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Some kind of relaxed and beautiful thing
kept flickering in with the tide
and looking around.
Black as a fisherman’s boot,
with a white belly.
Somehow, despite everything, they live.
It’s all entirely thanks to Chiyoh, who managed to drag them, half dead and beaten by the bloody pounding of waves against rocks, onto the solid wood of a small fishing vessel.
Will doesn’t remember most of it honestly, just vague shapes and sounds. He knows that Chiyoh swore at him, that it took seven minutes to revive Hannibal the first time, and four the second time, that the burning, sharp pain of his wounds ebbed when Chiyoh had scooped sand and salt out of them and dressed them accordingly. That when things had settled she’d gotten close enough to his ear to tell him that Hannibal’s not going to die. He remembers the drop and reshape of his stomach when she’d said it. The glances he spared at Hannibal’s dripping wet, heavily bandaged form lying unmoving in the small, cramped bedroom she herded them into.
She dosed them both heavily with drugs that first week too. Will knows that for sure because he slept for the first time in months without a single dream.
When he did wake, which was always for brief, pain-filled meals, he’d spent it looking at Hannibal. Memorizing the tufts of his grayed hair that stuck out haphazardly beneath the bandages Chiyoh diligently changed every six-or-so hours. Mostly, though, he remembers clutching at his hand, feeling the warmth of his palm and squeezing tight before Chiyoh would put him back under.
They spend weeks like that; injured and in international waters. They’re headed to Cuba, Chiyoh tells him, but it’s a slow process, one that’ll go infinitely better if Hannibal is awake when they arrive.
Eventually Will stops needing to be drugged, and Chiyoh puts him to work.
He still can’t do much, he broke three ribs in the fall despite Hannibal taking the brunt of it. His shoulder is endlessly fucked up, thanks to the Tooth Fairy’s careful knife. It had already been bad- unlucky, Molly called it, seeing as it had previously been subject to another stabbing and Chiyoh’s bullet beforehand, which leaves it clicky and uncomfortable. His face aches too, he can’t really open his jaw much without the threat of popping stitches. It leaves his short conversations with Chiyoh whispered and lisped, which seems to amuse her terribly.
Still, he cares for Hannibal. She puts him in charge of changing the bandages covering his stomach wound twice a day and dripping water into his mouth to keep it moist. He’s not allowed to touch or change out his IV bags or manage his medication though, which irks him more than it should.
“If I was going to kill him I would’ve done it by now.” He tells her, sitting against the edge of his and Hannibal’s shared bed, watching as she hooks and unhooks a saline solution, filling a syringe with god-only-knows-what and adding it to the bag she hangs in the old one's place.
“I know.” She tells him.
“Why won’t you let me do this, then?”
She looks at him then, all stone-cold, dark eyes. For a brief moment, he can see how he would look lined up in the crosshairs of her scope. “Why did you throw him off a cliff?”
He bites the side of his cheek hard enough that it stings, and debates chewing until she’ll have to re-stitch the wound. Instead, he finds himself telling her: “He told me that he loves me.”
Chiyoh laughs, more of a sharp exhalation than sound, and leaves the cabin without another word.
Hannibal doesn’t wake before they reach Cuba.
Supposedly, it’s alright-at least that’s what Chiyoh tells him with tight-drawn brows. “It’s more time to heal,” she says.
And it’s true, his stomach wound is healing nicely at least; a puckered, pink-brown target just above his belly button, held together with a row of tight, neat stitches. His right leg shattered in the fall, though it hadn’t troubled her when she’d set it tightly between two pieces of pressed wood board. Now, she touches the edge of his shin, feeling for the fracture line, “He won’t want to sit still when he wakes.”
Will swallows and nods. When.
They settle in a stupidly nice villa on the coast. It’s big and well-stocked when they arrived, all terracotta floors and bright, high ceilings. It’s a stark contrast to the dark, gothic tones of Hannibal’s Baltimore home, even more so of the now empty, loved cabin he’d been living in. The kitchen is massive, all yellow and red with stainless steel appliances wall-to-wall. It makes Will’s gut ache with the phantom feeling of Hannibal’s knife.
