Chapter 9: hinterland
She realises pretty much immediately that she has made an enormous mistake.
Well, she corrects herself, she had known that even before she opened that door and ran out into the night.
But what, then, would be the alternative? Stay? Stay, and not even try at all?
No, she determines as she lowers her head against the coldly burning pain of whipping snow and struggles onward, that is not an option. That is not her.
Everything is white and black, there is nothing in between. Night and snow, and no light to shoot through it all, nothing to make sense of the sheer, impossible violence of the storm. The wind seems to come from several directions at once, taking the snow in wild swirls and swoops with a single minded ferocity she's never seen before. It screams and howls and traces chaos theory through the air. She's never seen such elemental fury; almost like a sentient being, a demi-god of winter, is trying to bury her alive.
She knows winter. She knows winter in the West Virginian mountains, she knows winter in Montana. None of those iterations of the season can quite compare to this cruel, Arctic one. She is forced to admit that she has greatly underestimated the sheer lethality of a truly northern winter.
Not to mention that she'd gravely overestimated her own ability to face it.
She's miscalculated a lot of things, it seems.
Certainly she had underestimated Hannibal's wish for freedom and overestimated his need for finery and fripperies. She had thought him unable to exist far from civilisation, had thought that he would never head into the wilderness to hide. She hadn't really believed him when he told her they were far north. She had assumed that, if they were indeed in Canada, he would have placed himself somewhere near Montreal or Quebec City, somewhere within relatively easy reach of New York City.
She had also, she thinks, underestimated the influence of Will Graham.
Because this is Will's landscape. Will's world. Desolate wilderness, hinterland. She can't really say she knows Will Graham, but even so she knows that he would be comfortable here, thrive here.
And there is always fucking mail order.
Her thoughts are rambling, she thinks, to distract from her situation. She stops, briefly, and looks around.
It doesn't do her any good.
She lost her sense of direction almost immediately, closely followed by her sense of time. She has been trudging in what she hopes is a straight line, leaning into the wind when she's not being hit by it, and she is faintly surprised at how quickly despair has set in. But how could it not, walking as she is in a frozen purgatory?
She cried earlier, but she stopped when she realised that the tears immediately froze to ice on her cheeks. Now they are steaks of frost holding her face still, and she's unwilling to expend the effort required to raise her hand to wipe them away. If she even could.
No, she doesn't think she could; her hands are as frozen as her face. The too-long sleeves of the parka she stole have proven insufficient to keep her hands warm, and her only comfort is that they hurt like a sonofabitch. At least that means she's not yet suffering from frostbite. They are doing better than her bare feet. The first snowdrift she had to wade through saw lots of snow welling into the too-big boots, and she has lost all sensation in her toes.
"Ok, Clarice," she whispers to herself, "- this was really fucking stupid." The words get blown away by the wind, though and it's like they were never even there at all.
She is having to face that she will probably die. That Hannibal hadn't lied when he told her that they are in the middle of nowhere, lost somewhere in the vast, frozen north. It could be hours to the closest house. Village. Town. And she doesn't have hours. She probably does not even have one hour. It hurts to blink, to keep her eyes open, because her eyelashes are frozen to ice. Her mind is getting foggy, and she is getting more and more unwilling to fight. How easy it would be, she thinks, to simply sink down in the snow and rest. Succumb to the cold, and drift away. At least she hadn't ended up as fucking pot roast. At least there is that.
She almost stumbles straight into the stag.
It stands with its side towards her, against the wind, but she doesn't see it until she is right upon it. She stops, looks at it, and thinks she's hallucinating. Somewhere, far off, she knows she is hallucinating, of course, that the creature has never been real. But even more so now. She thinks she's delusional, that she is about to die; that she is seeing things because she is closer to death than she is life.
