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Chapter Text

Fall time in the state of Virginia was aways pleasantly cold and crisp. The sight of the changing leaves were nature's treat for the eyes and an annual reminder that the seasons were cycling once again. There were many things to like about Virginia during these times. There were many things to like about Virginia in general, what with their beautiful, diverse landscapes from the famous Appalachian mountain range to the popular Virginia Beach coastline and their oh so rich place in American history.

The state motto is Sic semper tyrannis roughly translating to "thus always to tyrants". In contemporary parlance, it meant tyrannical leaders will inevitably be overthrown. The phrase also suggests that bad but justified outcomes should, or eventually will, befall tyrants. Victory would go to the people. Such a powerful motto for the state. But for one particular person, she was feeling anything but victorious. 

A feminine figure draped in a dark blue coat donning a large hat of roughly the same color, walks slowly and awkwardly through the streets of Quantico on a cane. While the people around her, dressed in their best suits, quickly bustled about around her, she alone was moving at a snail's pace. Eventually she reaches her destination and hesitantly looks up at the sign of the building she's far too familiar with. 

FBI Academy

Once she enters the building, she goes through the usual protocols of checks and security. She hands over her purse and wallet as well as her cane. When she goes through the metal detector, it goes off with a loud beep.

"Ma'am please come back", the security guard gestures to her. 

She turns around to him and knocks on her left side with her knuckles. He nods as he raises his hand in confirmation and let's the security guard on the other side with the handheld metal detector attend to her instead. Once she clears her, she gathers her belongings and goes on her way. Up the elevator, through the halls, and into a certain room where she's met with a few men in suits. They waste no time offering her a chair and getting some recording equipment together. 

“State your name for the record please”, one of them requests as he turns on the tape recorder. 

The woman hesitantly opens her lips, but doesn't speak. 

“Ma’am?”

A separate agent behind her offers to take her hat and coat, a sign of common courtesy, but also to make her comfortable for this godforsaken interview she agreed to. She removes her hat first, revealing long locks of wavy blonde hair and sky blue eyes, and then came her coat. The agents across from her look her up then down, not to check her out, but to see the scars that she had supposedly been left with. As their sources have documented, the woman before them is indeed missing her left leg above the knee, a crude metallic prosthetic now in the place of what was once flesh. The agent with the recorder looks her in the eyes, then down at his report and repeats himself. 

“State your name for the record please”

This time the woman obliges. 

“Dr. Bedelia…Du Maurier”, she starts out slowly with a tremor in her voice.

“I am here to report…on Hannibal Lecter…and Will Graham”

~~~~~~

3 MONTHS EARLIER

~~~~~~

Will Graham had never believed in the afterlife. He never even believed in God. But if this is what death felt like, then it was anything, but merciless.

If what the good book said was true, then he should have been freed of all of his burdens and groaning experienced as a living being on earth. Except he was doing a whole lot of groaning. Because he still felt every ache and every pain that a mortal body would feel in its flesh and bones. Maybe even beyond that. Whatever he was feeling on the outside, he felt tenfold, maybe a hundred-fold on the inside. It doesn't take him long to realize the truth. That he was still very much alive. And apparently not alone either.

Though he had yet to open his eyes, he could undoubtedly feel another presence in whatever space he was currently in. He couldn't be sure where he was, but given the heavy sensation of his body sinking into something soft underneath him, he was likely in a hospital. He had after all, been in this position several times before. The faint beeping noises surrounding him could only support his hypothesis. That was until, the presence spoke to him. 

“Are you awake?”, a familiar feminine voice reaches his eardrums. He shakily lifts his lids and looks up to the dimly lit lights above him. Despite his senses still being in a state of disarray, he's able to register the soft, wooden tone as belonging to Chiyoh. He jerks his eyes to move in her direction, but can only see a black shadowy blob approaching him, then abruptly stopping once at his bedside. She leans ever so closely to his face until they can practically feel each other's breath on their lips. He can see her much more clearly now. 

“Good”, her ebony eyes locks with his as she smiles, showing teeth.

A split second later, he's met with a violent and powerful blow to the face. He grunts loudly, fairly sure he heard the sound of bones crunching upon impact. Blood spatters from his mouth as he coughs and gasps, speckling the blue sheets with deep crimson drops that quickly soak into the fabric. Will takes shallow breaths, shaking from the sudden sharp pain radiating in his cheek. The sensation coupled with the metallic taste filling his mouth triggers a jarring reaction in his brain. His eyes gradually widen as the red on the sheets overlap with flash memories of darkness. It's all coming back to him now. The slaying of the Great Red Dragon in a ritualistic dance of death.

Him stabbing Dolarhyde’s heart with his own dagger from the front. Hannibal viciously ripping his throat out from the rear. The blood that was spilled onto the ground and splashed onto them both. The moonlight had made it look oh so black. 

“See? This is all I’ve ever wanted for you, Will. For both of us”

”It’s beautiful”, he remembers whispering to him in pure ecstasy before pushing them both off the cliff.

Then came the sensation of the chilling ocean waves taking them down under, putting them completely at nature's mercy. Everything thereafter is pitch black, like a film strip snipped mid-way during a viewing in the cinema. There is nothing. And panic quickly begins to set in. 

“Where’s Hannibal?”, he dares ask. But instead of an answer, Chiyoh shoots him an icy glare and quickly walks out of the room, leaving him by himself. He feels his heart sink into his stomach and his hands beginning to sweat. His eyes dance around in their sockets as he thinks of the impossible. 

Did he actually kill Hannibal Lecter?

The possibility of it makes his heart beat so fast that he feels the room spin. He almost instinctively begins searching the room for clues; medical equipment, bloody used bandages, and another medical bed in the distance away from him. Except theres no sign that it had been used recently. All signs pointing towards nothing promising.

Just as he thinks he'll have to resign himself to the truth, he spots a small creature standing in the center of the room, looking directly at him. A small, raven-colored deer, young and barely able to stand on its own. Will stares into its deep, dark eyes, seeing his own reflection peering straight back at him. He can't help, but feel perplexed at its minuscule and mediocre form. It was certainly no stag. But it is a confirmation.

He pulls the covers off of himself and slides out of his bed onto the floor, all while maintaining eye contact with the deer. He rips the medical equipment off of himself and hobbles himself over to the creature. It twitches its ears and tilts its head curiously at him. He tries to reach out to it, but when he comes inches away from touching it, it turns its back on him and begins trotting away.

He feels inclined to call out to it, but soon realizes the best thing to do is follow wherever it was going. And so he does just that. He trails the deer outside of the room and out into the halls of whatever behemoth of a structure he's found himself in. Despite its black hue, he has no trouble spotting it in the darkness and he can hear its hooves echoing quite clearly. After what seems like an eternity, the deer turns a corner and seemingly disappears into the moonlight. Will follows its tracks and finds himself in a vast garden encased by large stones.

He looks around in search of the deer, but soon finds a figure sitting on a marble bench in the distance looking up at the sky. Will moves a few steps closer to get a better look, but already knows exactly what or rather who he’s looking at. The tall, imposing figure registers his presence and turns towards him, curving his lips into a familiar smile. 

”Hello Will”

~~~~~~

Will stands still, continuing to stare at the man before him. He instantly feels himself filling up with a multitude of contrasting emotions; relief, distress, calm, anxiousness, contentment, dread, and an overwhelming sensation of derealization taking over him. He can’t find the words to speak as his lips part and tremble. Hannibal no doubt notices this and continues to speak in his silence. 

“It is good to see that you are awake”, he says quite nonchalantly as if he isn't covered head to toe in cuts in bruises. Will stumbles as he takes a few steps forward, closing the distance between them, still unable to process if this is another figment of his imagination or not.

“It feels like I’m in a dream”, he finally manages, nearly choking on his words. 

“Your mind has yet to adjust", Hannibal chuckles a bit before switching to doctor mode. "You sustained some fairly heavy injuries. Though...I don’t recall you having a broken nose”, he furrows his brows, curious at the new and still very fresh wound on Will's face. 

“Chiyoh…punched me in the face when I woke up”, he attempts a sniffle out of his blood-filled nostrils. The doctor raises his brows in amusement before giving a small nod of satisfaction.

“Good for her”

“Allow me to set it for you. Come, sit”, he scoots over a bit to give Will space to come next to him. He quickly obliges and shuffles over to sit on the marble seat. He flinches when the cold surface makes contact with his sensitively bruised skin and again when Hannibal begins examining his nose with his fingers. He's familiar with pain, maybe even intimately acquainted with it. But he'll never get used to it.

"This garden is one of my favorite places in the estate”, Hannibal begins to explains as he angles his face to get a better look at Chiyoh’s handy work.“It’s one of the few places where you can bask directly in the moonlight while still remaining within its walls. Quite ethereal” 

True to his word, the garden was something incredibly surreal. The elements were Victorian in nature, but also had a certain gothic appeal to it. Everything the moonlight touched, even the moths fluttering around, appeared to be glowing. It was as if the space itself was taken from another dimension and brought to this very place. The silence was absolutely serene. But it wouldn't last for long. 

“Aren’t you going to say anything about it?” Will practically slices the air with his words, annoyed that Hannibal seems to purposely be avoiding the obvious.  

“Did you want me to?”

He decides not to answer to that, now thoroughly regretting even asking him in the first place. He would’ve never gotten a straight answer anyways. He rarely if ever does from this man. He winces as Hannibal presses his thumbs on opposite sides of his nose, trying to get a good grip on the shattered bone.  

“There is nothing to be said Will” he says, seemingly clarifying his stance on remaining passive about past events. “I understand your actions just as much as you would understand mine”.

Without warning, he jerks his nose back to its proper position, causing Will to yelp rather loudly. 

“Good as new”, the doctor smiles, nodding at a job well done, while his "patient" holds his face with his eyes squeezed shut from the sheer magnitude of the pain. With the bone now properly in place, fresh and old blood alike begins dripping into Will's hands. He slowly peels his fingers off of his face and looks at his shaking palms, seeing a very familiar sight. Blood truly does look black in the moonlight. And he can't help but admit that it's beautiful. 

“Where do we go from here?”, Will asks. A simple yet very complex question that's vital to their future. 

“Where would you like to go?”

“I don’t know”

He truly didn't. He didn't even know what to think of the fact that he and Hannibal are still alive. Everything about that fateful night was moving moment by moment in an ebb and flow of contradictory patterns. And now, he feels a disturbing amount of calm stillness. What's he to do about that?

“I have a few ideas" Hannibal proposes. "But first let us heal physically”

Yeah. That sounded good. 

"Does it intimidate you?", Hannibal asks, limping quite rigidly on what may possible be two broken legs. Maybe even a broken spine and a few shattered ribs given that he hit the water first. Not to mention that initial bullet wound through the gut. His abnormal pain tolerance makes it hard to tell even if he looks worse off between the two of them. 

"It's eerie...but oddly calming", Will looks up at the buttresses above him as he passes them by. It turns out that this massive structure he was in was the estate of the Count Robertus Lecter in France. It also happened to be another home that Hannibal Lecter had grown up in. Another hall of his beginnings that he was now quite literally stumbling through. A feeling of deja vu floats around in Will's mind. What was it with Lecters and castles?

Hannibal stares at Will pleasantly, the same way he always does when his mind is elsewhere and he's looking at anything, but him; up, then down, then up again as he grins. But his lips soon fall into a frown and he turns away from him.

“Will, I must advise you to not to leave my side during our stay here”, he says quite abruptly. Will looks to him, raising a brow in annoyance. Despite the lack of context, he was pretty sure he knew what he meant.

“Keeping me on a leash?”

But Hannibal doesn't chuckle, not even a little bit. Instead his face is stern, concerned even. “It is very easy to get lost within these walls", he starts to explain to him. "You may find yourself in places you do not wish to be. Or cannot escape” 

Will can only stare at him in confusion. Again, the man doesn't give him a straight answer and sticks to his metaphors and allegories. Even if he was speaking in literal terms, he isn't exactly sure what to do with that information. If anything, it just annoys him even more, so he decides to change the subject to something a bit more concrete. 

“How did we get here?”

“Chiyoh brought us here by boat", Hannibal suddenly perks up. "I performed first aid on the both of us until we could get to land”. That was a clear of an answer as he was ever going to get from him. But some part of it didn't seem to make sense. Something was off. 

“How did she even know where to-”

It was then that Will came to a rather startling conclusion. Even if Hannibal did manage to pull them both out of the ocean after their descent, the timing of their escape just seemed too perfect. The only way this could have possibly worked out was if Chiyoh had been aware of all of Hannibal's activities since his escape from the hospital. Maybe for even longer than that. Her loyalty to him is, after all, unbound. 

“How long was she watching us?”, he asks the older man quite directly in a low tone. He's not even surprised when he looks back at him with a stupidly wide grin. 

“Bold of you to assume she had ever stopped”

The hair on the back of Will's neck prick up at the sound of those words. He slowly turns his head to look around, at every window, every rooftop, expecting to see the glint of a sniper telescope aimed at him. He shudders a bit, feeling an old ache from his right shoulder. He decides right then and there that it's best to shut up and stop questioning Hannibal. At least for now. 

After quite a long walk down many a corridors, the two men make it back to their room. Will is first to enter, but stops in his tracks. 

“Oh”

There in the room was a slender East Asian woman sitting in one of the stools. She donned a long, flowing cream colored white robe with intricate red bird and floral patterns and her jet black hair was tied into a loose bun. She shared many similar features with Chiyoh, but appeared to be around the same age as Hannibal. And she was…gorgeous. So much so that Will is left speechless. 

“We uh…must’ve gotten…the wrong room”, he stammers. 

“Nonsense. I have been expecting you Mr. Graham”, the woman stands and walks towards him. She speaks in an accent identical to Chiyoh’s, but with a much softer tone. It’s airy and comforting to the ears. 

“Will, this is my aunt. The Lady Murasaki”, Hannibal introduces her with a slight smile. 

Will widens his eyes and looks at Hannibal then back to the woman. He had heard of her in his conversations with him back in Baltimore, but never expected her to look like she did. He didn’t even expect for him to have any living relatives. Or ones he remained in contact with for the matter. 

“It’s…nice to meet you”, he awkwardly extends his aching arm. But Murasaki moves well past his hand and closes in on him. Will nearly stops breathing when she places her hand on his chin. 

“You are healing quite nicely my dear”, she tilts his chin from side to side to get a better look at his face, conveniently ignoring the fresh wound that was made there a mere hour or so ago. She doesn’t break eye contact with him or rather he couldn’t look away from her. It was like she had paralyzed him with her gaze alone. “You did not wake for several weeks. You had Hannibal quite worried”

It’s only when she lets go of his face that Will realizes what she had just said. He had been out for weeks, not days. His sense of time was definitely off. Murasaki chuckles softly at his confusion, covering her mouth with her sleeve. 

“There is much I wish to discuss with the both of you, but first some sustenance. You must be quite famished”

He hadn’t thought about it, but now that he was awake, Will couldn’t help but notice that his stomach was completely empty. He could practically feel it touching his spine. Food sounded pretty good right now. 

“Chiyoh will be here shortly with something to eat”, Murasaki assured the two of them before gracefully leaving the room with a smile. And just like that, she was gone. 

“She seems nice”, Will remarks in a whisper. 

“Yes, she is. But do not let appearances fool you”, Hannibal smirks. 

“Who do you think taught Chiyoh and I our skills in marksmanship and martial arts?”

Speak of the devil. A good thirty minutes after their encounter with Murasaki, her attendant comes into the room with a cart carrying food. Will makes no attempts to hide his animosity towards her for her past transgressions. 

“Chiyoh”

“Will Graham”

The two of them stare each other down for a good minute while Hannibal looks at them both with a smile. Of course he was enjoying this. Chiyoh breaks eye contact first and strolls into the room, uncovering the lid, revealing a soup of sorts. 

“Zuppa Toscana. Bread soup with kale and potatoes”, she announces, serving first to Hannibal who’s seated in front of a coffee table and then Will who’s sitting up in his bed.

“Enjoy”, she says without so much as a smile. 

“Thank you Chiyoh”, Hannibal nods to her with a smile before she exits the room with as much grace as her Lady. 

Will stares at the dish in front of him. With how his nose is now, he can’t really smell if anything is off. He takes his spoon and shifts through the liquid dubiously, looking for maybe a worm or even crushed beetles. 

“Rest assured. She has not tampered with your food”, Hannibal takes a bite to prove his point.

He sighs and decides to dig in. To his surprise, it’s very good. Simple and hearty like country styled soup. He continues to take spoonfuls into his mouth as Hannibal chuckles.

”Zuppa toscana originated in Tuscany in the 1800s. Its ancestor is minestra di pane and was originally created as a way to not let leftover stale bread go to waste for those in poverty”

If Will weren’t so tired right now, he would roll his eyes. He’s become accustomed to Hannibal making every meal a culinary art history lesson, but he’s also learned that over time it becomes quite an earful. He once even mentioned that trout was a “Nietzschen fish” of all things. Like that made any sense. 

“Legend has it that Leonardo da Vinci himself ate this dish. I’m glad you like it”

“Better than your ‘soup’ in Florence”, Will mutters back, knowing full well that it’ll shut him right up. It does. 

They eat in silence for a while as the bitterness simmers in the air. There's many things in their history that have never been spoken about and left unresolved, this being just one of them. For Will, it was more or less an impulsive jab for an attempt for some peace and quiet. For Hannibal, it seemed to be a bit more.  

“It is a shame that it was the last dish that I had prepared for you”, he remarks in a tone laced with a certain sorrow which Will picks up immediately. Now the silence he had craved for was becoming unbearably awkward, so he decides to humor him by continuing the conversation. 

“How much does your aunt and uncle know about you?”, he asks with genuine curiosity. 

“Everything. I have hidden nothing from them”

Will raises his brows skeptically as he takes another bite of soup. “Your aunt seems to take it in stride”

“Yes. Though it was not always the case”

He hums, still very much taking Hannibal’s words with a grain of salt given his history of telling half truths and whole lies. But since the floor was open, he decides to dig further. 

“And your uncle?”

“He tolerates me”

Will blinks a few times in response to his answer. “Tolerate” was a strange word to use when it came to him in any capacity. Whatever relationship Hannibal had with his uncle, it was definitely a strange one. 

“I take it you two don’t exactly get along”, he eyes him from the side, trying not to get too caught up in the mystery. 

“I prefer to limit our interactions to the bare essentials and pleasantries. For his sake and mine”, Hannibal huffs out his nose.

Tension. That’s what Will feels in this relationship. That’s something he can definitely relate to when it comes to having any sort of relationship with Hannibal Lecter. If he can make Hannibal feel this way, then Robertus Lecter must be one hell of an entity.

It was definitely intriguing. 

~~~~~~

“You and Murasaki seem to be doing well”, Hannibal remarks as he attempts to chop vegetables on a cutting board, his arms still healing from their bruising and atrophy from lack of use. Chiyoh, donning her uniformed black and white dress, assists him in the kitchen with his culinary occupational rehabilitation. 

“The Lady and I had much to catch up on. I was relieved to know that she had not changed much over the years”, she answers, picking up the vegetables and putting them in a bowl for later. 

“Yes. It’s one of her greatest qualities”, he affirms while panting and sweating. Doing anything while injured was quite taxing, but he had to rebuild his strength. The last few weeks, he had mostly remained still in his room to rest, but also to keep an eye on Will who had remained in a coma. Other than that, he spent days in the garden to relax and stretch out his legs. 

Chiyoh hands him a dry towel to wipe off his sweat. He immediately takes it for use then turns on the sink to wash his hands. The sound of running water fills in for the vast silence in the room. Chiyoh’s eyes gradually go blank, memories of the past seemingly grabbing her away from the present moment.  

“Do you resent me for leaving you in a cage? Unable to go home?”, Hannibal asks without looking at her, snapping her out of her trance. 

Chiyoh takes a deep breath in and breathes out. “I have given it much thought…but no. This is home”.Her expression then hardens into something else entirely.

”Though I do resent your choice in…acquaintances”, she enunciates the word as she looks at Will who’s sitting at a table not too far away. He turns to look at her, but she snaps her head away and turns off the sink tap. 

“You seem to not like Will. Tell me why”, Hannibal asks intrigued, wiping his hands on a dry towel. 

“What is there to like about him?”, she immediately hisses back. 

“Many if you get to know him”

“The last time we got to know each other, he tried to help me ‘open my mind’ ”, she widens her eyes as she begins peeling potatoes. “I returned the favor by pushing him off a train”

Hannibal smiles proudly, reminiscing of the moment Will informed him of her deed in the Uffizi Gallery. 

“And the broken nose?”, he leans his head closer to her, hoping to hear something interesting. She turns her head with a silent rage in her eyes. 

“A warning”

He leans back and raises his brows affirming her actions. 

“Point taken”

~~~~~~

Will stood in front of the mirror in his and Hannibal's room. It had been the first time that he had taken a good look at himself in a while. His hair had grown out, but his face was clean shaven, likely to keep the hair from growing over the wound on his cheek. The stitches had already been removed and a pink, raised scar was now in its place. He pulls open his gown, revealing a multitude of wounds in different states of healing. Some bruises, some cuts, and some with stitches still lodged in his skin. He looks like hell. 

“Do your wounds bother you?”, a seemingly disembodied voice speaks to him. Will snaps his head around to see Hannibal a distance away, there in the flesh. He blinks once to make sure he's actually there, before turning back around. 

“I’m just trying to wrap my head around it", he covers himself up. "That this is real. All of it”

Hannibal smirks as he slowly walks towards him with his hands behind his back. “Scars are powerful things aren’t they? They have the power to remind us that the past was real. And you now have quite the collection of scars”. He comes directly behind him, both of their reflections now clearly in the mirror, lips nearly touching his ear. 

“It’s best to never forget who gave you the best of them”, he whispers, sending a shudder down Will's spine. He winces as he recalls all the injuries he received from Dolarhyde that night. Every stab. Every blow. He glares at Hannibal's reflection in anger, knowing he chose the exact moment, the exact words to trigger this reaction in him. The other man stares at him in the mirror with a rather blank expression. 

“Do you regret not dying, Will?”, he asks him, eagerly awaiting his answer. 

“No”, he says back almost immediately. 

“I’ve never been more sure of anything in my entire life”

Chapter Text

When Will opens his eyes, he finds himself in a dark forest submerged in a sea of fog. If this were any other time in the past, he would’ve began panicking and attempted to ground himself in reality. But he felt no fear of losing himself since he knew exactly where he was. He was in his memory palace right in his own mind.

He looks to his right and then his left. Usually just about now some gothic supernatural creature would appear in front of him, but there were no sounds of hooves or the shadow of a Wendigo with glowing eyes before him. It was just him. Just him and this cold silence. So he decides to walk, his feet crunching the monotone colored leaves beneath him. 

It had been some time since he had been inside this part of his mind. He had been in Hannibal’s chapel numerous times, but had spent little time in his own palace, at least by his own will. Coming here was typically instinctive like a reflex to something occurring around him in his environment. Most times it was in dreams. He had no control of how he got here or even how to get out. It just is. 

After seemingly walking around in circles, Will loses any sense of skepticism he has about any dangers or even wonders about this place. There are no creatures lurking here this time. Just when he contemplates on methods of removing himself from his palace, he feels a deep and low rumbling from beneath him.

Suddenly the ground below tears open like the jaws of a beast and sends him flying backwards. Will lands on his back with a grunt and watches as the landscapes around him expands and morphs into forms unknown. The blackened trees look like they’re riding on tidal waves of earth while their leaves change colors and shapes. Timber roots rise from the ground and writhe like snakes, grabbing Will and slowly constrict him as he struggles to break free. His screams are muffled as the roots drag him into the earth like quicksand. He’s nearly enveloped in complete darkness when he hears a distorted echo through the thick haze clouding his senses.

“Will?”

He flutters his lids open back in the realm of reality, but his eyes remain anchored downwards as if the optic nerves themselves were tied down by lead weights. He doesn't need to see to know that he's been dumping sweat. His gown sticks to him like damp glue and it feels absolutely disgusting.

“Will, look at me please”, the voice calls out to him again. He feels a pair of hands lift his face until blue eyes meet a pair of amber ones in the dark.

“Ah, it’s Hannibal”, his mind finally registers as his chest slowly heaves for air. 

The doctor peels back his lids and carefully examines his eyes, then sniffs around his drenched hairline. He blinks once in confirmation before gently placing him back down onto the pillow.

Will groans. The only time he had ever felt this terrible was when he had encephalitis and that in it of itself was a horrid ordeal to go through. He watches helplessly as Hannibal walks away from him until he comes back a few minutes later with a glass of water and a wet towel. The second the cold, wet cloth is placed on his forehead, he feels an instant wave of relief overcome him. He feels like he can finally breathe.

“What’s happening to me…?”, he rasps breathless.

“Your memory palace has resumed its construction”, Hannibal lifts his head slightly, placing the glass to his lips and slowly tilting it to let him take small sips. 

“When you bid goodbye to me three years ago in Wolftrap, you had forcibly halted construction on your memory palace. I could still see our shared rooms through my own, but I did not see any further development. Until recently”

Will stops drinking for a minute and breathes in through his still slightly swollen nostrils, feeling infinitely better than he did a few moments ago. From that alone, he could confirm that Hannibal was likely telling the truth. This was not encephalitis. He swallows hesitantly before looking to him in worry. 

“Is it supposed to feel this bad?”

He wasn’t sure. How could he be?

“You know, change is a very funny thing", Hannibal places his head back down onto the pillow, then begins dabbing his head with the wet towel. “Sometimes it occurs naturally, while other times it is unexpected. Regardless, it can be rather uncomfortable and at times painful in nature. Even if the results are for the better”

He moves on to dab his face and neck, pushing his hair out of his eyes along the way. The cool sensation on the skin is calming to the nerves. 

“Some say the caterpillar feels immense pain when going through metamorphosis. Others argue that it does not”

Will closes his eyes and huffs in frustration. Leave it to Hannibal to make an analogy to something gruesome occurring in nature that’s not at all comforting. But it’s damned if you do and damned if you don’t with him. 

“What’s your verdict on that?”, he can’t help but ask. 

“Given that it is changing every cell in its body, I would think that it is a rather agonizing and painful process. But it becomes what it is meant to be just as nature intended”

The dramatic and severe poeticism is skin crawling, but Will understood the underlying message very clearly. Because it’s the same thing with Hannibal when it comes to him. It always has been. 

“You must create the constructs of your own memory palace and become its master”, he closes his lecture by placing the towel on the coffee table. 

“How?”

The teacher ponders before answering to the student. 

“You once mentioned a stream. Perhaps start from there”

~~~~~~

“Did Hannibal ever tell you he was the youngest person to be admitted to medical school in France?”

“Um…no…he did not”, Will murmurs, sitting awkwardly on the sofa next to Hannibal across from Murasaki, sipping on his tea.  

It was now week six at their stay at the Lecter estate and it couldn’t possibly get more uncomfortable. Not that Murasaki had not been hospitable, but it never got easier talking to her with her ever so radiant presence. She was like a graceful butterfly with the wit of a hawk. Yet she was also quite odd.

For a person who was privy to the Chesapeake Ripper’s well kept secrets, she never once brought up any of his past deeds nor did she present with any animosity towards him like her attendant for his. She was too relaxed about it all and it honestly put Will a bit on edge. But it wasn’t just her. His new ‘mind issues’ had been keeping him up at night and exacerbating his anxiety. His natural defenses were heightened. 

