Work Text:
One slightly loose bootlace.
Exactly two seconds of locking eyes with Hannibal Lecter and that harsh valley of blood and life and death all wrapped into one experience.
A slow blink, trying to push through the mental morass straining at the edges of thought in a way that even Garret Jacob Hobbs didn’t provide enough of a tectonic shift for.
That was all it took for Will to trip over his feet and plunge forwards. He cusses, dizzy and reeling, having hit his head hard on the mirror of a parked ambulance, and rubs his face exhaustedly as he bends to tie his shoe— and trips again, the sudden hit of adrenaline blinding, the beveled steel of the organ harvester’s ambulance’s back stoop inches away— the world tunnels—
His arms are doused in stickiness and snatched up in a clawing grip, pulled painfully like the legs of a rabbit strung up to cure. Hannibal looks down at him, eyes wide and wild. Will thinks, mind racing, that maybe he’s hallucinating the curl of his lip, the show of his teeth, the dark desperation in his eyes that only wolves or sharks or hawks with a limb in a steel trap can show, all rearing and full of determined violence channeled towards survival—
There’s a sharp, shaky gasp behind them, under the ambulance’s LED lights, that quickly turns into a sludgy, sputtering gasp, and a flurry of movement, and shouts— the clattering of a wheeled stretcher screeching to a stop— silence, in the ambulance company’s garage.
A man in a navy-blue ambulance uniform doffs his ballcap, emblazoned with a medical cross and the company slogan. A nearby driving intern yanks their beanie off their head, chunky sneakers slapping on the asphalt, and goes to retch in a corner, shaking, with several others. The agents stare in silence. Jimmy’s hand is clutching his face, cheeks pale, and Jack looks like a landed fish, mouth gaping open.
Jack shakes himself loose and strides towards them both. Will registers the oozing, velvety-wet slaps of intestines slowly unspooling onto pavement, staining the black asphalt impossibly blacker.
Hannibal’s Hippocratic oath is in tatters for all to see just like his bloodstained shirt and vest with the underarms torn wide. The sudden burst of motion broke open the stitches and the body behind him at once. The abdomen of the organ harvester’s victim is splayed asunder like an overripe fruit from the exposed insides out.
He lets Will slide safely to the ground, and half of his immediate state of shock doesn’t need to be faked. He never loses control of his actions, at the very least. And he never, ever loses control of actions of importance to his nature in a public manner, much less displays them at all— and he’s just done all of that in front of the head of behavioral science and a small crowd of civilians and FBI agents. Predictably driven and bureaucratically restricted as Jack may be, this will be a memory that everyone here is likely to let worm away at them until it burrows in and settles in the back of their minds.
Hannibal takes a shuddering breath, and goes to put a hand to his forehead, only for sticky warmth and bile to smear over his gelled hair.
He registers a nurse who must’ve been in the straggling remnants of the crowd checking his pulse, flashing a pen light in front of his eyes. “He’s in shock,” she declares to Jack, “He and the other man both. A couple inches further, and…” she pales, eyes flicking to the gurney being rolled out the back of the ambulance at a brisk jog, the sheet over it scarlet. “He’s very lucky to have had someone catch him.” Jack nods, mouth taut. A trail of belated guilts is blooming in his eyes as he helps Will to his feet, directing Jimmy over to help Hannibal.
Will stands beside Jack, swaying a bit before steadying himself, blinking slow, trembling like a newborn fawn. His brown curls are glossed in the blood and viscera of where Hannibal’s hands had reached for him, pulled him upward and close from where the mess of gore had spattered him.
At first he thinks Will is fearful, tense, shattering with finality— but then he meets his eyes, and they’re like cutting slivers of aquamarine, pupils dilated like hungry drops of ink. Will is shaking with the flood of adrenaline, basking in it, almost, as if the blood was some kind of baptismal.
He stares into Hannibal’s eyes and they burn like fire and he knows, he knows deep down that Will’s monster has smelt his own, is chasing it down— and then Jack guides him away by the crook of the arm, like an invalid.
