Chapter Text
Hannibal had not expected San Junipero to look like this, not at all. He blinked, covering the sun with his hand as his eyes got used to the bright sunlight. As soon as he did, he looked around and let out an uneven breath.
Everything around him looked real. So real. He lowered his gaze at his dressing shoes, now covered in sand, and moved his feet a little, feeling the sand crunch under his weight. He gazed around him then, taking in the way the ocean’s waves echoed in his chest, how warm the light of the sunset felt on his skin, how good the beach air smelled. It was so, so real…
“Hey!”
He turned at the voice, alarmed, as a guy that looked like he had been jogging stopped near him, still breathless. He looked around twenty-five years old, fit and sort of handsome. But the way he paused and brought both hands to his lower back as he straightened betrayed an older age, as if the man still hadn’t gotten used to his younger body.
“You new here?” he asked, taking a bottle of water out of his small backpack and sipping from it.
“I… yes. I am.”
“I thought so,” he said, chuckling. “Have you… You know. Passed over?”
Hannibal shook his head.
“So. Thinking about it, then?”
“Just… visiting.”
The man nodded, and Hannibal took a few steps forwards, hoping the man would continue his way. He sat down and touched the sand in a circle. It was warm in the surface, cold when he buried his fingers and reached deep enough. Exactly like sand from a real beach.
The man entered his field of vision again, sitting next to him; far enough to respect his personal space, but Hannibal still looked at him out of the corner of his eye. He had not exactly pictured this moment with a stranger beside him, but he couldn’t do anything about it, and the man wasn’t exactly being rude, so he forced himself to sigh quietly.
“How come you look so old?” Hannibal turned to him with a blank expression, and the man smiled apologetically. “Sorry, not the best way to phrase it. I mean… Most people here choose to look twenty, maybe thirty, not more than forty.”
Hannibal swallowed with difficulty, and he looked at the ocean again. He thought about lying, but what was the point? He wasn’t going to see this man again, and in a few days, he would be dead. So why not being honest…?
“Something important happened to me at this age.”
Hannibal knew that what he was wearing wasn’t an accident, either. He had appeared in San Junipero wearing the gray slacks and sweater, the white shirt underneath, the beige jacket… It was the same outfit he was wearing the first time he had been in Jack Crawford’s office. When he had met him…
“Ah, I see,” the man said. “Let me guess, met your wife or something like that?”
“Something like that,” Hannibal simply said.
The man chuckled, and he finally bent his knees and got up with an exaggerated groan that he probably didn’t need.
“Well, I gotta go, but pleased to meet you. Good luck with your… visiting. Maybe we’ll see each other again!”
I don’t think so, Hannibal thought, but he nodded anyway. The man raised a hand in a goodbye, and he trotted the opposite direction he had appeared.
Finally alone, Hannibal breathed in and out. He closed his eyes and thought of a dog, and a bark made him open his eyes again. The canine was middle sized, black, brown and white; almost exactly like one he had known, in what seemed like a lifetime away. He stretched out his hand and the dog pressed his head to it. The hair felt as real as a normal dog’s under Hannibal’s palm: soft and also coarse at some places of the animal’s fur. Hannibal smiled when the dog sat next to him, exactly in the spot the other man had been in.
“He would’ve liked this, right?” he asked the dog, looking at the horizon. The dog made no sound, but Hannibal nodded, agreeing with himself. “Yes… he would’ve…”
Hannibal suddenly felt his throat tightening, and he closed his eyes, fighting the tears welling in the back of his eyelids. He hadn’t cried in years, but it turned out, he hadn’t completely run out of tears.
*
Hannibal didn’t screamed as Chiyoh tended to his wounds, no matter how much pain he was in. He simply closed his eyes and tensed his jaw.
When he started healing and regaining consciousness more often, he asked her over and over. And her answer was always the same, and that hurt more than any physical wound. ‘I’m sorry. He wasn’t there. I couldn’t find him. It was only you.’
Only you.
The first day he was able to walk on his own, adventuring down the stairs of the house Chiyoh had brought him to, the first thing he did was sitting on the living room and turning the TV on. He endured the pain in his belly through catastrophe after catastrophe in the news, and finally something caught his full attention: the follow-up of the Chesapeake Ripper’s case. They informed people about how the search had been extended to other states, the FBI still unsure whether he had died or not. And then the reporter said, as nonchalantly as if he were informing about the weather, that the former FBI profiler Will Graham had died the previous night in the hospital due to his injuries.
And in that moment, Hannibal Lecter’s world ended. He did scream then at the TV, because it could not be true. It was a lie, a set up devised by Jack to catch him…
The following day, Chiyoh brought him a few newspapers for him to believe it. The news of his death and funeral was in all of them, Will’s picture merely occupying a small portion of the Chesapeake Ripper’s articles. As if he hadn’t meant that much.
Hannibal set them aside and closed his eyes. In a whisper, he asked Chiyoh to go. She didn’t argue.
*
Hannibal opened his eyes now to the sunny San Junipero as a couple of tears rolled down his cheeks.
