Chapter Text
“What did it feel like, when you killed him?” Dr. Lecter asks, sitting perfectly still and relaxed in his seat across from Will’s.
He’s having some trouble adjusting. Every time he sees Dr. Lecter now, his mind briefly supplies him a different image—a different face to own the voice attached to the words he sometimes hears and sometimes misses. Dr. Lecter’s been patient enough with him, and understandably rattled. Everything they went through with Garrett Jacob Hobbs dimmed the shock of his possession for all parties involved. It was, admittedly, not as private as perhaps the bewildered doctor would have liked, but he handled it and is handling it. Will felt, and feels, strangely proud of his composure.
Seeing Dr. Lecter so focused, calm, and quite nearly regal in his adulthood, for Will, is the most gracious, merciful thing God ever could have given him. Like a child crippled from birth later healed from his ailment, Hannibal Lecter exists for him as the splendid imago woven out of his most hopeful, unlikely dreams transformed into reality. It is a fitting consolation for what he lost in the doctor’s place.
“Will?”
“Hmm?”
Lecter leans forward so his elbows rest on his thighs. Will studies the round points his knees make through the pleated trousers and bounces his foot gently, restlessly. He doesn’t want to talk about Garrett Jacob Hobbs—not for pathological reasons; he just doesn’t want to talk about him.
It was a very pathological thing, the way he went out, Kamael had said to him the last time they really spoke. That was before he killed that nurse and all but forgot who Will was. That was before.
“Are you all right?” Dr. Lecter asks gently. There’s concern in his eyes, but he’s cool, aloof. Will likes him best that way. He can’t be leeched or conversely influenced. No push or pull in either direction. “Much has happened in the past few weeks, to both of us.” He checks Will’s face as if gauging for a tell. Will supposes he probably doesn’t find one because his next guess branches off into a slightly different direction, away from both of them: “Would you like to discuss Abel Gideon?”
Will swallows, the sound of it clicking dryly in the back of his mouth. He says, “There’s nothing to discuss.”
“Isn’t there,” Dr. Lecter asks without there really being a question or even a hint of doubt to the statement. “He was your friend.”
He thinks of the simultaneous wilt and craze in Kamael’s eyes the last time he went to see him so he could tell him about Abigail Hobbs. There was nothing there when Will tried to talk to him. He can’t speak in definite terms, but maybe nothing will ever be there again. Chilton took Arad in stride when it struck him. It stayed in his system for a meager stretch of time, and then the effects passed on, leaving him with something akin to aftershocks in the seconds following an earthquake. Whatever hit Kamael devastated him. It made him kill that nurse.
Will knows that’s what happened, though Chilton refused to tell him anything. He almost barred Will from the hospital entirely and would have if Jack had not been there. Matthew might have told him something, but he was nowhere to be seen, and the one time Will called him to ask, he didn’t answer the phone.
“I’m steadily convincing myself that he isn’t anymore,” Will answers, remembering that convention states he should reply to politely-worded questions. Never mind that he really would rather leave it alone. Vague conversation, though, he can manage. They have time to whittle down: twenty five minutes of it, to be exact. “I hear it said often that a person’s company is a reflection of his character. Do you think that’s true, Doctor?”
“Reflections measure only those things that we can see, and appearances can be deceiving. What is the fundamental difference between a volunteer at a homeless shelter and the homeless veteran to whom she serves dinner every evening? How do we judge one from the other?”
They’re rhetorical questions, but Will feels the need, still, to answer them. “Their individual histories and each person’s intentions,” he says quietly. “The difference is that they’re people, separate from their situations, whatever those may be.”
“If you feel this way, why worry what people will think of your alliance with an unsavory character? He never offended you the way it was taken for granted that he would.”
It wasn’t an offense, what happened to Kamael. He couldn’t be held accountable for it, but no one else could be either, not really. Will isn’t taking it like a personal blow. He can’t think of anything more selfish than to call what was done to his brother an attack on himself, the consulting agent, or on Mal’ak ha-Mashḥit, the fallen one. Jack wants him distanced from all that made him divine, but it’ll take some time and a hell of a lot more bargaining before he assimilates completely. He’ll find a way to be smart without being self-sacrificing; he’ll find a way to be compassionate without giving his whole heart away to someone who can’t possibly be trusted to keep it.
Whether it’s a man called Abel Gideon or a girl named Abigail Hobbs, whether it’s a creature born out of hell damned to run from him for all eternity…he can’t lose himself again. He can’t.
“Abel Gideon gave me a sense of what it was like to grow into this life, to accept it for what it is.” Will drops his eyes and slowly rubs his hands together. “That he couldn’t accept it after all is the thing that bothers me.”
Cautiously, though the details have been suggested to him before, Dr. Lecter says, “As you believe it, he was like you are.”
Will gives his doctor an unblinking look. “He was interfered with.”
Something quivers across Lecter’s face. It almost looks like fear, but it’s closer to revulsion, plain and simple. “Do you mean…like…?”
Will nods once, immediately sorry for not handling the matter with more finesse—that seemingly innate but actually learned skill humans so often must use when dealing with tender subjects. Emotion, he’s observed, can make people act out of turn. Will is angry, perhaps, but it isn’t Dr. Lecter’s fault. The same thing that hit Kamael hit him, too. No one had given him Ose’s name in association with the murder at Chilton’s hospital, but Will has abilities outside of those that the lightning left him intact with.
