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Somewhere, anchored in a nameless bay on the dark and freezing Atlantic, they lie shoulder to shoulder, shiver, shudder. Every gust of wind steals heat from the blood that spills from their bodies. It starts to freeze before it has a chance to congeal, staining the sun-bleached deck of the old sailboat that bobs in the waves.
There’s a good chance they will die here.
They should very well be dead already.
Will reaches out. He barely has the energy to do so after the superhuman effort it took to haul them both onboard. He nests their fingers together, cold to the touch, little more than skin and bone.
Hannibal sighs softly at the touch. It is the only signal Will has that he’s still alive. And if these are to be their last moments together, there are so many words he still wishes to say. There is not nearly enough time to say them all, so he chooses the most important.
“I wanted to go,” Will whispers to the black expanse of the sky. “With you. I wanted it so much that it was eating me alive.”
There is a moment of silence. It is thin as a single thread of silk, faded gold.
And then Hannibal exhales. His hand twitches within Will’s grasp, and then tightens just enough to bring their palms together in a kiss they never got to share. There had been so many chances. Will thought about it so many times, but only ever in retrospect. Hindsight is 20/20; Will has always been nearsighted.
“Why didn’t you?” Hannibal asks.
Another gale steals Will’s breath—the ocean winds are cruel and unforgiving. It may be crueler yet than the both of them. “I was three people shoved into one body. One of us was Jack’s. One of us was yours. Only one of us was mine, and none of us could agree.” Will breathes in shaky gasps. The muscles of his neck are sore and partially seized; whiplash from hitting the water. He’s probably even concussed. He turns his head anyway, and places his ruined cheek against the deck.
It takes a moment before Hannibal turns to face him. He’s pale, drawn, halfway to exsanguinated and nearly at the finish line of hypothermia. He is so far from the man Will met all those years ago—but Will, too, is far from what he’d been back then.
There is sorrow in Hannibal eyes. And yet, there lingers victory.
“If we could go back,” Will murmurs, “would you still kill Abigail?”
Hannibal gazes at him evenly. He does not blink, and neither does Will. “I’m hesitant to say I would change anything about my life since I’ve met you.”
Against his better judgement, against the screaming of his shredded facial muscles, Will smiles. If only for a second, Hannibal echoes him, before the pain sets in and Will gasps, coughs, and is overcome by agony.
He chokes on a thick stream of blood and saliva. Hannibal squeezes his hand until his airways clear. He strokes his thumb over the backs of Will’s knuckles. It’s so tender, so intimate, that Will can picture it as they wander the canals of Florence, the halls of the Uffizi, the catacombs where Will had whispered Abigail’s forgiveness, but not his own.
It all seems so long ago. Everything, in retrospect, that made him angry is now gone. There is nothing he can do about any of it. Hating Hannibal will no more return Will to his life in Wolf Trap than it will restore the fractured pieces of his soul—and it was never Hannibal’s influence that had broken him, but his own.
They forgive as God forgives, with blood and death. It seems that God may just be ready to forgive them both, and all that is left is to forgive one another.
“But if it were possible to turn back time,” Hannibal replies at long last, “would you come with me?”
Helplessly, Will nods. His eyes burn. Everything burns. He huffs a laugh and shivers in the freezing air; he sees the flicker of pain that crosses Hannibal’s face, and knows it’s not his own. He is hurting for Will. He is hurting for their lost time.
“I wanted you to go,” Will says. It takes an incredible effort, but he finds the strength to shuffle forward, to bring their bruised and broken bodies together somewhere in the middle, and he gasps through it.
He presses his face to Hannibal’s shoulder as he had in Florence. He’d been bleeding then, too, completely reliant on Hannibal’s mercy. He hadn’t earned it, but neither had Will been merciful. He supposes he can’t hold it against Hannibal. Not really. They had blurred beyond the lines of distinction; to expect anything else was to to willfully blind.
And now their eyes are open.
“I thought you could run. I never wanted to see you caged. You don’t belong that way, I knew that. I was trying to save you, I—” his breath catches on a dry sob that turns into a laugh. “I wanted to set you free.”
“You were what I wanted,” Hannibal says quietly. Their hands are pinned together between their bodies. Slowly, surely, Hannibal slides his free hand up, dragging over wet and freezing linen to splay across Will’s belly. He’s softer there now than he had been before. He feels Hannibal’s fingers sink into his flesh, over the knotted scar tissue where their threads of fate had been tangled before they were severed. The same place Hannibal clutched him before they went over the cliff, a baptism in the tides of Acheron from which they’ve both emerged reborn. “You would have seen me roaming the ancient wonders of the world while you yourself rotted in jail?”
Will’s mouth is pulled into a pained grimace instead of a smile. “Between the two of us, I think I belong in jail.”
“You do not.” Hannibal dismisses his words without hesitation, ducks his chin so his cheek is pressed to Will’s temple. When he speaks, Will can feel his mouth move against his sodden hair. He feels the words before he hears them. He hears them before he understands them. “You belong with me.”
