The bloody sheets caused by Bedelia's severed leg lie in a crumpled pile on the floor, and Will Graham reflects that he should probably just throw them out at this point. He doubts any amount of laundry detergent can save them, although if anyone knows how to remove caked and dried blood from designer sheets it's bound to be Hannibal.
A noise coming from the vicinity of the closet draws his attention. It's a small sound, similar to that of the squeaky dog toys well-meaning acquaintances used to sometimes give him, though he never allowed his pack to play with them due to the choking hazards they pose (and the obnoxious noises they produce). He almost convinces himself he's imagined it - almost worries that whatever is happening inside his mind will lead him to tearing through walls to rescue imagined animals again - when it sounds a second time. Which doesn't necessarily mean it's real, he reminds himself, but approaches the closet doors anyway - cautiously, because who knows what surprises Hannibal may have left for him in there.
He opens the door slowly, jaw clenched in preparation for what he might discover. But he's not prepared. The moth is immense, and flies directly into his face. Will catches himself mid yell, his mouth producing a strangled half-yelp as he springs back, out of range of the moth's furry wings. It flutters about him for a moment, avoiding his instinctive attempts to swat it, before gliding across the room to alight on the lampshade by the bed.
"God," Will exhales shakily. Now that it's no longer batting its wings against his face, Will is relieved not to have killed the creature. He creeps across the room towards it carefully, slow enough not to startle it from the lampshade. Its furry little legs carry it around the upper rim of the shade, circling and circling the light burning within its circumference. Its body is as long as his index finger, its wings trailing behind, like a dusty brown and white cape.
Will takes a last look, and spares a moment's thought in wondering how a moth this size wound up living in Hannibal's secret penthouse hideaway in Baltimore in the midst of a particularly cold spring. He lets the thought go and unplugs the lamp, plunging the room into darkness. He's seen moths fall dead on his porch many times, drawn too close to the lamplight and burned alive against the hot surface of the bulb. This insect looks large and solid enough not to perish at once, but he'd rather not risk it damaging itself. He can hear it moving in the darkness, still circling the lampshade, around the cooling dark bulb, its heavy wings rustling. Alone in the dark with only his thoughts and a moth for companionship, Will considers his present situation one more time.
In the past month, in no particular order, he's helped to kill five people, removed and eaten pieces of four of them, abandoned his wife following an attempt on her life he supposes he's partially responsible for, and helped break the Chesapeake Ripper out of a maximum security hospital for the criminally insane. He's forcibly amputated his psychiatrist's leg and then fed it to her. He's betrayed and endangered his closest - only - friends without a second - or first - thought.
He reckons that he can't spend the entire day hiding in an unlit room that still smells faintly of blood. They have Mike Barker's murder to arrange, after all. Will makes his way to the door, silently hoping that the moth will eat holes in all the suits Hannibal has purchased for him.
"After last night I believe a slight change of plans is in order," Hannibal says, shifting the logs on the fire with a pair of wrought iron tongs. The logs crackle as the fire rushes through the new crevices and tunnels he's created, devouring fuel. He'd had coffee waiting when Will walked into the room, and handed him the mug. "Our intentions must be obvious, even to Jack Crawford. They'll be waiting for us at Mr. Barker's house, in numbers too great to slip away from, this time."
Will frowns. The strength of his displeasure at the thought of being unable to exact justice (vengeance?) surprises him. "We can't very well go out in public to find him elsewhere," he replies. "Are you suggesting we just...let him go?"
Hannibal watches him closely, no doubt noting the incredulity and disappointment in his voice and bearing. "Of course not," he says at last, "but we'll need to be smarter than the FBI in order to avoid being caught. Remember Will, they know who they are looking for this time."
"But not where to find us," Will reminds him, "as long as we don't walk directly into any obvious traps. And since when has being smarter than the FBI posed any sort of challenge for you?"
"Or for you?" Hannibal replies. The flames now leaping in the hearth scatter his stark face with shifting shadows, a jungle of dark leafs his red eyes peer through. "How would you propose to go about bringing judgment to Michael Barker?"
Hannibal has a plan, Will knows. He always has a plan. "Why don't you just tell me what you're thinking?"
"Because I want to know what you think."
"Hmmmm," Will hums, considering. He can feel the force of Hannibal's eyes on him. "We can't take him from his home, and we can't take him from any public location where we'd be recognized. Concerned citizens are killing themselves, thinking it's you; we don't want to present them with the actual you."
"They wouldn't be able to kill me," Hannibal says, eyes sparkling mirthfully though his face remains blank, "or you either. But I agree; it would be unwise to draw that kind of attention."
"Then we need to bring Barker to us," Will concludes. He can tell from the twitching corner of Hannibal's mouth that this was his design as well.
"But how to convince a man to meet his own demise?"
Will closes his eyes, remembering. The dim room, weather channel running on mute in the background, Barnes tied to the chair, fighting screams, blood dripping from three finger tips as Will places the blade against the base of one more, Hannibal, stood to the side and watching, watching intently, weather girl predicting incoming cloud coverage, Barnes' voice wailing, giving up names but still pleading, Not him not him please he has a family -
He gasps, opening his eyes with a shiver. "His family," he says, and even though he can hear himself speaking and knows he should feel more ashamed of what he's proposing, he can't feel or think of anything except Hannibal's adoring gaze, "we threaten his family."
Hannibal smirks at Will's conclusion, a conclusion that he'd already undoubtedly come to himself. "That would be the best solution but I still have some lingering concerns."
"Such as?"
"Your mind," Hannibal answers. "We do not need you getting lost in another one of your hallucinations."
Will nods and a growing silence follows before he speaks. "That will not be a problem, Hannibal. I'm becoming more attuned to this transformation of mine. The only lingering concern left to me, is the We that you've just mentioned. You referred to us as we. What is that exactly? We're not Murder Husbands as the tabloids like to call us. What are We, exactly?"
Hannibal thought long and hard on this question before answering. "I don't believe their is a definition in the dictionary for what We are, Will. It goes beyond what an average human can label. Their is an undeniable attraction between us that refuses to be separated. It goes beyond love or attraction though. It transcends any physical or intimate sexual gratification that could be performed. My predilections are toward the opposite sex just the same as yours. Wouldn't you agree?"
Will stares at him long and hard, thinking over the question. He tries imagining a physical relationship with Hannibal. Their is an attraction undeniably, but not one that consists of a romantic nature. He loves the man but not in a lustful way. He can't imagine being away from him or without him. What were they then, if not lovers or Murder Husbands, as people like referring to them as.
"We are one entity," Will says. "One is incomplete without the other. People are too often consumed by the need to be labelled by one belief or another. We have transcended beyond that. We just are who we are."
Hannibal smiles, accepting the conclusion that his protege has come to. "I couldn't have said it better myself. Now that we have concluded that their is no label that can define us, We shall move on to more important matters."
Will nods, "Michael Barker's family."
Hannibal
Episode 4:
"Moth to a Flame"
Starring...
Mads Mikkelsen as Hannibal Lecter
Hugh Dancy as Will Graham
Caroline Dhavernas as Alana Bloom
Laurence Fishburne as Jack Crawford
Lara Jean Chorostecki as Freddie Lounds (uncredited)
Raul Esparza as Frederick Chilton (uncredited)
Recurring...
Gillian Anderson as Bedelia Du Maurier
Nina Arianda as Molly Graham
Scott Thompson as Jimmy Price
Aaron Abrams as Brian Zeller
Guest Starring...
Cynthia Nixon as Kade Prurnell
A second night of scalding coffee and poor small talk in a sour smelling Sedan with Jack Crawford, Molly thinks to herself. "This is some second date, huh?"
Crawford jerks slightly in his seat, snapping his eyes towards her before he laughs. "I don't get out much since Bella died," he says, "married to my job, as they say."
"Work makes for a shoddy second wife," she rejoins, holding her cup out for a refill.
"Made for a shoddy mistress, too," he says, pouring the steaming liquid from his thermos. The car fills with the scent. "If anyone actually wanted to date this aging widower they'd probably wind up right where you're sitting."
"How did she pass?" Molly asks. Then adds, "I hope you don't mind me asking."
"How could I mind?" he says, and she hears the unspoken after everything I've done. "Cancer. Lung."
"That's a shame," Molly says, sipping the beverage for the heat that spreads through her with each swallow. "Walter's father had stomach cancer. It moved fast." She doesn't add that the speed had been both a blessing and a curse.
"You always want more time," Crawford says, his eyes fixed on Michael Barker's house, across the street. "But the quality of time isn't worth maintaining. At least, that's what Bella used to say."
"Prolonged pain management," Molly says, and Jack snaps his head back to face her for a second time at the words.
"That's exactly what she called it," he says, and she smiles softly.
"It's what we called it, too. Must be one of those phrases you pick up when you're seriously ill, or when someone you love is. I thought we came up with it on our own, but maybe we read it somewhere. Maybe a doctor said it to us. Although, how grim if that's the case."
"It's a good description."
There's silence, for a while. Across the street the little house is quiet, too, one window lit. It's past midnight, and the lights in Barker and his children's bedrooms were extinguished hours before. Only the kitchen light remains. Molly can see a dark silhouette through the gauzy kitchen curtains. Michael Barker, sitting at his kitchen table, unable to sleep. She can't say she blames him.
The warmth of the coffee spreading through her chest and belly, Molly says, "I was so grateful to have Walter. I might not have been able to keep going for myself, but for him, anything."
"Children give us a reason to continue, a vision of a future beyond ourselves," Jack says, slow and deliberate.
"Do you have children, Agent Crawford?"
He shakes his head, smiling. "Not as such," he says. There's silence in the car, a quiet that stretches long enough for Molly to finish her coffee, grow cold again, and extend her cup for another refill. Crawford is pouring for her when the light in the kitchen window goes out. He stops, passes her the half full mug. "You might want to drink that fast," he tells her.
She doesn't say what she's thinking, that Barker has probably just given in to exhaustion or decided to lay in the dark beside his wife until the sun rises. Will had told her the students at Quantico had called Crawford "the guru;" he might lack Will's abilities, but he is perfectly capable of making his own uncanny intuitive leaps. She drinks the beverage obediently, scalding the inside of her mouth in her haste but enjoying the blossom of heat in her belly. Sure enough, in a matter of minutes the automatic garage door lifts, and a car peels out of Barker's driveway, speeding into the night.
The sound of the engine accelerating down the block is so loud that Molly sees the lights flicker back on in the Barkers' master bedroom, and then Jack sends them hurtling after the vehicle. They don't speak. Jack's face is a mask of dire concentration as he follows Barker's car. He gets on the radio with the SWAT vehicles laying in wait throughout the neighborhood, but they can't all pursue the car and still remain unnoticed. Molly watches the taillights that seem to pull further and further ahead of them. She can't tell where Barker is leading them, but Jack obviously has some idea, because he carries on racing through the quiet, dark streets even after the headlights vanish around a corner and it seems they've lost the trail.
She doesn't ask him if he knows where to go, or how he knows, trusting that famed intuition and concentrating on not losing the coffee sloshing around in her stomach as they whip around another corner. And she isn't disappointed, because, when Crawford finally pulls the Sedan to a halt outside the observatory, Barker's car is there, keys still in the ignition, one door ajar.
He rounds on her before he's removed his hand from the wheel. "This is your part, Molly. I need to know you're still up to it."
There's an urgency in his words that makes her understand why it was so difficult for Will to walk away from him, from the work he did with him. "I'm up to it," she says, feeling anything but.
"You have everything you need," he says. "I'll give you five minutes, then head in and trail you. Stick to the shadows, try to draw Will out on his own, do not engage with Hannibal Lecter." Jack looks at her, his expression an unreadable mix of emotions. "Trust me, you do not want Hannibal in your head."
