Chapter Text
They call him Jack Crawford’s bloodhound.
Will has never appreciated the moniker; it’s crass, and it settles over him like an ill-fitting suit, chafing in all the wrong places. It restricts him in a manner that’s more characteristic of a straitjacket than anything else, and he doesn’t recognize himself when he’s forced into it. All hard tailored lines and rigid angles, edges that lie too flat and contours that flow too smooth.
And Will doesn’t sniff out his quarries. What he does isn’t particularly characteristic of the dog in question, but sometimes he feels like one anyway. Following at Jack’s heels at every crime scene he’s called to, being forced to make a spectacle of himself, to perform. On his leash.
Freddie loves to give him petty little nicknames like that, Bloodhound and Pet Profiler and Murderer Mind Reader. And while she calls them titles with that false, saccharine smile of hers, he knows they’re taunts. And unfortunately for him, they stick.
She’s taken to calling him The FBI’s Mad Dog now. He can’t even bring himself to be pissed off about it; that one practically named itself.
Being back home again feels strange. Everything is exactly how he left it with the exception of his fishing lures, almost eerily so. The desk scattered across with yellow sheafs of paper covered in his inelegant scrawl, the books stacked at the foot of the bed, the clock by the mantel whose hands have sputtered to a stop near nine o’clock, all of it. It’s him that’s changed.
He feels it in his bones, that he’s different now. Something has been irrevocably altered in him, something that is far beyond reverting. It didn’t happen all at once, a seismic quake cleaving the earth open down to its core in one mighty stroke—it was erosion, slow and persistent, careful and steady. He hadn’t even felt it until it was too late.
The shape of his thoughts has changed now, molded and distorted and warped to the whims of another. Something dark and damp and insidious has taken root in his brain, its feelers stretching upward and out in a thicket of antlers whose points force their way through his skull in a grisly crown that wreaths his brow.
He doesn’t want to admit to himself that it’s a comfortable weight. A second skin, this darkness that clings to him so readily.
The front door slams behind him and he’s greeted immediately by a swarm of multicolored fur and seven tails wagging in synchrony, happy yips and tugs at the laces of his boots. Almost against his will he feels his mouth tilt upward into a smile as he crouches, pausing only to tuck the gun he had been holding into the back of his jeans.
He can feel the remnants of anger and adrenaline in his blood, a slow, hot current in his blood that hadn’t dissipated the entire hour-and-a-half-long drive home from Baltimore. His hands are still shaking and he buries them in the dogs’ fur to stave them off, fine tremors that wrack his fingers and seem to travel beneath his skin and make his bones thrum with the force of it.
He had been so close to pulling the trigger.
He had played the moment over and over and over again in his head, thinking and imagining and fantasizing, the unforgiving, deafening shot that would ring out and the spray of blood that would skid across the countertops. How Hannibal would crumple like a marionette whose strings were cut, dead before he can hit the ground with blood spreading out around his head in a crimson halo.
How Will would kneel over his body with the gun beside him, his head in his hands and regret pooling into every inch of him like bitter poison choking him, corroding him from the inside out. Not because he had killed Hannibal, but because he had done it with something as impersonal and dispassionate as a gun.
There are fantasies there too, layer upon layer of them under and over each other, overlapping into a deafening crescendo that echoes in his mind and rings in his ears. His fingers around Hannibal’s throat and his fists against his jaw, Hannibal’s skin burning fever-hot underneath his hands. The sound of the life leaving his body one labored breath at a time, the light fading from his eyes as they bore into Will’s.
He tightens his grip in his dogs’ fur to ground himself back in the present, forcing the illusions to scatter, fanciful mist struck by the harsh golden rays of reality. With one final generous rub to an enthusiastic Buster’s belly he stands, stripping off his jacket and running his fingers through his hair. It springs free in a disheveled mass of wayward curls that falls over his forehead and his ears and the back of his neck, its length still unfamiliar to the touch.
He places the gun on the nightstand beside his bed, incongruous amongst the other ordinary paraphernalia scattered there. An exotic poisonous flower growing in a bed of familiar weeds. He feels the same way, lying in bed and staring upwards, hearing the dogs snuffling softly and watching shadow and light chase each other across the ceiling as the moon ascends the stairway of the stars. Like something deadly and dangerous nestled into a space in which he no longer fits. He is his own doppelgänger.
Sleep doesn’t come easily that night, and he tosses and turns till the sky blushes red with the dawn. The last thing he remembers before an uneasy slumber drags him under is hearing a soft rain begin to fall like footsteps on the porch.
“How would killing me make you feel?”
Hannibal’s voice slithers out of the waiting dark, coiling around his body like a serpent winding its way up his limbs. He’s but a shadow among shadows, dark leathery skin stretched tight over jutting bones and hollow white eyes staring back, grotesquely long fingers bent into claws and great arching antlers whose points are sharp enough to tear through skin and punch through bone.
