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Chapter Text

Flambé (v.) - the process of adding alcohol such as brandy, cognac, or rum to a hot pan to create a burst of flames

There was a pot roast on the table. Sliced yet untouched, sifted with mould as a housefly buzzed around the decaying carcass of a dead Sunday lunch. A grim family dinner turned rancid. Bugs were crawling in the potatoes, maggots bursting out the heads of the cauliflower, a thick film of fat coagulating over the gravy boat.

The Turner family, mother, father, two children, were pitched forward onto the table, gunshot wounds to the heads the cause of their eternal slumber. Resultant pooling’s of dried blood read like inky shadows on the dining table linen, dark sprays of brain matter spattering across the family portrait on the wall like black constellations across the sky.

Will Graham sat at the head of the table of the dead. He stole a breath, exhaled, then closed his eyes. The pendulum of a grandfather clock behind him swings, and it joins the encroaching darkness of Will’s mind, his own internal pendulum, keeping rhythm with his heart beat. Thrum… thrum… thrum… with each beat, the scene changes.

The deathly pallor of the those seated at the table flush with colour, thrum, shooing insects from the pot roast, thrum, aromatic steam now rising from the roast as though it had been set down only a moment before, thrum, the pool of blood in front of Mrs Turner shrinks and recedes back inside her head with one too many cavities, thrum, the Turners begin to shift, slowly sitting up one by one, thrum, the blood flies off the family portrait. Thrum.

A crime scene sanitized by Will Graham’s twisted imagination.

He opened his eyes, sitting at the table, watching the Turner family motionless in the tableau before their deaths. Will sniffed, scenting the smell of a homemade meal.

The pendulum snapped into place. Locked.

Each member of the Turner family had a full plate in front of them. In front of Will, however, an empty place setting.

“I take my seat at the empty plate. My seat. My place setting next to Mrs. Turner.” A beat. “I am the guest of honour.”

The youngest Turner held a fork in her hand with a small stalk of broccoli skewered on its tines. “No one has taken a bite of their dinner. Except the youngest.” Suddenly he lurches, suddenly he points, suddenly he’s snarling at the immobile, frightened little girl. “Unless you eat your vegetables like a good girl, you won’t get any dessert.”

The youngest Turner popped the broccoli in her mouth, and Will slunk back into the chair, temporarily placated. “No one is bound. No one leaves the table. All afraid to move. Even the little ones behaved themselves.”

He scanned the room, the faces, the soon to be lost lives. “I brought my new family to this home invasion, controlling the Turners with threats of violence. Threats that turned to action.”

Three gunshots, synchronized, ring out in the dining room. “The Turner family is executed simultaneously with the exception of Mrs. Turner, who dies last.”

A haggard breath, the last in a long line in this grizzly tale. “This is my design.”

A blink, and the Turner family was back to their face down prostration on their plates, with the exception of Mrs. Turner, who stared, still, directly at Will. “I shoot Mrs. Turner, gun against the canvas of her forehead, looking directly in the eye when I pull the trigger.”

He saw it himself, on the back of his eyelids, a muzzle to a temple and then-

BANG.

The smoking gun trembles in Will’s hold.

Jack Crawford stood in the dining room doorway, hands in slacks and dark eyes dissecting Will sitting at the head of the table, although that is all he sees, all he can see, the rubber gloves tight across his knuckles, hand still raised in imitation of a gun. Clearly, Will Graham can see more than he can ever hope to, 'cause all Jack can spot is four dead bodies in need of transport to the morgue. “What do you see, Will?”

“Family values.” Will finally replied as his hand fell back to the table, back to the room with the dead bodies and the dinner that would never be eaten.

“Whose family values?” That… Will can’t answer just yet, though he suspects it might be a rogue Alpha playing out their domineering fantasies, and it leaves him and Jack to silence and the clean-up and the lingering hollow feeling between their ribs that comes with every crime scene.

The reminder that humanity could be an awful, brutal, thing.

Maybe it really was better to be alone.

Will Graham’s pack of misfit dogs sniff and wander the house, rousing and stirring under pale moonlight filtering through the crooked blinds. Most of them crowded the front room, hopping up to nap on the low hanging couch, some drinking noisily from the line of shiny silver water bowls pressed against the wall, one or two, the more adventurous members, prowling into the kitchen to try and steal a snack from the plate left on the counter.  

Some might look upon these dogs as a desperate Alphaen attempt at creating something resembling a Pack, a home, a family. Will Graham was no ordinary Alpha, and he would not thank you for the assessment.

Yet Will was not in the house that day, and unexpectedly, the dogs go still, tails motionless, heads turning, ears pricking to observe the front door with curious interest.  

Hannibal Lecter glides through the front door, pocketing the spare key he'd stolen weeks ago, the day lit up behind him with overcast clouds before he slipped the door shut. In his hand, waiting, he held up the link of sausages.

Dinner time for the dogs.

They don’t even bark.

With the dogs occupied with a meal, Hannibal Lecter scanned the cluttered bookshelf of Will Graham’s living room. He checked the bindings with quick and nimble fingers, pulling one tome out for a better look, which turned out to be an instruction manual on fly fishing. He raises a pale eyebrow, but he’s not surprised.

He can scent Will heavy in this place, better than anywhere else, where scents disorganized and anatomized together in muddled mincemeat that sometimes even Hannibal couldn’t pick apart.

Unlike his psychiatrist office, there’s no other previous patients to dull the sharpness of notes, to stop Hannibal delving past the thick chemical layer of suppressants to the sincerity hiding just beneath. Unlike a crime scene, decay couldn’t expunge the softer shades that so happily shone here, this home, where Will locks himself away from not only the word but what he sees in it.

Here, Hannibal can take a good, hard, long pant through an open mouth to hold on his taste buds, and there he has it, in his nose, on the tip of his tongue, in a memory he’ll never lose.

A scent.  

The last thing you want a man like Hannibal Lecter to have.

Hannibal can smell Will wafting on the sofa, on the lone kitchen chair, on the pillows he piles in corners, on all the soft furnishings dotted through the fatigued house that even Will Graham, ostensibly recalcitrant to his own secondary sex by the amount of suppressants he was on, couldn’t stop himself from collecting as he collected strays.

It was a common misconception that Omega’s preferred softer abodes where Alphas were happy with brick and wood. Old Victorian superstitions pinned on the epochs misconceptions of masculinity and femininity, and what it means to be on a spectrum between the two.

Alphas in reality predominately preferred luxury over austerity, it was a badge of pride pinned on the primal aspect of supporting a Pack, strength shown in the gathering and presenting of a safe, warm home. A demonstration on their capability to provide. In short, both secondary sexes on opposite ends leaned towards nesting in their own ways, though soft materials were normally present on both sides.

It was nice to see, despite the myriad of drugs Will was on, Hannibal sees from a cursory perusing of his medicinal cabinet in the bathroom, that even they couldn’t fully temper his more instinctual inclinations fully.

Will smells of black pepper, toasted clove, and a touch of… Sweet pine sap.

Hannibal anchored the smell into the vault of his mind, where nothing was ever forgotten.

The drawer glided open, and Hannibal inspected the insides with a keen eye, looking for clues to Will’s past, instead he only found old white t shirts neatly folded in a line.

Telling in its own way.

