rhymeswithcannibal | After the fall

After the fall

“Love, which absolves no one beloved from loving,
seized me so strongly with his charm that,
as you see, it has not left me yet.

Love brought us to one death.”
― Dante Alighieri, Inferno

The path to the cliff's edge has been neither straight nor strait; there have been setbacks, diversions, even moments when one or both of them could have been lost. Jack could have killed Will in Garret Jacob Hobbs' kitchen; Tobias Budge or Randall Tier or Frances Dolarhyde could have killed him. Jack could have killed Hannibal in his own kitchen, or in Florence, or even executed him on his knees in front of Will's house. Tobias Budge, Matthew Brown, or Mason Verger could have ended the story of Hannibal Lecter save for the afterword written as Hannibal's secrets slowly unraveled posthumously.

All of those almost deaths are nothing compared to the endings Hannibal and Will have wrought or nearly wrought upon one another time and again.

In this life, this world, this universe, every missed ending has been another step down the path that has led them to this precipice with the Dragon pouring out the last of his life on one side and the unforgiving Atlantic on the other.

Caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.

He can feel Will's muscles tighten with intent, and in the microseconds between intent and action, he has to make a decision as to which final ending he will accept.

He cannot accept the ending that sends Will back out into the world without him.

The water doesn't wrap them in the warm comfort of the womb, but rather strikes them like a jealous lover's fist, determined to drive them apart and keep them individually for itself. After everything they have been through to reach their "final" tipping point, Hannibal isn't willing to just give Will over to the water.

Even his memory can't parse the chaos of the next minutes? Hours? The chaos and desperate fight cover all considerations of time in favor of survival not just for himself but for Will.

What he knows, without a doubt, is that Will fought just as hard for survival after hitting the water as Hannibal did. He knows as well that they wouldn't have survived without one another, and that is as it should be. They have died together and they are reborn together.

That is the thought in his mind as consciousness flees him and their rocky piece of shoreline. Not even the strobing red and blue lights' approach can keep him present once his hand finds Will's cold hand.

They will either wake or they will not, but in either case, in the end, neither of them simply gave up.

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At the edge of the world, where moonlight bathed the body of the Dragon, and blood ran black in her light, the scales had fallen from his eyes and what they had done, together, was more heartrendingly beautiful than any of Hannibal's staged crime scenes. They had moved together as wolves, as two bodies of one mind and taken down the most dangerous of prey. Something of Hannibal echoed in him and he knew that there was no going back, there was no returning to the life he had known.

It had always been leading to this. The chrysalis had finally opened and what emerged belonged with Hannibal. But neither of them belonged in this world.

His fingers tightened in Hannibal's shirt, telegraphing his intention to bring them both over. Hannibal could object, could step away, could fight, but it would shatter this glass-fragile moment between them, this spiritual marriage witnessed by moonlight and consummated in the blood that still felt warm against their skin.

When they hit the water, it was absolution. Their sins washed clean and they moved together, fought together, in gasping breath, and failing limb. Before he lost consciousness, Will recognized Jack Crawford standing on the shore, expression set. One blink, then another and it was all blissfully black.

He's in a different cell this time, on a different floor. They can't be kept together, that would be too great a mercy. And apart, Jack smells blood in the water. He's just left, again. They hadn't known about that property holding of Hannibal's, they'd followed the tracking device in the police car and spread out to search the area. How many more little bolt holes did Hannibal own? How many more pies did he have his fingers in? Will, do you know? Will. Look at me. We can make this easier on you. I pushed too far. This isn't your fault Will, not really. I should never have come for you again. I see that now. Just work with me, Will, and this can all go away.

Time passes strangely, sometimes he's in the stream, sometimes he is fully immersed in the cold gray surroundings, behind the bars. For now, he's on the shore of the river, walking through tall grass. There's so much more than the stream and he has all the time in the world now.

Jack doesn't look good; he's aged entr'acte and the sudden weight of years on his shoulders has done him no favors. Funny how he didn't appreciate Hannibal's observation of that truth.

Funny to Hannibal, at least.

Something needs to be humorous, because the dark little cell under the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane has little to recommend it, and Alana's gratitude for her wife and son has expired.

He expects that eventually Jack, or Alana on Jack's behalf, will offer him some of his old luxuries in return for exposure. Expose the boltholes, expose the contingency plans, expose himself.

But they won't ask him to expose Will. There are no inducements they can offer for Hannibal to do that and they all know it.