Chiyoh puts him and Hannibal in a bedroom on the main floor. It’s well-equipped; two twin beds with soft, fresh mattresses take up most of one wall, with a heavily-stocked medicine cabinet and stainless steel sink opposite them. There’s a dresser full of fresh, needlessly expensive loungewear on the third wall, with a wide, round mirror hung above it. He has to stop himself from staring at his reflection when she leads him in there, from looking too hard at the bandage on his cheek, the wild, worn look of his unshaven face, the hollowness of his eyes.
“There’s a bathroom over there,” Chiyoh says, half-watching him while she settles a clean cotton sheet over Hannibal’s lower half. She points to a small door on the same wall as the dresser, “You can manage a shower.”
He looks at her and smiles.
Sleep evades him in Cuba.
Without the slippery-softness of drugs, Will finds himself tossing and turning-fighting something entangled in his sheets. He gets two, three-hour-long sprints at most, drowning in nightmares no different than the ones that have plagued him since Molly and Walter’s death.
There’s a change to them though, something abstract and angry that sticks and pokes against his insides: Molly kills him. She kills all of them, really, everyone he’s cared for. Everyone he’s loved.
It’s different every night; an ever-morphing shape of pain and anger. Sometimes it’s near the creek where he’d thrown their rings, other nights it’s the dusted, empty shell of his old home in Wolftrap, the kitchen where Hannibal gutted him.
Those ones are always the worst; the ones that happen in Hannibal’s home. They edge on eerie in their vividness, creep up against his neck with cold, lingering breath.
He can feel it happening before the dream around him begins to take form, shifting from clouded and round to solid in a split second. Will is no longer alone.
Because suddenly he’s sitting in the living room of Hannibal’s Baltimore home, all warm and clean-a crackling fire warming the plush, deep rugs that line the room. The leather of the sofa is the same deep brownish-black it had been the first time he’d sat on it, the first time he’d felt at home in Hannibal’s belly.
He is sitting in the living room of Hannibal’s home and Molly sits across from him.
She looks good, warm and bright and uninjured. Her cheeks are flush from the heat, pinky and crinkled with so, so much love. She’s wearing her favorite comfy clothes; a stolen band shirt that Will had forfeited about a week into living together and a pair of old, used leggings. Her hair is loose, hanging on her shoulders gold as the day they met.
“Will,” she greets, and she smiles.
It sends grief plunging through him. It’s all wide and comfortable, toothy in a way she’d only ever shown him. The same smile she’d given him when he’d met Walter, when they’d adopted their first dog together, when they’d married quiet and content in some Virginian town hall.
“Molly.” He says, “God.”
She adjusts in Hannibal’s chair, tucks her legs underneath her the way she used to when her feet were cold and Will had been too overwhelmed to let her tuck them against his side. “Yeah.”
“I’m sorry,” he says, because there’s nothing else to say, “I’m so sorry, Molly.”
She smiles, “I know.”
“I didn’t-I shouldn’t have. I should have stayed.” he bites his tongue hard enough that he can feel the coppery slip of blood in his mouth.
“What’s done is done,” she gestures to his cheek, “you know that better than anyone else.”
He laughs, quiet and huffed, “I didn’t think we’d live, honestly.”
“You hoped.”
“I did.”
Molly looks at him, pins him with her gaze like a bug. The unease in his spine groans and curls, presses itself up to his shoulders.
“You were a good man, Will.” she tells him, “You were good to me and Wally.”
“I’ve never been good, I think.” He can feel his jaw creak as he says it, “I’ve had the chance to do good-to be good, but it’s never. I don’t. Every chance I’ve had, I’ve missed.”
“I died thinking you were a good man.” She blinks and adjusts her hands.
“You died alone and afraid in our driveway. I’m not good.”
“I believe you used to be.”
“I think I was too. I choose to believe that, at least. Seems like I’m choosing to believe a lot of things lately. I believe that I loved you, I believed that we could be happy, that I could put that goodness in a box and keep it for a while.”
Molly laughs, “Will Graham: King of compartmentalization.”
He lets himself get lost in the curve of her smile for a moment. Some selfish, angry thing stabs in the back of his brain, demanding more. More of her, of the things he misses, of the things he’d change.
Instead, he asks her; “Did you love me?”
She makes a face, “Christ, Will, I am a figment of your imagination.”
“Maybe I’m looking for implicit bias.”