She thinks maybe he's already there, making a home for himself amongst her happy memories, like a filter overlaying all the images she has of her sweet man - Will helping Wally assemble a remote control car he received for Christmas last year, the three of them throwing sticks for the dogs, his face on those rare occasions when he managed to fall asleep before her. All of it is ruined now, and will remain so, unless she walks into hell and brings him back.
It's darker than she'd expected, once the door swings shut behind her, and Molly fishes the penlight from her pocket before the panic gripping her has time to grow. Already she can feel her heart pounding so hard she feels dizzy.
"Okay, okay," she whispers, to herself, and breathes a long exhale, listening through the darkness for some sign of where to go. There are footsteps somewhere, muffled and moving further away. Molly swings the little light around, and the room is illuminated in pieces. It's hard to tell, but she thinks the room is smaller than it looked from outside, dominated mostly by the telescope in the center. The light catches on something towards the back of the room and Molly steps towards it, a doorway with no door, and beyond it, stairs leading from one darkness into another even more total one. She's been anxious, but now she is truly afraid.
She forces herself to think of that night she and Walter fled from the Red Dragon. It stands out in her memories, a surreal and misplaced moment in the journey of her life. She turns to it now, pulling on the reserves of calm and calculation she'd relied on to get them through that night. It had been for Wally that she'd held herself together then. Now, she thinks, she needs that courage again, to save Will. But she is frightened. Frightened of the darkness, and of what hides within.
She and Crawford had arrived after Barker, and wasted precious moments discussing their plan after parking. By now he could be dead, or dying. Molly shudders to think what she will find with the searching light of her little torch. Crouching beneath the floorboards in the cold, watching him from below, his face shadowed in the moonlight, how terrifying she had found the Great Red Dragon. How much more terrifying, she wonders, would it be to meet the man who sent him. Alana and Agent Crawford have both assured her repeatedly that Lecter has no reason to target her, but it occurs to her now to wonder whether or not she's giving him one by being here. She isn't a timid person, but she doubts her bravado and brash speech will go far if she encounters Lecter without Will. Or...
She forces herself not to consider that next thought. She forces herself to begin descending, her sneakers muffling her steps as she sinks herself into the darkness of the observatory basement. She'd read about the violent crimes that transpired here, long before she met Will, and wonders now if any ghosts linger in the lightless cavern she's entering.
The figure moving quietly towards her when she reaches the bottom step isn't a ghost, though.
The stone leaks cold into the air around Will Graham. Stone walls, stone floors. If he could reach high enough his fingers would brush against stone ceilings overhead. The plastic jumper does little to protect against the elements, and the cobalt blue suit beneath it lets too much of the frigid air seep in to raise bumps like braille along limbs. He shivers, but finds there's something pleasant about the discomfort, another sensation to delve into and catalogue, now while his nerves are most finely attuned. He feels the cold, but not the pain of it. Deep inside his body, Will's heart burns.
He thinks of the future, of a few short minutes from now, when Hannibal will have finished taking the pieces of Mike Barker he wants - he's been uncharacteristically secretive about it, saying something about surprises and sending Will to wander in the darkness of the observatory basement on his own, with only his imagination and memory for company.
They'd made quick work of Barker - quicker and more merciful than Will had intended, but in the moment he'd found himself unable to stop, or even slow. The look in Hannibal's eyes as Will's knife buried itself in Barker's soft belly and the pressure of Hannibal's hand over their victim's mouth as his hand jerked the knife up to gut Barker like a trout. The man's entrails made a wet sound as they hit the stone floor.
Will hasn't been down here since Jack brought him to see Beverly. He remembers his shock, the feeling of almost unendurable loss at the disappearance of his last true ally, remembers, too, what it felt like to shift into Hannibal's mindset, the quiet feeling of power he'd recognized too well. Now, Will sees Beverly standing in the darkness, the separate layers of her flesh coming together again to unite into a whole being who stands before his dazzled eyes.
"Will?"
It's not Beverly's voice that calls to him from the figure standing at the dark archway at the base of the stairs. Will blinks, and the vision of Beverly wavers briefly, like an image viewed through rising heat. This, he knows, cannot be real. Beverly is gone, and perhaps it's time to admit to himself that as angry as her loss made him, as angry as the thought of it still makes him, it's not enough to stop or even dull the force of his desire. Nothing is.
Safe in the knowledge this is all in his head, and curious what the ghosts of the past will say with their mismatched mouths and voices, Will steps closer to the apparition. He wants to tell her how sorry he is, both for what was done to her and for what he's done since, but he knows that it would be a meaningless gesture, that it would only benefit him. Beverly won't hear. She's not really here. He elects investigation over apology, running his eyes over her as he draws closer and noticing the stitches running in thin red stripes down one half of her face and neck and disappearing into her collar. He lets his fingers trail over them, when he is close enough, and feels the pucker of thread between the smooth planes of her face, the ridges of her cheekbone, a stray strand of soft dark hair. It's more intimate than any touch they shared in life. He can feel the guilt in him running through his arms and out of his fingers, spiraling away in shimmering filaments that frame her puzzled face.
She doesn't matter to him. Not really. Not the way Hannibal does.
"Oh, Will."
It's not Beverly's voice, and her face waivers a second time, shifting beneath his fingertips to become not Beverly's face. Will freezes, hand still outstretched to touch someone who isn't there - touching someone entirely different by mistake. He's no longer certain whether this is real, or partially real.
"Sweetheart," Molly says, and he can feel the hot tears on his fingers. The feeling is too concrete, and he snatches his hand back at the sensation.
"You need to leave," he says, glancing towards the back room of the basement, where he can hear Hannibal's footsteps. If some part of this vision is real, Will senses things are about to go very badly. "Right now."
He thinks, at first, that she's about to hug him. She raises her arms as if in preparation of an embrace, and his mind is racing too fast for him to react to the gesture. He's trying to decide whether to shove her back towards the stairs, or take her hand and drag her away - a frighteningly large part of him is imagining how her countenance will break if he just grabs her right now, how she'll struggle against his arms as he pulls her towards the back room and those approaching footsteps.
For an instant her eyes are broken mirrors, and he sees the flash of his gritted teeth and furrowed brow as the needle slides into his neck, and the sound of approaching footsteps grows louder and faster, seeming to come from every direction at once as the dark room dims further. His last sensation is the jolt of his knees colliding with the concrete floor. He's gone before he finishes falling.
He's aware of the pain in his head pounding in time with his heart before he even opens his eyes. For a moment, he thinks he's going to be sick, and his eyelids flutter and clench tighter reflexively. He gives a shuddering breath, his nostrils flaring, and groans. But the wave of nausea passes, leaving a sharp pain in his head that is scarcely bearable, but bearable nonetheless. Will Graham opens his eyes.
The room is familiar, burned into his memory from his several visits, but he's only seen it from this angle once before. Or maybe, more accurately, never from this angle, not precisely. He swings his legs over the side of the low cot and eyes the toilet standing two feet away, wondering again if he's about to vomit. But, deciding he's fine, he pushes himself unsteadily to his feet and approaches the glass. He sees himself standing on the other side, one hand pressed to the cold barrier, sees the longing and denial in his own eyes, the soft defeated parting of his own lips. Will lifts his hand to place it against the glass, pressing his palm against the walls of his memory. His head throbs.
The dark wood doors swing open before he can even begin to process where he is and what it means to be here, and Will snatches his hand back from the glass as if it's been burned. Alana clicks towards him on modest heels, her hips swaying in a way that might appear seductive or affected to someone who didn't know it was merely a symptom of her left hip healing improperly after her fall. She's able to walk - even to wear the kind of short heels she's sporting now - but that night in Hannibal's Baltimore home changed her in every way that counts. She sways her way towards the glass, tight expression coming into the light.
"Hello, Will."
Alana watches him through the glass, her face a carefully neutral mask. Red lips, blouse cut nearly to her navel, bits of smoke and mirror intended to draw attention away from those cautious, cunning eyes. There's a touch of success in the curve of her crimson lips, but her expression is otherwise controlled and her voice betrays nothing. Even so, Will thinks he can smell her self-congratulation and pride, the way Hannibal might do, and he's determined to break them.
"Hello, Alana," he answers, "what the hell do you think you're doing?"
She inhales sharply at the coldness of his tone. Truth be told, he's shocked by it himself; he doesn't recognize the icy, angry voice coming from him, or the feeling of gelid hatred gripping him by the guts. He knows he should feel otherwise; she's his friend, after all. But he can't curb the tide of anger rising in him. He's sure it must show on his face, but she has the audacity to try to speak to him, even so. "Will - "
"Shut up," he interrupts, noting with a small measure of satisfaction the flinch she tries to hide. "Let me out."
She shakes her head, looking for a moment like the ghost of her old self, like the woman he remembers she was when he knew her before. Her voice sounds strangled when she speaks, wet and thick as a forest floor. "You know I can't do that."
"I know you know keeping me here will kill me," he scoffs in that unrecognizable, commanding tone. "What do you think you're doing, Alana?"
"Saving you," she hisses, her indignation overwhelming her shock. He hears her voice break as she continues, smells the saline of the tears gathering at the corners of her eyes. Her words come with obvious pain, but she forces them out, past her gritted teeth. "Say he forced you."
Will cocks his head, considers her without expression as she crumbles in front of him. "What am I saying he forced me to do?" he asks, as the tears slide down her face, over her quivering chin. "What am I being accused of, Alana?"
"You know," she says, and her voice shakes badly. After everything, all the infinite changes they've both endured, it's still hard for her to acknowledge what he's capable of doing. Of enjoying. She'd far rather they both pretend, as they've been doing for years. Will stores that information. "Please don't play this game, Will. We just want -"
"You just want to help," he spits. She flinches again, and he smiles, a bitter grimace. "You've been so good at helping, you and Jack both, always keeping my best interests at heart."
"I have," she protests. "You want to be mad at Jack? Be mad at him. I'm mad at him. I'm furious." Her face is flushed, the pink of her cheeks clashing badly with her bold red lips. She must not blush often anymore, he thinks, with a rising sense of contentment as he pushes her further past her calm, further out of the shell she's built for herself. A little more, a little further.
"Let me out of here, Alana," he commands, pitching his voice to the low timber he would use on his dogs. He sees the twitch in her mouth, feels her wanting to obey. Knows he has to apply just the right amount of pressure. "Whatever plan keeping me here fits into, you know it won't work. Look at you; you're so scared. But you don't need to be." His voice slides between them, low and smooth, a current dragging at her. Her hand is shaking. He can hear her breath catch. "Let me out. Give me the gun you're carrying. I'll use you as a hostage to get out of here. No one will get hurt. You can tell them I faked an allergic reaction to the tranquilizer and overpowered you when you tried to administer first aid. You'll never hear from either of us again. I'll tell him you helped me."
Too far. He sees it in the instant the last words leave his mouth, in the straightening of her spine and the flash of her teeth when she speaks. "So if I help you escape federal custody you'll be sure to intercede on my behalf," she spits. "And if I don't help you, what then? You help him kill me? Cooperate or die?"
"I can hardly do that from in here," Will replies, acerbically.
Alana scoffs. "Did you spare any thoughts for me at all, Will? Did it occur to you even once in the past three weeks? Surely the topic of what Hannibal promised to do to me, threatened to do to my family, must have come up."
"It honestly didn't," Will says, watching her jaw clench at his words. He remembers her standing on his porch in Wolf Trap, telling him she'd been surprised by his true nature, that she'd misjudged him. She's not going to let him out, but he can still push her past rationality, and maybe she'll slip, or let something slip. "I'm sure we would have gotten around to you eventually."
"I'm your friend," she says, voice trembling but firm. "You're not yourself."
She sounds like she has more to say, but he cuts her off before she can. "Oh, I'm more myself than I've ever been," he says, and her indrawn breath sounds like a sob. "You're not going to find any psychoactive in my blood, Alana, or any fever in my brain. There won't be a convenient medical excuse this time. I'm not going to recover if you keep me quarantined long enough."