There's no such thing as silence here, no music but the shouts and mutterings of the other men deemed worthy of the dungeon. He closes his eyes and leaves the hospital behind, stepping first into the Norman Chapel and from there into the cliff house, where he can see Francis' body still sprawled on the pavers outside the window.

Beyond that, where he would expect to see the drop down to the ocean, instead he sees trees, and beyond them the glint of running water.

He stands at the window silently observing that incongruous patch of scenery that he had never built into his memory palace. He had meant to find his last coherent memories of Will here, and instead he has found a mystery.

When he ventures out of the house, he has a glass of wine in one hand to sip from as he walks through Francis' blood and steps over his body on the way to investigate this fascinating, and potentially disturbing anomaly within his own mind.

Leaves crackle under his feet, and the briny scent of the ocean is replaced by that of loam and fresh water. He follows the sound of water and stops at the river's edge to sip his wine and watch vague shapes flow by under the water's surface.

Which of Dante's rivers is this? And why does he not remember the inspiration for this new scenery in his mind palace?

The movement in his peripheral vision provides his answer. Not Acheron or the Styx, then. He watches Will pick his way through the grass, lips faintly pursed while he considers whether this spectre brings pain or understanding.

The answer, he's certain as he takes a step toward this created memory of Will, is both.

On the opposite bank of the river than the one Will had exited on, far back across a field sat his house. It was only a shell now, the warmth of life gone from it. He relinquished the memory of his pack of strays, the way the dim light in the window on a moonless night was a beacon to this place of warmth and safety. Now it was just the cold memory of empty rooms and a hearth full of ash.

He turned away, back towards his goal, the other side of the field. With naught but time on his hands, suddenly there was interest in what lay beyond this bank, through the trees and the tall grass. He stretched an arm out, letting the tips of his fingers trail over thick strands that waved slowly with the passage of his body through them.

Through the trees, he recognized the familiar angles and slopes of a midcentury modern house, knew the feel of the cold concrete patio under his hand, the way the crumbling edge of the cliffside backyard felt under foot. His brow furrowed, this wasn't his doing. Neither was the shape following the curve of the river towards him. "Hannibal?"

He'd had purposeful company before, Abigail, when he looked back on the things he'd wished he could have taught her, when she was not alive, but alive. This specter, this shadow, Will had not conjured. He knew this and knew that his mind had never felt so clear.

He'd seen Will wandering the halls of his memory palace before. He'd tried putting Will behind closed doors where he could be locked away to be remembered with the same fond distance as that with which he remembered Mischa. Unlike Mischa, Will had refused to be contained.

But he'd never tried to initiate contact.

Hannibal's steps don't falter, but his thoughts (within thoughts within thoughts) race to find an explanation for this novelty. He'd had three years to long for Will; if Will hadn't appeared before, it isn't just longing manifesting him now.

Hannibal's curiosity drives his steps. "Which Will are you, hm?"

The connection they forged in Francis' blood is the only explanation, but only a superficial one. Which door has opened to release this Will into the halls of his mind?

Both of Will's eyebrows raised at that question. "Existentialism and self examination as a greeting. Certainly I have conjured a very authentic simulacrum." He made to circle this Hannibal shade, cataloguing details- the glass of wine, the set of his shoulders, had he created a version of Hannibal as Hannibal would see himself?

Will had dreamed of him before, of watching the Ravenstag pull him apart, drawn and quartered. But this was different, this was a Hannibal at Will's mercy, a Hannibal that Will had crafted.

Curiosity saw him reaching out, slowly, gently, at first, then in a sharp motion, attempted to slap the glass of wine out of shade Hannibal's hand. Just to see how he would react within the cage of Will's mind.

This version of Hannibal lacks a scar on his cheekbone; his cell in the BSHCI had lacked convenient mirrors to let him study his changed features and integrate them into his sense of self. He is aware of it, but it never quite entered the realm of "me" to the point that his internal escapist manifests it the way he does the details of the wine in his hand or the comfortably casual clothes he'd worn when they killed Francis.

Will's response is puzzling enough to leave him silently studying him as he approaches. Is there some message he is trying to send to himself? Some subconscious recognition crawling out of an oubliette with ill tidings?

Is it any wonder that he doesn't react until Will knocks the glass from his hand to spill out on the leaves and dirt beneath their feet?

He turns his eyes up to Will, tilting his head and frowning faintly while he teases at this puzzle and an answer that can be nothing but purest wish fulfillment. "That is the second time that I have been unable to finish a glass of that wine. Francis had an excuse, what is yours?"