Ose hadn’t refrained from torturing and killing him like the others who were sent after him because of the mere fact of his identity or of the skin that was chosen for him. They’d done what they did because flesh didn’t matter to them.
The paramount variable to them had always been an intangible, viciously painful link much like the missing band that forever keeps two lashing chains wildly unanchored. Their paths ran like planetary bodies traveling along preordained orbits that never changed yet scarcely intersected in the course of their lives. And when they did clash, it was never with predictability. Someone always suffered for their stolen time, and the consequences were always grave. It was a thing that should never have come to pass.
Will is ashamed to even think it, but he wouldn’t trade the penance he served. If he could go back, he would own the empty, char-black silence that was his debt to pay. He would relive it again and again for as many lifetimes as he needed to if it meant going back.
It was the most beautiful, and the most horrific, time of his life. The scars had faded considerably, but he felt them still. There was no way he could forget what they felt like, raised on his skin long before the clamor of tanēhu and long before he knew what real pain was or how it could shatter a person from the inside out. He could remember, vividly, how that old touch felt, not weighted by ḫasīs like Kamael suspected. It was light, soothing; a provocation and a tantalizing invitation. It was sin, and God help him—God forgive him—but he loved it.
“It would seem I can no longer afford to be skeptical of your situation,” Dr. Lecter says softly, eyes lost somewhere over Will’s shoulder when he blinks out of his speckled memories that it would only heal him to forget. Lecter ignores or doesn’t notice Will’s attempt to catch his eyes.
Whether it’s Arad hanging around in his system or something Ose left with him, similar to the webs Barbas left with Chilton, Will can’t place. He’s foggy, a strange thing to see on his face, though Will hasn’t seen much of him, all told. The last image of Hannibal Lecter he had in his mind before dropping to earth and seeing him in the flesh was that of a young boy, freezing and half-dead somewhere in a Lithuanian wilderness.
The last time he saw Lecter’s face, he was a child, hollowed out and only just clinging to biological life. It was the first and last time he endeavored to murder outside of those sanctioned by the natural and divine laws that kept the ichor fresh within him. His calling was the thing that animated what which was lasting and eternal within him—fueled his whole universe and kept the quicksand around him from swallowing him whole.
He’d tried to murder that little boy in the snow—tried to save him from a future it didn’t seem he could find without his sister. But his order had been for the girl, Mischa. The boy, Hannibal, was none of his business. It was not his concern. He should not have interfered.
His calling should have driven his obedience. It was not his right to choose but to be chosen for others who were chosen. He had no right to Hannibal Lecter. Knowing he was out of line did nothing to stop him. It was the same thing that pushed him to pull the trigger on Garrett Jacob Hobbs. Saving someone else—showing another human being mercy, even if the ripples would follow him forever—was the right choice. Wasn’t it the right choice?
“How did you know that you would find him there, in Chilton’s hospital?” Dr. Lecter asks, disturbing the clanging well of Will’s thoughts that he’d fallen down like a rabbit hole—a reference he can make because of Jimmy’s reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to him in the hospital, which he’d begun to do in secret after he noticed Brian bringing books Will’s fourth week comatose.
Will thinks about how to explain the beacon Kamael made for him completely unwittingly and decides on drawing a comparison. He murmurs, “We were like two magnets.”
Lecter jumps on his description, which, inexplicably, tickles Will very much. “You mean you were attracted to him, as if there were a gravitational pull between you?”
“No, the other way around.” Will presses the point of his finger into the armrest thoughtfully. “He repelled me.”
Like the concept completely enraptures and intrigues him, Dr. Lecter leans forward in his seat and plants both feet on the floor. “Like heat from an enormous fire?”
“Ripples in a pond,” Will replies, almost sleepily. “The closer you are to the impact of the thing causing the waves, the more immediately it rushes into you, all resistance and blind momentum. It’s like the smoke that when it gets into your lungs you can only stagger back and gasp for clean air.”
“Fascinating.” Lecter almost smiles.
Will saves him the trouble and smirks down at his lap. “I could say the same thing about you.”
Now Lecter does smile, very small. “Me, Will, or the entirety of the human race?”
“Yes,” he answers because the only answer is yes.
Evenly but with a mild peppering of humility, Dr. Lecter says, “I wonder how you can believe that when there are beings who exist outside of our comfortable, tiny worlds that we know nothing at all about—when you have experienced so much that we could not even begin to comprehend.”
“You’ve encountered strife of your own.” Will ducks his head and bites his lip, thinking, wondering, daring himself to be brave, and daring himself not to think of it as bravery but as honesty and selflessness. It’s a challenge for him, still, to see past the sunken, catatonic face that burned its likeness into his memory for years. He musters up the courage to begin and then flees from the ledge, afraid—miserably and unforgivably afraid. “All of humanity has,” he adds, a clear cop-out, as Beverly would say.
How could he say to this man who had made something of himself and triumphed over the atrocity of his sister’s death that he, the one now sired Will Graham, had been the one to whisk her away from that short life they shared together? He had nearly been the death of Hannibal Lecter that morning when the soldiers discovered him dragging the evidence of his bondage with him in his vacant eyes, in the blood flaked under his nails, and in the hypovolemic shock he’d survived that any halfway competent doctor would have diagnosed as a complication brought about by severe dehydration.
