Chapter Text
It felt as if the noose was back around his neck. Hannibal’s breaths came only with a rasping strain, the tightness in his throat due not to constriction but to a fullness. He couldn’t feel the burn of rope around his neck but even still he wondered whether this was a post-traumatic reliving. It had, he rationalized, been a long time since he had felt as powerless as he had on that makeshift cross. He was a good enough psychiatrist to recognize that a gun to his head could have triggered a flashback to the last time Will Graham tried to kill him.
He took a ragged breath that still smelled of Will’s lamentable aftershave. He turned a hand over to stare at the scar on his wrist. It didn’t hurt, but he felt something spasm in his chest as he looked at the stitch marks.
He shook his head sharply and pushed the door to his fridge shut. The sensation in his chest morphed from tightness to an itch. Hannibal coughed once, twice into his fist to dislodge it. He found himself looking at a single, blush pink petal, glistening on the triangle of firm flesh between his thumb and the back of his hand.
Hannibal did not indulge in senseless denial, so he didn’t try to hide from the explanation that rose instantly in his mind. Hanahaki disease. Incredibly rare, all but mythical save for a few documented cases.
Hannibal found himself smiling at the petal, irrationally amused as he breathed in the last of Will’s aftershave. He had never doubted that his fascination with Will Graham was well-placed, but this was the latest confirmation. That Will had unknowingly afflicted Hannibal with the rarest and most mystical of diseases seemed only fitting. That he was, through no action of his own, revealing depths within Hannibal that Hannibal himself had thought long made barren, seemed only slightly more improbable.
He did not despair that Hanahaki disease indicated his love was unrequited. Nor did he feel any special concern over the countdown that began with this first petal. His lungs becoming choked full of flora was a concrete and discomfiting threat in his mind. But this was not the first time Hannibal had allowed his affection for Will to endanger his life. In every way, this only solidified his need to continue tugging at Will. On some level, Hannibal’s life had always hung in the balance, should his endeavors fail.
When Will showed up at his office, newly groomed and honed into something deadly, Hannibal hid only half his delight at the sight of him. He swallowed down the petal tickling at the back of his throat and smiled. “Hello, Will.”
Hannibal had the gun, but he was indisposed. Will had a feeling, judging from the way Hannibal was coughing, that he could pull it out of his grip without much fight. The idea ate at Will’s brain, leaving no room for him to even question what had come over Hannibal when Will pulled back from the hand against his cheek. He imagined taking the gun and finishing Clark Ingram, still on his knees in front of Will. If Hannibal was right, and it wasn’t a good enough substitute, Will told himself he could turn the gun to Hannibal, too. He was watching the bullet leave the pistol in a clear path to Ingram’s head, as it should have two minutes before, when he heard footsteps behind him. He knew it was Peter, come to find out if his therapist had learned his lesson. Rationally, Will knew he couldn’t grab the gun now that Peter was here to witness Will’s kills. It didn’t stop his hand from itching with the absence of the pistol’s grip.
“Wh-what’s wrong with him?”
Peter’s voice was finally enough to convince Will to abandon his murderous visions. He broke his staredown with Ingram only long enough to glance at Peter as he drew timidly up beside Will. Peter’s darting attention rested on Hannibal, rather than his own therapist.
Will needlessly checked that Ingram was still on his knees without a sign of fight in him before joining Peter in considering Hannibal.
His back was bent by the force of his racking coughs, broad shoulders coiling with force. He had turned away, but the piles of petals at his feet grew too big to go unnoticed, vibrant splashes of color against the soft wood of the barn floor.
Those petals should have registered as a shock to Will’s mind. He knew implicitly what they meant, his certainty aided by the phantom sense of Hannibal’s hand against his cheek, his quiet words and burning gaze. The affliction marked by those petals was the stuff of legends, but Will knew it all the same and could come up with no way to deny what he was seeing. It should have evoked a sense of vindictive satisfaction in Will, hearing Hannibal choke and gag between coughs. Or maybe a sense of sympathy, seeing his careful dignity cracked by infirmity. Instead, Will felt like his insides were draining out of him, leaving only an empty ache.
“Will?”
He turned back to Peter, remembering the man’s question. He could feel Peter’s fear and confusion with clarity.
“It doesn’t matter,” Will told him. “I can’t help him.” His words were quiet, but he knew Hannibal heard them.
It became another of the many things they danced around in their conversations. The petals encased in handkerchiefs readily drawn from Hannibal’s inside pocket were much like Abigail or Michael Brown or Beverly Katz— another in a long string of wounds they had inflicted on each other. They were never addressed directly, since addressing them would shatter the illusion upheld in Will’s return to therapy. Will had to know what the flowers meant and, Hannibal suspected, who had caused them to blossom.
After the first few times, Will seemed to enjoy it: the way his lingering gaze or touch could force Hannibal to excuse himself to clear his throat or cough. The vindictiveness matched his new haircut and quiet arrogance. His quickly-hidden smirks of triumph often only set a second rush of petals stirring in Hannibal’s chest.
They talked of regrets and killing, and Hannibal allowed himself to imagine that some part of his desire was finally coming to fruition. When Will described killing Garret Jacob Hobbs and attempting to kill Hannibal as “a quiet sense of power,” Hannibal was almost overwhelmed with pride and petals bubbling up in the back of his throat. He coughed only once before continuing their conversation, but he saw Will’s attention catch on it. He knew Will was building an inventory of cause and effect for Hannibal’s symptoms. It wouldn’t escape his notice, how his dark instincts made Hannibal choke on affection. Hannibal wondered, with the fondness of a teacher considering a star pupil, what Will would save these weapons for.
