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“What is a ghost? Something dead that seems to be alive. Something dead that doesn’t know it’s dead.” - “Landscape with Fruit Rot and Millipede,” Richard Siken
After they fall from the jagged cliffs, after their bodies slam into water hard as rocks, after they struggle to breathe against the burning in their lungs, after they push against waves and prevail against exhaustion, after all of what happens after they - together - ended the Red Dragon’s reign, they rest.
Hannibal, in his apparent undying providence, had arranged a boat to wait for them not too far from the cliffs. Will assumed that, like many of these precarious situations, this boat was but one of several escape plans, and perhaps if they had not fallen, there would have been suitcases packed with medical supplies, and they could have driven the stolen police car from the little house. Perhaps if one of them had died…
Will could not allow those thoughts to surface in his head. Together, or not at all. And that was the way it had always been, and the way it would always be.
He stumbled across the deck of the boat, raising sails and steering them to safety, following Hannibal’s whispered instructions. Hannibal, with a bullet sitting in his belly, was doing far worse than Will, and blood soaked every cloth surface of the boat. He had pulled off his sweater once its color had turned fully from brown to dusky red, to black.
With the state of the boat settled as best as he could manage, Will returned to Hannibal. With shaking fingers, Will cleaned the wound, trying to ignore the small sounds coming from Hannibal’s mouth. He was not used to Hannibal showing any evidence of feeling pain, of being quite this human.
The world grew dark around the edges, and then Will awoke inside a room with four walls, the ocean presumably far away. He jerked up, wincing at the movement, and then closing his eyes at the pain from wincing. He heard the jagged noise of pained breathing, and looked to his side to find Hannibal, curled in on himself. Will could not tell if he was asleep or awake.
Hesitantly, he laid a hand on Hannibal’s shoulder, and Hannibal uncurled himself and turned to lie flat on his back. Awake, then.
“Hey,” Will whispered. What else was there to say to the man you nearly killed, to the man who had, so many times, nearly killed you?
When Hannibal did not immediately respond, Will touched his shoulder again. “Hannibal?”
Hannibal opened his eyes, then closed them again. Will noticed that the wound on his stomach was wrapped in new bandages that already, it seemed, had soaked through. He gingerly swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood up, feeling his way by the sparse light coming in from the windows, in the growing darkness of sundown. There, in a bag on the floor, were medical supplies, and he grabbed a roll of cloth bandages and scissors. He returned to the bed - the bed that he and Hannibal had evidently shared while they slept - and leaned over Hannibal.
“Are you awake?” He whispered. He was met with a low groan, which he took as an affirmation, and he slowly unwound the bandages from Hannibal’s stomach, touching skin only when absolutely necessary.
The bullet had clearly been removed. Will did not remember doing that…
“Did you take it out?” He asked. And then, more of a response - Hannibal nodded.
“Yes - but,” Hannibal started, breath hitching. “Couldn’t stitch it. Hands shaking.”
And so, Will walked over to the bag again, more surefooted this time, and found a sewing kit and black surgical thread, and came back to Hannibal. “Can you guide me?”
“Yes.”
And so, with Hannibal’s quiet voice, and Will’s steady hands, a neat line of stitches brought skin back together.
Will fell asleep again with his hand over Hannibal’s healing wound.
They passed hours, days, in the house. Will never asked where it was - he didn’t need to know. After all that had happened, after all that they both had done and experienced, there was little reason for him to question anything. He trusted that Hannibal would have directed them to a safe place. That was all that was necessary for now.
Hannibal regained his strength, and so did Will. After Will had stitched the bullet wound, and after Hannibal’s hands had regained their sure direction, Hannibal took thread and needle to Will’s face, reducing the Great Red Dragon’s destruction to drying blood and a sore cheek. They cleaned each other up, and for the first few days, they rarely spoke except when required.
But as Hannibal came back into the world of the living, so did he find again his verbosity.
“When we met in Florence, you told me that you had to understand me before you could see me again,” Hannibal said, sitting opposite Will on the bed, having just helped Will change the bandage on his face. “What did you understand, Will?”
Will considered the question and its implications, the possibilities spanning out like the wings of a butterfly. “I understood the origin of horror and grief, and I saw where the boy you once were twisted into the man you are now.”
“The boy and the man are the same. Trauma has not erased my beginnings, nor will it inform my end. Much can be said for you, I imagine.”
Will started to laugh, then remembered the healing wound on his cheek. “I am a different person than I was before you. And have you not given me trauma?”
Hannibal bowed his head, his hair falling across his face, and Will could not see his expression. “You changed me as well. You said that on my kitchen floor.”
“Are trauma and change the same, then?”
“They bring about the same result - evolution. Through both, you become a distortion of what you once were. We are both the same, the same as each other and the same as we once were, but we are made anew.”
“We’re ghosts, Hannibal. We can’t ever go back. We can’t return to the world of the living.” And Will said it as metaphor, speaking in the coded tongue that conversations with Hannibal tended to flow in, but there was a part of him that feared - or perhaps desired - that it was real. Death seemed easier than life.
Hannibal looked up at that, something in his gaze searching - for what, Will could not divine. “We are not ghosts. We are alive,” Hannibal said, a fierce tone in his soft voice. “And we will survive. These wounds will heal, and soon we can travel further from Jack Crawford and the life we once lived, and then we will be free.”
Will shifted so he could sit next to Hannibal against the headboard, their legs stretched out together. “You sound so certain about a future I cannot even imagine.”
“Cannot imagine, or will not?”
“Is there a difference?”
“There is all the difference in the world, Will, between ability and desire. I desire this future, and I have the ability to turn it from wish into reality.” Hannibal looked at him, eyes sharp behind too-long hair. “Do you, Will?”
Slowly, softly, Will reached for Hannibal’s hand, lifting it from where it rested on the bed and taking it into his own hands, brushing rough, sea-worn skin with his thumbs. Ghosts could not touch, could not feel, could not turn wish into reality. The part of him that desired nonexistence must be purged from his mind, his soul, his being. Hannibal was real. So should be Will.
“Yes.”