Chapter Text
The morning light came without breakthrough.
The equation was still unfinished and dangerously close to a standstill. He needed to backtrack. He was running out of time.
Hannibal stood up from his spot near Will’s bed instead of admitting its futility.
He drank his coffee on the front porch out of an old mug that said I’d rather be fishing that Hannibal couldn’t imagine Will bought for himself. The price tag was only partially scratched off the bottom and wrinkled with water damage, surely a staple of some mandatory office Secret Santa for which Will was only really known by his few safe hobbies. But yes, he would rather be fishing, wouldn’t he?
Hannibal stood up straight when he noticed the dark figure guarding the house. Chiyoh walked cautiously toward him, eyes skirting back to the road. This property was far more open than the Lecter estate. Less places to hide from the road and more people willing to enter its borders. It was only a matter of time, and she knew it too.
Chiyoh met him on the porch, hesitant but kind-eyed. They rarely found a need for words between them, having developed an understanding of each other at a young age almost entirely without them. Now Chiyoh might slip away and go somewhere Hannibal would never find.
“Will you go home?” he asked, and then paused, considering what he really wanted to know. “Can you go home?”
“No more than you can,” she said with a knowing gaze.
He glanced down toward the rifle she held like it was another part of her body. She had always been loyal.
“Would you watch over me?”
“I will.” She looked toward her feet. “Not in a cage. Some beasts shouldn't be caged.”
He imagined himself caught in the darkness of that place they could never return to, in place of the man she had imprisoned for most of her life. Would Chiyoh truly be caught in such limbo if it was him in chains instead?
“Your obsessive and successful hunt, whose plight was it driven by? Mine? Yours?” he asked, and then saw it in her eyes.
“Mischa's,” she said.
She observed him for a moment and then asked something that he’d been expecting.
“Did you eat her?”
He bowed his head slightly in admission.
“Yes. But I did not kill her.”
Chiyoh seemed relieved by his honesty. It was worth more than she knew. The words escaped his mouth with the impersonal distance of a copied language he didn’t know, and that was difficult enough. The real truth of the matter existed somewhere unreachable. For her unfailing loyalty, she deserved at least an answer to her question.
Chiyoh had always offered a comforting security, one that Hannibal removed himself from. Placidity was a shame, but with age and experience, Hannibal could understand the appeal with less judgment.
“The most stable elements, Chiyoh, appear in the middle of the periodic table, roughly between iron and silver. Between iron and silver….” He felt it out in his mouth. “I think that's appropriate for you.”
He did not fault her for turning to leave without replying. It was more words than they usually exchanged. She left to linger just out of eyesight.
It was nice to know some things never changed.
Hannibal drank the last drudges of his coffee, cringing at the bitter grounds that hadn’t been filtered out by Will’s old machine.
He held the mug in front of his chest, took in a deep breath, and then let it fall from his grip.
Evidently, even the oldest and cheapest of mugs imprinted with silly slogans were more sturdy than the average tea cup. He picked up the cup and dropped it again, and then again until it cracked in half and one piece rolled off the porch.
He could drop half of Will’s mismatched mug cupboard at his feet and still nothing would be twitching together, but he considered trying just to see.
He was sure the noise woke Will so he returned inside, the door creaking as he re-entered. Will was already sitting up and shifting his stiff body. His notebook of equations for turning back time was left open on the foot of his bed. Hannibal had wanted it to be seen, for Will to understand the extent of his regret for what he suspected was to come. He retrieved his notebook as he sat near the foot of Will's bed.
He felt uncharacteristically unprepared. They’d had many goodbyes in the past and he couldn’t shake the feeling that this one would be more sustaining.
“Do we talk about teacups and time and the rules of disorder?” Hannibal asked, holding his notebook in his lap. Will had a mythical way about him, preternatural in that strange things tended to come about him, as if he was a prince in a fairytale rather than a wayward stand-in agent of the law. Perhaps he would know the missing variable in Hannibal’s equation.
“The teacup's broken. It's never going to gather itself back together again,” Will rasped.
His hair fell messily over the soiled bandage on his forehead. He was certain Will wouldn’t allow him the care of changing it this time.
“Not even in your mind?” Hannibal asked, because surely that was where salvation sat, with all the other treasures just out of Hannibal’s reach.
Hannibal had never wanted someone more.
“Your memory palace is building,” Hannibal continued, considering the undeniable presence that followed him to his furthest hiding places. It was jarring that someone could encroach on his most sacred of places, but if anyone could sidestep what was natural and expected, it was the man before him. Hannibal had long since stopped being able to control Will’s influence on him.
“It's full of new things. It shares some rooms with my own. I've discovered you there, victorious,” he continued, hopeful.
“When it comes to you and me, there can be no decisive victory,” Will replied.
“We are a zero-sum game?” Hannibal asked. If that was true then it hardly mattered how far back he searched for Will. They would never meet in the ideal he once dreamed.
