Chapter Text
Sometimes, Will doesn’t feel real. The old armchair he’s slumped against feels solid enough, framed by the aged walls of the old cabin Hannibal found for them. The trees beyond the window look real and present, and so does the small visible slice of clear Canadian sky. Chilly air prickles across his face and neck despite the closed window, a sharp contrast to the warmth of the sweater he’d rescued from a thrift shop bin before they’d retreated from civilization. Will sees it all and feels it all, and, more importantly, he believes it all. There have been times in his life when seeing and feeling had no relationship to reality.
Sleep-walking, hallucinations, fever-stained nightmares, heady psychotropic drugs — Will’s been through every variety of waking and sleeping vision. He considers himself something of an expert on dreams, so there’s an uneasy authority in his opinion when he recognizes the tumbling sense of vertigo and the hot-cold crawl of vulnerability across his skin. It’s like the fever dreams, only he doesn't have a fever, and he’s very much awake. Today, Will’s struggle isn’t with a dream or a vision. Today, it’s Hannibal’s tablet in his hands that has him drifting away from the ground when he’s only just started to rest on his own foundations.
He takes a breath, and reads the headline again.
Escaped Serial Killer and Missing FBI Consultant Declared Dead
He can’t look away from the letters screaming across the header of the news page. He should be breathing a sigh of relief, should be calling out to Hannibal in the next room to tell him that the noose around their fugitive necks has relaxed, just a little.
Instead, Will’s world has suddenly, violently narrowed to include only himself and the first sentences of the lengthy news article.
“My husband was a good man,” said Molly Graham, wife of Will Graham, the FBI consultant who was declared dead today. “He would never have done the things they’re saying. That’s all I have to say.” Aside from this brief statement, Molly Graham has barred her door to reporters, letting friends and family serve as her spokesmen.
“She’s just been told she’s a widow for the second time,” said one family friend. “We’d like to ask that the reporters respect her privacy and the privacy of her son at this difficult time.”
Will Graham, a former teacher at the FBI Academy in Quantico and frequent consultant for the Behavioral Science Unit of the FBI, disappeared when infamous serial killer Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lecter escaped during a prisoner transfer. The alleged botched transfer drew heat from the public as well as the federal government in what many have called the case that launched a thousand inquiries. Suspicion has since fallen on the missing profiler as a possible co-conspirator of Dr. Lecter’s rather than another addition to his long list of victims.
Will grips Hannibal’s tablet tightly. The page glows white; the light feels like fire against his face. He wonders if the words good man and widow for the second time are branded against his skin with the heat.
The article disappears into the edge of the screen; his thumb hovers, ready to scroll down and read more, but he can’t move. He’s full of a heavy pins-and-needles sensation like sleep paralysis. Guilt creeps cold and merciless up his neck, his mind full of white noise that might resolve itself into a scream if he concentrated on it. But Will is used to avoiding eye contact, even with his guilt, even in the solitude of his own mind. He breathes deeply and drifts away from his body with each exhale.
Hannibal is in the room now. Will wonders distantly if he could detect the change in Will’s thoughts from across the house. He leans over Will’s shoulder to read; Will can smell the bread he’s been baking all morning. For a single, hanging moment, it’s almost comforting.
Hannibal isn’t touching him, exactly. He hasn’t really touched him since the last of the bandages came off. Will wonders why he’s aware of that, wonders why he doesn’t shift away from Hannibal’s ambient heat and firm presence. Hannibal reaches for the tablet.
“May I?” His voice comes from directly beside Will’s ear, soft-spoken and almost gentle. His quiet tone echoes like a shout in the emptiness of Will’s chest, leaving an ache behind it. Will nods, and surrenders the tablet with nerveless fingers. Hannibal carries it to the sofa and settles in to read.
