Title: Snapshots
Author: Prentice
Rating: Mature
Fandom: Hannibal (TV)
Pairing: Hannibal/Will
Warning: Reference to child Abuse. Disturbing themes. Possessive Behavior. Unhealthy relationship. Canon-typical violence and gore.
Notes: This fic was inspired by a snapshot challenge (that was actually meant for photography but I hijacked and modified it for my own purposes). Anyway, the whole idea behind it is to tell the story of someone's life through a series of interconnected snapshots. I decided to do Will Grahams' life (and by extension, Hannibal's, as well). I don't really know how long this will be since I could, potentially, go on indefinitely and I don't write deathfics so...yeah. We could be here a while, folks.
Summary: The story of Will Grahams' life through a series of snapshots.
Will is five years old the first time his parents get divorced. He doesn't remember much of it. There are some vague recollections of harsh words he doesn't understand being volleyed over his head but, for the most part, it's a blur that never resolves itself.
He tries not to be too thankful for that.
His parents, Michael and Carolyn Graham, stay divorced for nearly a year before getting back together. They have a small private ceremony in front of friends and family less than a month after they start seeing one another again. At the reception they smile and laugh merrily with all the people who are there to celebrate the "new" couple with music and dancing and enough food to choke a gator.
At the end of the evening they kiss each other like it's the first time. Like they never want it to end.
Michael and Carolyn get divorced for the second time eighteen months later. It's not a pretty break-up and Will can only remember the sound of screaming. Lots and lots of screaming, the sharp shatter of a glass vase breaking against the wall, and his father's voice, low and deep, trying to get his mother to 'calm down.
She does. Eventually.
It takes another two unhappy years for his parents to get together for a third time. There is no ceremony this time; no acknowledgement of any kind. Instead one day Will wakes up to his father sitting at the kitchen table, face buried in the local paper and his mother smiling wide and bright and manic, like she hasn't since his father left the last time.
Will eats his breakfast extra carefully that morning, anxious and afraid to draw too much attention to himself, and doesn't wait to be excused before he's bolting out the door, heart hammering in his chest.
It takes less than a year for Will to come home from school to find his mother standing over his father with a butcher's knife, eyes gleaming with unshed tears and anger. Her lips quiver the second she sees him standing in the doorway, eyes wide and face pale, before hardening into a thin determined line. Her hands are icy cold and stiff when she pulls him into a fierce embrace, hot tears leaking into his tee shirt as his father's blood curls warmly against his toes.
Neither of them speak when they bundle his father's body into the bathroom's shower curtain, the plastic crinkling and wet, and wait until nightfall to haul his body out to the end of the dock near their home.
They push him into the murky water in continued silence, the low hiss of a nearby gator echoing eerily in the darkness.
No one asks where his father went. They're all too used to him leaving. Will is bitterly grateful for that.
Six months gone and Will's mother is going through the motions. She takes him on doctors' visits and to see therapists at the school's recommendation, and does an admirable job of pretending she doesn't know what's wrong with him or why he's having trouble sleeping. When the doctors suggest she check him in for observation, she politely declines, and when the therapists recommend medication, she grimaces, expression furious and sharp, before she adamantly refuses.
Will tries not to think about the row of bottles on his mother's nightstand and how much they actually might help her. If she'd take them, anyway. He doesn't think she does.
Not anymore.
Sometimes, Will finds his mother standing at the end of the dock in the middle of the night, her face blank as she stares out into the muddy darkness. Neither of them speak of it. Or the way Will sometimes hesitates to bring her back home.
He always does in the end, though. He's too young to live alone. Legally, anyway.
TBC