Chapter Text
There’s no logical reason for why it happens.
Well, concedes Will, sunning himself on the green lawn that overlooks the waters of the Salish Sea, perhaps that’s not entirely true. If asked, he would say he would prefer to not be a swan, but alas, no one asks that, and he’s not sure how to say it anymore.
His head is tucked neatly into the crease of a wing, white feathers a bed for his vermillion orange beak. The daylight of the Spring day sits heavy in his eyes, and his long neck, turning the field and the sky into kaleidoscope color. His eyes, like everything else, are different in this way.
He doesn’t smell things, but he does see further. Teeth replaced by a barbed tongue that’s no good for talking. Hair flattened and greyed in soft down. Quills overtake what was once fingers, the anatomy of the elbow turning spindly, ungrasping, but all of him glories in the heat of the sun and the chill of the afternoon breeze. The days are long here, but without the sting of summer. He is more animal than Will out here in the vastness of the grass, always seconds away from flight into the redwood and pine at its edges.
Somewhere in the background and in the safety of the panorama of the porch, Hannibal basks as well, just his feet unsheltered in the sun and uncommonly bare. He is quite at home with a glass of wine, and woolen sweater, only the nakedness of toes looking anything less than magazine perfect.
“My legs were often chilled,” he explains one day. Not this one, but Will’s grasp of time and dates has grown vague with each week that passes in this body. Hannibal talks to him like this sometimes, confident that he is still himself underneath the rough black flesh around his eyes and beak. ( You are. His certainty of it is how you think it’s possible that you don’t wade into the neighboring pond or the shoreline of the Pacific’s waters and just forget that you are. ) “No simple matter to ask them to warm an entire prison for the benefit of me, or to advocate for something better than a canvas shoe. I suspect our dear Alana would have been delighted to know I dislike the cold, and I was delighted to deny her the opportunity to know it.”
Their new home is not much warmer than all that, but Port Angeles is kind to him and what he’s become, as it is to Hannibal. The Olympic Peninsula is as far from Baltimore as the tires of a car can take them without hopping the border, and the rise of white mountains to the south and east hide them as sure as a wall. He would have liked it as a man. He likes it now as he is.
Hannibal in turn is kind to him. As long as they remain together, the man seems content to live in this remote space of the world.
( Quiet, meditative, understood. Suffering, if that’s what this is, is a small price to pay for the peace that falls between you now. There are no conversations to try and cut each other with. For you, there are no hands either. )
It’s safer to become this, in a way. He just hadn’t thought it was what he was wishing for.
---
Make me light, he had thought.
The ground falls away, the bluff recedes at first before rising in his vision. Triassic to Quaternary rock, the Atlantic Plains raised cliffs laid bare by the work of the ocean, is dark in the nighttime and becomes mountainous and sharp in his mind. They’ll break against it if he’s not thrown them far enough away from it. The sea will get them in its mouth if he has. Will thought he wanted that, but now in the face of the monstrous time and mass of stone, he’s having his doubts.
Hannibal tucks his head into the crook of his neck, tacky with blood. Will’s cheek aches against his collarbone which is warm. There’s the thrum of a heartbeat there. It’s less a drum to his growing dread, and more a clock winding down. He wants to say something but his mouth is full of himself, and Will is terrible with saying the right words for all his supposed knowledge, insight, and cleverness.
Make me light, he thinks again. Hollow me out so that this doesn’t hurt me, and I don’t hurt him, and the inevitability of this is water running down the stream bed, and away from the memory of Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter. He will leave a crater from the force of his end ( as is appropriate - his should be marked in some way ) - but make me graceful, and featherweight, and fade away.
They miss the rocks by a fair margin, both the cliffside and the aching pillars rising from the sea with their little cutting mussels and clams embedded as unpolished jewels. The sea itself greets them with the sting of a punched nose, or a fall to asphalt, and Will feels hurt regardless of his prayer. Hannibal is a steel band around his chest, soundless save for the sudden rush of air from his lungs when the impact comes. Will thinks he moves his mouth to say something in his ear, maybe a prayer of his own, and the water is loud beneath them.
But he does feel light.
