#rip beverly katz you got too close

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I've seen this Hannibal episode, still stings.

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The Unquiet Grave: Chapter 18

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Chapter 18:

           Will snaps his walls down, sharp. He’s within his garden, and he’s tending it, and isn’t that another row of thyme?

           It is, and he thinks of the walls around his walls, hiding his secrets. The empath can’t get him here. The empath can’t dream himself here.

           “Whenever you’re ready,” the annotator tells him.

           He looks around, and he stares at the sun rising high, arms reaching to brush against a promising sky. He can’t stop staring. Surely Jack and Hannibal can see it, but he can’t bring himself to care in the moment because the scene makes perfect sense. The scene he is currently playing, the victim he portrays so well.

           “He is claiming the victim, that he is being dragged before the FBI with nothing more than false accusations and slander,” he lies, and if there are other empaths around that are trying to sense him, he thinks it’s a damn good lie. It’s easy on the tongue, and there’s a wild streak of memory that darts in front of his eyes in his hiding, in his misdirection; his dream where he kissed Hannibal.

           It wakes him from what the killer implanted for him to find—a cold shock of water to the face. He looks to Jack and pushes the thought from his mind, finding enough sense to pull his gloves back on.

           “He’s…trying to paint a picture,” he explains, and just beside Price, Beverly Katz watches with narrowed eyes. Far behind her, the public gawks behind the police line, uncaring of the snow. News, cameramen, and social media gurus alike are bumping shoulders, waiting for that moment to catch an empath…doing whatever it is empaths do.

           “Is he speaking again?” Beverly asks before the annotator can. The jostling of ceremony, of the process and procedures is irritating to the annotator, and it’s apparent in how they adjust their blazer, a quick tug from the hand also holding the pen. Will hopes it doesn’t stain their jacket.

           “He doesn’t trust you not to be the bad guy,” Will says. Then, wryly, “the FBI, that is. He wasn’t thinking of you specifically, Beverly.”

           “But is he speaking,” she repeats.

           “No.”

           “How are your walls?” the annotator asks, getting control of their crime scene.

           “Sturdy,” Will assures them. It’s a little sobering to think he’s somewhat telling the truth. Walls within walls within walls. Sturdier than the last time he stared at a dead body like this.

           Beverly moves to the body, and the annotator follows to jot down any notes of worth, should they hear them.

           “Did you get any sense of identity?” Jack asks when Will draws close.

           “Whoever they are, they know how to hide themselves. Not only can they manipulate and distort what they leave behind, they can stay under the radar…I don’t have the kind of training to find someone like that.”

           “You can’t break past his memories and find something?”

           “I risk exposure if I dig too far and find his madness. I used my hands, Jack.”

           Just past Jack’s shoulder, Hannibal talks to Beverly beside the bodies, at a distance and in close enough earshot of Price and Zeller. She doesn���t seem upset, merely focused on Hannibal’s words, hands idly resting on her hips.

           “One of these girls was a senator’s daughter,” Jack reveals. “What kind of training do you need?”

           “The kind of training no one can teach, Jack,” Will snaps. A senator’s daughter means nothing to the man that guts people for fun. To think such a position of status would stop him is laughable, but Will is in enough control of himself not to laugh. Something residual from the killer? Maybe, but now’s not the time to show it. “It’s illegal. It’s called weaponizing your gift.”

           “You’re saying you can’t find him?” Jack demands –likely not as harsh as he intends, but still harsh enough to prickle.

           “I mean unless he makes a mistake, I can’t find him. I can’t find an intelligent psychopath like this—they’re not something the Academy thought we’d be up against in my line of work. Minds mended and whole are harder to see inside when they know how not to be found.”

           The lights from the media flash just beyond them. He’s relieved it’s cold enough people may not realize he’s the empath just because he’s got gloves on. He’s relieved they’re far enough away they can’t pick him out of a crowd, can’t see the way he can feel their curiosity. It’s sicker somehow, sicker than the way the scene even happened because this man may have been cruel, but what’s crueler than being in a position enough to watch and take note of the horrors within the comfort of your own living, intact skin? Horror was only loved in safe spaces?

           “And how to you see him, Will? What are we up against?”

