Chapter Text
Lovers in Reverse
“These violent delights have violent ends/And in their triumph die, like fire and powder/Which, as they kiss, consume” – William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
The first thing Will Graham remembered, upon dozing out of a deadly sleep, was the sheer violence of the ocean’s bite. He thought on the sticky heat of blood on his skin, the sharp agony in his cheek, the tension and relief of falling over the edge of the bluff. The water below- the pain of the breaking through the water’s surface was unlike anything he, a walking mosaic of scars, had experienced before. Will thought of the pain, the cold, the frenzied thrashing of his arms against Hannibal’s own and-
The second thought, infinitely more important and infinitely more terrible: Hannibal.
Panic bubbled up in his chest. Finding himself unable to move, his head dizzy and his body numb, Will tried desperately to make out his surroundings. The room was dark, the air cold and damp. The surface beneath him was too hard to be a bed- a table, perhaps, or some sort of makeshift gurney. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, Will could make out a slumped form laying across from him: Hannibal’s unmistakable shape. Will’s stomach churned with mixed horror and relief. They had survived. They had, the two of them, survived.
“You’re awake,” Hannibal rasped, voice hoarse and broken. “I was beginning to suspect you’d died.”
Before Will could respond, a fresh taste of copper filled his mouth. Speaking was aggravating his wounds, pain breaking through what he now recognized to be an aesthetic-induced numbness.
“No,” Hannibal continued. “No, you are as alive as I am. Fate, it seems, has superseded you once again.”
“H-how did we-“ Will began, feeling blood pool in his mouth. Words were precious now and few. He thought on Abigail suddenly, and how he had carried her phantom with him for so long. “Are you real?”
Through the darkness, only silence and the rise and fall of Hannibal’s breathing form so subtle, so soft that it could barely register to Will's sight. The question, he realized, was a waste of effort and suffering- no answer would come.
Will tried, with his last bout of strength, to reach out for Hannibal- to stretch his arm across the space between them and touch him again like he had done on the ledge. But his strength failed him, his limbs heavier than lead, and the scant light grew dim. Everything tossed and heaved to, melting into a dizzy haze.
Later, Will would learn that Chiyoh’s boat knew the tidal waves like a shark does and she, too, could follow the scent of blood through dark waters.
Will’s coherency was fragmented by a high fever. He couldn’t remember the path to Chiyoh’s home or how she managed to carry him there, but he recognized the sanctuary she was offering them both nonetheless. She, in her curt and vigilant manner, extended them every mercy: anesthetics, a warm bed, the promise of food and drink. Chiyoh had even been as wise as to keep Hannibal and Will united, her courtesy seemingly knowing no bounds. But, Will understood that his young savior was not acting out of any particular compassion for him- she ran needle and thread through the gnashes on his skin with practiced and unemotional precision. Chiyoh wasn't a caretaker, she a wartime doctor of sorts, long desensitized to the carnage of war.
There was a shift, however small, when she looked onto Hannibal’s wounds. A slight softening in her touch, a subtle sharpening in her demeanor- an expression that spoke of reverence and duty and something darker, something harder to name.
Hours later, Hannibal sat silently besides Will in the bed they now shared. The older man sat half-dressed, the bandaging around his bare stomach stained with the damp color of fresh blood. Turned away from him, Hannibal looked beyond the wall-length window glass of their bedroom and onto the dawning sky. Will felt a knot in his throat, a flittering in his chest- it would be so easy now, he knew, for Hannibal to kill him. Even broken and bloody, all it would take would be a swift twist of the neck and he'd be gone.
“How can I survive your anger with me?" Will asked, his voice rusted by drowsiness and injury. Even to his own ears, the question sounded weak and nearly irritating in its vulnerability. "If the prospect of surviving, that is, is something I should even be humoring as a possibility."
"I don't intend to kill you," Hannibal said. In Will's mind, Hannibal's age was rarely a thought but suddenly then the man sounded infinitely older and unbelievably exhausted. The low strain of Hannibal's voice felt wholly foreign to Will, who sometimes feared that his own thoughts came in the timber of Hannibal's steady intonation. In Will's memories, his nightmares, his flights of what if's, Hannibal never sounded like this- human, vulnerable, and far-off. It troubled Will far more than he cared to admit.
“Are you angry with what I felt I had to do?
Hannibal debilitated on his answer, still turned away. “No, Will.”
