Chapter Text
Will wakes to water sluicing out of his mouth and breath on his face. It’s hard to tell it apart from the spray of the ocean and the salt stinging in his cheek. Everything from his jaw to the space beneath his eye is on fire.
A hand touches his unwounded cheek. The hilt of a thumb rests on the corner of Will’s mouth. Fingers trace the ridges of his brow, cheek, and jaw. Water insinuates itself where friction and matter are not enough to close the void between one body’s end and the other’s beginning. Blood ekes out of the chasms in his flesh. The burn of it shifts from the harsh jolt of tearing into a slower dripping sensation.
The trace of Dolarhyde’s knife carved into his face aches, wanting almost to itch. Will concentrates on the slots in his skin where his blood mingled with that of the Dragon. He imagines their essences collide about as well as acid corroding its container.
Will is the acid. His white blood cells are the acid eating away at Dolarhyde’s influence. All that’s left is time, salt, and biology.
Hannibal is there, too. He is an amalgamation or usurpation of those things. His memory undoes the spools of time. Salt is of his body but does not allow him to be petrified as it did with Lot’s wife even though they both had looked back. Biology can’t explain Hannibal’s durability, his strength, or his limitlessness.
Math can’t either. It can’t reverse time, but Hannibal can and does.
His hand on Will’s face is the oar that took them to shore. Hannibal’s shoulders are the raft that Will clutched to his heart as they fell together, endlessly but quickly.
“Will,” Hannibal says on a strained sigh. “I need you to speak.”
“You do,” Will murmurs back, throat hoarse and tainted by salt. “Don’t you?”
Hannibal’s fingers flutter over his ear and press smoothly down the curve of his skull. His fingertips rove gently along and land unerringly on the pulse hammering in Will’s neck. Calculated and patient as ever, Hannibal holds there and waits without seeming to breathe.
Will opens his eyes, groggy and in pain but unmistakably alive. Hannibal’s eyes shine in the darkness the same black as blood spilt in the moonlight. His smile is slow and cautious. They are close on wet, cold ground. Hannibal’s lips are glossy from their plunge into the Atlantic. The bunched strands of his hair drip onto Will’s chest. They help each other to sit upright.
“Are you all right?” Will hears himself asking as his eyes light upon the blood still oozing from beneath the bullet and Hannibal’s hand alike.
“I’ll survive.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Will inches his hand over the wound in Hannibal’s stead. A craving stirs under his skin to feel what Hannibal feels like when life is coursing out of him. He presses his palm there, an immovable object adhering itself to an unstoppable force—his hand and Hannibal’s blood.
Hannibal gasps at the pressure or at the implication of Will’s touch. Will wonders if he’s thinking about the same thing that Will is.
“Gunned down at the hands of another,” Hannibal muses, short of breath and clearly in pain. He raises his chin to observe Will’s face, angling his head to better see the jagged tear in his cheek. “Cut by a knife not my own.”
Will doesn’t turn his face to let Hannibal examine more closely. He watches until Hannibal finds his gaze with his own and holds him there when their eyes meet. Shivers rack Will’s body from the cold. He doesn’t look away even as the chill holds fast to his bones. His hand twitches hard against the dip in Hannibal’s skin, causing a short burst of warmth to spill out over his freezing fingers and down his wrist. Hannibal doesn’t flinch away from him.
“It isn’t my flesh caught in your teeth or your blood in my wounds.”
“No,” Hannibal agrees. “It has never been my blood in your wounds or your flesh in my teeth.”
“Hasn’t, isn’t.”
“And shall not be.”
A light shines from farther out on the water. Will looks first and can’t make out the features of the person driving the boat toward them. There’s only so many people he expects it could really be.
“Are you sure about that?” Will asks, voice drowned out by the very familiar cry of the boat horn.
Hannibal smiles when Will turns to look at him. The shape of it on his mouth is still uncharacteristically shy. A searchlight cursorily skates over Will’s person and then swings toward Hannibal where it lingers. Hannibal pays it no mind, evidently finding Will’s face to be the far more interesting spectacle of the two.
“I am, in fact.”
--
The gash in Will’s cheek is a splendorous thing to behold. It is even better than the gout of blood that shot out of his mouth when Dolarhyde stabbed him. Hannibal thinks, as he takes to the disinfected wound with a needle and thread, that Will might be fretting over the inevitability of a scar.
