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He doesn’t mind being told that he’s good. Though he knows it’s not true
By his father, by his teachers and by his youth pastor.
And while is his father is the only constant since Will was ten, he doesn’t mind, not when his father is omnipresent after all.
The first time it happens is when he’s just turned 12 and there is another thing on television his father deems him old enough to see, or maybe he does not care.
He cares about his son screaming incoherent phrases that would all prove to be true later.
He cares about his son sleepwalking about a mile before high way patrol picks him up.
“Get in the car Will.”
“Where are we going?”
“Just fishing.”
They do drive quite a while up a hill and then they stop in front of a house and as his father drags Will out of the car, he sees that there’s no fishing rods in the back of the car.
He just digs his heels in the dirt staring upwards begging for something to happen.
Nothing.
Not even a cloud.
His father doesn’t ever get him the summer jobs he talked about even though they both know that they could use the extra money.
Instead a friend offers to take Will hunting and Will’s good, his mind blank as runs to get the stag out of hiding.
Precise when he takes aim only to a split second too long.
The sound of the bullet shattering the stags shin is ringing in his ears as he runs up the heaving animal, the older mans hunting knife in hand.
Waidmannsblatt he called it.
He focuses on that ridiculously long word as he sinks the knife in behind the shoulder blade.
The stag breathes one last time looking Will in the eye.
“Atta boy just as I told ya.”, the hand on his shoulder is too heavy, the blade falls from his hands which are stained with blood way too warm.
He makes one, maybe too steps before throwing up.
Will does not go to confession the week after and not the week after that. It gnaws on him that he’s killed one of God’s creations.
He knows that he eats meat more often than he should, that animals do not have a soul.
But if that stag did not then Will himself does not have one either.
After that he sticks to fishing. No screams and no warm blood, only the quiet of the stream.
The year before he graduates, he realizes and then everything breaks and slides into place at once.
Of course he’s never been forgiven and Will knows that he never can be.
He cries and he prays for an answer, for a sign of compassion – that he has not at last broken in half.
A clear sign of malice of hate just of how far he’s strayed away.
Nothing.
So he tells his father, a bag packed, standing away further than usual.
He imagines a kind word, a ruffling through his hair when what he craves is blood on his nose and an ache in his jaw.
Again, Will gets nothing, a shrug, a clenched jaw and finally a nod.
Then it’s just silence until he moves a town away for community college.
The year goes by in a drunken haze in which he tries to forget his alarm clock on Sunday and his rosary under his shirt.
The mornings on which he sits in a pew feeling half dead, the beads that slide through his hand too fast while his brain cannot keep up with the words anymore.
Will knows how it will end, knows how his father will grimace behind the phone when he asks for money to move down to Quantico.
He likes his advisor well enough, but he stays behind in class soon, the Sunday mornings and burning questions do not go well with his studies.
Or rather that one question.
Why.
When he sits in his dorm room awake for too long, too far gone into the pictures that feel like glass shards when he pushes them around.
Will can’t tell if it is the girl’s blood or his own on his fingers and maybe it does not matter.
It doesn’t.
He now knows why he’s so much better at solving the cases they assign them in class, why he’s the only one in their year who can never pride himself with anything he does.
He’s seen what his classmates do and he still let’s them take credit for his achievements.
The answer to the big why is blasphemy but it’s right.
Will comes to his senses when his father finds him in the shed, the second nail halfway through his hand alerted by the motor of his roommates car still running.
The shame of reading that it should’ve gone through his wrist in the history book the nurse gave hi nearly swallows him whole.
He fails the physical exam, trigger finger aching from putting so much pressure on his freshly healed bones.
He never gets his badge only a letter of consolidation and a job in the archives because he was “injured on duty”.
It’s performative kindness that he knows, but then wasn’t Lazarus rising from the dead performative kindness, when God had the power to eradicate every other illness?
It pays for medication, another hospital stay and his college degree.
Then they ask him to teach even though he knows he cannot but he does it anyway.
Jack promises a nice paycheck and that sounds like dinner with Dr Bloom if he’s lucky enough.
Sweet Alana who does not push to talk about his father’s funeral but who shows Will her own Rosary, when he can’t put the old feeling creeping up on him.
It should be enough to like her.
He should be.
He is not.
Not when Hannibal Lecter is tearing at his walls with such verve.
He knows Hannibal sees him as nothing more than a dog and that’s how painfully obvious he sets his trail out – the end of it is going to be a butcher’s knife.
But then getting rid of Will does not give him satisfaction and the man has the audacity to cry in court to try and get him back, as though all of Will’s life has become some bizarre comedy.
Hannibal the cannibal – it even fucking rhymes.
He does not want to understand him. It would be easier to list what hasn’t happened to Will than list what has.
“Nothing happened to me, Will. I happened”
And yet.
Will cannot decide if Hannibal turning him had already been the most intimate, they’ll get or if he will be the one to triumphantly kiss him after all.
Matthew Brown hangs and crucifies Hannibal and Will can feel his skin crawl. It’s too on the nose and nowhere near intimately enough.
Only after that he sees where his Hannibal’s path divide.
He himself cannot be Christ so he is nothing at all, Hannibal cannot be Christ so he presumed himself to be holy spirit instead.
That man is nothing but flames and falling to Will.
Florence is a heat he will never escape and yet the eyewatering rapture is nothing but divine to him.
Only after he’s lost his breath under Hannibal’s hands and teeth tearing at his neck, only after he pushed Hannibal down against the cold marble floor of the Battistero di San Giovanni, blood still hot between them he dares to ask.
About the hoarse scream to god he just let out, about the muttered Christ when Will lights his cigarette in the morning sun, about the prayers that have Abigails name in them but never Will’s.
His question sounds bitter and full of fear.
“Why I never say your name?”, Hannibal looks at him, his eyes never leaving Will’s. Then he repeats the question again sounding more like a statement now.
“But I did, I do, I do.”