Chapter Text
It was hard to call it a party. First, it was too official for that. Senator Dunmore from Minesotta would attend, because of Will’s role in solving the Hobbs case. Senator Kelly would be there as well because his office had contributed to the BAU’s funding through a bill passed in 2008. Jack had sent them the list of all guests by e-mail. Will had looked at it on his laptop, in the kitchen, with Rockie sleeping, her head on his feet. It had seemed far away, in both space and time, at the moment.
Second, it involved too much socialization to be a party. In a party, Will could have just stayed back and drunk. Better yet, he could have not attended.
It was held in Quantico. Will had brought his tuxedo in its plastic dry cleaning bag. He put it on in his office and walked out, bow tie hanging untied around his neck. He could stop in the restroom to tie it in front of the mirror.
There were some guests nearby already, a flow of black and white with the occasional chic gown and naked back. He spotted Dr. Lecter and Jack Crawford and ducked in the hall that led to the bathroom.
Even in front of the wide, absent mirrors, his footsteps echoing in the empty space, all stalls void of anyone, Will felt watched already. There was a faint buzz of voices coming through the door.
He steadied himself and focused on his bow tie. Cross both ends, the longer one over the shorter one. Then hold the longer one while folding the shorter one to obtain the bow form.
Will was bringing the longer end down on the shorter horizontal one to shape the tie of the bow, when Hannibal stepped in. Will’s eyes darted to him in the mirror. He straightened his neck. “Don’t comment,” he said.
Hannibal bowed his head and turned to the mirror, feigning to adjust his own bow tie. There was a slight glimmer to the material it was made of. “I would never.”
Come to think of it, Hannibal’s entire tuxedo seemed to have a shimmer in the fabric, nothing obvious, just a glint, when the light was right. “I didn’t know you’d attend,” Will said. It wasn’t entirely true. He had suspected Hannibal would be there. It made sense. And he hadn’t really read through the whole list of guests.
“Jack was just telling me that, if the BAU is to get more funding from Congress, it should appear to have as many consultants as possible,” Hannibal explained.
Will had finished with his bow tie. The left part was minutely bigger than the right one. He went to his cufflinks. “This isn’t hard for you,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
Hannibal didn’t deny. He turned to Will and examined him for a moment. “How do you feel?”
Shrugging, Will gave a brief smile. “My head aches insistently. My stomach doesn’t feel that right. I feel… wobbly. Like a brick wall that’s begun to crumble.” He sighed. “Jack will parade me out there, won’t he?”
A fine smile came to Hannibal’s lips and he blinked in assent. “You’re a prized asset,” he said. “Some would feel valued.”
Will huffed. “I feel more valued when people aren’t looking at me.”
“People are looking at you when you save lives. Even symbolically, you are the object of their admiration.”
“Symbolically is the important part,” Will said.
Hannibal kept scrutinizing him. He reached for his own forehead, inviting Will to brush out the strand of curly hair that hung down and caught the top of his glasses. Will did so.
Beverly peeked in the door. “Is this a boys’ meeting?”
“You are in the boys’ bathroom,” Will told her. “Very eighth grade.” She smiled in appreciation and wriggled her eyebrows before stepping in.
She wore a violet gown, so dark the valleys of the folds seemed ink black. It hung over her right shoulder and bared the left one. “Eighth grade were the good days.”
Will searched what to do with his hands, put them in his pockets, smiled nervously. “Christ, I want your life.”
“I suppose we are expected?” Hannibal asked her.
Katz nodded. “Jack’s getting nervous.” She gestured to Will’s tuxedo. “I won a bet.”
“You bet I owned a tuxedo?”
“No, I bet you’d wear it without the use of force.”
“Physical force isn’t the only kind,” Will said. “How much did you bet?”
Beverly waved with her small purse. The bright white contrasted with her dress, like the moon in the night sky. “One drink.”
“Drinks are on the house.”
She grinned. “Price didn’t know that,” she said. “Speaking of which, you either look like someone who needs a drink or someone who really shouldn’t be drinking…”
Will pushed his glasses up his nose. “The first one.”
