Chapter Text
Seeing William’s broken body makes Hannibal’s heart shatter harder than his own femur when it clips the jagged rocks on his way down. When Will grips him and leads them over the edge, perhaps they might have both made it. But the fragile skin beneath his loose curls gives way easily when it collides with the cliffside. The fractured hovel outpours heavy blood and skull fragments and bits of his occipital lobe. Lamentations echo against the bluffs in a symphony with the crashing of waves. Will always hated the symphony. His heart has already stopped beating when Hannibal reaches him, and Hannibal wishes more than anything that he could feel the lup-dup pound one last time into the palm of his hand around his throat or past his lips grazing the soft spot below Will’s earlobe, but his chest cavity is wholly empty without even a growl of hunger. His years as a surgeon make no assistance in his attempts for resuscitation.
With his obliterated femur, Hannibal pulls Will's lifeless body into the sailboat and sets off. He named her Winston’s howl, but there is no one to appreciate the sentiment now. The burning agony radiating from his leg howls in tandem.
The Chesapeake Ripper never strikes again. Eventually the FBI moves on, hunting killers who pose a real threat to the public, and soon the man becomes an old fable that is only discussed on conspiracy podcasts broadcast from mothers’ basements. The BAU walks through the halls like a recessional march until everyone who knew Will Graham has quit or moved on; Jack retires in solitude without Bella—only Hannibal Lecter as a companion in his mind, his own now closer to evil than he will ever admit.
Hannibal was a scholar, but he was no scientist. Still, as the months and years pass, his library fills with every book, essay, lecture, diagram, blog rambling, and science fiction novel that may uncover a formula to fix Will’s ruined skull and undo what time has done. He calculates the speed of light in every language forward and backward until the theory of relativity is but a picture book he read as a child. He tampers with circuit boards and battery cells from sunrise to sunset until the leaves change colors and—slowly, then all at once—fifteen years have passed. Once tanned skin is now pale and littered with wrinkles, and his hair shines with more gray than sandy blond. Suits lay dusted and would drape over him like a poncho protecting him from the rain if he ever went outside and put one on. His psyche has been cracked in half and he doesn’t recognize himself in the mirror, even when holding a knife.
With time, the mad-man scribbles become hard fact, and the piles of scrap metal and junked microprocessors are modified into a functional piece of machinery. He refuses to spend even a moment considering this is a dead man’s plight. Hannibal isn’t dead yet. His prior tests have all proven failures, but he corrected his mathematics over and over, and all science points to this being it.
All he can do now is flip the circuits on.