Chapter Text
Will wakes up.
He’s in a private hospital room—generic, institutional. He can’t see out the window to gauge what town he’s in. He’s not hooked up to any machines.
He expects a lot of things in that moment, but Alana Bloom sitting by his bed holding his hand as she wipes a tear from her eye is not one of them.
He clears his throat, and she lets go of his hand. A few moments later there’s ice chips in his mouth and the pain in his throat is still there but it doesn’t seem as outlandish a notion that he might speak as it had before. He tries. “What happened?” he asks.
He remembers what happened. The Red Dragon. The blood, black in the moonlight. An embrace, and a plunge that might be betrayal if Hannibal hadn’t seemed kind of into it at the time.
“You got hit by a car,” she says.
Will closes his eyes and repeats the words to himself a couple of times but they make no sense no matter how many times he says it. Where would a car have come into the story that night? Did they fall, and Hannibal saved him only to push him in front of a car? Did they survive and run off together and then Will got hit by a car? Maybe Hannibal manipulated his injuries from the fall to seem like injuries from a car accident. Will inwardly grimaces. He has to stop giving the Hannibal in his head godlike powers. Hannibal’s obnoxious enough about comparing himself to a god without Will doing it, too.
Will struggles to find a way to ask Alana what the hell she’s doing in his hospital room and if she would leave him alone and go back to her family, please, but then something he had seen but not noticed cements itself into meaning in his mind. “You’re not limping.”
She’d got up, alerted the doctor of his awaked state, and she’d bustled about the room. No cane, no limp. Had he been unconscious for so long that she’d had some kind of miracle surgery? Grim, to imagine he’d lost even more years to recovering from Hannibal and the things Hannibal made him do.
But the look she gives him is uncomprehending. As if she had no idea what he meant. No context to give her understanding of the idea of her limping.
She puts a hand on his forehead and smiles kindly. “I’m happy to tell you that whatever reason you think I have a limp isn’t real. You could have experienced coma dreams and confused them with reality. People often do. Or you’ve been experiencing delusions. Hallucinations. Not caused by mental instability or the work you do, but by a physical ailment.” She then proceeds to give him the rundown on encephalitis, but Will has heard enough about that damned disease for three lifetimes, so cuts her off.
“You of all people should know that I know what encephalitis is by this point,” he says, feeling his jaw start to hurt the way it does when he’s been clenching it too hard. He takes a couple of deep breaths. “What happened to Hannibal? Is he dead?”
Alana blinks several times and sits back. “Why would Hannibal be dead? Will, he’s been at your bedside this entire time. I finally persuaded him to go home and get a good night’s sleep about an hour ago. He’s been beating himself up for not recognizing the signs. And I’ve been doing the same. I can’t believe…when I think that I just…assumed you were losing your mind when you were always so hot. I saw sweat on your face so many times. I felt your forehead and it never occurred to me to take you to a doctor! I knew you were hearing things. You confided to me about the animals you were hearing. I should have made the connection and realized it was neurological.”
Will struggles to sit up straight, uncomfortable at Alana seeing him this way now that his mind is clearing. He doesn’t hate her but he hasn’t felt friendly towards her in a long time. He resists the urge to say that assuredly she and Hannibal are both terrible doctors in their own ways. He moves his jaw from side to side, trying to ease the tension. “Hannibal’s home? In his…house?” He knows he sounds like someone relearning English after a head injury but there’s no way Hannibal could go from breaking out of prison to just…home. Nothing made sense.
Alana gets the look on her face she gets when she thinks about Hannibal and smiles fondly, and it’s the fondness that makes him realize that he’s not in a place he recognizes anymore. “I think he’s making you chicken soup.”
Will feels hollowed out, like someone who woke up after being embalmed, unaccountably alive in spite of his organs laying outside his body on a tray somewhere nearby. He feels on the edge of panic. “How long have I been asleep?”
“Three weeks. We, Hannibal and I, had worries about if you’d wake up at all. The doctors wanted to pull the plug at one point but Hannibal was adamant that you were stronger than you seemed.”
That tracks, Will thinks. Hannibal would be loath to let him die in any universe. Too much fun toying with him. “What was I doing when I got hurt? Was I working a case?”
“You’d just come home from Grafton. I think you were at the grocery store,” she says, and she smiles that very particular smile she used to have just for him, and he realizes. He’s somehow woken up before Abigail and her ear. Before Alana had lost all faith in him. Before Georgia Madchen or Dr. Sutcliffe were even dead. Grafton was the place with the human totem pole. That’s the place he was. That was the time.
So was it real, or was everything Will remembered afterward, as Alana had suggested moments before, a hallucination?
Imagine if “Hannibal Lecter is the Chesapeake Ripper” is nothing but a fever dream. Hannibal is a mild-mannered psychiatrist by day and foodie by night and nothing more. The operatic events Will remembers nothing more than the unconscious dance of the people he knows in a disordered mind. It is dangerously plausible. Seductive, even. It would be easy to forget what he thinks he knows.
But what if he, for lack of a better term, dreamt the truth? What if his empathy extrapolated from what it knew about Hannibal, and it told him the truth about what would happen to Will if he stayed in Hannibal’s sphere of influence? What if Hannibal is the Chesapeake Ripper, but Will learned the truth about him before Hannibal could discredit him this time?
Or what if time really can reverse itself?
Will tears at his bedding, ignoring Alana’s alarm as he exposes his belly. There’s not a single scar. Will feels a twinge of loss he doesn’t understand because even when he acknowledged his…feelings…for Hannibal he had never liked the scar or the suffering that had come with it. Familiarity is still familiarity. This abdomen doesn’t belong to him. This life feels…wrong. He absently rubs at the scar on his forehead and it’s absent. It’s like, suddenly, pieces of Will are disappearing and he looks down at his legs to make sure they haven’t disappeared, too. He sees his feet but can’t move them, and the ensuing panic persuades Alana to call a nurse who administers a sedative.
