DISCLAIMER: I claim no ownership of Hannibal NBC or affiliated branding (sadly).

SUMMARY: Still shaken from Baltimore, Will is thrust into the midst of a horrific new case: a killer targeting close to home. He struggles between clinging to personal morality and fighting new influences. He reaches his breaking point and, horrified by the aftermath, becomes desperate for emotional stability. Solace is found in the only person he knows will understand. Set mid season two.

NOTES: See chapter end.


Flourishing sunlight highlighted the high shadows of the room, the ceiling's wooden beams lightening to a rich brown. Will opened his eyes a crack and watched the sunrise lazily. The curtains draped lightly over the windowsill and aired in the mild morning breeze.

Eventually he stood, gritting his teeth as his side punched shockwaves into his body. There was an untouched glass of water by the bed. Cracks lined Will's lips, but he avoided drinking it on the off-chance that Hannibal had blended another cocktail of drugs for him. His palms found the edge of the window. Snow blanketed the ground, but the wind was light and caressed his face with warm fingers.

He found his phone and his keys tucked behind a medical book on the bedside table. He had no pockets, but he found a jacket in the wardrobe that he shrugged onto his shoulders. It hung off his arms, but at least it covered them, and he dropped his possessions into its pockets.

Hannibal smiled as he entered. Will checked the clock. It was early. Hannibal pulled out the grill and drizzled flakes of green spice onto the meat. It sizzled. "Breakfast?"

Will stood in the doorway, head fuzzy. "Uh - sure. Is that fish?" He recognised the smell.

"Yakizakana. A Japanese breakfast dish of grilled mackerel and rice. I tend to serve it without the miso soup in the morning."

Will didn't have any additional thoughts on that matter. He settled in one of the chairs by the kitchen island.

Hannibal set a cup of coffee in front of him. "I heard you get up," he explained. "How do you feel?"

Will glowered at him, without real malice. "I would've slept without the drugs, you know. My head hurts."

"That will fade soon. I didn't want to risk you waking and harming yourself while I was gone."

Will sipped warily. It burnt his tongue, but sweetened the lingering taste of bile in his mouth. Hannibal's focus wavered between the food and him.

The silence between them comforted Will. It rendered the plates clattering and moments of Hannibal's light humming more potent. Relief flooded him as he saw that the fish was exactly that: just fish. He'd half expected to see strips of flesh with pale skin lining one edge, or a severed arm or leg sitting spice-covered the oven. His appetite wavered.

"Where is your mind wandering, Will?"

Will sighed, swilling his coffee around his mug. "To places I'm no longer scared of looking. Like… like a pig who's survived too many winters to be scared of the slaughterhouse."

"That's a negative metaphor for a positive advancement," Hannibal chided. He scattered rice on a thin place and positioned the fish on top. He slid the plate at Will and sat opposite, his own meal sparser.

"Do you ever just have toast?" Will said. Hannibal looked at him with something akin to disgust. Will grinned. "This looks delicious."

They ate slowly. Will found his face hard to move, set to a solid desolation if he wasn't concentrating. He didn't think that was the drug's doing. He stomached a few bites before his body protested, washing queasiness into his blood. Hannibal didn't force him to continue.

There was a knock. A sharp, single knock, and the quiet was shattered. Will raised his eyebrows. "Company?"

"Company," Hannibal said grimly. Will nodded, thin-lipped. Hannibal set his fork on his plate and stood, slinging a dishcloth over his shoulder. "I will attempt to keep it brief."

"Right," Will said. His stomach churned. His heart beat. A lump formed in his throat, clogging his airway.

Muffled greetings echoed down the corridor. Hannibal's pleasant façade bled over Jack's telltale monosyllables. Will drew Hannibal's jacket tighter around his chest to cover the lump of bandages, combing his hair forward with his nails to hide the gash on his forehead. He couldn't do much about the rest of the bruises.

"He's just through here." Hannibal's voice. "Coffee, Jack?"

"No, Doctor. I'm only -" The sight of Will cut Jack off. He froze in the doorway. Not from shock, or fear or anger or horror. His face twisted into a barely palatable expression of pity, hidden beneath the well-worn mask of efficiency.

Will's mouth dried. "Hello Jack."

Jack strode in slowly. He put his hands in his pockets and leant forward tentatively to scan Will's face, catching the light from the back door to better illuminate him. Will fixed his eyes on the wall.

