Archive of Our Own ^beta

Will doesn’t really remember how he gets from the front of the mental hospital to the impound lot on that Monday morning. 

He surely does though -  alone in a cab, watching the naked trees streak by for fifty miles, taxi driver saying something about the miserable weather this year and last. 

It’s a little offensive at first, when Will thinks about it. Not the cab driver who’s doing his best to not show he’s nervous around Will. Mostly the fifty miles, though the weather leaves something to be desired when you’re having your worst autumn and winter on record. Fifty miles is a considerable distance to expect someone to go without means to. 

Will makes do. Having lived within a triangle of distances averaging similarly on each of its sides, he supposes it’s not too shocking for someone to assume he’s ok with this. Surely Will won’t mind taking an address from the discharge coordinator alongside a strong recommendation to continue therapy with Doctor Chilton, to hopefully find his car south of Dulles down a gravel road. Surely this isn’t the thing that is the bridge too far.

He’s been abusing his own time all year. Far be it for the FBI to not want to do more of the same.  

He does know the FBI pays for the privilege though. Will’s not in a position to fork over thousands of dollars, and Kade Purnell’s not in a position to go to court alongside Jack Crawford for Will’s wrongful—

Employment? That suggests lack of agency. 

Arrest? That suggests lack of reasonable cause.

Will watches the impound clerk pull keys from all the others hung on the wall, and calls it nothing. It doesn’t really change anything for it to have definition, so long as the bill is paid, his house is still standing, and he’s free to go where he wants.

Will mulls that around between waiting in line for service. 

Free to go. 

The clerk grumbles when he fails to extract an extra day’s worth of fees, like the ones received were unacceptably low for parking a perfectly functional station wagon, in a near-to-empty lot of two-hundred spaces for the better part of four months. Will notes that his service manual is missing from the dashboard, and the state parks pass with it. The car lights up to tell him it needs service, and gas, and that some gadget in the engine isn’t working right in the cold weather. 

“Thanks,” Will says out of habit when they open the gate.

He drives the modest sixteen miles back home. 

It’s unclear if he’s supposed to, but he’s been told the Chesapeake Ripper has set him free, and he’s meant to be happy about it. Maybe even strongly enough to recommend it on an ongoing basis. So he should go wherever he thinks that might be. 

— 

Will nearly doesn’t recognize the house. 

He stares at it from the roadside, wheels of the car cutting lines into the snow where it finds mud underneath. The red-orange flag is up on the mailbox, where his last name is written in all caps here at the edge of the road. The driveway behind it makes a long line of white that is disturbed by nothing, the roofline and eaves frosted and glistening. More than half a decade of his life has been spent here, and it looks like a postcard that he could pick up anywhere. 

It’s his, he swears, as does the commonwealth of Virginia, and the postal service with ‘GRAHAM’ scrawled across the side of an aluminum square.

(“Heard someone died here,” you picture the neighbors saying, and you helpfully replying, “no, but there were a few imagined attempts to.”) 

For another half an hour, Will stares some more, feet sinking into the wet slush of the roadside. He wonders if it’s possible to forget what belonging feels like.  

—

Will drives the sixteen miles back to the airport. 

“What do you have going to Savannah?” he asks the first major airline kiosk that he finds, and tries not to wince at the agent’s elegant little scarf, bright vermillion and held together with a little enamel pin like a gash.

—

Will washes his face in the airport bathroom after buying a ticket. He ignores the afterimage of aspirin tablets in the basin, or that he feels sick after eating an overpriced egg sandwich that tastes the same in every terminal across America, all of them committed to liminal mediocrity. 

He leaves it in a trash can in a quiet corner not long after, heaving over the open lid with fingernails that go white from holding it so tight. He is relieved no one is there to see him do it. 

(Especially all these shroud-necked women that are rightfully uncertain what you want, or why you’re here, or if there’s something that can take you away quickly enough to suit everyone. “I’m afraid I’m going to ask you to leave,” you imagine her saying, same as before, the seat beside you empty, your boarding pass golden.) 

—

He makes three calls that he can’t totally avoid, waiting in the terminal with nothing but his lavender plastic bag from the hospital, filled with the few things that they bother to return to him. It’s fortunate that one of them is his cell phone, though he knows two numbers by memory, one of those by heart, and could have managed without. 

First, the bank: “Yes, Mr. Graham, your mortgage payments have continued to auto-draw since September, though I see here that the escrow account has charged an additional–”

Will listens to this explanation with the same habitual patience that he says his thanks with. It feels nice to listen to something as banal as a customer service agent warning him of additional fees for the new year, that his taxes increased and the reserve needed funding. It reminds him that it’s a new year at all, that time passed sequentially, and he’s not caught looping between the basement cell block, the Hobbes’ kitchen floor, and home, in whatever order his mind sees fit.

Second, Alana Bloom. 

This is done as a text message rather than a call, but text messages are a call for attention, if he wants to be pedantic about it, and he does, so: 

I’ve sent you some money for taking care of the dogs - thank you for doing it. I’m going to have to ask a favor, and leave them with you for –

Will checks his airline receipt, wedged and creased between the creased white of his boarding pass. He hasn’t had it long enough to commit any of it to memory. He has to check it multiple times to even convince himself that his name is next to a destination, and that is somewhere he belongs to as well. 

– Another six days if that’s ok.

She doesn’t take long to respond. She usually doesn’t, the soul of professionalism where Will is involved. Will wonders sometimes if she’ll hate him now and gone will be the quick texts and earnest defenses in courts, and if that won’t feel better than being politely evaded for the rest of his life. 

Did they not let you go today? she asks. 

It’s a fair assumption. Will doesn’t know why they did, no matter what evidence releases him of guilt. He hates Baltimore State, and its orderlies, and its drugs, directors, duty of care , but he still knows he belonged there in some capacity, if nowhere else.

Maybe in the future, he comforts himself. 

He’s usually right about these things.  

Gonna do the normal thing, he texts back. Trying out being the prodigal son. I hear lots of people do it at some point in their life, and maybe I’ll be developmentally ruined if I don’t join the club before I hit forty or before my father dies.

More than he is anyway, thinks Will, seeing how that looks on the screen before sending it along. 

Which leaves Will to his third call, left as a voice message. 

Will’s secretly glad it’s a voice message, because he doesn’t know if he could tolerate being told no. He sighs into the receiver, as he does every Easter, birthday, Thanksgiving, Christmas: 

“Hey daddy, it’s me,” he says, leaning back into the stiff terminal bench “Doing just fine,” he says, staring out at the tail of an airplane crossing the tarmac, and beneath that the rows of oval windows. “Just the same old, same old. Can I ask you for something?” 

—

He doesn’t really know what he expects of the four hours that follow - the cattle-like herding of people onto the plane, the incessant hum of the jets, the strange reluctance of people to open their seat windows, like the cold bright sun above the overcast day they leave beneath them will disturb someone. 

Will wants to look out from one. He wants to know if anyone would be staring back at him from inside the airport because no time has passed, or across the clouds from another plane because time is inconsequential off the ground, or if they’ve parked the entirety of him and it inside a hangar somewhere and now he can live in that for another four months instead, waiting for people to tell him to be happy about whatever it is they think he should be happy about. 

When a child a few rows ahead opens a window long enough to see that it’s still daylight, Will pretends to not be reassured by it, and thinks about the weather instead. 

Is it sunny in Savannah? Will’s not seen his father in nearly a year, and he doesn’t call back to see if his voicemail is seen, or if Beau Graham is even on the shore for the season to say as much. Shrimp trawling starts soon. It’s been shad season for a few weeks. There’s no reason for him to hang around the port if he’s got other work. 

This persists between settling himself in the middle seat of the exit row, lavender bag pushed up underneath the seat in front of him, a man and a woman to either side of him looking at it with awkward distaste. 

Maybe they think Will’s homeless, or wonder if this violates a condition of his parole. He wonders the same for a few minutes when the airline agent takes his information and finds him somewhere to sit, but no police come out of the hallways. No marshals chase him through security, no TSA agents pull his drivers license and tell him he’s here forever, he has to go back to Baltimore and suffer more indignities, he has to scrabble around in the woods for the remaining shreds of his logic while the Chesapeake Ripper organizes his fly tying tackle, or rearranges the glassware that Will has kept to the left of the dishwasher since he moved away from home for the first time, because it would be more ergonomic to the right of it instead. 

“Joke’s on you,” he would tell them, crossing his legs, reclining the plane seat by its meager two inches in coach. “They said I’m still allowed to pretend to be a person, and the software they’re replacing people with said that I’m required to do it between your ginger ale and her overpriced cranberry vodka.” 

He doesn’t, but he thinks about it in the kind of detail that people tell him his whole life is unnatural, and that will have to do. 

Will smiles when the plane lands and he grabs the white cotton drawstring of the bag in front of him, and both pairs of feet to either side of them retreat to the aisle and fuselage wall as tightly as they can. 

—

It’s bordering twilight when Will walks out to the arrivals pickup area, long slabs of concrete held close overhead. He’s thankful for them, outside for his fourth time today after one-hundred and twenty or so days of being inside, or trotted around outside by other people’s needs. 

He can pretend that it’s any airport. He can envision himself on a profiling trip as easily as envisioning himself being hateful to people who just have the misfortune of being seats D and E of row 32. There will be no shame in calling his second taxi today and hiding out in the neighboring low-to-mid budget hotel that exists solely for people who unexpectedly don’t know where they’re sleeping tonight. 

But a car honks, obnoxiously loud in the hum of other idling engines and people greeting people with hugs and help with their suitcases. 

Will stops breathing to look with his whole attention. 

He has to be sure he knows what he’s looking at.  

