A/N: Gratuitous squick warning. This chapter is gut-wrenching in multiple ways. Reviewers have said it's very realistic. You can skip it and the rest of the fic will still make sense.
Will Graham doesn't believe in hell. Not in the hell of Scripture nor in the hell of the popular Western imagination. No absence of God's love, no fiery pits, no mischievous devils for him. But he does believe in hell on earth – hell as a place created by people for people. He's seen more hells than he cares to count.
Will lies on the cool, white tile floor of the bathroom, grateful for the hard, solid surface. It's reassuring. He needs that reassurance because his body has turned against him as violently as it can.
This is not his personal hell, he reflects, but it's certainly hell-adjacent.
He estimates that he's been here, lying on the floor, for half an hour. He closes his eyes and tries to think of something else – anything else. His dogs. Their faces. Their warm fur. Their happy barks and yips. Their solid comfort.
A violent cramp snatches him from that happier place and pins him to the present. He can't escape his body. He shivers.
At least he's been alone for the most part. When he burst into the stall half an hour ago just in time to crash to his knees hard enough to leave bruises and vomit more on the toilet seat than in the bowl, he was alone. Alone in his wretched misery.
He had hardly caught his breath and wiped the emesis – still disgustingly recognizable – from the seat before his bowels groaned and he found himself gritting his teeth against the cramps and embarrassing noises of a truly nasty, painful shit.
Someone may have come in then, heard him, and left. He isn't sure. It was all he could do to breathe through the pain and humiliation, the nauseous stink of a serious digestive ailment.
After several long minutes, the urge to shit his brains out dissipated and the cramps eased. He'd been able to clean up, mop the sweat from his face with toilet paper, and shuffle to the sink to rinse his mouth out and wash his face with refreshingly cool water. He stowed his glasses in his shirt pocket.
Will stared at himself in the mirror – pale, sweaty, shaking – and wondered what he should do. He wanted to go home to ride this thing out alone where he might retain some shred of dignity, but the thought of driving made his stomach clench. The infirmary on the Marine Corps base that hosted the Academy was an option, but Will could not imagine getting along with the marines who ran the place, nor could he imagine presenting himself, a civilian, at their facility, even though trainees routinely went there.
He didn't get any further than that before his stomach sent him back to the same stall. This time, at least, it gave him enough notice that he could sink more carefully to his knees, grip the bowl tightly, and dread the inevitable heaves. His intestines joined in again, too, and by the time he could breathe again, he was too tired and sick to do anything but curl up on the floor next to the toilet.
He decided at that moment, staring at his warped reflection in the plumbing, that he would stay on the floor until the worst of it passed. The floor was cool and calm and stable. He needed it: he was falling apart.
He shook and squeezed his eyes shut as his stomach contracted, curling up more tightly. He heard a few men come in, urinate, wash their hands, and leave, all without noticing him. Good. He didn't want anyone's attention on him. But it couldn't last. Not with so much pressure to find the clue that would reveal the Ripper.
He was clenching and unclenching his fist, his nails biting into his palms, in an effort to focus the painful cramping and unrelenting nausea on something he could control when he heard the door open again.
"Will?"
It was Price.
Will shivered and turned his face toward the floor as footsteps approached the stall. He didn't want to see or be seen.
"You're clearly not okay," Price said, "but are you okay enough or should I call someone?"
"I'm okay enough," Will answered tightly.
"Oysters?" Price asked with a wince in his voice.
"Yeah."
"I'm sorry," Price said.
And he meant it. He was radiating sympathy. It should have be soothing, but Will was too sick and too tired to be anything but annoyed.
"I'll tell Jack," Price continued. "He's looking for you."
"Great," Will replied wryly, closing his eyes. He'd get to repeat this scene with Jack in the near future.
Price left about ten minutes ago. Jack will be here soon.
It isn't hell on earth yet. It will be if his mind abandons him. But not yet.
The thought hasn't fully formed in his mind before his stomach clenches in a warning. He grabs the bowl and pulls himself up, trembling, so he can cough miserably into the indifferent water. Not much remains to come up; just a bit of bile and a whole lot of painful nothing. He's going to pull a muscle, he thinks, as the heaves subside and he lowers himself weakly to the floor again.
He pants and indulges in a groan, wrapping an arm around his cramping stomach. The unshaven scruff on his cheek and chin scratches against the white tiles. Sweat from that round of vomiting cools against his skin. He shivers and wraps his other arm around his midsection, focusing his mind on breathing.
Breathing. Just breathing.
He closes his eyes and thinks about breathing and nothing else.
When he opens his eyes again, the Ripper's victims are laid out in a row curled on their sides like he is, facing him. Not just the two most recent victims, but the nine before them as well. Their bodies stink of death and failure. Their eyes are closed, but he hears them begging him to save them. To save the next one. To see what they've seen so he can know the man who ended them.
The eleventh victim, Donovan Victor, opens his eyes and stares at Will. See what I see.