Will watches him. He’s almost expressionless, legs crossed elegantly at the knee, one hand holding the tablet, the other curled into a loose fist. His thumb traces circles against his forefinger with enough controlled force to belie his mostly smooth face. Will recognizes the troubled set of his jaw, the tension in his lips. He sets the tablet aside and smooths his hand across the fabric of the sofa. After a moment of silence, the tablet screen goes dark. Will watches Hannibal’s face shut down just as surely as the screen had.
“This article upsets you,” Hannibal acknowledges. “Will you tell me why?”
The tightness in Will’s throat is verging on pain, and he knows his voice will tremble and crack if he tries to speak at anything approaching a normal volume. “You know why,” he whispers.
“Because you caused pain to people who did not deserve it.”
“Yeah,” Will says, his voice cracking over the word. His life would be so much easier if he could wander through his mind and turn off every emotion as effortlessly as flicking light switches. He grimaces against the sudden burn in his eyes; he doesn’t particularly want to cry in front of Hannibal ever again. Or cry at all, really. Tears don’t usually respect his wishes, of course. And Hannibal’s seen him in much worse shape than this. He tries to decide whether that’s a freeing thought or a debilitating one, but Hannibal speaks before he can make up his mind.
“They think the best of you, and take their memories on to their new lives. The same is true for you. You have your memories and your new life.”
Will’s laugh is flat and it scrapes his throat on the way out. “Memories hurt, Hannibal.”
Hannibal’s eyes are black in the dim light when he answers. “Beautiful things often do.”
Will sees something in those depths, a faint flash in the dark, like moonlight against metal. He’s intimately acquainted with the cold glitter of fear, even if he’s surprised every time it appears in Hannibal’s eyes.
“I’m not going back,” he says quietly, and wonders if he sounds reassuring or just defeated. “I can’t.” He thinks that he means it as comfort, but his words land just beyond his fingertips and out of his control.
Hannibal nods, once. The cold glitter slips back out of sight.
“I’m sorry you are in pain,” Hannibal says. Will hears the unspoken qualifiers threaded through his words; I’m sorry you are in pain I neither cause nor control is probably the best translation. But Will thinks that he means it. It cracks something in his chest and Will feels an indefinable tremor, like the first hint of a tidal wave.
“I—“ he says, wondering what feeling is washing over him. “I hurt everyone. Always.”
The pain is in his throat again, sharper this time, and he can’t swallow it back. Whatever just cracked inside him, it must have been a load-bearing support, because, all at once, Will can feel himself falling apart. The taut muscles in his face spasm and he curls in on himself reflexively, burying his face in his hands. He’s crying, sudden and harsh as an unexpected downpour. It should be humiliating, but his vanity seems to be the only thing anesthetized against the pain eating at him like acid. He’s crying and he doesn’t care.
“Will.” Hannibal’s voice has that awful gentleness in it again. Will doesn’t want to look at him, but he can’t seem to help himself.
Hannibal is sliding the tablet farther away, clearing the seat beside him on the sofa. It’s such a tiny gesture. An invitation so faint it could be nothing, really. Will could pretend not to understand what’s being offered, and go lock himself in his bedroom until this wave of battering emotion passes. He’ll survive this. God knows he’s survived everything else. Will has held himself up and held himself together his whole life. Hannibal looks at him, and there’s something imploring in his eyes.
Will doesn’t want to hold himself together right now.
He stands up and drops himself onto the sofa beside Hannibal, unsurprised when Hannibal’s arm is instantly around him, pulling him in. He tucks his face into Hannibal’s shoulder and lets the tears fall as they will. Hannibal’s hand strokes over his shoulder, through his hair. He lets himself go until he’s not bearing his own weight, or his own tears, or even his own pain. Hannibal is soaking up every bit of it.
“Life is full of pain, Will,” Hannibal murmurs very close to his ear. “But it is also full of so much more.”
Will feels too exhausted to argue. He’s not even sure he disagrees. Hannibal’s arms are still firm around him when the tears slow and Will leans against him, heavy and boneless. He almost doesn’t feel the feather-light kiss against his hair as he drifts off to sleep.