Hannibal hadn’t had another attack as severe as the one in the barn. He was building his own cause-and-effect list, of course, and he realized he had likely brought the attack upon himself by indulging in the physical intimacy of holding Will so closely. Should a moment as sacred and appetizing as that one arise again, Hannibal doubted the threat of a coughing fit would keep him from making the same choice. Still, it was good to understand what little control he had over his symptoms.
He allowed his relationship with Alana to wane, a simple task given how fervently she disapproved of him resuming therapy with Will. He had quickly discovered that intimacy with her seemed to aggravate the infection in his lungs, and it would be far too difficult to keep his symptoms from her. He worked to keep her friend-distanced, which she allowed without bitterness.
He was grateful to Randall Tier when his former patient drew attention to himself with cosmic timing. Hannibal delighted in weaving his web around Will as new threads became available, day to day. He wound Randall up carefully, not wanting to waste such a fascinating patient on anything less than extraordinary.
All told, for a man suffering from unrequited love and a mythical disease that would kill him in a matter of weeks, Hannibal felt quite content.
The first roots took hold the night Will brought him Randall Tier’s body. Even Steven and Hannibal found himself having to focus on the breaths he drew. Will’s confession of the kill’s intimacy marked the first time Hannibal had to turn away for a pained thirty seconds. His handkerchief was dotted with blood, phlegm, saliva, and two crumpled purple-black roses when he was done. The flowers were half the size of his palm each, spat into it with effort, nauseatingly sweet with every breath he took. The first whole flowers he’d coughed up, and already past their time. He folded them stoically back into his pocket as he turned back to Will.
He soaked Will’s bloodied knuckles and every breath was sharp. The petals rose, pressing up his trachea. He could breathe through them, but barely. He didn’t need much air, standing so close to Will and feeling the heat of his hands as he cleaned them. His head spun and his breaths were shaky and shallow to his own ears, but he wasn’t going to let his failing body take a single moment from him. Will had never been more magnificent, his thoughts a twisting, sinister horror in the room between them. Hannibal wanted every detail of him etched and splashed in the halls of his memory palace.
“Don’t go inside, Will,” Hannibal told him as the rest of his words were stolen by flowers, his carefully selected advice and metaphors too verbose for his empty lungs and full throat. He rubbed salve into Will’s knuckles and saw Will continue to fight back his mind. “Stay with me.”
“Where else would I go?”
The true torture came not from the tightness in Hannibal’s chest or the flowers in his throat, but the reminder carried by their presence. Here was the Will that Hannibal had hardly dared imagine, who had brought a kill to Hannibal’s dinner table and still had a man’s blood creased in his palms. He had embraced his potential, emboldened his becoming, and still he was no more Hannibal’s than that very first day in Jack Crawford’s office. He was a dark, terrible, perfect temptation, stood this close to Hannibal, meeting his eyes in magnetized glances, and he knew what he was doing with his words and the body on the table.
Hannibal dropped Will’s bandaged hand and took another minute to cough. He saw a full rose mixed with the petals before he stuffed his sodden handkerchief away. Will’s gaze stayed fixed on Randall’s body.
“You have everywhere to go,” Hannibal forced himself to say. “As long as you buttress your mind against deterring forces like guilt.” He caught his breath. “You should be quite pleased. I am.”
“Of course you are,” Will said. He must not have caught the untruth laced in with Hannibal’s genuine sentiments.
Hannibal braced himself against the table as discreetly as he could. His chest ached. “When you were killing Randall, did you fantasize you were killing me?”
Will met his eyes. “Yes.”
Hannibal smiled, but the pain swelled so strongly that it drove him to his kitchen sink, bracing himself with hunched shoulders as he layered the bottom in black, crimson, inky purple roses.
He didn’t realize Will had followed him until his coughing finally subsided to shaky gasps.
“I’m sorry this is happening to you.” Will said it like it came as a curious surprise to him, a realization only made as it vibrated the air between them. “I can’t figure out why, but I am.”
There was a candor to the words that took Hannibal aback. He pushed himself upright, running the back of his hand across his mouth to swipe away blood and saliva. He wished he could taste something other than September roses. He could hardly smell Will’s aftershave over the sweet decay.
“It doesn’t strike you as poetic justice?” he asked hoarsely, gesturing back to the sink, knowing Will would remember his own time spitting horror into the bottom of a kitchen sink.
“It does. It’s less awful than many of the fates I’ve wished on you.” He shrugged with an unhappy quirk of his lips. “But this is not the reckoning I would have designed.”
This was the closest they had ever come to talking about Hannibal’s affliction.
“You would not wish me to die by your hand so indirectly?” Saying it had a horrible weight to it, but Hannibal knew his feelings hadn’t been hidden in a long time.
Will shook his head. “It’s a power imbalance. You, made vulnerable and hurting from something I haven’t done. I wanted that, in the State Hospital. But not like this.”
Hannibal sighed. He understood what Will was and wasn’t saying— he didn’t like the guilty complexity spelled by the Hanahaki. In his version of events, those feelings would not exist, so Will could simplify his relationship with Hannibal into something more palatably hostile.
“Most of what we do, most of what we believe, is motivated by death,” Hannibal told him. He wasn’t sure the word had been ‘death’ before it left his mouth.
