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i.
Willa Graham has always felt like a boat adrift on a stormy sea, searching for the shore. She has always been fractionally unstable, her skull spilling with nightmares she can’t explain. She has always felt a little neurotic. She has always felt intimately acquainted with the ways to break a body, with the iron-bitter taste of blood on her tongue, with the sweet-musk scent of death in her nose. She has always known she was different, pulled toward things she knows she shouldn’t want.
Her father sends her to a therapist when she is fifteen, and she makes the mistake of telling the old man the truth. She tells him that she wants to go by Will and stop wearing dresses. She tells him that she has nightmares after reading the newspaper or watching true crime shows—not because she is scared anything like that will ever happen to her but because even then she can imagine herself in murderous shoes. And then she tells him about Molly Foster, the cute brunette in her biology class who somehow manages to see past Will’s skein of awkwardness, with whom Will is hopelessly, stupidly in love.
But her therapist is a southern gentleman, old-fashioned to the core. He never bothered reading the DSM past the 1968 edition, and it shows. He listens dutifully to every word she says, but he doesn’t make the slightest effort to understand. Then he tells her father everything in a twisted speech full of words that aren’t synonyms. He tells him about Will’s perversions, and he tells him Molly Foster is responsible for Will’s neuroses.
Two days later her father moves them two towns up the river, without discussion.
Will has never felt more adrift.
---
When they unpack into their new apartment, Will finds a stack of newspaper clippings dated fourteen years prior. They all center on a single crime, the brutal rape and strangulation of one Wilhelmina Graham.
She skims through the articles one by one, and she can see the scene projected against a screen inside her mind. Her name is Hank Jones, and she is six feet tall. She loiters outside the liquor store, guzzling cheap whiskey from a brown paper bag. The night is warm, the air crackling with an oncoming storm. She feels the spark in her bones when she sees a woman in a red coat emerge from the store, carrying a bag of groceries; a pack of diapers peeks over the top. She watches the woman walk away, stares at her ass. She’s warm with drink and lust, her blood crackling with the oncoming storm. She drops her empty bottle; glass shatters in the dirt. She adjusts her crotch, and then she stalks her prey.
Will comes back to herself in a jolt of cold horror. She’s panting like she just ran a marathon. She feels dizzy with self-loathing, guilt. She is soaked with sweat and the memory of her mother’s blood. She doesn’t think she’ll ever get clean.
She should drop the clippings, or burn them, but she can’t. It’s like they’re glued to her fingers. She flips through them, assaulted by headlines, unimaginative variations on a brutal theme. At the bottom of the stack, there’s an obituary.
Will’s father never talks about his wife, and Will has no other family to fill in the long-standing gaps. Nothing but this faded scrap of newspaper to tell her that her mother went by Mina, grew up in New Orleans, was twenty-eight when she died. There’s a photo, too, and it’s chilling because she looks so much like Will. Her curls are longer, her nose is smaller, and she actually knows how to smile. She looks happy, holding a pink blanket bundle, standing in front of a house Will has never seen.
Will feels as if she has stolen someone else’s skin. She shoves the clippings down the garbage disposal. It doesn’t help.
So Will sits in the shower for two hours, but she still doesn’t feel clean.
---
Will does date Molly, eventually. It’s only two towns, after all, and Will doesn’t exactly excel at making new friends. So each weekend they drive to the halfway point between their homes. It’s a barren patch of country road. They park in the dirt and lie down on a nest of blankets in the bed of Will’s truck. They stare up at the night sky, bursting with bright white stars. The Milky Way cuts across like a girdle, holding the heavens in place.
Will is three weeks from seventeen. As much as she loves kissing Molly, loves the hint of bubblegum on her tongue, she loves the quiet moments just as much. As much as she loves the way their bodies slot together, the way their breasts fit like pieces of a puzzle, she thinks there might be more intimacy in this. In lying in the bed of a pickup truck on a lazy summer night, holding hands, and whispering about their place in the sprawl.
They’re stupidly in love, or at least Will is. She’s so young, so naïve; still foolish enough to think the stretch of infinity above them means they have a shot at forever.
Then Will tells Molly she wants to be a cop, and Molly leaves. Heartbroken, she locks herself in her room for three days and cries until her tear ducts are desert-dry.
Will decides she’s really better off alone.
