a small part of a great whole

Will pulls them in, and Will pulls them back out again.

Hannibal fails to walk back up the rocky cliff-face. Will, somehow, manages to drag him. At some point, he becomes aware that he is dying. Not quickly– he doesn’t deserve a quick death– but it is happening.

He is so, so cold. Will is saying things, the kind of things Will doesn’t usually say, at least not in Hannibal’s imagination. Encouraging him up the hill. “Easy does it,” Will says. “One step at a time.” As if there is some other way to walk. He actually needs the reminder. Hannibal takes one step at a time.

He is just as cold as they wash themselves in the shower. Hannibal has only used it on the occasions that he came for dinner with Abigail here, and stayed in his bedroom here for the night. The one with a wardrobe in Will’s size in the closet. That bedroom. Will is in this shower, they are in here together naked now, and Hannibal is dying.

“Do you have another car?” Will asks.

He does. It wouldn’t be much of a getaway house if he didn’t have the means to, well, get away from it.

Will piles him in the backseat like cargo, and pulls out of the little shed in the woods. It’s the car’s maiden voyage since being purchased through a proxy, save for small spins around the grounds every so often to keep the engine functional. He wonders if Will notices the low miles.

He sleeps. He returns in fevered dreams to that moment, the only moment, the best and worst moment of his life, when they went over. What does it mean? What was supposed to come after? Such moments aren’t supposed to have an after. But here they are. And Hannibal is still dying.

When he wakes up, Will is talking on the phone.

He looks around, first with an attempt to move his head, and when his stomach prevents him even from that, with his eyes. Will has the contents of the trunk– paper maps, money, passports, fresh burner phone– on the passenger seat beside him. They must have been driving for a few hours already, far enough that it wouldn’t occur to anyone to subpoena all records of the cell towers nearby.

“Yes. A surgeon. Someone discreet. I have money.”

Hannibal can hear only the tone, but not the words, on the other end of the line.

“Fine. I’m just saying, financially is the only way in which I’m not completely fucked right now. I don’t want to be any bother,” says Will. “Besides the bother I’m already going to be.”

A gruff tone. Skeptical, but willing. Will winces. “Thank you,” he says. “We should be there by dawn. And sir– I’m sorry. It’s a mess.”

The man on the other end makes some final comment, and Will hangs up.

“Who,” says Hannibal. He had meant to finish the sentence, but even the one word leaves him disoriented with effort.

“Friend of my dad’s.”

Hannibal tries to call to mind everything he has ever learned about Will’s dad. Also named William. A boat mechanic. Never stayed in one place long, dragging his only child along with him. Hannibal had asked once, “alcoholic?” and Will had answered yes. Dead, of a cause Hannibal never had the opportunity to learn, while Will was still on the police force in New Orleans. Nothing about this picture suggests that Will’s dad had had friends who could call up favours from surgeons on a moment’s notice. Far less that they might do it on Will’s behalf.

He sleeps some more. He doesn’t know where they are. He is in a car with Will. Perhaps that is the best he can do. The best he will ever be able to do again. Why did Will pull them over? Why did he drag them out? The questions are mutually exclusive. Can Will have wanted to do both of those things, or was one a mistake? They chase themselves around in his head.

They stop once. Will gets out and Hannibal can smell him pissing. Hannibal would like to piss, but he can’t move. Eventually he probably does anyway, but he doesn’t feel it.

The car stops.

“We’re here,” says Will, as if Hannibal has any other option.

It’s too dark outside to see where “here” is, which is probably good. Will gets out of the car, comes around to the back. Hannibal can feel the cooler air on his face as the door opens. Will plants his feet on the ground, angles his shoulders inside the car so he’s hovering above Hannibal, trying to get an angle where he might be able to pull him out.

“Yeah, no,” he mutters, then closes the door.

Perhaps Hannibal is finally being abandoned. This is it; Will had pulled them out of the ocean and then driven to the middle of nowhere just to leave Hannibal’s body in a car.

The door opens again. A new scent. Someone else is here. Soap, cleaning solution, the slight cigarette miasma of someone who doesn’t smoke but spends time around smokers. “Hmm,” says a voice. “We better wait. It’s gonna take all three of us.”

Three? Hannibal hopes he isn’t included in that number. He’s not in a mood to contribute much to any sort of group effort. He wishes the interiors of the car weren’t leather; it would be more comfortable to press his cheek into fabric.