Will absently hazards the guess that he’s died when he senses this. They sink at first, just little bubbles clouding around them, like the living walls of the rock near them will breathe it in. It’s dark beneath the seafoam, and he is so tired. Gravity begins to loosen its hold on him. He is buoyant. He is smaller. Hannibal holds on all the same, even if the geometry of his body changes between the waves and wakes under them.
Will assumes maybe he’s just been broken into smaller pieces, and at last he is no longer several people hiding in one body, and all that remains is that tiny shard that was always only himself.
---
Will’s not aware for most of what follows. His mind, arguably, is not the same being dragged from the depths to the pebbly coastline, and this sensation is entirely reasonable. Dragged is not the right word either though - he knows that Hannibal carries him, with a kind of engine-like determination, as though the force of his desire to live burns the water from his skin and turns it to steam.
Will doesn’t remember it feeling like this when they flee Muskrat Farms, even if the carry feels similar.
He has the urge to thrash his head and his arms, make himself bigger than he is, to make himself warm. He tries to open his mouth to say something. ( Sorry? Not as far of a fall as you hoped? Some night, huh? Do you understand we were supposed to die? Do you understand that I love you, and I'm just not sure how to partition an emotion that large and widening by the hour? )
None of this comes out. There is no blood running onto his tongue. There is no tongue. There’s no press of the soft palate, or the smoothness of gums, or sharpness of teeth.
He doesn’t recognize what his mouth is .
Hannibal says nothing, knowing nothing of Will’s confusion, and merely adjusts his hold. Brings the surprisingly dry down of Will’s body ( skin, you correct, and then rescind it because it’s not right ) into the wrap of his arms, brings Will’s long neck to swing around the back of his. It doesn’t make sense how the two of them fit together, but Will accepts it and listens.
It’s not until he is carefully bedded into a pile of spare sheets and pillows in the back of an old Cabriolet that he realizes that his body is different. Not broken, as he supposed, but different, foreign. What should have been muscled arms and legs are gone, hidden in the snowfield of whiteness that’s overtaken him. Hannibal winces when bending over him to look at the flats of wings rather than arms for injuries. He tests the bend of webbed, gnarled feet between old linens and the soft folds of Will’s body. His hands are icy cold and shake, running along the snaking line of Will’s head to the rest of his body. He has dark eyes, forward facing, predatory, but right now very kind.
“You are beautiful like this,” he says, “just as you were in your past distress, and as you were in your fury.” Will is relieved to recognize this as words. He can’t form them himself, but he’s cognizant of them, the weight of meaning still written into them.
“I don’t understand why,” Hannibal adds, voice cracking with tiredness, “but it is what you are now, and we will make due.”
Hannibal worries for a bit at a spot at the joint between shoulder ( wing ) and chest where Will remembers the burn of Dolarhyde’s knife, but eventually winces against his own injury, probing the bullet’s entry wound with curious fingers, and the exit wound behind. “It would have been better to have a getaway partner with fingers, though,” he muses with a half-grimace. “Surgical field extractions benefit from an extra pair of hands. Never let it be said you make things easy, Will.”
Will opens his mouth to reply out of habit, but nothing comes out. It merely remains open, panting, and so very cold while his body trembles. The response he receives to this is another brush of long fingers down the flat of his back, before Hannibal turns out and away with a groan. The car door closes and Will gives a half-hearted attempt to move again. He sees the whiteness of feathers, and doesn’t try again, distressed more by that.
Hannibal turns up the heater and turns from the front seat to throw a jacket over Will until the both of them stop shaking, and drives with one hand at his waist, applying pressure and the insistent thought that he won’t stop, even for bullets, even for the disappointment of Will being present but still being far away. He tells Will his plans - their next stop to assess the damage, their route through the northern border states, the place he wants to make anew for them, like the other one didn’t disappear in a haze of rain and misunderstandings. This one’s foundation and mortar, Will thinks in silence, Hannibal has put time into rather than blood.
---
They stay in shitty motels, because they don’t draw a lot of attention with an equally shitty Cabriolet with it’s tatty leather convertible top sealed shut from the 90s this way. Today it is on a frontage road in Twin Falls, Idaho. Tomorrow it will be Yakima, Washington.
He is told these things like it matters, but also with an apologetic explanation that Hannibal cannot sit still and upright for more than eight hours at a time without threat of developing clots. Will feels disquiet at the reminder of the fragility of human bodies. His empathy can’t shape strokes, or the pain of obstructions, or the idea of acute pain in legs and feet as he is now.
