Work Text:
Drink up with me now and forget all about
The pressure of days, do what I say
And I'll make you okay and drive them away
The images stuck in your head
~Elliott Smith, "Between the Bars"
“I know,” Will tells Hannibal’s voicemail.
He ends the call and pours another drink.
Hannibal isn’t answering his phone. As recently as this morning Will would have assumed any number of innocent things - a patient, a dinner, an opera. Hell, a date. Hannibal probably dates.
Will knows things now that he didn’t know twelve hours ago, and so his mind conjures other possibilities. Hannibal could be wrist-deep in someone’s chest cavity. He could be carving slices off the bone.
It’s probably beautiful, whatever it is: intricate and unique. Some essential, awful part of Will is probably going to enjoy deconstructing it if he lives long enough to see it.
He tastes acid in the back of his throat, all that whiskey threatening to come back up.
He wonders whether Hannibal will call him back or just show up.
He’s less certain about Abigail. Hannibal might have been telling the truth in his office about Nicholas Boyle’s death being self-defense. He does that, Will knows now, looking back over their weeks of conversations. Hannibal tells so much of the truth that it sounds like a lie, doubling reality back on itself.
He never actually sat behind his desk in one of Will’s sessions and said, “I’m the Chesapeake Ripper and I’m feeding you my victims.” But he might as well have.
“I don’t care about the lives you save, only your life,” he’d said. At the time it hadn’t sounded like a confession. Will had thought - trusting idiot that he’d been - that it had sounded like friendship.
He’s still not sure it wasn’t friendship, and maybe that’s the most fucked up thing.
(“Drink,” he says to Buster, raising a glass, because he’s inventing a So You Just Discovered Your Psychiatrist Is A Cannibal drinking game right now, and the first rule is “drink every time you think “no, wait, that’s the most fucked up part.””)
And so: Abigail might be no guiltier than Will himself, as Hannibal had said. Which is plenty guilty enough, but not as bad as it might have been. Or she might be a psychopath in training: Schroedinger’s Psychopath, a quantum phenomenon, one of Jack’s future crime scenes just waiting to happen.
Which would not be the most fucked up part of this. He raises his glass to Buster anyway. Buster pants back at him, mindlessly happy, his entire world just as it ought to be.
Will ushers the dogs upstairs on mostly steady feet, with a treat and an extra pat for each head before he shuts them in. It’s not that he thinks Hannibal would harm them intentionally; he knows what kind of monster he’s dealing with, now, and it’s not that kind. But he also doesn’t think Hannibal would hesitate if they got in the way at the wrong moment, and none of this is the dogs’ fault. They’re not responsible for the trainwreck of Will’s life.
He gets a second glass and a second bottle to go with it, and sits out on the porch. It’s a beautiful night, cold and clean.
Hannibal hasn’t called. It shouldn’t be taking him this long.
Will feels jittery, electric under his skin. He sips, and doesn’t call Jack, and sips, and watches clouds skitter across the moon, and doesn’t call Alana either.
He should have figured it out at the hospital with Abigail. He’d gone to see her after talking with Hannibal, only half sure why. Needing, maybe, to see if he could see any telltale signs on her. A mark of Cain. Something. They’d had to speak in circles, a conversation half nonsense, people all around.
“I can show you where to climb over the wall if you want better coffee,” she’d said, straight and nearly prim, today’s scarf all pink stripes. The coffee was, in fact, awful.
When he’d asked, “Don’t you think you’ve spent enough time off the premises lately?”, she’d only wavered for an instant. He might not have noticed if he hadn’t been looking for it. She’d steeled herself quickly.
“Eat a few meals here and see if you’d want to stick around longer than you had to,” she said. “Between the cooks here and Dr. Lecter’s dinners, sometimes you just need to sneak out and eat a cheeseburger.”
“Minnesota’s a long way to go for a burger, Abigail.” A long way to go to dig up a corpse.
She hadn’t blinked, her momentary weakness sealed up and armored over. He could almost believe he hadn’t seen it at all. I haven’t been back there since, she’d said. I don’t think I’ll ever go back. There’s nothing left to go back for.
It was probably at least as true as anything else she’d ever said.
It had been stupid to take out the files again this afternoon. Stupid to think that whatever he might learn would be something he wanted to know. He didn’t have the well-worn excuse of Jack this time, asking or goading him to do it. There were no more lives to save. Nicholas Boyle and Louise and Garrett Hobbs and Marissa Schuur were all dead, every string holding Abigail to her old life cut. Nothing to find but the secrets Abigail and Hannibal had buried. No one left to profile.
He could have gone fishing, or taken a nap, or read a book, or done literally anything else but this.
Will has been, he thinks now as he watches the stars wheel overhead and listens to the sound of no cars approaching, exceedingly foolish.
When Hannibal does come, Will hears the car making its way up the driveway. He supposes that says something about Hannibal’s intentions. There were other options, after all, silent and deadly. Not that deadly isn’t still on the menu, but if it’s coming to that, Hannibal seems to want Will to know it’s coming.
He seems to want to talk.
(Drink, Will thinks although Buster is out of sight now, and does.)
For a moment, just before Hannibal exits the car, silhouetted against the interior light, Will thinks Hannibal’s shadow is too large, too dark, spiky and inhuman. But he blinks and it’s gone. It’s just Hannibal: his friend. His doctor. Trusted consultant of the FBI.
Then again, that’s a title that belongs to Will, too. And he’s sitting on his front porch with two glasses out, waiting to have a drink with a serial killer he invited over for a late-night chat He didn’t even strap his gun on before making the phone call. Maybe the FBI has made a lot of bad choices.
The sound that tries to escape him is probably laughter, of a sort, but it’s swallowed up in the sound of Hannibal’s car door shutting behind him.
