Hannibal watches.
The ache in his broken arm is a distant melody, the pain of the bullet wound more acute as Will slices away the bandages to expose it. He thinks, watching Will's hands work the scissors, the concentration carved on his battered face, that it might take him some time to understand exactly what has changed.
The sun filtering through the crimson gauze of the curtains makes Will's skin look red and translucent. It turns his changeable eyes a faded maroon. Light flashes off the steel handle of the scissors as he sets them on the bedside table.
The wound looks agreeable enough - there is little swelling and no redness, and the stitches are half-way decent.
"This next part hurts," Will says, with no particular inflection on any of his words. Of course, he is right - the alginate dressing rasps like steel wool when Will packs it against the wound. Hannibal closes his eyes and schools his face in stillness.
"Turn over," Will says, and Hannibal braces the bed rail with his good arm to turn onto his side so Will can change the dressing over the entry wound.
"What's it look like?"
"Tidy. Narrow. The bullet made more of a mess going out than coming in."
Hannibal settles onto his back again. Doing so hurts, but he does not wish to wince and so he doesn't.
"I recognize this safe house," Hannibal says, "but I can remember nothing of how we got here." The memory of hitting the water, of being buffeted away from Will by the force of the waves merges with that of the sting of Matthew Brown's dart and sinking down into the bright blueness of the pool's bottom. He thinks that he must be more badly off than he realized for that memory to have without his consent escaped the oubliette to which he sentenced it.
There is more that he wants to say - a hundred questions and a thousand professions - but weariness is closing over him. He understands that rest is something that his body needs now, and he does not fight it.
There is a memory, as shadowed as the black water which they had fallen into. Will remembers waving down the car, using the blood on his clothing and his own ragged half-drown body to lure the driver into well-intentioned foolishness, pulling him out from behind the wheel and hitting the man over the head with the rock that he had secreted in his palm until he crumpled to the ground and stayed there.
Will considered hitting the man again, as many times as it took with such a crude tool - or better, wrapping his hands around the sunburned throat.
Hannibal would have killed him, Will knew - for the pleasure of it and to protect them both - and that knowledge as much as anything else was the decisive factor. He left the unconscious man tied at the wrists under a large tree, just out of the sightline of the road, and then he got Hannibal into the car.
Will thought it most likely that the man survived.
He'd called Chiyoh at the number that Hannibal had given him to memorize, and she told him where to go.
"That surgeon is intolerable," Will says, when the man has finished inspecting Hannibal and has gone. "He reeks of hogs."
"He reminds you of Cordell." Will doesn't say anything, but the flash of teeth as he glares at the door through which the man has disappeared is answer enough. The anger is gratifying, especially because it is directed away from Hannibal.
"He's a worm," Hannibal agrees, "He wouldn't have been my first choice, but if he were more than semi-competent he wouldn't be taking these sorts of housecalls.
"He did a hatchet job on your stitches, Will, that scar's going to be worse than it need be."
"He didn't like touching me. His hands shook. He rushed through it."
No great wonder, Hannibal thinks, but does not say. Will has seethed, openly, a great deal of the time that they have been here. He'd hope that this thing, whatever it was, would burn itself out, but increasingly implosion seems the more likely outcome.
"If it had been up to me I'd rather have done the work on you myself. You should let me take the stitches out and do it over."
The movement of Will's head to the side and back again is nearly imperceivable. "It's fine."
"I want to keep an eye on this for a few more days," he continues, motioning towards his bandaged abdomen, "to make sure that there isn't anything that I can't handle myself or that you can't do for me. After that, call him back here - tell him you think my wound is inflicted - and kill him."
"I'll take care of it," Will says, curtly, as though Hannibal has repeated something that they've already discussed. Hannibal bites back his annoyance, but knows that Will sees it anyway.
Hannibal is subtle.
There is nothing obvious as a cringe - or even a flinch.
It's his head tilted back on his pillow, bare neck stretched out like an invitation - or perhaps a dare - eyes closed, though Will knows that he is not asleep.
It is, at most, the briefest pause in the intake of breath upon Will's touch, a slight clamines to the skin which at first had lead Will to fear the onset of fever, eyes that are a tad too intent in their watchfulness.
It takes Will longer than it ought to figure out what's going on, though he supposes this has always been the case with himself and Hannibal.
"You think that I'm going to hurt you," he says, when it clicks into place. "You are waiting for me to hurt you."
Hannibal does not deny this.
Everything inside of Will has been so close to the surface since the fall. He'd thought, when he made his decision, that the world might go grey for him afterwards, that some fundamental piece of himself would grow numb and die. The exact opposite has happened. The world around him hums with vibrancy and life, in the very way, he is sure, that it does for Hannibal.