“You gettin’ in?” shouts his father from the open passenger window of it, leaned as far towards it from his seat as he can. “Ain’t no magic pumpkin, but it’ll fall apart the same as one if you wait long ‘nough.” 

Will blinks and hefts his plastic bag over one shoulder, and directs his eyes to the ground. 

There is no word that adequately conveys his gratitude for the smell of burning oil from the old Crown Victoria. There is no emotion that properly conveys the big thing in his chest that knows what he is seeing, and that it is his in some way, and that it was without ever needing to call back. 

Will wipes the sting of the exhaust from his eyes, and only has to remind his father once to unlock the door if Beau Graham actually wants him to get in.

Not once does Beau ask why he’s here.

—

Interstates rumble under them for a while, Beau swearing quietly at other drivers, Will swearing to himself every time the car brakes too hard, or the lights are too bright, or he can feel the texture of asphalt under his feet. Close to twelve hours of freedom now, and every nerve in his body is at its surface, trying to escape it.

Will is nothing but a mesh of overstimulation, held together and in by corduroy pants, canvas jacket, flannel shirt. All of them buttoned to their top because they are too big now where they had fit him before. Maybe this is all that’s left that is his, other than Beau. 

Maybe he’ll wear this forever. 

Maybe they sent out headshots of him looking thin mouthed and hungry beneath his clothes, and now he doesn’t have to worry about hiding it anymore because they can’t cover it. 

Will imagines them being pulled over by highway patrol for speeding. Maybe instead of taking his father, they’ll have to take Will. He envisions Beau letting them, because surely he sees something in Will too, or maybe because Will let the police take Beau time and time again when he was a teenager and thought he had no alternative. 

“Stop lookin’ so sour,” says Beau from the driver’s seat, a cigarette hanging from his hand between a narrow strip of open window. 

“Yes sir,” says Will, automatically. “Just as soon as you do too.”

His father smacks his lips, hissing the smoke out from between his teeth. He ignores Will, used to this kind of response. Any minute now, Will can expect the equally automatic reply that Will is too big for his britches, that he’s ate up with attitude from cradle to college, that somebody’s kids, et cetera, et cetera.

“They not feedin’ you on flights anymore?” he asks instead.

Will shifts in the seat, feeling narrow between the console and car door.

“I’m nauseated,” he replies smartly. He feels bigger when he is hateful, and poking at someone else. “So thank goodness that they didn’t.”

“Lucky your daddy’s got a good license righ’ now,” Beau snorts. He changes lanes to exit, the click of the turn signal loud and mechanical, metronomic. “In my day, you’d not have no one t’drive you ‘round. Have t’ take a bus and wait an ‘our downtown for your momma t’ getcha.”

(You have a long-standing armistice to not ask about mothers - yours or his. You think of Beau as much of one as you were ever going to get, and his as some mythical character that teaches young men to wash their mouth, or separate their colors when they do laundry, or how much milk to use in grits, or to clean cuts, or rice, or rooms, but neither of you discuss it because it changes nothing except the illusion that it’s fine; that you’re fine with not knowing, he’s fine that you don’t, and everything will work out as long as you’ve learned to be a functioning human.)

Will watches the car next to him - a family of three, oblivious to him gazing vacuously into their sedan, thinking about what that feels like.

(You’re not sure if you did, or if you still do.) 

“According to you, they’d feed me before all that, so which do you think is actually better?” Will asks, looking out his window, finger tapping in time with the signal. 

Beau takes a drag off his cigarette and blows more smoke half-heartedly between the scant opening in his own window out of habit. The striped chenille of the car cabin is rank with the stink of it and motor oil, spotted in the back seat where he has been uncareful with both. It’s an old police cruiser, he tells Will once upon a time, and he doesn’t think a little mess is the worst that it’s seen. 

Will breathes it in to the timing of the turn signal. 

Soon after, the stink of a Hardee’s burger pulled from the curbside window joins it. 

“Settle your stomach,” says Beau, passing it over. “Ain’t got money t’ get the seats cleaned, and vomit’s not the kind t’ come out in a warsh besides.” 

It doesn’t, because they have another fifteen minutes of driving to do, Beau accelerates into his right turns, and Will hasn’t eaten anything that didn’t make his stomach turn on itself in near to five months.  

He eats a handful of fries anyway and listens to his father complain about the neighbors parking in front of his rental house, or how the construction near the port is annoying, and that it’s going to be cold tonight so he hopes Will is ok with using one of Beau’s sweaters if he needs it because there sure as shit isn’t one in that piddly little laundry bag Will’s carrying. 

—

Where the hell did you go? asks Jack Crawford somewhere between the Laurel Grove Cemetary and the railroad. 

Will doesn’t bother to answer it. 

Say hi to your folks for me, says Alana, and Will doesn’t answer this either, even if she is doing him a favor. He doesn’t have folks. He has a folk, singular. 

He feels distantly satisfied that his father wouldn’t give a shit, about the regards or the favor or the folks, because those things should be a given, and doesn’t pass anything along.

—

Will tries to not be disappointed that the name Hannibal Lecter never pops up, and that it says nothing. It remains several entries behind creditors, his lawyer, lesser known acquaintances that congratulate him on the clearing of his name.

But the Chesapeake Ripper has set him free, and Will should be happy about that, and Hannibal should be happy that Will is happy if that’s what he really meant for Will to feel, and maybe being free means they never have a reason to speak again. 

— 

It’s not coming home to seven dogs, and Will’s only seen the place twice, but Beau’s shotgun house sits in the middle of its neighborhood looking comfortable in the nighttime dark, the peeling white paint of it made warm yellow by the old street lamp on the corner. It’s chilly, and the street is slick from an earlier warm rain coming up from the south, but the humid air feels more familiar than the frozen expanse of his own front yard, and smells like a hundred houses he’s slept in before moving to Virginia. 

That’s all that matters to him right now, he thinks, that he recognizes it as the way anywhere Beau lives always looks. 

Will watches Beau open the door to his own dog - a pretty blue tick hound that looks at Will the way that Will thinks most people look at him. Suspicious, but luckily for Will tonight, only for a moment. 

Will left a good impression last time with some trout jerky. Still, its name doesn’t come to mind, and he doesn’t ask for the strange dread underneath the sentiment that it’ll be taken from him, or he suddenly won’t remember what it is. 

Maybe that’s how it works, Will considers while stroking the long plush black ears, watching fine hairs stick to the corduroy of his pants. Everyone is inevitably deceived by the promise of food and somewhere safe to sleep, and what they’re called or call things isn’t all that significant, only that they survive. 

—

His father has made him a serviceable bed in the living room of the house out of an old brown couch covered in sheets, and the one extra pillow Beau keeps for guests. Will’s always been amused by the military corners he folds into the top sheet, fastidious in a way that the man himself isn’t. Tonight it would look like a medical cot, were it not for one detail.

From a moving box marked and renamed more times than is legible, Beau pulls a blanket that Will recognizes as his own from high school, and folds it over the back rest. 

“Had t’ get a few things outta the storage unit,” Beau shrugs, sounding tired. “Didn’t give me time t’ air it out, so it’s sure ‘nough gonna smell like that.” 

“I’m sure it’s fine,” says Will, and out of the same ritual as the military corners, or picking up impounded cars, says, “thank you.”   

Eventually, they both lay down - Beau in the back, needlessly reminding him where the bathroom is, or where to find towels, or how to use the old tube television. 

How long they’ve lied down for, Will couldn’t say. He can’t tell the time at night, because the stove in the kitchen across the room has an analog clock, as does the radio over the aging television, and while there was a brief time Beau enjoyed having a grandfather clock earned in a gamble, it’s long gone. 

Thankfully, most everything is silent. No ticks or clicks to annoy him. Nothing drips from the sink or down the hall, save the occasional sound of the dog slouching from his father’s darkened bedroom in the back of the house to the water bowl at the edge of the kitchen, and back again. Nothing and no one but that can reach Will from the couch, his cell phone plugged into the wall underneath the front window and three feet from a comfortable reach.

Will stares at the ceiling, palms flat to the top of an old flannel comforter smelling of cardboard and Georgia summer mildew, and counts cars driving down the street long minutes apart. After that, he counts in hours. He justifies this as being because no one has told him he needs to sleep, just to lay down - and so he doesn’t. 

Five nights of this should be enough for Will to be happy to go back to Virginia, he thinks, settling back into the tight sheets. 

—

Judging from the frequency of the cars passing, Will suspects he throws up somewhere between two and three in the morning, more bile than french fry.  

The blanket bothers him less now that his stomach is settled the way his father wanted it to be. He strokes his hand across it and feels out all the places that the fabric is pilled. 

It’s funny that Beau thought to keep it, but Beau’s not in the habit of entertaining, and it would be practical considering he already had it. On consideration, it’s funnier that Beau keeps a box of Will’s things in storage at all. 

(You know better than to laugh. He’s always done that - “important shit goin’ in the storage box,” he would tell you before going places, perpetually in the habit of falling back on rent when he’s not there to look the landlord in the face, and you long gone and no longer in need of a stable place to be. If he wants it, he puts it somewhere else until he is ready for it, and you are charmed that your ratty high school belongings make the cut.)

(Maybe Hannibal thought of you the same way. Prison’s as good as anywhere to store something for later – things to be done until he is ready for you, and then you can be important and useful again too.)

Will pulls the blanket up to his chin, cold and shaky from vomiting.

(Maybe ignoring you is his way of airing you out.) 

He listens to the dog do two more passes from kitchen to bedroom, bothering once to check in on Will to make sure he is where he is intended to be, pushing its cold snout to the side of his head. Will is unexpectedly grateful to it when it does. 

Between that and three more cars, Will manages to fall asleep. Their lights chase across the ceiling, pushing the shadows out of the room with their glow.

