I'm rewatching Hannibal, and finally contributing to the fandom for one of the greatest shows I've ever seen. I hope you enjoy.
Opus Posthumous
—
adagio lacrimoso
—
Will Graham remembers playing the piano. Not much and never well, but his dad demonstrated his own meager skills over the years and Will was an exceptionally fast learner. He can still tease skeletal versions of a few songs from the keys of the battered spinet at home.
Former home, he corrects himself, almost automatically. He'd left the piano at the house in Wolf Trap when he moved in with Molly. He isn't sure why the memory lifts itself with all the sudden and mournful presence of a ghost; it isn't as though he's ever considered it a loss before. He'd gotten the instrument on a whim, and only because the woman at the yard sale was offering it free to whomever would move it.
He glances through the glass window-walls of the house where Hannibal has driven them, notes the sleek black grand piano inside that more than lives up to its name, and idly wonders how Hannibal would react to a one-fingered rendition of Mary Had a Little Lamb.
Molly had a little lamb, a voice in his head corrects and accuses — the voice that sounds entirely too much like Hannibal. Suppressing that voice is a well-honed habit after the past three years; he imagines the words turning to smoke and floating away on the wind rushing past him, urging both him and his thoughts toward the cliff at his feet and the Chesapeake Bay beyond.
Even so high above the water, the salty tang of the air is enough to fire off a parade of memories. Will is suddenly submerged in the creak of ancient docks as he walks beside his dad, the feel of the warm Gulf waters lapping the sides of countless boats as he examines the motors, the sweet, moldering smell of the wooden planks when they were damp and chilled with rain and waves. But he is not safe in the past, warmed by the humid heat of Mississippi and Louisiana. He is here.
With Hannibal.
His mind twists again, and he is back in Dr. Lecter's office, drawing clocks and anchoring himself with purposeful words. My name is Will Graham. I am in Baltimore, Maryland. Across from him, Hannibal smiles.
The images dissolve in a few blinks, and he is left staring at the cold, glittering water far below. He's not in Baltimore anymore. He wonders whether the rest of his statement is still true. I am Will Graham…
His coat isn't enough to keep out the chill of the wind that pushes and plucks at him with iron-clad determination.
Will shivers.
—
andante agitato
—
Hannibal disappears almost the moment he unlocks the front door, but Will catches the way his eyes trace the open living room fondly, the way his fingertips brush the glossy finish of the piano as he walks past. He feels a stab of sadness that Hannibal has been deprived of music for so many years. But the emotion is probably Hannibal's and not his own, so he twists away from it and stands in stony silence, unmoving as the furniture covered in plastic to protect it from both dust and time. There is a bookcase against one wall, packed with thick volumes. He entertains the idea of uncovering it and browsing the collection of the erstwhile Chesapeake Ripper.
He can't muster the necessary focus in the end. Besides, he knows well enough what Hannibal reads. There was a time when they discussed books, although Will didn't read much beyond criminology and forensics texts when they first knew each other. He rarely reads at all, now, even avoiding the paper Molly has delivered. He always hears the headlines in Jack Crawford's voice. Slain Family Linked to Tooth Fairy Murders. Jack's measured tone could make any statement an accusation, and any accusation a chain forged of guilt. So he doesn't read. That had been different, once.
Will remembers the battered paperback version of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes that rested beside his bed in Biloxi and then New Orleans, and found its final resting place high on a dusty shelf in Wolf Trap. Was it still there? He can't remember taking it with him. He'd thumbed through the pages as a child, long after Dad announced lights out, and wondered what it would be like to be the famous consulting detective who could see everything the police missed.
Thirty years later he knows precisely what it's like, and he sympathizes with Holmes' morphine habit entirely.
Sherlock Holmes, who thought of emotion as the grit in the sensitive instrument of his mind. A crack splintering through a high-powered lens. Empathy is Will's instrument, emotion the very lens through which he focuses. Of course, lenses can also channel light and heat to the point of burning. Phantom flames tease at the edge of his vision.
Am I alive?
Years have passed, and still Georgia Madchen has the ability to make him wince. He sees the flash of a pale face under his bed, bloodless fingertips brushing his as she reached for someone, anyone; a hyperbaric chamber and a pleased, troubled smile; finally, he sees the spark that reduces it all to charcoal. Am I alive?
Not anymore.
Her fingers ghost across his, and he can almost see her sad smile out of the corner of his eye. Hannibal killed her, and Will can't muster up any anger over the fact. He wonders if he's numb or crazy or something far worse.
