Chapter Text
SLIP THE VEIL
Chapter One: Aftermath
Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter.
- E. Hemingway
*
Will experienced the aftermath of the night at Hannibal's house as a series of stroboscopic images, burned into his mind: Abigail's empty eyes, the stag’s last gentle breath. Darkness, for a while. Then someone's boot slipping on blood, hands that grabbed him. There was noise, voices, but they were far away.
He woke in a hospital. An oxygen mask clung to his face. Every inch of him hurt. Two weeks in a coma, a doctor told him. Lost kidney. Extensive damage to his digestive tract and considerable blood loss. A twelve-inch scar, where Hannibal had -
Where Hannibal had gutted him. And then he'd -
“Abigail,” Will croaked, his tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth. The doctor gave him a sympathetic look and an awkward pat on the thigh. There were other people in the room – a nurse in pale blue scrubs, a man Will didn't know, in a cheap polyester uniform. They looked at him with pity. Something smooth and calming slipped from the IV into his arm, and Will drifted into glorious oblivion.
*
The next time Will woke, he felt clearer, if no less fractured. He'd lost all sense of time and had to ask a nurse what day it was. They were slowly weaning him off the morphine, to avoid creating a dependency. In a few days, the nurse explained, the drains would come out. She gave him a sponge bath and helped him sip from a cup. The tepid water tasted better than the richest wine he'd had at Hannibal's table.
He caught himself palpating his tender abdomen, to find the empty space left behind by the kidney they'd had to remove. The nurse gently dragged his hand away. He did it again. Kindly, she told him that if he didn't stop doing that, he would have to be restrained.
Will stopped doing it.
*
Days passed, flowing seamlessly from morning into noon into night, with no discernible features. He refused to think. He was afraid what he'd come up with, if he did.
*
And then he had to.
One morning, Alana rolled into Will's hospital room in a wheelchair, dogged by a protesting security guard. She gave the man such a quelling look that he visibly shrank from her, nervously fingering the butt of the revolver in his hip holster while his gaze darted back and forth between Alana and Will.
“Am I a prisoner?” Will asked. His voice sounded weak and breathy. The nurses knew by now not to engage him in meaningless small talk.
“No, but...” The guard trailed off. Alana was giving him the full brunt of a disapproving stare that had teeth in it. “I'll be outside.” It was directed at Alana. “Call if you need help.”
Will's bed was surrounded by portable machines monitoring everything from his oxygen levels to his heart rate. Alana had to make do with parking herself near the foot end, but it was close enough for her to grasp his outstretched hand. She looked exhausted, pale; her hair was lanky, her eyes ringed by blueish shadows. She wore a stiff, white medical corset over her hospital gown, keeping her in an upright position, and there was a curved scar on her forehead, the skin surrounding it puffy and red.
Will could barely bring himself to look at her. “Can you – will you be able to -”
She squeezed his hand. “I'm looking at months and months of extensive physical therapy, but I'll be able to walk again. I might have a limp. I should get a cane, don't you think? Nothing like Doctor Chilton's, though...his was a bit too much King of Rock'n'Roll for my taste.”
Will pulled his hand away. Shame flooded him. Alana was her own woman and made her own decisions, but Will couldn't help feeling responsible for her injuries. He should have been more adamant about warning her – they should have included her in the plan – she had been so close to Hannibal -
“It's not your fault, Will,” Alana said quietly.
Wasn't it? It had been his idea to lure Hannibal out into the open. He thought he could bait him, but in the end Will had been trapped in his own snare, as much seduced by Hannibal as he had been trying to seduce him. He should have pulled the trigger the moment Hannibal laid a hand against his cheek. Instead, like a deer frozen in the headlights of an approaching car, Will had let Hannibal gut him. Had hoped, even, to die – to escape from the terrible, self-recriminating certainty that he could no more hand Hannibal over to the authorities than he could fully give into the destructive urges within.
“I'm so sorry,” Will whispered. He'd done his best to avoid thinking about that night, and with the aid of morphine and sleeping aids had more or less succeeded, but now it all came rushing back. He realized he was still caught in that infinite loop, divided between the loyalty to his good morals and the siren's song of Hannibal's world.
He couldn't even bring himself to hate Hannibal. Instead, irrationally, Will missed him. And Abigail. God, Abigail.