—

(You imagine it sounded very sad: “Hey daddy, it’s me - doing just fine. Just the same old, same old. Can I ask you for something?”)

—

Tcshhh, tcshhh, tcshhh.

Will rubs his eyes to the dull sunlight against the walls of the living room. They pound beneath his hands. 

In the kitchen, he hears his father shuffling around, hound dog underfoot, swearing kindly at himself and the dog in their morning routine. It’s different from what Will remembers - kinder. Or at least more like the kindness Beau shows Will as a very small child. Pets are similar, Will comforts himself - made to be spoken to softly, even when irritating and needy.

He throws an arm over his eyes to hide from the grey-blue of the dawn.  

“You awake?” calls Beau across the open space. 

Will breathes through his nose. It takes note of the smell of the blanket, the constant soft nag of cigarette smoke, coffee trying to work its way across the room. It feels like being in school again, Beau content to make a racket and let that be alarm clock enough. 

“Hard to not be,” Will replies, hands raking across his face. He turns his body to sit up. 

The dog comes over to greet him, great sagging face happy for the attention. It noses his knee. 

Will rubs at the long stretch of the dog’s cheeks, and misses his own. The thought pushes him to his feet to help find sausage patties in the fridge that have been the same brand since Will could recognize that concept. Surprisingly, that comforts him more than the dog.  

“Don’t you have a welding job right now?” asks Will after they’ve cobbled something recognizably breakfast from Beau’s pantry. He turns an oven-toasted square of toast in his hands, strawberry jam thinly glistening on its surface, and doesn’t eat it. 

Beau does his best to not see this, noisily drinking his coffee and sitting imperiously with the newspaper. The glints of his facial hair are bright underneath the kitchen lights. For not the first time, Will aches when he thinks that Beau’s starting to look old. 

“Yessir, I certainly do,” says Beau when he settles the mug down. If not looks, he sounds how he always has. “Ain’t so late that I’m late.”

“Color me surprised,” Will smiles, hiding it with a hand to his face, elbow to the table. 

Beau folds his paper down. “I thought you needed a few days outta town, not a few days outta my hide,” he sniffs, picking up a puck-shaped piece of sausage, cooked to a crusty near-black. “If you got time t’ be pickin’ on me, you got time t’ eat and get your hair cut. You’re lookin’ foolish wit all them curls.”

Will sips his own coffee.  

“Maybe I will,” he says absently.

He consciously reminds himself that the coffee is good because the coffee is terrible, and that samovars, and espresso machines, and every other spoiled rotten kind he’s had in the last several months was terrible because it was good.   

—

Will’s told to let the dog out occasionally, but other than that, Beau trusts Will to entertain himself. 

wenty public channels off of the antennae. Enough books stacked on the floor to keep long weeks of crew shifts filled. Some bills on the entry table if he’s really looking for a challenge to sort, but that he doesn’t want Will trying to pay them or some such nonsense.

“Or take a nap,” he grumbles. “You look like the devil walked nex’ t’ your bed.”  

Will shrugs, turning a billing statement between sticky fingers. 

“The devil walks at night,” he says, and that he hopes Beau drives safe in the traffic. 

—

In the minutes after the deadbolt locks, Will thinks of all the things he’ll do. Mostly to cover the swell of panic that takes him watching the car roll down the street, but also because it feels like the right thing to do. 

Will breathes for a second after turning the deadbolt. Doing the right thing makes him happy, he reminds himself, and tries to not resent the dog for staring and seeing that he needs the reminder.

He indexes: 

The porch to be swept, the kitchen to be tidied and cleaned, an entire yard getting overgrown and miserable with mud beneath it where it can’t dry in the mild winter weather. A side yard filled with parts to be sorted. A dog the size of a small horse that could use a jog up and down the street. An impressively ignored stack of letters. A storage box in need of airing out, sheets in need of cleaning, maybe even all of the sheets in the house if it suits Will to clean them.

Will makes another pot of coffee, and sits on the couch listening to it gurgle. He turns on the television while he waits, and listens to the tubes inside it hum, and the advertisements and morning shows tell him what a great day it’s going to be. 

The dog sits beneath him, heavy bulk sprawled over the tops of Will’s bare feet, warming them. 

If Will were at home, he doesn’t know what he would be doing. Probably reconnecting utilities, or winterizing whatever got missed during the worst of the encephalitis. Maybe sorting messy piles of mail of his own. Maybe he’d order a new owner’s manual for his car if his laptop was returned to the house. Maybe he’d be trying to figure out what was returned or was missing, like his white shirts that were all taken as evidence. 

Traces of unmetabolized aspirin, sodium amytal, sodium pentothal, and enough blood to merit eternal suspicion, the lab work would suggest, firmly supporting Will’s degeneracy instead of victimhood, signed by people he’s worked with and thought might know him better than that. 

(You frown at the word victim , and watch a little girl read a children’s book on national television, her own father clapping happily from the audience.) 

Maybe Will’s things would just be stolen like the contents of his car. Maybe his car will be stolen by the time it’s time to go home, and then there really will be nothing but the brief glimpse that he saw before deciding to return to the airport yesterday. Maybe it would just be empty, missing, a blank horrible whiteness hiding behind a door that he’s expected to navigate because everyone is accustomed to him functioning on near to nothing.

From across the room, the phone buzzes. 

I’d like for you to meet with Miriam Lass, says Jack. What’s the chance you’ll be home today?

None at all, thinks Will, and returns to the couch with the phone in hand. He is not within reasonable driving distance. He has exceeded the fifty miles on average he is willing to go.  

Even with the simmering conviction to say no, it feels too big a task to answer, so he doesn’t.

He thinks of sweeping the porch instead, until that feels big too.  

Will changes the channel and lets a different host introduce the day to him, patting the space next to him on the couch to encourage the dog up. With exception of the canvas coat that Beau takes from him to hang at the doorside, the same navy flannel and corduroy from yesterday press sleep patterns into his skin. His skin buzzes underneath them, in time with the phone.

She didn’t identify Hannibal as significant, in case you had doubts, he sees across the front screen before setting it on the ground so that he doesn’t have to see anything else. The television glows against the wooden floor where it lies, disguising the screen, highlighting the dust instead.

Still, Will thinks about it. 

The comment doesn’t bother him as much as he thought it would. He is made of uncertainties and doubts these days. That anyone could doubt Hannibal is significant, well - that’s funny, if not surprising. 

In some ways it is to be expected if Miriam Lass is alive and well enough to be mobile, all limbs accounted for, all segments of the abdomen left inside their respective pockets of connective tissue and viscera. She is lucky in this way. Seems the Chesapeake Ripper is in the mood to let non-credible witnesses go where they please in his name. 

Will is lucky in this way too. He is in Savannah, Georgia, sleeping on his father’s couch after half a year of illness and imprisonment. In a week, he will have all of his own dogs back. A couple weeks after that, maybe a replacement for anything that isn’t where it should be in his house, when the house begins to feel like it’s his again and he’s tired of this one. In a couple years, maybe his self-esteem, something to show for his time working on the problem of being happy. 

Will picks up the phone long enough to clear the message. He scratches the dog with the side of his foot, day-old sock catching more glossy white and blue hairs with each pass. 

The phone rattles when it hits the ground a second time.

By ten in the morning, Will is back beneath the sheets, the dog laying on his legs, having forgotten the coffee pot entirely. Daytime slides around outside the front door, the breeze moving a few leaves across the stoop with whispers. The mailman leaves something in the box by the front entry, marked Graham. Game shows award points and prizes, and his brain tells him that he must be home from school, out sick for the day, and that he should go back to sleep. 

Will does.  

—

The dog wakes him up. 

It looks at him with patient eyes, tail wagging behind. The sun tries to peek through the blinds towards the couch. Quiet shining motes dance between them with each wag of the tail moving the air. 

“I owe you a trip outside,” Will rumbles into the guest pillow, eyelids heavy. When he opens them, he imagines them weighed downwards, wrinkling, liquid. He extends an arm to pet the soft hair of the dog’s ears again before standing, unhappy with himself for sleeping so long.  

He stumbles into the kitchen, staring at the stovetop clock - three o’clock. Beau will be home soon. 

By the time that he’s managed to get outside with the dog, the car is rolling up to the front of the house, and Will feels very foolish and long-haired indeed. 

“Y’got the dog outside,” says Beau cheerily when Will tries to apologize, juggling two grocery bags. “What on earth d’you think I’d be mad ‘bout?” 

Will considers that, nose scrunched. 

“I don’t know,” he frowns, watching the dog sniff at the bottom of the bags. “Seems like a waste of a day, I guess.”

“What’s visitin’ me good for if not wastin’ a day?” asks Beau.

Will sees that the bags are almost entirely filled to the brim with junk food, and a small selection of fresh produce chosen at random. Hostess cakes, cheese crackers, chips, enough of those little protein shakes to choke a horse. 

“An’ taste like they oughta,” Beau bitches with one in hand to put in the refrigerator between a case of cheap beer and a browning bottle of orange juice. “But you liked ‘em well ‘nough as a boy.”  

It’s not all junk food, but as close to it as his father could have come to it. He makes oven-baked potato skins to snack on in front of the television, pulling a chair in from the kitchen so that Will’s bed can stay just as it is. He goes to extraordinary lengths to talk Will into eating three of them, and a handful of pretzels, and a small tub of macaroni and cheese that the grocery deli makes that Beau likes. 

Will dutifully eats this between taking sips of cola and whiskey, and watches replays of the day’s news headline. 

—

He dutifully throws up somewhere around two in the morning again, shaking on the couch when he is done until the dog’s nose pokes the side of his shoulder. 

