Note: AU. Obviously.
Lost and Found (the twenty-six remix)
Freddie has nothing to do with the book. Abigail writes it on her own, cloistered in solitude like a nun, or quarantined like a disease vector, maybe. She has to do it alone.
The story she tells turns out to be mostly true, and more honest than Abigail remembers ever being. It's called The Shrike's Nest, and it's a thin, unimposing memoir of insanity with an artful photo of an empty bird's nest on the cover. The reactions are predictable - outrage, fascination, accusations and speculation, and countless calls for an apology.
If she's going to be honest, it bores her, completely.
My dad loved me. My dad wanted to kill me. This is why you know my name.
On their wedding night, he traced her scars as though connecting the dots to make sense of the bigger picture. Anyone else might have hated him for dwelling on them, for reminding her even now, but Abigail will never forget and has long been finished with pretending. She felt his fingertip tracing along each line as though he could read the nighttime sky and portents in what Dr. Lecter left of her. She quivered in lust and whispered, "Please, please," until he surrendered.
"I still don't believe you," Will said against her hair afterward.
"I know," she said, and told the truth again. "But I'm fine."
Fine is a continuum. A spectrum. Fine has everything to do with coming to terms with the intolerable things in your life. Abigail is fine.
Will is not fine. He may never be fine. She holds him when they sleep, and it fends off the things that haunt him, more nights than not. In the day his mind races, and he knows. He can't deny what's happened, or accept it.
(This is the problem with men who want to be heroes. The world isn't built for them. It's built for the villains, by the villains.)
He's awake, all of the sudden. He kisses the scar on her neck, and she aches with aimless love in that instant.
"I want to talk about it," he mumbles.
For the first time in a long time, she's afraid.
Abigail balances the camera, but hesitates once and again before touching the record button. "You don't have to do this," she says. "With me. Or anyone. And if you want to, maybe it's a better idea if – "
"You're ABD." Will fixes his gaze on her. "And you're my wife."
"I know." She still hates the way he talks down to her, like he's wiser, smarter, knows better. But that's just Will. "That doesn't mean I can help you with this."
"I trust you," Will says, in his impatient, harsh, desperate tone, and she folds.
(Will doesn't trust anyone anymore.)
"Whenever you're ready," she says, and touches her fingertips to his, across the table.
He looks into her face, searching, measuring her reaction, then rises to decidedly press the record button on the camera.
"I'm so sorry," Will finally whispers. "I was full of hubris. I made it worse, I thought that I could take it inside me and keep it from hurting anyone else. I thought I was strong enough."
"It's not your fault, Will."
"I let myself become him. I lost myself in him."
"So did I," she says, in a rush, furious. "I lost myself in both of them."
"You were innocent," he says roughly.
"So were you."
There's a pause. Will is looking at her just slightly over his glasses, as though he can't see her, like something hovers between them obscuring his view of her. Arguably, something is.
"Sometimes I think I love you because he loved you," he says, and gazes down at his hands in shame.
"He didn't love me," she insists. "You don't hurt someone you love. Not like that."
"Why would you marry me?" he asks, in plain frustration. "Because of what happened to us, because – "
Abigail raises her hands and then huffs when he starts to interrupt her before she gets to begin. "Because no one else would understand, Will! And because I believe both of us are more than what happened to us. Or we can be, if we try."
Will tenses. "Sometimes I don't know who I am," he says, voice and gaze low.
She smiles. "You're Will Graham. It's 11:58 pm, and you're in Baltimore, Maryland."
He just barely cracks a smile in return. "It felt good," he admits. The smile fades. "To be lost."
She touches his hand. "Now you're found," she says.
Maybe Will has exorcised the last of their demons by speaking its name. Temptation. Or maybe he's just accepted things for the way they are. There aren't pure-hearted heroes, or villains defeated without taking something precious along with them. There are no damsels in distress whose problems can be solved by a prince on a white horse placing a crown on her brow. The truth of stories is much simpler. There's just people, and power, and temptation.
Inexplicably, then, Will is crying.
