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Will used to have a voice, but now he barely makes a sound. He just does what he's been told. It makes his days easier. Ever day blends into the next, into the one before. He takes the pills he is given, and goes through his days in a haze. The cups have different ones, tiny blue ones, a large while one he can barely swallow, some yellow ones that remind him vaguely of the totem pole of bodies. He downs all of them dry when they are handed to him. He doesn't know what else he can do. No one will believe him that he did not kill those people. He did not do the things he is accused of. It's not like his solitary existence with his dogs gave him much of an alibi anyway though. He taught his classes, and as long as Jack didn't need to trot his pet psychopath out to do his trick, he went home to spend time with the dogs. It was simple. He may not have slept well, but at least he wasn't stuck behind bars. The ceiling has a crack on the opposite side of the tiny cell, where the white has turned yellow, and sometimes small drips and drabs of water seep from it.
Alone in his cell, surrounded by the screams of the truly disturbed, he has all the time in the world to think. He can see now. The scales have fallen from his eyes. It's easy to notice his mistakes in hindsight, now isn't it? He can see Hannibal Lecter now. He can see the devil under the thin veneer of gentility. He can see his design. People are swine to him. People are just meat waiting for the slaughter. He is inhuman in his complete lack of empathy. He is the negative of Will. Will is empathy so strong that it sets him apart, makes him other than the normal people, but Hannibal is a lack of empathy so complete that he is a predator wearing a human suit. Playing pretend. Putting on a show, so that the prey doesn't even see the wolf perfectly camouflaged in their midst.
Will knows he didn't commit the murders that he is in here for, but he could have. If he closes his eyes, he can see each one, step by step, the design laid bare. Perhaps, in some way, this confinement would be better if he had actually committed the atrocities attributed to him. The other prisoners watch him here. They watch him as he slouches in his seat at lunch, picking at the lumpy mashed potatoes and the oddly cold gravy. They eye him, because no matter what he is said to have done, he is something different from what they are. The longer he is stuck here, the more Will feels like he is disappearing. His lines are beginning to blur. He is no long sure of anything. Sometimes Will closes his eyes and he sees Abigail's frightened face. Hears her scream, high and sweet and oh so loudly, as he envisions himself cutting off her ear. He dreams of licking the blood off the knife. He dreams of honoring her. He carved her up, took her heart, while it was still warm, and sliced fine slivers and ate them raw. He dreams of holding her close, only to slash at her throat, feeling the release from the ghost of her father, Garrett Jacob Hobbs.
Will knows though. He knows, he did not do it, these were not his design. He knows his design. He sees the cracks in the mirror. He knows what side of the glass he is on. He knows what he had done and what he has not.
His dreams are worse than ever. His dreams leave him screaming hoarsely, echoing in the desolated basement. His cell smells of stale sweat and sour fear. He cannot help it. There is nothing to ground him in his head anymore. The lights flicker on randomly, sometimes they stay lit for hours, sometimes a few minutes. It's disorenting, and Will is no longer sure how long he's been here. Has it been days or weeks? Chilton is trying to break him. Chilton is lazy and his methodology is so clumsy, so blunt, so easy to see through. He has no sense of finesse, but the isolation wears on Will even if he wasn't the most social of people before this cage. He misses his dogs, he misses his home. Sometimes, when he cannot bring himself to close his eyes for the terror that resides behind his eyelids, Will misses Hannibal. He misses the Hannibal he thought he had known. His friend, his confidant, his anchor. He has none of this now though. He is stripped down and left to scramble to find anything solid enough in his thoughts to hold on to. He aches for his lost hope, of finding someone who understood him, and saw him, and someone who stayed despite of him.
There is no shelter from himself. There is no shelter from the cracks, and he sees the hungry fingers prying wanting to get in. Hannibal is a parasite, lingering under his skin, squirming his way into every part of Will. Sometimes, he finds himself talking to Hannibal, even though he knows that Hannibal isn't even there.
He sees him though, standing so close to the bars that he could just reach out and touch him. He could reach out and tear the flesh from his smirking face. Hannibal knows that Will figured him out. “Dear Will, how have you been sleeping?” He is so pleased by Will in his cell, he is so smug, because he's won. He is smarter than Will, he put Will in this cage for his own crimes. He enjoys softly taunting Will. He knows that Will isn't sleeping at all. He knows that Will lies here in his stinking sweat and curses himself for ever trusting in Hannibal. He curses himself for trying to reach out. His lost hope is now the albatross around his neck.
Will should have known. Will should have seen. Will has always seen everything before, but this time he was blindsided. Sometimes Will sees the nightmarish upright stag monster in Hannibal's place, talking with Hannibal's voice. Those days Will can't decide if what he sees there is worse than what he sees with his eyes closed. His friend the monster, or his ghosts the dead? Which one indeed is easier to bear? Those days Will lets the screams that he'd been holding down in his throat escape and pulls at his hair, the pain helping him focus on anything else. Anything to drown it out, anything to shut Hannibal up, anything to make him go away. Will is becoming something different while trapped here in the Baltimore Criminal Insane Asylum.
The other inmates begin to watch him warily. They begin to see.
Will's smiles start to appear again. Will's smiles are something different than what they were before. They become sharp, they reflect the man, the monster that put him here in Hell. It isn't intentional, it isn't planned or premeditated, but it happens all the same. Miggs, a violent serial rapist with a grudge against women and fags, finds out the hard way about the new man Will is. Will looks at him and his fear of seeing is gone. He sees all. He knows all. He sees a mother than berated and was too distant, too cold, who did not see what was happening right under her hooked nose. He sees a father that visited Miggs' room late at night and told poor, poor Miggs that this was how he showed his love, as he pushed inside ripping and tearing and hurting young Miggs. Will sees the agony, the worthlessness, the fact that the anger is just holding poor Miggs together.
Will sees fault lines. Will knows just how easy it is to apply pressure to fault lines. Miggs cracks under the weight of Will's words, the truths held there spat back into his previously smirking face. Miggs becomes a splintered man raging at himself instead of raging at the world. Will sees his own design. He is the worst possible scenario. He can see and he knows exactly where to push. He knows how to break a man down, with his words, with a knowing gaze, with a smile in his heart.
He looks at himself in the dirty mirror while he is shaving with the cheap safety razor, under the watchful gaze of an orderly, and Will doesn't know if he likes what he sees. He doesn't know his reflection anymore. The man staring back at him has eyes like glaciers, cold and arid. There is no sadness or doubt lingering in those places anymore. There is only a frozen resolve.
Will plans instead of sleeping now. Will plans because he knows. He knows that they cannot hold him here forever. It only takes a single mistake, a single slip. He only needs one hand free after all. Will knows that he will make Hannibal see what he has done. Hannibal will see his creation, shaped and free, and ready to show the world his new design.
He will see and hopefully he will know the shape of despair after seeing what his design has helped Will to become.