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Will wakes up with his back on a familiar bed sheet. It’s cold. He’s not falling. He should be.
There is a moment, one, then two, then another. The figures beat. Horse hooves atop his pulse. He is home, stretched backward in time; or perhaps he’s still falling, in an embrace with Hannibal, and this is a vision he was granted right before they hit the water.
He can feel the wrong cuts on his skin, as he sits up. There is a stitched gash on his forehead, on its way to healing. Both his cheeks remain closed, and at the moment, it feels wrong. But then again, nothing about the present he finds himself in was right. Paper tickles his leg and it brings a chill, a reaction. Will doesn’t flinch.
A writing pad is on his bed. With a minute move, Will maneuvers to find a comfort in which he can look at the open page, making it out to be scripts of astro and particle physics. It isn’t his.
The fact that it’s Hannibal’s come to him shortly after, and it’s the only reminder he gets before the man himself enters.
Will starts out his skin for a millisecond, spying the clothes Hannibal was wearing: a black coat wrapped around him, coiled unfamiliarly, much like the scarf he also sports round his neck—it shouldn’t have surprised Will as much as it does, but the memory of Hannibal in a sweater with Dolarhyde’s blood is too striking to forget. Will made sure to smear some of his own, too, complete with a sense of belonging.
In spite of that, Will feels strangely calm. Perhaps he really is underwater.
He watches as this Hannibal, the one that isn’t his, all dressed clean, picks up the pad. He carries it with a grace only he can manage, firm along the fingertips, and the moment is over when he sits down and lets go of it.
“Do we talk about teacups and time and the rule of disorder?” Hannibal’s voice is three years younger when it rolls out his mouth and into Will’s slowly accepting ears. Accepting. For he understands that may he still be falling or not doesn’t change the fact that this voice feels real. Sounds real. Reality has often proved itself fickle.
What had he said, before, at this time? The teacup is broken. But the last memory he has is an embrace with Hannibal. A teacup coming together. Was he here to break it again?
“I find time to be confusing,” Will decides to finally say. “The teacup is unpredictable.”
Their past conversation runs like a playback in Will’s mind. Today, they will have another life to compose a different one.
“Is that how it is, in your mind?” Hannibal replies after a beat. Will swallows the urge to laugh. He always drives whatever talk straight into Will’s mind, as if there’s a hunger inside of him to cut open his head and look into it. Will remembers the stitch just along below his hairline and finds it to be a comedy after the making. “Your memory palace is building. It’s full of new things… it shares some rooms with my own. I’ve discovered you there—”
“—victorious.” Will finishes for him. This is an exchange that’s haunted him for three years. He knows every word in this production.
Hannibal pauses. There's a clear surprise shown on his face, and it softens. As it always does. A nod of assent. “Yes.”
The next moments will prove to be crucial. In the end, it all comes down to Will. They’ve spoken of counter alternate lives often, and how arrestingly different they know it would be. Should he dare? Should he be afraid to wake up underneath the Atlantic, provided he does?
If he takes up abated loyalty, he’d say there isn’t to be a decisive victory between them. Hannibal told Will he’d seen him in a palace of his own, triumphant, forever in memoriam.
If loyalty is different than his needs he’d open with missing his dogs. If his loyalty caves in and takes up a home in his ribs, he’d talk of not wanting to miss and find and look. Privately, he would say he’ll wonder. But back then, there was nothing more foolish than to say it out loud.
If his loyalty could kill him, he’d tell Hannibal he didn’t want to think about him anymore.
Luckily for him, delighting in the wicked almost makes him immortal. That’s how he found himself here.
“Do you still want to forgive me?”
Hannibal’s jaw slackens in face of a minute show of unprecedency. Will thinks shock, however small, is a good look on his face.
When he doesn’t answer immediately, Will continues, “Or have you already?”
“You spring upon me a question I have already answered, Will, I had only expected you already knew what it was.”
Like a bee sting, the stitch in Will’s head revives itself to be remembered. Unlike a bee sting, he relives the last few hours.
“You have.” It’s not a question. Will might have made his conclusion definite, but he is not wrong. The fact that he woke alive is proof enough. They have already paved forgiveness in one another; although their forgiveness is a strange thing, outside their eye view, gods as they think themselves to be.
Will does not feel the Atlantic lap up at his feet hungrily, having already veered the future incoherent. He’s still acutely aware he should be falling, a cliffside sight submerging. What would it take to wake up from this dream? How far can Will take this present before it’s digested back into the ocean?
A wrong move could cull him steps into the old song. The right one could write himself a new one.
(It is obvious—the choices—which ones they are. He’d seen one of the outcomes before, righteous in the wrong way.
The light behind Hannibal painted him a gentle picture, then, brushstrokes soft, intent violent. There were cuts on his face lined diamond; blood dried and browned and sweltering red in the center, gashes of the same design littered all over. Almost in a pattern. Almost a match to his own trophy of wounds. Almost future foretold.
Hannibal Lecter had knelt for Will, that winter, night fading into ink on the snow where his knees lay.
He had made a sight, figure stretched into a prayer, looking back at Will. Expression sly, eyes trying to form a conversation from the snow-stricken ground to the wood floored on the porch where he stood watching.
Will would have called it intimate, only for the lack of blood.)
This is the mistake made in the right way:
A temporary teacup sewn together. An ending they hadn’t allowed themselves to see.
“If I asked you to make true one thing for me forever, Hannibal, would you indulge me?”
The answer is instant. “You need only ask.”
The demand is a long-time coming. “Show me Florence.”
The smile that greets him rips his heart out and gives it back, half-eaten.
The water does not yet dare come.