Chapter Text
Will’s roommate in college had been a sci-fi junkie. They weren’t exactly friends, but every so often the two of them would get high and watch old Star Trek episodes. (Or rather, Will’s roommate would get high, and Will would drink. Cannabis tended to have an opposite effect on Will, heightening his anxiety to an unbearable zenith, making him want to peel back the skin of his own face.)
Once while they were engaged in this pastime, his roommate turned to him with unfocused eyes. “I heard this thing about black holes. They’re, um, like the sheer gravity of them causes… what’s the word?” They sat in silence for several minutes, and Will was startled out of a sleepy half-awareness when his roommate shouted: “Time dilation! That’s it.”
“What are you talking about?” Will croaked.
“It’s like when things last the same amount of time but feel slower. Like you can be destroyed by gravity almost instantly, but it’ll feel like it takes centuries.”
Will took a large swallow from the bottle of cheap bourbon at his side. The burn was nice. Distracting. “Sounds torturous.”
“Closest thing to actual Hell I can think of,” agreed his roommate.
Twenty years later, in free-fall toward the dark waters below, Will felt as though he were falling through a black hole, feeling the weight of his own destruction press in on him with unreal slowness. He clasped himself closer to his companion, who resisted Will’s decision to finally destroy them both not at all. Hannibal’s heartbeat was impossibly steady in his ear.
Centuries passed as they fell. Will drafted letters in his head to everyone he had ever known. It was mostly apologies. Apologies to Molly and Walter, not for leaving them, but for ever allowing them into his life at all. Apologies to Alana and Jack, for getting too close. An apology to Abigail, and truthfully that was the only one he really meant.
Will had all the time in the world to regret what he had done, but he still could not do so. This was the only way any of this was ever going to end. It was not so bad, considering. Will had already slain a dragon that night, and with his final act, one more monster would fall.
Or, two more.
It was alright. Soon it would all be over, and like the pharaohs of old, Will would selfishly carry with him to the afterlife the source of everything bright and real and true in his world. Good, thought Will jealously, pettily, as he clung even closer to the worst thing that had ever happened to him. Hannibal’s open mouth was pressed against his forehead, his teeth almost breaking the skin in a firm kiss.
Finally, finally, there was the water that would take him.
Finally certainty. Finally peace.
Will gasped awake soaking wet, not in seawater but in his own sweat.
His eyes frantically darted across the room. It was either late in the day or very early, and the sun was barely creeping in through the shades. But there was light enough for Will to recognize where he was, and he did so to his own amazement. The water stain on the ceiling, the slant of the door-frame, the smell of many many dogs. Impossible.
He’d sold the house nearly two years ago, signed the papers with a hand that hadn't stopped shaking for a week afterward. None of his furniture should’ve been here. Will shouldn’t have been here.
Will should have been dead.
He heard a whine and one of the dogs shuffled around nervously where it was sleeping next to Will’s bed, nails clicking softly against the floorboards. He was startled to see Ellie, who he had given away to a sweet old widow before sailing off to Europe three years before. The woman fussed over the dog like a baby and still sent Will Christmas cards with Ellie dressed up in awful little sweaters. Yet here was Ellie, snuffling his hand which hung limply over the side of his mattress.
Will sat up, his body aching in the awful, familiar way it ached after a fever broke, and noticed the towel beneath him, soaked through and gone cold. His phone buzzed briefly on the table next to him, an ordinary sound made obscene by everything else. It was 5:30 in the morning, and he had a text from Jack that startled him out of bed.
Elise Nichols autopsy today. I want you there.
Will blinked, willing the letters to rearrange themselves into something that made sense, but it still read the same.
He missed the light-switch twice before his fingers caught. The man in the bathroom mirror was wild and trembling. Will drew back his bangs to reveal no scar on his forehead, no wound on his cheek. He gripped tighter at his hair and began to hyperventilate, the bathroom filling with the sound of his own ragged breathing.
Will slid down the wall till he sat on the cool tile, head in his hands. The house was silent, other than the breathing of the dogs settling back into sleep somewhere beyond the door and a drip in the shower he fixed years ago—or would fix, or had already fixed. He no longer knew which tense applied.
It was a dark curiosity that drove Will to Quantico the next day. The route there was simultaneously familiar and disorienting. He had to take a detour due to construction of a traffic circle that, from Will’s perspective, had been completed years ago. The songs on the top 40 country radio station were all outdated.
When Will arrived (ten minutes late, as he had forgotten the sheer length of his commute), he made his way over to the morgue. He walked in and froze.
Will had not prepared himself to see Beverly Katz again. If he needed evidence that time truly had gone and reversed, there it was, standing hale and hearty in front of him, grinning proudly at a tiny piece of metal. When she noticed him approaching, she turned that grin on him. Will felt like he was going to be sick, but that might just have been the early stages of encephalitis.
(And God, he was going to have to deal with that again, wasn’t he? At least now he knew which neurologist not to go to.)
