Jolly

Alana did as she threatened, Will knows.

He knows, first and foremost, because he’d seen it: Hannibal standing in the empty room, all books, all entertainment, all comfort removed. The fireplace boarded up, the only furniture a raised platform presumably intended to serve as a bed, which Hannibal had placed directly on top of the hole where the toilet used to be.

Will had been too angry, too full of pent-up rage that felt too much like wanting to see Hannibal again even if it was just to be angry in his presence, to have reconstructed Hannibal’s new living space like the crime scene he could have seen it as. (Arguably, the crime scene it was: had Hannibal remained at the BSHCI any longer, his lawyer would undoubtedly have had something to say about his client being held without access to adequate sanitation.) But his mind had been full of the image of Molly, in her hospital bed and alive– Molly as Hannibal would have wanted her, dead in their home with glass on Walter’s eyes– and he hadn’t thought too hard about it.

Now, he thinks about it. he closes his eyes to the latest scuzzy motel room they’ve stopped in for the night, and lets the pendulum swing. He walks through the halls of the hospital, down to Hannibal’s elaborate cell, hearing his shoes click against the floor. The hospital smells of bleach and insanity. He looks down: the clicking sound is his cane, not his shoes.

It’s Alana, he knows, whose memories he is inhabiting as he steps up to the glass. But it feels real, just like it always felt real when it was dead bodies he was extrapolating off of and not Hannibal himself. He hesitates. He does not want to be here, but he is too curious to stay away.

He is curious whether he has finally come up with something he can do to Hannibal’s physical presence that might reach through to him psychologically. He remembers him, lying calmly bound in Mason’s pigpen; he knows that pain doesn’t touch him. But indignity-- that, perhaps, is a different beast.

Hannibal had stood up when he’d heard Will enter the room, from where he had been engaged in pushing to the side the metal riser overtop of the hole in the floor. “Alana,” he says. “You must excuse me, I’m afraid you’ve come at a private moment.”

And then, Hannibal undoes the top of his jumpsuit, folds it down to underneath his knees, and squats.

Will feels Alana’s heart rate pick up, despite the fact that there is nothing to be afraid of. Hannibal is on one side of the glass, and he on another. There is nothing that Hannibal can do but exactly what he does: spread his feet slightly on either side of the hole, fold his hands underneath his chin, and turn his head to stare at Will.

Will tries not to flinch. He can see the shit exiting Hannibal’s body and dropping down into the plumbing underneath him. He ought to look away. He has no idea if it’s watching or looking away that would constitute giving up.

It is, Will has to admit, a striking power play, especially given that it is more or less the only one that Hannibal has left open to him. But then, he had always engaged in this particular strategy, to some extent: raising the absolute, terrifying lack of self-consciousness nearly to a form of art. He has taken the indignity forced upon him, and forced it upon someone else instead. He looks rather pleased with himself, a kind of grotesque jolliness that makes Will’s fists curl.

There is no toilet paper in the cell, Will realizes. Hannibal appears to notice the lack at the same moment and tilts his head, considering. Finally, he simply pulls up his white prison-issue briefs and does the jumpsuit up overtop. He smooths his hands down over the lapel, as if it were a tuxedo jacket, and walks calmly towards where Will stands.

“Now,” says Hannibal, “What can I do for you?”

Will opens his eyes.

He’s still lying on the bed in the motel room. The door to the bathroom is still closed, steam leaking out from the crack between the door and the carpeted floor of the room. Hannibal has been in the shower for nearly half an hour, but somehow, Will can no longer find it within himself to be annoyed about it.