Archive of Our Own ^beta

They settled, at last, somewhere north of Winnipeg, where the weather was icy and the woods deep and wild. They debated the merits of living in a more urban setting rather than one that was more rural—more people to potentially recognize them, stronger law enforcement, but easier to fade into the crowd, less attention paid to them by each individual.

It was Will who suggested that at least for a while they could become self-sufficient. They found a small property that was isolated, surrounded by fertile woods and with access to a stream. Plenty of wood for a fire, plenty of cabinets to stock with non-perishables. They could make the drive out to a nearby town once in a while and stock up.

Hannibal’s brow furrowed as he paced around the property for the first time. He knew how to survive in such conditions. Even as the frigid air bit his cheeks and numbed his nose, he attuned himself sharply to the environment. He could smell traces of animals. The summer must have been kind and the autumn not too harsh, for the scent of deer was strong. Rabbits, too. A distant hint of bear—not a frequent visitor, but with musk powerful enough to linger for weeks.

It was better odds than he had when he was a child, but still he hesitated.

His silence was noted. “Hannibal?”

He shook off the lingering touch of unease and reminded himself that in reality, this was a good option for them. “We can survive here,” he said. He looked up at the sky, already dusky in the early evening. “As long as we need to.”

“You don’t need to worry about survival,” Will said. “I’m an old hand at this kind of thing.”

His small smile was confident but somewhat wry. Will had said he was poor growing up, and Hannibal supposed that hunting and fishing could have been an important source of food for him when money was scarce, but it still rankled a bit, almost striking him as arrogant.

“As am I.” And that made a line appear on Will’s forehead beneath his scar, for he hadn’t asked certain details about Hannibal’s past, and Hannibal hadn’t offered. He didn’t offer now, either.

“Chiyoh seemed to be doing well on her own, under similar circumstances,” Will commented, skirting along the edges of what Hannibal was avoiding. “Did she get her survival skills from you?”

“In part. The rest was learned, I’m sure. The forest in that region is less kind than I am, but she is resourceful. If she wasn’t, she wouldn’t have survived her first winter there.”

“Did you expect her to?”

The question was unexpected, but he couldn’t deny Will had detected a thread of truth. “I thought she might reach a point where she had to make decisions that she was trying to avoid. I wasn’t trying to kill her—I left her with a reliable source of food, kept conveniently in a cage. If it remained alive until your arrival, she must have adapted more quickly than I expected.”

“You thought she would either starve or have to eat her own morality.”

“Yes.”

There was no judgement in Will’s eyes. “It did seem uncharacteristically kind of you to let her make her moral stand like that, even if she was suffering for it. If I hadn’t found her, that equilibrium could have been undisturbed for decades more.”

“Was it kind? Even if there had been no threat to her survival, I knew she could administer a more effective and prolonged torture than I had patience for at the time. Some twenty-five years of deplorable conditions, gnawing pheasant bones. The façade of her mercy was the cruelest sentence of all.”

“No crueler tyranny than that which is perpetuated in the name of justice,” Will quipped.

“You would know.”

Will barked a laugh. “I can hardly be considered to be on the side of justice anymore, even in theory. I’ve given it up.”

“And what will you replace your sense of justice with? Have you engineered a new philosophy, or are you only willing to look as far into the future as you can see where you stand?”

“Ideals of morality and justice haven’t brought me anything more than pain. I’m not following anything so structured. Just doing what I want. Letting myself want it.”

“In a society that prizes conformity and self-restraint, it is a radical act indeed to act on nothing more complex than desire.”

“Desire is complex,” Will said, expression softening into not-quite a frown. “Would be easier if it came to us in full words, not abstractions that we have to try to pin down.”

Hannibal could sense what lay under that statement, what hung between them. It had become a tangible presence, but between the limitations of their physical convalescence and their mutual caution, had not yet been fully broached.

“I would posit it’s not desire that’s complex,” he replied, “but rather other emotions that interfere and give us reason to doubt and hesitate. Desire is desire.”

“You speaking as someone who can always know and follow his own desires?”

“I’m speaking as someone who has too many times ignored desire, forsaking it for fear of vulnerability.”

Will blinked, not entirely disguising the surprise on his face—and Hannibal, in truth, had not expected to be quite so forthright with so little prompting. Then he grimaced. “I might still be struggling with that point,” he said quietly.

“Our history has given us much reason for distrust, and little to make the risk of vulnerability.”

“You did, in the end.”

“As did you, in coming to this place with me. It may not be possible for us to make full leaps, but we are taking intentional steps to facilitate trust. And that is all we can expect of each other for now.”

“Small steps,” Will agreed, and his eyes left Hannibal and went back to assessing the cabin. “It’s a good place for that. Won’t be much to rush us in the middle of winter.”

“Then let us make this our home, at least for the moment. I have no real objections.”

So setting his hesitations aside, they made it so.

The forest where they lived now reminded him of the forest of his childhood in many ways, despite differing in others. They had ended up at a very similar latitude to Hannibal’s childhood home—something that he had suspected instinctively upon arrival, and later confirmed when consulting a map. The climate was similar, and many of the trees were the same, but there were more evergreens here, and the wildlife differed, especially the birds. Still, he hadn’t been anywhere so similar in decades, and it was inevitable that some memories would surface at unexpected times.

They walked through the woods together, noting the trails of various animals. It had been a very long time, but Hannibal’s eyes were still attuned to certain things, and it wasn’t long before he was slipping away from Will’s side to chase down the pale gleam of a mushroom stem.

He couldn’t expect all of the mushrooms that he grew up around to be found in the Canadian wilderness, and in truth it was later in the season than was ideal, but some species, fortunately, were both widespread and hardy.