“He has always been very bright. It is what allowed him to graduate from the Lycée in Paris so early”, she looks to Hannibal with much pride which he reciprocates with a slight smile. 

“And these…earned him a scholarship to John Hopkins”, she spreads out and displays several of his old drawings onto the table; illustrations of cadavers. 

The drawings were ultra realistic in detail that they could’ve been mistaken for photographs or even architectural blueprints. Such pristine and exact details of organs and vessels. It was no wonder that it impressed his mentors.

“Do you still paint, Hannibal?”, Murasaki asks while sipping her tea. 

”No, not as of late”

“A shame. Robertus always did like your paintings”

Will notices Hannibal’s expression change at the sound of his uncle’s name. Again with this tension. It intrigued him so. 

“Murasaki-sama”

Chiyoh calls for her Lady as she steps into the room unannounced. She reports something to her in Japanese to which the Lady beams in response. Once Chiyoh leaves the room, she swiftly stands up in glee. 

“Please excuse me. It seems my husband has returned from his trip”, she bows then swiftly exits the room, leaving the two men by themselves. The ticking of the clock makes up for the deafening silence left in the room.

Will sips on his now pretty much nonexistent tea and eyes Hannibal from the side, inconspicuously.

Such a serious face. 

Tension. 

They spend the rest of their afternoon more or less lounging around and picking out what to wear. Now that their wounds were closing, they could finally shed their gowns and wear normal clothing. Upstairs in one of the guest rooms, a plethora of clothes are laid out atop of a twin sized bed. 

“Well, how is it?”, Hannibal steps back after adjusting Will’s blazer. 

Of course he had clothes in his size prepared. Dress shirts, slacks, even socks and shoes perfectly tailored down to the very millimeter. 

“It’s good”, Will murmurs, not at all comfortable with the feeling of being made into Hannibal’s personal dress up doll. Though technically it was he who had let him cut and style his hair earlier. 

The other man smiles at him, taking him in like he was burning his image into his memory. He himself chose to wear a beige colored dress shirt with a dark blue blazer with striped accents and slacks. His choice in clothing seemed to have become more simple since his time in prison. Perhaps being caged away made him appreciate the art of minimalism. 

Suddenly a knock on the door and Chiyoh enters. 

“Dinner preparations have been made. The Lord and Lady are expecting you downstairs in the dining hall”

Will's ears perk up and he looks to Hannibal. He sighs a bit then looks to Will. 

"Shall we?"

The three of them exit the room and make their way down the hall to the grand staircase. Chiyoh leads the way while the two men follow her not too far behind. If this were only a week ago, going down any flight of stairs would have been an issue, but they've both made remarkable recovery in their time here even if they still creek and ache in a few places. Once they make it a considerable ways down the numerous stairs, Will spots Murasaki a distance away, gorgeous as ever in a dark evening gown with Japanese accents and another larger figure beside her. Time seemed to move considerably slower when the man next to her began turning around to look up at the stairs. 

He was a tall man in his late 60s to early 70s with sharp facial features not unlike Hannibal's. He wore a three piece grey and red suit, likely Italian in design. He had greying hair that was parted to the side and had piercing blue eyes. His arched eyebrows and frown lines made it look like he was persistently scowling, but he soon breaks into a smile as he approaches them at the bottom of the staircase. 

“Mano berniukas!”, he exclaims while opening his arms up to embrace Hannibal, kissing one cheek then the other. 

“Labas dėde”, Hannibal responds with a slight smile as the older man pats his shoulders. 

It was the first time Will had heard Hannibal speak in his native tongue of Lithuanian, despite him hearing him utter words from several different languages in the past. It rolled off his tongue as easily as any of the other languages, but oddly not as comfortably. Perhaps another one of those things that make him uncomfortable about his native country. 

The man continues to smile at Hannibal until he spots Will behind him, recognition lighting up in his eyes. 

“Mr. Graham”, he greets him with an accent similar to Hannibal's as he makes his way towards him.

“Robertus Lecter, Hannibal’s uncle”, he reaches out a hand as Murasaki comes from behind with Chiyoh. Will shakes his hand firmly. 

“You’ve already met my wife, Murasaki”, he gently take her hand in his. “I do hope your stay here has been rather comfortable so far”

“Yes, it has been. Thank you”, Will responds with a nod. He tries not to stare at him too much, but his severe gaze makes it rather hard not to. Almost an identical, yet opposite effect of Murasaki's.  

The man turns and does a visual sweep of the room before looking back at Will. 

“Shall we get to dining then?”

The dish served tonight was Veal Orloff, a french dish consisting of thinly sliced braised loin of veal. Surprisingly there was no verbiage from Hannibal about where it originated or some kind of long and drawn out narrative attached to it. He just ate rather silently next to Will who was still trying to figure out what this whole tension about between him and his uncle was about. If anything it looked like Hannibal was tolerating Robertus rather than the other way around. Projection perhaps? 

“Tell me Mr. Graham, how did a criminal psychology professor end up working for the front lines of the FBI?”, Robertus suddenly brings up in conversation. 

“I…uh got recruited by the head of the Behavioral Analysis Unit after one of my lectures”, Will answers back, surprised that he knew much more about him past just his name. 

“Jack Crawford yes…you must have quite the remarkable mind to be recruited to work alongside him”

“You could say I have a passion for the human mind in general”, he answers with more confidence this time. 

Not that he wanted to stroke his own ego, but he also didn’t want to look stupid in front of this man either like he had been with Murasaki in the past couple of weeks. Something about him made him feel this way. Chiyoh rolls her eyes at him as she takes a bite of her salad.

“Indeed”, he nods back. “Though he must be quite bitter that his best has gone missing. But nevertheless he remains ever vigilant”

Will practically hears his heart skip a beat inside of his ears. 

“What…?”

“Last I checked, he had been on ventures in Italy in search of you. But no such luck. Is that right dear?”

“Yes”, Murasaki answers as she covers her mouth, still chewing. 

“My wife here has taken a liking to reading articles about you and Hannibal from that one news website. TattleCrime was it?”

Will’s eyes dart back and forth as he tries to make sense of everything the two of them had just said. Jack. Italy. Tattlecrime. All things he had more or less forgotten about in his time here. He suddenly uncovers a memory of the Norman chapel where he and Hannibal are sitting side by side in silence in the front row of the pews, uninjured, donning suits. He remembers their eyes closed, basking in the radiance of the glow of sunlight through the stained glass. He looks at Hannibal who’s still chewing his food and locks eyes with him. He seems to understand what just happened and gives him a silent nod of affirmation. Apparently they have much to discuss later. 

“I find Ms. Freddie Lounds to be quite the charismatic character”, Murasaki chimes in, bringing Will’s attention to her. “She is very…different than most journalists”

“Uh yes…yes she is”, he clears his throat, covering up his complete bewilderment in her taste in such shoddy journalism. 

“Thanks to her, my wife is much more up to speed on your activities than I. Although I do occasionally join her in her endeavors”, Robertus smiles at her as he continues to cut his veal. She returns the sentiment. 

“Yes…such interesting journalism”, he takes a bite of meat and chews. “The Great Red Dragon piece was quite riveting. The chase into the nightfall…and your ‘disappearing act’…”

“Why did you try to kill my nephew, Mr. Graham?”

The bombshell question leaves everyone at the table frozen for what seems to be an eternity. That is until Will soon finds that all eyes are now on him and he’s obligated to give a sound answer. 

“I…I didn’t-”, he stammers. 

“You didn’t…?”, Robertus questions him. “Then what would you call the events in Baltimore? Florence?”

“Robertus”, Murasaki places her hand over his in concern, but he heeds her no mind.

Will hears Hannibal sigh next to him and sees that Chiyoh is covering her mouth, but can most certainly see that she’s hiding a smirk. He shoots her a nervous glare. 

“Or was leaving him to rot in a prison cell for three years not enough for you?”

Then there is a deadbeat silence. Once again, all eyes were on him. Quite fed up with this whole situation, Will gives the most feasible answer. He decides to say exactly what’s on his mind.

“You wouldn’t understand”

“I ‘wouldn’t understand’ ”, he echoes Will’s words then nods a few times, raising his brow. He breaks eye contact then resumes eating his meal. 

“You are a very interesting man, Mr. Graham. A very interesting man indeed”

~~~~~~

“You must excuse my uncle. He is a very particular man when it comes to family matters”, Hannibal strolls alongside Will through the halls with his hands behind his back. His tone is almost apologetic.

The dinner with the Lecters ended without any further issues, but they decided not to stay for dessert or coffee. It probably wasn’t in anyone’s best interest if they did. 

“You say particular. I say he’s normal”

Hannibal stops and turns around to see that Will had stopped walking a few strides ago. With hands behind his back and a tilt in his head, he is the picture of surety. 

“A man comes into another man’s life and tries to kill his kin. Several times for the matter. A father’s role and natural instinct is to be protective and suspicious of him. Even hate him for this unforgivable act of cruelty. Yet somehow you seem bothered by that”

The older man looks down then smirks before looking up and walking back towards his younger companion.

“I am glad to see your mental capabilities have remained unaltered despite the physical damage to your body”

“It’s…getting there” Will sighs, feeling the exhaustion from overusing his brain. 

“What about you Will? Are you normal?”

He closes his eyes slowly in irritation at his grin, knowing that he asked the question despite already knowing the answer. He just wants to hear it from his mouth. 

“We are both abnormal”

Abnormal to no end. He’s known that for some time now. Yet there was something he’s only come to know recently from interacting with the Lecters. He looks up at Hannibal and blinks, unsure if he should utter what he's discovered. 

“But your family makes efforts to normalize the abnormal that is you”, he practically whispers. 

“Are you implying they are engaging in a facade for my sake?”, Hannibal asks, not at all offended. If anything, he sounds curious. 

Will looks down then up again at him. 

“The opposite”

Hannibal smiles for a brief moment then goes silent, eyes somewhat distant. Will could tell that he was already retreating into his chapel. It was a defense mechanism of his that he first picked up on in Florence during their sporadic conversations. A sign of avoidance.

"Shall we retire for the evening?"

"Yea. Sounds good"

The two men continue their way down to their room in silence, deciding not to push the conversations any further. Though he was completely willing to, Will was fine with it for now.

He's had enough Lecters poking around in his head for today. 

Chapter Text

There’s nothing quite like the feeling of a cold chill touching the skin in the middle of the night. 

Will squeezes his eyes shut and shivers as he dreams of wintertime in Virginia. He paws for the blanket that must have fallen off of him sometime during his slumber. When he can’t find it, he rolls over and reaches with his hand only to nearly fall off of the surface, catching himself in the nick of time. His eyes fly open and his heart begins racing. 

“Hello, Mr. Graham. I see you are awake now”, a familiar voice suddenly greets him.

“The night guard found you wandering the halls. He thought you were a specter haunting the grounds.You nearly stopped his heart”

Stop his heart is right. He feels his own heart nearly jumping out of his chest as he tries to comprehend just what the hell is going on. He thinks carefully about what he had just heard.

“Did I…sleepwalk?”

“It is possible”

“God…”, he holds his head in his hands.

Despite confirming that he was not in fact suffering from a reoccurrence of encephalitis, Will couldn’t help but feel a bit shaken. The current circumstances were almost too similar. At the very least, he wasn’t walking the streets aimlessly into nowhere. 

“Where am I…?”, he rubs his eyes with his palms, trying to focus his vision. All he can see is a blur of greens and reds and maybe a splash of yellow. 

“You are in my study”

Will squints and sees a room full of books and crude looking paintings of all kinds in a two-story room complete with a sliding ladder. It reminds him of Hannibal’s office in Baltimore. 

Hannibal…

“I need to get back”, he murmurs, suddenly remembering the warning he gave him. If he noticed that he went wandering off alone, there would be hell to pay. 

“No need for you to leave so soon”, a hand firmly pushes him back down to the long chair he was laying on. “We have yet to finish our previous conversation”

Will winces in pain as Robertus pushes directly on his still healing shoulder wound. 

“Tell me, Mr. Graham. What do I not understand?”

He decides to fall back into the long chair, but is hardly willing to concede. 

“I am saying you don’t understand our relationship. Hannibal’s and mine”, he answers with a sharpness in his tone that even surprises him. 

“You and my nephew do have a rather special bond don’t you?”, the older man chuckles. “So remarkably similar yet so different. Like two opposite poles that have come together to meld intimately together”

His words dance around on his tongue like he’s reciting poetry. 

“Do you know what an Ouroboros is, Mr. Graham?”

“The depiction of a serpent swallowing its own tail. A symbol of transmigration of the souls and death and rebirth”, he answers back without skipping a beat, very well aware of how to play this kind of game. 

“Clever boy”, he smiles. “It also represents eternal recurrence. Time in an infinite loop. I find you and Hannibal to be in such a loop”

He’s stopped smiling now, showing his signature scowl. 

“You’ve ravaged and upended his life just as much as he did yours. Yet neither of you seem to really ever learn your lesson”, he shakes his head regretfully as he narrows his eyes at Will. 

“These quid pro quo battles you two have in an endless cycle. Like a serpent trapped, swallowing its own tail while suffocating in its wake”

“What’s your point?”, he spits back now thoroughly annoyed at the man.

Robertus stands up from his stool and slowly walks over to one of his unfinished oil paintings nearby, taking a palate knife in his hand. 

“Sometimes…it is best to…cut off the serpent’s head to put an end to its perpetual misery”, he begins walking back towards Will while fiddling the knife with his fingers. 

“Whose misery would you be ending? Mine or his?”, he glares at him. 

Robertus reaches the long chair, casting a dark shadow over him. 

“I only want what’s best for him”

Suddenly a knock on the door. Robertus eyes the door, but keeps his attention on Will.

”Come in”, he orders.

Chiyoh enters gracefully as always.“The Lady has asked for me to retrieve Mr. Graham for his slumber. His bed has been re-made”

Robertus moves away from the long chair and puts his hands behind his back, stealthily hiding the palate knife. 

“Very well”

Chiyoh looks to Will almost as if giving a signal to follow her lead. He decides not to question it and quickly goes to her. 

“Do you dream much Mr. Graham?”

Will turns around at the sudden question imposed upon him. 

“Hannibal thought of you often when he was here last”, he turns to him with a tilt in his neck. 

“In fact you were all he could think about”

The second they leave the study, Chiyoh grabs Will by the arm and begins strutting down the hall. 

“Hannibal told you not to leave his side. Why do you insist on not listening to him?”, she admonishes him in a whispered hiss. 

“It’s not like I was doing it intentionally”, he barks back quietly. 

“Then your subconscious mind is as defiant as your conscious mind”

As much as he didn’t want to admit it, Chiyoh was probably right. He went to sleep being fine with not letting any more Lecters inside his head, but here he was moments ago in Robertus Lecter's grasp, possibly due to his own morbid curiosity. This memory palace situation was seriously becoming a problem. 

“Chiyoh, wait”, he whispers to her. She stops so abruptly he nearly stumbles into her.

“Robertus Lecter. What is he?”

Although he had registered Robertus as once being normal, the interaction he just had with him proved anything but. He was the farthest thing from normal, but he couldn’t quite put a name to it. He looks to Chiyoh for an answer. 

She sighs slightly before turning to him to answer.

“A ‘big cat’ ”

~~~~~

When they reach the upstairs bedroom, Hannibal is already at the other side of the hall. The second he sees Will, he rushes towards him with tremendous speed. 

“Will”

Chiyoh practically throws him at him. “Might I suggest for you to keep him strapped to the bed next time”

“Where did you go…?”, Hannibal looks at him eyes wide as if he had escaped a minefield unscathed.

“He was with Lord Robertus in his study. He had apparently been sleepwalking”

He looks up at Chiyoh then to Will. “Are you alright?”

But instead of an answer, Will had this to say. 

“You lied to me”

No sooner than he uttered those words does Chiyoh leave them to themselves. She will not stay for this. 

“Your uncle doesn’t tolerate you. He is obsessed with you”

Hannibal opens the door to their guest room and enters before answering. 

“He tolerates me, but is intrigued by me all the same. The two are not mutually exclusive”

“Still an obsession”

A small silent tension builds around them as Hannibal pops open a bottle of wine and begins pouring a glass for himself and Will. A typical way to start an insightful conversation between them. 

“Tell me, what did you see in Robertus when you spoke to him?”

Will slowly rolls his eyes up at the ceiling, taking a deep breath in through his nostrils as he covers his mouth. He has to gather his thoughts. 

“He’s like you, but he’s not like you”, he starts his analysis. “He’s an observer. And he delights in it”

Then the pace picks up rather quickly. 

“He watches you from outside the veil. He peers in from time to time to make sure you made all the right moves and didn’t stray from your designated path. Except you did. And he’s not happy”

Hannibal walks over with the glasses of wine and hands one to Will. 

“Did you wish to kill him?”

Will finds himself pausing at the question. Surely it had crossed his mind at least once in their interaction. 

“No”, he sighs. “It would’ve been far too pitiful”

He takes a sip of wine, recalling the desperation in Robertus’ eyes, in the tone of his voice. Despite their shared animosity in that moment, he can’t help but feel that if he did kill him with that palate knife in that moment, justification would have likely been there. 

“He is bitter and fearful”, he speaks in a tone that matches the very words he speaks.

“That you’ve changed. That I had changed you. That his design has been tampered with. You’re becoming unrecognizable to what he knows. What he molded you into” 

“He molded me, but he did not make me”, Hannibal quickly corrects him. “That I did very much on my own. He and my aunt merely provided me with much needed structure”

“You, however, contribute to my constant metamorphosis”, he raises his glass to Will before taking a rather long sip. 

Will stares at Hannibal as he lets his words sink in. He imagines his past conversations and actions overlap with Robertus’ image, wondering just how much he had learned from him and how much of that conditioning he had destroyed. 

“Does change frighten you as it frightens him?”, he finally asks him. 

“It did. But not anymore”, he answers quite simply as he places his empty glass down and sits on his bed, crossing his legs. “What about you, Will? Are you frightened?”

“I’m not sure yet”, he stares into his glass as he swirls the wine around, the swishing liquid matching the patterns of waves on the night of their fall. 

“Maybe that’s just fine”

He swallows his wine fairly quickly and finishes off it without as much as a sigh. Hannibal looks at him from the bed with a slight frown then looks down at his feet. 

“Get some rest. We will leave here come morning”, he announces.

And that was the end of that conversation. 

~~~~~

“Are you sure you wish to come with us?”, Hannibal asks Chiyoh as she gathers her luggage together onto the docks to put on the boat. 

“You asked me to watch over you. I believe you need that more than ever”, she slings her signature hunting rifle over her shoulder and boards the ship.

Will stares at Chiyoh settle into the vessel, but turns away when they’re about to make eye contact. He doesn’t even want to think about the idea of them living in such close quarters for who knows how long. 

“Mr. Graham”, a delicate voice calls out to him. He instantly feels a sense of calm overcome him. He turns around and sees Murasaki dressed in a long, Western dress with her hands folded in front of her. 

“I must apologize on my husband’s behalf”, her tone is apologetic yet kind as always. “He does mean well. He is just very protective of Hannibal”

“It seems some things never change”, she sighs with her shoulders as she frowns. 

Will stares at her despondently, seemingly mirroring her expression. 

“He’s afraid of losing him. Just like you”, he says so with great clarity. He understands. Incredibly so. What Hannibal Lecter means to this family and maybe just the slightest bit about what they mean to him. 

“Yes”, she clutches her hands. “But I do believe that not all changes bring misfortune. The chance of someone like you appearing before Hannibal…well…it must mean something, no?”, she shakes her head and smiles gently at the sheer impossibility of what’s occurred in his life. 

“Maybe. I hope”, he tightens his lips together. 

“I wish you good luck and safe travels”, she gently places her hand on his shoulder. It doesn’t hurt there anymore. 

“Thank you”, he whispers, then turns around to join Hannibal on the boat. 

Chapter Text

“And…that’s the last one”, Hannibal places the tweezers into the kidney tray with a clank. 

”How does it feel?”

“It itches”, Will murmurs. 

“I encourage you not to scratch at it”, he pulls off his surgical gloves and throws them into the nearby trash bin with the cut up sutures.

Will peers over at his right shoulder that’s now acquired another large scar. It seems to be a target mark for enemies and a sweet spot for injuries. 

“If scars are reminders that the past is real…what exists to let us know that the future is too?”

Hannibal looks over his shoulder as he places the contents of the tray into the kitchen sink.

“Nothing”, he responds before looking back to wash his tools. “The past, present, and future exists simultaneously in time, but the future is the only one of the three that we cannot predict”

“The best way to predict the future is to make it”, he sniffs.

Will raises his eyebrows as he puts his shirt back on. What a cliche. It sounded like a dumb inspirational quote from a 5th grade yearbook. But apparently this is the path they were following.

It was Day 0 at sea to who knows where. Hannibal said he had ideas, but he didn’t speak about them or was keeping them hidden inside his mind. Will’s mind on the other hand, was going in all sorts of directions. His memory palace was a fickle thing that more often than not refused to move or craft itself in ways he wanted it to. So much so that he wondered if it was mocking him. The only constant structure seemed to be the stream. It was the one thing that he more or less had control over and helped him sleep at night. At least he was allowed that comfort.

Will sleeps on the couch of the shared living room that night while Hannibal and Chiyoh takes turns on the helm. He dreams of his forest as usual, but found an unexpected visitor waiting for him there; a tall, muscular man in black with a distinct lip scar standing in the fog.

“Hello Francis”, Will greets him softly as if he had been waiting for this moment. 

“You betrayed me”, the man rasps with a lisp. It is a statement rather than an accusation. 

“I did”, he admits, showing no remorse in his decision.

“How did it feel? To finally let go?”

“The same way it felt for you”

Powerful. Alive. Liberated.

Will closes his eyes as he remembers the visceral sensation of killing Francis Dolarhyde, the Great Red Dragon. The sound of his flesh tearing. The sight of his life draining from his eyes. The smell of his blood as he bathed in it. It all tasted so delicious. 

Francis watches him as he submerges himself in the pleasure of sacred memories.

“It’s a shame”, he scoffs. “You’ll never feel the same way again”

His words immediately snap Will out of his ecstasy. He furrows his brows at him, questioning his choice in words. The man stares at him with a look that could only spell pity. 

“It’ll never feel as good as it did with me”

Chiyoh is at the helm of the boat when she spots Will from the corner of her eye. He should be asleep right now, but he was walking on the deck. Perhaps he was sleepwalking again. Suddenly, to her horror, she sees him climb over the railings and jump into the sea. She immediately stops the vessel and rushes downstairs. 

A few minutes later, she and Hannibal search for him with a flashlight and soon finds him on the side of the boat, splashing around in the waves. He seems to be completely lucid. Sane is another question…

As soon as they retrieve him from the sea and wrap him in blankets to prevent sure hypothermia, Will gives out an order. 

“Change the course”

They both look at him perplexed, and then at each other. 

“Where do you wish to go?”, Hannibal decides to humor him. 

“Where Dr. Bedelia Du Maurier is”, he answers back with a shiver in his voice.

Hannibal puts his hands in his pockets, intrigued.

“Why now?”

“Why not now?”

“Fair point”, he nods.

“Unfortunately I do not know where Bedelia has gone”, he sighs. “I can assume she is no longer in Baltimore since you gave her a…‘head start’ ”

True to his word, Will did indeed give her a chance to “pack her bags” and flee when he concocted the plan to fake Hannibal’s escape. But if his interactions with her meant anything, he knew one sure thing. Bedelia was a creature of habit and old sentiments. 

“I know exactly where she is”, Will narrows his eyes into the distance.

“Set course for Italy”

~~~~~

“You seem eager to wish to bring harm unto her”, Chiyoh remarks, arms and legs crossed as she sits across from Will. 

“Let’s just say this has been a long time coming”

The three of them had made their way to the docks of Italy in the middle of the night and decided to take the latest night train to Florence. Since Hannibal’s face is practically plastered all over Europe, they had to be as discrete as possible. An irony given what they were seeking out to do. 

“I met her once” Chiyoh recalls her encounter with the psychiatrist. “Three years ago when we were all last in Florence”

“Did you now?”, Hannibal asks with humor in her voice. He’s sitting adjacent to her, disguised in a coat, a large hat, a heavy scarf, and a cane to look like an injured old man (not that he wasn’t already). “What did you think of her?”

Chiyoh hums. “She is a cunning woman. Loyal only to herself and her own self preservation. Not unlike someone here”, she looks directly to Will, making her point known. 

“Looks like someone took a nice healthy dose of vitamin bitch this morning”, he spits venomously at her. 

An awkward silence ensues. Chiyoh scowls at him while Hannibal gives him a look of sheer disappointment that a parent would give to an unruly child. Will knows he’s gone too far. He decides to apologize. 

“Sorry…that was uncalled for. Just…really on edge”, he sighs, stressed as he looks out the window. 

Already annoyed with his attitude, but also expertly reading the room as always, Chiyoh decides to exit the compartment to leave the two men to themselves. 

“Bedelia seems to have had a lingering impact on you. Your anger towards her is quite profound”

“She deserves what’s coming to her”, Will mutters angrily, still looking out the window. 

“Tell me Will, what sparked this sudden urge to kill?”

“Aren’t these things sometimes spontaneous and on impulse?”, he decides to look at him, furrowing his brows.

“It can be. But historically, in your case, there is typically a trigger. Certain events or circumstances for example”

Will recalls what Francis had said to him in his dream, but decides to stay mum about it. 

“Maybe I’m just changing in a way you can’t see or predict”

“It is possible”, Hannibal raises his brows in consideration.

After a brief silence with the sound of train tracks filling the air, he brings up the next question. 

“Why her?”

“You know why”, he answers back annoyed. 

“Enlighten me if you will”

Since the floor was now his, Will decides to not hold back. 

“She is the only participant in this game who remains completely unscarred and has escaped from you unscathed. She is a liar and a cheater who thinks she’s won and doesn’t care to shy away from gloating about. She is undeserving of the crown placed upon her head”

“She doesn’t get to get away without facing consequences”, he growls out the last of his words. 

“Her actions irk your brand of righteousness”, Hannibal validates his seething anger. “But surely you did not spend a fortune to engage in several ‘sessions’ with her just to confirm what you already know”

Will looks at him as if a thin layer of the surface of his mind had been peeled away. His anger gradually quells and he starts to feel something else entirely. 

“Maybe I did”, he whispers, covering his mouth with his knuckles as he looks back out the window. An ocean of trees and darkness that enters his field of vision. “I wanted to know what was behind the veil. What she got to see that I didn’t”

Hannibal looks Will up and down with his eyes. “And what did you find there?”

He hesitates as he parts his lips, then looks back at him with a thousand-yard stare, eyes starting to well with tears. But before he can say anything, Chiyoh returns. 

“We will be reaching our destination in 2 hours”, she announces. “Perhaps we should rest”

“Yea rest sounds good”, Will sniffles and leaves to seek out an open roomette, conveniently avoiding the both of them. 

Chiyoh looks at Will’s back as he leaves, then looks to Hannibal who seems to have an ever distant look in his eyes. 

This was going to be a long trip. For all of them. 

Chapter Text

A chill down the spine and a sudden wave of nausea. That’s what Bedelia Du Maurier is hit with one evening in her second month living overseas in Italy.