He doesn’t think there’s a way to have that conversation. Even if there is, he isn’t sure he wants to have it. Someday, he’s hoping, he will be strong enough to risk destroying whatever rapport they manage to build for the sake of honoring Mischa Lecter’s memory. And anyway, the truth will out. At least he has always believed that, even as everything else he deigns to have faith in goes to shit, as Brian would say.
“I went to see Abigail yesterday,” Will mumbles, hopelessly floundering for a new topic and knowing he can trust this one to mean something to both of them. Judging by the spark of interest in Lecter’s eyes, his instincts are not misguided.
“Was she much the same as the last time you were there?”
“Yeah, the doctor couldn’t tell me much. I just sat with her for a while and read to her a bit.”
“What did you select for the visit?” Lecter asks, head tilting and lips twitching just a fraction into a curious smile.
Will looks away, hoping to hide the heat blossoming in his face and up his neck. He says, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.”
“Brian Zeller had that book with him the day you woke up,” Lecter supplies, probably not ignorant of Will’s red face but kindly not acknowledging it all the same. “Were you hoping for a repeat act of divinity from those angels still occupying heaven?”
“I woke up before he could finish it,” he explains, a wide smile stretching across his face. Will notes, with some odd, near pride, that Lecter’s eyes soften at the sight. Whispering, quite incidentally, he tells him, “I never had any friends up there.”
His eyes glint, strangely and conspiratorially. “Not even your Heavenly Father?”
“Is it a custom for parents to befriend their children, down here?” Will’s smile sharpens at the corners into a smirk. “That certainly isn’t traditional, even if it has become the norm.”
“Not many things that fill that slot adhere to tradition,” Lecter counters. “We must always change this arena we have claimed for ourselves, or we will never be able to accept that time can only remain the same, no matter what we do to make our experiences more unique.”
“I want that to be true,” Will says softly, “that time doesn’t change.”
And Lecter’s smile disappears, turns down into the smallest frown. “I believe it is true.”
“Speaking of time…”
The smile returns, more implied than outright and less polite than casually given out of distraction. “Yes. There is just enough left for me to see you out.”
Will rises and makes for the door. “Think there’ll come a day when there’s not enough time?”
“It is all illusory anyway. Man created time so he could keep it, just like he built the clock so he could contain the trick rather than learn its constructs and commit them to memory.” Lecter opens the door for him and stands to the side of it, his arm hidden by the lavish wood. He adds, “And besides, you are my final appointment for the day. From the moment you step into my office, the arbitrary cells we maintain comprised of hours, minutes, and seconds affect only us. The elapsed time is simply a charade we enforce by allowing it to govern our behavior.”
A few seconds tick by slowly, Will on the other side of the threshold with one foot over the dividing line and Lecter studying him from his place adjacent to the door. Will titters, hard pressed to call the sound he makes tittering, and his doctor cracks a smile, sharing with Will in the joke.
He can’t tell him the truth. There’s no doubt in his mind that Lecter would hate him if he knew, that telling him would only drudge up terrible memories of a history better off if left forgotten. But, maybe…?
Will knows a little something about hard truths and deep, traumatic wounds that don’t ever heal the right way. If Lecter knew something about Ose from the short time he’d been occupied by the smoke and ash being he can’t ever let go of even as he knows he’ll be forced to—if he had retained even a memory as Chilton had retained so much confused knowledge of Barbas to go so far as to think that Will was Ose…
“Wait,” he breathes, stopping the door with his palm when Lecter starts to shut it after Will’s back is turned. “Wait, I’m sorry, I…”
He hadn’t even thought to ask.
That first day in the hospital when he awoke and Lecter came into his room, the question hadn’t even entered into his mind. There he was, standing there, and Will couldn’t detect even a trace of Ose inhabiting him any longer. He’d felt something like a gaping hole in his chest, like the ground had been ripped out from under his feet. It was like being abandoned—it must have been what Ose felt when Will, then known to him intimately as Akh, had been yanked away and into the sky like a toy in a claw machine worth little more than a quarter to the one who took him out of their small, beautiful, disastrous life together.
Lecter must have had questions, too, though he never asked either. Maybe it just hadn’t occurred to him like it hadn’t occurred to Will. He should ask—he should…
The door opens wider, and Will’s hand slides down the polished wood as it goes. Lecter’s voice is concerned when he asks, “Will, what is it?”
“I…” His mouth goes dry. If he can’t be selfless, he should at least commit to honesty, to bravery. He swallows once and drops his hand to his sides, both of them balling into nervous, trembling fists. The cadence of his voice is panicked and nearly hysterical when he grits out in a stalled, but determined rush, “Do you remember anything, from…from when he used you to get to me?”
Dr. Lecter watches Will’s face with some foreign tenderness written clearly across his own, something dangerously akin to mercy in the worried set of his brow. He names the one Will called he: “Your Ose?”
My Ose, Will lets himself think, delighting for just a moment in the horrible thrill and ecstatic buzz it puts in and under his skin. It makes his muscles ache as if with exertion and forces his blood move quicker like a fast-acting drug injected directly into his veins. His fingers uncurl and his shoulders droop. He whispers, ashamed that he knows why he whispers this time, “Yes.”
Lecter blinks a few times and drops his gaze somewhere near Will’s throat, looking through him more than he’s looking at him. His fair eyebrows draw together, remembering, or maybe willing himself to forget.
“Will you come back inside?” he suggests, eyes still pointed low, nearer the vicinity of Will’s shoulder.
“Okay,” Will tries to say, though his throat only makes an awkward rasping sound in place of the first syllable and the second doesn’t get voiced at all. He nods instead and steps back through the doorway when the door into the office opens for him a third time.