“Are you disappointed, then?” Will prodded further. Look at me, he silently pleaded. Let me see you again.
“You often surprise me and that is, at the very least, a tremendous feat. Whatever snares I lay out before you, it seems I can never entirely predict where you’ll fall,” Hannibal said. “More importantly, it seems you have taken care to do a good deal of ensnaring yourself.”
Hannibal turned to him then, patiently looking Will over, his eyes lingering over the fresh stitches along his cheek. “Death has never frightened me,” he assured the younger man. “Even as a child, I found the prospect of it alluring. The undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns, or so it goes. I would have been happy to experience death with you, Will.”
It was now Will’s turn to avert his focus. Hannibal had an impossible knack of giving buried thoughts fresh life, speaking the things Will was too unwilling to voice aloud as if he could peer into the very depths of his being and pull from the inside out. He didn't want to admit it, but Will, too, had felt their story had been completed. The plunge over the bluff was part desperate deliberation and part ecstasy, too- pleasure in knowing Hannibal would die by his hand after all. Pleasure in knowing, more than that, that Will would have died with him. That pleasure had been robbed of them both and now there was this- the consequences of his wraths and the ambiguity of what remained between them. Death would've been easier. Living, Will Graham knew, would be infinitely harder.
"The Greeks believed that the dead retained no memory of their previous selves," Hannibal told him, as if reading Will's mind. "Upon entering Hades, all that was once known was forever rendered to the dust. But Homer wrote that Odysseus found Achilles and his Patroclus united, defiant of divine order even onto death. ”
“A bond so intimate that they could not suffer death apart,” Will replied, swallowing against a knot in his throat. “Is that what we are?”
“I believe you answered that question when you who pulled us over the precipice," Hannibal replied, his voice rounded with honesty. "The question remains in the aftermath. You were willing to die with me, Will, but that has been usurped from you. I'm curious as to where your intentions run now. Do you intend to take my life again, Will, or your own?"
“I don't know if I can answer that anymore honestly than you can. Violence seems to be the only thing either of us understand."
"There's an alternative," Hannibal suggested. He shifted where he sat, wincing at a sharp pang of pain. "We fixed our canon against the Great Red Dragon, Will. You have wet your feet in the waters of your becoming. The possibilities beyond us- not against one another in violence, but directing it outwards instead-"
"You want me to kill with you again," Will interrupted. He read Hannibal's body- a touch of annoyance at the interruption, uncharacteristic of the man who tolerated Will to the point of taking a bullet for him. It must be the pain, Will inwardly noted. Walking on thinning ice. "Is that the prerequisite to living with you?"
"You know what I want most for you, Will. Hunting is a shared desire between us both- it was shared, too, with the child we could have shared. Between us both is a shared understanding that your becoming was ephemerally beautiful."
"There was-” Will swallowed, circling over something intimate and sharp. “There was urgency in my decision to push us over the edge." "That's a poor excuse," Hannibal interrupted. "Tell me the truth." Will felt the knot tighten in his throat, his stomach jolt with nausea. "Yes, it was beautiful. But there was self-distraught, I think, at the knowledge that killing felt- vivid, somehow. I had never responded to blood more than when it was spilling down my own hands. It wasn't like Garret Jacob-Hobbs. It wasn't what I imagined killing Freddie would be like. It wasn't like Frederic, either. Killing Dolaryhyde was electric in a way I’ve never experienced before."
Hannibal turned, now, the mattress creaking beneath him. Will, for all his disparity, turned his gaze down. "You were blind and now you see," he said and Will could hear the satisfaction dripping in his voice.
Will took a breath he didn't know he had been holding. "But, more than that, there was you- the feeling that I had acted completely in extension of you when I stood against the Dragon. Goddamn it, Hannibal, I didn't even know where you ended or where I began, I just- I don’t know if I can tell where these lines measure up to even now. I only know that I- I couldn’t just kill you, Hannibal. I couldn’t even watch you die. It had to be both of us. Us, together, or I'd have nothing at all.”
In that moment, Will clawed at his courage and raised his gaze to meet Hannibal’s, to look him in the eye and risk spilling forward with truths that had, for years now, been threatening to smother him. But when Will had finally turned his eyes upwards, Hannibal had already turned away again, the purple light of dawn now illuminating the line of his shoulders, his back, his bared and violently bruised neck.
"Us, together," Hannibal repeated, tasting the words in his mouth. "Us, together, or nothing at all."