Chapter Text
“This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
The corpse is a sweeping curve, split in a straight vertical line down the middle and fully separated, one half from the other. If it were truly a stringed instrument, the neck would be lopped off. In this case, the arms have been sculpted into the neck, fingers twisted into pins with dangling broken strings, and tossed aside.
The strings are, as one would expect, treated gut. In this case, they are not playable, not strung. They are split and curled at the broken ends where they’ve been bisected. This instrument is useless.
It would be hard to identify him had the FBI not been searching for him for the past week.
“And so perishes Tobias Budge,” Will murmurs, doing an impeccable job of keeping his delight contained. “You don’t need me to guess who did this.”
“No,” Jack Crawford says grimly. He stands shoulder to shoulder with Will, cloaked in his woolen duster in the chill of the small concert hall—the one where the junior orchestra usually performs.“Looks like the Ripper didn’t appreciate his serenade.”
Will’s wounds are still healing from when he paid Tobias a visit at Chordophone last week. It wasn’t a secret that he’d gone to investigate—he’d loudly taken on investigating “every music shop” in Baltimore. And it wasn’t that Tobias caught him off guard. Will had known a fight was inevitable, and it would have rung alarm bells if he’d come out of it totally unscathed.
What Will hadn’t mentioned is that he hadn’t been alone when he met with Tobias, and Tobias hadn’t escaped the way Will said he did.
“This is worse than any of the rejections I’ve gotten on OkCupid,” Zeller says.
“If you got a haircut, you might do better on Grindr,” Jimmy says.
“What’s Grindr?”
“You gotta hand it to the Ripper,” Beverly says. “At least this kill probably saved a few lives.”
“You do not, under any circumstances, ‘gotta hand it to the Ripper,’” Jack says, raising his voice just enough to make the entire team duck their heads and become suddenly a thousand times more interested in gathering evidence. “The Ripper hunts alone. He doesn’t want a partner.”
“Not this one, at least.” For a stomach-swooping moment, Will wonders if that was too much of a slip, but Jack doesn’t give him a second look.
“Ripper’s a lone wolf,” Zeller says.
“Wolves are about as social as animals can get…well, short of bees. All that alpha-beta business is bull-roar that came from studying wolves in captivity,” Jimmy says.
Warmth creeps from Will’s heart and into his belly. He knows for a fact that the Ripper no longer hunts alone, and this kill in particular is going to feed both of them for a long time to come.
As the cleanup crew closes in, Will follows Jack out into the parking lot. There’s snow on the ground, just as there was on this day in the previous loop.
“How’s Bella doing?” Will asks.
He has a good idea, based on the way Jack has been carrying himself: slightly preoccupied, but not despairing. His temper is on less of a hair trigger (at least when the Ripper isn’t involved), but it also means his senses are sharper than they’ve been in the past. But Hannibal has kept the upper ground for years, and Will is nothing if not judicious with revealing truths.
Jack snaps out of the focus he’d undoubtedly been devoting to Tobias’s display, currently being dismantled in the building behind them.
“She’s doing alright. They say we caught it early enough that she still has a chance. Thank Hannibal again for that nose of his.” And then Jack smiles, which supports the truth of what he’s said more than anything else ever could. “I don’t even think she’d say no to a dinner invitation at some point soon, as long as it isn’t too close to treatment.”
Will mirrors Jack’s smile, but he also feels it genuinely.
“I’ll gently insinuate that to him,” he says. Jack waves him off as he slides into the front seat of his car, and in spite of everything, Will feels oddly charmed as he crosses the cracked asphalt.
Tonight Will is accompanying Hannibal to the opera, and there will now be two murders for Hannibal’s elite circle to gossip about. But what really concerns Will is that this is the furthest into the timeline that Will and Hannibal had ever gotten. It should be something to celebrate; they’ve made it further in time than they’d ever made it before, and their killer has been taken off the board.
The loops have stopped. He’s almost sure of it. There are no physical signs haunting this world: no missing people or dogs, no repeated constellations stamped across the sky or fermenting food where it shouldn’t be. But of course, there’s still that doubt that lingers in the air like a bad smell, and today it’s extra smelly.
He flinches at a sharp knock on his window.
“Hey!” Beverly shouts, eyebrows drawn together.
“What?”
She makes a motion for him to roll down the window, and he does as she points at his lap. “Good question. What is that?”
