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"When did you know?" Will asks.
The cooling air is fine; it smells green and alive, sweet summer grass and wild onions. Mischa is sleeping soundly beneath the lazy hum of the ceiling fan in the loft. When he last checked on her, she'd been sprawled, limbs akimbo, her current favorite stuffed animal (a moose named Chester) tucked beneath one exhausted elbow. It had been a good sight. Will has always liked to watch the slow rhythm of her breath, the flutter of her little eyelids. It makes him feel old, but also very young.
"When did I know what?" Hannibal asks. He too, looks sun-brushed and loose-limbed. His hair spills soft across his eyes, the T-shirt borrowed from Will's endless stock strains a little at the shoulders. Will smiles, and decides secretly that the Lake agrees with Hannibal, even if he doesn't agree with it.
Dark eyes find him when he takes too long to answer, and he remembers himself.
"I mean, when did you know that I—” he winces at the way it sounds, finds himself making a hapless gesture, “that we were..."
The fading sunlight flickers across Hannibal's face when he smiles, his eyes crinkling. He too, startles Will with how old he seems at times, how very young at others.
"That we were what?" Hannibal says pleasantly, the thread of teasing ever just beneath the surface. He leans back in the deck chair as gracefully as he can manage in clothes that are two sizes too small. Sweatpants too, agree with him, Will thinks around a smile, watching the lithe legs move within the stretch of dark cotton. He'll have to remember that, come Christmas.
"That you wanted to be with me." Will clarifies, not playing into Hannibal's hand. They are in Will's element now, the land of screened porches and fireflies. Perhaps Hannibal can still draw a blush from him at times—no, strike that, Will knows he can—but not here, with the cicadas humming in the trees, with his only suit hang-drying inside the cabin.
Hannibal looks briefly disappointed, mourning the loss of a chance to make Will stammer and flush, but he straightens, considers. Will lets him. He focuses instead on the sugary rim of his glass, the leaves floating on the amber liquid within. A ritual from home—his first home, rather—and now he shares it. The thought floats warm in his belly, through limbs that are tired from a day spent keeping up with Mischa.
"When I first felt it, and when I knew it for what it was are two different questions." Hannibal says at last, eyes moving in the gloom as though searching a shelf for a favorite book.
"Both," Will challenges, enjoying being the one asking questions.
It takes him briefly, the memory only flickering, to an office in Baltimore, when they had sat not side by side, but across the room from each other.
He lets his free arm fall into the space between their chairs. The back of his knuckles brushes one cotton-clad knee. He's glad for the removed distance. A frown, short. Despite the cost.
But there's little room for thoughts like that in the heady summer air, no one to see his scars but Hannibal, and he doesn't gape the way others do. Just looks sadly, when he thinks Will can't see him.
"I believe," Hannibal begins, a sigh, "that I felt... Something the day you were attacked by Tobias Budge."
"The day you killed Tobias Budge," Will corrects, into his glass. Hannibal's eyes snap to him, wary, but there's no venom in the words.
"Yes."
Will thinks about that day too, they go there together. He thinks of rushing to the office, knowing only that Hannibal had been attacked by someone he, by all rights, should have taken care of. He thinks of fear, and guilt, and then... Relief, sudden and wearying. Their eyes meeting across the room, and he'd seen his own feelings reflected back on Hannibal's features. Threads weaving together.
"It was nothing more than potential, this new thing. It was my realizing it mattered to me what happened to you. The thought that you were..." Hannibal licks his lips, closes his eyes, as if re-living it, "that I had found you, and that just as quickly you were gone... I had not expected to feel so strongly."
Will is almost touched. He smiles, traces patterns with his knuckles until Hannibal's hand closes over his.
"And when you knew?" Will presses, curious now. Hannibal's face softens, a smile spreads.
"I have known many times, each one a revelation all its own. I knew when you threw your first kill across my dining room table, I knew again when I discovered you'd outwitted me, and that Freddie Lounds was still alive."
Will feels a soft noise of apology leave his throat, old and stale wounds though they are. Hannibal dismisses it with a look.
