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The walls of Will Graham's cell are plain, bare, and the light hits them in such a way that elongate the shadows on his face when he looks in the mirror. At first he doesn't look in the mirror at all—he was never often wont to do so in freedom, and is even less likely to do so in captivity, when there's no class to put on a tie for, no crowds of people among whom he wants to disappear. No change in clothes to concern himself with, just a jumpsuit that gets rotated out for a clean one every so often, every possible sharp edge smoothed down for both his comfort and his safety. And because they know he wants to run, though they don't know yet where he'd run to.
If they have their suspicions, though, then they'd be right to think that his feet would turn to Dr. Lecter's door. They're turning to his door even now, at lights out when he should be lying in bed. He's always had a good internal compass. And he hasn't been sleeping well.
-
In the hours following Lecter's farewell, the mirror does become a convenient site for self-reproach. Will develops this tendency to stare into the small reflective pane, to review his shortcomings. Like he could've done something about the fact that his arms weren't long enough to reach through the bars and just choke the bastard. Like it's his fault somebody found all his loose seams and pulled.
But he knows—he knows that whatever Lecter is deserves more than him unraveled. Will drinks in enough of other people's emotions to know the burn of anger in his throat, like bolting a glass of bourbon, and days and days after Lecter's first visit it doesn't recede.
In fact, he starts to think, with increasing clarity, he'd like to climb out of the window with his heel on Hannibal Lecter's neck.
And then, staring into his reflection, he can see someone he barely recognizes, someone who might've been in constant disrepair but was never helpless. A Will Graham who never came apart in someone's hands.
The fact of his sanity remains. It feels newly wrapped, a present to be turned over in his hands.
-
Will's head, pulsing with the sounds of Lecter's retreating footsteps, flips back and forth through every meal they had together, reexamines every room they shared as if he can see them from outside his own skin. If he stares long enough into the mirror, the pendulum flicks over his vision and illuminates behind him all their moments spent in a single space, space that he only in retrospect can appreciate as the theater of his own destruction. It's not perfect, because Will's always been a shitty hand at empathizing with himself. But it's a start.
He looks hard at the Hannibal Lecter that lives in his memory, reaches out to find the fault lines in the mask. This doesn't do him much good: it's immaculate as it had been back when they first met, when he hadn't been able to wince out the life underneath.
So he looks instead for the edge of the mask, something under which he can slide his fingertips, maybe try it on for himself. After all, what he's capable of has always been several pathological notches above a simple ability to slip into other people's shoes.
I got so close to him, he thinks; he throws the full weight of himself into it, because while it doesn't mean the same thing it did when Garrett Jacob Hobbs was the ghost at his heels, he and Lecter had been close. Drawn the same breaths at the same time. Brothers, it had seemed, in different skins.
Will shuts his eyes.
It's eight o'clock in the evening.
He knows this because there is a maple grandfather clock in the foyer, positioned by the stairwell. It sounds off quarterly, and he uses its sonorous chime to help keep time while he cooks, even though precision in cooking is something to be felt and not measured. Except in the case of desserts.
I am cooking.
The food is for a potluck to be hosted by a local association of Baltimore psychiatrists. He doesn't especially prefer their company, and his clientele is enough such that he has no strong need to network, but he will attend for the sake of professional decorum: he has attended this benefit every year since he established his private practice in the city.
In an hour, I may kill someone.
He has a list.
Maybe it can wait until morning, or perhaps a week from now.
He is patient.
It could even wait a year.
Will opens his eyes.
In the mirror, he sees a naked figure cast in dark black rust. Bones standing out beneath the skin. Horns that tower past the height of the mirror. Devouring eyes.
He knows this dream, knows it can recur between blinks. And he knows what it means.
“I can see you now,” Will says aloud.
The flicker of the light overhead doesn't feel real, but when the room is illuminated again, all that's left in the mirror is himself.
-
Will has never liked looking people directly in the face, and his neurosis is such that on bad days this extends to his own reflection. Now there's a certain grim ease in using the mirror as something other than its intended purpose—as an easy conduit through which he can step into his memories, memories that grow increasingly more detailed as he tries to fill in his past from multiple camera angles. The foreign angles are informed by those fleeting moments when he succeeds in zipping himself into Hannibal Lecter's skin, mimicking his days in abstract. And his days are usually mundane, though framed with finery. Where Lecter may have been responsible for death upon death during his acquaintanceship with Will, there's a good chance he recognizes a dodged bullet when he sees one. Which means there's a good chance that he hasn't spilled a drop of blood since Will's incarceration.
