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“You will die a soft, poor death. You will die with a kiss on your lips and a lie in your heart.” – Czernobog, American Gods
Hannibal was right, in the end: Will does find him interesting. If nothing else, at least he will never be bored. Maybe that can be enough.
It has to be enough, of course. Will does not have another option.
-
Freddie’s smile is sharp and her words are sharper. Will has always known this, but he has never before felt it so viscerally.
“Will Graham,” she says, the way she has always said it: like she knows him better than he knows himself. He used to think she was just full of shit. Now he knows better.
Perhaps she was using his name as a preface to questioning him about this case or that one. Freddie Lounds always manages to find more dirt to dig up, but Will doesn’t care. He interrupts anything else she might have been about to say, because seeing her for the first time in weeks, he understands, at least on some level, what she is. “You knew,” he says. His hands curl into fists, involuntarily. “You always knew.”
“Of course I did,” she says, smooth as a snake. “It’s in my nature to know things.”
He closes his eyes. It’s seven days since Hannibal Lecter brought his whole life crashing down. He’s not sure he likes his new life, but it’s not as if he has a choice. There is nothing much comforting about death, these days. “You’re like him, aren’t you.”
“You’re like him,” she says pointedly. “I am nothing like either of you. I am something better, brighter—I’m what this place has been waiting for. You old gods and your petty squabbles are on the way out, Mr. Graham. I’m what the people want now.”
“You’re nothing,” Will says, with a viciousness, a protectiveness, that surprises him. “I don’t quite know what you are, exactly, but I am good at reading people, Ms. Lounds, and I know that whatever you may be on any—any greater cosmic level, you will always be nothing more than a two-bit, hack tabloid writer thirsty for attention.”
Freddie laughs. “We’re all thirsty for attention, Mr. Graham,” she says. “I’m just better at getting it than you and your Dr. Lecter are, these days.”
-
Will and Hannibal do not live together. Will spends time at Hannibal’s home, however. He spends quite a lot of time at Hannibal’s home. He does not think about why, or about how much time it is, exactly, that he’s spending there.
He has never been at Hannibal’s house without eating something, anything, even just a snack. Before, he’d never noticed that. There were a lot of things he’d never noticed before.
Or maybe it’s just that Hannibal has stopped bothering to hide.
There is no case today. After Will finishes with his classes, he drives to Hannibal’s house, where dinner is already waiting on the table.
Will has stopped asking what—or rather, whom—they are eating, because Hannibal would not stop lying to him, always twisting his mouth up at the end in what he probably thought was a smile. Will is sick of listening to Hannibal’s lies; he is done with willful denial.
Telling Hannibal that would be admitting defeat, however, and so instead he simple stops asking.
Over a dinner of what Hannibal would probably try to pass off as pork, Will asks: “What exactly is Freddie Lounds, Dr. Lecter?”
“You refer to me by my title when you are angry with me,” Hannibal observes.
He refers to Hannibal by his title when he wants to make Hannibal angry. Will is not sure he is ever not angry with Hannibal, anymore. He does not correct him; he shrugs instead. “Deflection is a little obvious for you, isn’t it?”
“Freddie Lounds is a cheap imitation.” Hannibal takes a delicate bite of his meal, closing his eyes and savoring. Will watches, involuntarily, as he swallows, eyes following the line of his throat. He glances away before Hannibal opens his eyes, as if that will help.
Death has always fascinated Will, and it seems that among his—his kind—fascination is what passes for love.
“A cheap imitation of what?”
“Of us. Of power.” Hannibal sets his fork down. “We are ancient, my dear Will. Ms. Lounds is still a babe in the cradle, compared to us. We are an old story, passed down for generations. Ms. Lounds is a story that has yet to stand the test of time—and I assure you, her story will fail. We are a grandmother’s secret recipe, secreted away and passed from generation to generation. Ms. Lounds is a fad diet, clipped from a magazine, soon to be discarded.”
Will sits back in his chair, and tips his head towards the ceiling. “Are you going to kill her?” he asks, resigned. People that Hannibal hates don’t seem to last long, and his hatred for Freddie Lounds runs deep in the currents of his words.
Hannibal stands, plate in hand, and he inclines his head at Will, gesturing for him to do the same. “There are greater forces at play,” he says. “I am still unsure what is to be done about our friend Ms. Lounds.”
Will stands and watches as Hannibal does the dishes, as careful as he does everything. “When people read Tattle Crime,” he says, “when they talk about her stories, when they clamor for more—it’s like worship, isn’t it.”
“It is not like worship, Will. It is simply that, exactly.”
“She needs it to live. Right?”