He crouched by the roots of a tree and pulled a mushroom free from the leaf litter to examine the underside of its cap. It was spongy rather than gilled, and a closer sniff confirmed his initial identification. It was a delightful find, and crouching down to the earth with his prize held in his hand, he felt much like he had once as a child.

A rustle of leaves behind him signaled Will’s approach.

“These are good mushrooms,” Hannibal explained, gesturing with the one in his hand. “Baravykai,” he said, calling it as he would have in the memory that now floated close to the surface. Then frowned, searching for a word more recently learned. “Boletes, that is. Porcini, more specifically.”

“You had these where you grew up?” Will asked, clearly catching the slip of his tongue.

“When we were lucky.” Instinct told him to withdraw from the topic, but perhaps the spark of delight made him bold, because he continued. “I learned to identify mushrooms from our cook, Judita. Or rather, I insisted on following along when she went to forage, and she was content putting me to work harvesting them and saving her hip the trouble.”

He went distant for a moment, uncertain of the last time he had spoken her name and realizing that with it came a rush of all manner of things—folk wisdom, local superstitions, a barrage of culture that the upper classes had mostly bleached from their lives, but had not disappeared entirely.

“Fingers of Velnias,” she had called mushrooms once, and waved her hand when he had pressed to know more. “The devil, child. What are your tutors teaching you? People used to say he was God’s brother, and while God created everything that was good in the world, Velnias created what was bad.”

When Hannibal had gone to one of his tutors to ask, he was informed that God didn’t have a brother, and that this was likely the influence of some lingering pagan influences. It was when he learned that Lithuania had been the last country in Europe to adopt Christianity, centuries after most of Europe had done so, and that there was evidence of peasants maintaining their pagan practices well into the sixteenth century. Though it hadn’t meant very much to Hannibal when he first learned this at the age of eight, he was later intrigued by the idea that his country resisted Christianization for so long, as if those local gods had remained strong and their people loyal until the bitter end. He had learned as much as he could with limited resources.

He placed his hand on the earth, and as he had when he was a child, imagined he could feel something more than just dirt and leaves, some trace of Velnias or that underworld, or some pulse of the earth goddess Žemyna simmering under the surface.

Then, reluctant to linger too long in this state, he gathered the two smaller caps that had sprouted near the first mushroom, and rose to his feet with a slight grimace at the crack of his knees. “Nowadays I think I can better appreciate why Judita was so eager to have a child doing the gathering for her.”

Will smiled at that, but Hannibal could see in his eyes that he wanted to know where Hannibal had gone in those few moments on the ground.

He spoke before Will could ask any questions. “I have the perfect recipe for these. If we’re lucky, we can find some others to add to the pot.”

“As long as you’re sure you can safely identify them. I’d hate to waste a delicious meal by throwing it all up.”

“If they’re a species I’ve come across before, I can certainly recognize them by smell. It’s a great deal of help in determining which are safe to eat.”

He did not mention the time he had come across a patch of toxic mushrooms and had nearly been desperate enough to eat them. It was a war between his stomach and brain that he wished to never repeat—knowing that the benefit of food in his stomach would be outweighed by dehydration when his body would inevitably try to purge itself of the toxin.

He reminded himself, again, that he had no reason to fear or linger on unpleasant memories. He was here now with Will, and a pantry stocked full of supplies—and he was no longer a child weak with hunger, and nothing could pry the one he loved away from him without suffering tenfold in return.

That night he dreamed of his sister—not shining with life and joy as he liked to remember her, nor sunken as she had been when hunger carved out hollows between her bones, but faded into a form no more solid than an early-morning fog, and fuzzy around the edges.

She sat on the edge of the fountain that had once overflowed with exuberant water, and now sat dark and still in the forest, snails crawling over every inch like overgrown ivy.

“Broliukas,” she called to her brother, soft as an evening breeze—or perhaps it was the breeze itself, fluttering the leaves and chilling his ears.

“Saulute,” he said in response—little sun. A word familiar and bittersweet on his lips. Her hair was not the brilliant gold it had been in life, but she still seemed to glow. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you like this.”

“Like this?” She laughed lightly. “A vėlė, you mean. You can say the word.”

“You’re a memory. I don’t believe in ghosts.”

“That’s good, because I’m not a ghost. My mind is here, but my soul, my siela is in a linden tree.” She plucked a snail free from the stone fountain and flipped it over, prodding at its soft underside with a transparent finger, as she had done when she was alive. Look, broliukas! she had said with a giggle. Under its hard shell it is soft, just like you. He had admonished her, insisting there was nothing soft inside him, but she had found that vulnerable spot in his armor all the same. “You should know. You were the one who told me about vėlės in the first place.”

“I also told you about a witch who turned the king’s sons into ravens. You can’t expect all tales to be true.”

“You wanted it to be true.”

His brow furrowed. “I never said that, little one. What makes you think so?”

“You didn’t say it, but you thought it,” she said, chin thrust out stubbornly. “When you ate me, you thought it. You wanted me to stay with you, and if those old stories were true, I would. And I would have stayed only with you, and not with those men.”

It was true, and it shouldn’t have surprised him that she knew what had been going through his mind then. If the superstition held, it meant her soul would leave her body and reside only in her head for three days, before departing entirely. Perhaps it was then very strangely fortuitous that her head had been the only part of her left untouched by the men who had killed her for meat, and thus he was left with a small meal and—perhaps—her soul to consume.

