Archive of Our Own

The first thing Will said to Hannibal Lecter was, "No."

It was more of a general no--at Jack, at the office, at the swims of noise around him, the tenor of socialization--but it included the calm, amused powder-blue person sitting in front of Jack's desk.

It was also not, in the traditional sense, speaking. A robotic blare from the shitty speakers of the tablet he tapped at. He carried it with him. The BSU recognized the voice of the automaton. He couldn't even understand the crunch of the synthesized syllables. It didn't matter. His voice was the slow, heavy closing of his eyes and the the curl of his forgotten hands at his side or chest or throat and thinking.

"No. No. No." Click-click click, like the distant chatter of unknown birds. Songbirds sang to warn other birds away, and he knew what a doctor looked like.

"No," and each electronic voicing was punctuated by a signed, "No." The dull bony tap of his fingers against each other. The clicking of birds' beaks.

"Will!" Jack broke in, making a an aborted motion towards Will's hands. He alternately roared and softly prodded at Will, never sure what to do. Now was a roaring time.

Will drew back his lips, stretched his brow. Petulance. Petulance, but eight glossy pale field-born girls were dead, and here was a pale doctor.

"I want Bloom," he typed. She was a doctor, but she was rich color-life and looked warmly at his eyes. If she had a wondrous hunger in her own eyes when he glanced at them, she was made of holding her brain in. She conversed to him about their jobs.

"Will. Alana wouldn't take your case because of her reservations. Doctor Hannibal Lecter is here to assist us." Jack dropped words like they were stones from his mouth. It wasn't difficult for him.

Doctor Hannibal Lecter was watching them with the exact measure of expression needed. His face looked like it was made of endless folds of flesh, but was no less smooth for that.

Will stared at his eyes.

Wade through comfort, tangling fingers in cartilaginous strands, like he would wade through discomfort.

Comfort.

Will broke, stumbling out of the chair and a pretty, calm doctor who would seep perfectly to fill his negative spaces.  
---
There were a lot of doctors growing up. Primary color tests. He didn't remember most of it, didn't remember a lot of his childhood aside from staticky nervous pain. It was hands in icy river water or white white aching light. And then his mother just--left, and there weren't any more doctors for a while.

It was a life. Following his father. School and sometimes not school, but his father would never have let someone take him.

It was at age twenty-three--seventeen--thirty?--that the police found him next a drowned body, trying to hold himself under. He came up crying.

They took him at that, kept him after they discovered he could name the killer's hobbies.

His father died a year later.
---
Lecter had come with them to the ghost of deep love and the mocking opposite of a field dressing. He wasn't there in the space Jack and Will swam through, but Will felt him anyway, the weight of his gaze at Will's temples, his calm presence in the bony spires Will's fingers modeled in the air.

Will was crazy, shied from and trembled at the chaos layers of the world around and found dark inverted pockets of worlds inside him, but he was a stable kind of crazy. He didn't need this. He didn't need Lecter blindingly bright against the green leaves at his motel door.

"May I come in?" he asked. Will stared. He hadn't brought his tablet to the door, disbelieving that someone would be there for him. He stalked away across the desiccated carpet to retrieve it. Disbelief, and let Lecter step in if he would.

"I have been nonverbal since childhood. I type on a tablet to have it automatically read out. I know American Sign Language. I work writing textbooks and monographs tucked away in the bowels of the FBI. I test as very mildly retarded at most." By now, these sentences that he had pushed and twisted into the tablet were easy to glare flatly through. A gesture at himself and the solid outward flip of "Finished" in ASL.

Lecter gave a polished psychiatrist's nod and said, "I brought breakfast."

Will set the table.

Food on the fork, to the mouth, tongue curled back to let it through. Volley back and forth dead girls and dead girls, one hand to the fork and one hand to the tablet. The puffs of egg, grease of sausage. Stare dark at Hannibal Lecter.

"I think Uncle Jack sees you as a fragile little teacup," Lecter voices, and Will startles back, hands making echoes shadow-cupped around his mouth. It is a laugh.

"How do you see me?" Will taps out, and then curls a "Yourself?" in ASL. Sweet natural.

"The mongoose I want under the house when the snakes slither by." The sibilant stacked planes of his accent, and Will's limbs stop. Rings upon xylem rings. Vascular in himself.  
---
"Yes, there's fellows from the FBI here, boxing up papers. One of them's one of those savant types, doesn't talk?"

Harsh broad voice behind them. Ignore it. Papers swish-thwip. Dig. Incongruent love in metal shavings.  

"His carer's looking through the files too, though. Well, I don't know."

Clench. Not at the robot boy needing a carer, that a monument like Hannibal Lecter would shadow him to sift his fingers through the wires in his gut.

"Excuse me," Hannibal interrupted the office woman, "Special Agent Graham has something."

Will looked at the papers he had detached from, and he did. He crouched on the gray floor to lay down his keyboard and clacked, "Do you have an address for Garret Jacob Hobbs?"  

---

Copper, copper, red. Tremble at the haze of the air. Tremble at the rends in it.

"See? See?" Hiss. Copper, copper, red.

Luminously pale, sea not forest, straight thick curtain at her neck.

"Ah, ah, ah," from his throat to match the gasps from hers. "Ah, ah, ah." Scrabble not hard enough at the rawness. Breaths fast. From who.

And then. Hannibal's fingers over his. Staunched.

Rings upon xylem rings. Around them.

---
The stony halls didn't touch him as closely now, the approval that waved from passing people even less.

Deer didn't actually freeze in headlights. They twitched their stupid fawny flanks and unflinching tapetum lucidum and bounded outside the cone of lights to wait because they were used to humans. The antlers of Hobbs' cabin fairly writhed in the beam of his flashlight.

Will didn't freeze, didn't kick away to wait. He lived in yellow-lit corpse and quivering hot now. The urge to roll his flesh across the dry sponge points of bone to feel the outlines at his skin was unbearable. He wouldn't press hard enough to bleed. See, see?

Powdery latex glove at his nose didn't blink him into the crime scene anymore. He was sorry. Gustatory.

At the hospital, most of him had shrank, desiccated, from the medical intent around, but something had swelled liquidly at Abigail Hobbs' beeping body in the white bed. Hannibal clasping her hand. Swollen red tender, too much.

He couldn't touch praise for killing a bizarre stunted creature now. He wanted too much to prod at the tenderness rising in him.
---
Alana Bloom asked, "How are you doing, Will?" like she would ask anyone else. She signed along, out of order. Pidgin, they hopped at each other. She made as if to lay her hands over his sometimes, common comfort, but she would not overtly smother his voice. Will flashed to a vision of her fingers patting the wet useless tube of his throat.

He liked Alana's face so much. Pursed, constantly, wryly, concernedly. The mobile skin of Dr. Lecter's face, but with all the emotion he lacked made bearable.

"I really don't know." He punctuated it with a huffing sheepish gray full-body spasm of helplessness. There was no way to be other than laughing-apologetic about the floats of emotion over exhaustion that he could not describe. He had that in his profile once, and he would again.

It was true he had no idea. It wasn't worse, was the thing. The glow of dust and blood was as it had ever been.

Strange, then, the hollowness in his bodily cavities when Jack stated his recommended psych eval. He wanted to rap knuckles on his stomach, like practicing.

"Therapy doesn't work on me." Directional, quick jerks toward himself, and let Alana voice that for Jack. He juts his jaw. "Obviously." Jab at his throat.

Clawing spaces futilely. He was taken at "How many nights did you spend in Abigail Hobbs' hospital room?" No room for a sheepish deflect there. It was inevitable that he step straight from the Quantico office into Dr. Lecter's space.

Climbing the ladder, single limb by limb and suspending himself in a pace among the bookshelves was the only easy part.

"What's that?" He hung himself over the railing with his tablet as he directed his gaze at a bundle of papers, the only concession to Lecter hearing his terrible voice.

"Your psychological evaluation. You are totally functional and more or less sane. Well done." His voice was mushy over the odd syllable. It was nothing like the slow slur Will imagined for himself. In some other world.

Dr. Lecter wanted to help him. Will felt his chin lifting, wagging. In spite or because of the ghost of Lecter's strong fingers over his.

"I feel a staggering amount of obligation. I feel responsibility," Lecter metallically intoned. Will could feel himself breathing when Lecter spoke. He imagined an implement, not metal, hollowing out the marrow of his hip. Rib.

"The mirrors in your mind--or at your fingertips--" Nod to Will's tablet, "Can reflect the best of you, not the worst of someone else."

Will hadn't spoken since asking about the papers.

Climbing up the ladder was the only easy part of this, but it was not the only natural part.
---
Earth and loam. Pulsing veins. Mycelia were approximations of fractals only. At certain ranges, the sections inside sections stopped being self-similar. Living things had only so far to replicate themselves.

The trails of IVs from trees. Feeding tubes. Earth and loam. He could relate.

When the body in the shallow pit clutched at him, like the momentum had carried down the line of corpses in a fleshy Newton's cradle, he had wanted to clutch back before it had turned into Hobbs.

"Is it harder imagining the thrill someone else feels killing, now that you've done it yourself?"

Lecter had such deep-set eyes. He would not take back Will's sanity papers. He felt aware of the canvas jacket weighing still on his shoulders. A field jacket, it was called.

It wasn't about difficulty. Everything was hard, the daily tautness of pulling his limbs to action, unless it was the kind of easy that woke to blood scratched out from his skin and smeared on the sheets, but that was not what imagination was for.

Will nodded, breathing out, jaw working. Working.
---
He dreamt of brushing sawdust and pigshit from Abigail's silky unconscious head as he lifted her from the ground. He dreamt of hoofbeats oscillating far lower in his chest than their volume would suggest. He dreamt of blankets heaped over his head, a cocoon of sweaty scent, and he dreamt of Alana's back all covered in brown cream-edged feathers.

Will woke to Alana bent over Abigail, voice pitched in the tones of reciting narrative. He tugged his arms from the shifting covers and slapped his hands dully against each other to catch her attention.

Alana telegraphed everything in the pull of her mouth, the sheepish long blinks in her story of a young her reading O'Connor. She telegraphed verbally the topic of Lounds' article.

"'Jack Crawford's Crime 'Tard," he signed. Cramped flex of fingerspelling. She laughed, nothing else in her face, and didn't continue the conversation. Will felt a lobe of his lung section off in gratitude.

They were in a hospital room, possibly the only time he had felt near to safety in a hospital. Heavy, but uncharged air.  Will pushed himself from the inertia between waking up and recalibration and sat all the way up, a blanket corner still perched on his thigh.

He remembered the echo of hoofbeats leading from minutes ago.

When he came back at Jack's message, he could not speak to warn of the cultivator Stammets. Abigail would not have heard him scream at the man who had taken her even if he had a voice.

Stammets wanted to plant her a voice, plant him a voice. Standing over him, Will could momentarily see pulsing-branching reaching for others through capillary mycelium.

His plan sounded like any other kind of therapy.

---
A sprig of zest when killing. Hannibal Lecter made life sound practically culinary. What kind of bright being could live off consuming the substance of catastrophe.

Intent, settling across from him, Lecter asked, "Killing must feel good to God too. He does it all the time. And are we not made in His image?"

An image. Holding on to an image long enough without something unintended slipping into being must be difficult. Images blink into place with the intrusion of thought, more sensible an explanation for humanity than deliberate creation. A divine watchmaker did not necessarily make divine watches.

Lecter's voice creaked like leather. The inevitability of bad men was the inevitability of randomness. Cogs tossed in the air and clinking into broken mechanisms. If God willed it, he willed chance only.

God felt powerful, perhaps in the pull of inevitable statistic. God did not feel any such nebulous thing as good in killing, or anything else. Will couldn't feel any delusion simple as a God complex.

Lecter believed, if anything, in a God who wanted to know cruelty in a human complex.
---

Will sometimes stood outside in cool air and breathed broadly onto bare skin just to remember what a warm patch fading to surrounding cold felt like. Today, among the sweet, furry, always warm dogs was Alana, pale knees between coat and boots.

Breathe. Cringe. Tense. Almost naked in front of a doctor with assessing eyes. But no, it was Alana. A guest if anything, so to offer her courtesies.  

"Abigail Hobbs woke up," she said, and Will did not have to think about his breathing anymore.

Alana watched carefully through his "I don't want a coffee. I want to get my coat," and never interrupted, but she somehow pressed him back through his door for coffee anyway. At least under her eyes his morning-slow hands remembered how to feel around the kitchen for coffee, at least he remembered how to set the table. Lately it had been more swigs of whiskey whenever he went into the living room, brushing his teeth clean whenever he went into the bathroom, slapping his desk blankly late nights before something caught minutely and he could go to bed.

She was concerned. Will could see some finger-combed ropy tendrils of hair haloed out against his chipped wall. The phone buzzed and glowed, messages from Jack up high.

"Is he going to keep calling?" he asked, like "Is it going to keep raining?" Determinedly gritty conversational.

"I don't want to get in the middle of you and Jack, but if I can be helpful to you as a buffer--" Jack, who wanted him to see Abigail.

Alana said some things like she had practiced them, with her head and gaze held fixed over her curled hands. Will felt hazily lucky that she allowed him to see that. He wondered what Abigail practiced saying, before and now.

"I like you as a buffer. I like that you rattle Jack." Rattle, the sound of hitting ironwork and teeth shaking loose. I like. I like. Difficult to say. Hands twitch in the air.  

"Abigail Hobbs doesn't have anyone," he signed. Awoken alone in a hospital. Gone, all gone. Will could be her buffer, could not speak as cleverly and honestly as Alana, but he knew how to stand while the water tugged at his legs.

Mouth pulled. She looked at him sharply. "You can't be her everyone." And then eyes rolled, glance side-to-side, back to sheepish prevarication, "When I said what I was going to say in my head, it sounded really insulting, so I'm going to find another way to say it--"

Lean forward, elbows locked. "Say it the insulting way." Yes, the right script.

She looked sorry. "Dogs keep a promise a person can't."

Will had a flash of toweling wind-chafed skin to a fluff like he did for Winston. He wasn't even his dogs' everyone, Abigail wasn't anywhere to being his everyone. She was. He was sorry.

Alana continued, "The first person Abigail talks to about what happened can't be anyone who was there when it happened. So that means no Dr. Lecter either." Will was already nodding.

Abigail was there when it happened. It was what this was all about. She couldn't help having been there. Will couldn't help not being there now. He wondered if she would turn her head towards his absence, the person who killed her father.

Garret Jacob Hobbs couldn't help not being here now.  
---
In between Will's thoughts of an insinuating copycat--he must be coiling, sly, ingratiating--Dr. Lecter had apparently overridden Alana's ruling on Abigail. He was here again now, at Will's side in Abigail's hospital. The dim sealike hallway's homeyness grated at the metallic psychiatric facility of it all.  

As they entered the door--it locked from the outside--a cloud of coppery hair was saying, "He catches insane men because he can think like them." The woman turned to look at Will and finished, "Because he is insane." Will thought hysterically that it was a doctor warding Abigail against him before the sharp little face aligned itself with the writer's portrait on Freddie Lounds' Tattlecrime.com.

"I really must insist you leave," Lecter told her in the grave tones of a threatened doctor. Will snatched the card Lounds offered Abigail as she left and tucked it in an inside pocket. Lounds' hand was gloved, to match her absurd animal-print skirt and mushrooming poncho. Some animals had coloration that warned predators against eating poisonous prey.

"I am Dr. Hannibal Lecter, and this is Special Agent Will Graham. Special Agent Graham is nonverbal, and so he uses a form of Augmentative and Alternative Communication." Will cut his eyes shortly at Lecter. He had never taught those words to him.

He approached Abigail laid out in her flowered bed and brought out his tablet. "Do you remember us?" he asked. Her freckled face did not shrink more warily knowing that he father's killer could not speak.

"I remember you," she told him. Her cheeks and nostrils quivered, only a little. She couldn't help remembering. In the moments between speaking, her face looked like ice. "You killed my dad."

Will set his chin back and worked his throat and eyelids to match hers.

"You've been in bed for days, Abigail," Hannibal smoothly cut in when it was clear Will could not bring up anything to type, "Why don't we have a walk?"

Abigail silently and stubbornly bundled herself in a coat and soft-lined boots. She added a filmy scarf over the bandage on her neck. Coverage she could afford while still being vulnerable. The clothes were from Alana, probably. Younger, Alana would have fit Garret Jacob Hobbs' profile.

She allowed Lecter to prop hands at her elbows to guide her to the autumn-glow greenhouse. She was stubborn, but she understood how she would work and not work in this situation.

"I'm sorry we couldn't save your mother. We did everything we could, but she was already gone," Will laboriously typed. The greenhouse was the kind of cold that came from being under glass without a heat source. Neither Lecter nor Abigail tried to interrupt him, to finish his words for him.

"I know." Abigail lowered herself into a bench. She looked exhausted. "I watched him kill her." She must have known a lot of things at that moment. "He was loving, right up until he wasn't. Kept telling me he was sorry, to just hold still." She settled in to her seat and gazed dreamily at the far glass. "He was gonna make it all go away."

Will wanted to look at the same place and tell her he knew, how loving sputtered to a start or stop, how somewhere in the love, people wanted to kill you just because of the inexorable forces of how the world worked. But he didn't know. No one had loved him like Hobbs had loved her. He didn't track Abigail's gaze to the frost, typed instead in the long pause, "There was plenty wrong with your father, Abigail, but there's nothing wrong with you. You said he was loving, I believe you." He believed her and didn't blame her and meant it, from a place opposite her figure. Like Alana had bled into him. And then, "That's what you brought out in him."

"That's not all I brought out in him," Abigail said, like she wanted to be strong as she said it but changed her mind halfway through the sentence. No one chased what and how they all knew already. "I'm going to be messed up," she continued almost wryly. She must have known a lot of things at this moment, too.

"We'll help you," promised Lecter, always promising to help. Will sat down beside her.

"There's no such thing as getting used to what you experienced," he confessed. He was there too. And now the experience has followed them, always morphing before they could acclimate to its shape.

"So killing somebody, even if you have to do it, it feels that bad?" Abigail asked, like she wanted something particular out of his answer.

Will hissed a few practice breaths, fished up the truest words he could. "It's the ugliest thing in the world," he promised her.