Hannibal sutures what is sure to be a charming dimple to the smile on Will’s stomach and moves onto the cut above his clavicle. The wound is superficial, due in part to the length of the blade but also due to its location. Will stands from his perch immediately behind Hannibal on the toilet and stays in the bathroom as Hannibal pries the bullet out of his body. His skin still thrums where Will pressed his hand to the fount of blood pushing out of him.
Will bends his neck to see over Hannibal’s shoulder, warm breath teasing over exposed skin. The bathroom is extremely close quarters for even one person but absolutely diminutive when faced with two.
They’ve changed clothes: a soft robe for Will, sweatpants for Hannibal, and warm socks for them both. The sweatpants hang low on Hannibal’s hips. Will’s robe opens over his sternum to reduce unnecessary chafing to his dressings. There’s no attempt by either of them to shorten the distance, but the listing halves of the robe still graze Hannibal’s skin and make his heartbeat skip recklessly in his chest.
He can’t decipher what Will’s intentions are, but the thought of their proximity and more, that Will initiates it, nearly sets his hands to trembling. Hannibal finishes with the sutures, tensing when Will reaches around him for the roll of elastic bandages on the sink. He listens and watches Will’s deliberate movements in the mirror.
The strained moment flickers by and Hannibal raises his elbows to the sides. Will circles his arms around Hannibal’s waist wordlessly and binds him. He cuts the bandage at Hannibal’s front and takes his time securing it along Hannibal’s navel. The robe drags across Hannibal’s back and against his sides. He can’t even lament that he doesn’t feel Will on his skin, their closeness alone is so satisfying.
Will ducks his head, chin dropping past Hannibal’s shoulder. Lips trail down the curve of his flesh for just a moment. Will takes his hands away and steps out of the bathroom in a quick, smooth retreat. Hannibal can’t lament his evasion either.
In the cabin, Hannibal discovers Will collapsed on the bed with a quilt flung haphazardly over his feet. There’s room enough on the mattress for Hannibal to crawl in beside him, but he won’t tonight.
He contents himself to sit at Will’s bedside in a chair, watching him sleep as he has in times past. His exhaustion would make sleep an easily attainable goal, but he can’t himself rest until the point that it becomes wholly unavoidable. Before he can follow Will in slumber, he must see to their host and rescuer where she waits for him, singularly, at the wheel.
There is no robe for him to wear when he finally leaves Will to his dreams. They look peaceful or perhaps it’s only that they find him peaceably enough. Hannibal shrugs on an over-sized shirt and a coat to shield himself from the cold and climbs up onto the deck.
Chiyoh is where they left her, steering the boat with both hands and bound up in a warm coat that covers her from neck to knee. Her boots, gloves, and hair meld her to the jet curtain of nightfall. The black sea, the black sky, and the black gun packed away in a stowed trunk are extensions of her.
He had left her in Lithuania as a girl with coal in her heart and terror in her belly. Extreme pressure converted those quantities into diamonds. He can see wildfires sparking in her eyes and in the quiet language of her mouth.
“How did you know where to find us?”
“Your involvement with the man who hunted you made your intentions predictable. His involvement with you, in turn, made him predictable.”
“In what way?”
“He approached him—your unmei no hito.” She points a studious look at him that withers into something warmer and more delicate, tinged with nerves. “Sit, Hannibal,” she half-commands, half-chides him. “You’re wounded.”
He limps closer and drops into a seat at her right. She allows him a moment to relax and turns her eyes forward again. Her face looks serious in profile. Mist from the sea sprays them as they sail onward. Chiyoh’s only indication that the elements touch her is the single curl of hair over her temple that shudders in the breeze. Specks of foam and salt water on her cheek catch the light from the full moon. They shine like fragments of shattered glass.
“The house overlooking the bluffs, this boat…?”
“Bedelia Du Maurier,” Chiyoh tells him, killing the engine as she does. “She told me yours was a tower by the sea.”
It hasn’t slipped his mind that he told Bedelia about his property on the edge of the cliff. He contemplates the conversation in the absence of the boat’s revving motor.
They had been sitting by firelight in a Florentine estate, Bedelia consumed with a glass of Chassagne-Montrachet and Hannibal fixated on an elegant dish of delectable candies. He took them into his mouth one after the other, remembering Ortolan birds in the sugary, near almond taste of the marzipan strawberries. In a slow, ecstatic performance of nostalgia, he had related to Bedelia the story of his own experience making them with Abigail.
