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Will’s vision was still foggy around the edges. His lips felt permanently dry, as if the salt had seeped into them, filled his mouth, filled his lungs and refused to leave. He hadn’t felt the salt in his wounds when they fell – they had fallen, hadn’t they? And it had been his doing, his fault, his last desperate effort to fix the situation they were in. It was his becoming.
He could still see the blood when he closed his eyes – his blood, Hannibal’s blood, the Dragon’s blood. Even as he woke up in bursts, seemingly disconnected and yet cohesive little flashes, like nonlinear prose, Will could see the shadows of the veins in his eyes pulse, throbbing with his rapid circulation and the pounding of his head.
He remembered salt, he remembered wind, he remembered the sky.
“ It does look black in the moonlight ,” he remembered saying.
He also remembered an elderly woman’s house – shack? – the smell of damp that clung to the garish crocheted rug he lay on, muscles spasming as he watched the lights slowly crawl across the ceiling and feared for the worst. Will felt frozen, still, as if the Atlantic had stolen his ability to move properly on land. He didn’t recall being pulled out of the water, just thinking that he might be dead already. He should be dead, shouldn’t he? And so should Hannibal, who had gotten it worse than he had, surely.
Hannibal had been shot . He had been shot and still managed to fight back, still managed to rip the Dragon’s throat with his own teeth.
At the memory, shame crept up Will’s congested throat alongside an odd feeling he could describe as arousal . It curled around his neck from the inside, curled in his stomach and spread a warm thrill down to his toes. It made his ears burn hot as he heard Hannibal speaking to the woman in some foreign language he didn’t recognise. The hissing sounds melded with the forceful crash of waves Will was sure had to be a product of his own imagination, as she had stitched Hannibal’s wounds and then his own. He couldn’t tell if she’d anaesthetised him or not. Whoever she was, the wrinkles around the woman’s eyes looked like deep welts on terrain; like darker valleys below already dark mountains. She had smiled at him with sharp benevolence.
There had been travelling, then. Or before that, Will thought, as nausea brought back the sensation of being on the road. His tongue kept drifting to the (former) hole in his cheek, to the prickly stitches someone had given him while he was unconscious. He had been under blankets, then, hair plastered to the back of his neck as he buried his face into sweaty makeshift pillows and the outer ends of the suture got caught in the rough fabric. All he smelt was salt at that point, lips still raw as he breathed through his mouth and tried not to drown on dry land. He had tried not to drown in the water, as well, even though he’d thrown himself on purpose – hadn’t he?
“We died,” he remembered muttering. Moaning. Screaming. Dry heaving and then vomiting on a patch of sunburnt grass. He didn’t remember eating whatever it was he was now expelling – sour, brown, beige, red.
“You died, Will,” Hannibal had told him, he was sure of it. There had been light and wind, a cloudy day somewhere cold. The air nipped at his numb ears as Will rested his heavy head on Hannibal’s thigh. He had felt the warmth radiating from him as from a beacon of light and – and heat. Power. Hannibal was alive. “Rest in peace now.”
Will had rested. He must have had. His body felt heavy but not rotten – he was still overground, over water, his neck out in the air. He should have broken it in the fall. Hannibal could have snapped it. In his dreams, Will was reborn as the man he had mounted – with bright wings made of broken glass and sunken cheeks as the ones he had wanted Hannibal to see. His body was stiff and bound, protected by an exoskeleton that was stronger than anything he’d ever felt himself to be. His wings projected multicoloured light in all directions and having died was worth it.
Hannibal’s voice was almost sweet as he coaxed him back to life. “Will, come forth,” he had commanded, like Jesus to Lazarus. “Loose him, and let him go,” Hannibal’s voice had called out to no one.
Will had felt his wrists bound, his ankles bound, the cloth over his face, but not the odour of death. Four days. He had no sister to warn Hannibal away from his grave. And yet the miracle was performed.
Will was alive.
Will was aware of what he looked like: square jaw, closely set eyes, patchy beard. He knew of the proportions of his skull — wide forehead, like a baby’s, inspiring an inconvenient sense of misplaced pity in others. He also knew of his thin lips and slight overbite, of the ways his ears stuck out from under his frequently overgrown hair. Caucasian male, about 6 ft tall, late thirties. Average. Nothing to write home about. Small potatoes.