“Would you care for a drink?” Lecter offers, already making for his desk. Will follows and nods yes when their eyes meet. He has a deep appreciation for wine already that everyone had, quite adorably, expected him to hate from the very first taste, and Lecter’s already picked up on his advanced palate. They have a kindred love for wine, it would seem. “Red or white?”
“Red, please.”
Dr. Lecter pours two glasses and brings one to Will. “Of course, you will not be billed for this time.”
Will tips his head gratefully and raises his glass. “To the illusion.”
“To the truth behind it,” Lecter toasts back, delicately clinking their glasses. “And all its consequences.”
He drinks, and Will does, too, eager but biting back his questions in favor of letting the silence smother his curiosity. Will follows Lecter to the window, and they look out together, the former at the latter’s shoulder and less than half a step behind him. The wine in his glass is almost purple, a bruised, lovely kind of red Will has seen so many places and so many lives before the fleeting, always shifting moment only capable of being called now.
“I remember darkness,” he hears murmured into the lip of Dr. Lecter’s glass. Will’s eyes flick down to track the movement of Lecter’s hand as it disappears quickly and jerkily into his pocket, fingers crushed into a tight, trembling fist. “I remember looking into your eyes when you spoke that name for the first time—not in Jack Crawford’s office; the very first time.”
Will sees Lecter blink once, hard, like he’s trying to get something out of his eye. He turns that concentrated expression on Will, and he looks perfectly amazed and confused and stunned at everything, at the impossibility of the thread in his possession. It is a key into the past and an open window that all he has to do to see through, is lean forward just a bit further and surrender his balance. The trade for wisdom has always been a loss of footing; a disruption of equilibrium to mimic the teetering scales measuring the natural order of things. Will watches Lecter cross that line with a slow, shivering kind of pleasure that he should not feel but absolutely, irrevocably does.
Dr. Lecter swallows once and says, “I was somewhere else, somewhere…half-wild with tropical heat and unrestrained energy coursing through the air, like waves of gasoline fumes washing over me except fresh, more…” Lecter drops his eyes, the two hazel-black rings searching the space between them for the memory to recreate itself so that both of them can see it. He shakes his head. “It was…more; more than I think I know how to describe.”
Will wants to teach him the word Arad or to tell him what Kamael said about ḫasīs, but Lecter wouldn’t know what he was talking about. They can talk about lore and logistics some other night. Tonight Will is being selfish. Maybe it’s what he’s best at. The time to care about it has come and gone.
“You looked just the same as you do on this night,” Lecter says in a small voice with a slight grimace on his face that Will understands perfectly, though he actively keeps himself from mirroring it. “And I saw—myself, or the person whose eyes I saw through, watching you.” He laughs wetly, eyes moving to stare out the window again as he takes a long drink of his wine. “You were looking for me, and you couldn’t see me. I was there, staring straight at you, and you couldn’t see me—” Dr. Lecter clears his throat. “I should say that he was staring straight at you, but you understand me well enough, I think.”
Will nods, not obtuse enough, unfortunately, to ignore the irony. How could he, even if Dr. Lecter makes no attempt to point it out to him. He’d failed to detect Ose in Jack’s office, too. They’d shaken hands, and Will wouldn’t have known him from Adam if his face hadn’t flickered for those few pivotal seconds and turned his world upside down.
“There are thoughts attached to the memory, but as they are in a language I do not speak, I couldn’t repeat them to you.” Lecter swishes the wine in his glass, upturned palm swiveling from side to side with the careful, slight movement. He nods his head with a petite bunching up of his shoulders. “I can tell you of the frustration attached to those thoughts.”
Will brings his eyes from the window. His mouth quivers, on the verge of laughter. “Frustration?”
“I think he wanted to be ruled by you,” he murmurs, closing his eyes and sucking in a breath to calmly clarify: “In much the same way that a warrior yearns for an honorable death on the battlefield by a worthy opponent.”
There’s a knot twisting painfully in Will’s stomach. He’s a selfish rot of a disgraced angel. Ose is every bit as selfish, rotten, and far from grace as Will has become in his decadence. Damn it all. It helps no one to pretend to be modest. Lecter watched him take a life even as he saved one. There’s no point in hiding something so innocent as curiosity. He’s beginning to wonder why he should hide anything from the people in his life anymore. They know his shame and his great, blasphemous pride. All that’s left is the long, persistent ache of delight he’s kept buried within himself like a resplendent treasure to be preserved for a generation not yet even born.
All this in mind, Will asks, “Is that the only way?”
Lecter doesn’t grow shy or embarrassed. He doesn’t interpret Will’s inquiry as crude or distasteful. He only looks curious. “Do you mean to ask if he harbored affection for you? Truly?”
Because he’s selfish and because he cannot let go of the past that ruined him and because he’s positive that there will be no other end for them than death at each other’s hand, he takes a deep breath, steels himself, and answers, “Yes.”
“All that I saw, Will…” Lecter shakes his head vaguely, shoulders lifting in a helpless shrug. “I couldn’t tell you one way or another.”
Will isn’t disappointed, not exactly. He’d expected as much, but it had felt worth it to at least try. “And in Jack’s office, do you remember anything about that?”
“Yes,” he murmurs, eyes drifting closed like the black of his eyelids will take the memory from him. “Something went into you. Part of it, part of that darkness…”
Will searches his face, but Dr. Lecter doesn’t open his eyes. “What do you mean?”