Alana said nothing, only looked at him steadily, her hand now resting over Will's ankle over the thin hospital blanket. A nurse came in with Will's lunch, depositing the tray and walking back out without a word, sensing perhaps that any attempts to break into the silence would be unwelcome by both occupants of the room. The security guard stuck his head around the door, checking up on them, and likewise withdrew without comment. Sunlight meandered across the ceiling, the passage of the minutes counted by the steady beep of the monitors.
Eventually, Alana said, “Jack's funeral is in two weeks. I plan to attend. I will attend, and if I have to roll myself all the way out to the cemetery.”
Will took a deep, shuddery breath. “I'll be there.” He hadn't been the one who pushed her out of a window, but he could be the one to push her wheelchair. “We can roll out there together.”
She smiled at him, tentatively.
*
A week before Jack's funeral – a month after the night at Hannibal's house – Will got out of bed, observed by a doctor and two nurses. The drains were out. He'd been given solid, bland foods for the first time, and the prospect of a shower and other sights than his room's ceiling were motivation enough to help him ignore the very real pain that still trembled through his midsection.
He only managed about ten steps before he felt as though he'd run a marathon, and had to lean on the small table in the corner, light-headed and weak.
“That's normal,” the doctor assured him. “Your muscles need to remember how to move, after the long convalescence. I suggest short walks, with plenty of rest between. Make sure you don't wander where nobody can see you, in case you do need help.”
Will took a shower, his midsection packed tightly in plastic. Then he stared at his reflection in the bathroom's small mirror for half an eternity, dripping water on the floor mats. His careless five-day-stubble had grown into a full beard, which did nothing to hide how gaunt he looked, how the skin stretched tightly over his cheekbones. He'd lost muscle mass – not enough to look emaciated, just enough to make it feel as though he was looking at a stranger.
It took him forty minutes to trim down the facial growth to something less wild. He was so tired by the end of it that he almost fell asleep at the sink, and retired to bed for the rest of the day.
The following morning, Will shuffled up and down the corridor outside his room for twenty minutes. The scar on his abdomen pulled and ached with every step. It was an ugly thing, thick and red. The doctors had told him that with time, it would fade a little, and if it bothered him too much, cosmetic surgery was an option.
Will wasn't going to do a damn thing about it. The scar was the only visible evidence he had of his encounter with Hannibal Lecter, not counting the ones in his mind; he would wear it – not proudly, but doggedly, as a reminder of...
Of what? His own fallible nature? His failure? Will sat down on a visitor bench outside his room, ignoring the security guard – a stern-faced, unfriendly-looking brunette who'd trailed after him the entire time – and the other patients and nurses.
Jack had warned him about not letting his empathy confuse him.
Will hadn't been confused, though, there at the end.
He knew exactly what Hannibal was, and it was nothing like what had anchored Garret Jacob Hobbs in Will's subconscious. Beneath Hannibal's genteel, refined exterior, beneath the layers of sadism and manipulation, lurked a scarred creature – scarred, but not meek or apologetic. Proud. Unlike most serial killers, Hannibal wasn't delusional or attempted to explain his acts away, to rationalize them.
Surely there was a childhood trauma, probably connected to that long-dead sister, Mischa. Nobody was born a fully fledged cannibal with a penchant for making five-star-meals out of their victims.
Will's empathy had resonated neither with the scarred creature nor the traumatized child, but with the man who ate the rude and made their remains into art. He hadn't been seduced by the blood and the meat, although Will could no longer claim 'doing bad things to bad people' didn't feel good.
He'd cared for Hannibal, still did. He was possibly in love with him, or at least with the ideal Hannibal represented: that ironclad certainty that there was a place for Hannibal in this world, and his right to claim and defend it. His right to be what he was, without having to explain or justify it.
Will could relate to that. To all of it. Having never been the most stable of persons, Will could see how he would yearn for that certainty and the man who represented it. Who wouldn't, when it promised so much freedom from the trappings of convention and the plague of self-doubt?
But that wasn't all, was it? He -
“Hey. You all right?”
Will blinked, resurfacing. The security guard was peering into his eyes, a frown on her face. “Yeah, I'm fine. Sorry.”
“You sat there for like ten minutes, without moving.”
“I do that, now and then.”
