Work Text:
Will Graham spends the majority of his life driving from his little farmhouse in Wolf Trap, VA to cemeteries around the country. The ones he's interested in are mostly southern, but people emigrate (and when you are from the South, it's emigration rather than moving even if you are just relocating to Ohio) and customs travel with them. He's been as far north as Duluth, MN, and as far west as Carlsbad, NM, because of his… well, he wouldn't call it a hobby, really. Collecting spoons was a hobby. Golfing was a hobby. This thing he does? Well. Technically it's collecting.
Today he's staying relatively local. Cemeteries aren't always well documented, and family cemeteries are often not documented officially at all. Occasionally a journal, a diary, a newspaper will come to light, and a mention will be made of a burial out in an old graveyard in the woods behind a farmer's field, and so Will will get in his car, consult his aerial maps, sometimes go to the local library, and then when he's fairly certain of the general location, he will drive as far as he can, and then trudge further, often on private property, until he catches the shape of moss-eroded stones in groups.
Winston guides him. Winston can sense things, sometimes, a perception of those like him, that tugs him in the right direction. If a dead dog can be considered to have any sort of perception at all, technicalities aside, it works for Will, and he doesn't question it too deeply. Now Winston is vanishing into the underbrush, not even a flicker of a leaf out of place, and Will has to remind himself that no matter how many times he has to tell Winston that he can't move through hedges and walls or cliff faces, Winston is still just a dog, and has to be forgiven for forging a path where his master can’t follow. Will pushes through the best he can, trying not to begrudge a ghost that can't get burrs or nettles, and follows the thin, excited barking over the crest of a hill.
Down in the little cove beyond, there are a few standing stones, the rest broken shapes covered with the leaves of a hundred autumns. Will estimates perhaps thirty people are buried here, half of them children and babies, because that's just how things were. In the center of the rough oval is a large stone, worn down to a barely recognizable lump of granite. Running around it in ecstatic circles is Winston, and in front and then behind him, playfully snapping at his heels, is a small blobby shadow with four little legs and a whippy little tail.
Grims that have been forgotten for this long lack definition. Winston himself had been a dark, indefinite shadow for several weeks, slowly gaining shape and deepening from nearly transparent to his fuzzy robust self as he soaked in Will's affection and steady attention. Will thought this new grim might be a terrier of some kind. He ducks low to the ground and takes out a stub of charcoal and a sheet of thin, folded paper, setting them on the ground next to the lump of stone. Sometimes the name, buried in the dirt, would survive. If it hadn't, he will give the grim a new name. New names always take longer to catch on, though. The original name is always better.
He spends a few moments clawing away the detritus of a century of neglect, loamy dirt under his fingernails, as ghostly paws plunge over and around his hands. Winston's pitchy bark tickles his ears, and he thinks perhaps underneath it’s the shrill yapping of the new grim. It’s hard to tell; even Winston sounds like a faraway howl, like a coyote miles away across the fields. His fingers feel the roughness of ridges in the stone, and he digs around it, as deep as he can without any tools, so that he can flatten the rice paper against the base of the stone.
Both grims halt their frenzied dash to watch him work, and the new grim snaps at his hands, nervous and over-excited. Winston noses at it, gently whining, a mosquito sound in Will's inner ear. With the charcoal pressed flat between his fingers, he rubs across the paper, pressing inward to catch the ridges of the old, worn inscription.
Pulling the paper and holding it up to the green, filtered light, he can make out the clear shape of the top of a capital R or B or P. Then a U or two I's. The third letter is definitely an S, and the fourth is a T. That's it. It could be Rusty, or Buster, and that's his best guess. He turns to the new grim, who is watching him with alertness, the two shadowy points of his ears straight up.
"Rusty?" The grim wags hesitantly, head cocking. It's not a ringing endorsement, but that doesn't mean anything. Sometimes their hearing is eroded. Sometimes they forget what voices are. He tries again. "Buster?" The little tail wags a bit more heartily, and the grim sticks its butt in the air. Winston barks excitedly, and they’e off again, zooming around the border of the cove. Will grins happily, slipping the folded paper back in his pocket, charcoal tucked between the folds.