Will bites his lip and looks down at where she’s pointing: the platinum band around his ring finger. Hannibal had given it to him last night, and it felt so natural on his hand, he’d almost forgotten it was there.
“Oh my god, you’re blushing. Is that a frickin engagement ring?”
“No,” Will says, a little too defensively. “More like engaged to be engaged.”
The truth is that, as far as Hannibal is concerned, they’re already married and have been for months. Will isn’t sure when or whether they’ll ever have a ceremony, but it’s not a conversation he’s going to have with Beverly right now.
“Yeah, whatever, Graham. You know Alana’s going to flip that neither of you called her.”
“Well, maybe you could do me a favor and keep it to yourself for now.”
“I don’t know…it’s a bad habit to keep secrets from your partner,” Bev says in a sing-song.
He smirks and drops both gloves into the passenger seat. “That’s never stopped me,” he says, thrilling as he tosses this atop the many inside jokes he increasingly has with himself. He’s starting to get why Hannibal makes so many snarky cannibalism jokes at their dinner parties.
Bev rolls her eyes for possibly the ten thousandth time in their friendship. “Get out of here. Go get ready for your fancy date while we work our fingers to the bone back at the lab.”
Will rolls his window back up. She gives the hood of the car a light slap as he starts the engine.
He’s going home to spend time with his dogs, then he’s going to enjoy an evening out with his partner. And it won’t end with either of them dead on the floor of Hannibal’s kitchen—of that he’s fairly confident. If any queasiness he’s feeling right now doesn’t wear off as he’s throwing the ball for Winston and the rest of the pack, he’s sure Hannibal’s presence will soothe it away.
—
Opening night for La Traviata had been just as exquisite as it was the first time, even more so for having Will at his side, wearing his ring. The piece had been in Hannibal’s possession only days after time clicked back into place. When they had apprehended and killed Tobias Budge together, when Will had tied the strings Hannibal had treated around the pins formed by their quarry’s fingers, Hannibal knew he needed to stake his claim immediately and publically.
The Board had toasted them at intermission, and Will had ducked his head humbly at the attention. Hannibal, on the other hand, had held his head up higher than he ever had before.
But as Hannibal now drives them home, Will is more quiet than usual.
“Are you alright?” Hannibal asks as they undress for bed. It’s unusual for Will to take alcohol upstairs, but there is a crystal tumbler with two fingers of Scotch sitting on the bedside table.
“A little on edge with the…well, I guess you wouldn’t call this an anniversary, would you?”
“Not precisely, but it captures the spirit of the moment,” Hannibal says, eyeing Will as he dutifully puts his tux in a garment bag for the dry cleaner.
Will flops onto his side of the bed in his underthings, still not quite prepared for bed, and takes a sip of Scotch. As his eyes stray toward the cool fireplace, Hannibal takes the cue to cross the room and light the gas fire. He’s rewarded with a wry smile, which would never had been the case were he upset with Hannibal.
In just his silk briefs, Hannibal joins him on the bed, sitting with his back to the headboard. Will’s eyes stay fixed on the fireplace, his profile flickering with shades of orange and black, lit as impeccably as the first night they made love.
Perhaps Hannibal should say something.
But he prefers to wait until Will asks him. And when Will turns away from the fire and he reads Hannibal’s face, he finally does.
“Let’s not make this too difficult on ourselves,” Will says. “What aren’t you telling me?”
Nothing thrills Hannibal more than being caught out by Will Graham (nothing that wouldn’t end in their deaths, at least).
“I received a letter earlier today from the partner of a former patient.” It had come in a manilla envelope, a brief handwritten note on white ruled paper wrapped around a cream-colored envelope with “Doctor Lecter” written across it in passable calligraphy. It was filled with stories of adventure and satisfaction, effusive thanks, and good wishes. None of the content was particularly striking. What it indicated, however, was much more revelatory.
“He passed away,” Hannibal added.
Will stills, pressing his lips together and taking a sip of his whiskey before responding. “And that moves you for some reason.”
Clever boy. There are very few people whose deaths Hannibal would find remarkable. “I find it interesting that he had a partner. And that his cause of death was a skydiving accident. When I treated him, he was quite fearful and socially awkward.”
