Chapter Text
Guilt burrows like a worm through Jack Crawford's gut as he stares at the limp body of Dolarhyde. It's not an unfamiliar feeling - quite the opposite, in fact. It became an almost daily occurrence in his life after pulling Will Graham back into the field.
He sighs and forces his eyes away from the Dragon, skirting them up towards the edge of the bluff. Will's blood stains the stone there, as confirmed by forensics; far too much of it to be healthy. Hannibal Lecter's blood gathers there too. There is no trace of them left, aside from Will's gun and Lecter's jacket, but Jack already knows, with a sinking heart, exactly what happened.
He doesn't want to think about it, but he can see it play over and over in his mind, like an old-fashioned film reel behind his eyes. Jack suddenly understands how Will must have felt, gazing at crime scenes.
Jack catches himself, realises that he's been thinking of Will in the past tense again, and tells himself to stop it. There's no evidence yet to prove that Will is anything but alive.
Delaying the inevitable... a voice whispers in his mind. Jack shakes it away. It sounds eerily like Bella.
It's his fault. It was Will's plan, yes, but Jack agreed to it, Jack allowed it to happen, and now it's all backfired. Jack should never have allowed it. He should have listened to Alana.
The only consolation is that Lecter is presumed dead too. Jack can see it all in his mind's eye: the pair of them take Dolarhyde down, Lecter lunges for Will, Will tries to throw him off...and they both tumble over the cliff. It's the only explanation that makes sense to Jack. Will wouldn't have walked away from this. At least, not the Will that Jack knows.
He is startled out of his gruesome reverie by the apparition of Jimmy Price at his elbow. Price looks pale, which is unusual. He is accustomed to murder scenes, even those as bloody as this.
"What?" Jack snaps, guilt gnawing at his very soul. Price's expression doesn't change.
"You might want to come and see this," he says.
"See what?" Jack asks, but Price is already walking towards Jack's car. Reluctantly, Jack follows.
"Where are we going?" he says, slipping behind the wheel. Price is fidgeting nervously in the passenger seat, which is as odd as his paleness. He refuses eye contact. It's almost like having Will back in his car, Jack catches himself thinking, before mentally admonishing himself.
"Follow the road until we hit the bend," Price tells him. His jaw is set.
Jack starts the car and begins driving before he says, "Are you going to tell me what this is about, or not?"
Price shakes his head. "It's, uh, better if you see."
They drive in silence the rest of the way. Jack takes a right at the bend in the road, and the path he follows leads down to the sea. There's a cove here, he remembers - a sandy one. They'd passed by it on the frantic drive up to Will's last recorded location.
Jack had, of course, installed a tracer into Will's phone. He didn't want to have a repeat of Florence. (It had happened anyway, though - Will missing, presumed dead, possibly in Hannibal Lecter's clutches, and Jack left out of the loop.)
Jack drives down towards the cove, both guilt and nerves churning in his stomach. He isn't sure if he's prepared for what Price is taking him to see. He's not even sure if he wants to be. Perhaps horror will banish guilt from his heart, if only for an hour. An hour is all he needs to re-erect his defences.
The sheer cliff faces that frame the cove are gleaming with flashing red and blue lights; an ambulance is parked there, as are two police cars and an unmarked vehicle that Jack is certain belongs to the FBI. People swarm like ants around him as he parks and gets out of the car, beginning to jog across the sand to the centre, leaving Price behind him. He's not sure what he's hoping to find.
What he finds is a body, except it's a wet and bedraggled body, heart still beating, lungs still breathing. It's a pale and too-still lump of a body, and it's bleeding like a burst star all over the sand, but it's alive and it's there and Jack knows it so, so well.
Relief catapults through Jack's veins, even as the paramedics load the body into the ambulance, attaching an oxygen mask to its face, pulling a blanket over its soaking frame. Although fear still beats a warning tattoo in Jack's head, he almost smiles.
It's Will Graham.
***
This is all your fault, Alana doesn't say, sending a death-glare in Jack's direction. She hopes he gets the message anyway. Her mother once told her that if looks could kill, Alana would be a serial killer. Alana agrees. She feels that, given the time and the resources, she could put the Chesapeake Ripper out of business.