A righteous, reckless, twitchy little man.
Nothing that would warrant the sort of look Hannibal had fixed on his face when Will woke up with a startle, breath heaving, as if he still needed to expel water from his lungs.
The raw emotion matched whatever Will’s chest was filled with — a mix of yearning and bone-chilling hunger — and it didn't look like it belonged in Hannibal’s permanently impassive face; the intensity of it sure enough that it should frighten him. As it did. And it didn’t.
“Were those nightmares you were having, Will?” Hannibal asked him. The expression was gone within the second Will took to blink.
Will gulped a lungful of air, and then a second and a third. He waited for the panic to set in — for his vision to go dark around the edges and the sweat to turn cold on the back of his neck — but it never did. He breathed and it was enough.
“Ever since you pulled us out of the water, the nights have been unkind to you,” Hannibal continued. Will felt gentle fingers push damp hair from his eyes; not enough to keep away the urge to shut them tightly, waiting for the lights to burst.
He didn’t remember pulling them out of the water, didn’t remember any other nightmares. He was dead, and now he wasn’t.
Some sort of sound bubbled up from his throat. Will clutched at the bedsheets beneath him and tried to access his surroundings but all his eyes could find was blurred colour. He felt overheated, sticky even, spent.
And then there was a cool cloth on his forehead; tender and not tentative. Just what he needed, it seemed.
“That’s not what happened.”
Hannibal’s lip twitched at that. It was almost a smile.
“I was barely conscious, Will. You were the one to swim to shore. I then guided you to find what we needed, an old acquaintance. And then you drove us away. A hero, one might say.”
Will scrubbed a clammy hand over his face. He couldn’t have driven them anywhere. He was injured and in pain. His headache had overpowered the cuts and bruises and it had made him nauseated, sick. And yet.
He didn’t feel like a hero.
“No.”
Yet, the protest sounded weak to his own ears. He had been dead. Embalmed and left to rest, engulfed by the Atlantic ocean.
Loose him, and let him go.
“We are safe now,” Hannibal told him, and it sounded like the hissing sounds he had used to talk to the woman in the cabin. Like Will had no business understanding it, the same way he had no business feeling relieved at all at hearing that.
Betrayed by his body, he felt his sore muscles relax, suddenly aware of how tightly they’d been wound. The sheets were soft and clean underneath him, if Will overlooked the fresh sweat. The nice quality furniture was bathed in soft yellow light from a lamp on the nightstand, and the mattress firm enough that it barely dipped with Hannibal’s weight. “I am grateful to you,” he said, retrieving the cloth from Will’s forehead, and he missed it as soon as it was gone.
Will croaked a noise and sat up, then. He didn’t know what he had meant to say. It certainly wasn’t the little “so am I” Will heard in his own head as he grabbed at Hannibal’s wrist. He inhaled.
Hannibal didn’t tense up. He let himself be grabbed, lowering his other hand to rest by his side; innocent, harmless. It was in the drawing of his eyebrows, along with the curve of his lips and the relaxed line of his shoulders. He waited.
Will let him go.
Hannibal replaced the cloth on his forehead with the utmost care. This time, Will didn’t protest. He tilted his head back, resting against the headboard. Closing his eyes, he breathed in deeply and kept track of Hannibal by sound and movement only: the shift on the mattress when he rose to retrieve the humid pillows, how he moved somewhere across the room to get new ones. His steps didn’t echo on the carpeted floor, but still Will could hear the dull sounds of his feet, the rustling of fabric, the opening of a closet.
“How long have we been here?”
“Long enough to have settled some,” Hannibal told him, though it wasn’t necessary at all.
“How long are we staying?”
“As long as you wish.”
Will cracked an eye open. He exhaled. “Are you coming back to bed?”
Hannibal studied the room from where he stood. Will tracked his gaze: outside the window, over to the comforter, back to the clean pillows he’d just replaced. His eyes drifted to the side of Will’s face, to the wound (scar?) on Will’s cheek. Instinctively, Will touched the inside of it with his tongue. Rough, but not sickly-hot, not inflamed. It had healed.
Will blinked. Hannibal met his eyes, finally. There was something there – something cautious, hesitant, warm. Compassion, maybe.
“As long as you wish me to.”