           “I…” at that, he falters. What are they up against? What’s he up against? He shrugs, helpless, and he looks to the women that hiss and whisper in the John Doe’s ear –Jack, he can now say with assurance. They’re standing in the middle of an art piece dedicated not only to Will, but to Jack. A show they’re playing out, only Jack doesn’t seem to realize just how well he knows the lines. “I think…we’re dealing with a level of psychopath that can use their empathy as a weapon without being consumed by it. Somehow, they’re able to completely detach themselves from the moment, from the way emotions can overwhelm us as empaths.”

           “How is that possible?” Jack’s voice grows louder the more Will notices the number of flashing lights in the distance.

           He grimaces, but looking away only pulls his gaze to the women hissing in the man’s ear, and that isn’t any prettier to see, easier to feel. “I don’t know, Jack. Do I look like the fucking killer?” he snaps, and at that he does notice Hannibal turning his head to look, just at the same time he notices Jack’s impatient expression twist to a livid disapproval.

           “I didn’t hear that,” he snarls, and he leans in, shoulders squared. It grabs the entirety of Will’s attention, arresting. “Did I, Will?”

           One beat, then two. Will rips his eyes away, to the sunrise where things are terrible because of how beautiful they are in their perfection to the scene set before them. He smiles a little, then rubs his face with his gloved hands.

           “You didn’t, Jack. But I’m just telling you what I know, and this isn’t something I know. I think…he’s’ taunting us. Because he knows how to do something we don’t know how to do, and he knows I can’t do it because it would land me in prison.”

           Or permanent retirement.

           Jack doesn’t want to accept his words. He stews on them as Will makes his way to Hannibal, who’s somehow detached himself from Beverly and is preoccupied with examining one of the marble columns and the way the sunlight hits it. Will notes just how far it is from the actual scene, and he can’t help the twist in his chest at the consideration that’s entirely too obvious.

           “How are you?” Hannibal asks when Will steps up beside him.

           “You surprise me every time you don’t react to some new crime scene thrown at you,” Will says by way of reply. He doesn’t pretend to examine the statue with him, mostly because he’s done studying the scene. He doesn’t want to look back again. The words sit on his back, the ones he spit at Jack. He doesn’t have luxury of pushing Jack. He’s got enough enemies that his own direct boss would be a terrible addition.

           They know.

           “My work before this wasn’t entirely innocent, as I may have mentioned,” says Hannibal, and he looks away from the column. His eyes linger on the picture before them, and Will can’t quite trace the emotion as his lips press down tightly. “Would you like to wait for your session before you discuss anything?”

           “Yes.” Will can’t quite bring himself to stop looking back to the onlookers. Their pale, neurotypical stares. Curious, not at all realizing just what they are witnessing. “What’d Beverly say?”

           “Agent Katz wasn’t quite sure what to think of your revelation. I think she was expecting more, given what you promised her over dinner.”

           “I promised her the truth. Nothing more, nothing less.”

           “Which is all anyone can ask,” Hannibal agrees. “Do you need to leave?”

           Will doesn’t want to look back to the bodies, but he forces himself to. He can’t say if it’s because he needs to prove to himself that he can, or if it’s because there’s something in the way the empath spoke that keeps him looking back. How could a voice sound so familiar yet so utterly unknowable? A voice that could belong to anyone, anything, and he wonders if maybe he knows the Dreamer, otherwise why else would their voice mimic the forgetful nature of a dream?

           “I’d like to leave. I don’t know if there’s anything here for me,” he says, and the annotator lingering nearby nods, pen poised over the paper.

           “Your walls are sturdy today, Agent Graham,” they say.

           It’s not until Will is tucked into an SUV headed towards Wolf Trap that he realizes he’s never once asked the annotator’s name in all of his years working with the FBI.

-

           “I’ve been thinking about Callumny of Apelles,” Will says during his therapy session later that evening.

           Work dragged. No word of Dolarhyde, no word of the Dreamer on the loose. No word on how they’d combat an empath that knew how to weaponize. Knew how to hide. No word on the exact day of Will’s psyche-evaluation. Sometimes they liked to spring it. Sometimes they let a sharp white piece of paper carry the weight for them. It was coming up, though. That much he knows.

           Will wonders how Francis Dolarhyde is doing. If The Great Red Dragon is treating him well.

           “Do you feel particularly accused of something?”

           “Yes,” he says. And then, “no.”

           “What made you think of it?”