---
So Will becomes a cop. She’s good at it, at first, until the first time she has to pull her gun. Her hands are shaking. She can’t pull the trigger. There’s nothing she can do but watch when he partner is shot.
She goes to the FBI, then, thinking they’ll let her profile in peace. She fails the psych screenings, but someone must see something in her because they ask her to teach.
So she packs up her limited wardrobe, fishing gear, and three dogs and moves to Wolf Trap, Virginia. She lives in the middle of nowhere, forty miles from Quantico. Her lecture hall has stadium seating, and if she dims the lights before each slideshow, she can almost forget her students are there.
She learns not to need anything but silence and solitude.
---
ii.
Everything changes when Will meets Alana Bloom.
The first time she sees her, Will gets dizzy. Three-inch heels, pencil skirt, low-cut blouse. Too much cleavage, and lips that look all too kissable.
It’s a stupid wine and cheese reception for the visiting faculty. Will wouldn’t be there at all, except she was curtly informed that afternoon, as she tried to duck out, that her attendance was mandatory. Collegiate courtesy, or some such alliterative bullshit. So she goes, grabs a disposable plastic wine glass filled to the rim with a dark cab sav, and stands by the wall. She keeps her head down, studying the mind-numblingly dull pattern of the carpet.
“You’re Willa Graham, aren’t you?”
“Will,” Will corrects, thinking that no one has called her Willa since high school. She forces her eyes up, trains them on a point just to the left of the woman’s head, and that’s when the dizziness sets in.
“Will,” she repeats warmly. “I’m Alana Bloom, from Georgetown. Pleasure to meet you.”
Will nods, feeling uncomfortable, not that that’s anything new. She shoves her hands in pockets, cursing the social rituals she doesn’t understand. The stupid necessity of painting on a smile, of faking sincerity, of forcing contact between dead eyes.
And that’s when she realizes Alana made no move to shake her hand.
---
Will dreams about Alana that night—and every night for the next week. Some of her dreams are innocent, just flashes of their conversation about psychology and profiles and teaching. Some of them are less innocent, and those are vivid. In graphic detail she imagines unzipping Alana’s skirt, sticking a hand between her legs, kissing every part of her.
She assumes it’s just lust, that she’ll get over it in short order.
But a few days after the reception, a few days after a few nights of undressing Alana in her sleep, Will finds an email from Alana in her inbox. It’s nothing earth shattering, just a follow-up to their discussion of a profile Will wrote last month. Will’s heart is pounding as she taps out a reply.
They exchange seventeen emails over the course of the next week. Will grins like an idiot each time she seems Alana’s name in her inbox.
It doesn’t take long before she realizes she has a crush—on a girl who didn’t try to touch her, no less. It’s hopeless, of course, and Will knows it. The red skirt screams femme fatale, not lesbian femme. Alana is the girl she wants but can’t have, the girl it would undo her to chase.
After the twenty-eighth email, they venture from strictly professional territory to the less stable ground of their personal lives. There’s a line in the sand, of course, of how far they go. They don’t discuss relationships or dating. But they talk about their hobbies and favorite books. Will sends pictures of her pack of dogs; Alana sends a picture of her cat, a fluffy white Persian with a flat pink nose.
Will leans quickly that Alana is no femme fatale. There’s nothing dangerous about her but her wit, her charm, and the stupid way she has of making Will want her without even trying. She’s confident, self-assured, and stable—so many things Will has never been.
And Will wants her in this low-down, visceral way that terrifies her. She has nothing to compare it to—wanting Molly was nothing like this—nothing but the way killers lust for their victims’ blood.
Will has never felt so terrified.
---
Another month. Another faculty reception. Another plastic wine glass.
The only difference is Will didn’t require any threats to show up today. Hell, she even ironed her shirt and put on a tie.
Everything goes according to plan—at first, at least. Alana smiles when she sees her. She makes excuses to the group she’s been conversing with and joins Will by the cheese table.
Will manages to keep up a conversation with minimal awkwardness. She finds that if she adjusts her glasses just so, the frames block Alana’s eyes while maintaining the illusion of eye contact. Instead, Will focuses on Alana’s lips.
They chat about the article Alana wrote on Abel Gideon. He’s an interesting criminal, to be sure, but not really Will’s area. There was never any doubt he killed his wife and her family; he never denied any of it.
