Chapter Text
For all the time spent laboring over the philosophies of life and death (taking life, creating death) over the past three years, Will Graham hasn’t actually given much thought to the afterlife. Not in any practical sense, anyway. Though now he supposes, if there is going to be one, perpetual ink-black darkness and searing, unending pain seems as fitting an afterlife as he is bound to get. Because surely - surely - he could not have survived the drop into the Atlantic. Not with a stab wound to the face and the shoulder, not when falling that far is supposed to be akin to hitting pavement. He feels like he’s hit pavement; beaten, flattened, gored. Pink mist, he thinks. I should be pink mist.
Except then there’s light and sound, the void broken by sunlight filtering past sand-crusted eyelashes. Opening his eyes, Will sees a seagull flying overhead, dipping low out of his line of vision, then cresting suddenly back up, up, up, towards the sun. He tracks it until it is out of his line of sight again, and then watches the expanse of blue sky, clouds rolling unhurriedly along. Abigail is here too, in this moment, watching the sky as well, laying by his side in the sand. She doesn’t say anything and he doesn’t need her to.
And then his relative peace is shattered by a burst of ocean-water vomit, tinged with blood, ripping out of him with such force he has to roll onto his side to avoid choking to death. When the last of it comes up, he wipes his mouth and tries to sit up, using his good arm to hoist his weight as best he can. Surveying the rocky beach, Will sees he’s alone. Pulled far enough from the water-line, however, that he couldn’t possibly have washed up to this spot unassisted. Hannibal lived too, then, and had brought Will's lifeless body to this beach before taking his leave of him.
“Okay,” He says out loud. Okay. He lived, and Hannibal lived. It was always a coin-toss, how this went down, though he can’t pretend that he hadn’t wanted it to just be over. The pushing and pulling, the warring, sparring, stabbing and bleeding and hurting. With that thought the image of Francis Dolarhyde’s blood coating his arms, black in the moonlight, so striking he couldn’t help but observe it out-loud, fills his vision entirely. He’d seen it, in that moment – seen it through his own eyes and nobody else’s. Felt the exaltation, all his own, the unbridled beauty he’d been forcing himself to look away from for so many years. And he’d reached for Hannibal, then, because-
Because-
When the memory releases him there is no pendulum swing. No stepping back into himself. Just him, alone, and the long, empty beach; his bloody sea-water vomit running rivulets in the sand as it makes its way back towards the ocean.
“He threw you off of a cliff.” Chiyoh’s gaze is unflinching, staring back at him openly. She had never hid from Hannibal’s eye contact the way others had - a product of familiarity, he supposes, of bearing the weight of his gaze for so many years.
“Us,” Hannibal says. “He threw us off of a cliff. An important distinction, I think.”
Chiyoh leans back in her seat, drumming her fingers on the small plastic table that separates them. The boat rocks with the tide, and Hannibal has to catch the small medical supply bag before it slides off the table and onto the floor. He returns to stitching the bullet wound at his side, not looking at her while she decides how to respond. He understands why she didn’t want to take Will with them, but it doesn’t do anything to soothe the lingering curl of. . . of what? Pooling low in his gut. Anxiety? Fear? He knows Will can take care of himself, and that they’d left him on the beach very much alive. Not fear, then. Something hollow, bereft.
Hannibal thinks of him, waking up alone, torn flesh hanging from his jaw, arm hanging uselessly at his side. He wonders what he’ll do - no phone to call Jack, miles away from the cliff house and undoubtedly not enough strength to find his way back, even if he could get his bearings. They’d brought him on board briefly, ferried him a few miles down the coastline and away from the eventual FBI sweep, and left him ashore. He’d stayed unconscious the entire time, Hannibal hovering over his still form to monitor his breathing and heart rate. Hannibal had wanted to do more for his wounds, but Chiyoh wouldn’t have it, convinced that fussing over him would cause Will to regain consciousness and he would try to finish the job he started. Hannibal wasn’t sure she was wrong. So, in the end, all he did was a visual exam, to make sure Will’s wounds weren’t immediately life-threatening, and deposit him on the beach to wake up and forge a path forward on his own.
Will is resourceful, resilient. He’ll find a way. Hannibal still finds it distasteful, though, to leave him there, wounds untended. Even gutted on his kitchen floor in Baltimore, he knew ambulances were on the way and that, even if Will succumbed to his injuries, he wouldn’t die alone. He was with Abigail, after all.
“Did he intend for you to live?” Chiyoh finally asks. Hannibal is quiet, considering. He finishes the stitches, bandages the wound, and pulls his sweater back down over his abdomen.
“I told him once that, despite all my whisperings through the chrysalis, I could never entirely predict the creature that would hatch. It would follow its own nature,” Hannibal says. When she doesn’t seem satisfied with that, “I think it was a decision born in the moment. I don’t know that even Will knew what he intended.”
She nods, once, and stands. They’ve been anchored for several hours, so it’s time to continue their trek out of the channel and into the open ocean. Another few hours should do it. Then he’s free to go anywhere, start another life in some faraway city. Host parties, hunt freely, stock up his closet again and prowl for ostentatious art to decorate his walls. But Chiyoh, knowing him well (though not as well as some, Hannibal concedes), can sense his displeasure.