Hannibal had lightly teased her for getting sugar all over the countertop. The more strawberries they made, the more her creativity inspired her to experiment with different molds. Her last was formed into the shape of a human ear. It looked more like a flower petal than anything else.
He recalls, even now, the words he had said to Bedelia in Florence: We stayed in a house overlooking the Atlantic, perched on the brink of ruin as a drop of blood balanced on a knife’s edge. She loved it there. I believe she wished us to stay.
Hannibal smiles into Chiyoh’s silence. Clever Chiyoh. His clever, beautiful sister in everything but in blood.
“I was a child and she was a child, In this kingdom by the sea,” Hannibal recites.
Chiyoh’s face, hardly anything like a fortress to him, closes off. “You need to rest, Hannibal.”
“Yes.”
The shadows in her face age her, but they are nothing to the darkness in her eyes or to the prominence of her frown. He stands and she tears her gaze away from him. She does not lift her gaze even when his steps bring him close enough to touch.
“I was a child and you were a child,” he says, softer, tilting his head to one side as if to see her better.
“I was a child,” she tells him, turning away from the controls to face him. A wrinkle pinches between her eyebrows. One corner of her mouth trembles. “You left me.”
“You elected to be left.” He raises his hands slowly and she allows him to hold her by the tops of her arms. “Would you have come with me, then? Could that have been our life?”
A delicate tremor passes through her. He feels it beneath his hands like a current of electricity.
She whispers, “No.” Her eyes glisten, lending a look of devastation to her expression. “You needed me to need you now, not then.”
“Just as you need me to need you.”
Her chin drops, head ducking in almost a bow. Hannibal sees her eyes squeeze closed just before he leans in to press a kiss to her wrinkled forehead. He holds there until the skin smooths beneath his lips. She sighs but does not cry. The engine roars to life once more, giving them reason enough to separate without idling too long on the conclusion to their exchange, so many long years overdue.
“Thank you, Chiyoh.”
She doesn’t respond.
He lumbers back toward the cabin, aware that in every step down and down and down, Will waits for him at the end of the descent as Eurydice did for Orpheus.
Will sleeps heavily without stirring as Hannibal sinks into the small, stiff armchair at his bedside. He’s since drawn his arm up and rolled onto the side that lets him rest his face on the bed. Hannibal stares as unabashedly as he would if Will were awake, manners be damned. The disquiet of the boat and the rush of the sea beneath them do nothing to hinder the effect of his creeping exhaustion. Adrenaline could only accommodate his resistance for so long, after all.
--
There is little natural light bleeding into the cabin, but Will can see Hannibal blinking awake in the chair. He presses his temple into rustling sheets and sighs, catching Hannibal’s attention. Will holds out one hand in a clear invitation, but Hannibal does not move.
“Come here.”
Hannibal hesitates. Will emits a tiny sigh and pivots gingerly on one hip. He eases slowly from his side onto his back.
To the ceiling, he whispers, “Please come here.”
It’s easier, and harder, to envision someone other than Hannibal rising from the chair to join him in the bed. Especially confounding is that Hannibal keeps his hands rigidly to himself. Will ought to be grateful for it, but he can’t reconcile what he should be feeling with the ravenous curiosity that he very much does feel. He turns his chin toward Hannibal but slides his eyes closed to luxuriate deeper in the smooth, warm darkness shared by the two of them.
Hannibal is out like a light when Will wakes next. He hasn’t moved from the position he held when they fell asleep either, meaning that they still don’t touch. Will gets up to use the toilet before wandering up to the deck with the coat Hannibal wore as he slept in the armchair.
Chiyoh is driving the boat. He has no idea how long she’s been at it, but the sun is past the midpoint of the sky and her eyes are bloodshot when she turns to acknowledge him. She looks every bit herself, even if the frayed edges are a bit disconcerting to behold. Will thinks to smile but doesn’t, sparing a thought for the stitches in his cheek and one more for the feeling of train tracks coming up hard and fast under his body.
“You can take a break. I’ll cover.”
“You aren’t going to ask me whose boat this is,” she observes, a question buried somewhere in the statement.
“It’s not mine.” He shrugs. “Doesn’t feel like Hannibal’s.”
She gives him a tense, longsuffering look. Appearing to change her mind at the last second, she asks with more of an inquiring tone now, “What will you say if someone thinks to ask what happened to your face?”