"What's going to happen, then? Have you thought about that? You'll stand trial. We can help you, if you want to be helped. If you want to avoid the federal death penalty."
Will cocks an eyebrow at her determined stance, her upthrust chin. "Cooperate or die?" he asks, voice bitter but appreciative. "You think you're, what? Going to trap him somehow? The old box on the stick, and I'm the lure? Funny how you and Jack always come back to that tired routine. You think you'll make yourself safer, doing this Alana, but you're just making things worse."
She shakes her head, looking down, away from him. He finds he doesn't have as much of a problem meeting her eyes as he once did. It seems the shoe is on the other foot now; she's looking anywhere but back at him when she finally speaks, her voice little more than a whisper. "What happened to you?"
"Nothing happened to me," he says, "I happened."
Alana blusters wordlessly for a moment, doing little more than making exasperated sounds and gestures towards Will where he stands behind the glass partition. Finally, she manages to verbalize her thoughts once more. "We bring you in," she breathes, "and find Mike Barker hollowed out like a drum in the back room when we search the conservatory. We bring you in and you're wearing a plastic suit and raving in your sleep about needing to see Hannibal. The last time I saw you you were on your way to dispatch justice on both the men responsible for the attack on your wife and son. What the hell have you been doing?"
He crosses to the back of the cell without looking at her. The cot is long enough for him to stretch out on his back and lace his hands behind his head comfortably. "I'm done talking to you, Alana," he dismisses her, and then he closes his eyes and goes away.
Jack Crawford offers her a drink when she enters the room, even though it's her office, and even though the sun is just starting to rise. There's a sheen of grey light on the dark sky beyond her window, a promise of the coming dawn. Even in this strange new world, some things remain assured. She accepts, and drains the glass before speaking.
"He's not going to make this easy," she says, at last.
"That was always a possibility," Jack says. She nods. It was. Just one neither of them had wanted to consider. It had been an easy topic to avoid, when they'd still had to focus on managing his arrest. There's no avoiding it now. "We need to keep trying to get through to him. What's his mental state like?"
"Oh he's extremely lucid," Alana answers, grimacing. "Too lucid to get far with an insanity plea." She doesn't add that she doubts Will would opt for an insanity plea. Or any plea. After their last brief conversation, she feels fairly certain Will will simply refuse to participate in the rituals and ceremonies of court altogether. Her thoughts hit a wall imagining how that scenario is likely to play out.
"What did he say?"
"Why don't you go talk to him and hear for yourself?" she snaps, and then regrets it. "I'm sorry, Jack. I shouldn't let him get to me. But."
"I take it he isn't volunteering to cooperate."
"He'd probably give a confession right now. How's that for cooperation?"
Jack utters an oath under his breath. "There's got to be a way to snap him out of this."
Alana says nothing, considering possible means of bringing Will back to himself - or back to a version of himself that won't wind up incurring the federal death penalty. She's considered some of the options available to them before, but had hoped it wouldn't come down to this. Jack isn't ready to hear any of those options, however, not until he sees what Will's become for himself. Maybe part of her still hopes that Jack's presence will be enough to restore Will's mind to order; it's worked before.
Finally, she says, "He can still serve his main purpose, for now."
It's impossible to miss Jack's indrawn breath. "Saving Will has never been your primary objective, has it, Alana?"
"Once," she says, "a long time ago, it was." She helps herself to another drink, refilling her glass and draining it again in the silence that fills the air between them.
"What is your objective, now?" Jack asks, when she begins to pour another glass.
"Handling the consequences of all the times I put Will's safety first," she answers.
Jack's in the room when Will opens his eyes. God knows how long he's been standing there. He's even speaking, Will realizes, though it takes him a moment to understand the words.
"...help you, Will, please," Jack implores, his body a tense line on the other side of the glass. Will blinks out at him.
"Hello, Jack," he says. "How long have you been here?"
Jack exhales noisily, and remains silent for a moment. At last, in a tense voice, he says, "About four minutes."
"My apologies for not being here to greet you," Will says, voice bitingly sarcastic. "Were we having a nice chat? I'm sure it was more productive without me present."
He can see Jack struggling to remain calm. His voice, when he speaks, is strained almost to breaking. "You need to give us something, Will. An address, ideally, something that leads to his capture. We can say we struck a deal, avoid a trial, but you've got to show you're working with us."
Not wounded or dead then, he thinks, not captured. He's not surprised, but a small part of him aches, even as the rest of his body floods with relief. Will considers Jack for a long, quiet moment. He looks half dead, eyes darkly circled, chin covered in two days' worth of stubble. There's still hope in his eyes. Hoping the leash we've been keeping me on has only frayed and not snapped, Will thinks, hoping he won't have to feel too guilty.
"You know I'm not going to help you, Jack," he says, at last, and watches the muscles in Jack's jaw tighten like a vice.
"Help yourself," Jack manages to spit, finally. "You want to go to trial? Remember what that was like before? Imagine it now. They'll burn you alive."
"Oh, I won't be standing trial," Will answers.
"And just how do you intend to manage that?" Jack asks, arching one eyebrow.
Will's smile is tight. "Hannibal won't let me."
There's a flash in Jack's eyes, so quick he's half certain he imagined it. "You think he'd risk his freedom, his life, to free you?"
"No," he says, "he'd risk it to kill me."
Will can see his own face reflected in the glass, laid over Jack's frown. The black line of stitches running across his cheek stands out in the dim light, a darker shadow making his already slim face appear unnaturally gaunt.
"Why would Lecter want to kill you?" Jack asks, when it becomes clear Will is not going to offer any further information on his own without some prodding. "You seem to be getting along so well these days."
"He'll consider this a betrayal," Will informs him, coldly. There's no reason not to let him know the truth. "Did you see him, when you brought me in?"
Jack shakes his head. "No, it was just you down there. You and..."
Will's smile is tight and humorless. "Me and what was left of Michael Barker," he finishes for Jack, noting the older man's wince. "Were you hoping I'd claim not to know about the body, Jack? That we could both pretend I wasn't actively involved in what happened to Mr. Barker?"
Jack says nothing for a long moment, but considers him from behind his closed off facade. "I hoped you'd tell me I was wrong for suspecting you again. I was certain of your guilt before, and I shouldn't have been. If you'd asked me to trust you now..."
"You'd have done it to make up for the last time?"
"I figure I owe you."
He snorts a bitter laugh. "Come on, Jack, you're a better detective than that. I'm clearly guilty." Jack says nothing. "And just as clearly I've abandoned Hannibal to return to my life with the FBI, and in particular my wife," Will continues, voice dripping with derision. "That's how it's bound to look to Hannibal, anyway. Tell me, how did you convince Molly to help? That's a pretty low move, Jack, even for you. I'm almost more surprised that you asked her to help than I am that she agreed to anything you had to say."
Jack coughs, shifting his weight from one foot to another. "Alana brought her to me," he says to Will's raised eyebrow. "I didn't want to use her, believe me. You didn't leave us a lot of options."
"I don't suppose it occurred to you to just let me go," Will says, "repay your debts by just not bending the law and your conscience to subdue me. Just let me slip away."
"You weren't exactly trying to slip away," Jack points out, and Will supposes he can't argue there; vanishing without a trace hadn't been on his agenda.
"You could let me go now," Will says. "You'd be saving my life."
"We have enough guards on you right now to start a war," Jack says. "We can protect you from Hannibal Lecter just fine, Will."
"Protect me from Hannibal in order to deliver me to the state executioner," Will sneers. "Unless I'm willing to give you something that proves I've been your man the whole time, right? Or at least that I'm still trying to be. And if I give you something good enough, what then? Do you let me go then? Do I get to go back to my wife? Back to my life by myself with just the dogs for company? Do I get to rest secure in the knowledge that Jack Crawford will never call on me for help again?"
Finding himself almost breathless, Will stops speaking. He watches Jack, but the other man makes no attempt to reply.
When he reaches the fifth floor, Jack Crawford rides the elevator down to the bottom. He and Alana are the only ones with the code to that; Alana's rationale was that everyone should know as little as possible, lest they become compromised for any reason. Jack can't help thinking that they never tested whether this prison could actually hold Hannibal, if he'd been interested in escaping. It's as secure as anywhere can possibly be, he supposes. He passes Alana on his way out.
"Molly wants to see him," the doctor says with a purse of her glossy red lips.
"I'm not sure that's a good idea."
"It might be what he needs to bring him back to himself," Alana shrugs. "She'll insist on it, whatever we say."
"Let's just try to delay that as long as possible, then," Jack answers. He edges towards the door. His head has begun to throb, and he's anxious to get back to his office, where he can mix an Alka Seltzer and drink it in the dark.
Alana nods. "Have you thought at all about what I mentioned to you?"
He has, but he doesn't want to talk about it right now, not with the pound of a migraine beginning in his temples and the edges of the room beginning to blur. "I don't know, Alana. Don't you feel like we've already crossed enough ethical boundaries?"
"What's the point of any of it if we don't get the results we're after, Jack?" There's an edge to her voice that he recognizes, but not from her. "It won't hurt him."
"Not more than he's already been hurt, you mean," he says, turning to the door. "You have my opinion." He can't forbid her, with Will technically residing under her care. More than that, he doesn't want to forbid her. The air outside is crisp and cold, prickling with moisture, the promise of rain.
Jack staggers towards his car, no longer certain he's safe to be on the road. Perhaps he can sleep in the front seat for a few minutes, just long enough to let the pain in his head subside. He shouldn't have been so anxious to leave, should have asked Alana for an Aspirin while he was in the damned hospital, for God's sake.
He's cursing himself for his lack of foresight when he reaches his car, and stops, knowing at once that something is wrong, even as it takes his mind longer than usual to catch up with the vision in front of him, seated on the passenger seat of his car. Her blonde hair spreads around her on the heavy silver platter, pale tendrils twirling around peacock feathers and split pomegranates, black figs coated in honey that drips into her honey colored locks, antlers woven into her curls. Jack fumbles for his phone, shouts for back up, and stands, silent and alone in the parking lot as he waits for someone to come.
From within the car, Bedelia Du Maurier stares back, dark grapes spilling from her distended jaw, her eyes like the spaces between the stars.
The stack of photos makes a soft plop as it hits the bottom of the metal tray, and then there's a short series of slams and scrapes as the tray slides to his side of the glass barrier. Will Graham opens his eyes, but makes no move to stand from the desk. The books, papers, felt tipped pens that had filled the room when he first came here, what feels like another lifetime ago, are noticeably absent now. Of course, Hannibal hadn't quite finished earning back his privileges. Any rational society would have either killed him or given him his books, but Will knows that Hannibal's motivation for risking his life to help apprehend Dolarhyde had nothing whatsoever to do with the petty privileges Alana and the BSHCI had afforded him. Now that he is here, on the other side, Will knows Hannibal never needed those things. He never needed to stay here either, Will thinks. No prison is impervious. If he'd tried he could have gotten out - just like he'll get in when he tries, now. If that's true, it means there's a possibility of escape.
"Will," Jack says, finally, when Will neither approaches the tray nor looks in his and Alana's direction. Will turns to him, slowly, as if towards the sound of a bird singing, a dog barking, some peaceful noise that draws only idle curiosity rather than urgent concentration. Like their presence does not affect him, but might amuse him. It's a look Jack's seen before, from the other side of that glass partition, but never on Will's face before. He quells the shiver that starts at the base of his spine before it can traverse the length of his back. "We need to talk."
"So talk," Will says, voice polite but cold, hands clasped on the empty desk.
"We brought you pictures," Alana says, too quickly, and Jack scowls at her as Will raises an eyebrow, still making no move towards what they've sent over to him in the little metal tray. To her credit, she doesn't flush this time. She always was a fast learner. "Bedelia Du Maurier's body was discovered in the parking lot three hours ago."
"Surely not all her body," Will states, tone amused but matter of fact. Alana's skin crawls at the sound, and at the look he gives her.