===
Will’s body is awake before his mind, and he’s aware of Hannibal’s shirt beneath his cheek before he understands the significance of the sensation. He’s warm and relaxed, even though his eyes are heavy and his neck is stiff. Time has passed. Hours, maybe. Hannibal hasn’t moved an inch.
Will’s mind catches up with the rest of him when he realizes that Hannibal sat as still as a statue for hours on end so he could sleep. He rears back with enough speed to set his head spinning with vertigo.
“Sorry,” he groans, jamming the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. “I didn’t mean to — you didn’t have to —“ Will’s eyes have decided to function again now that his head isn’t spinning; Hannibal comes into focus, his shirt wrinkled past all hope, a conspicuously damp area on his shoulder. Will experiences a sudden, frantic hope that he’d merely stained it with tears and not drooled in his sleep. Hannibal makes no comment either way as he gingerly rolls his shoulder forward, flexing the fingers of his right hand as if they’d lost sensation. They probably had. Will grimaces and leans forward to dump his head into his hands. “I’m an idiot,” he concludes.
“A natural display of emotion is nothing to be ashamed of, Will,” Hannibal replies, unruffled, and sounding so much like he used to in their sessions that Will feels an echo of the anger that shadowed his heart in those days. He wants to say something to diffuse the breathless feeling that has suddenly replaced all the oxygen in the room; he should probably thank Hannibal for offering silent support. But the words tangle before they can reach his tongue, and the only sound he can make is a sigh. He can feel Hannibal waiting beside him. For what, he wishes he knew.
“Are you feeling any better?” Hannibal asks eventually. Will had enjoyed the deep silence, and he wants it back. But Hannibal is standing up, now, and offering Will a hand.
Will doesn’t take it when he stands, and he doesn’t quite know why. The thank you and the sorry I fell asleep on you, but I appreciate the nap both snag in his throat again, until he’s swallowing and staring at some point behind Hannibal. He feels the distance yawn up between them until he can almost see it — a deep, black chasm, dark and churning. Hannibal’s hand falls back to his side. By the time Will blinks and forces himself to make eye contact, Hannibal is turning away. But not before Will catches a flash of something dull and black in his eyes. It tugs unpleasantly at his mind and he suppresses a shiver.
“I’ll make you some breakfast,” Hannibal says, smooth as glass. But Will hears something ragged just at the edge of his tone. The room feels like a vacuum while Hannibal walks to the door — silent, airless, lifeless. His footsteps seem unnaturally loud in the breathless quiet. When he steps through to the kitchen, Will can breathe again. But the feeling doesn’t last long.
That dull shadow in Hannibal’s eyes stays with him, staring at him mirror-like in his mind. A sound, faint at first, but building, accompanies it. A rush of memory.
Abigail’s wet gasps as her blood pulses from her neck. The searing pain of ripped flesh in his own side, their blood to pooling hot and thick around them. Hannibal’s eyes above them both, black and fathomless.
Will forgave him long ago for everything that happened that night, but the memory of Abigail is hardwired through a well-traveled path in his brain. Her memory fires a million synapses that conjure the spectral flash of a linoleum knife and the phantom smell of blood. He feels, again, the worst pain of all: the tearing sensation in his chest as Abigail faded from behind her crystal blue eyes.
The images and scents and agonies fade, leaving Will cold as he listens to Hannibal moving in a kitchen not so very different from the one where Abigail died. Hannibal has never again looked at him that way, not since that night. Not until the faint echo he’d seen just now.
Will shivers against the regret and wonders how badly he’s hurt Hannibal by being withdrawn. The man who —
Even in the privacy of his mind he flinches from the thought, and then from himself for the weakness.
Is Hannibal in love with me?
He’s been avoiding the answer to that question ever since he asked it. Hell, he’s been avoiding the question for longer than that.
Bedelia’s voice slides through his mind like vapor, cold and clinging. Could he find nourishment at the very sight of you? Bedelia’s eyes replace other, better loved gazes in his mind, her varnished contempt absorbing Hannibal’s opaque black and Abigail’s crystal blue. She watches him with icy contempt even through the filter of memory. Do you ache for him?