But it looks so very solid. It looks like it's here, right in front of her. In fact, the wind is no longer quite so cruel, because the stag absorbs some of its force with its massive body. She can see the breath billowing from its nostrils, she can see herself reflected in its pitch black eyes, she can feel the heat emanating from its hide. Smell it, too: musk and deep woods and snow. She's about to warm her frozen hands on its steaming flank when it starts moving, starts walking into the snow with its head low against the force of it, so low its antlers about touch the ground.
She doesn't hesitate. Not even for a second.
She follows it.
They walk not quite side by side for a while, and for the briefest time she feels… almost safe. Safe with the stag. Like things will be alright. Like she isn't walking on the thinnest line between life and death. Like she hasn't taken an impossible decision to escape an impossible situation.
Then she falls forward, goes down on one knee. It takes her a while to get back up again, and when she does the stag isn't there anymore, it has disappeared just like that. Away into the snow like it was never really there.
Then Will Graham emerges out of all the white.
She doesn't try to run. She's too frozen, too numb, too worn. She just stands there and watches him get closer to her.
He's dressed entirely appropriately for the weather. Down parka, snow pants, hat, gloves, a scarf covering the lower half of his face. Snow boots. He looks like he belongs here, like navigating and traversing this snowy hellscape is entirely without consequence for him.
Winter, she thinks half hysterically, seems to embrace him.
Just as she had thought.
He stops a couple of feet away. He doesn't grab for her, or gets in her space. He just pulls down the scarf from over his mouth so that she may better hear him.
"There is a little chalet not far from here," he shouts at her over the wind. "We would need to take cover there."
Then he holds his hand out to her.
She stares at it, his hand, and her exhausted mind is reeling, twisting and spinning. He's giving her a choice. He's giving her a fucking choice. It is non-verbal, but she hears it loud and clear. Take my hand, or take your chances.
Those chances are pretty certain to end in death by hypothermia, but he is offering it up to her. It's her decision; she believes the look in his eyes which tells her that he would allow her to turn around and let winter swallow her down, should she choose to do so.
That fucking bastard.
She is so tired as to be near unconscious, but still she manages to summon up some fury over his methods. Making her choose to come to him, to go back to captivity.
She hesitates.
And it feels like something cracks inside her, her thoughts slipping through darkness and light like skittish animals; boundless, trapped. It's a big crack, she feels, something like a fault line; irreparable, irreversible, she will never be the same again. Her soul hanging loose, swinging in the wind, her mind worn so threadbare as to be almost transparent.
She hates that. How can she ever come back from this, how can she…
…she steps forward, and she takes his hand.
He clasps it in his, and pulls her close to him.
"It's a little ways away. Do you think you can walk by yourself?"
She doesn't even have the energy to speak. She just nods in affirmation, even though she thinks that might be a lie.
Because she's got no strength left at all. She has no idea how she is meant to walk to this chalet of his, no idea at all. But she must try. She allows him to slip his arm about her waist and then they turn into the storm together.
It doesn't go so well. Even though she's upright, on her own two feet, she slips in and out of consciousness. A second here, a second there; a recurring fugue state she can't control. Her sense of place is disjointed and fluid; one second she's in front of a massive pine, the next she's left it long behind. She moves like an apparition caught in static, in fretful fits and starts. And time, she loses time everywhere, sweet little beads of memories and awareness slipping between her fingers and scattering all about the frozen ground.
She's as weak as a newborn.
"Will," she slurs. " Will. I don't think I can...I can't go on...I can't."
His arm tightens about her waist.
"Yes, you can," he says, turning his mouth into her temple and pressing the words and his will straight into her head. "Do you really think I will allow anything else? You will walk, Clarice, and you will walk straight."
She nods, lowers her head, and determines not to try and cry again.
Still, by the time they reach the chalet, he is mostly carrying her.
It's a squat, simple little building. More of a cabin, really. It's dark of window, thick with an atmosphere of desolation. It stands among a cove of pines, seeming to use the trees as support in staying upright in the storm.
She can barely climb the few steps up to the simple porch, but Will gets her up it somehow. He finds the key tucked above the lintel, unlocks, and ushers her inside.
