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When they first get the house they cycle through a few different names for it. Mainly all jokes made by Will or Abigail — they’re not really planning on naming the thing, and anyways Graham-Lecter or Graham-Lecter-Hobbs are both kind of mouthfuls. Silly ones, at that. Abigail likes House on Avenue Chêne better anyways; it sounds nicer, like a polished sort of place where a well-mannered family would live. In that world Abigail’s the mild, kind-hearted daughter of a normal straight couple with fancy clothing and an overabundance of suits. In this world it’s only the suits, and even now Hannibal wears far less of them, preferring to stay on the down-low. It’s particularly odd to see him constantly in sweaters.
Will, of course, looks the same as always. His hair is a mess he keeps forgetting to brush (not that Abigail can speak any better of hers). He wears flannel and old jackets and looks utterly out of place in every room he enters. Sometimes when all the lights are off, he’ll walk downstairs in a worn t-shirt, his edges softened by only the glow cast through the windows, and Abigail will look at him then and wonder if he’s really the same man people back home were afraid of.
She knows he is. It isn’t hard to guess.
Will has taken to ruffling her hair when he passes her; whenever he enters a room with her in it or exits one, before bed and when she gets up in the morning. He’s hugged her before, of course, but there’s something about this that feels different. It’s the casualness of it all that gets to her. The first time he did it, she had to take a moment to be quite sure she wouldn’t say anything stupid. Like, huh, that really felt like family. Should it have?
Abigail used to be the last to wake. Lately, though, she’s always the second; Hannibal gets up at god-awful hours she doesn’t really care to try and beat, but Will sleeps in more days than not. When she comes downstairs Hannibal usually greets her and makes tea for her, and it’s the closest they ever get to standard father-daughter bonding. Everything with Hannibal is… weird. Muddled. That’s the simplest way Abigail can describe it. She’s still getting used to it all.
Once, she asks him, “Would you have killed me?” It’s over morning tea, sure enough — chamomile and lavender. Hannibal barely glances away from his mug.
When he does he’s got this… look, in his eyes. This strange, sentimental sort of thing that fits better than she might have thought it did. “What makes you ask that?”
Abigail shrugs. She’s been having nightmares. “Don’t know. I just thought— That woman, Alana Bloom. You loved her. I still pushed her out a window.” Would you have done the same to me?
She watches Hannibal read between the lines, the darkness of his eyes scanning over her face carefully, gently. “Whether or not I loved her is practically irrelevant,” he says, which— is not entirely correct, Abigail decides independently. “She was a colleague. You, Abigail, are most certainly not my colleague; and neither is Will. I could never have hurt you in quite the same way.”
Painfully vague as always. “So, you would have? Or wouldn’t have.”
“Abigail,” Hannibal returns like it’s an answer, “I didn’t. Is that not enough for you?”
She removes the spoon from her mug and it drips, three times, onto the dark wood of the coffee table. In the morning light that drifts through the windows, there’s a stark chiaroscuro between the sun glinting off of the porcelain, and the unmoving shadows. “Well. Clearly not.”
Hannibal’s eyebrows crease into almost a frown. He is still learning to accept that she talks back, and pushes for answers, and is allowed to. More than ever she is allowed to. Hannibal pretends it doesn’t grate him, but it does.
Abigail takes a deep, velvety complacency in it. She quite enjoys their equal footing.
Before either of them can speak further, Will walks into the kitchen, the wooden floorboards creaking to announce his arrival. He’s about an hour earlier than usual. Both Abigail and Hannibal look up as he makes his arrival.
He glances over them both, his face overcast and tired, and does not say anything before heading for the fridge. His fingers trace bleary lines over his eyes to try and clear them of sleep. Will is a bit of a mess in the mornings, often miserable and usually incoherent. Why he decided to join them today is beyond Abigail.
But if there was any tension between her and Hannibal, something uncomfortable and sharp building and pressing at the floodgates, it’s now gone, and in its place is a shared entertainment. Will, with all his sullenness, brings them both together; Abigail’s mouth twitches in a smile.
