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In a world where Will Graham never meets Hannibal Lecter, the globe still oddly spins on.
The birds continue to sing outside of his Wolf Trap residence - vivid without the hearing damage from gunshots. He wakes up every morning to the rising sun peering through the treelines, watching his living room slowly fill with light, his alarm going off just as the second level of his bookshelf is fully shone upon, the lines of dust luminous in the morning glow.
Will Graham has his routines and he follows them. He finds solace in the rhythm of clockwork - definite and certain and unerring - blissfully untethered to anything and anyone, free to do as he pleases on his own whims. Even his job plays into his modus operandi: lectures on the same days, at the same times, in the same place, week after week. He spends his days in lecture halls, between teaching and compiling lessons, and his evenings with his pack working on old motors and cooking meals for the eight of them (though the number is ever-changing) with fresh-caught fish from the creek behind his house.
He’s not the sort to keep much company - of the human kind, at least - and possesses no particular desires to be any further social than the parameters of his job require him to be. Teaching in a lecture setting allows him to manufacture the perception of sociability - he talks, yes, but he is not social, beyond the minimal allotted questions he allows following a lesson. Even then, it is a mere dispelling of information: no facades to craft and uphold or civil expectations to meet. He is a teacher and they are his students - he is not required to interact any more than he deems necessary, as a figure of authority, therefore keeping any and all exchanges as impersonal as possible.
None of Professor Graham’s students learn a thing about his life outside of the classroom, no matter how perceptive or intuitive they believe themselves to be. He remains a mystery in the halls of the academy: a ghost who momentarily apparates to dissect a killer’s mind, then withdraws, gone with the wind as though never present at all.
He never develops a relationship with Alana Bloom nor gets close to her in any capacity, because what need would he have to? They teach in the same building, but only briefly, acknowledging each other in passing out of professional obligation and never staying to chat. He never generates a professional curiosity from her, as his colleagues are just as unaware of his personal affairs as his students are, and she never avoids finding herself alone in a room with him, for they are never in shared spaces at all. Following her guest lectures, she returns to her practice in D.C., seldom stepping foot into the bureau again. Will Graham and Alana Bloom remain an untold story; one whose words are written out but the pages will never begin to turn.
A substantial amount of rules remain unbroken in the Behavioral Analysis Unit in the absence of special agent Will Graham. Following the loss of Miriam Lass, Jack Crawford resolves himself to never again allow such carelessness, for he cannot stomach the possibility of another innocent agent’s death on his hands. The temptation to betray his vow is the worst the afternoon of Elise Nichols’ disappearance - more so than anything he ever felt compelled to do throughout his career in the past - but ultimately, he refrains from stepping into Professor Graham’s lecture hall. As he roams the halls of the academy, contemplating his decision, he narrowly avoids a glimpse of the teacher inside - an amalgamation of pure luck and circumstance - and walks past the open doorway, stuffing his hands into his pockets and bracing himself to make a number of desperate phone calls.
Had he caught sight of the man in the classroom - overheard even a snippet of lecture - he would have undoubtedly paused to linger.
Instead, he and Will Graham remain strangers. They never cross paths again following their first meeting, years prior, and Will continues to be merely a passing face in a tangle of others - victims, perpetrators, witnesses, colleagues… strangers, friends, and adversaries. He does not remember the way Will’s glasses blocked his line of sight or the twitchiness of his mannerisms or the almost forcible standoffishness, as though purposefully exaggerated for the sake of presentation. A facade, which once could’ve been shattered, but now will eternally persist, for no one will be clever enough to peer through it.
Without Will Graham, the Shrike case goes unsolved for another three girls, until Abigail Hobbs - the killer’s daughter - makes a distressed phone call one wintery evening, turning her own father in. She is found dead, alongside both her parents, by the time the FBI arrive at the scene. The cause of death is the same for all of them, all inflicted by the same knife, and the room fills with blood as though pouring through a burst dam; dark and pooling across the laminate flooring. Even after the cleaning company is finished, impenetrable stains remain, and the entire room has to be redone before the house can enter the market, where it, of course, does not sell.
Will reads about the case in the news on a chilly morning, gathering his pack for a long run through the treeline and deep into the woods. The air in front of his face mists with every heaving breath he takes, his feet pounding the forest floor of pine needles and fallen leaves, the rustling of dogs never far behind, yet each time he blinks he feels his sneakers hit tacky blood, squelching sickly on tile floor, and hears not the panting of his canines but the pained, final breaths of a wind-chafed girl, fitting the previous victim profiles to an unnerving degree.
