Notes:
This is a story about Will Graham as an autistic character.
Warnings for... pretty much everything, considering the source material, but particularly ableism. I know the term "dubious consent" is kinda gross, but in this fic at least, Will and Alana really aren't sure how to interpret their relationships with Hannibal. It does all happen off-screen, if that helps.
"When I was twelve the neighbors called the cops on me."
Alana blinks. "I did not know that," she says, leaning back.
He barks a laugh. "Yeah, well, it's not the sort of thing you brag about," he explains to the wall. "Especially not if you're trying really hard to appear mild and harmless."
She looks at him for a long moment, and he really wishes she wouldn't do that. "Do you want to tell me about it?"
"Not really," Will says, wishing he'd never brought it up. The air is too close in here. His fingers drum a pattern on the side of his leg, and it doesn't feel like they're connected to his brain. He needs to leave, but- that would be rude. He's trying very hard not to be rude.
He flips familiarly through his recollections like a slide reel, sensations preserved between panes of glass. Will remembers the incident quite well, remembers with a visceral clarity that rivals his memories of crime scenes.
The name of the place is not written on his mental slide. Another river town, another trailer park, more empty time before his father comes home with oil-stained hands and the smell of fish guts.
Five hours before his father shows up at the police station, five hours in a cold room with his hands in restraints, fighting the urge to beat his head against the wall. Listening to the conversation behind the wall like an observer from across a dark and placid lake. He was acting sick, sir. So you locked him up? We were concerned he might endanger himself or others. He's twelve years old, for Christ's sake-
When his hands are free he stares at the red marks he's caused by wrenching at the restraints. Come on, son, his father says, angry. It isn't until they reach the dark night outside that he realizes his father is afraid. It's worse than anything Will's ever experienced before, not knowing how much of his father's fear is for Will and how much is of him.
Something clicks in Will's head that night, and the next day, first day at his new school with his frayed sweater and empty stomach, when he feels the weight of other children's stares, he turns his head and gives them the widest smile he can manage, making sure to show off all of his teeth.
("Jack Crawford's pet psychopath," Freddie Lounds will call him later, with a snarl, a desperate viciousness in her voice, dressed in red like a wounded fox. He'll use the same smile then, ignoring Jack's cursing, because pouring oil on the fire himself is the only way he can get the pretense of control. He'll make a torch of himself and save her the trouble.)
Will's always had two things working for him. He's always been smart, and he's always been scared. The fear engenders in him a desire to survive, and the intelligence lets him know how to. He's a fast learner, as a child. He learns to force himself to silence when he can't be certain of his ability to communicate acceptably. He learns to still most of his movements, though they itch under his skin. He studies hard because from the very beginning it is obvious that money will buy him survival, and education is his only path to money.
As he ascends away from the lakes and rivers and backwaters, to New Orleans and then to Washington and finally to Quantico, he learns to accessorize. A more acceptable accent. A careful vocabulary. Glasses to hide his eyes and give him something to do with his hands. Expensive clothing still baggy and layered enough to provide some sense of security. The diffident manner of a shy intellectual. He can't trick himself into thinking he's fooling anyone- girls shrink from his clumsy overtures, he makes no friends, he continues to attract stares- but he's able to pass enough to adopt a dog, to get through job interviews, to feel relatively safe. It almost works. He tries working homicide, until he holds a life in his sights and can't pull the trigger, panic washing over him in a great wave. He's tired by then. He lets the tide carry him to UVA. One night he opens a textbook and then slams it shut, because five seconds looking at the grainy black and white photo told him all the words on the page in vivid color detail. Will sits at the library table for two minutes, trying to catch his breath. The first real human connection of his life and it's with the Acid Bath Murderer.
"I don't know who I am," he tells Alana Bloom, and maybe that's always been true, maybe he's only ever known what he doesn't want to be.
"I know exactly who I am," he says to Hannibal Lecter, and flinches from Hannibal's indulgent smile.
Maybe it would have served him better to stay poor and ragged, fix boats like his father, hear the ocean every day and never look at a totem pole of body parts through the eyes of the monster he's always looked for in the mirror. He might have died from the encephalitis or been bankrupted by medical costs but maybe hunger and disease are the toll he should have payed to avoid the attention of the wendigo.
Jack Crawford introduces himself for the second time by marking Will as property. "May I?" he says, and it's not a question, it's a mockery. His hand is already reaching. Will swallows and fights not to flinch or step back. Jack doesn't touch him, just settles the frame of the glasses on the bridge of Will's nose, his fingers an inch from the jelly of Will's eyes. Will stays still, and hates himself for it.
