Chapter Text
The way Jack ducks his head out of the door to his office, something about his expression seeming world-weary yet also drawn tight with low-burning fury all at once, and crooks two fingers to beckon Will inside instead of just saying his name, tells Will that this is not going to be a good conversation.
“Did something happen?” he asks as he steps in and closes the door behind him.
“Not yet,” says Jack, and yeah, there’s the fury he was talking about, simmering just shy of boiling over underneath the surface.
The man takes a step back to lean against his desk and crosses his arms, moving aside and allowing Will to see that they’re not alone in the room. Seated in the chair in front of Jack’s desk is Kade Prurnell, the investigator from the Inspector General’s office who once wanted to see Will fry for his alleged crimes.
Will clenches his fists at his sides, trying to hold back something ugly and dark that wants to claw its way out through his chest at just the sight of her. He can tell by the way her eyes flicker downward just for a second that it doesn’t escape her notice, but her face could be made of stone for all the expression it shows otherwise. He’d have to give her credit for that if he wasn’t so pissed off at the moment. Even now, several long months after he was exonerated of all charges, people still tend to skirt around him and look away nervously whenever they recognize who he is.
“What is this?” Will asks, not even bothering to keep the hard edge out of his voice.
“Will, just…hang on,” Jack says with a placating wave of his hand. “You need to hear this.” He sighs and turns his attention back to Prurnell. “Tell him what you just told me,” he says to her, his tone now grave.
Prurnell’s eyes flick to meet Jack’s for a moment, before she turns to better face Will and says, “As of last Friday morning, Hannibal Lecter has confessed to the murders of both the bailiff and the judge for your trial.”
Will’s anger dissipates to make room for confusion, followed immediately by sardonic amusement. “He what?” Will asks, unable to keep the laughter or disbelief out of his voice.
Prurnell’s face remains impassive. Jack, on the other hand, sighs and rubs a hand over his eyebrows as though Will’s reaction, while not unexpected, is somehow worse than his hostility from before.
Okay, so this is really happening, Will thinks, check-marking a box under the ‘Not Hallucinating or Victim of a Really Bad Prank’ category.
“Alright. So what does this mean?” he asks.
“It means,” Prurnell begins to explain, dragging the words out in a way that makes Will want to grind his teeth, as though she thinks she’s talking to a child, “that the only charge still standing against Matthew Brown is one count of attempted murder. The prosecution has dropped the other charges.”
Oh. Will blinks. He’s sort of embarrassed to admit he’d forgotten about Brown’s trial altogether. He’s had bigger things on his mind since his own release from the madhouse, him along with the rest of the country. Brown’s crimes were never as highly publicized as the Ripper’s or the Copycat’s, so no one in the justice system ever saw the urgency in pushing his trial date forward, allowing the courts to drag their feet on the issue.
Then Hannibal Lecter’s sins had caught up with him at last, and the world watched in slack-jawed horror and appreciative awe as the Trial of the Century commenced, revealing the identities of the Chesapeake Ripper and the Copycat Killer as one and the same—and thus spawning the birth of a new nickname more tasteless and garish than anything previously created on Freddie Lounds’ blog, Hannibal the Cannibal.
The courts had been rather keen on wrapping that case up with as much pomp and fanfare as possible, not satisfied until every sordid detail of Lecter’s life had been dragged out into the light and ensured that he earned all nine of his consecutive life sentences in the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.
This had the understandable effect of delaying all other ‘lesser’ trials even further, including the now long overdue one for Will’s former admirer.
“The man really does know how to make arrogance into an art form,” says Will, unimpressed. “Now he’s even going so far as to take credit he doesn’t deserve for work he didn’t do.” How rude, Will thinks, and pulls his lips into a thin line because he’s positive the smile that wants to come out would be wildly inappropriate at best and utterly horrific at worst.
“Unfortunately, it’s not up for you or me to decide what Lecter is found guilty of,” says Prurnell, now rising from her seat to stand. “The courts have accepted his confession almost without question. The only thing left on the table for Brown’s trial is his attempt to kill Lecter.”
“Is that what you came all this way to tell Jack?” asks Will. “Because I’m not really seeing the point here. I don’t care what Brown’s charged with as long as he’s in jail. He’s guilty, and last I checked, attempted murder is still very much a big deal in Maryland, showy cannibals with a weakness for the spotlight aside. They’re going to put him away no matter what,” he says.
Jack is still unusually quiet throughout all this, just takes another deep breath and looks every inch the tired, burnt-out old widower he unfortunately is.
Somehow, after Will’s done speaking, even Prurnell seems wearier, and for once he’s not the one who seems to have trouble maintaining eye contact. The evasion makes something cold and disquieting creep tendrils along his spine.
“What?” he asks. “What am I missing?”
“Will,” Jack says finally, his voice far gentler than Will’s heard it in some time, probably since Bella’s passing. “Brown’s lawyer is going to spin this in any way he can in his client’s favor.”
“Isn’t that what lawyers do?” Will asks, feeling belligerent and wishing he could channel some more of that morbid humor from earlier. “He can’t change the facts.”
“He doesn’t need to change the facts,” Prurnell says as sharply as ever, her momentary lapse into something a little more sympathetic than normal already gone. “He just needs to change the motive.”