It came on so suddenly that she barely had time to excuse herself while at the market buying bottles of wine and truffles. She vomits in the alleyway and shudders as she struggles to compose herself. She knows exactly what this is about. He is here in the city of Florence. She quickly wipes her mouth with a handkerchief and hurries her way out into streets towards her apartment. Once she's there, she'll contact the Polizia. 

She doesn't look around her as she rushes through the streets. It would only make her look suspicious and slow her down. When she makes it three blocks away from her apartment, her heart skitters like a rabbit's. Two blocks. One block. She makes it inside the gates and breathes a sigh of relief. She makes her way up the stairs in her heels, pushing her long lock of hair behind her ear. She takes out her keys and opens the door to her apartment, victory now secured. She smiles as she places her keys in the bowl. Now all she had to do was contact the-

“Hello Bedelia”, a voice calls out to her from the dark. 

~~~~~

Bedelia stands frozen in place. She knows her goose is cooked. She hesitantly reaches for the light switch and flips it on to find three very familiar faces looking back at her, one of whom which is aiming a gun straight at her. Despite the dire circumstances, she finds herself chuckling softly. 

“Well…if it isn’t the Three Musketeers”, she folds her arms at them defiantly. 

“I suppose that makes you d’Artagnan then, Dr. Du Maurier?”, Hannibal questions her, tilting his head. 

“Hardly. Unfortunately, I have no interest in joining Hannibal Lecter and his band of mistakes”, she says ever so pompously.

Chiyoh narrows her eyes at her, but Will is much less passive. 

“Oh please, like you’re such a damn success story”, he walks towards her like predator stalking prey. 

“My best sellers would conquer”, she affirms only herself. “I made it further than anyone else in the last round of this game. My only mistake…was underestimating you”

“And now you’re the first piece to fall”, he whispers, now practically in her face. 

Bedelia bites her lip. There’s a certain humiliation when a reigning champion is dragged down from their pedestal of triumph and victory. Be it in sports or in the animal kingdom, there is no honorable way to admit defeat when it just tastes oh so bitter. Oh how the mighty hath fallen…

Seeing that she can neither run nor hide, Bedelia lets out a small laugh through her nose. She looks to Hannibal, her old flame, with much sentiment in her eyes as she fiddles with her pearl necklace.

“How do you plan on killing me Hannibal? Will you do it quickly? Or will you savor in the hunt?”, she asks ever so seductively.

At the very least, she would be dying by his hands and no one else’s. Or so she thought. 

“Who said anything about killing?”

Bedelia slowly turns her head around to Will, her expression turning from one of shock to pure rage. She had once again underestimated the man’s penchant for violence.

“You insolent little man”, she snarls at him, balling her hands into tight fists.  “It’s not enough to crush the bird for you is it? Your ego just won’t allow for it”

“Look who’s talking”, Will growls back, pushing her backwards just with his sheer ferocity. 

“You won’t get away with this”, she bares her teeth at him. 

“I already have”

Bedelia suddenly feels a larger than life presence behind her. Before she can even turn around, she feels her mouth and nose being covered, while an arm twists around her neck, pinching her carotid artery. She screams and writhes until she loses consciousness and is dropped to the floor like a rag doll. 

Hannibal looks down at her with his brows raised much like a barn dog who doesn’t quite know what to do with a rodent he’s been ordered to drop at his owner’s feet. He looks up at Will and raises his arms at him, confused. 

“So, are we not killing her then?”

The three of them stare at Bedelia sprawled out and unconscious on the floor of her own apartment. She’s definitely breathing, but it doesn’t seem like she’s going to wake any time soon. Now about what to do with her…

“No”, Will answers Hannibal’s previous question, shaking his head. “But we will still make a meal out of her”

He raises his brows once more and nods. “The Abel Gideon course it is then”

Will furrows his brow at him, knowing what he meant since he heard about what he did to the old transplant surgeon turned serial killer. Nonetheless, he finds it weird that he would call it such a thing. His humor had really become something else in these past three years. 

“Though I do relish in your unpredictability…”, Hannibal starts dragging Bedelia over to the couch, his back still too injured to lift her. “…it does come with its consequences”, he grunts as he plops her onto the cushions, positioning her feet so they fit snuggly. 

“I unfortunately did not bring anything to anesthetize her”, he huffs. 

“Do we really need it?”, Will raises a brow. 

“If you are fine with her screaming and thrashing about when we begin cutting her”

Good point. Most times that Hannibal cut people, they were already freshly killed. Or in Abel Gideon’s case, had been paralyzed from the chest down so he didn’t feel a thing when he cut into him. To have Bedelia screaming bloody murder would be a pretty big problem.

“She is a doctor”, Chiyoh suddenly chimes in. “She should have medicine”

A lightbulb suddenly goes off in Will’s head. Chiyoh was right. When he had seen Bedelia in Florence last, she had shot herself up with something that made her disoriented and loopy. Chances are she still had a medicine box somewhere. He grits his teeth at the bitter memories. 

“Keep watch”, he orders to her before making his way to the bedroom. Hannibal follows soon after. 

“We will return shortly. If she wakes up, do feel free to put her back to sleep”, he nods at her. 

Chiyoh takes a seat in a nearby chair and watches Bedelia’s chest move up and down, her trusty rifle ready at her side. 

“Where’d she put the damn thing?”, Will opens every drawer he can find, looking for anything that remotely resembles a medicine box. 

“Will, I cannot help but notice that you did not answer my question back in the train”, Hannibal suddenly mentions from behind him, not at all joining in his search. 

“It’s not relevant to the now, is it?”, he answers back, now in the walk-in closet, shifting through a sea of dresses. 

“Quid pro quo. You answer my question and I tell you where the medicine box is”

Will turns around to see Hannibal standing a distance away with his hands behind his back. He isn’t lying. With his keen sense of smell, he could find the box in an instant. 

“What did you find in your sessions, Will?”, he asks him sternly.

His breath begins to shake and he feels his eyes burning just as they did the first time he asked the question. He swallows the hard lump forming in his throat before answering. 

“All the things I chose to remain blind to”

Bedelia flutters her eyes open as she slowly regains consciousness. She gradually becomes aware of the cold draft at her feet where her shoes had been. She groans as she lifts her head, still lightheaded from asphyxia. 

“I would suggest for you to close your eyes and go back to sleep”, she hears a voice from across the couch. She looks up and sees the muzzle of a rifle pointed directly at her.

“It would be the best for the both of us”, Chiyoh tilts her head at her. 

The doctor smirks sleepily then begins to chuckle under her breath quite audibly. It puzzles the gunman. Had the lack of oxygen to the brain driven the woman mad? Eventually, she ends her laugh with a long sigh, still smiling.

“What a disappointment you turned out to be”, she shakes her head at her, eyes half-lidded. 

“Because I did not manage to cage Hannibal?”, Chiyoh guesses from their last conversation three years earlier. 

“At least you had the nerve”, Bedelia sneers, commending her past resolve that had now become null. “But here you are now obediently back at his side sitting idly in your cage, ball…and chained”

“I came here by my own choice. No one is making me stay”

“But did you choose to participate? Or were you influenced to?”, the doctor asks of her. 

Chiyoh feels her heart thump in her chest as a single thought begins brewing in her mind. Though she doesn’t outwardly show it, Bedelia in all her psychiatric expertise, already sees the one thought smearing inside of her like an ink droplet in water. 

She smiles wide, triumphant. 

“I went to her in search of you behind the veil…but instead I found myself there”, Will confesses as if revealing a carefully guarded secret.

Hannibal eyes him carefully, not letting him out of his sight. “Did Bedelia help you understand?”

“Yes…god, yes”, he squeezes his eyes shut, remembering all the key moments in their sessions. 

As much as it pained him to admit it, the conversations he had with Bedelia over those few short months were some of the most insightful he’d ever had. Despite all her lies and manipulations, Bedelia was a damn good psychiatrist when she wanted to be. All these concepts and allegories he now knew because of her…She uncovered layers of mysticism in his psyche and polished the opaque into crystal clear. Hell, he could even see why Hannibal had chosen her of all people to run away with to Europe. Because he needed her in his broken state. 

“Yet upon your discovery, you made the decisive decision to come see me to gloat of your undeserved victory”, the doctor speaks in a critical tone laced in bitterness as he walks towards him. “You told me it was not good to see me. And then you bid me goodbye”

”Yes…”, Will confirms his trespasses as he nods. He knows what Hannibal is doing. He’s testing him. “But I came back didn’t I?”

“And now here we are back on the other side of the pendulum”, he remarks, now a good foot away from him. 

Will looks up and sees darkness in his eyes. The eyes of the devil. 

“Will you run again, Will? From me? From yourself?”

He stares into the abyss and sees himself staring back. He feels a need to compose himself before he gets lost in it. He closes his eyes and immediately sees Francis staring back at him with such pity in his gaze.

“It’ll never feel as good as it did with me”

“No”, he shakes his head. He looks back up at Hannibal with fire in his eyes.

“I’m done running”

“If you think the beasts won’t bite with their jaws…won’t catch you in their claws…because they’ve become familiarized with your scent…you couldn’t be more wrong my dear”, Bedelia whispers. 

“Beware the Jabberwock. Beware”

Chapter Text

When Will and Hannibal return from the bedroom, Bedelia is sitting idly on the couch, legs crossed, clearly not at all phased by the strangling she had endured earlier. 

"You sure did take your sweet little time", she eyes them both with a smirk. "I was starting to believe you had...backed out"

Before Will can snap at her, Chiyoh gets up from her chair and walks past them towards the entrance. 

"I will be waiting outside. To keep watch”, she says without making eye contact, tone unusually flat. And in the next second, she was out the door and gone.

Hannibal keeps his eyes glued to where Chiyoh had left them while Will glares at Bedelia. Neither men have to use too much of their imagination to get an idea that she had been up to no good in their absence. He hands the doctor the medicine box while keeping his eyes on their adversary. 

"Give her just enough so she's still awake" he orders. "I want her to remember everything"

Once Bedelia is given the proper dose of morphine, she seldom moves, but she's left with a perpetually dazed grin on her face that reminds Will of the time he and Jack had confronted her in Italy when she insisted she was "Mrs. Fell". It enrages him so, but he keeps himself calm enough to not go for the kill. He takes a page from Hannibal's cookbook and decides on removing one of her thighs. She would no longer be able to run away so easily without both legs. It's poetic. It's perfect. 

Will manages fine when Hannibal lifts Bedelia's dress to expose and expertly cut through the meat of the thigh with a scalpel. The sight of the blood squirting out of her and soaking into the bath towels awakens an all too familiar thrill inside of him. The rush of adrenaline fills him with ecstasy. But it's when the bone saw is turned on that he unexpectedly crashes to his knees. A chilling visceral feeling runs through his body as gruesome gory memories flash through his mind. He feels nauseous and a cold sweat pours down his face. 

“Are you alright?”, he barely registers Hannibal's voice as he gags. 

“Yea…yea I’m fine”, he manages.

“Shall we stop?”

“No, don’t you dare...!", he snaps at him.

He forces himself to endure the sound of the sawing of the two leg bones, vomiting once during the process, then plops himself down on the couch to get his bearings straight. He puffs out a breath of air and peels open his eyes. This was not the feeling he was going for. But they're far from done here tonight. 

~~~~~

"When you cooked Abel Gideon, did he eat himself or did you?"

Will is now in the kitchen nursing a glass of wine as Hannibal prepares Bedelia's freshly cut leg for cooking. They left her on the couch alone to deal with her new stump. It's not like she could run away in the state she was in. 

“We both partook in the consumption", he answers as he rubs all kind of spices on the meat. "He actually quite enjoyed it”

“You think Bedelia will enjoy eating her own flesh?”, he asks curiously, taking a sip of wine. He can already imagine the layout of the meal they’re about to serve. It makes his heart flutter. 

“Let’s find out shall we?”, Hannibal smiles. Pretty soon, so does Will. 

Many hours and much prepping later, the dish is finally cooked to perfection. The table is set for three and their "host" sits at the head of the table, dressed in a dark blue v-neck evening gown for the special occasion. 

“Roasted thigh meat”, the cook announces as he brings the main dish to the table. He adorns it with leaves and lights candles on them for a finishing touch. Bedelia starts to breathe shallowly at the sight of her own appendage being served for a meal. 

“I…I would like some wine…”, she stammers. 

“I don’t think that would be a good idea Dr. Du Maurier. Given all the morphine that is inside of you”, Hannibal warns her gently. 

“I would…really…like some wine…please…”

“Oh alright. We’ll give you a little just to shut you up”, Will humors her as he leaves the table. Hannibal also leaves to the kitchen to grab some carving utensils, once again leaving Bedelia by her lonesome. 

Once she sees that her "guests" have left her sight, she carefully grabs the snail fork on the table and hides it in her dress. A few moments later, both men return to the table. 

“The first cut…of course, shall go to our host”, Hannibal announces as he cuts a thin slice of meat and places it on a plate. He walks in synch with Will who's on the other side of the table, holding a bottle of wine to pour into Bedelia's glass.

No sooner when her plate is placed in front of her does she attempt a strike on Will. But she's easily intercepted by her old patient on the other side. 

“Now Dr. Du Maurier, do play nice”, he tries to pry the fork out of her hand. “Let go of the fork please”. A few more seconds of struggling and she finally lets go. 

“There you are”, he places her arm down, pocketing the fork in his pants. 

“Go on Bedelia. Take a bite”, Will encourages her, pouring her glass with the requested wine. 

She hesitates, breath shaking. She grabs her utensils and cuts into the meat, but is unwilling to bring it to her lips. He moves closer to her ear and whispers a command. 

“Eat it”

She does as she's told and pushes the meat into her mouth, chewing it thoroughly before swallowing. 

“It’s…delicious…”

The confession immediately brings out a feeling of pure bliss inside of Will that blows everything away. This. This is the moment he was waiting for. It was so beautiful. 

~~~~~

“You have no idea what you’ve done”

Those were the first words out of Bedelia's mouth since she consumed her own thigh meat. The morphine was likely starting to wear off. 

“The second you set foot in my home…you started a countdown to your demise”, she warns the two who are packing up their things. “Once word gets out…the others will come for you. And they will not go down so easily”, she scratches the tablecloth with her nails with such force it tears the fabric.

“I don’t intend them to” Will answers back. 

The threats are far from idle, they both know that. Everything about this trip to hunt down Bedelia had been reactive and impulsive. Nothing had truly been decisive from the start. It was full of disadvantages rather than advantages. But they accomplished what they came here to do, their living tableau now complete. All they had left to do was to leave the scene. 

As they exit the apartment in the dead of night, Bedelia spits one last thing at their backs. 

“Off…with your heads”

Chapter Text

The train to Venice from Florence runs at a rather specific time in the day, but the trio managed to secure tickets nonetheless. Despite Bedelia’s menacing closing remarks, they miraculously made it back to the train station unscathed and undetected by the Polizia. But such relief from their small victories would be short lived.

They all decide to sleep off the late night “activities” with Hannibal and Will sharing a bunk bed in one roomette and Chiyoh taking the adjacent one. However, there was really no sleep to be had. 

Will violently tosses and turns in the top bunk causing the mattress to creak loudly.  

“Are you alright, Will?” Hannibal calls out from below. The creaking suddenly stops. 

“I feel restless”, he sits up, holding his head in his hands, unable to stop himself from shaking. 

“Would you like a sleep aid? Or tea perhaps?”

“No…I just-I need a minute…”, he shakes his head despite knowing otherwise. 

Hannibal climbs up the bunk bed ladder and peers up over the mattress to check on Will’s condition. He climbs back down and then comes back up with his coat. He sits next to him and drapes it over his bare shoulders. Will buries his head in his chest as he grabs at the lapels tightly. 

“The experience of what we did to Bedelia was both exciting and overwhelming for you”, Hannibal begins explaining to him in a low voice. “You are having difficulty coming down from the rush of the hunt”

Will doesn’t respond, but he nevertheless knows he’s listening when he hears a faint whimper escape from his lips. 

“Try to retreat into your palace”, he advises him with a small pat on the shoulder. “I’ll have Chiyoh bring you some tea to help you relax”, he starts to climb down the ladder.

“I saw Francis”

Hannibal freezes then turns his head towards Will. He knows exactly what he means by those words. 

“He told me…that the act of killing only felt good because of him”, he shudders. 

Hannibal crawls back next to Will, crossing his ankles. He folds his hands as he looks at him, intrigued. 

“You felt a need to prove him wrong”, he analyzes his actions, making sense of his sudden and unexpected violent urges. 

“I had to know…I had to feel something”, Will whispers. “To prove that the rush I felt when killing him…it wasn’t just a fluke…”

“But you did not kill her”

“No”, he hisses, shaking his head. “She didn’t deserve that kind of mercy”

“And how did it feel to mutilate her?”

Will doesn’t even need to think to answer that question. Bedelia had once told him that extreme acts of cruelty required a high level of empathy. He sees such clarity in that belief now in his current mindset. It didn’t just feel beautiful…

“It felt…just”

Hannibal looks at Will with a slight curve in his lips, then looks down at the mattress in contemplation before speaking again. 

“What we had with Francis…was marvelous and thrilling. But not all acts of violence will feel exactly the same”

Will slowly peels his head from his chest upon hearing those words. He lets them settle in his mind for a while. 

“There is no need to attempt to replicate what you felt when we conquered the Dragon. It will always be our moment in time”, he assures him with much fondness. 

“Other opportunities will soon come”

Will looks down at the mattress, gripping the coat ever tighter and sniffles. His shaking calms a bit, but conflict is ever present in his face. 

Meanwhile, in the adjacent roomette, a different kind of conflict was brewing inside another killer…

~~~~~

The train continues to run into the early morning just before dawn.There is time to spare before the next major destination, but a lone passenger has decided to immediately get off at the next stop. Donning a heavy brown coat and slinging a long rectangular case over her shoulder, her boots click quietly on the metallic floor of the locomotive. 

“Getting off so soon?”, she stops at the sound of an all too familiar voice. 

“Will you stop me?”

“No”, Hannibal whispers as he shakes his head, careful not to wake Will who had finally managed to fall asleep. 

Chiyoh grips the strap of her rifle case as she keeps her face to the front of the train, unable to look at her dear childhood friend and family in the face. 

“Have you become frightened of Will?”, he asks her. “Of me?”

She sighs with a harsh tremor in her voice. 

“I fear that Lord Robertus is right. You and Will Graham are part of the same serpent suspended in time”, she shakes her head. 

“Eventually…I would become inclined to cut off the head. And with it…the tail”

Hannibal doesn’t need to see Chiyoh to know that she’s weeping at her sudden epiphany. Perhaps Bedelia had led her to it or maybe Robertus had. Observers had a different mindset than participants. And against all her iron will to remain loyal, Chiyoh’s was telling her to flee. 

He looks down at the floor then back at her before finally speaking, choosing his words carefully. 

“Please give Murasaki my regards”

She doesn’t respond to him as she leaves the train and he doesn’t stay long enough to get a look at her face as she parts with him. 

In a strange way, it was probably best for Chiyoh to have not have stayed. Because shortly afterwards, all hell would break loose between the two beasts. 

~~~~~

It all started when Will spiked a fever in the middle of the voyage.

They say karma’s a bitch, but in Hannibal’s case his past actions of deliberately prolonging Will’s encephalitis several years prior was coming to bite back at him. The long term effects of his past “experiments” were coming in the form of waves of flare ups which was mixing and mingling with the already tumultuous construction of Will’s memory palace. With no hospital that could take a couple of fugitives, he was left to use the medical supplies he could scrap together and care for Will himself. And Will…well, he wasn’t happy.

With his mind in a constant state of disarray, he was in perpetual agony and unable to hold any sound or reasonable conversations. He eventually took to alcohol to calm his nerves, something he picked up after his ordeal at Bedelia’s apartment. It was the only way he felt he could maintain a fraction of his sanity as he started talking to himself and made desperate remarks about seeing the deceased and gothic creatures crawling around the cabin of the ship. And whenever Hannibal tried to take the bottle away from him, he would erupt in fits of rage then begin crying uncontrollably. Sedating him was near impossible when he would do nothing but avoid him with great distrust and skittered away with the speed of a rodent expertly avoiding a trap. For Hannibal, the experience was a struggle on all levels, physically and emotionally. But he had a capacity for enduring. And endure he shall. 

“You have been doing an awful lot of drinking lately”, Hannibal comments for what might be the hundredth time of having the same conversation. 

“No more than you”, Will slurs, sitting on the kitchen stool. 

“I do not recall drinking a whole bottle of liquor with my dinner, Will”

At times like this he can only blame himself for stocking any and all places he goes to with almost an endless supply of alcohol to fulfill his love of wine. 

“Talk to me”, he urges him gently. “What is happening inside your palace?”

Wrong question. 

“Forget…the stupid palace for once…!!!”, he screams at him, shoving him away with remarkable force.

Hannibal dusts himself off and sighs. “You are under distress”

“No shit, Dr. Lecter”

He raises his brows as he bites his lip. He knows it’s serious when Will calls him that. 

“Wow you’re reaching all new levels of unstable, unstable”, Beverly Katz appears in front of Will, clear as day with her arms crossed. 

“Shut up…just please shut up…”, Will murmurs as he holds his head. 

“Do you not want to remember?”, Georgia Madchen appears next, behind him, gentle and serene as the day he saw her last. 

“No…I want to…but…”, he turns to reach out and respond to her. 

Hannibal looks at Will with concern as he interacts with the hallucinations. It’s not good. 

“These conversations you have been having with the fragments inside your mind. Have they at all been productive or beneficial to you?”

“Better than talking to you”, he turns and snarls at him.

Hannibal huffs with his shoulders as he puts his arms out.

“What is it that you need, Will? I cannot help you if you do not tell me”

“Help…” Will whispers with a slight maniacal chuckle. 

“He can see. Can you see?”, Garrett Jacob Hobbs whispers in front of his face, the ten bullet holes he had put in him oozing dark blood. 

“Any ‘help’, any form of ‘guidance’ you have ever given me…has just been another stab wound”, he tightens his hands into fists. 

“Aren’t you lucky…he chose you”, Tobias Budge appears behind him, prestine in his vest and tie with a look of envy in his dark eyes. 

“It keeps bleeding…”, he begins whimpering and shedding tears. 

Elliot Buddish drapes over him in his gory angelic form and whispers in his ear, “Are you still looking alone? Don’t you have someone watching over you?”

“It won’t stop…”, he covers his face with his hands. 

“He helped me. Just like you helped me become my true self”, Randall Tier in his Sabretooth tiger form places his claws on his face. 

Hannibal looks at Will twitching about in all his vulnerability, witnessing this mental phenomenon play out in front of him. 

“You are in pain”, he validates his struggle. “Is alcohol the remedy to this pain, Will?”

“You just can’t admit anything can you?”, he suddenly snaps. “It’s all just a big…mind game to you. It always has been”, he waves his hands in fury. 

“I don’t find anything amusing about you poisoning yourself, Will”, Hannibal looks at him dead in the eyes. 

“You deflect, because you can’t face the truth”, he spits back. 

“Then what of you, hm?”, his tone now changes. “Are you not fogging your mind with ether to escape from the bitterness of the reality unfolding before you?”

Will’s expression twists into one of deep, blood-red rage. 

“If it’s my mind you like so much…maybe you should’ve cut my head open and ate my brain in Italy all those years ago”

Suddenly, his field of vision goes straight backwards and he’s looking up at the ceiling. 

“Enough”, Hannibal growls with great ferocity as he pins Will to the dining table. His eyes are practically glowing like a predatory cat’s. 

“I have allowed you space to accommodate for your ongoing changes, but you of all people should know which lines not to cross with me”, he snarls at him. 

“I suggest for you to choose your next words very carefully”

Will glares back at him, gritting his teeth in bitterness. 

“I didn’t ask to be changed”

He grabs a nearby pepper crusher and rams it into the side of his head with such force that it breaks in half, sending pepper corns flying everywhere. Hannibal stumbles sideways as blood pours out of his wound and crimson drops fall to the floor. 

Will shudders from the sight of the gore, breathing heavily and runs away to the upper floor. Hannibal eyes him as his vision stains to red, but ultimately decides to let him go. 

~~~~~

When Will opens his eyes, he finds himself in a familiar yet different landscape. He knows it’s his memory palace, but it looks…brighter and so full of life. Not mention that an unexpected visitor is there waiting for him. 

Before him is a young, dark brown haired teenage girl with a fair complexion and bright big blue eyes. She’s donned in fishing clothes and is holding a rod in her hand. 

“Abigail”, Will whispers. He picks himself up and realizes he’s also wearing fishing gear, complete with a cap. 

“Why now?”, he asks. When was it that he saw her last? 

“Why not now?”, she answers with a smile. 

“The stream’s bigger than last time”, she looks into the distance of the clear water. “Maybe there’s bigger fish”

She leads the way to the signature stream of the palace while Will follows close behind. He looks around and sees that his palace had gone through quite the remodeling and reconstruction. 

The grass is much taller, but definitely more alive. The trees are in different shades of reds and greens. There is no fog. Not to mention the behemoth of a stag skull above him with its jaws open wide with a waterfall rushing out of it, the source of his now larger than life stream. Will can’t help but wonder what it would look like if the waters were red and not clear.

“Your memory palace is building”, he remembers Hannibal telling him years ago. 

“It's... full of new things. It shares some rooms with my own”

When he looks into the abyss that is the stag’s eyes and mouth, he senses what he said was true. He can feel Hannibal inside of there. 

“I've discovered you there, victorious”

Victorious. Yes, surely he feels victorious in this place. For the first time ever. 

“How come you never bring him over here?”, Abigail asks him as she casts her line out. 

“He can come in any time he wants. He comes and goes as he pleases”, Will mutters as he casts his own line out. 

“But that’s not the same as inviting him in”, she raises her brow at him. 

“Not sure if he’d exactly enjoy fishing…or all this”, he raises his own brows, knowing Hannibal’s tastes are much different than his own. 

“Do you not want him here?”, Abigail asks, her tone suddenly sounding sad. 

“I don’t know…I do…and I don’t. It’s complicated”, he sighs. 

Complicated doesn’t even begin to describe how he feels about Hannibal being in his mind. Especially with the phantom of their dead daughter, the daughter he had killed right in front of him, asking these questions. Perhaps if he asked her some questions, she could provide him with some answers. Their conversations in Italy were somewhat fruitful after all. 

“Do you regret doing everything he told you to do?”, he tests his theory. 

“Do you?”

He huffs in frustration. Of course it wouldn’t work. That’s not how the memory palace works. Abigail and anyone else he sees in this place or otherwise are only fragments of what he knows of them, but they aren’t actually them. He’s always forced to find his own answers. 

“Must be nice being him”, he mutters bitterly. “Being in complete control of everything. Not regretting a single thing”

Abigail suddenly turns around with her brows furrowed in a puzzling way. She walks up to him real close as her legs splash in the stream. 

“You seriously think he doesn’t have a couple of regrets?”

Will peels his eyes open and finds that he’s no longer in his memory palace, but in a bed. He’s been changed into different clothes and covered by a blanket. His arm hurts a bit and he notices that he’s been hooked up to an IV, likely fluids and other medications to ease his flare up. 

“I found you collapsed on the deck out in the cold. I brought you back inside”

He looks to his side and sees Hannibal sitting in a chair right near him. His head is bandaged, but there’s still a bit of blood seeping through. He likely stitched himself back together. 

“How long was I out for…?”, Will rasps, noticing that his throat hurts like hell. 

“A good 6 hours. I was really beginning to worry”, Hannibal widens his eyes. “Did you see any dreams?”