Soft, worn, old, the fabric slipped through Hannibal’s finger like heated butter.

When Will looks into the drawer two days later, he won’t wonder where number four has gone. He’ll think he’s used it as a grease rag in his shed, and thrown it out with the rest of the garbage. He won’t bother to look in the bin to verify his assumption. He’ll travel to Selleys on Saturday, the local thrift shop, and buy himself another.  

Hannibal will have the lost one stashed beneath his pillow by then. 

On Will’s work desk was a boat motor, unceremoniously displayed in a partially disassembled state. Hannibal picked up the pieces of the stripped motor and puts them back together again effortlessly.

Only to stop abruptly.

The water intake was missing, though Hannibal doubted Will had figured that out yet by the lack of how far he’d gotten before Hannibal had finished the job. The allegorical irony was not lost on him either, and he disbelieved it would be lost on Will also if the fellow Alpha had spotted it as Hannibal had.

There was the skeg, there was the propeller, and there was no water intake.

The engine would blow if switched on.

Machinery, much like humans, much like Packs, was a delicate balancing act. One overzealous piston, one loose screw, and the whole thing crumbles underneath its own ambition and hubris.

Hannibal had thought Abigail Hobbs might balance the figurative structure he was creating, but that was looking less probable as the days drew on. She was young, and bright, and far too naïve and centred on her self. Confrontational in ways Alphas typically were. Of course, she, in turn, invoked Will’s Alpha paternal instincts, as much as the man would deny it, but she also chafed against him, them, appealing to the ghost of Garret Jacob Hobbs lingering in Will’s mind, ensuring the shade will never really leave the dwelling it haunted.

And while that would always remind Will of the moment he and Hannibal shared, a first kill was always a memorable affair, it would also rile against what Will assumed he had lost that day and blind him to what he had gained, like over seasoned meat, the whole meal would be tainted.

That simply wouldn’t do.

The water intake was missing.

That wouldn’t do either.

If there is one thing Hannibal Lecter knows well, it is thus; Where there is a will, there is a way.

Lucky for them both, Hannibal’s will was indomitable.

Will’s study had one last desk pushed up to the window, allowing natural light to dazzle the array of trinkets and tools. An arrangement of Will’s fly-tying gear. There was a rack of completed flies, a vice, lamp, magnifying glass, yarns, threads, feathers and hooks.

Hannibal sat at the makeshift station, admiring Will’s handiwork, such delicate lures for catching fish. Will doesn’t see the irony of his own hobby yet, but he will.

Utilizing himself to finish the incomplete salmon fly Will had been working on, Hannibal found the tools not so alien in his hands. Thread, bobbin, scissors, pliers, these were not new instruments or devices to him and his steady hand, though they differed slightly in application and design.

His surgeon’s precision coming into play to fix the discrepancies.

Finishing the short task, Hannibal admired the fly and the hook, the pretty feathers fledged in a peacock display, pressing his thumb gently against the pointed barb on the end, keeping the pressure on until the skin gives and a drop of blood bubbles to the surface, staining the tip.

A clue.

Just one.

That was all Will ever really needed to see the bigger picture.

Will’s fishing was more than his mere hobby, as it was not enough for Hannibal to simply see the fly and recognize that, at his disposal, he had something of Will’s that he could use. He contaminates not only the hook with himself in this act, but Will too.

In these hooks lie the eye of Hannibal’s fascination with Will Graham. They’re magnificently crafted, as Will’s empathy was built on a mind fevered with imagination, and yet they hide something deadly, lethal, just as Will hid himself beneath the jittery façade of an overworked and underpaid teacher, by purpose or coincidentally it matters not.  

The intention of a fisherman was minimal, pure, to entice a predator by superficially providing it with prey too enticing to refuse. It was only at the last second, when the line pulls tight and the hook pierces cheek and the fish is reeled to its demise, does the predator understand it’s folly.

Hannibal Lecter was smarter than a haddock, however. He knows very clearly what is going on, and still, he clamps his jaws around the bait and waits. Though primarily unsuspecting about it, this is precisely what Will was doing to Hannibal.

Fishing.

The predator has taken the attraction between its teeth, now it was time to set the hook and reel it in. But like the boat motor, there’s a piece lost, missing, just outside of Hannibal’s periphery that he can’t quite put his finger on.

After all, you can’t have fish and fishermen without a river or ocean to bind it all together, to balance the scales, to bring the two concurrently into the same orbital world.

So where was the river?

Out there, somewhere, just out of reach.

A problem for tomorrow.

This was a small drop of a declaration, an understanding of his own position, not just as predator but as prey. Without lingering on his act much more than he had, Hannibal sucks the lone drop of blood from his thumb-tip.

The sound was not unlike a quick kiss.

Chapter Text

Jack Crawford strode past the few local police who controlled the scene into the Tuners home dining room, as his team, peppered about the place, gathered evidence. Jimmy Price stood photographing the dinner table of death. Brian Zeller was in a crouch, checking and double checking the wound angles. Beverly Katz was collecting finger prints from a glass of half-drunk Sunny-D. Will was removed from the nativity, standing before a mantel, looking at the family photographs in several repose in various frames.

“Karen and Roger Turner.” Jack introduces the man to the parents in one sleek black edge. “Childhood sweethearts. They owned a successful real estate business. News is they were pillars of the community around here. Three children.”

“Minus one.” Will rebutted, not sparing a glance to the photo Jack had gestured to.

“A son.” Jack agreed. “Jesse, disappeared last year. Last confirmed sighting had him boarding an RV at a rest area on route forty-seven. Possible runaway, probable abduction.”

“Or both.” Will contradicted, seemingly in the mood for some form of confrontation, as we was more often than not these days. Nevertheless, Jack couldn’t argue against him. In their line of work, it never really was black or white.

“Hundreds of tips came in but not a single one held up past lunchtime. When Misery rains, she pours.” Even to Jack Crawford, who was not so arrogant to think his perception and observational skills could rival someone like Will Graham, could tell the sentiment was counter to the smiling faces in the photos.

“Holidays, vacations, milestones…” Will catalogued listlessly, droll in a deadpanned way. A tone much more suiting to the four dead bodies being bagged and tagged behind them. “Never reveals the whole picture.” Jack thinks, just a little, there was a hint of personal experience in that nugget. Not a common occurrence with Will, who liked to keep his childhood cards as close to his chest as possible.

“Who wants to fill their scrapbook with arguments and dirty laundry?” Jack too knew personally that if anyone was to look at his own fireplace, where he too kept photos in pretty frames, a shot of his wedding day, their vacation to Tuscany, a candid shot of him and his wife at a Baltimore Ravens game, no one would suspect his wife was dying of cancer.

“False faces in family portraits.” Will, never one to sugar coat the details, grumbled. “Layers and layers of lies betrayed by a sad glint in a child’s eye.” Jack doesn’t need to think or suppose the intimate note in Will’s low-slung voice. He doesn’t even try to hide it. Not for the first time, he wondered if Will had any childhood photos of himself.

He doubted it.

Jimmy Price snapped a photo of the dinner table, clucking his tongue on the back of his teeth with the sound of the shutter. “Normal Rockwell with a bullet.”

“Any signs of forced entry?” Jack queried to the room at large.

“Parameter is clean of scoring and rupture.” Beverly was the first to respond, as Will knew she would be though he still faced the photos laid out like a police line-up on the mantel. “No broken windows or torn screens. It’s all sealed up tight.”