Alana stifles a wry smile at that. She wonders briefly what Hannibal would think.
The noise of the hospital grates on Alana's nerves, but she's developed an immunity against it over time. She turns her thoughts away from fantasies of killing Jack Crawford, and instead pictures Margot and their three-year-old, waiting at home for her. She misses them both terribly. It's just one more thing to blame Jack for.
"This is all your fault," Alana hisses at Jack, deciding against composure. Margot would probably approve anyway, she decides, and it's not like Will would care, even if he were awake.
Jack looks up from where he's been staring morosely at Will's pallid face. "It was Will's idea."
The heart machine beats steadily next to Alana's chair, the only indication, other than the slight rise and fall of his chest, that Will Graham is still alive.
His face is a mess: he's got a knife wound in his cheek and a fractured skull from where, presumably, he hit a rock on the cliff face. His collarbone is patched up too, as is his back, and Alana can't help but notice other scars. A bullet wound, courtesy of Jack. Another bullet wound just a centimetre away (Alana's since learned it was from a woman named Chiyoh). An old stab wound to the shoulder from Will's police force days. And, of course, the centrepiece to the table, the main course of Will's collection: a long and jagged crescent of scar tissue, stretching right across his abdomen in a grisly smile.
It draws the eye like a well-placed vase. Hannibal would have liked it.
Hannibal has probably gloated over it.
Alana scowls at Jack over Will's prone head, forcing her eyes past the ventilator tube taped into his mouth, past the bandages that swathe far too much of his body. "I know it was Will's idea, Jack."
He shrugs. Alana contemplates stabbing him with a scalpel. "He knew the risks."
"So?" says Alana incredulously. "That didn't mean you had to listen to him!"
"We had to catch Dolarhyde," Jack says, sounding as if he's trying to convince himself. "It was the only way."
"There were other ways." Her voice, embarrassingly, nearly trembles with her anger. "There were other ways, Jack, and you know it."
"He presented a compelling argument."
Alana is furious now. She wishes Margot were here to back her up. She wishes that her child were here, too - she wants nothing more than to run her hands through his hair, to inhale his warm, real scent. Instead, she compromises by brushing her hand across Will's thick, untameable locks, which lie limp on his forehead.
"Tell me, Jack," she says quietly, "if Will jumped off a cliff, would you jump too?"
Jack flinches, and Alana, briefly, feels a little guilty at her choice of wording. Then she hardens her heart, and wonders if she could get away with strangling the man with her visitor's lanyard.
She is beyond pissed at Jack, has been ever since he failed his promise not to let Will get too close. She is angry at him, but is, truth be told, angrier at herself. Will is a fighter outnumbered fifty to one, the only one in his corner, and he is tiring, has been tired since the day he was born. Alana should have been there for him. She should have fought harder for him.
Their gazes lose energy and droop like faded flowers to the man lying between them on the hospital bed. Will seems too still like this, too quiet. Alana is used to him twitching, looking away, fidgeting with his glasses - which, rescued from the house on the cliff top, now lie, inert, on the bedside cabinet. The last time Alana saw Will lying this still, he was being treated for encephalitis...something else that she should have noticed.
Alana sighs and pulls her hand away from where it has been drifting, automatically, for Will's arm. The guilt is eating into her heart, her muscles, her bones. In a fruitless effort to cheer herself up, she considers stabbing Jack with the IV pole...until she recalls the Wound Man, something else Hannibal was behind, and stops.
They are quiet for a moment. Jack is probably calculating exactly when he can get Will back in the field. Alana is picturing Margot and their son. They fill her with something akin to peace.
Suddenly, a shrill, rapid beeping cuts through the air, and Alana jerks fully upright in alarm. The heart monitor next to her is registering an rapidly quickening pulse, and when Alana glances back to Will, she realises that he's starting to shake - small, quick tremors, almost invisible to the naked eye.
She looks to Jack in alarm, to find her concern mirrored on his face. They stare down at Will again, who's beginning to shiver more violently, his throat working. Even his eyelids are trembling.
Will's eyes snap open, and Alana feels nearly blinded by the bright blue of his irises. He tries to sit up, his eyes wide and panic-filled, and that's when Alana realises that he's frantically gagging against the ventilator tube in his throat. He reaches up to tear at it, and Alana and Jack both grab his shoulders, pushing him back onto the mattress as a doctor swings through the door.