He is more himself than he has ever been, and he is, very often, Hannibal as well. His feelings are huge and he is a speck lost among them. He cannot contain or conceal them - moreover, feels no urge to do so. The anger, now, is overwhelming.
"Where the fuck ," he spits, "do you get off being scared of me?"
Their snarls are mirrors of one another.
"How long, Will, until your next bout of self-flagellation? How long until you decide that this is all too ugly for you, too far out of line with your sensibilities, and you decide that we both ought to be put down like rabid dogs?"
"You don't know shit."
Hannibal says nothing. He glares, holding Will's gaze.
Will breaks first. He gets to his feet, paces in front of the bed. "What are you after - an apology? Like hell I'll give you one."
Hannibal knows that Will has left the bandage scissors sitting on the bedside table again. He remembers seeing them there, and though he does not look towards them now, Hannibal finds himself deeply worried by their potentialities.
Reassurance, he thinks, but he says, "An explanation, Will."
Will refuses. His words come rapid fire, grievances gone half a decade barely voiced. "Don't you get it into your head that you're the wounded party here - don't act aggrieved. You're like a bull in a china store when you don't get your way. It is so ugly. Do you even understand how ugly it is?"
"You did push me off a cliff," Hannibal says, and is surprised by the mildness of his own voice.
Will's laugh is short and bitter. His anger is like a blood clot caught beside the hinge of his jaw, throbbing hotly there. If it breaks free it might kill them both. He knows this but he keeps going anyway. "Are we tallying up scores now?"
Hannibal does not look towards the scissors, but perhaps his body leans in some manner unperceivable even to himself in their direction, because Will snaps, "Stop thinking about those."
He's quick as a snake, even now - drugged and busted half to death - but Will is just a hair faster. The scissors are in Will's hand, and then the blade is at Hannibal's throat.
Hannibal's upper lip flexes, the tiniest hint of a snarl that he can't conceal completely. He seethes with outraged resentment, but pushes his head back into the pillow to bare more of his neck, nostrils flaring.
The edge of Will's hand touches the underside of Hannibal's chin, radiating heat. The metal is cold against his skin. It nips at his adam's apple when he speaks. "You can do it," he says, "and I won't fight you and it won't stop me loving you."
He says this, knowing that it is a lie. It would never have occurred to him to reach for the scissors if it were not a lie. And too, he knows that there have been times when his body has fought to live, despite what his heart or mind said. He has, in the past, taken the soup, knowing.
But he wants very badly for it to be the truth.
Will steps back, slipping the scissors into his pocket as he does so. When his calves bump against his chair he falls back into it, bonelessly.
He wets his lips. "This is going to be hard," Will says, looking down at his hands, folded across his spread knees.
"I know."
The words come slowly, as though each syllable is a revelation. "But there's nothing else that I want."
"Will," Hannibal says, the cadence of his speech matching Will's own, "are you glad that we didn't die?"
"I thought you were dead when I found you," Will says, and it is the first time he has consented to speak of this. "Then when I saw that you weren't, I thought how easy it would be to pull you back into the water and hold you under until... Until it was over and I was out of this. You were bled alabaster white and broken in more places than I wanted to count. You wouldn't have been able to stop me."
Hannibal's mouth is dry. "Would you have watched my face, from above the black water, looked to see if my eyes opened, searching for you - for any escape?"
His eyes are searching now. Will has seen starving strays with eyes that searched like that. "I don't know. I would have looked upwards and watched the moon, I think."
Will pauses. "But I thought about how easy it would be," he says again, his words slow and deliberate, as though he were considering each one as he said it before moving onto the next, "except that I knew that I didn't want out."
Every part of him that wanted to end this with Hannibal - that wanted to end himself and Hannibal - felt weak and waterlogged, pitiful in a way that Hannibal was not and could never be, not matter how close he came to death's door. Beaten.
Dead.
There's a shine to Hannibal's eyes, a spark of hope, but the suspicion that draws his eyelids just a shade narrower than they would otherwise be does not lift.
"And what was it like, realizing that?"
"It was an incalculable relief," he says, and sighs.
The smile on his lips is very faint, but Hannibal thinks that if he offers a stronger one that Will will be able to do the same. He tries it and finds that he is right. "This is going to be hard," Will says again, "but I'm glad we're alive, Hannibal. I'm glad that I didn't kill you."
Hannibal feels much of the tension that he had been holding onto leave his body. He considers asking, "Will you try again?" but does not think that he wants the answer. Knows really, that Will could not answer it now with any real certainty.
He takes what he has been given, and allows himself to be glad along with Will.