“In small dosage, alcohol does wonders for social anxiety,” Hannibal pointed out as they started to head for the door.
“Dosage increasing, I might eventually behave like a normal person for ten minutes,” Will said. “Then, the depressive effects will grow and I will get even duller than my usual.”
Hannibal cocked his head. This close, it was impossible to tell if his tuxedo was a rich black or the darkest indigo blue. “Of all the words I could choose to describe you, dull doesn’t come to mind,” he said.
Will closed his eyes. He had already taken his share of aspirin and the headache still pounded near his right temple. “Please don’t describe me to your friends.”
“I promise not to.” Hannibal leaned slightly closer. “You’re my secret.”
Just as Beverly reached the door, it burst open and Jack’s face looked at them. He seemed constricted in his dark suit. He breathed out loudly, glaring at everyone in turn and stopping on Will. “Well,” he said. “This way.” He held the door open with one arm and invited them to join the murmur of voices that filled the corridors and rooms beyond with the other.
Quantico had many lecture halls and conference rooms large enough to welcome receptions of all kinds. This was one of the rooms in which trainees would take part in the yearly shooting competition. The targets and stands had been removed, even if the slots and lines drawn in tape were still in the floor. Will couldn’t see them in the mid-darkness, but could feel the texture changing sometimes under the soles of his shoes.
The walls had been covered in heavy black drapes, to mask the concrete and – Will thought he recalled – the tall patch of white near the ceiling in the eastward corner, where the sand had seeped out from the cement, under the pressure of infiltrated water, coming from the underground parking above them.
A small stage had been set up at one end of the room. It had yet to be used, the brown lectern sitting in quiet and slough.
Movements that seemed self-generated animated the crowd. Suddenly everyone knew who to talk to. Like ships on rivers, brought to harbor without the need to ever adjust the sails or paddle among the pulling currents and threatening waves. In a corner, a chamber quartet played a rendition of the Brandenburg concertos. Along a wall were tables, covered in white, rich cloth, with elements of a buffet on it. Will saw pyramids of petits fours and plates of scattered tiny pastries. He glimpsed Beverly at the bar.
Jack’s fingers went to Will’s elbow as soon as they entered the room and didn’t let go until he had presented Will to the two senators, his three direct superiors in the Bureau’s hierarchy and the representative for the OIG, a thin woman with a slim suit, by the name of Prurnell. She eyed Will with her lips curling into a mix of disbelief and analysis, focusing on him the more Jack described Will’s successes. Garrett Jacob Hobbs, the rescue of his daughter Abigail, the later capture of Gordon Stammets-... Will’s ears began to shake with the roar of his blood. The floor rocked and, in Will, the fear increased that it would break, too thin to hold him. He would fall, feet first into the penetrating abyss and, yanked back up by the flow of water, he would only be able to hit his fists against the transparent ice, staring at the legs and feet of the people above. Jack would look down at him, curiously, almost amused. But the fear quit, as suddenly as it had come, and Will drowned, unafraid, heavy enough that he should prefer sleep to life. In the distance, the stag leaned down to touch his nose to the ice.
There was a tremor in his chest, something quick and unseen. And he came out of the vivid hallucination and into the room. Kade Prurnell’s eyes were still on him. Jack told her of the two most recent findings Will had helped the BAU with: Devon Silvestri and Tobias Budge.
“How does it feel to be such an asset, Mr. Graham?” she asked. “Do you miss your classroom?”
Will knew of the small smile he should give, but it came a bit too late. “I’m…” He licked his lips. Somewhere, fifteen feet away, as he conversed with the senator, Hannibal cast a glance in his direction. The gaze held for a split second and then Will was alone again. “I’m glad I can help,” he said.
Prurnell leaned on the side to say something to Jack, but Will had stopped listening. Around them, the room began to animate. Groups disbanded to reform. Heads and eyes went upward. Attention focused on the stage, at a point over Will’s shoulder. The lighting shifted to plunge the audience in darkness. “Excuse me,” Will said. He wasn’t sure if Jack or Prurnell had heard him and he stepped away, making his way to the bar, set up at the end of the buffet tables.