The doctor takes the situation in in one well-practiced glance, strides over, and pulls the tube out in one swift tug. Will gasps like he's drowning, and Alana feels guilt, guilt, nothing but guilt rip up her lungs and her arteries.
"It's ok, Will, it's ok, it's me, it's Alana," she soothes, realising she sounds as if she's soothing her son after a nightmare.
"Alana?" Will croaks, and, in a movement so unfamiliar to her that it feels alien, he locks eyes with her for what could be the first time ever. And, in this moment, Alana feels like they've finally connected again.
***
Will feels like shit. Not even regular shit - that would imply that he still felt somewhat whole and unblended. No, Will feels like shit that's been through several digestive systems, a fan, a tub of acid and an atomic bomb. He hasn't felt this bad since the encephalitis.
He sighs and scratches the skin around his IV needle. He's taken it as a good sign that he's allowed to sit up today, even though his back and shoulder scream at any prolonged movement, and smiling makes his face sting like crazy. His cheek, he's been informed, is probably going to scar. Will doesn't mind. He supposes it'll stop people trying to look him in the eye.
Will's actually a bit surprised he's still alive, to tell the truth. He'd thought it was the end when he hurled himself and Hannibal Lecter off a cliff.
Can't live with him, can't live without him. And wasn't that so true?
The doors squeals open, and Jack Crawford enters. Will represses a groan. He's been dreading this discussion since the day he woke up in hospital.
"Hello, Will," Jack says, seeming much more subdued than Will's used to - although he could still be high off the morphine.
"Hi, Jack," he gets out. His throat feels like sandpaper.
Jack gives him a smile and takes a seat by the bed. "You're looking better since I last saw you."
Will snorts derisively, and immediately regrets it as pain shoots through his face. "I look and feel like shit," he informs Jack, who offers a wry grin.
"Falling off a cliff will do that," he says.
"Yeah, it does." Will suppresses a wince. "So, what's it to be?"
"What's what to be?" Jack asks.
Painfully, Will raises a stiff eyebrow. "Don't play dumb, Jack, you know what I mean. Is this a statement or a discussion?"
"Why can't it be both?" Jack asks carefully, shifting in his seat. Will doesn't even need to look to know that Jack is preparing to record the conversation. He can't be bothered to protest.
"Let's just get on with it," Will mutters, tipping his head back to rest against the pillows. He feels exhausted before they've even begun.
Jack shrugs. "Alright," he says, and leans forwards. Will tries not to tense. "Can you tell me what happened on the night Francis Dolarhyde died?"
And so Will tells him. Every last detail.
Almost.
"...but before I could get to my gun, he turned around and stabbed me in the face," Will recites dispassionately, resisting faint amusement at Jack's slightly nauseated expression.
"He threw me through the window. I pulled the knife out of my face...stabbed it into his leg, trying to get him off me. He pulled it out, stabbed me in the chest, just under my collarbone."
Jack winces. Will pauses, not quite sure he wants to relive the next part.
"Go on, Will," Jack prompts. So Will does...with some minor redressing.
"Hannibal jumped on Dolarhyde, and bit his neck. I pulled the knife out of my shoulder, threw it to Hannibal, and he stabbed Dolarhyde in the belly. And then the Dragon died, in glory, just like he'd always wanted."
Will feels a certain amount of guilt, lying about Hannibal like this. Then he remembers Abigail dying under his hands, and the sensation of Hannibal cutting into his head with a cranial saw...and the guilt magically vanishes. What's one more murder to Hannibal's list?
Then Will remembers that Hannibal is probably dead, and he feels abruptly guilty all over again.
"But what about the cliff?" Jack asks. Will takes in a breath.
"Hannibal...attacked me. We'd got to the cliff edge by then, and I realised that..." Will trails off, before saying, "I knew he was going to kill me. So it was together, or not at all."
"Together, or not at all," Jack echoes thoughtfully.
Will is lying so much he half-expects his tongue has turned black. He knows damn well why he threw them both off that cliff, and it wasn't because Hannibal Lecter attacked him.
No, Will leapt off that cliff because he was afraid, if he stayed with Hannibal, of what he might become.