“I don’t think I’ve ever felt more alive than when I was killing him.”
This time, Hannibal imagined he could feel the roots of one of Will’s flowers tunneling through his bronchi.
“Then you owe Randall Tier a debt. How will you repay him?”
Will wished he could ignore Hannibal’s illness. He told himself, again and again, that Hannibal’s weakness and distraction made him no less eligible for the capture Will and Jack were constructing. It was only hard to believe when the coughing spells lasted more than a few seconds or when he caught a glimpse of blood and petals trapped in white fabric, quickly stowed away. Both occurrences had been more frequent since Will killed Randall Tier.
His dreams saw fit to punish him, forcing him to confront a Hannibal who was far more explicit with his feelings than the one in the waking world. By that love we see potential in our beloved. Once, even: I love you, Will. Will leapt to consciousness after that particular dream, finding himself as shaking and sweat-covered as if he had just reenacted a murder. He made his way to his bathroom, intending to splash his face with water but unable to stop staring at the bowl of his sink. He imagined it covered in those blood and bruise roses from Hannibal’s kitchen. He leaned forward until his forehead hit the mirror, no doubt leaving a smudge on the glass that would piss him off in the morning.
Why? Why did Hannibal have to love him? The unjustness of it hit even harder than when Will had been wrongfully imprisoned. He’d been the object of so few people’s affection, through the years. Hannibal’s love, written in those damn plants, was such abject, purposeless cruelty from a universe or god that seemed to delight in tiny ironies. Will squeezed his eyes shut and huffed something that wanted to be a laugh as he wondered whether Hannibal’s unrequited love was keeping Will awake at night more than it was the man himself.
He forced himself to keep going through the motions of his plan, keeping his waking hours as free as he could from thoughts of Hannibal’s diseased feelings. He recognized in Margot Verger some sort of hidden play on Hannibal’s part, but he couldn’t see the shape of his strategy. It was a small relief, though, to recognize he was still being toyed with.
Freddie Lounds was unexpectedly painful.
Not the confrontation in his shed. That had, if Will was honest, been thrilling in a skin-crawling sort of way. He found it wasn’t very hard at all to shift through the killers in his head until he found the right terrifyingly flat affect. Her panic was far more fun than her fury once Will revealed she’d been a pawn in his and Jack’s game.
No, the pain came afterward, in Hannibal’s kitchen.
“I provide the ingredients, you tell me what we should do with them,” Will said as he looked over his offering.
“What’s the meat?”
“What do you think?”
Hannibal’s small smile had a twist buried in it, due no doubt to the pressure of flowers building in his lungs. Will dragged his mind back before he could imagine what it must feel like. He watched as Hannibal bent to smell the meat in its paper wrapper, putting on airs so Will could clearly see his giddy pride.
“Red meat, but only just. Veal? Pork, perhaps?”
Will had to pull his eyes away from him, choked with a toxic blend of anger at Hannibal’s detached smugness over the idea of human meat and vestigial affection at the sight of his once-friend made so delighted by what he thought Will had done. To hide his emotions, he leaned a little too hard on the viciousness from some of the killers he’d studied when he responded, “She was a slim and delicate pig.”
Hannibal’s only giveaway that he may have noticed Will’s slip was the fact that he didn’t cough or clear his throat at Will’s words. He announced which meal he’d chosen to prepare and enlisted Will’s help.
He had an energy to him as they cooked that Will wasn’t sure he’d ever fully seen before. Will mostly stayed to the side, chopping vegetables and peeling potatoes and watching Hannibal in his element. He’d seen the other man cook before, most notably the night he’d stopped by with the bottle of wine. This was completely different, somehow, and not just because Hannibal paused every few minutes for the flowers.
For a moment, Will tried to imagine they were different people. What might it feel like, to share a moment of open domesticity with a person who was in love with him, if that person were anyone other than Hannibal Lecter? He could almost see himself inhabiting the same space as Alana, blissfully unaware that Hannibal was anything other than charming and clever and enigmatic. He remembered when he’d held a more reserved version of that view himself, not so very long ago. But when he tried to envision Hannibal as anything other than what he’d seen since that night in the Hobbs’ kitchen, he found himself unable to. Hannibal without his appetite or his sharp-toothed smile or his dramatic cursed flowers was impossible to imagine. Will remembered what he had told that version of Hannibal, before he caught his first glimpse of the real thing: I don’t find you all that interesting. Besides, Will told himself, he was doing Hannibal’s victims a disservice by attempting any such fantasies. Abigail, Beverly, Georgia Madchen. Others Will knew the names of. Countless more he didn’t.
Hannibal’s hand landed on the crook of Will’s arm. “Where did you go?” His voice was hoarse.
“Where else would I go?” Will thought they both might have flinched at that, under their careful composures. “Sorry,” he said for no reason, slipping his arm out from under Hannibal’s touch, glancing at the vegetables on the cutting board in front of him. “What next?”
Hannibal regarded him with fathomless brown eyes for a moment too long. “Must you always keep me at arm’s length, Will?”
“You haven’t given me much of a reason not to.”
He felt Hannibal’s disappointment and irritation prickling.
Fine. “Are you going to let me kill you?”
A tiny head tilt, followed by the bob of his Adam’s apple as he swallowed. This Hanahaki thing was certainly helping Will figure out what Hannibal liked best from him. “Not if I can help it.”
Will huffed. “There’s surgery, you know.”
“I suspect it may be too late for that now.”