Even after the press stops covering the Shrike, it takes weeks longer for Will to scrub the images from his mind, and even then he never truly feels clean - never has, ever since the first case he read implanted in his head and refused to leave, as did every single one following.
Behind a veil, much further from the public eye than Garret Jacob Hobbs, the Chesapeake Ripper continues to rip. There continue to be sounders, each kill more gruesome than the last, with gradually increasing intervals passing between each one until, eventually, they cease completely - though not from a lack of killing, for he only wants the bureau to believe he has grown out of the habit of playing with his food. Not that they ever recognized that the surgical trophies he collected were ingredients, for not even their sharpest agents could so intimately understand the Ripper as Will Graham could.
The Ripper exists behind his veil, and is never caught, because he never allows himself to be. He never finds himself entangled with the bureau, and therefore never graces the presence of Will Graham. His displays harbor no hidden messages - no reckless, uncharacteristic escalations or confessions to be made. He, like Will Graham, is a mere ghost passing through time, slipping through fingertips despite never really being quite there, so close yet not at all, and he lives on as Jack Crawford’s biggest regret: the fact that he has never and will never be captured.
The Ripper’s walls are never torn down by another; he never allows himself to be made vulnerable or visible behind the stitching he presents to the world. He is never understood for who and what he is - the academy trainees will learn him to be a sadistic psychopath, for there are no other terms to describe a shadow that never lingers long enough to discern its shape.
Will Graham also forever remains misunderstood. There are parts of him that rest, deep inside his ribcage, untapped, lying and waiting for a knowing hand to reach inside and nurture them, to both wake and tame the beast. It is never done by Will himself - not out of the fear of enjoying his transformation, but rather from the simple knowledge that he will, and that he cannot find himself to deny its nature once he makes the leap, finding he’s incapable of looking back. Monumental pieces of him forever remain repressed - he never allows his thoughts to stray at night when groping a hand down his pants from the silhouette of a woman - sure and right, not something he has to think about - and certainly never gives thought to the way flesh would rip beneath his hands, painting his hands red and insinuating itself into the dry, cracked skin, never to be scrubbed clean.
He never meets his entropy, nor his beginning, nor his end. There is no before and after in the events of his life - he merely is. The Ripper eats well in the privacy of his own home and carefully crafted circumstance, and Will Graham holes away with his dogs and his lecture slides and the briskness of undeterred country air. They never cross paths, never realizing that they are each other’s missing chapters; the keys to the gaps of consciousness in who they believe themselves to be.
He fails to discover the crux of his own story - no new chapter is ever started; no climax ever reached. His life remains stagnant on the same chapter for years upon years, never quite reaching the parameters needed to turn to the next - the Becoming. He persists, unknowing and never quite realizing the reason he always felt entirely unfulfilled.
Life goes on, despite everything. The birds sing, killers kill, and blood continues to spill red - inevitable and everlasting. Will Graham never gets the opportunity to see it gleam black in the moonlight, far more beautiful when wrung by his own hands. The closest he gets is photographs in case files, sickening and subdued by the flash of a camera, never coming close to the satisfaction of the sight in the flesh.
For Will, however, it is more than enough to see the images distant and glossy beneath faded overhead lights. He merely exists, wholly, entirely disposed to his own whims, just as his counterpart - the other end of his red string; their tether abruptly hacked away, hanging by mere threads, entirely unbeknownst to each other. Will Graham lives on, unaware - though not quite blissful - and if some nights he dreams about death authored by his own orchestration, feels a hazy sense of purpose as a life is subdued beneath him, he never lingers on it for long come morning; instead reaching down to scratch his dogs and huff out a sigh to the tone of his alarm.
The dogs are never one to pass judgment, after all, if he spends a minute or two longer in bed with his eyes shut, reliving the bites of subconscious he can snag before they slip away; before he becomes alert enough to recognize and tamp down the faded dreams that feel more like distant memories in those moments. Even if the dogs were somehow capable of judgment, they at least are not able to betray his secrets: the flashes that peek through the cracks in his mask before he can glue the seams back together presentably.
He tells himself that it is all enough, and for the most part, means it - for it is altogether impossible to grieve the lack of something you never knew to exist at all.