Will slowly recalls his memories from the palace. 

“I saw…I saw Abigail”, his eyes look around at the ceiling. Hannibal remains silent, not speaking a word. 

“We went fishing. Didn’t catch anything”, he furrows his brows now realizing after the fact. He’s usually a very good fisherman. 

“My memory palace…it’s so much bigger now”, he tells Hannibal, his voice full of wonder. “Bigger stream, bigger trees, and a huge stag skull. Huge”

Hannibal chuckles silently as if he’s looking at a child who’s sharing their creation with pride to him. “You’ve been quite busy in your drunken stupor”

“Yea…yea…”

Will looks down, swallowing as he recalls the last few moments he had with Abigail in the palace. There’s just some things he can’t confirm in his mind alone. He needs to borrow Hannibal’s imagination to get clear answers. 

“You said…you once feared change” 

“I did”, Hannibal responds quietly. 

“What was it like…?”

Will immediately sees his expression drop into a familiar and distant look. His pupils constrict and he goes silent. Knowing how this could play out, he reaches his arm out and places a hand on his knee; less of a means to comfort and more to keep him docile and complacent to answering honestly. It works. 

Hannibal sighs then begins answering. “As if over three decades of my life was unraveling in front of my eyes and I could do nothing to stop it”

“I tried in earnest to reject all realities I was unfamiliar with, but found myself destroying the realities I knew with my own hands”, he mirrors his words using his actual hands. “I had lost all sense of who I was and what I was becoming. So I went searching”

“Is that why you went to Italy?”

“Yes”, he whispers as he nods. 

Will can feel that Hannibal wants to end things there, but seems conflicted if he should continue his narrative. There’s something else. He strokes his knee with his thumb, urging him to continue. 

“The instability left my mind open to suggestions…and influences I would have otherwise been able to ignore or dismiss in the past”, he struggles with his words. “I unfortunately let Bedelia see too much of myself during that time…leading to my plight…and…its…many consequences”

Will doesn’t know how and why, but from those words alone he starts to piece together the events in Italy in rapid fire succession. The encounter with the drugged Bedelia. His reunion with Hannibal at the gallery. Their respective acts of betrayal. And…the dinner afterwards. He nods repeatedly as his forehead scar starts aching and his eyes well with tears. He gets it now. He gets it. 

“Should’ve cut off both legs”, he shakes bitterly with anger. “Let her grovel like the worm she is”

“We can still go back”, Hannibal leans towards him without a shred of humor in his tone. It’s the same tone he used when he suggested for them to run away into the night several years ago. 

“No”, Will quickly pulls his hand away from his knee, shuddering. “No more of that for a while”

Hannibal recoils into himself awkwardly, knowing he made a mistake. “I understand Will”

Then there’s a brief silence between them. 

“I didn’t ask to be changed”, Will sniffles, seemingly circling back to his despair, causing Hannibal to frown. “But neither did you”

Neither of them wanted this in earnest. But like a butterfly that had already formed into a chrysalis, here they were, changed men who couldn’t go back to who they once were. So they might as well deal with it. 

“I thought…it would all make sense to me”, Will grips his blanket in frustration. “That I would be able to see things more clearly. But…it’s all muddled and murky”

“I’m confused about things I thought I would never think about. I don’t know how to navigate my thoughts or emotions”

Given what kind of man Hannibal is, he instantly regrets confessing such things to him, knowing very well that he can use it against him later. But he was completely honest with him for once. He could let this pass as equivalent exchange. At least for tonight. 

“You will in time”, he assures him. “But you must also allow yourself periods of rest and recovery”

”Might I suggest going back to your stream?”

“Will you be there?”, Will looks at him. 

“If you want me to be”

Chapter Text

Will wakes up with a raging hangover.

He should have known better than to drink as much as he did, but he honestly felt the need to soak his brain in alcohol just to feel any sense of peace throughout the storm. His head is pounding, but he doesn’t experience any of the hallucinations he’s had in weeks past. He doesn’t hear anything abnormal. His stream had brought him to a place of stability. The medications probably too.

He lifts himself out of bed with a groan, his entire body feeling as heavy as a bag of bricks and probably looking as disheveled as one. He grimaces as he stretches his limbs and then scratches his aching back. That’s probably as good as it’s gonna get for now. 

Will looks around for Hannibal, but doesn’t need to search far to know where he is. The smell wafting over from the kitchen gives it away. He pulls himself out of bed and waddles over to the sound of sizzling and kitchen utensils clacking about. 

“Good morning Will”, Hannibal greets him as he enters the room.

Will looks over at the table and sees a variety of dishes already placed there. Plain eggs and toast, white chicken noodle soup, spinach and kale salad, and from the smell, salmon grilling on the pan. All foods helpful in a hangover. Hannibal turns around and places a glass of a creamy yellow-white drink in front of Will.

“Banana smoothie with honey for the stomach”, he instructs him like he’s giving him medicine before quickly turning back around to work on the salmon. 

Will takes the glass and takes a small sip. It does help with the queasiness a bit. 

“How’s the head?”, he asks without looking at Hannibal. 

“I’ve had worse”, he eyes him for a second before looking back at the pan. “Jack once hit me in the face with a medieval spike after beating me, then threw me out of a window from the Palazzo Vecchio in Italy”

Will grimaces a bit as he imagines how that fight went down. It explains the heavy injuries to Hannibal’s face when he saw him at the gallery. Compared to that, a pepper crusher to the head was likely very mild. 

He looks at Hannibal’s back as he continues to work on the salmon. He reminisces about their conversation last night and the rare sight of his open vulnerability. He didn’t invite him over to his stream afterwards, but nevertheless he’s come to understand something very clearly. The man never paints himself as a victim no matter the situation.

Not when he flaunted his “person suit” in front of the FBI and his acquaintances in his social circle. Not even the night in the kitchen when he seethed with anger and his heart shattered into pieces. Even as he changes before him, it seems to remain a constant part of his character. He’s equal parts unapologetic for the sins he commits unto others as he is to not allowing for self pity when others cross him. Will isn’t sure if it’s because of pride or ego or if it’s a front to hide something else entirely. It’s another part of Hannibal Lecter he’s just starting to figure out.

“Where next?”, he asks him. 

“Cuba”

Will cocks his head curiously at the answer. Hannibal seems to pick up on it. 

“No extradition treaties with the U.S. and I have property there”, he explains simply.

“What’s it like over there?”, he asks genuinely. He’s never been. 

“The days are hot and the nights are beautiful”

Perfect. 

~~~~~

It takes them a few more extra days to reach Cuba on the account of Will still recovering from his stubborn flare ups, but they reach there in one piece nonetheless. 

“Here we are”, Hannibal opens the door to a two story house and enters with Will who’s mesmerized by the sight. 

The interior design is surprisingly simple with grey and white accents, but most definitely screams with Hannibal’s exquisite tastes. There’s furniture with familiar looking accents, an open concept kitchen on the bottom floor, and of course a harpsichord in the corner. Curiously, despite its lack of use, everything is surprisingly in excellent condition. And then he finds out why. 

He finds a small handwritten note on the counter.

”I have tended to keeping the property in prestine condition in your absence. The harpsichord may need tuning upon your return”

                            - Chiyoh

Will’s chest pangs at the sight of her name on the stationary. Her handwriting is delicate and polite in style in contrast to Hannibal’s severe and gracious calligraphy. He’s only now realizing he didn’t say anything to her before she left. She was just…gone. 

“Chiyoh had been managing some of my properties in the time that I was in the hospital”, Hannibal comes from behind him as he picks up the note. “My aunt’s teachings has made her a most excellent housekeeper”

Will scratches his head, not knowing what to do with how he feels about Chiyoh’s situation. He somewhat feels responsible for her abrupt departure. Hannibal notices this, but remains quiet about it, instead escorting Will upstairs to the bedrooms. 

When Will enters the guest room, he drops his bag and immediately sits down on the king sized bed in the middle of the room. It’s as bouncy and comfortable as he thought it would be. He spreads out his arms and legs out on the mattress like he’s swimming in a pool. 

“Is it to your liking?”, Hannibal smiles. 

“Feels good to be able to lie down in an actual bed…”, he sighs. 

“It has been some time”, he nods in agreement. They’ve been at sea for far too long.

“I will be in my room unpacking my luggage before procuring groceries for lunch”

Will barely responds with a hum as he drifts off to sleep in a sea of comfort. 

When he wakes up next, the room seems much darker. He rubs his eyes and checks the clock on the wall. He’s astonished to find that he had slept right through the noontime into the evening. A good bed really does help with sleep.

He gets up from the bed with a small grumble, wondering if he’ll be scolded for missing lunch or if he would be left off the hook due to his current physical state. He never knew what he would get when it came to Hannibal. He was just so fussy. To avoid it altogether, he decides to unpack his things. He opens the bag and starts taking out the items one by one until something catches his eye. 

His wedding ring. 

A cold chill runs through his body at the sight of it as images of Molly flash before his eyes. He digs his hand into the bag and picks it up, but then quickly pockets it away. He sighs as certain unresolved questions start lining up in his mind. He can’t keep avoiding them forever.

Will creeps outside his room and peeks around the corner to see if Hannibal is anywhere to be found. It’s too late for lunch, but too early to prepare for dinner. He said he was going to get groceries, so if he’s lucky, he might not be around. There was something he needed to do in private. He needed to consult with the good ol’ internet.

If Hannibal is anything like his aunt, his taste for TattleCrime was likely still very much alive. He may not be big into computers, but he’s sure that he likely has a tablet lying around somewhere. His hypothesis is proved correct when he finds the tablet on the counter in his room. Somebody has been catching up on the news.

Will takes the tablet and is relieved when he finds that it’s not locked with a password. Even more relieving is his data roaming is still active meaning he won’t need WiFi. Just as he suspected, Hannibal had been busy doing some internet sleuthing. He scrolls back and finds the articles that Robertus and Murasaki had spoken about back in France, but then a certain title makes his heart skip a beat.

Ex-wife of Murder Husband Will Graham Keeps Mum on Disappearance 

He squints at the word “ex-wife” and feels a sense of confusion. Against his better judgment, he scrolls down to read the short article below. 

It’s been one month since the disappearance of serial killer Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter and former Special FBI Agent Will Graham since their deadly encounter with the Tooth Fairy Francis Dolarhyde. TattleCrime has reached out to Graham’s now ex-wife Molly Foster for questioning in hopes of enlightening the public of his possible whereabouts, but her phone had been disconnected and her home abandoned. No dogs to be seen anywhere. 

Ever the vigilant truth seeker, our very own Freddie Lounds tracked her down in Oregon of all places and found her volunteering at a local elementary school. When asked about her ex, she only commented on her impending divorce case and her eternal quest for peace. The love triangle seems to now be permanently broken. Looks like the Murder Husbands won this round. 

“Although I would love sharing my things with you, it would have been nice for you to at least ask first”

Will flips his head around and sees Hannibal standing at the door with disappointment in his face. He’s reminded of how he dislikes discourtesy, but scoffs at the hypocrisy. 

“If I had asked, would you have let me seen this?”, he gets up from the floor and confronts him. 

“I did not think it would have been beneficial after what occurred on the boat”

“You don’t get to make decisions like that for me!”, he shoves the tablet at him. 

Hannibal sighs. “Will, you confessed to me of your confusion and your difficulties managing your thoughts and emotions. Your are becoming reactive to what you have read”

And here it was. The consequence of him being open and honest with him. He used it to justify yet another boundary crossed in guise of ‘helping’ him. 

“I am reactive because you decided to hide things behind my back and limit my access to crucial information!”

“I am not the only one hiding things, am I Will?”, Hannibal crosses his arms at him. 

“Excuse me?”

“You still hold onto your wedding ring. Despite your claims of no longer running away, you refuse to part with it”

Will becomes increasingly agitated. How in the hell Hannibal knew that information he couldn’t say, but given that he’s in every corner of his life, why should he even be surprised? 

“Even now, you hold it in desperation that your wife will somehow take you back”

And that was the last straw. Will shoves past Hannibal and rushes down the stairs. 

“Where are you going?” he calls out to him from upstairs. 

“Out”, he spits acidic as he puts his jacket on. “Don’t wait up”

~~~~~

Will walks for at least maybe an hour on the sands of Cuba until he stops and sits down on a bench. It dawns on him that he’s in a foreign country where he doesn’t even speak a word of the language. Not to mention that he stormed out of the house with no money or even a phone for the matter. He buries his head in his hands and growls in frustration. Suddenly, he feels a presence sit next to him.

He lifts his head and finds a sandwich wrapped in paper in front of his face. He looks up and sees Hannibal in the dark. 

“I was unsure if you ate”

He feels a sense of agitation and relief mixed in one as he takes the sandwich.

“Is this supposed to be a peace offering?”, he asks with much sarcasm in his voice. 

“I won’t apologize for speaking the truth, Will”

He bites into the sandwich and chews silently for some time, stewing in his thoughts. 

“I didn’t think she would move on so fast”, he finally whispers. 

Will knew that he and Molly were over the second he saw her in the hospital bed after her attack. The look in her eyes reflected her thoughts and desires completely. She didn’t sign up for his life. And when Wally told him he wanted Francis dead, he couldn’t help but feel he had already poisoned this family with his wicked nature. It was only a matter of time. But still…the pain of abandonment stings. Perhaps that goes both ways. 

“She smelled danger and chose to flee to protect her son”, Hannibal remarks. “Just as a mother should”

He speaks as if he knows from lived experience. Will wonders if he’s talking about his own mother who passed so long ago. Strange how a conversation from so many years ago can pick up at unexpected times. 

“You make everything look so easy”, he huffs. “You do it all so flawlessly”

In some ways, Hannibal Lecter is the symbol of perfection. He speaks countless languages fluently and knows several aspects of history like the back of his hand. He can draw like an architect or an artist all based on his mood. He can not only play instruments, but compose for them. And he can cook in ways that would make a Michelin star chef drool with envy. Not to mention that he evaded authorities undetected for over 30 years as a highly prolific serial killer in multiple countries. There’s nothing the man can’t do. 

But Hannibal doesn’t gloat about his faculties. Not one bit. 

“I’ve had much experience...and time to consider”

“Yeah…I guess you did”, Will wonders if the ten year gap of life between them has anything or nothing to do with it.

He eventually drops the subject altogether and moves onto what’s actually important. 

“What do you think Jack will do to us if he catches us?”

“He will kill me without a shadow of a doubt”, Hannibal answers with surety. “But you, he will spare. For how long, I cannot say”

“He needs me until he doesn’t”, Will mutters, knowing Jack’s work ethic quite well. 

He is after all, his prized lamb. 


When they return to the house, Will takes a much needed shower and spends his leisure catching up on TattleCrime on the tablet, with ‘permission’ this time of course.

The journalism is full of sickening confabulations as always, what with Freddie continuing to hype up the ‘Murder Husband’ lore like a teenage fanfic writer. But even so, Will knows that every delusion has a root in truth. And it’s those small morsels of truth he seeks. 

He soon finds out that the FBI had raided and seized any and all properties Hannibal had owned in the states, Chilton had recovered from his horrendous ordeal and is back to running the BHCI, and he didn’t need to be reminded twice about Molly’s ongoing divorce case. The link to her online public case record was enough to understand that it was a done deal.

But he gradually realizes something oddly peculiar about the content of the articles the more he scrolls. There’s absolutely nothing about Bedelia’s recent ordeal in Italy. He can’t be sure about the European news, but no matter how much he searches, the name “Bedelia Du Maurier” doesn’t show up anywhere in TattleCrime. Not only that, but the language of the articles themselves has subtly changed. The usual buzzwords have all but gradually faded out, but just enough to still keep the usual audience hooked. 

If there’s anything Will knows about Freddie Lounds, it’s that she’s loyal to no one but herself and her readers. For her to dumb down her signature histrionics was not only uncharacteristic of her, but telling. The only times he’s known her to cover up the truth was when the situation forced her to…or there was an offer she just couldn’t refuse. 

He ponders at the possibilities, but only one person truly comes to mind; Jack. It’s not the first time he’s teamed up with Freddie for mutual benefits. “Make use of me”, she would say in situations like this. Given that Jack had ventured to even Italy in search of him and Hannibal, whatever they were planning, it was probably huge.

Will closes the tablet and ponders over the recent articles and then his entire history with Jack Crawford. He didn’t know what to call his relationship with him. They weren’t exactly friends. Colleagues at best maybe. But he also never truly said “no” to all of his many requests over the years to use his gifts to “do the right thing”.

Because he made it so. 

He thinks of the pictures and the wording in the articles and imagines Jack in his usual black coat and hat, a sharp twinkle in his eye. He couldn’t help but think that this was all his way of calling him back to him. A bridge back to the other side. 

Temptation beckons him from afar. 

Chapter Text

“How many people other than Jack are participating in the hunt?”

The question came quite abruptly and out of the blue during breakfast time. Hannibal looks up at him from drinking his coffee. He places his mug down onto the table and strikes his usual pose of placing his laced fingers over his crossed knees for a discussion. 

“I supposed it would be wise for us to discuss wouldn’t it?”

After clearing the table for breakfast, they move their way to the living room to have a proper discussion about who or what could come their way. 

“Chilton”, Will names first. “Though his vendetta is technically with me”

“Ah, the Tooth Fairy incident”, Hannibal smiles enthusiastically. “Though I must say the article and the events occurring afterwards provided me with much needed entertainment while I was in the hospital”

“All because I put my hand on his shoulder in a damn photo…” he mutters, rolling his eyes. 

“You were curious too see what would happen”

Will sighs in frustration remembering that Bedelia had pointed out the same thing about his intent during one of their sessions. 

“You might as well have lit the match”

“Apparently the only person who wasn’t aware of the consequences was me”, he widens his eyes annoyed. He feels judged. 

“Given how your train of thoughts tends to move, I am not surprised”, Hannibal remarks. “Your subconsciousness is often far more turbulent than your conscious mind. And much more violent”

“Doesn’t that go for anyone though?”, Will eyes him from the side. 

“Not always”

“According to sources, he took up running BHCI again after his recovery. He really doesn’t learn not to mess with killers”

After nearly dying a good three times while working around the criminally insane, one would think it would be best to steer completely clear from that life completely. But Fredrick Chilton was arrogant as he was stubborn. And apparently a glutton for punishment. 

“That he does not. But it is quite entertaining to watch him come back from his plights every time”, Hannibal snickers to himself, remembering good times. 

“Guy’s like a cockroach I swear”

Indeed…

“The Verger-Blooms of course will be out for my blood”

“They are or you are?”, Will raises his brow, dubious. Last he heard, Alana and Margot went out of country to escape Hannibal after he was planned to be transported for his fake escape. 

“Do you doubt that the feelings are mutual? Or is your judgment clouded by the lingering feelings you harbor for Alana and Margot?”, he asks quite critically. 

“Okay, first of all, I don’t harbor any feelings for either of them, okay” he shoots back. “I kissed one and had a one night stand with the other”

It was the truth. At least in his eyes it was. 

“But you did desire Alana at one point”, Hannibal’s tone suddenly turns incredibly bitter. 

“Yes…but that was a different lifetime ago”, he sighs at memories from a very distant past. 

“It is merely a matter of who will strike first”, Hannibal looks into the distance with a piercing glare. “I prefer not be taken by surprise”

Will sees the intensity in his intent and feels his anxiety heighten. He wasn’t quite sure who was right or wrong in this situation. But he also felt he had no place in telling Hannibal that either. 

The day goes by quickly and turns to night. The hot air is replaced by a cool breeze and the sky turns to a stunning shade of dark navy blue. 

“Do you like the view?”, Hannibal asks Will who’s mesmerized by what he sees from the balcony. A beautiful nightlife city that seemed like it was out of a dream. 

Hannibal hands him a glass of what looks like a green liquid that smells incredibly sweet. It’s definitely not alcohol. Will takes a sip of the drink and finds that despite its smell it’s actually quite light in flavor. It’s refreshing. 

“Havana is filled with architecture from 16th Century Spain” Hannibal begins to explain the sights. “There is the Castillo de la Real Fuerza, the Castle of the Royal Force, as well as the Havana Cathedral designed by the baroque Italians. Both of which are exceptionally beautiful in the nighttime”, he points to the different areas in the far away city. 

“It’s not what I ever imagined Cuba to look like”, Will feels the cold breeze on his face. 

Hannibal turns around and leans his back onto the railings of the balcony. “You should travel more often, Will. You will see new sights and broaden your horizons”

“I’m sure I’ll get enough of that if I stick with you”, he tilts his head at him as he takes another sip. 

Hannibal smiles at him then turns back around to look at the beauty that is Havana from afar, taking it all in. 

“I find moments like this important to savor and remember”, he tells Will in a gentle voice. “Sometimes peace is just as important as violence. It is a balance”

“Periods of rest and recovery”, he echoes the words he told him in the boat.

“Precisely”

Will thinks about the concept for a moment before speaking again. “Is it really necessary to strike first?”

Hannibal perks his ears and turns his head. 

“Can’t we just wait until they come to us and take care of things as they come?”

He turns over his shoulder and steps closer to him. 

“You know that’s a request I cannot fulfill even for you, Will”, he clinks his glass against his. 

“It was worth a shot”, he murmurs as he takes another sip of his drink. 

The next two days go on without a hitch. Hannibal spent his time tuning the harpsichord that was very much out of tune while Will spent much of his time in his memory palace, putting into practice the things he had recently learned. It’s bitter work, but he knows if he doesn’t at least try, the palace could come to attack him again. He knows from his own ordeals as well as Hannibal’s that the palace is not an unconditional servant to its master. If it smells fear or instability, it will turn on them. It’s a symbiotic relationship that must be well tuned and often. 

And he was going to need this relationship. Because on the third day, reality hit and hard. 

~~~~~

The night air is pleasantly cool and evenly spaced out throughout the home. Though heat is known to rise, even the upstairs bedrooms are at a comfortable temperature. All is calm and quiet. Maybe too quiet.

Hannibal opens his eyes in the darkness. There’s a foreign smell in the home that has disturbed his slumber. He pulls himself out of bed and quietly places his feet onto the floor below. He takes light steps towards the direction of the smell, grabbing a scalpel that he left on the counter next to a pencil. But when he makes it outside his room, he finds to his confusion, that there’s an entirely new smell mixing in, spreading far and wide throughout the vicinity of the home. And what more, it was getting stronger. 

He looks down over the balcony and hears the sound of hissing. He begins to cough and gag profusely. The smell is overwhelming. In this brief second of olfactory distress, he’s hit by an electrifying shock to the neck and falls to his knees. Before he can react and strike with his scalpel, he feels a needle being plunged into his jugular and he gradually loses consciousness. 

On the other side of the hall, Will is awoken by the same pungent smell and begins to gag. He’s close to retching when an unknown force suddenly grabs him backwards by the neck. He tries to fight his assailant off, but between the choking and the malodorant, it becomes near impossible. He starts slipping into unconsciousness when suddenly he hears a faint CLACK sound. 

The weight on his back falls off of him instantly as the assailant falls to the floor with a thud. Will gasps and begins coughing both from lack of air and the ever present stench in the air. This time he actually does vomit. When his vision finally clears, he sees a figure in the shadows coming into the room and hears the familiar sound of boots clicking on the ground. He furrows his brows at the impossibility. 

“Chiyoh…?”

Chapter Text

The average flight from Paris to Havana is roughly 10 hours and 3 minutes. 25 minutes depending on what airline is flying. Chiyoh manages to make it in 10 hours 5 minutes flat and wasted no time making her way to Hannibal’s property. It was reaching dawn and there was the 6 hour time difference, but such things were hardly an obstacle. Dressed in a red and pink flower patterned short sleeve belted wrap blouse, her usual boots, and sunglasses to shield herself from the Cuban sun, she remains ready and alert with her trusty rifle case. But what she didn’t prepare herself for was entering a house that reeked of an unknown pungent odor…

She sighs. Something strange was already happening.

~~~~~~

3 MINUTES LATER

~~~~~~

Will stares at the gunman in front of him in disbelief. She carries a handgun with a silencer attached to it, explaining the muted sound of gunfire. 

“I thought you went back to France”, he says to her. But Chiyoh doesn’t respond, only walking towards the balcony door and sliding it wide open. 

Once outside, she takes a deep breath in through her mouth into her lungs. From the sound of her awkward breathing patterns that followed, Will can tell she had held her breath all the way up the stairs before shooting the assailant. He picks himself up and decides to join her outside for some fresh air. 

“They have taken Hannibal”, she says a bit winded. 

“What are you talking about? Who’s they?”, Will tries to catch his breath, staying far away from the odor inside the home. 

Chiyoh turns to him and looks at him with her usual sharp stare. 

“The two women”

The second those words leave her mouth, Will knows exactly what she’s talking about and pieces things together. A familiar feeling of annoyance builds in his chest. 

“So he was aware Alana and Margot were here…and didn’t care to tell me?”, he asks her just for the confirmation with much acidity in his tone. 

“He did not wish to worry you”

“Well I’m worried now”, he hisses back.

Hannibal had done it yet again. He’s withheld information that’s crucial to both of their survival to make plans work in his favor. To make sure things work out the way he wants. And now here he was captured and taken to who knows where because he decided to operate alone and in secret. Who knows who and what is coming next? It frustrates Will to no end. 

As he stews in his anger, a faint groaning sound comes from back inside the house. The assailant who had hit the floor mere moments earlier is miraculously moving…

Chiyoh walks back into the room, gun at the ready. She gets close to the assassin on the floor with Will following close behind. 

“Not dead…yet”, she raises her brows. It seems whoever this was, they were mighty lucky. Or were they…?

Will looks at her then back at the assailant on the floor. He carefully steps closer to them and kneels down, grabbing the heavy, black gas mask on their face. When he pulls it off of them, they start flailing about. 

“No! Nah-no! No! No! No!”, the assailant whips their arms around like tendrils in a defensive manner as they screech.

The assailant is a middle aged male, fit in build with brown hair and brown mouse-like eyes…eye. The bullet had certainly hit him, but due to the struggle and the angle at which he was hit, it seems it had grazed his eye socket and taken the eyeball with it when it exited from the side of his skull. How he managed to survive this, they couldn’t be for certain, but there was one thing that was. Will knew this man and he knew him well.

“Clark Ingram…?”, he furrows his brows, getting a better look at his face to make sure. 

“Do you know him?”, Chiyoh turns her head to him. 

“Please…please please…please…” Ingram backs away from them pleading for his life just as he had done in the stable when Will had a gun aimed at him. He was sure now. It was definitely him. 

“He’s a serial killer from Baltimore. He was incarcerated. Or at least he was supposed to be…”

He stares at Ingram’s pitiful state and licks his lips in thought before looking back at Chiyoh. 

“I think we should compare notes”

After opening up practically every window in the home to air out and get rid of the horrendous stench from the malodorant, Will and Chiyoh utilized Hannibal’s compact study for discussion. Between the two of them and anything and everything they could scrap together from Clark Ingram who was still in hysterics (but now tied up with no chance of escape), they managed to figure out what was going on. 

First and foremost, the reason Clark Ingram was here in Cuba in the first place. It was certainly no accident. Fredrick Chilton who had full reign over all the inmates in BHCI had hand picked a team of criminals and placed them under the custody of the FBI into a very specific and top secret task force. Their objective, to catch and/or eliminate the escaped convict. The classic dead or alive bounty. 

“With a full scale operation like this…the Vergers are probably backing them up financially. Might even be leading them”, Will murmurs, thinking of just how much money can be used to protect the wicked. He should know. Hannibal’s vast wealth was practically protecting the both of them. 

Though he had threatened Ingram at gunpoint to give him the names of the other convicts involved in the task force, the man swears he doesn’t know. Meaning he could be lying…or whoever was above him was a bigger threat to him than him or even Hannibal. He tries to imagine what kind of entity that could possibly be. 

Since Ingram wouldn’t talk, he would have to rely on his memory palace. He grabs a piece of stationary and pen and begins to rapidly put ink to paper.

“What are you doing?”, Chiyoh asks, stunned by the speed at which he writes. 

“Writing down all the serial killers Hannibal and I caught in the states. The ones who are still alive anyways”, Will murmurs. 

When his pen stops, Chiyoh leans over to look at the list with furrowed brows and parted lips. 

“Such abnormal personalities”, she whispers. 

“You have no idea”

~~~~~

Elsewhere, all the way in Mariel, a series of meat packing plants stand triumphantly in all their glamour. Triumphant and resolute in their appearance, Verger Corp had truly reinvented their image in the last three years, severing itself from its previous image…and master. 