“They probably rang the doorbell.” Jack considered in a way Jack always considered. Cocksure and blind and driven partially on the instinct honed by twenty-odd years in the force. Not typically a great combination, Will believed, but it had worked out well for Jack most of the time.

“I’ve got bullet holes on the upper sections of the wall and ceiling.” Will imagined, still with his back to the room, that Beverly was pointing up as she spoke, drawing the groups attention high. It was the wrong direction, of course. They needed to look here, as he was. Something was in this ink and gloss paper, in these photos, in this family, behind the strata of plastic dollhouse burlesque all families portrayed to the outside world.

“Pull the slugs for ballistics.” Jack ordered.

“If they aren’t frangible, it shouldn’t be a problem.” Beverly consented.

“Those elevated termination points match what I see on these bodies.” Will heard Brian echo behind him, matched with the squeak of his plastic bagged shoes indicating he was moving towards the table and the bodies. “Angled cranial impacts, coupled with acute exit wounds and conical spray, the shooter was firing from low to high. Probably crouched.”

“Or maybe they were Hobbits.” Jimmy joked, because that’s what Jimmy did, joke, but this odd information struck something, a chord, a tiny little high note that rang loud, for Will. The thrumming in his ears sounded like an epiphany. Or it could have been tinnitus. 

“How long since Jesse was abducted?” Jack doesn’t hesitate in answering Will. Why would he? The quicker he fed his little blood hound; the quicker Will would be able to sniff out a trail for him to release the foxes on.

“Just over a year.” Will worked his way down the line-up of too merry faces staged in milestones of a familial metamorphosis, something he hadn’t really had himself, stopping on one in particular. A much younger version of the boy Jesse. The six-year-old boy held a stuffed octopus in his chubby little hands, one of its dangling arms lodged into his half toothless mouth. His mother looked sweetly on.

The boy looked as if he wished to be anywhere but where he was.

That Will could sympathize with.

The corpses of Mrs. Turner, Mr. Turner and their two children, covered in sheets, were presented on the morgue slabs for inspection. Jack Crawford stood at the head of the gathering, facing Zeller, Price, Katz and Graham. Will thinks, with thoughts that trickle in his mind slowly like honey, that Jack appeared as a demanding father, pumped on his Alpha pheromones, presiding over his children as they present what they’ve just learned in class.

It's not lost on Will that he stood slightly apart from the group, closer to the fridges, to the dead bodies than a beating heart, not quite fitting into this surrogate family. Family. He just can’t escape that word this week, could he?

“I’m glad we didn’t have guns in my house. I would’ve shot my sisters to get them out the bathroom.” Brian chuckled, and it does the job. The tension breaks, and the children play.

“I liked having a big family.” Beverly interjected, crossing her arms over her chest and cocking a hip out almost in confrontation. It was an old dance at this point, done till the soles were paper thin. If Brian said one thing, you could bet Bev would argue the other, and along the way, Jimmy would-

“My parents gave me a gift. A twin.” Try to make it about himself. “Why wouldn’t you want two of me?”

“Must’ve been an only child.” Will hadn’t been expecting to be roped into this conversation, so it takes him a second too long to realize Brian had aimed the jab his way.

“Why do you say that?” Brian was not wrong, but Will was curious on how he’d come to the conclusion. His clothes? His accent? Low-income families, such as the one Will came from, on average had a larger production of brood than typically found in higher classed families. Given, in the past, most of those children died of malnutrition, disease, or from working from age five, and seen as Will had nearly lost all Louisiana inflection to his pronunciation, he doubted Brian, Brian, had gleaned anything remotely useful in sussing out Will’s history, why would he even want to after all, and so the question remained, how-

“Family friction is a catalyst for personality development.” Brian sniped from across the room, and the mark lands. Ah. Will’s… Neurotic empathy. Brian likely believed his parents took one look at him, and for the betterment of humanity, decided to call it quits before they made something worse. The thing is, Brian could have been right. Half right.

Who knew what was going through Will Grahams Mothers mind when she ditched him with his father so long ago, before Will could even hold his own head up? Maybe she had seen something no one else had. Maybe she wanted out. Maybe, as a fifteen-year-old girl, she was just a child herself as his father had been barely a man.

Will was a product of an unsupervised summer fling between two teenage parents who’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time when a Rut had struck on both sides, like a candle being lit from both ends.

Was it any surprise he’d turned out the way he had? Family. Was there ever more a cursed word in the English language?

Bev, sweet Bev, swooped in to take the sting away. “I was the oldest, so all the friction rolled down hill.”

“The attention and responsibilities given to the firstborn children prime them for future success.” Jack agreed lightly. It didn’t hurt, Will supposed, that Betas, like Bev, more often than not had a more… agreeable nature. Less ambition, but more social skills. They pay off seemed fair.

“Any favouring of another sibling could undermine the eldest's ability to handle stress.” Will parroted from a journal he’d read back in his academy days. And there it is, in Beverly’s answering grin, her congenial character.

“My baby sister got away with murder. I think all youngest siblings do. They’re the real problem. They act like butter won’t melt, and somehow everyone buys it. She had them all fooled.”

Jimmy shrugged. “I thought middle children were the problems?”

Brian seemed affronted by the very notion of himself being equated to anything but a good time. “The middle is the sweet spot.”

“Always trying to figure out where they fit in.” Will disagreed dryly. Perhaps still feeling a little petty from earlier. “Forces them to use different strategies navigating up and down the developmental spectrums. They can be great politicians.” A shrug, a jab back, this one aimed for the metaphysical throat. “Or lousy ones.”

Spotting the twin peaks of flush rising on Brian’s face, Jack intercepted the oncoming argument to swing it all back to the bodies they stood before. “All of the victims have defensive wounds. Except Mrs. Turner.” Motioning with a tilt of his chin to the woman in question, white and blue and slowly blackening to the left.

“There’s acceptance in her body position.” Will theorized off the cuff. The best way his mind worked. When he didn’t have to think. “Forgiveness, even.”

The idea struck like lightning touching a metal rod, it zapped down Will’s skull, lighting up the nerves in his body, building in the earth below his feet till even the air felt like it was strumming with an electrical charge so fine and so potent the hairs on the back of Will’s arms stood on end.

Forgiveness.

Family.

Jack, sensing a lead, prodded. “What kind of victim forgives her killer at the moment of her death?”

“A mother.” Will answered, never taking his eyes off Jesse Turner’s mum. He wondered if his own mother had dark hair like that or something lighter. Blue eyes or green. Alpha? Beta? Hardly an Omega. They were so rare these days they were scarcely heard of beyond academic journals or the odd CNN report that mirrored the lines of a bigfoot sighting. No. He thought she might have been an Alpha, could have been short like him, mad like him. Was she dead too? “Who else?”

Chapter Text

Hannibal Lecter’s office was an incursion of a historical building, a not so hostile takeover Hannibal had fostered with modernity, Will thought. It made it more visually appealing than your conventional psychiatrists office, with their Ikea chaise lounges, wilting sunflowers in glass-tic vases,  and nauseating Keep Hanging In There posters. It sort of reminded Will of the North Caroline State Library, one of many libraries he’d visited during his nomadic youth before settling in Louisiana. The interior art nouveau elegance, paired with the minimalistic stoutness of the Danish furniture, reflected Dr. Lecter’s European background well. The colour scheme was a grey palette, dreary if anywhere else, but with points of intense colour Will sometimes had trouble looking directly at, like the holly hunt blood orange red shining from beneath the underhung wall.

