Chapter Text
It can’t last. Of course it can’t.
A pall hangs over their house now, and Will can’t even pretend it’s because of Peter’s death. It is in part, but not fully. Not even mostly. Mostly it’s the fear of discovery. The instincts he gained over a lifetime in law enforcement that he can’t fully put to sleep, not now that part of him has woken up again. It would take more to lull it—more time spent making love and lolling in the sweet grass. Time he’s aware they don’t quite have, not anymore.
Hannibal shields Will from it as best he can. In this at least, he’s as good as his word. There are little things, though. Things that tally up to make the writing on the wall: their days here are numbered, ready or not.
Will wakes more often now. He’s become accustomed to sleeping through the night, so it’s jarring when he’s woken from dreams again and again. His visions all have the tenor of blood, but Will can’t quite say if they’re nightmares or not. They make his heart race. They make him sweat.
He wakes in the night often, and half the time Hannibal isn’t there. If Will creeps into the living room on silent feet, he can hear Hannibal talking on the phone, booking flights and making plans. If he looks out the window, he can see the blue glow of a screen as Hannibal taps impatiently. He doesn’t disturb Hannibal, although he knows he’d be welcome. He pads back into the bedroom to stare at the ceiling until Hannibal settles in beside him near daybreak.
* * *
“Liver sauteed with garlic and parsley.” Hannibal sets a plate before him before settling down at the opposite end of the table with a plate of his own.
There’s a bright green salad to the side, garnished with watermelon radishes and strings of pickled red onion. They’re drinking Bordeaux out of clean, shining glasses, and there’s a spray of delicate white flowers in a little vase on the table. Will has no idea where they came from. It’s beautiful, like every meal Hannibal has ever served, but this is hardly any meal.
Will doesn’t say thank you. He doesn’t compliment everything Hannibal’s done. He picks up his knife and fork, cuts into the tender organ meat and closes his eyes as he brings it to his mouth.
The meat tastes like meat, although it feels like a funerary ritual. He chews and swallows. Hannibal is watching him when he opens his eyes; Will knew he would be.
“It’s different,” Will says.
“The liver is instrumental in filtering ethanol from the body. I’m afraid alcohol dehydrogenase imparts a distinctive flavor that isn’t altogether pleasant, although it can be mitigated with the right accompaniments. Lemon juice, salt, a generous amount of butter.”
“That isn’t what I meant,” Will says. Then, “Why take the liver, then? You knew he was drunk. Why not take something else?”
Hannibal smiles. “Because it was part of your design. You drugged him, that he might not suffer.”
That I might not suffer, Will thinks but doesn’t correct him. Maybe they’re one and the same. Certainly, they are, where he and Hannibal are concerned. With other people… it’s harder to say. The line grows fuzzy. A great many lines do, and he crosses them again and again.
Will takes another bite of meat.
* * *
“Is there anything here you’ve grown particularly fond of, that you’d miss if we were to leave here?” The question isn’t wholly unexpected, but it takes Will off guard nonetheless. Possibly because he wasn’t expecting Hannibal to actually admit that he was reaching the end of his ability to keep them safe here.
Will’s kneejerk reaction is no, nothing, but he takes the time to actually consider it. The truth is he’ll miss a lot of things, but—
“Nothing we can take with us,” he says with a rueful smile.
Hannibal reaches across the table and presses his hand. “You found a home here. You’ll have it again. I will make you a home no matter where we go.”
Will thinks about it, being back in the world of cellphones and digital clocks, airlines and a dozen unquiet minds whispering to his. “I don’t want to think about it today.”
“Then we won’t.”
Their mouths come together like magnets, and then they don’t think of anything at all. Somewhere an invisible clock ticks.
* * *
The day they leave dawns just like any other. Will snuffles into the pillows and tries to pull Hannibal back down into the thicket of blankets when he goes to get up. Hannibal tries to extricate himself from the tangle of grasping limbs with a quietly exasperated, “Will.”
Will holds him for a moment, just because he can, before releasing him and earning a kiss for his magnanimity. He smiles to the empty room and stays a few minutes more, drinking in the easy languor of warm and sleepy mornings. But without Hannibal in it, the bed has lost most of its appeal, and it isn’t long before Will rises himself.
By the time he emerges from the shower wearing nothing more than a towel slung low around his hips, there’s coffee waiting for him on the counter, freshly brewed and still steaming. He wraps his hands around it to feel the heat bite into his skin. Hannibal wraps his arms around his waist.
“I thought I’d go fishing today,” Will says. “Maybe bring back something for dinner.”
The earth is still cold, but the weather has been warming up, enough that the fish might be stirring in the stream. There was a recipe for trout Hannibal’s been meaning to try, and Will wouldn’t mind stretching his legs, clearing the stagnant air from his lungs.
Hannibal puts a hand on Will’s forearm, hot from his own mug. “I was actually hoping you’d sit for me and let me draw you today.”
Will nods, mentally adjusting the shape of the day as it had been taking form in his head. Another day, then. “Okay. Now?”
“Finish your coffee first,” Hannibal says.
He doesn’t need to be told twice. He takes another sip of his coffee and lets the thick bitterness coat his tongue. It’s better than any coffee he’d have bought for himself at any point in his life. Better, even, than what Molly bought, although he’s starting to grow used to it now, these little luxuries. He’s growing used to a lot of things. It’s getting harder to remember why he shouldn’t.
They stand around the kitchen and drink their coffee in comfortable silence, and when they’re done, Will takes both their empty cups and sets them in the sink. He uncoils the towel from his waist and hangs it over the back of the chair. “Where do you want me?”