She rises then, crossing the room in short, shuffled steps, the way she’d walk about at night when they’d put Walter to sleep and didn’t want to wake him up, and sits next to him. Her warmth is so encompassing that the moment she slips down into the cushion next to him, Will has to stop himself from pressing into her. “Did you love me?”
“I did,” he promises, “I did. Entirely.”
She tilts her head, “Not entirely, but enough.”
The warm press of her palm against his cheek is startling; skin against skin in a way his bones have ached for since the fall. Something non-medical, something loving.
“Enough?” he repeats.
She brushes her thumb along the ridge of his cheekbone, “Enough.”
Some part of him will always ache for this, he knows. For the light of a match in the dark, deep belly of Hannibal’s affection. For the way she’d loved him and the way he’d loved back; the way a dog chained to the fence presses against his collar, the way a starving farmer loves his last suckling pig.
“I loved you,” she tells him.
Then, more decidedly; “He loves you.”
And then she stabs him in the gut.
Will wakes up crying.
They’re soft, gentle tears, nothing like the screaming, wracking things he’d had before the fall. It’s almost kinder, in a way. Like he’s mourning something he can’t quite place instead of the wreckage of the life he’d known.
He does his best to wipe them as they fall, pressing the edge of his palm against his eyelids just on the edge of too rough. It’s grounding, he tells himself. Really, it doesn’t help anymore.
He can’t be bothered to turn on a light-the room’s better dark anyway, when he can pretend he’s not sleeping in a home that Hannibal purchased. The darkness around him only calms him more, because there’s nothing to see. There’s nothing that sends clamoring, wailing thoughts splintering through his head, just darkness. Just emptiness.
He sniffs, breathing quietly into the open, cool night air when he hears it; quiet, rough murmuring.
For a moment, he thinks he’s hearing things again, and his blood surges with the fear that his encephalitis might be flaring. But the murmurs aren’t like that-there’s no violence to them, they’re strange and uncommon, a creaked, stilted, unfamiliar sound.
Then, Hannibal shifts almost imperceptibly in his bed, and he finds himself screaming for Chiyoh.
She appears moments later in a matching pajama set and flips on the light, brow pressed in concern.
“He’s awake.” He tells her, “I heard him.”
The murmuring pitches then, louder than it had been. The tone is garbled, wrapped in syllables and inflections that round them. “Prašom.” He says, voice cracking around the word.
Chiyoh’s expression shifts with it, ridges softening as she pads to Hannibal’s bedside. “Atsiprašau.” She tells him, pressing three firm fingers to his forehead and frowning.
“It’s a fever.” She observes, dark eyes flitting to Will. “He’s fighting infection.”
“That’s not-” Will stutters, “It’s not English.”
“It’s Lithuanian. I don’t think he’s conscious enough to pick a language. If he was, he wouldn’t choose this one.”
The unease in his spine returns, “What’s he saying?”
“Please. ”
Hannibal sleeps.
And in his sleep, he speaks.
He’s not really conscious for it, just enough that rough, whispered sentences wind their way from his lips. All the while fever burns through him like a wildfire.
Chiyoh instructs Will on how to take care of him-she’s gone most of the time now, leaving for stretches of time that melt and strengthen like hot taffy. Despite his protests she still does the bulk of the medical side of Hannibal’s care with a terrifying sort of calm efficiency, leaving him to play nursemaid with tight, untrusting glances. Though truthfully, he listens to her instruction the best he can; working through the dull, constant ache in his shoulder and side to insure that Hannibal’s bandages are cleaned and his bedpan emptied. Mostly, though, he sits and keeps him company.
There’s not much to do, despite the plethora of instruments and knowledge at his beck and call in the big, wide grayness of their new home. So, he sits and watches.
He’d tried, originally, to find a Lithuanian dictionary in the large library that stretches through the large, open living room, all cataloged and in pristine condition the way Hannibal’s things have always been. He hadn’t found one though, and he’d been met with a no from Chiyoh that left no room to bargain when he’d asked if she’d be able to pick one up on her trips into town-or, well, wherever she fucks off to for most of the day.
Still, he sits.
Hannibal starts sweating through the sheets on the second day; overheating until his skin is pink and angry with fever. Until Will find himself wiping down his unbandaged skin with cool water. It soaks his hair, wetting down mousey-brownish-gray until sticks to his forehead.