Will thought, distantly, that he was angrier about this than he’d realized. “Well it wasn’t always. Were you really too arrogant to admit your disease has no chance of remission?” He meant to look away when he said it but instead found himself staring at Hannibal’s face, watching for any twitch in the muscles that might betray hurt or anger or unfazed amusement. He thought possibly he saw a distant form of puzzlement instead.
“Have you changed your mind about wanting me dead, Will?”
Will shook his head, looking down to the pile of potato skins he’d built on the impeccable marble countertop. People had died for lesser offenses in this house. “I would cut you out in a second, if it was me,” he said, voice gone awful and quiet. “I would cut me out of you even faster, if I thought I could.”
Hannibal reached out slowly to brush his fingers through the side of Will’s hair. “I suppose that’s where we differ, you and I. You view this thing between us as even more evil than you see me.”
“It’s… we are destructive,” Will said. He was tense under Hannibal’s touch, but he hadn’t pulled away yet.
“And that’s evil?”
Will closed his eyes, knowing the answer to the question and knowing it wasn’t enough for either of them. He wished he could turn the rest of his mind off and think only of Hannibal’s hand where it caressed his hair. He heard Hannibal’s inhales grow shallow and choked. Behind his eyelids, he saw lungs fill with leaves and roots and flowers and then, inevitably, grave dirt and maggots and earth worms. He remembered Hannibal’s victim just before Will’s release from the State Hospital. Will couldn’t remember the man’s name. Maybe he’d never known it. But he remembered the tableau, the man whose insides Hannibal had hollowed and filled with flowers. Somewhere, maybe, a god was laughing at them.
“Every choice carries the possibility of regret, Will,” Hannibal said, softly breaking his reverie. “It is as I told you: if I choose not to do something, it’s for good reason.”
Will opened his eyes to find Hannibal’s glistening at him, bright and bottomless and lined with whatever pain he was holding back. They held each other’s gaze until Hannibal doubled over, choking. Will knew that was his answer for his earlier question and he knew what Hannibal wasn’t saying just as clearly. For some stupid, impossible reason, Hannibal would rather risk his life than resign himself to living without Will.
Will slid down to his knees and pushed Hannibal to join him as the flowers started coming up in earnest. He kept his hand on Hannibal’s shoulder blade, even as it made the gasps between his heaves more ragged. The flowers spilled impossibly out of him: roses and tulips and carnations, tiny white baby’s breath, all shades of blood and tendon and viscera, slick from their journey up Hannibal’s throat.
“And I told you: you’ve riddled me with regrets.”
He was grateful, in a way, that Hannibal seemed determined not to let his disease dull his bite. What had happened to Margot, to the embryo that she regarded as her freedom and Will regarded as his second chance, was an unspeakable, hateful, ugly thing. It had Hannibal’s slender fingerprints all over it. It became easier, watching Hannibal’s disease progress. It gave Will the conviction to set Mason Verger on Hannibal’s path and to assure Jack that his latest plan to entrap Hannibal would work.
During therapy, he began initiating more of the casual touch Hannibal had once invited between them. It thrilled him, hearing Hannibal hack wetly into a handkerchief after Will bent close to speak into his ear or slid fingers along his upper arm. He could almost forget that the wound he was poking was Hannibal’s twisted, rotting love.
Hannibal never seemed angry about these new cruelties. He would lift his head from bloodstained fabric and, more often than not, consider Will with that familiar fondness across his features. It made Will want to cause him fresh torment; he usually resisted the impulse.
Once, he dreamed of being in Hannibal’s office, his insides alight with boiling rage over Hannibal’s latest manipulation. Will brushed his fingers along the back of Hannibal’s hand where it lay against the armrest. Once he’d spat up all his flowers, Hannibal looked up at Will with such an adoring smile that it made Will’s gut twist with indignant fury.
He bent down and kissed Hannibal. His mouth tasted like blood and roses.
The attack once they parted was fit for a deathbed.
In his waking hours, Will restricted his touches to small, casual things. He didn’t press too far, even when the affection spilling out of Hannibal’s gaze made his fists tighten. Instead, he focused his need for retribution on waiting for Mason Verger to inevitably strike.
She agreed to his request to speak privately with a nondescript nod. He followed her out of the interrogation room and far enough down the hall that there were at least five or six walls between them and Jack. Will stopped and Bedelia turned to look at him. He didn’t want to ask his question, hated the sound of it in his head.
“I need your professional and personal opinion,” he told her. “As someone who knows him as well as you do.”
Bedelia nodded for him to continue, her expression a carefully-practiced neutral.
“Do you think he’s capable of loving someone?”
He could tell with a bitter certainty that she knew why he was asking. Hannibal must have spoken of him often, before Bedelia went into hiding. “That may be too subjective a question for my professional opinion, Mr. Graham.”
Will shook his head, hating her for trying to slip away when he’d been laid bare. “If you don’t want to tell me what you think, the door’s that way. I’m not playing games with you.”
She put her head to the side and said, “He certainly thinks himself capable of it. We spoke often of friendship, during our sessions.”
Will scoffed. “I’m not sure he walked away with a very solid grasp of the concept.” Unsatisfied with her answer, he pushed farther. “Love requires empathy. I’m not sure he has any.”
“Hannibal once described your abilities as pure empathy. Do you feel they make it easier for you to love?”
He regarded the ceiling from the corner of his eye. “In order to love someone, you have to care about them beyond your own self-interest. We’re all just things for him to have. If we’re interesting enough, he consumes our lives and thoughts instead of our bodies.”