Down the line at the very last plant, a certain prisoner was kept captive in the farthest corner of the factory. Shackled tightly with a heavy locked chain around his bare neck, Hannibal Lecter sits behind a pig cage in a rug of hay. He looks around with his eyes, seeing a familiar sight. At least he isn’t nude this time. He has his pants. 

“I heard Verger Corp had transitioned into using ‘cruelty free’ methods for their products. It seems that I was misinformed”, he says to the figure in front of the cell.

Standing before him is none other than Alana Bloom. Her wavy hair has grown long enough to be wrapped into a small bun. She dons a monochrome black and white pants suit with black heels. The only coloring on her comes from her bright red lipstick. She stares at the doctor through her dark triangle rimmed sunglasses, arms crossed. 

“Are you not going to alert Fredrick or Jack?”, Hannibal asks. 

“What’s the point of sending you away to be placed in a cage if you’re going to break your way out anyways?”, she swipes off her sunglasses revealing her blue eyes that look gray in the darkness. 

“Or…someone will break me out”, he tilts his head at her. 

Alana huffs air out the side of her mouth. 

“I should’ve never trusted Will with that plan”, she mutters. Not that she trusted him from the start. 

“You underestimated the compassion Will has for me”, he smiles at her. 

“Compassion…”, Alana lets the word roll around on her tongue. 

“Is compassion what led Will to push you both off of that cliff? Or let you get captured to be left with me?”

“I care for him nonetheless”, he shrugs. 

Alana scoffs with a curved smile, then immediately glares at her prisoner. 

“You don’t care about Will. You’re incapable of caring about anyone but yourself”, she speaks both from professional and very personal experience. 

“Is that so?”

She walks closer to him and crouches down to his level while placing her hand on the top layer of the cage, knowing very well that he can’t move to attack her. He’s shackled tight. 

“You’ve made Will into what he is now because of your sick obsession to make little copies of yourself. The only reason he stays with you is because he thinks he’s indebted to you. You trapped him”, she snarls at him. 

Hannibal stares up at her and blinks. He’s quite sure they’ve had this conversation before. They might as well have it again. 

“Facts are an enemy of the truth Alana. We have trapped each other”

She scoffs out a laugh and pulls herself upright, folding her arms at him once more. She can’t believe her ears. 

“You’re not trapped. You’ve never been trapped. Even when you were in the hospital, you were in complete control”

Despite their silent mutual agreement from the events of Muskrat Farms and BHCI, Alana knew very well that Hannibal had continued to manipulate the staff and the outside world in his favor all while inside a cage. She turned a blind eye to much of it to keep him tame and content, but even that ended up backfiring on her. 

“I beg to differ”, Hannibal shakes his head at her. “Might I remind you that you were the one who took my books…and my toilet”, he narrows his eyes at her, recalling the bitter memories. 

“You left me no choice”, she stresses, justifying her actions. 

“You always had a choice Alana. You just chose wrong every time. Just as you are doing now”

Alana’s pupils sharpen into pins as she begins boiling on the inside. But she doesn’t scream or yell. Instead she curves her lips into a vindictive smile.

“You like Biblical references Hannibal. How about this one?”

“Only with thine eyes shalt thou behold and see the reward of the wicked”

She swipes open her phone and turns it around to show him a live camera recording of him in the cage.

“You’re a disease Hannibal. A cancer”, she glares at him. “And the best way to deal with cancer cells is to starve them out until they shrivel into nothing”

She then pockets her phone in her pants then turns her heel to walk away. 

Hannibal looks up at the very clear window above and around him as the sun’s rays blare through them. The room is getting hotter by the second and the chains on his neck begin to heat up. He twitches his lip at the grim prospect of his situation. 

~~~~~

“There’s armed guards surrounding the buildings”, Will whispers, looking through a pair of binoculars. “And a few familiar faces…”

It had taken them a good two hours to reach Mariel by rental car, mostly due to Ingram giving shoddy instructions on how to get there. Luckily, Verger Corp’s plants weren’t that hard to find on the web and GPS. What was difficult however was finding the exact factory that housed the convicts. It was a matter of if they could trust Ingram’s instructions or not. They decided to take a gamble and it was paying off. 

As Will puts the binoculars down, he hears clicking and clacking sounds behind him. He turns around to see Chiyoh gathering her arsenal of weapons and strapping them onto herself. 

“What are you doing?”, Will whispers from behind a hedge. 

“Preparing to go in”, she answers back, checking the magazine in her handgun. 

“Alone?”

“I have the necessary information. I will be fine”, she straps the gun to her holster. 

It was then that Will realized why Chiyoh had been so tame with him in the past few hours.

She had used him.

She knew he would have information that would be beneficial to her and the skills and rapport to make Ingram spit out what she needed to know. Now that she had exhausted her use of him, she was discarding him like a crumpled napkin. 

Will huffs bitterly at the old familiar feeling of being used like a tool by another. Apparently Chiyoh thinks that little of him. Or…she was continuing her rampant campaign of belittling him by throwing back at him what he had done to her in years past.

Touché. 
 
“I’ll go”, he declares firmly. 

She turns around slowly, glaring her eyes at him.

“Why?”, she asks with a tone as venomous as a snake and quite frankly sounding like one too. 

Will glares back at her, mirroring her gaze. He’s not sure what annoys him more at the moment. The look she’s giving him or her overall attitude. 

She rolls her eyes, muttering something foreign under her breath that were very likely insults. She then turns around to crouch in front of him. 

“You are impossibly hopeless”, she tells him. Whatever that means…

She takes the handgun out of her holster and shoves it at his chest. 

“Go. I will cover you”, she crosses her arms at him, leaving him quite surprised. 

“Thank you”, he says before turning around. But before he can take another step further, he feels a light touch to the shoulder and a ghastly whisper in his ear. 

“If Hannibal does not survive this because of your incompetence…know that I will cage you like I did that man. I will cut your knees, wrists, heels, and tongue so you may never escape me”

Will twitches his brow. Of course she wasn’t going to do this out of the kindness of her heart. She was clearly still pissed at him. Perhaps he underestimated the violence Chiyoh was capable of…Her specialty isn’t just limited to marksmanship after all. 

“They won’t kill him. Not yet”, he tells her confidently. 

“How can you be so sure?”, she asks him dubiously. 

“I’m sure”

He shoves the handgun in his waistband behind him and moves towards the terrified Clark Ingram. He unties his restraints and looks him dead in the eyes. 

“Start running”, he commands him.

The one eyed man wastes no time doing so and starts sprinting down the hill to where the plant is. Will trails him with his eyes and starts making his way down. Chiyoh watches him for a brief moment then grabs her rifle, preparing to shoot from behind the bushes. 

It was time to sound the horn for the cavalry. 

Ingram runs to the guards at the plant in hysterics, barely making out any intelligible words for them to hear. 

“Here! Them! He’s-he’s got a-!”

But before he can get the next words out, the head of the guard in front of him explodes, spraying blood all over his face. His body drops to the ground with a dense thud. The second guard quickly reaches for his radio, but is met with the same fate.  

Ingram stares at the two corpses jaw hinged wide open. He begins to run to the other side of the plant, all while hearing more silenced gunshots fired. He sees an elderly man in his 70s with white hair go down in the distance. Then a blonde middle aged woman next. When he finally makes it inside the plant, he breathes a sigh of relief and gasps for air. 

“Oh god…thank god…”, he cries as he stumbles inside to safety. “I’m safe…I’m safe…”

Just as he makes his way to the deeper parts of the plant, a disembodied voice stops him in his tracks. 

“Where do you think you’re going Mr. Ingram?”

Ingram turns around to the direction of the voice, trembling. 

“I-I tried to capture him…but he had backup…”

“I can see that by the big hole in your face”, the voice tells him, commenting on the crater where his right eye used to be. 

“They’re killing us off…one by one…we’re all prey”, he cries. 

Suddenly, Ingram feels a sharp stab through his back from behind. He looks down to see his chest bleeding as he chokes on his own blood. 

“No. Just you”

A second sharp stab comes from the front as the voice now speaks directly in his ear. 

“I always knew you weren’t one of us. Just a great big pretender”

The knife slices up the chest and arterial blood sprays up into the air like a fountain as Ingram goes down, falling to the floor. Dead. 

The voice snickers at the sight of his pathetic corpse leaking blood onto the ground and then soon cackles. But he gradually stops his sadistic laughter when he senses a familiar figure approaching. 

He grins, wicked. 

“Hello Mr. Graham”, he sneers at the man who’s already sprayed in the blood of another. 

“Hello Matthew”

Chapter Text

There were many sights to see during the two hour car ride to the Verger Corp plants. Big open green fields, the ocean, and the wide open roads of Cuba in all its morning glory. Will took it all in as Clark Ingram sat trembling, bound and gagged next to him in the backseat and Chiyoh drove in the front. As beautiful as it all was, what he was really trying to see was inside Hannibal’s memory palace. He remembered what Hannibal had once said about seeing through their shared rooms while he was in the hospital. If that were true, the reverse should be possible for him even from within a moving car.

After a brief period of concentrating, he finds himself transported to Hannibal’s chapel, or rather a small portion of it. Only a chair where he sits donning a light colored checker patterned suit and the signature altar in front of him. The rest is a dark space and nothing more. It would have to do.

“If you’re in here…I’m assuming they’re keeping you in a place that’s rather unpleasant”, Will approaches him from behind, donning a dark blue suit. 

“I see you are learning from past experiences”, Hannibal turns his head around to him, smiling. 

“Where are you?”

“In a place much like last time Alana and Margot were entangled in our lives”, he answers somewhat allegorically. 

Will grimaces, not exactly recalling many things from the events of Muskrat Farm except Mason Verger and his chef/surgeon Cordell wanting to cut off his face and plaster it onto the former to eat Hannibal with it. The rest is blurry at best. 

“I was unconscious. I don’t know what you mean”, he tries to pry for more concrete answers. 

“You’ll find the answers to the questions you seek, Will”, Hannibal assures him. “They might just appear in unexpected shapes and colors”

And oh the shape and color that has appeared before him now…

~~~~~

Matthew Brown, the former orderly at the Baltimore Hospital for the Criminally Insane and budding serial killer stares at Will with a sadistic smile on his face as he twirls his blade with his wrist in glee. He’s shirtless, proudly displaying the dark twin cross section tattoos on his ribs. A gunshot wound scar is on his abdomen. 

“I take it you’re the top gun here”, Will carefully keeps his eye on the cunning and dangerous man. Matthew responds with a chuckle. 

“Had to really work my way up there, Mr. Graham. Build myself a good rep with the ladies in the high tower”, he answers, his smile never wavering. 

“Where’s Hannibal?”, he questions him. 

“Afraid I can’t tell you. What kind of bodyguard would I be if I can’t keep my mouth shut?”, he expertly spins his blade into a stop to his other hand. 

Will narrows his eyes at his reasoning. “Last I recall, you and I are ‘Hawks’; solitary creatures. You prefer to remain the dominant species. Why follow the orders of smaller birds who can chase you away?”

Matthew continues to smile at him, making him keep guessing as he taps the blade in his hand. 

“What are they offering you? Money? A reduced sentence?”, he keeps at it, trying to find his motive while simultaneously reaching for his gun. 

“How about a chance to finally be somebody?”, Matthew’s smile suddenly fades, his eyes cold as ice. Will shudders, feeling his drastic change in demeanor. 

“You know, I forgive you Mr. Graham”, Matthew slowly starts to circle the room. Will moves along with him, carefully matching his steps in the opposite direction as he pulls out his gun. 

“For lying to me. Betraying me. Sending me out there to my demise”

“You took the risk yourself, knowing what I was”, he tilts his head at him critically. 

“Because I liked you”, Matthew stares him dead in the eyes even as he continues his circling. “In fact I liked you a whole lot”

He suddenly stops, putting the blade behind his back. Will takes the opportunity to aim, but doesn’t shoot quite yet. 

“But imagine my disappointment when I found out you became a big stinkin’ bore…”, his voice lowers to a hushed growl. 

“To think the guy who left me to rot in that damn hospital ran away with his tail tucked between his legs just cuz he had a little tiff with his boyfriend the Chesapeake Ripper. Complete with a ready made family, living a life of sheer mediocrity…”

“Where is your dignity?!!”, he shouts at him loud enough to make the windows shake. 

Will winces as he closes his eyes against his better judgment. He felt Matthew words hit him straight in the chest in a very raw way. He’s not just angry. He’s furious. Enraged. And it actually hurts him, because he knows what he says is true.

Matthew Brown may be a killer, but he knows respect when he believes a person is deserving of it. And he had stomped on that respect not when he sent him after Hannibal, but when he had run away from the familiar life of bloodshed to hide in normalcy. In a way, he had wronged him and his code of honor. Just as he had wronged Hannibal.

Suddenly Matthew begins to chuckle quite maniacally. Will opens his eyes confused at what could make the man laugh in such a way. 

“But then I saw the video. Oh man was it great…!”

“What video…?”, Will dares ask. 

“You and the Chesapeake Ripper conquering the Great Red Dragon”, he says in a sinister whisper. 

Will suddenly remembers Francis pulling out his film equipment after he had shot Hannibal. 

”I'm going to film your death, Dr. Lecter. As dying, you meld with the strength of the Dragon”

“Top secret, never released to the public. But I had the privilege to see it along with everyone else here guarding this place. What a fun movie night that was…”, he sighs snickering at fond memories. 

Suddenly the articles and what Robertus said made sense. Will hadn’t given the film equipment a second thought given that Francis had rammed his dagger into his face moments after declaring to “change” Hannibal. But it was now very apparent that the camera had recorded their entire battle. Whether it had fallen over in the scuffle or Hannibal had deliberately made it so it was recording the back yard, he can’t be for certain. But if it’s the latter, should he really be all that surprised? The man always keeps some kind of secret from him. And he likes leaving “gifts” for the FBI. For Jack. 

“Can’t hide who we really are, can we? Men like us…”, Matthew begins to move again, blade behind his back, swinging to and fro.

“You know? I think I’m starting to like you again”, he smiles at him with wide eyes. 

“So, what? You waited for me to show up so you can get an autograph? A photo op maybe?”, Will readies his gun to fire at Matthew. 

“Oh don’t flatter yourself…I got out of the deification and hero worship phase years ago”, he scoffs raising his brows. “But I do still believe in the practices of the Iroquois as does the lovely Ms. Alana Bloom”

“Jack Crawford still wants me alive”, he reminds him nervously as he imagines Jack and the bridge back to him. 

Matthew clicks his tongue repeatedly as he shakes his head. “I’m afraid the ladies and I disagree”

Will fires his gun at him in quick succession, but misses as Matthew retreats into the dark shadows of the plant. He aims again, trying to find him, but there’s machinery and equipment everywhere, giving him several places to hide. His target moves quickly, appearing as a blurred image only every so often. 

Suddenly he feels his presence behind him and turns around to pull the trigger only to find that he’s not there. In this split second of confusion, a blade slashes diagonally across his back, causing him to scream out in pain. Will falls to the ground, now bleeding from his back. He reaches for his gun, but a boot steps on his wrist. 

“Shouldn’t bring a gun to a knife fight Mr. Graham”

Will looks up to see Matthew’s dark silhouette towering above him with the sun’s rays to his back. He lets the blade now soaked in his prey’s blood, rest on his shoulder. He sneers as streaks of crimson fall down his chest. 

“This is where your legacy and Hannibal Lecter’s legacy ends”, he declares. 

“And where mine truly begins”

~~~~~

Chiyoh looks through the lens of her sniper telescope trying to find Will in the plant he had gone into to no avail. The hill she was on was far too low to see through the windows of the buildings. Suddenly, she hears faint shots of gunshots firing from the plants. She clicks her tongue. This can’t be good.

She looks around and sees a rather large unattended crane in the area. A bit far ways up a climb, but it would provide the best view.

Perfect.

Elsewhere, Hannibal remains seated in the cage, careful not to let any part of his exposed skin touch the hot metal surrounding him save for the chains that were already causing blisters to form on his neck. He keeps his breathing even and steady as sweat leaks out of his pores, depleting him of his already limited body water. Panicking now would mean sure death.

The camera lens focuses on the cage. On the other side of it sits Alana in her office space, watching her prisoner slowly cook under the sun. She stares at the old Verger brand on Hannibal’s back, an old gift from her departed brother-in-law Mason marking the doctor as livestock and property. Never did she think a day would come that she would thank him for anything given what he’s done to Margot her whole life. But right now, the view just couldn’t be any better. 

~~~~~

Will stares up at Matthew as he grabs the blade to bring it down to decapitate him. Maybe it was the blood loss, but he swears he feels like he can see him moving in slow motion. He feels his heart beat slow in his chest as he sees the blade come swinging down frame by frame. And then it hits him. 

He’s alone. He needs to save himself.

As the blade comes within inches of severing his head, he flips over and manages to land a blow on Matthew’s head with his foot. The sudden impact causes him to tumble backwards and lose his grip on the blade. It falls, clattering to the floor. Will stumbles to his feet as he picks up his gun and fires a shot at Matthew. It lands, causing blood to splatter onto the steel of the nearby machinery.

Will breathes sharply and prepares to fire more shots, but suddenly finds himself falling backwards as Matthew pounces at him with tremendous force. His left ear’s been blown clean off as blood continues to drip from the wound. The two men struggle and fight for the gun as their blood mixes onto themselves and the floor. Will fires another shot, hitting a window. It shatters the window with a piercing screech. Glass shards fly everywhere as the sun’s radiant beams enter the building. 

Just as Chiyoh makes it to the top of the crane, she sees one of the windows explode in the plant that Will had entered. She secures herself on the structure and looks through her telescope. She can now clearly see Will and another man fighting on the ground. She follows the two with her rifle, but it’s impossible to get a clean shot when the two beasts are viciously fighting to the death. 

Back inside the plant, Will tries to fire another shot, but eventually loses his grip and the gun is swatted away. It slides underneath the machinery, to a place unknown. Matthew strikes Will in the face, leaving him discombobulated. Seeing the opportunity, he picks him up by the collar and turns on one of the conveyer belts for packaging meat. Just as his vision begins to clear, Will sees himself being pushed closer to loud, moving jagged blades.

“Hate to do this to such a pretty face, but this is the way it’s gotta go!”, Matthew howls maniacally, pressing his face closer to blades.

Will struggles to grab the edges of the quickly moving conveyer belt, coming ever closer to the blades touching his face. When the blades are a good half a foot away, he manages to use the speed and momentum of the belt to spring himself backwards into Matthew’s face with such a force that it breaks his nose. Both men fall to the floor with a thud, but it’s Will who gets up first.

He gets on top of Matthew and begins beating him with his fist. The blows land in synch with the rhythm of the sound of the packaging machine. 

GA-DUNK!

GA-DUNK!

GA-DUNK!

Blood covers his face and fist as his heart races from the rising adrenaline. Matthew tries to raise his fists to fight back, but soon falls limp and only twitches from nerve endings firing off. And then he becomes still. 

Will throws one last punch, putting an end to him. Bathed in blood of his enemy, he comes out victorious in the savage battle. But he would have no time to gloat nor enjoy the beauty of the violent encounter. Someone was approaching. 

The sound of heels click and echoes through the plant…

Chapter Text

Gold colored heels click through the halls of the Verger Corp plant. They say one can tell a lot by looking at someone’s shoes. Personal characteristics such as personality, age, income, and gender for example. These shoes showed a middle aged woman of overwhelmingly vast wealth, but of a quiet personality. Her heels flaunted her high class status, but the way she walked said something else entirely. 

The heels and its master make their way to a certain part of the plant. They stop at the first sign of red smeared across the floor. Close by is the corpse of a one eyed man. They turn a small corner and follow the sound of heavy machinery echoing through the space. Once they find the source, their master comes face to face with a familiar soul.

After nearly four years, Margot Verger and Will Graham meet again. 

~~~~~

Margot stares at Will leaning against the metal portion of the conveyer belt, smearing the machinery with bloody handprints as he attempts to pull himself up to his feet. She looks down at the corpse of Matthew Brown, now only recognizable by his rib tattoos, on the floor. But she bothers with neither men, alive or dead, and only walks over to the control switch of the machine. Her long curly brown hair and white and mustard yellow wrap tunic dress flows as she clicks her heels on the floor.

She quickly turns off the machinery, stopping their insistent and loud bellows. It’s only then that she speaks to Will. 

“An alert for the machines turned on”, she tells him in her usual hushed voice. “If your plan was to be discreet, you sure didn’t do a good job at it”

Will lets out a pained laugh as he raises his brows. “Well being shoved into a machine to be packed into the next shipment of meat wasn’t exactly in my plans today”

Margot looks at him with her big blue eyes with a shade of sorrow in them. It isn’t exactly pity, but something rather close. 

“If you’re looking for Dr. Lecter you’re wasting your time”, she informs him. “He’s not here”

“But if you stay here too long, you might just end up where he’s headed”, she pulls her phone out of her pocket. 

“How about this?”, Will turns towards her. “You don’t alert your goons and my friend up there won’t shoot you or your son. Deal?”

Margot eyes the shattered window and sees the glare of a reflection off a glass surface in the distance. She doesn’t need to think twice to know Will isn’t bluffing. The beast’s gunman is watching them. 

“Deal”, she sighs, putting her phone down.

Will manages to finally pull himself up to his feet and stand. He lets out a sigh then a shuddered laugh. 

“You’ve stooped real low Margot”, he shakes his head at her. “But I can’t say I’m surprised. You’ve been known to get down and dirty when you’re desperate”

How could he forget? Their ‘memorable night’ was all part of her plan to impregnate herself to create a Verger heir to attain the family fortune. It could have been anyone fertile with a Y chromosome. He just happened to be there and was willing to go through with the act in his loneliness. But that child is now gone as is any kind of relationship they had built during that time. They were practically strangers now. 

“I don’t have anything against you or Dr. Lecter personally, Will. But Alana and I have to keep our family safe”, Margot says to him almost apologetically. Key word being ‘almost’. 

“We can’t let anything happen to Morgan”

“Because he’s your son? Or because he’s your ticket to the Verger dynasty?” he asks quite directly. 

Margot’s demeanor then changes entirely. Her flat affect changes to become tearful and she has a pained look in her eyes. 

“I love my son”, she says with a low growl. 

“Does Alana?”

~~~~~

Alana sits at her office desk looking at a photo of her, Margot, and their son Morgan. She smiles at the photo with her bright red lips as she strokes the photo frame fondly. Just then she sees an alert on the machinery alarm and turns her attention to the red light. 

She peers at the screen where she can see Hannibal continuing to maintain composure. She taps her nail on the desk in contemplation, but then receives a text.

“I got it”

- Margot 

She smiles then goes back to looking at the screen.

~~~~~

Will looks at Margot glaring at him with tears welling in her eyes. The look of a mother who’s offended about being questioned about her love for her son. But there’s something else he can’t quite put a finger on. She looks different. And it’s not because of a change in make up or fashion. There’s something different about her. 

“You two murdered Mason and used Hannibal to harvest his sperm to secure your ‘Verger Baby’. Why didn’t you just leave it alone at that?”, he gets straight to the point.

“I did”, Margot answers, crossing her arms at him. 

“But Alana didn’t”

She slightly widens her eyes at his statement. Will keys in on her reaction, curious. It only confirms his suspicions. Something is different about her. He decides to push further.

“She came down from her high tower and kept pulling on the tiger’s tail until he snapped his jaws. And then she ran for dear life”, he whispers at her. 

“She did what she had to do”, she turns her head slightly, arms still crossed. Tighter now actually. Defensive. 

“Do you really believe that? Or is that what Alana wants you to believe?”

Margot’s eyes start swimming. She inhales through her nose sharply as she tries to maintain her composure.

Bullseye.

Will steps over Matthew’s corpse and begins walking towards her. She takes a step backward for every step he takes. He opens his mouth as he continues forward. 

“Alana’s problem Margot…”, he says, breath shaking. “…is she always thinks she’s in control of situations she has absolutely no control over”

He eventually makes it to a foot away from her before he stops. He takes a deep breath and sighs before looking at her. 

“If you want out of this, you know what you have to do”

~~~~~

Chiyoh looks through her telescope and sees that Will and Margot are now out of her field of vision. She looks away to wipe the sweat off of her forehead with her arm. Even with the protective shield of the window of the operator cabin, the strength of the Cuban sun was formidable. She’s unsure of how much longer she can stay up here, sweltering in the heat. 

Just then she sees a figure come out of the plant. She looks through the telescope and sees Will exiting the building. She begins climbing down the crane, ever grateful that she wore gloves to combat the heated metal. A hop and a skip later and both parties make it back to the hill where they started their mission.

“Will”, Chiyoh calls out to him as he makes his way up the hill. 

He pants, blood and sweat trailing down his face. He manages to make it up to a tree and places his bloodied hands onto the bark. 

“I really…really need to learn some martial arts moves from you guys”, he pants, stressing his words out of his mouth. 

“You seemed to have done well on your own”, Chiyoh looks him up and down, staring at all the blood stuck to his clothes. 

“Old FBI training came in handy…and luck”, he answers, beads of sweat falling off of him. 

“Did you find Hannibal?”, she puts her rifle down behind her, assessing Will’s condition. 

“No…but I ran into Margot”, he looks up at her, squinting his eyes from the sun’s rays. 

“I saw”, she looks into his eyes. He looks pale, even for him. 

“Did you discuss negotiations?”

Will scoffs. Negotiations. He wonders how that word must have tasted on Chiyoh’s tongue as she said it. Such a concept in this situation was cheap and metallic like sucking on a greasy coin. Yet still, he did what needed to be done. 

“Not…exactly…”, he says before he topples forward. 

Chiyoh catches him as he falls limp, his head hitting her shoulder with a thunk. She looks down at her hand to see Will is bleeding profusely from his back. When she lifts his shirt there’s a massive diagonal gash wound that’s been stretched wider from the scuffle. It was clear that he needed medical attention and fast. 

She looks down at the plants from in between the trees briefly, then turns around to haul Will away. 

Chapter Text

Night time came to Mariel in a blink of an eye. The workers in the active plants had packed up their things and left for home hours ago. By now they were likely spending their time abundantly indulging in music and dancing, visiting bars and clubs, or spending time with their families they had been apart from the entire day. It was such a time for the Verger-Bloom household as well, though in their case, they were already home given that they lived in the mansion adjacent to the plants. 