“Bourbon. Neat,” he said to the woman dressed in crisp black.
His drink was set in front of him. The speech started. The Senator from Minesotta started to talk about families and values.
“Champagne. Veuve cliquot, if you have it,” Hannibal’s voice said beside him, slightly hushed.
“Are you scheduled to speak?” Will asked as they moved away from the bar, their glasses in hand.
Hannibal shook his head. Around the pale golden of the sparkling wine, his fingers seemed hefty and gray. “But Jack did say he would mention my work, as well as yours.”
Will sighed and his answer – that he didn’t feel he was working, only that he was hanging from a thread thinner and thinner, his hand extended into the pit to catch someone who had already fallen – left him. Kade Prurnell was coming their way, sipping from her martini.
A round of applause fired. The first speech was finished. The whispers of the crowd started anew. “Hello again, Mr. Graham,” she said. She gave Hannibal a nod. “Dr. Hannibal Lecter, I think? Kade Prurnell.”
“Indeed.” Hannibal returned her nod. “Pleased to meet you Ms. Prurnell. Jack introduced you as his superior. Do you work within the FBI?”
Kade Prurnell’s smile was friendly, but distant. “No, I’m with the Inspector General's Office. Me and Jack have known each other a long time.” She turned to Will. His fingers were wrapped around his glass and hid the fact that it was already empty. Around them, people ruffled as the short break turned out to be longer than expected: Senator Kelly had run into a journalist while taking pictures at the entrance of the room and only asked them to be patient a little longer, said the young man on the stage. “Jack mentioned that one of you is the other one’s unofficial therapist. Which one is it?”
Will looked down. Hannibal answered before he could. “Being a psychiatrist myself, I admit I found it hard to seek support and council, but the cases we are required to investigate can be disturbing.” He turned to Will. “Will’s assistance has been of great significance.”
Still, Will watched the bottom of his glass. Prurnell eyed them both. “I don’t believe you,” she told Hannibal.
Hannibal cocked an eyebrow. “I tried,” he said to Will.
“Thank you,” Will said, a little too emphatically for sarcasm not to show through.
All three of them went silent as Senator Kelly’s speech started. It was a bit longer than the first. Kelly was aiming for re-election, Will figured out, when the middle-aged woman started listing the donations, their amounts and the corresponding projects she had worked on for the state. In the middle of it, Hannibal’s fingers came to rest on his wrist, nimble and feathery, and he smoothly removed Will’s empty tumbler from his hand. Then he vanished into the crowd to return minutes later with refills for both of them.
When the speech ended, a short intermission started. The orchestra played Vivaldi and people gathered again.
Prurnell sipped from her martini and turned to Will. “I confess I have trouble understanding what it is exactly that you do, Mr. Graham,” she said. “Jack says you have an exceptional talent as a profiler, but I’d gathered profilers weren’t in the field.”
Will swallowed and tried to focus on the smudge of a fingertip at the top of his glasses. “Some of us go into the field sometimes, when the crime scenes are difficult to recreate or describe,” he said. “And it’s not really a talent. It’s more like a susceptibility of the mind.”
“Your mind is susceptible to the one of those you profile?” She took the toothpick to slip the olive in her mouth. “Or is it the other way around?”
“Killers are not so different from us, Ms. Prurnell,” Hannibal said. His champagne flute was empty. Will downed the rest of his bourbon. “Most people find it hard to grasp the substance of their motivation, only because their actions are extraordinary, or uncommon in scale and violence. Will doesn’t.”
“And once you think like them, how do you use that?” Prurnell asked Will.
“I don’t… use it,” Will said. “I expose the intents as patterns and the desires as plans and then…” He didn’t know what to do with his hands. “We catch them.” He had to set his glass down on a table behind him so he could slip his fingers in his pockets. At that moment, the desire to be unseen and remain unnoticed and peaceful instantaneously transformed into the wish to repulse and shove away. “It’s like reading body language. Like I know you don’t really want to be here tonight. You tried to get that information about me from Jack, but he wouldn’t tell you. You want this to put it in a report and then leave.”
