Chapter Text
Yes, if there is justice,
though I have said there is none,
I will die in spring, this season I love least
of beginning all over, I of no patience,
when hope is a door left unlatched in a high wind
banging and banging itself to pieces.
—“Postmortem Georgic,” James Richardson
***
He’s dead, so he goes to the cabin.
Two days went by that he can’t remember, though the nurses said he was awake, sometimes, after the first one. On the third day, when he asks for Abigail, the nurses make sure somebody comes and talks to him, somebody with clearance for this sort of thing. She leads with Jack and Alana: still critical. Your assailant: missing. And Abigail. She says something more polite than dead, but dead is what rings through his ears, whites him out. He can’t really hear anything else she says. It was good she led with the good news, probably. He feels like he’s seeing from behind his eyes. Derealized dissociative state, he thinks, absently.
The surgeon comes to see him, a rangy, fast-talking white guy, who seems like he’s telling a joke no matter what he’s saying. “We thought you were a goner,” he says, shaking Will’s hand. “Never seen anyone fight so hard to stay down.” Shoulder clap. “Welcome back.” And exit.
Penetrating abdominal trauma, and how; the scar is fully eight inches. Staples scraggle across his belly in gothic style. He’s reanimated matter, pulled off the morgue slab. Or out of the freezer case—an eight inch wound and no damage to the internal organs. To the meat.
The nurses tell him later that he kept asking for the ambulance, when his morphine got low. Wouldn’t settle down when they told him he was in the hospital already. “Not my ambulance,” he says.
He can’t think what to do about the dogs, spends fully twenty minutes glitching Alana-Beverly-Jack-Hannibal-Abigail before he gets the nurse to bring him his cell phone. He looks through the contacts, one by one. There aren’t many. Brauer makes a predictable joke about his hourly rate, but he goes over right away. He sounds genuinely sorry when he calls back to say they’ve all been taken to the pound, Shadow got loose and bit the neighbor’s kid. It’s just another concussive wave of no-sound. He’s not going to be hearing right for a while.
It makes sense, though, that the dogs are gone, because the dogs were for his soul, and you don’t get to keep everything when you get brought back. He’s suddenly fiercely glad that he has no psychiatrist to ferret that out of him, pencil poised.
When Brauer calls back, to offer to try to wrangle custody back from the pound, Will says no. Says he can’t manage them, now. Says thank you.
***
He leaves the hospital as soon as they’ll let him, sooner than they’d like. He wants to head north right away, but he ends up being too weak to manage much beyond eating and sleeping for a few days. He resists the temptation to take too many Percoset by taking none. It hurts, but he’s dutiful about his antibiotics, and when he changes the dressing there’s no sign of infection. He holds on to that grim satisfaction.
He eats canned soup and apples and peanut butter and coffee, and nobody begs him for a lick of peanut butter off his finger, and as soon as he’s only horizontal 12 hours a day he starts getting ready to go. The car goes in for a tune-up and he checks his sump pump and starts excavating the geologic formation of laundry in the closet. It’s still dirty from three, four weeks ago, and it’s mostly his new clothes, his makeover clothes; he puts them away in a bottom drawer and packs Beefy-Ts and flannel.
The day before he leaves, he cleans out the kitchen. He packs up some of the staples, the ketchup, the canned food; he can’t remember if he’s got clingwrap up at the place so he sticks it in the box too. The rest gets chucked—all the dog food, too.
Awful pain lances through his gut when he lugs the bins out to the street, and he has to stop and pant at the side of the road, hands on his knees. He walks back up to the house carefully, checks his bandage, lies down. Dinner waits til 10pm.
Sleep isn’t easy, and morning comes slowly, but finally it’s dawn and he gets up, nervy with the gray anxiety of travel. He puts the lights on timers, turns the thermostat down, gulps instant coffee and washes the mug out in the sink. The rumble of the garbage truck filters in to him as he’s shutting off the water; he brings in the bins and locks up, stamping his feet against the March chill.
The sun’s made a clean break of the horizon, gilding his house in rose-gold light. He’s seen it like this so many times, throwing a coat over his undershirt to follow the dogs outside, a steaming mug between his hands—heading back to bed afterward, the dogs flopping to the ground in a chorus of stretches and yawns.