“She does.” Hannibal finishes drying the last plate, and turns to face Will.
“It’s always power, it’s always belief—we don’t have any of that, Hannibal. No one believes in us.”
Hannibal raises and eyebrow. “What do you call Alana Bloom’s attitude towards you, or Jack Crawford’s, or Beverly Katz’s, if not belief? Why do you think you have never been able to resist that call to the FBI, Will, despite how detrimental it has been to your mind? It is not something you want. It is something you need.”
“What about you, then? No one believes in you.”
Hannibal’s mouth twitches upwards, but he does not smile. “I am one with many faces, Will. People may not believe in Death, these days—but they do believe in the Chesapeake Ripper. And is there really any difference?” He steps closer to Will, curls a hand around his jaw. He smiles wide, showing his teeth. “I need what anyone else needs to live, Will. I need to eat.”
-
Abigail has not gone back to school. Her life seems to be somewhat in limbo—she remains in the facility, directionless.
She leaves often, both officially and unofficially. Will wants to teach her to fish, when it gets warmer. Hannibal is teaching her to cook, Will thinks, but he is not entirely sure. He is always absent for these lessons, and not by his own design. Hannibal still keeps his secrets, even after everything.
Perhaps it’s a tactic, to keep him interested. Will could tell Hannibal that he needn’t bother—these days, he thinks of little but Hannibal Lecter.
Abigail has secrets of her own. Will lets her have them. Hannibal does not.
“You are late,” Hannibal tells Abigail when she comes to his house one day. Will is about to leave to go see a new crime scene. He’s not sure how Hannibal always seems to manage to time his visits with Abigail this well. He is sure that he doesn’t want to know. The options range from the unsettling to the unthinkable.
On his way out the door, Will sees a car driving away. It isn’t a taxi, as it usually is. Will recognizes the car. He glances back, feeling Hannibal’s eyes on him, and wonders if Hannibal will recognize it, too.
He closes the door again. Jack and his crime scene can wait.
“Sorry,” Abigail is saying, adjusting her scarf around her neck. “There was traffic.”
“No,” Hannibal says, “I don’t think so.” He inclines his head towards the door Will has just closed. “I think that you were with Freddie Lounds, Abigail.”
Abigail stiffens, but she stands her ground, and does not deny it. “Okay, I was. She wants to help me.”
“What Freddie Lounds wants is to help herself,” Will says.
“Will is right. It’s not a good idea for you to see her,” Hannibal says.
“It’s not your decision,” says Abigail, looking first at Will and then at Hannibal. “You can’t stop me from talking to her.”
“No,” Hannibal allows. “But I can strongly advise you against it, as someone who cares about you.”
Abigail’s shoulders droop. “Can we not talk about this?” she asks. “I thought we were supposed to be making stew.”
That’s Will’s cue to leave, and he takes it.
-
He’s back at Hannibal’s house again that night, almost as if he never left. The stew Hannibal and Abigail made is still warm when he gets there, although Abigail herself is gone.
“What do you think Freddie Lounds is trying to do?” he asks, after they sit down to eat.
“She is merely scrabbling for power and influence, as one such as herself is wont to do.”
“I think she’s trying to piss you off.”
“That’s not very smart of her,” says Hannibal idly.
Will should feel unsettled by that, but the fact of the matter is that he hates Freddie Lounds, and his hate runs hotter than Hannibal’s does.
“Have you considered, Will, that perhaps Ms. Lounds is trying to piss you off?” Hannibal asks.
“It all amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it?”
Hannibal shrugs, and takes another bite.
“I’m worried about Abigail.”
“Let me worry about Abigail. You have enough worries at the FBI, Will.”
Hannibal is right, of course. Alana is worried about him. Jack is worried about him, which is worse, because unlike Alana, he isn’t always worrying about Will.
Alana had cornered him earlier today, before he’d left to return to Hannibal’s home, arms crossed and face set, and she’d laid out her concerns. Alana is worried because she doesn’t approve of him dating his psychiatrist, because she thinks it’s a conflict of interest, a breach of ethics.
Will had laughed so hard that he’s honestly surprised Alana didn’t slap him. As if any of that were the worst of his problems. He’s not sure what he and Hannibal are doing can quite be described as dating, either, but that’s an entirely separate issue.
“I can take care of myself,” he’d told Alana. “Dr. Lecter isn’t my psychiatrist anymore, anyway.” It’s true—there’s not point in meeting in his office when Will practically lives at his house. He spends enough time at Wolf Trap to care for his dogs, but that’s about it. Hannibal no longer comes to crime scenes, either; instead, he smells the scent of death off Will’s skin when he comes home, kisses the taste of it from his mouth.