Fear makes him bold, pushes him to loudness with Jack, bitter sarcasm with Jack's friend the shrink (the ravenstag, the wendigo, the monster in a pale blue suit). It makes no difference. Jack crashes from murder scene to murder scene, dragging Will along behind him on an invisible rope, like a collapsing balloon. Jack pushes and pushes and pushes, and Will performs as best he can, though it's never enough, they're never quick enough at catching the monsters, he never wins.
"Quit, if that's what you want, Will," Jack says, disgust weighing down his voice, and the whiplash knocks Will back, deflates and confuses him. He shakes his head and doesn't know what he's denying.
"You had a chance to quit," Jack says, "and you didn't take it. Why was that?"
It will take years for him to figure out the correct answer. In the moment he trembles and feels a sob hitching its way up his throat and silently promises to stop messing up and silently hates them both.
"If you knew you were sick, why were you here?" Beverly asks, even her professional dispassion cracking, and he watches rose petals drift from under his nails and whispers, "I thought I would get better."
He didn't, really. He's always known this would be a downwards slope. All the way down to hell.
Will would be the first to label himself self-centered. Narcissistic, maybe, it's not impossible. He's aware of it, at least, and that has to count for something. "My own pain fascinates me so much, I rarely think about other people, except in ways they relate to my life. It's like my mind is a fishbowl. I can see people distorted through the glass, I notice when they tap it to make me jump, but there's not much I can do about it, you know?"
"Tell me, when did you first begin your flirtation with metaphor?" Hannibal asks.
Will stops pacing, startled. "Uh. At the end of high school, I guess? I started reading a lot of poetry. I guess that was, ah, my pretentious stage. It helped, though. When I use metaphors, I- it's easier to put words together coherently."
"You have always had these problems with coherency?"
He rubs the back of his neck with one hand and nods, not looking up to see if Hannibal is watching him.
"Interesting," Hannibal says, and all of a sudden Will feels very, very tired. More than he usually is.
It doesn't escape Will that the only people he ever looks at directly are serial killers.
It doesn't escape him that this means he knows Garret Jacob Hobbs more intimately than he will ever know Alana Bloom.
(More than he ever knew Abigail.)
It doesn't escape him that this is how Hannibal got away with murder.
If he were to let his guard down around anyone else, it would be Beverly. This is because she has no particular expectations of him. She still looks at him the way the others do- like he might snap at any moment, like a stretched-out rubber band- but she has no particular feelings about it. Will has no particular obligation to please her or accede to her or protect her comfort. He does anyway, as it's a deeply ingrained habit, but there's less anxiety about it all. If he started acting crazy she probably wouldn't run away.
She's blunt, but she's not cruel. He likes the sharp angles of her. She has beautiful hair- and his stomach roils as his brain churns with sick desires not his own, to possess or knot or arrange that hair and he would retch if he were alone in his house but he's in the lab and she's just asked him a question and if he's not careful they'll all notice and they'll stare and more of him will die.
"It'll be close to the water," he says, and they're not in the lab, they're in Chilton's labyrinth and she's standing just out of his reach. He hands her back the file and she takes it and she smiles.
Beverly Katz has no trouble smiling. He envies that. Her smiles are as effortless and meaningless as his frowns. She is almost always smiling in his memories, except in the dark, staring a killer in the face.
"Beverly is dead," Alana reminds him, and she tries to be gentle but he suspects they both ran out of gentleness a long time ago.
"I know that," he says. He scrubs at his face. "Most of the time, I know that. I wish I didn't."
He can't look people in the face, can't parse their expressions and body language, but he can look at a tapestry of blood and gore, a sick artistic triumph in reds and blacks, and he knows precisely how the muscles in the killer's face settled as he ripped off an arm.
Hannibal is a lot easier, because first he's nothing more than a solid wall to lean on, and then he's the wendigo, and neither of those things are exactly known for their expressive natures.
After Beverly dies, Will discovers that he's wrong (which is, after all, par for the course, these days). (For once he's glad to be wrong.) There is someone else he can trust with the parts of himself that don't often see daylight. That second exception is Peter.
Will doesn't have to look Peter in the eye because with Peter, it doesn't matter, and the overwhelming relief that brings keeps drawing him back to Peter's facility. It's light and airy but not blindingly bright, and he fills his pockets with crumbs to feed to Kevin, and he talks animals and religion and morality and cosmography with Peter, the longest conversations he's ever had with anyone who wasn't trying to manipulate him. It's the only place he ever truly feels happy. Of course, that's only because he can walk out whenever he wants to.