"And again, when I tried to walk away from you, and instead found you in everything I touched."
The sky is just a glow, the trees a dark line against it. Hannibal looks soft and strange in the hazy, cool light, fireflies flickering around them. Will's hand doesn't move within Hannibal's; he waits.
"But the first time?" Hannibal asks, something secret in the quirk of his lip, something hidden he's about to share. Their drinks gather beads of condensation.
"You were sleepwalking. You asked me to come over when you woke, you sounded..."
His eyes close, he tastes the memory. Perhaps the exact tone and timbre of Will's words as they had sounded through the phone years ago.
"Desperate," he decides. "For me; for my presence."
Will does flush now, despite his earlier convictions. He remembers the night—though perhaps not as much of it as Hannibal does. He remembers waking in the yard, his bruised and aching feet a testament to how far he'd gone, his breath a frosty cloud, knives in his chest as cold lungs heaved for oxygen.
He remembers the phone in his hand, gasping something unintelligible before pouring himself a generous glass of whiskey. He'd used a coffee mug, he remembers, because all of the tumblers were in the sink.
"You tried to call back, likely to tell me to forget it, to apologize and let that be that."
Will nods, amusement tugging at his mouth. That had been exactly his intention—once the shaking stopped, and he looked around at the shabby state of his house. At himself. Suddenly, with the cold, dark gaze that haunted his nightmares no longer lurking, it had seemed absurd for a grown man to call another in the middle of the night because—because what? He was afraid to sleep? He'd nearly dropped his phone in his urgency to dial.
"But you didn't answer," he says quietly, finishing the last swig of his julep.
"I was already driving," Hannibal answers, mock-defensive. And Will laughs, as he realizes that's exactly the reason Hannibal gave that night, when he showed up, fully dressed, to find a heartily drunk Will Graham answering the door.
"You had already self-medicated when I arrived," Hannibal goes on, a wry twist to his words. Surely, he is now recalling the slack to Will's motions, the near-spill he'd made as one of the dogs tangled around his already unsteady legs. The apologies, embarrassed, that had spilled from his mouth. I'm sorry, he'd said, completely inappropriate, as Hannibal eased him towards a chair.
Will grimaces at the memory.
"You fell asleep in your living room, while in the middle of a very stimulating lecture on the evils of a particular name-brand dog food."
"That's when you knew?" Will interrupts, unwilling to further rehash what he had gratefully forgotten a majority of by the next morning.
Hannibal looks cooly amused, fingers tracing lazily through the condensation on his glass.
"No."
Will groans, starts to get up, another drink already in mind, but the hand holding his tightens, tugs him back towards his seat. Hannibal's eyes glitter in the dark and Will sits, wary.
"No, though there was once again that tug of connection," Hannibal goes on, pleased, "and even some wonderment as I watched your eyes slide shut, messy, strange creature you were, but it was not until the long, late car ride home that I realized. Because you had asked. In your state, you desired me, before anyone else. And beyond that, the fact that you had asked, was the more remarkable fact that I had gone. Without a second thought, I dressed and resigned myself to an hour drive each way; solely because you were lost, and you asked me to. It was as though I was finally hearing the rest of the melody. And I knew that I was yours."
Hannibal looks to him now, though his features are hard to see in the dusky light they're left with.
"And so I have been."
"And all it took was me getting wildly drunk and trying to kiss you," Will muses, going to drink before he remembers the glass is dry. Hannibal laughs, once, and it sounds genuinely startled.
"I thought you'd forgotten that part."
"I did," Will says, but he's smiling too. "Intentionally. It wasn't my best effort."
The sloppy, desperate press of lips he'd tugged Hannibal into could hardly even be called a kiss. Maybe an assault.
"I suppose not," Hannibal chuckles beside him, and he gets a glare in return. It only widens his smile. "Lucky you have had ample time to leave me with a better impression."
Will laughs, despite himself. He sighs then, tries to save this moment among all the others that have come and gone. Another small revelation. The sky has grown dark, but he doesn't move to turn the porch light on. They sit together beneath the strange silver wash of the stars, the two of them side by side in the dark.