Disclaimer: The characters and concepts in this story are the property of Thomas Harris, Bryan Fuller, and their related affiliates. This is an amateur writing effort meant for entertainment purposes only.

Summary: Not the first time, Will has to praise the Ripper's impeccable sense of timing. It's almost like the bastard knows he isn't capable of thinking today.

Distractions

Will pats down the pockets of his jacket.

"Lost something?" Hannibal asks.

"Do you have any aspirin?"

"You don't have any?"

Difficult as it is to tell whether Hannibal's surprise is authentic or feigned, Will still gets the impression that he's being teased. He gives up the search and goes back to processing. "Nevermind."

"Feeling alright, Will?"

"I'm fine."

Except that he's not, because the pain in his temples is really starting to crest, and he remembers grabbing the bottle on the way out the door that morning.

Or does he? Will's not sure anymore.

The bottle in his messenger bag is gone too. Unless it was never there to begin with, but Will swears it was.

Not today. Any other day but today. Will can't read the scene if his head's pounding. He's already having problems mentally cataloguing all the evidence and making the appropriate deductions as it is; his thoughts keep getting derailed by the hot, throbbing promise of agony on either side of his frontal lobe. Give it time, and...well, Will really doesn't want to think about that.

Bev sidles up and elbows him lightly. The pain lances for just a second, but Will catches himself before he groans. "It's not Aspirin," she says, offering him a small, travel-sized bottle of extra strength Tylenol and a bottle of water, "but it should take the edge off."

Will thanks her and swallows two of the tablets. The fake-cherry taste clings to his throat, another small misery. So far he's tallied three today.

Sensitivity to light accounts for a fourth.

The day should be getting darker, but for Will's eyes, it's getting brighter. Hotter. More painful. The Tylenol takes the edge off his temples only to have the sunlight neatly impale his corneas and drive itself straight into his amygdala.

He drives his fingers against his eyelids. Thoughts nag at him, but Will can't piece them together, no matter how important they might be. She fits the profile: Caucasian female, mid-twenties, chestnut hair, missing kidneys. Practically gift-wrapped all over again. But she's just been dumped in a field this time, clothed, and Nathan Schurr doesn't have the twisted, sick sadistic tendencies required to treat another human being this way. At least, Will's pretty sure about that. If the world wasn't so bright, if his head didn't hurt so much, he would have a better idea.

He'd also be able to articulate his thoughts better. As it stands, Crawford's doubling up the manhunt and talks to Will with an underlying current of the-profiler-doth-protest-too-much.

Will would yell if voices weren't starting to grate on his ear drums. Instead, he shades his eyes with his hand and charges away from the scene.

Hannibal follows in absolute silence. It's the nicest thing Will has heard all day.

They stop for Aspirin. Will's fairly certain it's too late, but he takes two of the capsules anyways – Hannibal clucking softly that he should just go home – and gets back to the BAU for the autopsy.

His headache decreases somewhat over the next hour, as does the sensitivity to light and sound. It's enough that when Zeller notes the field is a step down, Will's cogent enough to consider the implications. Their cannibal is a sophisticated sadist, one who took advantage of Hobbs's killings to get in on the game. Dumping the victim in a field is sloppy and careless. Maybe there's a shortage of options with the FBI out in full force. Or maybe their cannibal just isn't interested in making an impression anymore? Will favours the former. This cannibal, his cannibal, is always out to make an impression.

So why risk repetition? Did he think he would get away with it?

Will's thoughts are cut short all of a sudden when the pain blossoms into something terrible. He tears off his glasses and shoves a hand over his eyes to absolutely no avail. His whole consciousness is ripped open. The previously uncomfortable glare from the light now plunges all the way to the back of his skull like a knife over and over again and Keller's ongoing narration is grating so Will tells him to shut up. Just shut up, please. His head isn't big enough to hold all the pain he's in right now.

He lets Bev grab his shoulders, bloody gloves or no, and guide him away from the operating theatre, away from the bluish glow of fluorescent lights and the concerned – but too-loud – voices of the other doctors into dim lights and quiet. Bev's pushed him into the break room and is settling him on the couch. His head still pounds thickly, but at least the pain isn't getting any worse here.

Bev takes care of everything. She gets a wet cloth for Will's face, hushes all his feeble and inarticulate protestations in a tone that manages to avoid exacerbating his monster migraine, and leaves him to rest.

He can hear her out in the hall beneath the magma swirling beneath his skull a second later. She's on the phone.

Will's Holy Trinity shows up soon after: Father Jack Crawford, Son Hannibal Lecter, and Holy Ghost Alana Bloom, whose bare stockinged feet pad gently across the floor. Will acknowledges their entrance with a wince, tries to stand up and reassure them that he's fine, he just needs a minute, but words and movement fail him. His profound empathy fails him too. Will's own pain distracts him from his cannibal's motivations, then overlaps it, until he's thinking on a backwards diagonal straight into a fiery hell that may or may not belong to him.

"Your voice is like a chainsaw," he tells Crawford without hesitation, earning a rare look of amusement from Hannibal. Crawford glares but remained blessedly silent.

Alana and Hannibal are much less irritating for his current condition. The former speaks softly; the latter doesn't speak at all.

"Have you taken anything?"

"Aspirin. About two hours ago."