“Change the motive?” Will turns to face her again. He feels at sea here and he doesn’t like it.
“The new angle,” she says, her voice dripping with scorn that, for once, isn’t meant for Will but makes him want to cringe all the same, “is that Matthew Brown is a tender-hearted but misguided soul who, after deciding he believed a certain patient’s claims of innocence and feeling ever so protective of this wrongly accused man under his care, took it upon himself to seek justice on his own and end the Ripper’s reign of terror once and for all.”
Will feels something strange swell in his chest and rise like bile up his throat, but he’s not sure what it is until it bursts past his lips—deep, uncontrollable bouts of laughter so rich and thick he can hardly breathe through it and, judging by the looks Jack and Prurnell are now giving him, bordering on just this side of hysteria.
“Are you…” Will stops for a second to catch his breath before he continues. “This is a joke. You’re joking, right?”
Prurnell takes an uneasy step back from him. When he seems to have regained his composure a bit, she says, “Vigilantism, as you know, while still a serious crime is nothing compared to what he’s currently accused of.”
“Being a vicious homicidal psychopath who kills because he can and because it’s fun,” Will says flippantly. It’s not entirely accurate to his own portrait of what the man is, but he thinks it gets his point across.
Prurnell nods her head in acknowledgment. “Frankly, it makes me and anyone else who can see what kind of monster he is sick to our stomachs.”
None of you can see what kind of monster he is, Will thinks. “But…” he trails off expectantly.
“But…it’s already leaked onto the internet and it’s only a matter of time before the press catches on as well. So far, public opinion seems to lean towards Matthew Brown as a righteous figure who is being unjustly punished for having the courage to stand against the Devil himself. They’re treating him like a goddamned unsung folk hero,” she says. “There’s already an outcry for his release. Every law enforcement department with even the thinnest thread of involvement in this, from my office to the presiding judge to the head of the FBI, has been seeing a flood of phone calls, emails, even tweets that say ‘Free Matthew Brown’ or whatever in their twitter feeds since noon yesterday.”
Will turns his head to look over at Jack. “The head of the FBI has a twitter feed?” he asks wryly. Jack just shrugs.
“My point is that you might want to start taking this more seriously, Mr. Graham. I only came to tell you this as a courtesy. I’m not the object of an unhealthy fixation by a serial killer,” she says.
Two of them, Will mentally corrects. He frowns. “Since when has public opinion held sway over a judge’s ruling?” he asks.
The look she gives him manages to appear both scathing and pitying at the same time. “Surely you are not so naïve as that. Probably as we speak, Brown’s lawyer is in Justice Peters’ office requesting that his sentence be reduced to time served. It’s what I would do in his place.” She straightens as she says, “Keeping in mind his constituency, Peters would be a fool not to at least consider it. Do you still find this situation funny, Mr. Graham?”
No, he doesn’t find it funny. Will feels like the world is tilting on its axis, like any moment he’s going to slip and fall off the edge of the earth. Distantly, he hears Jack say, “Well, what if Will testifies—”
“No,” Prurnell interrupts. “The prosecution would never put him on the stand. Unless he has concrete evidence hidden up his sleeve somewhere, his testimony will never hold in a courtroom.”
“Why the hell not? He’s the man who caught the Chesapeake Ripper!”
“I don’t care if he’s the goddamn pope, Agent Crawford. Any testimony your friend here can provide will be information he learned while undergoing psychiatric care in a mental institution.”
They keep arguing like this for Will doesn’t know how long. He doesn’t hear any of it.
It feels as though nothing has changed, as though nothing he’s done since the scales were lifted from his eyes and he faced off against the man who represented his own living nightmares has amounted to anything at all. He clutches unconsciously over his shirt at the jagged scar that runs horizontally over part of his torso and asks, “What does he even get out of all this?”
“Who?” Jack asks confusedly, interrupting Prurnell mid-rant. “Brown?”
“No. Lecter.”
That pulls Jack up short. “You think he saw this coming?”
“Jack,” says Will impatiently. “It’s Hannibal Lecter.”
“Who cares?” Prurnell snaps suddenly. “He’s crazy. You’re crazy. Matthew Brown is crazy. You all deserve each other,” she says.
Jack looks like he’s about to say something very regrettable to this woman who technically outranks him, but she cuts him off before he can speak. “I think I’ll take my leave of you both now. Good day, gentlemen.” With that, she skirts past Will and strides out of Jack’s office, and hopefully out of Will’s life for good.
Now only Will and Jack are left standing together stiffly in the ensuing silence. It’s too loud. Will wants to go home to his dogs.
“I’ll see about getting you a protection detail,” Jack says finally.
“Don’t bother.”
“Will…”
Will shakes his head and sighs. “Don’t worry about it,” he says. “Brown won’t try to hurt me.”
Jack narrows his eyes at Will. “You’re sure about that?” he asks.
Absolutely not. “Yes.”
Jack clearly doesn’t believe him, but Will doesn’t care. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he says awkwardly, and leaves.
When he gets home, he’s tempted to open his laptop and look at what’s being said for himself, or turn on the TV to see if it’s on any news reports yet. He does neither of these things.
Instead he pours himself a stiff drink, downs it all in one go, then whistles for the dogs to come outside with him and runs around with them in the yard until it’s almost too dark to see.