Chapter Text
The house was relatively huge. It stood four stories high, in addition to a basement that seemed to just keep digging deeper and deeper into the ground. It was painted in ornate tans and blues, the shingles layered in reds to match brickwork that crawled up each side. Although, despite its immensity, Will often felt claustrophobic during the period he lived in that Victorian mansion. Each room was more of a cabinet sectioned off from the rest of the house, each hallway bent and thin, each stairwell crammed up against a wall, nearly impossible to find alone. There was only one door that went back to the outside, an ornate oak entrance way lined in red stained glass, such a deep crimson, Will felt like flinching away whenever light ran through its bloody patterns. Speechlessly, Will hated the house. He missed his home in Baltimore, he missed his dogs, he missed being retired. Yet here he was, in hiding from the FBI and a good portion of Europe, presumed dead and in truth mortally wounded.
After the fall Hannibal brought him here, wherever here was. Since their arrival, Will had never left. He stayed in his room, the room he claimed for its large windows and tall ceilings as to illusion him that the building wasn’t as cramped as it really was. It was a large room, fit for a lord, with a hideous king-sized bed laced in gaudy golden fabric, a cherry colored wood floor recently polished, and this yellow wallpaper, the hue of something vulgar metastasizing, rotting. It was dirty, torn in some places, whitewashed in others and occasionally charred in burns. Hannibal explained that there was a fire a few decades back.
The house was ancient, a real piece of history, adorned in antique furniture and colorful rugs, galleries upon galleries worth of artwork- oil paintings of people looking into the heavens from the dark grounds of the earth, angels dancing in the clouds, angels laughing, or crying, or screaming. People dying, anguish abbreviated on on each face, confined to their framed prisons. Even so, Will was almost jealous of them, locked away in a spacious, unmoving place while he was confined to one of turning parts, terror behind each corner, nightmares carved into his skull each night. Nightmares of when he killed the great, red, dragon. When Hannibal had finally succeeded in peeling back every human part of Will, leaving him with this corpse that wandered mansions and stared blankly at paintings of screaming angels.
Will broke a good portion of his bones in the fall, bruising almost every inch of flesh that made first contact with the ocean. Aside from that, he was tossed into rocks, nearly drowned, and sustained a concussion that seemingly would not recover. Even with Will turning into a pulp, strangely, Hannibal sustained little to no injury at all, like he never was truly human to begin with, not that it surprised Will at all. He would sooner suspect Hannibal as satan rather than an actual, feeling person. Then again, satan was once a being of light, something that was able to feel empathy, and perhaps still is.
He spent the first few days in the mansion bed ridden, just waiting in pain, trying not to wreath in response to the raw agony of pure physical pain. Honestly most of those days were spent in an unconscious limbo, flashing in and out of existence in cold fevers, whispering terrors, and Hannibal standing over him with a wicked look of understanding, as if this was his plan from the very beginning, it was his plan to watch Will panic through so much pain.
But then it got better. He healed. He was able to sit up, then stand, then walk around his room, and now, maybe months later, he wandered the mansion, alone. Hannibal was gone most of the time, out getting dinner or something, setting new records for local serial killers, or something. So Will wandered. He thought about just leaving once, but where would he go? What did he have left outside of Hannibal? The FBI thought he was dead, but if they discovered him alive and well, Will was a wanted man. He couldn’t go home, someone would notice. He had no idea where Alana or Margot ran off to, but they were undoubtedly in some dark corner of the world where they could live happily with expensive wine in their hands and perhaps a child on the way. Who knew what became of his dogs by now. Perhaps Alana pulled one last favor for him, perhaps not.
The majority of his time was dedicated to aimless wandering, prowling through each room to see what was behind each door, in each closet, beneath each bed. He would crash through the kitchen each day, looking for anything that Hannibal had not touched, anything that was morally edible, not that Will truly believed his previous, life-long standing morals still existed. No, his philosophies had long evolved, or rather, were killed off and re-shaped in a terrible game of natural selection, his own head being the playing field. Now he believed himself a murderer. He had done it- he drew blood and enjoyed it, relished it, fantasized of it though he repeatedly told himself not to. This conflict was where the nightmares grew from, but it was easier to manage them because it wasn’t like Will had gone many nights before hand without terrors lurking in the dark parts of his head.
Once he went to the basement. Hannibal told him that there was in fact another basement beneath this one, but it was hard to imagine as the staircase down there was already long and winding enough. It was dark down there and the lights didn’t work, so Will left, scared as if he was some kid again believing that the monsters lived there. Will was an adult though, and he knew where the monster lived. It lived in the walls, in Hannibal, in the Red Dragon, and mostly in himself. It was there- prowling, snarling, itching to be set free again, itching for Will to kill again.
Will rarely talked to Hannibal, let alone saw him. When he did though, it was always strange encounters filled with idle ‘hello’s or ‘goodnight’s or ‘Hannibal, I hope you burn in hell’s- the normal. Hannibal would sometimes wake Will from his nightmares, trying to show kindness, but Will did his best to brush it off, degrade Hannibal back to the animal he was, though now Will was down there on the moral scale with him. Now he was the animal too.
They poked and prodded at him, they threw him in a cage, they forced him into the things he swore never to do again, and then they killed or destroyed everyone he loved- and now, finally after all of it, they succeeded. Or rather, Hannibal succeeded. They took away his human parts and replaced them with something else. Something foreign. So Will wandered mansions, watching oil paintings, trying to decide between this limbo or death, ate food that made him feel more human, thought things that made him feel more human, did things that made him feel more human, but deep down, both Will and Hannibal knew that that was not true.