As so many times before, Hannibal sat opposite Will across a Parisian rug, smiling favourably with one long leg slung over another, every button on his expensive suit shining as bright as the polish on his Italian leather shoes. “Tell me about your mother.”

“That’s some lazy psychiatry, Dr. Lecter.” Will heckled from what felt like the peanut gallery, leaning back in his plush seat, in his Henley and his jeans. Parallel sides of a field in more ways than one, these two. “Low hanging fruit.”  

“I suspect that fruit is on a high branch.” Hannibal bartered back good naturedly, tastefully side-stepping Will’s more mercurial mood swing. “Very difficult to reach.”

“So’s my mother.” Will griped perhaps a tad too fast and too hard to be as noncommittal as he would have liked the answer to be. “I never knew her.”

“An interesting place to start.” Hannibal verbally skirted them back around, but Will had already shuttered the situation off. Mothers, fathers, families, Packs… It was a never-ending segregation of identity, of which Will had very little for himself to begin with given that he spent his day job putting his mind in a box to allow killers to wear him as a symbolic meat costume. His buttons, nevertheless, were less shiny than Hannibal Lecter’s suits or shoes, and his stitching was coming apart at the seams.

He made a poor tailor.

“Tell me about your mother.” Will sidesteps again. “Let’s start there. Quid pro quo.” And Hannibal seemed to enjoy Will’s use of Latin, a little tick at the corner of his lean mouth giving him away. A fan of dead languages as he was of demented minds, then.

“Both my parents died when I was very young.” The good doctor gave far more lightly than Will had admitted about his own missing mother.  “The proverbial orphan until I was adopted by my Uncle Robertus when I was sixteen.” Will considered that, as best as he could, and  found it difficult to conjure up Hannibal Lecter as anything less than as he was now. Young, afraid maybe, lost in a system built to keep the unspeakable out of sight. Will thinks he might understand Hannibal a little more clearly than before.

So he thinks, and Will Graham’s smart enough to realize the unspoken rule with that devil’s deal.  

“Orphans are usually more familial inclined than others. Motivated to regain what was lost once upon a midnight weary.” Will doesn’t rightly know why he’s being as impish as he is, here now, with Doctor Lecter of all people. But he does know it feels good to fling back the muck being constantly chucked at his own head, as undeserving as the target currently is. “Alpha Orphans are generally worse. Trying to settle down, they characteristically exert controlling behaviours in an attempt to stop history from repeating itself, but often this just triggers the forming Pack to feel restricted and manipulated, and ends with a family trying to split bondings in a family court. An unpleasant experience, or so I’m told. Painful too.” Hannibal-

Hannibal smiles. “Do you think about settling down a lot, Will?” Will dragged a long, humid gulp through his nose, held it in his lungs, a puff of breath tinged with the after concerns of Hannibal.

He smells of oakmoss, bergamot, and red wine so dark it’s black, wrapped up in a length of the red velvet curtain Will imagines has been hanging in the Opéra National de Paris for over a century.

“No.” Will lies, and then gives in when he realizes how cruel it constrains his tongue. “Sometimes. Rarely. There’s something so foreign about family. Like an ill-fitting suit. I never really connected to the concept.”

“You never connected to the concept formulated by those around you.” Hannibal casually corrected. “That does not mean you have not devised your own model. Tell me, Will, what do you fantasize when you think of family?”

“Fantasize?” Another word Will can’t escape, it seems. “Not much. I don’t think of houses and kids pitter-pattering feet. I don’t think of Sunday pancakes on the stove, or rushing a brood to the nearest car or school bus fifteen minutes late. I don’t think of bonding rings or vacation holidays or graduation ceremonies.”

“That’s not what I asked.” It appeared Hannibal wasn’t budging on the matter, though what use this discussion had on Will Graham’s deteriorating stability and Hannibal’s work to fix that for the FBI was beyond his current catch.

“I don’t know.” Will ultimately said. “I don’t imagine anything concrete at all. Betas, Alphas, men, women… I don’t hold preferences. I never have. But I think…”

“You think?” Hannibal edged softly.

“I think it would be nice to be… seen. Seen and not-“ Will can’t finish it, the sentence, the thought. It feels like he’s holding his hand over a lit fire pit, or having his hand held over a lit fire pit. It doesn’t matter in the end. Hannibal finished it for him.

“Seen and not have someone turn away from the darkness you perpetually wrap yourself in, inside and out. To be seen and not only be understood, but to be accepted just as you are.” Hannibal doesn’t write anything in the flat notebook spread across his lap, though he keeps a pen at hand, perched between his fingers like one would hold a spoon to stir a cup of tea. He never writes anything down in Will’s sessions, and yet-

Yet Will knows not a word goes unattended, and he is making tea in a way, Will’s thoughts the leeching leaves in the boiling water. He wonders what Hannibal tastes in his miserable drink.

“A noble endeavour.” Hannibal agreed. “One not as uncommon as you may believe.”

“Yes.” Will nodded, smile sardonically tight on his face. “But I doubt anyone else regularly puts their feet in serial killer shoes. That often puts off any prospective party. I think they’re afraid of the mud I might track in through the back door with them on.”

“Ah-“ Hannibal sighed. “Perhaps you have been looking in the wrong places.” And before Will could refute, tell the Doctor he hadn’t been searching at all, Hannibal was shifting lanes faster than a wall-street wolf late to a meeting. “Tell me about the Turner family. Were they affluent? Well to do?”

“They lived like they had money.” And Will knows the two, living and having, were never necessarily aligned. Still, they had a dining room, money for holidays, a real estate business. That garnered some form of financial strength.

“Did your family have money, Will?” Back around again. Hannibal Lecter liked doing that, Will saw. Speaking in circles. Luring you into a verbal comfort only to swing the axe down.

“We were poor.” Will unapologetically replied. He’d spent years bullied in school about the duct tape around his shoes and the stitched holes in his shirts. He wasn’t going to spend an adulthood equally as attentive and embarrassed of societally seen short comings out of his control.  “I followed my father from boat yards in Biloxi and Greenville to lake boats on Erie.”

“Always the new boy at school?” Hannibal’s head cocked curiously. Not like a puppy’s. Not at all. He had a distinctly… reptilian grace to his movements. “Always the stranger?”

“Yes.” Will gave blandly, simply. Nothing more. That seemed to amuse Dr. Lecter too.

“Harbouring a half-buried grudge against the rich?” Will scoffed.

“Aren’t we all?” Not Hannibal. Will wouldn’t be surprised if he found out the man had been born in a castle in some far flung eastern European province. A prince in all but name.

“What grudge was Mrs. Turner’s killer harbouring against her?” And around they sweep again on the cord of Hannibal’s direction. A dance. A spiral. A plunge down a drain.

“Motherhood.”

Hannibal shook his head at Will’s answer. “Not motherhood. A perversion of it.”

Another family is killed three weeks later. Same MO. Same fractious staged scene, this time around a Christmas tree-

Or, more aptly, Will thinks, underneath a Christmas tree. Bodies laid out like presents shot down a chimney.