Bile sticks to his throat when he runs fingers through it, fingertips pressing against the heat of Hannibal’s forehead the way he’d held Will in the quiet of his home before he’d been framed and everything between them had gone stale.
Beautiful. He’d called it then. Will’s mouth tightens around the words.
And when the fever breaks-and it does, in sour, defeatist fashion, Will lets out a week-long breath he hadn’t been aware he was holding. Clutching at the wet, cold rag he’s spent hours pressing against Hannibal’s forehead, and letting his shoulders fall.
It's then, in the darkness of late evening that the curled edge of Molly butts up against him-pushing against their bedroom door, leaning contentedly on the doorframe. He turns to her, to the glint of her eye studying the way he’s folded himself neatly in a chair against the edge of Hannibal’s bed, diligently brushing the cool rag against his ragged, sweat-soaked limbs.
“I sat like this with him.” he tells her, “I didn’t let him die alone.”
She hums, “You’re punishing yourself for mistakes you had no control over.”
“I’ve been told you still have to atone for those.”
The lines around her mouth, faint but ever present, press into a smile. Will’s stomach sinks with the knowledge they’ll never grow any deeper. “It’s a complicated thing, all very Dante’s Inferno of you.”
He hums, turning his attention back toward the cloth in his hand, “You told me that he loves me.”
She snorts, “ He told you that too, if I’m remembering correctly.”
“Yeah.” He says, running one smooth palm against the scruff of his beard, “Yeah.”
He sneaks a glance back at Hannibal, whose face is still slack with sleep, lips pressed tightly together. His skin is still pinky and flushed-but lighter, like he’d spent a day in the sun. Tentatively, Will runs a hand over the gray strands of hair that have fluttered over Hannibal’s forehead. It feels false, more of a kindness than true intimacy.
“I don’t know what to do with that.” He tells her quietly, eyes still studying the rusty-red scabs that are speckled across his face. “I don’t know what to tell him.”
“You’ve got time for that.”
He clicks his tongue, “It’s not that easy though, it’s not-I don’t know how to love him. Back. If I can love him back.”
“Because of what he is?”
“Because of what he’s done. Because of you, because of Wally, because of the months I spent alone and imprisoned. Because of Abigail. Because of his mistakes.”
“What will you do if you can’t love him?”
He smiles then, feels the stinging pull of his stitches drawn tight, “Do I have a choice?”
Will is the first thing that Hannibal says when he wakes, cold and clammy, in the early hours of the morning. It’s cracked and strained, shouted hoarsely into the cool air of their dark room.
The sound of it makes Will bolt upright, swinging his legs over the side of his bed so hard they sting with the impact. He ends up against the side of Hannibal’s bed before he really has the chance to consider it.
The deepness of Hannibal’s eyes greets him when he remembers to click on their shared bedroom lamp. They’re all soft around the edges, glowing against the orangey-yellow of the lamplight. It makes his stomach flip, sends adrenaline pumping against his weary, tired heart.
“Will.” Hannibal says again, reaching a hand up towards him, slow and aching. “Will.”
He meets Hannibal’s palm halfway, cradling it in one hand while the other traces the scars forming on his knuckles. “We lived.”
“Ačiū, ačiū." Hannibal’s expression cracks as he says it, all quiet earnesty. He pulls against Will’s wrist, tugging their conjoined hands down until he can place a soft, light kiss to the base of his left thumb.
His lips, chapped and dry, drag against Will’s skin before they press, all soft and warm, against the worn skin. It feels loving- worshipful, almost, like he’s become Hannibal’s communion wafer; a chance to taste salvation.
Will’s face contorts with the gesture, eyes following the way Hannibal’s hair sits, messed and undefined in the low light. His jaw aches with some indefinable feeling that sits behind his back molars and presses until his mouth sours from the feeling.
“Negyvenčiau be tavęs.” Hannibal tells him, lips still pressed to the back of his hand.
Will nods, like he has any chance of understanding, and gently frees his hand from Hannibal’s drugged grip. “I need to get Chiyoh.”
Hannibal’s mask slips for a moment then; a flash of brief understanding that cuts through the wide expanse of his pupils in the dark light.
“Ačiū.” He says again, and Will turns to leave before the ache grows stronger.
Hannibal’s Lithuanian is beautiful, Will decides.
It’s not like he has much of a choice, really, because at the moment it’s the only language Hannibal seems to be capable of speaking.
