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It was her last choice. Seriously, if Maggie had a way to contact her great grandfather’s ghost to ask him instead, she would.
Her parents lived in a different state, all her friends were at least forty minutes away or busy, she had no car, no bus stations nearby, like two dollars and 6% battery left on her phone.
The thing was that her phone didn’t charge last night and she was too busy to sit down and let it charge before her date that night. Her date with a guy she met through a dating app and had never met before, but obviously, she spent a lot of time texting him if her phone battery were to say anything.
She knew it was a bad idea to have him be her ride home. That’s like the first rule of dating, make sure you have your own way to get home Just In Case. But Maggie didn’t really think about the Just In Case scenarios because this guy seemed totally cool.
His profile said: ‘Trevor Carlson, 23, all you need to know about me is that I’m really into true crime’, not ‘Trever Carlson, 23, I will only talk about true crime and serial killers during the entire dinner and when you tell me you want to work for the FBI I will get creepily interested in it’ like it would if it were accurate.
Her friend Sam did tell her it was risky going out with a guy who’s only hobby seemed to be true crime, but so is hers! That’s how she ended up here at Quantico in the first place, wanting to be an FBI profiler because of all the interesting unsolved cases out there in the world.
So yeah, Trevor seemed cool and they’d have something to talk about the whole night. He picked Maggie up from a street by her campus and complimented her dress when she entered the passenger seat. So far so good.
Then Trevor brought up his fascinations with serial killers and it became clear that he was not a fan of detective work and crime shows like she was, this guy was the fan of the kills and how they were done. Kill Bill sirens went off in her head every time he mentioned another killer. Which was a lot. By the time he handed her the check the sirens had caused a thrashing headache behind her eyes.
Even if she did have a car driving with this headache would be a hazard to anyone on the road. So she declined a ride from Trevor, fearing spending almost an hour alone with him in an enclosed space without the watchful eyes of strangers keeping him in check.
Maggie knew that Trevor probably wasn’t a serial killer, or any killer, he was just bad at first dates. Hopefully. But now she was stuck outside a random restaurant by the outskirts of some town called Wolf Trap. It was late and her head was still pounding, even imaginary sirens take their toll on an uneasy mind, and she remembered something from class.
Maggie turned on her data and used what was left of her battery to find the syllabus for her criminal psychology class and scrolled all the way to the end where in a smaller font than the rest of the paper is written in there are two lines under ‘contact for emergencies’. An email and a phone number.
Maggie quickly typed the number into her phone but hesitated to actually press the call button. What if he was mad that this wasn’t a class-related emergency? What if he didn’t even pick up?
Maggie held her breath as she watched her phone battery descend to 5%. Yikes, she didn’t have time to think too hard.
She clicked ‘call’. Really the worst that could happen is he says no. It’s not like they were totally friendly in class anyway.
It picked up on the second ring, startling Maggie slightly.
“Will Graham’s phone,” an unfamiliar voice said on the other end.
“Uh, is Mr. Will there?” Maggie clenched her eyes shut and desired the sweet release of death as the guy on the other end chuckled. She was debating on whether to say Will or Mr. Graham and her mouth went with a combination.
“He is driving at the moment, is there a message I can get to him in the meantime?”
“Y-yeah, Uh, please tell him, or- er- ask him, if he’d be willing to give me a ride- This is Maggie Garcia by the way, one of his students. I’m um, kinda stuck in Wolf Trap and I remembered he lived here and I don’t have anyone else to call…”
“One moment, please.”
Maggie let out a shaky breath as two voices mumbled on the other end. She couldn’t catch what they were saying until her teacher’s voice came on.
“Hey Maggie, where are you, we’ll come get you,” he said.
Maggie could have cried at that moment. “I’m by this restaurant, Aunt Polly’s, I’m so sorry about this-”
“It’s okay, we’re out anyway, it’s no problem.” Will chuckled into the phone. Chuckled. He actually sounded sort of happy, not like the somber voice he used to present in class. It was weird.
“Thank you so much, I really appreciate this-”
“It’s really no problem, I’m just-”
But Maggie never got to hear the rest of the sentence because her phone went dead. She stared at it and poked the dark screen a couple times to just make sure. Yeah, it was dead.