He sat alone before an open laptop, two Amber Alert photos appearing side-by-side; one of them Jesse Turner, the other Connor Frist, the missing boy from the Christmas massacre found charred in the fireplace. Something had gone wrong with this invasion. This is the first time Will’s seen an image of the second boy.

He tries not to think the two look a little like himself at that age.

Will doesn’t hear the door open or close as Beverly Katz entered the room, too busy studying the photos of the two boys parallel. He doesn’t look up. Not much can distract him when he’s concentrating as he is.

“Ever heard of Willard Wigan? He’s this artist who does micro sculptures, like putting the Obamas in the eye of a needle. He’s so focused that he can work between beats of his heart. I guess archers do that too, right?” There’s a smug smile on Bev’s face, as if she knew her words were already falling on deaf ears, that Will doesn’t see, for he barely tilts his head towards her in reply.

“Hm?”

“What are you looking at?” Beverly asked as she slunk closer to Will’s chair, spotting the computer screen and what had captured Will’s attention. It was only then he acknowledged her presence.

“These kids are both small. Underweight for their age.” Both were Betas too, though the former had only presented two months before his missing poster had begun to circulate the streets. Not enough time to truly present, to start producing pheromones, to begin slipping into biological instinct. 

“You think there’s a connection?” Yes. Of course he does. There was a connection in everything if one looked hard enough, deep enough, long enough. Yet, the problem with looking too long was things looked back.

Will knew all about that one, didn’t he?

“I’m thinking possible ADHD diagnosis for both boys.” Will began. “Ritalin, Focalin, any medication containing methylphenidate can affect appetite and slow long-term growth in kids.” A beat as Beverly inspected the two photos. Her own Beta scent flooded his nose. Linen, fresh soap, sea salt. Unobtrusive. Clean.

“Another thing about Willard Wigan? He had a lonely childhood. He used his tiny sculptures as an escape.” Will frowned and finally tore his eyes away from the computer screen, though they never quite made it to Beverly’s eyes, hovering just on the tip of her nose.

“Who’s Willard Wigan?” Bev chuckled at him, patting him on the shoulder jovially. It only made Will scowl harder.

“Price got a hit from the ballistics matching program he’s been running on the two family murders. The bullet that put Mrs. Frist out of her misery matches three used in a murder in Fort Smith, Arkansas a year ago. Mother of a thirteen-year-old boy shot to death with her own gun.” Could it be?

“Thirteen-year-old milk carton material?” Bev’s grin was answer enough. Will doesn’t look back at the two photos again.

He’s only going to see himself.

As Will entered the office, Jack looked up from his computer, nursing a mug full of black coffee. “It’s not just C.J. Lincoln. There’s an adult with some formative sway. It’s a woman. A mother figure. Possibly Alpha. She’s looking to form a family.”

Jack sighed with sleepy eyes and relinquished his sloppy hold on his mug, letting it form a ring stain on the corner of his desk. “Family can have a contagion effect on the alienated. You adopt the same attitudes, the same behaviours.”

“I never got bit by that bug.” Will shrugged as he came to a stop on the other side of the desk.

Jack mirrored his movement. “I managed to avoid it myself.”

“Whoever this woman is, she wants these children to... burst with love for her. And she needs to erase their families to do that.” She’s getting desperate, Will can tell. Desperate after the last boy failed to erase his past, and he got burned and chucked in the fireplace. She’s going to demand more from the next, if only to ease her bruised ego that a small boy chose someone else over her.

“She abducts them-“ Jack began, getting the story straight in his head. “Convinces them no one can love them like she does. Then makes absolutely sure of it.” From the crux of his elbow, Will produced and handed Jack the file on Chris O’Halloran.

“Security camera from a convenience store in Alexandria, Virginia captured surveillance footage of Chris O’Halloran this morning.” And of the boy wetting himself under the eye of a hazy, static faced band. The lost boys with a manic Peter Pan. “He was with an unidentified woman.”

“Where’s the kid’s family?” Jack asked, already swinging up from his seat to sweep the coat on the back of the chair over his shoulders, heading for the door and to a family perhaps only days from murder.

“Fayetteville, North Carolina.” Will said as he fell instep beside Jack. Because that's what good, loyal dogs do. 

Follow. 

Chris O’Halloran slouched on the bench, alone, deserted. The blood splatter was still on his face, on his chin, rusting over the arch of his eye socket. After a moment, the back door to the house behind him opened, blasting daylight and silhouetting Jack Crawford heading towards the prone boy. Taking a seat opposite, Chris does not return the look at the imposing man studying, there was only the whistle of the wind before a small voice pierced the air. “Can I go home now?”

“No.” Jack said with no harsh line drawn in the sand, but with no room for misunderstanding to take root either. “You might not get to go home for a long time.” A beat, a break, the boy bats his eyes. “You came here to kill your family. That’s all anybody knows. That’s all anyone may ever believe.” It’s not fair, Jack knows this, but life rarely was.

“I wasn’t going to do it.” The spindly boy promised, with the same sort of child born naivete that had drawn Eva Bell’s eye.

“You’re going to talk to a lot of people who will try to understand exactly what you were going to do.”

As if it was possible, Chris looked like he curled up more in himself. “Am I going to jail?”

“I don’t think you have the capacity to plan and execute murder. The civilized thing to do with you would be counselling and rehabilitation, not prison.” Jack does not lie, but neither does he admit that sometimes, the worst of times, the judicial system was not very civilized at all. The boy, however, has been through enough for one day.

“She told me they weren’t my family.” Chris squeaked, voice cracking. “That we had to make our own family.” A coy glance. “Do you have a family?”

“I don’t have children, no.” And soon, very soon, he wouldn’t have Bella either.

“Then you don’t know what it’s like.” No, Jack doesn’t, and he doesn’t think he ever could.

“I wish to god you hadn’t gone with that woman, but you did. All of that can’t just suddenly be undone. But in time, if you trust me, we can start undoing what we can.” The boy shudders in the breeze.

“Can I talk to my mom? My real mom?” And it hit home in Jack just how fuckin’ young this kid was. On days like this, he hated his job.

“In a little while.” Jack promised with what little he had to promise. “But right now I need you to talk to me.”

Will Graham was home now, where he could put the last week behind him, in the dark recess of his mind that was beginning to leak more and more every day. The sparse comfort he had, despite the saved family, was he wouldn’t need to hear that word for a while again. Family. Mother. Pack. The mention would pitter out now Eva Bell was dead.  

In his bed, tangled up in sheets, Will watched through a cracked eye as the last of his dogs finally settled in and began to fall sleep. His own children happy in their beds. He smiled and closed his eyes-

The knocking on his front door springs them back open.

It was a hassle to pull himself from bed, to shirk his pants back on, the person calling on him had knocked another three times before he gets the dogs back and away and opens the door to find… Social workers?

Two men with lanyards around their neck, packing heat on their hips. Maybe not social workers then. “Will Graham?” The tallest one in a trench coat asked, shuffling on his stoop. Will grunted his hello, and neither man smiles.  

“I’m agent Bates and this is my colleague Talbot. We work for Mi5. We need you to come with us down to John Hopkins.”

