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“How did you realize you like guys?”
Abigail Hobbs gave a few rhythmic wiggles to her fishing rod, bouncing it in her hand. Will had told her before it didn’t help, but she liked to imagine it made the fly look more alive, skittering across the surface. If she had the choice, she would rather bite something moving too. Something alive.
“Big question.” Said Will, standing just close enough that he didn’t have to shout, but competed with the rushing of river water to be heard nonetheless.
“Isn’t that why you come out here?” She stilled her rod, watching the ripples of the water like she could glimpse the fish beneath. “To get answers to big questions?”
Will laughed. “You’re right I guess, but I’m not really sure I have a very good answer for you.” He looked over to Abigail, watching her recast with a grace much improved from the first time she had tried. The bright colour of her flyline stood out starkly against the muddy grey sky and the hiss of her reel was loud against the quiet of the morning. “I’ve never been the best at reading the clues in my own head.”
She looked over and gave him a lopsided smile, “No, really?”
He recast as well, careful of the angle so their lines wouldn’t drift together and tangle. “I guess it was a gradual process.” He looked back over and she jiggled her line, just to show him she was still convinced it would work. “I never really put much thought to it.”
“Hannibal says you can read everybody but yourself.”
“It’s more that I’ve never cared to. Didn’t put the effort in.” Will adjusted his footing on the river rocks below him, carefully nudging his rubber boots between smooth stones to secure himself against the current. “Does he make a habit of doling out nuggets of my psyche like that?”
“Only when you work too hard or forget to take care of yourself.” Abigail pushed a few loose strands of hair behind her ear, wetting them dark with river water. She cracked a smile. “So yeah, kinda.”
Will laughed, grateful now as he had never felt the need to be that fishing wasn’t a sport that required silence. “I guess that’s what I get, isn’t it.”
Abigail smiled at him in a way that very clearly said, yes, yes it is.
“He’s right, in any case. I don’t think I caught any idea until grad school maybe? And even then it was nothing earth shattering. I managed to ignore it pretty much up until a few years ago.”
Abigail regarded him, freely for the moment as he looked out over the river, seemingly lost in memory. Will’s mind tended to float away downstream a lot when they were fishing - she had grown used to his long pauses. She wasn’t sure he even had much of an idea he was doing it. He looked peaceful, the life the water gave him not lost on Abigail. She was honestly surprised Hannibal didn’t get over himself more often to join them - it was the exact sort of thing she would have expected him to hoard from Will.
“You just ignored it?” She said when Will’s silence stretched particularly long, drawing him back to the conversation from wherever he had gone.
He shrugged. “It’s like I said. Nothing life changing, nothing I particularly wanted to change my life, at the time. It was easy enough to just keep going after women and pretend like that was it.”
Abigail’s eyebrows lifted, realizing once more how little she truly knew about Will, how little they knew about each other. For as long as she felt like she had known him, and some days it felt like she had known him on some level all long, neither of them were particularly good at communication. For the most part, they happily relied on Hannibal to fill in the gaps. “So you’re bi?” She asked, and Will shrugged again.
“I guess so. Haven’t ever really needed a word for it though, it's not like I talk about it much.”
“But isn’t it nice to have a name? To know for sure?” She kept her voice steady, words measured so they didn’t sound too obviously like those that had been tumbling around her own mind for what some days felt like forever too.
“I’m sure its comforting to some people, yeah. That's why we have them, right? The names? But I don’t know, I guess I never needed it to be concrete like that. I’m sure Hannibal would have something horribly insightful and pretentious to say about it, but I’m not sure he actually has a name for what he is either.”
Abigail digested that.
“Have you ever been in love with a woman?” She reeled in to recast her line. Will watched her and waited until her line was in the water again to reply.
“I think so.” He said simply, and Abigail had the impression he was drifting again.
“Was it any different to being in love with a man?” She was well aware that if she had any plausible deniability at the start of this conversation, it had long since been washed away towards the ocean along with everything else in the river. Will, kindly, didn’t mention it.
“In some ways, but I don’t know how much of that is just my experience though. It’s different but…” he paused and recast his line, jaw tight in thought. Abigail knew he hadn’t been wearing the night guard Hannibal made him get to help with grinding his teeth. She liked that about Will, how he was so steadfast in his ways that sometimes things that were better felt worse. She saw herself in it, knew that her and Will understood their little rebellions in a way Hannibal didn’t. His rebellions were larger, louder. Purposeful. Will didn’t need purpose.
“…But it’s the same, in the end. It’s all love. I don’t think that changes much, no matter who it is.” Will looked over at her, a smile pulling at one corner of his mouth like it had been caught by a hook. “Don’t tell Hannibal I said that, you know he likes to feel special. I don’t think he’d like to be put on the same level as Alana Bloom.”