Getting a grim to leave the only place they had known for untold years was sometimes difficult, sometimes easy. Winston had taken a few days to coax out, and it wasn't like Will could bring treats. Treats didn't have ghosts. So it was with patience and time that he convinced them to leave their posts, entrusted to them by long dead owners. Grims were there to show spirits the way to the afterlife, after all, and it was not a job the dogs had any say in. Sometimes a death happened quickly, and a beloved pet had to be dispatched so that it could be buried first and keep the human spirit from being trapped for ages, standing guard and guiding souls. Will loathes the custom. He would much rather a human be condemned. Most humans souls eventually got bored, realizing they were no longer needed, and moved on. Dogs had no such agency.
In the end, it’s Winston who convinces the little grim to come with them. The shaggy sheepdog coaxes Buster beyond the cemetery border, and then runs circles around it until the grim is dizzy. From there, Will walks slowly back to the car with two grims in tow, feeling pretty pleased with a few hours work. Buster would fit right in to his pack of grims, now well over twenty strong. They stayed with Will, on the farmhouse lands, and sometimes came with him on a hunt for new grims. And sometimes they just weren't there one day, having faded back into the ether, going wherever it is that dogs go when their job is finished. Will estimated that he had rescued well over a hundred now, and there would always be more graveyards to search.
Still, it’s lonely work. Living dogs would not come near him; even when he was entirely alone he figured he must smell like brimstone and grave dirt. And he was rarely entirely alone. He slept in a pile of warm, twitching shadows, and dreamed of running over the dark sands of a midnight beach, throwing driftwood sticks into the consuming waves.
***
The thing about living with ghosts…well, one of the things, is that Will doesn't have much cause to keep himself up. The grims don't care if he hadn't showered or changed clothes for days. They never beg for food, so he is the only one to remind himself that he needs to eat. Often he just feels… faded. Insubstantial. He drinks entirely more than any single person should, and only Winston ever looks over at him with concern when he doesn't move for hours, working through a bottle. He does enjoy fishing, though, and fish weren't spooked by happy grims threading through the water without leaving a wake. Birds were, though. Will can't remember the last time he had heard birdsong except from very far away, or on the TV.
Will whiles away his days alone, drinking and fishing and researching possible gravesites old enough for the custom of christening with the life of a dog. He has no friends, no family. He slowly forgets the sound of his own voice. And one day, while he is deep in a bottle and half asleep in his favorite chair, there is a knock on his door.
It takes Will a long time to realize what the sound means, but that’s mostly because every grim in the front room has sprung up from the floor and bristles in tandem. The room is filled with a cacophony of sharp, frantic whines as a dozen ghost dogs hold point facing at the door, and the air crackles with the sharp, eye-watering scent of ozone. Will sets his glass down on the floor and stands, his back aching and his stance none too steady. Buster runs between his feet and begins snarling and barking at the door while Will scratches his neck in bemusement. He moves toward the door, wondering what poor mail delivery person was going to have nightmares tonight. As he opens it, the afternoon light blinds him to everything but a large indistinct shape of a person.
"Hello, Will."
***
The grims can't have conversations, of course, because even dead dogs can’t follow complex threads of thought. But Will Graham has learned the limits of that, since the first grim he had rescued, entirely by accident. Will called her King, because he didn't know the trick about taking rubbings off the grave marker yet, and the grim was a mighty Great Dane, her head fully as high as Will's chest. She had followed him home, and Will had been nervous those first few days, not knowing what he had. She had just been a presence then, just a vaguely doggy-shaped fog that nosed around his home and chased off all the mice living in the walls.
One morning he groaned aloud for coffee as he climbed out of bed. He had still been working then, before everything, at a distant boatyard, and Will had never been much of a sleeper. As he gripped the handle of his kettle, preparing to make his pour-over for the long drive, he heard a rough, questioning thought echo between his ears. Kawvi?
He had managed not to scald himself, just barely. When he turned to look at the blobby dark spot that was King, she might have wagged her tail. Kawvi?
He nodded shakily at her. "Good girl. Coffee. That's a good girl."
King exploded into motion, careening around the house, and all of the sudden the shape of her was sleeker and better defined. She plowed around the front room crowing Gudgil!! Gudgil!! at the top of what Will would have called her lungs, has she been corporeal. He couldn't help but grin, and then laugh helplessly at her palpable joy. "Heard that one before, huh?"
He didn't go in to work that day, after all.
Will discovered that the grims actually, fascinatingly, passed on vocabulary to each other, although often it was like a hilarious game of telephone. He remembered vibrantly the day his pack learned the word 'squirrel.' Winston had been newly acquired, then, but already had a knack for bossing everyone else around, including Will. The sheepdog, like all the grims, couldn't track a live squirrel to save his… well. But dead ones?