He towers over Will, beautiful and terrible in equal measure, strong and deadly, familiar and alien. He’s silhouetted against the pale washed-out light of the refrigerator, one of its doors standing ajar and placing the bloody carcass of the stag inside on full display.
It’s been stuffed into the small space awkwardly, limbs bent and broken, antlers snapped and hanging by threads of velvet. Its empty dead eyes stare at him, through him, and even as he watches they shimmer and shift and begin to change, shrinking and paling from brown to blue. Its limbs bend and widen, antlers retracting into a skull from which long dark hair cascades, hooves splaying into pale slender fingers that he knows so achingly well.
“Abigail,” he whispers, and it’s strangled and wretched and it hurts to say her name, bitter on his tongue and burning in his throat. Hot tears spill over his lashes and down his cheeks, and when he looks down at where they spatter on his hands, he sees they’re tinged with blood.
A bloody rent opens up in the alabaster skin of Abigail’s throat, the beginnings of the upward curve of a cruel red smile sending blood gushing from it in forceful gouts. She holds a hand out to him, pleading and beseeching, her lips shaping his name. He reaches back, her name ripping itself from his throat on a half-swallowed sob. But even as their fingers brush she fades with a sigh, leaving him grasping at empty air.
“Will,” Hannibal’s voice says in his ear, and he wakes with a violent start, sweating and shivering all at once with a cry clawing up his throat and out of his mouth.
He listens to the voicemail Jack had left him early that morning as he makes coffee and feeds the dogs, feeling an all-too familiar bitterness like a fist against his jugular when he hears about Miriam and Frederick. It’s unsurprising; he had been expecting it, but it doesn’t make it sting any less.
Hannibal prepares his evidence the same way he prepares his meals, and he prepares his meals the same way he prepares his crime scenes. It’s all so perfect, so meticulous, so ready to be assembled and garnished and served on an ornate silver tray placed before the intended diner.
He is always in total control of every situation he’s in, and he’s in total control of every situation he isn’t in, too. A puppeteer holding the strings of all their fates, tugging at them and then watching with detached deific amusement as they have no choice but to dance to his every whim.
Hannibal’s residence in Miriam’s head had been too consuming, too unmediated, too uninterrupted. It had made her instincts wild and impulsive, honed them to a single uncompromising point: survival. But his stint in Will’s had been subtler, briefer—and he knows not to act as unthinkingly in order to reclaim the parts of him Hannibal had tucked away. Will is beginning to see the elaborate chessboard of deceit and pretense that he’s laid out, see the move he’s made; the first in a long, calculated strategy whose fastidious construction has been the product of years.
Perhaps it’s time Will acknowledged it with a retaliation.
The dogs crowd around his legs as he stands over the bathroom sink, watching locks of dark hair sift down onto the chipped white enamel. The soft snick of the scissors and the give of his hair beneath the blades is all he’s aware of, a strange kind of intent anchoring itself into his bones as he shears away the evidence of months of decay and stagnation and rot.
He picks up his razor next, dragging it down his cheek to tame the mutinous few whiskers that have sprung up since yesterday. The water is cold as he splashes it onto his face and his freshly cut hair, uncaring that it drips down the back of his neck and beneath his collar. He grabs a towel in one hand and the bottle of aftershave beside the sink with the other—and then he hesitates.
He looks down at it, suddenly uncertain. He can feel something forming slowly in his mind, something that begins to take shape dark and dangerous. A seed sowed by recrimination and watered by rancor, one that takes root slow but sure.
Freddie Lounds might call him the FBI’s bloodhound, but Will’s sense of smell has never been good enough to live up to the sobriquet. Maybe now is as good a time as any to try.
Will may not have Hannibal’s gift for identifying scent, but if he’d learned anything from having him in his head, it’s that gifts are just curses lying in wait for the right person to wield them. And if this is to be a game, then what he’s about to do will bend the rules if it doesn’t break them entirely.
But then again, Hannibal has never exactly been a stickler for the rules either.
He glances at his watch, gnawing on his lower lip. If he drives fast enough, he’ll have time to make it home before making the trip to Baltimore in time.
Making up his mind he sets the bottle down and strides out of the bathroom, pausing only to grab his jacket and keys before leaving the house and slamming the front door shut behind him as he goes.
“Hello, Will,” Hannibal says.
Will turns to face him, slowly. For once he realizes he doesn’t have to force his pulse to slow, doesn’t have to school his features to be wiped carefully blank of any emotion. He feels oddly as if he’s standing in the eye of a hurricane, cities and civilizations and whole worlds being razed to the ground around him as he remains calm and indifferent and dispassionate to it all.
“May I come in?”