"Will." Jack drew out a chair, the one Hannibal had been sitting on previously. Hannibal whisked the plates away with an absence of his usual flourish. "You look like hell." Jack's voice lacked his professional temperament.

"Thanks. I feel like hell."

Jack clasped his hands together. "Where were you last night?"

Will caught Hannibal's eye, gauging what he'd already said and not said in a single blink. "I was here."

"I told you to stay at the station."

"No," Will answered, "you told me to either stay at the station or go to Hannibal. I chose the latter."

Jack remained expressionless. Patient. Will wished he'd start yelling, start shouting, if only so Will could scream back and let the truth lay bare on the table like a feast, so he could watch Jack suffocate under the weight of the torment bubbling in his gut. But Jack's lenience endured. "You were here all night?"

"Yes."

Hannibal raised his eyebrows, wiping one of the plates. "Will came to me in great distress. I did not deem it sensible to allow him to return home, or to you, given the situation at hand."

Jack surveyed them both at equal lengths, his eyes barely moving. Hannibal stood behind Will, a hand on his back, and he compelled his breathing to slow.

"Dr. Michelle Spencer was found dead last night. In her home."

Will's eyebrows shot up in genuine confusion. "She… what?"

Jack narrowed his eyes. "Brute trauma to the body. Multiple penetration wounds. Probable brain damage. We've combed her for anomalous DNA but found nothing."

Will swallowed. Hannibal's hand shifted away. "How's that possible?"

"We're not sure. The injuries are positioned as such that she could have done it to herself, but I doubt that. I knew Michelle. She was strong-minded."

Will sighed and rubbed his forehead. "I'm sorry Jack."

Jack remained unimpressed, but not harshly so. "So am I." His eyes found the dried blood at Will's hairline. "What happened to your head?"

"Oh. I, uh - I tripped. Into a door."

"You tripped. Into a door." Jack's face set into disbelief beyond anything Will had seen. He seemed more surprised at the flimsiness of Will's cover story than at the entire situation otherwise. Will shrugged.

Hannibal leant against the countertop. His hands drummed the metal surface. "Why have you graced us with your presence this morning, Agent Crawford?"

"To talk to Will."

"Talk?" Will grinned like an animal, teeth bared. "This is an interrogation, isn't it?"

"It's an apology."

Sincerity at last. Will had finally chipped at Jack's stone exterior, scraped the bedrock away to touch the human within and he found it lacking. "Sure it is. Do you want me to consult on the case?"

"I want the truth."

Will said nothing.

"There's a gap in our monitoring footage. There is no evidence of you, nor Dr. Spencer, leaving the station yesterday evening."

"Glitch in the system, Jack." Will schooled his expression. He was blank and he was empty. He was a hollow skull, sea air filling the shell of bone. "It happens."

"Does it?" Jack regained his iron. "This is the FBI monitoring system."

Will blew into his mug. The cold coffee swilled in ripples, lapping against the sides and onto his finger tightly cupping the rim. He stared into the liquid, quiet, contemplative. His organs tore with displaced horror, a scream of self-pity building in his oesophagus. Hannibal's eyes gleaned his emotional state and Will locked onto that focal point, draining the guilt like water through that connection.

Evidently the silence evolved to insurmountable. Jack exhaled. His eyebrows upturned in genuinity. "God, Will."

And maybe that's why Jack was there. A misplaced faith. A dwindling hope in a kinder future for his pet – his best – agent. Slips of doubt shuttered like blinds in his pupils. Will was crushed between the bars, spine cracked underneath the teeth of Jack's presumptions. He'd been lured into the maw of the beast and spat out when his flesh did not yield enough blood.

It felt like an abandonment.

A weight settled on Will's shoulder. Hannibal's hand. A solid reminder. One man deemed him unworthy, but a kinder one had swallowed him whole, bones and all. Preferential, perhaps – to be consumed alive and complete, in totality – as compared to a slow digestion, only the worthy parts deemed tasteful.

Will settled quickly into this new thought. This new place. It was the soft fall at the end of things. His hands were steady when he brought the mug to his lips. "Will that be all?"

Jack surveyed him. "You claim no involvement in this murder?"

"None, apart from the events you were present for."

"And Dr. Lecter? You are the same?"

Will heard Hannibal's nod. "Of course."

Jack didn't unglue from his stiff professionalism. Yet his eyelids flitted, briefly, to his watch. "This meeting is off the record. And, therefore, I have no legal qualms in diverting the conversation to the original case."

Will's heart twisted, ripped from its newfound safety before he'd allowed it time to settle. He tightened his grip until his knuckles whitened.

