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There is a storm coming.
But then, Will thinks, there always is.
-
When Hannibal shows up at Will’s door with breakfast the day after they meet, politely demanding to be let in, Will eats the food he is offered, because it is good, and free, and he is hungry. He does not think about the cost.
He keeps his eyes on his bowl, and so he does not see the way Hannibal tenses, at first, and then relaxes, as Will takes his first bite. He does not see the way Hannibal smiles to himself, as he chews and swallows and continues to eat.
The food is very good, Will thinks, as he tells Hannibal that he does not find him very interesting.
“You will,” Hannibal says, certain as death.
Will continues to eat, and doesn’t notice.
-
That night, Will dreams of a stag, shadowing him wherever he goes.
He wakes terrified, and not quite sure why.
-
“Drink,” Hannibal says, after Will has shot Garret Jacob Hobbs. He offers Will a glass of something sweet-smelling and strange, and Will takes it and knocks it back without looking at it very closely.
He coughs. “What was that?” he asks. It was sour, perhaps a little sweet, and not particularly good.
Hannibal shrugs, pouring a glass of wine for himself. “A formality,” he says. “Our pact has already been sealed, I think.”
“What?” Will asks, but then—he is used to his psychiatrists speaking in riddles. “Our agreement with Jack, you mean? I—I do think he’s right. I do need to see you. I think—I think it could help. You, you could help me, I mean.” He rubs at the back of his head, sheepish.
Hannibal smiles, and sips at his wine. “I agree,” he says. “Would you care for something other than mead?”
“Whiskey,” Will says, and Hannibal obliges, watching his throat as he swallows.
-
“Well,” says Zeller, “at least she went out with a smile.”
“Considering the current state of her entrails, I find that more disturbing than anything else,” says Price.
Since the current state of her entrails is spread out around her body, soaking the carpet with blood, Will is inclined to agree. She is indeed smiling, the expression frozen on her face.
Will shivers, and closes his eyes, and sees:
The girl is smiling, when he meets her, and this is not the first time. She is an old—friend? Lover? No—disciple. His most treasured and most loyal, and he is going to kill her. He loves her, in his way. He is happy to kill her, happy to give her purpose, to draw power from her blood. Because it is about power—there is a cause, too, something he deeply cares about, but behind that cause is a lust for power, for control, for—recognition.
He and the girl both smile as he cuts her open. This is their design, and they have made it, together.
Will comes back to himself all at once, between blinks, and he turns around and walks out of the room with measured steps, before he stumbles to his knees just outside and retches on the ground.
Jack has already called Hannibal by the time Will manages to stand up.
-
“It was worshipful,” Will says, as he runs his hands along Hannibal’s desk, back in his office.
“The killer was worshipping the woman?” Hannibal asks, tilting his head to the side.
“Not her, no. Her death was a, a tribute.” He pauses, dredges the right word up from the corner of his mind. “A sacrifice. The girl didn’t matter at all, beyond the blood flowing through her veins, the meat under her skin.”
“And her belief,” says Hannibal. “She was smiling as she died, yes?”
Will snorts. “Her belief, yes. Her belief in some sort of higher power that would reward her for her death. She was as delusional as her killer, she thought she was doing something—something divine.”
“Who are we to say she was not?”
Will stares at him. “What are you trying to get at, Dr. Lecter? Are you trying to say there was something good about this woman’s death?”
“Not at all,” Hannibal says. “But she died for something she believed in. Surely that is worth something.”
“She died for a story,” Will says.
“Stories have power, Will.”
Will rolls his eyes, and then keeps them glued to the ground, avoiding Hannibal’s reproving stare. “Stories are just stories, Dr. Lecter. The only power they have is the power we give them.”
“And what is power,” Hannibal asks, “if not something that is created by the fact of it being given? By belief?” He leans forward in his chair, folding his hands in his lap. Will sits down across from him, but does not meet his gaze.
“Belief isn’t the same as power,” Will says.
“But power cannot exist in a vacuum. Belief feeds it, as wood feeds a fire. Why else would a god’s followers kill in its name?”
“Because people will take any excuse to believe that they’re somehow special, that they’ve been chosen for something great.”
“Is that not what you believe about yourself?” Hannibal asks, and Will laughs, without humor.
