Author's Note: Written as a birthday present for my friend, MsRedmobile, over on AO3. For everyone who doesn't know what this nonsense is, MsRed and I have been flailing about this crossover for like, four months in the comments section on my fic, Simple. Because reasons, and also dogs. We love dogs. There aren't nearly enough dogs. Anyway, I don't think you really need to read the other story to get what's going on here (because this is sort of an 'after the events AU,' and there aren't really any spoilers), still taking place post-CATWS. Hannibal-wise, this is Canon Divergent as of episode 4 of Season 2, in that Beverly didn't go lurking around Hannibal's house and find his murder dungeon, so she's still alive and working with Will to get proof that he's the real Chesapeake Ripper. Miriam Lass has still been found, Chilton still got shot in the face, and this fic starts the night after episode 7.

Relevant Tags include: Misunderstandings, Mistaken Identity, Objectification, Assets & Handlers, Dogs, Bonding, Adoption, and an Unreliable Narrator. Other additional tags will be added as they become necessary.

Pack Mentality
Chapter One

He wakes because someone is barking.

Will struggles against the tangle of bedsheets, feeling too warm and breathing hard. He doesn't remember what he'd been dreaming of, but he can guess that it's more of the depraved, dark imagery that has plagued him since taking on the Minnesota Shrike case. The Ravenstag, maybe. Or the Wendigo, who shows up in shadows even when he thinks he's awake. He's comforted by the fact that he's in his own bed and there's no mud on his feet this time.

It takes him a few more moments to find his boots, which he slips on without socks, and grab his jacket on the way to the door. He only counts five dogs crowded around the entry, ears cocked and tails motionless. Winston, a fluffy mutt and his latest stray, is whining, nosing at the bottom of the door. Dakota, the pitbull mix he'd started fostering when her owners were arrested on suspicion of dog-fighting and then 'accidentally' forgot to give back before moving to Virginia, is the one barking, and Oscar, the cattle dog-labrador pup he'd pulled out of a cardboard box in a parking lot six months after that, follows her lead and joins in. Coop and Teddy, a white chin-wa and a brown bichon-havenese, respectively, keep their mouths shut. They're both a bit older than the rest of his dogs by several years; Will had received them as a surprise inheritance when a neighbor died back when he was still living in New Orleans.

He doesn't see Buster, the jack russell terrier with a knack for escaping, or Madison, the bernese-shepherd mix he'd rescued from a fencepost a year ago.

"Back, back, everybody back," he grumbles to the dogs, who don't so much move out of the way as shift around his legs when he pushes forward. It takes a little maneuvering to get himself outside without letting anyone else out, but Will manages. He's had a lot of practice.

There's snow on the ground, which isn't at all uncommon in this part of Wolftrap, given the season. Will's breath puffs out in a white cloud, and he crosses his arms over his chest, hands in his armpits as he shivers and looks out over the yard. There are tracks in the snow, paw prints and deep troughs dug in the places where it was too deep for Buster to walk, leading out towards the woods. He whistles and tries to call them back to the house, not really expecting it to work.

Buster's a little shit who never comes when called, and Madison doesn't ever go anywhere without him.

He curses, and heads out into the dark.

He's not quite sure how it happens, but he comes back with an extra stray.

The man is not a dog, but he sits on the floor with the dogs in front of the fireplace, stares into the flames and doesn't speak. When Will is around him, he feels strange; an odd sensation like he's not quite human anymore. It's different from the nightmare stag that wakes him sweating from restless dreams. This is cold, like blued steel and ice. This feels empty and drifting and confused. Will knows that he's feeling what the man is feeling, that this is just his empathic nature kicking in, but he can't help it, he –

He feels like a tool, a weapon. A rifle, smooth bore and deadly. It is. . . disconcerting, to say the least.

"Do you need anything?" Will asks. The house lights are all off, the doors relocked, and he has a pot of coffee started, despite the hour. He'd found the man kneeling by the creek a half-mile into Will's property, staring at the trickle of water and impossibly still. Madison had been licking at his face, trying to tease some kind of response out of him. Buster had been snuffling around his wet boots.

Will had enough experience with his own dissociative fugues to know one when he saw it.

It had been surprisingly easy to coax the man back with him, Buster tucked under one arm and his free hand on the man's right shoulder as he guided him towards the house, Madison weaving around their legs and causing them to stumble every ten or so feet. The man had seemed dazed, but wouldn't allow Will to stand on his left side, had quickly stuffed his left hand into the pocket of his worn, hooded sweatshirt. He wasn't wearing a coat, and there were snowflakes caught in his hair and on his eyelashes, like he'd been out when it first started to come down earlier in the evening.