Has he ever been, his mind on fire as it is? He sees me. But is that new after all, or was this only the tipping point…?
Jimmy gently pulls him aside for some questions, and he goes just as easily as he spins half-truths about losing patients as a surgeon and forgetting his limits, as much as it pains him.
Hannibal, gentlemanly to a fault as benevolent Doctor Lecter always should be, insists he wants to find the poor man’s family and settle things with them.
Beverly runs the victim’s ID and records, the organ harvester is questioned before being passed off to the judicial department, and they learn he’d been a severe addict who’d been clean for several years. He’d been in a hole of debt and had thought that the money he’d get from selling a kidney through back-alley surgery was his solution. Nobody shows up for anything to be settled with, and Hannibal is coldly relieved.
*****
Thursday comes, and Will is late. Twenty minutes late, and he has always made it a firm routine to be no more than four or five minutes tardy to his appointments with Hannibal at the very most. He walks in the door, dark circles under his eyes. They’re wider than the usual ones induced by abysmal Quantico coffee, nightmares, and Hannibal’s treatments to strip the caterpillar of the leaves and thorns ensconcing it to guide it into its overdue chrysalis.
“….Sorry I’m late,” Will says, rubbing a hand over his clearly day-old stubble, trying not to look as if he feels the relief he’s so clearly showing, managing to turn a slumping sit into an abrupt yet-straight backed planting of his feet, trying to relax his shoulders as he settles in the chair. His shoe rubs across the carpet in a nervous tic, head tilting almost imperceptibly towards the noise. He looks over at where Hannibal is posed primly on his chair, notebook nearly forgotten on his lap at this sudden and painfully unexpected decrease in lucidity and function. His eyes track across his face and the room in flitting, wavering lines like the ticker of a pulse monitor, up-down, up-up-down, up-down.
“Will,” Hannibal says, and the short, velveteen softness of his voice surprises even him— he’d meant for it to be smooth, comfortable, calm. Easily misconstrued and missed, Hannibal decides.
He allows himself a firm breath. I should not care what his opinion of the barest change in inflection is. It’s only my judgment that matters in this room. I should not care about a patient’s impressions of me. Therapy, psychiatry— sculpting the finished form from the rough marble— it is about my impressions of the person before me and their response, and that alone.
“Have you been struggling with new nightmares? Having any new bouts of sleepwalking? You know it’s important to tell me these things, Will. Forgive my frankness, but— you don’t look well at all. You know I care for you”
Will laughs, a sharp bark of a thing, and nods his head. His arms slide to the side of the chair’s armrest, letting them hang. “Do I ever look well? Hale and healthy… Up to FBI agent standards? There’s a reason I failed the exams…”
Yes, you often look well. Windswept on the rough breezes of the storm winds battering the forts of your beautiful mind, dark hair laid across your brow. Not out of place within the works of John William Waterhouse, or Michelangelo. I imagine your eyes will be the piercing hues of distant stars when they’re cleared of the fog I’ve further fostered….
“There is. And it’s because you do not fit with what the FBI demands of official agents— individual scaffoldings over a common blueprint. And yet Jack relies on you so, cajoled you to work as a Special Agent. You are better than them thanks to your differences despite the struggles they may cause, and that intimidates them.”
Will snorts, gazing out the window absently through the red-and-white billows of Hannibal’s office curtains. He thinks of the ruddy salmon-pink and blue-veined spools of intestines, of something just out of reach, of opaque glass like that of the cup from the office’s discreet liquor cabinet that Hannibal hands him instead of a wine glass, filled with ice water.
“Some lazy analysis there, Doctor, but not entirely inaccurate. People tend to fear what they don’t or can’t understand. Fear of the dark is why nightlights get sold. I wouldn’t say I’m feared. More like… watched out of the corner of the eye. Marked as risky. I wouldn’t say they’re wrong about that.”
