Chapter Text
At first, she couldn't tell if she was feeling herself choke on her blood or if it was the feeling of it pouring out and over her, her clothes, and the floor.
It was all so familiar to her.
Maybe a part of her should have remembered this sequence of events from her first family, from her first father, but she really hadn't wanted to. She had hoped it wouldn't end this way.
Not again.
Only this time, she found her mind wandered. She thought about how much easier it would be for people to have to clean the stone slabs of this kitchen than the vinyl of her childhood home. Blood had to come off stone easier than plastic after all.
It was partially nice though. The feeling of having Will worry about her. Like she was back where she was when she first began this journey into the next chapter of her life. Like he was going to save her life one more time from her fathers who had both tried to kill her (in the same way no less - adding a sort of cyclic nature to her life, something poets would love). His rough hands applied too much pressure in the wrong spots and it wasn't long until he couldn't even keep that up.
Not that he didn't want to. She knew that much.
There were sobs coming from him, soft and breathy, and small little pleas that escaped his lips, and that hurt her more than the actual injury she had sustained. If she hadn't been lying next to someone who had literally just had his guts torn through with a knife, she would describe her having to listen to him as gut wrenching.
It was horrible.
Hearing him cry over her... Funny, seeing how she loved the worry but not anything that came with it. She didn't deserve it. Not after all she had done to him, or all she hadn't done for him.
All those talks about being a family really had gotten her hopes up. The promise of learning to fish came hand in hand with the promise of a further education in any field she wanted, which meant the life she had rightfully deserved all along. Only this time it would have been with two fathers who had loved her in a way that made sense. It was the whole reason she had so diligently learnt Italian after all.
If only they had left.
She wanted to turn her head and look up at Will one more time. She didn’t want her final moments of vision to be of Hannibal’s feet as he walked away from everything that he had worked so hard to piece together only for it to come crashing down around him by his own hand. She couldn’t bring herself to.
Her brain sent words, hundreds every second, through her mind. Hundreds of questions asking “what if”, hundreds of questions wondering what she did wrong. Could she have done anything to have changed this outcome?
The next time she blinked, despite her best efforts, her eyes fell shut and she couldn’t muster the strength to open them again.
Hannibal had surrounded her with death since he took her hand in her childhood house and yet she still found it strange how alien the concept felt in her current state of being. He had once talked about how God created humans in Their image. She never put much thought into religion, but if she were to truly believe in God, she would think of how God is a being outside of death.
Pitiful that she, as a creation of God’s who has defied death so many times already, was stumbling into its grasp so easily in the end.
If she could speak, she would, but she couldn’t and so she instead settled for moving her lips, even with the limited amount she could do that. She mouthed her words silently into the room.
Please, God, if you’re there, none of us have much left. Don’t take them from me. Don’t take me from them… Please, just one more chance. I’m not ready.
There was no response. In fact, there was no light, sound, or touch that she could perceive anymore.
So, was this death…?
Abigail Hobbs woke up, a silent scream torn from her shaking figure, as she jolted into a sitting position.
Her hands went straight to her neck, clammy and too warm compared to how cold she had been mere seconds ago. There was no scarring, no blood, and definitely no wound. She slid them up her jaw to her ears and twitched away from her own touch when she felt both of them still there.
What had happened?
It had all been too realistic to have been just a dream. She could remember those night she spent in hospital for rehabilitation, she could remember every interview she had with Freddie Lounds and Alana Bloom, that was not a dream. The sounds and sights and feelings of every interaction she had was etched so deeply in her brain.
Abigail was not the kind of girl to dream such wild and fantastical happenings. It had to be real.
She glanced around where she was and each time her eyes darted to another item in the room, she curled more and more into herself, pulling the blanket up against her chest as if it would shield her from what reality seemed to be.
The pictures on the wall, the cupboards half open with clothes peeking out, the desk covered in papers and books and makeup, the floor that was still the same carpet it always had been since the day she first set foot in this room… This was home.
Not where she had called home for a while but still. Home.
This was Bloomington, Minnesota. Her childhood house and where she watched her mother and father die.
This was where she first met Will.
And Hannibal.
She decided to push everything out of her head for just a moment and ground herself in what she knew had to be real for her to wake up there and then. To still be in her family home, her parents would be alive and she would have to still be helping her father…
Thinking of, she was meant to be downstairs helping him set the table for breakfast if the clock on her bedside table was telling the right time.
Abigail got out of bed and tried to forget everything as she got dressed. It was getting colder so she layered a shirt, a blouse and a cardigan on top of her, opting to wear jeans instead of a skirt as she usually did. A quick brush of her hair and she was off downstairs.