Alana had pursed her lips. “A romantic relationship can’t be a replacement for therapy, Will,” she had said. “Do you want me to give you a referral?”
Will had told her he would think about it, and he had left her standing there, with her crossed arms and worried eyes.
Talking to Alana is hard these days. She reminds him of what his life was like before he got mixed up with Hannibal Lecter, and it’s hard, because sometimes when he’s with her he realizes that he doesn’t quite miss it. Alana was always steady like a rock, and he thought he loved that about her. Hannibal is steady except for when he isn’t, like a river in a rainstorm, and Will is almost as obsessed with him as Hannibal himself is obsessed with Will.
-
Hannibal does not bring up the subject of Freddie Lounds or her involvement with Abigail again.
Instead, the Chesapeake Ripper begins to kill once more, elaborately and ostentatiously.
Jack, at least, stops worrying about Will and starts worrying about the Ripper. He calls Will to every single crime scene, and Will gets to let the pendulum swing in his mind and feel himself mirror Hannibal’s steps, his murders.
Today, it’s a man murdered in the middle of his living room, head cut off and place inside his smashed television. He’s missing his lungs and liver, and when Zeller pops open his laptop in the lab, he data wipes itself before they can gather anything useful from it. Finding the man’s identity, in fact, is an exercise in frustration—his online footprint is has been destroyed, obvious chunks of data taken from websites he must have frequented. In the end, the only records they can find about him are on paper.
When Will closes his eyes and puts himself in Hannibal’s shoes, he sees it all laid out clearly—tampering with the computer first, before the man had come home, the smashing of the television, lying in wait until the man had come into the living room, knocking him out as he searched for the remote.
He doesn’t hate this man; he is utterly indifferent towards him. He is a mean to an end, a way to make a statement.
“You seem a bit on edge tonight, Will,” Hannibal tells him. They’re not at Hannibal’s house, for once—Will had told Hannibal he had to spend time with his dogs, and Hannibal had shown up at half past seven with Tupperware and candlesticks. He’s the one who looks on edge, honestly. Will doesn’t think he likes spending time at Wolf Trap very much. Or maybe he just doesn’t like Will being anywhere but in his home. It’s hard to say.
“Don’t you think three murders in ten days is a little excessive? Even for you?” Will snaps, rubbing his temples. “Couldn’t you try to be a little more original? The television, really?”
Hannibal raises an eyebrow. “I’m open to any suggestions you would care to give, if you would like to correct my technique,” he says.
Will glares at him. “You do realize that when I can’t tell Jack anything useful, he just works me that much harder.”
Hannibal carefully lays out the food on Will’s rickety table. “Our friend Jack needs to be kept on his toes, my dear Will.”
“That’s not why you’re doing this, though. It’s for Freddie Lounds. It’s some—some kind of asinine display of power for her.” Winston whines at his feet, and Will absently reaches a hand down to pet him.
Hannibal raises an eyebrow. “Have you been in my head, Will?” he asks, obviously pleased.
Will breathes in deep. He thinks about punching Hannibal; he thinks about kissing him. He thinks about walking out the door and out of this life.
He does none of these things. He sits down at the table and does not ask Hannibal what there is to eat.
“Freddie Lounds and I are the only people who know what you are,” he says. “And so we’re the ones you show off for.”
“Please, Will,” Hannibal says, mock-disapproving. “No psychoanalyzing at the dinner table.”
Will rolls his eyes. “You told me you weren’t going to kill her. Are you sure that isn’t what all of this is leading up to?”
Hannibal smiles. “Why don’t you tell me?”
Will sighs, and tips his head back, and thinks of the corpse he saw today, thinks of the pendulum swinging through his mind, thinks of Hannibal, who he is finally beginning to understand. “No,” he says at last. “It would upset Abigail.” He smiles, thinly. “And upsetting Abigail would upset me.”
“Ms. Lounds is not a threat; merely an annoyance,” Hannibal says with a nod.
“And you have to show her how much better you are.”
“How much better we are. We are a unit, my dear Will.”
Will lays a hand on top of Winston’s head, sitting hopefully by his side, and he picks up a fork. “Guess so,” he says.
-
Will goes to see Abigail the next day, a respite from the constant barrage of crime scenes and autopsies and worried looks from Alana Bloom.
She tells him about her dreams.
“It’s like—a stag. Not like the kind I used to hunt with my dad, I mean—I guess that would make sense, right? But this is different.”
Will breathes in deep through his nose, and refuses to shudder. “How is it different, Abigail?” he asks.
“It...talks.” She clenches her hands in her jeans, staring down at them. “It tells me stuff. About me.”