They had been walking in the cool of the morning, Will and about seven grims, when he caught a whiff of a small thing rotting nearby. The grims had sensed it, in their unerring compass for death, and they gathered around the little corpse. Noble, a rangy Greyhound, had asked, in typical abbreviated fashion, Wil wot?
"Squirrel," he replied. It was echoed back to him as Eskal? because honestly, consonant clusters were a bit too much to ask of a dog. With a flurry of paws and ears, they all nosed at the tiny corpse, which to Will's utter shock, and in which moment he might have peed himself a little, a tiny black squirrel shadow spurted upwards, squealing bloody murder, and took off across the fields, headed for the trees, pursued by a black miasma of thrilled barking, Winston in the lead. In a moment, Will was utterly abandoned. He stood, bemused, for a long moment, blinking ozone out of his eyes, and then continued his walk.
All but one came back eventually. And every new grim was brought gleefully to the site of the squirrel corpse, as long as it lasted, and taught the word, kal.
Now, even while Will is blinded by too much light all at once, the growling and the snapping is peppered with the distinct words bon and fuk, a word he had not intended to teach them but that they used for all sorts of purposes, just like Will did. Buster, frantic, is just barking no! no! no! over and over again. Will tucks the little grim behind his feet, still blinking and disoriented. "Is there something I can help you with?" he asks the shape in the door.
“Possibly,” the shape answers in a low, deep voice. “I’ve been told you are the man to see about a dog.”
Will rubs his bleary eyes, and the shape comes more into focus. It’s a man, tall and broad, archly handsome, dressed in an expensive looking grey suit, threaded with red. Winston growls Bad bon! from behind Will’s calf. He takes a deep breath, trying to force his blood to oxygenate. “Dogs don’t like me very much. Try the shelter down the road.” He waves vaguely to the south and closes the door in the man’s face with a click.
“You have several fine specimens here. I would hate to waste a trip.” Will spins around. The man is now behind him, standing in his living room. He reaches down to pat Noble, who snarls at him, and backs away. “They don’t seem to like me very much, either.”
Will immediately realizes why he had so much trouble seeing the man on the porch. He is not quite solid, and Will can see his bed through the man’s torso. It’s not the strangest thing he’s seen even this week. “Who are you?”
The man reaches out a hand. “Hannibal. And you are Will Graham. I’ve heard so much about you.”
Will doesn’t want to shake the hand of the spectre that knows his name, but he does anyway, because he has manners. The hand in his is strong, dry, and skeletal, and also the first solid person he has touched in an unknowable amount of time. Hannibal smiles at him, something both pleased and hungry, and Will tugs his hand away. “Who are you?” he asks again.
“I’ve been watching you for a long time, Will Graham. Waiting for the opportunity to meet you. But unlike your pack, you have not been able to see me, until now.”
Will realizes he is not going to get a straight answer. He follows the path of the conversation with reluctance. “And why’s that?”
“I think you know.”
Will frowns. He does know. He’s known for a while, maybe, but it didn’t seem to matter. “I’m not leaving them.”
Hannibal raises his elegant eyebrows. “I guessed that would be the case. Fortunately, I was hoping to offer you a job, and they would be welcome.”
Will hasn’t had a job in years. He’s not even certain he remembers quitting the last one. Now that he thinks of it, it’s a distinct possibility that he didn’t quit at all. “If I were even interested, what would this job entail?”
Hannibal smiles at him, and there is no mistaking the hunger now in the flash of his teeth. “I’ve been desiring a companion. Someone to help me with my work. You are patient, gentle, and persistent.”
“I’m an anti-social drunk,” Will counters, “who cleans up other people’s mistakes. I can’t hold a conversation, I’m unpleasant and rude, and I can’t imagine anyone wanting to be in my presence for more than a few minutes at a time.”
“I promise you will never want for solitude, and companionship, if you should want that as well.” Hannibal ducks his head, catching Will’s eyes, and Will has no idea how he ever thought Hannibal could be human. Or alive. “I would show you the world, Will, and what lies beyond it, for as long as you would stay with me.”
Will is suddenly overwhelmed. He can feel tears stinging his eyes, and he blinks to clear them. “Why?” is all he can manage to ask.
Hannibal reaches out a hand. “Come and find out, Will Graham.”
Will stands there for an age, and then wonders why he is hesitating. He reaches out and takes the skeletal hand offered to him, and then the room is empty.
Empty but for the dessicated curly-haired corpse sitting in the armchair, bottle at its dried fingers, staring unseeing into the dark.