He starts to say something but stops, eyes fluttering open and pinning Will instantly. There’s awareness there, a razor sharp acuity that Will hadn’t been even peripherally concerned about but that now worries him deeply. Only worsening his tentative dread, Dr. Lecter remarks, flatly, “You knew what he was doing the moment it touched you, and you did nothing to stop him.”
“I couldn’t—I…”
They watch each other in a battle of wills. Taking a quick breath in and out, Will steps back, clutching his half-emptied glass too tightly but careful not to squeeze where he knows the bowl would snap under pressure. He’s prepared for a litany of stern reprimands and harsh warnings and judgment. But Dr. Lecter only looks…curious.
“There was nothing you could have done?” he fills in for Will when he makes no move to finish his aborted sentence. “You had no way to defend yourself in the state you were in?”
There’s a long list of excuses to which Will could plausibly lay claim. He would just have to name one, and Lecter would accept it for the truth, even if he knew perfectly well that it wasn’t. Will’s answer would not be challenged. He could leave now, flee the office he pleaded to be invited back into, and never again revive the subject for discussion. Lecter would let him. He would let him get away with his cowardice and his lies, and he wouldn’t ask if the loss of his wings when he fell deteriorated his backbone, too.
So Will chooses, as is his inalienable right, and manages to speak around the mess that his heart has devolved to, rampaging behind his ribs. He breathes, unsteadily, “I thought he would be there when I came to.”
“Do you believe he owed that to you?” Dr. Lecter asks carefully, clinically.
He’s obviously intrigued, but he’s keeping it light, which Will appreciates. It all feels less personal and unclothed when it’s treated this way, like something already revealed being aired out rather than something tightly bound in thick cloth stripped bare and left to freeze or be seized at will—a trauma quite identical to that of his fall. Will doesn’t look away. “I just thought he would want it, like I wanted it.”
Lecter’s eyebrows twitch down once. “This is the same individual you’ve told me any number of times that you mean to kill the next time you meet him. Even Jack Crawford and his team know of those intentions.”
“It isn’t personal, that we’ll end up dead soon.” Will shrugs, though it means everything in the world to him. “Everything else is—not just the possessions or the encephalitis or…or the abandonment.” He winces at the fragile break in the final word. Will takes a slow, patient sip of his wine, savoring the taste and inky glide of it over his tongue and murmurs, on a sigh, “Tenochtitlan.”
He feels Dr. Lecter’s nod behind him and finishes his wine in a few big, unwise gulps, dismissing it as a reward for being forthcoming, finally, with a single person. Between his emotional crisis in the hospital when Lecter allowed Will to muffle his pitiful weeping and moaning in the barrier he made of fabric and flesh, the Hobbses, and Kamael, Will hasn’t been able to hide from Dr. Lecter the way he’s taught himself to do with everyone else.
It’s a part of being human, or so he’d picked up, that there is a line between that which happens privately and that which happens publically. Ever since the hospital sent him home with Lloyd, he’s learned to withhold the better parts of himself until they’ve been earned.
Beverly didn’t like it, and it about broke Lloyd’s heart once he started to notice Will’s withdrawal, but they didn’t try to take it from him. He thinks they understand how important it is for him to make decisions of his own, to be the king of his own life as much as he feasibly can. Jack supports the move, and Alana supports Will. He’s come to think of Dr. Lecter as the neutral space between them: between Jack and Alana, and between Will and them—a buffer, a thing of safety rather than restriction.
“You’re convinced that your deaths are the only outcome; you speak as if they are, in fact, inevitable.”
“I believe they are,” Will says quietly, setting his drained glass down gingerly atop a loose stack of papers on Dr. Lecter’s desk.
Matching his tone, Lecter asks, “Can you be so certain?”
“With Ose?” Will smiles, an almost beatific swell settling over and inside him. “Never.”
“Tell me, Will,” Dr. Lecter says, striding evenly away from the window toward and around his desk so that he’s in front of Will again. “Is that what attracted you to him in the first place?” A short silence drifts up between them like mist, and the doctor clears his throat. “I don’t mean to cross a line in asking, but we established previously that appearances are deceiving. I’m only curious as to what you see when you look in the mirror at your reflection.”
Tiredly, Will asks, “Lately, Doctor?”
“Now; seven hundred years ago; a thousand.” Dr. Lecter studies him for a few seconds and says, “Yes.”
The answer teases a smile onto Will’s face. In the spirit of that connection—even if it isn’t the point along two celestial tracks where one star can chance colliding with another star—he replies, “Garrett Jacob Hobbs, a foolish infant of a man, and something I can only describe as clumsily Pleistocene.”
“Lethal and overlarge?” Dr. Lecter asks readily.
Will laughs, “Vaguely mammalian.”
Dr. Lecter ducks his head, a smile playing on his lips that makes Will feel warm right in his stomach. It reminds him of Matthew Brown and his unconventional kindness, and it reminds him of Alana Bloom asking him what kind of love he felt for Ose: Agape or Eros.
He glances at his watch, not wanting to spoil this night while he’s still ahead—a funnily nuanced thing Brian taught him to appreciate his second night out of the hospital when the team took him out for dinner.
“It’s late,” he announces softly, half-wishing that it weren’t. “I’ve still got a drive ahead of me. I should go.”
“Do come back if your ride hasn’t arrived,” Dr. Lecter says, just as accommodatingly as Will ever expects him to be.