"Curiosity," Will said, tilting his head. He'd noted the lack of a scar on Hannibal's face and that had been- well he wasn't sure. Will remembered Hannibal's face distinctly and the scar was a part of it what he conjured in the mind's eye of his mind's eye. He toed at the broken glass amidst the leaves and dirt. "About what you would do. About why you are here."

Had it been loneliness? His mind conjuring the one companion he and blurred borders with in a way that was more intimate than any physical interacts Will ever had. No. He had never been lonely in that stream. Abigail having been there was... wish fulfillment. Domination? Control over this version of Hannibal in a way that Will could not have achieved in the waking world? That wasn't entirely it, either.

"Why are you here? Why now?" Will asked, as though any version of Hannibal would give him an easy answer.

"I'm rather curious about why I'm here as well." It's a simple admission when there are no observers but himself. "I have never unintentionally built an annex before. Why have I done that?"

He watches Will nudging the shards of glass with that oh so familiar expression on his face, then turns away to regard the flowing water instead. Will is familiar, but this setting, this stream is not. The answer to this mystery will be found in that which is unfamiliar; Will is not unfamiliar.

"This is broader than I had imagined when you spoke of your stream." The observation is much more for himself than for Will, given that the distinction is an illusion he's spun for an audience of one. "What am I telling myself?"

"Are you really thinking for yourself," Will wondered aloud, not really directing the question to Hannibal. Had he created a thought form with enough detail that it could question its own surroundings? Its own mind? Or is this simply how Will would expect Hannibal to react in a situation such as this.

No. Actually, this isn't what he would have expected. A self conjured Hannibal ought to be regarding him any other way but questioning Will's existence. Perhaps his mind wanted Hannibal confused, for once at Will's mercy. Or perhaps he simply wanted the exchange of words that he had missed during their separation. No matter how he'd shoved down and locked away tight between heavy mental doors those things about Hannibal he had missed, he knew they were always there. Specters that he could ignore but not entirely exorcise.

"You are telling yourself that this is a world of your own making," Will said. "That you are the one crafting it to form, and yet you are not in control."

"I am no fractured creature like our late, unlamented Francis; it follows that I must be in control," Hannibal mused as he dropped into a squat to get a better look at some of the figures sliding past in the water. Even in his mind, he wouldn't just wade into the water to look without proper attire, and there would be time for that kind of investigation. He had nothing but time, memory, and this curious new landscape.

He dipped his fingers in the stream and flicked shining drops of water out to create ripples like raindrops.

"What message would you have for me? What do you need to reveal?"

Will looked down at Hannibal, watching his fingers ripple in the stream, "I am resisting temptation to shove you in and see what happens. Whether you would disappear or emerge unpleasantly drenched." Or become one of the memories swimming just under the surface of the water.

"When Abigail was here, it was purposeful. I taught her how to fly fish, as I would have wanted to do," Will said very precisely. "You are an anomaly on the landscape of my mind, appearing as you want."

He dropped down beside Hannibal, "What do you think this is? Where do you think you are?"

The responses did nothing whatsoever to resolve Hannibal's questions. Will had told him of seeing Abigail in his stream, and he certainly had the kind of bitchy potential to shove him in the water in this setting, but how peculiar that his imagination would try to unleash it against him.

"In a patient I would see this place as a construct meant to shield from trauma." His smile was a bare twitch of his lips. "But I am not traumatized, nor do I need a shield."

He turned his head to study Will as he had studied him so many times before. The pang he felt was less bitter than it had been before The Great Red Dragon. They'd had their consummation, and as long as they were both alive, there was hope of reunion. "If I were to believe that you are real, I would be as mad as Frederick had painted me to be. I can admit to myself that Will Graham changed me, but not so much that I would accede to delusion for the ghost of his company."

After a moment longer, he stood, fussing for a moment with the creases of his trousers while he looked down at Will. "Perhaps you are here to help me reconcile those old changes with the new ones we wrought under an inconstant moon."

Will rose when Hannibal did, amusement at the upturned corner of his mouth, "You are so arrogantly certain of your own personhood." It was just like Hannibal to place himself at the center of things, to think everything else was a spoke revolving around him. Was that a comment on his own mental state? Was Hannibal the projection of the part of himself that had been ground down and broken, then put back together with edges that matched the ones he'd ground down and put back together in Hannibal?

"Which changes were so disconcerting that you would need me to puzzle them out with you?" Will decided to humor himself, it did no good to try and argue with his own subconscious. Something deep in his mind was manifesting here in this purposefully made refuge, Will intended to chase it to the origins.