Will envisions himself repeating the murder he saw this morning: rushing at Victor and crushing the soft tubes of his esophagus and trachea against the hard bone of his neck, squeezing until Victor passed out. Then thrusting the metal rod through his guts and spine to pin him to the table.
Victor wakes up trying to scream but is unable to make a sound through his crushed larynx.
Design.
He deftly slices into Victor with a scalpel, seeking the kidneys. Does he talk to them while he does it?
Will needs to know the answer to that question, but Victor's open-eyed corpse, facing him again, says nothing.
Beyond their bodies, Will sees the stag's hoofed feet as it enters the bathroom. The heavy clicks of its hooves echo maddeningly in his head. It stops at the stall door and Will can feel its gaze on him through the metal partition.
The stag, the corpses, and the bathroom fall away as the dream shifts to a scene he's seen too often: himself bursting into the Hobbs' residence, calling out, seeing Hobbs with a butcher knife at Abigail's throat, trying to aim in spite of adrenaline and a bad shoulder, the bright slash of the knife and gush of blood.
Fear and uncertainty as he pulled the trigger the first time. Bang.
Then, as Hobbs moved toward Abigail, assurance. Bang. Confidence. Bang.
And then the split second between the two shots in Hobbs' chest and the seven that followed, driving him back into the cabinets as Will advanced: in the gaping maw of that split second stands the sum total of his life before he killed Hobbs. Because at that moment the sweetest rip tide of exhilaration like an orgasm overcomes him and bang bang bang bang bang bang bang –
Will starts, adrenaline racing through his body, and for a moment has no idea where he is or why he's lying on a cold, hard floor. In the next moment, the too-bright lights, the smell of urinal cake, and the vicious, cramping nausea come crashing down on him.
He has just enough time to moan weakly and think that he'd prefer the horror of the dream to this sick moment before he's pulling himself up as if by instinct and heaving painfully. There isn't even any bile this time – just hollow emptiness – but his stomach keeps turning itself inside out.
When the last retch is gone, he slumps to the floor, turns his face to the tile, and sobs.
Tears run down his cheek to mix with snot and spit. His shoulders shake helplessly. He hears his broken sobs echo in the tiled room like the cries of a mortally-wounded animal. He chokes on the next one before it can escape.
His outburst lasts no more than thirty seconds, but in those thirty long seconds, he can barely breathe for the weight of exhaustion, illness, and the impending death of another person. It's too much for him to bear.
Then a cramp pulls him out of his existential misery and plants him firmly in his miserable body.
Tears still stream hot down his face as he pants against the pain.
Too sick to cry. Fuck.
He hears footsteps again – unmistakably Jack's – and he hastily wipes his face with his sleeve. It's a ridiculous thing to do since he isn't going to try to sit up, but it makes him feel marginally better.
"Tell me you're not sick, Will," Jack says sternly from the other side of the door.
Will breathes deeply, calming himself, and presses his face against the cool tile.
"I'm not sick, Jack," he groans mockingly.
He knows Jack can see his legs, that he's lying on the floor – knows Price told Jack he's puking his guts out.
"What's wrong, Will?" Jack asks impatiently.
Will clenches his teeth as another cramp attacks his gut.
"Food poisoning," he grinds out. "Bad oysters."
"We don't have time for this," Jack says.
"Well, I can't do anything about it," Will retorts.
He hears Jack thinking on the other side of the door. Jack will want him to come out or at least to open the door. He won't accept that Will is sick until he sees it for himself.
As if on cue, Jack says in much softer, almost sweet voice, like he's coaxing a child, "Can you open the door, Will?"
Dammit. Will takes a deep breath. He has no choice.
"I'll try."
He curses Jack inwardly as he pushes himself up, his body aching from the hard floor and his stomach threatening mutiny again. He gets to his knees and opens the latch. The door swings open as he sinks against the wall, shivering, his arms around his midsection and knees against his chest.
Jack pushes the door open, takes one look at Will, and looks away in frustration, tapping his foot.
Will focuses his mind on Jack's face. Anything to distract him from his aching stomach.
Jack sighs. His face softens slightly as he crouches so he can be at eye level with Will.
"Okay," Jack says, his voice still soft, even somewhat sympathetic. "You're sick. I'm sorry. You look terrible. But I need you back at work. What can I do to make that happen?"
Another cramp forces Will's eyes closed.
"I'm not sure there's anything you can do," he answers tightly.
"Oh, I don't know," Jack replies calmly. "I've got a couch in my office. We'll set you up there with some medicine, maybe an IV if you're dehydrated, and you'll feel better."
And you'll work.
Will recognizes the steel in his voice. There's no fighting him on this. It sounds better than lying here suffering - especially the part about medicine to ease the merciless cramping in his gut - even if he won't have as much a sense of privacy. But –
"I'm not sure I can make it," Will says.
"It's not far," Jack coaxes. "I'll help you."
I don't want any help, Will wants to scream. He knows it would do no good. Jack will have his way.
So instead he merely braces himself for the discomfort of moving and replies, "It's not my fault if I puke on your carpet."