He sighed, and crouched before her, taking her hands into his, though they felt like cold water spilling between his fingers. They looked even smaller now that he was fully grown. “You shouldn’t think of such things, Mischelė.”

“Why not?” She pouted. “You liked me more after you ate me, anyway.”

He could not deny that while he had cared very much for her while she was still alive, he had not entirely forgiven her for her influence on him until she lay in his belly.

“I loved you then, and still do,” he said instead, truthfully. “Saulute, why are you here now?”

“You were playing in the dirt again, and thinking about our home. I could hear you.”

“All the way from here to the land of the vėlės?” He spoke teasingly, but she nodded solemnly with wide eyes.

“You used to think about these things all the time, broliukas. Remember, with Chiyoh? You pricked your fingers and swore with blood, and you believed in it.”

The memory made him smile. He had been so young—at the tail end of his teen years—and yes, he had believed in some force beyond what he could physically perceive. Chiyoh had been even younger, wide-eyed and out of her depth, but following his lead. She had been gentle, full of empathy. The tale that he told her had been enough to shake her to her core, and it had not been so difficult to convince her to follow him on his quest to avenge his sister.

“I was a different person then,” he said softly. “I do not regret any of it, not for a moment. But it was a different life. I had some beliefs about the world that I did not carry with me into adulthood. I had to change the way I saw myself and the world around me, to survive in a different sense. The symbolism still resonates, but within a hollow drum.”

“You’ve started a new life, just now. You and Will.”

“Yes, we have.”

“Then you can make changes again, if you want.” After a moment she asked, “What do you need to survive now?”

Her question struck him squarely in the chest, and his brow tightened. He didn’t know how to respond, because he wasn’t at all sure of the answer. He and Will had settled into something resembling normality, but it seemed tenuous. He would grow restless in the winter with no outside distractions, and he couldn’t be sure Will would continue to be satisfied with the life he had chosen.

“It’s okay, broliukas. That’s why I asked, because you don’t know yet. But you can think of me and our home, and you don’t have to be sad anymore.”

She kissed his forehead, and it was like being dusted with new snowfall. When she pulled back, she had dimples in her cheeks, and his heart ached, for he knew this was another farewell.

“I will think of you, saulute,” he promised.

The dream faded, and he opened his eyes to see the first glimmer of sunrise peeking from beneath the blinds.

As promised, Hannibal thought of Mischa often during the next week. When the snow fell and dusted every branch of the forest around them, he thought of the way it made her smile when she was just a toddler, how she would catch snowflakes and watch in amazement as they vanished in her hand—and pushed to the back of his mind the memories in which the snow had felt like fire when he was already cold and underdressed and without the insulation of subcutaneous fat.

Will caught him staring out the window one morning, lost in thought, the reassuring warmth of coffee cupped between his hands.

He sat nearby and was silent for a while. It occurred to Hannibal that he should try to redirect his attention, but he had fallen into a state in which this presented a challenge.

“You’ve been quiet lately,” Will commented, finally. Softly, whether from caution or respect: “Something on your mind?”

There was little room for falsehoods in this life they had built for themselves. “I’ve been thinking of my childhood more often since coming here. Once those doors are open, it can feel all-encompassing.”

Will’s eyes went from his to the windowpane beyond him, and he nodded. “The forest is here is as dense as it was on those grounds. I can see how it would remind you.”

“In many ways. When I was quite young, I thought of the forest as something beautiful, both aesthetically and conceptually. A stretch of untamed woods in contrast to the carefully kempt grounds closer to the mansion itself. There was both beauty in order and beauty in chaos. Beauty in the cycles of life. I would see foxes with shining coats that feasted on vermin, and small birds that had been tossed from their nest and wasted away with broken wings.”

He paused, lingering on that image. He had learned young how it felt to have such delicate bones crack underfoot—a mercy for the maimed bird, but more valuable to him for what it revealed about the power over life and death.

“Did you find nature any crueler than you were yourself?” Will asked, eyes deceptively soft for how well they pierced through and revealed him.

“I found it to have equal cruelty, but with less sense of rhyme or reason. The weak fall first, but disaster could strike anyone.”

“And it did.”

He inclined his head and wet his lips, treading slowly over the memories. “My family had resources, but resources can be taken. I was not strong as a child—I spent far more of my days reading than I did with exercise. I played no sport beyond what my school demanded of me. And my sister was very young. Six years old, when she died. I was twelve. We managed to survive for a while after our parents died, but not easily. There had been a famine, and it was… a very harsh winter.”

He stopped again, finding himself tripping slightly on the words. He hadn’t explained the entire story since he had told Chiyoh thirty years ago, and then he was motivated by as much anger as sadness. It pushed him through the turbulent waters of still-fresh memories, enabled him to speak with passion and certainty. Now the anger had destroyed those responsible and smoldered out in the heaps of their ashes, and he was left feeling, if anything, exhausted.

“The details aren’t important anymore,” he said softly. “The men who killed her were starving. They believed she was like that broken baby bird and would still not survive if they killed me, instead. I was also starving, so I ate what remained of her. And when I was older, I found those men and ate them, too.”

“All but one,” Will said.

“All but one. But he served his purpose. He was part of Chiyoh’s becoming. And yours.” Will had told him what he had done with the body, and Hannibal only wished he could have seen the sight himself.

“I walked into those grounds and felt like I had walked into the center of your mind, feeling for a latch. It seemed appropriate to transform him in a way befitting your style.”

Hannibal recalled how he had known, with absolute certainty, when Will had made that journey to his childhood home. “I could feel your trespass there. It was strange to know you were walking in a place to which I could never return.”

“It’s rare of you to speak in absolutes,” Will observed quietly. “Especially if it involves placing a limitation on yourself.”