Abigail fluttered and went far away again. "I want to go home."

There was no such place as home, either.
---
As they left, Will wanted to ask Lecter what to do for Abigail, and, selfishly, where he learned the words for Will, why he was helping. But like a sign of misfortune, Freddie Lounds was waiting perched on the hood of the car. He barricaded his glasses up his nose.

Will wondered if she was capable of making anything sound sincere. The way she said her own name amidst her false apologies sounded like a sell. To her credit, she directly addressed him, the crazy man, not Lecter acting as buffer again.

"You told Abigail I was insane," he said, from his tablet cradled heavy in his arm. Direct. Not that Lounds was wrong, that she would frighten Abigail with an insane person who could think like her father. There were few monsters in the world like Garret Jacob Hobbs.

"I can undo that," she slid forth. Will poked at himself. He felt angry. There was a heat growing at his temples. Here she was, trying to sell him, and not even clever enough to sell an honest description of his stunted brain. Freddie Lounds had probably gotten good at this the day she had realized no one would ever like her for all of her efforts.

Will stepped in closer. Rasps of concrete. The blurred rim of his glasses between him and Lounds. The words flow as quickly from his fingers as they ever have. "Miss Lounds, it isn't very smart to piss off someone who thinks about killing people for a living."

He probably deserved the resulting parent-teacher conference.  

Jack was deeply disappointed in him, and they all should have known better. Will off the leash ran puppy-wild.

"I trust Will to speak for himself," Lecter said. He looked amused, like he always was in Jack's office. He wanted to help. He had a game.

Jack spoke like repressed weariness, "So, Abigail Hobbs wants to go home. Let's take her home."

"What Abigail wants and what Abigail needs are different things. Taking her out of a controlled environment would be reckless!" Alana pitched her rage professionally. The halls outside were steel.

"You said she was practical." Jack was decided against Alana already. The door behind Will was glass, the halls were steel. To his sides were Alana and Lecter, to his front Jack. At his back, only the chair lifting him.

"That could just means she has a dissociative disorder," Will chimed, his only contribution. He was not interested in a conversation about the decisions they could make for a hurt girl, but he could offer possible diagnoses from any psychological symptoms. He imagined diagnosing himself, sometimes, in the times he was a silent presence in conversations people had about him.  

"You take her home, she may experience intense emotions, respond aggressively, or even reenact some aspect of the traumatic event without realizing it," Alana continued. Did she even know she was talking about Will too. Did they even know.

Outside, Hannibal stopped expectantly for Will, like he knew what he wanted.

"How?" is all Will manages to tap out at first.

"If you are asking about how, during the unpleasant disruptions to our visit with Abigail, I knew the words people use to describe you, I do have access to several libraries. It is my duty to know about my patients."

He was making jokes. "I'm not your patient." He couldn't be. Will fidgeted with the placement of his glasses.

"No, you are not." Lecter smiled, just slightly. "But, then, as friends, if I can use the place in the world I occupy to smooth the making of your place, I am quite happily obligated to do so. And I do hope that, if you have not already, you would call me by my given name. Good day, Will."

Will was ready to type "Why?" before he elegantly swept away with the breeze, leaving Will with a "What?" And then, "Hannibal."

---

Abigail looked at her emptied home like she was a ghost, or like she was welcoming ghosts and their chains in. Will wondered if she could find him among them. He only shadowed her, nodded when she asked if a place was where blood had fallen. Her coat, the thing Alana had bought her, was still on inside her own house.

She asked him, assessing something, "How did it feel? To be my dad?"

With all the weight of killers distending his brain, he still could not feel their bodies. He could barely feel his own, just the tug of empty space and heavy liquid as he moved sometimes. He stepped closer to her, paused between each word he pulled out. Bared his teeth. "It feels like talking to his shadow suspended on dust." A figure opposite him.

"Wow, no wonder you have nightmares," she played, teenagedly. Abigail dismissed him. Or understood him. Or felt the edge of a truth that she didn't understand, but knew Will was weighed down by. He had a headache.

She seemed eager to play detective with them, crouching in her father's effects. "Are we going to reenact the crime?" Her breathlessness teetered on something. "You be my mom," she told Alana, "You be my dad," Will's insides twisted, "And you be the man on the phone," she finished to Lecter, standing in front of them. Abigail found...something in acting out happened things. Talking to her own dust-shapes. The copycat was probably doing something similar. Like Will and Garret Jacob Hobbs. The resonance of people like wounds in the world taking the same mundane actions, until the moment the pitch of their joints was not mundane anymore. Folie a deux.
---
In his dreams, the air was stained iodine yellow, like the air of the kitchen. Its footsteps like the heartbeat of this world, the feathered stag came into the clearing. To watch them. He could feel the dampness coming from his skin until it was a feature of the atmosphere.

In this dream, he spoke to Abigail with the voice of Hobbs while she struggled in his arms. "I'm sorry, okay? Please. I'm going to make it all stop." His lips moved, his throat did not.

As he slashed her throat, the stag's legs buckled. He threw her body down and went to see it.

When he awoke, his mouth was silently working over words he did not know. The light hurt impossibly.
---
The antlers were gone. To be processed, maybe so no Lounds' mane would get caught on them. Will's FBI badge hung clearly at his hip for the local police opening the scene to them.

Abigail took in the cabin with a new lens whose view shook. She could list the things her father had made with deer. Putty, knives, rugs. Humans wouldn't make a nice rug, though.

And then the leap none of them knew how to make for her. "He was feeding them to us, wasn't he?"

Behind them all, Lecter simply agreed. "It was very likely."

Abigail's mouth was open now. Wood floors. Air on the wet skin inside the mouth felt different, and then different again when the membranes dried and tightened. If air inside the mouth could clean it. Will pressed his arms tight to his side where he could not curl them around himself.

"Before he slit my throat, my dad told me he killed all those girls so he wouldn't have to kill me." She turned away from them. Crying. What happened when you fed a delusion to another delusion? They became the same, he supposed. Abigail heaved a little. Will could not bear to try and touch her when he remembered the dream-her's heaves at her throat being slit.

"If only he had killed me, none of those other girls would be dead," she choked out. Alana moved to comfort her in her psychiatrist's way, stating therapeutic facts, but they were all broken up by the blood that splashed onto Abigail's brow.

The ceiling. Attic. Will crept up the stairs, eyes heavy. Wood soaked long in blood changed texture, internal structure. There.

A girl hung on antlers pierced through the layers of her flesh. Blood pooling at her feet, and she the spring. Will felt places in his organs start to ache. The wrong places for the wounds, but that thought did not move the phantom pains.

Abigail tore up the stairs behind him. "Marissa!" Her friend, then. She had yelled and thrown rocks in life. Alana led Abigail back down.

Again he felt the urge to roll his skin on the antlers, to walk up and just. Pretend. He couldn't. The FBI was on the way, Jack was on the way, and he would just have to reenact it and write it down again. The feeling of communing with killers roiled like stormy waters in his palms the moment he stepped away. He shed the I in the story being both the killer and himself, but he shed the usefulness too.

The only place where he could see pictures in the rolling depths was in his dreams.

If he wanted to be useful, he had to stay here with the body oozing thick blood, wait. He waited.

Slowly, Hannibal came up the stairs too. He stood beside him, closed his eyes, and they both kept their short vigil over this copycatted girl Abigail would never come back for.
---
Hannibal was good. The cadences of his speech were pitched to match Will's. With their words they rolled into each other, thickly folding liquid. Infinite soft mirrors.

The back and forth pulled it out of him, almost drowsily. "At night I leave the lights on in my little house and walk across the flat fields. And when I look back from a distance the house is like a boat on the sea. It's really the only time I feel safe." The lights bobbed when he blurred his eyes. Fog muffling the little clicks he tried making. Some sort of damp shadow creature from the depths feeling comforted at the alienness of a houseboat.

Vividly, he could see the shadows of bed-table-motors-lures inside. He could press himself to the doorway and see everything, the little islands he could throw himself to when it was time. Almost within arm's reach on hard days.

"Tell me, Will," Hannibal peppered his conversations with. Tell him the things he could already sense. The madness of Hobbs' house didn't hurt, the love did. Love and Abigail's bright face. Telling Hannibal, with the endless patient shifts on his face for Will's halting sentences, was easy. The assurance that he felt the same atmospheric pressures.

Hobbs' movement didn't ripple through Hannibal the same way they did Will. Hobbs' love did, maybe, but not the basal resonance of movement that sculpted the concentric circles on the surface of Will's pulse into jagged frozen waves. Good. It was better, then. Hannibal was not guilty. Will didn't know what he wanted for himself. Not that. Clarity noise clarity. Endless guilt.

Will moved his mouth into the same purse as Hannibal's.

---
Truthfully, Will liked the idea of being pressed inside a refrigerator, though he was free of traumas that may have put him there. Damp breath condensing on keratin, curls around his face. Blinking, icy, burns on his flesh, tongue curled still. Empty fortress of the self.

If his mother had stayed, he would not have loved her. He had not loved his father. Enormous crests of emotion lurked fuzzily in the lining of his younger self's lungs, salt tears on exhalation, but he could not claw out love from the spasming tissue.

Will was--an age--when he first realized he did not love his family. He was even older when someone taught him how to write down some of what he could not say.

Abigail no more had refrigerator parents than he did, though she had less wrong with her. A woodstove father, maybe, rusted damper, used catalyzer. Burning biomass into carbon monoxide. For her, Will felt those unspeakably huge feelings spasming in nonexistent organs, no selfless love clawing out, but he knew how Alana and Jack and Hannibal talked about her, what she could handle. He had selfish love, maybe.

Hannibal-as-hearthstones questioned him in the concavities left by these theories, reassuring for still being there. In Hannibal's stony concavities, no doubt, were some of these same emotions towards Abigail.

Will could smile at the ache of his family. Lucky.
---
The Lost Boys were small, he knew that. Stunted from medication, their neurology projected onto their bodies. Looking young or old for their age, something, something marking them as the kind of target that would make their remove from their families physical.

Will did not take the emergency room barbiturates and tranquilizers rattling around his desk in sets of ten, no more than he looked at the referral scripts that formed their bedding, and it would have been too late to stunt his growth if he did. It was easier to picture poking fishing line through his skin, transparent stitching, and feeding the local waters the medication.

A physical kit for the family-broken neurology felt like admitting too much, a performance, so perfect for Abigail, until it wasn't. Store-boxed magnifying glass in gray paper that was too sharply creased in some places, rumpled and wrong everywhere else. Too much like rummaging in the past, rearranging when it was only right to witness. And, as Alana had mentioned, Abigail was matrilineally Jewish. ("Some traumas arrest vocal development. Some victims broadcast victimhood involuntarily," Alana did not mention.)

To be leader of the Lost Girl glowed. It hurt. Some things you couldn't get back. Some kinds of medication did not bear thinking about. Trauma did not form the brain into disability, except for all the ways that it did, and what those boys were doing was deeply unfair. Giving Abigail this felt fair; it wasn't. Feeling was not an indicator.

The silky-ribboned package stayed on Hannibal's office couch, for his clever fingers to expand.
---
Beverly Katz stood too close to him. Sometimes, all the time, he looked up and she was there, within breathing space of him.

She knew. So many things. Speaking in bright textures, bursting, always there. She saw too many things, did not flinch at any of them. Did not flinch at him, his tired body piled into briefings, the exhausted dream fogging his eyes.

Will could imagine leaning into her, her unrepentant naked curiosity, and pressing. Just for a second. To know that something so frightening would not hurt him, just for that moment.
---  
The thing was, it hurt. People, around, hurt. He could feel his bones creaking into powder with his breath.

Seeing in real life Christopher O'Halloran wrapped in the arms of a mother, kneeling down for him and panting on concrete, hurt as much as a person ever did.

The thing was, some days it hurt so much it felt like he was trying to captor-bond with everyone alive.
---
Shivery and cold-wet, not warm. His own breath rising in front of him, animal heat snorting behind. Feet falling on the line of the road, hips swaying, dents pushed into his skin. Easy rhythm.

When the police came and he could not answer them, it was the distinct feeling of all his childhoods. Wandering boy who could not speak. The local cops muttered to each other about calling the hospitals. Find which one he belonged to. Clutch at Winston's fur and strange doggy skin. Fur. Skin.

Huddle under blanket, so much of his life spent huddling under blankets. Blow obediently into the breathalyzer, feel thankful that they could not expect him to piss into a cup in the backseat of a squad car. Winston. Panting, panting. It was so easy, so procedural, that it was dreamlike when he made his fingers tap for permission to scrawl an address onto the pad one of them carried.

Hannibal Lecter in the night looked exactly like the Hannibal of the daytime. In all the ways that mattered.

"Sorry to wake you," one officer told him, "but is this man your...patient? We found him on the road, in his underwear, all he could do was write your address."

Hannibal swelled like an offended peacock. Psychiatrists were good at that. "Will Graham," and Will allowed Hannibal to motion him forward to his side, "is a friend. He is an adult man, and I am in no way responsible for him. Goodnight." Will felt the tug of guilt high in his abdomen for vaguely wanting, and felt the press of Hannibal's hand on his shoulder guiding him inside, not vague at all.

"Wait here a moment," Hannibal told him when they were inside, and walked upstairs. Will closed his eyes. The air smelled spiced and expansive. He propped himself in the angle between wall and floor, felt the creak of his neck. He had written down Hannibal's address. Because he wanted to. Despite knowing the cause-effect, there was no defined connective tissue between the two ideas. Like the usual almost-detachment of his flesh from his mind, like the they overlapped in form, but did not communicate.

Hannibal redescended carrying a soft robe and a tablet computer. "This application does not read out your words, but I still am capable of doing so myself. It is the best I can do right now, I am afraid."

Will took them, wrapped himself up, tapped out a word to show Hannibal.

"Sorry," Hannibal read. He tightened his face. "Nonsense, Will. Office hours are for patients. My kitchen--and my practice--is always open to friends."

Friends. That was. A word. Will tapped out more.

"Do you think it could be seizures?" he read out. "About the sleepwalking? No. I would argue good old-fashioned post-traumatic stress," Hannibal replied. Will wondered if it was odd for him to voice both sides of the conversation. It didn't feel strange, but his feelings were not an indicator. "The job you do for Jack is traumatic, and you respond accordingly. You are feeling a loss of control."

Rising warm grainy feeling. Frustration. "Well, if my body is walking around without my permission, you'd say that's a loss of control?" he typed.

"Wouldn't you?" responded Hannibal, not bothering to read Will's words out loud this time.

It wasn't--It wasn't as if he could directly command action from his bones. Or that he could even control the actions he took by denying the right parts of his body permission. All his life, his flesh had been a malfunctioning whole-body prosthetic. It wasn't a loss of control. Something else that he didn't have the words for yet.

"I gave them your address," Will typed for Hannibal instead, "because I couldn't remember my name," and Hannibal briefly grasped his collapsing hands.
---
Will could not imagine the last time he had awoken and his eyes hadn't stung. The whole room smelled exactly the way his eyes felt, blood-sweat-vomit, but with an infusion of justness. Righteous indigestion.

The angel-dressed corpses looked like marionettes at first. Still did. Angels were supposed to be creatures that hurt to look at, blazing limbs all too many. These had dusty motel air not stirring the skin cut from the serrations of back muscle. Jack had promised this would awaken him. It did; his dreams were not so...crowded.

Most of the room winced when he folded himself onto the bed like the skin wings must have unfolded. Jack was impassive. Katz looked bright and considering. When his back met plastic, he knew it was right that there were people watching. He suspended himself above damp night sweats and dreamed.

Behind the veins of his eyelids he felt righteous, and terrified, and armed. He had felt the same way before making the angels. And in the veins running along his temples, there was a vague but sharp longing, like a blade out of focus.

In Will, there was only righteous exhaustion.
---
Contributing to case conversations--afraid, playing God, tumor distorting his thoughts, someone to watch over him--felt like trying to swim. Clutching at himself down aching bay water, his observations breaking the surface when the conversation had drifted on. Jack waited for him to say things. Jack probably had icons of the saints somewhere in his private life.

The blood streaking down the alley walls seemed to coalesce in the lump of meat. Advantages of playing God: solitude. Disadvantages of playing God: the flesh carved away for creating new life.

Beverly Katz had beautiful arched gray eye sockets and she spoke to Will like she didn't care that he was broken.

"Do I seem different?" he asked. Metal morgue walls. Here, she waited for him to speak his piece. If anyone would dispassionately know, it would be bright avian Katz.

"You're a little different, but you've always been a little different." She grinned. "Neat trick, by the way. That way no one can tell if something's up with you."

Katz used the trick of smirking, bulling through, edges of joking. Boyish demeanor, far more masculine than Will himself. Her hairline was sharp.

It wasn't an answer, and Will did not promise to tell her of shakes in his brain. Promises were sloggingly hard for him to keep, promises of initiating piece-exchange of his emotions impossible.

He wondered if angels in the process of shedding their humanity kept promises.
---
Enough and not enough was wrong with him. Every time he woke, his body hurt like he had been dropped from a great height, and he didn't know why it had gotten worse. If it had gotten worse.

He closed the windows, but his asleep self's hands worked latches better than when he was awake. And the dogs liked having a breeze winding through the house.

The thought of wrapping his legs still in a sleeping bag made rough panic balloon in his chest. It rang a tone when he tapped at it. Angels in Judaism had their legs fused together into one. Thrashing, wrestling. They were made to execute one purpose. The form of struggling seemed a purpose in itself. If Will had a purpose, it would be perceiving. If Will could choose a purpose, it would be to be for Abigail.

Coming to a session with Hannibal felt like his whole body crumpling, but softer. Hannibal did not signal emotion as sweetly as Alana did, did not signal emotion at all. It was an entire untensing, the presence of Hannibal. He had a way of pushing, and Will liked the tug of the current, if not the destination.

The destination was the Angel Maker, and how he was killing Will's brain. Hannibal did not see angels when he closed his eyes, could not know how Will's insides stung  pink raw. He had to look. There was no such thing as knowing naughty or nice at a glance, so he had to look deep, and think. He could not stop being Jack Crawford's hound. Grotesque fiery automaton, like the creature of a story.

