Hiyah! This is my first Hannibal fanfic and my first upload in a year and a half, so please be gentle. This is an alternate version of how that one scene between Will and Alana might have worked out. Hope you like it!
Run With Me
"I wouldn't be good for you."
"Don't."
Alana talks a little more, as if what they're feeling can be dissolved, folded back into the origami flower bud, but no, it is too late for that, it will no longer fit into its box. Will kisses her again; it's worse than before, and better.
"I should go. I'm going now, okay?"
He doesn't nod so much as head-stutter, and then when she's left the room he puts his face in his hands and inwardly swears at himself. He has never hated anyone more than he hates himself, and never quite so much as right now, when he's both the reason she wants to stay and the reason she can't. He wishes it were possible for him to sink into the floorboards and become part of the house, and be enveloped in the structure, and be able to close the doors tight and keep her here. But that would be assault and kidnapping and how-could-he-even-think-about-doing-that-he-doesn' t-deserve-her-not-one-little-bit.
Will kicks the couch with silent violence and feels like bursting into tears, even though up until now he's managed to save himself from this one humiliation, if not from all the others. But then he gets the sense that something is out of place. It isn't a definite sense; it's more a twinge of impatience, like his brain is waiting for something that should have happened by now.
It takes him a couple of seconds to realise that the door hasn't been shut. He treks through the house and feels a whirlwind of brisk outside air through his clothes and discovers that Alana has not just forgotten to shut the door, but forgotten to go through it.
Alana stares out and imagines that her resolve is a person, standing on the porch in the same clothes she is wearing, and with the same hair, but different somehow. She can see her resolve more clearly than she can see Will in the corner of her eye; as she watches it regards her, and gives her a disappointed look, and then it turns and walks until it has disappeared into the woods.
She imagines it, then rewinds it and imagines it again, until she's sure her resolve isn't going to come back.
Will watches her and says in his head that she is beautiful, over and over again, until she finally tears her gaze away from the trees.
"What is it?" he asks.
She shrugs and answers, "My resolve is gone."
"Into the woods?"
"Into the woods."
"I don't know what that means."
She dips her head and swallows, closes her eyes briefly, then she's up, and turning to him like a dancer come out of a turn and back into position, bird-like, graceful as a ribbon through a breeze; but the kiss has a roughness sewn into it, and this time she's on her tiptoes and leaning into him and asking him to kiss her back.
He knows she's kicked off her heels when she falls an inch or two and he lifts her into his arms to accommodate for it.
She knows they're heading for his bedroom when she opens her eyes for a second and watches the framed photographs pass in the hallway like sluggish traffic. As they come close she thinks she can almost see the people in the pictures waving, honking their horns, speeding up, slowing down, driving their wooden cars. Then she remembers that they're only pictures, and thinks that maybe she's just as crazy as the man carrying her.
Maybe the whole world is crazy and psychiatrists are fighting a losing battle.
If so, this means that she can either love nobody or that she can love anybody, including him. Alana chooses to be optimistic.
Will stands in the woods in the glare of a morning sun and decides without any certainty that he's dreaming. He must be dreaming, he assures himself, because only a second ago it was night-time and it was him and Alana and he is positive that all that was real. But he only becomes fully convinced when Garret Jacob Hobbs steps out of a bush beside him and points to a deer standing in the near distance, its antlers reaching toward the sky like gnarled fingers.
"Can't waste any of it," says Hobbs. "You've got to honour every part of it, otherwise it's murder."
Hobbs raises his rifle and aims it at the deer's head, but lingers over the trigger and eventually stops himself. He turns and announces, "You can have this one. I think you're ready."
Will glances down at his own rifle, which he seems to have been holding the whole time. The deer gingerly steps forward and sniffs the air, and all Will can see are his dogs, and he refuses to pull the trigger.
"Shoot the deer."
"No."
"Shoot the beast."
Will is silent. Garret Jacob Hobbs is motionless for a heavy, nervous while and then he raises his gun again, but this time he is aiming at Will. "Shoot the beast," he repeats, but now he's talking to himself, and Will couldn't change the situation even if he wanted to because his rifle has disappeared.
Hobbs cocks the gun and there are three shots, crisp, cold, but it's Hobbs and not Will who falls down.
From behind a tree, Alana emerges, but she is far too tall, even though she's wearing heels. If she kicked them off now there would be no need for him to lift her so she can reach him; in fact, he barely comes up to her waist.
"Why are you so tall?" he asks, but he doesn't need an answer because in the wake of his high-pitched voice he discovers he is a little boy.
Alana isn't listening. Her eyes are glued to the deer and suddenly she says, "Go. You have to go."
The deer has noticed them and bows its antlers in threat.
"You have to go, Will."
"Please come with me. You're going to get hurt."
"Run, Will!" she shrieks as the deer charges towards them, and without a single word more he turns and bolts into the trees. Behind him there isn't a sound, no gunshot, no crashing, no screaming, no footsteps. He runs like people often run in dreams—like no-one has ever taught him how. He runs for days. For years.
When he finally stops it has started raining, but the water is coming up from the ground instead of down from the sky, going up his nostrils, up his pants, and he's terrified. He finds a large chopped tree stump which he can sit on without being flooded, and as he rocks back and forth he stares into the up-pour and waits for her to come.
A long time later he starts to shout pointless things.
"Alana, it's raining!"
"Get away from the deer!"
"Lose the deer in the rain!"
"Lose it in the rain, Alana!"
There's a slight jolt, like something's being clicked into place, and it's strong enough to nearly knock Will off the stump. He catches himself right at the edge; he doesn't feel any pain, but he thinks that he must have hurt himself because there's blood coming off his hands, wriggling past him to drip up to the sky.
There's blood shooting up from the ground.
There's blood everywhere. It's replaced the rain. It's murdered the rain.
"Alana," he yells, but it's like he's in a small room because the sound bounces back at him, loud, haunting, close. He tries again, more fervently, but it gets closer and closer until the syllables are leaking together, blaring like a trumpet blown too loud, "Alana," and he can't tell if it's him or the echo, "Alana, Alana," and he's freezing, and he's small, and he's alone, "Alana—"
"Will."
He bursts awake and yells something about a deer and rain, and she clings onto him to keep him still, keep him unafraid. She holds his face and digs the tips of her fingernails into his hair; his eyes are huge and wild and they lock onto hers from barely an inch away and he takes a desperate, gulping breath of air, then another. His heart is making the bed pound.
"It's alright," she says.
He says, frantically, "If I ever have to run away from a deer you've got to run with me."
"Why?"
"Just please promise."
"But what was I—"
"Please." He does what she's done to him, stretches a trembling hand across the side of her face and begs her to understand.
"Okay," she murmurs.
He exhales in something quite like relief, but it's soaked in something else and it's twisted up in that. Fear? Just in case she's right, Alana shifts herself up the bed until she can hold Will's head like a newborn baby, fingers in his dark curls, and his arm wrapped around her, and his nose pressed into her collarbone.
"I don't even know if you're real," he whispers.
"How would you know if I'm not?"
"You'll vanish. You'll be gone as soon as my mind gets bored."
"You're not imagining me." She considers, then adds, "Tomorrow you'll wake up and I'll still be here, and then you'll know."
"I really hope so."
They stay there for a very long time. In the morning she isn't in bed with him, and he leaps and gasps and races in panic until he finds her in the kitchen making coffee, and he almost falls over with relief.
The window pane is dotted with condensation just behind her head. For good measure—just for the hell of it, he tells himself—he goes to her and holds her against his chest until the sun comes out.
Thanks for reading! Please review; it'll make my day :)
TAJ