           “Because that’s what he painted,” Will replies. He’s standing by the fireplace, the warmth at his back and making his palms hot. Hannibal, still seated at his office chair, had let Will pace some of the emotions off of the soles of his feet and waited until he was ready to speak.

           “So he did speak?”

           “He did,” Will affirms. He looks around the room, thinks of when he’d crept in alone and stole hands along the walls and book bindings. “He’s powerful…he…”

           He doesn’t know how to say it. How can he put to words what he feels when the Dream takes hold? The care, the artfulness in how it feels so utterly real, but there wasn’t anything real to the way that touching the John Doe’s skin hadn’t brought any true pain.

           “How do you see him, Will?” Hannibal asks, echoing Jack from that morning.

           “He’s…intelligent, Hannibal.” He starts slow, trying to gather his thoughts. He can be honest with Hannibal. The thought lends itself some sort of power. He inhales sharply. “He’s an intelligent psychopath whose talent in empathy is such that he has…layers to his Dreams. He can literally dampen the feelings and events of the scene of a crime just by Dreaming over it, and that’s what I feel when I put my hands to it. He’s a sadist, but…but he chooses to remove the agony of a murder to talk to me instead. He finds me useful, then, or at least interesting. Being an E-3 has its drawbacks.

           “I…don’t know what he’s seeing, though, what he’s thinking. If he has the power to distort the space around a real, tangible place for empaths to find later, do I have to sit and watch the bodies stack until he makes a mistake that I can find? How close is he to me that he has such intimate knowledge of what’s going on around the FBI? It could mean he works there, and I’m just not looking hard enough.”

           He pauses and looks towards the far wall where the windows were covered in thick swathes of gold and burgundy. He’d once tried to draw it back, only to find that Hannibal was an old-fashioned sort of person and had several layers to what he referred to as drapes, not curtains. “That lends the question, though…that lends the question at just how powerful he is; that he could fool the FBI for so long and work underneath them? This is a dangerous person. I don’t…know how to find him yet.”

           Hannibal is quiet, watching Will with the same expression he always seems to. Will rubs his mouth, his words unsure on the curl of his lips, and his other palm begins to get too hot.

           “But some part,” he says, and his voice is a little lower. The fire cackles behind him, pops and hisses the last bit of moisture from a branch. “Some part of me…wants to protect him. Because even though I can’t see him, we seem to have a lot in common.”

           Hannibal tilts his head curiously, a small frown at his lips. It’s not disapproving, although it’s not in the least pleasant. He steeples his fingers. “What makes you feel that way?”

           “We’re both willing to break the law to save ourselves. Survival instincts are in our blood.” Will replies. He wanders over to Hannibal’s desk. It’s normal tidiness and strict attention to the spaces between pencil and pen is distorted by the scattering of drawing paper, perhaps something he did between patients that day during his lunch.

           He studies the strict, sharp lines that define what seemed to be an elegant, Tudor-style manor of sorts. Hannibal graciously stands and moves his chair so that Will can study it at a closer angle. “My old boarding school.”

           “You seem the type to have gone to a boarding school,” Will replies, not unkind. Just beside the pencil, he spies a scalpel. He picks it up and holds it to Hannibal, more of a question than an offering.

           Hannibal allows the change of subject, his dark eyes calculating but amiable. Will wonders what he saw at the crime scene, what analysis ran through his mind. The tide shifted once more, and he again resents the lack of ability to simply see.

           The scalpel is accepted, and Hannibal demonstrates sharpening the pencil just beside the paper. “I found during school that a scalpel cuts sharper and better lines for drawing. I prefer a fine edge to my art.”

           “It’s art,” Will agrees readily, looking back to the piece. The boarding school is drawn in what could only be described as a factual way. There was no emotion to it, the sort of thing drawn from a memory but not a particularly poignant one. He wants to press a thumb to it and twist, and there’s a wild moment where he’s not quite sure if that’s residual from the crime scene, or if the ugly thought is his. He wonders what he took from the killer, what the empath dared to leave behind.

           “I believe I have a school book somewhere…” Hannibal walks away from him, and Will is just brave enough to drag a finger along the blank space just beside the trellis. He couldn’t ruin it; he exhales, and the wild thought is abandoned.

           He does move the picture, though, to see the one beneath. There’s the rustling of paper, then quiet. Hannibal’s footsteps along the bookcases make no sound.