She rounded the corner into the kitchen and paused for a moment as she saw her mother by the fridge and her father at the sink.
It was like she wanted to throw up. In her dream, if she was sure that it was even that, this was exactly the scene she had been picturing near before it ended and she woke up. Her father was more than capable of doing what she had seen him do once before, she knew she had to be careful to avoid any danger. It would not serve her well to offer herself up once again after all she had helped him do to avoid that exact situation.
One of Abigail’s hands rubbed at where the scar on her neck should have been.
She walked into the kitchen.
Greeting her parents with a good morning, she looked around a little before her mother asked her to set the table. She nodded and started laying out cutlery and napkins.
Each step was careful, like everything would come crashing down around her if she even hinted anything being wrong. Even so, she couldn’t get the dream or memories out of her head, not fully.
She just finished putting the knife and fork down at her own seat at the table when the phone rang.
There it was again, that sick feeling, but she couldn’t stop herself from walking right over to it and picking it up. A glance at the display said the caller ID was blocked so she pressed the button to accept the call, holding it up to her ear.
“Hello?”
A heavily accented voice spoke, “Garret Jacob Hobbs?”
Abigail almost dropped the phone.
She knew that voice.
She knew this morning.
Oh God.
Oh God.
Had her wish really come true? Those words she had whispered into nothing really had someone listening after all?
Hannibal spoke again, “Mr Hobbs?”
In her panic she couldn’t stop the words from leaving her mouth, “Scusa, ha sbagliato numero,” and she hung up.
Once again, she didn’t have time, just in a different way now. All those days she had spent thinking about what she would do if she had the chance to change the past hadn’t prepared her at all for actually doing it.
She could feel her mother standing behind her so she turned around and tried her best to smile.
“Wrong number,” she said trying to keep herself calm.
“Sweetheart, you speak… Italian?”
“I guess I just picked some things up from television and the internet,” it was a hesitant reply as Abigail herself processed the fact that she really had lived these events before. Her father’s questioning eyes turned to look at her from over his shoulder and she thought better of her acting skills. She opened her mouth to speak, add on more lies to get him to not be suspicious, when the ringing of the phone filled the room again.
She tried to reach for it but her mother got there first.
“Darling, it’s for you, an unknown number,” her mother held the phone out to her father and Abigail could only blink at the sight before her.
No…
Not again.
She could hear the car pulling up to the house as she backed into the counter, hidden behind her mother who was pleading with her father to put the knife down.
She couldn’t stop crying, tears blurring her vision, and as the knife slashed through her mother’s neck Abigail knew it was her turn next. Her legs went weak and her father grabbed her mother by the collar while she was still alive and walked her from the kitchen to the front door, depositing her outside of it.
There was a brief moment when Abigail thought to run away but her father’s footsteps were coming back for her. She had nowhere to run.
“Garret Jacob Hobbs! FBI!”
Will.
Abigail tried to reach out for his voice but her father grabbed her arm and pulled it round her waist and then slid the knife up to her neck.
“I don’t want to do this Abigail, you know I don’t want to hurt you,” his whispered apologies meant nothing to her; she still couldn’t stop crying.
Whimpers were all she managed to get out and when Will appeared in the doorframe Abigail could only look at him with desperation.
Those were the eyes she had wanted to see before death. Almost at least. He looked different when he had his glasses on, they shielded him from directly looking at her, and Abigail felt a pang of disappointment at that amongst the terrifying atmosphere her father had created.
She tried her best to beg with her eyes for him to shoot, she didn’t need his hesitation now and she hadn’t needed it when she wanted to run away with him and Hannibal. She knew what was coming.
The gunshot.
The knife.
The ground.
Will’s hands.
He clasped a hand around her neck and then briefly took it away. A spurt of blood exited the wound and Abigail gasped in pain. That got him to put his hand back and use his other to tilt her head so it was facing the ceiling.
Another set of footsteps and then Will’s hand was removed and another pair, surer in their actions, held on to her. Her vision was spotting, she was passing out, but it was a slow process.
Vaguely the sounds of voices and the sounds of an ambulance passed through Abigail’s perception but what stayed with her, even when they were taken from her neck and replaced with gauze, were those hands.
Ones that held on tight to her own even as she was placed up on the gurney and wheeled into the back of the ambulance.
Hannibal was there holding on to her.
She was conscious enough see Will as they walked past him leant up against a car, zoned out. If she could have summoned any strength, she would have liked to reach out to him, but she couldn’t and focused instead on keeping her breathing as steady as possible.
There were lights, sounds, and touch and Abigail knew, she was still alive even as she closed her eyes.