But the sun is up and it’s time to leave. He turns himself away from those thoughts and folds into the car, checking the passenger seat: empty. He revs the engine.
I am alone in this darkness, he thinks, and if it wasn’t a prayer before, it is now.
***
Normally he does this drive in one long, grinding day, finding what calm he can in the steady roll of asphalt beneath him, but he’s not quite stupid enough to try it this time, with his belly aching by the fourth hour.
On the second day he watches the land get less industrial as he passes away from Detroit, turning scrubbier, pinier. On the Mackinac Bridge the water far below shines like foil: Huron to the right, Michigan to the left. He sails above the strait and lets himself imagine for a moment that he’s down there, really sailing, buoyant and sure on deep water.
It’s cold, and the sky is a steely gray; he flicks the radio on, worried about snow. Maybe, maybe not, say the too-bright radio voices. They cut to a section on local crime and he slaps it off.
Lunch, groceries, and a couple cords of good firewood in St Ignace, and then the last leg, into the deep woods. There’s barely another soul on the road.
The long gravel drive leads the way and narrows as it goes. Some of the oldest trees on the property rise up on either side, and the understory is dark with brambles. The gravel crunches underneath as the car noses deeper into the woods. The path takes a sharp curve, and as he rounds the bend, he has the sensation of crossing into one of the world’s hidden places: the path opens into a wide clearing, light and bright, and in the center his house sleeps patiently, cradled by the woods all around. He pulls into the end of the drive and opens the door, feeling suddenly light-hearted in the rush of cold, clean air.
It’s cold as penguin shit inside, as his dad would have said, but the roof is still up and none of the windows are broken. Good start. He flicks a light switch experimentally and says a little prayer of thanks to no one when it comes on.
The space heater on full blast will help take the edge off while he starts on the fire. While the kindling is catching, he plugs in the fridge and puts away the food, and by the time he’s done the stove’s ready to get going on some proper logs.
Next, water. He starts checking the pipes. No obvious bursts or warps, no cold spots signaling ice inside, so he starts the well pump, opens the valve, checks the taps one by one. The bathroom fixtures all gurgle back to life, and he dares to hope that he won’t have to do any plumbing this time, but then the kitchen sink trap springs a leak and he swears at it with all the vigor of a kid from the boatyards.
The sink can wait. He leans against the kitchen counter and looks over the cabin, taking a deep breath. There’s something he loves in this, the ritual of waking this place up in the spring, step by painstaking step, transforming it from a post and clapboard shell into someplace warm and safe, snug as a matchbox. It’s not about making life into art, he thinks, with a stab of bitterness. It’s not like that. It’s something else. A home has its own life, its own long breaths in and out, warmth that rises and ebbs, steady cycles of water, fuel, waste. It’s not alive, but it shines with the animal life inside it like the moon shines with the light of the sun.
He sways on his feet and drops into a chair, the exhaustion finally crashing over him. He thinks of all he has left to do and it’s all he can do to keep tears from springing into his eyes. Instead he plows mechanically through a tray of deli mac and cheese and lays his head down right there on the table—if the dogs were here they’d start nudging him, worried, because “head on table” is not an acceptable position—he levers himself upright and forces himself to make up the bed, pulling the mattress and all the linens out of the triple-thick anti-mouse plastic bagging he left them in, last August, when he thought all he was facing was his Intro Profiling students trying to talk to him in the cafeteria; on that thought, bed not so much made as piled up, he crawls in, and tumbles into sleep.
He shivers himself awake at some godforsaken hour, having burrowed himself into a ball in the center of the bed searching for warmth. The fire’s dead—he fell asleep without banking it for the night, and the cabin is agonizingly cold.
He lays there in his huddle, trying to convince himself that if he just curls a little closer around himself, he’ll warm up, in just a minute. The wind sighs in the pines outside. He drifts just shy of sleep, his mind wandering through memories: rehab, the drive, packing up the house in Wolf Trap … he runs his winterizing checklist over in his head three times trying to quash a baseless suspicion that he forgot to turn off the water before he pushes up out of bed in disgust, swearing and hopping a little at the cold burn of the floor.
Once he gets the stove going again he scoots back into his warm spot and forces himself to focus on the crackle of the fire. His worries hover nearby, but soon enough the cabin must really start to warm up, because darkness pulls him away.