He allows the moment stretch out into syrup between them, slow and sticky and cloying. Their eyes meet, hold, locking in a careful stalemate. Hannibal steps back, holding the door open wider, and it’s almost as if Will can actually see his guard go up, a shield that shutters his eyes and tightens his mouth.
“Do you intend to point a gun at me?” he asks.
The question amuses him and he lets Hannibal see it, lets himself smile as he steps forward. He feels no shame for what happened last night in Hannibal’s kitchen, no more than he feels any for sending Matthew Brown to kill him. Nor does he have any interest in pretending to.
He shakes his head, meeting Hannibal’s eye. “Not tonight.”
He steps into Hannibal’s office though he hadn’t invited him in, casting a glance over the stifling familiarity of the place. He had lost his mind here, lost it among the web of clever lies and even cleverer truths Hannibal had spun. It’s here, he knows, somewhere in the space between those two leather chairs in the middle of the room. And he intends to find it again.
“Are you expecting someone?” he asks, and he hears the door close with a quiet click. Locking him inside the lair of the beast.
“Only you,” comes the soft answer.
Will huffs out a humorless laugh. “Kept my standing appointment open?”
“And you’re right on time.”
He swallows, tilting his face up. “I have to deal with you,” he says on an exhale of breath. “And my… feelings about you. I think it’s best if I do that directly.”
“First you have to grieve for what is lost,” says Hannibal’s voice behind him, “and what has changed.”
The words shouldn’t sting, but they do. “I’ve changed; you changed me.”
And he has, changed and grieved—grieved for himself and who he had been, every night in prison feeling antlers burst out of his back and his skull, branching above him into a thicket that filled his cell. It had been a violent thing, his grief, blood and bone and memory.
“The friendship that we had is over,” Hannibal says. “The Chesapeake Ripper is over.”
If only. “It had to be Miriam, didn’t it?” Will asks softly. “She was compelled to take his life so she could take her own back.”
“How will you take your life back?” Hannibal asks, and finally Will turns to face him.
“I’d like to resume my therapy.”
Without waiting for Hannibal’s reply he turns, moving towards the chair beside him and sitting down. Hannibal mirrors the movement a moment later, leaning back and crossing his legs as he levels an inscrutable look at Will. He returns it, everything else fading but for the two of them facing each other like this once more. The tables turn and then turn again, bringing them back to where it all crumbled apart.
“Where shall we begin?” Hannibal asks.
“When I was in the hospital,” Will says without preamble, “I had what could be termed a moment of clarity. An epiphany of sorts, a single moment where everything suddenly became clear. But it wasn’t a single moment, not really. It happened… gradually. Like I was dusting off the cobwebs on memories I didn’t even know I had.”
“And what was it that became clear to you?” Hannibal asks mildly.
“You told me,” Will says, “that I was more in control then than I had ever been. What became clear to me was my own agency.”
“The only time you felt you were truly free was when you were behind bars,” Hannibal says. “An irony indeed.”
“A consequential withdrawal,” Will corrects him. “Not an irony. Irony would be coincidental.”
“Did you anticipate your agency?” Hannibal asks. “Did you see it, or was it thrust upon you, unsuspecting and vulnerable as you were?”
“I anticipated lucidity,” Will says. “Agency was merely a welcome side effect.”
“Simply having agency and acknowledging it was clearly insufficient,” Hannibal deduces, inclining his head. “You sought to wield that agency, to regain the control you felt had been taken from you.”
“It was taken from me,” Will grits out. “I did what I had to do.”
“By sending someone to kill me.”
“They told me he crucified you,” Will says softly. “A noose around your neck and nails through your wrists. Forcing you to atone for your betrayal.”
He raises his eyes to Hannibal’s, and when he speaks his voice is barely a whisper. “Did it hurt?” he asks, and he knows Hannibal knows that he isn’t talking about the livid red scores on his wrists. The scars of the wounds Will had dealt him run far deeper than flesh.
“I could ask you the same,” is all Hannibal says in reply.
“It did at first,” Will says. “In Garret Jacob Hobbs’ kitchen the second time around. The first vestiges of realization and awareness were unlike anything I had ever experienced. I felt… abandoned.”
“Abandonment requires expectation,” Hannibal says softly, his own words echoed back to him. “What was it that you expected from me to feel abandoned, Will?”
“Better,” is all Will says bitterly, his throat tight.
“We’ve both left our marks on each other,” Hannibal concedes with a dip of his chin. “We have the scars to show for it, some visible and some not. Old wounds dealt in passing storms of biblical wrath.”
Will doesn’t look away from him. “You didn’t answer my question,” he says.
“You want to know if your attempt on my life caused me pain,” Hannibal says. “If I say yes, then will you consider it to have been successful?”
“If my attempt on your life had been successful, you would be dead,” Will says bluntly. “So no, I wouldn’t.”