He contemplated for a moment how to explain. “It doesn’t feel entirely like something that’s within my ability to control. There were oaths made, and the matter of fate. More than memories linger there, and I have avoided engaging with what remains. It begins to feel like a neglected correspondence, or an answer you have avoided giving for too long—resulting in further avoidance of that particular person or thing. I have declined to return, and turned my back on everything there, so now it feels like I cannot return, even if I wanted to.”

“You’re not referring to Chiyoh, are you? I thought that was part of it—you couldn’t interfere with those events after you set them into motion. But it sounds like more than that.”

“It’s far more abstract than that, yes.” He hesitated. “As a child I had often had the sense that in the forest, there were forces greater than myself, though I did not seek to personify or define them to a greater extent. When I entered adulthood it was rare that I returned to such places, and the cities in which I have lived had an insulating effect. I abstracted what I had felt as a child and placed it in a form that was more accessible in my new life—the Christian God, to whom were dedicated countless architectural wonders around me. I had resented that influence in my youth, as I was expected to abide by rules of Christian morality, yet it became an intriguing study in contradictions when I had matured as a philosopher.”

“Typhoid and swans,” Will said with a murmur. “And the irony of church collapses.”

“Precisely. The answer to the old theological debate against God that questions how a being of goodness can be responsible for such horrors, succinctly answered by positing that he is not a force of good, but as capable of violence and so-called ‘evil’ as are humans.”

Will tilted his head, searching Hannibal’s face. “You’ve been certain of your beliefs, or disbeliefs, for a long time. You once said you haven’t been bothered by any considerations of deity, besides seeing that your own actions cannot rival those of God. But now you’re reconsidering some aspect of that.”

Hannibal hummed. “It’s true that it hasn’t been a concern of mine—I haven’t been driven to probe the question of the divine in order to make sense of my life, and I have never labored in the trenches of doubt or sought answers from an unearthly source. It hasn’t been important, besides offering an intriguing philosophical angle. But that doesn’t mean alternatives have never occurred to me. And when I was younger, and had that particular sense upon wandering in the forest, I conceived of it differently. I found the infinite diversity of the universe awe-inspiring, and that’s particularly evident in natural settings. And in a world that is endlessly diverse and ever-changing, it made sense to me that anything beyond the scope of human perception should be equally diverse and complex—not just one being with a single nature and purpose, but many. In other words, I saw the virtue of an animistic or overtly polytheistic worldview.”

“Are you revisiting that theory?”

“Possibly. Now that we are here, it feels in some way as if I’m once again within the realm of influence of those forces I felt as a child. I’m just not sure what to do with that awareness.”

Will looked past him again. “I can relate to feeling like there’s something greater out there in nature, but I never felt like the idea of God I had was particularly relevant to my everyday life. I don’t know how well I can help you hash this out, but I can try.”

“You’re under no obligation.”

“I threw you into the ocean; I probably owe you a few tricky philosophical conversations,” Will said, with a smile that tugged at the scar on his cheek. “But honestly, I want to help. I want you to feel comfortable here, with me. So if you ever want to talk, you know where I am.”

“I appreciate that, Will,” he said, and meant it. “But for now I think I just have to mull things over.”

It grew darker every day, the sun barely showing its face between the waning hours of dawn and dusk. Snow blanketed the forest, and Will set about stocking their woodpile even higher in case the generator had any issues. Hannibal kept the thermostat at a respectable temperature, ever wary, but built a fire in the hearth every day without fail. It was a comfort, drawing him in with its heat and glow, but the flames themselves were the main draw—sometimes roaring like a furnace, sometimes licking the grate with delicate tendrils, sometimes fading down, barely a glow until they sank entirely into embers.

He remembered that Judita kept a bowl of salt handy, and whenever she set a fire in the woodburning stove, she always tossed a pinch of salt into the flames for luck, and it would crackle and glow a brilliant yellow. She had no explanation for the origin of this tradition, but as a curious child he had looked into whatever books of local folklore and myth he could find, and learned that before Lithuania was Christianized, bread and salt would be placed in the fire as an offering to the Goddess Gabija. She would protect the house and family if treated with respect, but if she was offended—her fire spat or stomped upon—she would “go for a walk” and burn down the house.

He remembered, too, the fire he desperately stoked when he had little personal experience with fire-building, yet knew without it he and his sister would freeze. The panic of waking to find he had slept too long and only coals remained, and the relief when he was able to coax the flames back to life with pages ripped from the few books that were kept in what was only meant to be a hunting cabin, not a long-term refuge. Hannibal did not have the luxury of distant philosophizing, then—the fire had been as a deity to him, and it kept him alive in the halo of its warmth, even when he was certain he would die.

With these memories at the forefront of his mind, it was on impulse that he one day put a scoop of salt in a small bowl and set it on the hearth to the side of the fire. He took a healthy pinch of the flaky salt crystals between his fingers and tossed it into the fire, and the answering crackle and saffron-yellow hue felt like a greeting from a person long since forgotten. He felt a prickling up his arms like he had been seen, and he wondered if he picked up this stray thread in the labyrinth of his memory palace, what he might find on the other end.

Will watched him over the top of his book from his seat nearby, but didn’t ask about the gesture, and Hannibal didn’t offer an explanation. He stared into the flames and thought about what Mischa said about what he needed to survive in this new life of his.

That night he didn’t dream of Mischa—he dreamed of a fire burning bright in a forest when the land around it was dark and dead. Ice-threaded snow crunched underfoot as he approached, squinting at the brightness, yet unable to resist its warmth. The fire grew larger and larger, but did not consume the trees around it. Instead, its boundaries shimmered into the form of a golden orb, and it rose into the sky until the land was cast in soft light.