“We can go back for him. If you think it is wise,” she says quietly. “If you wish to.” With that, she descends up the few steps to the upper deck and is gone.
It is not wise. By now, the carnage at the cliff house has been discovered, and the FBI is sweeping land and sea looking for their bodies. There is no evidence to suggest that the two of them left the area by any way other than over the side of the cliff. No blood trail or stolen vehicle. Both of their phones left behind. Jack isn’t foolish enough to assume they both perished in the fall, especially if the search yields no remains, so it is likely that he’s started alerting local authorities to keep an eye out for him, for him and Will both. Hannibal allows his mind to conjure all the possible series of events if they were to return, unspooling before him like ribbons, twisting and threading around each other endlessly.
Will, standing on the beach where Hannibal left him, as the small vessel approaches the shore. Climbing aboard, meeting Hannibal’s eyes placidly, gesturing to his injured shoulder. “Gonna patch me up, Doctor?”
Or, laying defeated in the sand, unable even to walk. Hannibal would help him up and onto the boat, one arm slung under his shoulders, supporting his upper body and half carrying him into the cramped cabin under the main deck. Hannibal would turn to ready the medical supplies and, upon turning back, find Will. Blue eyes burning, standing with wings unfurling behind him, the archangel Michael sent to unleash the Lord’s wrath upon the faithless. Will would lunge, getting his hands around Hannibal’s throat before he could even react, taking advantage of Hannibal’s similarly wounded state. As he feels Will’s fingers digging into his trachea and the breath leaving his body, he is glad that this face is the last one he sees.
Approaching the beach and finding not Will but Jack, having found his favorite bloodhound and sent him off for medical attention, waiting for Hannibal, knowing he would come. Of course he came. Of course he did.
There are infinitely more possibilities - ribbons where Will tells him to fuck off, that he should have died, they both were supposed to die. Ribbons where Will says nothing, just climbs onto the boat on his own, pushing against Hannibal’s offer to help and grunting with pain when the boat rocks and he’s slammed into the wall on his injured shoulder. This one makes Hannibal smile faintly and he plays it back in his mind, rotating the image around, seeing it from different perspectives. His Will, so capricious, snapping viciously at the hand that feeds him even while he starves.
And then, all at once, Hannibal is back in his psychiatry office in Baltimore, sitting across from an empty chair at 7:30PM on the Thursday night after Will’s incarceration. The silence is heavy and uncomfortable, an altogether new sensation, one that Hannibal’s psyche roiled against. Sensing that something, somewhere, had gone amiss with his design, he plucked that sensation up and examined it, feeling for its edges, prodding its outline. Unlike Will, Hannibal considered himself incredibly apt at fleshing out the corners of his own mind, leaving no stone unturned. He knows where his feelings start and end; is intimately familiar with the vast chasm of emotional depth most people harbor but is, as yet, unavailable to him. How thrilling, now, to stumble upon a novel feeling in his middle age.
Blinking, he’s back at the small table in the back of the sailboat’s under cabin, staring into the empty space across from him. This feeling, he decides, is markedly less thrilling the second time around.
Deciding it’s time to get on with it, Will finds a path up into the brush and away from the beach. It’s almost entirely uphill, and it takes several hours of stopping, spitting blood into the dirt, and winding pieces of his tattered clothing around his injuries to staunch the bleeding, before he comes upon another path. This one wider and better maintained – probably a bike, or hiking, trail. He prays he won’t stumble into anyone’s path, dragging some poor unaware hikers into his twisted mess, but decides to follow it anyway. He’s got no better plan, after all.
His thoughts flutter aimlessly around the events of the last 36 hours. Nothing solid, more indentations of sensation than anything else – his hand buried in Hannibal’s sweatered shoulder, soaked with blood, holding on for dear life. How soft he’d noticed the material was, in the moment. The way Hannibal's head moved, animalistic even, making room for Will to lean on his chest. It reminded Will of lions grooming one another after a hunt, fur matted with antelope blood, drying tacky in the desert sun. He lets himself examine the fight, the way he thinks Hannibal would want him to. Hannibal isn’t here, after all, to bask in the satisfaction of peeling back Will’s layers and laying bare the truth. With no prying eyes, it is safe to let himself bleed into the memory.
He’d felt like a lion. Crouching low in the moonlit patio of the cliff house, dancing the age-old choreography of a group kill. Gene memory. Thousands of years of evolution means they know this dance, him and his pride. Will and his lion. Circling their prey and moving in sync, tearing flesh from bone and backing away to watch the fight drain out of its eyes. For all that Bedelia may have been right about Will as Hannibal’s agency in the world, at some point along the line, maybe Hannibal had started to feel like Will’s as well. His beast; to track and hunt and cage, then let loose on the world as he sees fit.