"You want to feel such sweet and easy peace," Hannibal said, and sweet and easy have always been things Will has wanted. Always wanting, and there wasn't such a thing as ease in nature for him. He could keep wanting, would keep wanting. How killers wanted, in a way, did not matter.

And then Hannibal smelled him.

He had a curled mouth and a quip before Will could turn and sputter into his tablet, but Hannibal had an ease in it that sheepishness could not erase.

The strangeness of Hannibal's smelling him warmed him, low near his spine.

The next time they were together, Hannibal had prepared.

"I confess, I had not known much of American Sign Language before meeting you. A language all its own. The sparseness and placement are more reminiscent of Japanese than English."

Will listened. A language all its own. Intent determination at the back of the local Deaf church's services, a grade school teacher shaping his hands for four months before his father moved.

"Your name sign, Will?"

"None," he pulled, before reaching for the tablet to continue. "I fingerspell W-I-L-L. Short."

Hannibal smiled, sly gray, not at all sheepish. "I consulted with a colleague," and he touches a fist to his brow and shortly flicks a four-hand up. Brain and fire.

Will copy-signed. "Brain-fire. Will."
---
He had known before walking into the barn that he would find an angel in the rafters. The place was right, roof smeared brown like something in the huge sky had rolled over and brushed blood on long ago. Flames sucked all the oxygen out of a room. Budish wanted to feel such sweet and easy peace.

He had known before, and that was it. "I don't know how much longer I can be useful to you, Jack." He did know. He could do this all day, could see this going on forever, shreds of ragged skin. It would even be easier after he wore down, as Mrs. Budish had said. When they could only see a very sick man, not a person who was very frightened. He could do this all day.  

"It's getting harder and harder to look," Will told him. The space between the robotic voice and his shaking mouth seemed too much. Inertia pooled in all the wrong places.

"No one's asking you to look alone," Jack said, brow swinging decisively, and no one asked Will, true. They pointed him.

The angel in the rafters stank almost as badly as the motel room had, despite the cold air. Was it possible? Stacks of straw litter, almost hexagon cells. If he looked.

Will did not look at Jack. "The thinking is shutting down. It's not this one, it's the next one, it's the one I know that's coming after that. " Words didn't come anymore. Nothing to impart the vision of the heavy tunnel ahead, he could see, he could see.

"If you want to quit, quit." Jack walked off without looking back at Will.

A cloud of breath rose in front of his face. That sound everywhere was not his blood, it was his breathing. Hyperventilation. Louder. Shakeshakeshake if he could chatter his teeth he would. Every organ hurt unbearably, prayed for death, it had to all be in his head. Knuckles against his jaw, again and again. He could do this all day, oh G-dash-d no no. Winter. He was bleeding from somewhere. Haze red purple bright G-d.

Through his tears and shake back-and-forth Budish came down to walk flayed before him, God, he had seen this coming too. Knife skin angel.

"I see what you are," Budish whispered silver through the air, Will scrabbled at his own ears, "Inside. I can pull it out of you."

If only if only please. Winter. Winter. Move towards Budish's knife. Will moaned, the sound shook the joists, and Budish collapsed in a kneel at his feet.

He was left to practice his name and shake and avoid looking to where God would be.  
---
The Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane was beautiful-severe, tree branches reaching up like frozen vapors, a white round of steps. Will felt sick to his stomach.

"I always feel nervous going into these places," he tried to explain to Jack, stopped on the steps waiting for the police officers staring at his tablet to pass. Offer these small pieces of himself and try to do the job. Jack had told him about Bella, and her position was not one he wanted to occupy.

"Why's that?" Jack replied. Even, placid, exchange.

"Afraid they won't let me out again." It would be easy, so easy. When he tried to see himself years down the line, it was the easiest thing in the world to imagine waking up in a hospital and always having been there. His outline sitting up in a concrete room and having nothing but black stretching on either side of time.

"Don't worry. I won't leave you here." Jack did not strain with how he tried. Enviable.

"Not today." Will's hand came straight up from the screen to hover at his mouth immediately after typing it. Waking up to a cell would be easy, traversing through one dream. Denying the trap took struggling again and again and again and. It was more than one person could be expected to do without end, was all.

The gray glowing halls they walked though could last forever.

The director's office when they got to it had a solid deadbolt on the inside, Will noted, letting his hand trail across it as he passed. He had been finding his fingers rubbing together more often lately. Both sensation feedback surfaces.

Chilton stood too close, not calm-bold like Katz, but flop sweat nervous and oozing beneath the plates of his skin. He addressed Jack and watched Will slickly.

"Dr. Bloom called me about Mr. Graham. Or should I call him Dr. Graham?" he asked.

"He's not a doctor." Jack sounded weary already.

You aren't much of one either, Will wanted to say to Chilton, but he could not raise his arms to type without brushing against Chilton's overpresent body. Alana had communicated as much about Chilton’s competence with her pressed mouth and middle-distance glance when she told Will she would call the BSHCI about him. An apologetic attempt to treat him like an adult after the reprimand for Freddie Lounds.

Alana did not know what had happened when he shook himself apart in the barn. Will did not plan on her ever knowing. She gave him decorative professional courtesies now. The kindness of it took his breath away, and he did not want that veneer to be injected with pity.

"He's not FBI either--his badge is temporary," Chilton said, playing at clever hidden behind polite and missing both. Jack did not admit that Will was the Bureau pet, and Chilton's smile widened.

"Gentlemen, sit down," he continued when he felt he won. Will sat. The desk was huge; the entire office smelled like Chilton had hired someone to decorate like he had huge amounts of money and then secreted his oiliness all over to be sure. Excruciating white.

"Dr. Chilton," Jack said, "We're going to need to see the crime scene while it's relatively undisturbed." He wasn't saying more than necessary. His dislike of Chilton churned beneath the surface. For all that mute Will should have been good at that game, he wasn't, he thought distantly.

"I assure you, for something so disturbing, it is quite undisturbed."Chilton had probably practiced that. "I cannot help feeling responsible for what happened. Gideon sat directly across from me and I had no idea what he was hiding. And now one of our staff is dead." Chilton flapped a hand in the vague direction of Will. His voice was weaving, expressive flute notes. He didn't care at all.

"I understand, Doctor," Jack replied. "Mr. Graham's going to need to see the crime scene with as much privacy as you can provide."

And here it was. "Oh, yes, that thing you do." Chilton leaned forward, as if he had just then been reminded of it. He had not stopped running his eyes over Will the entire time. "You're quite the subject of conversation in psychiatric circles." Subject, object. "A unique cocktail of personality disorders and neuroses and cognitive delays that make you a highly skilled profiler. We are woefully short of material on your sort of thing, Mr. Graham. Would you mind speaking to some of the staff?" He advanced eagerly from behind his desk and onto Will as he spoke.

Chilton could probably find someone robot-voiced and terrified by throwing a rock. In his own facility, even. He didn’t need Will for that. Will thought of those harnesses service dogs wore. Don't Pet Me, I'm Working. Beverly Katz would think his wearing one was hilarious. Alana would be sad.

Will shrank his shoulders back from Chilton's presence and pecked at letters on his tablet. Chilton's eyes lit up, no doubt noting motor planning and verbal ability, and Will had to fight the urge to sit on his hands. "I'd like to see the crime scene now," he managed after too much time tapping words out, and he glared stiffly at Chilton's forehead.
---
Gideon had seen the sign reading "All patients must be restrained past this point" on the bars. Victory for him. Electrodes plating his slick chest, all his slick membranes. The fork tine slid so beautifully from the blood-edged slit in his palm, like all shapes under skin should.

Easy languid move up, shedding masks and monitors. No rush.

The lines of the nurse's back under crisp white. Anything should be so easy.

Strike her throat, watch her stumble, everything easy easy easy. Lift her up, shelves clatter, hair sticking to his temples. God, but she was so predictable.

She cried when he threw her onto to the floor, hard enough to make her beautiful head bounce back against the tiles, and straddled her. "Shh shh shhhhhhh," he soothed. His fever.

She cried louder as he dug his thumbs down the soft planes of her brow. Perfect fit. Less perfect with the blood running out of the sockets, but oh well. He wondered what her name was.

The nurse crawled away all streaming blood on the floor, and he let her while he examined the room for implements. Hey, something had to end this show. The curve of an IV stand fit nicely in his curled palms. The blood smeared on the shiny steel as the pole made a little metallic scrape coming out the base.

Tiles slapped cool against his bare feet. The feet were supposed to be cold during fever. She hadn't gotten very far at all. No point in shushing now, mmm. Was it still crying if you had no eyes to cry with?

He raised his stake, paused a moment for drama, and slammed down.

When Will came back to himself, he was crying. Heaving little sobs he hid behind the glasses he fumbled on as best he could, feeling for the curves of his eyes. His throat was raw.

He wanted to take a moment to feel himself fill his skin again, but Chilton and Jack were waiting in the doorway for his empathy.
---
He watched out the window of the BSHCI, tree branches waving and leaves ruffling. The constants, season after season, rings on rings widening the trunk, only view to be had from the windows. Until they weren't, until they took you down to a worse place in the bowels of the institution. Past a certain point, it seemed as if no bad things added on should make it hurt worse, but a view of trees was an aching thing to lose.

Will wanted to slam his bones against the window, break into grimy light, feel the wind and the fields until no humans existed at all that he could be cruel to, but there Alana was in bright color making a polite face at Chilton. The sound of flesh being crushed bounced around the room to inhabit each of their bodies if Will let the view of his fingers unfocus in just the right way.

"He butchered his last wife and her family on Thanksgiving," Alana said, light disapproval to Chilton. That had been bloody fun. Ripping.

"No accounting for taste. Or intelligence," Chilton said, as if he had either.

Will let out a breath and flapped for Alana's attention. "He murdered his wife impulsively," he signed, languid tumble of hands for Gideon's racing thoughts, "The Chesapeake Ripper is methodical, meticulous." It was so easy to adopt their styles in signing. Let in too much.

Alana voiced out loud for him. Chilton smirked. "I see you use sign language with Dr. Bloom here, very fascinating," he said, advancing on Will as Alana gave him incredulous little sidelong glances. "If she is your therapist, I'm sure some staff here would be happy to speak to her about your condition as well. And," he added, "Abel Gideon was methodical until he wasn't. A surgeon, you know. It was the exception that proves the rule, the murder that ended his murder spree."

"Dr. Chilton," Alana said firmly in her tall boots, "Special Agent Graham and I are here in an investigative capacity, evaluating Abel Gideon's claims pertaining to a federal investigation."

"I suppose," Chilton sighed, drawing out the syllables theatrically. Perhaps Alana would throw him out the window. She looked glossy-professional-annoyed. "Will Mr. Graham be present at our interview? Give us a close-up of the carnage?" he asked her.

"No, we'll each conduct our own interviews," Alana said, carefully arching her neck towards Will. The Bureau pet knew the routine of the talking-to-psychopaths trick without prompting. "Compare and contrast." She made a little motion as if to get up from her chair. Polite little social signal.

"I know you're anxious to get on with it," Chilton blithely continued. Airy thing. "You have talked to Gideon before, for some length of time. He has given you a lot of thought. You've had some sessions with him?"

"Yes, when he was first institutionalized." Little looks at Will. She couldn't understand the unwanted blank anxiety pouring off him, his impassive face, but she saw.

"I've read your notes, of course," Chilton answered his own question. "They were more or less helpful."

"Well, I'm glad I was helpful." Alana seemed to pinch her entire face up while maintaining a look of professional respect.

Will surprised himself by snorting, far too loud damp in the rich office. They stared at him, but he didn't rescind it. Chilton looked far too insulted to note it in his study of Will Graham.

Alana gave up, broke the silence. "I'll go first then."

Will trailed her out of the room, feeling like he should be clutching her sleeve against the halls. Her jacket had a black print like chain on it.
---
They kept Gideon in the basement. Dim, unscrubbed tile walls to contrast against the biting white wall panels. Maybe he had looked for trees before he killed the nurse last night. Abigail's window had trees outside it, to bear her to the ground. Clever girl.

Alana clacked down the halls, long stride, drawing prisoners up to the glass like ghosts. Jealous of her liveliness. Will knew how they felt as he shuffled behind her. The trick was to feel their banal urge for violence more than their gray curiosity. The trick to the trick was that it made his chest heave huge.

Gideon was flopped, knees bent and arms out on the bed. Feet towards the viewing window. Languid deliberate head raise, arch mutter, the kind of person expected in an institution. Coy press together of wrists. And sadism. impatient sadism.

"Why Dr. Bloom, how wonderful to see you again," Gideon drawled. Folded himself behind a metal support like a parody of shyness. Will folded himself harder against the wall.

"You remembered." Alana was blinking, her best impression of coldness.

"I've met a lot of psychiatrists over the past two years." Too many, all blank. Gideon darted his eyes at Will, who breathed out hard through his nose. He wasn't a psychiatrist, could never play at looking like one. The muscles around his mouth twitched not entirely in his control. Gideon looked back with his lazy hunger at Alana. "Hard to forget one so sublime."

"Thank you for your time, Dr. Gideon," sighed Alana, pressed herself into a folding chair waiting for her. "I won't waste it. Shall we begin?"  And he was a doctor, wasn't he. Easy to imagine how he might have passed for one. All theatrics, manners of an antique traveling quack and the incongruous surgical skills. Hard to imagine the Ripper ever allowing himself thought incompetent, even in affect.

"Dr. Bloom, what is this to be? I was caught red-handed, I mean literally. There is no mystery as to whodunit. I did it." Chilton practiced his little quips. Gideon didn't. The eternal battle between those two to prove who was cleverer with words, could laugh the worse things off.

Alana exaggerated her expressions as much as she always did, no more and no less for this killer behind glass. "The mystery is whether you are who you say you are."

"Or not." Gideon finished the sentence that didn't need finishing. "Isn't that the mystery for us all? Just who do I think I am?" And then, "Never liked being called the Chesapeake Ripper. A bit dry, don't you think?"

"Is that why you didn't take credit for the Ripper murders until now?" Alana unrelenting, beautiful in this place. Will's lungs slowly leaked.

"Just watching the goose chase from the box seats." Gideon's expression suddenly dropped off, and then something new was aimed at Will. "And just who is that twitchy little thing silently lurking in the corner?"

Alana did displeasure much better when she shed her coldness. "Agent Graham is here, same as I am, to discuss your claims."

"Ooh, an agent. And here I was thinking a new patient had escaped." Gideon's voice seemed ever flatter. A high-pitched whine rose in the corner of Will's mind. "Not as young as Jack Crawford's last pretty young thing, from what I saw bandied about in the papers, but he's just as pretty. Nothing on you, of course, Dr. Bloom. The Feds can only come to bad ends."

"I think we've gotten as far as we can with this today." Alana stood up, rustle of fabric. And then oh, her eyes right there. "Will?"

Will's head hurt. It had been hurting for a while, he realized. He went to follow Alana out, trying to match her purposeful stride. Stretch on the inside tendons of his legs.

"Do come again, Dr. Bloom!" Gideon's voice echoed down the corridors. "And you too, Agent Will Graham."

Alana's stride grew heavier.

Outside, she just shook her head. They had not stopped to say goodbye to Chilton. Neither of them mentioned it. "He's placing himself as one of the crowd. Seemed to know to mention the Lass incident, that we were there for Jack," she said-signed.

Miriam Lass had been investigating the Ripper, and then she wasn't. They all danced around it with Jack, the topic there and then not. All so natural. "Gideon is aimless, wandering in his killing. He's--no," Will signed. Alana nodded, and then turned away.

She would take a moment to pretend she believed he was okay, and he would take a moment to pretend that he knew he would make it out of the BSHCI. That he could breathe.
---
There had to be a body. Body of evidence to examine. Lass was taken, dish-eared trainee, without a body. Jack needed her to be dead, needed death to be a sure thing, but. She had been taken and Jack pushed harder that she was dead, did not look for her, and something in Will screamed at that.

Maybe sometimes it really was just that he was afraid.

The feathered stag appeared all the time now in the spaces between his dragging fingers. Huge rushing echoes of its hooves. It had to duck to fit its rack of antlers into the places Will spent time in. Were they growing? Vascular skin covering cartilage ready to become velvet dripping off spurs of bone?

He would wake up if he touched it, he felt in his veins. He didn't reach out for it, didn't want to lose the assurance that there was such a thing as waking up.

"Here we are," Freddie Lounds had said, clothed in her horrible animal amalgam, "Just a bunch of psychopaths helping each other out."

Maybe sometimes it really was just that he was afraid.
---
Night-day-night again, rub sleep out of his eyes, or deeper in. The knobs of bone on his hips hurt against the mattress. Jack was at his door, far enough away from the stink of his bed, doggy noises shuffling on the porch. People were not supposed to arrive at the door of a houseboat, but here they were.

The white blare of his tablet glowed brighter in his lap than the sodium lights along the highway. Flick-flick-flick past the window, Will sometimes picking one to attach his eye to for a few moments before motion threw it behind the car. The easiest way to get Will to the crime scene was to bundle him into the nearest investigator's car, every time. Sounders of three for the Ripper. Piggy pig pig.

Local police radios and staring eyes. They all could have read Tattlecrime. Crazy shaking little thing sleepwalks through crime scenes. The ring of a headline.

The hotel room was beautiful like brocade was, rich and shining-threaded and deeply uncomfortable. The congealed blood and flesh like breadcrumbs trailing along the floor was better. Katz gave a little wave from where she was tweezing fibers from the surfaces of the room. Will gave a little wave back.

Behind him he could hear Jack order everyone out as he drifted to the bathroom. He could swear a flash of feathered hindquarters ducked in ahead of him. Check the ground--hotel carpet, not hot black gravel. Close the door behind him, no animal signs but human now.

The victim had been sedated, and then he wasn't. Bruising ache of his palms against shoulder, bicep. Struggle and little grunts ringing off the glossy-papered teal walls, trails of blood. The squares of ceramic around a sink were called a splashback. If only he would stop struggling, just go to the tub where he could lay down.

Body now in the bathub, hot breath coming from each party. A scalpel in his hand that had been there the whole time to cut open the plain shirt, then plain skin. He had to. Spread the ribs, even the muscles in his cheeks twitching with the effort, and then feeling for the heart among all that blood. Squeeze-press once, twice, try to remember the rhythm a natural heart made.