In the light, he could see that frozen into the ice and snow there were bones. Buried deeper and deeper by layers of snow, until only his boot scuffing at the surface could reveal the curve of an orbital bone, cracked from blunt-force trauma. He knew from that mark that these bones belonged to the men who killed Mischa, who he then killed in turn. And they were now dead and gone and buried, buried deeper and deeper by this winter. And it was safe, now, to see them, as it was safe to uncover those bits of his childhood that he wished to keep.

He lifted his head to face the new sun, and he did not fear. Nor did he feel a sense of blessing, or love—simply an awareness of fact. Things had changed and would continue to change, and this sun would bear witness to it, as it had borne witness to the rest of his life.

Even when the sight of the woods were bleached out entirely by the light, he stood firm in this knowledge.

The solstice approached, and Hannibal had questions he could not answer. He was able to patch some of them through new research, filling some gaps that were purely of knowledge, but others remained less a matter of fact or folklore, and more a matter of ontology. His relationship to the concept of deity had been mostly philosophical and aesthetical—an appreciation of elegance, poetic irony, and all the complex symbolism that Christianity had built upon for centuries. He did not feel any desire to relate to that god in any more than a symbolic fashion, and nor did he now, at the prospect of other gods, feel anything that he truly considered to be a need. He had seen patients with a broad variety of religious inclinations; for the most part, their religiosity had stemmed from tradition, moral aspirations, or some crisis that had altered their perception or given them enough fear that they needed to staunch it with a bandage of faith.

The constraints of religious morality made him feel nothing but disdain and a childish impulse of rebellion. Thoughtlessly traipsing after his parents’ religion brought no appeal, nor did it if he looked back centuries further to ancestors who may have worshipped the gods who were recently on his mind. Nor was he in crisis. He supposed if any point in his adult life would qualify, it would have been the last time he fled to Florence, or the years he spent condemning himself to prison without so much as a glimpse of Will, and neither of those made him contemplate the concept of deity in any more concrete of a fashion than he had before.

But his life had become quiet, and this place had begun to echo the chambers in his mind palace that he had previously locked away. He could not leave it and seek distraction elsewhere, not yet—Will had asked for these months of safe recovery, and he was willing to give them. He was left with the folklore and half-beliefs of his childhood, and he felt himself grasping for something—what, precisely, he was unsure. But it had the shape and scent of home, and he might as well follow it to its source. He didn’t like to leave his curiosity unsatisfied.

Two weeks into December, he found himself adding items to a grocery list for certain dishes he hadn’t eaten since he was a child, and only then on Christmas and Christmas Eve. An assortment of grains for kūčia, including many less often used—barley, hemp, poppy, rye—along with other dishes that would include beetroot, cranberry, apples, herring, until the list was full and sprawling.

Will caught him with the cap of his fountain pen tapping indecisively on his desk.

“Want me to make a grocery run?” he asked.

“Possibly.”

Will leaned over his shoulder to inspect the list.

“Doesn’t look like your typical list.”

“They suit the season. Readily available ingredients in winter where I grew up.”

“Are they for Christmas foods, or…” He trailed off. “I should have asked if you wanted to do anything for it. I didn’t do much more than drink eggnog when I was on my own, but I’m guessing you used to hold holiday parties and that sort of thing.”

“I did, but that was merely an excuse for an extra flair of pageantry,” he said with a smile. “But yes, these would be used in the meals I ate when I was a child for Kūčios and Kalėdos—Christmas Eve and Christmas.”

“Time to unpack some rooms in your memory palace?”

“Something along those lines. There are dimensions to those traditions that I have left unexplored for some time. I’m wondering if it’s time to change that.”

“You’re not sure.”

He nodded, and Will took a seat nearby and sighed, though he didn’t appear weary.

“If you’re not just acting on impulse like usual, I take it there’s something about it that concerns you.”

He pursed his lips. “There are aspects of Lithuanian Christmas traditions that remain strongly tied to their pagan roots. They still retain the names that pre-Christian solstice celebrations held, and a similar sequence of events. Kūčios would represent the death of the sun, and Kalėdos its rebirth. Solar symbols remain abundant, but of course without overt references to older deities, except among pagan revivalists.”

“Is that revival something that interests you?”

“Perhaps.” He tapped his pen on the table again, glancing at the list and imagining the feast that could emerge from it. “The concept of ritual has appealed to me for a long time. The concept of religion, less so. Humans look to religious structures for moral guidance and pray to deities for assistance in their lives. I’m not interested in an external influence of morality, or in asking for help when I believe humans steer the wheel of their own fates.”

Will snorted softly. “That’s a very psychiatric way of looking at religion. I’m not saying those aren’t factors, but it’s a lot more complicated than that for the average person. Even for people who have the whole Bible to cherry-pick morals from.”

“How would you view it?”

“I’ve always seen God as… distant. More of an abstract metaphysical concept than an actual person. A cosmic force of order, or of chaos. No interfering with humanity’s messes, no answering prayers. My upbringing predisposed me to think of God as a fact, but that didn’t mean he always felt pertinent to my life. And there are plenty of people who believe in God without seeing him as a moral guideline for their lives.”

“Pairing belief with a sense of apathy?”

Will shrugged. “In a way. Or you could look to the perception of him as a heavenly father, and think about it in familial terms. People can diverge from their parents’ expectations and morals and still feel connected to them, want them to be a part of their lives. If they’re lucky, their parents can even feel the same way. You don’t need obedience or absolute agreement to care about someone.”