“Will,” she says, watching as he turns his head to look back at her. He’s at the kitchen counter, buttering a piece of rye bread. He hasn’t shaved in a while, according to the stubble lining his face.
“What,” he says, not bothering to sound polite.
“Good morning.”
“Oh.” He blinks at her, the spot right below her eyes. “Yes. Good morning.”
“Rye toast?” she asks with a grin. Trust Will to go for anything except leftovers the day after Hannibal prepared dinner. Honestly, she can’t really blame him.
“Is… there a problem?”
“Nothing,” Abigail replies, raising her eyebrows. “Just… thought it was funny.”
Abigail catches Hannibal’s eye and sees that he looks privately amused, rather taken by this morning dynamic the two of them have settled into. Any offense he might have had at Will’s taste in breakfast is unapparent.
“Good morning, Will,” he says without looking over at him; he is still apparently occupied with the remaining tea in his cup. At this point, Will has gone back to buttering and only makes a general noise of assent.
Abigail takes her now-empty mug and leaves it in the kitchen sink, not bothering him as she passes him. And still — despite his circumstances — Will reaches out in a sore attempt to ruffle her hair. He fails and hits her shoulder, but the sentiment remains; Abigail cannot help her smile.
Her hair is shorter lately, just below shoulder-length and far easier to manage; she cut it herself. She’s still glad Will missed it, though, especially in its bed-head state. As she passes Hannibal he reaches out and pats her shoulder as well, his hand firm and expression clearer than before. It’s funny — she doesn’t think he saw Will do the same. Between the three of them there’s always some sort of coincidence.
-
As far as Hannibal and Will go, Abigail has to think very intently to try and understand them.
Separately they’re easy enough — she has seen so much of the both of them that she knows their every projection and ideal. But the two of them alone in a room together is something she can’t witness nor wrap her head around. The most she can ever do is catch glimpses around a corner.
It’s confusing. She’s sure they aren’t soft with each other, but there’s a certainty in the way Hannibal looks at Will that could hardly fall under any other category. Abigail does her best to interpret it right but she isn’t sure, ever; not when for each moment they appear to be getting closer, Will leaves the house not twenty four hours later for what she can only assume is… fresh air.
(Abigail tries to ask Hannibal about it, and yet discussing Will with him gets her no clear answers. Most of the time they end up talking about other things. She can’t say she ever minds the conversation.)
Will always comes back, though, and there’s something dark in his eyes but along with it comes an unspoken resolution. On those nights, Hannibal is quieter than usual. He pushes, though, gently; he hovers at Will’s back and presses his hands to Will’s shoulders, to his arms. Sometimes Will leans into it. Sometimes he just goes quiet and slightly flushed and doesn’t say anything.
One time it’s midnight and none of them can sleep, so they’re all sitting in the living room, Will and Hannibal on one couch and Abigail perched on the seat of the armchair opposite them. After an hour, Will succumbs first; his head rests partially on Hannibal’s thigh, his eyes shut. It’s the most vulnerable Abigail has seen him in months. She supposes the realm of sleep does that to people.
She says to Hannibal, “Sometimes I think he’s scared of you.”
Hannibal gives her a knowing look and shakes his head. “I believe you’re both past that phase.”
“I wasn’t talking about me.”
“Weren’t you?”
Abigail sighs. “Why would he leave all the time if he wasn’t scared of having this? A family, or, I don’t know, something close to love. Why would he do that?”
“You should ask him,” Hannibal tells her, and he threads a hand through Will’s hair. With the other hand he beckons her over, and she moves to the last available spot on the sofa they’re sitting, pressing herself halfway into Hannibal’s shoulder in a sort of embrace. It’s warm.
“I think,” she says quietly, “we’ve all lost a family of some kind. This is a fucked-up way of fixing that problem.”
“Most of our solutions are beyond the point of regular logic,” Hannibal says, with a slight smile. “Sometimes the only option is to be… fucked up.” Then, “I hope you’ll forgive my language.”
