Chapter Text
It starts with Jack Crawford asking for their help.
Will and Delilah don't help people. Well, they do but they prefer to do so in a more round about way such as teaching.
Ah, yes, molding the bright young minds of tomorrow. Most of them aren't very bright, in Will's opinion, but it pays well and occasionally there will be student where he thinks yes, you! You are going somewhere special. Sometimes, that someplace special is MIA or pronounced dead on scene.
Delilah tends to put people off. Will likes to say that it wasn't bad enough that she was a hyena: she had to be a striped one.
"Like a gangly, furry zebra," he said when she settled and she didn't speak to him for a week.
He felt mildly bad. It wasn't her fault his soul was so ugly.
Nowadays, it's something useful. Most people don't approach a skittish man and his hyena daemon.
Most people aren't Jack Crawford and Cyra.
Cyra, in her sleek, hummingbird form, tends to make an amusing contrast against Jack and his furrowed brow and the stern downtick of his mouth.
Will knows better. Hummingbirds are vicious little things. Jack Crawford is far too often vicious.
"Where on the spectrum do you fall?" he asks and, if this is his attempt at gentle prodding, Will would hate to see him harsh.
He feels Delilah's soft huff of laughter and kicks her side to quieten her.
"My horse is hitched on a post closer to that of autism and asperger's than to that of narcissism and sociopathy," he answers, parroting something Jack had mentioned earlier that he'd been half listening to.
(Mostly, he was thinking about his lesson plans - and about the stupidity of Jack's Evil Minds Museum, which he was still sore about.
It wasn't as if a personality disorder was a synonym for murderer anyone in much the same way that a daemon wasn't but never mind that. It was far too abstract of a thought for Jack Crawford to wrap his mind around.
Will admired Jack in many respects. He truly did. He also thought that the man was phenomenally dense.)
If Will were to assign certain traits of his to a particular personality disorder, it would not be any cluster b disorder: the borderlines, antisocials, narcissists and histronics. No, it would be closer to cluster a. He'd define himself as having traits of something more akin to schzoid personality disorder. His mind made strange leaps, twists and turns; he was at home in his loneliness; his emotions were stunted and his ability to connect was sorely lacking. Yes, that would fit Will and Delilah better.
"Can I borrow your imagination?" Jack asks and it pierces through whatever veil of consciousness Will is in right now and he hears it.
Before he can formulated an answer, Delilah is speaking to someone other than Will - an incredible rarity.
"Yes," she says and Will almost finds himself laughing at the way Jack's eyebrows shoot up.
"Thank you," Cyra says in return and they march off.
Will and Delilah follow them.
"What was that?" Will demands quietly.
"I'm bored," Delilah replies, her volume making Will wince, "ergo, we're bored. We might as well do something about it."
Will's angry with her but he's had arguments with her in corridors before and it never goes well. She'll snap or bite at him and the people around them, already shocked by their way of talking to each other, will nearly pass out from public indecency. Will doesn't much care but he thinks Jack would have something to say about it. Then again, maybe it'll make Jack rethink the need of Will's imagination.
"Don't you dare," Delilah hisses as if she knows what he's thinking. She's his daemon; of course she does.
He ends up using a Willy Wonka metaphor to help Jack understand what seems so obvious to him. This killer, who's already abducted eight girls, all who look alike, clearly has a reason for it. He wants white girls with dark hair and blue eyes is the FBI's view. Will's view is that he wants a white girl with dark hair and blue eyes. The rest are poorly made substitutes. They're decoy chocolate bars but only one is the golden ticket.
He can picture Delilah rolling her eyes at the metaphor but Jack and Cyra understand and they take them to the house.
It's a stroke of luck or misfortune that Will finds the final missing girl's body at that house. She lies tucked asleep in her bed. She doesn't look like she's sleeping. No dead people do. She just looks dead.
Delilah nudges the father's terrier daemon out of the room and Will urges him to follow. It was a cat of all things that made him think to look here in the first place. The father is still cradling the cat in his arms when the police reinforcements arrive.
"He loves her," Will says to Delilah. He hasn't played the scene in his head yet but he knows instinctively. There's so much love in the picture he sees before him, even if it is mangled and twisted and unsightly to everyone but him.
"I see it too," Delilah says, swaying as if transfixed. Will kicks her to make her stop. It's fortunate he does because a woman bursts into the room a few minutes later.
She's rude and brazen. Her jacamar daemon flits around the room, searching for evidence, while she stays perfectly still. Her name is Beverly Katz. Will doesn't bother remembering her daemon's name. He rarely bothers to remember anyone's name.
However, he remembers her team (Jimmy Price and Brain Zeller with their bulldog and serval respectively) because they both seem entirely too fascinated with death for them not to be on his radar.
Delilah thinks he’s being paranoid. Will thinks anyone can kill if they’re put in the right circumstances and given enough of a push. He also thinks scientists need less of a push than most.
So he keeps going out, of morbid curiosity and his inability to not see things through, and this is how he meets Hannibal Lecter and his Jadvyga.
(He wonders, much later on with his feet warmed by a fire and his husband making hot chocolate in the kitchen, whether anything would have changed had he not met Hannibal Lecter. He supposes it must have eventually. Everything comes to an end.)
Delilah is on edge as soon as they enter the room. She stays close to Will, largely ignoring the black, beige and white basenji daemon, who is shamelessly staring at her.
The daemon's man, in turn, is shamelessly staring at Will.
Will sits down.
"This is Hannibal Lecter," Jack says. "He's consulted with the FBI on profiles before."
Hannibal Lecter, Will turns over the name in his mind.
"Will Graham," he says and the man smiles ever so slightly and launches straight into provoking him.