Aphasia, as a concept, is something he’s mostly familiar with; the idea that brain damage can affect and change people’s speech. It seems entirely unbecoming of Hannibal, who’s always been so undeniably proper and refined that he doesn’t quite seem human enough to be changed in any way at all that he doesn’t explicitly allow. Nevertheless, Lithuanian trails after both of them, clings to their backs like moisture on a humid day, worms its way into the cracks and fissures of Hannibal’s recovering brain.
Chiyoh maintains that it won’t last long, if things go well, remaining positively nonchalant about the entire thing. Still, it seems to cling to Hannibal’s brain in a tangled, angry web.
He’s too weak to talk much, which is probably lucky considering any attempt at conversation eventually leads to Will forcing Chiyoh to translate- mediate- their conversations in poor, broken Lithuanian.
“It’s not my strongest language,” she tells Will, “he hated when I spoke it.”
Judging by the scrunching of Hannibal’s nose when Chiyoh pronounces certain words, she’s not being humble.
Despite the wide, beautiful scope of the Lithuanian language, Hannibal’s favorite word seems to be the only thing he retained in English: Will.
Because of his completely foreseeable and entirely stubborn insistence on holding conversation despite his injuries, he seems to task himself with making sure Will knows he’s watching him. That he sees him.
He says it in greeting when they wake and sleep, with the pinch of an exasperated sigh in the long heat of the afternoon, with solemn, angry forgiveness each time he sees the bandage on Will’s cheek. Will. Always Will. Never, ever anything else.
Frankly, it’s starting to drive him a little nuts.
Since Hannibal’s woken up, most of his fever-tending duties dissipate and he’s stuck doing mediocre tasks in the large, empty halls of their home. Chiyoh doesn’t ask him to do them, really, but she doesn’t ask him to rest, and she leaves piles of unused, clean clothing nestled on the living room couch in order to tempt him away from Hannibal.
It feels just as relieving as it does entrapment. Will, though, is fortunately good enough at folding things that he doesn’t really mind all that much.
He cleans too-not that there’s a need for it, the house was spotless before they’d arrived and Hannibal had arranged for the house to be vacuumed and dusted weekly some years ago by two Brazilian women that never ask Will any questions, let alone look him in the eye. The process is meditative though, and decent enough physical therapy that he counts wiping down the counters as muscle training for the injury in his shoulder.
Chiyoh still leaves every day, usually after she’s stumbled her way through his and Hannibal’s daily mid-morning conversation, but she comes back quicker, eyes a little sharper, chin held a little higher. She still refuses to give Will a Lithuanian dictionary.
He asks her about it one day over dinner, when Hannibal’s nodded off in his bed and the two of them are left picking at their plates of pot roast and root vegetables Will had thrown in a needlessly expensive crockpot that morning. The question makes the left corner of her mouth lift, which is probably as close to laughing as she ever gets.
“You remember the castle. No happy memories are shared between him and Lithuania at this point-I doubt there were few to begin with.” She stabs needlessly hard at a potato, smashing into it until the skin lays flat on her plate.
Will hums, “Somehow I feel like I’m being left out of the class discussion.”
“I wouldn’t bother learning. The minute he can speak anything else he will.”
“So, I’m left at the mercy of you and Google Translate then?”
She shrugs, “We’ve all survived on less.”
“He keeps saying, Will. ” He says around a mouthful of meat. “It’s the only word he can remember in English, I think. Makes me feel like a lapdog.”
“Well, do come when you're called?”
“I took him off that cliff, didn’t I?”
Her lip raises again, “I assumed that was for love.”
“It was out of the assumption we’d both die.”
“And yet, here we are.”
Will hums again, a sort of half-laugh, “I don’t know if he loves me like that anymore anyway. He seems to be fond of me the same way a hunter likes his dog.”
“For its uses? Its companionship?” She asks, smashing another potato.
He clicks his tongue; “For its potential. Once, he told me he’d whispered into the chrysalis of my Becoming. Now, I wonder if he’d bothered to tend to me at all.”
“If he’s been born into this new life, his first word was your name. Surely that means something.”
It makes him smile against the pull of his stitches, “I’m not sure it means much more than the throw of a die to him. This might be his version of Yahtzee. ”
Chiyoh leaves shortly after that in a stack of clanking dishes. And Will is alone again.