“But he never explained why he did it,” Alana comments delicately around a mouthful of brie.
“Does it matter?” Will asks, daring to make eye contact, just for a moment. “He did it. He’s behind bars—or glass, I guess. Does it really make a difference why?” It’s a stupid question, really, because she knows better.
Apparently Alana does too because her eyes call bullshit. “We psychoanalyze people for a living, Will. Of course it matters. Sometimes the reason why matters more than the thing itself.”
“I know,” Will mutters, looking away quickly. She does know. She just wishes she didn’t. She wishes the why were irrelevant, that she didn’t have to feel a killer’s design to see it. “I just.” She shakes her head. She’s nowhere near ready to admit any of this, to let Alana see the madness that lurks just beneath her civil skin. Besides, her plan is veering off course. “Look. Any chance I could interest you in a drink? Somewhere away from here, I mean, preferably with real china.”
“Sure,” Alana replies with an easy smile, so bright Will thinks it could blind her. “Just let me tell Bev and the guys.”
---
It turns out, by, “just let me tell Bev and the guys,” Alana means, “just let me go invite Bev and the guys to come along.”
Will plasters on a polite smile and swallows her disappointment. She should have known it was too much to hope, that Alana might actually be interested in her. It’s fine. She thinks she could use a friend like Alana.
So the five of them head to a dive bar full of FBI trainees. They get a booth in the back corner. Alana makes introductions, but Will doesn’t feel comfortable doing much more than nodding at Bev, Brian, and Jimmy. It turns out not to matter because Brian and Jimmy spend the whole evening debating the merits of the latest super hero flick that Will hasn’t seen, and Bev spiritedly referees.
So Will and Alana continue their conversation, alone in the crowd.
“There’s something I’ve wanted to ask you, but I don’t know if I should,” Alana says once she starts on her second pint. If there’s anything Will has learned, it’s that Alana drinks beer like a pro.
Will just nurses her whiskey, feeling inferior. Nothing new, there. She shrugs with a calm she doesn’t feel. “You can ask me.” Every question always comes back to her empathy, to her social disorders, to the great clusterfuck that is her brain. She should have known it was only a matter of time before Alana’s psychiatrist side started showing.
“Do you miss the field?”
Will blinks in surprise.
“You said you used to be a cop,” Alana adds quickly, “and I know you wanted to be an agent. It must be different, teaching.”
“I don’t miss the field, exactly,” Will answers. It’s a delicate line, this. She doesn’t miss the weight of a gun in her hand; she doesn’t miss the weight of killers in her dreams. “I miss feeling useful.” She misses knowing that her gift—or curse or whatever the fuck it is—is being put to good use, to catch killers. Because if Will does good, she won’t do bad; if she catches killers, maybe she won’t become one.
“Useful how?” Alana leans forward, just an inch.
“I’m very good at what I do.”
Then Alana laughs, and Will can’t help but smile.
There’s something foreign about this, something terrifying, but also something liberating. When Will talks, Alana listens; she listens like she cares.
---
It doesn’t compute.
At social functions, Alana seeks out her company. They have easy conversations—or as easy as any conversation can be, when Will is doubly crippled by a lifetime of neuroses and an impossible crush.
But Alana shies away from any situation that would leave them alone together. She makes sure they’re always in a group. She always invites Bev or Brian or Jimmy, or any combination of the three, and they always go out in public. Bars, restaurants, and once a movie theater, but never anything private. No one’s house or apartment. Not even their own classrooms. It’s stupid, but Will can’t help but think she’d really like to meet Alana’s cat.
It’s clear that Alana is keeping her at arm’s length, but Will doesn’t know why. She has theories, of course—she always has theories—but she has no way of being certain which are true. She knows she makes Alana uncomfortable, but she isn’t sure why. She makes most people uncomfortable, after all, between the persistent lack of eye contact, the occasional echopraxia, and the crippling empathy disorder. As a psychiatrist, Alana is used to these things. They don’t unnerve her; on the contrary, she seems curious, more than anything else. Maybe that’s the problem. Rational Alana, ever the scientist, can’t stop observing. Maybe she thinks she’s protecting Will from herself, her own instincts, the scrutiny of the psychiatric community.