***
In the weeks that follow, there’s enough to be done that he doesn’t have to think about anything else. Every time he turns around there’s something that needs work: fixing the sink, evicting the mice that have wintered over inside, plugging up the drafts. It’s easier to focus now than it used to be. His mind isn’t so unruly. Vast parts of him, the wounded, monstrous parts, are numbed to a dull white, and only a small animal life in him moves, tending to its den.
More than food or work, it’s the rhythm of the stove that organizes his day. The old habits come back to him: run the first fire of the day hot and open for twenty minutes to burn off the creosote, pack in the biggest logs at night to keep the fire glowing til morning. The wood he chopped two summers ago is well-seasoned now, and he takes satisfaction in hauling it over from the shed and watching it burn up, hot and clean.
It’s the simplest drive he can hold onto: make a little more heat and light, keep buoying up against the dark.
Each night, as he falls asleep, he thinks about the faint plume of smoke rising from his chimney in the dark. There’s nothing else around for miles, only tall trees and scudding clouds. It’s not the flame that draws him, but what’s flung from it, the paths the eddy takes in the high free air above the forest.
***
If he’s tired enough, he doesn’t dream, so it becomes his business to be tired. He recaulks and weatherstrips, scrubs the floor, airs the mothball smell out of the linens, and topples into bed every night, riding the edge of real exhaustion.
It’s no surprise, then, when he wakes up one morning with an agonizing sore throat. He makes his coffee light and sweet and crawls back into bed with it. The trip into town can wait until afternoon.
But in the afternoon he’s worse, achy and shivering under the blankets. Once he would have struggled out of bed and dosed himself up with pills, desperate to fight his own weakness, but he has less to prove now, and the fever is so familiar. There is a comfort in giving in. He only gets up to pile wood onto the fire, teeth chattering; his rising temperature is a sick satisfaction.
Sunlight crawls across the cabin as the day closes, and Will’s mind roams uneasily, freed from the boundaries his hibernation has maintained. He tries to focus on the expression on Alana’s face when she walked over to him and cupped his face in her hand. That tenderness. “You’re warm,” she’d said, worried. He should have said take me home, stay with me, don’t let go. He should have said please.
But Alana keeps falling away from him—he keeps seeing her gasping on the concrete—and as he skirts delirium he sees Hannibal, or he feels his presence. His warm, steady friend. Hannibal made him soup once, in the hospital. “You made me chicken soup,” Will had said, pleased, disbelieving, making fun of him just a bit; and Hannibal had made that funny little gruff expression and turned away. In embarrassment? Did Hannibal get embarrassed? The soup was delicious. And Hannibal had washed his knuckles so gently—if Will’s careful he can remember just that part, not before or after—the precision of his hands, the calm of his silence.
It’s not that he forgets what really happened, as he drifts, but what clings to him through the fever haze is not the truth of Hannibal Lecter, only that feeling of warm expectation, of fondness, that went with the thought of Hannibal for so long. It was the last thing he expected to find in the BAU; and for so many months, the only comfort in the daily assault of his sleepless, dissolving dreams.
There’s never been any escape from the dark eddy of Hannibal’s influence, not since that first afternoon in Jack’s office. There is no away, there is no free. All of this is some kind of peaceful, dead-wind limbo where he is being allowed to wait out the days. When the time comes, Hannibal will find him.
Let it be soon, he prays, through the roil of his sickness. Why burn more wood? Why make more tracks? Let it be now.
When he sleeps, Hannibal stays with him all night, hiding where the shadows move.
The fever is worse the next day, and he vomits up his toast and coffee, but in the afternoon he manages some crackers and tylenol and sleeps again, dreamlessly this time. It’s dark when he wakes, disoriented and dry-mouthed, bladder aching.
The bathroom mirror reveals that he looks like shit. No surprise there. Sparks are swimming at the edge of his vision, more and more of them, and he realizes dimly that he had better lie down again. They swarm bright and dark, then dark and dark, and he only makes it halfway back to bed before he crumples down into the nothingness.
Time passes, or doesn’t. At some point he blinks into consciousness. His body filters back to coherence slowly—his arm is uncomfortably folded under his chest. It’s cold. He can see his bedside clock from here, glowing steady green, but his vision is too blurred to read it.