“Have you been consumed, Mr. Graham?”
Will twitched a smile. “I’d like to think he’s still gagging on me.” He took a step forward, closing the distance between them. Bedelia took a step back and a flash of alarm showed through her careful composure. “You keep dodging my question, Doctor. Is Hannibal Lecter… in love with me?”
“Could he daily feel a stab of hunger for you and find nourishment at the very sight of you? Yes.” Her tone never strayed from matter-of-fact, though her eyes darted between Will’s. “Is that a love you would accept from him?”
“I can’t accept any of it,” Will said with jagged edges on the words.
“You don’t ache for him?”
Will shut his eyes for a moment. There were many things he was unsure of in himself, these days. He was grateful to Hannibal’s sickness for making sure his feelings for Hannibal were never something he had to question.
“Thank you, Dr. Du Maurier,” he said, regarding her with a polite disdain he suspected was clear in his expression. “You’ve been entirely unhelpful, but I appreciate your time.”
The ravaging course of the disease became more apparent during the confrontation at Muskrat Farm. It almost forced him to forfeit Will’s life along with his own numbered one. In the end, overpowering Mason and his men was a sprint, not an endurance event. Hannibal could still sprint, even if it left him shaking and coughing once the bodies had settled to the ground. As soon as the fit subsided, he crouched beside where Will had fallen, turning his head so his face wasn’t pressed to the ground. He found his pulse in his neck with one hand while the other searched through Will’s hair to find the place the gun had hit him. Hannibal’s lungs felt like they were being crushed in his chest, but he ignored them. His fingers came back from Will’s head with an unalarming amount of blood. He might be concussed, upon waking, but he would be fine.
Hannibal got to his feet but just as quickly doubled over again. Mason stirred from his spot a few feet away, watching as the flowers— mostly red tulips, this time— were practicedly expectorated.
“Well, Dr. Lecter. I never would have guessed you to be a man no longer in possession of his own heart.”
Hannibal blinked at him, too wrung-out for a quick response. He stooped to grab Carlo’s gun and pulled Mason to his feet by the scruff of his neck. He bound Mason’s hands in front of him, tightly.
Mason wore a smirk, his next words regaining their cadence now that Hannibal’s blow was wearing off. “Since you’re going to kill me, you might as well tell me who didn’t want it.”
If Hannibal hadn’t felt so weak, he would have been able to keep his body from tensing and his eyes from slipping, just for a moment, to the back of Will’s head on the floor. He coughed at the sight, an involuntary and unproductive response to the spasm in his throat.
Mason grinned. “You’re kidding. He wanted me to kill you, you know. Unless the two of you planned all this.”
Hannibal took brief stock of his strength and decided he had enough to leave Will a calling card. He dragged Carlo’s body over to where the straitjacket lay torn and crumpled on the ground.
He bared his teeth in a smile over one shoulder, back to where Mason stood watching. “No plan, Mason. I’m afraid you were caught between Will and myself.”
“Some lovers’ quarrel.”
Hannibal forced the straitjacket around Carlo’s arms. The straps had been severed in a few important places, but Hannibal tied them together where he could until he thought they would hold. He moved to the winch, cataloguing his fatigue and realizing he may have overestimated; he didn’t think he would have the energy to subdue Mason if the man really decided to put up a fight. Hannibal watched his knots bear the weight of Carlo’s body as it rose from the ground and started gliding back toward the pigs.
Fortunately, Mason still seemed content merely to watch as Hannibal worked. Unlike Hannibal, his viciousness seemed second to his sense of self-preservation.
The pigs squealed and scuffled; Hannibal moved back from the controls, turning to Mason. His patient was smiling, his head tipped as if enjoying the symphony as the pigs gorged themselves.
Hannibal crossed over to him, pushing him to start walking.
“You know, for a man with your palate, Dr. Lecter, Will Graham seems in remarkably poor taste.”
Hannibal glanced back at the crumpled Will and grinned.
Hannibal suffered beautifully.
He never fully seemed to recover after the night at Muskrat Farm. When Will sat with him, days later, as he drew Achilles Lamenting the Death of Patroclus, the hollows under his eyes had gone purple-gray. His skin was pale in the firelight, the lines around his mouth more drawn.
“This isn’t sustainable,” Will told him, and he didn’t just mean their newly forged partnership as killers.
On those sorts of nights, the only thing Will was sure of was that he didn’t want Hannibal to die from the growths in his lungs. When he dreamed of Hannibal’s death, it was bloody, intimate, vicious. Not a slow, wasting, tragic thing, a result of Will but not his doing. The dreams where he manipulated Hannibal’s affliction had been replaced by dreams of Hannibal spread on a metal table with his ribs cracked and his lungs cut open. The roots and stems wrapped through the meat, flowers spilling impossibly from anatomical spaces too small to hold them.
As ever, it wasn’t something they spoke of. Instead, they talked about easier topics like the not-murder Will was deceiving Hannibal with, or whether they should kill Jack Crawford. Part of Will kept wondering: how long did he have left? The day Will almost killed Clark Ingram was deep within the past month. He had done his homework; he knew Hanahaki disease would already have killed some people, this far in.