That was then. Now though, shambling, bleeding and battered through the Chesapeake wilderness, Will feels more like the antelope. Cruel, he thinks. For the lion not to finish the job. To let it limp away to nurse its wounds and meditate on the nature of being left behind. It isn’t fair, he knows, to cast himself and Hannibal in these roles, lion and antelope, predator and prey. It hasn’t been true for a long time. But that’s what suffering does. It eclipses truth and leaves only resentment.
After an eternity of stumbling along, he finally finds some semblance of civilization, a small mercy. A shack. It looks abandoned, set off the path a few hundred feet, overgrowth threatening to reclaim it permanently. The door opens easily, not locked. It’s a single, small room; a simple wooden table and two chairs crowd the center, a single bed tucked into the back right corner. No bedding but, thankfully, a mattress. The slippery, thin, blue kind that populate dorm rooms.
In the back left stands a utility sink and what remains of a workbench, gathering dust and cobwebs. It would be a miracle if this place had running water. Sure enough, turning the knob yields nothing, not even the groan of pipes attempting to pump. Setting aside any hope of cleaning himself up or quenching his ever-growing thirst, Will lets his body drop onto the mattress and is out cold before he can even consider the danger of staying in one place for too long.
Up on the main deck, Hannibal is watching the coastline grow more distant with each passing moment. Chiyoh is steering. She doesn’t ask if they’re going back – just waits until Hannibal tells her one way or another.
“Tell me about home,” he says.
“When the prisoner was dead,” Chiyoh responds, knowing what he means. What he wants to know. “After I killed him. Will stayed inside with the body for a long time. I don’t know what he did. I didn’t go to see it. After he was finished, we left.”
Hannibal wishes he could see the piece left behind. Will’s tableau, born entirely from his own mind, unlike Tier’s. With the benefit of hindsight, Hannibal can see now what he hadn’t seen then, that Randall Tier’s transformation was not Will’s own. A flattery. A gift so delicious, so tempting, he hadn’t wanted to look the horse in the mouth. To be known and understood so thoroughly can be one’s downfall.
This, though. Will had known Hannibal would never see it. A spark of cruelty – not the mutilating of the body, but to Become, alone, depriving Hannibal the pleasure of bearing witness. All those years pushing and prodding and coaxing and he didn’t get to delight in the fruits of his labors. Will kept it for himself, and Hannibal supposes there is triumph in that. He is both proud and contemptuous at the same time. It is a petty thing, this ownership he feels over Will Graham. Naturally Will pushes against it – fiercely independent as he is. Hannibal knows that he wars with it; trying to maintain ownership of himself, his agency, while simultaneously blaming Hannibal for – what was it he said once? Getting inside his head and moving all the furniture around. They are trapped in an endless feedback loop of blame and war, constantly switching sides, rearranging the armies as the battlefield shifts like the tide.
Across the water, dusk is settling, the sun bisected by the land. Honey golds and burnt oranges cast across the clouds, a few lone birds swoop high and low through the air. Hannibal closes his eyes and commits this moment to his mind palace: breathtaking swaths of sunset-rich colors drenched in a low ache, a vibrating hole in the scenery, dimming the beauty that could have been.
When he wakes, it is with the barrel of a shotgun a mere three inches from the end of his nose. Past the barrel a man, mid-50s, salt-and-pepper curls tumbling loosely around his face. In those first few moments, Will thinks that the man isn’t dissimilar to how he himself may look, in another decade or so.
The man notices Will is awake and twitches the shotgun in an upward motion. Will sits up slowly, bringing his hands up in the universal ‘I surrender’ motion. Except that his injured shoulder can’t actually raise his arm fair enough, so his hand just sort of hovers a few inches above the mattress, twitching lamely.
“I’m sorry,” Will tells him. “Is this place yours?”
The man still doesn’t say anything. His eyes dart frantically over Will’s face – eyes, mouth, bloody cheek. Will can see the moment recognition dawns; a subtle shift in the eyes, a tick in the corner of the mouth. He knows, then, that Jack must be broadcasting an APB for him, since they didn’t find a body.
“You-”
“Don’t. Don’t say anything.” Will desperately doesn’t want this. Desperately, achingly wishes this man hadn’t checked the news today, hadn’t listened to the radio on his way out here.
“You don’t get to make demands! I have the gun,” the stranger half-yells. The air seems to be slowly leaking from the room, the temperature dropping, despite how warm it actually is outside. The stranger, despite pointing the gun, can feel that he does not have the upper hand here somehow. He racks his brain for how that could possibly be true, though if he’d listened to the radio broadcast closely enough, or watched the news alert attentively enough, he would know.
All at once Will is breathing the humid, cloying air of his cell at the BSHCI. Antlers are growing out of his skull and it's blindingly painful, searing, inescapable. Simultaneously, he’s sitting, humiliated, in a cage in front of Jack, who looks at him the way you’d look at a lame horse about to be put down. Alana’s soft pity is radiating off of her in waves, no empathy needed to pick that up. There are a thousand questions he doesn’t have the answers to, doesn’t want to have to answer, and everybody’s eyes are boring into his skull, searching searching searching for an explanation that will ease their guilt and the cabin has shrunk down to only this moment right now, where Will exists in two places at once.
And then, just as suddenly, the lights in his mind flicker out and it's dark.