That would have been hours ago. Will was worried about frostbite and hypothermia.

The man shakes his head slowly from side to side. Will fixes them both a cup of coffee and sets one down on the small side table near his armchair in case the man changes his mind. The man's pale eyes dart to it for a moment, following the movement in his periphery, before he returns his attention to the fire.

"I'm not allowed," the man says after a long silence. Will frowns, brows drawn.

"Allowed. . .?"

"Coffee." It is a terse, concise reply. He speaks with a lack of inflection. It's all very cut and dry, monotone and flat. Drab, he thinks, which is not an adjective he would normally use to describe a sound.

"Ah," Will replies, looking into the contents of his own mug. He's drinking it black. "Well. I won't tell if you won't."

The man's eyes flick back to him.

"You're an asset?" the man asks, his voice quiet and hoarse in the warming air of the house. There's a dog sitting on either side of him, Dakota on his left and Oscar on the right, Winston curled in front with his head in the man's lap. The man has his right hand on the dog's head, scratching behind his ears in that way that always gets Winston's tongue lolling and his tail wagging. He is wearing black gloves, thin and textured. Tactical. For shooting, it looks like.

Madison and Buster are laying closer to the fire, drying out wet paws after being banished from Will's bed upon their return. The small, circular dog bed has been dragged over as well, with Coop curled inside, head propped on the edge as he watches their exchange with small, expressive twitches of his fuzzy brows. Teddy is snoring softly on one of Will's pillows.

Will nods. He is a lot of things lately. A teacher, an ex-cop, a profiler. A patient, a friend, a fool. A psychopath, a murderer, an acquitted criminal. To someone, he's sure that he is, indeed, a resource of some value.

"Yes," he pauses, then adds, "For the FBI."

"Your handler is an agent, then. For the FBI." The man doesn't look up or nod or turn his head. He stays focused on the flames and pets the dog. "I belong to the Army."

His hair is too long, dirty and unkempt, and he's unshaven. His clothes are disheveled and unwashed. He hasn't bathed in several days. There is a precision to his movements, something trained and lethal, but it isn't military. Will knows military men, and at the end of the day, they are still men.

Perhaps he was in the Army, once, but he certainly isn't now. The Army, then, is part of the delusion, his mind's way of making sense of whatever has happened to him. Will can understand that. His way of making sense of things is to hallucinate symbolic visions and experience long spirals of hyper-violent intrusive thoughts. Will's method involves fracturing along the delicate, strained lines of his sanity and clawing at the suffocating weight of madness. Honestly, the man might be on to something if this Army coping strategy is working at all.

But, the facts remain: this man is not in the Army. This man isn't really a man at all. He doesn't feel like a man, like a person, like anyone that Will has encountered before. He feels like a rifle. A weapon. A resource of value. Asset, he supposes, would then make for a fitting descriptor.

"I have a captain," the asset says. "We got captains in the Army."

They are silent after that admission, which seems to be the end of what the asset had wanted to say to him. Will sips his coffee. There was an accent, subtle and brief, on the last statement that hadn't been present on anything else he'd said earlier. Winston pants happily, tail wagging and drooling a little on the man's leg.

"I had a captain when I was on the police force," Will says. The asset turns his head at last, regarding Will carefully. "Before the FBI."

"Did you like your captain?" the asset asks. The accent does not return. Will offers him a small, tight half-smile.

"Not particularly. I like Agent Crawford more. He's a good man," Will's smile falters, and he looks away into the fire. "He doesn't always listen to me when he should, but he's a good man."

"My captain is a good man," the asset says. He brushes his thumb over the soft fur between Winston's eyes, as though smoothing out worry wrinkles. Winston closes his eyes. "He doesn't have to listen to me because I'm a stupid jerk and I wasn't made for thinking."

It isn't said with malice, or bitterness. It's stated with the same lack of emotional investment that he'd used when informing Will that he wasn't allowed coffee. It is not his own neutral thought, but rather, the asset is repeating something that he has been told, most likely several times and in various stages of awareness. Will is struck by the odd idea that perhaps whatever position this nameless captain holds over the asset is less like his superior-subordinate relationship with Jack Crawford and more akin to his complicated association with Hannibal Lecter.