“Not to worry,” Hannibal adds. “I’ll recognize it happening long before you.”
( Like most things. )
Hannibal parks as close to the door as he can each time, and carries Will in like he is merely a strange prop or a toy, neck swung around Hannibal’s, wings tucked in tight. A strange thing for a single man to carry around with him, but also not the kind of thing that anyone would ever associate Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lecter with. There’s no clear way to know if he’s insane or if he’s merely acting in an official capacity, and what would the phone call to the authorities even sound like anyway? Who wants to be the person who explains? “Excuse me officer, but I dislike the look of this single, well-dressed male with a bird who pays in cash and tips well. No, he hasn’t done anything wrong. Yes, he’s strange, but in no discernibly threatening way.”
( You wonder at that - at Hannibal’s privilege, coasting along on his looks and his wealth and the assumption of his righteousness nestled in that. How lucky he is to be what he is, how charmed a life one must lead to commit dozens of acts of homicide and desecration and not garner so much as an onlooker’s blink between. The original jester king, lording over and laughing at everyone. )
The added benefit of the motels is the short walk - despite his bluster, and his skill, Hannibal is weak. Taking things out of you, bullets or otherwise, really takes it out of you. Will can only watch him flush debris and blood from the entry wound on the first night. He keeps his proud head high as the stitches are placed, and the little windows into his body are sealed away once more. It’s a step forward, but it’s hardly guaranteed improvement.
Each time they open up to a new room and a new city, Will is placed gingerly onto the closest bed until he can find his feet, clumsy and wide, and gaze at himself in the mirrors of the bathroom and in the glass of the cheap wall art. He doesn’t have feeling in them the way his human feet did, little webs between more hindrance on land than a help, although he feels cold and heat more keenly throughout the rest of him. His wings tuck neatly to his body in a way his limbs never did as a man. He cranes his proud long neck to see wherever he can in a way his eyes always have. He is white and smooth, save for the ugly gauze that is replaced at the apex of his wing ( shoulder ) night to night, and he is undoubtedly a bird.
He stares with black eyes into the mirror now. Still a bird. Still not a man. Still Will Graham somehow despite this.
“In Swan Lake, Rothbart curses Odette to turn into a swan, and she, terrified, seeks aid from Siegfried,” Hannibal muses one night, turning Will’s wounded wing this way and that, nitrile gloves a vivid purple against the feathers. “She can only be returned to her human form by the lake at night, and permanently if someone who has never loved before can love her, otherwise she remains a swan forever.” He is dabbing the edges of the stitches with something that stings, and Will snaps at him with the roughness of his orange mouth from time to time in protest.
( It’s as if once you understand that you are a swan, the passivity runs out of you to be replaced with what you understand of swans - aggression, territorialism, hissing. Chase people away from your waters. Hannibal laughs the first time you do it, and says that you are like this even as a human and that maybe being a swan suits you. )
Hannibal continues, eying red, healing flesh between quills. “A cruel fate. There have been attempts to explain why Rothbart does this in later adaptations,” he muses. “Perhaps a Western need for context. Motivation is an obsession of the business-driven, why are we here, what is the necessity of this thing. Lust, revenge, malice - none really stick to the wall of Rothbart’s sorcery.”
He dabs again at a tender spot, blood coming away with the cotton. Despite this, he is so very careful with the small feathers there, pulling them gently away, keeping them tidy and unsplit. The skin of a swan beneath them is every bit as pink as a man’s. He is careful with this too.
“But the original Russian as Tchaikovsky wrote it is without cause,” Hannibal adds. “The cast is set, the circumstances understood without the lens of history. Odette is what she is, and you need only accept it and watch her dance.”
Will turns to nip at him, annoyed, and Hannibal just smiles.
He wraps Will’s wing as he does every night, four days now driving through the plains of North America. He does this before he cleans and wraps his own torso, wincing with tenderness, dry swallowing doxycycline and pain medicine and never admitting to discomfort beyond this. Hannibal has no room for doubt, and so he has no words that build space for it.
Will is not capable of saying anything, so he doesn’t.