Abigail gawped.
“You were in love with Alana Bloom?” Her brain whirred like a fishing reel as she tried to imagine Will and Alana looking at each other the way they looked at Hannibal and Margot. It wasn’t impossible, but it did nearly make her burst out in laughter to do it. She had always secretly thought they looked very similar, in the way that beautiful people sometimes do - all wide puppy eyes and pouting lips - the thought of them getting all moony at each other was just a little absurd.
“Well, okay, maybe love is a strong word for what we had.” Will laughed as he saw her own poorly stifled giggles. “But I think I could have, if she’d let me. Probably good that she didn’t.”
“I’m starting to think that you just like therapists and your sexuality has nothing to do with it.”
Will barked out another laugh. “I honestly would rather go through another sexuality crisis than whatever the hell that one would be called.”
“Mid-life, I think.” Said Abigail, earning another belly laugh from Will. Both of their cheeks were no doubt pinked from smiling.
They fell into another silence for a while, periodically recasting their lines. Abigail didn’t mind though, she had enough on her mind to be comfortable in the lull. It was a weird thing, trying to figure yourself out. Like trying to untie a knot in a fishing line, all tangled up and slippery with water and whatever it managed to snag in the water, pushing so hard against your fingers it feels like it could cut them. She realized she was grinding her teeth too, and released her jaw to ask another question.
“What changed, a few years ago? What made you stop ignoring it?”
“I met Hannibal.” Said Will without preamble. “It was only one of many things he forced me to realize about myself.”
Abigail laughed. “I think he does it on purpose. Makes you confront yourself like that.”
“Oh and he doesn’t even bother being subtle about it either.” Will looked steadily down at the water parting around his legs. “Though I can’t imagine I was being very subtle either, back then.”
“You say that like you’re subtle now.”
Will looked over at her with a fond but slightly sheepish look.
“I’m not that bad, am I?”
“Don’t worry, he’s terrible too.”
Abigail twitched her line, bouncing it in her hand, the sun shifted behind the clouds of their grey little morning, and the river grew a bit clearer.
--
Abigail handed Hannibal another peeled carrot and watched him slice it into coins carefully, enjoying the crack of it against the cutting board. She wiped her hands on her apron, even though they were only barely damp.
“Can I ask you something?” Abigail leaned against the counter, still watching the carrot as it was broken down and swept to the side by Hannibal's knife.
“Of course. I would never disparage you in the pursuit of knowledge.”
Abigail huffed awkwardly. “It's not that serious, it's just a question, not a… pursuit.”
Hannibal turned to look at her, knifework uninterrupted. “All the same. What would you like to ask?”
She chewed at the inside of her lip, sure Hannibal could see it and read her nervousness. He too, said nothing.
“Have you always known you...um-” she laughed, trying to diffuse her anxiety. Somehow this felt much more like a confrontation than her conversation with Will in the river had - maybe she should have picked a time when Hannibal was distracted too. Abigail gathered herself and tried again.
“Have you always known you liked men?” Her gaze dropped to the carrot peels in the bottom of the sink, her hands whiteknuckled around the mouth of the sink basin. She released them and wiped them on her apron again, only for the movement of it.
Hannibal gave what felt to be an assessing pause before responding. Abigail stewed in it. “Not always, but for some time. I was perhaps only a few years younger than yourself now when it came to my awareness.”
She couldn’t see his face, but the steady rhythm of the carrots snapping under his blade kept her grounded. It felt like her entire body was humming, vibrating like a plucked string. Hannibal had tried to give her music lessons, but she had never been much good.
“How did you know?”
Hannibal stopped briefly, but only long enough to place another cutting board by the sink and placing a bundle of celery on top.
“Would you help me with the celery? Quarter of an inch thick, please.” He handed Abigail a knife handle first, his own fingers on the blade. She eagerly accepted the task.
They fell into a rhythm like synchronised metronomes.
“I was a young man in Florence, when I realized that particular facet of myself.”
Abigail fell out of synch before pausing, taking a deep calming breath, and rejoining Hannibal’s steady cracks. Hannibal had been teaching her about proper breathing while cooking too, about the art that came with being in the kitchen, and the care one must take. It felt a little pretentious to her at times but she couldn’t deny it was helping now.
Hannibal continued. “At the time, it had little more meaning to me than a greater appreciation for the beauty around me. It felt absurd to be limited by anything in my love, like discarding half a museum only because I preferred oil to marble.”
“Did you fall in love there?” Abigail said when Hannibal left it at that, pushing the celery she had already chopped to the side to make room for more. It was a rare thing, to hear Hannibal Lecter talk about love. She felt close to trembling, both with his admissions and what she could only assume he would quietly take to be her own.