She gets a hazy sense of rough hewn wooden walls, simple furniture, stale air.
"This has not been in use since before Hannibal and I came here. I hope the electricity still works."
He leaves her standing in the middle of the room, and she sinks onto the floor as he moves about the place, trying the switches.
The light comes on, flickering and uncertain. More off than on. It seems inevitable that before long it will give up entirely.
"The storm doesn't help matters," murmurs Will.
In the brief, startling bursts of light she tries to take in the place as she sits on the floor, curiously apart from herself.
From what she can tell it's a one room cabin. There is a kitchenette along one wall, a bed against the opposite one. A table and two chairs underneath the only window, an old wood burner just along. She sees Will flickering in and out of illumination as he picks up one of the chairs and smashes it to pieces against the wall, then stuffs the splintered wood into the burner. She watches him expertly light a fire, but it's a distant, indifferent sort of observation, far removed.
She is drifting away from herself. She can feel it, but she doesn't care. It's nice. It's nice not to feel anything anymore, nice not to care. Nice to just let it happen.
As from afar she sees Will pull the mattress and all the bedding from the bed and drag it to the floor in front of the wood burner. Then, just as the light finally gives out and leaves the room in nothing but faint firelight, he crouches down in front of her, tips her face up towards him with a finger under her chin.
He doesn't say anything about what he sees in her eyes, just immediately starts ripping her clothes off.
That jostles her back to herself.
"What are you…"
"Hypothermia,"he says shortly. "You will die. You need body heat."
He strips her down to her underwear, and then himself, and she doesn't stop him. She can't, shivering in place on the floor, unresisting when he moves her onto the mattress and pulls her back into himself, her back to his front. He sweeps all the blankets around them both, then wraps his arms around her.
She wants to sit stiffly but doesn't have the energy for it, simply sinks back into him. He's so very warm against her back, around her, and his breaths are so familiar. Safe, even though she knows that he isn't. She drifts again, but follows his breaths, like she has done before. It feels so good to leave herself behind like this, to…
"I know you want to sleep, Clarice," says Will in her ear, "- but I can't let you. You need to stay awake for a while yet. Until I know you will be fine. Talk to me."
She must be warming up a little bit at least, she thinks, because she notices her frozen tears thaw and run freely down her face in a frigid echo of crying.
She's so close to him. That awful intimacy of skin on skin She can't bear it. She wants to get closer. She wants to get away.
"How did you find me?"
She can barely get the words out, can't wrap her lips around them properly, but Will understands her well enough.
"I know the area very well. The grounds to this house are very vast, and you had made good tracks. You were almost at the border of the property." He pauses for a second. "Of course, you were on your way back towards the house when I found you. That made it easier."
"I followed the st…"
She cuts herself off as she tries to wrap her mind around the implications, as she realises what it might mean. Is it reasonable, she thinks dully, to feel betrayed by an apparition?
She decides to focus on something other than a familiar that might not be, after all, hers.
"You came alone."
He moves a little behind her. She can feel his heart beat solidly against her spine, his thighs cradling her body.
"Hannibal wanted to be the one to fetch you back, but I wouldn't let him. I convinced him I should go."
"Were you afraid he would kill me if he came instead?" she asks plainly.
He doesn't answer, simply brings her closer, and she, she turns her head and inhales him, her nose as the base of his neck. His mouth is in her hair, and she doesn't hear what he says at first.
"What was that?" she murmurs.
"I watched you go."
"What?" she whispers.
"I knew you would try it, of course. So did Hannibal. I took care to keep an eye on you, because I wanted to see your face the second you took the leap. And I did, and it was fascinating." He looks down on her then, meets her eyes squarely. "I saw determination, of course. But I saw hesitation too."
"You did not see hesitation," she says hotly even though she's still so cold. "You must have been mistaken."
He doesn't challenge her lie, if indeed it is a lie.