It is all at once that Will realizes Hannibal’s thumb keeps brushing the worn gold band of Will’s wedding ring. It feels like longing. It tastes of heartbreak and seawater and history aged like wine.
Will lifts his head. His lips brush Hannibal’s throat. “I know.”
Hannibal exhales harshly. He noses at Will’s temple like one of Will’s dogs, but he is feral and undomesticated—Hannibal has never craved the touch of a master, but rather the comfort of a pack. A mate. And the ghost of their lost young is crushed into the space between them, and it hurts more than any of their wounds.
When Hannibal asks, Will knows it’s not because he wants to, but because he must. “What about your wife?”
Will closes his eyes. By feel alone, he uses his thumb to push at the base of his band, loosen it enough to slip it into his palm. The path of Hannibal’s touch comes to a halt. Will rolls the ring between his fingers, its weight. He had never grown used to it. More often than not, he had removed it while he was working, and only put it back on before he crossed the threshold he and Molly shared—a house, and not much else.
Now, he holds it between his thumb and forefinger. There is the weight of a promise there that has never truly belonged to her. Will ducks his head and opens his eyes, squinting into the darkness as he searches for Hannibal’s hand. There is no sound but that of the waves and their shaky breaths as Will slides it onto his ring finger. It snags around his second knuckle, but slips on with the insistence of Will’s slow and steady pressure. It settles just shy of the juncture of phalanges and metacarpals, a tight but perfect fit.
Everything is still for a moment. Their breaths. Their hearts. Their thoughts. There is only this.
Their teacup has come together, by kintsugi repaired.
“I tried,” Will whispers, and lifts his head to murmur the words against a pounding pulse, living and thriving. “But I knew I was never her husband.”
In the screaming silence of Hannibal’s wonder, Will’s lashes flutter. Nausea wells in his stomach, an excess of seawater not yet expelled, and his body fights it violently. It should be encouraging, but all he feels is sick—he is moments from passing out, he knows it, and he clutches at Hannibal’s hand as his head rolls back and hits the weathered floor.
With a shuddering gasp, Hannibal pushes himself up onto one arm, propped above Will. He grits his teeth, and there is something fearsome in his eyes. “Will,” he says, and jostles Will’s injured shoulder. He moans with pain, but Hannibal doesn’t apologize; Will knows better than expect him to. “Don’t go inside. Stay with me.”
Through a haze of dizziness, Will asks, “Where else would I go?”
Will’s face is pulled against a broad chest, thrumming with a heartbeat blessedly stronger than the wings of a bird. There is no dove to burst forth from their ribs. No one else at which to direct their fury. They have only each other, only the sea. Only the stars above them, flickering.
Over the crest of Hannibal’s shoulder, Will turns his eyes skyward. It feels like serendipity. One winter night, three years forward and three years back, but there is no before Hannibal, not anymore. “Do you see it, too?”
It takes Hannibal a moment to look up in the same direction as Will, but when he does, he sighs, and the sound glows with memory. “Orion, above the horizon,” Hannibal echoes, and Will watches in the undiluted radiance of the moonlight as his eyes slide upward. “And near it, Jupiter.”
Will’s head tips back against the deck, his hair a tangle of wet curls around his ears. He can feel his torn cheek dripping down the side of his face. And yet, when Hannibal tears his gaze from the stars and turns it back to Will, he stares at him with all the wonder he held for the infinite cosmos stretched above them.
“Our stars are the same,” Will murmurs. “They always have been, then and now.”
There is something there in Hannibal’s face that is more fragile than Will has ever seen it, even on the night they first cut themselves apart. It is so hungry, so needing, so desperate and affectionate and rich with love. How could he have never seen it before?
“I want to show you Florence, Will,” Hannibal says. “Properly. So that we may rewrite ourselves and our pasts. So that we might mend all the breaks between us.” He glances down. His eyes settle on the ring. Will’s ring. And he looks up. “Will you come with me?”
Will’s hand shakes as he touches Hannibal’s cheek, an amalgam of exhaustion and emotion. His lips curve into a pained, trembling smile when Hannibal turns and presses his mouth to Will’s fingertips—and part on a breath when Hannibal leans down to touch their lips together, to suck blood and salt and burgudgeoning warmth from Will’s tongue.
Will breaks the tenuous connection out of necessity; they pant into each other’s mouths, even the slightest strain an insurmountable exertion, but it’s worth it. So worth it. There in the dark and the light of the moon, Hannibal’s eyes are huge, hungry, black as blood—but they are patient. They have waited this long. They can be patient, whether or not they want to be.
“Let’s start with the cabin,” Will says softly, and embers glow to life inside his hearth of his heart, fed to flame with a drawing of a clock, a marriage license.
“And from there?” Hannibal asks. Despite the tightened lines of pain around his eyes, the fact that they are both weak with blood loss, rife with trauma, and riddled with scars, Will knows him enough to know that he is delusionally happy.
Perhaps delusional is right—but maybe they both are, and always have been.
“Anywhere,” Will replies. “Everywhere.”