           Will’s breath catches, and for a wild moment he can only stare blankly, simply no thought coming to mind as all that he can do is process.

           I’m fond of you.

           Will Graham is not a vain man. He is smart enough to know he can be seen as attractive, but he is humble enough to not suppose himself to be anything remarkably extraordinary.

           The curves of skin, in contrast to the lines of the house, were gentled with reverence. Will glances about, and Hannibal is in the loft, his back turned. Greedily, he tugs a glove from his hand and touches the paper, swallowing down a rush of spit.

           Hannibal’s drawing of Will feels first, gentled in a sort of awe. Then, greedy, wanting. Hungry is the word for it, but the sort of hunger that makes mouths soften. He draws Will with his back turned, although it is bare, and he wonders just what it is he’s hiding that Hannibal feels the need to draw him turned away. It’s Greek in nature, as if Will is made of the same marbled stone as the gazebo that demonstrated Callumny and her cruelty. Maybe no longer the victim, but the one holding the entire play.

           It’s what they know that’s important.

           He’s never thought himself so beautiful as it feels in this moment, bare fingers on the curls of his graphite hair.

           “Oh,” Hannibal says, just behind him.

           Will turns, but he’s caught by the wrist and held fixed, Hannibal’s expression unreadable. He looks to the drawing just behind Will, displayed nakedly with a guilty glove beside it. He looks back, and his politely gloved hand lessens its grip, albeit only slightly.

           Before Will can speak, Hannibal leans in and presses a hungry kiss to his lips.

           Obsession, Alana had warned him of. Obsession, like Will isn’t suddenly arrested by the sharp and delightful way waves of hunger washed over him. Perhaps waves aren’t so right, but ripples, starting where their skin touches and spreading lazily over his skin. Muted, as Hannibal had once described it. Muted, but present, tingles of awareness that make him hungry for so much more, hungry in a way he’s never quite felt before.

He’s not overwhelmed. He presses closer, and his hand is released, to better press fingers to his cheeks. One hand is gloved, but the other feels stubble and the gentled thrum of pleasure.

           And it is coming from Hannibal.

           His mind swims, dizzies with the rush of it. Has he dreamed of it like this? No, no, but it is all the sweeter, and his back is arched over the desk as Hannibal wraps arms around him and tangles fingers into his hair. His skin is his own. His own skin and his own bones.

           He kisses with enough want to bite, to sting a little. Will is buzzed off of just how much he likes it.

           And then they are standing apart, and his hands are by his side. Hannibal is staring at him, simply staring, and Will is just greedy enough off of the endorphins of it that he sets his bare hand on the drawing beside him. He’s feeling something.

           He’s feeling something.

           I’m fond of you.

           “Oh,” Will says. His heart sits at his feet, and it beats in slow, ugly thumps. Hannibal’s hunger sits in his veins, and the memory of how the pencil pressed into the grains of the page sit fat in the whorls of his fingertips.

           “Are you processing?”

           “A little,” Will admits. Before Hannibal can misunderstand, he adds, “I’m not upset.”

           “I’m fond of you,” Hannibal says, and he allows that to show on his face for the briefest of moments. His hair is askew, but only just, and Will has the impulsive urge to fix it. Hannibal glances to the drawing again, then back to Will. His eyes are fixating. “I suppose that was my thought in drawing this.”

           “I can feel it,” Will agrees, and his heart is climbing up, up, and it sits in his throat. “I can…I could feel you, Hannibal.”

           “Do you?” Hannibal wonders, and his eyes fall back to Will, his gaze falling to his lips. “Do you, Will?”

           Can you see?

           Will takes his other glove off, and he cradles them along his jaw as he kisses Hannibal with a hunger, as though they are rolling along the fields within the walls of his slowly strengthening mind, tucked away with a Dream. He wonders if Hannibal, whose own consciousness is powerful enough to resist the power of empaths, can feel anything in the way Will holds onto him, if he can glean insight and awareness in the way Will kisses as though he hasn’t been touched by another human being in a long time.

           But he presses back, just as needful, and Will wonders how long it’s been since Hannibal has felt someone feel just what was behind the mask.

-

           He wakes up the next morning and lays there for a time. His dreams had been quiet, muted. His walls were sturdy, and in the dark space of night when one dances between rest of wakefulness, he had imagined himself tending his walls, both ones with trap doors and the one whose repair mattered most. Monkshood and Thyme grew in the same rows of the garden. The Stag watched from a distance.