He didn't want to explain himself to her. Baltimore PD and the FBI had both promised him he wasn't being treated as a suspect, that the security guards where there for Will's protection, but he knew that wasn't quite true. The manhunt for Hannibal Lecter was national news; he'd been last seen by airport staff, boarding a France-bound plane in the company of a woman who matched Bedelia du Maurier's description. Interpol had gotten involved. Hannibal wasn't going to suddenly pop up in Baltimore, breaking into Will's hospital room to finish what he'd started. If he'd wanted Will dead, he would have made sure Will was dead, that night at his house.
The security guards weren't there for Will's protection. With Jack gone and no physical records of their plan, there was very little that would prove Will hadn't been seduced over to the dark side. He had killed Randall Tier and then mutilated the corpse. He'd almost shot Clark Ingram, and who knew what Mason Verger would say, if asked about Will's involvement in his curious 'accident' in the pig pen, now that Hannibal was no longer on American soil?
“You should probably go back to bed,” the guard said. “You're looking a little peaky.”
*
A day before Jack's funeral, Will received a visitor. The man who let himself into Will's room was very tall and lean, with greying brown hair and the habitual stoop of someone trying to minimize the impact of their physical size. That, or he'd been warned about Will's volatile social skills, his odd-man-out mentality.
“I'm Carter Jones, FBI,” the man introduced himself, not offering Will his hand. “I'm Jack Crawford's successor.”
Will disliked him on sight. Successor. As if Jack had simply stepped down, retiring to well-deserved years of good living.
Jones had brought a briefcase full of files, and wasted no time spreading them out on Will's bed and the small table in the corner, where Will usually ate his meals. They were case files. A small photo was clipped to every folder, showing men and women across all ethnicities.
Will looked from the files to Jones. “What's this?”
“Victims of the Chesapeake Ripper. I'm sure you're familiar with some of the cases. We're slowly unravelling Hannibal Lecter's 'career' here in Baltimore.” Jones took the only chair in the room, forcing Will to remain standing, as his bed was currently occupied by the files. “I'm sure we'll dig up more. Lecter was careful in leaving no traces, but now that we know what we're looking for, we're finally going to nail the bastard.”
The urge to laugh right in Jones' face was overwhelming, but Will suppressed it. 'Nail' Hannibal. As if the FBI had ever gotten closer than Hannibal allowed them. As if they'd been suspecting him for years. If circumstance hadn't put Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter in the same room, if Will hadn't somehow managed to worm his way past Hannibal's careful defences, if he hadn't let Hannibal past his, there'd be bodies turning up for a long time to come, in sounders of three.
“You misunderstand me. What are these files doing in my room?”
Jones crossed one leg over the other, affecting a surprised expression. “Surely you have some interest in contributing to the capture of the man who nearly killed you.”
Will's gut reaction shot right past the filters between his brain and his mouth. “No.”
Jones' eyebrows wandered up toward his hairline. “No? Too bad. We were going to offer you a chance to redeem yourself.”
Will wasn't in the mood to play the talking game. “Cut to the chase.”
Jones held up a finger for each point he mentioned. “Mr. Graham, you're under suspicion of murdering Randall Tier. Clark Ingram has spread a pretty interesting tale, as well. And let's not forget that you mutilated Tier's corpse and mounted him on a pedestal at the Museum of Natural History. Then there's the fact that you acted as an accessory to entrapment, regardless of whether Lecter's guilty or not. All that combined is enough to put you behind bars for the rest of your life.”
Will shrugged. He wasn't hearing anything new. He'd known Jack and he would be skirting dangerously close to the shadier side of the law, and although neither of them had anticipated Will would have to kill someone in self-defence, they'd both known it came with the job description. Short of catching Hannibal in the act, though, which they'd both known was never going to happen under normal circumstances, they hadn't had many options. And Will had so wanted to be the one to catch Hannibal, then, when he'd been fresh out of the Baltimore State Hospital, aching for revenge.
Funny how things had changed.
“The only thing that's kept you out of prison so far,” Jones levelled a pointed look at him, then flapped a hand at the quite cosy hospital room, “is the fact that you're the guy who identified Lecter as the Chesapeake Ripper in the first place. And, of course, that weird thing you do. You're valuable. We're willing to offer you a deal.”
Will shoved a few files into an untidy heap and sat down on the edge of his bed. “Let me guess. You want my full cooperation.”