Will came back to himself hunched in the tub, clutching his own chest. He stumbled out, knocked on the door before he remembered how to open it, one hand on the frame as he spread it apart on the hinge. Such a green bathroom.

He fumbled out his tablet from the inside pocket of his jacket laid against his ribs. "Internal cardiac massage,"  he managed to input for Jack. Hand from the outside, keep the muscle going. He panted. When Jack raised an eyebrow, he tapped out, "The killer wasn't killing. He was trying to save his life. Ever see the Ripper do that?"

"It's the Ripper!" Zeller called from outside. Will shook his head. Wrong, all wrong. The killer touched a heart trying to keep it going. The Ripper wouldn't, not in a hotel bathroom only to leave the body split plainly in the tub, traumatized heart still intact.

Outside, Price was listing twenty-two anatomical similarities to Ripper killings along Zeller's insistences on the Ripper. Tongues moving, too much noise. Will wanted to stamp his foot childishly until the high-up cottony feeling in his head stopped. Instead, he pushed the door to the bathroom back closed. Katz gave him a radiant smirk as the door swung shut on Zeller.

Will settled back on the closed toilet. It felt like a lot of his life was spent slumping in bathrooms and wishing for the world to stop. Less swirly loud wallpaper, usually.

Jack sighed, pressed a latex-gloved hand against on of the swirls on the wall. "You're sure?"

Will sighed back. His head felt too heavy for his neck. The stag didn't appear around other people. "More or less," he typed and then released.

"Tell me why you're sure," Jack prompted.

Will typed it all up, head wagging. "The Ripper left his last victim in a church pew with his tongue as a page marker in the Bible he was holding. This isn't that. This is a medical student trying to make an extra buck in a back-alley surgery, and it went bad," he poured forth. "Actively bad," he added after a moment. All the different kinds of wrong it could go.

Jack turned, lips working a bit to bite back disappointment. He crouched down to Will's level, and Will took a second to feel absurd guilt for taking the only seat in the room. "I need you to tell me how you see the Ripper, Will."

The inset bathroom lights hurt too much. His heart pumped heat into his face, useless and unbidden. "I see him as one of those pitiful things sometimes born in hospitals." It was easier to use the AAC for this, awful as it was. It did not command the expression of signing. "And they feed it, keep it warm, but they don't put it on the machines." Will almost snorted at the tablet in his hands. Birth defect, illness, had to find his way to the machine in his own hands by himself. "They let it die." Should have. "But he doesn't die. He looks normal." And there was the difference. "And no one can tell what he is."

Will pushed himself up, did not wait for Jack. Shuffled out of the bathroom, threw the door open, all too much. Katz was still smirking out there, or smirking at something else. He stomped over to the far wall, aching, wishing for an internal cardiac massage to keep going but biting his tongue instead until the bumpy flesh gratefully bled. Katz appeared, bumped his shoulder while looking past him, let him.
---
The Chesapeake Ripper did not rip. He slit. Took. Taking was his nature. Desire in grace in brutality.

Heart kidney liver intestine pancreas spleen stomach. Maybe the Ripper was building a whole new person out of all these parts. Solder the arteries and veins together, and there a better body for a pitiful thing born in a hospital. A climactic performance. Bolt of dramatic lightning.

Will poured sweat in his dreams, saw flesh everywhere. Imaginable as velevety, probably slick and fatty.

All these corpses felt desperate. The Ripper wanted to perform, and Will wanted--

He wanted.

Abigail sat across from him in the field, any field. More wind chafing her wind-chafed skin.

"It's better that it's just the two of us," she said. Dazzling cold blue eyes. Just a child. "Will?" Hair whipping around her face, eyes sliding to the side. He tried to answer her. "Dad?"

"Yes?" Will said. He looked down at his hands and saw them still at his side. The words had come from his throat. Vibrating flaps of skin worked. He looked again, and the body of Cassie Boyle was impaled there between him and Abigail. Murder turned art turned dining room table. Crows.

Abigail beamed. "There's someone else here, Dad."

Will opened his eyes, and bird feathers blinked into Hannibal, crammed there into his tiny office. "Will? I have a twenty four-hour cancellation policy."

Oh. Conversations between friends. He was late. "Sorry," he signed, mouthed, before reaching for his tablet. "Was I sleepwalking?"

"Your eyes were open, but your mind was not present." It was like the usual then, Will thought bitterly in some corner of his mind. Empty shell, chitin exoskeleton. "But no apology necessary," Hannibal continued. And then Hannibal brought his hand splayed out to his chest and signed, "Fine."

Will's face must have done--something. The corners of Hannibal's mouth lifted just a bit, beige skin. "I have been working on it, although it is difficult to find time to practice a new language between this practice and that." Will looked down. "How goes your practice, Will?"

They looked together at the photos of Will's bad dreams. The Chesapeake Ripper's tapped ore. "What do you see?" he asked Hannibal, realizing the echo of the note left by Lass's arm too late. Brown Bear, Brown Bear.

Something in Hannibal's head tilt was almost reptilian. "Sum up the Ripper in so many words?" He drank in the images. "Words are living things. They have personality, point of view, agenda."

Will felt like his skin was bursting at the seams, ready to grow a new one. He leaned in a fraction to Hannibal. "They're pack hunters."  
---
The thing about Hannibal Lecter was that seeing him with blood-slick hands in the back of an ambulance at night felt like watching his little house through the fog.
---
Little whines sounded in his head all the time. Animal pain, and metallic groans. Mechanical pain. The bolts he spread over his floor rang in sympathy.

It just seemed like a good idea to build a new motor for his boat. In this kind of fog.

He checked every one of the dogs for the source of the noises, holding a hand to their throats while they lolled their doggy grins at him. Checked himself, feeling the cartilage ridges of his trachea. Watched his mouth in the mirror, trying not to let the whole of his face come together. The sound moved closer, and then further away. More and then less distress.

So Alana then. Hugely soft, and warm towards animals, and willing to help carry off a savaged furry corpse. They walked looking out over the dun frost fields. Sun and wool and the curve of her mouth.

"You invited me to collect animal parts?" Stretched pale brow, question open to him. Rock back and forth of their walking.

Will huffed a laugh. They each knew how to collect animal parts by themselves. "No," he signed, and it was easy if he did not try to think of all four limbs moving at once, "I invited you on the chance it's alive. Hard to carry a wounded animal by myself." Alana looked so sweet, and kind of melancholy there, trudging through crusts of barely-snow. She did not follow up on the obvious metaphor in his words, and so it was easy to imagine her bundling him up and carrying him out as he whimpered. Blood on his muzzle.

Perhaps it was the twist of shame that made him ask what he did. "Did you think it was a date?" More shame. He could not stop throwing himself at the hot sharp feeling in his stomach.

Steely Alana. Will tried to sweep the ground for tracks. "It never crossed my mind," she said.

Will laughed more. Everything about this was going wrong, and he couldn't stop. If this was how other people felt. "Why?" he signed, brows down and mouth gaping open a touch. "Too broken to date?" He pressed his hand to his chest. Try to find the provenance of the whimpers.

She gave him all her consideration. Signed it. "I don't think you're broken."

There were no animal signs aside from dead brown antlers sitting in the distance. He did not chase them. There was no wounded animal and everything about this outing was the kind of symbolic that made psychoanalysts gleam and him want to bury his head in his arms and bite at the thin skin there.

The possibility that there was something wrong with him. The possibility that nothing was.
---
Cupping palmfuls of aspirin and dry-swallowing them made him feel like he was marked, regressing. Regressing to a state not previously accessed, since he had never taken the medications prescribed him, but still the feeling of walking backwards. Or his surroundings moving forward, that nauseous disorientation of not knowing which.

"Is it just me, or is it getting easier for you to look?" Jack hit him with. On the other side of the stage, Katz made a white cloud of dust rise from a horsehair bow, more at ease in the luxurious hall than he would have guessed.

Easy. Easy. It felt as easy as it ever was. Endless as it ever was. If he could not avoid the burn of humiliation, he could fling himself into it, was all. He lied, "I think of it as a purely intellectual exercise. I shake it off and keep looking," and then tucked his tablet back into his pocket. Jack dismissed him, Katz looking back at the edge of the spotlight. She spoke the language of the arrangement of things.

The basis of the display was show. House lights down, anticipation. Practiced opening of the corpse. Cello neck down a human neck, no need to stretch these strings over a bridge to hear them ring. No need for pegs to tighten the string, either, no wooden ribs to supplement the bone ribs. A new exquisite kind of instrument. Cellos were only curved the way they were incidentally, profile having nothing to do with producing sound.

Voice. Voice. Voice. It was simple physics. Harmonies were only mathematical ratios of vibrations. If the human element could steady, perfect music was easy.

There. In the audience. Applause.

Will gasped, clawed himself across the face when he realized it was Hobbs watching. The fingernails he had forgotten to cut made a huge sharp noise.

No one on the team commented on the wounds when he reported the nature of the instrument to them.
---
He blinked again and he was in Hannibal's office. Pure gray light, snow like dust outside.

The history of humans was death rituals. Bone flutes, saline fires. If everything he did, if all the looking at corpses he did was just a death ritual, it would be alright. Drowned child held underwater. If everything he did with his body.

He couldn't see bodies as music, as Hannibal did. Collections of light and sound, existing as particular things only at certain moments. Bodies had weight to them. Too much. Shapes clumsily transposed over beings, just a bit offset from the source of sound, the real self, but shapes nonetheless. Stubborn existence.

He couldn't see taking a body and cutting it out of life just to weave a song. Dust in the air, the shape of Hannibal's sleeve. These things were real and existed, and did not make sense carved into instruments for other people. To take it just as a show to someone else, lover's token carved in flesh. Incomprehensible.

Will stumbled into a wall and had to breathe. "Will. This is aside from the contents of our conversation entirely, but have you eaten?" Hannibal asked. Will blinked. He hadn't registered the words he had apparently been typing.

"Yes," he typed, slower. He had to have eaten something. At some point.

"Will," Hannibal clucked again, but he didn't press the places Will was already transparent. Will didn't know what he would have done if he did.  

At some point in these endless days, he realized, he had stopped feeling his body. It was a relief.

Perhaps that was why he chased the sound in his chimney when he heard it that night tying flies like it would convince him his fingers worked. A suffering body. Sidle close in to the churring and churning. It screamed in the walls.

Will panted hard. He feet knocked into a heavy wrench on the floor--shouldn't have been there, the dogs could mouth at it--and he picked it up and charged at the wall. He prayed what was in there could survive it. Prayed through the almost neat way he pried the plaster apart. Had to open you up to get a decent sound out of you.

When it was done, he stared. Stopped praying. The door knocked, and it took him long seconds to realize it was not a sound he was generating.

Alana. Snowflakes melting in her hair. Smiling at the dogs.

Not smiling at the hole he had knocked in the wall. The start of another hole.

"I heard an animal," he signed. No idea where his tablet might have gone.

"What kind?" she asked. Always the question. What kind of animal.

"I think it climbed out the top," he responded. Never the answer. "What are you doing here?"

She was making a reserved face for him to see. "I was just in the neighborhood, thought I'd make some noise, scare off anything here." Making scuffling reserved words for him too. "Looks like you made enough noise by yourself though."

It burned. It burned, so he shuffled to Alana as best he could and signed, "I'm not your patient."

"No. You're not," she agreed. She moved closer and she was so lovely. And Will knew what he should do.

Their kiss felt long, and damp, and unreal. The resting of his hand on her cheek. It was beautiful.

Alana stepped back and Will knew what she was going to say, or the feel of it if not the words. "You have to stop thinking so much," he signed with every bit of affection, inflection he could.

Her eyes fixed on his. For once. He let her. "I can't," she said, and she was signing as she spoke again. "The way I am isn't compatible with..."

Will dropped away from her, all the grace of gravity. "I wouldn't be able to stop analyzing," she continued, "because of this professional curiosity I have about you, and..."

He nodded, gave an answering sound that was more a breath. His brain just felt dull. He was supposed to do this, he knew, but her Alana was giving a psychiatrist's answer, and the warmth of her presence didn't feel so warm anymore. It was.

"I'm going to go now." She patted some of the dogs on her way out.

Will didn't know how long he stood there. Staring at the hole he had torn. He was crying, and it wasn't a relief at all.
---
Driving felt more like drifting these days, like he could float off the road on a trail of snowflakes, but he made his way through the dark to Hannibal anyway. Not even a behaviorist and he was trained. He felt like Pavlov's dog sometimes, just waiting for a bell to be stimulated by to drool.

His hands shook taking off his coat, and everything didn't really stop shaking after that. "I kissed Alana Bloom," he had ready in his tablet for when Hannibal opened the door.

He lead Will to the kitchen. Hearth. Dessert. "I am wondering why you kissed her, and then compelled to drive an hour in the snow to tell me about it." Hannibal spooned cream onto some tart thing.

Compelled. That was a word. Compulsions were supposed to be erratic jerks, not this smooth skim of...numb whatever this was.

"I heard an animal in my chimney," Will said, "And I opened my wall to get it out. And Alana came by and had this look on her face and she knew." Psychiatrists were supposed to know, and Hannibal did. He asked anyway. For Will.

"Knew what?" Even tone.

Will rubbed his face furiously. It made his eyes burn worse, made the skin on his skull feel stretched out after he returned his hands to the keyboard. "I have headaches. I sleepwalk. I hear things." The evidence explained it. "I feel unstable."

"You kissed her as a clutch for balance." There. Every behavior easy to diagnose. No compulsions.

Crumbling, drifting, maybe just being. Himself. Everything about Will seemed easy under Hannibal.
---
Will wasn't supposed to be doing this. Not wandering around downtown Baltimore. Not sprinting blindly through cars. Or he was, he was supposed to have wandering into traffic behaviors, depending on who you asked. Asking was not how it worked.

Every single motor emission was accompanied by the sound of an animal squeal. The score to his brain. Music says what words cannot. Across the street, the Chordophone music store waited, silent of any music itself.

Inside, the store was dim, full of the wooden bodies of breakable things. It smelled like the powder on the vocal cords of the opened man had. Will shook, and there was a corpse on the floor.

Blood. Uniform of the police. He could feel what he stepping into. A text to Jack, sound the alarm. He stepped deeper into the bowels of the store.

Basement-green ambiance. Christ. In the beam of his flashlight were racks and racks of plump intestine. The sounds of the body. Translucent beautiful sea creatures. If you took all the intestines out of your body and laid them end to end, you would die, he though hysterically.

At least Budge didn't seem to be eating them.

Will felt arms around him and he shuddered before realizing what they meant. Wire, garrote, ready to tighten around his throat. Gut should be too soft to strangle someone. The beam of his flashlight rolled somewhere far away. He wasn't supposed to be doing this, Jesus, someone who would make people into instruments.

Screaming, faraway, Will turned around, letting the the wire cage slice open his cheek, and bit.

Budge stumbled away. Head rattling. Dark room of guts.

Up, out. He ran onto the gray Baltimore streets and spun under the clouds and let his feet take him to Hannibal.

It had all already happened by the time he got there, slinking in after Jack. Little yellow markers scattered among the glass on the floor. Too many uniformed FBI humming around for the office that was supposed to be cavernous dark. Stupid of Will, really, to search all alone and scream and come too late in the end.

Through the private patient's exit to get in, the office all spoiled. Hannibal's hair was floppy. A cut across the bridge of his nose, blood in the corner of his mouth. Slumped in his chair. Some huge emotion rose in Will's chest. Hannibal looked beautiful.

Will perched on the edge of Hannibal's desk, closer and then closer. His feet hurt like they never did in dreams.

Hannibal, bloody faced and impossibly soft. "I'm glad you aren't dead."

Huge solid feeling. Choked up, choked out, and then Will felt the vibration pass between his teeth wet with Budge's blood and say, "No." Throat all raw and open.

Hannibal gave him a look like the sunrise.

---

Jack gaped when Will opened his mouth and told him that he wanted to accompany Hannibal to the hospital. Will ducked off to lurk in the corner while Hannibal submitted to hospitals, itch constant in the corners of his brain, but Jack was waiting in his office the next morning and ordering another psych eval anyway.

Katz bumped into him in the halls and muttered, "You're fucking weird, Graham," before grinning and nudging his elbow.

Alana hugged him achingly tight and perfect for just a moment before asking him to go to a functional assessment. "I'm sorry," she said. "You'll be okay?" Will allowed himself to sink into her soft hair. Just for a moment.

Abigail, when he greeted her, cocked her head evenly. He felt all sheepish and empty of  purpose in visiting her, showing her this new trick he could do. Chasing the moment over his dream of Cassie Boyle's body when he had been able to say "Yes," to her question.

But she nodded. "They made me go to speech therapy. Makes sense, I suppose. My dad cut my throat." Abigail had her knees folded neatly beside her on the bed. Socked feet and scarf. "I thought for a while that was what made you not be able to talk too, but you couldn't talk even before then, could you?"

"No," Will said.

“I’ll ask Freddie Lounds not to come around while you’re here,” she concluded. Will’s chest hurt at this.

Hannibal, working lamb in his kitchen, merely told him, "Many traumas affect verbal ability. The agenda of words again. I myself did not speak for a period of many years in my youth." Will didn't ask.

The way Hannibal looked at him now, perhaps the way he had always looked at him, made Will reel with rushing fear when he caught it. Falling into some kind of connection.

---

Reba McClane smiled across her broad face and told him she was there to help him only as much as he wanted.

"Speech therapy helps you communicate in a way more people understand, but it's their job to listen to you as well. Communication goes both ways."

Will floated outside his body and let his mouth move to copy hers, in unison and in delay. Lips stretched, tongue pressed, just muscle. The goal was to acquire useful speech. Appropriate responses to common situations.

McClane was Blind, marking herself with her words. Strong with it. The label indicating her connection to the Blind Community, that they were all alike in some way. Will's stomach hurt. It was terrifying.

When the session was over, he signed apologies into her hands and fled.

---

It didn't stop it even, this voice-thing curled in his chest. It was a protection of sorts, to still have Jack Crawford steal him from doctors and to murder tableaux. Of sorts. The blood came, inexorable like the tide, and his talent at looking could still keep the psychiatrists away.

