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Snow crunching beneath his braced snow boots, threatening to pile up to his knees. Rain in the clouds above, slowly creeping over the vast expanse of countryside sky, something wicked rolling in . Two months have passed and it’s mid-October; the humidity has been put to rest and a bitter chill begins to nip at Will’s ears each time he leaves a window open. Somehow, he’s never been more grateful for the cold. Everything seems more silent, more manageable .
His blithe dogs romp around in circles, curling their tails over their backs and tugging at one another’s scruffs. They love the snow like a camellia loves the moon, and he’ll find Winston pulling Buster out of its icy depths when it begins to swallow him whole. That’s Will’s second favorite part of Winter, the pure and unbridled joy from his pack.
The spot of First Favorite Thing About Winter is reserved for the fact that nobody dares to brave the surmounting snow in his driveway, meaning he’s less likely to have his solitude interrupted. Will never bothers to shovel it or to sprinkle snow salt over the pavement, he doesn’t need to; he has a four-wheel drive, and if a matter is pressing enough that it requires a trip to Will’s house, well, then they can simply deal. Which is why he’s surprised to see a familiar Bentley rolling over the white hills without hesitation. A rare and unbidden dedication, given that it’s completely unnecessary (and poses a disgusting amount of danger to his vehicle).
Will– as he often does– pretends not to notice, even as he feels the warmth of the running machine radiating from the engine several yards away. Rounding his dogs up and ushering them into the house, he feels much more like the cur in this situation. Tail tucked between his legs, silently waiting, waiting, always waiting. After his dogs file into the comfort of his home, he closes the door behind them, and the storm door loudly rattles shut. Behind him, the engine dies and Will feels more weak than usual, as if he was struck by a sudden sickness.
He isn’t afraid; there is nothing to run from, no imminent danger, so why does he feel gooseflesh spread like a plague across his arms, footsteps crunching behind him? They stop at the steps to his porch, and Will turns and faces them in much the same way that a very unstable man mimics the behavior of the sane.
Hannibal’s smile seems genuine, thin and pulling at his lips. The sky is empty and the scene around him has a limited color palette of white, brown, black, and sky blue. Susurrus wind gently whips his hair, threading long fingers through it in a familiar manner. Will has been here before, he feels. He was in Hannibal’s place, though, and it was far hotter. His eyes appear brighter than normal, but perhaps that’s an illusion from the reflecting snow. His wool trench coat threatens to drag against the ice and is already wet at the edges.
“Will,” he greets, “we meet again.” His tone falls just short of sarcastic, and sounds almost ironic, as if Will didn’t expect them to see each other again, but Hannibal certainly, certainly did.
There was no good reason for Will’s avoidance, really, nor any apparent alarms in it. The only person who asked about his sudden celibacy from Hannibal’s treatment was Beverly, for she was the only person who knew that his and Hannibal’s relationship extended any deeper than the surface. How deep that truly was, Will didn’t know, but not for lack of intelligence; rather comprehension, or his own mental barriers. In any case, Will hadn’t been showing up to his appointments (without warning!) and he was sure Hannibal found that terribly rude.
He grimaces at Hannibal’s address. “What, are we strangers again?” He remarks defensively, sarcastically. As if he’s hurt by something.
Hannibal’s smile doesn’t falter. “Not unless you want us to be.” He scuffs his boot against the ice. “I wanted to discuss with you the matter of your therapy.” He pauses. “I assumed we were back to a professional relationship again.”
Will shakes his head. “No. No, I don’t think we’ll ever be quite professional.”
Will falls silent, nervously cupping the back of his neck and shuffling on his feet, idly shoving his hands in his pockets, looking around at nothing. Hannibal moves forward onto the step. He’s still looking up at Will, eyes round.
“May I come in?” He asks, like a vampire from the stories Will’s teachers used to frighten him with.
Will nods and lets his own death enter. “Sure.”