It had been more than ten years since the fall, and each day still ached and weighed in Hannibal’s heart. The image of Will in his mind palace didn’t fill the gaps that had been hollow since then, and nothing he did in his life ever brought him anything close to joy, anymore. Not cooking, not any opera or work of art, not even killing the rudest of people.
After recovering completely, Hannibal had become more violent and careless than ever. He had not cared about anything, not anymore. Somehow, he had managed to avoid capture, despite not being precisely careful in most of his murders. He simply wanted to make the pain stop. He wanted to go back to the time in which nothing hurt this much, in which his biggest worry was avoiding jail. But he only managed to dull every emotion, even if it never stopped aching.
Years later, he had simply stopped killing, unless the opportunity presented itself. After all, what was the point, if he couldn’t share it or enjoy it…?
He sighed again, and he petted the dog’s head one last time before standing up, brushing the sand off his pants out of habit.
“Hannibal?”
The sound of that voice knocked the air out of his lungs, his heart climbing to his throat and an almost physical pain taking over him. In the ads they said you couldn’t feel pain in San Junipero, but nothing prevented you from emotional pain. He remained still for a long moment, his breath shallow as he finally turned around slowly.
Hannibal stood frozen, because there he was, in front of him, as if he was an apparition. Will was standing a few feet from him, dressed in a white V-neck t-shirt and jeans, his hair slightly longer than he last remembered… and he was so impossibly beautiful, Hannibal’s heart tightened immediately, another tear escaping his eye.
“Why...?” he asked at nobody in particular, and he blinked the tears away to focus the man. “I… thought you could only make up things, objects… animals,” he added as he remembered the dog next to him.
The Will in front of him blinked, apparently as astonished as he was, and he took a single step towards him. And then, he beamed as he huffed out a laugh and his eyes welled up.
“It’s… it’s really you,” he said in a strained voice.
Hannibal frowned, because he didn’t understand what kind of sick joke this was. Did San Junipero know what people’s deepest desires were and give them to you so you would choose to stay…? Or perhaps he was doing this subconsciously. Was he hallucinating? Could one lose his mind being in San Junipero…?
“What-” Hannibal started, but stopped himself and looked down.
This was not real. It was not, and this Will was not real either. His Will was gone, had been gone for ten years, and soon Hannibal would join him, wherever he was.
“Hannibal… Hannibal, look at me,” Will demanded, and Hannibal did so with a sharp intake of air because it sounded so much like him, the sweet sound of his voice making him smile weakly despite everything. “You’re… here. You’re really here.”
Will took a few steps towards him, erasing the distance between them. When he was close enough, Hannibal inhaled and pursed his lips. He smelled like him, and up close his eyes had the same storm-blue color that he remembered seeing in Will when they had been outside. Hannibal swallowed once again. He had thought he would never see this face ever again anywhere except in his own mind…
“Hannibal…” Will whispered, a tear rolling down his cheek.
His hand moved on his own accord, raising and reaching out to brush the tear away before it got lost in the stubble of his jaw. But as soon as his fingertip touched Will’s skin, he stepped backwards as he gasped. Will’s brow furrowed as he bit his lower lip, shedding a couple of tears more. Hannibal shook his head, because it wasn’t possible.
“No…”
“Hannibal-”
“How can it feel so real?” he asked.
Will moved closer to him again, and that time it was him the one who raised his hands and, very slowly, he cupped Hannibal’s cheeks in a careful touch, and as soon as Hannibal felt the man’s contact, he sobbed, his hands closing around Will’s wrists and leaning into his contact. Will let out a strangled laugh, or another sob, Hannibal wasn’t sure.
“Hannibal, it’s me. It’s… really me”
“No, it can’t be…” he said, shaking his head and closing his eyes, refusing to look anymore at that perfect, beautiful face. Will tightened a little his hold around his face, as if to demand him to open his eyes.
“How much time has it been? God, nine, ten years? But come on, it’s me.”
“He died. He- I saw the news, I saw the images of his funeral.”
“I did… but not exactly. I passed over,” Will said, and that made Hannibal open his eyes. Will smiled shakily at him as he let his hands fall from his face.
Hannibal missed the touch immediately, though he parted his lips to say, once again, that it was not possible. But in that moment, three rings of an alarm sounded. Hannibal looked around him, but the sound seemed to come from inside him. Will furrowed his brow.
“What’s wrong?”
“I think my time is up,” Hannibal answered almost unconsciously, remembering where he was, how he was here.
“What?”
Hannibal looked back at Will, at his widened eyes and open mouth.
“I only had two hours here…” he said, and Will shook his head.
“No, not yet. Hannibal-”
He gasped as he sat up in the armchair, pulled out of San Junipero. Hannibal looked around at the empty, cold room around him, and then down at the controller in his hand. The small screen said ‘trial version expired’ in blue letters, and Hannibal wrinkled his nose.
He took the pad from his temple and set both things down on the table as he walked to the kitchen, where he poured himself a glass of wine. His hand was shaky when he sipped it, so he sat at the small table there and pressed his palm flat on the surface as he breathed in and out slowly.