Will and the other man wait for whatever they’re waiting for. Hannibal waits for death. A memory, hazy as a dream that could have happened or could not, runs in his mind, not forwards like a movie but sideways and backwards. He was in a car, sleeping, and then he was being carried gently and set into bed. They’d been coming back to the estate after the trip to the hospital in Vilnius, and Hannibal had been allowed to hold her on the trip back as his mother slept in the front seat. No seat belts in those days, he thinks of telling Abigail, but Abigail is dead. The three of them, asleep: Misha, new to the world, safe in Hannibal’s arms; Hannibal, slumped back against the seat nearly supine so as to not drop her; and their mother, pale and exhausted but with tears of joy in her eyes as she handed her newborn child into the loving arms of her elder. “Don’t wake them,” she’d whispered when the car stopped and she woke up herself. Hannibal’s father had picked up both of them together instead, depositing Hannibal in his own bed and only then taking Misha from him. How could it be a memory, if he was asleep? Or was he only pretending to be, for the pleasure of being picked up and held? Is that what he’s doing now?

When he next is aware of anything, something very similar is happening. No, not similar at all. There is a lot more grunting. Also, there are many more hands. Hands on his shoulders, under his arms, around his waist, supporting his feet. It hurts terribly. He passes out again.

There are bright lights. A needle in his arm. Another smell, a different voice, soft tenor. “Jim was worse when he came in,” it says, an edge of amusement, “but not by much.” Oblivion.

Darkness, a different timbre. The darkness was inside his head before, now it’s outside of him. There is a palpable lack of light in the room, of the sort that comes from blocking out the sun with blackout curtains. The brightness beyond is a necessary part of the darkness. Can’t get that kind of darkness at night. It feels like being with Will. Will is like blackout curtains. Will is here.

“You’re a blackout curtain,” Hannibal mumbles, and becomes aware that he is extremely high.

Will has the gall to laugh at him. Will is here. Will must have been sitting in a chair by his bedside– how many chairs has Hannibal sat in, by how many bedsides, because of Will? Will’s own, of course. And Abigail’s. And his own, for the three years that he sometimes felt he was an observer of his own reality, and interested party observing Hannibal Lecter through impenetrable glass, watching him sleep, wondering when he was going to wake up.

He has woken up.

He opens his eyes. He’s in a dark room, thick black hangings indeed covering the window. In what little ambient light there is, he can see the outline of Will Graham, now sitting back on the chair, leaning forward, curious, hesitant. He is too much to even try to look at. Can’t stare at the sun, or you’ll go blind. Instead Hannibal notes that the only furnishing in the room is a bookshelf, which doesn’t appear to have very many books on it. A few thick ones on the middle shelf, and perhaps the outlines of a few pictures on the others. It smells of cigarette smoke and, very faintly, of vomit, which has been meticulously scrubbed out of wherever it got into with strong cleaners, but will linger forever. Carpet, probably. Too old to have been him, and in any case he hasn’t eaten anything in recent memory that he could possibly vomit up. There is also another smell. He can’t quite place it.

Hannibal tries to sit up, which is stupid. He knows it’s stupid as he does it, and then thinks it actually might have been brilliant when it gets him Will’s hand on his chest pressing down. “Hey,” Will says, and he actually sounds alarmed. “Easy. Easy does it.”

“Please stop saying that,” says Hannibal.

Will snorts. “Fuck you,” he says quietly, a gentle laugh. It doesn’t sound like the Will he knows. It sounds younger. Carefree. They don’t joke like that. Their jokes have body counts. What is that smell?

“I’m going to call Shane in,” says Will, still oddly gently. “He’s the surgeon.” Before Hannibal can demand what Will has on this Shane guy to force him to operate on Hannibal in a private residence, and why he’s letting him out of his sight to call for help, Will goes to the door, and in the shocking stream of light that it lets in, two figures enter.

Hannibal finally places the smell. It’s aftershave with a ship on the bottle.

“Hello,” says a voice, the same one that had compared his condition favourably to someone named Jim. “I’m going to turn on the lamp now; I suggest you close your eyes and open them slowly. Once they’re all the way open, you may have some water.”

They’re good instructions. Hannibal follows them, and is given water. His parched mouth slurps at it faster than his mind intends him to, and he is informed again that easy does it, this time by the surgeon. His eyes adjust to the light, and he looks at the new arrivals. The man who must be Shane, Hannibal immediately identifies as a young man, but only because he has prior knowledge of him being a surgeon, and is used to automatically subtracting ten years from any surgeon’s apparent age for a better estimate of their likely career advancement. In reality, he is likely not much younger than Hannibal himself. The other man who accompanied him, unnamed as yet, is older, paunchy, grizzled. A little like what Hannibal imagines washed-up members of forgotten American rock bands to look like if they survive long enough. Not exactly a paragon of graceful aging, but then, Hannibal has lately given up any claim he used to have to that distinction.