“By the window,” Hannibal says without hesitation. There’s a chair waiting there, one of the dining room chairs Hannibal must have dragged over while waiting for Will to get out of the shower. It’s draped in a red cloth with a satiny sheen.
Will sits and lets Hannibal adjust him, propping his arm over the back of the chair, angling his hips just so, taking Will’s chin in hand to turn his face slightly to the side. Will lets himself be moved. There’s an intimacy to it, the way Hannibal handles Will’s body as though it were his own. As though it were his right.
He’s gentle and thorough and unwilling to be rushed. He shapes the line of Will’s body until it matches some picture he sees in his head, until Will is gazing out the window with his head to Hannibal in profile. Only then does Hannibal start. Will can’t see him, not without turning his head and undoing all of Hannibal’s careful work, but he can hear the scratching of a pencil and the occasional drag of an eraser. He settles in and lets his mind wander.
“Let me know when you need a break,” Hannibal says, and Will hums in acknowledgment.
He doesn’t ever call for a break, but Hannibal eventually does—more for Will’s sake than his own, he thinks—and Will takes the opportunity to stretch his legs while Hannibal makes them both a second cup of coffee.
He drifts over to where Hannibal’s sketchbook is lying open on the table, peering curiously at the page. It’s a very good likeness, and Will has to stop himself from reaching out to touch his face, rendered in smudgeable graphite. There’s delicate expression there, at once wistful and content.
“Do I really look like that?”
Hannibal brushes a curl from his forehead. “Often. Today you do. It suits you.”
He sits down again, and Hannibal fusses over the draping. Readjusts Will to his liking. They don’t take another break, and Will doesn’t know what Hannibal could possibly be doing—the drawing had looked finished when he saw it, but the scratch of graphite on paper drones on like a soft metronome. They’re at it for so long that the light changes, and Will is beginning to drowse despite all the coffee he’s had. His stomach grumbles loudly, and he realizes he hasn’t eaten anything today.
“My apologies,” Hannibal says. “I’ll make you something to eat after, if you’ll be patient with me a while longer.”
“It’s fine,” Will says, because it is.
This is important to Hannibal; he knows it without knowing why. This drawing is different in the way this whole day is—set apart. Consecrated. It’s a small thing to ask, in the grand scheme of things. It’s such a small price to pay. He’s paid much more. Would, and has, and likely will again. But it’s nice that things are easy today.
He’s thinking of consecration, of cities laid waste and the God of ruin. His mind stalks down dark paths.
“Do you know things that were touched by God were destroyed? They were ruined for their original purpose, set apart so that no mortal could ever use them again.”
“The virgin Mary,” Hannibal says.
“The ark of the covenant.”
Scalpel scrapes against pencil, and curls of wood fall to the floor.
* * *
He doesn’t put his clothes on until it’s nearly dark. Hannibal turns to him with a look that is very nearly regret, and Will just knows. He’s dressed in five minutes.
“Do I need to pack?” he asks.
“I have things for you in the car. Take anything you’d be sorry to leave behind.”
The answer is both everything and nothing, so he says, “I’m good.”
Hannibal nods.
“Jack?” Will asks.
“Yes.”
“How long do we have?”
Hannibal pulls out a sleek, black cellphone. It’s the first time he’s done so in front of Will in several months, and there’s a ridiculous moment where Will feels like he’s witnessing something he shouldn’t. It passes. There’ll be time for him to fall apart later, if he needs to. There’s always more time.
“An hour or so.”
Will nods. He stands in the kitchen with his hands shoved in his pockets, for once unsure of what to do with himself.
“May I?” He asks, gesturing toward Hannibal’s sketchbook with a pen already in hand.
“Be my guest.”
Will rips a thick, cream-colored page out of the leatherbound book and starts writing. Jack, he begins.
* * *
Hannibal locks the door behind them when they leave. It’s a symbolic gesture more than a practical one—this place will be swarming with federal agents before long, but the symmetry of it isn’t lost on Will. He smiles and shakes his head, and Hannibal gives him a questioning look.
“Turning off the lights and locking the door on our way out. Leaving a note. Almost polite.”
Hannibal chuckles, a shared memory.
They’re both empty-handed, save for the clothes on their backs and the sketchbook under Hannibal’s arm. They lapse into silence as they get in the car—an ordinary grey hatchback that couldn’t look less Hannibal’s style if it tried. He sinks into his seat as Hannibal gets in. The engine hums to life.
Will thinks about what Jack will find. There’s the note they’ve left, but that’s the tip of the iceberg. To an FBI profiler, their house screams secrets. Will breathes it in and sees what Jack sees: Two bedrooms, one grown dusty from disuse. His things and Hannibal’s, the intimacy of their wardrobes mingling together in the closet. Dogeared books and half-finished fishing lures strewn haphazardly across a table. A nearly empty bottle of lube in their nightstand, a bed full of their DNA.
Evidence of a life they’ve chosen to spend together, all of it.
He thinks about the coffee cups in the sink.
Will takes one last look at the cabin, small and yellow, built on a slant and sinking into the earth. A failure of architecture by any measure, but also home. He runs his eyes over cheery, chipped walls and overgrown fields covered in white. The tall grass swallows it all whole as they drive down the dirt path toward the main road.
Will doesn’t know where they’re going. He doesn’t want to know.
It doesn’t matter.
Hannibal is driving with one hand on the wheel, the other stretched out in his lap. He puts his hand in Hannibal’s and doesn’t look back.