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The radio aches a little tune that tells the story of what the night is thinking.
It’s thinking of love.
It’s thinking of stabbing us to death
~Richard Siken, “Little Beast”
They proceeded in fits and starts, forward and back: a pendulum, or perhaps a pair of them, falling in and out of step.
For Hannibal, the mismatched days when they stuttered out of rhythm were nearly inconsequential. Not entirely, but close. They were merely days, with Will nearby if not necessarily on speaking terms. Hannibal had waited out Will’s silence before, and in less pleasant conditions than the villa afforded them.
It was a larger home than they needed, even accounting for their shared and separate pastimes. Will had protested the expense at first - garish, he’d said, and why not just send up a signal flare, and here we are, come and get us, we’ll leave the key under the mat.
Will had stopped complaining the first time he’d realized the extra rooms also meant space he could put between them at need. Areas Hannibal would not intrude into, on the bad days.
Will likely also understood that Hannibal had arranged and selected things carefully so that he could hear Will’s footsteps pacing the floor above, or catch a glimpse of Will through a window if he went out to the garden. He could, if he chose, play the piano loudly enough to permeate even the farthest room in the villa. He could make himself inescapable.
It was the semblance of separation without the thing itself, and most of the time it was enough. Many of their days were good, and they occupied themselves companionably in the shared rooms - an easy dance, as long as they kept clear of each other’s sharper edges.
There were still days, though, when Will chafed at the confines of their life. Days and moods in infinite variation, common and precious and unrepeatable as any sunrise.
Hannibal could not always predict them, nor keep them at bay. But he could observe; there were patterns to be found.
*
When Will went to the bar with the neon signs outside - buzzing and sputtering, filthy with flies and grime - he inevitably returned stinking of smoke and cheap liquor. He went to get drunk, and Hannibal had learned quickly to leave him to it. The fight had been too vicious the one time he’d tried to intervene. Too attention-drawing, to no benefit. Will would come home when he saw fit. Sometimes, if there had been fighting and if he’d worn himself out sufficiently, he’d let Hannibal tend to him afterwards.
Hannibal never raised Will’s bandaged knuckles to his lips, but he’d wanted to then, and he wanted to now.
In contrast, Will’s rambles in the park signalled pensiveness more than anything else. He went when something had reminded him of the things he tried so fiercely not to think of. Hannibal was allowed - tacitly, in the sense that he was not disallowed - to accompany Will on his long walks. Will rarely spoke, but didn’t object to Hannibal’s filling the space between them with words.
Hannibal sometimes thought that Will didn’t listen at all, his mind busy gnawing on the bones of the life he’d left behind. But then just often enough to keep Hannibal guessing, Will would mention something later on, picking up the thread of a thought Hannibal had spun out for him days earlier. It warmed something in Hannibal’s gut that he had no name for and could not have pointed out in any anatomy textbook.
Sometimes, afterward, Will would speak of the early months of their acquaintance. It was a topic he rarely broached in any other frame of mind.
“I was angry when you didn’t come,” he’d said of his incarceration once, in that particular mood. “And then angry when you did. I guess you know what that felt like.”
It felt now as if Hannibal never had been angry at Will, and never could have been. But they both knew the truth of that; Hannibal’s hands still felt stained with Will’s blood. Down under his skin, deep in the bone.
“I didn’t anticipate how it would affect me to see you in that cell,” he said, finally.
Will turned that over in his head for a time, studying it as thoroughly as whatever he had been considering at the park that afternoon.
“You should have,” he’d said finally, and left it at that, falling back into silence, watching the evening settle around them.
*
There had been a hotel, once. Alana had been the point of contention; Alana and Margot and the child.
In retrospect, Hannibal hadn’t even cared much. He rarely broke a promise, but this wouldn’t be the first he’d broken at Will’s request, and it was unlikely to be the last. It had been curiosity more than principle that had led Hannibal to push hard enough for things to break: a fragile truce, and then a glass against the wall, and then the feral thing behind Will’s eyes that he kept firmly in check, locked away there since they had choked and sputtered their way to shore.
It had been pleasing to see that side of Will again. Hannibal hadn’t truly believed it drowned and gone, but it was good to know for certain.
Knowing, Hannibal could be patient.
It had taken very little work to coax a room number from the bored night clerk. More to convince Will to open the door.
It was no work at all, in the end, to agree to spare three lives in exchange for Will’s return. Hannibal wasn’t so nostalgic for their first hotel breakfast as to want to repeat it, when there were comfortable beds and a well-stocked larder at home.
“I mean it,” Will had said in the car, parked in their driveway, staring at the house as if it meant him harm. “Not a hair on their heads.”
“I promise,” Hannibal had said. That this entire long night had been about the breakability of Hannibal’s promises went unspoken between them. When Hannibal awoke in the morning Will had cleaned up the broken glass as if it had never been there at all.
*
This one, however, was new. It had taken time to track Will down; this was out of the way of any of his usual haunts.
It was a step up from the bar Will frequented in his darker moods. At the very least, Hannibal mused from inside his car, it appeared that the windows had been washed sometime in the past year. Possibly even in the last six months, although he wouldn’t have cared to place money on it.
He glanced at his phone screen again. His last message still sat there unanswered.
Hannibal thought for a moment before tapping out another message: I’m outside. Will you come home so we can continue our discussion in privacy?
He waited, but there was nothing. Not even the courtesy of telling Hannibal to go away.
Hannibal considered, and decided to take the silence as its own message: an uncertainty. A possibility that Will himself didn’t know precisely what he wanted, only that a new setting would be required for it.
Patterns can be broken. Observers can step into the scene under observation, if they are willing to risk contamination of the scene, and of themselves.
*
Hannibal’s entrance was briefly noticed and little commented upon by a bartender and a few people scattered about, nursing their drinks and grievances. He tuned out a jangly pop song and a burst of laughter from a table in the corner. There was, after all, only one response he was there to see.
Will glanced over and then away, brief and uninterested as he might have been in any newcomer.
I don’t find you that interesting.
They were long past the point where Will could claim that as truth. The pretense made Hannibal want to laugh. It made him want to rip Will open with his teeth to the meat and bone of him; to the parts that couldn’t lie.
Instead, he took a seat at a table with an unobstructed view of Will’s seat at the bar. Ordered the least offensive beer on tap, pulled a small notebook from his pocket, and occupied a few minutes sketching. The line of Will was interesting to capture; the tension in him only slightly unwound by the line of empty shot glasses in front of him.
Hannibal reached for his phone again.
You can ignore me just as well at home without this terrible music, he tapped out. Watched Will reach reflexively for his pocket when his phone buzzed. Watched him stop himself with an effort from checking the message; watched him fail to stop himself from glaring sidelong at Hannibal for just a moment.
Hannibal didn’t bother taking his half-drunk beer with him when he left his seat and moved to the bar instead.
The high stool scraped and squeaked against the floor when Hannibal took the seat next to Will. Will didn’t flinch, nor did he look over.
“Is this seat taken?”
Hannibal needn’t have asked. The seat was open, as were most of the others, this early in the evening. But it was an opening; a line cast, a bait that Will could take or not, as he pleased. Hannibal had others, if this one failed.
Will’s sardonic snort was barely a laugh, but it was an acknowledgement. He glanced up to be sure the bartender was at the other end of the bar before replying.
“I’m not talking to you,” he said.
Which was, of course, talking. Which was a victory. Which surged in Hannibal - a bright, hot flare of joy.
“Of course you’re not,” he said, quiet enough that Will might not even have heard it.
He signaled the bartender for another drink and settled in to see where Will might lead him next.