It takes all of his limited concentration to sit up and lean against the bed. There’s a can of Sprite on the bedside table. Half full; mostly flat. A weird contentment steals over him. It’s kind of funny, after all. His life has contracted into an infinitesimal size, just him and this scratchy rug. No one knows where he is. No one will help him.
He smiles, baring his teeth. The Sprite’s pretty good.
***
Winter begins turning to spring, and the snow starts to melt. The sound of it is everywhere, trickles running unseen under the snowbanks. Every day he’s a little less sick, but he feels cracked open, somehow. He can’t stop dreaming of old cases, dead bodies, triggers pulled again and again—the usual parade of corpses and screams.
But waking up in a cold sweat is routine, at this point: towel off, bank the fire, crawl back into bed. It’s comforting, or comforting enough.
One morning it’s the image of Beth LeBeau’s face that wakes him, her scored-open fish-belly smile. After all this time, he still feels like he did it—which: he didn’t, he’s not confused any more, he knows that. If anything, that case was a success for him. He was actually helping Georgia, doing something good, for once, he thinks, staring defensively across the room, as though there were anyone to prove it to. Not that his good intentions counted for anything, once he led Hannibal straight to the mark.
Still. No matter how much he’s responsible for, he didn’t hurt Beth. But his nightmare has brought back all the horror of that hallucination: the calm of cleaning the fish, hands steady with long habit, turning slowly to unease as the gorge rose in his throat and he began to sense the real, lifeless young woman beneath him. He fairly throws himself out of bed.
The fishing season will open in a few weeks: April 26 is a date emblazoned on his memory, and historically, a happy one. But the last time he went out was when he caught Hannibal those trout for dinner, and he’s worked hard to avoid thinking about it since. But today some heady mixture of defiance and self-loathing, or maybe just the hopeful light, pushes him out the door to the DNR.
“You want to do a combo hunting/fishing license, hon?” the clerk asks. She doesn’t look much like Beth—square jaw, pert nose—but she’s slim and brown-haired, and he’d really rather not be near her.
“Just fishing,” he says, tensing up. The fluorescent lights vibrate nauseously above him.
“It’s a real good deal now,” she tells him, peppily, but he already said no. It’s not clear why they have to keep talking about it.
The counter is made of some cheap laminate that feels greasy under his forearms; he stuffs his hands in his pockets. “I’m not interested.”
But she’s only just getting into her spiel. “We just rolled out some changes this spring, why don’t I get you a flyer on the license restructuring—”
“I said no.” His voice is too loud. He clenches his jaw shut, holding himself in place. “I don’t hunt.” He sees the moment when it occurs to her finally—finally—to be wary of him. She tucks her hair behind her ear nervously and darts to the back for his forms.
In the parking lot he’s watery-kneed, shaking with rage. Hunting and fishing, they’re the same, aren’t they? One you stalk and one you lure. A vision of the clerk’s cut-up corpse flashes through his mind, and he gags, leaning against the sun-warm side of his car.
A handle of Evan Williams is only eighteen ninety-five up here. It tastes just like it used to, snuck from the cupboard when his dad wasn’t home.
***
That night he dreams about Abigail. It isn’t a nightmare.
For months the only thing he could imagine salvaging from their lives was her future: a future where she got to grow up and be free—that’s how he thought of it—free and clear, clean of violence, and the only way to imagine this to himself was to think of her washed in golden afternoon light—golden light and blue shadow—and this is the dream: he’s walking up a grassy knoll in the freshness of late spring, and as he crests the hill, they’re waiting for him. Abigail and Hannibal. And they’re happy, and she’s laughing, shouting at him to hurry up, and woods and fields spread out ahead of them gilded, all the way to the blue mountains in the east.
The patter of drizzle wakes him. The buttery warmth of the dream drains away as chill gray light filters in, and with a sickening jerk he remembers all over again that she’s dead. He rubs his face, feeling cold and raw.
The tumbler by his bed has a finger still left in it. He knocks it back.
He grieved her already, is the thing—there were days in prison when he’d swear it was the only thing keeping him alive. This grief already has a shape and an edge and and a well-worn pain, and it has a purpose: bringing down Hannibal Lecter.