The streetlight becomes a welcome stripe of white-blue on the dark walls of the living room, where he can see dimly into every space. There are no shadow men here. There are no infernal stags. Any nightmare that he has, he’s brought here on a two-hour flight, where it only lives in his head and his appetite, and that is how he manages to fall asleep. 

—

“Hey daddy, it’s me - doing just fine. Just the same old, same old. Can I ask you for something? Just if you get this message. I don’t really know what I’m supposed to do right now.”

—

The coffee being measured makes Will get up when his father does. 

Tcshhh, tcshhh, tcshhh.

“You awake?” asks Beau.

“Hard to not be,” says Will, eyes pinched against the kitchen light, watery, the lamp over the oven gone liquid when he looks at it before rubbing the illusion away. It buzzes, ready to make cinnamon toast this time, and Will tries to not let himself get sick at the slide of butter over his tongue. 

—

“Mind warshin’ my work shirt when you get ‘round t’yours?” Beau asks before he leaves. “After you mind the dog. Maybe we might could go out t’ Broughton Street t’morrow and get you some new duds.” 

Will doesn’t mind. It strikes him that he should wash his clothes, and that it’s silly that he needs telling. 

“Of course,” says Will, looking down at himself. The flannel and corduroy stare back up at him, rock-face blank save for the deep creases in them.

He feels dumb and teenaged, even more so an hour later sitting naked in his father’s house listening to the ancient washing machine whine its way through a cycle. He pictures the agitator spinning it all, Will’s limbs a jumble inside shirt sleeves and pants legs like he never got out of them.

The dog doesn’t tell Will to do anything else, but noses him gratefully behind his bare knees when he goes to move clothes to the dryer, and again when his pants slide over his legs, warm and floral from the dryer sheets. Maybe to see if there’s a difference.

Will thinks it’s different, in any case.

He eats half of a strawberry shortcake roll, and two cups of coffee for lunch. He doesn’t look at it while he does it, eating with his hands, pulling it from the packaging himself, and finds that it helps.

—

Beau’s questions are probing when he has them, but of the usual kind they share between phone calls. He finds a few when he gets home, after a needless thank you for doing a few loads of laundry. 

“Got anyone waitin’ for you back home?” he asks, cracking open a beer with one hand, tough old fingers strong against the glistening sides. “Any girlfriends?”

Will rolls his eyes, moving stacks of the laundry. 

Beau is undeterred. 

Will has always been a secretive child.  

“Boyfriends?” 

Will doesn’t deign to answer that either, initially because it seems juvenile. 

When the irritation with that passes, it becomes the strange fear that no one is waiting for him because they have found each other instead of him. That he is free to stay here forever, or until they are tired of each other’s company and Will must nonetheless go back to being as efficiently alone as his father has learned to be.

He folds his navy flannel instead of putting it back on. He feels very small without it, arms more mirage than flesh, but it’s impractical to wear it when Beau asks him to turn the stovetop on and to add exactly three tablespoons of the cheap oil to an old skillet, clapping him on the shoulder and grounding him to the kitchen’s linoleum floor. 

—

Chilton’s been arrested at your house on suspicion of being the Chesapeake Ripper, texts Jack in the evening time, Will sitting quietly on the couch next to his father, arm leaned against another neatly folded pile of linens waiting for him to want to lie back down. They are watching the local news again, “letting supper settle” at Beau’s insistence after Will forces himself to eat a full plate. 

I thought you should know, it continues.

Will looks at the text with dumbfoundment. 

On the television, a business owner takes credit for a waterfront improvement plan. Three pelicans are released on the Wilmington River. A gas leak on Hutchinson Island is treated like a national tragedy. Beau pours himself his second whiskey, and taps a cigarette from the tableside carton to put behind his ear for the commercial break, and not a one of the news anchors thinks anything of Jack Crawford’s statement, like he made it up, and the Chesapeake Ripper never actually existed.

Eventually, thought crawls back into Will to fill the long, loud breath outwards that makes space for it. 

Congratulations to him, then, texts Will.  That will be the closest to prestige and fame that he’ll get for all that work he did on Abel Gideon.

Will certainly doesn’t believe it, because Will knows better. The Chesapeake Ripper has gone out of his way to make sure Will knows exactly who the Ripper is, and that there’s nothing useful to be done about it so he might as well be grateful to be free, and feel–

– defeated, frustrated, furious, witless, worthless, twelve-years old and sleeping on a couch as old as he is –

– happy about it.  

Next to him, Beau sighs about a local bridge closure. 

You don’t think it’s wrong? asks Jack after a moment’s time.

I think it’s what you’ve been allowed to see, he replies, and puts the phone back down. 

Will grabs the rocks glass closest to Beau and pours a few fingers of cheap whiskey for himself too. It’s been a long time since he’s been allowed. It’s not very likely that his lifelong drinker of a father is going to say that he isn’t. 

“You’re gonna be walkin’ at a slant,” says Beau, but only quietly, and easily ignored. 

Will does just that, and takes a burning swallow of the whiskey to the sound of the weather report. 

He hadn’t been so sure in the entrance of Baltimore State if it would come to this - if Jack would trust his opinion. Will hadn’t even been sure he even wanted to talk to him anymore, or if he had a job, or if there would still be a house for him to go back to. Will had instead entertained the fantasy that maybe Hannibal would roll up to the front entrance himself, dazzlingly happy, everything a great joke if in the right frame of mind, a profound speculator and gambler that Jack could never be.  

(You’re still not sure about those things - if you have a job, or if you want to talk to anyone, or if Hannibal isn’t going to show up on the doorstep somewhere between three and four in the morning to trot you around in the mud again, maybe call you a good friend and shear your hair off like the wardens threatened to so that no one can call you a man, or strong, or remember a time that you were.) 

(You’ll always remember he played with the curls at the base of your neck when he rammed a pipe down your esophagus. He wiped the sweat from your face with the same hand, wrapped a ringlet wetly around his thumb.) 

Will stands to look out the window where a modest quarter-inch of rain is expected to fall between tomorrow and Friday. He fidgets with the windowsill. He combs his fingers across his scalp, and turns to lean against the wall. 

(You still don’t know if that was a comfort, or horrifying, or beguiling or something between the three.)

“You got another one of those?” asks Will, pointing to the cigarette standing watch from behind Beau’s ear. 

His father is unbothered, though he does look at Will strangely for a moment. 

Will supposes that’s fair - Will quit smoking years ago.  

“Oh, just ‘bout a hundred of ‘em,” says Beau, taking his own drink in hand and turning off the television. “But let’s get on outside if we’re workin’ through somethin’.” 

—

Will smokes two of the “about a hundred” - Beau, a modest solitary one.

“Gotta be mindful of my health,” he insists with a grimace, and Will hears it as the remnants of an argument they had years ago that’s stuck around.

(So someone listens to you.) 

“Well that’s at least one of us,” says Will, and pours himself another drink. 

His father watches him as he does, mouth pulled to one side with the cigarette pointed opposite from it. “You’d best slow down,” he says. “Bottle ain’t empty, but it’s not your job t’ make sure it is. Would rather see you clear out the icebox or the counter.”

Will disagrees. He feels what dinner he managed to eat in his throat still, a perfect little lobe shaped bite of salisbury steak and mashed potatoes from the freezer. 

“I’ll need something to wash it down first,” says Will. 

He frowns deeper when his father comes back with a glass of water, still filled with the smallest of bubbles from the tap. It doesn’t really stop Will, well on his trajectory for the night, but it does briefly make him feel lost again, sleeping through the day, sitting undressed to the sound of clothing being spun in the wash. 

“I’m an adult, you know,” Will says, downing most of the water in one go before pouring whiskey for himself again - one finger of it this time, to put him down for the night.

Beau seems to think that funny, wrinkled corners of his eyes becoming a spiderweb of lines. 

“You sure have folks thinkin’ it, goin’ by the mugshots,” he says around the butt of his cigarette before taking it between his fingers to look at. “You got a guilty look ‘bout you. Came by it honestly from your daddy’s people, sorry t’ say.” 

Will doesn’t reply, instead thinking that he’s surprised Beau can feel where to grab the cigarette through all the scar tissue there. 

When Will says nothing, Beau asks, “Or are we not talkin’ ‘bout that yet?” 

It must be nice, Will thinks perversely, once you’ve burnt all your fingerprints off on engines, not having to think about where to put them, or what they touch. 

“Not yet,” says Will to the bottom of his rocks glass, feeling scolded and even younger than the twelve he felt an hour before.

— 

As the marine fog comes in, and the moss in the trees goes to shining with moisture again under the streetlights, Will thinks maybe he’s finally done it - he’s drank enough to fall asleep by the time his father is ready. He’s matched him dinner for dinner, whiskey for whiskey, and now they are equally grown and independent.

He stumbles through the screen door and front door behind it thinking himself very clever and unhealthy for it, but that it will all be ok once he lays his head on the guest pillow and stops thinking about anything at all. 

If the bed is made, he doesn’t remember that. If he goes to the bathroom or brushes his teeth, or even plugs his phone in, or takes off his socks, he doesn’t remember that either. 

—

Will wakes a couple hours later to vomit, pounding down the hall fast enough to upset the dog, no time to throw the light on to see where he’s going. Even with all the noise, he still floats his way across the floor, walls taking turns getting close to him, doorknobs catching his hips, hands catching the rim of the toilet. 

It feels more normal, vomiting here. Just a normal kind of sick. Self-inflicted. The kind idiot children that drink too much deserve, amongst them idiot sons that do to prove that it’s possible. Not like the hospital prison cell, or the kitchen sink in Virginia, hidden in a postcard-worthy picture of winter snow.

Will flings the lid up, and kneels. 