“I’m nothing special, Dr. Lecter,” he says. “Just ask Freddie Lounds. According to her, I’m just your regular, run-of-the-mill psychopath.”
“Do not sell yourself so short, Will,” says Hannibal. “You are nothing if not special.”
Will shakes his head, and does not look up to see the gleam in Hannibal’s eyes.
-
That night, Will dreams of the stag. It speaks, this time.
“There is a storm coming,” it tells him, lips unmoving.
“I know,” Will says, because he does, but the stag does not leave.
“You are not safe,” it tells him, and Will laughs, because of course he isn’t.
“Open your eyes,” it tells him, and Will does, into the flashlight of a cop.
He thinks that probably isn’t what the stag meant, as he stumbles his way back into consciousness.
-
They never do catch that woman’s killer, in the end.
-
Next week it’s a man, and he’s been torn limb from limb. And some of those limbs are missing.
Hannibal comes along to the crime scene, since Will got the call while in his office. He takes one look and then glances at Will, sidelong. “Maenads,” he says. “Another ritualistic murder. Perhaps belief is catching.”
Will glares at him, and Jack asks, “Maenads? That supposed to mean something to me?”
“They were followers of Dionysus,” says Price, looking up from bagging evidence. “Sometimes they got a little drunk and a little crazy, and ripped animals apart and ate them. Men too, sometimes. Think Pentheus and the Bacchae.”
“Sounds like a normal Saturday night for you,” Zeller says, and Price rolls his eyes.
“Listen,” Katz says, sidling up to Will, “this one’s pretty heavy. I mean—tearing people apart while they’re still alive? That’s ridiculous, even for us.” She wrinkles her nose. “No one would blame you if you wanted to sit this one out.”
“I feel fine,” Will says, eyeing the scene before him: what used to be a man, ripped apart piece by piece. He isn’t lying—he does feel fine.
-
“Two religious killings in as many weeks,” says Will. “And yet…they don’t feel connected.”
“I beg to differ,” Hannibal says, and Will inclines his head towards him, gesturing for him to go on. “They are certainly connected, these two crimes, at their hearts. They were not necessarily committed by the same killers—almost certainly they were not—but they were committed for the same ends.”
“Worship,” says Will.
“Power,” says Hannibal.
“Oh, so it’s back to that?”
“Why else would you eat the flesh of another human, raw? Feast on it with your bare hands?”
Will laughs, and if there’s the slightest uneasy edge to it, Hannibal doesn’t mention it. “Personally, I don’t find the prospect all that appetizing.”
“But you can understand why one would?”
“Well--” says Will, and he can. He did, at the crime scene—he’d stepped into the minds of those women (and they had been women, he is sure of that), and he had understood. He had felt the power that had coursed through their veins, felt the beauty, the rightness of what they were doing.
And afterwards, he had felt perfectly fine.
Perhaps Hannibal’s influence truly is helping him cope.
Hannibal nods his head. “So you can see it,” he says.
“I can,” says Will, resigned. “I understand it. As always. But you know, Dr. Lecter, I still don’t understand you.”
“You will,” says Hannibal, with a smile that shows all his teeth.
-
Hannibal insists on providing Will with food more and more these days—something warm against the winter chill, he says.
“I can take care of myself, you know,” Will tells him.
“Of course you can,” says Hannibal, “but that does not mean that you always have to.”
The meal this time is exquisite, of course—it has some French name that fell out of Will’s head the minute Hannibal said it, but as far as Will can tell it is fried lamb kidneys.
“How is it that you manage to come by such fresh game in the middle of January?” Will asks, looking up and meeting Hannibal’s eyes.
Hannibal is chewing, and doesn’t answer, but between one beat of his heart and the next Will knows it, anyway.
He drops his fork, and says, “No.”
Hannibal puts his silverware down delicately, and pats his mouth with a napkin. “This is a discussion I’m been meaning to have with you for some time, my good Will,” he says, standing up.
Will staggers back from the table, knocking over his chair, and Hannibal takes his arm and leads him to the basement, and Will lets him.
He doesn’t throw up, doesn’t even feel nauseous, and he lets Hannibal lead him down into the dark.