Hannibal’s lips are tilted in the barest of smiles. “And if I say no?”
“Then I know you would be lying.”
“Then why ask at all?”
“Because I want to hear you say it,” Will says, his hands twitching into fists where they’re clenched on the armrests of the chair on either side of him. “I want you to tell me that it hurt you, that I hurt you.” The way you hurt me goes unsaid, but it rings in the air between them loud and clear anyway.
“It hurt when you tried to have me killed, Will,” Hannibal says, his eyes never leaving Will’s. “You hurt me.”
It doesn’t feel like a victory, doesn’t make righteous vengeful satisfaction surge through his veins like he had thought it would. There’s no relief, no catharsis. He just feels tired, wrung out and stretched thin. Hollow, like someone had carved him open and whittled him down to the bone.
“You said your abandonment hurt at first,” Hannibal says. “What did your pain metamorphose into, Will?”
Anger, he thinks. Vengeance, a desire for justice. Instead, he says, “Understanding.”
“Of what was done to you?”
“Of you,” says Will. “And through understanding you, I understood myself.”
“Do you regret sending Matthew Brown to kill me?”
The suddenness of the question catches him off guard for a moment, and the answer tumbles from his lips before he can stop it. “Yes.”
“Why? Because he was foiled before he could carry your request through, or because he almost succeeded?”
“Because I didn’t do it myself,” Will says, the words ripping themselves from some dark, hidden place inside him. The place where they had been feels raw, flayed open. “Because just thinking about it, dreaming about it, wasn’t enough. It would never be enough.”
“Do you often dream about how it might have gone should things have progressed the way you wanted them to?”
“Yes.”
“What do you see?”
His hands around Hannibal’s throat and Hannibal’s fingers around his wrists holding him there, coaxing him to grip tighter, eyes staring into Will’s as the life leaves his body, as he gives it to Will one gasp at a time—
He wrenches himself away from the fevered images his mind offers up readily, clenching his jaw. “What I see doesn’t matter,” he says. “It’s just a mirage. A chimera.”
“What you see is a product of your desires, the offspring of your imagination and subconscious,” Hannibal says. “It is no mere daydream.”
“I thought it might be counterproductive to talk about what could have been, rather than what is,” Will says tightly.
“On the contrary,” Hannibal says, raising an eyebrow. “Therapy often benefits most when patients talk about their desires rather than locking them away. When we allow ourselves to want, to fantasize and to dream, we allow the entirety of our potential to come to light. We are made of our desires, Will; they manifest themselves in our actions and our words, in our choices.”
“They control us,” Will murmurs.
“In some way.” He laces his fingers together placidly. “An apt term, chimera, to refer to a fantasy. Mythical and dangerous, made of unimaginable paradoxes. Inconceivable.”
“And near-impossible to defeat.”
“Indeed.”
“What desires control you, Dr. Lecter?” Will asks musingly, leaning back in his chair. “What whims do you bow to?”
Hannibal only smiles disarmingly. “Perhaps that is a question for another day,” he says. “But for now our hour is up.”
They stand and step towards the door in unison and for one disorienting moment Will feels as though he’s looking into a mirror, seeing Hannibal instead of himself in the reflection. It fades a moment later and he shakes off the unease creeping up the back of his neck, pins and needles making his skin prickle.
“Same time tomorrow?” Hannibal asks, making to pull the door open and stepping aside. Will steps up beside him, turning deliberately as he does and effectively cornering him between the doorframe and his body. He sees Hannibal register the proximity with a blink of surprise, a quick intake of breath—and then he goes still.
He turns fully towards Will and he notes with a rush of exhilarated satisfaction that his pupils dilate ever so slightly, as if he had just inhaled a particularly intoxicating drug. Will steps away and into the open doorway before he can react further, feeling another surge of something searing and dark when Hannibal tracks the movement with a predator’s focus, drawing in a longer, more deliberate inhale as he moves back. Will feels his heart skip a jolting, uneven beat, as if he had just missed a step going down the stairs.
“Dr. Lecter,” is all he says in curt farewell, then turns and walks away before he can do something he knows he will regret. He resists the urge to turn back as he leaves the building, and only releases the breath he had been holding when he’s sitting in his car with the doors locked.
His gambit had worked, evidently, but there’s something almost like nervousness that makes his blood fizz where it rushes hot through his veins. He hadn’t anticipated so intense a reaction; he had thought there would be an amused comment about finally purchasing a better aftershave, perhaps a droll remark or two. Not… that. Not whatever had just happened.
He starts his car, forcing himself to dismiss the burning afterimages of Hannibal’s face and the stark hunger there that sear themselves behind his eyes. He pulls away from the curb and begins the long drive home, unaware of Hannibal’s gaze on him through the window following him until he turns the corner and disappears from view.