“But he somehow transformed into someone who lived a…vivacious life,” Will says carefully, waiting for Hannibal to hand over the decoder ring that would make sense of this conversation.
“He lived several of them.”
The glass is halfway to Will’s mouth when he freezes. Clearing his throat, he sets it down on the bedside table.
“He was looping with us,” Will says simply. He is never taken aback by his own insights anymore, especially as they pertain to Hannibal. “And you didn’t tell me…because of what? HIPAA?”
“Partially that, partially because I didn’t know him to be until much later in our plight,” Hannibal tilts his head playfully, needling. “And because right after he told me, you paid me a visit, and it quickly slipped my mind. Or rather, thanks to you, my mind slipped from my skull.”
“Well, sorry,” Will huffs, not appearing sorry at all—as well he shouldn’t. Then the minor indignation evaporates from his expression and leaves behind wide-eyed realization. “So it’s official.”
“Yes,” Hannibal says, chest warming with this shared knowledge. “We’ve freed ourselves from samsara, at least for now.”
“Our fates are no longer linked.”
“Not with Mr. Froideveaux’s,” Hannibal says. “Yours and mine? I would still consider them so.”
“Yes, well, not literally.” Energy infuses Will’s limbs, like a rapidly recharged battery. He shifts to the side and faces Hannibal. “It’s over. Really, truly over.”
“Had you not believed so?”
“God dammit Hannibal,” Will says. In a second, he’s astride Hannibal’s legs and gripping his shoulders. The pinch sends tingles through Hannibal’s triceps, spreading to the nerve endings of his shoulders and back. “I’ve been waiting on a knife’s edge to discover this wasn’t what I thought it was. I kept expecting to fall down the stairs or something and have to start all over again, but now you’re telling me…”
The way Will trails off, as well as the ache in his own cheeks, tells Hannibal that he’s grinning widely. Will dives in to take his lips in a biting kiss that eventually breaks the skin. Hannibal hisses; with that sting and the delectable pressure of Will straddling him, arousal blooms in his pelvis.
As it does, Will pulls backward, and his face softens. Those scouring eyes rake gently over him, reading the surrender that settles into Hannibal’s limbs. A familiar hand caresses Hannibal’s cheek, pushes his hair back from his eyes, and smooths down the side of his neck. Eyes closing, body relaxing into the pleasure of sharing himself, Hannibal nuzzles into Will’s palm.
“Will…” he whispers.
“What?”
“I adore you.”
Like he’s bestowing a blessing, Will lays a kiss on the crown of his head, then says softly, “What else, baby?”
“I want you to touch me,” Hannibal says, mouth drying but for the blood pooling in the pocket of his lower lip. Sensual language had come so easily before he was with someone whose touch transcended words. “I want you to take what’s yours, however you choose.”
Will knows what to do, as he always does. He knows how to slowly ease Hannibal’s briefs down his thighs, following them with soothing palms and trailing kisses. The scent of him is intoxicating: salt and musk, the tang of pre-cum, lush forest on a summer afternoon.
Ice cubes clink against the crystal as they melt in Will’s glass.
Will knows how to coax Hannibal onto his stomach and how to open him up with his tongue, then his fingers. Knows exactly the sound Hannibal makes and the way he arches when he’s more than ready.
(Truly, he’s ready the second Will deigns to want him.)
Will is perfectly attuned to how he should enter Hannibal; the amount of weight to lay against his back; the depth, the pressure, the speed with which he wants to be fucked.
And Will has learned to make Hannibal come, hard, with their fingers still laced together on either side of Hannibal’s head.
And when it’s over, Will gentles Hannibal as he reels in the aftermath, the wake of a lifetime’s passion and compassion wrapped into mere minutes.
The quiet is unbroken by anything but the stars peeking through the sheer curtains. The sun may glare upon them in the morning, but Hannibal will welcome it. It will mean their time together will have broken all previous records, surpassed the limits of what they’ve experienced together before.
“This is it, you know,” Will says, his lips brushing Hannibal’s hair. “We don’t get anymore chances after this. It could happen tonight; it could happen in forty years.”
“And then maybe we will begin all over again,” Hannibal says.
Will’s chest, holding his clear lungs and beating heart, rises and falls under Hannibal’s ear.
“Maybe we will,” he says.
They fall asleep like this. The night turns into day, just as it’s meant to, and then day into night.
And on, and on, and on.