Hannibal takes a sip of his own usual glass of red wine. “And are you afraid of the dark, Will? People may deride that fear as childish, but it is baked into our very DNA as a species. With the advent of modernity, darkness has become a symbol of the existential or a pathway to depths of the self we cannot otherwise experience in our very busy lives.”
“People aren’t afraid of the dark,” Will says, wetting his chapped lips, “They’re afraid of the possibilities of what could reside within it. How bad it could be for them. A personal reflection.”
“Could darkness— the shadows of the subconscious, of dreams and nightmares and one’s instincts, if we’re to commit to being Jungian— be a medium of growth, then?”
“No.” Will replies with a sudden rush of conviction. “No. You need to be able to see what’s ahead of you to grow. Otherwise it’s not growth, it’s just…” he waves his hands in the air, and the gesture is limp and shaky as he had to pause to find his words. It felt so very off for the Will Hannibal is usually privy to. “Risks. Taking risks.”
Hannibal pauses with his glass halfway to his mouth at Will’s words, his mind churning to a stop. He cannot not monitor the progress of Will’s encephalitis, such a rare and varied condition with no one given cause, without the proper medical equipment and specialized knowledge that wasn’t in his former surgeon’s repertoire. Sutcliffe is a weak link, he had already expressed doubts and resistance to circumventing regulation and law when they last discussed Will’s true diagnosis. And now Will has steeply declined.
Will— Will Graham, this shaky, self-defeating, beautiful man he’s known for a handful of months— has made a hurricane of him. For the second time in his life, with crushing certainty of blame, no avenues of weakness or youth or hollowing, no hungry needs to be explored— he fears that he’s ruined something irreplaceable.
Someone irreplaceable.
*****
He’s stunningly glad when Will gets checked into the hospital, a mild concussion from bumping against the ambulance mirror having worsened with him avoiding treatment for it. Jack Crawford calls him, panicking, about how Will had nearly passed out and almost face-planted into a corpse that had been found in a golf course lake with its chest hacked open— Hannibal’s hand tightens on the phone, thinking of the smell, the slimy feel against his pale, dewy skin, the bacteria. The disgrace.
He makes a mental note to chalk any of Brian Zeller’s recent snappiness towards Will up to excess stress. Being polite and quick enough to catch him makes up for it, and stress does make meat overly tough.
Hannibal lets opera music swirl through the kitchen as he dices carrots, beets, ginseng and ginger, thyme and bok choy. The soup broth is bubbling on the stove, and his hand hovers over the cuts of meat wrapped in butcher paper in the fridge. He selects a prime cut of thigh and sets to cubing it, adds some diced rice noodles to the soup with a cloud of fragrant steam.
He ladles his gift into a Tupperware and chooses to focus on more important matters than why he used a very fine cut meant for his weekend dinner party from a jogger who spat on the sidewalk as he passed and why he’d felt like listening to music from Wagner’s Tristan Und Isolde in particular.
Will is sitting upright in his hospital bed when Hannibal enters his small room, looking out the window across the concrete rooftops and planted trees of the Baltimore General Hospital building complex. He has not one, not two, but three IV’s in, one in his right arm and two in his left. There’s a glass of water by his bedside and a pill organizer. An overlarge bouquet of bright sunset lilies and yellow roses and daisies color the dull beige and white room. It has a card beside it, turned face down. The bouquet accosts Hannibal’s senses, nearly acidic in its false freshness. He wrinkles his nose at its brilliance and looks to Will.
“Hello, Will. How are you feeling?” Will turns, and runs a hand through his limp curls, sighing as he briefly glances down at his papery hospital clothes and the thin blankets.“Hello, Doctor Lecter. I’m feeling… grateful.”
Hannibal hums curiously, and turns the card over to find a “get well soon” note signed by the team at the BAU. “I’d say I might’ve actually done myself a favor, tripping over my shoelaces. I had a minor concussion. Don’t know if Alana or Jack told you, but Zeller caught me when I almost faceplanted in a much worse place at a crime scene on Tuesday. All I really needed was some literal instability on top of everything else, right? I, uh, never did thank you for catching me.”