-
There is a dead girl in the middle of the basement cellar, body cut wide open.
“I was wondering when you would feel her calling,” Hannibal says, running his fingers through her hair. He reaches inside her, pulls out a kidney—her other kidney, Will thinks, numbly—and he takes a bite. He closes his eyes, and sighs. “There are more forms of power than belief, although belief is always the purest. But I have never been one to pass up blood, even that which was not freely given.”
“What are you?” Will demands, something he should have asked a long time ago.
Hannibal smiles at him with blood on his teeth. “Hades,” he says. “Pluto. Death. I’m Death, Will, and not the nice kind, not the kind that takes your hand and quietly leads you away. I’m the kind of Death that you, and everyone else, knows must exist—I am the Death that stalks you in the night and rips out your still-beating heart and eats it. I am the Death that breeds your fear,” and he pauses, takes a deep breath. He sighs, pleased. “And believe me, my good Will—that fear is delicious.”
Will stumbles back, hits the wall of the cellar, presses his palms back against the cool concrete. “That can’t be true,” he says, shaking, running different ideas of delusions through his mind, for clearly Hannibal must be suffering from one of them. His own psychiatrist is insane, and Will never once noticed.
Hannibal laughs, unrestrained, in a way Will has never heard him laugh before. “Oh, Will,” he says, “I am not insane. You didn’t miss anything—you saw what was truly there, if only a little. That’s more than most could manage. That’s more than any mortal could manage.”
“No,” says Will. Not to anything in specific, just—a denial, a denial of the blood staining Hannibal’s mouth and the words spilling from it.
“Tell me, Will,” Hannibal says, stepping towards Will and away from the dead girl at his feet, “how did you ever convince yourself that you were one of them, when you are clearly so much more?”
“I’m not—I’m not who you think I am.” Will tries to back away, but he’s already pinned himself against the wall, stupid, stupid, there’s nowhere for him to go.
Hannibal smiles at him, gently, like a father to a son, and then he stabs Will in the gut.
-
Will opens his eyes to darkness, and a river, and his father waiting on the other side, elbow deep in the engine of a boat.
He sits, dipping his feet in the water, watching his father work.
“You can’t just sit there,” says a voice from above him. He looks up, and framed by a curtain of dark hair is Abigail, blinking back at him.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Will says, voice hoarse.
Abigail shrugs, and holds out a hand. “C’mon,” she says. “You have to go across.”
Will takes her hand, lets her pull him to his feet. He eyes the river doubtfully. “The boat’s on the other side,” he points out. When he looks across this time, the boat is still there, although he no longer sees his father.
Abigail scratches the back of her head. “Huh,” she says. “I guess I’m not supposed to take you across just yet.” She brightens. “Hey, I could show you around, if you want!”
Will shrugs. It’s not as if he has much of a choice, and Abigail seems happy. He lets her take his arm and lead him.
There isn’t much to see. All the interesting parts are probably across the river, but Abigail leads him in the opposite direction. Will’s not sure if he’s disappointed, or grateful, or neither—everything he feels seems somehow less, here.
He follows Abigail. He’s good at that—following.
It turns out that all there is to see are more rivers, and they mostly look the same as the first. Will tries to seem interested, though, for Abigail’s sake. Her smile stretches from ear to ear.
It takes Will two rivers to realize it, but her scar is gone.
“Oh, here we are,” Abigail says, at the fourth river. “Lethe.”
This one’s clearer than the rest—Will thinks he could stare into it forever, if he let himself. Maybe he ought to. He knows what it does, and there’s plenty that he’d like to forget.
Abigail doesn’t let go of his arm, but she doesn’t try to pull him back, either, when he steps forward. Just a drink, and he can forget about how he got here, about Hannibal, about what they all really are. He could probably go across the river and fix boats with his father, if he wanted.
Something prods at his side. He turns, and it’s the stag, feathers fluttering in the wind.
Abigail laughs, and smooths down the feathers at its side. Not like it’s a pet, exactly—she does it reverently, like it’s something precious.
Will watches for a moment, and then he follows suit.
The stag inclines its head, and Will only hesitates for a moment before he follows. Abigail stays where she is. “Are you sure you want to leave?” she asks, trying so hard not to look disappointed. “There’s one more river to see.”