Salt spray on cold gray winter sand. Like pieces of Louisiana, the times that were not only cottony white light everywhere. Ocean fish had to osmoregulate towards taking water in, to replace what the concentration of salt in their surroundings leached out. Teach a man to fish.

The totem of bone and rotted flesh, carefully excavated graves surrounding it, looked like something to embrace. The sky, the sea, the unnatural world.

"Clear the scene!" Jack snapped, clapping the team into radiating away from the tower. Bullheaded acting like Will shivering and dry-swallowing half a container of aspirin was normal. It wasn't not normal.

Close his eyes, and there. Materials strewn across the beach, flesh and wood, and a person who would become flesh and wood. The weight of a single human limb was surprisingly heavy detached from the body.

Flip the struggling young man on the sand onto his back. Mouth bound, what he deserved. Face up, so he could watch--again--not again. The intimacy of straddling him a statement. The statement of stabbing him no intimacy.

He was narrating as he did this, he was vaguely aware. The words could have been anything. The waves rose behind his design, and the water droplet on his face dropped him into the waiting room outside Hannibal's office.

Will shuddered. He had been on the beach and now he was not, and this kind of thing happened all the time, except it hurt now. His body made motions and actions trained into it, reactions to the environment, but it wasn't supposed to happen like this. He was afraid because it was different, and what was different was the fear.

"Will," Hannibal gazed out at him, "I wasn't expecting you."

"I don't know how I got here," he breathed. "I was at a scene and then I blinked and I was waking up here, except no I wasn't asleep!" He was aware his words were coming in a high whine oh God it wasn't pain it was panic.

"You lost time." Hannibal standing at the center of his office, collected within himself.

"There's something wrong with me." His legs moved, pacing out oblongs around Hannibal, all his joints wrong like his muscles would seize any moment.

"You're disassociating, Will. It's a desperate survival mechanism for a psyche that endures repeated abuse."  Diagnosis there, and no that wasn't it.

"I'm not abused!" he hissed. He knew how to float from his body, slide from reality. He was present for dissociation so that wasn't it.

"You have an empathy disorder. What you feel is overwhelming you." Placid, placid, had anything overwhelmed Hannibal in his life.

"I know I know I know." Curl his arms over his head as if it would help. Shaking again, he had never stopped shaking.

"Yet you choose to ignore it. That's the abuse I'm referring to." Stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself. As if his limbs were under his control. I know I know I know.

"Brain scan. For me," Will muttered. "Sleepwalking, hallucinations," There, evidence. He interpreted the evidence.

"Will." Hannibal was stern, closer now. "Stop looking in the wrong corner for an answer to this. You were at a crime scene when you dissociated, were you not? Tell me about it."

Oh God oh G-d it was all getting bad again. Lean his head against Hannibal's finely-suited side, it was all getting bad again. "It was a celebration."

---

“This is his design,” Will muttered. Winston whined and sprang out of his grasp.

---

I’m trying to be understated when I say that this is a bad idea,” he told Abigail. Fluency out of somewhere, words probably lifted from another. Good to speak, when Lounds’ influence stretched around the little institution room even when she wasn’t present.

Abigail could use the money from writing a book, he knew, but she wouldn’t let him, wouldn’t let Hannibal. Will wasn’t sure he’d let Hannibal.

“You’re important to me, Abigail,” he told her, trying not to drop his nose to rub against his wrists. She could see the aborted motion, he knew, he knew.

“Just because you killed my dad doesn’t mean you get to become him.” Snipping. Closed off. WIll felt grindy-frustrated around her all the time, trying to soothe her experience. Abigail wasn’t wrong, but something hurt there under his breastbone about what she went through, and he wanted to help. The deadliest sin of all.

“We've been through a traumatic event, and no one more traumatized than you, Abigail, but we went through it together,” Hannibal reasoned. Reasonable.

Abigail pursed her lips. Most traumatized. Good for her. Good for the three of them. A celebration.

---

“I’m going on the record as saying this is a very bad idea.” Alana stood barred, firm. Record of her disapproval. What did they all want these records for, to know far in the future that they were against something? Could they imagine vindication?

“You can’t…” Will told Jack. Couldn’t do this to a wary doe-eyed girl. She was sharper than she looked, but sharp didn’t mean unpained. The frozen body of Nicholas Boyle that Will had honestly forgotten but that Abigail would not have. It would pierce her. “Hannibal?”

Hannibal did not move the planes of his face. “Jack has the look of a man who is not interested in any opinion but his own.” It was a look.

Jack shrugged it off and swept Alana with him, dismissing any idea of Will’s objectivity. He was good at shaking many things off, professionally. He had risen to the head of the BSU as a smooth stone. And here he was pushing his weight on a girl. She was so scared. Will felt the air around her tremble with it. She was so scared, and it hurt like slow air that no one noticed, how could they not notice?

“He could do her irreparable damage,” Will protested to Hannibal. Often the only one left listening to protest to, it seemed. He was gutted.

“Perhaps Abigail is stronger than we think,” intoned Hannibal, grave. And then, “Perhaps we should leave off standing in Jack Crawford’s office. If we may use yours, I could have a modest lunch waiting for Abigail when she is done.”

Will laughed. He felt the sound.

---

He probably would have owed his father a retirement if he had lived. He didn’t know if he could do it, didn’t know if he could stomach putting someone in a home to be roughly handled by nurses. Didn’t know if he could keep his father with him either, rattling around his little house while Will retched at his work. Watching Will jerk involuntarily around.  Family.

And he wasn’t sure, now, if talking would have made his father happy.

Laurence Wells’ murders were one solution, he supposed. Always the possibility hovering there. Of prison. Taken in if he couldn’t take care of himself.

That was what what made Will step into Wells’ space, lean down at him, hiss. The smugness of it. He smelled old. “He was your son. Joel Summers. Your one act as a father was to destroy your son.” Congratulations to all of them.

The things family owed.

---

He was Summers on the beach bound by his father, he was Wells twisting the knife. He was Nicholas Boyle, flesh pale already, and he was a ram caught in a thicket. He cut Abigail’s sobbing throat from behind, and he faced her and cupped her cheeks in his hands.

“Please,” he told her.

She cried, clearwater eyes. “I’m so sorry,” she gasped.

He looked down, and blood was gushing around a hunting knife and pooling on the altar.

Will woke from the dream and into Hannibal’s dim office. Hannibal’s eyes fairly glowed.

“Abigail gutted Nicholas Boyle. She killed him.” The nightmares, all the nightmares. She saw herself cutting as well as being cut.

Hannibal rolled a pencil between his fingertips, brushed wood shavings and a little silver scalpel. “ Yes. I know.”

Will echoed an investigator. “Tell me why you know.”

“I helped her hide the body.” Hannibal’s face was deep, endless.

He felt his own body stiffen, curl in. “Not well enough.” She was so scared.

“Have you told Jack Crawford?” Hannibal asked.

Will shook his head. Hannibal nodded his.

“Why didn’t you tell him?” continued Hannibal.

Shoulders bunched high. “Because I was hoping it wasn’t true.” Magical thinking. Like Budish didn’t have to know, he just had to believe in the angels, the faces wreathed in flame. “Why?”

Hannibal advanced from behind the desk. Muscles contracting under his fine clothes. “You know why. Jack would hang her for her father’s crimes, and the world would watch her burn in his place. That would be the story. That would be what Freddie Lounds writes.”

Stalk to the window. Petulance or a rebuke. The branches outside the glass waved. Thicket.

“Abigail is no more a killer than you are one for her father.” That wasn’t how it felt. He felt caught.

“It’s not our place to decide,” Will hissed. Place, place, they did not occupy that space.

“If not ours, then whose?” God, Will wanted to irrationally say. God’s. “Who knows Abigail better than you and I? Or the burden she bears?” G-d, whichever G-d had given her this burden and this test in the first place, to watch her do G-d knew what with it.

“We are her fathers now,” Hannibal intoned, and Will closed his eyes against it. “In time, this will be the only story any of us cares to tell.”

Will breathed, and watched the trees and their shadows, and wondered if perhaps it had been Avraham testing G-d with Yitzhak after all.

---

The paradox: life inhabited flesh, but it was not flesh. Seeing flesh every day, devoid of life. What the heavy drag of sinew and bone on the living meant, then. Like oily pretty mercury, not flesh and not life either.

“We both know the unreality of taking a life,” Hannibal counseled him. Unreality. “The people who die when we have no other choice, we know in those moments they are not flesh, but light, and air, and color.” He could feel it, the excitement they knew and Abigail knew. Vivid smoke slipping away, or lingering to pool in hands. Flesh. Unreality.

What else was life, what left to mourn but themselves? Selfish. A moment to crouch at the altar and cry for the sheer agony light would always be. Consumptive mourning, fat on the vapors of nothing, that was now consuming him.

“Do you feel alive, Will?”

He opened his eyes to his bare feet on the roof most mornings, breath beginning to frost the air. Little bruises from forgotten places pressed into his skin. Rubbing fingertips together as hard as he could, making tuneless moans to trap against his teeth just to make sure he could. Like his thoughts were diffusing out to sink into his flesh, endlessly heavy flesh.

“I feel like I’m fading.”

Hannibal exhaled. Always concern. “I’d like you to draw a clock face. Numbered. Small hand indicating the minute, large hand the minute.”

“Why?” Clocks. Metronomic ticking. The trick was to pinch the groups of five together quickly, the hour being whichever the large hand leaned towards.

“An exercise.” Hannibal must know many ways to stretch fragile bone-minds. “I want you to focus on the present moment. The now. Often as you can, think of where you are, and when.”

Grounding. Planting metal in earth so shocks did not threaten. Easy enough to follow the schematics, harder to stand the electricity. Will scrawled a circle, numbers inside the edges all around. “7:16 pm. I’m in Baltimore, Maryland. And my name is Will Graham.” Script, fall from his lips. Brain-fire, Will, he mumble-signed. Here, here, he was here and now with his fevered mind tied to his flesh.

----

It always looked like an improbable amount of blood. The average human had seven pints. Slick, perfect pool. Slick, perfect draining. He had been in too many places where he could see his own strange face in the reflection.

The fish had little fat on its belly.

The human face was all cartilage and bone.

Will saw blood on his hands and on a dead woman and tried to tear his own skin off.

Doorknob, blood, hands, paws, gloves. “No no no no no,” he whispered.

He opened the door to a staring team. “Will,” Katz said, nothing else. Concerned face. And Jack’s face impassive above them all.

Sink. Pink water where it seemed like the blood should have flaked off. Flesh shouldn’t run down the drain. Neat little kitchen. Checked dishtowel. The kind of thing Hobbs would have had in his kitchen. Jack interrupted his skin watching with a grab to his shoulder, a steer out onto the biting air of the porch. Little snowflakes.

“What happened in there?”

Will shrugged. Felt his shoulders move in his jacket. “I got confused.” Overly accurate kind of confusion.

Jack peered at him, half over his shoulder. Trying to make it easier on Will. “I’ve seen you confused, and I’ve seen you upset, but I’ve never seen you afraid like this.”

Pull his mouth. Bare some teeth. Easy, easy. “I’m an old hand at fear.” Old hand, ranch hand, handling horses hitched closer to Asperger’s and autistics than narcissists and sociopaths. “I can handle this one.”

Jack’s serious intonation. “I saw the look on your face when you got out of that room.” Yes. Will wished no one could ever see his face. “Now, what did you experience that’s got you babbling all of a sudden?”

Address the snow-dusted back of Jack’s coat. “I can see and and hear and speak better afraid. I just can’t move as correctly.”

“Will, you contaminated the crime scene. You’ve never done that before.”

Many things he’s never done before. Contamination like his mind is contaminating his unreal flesh. “I thought I was responsible for it.”

Turning, now, Jack. “What are you saying? You thought you killed that woman in there?” The rise and fall of his voice. Explaining how Will should think.

Confession, forward. Gaze at the snow sheeting down. “Sometimes, with what I do. I get lost in the reconstruction. Just,” the difference between one space and another, “a blink.”

“I know you don’t like being the cause for concern.” Fully facing him. “But I am officially concerned.”

“Officially?” Twist of the second syllable upward. Derisive sarcasm, a fair expression.

Jack didn’t back down. “Yes, that’s right.”

Amble down the porch stairs. Aggression signals. “I thought the reason you had me seeing Dr. Lecter and not an FBI psychiatrist was so that my mental well-being stays...unofficial.”

Jack, so quiet. “I just want to be careful with you. We don’t want to break you here.” We, we, we.

Will pulled back, grinned. “Do you have anyone who does this better unbroken than I do broken?”

Jack stalked off. Will looked at the seams on his hands and wondered if they would come off now.

---

Practice using his hands. Flex release. The spread and strain of his crooked fingers. The coppery blood almost visibly wafting off his skin.

Jaw twitching. Those muscles forgetting how. “I can’t remember seeing the crime scene before I saw myself killing her.” The movement of his palm like some aborted sign. Continue.

Hannibal was almost slumped sitting on his desk. Little mirror of Will. “Those memories sank out of sight, yet you’re aware of their absence.”

Precious few things he was aware of these days. “The… grandiosity of the violence I imagine feels more real than what I know to be true.”

“What do you know to be true?”

Point of his fingers, emphatic. Emphatic was not the same as empathetic. “I know I didn’t kill her. But I remember watching her die.” God, God, the improbable amount of blood from the woman’s face. If Garret Jacob Hobbs had aimed a little higher across Abigail.

“You must overcome these savage delusions that are disguising your reality.” Hannibal’s accent rasped more on some words than on others.

Will remained silent, locked his wrist through the juncture of Hannibal’s ladder. Overcome. If only.

Hannibal ceded it. “What kind of savage delusions does this killer have?”

“No,” Will said. “Not savage.” All out in a hot rush, feeling the way his voice croaked. “Lonely. Desperate. Sad.” Stupid, the simplicity of the words. Sad. Sad sad sad. The breathless ache of the woman choking on blood underneath him. Sadness resolute. “I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and looked through me. Past me. As if I was just a stranger.” Disappearing. Always the feeling of disappearing. Always the feeling that disappearing might be best.

“You have to honestly confront the limitations of what you do,” said Hannibal, stalking over.

Will let out a huge breath. Let his back press harsh against the ladder, let all his bones slouch open at Hannibal’s insistence. Limitations there. I could do this all day.

“I don’t accept...that,” he said. Hannibal’s gray skin. “I know what kind of crazy I am, and this isn’t that kind of crazy.” Difficult to avoid. Knowing. “This could be...seizures.” He thought of the invading cells in Bella Crawford’s bronchioles. “This could be a tumor.” The improbable spray. “A...blood clot.”

“I can recommend a neurologist,” Hannibal gave him. The fineness of his eyelids. Little clicks of his blinks. “But if it isn’t physiological, then you have to accept that what you’re struggling with is mental illness.”

He moved away, and Will felt little contracting rings in his throat.

---

The neurologist had a painting of a horse that looked almost bloodied in its pinks hanging by his door.

“You’re in good hands,” the smooth thing, Sutcliffe,  assured Will, bustling them into his office. “Dr. Lecter here is the sanest man I know.”

Will flinched. What chance did Hannibal have of catching an insane man if he could not think like an insane man. If he wasn’t.

“I would have to agree,” said Hannibal. Non-answer.

Sutcliffe seemed to catch himself, slid his genial smile off. “So, Will. When did these headaches begin in earnest?”

Will’s eyes roamed around and around the steel office. “Two or three months ago.” It was unpracticed, the idea of talking to strangers. Never a fear for him, as a child.

“About the time Will went back into the field, which is when I met him,” Hannibal broke in. There was a tension. Sutcliffe jotted down a quick note. The point of Hannibal with him was supposed to be..not this. Hannibal would tell the doctors the fine details of him, and all Will would have to do is submit to the doctors. Not this. Not sit here through this.

They handed him off to the machines, finally. The equipment that used to be the only things he faintly related to in hospitals. A lab tech handed him the earplugs. From somewhere out there above him, Will was sure, Hannibal was watching over him as he was lowered into the MRI machine.

The little play of laser grids over his face. The whir, the steady thumping like someone was standing outside and throwing rocks at the shell of the machine. Magnetic.

Crazy thing. The monster under the bed. Steady thump. Will looked up and saw bedsprings.

Approaching feet in a puddle of light. Water dripping steadily on the swelling wooden floor, as like to have flowed from his breath as the storm outside. The plastic cradle to keep his head all still.

There. She came closer, and he sprang his hands around her ankles to lay by him as he peeled the mask off.

Brain-light-blood-metal-teeth. Will saw himself picking diligently at Beth LeBeau for hours trapped inside that metal shell, and he emerged to find that for once in his life, the doctor thought there was nothing wrong with his brain.

---

He had to go. He had to find the lonely monster. Had to drive himself when he couldn’t remember the last time he had driven himself, when the drive blinked by suspiciously fast, to Beth LeBeau’s snowy little house taped neatly shut.

She had kept birds. The way his flashlight played over the plastic toys inside the steel bars hurt.

Lace curtains. Aging floral bedspread. Horse figurines. There was nothing for it. Will advanced further into the room. He counted the marks on his watch face.

“It’s 10:36,” he practiced out loud, looking up into the corners, “I’m in Greenwood, Delaware. My name is Will Graham.”

A pale face shrank from him under the bed.

Will knelt. Slowly. Strange lead in his limbs. Inching closer to the monster under the bed.

The bedframe abruptly rose as him, scattered the light. Will grabbed at the pat of footsteps, felt a terrible dry slipping, saw a glimpse of a fleeing woman, and found himself holding a glove of skin.

He blinked to the middle of a clearing in the woods, Jesus, time gone according to his watch. Like the monster stories, shapeshifters waking naked and bloody in the forest. The skin glove was gone. He touched his lips, breathed slow. Turning, turning, watch your back.

“It’s 1:17 am,” he shook out, “We’re in Greenwood, Delaware, and my name is Will Graham.”  The best he could do. “And you’re alive.” He spun, screamed at the fairytale woods with what he had, “If you can hear me, you’re alive!”

Only echoes in reply. But echoes were not nothing.