Why should any of it be different now? Abigail is dead, Hannibal killed her, Will didn’t stop it. Those are the only facts that matter. Move the period of that sentence forward three months and here he still is, in the white space with its awful roar. But when he thinks about those dinners he had at Hannibal’s, the two of them smirking and flirting and circling each other, their sick dance of death, and she must have been in the house—
What he should be doing is chasing Hannibal down and exacting some measure of justice, or at least revenge. It’s what he swore to do. But if it was a binding oath, it belongs to a dead man. What’s left of him doesn’t have enough substance to bind to, as he shuffles through this quiet purgatory—he’s just memories and visions, vivid in the mist.
He is scrupulous about his drunkenness that day, and goes to some trouble over it, methodically refilling his glass. It’s not that he thinks it will help, but at least it makes the ghosts a little watery and indistinct. Or the ghosts are real, but he can fade, for a while.
Slumping into bed as the room spins, he’s too far gone to pretend he doesn’t want to have that dream again. Just that comfort: he’d sell his soul for it.
He dreams of Abigail again, all right, but instead of peace he gets one of those sickly, interminable drunk dreams, that winds through the night like a choking vine. The snowmelt trickling down the gutters dribbles through his brain and he dreams of the river, overflowing its banks, treacherously cold and fast. She was trying to tell him something—she was trying to say something important—but the water roared and now she’s gone and he can’t remember whether he told her to stay away from the river.
He wakes up cotton-mouthed and stinking, confused by the late-morning sun, and he’s halfway to adding a slug of bourbon to his coffee when he notices that the heel of his hand is throbbing. A closer look reveals an angry burn that he only barely remembers getting from the wood stove. Christ.
Enough time spent around shrinks will teach anyone the snippy vocabulary for this kind of thing, and it’s “avoidance coping,” sure—but everyone would do better to avoid him, himself included. He’d looked at that woman in the DNR and tasted bitter meat. His stomach lurches.
This is, he knows, what vengeance has bought him. It had felt so good to finally use the power humming inside of him, instead of running from it. He’d spent his whole life trying to box up and tamp down and lock away his mind, with its terrible understanding and dark obsessions, and he’d been so busy trying to straitjacket himself that it had never fully dawned on him that the ability to understand was only the flip side of the ability to control. And when grief burned away all his timid scruples, there his mind was, ready and waiting, as though he’d never tried to disown it, and the rush of power that came with laying his traps had brought him an ease he’d never felt before.
From that first roar of acceleration, he’d plunged deeper and deeper into evil and ruin. There was a brutal inevitability to it: to catch Hannibal he had to be close to him, but to be close to Hannibal was to be warped, like green wood in an overheated kiln. The costs were acceptable, as long as he succeeded—he told himself that—and all the while, the pleasure of it drew him on. It felt good, hunting Hannibal—hunting with Hannibal. Power made him feel real. He had a purpose; it made him whole. So he thought.
The image flashes through his mind again, of the DNR clerk tucking back her hair, suddenly afraid. Shame is thick between his teeth. It was supposed to be safe, here, this is as far away as he knows how to be—that was the whole point. He thought he couldn’t be dangerous if he could just be alone.
But alone, he drifts. He’s an unstable terrain, a formless weather; plumes of violence erupt from him with no warning. He’s just a medium for the past to crash itself against the present, casualties be damned. He bangs his fist on his thigh, throat tight.
The cabin is rank with flop sweat and dirty clothes, and suddenly he can’t take it for another minute. He grabs his coat and shoves his feet into his boots.
There are still a few drifts of snow glinting on the ground in the forest, and his trails are overgrown, but the blazes stand out clearly on the gray trunks. He crouches to tie his shoes. When he looks up, the sunbeams are slanting down to illuminate the tentative greenery, and the cold air is soft with the promise of spring, and it hits him: here is no nightmare, no prison daydream, but the real forest, reaching out to him.
Tears well up in his eyes—there’s so much here that he couldn’t keep with him in Chilton’s cell—and then he thinks of the dogs, bounding over the rolling hills, bowing and barking, and his tears choke in his throat. It’s not one memory, one day, it’s something he feels with his whole body: how they came to learn every ridge and gully of this place with their feet, carving the land into themselves, or themselves into the land, leaving behind these ghosts still playing chase in the woods.
***
Riehl’s is the same as it ever was, with its ancient wood paneling and racks of shiny gear. Will nods at Daniel when he walks in, but Daniel’s restocking and doesn’t see him, so he gets to work rebuilding his fly box. He’s put together a decent set of his favorite nymphs and dries, and is idly considering a garish monstrosity when Joyce comes over with a box of reels in one arm and gives him a hug with the other.