He’s embarrassed by the state of his unusual, one-room home, currently as cramped as his mind is. Books and clothing littered about, strewn on chairs and tables. Drenched sheets thrown off of the mattress, which is surrounded by a moat of dog beds coming in various sizes and colors. Speaking of dogs, various toys and bags of treats bestrew the counter. His makeshift dining table is a nightstand, his couch is two chairs. He barely fiddled with the concept of furniture when he moved in, and preferred to keep to the first floor; he felt safer there.
Hannibal doesn’t mention it, scanning over the mess only once before resigning himself to silence in lieu of anything he may have wanted to say. Like in his own home, he approaches the coffee table, retrieving a loose novel and running his palm over the cool hardcover. “You haven’t been showing up to your appointments.”
Will chuckles dryly. “Haven’t been showing up much to work, either.”
Hannibal is piqued by this, and turns his head to Will, who has taken his place across the room, back leaned against the countertop. “You’ve paused your investigations?”
“ Paused, ” Will contemplatively repeats on a shrug. “If there’s anything that needs urgent investigation, I’ll go, but I mostly… avoid the headquarters. I basically work freelance, anyway.” He laughs dryly again.
Hannibal hums. “Like an artist.”
“Mm. A very, very starving one.”
Hannibal ambles towards his bookshelves that tower over either side of his television, dust accumulating about their pages. He runs his hand over the bumps and ridges over the spines, his other thumb hooked in his pocket. “Do you read often?”
The books lying face-down on every surface imaginable should be enough of an answer. “No,” he lies. “I use them as firewood.” He gestures toward the fireplace, who’s hearth is barren.
Hannibal nods knowingly and turns his back towards Will. “I feel as though there is something you wish to discuss with me.”
“Isn’t there always?” Will deflects.
“Such is life for a man of your stature,” Hannibal says, “but I sense there may be something you are less eager to talk about.”
Now, Hannibal is facing Will, but keeps a lengthy distance between them. “You feel correctly. Knowing that, then, why bring it up?”
Hannibal crosses the room to stand directly before Will, trapping him between himself and the counter. Suddenly, Will is on the defensive, his body reacting to every movement as a threat. He inhales deeply, holding his breath and then letting it out in a pathetic attempt to regulate his body temperature.
“Some things bear discussing,” Hannibal says evenly. “Breaking down barriers of the mind in order to reach a better understanding of oneself. That’s worth the price of confronting a difficult topic, is it not?”
Will slips away from Hannibal’s scrutinizing gaze; if anything were ever to make Will slip again, to fall into whatever that was, he would not let it be this. Not ever again; the heart has no jurisdiction over the mind, none at all, none at all. And Will’s mind is entirely too nonspecific and vast to answer to anybody’s orders. He tells himself this as he crosses the room, several feet away from Hannibal. Nearly bumps into his fishing lures.
“I am not interested in mind games with you,” he says, because he isn’t.
“You’re defensive,” Hannibal says, “both in speech and mind. Too ashamed to be open to conversation, too afraid to be open at all.” A beat of pregnant silence follows, and Hannibal’s gaze flicks from Will to the window just behind him. The sun has only just risen, rubbing its tired eyes, and it occurs to Will that Hannibal is at his home entirely too early for living a full hour away. His eyes return to Will’s.
“What say we go for a drive?” He offers hopefully. “I find it has a remarkable way of clearing the mind, as if another burden is abandoned with every mile.”
“I’m busy,” Will says flatly, and hopes Hannibal does not ask with what.
He doesn’t, and instead suggests they go for a night drive. Hannibal would pick him up at 7:30, their usual appointment time. Will’s thoughtless agreement is purely to get Hannibal out of his head, out of his home. He fears, though, that he might have agreed out of a genuine desire; a desire of what exactly is a different question. A desire to be open, or to go on a drive with Hannibal just for the sake of it, like he used to when he was a child.
He severs that line of thought before it can develop, and slips on his coat, figuring he might as well find something to do to pass the time. The thought of reading makes him sick, the thought of eating makes him groan, and the thought of fishing sounds fine, but the last time he went fishing in a vulnerable state it didn’t bode well for him.
When he relents to his duties and eventually arrives at the headquarters, he finds Beverly standing in the doorway, leaning against the frame. Will deposits his bag beside her as he enters, and she trails behind him.
