Fandom: Hannibal (TV)
Rating: Teen up
Summary: After Will has taken Abigail to Minnesota, and before the events of Savoureux, he finds himself at Doctor Lecter’s front door, one final time.
Tags: Encephalitis, canon-divergence, ravenstag, mentions of blood and general canon-typical unpleasantness, general threat
Notes: I had an amazing chat with @the-bees-patella last night and encephalitis and agency were mentioned, and I remembered this tiny little piece a wrote a few weeks ago. I was actually planning for it to be the intro of a canon-divergence series. But, it became too dark, even for my standards.
Will Graham blinks, mouth open in a silent scream, and realises three things.
One, Will realises has a body again.
Two, his body is having a seizure. Three -
Will Graham is falling. One moment he is blinking groggily, sitting on the doorsteps of Doctor Lecter’s Baltimore house, and the next moment the ground has disappeared from under his feet. He feels his stomach lurching, salty, iodised wind pelting against his face until the skin feels rubbed off. Pain, slashing, burning, stabbing pain, is competing with nausea and vertigo, but the bloody gash of his mouth is split by a smile; Will is plummeting from the Heavens into a freezing cold abyss but he is bursting at the seams with joy. His arms clench harder against the sticky body pressed against his own and time stops.
Will Graham is a body no more. He is floating up and away as time inverts in one brilliant continuous stream. He witnesses two bodies floating up, sucked into the sky until they softly land, fit first, on the cliff’s edge. He sees Hannibal and his doppelgänger - suppressing an immaterial shiver at the bloody grimace his face wears - killing a dragon. Will witnesses everything that ever happened by the cliff house in the space of an. Hannibal biting through the man-dragon’s throat, Hannibal driving up the winding road with Abigail in the car, bloody, smiling, fearful, cunning Abigail, another young woman - carried and cared for - and an unconscious body - uncared for - before her. The instant ends as the house gets unmade, blinking away with a last image a Hannibal, smiling at the empty land with wind-swept hair and a sports jacket. Their eyes meet and Will mouths “I am dying, can you see?”
Will blinks, and he knows Molly, he blinks again and he’s spent three years in a corner of Hannibal’s cell. He reaches fingers that are not there, then, and he traces the knowing gaze of Venus. Behind him, Hannibal and Will talk circles around forgiveness and somewhere in his past he can feel his heart fluttering.
“Will. Talk to me, Will”
The insistent - if level - demand, rises to choke him. There is forest around him and Will is riding the feathered stag through the gates of Lecter Castle. How can he feel the warm feathers tickling his feet. He squeezes his thighs and he feels the thick muscles of the beast ripple in response. The sun hangs low in the horizon, the shadows frozen forever long and inky, fingers of a witch. Hooves clicking through corridors, Will knows they are the last beings in the world. He feels his belly swollen by the flesh of every single creature they devoured.
“Will, I need you to breathe”
He is no longer riding the stag, but he can still see the beast - spilling its steaming blood on the floor, just behind Hannibal’s shoulder. There is so much blood - the blood of everyone they consumed, he thinks. They are in the kitchen. There is a hand, firm, warm on his jaw, forcing his line of sight away from the beast. Hannibal’s pulse is almost steady, but his thumb is twitching as it bruises Will’s lips.
He meets Hannibal’s eyes and he lets the three realisations occur, for the infinite time.
One, Will realises has a body again.
Two, his body is having a seizure.
Three, he knows who Hannibal is.
They lock eyes, as the tremors slowly stop. Hannibal’s fingers trace the back of his neck deliberately, over and over again.
Somewhere over his shoulder, the stag lets out a death rattle and stills.