Hannibal did a remarkable job of hiding the pain: it was only visible occasionally, in a sharp breath or the tight set of his shoulders. He went through multiple handkerchiefs in a day, Will knew, so the first didn’t get too visibly soiled. The flowers were everywhere now, and in his office Hannibal submitted to the indignity of keeping a wastebasket nearby to spit them into. Even so, Will found petals trapped in his clothing when he was home in Wolf Trap, hours after leaving Hannibal’s presence.
Will didn’t tell Jack about Hannibal’s illness. He supposed it would have been the smartest thing to do, to tell Jack that the fish they were working so hard to bring in wasn’t long for the world anyway. He didn’t have to confess the nature of the disease, he told himself. It was still impossible to imagine trying to explain it to Jack.
“How often do you wonder if I’m just waiting out the clock?” Will asked one evening, when the pretense of therapy had long since passed.
“How often do you wonder why you aren’t?”
Will sighed. “I am, though. And so are you.”
Hannibal shook his head, swaying the lock of hair on his forehead. “I haven’t resigned myself to any fate, yet.”
“What you’re waiting for, from me?” Will shut his eyes. “I can’t give it to you.”
“We cannot control with respect to whom we fall in love.”
Will’s breath shuddered on his next exhale. “You aren’t in love with me, Hannibal.”
The silence went on so long that Will opened his eyes to find Hannibal studying him. His eyes were as flat as they got around Will, these days.
“I should think I have evidence enough to prove otherwise,” Hannibal said, nodding toward the basket of flowers at his side.
Will shook his head. “I know you and your lungs think it’s love, what you’re feeling. It isn’t.” Even Will wasn’t sure what he hoped to get from pressing the conversation in this direction. His chest had gone hollow, again.
“I’m curious, given your empathy, what you think you detect from me, then.”
“I know you’re obsessed with me. Enamored with the idea of what you could twist us into.” He paused for Hannibal to recover from coughing. “I know you want me at your side, dragged into your world. You foster codependency. You watched as I bonded with Abigail, bonded with barely more than the idea of a child, before you took them away. You’ve made me alienate myself from Alana, from Jack. You don’t want me to have anything in my life that’s not you.” He stared at Hannibal, unsurprised to see that there was little argument on the doctor’s face. “You need to have me. But that isn’t love.”
“Even now, it’s as if you cringe from the light of the sun. You see only part of it, since you cannot make yourself take a full look.”
“It’s generally inadvisable, staring at the sun. People don’t often recover their sight.”
“To see the solar corona, one only has to chase an eclipse. Embrace the darkness, the better to see the light.”
“I’ve embraced. I still feel blind.”
“Will.” Hannibal sat forward in his chair, resting elbows on knees and chin on folded hands. His face looked skull-like in the soft light of his office. It might have been beautiful, somehow. “What would it take to convince you that my love for you is complete? I know you consider yourself wronged by my past actions. Would you have me apologize for them?”
“No. I know you wouldn’t. And if you did, it would only mean your survival instinct had finally kicked in.”
Hannibal’s lips spread into a smile before he bent for his basket. Will saw crimson blood on the blossoms as they fell. “You understand me so perfectly,” he said as he straightened. “You always have.”
“Not when I thought we were friends.”
Hannibal shrugged Will’s words off better than Will himself could. “Even then, you understood what you saw better than most.”
“Everything you’ve done since the moment we met has been about breaking me down so you could mold me into the shape you wanted. Did it ever occur to you to ask me what shape I wanted to be when you were through? Did you ever wonder if the Will Graham you met in Jack’s office didn’t need changing at all?”
“I could see your unhappiness as plainly as I imagine you see it in others, every day. You had spent so long hiding yourself from the world.” His pause wasn’t one of his intentional, loaded ones; Will heard him fighting to catch his breath. “What good came from all your quiet, unrecognized misery?”
“People’s lives, saved. I know that doesn’t mean anything to you.”
“People die every day. We only evolved capacity to care for a small few. Biology demands that we only truly conceive of the full complexity of a small handful of people. Compassion beyond that is merely performative.”
“Not for me.”
This pause was careful, studied. “Perhaps not.”
Will absorbed the victory quickly. “I fought for so long to keep myself from realizing the potential you thought you saw in me. You brought it all down with a dropped stack of papers and a phone call.” He thought of Jack, then, and Will’s promise that he was a good fisherman. He needed to stop this line of conversation, but he felt unfettered. “I never wanted this.”
“How you torment yourself.” Hannibal sat back in his chair, his eyes drifting shut. Before his next words, in the flickering light of the fire, he could have been a corpse. “You think my love is only for the part of you that I created within you. Has it ever occurred to you that in truth I saw your entirety, and chose to love your demons in ways you could not?”
“You had to cripple their captor to do it.”
Hannibal’s lips lifted before he cleared his throat. His eyes remained closed. “Yes. I have fought that captor many times. But I love even him.”
“How does it feel, when you imagine yourself dying for that love?”
“Poignant. A bit too tired for a truly great tragedy, but perhaps still affecting to lesser audiences.”
“I don’t want you to die from this. But I can’t save you.”
Hannibal finally stirred from his stillness to cough. “You have made both points more than clear to me, dear Will.”
Will huffed impatiently. “You’re holding out hope for something that won’t happen. I’m trying to explain your prognosis. Tomorrow will we go back to pretending like you aren’t dying?”
“We all live on borrowed time. None of us sure what the next day can or cannot bring.” He looked at Will with a depth to his eyes that almost made Will question his conviction about Hannibal’s feelings. “I still shatter teacups, never convinced I know the outcome.”