"Three," Hannibal corrects him.

Scowling hurts, but Will scowls anyways. Well, tries to. The look of amusement crosses Hannibal's features again.

"You need something stronger than aspirin," Alana says, rising.

She and Hannibal's conversation drifts almost entirely into pharmacolese. The pounding in Will's ear drums drones them out.

He's having flashes of the woman in the field. Harvesting her kidneys. Strangling her to death. Laying her to rest.

This is not his design, but it will have to do. For now.

"He's going to kill again," Will mutters. Their cannibal is only slightly more frustrated than Will is right now for having to repeat himself. He'll find someone else soon and make it worse.

Of all the days for the Aspirin to go missing, it has to be today. The Ripper doesn't make mistakes, and it's always easier to read the mistakes than the changes in his profile. Will needs to feel anything other than his own pain right now.

"Shhh..." Alana hushes him. "Will, I'm going to give you an injection. It might make you a little drowsy."

Will tries to refuse with every excuse in the book, but Lecter places a hand on his shoulder. "Doctor's orders."

She takes his arm in her hand and pushes up his sleeve. Something cold swabs against the inside of his elbow.

There's a sharp kiss of steel, pressure and heat in the vein, and then Will's head starts spinning. Centrifugal force drives the pain into a single, neat cylinder balanced atop his upper vertebrae, and all the empty space the pain once occupied gets filled with thoughts. Hobbs's thoughts, the Ripper's thoughts, and, somewhat distantly, the thought that Alana shouldn't have ready access to Phenergan at the BAU. Neither should Hannibal for that matter.

Will slowly diffuses to the endless supply of violent imagery his mind concocts. The woman's corpse had to be discarded, but there was no time to do it properly. Hence the clothing and the lack of pomp. But the devil is in the details, and this instance of repetition could break the case, so why risk it?

Not the first time, Will has to praise the Ripper's impeccable sense of timing. It's almost like the bastard knows he isn't capable of thinking today.

"I swore I had it with me..."

Hannibal pats his hand. "It will come to you."

Will blinks dazedly. "Everything's blurry."

"...reckless and irresponsible, Jack. Catching this guy can't come at the expense of..."

"Will."

He tears his gaze from the crack in the door where Alana's voice drifts through, mid-tirade against Jack. Hannibal towers over him.

"Time to go home," the good doctor says, taking Will by the arm.

The stag follows him through the hallways of the BAU. Always several paces behind, but Will can hear the thud of his hooves against the floor, the huff of his breath. Will even catches a glimpse of his feathery coat on the fringes of his vision when he and Lecter round the corner into the elevator.

He's back again in the parking garage, as Will settles into the passenger seat of Hannibal's Lincoln. The immense shadow looms between the parked cars, always just out of eyeshot, and Will's eyes finally close out of their own exhausted volition.

If either he or Hannibal say anything on the drive to Wolf Trap, Will doesn't remember it. He's getting his empathic wheels stuck in the mud of his own cloudy thought process again and can't shake the feeling that he's never been closer to catching the Ripper, but he's drifting so far away.

The sight of his front door prompts Will to fumble for his keys.

"Apologies," Hannibal brandishes the sparse key ring in his hand, "I took the liberty of removing them in the car."

It should unsettle Will that he doesn't remember that. In fact, a lot of things should unsettle him about today, but nothing seems to penetrate the Phenergan fog. Even the thought of having Hannibal in his house doesn't faze Will in the slightest. "Thank you," he says, and then hobbles forward as if he's alone, vaguely aware that Hannibal looms behind him, hooves heavy on the porch steps.

"He picked the right day."

"Pardon?"

Will adjusts his face on the pillow so he can speak. "I said he picked the right day. The Chesapeake Ripper. Almost like he knew."

"It is quite the coincidence."

Hannibal places a glass of water on the night table, the last step in a seemingly rehearsed dance to help Will recover. He's closed the blinds, locked the dogs out of doors, and tidied a path from the bed to the bathroom. The bedroom swaddles Will in warmth and darkness, but he's not nearly cogent enough to hold them in suspect right now. Later, he will, when the world isn't circling the drains of his consciousness.

For right now though, his eyelids flutter. His head spins. Hannibal checks his pulse, and his touch is an anchor. Will follows it back on a swell of tide and then washes away. The pain feels like someone else's bad dream. Mercifully, it's the only person on the planet Will doesn't have any access to: himself.

"Sleep well, Will."

For the first couple of hours, he does. Then the storm hits, Will panics, feels his own guilt and the Ripper's power at the same time, but doesn't wake up.

By the time Will jerks awake a full fourteen hours later, his head aches with the same dull throb it always does and he's missed four calls from Crawford, which, after Alana's stern tongue lashing yesterday, can only mean one thing: they've already found another one.

He's cursing himself through a hasty shower, then dresses rapidly, swings his coat over his shoulders and heads out the door for his car. He probably shouldn't be driving this soon, but he shouldn't have been incapacitated with a migraine yesterday either.

As he digs for his keys, Will's fingers brush something that makes his blood run cold. His small bottle of Aspirin, the one that went missing at yesterday's crime scene, is nestled in a nest of keys and spare change at the bottom of his pocket.

He's positive he didn't have it with him yesterday.

Or is he? Will's not sure anymore.

Happy reading!