“Will,” she says. “Long time, no see.” Her heeled boots click against the tile and then are muffled by the carpet.
“It’s only been two weeks,” he replies, not sounding half as offended as he was, pulling papers out of his drawer and splaying them on the desktop. Offended wasn’t the proper word. More like chastised.
“Two weeks too many,” Beverly retorts. “You’re always slaving away at crime scenes, and then suddenly you go radio silent? Something’s up, I can tell.”
Students are beginning to file in and find their places among the auditorium seating. Since Will had taken to repeatedly canceling class, many students had taken to repeatedly showing up to his evening classes rather than his morning classes.
Beverly doesn’t know , Will thinks, she can’t possibly know .
“Is it Hannibal?” She asks.
But of course, she knew, because she always seemed to know, in such a way that was less otherworldly than Hannibal’s ability but more personal, which was, in turn, far scarier. Will nods complacently and mentally checks out, watching himself and Beverly have a conversation from several miles away, staring at the tops of their heads. Beverly’s speech goes through one ear and out the other as if there’s a filter that turns all sounds muffled and unintelligible. Will turns on a student film about the development of the legal definition of crime and takes a seat in a spare chair in a dimly lit corner. Beverly pulls up a seat beside him.
“You know, I don’t think you’re as good at being vague and enigmatic as everybody else thinks,” she says. She’s sitting backward in her chair, arms folded on the backrest. Far more relaxed than Will.
“How do you figure that?”
She sits up properly and rests her hands on her thighs. “Well, I remember you missed your appointment with Hannibal several weeks back… and that’s certainly not like you. After that, you were skittish and cranky, and I know it wasn’t anything Jack or Alana did, because I work with them, so…” She gestures vaguely.
“You were doing better before, you know. When you were seeing him.” She stretches the word seeing in a way that makes Will’s skin crawl.
“Stalker,” Will says sarcastically.
Beverly snorts. “Totally. Anyway, you don’t have to go into any sort of great detail about your personal life. I care about you, and if you need anything I’d be happy to help. Just thought I’d let you know I’m aware of all the things you might hope for nobody to notice.”
Will raises a brow. “That’s supposed to comfort me?”
She shrugs. “Not necessarily. You can never hide, not entirely. Take that as you will.”
Beverly says her goodbyes, excusing herself with a curt ‘shit, Jack is calling’ and a promise of later correspondence. She’s hunched over as he hurries out of the room to not interrupt the students’ film; half of them are on their phones and half of them are falling asleep on the heels of their palms. Will would return to his desk in the center of the room if it didn’t make him feel so exposed. It was an easier feeling to deal with when everybody was distracted by your words, not noticing the way you seem to zone out, to trip over your speech. He’s played this film a million times before for a million different classes. It’ll run its course, by which point his students will have already noticed Will is gone.
He stands outside of the bureau, hands trembling, body shaking. This is fine. He’s fine. His watch shows 7:25. He feels a horrible dread, a doom hanging over his head. The sun is setting by now, abandoning him, retracting its tendrils of light. He needs something, but he doesn’t know what it is; it would seem that he always needs something and that something would forever be just out of reach. With tremulous hands he retrieves a loose cigarette from his coat pocket, and twirls it between his fingers– this is fine , he thinks as he lights it and brings it to his lips. I’m fine, I’m doing fine .
The relief is immediate. This is a habit he dropped a long, long time ago, but never truly eradicated; naturally, he’s not an addict in the same way that other people are addicts. Why? He can’t be anything the way other people are. Fundamentally, he is different, and he is a grown man who can do as he pleases and smoke if he wishes but there is a dose of shame that accompanies it. His mouth and throat are pleasantly warm, though, despite the frigid cold cloaking Virginia, and a rush of contentedness washes over him like a wave. He shivers and settles into himself.
He needs something. He needs something. He feels it gnawing at his flesh, or rather, his bone, clambering to escape. He won’t let it in, though; why ?
Afraid , comes a thought. You’re afraid, aren’t you?
