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They don’t die in the ocean, they die in the house. Caked with blood and sand and sea. It’s a feat that Will even managed to drag their broken bodies up the bluff and into the living room at all. Stumbling like a child, slipping and having to adjust Hannibal on his already ruined shoulder. Amazing still that he got Hannibal onto the couch and found his medical supplies so he could start some sort of procedure.
It made him feel good, it made him feel like they had a chance in getting away. In having the life that they both wanted but Will was desperately trying to avoid. They could have it now, he tells himself, they survived separation, they survived the Dragon, they survived the ocean, they can survive this too.
Hannibal’s first, somehow. It shocks the air out of Will’s lungs. He’s packing the bullet hole in his gut with the kind of desperation a man with everything to lose has. Shaky fingers and bloodied lip from where his blunt teeth ripped into the delicate skin there–he wonders offhandedly what it would feel like for Hannibal’s own teeth to break the skin there.
In his mind, Will is thinking three steps ahead. He’s already past here, spiritually. Canada, he thinks, Digby. It’s small, he knows it is. Small and it would be a good place for them to heal and he could easily find work there until Hannibal is well enough to move. There’s a car in the garage, he’ll just have to load Hannibal up into it, grab some supplies, and not stop until they’re deep into Canada and away from wherever Jack and the rest of the upper east coast will be looking.
Yeah, yes, he thinks nonsensically, this is fine. They’re fine. This is fine. He just has to–he just has to stop the bleeding. He just needs to–god, he needs to stop the bleeding, why can’t he stop it?
He’s packing gauze into it and his fingers are stained and slipping in fresh blood. It’s warm and dark and it floods his senses in a way that makes him hack up bile onto the carpet beside the couch. Hannibal’s insides are sickly warm, and he can feel his intestines against his fingers. They’re smoother than he expected, and he can feel where the bullet tore through muscle.
There is so much gauze in Hannibal now, more than should be enough but it isn’t. Both entry and exit are packed and soaked through, and blood is staining their bodies and their clothes and the couch and if Will was a praying man he might beg.
God let them survive the fall, so why can’t Will stop the bleeding.
When Hannibal dies, he says nothing. He’s salt soaked and blood drenched, and his eyes are half lidded and looking at Will because that’s what he needs to be the last thing he sees. If it were anything else he might try to fight it more.
He parts his lips to say something, to let Will know he’s right here, that he sees him, that he can feel his warm touch. To say one last thing to the only person living he loves. He wants to comfort Will, even now, but he can tell by the look in his Will’s eyes that nothing he says will be of comfort. He’s fighting god now.
Hannibal wonders, oddly, if death will be warm. He’d like to think it feels like Will’s skin against his, like sitting on a windy beach in warm clothes and somewhere behind him he can hear Will picking up shells.
It makes it worse that Will keeps promising everything is going to be okay even though he’s lightheaded and everything hurts down to his bones, down to his cells, and his words have started to slur just enough around the edges that it catches Hannibal’s hazy attention.
His body aches in only the way Jesus Christ’s body could have ached when he bore his cross down to Golgotha, down to Calvary. Shoulder throbbing and legs heavy and he feels the kiss of Judas on his cheek still. He wonders who will lay the crown of thorns on his head, if they will dig it in until he bleeds down his face and into his own mouth – he wishes it was in Hannibal’s mouth, instead.
“Hannibal,” he says through a cracking voice when he realizes that it doesn’t matter if he stops the bleeding or not. He finds his hand; skin sucking together from the gore of it all. “Hannibal, please.”
His throat is sore and his eyes are heavy. His own limbs are starting to move much slower than before and it startles him. He doesn’t want to die. Not now. He wants to live, god, he wants to live.
“Hannibal, listen,” he fiddles with the frayed ends of the man’s shirt, trying to focus on something other than the blood under his nails, “it’s going to be okay. I’m here with you. I’m not leaving anymore.”
His face twitches, and Hannibal blinks, softly. The words, whether they’ve registered or not, hang heavy in the air. Though, Will thinks maybe he hears him, maybe because his fingers twitch in his grip. Maybe because he makes a noise like acknowledgment but his own man is slipping he isn’t sure if he imagines both.
A tender whine escapes Will’s throat, and there’s a burning in his eyes that isn’t from the pain. Hot and heavy and behind his nose feels pressurized as the first few tears streak through Hannibal’s blood on his face.
“Where you go, I will go.” Everything else seems too hard to say now, but he says this, and he squeezes Hannibal’s hand three times. “When you die, I will die.”
Will lays his head on the couch, face pressed against Hannibal’s shoulder and his body shakes, his arm laid out strangely overtop Hannibal’s chest so he can feel the arrhythmia of his dying heart and keep their fingers together.
They lay like this until dawn breaks, a kaleidoscope of muted sun breaking across the living room floor and blinding Will in one eye temporarily. When he moves, just enough to adjust to get the sun out of his eyes, Hannibal’s chest falls for the last time.
It’s horrific; it’s calm. He doesn’t fight it, he lets death take him as an old friend and doesn’t worry about where Will is because Will is there and he knows it, can feel it.
(Their hands are still clasped together on his chest, and when he slips, he can still feel Will there. His hand is warm and heavy and it stays that way.)
He falls asleep there, clutching onto Hannibal, and he sleeps with his legs tucked under him and his hands holding Hannibal’s like a sinner in prayer and he doesn’t wake up again.
(It’s dark and soothing and his own hand is heavy and warm and he finally feels like he doesn’t have to fight anymore.)
Their bodies are discovered two days later, before the FBI gets there at all. The local cops found them first, somehow, probably because they were closer and when they stepped foot in the house they could feel death on their heels.