Or maybe it’s simpler than that. Maybe it’s the proverbial elephant in the equation. Will plus Alana doesn’t equal romance if Alana’s straight. And Will knows it’s obvious—written on her face in neon lettering—that she’s enamored with Alana. So it’s possible, maybe even probable, that that’s why Alana avoids her.
Even if Alana were interested in women, Will probably wouldn’t be her type. Hell, Will probably wouldn’t be Alana’s type even if “Will” were short for “William.” What with her penchant for plaid and picking up strays, she wouldn’t exactly call herself a catch. She can only picture Alana with someone elegant and graceful—a man, few years older, his hair just starting to gray. Maybe a European, with just the hint of an accent, enough to give him an aura of mystery. Another psychiatrist, probably, who has season tickets to the opera, the orchestra, the ballet. The type who wears three-piece suits with pocket squares seven days a week and can tell where a grape was grown just from a sip of the wine.
Will isn’t any of that, and she never will be.
But this is a hopeless line of thought because Alana isn’t interested in her, not as a girlfriend, not as a real friend. Friendly colleague is the best she can hope for, and so she nurses her impossible crush with cheap whiskey on solitary nights.
---
iii.
The day Jack Crawford pulls Will out of her classroom he sets in motion a course of events that will touch every facet of her life. He is the butterfly, flapping his wings without thought to the hurricane he is causing.
Within a few short days, her carefully ordered world is falling apart.
She brings home a new dog and names him Winston. She realizes two days later that Winston is, in fact, a girl. She doesn’t bother to change the name.
She meets Hannibal Lecter, who seems determined to tear down her forts. He pokes and prods and pushes. He wants to get under her skin, but all her skin does these days is crawl. He brings her breakfast, tells her they’re very much alike, and stands beside her as they hunt a monster.
She catches a serial killer, pulls the trigger on a gun, finds herself splattered in someone else’s blood. She tries to save Abigail Hobbs’s life, but her hands are already bloody.
She dreams of a black stag, of mounting girls on antlers, of eating their lungs.
She finally finds herself alone in a room with Alana, but she can’t bring herself to feel anything like happy because it’s Abigail’s hospital room, and Will hasn’t slept in three days.
There’s a hurricane coming, but Will can’t predict its course.
---
Alana shows up at her house first thing in the morning, when Will is wearing nothing but a sweat-stained t-shirt and boyshorts. Alana tells her Abigail is awake, but she’s wearing her psychiatrist mask.
So they sit in Will’s kitchen, drinking coffee. The dogs are locked in the other room. Will has covered up with a terrycloth robe, but she still feels exposed. Giddy. Like a teenager with a crush. What’s all the more mortifying is Will doesn’t remember feeling like this when she actually was a teenager and could justify it with the hormonal haze of puberty. It was never like this with Molly, never anything like this forest fire blazing in her heart. What she feels for Alana is dangerous, uncontrollable.
“I like you as a buffer,” Will says, much too quickly, knowing how it sounds. She’d like Alana as so much more than a buffer. She should really stop hoping for something that’s never gong to happen.
But Alana just smiles at her, and Will thinks this must be what drowning feels like.
It’s so easy to be pulled under, easier yet to be torn asunder.
---
“Do you have many friends, Will?” Hannibal asks. Although his tone is careful, the question comes out of nowhere.
It’s late fall now, and Will is beginning to crumble. They’ve established that her family consists of a hodgepodge pack of dogs, that she feels more maternal than she should toward Abigail Hobbs, and that Jack isn’t her friend. Hannibal rarely asks her questions beyond the thematic scope of her current case. There’s no case on now, certainly nothing to do with friendship. Will isn’t even sure why she’s here, except out of habit. And now Hannibal is asking her an irrelevant personal question she really doesn’t want to answer because she knows Hannibal already knows that Will doesn’t have many friends. Or any, really.
So instead of answering, Will asks, “Why?”
“Your mind is a boat adrift in an ocean you cannot navigate. You need a support system.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be my paddle?”
“I am, but I think we both know that’s not enough.” Hannibal leans forward, just so. “You need more than a paddle, Will.”
Will blinks. “Are you propositioning me?”
“Of course not,” Hannibal replies mildly, his eyes shuttered. He sits back, crosses his legs, and clasps his hands in his lap. “Remember, I asked about friends.”