"No," Jack answers him, "not all of her was discovered. Would you like to tell us which piece of her you think we'd find?"
"Oh I couldn't possibly say," Will says, pushing the chair back. He stands, one hand resting palm down on the desk as he does. "Probably not her left leg, if I had to make any guesses." He crosses towards the glass and the photos, pausing before he removes them from the metal box. "Or her eyes."
His expression doesn't change when he looks at the first few photos. He flips through the top of the stack cooly. Alana thinks there might be a hint of a smile starting on his face when he reaches the last picture, but she hopes it's her imagination. He sets the pictures back in the tray and looks up at her and Jack again. "Thanks," he says.
Jack looks as if he's about to swallow his own tongue for a moment. At last he manages to make it work properly again. "Will, you need to tell us where to find him."
"Did you bring me these pictures so I could assume his thoughts, Jack? Tell you his motive and how to catch him before he completes his surrender, just like old times?" Will sneers. "It didn't work then. Why should it work now?" Will watches their faces, not their eyes. Jack's mouth is a hard line; Will can practically hear his molars grinding themselves smooth.
Alana's expression is less transparent. "You need to understand what's happening here, Will," she says, her voice suddenly steadier than he's heard it since he first returned to Maryland, "for your own good. You helped break the world's most notorious serial killer out of a maximum security hospital, then proceeded to go on a murder spree, killing so many innocent people in such a short amount of time that the two of you together started to make the Chesapeake Ripper look mild. We don't have hard proof of your involvement in all of the murders, but you left your DNA all over Clark Ingram's condo, and you were spotted at the scenes of Frank Duffy and Michael Barker's murders. We needed to bring you in; that's our job. It was your job, as well, until recently. You need to understand that you needed to be stopped. This has nothing to do with friendship or cruelty and everything to do with preserving innocent lives, something you used to understand.
"You will stand trial without our help - maybe even with our help, Will - and you will be found guilty. You'll be damned lucky if you get anywhere with an insanity plea; guilt has a habit of sticking to you, Will, and you've been linked to Hannibal Lecter for too long in the public's eye. I tried to approach Frederick Chilton about writing something in your defense - something like what he did with that horrible purple page turner he wrote on Hannibal, that helped lend credence to his insanity plea." She shifts under Will's gaze. "You can imagine he was uninterested in helping."
"I'm surprised you bothered asking."
"It was worth a shot," she says, "if there was a chance it could help you avoid life in prison, or keep your head from the chopping block."
He examines her closely, the faint creases at the corners of her eyes, the concern written in furrows across her brow. "You really do want to help me," he breathes, and her face breaks.
"Damn it, Will, yes, that's what I've been trying to tell you," she practically sobs. Beside her, Jack is silent and stoic, no doubt sensing they'll get further with Will if he lets Alana do the talking. She was always better at the emotional appeals, after all. "I've known you since before this all began. I love you. This isn't what I wanted for you - I'm the one who recommended Hannibal work with you and I will never forgive myself, even though I couldn't have possibly foreseen the consequences."
"None of us could," Will says softly. "Not even him." He sees her shiver.
"I wish I could take it all back," she says, "make it so you never met each other, so we never made it here. He might have kept killing, unchecked, and never been apprehended. But I wish I could take it back anyway."
Will doesn't speak. He wants to tell her that he doesn't wish that, to see how her face would look in reaction, but he wants to hear how she'll finish this plea even more. There's regret, and compassion, and love in the twist of her mouth. But that's not all there is. Will supposes he can hardly begrudge her a little self preservation after all these years.
"You need to understand the reality of this situation," she repeats. "The only way we can help you is if you help us. It's not a bargain - not with us, anyway. We're your friends, even if you don't feel like that's true right now, and we're putting ourselves and our careers at risk for you by doing this."
"I haven't been officially arrested yet," Will realizes. "I haven't been read my rights."
"We didn't want...anything you said to be on record."
"You could have sent a SWAT team in after us." "
"We thought you might kill someone."
"I would have."
Alana flinches. "If you give us something that helps us apprehend Hannibal, we can say you were working with us the whole time. We'll say Hannibal abducted you after Dolarhyde wounded you."
Will is silent, staring back into Alana's wide blue eyes with uncharacteristic calmness. Beside them, Jack shifts, still trying to remain as unobtrusive as possible for once. The moment stretches, and time seems to slow until Alana can count the breaths she takes between her heart's heavy beats.
Finally, Will says, "Bring me the head."
They argue about it for a while - just like they'd argued about allowing Will to retain his wedding ring when they'd let forensics strip the rest of his clothes and belongings; Jack had argued in favor of following protocol as best they could, siting the fact that they were "already in deep enough crap as it is," but Alana had convinced him they'd retrieved Will due to his attachment to Molly, and the presence of a symbol of their marriage, after everything else was stripped away, might help revive his sense of loyalty to his old life. She convinces him again, now.
"I still think we're making a mistake," Jack grumbles, following the click of Alana's heels on the linoleum, right into the forensics lab.
"I know," Alana says, "you mentioned. Extensively. Repeatedly. For the duration of the drive here, the walk to the door, the entirety of the elevator ride, and then again thirty seconds ago. I hear your concerns."
"Concerns about what?" Jimmy Price chimes as they round the corner into the lab. "The correct shoes to wear with this stylish little cellophane number? I'm thinking something daring, maybe in red."
Alana stops abruptly, and Jack nearly collides with her back. Price is holding a transparent, one-piece, plastic jumpsuit. White stitches run up the sides and in two lines along the lower back of the suit. "There's darts," Alana observes tonelessly.
"You know your sewing," Price beams, displaying the suit for them like he's convincing them of the next fall trend. "I won't believe you if you say you made that outfit you're wearing, though."
"This isn't funny, Jimmy," Jack growls, finding his voice again.
"Oh no, of course not, no," Price agrees. "It's a proper tragedy."
"What is?" Brian Zeller asks, coming into the lab with two mugs of coffee in hand, one of which he delivers to Price. "The pairing of a conservative brown loafer with something as fashion forward and Avant-garde as this suit?"
"This really is the kind of piece you need guts to pull off," Price says, "sometimes extra guts. More than you were born with. Someone else's."
Alana stares. Beside her, Jack looks as if his head is about to explode. She decides it's better if she speaks before he does. "Have you found anything useful?"
"Besides learning something new about Will's wardrobe preferences, we've learned very little, sadly," Price says. "The suit is mostly composed of polypropylene, and appears to have been custom made to fit Will Graham's measurements. Do you think Hannibal sewed it himself? I would love to read the invoice if he ordered it custom made."
"He probably has a matching one," Zeller says, chugging his coffee. "It would explain the lack of evidence at his crime scenes. Kooky look, but a pretty smart move, I have to admit."
"The suit and the rest of Will's clothes appear to be brand new," Price adds. "Have any local tailors reported taking orders from the FBI's most wanted this month?"
"Assuming Lecter is the one who procured the clothes," Zeller says, "which seems likely since they aren't flannel, I'm kind of surprised by the total lack of paisley."
"Prison has changed him," Price says gravely.
"No fibers or clues to where they've been staying?" Alana hurries to ask, seeing Jack's face tightening further. Zeller shakes his head. "What about the head? Anything useful?"
"Aw," Price lights up. "We did find something there, but probably nothing that will help you locate Lecter."
"What?" Jack speaks, voice strained.
"For starters," Price says, "it's covered in prints. There's an entire palm print across the forehead, three perfect finger prints and a partial fourth along the right cheek, practically the entire hand along the left. Two hand prints on the platter itself."
His eyes look misty. "Lecter's?"
"It's like he was patting her face," Price confirms. "And there's more."
"We found six of his hairs wrapped around the quill of one of the peacock feathers," Zeller says. "I mean wrapped, like intentionally wound around the calamus and then tied in a loose knot."
Jack's frowns so deeply his face creases into new wrinkles. "He intentionally left evidence."
"Like he wanted credit for the kill and thought we were too dumb to figure it out on our own," Price says.
"We were too dumb to figure it out," Alana says. All that time, killing right in front of us and growing more and more audacious, and we never saw him.
"It gets weirder," Zeller says. "I noticed a sound, like something shifting inside her head each time I moved her. So I shone a light down her eye sockets and found these."
He takes a clear acrylic box from the cabinet to his left and lays it on the desk in front of them. Alana leans in, staring down at a segmented cylinder roughly the size and shape of a man's thumb. Its surface shines, glossy brown like polished wood, and scored by faint grooves. The ends of the thing taper, and one extends into a thin dark curl like a willow twig.
Jack picks the box up and brings it closer to his scowling face. "Some kind of cocoon?" he guesses.
Price nods. "A large butterfly or moth, we think," he says. "There was one in each eye; we sent the left one to the Smithsonian for analysis."
"Send this one as well," Jack says. "No reason to assume they're identical, even if they look it."
Zeller nods, taking the box back. "That's all we've got for now I'm afraid."
"We need one more thing," Alana rushes, before Jack can drag them both away.
They bring the head to Will in a small styrofoam cooler. Alana insists on bringing the cocoon as well, arguing that Jack can send it to the Smithsonian himself immediately afterwards. Jack drives them back to the BSHCI, Alana in the passenger seat with the cooler locked between her knees.
She won't fit through the metal tray in a dignified way, so they place the open cooler against the glass partition so that he can look into it. Jack lets Alana take the cooler up to the glass and remove the lid herself. She supposes that's fair. Dr. Du Maurier's gaunt and eyeless face gazes up from the ice packs, her broken jaw hanging in an expression of permanent surprise, as if she's just witnessed something utterly scandalous. Alana expects whatever the doctor saw last probably counted as scandalous.
Will stares down at the head without any apparent interest. They send the box through the metal tray, and he takes it, holding it up to the light to examine.
"It's some kind of insect cocoon or larvae," Alana tells him, though he hasn't asked. He spares her a glance before returning his attention to the dark little shape. "We're sending it to the Smithsonian this evening for analysis."
Will turns the little case against the light, expression contemplative. The overhead light glints against the shiny carapace. Watching from behind the glass, Alana thinks she can see the hint of wings through the thick silk of the cocoon, the barest impression of a dark shroud draped within the darker casing. He drops the box gently back into the tray and slides it across.
"Okay Will," Jack says, clearly marshaling his last reserves of patience at this moment. "We brought you the evidence. Time to uphold your end of the bargain. Give us something we can use to find him."
"I changed my mind," Will says, and then he shuts his eyes and no amount of Jack's apoplectic commands rouse any response.
Will sits on the bench before the Primavera, ensconced by the warm light and rich colors of the Uffizi gallery. His knees are drawn to his chest, shoes resting on the padded bench. He can imagine the silent look of disdain Hannibal would serve in response to his disrespectful posture, but the gallery is as empty as the catacombs had been, and so his transgressions pass without even a silent rebuke.
"You're here somewhere," Will says, to the Botticelli paintings, to the soft lights set into the painted walls, to the dichromatic marble floors. "I know you can hear me." So why don't you answer? There's only silence and the sound of his own troubled breathing in response.
But you did speak, Will thinks, didn't you? He thinks of what Alana and Jack brought for him. What Hannibal had sent for them to bring him. Surely the head had been a message for him, not them; they'd just been playing postal service.
It's not a threat, Will had known at once, though Alana and Jack would doubtlessly interpret it as a warning to them. Alana had said they'd found it in the parking lot - Will feels certain one of them found it in their car. Jack's, he thinks, suddenly very sure of it, like Miriam Lass's arm, it would remind him there is no secure place in his world, no part of his life he can safeguard against invasion. The method of delivery is a threat, but the message itself is something other.
He turns his mind to reading the message that Hannibal has sent for him. That he's sent it all feels like the loosening of a noose, like Will can take a deep breath again. It doesn't necessarily mean that Hannibal isn't intending to kill him for the perceived betrayal, but Will realizes that, perversely, he fears being ignored far more than being murdered.