The asset may have escaped some kind of captivity or experiment. He's certainly been brainwashed at some point, and from Will's own experiences he knows that takes time and repeat offenses to be done properly. They have a surprising amount in common, then. Hell, even the dogs like him.

Will hasn't believed in coincidence much lately, not since he stumbled into the Chesapeake Ripper's twisted games. So, if it isn't a coincidence, then it's part of a new plot, some grand overture that Lecter is orchestrating.

Maybe this man is supposed to take the fall for the Ripper's next round of victims. The team is, more or less, aware that Doctor Chilton, despite the elaborately gruesome – and all too convenient – set up in his home, was not the real Chesapeake Ripper any more than Gideon had been. And with Chilton dead, Lecter will need someone to direct the attention to. Will had thought that man would be himself, since he was so expertly primed as a recently exonerated but still suspect person.

He's not sure if he's relieved or disappointed that there's a possibility that Lecter has someone else in mind.

Then again, it wouldn't be the first time that Will has read the situation wrong. Maybe he's supposed to kill this man, make it a symbolic victory for the Ripper as Will destroys himself to be reborn as another onyx-skinned monster rising out of the blood.

Or maybe the asset is supposed to kill Will.

Whatever the case may be, it can't be a coincidence that he ended up on Will's property.

"You get to stay with the dogs?" the asset asks, rousing Will from his thoughts. There's a hushed property to his tone now, like this is something important to him. Something warm and bright and good, and Will feels it in a way that's difficult to articulate. He feels it in half-remembered sensations, the rattle of a train like static behind his eyes, the cold so biting that it stings his throat. The sound tastes like fear feels, like ice under his skin and the Wendigo's footfalls rippling in his mind, ever-growing concentric rings spreading out from where he landed in the snow when he fell and fell and fell.

Dakota crawls closer to the asset, her chest sliding along the floorboards until she can worm her head under his arm and rest her head on his lap as well. Her nose bumps into Winston's muzzle. Will takes another drink of his coffee, which is beginning to cool.

"They're my dogs," Will replies. The asset smiles, lopsided and charming. It crinkles the corners of his eyes. Will thinks it is a lingering piece of whoever he might have been, before all this.

"I was assigned dogs, back at the base." The asset puts his left hand on Dakota's head, so much more careful with her than he had been with Winston. Or perhaps, with that hand. "Not the tower. There aren't any dogs at the tower. I'm assigned a soldier there, but I would like dogs. We'd be good with them. I like the bases with the dogs better than the ones with furnaces."

There's a lot in those sentences to unpack. Will chooses the first one, the most pressing, in the hopes that it will give him some clue where Lecter has been keeping him. He asks, "The base?"

"It's a big house, in Sosnogorsk, behind the railway and away from the mines and the work camps. The training is hard there. They keep the dogs in the back and the guards downstairs."

Will has no idea where Sosnogorsk is. He assumes Europe, and given the sound of the name, he feels confident that it's probably in a former Soviet-bloc country. Lecter is originally from somewhere around there; Lithuania or Estonia or the Ukraine or something. Perhaps the asset is an old associate of Lecter's that he's flown in to assist him.

"What did they train you for there?" Will asks.

"They didn't," the asset answers. "The матрона had me carry bodies from the basement and I looked after the dogs. We didn't lose any dogs while I was there."

That doesn't sound like Lecter or his body of work. Will frowns. He must have asked the wrong question. "Where's the tower?"

"It's in New York," the asset pauses, removes his hand from the mutt in front of him and watches as Winston tilts his head to one side in confusion. He mirrors the action. "A part that I've been to but not the part I remember, not the part I know. I've never been to New York."

Will thinks he means first the state, and then the city, though it isn't really clear. He's not sure if the asset even knows. His mind is a jumble of wires and broken glass, still firing and reflecting but not always making the connection it means to or needs in any given moment.

Oscar whines and sits up, holding up a paw and setting it on the asset to get his attention. The asset complies with the nonverbal request and rubs at the underside of Oscar's jaw, then down his throat and over his breastbone.

He hasn't made much progress on solving this new piece of the puzzle, but he knows that he's already on thin ice with Jack and can't afford a psychopathic shadow following him down the halls when he checks in. Will finishes his coffee and stands up, stretching a little. The asset ignores him.

Not the Will can blame him. He'd rather spend time with the dogs, too.

"I have to go to work in a few hours," Will tells him. "Will you stay until I get back?"

The asset nods. "My captain will come get me. He always does."