“Not in the sense you are asking about, though a substantial part of my heart remains in Italy. I believe it always will.” Hannibal said, moving to fetch the meat for their bourguignon. It was wrapped in brown butcher paper, though he neglected to say if it was beef like the recipe card called for. The meat was crimson under his hands, staining his fingers with blood.
He continued, after a moment of what Abigail had assumed to be the end of the conversation, but may have just been a quiet contemplation. “My love, for all that it is non traditional, I believe is usual in the sense that I have no control over it. As humans we might come to believe, through whatever means, that we have some modicum of exercisable restraint, or influence, in our emotions, and while true on the surface, it is completely incorrect on every other level. To assume that is fault.” He paused again, and Abigail weathered it, as she weathered them with Will. “If you find yourself in any amount of quandary over love, not to assume that is what this is, I urge you to find solace in that we are simply ships to be steered by its current. It is as ungovernable as the tide.”
Abigail didn’t respond, not quite sure how. As per usual, she was somewhat struck by the gravity of what he had said.
She finished the celery and stood by, staring at the pile in thought until Hannibal placed an onion in front of her.
“Diced, please. Like I showed you.”
Part of her wanted to keep pushing the subject, and knew Hannibal wouldn’t mind if she did, but had no idea how to go about it. Maybe she could even get another metaphor or two out of him if she really needled.
Abigail nodded and set to work peeling and slicing the onion the way Hannibal had taught her - and it wasn’t long before tears began to sting her eyes. Hannibal, beside her, was unaffected. Sometimes his cool lack of response to everything was a little too impressive, in her opinion. Maybe he was breathing through his mouth somehow? Or very subtly chewing gum? She had heard those helped, but couldn’t tell either way.
“I am curious, what did Will say, when you asked him your question.” Hannibal cubed the cut of meat with deft slices.
Abigail, knowing Will wouldn’t have brought up their conversation to Hannibal (or would have even had the chance to, since that morning) didn’t bother to wonder how Hannibal knew she had already asked him. Sometimes he just knew.
“The first one?” She wiped a tear away with her bicep, the fabric of her sweater soft against her cheek.
“Yes.”
“He said he didn’t have a good answer. That he ignored it until he couldn't.” She wasn’t worried about Will being angry for sharing that with Hannibal, but she was purposefully brief. It still felt like something a little too intimate to discuss casually.
Hannibal hummed, finishing butchering their dinner in silence.
“And was it?”
“Was what what?”
“His answer. Was it good?” Hannibal oiled the massive stock pot on the stove and added their chopped vegetables with a faint hiss from the oil.
Abigail wiped another few tears from her eyes, thinking. Will’s answer had been… maybe not what she was expecting, but it was his. It made sense with what she knew about him, brought more of him into focus. Even if she couldn’t relate to it, couldn’t imagine the will power it would take to ignore something like that, it was, in the end, a good answer.
She nodded. “Yeah. I think so.” She put down the knife and went to scrub her hands in the sink, only then remembering that she hadn’t cleared out the carrot peels.
“Damn it,” she said quietly, rubbing at her eye with her forearm even harder, trying to will away the sting. She could barely keep them open to clean the sink. “Hannibal could you-”
“Of course.” Hannibal joined her at the sink and quickly cleared out the peels, even going so far as to run the tap for her. “There.”
She washed her hands quickly, eyes squeezed shut and buried in her sleeve.
When she managed to dry her hands and get her eyes open, still stinging and wet, she glimpsed Hannibal smiling at her.
“What?” She asked, unable to keep from smiling back. “Is my pain just that funny?”
“Not at all,” said Hannibal, turning back to stirring the mirepoix in the stock pot. He quietly stirred for a moment, the hiss of heat and water from the vegetables loud in the previously quiet stillness of the evening. “Thank you for asking me.”
Abigail blushed a little and ducked her head, she hadn’t been expecting that. Of course she would ask Hannibal, in what world wouldn’t she?
She was glad she did, too. He had a way of making things come together.
--
Abigail heard Will arrive home as she was helping Hannibal set the table, carefully lighting the red taper candles as he laid out plates and cutlery.
“Honey, I’m home!” Came Will’s exaggerated call from the door, just close enough to be heard.
Hannibal didn’t respond, but Abigail saw him smiling as he adjusted the serviettes in their little rings. She couldn’t help but smile too.
“Dinner smells amazing, you two,” said Will, arriving to hover in the doorway to the dining room, his face flush with the cold outside and the warmth of their house. His expression was alight with the familiar shape of his grin.
“Welcome home,” said Hannibal, not doing anything so cliche as giving Will a kiss as he passed by him towards the kitchen, but widening Will’s smile all the same as if he had.
Abigail watched them over the bright flutter of the candle flame in front of her, wondering if she would find someone to make her smile like that. To cook her dinner. To make her feel that way with nothing more than their arrival at the table. She wondered what they would be like, if they existed.