He used to worry about being crazy. He doesn't anymore.
Which probably means that he is.
Folie à deux, Alana's voice surfaces in his mind next, warm and helpful and as unbroken as her bones and the second story window of Hannibal's home, once upon a time. He remembers when Alana was kind and her smile was genuine. Another thing Hannibal killed and didn't mourn. He searches his heart again and still can't find the anger he craves. The anger that used to be within easy reach.
Alana's voice translates quietly in his head, almost an afterthought: Madness shared by two.
Hannibal moves so silently that Will feels rather than hears the moment he reenters the room. He uncovers the piano first, lifting the lid with gentle care, and brushes his fingers across the keys in a motion that's almost a caress. The scales he plays are light and sure, and he gains speed as he plays up and down the length of the piano. It's a little out of tune, even to Will's untrained ears. Hannibal's lips tighten, but he nods in concession to the inevitable decay of time. A short pause, and he begins playing in earnest. Will thinks it might be Mozart, but he doesn't care enough to ask. Besides, hearing the music is infinitely preferable to hearing Hannibal's voice just at the moment. He suspects Hannibal knows that.
He stays rooted to his spot in front of the window-wall, his undefinable emotions swirling around him like the barbed arpeggios Hannibal is coaxing from the piano, and wonders whether Hannibal is his lens or the crack running through it.
His eyes wander back to the Bay, just visible through the glass and beyond the cliff's edge. A waterfall shimmers to life at the cliffside, dull sepia in his mind's eye, just like the cover of his old paperback. Two figures were locked in a struggle on that cover, grappling as they toppled over the edge: Sherlock and Moriarty at Reichenbach Fall.
—
allegro appassionato e maestoso
—
Hannibal sees no crime in killing Francis Dolarhyde, just as he sees no crime in killing anyone else when it suits his purposes. He doesn't consider breaking something — or someone — to be a crime as long as he puts them back together improved, creating beauty with the pieces. Doesn't consider that perhaps the violence of the breaking, that the breaking itself, is a desecration. Will thinks that wholeness is its own type of beauty, but then maybe he's idealizing something he's never experienced.
Hannibal sees humans like any other animal with irrepressible urges. Herd, breed, eat, be eaten. He thinks that their nature is their reality and sees problems as originating from misunderstanding or ignoring that nature.
Will disagrees.
Neither lions nor gazelles can choose to be other than what they are. But Will chooses, daily. He's been choosing against violence and horror for three long years.
Nevertheless, it feels completely natural when he chooses to help Hannibal kill the man who called himself the Great Red Dragon. He isn't surprised, though he is so very disappointed, when he feels no hint of remorse.
He is half-collapsed against the ground, watching Francis' blood pool around his fallen body like slow-spreading wings, feels the cold and the pain of his wounds at last, but they hover at the edge of his focus, ready to scream to life the moment his adrenaline ebbs. Hannibal, bloody and barely standing, offers him a hand up.
Will takes it.
"See?" Hannibal says, his voice rough and rasping in the freezing night air. "This is all I ever wanted for you, Will. For both of us," he adds with an attitude of quiet confession.
Not fond of eye contact, are you? Hannibal's voice crosses the distance of years, full of irony. Because now Will can't look away.
The space between them shatters like so much porcelain, and Will knows the distance can never come back together. Hannibal's hand in his, warm and slick with their mingled blood, and the blood of the Dragon. Hannibal's labored breaths ghosting across his face and catching somewhere in Will's chest, a tearing pull distinct from the ache of the knife wound under his collarbone and the faded scar on his belly.
Too close.
The realization comes as if from a great distance, but it is also waiting just behind his sternum.
"It's beautiful," Will breathes. And it is.
The best tragedies always are.
That's what the past years have been, starting with the moment Will walked into Jack Crawford's office to hear, I'd like you to meet Dr. Lecter. A tragedy, painted in shades of scarlet, darker and darker, until it's become as black as the blood in the moonlight. The two of them, blacker still.
You're playing games with yourself in the dark of the moon.
Will thinks that it might be more accurate to say that he is the moon, caught in the grip of another's gravity, half reflected light and half absorbed dark.
Will resists the other gravitational pull he feels, the urge to be the victim, to point his finger and insist you did this to me. Because if there is one thing he believes with all his heart, it's that he decides which direction to point his steps and where to turn his sight.
I know who I am, he has always insisted, even when his mind was on fire. He still believes that.