It had been Marissa, in the end. Everything else in the files he could twist and turn somehow, make it someone else’s fault. A shadowy Someone still out there to be caught, safely elsewhere.
Marissa didn’t fit. Too personal; too close.
Knowing Abigail had it in her to kill Nicholas Boyle made her the obvious answer, and he’d spent a long while earlier in the evening trying to convince himself the pieces fit. They almost did. He could poke and prod them close enough into alignment that Jack would accept the story if Will had wanted to sell it to him. He didn’t; he just wanted to know for himself. So he could sleep at night instead of worrying at it.
Turn and twist it any way he could, though, he just couldn’t bring the story to life - Abigail lifting Marissa, lowering her gently onto the twisted antler prongs. Maybe settling her hair and clothing into place for modesty’s sake and friendship lost. Sorry, just a little. It made a good picture but he couldn’t bring the edges into focus.
In the end her form always shifted into someone taller, broader, who could move Marissa’s body with ease. Someone who might have neatened her body but would have done it for his own purposes, with the same single-minded focus that built elaborate centerpieces from feathers and bone.
(whose bones, whose meat, how many dinners, how far back did it go, was it that first breakfast, did they save Abigail together for this)
(Drink.)
“You’re smiling.”
“Am I?” Will supposes he might be, at that. His face feels slightly separate from his body, and it hardly seems as if there's a point in hiding his thoughts, here and now. “I guess it’s good to see you. I wasn’t sure it would be.”
Hannibal hovers at the porch’s edge, very nearly awkward. There's a small case in his hand and Will ignores it as pointedly as possible.
“You must have known I would come.”
Will shrugs, setting the ice in his glass to tinkling. “I seem to know a lot of things tonight. Sit down if you’re going to.”
Hannibal does, and takes the glass Will fills and hands over to him. The leather case sits by his feet like a faithful dog. They sit together for a few quiet moments as calm descends around them, the night temporarily paused at Hannibal’s arrival and now relaxing again: wild things singing their songs with no care for the small drama of human lives and deaths.
Will's waited this long. He can wait a while longer, wait Hannibal out, wait for the moon to go down and the sun to burn out and the ice caps to melt and none of this to matter anymore, in the grand scheme.
“What do you want, Will?” Hannibal finally asks. Not what do you know or even what are you going to do. Hannibal never gave Will the easy out of a question with a simple answer, and apparently isn't going to start now.
“Sleep,” Will hears himself say, without planning it. “I’d like to turn my brain off and sleep for a month without dreaming.” Hannibal starts to say something and Will cuts him off, growing louder. “I want to know why you do this. All of this. Why it feels…” A pause. Hannibal waits, this time. “Personal. Sorry. Stupid. I realize you’re not killing people at me but it kind of feels like you are. I want to not know any of the things I know. I want… It doesn’t matter what I want. You’re going to do whatever you’re going to do. You always do.”
(Drink. If only to shut yourself up when you start babbling at the serial killer at your door, that’s a new rule of the game, added right now.)
Hannibal just watches and listens until Will runs down, a wind-up toy grinding to a halt. Hannibal’s personal plaything to mislead and misinform. How entertained he must have been. Will’s face feels hot in the chilly air, thinking about that. I want to punch you, he should have said. Maybe he still will.
“It matters,” Hannibal says. He sounds terribly sincere. Will believes him. But then, Will’s believed him before. “It does matter to me that you have the things you want, Will. I would provide them for you, if I could.”
Will sputters, but he can’t, immediately, come up with a counterargument. He has a terrible feeling that Hannibal believes his own bullshit, on this one. That if he stepped outside of his own head and into Hannibal’s in this particular moment, he would find there a deep and brutal and monstrous sincerity that would break him apart.
He’s been in Hannibal’s head enough today.
“So what are you here for?” he asks, mostly to keep himself from throwing that punch. “Just because I called?”
Hannibal sighs, barely. “Because you called,” he allows. As if he were that biddable, just one of the pack. “You have questions. I’ll answer them, if I can. And then you’ll sleep.”
He reaches for the case slowly, as if Will might reach for the gun he doesn’t have, and opens it out flat on the little table between them. A syringe and two unmarked vials, both clear liquid, innocuous. No telling what they might do or if they do the same thing at all. One pill makes you larger.
He has a million questions, sure. But really just the one that he’s been trying not to think of all night, the most fucked-up thing, the big drink all the little ones are building up to.
He finishes the glass before he asks.
“How many times have I figured this out?”
Because it’s not the first. He knows that. The pieces fell into place in his head too perfectly, with a click like a lock sliding home, with a feeling like he’s known this all before. And Hannibal hasn’t killed him yet. He wonders what it would take for that to happen. Whether he wants to know.
Hannibal twitches ever so slightly. He wasn’t expecting that. Maybe it’s the first time Will’s thought to ask.
“Twice before,” he says after a moment, in a tone something like pride. “Your mind is a marvel, Will.”
Twice. The vials won’t kill him, then. Or at least one of them won’t. Hannibal will put him under, wipe him clean. Help him sleep. Maybe he’ll wake up with no memories of dreaming, for once. It sounds more appealing than it should. Restful. Like something he wants.
“One more question for now,” he asks. Hannibal tilts his head slightly and waits, and Will wants nothing so much as to laugh at the gesture. He’s terribly drunk and his friend is a vicious murderer and the stars are lovely in all their cold and distant light and he's going to die someday, but not tonight.
He takes a deep breath until he’s sure he won’t laugh and then asks.
“Have I punched you yet?”
And it’s Hannibal who breaks, first and finally, nighttime animals silenced again by the sound of their laughter.
Two voices spiralling out into the night, where the wild things lurk in the shadows, and everything is terrible, and everything is, just for a moment, fine.