You can kill me, he thinks, and finds that the idea is not at all an unpleasant one, only still speak to me, as you have always done. Don't make me like your other victims. Don't show me only silence and flippancy, that distance and insincerity you forced between us when you took the bone saw to my skull. If you're going to kill me do it while you're holding me, like you did that night in Baltimore, hold me and keep your hand over my heart as it stutters to a stop. The words echo around him in the lonely gallery. The air smells like blood.
"You're in love with your own doom," Bedelia Du Maurier says, and Will jerks his head towards her where she sits to his right on the bench. Her jaw hangs at a wrong angle, too far from the rest of her face, and her words seem to float up into the air from out of the black tunnel of her throat.
Will stares back into her empty, blood-caked sockets, and disregards everything she's just said. "You're a message," he tells her, "a symbol. But what do you signify?"
"How did he change me?"
"Where's the rest of you?"
Her sigh sounds on the air like the rush of a wave over soft shores. "Divided and conquered, torn apart by my enemies."
"Your mouth," Will says, "broken jaw, mouth pulled wide and crammed with grapes."
"Tempranillos, to be precise," Bedelia's voice breathes upon the air, her jaw unmoving. "Excellent for making wine. Perhaps that symbol was a gesture intended for me."
"Perhaps," he allows. "In vino veritas. Perhaps he's worried I'll tell them the truth."
"Perhaps he's worried you won't."
"Your eyes," Will says. "What did he replace them with?" He thinks of the moth in the room Hannibal made for him, walking the rim of the lampshade with its dark wings draped over its back like a monarch's cloak, dusty black with jagged lines of ivory and flashing violet. The memory of the wings pressing against the hardened silk, visible through the casing when he held it to the light. He can feel the breath of Hannibal's words falling on his face, years ago. I can whisper through the chrysalis... "He wants them to see me," Will breathes, his heart stuttering an irregular rhythm in his breast. "They couldn't see either of us before, couldn't see...what I was becoming. My transformation."
"You could scarcely see yourself," Bedelia tells him. There's a dark line forming, right to left, across the white column of her throat. Will watches as the thick blood begins to drain out of her. "Do you see now?"
"I do," Will says and then he looks away from her. "I'm no longer in need of your services, Dr. Du Maurier. You may now feel free to disappear to wherever dead people go."
"Kade Prurnell came down on us this morning," Alana says, her voice floating from somewhere in the darkness behind him. He can't turn his neck far enough to see her. "They want to take an official statement from you if we don't provide one for them first. Can you be trusted to give a statement that ensures your survival, Will?"
"Can anything ensure my survival, Alana?" Will asks, staring into the dark stone room ahead of him. "And what kind of survival would I have?"
"What you'd make of it," she answers, stepping closer. He can smell her perfume curling through the air around them, patchouli and orange blossoms. Her voice is gentle. "I'm doing this for your own good, Will."
"Everyone is so kind," Will hears how his voice seethes with bitterness, years of resentment he hadn't meant to reveal, "Always doing things for my own good. You, Jack, Hannibal. Gosh, with friends like you, it's a wonder I haven't ended up in a better situation."
"You could have ended up dead," Alana tells him from right above his shoulder.
"Still might," he says. "That might count as a better situation."
"You are lucky," she says, "that so many people want you alive. Me, Jack. Hannibal."
His laughter tastes like bile, and he nearly chokes on it.
Alana steps around his shoulder, and fixes him with a piercing gaze. She leans heavily on a glossy ebony cane, though she hasn't needed a cane in her day to day life for at least two years. Signs of stress, Will thinks, the wear and tear the past four weeks have had on her. He returns her stare, forcing his face to appear calm, even as he feels his heart accelerating. Something in the way she's looking at him - her eyes and face devoid of the softness she's always reserved for him, even in times of anger, through all her many changes these years - makes him highly uncomfortable, but, he thinks, she doesn't need to know that.
"Poor Will Graham," Alana murmurs, leaning down to peer more closely into his face. "You've had so many people inside your head. Doctors, journalists, therapists, killers. At least by now you must be used to it."
His heartbeat skips, and he feels his chest clench as he sees where her attention has turned - to the low medical tray equipped with one loaded syringe. "Alana..."
"Yes, Will?" She pauses, midway to the tray, her attention focused completely on him. "Is there something you want to tell me that might make the rest of this interview unnecessary?"
Will licks his lips. Memories spring into the foreground of his mind - of his prior incarceration, of the dark shapes that flayed and skewered him, set free by the drugs and the cooling fever in his brain. His instinct is to prevent it, in anyway he can. The knowledge that he could make this go away in an instant appears clearly at the center of his thoughts. He doesn't even entertain that as an option.
Will shakes his head, chin tilted defiantly at her. Alana shrugs, masking any disappointment she may feel. She's far more composed than she was the last time he saw her, Will thinks. Now that she knows what to expect, she probably finds each encounter easier to prepare for than the last. And the allotment of power between them - her, looming and dressed in pressed silk and clean dark wool; him, bound to a chair in a sack cloth jumper that scratches uncomfortably over his sensitized skin- certainly can't hurt her confidence. He closes his eyes, listening to the small sounds she makes, prepping the injection.
"You remember what this feels like," she says, her voice filtering into his private darkness. He breathes slow, picturing the stream, the water tugging at his ankles, her face calm and collected as she calls to him from the bank. "I read Chilton's notes. Your reaction to the sodium thiopental was unusual, and strong. Traumatic, he said, but productive."
"I was recovering from encephalitis at the time," Will tells her, feeling the wind on his face, gauging the best angle to cast. He can already feel the motion, stored in his arm and waiting to be called to the forefront of his memory. "Might have influenced my reactions a bit, don't you think?"
"It's a theory worth testing," Alana tells him, wading into the stream towards him. Her woolen slacks turn a darker shade of grey as the water soaks them to the knee. Careful, he wants to tell her, you're not used to the cold like I am. "I want you to know I'm sorry," she says, "that it's come to this. I really do want to help you; that's at least a good part of what this has all been about. We gave you a chance to cooperate, and I really wish you'd taken it. I don't suppose we'll call each other friends again, after this." She smiles, sadly, her short brown hair plucked by the wind. "I love my family as much as you love Molly and Walter," she says, "and like you I would do anything to protect them."
There's no talk of consent forms this time. He feels the injection like an insect's bite, pictures darkly furred wings unfolding in a hum of vibration. The stream, the trees, the red and orange leafs along the bank, Alana's forcefully calm face are all lost in the unfurling shadow. Will breathes the cold dark air, feeling tranquility expanding outward from the center of his chest. Oh, how he wants to sink into that feeling, to let it take him away, like a bit of bark or a dead leaf borne away on the clear water of the stream.
"Let my voice follow you," he hears her say, and the words seem to come from the air all around him. "Will, can you hear me?"
He moans, feeling the vibration of her words running through his bones and tissue. The darkness shifts, buzzing around him. There are eyes, great flat pupils watching him at all sides, unfolding before his eyes as numerous as the stars. They blot out the sky, the earth, surrounding him. Somewhere, maybe, one pair is not black or grey, but luminous as rubies; Will can't find them in the dark onslaught of watchers, though. The air ripples, eyes moving like paintings on silk screen.
"I'm going to ask you some questions now," her voice undulates in the dark air. Will sighs. It feels so easy, so simple, almost funny now that he has time to consider. He can tell her anything now and it won't be his fault. "If you answer truthfully, it will mean good things for you. Will you do your best to answer the questions truthfully, Will?" His response is a noise tragically similar to a giggle. Alana takes it as a yes, at any rate, because she proceeds with her questions. "Have you been with Hannibal since the escape?"
Dark eyes flutter in lidless vibration all around him. From with the dusty darkness, he hears the shift of some large body, but he feels warm, comfortable, unworried. "Yes," he says, in answer to a question he has almost forgotten.
Through the darkness, he sees Alana smile, her lips curling too many times at the corners, tiny spirals like a snail's shell forming there. Then the eyes shift and she's lost once again. Her voice comes through. "The entire time?"
"Yes."
"Very good," she says, and her voice is so pleasant Will smiles back. "They aren't hard questions, are they? Do you know where Hannibal is now?"
"Yes," Will says.
"You're doing such a good job. It's easy, isn't it?"
It is easy, Will thinks. Her voice, the events transpiring around him, the round painted eyes watching him, all just feel like sinking into a warm bath.
"One more question, and then you can go," Alana's voice drifts down through the forest of flickering pupils. "This one is the most important, but it'll be easy to answer. You're doing great." Around him, the eyes shift, sliding in the darkness. "Where is Hannibal Lecter?"
There's a clamor of small bodies, dark wings shuttering open and closed with soft clicks as a thousand moths with wings like eyes rise up in a pillar around him. It would be so easy, he thinks, I wouldn't even be able to blame myself. Through the reeling dark wings there's a flicker of fire caught between great pronged horns. The sound of a hoof stamping cuts through the din of clicking wings. Will swallows thickly, twice.
"H-he," Will starts, then breaks for something between a cough and a laugh before resuming. "Heat two tablespoons of butter in a saucepan on low heat," he says.
Alana says nothing.
"Add...two tablespoons of flour. And a cup of milk," he continues, his voice strengthening as he speaks. "Whisk it to mix, if you've got a whisk. If not, you can stir with a spoon, but it takes longer." Through the flapping of wings, he forces his mind onto this one image. He pictures his old kitchen, back in Wolf Trap, years ago, a saucepan of thickening cream bubbling away on the stovetop. "You'll need to stir for about ten minutes," Will says. "Just long enough for your arm to start getting real sore."
"Will," Alana tries to interrupt.
He ignores her. "You can use any cheese," Will says. "The recipe said gouda, but you can use any shredded cheese you have. Cheese is cheese," he says, smiling inwardly at the thought of the pained expression his words would no doubt evoke if Hannibal could hear them. The world begins to lighten at the thought, dark eyes and wings and eyes on wings flittering higher and higher, away towards the sky. "Stir in about a cup and a half."
"Will," she says, louder. He can see her, standing in the stream, as the black moths lift in a cloud to reveal the world again. Everything just as it should be.
"And that's it, really," he says. "When the cheese melts, you can serve it with bread, or crackers, or apple slices. The picture that came with the recipe showed it in a bread bowl, but that's always struck me as a decadent waste of both time and food."
The door slams shut with a brief echo when she leaves. Will waits, alone in the dark, for the orderly to come with an armed guard, to escort him back to his room.
"I can't begin to tell you how tired I'm becoming of cleaning up after the messes you invariably create with Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter," Kade Prurnell tells him when he reports to her office the following morning as instructed. Her voice is higher with exasperation, her mouth a disbelieving scowl as she glares up at him from her desk.
Jack Crawford resolutely refuses to shift his face or body. "If you could just allow a little more time, I assure you that Dr. Bloom and I can clean this up sufficiently on our own, Ms. Prurnell. We'll have Lecter back by the end of the week."
Prurnell almost laughs, her tight lips pulled into a mirthless smile by his words. "You're in deep enough trouble as it is without any further scheming, Agent Crawford. You and Dr. Bloom both." You and your little dog, too, Jack hears in his head, and fights to keep the sneer off his face. "You've been holding a man without charging him or officially arresting him for days, you've yet to take an official statement, you used a civilian as bait to trap a suspected murderer who happened to be her husband, and have since refused her access to him, you lost Hannibal Lecter when a man who is not an official agent working for you convinced you to let him help Lecter escape...we don't have time to waste on anymore of the juvenile games of cat and mouse your team seems intent on repeating. I'm placing Will Graham under arrest. I'll get a statement from him myself, since you and Dr. Bloom are incapable of producing one. Honestly Jack, how have neither of you taken a statement yet? You've had him in custody half a week. I don't recall him being mute, unless Lecter has eaten his tongue."
"He's not mute," Jack grumbles. "Will's been...too confused to provide an adequate statement."