Margot sits on her son Morgan’s bed as she tucks him into bed. She strokes his hair with her delicate thin fingers and kisses him good night just as she does every night. 

“Goodnight sweetheart”, she tells him tenderly with all her heart. 

“Goodnight Mama”, the boy tells her. How she loved being called that ever since he’s been able to speak those words at the age of just 6 months.

She kisses his small head again then starts to stand up, but is stopped in her tracks by what the boy says next.

“Mama, when can we go back home?”

Her heart drops into her stomach. She knows what she means by when he says “home”. Home in Baltimore where he was born and had spent the first three years of his life. Home where he spent his time playing with Applesauce in the backyard so gleefully. Home where they made breakfast and ate as a family. Not all over Europe where they went first nor here in Cuba. The boy knows that “home” is not here. 

“I don’t know sweetie. We’ll have to wait and see”, she touches his cheek to comfort him. He looks back at her with his big blue eyes then looks down at his blanket. 

“Can I sleep with Applesauce tonight?”, he asks, fidgeting his little fingers. 

“Of course you can”, Margot answers back immediately.

She opens the door to go get the dog and comes back, bringing her into the room by her collar. The dog whines, not liking being brought into such a small space, but remains compliant nonetheless. It turns around once then settles down at the boy’s bedside.

“I love you”, Margot tells her son.

“I love you too Mama”. The words nearly bring tears to her eyes. They always do when he says them. 

She turns off the light switch all while keeping her eyes on him. She walks backwards slowly, closing the door then sighs. She looks at the empty halls of the mansion where she’s been staying for the last few months. It’s disturbingly quiet.

Margot looks down at her wedding band and strokes it fondly, recalling the day she and Alana had exchanged their vows. It was a moment almost as sweet as the first time they made love impromptu at the Verger estate. She carried scars just like her from a man who had hurt her. Yet she was confident, resilient, and oh so passionate about her goals and intentions. Through all their trials and tribulations at Muskrat Farm and rebuilding the Verger Corp legacy, she knew Alana Bloom was her dream girl. 

But that girl was now preoccupied with someone other than her. Or their son. 

The Verger heiress looks at her watch and walks down the halls into the distance. She grabs her fur coat and makes her way outside the mansion to the farthest plant in the area. Once inside she’s greeted by two guards on the nightshift who immediately straighten themselves up to attention.

“Mrs. Verger, what brings you here this late at night?”, one of them asks with a heavy Cuban accent. 

“I need to have a word with our ‘guest’ ”, she informs him. 

“Er…with all due respect, I advise that you do not”, the other guard answers back with hesitation. “Mrs. Bloom has told us he is a very dangerous man”

“I know”, Margot raises her brows. 

She takes out a wad of green bills from her coat pocket. “Which one of you wants to do ‘overtime’ tonight?”

The two men look at each other then at her, eyeing the big wad of cash in her manicured hand. 

“Tell you what”, she looks at the both of them. “You both get it if you stay quiet about what goes on here tonight”

“Of course Señora”, the guard says with a respectful smile. “Our lips our sealed”

She reaches out to give the men the money, but pulls away when they’re a hair away from taking it. 

“I need you to distract Alana from the security tape”, she tells them. “Maybe for about 5-10 minutes max”

“Do it successfully without suspicion and you get double”, she eyes the both of them.

The two men widen their eyes, then grin, bowing as they place their hand over their hearts. “You have our word”

“And you have mine”, she looks at them both in the eyes.

The power of wealth had done its work. 

A few moments later, Margot had entry into the room keeping Hannibal Lecter prisoner. Her gold heels clicks on the floor, echoing through the chamber. The room is dark, but the moonlight is plenty to make out what’s inside the room including the pig cage in the back. She can’t see the back of it, but she knows that her ‘guest’ is awake.

“Hello Margot”, she hears a raspy voice greet her from the darkness. 

“Hello Dr. Lecter”, she replies to her old psychiatrist with courtesy. 

“Are you here to put me out of my misery?”, he asks breathless, the toll of his torture apparent in his voice. Any sane person would have tried to kill themselves quite some time ago. 

Margot folds her arms and purses her lips. She looks down at the floor and sighs, staying silent in contemplation before opening her mouth again. 

“I never wanted any of this”

A chilling silence fills the room. Though she can’t see Hannibal, Margot knows he’s looking at her carefully, tracking her just as he had done in their therapy sessions. Perhaps this is what this was. The two of them back in therapy like old times. 

“You always were quite reasonable Margot”, he says in a hushed voice. “You chose to stay clear of me after the incident on Muskrat Farm. To remain blind”

“Alana insisted on taking the job at the hospital to keep an eye on you”, she sniffs. “It wasn’t supposed to end up this way”, she confesses. 

“Us on the run. Tucked away. Hidden”, she looks up at the walls encasing Hannibal as if they encase her as well. 

The doctor looks at her expression from the darkness then down at the blanket of hay, the sole source of tactile comfort in this space, underneath him.

“Do you feel trapped, Margot?”, he asks her. 

Her eyes begin to water as her lips quiver at his question. She sheds tears, causing her dark mascara to stream down her cheeks. 

“I just want to keep Morgan safe”, she pleads in a tremor. 

Hannibal looks back up at her, seeing her shake like a leaf. He crawls to the front of the cage and wraps one of the bars with his thin fingers. 

“You are a mother”, he whispers to her, his rugged face now illuminated by the moonlight. 

“You can”

~~~~~

Will finds himself in a familiar place in the planes between consciousness and unconsciousness. It’s typically when Hannibal is involved that he’s in this unique mind space. It puts him in a place of mixed perceptions and memories of the monotone. It’s here that he’s often able to see glimpses of memories forgotten due to lapse in consciousness and concentration. In the past, he would question these memories due to…certain influences, but right now he senses he should trust them. 

The memories of Muskrat Farm are showing themselves to him in brief moments like clips in a film. He sees himself being wheeled into the main pen area along with Hannibal in shackles and restraints. He sees himself strapped in a surgical chair, conscious but unable to move. He sees…Hannibal in a surgical mask. And then it cuts to black. 

Black…Hannibal’s memory palace is pitch black.

He gasps awake, eyes flying open. He pants, lifting himself up and looking around through blurred eyes. He has absolutely no idea where he is, the only familiar thing being the sharp ache he feels in his back. 

“Señor?”, he vaguely hears a male voice speaking to him. “Mírame porfavor”

He suddenly sees a bright light being shined in his eyes. He blinks, seeing a middle aged, brown skinned man with a mask looking into his eyes. He blinks again and sees Chiyoh behind him. 

“Will”, she calls out to him. He shakes his head, trying to focus as the man walks away. 

“You are in a hospital”, she explains to him as she comes to his bedside. “Your back was sliced open. You required surgery”

“Yea, thanks for that”, he rasps, rubbing his eyes. She looks at his injured and bandaged state with bewilderment. She’s unsure if the lack of reaction is due to the pain medication or if it’s natural, but it certainly reminds her of Hannibal.

“We need to leave right now”, he suddenly tells her. 

“You are severely injured”, she narrows his eyes at him. 

“I survived being pushed off a moving train and getting shot by you and then some within a few days of each other. I think I’ll be fine”, he reasons with her, trying his best to hold back his acidity. 

“We’re leaving. Now”

Chiyoh senses the urgency in his voice and leaves to grab his things from the nurses. Will squeezes his eyes shut and tries to find Hannibal inside his memory palace, but still sees a pitch, black, darkness. No chapel, not even a fragment of it.

He grits his teeth. It’s not even an ambiguity. It’s a complete lack of context. 

But he does know where Hannibal is. The answers came to him in the monochrome. 

~~~~~

Alana Bloom’s morning routine has been set for at least the last couple of years. Get up, take a shower, get dressed, check in on Morgan, check in on Applesauce, make breakfast, eat breakfast, then go to work. However for the last half year or so, the routine has had to skip a few steps due to unforeseen circumstances. And in the last couple of days especially, the steps have been reduced even further. They had to be. 

After checking in on both Morgan and Applesauce, Alana makes her way back to her office on the other side of the mansion. She had more or less spent her nights there when she had to attend to major business concerns. She opens the double doors and makes her way to the monitors that are constantly running. But when she gets to her desk, she does a quick double take then widens her eyes in horror.

Hannibal Lecter is nowhere to be seen in the pig cage. 

She quickly opens her phone to check on the feed there. She had only checked on it last 10 minutes ago and he was there then. But when she looks on the screen, it’s identical to the one on the monitor. It’s confirmed.

Hannibal has escaped. 

She quickly grabs the radio on her desk from its charging dock and presses the PTT button. 

“All units report. The prisoner has escaped. Repeat, the prisoner has escaped!”

But all she hears is silence from the other side. No one is reporting back to her. 

“All units report!”, she repeats herself.

“They’re not going to answer Alana”

Alana looks up from her desk to see Will in a dark colored button up shirt with matching colored pants standing in the middle of the room, staring back at her. He smells a little of blood and dirt. 

“They’re all dead”, he informs her, putting his hands in his pockets.

“How did you get in here…?”, she quietly demands an answer, glaring at him. 

“I got a bit of help”, he tilts his head and steps to the side. 

Behind him is Hannibal wearing the Verger Corp security uniform drenched from head to toe in blood and water. 

“Hello Alana”, he greets her with a winded and raspy voice. His hair drips pink water all over her pristine rug.

“I believe it is time to make good on my promise…and collect the remaining time you owe me”, he grips the bloodied meat saw in his hand.

Alana takes a step backwards towards the stained glass window, glaring at the two men staring back at her. She makes sure to be careful not to make any sudden moves. Just then a certain thought enters her mind. 

“How did you get past the security clearance…?”, she asks with genuine suspicion.

Although Hannibal had been secured in part of the meat packing plant, the particular area required a very particular set of security combinations to go in or out. Since the specific warehouse kept some of the most important contracts and documents necessary for the company, only a select few individuals working in the plant had the ability to get clearance for entering the area. 

Yet here Hannibal was. 

“I didn’t”

The slow and hesitant sound of clicking heels echoes through the empty halls and soon a very nervous Margot enters the room, joining the duo. 

“Margot…”, Alana whispers, looking at her wife who already has tears welling in her eyes. “Margot…come over here…”, Alana quietly gestures for her to join her on the other side of the room. But Margot begins shaking her head and soon bursts into tears. 

“Margot!”, she screams at her.

“Alana…I can’t…”, Margot gasps, tears pouring down her face. 

“I love you”, she tells her in earnest. “But I can’t keep doing this”

“All these moves…not being able to go outside…always feeling like something is going to happen…this isn’t a life Alana…!”, she erupts, laying it all out on the table. 

“I need to do what I have to do to keep Morgan safe”, she stresses.

It’s through these words that Alana puts together the pieces of the puzzle of what exactly her wife of three years had done. And what she was planning to do. It was all too familiar since she had done so herself years ago. 

“You made a deal with Hannibal…”, she whispers the truth. 

Her face twists and morphs as she bites down, gritting her teeth into a grimace. 

“How could you do this to me…?”, she confronts her. “To Morgan?!”

“This thing tried to destroy our family!”, she points to Hannibal while still looking at Margot. “He’s still doing it right now!”

But the Verger heiress is no longer convinced that such things are true. She had realized this some time ago. So she takes a step forward away from the door and calmly looks her wife in the eyes to tell her the cold, hard truth. 

“No Alana…you are…”

Upon hearing these words, Alana’s expression turns cold. She opens her side drawer, pulling out a pistol and aims it at the trio. 

“Oh god…”, Margot shudders. 

Will steps in front to shield her from Alana’s silent wrath. 

“Put the gun down Alana”, he tells her calmly. 

“You put it in my hands first, Will”, she glares her eyes at him, reminding him of his past deeds. Oh how things have changed…

She points the gun at Hannibal to the side of him and clicks off the safety. 

“He has to die. He has to”, she stresses adamantly. 

Hannibal parts his lips, unamused. “Alana I highly advise you to listen to Will and lower your weapon. Or must I remind you of what happened last time?”

She shoots once, grazing the side of his head with the bullet. Margot covers her head as she falls to the floor with a shriek.

“Fully locked and loaded. No bullets missing”, Alana warns confidently. Next time she won’t miss. 

She presses her finger on the trigger aiming directly at Hannibal’s head, but before she can fire, another sound of gunfire fills the room. Blood erupts from Alana's flank, her once perfectly dry cleaned blouse now blooming with red. The gun falls out of her hand as she stumbles backwards, away from her desk, head bouncing off of the now cracked stain glassed window behind her with a grunt.

Hannibal looks at Alana then trails the pathway of the bullet backwards, blood still very much streaming down the side of his face. The one wielding the gun is a trembling and tearful Margot. 

From the looks of it, Margot had taken the gun that Will had taken from one of the fallen security guards or inmates when Alana had fired her gun. She kept herself on the floor and then got up to shoot her when she knew for certain that she wouldn’t back down. She had already prepared for this outcome and reacted in less than a minute. It’s impressive. The traumatized are truly unpredictable and it’s clear that Margot chose survival. Just as she always has. 

He discards his meat knife and slowly walks towards Margot, eyes still very much on the gun. When he reaches her, he gently puts his hands on her's. 

"You said your eyes were for seeing me receive my ‘reward’”, he throws Alana's words right back at her as he carefully pries the gun from her wife.

Firearm now in hand, he pivots and begins making his way towards her. “But your eyes only see black and white, Alana. You cannot see human aim and action. You cannot see life in its light in many-hued reflection”

Alana backs away slowly, hand covering her oozing gunshot wound and nostrils flaring as she seethes in pain. Weakened, her legs buckle underneath her and she stumbles to regain balance, all while keeping her eyes on the beast. She refuses to concede even when she's cornered like prey. Her wobbling frame eventually leads her back to hit the window behind her. And that’s when it happens…

All too quickly, the crack in the glass behind her spreads throughout the surface then quickly gives way. To Alana’s horror, she finds herself plummeting backwards from her high tower down to the ground below with a thick thud.Hannibal blinks once then goes around the desk to take a look below.

Alana Bloom, once a powerful administrator of the Baltimore State Hospital of the Criminally Insane and the career businesswoman of Verger Corp, broken and bleeding onto the scorching sands of Cuba. A familiar sight. 

“It is a shame that you could never see the world in rainbows", he sends her his regrets from above. Hannibal straightens himself up and walks back to Margot who’s frozen solid at the turn of events. 

“I suggest you get a very good divorce attorney my dear. You will be needing it”, he advises her as he hands the gun to Will. 

“Also, could you procure us a boat?”

The direct aftermath of the battle at the Verger Corp plants happened fairly quickly. Will escorted Margot away from the scene which was probably for her own good. For both of them. She then took Morgan and Applesauce and fled to an unknown place. It was only then that an ambulance came to take Alana away to treat her injuries. Margot had likely done one last act of love to save her soon to be ex-wife’s life and dignity. 

Knowing that this incident would make headlines very quickly, Will knew he, Hannibal, and Chiyoh needed to leave immediately as soon as possible. But before they did, there was one last thing he needed to do. 

When all the paramedics left the scene and took Alana away, he returned to the office one last time. He approached the broken window and looked down, standing where Hannibal was earlier in the day, taking in the view. He stared at the sea of blood that had now been absorbed by the sun and sand. He took out his wedding ring from his pocket, then let it fall into the now red soaked soil. 

He takes it one last look at it, then leaves it behind with his memories of Cuba.

Chapter Text

Will sits on the floor of the halls in front of the sick bay of the ship. When they boarded the ship, he let Chiyoh tend to Hannibal’s wounds first before deciding to debrief with him. He practically owed it her. He fidgets with his fingers, thinking about the events that took place in Cuba. The decisions Hannibal made. The decisions they all made.

He takes out the bottle of pain meds and pops a couple in his mouth. The adrenaline was wearing off and so was his ability to manage the pain without it. He swallows then sighs, waiting for sweet relief to take over. Just then, the door to the sick bay opens and Chiyoh comes out.

Will stumbles, picking himself up to his feet and goes to meet her. 

“How is he?”, he asks her. She purses her lips, then swallows before speaking. 

“Exhausted…malnourished…burned”, Chiyoh sniffles as she crosses her arms, looking down at the floor. “But he will be fine”, her voice trembles.

Will nods at her, sharing her feelings of worry mixed with relief. This had been more than a tumultuous ordeal for all of them. But it was now over and done with.

She looks up at him and touches his shoulder. It instantly reminds him of Murasaki. 

“He wishes to see you, Will”, she says with a softened expression. She then walks past him and leaves. 

Will pushes past the door of the sickbay. When he enters the room, he sees Hannibal in the bed with an IV hooked up to his arm. He’s thinner than he remembers and he has a stubble now. The skin on his face, neck, chest and arms are red and inflamed from the extended sun exposure. Some areas have bandages from draining the gruesome blisters that had formed from where the heat of the sun had hit him the worst. There’s a thin layer of gauze wrapped around his neck where the metal chains had been placed and burned into his skin. It was very likely going to leave a scar. 

“Hey”, he calls out to him in a hushed whisper, taking the stool to the side of him. Hannibal peels his eyes open and looks at him. 

“You look like hell”, he says. Or more like he came back from hell. His appearance is a good contender with Chilton’s black and charred appearance. 

“You don’t look so bad yourself”, he rasps with a smile, lips scaled and bone dry. 

“Must’ve been agony”, he tries imagining his torture. “A glutton like you having no food or water for days. Burning underneath the smoldering, hot Cuban sun”

“Though I am experienced with starvation…dehydration under trying weather conditions was admittedly…quite challenging”, he manages. Even with the IV fluids in his arm, his throat is still obviously very dry. 

Will holds up the glass of water with a straw in front of him so he can take a sip to coat his throat. It’s a strange feeling to have the roles reversed like this. 

“You didn’t kill her”, he suddenly remarks. 

“Did you expect me to?”, Hannibal coughs, clearing his throat. 

“Honestly? Yes”, he widens his eyes. 

“You seem quite intrigued by that fact”, he puts his head back down. 

“You had your eyes set on killing Alana the moment you got out of the hospital”, he recalls the heavy animosity he felt from him for her and all her trespasses. 

“Not untrue”, he admits. “However, you forget that you are not the only one who is going through metamorphosis. I learn from you just as much as you learn from me”

“And…what exactly is the lesson I’ve taught you here…?”, he raises his brow at him, now admittedly a bit curious. 

“That some fates…are far worse than death”

Such ironic words to come out of a man who had just had a near death experience himself…

Will knows he’s probably talking about what they did to Bedelia rather than his current condition. Or both. But since they didn’t cut up Alana into a tableau, he would need a bit more clarification. 

“I told Alana that her wife and child belonged to me”, Hannibal looks up at the ceiling. “They are now eternally indebted to me. If they wish to keep their lives, Margot and her child will do as I say and abandon her”

“And Alana’s life is now officially ruined. Financially and otherwise”, Will raises his brows, now understanding his reasoning. Though he believes neither Margot nor Hannibal would have to do much to fulfill their ends of the contract. It was very clean cut. 

“It did not take much”, Hannibal adds. “She drove herself to madness and drowned in it all the same”

Will looks at him and nods, knowing that what he says is true. Alana and Margot’s marriage was already hanging on by a thread by the time they arrived in Cuba. Hannibal may have been the influence and the catalyst, but Alana in all her paranoia and thirst for power and control over Hannibal had turned herself into a monster. And Margot…for her, one monster was enough for a lifetime.

When he locks eyes with Hannibal next, he knows exactly what to say. 