Sometimes his steps landed him in quicksand and his sight was screened by fever dreams, sometimes Jack manipulated him and Hannibal pulled his strings, but Will has chosen every time.
And, to be perfectly fair, it wasn't Hannibal's fault that he knew Will had murder in his heart. It wasn't his fault that he, too, could see.
Will is and always has been cursed with sight, is perpetually the man thrown into a dark room who can always, always see what's lurking, while most people sit outside in the light, blind. Most people don't walk in nightmares, can't see the monsters and can't dread them. He stares at Hannibal and wonders what that blessed blindness might be like.
The swell of warmth in his chest is mixed with despair.
I am your friend, Will. In his own way, Hannibal always has been. Quietly guiding him through realizations and epiphanies and celebrating each one.
For a moment, there is carpet beneath his feet instead of bloody stone, and the warm sunlight filtering through the high windows of Hannibal's office illuminate the police milling around the crime scene within. It was the first time he ever associated Hannibal with violence.
With death.
I thought you were dead. He remembers Hannibal's smile of relief, feels his own lips mirroring the expression as the remembered sun fades back into the present night.
For the first time in three years, Will allows himself to feel glad that Hannibal is not dead, either. They are alive and they are free.
They are together.
The rush of relief is intense, and he grips Hannibal's shoulder, struggling for an outlet for his sudden wave of affection and despair. Hannibal's breath catches when Will embraces him; his arm is hesitant at his back.
Will feels Hannibal like an open wound against his skin, warm and open and bleeding, nothing between them any longer. Will has been torn apart many times, and he thinks it very unlikely that this particular rip can be stitched back together. The sudden intimacy is as heady and sickening as the clawing grip of vertigo; Will drops his head against Hannibal's shoulder and takes a few deep breaths. Hannibal's grip tightens fractionally, comfort or possession or some combination of the two.
They're unsteady and shaking on their feet; the tiniest breath of wind could sway them disastrously over the cliff's edge beside them. Will's vision has gone fuzzy around the edges, the delayed effect of blood loss. They'll both need a hospital very soon.
Unless, of course, they don't.
His limbs are too heavy to move, but in his mind he steps again into Hannibal's office, just as it looked years ago when they stood in front of the fire talking about new lives and new dreams, warmed by the burning of all their old ones. The air is full of drifting pages, and Will sees the warped clocks once produced by his fevered brain. Only now the clocks expand and settle into perfect circles, neat numbers arranged precisely around the face. Time, frozen. A perfect clock flutters above the flames, hesitates, and falls directly into the fire.
And for the first time since he met Hannibal Lecter, Will knows exactly what he should do.
He is back on the cliff, wet with blood and sweat, and nothing feels solid except for the man in front of him.
Hannibal has always been right about him, he acknowledges at last.
But that doesn't make Will wrong.
I know who I am.
And he knows who he chooses to be.
His mind wanders over the endless hours of their therapy sessions in the space of an instant. He remembers Hannibal speaking smoothly after their official time was up, one of the many occasions when he had set aside his leather-bound notebook and lingered across from Will, discussing nothing of importance. He usually spoke about music.
Beethoven, he'd said, had no control over the way he was remembered or over his ultimate legacy. His life was carded through after his death, and all the scraps of his work thrown into the light, to linger or burn at the whims of others, judged and studied and labeled either worthy or inferior. But Brahms went beyond that — he remembers Hannibal's look of undisguised admiration so clearly as he described this — and he burned the work he didn't want remembered. Brahms could see that he would have a legacy and chose to control it.
In retrospect, Will wonders whether Hannibal's fraught relationship with Beethoven was due to the fact that Beethoven, ever the consummate humanist, had too much regard for human life. His begrudging regard for the great master came no doubt from the fact that Beethoven strove endlessly for the divine.
Even now, his first instinct is to try to understand Hannibal. Even now, after everything, he can.
The Bay is whispering so far below, and the wind is cold through Will's soaked clothes as he decides on his own legacy.
An Opus Posthumous, he thinks in the corner of his brain that can still register humor.
Hannibal would appreciate the reference. Art and death, inextricably intertwined, eternally bound, the one making the other important by offering context. One last work to transcend and connect and illuminate both. An Opus Posthumous to live after the two of them.
You wouldn't publish anything about me, would you, Dr. Lecter? Just do me a favor and publish it posthumously.
After your death or mine?
Will finally has an answer for that question.