Her expression, though unchanged, conveys the depth of her contempt perfectly. "Adequate? Confused? Jack, you just ask him what happened and record what he says; you don't give him a week to clear his head and figure out his story because you don't like what he tells you the first time."
Jack feels the indignation rising in him in like bile. He can't, technically, refute what she's saying. He's behaved unethically, injudiciously, illegal, as he inevitably does when Will or the Chesapeake Ripper are involved. Still, in his heart he feels this was, if not the right choice, nonetheless the only one he could make. It's a course of action motivated by love, at least.
"It's just difficult to get him to make any comments relevant to the matter," Jack lies, hoping Will will have the good sense to shut up when he sees the Investigator. "He seems indifferent to his circumstances. When I speak sometimes I'm not even certain that he's listening." That last part, at least, was true.
"Inattention can be a stratagem to avoid pain, Jack," Prurnell tells him, sounding utterly bored. "It's often misread as indifference. We just need to make Will Graham's situation too painful to ignore."
He's standing in front of the glass partition when Kade Prurnell enters the room, facing forwards, expression calm. There's something unsettling in the stiffness of his body, in the way he holds his hands with palms facing away, in the expressionlessness of his scarred face. He's changed since she last spoke with him, and not in any good way that she can see. "Mr. Graham," she greets coldly, "in trouble again."
"Not for long," he tells her gently, and it's the gentleness more than his words that chills her.
"Let me tell you what's going to happen," she says, "whether you cooperate with us or not. Tomorrow evening you'll be transferred to a federal detention center. You haven't been found insane, so you don't belong in this hospital and you certainly don't belong in this cell. You'll be placed with the general population, and let me tell you, law enforcement, even ones with records as spotty as yours, don't tend to thrive in that environment." She pauses, eyes raking over him, evaluating. "You look like it could go either way with you; either you'll wind up in solitary because you keep getting your teeth shattered or because you keep shattering teeth. Either way, you'll spend most of your day alone in a dark little room till your trial date...whenever that is."
She pauses again, allowing him time if he wishes to speak. When he says nothing, she continues. "Now, let me tell you what's going to happen next if you don't cooperate. They'll find you guilty. The FBI will supply such a mountain of evidence tying you to the deaths of Bedelia Du Maurier, Clark Ingram, Patrick Duffy, Michael Barker, and James Barnes that they'll have no other rational option before them. You will not be found insane. Your past record is against you. You can't cry encephalitis this time. Your good deeds and dragon slaying won't excuse your crimes in the eyes of the jury. You have no defense. You won't come back here, to be watched over by our kind Dr. Bloom for the rest of your days, given books and special privileges and a room of your own. Instead, you'll go to a supermax prison, and spend the next fifteen years of your life in a cell the size of a walk-in closet, alone for twenty-three hours a day. And then they'll kill you, and when they do you'll probably be relieved."
She waits again, but his expression doesn't waiver, and he doesn't say a word. She's not deterred. "If you want to avoid spending the rest of your life alone in a box, you'll give us what we want."
"So I can spend the rest of my life in a box with Hannibal Lecter?" Will asks, voice oddly relaxed, almost humorous. "I don't anticipate the rest of my life lasting long enough for any of your predictions to come true, Kade."
She doesn't quite manage to hide the flinch of surprise at the use of her given name, which is no doubt what he'd intended. But she won't be shaken so easily. "You think he's coming here to kill you," she says, "for what he'll perceive as a betrayal of his trust." He says nothing, but the widening of his pupils is all the confirmation she needs. "He isn't," she says flatly. "We had reports of sighting from multiple sources in Paris early this morning. Interpol confirmed prints on a wine glass collected by a keen-eyed and financially ambitious server on Rue de Beaujolais." She wets her lips, watching for any tell. "He's not coming for you."
"He'll come," he tells her, voice as calm as before, face like the surface of an untroubled lake.
"He won't," she says. "But you're welcome to wait. At this point, the information you hold isn't really that valuable, anyway."
"Then I'm sure you won't mind me keeping it to myself," he says.
She frowns. "Things will go easier for you if you help us," she says. "When you're ready to do that, let your guards know to call me." She turns for the door. "But don't wait too long."
He's grown accustomed to blocking out the voices of his visitors - jailers, interrogators - but at the first sound of her soft voice his eyes fly open. She says his name, and nothing more, looking small and misplaced and frightened in a way he's never seen her look before. Frightened of me, he thinks, I caused that look. He's not proud of that.
"You should go," Will says, after a long silence. He can't think of anything kinder to say.
She makes a noise like she's being strangled. "I've been trying to see you for days," she says. Her voice is steady, if quiet. Free from tears. She sounds scared and confused more than angry, as if she is visiting him in a hospital rather than a maximum security institution for the criminally insane.
"Molly, I know," he says, after a pause, stepping closer to the glass. "I know this is confusing, and...painful." The word is difficult. He closes his eyes against the sight of her anguish, and forces himself to recall how it felt to be her sweet man and husband, father to her child. "Alana found you?" She nods, tendrils of blonde hair escaping her loose bun to fall about her sorrowful face. "She told you that you could help me," he surmises, "help bring me in...rescue me?"
"Yes," Molly gasps.
He can imagine what else she told Molly. He supposes it's only right; he wouldn't begrudge his wife the truth. She's owed that much, and probably much more. "I wish you hadn't listened," he says, "for your own sake. Aren't you tired of being entangled in this, Molly?"
"Entangled with you, you mean," she retorts. "I love you, Will. Do you know what that means? Do you think I wouldn't do all I could to protect you?"
It hurts - oh it hurts - to hear. Her pain is a cloud around her, drenching him as well. But far worse than pain is the hope he still senses in her. He feels her desires, pure and strong and simple, as all her emotions are, as she herself is. He sees what she wants as clearly as if she has painted it for him. Her desire is so strong he feels himself drawn to give in. She held him together for two years; she could do it again. He could again choose to lose himself in her goodness, her calm passivity.
He steps closer still to the partition, closer to his wife's tortured face. He extends his hand towards her through one of the round ventilation holes in the glass. She doesn't hesitate, and her smooth hand is warm in his. He strokes his thumb over the back of her wrist, smiling softly. "My pretty baseball wife," he sighs, "you cannot truly intend to take me back. Think of your son."
"Your son, Will," she says, and he can hear the tears thickening her voice.
His smile is sad. "No," he says, voice gentle. "It was generous of you to share him with me for a time, kind of you to trust me. But unwise." He passes his other hand through a second hole, gripping hers between them. "It was unkind of me to take the peace you offered me. You couldn't have known what I was."
"I know who you are, Will." Tears slide down her face, and a part of him still wishes he could brush them off. Even if no barrier lay between them, he knows he couldn't. "You're a good man."
"No," he says, quickly, firmly, but she protests. "No," he insists again, over those protestations, "I'm not. I've tried, but it's not my nature. You made it easier to pretend that I was, but a part of me knew when I married you that I'd hurt you. And I did it anyway."
"Oh, Will," she sobs, her voice breaking finally on his name. "Weren't you happy? With us - Walter, and me, and the dogs. Did you ever love us?"
His breath hitches at her words. He can feel her nails digging into his palm, her pleas digging into his heart. He shakes her hands loose. It would have been best, he thinks, if this could have been done gently, but he can see now that she will not be shaken of lightly. Her voice and the sound of her crying is causing a vein to beat in his forehead; a headache gathers like a storm cloud in his temples.
"I was wrong to marry you," he says, voice colder now, hands no longer returning her clutching grasp. "I knew it would end like this. I knew," he swallows, forcing the cruel words through his teeth, "I belonged with him." He can scarcely bear to gaze upon her crumpling face, but he forces himself to look until the sight no longer affects him as strongly.
"Why did you then?" she sobs, "Why marry me if you didn't love me or intend to stay?"
I meant to stay, he thinks, I hoped I could; I wanted to. Or I wanted to want to. But that truth won't help her now, only galvanize her hopes for his redemption. And her hope is dangerous, to him but even more so to herself.
"Maybe I just wanted someone to look after my dogs once I'd gone," he sneers, and watches the shock of anger rise in her face with a curious mixture of satisfaction and revulsion. He twists the ring off his finger and presses it into her palm. "Go to Oregon," he commands her, voice firm. "Go to your family. Take Wally, take the dogs, go far away from here, and never come back or answer a call from Jack Crawford or Alana Bloom again."
"Don't say this to me," she cries, almost shouting. "You can't."
"I have to," he says. "Go. I'm getting out of here, Molly, and I'm going with him." His chest tightness at the words. He hopes she believes them more than he does. "For your own safety, you need to be gone."
She goes, walking out of the room and out of his life without another word.
Will Graham is asleep when she enters the room, but wakes quickly to stand, alert, before the glass. He searches her face for any trace of shame or remorse over what she did to him a day before, but her face is shuttered, expression closed to his prying eyes.
They stare at one another for a long while before Alana speaks. "Molly left last night," she tells him, wetting her red lips with the tip of her tongue so they glisten. "I thought you might want to know."
"Good," Will says, surprised by the measure of relief he hears in his own voice. He knows, now, that he'd never loved her the way he'd promised to do - she'd never been able to know him enough to love him, either, though he knows it will be a long time before she lets herself face that realization. It'll come someday, he hopes, the knowledge that he tricked her; there's nothing wrong with her. You drew a man with a monster on his back, Will thinks, remembering the pain on Reba's face. At this moment, though, he feels entirely monster.
"She's your wife, Will," Alana says, her voice, like her face, kept carefully emotionless. "Don't you think you could have been a little kinder?"
"Do you wish I was milder, Alana? I'm done playing something other than my nature. Rather say I play the man that I am," Will bites the words at her.
"I only said kinder."
"Kind like you were when you got her involved?" Will arches an eyebrow. "You let her endanger her life. Did you explain the risks to her, or were you worried she'd say no if you did?"
Alana dips her head, giving a short, bitter laugh of shock. "You endangered her life, Will. You got her involved. Don't try to pin your guilt on me; she wouldn't have been there to use if you hadn't brought her into this first yourself."
"You didn't need to bring her back into it," Will insists, feeling the anger she's no doubt hoping to awaken in him. He tries to keep it from his voice, but he's sure it shows in the tight line of his mouth. "You should have let her slip away."
"You made it necessary to involve her, when you helped Hannibal escape from federal custody," Alana says. "We haven't all lost interest in protecting our loved ones."
Will laughs in her face. "How is Margot?" he asks. "Where is Margot? Are you sure she's safe, without you there, Alana? Maybe you're less protective than you think. Maybe this isn't about keeping anyone safe but yourself."
She looks like she would hit him if it weren't for the glass between them. Just for a second, before the mask slides back into place, rage cooling on her cheeks but not in her eyes. He sees the anger there, unmissable now. He feels it twisting in himself as well, like a coil of snakes in his chest. If there were no glass, he thinks, what would I do?
"I'm not going to argue over which of us is worse at safeguarding our families," she tells him placidly, but he sees the storm in the darkening of her irises. "I'm here to inform you that a transfer for you has been arranged for tomorrow morning at ten am. That gives you just shy of twenty-four hours to convince Prurnell it's worth her time to keep you alive, because whatever you may think of my integrity, Will, you know I'm telling the truth when I say that you will get killed if you're moved to federal detention."
"Don't worry about me," Will reassures her, voice thick with irony. "I'll be dead before twenty-four hours go by."
She sighs. "Will, Prurnell has prints-"
"Well she's either lying or being lied to," Will scoffs. He locks eyes with Alana, smiling now, at the way her pupils dilate. "Hannibal is coming, Alana. Soon. And when he does you will want to be anywhere else, because he's coming to kill you, and me, and anyone else he finds when he gets here."
Something in his voice doesn't leave room for second guesses. Alana tells Jack Crawford as much while alarming the panic room, inputting codes that bring the heavy steel outer door sliding into place with a resounding thud.