Will fears the worst immediately, but his mind jumps to the oddest conclusion that he doesn’t have control over. Not to Alana in a car crash. Not Jack in intensive care with a stray bullet form a shootout. No, he jumps straight to-

“Is Hannibal alright? Is he hurt?-“ Which makes little sense, and what would Hannibal have to do with Mi5? What would any of them have to do with the British secret service-

“We need you to come down for an emergency blood transfusion. Your sister’s being transferred as we speak, and she’s in critical condition. The sooner we get there, the more likely her life will be saved.”

Will blinks away the sleep still in his eye. “Excuse me… did you just say sister?”

Chapter Text

Mise en place (v.) -the preparation of ingredients, such as dicing onions or measuring spices, before starting to cook

The hospital room appeared to Will Graham like a chrysalis in the worst of ways, a place to be melted down to a soup of a soul and converted into raw material to be compressed back into a shape relatively human, somewhat whole. The only advantage of this, Will supposed, was that the girl in the middle of the bed was unconscious and unlikely aware of the gruesome process at work, underneath all her tubes and wires and IV drips keeping the gears turning even if her mind currently wasn’t rolling with the rest.

The metrical beep of her myriad of monitors clipped along with the passing of time Will couldn’t count himself. “I didn’t know who else to call.” He said from the bottom of the bed, oddly vulnerable in a way that was utterly disconcerting, not bothering to turn at the dual click of the private room door opening and closing.

Somewhere out in the hall, he knew Agent Bates and Agent Talbot were keeping watch, waiting for the arrival of a man called Shacklebolt.

“I am glad you thought of me in your time of need.” Hannibal proffered as he came to his side, glancing down to the bed Will was watching. The occupant didn’t seem to mind the scrutiny, under a heavy layer of starched hospital sheets and gauze wrapped around a chest recently cracked open on a surgery table.

“The trauma specialist said she has about a forty percent chance of pulling through.” Subconsciously, Will’s hand travelled to his own bandage, wrapped tightly around the crux of his elbow. It felt stiff and cold to the touch, not unlike a corpse in rigor mortis. “Fifty, now that she has my blood to bump up what she’d lost.”

“Medically induced coma?” Hannibal asked, eyeing the IV drip and the plaster holding it in a pale, limp arm stretched out on a hospital cot. The kind of beds with the wheels on a gurney, just in case they needed to shift her back to surgery as fast as possible.  

Will nodded, blinking away the idea of bone saws and suture tape. “They can’t risk her waking up and causing more damage before the transplant has time to be accepted by her body. She might be awake in a week, she might-“ Not be awake ever. Fifty percent.

A flip of a coin, really.

Heads or tails, and Will Graham couldn’t make sense of either.

“How are you feeling?” Will retreated internally from the question, still not turning to face his therapist, Instead he blindly held out the fat paper packet with a torn lip he’d been clutching in Hannibal’s general direction, letting it slip through his fingers as it was taken. It felt like a part of him went along with the paper and ink, sense perhaps, reason. The part of him that had been lost since two Mi5 agents knocked on his front door.

“Give that a skim and you tell me what I’m feeling.” He doesn’t see Hannibal flicking through the files contained inside, most, if not all, declassified stamped on top, redacted in large, opaque squares that stretched a whole paragraph in places, though he recognizes the sound of shuffling papers tickling the shell of his ear.

He’d gotten the file from Agent Talbot last night, while he’d been indulged on a seat as they took as much blood from him as medically suitable to pass over. He had read it wall to wall by three in the morning, and, five hours later, another blood taking done with, he still couldn’t quite believe what he’d read printed clearly in black and white and sandwiched between small, photocopied photographs.

Mi5. Terrorist sects. Indoctrination. Assassination of department heads and triple spies hiding as school teachers. Words you don’t normally find orbiting the life of a seventeen-year-old girl. Will tried to find the pattern in it, the red rope tying it all together, and all he saw was a twisted, rotten spiders web.

Hannibal doesn’t speak for a long while, twenty minutes, an hour, two, Will can’t tell from the bleating of the heart monitor, he spends that time, as he had for the last few hours, looking.

She’s pocket-sized on the bed, lost in the layers, nearly swallowed whole by the linen and bandages, cords and cables crisscrossing her body like jungle vines. Only the top of her form peeped out from the Jurassic mess. Tiny, sloped shoulders slanting out the dressings tightly bound around a sluggishly rising and falling chest. She’s pale, nearly deathly so, but Will supposed fatal blood loss would do that to a person.

It was hard to get a firm grasp of her features, slack as they were, half hidden by the breathing tube and ventilator squeezed from her mouth, but they were harsh under the fluorescent lighting of the bare stripe bulb above. They are merciless though, Will can tell, even in sleep, even half obscured, even half dead. High cheekbones, cattish closed eye, the slant of her jaw cuts a sharp and keen line on her pillow, much like his own, the up twist of her nose contrarily delicate as was the high bow of a full brow. She had a sort of wild aristocratic air to her face, something out of a  Pierre Choderlos de Laclos novel.

She looks a lot like him.

She also looks nothing like him.

It’s a dizzying riddle Will can’t really hold too tightly. Prickly as it was. Thorned with old hurts.  

The only colour to be found in the white-washed room was the red line of her heart monitor, the green tinge to the privacy curtain, and the almost spitefully bright inky spill of her preposterously curly hair spilled across a pillow like an oil slick.

It’s the smell that gets him though, reaches in somewhere deep, somewhere forgotten, into his chest, as if he was the one who’d only just come out of an emergency heart transplant, and set the hollow cavity of his ribs on fire. Black liquorice, pomegranate and pine, topped with the distinct scent of a used bullet moments after being discharged. Gunpowder.

Sweet and dark and with an unfamiliar provocative touch Will wouldn’t have been able to put his finger on if it wasn’t marked big and bold on her hospital record. Omega.

The sound of the thick file being slapped shut brought Will out his inner musings with a startle, and this time he does look to Hannibal Lecter, finds him, instead, looking to the bed and the girl. Roles reversed and overturned. “According to this, she’s a resilient and audacious young woman. I would be greatly surprised if she does not pull through. I am shocked they managed to find a heart donor so quickly, however.”

Will hummed, voice lost to the beep, beep, beeping. “They didn’t need to look far.” The white of the room seemed too cold, too bleached, too clean. The girl too small and too lost. Will too big and too clumsy. Too much and too little. A strange inconsistency that settled in his bones. “They had a fresh body on standby.”

“This Tom Riddle?” The name in the file sounded different when it was spoken out loud, especially by someone with Hannibal Lecter’s dialect. Crisp, clear, as precise as a scalpels edge.

“Apparently.” Will shuffled where he stood, hand running along the bar of the foot of the bed. “They’re still not a hundred percent sure what went down that night. They found her and Tom Riddle collapsed in a courtyard of her boarding school. Riddle’s throat slashed and Hemlock Potter with a stab wound through the heart.”

“What do you think transpired?” Will doesn’t think anything. He doesn’t have to. The gift of his empathy, his imagination, was Will Graham knew things he wished, really wished, he didn’t.

“I think Tom Riddle caught up to her finally. I think that was his last mistake. I think he went for the killing blow, struck gold, and I think Hemlock Potter had just enough time from a failing heart to pull the blade from her own chest and make sure Tom Riddle wouldn’t get another chance to come back again.” Just as Will had fired his gun at Garret Jacob Hobbs, not once, not twice, but eight times. Swiss cheese.