He will have to kill these men. He’s in no condition to do it right now– he will need them to like him, trust him, continue taking care of him until he’s ready to strike. He tries to come up with something charming to say.

“I like your aftershave,” he says.

He is still very high.

Everyone laughs, Will most of all. Hannibal watches Will laugh. There is something private in it. He laughs like he’s alone, like he’s with family. Shane has snapped on a pair of gloves and is smiling as he pokes around at Hannibal’s abdomen. Not only will Hannibal have to kill them, he wants to.

“Thanks,” says the older man. “Nothin’ fancy in this house. Makes a good Christmas present for kids who forget to shave, too. I’m Frankie. This is my place.”

Hannibal takes as deep a breath as he can under the circumstances. “Thank you,” he tries again, with deliberate dignity, “for your help.”

“’Course,” is all Frankie says to that.

But it is not of course, of course, and now that his speech seems to be at least marginally linked to his brain, his thoughts slip out. “Why?”

“Because Bill G.’s son asked,” says Frankie simply, and places a hand on Will’s shoulder.

Will doesn’t shrug it off. He looks a little bit uncomfortable, but only the way a teenager being sent off to college looks uncomfortable when his parents insist on hugging him.

“And the fact that–” he shouldn’t say that. Doesn’t. But how could they not know? Who could these people possibly be, who haven’t heard of him? Even if the cliff incident hasn’t hit the news, there’s no way his escape hasn’t.

Frankie shrugs. “Live and let live,” he says.

If I hear one more tired cliche dispensed like great wisdom, I am going to kill everyone in this house who isn’t Will Graham, Hannibal doesn’t say, because he is going to do that anyway, so the cliche isn’t even true.

He marks the time by pills and by meals, which Frankie and also a stout middle-aged woman with a permanent no-nonsense frown called Mag bring in from him. Mag doesn’t seem to be a romantic partner, nor necessarily to even live in the house; she is simply there, like Shane, and a few other voices Hannibal hears greeting each other easily– like, to be fair, he and Will, who are also just here.

The food is mostly cheap carbs. Hannibal has known hunger, and he would not turn up his nose at the best efforts of an obviously impecunious host. After a few days, however, he is forced to bring the issue up with Mag. “My abdominal muscles having been significantly weakened,” he begins, “I admit that with a diet so low in fibre–”

“Oh, of course, honey!” Mag exclaims. She pulls out her phone and starts tapping on it, muttering manically, “Sara from Wednesday night has a grocery store near her place… and she goes to the breakfast meeting tomorrow… and I’ll see Rob at All Saints… we’ll get you some prunes, darling, that’s what always works for me when I get stopped up.” The last remark being directed at Hannibal, though he pretends it wasn’t. Plans of a near-military complexity are drawn up in the space of a few minutes to transport the fruit to his bedside across whatever wasteland of all-American food desert he is currently inhabiting.

He eats the fake-cheese noodles that Will had informed him delightedly are Kraft Dinner. The next evening, however, Mag brings him a big box of prunes, and the noodles have frozen peas in them.

He has to kill all of them, all these people who are taking care of him for seemingly no reason at all besides that Will asked. But he finds himself unexpectedly struck by the mealy texture of old peas in the smooth cheese, an artistic statement that is all the more authentic because unintentional. He will kill Mag quickly, he decides.

Will sits in the room with him, for the most part. Hannibal mostly sleeps, and maybe Will reads while he is asleep, but he never seem to do it while Hannibal is only dozing. Only once, Hannibal sees him placing a book back on the shelf as he is waking up; he doesn’t bother marking his place in it. Sometimes Frankie cracks the door open and asks Will do so some chore. He’s simply one of the people available to help around the house, same as anyone else; though he can’t do much in the way of physical labour.

The first time that Hannibal decides to haul himself upright, he chooses a moment when the house is quiet, and Will isn’t there to see him struggle. Then he regrets it, and wishes that Will had seen after all. Too late now; there can only be one first time. He stumbles out of his room into a living room, where Will is ironing shirts.

They stare at each other for a moment. “You’re walking,” says Will, which Hannibal thinks is an uncharacteristically stupid thing to say.

“You’re… ironing,” says Hannibal, equally stupidly.

“Might as well make myself useful.” Will raises and lowers his arms, experimentally. “Also, it’s physical therapy.”