"Honestly, Alana," Jack huffs, watching the doctor bring a row of screens to life. Ten little boxes flicker with images of the hospital grounds - a shot of each side of the building, a close up of the front door, and a camera positioned by the stairwell of each floor of the building. A final, eleventh screen to the left of the others flicks on, showing the cell that used to hold Hannibal, where Will now sits, knees drawn up to his chest and back resting on the wall. "Do you really expect Hannibal to come? Or to get beyond fifty armed guards and SWAT units if he did? This place is a fortress. As we planned."
"I know I feel a lot safer with both of us on this side of that door," Alana replies succinctly. "Let your army of guards handle whatever does or doesn't happen tonight. We can watch from here."
She hands him a tumbler of scotch, the crystal winking as it catches the light. "Final steps in preparing for an incoming crisis?" Jack raises an eyebrow, his smile small and sharp. She lifts her glass to him.
Part of him does wish Hannibal would come, Jack acknowledges as he takes a sip. He feels the alcohol burning down his throat and it's a clean heat. If Hannibal comes now, it will be according to their initial plan. They may catch him, if he comes tonight, and that may pacify Prurnell enough to win some special allowances for Will.
"Promise me one thing," Alana says, when they've both had time to finish half their drinks, watching the little screens project nothing worth noting in silence. Jack hums. "Whatever happens, or doesn't happen, stay here. With me."
"Alana..."
"If he comes," she hurries, cutting off his protest, "you've got half a hundred people out there armed to the teeth, all younger, all faster, all posing less emotional liability than you." The words hurt like a slap, and the pain must show on his face, but they both know they're true. "What do you think you could accomplish that fifty trained individuals armed with paramilitary weaponry can't?"
It's not that he thinks he could succeed, if all else were to fail. They won't fail, he thinks, of course they won't. Not even Hannibal is that impervious to harm. But if they did, he doesn't think he could accomplish anything they couldn't. It's just that he'd like to go down with them, he realizes. This is his fight, and if anyone is going to die in it he ought to be among the casualties.
"Be smart, Jack," Alana says, eyeing him as if she can sense his thoughts. "You won't catch him by becoming a martyr. Survive to fight."
She's right, he knows. Still, he doesn't give her his word that he'll stay. He raises his glass in stern salute. "To the mess we helped Will Graham build," Jack says. "To old friendships."
She smiles, and he watches the scotch run over her teeth, her slender throat working as she swallows. Perhaps nothing will happen tonight, as he'd protested to her only moments before. But his instinct says otherwise.
The man slides into death without so much as a whimper, accompanied only by the popping sound of his spine snapping between Hannibal's strong hands. The sixth soul sent fleeing so far this night, and the last of the snipers stationed around the hospital. It had been easy to take each of them, one at a time, with silent efficiency. Now, he holds the final one's body, feeling the heat fade from it. The limbs are still limber enough to make undressing them easy.
He stares through the trees as he slips his arms through the dark grey vest, his breath steaming in the air so that the hospital beyond it is wreathed in brief clouds of fog. He's facing the back of the building. There are seven guards stationed outside: one in each corner, of the building, one at the padlocked back entrance, and two more at the front door. Hannibal closes his eyes, bringing the annotated floor plans into focus in his mind.
Dropping to one knee, Hannibal lifts the dropped Remington to his shoulder. He searches through the telescope, scanning along the south side of the building. He can see a guard at the southeast corner, and another at the back door.
He hesitates for a moment, finger on the trigger. It would be easy to pick them off, one by one. Eliminate these two, then wait a moment to see if their deaths draw any of the others. Move around the building taking each of the sentry out from a quiet, safe distance.
The barrel flickers upwards with a minuscule motion of his wrist. Yards away, a security camera's glass eye shatters.
"You hear something?"
"S'nothing to hear."
"Huh."
"Why? You hear something? It's your own imagination if you did."
"I can tell the difference between what's real and what's imagined, thanks. I'm not a kid."
"No offense intended, friend. Just mean I've done a lot of night shifts, and I know how it can mess with a person's head. You're out here, armed to the teeth in the dead dark of night, having to remain on high alert for the worst case scenario at all times. But you know what usually happens on shifts like this?"
There's a long pause. Finally: "What?"
"A fat load of nothing. The action doesn't come to you. Ninety percent of the time, a job like this, we'll spend the whole night just waiting, jumping at our own shadows. In the morning they'll say they got a tip off, the real action is two miles from here at an abandoned warehouse or a run down apartment complex."
A snort. "Really."
"Well, somewhere. Somewhere where you know what you're getting into, and you have that adrenaline going in, and it gets used up fast. Here, it just simmers in you. Makes you start hearing sounds, seeing things moving. Just wait till two am. That's when it always gets bad for me."
There's silence for a long moment. From the west side of the building, a small sound passes without comment. Raccoons, stray cats, even a mouse, could make such a sound. "I'm gonna take a leak."
"Sure you're not heading out to investigate that mouse fart?"
"Might as well do that, too. We've got the whole night to kill."
The next noise to break the silence is louder - not a sound a mouse or cat or raccoon could make. Something larger and heavier, hitting the grass with a thud. "Hey, Jones, what was that?" Silence. "Did you catch your mouse?"
No answer. Footsteps, and the guard's grumbled, "This better not be some kind of joke," and then his shadow preceding him around the corner.
Hannibal is on him in a second, one arm pinning the guard's arms to his sides, one hand covering the mouth that opens in a scream of alarm. "It's no joke," Hannibal whispers against his ear. He moves fast, twisting the guard's neck before the man can anticipate his intentions and tense the muscles there. He feels the fracturing of the spinal column beneath hands strong as gallows, feels the body sag, becoming nothing more than meat. He lets it fall to the earth.
He uses the guard's gun to shoot out the fourth outdoor security camera, and walks towards the front of the building, shoes grinding broken glass into the cold ground. There are five doors between him and Will Graham, and Hannibal intends to make his way through every one.
"Do you think Hannibal is really in Paris," Jack asks, watching the remains of his second drink swirl in the bottom of the glass. He's not drunk - not even tipsy - but he's beginning to feel the outer edges of intoxication. It's not enough to dull him, but enough to blunt the edges of reality, lending a surreal haze to the night. "Or do you think Kade was lying?"
Alana, pouring herself a refill, doesn't answer for a moment. "I think we need to prepare for the possibility that what she said is not true," she finally tells him.
"It would be a good tactic," Jack says, "if she was lying. Make him think he's been abandoned, force him to confront the reality of his situation. A little underhanded, but I can't fault her for that. It's a good scheme, if it is a scheme."
"It didn't work very well," Alana points out.
"No," Jack frowns. "She believes he's in Paris. As angry as Prurnell is with the BAU, she wouldn't thwart our efforts by allowing us to believe that our quarry was on the wrong continent."
Alana shifts in her seat, holding the glass to her lips but not drinking. The amber liquid rests against her closed lips for a long second.
"You think he's coming?" Jack asks.
"No word yet," Alana says. "None of the alarms have sounded and no word from - " Her words end abruptly as she swivels in her seat to face the cameras. When she speaks again her voice is small. "Jack."
He turns in his seat, looking where she looks. Four of the little screens show only static. The interior cameras show stationary guards, and Will Graham standing stock still in his cell before the thick glass. Stillness and static. The one that holds Alana's attention, however, shows movement. It's the camera at the front door. Jack inhales in a sharp hiss.
"We didn't look away for more than a few minutes - "
But it doesn't matter. Even if they'd stayed, staring, unblinking at the screens every second, Hannibal Lecter would still find a way to emerge ahead of them. For there he stands, keying a code into the pad at the front door - a code Jack memorized, because Alana forbade even him from writing it down. And the door swings open, just like that.
And then the rest of the screens go black.
Alana is rigid in the seat beside him. He can feel the tension seeping off her, adding to his own. His eyes flick towards the door without conscious thought, and he feels her fingers gripping hard through the sleeve of his jacket before he can look away again.
"Jack, no," her face is pale, drawn, eyes wide when he returns his gaze to her face. "No, I need you here."
"You don't need me here," he scoffs. "The doors are keeping you safe, not me."
She shakes her head, chestnut bob swinging around her face. "There's nothing you can do out there. We can contact the guards from here." She pushes a button on the console, speaks into what he assumes is a microphone. "Officer Lee, Lecter has breached the front doors. Do you copy?" She pauses, finger raised over the button for an instant. "Officer Lee, or any other officer on this channel, what is the status of the first floor? Report."
A longer pause. Jack can feel the blood beating harder in his throat, a trickle of sweat beginning to form along the back of his neck, a shift in his breathing as if he's preparing to run. Alana jams her finger back onto the button and shouts into the microphone. "First floor officers, report: is Lecter inside?"
He thinks the silence that greets her might stretch forever. It's the same quiet he's heard when visiting Bella's grave - a marker on a hill in the cemetery behind the church where they said their vows, no body below it, but a place to visit when he feels her absence like a jagged hole inside him - the same quiet as the one that sounds in the morgue on late nights and early mornings. And then there's a frizzing hiss, the sound of a mic being turned on, and Hannibal's familiar accent responds.
"Hello again, Alana."
He thinks he's going to have to catch her, but she steadies herself with one hand on the console before her body can tilt out of the chair. He watches her knuckles whiten, her jaw clenching so hard he imagines teeth splitting.
"I'm afraid you'll need to have the first floor cleaned thoroughly," Hannibal says, voice politely apologetic. "I'd offer to foot the bill, but I'm afraid I'll be leaving town shortly, and I don't think you'll be able to send me the invoice."
Jack watches her shake herself, her eyes brightening in fear. She punches a few keys on the board in front of her and pushes the button again. He can hear her voice echoing faintly on the other side of the heavy doors as she speaks over the intercom.
"Attention all guards and SWAT," she says, voice clipped and severe, "there is a trespasser inside the building. He is to be considered armed and dangerous. We believe he is located on the first floor at this time, reinforcements are on their way."
She releases the mic, and a few seconds of silence pass before a light begins to flash on the console.
"It's an incoming message," Alana says, "from the guard stationed at the second floor stairwell."
The message is screaming. It's too loud to be just one voice - too loud for two voices, or five, or ten. The entire floor, by the sound of it, every inmate in each cell, shrieking and whooping and singing like some infernal choir of the damned.
"Don't listen to it," Jack orders, placing a hand heavily on Alana's shoulder and shaking her lightly. "He's just trying to scare you."
"He doesn't have to try," she whispers. There's a quiver in her voice, a terror Jack hasn't heard from her before. It is almost resignation, he thinks, but the clench of her jaw is not resigned. "He opened the doors. He shut down the cameras. We're blind, trapped up here."
"We need to go," Jack tells her. "We can stop him before he reaches Will. I'm not taking him into custody, Alana; I'm putting a bullet through his head and ending this once and for all. Come on," he slides his hand down to take hers, tugging. "Let's go. It's no safer here anyway; who's to say he can't open this door, too?"
She pulls back against him. "It's a different system than the rest of the security," she says. "All these years, feeling his eyes on me like I was the best cut of meat at the butcher's shop, I taught myself to be cautious."
Jack shakes his head. "I can't wait this out, Alana. Whatever's happening out there, I need to be a part of it."
"You're making a mistake," she says, but he goes anyway, and Alana is left to survey her darkened security footage alone. She eyes the door warily, fingering the pistol in her pocket with her right hand
Will Graham paces, no longer able to stand still or lose himself in inward examination. He feels like one raw, stretched muscle, waiting to snap. How Hannibal managed to hold his facade for so long is beyond Will. He knows without having to be told that the other man's mask never slipped. But right now, Will doesn't particularly care that his restlessness is visible on camera. Whomever is watching him, let them watch. He has bigger concerns.
He feels as if he's about to crawl out of his own skin. The room is sound-proofed, the only noise the hum of electricity and the faint shushing of air being circulated through the room. And yet Will swears he can hear screams. If he closes his eyes he can see them, smeared like bloody hand prints across the air. His limbs ache, muscles coiled and tightened, longing for release. He pictures his dogs, the way they run. Inside his chest his heart beats slow.
