Shattered
"Your reason and your passion are the rudder and
sails of your sea faring soul.
If either your sails or your rudder be broken, you
can but toss and drift, or else be held at a standstill
in midseas.
For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.
"THE PROPHET" Khalil Gibran 1923
Chapter 1
Will Graham's hands moved swiftly, like those of a skilled surgeon. Long, sure fingers replaced gears, lubricating teeth as needed. Satisfied, he eyed the next problem, selecting appropriate parts. Rebuilding diesel engines was a poetry all its own. Precision, predictability, repetition; lovingly nuanced by his patient expertise. Considering for a moment, he chose his smallest wrench and began to tighten the joints. Muscle memory brought peace, letting him slip into the void. In that blackness without form or personality, he bathed in solace. If he was fortunate, after a day wrangling metal to his will, Fate might gift a few hours of dreamless sleep.
Monsoon season arrived with a flourish the week before. Another storm, the sixth in as many days, lashed the workshop skylight. A lifelong lover of southern rains, Graham closed his eyes, his senses shifting to the storm's rhythms. He'd missed these sounds. He'd missed many things: lazy summer afternoons that melted into muggy nights. The glow of dancing fireflies. Steel drawers filled with nuts and bolts instead of the victims of the latest sociopath.
Graham leaned back, his head resting against an exposed 4x 4. He reveled in any opportunity to simply be. Eidetic memory dominated his life. Rare. Typically found in children under the age of twelve. Many academics claimed eidetic memory was fiction, but then, they hadn't tested him. His gifts were legendary in law enforcement circles. How ironic that of the two people who most appreciated his uniqueness, one was a now infamous F.B.I. supervisor and the other, an even more infamous sociopath.
Will Graham's mind rarely skipped a beat, endlessly cataloging and evaluating the multitudes of data relentlessly streaming through every sense. Waking moments were frequently populated with nightmarish visions that forged pathways into his dreams. Months away from his Quantico classroom, his days peopled with healthcare professionals instead of corpses, had not changed his inner landscapes. Peace, with an imagination like Will Graham's, was rare.
His chest rose and fell in an easy rhythm. Time slowed. Unguarded moments, however, were not without challenge. Graham shuddered involuntarily, suddenly chilled. Ah, tonight was to be one of those nights. Lack of focus, given all that lay unresolved, stirred memory.
Dark. Chaotic. Decidedly untasty and greedy for attention. By now, he knew the signs. Fine, let them come. A breath later, time bent.
"Will." The all too familiar accent filled the workshop, as clearly as if Hannibal Lecter stood in the room. Larger than life, impossible to contain. Dominating space, even when starring in a memory. Hannibal made heads turn. Electrified lives. Created devoted admirers. Devastated futures. "We are just alike."
Even three fingers of Glenfiddich, failed to keep Lecter buried in his subconscious. "Are we?" Carefully constructed walls began to crumble as Will Graham opened his mind to the force before him. Hannibal's eyes. Cold. Dead. If he admitted the truth, Will suspected Lecter's true nature that first terse meeting in Jack Crawford's office. Graham's ire soared over what, to Jack's keen eyes, was a juvenile display of jealousy. In truth, Will's reaction was anything but an immature tantrum. His defensiveness stemmed from instinctual awareness of being in the presence of a predator. A knowing he tucked, barely acknowledged, into the darkest corners of his mind. Jack accepted the man and Crawford's assessment skills were legendary.
Water under the proverbial bridge. Graham was no slave to hindsight. One couldn't be and survive in law enforcement.
Hannibal. Brilliantly gifted. Brilliantly flawed. Deadly if provoked. An appraisal that, on the surface, could be applied to himself. However, close inspection blew that theory apart: Lecter's motivations and his diverged wildly.
Hannibal stirred, three-piece suited to perfection and not a hair out of place. He would not be ignored. "You are alone because you are unique."
"Touche, Dr. Lecter." Projection at its finest. Loneliness was their shared albatross; the single characteristic that shaped the drama they authored. Each accepting of their Fate until meeting the other: one hungry to focus on the similarities that bridged the abyss separating the two, the other happy to cross for the sake of justice. And yes, at times, playing with the Devil had been worth the risk.
But the cost? Graham yawned. Guilt enough to last a lifetime. He lived in exhaustion's shadow; sleep offered no relief for his brand of tired.
Rain continued to beat against the workshop's hardy board. Hypnotically soothing.
Graham slid further, this time into another night, another storm. Visions washed over him. Rain pelted his face, his pace quickened as he recognized the dark form sprawled on the sidewalk. Alana's azure eyes, the whites red with blood, her soul ever compassionate as she sent him to save Jack Crawford.
"Pleased with your design?" Hannibal's voice taunted.
"Not my design. I save lives." Graham clung to that truth, a flashing beacon in his sea of doubt and self-recrimination.
"Hubris, my friend." Hannibal opened his arms and beckoned him to look once more.
The scene fast forwarded to Graham walking past a pool of blood spreading ominously from the other side of the pantry door. A slight left and the freckled face he'd never thought to see again, begged him to understand she'd had no choice. Graham's brain burned with truth, "You never had a chance, Abigail." A young life ruled entirely by sociopaths; she left this earth knowing little else.
The dance began as it always did, the scene in Hannibal's kitchen replaying in the slowest of slow motion. Will saw, felt and heard every detail. Then again, from each participant's viewpoint. Followed, mercilessly, by every 'what if' his mind could conceive.
His imagination, gifted with endless scenarios, could not alter the outcome: Lives lay shattered. ( # detail Jack, Alana )There was no going back.
"Did you really think you could outmaneuver the Devil?"
"Enough!" Graham screamed hoarsely. He bolted upright and twisted, reaching for his heaviest spanner. Its weight would ground him in reality. The technique, one of Alana's favorites, rarely failed. Anticipating relief made him incautious. Mid-reach, he groaned in agony as searing pain tore through his lower body.
His primary physician's stern warning echoed, "At least a year. Maybe more. Your body has been through a hell few survive."
Will broke into a sweat, his hands shaking as he waited for the misery to fade. Graham massaged his temples, impatient for his heart rate and respirations to return to normal. These episodes exhausted him more than the workouts he added to his daily routine. Life, more than 1100 miles south of Wolf Trap, Virginia, was about one thing: returning norms. At least that's the story he weaved for those who asked.
He realized, of course, that 'normal', per Will Graham standards, had little to do with normal as defined by those around him.