Will dragged his cold flesh back to the little house. Sat in the dark, intruding, in the high-backed dining room chair. Pulled his phone out and thumbed his way down to text Beverly Katz.

She arrived, followed him all the way to the bedroom before saying anything. “Why did you call me? Why not Jack? Why not the police?” She shined her light over the powdery blood stains that Will had disturbed.

He kept behind her. Squared himself to open his skin to someone who was not a doctor. Steady Katz. “I called you because...I’m not entirely sure what I saw was real.” He stretched a broad smile, reflexively and achingly.

Steady Katz. “Then let’s prove it.”

---

Hannibal was pushing him towards it, Will knew. It was quiet, but ungentle.

“It is 7:05 pm, I am in Baltimore, Maryland, and my name is Will Graham.” He finished drawing the clock, sitting behind the expansive desk in the expensive leather office chair, and handed it to Hannibal.

“Thank you for humoring me,” Hannibal told him. Will’s mouth twisted, just a fraction. In this relationship, he was not the one humoring Hannibal.

“I feel like I’m seeing a ghost,” he near-whispered.

Hannibal looked down from his drawing. “Regarding this killer, or yourself?”

Will let himself slump further in Hannibal’s chair. Exhaustion signals. Something. “Both.”

“She’s real. You know she’s real. There’s evidence.” And Will just interpreted the evidence. “When you found her, your sanity did not leave you.” No evidence of Will being real. Hannibal’s hands bound the notebook.

“Time did,” Will said. Every exhaustion.

“I discussed the particulars of your visit with Dr. Sutcliffe. Would you like to discuss them with me?”

At least Hannibal had the decency to tell him. The discussion of dysfunctions that Jack would never admit to. “There are no particulars. He didn’t find anything wrong.”

“Then we keep looking for answers,” Hannibal said. “Perhaps you would allow me to run some tests of my own.”

Will waved a hand. If his dissection had to be published one day--and it would be, he could feel it like he could feel the forms of hospitals lurking in his future--it was better that it be Hanibal. His clocks. Will swivelled the chair minutely back and forth.

“Have you considered Cotard’s syndrome? Le délire des négations, a rare delusional disorder in which a person believes he or she is dead.” Hannibal let Will see how he checked his face.

“Are you talking about the killer or me?” It was not a relief for Will to finally be able to ask this.

“The killer, of course,” Hannibal returned easily.

“Of course,” Will muttered. A hallucination was not a delusion. “She couldn’t see the victim’s face. Or she was trying to uncover it,” he put out in the allowances of his flexing hands.

Hannibal, ever kind in his way, flipped through papers and journals talking to Will. “The inability to identify others is associated with Cotard’s.” The inability to look at others was associated with, well, Will. Empathy. “It’s a misfiring in the areas of the brain which recognize faces, and in the amygdala, which adds emotions to those recognitions. Even those closest to her would seem like impostors.” Ever kind in how he looked at other things when he was talking about Will.

Shuddery nod.

And here, the push. Hannibal continued, “She can’t trust anything or anyone she once knew to be trustworthy. Her mental illness won’t let her.” Ever kind. Ungentle.

---

The monster, it turned out, had the tissues of a girl named Georgia Madchen. Blonde and plain, grinning at the camera in the picture they could find of her.

“I was almost relieved when I got that phone call,” Madchen’s mother admitted, all ordinary in the glossy Bureau conference room. “I thought that you had found her and she was--would be at peace.”

“You thought she might be dead?” Will interjected. The question not in the thought, but in the way that she giggled at her admission. It matched, horribly. Parent wishing child dead, child believing they already were.

“Well, that makes me sound like a horrible mother,” she smiled broadly. “I tried to be a good mom. I tried to do everything that I could.” Including death wishes.  “I just don’t want her to be in pain.”

“No one’s doubting your dedication to your daughter, Mrs. Madchen,” he broke in. Wishing them dead was a form of wishes for your child. For their future.

“What sort of symptoms did they have?” Jack lead on.

“She had seizures, hallucinations, psychotic depression. I was grateful when she was catatonic,” she said with another half-apologetic laugh.

That it would be easier when they were unconscious. Unspeaking. Will’s chest seized, absurd panicky sweat trickling at his skin. In this moment, he could cry.

“I listened to what the doctors said, did a lot of research. Learned a lot,” Mrs. Madchen continued, “But mostly what I learned is how little is actually known about mental illness. All they know, it’s rarely about finding solutions. It’s about managing expectations.”

The expectation your child would die early. Will slipped the photo of Georgia Madchen into his pocket. Let Jack wrap up the meeting, assure Mrs. Madchen they’d be in contact. Will could not shake her hand as she left, could grab for her daughter’s sloughing-off hand to hold, but could not touch her.

Jack let Will stumble his way out, duck into the thankfully empty bloodred bathroom. Someone’s idea of a design joke. Will filled the sink and plunged in.

Cold. Growing up when your mother wished you would die. That it would be easier for everyone. Promise of violence not in reprimands, but in lingering hands putting you to bed. Crushing. Lonely. Will wondered if his mother had made such a wish before she left. Something out of a fairytale. Standing over his cradle and wishing for the blessing of death. Marked over you all your days.

Will opened the door to Jack, marked, and asked, “Managing your expectations?”

“Changing my expectations,” he asserted, came up closer to Will. “You know, when Miriam Lass died , I had to come back to this office to pack up, but…” He gestured at the maps on the walls. “That got to be too overwhelming. I thought I should just leave, seeing as how I got a trainee killed. The lack of leadership on my part, that was my responsibility.”

Jack’s height on him loomed. “You didn’t kill Miriam Lass. The Chesapeake Ripper did.” The door to this room was glass.

“It didn’t feel that way to me. I pulled her out of a classroom, same way I pulled you out of an office.” He spoke like he was explaining.

Will felt a hot liquid surge of anger. Wet like humiliation. “She was a student, I am--”

“I’m still just as responsible for you as I was for her,” Jack insisted, broad tones.

“I’ll take my own responsibility.” Snarl. The only way to get things. Take.

“Well not from me you won’t. We can do it together. I broke the rules with Miriam. I encouraged her to break the rules. I’m breaking the rules with you now.”

“By letting an unstable agent off the leash to do field work?” Don’t Pet Me I’m Working.

“Special agent.”

Will knew what special meant. Schoolyard teasing. Special-unstable thing that would be a relief in dying.  Special agent meant not really an agent, special person meant, well. “Oh, special--”

“That means you represent the FBI. You still represent me.” All that professional glory.

“Have I misrepresented you, Jack?” It rushed croaked out with how his head shook. Throw himself further into humiliation, the only thing to do.

“No, no. But you have me curious.” Jack’s voice stayed even. “Why are you still here when the both of us know that this is bad for you?”

The openness felt like betrayal. “Do you want me to quit?”

“No. No, you had a chance to quit and you didn’t take it. Why not? Let me tell you what I think,” said Jack with a great craggy face, “I think the work you do here creates a sense of stability. Stability is good, Will.”

All the hallmarks of psychiatrists in that little speech. “Stability requires strong foundations, Jack. My moorings are built on sand.” Little boat on an ice shelf, drifting out to sea.

“I’m not sand. I am bedrock. When you doubt yourself, you don’t have to doubt me too.”

Paternalism. And all the things parents could be.

---

The kinds of ghosts that haunted hospital. Frightening for who they were in life.

Will felt like one of those. Ghostly bloodstains on his hands. Out of the metal coffin. Barefoot on the tiles dimly reflecting fluorescent lights. Beverly brushing her gloves all over him and at the iron scissors and telling him that he couldn’t have killed the man whose tongue was lolling out of his neck five feet away. The shadowy corridors.

The people these ghosts were in life were already frightening. Wishing them into death did no good. Might as well have let them alive.

It felt a dream. A true dream, not a hallucination. His own hot breath in the sweat-slick juncture between his cheek and shoulder, tossing beneath his sheets and dreaming of ghosts. It all melded together like collapsing glaciers, melting clocks. The impersistence of memory. The body-warm salt water he was disappearing into, little mermaid, sending his boat drifting off to sea.

The dogs whining woke him, and in the moment he half-dove half-fell out of bed he knew what ghost was trying to call him.

His breath was too loud. Too wet, the salt taste of his tears. Limbs all wrong. Georgia Madchen lay waiting for him. Monster under the bed, and he the monster in the bed.

Will trailed his hand out into life and waited for Georgia to reach back.

---

He hated this. Hated the way the skies pressed down. Hated that he could not bring himself to tell anyone. He had stood in front of Georgia’s glass chamber in the beeping hospital. Practiced admitting it to her unconscious form, the almost waxy-looking lesions on her skin that was trying to regrow its layers. Rested his hand on the glass and hated the oily smudge left.

Will swathed himself with loathing, and rewrapped the layers of the scene Abel Gideon had left. Clear the bodies and blood and back himself into the the armored transport van. Almost an ambulance. Emergency emergency.

The orderlies guarding him did not want to talk about their marriages. Probably a sign of marital strife, that. “Just kill them all, it’s easier that way,” he genially advised. This van was basically a metal box. No room to move, barely any room to sit, to be honest. He could use that. “How d’you keep those whites so clean?” He could see the blood seeping already.

He faced them. “Gentlemen. All I need is one hand free,” and he very efficiently dislocated his thumb and slipped his hand out.

They rushed at him, but he was faster. Better prepared for this little tumble. Really, what did they think they were here for, company? He managed to pin one while kicking the other’s throat up against the horrible florescent on the ceiling. A nice snap of the neck, and then he could gouge out the other one’s throat, not so orderly now.

“Oops,” he said to the blood splatter on the door. A bit late for nice aesthetics. He stood on the seat as the van stopped, and realized he had a great lunging grin on his face for the driver.

He ambled to the side of the road, dragged the three bodies. They could come to use, even though this kind of thing really was supposed to be done before killing them, but needs must. Needs.

Will opened his eyes and looked for a long time at the glistening organs tied all in blood vessels and dangling from the branches of the tree, and felt the urge to lick their candied-looking surfaces.

“His tracks head back to Baltimore,” Beverly Katz said. She watched Will.

---

The antlers did not sprout. They appeared. Whole. Having always been there.

Chilton seemed like he could hardly contain himself between sniping at Alana and grabbing at Will’s alleged new speech abilities. Will did not speak at all. Alana was resplendent in her reddish indignance. Faraway, underwater, preferable to the hospital. Darling it’s better.

The bone was dry, being mounted for so long. Spongy-absorbent when he licked it. All he had to do was open his mouth, and a prong would appear on his tongue. Would appear everywhere, sliding against his sweaty skin. Almost the promise of marrow when he sucked.

The bone could be dry and soaked through at the same time. Faraway, underwater. Every room was an antler room.

Hardly any room for Jack’s webs and maps spread on the walls. Baby agents, or full agents. Outranked Will, probably. Every line of the briefing the same. The force would not be enough to impale unless he threw himself at the antlers. All those points of contact. “...Institutionalized at the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane…Institutionalized at the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane…” Jack Crawford should over and over again. I know, Will wanted to say. I knew.

Abigail hummed a bit at the base of the hospital walls she habitually climbed over. He had never heard her do so; it would scare away the prey. Her bare feet, too naked for the frost. She laced her fingers together into a delicate saddle, boost up for Will. Momentum giving the impression of weightlessness for a short second, launched from Abigail’s hands, stupid nervous panting. Will nuzzled at the antlers he caught on and Abigail hummed, pleased.

Always having been there. Those bones and his bones. Fleshy rhythm. Under collapsing glaciers, collapsing stars.

Hannibal gave him wine and thumbed lightly at his wrists, the wrongness of the feeling enough to make Will resurface.

“What did you see?” he asked. At the point where it could be assumed Will was seeing things. More than ever.

"A thicket of antlers." Which came first, the ram, or the thicket that trapped it? G-d's design, that they sprang fully formed beside Yitzhak. “All I heard was my heart. Dim, but fast, like...footsteps fleeing into silence.”

Hannibal inclined his head. Strong profile for sure, if he would twist around. Perhaps his silence was where Will’s heartbeats fled to.

“I don’t know how to gauge who I am anymore.” God, God. Pay confession, receive penance. “I don’t feel like myself. I feel I have been gradually becoming different for a while.” It pulled out of him, this space and the inadequacy of his words. Circling back around on themselves. But oh he could speak, oh yes. “I just feel like somebody different.”

“What do you feel like?” Hannibal asked, and Will did not mock any lazy psychiatry now. It was the right prompt.

Deep breath. He felt suddenly aware of the way the tips of his eyelashes moved at the edge of his vision. Like he could blink antlers, and blood would finally stream down the corners of his skin. “I feel crazy.” First whispers.

Hannibal leaned forward a tiny amount, reaction to some kind of behavior. Smooth, placid, “And that is what you fear most.”

Will shook his head and the bones in his head and his eyes shook, no, no. “I fear not knowing who I am.” He had known, had always been, but oh the cold stabs of lightning fear worming up the edges of his neck. Ungrounded.

And. “That’s what Abel Gideon’s afraid of, isn’t he?” Dark stumbling scared. “He’s like a blind man. Somebody got inside his head and,” the image of another kind of Gideon shoving red Bibles into the nightstands, “moved all the furniture around.”

“I imagine Abel Gideon would want to find the Chesapeake Ripper to gauge who he is. And who he isn’t.” Hannibal’s face gave softness. “Will.You have me as your gauge.”

Blind men. Reba McClane appeared glowing in Will’s mind. He knew his voice would not see her again.

---

Scrambled brain. People got chunks of their brains removed to make them more compliant. Scrambled brain, trepanation, scrambled eggs. Whatever it did it wasn't compliance.

The antlers were joined by water. Glowing streams down the metal faces of the corpse drawers. Frozen bodies dug up from the frost line and melting. Trickles and splashes sounding like the water ran much deeper than it should have. Pill-bottle rattles.

He felt slick-hot. Melting body. Water should be cool.

“They’re going to kill Gideon, aren’t they?” Alana said, arm-crossed stricken. Lines dragging down the corners of her mouth. The pattern of the dress she wore today looked like the impression of a stream.

“Whatever happens. That has nothing to do with you.” As much bleary sincerity as he could put into that as possible. She shouldn’t have to feel responsibility settle on her. As if her quiet questions had done any harm.

“He can’t be completely responsible for his actions if he was subjected to an outside influence!” Alana insisted. Her lovely touch on Will’s cheek was not unhesitant. “Oh,” she said. “You feel really warm.”

Will shrugged. Scrambled-brain people. Couldn’t maintain homeostasis with that attitude.

And night again. Again? The inside of a car. Jack telling him, “I want you to wait outside.”

He nodded. Outside with snowflakes catching in his hair. Wake up someplace else. Don’t wake up.

“You look like hell, Will,” Jack was continuing, still.

“I feel like Hell,” he muttered. All the roadside lights flashing by. Circles of Hell for the pagans, the traitors. The suicides agonized into trees that bled wet when cut. And then, “Actually. No. I feel...fluid, like I’m...spilling.” Spilling forth when cut.

Jack shook his head. “You’ve got to shake it off, Will.”

Will shrugged. His shaking was too fine-grained to do anything but embed it further into his skin. Impossible to centrifuge free.

“I want you to wait outside, Will,” Jack said again. Again? They were at the observatory. Observe. Water ran down the windshield. Will waited outside.

Jack led the agents. Waiting army. Rifles clicking for Gideon. They rifled in, leaving behind a vacuum. No. Not a vacuum if it contained Will and the matter inside Will.

Snowflakes caught in Will’s hair. Weight of something in his hands.

At the edge of the forest, the feathered stag snorted at him and invited him to follow. And Will wandered.

---

The inside of another car, backseat. Later though, by the placement of the moon.

He slid in, started the car. Will leveled the gun at him. Should have been like this the first time. Prepared, lying in wait.

“I was expecting the Chesapeake Ripper,” Garret Jacob Hobbs said, impossibly. He was supposed to be dead, was dead after the first time. But something had turned the key in the ignition. If history could repeat. Will could show him, whole, to Abigail. He should shoot him dead again.

“I may be crazy,” Hobbs said conversationally, “but you look a little ill. What kind of sickness renders a mute able to speak, but leaves him so...clammy? Who’s your doctor?”

Will said what he knew how to say.

Hannibal opened his door in silence.

“I’m having a hard time thinking,” Will told the three creamy eggs at the center of Hannibal’s table. Hannibal had been here last time, knew how to staunch wounds. “I feel like I’m losing my mind, I don’t know what’s real.” There was a stutter in his words, in his voice.

Very slowly, Hannibal slid back his jacket sleeve and looked at his watch. “It’s 7:27 pm,” he said with the same malted slowness, “You’re in Baltimore, Maryland and your name is Will Graham.”

“No, I don’t care who I am!” If he could dig holes in the script with his clenched knuckles he would. “Just tell me if, if--time did reverse, if he’s real.” He kept the gun on Hobbs, there in his bloody shirt at the head of the table.

“Who do you see, Will?” Hannibal’s deliberate voice came. Hobbs’ milky eyes rolled.

“Garret Jacob Hobbs,” Will near whispered, of course, of course and he had to be. “Who do you see?” His voice broke.

Inevitable, ungentle, “I don’t see anyone.”

“No, no he’s right there!” Wil’s voice came as a whine.

“There’s no one there, Will,” and Hannibal’s voice had a note of gentling in it now. Will’s vision shook, and for a moment his gun pointed at a vacuum.

“No, no, no, you’re lying,” he chanted, turning to Hannibal’s calm face.

“We’re alone. You came here alone. Do you remember coming here?” Hannibal’s voice rose to sit above his, pressing down.

“Please don’t lie to me!” Will begged. He wasn’t sure what it came out as through every single bodily fluid that it felt like was filling his lungs. “Please please, what’s happening to me?” he tried to shriek over Hannibal. He spread his hand to his face and tried to dig all the way through to his lightning-storm brain. Hannibal’s hands overlaid his.

“Will. Can you hear me?” Hannibal said. His hands were away. Time gone again. “Repeat after me,” he instructed like someone would say something they had been repeating for a long time, “My name is Will Graham.”

He was too tired to resist the script. His body suddenly ached. Electricity still crackled behind his forehead. “My name is Will Graham.”