When Will opens his eyes there is someone else in the room with him.
"Oh, God, oh," the young man in SWAT gear curses, his chest rising and falling so rapidly Will is momentarily certain the man is about to keel over with a coronary attack. "It's you."
He arches one curious brow at the words. "I'm the new tenant, yeah." Will licks his lips. "Were you expecting someone else?"
The man shakes his head. He's dressed in Kevlar, the dark grey and navy gear of the SWAT team. "No, no, I was looking...looking for you." The man is shaking so hard his words are punctuated by the clatter of his teeth. "Will Graham."
"That's my name," Will says, cocking his head to one side, curious. The man has become mute with fear, by the look of it, literally quaking in his boots as he stands, staring, in need of prompting. "What's your name?"
"Phillips," the man manages to splutter.
"Did you want something from me, Phillips?"
The man shakes like a dead leaf clinging to the branch. "This is all happening because of you."
Will feels the fear rolling off the man like a stink, feels the limits of his own patience being tested. "What's happening out there, Phillips?"
The young officer shakes his head, a short fringe of sweat soaked hair swinging against his clammy forehead. He doesn't speak in response, just opens the sound-proofed door behind him so that Will can hear what's playing on the intercom loudspeaker.
A hundred voices fill the room at once. Will steps back in an involuntary flinch as screams rend the air - the shrieking, gibbering, animal-like hoots of the madmen calling from their cells. He hears their garbled, overlapping words, feels the desperation and excitement and fear rushing through them. Above it, he hears one voice screaming in piteous desperation. It begins as pleas.
"No...no, please, stop..." but the voice quickly loses its grasp of language, sliding into frantic, animal wailing. Will can hear the wet sound of flesh rending before the screams fill with fluid, turning to chokes, desperate wheezes, a thud lost in the sound of the inmates hollering and howling. Will reels on his feet, unsteady with terror and expectation. It's a piece composed and broadcast especially for him, he knows, played on an orchestra of living instruments more macabre than anything Tobias Budge dared dream of. Hannibal is inside. He feels his heart rate begin to quicken.
"It's because of you," Phillips insists again. "You're what he's here for. I...I need to be here when he comes...to stop him."
The last words come out shaky and uncertain. It's almost too easy; the boy is begging to be talked into it. "You're right," Will tells him, "I'm what he's after. No one else has to die, if you hand me over to him now."
The young man makes a decent show of struggling. Will sighs, chooses to indulge him further if that's what it'll take to hasten this process along. "He'll get to me eventually anyway, you know," he says, gentling his voice through enormous effort. He sees Phillips eyeing him plaintively. "It's a senseless waste of life," he says, "you could save a lot of people." Including yourself. The words hang between them, unsaid but heard.
"What does he want with you?" Phillips asks, already moving towards the door set into the wall to Will's left.
"He wants to kill me," Will says. "It's not worth protecting me, after the things I've done. Do you think my life is worth all the men who've already died defending it tonight? I certainly don't."
It's true; a certain part of him is disgusted by the thought of how many innocent guards and law enforcement agents Hannibal has mowed through - is continuing to mow through - in order to reach him. He feels the weight of guilt as if the crimes were his own, and it turns his stomach at the same time that it sends a shot of energy sliding along his spine.
Phillips needs no further convincing. He's keying in the door code and sliding open the door before Will's even finished speaking, and he's standing at the doorway to the cell so quickly Will wonders if he's losing time again. Once he's stood in the entrance, with only his gun between himself and Will, the young man's resolve seems to waiver.
"You won't try anything, will you?" he asks, and Will has to stop the pitying smile that wants to blossom on his face. "I'm giving you what you want, aren't I?"
"Very much so," Will says, extending a hand to Phillips, who steps into the cell cautiously. Will is on him in a flash, pushing his arm upwards and tightening his grasp over the guard's trigger finger, forcing him to fire all twelve rounds into the ceiling in quick succession. He loosens his grip on Phillips' arm, then, allowing the man to break free from him, staggering slightly as he unbalances himself in his haste to pull away. Will uses the moment to strike, pressing the meat of his thumb forcefully against the crook of his index finger, forming a hooked fist which he slams into Phillips' exposed Adams apple in one quick, brutal movement. The young man chokes brokenly, clutching his throat with both hands, the useless gun falling forgotten to the floor. Will watches his mouth move like landed fish's, opening and closing on a breath that won't come. He plucks the handgun from the ground and brings the handle down hard on the back of Phillips' neck, sending him sprawling and still.
The sound of chattering and screaming is louder in the hallway. His cell is on the fifth floor; he remembers choosing the stairs over the elevator on his visits, descending with a heaviness as if he carried the dead on his shoulders. He recalls the building's layout from those visits. Other inmates reside on the second through fourth floor; first floor is hospital services; fifth floor is administrative offices, and one fortress-like cell lined with empty bookshelves.
The guard outside the ante-chamber doesn't hear him coming over the shrieks exploding around them. Will presses the barrel of the gun to the back of the man's neck, takes his gun, takes the knife strapped to his belt, and catches the man in a headlock, one hand squeezing his nostrils shut, palm flat against his mouth. Will can feel his breath coming hot and wet, growing shallower and less certain against his hand. He waits until the man no longer struggles, until he cannot feel the hint of breath against his damp palm, before he lets the body slide slackly to the floor. He drops the empty handgun at the dead man's feet and carries on.
There are two SWAT officers stationed by the stairwell, looking rattled by the madhouse bellowing but alert enough to spot him as he rounds the hallway corner coming towards them. Will ducks, rounding his shoulders and dropping into a roll, only to spring up in a crouch within reach of his prey. He sheaths his stolen knife in the first officer's femoral artery, his blade sliding home right below the groin. The man grunts above him, and Will removes the knife, uncapping a cascade of blood. The officer drops to his knees, and Will wraps an arm around his weakening form, advancing on the second officer with the body of the first shielding him from the upraised weapon.
Will bowls the remaining officer over with his weight combined with that of the dying man pushed between them, sending him onto his back. Will straddles him, clenching the man's head between his hands. He brings it down against the hard floor once, twice, a harsh, fast staccato. His fingers slide against the slick hair at the back of the officer's head as he releases the head to drop with a wet smack.
He wipes the blood and brain matter onto the front of the jumpsuit as he stands and approaches the stairwell door. The handle doesn't budge beneath his grip. Will frowns, noticing the security pad with its red light blinking, signaling that the system is alarmed. His scowl deepens as he contemplates his situation.
A faint whimper from the supply closet to his left cuts through his thoughts. Will wrenches the door open, gun raised to point into the terrified face of the guard hiding among the mops and latex gloves. The man has no weapons in hand, and is shaking so violently Will doubts he could aim a gun if he tried. Honestly, he thinks, rolling his eyes to himself as he digs a fist into the guard's shirt and drags him out into the hallway, where did Alana hire her security? Though he supposes the otherworldly shrieking permeating the air, broken at intervals by the sound of security officers being torn apart painfully, probably contributes to a feeling of inescapable fear. Normally, intense fear is felt in waves; the body can't stand it for long periods. Knowing this, of course Hannibal would attempt to push them beyond their limits, confront them with constant agitation, a terror that cannot be shut out or turned off for a moment. Will feels the screams echoing in the arena of his own skull as he slams the frozen guard against the wall beside the keypad.
"There's a code for the door," Will snarls, and the sound of his own voice startles him out of speech for a moment. "You know what it is," he recovers, listening for the biting edge with which his words sting the air.
"I-I-I," the man quakes harder, shaking so hard Will's arms strain to hold him. He might as well be seizing in fear.
Will presses his thumbs into the soft flesh below the man's chin, forcing his head to tilt back, and feels the body slacken in surrender beneath his touch. He feels the guard swallowing again and again, throat muscles working against the pressures of his thumbs. He leans close, smelling rancid terror on the man's breath. "Listen to me," Will says, voice calm, heart steady. He pushes their faces close, placing his mouth right above the guard's ear so he can be heard above the sound of tearing skin and screams playing over the intercom speakers. "You're going to give me the code. You can do it now, or I can hurt you first, but the end result is going to be the same." His left thumb strokes against the straining throat, pressing against the curve of the Adam's apple. "Up to you," he says.
The guard swallows hard for the tenth time, and opens his mouth to speak. "9 - 9 - 0 - 6 - 4," he croaks. Will smiles.
He takes the guard's gun and sends him to sit against the wall while he punches in the numbers. There's a half second pause before the red light turns green, during which Will feels his heartbeat suspended. Then the light flashes green, and the lock turns with an emphatic thunking sound. Will spares the guard a glance - finds him mouthing prayers, eyes closed - and returns his eyes to the door. He turns the handle smoothly and the door swings open unhindered.
Will's breath catches in his throat. His hand, clutching the gun in front of him, lowers of its own accord, gun aimed towards the floor now, his finger no longer pressing against the trigger. He feels his mouth go as dry as ashes, throat aching as if he's inhaled fire.
Across from him, he watches Hannibal Lecter, blood smeared and slack jawed, drop the crumpled body he holds to stand, motionless but for the increasingly rapid rise and fall of his chest. He watches Will from beneath heavy lids, eyes glinting oxblood in the harsh light. It's a look Will's only seen once before, and for an instant he's back there, smelling salt on the night air, his skin blazing against the cool breeze blowing over the cliffside.
Will can't hear anything except the rush of his own blood, the pound of his own heart. It roars like an ocean within him, drowning out the sound of the screams. There is no sound but the sound of blood flowing like the sea upon the shores, and then he hears his own breath, coming after too long a pause. It's a rough sound, broken and surrendering. And he's moving before he can stop himself, weapons dropped and hands clenching in the fabric of Hannibal's shirt. Hannibal's fingers burn like brands against his wrists and forearms, and Will sways on his feet, inhaling the scent of blood and fresh earth clinging to the man in front of him. Clinging as Will himself clings, unable to relax his grasp, managing little more than raucous breaths through gritted teeth for a long stretch of seconds.
"I'd kill them," Will hears himself chanting, words he's speaking without planning to, swelling up from a place inside him that is deeper and purer than rational thought, cleaner than desire or guilt. Each word is an epiphany. There's no cap on it, either, no way to filter what he's saying. Will can do no more than listen, and feel the weight and truth of each revelation. "Everyone there is. Everyone on earth. Everyone alive. I'd kill them all, for you, to get back to you. Jack, Alana, Molly - there's no one - no one but you, and I would do anything, kill anyone, kill everyone - " the words flow from him as hot and unstoppable as blood from a wound, "everyone and everything for you." His teeth clench. He can hear the break in his voice but can't stop the words coming, though quieter now, breathed into the scant space between them, audible above the symphony of screams coming from the speakers. "They don't mean what you mean to me. You're everything, the only one, you've always, always been."
"You can kill me now," Will hears himself saying - sobbing, unplanned and unchecked - as he watches his fingers tighten impossibly over the wrist and forearm they're gripping, holding tight enough now to bruise deep.
"Will." Hannibal's voice is low and toneless, and, miraculously, it shuts Will up. "Breathe," Hannibal says in that same deadpan voice, and Will gasps for air, suddenly aware that he'd forgotten to breathe. His cheeks are wet, he realizes, his nose beginning to run. He huffs gracelessly, air coming with a harsh cough. Hannibal could just have let him talk himself to death.
Hannibal's hands tighten around his arms, holding him so close that Will is forced to crane his neck back to meet Hannibal's eyes. He does so now, lips parted to gasp for the air Hannibal has reminded him he needs. Hannibal gazes back down at him, eyes full of a familiar fondness.
"I'm not here to kill you, my remarkable boy." Will closes his eyes, sighing as the words slip through him. He opens his eyes again at the wholly unexpected sound of soft laughter. "Courageous Will," Hannibal breathes, voice full of indulgent amusement, "are you ready to go home?"
The End of Episode Four