Chapter Text
Will woke up in the stars.
They were in him and around him, brighter and clearer than they had ever been; he could reach up and pluck one right out of the sky, he knew. Attempted to, even, but was deterred by a pain in his shoulder so intense he nearly blacked out again.
“Don’t move your arm,” a voice said from somewhere near him, the sound sending a sharp pain to his head. The words moved through his mind slow and thick like syrup.
His focus shifted from the field of stars to the clouds forming and disappearing just above him. He watched the clouds for a long time, fascinated, before he realized he was the one making them. Cold. He was cold. “Cold,” he whispered, and then came the pain.
He noticed his cheek first; speaking had drawn attention to the white-hot sting that was so overwhelming it made bile rise to his throat. The intensity was brief, however, and once it settled he noticed everything else. His shoulder throbbed, his throat burned. His head ached so terribly that he could feel his heartbeat in his temples, and it made coherent thought impossible. He wanted to scream. He wanted the stars to take him far away from here.
He must have blacked out again, because when he next opened his eyes, he was wrapped in a blanket and the stars were replaced by the muted orange of sunrise. He winced against the brightness, but noticed that the pain had considerably lessened overall. The fog in his mind remained, however, and everything seemed to move in slow motion as he forced himself into a sitting position with his good arm.
“Water,” he said, his voice hoarse. He hadn’t quite gauged his surroundings, but he felt a presence near him, and knew someone was listening.
“Beside you,” the voice from before said, and now Will recognized it. “Be careful of your stitches.”
He obeyed, resisting the urge to chug the entire bottle in one go. The pain in his cheek was muted, now, so much so that he knew drugs must be involved. He wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve and looked around.
He was sprawled out on the bench seat of a cabin cruiser, bobbing along in what he had to assume was the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Kneeling in front of the bench seat across from him was the person who had been speaking; a face he hadn’t seen in over three years, but was decidedly unsurprised to see nonetheless.
“Chiyoh,” he said, his voice weak. Tried to say more, but forming words suddenly seemed impossible.
“You hit your head,” she said, answering the question he didn’t ask. She was focused on something, but Will struggled to process what it was. “It is likely that you have a concussion. Don’t move too quickly and try to stay awake.”
Will just nodded, looking out over the ocean. It was a beautiful morning.
They sat like that in silence for what felt like minutes but might have been hours, Chiyoh working fervently while Will drifted in his head trauma- and drug-induced haze. He was only pulled back to reality when she spoke again, her voice cutting sharply through the dewy morning.
“Can you walk?” she asked. Will blinked slowly, before throwing his legs over the side of the bench and rising unsteadily. She briefly glanced at him over her shoulder and nodded in approval. “There’s a cooler in the cabin, grab the ice packs out of it.”
Will complied, pulling himself toward the interior section of the boat and opening the large blue cooler tucked in by the door. Inside, along with the ice packs, there was a wide array of perishable foods and beverages. Will wondered how long Chiyoh expected them to be out at sea. The thought made his head throb, so he stopped wondering.
He brought what she’d requested back out onto the deck, approaching Chiyoh and catching a glimpse of what she was working on for the first time. Or who, rather.
“Put one on his forehead and one on the side of his neck,” she demanded, sweat dripping down her temple as she leaned over the wound on his abdomen. “His fever is too high.”
Will kneeled near her, placing the ice packs carefully where she’d indicated and watching blankly as Chiyoh continued to work. He allowed his eyes to drift over the other man’s body, all the way up to his face, where his eyes were moving rapidly behind closed lids and breaths came short through dry, cracked lips.
I did this, Will thought, the first modicum of awareness his brain had afforded him since he’d regained consciousness.
For lack of anything better to do, Will laid his head on Hannibal’s chest and listened to his still-beating heart. They had been in the same position not long ago, on the edge of that cliff. Will tried very hard to remember what he had been thinking then. He kept trying all the way until Chiyoh stood up, swiping an arm across her forehead and leaning against the cabin door in exhaustion.
Will lifted his head again to look at Hannibal’s face. His eyes were no longer moving, his strain no longer apparent. He was very pale and very still.
“Can you save him?” Will asked, and he was startled into clarity by his own words. His head throbbed as the situation truly dawned on him for the first time, as he realized with no small amount of dread that the answer could be no.
Chiyoh gave him a long look, her expression carefully unreadable. “I’m not so sure,” she said distantly.
“What does that mean?” Will snapped, suddenly feeling everything at once. It was incredibly difficult to think, like trying to walk in a straight line drunk, and his baser instincts urged him to stop thinking all together and let the waves lull him back to sleep. But a stronger part of him, a part so desperate that it ached, needed to see Hannibal open his eyes. Needed the man he’d just tried to kill to live.
Chiyoh narrowed her eyes and looked away from him. “He will survive this,” she said. “But the two of you will not survive each other.”
The statement was easy enough to swallow, because he’d already done so, covered in blood and moonlight at the edge of a cliff hours or days or lifetimes ago. But only then, because every moment before that he’d still been arrogantly convinced that they were playing a game that could be lost or won.