“Raise both of your arms, Will,” Hannibal commanded. Will did, fingers curling in emptiness. “More,” and he did. Surrender gesture, unarmed. “More. Good.” Hannibal pressed gently on the crooks of Will’s elbows and guided him down. “Although you may not feel like it, I need you to smile.”

Will wobbled for a moment, and then beamed. Like any other smile he had ever made. Hannibal smiled back at him.

“Good. It wasn’t a stroke,” Hannibal proclaimed. “Tell me the last thing you remember?”

Will panted. Head of the table empty. “Here. I was with Garret Jacob Hobbs.”

Hannibal reached for him, and for a second Will thought he would sink his fingers through and finish it. The lobotomy Will goddamn deserved. But Hannibal’s hand just sat there. “You have a fever, Will. You were hallucinating. You thought time had reversed, that he was here in the room with you.”

“I saw him,” Will muttered. He had, he had, he hadn’t and then he had.

“He is a delusion.” Hannibal got up from the table. “You killed Garret Jacob Hobbs once, you can find a way to kill him again.”

“Where are you…?”

“Abel Gideon is still at large. I’m worried about Alana.” Hannibal briskly put on his coat.

“Alana,” Will murmured. The lights reflected on the table spun. Dark things descending onto her shoulders, Alana.

“No no no, Will, you’re in no state to go anywhere but the hospital.” His hands pressed Will down again. “I’ll call Jack and tell him where you are.” Hannibal swept out of the room.

On the table was the gun Will must have stolen from Jack. In his water-fugue. It felt all wide open, easy.

Will took it and left.

The feathered stag waited outside. Let Will close enough to feel its breath condensing, smell its musk. He reached his fingers out, did not know if the feathers would feel downy-soft or cut like metal. He reached harder.

Like that, all outstretched, it lead him to Gideon, and Alana’s office glowing like a ship on the stormy sea.

Will shuffled up to Gideon, listened to him say casually, “I don’t know if I will ever be myself again. I don’t know if I’ve got any ‘self’ left over. I spent so long thinking I was him, it’s gotten really hard to remember who I was when I wasn’t him.”

“Who are you now?” Will asked. In this moment, this puddle of light on snow, they could have been wise. Could have seen infinitely through time.

“Now I’m you,” Gideon said with Hobbs’ face. “You and I...it’s hard to be with another person when you can’t get out of your own head.”

“I want out.” It was what he was supposed to say. Wanted out of this prickling pressure for once. Maybe the gaps in time were just his brain’s way of trying to get out.

“Well, we all want things we can’t have,” Gideon kind of cringe-snorted. “But if I kill her like he would have, maybe I can understand him better.” Those milky eyes. Seeing. “I wonder if you would finally understand what you’ve become.”

Will shot Gideon down as he cocked his head. Finally let his own bones collapse, down, down, together. He felt every second, lying there in the snow.

---

“...he said, ‘because I can’t make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through as punishment’...”

He jerked away from the voice, and in his left arm, something pulled out and blood and clear fluid began to pool under gauze.

“Will!” It was Alana, sitting hunched in a chair above him. She put down the open book she was holding. “You’re in the hospital. They found you unconscious in the snow, with a fever of 105. What were you doing?” Her voice sounded so gentle.

“Gideon?” Will whispered.

Alana’s face grew more severe. “They arrested him. He has a gunshot wound to the arm, but he’s fine. Chilton’s fine. So’s Freddie Lounds.” She crossed in on herself. “You stole Jack’s gun, Will. You know there’s going to be an investigation when you get out of here.”

Will felt the breath passing through his respiratory tract. The formations it must have caught on to whistle in his head like that. If they found out people like him could find guns. “Could you, ah.” He gestured to where saline continued to pitifully leak from the catheter.

“I’m not supposed to be your doctor here, Will. I’ll call a nurse to reinsert your IV.” She pulled her heels back on and slipped out, smiled with her eyes half closed. Will did not try to ask if she would come back with the nurse.

---

No one in the hospital had tried to stop him yet, so Will bit down on the fear that rose whenever he stepped into the halls without permission. He imagined it bursting, tarry, between his molars.

He brought the IV stand with him. Pulling along the things under his skin.

Georgia raised her head when Will came in, propped herself up on the arm that didn’t have incredible bands of scarring all the way down to her wrist. He wanted to apologize for it, for taking her skin and doing G-d knew what with it.

“It’s just me. Will. You look better,” was what he said instead. Through a machine, what they needed to speak. Again. It all felt like he was machines again.

“Do I look alive?” Georgia asked, reacting to him smoothly. Must have been used to that, the adjusting of socializing to the sudden identity of the person speaking to her. Her voice creaked like old things, the rasps of oxygen like something that was meant to exist in it.

He studied her dark eyebrows and pale hair, her broad protruding mouth. “You look pretty.”

She giggled, shy for the moment. Girlish. Not Mall of America, cornfield a pretty girl, but the smile and flicking gaze of one. “Must be all the oxygen.”

“Did anyone else come to visit?” Will mumbled. (“If it weren’t for Bev, there is no way he would know how to talk to human women,” he had heard Brian Zeller say from across the lab once.)

“Just my mom,” Georgia said against her arm. “Didn’t stay long. She doesn’t really know what to do when I’m lucid. Guess being almost normal sometimes makes it harder when I’m not.”

Will’s stomach clenched. The things she must have overheard from her fugues. Prayers for children.

“They say what’s wrong with you?” Georgia smiled kind of crookedly with her wide eyes.

“No, just the fever.” Will let himself flick his gaze down for shyness, or an adjacent emotion. “They’re trying to find out what else.”

Georgia shook her head. “They won’t find anything. They’ll keep looking, keep taking tests, keep giving diagnoses, bad meds.” Cassandra had to be mad in order to be Cassandra. “But they won’t find out what’s wrong. They’ll just know that you’re wrong.” She was almost wry. Hard to be anything else. “I hope you have good insurance.”

“I do too.” He offered her little smiles that kept disappearing when he didn’t think about them. The cycle of testing and diagnoses and meds he was fated for. Like cosmic justice for having escaped it early as a child.

“They’re going to give me shock treatment. They call it ‘electroconvulsive therapy.’ Shock treatment sounds nicer,” Georgia said, with infinite delicacy. “They say I might remember what I did. But I don’t want to remember”

Will played his hands along where the window met the rest of the chamber. Convulsions. “You know what you did, Georgia.”

“But I don’t remember it. It feels like a horrible dream where I killed my friend.”

The opposite of Will. He remembered all his dreams. The sensation sparking in his skin and the weight of his bones. Yet he could not assign knowledge to them. Could not shape them into knowing. “You dream about killing anyone else?”

“I dream you killed that doctor,” she said, scrunched the lines around her eyes, “but I couldn’t see your face.”

Dreams with the weight of knowledge. Cassandra had to be mad in order to be Cassandra.

---

Hannibal came into his room. Maybe had coordinated with Alana. Clinking porcelain bowls.

“Silkie chicken in a broth,” he announced. “A black-boned bird prized in China for its medicinal value since the seventh century. With wolfberries, ginseng, ginger, star anise, and red dates.”

Will’s head felt warm and stupid among the stiff hospital blankets. “You made me chicken soup?”

Hannibal smiled. “Yes.” He came over, helped Will out of the bed. Guided him by the elbow to the little table. Hannibal, Will, and Will’s IV stand. He was beyond caring, really, that sweat rubbed on his thighs and wormed under the hem of his underwear. Let him eat soup pantsless.

He sat. Hannibal set the table.

It could have been another hallucination. Trying to make his mouth work enough to swallow soup. Skin on the bird bumpy and black and then gray, like ink in various dilutions. Ink-bird. Chicken instead of egg this time, for this strange meal in a room that didn’t belong to him with Hannibal. It had been eggs before Hobbs, was eggs in the pan Abigail would have eaten that morning.

Hannibal placed three cups, and poured tea into two. One for the ghosts and prophets. “The nurses tell me you’ve been wandering, Will.” Reproach for what he continued to do. For when he wandered from Hannibal.

So the staff had been noting the behaviors he had after all. “I was awake,” and he snorted at that idea, “and wandering with good intentions.” Wandering straight to hell, his words sounded like. He felt like hell.

“She’s my support group,” Will quipped tiredly. He watched Hannibal’s hands take the third cup and fit it back into place on top of the Thermos.

“And I hope you’re hers,” Hannibal allowed. “Nothing more isolating than mental illness.”

Will settled back in his chair. He had been isolated and ill before. It wasn’t this kind of crazy. “The hallucinations, the loss of time, the sleepwalking. Could that all just have been the fever?”

“Fever can be a symptom of dementia.” Hannibal leaned over his soup bowl. “Dementia can be a symptom of many things happening in your body or mind that you can no longer ignore, Will.”

Here for reproach and soup. “Does Jack know?”

“That this could be more than a fever? No, I haven’t told him.”

That this could be more than a fever. “Shouldn’t you?” The purpose of doctors, to tell things while you slept.

“Not until we know what it is,” Hannibal assured him through the unknown.” What we must do now is continue to monitor and support your recovery. This young woman you were visiting. How’s her recovery?”

Will slurped at the tea. It was leafy, and, he imagined, left a patch of tastebuds scorched white on his tongue. Scraping pain. “I don’t think she wants to recover.”

---

He had wandered with good intentions, and here the hell had crept in for someone else.

Georgia’s burnt body looked like it would crumble if he touched it. His body felt like it would crumble if anyone touched it.

Jack helped drag his IV stand through the door. Awkward, limping. Will shouldn’t have been there, marked by his robe and slippers. Beverly’s face was closed off from where she looked at something in the corner. She had been looking with Will in attic corners for Georgia too.

“Hospital speculates that it was a short circuit that ignited the fire.” Jack gestured at the blackened chamber, blackened body.

“Horrible way to die,” Will muttered. Cold running in his muscles, looking at Georgia who was so lonely.

“Two cubic yards of oxygen suddenly became two cubic yards of fire,” Price sighed. He snapped more photographs.

“Is it possible she set the fire herself? She was facing two murder charges,” Jack demanded to the room at large. It should have tasted ashier.

Zeller plucked a lacy black melted something from the oxygen chamber and warily held it up to them. “She wasn’t wearing her grounding bracelet, which prevents the buildup of static electricity.”

Grounding. Grounding exercises. “She wasn’t suicidal, Jack.” Will shook his head, stuttered over it. “She was...sick.” A kind of sickness. Disappearing, self-destruction, that wasn’t sickness. They could overlap. Distort, black soaring form. “I was here. I talked to her.”

“Why did you speak to her?” Jack’s reproof, again, that there was nobody to stop Will from saying the things he did. Dangers of wandering. Zeller looked startled, straight at him.

The obvious answer, anger and humiliation in one. “Because I knew how she felt.”

Jack shook his head, gathered his team. “You’ve got to rein it in, Will. Doing these kinds of things in murder cases, it isn’t going to look good for you. You still represent me.” He marched out of the door. Could leave, could wander.

Beverly stopped by Will, snapped the blue rubber on her hands a little. “You knew how she felt. Because you felt the same way, huh?” She let Will keep his eyes on her cheekbones, not quite at her own eyes. “You sure it wasn’t suicidal, then?” She rested her gloved hands on his shoulders.

Blunt. Blunt enough to make yellow sweetness dislodge itself and bloom, dropping, in Will’s chest. He couldn’t make his voice come. Squeezed her shoulders back.

“Let’s go, Katz!” Jack’s voice rang from the hallway.

“I’m glad you talked to her,” she whispered, and stepped away.

---

He couldn’t call his dogs anymore. The gestures, signs, he had for each of them hung out of his memory’s reach. Black. Upper corner. “Leo! Buster! Winston!” he tried. Sounds they never knew, wouldn’t respond to. “Tss, tss,” and they whined, laid down their heads.

Will perched. Edge of the bed. Still moving like he had to be careful of the IV. Like he had to be careful of fever. Like he stole himself out of the hospital, something that was not his. The dogs  lolled on the floor, and he wished to get up out of bed and sink his hands into the fishing lures on the tabled across the room. Blood on the things he had forgotten how to make. Weeks and months ago.

He couldn’t make himself move, and he laid down. Stupid tear in the chimney he had never patched up.

Numbers on the clock melted by. Dry, sideways, not down.

Georgia-not-Georgia tugged on his arm. Moved like she was missing frames in the animation of herself, moved like frames of something else had been inserted. “See?” Will buckled his knees. Rolled under the bed to look for her. She waited until he came out to lead him out to his yard.

“See?” Barefoot in the snow. Will looked down, and he was the same as her. “See?”

Antlers pierced Georgia’s chest, and she writhed. Tucked her chin down, into the points slicked with her own gore. The fire was not lit. It appeared.

She bloomed into the feathered stag, the antlers shedding fire stirring a wind that stung Will’s skin.

---

Blood fell on all of them. If they would reach up and trace their fingers the trails through the black. Constellations in the waiting.

A fine spray spread across Jack’s face, and he could not see. “Will, I understand. You’re looking for an explanation, any explanation that makes all of this okay.”

“No no no no. Listen!” Scrubbed the back of his hand through the tacky smears on his jaw. “Georgia didn’t kill herself. She fought. She was fighting the wrongs alone, and was misunderstood, and we can’t! We can’t misunderstand her too!”

Hazy. They were looking at him like he was still in bed at the hospital. Cracks in the ceiling, had to come from somewhere, something coming and shaking loose stones. Georgia’s hair preserved like amber in the flint that sparked her death in the thing that was supposed to heal her. Blood fell on them. Blood welled in Will’s cheek where he was biting raw. He grabbed open a drawer, Sutcliffe’s split face.

“Look, whoever killed Sutcliffe wanted to kill him how Georgia killed her friend, but not exactly how, correct?” Look. See?

“So she went further the second time,” Jack soothed. “Serial killers often do that,” and no, no it wasn’t an escalation in that direction of brutality. Like clock numbers sliding sideways into a stiff blur, not down into liquid.

Antlers through her chest. “She was copied. Like whoever killed Cassie Boyle and Marissa Schuur wanted to copy Hobbs. But not exactly.” Just out of reach, blood fractals for the finding. Connection.

“Wait a minute.” Jack, always trying to rein the pace, his broad, serious expression. “Are you saying that Dr. Sutcliffe was killed by Garret Jacob Hobbs’ copycat?”

The dream. Fine prophet. “So was Georgia. Because he thinks she saw his face. It’s the same person.”

Fine identity. Something clawing after all of them. Blood spores.

---

Abigail was. So quiet. Fists curled under her chin, room full of plants. Like if they could practice having hushed conversations in spaces full of people. If their hurt parts blended into the larger world.

“You told me that killing someone was the ugliest thing in the world,” she said.

Will looked at her, river eyes, voice always like the quietest possible deluges, girl left with pale fear in a psych facility, and said, “One of the ugliest.”

“I finally get it, she continued, nothing for his correction, and that was fine. “I thought there was something wrong with me because I didn’t feel ugly when I killed Nick Boyle. I felt good.” She hissed out a breath. “That’s why it was so easy to lie about it.”

He dragged his gaze down, to the corners of himself, the pieces of flesh that kept existing. “Like you didn’t do anything wrong.” Like she hadn’t felt anything wrong.

Abigail so sharp, her face above her fists. “Feel like you’d done something wrong when you killed my dad?” Doing her watery best to project only curiosity. Succeeding.

“I felt terrified.” Yellow air, body flailing back. Blood already on his collar and Abigail bleeding out below. That he could. That he’d done something. A gun he wasn’t supposed to have had, even then. “And then I felt powerful.”

Abigail’s mouth shaped itself, round freckled face. Bitter satisfaction. “It felt good...to get it to end, to stop it all.” To stop, to stop. Self-destruct, destroy others. Will’s skull nodded. “I thought I got away from him.” The unfairness of never stopping.

“Oh,” Will sighed, “Neither of us got away.”

She shook her head, lashes fluttering. “I wish I’d killed him.” If Will had burst in that morning and found a girl kneeling over a slashed-throat murderer. If she had turned in his arms and sunken her knife in his belly. “For killing my mom, for killing all those girls, for making me--” She looked away.

“For making you what, Abigail?” Her confessional, her manipulation. He wanted to give himself over to her manipulation, always.

“Part of it.” She flicked her gaze around the room. “Part of any of it. This wasn’t supposed to be my life.”

Wasn’t supposed to be her life. Wasn’t supposed to be trapped and afraid and felt life bleeding out from animals bigger than deer. She was--upended. The opposite of Will, born to this, the painful light, the death work. Born to it, he could do this all day. Was meant to. He had taken her into this world.

She curled. “It feels like my dad is still out there.”

“In a way, he is.” Every kill. Echoing in every mundane action, every seeing.

“You mean the copycat,” Abigail said, and that too.

Will tried to smile. Tried to make parts of his face do things, twitching mouth and brow and eyes. “I think I can catch him.” He folded his hands over hers. “But I’m going to need your help.”

Shuddery nod. Shudders from both of them. He felt the fine bones in her hands, the way she exhaled. He could not let go.

---

The inside of a plane. Concern. Weaving dodging, the outline of Abigail ahead of him.

Minnesota forest animals could melt in.

Gray, black, red crows. Shrikes. Black cabin, antlers to melt into.

Stalk, lure, wind the string, mind the sharp parts. Mind the sharp parts.

Screaming. Abigail screaming and him pressing his palms against his slick head as if it could burst and gray, and gray, and waking up from his fated dreams to the inside of an empty airplane in Virginia.

No Abigail. No bone piercing his stomach. No Hannibal to staunch the wound.

---

Stalk or lure. Woods insects chirping. Circular, circular. Rifle in his hands. Was this the forest he had lost Abigail in?

In the distance, the feathered stag dipped its head delicately. It was not eating.

He shot. Spooked. Bounded away. Towards the light, both of them towards the pale light that glowed always somewhere ahead. Promise of a clearing.

“Please,” Will said, or didn’t say. Whip of black branches at his face. He edged closer, and it stood on two legs. Human, humanoid, about as humanoid as Will. It might have been eating.

In a clearing, not the promised clearing, but a clearing, it snorted and vanished. Patches of snow stained with blood. Tree bark stained with blood. Slick under his fingers. His mouth. Black in the moonlight.

Circular. It reappeared, pressed velvet fingers to his mouth. Tapetum lucidum.