“That’s okay,” Will says. “I have to save something for next time, right?”
Abigail grins at that, and she waves to him as the stag leads him away.
-
Will wakes up in the same cellar he died in, Hannibal kneeling beside him, one hand on his neck, the other cradling his cheek almost tenderly.
Will sits up too fast, sees black spots in his vision, and then he looks down at his stomach. He presses a hand to the place where he very viscerally remembers Hannibal trying to, well, eviscerate him. Not only trying—succeeding. The cut is gone, and only the blood remains, sticky over his hand. He stares at it, uncomprehending.
“Did you just kill me? Did you just—did you just bring me back from the dead?”
Hannibal smiles thinly, and sits back from Will a little bit. “You needn’t sound so impressed, although I am of course flattered,” he says. “It is in my nature, after all. And as in any good story, every hero must have his trip to the underworld.”
“Which one of us is the hero in this scenario, exactly?” Will asks, shakily.
“What do you think, Will?”
Will says nothing, staring at his own blood on his fingers. “Abigail was there,” he says, quietly. “How can that be? She isn’t—you wouldn’t kill her.”
Hannibal looks amused. “No?”
“No,” Will says, more resolute now. “Or if you did—it’d be like what you just did to me. You wouldn’t…you wouldn’t leave her there. You wouldn’t let her cross.”
“I wouldn’t, you are correct,” Hannibal allows. “It was indeed Abigail you saw during your brief sojourn. But then, it was also not quite her at all.”
“You can’t honestly expect me to know what that means.”
“The girl you saw down there was…what Abigail can come to be, if all goes well. One who leads others into death. It suits her, don’t you think?”
“Not really,” says Will. “But then, I’ve never thought of myself as much of a Persephone, so what do I know?”
“More than most,” Hannibal says, and he reaches up, runs his thumb down Will’s cheek, leaving a trail of blood in its wake. “I wouldn’t worry too much about it. These things have a way of sorting themselves out into their right places. You believe now, do you not?”
Will closes his eyes and lays his head back against the concrete. “Is there another version of me down there?” he asks.
“The answer to that question is…complicated,” says Hannibal. “It all really depends on what you mean by ‘you’.”
“But there is someone,” Will says. “Like me. Who got trapped by someone like you.”
Hannibal settles next to him on the floor. “Come now, Will,” he says. “Do you feel trapped?” He spreads his hands out, demonstratively. “You are free to leave at any time.”
“I certainly don’t feel free,” says Will. “You are the one holding the knife.”
“Don’t tell me you still find death frightening,” says Hannibal, although he does lay the knife, still slick with Will’s blood, down on the floor. He takes Will’s hand instead, and Will grips it tightly, knuckles going white.
Will looks Hannibal in the eye, and says, “At the moment? I find it rather terrifying.”
Hannibal throws his head back and laughs, and then he says, “There’s a storm coming.”
“I know,” Will says. Privately, looking at their joined hands, he thinks that it may have already arrived.
“Shall we weather it together?”
Will looks at the blood dotting Hannibal’s forearms, the blood staining his own hands. He thinks of the stag in his dreams and in his death, and of all the food he has eaten from Hannibal’s hand.
He thinks of Abigail’s face, so pleased to be able to show him around.
He and Hannibal stay like that, sitting side by side, hand in hand, for a long time.
-
“I won’t leave the FBI,” Will says in the morning, after Hannibal has cleaned the cellar. Will did not offer to help, and Hannibal did not ask.
“You can’t live two lives,” Hannibal says, looking up at him over the rim of his coffee. “There simply isn’t enough of you to go around.”
“That isn’t true, and you know it. I can live two lives if I want, Hannibal, as long as I only live half of each. And I don’t really have a choice in that. Do I?”
Hannibal takes a deep drink of his coffee. “No,” he says. “I suppose you don’t.” He pours another cup and offers it to Will.
Will takes it, and drinks, while Hannibal looks on. He has never been more conscious of the act of swallowing before in his life.
When Jack calls him, he puts down the cup and answers it, and on his way out the door to a fresh crime scene, he closes his eyes, and lets Hannibal kiss him on the corner of his mouth.
The game may be crooked, Will thinks, but—it’s the only one in town.