“Yeah, thanks.” Will nods, walking back with Lecter toward the door. “And…thank you, for telling me.”
“It wasn’t my truth to tell,” he argues, keeping his expression neutral but soft. “Perhaps you shouldn’t drive tonight.”
“Diligence, Doctor?”
Dr. Lecter smiles and opens the door for the fourth time tonight. “Naturally. Good night, Will.”
“Good night.”
The air outside is crisp and cool with lingering accents of heat simmering upward from the sun-warmed concrete underfoot. Will looks around the adequately lit car lot and fishes the phone Beverly bought him out of his pocket. It’s strange and too-small, and his fingers haven’t adjusted to the touch screen yet, but she insisted he learn to navigate the interface for ease of use later. He calls Lloyd when he doesn’t see his car anywhere on the property.
“Will, hey. Appointment run late?”
He hears something sizzling noisily in the background, and his mouth waters. He hadn’t eaten anything before driving Lloyd’s car to Dr. Lecter’s practice, and Lloyd probably hadn’t started dinner until a little while ago since he had to drive back after dropping him off. Will connects the dots and murmurs, “Just a little bit later than usual. Do I need to call a cab?”
“Oh, no, I asked Matthew if he’d bring you home.”
Will frowns. He hadn’t spoken to Matthew since before the nurse was killed in Chilton’s hospital. He sighs, put out by association. “Isn’t that an imposition?”
“I bribed him with dinner,” Lloyd protests. “He likes steak; I’m making steak. He also likes you, and what do you know, you’re going to be home tonight—well, in approximately forty five minutes if you drive like a maniac, which you do, by the way.”
“No, I don’t,” Will complains, using Lloyd’s tone right back at him. “It’s not helpful to either of us that you encourage his attentions, Lloyd.”
“He’s a grown man, William,” Lloyd chides him in an overly pretentious, dramatic voice. “The minute you start protesting for yourself, I will back off.”
Will opens his mouth and thinks of how to respond when he sees headlights sliding toward him from up the street. He recognizes Matthew’s car from a ways off, eyes struggling in the dark.
Sounding far too pleased with himself, Lloyd teases, “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”
“He’s here. Don’t start without us. I’ve been told that’s rude.”
“It is, and I wouldn’t dream of it.” There’s a pause. Will hears footsteps and claws scratching on the floorboards. “Hey, Will, if you had a problem with him being around, you’d tell me, right? If it made you uncomfortable, I mean.”
“Yes, Lloyd.” He steps off the sidewalk and waves his free hand when Matthew brings the car around. “We’ll be home in a bit.”
“Be safe, Willy.”
“You can’t call me William and Willy in the same night,” Will tells him irately as he’s rounding the front of the car and opening the passenger side door. Over the hood of the car he sees the blinds of Dr. Lecter’s office window shiver. “Goodbye, Lloyd.”
“Hmm,” he hums, sensitive still about farewells and justifiably so.
“Hey, Will. You don’t want to drive tonight?” Matthew leans a bit to one side to look up at Will. “Lloyd said you were learning.”
“I am,” he concedes, sliding into his seat and tucking the cell phone daintily into the front pocket of his jeans. “We had wine with therapy tonight.”
“Sounds rich,” Matthew muses, sounding warm and amused and nice, after not hearing from him for a while.
He turns the key and switches gears. Apparently he thought Will’s phone call would take longer than it did. His car runs smoothly enough, though the engine doesn’t rev proudly like Beverly’s or purr contentedly like Alana’s. It’s a healthy cross between the two and doesn’t stall or chug. Matthew freezes up a bit, timidity creeping into his demeanor. “Lloyd invited me for dinner. Is that okay?”
Will nods and tries for a smile that comes naturally enough. “Yeah, it’s fine.”
They drive for about fifteen minutes with the radio turned down but audible on some whimsical Jazz station. Will keeps his eyes trained out the window and slumps in his seat, hanging onto the barely there wisps of intoxication nudging at his senses. Right after they get off the exit, Matthew takes the car to a well-lit supermarket just off the turn and maybe a ten minute drive out from Lloyd’s house.
Matthew checks their surroundings and gauges Will’s expression before killing the engine, slow with his hands and wearing an innocent look on his face. In a voice that doesn’t sound like his own, he tells Will, “I’m sorry I didn’t take your call.”
“There were extraordinary circumstances. You were under a lot of pressure.”
Matthew shakes his head. “It was…I couldn’t believe that he did it. After Chilton, I thought it—that it left him, but he killed her. He had no idea that he did it, even. You saw him after. He wasn’t even there. Chilton’s beside himself, just a Goddamn wreck.”
“Has anything changed with him?” Will asks of Abel Gideon.
“Some days he gets a few minutes, but it’s like talking to a dementia patient. He’s never lucid long enough to have a real conversation. The short bursts of coherency that find him ruin him all over again, every time.”
Will swallows and lays his head back against the seat, eyes pinching shut and staying that way for as long as the silence between them stretches. There’s rain outside, just enough for there to be a gentle pat-pat-pat of tiny raindrops hitting the windshield. He thinks it’ll stop by the time they get to the house with how gentle it is.
“It was Ose,” Matthew says in a tiny, confidential voice. His eyes are wide and shiny but unseeing. When he speaks again after a long pause he sounds much younger than Will knows he is. “Gideon…when it had him, he…”
Will sighs quietly and murmurs, “I know.”