“They’re just dreams, Abigail,” Will lies. “It doesn’t mean anything about you.”
Abigail leans forward, eyes squeezed shut, hair falling in her face. “It keeps telling me that I’m a killer,” she says. “That it’s all I’m good for, leading people into their death.”
Will gathers her close. “It’s wrong,” he says, words bitter on his tongue. “You’ll get away from this someday, Abigail. Death won’t always follow you around, I promise.” Even as he says it, he knows it isn’t true, cannot be true.
“You sound like Freddie,” she says.
Will schools his face. “How is that?” he asks.
“She’s always telling me that I’m more than my past. That I was made for something greater.”
“I see,” he says, frowning. “Well, she isn’t wrong.”
-
Will doesn’t tell Hannibal that Freddie Lounds is trying to tell Abigail that she is like them. He may hate Freddie Lounds, but he doesn’t want her dead, doesn’t want to have to stand at a crime scene and relive Hannibal killing her. So he decides to seek her out himself. He’s unsure how he should go about it, at first—Freddie Lounds is the kind of person who finds you, not the other way around. Other than a generic e-mail address on Tattle Crime, she has almost no digital footprint, Will finds, poking around on Hannibal’s tablet. An advantage of her nature, Will guesses. Her nonexistence online is much more elegant than Hannibal’s brute force, obvious destruction of the identity of the man he murdered.
He’s not sure how he’s going to find her, and he is beginning to think that he might have to resort to asking Abigail, when he brushes his hand against one of the vines crawling up Hannibal’s house on his way out the door.
The vine flutters in a sudden gust of wind, and Will knows how to find Freddie Lounds.
He doesn’t know where she is, is the thing—he just knows how to find her, his feet carrying him there almost without his mind giving them any input.
He finds her leaning against the back of a brick building with a garish neon sign in downtown Baltimore, a vine growing out of a crack in the sidewalk curled innocuously around her ankle.
Will wonders if he could keep her there, if he wanted to. He wonders, feeling sick, if he might do it without even meaning to. He stares at the vine from his car, closes his eyes, and wills it to let Freddie go.
Opening his eyes, he finds the vine has returned to its place on the sidewalk. He can feel the beginnings of a headache starting to pound at the back of his skull, but he feels much better.
Perhaps he should ask Hannibal for lessons, he thinks, and just manages to stop himself from laughing.
Freddie has her arms crossed, and she either hasn’t seen Will yet or has decided to ignore him. Will doesn’t want to talk to her alone, still a little afraid of what he might do, and so he waits until the back door of the building swings open, and a blonde woman comes out. She says something to Freddie, who uncrosses her arms and answers. They kiss, and talk for long enough that Will is certain that the woman isn’t going to leave soon. He gets out of his car.
He expects Freddie to look surprised when she seems him, or maybe even afraid, but instead she just smirks at him, self-satisfied. “Hello, Mr. Graham,” she says.
“The Will Graham?” the blonde woman asks, hands in her pockets, cocking an eyebrow. She sticks out her hand to shake. Will stares at it. “I’m Wendy,” she says. “You’ve made my girl a fortune in ad sales, so I figure I ought to thank you.”
Will doesn’t shake her hand. “Believe me,” he says. “It wasn’t on purpose. Listen,” he says, addressing Freddie, and then he stops, suddenly reconsidering his idea of having this conversation in front of someone else.
Freddie rolls her eyes. “Nothing you have to say is going to shock Wendy,” she says.
Wendy leans back against the wall. “I don’t get surprised easily these days,” she says. “The way I hear it, neither do you.”
Will sighs. “Does everybody have to know my business?” he snaps at Freddie.
Freddie just smiles her snake smile. “It’s in my nature to know things,” she says, “and also in my nature to share them. We’re living in the age of information, Mr. Graham, or hadn’t you heard?”
Will grits his teeth. “Stay away from Abigail Hobbs,” he spits out. “You don’t need to be sharing information with her.”
“Don’t you think she deserves to know who she is?” Freddie asks. “Or are you the only one who gets to know your own nature?”
“I was better off not knowing,” Will says, thinking of Hannibal’s cellar, which he has only been in once, thinking of the way the January cold bothers him more than it ever has before, thinking of the vine curling at Freddie’s feet.
Wendy tilts her head. “You don’t have to be on his side, if you don’t want to. You don’t have to let him trap you,” she tells him. She looks at Freddie. “I’ve picked a side, and you could too.”
“This isn’t about picking sides,” Will says. “It’s about what’s best for Abigail.” He looks at Freddie. “Is that what you’re trying to do? Get Abigail on your side in whatever insane conflict you’re trying to start?”