Jones nodded. “The Inspector General has already agreed to drop all charges, if you help us track down and capture Lecter. Considering Randall Tier's personal body count and the state of his victims when he was done with them, you were acting under, shall we say, extreme duress. That can go a long way to excuse some behaviours.”
Kade Prurnell would never have backed down like that. Someone higher up the chain of command than her had put their foot down and was holding a protective hand over Will, or the FBI was really that desperate to catch Hannibal and had pulled some strings. Considering the Chesapeake Ripper's body count and Hannibal's personal involvement with the BAU as a consultant, as well as the fact that Jack Crawford, head of the BAU, had died at Hannibal's house, it was likely the second option.
Someone wanted Hannibal caught, fast.
Will knew he didn't have much of a choice. He'd sailed out of the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane thanks to Matthew Brown and the Chesapeake Ripper, neither of whom was going to step up now. Will could think of a million things he'd rather do than immerse himself in Hannibal once more – and in the same breath, immerse himself in his own twisted feelings – but he didn't want to go to prison again.
“I have two conditions.” Will stared at a spot of wall directly above Jones' head. “I want Jack's name cleared. He died trying to stop Hannibal. He doesn't deserve to be dragged through the mud. And I want Abi – Miss Hobbs' name to be kept out of the press.” He recalled the newscast he'd watched earlier and amended, “As much as is possible, at this point.”
“Done.” Jones picked up his briefcase and rose, with an air of self-congratulatory smugness oozing from his every pore. “Welcome back aboard, Mr. Graham.”
Rude, Will thought.
*
Jack's funeral was a quiet affair. His wife Bella wasn't there. She'd finally succumbed to her body's rapidly progressing deterioration and was confined to a bed at John Hopkins. There were a couple of guys from the BAU, Zeller and Price among them, the director of the FBI, and enough police to curtain the area to keep the press from making a mess of everything.
The official story was that Jack had followed Lecter's invitation to dinner, only to be attacked and killed by his host. Abigail and Alana hadn't been mentioned at all. Will's involvement had been kept deliberately vague in regards to the deadly cat-and-mouse game he'd been playing with Hannibal. The press were currently praising him as the 'uniquely gifted FBI agent who had sniffed out Hannibal the Cannibal'.
If only they knew.
Will kept craning his head during the service, anticipating a certain red-haired journalist among the crowd loitering on the cemetery's gravel paths, behind the rows of police officers. He'd given Freddie Lounds carte blanche to write about him and Hannibal and he couldn't imagine she'd hold back. And if not her, then someone else. Something always leaked through the cracks.
Freddie wasn't there.
After the casket had been lowered into the ground and the funeral guests had spoken their respective pieces, Will and Alana slowly made their way to the car waiting for them. It was straight back to the hospital for both of them. The doctors had already fussed about allowing them to attend the funeral in the first place, but Alana had been adamant. Now she looked as tired as Will felt.
Carter Jones was waiting for them at the car. He greeted Alana with a curt nod, then held out a file to Will. “They fished a body out of the Seine this morning, in Paris. We're still waiting for the French authorities to send us the details, but here's the preliminary report.”
“Will,” Alana glared at him, reproachfully. “You can't -” She took a noisy breath, fingers clenched white around the armrests of her wheelchair, and averted her gaze. “God.”
The file contained a single sheet of paper, with a photo clipped to it. The report was in French. The photo showed the water-logged, naked corpse of a woman. Will had only met Bedelia du Maurier twice, but he recognized her features in the corpse's bloated face. Hannibal had been kind to her; she hadn't been turned into art, hadn't been put on shameful, public display or carved open. She hadn't become someone's meal.
Skimming over the written report, Will managed to translate enough to get the gist of it: the assumed cause of death was blunt force trauma to the back of the head. Unless the full autopsy turned up anything else, judging by the location of the deadly blow, it was likely Bedelia hadn't seen her death coming.
Distantly aware that Alana had started a low-voiced, angry discussion with Carter Jones, Will tried to sink into the scene, to put himself in Hannibal's shoes when he killed Bedelia, tried to be Hannibal, but the connection wasn't coming. The pendulum didn't swing. It was always more difficult if a picture was all he had to work with, instead of a fresh crime scene. Still, he should have got something.
All he got was an irrational flare of jealousy messing with his concentration. Irritated, Will tried to staunch the flood of hostility toward a woman whose corpse he was looking at, until he couldn't. Jaw clenched, he gave in, allowed himself to sink into that.
