Work Text:
“Why did you fall with him?”
Will looks up from his book. His eyes keep slipping closed and the words don’t want to hold still. He’s not even sure what the book is about. Finance? It was just sitting on the bedside table.
“You weren’t even hurt that badly.”
The room has grown too dark to read, anyway. “I was stabbed in the face.”
“You’ve had worse.” Abigail runs a finger over her neck. “We’ve both had much worse.”
Will touches the sutures high on his cheek. The stretch of days between sustaining the injury and cleaning it up means he’ll always have a scar. Abigail pushes her hair back behind her single ear and cocks her head, waiting for an explanation.
Alana hadn’t asked for an explanation. She hadn’t asked how he found her. She just raised her phone to her ear and ordered a cab. Then she packed up herself and her son, kissed Margo on the forehead, and left.
“I hope I haven’t ruined your marriage,” Will said.
Margo’s eyes were the same as they’d always been. Horror layered over with a thin patina of normalcy. The artifice she’d erected during her life as a Verger. She didn’t look away as Will described dragging Hannibal from the water, finding a surgeon and holding him at gunpoint while he removed the bullet.
“You haven’t ruined anything,” she’d said. “Today.”
Abigail waits patiently for an answer. She’ll wait forever because she’s dead. He can’t obfuscate or lie to her. Even if she was really here, he wouldn’t dare. Lying to Abigail always feels worse than lying to anyone else.
“What other choice did I have?”
Abigail is wearing the same green coat she had on that night in Hannibal’s kitchen. It is pristine. “You could have knocked him out. Or fallen the other way. You could have pushed him.”
But Will is already shaking his head. “I couldn’t...I couldn’t leave him like that. I’ve tried." He pushes his glasses up and presses his palms against his eyes. They burn like they’re on fire. “I’m so tired, Abigail.” And not the sort of tired a good night’s sleep can cure. It’s the soul-deep exhaustion of throwing himself against the glass partition that keeps the disparate parts of him corralled.
“I thought that if I could just get away from him for long enough, I could get him out of my head, but it isn’t him that’s in my head. It’s...it’s me. It’s always been me.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“Don’t I?” Will drops his hands. Abigail watches him with distant sympathy, like he’s the one who’s dead. “I just wanted to stop. Hating him is so exhausting.” He thinks of Hannibal’s smile when he’d handed Will the wine glass in the house on the bluff. Subtly proud, warm with understanding. Hannibal’s approval, Hannibal’s love.
“I knew that if I let myself have it, even for a second, I wouldn’t ever be able to stop.” Will sets his glasses down on the table. “I didn’t want to live in a world where I had to wake up everyday and decide how to feel about Hannibal Lecter.”
“So you decided to die.” Abigail shrugs. “I get it. I’m dead. It’s fine.”
Will snorts.
“But you didn’t die. And I’m not here. You’re talking to an empty chair. So, were you?”
Will looks up from his hands. “Was I what?”
“Able to stop?”
Will looks at the man in the bed, pale and still but for the shallowest of breaths. The IV drips silently. Every minute the coma lasts it’s less likely that he’ll ever come out of it. Will may lose him yet.
“What do you think?” It isn’t rhetorical. He genuinely wants an answer. But the chair is empty, and Will is alone with Hannibal.