“He called you Barbas,” he whispers, searching Will’s face with his scared, bewildered eyes. “He said you’re not Will Graham but that you’re Barbas. He said not to trust you. Why did…why did he single you out?”
Will watches him, weary and heavy with a resigned kind of sadness emphasized by relief. Matthew doesn’t believe the lie that was fed to him. He believes Will, though he was warned not to. Softly, gratefully, he says, “I think it was more for Chilton’s benefit than for yours that he said it.”
Matthew bites his lip and looks away. “Who are you, really?”
“It’s not who I am.” Will shakes his head when Matthew gives him a brief, bewildered glance. “It’s what I was.”
There’s a charged, oddly intense moment where Will feels like he might fall out of the car and onto the cold, wet ground. It’s strange to think that Matthew could have any kind of power to make him feel that way without doing anything to reinforce the reaction. If he asked, right now, for a deeper, more comprehensive history, Will would give it to him. He would lay it all out and leave it for Matthew to believe or deny as he chose—because there is always a choice, and if Will is given the opportunity to decide for himself he will extend that privilege to Matthew as well.
But Matthew surprises him, maybe both of them, judging by the expression on Matthew’s face, and asks instead, “Barbas? Ose?”
“They’re different, but not in the way that I’m different,” Will explains, patient about his words and cautious of all the various things they could mean. “They’re like bacteria, and we’re like the fruits collected at harvest. We fall when we’re overripe, and they grow opportunistically whenever given the chance for life.”
“What does that make us?” Matthew asks shakily, wrapping his head around the far oversimplified model Will has given him.
Speaking as gently as he can, Will tells him, “It makes you human.”
Matthew nods, breathing out a shaky exhale and drumming trembling fingers on the steering wheel. “Okay.”
“Death follows me like a disease. That was the case even before the vine rejected me.”
“Why did it reject you?” Matthew gives him a wary look out the corner of his eye. “What made you overripe?”
Will opens his mouth and drops his eyes, feeling unprecedentedly guilty at the answer. “I made…a mistake.” He cringes at what feels significantly less substantial than the truth. “The punishment fits the crime, and I’m still…struggling to see it as a mistake.”
Matthew cracks a sad smile, the sheen of tears in his eyes making his face look vulnerable and innocent. “You’d be more bacteria than human if you never had second thoughts about the bad things you’ve done.”
He searches Will’s face, and the corners of his eyes wrinkle just a little bit at whatever it is that he finds there. It puts Will at ease in a way he almost can’t explain but that he’s felt too often with his new friends not to draw comparisons, although it’s different now—the fleeting, always shifting now. Lloyd gives him safety, and Beverly gives him care; Jack gives him security, and Alana gives him compassion; Jimmy and Brian give him laughter. Kamael gave him knowledge. Dr. Lecter gives him clarity. Abigail Hobbs gives him purpose.
And then Matthew. Will blinks and clears his throat around a giddy, breathless chuckle. “I thought you had a proclivity for dangerous men because you enjoyed the risk, but that’s not it at all, is it?”
Matthew’s expression doesn’t flicker. His face stays just the same, and Will is…so happy that it does.
Because he’s amazed and because he’s thinking about reflections, he remarks, “All you want is to help.”
He holds Will’s eyes for a few long, admittedly enjoyable seconds and then closes his eyes, a weak smile twitching over his mouth. Matthew murmurs, “I’m no saint.”
“I know.”
Will watches Matthew nod once to himself and then open his eyes, hand going for the key and turning it. “Lloyd’ll be waiting to eat right about now.”
“He said he made steak for you,” Will tells him in a soft, casual voice. “I think he enjoys having you around.”
Matthew huffs a laugh and turns the radio up a bit louder but not enough to discourage conversation. “Lloyd’s a good guy.”
“Yeah, he is.”
They drive for a while on the darkened back roads, and Matthew turns his head toward Will without taking his eyes off the road—a gesture Will likes as he doesn’t feel quite so endangered that way. He says, only just speaking above the music, “You’re a good guy, too. Everybody makes mistakes.”
He doesn’t tell Matthew how much he enjoyed what he did, but there doesn’t seem to be any need for further explanation. Matthew understands well enough. He understands and demands nothing in return. They don’t speak again.
Lloyd is standing on the porch with a beer when they drive up to the house. The cage they use to take Winston to the vet is out, and there’s a dog inside it with predominantly dark brown fur and a smattering of white down the chest and one arm. Will makes a beeline for the cage with a bewildered expression on his face and his hand out to Lloyd in a silent question.
“Found her wandering the highway while the two of you conspired to starve me,” he says in the way of an explanation, shrugging when Will looks at him. Matthew has an entertained look on his face, eyes trained on the mysterious new dog.
“Her? Are we keeping her?”
“She’s friendly.” Lloyd nods his head toward Winston (Churchill). “He doesn’t mind her too much.”
“What’ll her name be?”
“I don’t know. Thought I’d leave it with you. Anyway, we should eat. I can make you guys plates and bring them out back? If you can just take her and the cage around to the back porch? I’ll bring Winston inside with me.”
“Yeah, I got the cage,” Matthew volunteers, raising one hand and approaching the cage with a healthy amount of caution but not enough to set the lovely canine on edge. He leans down to offer his hand and smiles serenely when she gives him a cursory sniff. “Got a leash?”
Lloyd hands it off. “Yep. Will? Can you take her?”