A murderer.
A psychopath.
Or, as Hannibal would put it, an artist.
Will can't deny to himself that he enjoyed the power he felt, slaying the Dragon. But, despite it all, he doesn't want to feel it again. It's like coming off a heroin addiction; it was great during the high, but now Will looks back on it, he recognises it for what it was: ugly.
Killing, he remembers telling Abigail Hobbs, is the ugliest thing in the world.
And it is. But when Hannibal did it, it became beautiful. And now Will finds himself missing Hannibal with a keening ache, more than he ached for him even before Molly and Walter. He doesn't feel that he can go back to them now. He doesn't feel that he knows what he wants anymore.
"Thank you, Will," Jack says now, pulling Will back into the present with a jolt.
"No problem," Will replies quietly, his throat beginning to feel hoarse. It's been like that ever since the damn ventilator tube.
Jack pauses. "Just one more thing..."
Will nearly groans. "Yes?"
"People suspect you," Jack tells him bluntly. Will appreciates bluntness. "You fake-helped Lecter escape. You were there at Dolarhyde's murder. You somehow survived falling off a cliff. People are going to talk. And sooner or later, they're going to star thinking that you and Lecter were working together."
Will bites his lip. Jack sighs.
"You were on a suicide mission, weren't you?" he asks, but it isn't really a question. "You knew from the start that you might not make it back. You told us to ruin your reputation. You threw yourself off that cliff. You knew, didn't you? You knew."
Will leans back, and a tear prickles his eye. It's the first that hasn't been a product of pain since before the fall.
"Yes," he says. "I did."
Jack shakes his head. "Jesus, Will."
When Will doesn't respond, he gets to his feet and pats Will's calf. He's been avoiding Will's shoulder like the plague. "I'll see you soon, alright?" he says. "Alana's coming to visit tomorrow."
Then he leaves, the door squealing shut behind him, and Will's left running his fingers over the scar on his belly, his ears full of the ghost of Hannibal Lecter.
***
"You are such an idiot," Alana informs Will, the second he opens his eyes.
"Good to see you too," he croaks wryly, emerging from his doze, and Alana pulls him into a gentle hug. She pulls away hurriedly, though, when Will hisses in pain. His stitches have yet to come out, and they still sting like crazy.
Alana sits in the chair by his bed; the same chair she sat in when Will first woke up. Her face is carefully schooled not to betray too much sympathy, and Will appreciates that.
"How are you doing, Will?" she asks. Will shrugs.
"I can't complain. I was expecting to wake up dead, so anything else is bound to be a step up from that."
Alana smiles and Will attempts a chuckle. It fails miserably as the wound in his face decides to make itself known again, pain ripping through his cheek, but he had tried, and that is what matters. Alana shoots him a knowing stare.
"Want me to restart your morphine?"
Will bites his lip. The wounds in his face and back and shoulder are giving him grief, it's true, but he doesn't relish the sensation of being off his face on sedatives. It reminds him of Hannibal.
Everything seems to remind him of Hannibal, these days.
With a sigh, Will manages a weak nod. He's tired, today. Speaking to Jack the day before really took it out of him. "Yeah, ok. Knock yourself out."
Alana expertly fiddles with the taps, and Will tries not to moan with relief as the drugs hit his system. He relaxes back onto the pillows.
"So," he says, voice beginning to slur a little, "any news on Hannibal?"
She shakes her head. "None yet. No sign at all - not even a body."
Will grunts. For some reason he cannot fathom, there's been a niggling thought in the back of his head, ever since he woke up in hospital, that Hannibal is still alive. The feeling hurts him in ways he cannot fully understand.
Only last night, Will woke up in a cold sweat, hair prickling along the back of his neck, knowing, somehow, that he had not been alone in the room. The shadow of a set of antlers had passed across the wall, framed by moonlight that poured in through the sloppily parted curtains.
Will doesn't want to think about what that implies.
The morphine is relaxing him more than he expected. Hazily, changing the subject, Will asks, "How's Margot? Your son?"
Perhaps it's a figment of his hyper-zealous imagination, but Will catches a glimpse of a tear in Alana's eye. "They're fine, Will. More than fine. They're both safe, which is the main thing."