Hannibal admired Brahms' choice; maybe he will admire Will's version of it.
He slides an arm around Hannibal's shoulders, just tight enough for his purposes. After a beat, he curls tighter than necessary, pulling him close. He doesn't apologize, though he wants to. He can barely move, but he doesn't need to — he only needs to let go.
Will falls and drags Hannibal with him.
Hannibal doesn't fight and he doesn't let go. He is silent, but his voice slides through Will's mind one last time.
Occasionally I drop a teacup to shatter on the floor on purpose. I'm not satisfied when it doesn't gather itself up again. Someday, perhaps...
The wind is cold and stings of salt as they fall. The Bay rushes up to greet them.
Well, Will thinks distantly, we'll see.
Overlong Author's Notes for Anyone Who Cares
Music
Firstly, an Opus Posthumous is a work published after the death of a composer. That's probably very obvious, but I thought I'd explain because the music teacher in me can't help it.
Speaking of which, I let my music aesthetic run a little wild in this ficlet, because if you can't include a bevy of classical music references in a Hannibal fanfic, then what's the point, really? That said, I thought carefully about framing a Will Graham POV oneshot with so much classical music, since he's a former cop, a fisherman, a teacher, and a profiler, and his technical knowledge of classical music is not nearly as pronounced as Hannibal's.
However.
Classical music is something of a motif in the show, usually connected with Hannibal. It permeates the fabric of the show by the time we get to season three, and many of the simple piano themes we associated with Will once upon a time are all but gone. Hannibal's music permeates Will just as the man himself does. So I think it's thematically appropriate for Will to operate under Hannibal's aesthetic to a certain extent.
I used tempo/expressive markings as section headers, setting aside any adherence to correct musical form and aiming for mood instead. Hannibal might eat me for these choices, but Will wouldn't care. Since this is a Will-centric fic, I will defer to his judgement. ;)
One final note about music mentions in this fic: I played a little fast and loose with the historical facts of Beethoven and Brahms. What I said is technically accurate, but I played up the drama. Artistic license and all that. What I'm saying is don't cite this fic as a reference in your Music Appreciation paper, okay?
The piano piece I imagined Hannibal playing in the middle section is Mozart's Fantasia in Dm, a glorious, deceptively simplistic piece that wanders through many moods and struck me straight through the heart the first time I heard it.
P.S. I want to personally apologize to Beethoven for making Hannibal less than ecstatic over his music. But Beethoven believed so strongly in the worth of the individual human spirit that I can't help but think that Hannibal would be distinctly unimpressed by that paradigm. Besides, Hannibal seems to be all about Bach. Cerebral, exquisite, decidedly more divine and less messily human Bach.
Time
I find Hannibal's obsession with time to be fascinating. The equations he works on to try and solve the past and how to unravel and repair it — it's such a crazy, overblown idea which is first introduced in the novel Hannibal, when he is attempting to right the past through catalyzing Mischa's return through brainwashing Clarice…yeah. (Book!Hannibal, much like tv!Hannibal, desperately needs to find his chill.)
All that weirdness aside, glorious hyperbole is Hannibal the show (and the man) at its best. I endeavored to include some fluidity of time and experience partially because of Hannibal's fixation on time, partially because Will has an extremely fanciful and fluid view of the world, and mostly because Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter's story is just so sad when come right down to it. And time is one of the saddest things there is.
Sherlocked
With the saturation that Sherlock Holmes has been experiencing in the media in recent years, drawing a parallel between Will Graham and Sherlock Holmes seems like low-hanging fruit these days. But the parallel does exist, and as someone who read the Holmes stories as a kid, they seemed like something Will might gravitate toward, especially with the way his mind works. Between that and the fact that Bryan Fuller mentioned the similarity of Will and Hannibal's cliffside finale to the Holmes and Moriarty showdown in the commentary for "The Wrath of the Lamb," I feel completely justified. But feel free to disagree with me in your review. ;)
Miscellaneous
One little note about the setting. Hannibal says that he and Will are "suspended over the roiling Atlantic" when they look out over the water together in TWOtL, but I decided to call the body of water the Chesapeake Bay after looking at a Baltimore map. The Bay feeds into the Atlantic, so Hannibal is accurate either way.
Finally, let me conclude by saying that this fic is my official love letter to the show Hannibal, which will forever be one of my favorite shows, and to Will Graham, the man who grappled with monsters within and without, and made his own choices to the end. What a clever boy he was.
Forever waiting for season four.
Please review!