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Did Hannibal care?
At the end of the day, when the night sky drew its curtains and covered him in darkness, Will had to wonder: did Hannibal truly care.
He had told Will that they couldn’t leave without him, that they were waiting for him. And they had. He and Abigail had waited for him, just as they promised. Just as Hannibal had promised. Though as the dust settled, and the blood that had been spilt was cleaned from their hands, Hannibal was gone, and Will was left hollow.
Abigail was dead. Hannibal was gone.
And he? He was alone.
It reminded Will of a story his father had told him, from decades ago, at the shipyard. He had explained to Will that, back in the day, there had been a man who lived on the coast with his wife and daughters; he was a fisherman who made an honest wage. Every night, the man would return home with fresh fish and coin to purchase bread and milk and cheese, all for his family. Only for his family. He had promised he would. Though the village was struggling, and food was becoming scarce.
One day, his wife had disappeared. Their daughters taken with her, she had left a note, telling him that they had moved back in with her parents inland, out of safety. They would wait for him, she had said. But after months of grueling on the shipyard to scrounge up all the money he could gather, the fisherman found that his wife and daughters were nowhere to be seen.
He had found them buried in the cemetery outside the city. They had never even made it to their destination.
When Will had asked the moral of the story, his father had told him, “There isn’t one. It’s true.”
Will had never found out if it really was.
Though, over the decades, he had time to think. Had that woman actually loved her husband? Or did she see a loveless marriage approaching its end? Had she run away out of greed? Or was it truly safety? And, moreover, did she truly love him? He had truly loved her…
Will felt more and more like that man in the story the longer he had dwelled on his thoughts.
He turned to his side, ignoring the pull of his stitches. His dogs whimpered at his feet, smelling his distress, likely, but being unable to do anything about it. Outside, the snow was melting, even in the middle of the night. It glittered here and there in splotchy patches but, for the most part, was mud. The heat left it to puddle in a disgusting mess, something that his dogs tracked in whenever they went for a run. It was the shit caught in Will’s boots, the glide under his feet that made him feel unsteady with every step.
Or perhaps the mud wasn’t the perpetrator.
Perhaps it was the dozens of stitches in his stomach. Perhaps it was Hannibal .
That was likely it, he knew. It just hurt to admit.
His loveless marriage to Hannibal made him both the husband and the wife from his father's story. It muddied his waters, made him confused. The stitches in his stomach were just as confusing as the sutures in his heart, in his brain, the ones that Hannibal had sewn in himself. None of it made sense, and Will felt as if he were going to unravel.
Maybe that was for the best.
Unravelling for Hannibal, and only for Hannibal.