They both stare this evening into the bathroom mirror, shining and greenish from across the space. Will is a beacon next to the dark clothes that Hannibal wears to hide spotting blood from unsuspecting passers-by, and he watches with a stiff neck when Hannibal ghosts fingers across the backs of the flight feathers. He pets the tight down of his back. He uses the flatness of his hand to run the length of Will, head to shoulders. Hannibal’s eyes are dark now, as they were in the car, still shivering with cold. Will allows it, curiously comforted by it and how it defines the edges of his new body.
What would it be like to do this as two men? Will thinks he might be skittish, shy of this kind of tenderness, or suspicious of it in a way that his wild self ought to be but isn’t. Affection is safe with this alien distance of shape between them. Hannibal’s attention in the mirror is appreciative of the aesthetic and the sharp mind hiding somewhere beneath, but it’s sexless. He can’t know if Will feels anything other than the pressure of fingers. Reciprocation is unnecessary - this is a picture to be taken with his eyes, and tucked away into a room in the vast halls of his mind.
Will gets caught by the flash of orange that is his own mouth again, and looks away from the other man, thoughts scattered and animal once more.
When Hannibal lays down with a quiet groan, Will starts the night at the foot of the bed in a pile of pillows and the obligatory short-fibered velveteen blanket of every motel, tucked into himself. Once he is certain Hannibal is asleep ( and even this you do not know for certain save for an a feral cunning that says he is ), he walks on his awkward feet to bed down again next to him, and feel the warmth of his shoulder for fever, and to chase the early Spring cold from his own hollow bones. It is uncomfortable, his new body wanting the mound beneath them to sleep on, but his reasoning is practical, and he fights his avian instincts with a man’s fears. Hannibal has no room for anxiety, but Will does, everything a progression from one reflexive compulsion to the next.
If the front office attendant or housekeeper walked in, they would see Will as nothing more than a strange pillow, the vividness of his face hidden by black clothes and an ugly printed quilt. Will worries about that sometimes - waking late because Hannibal has died in the night, optimistic about his recovery to a fault. He wouldn’t be able to explain it to them - he wouldn’t even be able to properly try to bring him back, no fists to compress the chest, no lips to force breath into his lungs. He’d just die.
But Hannibal always wakes early, makes no comment on Will’s change in location, and merely asks him not to spread his wings when he probes the bandages on it for signs of sticking to the stitches.
“Despite the change of costume,” he rasps, “you are less graceful in an enclosed room than ever before.”
He strokes each wing after, settling pin feathers and down into flatness. “Someday you’ll have to learn to preen if you’re going to insist on being like this forever,” he finishes, but always minds the clean expanse of Will’s body like it’s an expanse of sunrise frost, or a zen garden in curving lines - a thing to calmly gaze at, and look forward to its restoration by the morning tomorrow or by his hand and a rake.
Will allows it, because he doesn’t know how to do either of those things anymore, and because it feels nice to be looked at and known for what he is even if he can’t do as he used to.
---
In two more days, Seattle arrives with mid-afternoon rain. Will’s only ever been once for a conference. The federal government has some kind of hard-on for sending it’s contractors to depressing locations, as though the absence of crime scenes demands a progression of grey, wet, cold-fingered days to stretch his mind over instead. This is Will’s first time seeing it as a bird, but it’s also Will’s first time being a bird amidst other people, and this colors the experience more than the drizzle, or Hannibal looking vaguely miserable as Will waddles his way through the grass in a park south of the airport.
It’s harder to hide him in a big city like this. He’s quiet, and nests easily in the back seat of the Cabriolet, but there’s just so many people, and so few places that Hannibal can treat him like the ornery neck pillow that he is. People peer in the windows at him at gas stations. At least two people take quick snapshots with phones, naive as to who they are trespassing on. Will is mute, and can’t warn them. Hannibal is on the run, and can’t easily kill them, and has the face of one who is barely able to keep the unhappiness out of it.
Will thinks it’s this that causes Hannibal to release him in the park, while he industriously uses a cell phone to make alternative arrangements. There’s nothing to be done about needing to carry him down the hall of a chain hotel, and the possibility of cameras and displacement and the Seattle Animal Control, but for the moment there’s nothing wrong with a swan in a public park. Will can stretch his good wing here. He can unfurl in a way that the small space of the car, or the careful cleanliness of the motel rooms forbid.