The woman’s eyes had widened slightly. Will could almost see his words reflected in the irises’ shine.
“Will,” Hannibal warned.
“You’re a bureaucrat,” Will went on. He nodded to the stage. “You despise the obscenity of politics just as much as you scorn the rough and tumble of field operatives. You don’t care for the how or the why of the things we do here. You care that things are done. You don’t think or deliberate: you need and you execute. But you always get what you want, because you’ve always come out on top, haven’t you?”
He stopped to breathe. Kade Prurnell’s face had turned into a mask of dismay, bordering on rage. She seemed determined on not answering, but her eyes didn’t let his go. Will met her gaze to let her discern how true the words had been. He saw them reach down far into her mind.
Then he turned away and left. As he made his way out, the audience applauded the chief of the BAU, Jack Crawford, coming to the stage.
Will was not fifteen steps away, that Kade Prurnell was met with a colleague. The man greeted her with warmth and connivance. She blinked a few times, eyes still narrowed in Hannibal’s direction, then placed her empty glass near Will’s own on the table with a tight thud and moved closer to the stage with her acquaintance.
The violence in Will’s eyes had softly simmered, never quite honestly coming to a boil, still much held back. Jack’s words around him – it’s strange to be on this stage alone while nothing I do could be done without the collaborative work of – Hannibal followed Will’s path through the crowd.
He had taken the second door at the end of the room. The smell of his aftershave was easy to follow, the strength of clove drowning all other scents, the aldehydes employed instead of alcohol leaving a distinct bite in Hannibal’s nose.
Will had gone to his right. People became rarer. Hannibal passed a few members of the catering staff, joining the main room with platters and piles of white, paper plates.
One of the smaller classrooms had been converted into a micro-cellar for the duration of the evening. Its desks and chairs had been pushed to the side and refrigerators for wine and food lined in their place. Through the glass in the door, Hannibal could see Will exploring one of the refrigerators with eyes still unsettled. He had taken his glasses off and slipped them in between the buttons of his shirt. His bow tie was undone. He searched for liquor, Hannibal supposed, but they must keep it at the bar itself.
Will opened one of the refrigerators’ transparent door and began to sift through the bottles of wine in the racks. Hannibal couldn’t identify the labels from where he stood, but some of them were visibly high-end. The profiler slipped a bottle out and Hannibal entered the room, waiting for the closing of the refrigerator to mask the noise of his opening the door.
Will turned around, bottle in hand, and jerked when he saw Hannibal. Their eyes met for a time. The violence in Will’s was receding, just as mist dissipates when the sun comes up. Its humidity remains, clinging to the clothes, the stones, the grass, and whenever the night comes back, it rises again.
“Château Margaux,” Hannibal noted, with a glance at the bottle’s shape. The writing was masked by Will’s hand. “Which year is it?”
Will seemed tired, or as if the world was weary of him. “1989,” he said. “Plainly put, it’s the oldest I saw.”
“An impressive budget on the FBI’s part,” Hannibal commented, moving closer to the refrigerator. It was a Liebherr, a recent model, dual-temperatures, altered to be portable. Maybe this was a Senator’s reserve, transported here for the awaited after-party. “What’s your plan?”
Will’s eyes went inside, his fingers were at his neck, undoing the bow tie. “Find somewhere quiet to drink this alone. Anticipate Jack’s wrath.”
“Given that it could be anticipated.” The dim lights at the end of the shelves projected the glow of the bottles on them, spots of yellow, dark red and earth green. Hannibal noticed a brighter Château Margaux label, near the door of the refrigerator. “That is another Château Margaux. 2005. The best vintage currently on the market.”
Turning to lay eyes on the bottle, Will found it unremarkable, with a white label in a recent design showing the facade of a manor in gold lines. “Do you want it?”