Up comes whatever there is of dinner. Canned biscuits, curdled mashed potato, the unchewed shreds of processed meat rising from him. Up comes whatever water and alcohol isn’t already buzzing around inside the rest of him. Behind all that, up comes a miserable small noise in his throat, all the capillaries beneath his eyes, a few dull tears from the choking insistence of everything. 

For a few minutes, Will is certain that there’s more - maybe the bright-blue of an eyeball would be staring up at him from the toilet bowl if the light was on instead of an ear this time. Maybe that itch in the back of his throat is hair. Maybe that softness on his tongue is nitrile-gloved fingers, probing at his teeth to make sure he hasn’t lost any wandering around at night. Maybe it reaches all the way down into him and goes looking for everyone else that has been more carefully sent down his throat, Abigail Hobbes’ ear having been the last passion project that required Hannibal’s extraordinary delicacy and violence.

(“All but the discomfort of a few moments,” Hannibal would say, violet-blue nitrile tracing the wet eyelashes beneath them, you shuddering from the endotracheal tube squeaking up your throat. “You’ll be as you should have been when it’s all done, right, Will?”)

Behind him, the floor thumps. 

“Told you so,” Beau says groggily from the hallway, flipping the light on, but only to help Will get a better grip on the toilet, and to pull the sticky undershirt from his back. 

Will squints at the light, afraid. 

“Told me so,” he gasps when another wave of nausea has him gagging for lack of something to take away. 

The toilet bowl is filled with all the normal atrocities - bile, partially digested food, more than a little foamy water. There’s nothing here that isn’t the efforts of a man who cooks from the freezer section of the Kroger when he’s not eating what came from the bar or directly from a dock. 

Beau wipes the sweat from his face, pulling hair to sit behind his ears, scarred hands firm but tender, hiding nothing. His skin smells of aftershave, the old kind in the green bottle, rather than Will’s with the boat. 

Will turns his head to rest on the side of the toilet seat, shivering against the hands, breathing around them. When they are taken back, his father settles a towel that stinks of old house and the scented detergent that he has bought faithfully for close to thirty years, and that works just as well. 

When Will wakes up a few hours later, falling asleep on the floor, it is joined by the blanket from the couch.

—

(What would you have said instead if your father had answered the phone? You’ve never been very honest about yourself. You never considered asking him to come bail you out the way you have him. “Hey daddy, it’s me - no, no reason. Just the same old, same old. You at home or you on your way out?”)

(You are afraid he wouldn’t have. You are afraid he would, and he would be part of that whole miserable chapter of your life. He taught you better than this by example. He would see it crush you to not actually be better than that after all, and he’d wonder if you hate him as much as you sometimes hate yourself.) 

—

Tcshhh, tcshhh, tcshhh.

Will pads down the hallway, sore-headed.  

“You awake?” asks Beau, who appears to have not slept at all to awake from anything to begin with.

(You recognize that question like you have since you were too little for school, and that he asks it the same way, no matter how obvious the answer. Age one to age late-thirties, and you are never too grown to not need to be minded and fed and sent on your way. Hannibal does that too. Maybe that’s why listening to him came so second nature to you.) 

“Can I have some coffee?” he asks his father. 

“Only if you’re done sleepin’ by the commode,” says Beau, pushing the button to start the coffee brewing. He pours it sloppily when it’s ready, the slight tremor of his hand worse when he’s tired. He only swears a little when he goes to mop up the mess, content to ignore he has a tremor at all.  

Will takes it with two hands. 

(Maybe it’s only you that sees Hannibal in everything, and everyone else is right that you are losing your edge.) 

The kitchen table is littered with books. Vonnegut’s sketches stare up from next to the salt. Hemingway looks for fish next to the unopened mail, a few half-hearted attempts to look at them made to pass the early morning hours. Jackson cautions against kindly strangers from the arm of his captain’s chair, the last thing on Beau’s mind.

“You been keepin’ strange hours, son,” Beau says with a yawn. “Can’t ignore ‘em the way I could when you didn’ meet my shoulder yet. Ain’t got no room t’ send you to, and ain’t got the heart t’ tell you t’ stop.” 

Will swallows around his sore throat, eyes aching in his head. 

“You’re telling me,” he says.  

—

When Beau opens the front door this time, he turns to make sure Will is ready to leave. “We’ll make a day outta it,” he says, watching Will lace his shoes.

Will frowns at the doorway, but steps out with him. 

It’s been three days now. It’s the least that he can do, but it feels terrible anyway. 

His father takes the day off. By all signs he seems to have asked for it rather than as a response to the poor night’s rest. It’s just as well that he does - Will has a hard time picturing him holding a blowtorch when he only just barely manages a mug and a buttered biscuit from beneath his gruff face. 

“Couldn’ get the first couple o’ days,” Beau explains - not apologetic, but matter-of-fact. “Too last minute t’ find someone who does what I do, but I didn’ want t’ discourage you from visitin’.” 

“You mean you didn’t swear and fight with middle management instead?” Will prevaricates, walking alongside him in a borrowed t-shirt, canvas jacket as dirty as the day he arrived, and however many days it existed in a plastic bag from his intake before that. “You must be getting old,” he says, watching the trees of the greenspan pass by to either side, dripping wet this morning with nothing but nearby humid sea.

“Sure as shit,” says his father. “But I reckon I’m gettin’ a little too long in the tooth t’ keep gettin’ fired. Don’t have the same gumption t’ find a new job.”      

Will hums instead of responds. Both things are true. Neither of them like it. 

They walk northeastward to downtown from Beau’s house, on his father’s argument that neither of them left the house entirely sober from the night before, and that he meant to return to it in like fashion. “You gone drank me dry,” Beau snorts, lighting a cigarette. “Nothin’ for it but t’do more o’ the same at someone else’s place.” 

Will pockets his hands to the mild cold. “I probably shouldn’t do it at all.” He turns to admire some of the old bungalows - listens to seagulls, watches the swifts sail above the mossy branches of leafless oaks. “I’m not a very fun drunk.”

Beau snorts. “Neither should I, nor am I, but it ain’t stopped me ‘fore now.” 

“Seems counterproductive to that staying employed thing you were just complaining about,” says Will, smiling at the concrete. “But I guess I shouldn’t be talking. Being a pot calling the kettle black and all.”

His father seems to mull that over for a few minutes of silence, mouth working at a thought between his teeth. A few cars pass them in morning commutes, a few doves enjoy the sun, steam rising from the rooftops where the damp night simmers off.  

Will lets himself be walked for near to two miles from the safety of the white shotgun house to the busy thoroughfare of Savannah’s downtown, and tries to remember that these are the places that normal people go, and that not everything is a crime scene, or ways to get between them and home. Much like Beau doesn’t give a shit about anything that doesn’t concern him, neither does the rest of the neighborhood, as ignorant of Will’s arrest, incarceration, embarrassment, and hangover as they like. 

Will walks their streets amidst their ambivalence, torn between the sensation of being walked to school as a boy, and imagining all the ways he could sneak into the nicely manicured yards close to the townhouses and kill everyone in them - as a matter of hypotheticals, he tells himself. 

He finds both fit, same as the canvas coat, and that they are both comfortable.   

—

Find standard white shirts. Find practical slacks. Find socks and underwear in a multipack. Put these things on a counter, and live in the current reality where the federal government deposits a considerable amount of backpay into the bank account that auto-draws for mortgage payments.   

Will watches these things disappear into a bag to not be thought of in any serious way other than it feels like a small success. Control of some kind, towards the bottom of the pyramid of adult needs. 

He watches in like fashion as the barber shop up the street from the clothing store wets the curls at the base of his neck down with spray, each being buzzed shorter to the same tone and fervor as the text message vibrations from the pocket of his jacket. 

Will doesn’t check them, instead answering benign questions from the younger man with the clippers that tells him he has beautiful hair, and that he should be proud of it. He pretends that he doesn’t shake when they are experimentally pulled to see how they want to curl in on themselves. He holds his composure when his cheeks and sideburns are cleaned up with a gently scratching shave. 

“Your momma had nice hair too,” says Beau from his chair at the front of the barber shop, staring as all of the cut bits of it are swept away with a broom, a beer in hand while he waits. He seems perturbed watching it disappear. “Crazy as creek water, but a fine sight for fellas who appreciate creeks.” 

Will says nothing, jaw set too tight with each pass of the razor, picturing all the last year’s madness being shorn away. 

Perhaps that’s how it works, and he will feel more normal now that it’s gone and no one will admire it. 

He wonders what Hannibal would have thought had Chilton had his head shaved. Frederick would have liked that - holding it over the prestigious Doctor Lecter’s head that it was him that could now alter Will Graham to his liking. It would have fit all the medical monitoring diodes better. It would have made him look more criminal, that he was at last where he was destined to be. 

It’s strange that Chilton passed on the opportunity. Will now instead wonders why he didn’t, and if he’ll have the chance to ask now that Chilton’s been arrested and there’s a vacancy open on the outside of the cell bars. 

“Well, how we feelin’ about it?” asks the barber, turning Will’s chair to face himself. 

Will squints at the man in the mirror. He recognizes him on some level as being Will Graham, to a better extent than Will Graham’s house, but there is still something changed.  

“S’good,” says his father from the side, seeing the set of Will’s mouth, thinking and chewing and looking more akin to his father who he’s seen a thousand times, beneath what he’s told are his mother’s orphaned glossy locks. “A fair mite better than you was, anyhow.” 

Will nods, hand coming up to feel the soft shorn taper of his neck. That’s a sort of control, he supposes - choosing the moment and place where it happens. 

—

Will buys one frivolous thing - more out of nostalgia than an actual liking for it, but also out of the persistence of his father that it’s too cold in the winter to be putting around in his autumn clothes, and that he’s too smart to go around wearing his father’s ratty shirts.