“Look who made it up for the start of the season! How’s it going?”
“Hi, Joyce,” Will says, trying a smile. His voice feels rusty. “Looking forward to getting on the river.”
“Well, of course,” Joyce says, “of course you are. Hey, you’re looking like a million bucks.” Will flushes with embarrassment. His parka was damp so he’d grabbed one of his new coats, the lambswool, with the stand collar. It’s—nice. Warm.
He scrambles for a change of subject. “Now, what kind of tourist trap are you turning this place into?” he asks, holding up a would-be Woolly Bugger. Neon green with purple stripes. It’s the worst thing Will has seen all week.
Joyce snorts at that, waving him off cheerfully. “You know how many of those I sell to guys trying to get their kids to come out with them? I’m trying to make a living here, Herr Professor. But what are you doing by the pre-mades? I’ve got some new, really top-notch partridge just came in.”
“I—don’t have my kit with me this trip. It’s a long story.” The FBI gave him back most of his stuff, but not his tying gear. It hadn’t occurred to him to feel much about that one way or another, before now, but Joyce’s open expression falters and Will feels a stab of unhappiness.
She presses on. “How do you think our chances are for getting that advanced fly-tying class out of you this summer?”
“Joyce,” Daniel says, coming over. “I don’t think that’s the kind of attraction we want.” He shoots Will a dirty look.
Oh. Of course. “World’s most notorious fly-fishing enthusiast?” he asks bitterly. “Yeah, I drove up to the back woods of the UP with a barely-healed stab wound because I just love the attention.” He’s trying to be an asshole, but his voice is wavering oddly. Daniel looks uncomfortable. Good.
“Let me ring you up,” Joyce says, a hand on his arm.
***
On April 26 he sets out at dawn for the best spot on his land, where a tributary of the Carp runs, thinking about Beverly.
She’d given him a hard time, once, about how his only publication was on time of death by insect activity, instead of his “real” talents. “You don’t want to share the love with the rest of us?” she’d asked.
He’d looked at her flatly, a headache pounding behind his eyes. “You don’t want this love,” he’d said, and she’d dimpled at him in that infuriatingly cute way that she had whenever he was being a dickhead.
God, he misses her.
He takes a deep breath and forces himself to focus on the landscape around him: the gold-foil gleam of sunrise in the clouds, the birds singing, the insects low on the water.
What he hadn’t gotten to tell her was that it makes perfect sense for him to have studied insects. Insects are the business of fishermen. Even the most junior fly fisherman knows the life cycle of the caddis and the mayfly. He remembers being barely five years old and finding caddis larva cases by the banks while his dad fished. Delicate and beautiful, made of grains of sand a single layer thick. When he found one, he would pick it up so carefully he’d almost be holding his breath, and swathes of time would slip by as he tried to understand each individual grain of red and brown and gray.
To design a fly, you have to cast yourself out to the hungry fish, scanning the shadow and dazzle of the surface from below: what does it make of its prey? What shape and color and pattern of motion does it expect, given the season? There are some basic guidelines, but real competence, real connoisseurship, comes through long practice. Reckoning with the desires and visions of an alien consciousness drags you down into a different mode of thought, one that brings you swirling down the currents of the river, clarity coming in bright flashes. And meanwhile the real insects buzz along, making their small instinctive circles, eaten or not eaten, all part of the great hum of the world.
He realizes with a lurch that in his mind, he’s explaining this for Abigail.
The thought chills him, and his convulsive grip on the rod scares away a trout. It’s cruel, the way these things still lurk in his imagination. They wait in hidden wells, sheltered from the rough current of the present. That someday she’ll come out to the river with him; that she’ll smile at him. Forgive him. He believes all of these things. They live as far from the surface as blind cave fish and wait for him to lose his way.
That is one of his powers, after all: to inhabit a thought so completely that it becomes a place to live. It’s tempting to let himself stay there, in the fantasy that someday he could teach her what he knows about fishing. It would be so comforting to dwell in the possibility of her, shield himself in it, until every real moment is softened by the armature of daydream he holds in reserve. A gentler insanity than his usual.