He'd had Hannibal, there at the end, Will was certain of it. He didn't know what had given the plan's existence away, but he'd had him, hook, line and sinker. He'd seduced Hannibal into believing Will was his friend. His memories of that night were a red-tinged miasma of agony, yet he remembered Hannibal's voice, full of barely concealed hurt.
I let you know me. See me. I gave you a rare gift, but you didn't want it.
Hannibal had gutted Will, severing the bonds that tethered them together, an act of retaliation. He'd killed Abigail, who had no longer served any purpose other than that of a tool to hurt Will with, when Will rejected the possibility – the reality of the teacup coming back together: Hannibal's sister's unconditional love remade, reshaped in Will.
And then Hannibal had walked away, literally, as if Will had no more meaning to him.
Had walked away all the way to France, with Bedelia du Maurier. As if it was nothing. As if Will was nobody – just another victim of the Chesapeake Ripper, one unworthy even of being turned into art. Of being consumed.
“Will? Will!”
Alana's concerned shout snapped Will out of his trance. She'd reached up to grasp his wrist, was pulling on it. Carter Jones was giving him a stare that wasn't so much dubious as it was fascinated – like a zoo visitor watching an animal perform a neat trick. Will had gripped the file folder so hard the edges were digging into his palms, crunching up the report.
“Anything?” Jones asked eagerly, ignoring the dirty look Alana shot him.
Will shook his head, as much to dispel the lingering memories as to answer the question. “I need the full autopsy report. And if you don't mind, I'd like to return to the hospital now.”
He took sadistic pleasure in watching Jones' face fall. The man wanted Hannibal caught with a fervour that bordered on avarice, but for all the wrong reasons. Jones was a ladder-climber, an opportunist. Will could read him as easily as this morning's newspaper. He wanted Hannibal's capture on his list of achievements, not out of a sense of obligation toward justice or Hannibal's victims, but to climb yet a little higher on that ladder, perhaps all the way into the FBI director's seat one day.
Jones didn't deserve Hannibal.
“I'll get that to you as soon as we have it.” Jones tipped an invisible hat at Alana and headed toward the exit of the parking lot, where a few reporters were still lingering.
Alana was staring at him, her expression a mix of disbelief, worry and anger. “I can't even begin to formulate how bad an idea I think this is. Will, you're not even out of the hospital yet. You haven't had a chance to process everything that happened. Haring after Hannibal now is the absolute worst thing you could do. I can't believe they asked you to do this!”
“I'm not haring after him,” Will protested, the words tasting stale even as he said them, feeble. He'd been haring after Hannibal for so long now, he couldn't just stop. Not even when the man himself probably considered Will dead meat. Alana's questioning look prompted him to add, “They gave me a choice between going to prison, or helping them. I chose helping them.”
“That wasn't much of a choice, was it?”
“No. But you can't deny I'm the best chance they have at catching him.”
A muscle jumped in Alana's cheek. She looked away, across the peaceful, early-morning cemetery with its acres of evergreen lawn and the hundreds of headstones and carved crosses, man-made reminders of the fragility of life. It had rained during the night, and a fine mist hung between the trees.
“Promise me you won't get too close this time.”
“Promised.”
She glanced at him. “Liar.”
*
Later that day, in the evening, an FBI courier brought a copy of the translated, full autopsy report. There were more detailed pictures of Bedelia's corpse as well, from different angles than just the upper body shot Will had already seen.
Instead of jealousy, Will felt vaguely sorry for the woman now – whatever goal she'd had in mind when she accompanied Hannibal to Europe, clearly she hadn't achieved it.
He couldn't tell if it had been professional curiosity, a chance to study a rare beast in its natural habitat, so to speak, that prompted Bedelia to risk not only her career but also her freedom. Will knew she'd been Hannibal's therapist, but had she been more? They would have made a lovely pair – both of them brilliant and ruthless. They would have taken Baltimore's upper class society by storm.
Had Hannibal been grooming her, the same way he'd groomed Will to follow his urges, the way he had groomed Abigail to be Will's Mischa? Was Bedelia meant to be the reincarnated Mischa, now that Will hadn't panned out?
Will did believe Bedelia's story about having been persuaded into killing the patient who had attacked her. He knew all too well what having Hannibal Lecter in your head could do to you.