Jack continued, "There were more bodies found last night."

His words gashed Will's stomach wide open. He fell, head spinning, into the pits of his mind He clawed at his eye sockets and dug his nails into the skin until it broke. Liquid, haemoglobin red, flooded his mouth. His hands around the coffee mug became sticky, black and brown, the blood under his nails evidence of his crimes. Crimes against an innocent. Crimes against the wrong woman.

He was wrong.

"But…" Jack paused.

(Will hung on the tenterhooks of that 'but', a flame of hope licking his ribcage.)

"There were only two. No more than those two bodies in addition to the children already found. We are awaiting confirmation, but we believe Dr. Michelle Spencer may have been the perpetrator of these offences."

And there it was.

Will unravelled under the confirmation. A breath tugged from his lips and shattered the still surface of his drink. Wilting, at least on the inside, he forced his body to remain indifferent. But elation – a sick euphoria – rose from the acid in his stomach and bloomed in his chest. It cleared his airway and he inhaled.

He was right. He was right. Nobody else will die.

His face muscles didn't even strain against the smile crawling across his lips. It was thin and weak and shaky, and not even appropriate at a stretch. "You… you think she is our murderer?"

"Was. She was our murderer." Jack rested his hands on the table. "Likelihood is, she killed a proportion of victims in the day and displayed them in the early evening. That diverted our attention to the wrong areas, so she had time to complete the rest of her night's quota."

Will's sigh of relief was audible.

Jack hunched his shoulders closer. "And," he paused, mulling over his words for this first time since Will had met him, "for my misguided disbelief in your theory, I owe you my trust. Hence the apology."

"You owe me trust, Jack." Will's lips dried. He licked them, covering for the hoarseness in his voice. "That… that doesn't ensure that you will not forgo your assurance."

Jack looked at his watch again. Murder waited for no man, and no doubt the call of Dr. Spencer's scene was overwhelming. Will, on the other hand, was averse to catching a glimpse. A downward spiral would ensue, and Will wasn't sure even Hannibal's hands could steady him from that descent.

"I promised I'd be your bedrock, Will." Jack's eyes darted to Hannibal. Frown lines appeared at his brow, a threat hidden in the well-worn wrinkles. "I promised twice and failed you both times."

"You crumbled, Jack."

"I did," Jack admitted. A rare display of vulnerability. "And I won't offer that to you anymore. But I can offer you solace. Better solace than what you might cling to." Again his eyes found Hannibal, who remained neutral-faced at the implication. "We can find you better help, Will."

Will would've liked to take time to revel in the influence he held. Power imbalance filled the room silently and stuck Will in the centre of the warring minds. Apprehension leaked off Jack, and Hannibal too, though he masked his with a well-timed smirk.

Yet Will's decision was simple. It was permanent, and it was stable. The first time he'd felt stable in a long time. "I'm okay, thanks. I'll push through. I have Dr. Lecter's psychiatry, after all." Will grinned, exposing all his teeth.

Jack's stillness betrayed a dismayed seethe. Hannibal's betrayed victory.

Will's betrayed nothing at all.

"Then you have nothing more to add?" Jack ascertained. He seemed bewildered, lost in the realisation that Will would not be following him meekly out the door. It was quickly morphed into his cover of indifference.

"I advise," Hannibal leapt in smoothly, "that Will does not return to the field today. He may become overwhelmed."

Will drifted into thought. Jack's muffled objections and Hannibal's stubborn argument reached his brain through a heavy fog. His mind floated between half-chewed possibilities, palatable now that his original suspicions were confirmed.

He was right.

Maybe that made him a worse man. The weight of his deeds was less crushing at the thought that it was righteous. But if it made him a worse man he could grow to accept that, so long as it meant the dread in his gut remained as it was. Dimmed. Insignificant. Stomachable.

"Will."

Will fell from thought and back to the warm scent of Hannibal's kitchen. Jack had stood. He angled his boots towards the door. "I want you on the scene tomorrow. We can determine your… we can determine the suspect's motives." He put on his hat, adjusting it until it shaded his eyes. Will hadn't even realised he'd brought it. "But I will accept Dr. Lecter's medical advice." He didn't seem pleased. "Take the day off. Go home."

Will offered a stilted nod.

Hannibal smiled gleefully, his actions bordering on giddy at Will's affirmations of his preference. "I'll show you out, Jack. A pleasure having you as always."