With a fine smile, Hannibal took the bottle from its shelf. Will held his bottle by the neck and examined the other man carefully, wondering what was going on exactly. Hannibal cradled his bottle against his side, his palm against the bottom, the neck in the crook of his elbow. They were at a good distance from the party, enough to hear the subtle variations in volume and measure the progress of the evening on its course. Jack’s speech had ended sometime ago. Outside, the slow sways of popular waltzes had started. The speeches had ended. The time had come for dancing, fund-collecting and refreshments.
They slipped out of the room unseen and headed down the corridor until they reached the elevator. Will’s fingers hovered over the buttons bringing them two levels down, in the sub-basement, the labs, the morgue, death and its long claws. Hannibal stepped forward and pressed the button of the highest floor. “Jack wants to bury you in cadavers and maggots until you can’t see or smell anything else than putrid decay.” He turned to Will and said, softly. “Let us take you into the stars of above.”
The elevator’s doors closed with a curt ring. Will was running his thumb along the thin, old metal paper around his bottle’s cork. “On a scale of one to ten, how evil was it?”
Hannibal adjusted his bow tie with his wobbly reflection in the unpolished steel as a guide. “Seven,” he said. “I’m convinced you can be much eviler, given the opportunity.”
Will closed his eyes and sighed softly. His amused smile came on its own, curling his lips from the inside. He didn’t see Hannibal’s teeth-showing grin flare in response.
The ninth floor was darkened, although some lights turned on by motion detection in the classrooms and offices they passed. They crossed the corridor and found the stairs. It led them to the roof above. With a twist to a corner of his mouth, Hannibal took a business card someone had given him and folded it four times, lodging it in the door’s handle’s latch to prevent it from locking up behind them.
Will had walked to the end of the roof. He looked down at the parking below. The night was clear and the starlight sharp and far. In the distance, there were the shapes of the three dormitories where trainees lived, with dots of light in the windows. Then only wild, land and woods, with some clearing for the tracks. It was cold, but not enough to warrant wearing a coat.
Hannibal walked to him and sat down on the large low metallic wall that served as a railing. His hair was skewed in the wind that came in bursts at this height.
“Why are you here?” Will asked him. “I mean, with me. Why leave the party?”
“On the one hand, this evening is particularly disappointing,” Hannibal started, placing his bottle down beside him with a clink. “On the other, you seemed like you could require company.”
“I never require company,” Will said, stiffly.
“I wasn’t implying I was here in professional obligation.”
Will slid his undone bow tie off his neck and put it in his pocket. “I know.”
Hannibal watched Will avoid the topic by rummaging his pockets. “You didn’t take a corkscrew with you?”
“Why?” Will found a pen in his jacket. He unwrapped the bottle’s cork. “I actually grew up thinking this was how it was meant to be done.” He took the pen’s cap off and planted the tip in the bottle’s cork.
Hannibal watched him force the pen’s plastic in the soft wood, then twist it and push down until the cork descended in the bottle with a pop. There was a quiet splash when it hit the wine.
“Often, you're the one who doesn't seem to need anyone,” Will said, handing out the pen.
Considering that question for a moment, Hannibal took the pen, face unreadable, the softness changed into something murkier. “What do you think of me, Will?” He inserted the pen into the wood so smoothly it seemed to slide in. “Be honest.” The cork went down in the wine.
Will made eye contact with him briefly, long enough that Hannibal saw that he considered a truthful answer. It was there, behind the irises, dangling and squeaking. “You do like to socialize.” He frowned. “Or you’re good enough at it that it doesn’t matter if you like it. And no one wonders what goes on behind the glorious canopies of words.”
The slivers of a roar that had begun to settle inside Hannibal quieted down suddenly. Will turned away to sip from his bottle. Hannibal took his eyes to the horizon and drank as well. It was regrettable that he could not smell in the aromas from the cork, but the shake of it against the bottle’s neck provided oxygenation.
In his throat, the wine met the snugness that had begun to gather at the top of his stomach.