He was quiet for several long moments, watching Hannibal, overwhelmed with a feeling he refused to put a name to. “This is cancer,” he finally said, quietly, as if speaking mostly to himself. “Almost impossible to cut it out completely when it’s already spread so far. You can try, go years thinking you’ve beaten it, and then before you know it it’s back and killing you all over again.”
Chiyoh took a moment to consider the words. “Yet the cancer will never win either,” she said. “Cancer and its host die together, at the same time. It’s always a draw.”
“Mutual assured destruction,” Will agreed.
Chiyoh sighed, fixing him with a hardened stare, and Will could feel every inch of resentment she had for him. “You had resigned yourself to that destruction, and yet you are both still here,” she said. “So now you are faced with a choice you did not think you would have to make.”
Will huffed a short laugh. He didn’t have a great track record of premeditation, regardless. “Not much of a choice,” he said. “The remission failed. Now all we can do is make the most of our time before the inevitable.”
“Or,” Chiyoh countered. “We try to cut the cancer out again.”
There was a long, heavy pause. Will weighed the words carefully in his mind, his stomach twisting in knots as he slowly but surely understood.
He let his gaze fall back on Hannibal’s sleeping face. “So only the cancer dies,” he said, soft and raw.
Chiyoh nodded. “Yes. Although,” she said. “I think that you and I might have different ideas of who the cancer is.”
Will brought a hand up to rest gently on Hannibal’s stomach, tracing the bandages with the pads of his fingers. He let his eyes move over his prison-cut hair, and his thin frame, and the fresh cuts and bruises on his face. He thought of the man he’d met all those years ago in Jack Crawford’s office, and tried to amalgamate him with the man lying before him now.
He laid his head on Hannibal’s chest once more, trying to memorize his heartbeat like the notes of a song. “Actually, I think for once we might agree,” he said, and he closed his eyes.
—
Hannibal woke up in the sea.
He could feel the gentle rocking of the current, could smell the salt and feel the spray on his skin. The water muffled all sound, leaving him in a still, quiet solitude as he floated toward the light of the surface.
He broke through, and all at once the ocean fell away like a dream. His vision and hearing slowly came into focus, and the salt he’d smelled strayed from the brine of the ocean and inclined toward blood and IV fluid. He was indoors, that much was clear, and injured. He shifted a bit to test his limitations, hissing through his teeth as he felt a deep ache throughout almost his entire body. Very injured, then.
“Don’t move,” a familiar voice came from near him, though not the one he’d wanted to hear. “You have a broken collarbone, a sprained wrist, a gunshot wound that has become infected, and a fever that has been running off and on for three days.”
Hannibal let out a deep breath through his nose. “On, now, if I had to guess,” he said, closing his eyes against the spinning room. “Sepsis?”
“It did not get to that point, no. You are on antibiotics, the infection should clear,” Chiyoh said clinically, and he listened as she fiddled with his IV drip, perhaps to administer something. He hoped it was morphine. “It is fortunate that you have stocked this house well with medical supplies.”
He knew where they were without asking; he had a house in a remote area near the coast of Rhode Island where Chiyoh had, as far as he was aware, been staying for the past three years. It was far from untraceable and wouldn’t be safe for long, but it would do for the time being. That was currently the least of his concerns.
“Where is Will?” he asked, impatiently shifting the conversation to his true priority.
There was no reply. Hannibal opened his eyes slowly, ignoring the disorientation brought on by his fever, and turned to meet Chiyoh’s eyes. “Where is Will?” he repeated, hoping that his tone was firm enough to make it clear that avoiding the question again was not an option.
She held his eyes firmly, and not for the first time, he admired the nerve she possessed to hold her own against him as much as he deplored it. “He’s dead,” she said.
Hannibal closed his eyes again. “That was not what I asked,” he said calmly.
“He is in the Atlantic Ocean,” she said without missing a beat. “Where I left him.”
“Why.”
He could feel her looking down her nose at him without even opening his eyes, and he briefly wondered how badly he would regret killing her now. As if he possibly could, anyway, in his current condition. It seemed broken collarbones served as effective impulse control.
“So you wouldn’t eat him,” she said, raising her voice only slightly to emphasize her conviction. Just as she had the last time they’d disagreed. “Like Mischa.”
Hannibal was defiantly silent in response, compelling his mind to take him far away from this room, from this moment. The method wasn’t as effective as it had always been in the past. For reasons he couldn’t comprehend, his mind palace suddenly seemed unreachable to him.
Chiyoh, limitless in her audacity, carried on. “When I pulled the two of you from the ocean, he was already dead,” she explained. “And I made the decision, in that moment, to leave him where he’d chosen to die. To let him be at peace.”
Hannibal felt his composure crack for a fraction of a second, just long enough for his eyebrow to twitch in the beginnings of a scowl. He breathed in deeply and the moment passed.
“And my peace?” he asked, petulant.
He felt her hand lie gently on his arm, and just like that, the tension dissipated from the air. Hannibal wished it would come back. He wanted to be angry. Anger was much preferred to whatever was currently storming inside of him.
“You will have to find it elsewhere,” she said.