Will swallows painfully and acknowledges to himself that the emptiness in his chest is very definitely an ache. He lets himself wonder, at last, just how badly he’s hurt the man who loves him.
It’s strange, he thinks. After all the blood and blades and cliff’s edges that have come between them, Will’s withdrawal wounds Hannibal the most. The power to wound — it’s a power Will had never wanted, and it appears to be the only one he has.
===
Will lies awake that night, his door cracked and every nerve primed for something. He can feel Hannibal’s restlessness like the tang of static electricity in the air before a thunderstorm. He knows with absolute certainty that Hannibal is going to do something rash — and soon.
All that remains to be seen is whose blood will be spilled.
Will lies still in his bed, his fingers clutching hard at the comforter, his ears straining for sound. It’s like being on the sea again, tossed back and forth, only ever able to wait out storms and never to control them. But this time, the fickle waves that froth around him are made of silence and misjudged words.
Down the hall, Hannibal’s door opens. He moves silently, but Will feels his approach.
His shadow flashes past Will’s door without pausing. A long, silent moment later, the bolt of the front door scrapes, opens, locks back into place. Hannibal is gone.
Will is up and grasping after his shoes almost instantly. The house feels strangely empty without Hannibal’s presence, but Will is too distracted by wondering and worrying to give the sensation much thought.
He slides out the front door and hustles to the shed where Hannibal parks his motorbike. He’ll have to borrow it if he wants to pursue the fresh tire treads that have replaced their parked car. The distant glow of Hannibal’s tail lights is rapidly fading into tiny red specks in the distance. Will plucks the leather jacket from the hook beside the door and shoves Hannibal’s helmet over his head, ignoring the scent of Hannibal’s cologne clinging to the lining. The roar of the engine almost drowns out the questions pulsing in his mind like a migraine.
He wonders what Hannibal is doing as he peels away from their secluded cabin, the wind cutting through his jacket and chafing at every scrap of exposed skin. He keeps the red light of their car within a reasonable distance and uses the time to worry at the question of where Hannibal is going like a dog might lick at a wound. Can I stop him? becomes the metronome click in his mind, louder than the engine’s groans. But the question that truly consumes him is quieter, buried neatly beneath the first. He avoids thinking about it directly, but the echoes of his subconscious are loud in the mental silence he’s trying to maintain by force. Will I?
The flat, forested horizon of Manitoba speeds by, cold and sharp-edged in the unforgiving moonlight. The towering spires of pine and spruce trees stab, needle-like, at the sparsely clouded sky. The air has the metallic edge that means snow will be rolling in before the night is over.
Will ignores his shiver and focuses hard on the gleam of the moon against his asphalt path and on the distant tail lights up ahead. He doesn't have a clue where Hannibal is going. They're in the middle of nowhere by meticulous design. Unless, of course, Hannibal suggested this location with ulterior motives in mind.
Will grits his teeth in a sudden flash of anger and speeds on.
The road is lonely and dark; there's not a single streetlight here in the mostly untamed wilderness. He catches occasional glimpses of movement in the trees on either side. If he looked, he would be sure to catch the glint of an owl's eyes, or see a moose gilded in silver moonlight. He keeps his eyes trained forward, watches the miles fly by, keeps Hannibal squarely in his crosshairs.
The tail lights veer off to the left and disappear behind a wall of trees. Will matches the move, slows to examine the sign that appears in the glow of his lights.
Manitoba Meats
His heart seems to sink and rise all at once, turning heavy and immovable even as it lodges in his throat. He knows where they are even before his eyes flick down to read the rest.
A Verger Company
Will lets out a breath that steams around the edges. He understands, at last, just what Hannibal is up to so secretly in the dead of night. And he knows exactly what he has to do.
The car lights have gone dark somewhere ahead. Will cuts his engine, swings himself off the bike, and walks it into the trees. Alone in the cocoon of black branches, he cuts the lights.