Hannibal looks at the pile of carefully folded cheap polyester shirts. All different sizes, like this is a laundromat. “You’re quite good at that.”

“I did used to be a respected professional. Before you put a stop to it. I sometimes wore decent clothes.” The statement sounds neutral. Just an observation.

The lower part of Hannibal’s abdomen feels permanently shrunk, as if his belly button is being pulled towards his hip flexors. His legs are already trembling with the effort of remaining upright. Will puts down the iron, carefully, and reaches for his arm to help him over to the couch. Will’s hands are not strong– his shoulder must still pain him. Hannibal hasn’t even asked about it. Shane saw to it as well, doubtless. But they are even warmer than they must be usually, because of the iron. Hannibal cannot apologize if it would mean wishing them away. Will lowers him down onto a cushion that sinks about a foot under his weight.

“If you say ‘easy does it,’” Hannibal warns him, “I will gut you.”

He had intended, if he’d had any intentions at all for the statement, to pull a small laugh from Will. There is a particular twist of his mouth that floats on the edges of Hannibal’s memory, a thing Will’s face does when he knows he shouldn’t find it funny.

Instead Will just pants and winces, his shoulder obviously paining him. He lets go of Hannibal as soon as he is settled on the couch, and stands apart from him, clenching and unclenching a fist. Silence, for a moment. The noise of the neighbour running a vacuum cleaner is audible through two sets of walls.

“I apologize,” says Hannibal. “That was tasteless.” And though he hadn’t intended it of course it is that that gets the smile. Will looks down at his hand, as if wondering what to do with it, then reaches out and brushes the back of Hannibal’s shoulder with a fingertip. “It’s OK,” he says. He is back out of reach before Hannibal can react to the touch at all.

He stares at him instead. Is it? He wants to ask. Is it okay? What is okay, exactly?

“I thought that you…” Hannibal waves a hand at the room around them. It’s more of a finger twitch. He had already known, anatomically, the extent to which the core muscles contribute to each and every movement, but it’s a different thing from feeling it.

“You thought I had nobody in the world.”

Hannibal doesn’t answer.

“You hoped. You tried your best to create the reality you hoped for.”

“Yes,” says Hannibal, and Will rewards him with a soft look for it, and it’s like OK all over again.

“Who are they?”

“Friends of my dad’s. We were here for four years, left when I was twelve. They kept in touch.”

“And Frankie kept sending you aftershave.”

“Yes.”

If he could only ask the right question, this would all make sense. He used to be able to ask the right questions. That’s what psychiatry is. But then, Will had always resisted psychiatry. Even his.

“Will,” he says. The house is quiet, and they are alone, but he lowers his voice anyway. “Will, you know that I will have to– that we–”

“No,” says Will, with a finality that reminds Hannibal of hitting water from a great height.

The sofa cushion seems to suck him down, all of his bones suddenly heavy and exhausted. So maybe now is when he learns that nothing has changed. Will has never made up his mind and never will, constantly teetering on the edge of something, but never falling. Then what did you pull us off for?

But Will knows what he’s thinking. He always does. Does he always? Or was that just a prison fantasy, that his mind was as transparent as the walls of his cage, only for Will? “We’ll kill plenty,” Will murmurs. “But everyone in this house lives.”

We.

There are logistical reasons to object to this. But Will has just said we, and Hannibal’s eyes are slipping closed despite his best efforts.

“Will you help me back to bed?” he asks, and Will does, and sits with him as he falls asleep, the iron steaming futilely beyond the door.

The next time Hannibal tries moving around is four meals and two pill-times later. This time, Will is again absent, and he doesn’t hear his voice in the house at all, though he can hear Frankie humming in the kitchen. Hannibal holds on to the door of his room, carefully balancing himself, and Frankie must hear it. It would be a smart idea for him to come supervise the serial killer making his way through the doorway, but Frankie just calls, “In the kitchen.”

Hannibal makes his way to the kitchen, the peeling linoleum slightly sticky against his socks– well, they’re someone else’s socks, but they’re on his feet.

“Hey!” Frankie grins. He is chopping a few sad-looking green peppers, which is promising with regards to what might be for dinner– it includes a vegetable. “Up and about, I see. You hungry?”

“Yes, but I can wait until supper, and eat at the table tonight,” he says. There’s a small window in the kitchen wall that shows a square of backyard through it: concrete enclosed by a fence separating it from the neighbour’s square of concrete. It’s stuffed full of pots and crates of plants. Most are beginning to wilt with the autumn, but in the corner is a box of tomato plants where Will is sorting through the final fruits and placing them into an old yogourt tub.