The next day, they went back to pretending. Hannibal had never broached the subject—the few discussions they’d had had been at Will’s initiation. Instead, they focused on luring Jack to Hannibal’s dinner table, on making their escape once they were through. They went through the motions of disassembling Hannibal’s life in Baltimore, preparing for a rebirth elsewhere. Will forced himself not to let his anger make him confront Hannibal about the pretense again. He asked about Hannibal’s memory palace instead, as if it mattered whether Hannibal’s capture could be long-endured.
Hannibal answered from his chair. He wanted to be in the landing, Will knew, grabbing patient journals and tossing them down to Will as they once had in those distant days of friendship. His symptoms demanded that he keep excursion limited, though. Will was secretly surprised every time Hannibal was able to lift himself from a chair. When would the day come when that was too much for him?
“My palace is vast, even by medieval standards.” Hannibal’s voice had grown weak the past few days, strained and hoarse and frequently interrupted as he struggled to recover enough air to continue. “The foyer is the Norman chapel in Palermo, severe and beautiful and timeless, with a single reminder of mortality: a skull graven in the floor.”
A chill slid down Will’s spine. “All I need is a stream.”
“In those moments, when you can’t overcome your surroundings, you can make it all go away.”
“Put my head back, close my eyes, wade into the quiet of the stream.”
“If I’m ever apprehended, my memory palace will serve as more than a mnemonic system. I will live there.”
Will, turned away from Hannibal, squeezed his eyes shut. He thought of surgery, of how desperately the legal system would want to keep the lead suspect in so many unprosecuted homicides alive until conviction. He clutched at his composure, moving closer to Hannibal’s chair to grab a new stack of journals. “Could you be happy there?”
He saw Hannibal studying him. “All the palace chambers are not lovely, light and high. In the vaults of our hearts and brains, danger waits. There are holes in the floor of the mind.”
His gorgeous, duplicitous Will. Hannibal watched him from over his glass of wine. He had become more than familiar, in the past weeks, with the constant digging, expansive ache in his lungs. The shredding sensation starting in his heart was new, though, and likely unrelated.
“We could disappear now,” Hannibal told him. “Tonight. Feed your dogs, leave a note for Dr. Bloom. Never see her or Jack again. Almost polite.”
“That’d make this our last supper.” Will’s smile seemed uncomfortable, though he met Hannibal’s eyes when he offered it. His confliction was buried deep, almost too far down for Hannibal to see it.
“Of this life.”
In a moment of weakness, Hannibal had considered bringing Abigail to this dinner, to make his offer to leave a little more tempting. He had tried to imagine what seeing her might invoke in Will, but he knew it was unlikely to be the response he most desperately desired. Giving him Abigail wouldn’t make Will love him. Even if it could have, Hannibal wouldn’t want that love. He thought back to Will, refusing the idea of Hannibal’s apologies if they came from an impure source. Hannibal didn’t want a Will brought to him by anyone’s survival instincts.
Instead, he used dinner to try to talk Will out of his plan with Jack Crawford. Hannibal gathered his strength for one last round of verbal sparring, offering Will the promise of forgiveness, should he choose to leave. He knew Will saw the offer, knew he was clever enough to know what it signified, even if he didn’t know Hannibal had already caught wind of his deceit.
“Jack isn’t offering forgiveness. He wants justice. He wants to see you. See who you are.” Will met his eyes with a grim determination.
During his next fit of coughs, Hannibal decided to play one final hand. “Are you finally running out the clock, Will?”
“Are you?” Will asked, guardedly. “Where would you take us, after we have Jack to dinner?”
“Cuba, perhaps, while we lay low. After that, we have many options. I’d like to show you Florence.”
“Everywhere to go,” Will said distantly “Nowhere for you. How long do you have left?”
“Days.” Hannibal might have elaborated, but another set of coughs both stole and nullified his next words. Every fit was harder to come back from. He wiped the corners of his eyes before looking back up at Will.
“We could find a surgeon.” Will’s eyes cast around the table between them. “I know you think it’s too late, but maybe a transplant….“
Hannibal let him trail off before saying, “If I agreed to consider it, would you leave tonight?”
Will’s mouth twisted. “I wouldn’t trust you actually were considering it.”
Hannibal studied him. He could tell Will’s inner turmoil came from a true place. Why Freddie Lounds, then? Why was he so determined to hand Hannibal to Jack Crawford? “I can accept my fate. Can you accept yours? Or Jack’s?”
Will wetted his lips. “Let me show Jack who we’ve become. Let me show him the truth.”
Hannibal lifted his glass of wine and recognized that the tightness in his throat and tears in his eyes weren’t just symptoms of the flowers. “To the truth, then. And all its consequences.”
Will wasn’t sure he’d ever know what drove him to pull out his phone and start dialing. His heart thundered in his ears, almost enough to drown out the noise of the cars and his dogs barking back at the house. He would have to get to the road, call a cab. Could he get to Baltimore before the FBI? Before Jack?
The phone rang against his ear only twice before it was answered.
“Hello.”
Will only paused a second before he answered, but the second seemed to stretch to years. His stomach had dropped as soon as the line clicked, even before he heard Hannibal’s voice. His voice, when it arrived a half second later, was enough to make Will’s heart clench painfully. The world around him— the rain-charged night air, the sounds coming from the front of the house— all collapsed until it was just Will and Hannibal, on the other end of the line. Hannibal, who had killed and displayed and eaten dozens of victims. Who had let Will’s brain burn with encephalitis with the same conviction as he would later profess his love for him. Who had twice held Will as if he were the only thing in the world that mattered, with warm, gentle hands. Who wanted Will to run away with him.