“Hey Graham, what’s with that expression? You look like you've seen a dead person,” Beverly quipped, before sparing a glance at the corpse on the autopsy table and chuckling to herself.
“Boo,” commented Zeller, who did not at all seem concerned about the ghost of his murdered colleague walking and talking right in front of him. “What is this, NCIS? No unfunny jokes about the nature of our profession.”
“Hypo-crite,” interjected Price in a sing-song voice.
“Anyway,” continued Zeller, ignoring him. “Graham always looks like that. I think it's just what his face looks like.”
“Ha ha.” Will intoned drily as he suppressed the hysterical laugh bubbling up in his throat. He reached out a hand to steady himself against the wall, which was cool and solid against his palm. Not a hallucination. Or if it was, it was unlike any that Will had ever experienced. As the forensics team got back to work, Will bowed his head, closing his eyes in thought. Only one time had his hallucinations been fueled by wish-fulfillment. But even when he had imagined Abigail with him in Florence, he had known somewhere in the back of his mind that he was alone. That she was dead.
His eyes shot open as realization struck him with all the force of a physical blow. Not dead. Not anymore.
There was no saving Will. He was too far gone. He knew that when he dropped off that cliff. There was something dark inside him that ached for the beauty of violence and destruction. For the power it brought. Maybe Hannibal had brought it out in him. Maybe it had always been there. It didn’t matter. There was no battling it back any more.
But just because he couldn’t save himself didn’t mean he could do nothing. Beverly. Abigail. This time he would keep them safe. Protect them, as he should have done to begin with.
For a moment, when Hannibal walked through the door, all Will could see was the man as he’d last beheld him. His hair disheveled, his clothes stained with black blood. An awestruck tenderness in his eyes that Will had never known. Like he had just witnessed a miracle.
Will blinked and the vision dissipated. In its place stood an impeccably dressed man with an opaque but vaguely pleasant expression. He shook Will’s hand with the exact amount of firmness to be professional without coming off as domineering. Will remembered noting the first time they met how everything Dr Lecter did felt like a performance, if an extremely well practiced one. He could not have known how massive an understatement that would turn out to be.
Jack cleared his throat, and Will realized he had forgotten his boss was in the room. “Special Agent Will Graham, Dr Hannibal Lecter. Will, I’ve brought in Dr Lecter to help with a psychological profile. Please doctor, come take a look.”
Will needed to sit down.
Hannibal and Jack stood facing the evidence board, Hannibal in the center, and from Will’s vantage, all the threads on it pointed to him. Was every moment of Will’s life from this point forward to be laced with such obscene levels of dramatic irony?
“Tell me then,” said Hannibal, “how many confessions?”
“Twelve dozen last time I checked. None of them had any details. Until this morning. Then they all had details.” Jack moved to sit down across from Will at his desk, straightening his tie. "Some genius in Duluth PD took a picture of Elise Nichols’ body with his cell phone and shared it with his friends. Then Freddie Lounds ran it on Tattlecrime.com.”
Will scoffed. Good old Freddie. “Tasteless.”
“Do you have trouble with taste?”
Will couldn’t help a huff of laughter. He remembered this conversation, Hannibal gauging his responses, playing with him like a large cat. He remembered all of his time with Hannibal, every moment, whether he wanted to or not. “I find that lately, I have been forced to develop a tolerance for that which is not tasty.”
Hannibal was silent for a beat, almost as if he could sense the altered script. But as always, he recovered quickly. “One comes to tolerate that which one cannot keep out,” he noted as he examined the map more closely. “Tell me, Will, have you no effective barriers to ward off associations? No forts?”
“All entirely overrun, I’m afraid,” answered Will, taking a sip of his coffee.
Hannibal came to sit in the chair next to him. Will could hardly bear to look at the other man, sick to his stomach. Since he had woken up that morning, he had been staunchly avoiding thinking about the fact he would be seeing Hannibal again. Again and for the first time. His psyche simply couldn't handle it.
He was half afraid that he would fall right back into Hannibal’s gravity, slot right back into his role in their deadly waltz, their dual orbit around a single point of total annihilation.
He was half afraid he wouldn’t.
Now that he’d passed the event horizon once and come out the other side, Will didn’t know what he would do if he couldn’t step back into that same old dance, if his dance partner didn’t recognize him.
“Not fond of eye contact, are you?”
The question brought him back to reality, caused his eyes to finally shoot up to Hannibal’s own deliberately placid gaze, the only eyes that had ever seen him. Will was suddenly filled with a deep ache to be seen once again.
“Eyes are…distracting.” He trailed off before ripping his gaze away and started packing up his bag, exhaustion settling over him like a blanket. He was already sick of this performance.
“What are you doing?” Jack demanded as Will stood up.
“You’re wasting your time trying to psychoanalyze me, Jack. I’ll come back when you have actual work for me to do. Dr Lecter,” he nodded a goodbye at Hannibal, refusing to meet his eye again, and did not notice the man staring after him long after he’d left the room.