“Where next?”

~~~~~

“Korea?”

“North or South?”, Will asks just for the sake of knowing as Hannibal finishes taping the gauze on his back.

“South. Although I have visited the North before. It is not as sinister as most people believe it to be”, he presses on the tape firmly. 

“To you maybe”, Will winces. The sutures in his back still ache quite a lot. Thank God for the pain meds. 

“Why Korea though? Won’t we stick out like sore thumbs?”

Two White males in a predominantly Asian country was not exactly the idea he had in mind when it came to blending in and evading the authorities. Chiyoh aside, who more or less “looked the part”, he and Hannibal would immediately catch the eyes of the locals. 

“There are more tourists that visit South Korea than you may believe, Will. We will be fine”, he places the tape down. 

“Also…organized crime largely moves with money instead of violence in the country since the 1990s”

“Money talks. Which is why you…”, Will suddenly gets that stripping Alana of her assets was not just a humiliation tactic. “Very clever…”

The man always knew how to think so far ahead. 

The next couple of weeks at sea go by with a breeze due much in part to the boat that Margot had secured for them. The Verger Voyager was more comfortable than any of them could imagine. Not only was it the perfect disguise, it was stocked full of things they would need to reach Asia as they healed physically. 

Given that two out of the three on the boat were still recovering from gruesome injuries, Chiyoh took on most of the manual labor, but took turns on helm and cooking duties with Will. And since they both had injuries covering their backs, Will and Hannibal developed an odd daily routine of a literal “you scratch my back, I scratch yours”. Hannibal would redress and check on Will’s sutures while Will would help apply copious amounts of burn cream to Hannibal’s back. Within a few days, it started to really itch like crazy. Healing of the flesh was no joke. Chiyoh left them alone to their faculties during this time. She had enough to take care of. 

Eventually though, they did recover enough to sail to Asia and reached Korea in no time. But what was waiting there was more than they could bargain for. Much more. 

Will and Chiyoh sit frozen at the kitchen counter of the townhouse staring at the tablet in front of them, not blinking one bit. The newest issue of TattleCrime had uploaded and they couldn’t stop staring at the title. 

Hannibal the Cannibal and Will Graham Joined By Sexy Gunslinging Femme Fatale in Battle Royale Against Verger Corp in Cuba! Duo Now Turned Trio on the Run!

Hannibal mixes a spoon inside a mug of coffee as he walks behind the two of them with a rather large grin on his face. Eventually, it’s Chiyoh who breaks the silence. 

“I wish to shoot her”

“For once we’re in agreement”, Will responds, furious. 

“You had your chance Will”, Hannibal chuckles. “But you let your ‘slim and delicate pig’ slip away”, he says the last of his words with much suave. But Will is hardly amused. 

“She makes it sound like you’re the leader of some kind of deranged sex cult! The narrative is getting more warped by the minute!”, he slams his hand down on the kitchen counter. 

“Surely you did not think we would be without consequences after angering Alana?”, Hannibal raises his eyebrows, continuing to mix his spoon. “We all participated in her downfall”

True to his word, they all played a part in taking Alana down in Cuba. Now permanently crippled, penniless, and without a dime to her name with an impending divorce and child custody case that she was ensured to lose, the last act of vengeance she could enact against them was indignity in the papers, photos and all. Now the world would think they were not only cannibalistic murderers, but perverted freaks involved in a ménage à trois.

“Oh and what’s Chiyoh supposed to be? Your concubine?”, Will swings his hand in her direction. 

“This is humiliating”, she says in a flat tone, eyes wide at the article on the tablet. 

“Do you see now why I wish to limit your access to these articles Will? You worry too much”, he sips his coffee. 

“I’m not worried so much that I’m completely appalled by it”, he spits. “There’s gotta be some useful information in here somewhere in all this garbage…”

Fortunately for Will there was. The so called “Battle Royale” in Cuba did indeed make major headlines as he had expected. It was practically all over the news, but not for the reason one might expect. Aside from their involvement in the ordeal, Mason’s murder case was set to be re-opened due to “chatter” that Alana had a hand in it to secure the Verger fortune. Margot had confessed to the authorities of how they had obtained Mason’s sperm, but was set on playing the victim card that Alana had manipulated and seduced her into remaining complacent with her plans. Since there was no gun to prove she was the one who had shot Alana and her fall deemed a “freak accident”, things were starting to look more in her favor. It seems a mother would do anything to protect her child. Anything.

Much later after blowing off steam, Will makes his way up to Chiyoh’s bedroom. He sees her brushing her hair in front of the mirror of a dressing table, a worried expression in the reflection. He wonders if she’s screaming internally in horror as she imagines Murasaki reading the article. 

He knocks at the hinges to get her attention. She turns around and he clears his throat. 

“I’m sorry…that you uh…got dragged into all…this”, he lifts his hands, gesturing. 

It was probably the first time he had really apologized to her in any capacity since they met. Most of their relationship has been about discussing Hannibal and sharing their respective stories about him. And violence. Lots of violence and shared animosity. Now it felt like they were finally getting off on the right foot. 

Chiyoh sighs as she puts her brush down. After a moment of brief contemplation she finally speaks. 

“The fault is not yours. I got here on my own”

Will’s ears perk up, his memories taking him back to a time when Hannibal said those exact words to him in his office after being attacked by Tobias Budge. He smirks a bit from nostalgia as Chiyoh looks at him curiously. 

“It’s nothing. It’s just…Hannibal said something similar once”, he chuckles. 

“You and Hannibal. You seem to be doing well”, she remarks. 

“As ‘well’ as we could be”, Will sighs.“We fight. We disagree. Sometimes tear open old wounds while making new ones”

It very well seemed to be the norm for them. How they operated was never conventional by any means. Whether it was as psychiatrist and patient. Friend to friend. Or…whatever they were now. 

“Yet you put each other first nonetheless. It is practically instinct now”, Chiyoh goes back to brushing her hair. 

“Can’t live with him. Can’t live without him”

Will remembers Bedelia’s words echoing in his mind. 

“Yea…I guess it is”, he whispers, unsure if it’s entirely a good thing. Bedelia called it religion and that there’s nothing more dangerous than that.

Chiyoh catches onto Will’s shift in demeanor and looks back at him, still brushing her hair. 

“Have you explored other forms of intimacy with each other?”, she suddenly asks. 

Will feels his mind go blank and silent. He swears if a pin fell inside of his palace right now, he would hear it echo for miles. 

“What…?”, he asks, eyes wide. 

Chiyoh hums, going back to looking in the mirror. 

“Your reaction to the article…I assumed you two had not been intimate in…that way”, she raises a brow, turning to him with a coy smile. 

Will slowly turns around 180 degrees and exits the room without saying a word. When he closes the door behind him, he puts his back to it and slides all the way down to the floor. A certain conversation with Bedelia begins replaying in his mind. 

“Is Hannibal…in love…with me…?”

“Does he daily feel a stab of hunger for you? Does he feel nourishment just from the sight of you?”

“Yes”

“But do you ache for him?”

He hadn’t thought of this conversation since it happened. Given all that his mind had been going through, he isn’t surprised. Yet here he was now, confronted with this memory, Bedelia’s question still left unanswered.

Down below in the kitchen, Hannibal peers upwards at the second floor balcony. Will sees him and skitters away with a small yelp before they make eye contact. 

Chapter Text

“Will, I cannot help but notice that you have been quite skittish lately”

Hannibal breaks the silence while peeling chestnuts in the kitchen for the yaksik he was preparing for the afternoon. He had enlisted Will’s help in sorting out the dried fruits and pine nuts, but also to get to the bottom of his recent odd and avoidant behavior.

“Did I do something to upset you?”, he asks while peering over at him, not stopping his peeling by even a beat. 

“No more than the usual”, he murmurs back.

“Did that article change your perception of me? Since apparently you are, what was it that you said? Appalled by me”, he raises his brows while accenting the word.

“That is not what I meant and you know it”, Will snaps back, nearly spilling the pine nuts in the bowl.

“Then please do enlighten me on what exactly you meant”

“It is appalling because it’s nothing but lies. You are not a sexual deviant. It doesn’t fit your profile”, he huffs, moving on to sorting the jujubes next. 

Hannibal stops his peeling for a second, trying to make sense of his reasoning.

“So…you are upset over a misrepresentation of my psychological dossier…as a killer”

It sure seems to be that way…

“No, I- ”, he sputters, trying to find the right words. After much contemplation, he forms what he wishes to say.

“Where do we go from here? How do we progress?”

But no answers come from Hannibal’s side, only a long, drawn out silence. Not the type to come from deep thought or pondering. Just…silence. 

“Aren’t you going to say something?”, Will looks up at him, annoyed from the complete lack of response. 

“I was not aware that such things were on your mind”, he finally responds back.

“They weren’t…until recently”, Will discreetly eyes Chiyoh’s upstairs bedroom. 

“I see”

The kitchen area falls and folds away and suddenly they’re both transported to the Norman Chapel of Hannibal’s memory palace. 

“Tell me Will, how do you wish for us to ‘progress’ ?”, Hannibal asks from atop the altar, now dressed in his usual light checkered suit. 

“You tell me. You used to have a future in mind for us once upon a time”, Will gets up from a chair in the front row of the pews, now donning his dark blue suit. 

“I merely made a plan for a future that I could not predict. If you recall Will, our last collaboration in that effort ended rather messily”, he narrows his eyes at him, subtly shaking his head at their past failures.

“A lot of things tend to end that way for us”, he sighs, sluggishly walking up the stairs of the altar. 

When had any of their collaborations not ended with one or both of them disfigured or maimed? Or in some cases, surviving by the skin on their teeth. Someone always got hurt one way or another. 

“I would say that lately we have been quite successful actually”, Hannibal puts his hands behind his back. 

“It hasn’t all been terrible, I admit. My organs are still intact and inside of me”, Will places his hand over his abdominal scar. 

“We have also respectively gained new scars from our joint experiences”, Hannibal touches his neck where he now has a circular burn mark where the chains had been shackled around him. 

“Something to remind us”, Will raises a brow, still feeling the itch on his back. 

Suddenly the chapel is filled with a dense fog and the smell of running water. In no time at all, the halls of the Romanesque architecture drowns out and is replaced by pitch black darkness. The only light comes from the opening of the giant stag skull where water rushes out into the streams below. 

“But surely there’s still a future you idealize inside your mind. A desire to paint into reality”, Will tilts his head at Hannibal dubiously in the foyer of his own memory palace.

“There isn’t”

“You lie”, he steps forward, pushing Hannibal closer to the edge of the waterfall. 

“I speak the truth”

Will keeps pushing Hannibal backwards as he continues to speak. 

“I’ve told you before, Will. All I’ve ever wanted for us was a world where you would accept your becoming. To shed blood alongside me as an equal. That has already been accomplished” 

“You really wouldn’t want anything else?”, he stares at him now only a mere step backwards from a massive fall. 

“Every moment with you has been absolute. How could I possibly wish for more?”

Will steps closer to Hannibal until they’re eye to eye. 

“You could”, he dares him. 

Back in the kitchen, the two men remain in the same position they were in Will’s palace. 

“I must admit. I have missed that”, Hannibal whispers. 

“You mean crawling up into each other’s minds like maggots?”, Will raises his brow. 

“First time you've let me into yours so willingly”

“Had to see what you were hiding”, he snarks back.

Hannibal smiles, showing his sharp teeth. “Remarkable boy. I do admire your courage”

Will swears he can hear heavy hoof steps walking around somewhere in the house, but he doesn’t even look to check. Instead he smirks confidently, now knowing that he has more chess pieces in his arsenal to play this game. 

Upstairs on the balcony, a shadow looms from the railings at the sight below, grinning from ear to ear. 

The next two weeks in Korea are unexpectedly tame, but also quite interesting. The activities of the criminal underworld were not foreign to the people of this country, but to personally witness the other side of the veil was nothing short of extraordinary. Those with money were well protected, while those that couldn’t pay would face the wrath of the jopok. And Hannibal had enough to pay them off handsomely. In a sense, his wealth made him and his entourage nigh untouchable. 

It was an odd feeling to get used to the idea of a presence watching from behind meant safety more than danger, but they all eventually learned to tell the difference between security and animosity. When the trio weren’t in their townhouse, they spent their leisure in the markets and other districts, procuring necessary items for their stay in the country.

At one particular music store, they spotted a Korean styled lute where Hannibal encouraged Chiyoh to demonstrate her musical skills. It was quickly apparent that her delicate fingers were good for more than just shooting guns. 

“Still better than me”, he whispers to Will as she plays, leaving him quite stunned. It seems the Lecter family is full of different kinds of talents. 

Other times they tried their palate at different delicacies, but Will steered clear of the San-nakji, a well recommended dish of live octopus legs. He preferred his catch to be cooked, thank you very much. 

Back home, Hannibal would try his hand at recreating traditional Korean dishes. Despite having property in the country, it was apparent that he had not spent all that much time here in the past. 

And of course, he would play his beloved harpsichord. It was during one particular tune that Chiyoh beamed with an unusually bright smile. As if she hadn’t heard the song in years. Will couldn’t understand the appeal of something that sounded like a nursery song for children. But it seemed to make her happy. And when he looked at Hannibal, it seemed to make him happy too. 

Will particularly found during this time that when he looked at Hannibal and Chiyoh, he imagined if this is what Robertus and Murasaki may have looked like in their younger years and it admittedly made him feel a bit…out of place. Other times he would see a flash of what Chiyoh once mentioned of Hannibal when he was still a “cub”, charming yet somewhat childish in nature. It felt like he was privy to seeing another layer behind the veil. And something about that made him quite content. 

Despite being three fugitives who were very much still on the run from authorities, they were quite…happy. Will let that sink in when he realized it.

He was happy. 

“Going somewhere?”

Hannibal catches Chiyoh packing up her belongings into a bag in her bedroom. He leans on the hinges, waiting for her to answer. 

“I have decided to go back to France”

“Would you care to tell me why?”, he asks quite curiously. He can’t think of anything that may have scared her off like last time. 

“You and Will. You are reaching a point of stability”, she answers, still packing her things.

“But I find that you will not be able to progress further in your union if I am here”

Hannibal looks up to the corner in thought, realizing what Chiyoh meant. 

“You cunning girl”, he tilts his head at her with narrowed eyes, now understanding why Will had suddenly been so forward with him lately.

She looks back and smiles mischievously, knowing that she had been caught. 

“Lady Murasaki told me…to give love a chance. I find that I am glad that I did”, she sighs, with a look of fondness for her dear master. 

Hannibal’s lips curve a bit as he looks at Chiyoh. He’s not sure when he had last seen her so full of joy if ever. 

“Please give Will my regards”, Chiyoh whispers at the entrance of the complex, careful not to wake him. She carries her bag and rifle case with her. 

“I will”, Hannibal nods, looking a bit crestfallen at her decision to leave. Seeing this, Chiyoh decides to reach out for a hug. 

Hannibal embraces her gently, unsure if they’ve actually ever hugged even as children. They just didn’t have that kind of dynamic back then or ever. He strokes her hair, jet black and beautiful in the twilight. 

“Will you return to me if I ask of you?”, he asks, not really wanting her to leave. 

“Always”, she whispers back, smiling. 

And with that, the beast’s gunman was off to France.

“So she left again huh?”, Will chews on his pa jun during breakfast, sitting across from Hannibal who’s still cooking on the stove. 

“Yes, but she did ask me to give you her regards”

Will hums, lifting a brow. “That’s a first”

“I think she is starting to like you”, Hannibal smiles. 

“You seem unusually happy about that”, Will tilts his head at him suspiciously. 

“Chiyoh has always had a difficult time associating herself with people, even when she was young”, Hannibal adds seasoning to the pan. “She merely learned the ways of acting properly in front of others from my aunt for…familial purposes”, he bites his tongue a bit. 

“She was very feisty in the first hours we met”, he looks up at Will. “But we gradually became close”

“Just as she is with you now” 

“I think that’s a whole lot of wishful thinking on your part. We aren’t exactly ‘close’ ”, Will raises his brows dubiously, knowing that he’s looking at this situation through very thick rose tinted glasses. 

“But she does acknowledge you”

“Yea…guess she does”, Will chews, thinking just how far he and Chiyoh had come from their initial meeting in Lithuania. 

Elsewhere in an unknown dilapidated house on a hill, a small white poodle walks around, sniffing the ground. A grunt comes from inside a massive concrete well, chasing the poodle away, its collar jingling as it goes back up the stairs. 

Down inside the well, Chiyoh makes an attempt to grab onto the edges of the well and climb her way out. After failing at an attempt to side step her way out using acrobatics, she was starting to run out of options. Nevertheless, she tries.

Suddenly, a large figure looms over the well with a rubber hose and sprays water down into the well at her. Chiyoh yelps, shielding herself from the water, spitting out what had entered her mouth.

The figure then drops a bucket with a rope down the well down at her. 

“Rub the lotion on the skin”, the figure orders her in a low and imposing voice. Chiyoh looks into the bucket and sees a cheap pink American brand lotion bottle inside.

“And if I refuse?”, she asks the figure defiantly with much acidity. 

Water comes spraying down into the well again at full force, hitting Chiyoh in the face. She can barely breathe with the water filling her mouth. Eventually the sprays stop and the figure orders her again. 

“It rubs the lotion on its skin…or else it gets the hose again”

Chapter Text

Nighttime in Busan is vastly different than the sights of Havana. Instead of baroque buildings, the city is filled with an endless sea of lantern-like lights of different colors highlighting the violet sky. It’s absolutely mesmerizing. Coupled with the fact the city was well known for its world-class marine and fisheries, it appeals to Will quite a lot. But he and Hannibal were hardly here to be on vacation.

Though they did manage to take down Alana, Jack Crawford and Fredrick Chilton and possibly more were still contenders in this hunt. The question was, how much power these entities still had now that the Vergers had backed out.

“What’s the police like out here?”, Will asks, unsure of their current circumstances.

“Unified and integrated. All law enforcement falls under one unitary system under the National Police Agency, save for independent branches of the government that have their own units”, Hannibal explains. 

“However, unlike the Polizia, the police in South Korea do not particularly like being bribed or bought out. It will always come back to bite anyone who tries”

“That checks off Chilton then…”, Will murmurs knowing he would have gone down that route given how he had teamed up with the Vergers and their enormous wealth twice now.

“That leaves Jack”

“If Jack is to know our whereabouts, it is more likely that he will join forces with the National Intelligence Service. It is South Korea’s equivalent of the FBI”, Hannibal pours wine for both him and Will.

“Though I am unsure of how persistent they will be. I have no history of creating tableaus  in this country”, he takes his glass and sips.

Will raises his brow at him as he takes his own glass.

“I did not kill in every country I have property in, Will”, he comments, sensing his suspicion. “Some places were merely chosen in advance for temporary refuge for cases like this”

“We’ll see how long that lasts”, he thinks to himself while sipping his wine. 

Suddenly a ping sounds from Hannibal’s tablet. On rare occasions, he got messages from third party sources that aided him in his escape from the authorities. Will was never sure of who or what these entities were, but he decided not to question the method to his madness. It was what was keeping them both alive.  

“It is from Chiyoh”, Hannibal picks up the tablet.

Will perks his ears and turns his head. Strange. Chiyoh typically never sent any messages so far as he knew. But then again, he never really knew how she and Hannibal communicated. She just seemed to show up in places with all the necessary information already downloaded into her head. The woman was a machine. 

Hannibal opens the message to find a set of coordinates and a short message underneath:

“Urgent. Please attend to quickly”

He closes the tablet and ponders, lacing his fingers over his mouth. 

“What’s wrong?”, Will asks

“Chiyoh has sent me coordinates to a location within Korea”

“Shouldn’t she be back in France by now?”, he furrows his brows, just as confused as Hannibal. 

“Precisely…”

“You sure it’s not spam?”, he offers a possible explanation. 

“That would not be possible. I have spam blockers installed on all of my devices”

Hannibal gets out of his chair and starts clearing the table. 

“Chiyoh would not send me information unless it is important. Whatever she found is worth looking into”

After cleaning up, the two men rented a car and made their way to the coordinates that Chiyoh had sent. It turned out that it wasn’t so far away, but it was a bit complex given that the location was part of the Nakdonggang River. While some parts of it were open and vast blending into the city area, others were thin and minuscule, covered by nature. The coordinates pointed more towards the latter. 

It takes them roughly 45 minutes to get to the location of the coordinates. Despite it still very much being nighttime, the light from the moon was just strong enough to provide illumination. Nevertheless, Hannibal takes out the emergency flashlight from the glovebox to get a better lighting.

He searches around the location looking for something that may be concerning or in contrast promising, but finds nothing. However it’s when he shines his light directly onto the stream that he sees something familiar. Chiyoh’s night robe flailing in the wind on a branch buried in the ground.

Hannibal immediately begins sprinting towards the river. He wastes no time putting down his flashlight, taking off his coat and submerging himself into the freezing cold waters. Will follows close by, picking up the flashlight along the way. After much splashing, Hannibal comes out of the water carrying a figure in his arms. Will shines the light down on him and sees that it’s Chiyoh. 

Not just Chiyoh. Chiyoh pale, nude, and missing a significant amount of skin from all around her body. Muscle is visible where flesh should be and she’s lifeless and limp.

“Chiyoh…”, Hannibal whispers to her as if she can still hear him. When there’s no response, he holds her close to his chest, eyes widened, unblinking. 

Will looks down and glares at the circumstances before him.

What the hell was going on?

~~~~~

“Large sections of skin were removed from her body; the chest, abdomen, arms, and both thighs, and her back”, Hannibal gently turns the body on the makeshift slab that is the dining table covered in a tarp. 

“Blunt force trauma to the head…likely to subdue her”

“Starshaped contact entrance wound to the sternum...Muzzle stamp at the top…”, he comments on the visible mark on the pale skin. He recognizes the shape and unique marking.

“They used her own gun to kill her”

Will glares at the sight before him. Hannibal is conducting an autopsy on Chiyoh. She had been alive no less than 24 hours before and here she was now a corpse in their kitchen. He didn’t understand. He couldn’t. 

But they both had an intimate relationship with death. And here it was back on their doorstep. 

Will eyes Hannibal who seems unusually calm about this entire situation. He was calm on the drive home as Chiyoh’s body was tightly wrapped in his coat in the back seat. He was calm now as he conducted the autopsy. But Will knows this feeling and he knows it well. It’s the mindset and the zone that people like them are able to enter in the presence of mortality. And he was about to enter his own. 

He walks around the table to get a better look at the body. He sees the room go dark until he sees nothing but himself and Chiyoh. He looks at every mark, every injury, every mutilation that’s been left on her to get a clue of who or what did this to her. Time moves backwards as Chiyoh’s flesh is pieced back together one injury at a time. But even when she’s whole, he can’t seem to get a grasp on this particular killer. It seemed almost too simple. Just then, Chiyoh’s pale lips opens to speak. 

“No”

Will pays attention to her and what she has to say next. 

“You are looking in all the wrong places”

She opens her mouth wide and a swarm of winged creatures fly out of her, filling the room with them inside it. 

When he breaks out of his trance, he rushes to the other end of the table. Knowing Will has figured something out, Hannibal moves out of the way. He grabs a pair of gloves and then uses his hands to gently pry open Chiyoh’s mouth. 

“Hand me a light”, he tells Hannibal without looking back. He swiftly hands him the penlight. 

When he turns it on, he sees a black object at the back of her throat. 

“There’s something in there”, he murmurs. 

He switches positions with Hannibal as he continues to flash the light into her mouth. The doctor grabs a pair of tweezers and carefully, but surely pulls the obstruction out of her mouth. 

No bigger than quarter, but still quite the large blockage, the two men stare at the strange thing that was now in front of them. 

“What the hell is that…?”, Will whispers, now more disturbed than intrigued. 

But Hannibal seems to know exactly what the object is. Will sees a subtle change in his expression when he places the tweezers down onto the table and removes his gloves. And then he begins to move quite quickly, towards the front door. 

“Where are you going?”, Will immediately starts chasing after him. He gets ahead of him and blocks the front door, barring his entrance to the outside world. 

“Would you mind stepping out of the way, Will?”, he asks quite calmly. But Will knows otherwise. 

“No”

“Excuse me?”

A slow heart and steady hands. That’s what Chiyoh and Hannibal know what it means to remain in a stable state of mind in the face of violence. But Will can tell that’s not where Hannibal is right now. His heart may be slow, but his hands are not steady. His mind is not steady. 

“You…have never reacted well in the face of loss”, he confronts him as he steps back up onto the living room floor, pushing him backwards. “You become erratic and illogical and you lose yourself in rage”

“So here’s what’s going to happen. We’re going to do this my way”, he looks him dead in the eyes. “Either you play nice or you don’t play at all”

Hannibal stares at Will for a moment, then averts his eyes downward. He takes a deep breath and sighs out his nose. 

“Okay”, he concedes nodding with a faint whisper.

The murder case was now in Will’s hands. 

~~~~~

A bright red-haired young woman struts through the streets of Busan in heels donning a plum colored designer dress and matching blazer. She carries an equally expensive looking designer handbag with her carefully polished nails. 

Enter journalist Freddie Lounds of TattleCrime. 

Freddie had only made it in to Busan by flight mere hours ago, but she wastes no time following a certain lead given to her by an anonymous tipster. Will Graham had been spotted in the city and she was going to get to him. She couldn’t just leave her readers hanging. They must be up to date with the Murder Husbands’ activities. 

She arrives in the location where Will was said to have last been spotted and crosses her arms, chuckling.

“Someone still likes fishing”

The location is a marina port where fishermen in the local area are known to fish both for business and leisure. It’s full of boats and rods and…fish. A perfect place for someone like Will would hang around. 

She looks and walks around, earning stares from the fishermen along the way. Someone, especially a foreigner, dressed as pristine as her hardly ever made their way over to the port. Not unless they were involved in the higher branches of the fishing business. They whisper to each other, discreetly pointing at her confusion and nervousness.

But Freddie sees no sign of Will Graham anywhere. She huffs, looking down at her phone, double checking the address. Perhaps it was a false lead. South Korea was a long shot anyways. Nevertheless, she must cross all her “t”s and dot all of her “i”s. 

She makes her way to the inner area of the port where the office buildings are located. Just like the port, the entire area reeks of fish guts. No Will Graham here…

Suddenly Freddie feels a bag placed over her head and her vision goes black. When she opens her eyes next, she’s in a completely different location, sitting in a chair. 

“Hello Freddie”

“Oh my god”, she widens her eyes and mouth. Will Graham is in front of her in the flesh. 

“Yea it’s me”, he nods. But he wastes no time getting to the point. He gathers together a series of Polaroid photos and quickly spreads them out in front of the table. 

“This is what we found three days ago in the banks of the Nakdonggang River. Skin taken from her body and a gunshot wound to the chest. And the cherry on top…is an insect pupa shoved down her throat”, he explains to her with much anger behind his tone. 

Will had been quite busy in the last couple of days narrowing down who could’ve possibly mutilated Chiyoh like they did. After much searching with Hannibal, they could with certainty determine that the killer was not a local. None of the local gang members could identify their M.O., only responding by seething in frustration and anger that a foreigner of all people was doing “business” in their territory.

It all boiled down to two people. And Freddie Lounds had the answers. 

“Start talking”, Will orders. “Or Hannibal’s going to start taking body parts to cook for dinner while you’re still breathing”

Hannibal stands in the distance in the kitchen area, holding onto Freddie’s beloved designer handbag. He remains silent, but is present in the conversation. 

Freddie looks at the Polaroid photos, bewildered. Her expression subtly changes as she slowly picks up the particular one with Chiyoh’s face on it. She studies the picture closely then lets out a sharp sighs, her face forming a frown. 

“She was never supposed to die”

She places the picture down and crosses her arms, now looking down at them quite critically. She looks up at the two men and begins to divulge the information they both want to hear. 

“Jack Crawford and Chilton recently got word of their band of released inmates being wiped out in Cuba at the Verger Corp factories. Most by gunshot wounds. A sniper”

“Jack got a hold of Du Maurier to make her talk about her ‘leg situation’ beforehand. She gave all the gruesome details in exchange for full immunity and aid from Witness Protection”, she twitches her lip in frustration, probably due to being forced to stay mum on the matter for so long. But here she was now, spilling the beans to the ‘targets’.

“I’m sure it didn’t take much for Jack to remember your friend from three years ago in Italy”

“Which one of them put the hit on her?”, Will demands in a menacing tone. But Freddie answers quite willingly. 

“Jack’s plan was to neutralize your friend and use her as bait to lure you two out. Chilton obviously had other plans”, she sighs. 

Will furrows his brows in disbelief. “Are you telling me Fredrick did this to Chiyoh?”

“No. But it looks like he got someone else to”, Freddie answers with surety. 

“Who?”

“I’m afraid I can’t say”, she shakes her head. 

“Why not?”, Will grabs the edges of the table and looms over her. 

“Because the killer is not an inmate, is he, Ms. Lounds?”, Hannibal suddenly breaks his silence.

Will turns to him confused and turns back to Freddie who nods firmly in confirmation of his suspicions. 

“With the Vergers pulling out financially, operation Suicide Squad was over”, Freddie gestures for Hannibal for her handbag with her finger with a ‘come here’ to which he obliges. “Jack went back to the drawing board…but it seems Chilton was one step ahead of him”

Once Hannibal hands her bag to her she begins rummaging for something as she continues to speak. “They may have released me from their ‘NDA hell’…but they should know better about how I work”

“You have a lead?”, Will asks.

“You bet your hot little asses I do”, Freddie smiles at him, finally finding what she was looking for. Will rolls his eyes at her. The woman was obsessed. 

Freddie places her phone on the table and swipes to a particular photo of a mutilated corpse before turning it around for them to see. 

“Murder Husbands…meet ‘Buffalo Bill’ ”

The two men look down at the photo of a woman, bloated from being submerged and missing large portions of her skin. The cut patterns are identical to Chiyoh’s. The image burns into their eyes

Chapter Text

One tablet. One tablet full of crime scene photos, newspaper clippings, TattleCrime articles, and much more downloaded onto it. That’s what was sitting atop the living room coffee table. But it was enough to get the investigation started. 

With the combined prowess of the memory and imagination of Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham, the compact and digital would turn into an entire room designed for solving the murder. Of course, such valuable data wasn’t without its price…

To pay Freddie off, they gave the autopsy photos to her to use for an upcoming article. Neither of them wanted to exploit Chiyoh in such a way, but they both understood it had to be done. Not only to secure a line with Freddie, but also to warn Murasaki and Robertus in secret. Will knew it would break the Lady’s heart upon seeing the photos in the next issue of Tattlecrime. It would shatter her into a million pieces. But with Chilton’s newfound unpredictability, they couldn’t take any risks. If he was capable of getting one rogue killer to do his bidding, what was the possibility of two or even three? They quite literally had no other choice to keep them safe. 

Will swipes through the crime scene photos on the tablet, taking in the image of each grizzly mutilated body with great detail. 

“He’s been terrorizing the states in the last couple of years. Kills women and takes their skin as trophies” Will murmurs.

It’s hardly anything as severe as what he or Hannibal have seen in crimes past, what with their history of seeing totem poles made from corpses, corpses turned into bee hives, and even a whole mushroom farm made from live diabetic patients. But it was still something. 

The killer cut flesh very precisely in a certain pattern, but it was apparent that he had no respect or care for his victims. He only took what he needed from them and disposed of the women like scraps. This was not a crime of love or passion. This killer was an animal. 

“How the hell did Chilton manage to get a hold of a guy like this?”

Indeed. Fredrick Chilton wasn’t necessarily the  smartest or the most powerful man. In fact among all of them in Baltimore’s criminal justice system combined, he was what you would call…the weakest link. Nevertheless, here he was with the power of a ruthless and savage killer in the palm of his hands. 

“Perhaps they found in each other a kindred spirit. Fredrick has lost his skin and the killer is taking them from others”, Hannibal responds from the nearby chair.

“Fredrick wanted my skin not Chiyoh’s”, Will recalls the day Chilton had called him in to see his deformed state, accusing him of his wicked deeds.

“He got impatient. He could not get to us so he took from someone important to us instead”

Will closes his eyes as he feels the words hit him like arrows to the chest. He knew Hannibal had not meant to put blame on him for Chiyoh’s demise, but he couldn’t help but feel it was framed that way. 

“Hannibal-”

“Tell me Will, do you believe Buffalo Bill is in South Korea just to torture us and hunt us down?”

He opens his eyes and furrows his brows, confused. 

“What other reason would he have to be here?”

Indeed. What other reason than to make sure they suffer thoroughly and pay for their crimes?

“Do you know what kind of pupa was found in Chiyoh’s throat?”, Hannibal suddenly gets up from his chair. 

Will shakes his head “no”. 

“It is the Death’s Head moth”, he faces him, hands behind his back. 

“There are three different moth species in the genus Acherontia, each with different markings of what appears to be a skull on its back”, he begins to circle the room. 

“The one we found is Acherontia Styx, native to Asia. In South Korea, they are particularly known to be a nuisance to the yuzu farmers”

Will darts his eyes back and forth trying to see a connection to the mutilations. Surely if he examined the other bodies, the same pupa would be found in the other women’s throats too. 

“You think he’s come all this way just to harvest these moths?”

Hannibal stops and turns to face Will once more. 

“I think he is fascinated by these creatures. He could not resist the opportunity to see them in their natural habitat”

Will recalls the swarm of moths he saw fly out of Chiyoh’s mouth in his visions. He wasn’t sure at first, but now that he was hearing Hannibal’s analysis, he could see the appeal in these creatures. They were beautiful as they were disturbing. 

“The representation of death and metamorphosis in a living creature. Perhaps they symbolize what he wishes to have”

With that, Will hits an epiphany. 

“He wants to change…he wants a rebirth”

~~~~~

Change…metamorphosis…rebirth… all things Will Graham had become an expert in through lived experience. 

“When Francis wanted to change…he wanted to appease the Dragon so he could ‘become’ it”, he thinks of his design. “It’s why he killed all those families the way he did. But he ended up becoming something above it in power. He evolved”

“Marcus Aurelius of each particular thing ask: what is it in itself? What is its nature?”, Hannibal asks Will through a philosophical lens. 

“What does he do, this man we seek?”

“He kills women for their skin”, he answers quickly. 

“He takes from them what they value and uses it as a catalyst to become something he wishes to evolve into. He feels powerful by taking from them. It excites him”

“No”, Hannibal shakes his head. 

“No?”, Will is perplexed. He’s usually on point with his analyses. 

“Perhaps we should work backwards”, the doctor gets out of his chair. 

“What need is Fredrick fulfilling in this equation?”

“Vengeance, vindication even”, Will answers, knowing that very well. 

“We covet what we see everyday. What does he covet Will?”

He puts his hand to his mouth in thought. Now that was a question he needed to think about. What exactly does Chilton covet?

“He said he wanted the skin of everyone who wronged him. More literal than metaphorical. Because…”, he pauses, searching for the right answer. “…he hates his current appearance. He wouldn’t even want to look in the mirror…”

Will starts to see the connection between the vain Chilton and his newfound companion. 

“Chilton feels ugly on the outside. Buffalo Bill feels ugly on the inside”, he whispers. 

“Identically different, but they desire the same thing”, Hannibal adds. 