"Why did you run, Clarice?"
It falls out of her mouth before she can stop it, disobedient little words just dripping from her tongue like the water droplets down her cheeks. Breathless and unwanted. She wants to pick them up and shove them back in her mouth but they run away between her fingers and she can't hold them.
"Because you are keeping me against my will. Because...because Hannibal is saying things that sound right.. And you. You are saying things that sound right. And that is wrong."
She has never been more convinced of anything in her life, yet she sits there in Will's embrace and probes the widening crack in her. Like a tongue seeking out a broken tooth over and over; she can't stay away from it.
"Perhaps the things we say sound right because they are? Perhaps you are fighting against your own instincts."
"You are insane," she whispers into the fire. "Lost. He has warped you, twisted you so badly that you have become his."
Will shifts a little behind her, but despite her harsh words he doesn't move away. No, he moves closer. He doesn't quite put his chin on her shoulder, but she can feel the ghost of it, can feel the pressure of it making an indent into the muscle where her shoulder meets her neck, and how can that be? How can she feel him like that, so close and so true, when it is but a phantom touch?
"Do you know something, Clarice? We have had many conversations since you arrived here, yet you haven't once asked me to reconsider. You haven't asked me to leave Hannibal. Why do you think that is?"
She opens her mouth, closes it again. There is black ice inside the fault line in her mind, and she slips and slides along it, heedless, out of control.
It is terrifying, even with Will as an anchor at her back.
And he is right. Somehow, it hasn't really entered her mind that he might leave Hannibal. Not really. She hasn't tried to convince him, plead with him, bargain with him. "Help me escape, Will, come back with me, and I'll see to it that you will be cut a deal." In the face of the relationship Will Graham shares with Hannibal Lecter, she had forgotten that she is an FBI agent. An upholder of the law and the largest part of her identity.
How could that be?
What is happening to her? What will happen to her?
How hard did Hannibal work to fracture Will? Had he twisted the younger man and then bent him back right, so that he'd heal wrong? Are their cracks crossed now, and fused? Have they become a violent entity, a warped chimera unable to survive without all its parts? Yes, she thinks so. She thinks that they live under each other's skin; drink blood beaten by the other's heart.
Look out of each other's eyes.
Where, then, can she fit? Is she meant to fit?
She is so tired. Delusional. At a precipice, falling forward with her arms tied to her sides.
"Are you happy, Will?"
Her voice breaks into an ugly sob around the question.
"I am as happy as I am ever likely to get, Clarice. Do you want me to give that up?"
"No," she says, and she finds that she means it. She doesn't want him to give that up. But even so. But even so:
"But what am I? What is it that you want, Will? You, not Hannibal. What is it that you want from me?"
He's quiet for a few heartbeats; she can feel how they resonate within her, leads from her spinal cord through the birdcage of her ribs into her lungs, unfurls there like force grown blooms.
"I want you to live, Clarice. I want you to be alive. Do you think you can? Do you think you can, for me? Be that?"
"I don't know," she says. Then: "I feel safe now," and it comes out with the harsh sharpness of an accusation. It is an accusation. "I feel safe. How wrong is that? How twisted? I shouldn't… I can't…"
He shushes her, low noises in the back of his throat, and she becomes aware that he is rocking her, back and forth, back and forth. A quiet lullaby in his beating heart, the warmth of his skin, his breaths. And she falls and soars a thousand years in the cradle of him, her mind playing hopscotch, restless, becalmed.
And it is so very quiet now, the storm settling, and with its rest that peculiar, beautiful silence that only happens during snowfall. The otherworldly whiteness too, seeping through the window and burnishing the cabin in a cold silver. Cold meets the warmth of fire and she sits there in his arms, and she can almost breathe. She thinks she can maybe breathe.
"You can sleep now, Clarice. I will watch over you. Hannibal will come for us in the morning."
And her eyes grow heavy, and her head falls back to rest on the shoulder of Will Graham.