Hannibal smiles over at him, and tells a lie. “No need to thank me. It’s an easy decision to make to save a life, Will.” It isn’t an easy decision to make for me. I have a different precedent with such things. It’s far easier and more satisfying to decide to take a life, to abandon a life, to deconstruct and splice out a life. It shouldn’t have been so natural, yet it was. I cannot remember a time I strived to save a life for the fact of it being a life alone. And that is the hard part.
“Well. Thank you anyways.” Will says, expression softening. Hannibal nods and removes the Tupperware and a a soup spoon from his lunch bag and passes it over to Will. Will quirks a brow, smiling slightly as he gazes back at him, the soup hovering in the space between them. A beat passes, Hannibal’s mouth parted to say I thought it might bolster your recovery, homeliness and nostalgia can be a placebo cure all their own, but the words don’t come out.
Will’s eyes are clear, so clear, like broken glass catching the cold hospital light and the dim rays from the window, swirling, ever-falling and reforming— his hand curls around the Tupperware, eyes briefly wide, and he asks for the spoon. Hannibal hands it to him, and he hesitates over the soup for a moment before shaking himself out of a strange daze and plunging his spoon in.
He groans around the spoon in appreciation, and Hannibal shivers at the harmless sound beneath his suit jacket and admonishes himself internally. “Mmmmh. Thank you, really, you didn’t need to do all this. I’ve been living off of ham sandwiches, oatmeal, and ravioli from the cafeteria for days now. They won’t even let me have coffee. Something or other about my metabolism.”
Hannibal smiles. “I didn’t have to, but I wanted to. I often do things because I want to do them, believe it or not.” “Are you calling yourself selfish, Doctor?” “Perhaps. But I’d say that my intent is to express that I do things based on the worth of them.”
Will sips his soup in silence, and shifts in bed to ring the call button for pain meds. He hands Hannibal back his Tupperware and spoon, and the fact that there are only a few stray drops in the bottom makes Hannibal feel irrationally pleased. His knowledge of psychiatry and psychoanalytic theory is whispering to him about the act of feeding someone, of providing, of the act being something wanted and cherished and—
He stands up, straightening his coat lapels, forcibly cutting off that train of thought. A good, hard workout will do him well tonight. His pantry needs stocking.
He bids Will goodbye, and Will does not look him in the eyes again, seemingly wholly engrossed in a newspaper crossword as he sips his cup of water.
He tells himself that his brow furrows and his gut curls because of the rudeness of not bidding a proper goodbye to someone who’d been visiting.
He does not know exactly how much longer he can keep turning his masks and painted faces inwards. He knows that the limit is approaching, and it feels like a hurricane looming on the horizon, the great crashes of thunder promising cutting illumination.
Hannibal shares some calculated worries with the attending doctor in the hallway, and the puzzle begins to fall properly into place when she shakes his hand and says If only everyone was lucky enough to have a doctor at home like Mr Graham.
He considers killing her but decides against it, feeling shaken, and wonders at his own blindness alone in his wide, cold bed that night like a man realizing the oasis pool he’d been drinking from was simply a wavering mirage over desert sand, burning the throat and palms.
*****
Will gets his head cleared from what the doctors had discovered was the combined issues of a concussion and anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis, no thanks to the repulsive clinical smells, patronizing nurses and coursing emotions of the hospital.
With clarity comes rage.
It’s made all the more scathing with disappointment in himself and his abilities, the shame and bitterness over how it had been almost too easy for Hannibal, with how he was, how he’d been his whole life. His brain had been smoldering with fever, and the doctors said he’d been lucky that it had been caught so early. He’d been belly-up, weaknesses showing. Someone had finally understood— and Hannibal did understand, truly— but what he did and had done with that brittle honor was what mattered.