Will hates it. He has no way to say this. The sprinkle of rain beads and rolls off of him with ease, and still he hates it and longs for the safety of the car where people can’t see how he’s changed, and he can’t either.
He beds down on the grass nearest to Hannibal and the bench he’s taken residence on, and tries to keep to himself. The gaze of Canada Geese, and gulls, and children even in the spitting rain makes him uncomfortable. More people take photos. Hannibal keeps a stiff mouth. He never suspected how much he would resent the presence of other humans after the events of the cliff, and if this is a consequence of becoming something other than himself, or that he is still himself and merely changed in shape, Will can’t say.
( He’s never wanted to share you. He would kill your wife for it, by whatever means he can. It must be a relief to him that your wife wouldn’t have you as you are now. Only Hannibal recognizes who you are beneath this new anatomy. Who else would take the chance on such a ridiculous notion? Doctor in education and titles, even if stripped of those these days, but a man of some kind of faith despite this. Your transformation is unexpected. It is lovely. Your transformation is the last step between your lack of humanity, and your clinging to whatever of it is left in Hannibal. )
They go to hide together again, walking down the long hall of a Holiday Inn because it can’t quite be avoided this time. The carpet is yellow, green, and purple checkered, festive as Mardi Gras but muted by the flatness of fluorescents overhead and the shuffle of housekeeping. “You’ll have to pay a deposit for your animal,” the attendant says with reluctance, as though Will were a dog, not fully understanding what kind of creature Hannibal keeps as company, but Hannibal gives a winning smile that says not-a-problem-I-assure-you with teeth clenched together inside it.
They count their way down the progression of doors like they’re a cell block, and 411C is what passes for their prison home. A little girl chases her mother past the door when they stop before it, smiling at the huge bird in the strange man’s arms when they pass, and Will turns his feather-hidden ears towards her from underneath the safety of Hannibal’s coat collar.
“Don’t be silly,” says her mother, not even sparing a glance at Hannibal doing his best to open the room door with one hand. “We don’t bring wild things in like that.”
With the length of his neck caught around Hannibal like a noose, and his black, scaly feet tucked and braced against the tweed of a long trenchcoat, Will agrees. He doesn’t belong here, in a commuter hotel, where other people can see him. Everything about his wings and his mouth crave outside, and the safety of being away, and the little droplets of rain that bead and roll on the crest of his back. He should sleep in the reeds of the lake, and Hannibal can take the bed, and they can fade into the background noise and the thrum of the edges of a crowd.
“I apologize,” Hannibal says quietly to him, shifting his free arm to flip the cheap plastic key card and try again, watching the green lights with irritation. “You hate to be looked at by others, and as always, you are focused in their sights.”
It beeps at him again, flashing red instead of green as he misses the window. Will stares down at a suitcase he knows to have bandages, iodine, two changes of clothes washed frequently, and assorted lettuces, because that’s what a wildlife care veterinarian says that Will needs when gently prodded by email for instructions.
( Until such a time I can safely bring the swan in , Hannibal’s message says in all the most respectful tones, lying through his teeth because you have none to speak with for yourself, otherwise you would have told him not to bother. It’s for the best - it’s clear he doesn’t know what to do with you, and that he is trying, and you don’t think he could bear to hear it from you in words that you know.)
“I guess it can’t be helped,” the man shrugs when the door finally gives way, and sets Will down on the first of two full beds.
The lettuce packages crinkle in the bag when he moves it from the floor to the luggage rack, and again when moved from bag to miniature refrigerator, pushing aside tiny bottles of alcohol, and candy bars, and sodas that he’ll be charged for even though he didn’t drink them, because there’s nowhere else to put greens. Will swivels his head to follow their progression, increasingly angry with each rustling of the plastic.
He gives a breathy hiss, the best he can do for retorts these days, jumps from the bed with his lame wing flapping half folded at the metacarpus, and tucks himself into the corner beneath the sink of the bathroom.
He only moves when Hannibal gently herds him out to shower himself, and sterilize his wounds, and fall into a less fitful rest and more fitful thought. Rain splatters against the glass long into the dark hours, and Will eventually finds sleep behind a curtain, away from the rise and fall of Hannibal’s chest on the bed. It’s unbearable to know what he is, or be in this city, or near anything.
