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He was a wreck.
He was honestly and truly compromised.
He stared at his reflection, drinking in the new lines and shadows. He attempted a smile, and hoped that it looked much better than the tight grimace the man in the mirror gave him.
This house was familiar, but it was no longer home. It had too many ghosts. They drifted quietly around him, without him; Abigail and Beverly and the faceless, nameless others, all carrying Hannibal’s marks as he did. Maybe it was he who was haunted. The smell of coffee brewing was a small comfort, as was the feel of a warm, furry muzzle bumping against his hand, but even that could no longer ground him here.
He wanted to crawl back into bed.
He wanted to ignore Jack’s calls.
He wanted to shut out the cacophony of violence that they brought, sink deep into the last space in his own thoughts where it was still quiet.
Mostly, he just wanted to find somewhere that hadn’t been polluted by Hannibal.
He poured his coffee, and was pleased to see that this morning, his hands did not shake. Progress.
These quiet moments in the early hours were an important ritual, long before his days as a profiler, before scars had knotted themselves into his shoulder, his belly, his mind. It went back to cold mornings on the Erie, or was it maybe the Carolinas? All of the little apartments and houses blended together now. They all seemed to have the same cluttered kitchen with dark cabinets and the permanent, lingering smell of cigar smoke. In his mind, his dad sat in this kitchen—the kitchen, which was at once all of them and none of them—always opposite Will, drinking a coffee and reading a newspaper while his son perched on a barstool in Superman pajamas. Will kicked his bare feet. They didn’t talk, not really, merely danced around with their eyes: his dad’s across the classifieds and his own usually devouring the pages of a pulpy comic or detective novel. Weird Tales, where men and women screamed across big splash images of robots coming to murderous self-awareness, aliens bursting free of their pods. His dad never asked about his books, just seemed quietly pleased that he was reading.
Sometimes he would break the silence to remind his dad he needed lunch money. Sometimes, when the mason jar on the counter contained only a small handful of change, he didn’t.
Sometimes his dad would read the personals out loud, if he found them funny.
Now Will’s hand clutched the coffee mug, letting the warmth that radiated through his fingers and up his arm ground him in the now. It is 7:16 am. I am in Wolf-Trap Virginia. My name is Will Graham. Another absurd ritual, but he seemed to be collecting those. His mind was quick to wander, and even those pleasant, quiet moments with his father were stained now. He feared that he might look toward the sink to see Garret Jacob Hobbs, eyes going dark, whispering raggedly, “See?” …or worse, that Hannibal would be standing over the cutting board, humming pleasantly as he sliced into something red and steaming with a linoleum knife.
His coffee was cold when he finally took a long drink.
He couldn’t stay here of course, Jack needed him. He had already resigned himself to the fact that he would go back to the field, eventually. Even if he could avoid whatever splash-page horror awaited him outside his door, he carried far worse monsters around in his head.
As he dressed, he could almost see Abigail drifting around the room, shuffling through the receipts and knick-knacks that littered the top of the dresser, laughing at an old birthday card with a cartoon of a dog on the front, remaining tactfully silent when her fingers brushed the too-familiar script on the unopened letter in the maroon envelope. The one he still, for some unfathomable reason, hadn’t told Jack about.
She was gone by the time he headed down the steps. He was glad, and ashamed. These days he preferred monsters to ghosts.