           His lips are a little swollen, although it could be argued he picks at them too much to let them heal. Hannibal’s kisses were needing, although there was nothing in the way of complaint. Will scrubs his face with cold water. He wonders if Garrett Jacob Hobbs is still standing in the fields just outside of his walls.

           Jack’s got him on the phone before Hannibal finds him with a second cup of coffee, and he accepts it greedily.

           “Got a tip on the RA,” he says; despite the grim statement, Jack’s positively pleased. It takes Will a second too long to recall the RA is Dolarhyde. If you can’t find the Dreamer, why continue with that investigation?

“He’s been sighted in the Baltimore area,” he adds.

           “What tip?”

           “CCTV outside of a K-mart.”

           “Do you need me there?” Will asks. It’s too hot to sip the coffee, but he blows on it stubbornly to try and speed it up. Hannibal watches intently from his place just across the table.

           “It’s been so long it’s contaminated,” Jack replies sourly. “But now we know he’s keeping tabs on you. I’m thinking of keeping you at HQ.”

           It’s hard to reach the tone of his voice, especially over the phone. Will isn’t sure if he should take it seriously, or if it’s simply another way to trap him in a corner to retire him.

           He sets the phone down and puts it on speaker, for Hannibal’s benefit.

           “Do we know his next target?” Will asks. “Not likely it’d be me.”

           It’s the opening he knows he’ll always give that Jack won’t take the bait for. “Very likely it’d be you.”

           No, no; it meant Slowinski was there, Slowinski was in Baltimore for some stupid reason, otherwise Red Dragon wouldn’t be lurking there.

           But Jack doesn’t Will know Will knows that, does he?

           God, he’d better not.

           “I think there’s something personal to his killing Jack…all of this is personal, but I’m not personal. I’m just the RA-hunter.”

           He takes a sip of coffee, not sure what he’ll do when he has to go back to grinding his own coffee beans. It’s a guilty luxury, but one none-the-less. He wants to touch his lips again, to see if he still Feels it.

           “Yeah, well…Dr. Bloom says she’s gotten word about your six-month-evaluation,” Jack says, and the sudden turn isn’t lost on him in the least because there was something in the randomness of it, how he deliberately made it somehow worse than Dolarhyde potentially hunting him.

           Will stays quiet, and he spares a glance with Hannibal.

           “How are you feeling about it?” Jack asks “I know you’ve got a lot on your plate, but don’t think I’ve forgotten everything that’s happened.”

           Don’t forget you’re always being watched.

           “I’m feeling good, Jack. You got a date from her?”

           “I’ll ask her to e-mail you. You’ll have it when you come in.”

           And it’s there, there hidden in his tone that Will hears it. He looks to Hannibal, then looks to the phone, and like before, when Hannibal pressed his palm to Will’s, he sucked down the piping hot cup of coffee and set it down sharply, allowing the sharp sound to linger into a bitter silence.

           You’ll have it when you come in.

           “Thanks, Jack,” he says, sincere. His voice is hoarse and his throat scalds, but he means it. “I’ll see you when I’m in.”

           The line goes dead, and his screen flashes to the call time before going black.

           He accepts a glass of water from Hannibal, the carafe fogged from the ice that clicks and smacks together. He watches the ice bob and sucks the water down quickly, allowing it to both burn and soothe his throat.

           “I’m going to walk into an evaluation,” he says, and it sits fat in the air. Outside, snow stirs. Supposedly, Red Dragon lurks.

           “Do you suppose?” Hannibal wonders, and his hand rests without hesitation on Will’s. Will allows it, although his hands are gloved. He is torn between withdrawing his touch or removing the glove.

           His lips still hummed from the feeling of their kiss.

           “I know him…I know Jack,” says Will. “I know how he sounds when he’s hiding something.

           Hannibal doesn’t push him as he gets ready, doesn’t press when he decides to take his own car in. He needs the reassurance of a getaway, although there’s a detached part of him that is too cool to have accepted what the rest of him is resigned to. Standing on the stoop of Hannibal’s house, he’s kissed once more, and he’s allowed to taste something much like hunger, only it left a sweeter aftertaste of victory.

           Will drives to the FBI, and Garrett Jacob Hobbs sits in the passenger seat beside him.