---
It’s funny to think of them as having gone from coast to coast, the chill of the Atlantic being replaced by the iciness of its more vast and destructive sibling, the Pacific. Will doesn’t think they would have survived this ocean. The cliffs are higher, the current stronger and colder, and while there are lights on the shore from the shipyards and houses, they disappear quickly in the drizzle and wind coming down from the north. But the waters of Elliot Bay and the Puget Sound aren’t quite the edge of the United States - there’s further still that they can go, and with nothing to indicate Will is going to be anything other than a swan for the coming months, Hannibal eventually concedes that they’ll need a more permanent place to wait out...whatever it is that Will needs to wait out.
“It’s a matter of balancing privacy and convenience,” he says with a laugh, settled into the desk of the motel with a small laptop. “Mute swans, while very impressive, aren’t so common in the States as they are in Europe. You are very much a risk to us, but as an item of interest to birders,” Hannibal hums, looking at something Will can’t quite see from the bed. “It would be vexing to have to retrieve you from a rescue or a zoo.”
Will supposes that’s not a problem that he’s had before. Probably better than prison - there’s at least some incentive to keep him happy. It makes him depressed, if he’s capable of being depressed anymore. Maybe animals have always been sad and restless and being anywhere other than where they belong is a quick burning tragedy.
( How long do swans live anyway? Is that something Hannibal would have asked the veterinarian, or do you think he wouldn’t quite dare? The only flaw having dogs ever presented was that they didn’t live longer. You’re relieved you don’t have to see Winston pass from old age, or Harley grow too stiff to bound across the driveway, or any other commonplace fate for a well-loved pet. But maybe like being depressed, becoming what you are has freed you of the emotional burden of death. Or fate. In any form. )
“I think something on the coast,” says Hannibal, turning back to Will in the chair, only wincing once at the twist of his torso. “What do you think?” he asks, and it’s the first time he’s properly asked Will much of anything. Why does someone ask waterfowl their feelings on property, and material investments, and escrow duration?
Will weaves his serpentine neck, neither in a nod or a shaking no, and nips the fabric of the bedspread instead in frustration. Hannibal frowns, and sticks a hand forward to settle the feathers around the bandages, growing restrictive, growing itchy --
But Hannibal pulls his hand away, and smiles, as he often does.
“We’ll find your lake,” he whispers, “and perhaps there you’ll again be a man.”
Will avoids thinking about it, or how much he’s forgotten of it. How long does Will Graham have to live with his sharp tongue restored to order? Will he have a tongue, after the little angry knife Dolarhyde stuck in it did it’s damage? What if the seas of the Atlantic were his lake? What if he’d prefer this life, so much softer than the one they’ve run from?
Hannibal buys a house - cash offer, title as quickly as the flabbergasted agent can arrange for, all four and a half acres of field, and forest, and towering Victorian cottage. There’s a pond, and a boathouse. It’s not humble, but neither is it a large flat in Florence, with all the antiquity and fine wines that inheritance and Hannibal’s assumed hard work affords him. Will thinks it’s too expensive, but Will soon starts forgetting about money.
---
They bounce between more motels in the coming weeks waiting for their new home, Mount Rainier glaring at them on clear days from the east like a pillar of salt that they’re not to turn and face, maybe Jack and the FBI only days away from finding them. To the west, The Brothers and Mount Jupiter await, cold and distant and promising something other for them, the same color and albedo of Will’s body in the grey mornings. When the necessities of bureaucracy are seen to, they cross the Tacoma Narrows Bridge into the mist of the Olympic Peninsula.
“Destroyed, in many years past,” Hannibal says as the first suspension tower passes, verdant and cold as lichen on rocks. “A man-made disaster that didn’t account for nature, and the simple destructive force of wind. Perhaps from the same capricious God your typhoid and swans comes from, and yourself as it seems,” he says and looks into the space between the cables, not awed but appreciative.
In turn, Will’s head rests on the door of the car, pressed softly to the glass of the passenger window and watching the dark mass of the ocean pass beneath them. The water beneath them feels like it should be home, and Will rustles his feathers in memory of its weight. He would float now, if he learned to fly and land on the surface, looking no different from a crest of foam on the bay’s waves.
Make me light, he had asked, and only wants to be lighter still.