He raises his hand as far as his jaw and grazes his fingers there. It hurts, but it’s a foggy, bland kind of hurt tinged with analgesia. “Mad dog bit me.”
“How appropriate,” she murmurs without relinquishing her hold on the wheel.
“Chiyoh.”
She doesn’t speak, but the ice in her expression is enough of an answer for him. Her weariness wins out over recalcitrance and she steps back, maintaining her grip on the wheel until he can replace her hands with his.
“Don’t worry,” he offers, attempting to reassure her. “I know what I’m doing.”
“I never believed otherwise,” she says without looking at him. Her exit is only halted by her retrieval of a suitcase. She takes it with her and doesn’t speak or look at him again.
Will drives the boat a ways further in the same direction until he can safely dock them at a small town on the water. He ties them to a post at a beach and ventures down into the cabin to check on his travel companions. Chiyoh, whether she initially warred with herself over the proper course of action or not, is asleep in the bed. She and Hannibal both sleep like corpses on their backs, chins tipped waywardly toward the ceiling. Their hands overlap between them and Will wonders if it was done intentionally or unconsciously.
He slips out of the cabin as quietly as he can and stumbles off the boat onto dry land. It’s not exactly the right season for the beach to be overly crowded, so he buries his hands deep in his coat and stands on the docks, looking. His first instinct is to stretch his legs and see what there is to see, but Hannibal might think he ran and Chiyoh might shoot him. Will contents himself with sitting on the edge of the dock and watching his reflection in the water a few feet below.
A noisy low-flying plane cruises overhead about ten minutes later and Hannibal emerges from the boat. He scans their surroundings before noticing Will and visibly relaxing.
“Chiyoh is still sleeping,” Hannibal explains when neither of them moves to say anything else.
“Oh.”
“Do you know where we are?”
“Only that we needed to stop.”
Hannibal casts around once more, head held high and shoulders dropped back. He’s taken to wearing a simple t-shirt that can’t be warm enough in the chill of evening.
“It’ll be dark soon. We need to eat.”
“I think we will find food and lodging here,” Hannibal chimes in optimistically. “This coastal town is as good a place for us to quietly disappear as any.”
“Figured you’d want to leave the country.”
“Yes, when we’re able. Have you ever been to Argentina?”
Will looks away from Hannibal’s smile, blinding as it is. He contemplates their future in the deep blue stains creeping up from the sea to sink the sunset into nightfall. Hannibal sits beside him, folding his legs rather than letting them dangle beside Will’s.
He’s had it up to his fucking neck with Hannibal’s timidity and drops his hand heavily on Hannibal’s knee. Beyond that first contact, Hannibal doesn’t make him wait. He lifts his own hand to weave their fingers together. His hand is cold and the bulbs of his knuckles beneath Will’s fingertips are busted open. The flat line of Will’s mouth shivers into a smile.
“You don’t want to go back to Italy?” he asks Hannibal after a time.
“We have all the time in the world to go there.”
Pressure suffuses Will’s palm; Hannibal’s squeezing his hand. Will drags his gaze away from the blended shadows on the horizon and drinks in the sight of Hannibal’s cut-dappled face. Hannibal drinks him in, too, throat bobbing as if Will were a morsel or fine wine to be swallowed. Will lets his mind linger on the image, sure that Hannibal is thinking of it and that he’s thought of it.
“I’ve never been to Argentina,” Will mumbles, leaning in closer and delighting in Hannibal’s flicker of surprise on Hannibal’s face. He pushes just shy of being able to reach Hannibal’s lips and brushes a kiss over the corner of his mouth instead. “There’s a lot I’ve never done.”
This close he can see Hannibal’s eyelashes fluttering. He can’t hear his heart over the hushed waves on the ocean, so he corrects that sensory deficit by sliding his hand over Hannibal’s sternum, bold and fearless for all that he knows Hannibal is helpless to deter him here. He’ll let Will take anything he wants from him—as much as he can bear to want from him.
Hannibal’s heart skips beneath his hand and Will wonders, with his lips still pressed to warm skin, if this is one more way that they’ll transcend time and salt and biology together. From beneath the cloud of a decadent little shiver, Hannibal whispers, “I can teach you. I’ll teach you.”
Will smiles, pleased at the beauty in participation. God help him, but he’s curious.