She’s never heard him swear, it occurs to her. Almost funny that it’s now.
Abigail looks down at Will, whose face is cupped gently in Hannibal’s hand. Almost funny.
There’s more she should say. Or could say, but doesn’t. “Yeah. Sometimes.”
-
Living with Hannibal and Will is not quite like living with a family. She always realizes this after a while of forgetting it — both of them are not who they once presented themselves to be, and Abigail herself never escaped her hunter roots. With a normal family and a bit of therapy, things might have fixed themselves for her. She might have stopped having dreams about killing or bleeding or other things she can’t wash off of herself.
With them, though, that was never a possibility.
Abigail loves them, obviously. She loves them how the wound loves the knife and the saltwater loves the cliff, aching against it until it gently crumbles away, because they're all she has. There was Marissa, and Alana, and that reporter— Freddie, her name had been— but Marissa is gone now and everyone else is fleeting like rabbits. And she supposes she is fleeting, too; leaving everything behind her. Not a rabbit, though. There are no rabbits in the house on Avenue Chêne, and no bushes to hide in either.
It takes another nightmare for her to realize this. Tonight’s is not as bad as it could have been, or she’s getting used to it, or something; but the long, thick shadows of her bedroom still unnerve her. Usually waking up means she’s dead in her dream. She’s not surprised.
She glances for bushes and finds none; instead the walls and ceiling blur into focus. More surprisingly, Will’s silhouette interrupts the shapes of her desk and chair. Maybe she’s been talking in her sleep again, or maybe he just came to see her.
“Will,” she says after a while of lying there, steadying her breathing.
He glances over at her. “You’re awake.”
“Yeah, since five minutes ago. What are you doing here?”
“You were making a lot of noise.” Will shifts in the dark. “I came in quietly. Tried not to wake you.”
“Why are you awake? Isn’t it late?”
“Twelve-thirty,” he says without looking around for a clock. “At least, it was the last time I checked. I couldn’t sleep.”
She figures it out pretty quickly. “Do you still have nightmares?”
“Most nights,” Will admits without hesitation. “Not quite as much as I used to.”
Abigail wears her lip between her teeth. She keeps the fan on in her room at night, preferring to sleep in the cold, and now is sorely regretting it thanks to the goosebumps rising on her arms.
“Are yours getting worse?” Will asks and she realizes she hasn’t replied. She reaches out and feels for him, unsurprised when her fingers brush the fold of coarse fabric.
“No,” she lies. “But… I still have them. I heard, thinking about bad things before you go to bed makes them happen. It’s just hard not to.”
Will makes a small, derisive noise. “‘Course it’s hard not to. Nobody with a nightmare problem could ever fix it by just turning them off.”
What are yours about? Abigail could say here, has said before. "No, they couldn’t," she decides on instead. Her hand is on Will's shoulder, and his hand is on her hand, warm and always sweaty. She can’t think of anything to say, but talking is so much easier than going back to sleep.
Will is silent. Sleeping is easier than most things for him. Abigail says, "What do you dream about, on the other nights?"
She feels Will move and vanish under her hand. A creak at the end of her bed indicates he has taken a seat there, probably staring off into the endlessness of her bedroom walls. "My nightmare-free nights?"
"Yes. Those."
He takes a minute to think about it. "I'm usually on a boat."
"A big one?"
"Big enough to sleep in. It has a lower deck you can walk down to, and huge white sails. When it's windy, all you can hear is them flapping. And the ocean." Abigail has to strain to hear him, but he doesn’t seem to notice the drop in his own voice. "In my dream, it's nighttime. I can look out at the world around me, and only see sky and water. Sometimes a few stars."
"You feel safe there," Abigail fills in, yawning. In the night, floating somewhere between her bedsheets and her body, she thinks she can conjure up her own ocean. Underneath her bed it will crash and rock her to sleep, like a big salty hammock.
"Sometimes," Will says softly, "it's the only place I think I'll ever be safe."
"Better not go there then," she replies, her voice lilting with a gentle tease that gets lost somewhere in her throat.