They drank slowly, sitting side by side on the railing, some three feet between them. Below, in the parking lot, voices came up. Sometimes the wind came up carrying cigarette smoke.
“Did you speak to Alana?” Hannibal said.
“No.” Will swallowed his sip and ran his hands over his face. “I called her and I hung up before she picked up. Did you?”
The other man nodded. His bow tie was still done, his jacket still buttoned. “She called me. It was a professional call. She wanted to discuss a young patient. She didn’t speak of anything else.”
“Did you tell her I told you that-…”
“Of course not. I couldn’t.”
Will turned fully to him. “When we talk about cases in your office, I’m not your patient,” he said, quietly. “When I tell you the bland stuff, our conversations are subject to professional secrecy?” It was not as threatening as it sounded. Will seemed insistent to determine the boundaries of their relationship. At the root of the force that set Hannibal in motion, the desire was coiled to dilute these limits and walls, but its goal remained abstract to him, even now.
“Do you think I refer to you as a friend only to prompt confidence from you, knowing you would object to standard therapeutic context?” Hannibal said.
Will had placed his bottle down and ran his thumb along the neck. “At first, I thought that,” he said. “But not for long.”
For a moment, they returned to the silence they had shared up to now. The only sound was the one of their sips and swallows, liquid going down their throats like waves coming to shore.
“This is good,” Will said, eyes cast down to his bottle. The wine had left somewhat dark traces on his lips.
“It is.” Hannibal held out his bottle. “To the astute plan that salvaged a bitter evening.” Will raised his bottle and they touched with a low cling.
Each of them had drunk a little more than half of their bottles. There was an easy unrest in their limbs and they didn’t feel the prick of the cold with the same strength as before. In Hannibal’s mind, the thoughts had begun to arrange and float, more musical than linear. Will’s features were slightly more open than they usually were. Like he considered trusting the world, even for a moment.
Above their heads, the stars had begun to cloud over. It was dark enough that they saw the other mostly through the whiteness of their dress shirt, teeth and eyes. The soft light of departing cars from below entered the night from time to time.
“Bury me.” Will said, his head tilted back, his closed eyelids to the stars. “You said Jack wanted to bury me.”
Hannibal tilted his head. “He has been somewhat consistent in doing that. Even figuratively.”
“Are you implying he’s aware of it?”
“In conversations with me, Jack has often described you using mechanical or animal terminology,” Hannibal said, only stretching the truth as he would flex a muscle. “He considers you to be a tool.”
Will brought the bottle to his lips. “I know how Jack thinks of me.”
“Yet you find the image of burial violent.”
“Not violent. But inappropriate.” Will’s breath came out in a thickening mist as the night advanced. It surrounded his head with a halo, dotted with stars. “I don’t know what’s to be elevated in me.”
Hannibal swallowed around his sip of wine. The harmony of the taste had started to become lost on him, in favor of the light intoxication that wrapped him into its blanketing arms. “You trust Jack to use you for a good purpose?” he said. “What about yourself? What would you do?”
“Nothing.”
“Literally?”
Will sighed. It was short and contained. “The only thing my mind makes me good at is not a good thing.”
“Understanding why people kill?” Hannibal gave a light smile. It disappeared behind the bottle’s opening. “Are you of the mind that motivations of murderers should remain a mystery, then?”
Will placed his bottle down and dropped his eyes to his fingers. His knuckles were still scarred and red from the extraction of bricks from his fireplace’s chimney at home. “Did Jack show you my file?”
“I received a copy of it when I was to complete my evaluation authorizing your return to the field.”
“Did you read it?”
Hannibal had done so with attention and care. Along with official information (grades in the Academy, career status, physical test results), it read as a series of behavioral observations and notes that spoke more of what the FBI expected its employees to show and to hide than of Will Graham himself. Will Graham was hidden in between the tiny lines and round letters, in the whites of the page. “Not attentively. Discussions are more revealing,” he said. Will smiled, only half-bitterly. “What should I recall?”
“1987. Greenville.”
Hannibal frowned. “Nothing that early was mentioned.”