"I can see you," he says, thickly, his eyes shining with tears. "I can see you."
He sounds so relieved, so happy. Her heart swells, breaks, something. "Will. Will, what do you see?" she presses.
"A light at the end of the tunnel," he says all at once. "A lighthouse. A beacon."
She kisses his knuckles. "Then let me guide you home."
There's a pause, when Will stands, turns off the camera, and meets her on the other side of the table. Then his hands are in her hair and he pulls her into a kiss, so full of his characteristic intensity. She imagines his desire is blistering, scalding, that she'll burst into flame when he breathes her name like a prayer. She can't imagine anything better.
But his eyes are searching, face fallen, affect flat, when he rests against the table, where he still has Abigail's knees parted and bare and aching with him.
"Stay with me, Will," she whispers, desperate.
It's barely audible when he speaks next. "I don't feel anything."
"I know. That's... you," she says, and exhales, shakily. "That's... what it feels like when you're alone in your own head."
He touches her knee, looks into her face, and kisses her tenderly, and she remembers as she fiercely kisses him back, a snatch of memory like a conversation heard from another room -
Do you even know who you're marrying?
She didn't know then, not for sure. She knows now. She made the right choice.
Abigail is Abigail is Abigail. The locus of control was always outside of her. She did things out of fear, defiance, loneliness, to take back what she once had and still deserved. Now she exists, in this moment.
This moment has infinite possibility.
For the last two years I've been rewiring myself. The way I was built, the way I've been used, was wrong. I didn't know another way. They call it folie a deux.
The insanity wasn't my choice, or my family's. It wasn't genetic. It wasn't a thing any of us could control. The insanity caught all of us; it made my dad kill, it made my mom blind to it all, it made me grow from broken roots into a twisted unnatural version of what I could have been. The insanity caught Will Graham, and nearly sent him over the edge for good.
The insanity is gone, now, despite all it's responsible for. All that's left is a shadow that never fades from the lives of all it touched, a reminder that it won after all.
It's changed us. And we'll never know who we might have been instead.
I would apologize, but would it make anything better?
She knows she was never his first choice. Alana Bloom was his first choice. But as some are baptized by fire, they were baptized by blood, the blood of her father, from the instant Will pulled the trigger again and again the Hobbs family kitchen. In this way, they were meant for each other.
The only way to survive the shadow is to know that you're not alone in its grasp, but also that you are alone in your own head. You are the mover, the thinker, the real, despite how lost you might feel in something else. Solipsism, for once, is of real use.
She goes to the library to think, her tiny office, the tight space comforting in its completeness. There's nothing and no one in the room with her, not even Will. It's easier to think, then.
She tries to think.
We're going to be okay.
We're going to be happy.
I'm going to be happy.
She begins to write.
My name is Abigail Hobbs. I have been acquitted of all charges of being an accessory to my father's murders, and of murdering Nick Boyle. I'm more than this story. I'm more than the broken pieces my dad and Dr. Lecter left of me.
Again.
I am me. I can build a new life with newer, simpler problems. I can build my own family. I can choose what I want to keep and leave all the rest behind me.
No.
My name is Abigail Graham, she writes. My name is Abby Graham. My name is Mrs. Graham.
Nothing sounds right.
My name is Abigail. She writes furiously, the scratching of her pen hard against the notebook like an echo of her dad whittling away at bone in the corner. I killed someone, in another life. It was a mistake, and I'm sorry.
The last stroke is lethal, a slash of ink across the page. The tension, the terror, lifts from around her, and leaves Abigail dazed in the wake of its sudden absence. She drops the pen. Then, for what feels like the first time in nearly ten years, she exhales.
"We're starting over," Abigail tells Will the night she gets the letter telling her she passed the EPPP. Her head feels light. She wonders if this is what it's like to be deliriously happy. "All three of us."
Will's smile is worth everything in that moment, because though they are broken and scarred, they are also the glue that mends and the time that heals each other. They are together. They are free. And for now, the shadows are vanquished by light.