That sounds good, actually. Just give up on trying to face facts, for a little while. What the hell, right? There are no consequences for what he thinks, alone out here under the mild spring sky. He wiggles his toes in his waders.
She’d be safe, first of all; and happy, second; and doing something normal. Going to college—and they would fix it, somehow, the money, and the notoriety, Alana would be relentless on the phone with anyone she could think of, so that Abigail could be safe from the questions and the looks. Studying something practical. Alana would try to get her to study—probably not psych, but art or literature or something—and Abigail would give one of her devastating snotty eyebrow raises and say, “I spend enough time thinking about feelings in therapy, I’m going to make money.”
So she could come up here on a break and he’d teach her how to fish. No hunting, just the huge rushing peace of the water. Everything seems bearable, on the water. She needs that. Or she would need that, if she weren’t—
No. Focus. Spring break; fishing in the morning; she’d make him watch movies on her laptop and sigh about the lack of cell service. S’mores and pointing out birds to her in the early morning and her grumpy, indulgent face—
And—if he’s getting what he wants, he might as well go whole hog. A crime-free Hannibal, he can imagine that, sort of—although it’s impossible to imagine any version of Hannibal enjoying such rusticated accommodations; so a change of venue is in order. He would plan it all; there’s no version of Hannibal that is not an inveterate control freak. But Will would still get his fishing, and Abigail would probably get her 4G connection, and they would all get to share the quiet camaraderie of people who have lived through the same thing. Hannibal would make dinner and crack very dry jokes and Will would get to keep the best friend he’s ever had.
But the perfection of it starts to bring reality seeping back in: why, after all, not? They could have been part of his life, the strange makeshift family of the three of them, three orphans—he pushes down the voice in his head that wants to bring up all the ways it would never have worked and thinks fiercely that at least they could have tried. And instead Hannibal cut her throat like a sulky child throwing away a toy.
There was no reason, Hannibal loved her as much as he did, there was no reason she couldn’t be alive now. But Hannibal couldn’t have everything exactly the way he wanted it, and somehow that was good enough?
And oh, there it is: fury. He hasn’t felt anger like this since before he was gutted. It boils along now like floodwater, carrying him away. People were just tools to Hannibal. Lower beings. He loved Abigail but the instant she was inconvenient to him, that was it. And for all his talk of Achilles and Patroclus, love and friendship—and Will never stopped believing it, no matter how well he knew better—in the end Hannibal looked at him and saw nothing but an ill-trained dog.
It’s a relief to be angry, sort of, because it’s the only thing that can temper the shame. It settles in like a front. He goes to the river angry; he walks home angry. It makes the sunlight sharper and the fresh air warmer, bearing down on every moment. He loses track of time in the shower rehearsing arguments he’ll never get to use. One day the water turns icy and he almost falls down in surprise.
The hub of the argument is always the same: she didn’t have to die.
It’s not that he doesn’t understand Hannibal’s logic, because oh, he does. It’s all his own fault, actually—or that’s what Hannibal believes, and a large portion of his arguments are with the voice in his head that believes it too. Because, after all, how was Hannibal supposed to take her on the lam with him after Will betrayed them? How was any of it supposed to continue? It was Will who destroyed their family, Will who made the first blow: on some level, this makes perfect sense to him. The stomach-churning unease of plotting Hannibal’s downfall feels, in these moments, like unbearable guilt. He has to construct and reconstruct elaborate rebuttals just to fix in his mind that under no circumstances was he the one who started it.
But neither was he a passive victim. He can’t let himself forget that. Racing along in Hannibal’s wake, trying to be so fucking clever, fooling himself that he was even half in control. At least Hannibal was only ever acting true to his nature. There’s a purity to Hannibal: he is all one thing, from tip to toe, perfectly formed and perfectly confident—and the damage he causes is perfectly intentional. No stab wound is a quarter of an inch deeper than it needs to be.
Will doesn’t flatter himself that he’s an innately evil person. But that’s just the trouble. What is he? He’s not quite solid, and that formlessness makes him too dangerous to live out in the world, where anyone could become collateral.
He had waited with a fisherman’s patience to catch Hannibal. He had fashioned himself into the bait and cast himself out on a weightless line across the water. And he was the one left gutted and gasping in the kitchen. Saving no one.
He tosses the fish back when he catches them, and the birds sing earlier every morning for the warming days.