Will found the horizon again, somewhere above the trees, where its blurred line was puffing with dark-blue and depthless night. “We lived in a trailer park out of town, near the river.” He took another sip. Wine glistened on his lips. “One of our neighbors died. There was a police line but I saw the body before they could cover it.”
“How had he died?”
“Knife to the chest and throat. The police thought it was a drug deal gone sour.” He tightened his grip on his bottle. His voice flew as the memory came back to him, wings spreading onto thin air. Hannibal had never before seen Will’s mind so transparent to itself. “I told them that it wasn’t a drug deal.”
Hannibal blinked slowly. “You had no forensics knowledge…”
Shaking his head, Will went on. “I didn’t even know it was a crime scene. I didn’t even know what it was supposed to look like.”
“And you saw this killer?”
“I didn’t see the killer.” Will’s voice had gone somewhat lower. “The body was too neat. He was placed on his back, legs aligned, hands crossed on his stomach, eyes slipped closed.”
“Care and precision.”
“Precision and delicacy and tenderness,” Will said. “I told them that.”
Hannibal tilted his head. “And they considered you a suspect.”
Will didn’t answer. He drank more. It was sad, Hannibal thought, to drink so much of a wine made to be absorbed with parsimony and delight. But his mind was damp and floating, not in wine, but in the proximity of Will Graham.
“I was kept in a center for juvenile delinquents for 48 hours, questioned by the police. The bright lights, no bed, no food. The smell and taste of my own fear.”
“And your knowledge, feasting on your heart.”
Will nodded, slowly. A rapid, twitching laugh echoed from the parking below. Hannibal looked and glimpsed the sight of a dress, swirling. A car door being opened and reflecting the light of a street lamp. Will’s face had become downcast and blank, the wine breaching his walls to leave him limp and empty as if he still expected them to protect him. He tightened his tuxedo jacket around himself. He seemed thinner in the paling night. On his brow, some sweat blurred the skin near the temples.
“We should go back inside,” Hannibal said. “It’s well past midnight.”
Inside, Will went to his lecture hall, his step number and heavier, and Hannibal followed him there. There was hardly any wine left in their bottles. Hannibal’s motions were uneven. His senses were altered, the smells less sharp, the taste more prominent and the lights stronger, seeking to envelop him. He had only had the 2005 Château Margaux on three occasions since its fabrication and only one glass, every time. Now, the wine’s licorice nose was so clear and so bright, he could have been swimming in it rather than drinking it. But soon, the acidity generated by alcohol in his stomach would cover everything else in the wash-out that resembled hunger.
Will sat down at his desk. “Do you still feel imprisoned, as though the wrong accusations never really left you?” Hannibal said.
“Not when I work for Jack.” He sipped the last of his wine and placed the empty bottle before him, spreading both palms on his desk. “It makes me feel safe. Like if I was trapped in a dense contraption that gives me both weight and frailty.”
Hannibal’s smile was slow and bracing.
They spoke again after that, but Will’s words were losing their paths. His fever was rising, just as his body couldn’t bear the augmented stress. It didn’t seem entirely unpleasant and soon Will fell into a slow daze that left him near sleep in his chair.
Hands not as steady as usual, Hannibal went to Will’s side and removed the glasses Will had put back on his nose in an attempt to steady an unstable world. Hannibal took Will's pulse with two fingers on his throat. The Château Margaux and the scent of the encephalitis joined together to crash into waves and waves of sweetness. He breathed it in and, eyes closed, didn’t let go of it, hoped never to, and perhaps then he could keep Will inside.
Amid the swim of sensations, the dizzy litheness of hangovers and the bright lights overhead, Beverly’s face looking down at him was what woke Will up. She seemed a bit more tired than usual, her face drawn, but her gaze intent and curious and, Will realized, amused. “Did you sleep here?”
Swallowing, Will found his mouth dry and rough, like it had been breathing fire all night. “Yes.”