It’s barely late enough to justify sleep, so he doesn’t. Instead, he takes up post in a cushioned chair that he presses against the edge of Hannibal’s bed and closes his eyes.
He lets himself drift into Molly this time, into the way she curls around him.
“You seem used to this.” She observes, setting firmly over his reality like a warm, flannel blanket.
He shrugs, “I used to see Abigail Hobbs after her death. She used to come to me like this for conversation. I never really told you because I felt like adding ‘I see a dead girl on occasion’ to the laundry list of facts about myself might’ve been a little overwhelming.”
“How long did you see her for?” Molly asks, shuffling slowly towards the edge of Hannibal’s bed and settling near his feet.
It makes Will swallow heavily, feeling the weight of Florence settle on him, “Months, I think. She stayed with me when I woke up after he gutted me. I thought she was alive for a little while. She never really was though, not even after I shot her father. I let her go in Florence, I should’ve done it sooner.”
“Guilt is a powerful thing.” She hums, “So is love.”
The ache in his jaw begins to return, crouched low and thrumming bright and red, “It’s weird,” He says, grief pulling at the corners of his mouth, “I keep looking for you in places you’ve never been. You’re a ghost in a room you’ve never seen before.”
“Do you keep me out of love or guilt?”
The question pierces through the crevices between his ribs, spasming and terrible. “Love, I think.” He tells her.
His jaw aches with it.
Hannibal’s demands for good food don’t cease despite their strange language barrier.
He hasn’t been cleared by Chiyoh to leave his room yet, which he seemed to take mild offense to, judging by the curl in his mouth when she tells him as much in clipped, messy Lithuanian. Still, though, he asks for good food.
Will’s not a trained chef-he knows that, before he’d married Molly his diet had largely consisted of microwave meals and chips, but he’s not inept.
Besides, there’s a stack of cookbooks nestled in a small shelving unit in the corner of the kitchen, which is all the help he needs.
Most mornings he keeps it simple, things like cheesy scrambled eggs and sourdough toast or an array of flakey brown pastries that Chiyoh supplies paired with ripe, honey-sweet fruits. Hannibal doesn’t seem to mind either way, he’s content enough to sit and bed and let Will play nurse for a little while longer. That or he’s miserable, but he’s polite enough that it only takes Will a few days to realize that ačiū means thank you. And less time to understand that Hannibal doesn’t mind him knowing that.
Chiyoh lets the both of them indulge in coffee in the mornings; one small mug each of rich, brown Turkish stuff that she makes for the three of them before she disappears in the mornings, leaving Will to deal with it when she’s gone. It’s good enough black-at least, Will thinks so-but he’d figured out through a very frustrating game of charades that Hannibal takes his cup with cream and two sugars, which he spends an absurd amount of time putting together before it goes in its respective place on a large silver tray Chiyoh had given him that he brings their breakfast in on.
It makes him feel like a very fancy, very underpaid butler, which Hannibal would probably think is hilarious, so he doesn’t tell Hannibal.
Their pastries for the day are guava pastelitos- all browned and flakey, paired with two particularly succulent-looking pears he’d taken fancy to, mostly because they’re soft, partially because Hannibal seems to have some sort of thing about the way Will cuts fruit for him.
Hannibal had still been dozing when he’d disappeared to make breakfast, though Will’s sure his puttering has probably woken him completely. Chiyoh had very bluntly told him once that he sounded like a bull in a china shop when he cooks, which means he doesn’t have to wake Hannibal up and deal with the goopy looks he gives him when his eyes open. Instead, he has to deal with the ones he makes when he brings him food.
He shoulders their bedroom door open with the elbow of his good arm, gesturing with the tray when he sees Hannibal sleepily propped half-upright. “Breakfast,” he says, heading towards Hannibal’s side table.
“Your name is Will.” Hannibal greets.
Will drops the tray.
“My name is Hannibal.” he continues, “We are in Cuba.”
Will’s brain lights up full-force with the pounding adrenaline that shoots off, pulsing through him at a nearly alarming rate. He looks down at the tray, the spilled coffee and crushed pastelitos, and then up at Hannibal’s smirking face.
“You can talk,” he observes dumbly.
Hannibal smiles, “I woke up and decided I could speak it. Some of my words aren’t here though, I can’t…talk them all yet.”