And so Will cancels his appointments through voicemail and takes leave from the BAU and Quantico for two weeks, citing recovery precautions (and knowing that it certainly isn’t a lie, not really. Buster had gotten sick from scrounging when he’d overslept after a follow-up. He never fed his dogs people food— even sausage. He remembers Price’s recent quip on a scene about the removal of a victim’s intestines, and things start to make sense.)
He gathers his thoughts. Drinks a lot, because whisky is one old friend that can never lie about how it twists the backhanded knife. Reacquaints himself with himself, between a lot of staring in the bathroom mirror and sitting out in the dark fields at night and reading old journals of his.
Will thumbs through the pages of the leather-bound journals he’d kept to order his thoughts on cases and killers and victims, smiling with bittersweet self-pity at a pages on the last journal, left half-filled. The rust-red stain of a paper cut on a corner, the usual linear, scratchy script of his handwriting turning shakier when the curves and lines of O and S and Y are written, his words more stilted nearing the pages where the ribbon bookmark had been left.
He takes a sip of the thick ceramic mug of tea balanced on his knee beside a ballpoint pen, setting the journal aside to pick up the previous ones.
He’d forgotten how much he’d written about the Chesapeake Ripper, before.
He goes back to work, but not to therapy, not to Hannibal. Not yet. The team is almost hilariously overjoyed at the fact that he’s more amiable and collected, complete with a new and better aftershave he’d picked up at the mall, along with a few new, less worn-out flannels and coats.
Hannibal has given him inspiration through wrath and clear sight, and isn’t that what the Old Testament said God often channeled? He picks up the brush of his mind and paints with it. It’s when he’s staring into the sinkhole of a head that belonged to a man who killed children he gave music lessons to make violin strings, sweat pooling in his black rubber gloves and tee shirt soaked with red, that he realizes with full force that Hannibal could’ve let him die.
Should’ve let him die, and now Will allows himself to briefly mull over the logistics of it. It would’ve been a perfect end to the risks he places on Hannibal as an FBI agent, as a patient, as someone who’s gotten so close on so many levels and who had wielded his empathy like a sword in the hands of a child thanks to his sickness.
If he had been Hannibal……. The thought is useless. He would’ve done the same, no matter the more logical choice.
You’re alone because you’re unique. I’m as alone as you are. You and I are just alike.
He can’t get the reversed scenario of Hannibal being the one to fall out of his head, of Will just watching as he became a glorious fountain of red, eyes rolling back with exquisite agony, of his hands scooping out Hannibal’s exposed brain as if plucking a flesh-pale lotus from the gushing bowl of his skull.
Will lets the shower run hotter now that it’s November, and in the warmth he thinks his mind is tricking him for a sliver of a moment, perhaps as an apology for more malevolent illusions. But no strong, slender hands and broad chests and low-lidded amber eyes appear. He knows all too well now why his newest aftershave, left uncapped on the sink, smells of warm, sweet leather, wine and blackcurrant and sandalwood musk.
Jack brings up the Ripper again when a local councilman is found with his body unfurled from sternum to pelvis and filled with flowers on a stray cherry tree, and he has Will go over all the old files with his blessedly re-organized mind.
He does not tell Jack or the team that the triangle-petaled blue flowers nestled in the victim’s abdomen that Jimmy misidentifies as common periwinkles are actually wild sweet williams.
*****
In the bowels of the BAU record archives, the catacomb-like halls of concrete and corkboards and metal shelving chilled with dusty air conditioning, he finds a thin folder about a monster in the foreign crime section. It bears a glorious photograph— Zephyrus and Chloris, spring’s life painted in promising strokes on death’s canvas.
He knows the hands that moved the limbs, that laid the selected flowers, that shifted the silks. He’s thought about them much too often, and in the dim shelf row lights, Will lets the pendulum swing, and smiles, softly.
The last person to find a marker on the map to the center of this Minoan maze of clues— complete with a lurking, lonely monster— did not make it back into this building for a second look. He can feel the certainty drumming at his breastbone. He doesn’t need his empathy to paint him this picture, not anymore. He could know the killer blind, in the dark, with nothing beside the braille of memory. If the building’s power cut off now, he could taste it in the air, feel the shadow of him curl at his back like a lover, a palm over the heart, cupped against a cheek.