Will Graham is not simply afraid.
Thousand-dollar tires roll down the ice and stop at the road in front of the long staircase to the bureau entrance. Will snuffs his cigarette on the wall behind him and stuffs it in his pocket, making his way down the steps. The driver’s window rolls down.
Quite a scene, the two are painting. A man is smoking, looking disheveled. Another man in an expensive car pulls up, and the man– as if they had done this before– trots toward him and rests his arm on his hood as they correspond through the window. Will laughs to himself.
“Will,” comes Hannibal’s greeting, more casual this time, paralleling their earlier meeting. “There you are.”
“You were looking for me?”
“You were not at your home, and not at my office. I figured you would be here.” He inhales, and his nose scrunches repugnantly at the thick scent of smoke. No one else would have picked up on that, nobody but Hannibal. “I won’t lie, I was a bit worried.”
“Worried about what?” Will asks. “About whether a grown and trained man can fend for himself anywhere but his home?”
Hannibal chuckles. “You are right about that. Won’t you join me?” He asks, and pats the passenger seat.
It’s ridiculous. This is ridiculous, this whole day has been ridiculous. Hannibal worrying about him, unprecedented , something he's never done before– something nobody has done before, for that matter. Trying to coax out of him a discussion, or an admission that anything happened at all. All Will can think is, what does he gain?
Nevertheless, he rounds the hood of the car and plops into the seat beside Hannibal. The leather is exquisite and smells of– and smells of pine. Will squirms. The sun hangs low in the sky, mixing blue with divine purple and red. Will is tense on all accounts. He wishes he could sink into the seat, but he cannot; oh, he cannot.
His window is rolled down automatically and Hannibal drives leisurely down the parkway, heading West out of Quantico. Will can see the reservoir, the assorted academic buildings in and around the bureau itself, and people walking up and down sidewalks. Will never noticed how beautiful it was this time of year; light dancing on the water, the sky a brilliant watercolor painting. The bureau really, really blemishes that. Cicadas chirping mix in with the sounds of distant bustling streets, and Will has always hated the city.
“How are you feeling, Will?” Hannibal asks, and as Will adjusts himself his foot brushes against a discreetly placed bag on the floorboard. He ignores it.
“Fine,” he lies, and Hannibal doesn’t press him. It’s a strange, nostalgic feeling. He’s sitting, tired, in the passenger seat of a car with an all-black interior. The wind tosses his hair about and he closes his eyes to better feel it on his face. He doesn’t have school tomorrow, his dad didn’t drink today.
“My father used to…” he clears his throat, “take me on rides like this.”
When Hannibal is silent, Will takes it as a cue to continue. “I had night terrors often, in my youth. I was… utterly inconsolable. The only way my father could think to calm me down was to drive me to New Orleans and back.”
“You don’t talk about your father often. Were you two close?”
“ Close… Well, sometimes. He drank, but he wasn’t a drunk, and was about as emotionally available as I am, if you can envision that. We’d listen to his music over and over again on the way up. That is, whatever old country was playing at the time, or whatever scratched CD was left in the player.”
“I see. Do you remember those drives fondly?”
“I never got to see the New Orleans skyline, I was asleep before then. I always… I always woke up in my bed,” Will recalls.
“A unique comfort,” muses Hannibal. “Exclusive only to years of our childhood. Or so we believe.”
“What’s childhood good for, anyway?”
“Good for running from, I suppose,” Hannibal jokes, either at Will’s expense or his own. Perhaps both. Either way, Will laughs.
It’s cold. It’s warm. The AC is valiantly combatting the frigid winds and Will clasps his hands in his lap. They merge onto the highway and the smooth hum of the car as it zips down the highway is soothing. Night has faded from a deep blue into black, traces of stars dotting the sky, just barely piercing the light pollution. Against his better judgment, he trusts Hannibal.
“I’m… I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do here,” Will confesses, because he doesn’t, feeling out-of-sorts.
“What do you mean?”