Will’s brain short-circuits; “Right.”
“Chiyoh …telled… you about it, I know.”
His gut twists around the sound of Hannibal’s voice speaking English, clumsy and half-remembered in a way that refuses to suit the curve of his delicate teeth. “Do you remember what happened?”
Hannibal hums, “You took us off the edge of the cliff. We killed the dragon.”
The sound of Hannibal’s I love you perches its way under Will’s jaw. He keeps it there, tucked against the edge of his bones until it seeps into the marrow. “Chiyoh had to revive you twice.”
“I’m sorry you had to see that.” His voice is tender in a way that makes Will’s marrow burn.
“It was my fault.” He amends, more of an apology than explanation.
Hannibal’s eyes are rich and dark like aged honey, all glossy and clean, “I’m glad we lived, Will.”
Will smiles, “I am too.”
Molly comes to him again that night, tucked in the corners of his old Wolftrap home. She sticks herself in its cracks until the house nearly bursts with the thought of her.
He wanders through it for a while, trying in vain to turn on lights and stumble down hallways that twist to keep him square in the middle. The house is grayed with moonlight, dark in the way that scared him when the encephalitis had sunk its claws in. It makes his core ache with loss, sinking and churning with every step he takes.
He stops at some point to sink onto the floor of his living room-or well, the room with the dog beds in it. The room where he slept.
The carpet is still thick with dog hair, dusty and blue despite the horrendous amount of shedding that sits on top of it. Will sinks his fingers into it and rubs till the feeling goes away.
Molly comes in at some point when his hands are clutching there, feeling through the carpet threads for something he can’t quite place.
“Am I going to be your ghost forever?” She asks him, toeing against the blue of the carpet.
He smiles, “At least you’re aware, Abigail and I had no clue.”
She laughs a little, sinking down crisscross next to him, just close enough that he can faintly smell her shampoo. “Do you want to keep me anyway?”
“I love you.” He replies, turning to place one of his palms on her knee. Faintly, he realizes he can’t really tell if she’s warm anymore.
“That’s not an answer.”
He swallows, “But it has to mean something. I married you because I loved you.”
“We married each other because we needed it.” Molly says simply, “I loved you too.”
The carpet feels duller now, like scratching against the edge of sandpaper. It makes Will pull his hand away. “I’m afraid I’ll wake up one day and I’ll forget your face. That I’ll see you and you won’t look like anyone.”
“Do you want to see me forever? Or is it the guilt that you can’t that’s holding you back?”
He shakes his head, “I don’t care, really.”
“How long did Abigail last?” She asks gently, all calm and collected.
“Weeks.” He tells her truthfully, “A month and a half, maybe.”
“Did you want to keep her longer?”
“Yes.” He tells her, because it’s true. “But I couldn’t. I couldn’t keep her with me. I couldn’t do that to either of us.”
“So why are you doing it now?”
“Because I loved you.”
The house is empty and quiet save for them, tucked in its belly despite the fact that Will knows it's gone. An ache rises up through his ribs and wraps around his sternum-hot and wretched.
He knows it’s not sustainable-that the soft edges of Molly will crumble the way they had for Abigail, that letting her leave will be losing her again. It makes him greedy for it; for anything other than the pain of loss. For a future he knows he cannot have.
“Let me go,” Molly whispers kindly.
Will’s throat burns, “I loved you.”
There’s nothing there for him now but a four-poster bed made from words he’s placed in her mouth. It feels like his skin is too tight on his body, like a cicada stuck in its shell. His body squeezes around it until it feels like it’ll shatter.
He turns, reaches out to touch her, to feel the smoothness of her cheek again. It makes her hum, pressing into his hold.
“Go.” He tells her, clutching at her cheek.
She smiles, turning to kiss his palm.
“I loved you,” She says, “He loves you.”
And then he wakes up.
On the outer edge of their property is a very large, very upkept dock.
The whole thing feels quite dramatic-there’s a set of little paved stones that lead from the back door to the very edge of it, with soft, twinkly lights that shine like lightning bugs each night. It’s armed with a few sturdy whitewashed Adirondack chairs that rest under a small covered portion near the edge of the stone path, looking out towards the beach.