She had some idea.
Hannibal quickly returned with their plates, steaming and delicious smelling laden in his arms. He set them down at the table, not having bothered to take the head seat for himself, instead seating himself next to Will across the table from Abigail.
“So,” said Hannibal as they all found their seats (himself having pulled out Will’s for him, prompting Will to do the same for him) “How was class?”
Will had been back teaching at Quantico, firmly telling Jack Crawford to fuck off in not so many words whenever he suggested anything more. It was a good compromise for him, even if Hannibal wished he would stay as far away from it as possible, and considering the commute was twice as far from Baltimore than Wolftrap.
“Oh you know, the usual blood and guts.” Will blew on his spoonful of stew. “Nothing worth discussing over such a fine meal.” the corner of his mouth quirked up in a cheeky smile.
“Of course,” said Hannibal, “I wouldn’t want you to spoil your appetite.”
“Never.” Said Will, taking his bite and making a noise of pleasure around it.
Abigail watched Hannibal’s pride visibly swell. Even after all this time, nothing brought him joy quite like providing an enjoyed meal. Or perhaps it was something else other than joy.
Love?
Abigail took a bite of her bourguignon, and it was indeed delicious.
“I felt a lot clearer after going fishing this morning, even though we didn’t catch anything.” Will gave Abigail a warm look across the table.
“Me too,” she said, and meant it.
“Perhaps it wasn’t fish you were meant to catch today.” Said Hannibal, taking a sip of wine. Abigail hadn’t even seen him get a glass - sometimes she was convinced they just manifested in his hand, except Will had one in front of him too.
Will gave him a curious look, but didn’t comment.
“Oh, I have been meaning to tell you both, I got us tickets to La Donna del Lago next month.” Hannibal said, his nose above his wine glass, smile visible, distorted, though the side.
“An opera? Did you book out the whole box again?” Will asked, an incredulous but expectant look on his face. Will knew as well as Abigail that he had - Hannibal had even begun referring to it as their box.
“Yes, you know I prefer it. And I checked all of our schedules, there should be nothing standing in the way of a completely enjoyable evening.” Hannibal set down his glass and ignored Will’s eyeroll, one of the few people he would excuse rudeness from. Abigail knew she was the other.
“You could have also asked us, you know.” Will took another bite of his dinner.
“I know.”
Supper continued much the same, their comfortable joking air carrying them comfortably to the end of their meal and into the kitchen to tidy up. Will and Abigail stood side by side, washing and drying dishes, respectively, while Hannibal moved around them packing up leftovers and putting the dry plates away.
“You seem quiet.” Said Will, low enough that Hannibal might not have been able to hear with his head buried in the fridge.
Abigail shrugged. “Just thinking.”
She was, truly, for the most part miles away in thought. She wasn’t surprised Will had picked up on it, and was almost positive Hannibal must have too.
“What if…” She trailed off, chewing the inside of her mouth again. An idea had struck her early in their meal and had kept her occupied, among other adjacent thoughts, since.
“Hmm?” Said Will, accidentally bumping her elbow with his as he submerged another plate.
“Could I bring someone to the opera? I mean if we have the entire box already, I wouldn’t- and it’s not like I even-” She cut herself off, feeling the incoming babble. She forced herself to keep carefully drying one of the wine glasses.
“Of course you may.” Said Hannibal (of course he had heard), gently taking the wine glass from her hands. It was completely dry and probably had been for a good portion of her ministrations. “Did you have somebody particular in mind?“
It was an innocent question, she knew, and if she lied there would be no consequences, even if they could both tell, but after everything today, she found she didn’t much want to lie. Even if telling the truth was just as difficult.
She took a deep breath in through her nose and put her hands facedown on the cool marble countertop, trying to pull some of its steadiness into her body. She scrunched her eyes together like they were stinging from the onion all over again.
“There’s a girl from one of my classes. I think she might like the opera, I mean, I have no idea if she likes the opera but I just feel like she might and I-” Abigail opened her eyes, staring at her hands. “Is that okay?”
Her voice was quiet and thin, though she had no idea why she was so terrified - it wasn’t a rational or even reasonable fear, but it was there, and she was suddenly frozen by it. A deer in the headlights of her white knuckles against hard stone.
Will’s hand came into view and laid itself over one of her own, warm and dripping with soapy water.
“Of course.”
She looked sharply up at him, smiling at her fondly, and felt like she was back again to the onions. Hannibal was over his shoulder, eyes bright as they met with hers.
“We would love to meet her, Abigail.”
She felt her face twitch with the effort not to suddenly cry and she smiled at them both, releasing her lip from between her teeth.
She found that things felt a little clearer to her, too. Coming together like they were always going to.