“I– you’ve got me at a loss here, Lecter,” he says. “You can’t expect me to be fine with talking about—”
“About what happened?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Why do you even care? What do you gain? How does it affect you? You’re just as capable of ignoring things as the rest of us. You don’t need all the answers in the world.”
“I was included in your experience, too, Will.”
“Right, you were. So if you want me to– to just stop talking to you and stop showing up to therapy and ignore you whenever I see you then I’ll do that. I’ll do that.”
“You’re jumping to conclusions, Will,” Hannibal says calmly, because he knows that Will is aware of how absurd he is acting. “You know I don’t want any of those things. You’re trying to convince me to cut off contact with you so that you don’t have to face yourself, and so I don't have to face you, either. You’re my friend, Will. I am open to whatever it is you may need from me.”
“I urge you to remember that, as a psychiatrist, you are far from the strangest thing I have ever seen, but certainly the most delightful, and the most interesting. That is to say, I am not going to turn my nose up at anything that you reveal to me, whether it be voluntary or not.”
Will curls into himself— all over again, this is far too much; except, it isn’t. It’s cool, Will has already shed his coat, and he feels safe with Hannibal, and he trusts Hannibal, and this has been long since established. He looks at the side of Hannibal’s head, all lines and shadows and sharp and gentle curves. Not comfortable, not content. But safe. He knows nothing bad will happen to him here. He sees it in Hannibal, sees that he wouldn’t let that happen.
Tears are falling before he has a chance to suppress them. He’s overcome by a strange feeling; social barriers rendered obsolete. Flesh gone tender and mushy.
“I don’t like it.” His voice is little more than an abject whisper. “I want you to stop. I want you to leave me alone.”
“You want me to leave you alone?” Hannibal asks as a police cruiser zips past them. “You want me to drop you off at your house right now and let that be the end of it?”
Will nods aggressively as if he had forced himself to agree, for he didn’t know how to be honest. Hannibal reaches a hand over to his knee and squeezes, caressing his leg with the flat of his thumb.
“I’m afraid that is not going to happen. I know you think you know what’s best for you. I know you think you know what’s best for me . But you do not, and that’s okay.” He passes Will a sidelong glance. “It is okay not to know.”
When Will begins digging his nails into his arms, Hannibal squeezes tighter. “There is a bag on the floorboard. I want you to look at what’s inside.”
Will stares at Hannibal, whose eyes are fixated on the road yet somehow staring through him at the same time.
“Go on. Don’t be shy.”
Will swallows hard and shakily reaches for the bag, placing it in his lap. It’s simple beige paper with golden ribbon handles, and it bulges slightly at the bottom.
There’s no tissue paper, no anticipation. It feels almost like a gift— nobody is watching him, though, not even Hannibal, who eyes the semi-truck as it chugs on behind them. No performances, no expectations. Is he still Will Graham if he is not performing? Is he any more himself in this car as he is in the bureau, in his own home? He reaches his hand into the bag and is met with a plush fabric that soothes his aching hands. Some sort of polyester or cotton, but it’s outrageously soft.
A pale gray dog. He holds, as he retracts his hands, a pale gray stuffed animal .
Pale gray with a white undercoat and striking blue plastic eyes. Its legs are especially weighted, and Will slots his hands under its armpits, feeling it ground him, weigh him to Earth, just as Hannibal did all those months ago. It’s definitely expensive, thoughtful, and something he’d never purchase for himself.
“Do you like it?” Hannibal asks gently.
And Will folds over, clutches it to his chest, and sobs . Hannibal doesn’t chastise him, doesn’t groan in frustration, only runs his hand back and forth over the surface of his leg. Allows him his right to hiccup and whimper and cry and doesn’t tell him not to, doesn’t even say a word. Just lets him know he’s there– by God , he's there – and hums a soothing tune. Will doesn’t remember all too well when he grew weary and fell asleep, nor if he ever stopped crying, only the sudden silence of the engine dying, and a warm embrace accompanied by a weight on his chest. When he wakes up in the morning, he’s clutching the plushie while lying in his bed, one of his chairs moved to the foot of the mattress. It’s empty except for a book lying face-down on the cushion.