Now her only hope was Will Graham, one of her teachers at the FBI academy that she’d never actually had a conversation with before.
All she could do was wait, so she plopped down on the curb and just twiddled her thumbs for a while.
It was only a couple minutes of waiting before a car pulled up to the curb and the window rolled down, revealing Will and another guy in the passenger seat.
“You can go in the backseat, if you don’t mind,” he said while Maggie eagerly jumped up and grabbed the door handle.
The second she buckled her seatbelt she started talking,
“Mr. Graham, I am so sorry about this, my phone ran out of battery and I don’t know anyone around here and I’ve got this killer headache and I know I shouldn’t have expected to get a ride home from my date but at the time I didn’t know what he was like yet and I thought he was cool-”
“Maggie, it’s okay. Where do you need to go?” Will actually sort of smiled at her reassuringly.
“Uh, Quantico. But that’s like forty-five minutes away from here so if you just want to drop me off at a bus station that’s okay too.”
“Oh that’s nothing, it takes an hour and a half to get to his house and do it practically every day.” He glanced over at the other guy as if waiting for him to confirm it.
When the man didn’t say anything Will gave him a nudge.
“It’s not a problem, is it, Dr. Lector?”
“No, I suppose it’s not, Will.”
Maggie wasn’t getting any hostile vibes from ‘Dr. Lector’, but apparently Will decided to clear the air anyway. Maybe there was, she was too tired and her head hurt too much to notice.
As Will drove off their conversation silenced and Maggie leaned her head on the window. The car was much warmer than it was outside, and the thrum of the wheels on the road made a soothing makeshift lullaby.
“So Maggie,”
Hannibal turned around in his seat to ask her a question, but she was already asleep.
---
“No, Hannibal. She’s one of my students. We’re going to drop her off at Quantico then we can do whatever we want.” Will said to the man next to him.
Maggie’s closed eyes twitched as she started to wake up a little bit. She was about to open them for real when Hannibal spoke back.
“But it was quite rude of her to interrupt our date.” He said.
Maggie held her breath.
“She needed my help and I’m glad to give her a ride, Hannibal. I’m actually quite touched that she thought of me in this crisis.”
Maggie smiled a small smile but she kept her eyes closed. She wanted to hear what else Will would say about her. (Or anything about his life, really)
“Wait, did you say this was a date?”
“What did you think it was, Will?” Hannibal sounded almost sassy to Maggie. She tried not to smirk or giggle.
“Dinner?”
“Dinner can be many things.”
“... Like a date?”
“Yes.”
In the awkward silence that followed, Maggie figured it was a good time to open her eyes, maybe stretch a little so they knew she was still there.
Just as planned Hannibal turned to see her awake and dropped the conversation with Will.
“Maggie, I was wondering how you ended up in this predicament,” He asked not unkindly. Maggie smirked at his change in the subject.
“Well, I was on a date with a guy and I thought we would get along well but I ended up not wanting a ride from him back home.”
“And why was that?”
“He was just… Creepy, I guess. Like I knew we both liked true crime but he was like, really into it. Like more into the killers than the crimes.”
Hannibal nodded thoughtfully.
“Did he make you feel unsafe at all?” Will offered.
Maggie thought for a second.
“No, not really. I just didn’t want to spend any more time with him.”
“Smart,” he said from the driver’s seat.
The rest of the ride was filled with conversations about school and Dr. Lector’s job, nothing too heavy.
When they reached Quantico, Will pulled up in front of the dorms to let Maggie out. Before she closed the door he said,
“Hey Maggie, if you’re ever in an uncomfortable situation you can call me again, don’t worry about it, okay? See you in class.”
Maggie closed the door with a wave and was about to walk off when the window on the passenger side rolled down and Dr. Lector stuck his face out of it.
“Maggie? If that young man gives you any more trouble do not hesitate to contact me or Will, understand?”
Maggie could only nod sharply before the car drove away, leaving her feeling better about her decisions.
----
“Really, Hannibal, I thought you wanted to eat her, not save her from creeps,” Will said, poking fun at Hannibal’s last sentence to the girl.
“You seem quite fond of her, and as you said, she is your student. It would be impractical not to help her.”
Will smiled as he drove.
“Sure, sure.”