Which means that, honestly, Will isn't a hundred percent sure that he's really managed it. The matter of the potluck was mostly guesswork—Lecter had mentioned it once, in a different life, when he'd vaguely referenced having heard Chilton's name at an annual conference. And while it's good that Will was able to extract so inane a fact from the recesses of his memory, it's not quite enough for him to confidently feel as though he's really in Lecter's shoes, doing the same things at the same time. It's not quite close to what he had with Garrett Jacob Hobbs, whose empty eyes would leer at him in every reflective surface, whose home Will would sometimes find himself standing in as if it were superimposed over his own. Whose hands he saw sometimes in lieu of his, loading a hunting rifle instead of tying a lure, his feet on leaves in the woods instead of on the shore.
But when he opens his eyes, every single time, he gets this: the monster in the looking glass, standing at roughly the same height as Will but for its splintering horns.
And maybe he's missing a lot of objective information about Hannibal Lecter, whose distances had been careful and whose spoken history had been sparse. But he's close. He knows it. He breathes in sometimes, and miles and miles away, at the other end of the line that Lecter had tried to use to garrotte him, he knows, he's sure, Lecter is breathing in too.
-
Alana visits after another few weeks, and though it causes her obvious grief just to look at him, there's a straightness to her shoulders that suggests that her life has resumed the trappings of routine.
They bring her a folding chair so she can sit down across the cell. Will sits down on the edge of the bed himself. “Hello, Dr. Bloom,” he says.
She smiles weakly. “Hey, there.”
He looks down at his hands, then back into her radiant face. “May I ask … to what do I owe the pleasure?”
His voice, the words, they all sound alien. Good, he thinks absently.
“I wanted to see you,” Alana says.
He smiles benignly at her. His face strains somewhat with the effort. “I appreciate that you didn't want to know what I was doing, given that the list of activities available to me runs unsurprisingly slim.”
The corner of her mouth lilts up in a wan smirk. She looks down at her hands, and then back up, cordial. “I thought you might want to know that your dogs are all well. No unexpected visits to the vet, no one bolting out my front door during rush hour. It's kind of nice, having them around.”
Will nods.
“They're worried about you,” she says. “They can get a little restless at night. I give them treats to calm their nerves … even tried making a few myself. Which didn’t quite go as planned.”
“Dr. Lecter had a special recipe for them,” Will says abruptly. “He … made them sausages.”
Alana blinks at the mention of Lecter, but then the other corner of her mouth is turning upwards, as if she's warmed by the memory of their friendship. “He still does sometimes,” she admits.
Still feeding my fucking dogs, Will thinks bitterly, and then another piece falls into place like the shift of a tectonic plate: he thinks about Hannibal with Will's house key in-hand, flicking the dogs their sausages, sitting down with Will's fishing lures once they'd settled. Of course, he thinks. He glances over at the mirror and sees the shadow lurking, the beast staring as if in warning. Of course.
He looks at Alana. “And how is Dr. Lecter nowadays?”
She hesitates, which doesn't seem all that extraordinary, but her wrists flex in her lap too, unusually nervous. Alana is typically graceful in her avoidance: her anxious smile is normal, but the flick of her hands isn't.
“He's the same as always,” Alana says. “With an extra helping of gallantry, since he thinks he failed all of us in … letting this happen.” She pauses. “He thinks about you often. But I don't think he can bear to visit.”
He flexes his own hands, stares straight into her eyes. “And I suppose you know all this because … you've been spending more time with him?”
“He's been a good friend,” Alana says, but Will is standing up, stepping close to the bars.
“How good a friend?”
He knows half a second too late that Alana misunderstands, and her reaction confirms a suspicion that he didn't know was lurking in the back of his own mind. A blush briefly stains the side of her neck, and she's standing up too.
“Will,” she says sharply, “don't.”
“Alana,” he says, but he can't keep the frustration out of his voice. He's close. He has to get closer, and if Lecter can't bear to visit then the only thread he can pull is standing right in front of him, and maybe she's too unused to Lecter's cryptic curiosity falling out of his mouth, but dammit, it's all he's got.