Will looked past his shoulder, running his eyes over the emptiness of his home. His voice was gentle. It might have felt better if his rage was still recognizable.
“I miss my dogs,” he said. “I'm not going to miss you.”
In such simple words outlining exactly what made this place a home, and Hannibal had long lost that privilege. Will continued on, choosing his words carefully in what Hannibal knew was a rush to say goodbye.
“I'm not going to find you,” he said. “I’m not going to look for you. I don't want to know where you are, or what you do. I don't want to think about you anymore.”
Frustrated at his intransigence, Hannibal resisted it being such a simple ending. There was more to them than that, if only Will could accept it.
“You delight in wickedness and then berate yourself for the delight.”
He had delighted in that wickedness toward Hannibal before. He’d prefer that to being turned away, and perhaps Will knew it.
Will spoke clearly. “You delight. I tolerate. I don't have your appetite.”
Hannibal did not feel delight, nor did he have any appetite. Only a burning between his shoulder blades that rivalled the one in his chest.
“Goodbye, Hannibal,” Will said in finality, as if it wasn’t obvious enough.
Hannibal was not one to overstay his welcome, but if there was a way to escape this conclusion, he would have. He was at a loss and Will’s eyes were more damning than anyone’s had any right to be.
So he stood, tucking his notebook into his coat pocket, and took the last of his dignity with him.
He found shelter from the wind in Will’s garage at the end of the drive amidst rusted tools and a respectable deep freeze. Inexplicably, it was still on. It seemed that Will decided to continue to pay the electricity bill rather than get rid of the few stores of meat inside. It offered Hannibal some relief to lay with the fresh burn on his back against the cool surface.
He pulled out his notebook and propped it up on his stomach. Was his regret truly so strong that he couldn’t think of a way forward without erasing what he’d done?
It felt dishonest to say he would change what he’d already done. He couldn’t imagine getting to this place having not learned the sorrows of companionship and heartbreak. He’d rather enjoyed himself at times.
It felt more truthful to say he was merely greedy for more. Will made him feel a little selfish, and he wanted to covet every bit of him. It would not have been so hard to kill Will two nights ago. It would not have been so difficult to be gentler with Will those months ago. There was appeal in all of the different potentials and it was a shame he only had one.
Perhaps that was love. It was not the absence of hurt or the necessity of platitudes, just the restructuring of one’s life around another person, entirely against one’s will. He’d found himself longing for Will before he even knew him, as if he could go many years back and spend a bit more time with him.
The restructuring of a life was akin to a sacrifice of old values, and that may be his answer to placing Will more securely in his life in the future, even if it did in fact render him to being a bird in a cage.
Hannibal would not let Will forget him.
At night, he saw the police lights through the shed door.
He strode toward the vehicle, squinting at the headlights. A man—the unmistakeable and powerful figure of Jack Crawford—stepped before the vehicle so he was silhouetted by the flashing lights.
“He’s gone, Jack,” he heard Will say. Hannibal could imagine the scowl on Jack’s face as he knocked his cane against the ground in frustration. Hannibal quickened his pace.
“Jack,” Hannibal called from the darkness, finally stepping into the light. “I’m here.”
He stepped forward with his palms in the air until he could see Jack’s face. Strangely, there were no other officers, but perhaps the FBI had lost too much faith in Jack to give him that kind of control. They still would not turn away the Chesapeake Ripper if Jack delivered him on a platter, so he settled down onto his knees in the snow, trying not to favour his bad leg too much.
Jack smiled in satisfaction. That expression grew darker each time Hannibal saw him, the man changing in ways that Jack probably didn’t even realize.
“You finally caught the Chesapeake Ripper, Jack,” Hannibal said.
Curiously, Jack only stared down at him.
“Why’d you come alone, Jack?” Will demanded. Hannibal turned to look at him, standing there with his downtrodden expression and messy hair as if he’d never left his bed.
Hannibal caught his mistake as he noticed Will’s perceptive gaze on Jack. Perhaps he should have been more careful stepping into his own destruction.
“Why’d you come alone?” Will repeated. He stepped closer to the edge of his porch.
He lost the track and was spinning wildly off of it. It was time to fight, of course. Life was precious—his life was precious. His injured leg locked up as he tried to stand.
“I don’t think I want to catch you. I think I should have done this a long time ago,” Jack said. Hannibal looked back to see his hand deep in his pocket.
“Jack, hey,” Will said, and Hannibal could hear the sound of his feet rushing down the porch steps. In his distraction, Hannibal missed the source of the clicking noise.
A number of shots rang, from five feet in front of him to the tops of the trees, and for a moment he hoped he could have trust in his watcher, but his head was peculiarly hot and his knee hit the cold ground again.
“No, don’t!”
His body fell immobile just moments before his world turned as dark as the dreary sky above, and the last thing he thought was to wish for just one more chance. One more chance with the enraged, spiteful, screaming man bending down over his dying body.