He felt heavy and empty, as if he was carrying a huge, unbearable weight inside but at the same time he was missing a large part of himself. He had not felt that way in years, because he had not allowed himself to feel much. But now that he had seen Will as clearly as if he were sitting at the table in this moment, it was like having flung open a door that hadn’t really closed, not entirely. This wasn’t like those times, more often than he’d like, in which he visited Will in his mind palace. There had been moments in which he had spent so much time there, walking down the rooms with Will beside him, that he had lost track of the days, weeks passing by. But this hadn’t felt like that… not at all.
Hannibal raised the glass of wine and took a longer gulp before filling the glass again. But when he set the bottle down, he turned his right hand, rubbing the tip of his forefinger and thumb together. He could still feel Will’s wet tear and skin there and in his face, where Will had touched him.
He knew well how Will’s skin had felt. He had entire rooms in his mind palace dedicated to the feeling of his hair against his fingers, the way his stubble had tickled against his palm, the weight and warmth of Will’s hands and arms when he had embraced him the last time they had been together… And this felt so, so familiar...
Hannibal exhaled a long sigh, and he tried to think rationally: nobody could create people there. It was one of the basic rules included in the pamphlet he had read before buying the trial version of San Junipero and plugging himself in. Everyone who was there was someone who was or had been alive at some point before passing over.
He also recalled that San Junipero had started around twelve years ago. He remembered the few news and articles that had reached him while he was still in prison, of a revolutionary system, a way of interacting, but hadn’t understood much, nor had he been that interested. After the fall, he started seeing it announced on TV, more and more often as the time went by. But his mind had been stuck in one thing and one thing alone, and so he had not cared about it.
And yet, even though all the facts told Hannibal that it was possible that the Will he had seen could be really him, he couldn’t wrap his head around it. How could he, after everything that had happened, after how much it had hurt? How could be true that, after missing Will for more than ten years, it turned out he had been right there the entire time…?
Hannibal stood up, knowing what he needed in this moment. He left the second glass of wine untouched and he went out of the kitchen, switching the lights off as he walked upstairs. Once he was in his bedroom, he lay down in his bed, on his back. He observed for a few seconds the now familiar pattern of spots in the wooden ceiling. And finally, he closed his eyes.
Behind his eyelids, Hannibal switched on the lights of the foyer of his mind palace. His steps echoed along the walls as he walked down the hallway towards the room in which he knew he would find him, because it was the room he wanted him to be in. When he found the door to his office back in Baltimore, he stood in front of it for a couple of seconds. He breathed in and out, and he finally turned the knob and pushed the door in.
He was standing in between the two armchairs with his back to him. The daylight coming from the windows, even with the curtains half drawn, drew a sort of halo around him. Will turned around then and locked eyes with him, and Hannibal felt an instant ache in his chest. Will had a peaceful expression, and he was beautiful… but Hannibal already noticed the differences.
“I thought you weren’t coming back,” Will told him, turning to take a seat in one of the armchairs.
Hannibal did the same, closing the door to finally walk to the opposite chair and sitting down after unbuttoning the jacket of his suit.
“I thought so as well.”
Will ran his tongue across his lips. He seemed disappointed, and how could Hannibal blame him?
“Suicide is the enemy, Hannibal. Didn’t you tell me that once?” Will asked, crossing his legs as he tapped in the armchair with two fingers.
“I did. I guess I am a traitor to my own words, given the right circumstances.”
Will chuckled at that, the sound musical but empty.
“I guess that’s true,” he said, and then he turned more serious. “What are you going to do?”
“About what?”
“You know what.”
Will. The Will inside San Junipero. Hannibal looked away from this Will, not even standing to look at him in this moment.
“What if it is really me, Hannibal? What then?” Will asked.
“I… don’t know,” he said. He lied.
He saw Will tilting his head and raising an eyebrow out of the corner of his eye.
“You do know. You just don’t want to say it out loud, because… you’re scared.”
Hannibal looked up at him again, but didn’t bother denying it.
“I guess you have two options now, Hannibal.”
“Tell me,” he asked him, even if he knew them too well.
“You can stay here a little longer, keep talking to me, a version of Will Graham who is definitely not real, and go along with the plan you had of giving up on life…”
Hannibal swallowed and let his eyes roam the details of his old office in Baltimore for a moment. He focused back on Will.
“And the second?”
“You go back there.”
Hannibal felt his eyes welling up again, and he didn’t bother fighting the tears or brushing them away from his cheeks when they rolled down.
“What if it is really him…?” he asked in a whisper, almost not daring to say it out loud.
“Then you’re going to have to find the answer for what you’ve been wondering for years.”
Hannibal closed his eyes, letting more tears roll down as he tried to swallow the tightness in his throat. Because what scared him the most wasn’t whether Will was real or not; even if he couldn’t completely accept it because of how painful the very thought was; deep down he knew he had to be.
The thing that scared him the most was… would Will want him there, with him…? Or had he moved on, made a life in San Junipero away from Hannibal, away from the killers, the FBI, Jack Crawford…?
When he opened his eyes again, the Will of his mind palace was observing him from his chair. He smiled, knowing what Hannibal’s choice would be.