Will laughs a little - as much as his torn cheek allows - and his eyelids slip shut. "Who would have thought it?" he murmurs, the morphine crushing his verbal filter. "Dr. Alana Bloom, respected psychologist, and the seducer of heiress Margot Verger."
She gives him an amused smile. "You seemed to do pretty well yourself."
Will's brain isn't working properly, or maybe the morphine is working rather too well, or maybe even he's having an encephalitis relapse, because nothing else could possibly explain the words that fall out of his mouth next. When Will is more conscious, he is going to regret them severely.
"Yeah," he snorts. "Hannibal Lecter. Now that's what I call a marriage in the making."
Alana frowns. "What?"
She must have meant Molly, of course she meant Molly, but there's nothing stopping Will now. He waves an uncoordinated hand in the air. He's going to blame this heavily on the drugs later. He's also going to try and pretend it never happened.
"Hannibal Lecter was in love with me," he tells Alana matter-of-factly. It sounds a little pathetic to his own ears. "It's weird, and it's twisted, and I'm not even gonna lie, it's kinda hot - but he was in love with me, and it was fucking weird, but I wish...I just wish he'd been different, you know?"
To his horror, Will finds himself getting a little teary-eyed. Alana's expression is now completely unreadable.
"He made me trust him, then he betrayed that trust and framed me. Then I tried to betray him, then I changed my mind, and he thanked me for it with a knife in my gut, with a blade in Abigail's neck. Then he tried to eat me in Florence, then he saved me again, and then, then I finally realise it, that he's in love with me, and that the one person who ever dared to love me was a psychopath."
A slightly hysterical giggle edges up Will's throat. "Don't tell Jack," he adds, somewhat lamely. "Please, Alana - don't tell Jack."
"I won't," she promises, and Will relaxes, a cocoon of morphine enveloping him once more. "Can I ask you just one question, Will?"
"Sure," he says groggily, feeling himself begin to slip away again.
She leans forward a little. Will knows that he can trust her with his life.
"Did you...love Hannibal back?"
Will closes his eyes.
"Yes," he admits, and it's such a relief, such a huge fucking surge of relief to say it out loud that it nearly hurts. "I did. But it wasn't love like you and Margot. It was a horrifying, twisted sort of love - the love that you can't help feeling for the darkest part of your soul. We were like two sides of the same coin. I wanted to hate him, Alana - I wanted it so bad - but I couldn't help but love him."
A sob tears itself up his throat. "Alana - I'm so sorry."
She shushes him then, holding his hand, soothing him in the way that only she could. "It's ok," she reassures him. "It's ok. I'm right here, Will. I'll always be right here. I'm never leaving you undefended again. I'll always believe you, I promise. I'll never do that again. Go to sleep, Will. I'll be right here. Go to sleep."
Will drifts off, suddenly exhausted, and his dreams are haunted by Alana's eyes, and the shadowy antlers of the Ravenstag.
***
Alana holds Will's hand until he falls asleep, then leaves the room as quietly as possible.
She can't honestly say she isn't surprised. Despite his poise and elegance and beautifully cultivated blank mask, Hannibal Lecter had been an open book when it came to Will Graham. Alana would have been blind to miss the fondness that gleamed in Hannibal's eyes whenever the subject of Will came up.
The golden afternoon light is beginning to fade when she gets into her car. She locks the doors and pulls out her lipstick, retouching her makeup in the reflection of the wing mirror. She's seeing Margot again tonight, and she wants to look nice. She always wants to look nice, for Margot.
Alana isn't planning on telling Jack a word of her and Will's conversation. Even if she wasn't plagued by frequent urges to murder the agent, she figures that Will has enough on his plate without Jack Crawford questioning him on his latent feelings for a serial killer. Besides, it wasn't like she hadn't felt the, too. Hannibal Lecter had a way of getting under people's skin.
She aims a fist at the steering wheel, and is thankful when the airbag doesn't go off. "Goddamnit, Hannibal!"
Alana takes several deep breaths, and calms herself. She checks the mirror - she hasn't smudged her lipstick. All is well.
Except it isn't, though, and Alana knows that it can never - will never - be all right again.