"Isn't this what you wanted all along? What you planned for?" Will had seen this conclusion laid out before, had known since the cell and Matthew that this was who he was capable of being. And yet, he had tried to fight it, tried to take a different path. Jack and Hannibal had just pulled him back to a foregone conclusion. A mind that could think like a killer could either break or become a killer. Once he'd feared it and now, it just was.

"My personhood has never been in doubt." He didn't bother denying that he was arrogant. He had come by his arrogance through the simple virtue of being better than everyone he had ever encountered.

With perhaps one exception.

His smile twitched up in a mirror of Will's. "What do you think you are?" Not who. "Before this, you never spoke, only wandered my familiar halls."

He needed to understand. He'd learned his lesson when it came to underestimating Will's influence in his life, even in his absence.

"Hannibal," Will said in that specific tone he reserved for Hannibal's name, notes of fondness and bone deep frustration bleeding into each consonant and vowel. "Look around you, do you remember creating this? No. This is my stream, my refuge, beyond the other shore is a field leading to my house."

He gentled his tone, not knowing what, if any, psychic damage would befall him from dispelling this illusion his own mind had made against his will, "I made this. And for some reason, I've made you, too. Placed you here for a reason that I have not yet discovered. What you are saying are words driven from my own mind, some kind of self soothing to think that you conjure me in your thoughts as I have conjured you in mine."

The strange and un-ordinary were rooted in the mundane.

"Is that so?" Hannibal's posture shifted slightly, a change in his center of gravity that somehow made him stand taller. "Come with me."

He didn't wait to see whether "Will" would follow him. There was no reason to doubt that he would. Will had always been curious; there was no reason to think that Hannibal's subconscious would blunt that.

He retraced the steps that had led him out of the the stream's day and into the moonlight of their night at the bluff. "This place is no proof that you are more real than I, of course. This is a site of transcendence for both of us. How could you ever forget it?" He walked into the house and past a door where a hint of strobing light leaked under a closed door.

Hannibal knew that Miriam Lass was on the other side of that door, but he had no interest in pausing there to reminisce just then. His goal was out of this memory site and on to Palermo, and his enduring memory of the Norman Chapel.

He and Will shared memories there as well, but he was curious to see how this figment of Will would behave in Hannibal's memories of Paris. In another life he'd wanted to show Will and Abigail around Paris. This was no do over; it wasn't even an indulgence of his curiosity. Hannibal had to know how deep the rabbit hole of his imagination went with this deviation from his personal norm.

Will did follow him, out of curiosity and - even if this was a stand in for Hannibal, crafted from his own mind and his own knowledge of the man, Will found that he desired it's company. Craved the words and the presence that were now denied to him after only just finding where they fit together.

"Transcendence," Will repeated, agreeing. Then added, "Consummation," to see how this conjured Hannibal would reply. And Will did think of it as a consummation, an act more intimate than any other; eyes meeting in unspoken understanding, bodies moving together, blooding each other.

There were things about the house that- Will frowned at the strobing light that leaked from under a door. Was that one of his memories? He didn't pause to open the door, not yet, but followed Hannibal into the Norman Chapel. "Why here?" He said aloud. But the Norman Chapel wasn't just Hannibal's own. The broken heart remained on display, and a flash of red hair disappeared around a corner. Will was as much home here as Hannibal. He looked back at Hannibal.

Hannibal glanced back at Will, the curl of his lips answer enough. It had absolutely been a consummation of their slow-burning courtship. Was that the purpose of this simulacrum of Will in his mind? To help him digest?

It was a plausible explanation, but lacking nuance. It was part of the answer, but not its entirety.

"From this foyer we can visit the other halls of my memory palace." He indicated a door behind the altar. "I'm in the mood for warm and airy. The Musée Rodin on a June afternoon should do nicely."

Will this figment hold up to a foreign setting or will it lose that interesting spark that has made it both interesting and troubling?

He took Hannibal's expression for what it was worth, is this what he wanted? For Hannibal to be thinking of that night in the same terms Will was? Or was it confirmation his mind had pieced together from having been there, from knowing Hannibal as much as he did, as much as he could be known.

"And what are we trying to prove, Hannibal?" Will headed for the indicated door, hand on the knob. He glanced back, then turned the knob and opened the door. "Or disprove?" He stepped through the door and out into the very detailed relief of a place he had never been personally, but had seen pictures of. The reflections in the pond, the grand stair leading up to the former manor house, now a museum, he frowned slightly, walking to the steps leading up and up to the entrance.