“It is ironic-” Hannibal verbally crept, regarding the bed and the girl with a tilt of his head. “That the man who, fitting to these files, spent seventeen years trying to murder a child, would then be the catalyst in her survival after the last attempt to right his perceived failure went awry. That her life now continues because his ended. There is poetry in that some would say.”

Some were not Will Graham. Here, now, he doesn’t see poetry. He sees only a tragedy. “Not his failure. Not Riddles.” Will bit back with the heat still burning in his chest. “Everyone’s failure. Who the hell repeatedly uses a child as bait against a serial killing national terrorist threat?”

“Mi5, evidently.” Hannibal batted back skilfully, swiftly. “Of which your mother was ostensibly apart of.”

“My mother who was murdered in a nursery trying to protect said child while her Bonded had been murdered on a staircase.” Will’s head is spinning in circles, cycles, going around and around the same thoughts until they all merged together in a hot and humid, sticky mess he couldn’t separate. “You asked me how I was feeling?”

Hannibal waited patiently.

“Angry.” Will turned for the door, marching for the hallway. “I’m fucking furious.”

“Will Graham?” Will turned from the cafetiere in the hospital canteen, only to find a man holding his hand out in greeting. He was a tall man, broad shouldered and bald, wearing a single gold hoop through his left ear. He had a slow, deep voice that was soothing to Will’s frayed nerves, but the neatly pressed suit and lanyard around his neck sent the hackles right back up. “My name’s Kingsley Shacklebolt. I’m the man who tracked you down.”

Dumping the little wooden stick he was using to stir the pigswill coffee in his plastic cup, Will scoffed. “But not before Hemlock Potter could do your job for you. Fortunate, that.” Shacklebolt’s hand dropped when he realized Will wasn’t going to shake it.

“I see you read the file I instructed Talbot to give you.” Shacklebolt raised to his full height, every six foot six inches of it, and on any other Alpha, this might have been an intimidation tactic, but from a man like Shacklebolt it only felt like respect. “You know… Mine and your job are not so different.”

Will swivelled on his heel, understanding this was the part where Shacklebolt would try and build some superficial companionship, similarities to ease the tension, swipe on the charm and the smile and hope against hope no one tried to peer deeper than the shoals. Will wasn’t in the mood to let him, however, heading for the hallway back towards Hemlock Potter’s private room on the third floor. “I don’t know what Mi5 have heard about the FBI, but we don’t regularly condition children into being Passover goats.”

“I understand how it could look that way from what you’ve read-“ Shacklebolt gave democratically, with a sleek sweep of a politician, following Will into the lobby. “But there are things you cannot possibly understand merely by reading-“

“I understand well enough.” Will paused at a corner turn, catching Shacklebolt's eye as an old lady in a hospital gown toddled passed the pair for the gift shop. “How did you track me down?”

“We discovered letters between Lily Evans and your father, Henry Graham, in her bedroom drawer. Some, the last ones, had postal stamps from Louisiana. Most of them contained updates on how a boy called Will Graham was doing. It wasn’t hard to put two and two together once we cross checked consensus records.” The sick churns in Will’s stomach, stirs and whips up the closing pipe of his throat to sting the back of his mouth.

His father had never told him that his mother wrote. He had never said anything about Will's mother. Will had never asked.  

“And you just coincidentally found those letters just when you needed a blood donor that wouldn’t be rejected by Hemlock’s rather sensitive Omegan biology? The only possibly successful match being a close relative? Look at that, a brother waiting in the wings, just how you needed it when you needed it. How lucky was that?” the spasm in Kingsley Shacklebolt’s jaw muscle was telling enough. Will span sharply and smashed the elevator call button, trying his best to keep the fire in his chest to a simmer. “How long have you really known?”

“A few years.” Shacklebolt said honestly, and, begrudgingly, Will respected him for it.

“Does Hemlock know?” The ding above the elevator doors ushered in the whoosh of the metal sliding open. A couple came out, a child holding their hands between them, dress a pale pink as her head was patchy from hair loss. Cancer.

“No.” Will stepped into the brightly lit box, hitting the button for the third floor. Shacklebolt didn’t try to cross the threshold. Smart man. Not smart enough not to try and edge the blow, however, with an increasingly irate Alpha sloshing room temperature coffee in his increasingly shaking hand. “But you don’t understand the scale of what we just came through. Tom Riddle was a highly respected politician in England. He had numerous followers from all professions. As an FBI profiler, you must see the dangerous waters we were treading in trying to take him down. With Tom’s… Obsession, shall we call it, fixed on Miss Potter, It was best for everyone if Hemlock remained in our care-“

Care was a loose word, wasn’t it? Used sloppy and free here. Care, here, meant living in a cupboard with a paid off family, Will’s own maternal aunt and uncle he had never met, never knew existed, by the Mi5 director of homeland security, an Albus Dumbledore. Care, here, meant being used as lure against a madman since age eleven, hoping he’d slip up just enough for a conviction to hold in court before he could poison a child with snake venom, kill a classmate at sports’ day to prove a point there was nowhere Hemlock could go that he could not reach, or any other of the numerously creative ways Tom Riddle had tried to kill Hemlock Potter over the years. Care, here, meant not caring at all.

Care responsibilities they wouldn’t have had if the family courts realized there was an Alpha relative who could have petitioned for custody. Will would have been contacted immediately to see if he wished to appeal guardianship of the Dursleys, and if he did-

The goats out the pen and then they would have had nothing to tempt the fox into the slaughter house with.

Was it luck Will was only contacted now?

Of course not.

Would Will have petitioned for custody? This, he doesn’t know-

Didn’t know before this conversation. He doesn’t know how he’s feeling either, not in entirety, not above a shallow inflection of angry, sick, tired weight on his shoulders, everything is jumbled and cluttered and-

And completely, somehow, someway, calm.

Will is calm, steadfast, grounded in a way he had forgotten he could feel. Definite. Determined. Decisive. He knows what he’s thinking, who he is, and what he’s doing.

“No, Agent Shacklebolt. You don’t understand-“ The elevator doors began to close. “You and your men are not stepping a foot near Hemlock Potter again.” ding.

Chapter Text

Will sits beside the latched window of the private room, nestled in a high back chair an orderly was kind enough to drag in with the accompanying seat and a small, squat table from the nurses lounge. He’s not surprised when Hannibal Lecter comes through the door at exactly ten passed eight in the morning, visiting hours beyond immediate family meaning the doors for him having only opened ten minutes ago.

It's been the same routine for the last three days. Will likes it. The pattern of conformity. It fits him like his old white t shirts. Softly.

Hannibal’s carrying a satchel strapped across his chest, of what Will presumes, with a sniff, is home cooked food, one arm ladened with a pile of neatly folded blankets and quilts, from his other hand dangled a plastic bag. He considered the girl on the bed momentarily before making his way towards Will, placing his goodies down on the table, generous enough not to mention Will’s coat slung over the stiff bedspread of the cot, over Hemlock Potter’s still sleeping shape beneath the old coat. Then again, Hannibal Lecter might have found it… vulgar to point out someone’s Alpha instincts in action so pointedly. For this, Will is thankful.