She stepped back as he sat up straighter. His jacket was off his shoulders and had been placed neatly on his desk, the arms flattened and the back with a vertical fold in the exact middle. He tried to remember Hannibal getting it off of him and couldn’t find the image in himself, even if he did recall the man’s touch on his shoulders. He didn’t remember him leaving at all. Yet the chair where he had sat, in the first row, to his right, was empty and clean. The two bottles were out of sight.
“Is Jack alright?” he asked Beverly, getting to his feet. There was a sway that settled in his stomach, but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.
She frowned. “What do you mean?”
“He must have been thundering after what I told Kade Prurnell.”
She shook her head elegantly, while Will found his undone bow tie in the pocket of his jacket, folded, again. He put on his glasses and things became a little less glassy. “Well, you’re going to hear about leaving early for a long time.” She looked around at the classroom, as if high walls retained secrets like a sponge. “But that wasn’t entirely true so you might get away with it.”
“Did Ms. Prurnell leave early?”
“No. As a matter of fact, I heard her telling Jack you seemed very good at what you did.” She pursed her lips in an apology. “If lacking in people skills.” They started toward the door. Will’s step was steadier the more he walked. “What did you do?”
“Showed her how good I was. Apparently.”
They stopped to get a coffee from the machine down the hall. The dark liquid stuttered down. “Jack searched for Dr. Lecter for a while, though.”
Will froze for a moment, the hot paper cup in hand.
“He must have been called away or something,” Beverly went on.
Will nodded.
He drove back to Wolf Trap. He was almost there, just over the Western Virginia state line, when he began to remember. At first, he wasn’t sure if it was memory or dream. There were no walls and no lights. He was sitting with Hannibal, him in his office desk chair and the psychiatrist facing him, in the first row. Hannibal had taken his tuxedo jacket off and collected their two bottles of wine.
“Why are you here?” Will said.
“I was invited. And I like you.”
Will leaned forward. His forehead was damp, with sweat, but he didn’t recall feeling warm. “There might be nothing good about who I am.”
A smile came to Hannibal’s face as he settled down. “Then maybe I’m not interested in the goodness of it.”
His head felt heavy when Will shook it slowly. “I mean… here with me now.” He blinked, tried to focus. The farthest rows of chairs were lifting into the air before him, like the weightless leaves of autumn. “Why are you here with me now?” The invisible walls parted and some sun came in. The sun of Minnesota, cold and gray. “You like people. Not just me.”
Hannibal didn’t seem to notice the sky above their heads. He looked down at his crossed hands. He didn’t seem really drunk, but then, Will didn’t know if he could have seen that. “Are you familiar with the very end of the 15th century in Florence?”
It took Will a moment to gather his mind. “Savonarola’s reform?”
“Claiming he had prophetic visions, Friar Girolamo Savonarola convinced the Florentines to ban the former royalty and established a religious dictatorship.”
“He was burned,” Will went on.
“Tried, tortured and burned, yes.” Hannibal leaned forward over the concrete railing. “But not before he had also put in place the bonfires of vanities.”
“People had to burn the things they loved the most.”
“To prove their devotion to God,” Hannibal said. “At the peak of Savonarola’s reign, the bonfires were so high, they reached higher than the palaces and churches.”
A small smile curved Will’s lips. He didn’t feel it, but saw Hannibal smiling in return. “You like to see things burn, Dr. Lecter?”
“It can be crucial to separate the things we merely appreciate and enjoy from the things we love most.”
“By setting them on fire?”
The room had entirely disappeared now. Wind blew in his hair and Will knew it was a dream. “Some things cannot be burned, Will. They live on through the flames.”
In his home, after a shower and another coffee, he looked at his phone for a long while. It was on the bedside table. Settling down in bed in the morning light to try and sleep some more, hoping the alcohol had sufficiently exhausted his body to keep more visions away, Will searched for Hannibal Lecter’s number. He brought it up on the screen, but couldn’t think of anything to say exactly. He placed the phone back down.
On his back, just as sleep came over him like the rocking of the waves, a question took shape. Do you want to burn what you love? It was quickly washed away.