Frankie turns a little to see where Hannibal is looking. Hannibal feels a sudden sense of urgency. He is walking. He is okay. That means that whatever this is, it ends soon– however it ends. “How did you know Will’s father?” he asks.

Frankie raises his eyebrows. “Y’don’t know? You guys seem pretty close.”

Hannibal isn’t sure what to say to that. It makes his heart hurt. Or maybe that’s just his stomach.

“What did Will tell you about his daddy?”

“Not much,” says Hannibal. “That he was a mechanic. Somewhat itinerant. Alcoholic.”

Frankie’s hand pauses where he was about to slice through a strip of pepper. Then he laughs, a booming, hacking sound that almost pulls Hannibal into an amusement that isn’t his own. After all, he has already agreed– well, at least not objected as strenuously as he should have– to not kill these people. Perhaps he can laugh with them.

“Yes,” says Frankie, “Yes, he was that. Well, buddy, I think if you want you know about Will’s childhood, you had better ask him yourself.”

In what is quickly coming to seem a previous life, Hannibal would have exacted a terrible revenge for buddy. Now, it just makes him realize that Frankie might not even know his name– or not have been told it officially, anyway. Plausible deniability. Or maybe he would just do the same for anyone, named or anonymous.

Hannibal, Will, Frankie, Mag, and a grey-faced man that Hannibal has never seen before and who doesn’t manage more than a few spoonfuls of food all eat dinner at the chipped table in the corner of the living room. They eat rice and canned black beans and green peppers and the tomatoes Will salvaged from the tail end of the garden, seasoned with salt and way too much pepper. It tastes like home. Hannibal is certain he has never eaten anything remotely similar in its bland unsophistication in any of his homes. Will smiles softly at him during the meal. That must be it.

That night, Hannibal dreams. He wakes up to what has become to him silence in this house: the click and hiss of the pipes, the bone-deep rumble of trains passing through somewhere near or far. He still doesn’t know where they are, exactly. He clicks on the light, and tries to remember his dream. He feels the shadow of it, Will twisting and squirming underneath him, trying to get away.

Absent-mindedly, he picks up the one actual book on the bookshelf, a blue hardcover that feels almost soggy in his hands from age and use.

He stares at it. Yes, he was that, says Frankie. His hand on Will’s shoulder. Because Bill G.’s son asked.

Hannibal goes out into the living room. Will is sleeping on the sofa, the one that sinks so far it looks like he might fall through it. He sits on the edge, just by Will’s shoulder, and Will opens his eyes slowly.

“Hi,” he whispers. “You okay?”

Hannibal places a hand on Will’s shoulder. Will doesn’t pull away. Hannibal realizes that he has forgotten to but the big blue book back on the shelf, and is clutching it now with the other hand. “I dreamed,” he says quietly, “That we were somewhere cold, a cabin in the woods, alone. You said that that was how it was supposed to end, anyway– us, together but separate. You wanted to lie down, at arms’ length from me, and watch me freeze to death as you did the same yourself.”

Will shifts, rolling onto his back to look up at Hannibal. He rubs a stray eyelash out of his eye. “Then what?” he asks. “Did you let us freeze?”

“I…”

The corners of Will’s mouth twitch. “Did you cuddle-rape me, Hannibal?”

“…would not put it that way.” He spreads his hand from Will’s shoulder over his chest, and Will lets him. He moves it lower, and the muscles of Will’s abdomen jump in fear or arousal or something else, but he doesn’t move. The memory of Will’s thrashing in the dream recedes. Will has never tried to get away from him. Not even when Hannibal was holding the knife. Will has always been still. Will has always stayed. When they came out of the water, Will was the one who held him, struggling.

Even though, all along, Will had someplace else to go. A family that Hannibal hadn’t even known to take away from him.

Will sits up, and Hannibal’s hand simply stays there, on his stomach. Will places a hand on Hannibal’s stomach, but more gently; probing the area for pain, inflammation. It hurts, but it will always hurt. He looks at the book in his hand. The silver letting that spells out ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS on the spine glints in the low moonlight through the curtains.

“Stay with me,” says Hannibal, and this time, Will doesn’t deny that he has a choice.

“I think,” says Will, “it might be time for us to go.”

He’s right. Hannibal nods. They will go now, and nobody will die.

“You can keep the book,” Will says. “Frankie won’t mind.”

In the car, the rest of the drugs and the few clothes that had been turned into Hannibal’s possessions packed into a plastic bag, three sandwiches apiece wrapped in wax paper, Will takes the first turn driving, and answers.