“Villains wear trenchcoats,” says Will, turning the wool herringbone coat in his hands at the front of the shop. The black and white striping dance across his hands. 

“So do detectives,” says Beau, like this settles the matter.   

It’s fancy for somewhere like here - something to be trotted out for special occasions, the average temperature too high for utility, the fabric too nice for everyday use. Will thinks this is why it stops him, passing the glass front of the boutique, his head coming to rest above the mannequin and a burgundy scarf tucked under its lapels. 

Hannibal would like it, thinks Will. 

“It suits you,” says the store assistant, who recognizes that it catches Will’s attention, but not that the scarf makes him wince.

It doesn’t stop him from buying the coat though. 

It sits folded in the crisp black bag, brushing along his leg with each step, still too nice for a dive bar in Savannah, but maybe something to trot out for the snow back home. Maybe for the highway, or the airplane ride north, where the travel security agents can squint at his ID, and not know him for the newspapers and sordid internet articles that they’ll recognize attached to his name but not his face. 

(At last - nobody can see what you are.)

—

He does look eventually at his missed messages. 

He is between bites of fried green tomato and pimiento cheese when he does it, fishing the phone out of his pocket while his father watches a kickoff on a nearby screen. Mostly because he is barely managing to eat and would enjoy the distraction, but also because he is not the man people text to chat casually with, and that anything he receives is usually bad news.

It would be nice to not know anything that didn’t immediately affect him. The internet and the assumption of his twenty-four hour availability was a mistake. 

The Chesapeake Ripper has burned down the Library of Congress, thinks Will with a snort, making a guess at what he’ll find. Kade Purnell has stepped down from her position and named me as her successor, upsetting social convention and every security clearance requirement set since the Cold War.  

I think you’re doing the right thing staying away from all of this, says a message from Alana.

Will shrugs, and takes a sip of his beer. That at least has settled his stomach, “a bit o’ the hair o’ the dog that done bit ‘em” the bartender is told when its ordered for him. 

Will doesn’t know if he’s right to do much of anything, but he’s at the very least less afraid of disappearing into nothing at night when sleeping on a couch thrifted some time in the nineties than he is in his own home. Still angry about it. Still struggling to keep food down, no matter how familiar. 

He moves to the next message. 

Miriam Lass shot Frederick Chilton, says Jack. 

Will stares at that, and contemplates if the feeling that conjures up makes him angry too. 

It settles in the pit of his stomach, next to the beer and the bar snacks. 

It tries to digest the lie that it’s built on. 

He excuses himself to the restroom to the disappointment in his father’s face, who doesn’t know anything of the drama at home, but knows that pinched look in Will’s face better than anyone alive, and has no cure for these days other than to spectate and make coffee and toast when it’s done.

—

Do you think if they brought you into the interview room, they’d let me shoot you the way that Miriam Lass was allowed to shoot Chilton? Will types in the dark, for lack of a better way to use his energy with his belly empty and too late to try again. 

That would make him happy, he thinks.

It stares up at him, until something inside him that is tired and living on small bites of basic food and a few scant hours of sleep says to send it. 

It feels wrong, if only because Will Graham’s relationship with Hannibal Lecter has never been the kind that called for texting rather than voices. It is immediate in its need to be heard, here, an unreasonable six hundred miles away, a straight shot up a single freeway if Will really wanted to waste his time. 

It is insistent. 

He plugs his phone into the wall to charge for the night, and tries to ignore the anxious knot living between the top of his throat and his chest. 

—

Around what Will thinks is eleven or midnight, Hannibal replies. 

Will knows because he has listened for it, counting cars driving by, soft touches of the dog’s nose to his shoulder from time to time.

Will is embarrassed to pull himself out of the covers and off the couch to see it. There’s not a lot that shames him anymore, but this manages to. 

He pulls himself out of the warmth anyway, throwing the blanket from his shoulders, feet padding softly across the old wood floor, careful not to wake up his father or the dog again before it’s ready to do another patrol. 

You’d have to come back to find out, says Hannibal from such tiny text that it cannot possibly convey the magnitude of the voice behind it. I’d be disappointed if you waited for similar circumstances to play out, but maybe the symmetry of it is what would please you. Or maybe more importantly, you’d like another similarly dark, stony place to be held and found in.

Will frowns. 

He watches what he thinks is Hannibal typing more. It’s weird to think about - Hannibal Lecter texting at midnight from hundreds of miles away, likely comfortably warm and dressed to his satisfaction, well fed, rested. He will be perfectly content this evening with his new shiny scars on either arm, and even more so with framing an idiot like Frederick Chilton so solidly that he can tease about it in a written medium. 

And tease he does. 

Are you finding you want someone to keep you these days, Will? Gratifying to hear that I am still in your thoughts.

Will turns the phone over and doesn’t reply. 

It bothers him that it changes from received to seen, the last update time highlighted beneath. 

—

(You imagine what your daddy would say if you were ever honest with people you love.)

(“Hey daddy, it’s me,” you’d say from the driveway next to the house, watching icicles melt, or paint peel. “Doing just terrible. Just the same old, same old. Can I ask you something? Did you ever forget how to answer the front door or pay your taxes after being offshore too long? Has it ever felt like too much to get out of bed and feed yourself? Did you cry when my mother died, or did that just become background noise along with all the other things you learned to not trust, all the rest of the work that was pushed onto you that you didn’t ask for?”)

(You hope having a child wasn’t as bad as being sent to prison. You don’t have one - at least one that actually belonged to you, so you couldn’t say. You don’t have a lover or a best friend either, but you’re starting to understand that it could be as bad as all that.)

—

The dog noses his foot some time before sun up. Will knows because he does not sleep, and it doesn’t come looking for him again by the time Beau gets up and begins the process of making coffee, each scoop of grounds hissing in its measuring cup, scattering in the filter. 

Tcshhh, tcshhh, tcshhh. 

“You awake?” Beau rumbles from the kitchen. 

“Hard to not be,” says Will, throwing an arm over his eyes, letting the dog lick his fingers. 

—

There’s a small dread in Will knowing that he is running out of time. 

There’s the plane ticket that leaves tomorrow, of course, and that is alterable if he actually want it to be, but that’s not what he means. 

“Please make yourself somethin’ for lunch,” says Beau before he leaves for work. He doesn’t look as tired today, but his five o’clock shadow is more beard than stubble now, more white than mousy brown. ““Cream o’ wheat, toaster waffles, goddamn apples, I don’t care what, jus’ keep it down. Load o’ laundry, a couple dog breaks, thank you kindly.” 

Will sips his coffee, and tries to not be bothered by the low expectations. 

He decides to instead be happy that he recognizes the expectation is low. 

“Just having a hard time with appetite lately,” says Will, staring down into his cup. It’s a lie, because he gets hungry as much as the next person - he simply can’t deal with it once it’s in there. 

“It’s getting better,” he adds, and eats a square of bread, toasted with American cheese blistered on top.  

“Starvin’ ain’t improvin’ your circumstances,” says his father, buttoning up his own canvas jacket, embroidered with his name across the breast pocket to match the mailbox and the letters and Will’s birth certificate. “Bein’ hungry makes you weak.” 

“I know,” says Will, who goes back to sleep for a while once the Crown Victoria pulls noisily away from the curb, and the dog jumps up to keep him company. 

Just one more day to be lazy, he promises himself. Maybe not to solve all the problems he has, but one more day to feel bad without consequence, because Beau will never get in Will’s business without being asked to, but also won’t let Will feel like he doesn’t have a ride to the airport if he wants it, or somewhere to sleep if he’s afraid of the dark again, or finds himself suddenly very well suited to it and afraid of that .

—

Will wakes around ten when he hears the mailman closes the letterbox with a little slam, dog lifting its head in alarm, paws flexing into the blanket top. 

Will opens his eyes to the smell of the linens, and the deep set nicotine, and whatever is left of breakfast in the kitchen, stinking of cheap cooking oil and stale coffee pot. Beneath that, the scent of detergent in his clothes, and the subtle smell of himself. 

He is proud that he doesn’t jolt up the same as the dog. He is…not proud, but emptily satisfied when he opens the door to pull the letters from the box, and wave briefly to the post office worker getting back in their van. 

Close enough, he tells himself, and starts sorting everything on the entry table from oldest to newest, throwing away anything that feels like it might be trash, or at the very least trying to take advantage of him as he reads it.

—

In short order, the quiet hours become too quiet, and he starts to fill it with noise. First, with the washing machine, spinning sheets and oil-blotted work shirts in sweet suds of soap. Second, with the kitchen sink, all of Beau’s many uncleaned mugs coming to stand tidily next to each other, the oven sheets drying under the broiler after they have been scrubbed. 

Will starts to work on other things. He dusts the tops of the furniture, sweeps the front porch, clears out all of the rotten food from the refrigerator. He finds the little vacuum in the hall closet and watches the dog hair disappear under its mouth. He puts two slices of white bread together and slaps jam and sugary peanut butter between them and insists that he will keep them down. 

Peanut butter sticks, he hears his father say when he is younger than he is now. That’s a balanced meal, surely.  

The dog watches this in silence, laid out under a sunny spot. 

Will opens the blinds and lets the sun shine stronger on the speckled black, grey, and white hairs, pulling at the dog’s ears, telling it that there’s no need to do anything that it doesn’t want to, that he’ll try to sleep better tonight so that it doesn’t feel the need to check in on him. 

He runs another load of all the new clothes so that he’ll have something fresh to wear. These are shoved into an old rucksack that Beau keeps from his military days, Will swearing to mail it back when he’s done. 

Technically, it would have all fit in the plastic bag, save for the coat, which fights against the drawstring being closed to the very end. It begs him to wear it over an undershirt and the thrice washed corduroy, that all of that together is a near amalgamation to what Will thinks of himself today and that people should learn to recognize this new animal wandering around.