And then it’s all. Calm.
When Will wakes up again, Jack has taken Alana’s spot.
“Hi Jack,” Will says.
“I’ve got a bone to pick with you,” Jack says. “You should have been taking better care of yourself, Will.”
“This infection I had kept me from thinking clearly. I couldn’t take care of myself because I was having waking seizures and hallucinations.”
“I know, Will. But anyone else would have seen a medical doctor about that.”
“I was seeing doctors. Hannibal should have diagnosed it, if he’s so brilliant.”
Jack nods. “You’re right, but he’s been beating himself up about it quite a bit. I know it must be tempting to confront him about it but I don’t know if you should. Nobody’s perfect and he blames himself enough already. Will, he’s devastated. If you blame him for this illness, which he didn’t cause, by the way, it might cause hard feelings and you won’t be able to continue as his patient.”
Will pushes up on his elbows and Jack reaches over and hands him the bed controls. Funny, that Jack knew how that all worked but Alana either didn’t know or didn’t think of it before. Terrible bedside manner. Jack must have learned the last time his wife was in the hospital.
Will sits up. “I was never really his patient. And I don’t see why I need to see him anymore, now that my brain’s no longer on fire.”
“Alana’s concerns about your state of mind predate the period of time when you likely had this illness.”
Will grimaces a smile. “Alana’s not my doctor or my mom and what she thinks I need really doesn’t concern me. If you want to let her scold you that’s your business but her opinion about it shouldn’t put conditions on my employment. She was worried about my inability to pull the trigger on a murderer—well, I got past that on my first case. When I get out of this bed I want to go back into the field without a babysitter, if you’ll still have me.”
Jack…does not seem displeased with this. Of course he wouldn’t be. Less people telling him to give Will a break, take it easy on him? Of course he let himself be convinced. His smile is a little smug when he says, “If you’re sure.”
Will runs a hand through his hair, frowning when it feels greasy and pulling his hand away. “I think I was sedated before when I realized my legs wouldn’t move. But I can sit up. I don’t have a spinal injury, do I?”
Jack smiles. “No, not at all. Your leg muscles have atrophied a little. No big deal. You might need physical therapy. From the coma, not from the fight you got into with the car. Your injuries actually weren’t that bad—a concussion, mainly, which made them do an MRI and some other tests which made them think the head injury was worse than it was, because of the swelling your brain was already doing.”
Will’s eyes narrow. “I assume Hannibal has been helping you with cases? Catch me up, would you?”
Jack describes Georgia Madchen’s case, though the team hasn’t made a lot of progress without him. Not officially, anyway. Knowing Hannibal he’s probably been having tea and cookies with her for weeks. And it’s a relief to Will because it means that his memory of the years to come is real, but at the same time it’s not. Part of him covets the years he’s lost, but a deeper part of him is just so tired at the thought of living them over again. But then—
“Hey boss, we need you,” Beverly says.
Beverly. She’s standing in the doorway wearing tight, dark clothes, and she looks amazing. Beautiful. Her hair falls down as she moves, obscuring one side of her face, and Will shudders with the memory of seeing her. In sections.
Will feels his eyes well with tears. If he changes things, if he drags himself back through those years with Hannibal once more but does it better this time, if the goddamned teacup comes together, he can save Beverly. Abigail. Georgia. Hell, even Chilton didn’t deserve all the suffering he and Hannibal put him through.
He’d like to pre-emptively kill Mason Verger, though. What better way to get revenge than to do it before the person you want to get revenge on has even done anything to you? And he could honestly care less if Margot found killing Mason therapeutic or got her share of the Verger money; she wasn’t demented but that made all the morally questionable things she’d done or helped her brother get away with all the more reprehensible. Maybe being poor would help her become a better person—or she’d just have a child without Mason around to stop her. Will feels a bubble of mad laughter in his throat. He’d thought Hannibal sounded crazier talking about the damned teacup than he’d ever sounded talking about eating human flesh, and now Will had somehow managed to convince himself Hannibal was right about it. Will is a time traveler with foreknowledge. Maybe Hannibal was right about him being one of the gods.
Or about them sharing madness.
It’s madness. Absurd. Maybe he’s dead and this is hell. Eternal damnation. Hannibal would be so pleased to know that he could play with different endings for eternity. To live different lives and create different monsters with his manipulations.
“The mind is its own place and in itself, can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven,” Will mumbles.
“I’m trying to be sympathetic to your illness and pass along Jimmy and Brian’s awkward well wishes and you’re just quoting Paradise Lost at me, Will. Are you sure they unscrambled your brain?” Beverly asks. She crosses her arms and grins. “They’re supposed to be making you better, not making an omelette.”
Will had idealized her, he realizes. It floods back, how abrasive she could be. The thought fills him with fondness. “Sorry. Just thinking about things. My mind works just fine. According to Jack I just need some physical therapy and I’ll be back on the job soon.”
They leave, and Will’s doctors finally show up. Jack seems to know what he’s talking about, as they say he needs some physical therapy and he’ll have to take some drugs for a while for the encephalitis, but he’ll make a full recovery. He’s annoyed that Jack managed to get such current and correct information on his health. He doesn’t remember authorizing that—though he imagines Jack yelled and they just told him. He asks them to transfer him to another facility—one Jack and Alana and god willing Hannibal don’t know he’s at, and he begins to recover.
He’ll need to be completely healthy to match wits with Hannibal again.