“I’m not trying to start anything,” Freddie says, taking a step closer. “It’s already started, and it will not end until you, until Hannibal, until everything you stand for has been turned to dust. I’m just trying to make sure that Abigail Hobbs knows enough to make an informed decision when the time comes.”
“Whatever pissing contest there is between you and Hannibal doesn’t have anything to do with Abigail.”
Freddie throws her head back and laughs. “Giving you a little bit of information is like giving you just enough rope to hang yourself with,” she says. “This is bigger than you and Hannibal, Mr. Graham, and it’s bigger than me. You know enough to make your own choices. Abigail doesn’t.”
“She doesn’t need to know,” Will says. “If you tell her, I’ll—”
“You’ll what?” Freddie asks, head cocked, eyes wide. “I’m sure my readers would love to hear the end of that sentence, Mr. Graham. We are living in the age of information, after all.”
Will storms back to his car, but he manages to keep his mouth shut. Wendy waves to him as he drives off. Freddie just leans back against the bricks and smiles.
-
Will is staying at Wolf Trap that night. Hannibal arrives at half past seven, and Will doesn’t let him get more than a foot past the threshold. Instead, he grabs Hannibal by the shoulders and kisses him. He does this because the other option is talking to Hannibal, and Will isn’t sure he can handle that right now.
Hannibal kisses him back, carefully and dangerously, before he puts his hands on either side of Will’s face and pulls away. “Good evening, Will,” he says. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“Please don’t tell me you’d rather psychoanalyze me than this.” Will tries to lean back in, but Hannibal doesn’t let him.
“I am not an idiot, Will. You are hiding something.”
Will does not say anything at all, because if he did speak, he would ask Hannibal to kill Freddie Lounds, to do anything necessary to keep Abigail from learning the truth. Hannibal, at least, would feel no remorse.
Will honestly has no idea what he would feel, anymore.
Hannibal leans in and presses his nose to the juncture of Will’s neck and shoulder, breathing in deep. “I am not a mind reader, Will,” he says, “but when your thoughts turn to death, they ring as loudly and as clearly as church bells.”
“I think about death a lot,” Will says.
He can feel Hannibal grin against his neck. “I know.”
He doesn’t ask Hannibal to kill anyone, and Hannibal does not answer the unspoken request either way. Will refuses to regret this.
-
Abigail does not show up for their planned lesson on tying fishing lures two day later. She does she arrive late, leaving Freddie Lounds’ car—she simply never arrives at all.
Will is at Hannibal’s house. He calls the facility Abigail is staying at, and they tell him that she is with Freddie Lounds.
When they go to look for her at Will’s request, they do not find her. Will hangs up on them after that.
He thinks that maybe he should call Hannibal, or Jack, or Alana. Instead, he stares helplessly at the Tattle Crime website on Hannibal’s tablet, and wonders how angry Hannibal would be with him if he broke the damn thing in two.
The front-page article includes a video about him, of course, full of blurry shots cribbed from news reports. He plays it, out of a sick kind of curiosity, and is treated to the sound of Freddie Lounds narrating his life.
The first clip is from after the Hobbs murder, a camera shoved in his face. He hadn’t said a word.
After a moment, Freddie’s narration cuts out. The clip keeps going even after Will knows it should be over, and then his own face turns towards the camera and looks at him.
“Hello, Will,” the figure in the video says, with Freddie Lounds’ voice.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Will says.
“I’m afraid not,” she says, tilting her—well, Will’s—head to the side. “I thought it might be easier—and possibly safer—to contact you this way.”
“What have you done with Abigail?” Will demands.
“I haven’t done anything with her,” Freddie says. “That is, not anything she didn’t willingly agree to.” In the video, she tugs Will’s glasses from his pocket and puts them on his face, squinting through them. “I can see why you like these. They add a lot of distance, don’t they?”
“What did you tell her?”
Will feels as if he’s looking in a fun-house mirror, his own face staring back at him, twisted in a smirk. “Nothing,” say Freddie. “Not yet, at least. I asked Abigail if she wanted to know the truth about herself, and she said yes. So we decided to go on a little road trip.”
“I will find you,” Will says, almost a snarl. “I will find you, and I will bring Hannibal Lecter with me, and you will regret this.”
Freddie laughs with Will’s mouth. “You can try,” she says. “But I hope you’re not going to try to use any technology to do it.” With that, the screen cuts to black, and the tablet refuses to turn on again, no matter how hard Will tries.
His cell phone won’t work, but the landline does, and he calls Hannibal.
They don’t report Abigail’s disappearance on the news. When Hannibal comes home, his eyes are like a storm, and Will clenches his fists and thinks about death.