Peter doesn't complain about his situation but he doesn't have to. He speaks quietly and longingly of his house and his animals and the parks he liked to walk in with his dog, and he loudly does not speak of guards and food he can't stomach and nurses who are not patient with his stutter. He does make one comment, trying to be offhand: "There's no need to, to worry, you know. I would take my pills at home. I would. I would be good. Compliant. There'd be no trouble. You understand?"
Will wants to tell Peter I'll get you out of here, wants it more than almost anything, wants it more than he wanted to kill Hannibal. But ever since he tried to hold Abigail Hobbs' throat together for the second time, he's been resolved not to make any more promises he can't keep.
"I understand, Peter," he says instead. "I know."
Warm fingers, brushing against the back of his hand. "Is there- is there anything, anything I can do to help you? Will. I want to. Want to help you. Someone as good as you shouldn't be hurt." Will's gaze flickers up at that. Peter is blushing slightly, fingers pulling at his prison clothes. Will remembers what it's like, wearing clothes meant to take away your personhood. Not that either of them really had that much personhood to begin with.
He makes himself smile, holds out his hands for Peter to take. "We could continue our conversation," he says. "That would help a lot."
He has a lot of conversations with Hannibal. Usually across bars. Sometimes he's on one side, sometimes he's on the other. Sometimes they're back in Hannibal's office. Sometimes it's just in his head, in the dark woods that have grown there.
He doesn't talk about it much, no matter how Jack threatens; except on those rare occasions that Margot shows up unannounced at his door, a bottle of something ridiculously expensive under one arm, a sports car in the driveway, and a sheepish smile on her face, because she smiles like normal people, Will's figured out, and he doesn't know why he expected her expressions to work like his, and there's no real reason to feel so disappointed every time he discovers a new way they're different. There are a lot of ways. It's quicker to list the similarities: introverts, scarred victims, survivors. Vegetarians, now. He hopes Freddie Lounds never finds that out, because then she might invite herself to dinner, collecting data for her latest Cannibal of Baltimore! shockers, and then he might murder her for real. He's pretty sure Margot would help him hide the body.
"I have a new one," Will says, and lifts up his shirt so they can both see the white line running across most of his stomach.
She looks at it for a while, considering. "Matches mine," she remarks, but she doesn't touch her own clothing.
"I suppose we should both be in therapy," she says wryly, and he laughs at that, laughs and laughs and laughs until his lungs burn and his bones threaten to shake their way out of his skin.
"My name is Will Graham, it is five thirty six pm, and I AM NOT A KILLER," and his voice breaks at the end. No one to hear except Chilton, and he shouldn't have let down his guard like that, he's still playing charming murderer to seduce the dear doctor. Perhaps he should think more kindly of Frederick; after all, he acceded to Will's request for a clock in his field of vision, even if it is on the other side of the bars.
He'd be terrified of Chilton if he were still the person he'd been a month ago. If he hadn't had all his fear burnt out like exploding lightbulbs.
The stag looks at him sadly, rests its massive head on his knee and looks up at him with melancholic eyes. Great, he thinks, I've even managed to disappoint myself.
He's alive and Hannibal Lecter's alive and Abigail and Beverly are not. If he really is going mad then he wishes it would happen a little faster.
He gets so close to Hannibal by the end, or at least thinks he does. It's kind of funny, really. Will can't get in Hannibal's head at all, but he feels a million times more intimately connected than he ever did with James Grey, with Abel Gideon, with Randall Tier, even with Garret Jacob Hobbs. He can feel, instinctively, which way Hannibal is about to move, can sit on Hannibal's absurdly comfortable leather couch, listening to the clatter from the kitchen, and see through Hannibal's eyes, feel his own hands moving to carve up the meat, feel the heat of the flames beneath the skillet, experience Hannibal's intense concentration as if it were his own. He's never been that concentrated about anything. Even Hannibal's hands on his neck, even the burst of sweetness when he takes that first bite of the meat, even those things can't break all the way through the persistent haze fogging up Will's mind.