Hannibal couldn’t help but smile. “I suppose that’s fortunate, given there has been no shortage of conflict between us.”

Will smiled too. “Considering the number of times we’ve nearly killed each other, I’m not sure we’re the best example of a functional dynamic. But yeah.”

Hannibal bit his lip, for there were many things that he wished to say about his care for Will that had not been spoken recently, not since the immediate fear of survival after their fall had passed.

But before he could speak, Will said, “In a religious context with many gods, wouldn’t appropriate behavior depend on the individual god, anyway? I don’t know anything about Lithuanian mythology, but from I know of Greek myths, the gods weren’t always in agreement, anyway.”

Hannibal hummed. “Quite possibly. On the solstice, the Goddess Saulė would be honored—the sun. But unlike the Greeks, there is no extensive written record to indicate her preferences or personality—nor those of most of the figures who have been recorded. For most of them it remains anecdotal.”

“Can you think of her as being the sun in a literal sense?”

“At least symbolically—as the winter solstice is described as being her death and rebirth.”

“Well, that makes the matter of ethical agreement or disagreement less crucial, doesn’t it?” At the tilt of Hannibal’s head, Will clarified: “The sun doesn’t decide to shut off its light for some people based on like or dislike. There are clouds, and haze, and planetary rotation. But there’s nothing we can do in the course of our lives to make the sun stop shining, even if we can’t see it.” With a small tilt of his head to mirror Hannibal’s, he said, “Sounds like a god to me.”

The elegance of that concept, and Will’s implicit encouragement, made him smile. Then it faded.

“There is one other aspect of the tradition that gives me pause. As befitting the occasion of the sun’s death, Kūčios is a time to honor the family’s dead. A place should be set at the table for one recently deceased. Their soul will visit before moving on to the afterlife.”

Will’s brow furrowed. “Are you thinking of Abigail?”

He shook his head. “Though I would love to have her at my table once again, I’m not sure that her soul would care to make that journey to us so long after her death—if I’m to follow those beliefs. But Mischa…” He paused. “Though she died even longer ago, the circumstances of her death were unusual. I have not felt haunted by her in more than a vaguely metaphorical sense, but my beliefs at the time—or what I wanted to believe—disposed me to feel as if rather than making that journey, she remained with me, perhaps hidden away in those rooms of my memory palace which remained locked over the years.”

“Are you ready to let her go now?”

He hesitated. “I think for many years, despite resigning myself to remaining veiled to those around me, I carried a fear of being alone entirely. Mischa, or her spirit, would neither judge nor fear me. The concept of her remaining with me, even in those locked rooms where I would not see her, was some comfort. But now I don’t have to fear being alone—do I, Will?”

If there was a slight challenge in his tone, Will didn’t react to it. “No, you don’t,” he said simply. “I’m not going anywhere.”

He rose, and lay a hand on Hannibal’s shoulder. “No need to rush things now, if you’re not sure,” he said. “The sun will still be there in a year. But whatever you need, I’m here.”

It was enough of a reassurance to push Hannibal past his hurdle of hesitation. He finalized his list, and a few days before solstice, so the ingredients would still be fresh, Will took it into town with him. He always was the one to make their grocery runs, being the less inconspicuous of them in this part of the world.

When he returned, he came bearing more than just groceries—so too had he filled his bags with candles and lights and a few sparkling gold ribbons.

“I realize it’s not up to your usual decorating standards of taxidermy and thousand-dollar antiques, but I figured it would be appropriate. And if you want a tree or something there’s always all that.” He waved vaguely at the outdoors, and despite the slight snark, Hannibal could tell the gesture was heartfelt.

“It will be perfect,” he said with a smile. “Thank you.”

Will offered to help, but Hannibal decided to go out on his own to collect a few things for decoration. There was an even carpet of snow on the ground, but the air was still and clear, and he could see the trail of his footprints behind him as he ventured into the woods.

He decided not to take a whole tree, but instead just a few small boughs and pine cones for the mantle and centerpiece of their table, cutting each cleanly with a sharpened pocket knife. It was traditional to burn a birch log, but he hadn’t seen any in this stretch of woods—and considering the significance of birch in driving away evil, it would have raised some interesting philosophical questions about what evil precisely he and Will meant to drive away, when so much of the world would consider them to be evil themselves.

The frost was pinching his nose unpleasantly by the time he got back to their cabin, but it was perfectly warm inside, and Will quickly heated up a cup of mulled wine for him, which he gratefully accepted.

By the time they finished filling the house with lights and sweet-smelling pine, it was looking festive—in a considerably more rustic way than his choice of décor when he was in Baltimore, but appropriately so.

When Hannibal fed the hearth fire with its daily pinch of salt, its crackle felt like approval.

On the eve of the solstice, he woke early. The sky was still dark with a bluish cast, and the floorboards were cool underfoot as he stepped out of bed.

He went to the fireplace first, building a stack of logs that would burn long through the day. The tinder went up in a bright flame, and it wasn’t long before the larger logs had caught. He gave the fire its salt, and murmured, “May it please you, Gabija.”

He lingered in the resulting glow, reflecting that while it felt odd to speak such words aloud, it wasn’t unpleasant—it cast a shade of ceremony over the day, and when he closed the glass doors to keep the sparks safely contained, he had the sense of things clicking perfectly into place.

In the kitchen, he picked up where he had left off the night before. He had already begun some preparations—blanching almonds, soaking poppy seeds in milk. Now he began working on the dough for biscuits and rye bread, kneading it and setting it aside to rise.