“Right.”
“Well?”
“There’s Alana,” Will admits, averting her gaze. There’s something absurd about this, about telling her this man who isn’t her therapist—or her friend, for all his protests—about the girl she likes. “We’ve been friends for a while now, but.” She shakes her head, tries, “Saying Alana is just my friend is like saying I didn’t kill Hobbs, I just disabled him. Wishful thinking. I might be crazy, but even I’m not capable of deluding myself that thoroughly.”
“You have feelings for Alana,” Hannibal says in his impenetrable, neutral psychiatrist voice. It’s the only voice he ever uses to say things they both already know.
Will nods.
“Why don’t you tell me about that?”
So Will tells him.
---
Sometimes Will wonders if her first therapist was right. Maybe the reason she avoids men is more psychological than physical. Although she doesn’t really buy into gender stereotypes—can’t, considering she herself errs on the side of butch—she can’t help thinking there’s some truth in the one about violence. She associates brutality with masculinity. It requires power, force, and in this brand of patriarchy, that is the domain of men. Maybe there’s a reason so few serial killers are women.
Will thinks she knows better than to fall into the trap of this sort of thinking. After all, she wouldn’t be so afraid of herself if men truly had a monopoly on murder, but some stereotypes grow from a seed of truth. She doesn’t know if it’s the testosterone or the enculturation that spurs male aggression—probably a little bit of both. This is hopelessly academic, this rationalizing. The truth is simple: Will doesn’t trust men. It isn’t misandry so much as conditioning. It’s no surprise she has learned this fear, not when every times she shuts her eyes and becomes a man she lusts for blood. It’s no wonder she shies away from rough hands and smooth chests, can’t stand the feel of stubble on her skin.
It makes sense that she wants Alana, who is all curves, soft skin, wrap dresses, conditioned curls, and kissable lipstick. Alana is strong and fierce, her fury as sharp as any knife, but the power she embodies is distinctly feminine. And make no mistake, that power is what attracts Will to her. Will wants someone strong, someone stronger than her, someone safe and sane and stable; she wants a port in the storm of her existence. It might be easier to find with a man, but Will doesn’t want a man.
She wants Alana. With Alana, she knows she wouldn’t have to choose between safety and fear. Alana could be her safe harbor, and Will could finally put down her compass.
---
“It makes sense, doesn’t it?” Will asks Hannibal at their next session. “She thinks too much. I feel too much. We’re a perfect match.”
It’s a cheap trick, this, trying to get Hannibal to validate her crush. Hannibal seems to think so, too. His lower lip curls in displeasure, the way it does when he eats anything he hasn’t prepared himself. “Will,” he says, not unkindly but undeniably a chastisement. “What did I tell you during our last session?”
“You said a lot things,” Will replies, stubborn. She crosses her arms over her chest. She’s more than willing to play dumb.
But playing dumb with Hannibal Lecter never gets her very far.
“I believe I told you that you needed stable friendships in your life,” Hannibal continues. His countenance is calm; his voice is light and breezy. It’s a wonder that someone so cold can evoke the image of a sunny, windless day, a sailboat on still green water. “Do you believe it would be healthy to pursue a romantic relationship at this time?”
“Of course not,” Will bites. “Not that it matters. Alana doesn’t want me.”
“And yet you continue to indulge this fantasy.”
“What do you expect me to do? Just walk away?”
“If that is what you need to do,” Hannibal answers, perfectly neutral, as if he truly has no opinion on the matter, “then yes.”
“Alana is my friend. You said I needed friends. I think you’re sending mixed signals here, doctor.”
“A friendship, like any living organism, must be healthy; otherwise, it ceases to be beneficial. The unrequited love you feel for Alana is a parasite. It is devouring you as surely as the ghost of Garrett Jacob Hobbs.”
Will feels winded, as if she has just run a race and come in last. “She’s my friend,” she protests weakly. I love her, she thinks.
Hannibal leans forward, eyes diamond hard and just as bright. “Walk away.”
---
Will has never been very good at following directions she doesn’t like.
So when she hears a wounded animal, she calls Alana. They walk across melting snow in their winter wear, and it’s almost easy to pretend this is a date. So easy she jokes about it. “Did you think it was a date?”
“Honestly it never crossed my mind.”