They lay them out and Will is covered with a sheet in respect because he’s not the Dragon or The Chesapeake Ripper, as far as anyone knows. He’s Will Graham, a notorious Special Agent, abducted by a serial killer while just trying to do the right thing. With a wife and child as home waiting, for Christ’s sake.
They lay him down softly, rigor mortis having already passed, and cover him with a white sheet and mourn a man none of them knew.
By the time Jack Crawford arrives, he’s already made the necessary calls. There were three bodies found, and he knows who they were. He knows and he feels sick like sweat sticky and nauseous from guilt.
Molly Foster-Graham does not have to identify her husband’s body, at the very least. Which is good for her, and bad for Jack because he’s going to have to look at the face of a man who tried his best and who he helped break.
He was hoping, as much as he could, that Will would kill Hannibal. The Dragon, he considered, would die. Hannibal wasn’t going to let anyone kill Will, and Will wasn’t going to let Hannibal die by anyone's hand but his own. There was also a tickle at the back of his mind, from the moment that Will said he needed to see Hannibal, that maybe they would slip away. Maybe they’d run off together and become someone else’s problem.
That he wouldn’t be ducking under police tape to pull back a sheet and say–
“Yes, that’s Will Graham.”
It’s a punch to the gut, to say it, to look at his body and the blood and the bruises and the deep stab wound in his cheek and know that maybe this could have been avoided. He’s seen a lot of dead, he’s seen a lot of agents go, but this death rips at his sternum and touches his heart with nails and teeth. Both because Will was his friend and also because this is another person he’s failed.
His body count is rising, maybe one day it’ll match Hannibal’s.
He can’t stand to look at him any longer, so he gestures for them to lay the sheet back down over his pale face and he steps around to look at Hannibal.
Hannibal is laid beside him, their shoulders brush lightly due to the way they’ve been laid out, and Jack stares at him. It almost feels good to see him dead. It should feel good, he always imagined it would. That it would taste like sunlight and ambrosia and fuel his body to keep going.
This tastes like decaying leaves and cemetery dirt.
“You’re a stupid bastard.” He says, quiet enough that only the dead could hear him. “Should have taken your chance.”
Their bodies are tagged and loaded, and Jack feels the need to watch over them. To make sure Will is handled with care because, even if Will wasn’t always right in the head, he always did what Jack asked and he has a wife and child at home.
They are together in the morgue, where Jimmy and Brian cut them open and do their autopsies because Jack doesn’t want anyone else touching Will and Hannibal is government property. It must be hard for them to do this to Will, but Jack doesn’t care.
Hannibal and Will are kept one freezer away from each other. A body between them because someone that works in the BSU made a passing comment about Dracula and Southern Vampires in the 1700 and 1800s and–it’s such a stupid theory and yet it was enough for them to at least have a body between them.
The official cause of death for both is a mixture of blood loss and dry drowning. Hannibal was basically bled out and the both had a significant amount of salt water in their lungs that even if they maybe got away, the ocean would still have killed them.
Molly rounds up Will’s body not long after they’ve stitched his chest up and pays for another funeral for another husband. At this point, it feels ridiculous to keep doing this. Maybe she’s bad luck. Maybe she’s Sarah, bound to have each of her husbands die by the will of god. Either way, she’s half certain that she won’t marry again.
She can’t do this again, not to herself and not to her son.
It’s a nice, subdued funeral. Her family comes, and the few people Will actively associated with from the FBI also come. Alana Bloom sends an eccentric bouquet of lavender and green carnations from her and Margot Verger, but she can’t bring herself to make an appearance.
She’ll visit his grave after, touch the cool headstone; send food to Molly, but she can’t look at his face.
His body is buried in a family cemetery plot in the same cemetery that Molly’s first husband is in, somewhere in a small town in Maine that Will was never very fond of. His headstone isn’t in yet, but Molly’s already arranged for it.
It’s easier the second time around, somehow. She already knows all the steps. Who to call and what to arrange and how to write an obituary.
Preceded in death by his mother, Briar Graham, and his father, Richard Graham. He leaves a wife, Molly Foster-Graham, and a son, Walter Foster-Graham.
When Jack holds the paper in his hand, reads over the little outline of Will’s life and the people who died before him and who will die after him, he does laugh.
The grass crunches under his boots like bones and the papers is crinkling around the edges.
“Do you think he was scared?” She asks Jack at the graveside, as his casket is piled with dirt. “Do you think he died afraid of them?”
Afraid of them. What a thought. Jack doubts he was afraid of Hannibal, he wasn’t even afraid of him when he found out what sort of creature he really was. Not when he gutted him. Not in Italy.
He doubts Will felt any sort of fear at all in being with him. It’s not like Hannibal put a gun to his head and demanded he come along. He knows them both better than that.
“Will was a strange cat. I’m sure he thought of you.” Jack tells her instead, whether he believes that or not, it does something in way of soothing her because she relaxes under the words.
It must have been eating at her. Whether he was afraid. Whether he even thought of her in his last moments.
There’s some cop who wrote up the report that Jack saw that said Will was holding Hannibal’s hand when they found them. The first cop that arrived on scene separated them, only for the sake of Will’s own legacy.
He wonders if that cop seized up at the sight of them. If it was hard to pull them apart even after the rigamortis had left their limbs and they were pliable again. Did he step into it and wonder if he was looking at two gods? Perhaps Judas and Jesus? David and Jonathan? Jacob and Rachel.
He folds the funeral program into a neat square and tucks it into his pocket, and offers to take Molly and Walter out to dinner tonight. To celebrate the good man that Will was.
Hannibal is cremated and placed in a sealed, cemented urn atop an unmarked grave in an unknown cemetery in Virginia. The FBI was worried if they put his name anywhere then it would draw in fans.
There is no funeral for him. No one visits his grave.