When Will rose and joined him in the kitchen, he prepared a light breakfast of some blynai, a sort of thin pancake, and served them with sour cream and cherry jam.

“It was one of Mischa’s favorites,” he explained, without prompting.

“What was yours, when you were that age?”

“Jam? Elderberry. Of foods in general, I was rather fond of roast lamb, but it was a rare treat.”

“Sacrificial lamb,” Will murmured, but lowered his eyes quickly. Hannibal was certain they both held in mind the last occasion on which he had served Will lamb, the night before they had their most violent parting of ways.

“We have both sacrificed enough,” he said, perhaps kindly. “To each other, or in each other’s name. Nothing left to demand of the other, neither sacrifice nor forgiveness. Our lives have coalesced and parted repeatedly—lives upon lives, ending and renewing. I wish this to be our final life.

Will looked slightly wary when he met his eyes. “No more second chances?”

“No more departures,” he corrected. “There is no life after this one which I can imagine enjoying, not if it means being without you. You’ve given me everything I ever wanted—and then some.”

Under his sustained gaze, Will blushed. “The holidays make you sappy,” he said, ducking his head and hiding his face in his cup of coffee.

Hannibal smiled. “Not sappy. Honest.”

Watching the redness of Will’s cheeks, Hannibal considered that it was perhaps cruel to be so forward before Will had a chance to finish his morning dose of caffeine and could arm himself with words in response. So he contented himself with a simple, “Enjoy your coffee, dear,” as he rose and turned to go back to his cooking.

He was satisfied from the slight sputter behind him that his words had been received with appropriate significance, and his smile broadened.

After his coffee fully revived him, Will offered to help with the food prep, and Hannibal set him to work chopping beets—a task which left a brilliant red stain on his palms. He couldn’t help smiling at Will’s quiet dismay.

“You could have warned me,” Will complained, when he found the soap less than satisfactory in removing it. “I look like I’ve been boiling my hands.”

“A natural hazard of cooking. Have you not cooked beets before?”

“Not for ages, and even then they were canned. Already chopped. Didn’t have to worry about getting it on my hands then.”

Hannibal grimaced slightly. “I can appreciate the practicality of well-preserved foods, but you should find these considerably more satisfactory in flavor and texture than the canned variety.”

“If you’re cooking it, I have no doubt it will be better than anything I could have managed on my own, anyway, fresh or not.” He leaned back against the sink and watched Hannibal. “You mentioned going mushroom hunting with your family’s cook. Did she teach you how to cook, too?”

“I acquired most of my cooking skills in Paris and Florence. As a child I learned mostly through observation. I don’t think she had the patience to walk me through every step, or supervise my own early attempts—in truth, I don’t think she liked me all that much, for all she put up with me.”

“You hadn’t learned the art of being charming yet?”

He shook his head. “Not until I was well into my teenage years. When my uncle Robertas ascertained my location and sent to fetch me from the orphanage, I had learned enough of human behavior to make a convincingly fresh start. But until then I was motivated to behave either unobtrusively, or menacingly—and when I was very young indeed, I didn’t have enough self-awareness to be unobtrusive.”

When he glanced at Will, he looked entirely unsurprised. “Chiyoh said when she met you, you were charming like a lion cub is charming. I don’t have any experience with lion cubs, but kittens can sure as hell have a nasty bite out of nowhere.”

That made him smile. “I didn’t bite anyone, but my altercations with other children tended to end more severely for them, and I did not disguise the fact that blood and death intrigued rather than frightened me. Judita was able to witness this firsthand when she was butchering poultry, and combined with my rather flat affect at the time, I can understand why she might have distrusted me.”

“Was that the consensus among people who knew you, or was she just particularly observant?”

“The consensus among adults around me was that I was a prodigy, and my poor social skills were an unfortunate side effect of genius. With the exception of Mischa, who looked up to me before she was old enough to make a sound judgement of my character, the consensus among children around me was that I was arrogant and not above vindictiveness, and that it was advisable to stay on my better side.”

“Smart kids,” Will said, and when Hannibal shot him a look, he was met with a crooked smile.

“Does your predilection for insolence date back to your childhood?” he asked, though mildly.

Will shrugged. “If by ‘predilection for insolence’ you mean ‘got in trouble for backtalk,’ yep. Often. But don’t tell me you didn’t do the same.”

“If I was in disagreement with an authority figure, I didn’t hesitate to make it known.”

“A very nice way of putting it,” Will said dryly. “Bet we would have hated each other when we were kids though. I mean, I hated most people—having a good idea of what’s going on in their brains doesn’t usually make them any more likable. But your arrogance and my blatant disrespect?”

“It may have been unfortunate timing, true.” He checked the viscosity of the herring’s sauce, and turned it down to a low simmer. “But we didn’t. And rocky though our fortunes have been, I’d say it’s all worked out for the best, wouldn’t you?”

When he turned he was struck by how comfortable Will looked sharing the kitchen with him, with his sleeves rolled up and his casual lean.

“Yeah,” Wills said. “I guess it has.”

When all was said and done, they had twelve dishes, one for each month of the year—though in the interest of practicality, considering there were only two of them to consume it, Hannibal had been careful to moderate the quantity.

“It’s like Thanksgiving,” Will observed. “We’ll have leftovers all week.”

“No sense going about it in half-measures.”

Hannibal hadn’t been able to determine if the tradition of abstaining from alcohol on Kūčios was the influence of Christianity, or something that had predated it, but if they were to indulge in a feast he wished it to be properly accompanied by wine. He chose a light Pinot Noir that would reflect the earthy nuances of the mushrooms and root vegetables, without overwhelming the grains and herring.