“Why not?” she asks without thinking. It’s a stupid question with an obvious answer. Of course Will knows why not. Alana hasn’t given any indication that she’s at all interested in women. Will hates herself for being so transparent.
But Alana doesn’t say she only dates men or could never imagine Will as anything more than a friend. Instead she says, “You just don’t seem like you date.”
“Oh. Too broken to date?” Will asks, affecting hurt, unsure if there’s something real behind it.
“You’re not broken,” Alana replies firmly.
Then, finally, when she catches the force of Alana’s conviction, it’s a lighthouse in the fog, the Fresnel lens just a dot of bright white hope. It’s faint and distant, but it’s there, a beacon that all might not be lost.
Finally, Will starts to think her dreams might not be so impossible after all.
--
It’s the pity that does it.
They’re standing in the middle of a pile of rubble, a gaping hole staring back at them as Will unfurls the story of the sound she heard in her chimney. When she’s done composing excuses, Will turns to meet Alana’s eyes. They’re brimming over with emotion, dark and deep, and she feels it all as if it were her own. Concern, sympathy, affection, and pity.
It’s the pity that breaks her open, and as she falls apart, she’s reckless. She kisses Alana. She kisses her with desperation, with fear. She kisses her like she’s wanted to kiss her since the day they met. She kisses her as if she is drowning and this kiss is her life vest.
It’s perfect, better than she ever hoped it could be, because Alana kisses back. It’s perfect—for five seconds—and then Alana pulls away. She tents their foreheads together, whispering apologies.
Will hears the shape but not the details.
---
“I kissed Alana Bloom,” she admits to Hannibal, crashing into his house without hesitation. She feels undone, unwound, unhinged. She’s such a mess, a red giant unspooling as it dies. She’s lost her equilibrium, and she doesn’t know how to reel herself back in.
She tells Hannibal the truth, or most of the truth. Hannibal knows most of it already, and what she doesn’t say, he can deduce from the fabric of her evasions.
Then he asks her why she chose that seemingly random moment on this strange evening to give in to these old desires. He asks as if he can already see the answer written in the subtle flush of her skin.
He looks at her so damn calmly, thoroughly unsurprised by the revelation of her recklessness. But there’s a shade of something new in his eyes as they sparkle in the cool fluorescent light of his kitchen. It’s a step past curiosity, she thinks. He has a theory as to the method behind her recklessness, and he wants her to prove him right. This is his design.
Will blinks. This is why she doesn’t look at eyes. The pull is strong enough without searching for the bait. But the look has already reeled her in. She admits, “I feel unstable.”
A smile flickers through Hannibal’s eyes, but it’s gone even before she blinks.
---
“Do you feel unstable?” Alana asks just a few days later.
They’re standing in her classroom, and Will doesn’t know what to do. This should be a revelation. The impossible has just come true. Against all odds, Alana has feelings for her. And now she’s sending mixed signals.
Maybe Hannibal was right. Maybe she should have stayed away from Alana. It would have been easier to walk away if she’d never taken that last step into Alana’s arms.
Will forces her thoughts back to the question at hand, wishing she could lie even though she has just promised to be honest. So as much as she would like to pretend that the headaches and hallucinations aren’t splintering her brain, she won’t lie.
It’s all she can do to nod.
Alana nods back, sympathetic but impassive. “And until that changes, I can only be your friend.”
They hug, and it’s the saddest hug Will has ever felt.
---
Weeks pass, and the storm rolls in.
Nothing changes, not really, except that Will is battered by it. Her foundations are unstable. She’s losing herself, drowning in something she can’t explain, while her mind is flooding with Hobbs.
She doesn’t know when she’s awake anymore. The dreams and the hallucinations are seamless, now, fluid. They run together, the stag, the blood, and the bullets.
She takes too much aspirin, but the headaches won’t stop.
She starts losing time, jumping from crime scenes to home to Hannibal’s office in the blink of an eye.
She learns Abigail is a killer. She chooses to sacrifice her morals to protect her. It’s easier than she would have thought; her compass was already broken.
Hannibal takes her for an MRI, but there’s nothing wrong. There’s nothing wrong but for the part where Will is falling apart.
She has never felt more alone, adrift, insane. Jack assures her he’s bedrock, and Bev proves she’s not a killer, but Will has never felt farther away. Alana promised to be her friend, but she’s nowhere to be found.