"The pleasure is mine," Jack answered, his voice suggesting anything but. It grated like grains of salt scattering on Hannibal's tiled floor. "Thank you for your help."

"The help was all Will's," insisted Hannibal, an iron belief in his words. A pointed elevation of Will's contribution. "I will ensure that he is well rested for tomorrow."

Jack nodded, stilted. "Will," he said and he tilted his head in a goodbye. Will obstinately masked the twinge of regret in his chest.

Hannibal escorted Jack to the door, exchanging a few words. Will sipped his cold coffee. Hannibal returned with a rare grin; the wide smile graced his features with a keen authenticity. Will mirrored the expression as best he could, though his face felt heavy.

He was so tired.

"That went splendidly," Hannibal said. He took Will's mug from his hands, their fingers touching. Will leant into the contact, his hands chasing Hannibal's until the action became uncomfortably obvious. Will settled them in his lap instead, pondering.

"How did you erase the footage? How did you even think to check that?" he asked. Stupid question. Hannibal was no amateur.

"I have my contacts."

Will grimaced. "Of course."

The air lightened, fresh with the scent of the herb garden and washing-up liquid and another round of coffee. Will leant on his palms and studied the well-practised flow of Hannibal's fingers on the dirty plates. "Do you have appointments today?"

"Today? No. I cancelled them."

Will raised an eyebrow. "Cancelled them?"

Hannibal shuffled, his face adopting a veiled embarrassment. If the person across from him had been anyone except Will, it would've gone unnoticed. "I deemed them less important than you. On this occasion. I am consistent enough otherwise that exceptions can be made," he said.

"I'm honoured," Will replied dryly.

"Besides, you are in no mental state to be alone."

"I feel fine." And it was truthful. Will felt, in almost all regards, fine. Not good – that would be a stretch. But his thoughts ebbed and flowed like the current of a river, tickling the edge of his mind soothingly.

"That may be so. But I remain concerned."

"I've got to get back to Wolf Trap. I need to feed my dogs and finish the reports on those earlier deaths and -"

"And that could not wait a day?"

Will sighed and rubbed the unshaven bristles dotting his chin. "I don't know, Hannibal."

"Well," Hannibal said, "I am happy to drive you if you so wish. Jack alerted me to the fact your car remains there. But my advice stands."

Will leant back, stretching his legs out. "I don't - I don't know anymore. I feel okay. I feel… awake. Stable."

"Can you pinpoint a reason for this change?"

"I - I'm not sure. I think…" Will held Hannibal's eyes, searching, clinging onto the shreds of similarity shining back from within.

The pendulum swung and Hannibal, at least his present self, vanished. A younger, eager Hannibal took his place, hands damp from first bloodshed, a scared smile framing the planes of his face. A deadness hung in his eyes. A loneliness, a loss deep in his chest like a stab wound. There was nobody beside him to stem the bleeding. His actions were his own and they were terrifying.

Will knew that terror, that gutting sensation. But he'd known it only when dimmed, followed by soft hands and promised reassurance. And he knew he could always return to that in times of uncertainty. Hannibal had said himself: he would give it freely. And Will basked in the knowledge, loathe to tear his eyes away from that reality, that companionship.

Maybe that's where the flicker of worry in Hannibal's eyes stemmed. Fear.

He didn't want Will to deal with this alone as he had.

"I'm not sure," Will finished lamely. Hannibal's spark dimmed at the admission. "But," Will continued, "maybe we could figure that out together? If we talk?"

"Is this you implying you wish to stay here for the day?" Hannibal's voice quenched a tentative relief.

Will grinned wryly. "It could be."

Hannibal's lips twitched. To Will's shock (and no particular aversion), he reached across the counter and bushed his palm across the side of Will's face. Will grabbed his wrist before he slipped away and held him there, tilting his neck to maximise the contact. "I shall enjoy your company," Hannibal promised.

Will possessed no apt words. Reluctantly he let Hannibal's fingers retreat. He continued to wash the dishes, pausing only to switch on his sound system and hum along to the concerto as he worked.

Will was tired. But he was comfortable. He was stable. He was safe.

He was with Hannibal.

The home warmed him, though less effectively than the good doctor's presence itself. He fixated on Hannibal's pupils, lazily unpicking the elements of his own self reflecting back at him.

Will was tired. But he was safe.


A/N: And there we have it! A happy(ish) ending. Thank you all for the support on this fic, I appreciate it so much!

I am writing more Hannibal stories as we speak, so stay tuned for more :)