“Absolutely.” He introduces himself to the dog as Lloyd walks into the house and calls Winston after him. The beautiful brunette trots happily out of the cage when Matthew opens the door. She lets Will attach the leash to the collar Will recognizes as Winston’s unofficial “out-in-public” collar without kicking up any kind of fuss.
Matthew lifts the cage easily, the thin, short sleeves of his shirt neither strained nor dwarfing the swell of muscles in his arms—and what of it that Will notices? They walk in step with each other as they take the new dog around the side of the house.
“You’re good, too,” Will tells him quietly while Lloyd continues to move around in the kitchen getting their food. He smiles when Matthew does and works on teaching the brown dog at his feet to shake his hand.
It’s a good night to come home to family, even if he did miss a gorgeous winter. He’s sure where he wasn’t before that there will be more of them for him to see. Where he used to be relieved that he would meet an end sooner rather than never, the knowledge presently fills him with bittersweet sadness. That melancholy is saturated with a delirious, winded happiness that he gets to be alive at all.
Will guides the dog back into the cage when he sees Lloyd gathering silverware and sits in one of the three chairs Matthew pulled out while Will had his hands full lavishing attention on their guest, whose name Will is still trying very hard to find. He thinks of names that feel like home and homecoming, names that make an old soul feel young and rejuvenated.
Matthew sits on his right, leaving the one on Will’s left free for Lloyd. He reaches over and brushes his knuckles along Will’s arm, eyes trained fondly on the dog Will looks away from to look at him. Matthew swallows once, eyes looking glossy again but not with the frightened sheen of wild, helpless tears. He smiles and squeezes Will’s arm. Will’s mouth drops open just a fraction, and he says, “Penelope.”
The gleam in Matthew’s eyes dances, like a small but brilliant flame licking a black canopy of night sky. “Why?”
“Because when Odysseus comes home after losing his ship and his men, he still had his wife.” Will licks his lips, all of his attention honed in on the relaxed weight settled on his arm, even as his eyes don’t falter for a second. “He still had Penelope.”
Matthew’s hand falls gently into his lap, his easy, slightly splayed posture putting Will at ease, too. “Did you read about it like everyone else, or did you see it from your tree?”
“A little bit of both.” Will smirks and stands to get the door for Lloyd when he hears him trying to lever it open with his hip. “Her name is Penelope.”
“Classic,” Lloyd notes with an obvious twitch of his eyebrows that makes Will roll his eyes, which in turn causes Lloyd to pout. “I’m hilarious. Get my plate for me, please?”
Will heads inside and fumbles in the fridge for the pitcher of unsweetened iced tea Lloyd taught him to make just last night. Matthew says something that gets a booming laugh from Lloyd, and Will smiles to himself, taking a minute to lean against the counter and preserve this quiet, domestic night in his mind for the eventual wreckage that will come to splinter what’s left of him.
He wonders if Odysseus took his time to treasure small comforts after hearing Tiresias’ prophecy—if he took stock of all his men’s faces and if he took extra care to remember their little eccentricities and quirks, knowing perfectly well that they would be taken from him.
And how much more precious Penelope must have been to him, then. How precious she always must have been.
How very lucky Odysseus was to have known, to have always known, before the storm hit, that she would save a place for him in their home and be there for him when he survived the hell their gods inflicted upon him.
Will takes Lloyd’s plate outside and doubles back for the pitcher and plastic cups. He eats his steak and lets Matthew and Lloyd converse around them. Since their first meeting, the two of them have grown much more comfortable in their interactions with each other—or Matthew has. Lloyd is always comfortable, with most people, which Will likes, even if sometimes he finds it a little bit confusing.
Lloyd and Matthew are friends, maybe, or something at least more exclusive than acquaintances, which is good enough for Will, for now. Even if he doesn’t know who will be there on the other side of the flames once he’s done whatever it is he must do before he is free, he doesn’t have to leave them alone.
Winston sniffs at Penelope’s tail a few yards off where they left the cage. Matthew spills tea on himself, and Lloyd squawks when a bug flies up his nose. Will loves them, the dogs and the humans and the trees whispering around them and the dead stars overhead and so far out of reach. He loves his mistakes and his shortcomings and his good deeds and his triumphs. His sin and his good intentions and his corruptibility make him more like humans than bacilli, more like a person than a beast.
When Lloyd skips inside to switch the fork he dropped for a clean one, Will reaches over and squeezes Matthew’s forearm right beneath his elbow where the skin curves outward with firm, relaxed muscle. Matthew brushes his fingertips over the back of Will’s hand and drops his hand back into his lap. A few seconds later Will returns to his food.
Lloyd comes back outside and sets his fork down, jostling his steak knife off the worn wooden table and onto the floor in the process. Will just barely hears Lloyd cursing under his and Matthew’s combined laughter.
He loves them, fiercely, and with the certainty and clarity that no matter what happens to separate them, nothing will ever change the fact that he does. It’s enough to love them. It’s enough that they can have this happiness now, right now, even as one moment tumbles into the next and the future constantly rolls back into their ever-growing past and elusive present.
Matthew nudges Will’s foot under the table when Lloyd ducks into the house again. Will nudges him back, aware of what he’s doing and unafraid of it.
To the truth behind the illusion, and all its consequences.
Matthew maintains a polite distance, and Lloyd comes back to the table, excessively careful about setting his knife down on the safe side of his plate that isn’t near an edge. The bugs hum in the trees, and Will thinks about winter and the summertime that will precede it.