***
It's another two and a half months before Will's allowed to leave the hospital, and he spends another two weeks after that in a hotel. He doesn't feel he can go home to Molly just yet. She's supportive - tells him to take all the time he needs. He loves her so much in that moment that it hurts.
There's a hole in Will's chest that he can't quite explain; a hole that has nothing to do with the knife that had been embedded in it. He misses his dogs. In a fit of nostalgia, he misses the days when he could walk into Hannibal's therapy room, sit down, and just share whatever came to mind. The second he catches himself missing this, he throws the TV remote across the room.
He has seen Alana twice since the mortifying episode with the morphine, and neither of them mentioned what he said. Will is unbelievable grateful.
Although he's not quite healed, Will is mending quickly, and he feels better and better as each day passes. He can smile now without too much strain on his cheek. He is able to reach things on high shelves with his right arm without wincing. He can lean his back against chairs without pain.
The only pain Will truly feels is from the hole in his heart.
Although Jack offers him a place back on his team, Will quickly declines. He has no intention of following that path ever again. Jack, he decides later, may also have been high off morphine to make that offer to Will.
Will still owns his cabin in Wolftrap, although he left it shortly after his rejection of Hannibal. He hasn't been back since, and he doesn't want to think about how much dust it must have built up.
It takes Will four attempts to get to Wolftrap. He chickens out twice before even getting to the car rental, and once again after driving ten miles down the highway. He's not sure what keeps pulling him there, but somehow, he feels like it's the only place that will afford him peace.
Attempt number four finds Will standing in the crisp white snow of his yard. It's early evening, and the sky is dulling from gold to a taut slate-grey. He puts his glasses on. He wants a barrier to numb the memories that are already beginning to wash over him.
He stomps up the stairs with no attempt to stay quiet - there's nothing here to hear him. The wooden porch creaks under his feet. Key in the door - it's stiff, after so long unused - then turn and click. The door, rickety on rusty hinges, swings open.
It feels like a kick in the gut when Will lays his eyes once again on his old living room. It's almost bare, save for a few tattered cardboard boxes, an armchair, his tatty bed in the corner. He couldn't bring himself to sleep in the bed again - not after waking up there after the Florence affair was over. He left it behind, along with the armchair (still smelling faintly of blood and the ridiculously expensive aftershave Hannibal used to wear). He couldn't face the memories.
Come to think of it, he still can't.
Will wonders whether it was such a good idea to come.
He moves softly over the floorboards, his shoes leaving clear footprints in the dust coating the floor. Will reckons it must be at least an inch thick. He hasn't been back to clean in over three years, and it shows.
The air tastes musty, and there's a hint of something else that Will can't quite identify. There's the faintest whiff of citrus, and something coppery that smells a little like blood.
Maybe something died under the floorboards. Will wouldn't be surprised.
He finally gets to the middle of the room. The light seeps in thick bars through the dusty windows and spills out elegantly onto the floor. The dust is caught in a whirlwind, trapped in the hazy confines of the sunlight; bizarrely, it reminds Will of himself. He has never truly been free, even at his happiest - he has been and always will be confined by the terrors of his imagination.
Will lets out a breath he doesn't realise he'd been holding, and relaxes the tiniest bit.
Suddenly, a powerful arm wraps around his chest, another bringing a foul-smelling white pad to his face to clamp over his mouth and nose. Will struggles violently against the person behind him, one hand tugging uselessly against the arm at his chest and the other frantically pulling at the cloth covering his lower face.
His attacker has at least two inches on him and Will's worn shoes only just scrape the ground. He scrabbles his toes desperately across the floorboards, disturbing the dust that spirals up in the disturbance. His glasses fly off as he shakes his head in a hopeless attempt to free himself. Will dimly hears them shatter against the floor. He's struggling and the arms around him are so tight and Will can't breathe, he can't breathe and he feels certain he's going to die.
The darkness at the edges of Will's vision intensifies, and he's gasping now, his limbs going limp, still struggling weakly against his attacker's strong grip. Will gives one last, desperate heave for freedom, but he's falling down an endless tunnel, and his eyes roll back, and -
***
Will Graham slumps, limp, into the man's arms, his eyes rolling back in his head. The man looks down on him fondly, almost tenderly, and he gently guides Will's head back to rest against his shoulder.
Hannibal Lecter looks up.