His stomach was empty and the weariness of hunger beginning to set in by the time they sat down to dinner, but the scent of the food covering the table was enough to ease the discomfort that arose at the back of his brain at this too-familiar sensation.

When they were both sitting, Will looked at him for a long moment without moving to fill his plate, while Hannibal scented his wine.

“At my family holiday dinners, this was the part when someone said grace,” Will said. “Anything like that you want to say now?”

Hannibal looked at the place set for his sister, and contemplated that much of the significance of this meal was on a level that could not entirely be conveyed through words, however he might try. But it was unlike him to resist the opportunity to add an additional degree of ceremony, so he nodded.

“The themes of this day are not unfamiliar to us,” he said. “Our lives filled with so many deaths and rebirths, and the most recent nearly becoming a literal rather than symbolic death.”

He thought of the force of impact as they hit the water, jarring him to his bones; the burn of seawater in his throat; the beach where they washed up being so dark that it was hard to tell what was water and what was blood spilling from their bodies and soaking their clothes; shivering and uncertain in the moment if it was hypothermia or shock setting in.

“Nor can I ignore,” he continued, “the deaths that did bring us to this point. Pained or painted in glory. All that was burnt to ash to fuel our growth and transformation.” He looked at Mischa’s place, and imagined she could see and understand how important she remained to him, both her life and her death. “None was wasted. No deaths in vain. We survived. And through it all—”

He paused. There was unfamiliarity here, like he was navigating an unfamiliar kitchen when blindfolded—able to follow his nose as a compass, yet reaching without knowing any landmarks, not knowing which herb to use because he had yet to discover which ones were stocked in this place. “Through it all, the earth has turned and the sun has shined. And having begun a new life with new opportunities, I have brought us to this celebration.”

He paused again, meeting Will’s eyes. “I thank whatever tangled threads of fate brought us together in the end, regardless of our challenges. I thank the fertile earth that gave us the foods for this meal, for never will I take for granted what fills my stomach. I thank Mischa for guiding me in life and in death. And on the longest night of the year, I thank Saulė for the promise of returning light. May we never forget our darkest hours or our brightest hopes.”

He raised his glass to Will, who mirrored the gesture.

The bloom of wine on his tongue brought bright fruit and dark earth in turn, and it spread through his body like joy itself.

Dinner with Will was as much a pleasure as always, and even with some adjustments to the original recipes, the nostalgia of the dishes he had prepared was dense, settling around his heart—though he could not tell whether it was more happiness or pain.

After the dishes were cleared and most of the remaining food stored away, they went to the living room and the fireplace, where the flames were low and ash smoldering. Hannibal added some more sticks to the fire until it was bright again, then placed a small biscuit among them as Will watched from his usual seat nearby.

“For the Goddess Gabija,” Hannibal said quietly, watching as the flames cradled and charred the bread. “Without the gift of fire, my life would have come to a much earlier end.”

“Then I guess I owe her my thanks,” Will said.

Hannibal considered him, hearing no trace of sarcasm, yet still unused to hearing Will speak of him in unhesitatingly positive terms. “Does that mean you’ve come to see my influence upon you not as a tragedy, but as a blessing?”

“Neither of those are the words I’d use,” he said, lips tilting up at the corners. “It wasn’t like my life wasn’t already a train wreck. At least now I’m not alone in it. And I… care about you. Regardless of everything. You’re family, now.”

The words held such weight that Hannibal felt his chest crushed by a wave of affection. He swallowed, throat feeling tight, and took a moment to compose a response.

“Your regard means the world to me, Will.”

“I know,” Will said softly, not arrogant but stating fact.

It was Hannibal who broke eye contact first, looking back to the fire. After a moment, he said, “I dreamed of Mischa not long after we arrived here. She asked me what I needed to survive in this new life of mine. I was unsure how to answer her at the time.”

“And now?”

“Now I think part of the equation is reconciling the contradictions of my life. You have changed me in ways that for a long time seemed incompatible with the image I had of myself, and it has had a ripple effect on my entire identity. How I feel and what I believe now is not how I have always been—but I can recognize that, and accept it rather than battling the contradiction.”

“So you attempt integration instead of compartmentalization.”

He nodded. “And this celebration has been part of that, I think. Bringing into light some things that were discordant between my childhood and adult life, between my cognitive philosophizing and emotions closer to my heart, and having you bear witness to them.” He turned back to Will. “And you have. I feel more secure for knowing that it does not disrupt us.”

Will smiled. “I accepted the rest of you, didn’t I?” He cocked his head. “Traditions are important for families. You brought the memory of Mischa to our table tonight, combining old family and new. And it’s not just one dinner—it’s the potential for similar dinners in the years to come, in a way carrying her and the rest of it forward with us as a new family. Integrating and projecting forward. Is that the second part of the equation?”

“I believe so. You’re as astute as always.” He smiled back, but lingering on Will’s words—of Will implicitly accepting Mischa into his family as well, of them both moving forward together and always having this celebration to look back on and keep with them—it left his eyes prickling as they did when he was overwhelmed by the emotive sound of opera. He blinked, and found his vision blurred, the orange glow of the fire streaking across it.

Without a word, Will got off his chair and sank onto the floor next to him. After barely a moment’s hesitation, Will put his arm around him and held him close.

“I’m not sad,” Hannibal said, though it didn’t stop a tear from dripping down his face. He nuzzled closer, despite the emotions feeling ever more poignant the more tightly Will held him, and the tears feeling more free to flow. “I’m very happy.”

“I know,” Will said, hand settling in Hannibal’s hair, cradling him gently. “Me too.”