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Hannibal smiled softly as he felt Will sit beside him on the museum bench. So the time had finally come for them to meet again. He had appreciated the wait, but too much longer and he would have begun to worry about his choice in family.
“Hello, Will.”
He didn’t look up, electing instead to continue his drawing of the Botticelli before him. As a youth, he’d never altered the painting in his sketchbook. The style was his own, but all the faces remained the same as those hung on the wall. Now, so many years later, it no longer felt sacreligious as he rendered Will’s face in carefully placed dots. He wondered where the corporeal Will, whose warmth and scent were welcoming Hannibal home, was looking. Forward, beside, or down. Or perhaps into the middle distance, unwilling to participate as he’d been in the games played by those attempting to peer into his head.
The pause satisfactory and his drawing at a proper conclusion, Hannibal half-closed his sketchbook (keeping his thumb between the pages) and turned to Will, whose eyes shifted to meet his just as they had mere months ago.
“It’s good to see you. Where’s Abigail?”
Will’s brow wrinkled, his mouth downturned. He searched for intention in Hannibal’s face, but he’d never been very good at that. Not with Hannibal anyway.
Eventually, Will breathed and answered, voice full of contempt, “At home. Lying very still.”
“Oh.” Hannibal’s face hesitantly shifted to match Will’s. “She didn’t make it then.”
“No. She bled out on the floor, murdered by her father. Again. I wonder, did you whisper in her ear that it was all going to be alright? Or did you think you were too good for that, too absorbed in your elegance?”
“I didn’t want her to die, Will.”
“Oh? Because it sure looked like you slit her throat and left her to choke on her own blood.”
“I followed her scar exactly. The police sirens were approaching. She should have lived.”
“Well she didn’t. And conventional wisdom states, don’t point a gun at someone you don’t want shot.”
“Tell me, Will, what is it you believe I intended? Gutting you, and slitting her throat?”
Will was caught between fishing in the shallow pools of Hannibal’s eyes and easing his own pain by looking anywhere else. Ultimately he obeyed the latter instinct, his focus turning to the floor.
“You wanted me to watch her bleed. I destroyed our family, so you wanted me to watch you do the same, watch the teacup shatter.”
“Yes.”
“But… then you wanted me to find you. When I woke up. When… when Abigail and I woke up. You wanted us to meet you here.”
“You can imagine my surprise, then.”
“Jesus, Hannibal, didn’t you check the news? Abigail’s death is common knowledge.”
“This time we spent apart, it wasn’t meant for me to marinate in you.”
Will chuckled, bitter, at the word “marinate.”
“I knew if I couldn’t stop myself from looking up the aftermath, I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from keeping track of you and her. Apparently it was a decision made in error.”
For a brief moment, Will’s focus allowed itself to try and gauge Hannibal’s honesty in his sentiments. He answered, “I’d say so,” and he turned away again, this time to the painting. Hannibal did the same.
“I am sorry, Will. This wasn’t the intention.”
“I know. But fuck it was a big mistake for someone as practiced as you.”
“I would be lying if I claimed I was in a good state of mind at the time. Surgery is a long-kept practice of mine, but surgery with unsteady hands was never the way to keep a patient alive.”
“I remember that night like a photograph in my pocket. Your hands weren’t shaking.”
“Camera lenses are curved. Flashbulbs are fickle. Memory is not infallible, even for you and me.”
“Your hands weren’t shaking. But I almost thought, if not for the knife in my gut… Unsteady hands, uncertain mind. A surgeon can’t work on family members, there would be a person under their scalpel.”
“There were often people in my operating theater.”
“No there weren’t. Only pigs.”
Will stood, a signal that their conversation must move on, must be taken to sky and outside air. Hannibal accepted this, but held on for a moment longer.
“And you, Will? Were you ever truly family?”
“I think… I could have been. I was, almost. Never fully.”
“You were divided. Are you now?”
“No. No. For a moment, maybe, but that’s gone.”
Temporarily satisfied, Hannibal stood. He would have to wait and see on which side Will had landed. Very soon, Will would show him.