“I'm not going to patronize you by saying you don't know what it's been like for us,” Alana says. “Because I know that whatever you've been going through has probably been unimaginably worse. But please.” She swallows. Her eyes are bright. “Just try and remember that … we're still trying to help you out here. Okay? Try to focus on that.”
She leaves swiftly, because she usually knows what's best for her, but all Will can think of is how in ten minutes she's going to be in the parking lot, and Lecter will receive a phone call, and he will excuse himself from his patient in order to take it. He's going to comfort Alana with his voice low, as though someone will hear. And then he'll say he has leftovers from last night, and would she like it if he came by for a visit later, that she may partake?
And he knows, both in his skin and in Lecter's, that she's going to say yes.
-
That night the monster manifests at last in his dreams, a full body instead of long reaching fingers and deep canyon collarbones, and Will only has an instant to absorb the sight before it's upon him: a row of black teeth carelessly culling blood and meat from his shoulder, fingers coiling around his waist like barbed wire, and something too hard and too solid lashing its way between his naked thighs.
It takes a second, through the haze of the dream, for any sting to register, and when it does it occurs in lightning strikes. The beast is a man, and mounts like one, heavy cock weaving in and out of Will's body, which gives with surprising ease but not quite enough.
But the burn is good too, each thrust rubbing up hard against something in him that wrenches one moan after another out of his throat, his cock at full attention and dripping, wet as the blood trickling down his back. The pain everywhere does well to distract from the pain of getting fucked. He thinks, deliriously, that this thing could tear him in two. The possibility seems remote, though, not for any real reason but more because maybe he might've been two all along.
The thing cages him with its body, its knife-like fingers creeping up his chest as if to approximate a second ribcage. And then the fingers are digging in, and there's the sucking sting of flesh giving way before the fingers are in him, they're in him, his ribs splitting and creaking aside to allow these sinuous threads wrapping around his lungs and squeezing—
Will wakes up wheezing, his dick sputtering with painful intensity, the orgasm ripped from every living piece of him. The fabric of his jumpsuit clings to his body, hosed in sweat. On his ceiling he can still see the demon, imprinted on his very vision, the fluorescents flicking between their stale yellow light and the luminous gleam in the eyes of the beast.
Behind his eyelids, though, when he blinks, he sees a bedroom, lovely and patterned and lived-in. The armchairs smell newly of dog hair; the armoire, of perfume.
He sees himself leaning over Alana Bloom, sniffing her hair like a vintage wine, running his hands over her pliant body. Leaning down to taste her, then leaning up, using his hands to cage her, his hips—
Exquisite, Will mouths to himself in the cell once his breath has halfway returned.
His lungs still hurt as he says it, like Lecter's words in his mouth don't know how to do anything other than burn.
-
“Good evening, Will,” Hannibal says the next day, folded elegantly into a chair opposite the cell in a facsimile of the way they used to spend time together.
Will had words prepared for this moment, and every subsequent one, but with each drawn breath he feels Alana's perfume in his lungs, and he just—he can't.
He coils his hands around the bars. Numbly, he says, “Last night. Did you.”
Hannibal raises his eyebrows.
“Did you hurt Alana?”
At this Hannibal lets his head loll to the side, an even more frank expression of curiosity, a bloodhound attempting to follow the first thread of a scent. “Dr. Bloom,” he says, “is in assuredly good health.”
Will lets out a shaky breath.
Hannibal watches him for a while longer. Then a ghost of a smile appears at his eyes, the corner of his mouth. Like he's teetering on the edge of a good joke, about to painstakingly extricate a punchline.
“For my part, I've been well. Though … I doubt you would feel the need to speculate.”
His eyes skim Will up and down appraisingly, with a carnality that sends Will back to last night, to Hannibal's hands on Alana's body, his mouth on her shoulder gentle, not tearing. Heat prickles over Will's skin, furious, traitorous heat. He received a change of clothes earlier in the morning, but it doesn't seem to matter now. He feels sticky in a different way, bloody and beaten, like he tried to slip his fingers beneath the mask and it cut him to ribbons.
“Would you,” Hannibal says dreamily, and this, this is the last hallmark of Will's miserable success: the knowledge that the fire burning him to cinders under his skin has perhaps been Hannibal's all along.