Will folds it primly and stuffs it to the bottom of the bag. Airports aren’t special occasions. Going home, properly, for the first time in months, should never have been a special occasion, and he’s not going to act like it is. 

—

Will makes for the bathroom when the washing machine stops. He still needs to scrub the cut hairs from his shoulders, and learn how to style the rest of them the same as he does each time he’s gone to the barber. It’s been so long since he’s held a comb that for one passing second, he contemplates waiting for his father to come home to show him how it’s done. 

Beau need only comb his own hair, and Will can watch. Does one hold it at the spine? Do they gently pull at its teeth? Not so hard that they come out, just enough to remind them that it’s sharp, and that sharp or not, all of them can be pulled out. 

It would be easier to mimic than to remember, thinks Will, placing it next to the sink. 

The shower hisses and clouds the mirror when Will turns it on, him stepping into it with narrow, cold feet. He feels each jet from the head of it as a needle, all of them stitching him together. He opens his eyes to the steam, hand roving his shoulder, arm, belly, taking stock of what has been left to him. 

He’s pale. Thin, despite everyone’s efforts to make him eat, either out of amusement, desperation, or legal mandate that must be noted in a patient chart. Somewhere beneath his fingers, a sandwich better suited to a child is digesting and trying to stay inside. 

Above that, skin that is dry and tight. 

Above that, the fine velvet of tiny hairs, the ones from navel to groin catching at his nails.

Will runs his palm across them experimentally. It’s been a while since he’s acknowledged he has a body. He’s become so accustomed to seeing dead ones that the living one he’s born in feels temporary when he catches himself admiring it.

His body replies with the cold air of the shower stall intermingling with the steam. His toes tingle in the backwash. His fingers are velvet below his navel. He licks spray from his lips, and uses a free hand to push the newly cut hair back behind his ears and above his forehead.  Out of habit, he covers his face with pruning fingers and listens to the water run off of him, and travels downwards with it, hands cupped around neck, over cold-tightened nipples, the bend of his pelvis to thighs. 

Will frowns at himself, palming at his cock without much intention behind it. Masturbating in his father’s house doesn’t feel different enough from masturbating in a mental hospital, like the dog will submit a report about it the same as an orderly would note how much corn and carrots that Will eats from his dinner plate. He doesn’t feel very adult, grabbing for a dollar store two-in-one shampoo, promising ‘ No tears! Non-irritating! ’ on the package. 

He pushes through the instinct to be cautious. He lets the shampoo take away the friction against the tender skin, feels himself filling out despite the clicking of the dog’s nails in the hallway, or how the shower water isn’t as warm anymore. 

Will leans against the tile of the shower wall, and breathes through an open mouth. The water sneaks around to his tongue, tasting bitter with soap, like dry aspirin. 

Will tries to push past that thought, more aggressively than the cautiousness. He wonders how many pills he had taken before the emergency room doctors had started him on immunotherapy, and afterwards the common amalgamation of pharmaceutical mood stabilizers and antipsychotics that he doesn’t need. With harsh strokes, because the sting of arousal has found him despite grinding his teeth together at the thought of it, he wonders if Hannibal had a chart for that somewhere - making sure it was never too much anesthetics, too many barbiturates, too few days that Will wasn’t pounding down pain killers because he can’t think straight around the dull, massive ache of his own head.  

(“Gratifying to hear I am still in your thoughts,” you imagine Hannibal saying from the other side of the curtain, just enough between you that you cannot see his face in the vinyl, gloved hand looking for your curls through it.)

Will slams a fist into the tile when he comes, and swears when it is broken beneath the meat of his palm. 

He towels himself off like there is nothing here that he should touch. He doesn’t bother to dry his hair at all, all of it clinging to each other to make ringlets in whatever tangled way they’d like. 

Will drips down the hallway and throughout the house, unable to be washed down the drain the same as his come, or flushed away with nausea - wretchedly present in Savannah, as much as Virginia, as much as Baltimore, Quantico, Minnesota, nowhere that he doesn’t have the same body as much as he ignores it, or mind, as much as he wishes it would go back to being thirty years younger and safe to leave in someone else’s hands. 

He watches each spot dry between chores in the afternoon sun until they are faint evaporated circles.  

—

“You mus’ be feelin’ better,” says Beau when he returns through the unlocked door. 

Standing at the front of the stove, Will heats up an egg breakfast for dinner in the good skillet, mindful of his white undershirt. In the cheap oil - two tablespoons worth - four sunnyside eggs make white and yellow cankers in the pan, a roll of sausage meat still waiting on the counter to be sliced and fried with them. 

He thinks they all look disgusting, but Will is hungry. 

“I’m feeling something,” says Will, making room for more things in the skillet. “Will you take your eggs with decaf or do you want something stiffer than that?”

“Over hard, thank you kindly,” says Beau, scratching the dog’s ears, a relieved slump to his shoulders once he puts the new mail and his embroidered jacket to the side. “Ain’t nowhere t’ be but here tonigh’.” 

“Thank goodness for that,” says Will, all his skin beneath the clothes itchy and hot. 

—

They watch the Friday night football game. He’s not entirely sure that Beau follows it in any meaningful capacity, but he flips to the channel instinctually, and nothing controversial awaits on the screen other than play reviews and referee calls. There is no discussion of local crime. There are no arrests to report, or traffic to be inconvenienced by, or little girls reading for their proud parents on national television.  

Will sinks into the couch next to his father, both their long legs folded on themselves. The dog lays in a persistent line in front of them both, just in case either takes to the idea of petting it, or trying to leave the room.

From the side table, Beau’s ice clinks as it melts in the whiskey. From beneath the window, Will’s phone buzzes away, deliberately out of sight. 

“You gonna get that?” Beau asks only once, after the buzz persists on three separate occasions. “They’ve been callin’ like you owe ‘em somethin’.”

Will smiles, recrossing his legs.  

“Not tonight,” he says. “That’s tomorrow’s problem.”

“When you go on back t’ Virginia,” says Beau, looking down into his glass.

Will shrugs. “Gotta do it some time. Besides,” he says, grabbing his own modest glass of whiskey, his hand rocking it on the arm of the couch, “Can’t be unemployed at my dad’s house forever. Don’t think the landlord would like the extra tenant, even if it is my name on the lease.”

Beau grumbles at this reminder, and takes a sip. 

Will sees the thoughtful set of his mouth, and very nearly tries to head off whatever insult Beau will try to mine from that statement. Too big for his britches, eat up with attitude, all the usual fatherly complaints. 

But Beau looks at the television and watches the game for another fifty yard run, and eventually says, “You can come here whenever it suits you. I ain’t keepin’ score. God knows I’d deserve it if you took t’ doin’ that, but you never did.”

Will leans into his arm, fingers knuckled against the side of his face. 

“I might give it a go this time,” he says, tongue chasing the taste of grease and soap around in his mouth behind the liquor. “Not with you,” he clarifies, “but someone else.” 

Beau hums, stretching a foot out to scratch the long line of the dog’s back, a few short hairs falling to the floor where he goes along the spine. “You come from mean people,” he says with a wrinkled smile. “And mean people don’ forget a single favor or sin...a lifelong obsession wit’ debt.”

Will actually laughs at that - the weird little ember of resentment that smokes at the idea, and scratches the dog too, catching the scruff of its neck with long white toes. 

He tells his father he broke a tile in the bathroom and that he’ll have to fix it the next time he’s down. Slipped and fell - nothing to be done about it, entirely accidental, but that he’s very sorry and didn’t want to forget to say something about it.      

“Speaking of debts, and all,” he says, and empties his drink for the night without pouring another. 

—

The phone isn’t anything worth stressing about - a rare occurrence it seems this week, as though no one is able to hold it together without him stitching the three sided triangle of his geography together, and now it’s all falling apart. 

(You fancy the image of that - your little farmhouse sinking into the snow field, the FBI Academy a blaze of wildfire, Alana’s comfortable suburban home disappearing into a crevasse in the earth, all the dogs holding a wake around it, Hannibal’s massive brownstone degrading brick by brick into a pile of rubble until his life is cross-sectioned like yours, secrets making the timber frame.)

Initially, it’s a call. Just Alana, checking in to see when Will can come by for the dogs, or if she should plan to drop them off. 

After, it’s a text, because that is simpler, and Will Graham doesn’t merit the complexity of in-person attention when she is convinced he isn’t a killer, but not averse to becoming one given the opportunity. 

Everyone’s excited to see you, she says, talking like dogs have a concept of travel and that Will has just left them for a weekend of rest and relaxation. Will knows that’s who she’s talking about because Alana is undoubtedly not excited to see him. Maybe Winston will finally be able to sit still.

Not likely, thinks Will, familiar now with that kind of need. Maybe Winston won’t recognize the house either, now that Will doesn’t. Maybe worse still, he won’t recognize Will. 

Will rolls under the sheets, phone bright against the backrest of the couch. The ugly brown chenille texture loses its nostalgia under the blue glow, though the nicotine stays. 

He sends a brief update - no, he’ll come get them, yes, he’s sure they’re ready to move around on a large property again, thank you for keeping them comfortable. Flight’s at noon, and the drive from Dulles to Georgetown is a little over an hour, so postulating from that, he’ll see her just before the sun’s gone down for the night. 

It’s all very cordial. They are now two strangers in a transaction. 

Will wonders if that merits a coat. 

There’s a missed call after all of hers - Hannibal Lecter, reads the screen, duration of two seconds, like it’s accidental and he’s as prone to dialing numbers from the inside of his breast pocket as much as any person who is uncareful with lock screens, and conversations, and being heard. 

