Post-apocalypse, AU-set Hannibal and Will Graham? Why not?
I'm a sucker for broken characters and … cannibals? Sure, we'll go with that. I was hesitant and initially unconvinced by the casting of Mads Mikkelsen as Hannibal, but I came around. He has the definite element of elegance, class, and reserved psychopathic-ness. The show was my first introduction to Hugh Dancy. What a cutie. He plays tragicness well. For some reason, I'm reminded of Anthony Perkins.
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At a gas station outside Raleigh, Will siphons gas because Hannibal hates the taste. He waits until the sun-warmed fluid kicks up into his mouth and, gagging and spitting, he transfers the tube to their can. Hannibal’s shadow laps against him like water: the parts of Will that are darkened by him are the parts that are coolest and most at ease.
He pinches the tube shut with thumb and forefinger. His mouth still tastes foul and he wants to scrape his tongue against the asphalt until it is scoured clean, but he ignores that urge, as he’s been ignoring more and more of them lately.
“He had almost a full tank. If we can find another container—”
Hannibal nods and disappears. The lines and planes of his body are as straight as road-lines and power-lines, though of those three things, only Hannibal’s lines are still relevant and suggestive of order.
Will waits, crouched with the July sun against his neck. He scratches his fingers along the surface of his tongue, but his fingernails are grimy and bloody, bitten down past the quick, and it doesn’t improve the taste in his mouth so much as it alters it. When Hannibal comes out of the mosquito- and fly-spotted glass doors, the shape of his mouth changes, and he says, mildly, “That isn’t for the best.”
He sets the red plastic jug, its mouth darkened from use and dirt, down beside Will. Will drags out the rest of the gas and lets Hannibal give him a tube of toothpaste, a bottle of lukewarm water, and—a decent find—a blue plastic toothbrush. Will brushes and rinses there, still eye-level with the gas tank, but he walks up and wanders over to a grassy strip to spit: Hannibal is particular. His mouthful of watery foam lands against a used condom and a Hershey bar wrapper.
He licks ersatz mint away from his lips.
“Where do you want to go?”
Hannibal squints even underneath his plastic sunglasses, as though he refuses to believe that anything so tacky could take full effect. “Wherever you like.”
“Did you get Dramamine? Aspirin?”
Hannibal touches his shirt pocket. The shirt is white linen, with French cuffs, so purely clean, even now, that it looks like a star.
“Louisiana,” Will says. His head hurts from the sun and the smell and taste of the gasoline. “We can take a boat out—I can fish.” The ocean in his head is free of bodies and almost azure, and as warm as blood. He converts the long lines of Hannibal’s body to a swimmer’s movements, hands knives to cut through the water, feet paddles churning froth. He will hold his own head beneath the surface until the salt stings his eyes.
“I have always been fond of coastlines,” Hannibal says.
“Do you fish?”
“You can teach me.”
Will’s lips pull, as if on hooks themselves. If Hannibal were a lure, he would be irresistible, and well beyond Will’s minor craftsmanship. “You’ll have to cook.”
“I would enjoy that.”
Will rubs at a spot of rust beside the abandoned car’s wheel well. He thinks of suggesting that they wash Hannibal’s car—he still does not see it as even partly his—because they have time and because Hannibal would like it. He looks at the dust on his own skin and, more faintly, on Hannibal’s, and decides that should take precedence. The station will have soap and jugged water even if its tanks are already empty and its taps open on air: he can pour for Hannibal and Hannibal can pour for him. If there’s anything left over in the hoses, though, they should splash the car off as best as they can, or else he should—
The blood spray against his face at first is like the early burst from a showerhead, as though he has fallen deeply down his own rabbit hole.
The pendulum throws itself automatically across his field of vision and he sees the man coming at him from just the corner of his eye; then he is the man coming at him.
(He lunges toward the smaller of the two men not only because he is the one who siphoned the gas but because, with the sideways and crooked cant of his body, with his disconnected stare, he seems more frightening. He will not let what he has be taken away from him. He will drive his knife into this stranger’s temple from the side, avoiding direct contact with any blood and preserving his clothing. He has killed enough people to think of this. The other man is a businessman or something similar and will not be an immediate threat. He should die as well: he took from the store and he is, besides, a trespasser.
He will throw and then recover the knife, and burn the bodies with the gasoline they themselves siphoned. The fire will be a warning to any outsiders to stay away. The bodies will be meat. This is his design.)
Hannibal, though, steps forward and, with a knife Will is not familiar with, unzips the man’s throat as neatly as a butcher draining a pig.
The man claps a hand up there and it actually does make a wet smacking sound, like muffled applause, and then he drops to his knees and dies.
Will’s breath feels like a train inside his chest.
“You are uninjured,” Hannibal says. He is telling, not asking. His sunglasses have fallen to the ground.
His eyes are pale, but this is the first time Will has thought of them as being almost drained of color. Behind them is someone he has known for a long time.
“You need to bathe,” Hannibal says. “The sinks may still have water in them. It’s unlikely, if this man has been living in the area, but it is possible. You should check.”
His voice is like cotton batting. The knife is still in his hand, the sharp edge turned towards the body at his feet.
Will understands the choice he is being offered and understands, further, that it is not a choice Hannibal has ever offered anyone else. He goes inside and does not look back through the doors.
He finds a shower in an employee restroom, as dark inside as a closet or a cocoon, and he stands in it for a long time even though the tanks are as empty as Hannibal predicted. He shakes and skids his hands across the smooth plastic walls. He waits half an hour there, finally sitting, his heels against the cool metal of the drain. After a long time, he goes and gets water. The largest containers are missing, their old places on the shelves rectangles free of dust, but the disused cooler has spoiled hamburger and Evian. Will doesn’t unwrap new soap but uses the hardened yellow sliver from the shower. It produces a thin and quickly graying lather. He pours more water across his chest and watches what is left swirl down the drain.
His hair is crinkly with the dried soap. He teases out bits of it, like confetti.
When he comes out again into the bright and unforgiving sunlight, he sees that there is a spot of blood just outside the corner of Hannibal’s mouth.
The body is gone.
“He thought we were stealing,” Will says. “We were stealing.”
“The circumstances demanded action,” Hannibal says.
“What did you do with him?”
Hannibal looks at him. His expression seems painted, unchangeable. “You have suspected for weeks, Will,” he says. “Is knowing so different? And when it comes to it, what do you know that retains its meaning, now?”
He tears more soap shreds from his hair. “Did you kill Alana?”
“No. Nor would I have. That was barbaric.”
Will thinks about power-lines that are no longer straight and longer function. He looks at the blood just above Hannibal’s upper lip. There is only spray and spatter on his shirt, from the initial cut, so he must have removed it for the rest of the work. Will studies red on white. He stole that shirt for Hannibal from a townhouse in Richmond while Hannibal was downstairs turning a rabbit in the fireplace on an improvised spit. Grease had hissed against the flames and Will had heard that. He had watched the firelight throw shadows across Hannibal’s face and had wanted to give him something; he had opened wardrobes and pored through them by flashlight and moonlight until he’d found something worthy.
There is so little left that Will loves.
He goes and gets in the passenger seat of the car. After a moment, Hannibal joins him and hands him one blister pack of aspirin and one of Dramamine.
Will dry-swallows both. “Do you know the way?” Without waiting for an answer, he closes his eyes and leans his head against the thin metal pane, which is flat and almost scalding hot. He waits to see if he will smell his skin burn and he waits to see what Hannibal will do about that. Wind from the open window whips around his face and steals away all sound.
They drive south.
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