He unclips his trusty old pocketknife from his pants, digs out the ziploc bag from his sandwich lunch along with it, and takes the time to shred the dusty foreign file into slivers. He deposits it in the soggy trash can of the red-tiled bathroom that he once plunged his face into the sinks of.
Better to face the dark and dirty water than to look around and have the tile gloss start to morph into blood and the carved-out hollows of splayed ribs, an echo of his usual self on the tip of his tongue that he felt like he wanted to bite off— to taste the copper, to hear a click of teeth like the turn of a gun chamber, like a hunting knife unfolding, like bone on bone on flesh.
Now, though, Will lets his vision linger as he washes his hands. He idly exercises the atrophied muscles of his mind by calling those same visions to heel, letting them spool out, winding them back in. A kaleidoscope of brilliant, dripping death coalesces all around him before spiraling into nothing as the soap suds vanish down the drain, and he revels in being able to shift the lens of his empathy with intent once more.
Will asks Beverly Katz about the best place to find Italian pastries in Baltimore. He doesn’t ask Beverly Katz about her thoughts on the best place to find the limbs and organs of Ripper victims in basement freezers, or whether his suspicions of Doctor Hannibal Lecter hold water, because he knows he doesn’t need to.
The surprise on Will’s face at the fact that Hannibal’s waiting room and schedule are both empty at that familiar time of 7:00 on Thursday is only ousted by the surprise on Hannibal’s when he knocks. There’s genuine delight— and Will feels his throat bob at the knowledge of that— on his face when Will hands him a small dessert box of citrus and melon panna cotta, his hands steady.
Hannibal sits, and Will pulls up a chair for himself beside his desk, pretending not to notice Hannibal watching the flex of his thighs and biceps as he angles the heavy piece of posh furniture into place. If he lifts a little higher and swipes the bangs from his eyes just for show, it’s his business.
Hannibal produces a fork and knife from his lunch and cuts the dessert in two and Will takes the knife as his utensil wordlessly. He slices a gleaming, airy, savory-sweet sliver and slides it onto the flat of the knife, raising it to his lips.
Will licks his lips. Slides the knife deep into his mouth. Lets his tongue lave the steel curve clean with a hum of appreciation, dexterous pink tip curling over sharp silver one. His eyes glide up to lock onto Hannibal’s, and there’s a glacial fire in them so freezing it burns like molten lava. Hannibal wishes he could drown in it.
“You know,” Will says, tone dipping low with a purposeful lilt to his words, “I’ve heard that melon, citrus, and cream can all pair nicely with well-selected pork.”
The desk is shoved out of place with a screech over the office rug, Will jumps to his feet and moves to step back—
Hannibal lunges hopelessly fast to grab his arm, and they both freeze. Will is breathing hard, a grin like the blade of the knife splitting his pretty lips, ethereal eyes dancing. There’s creamy panna cotta splatter all over his cobalt button up and some of Hannibal’s work papers are just whispering to the floor amidst a mess of pens, desk trinkets and books.
Will’s become the definition of a complete mess in more ways than his stained shirt, a force of nature plowing through Hannibal’s perfect life and careful plans with the inevitability of fate. A liability, an inconvenience, an embarrassment to all he has ever aimed to make of himself.
Hannibal’s grip tightens on his forearm as Will looks down at the mess on his shirt and swipes a finger through it, slowly licking it clean, his questioning words enunciated oh so precisely.
“He is witty, graceful, lovely to look at, lovable to be with…”
“… He has also ruined my life. So I can’t help loving him— it is the only thing to do. Oscar Wilde.”
Will nods and laughs like the Devil himself at that, unabashed in his pride and joy. He’s the most beautiful fallen angel Hannibal has ever seen, after all, so the mocking isn’t unforgivable— it’s only fitting for him.
The only thing to do, indeed, Hannibal thinks, and pulls him in with a kiss.