Will hated him. Hated him more for the fact that something about him made it impossible for Will to imagine watching him die from Hanahaki disease. He couldn’t see him captured and subjected to the indignities the FBI would heap upon him. He wasn’t even strong enough to betray Hannibal in the hope of saving his life. That idea, now that he looked at it fully for the first time, wasn’t truly an option if it meant betraying Hannibal’s trust and putting him forever out of Will’s reach. Hannibal, without his love for Will, wasn’t worth saving.
In that moment, he understood Hannibal Lecter better than he’d ever understood anyone.
“They know.”
Hannibal hadn’t felt this alive in weeks. He could feel his heart pumping, his blood filled with oxygen as epinephrine told his cells to respire. That oxygenated blood sliding free of vessels in the lacerations and bruises from his fight with Jack seemed replenished by raw, coursing energy. It felt terrible and delightful to tear apart his old life limb by limb. Jack Crawford, bleeding out in his pantry. Alana Bloom, broken on his entryway. Abigail, petrified and pliant in the kitchen. The tableau was taking shape around him. He had only to wait for its centerpiece to arrive.
Will was drenched in rain, staring at Abigail with his back to Hannibal. “Where is he?”
He turned, knowingly, as Hannibal paced forward. His eyes moved numbly across Hannibal’s face and he lowered his gun. His expression carried shock and something Hannibal wasn’t sure he’d seen before. Grief?
“You were supposed… to leave.”
Will’s face, pale and damp and hollow, was arrestingly lovely. Hannibal tipped his head to regard him squarely. “We couldn’t leave without you.”
He reached out to caress the side of Will’s face. Will stared at him and didn’t move, didn’t even tense the way he had every other time Hannibal had touched him. Hannibal gripped the linoleum knife in his other hand, unseen and certain between them.
He pulled Will close, pushed the knife through, and pulled him closer. Will’s gasps and the spatter of his blood on the floor were music, stolen by Abigail’s distress behind them. Will clutched at Hannibal’s shoulder and leaned into him for support. Hannibal wrapped his arms around him, his hand stroking and fisting in Will’s wet curls.
“Time did reverse. One of my shattered teacups dared to come together. A place was made for Abigail in your world. Do you understand?”
Will shook his head on Hannibal’s shoulder, desperately, his breaths ragged.
He pulled Will back, holding him up and keeping a hand on his face to maintain his attention. “A place was made for all of us, together. I wanted to surprise you. And you… you wanted to surprise me.”
He let Will fall to the floor as his knees buckled. He fell against the wall, hands clutching at his guts, shaking.
“I let you know me. See me. I gave you a rare gift, but you didn’t want it.”
“Didn’t I?”
The words brought a snarling rage into Hannibal’s mind. Even now, Will taunted him, as if there weren’t heaps of flowers decaying between them. “You would deny me my life,” he said coldly.
Will shook his head again, cringing. “N-not your life, no.”
“My freedom, then, you’d take that from me. Even with your certainty that my days were numbered, you would take what freedom I had left. Confine me to a basement cell. Did you believe you could change me, the way I’ve changed you?”
Will looked up at him, gasping, his lips pulling back into a wince that looked like a smile. “I already have.”
Hannibal studied him, his throat filling with phantom flowers at the knowledge that Will was right. Phantoms, he noted dispassionately. Maybe it hadn’t been Hannibal’s lungs that needed to be cut out to cure his disease, after all.
“Fate and circumstance have returned us to the moment the teacup shatters. I forgive you, Will.” He straightened and turned toward Abigail. Even through his anger, this next part was lamentable. “Will you forgive me?”
Hannibal let Will’s gasped, broken pleas fuel him as he stepped behind Abigail and cut the knife through her throat. She fell to the ground as Will let out a strangled cry.
Will was full of despair, slumped against the wall, sobbing, finally well and truly gutted for his betrayal. It was perfect: the stunning centerpiece, the final crescendo in an operatic tragedy. Still, Hannibal bent down to look at Will one last time. “You can make it all go away. Put your head back. Close your eyes. Wade into the quiet of the stream.”
They stared into each other before Hannibal drew himself away from the wreckage.
The realization didn’t arrive with the rain at the entryway, as he tried to wash Will Graham from his skin. Even as he spit up a dry brown petal when he pulled Will’s jacket over his bloodied shirt, his mind refrained from looking too closely at the events that had just transpired. It only became too large to ignore on the plane to Italy, when Hannibal finally worked everything through in his mind. He wasn’t one for senseless denial, and he knew gutting Will wouldn’t have cleared his lungs. Even killing him wouldn’t have helped—he’d known that so instinctively, he had never even considered it.
Hannibal knew what caused Hanahaki disease to spontaneously remit. The flowers were gone, their crumbling remains purged within twelve hours of the bloodbath in his kitchen. The feelings that had put them there were not. Hannibal missed Will senselessly, as he and Bedelia took their seats on the plane. The absence of his symptoms was not due to any change of his own, then. Besides, he had reworked that night in his mind and the timing was obvious. He never could have fought Jack if he were still suffering from the disease.
His breaths had come unobstructed the moment he had heard Will’s voice on the phone, a curt warning that Hannibal had disregarded as too little, too late. In his own fury and heartbreak, Hannibal hadn’t considered what that warning had cost the other end of the line.
Didn’t I?