would.
He heated it and covered the scent with wild sage as much as he could manage, until he knew it would taste far too much of sage, but hopefully not so much like tinned chowder.
He served it to Will silently, in a way that had become ritual. He came into the room that served as Will’s room, where Will was standing, making a vague effort to loosen the stiffness of his body. Hannibal held out the bowl and fork, (he still hadn’t found a single spoon, forcing them both to eat all things painstakingly with tines or drink straight from the plastic bowls like dogs), and Will took the food and began to eat.
Hannibal sat in the chair by the bed and watched intently. A little too intently. Every few bites he would apologize. Every few apologies Will would tell him it was fine, really, and make some vague comment about the food reminding him of childhood or being better than Alana Bloom’s cooking.
This time, though, the time that began rolling the snowball into an avalanche, Will took a bite, then a second, then his nose crinkled. “Think this is a little past due, Hannibal, I might have to skip out on soup today.”
The way Hannibal tensed was palpable. His hand resting calmly on his lap tightened until his nails dug through the fabric. Will tried not to notice.
“Sorry for wasting your sage, but we’ll be out of here soon anyway... you can make me a much better soup... with sage...”
No response. Hannibal was looking through Will, through the wall, and quite possibly through the field and across the ocean into the center of a forest in Lithuania.
“Hannibal?”
Hannibal stood, rigidly, jaw clenched, and turned his back to Will. “I’m sorry,” he said, like he said every day, but not like every day at all. He said it too quietly, too passively. He sounded younger, somehow, and farther away.
“Hannibal, really, it’s fine, really, it’s not your food... hey, when you cook for me again I’ll just appreciate it a lot more.” The attempt at comfort and humor sounded strangely empty. It echoed without echoing, and Will felt suddenly inadequate to even try another sentence. He reached a hand for Hannibal’s shoulder, hoping to calm him and reel him back in with one of the casual touches the two had become accustomed to sharing in the quiet of the cabin.
Hannibal flinched.
It knocked the breath out of Will and he suddenly remembered a knife in his stomach and he remembered why it was put there and everything felt horrible again. “I...”
Will didn’t know what to say, and Hannibal didn’t wait to see if he found something. He left the room a little too quickly, and shut the door a little too firmly, kicking up a cloud of dust in the corner.
After a full minute of standing still, staring at the door and feeling like he’d failed to do some entirely unknown but deeply crucial thing, Will heard the violent shattering of glass in the next room.