A/N: So this thing was written at some point in 2015, and pretty much counts as the first piece of fanfiction I ever composed. It's really short, but I thought I'd put it up here on FF anyway. (Oh yeah, and spoiler alert for season two of Hannibal.)
"One can only see what one observes, and one observes only things that are already in the mind."
- Alphonse Bertillon
Dr. Lecter knew in that moment only one thing, other than the incessant drum of nature's tears upon the world around him.
He had killed Will Graham.
His fine shoes, once pristine and immaculate as the man himself, ran with blood and water, creating nary a scrape against the pavement as he walked. The roaring rain swallowed all sound, the night all signs of life, but the scent of blood curled between the drops in the air and past the keen nose of the good doctor. Jack Crawford's blood, Abigail's blood, Alana's blood, his blood. Will Graham's blood.
The universe wept, it seemed, as it always had for this moment.
Had he meant to do it?
Had he meant to drive the knife of betrayal so far? The sensations of the moment had not left him, reverberating through his consciousness like deep bass notes. He could recall the instant as if it still were playing out before him; the slight resistance of flesh against the blade, the flash of steel before the glistening crimson. The closeness of Will's gasping breaths near his ear and the feel of his quivering muscles.
He remembered the slip of his precision, no longer surgical, the grief that drove his hand into the ripping motion that dissected Will Graham. His insides, red and delectable as crushed cherries, spilling from their confines as the knife dug deep into his abdomen. Farther than Hannibal had perhaps intended.
He had held Will close, as if the rip between them could be breached one last time, as if neither had been cut by the others' machinations. He had offered him a gift, it had been turned away. So it had endured in their friendship, that perchance wounded was the only way Will could know Hannibal.
No stranger to manipulation, the doctor had been crafting the empath since their introduction, cutting pieces from the puzzle of Will's mind in hopes of having only his own fit in what remained. He had played both God and the Devil, but his humanity had died along with Misha, and perhaps his own missing fragments are what he saw in the unstable FBI profiler.
Shattered, now, split more intimately throughout than fine china against the law of gravity. What goes up must come down, Hannibal had known all too well that the delicate relationship they'd built would fissure. Had he known it would end in the death of possibly the only person that could understand him, maybe he would have played his hand differently.
Dr. Lecter knew the hollowness, left by the immensity of that point in time, would cave in on him soon enough and echo against the walls of his mind palace. All his life appeared to unfold this way, the opus of an accordion as it expanded and contracted, attempting to bend backwards on itself to remedy the unchangeable.
The thunder of the pummelling rain returns, as does the hints of chill edging the air around Hannibal Lecter despite the coat he wore. He pulled it no tighter around himself, let the cold tendrils of wind snake under his jacket and tug at his bloodied, ruined shirt.
Fate, the universe, it all seemed to have conspired towards one, irrevocable instant, destined to replay itself for eternity in his mind.
The moment when the teacup shatters.