‼️ New fic alert! ‼️
The long road home
This was such an indulgence, and it all started earlier this year w a pic of Mads where it looked like he ran a bar. Somehow I took that and invented an entire AU where Hannibal owns a bar that Will frequents bc he is dependent on alcohol to avoid the complexity of emotions. Totally normal thing to do…!
35k words later and here it is. I never intended to post it, it was just a silly lil project I was sharing with friends, but it felt a bit wasteful keeping it to myself! Hopefully it finds its audience :)
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PREVIEW (pretty long sorry!)
It’s unlike anything he’s ever felt in his life, but not in the way he expects. It’s a shock, first and foremost, but he’s more surprised by how numb he feels, from head to toe, a blanket of emptiness that settles on his shoulders and begins to slowly drown him.
The death of Will’s father came suddenly and unexpectedly. After eight years of almost no contact, Will hadn’t expected to feel anything at all, and in a way he was right. But in another way he was completely wrong. He doesn’t feel nothing, what he feels is the absence of something, and it looms over him constantly like a heavy, unshakeable shadow, always present but never fully seen. There’s a knot in his stomach and a lump in his throat that won’t go away. He feels restless and incomplete. He feels the permanent burgeoning of something, like he’s on the brink of an abyss, and it scares him to death.
His initial response is diversion. Something that will distract him from the feeling and push it far, far away, so that he doesn’t have to deal with it. He tells himself it’s a temporary fix until he’s ready to feel whatever he needs to feel, even though he doesn’t really understand why he feels anything at all. His father was distant, aloof and often cold. They rarely saw eye to eye, and Will has hardly thought about him in the years that have passed since they last saw each other. Until now. Now he’ll never see or speak to him again.
Drinking works, for a time. One glass before bed to turn off his thoughts turns into a glass with dinner to make the evening pass by in a haze instead of a hardship, but it only continues to escalate. He finds himself craving the indistinctness in his head, the escape and the sanctuary that alcohol provides him, and quickly his temporary fix becomes a longer-term solution. A habit he can always rely on to fade every incomprehensible thing that he’s feeling down to nothing at all.
Will has never considered himself avoidant, but if he stopped to think about it he would probably realise that evading the intensity of his emotions has been a game in his life that he has long been the champion of. It feels, to him, that this new and unfamiliar emotional response requires a new and unfamiliar battle plan, and eventually, rather than considering himself an alcoholic, he considers himself a person who is simply existing the best way he can in a world filled with unpredictable horrors.
His father left him his house — the house Will grew up in, the house he left when he turned sixteen. He didn’t go far, he never could convince himself to leave more than a few towns away, but returning feels like visiting another planet, another lifetime. Seeing it again, empty and hollow, is eery and discomforting, but despite how he feels, Will finds the idea of selling it to a stranger almost unbearable.
The plan had been to come here, make arrangements and leave, but on his first day Will notices a leaking drain, then a hole in the fascia, and before he knows it he’s chopping wood out back like he did when he was a kid. Hours and hours lost to it until the store is overflowing. A house in the forest, secluded and solitary, but still close enough that he can drive into work. It should be a sanctuary, but there’s a part of Will that still feels grief sticking in his throat every time he stumbles across another memory in the attic.
He begins to inadvertently collect strays. They have a habit of finding the house, or finding Will. He realises that people often dump their unwanted pets on the edge of the forest, his forest, as if they know a man in need of a project to nurture lies in wait. He takes each and every one in, trains them diligently, walks them as a pack well into the night. The routine helps at first, but every time Will returns to his bottle of whisky and his endless, inescapable thoughts.
Eventually, Will realises the dogs and the alcohol in the quiet of his new home aren’t enough, and he finds himself trudging through the snow to a bar he’s passed several times but never once ventured inside of. Just to be somewhere new, just to feel something different.
That’s how he meets Hannibal.
Keep reading…