The real beauty though, is the sparkling bluey horizon that sits at the end of the dock. It’s all calm and tucked away-the entire property is, really, it’s all hidden and wild behind carefully manicured square footage, friendly in the way its waves prickle along its sand beach, all tan save for the bursting speckly-white of the shells that’ve washed ashore. The wind stays far enough away too that it never whips, just sways pleasantly, dancing between the warmth of the early Cuban summer.
It takes Hannibal two weeks of incessant pestering for him to get Chiyoh to let him out there, and another day and a half to convince Will to let him transfer from his wheelchair into one of the Adirondacks.
Truthfully, Will’s always found the idea of water strange-it’s not like he’s not used to it, really, he grew up in boatyards, spent hours fly fishing and digging around the marshy areas of his yard as a child, but it’s always been a heavy presence. One that sits beside him grayed and smiling, that coaxes him with one thin finger, that laps the shore with inviting whispers. It used to frighten him when he was younger, the threat that someday he’d give in.
Now, he sits at the dock with Hannibal and remembers when he listened.
“I’m glad you’re here with me, Will,” Hannibal tells him quietly, eyes perched on the Cuban sun slung low on the horizon.
He means it, really. Will knows he does, he says it every day-each more meaningful than the last, laced with unwavering trust and warm, strong devotion. It makes Will’s jaw ache when he says it, mostly from clenching-ignoring the burn in his healing scar in favor of trying to forget that he loves him.
“I know,” He murmurs. “I know.”
Hannibal reaches a hand out to grasp at Will’s fingers, which makes him realize how tightly he’s been gripping the chair’s armrest. “Are you afraid?”
“Of the water? Or of the life I’ve chosen?”
He shrugs, “Either, both.”
Will swallows, feels the edge of Hannibal’s calloused, tired fingers tracing the lines of his palm. “Both.”
“I hope I haven’t frightened you too terribly,” Hannibal replies easily, giving him a warm, generous smile.
I love you. Will hears, I love you.
He ignores it, and squeezes Hannibal’s hand twice, memorizing the way his flesh molds and squishes around the shape of his fingers.
The breeze flutters around them, kicking up the leaves of the palm trees scattered on the beach, sending leaves and the like from their jungled yard spitting into the edge of the water. It makes Will’s chest squeeze with want, with the need for more.
“In Florence, you told me you wondered if we could survive separation,” Hannibal says then, in the coolness of the evening.
He snorts, “Well, clearly we have our answer.”
It makes Hannibal smile, which is all that seems to bring Will joy anymore-all light in the tips of his fingers, burbling in his chest until it’s replaced by the slow ooze of guilt. By the tangle of Molly’s hair.
“I wonder, though, do you think we could’ve?”
Will shrugs, “We did, for a time.”
“It was miserable-“
“-We survived, but I don’t think we would again. I think we’re inoperable now.”
Hannibal squeezes his hand back, “Too formed together?”
“Flesh becomes flesh, muscle becomes muscle. It’s all cannibally love talk.” Will smiles. It hurts his cheek.
“Poetic, I think.”
He just scoffs, “You think anything’s poetic if there’s the right amount of tragedy behind it.”
Hannibal hums, “Do you miss it?”
“Life before this?” Will asks, more to annoy him than anything, “There wasn’t much to miss, I was alone. Even with her, I was alone.”
“You loved her.” He tells him, eyes looking steadily out.
“I did. That doesn’t change anything.”
There’s a finality to it that hits him in the gut when he says it, like a spell’s been cast. It feels new, stretching and swirling through him; a release he’d put off. He grips at Hannibal’s hand again. “You kissed me. When we fell.”
Hannibal shifts almost imperceptibly, “I did.”
“You told me you loved me.” He squeezes again as he says it, feeling the way Hannibal tenses despite reassurance.
“I do.”
Will hums a laugh, “Still? After I threw you off a cliff?”
“It wasn’t entirely unexpected,” Hannibal sniffs, “You’ve always been unpredictable.”
The water of the bay is so, so blue in the fading light of early evening, and Hannibal still won’t look at him.
“How chivalrous of you,” Will says wryly.
Hannibal just sighs long-sufferingly and murmurs; “I love you, Will. I have loved you for far too long to stop now. I fear I’ll love you forever. Does that frighten you?”
Will shrugs, “I think that maybe, in some way I’ve always loved you.”
Hannibal squeezes his hand, warm and calloused, and his cheek aches from the firm press of his smile.