Will knows better than that. Will knows Hannibal has been trying to get his attention ever since Chilton stopped allowing him to have it in person. What he means by this, Will couldn’t say, but there’s very little that Hannibal doesn’t intend. Maybe to ask if he'll be needing therapeutic services. Maybe to ask him to supper and see if one ear tastes different from the other. 

Will himself has nothing to say tonight that bears mentioning yet, and so he does his best to ignore this. 

What little he has sounds ridiculous in his head. 

He would wager it’s not much better out loud. 

“Doctor Lecter,” he could say, “Doing just fine - yep, got my head back on straight these days, or as straight as it ever was. You know, same old, same old. We should chat about double entendres one of these days over dinner. My turn to cook.”

“I don’t know what to do about you these days,” he’d continue. “Statistics suggest I am likely to reoffend, federal violent crime recidivism being upwards of sixty-percent, and by golly, I think they might be onto something, even if I feel like a different person now.”

“I think I’m still on to you,” he would say, sliding a hand along the naked nape of his neck, thumbing the entry wound in his shoulder, “ no matter what everyone else does, or suggests, or shoots. I think I feel a little sick at the thought of you. I think even after all that, I miss you.”    

And there is where Will’s anger doesn’t quite carry him through the conversation, and phones begin to be inadequate, and no amount of mileage, electrical current, prison sentencing, or dead little girls is an acceptable distance between them.

Will puts the phone on the floor, and rolls back to facing the room. 

Three cars go down the street past his father’s house. The dog checks on his twice, bumping his head and his shoulder, breathing hot and gentle and brief in its passing and only marked afterwards by the soft clicking of its nails on the hardwood floor.

Will sleeps around what he thinks is one in the morning, the windows fogged from the warm air inside the house, all the cold held outward and away for at least one more sunrise.   

—

Tcshhh, tcshhh, tcshhh.

“You awake?” says Beau, turning on the light over the stove. Beneath him, the dog tap dances for breakfast and accidentally catches Beau’s foot under nails and paw. Beau swears quietly, a little soft scold in the low light that Will recognizes as being very similar to the ones he says in the kitchen at home. 

Will yawns. 

(“Damn it Chloe,” says your father. “You gotta stop gettin’ underfoot.”)

He turns his head into the sheets and blanket. They smell powdery, the couch old and tar-slathered, Will’s skin something between shampoo and salt and all those other things together to make him his father’s child this morning. He will smell different in a day. He will forget what any of this smells like in a month until the next time something reminds him of it. 

(Chloe, you say to yourself, listening to her shake her head, tail swinging nervously while Beau trots around her. Chloe, who likes the trout jerky, and goes on patrol, and likes to lean into legs, and nose the backs of knees. Chloe, who is important like Buster, or Winston, or Harley, or-) 

Will smiles as the two of them tip-toe around each other. He is happy watching them. It is the fleeting kind that he knows will be gone in a few hours, not enough to defeat things like depression, and the aftershocks of being sick, and the burning thing in the pit of his gut that has gone from rejecting everything to vacuously consuming whatever he thinks he can stomach, but nonetheless, he is happy.  

“Hard to not be,” he says. 

—

By Saturday, Will thinks he’s ok to go home. He doesn’t have a huge amount of choice if he hopes to keep the peace between himself and his father, or himself and Alana Bloom with his seven dogs, but he’s eating again. He can make a serviceable pot of coffee, and a few nice things for breakfast. He can do laundry. He can bathe himself. He can sort mail. He can make small talk, and hold a drink without the drink holding him tighter. He can sleep.

Six nights of Beau’s couch don’t make for very good sleep, though. Because of this, he isn’t sorry to see the guest pillow and sheets go into the washer for a third time since his stay began. 

Beau isn’t very excited by how quickly Will goes about doing it, but his father never looks excited for anything that isn’t attached to a j-hook or without an age advisory printed on it’s side, and so he is as sour looking as Will is when he arrives on Monday night. 

“You packed as fast as all get-out,” says Beau, who has nursed the same cup of coffee for the last hour, munching slowly on cheese toast. 

“I didn’t have that much to pack to begin with,” Will reminds him. “I think it was you that told me once that it’s a good thing.”

Beau grumbles at this as well, pulled up to the table in his captain’s chair and letting the occasional bread crumb drop from his hand to the floor where the dog - Chloe -  waits for it with a patient, shiny-eyed vigilance.

“It is,” he says. “At least if you’re of a mind t’ go.” 

Will shakes his head, pulling the strap of the rucksack. 

Clothing, check. Wallet, check. Digital receipt for his flight, check. Physical receipt for his parking garage, may it be there instead of fifty miles in a new direction, check. The existential dread that this will be the last time he sees his father because there is nothing governing the universe except chaos and some sociopath with a penchant for medical malpractice, murder, and desecration of corpses - check. 

“I’ll miss you,” he says, turning to sit on the couch, bag sitting near the door and the phone charger. “I usually do.”

Beau doesn’t say the same, but much like Will’s hesitation to say it to Hannibal, it is only because it’s weak in the same way as being hungry, and fathers are unaccustomed to being anything other than strong for their sons.

—

Beau claps Will on the shoulder when he drops him off at the airport. He tells him that it’s good that he’s ok now, but that he’s always welcome, and that no son of his needs to even call about it. House key is to the left of the front porch under an old tire hub. Sheets are in the hall closet. There’s no cable and no internet, and Beau’s never been much for news other than the daily paper from the corner market, but maybe Will could use that if he’s getting tired of hearing about serial killers, and jails, and that Will is anything other than the smartest man he knows.

“I’m really not,” Will tells him quietly, thinking of what he’s going back to, and why he’s going back to it, but Beau pulls Will close anyway. 

His father lets him know that he’d love him even if he was as sharp as a bag of rocks, or that neighbor-lady down the block. Will doesn’t smile, but he sighs into his shoulder, thinking of green bottles of aftershave, and if he will have to get some for under the bathroom counter back in Virginia to get out every once in a while, to keep Will’s with the ship on the bottle company.

—

The countryside is peppered with lakes and patches of forest, made into a fine layer of moss on the earth from the height of the airplane. Will is happy to see it from his window seat. He is relieved to see that time is passing here above them, and that he is passing alongside it, and that by the time the wheels of the plane hit the ground in Virginia, it will almost be time to collect his car for the second time in less than a week, and to go get all of the dogs. 

Will’s hair feels stiff against the headrest, gelled and combed back into the shape that it was cut to be. He doesn’t think he looks much like himself, but that’s ok because the Will Graham that is flying north instead of south is not who the police are looking for, and has never been pictured in television or print. This one carries old and new things in a vintage military duffel. This one changes its stripes to match whatever it’s running with or toward. 

“What do you think?” he asks Alana a few hours later at the front door to break the ice, dressed in his new coat. “Villain or detective?” 

There’s a moment that Will doesn’t think she recognizes him - that he’s a canvasser in her nice little neighborhood, or he’s just passing through in need of fashion advice from the first idiot that will open their door to the creature that Will hasn’t named yet that he has changed to match. 

Will thinks that’s appropriate - she doesn’t seem to recognize Hannibal for what he is either. 

“Which would you prefer?” she says mildly.

Will bends to greet the dogs rather than reply. They are deceived by nothing, and mind only that he smells of Chloe and his father’s house which they have never seen and could not ever be asked to describe.

It is a modest thirty-two miles from Alana’s house to his own, and it is properly dark when they pull up the road. The mailbox is nearly full to bursting now, the little red flag unnecessary next to the spill of white envelopes that are crammed into it. Most of the asphalt is clear now from the plow and a couple of days of consistent sunlight, but the drive remains tidily white save for a few car tracks that tear up the snow - remnants of Chilton’s arrest, thinks Will. Strange, how it feels more like something he knows when it’s the result of people inviting themselves over to Will Graham’s house.  

Will cuts a new line of tires to the front of the house, and considers if he needs a gate, or if gates were even on the Chesapeake Ripper’s radar as anything other than a nuisance. 

He opens the car door to the dogs. He unlocks the house. He sticks a hand in just long enough to turn the lights on in the living room and hall. He crunches his way through the snow,  twenty-four legs other than his following him into the patchy grass and ice, to look at it from a far enough distance back that it looks like a boat.  He pets the soft snouts and ears of all their faces without turning his away from the golden windows and cool shadow of the house’s silhouette in the twilight, filament fine hairs left in different colors along the cuffs of his new coat. 

Yes, Will thinks, that’s his. 

—

(Last week they let you out, and the first meaningful thing you said was: “Hey daddy, it’s me - doing just fine. Just the same old, same old. Can I ask you for something? Just if you get this message. I don’t really know what I’m supposed to do right now. Would it be ok if I came to see you for a few days? I think I’d be there by around 7:30…but don’t worry about it if that doesn’t make sense. I don’t do a lot of that these days. Love you. Talk to you when I talk to you.”)

(You know by Wednesday, over a week later, what it is that you’re supposed to be doing. 

“I have to deal with you,” you tell Hannibal from the office in Baltimore, fifty miles away from home, alien, coifed, self-shorn in the entryway. “And my feelings about you.”

You leave your phone in the pocket of your coat that Hannibal takes from you to hang by the door. You think he admires it - your coat, how it meets your knees, how it makes the peach of your neck look brighter and full of veins. Your hair, how even when it is styled a new way, your mother’s watery madness and dark head of curls can’t just be cut away.

From across the sitting area, Hannibal is as he has always been. 

He would be at home on a postcard of old figures of state, you think, the kind that you know everyone in the picture is important and has a name, but mostly because you recognize him and his name as being yours to deal with, and that you cannot conceive of another half a year that you don’t know what is happening, or have choices, or have him telling you what happiness should look like.

You stare at him for a long time, imagining snow melting between you.

“I think it's best if I do that directly,” you say.)