Still, she'd displayed a capacity for cold-blooded calculation and deception. She hadn't come forward with the entire truth until the US attorney granted her immunity from prosecution, despite the lives she'd had to have known were at stake. She'd visited Will during his incarceration at the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, told him she believed him, and yet hadn't lifted a finger to help prove Will's innocence.
Even what she had told them hadn't prepared Will for the eventual events – Hannibal had been lost that night, but certainly not in self-congratulation at his cleverness.
“Why kill you?” Will murmured, stretching out on the bed.
He briefly toyed with the idea that this had all been a set up from the start. Hannibal clearly was capable of long-term planning. Jack had been hunting the Chesapeake Ripper for years. Will could easily see how Hannibal could have planned to worm his way into Jack's side via everyone's favourite pet empath: wind Will Graham up and watch him go. Watch him drag Jack Crawford down into the rabbit's hole along the way.
He dismissed the idea almost immediately.
In retrospect, Will was certain Hannibal had meant for them both to get away unscathed, to recreate his happiness, even if that meant forcing fate's hand. Jack's death would have been...a bonus, a thumbing of the nose at the mighty FBI: See? I can get you. Any of you.
Why kill Bedelia?
Tourists had found her body on the banks of the Seine outside Paris. The autopsy report estimated the time of death at roughly two weeks ago – always hard to tell, with water-buried corpses. She'd had no other major wounds than a crushed-in skull, no organs missing, no trophies taken, no casual mutilations. Just the usual wear-and-tear of a body in a river.
Will closed his eyes.
They are walking along the river. It is night. Paris is always at her most beautiful during the night, the Eiffel Tower a shining beacon rising over the city, and there is the Pyramid of the Louvre, and above it all a melody, an echo of times past...
Interpol and every European police force have been alerted to the cannibal on the run, so Bedelia and Hannibal must stick to anonymity for now, until the waves have calmed, until the all-seeing eye of the press is turned elsewhere: another war, another political scandal. The world forgets. It always does.
Bedelia, stunning in her Armani dress, a shawl elegantly draped over her shoulders to protect against the chill. Click-click-click of her high heels on the pavement. Her hand resting lightly in the crook of Hannibal's arm, not proprietary, but careful, like the hand of the lion-tamer outstretched to pet the great, big cat...
Hannibal genteel as always, yet preoccupied. Discontent. Smarting over betrayal, aching for another's presence -
A careful question, in Bedelia's soft, dulcet tones. Hannibal answers almost carelessly, close to distress and furious about it. Gently, Bedelia probes, to gauge the state of Hannibal's mind.
They turn from the river toward the city. Hannibal picks a small flowerpot from a low windowsill, with prestidigitation.
Bedelia does not notice. The streets are narrow here, the street lights damp and distant, and it is late enough for them to be unobserved by locals and tourists alike. Still, she must watch her step, unless she stumbles on the uneven side walk.
The flowerpot is heavy, entirely carved from stone. A good weight in Hannibal's hand. He aims it at the back of Bedelia's head and he feels -
- nothing. Will felt nothing. He opened his eyes. The images were there, detailed as always, but the emotional component wasn't. Hannibal hadn't felt a thing. At least, nothing so tender as he had demonstrated toward Will, all the way until the curved blade sank into Will's belly.
This was Hannibal at his basest. Stripped of all emotions because he'd locked them away tightly. Prior to his attempt to lure him, Will wouldn't have been able to tell the difference – Hannibal presented the world with carefully tailored expressions and behaviour – but now it was like being back in that field in Minnesota, where Will had been handed a negative so he could see the positive.
Bedelia had been a means to an end. A couple aroused less suspicion at the airport if the authorities were looking for a man travelling alone. The authorities were looking for a white man in his late forties who had killed dozens of people in America and god only knew where else, not a doting, considerate husband. Oh, Hannibal had known about Bedelia's interest, that once-in-a-lifetime chance to study a cannibalistic serial killer from up close and live to tell about it –
Hannibal as genteel as always, yet preoccupied. Discontent.
He'd killed her because she wasn't Will. Perhaps he'd wanted her to be.
He misses me, Will thought. He wanted what could have been, so much. He was lonely, looking for someone to finally see him for who he is. To accept him as he is. He thought he'd found that someone in me.
And how do we feel about that, Mr. Graham?
*