This was certainly a place Hannibal would have attended, would have memorized in detail enough to reproduce it with pencil and paper. Is that where Will's mind had conjured this place from? An unintentional detail gleaned from the clear front of a cell? And his mind simply filled in the rest. It would become obvious at some point, Will knew, as he had only a passing familiarity with the sculptor's work.

"If I am a figment of your imagination, you already know the answer." And in his certainty that "Will" was the fiction, he felt no need to offer an explanation to a product of his imagination.

He led Will through the museum following his favorite path among timeless works of art, letting the lure of The Gates of Hell draw him onward.

"Entertain for a moment that you aren't the master of this reality." His steps slowed as they approached the monumental sculpture that had consumed thirty years of Rodin's life. "What message would you be here to convey?"

Aside from The Thinker, Will would have named The Gates of Hell as one of Rodin's works, but little else. He approached the looming sculpture, taking in the details from a distance far more close than one could get in the actual museum. Will's gaze fell over the carved reliefs for a long minute, he was only passingly familiar with the the sculpture, but the details were fully formed, vivid.

He glanced across his shoulder at Hannibal when the man came to stand beside him, "That you are in a deeper circle of hell than I am. If we're continuing with your more than passing fixation on Dante."

Will looked back at the sculpture, "I am not a figment and yet, the clarity of these sculptures that I have never seen here, the details of this sculpture, of which I have only a passing familiarity with... are more than I could possibly know." Had it been only the Gates, Will would have considered the details drawn from his subconscious, that, for some reason, held onto those details without conscious thought.

He frowned slightly and turned away from Hannibal, moving through this particular gallery to try every door along the path that they ahd passed.

Anyone who knew anything about Hannibal Lecter would be unsurprised to find that this particular sculpture was enshrined in memory in such loving detail that even scratches in its patina are captured there.

He gazed up at the sculpture and afforded a corner of his attention to once again admiring Rodin's vision, but he still had his interloper to understand.

"Why are you not in the lowest circle with me if that is so? What spares you the fate of the betrayer?" Turning on the last word, he breathed a soft sound of amusement to see Will once again trying to go where he wasn't invited. It would be rude from anyone but Will. From Will it was merely inevitable.

"My personal exhibits are through some of those doors. Be my guest." Other doors were entries into other rooms of the museum, and others still opened into other halls to extend the fractal branches of his vast mental construction.

"Jack, the avenging angel," Will replied, releasing his grip on one of the doorknobs. He turned, too, looking at Hannibal, "Now you humor me," Will took a step towards him, then another, "If you aren't yourself, and are a conjuring from the depths of my mind, what lesson are you here to impart? Subconscious self reward for not snitching?"

Will moved to another door, then another, trying them until he was satisfied that he'd found one leading out of the museum portion of this guided tour. "He always regrets what happens to me after the fact, but never does he actually regret involving me in the first place."

Will pushed the door open, "I don't think he wants to acknowledge that this time there's no going back."

"Jack's wings have been clipped." Authorizing using Hannibal as bait for the Dragon at the behest of his favorite hunting hound hadn't bought Jack good will with the establishment. Too many dead policemen for that, not to mention his hound's fate.

He turned toward Will when he approached, and even with his certainty that his mind was presenting him with this representation of... of what? Longing?

This representation still had a pull, and Hannibal silently chewed on its words. "Do I believe that you would see my presence as a reward?"

He had to chuckle, just a little in the privacy of his mind. "You should. We fought through too much to have our moment of consummation for my presence to be a punishment now."

Now that his imagined Will had managed to pull his attention away from Rodin, he followed Will to the door that he'd opened. "What do you hope to find with your explorations?"

What was his subconscious telling him to share with Will when (not if) the opportunity arose?

"I don't know if you would. Certainly you would like the novelty my presence provided," Will stepped out into a hall that was unfamiliar, and turned, waiting for Hannibal to follow. "His wings are clipped, but not broken. He's already approached me with offers. He's desperate to pick you further apart. I'm not even sure it's about ... rehabilitating ... me."

Will snorted, "Are you admitting that you're not real? I certainly wouldn't see that coming." He began to walk down the hall, whether or not Hannibal kept pace with him.

"What I want to find, is clarity. Something that I could have no possible way of knowing." If it didn't exist, then Will's mind was in a more chaotic state than he thought. He would admit to being consciously out of control of his own ordered thoughts.

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After the fall

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