It’s all Will can do to reach out at midnight in Wolf Trap, to brush her fingertips against Georgia Madchen’s, to whisper, “You are not alone.”
It’s more prayer than promise.
---
Will is tearing herself apart, trying to be stable. If she were stable, she tells herself, she could have Alana. But even those words feel like a ruse these days. She keeps trying to use Alana as a lighthouse, an anchor, a map to find her way home. But none of her metaphors are working. Even the promise of Alana isn’t enough.
She doesn’t just feel unstable anymore. She feels crazy.
“I fear not knowing who I am,” Will admits to Hannibal. The ebb and flow of their conversation is like the roar of a tidal wave in her ears. Her thoughts rise up, and she gets lost in the undertow.
“Will,” Hannibal says, pulling her back. “You have me as your gauge.”
Will is shaking when she looks at him. She remembers when Hannibal promised to be her paddle, to lead her out of dark places. He has been here for her, even when everyone else has disappeared. Alana can’t be her lighthouse when Will is so far from shore. Hannibal is here with her, on the boat. Her gauge.
She nods, and Hannibal smiles.
---
Abel Gideon is loose, and he doesn’t know who he is. Alana tried to tell him once, like countless others, and that means there’s a target on her back.
Will is coming loose, too, slipping out of her own skin and into someone else’s. She’s becoming someone else; she doesn’t know who.
She’s slipping. Or maybe she has already slipped. It’s hard to tell when only one word sticks in her head, but she still doesn’t know what kind of crazy she is.
So she waits outside Alana’s classroom, like some kind of lovesick puppy, until the trainees pour out.
And then Alana says she’d like to curl up in front of a space heater with Will’s dogs, and fuck. She flirts back, as if she knows how. They’ve had this conversation too many times for it feel so raw.
Alana comes close. She smells like lavender and spring, even this deep in winter. She lays her hand against Will’s cheek, feels the blooming fever raging beneath Will’s skin. “You’re really warm.”
“I tend to run hot.”
They stand side by side, close enough to feel each other’s heat, as they discuss what the Ripper will do, but Will has never felt farther away. She thinks she should have walked away from Alana when she had the chance. Now she’s sick with fear and something else, and she doesn’t know who she is.
Maybe she should call Hannibal.
---
Will is spilling out of her skin.
She tried to tell Hannibal, but his promise to be her gauge is starting to feel empty.
She tries to tell Jack, but he just tells her she needs to learn how to shrug it off, as if it were that easy.
She tries to tell Hannibal, again, but she has a seizure while holding a gun, and his hands are on her, but they don’t hold her together. When she comes to, he tells her Alana is in danger, and she loses all thought of self-preservation.
So she tries to tell the ghost of Garrett Jacob Hobbs, as they stand side by side, staring through Alana’s window. She’s fuzzy with fever, her boots half buried in the snow, her heart fast but fading. He’s been talking for a while now, but she hasn’t caught more than an impression of the words. “Who are you now?” she asks.
“Now,” Hobbs tells her, a lilt in his voice, “I’m you. We’re both here, looking at her. Just those kind of people that shouldn’t be in a relationship. You and I are already committed. It’s hard to be with another person when you can’t get out of your own head.”
“I want to get out.” A fervent whisper; her truest prayer.
“Yeah, well, we all want things that we can’t have. But if I kill her, like he would kill her, maybe I could understand him better. I wonder if then you would finally understand what you’ve become.”
Will shivers, convulsively. She’s spilling out of her skin, but she’s filling with something else, too. Something hot like rage, liquid and molten. She sees deep red fire, the burning stag, before her eyes.
Hannibal told her, didn’t he, that she needed to kill him again. So she shoots him, again, to exorcise the ghost.
---
When Will wakes in a hospital bed, Alana is slumped in a chair beside her, holding her hand.
She’s still blurry with fever, madness, an unknown disease. She doesn’t know if this is real or drug-induced wish fulfillment. She’s too tired to care.
Will shuts her eyes and lets herself pretend until morning that she has found solid ground at last.
---
In the morning, Alana is gone. Maybe she was never more than a lost girl’s mirage.
Hannibal sits in her place. His lips are flat, but there’s a smile in his eyes, full of teeth. “Good morning, Will.”