Will shifted awake. The slick on his face was sweat. “Oh,” he moaned. Dogs barking around. His own bed with his own scent. Pain-not-quite-pain coiling in his muscles.

Get out of bed. Vision rush, up, sideways. Where all the blood was going. Earth crusted his feet, his hands. What graves he had crawled out of last night. What grace.

His vision kept shaking. Floor, wall, doorway. Out to the kitchen and he could not tell if he was walking. Eyes on the bowl of bruised fruit on the counter. Faucet digging against the bones of his wrist.

The water was the kind of cold that should have hurt. Face, tongue, nerves in his teeth. Stinging in the back of his nose down his throat. Taste of metal.

Aspirin and cold cold water down his throat--caught on something. Flutters of his esophagus, stretchy-sharp pain of something kicking inside. Water, more water, in his cupped hands splashing it on his face. Slapping.

He stood there, and in coppery retches and dilated muscles, birthed a perfect ear out of his throat.

---

“I don’t. I don’t know,” was what he said to Hannibal, and Hannibal knew to come.

Wind. Roaring at the edges, no comfort on his skin now. His arms wrapped around his chest, his clamping thighs, like the pressure sinking down, down, down could ground him. Rings of dirt on his feet, winter sky beyond the porch. He hadn’t looked in the sink again. The mess of cartilage and mucus would stay or disappear. Be revealed under Hannibal’s eye only.

Hannibal approaching and wind. Like the midnight stag had blossomed into a flame that stirred hot wind, only Hannibal did not need fire. He fit in every coming storm.

Steps of the narrative. Hannibal’s tie showed as a stripe of dull red down his front. “I went to Minnesota. I took Abigail.” He was shivering, shivered harder at the realization, made his muscles push the words past shaky skin. Abigail’s shaky solemnity climbing the stairs to the cabin. “We went to Minnesota. And she didn’t come back with me.”

“Show me.” Up, unfolded limbs. Brief war of gravity, like his joints and tendons would unravel before he could be lifted by Hannibal’s hands. To the evidence his body had made on his little boat.

Hannibal sat him on the couch. Plucked a blanket from Will bed and wrapped it around him. Tending the wounded before going to finish the battle. The warmth felt good.  “I don’t remember going to bed last night. I must have.” Continue the story, narrative without memory. Hannibal’s figure advancing to Will’s sink. “Maybe--Maybe I got up and--”

It must have been there. The lump still in the sink. In profile, Hannibal’s throat working. “Will!” Sternly. To interrupt where Will was spilling everywhere. “When was the last time you saw Abigail?”

“Yesterday. At her father’s cabin.” It trembled, felt dragged out of him. The sting in all his soft tissues. “I had an episode. She ran away.” To Hannibal’s face, in a whisper, “I hallucinated that I killed her. But it wasn’t real, I know it wasn’t real.”

All the shadows in the house spilled in planes on Hannibal. He came slowly. Will, still pulling the warm blanket tight. Poor man’s straitjacket. Hannibal crouched down to Will. Sighed. Rubbed his face. Distress signals. “Will, we have to call Jack.” Will worked the muscles of his face, around his eye sockets. He had seen. “You can’t run from this. It will only make it worse.”

Everything in Hannibal’s face like he had been indulging Will thus far. It burned.

“Get dressed,” Hannibal prompted after a moment. Gentle. He led Will to the drawers just across the room. Rummaged around for pants and shirt and handed them to him. Will flung off his cold, sweat-stained pajamas, stared heavy at Hannibal as he changed in front of him. Shadows in the house. Hannibal cocked his head, and let him. Shrugged Will into a coat a

The FBI cars showed up in waves. Little boat overturned. Jack coming up, wary and weary. Hannibal still behind Will. “What are we going to find in Minnesota, Will?”

His lungs felt flat. Capacity lost. “I don’t know.” Winter, winter, winter.

“Go ahead and process him,” Jack flatly yelled at his team. The army of FBI come for this. Two men grab his shoulders, march him out of the driveway. Orderly, orderlies, fulfillment of every sick premonition. Jingle of dogs leashed behind, that Will had shushed into stillness.

Beverly Katz looked heartbroken at him as she brushed on the driveway.

They bundled him into the back of a police car. Did not restrain him yet. Left him there, to go account his house and his dogs and the lump of bloody flesh in his sink.

A whine. Winston, wagging up at Will. Slipped away somehow for the moment. Leash and tail in the dirt.

---

They undressed him anyway in the lab. Layers of evidence. The little wounds on his skin looked dark in the lights set at the floor. Glow from underneath his feet. Price and Zeller narrated for the camera, stripped his things off him. If Will could help by giving them the sample of skin he had bitten from the inside of his cheek.

Up close, Beverly picked and plucked and brushed remains from his body. Standing too close for the worst reasons. Blood fell from beneath his nails. Little crystalline shards. Would crunch like sugar if he rolled them against his teeth.

Beverly threw down her metal tool. “I can’t do the silent treatment,” she told him, practiced, determined. “I can’t pretend I don’t know you and I can’t pretend we both don’t know what we’re finding under your nails.” The patch of skin from his cheek sat in the middle of his tongue now. Felt wetness when he pressed it up against the roof of his mouth, almost stickiness between his teeth. “You called me once because you didn’t trust yourself to know what was real.” Beverly all insistence, leaning in. “This blood is real, Will.”

“I know,” was all he could manage.

“I wanted to be certain about you, but you can’t even be certain about yourself.” She was sternness, no more naked heartbreak. “If you weren’t certain with yourself, you shouldn’t have been here. This is the FBI.”

His breath felt full of salt mist like he wanted to cry. “I thought--I thought I would get better.” Didn’t know how to pull himself out of the worse.

---

Alana came for him in the interrogation room. They had dressed him before her arrival, at least.  The shame of nakedness, and the brand of an orange jumpsuit. It had him stiff. Hands folded in his lap.

She sat at the table so carefully. Raw beautiful face. Red petals running down her dress.

“Hi.” Will mirrored her seat.

“Hi,” she sighed. Eyes cast down.

Her kindness in writing every emotion she meant large on her face for him, gone. Only blank color in her cheeks. “You look flushed. Have you been yelling?” he asked.

Alana quirked her mouth minutely. Shiny black gaze. “Screaming is more like it.” It sat in the lower part of her voice.

“I could use a good scream,” Will blurted. He didn’t laugh it. The sheer feeling of being across a table from another person, evaluation, made his chest rise too fast. Alana would know what he hyperventilated for, assure Jack. He hoped. The fear fluttered, wedged his head up stiff. Like tilting up his jaw for eye contact. “I can feel one perched beneath my chin.”

“Let it out.” Alana’s eyes practically glowed.

“I can’t. I’’m afraid that if I started…” He was hitting her with this, he realized. Vague anger knocking against his ribs. “...I wouldn’t be able to stop. Guess you dodged a bullet with me.”

“I don’t feel like I dodged a bullet,” she whispered, blinking huge. Emotions glowing as sharp, but for her generous reasons. Rich raw Alana, looking so lost. “I feel wounded.” She sighed. Let it sit, licking her lips and snuffling. And then, “We’ll have to do some tests. They’ll be the standard psychopathology tests.”

“I suppose you’re going to ask me to draw a clock while you’re at it.” Futile little grounding works. For someone given the psychopathy tests.

“Did Hannibal ask you to draw a clock?” Her voice not quite right for the psychiatrist’s assessment. This was what doctors were for, to tell each other these things. So they’d never have to ask him.

Will searched the corners of the ceiling. The one-way mirror. “He said it was an exercise to...ground me in the present moment. A handle on reality.” He almost laughed at that. Time sliding, and his hands had stopped working long ago.

Alana looked steady at him now. Something she could latch on. “Draw me a clock.”

He got a pen and paper. Not thought in danger of violence with small objects yet, then. Circle for the frame of the clock, pressing too hard for the numbers. Tremors at this flat thing. Smearing the ink. “You see? It’s just a normal clock.” Standard Will Graham levels of shakiness.

She looked at it for a very long time. Tilted the paper. “This isn’t a normal clock, Will. There are signs of...serious executive functioning and spatial neglect.” Alana was growing more solid by the second. “I’ve been in touch with animal services. I’ll go pick up your dogs in a couple hours. I’ll take them home with me and then I’ll take care of them until...whenever.” Still believing that Will could make it out of this.

“Whenever could be a long time from now.” He flicked his eyes at the clock he’d drawn. Wrong crooked things he couldn’t see. Terror descending again through the fog to sit on his chest.

“I’ll take care of them until then,” Alana promised, and he knew she meant the soft things.

---

He stayed. Empty room. Someone probably watching him on the other side. Watching what the psychopath would do. He learned how his breath sounded when it was echoing in a chamber formed by his arms and his forehead and a shiny FBI table. Animal. Condensing on his face and neck. He worked to keep the flesh and blood he tore off himself in his mouth, hidden.

Animal. Echoing. Clicking. It thrummed in his chest. Will rose, slowly moved to the mirror. Stalking. All his edges felt sharp. Shadows coalesced on silver where his reflection used to shine, and he reached out for the horned lure.

“You’re sick, Will.” Jack’s voice snapped him back to his chair. Alana’s chair? He had not placed his back to the door before. His skin felt hot.

“I wasn’t consistent in taking my antibiotics.” Times the pills had frightened him. Times he had slipped some into his pocket to take when he could, and had thrown them back up again without food to settle in. “The fever came back.”

Jack paced behind him. Little human rustles. “We’re going to move you to a secure medical ward. We’re going to get to the bottom of whatever it is that is wrong with you and we are going to make sure you get whatever kind of treatment you need.”

Secure. Locked. “And then what?” Will tried to sneer, but the sneering did not work here. “The Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane? Have Chilton fumbling around in my head?” Brain scramble. Wrist deep in his frontal lobe.

Rustling up beside him now. “I desperately want to be optimistic about an alternative to what every fiber of the evidence is telling me you’ve done,” Jack intoned. “We found your fishing lures.”

Fibers of evidence. Beverly brushing through his things. “They--They were right by the door, yeah.”

Jack’s face was growing stonier and stonier. Pressed his knuckles on the table next to Will. “We found human remains amongst the material you made them from. The remains of Cassie Boyle, Marissa Schuur, Donald Sutcliffe, and Georgia Madchen.”

“No, no, no,” Will muttered. Flesh wound in the bits of metal and feathers. From posed corpses. From Georgia, so much flesh lost already, smiling at him from the other side of glass. Impossible even in fever-haze. Not his hands. “I wasn’t sick when Cassie Boyle was murdered. I wasn’t sick when Marissa Schuur was murdered.”

“That’s not an argument you want to be making right now. Not with me.” Jack’s face was set all stone and shadow, and this is what they were seeing him as after all.

“Because then I’d be a psychopath.”

Jack blinked evenly. “My greatest fear is that we’ll learn that you knew what you were doing the whole time.”

Always, always, always. The fear had always been his consciousness. Like Mrs. Budish, like Mrs. Madchen. It’d be easier if he was very sick. It’s be easier. To be the blank, pitiable monster doll. Only doing as his nature demanded. Unbearable for him to know, to think, to remember. Death wishes for his own good.

The person who had tainted his lures, who was doing this, knew how to use that. Knew how the image of him would break. How he’d break. It was someone being very clever.

Will looked through Jack, his proclamation of, “Will Graham, you’re under arrest for murder.” Remained silent. Someone was doing this to him. He looked through Jack, and could not see any shadowed hands in the mirror. Keep looking.

Two silent agents cuffed his hands to his belt. Tension of all his disparate parts being tethered. Led him out, Jack overseeing. He got pushed into an ambulance. Transport of the sick. Orderly, orderlies guarding him. Buzzing, heavier and heavier. Like flies settling on him. Choking. Black crunch.

Will wrenched his thumb out of its socket and threw himself at the guard.

---

The gun snatched, the weight of the guards thrown bleeding on the highway, the ambulance crashed sick. Running, running, letting his body heave. It led him to the place he had always woken up in.

Curled up in Hannibal’s loft, he could breathe.

Time--some time--passed before Hannibal raise his head from a book. “Hello, Will. How are you feeling?”

The weight of one of his hands atop the other atop his knees. “Self-aware.” And then, “Do you believe I killed Abigail?” Just to hear it.

“I believe it is possible, if not nearly indisputable from how you discovered her ear.” How Hannibal had discovered her ear.

The ear in his sink. Long-confiscated by the FBI, probably. It was wrong. The image was right, but the place it came from was wrong. “If it was just Abigail I would have believed.” Girl he had met, both of them bloodspattered. “I would have believed that I got so far inside Hobbs’ head that I couldn’t get out.” That she couldn’t get out.

“But it wasn’t just Abigail.” Quiet sibilants.

“I know who I am.” The things he had taken back from the fever. From his life. Child screaming at how the world hurt.

“No,” Hannibal said. Impossibly simple. “All sense of who you are has been distorted by your illness. You know who you are in this moment. That’s not always the case, Will.”

“I didn’t kill any of them.” It came out a slur. “And,” he shaped carefully, “someone is making sure that no one believes me.”

Hannibal considered him for a moment, then wheeled the ladder to the loft. “Come,” he said. “If we are to prove you didn’t commit these murders, perhaps we should consider how you could have.”

Will wobbled down the ladder. Skin scrapings.

“If you are this killer,” Hannibal said, seated across from Will, “then that identity runs through these events like a thread through pearls. Cassie Boyle would have been your first victim. You said she told you everything you needed about Hobbs.”

He grabbed the string of pearls. Cassie Boyle, there, was mounted on inky antlers. Marked by birds. Her flesh was black and gleamed when he did not look directly at it. Not a pearlescent shine. Shining like gasoline.

“What did you think when you first met Marissa Schuur? How much like Abigail she was?”

Hair and skin and the antlers that had broken her flesh all one color, spread like the Christ. Bloodless. Abigail’s only friend.

“Dr. Sutcliffe was murdered how you imagined murdering a woman only days before.”

Tongue lolling, coat and tie. Accoutrements of his office in the same black shell. Might crack at a touch, as the skin over his throat had.

“You catch these killers by getting into their heads, but you also allow them into your own. I’m trying to help you, Will.”

And one more. Whirring into being behind Hannibal. Not Georgia. The bony black stag creature. Closer. Alive.

Gasp back into himself like the drowned resuscitating. Fixed on Hannibal alone, no creatures. “Then take me to Minnesota. I want to see where Abigail died.”

---

The Hobbs house loomed dark. Nothing like the morning that lived in his dreams. What he entered again and again. They took down the police tape. Will felt a flash of the weight of Abigail, the scent of her in his arms as he slit her throat on a sunny innocuous morning. The memory that lived in this house. He held her, and then was held.

Hannibal, following him “Are we gonna reenact the crime?” Will muttered. Hannibal kept following as they neared the kitchen. Urgency, to get there in enough time to save her. Reluctance, air-slow, to see.

An abstract mass of dry blood was on the floor.

“It’s as Abigail was supposed to die in this kitchen,” Hannibal commented, looking at the edges of it.

Will swallowed. “Her throat was cut. Blood…” and he gestured at how it came out of his neck. Pointed jerkily at what smeared filmy white curtains. “Arterial spray.”

“They never found her body.”

“Just,” Will tugged at his ear. Cold spread over the misfiring nerves on his chest.

“If you were in Garret Jacob Hobbs’ frame of mind when you killed her, they may never find her,” Hannibal said, and Will wanted to punch himself in the chest. When, when.

“Because I honored every part of her?” He stepped closer to the blood on the floor. Almost every part. An ear and the blood lost from her arteries, it would have been.

Hannibal so calm beside him. Every inevitability of therapy. “Perhaps you didn’t come here looking for a killer. Perhaps you came here to find yourself. You killed a man in this very room.”

Dance of impact. Scattering of flesh. Again, and again, in dreams and waking. He saw it. “I stared at Hobbs.” Again. The words he had been practicing in his dreams too. Stalking the forest. “And the space opposite me assumed the shape of a man filled with dark and swarming flies.” Hobbs. Himself. Sleep like the dead, wake up like the dead. “Then I scattered them.”

“At a time when other men fear their isolation, yours has become understandable to you.” Hannibal moved as he spoke. Left shoulder.

Become, become. The things that he has always understood. Hannibal so close. “I’m as alone as you are,” Will breathed.

In this moment, Will could smell him. Hannibal smelled vividly, vividly human. “If you followed the urges you kept down for so long, cultivated them as the inspirations they are, you would have become someone other than yourself.” Will closed his eyes against the words, the pictures. Himself. Against the red glow of the veins painted across his eyelids, he could feel the direction of movement. Drag of his limbs, again, again after so long. Collapsing organs. Tight throat. The pull of the river.

Will drew the gun.

The blankness of Hannibal’s face, no comfort anymore against the pressures of the world. His open mouth. His shiny shiny dark eyes. Like flies’ carapaces. “Are you a killer, Will? You. Right now. This man standing in front of me. Is that who you are?”

River. River. One-handed, Will signed, shaking. Body feeling suspended in fluid, as it always had. “You were curious. Someone like me, someone who thinks like me. What I would do. Who I would become. But I am who I have always been. Before you taught me a voice. The scales...have just fallen from my eyes. I can see you now.” His breath, everything, caught in his throat, and Hannibal had nothing from what he said, and he signed.

Something pulled at Hannibal’s mouth. Calm, calm. Pale fingers. Out and laid warm on Will’s mouth.

His skin screamed, and he pulled the trigger to burning pain running down his side.

Jack. Jack appearing with a gun and he must have fired it and Hannibal still whole and calm and everything contracting. Fallen just away from Abigail's blood.

“See? See?” he might have tried to sign, fingers to his cheek. Or only his hands doing their best to tear his skin apart.

---

They restrained him in the hospital. Self-injurious behavior, even in his sleep.

In half-dream, a woman held a short vigil and spoke to him. Unfamiliar voice. “Sick your whole life, huh?. And that’s your story.” She sighed, something low and particulate in her speech, her breath. “You might be better at it than I’ll ever be, even now.”

Will tried to shift, then she was gone.

---

“Hello, Will,” Hannibal Lecter said, smiling and beautiful through the bars.

Will stared at the ground, and said nothing in response.