“They both want a ‘person suit’. A literal one made from human skin. To be seen, to feel…beautiful”

Will suddenly begins shuffling through the newspaper articles and photos in his mind. He needed to confirm something. 

“The women killed in the states…they’re all Caucasian and on the bigger side. Bigger means more skin to take for the suit. He’s probably a big guy himself given the choice in victims”, he recalls at all the case materials in succession. 

“Chiyoh doesn’t fit”

And there was his confirmation. He’d recognized it before in the case of The Muralist who changed palette color midway canvas and here it was again now. 

“He went outside of his design”

Will considers the possibility of Buffalo Bill having another accomplice other than Chilton, but quickly dismisses the idea. His goal wasn’t to complete some masterpiece he was struggling to finish. Nay, this man knew what his end goal was in his design. Yet still…the change in design bothers him so. 

“What about this murder…these moths…is worth irreparably and profoundly changing his design? What merit is there?”, he asks out loud. 

“I changed my own design when I began my copycat murders if you recall”, Hannibal reminds him of old times. 

“But you didn’t take trophies, you ate them”, Will comments. “Regardless of change in appearance, your M.O. didn’t change. Your goal remained the same”

“But it did change nonetheless”

“Yes. Because you-”, Will stops himself short recalling his days in Baltimore with Hannibal. All the copycat crimes and their tableus. The ever shifting designs of the Chesapeake Ripper. And the one commonality between all of them. 

“Because you…”

“Yes”, Hannibal whispers, closing his eyes. 

Will too closes his eyes and sighs, knowing he cracked the killer’s code. 

“Chiyoh’s murder wasn’t just an attack on us”, he whispers. “He wanted to impress Chilton. Give him a gift that was personally wrapped with a bow”

Hannibal opens his eyes first and tilts his head at Will. 

“It seems that our Fredrick has found himself an admirer”

Chapter Text

With Buffalo Bill’s design cracked wide open, Hannibal and Will designated a certain portion of their time to rest. They could only hang on so long on caffeine and will power alone after all. Given that the local gangs were watching their backs even while in their homes, they could rest easy knowing that security was well taken care of. Besides, they were hardly alone. Other residents living in the neighboring houses also paid their dues for the same benefits. 

But it was during this rest period that Will noticed something off. Maybe it was because they were so focused on the case or because their minds had blocked out anything but the case. Something was wrong with Hannibal. 

He first noticed it after their first real hour of sleep after cracking the case. It was the fact Hannibal didn’t rest. Or maybe he couldn’t. While Will practically immediately crashed on the couch, he spent his time holed up in his study doing who knows what. But given the intense scribbling sound coming from behind the door, it most definitely wasn’t sleep. Will at first believed that he was journaling his thoughts down, but dismissed it when he wouldn’t come out of the study for a significantly long period of time.

Hannibal never reacted well in the face of loss. This Will knew. He had witnessed and experienced it firsthand in the past. But whatever this was, it was far too calm and silent. 

“What’s happening to you?”, he asked him when he finally came out of his study one morning. After a period of silence, he had this to say. 

“I don’t know”

It wasn’t a comforting answer to say the least. Hannibal usually knew how and what to answer to almost any question. An open acknowledgment that he had no answer was concerning. Yet he was neither in distress nor at peace. Whatever was happening inside his palace, it was something Will couldn’t exactly see or hear. 

Finally one night during a heavy storm, it all came to a head.

Will is startled awake to the sound of a door slamming shut. He swings his legs off of the couch, fearing that an intruder had entered the complex. Pretty soon he realizes there was no such thing. Given the pouring rain, he figures something must have fallen or crashed outside. He thinks about going back to sleep, but then sees a light shining from the open door to Hannibal’s study that had been locked closed for days now. 

When he enters the study, he sees Hannibal sitting in his chair in the center of the room surrounded by what may be hundreds of pieces of paper. Will picks up the closest one at his feet and sees that it’s filled to the brim with a string of mathematical equations. He recognizes the patterns from three years ago in Wolftrap when Hannibal was writing them on a pad of paper in his home. Right before he surrendered himself to Jack in the snow. 

“Trouble sleeping? Or are you keeping watch?”, Hannibal finally speaks to him after days of silence. 

“Maybe a little bit of both”, Will clears his throat placing the paper back on the ground. 

“Rest assured, I don’t plan on going after him. Not without you”, he turns his chair to him. “This is your design Will. I cannot imagine myself not participating”

Will’s throat tightens from those words but also from the eerie and unnatural distance between them. Something isn’t right, but he can’t tell what. 

“It should’ve been yours”, he mutters.

“It’s just that…one of us had to have our heads screwed on right before we did something we would regret”

Hannibal looks up at him with an air of curiosity.“What drove you to that conclusion?”

“Chiyoh”, he answers back.

“I saw her in the room when you were doing the autopsy. She said…I was looking in all the wrong places”

“Is that how you found the pupa?”, he asks him.

Will affirms with a few short nods. “Chiyoh always tried to make me see things from a different perspective. I just…finally decided to listen”, he sniffs. 

“I knew you two would get along eventually”, Hannibal smiles bitterly as he nods at him. But he soon looks down at the sea of math equations he had built around himself, face drowning in defeat.  

“I was beginning to enjoy the small family we had built together”, he tells Will in a flat tone. “At times I wondered if this is what life with Abigail may have looked like as the years passed by…or…if it was always meant to end this way”

Will twitches at the sound of Abigail’s name. And the words that followed.

“Perhaps you were right, Will”, Hannibal looks back at him. “Broken teacups can never pick themselves back up again”

Will suddenly hears another door slam close. And then another. He gradually begins to realize that the sound isn’t coming from the outside, but inside of his and Hannibal’s minds. Their shared rooms are closing shut one by one. 

Papers crumple beneath Will’s feet as he shuffles through the ocean of stationary separating them. When he reaches Hannibal, he grabs him by the shoulders and shakes him.

“Look at me”, he whispers intensely as he looks him in the eyes. “We will find him. And we will make him pay I swear to you”

“Of course, Will”, Hannibal smiles at him like always. But there’s nothing behind his eyes. He’s empty. 

The raven stag in the house is certainly alive, but it does not move. It remains frighteningly still like taxidermy. Their palaces may still be connected, but their shared space is losing transparency. 

Hannibal was not only building walls. He was beginning to shut him out completely. 

Will grabs Hannibal out of the chair by his collar and viciously throws him onto the floor. The stationary goes flying in every direction. He gets on top of him and strikes him across the face exactly like he did in his fantasies so long ago. Blood droplets fly and splatter onto the equations, staining and severing their sequence. 

He curses Hannibal. He curses himself.

For having ever broken his allegorical beliefs of time and space even if he truly believed in his own words. For challenging him to want more than his small achievements and satisfactions. 

Chiyoh’s death wasn’t just a loss in the Lecter family. It was a loss of them. To Hannibal, it was pragmatic proof and evidence of what could never be. Even if they caught and killed her killer, nothing would change. There would be no point. Not for her. Not for them. 

Will places his hands around Hannibal’s neck and squeezes tightly around his trachea where his scar is, watching his face turn red, then gradually pale as he goes limp. If there was no point, then why even keep him alive? He should kill him just like he always wanted to. Hannibal would let him. And afterwards, he would kill himself. End this hell properly. 

Hannibal doesn’t resist Will, only letting out choked gurgles as blood and saliva drips from his mouth. He looks into his blue eyes as the light starts to go out of his, openly welcoming his own mortality like slipping into a warm bath. But suddenly Will loosens his grasp on him, forcing air back into his lungs. He gasps and coughs, relearning how to breathe properly as a living creature. Just when he seems to be catching his breath, Will pulls him up by his collar and lunges down into a kiss. 

Hannibal gradually widens his eyes, color returning to his complexion as he digests what’s happening. Will pushes him down to the floor, leaning in and slipping his tongue in to taste the blood in his mouth. Hannibal accepts the gesture then eventually wraps his arms around Will, constricting him. He flips him around onto his back, scattering the papers everywhere as he kisses him with much vigor. When they separate, Will sees that Hannibal is panting, his golden brown eyes shaking in their sockets. He can hear the creak of a door trying to find its way open and smirks at his growing distress. 

They quickly move their activities over to the master bedroom that Hannibal had been largely occupying. When they get there, Will immediately shoves him onto the king sized mattress and begins removing the buttons on his shirt at the foot of the bed as the other man watches, full of confusion and ambivalence.

He knows this isn’t an act of love. It’s barely a seduction. He knows nothing about being intimate with a man in bed. But he didn’t need a justification. It’s a means. It’s an influence. And he was going to use it.

He takes off his shirt and his pants, then begins crawling onto the bed as Hannibal backs himself into the pillows. Will stares down at him, predatory. His prey looks up at him with the same eyes he gave him when he got shot by Dolarhyde and fell to the floor; ambivalent and unsure if he could or should trust the man above him. Just hoping. Will takes his hand and places it upon his breast, letting him feel his heart. 

Hannibal shudders his eyes shut, feeling his pulse sink into him like a drug coursing through his veins. Unable to resist him for much longer, he slides his hand up to caress Will’s cheek, looking at him like he would a beautiful marble statue in an Italian art gallery. Within seconds, he gracefully lifts himself up and kisses him, all while delicately touching and stroking every inch of his bare skin; every scar, every imperfection. Will shudders when he brushes against his abdominal scar. When Hannibal leans him down and begins kissing his neck, he hears all the doors previously shut, creaking, begging to be opened back up. He smiles, victorious. 

It’s music to his ears.  

Chapter Text

“What are you thinking?”, Will asks Hannibal in a low hush, inches away from his face as he cradles his head, the home of his palace, in his hand. 

Covered under a thin layer of white sheets, Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter lay side by side after the impromptu consummation of their physical union in the midsts of a violent storm. It seemed to be a common theme and occurrence for them to be in the presence of water whenever something majorly progressed in their relationship. A storm, the ocean tides, even on a boat. Ever turbulent and never casual. 

Hannibal blinks at him, his eyes still very much swimming from all the surge of adrenaline. “I did not expect you to have such a ravenous appetite”

“You said I was skittish. Thought I’d take the initiative”, Will raises his brows mockingly at his previous comments. 

It could arguably be said that these two men had been involved in a highly intimate relationship for years with all their allegories and cat and mouse mind games. Acts of violence aside, even the way they ate meals together and how they looked at each other were full of subtle flirtations and arousal. In a way, what they did last night was no different than what they had always been doing. But the results of pushing the boundaries of physical intimacy was quite…unexpected, at least for Hannibal.

The morning after for him in bed was usually spent checking on his bedmate for various reasons. To make sure they’re well drugged and asleep. To make sure they haven’t left him to be caught by authorities alone. To check their bags for possible weapons that might be used to kill him. But there was none of that today. Because it was he who had been brought to bed the night before. 

“Always so full of surprises…”, he chuckles at Will nervously. “Circumstances aside, I am not disappointed”

“I’m gonna pretend like that wasn’t a backhanded compliment”, he rubs his thumb over the still raw bite mark on his shoulder as he winces. The massive scratch mark he left over the brand on his back is another ache altogether.

Hannibal smiles at him, looking him up and down quite bashfully. Will sighs through his nose, relieved to see him back to normal. To see him alive. He feels a crisis was averted. Still, the possibility of him reverting back to an empty husk is still there at every corner. 

He thinks of the infinite void he saw inside of him when he was surrounded by the sea of never ending math equations. How he never wants to see him like that again. Never wants to feel that eerie distance again. With anxiety creeping back up inside of him, he rubs his forehead against Hannibal’s and starts kissing him. He needs him to remain the dark wendigo. Cunning. Intelligent. Ruthless. His ideal. 

Hannibal begins kissing down his neck as Will sighs, craning backwards. He winces when he trails his long fingers down his still healing back wound. The wound that had been stitched up thanks to Chiyoh bringing him to the hospital in Cuba. Thinking of her, his heart pangs and he gently pushes him back.

“We should…check the news”, he convinces him with a parting chaste kiss. 

They have work to do. 

Hannibal grabs his tablet from its charger on the counter and prepares to open up the page to the TattleCrime only to see another article on his Recommended page. He clicks on it and it leads to a footage of a news conference that occurred in the states mere hours ago. 

He turns up the volume so they can both hear the coverage. 

“Our top story today. Catherine Martin, the 25 year old daughter of Senator Ruth Martin, who was vacationing in South Korea who was listed first as a missing person is now believed to have been kidnapped”, a male reporter reads from the teleprompter. 

“Police sources have indicated that the missing girl’s blouse has been identified. Young Catherine Martin as we’ve said is the only daughter of Republican Junior Senator Ruth Martin from Tennessee”

The screen suddenly shifts to a press conference with Senator Ruth Martin herself standing on a podium. A middle aged woman with a chin length haircut, she has tears welling in her eyes as she speaks to the camera. 

“I’m speaking now to the person holding my daughter. Catherine is very…gentle and kind. Talk to her and you’ll see. You have the power. You are in charge. I know you can feel love and compassion. You have a wonderful chance to show the whole world that you can be merciful as well as strong. That you’re big enough to treat Catherine better than how the world has treated you. You have that power. Please, my daughter is Catherine. Release her unharmed…”

Will sees the picture of a young Catherine show up on the screen and immediately picks up on what the Senator is doing.

“Pretty smart move. If he sees Catherine as a person and not just an object, he’ll have a harder time tearing her up”

“If he decides to listen”, Hannibal swings himself out of bed, putting on his briefs and pants. 

“Please…release my little girl”, the Senator begs. Will stares into her eyes through the screen. 

“I know where your mind is going with this Will. And unfortunately I am not in agreement with you”, Hannibal stands up to buckle his belt. 

“It could lead us to Buffalo Bill”

“Or…it could lead to both of our captures at the hands of the FBI and the National Intelligence Service”, he picks up his shirt from the floor. 

He gently lifts his chin up with the fingers of his free hand. “Your empathy is clouding your judgment”

Will frowns, looking up at him with pleading blue eyes. 

“But at the very least…”, Hannibal slides his fingers off of him. “We could invite her to dinner”

~~~~~

Marine City. With high-rise development and multiple affluent districts, it’s easily one of the wealthiest cities in all of Busan. A well-loved tourist sight, people from all over the world come to visit the area year round for the luxury experience. But for Senator Ruth Martin, shopping and dashing sights are not on her agenda tonight. 

Dressed in her beige suit and black coat, she and her entourage make their way to a specific restaurant. When she enters and walks down the halls to a very specific part of the building, a large, muscular Asian man in a suit tells her “only one” pointing one finger up as he does so. The Senator looks behind her and chooses her secretary and orders the rest to stand down. 

When she’s let into the room, waiting for her was a table for two in a large room. Given the vast emptiness of the other tables, it appears that it had been reserved for just her and the man sitting at the table. He sits there at the back of a long table in a pristine dark blue three piece suit. His hair is perfectly cut and parted and his face is clean shaven. He seems to be wearing light make up around the eyes and cheek for reasons unknown, but nevertheless gives off the aura of a high class gentleman. 

“Good evening, Senator Martin. So nice of you to join me”, Hannibal greets her courteously. 

“Please, sit”, he gestures to the empty seat reserved just for her. 

“I won’t be staying here long”, she responds with a thick Tennessee accent. 

“Dr. Lecter, I know of your expertise. If you find my daughter…I will negotiate with Interpol on having you transferred to my care in Tennessee with the appropriate privileges”, she takes a file from her secretary who had pulled it out of his briefcase. 

But Hannibal isn’t at all interested in the file and its contents. 

“I won’t waste your time or Catherine’s time bargaining petty privileges Senator. I’m sure Jack Crawford and his agents have wasted enough of your time already”, he laces his fingers with his elbows on the table. 

“I only pray they haven’t doomed your poor girl”, he shakes his head at her regretfully.

“What do you know about the bastard who took my daughter?”, the Senator urges for an answer. 

“He is our common enemy. But I’m afraid I cannot share any further details with you. Doing so could jeopardize this entire hunt”, he tells her as he pours wine into a glass. 

“This isn’t a game you freak…!”, she shouts loud enough for it to echo in the room. 

“Careful with your words Senator. You are being rather rude at my dinner table”, Hannibal gives a subtle glare at her temper. She grits her teeth, holding her tongue, not sure of what he’s capable of in this space.

“I will save your daughter. But in return I ask of you to have the FBI and all other intelligence agencies to call off the search for me and my companion and leave us in peace”, he takes a sip of wine. 

“You know I don’t have the authority to do that”

“Then I suggest that you obtain the authority quickly. Time is of the essence. Tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock”, he waves his finger back and forth like a metronome.

After a few moments of contemplation, the Senator’s decision was made clear.

“Get the FBI and the National Intelligence Service on the line”, she orders her secretary to the side of her while keeping her eyes glued to Hannibal. 

“Crazy son of a bitch is the only chance of getting my daughter back alive”

Hannibal raises his glass at her with a subtle smile. The deal has been secured.

~~~~~

“You actually managed to do it, you crazy son of a bitch…”, Will looks at the decree complete with Senator Martin’s signature. 

He had known that Hannibal had planned to meet with the Senator to discuss certain negotiations, but this isn’t exactly what he expected. And this fast. 

“Did you ever have any doubts?”, Hannibal smiles at him as he takes off his suit. 

“I didn’t doubt your ability to do it. I’m just wondering if you bit off more than you can chew”, he raises his brow at him. 

“Do you think we can’t find Catherine Martin?”, he loosens his tie and lets out a sigh. It had been far too long since he wore a full three piece suit. It now feels more unnatural to him than not. 

“Alive? The probability grows closer to zero by the day”, Will closes the file and hands it back to him. Although it was he who had suggested it, even he was starting to see the difficulty in the task.

“If Buffalo Bill is making a ‘person suit’, where do you believe he is getting his supplies?”, he sits down on the bed with a creak, looking up at Will. 

“Tailor”, he answers without skipping a beat. 

“I also smelled a very particular scent of lotion on Chiyoh’s skin that was not her’s”, Hannibal recalls the odd smell. “It had been washed off by the elements, but it was there nonetheless”

“So we got a guy who knows how to sew skin suits and prefers for his skin to be…supple?”, he furrows his brow, a bit puzzled at the fact. 

“The skin of his ‘product’ to be exact. I could not place the brand, but it is likely not local”

“Sometimes ‘sticking out like a sore thumb’ works in our favor”, Will taps the pads of his fingers against each other. 

And so the hunt was on to narrow down the list of suspects. Given the calculations between Chiyoh’s departure to her murder, it was clear that time most definitely was not on their side. They had two days maybe less to find Catherine and her captor. However what they did have on their side was money and a vast information network through the gangs of Busan who were more than willing to have the ‘trespasser’ eliminated. Such anger and passion ended up working greatly in their favor. Within a day they had their answer. 

“According to the local gangs, there were only five American males who came to the local tailors within a 25 mile radius from where Chiyoh’s body was found”, Will points on a map on the dining room table. 

“Three businessmen. One amateur fashion designer. And then this guy”

He places a piece of notebook paper on the table with a list of names written in pen. On the bottom was a particular name. 

“Jame Gumb”

Chapter Text

T-Minus 6 hours to the kill. They would leave at dawn. That’s what the two men both decided on. But it was neither excitement nor anticipation that they felt inside. This wasn’t their average hunt. It was highly personal, maybe too much so. 

While Will knew what had to be done, Hannibal seemed twisted up inside. From the moment he read the killer’s name on the paper, he seemed on edge and distant. Perhaps reality was hitting hard for him. Seeing him like this didn’t exactly put him at ease, so Will decided it was best to release their pent up anxiety rather than to repress them. 

They have sex again for the mutual benefit of clearing their heads and finding a sense of stability. Hardly as intense as the first time, but it keeps them distracted and close together. They fall asleep with Will cradling Hannibal’s head in his arms, feeling an instinctive need to protect his palace from being harmed or crumbling from the inside. Though an uncomfortable position, with Will’s heartbeat in his ears, Hannibal is easily lulled to sleep. 

Whether it was intentional or because of his subconscious yearning for the chapel, that night Will managed to enter Hannibal’s palace in his dreams. The chapel was as severe and graceful as always, but something felt incredibly off. It was too dark.

Will looked around to see all the pews had been filled with mourners wearing black. Though he’d been conscious of their presence in time’s past, he never quite knew any of their faces. Not that he tried to know them. But more peculiar than their presence was the change he saw on the engraving on the floor. 

There, covering the usual image of the praying skeleton was Hannibal himself, nude and tightly folded in the fetal position. Will didn’t understand. Hannibal always donned a suit in the chapel no matter what. He was always awake and alert and in control of this space. But right now, he is not. And what does it mean that he’s covering the skeleton of mortality? Is he in between life and death? 

Will approaches the engraving slowly and carefully reaches out his arm to touch Hannibal, but is abruptly stopped by a cold, wet grab to the arm. 

“Don’t…!”, a familiar voice whispers with a shriek. Will’s heart races in his chest. He turns to see a bloodied Abigail donned in black.

“Don’t…”, she repeats while shaking her head at him, her blue eyes shedding tears of blood. 

“Abigail…?”, he looks at her in confusion. She looks nothing like she does in his palace. She’s deathly pale and blood is pouring from the open slash wound on her neck. 

“You must leave…now”, another familiar voice calls out to him. When Will turns his head he sees Chiyoh, equally as pale donning a traditional black funeral kimono.

“Chiyoh…”, Will shudders.

Both Abigail and Chiyoh grab Will and drag him through the halls of the chapel away from Hannibal. They throw him out of the chapel gates, barring him from entering. Another room now closed to him in Hannibal’s mind.

Will grabs onto the bars of the gates and desperately tries to shake them open.

He couldn’t lose the chapel. Anything but this. 

But the bars were heavy as lead and wouldn’t budge. As he continues his feeble attempts to shake the gates loose, it suddenly opens quite easily when a little blonde girl pushes right by him, joining the two women in the halls. She came out of nowhere. But Will doesn’t need to think twice about who she is. 

“Mischa”, he whispers.

Before he can get a glimpse of her face, Will wakes up in the real world, still cradling Hannibal’s head. He looks down at him and sees that he’s still sleeping soundly in his arms. Not wanting to wake him, he gently peels himself off of him and pulls the covers up over his shoulders. He brushes his hair out of his eyes before making his way over to the bathroom. 

As he walks the halls, every step takes him back to the memories of the chapel. No, he felt this even before he left the bed. He quickly and stealthily enters the bathroom and turns on the shower. The second it turns to hot, he gets in closing the door behind him. And then he begins to weep. He crumbles to the floor, folding himself tightly into the fetal position and cries uncontrollably, like a dam had been broken inside of him. His heart feels like it’s being ripped out of his chest and squeezed by thorns. 

He had felt the raw impact of the heaviness of Hannibal’s grief and burdens in the chapel. Not only the grief of losing Chiyoh, the regrets of killing Abigail with his own hands, but also the perpetual loss of Mischa in his mind stabbing him constantly. Will felt every morsel of this blurred reality. He felt like he was crying all the tears that Hannibal wouldn’t ever cry for himself as the hot water washed them away and rushed them down the drain.

Hannibal’s losses were now all his own. 

It was in this realm of steam, water, and tears that Will finally felt all the pieces of the puzzle fit together. He understands. That a man who felt such profound pain from his grief was entirely capable of love. 

Awkward and off the mark and extraordinarily violent and bloody, but he finally recognized Hannibal’s love. For Mischa. For Chiyoh. For Abigail. 

For him. 

Back in the bed, Hannibal opens his eyes to find Will missing, but he feels him in the depths of his mind. He understands what had happened in his slumber. He sinks himself down into the covers, desperate to drown out the painful sounds of running water mixed with drawn out wails.

~~~~~

The car ride to their kill zones of Jame Gumb and Fredrick Chilton is mostly silent. Both men were aware of the turmoil of the other, but neither wished to speak about it. Will felt emotionally exhausted from crying for most of the morning and Hannibal seemed hesitant to speak at all. That was until he was 5 miles away from dropping off Will. 

“Will, I must confess something of importance to you”, he speaks as he takes an exit. “I’ve met Jame Gumb before”

“What…?”, Will feels his heart drop. 

“He was a partner of a former patient of mine who had presented with antisocial tendencies. I met him only once over a decade ago as a referral”, the doctor recalls the man in his memories. 

“He was an obsessive man. He spoke more about my patient than he did himself. I am unsure of if he had already killed by the time I spoke to him or if he started thereafter. Nevertheless, I had likely left a profound impact on his life”

He lets out a sharp sigh, dreading the words that will come out of his mouth next.

“Chiyoh’s plight is due to my own negligence. I had laid out the map that led her into death’s cold embrace”, he confesses like he’s at church speaking before a priest.  

Though Will thought he had cried all the tears he could possibly cry after this morning, he finds his eyes starting to well. 

“So did I”, he confesses in a trembling whisper. 

Every major interaction that he had ever had with Chiyoh from the start had been a roadmap of violence and death. He pushed her into participation time and time again for his benefit. He thinks repeatedly of how if he hadn’t made her kill her tenant, she could still be alive in Lithuania. She would be alone. But she would be alive. 

”Save yourself. Kill them all”

Before, when he had yet to catch Hannibal when he was the Chesapeake Ripper, he had believed that all those who had been maimed and killed by him was his fault alone. Because he was a killer. Because there was blame to be placed. Even when he felt himself blur with him, he wanted to believe these murders had something more to do with him than anything else. But after all these years, Will is starting to finally realize that he was mistaken. He and Hannibal are cut from the same cloth. No matter their desires, those who get too close to forces like them will eventually meet their demise. If not by their hands, by their influence.

This was the price of being unique. 

“Do you believe killing Gumb and Fredrick and saving the Senator’s daughter will free us from our burdens, Will?”, Hannibal asks in earnest. 

“I don’t know. We’re doing what feels just”, he answers with surety. This much he knew.

Justice. Righteousness. Vengeance. All of these things apply to what they were about to go do. 

“We covet as is our nature. As do they”, Hannibal remarks. 

In no time at all, they reach the address provided to them by the gang members who generously allowed them to do the honors of getting rid of their pest problem. 

“Here we are. Jame Gumb should be in that house up there”, Hannibal parks the rental car and looks up at the run down house hidden by trees.

“It is a shame that I cannot join you in this”, he sighs. 

“You gotta do what you gotta do”, Will murmurs. 

Both of them agreed that in order to make time and secure the chances of saving Catherine, they would split up and take care of one adversary each. Obviously two is better than one, but they didn’t have much of a choice. They had to do this. 

Will readies his gun that Hannibal purchased from one of the local gangs. He hasn’t fired a gun since Cuba so he can only hope luck is on his side this time. Because one or both of them might very well die today. 

They both breathe in and sigh in unison. And then a long silence follows. 

“Hey”, Will calls out to Hannibal who’s looking outside the car window, still ambivalent about this plan.

“I love you”

Hannibal turns to look at Will, his ambivalence now gone, replaced by yearning. He looks him up and down before responding to him. 

“I love you as well”

Will pulls Hannibal into a tight hug and it takes him a moment, but he hugs back. He sighs in disbelief. Here they were, exchanging words of love right before what could very well be a suicide mission. Maybe that’s all they were; words of mutual reassurance in the refractions of the day. But he felt a need to say them anyways. 

Hannibal breathes in Will’s scent as he holds him close while Will gently strokes the back of his head. When they finally let go of each other, Hannibal takes his hands and kisses them dearly before he leaves the car.

He watches him the entire time he climbs his way up the hill. And then he leaves to kill Chilton.