When Will Graham wakes up in a hospital, with the sharp white walls and the piercing smell of cleanliness, he is both shocked and in pain. Shocked to be alive at all; in pain because he is. He blinks rapidly at first against the invasion of sunlight streaming in through the window to his left (it was raining that night, at the house, thin cold shining drops, throwing into sharp relief the thick dark warmth of blood). Someone has opened the curtains; he wonders how long the sky has been allowed a front row seat to his suffering- and more importantly, how long has he been here? The clock is unhelpful, reading almost half past twelve (noon apparently). His senses are dulled at best, and though he is aggravatingly aware of the morphine drip somewhere above his head, there resides a deep and debilitating ache low in his stomach, somewhere deep in his body. He is reminded of the last time he was injured so badly (although he's not sure he's ever been injured this badly) when the stitches of Jack's bullet hole had itched incessantly to the point where Will had been tempted to rip them out with his own blunt fingernails.
Jack- it is then Will realises that someone is standing beside his bed, to the right of him. He has to turn his head and his brain slowly floats around in his skull; his mind is swimming in medicine and the pull of strange nightmares he knows he is soon to have. The person in the room with him is not anyone he expected; not Jack, not Hannibal, not even the ghost of Garrett Jacob Hobbs, who hasn't deigned to make an appearance since a small eternity ago. No- it's a nameless doctor, filling in numbers on his charts with a pen that clicks far too loudly as he puts it away. He checks Will's vitals and informs him that it's been about two weeks since he lost consciousness. Unsurprisingly, it was a very close call. Even more unsurprisingly, it's going to be a long recovery.
It takes Will a few days to start really talking- it's exhausting and tedious, but he eventually builds up enough of a report with his nurses that they give him straight answers when he asks them questions about what might be considered sensitive information. When he asks if any of his friends are still alive, the nurse on duty says nothing. Will watches thought the fishbowl doors (which people often forget can be looked through from the inside) as she relays the question to his attending physician. Will is told nothing, except that it's important right now to focus on his recovery. For the next two weeks of bed rest, he asks to have the curtains kept closed at all times. When he sleeps, he imagined the stream, the flow of it against the backs of his legs and the gravel river bed firm beneath his boots. He can no longer bring himself to fish- too many names for the bait on his lures.
Alana might have survived, he tells himself. He has no illusions, no mad grasp for hope, but of all of them (bar himself); she had the best chance of pulling through. Jack is more than likely dead. Abigail- part of him hopes she didn't make it. If he has to find solace in something, it can be the idea that perhaps she's finally found some kind of peace, in whatever lies beyond being a victim of Hannibal Lecter. His hospital room has become the only afterlife he'll ever gain acceptance to. With the curtains drawn, the passage of time is marked only by washed out patterns of light against pastel fabric and the ticking of the clock on the wall. In one of his more frequent dreams, the numbers begin to fall, the lines of the hands becoming skewered to resemble one of the drawings Hannibal had asked him to do. He still hears Hannibal's voice sometimes, but no longer in place of his own where thoughts are concerned. Recovery is a relative term.
As soon as he is able (allowed) to walk, the first place will goes is a mirror. There's a full length one hanging on the back of his bathroom door. He closes his eyes and steps in front of it. He half-believes that he'll see anyone but himself- the face, perhaps, of who he has become. When he looks, he sees only a scruffy, noticeably thinner and slightly gaunt version of the man he was before- or rather, the man he was becoming. He is now only half of who he was- the transformations, it seems, has been halted. The pieces of his aborted chrysalis cling to him in the form of a scar- an ugly line that loops from his left hip across to the right, below his ribcage. He dares not touch it, lest his fingers push too hard- despite the drugs, he can still feel the phantom knife tearing into him, again and again, until the pain has become so constant that he forgets what his body was like before it.
He is woken up twice a night by worried nurses- his blood pressure spikes or drops depending on the content of his nightmares- only once does he see the rotting carcass of the stag beside his bed, its feathers having lost their sheen, its ribs pushing grotesquely from inside its collapsing flesh. More common are the nights he relives bleeding out next to Abigail, reaching for her before the floor tilts, and he slides away from her along the river of blood. In these dreams, he always dies. When he wakes, he tries to close his eyes again and go back to the calming stream, but the gravel has shifted so that he cannot stand- the waters have run red.
Mostly his mind plagues him with the most torturous memory of all- the moments before everything ground to a halt- we couldn't go without you. He remembers the look on his own face, reflected in Hannibal's eyes, and the breath that passed between them being like so many before- it was almost as if nothing had changed, as if Hannibal was only about to lean in and kiss Will like he had so many times before. On these nights Will wakes up with a strange feeling on his lips, and he wonders how he could have been so close to someone, pressed up against them, tangled and conjoined with them so completely and assumed that when the end came, he would not come away with a scar. His memories supply him only with spliced images of Hannibal's sleeping face- the haunting warmth of Hannibal's breath on his neck or arms around him, voice thick and heavy in his ear, with words Will once tried to forget and now can only remember. These things are a part of him, like the ghosts and the stag and the scar he will wear forever. He trips over them in the night where he used to walk beside them; things have changed. Recovery is a relative term.
Will's thoughts are atrophied- his mind is a train that has broken down somewhere outside of an abandoned station. He has changed- he cannot say what he has become.