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: They're putting him in the ground; Will's certain of it.

Author's Notes: My knowledge of medicine is limited, but my research suggested that EMTs don't actually administer anti-anxiety medication in the field (or at least rarely do). I don't really put anything past the good doctor though; hence, the ending of this chapter. Hopefully, it doesn't strain your willful suspensions of disbelief too much.

More drabble-y than anything else, but I know there's at least another scene after this I have to write.

Interlude

They're putting him in the ground; Will's certain of it. He can feel the damp earth against his back, cradling his head; there are faces above him, disfigured no matter how much he squints, each one looking through him. He's not a person anymore: he's mulch. He's mushroom fodder. They're strapping an IV to his arm, a tube down his throat, burying him in a shallow grave, and keeping him alive long enough for the mushrooms to take hold.

"Get off me," he fights, but his limbs aren't working properly. His arms are backwards and his legs are wrong. All the nerves and tendons have been back-flipped and flip-flopped in such a way that when he wants to take a swing, he jerks in the opposite direction. His blurry vision isn't helping matters. Will can't hit what appears diffusely in several places at once.

Voices overlap one another. "...trying to help you, Mr. Graham," latex gloved fingers grab hold of his shoulders and keep him steady. "...need you...down...just calm..."

"I won't go down there," he tells them, still fighting. His fingers find the IV butterfly but someone restrains him just before he tears it out. "NO! No, I can't...I won't, I can't...let go of me. Let go of me." He manages to roll to his side before they can inject any fluids, but all he can do is squirm in the dirt as the phantom hands attack from all sides.

The stag stands proudly in the trees before him. Will reaches, shouts maybe, but he's quickly pulled back and rolled from the dirt to a plush surface. The sky opens up and swallows him, then spits him back out when his hands, feet, and chest are pinned down with heavy straps. Cold fluid is draining into his arm, and Will's tastes sugar, salt, and shiitakes in the back of his throat. A plastic mask is pressed firmly against his face, covering his mouth and nose and feeding him – and the mushrooms – fresh oxygen.

Will tosses his head, a last-ditch effort to free himself. "No more connections," he begs. "Please, no more connections." He's already made all the connections he could ever want. He's wrapped himself around Hobbs and Stammitz and the Ripper, and now they want him to be a part of everything. They want him eaten up from the inside until he's just an empty, rotting shell of a human being, then fill him back up with everything else.

The chill of saline clarifies the sensations of growth prickling about inside his thoracic cavity. Will gasps for breath in horror. He can already feel the fibres creeping around his organs: they're choking his liver, infiltrating his stomach, weaving around his lungs and heart. Mushrooms spores are dancing through his bloodstream and flooding his cells. He can feel the button tops balloon against his bones. Every breath bounces against a newly grown field inside him, just waiting to escape. And he'll be conscious when they do. They want him to feel. They want him to know. They want him to see.

"Will."

A hand grips his. Will tries to focus on it, but the pressure in his chest is overwhelming. Even with the oxygen pounding against his mouth and nose, he can't take a breath anymore. Christ, he's dying. "Get them out," he begs raggedly. "Get them out of me! I can't breathe! I can't breathe!"

"You can breathe just fine, Will," the grip tightens. "You...giv...a drug. What you're experiencing...just a hallucination."

It doesn't look or feel like a hallucination though. "Please," tears are coming. He chokes and spasms. "I don't want to go into the ground."

"You won't be going into the ground," the voice, heavily accented, grows quieter. Will has to stop gasping in order to hear it, but the message isn't for him. He catches one-word-in-twenty: something something respiratory distress. Ativan? Diazepam? Will doesn't have a chance to really contemplate before he's lifted off the ground. The whole world lurches on its axis, and he has to close his eyes against the whirling, twirling forest-sky-people all around him.

"Breathe slowly and deeply, Will."

But the words don't work, because words don't make the mushrooms go away. The first one bursts through his stomach, the next from his clavicle, and then the rest simply bloom from his chest in small puffs of blood and skin. The earth is cool against his ankles. Its pull is soothing, and Will feels himself slipping away and into everything else. Because that's what mushrooms do: they make connections. Will was already a mushroom, he just didn't know it yet, and now he's in the earth with Hobbs, the two of them rotting together, as it should be.

The skin around the IV port burns. "Will. Will? WILL." The voice is getting rather insistent, but it takes Will's head a lifetime to rejoin his body from under the earth. And even when he does return to his senses, his senses don't really return to him. The world's gone hazy; his involvement in it is half-hearted and prevented. There's a fog settling thickly in his skull that makes his thoughts whirlpool down into some lost, dark region where Hobbs is waiting for him. Hannibal's face looms above his, and the good doctor's hands are on his cheeks, holding him steady and above ground and in the moment.

"Breathe slowly," the good doctor commands. Will chokes for a long moment, terrified of what comes next. He can't express what Lecter should know. There's no room in his chest for air, not next to the garden of fresh mushrooms. Hannibal catches him mid-thrash though and forces their eyes to meet. "There is nothing here that will harm you, Will. You need to breathe. Slowly now."

Will's eyelids are getting heavy. His heart rate is decreasing. "I'm dying...I'm dying..." he sucks in what he expects to one last gulp of oxygen, but then the band on his chest loosens. Air spills into him, cool and clean, once-twice-three times deeply, and then he has to follow his pulse: slow, steady, constant.

Hannibal catches Will's head as it lolls, easing him into the pillow as his eyelids flutter shut.

"Sleep, Will...just sleep..."

Happy reading!