Will knows what she means. If he sails away from himself and he is wrong about everything, there will be not one place in the world comforting enough to hold him in its arms. "I'm not," he answers. "I doubt I'd be able to. You and Hannibal would make sure of that."
Abigail laughs and rolls over onto her side, her fingers curling into her shirt. "I'd let you go."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. I have to go to college someday anyways."
"Of course," Will muses, as if he's forgotten.
Abigail is not surprised. She'd forgotten, too. She adds, "Hannibal wouldn’t. Not so easily. Which means I would have to play along, I think. But I'd pretend not to know anything if you snuck out."
Will lets out a breath that sounds amused. "I don't want to leave him. You make it sound like I'm running."
"You are running," Abigail murmurs. Then, "Spectating your relationship is hard. I can never tell how close you are to each other. What wavelength you're on."
"I know." He sighs, and his voice sounds roughened, eroded. "It's not important. It's not supposed to be."
"He loves you," she says and it's not quite a question but it isn't not one.
Will is very still and very quiet. It’s as if he’s trying not to be found, an animal in the underbrush, twitching. Abigail wonders how deep his claws are digging into her sheets.
When he eventually continues, it’s, “He loves you, too.” Not I know or yes, and I love him or for Hannibal, love is the shallow twist of a knife. Abigail rolls over onto her back again and starts counting square inches of ceiling.
“Does he?” she asks. Sometimes she wants the parts of Hannibal that Will gets — not all of it, but the confidence he has with him. How he could dig a blade into Will’s gut without ever wanting to kill him. A fucked up kind of jealousy. If only.
“Yes,” Will says without a shred of doubt in his voice. “I think you underestimate how he feels about both of us.”
“He kept me in his house for months,” she says wryly. It’s not something she’s bothered by anymore; he wasn’t cruel to her, not really. But the facts of the situation remain, and sometimes she wonders if she’s still trapped in the role of the prey. The bravest survivors were all scared of something, once.
Will pauses. “For Hannibal, love isn’t always good,” he concedes.
“And for you?”
He takes a minute to think about this, and then says, “I don’t know. I guess… I never really thought about it.”
-
Sometimes, when Hannibal and Will think she’s asleep, Abigail hears their voices in the upstairs hallway. It’s funny how much they remind her of her own parents in that moment, hushed, probably talking about her because they suspect she can’t hear them. When she feels like it, she sits on the other side of the door and listens. She thinks she has the right.
Tonight Will is saying something about confinement. He’s got this fear of turning into her father, of never letting her fly the way she was supposed to. Typical of him; it’s nothing she didn’t know.
“When you first took on Abigail as your own, Will,” Hannibal is saying, “you were only trying to rebuild the parts she was missing.” He says something else but she misses it.
The bitter edge of Will’s voice is cutting when he returns, “Can’t always do that.” And he’s right. For all the times Abigail has been referred to as somebody else’s, she never gave herself away to any of them. Her problems are her own. So is every other part of her.
She opens the door slowly, and the light from the upstairs landing trickles into her bedroom. Will hears it first — he’s always been particularly receptive to sound — and turns. “Abigail,” he starts, between guilty and resigned. His eyes, tonight, are unsettled.
“Hi,” she says unfalteringly. “I think I’m going to go on a walk.”
She doesn’t wait for an answer before slipping past them and down the narrow staircase. Both of their eyes follow her as she leaves.
It’s summer, and although it’s late enough to be dark, there’s a muggy warmth to the night air that makes itself familiar as Abigail shuts the door behind her. Here, she can turn ninety degrees at the corner of the garden wall and run her fingers along every brick. This sort of freedom has not been granted to her in a very long time; the freedom to run and not be followed.
Abigail hums as she walks, and her feet — bare, dampening with the dewy grass — make small, cushioned sounds with every step. It's nice out here. Quiet. Without so many eyes on her, she almost feels her own again.
Maybe the only things Abigail belongs to are these: the night, the stars, and herself. After everything, after the silence, there’s got to be a constellation up there for her somewhere.