It feels, eventually, like they're two halves of the same creature. The same monstrous predator. Hannibal is the mind and the claws, Will is the angry terror, the bloodlust, the teeth that tear out throats and chew on bones. When Hannibal touches him, it feels disgustingly right; when Hannibal kisses him, it feels like finally being whole, until the drive back to Wolf Trap, until his constructed disguise fades and he feels more revolted than he can handle, and it's almost too hard to complete the hour-long drive when he's shaking so hard, brain fried by the desperate need to scrub off all his skin. Those are the moments when he's most tempted by the idea of surrender. It would be easy to let Hannibal's Will Graham dominate, to sublimate Jack's Will so deep it could never return. Hannibal's Will Graham likes the touch of the wendigo. Likes horrifying symbolic drawings. Enjoys building sculptures with dismembered human body parts. Doesn't have a bottle stuffed with various illegally obtained prescription emetics tucked next to the bottle of aspirin in his messenger bag, coated with a fake label. Doesn't vomit by roadsides often enough that he can't wash the taste of acid out of his mouth.
He hopes that if he ever does give in, Alana will be a good enough shot to take him down.
Hopes that he'll be hunted like a stag and the dogs will tear him apart before he can ever start a hunt of his own.
"Where do you fall on the spectrum?" Jack inquires, fingers a bare inch from Will's face, pushing his glasses up his nose, watching him flinch.
"He would like us to believe that he's on the spectrum," Chilton pronounces smugly from the witness stand, and a bitter wind whips along the surface of Will's river, leaving ripples and floating dead leaves in its wake.
"Autistic?" his project partner in Psychology 101 responds, disbelievingly. "Did a doctor tell you that?"
"No," Will says, glaring, already knowing where this was going. In a quieter mumble, he mutters, "I'm self diagnosed." He closes his eyes against her expression, wishes he could close his ears to her words.
"Oh," Peter says, petting Kevin. "What's that like?" He passes Kevin to Will. The rat's fur is so soft.
"You're a freak," Margot tells him, and exhales a cloud of smoke that hangs in the cold air between the porch and the roof. "I'm a freak. Fuck, Graham, I'd be shocked to meet anyone who isn't a freak. It's no big deal."
It is, actually, but he stays silent, like he always has.
Hannibal says a lot about it, but he chooses not to remember most of that. Just more blank spaces in his memory. More missing slides.
Occasionally, in the depths of the darkness, he wishes he actually were Jack's intelligent psychopath. Psychopaths are generally good at pretending to be people. The world's always told Will that he's a monster. For the first time it occurs to him that maybe he just isn't the right kind of monster.
If he were a psychopath then none of this would hurt.
Alana's house is more Spartan than it used to be. Most of the paintings and photographs and books are gone, replaced with accessibility ramps and a mattress on the floor, sheets messy, bed unmade. Apple's still there, and she's excited to see Will. A lot more excited than Alana. Will crouches down to pet Apple, away from Alana's unreadable stare. "Can I get you some tea?" she asks, hand hovering near her wheelchair's controls. Ready to roll into the kitchen and avoid him for three minutes while the water boils.
"No, thank you," Will says. "Though I appreciate the offer." He sits cross-legged on the ground, rubbing around Apple's ears.
After a while Alana says, "If you're here looking for an apology you can have it. "I'm sorry, I was wrong, I hurt y-"
"I didn't come for an apology," Will interrupts.
He's learned from experience that apologies are generally pretty useless.
"Then what did you come for?"
"I needed to know that you were well," he says. "Are you well?"
"As can be expected," and the words hang bitter in the air between them.
"We could talk," he offers. "I mean, we're the only ones who could possibly understand what we're going through."
"You don't understand what I'm going through. You can't. Do you know what it's like, knowing you've slept with a monster, knowing that evil has- touched you- like that? That you wanted it, that you enjoyed it?"
Will stares at his feet and whispers, as quietly as possible in hopes she doesn't actually hear him, "Yes."
Alana says nothing for a long, long time.
As Hannibal's perfectly steady arm leads him from the empty abyss of his house into a grey morning punctuated by sirens and flashing lights, Will's bright horror is dampened by a heavy sense of inevitability, like a thick duvet gently suffocating him in the night, or maybe more like soft snow blanketing a dead forest. He actually registers a certain sense of relief, settling down into the back of the police car. The doom he's been dreading for the last twenty years has finally come upon him, and there doesn't seem to be any possibility of escaping it. The guilt makes him want to vomit again, and he shudders in fear of what might come up this time. Abigail's ear is in his kitchen sink, and still he can't stop thinking about himself.
He misses the blanket Hannibal draped across his shoulders. He wishes Hannibal were with him in the car. He rests his forehead against the chill glass of the car window and watches Hannibal's tall pale shape until it's out of sight, and then he doesn't think of anything at all, just lets his brain drift into dizziness, like he's safe in a gently rocking boat, drifting through deep oceans a million miles from shore.