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As Will slowly comes back to consciousness, a few things make themselves clear to him. First, he isn’t dead. Second, he’s laying under the world’s warmest blanket with a fuzzy feeling in his extremities that speaks of heavy pain medication. Third, the cotton top sheet is directly against his shirtless chest, where two curved scars paint a damning picture.
The third is where the problem lies. Only one person could have dragged him out of the Atlantic, and that means that Hannibal knows.
Fuck.
“Will, you’re awake,” says a familiar voice. If Hannibal’s surprised, his voice doesn’t betray it. “You must be disoriented. You nearly drowned.”
He’s standing in the doorway, a broad-shouldered shadow against the light that floods in from the hallway. There’s a tension running through his spine that Will can see all-too-clearly, even from the bed.
Will’s throat burns and he can still taste salt on the back of his tongue, but he forces himself to spit out what he already knows is a pointless question.
“Did you see?” Will asks.
His voice is barely a rasp.
“Yes.”
Will can’t answer, and instead screws his eyes shut and turns his face into the pillow, willing away the prickle behind his eyelids.
He doesn’t know what he expected in the next days, but it isn’t for Hannibal to withdraw.
Hannibal doesn’t speak once of what he has discovered. He seems to have no conversation to spare for Will at all, actually. It’s like living in a fishbowl, the world muffled through a layer of water and glass, Hannibal’s gaze clinging silently to his every movement. The strange quiet that reigns over the safe-house is broken only by pedestrian small-talk of the “Some sugar with your coffee?” variety.
Will wants to feel angry in the face of such a dismissal, but all he can muster up is resignation. He’s with a man who kills people over petty rudeness—and Will can get away with a lot, but years of lies would surely embitter Hannibal, even towards him. Whatever tenderness Hannibal holds towards him had sufficed to keep Will by his side, at least. He’s thankful, even for that.
He locks his jaw against the questions—do you know everything I gave up to lead me here to you, was my becoming not also a love letter, did it all mean so little to be so easily undone—and marinates in the bitterness that coats his throat. He smothers the fire that flares in his stomach every time Hannibal looks away from him. The sleeping darkness that Hannibal woke in him itches for blood, eyes Hannibal’s throat with a fervour that equally hungry and lustful, but it’s soothed easily enough. A healthy dose of shame, the phantom stinging of the scars on his chest—they make it draw back into the recesses of his mind like a beaten dog.
He tells himself that it’s enough, being here. It has to be.
It takes two weeks of silence to wear down that resolve. The words slip out over dinner, too fast for Will to filter them into something less pathetic.
“Why am I still here?” he asks.
Hannibal is, as always, unflappable. His maroon eyes calmly meet Will’s as he makes a precise cut into the beautifully-cooked portion of veal on his plate. Will, for his part, wishes he’d never opened his mouth.
“Why do you believe the reason for you presence to be?” he replies.
“I don’t know,” says Will. His gaze falls to the table, tracing the pattern of the wood grain. “Bedelia said that you were in love with me, but now you know. I can’t imagine what use you still have for me.”
When Will glances up through his lashes, Hannibal is frowning.
Some part of him preens at breaking through that marble mask that’s perpetually sealed over Hannibal’s elfin features. A greater part of him is too busy wrestling down the erratic pounding of his heart to bask in the pride of seeing his impact on the man sitting across from him.
Hannibal sets his cutlery down.
“Will, forgive me if this is a foolish question, but—what do you think to imply with such a statement?”
“You know,” he says. That I’m transgender. Will can’t bring himself to say the second half of it, the truth, out loud. As if it would make his lies lighter as long as he didn’t explicitly acknowledge them. “You know.”
“Yes, so you’ve stated.”
Will feels blood warm his cheeks in angry embarrassment, and he huffs out a frustrated breath.
“Was Bedelia right?” he asks.
Hannibal blinks at him for several silent seconds.
“Yes,” he says calmly.
“What am I to think, then?” Will knows that his anger is leaking into his voice despite the whisper of be thankful be thankful be thankful that’s ringing in the back of his mind. “You were in love with me, and now you barely speak to me. I give you my life, and you don’t seem to know I exist anymore. It’s—it’s confusing.”
“Will—”
“We both know what changed,” Will says bitterly.
Understanding blooms on Hannibal’s face.
“My dear Will,” he says, reaching across the table. His hand lands on Will’s with a touch too gentle for a killer. “You misunderstand me.”
“Do I? I lied. I hid a truth I knew was too strange, even for you. And you found out. Am I misunderstanding?”
“Of course you are,” says Hannibal. “You are a man—that, you never lied about. Born or made, it does not matter to me. What Bedelia revealed to you is not what has changed.”
A thumb strokes across Will’s knuckles. The anger drains from him as suddenly as it had appeared. It isn’t fair, how easily Hannibal twists and shapes his emotions. All these years later, and he still feels like a puppet dangling at the end of Hannibal’s strings.
“And—and you aren’t completely repulsed.”
“No, Will. Not at all.”
Relief floods through Will’s veins like sunrise washing over a beach.
“Why, then, the distance?” Will asks.
He means for it to sound like an interrogation, strict and full of authority, but the voice that escapes him is closer to the whisper of a begging man. A pilgrim knelt at the shrine, pleading for mercy.
“Will, after everything, I would not—could not—demand more of you that was not given.”
Hannibal’s words are the divine answering the pilgrim’s cry.
“You should,” says Will. “By all means, Hannibal. Demand.”
Hannibal gifts him a honeyed smile, a thousand words held in the artful curl of that lip, and Will can do nothing but lean across the table separating them, helplessly caught in his orbit.