Doctor Lecter similarly already noted the scent in the air, heightening with the passing sunsets. Black liquorice, pomegranate, pine, on the end of an explosion of gunpowder. Hemlock's scent is getting brighter, stronger, which meant she was too. “I see they have removed Hemlock’s ventilation tube. That is a good sign.”

“The trauma doctor popped in around half hour ago.” Will said with a yawn he managed to catch just behind his teeth before it could break free. “He said they’re going to start reducing the sedatives this afternoon.  She might wake up within the next couple of days.” Turning his attention to the bag, Hannibal began producing little Tupperware containers of freshly cooked breakfast, eggs, sausage, bacon, high protein for the stressful surroundings, placing them meticulously across the dumpy counter as if it were his dining room and he was setting places for a party.

“I spoke to Jack this morning.” Hannibal quipped as he popped the first lid off with a plume of steam rising from the depths. “He said he’s been trying to reach you but you haven’t answered your phone, and when he visited your home to find it empty, he began to worry. He contacted Dr. Bloom who, in turn, hasn’t heard from you for a few days either.” One of the Tupperware tubs contained a stack of toast, ever so nearly cut into long stripes, soldiers laying in a mass grave. “They came to my office at seven this morning, minutes away from calling in a search and rescue team, I believe.”

Will ran a tired hand down the length of his face, palm catching on the stubble of his cheek. “I forgot my cell back at my house. My dogs-” Handing over a fork and knife, real silver, because of course it was real silver, wrapped in a carefully pleated napkin to Will, who groggily took the offer, Hannibal smiled and pulled out the spare seat to take.

“Fed, watered and accounted for. I’ve been checking in on them with the spare key you gave me when dealing with the Eva Bell case.” Spare key? Will had given Hannibal a spare key? Shaking his head, Will brushed it off with a hand threading through his hair. He must have.

“Damage?” Using his own napkin, Hannibal stretched it over his lap, primly brushing out the creases before he began shuffling the tubs around, gesturing with his hand silently for Will to dig in.

“I informed them of the basics of what has transpired. Jack is… frustrated you didn’t inform him of your absence, but he understands. Dr. Bloom said she will come visit at noon today.” Digging into his food, Will hadn’t realized how hungry he’d been until the first bite of fluffy egg passed the bridge of his throat.

“When isn’t Jack frustrated with me?” It’s not a question, not really, and definitely not one Will expected an answer too. He already knows it, anyway. Never.

Doctor Lecter was a lot more methodical with his own food than Will, who shovelled in gaping forkfuls like a mechanical digger excavating a pit. Hannibal sliced his sausage finely, lathered on scrambled egg herbed and spiced, and took delicate bites from his toast soldiers. He never, not once, touches the food with his fingers. “Have they started Hemlock on immunosuppressants, yet?”  

“Yep-“ Will grunted, licking some sort of tomato sauce from the pad of his thumb where it had dripped. Doctor Lecter watched him like a hawk. “Quite a few. They’re going to bring the dosage and types down the longer her body doesn’t reject the heart as foreign, but she’s going to be on them for life. Physiotherapist is lined up and waiting too. She’s going to need appointments with them every week to begin with. They’re expecting her to be quite… vulnerable for the first few months.” Will watches Hannibal’s knife slice into his sausage, the way the blade doesn’t touch the plate to squeak and squawk.

Former surgeon skills at work, Will knows. Hannibal understands just how deep to cut and not hit bone.

“If all goes well-“ Hannibal stated after a lingering bite of toast and that strange, spiced tomato sauce that didn’t really taste all that much of tomato. It did taste delicious though, like everything else Hannibal cooked. “Hemlock could be discharged from the hospital as soon as three weeks would be my estimate. Have you thought about what comes after, Will?”

“After?” Will queried, his own fork paused almost comically halfway to his mouth. Hannibal’s grin deepened in his cheeks, the barest hint of hiding dimples.

“I assumed you were going to petition the courts for guardianship. An Omega’s legal age of majority isn’t until they reach nineteen. By law, she needs a custodian. If not you-” If not Will, then they both know who else. Chomp, chew, swallow.

“I am-“ Will shook his head. “I have. I’ve already filled in the forms and documents and all I need to do is hand them in at Baltimore’s court house.”

“And if you succeed in the application? What next?” Will… Will hadn’t gotten that far yet. Then again, who could really blame him? Only a few days ago he’d learned his mother had been alive long enough to have another child, and said child was in the ICU fighting for their life after an attack by a terrorist. He’d been a bit busy focusing on the inherent now than a possible then.

Hannibal, nevertheless, didn’t let up. “No doubt the family court will appoint social workers to your case to investigate the sustainability of your care concerns and faculties. They’ll need personal references from your work. They’ll take into account that your career takes you from the home for days, sometimes weeks on end. They’ll conceivably want to see a school already applied to for Hemlock, an appropriate home-“ Will was guessing, very lightly here, that an ‘appropriate’ home wouldn’t be a one bedroomed bachelor pad in rural Baltimore filled to the brick with stray dogs Will had haggled in from the back streets. “Financial stability proving you could fiscally care for a teenage girl; especially one who has just come out of the circumstances Hemlock has. You might even be asked to provide a mental health evaluation to demonstrate-“

Will, unceremoniously, shoved his breakfast away with an almost cattish like swipe of his hand. He’d suddenly lost his appetite. “I’m not letting her go back to that hellhole, Dr. Lector. Court sanctioned or not, she’s staying with me. She’s my sister.” His family. Will hadn’t had family for a long, long time. Perhaps if ever. He hadn’t realized just how much he’d wanted it until it was so close he could almost reach out and skim his fingertips off its abstract face.

Hannibal’s smile flourished now, thriving on the expanse of his jaw, flashing his white teeth. “Of course.” He agreed readily, quickly. “I fear you have misunderstood my intention.”

“And what is your intention?” Hannibal folded the napkin from his lap, laying the pale cloth on the table beside his half-eaten breakfast.

“To help.” He replied as if it was the most obvious answer in the world. “The answer to your current predicament, Will, is sitting right before you now if you only considered it.”

The axe fell, the hangman’s floor dropped, the bomb ticked to zero, and along with it, Will’s laughter fizzed out his chest like a coke bottle shook too hard. “You’re not suggesting what I think you’re suggesting, are you?”

“Why not?” Hannibal bartered back thoughtfully, edging on provocative. “I have a suitable home with more than enough bedrooms. My profession as a psychiatrist puts me in good standing with the community. As my office is only a twenty-minute drive from my home, my work hours are minimal and regular. Chesapeake high school is but a stones throw from my residence. My previous work as a surgeon in this very hospital we now sit in has allowed me to accumulate a comfortable wealth. The benefits far outweigh any objections, surely?”

“Let me get this straight-“ Will said with an air of Jack Crawford to his voice. “You’re suggesting… What? We… Move in with you? Play house until a judge stamps his approval on my forehead?”

Hannibal sighed long and low, beginning to clear the Tupperware from the table, a breakfast abandoned for something else more meaty to munch on. More dangerous too, Will suspected by how sweaty his palms suddenly got. He doesn’t know why he’s suddenly nervous, skittish in the way deer’s caught in headlights were, but he was. Boy, he was. “It could be as temporary as you like. You could stay only as long as it takes the court to sanction your guardianship, after the investigation. Then you could see where the wind takes you.”

“The social workers will see us living together and assume-“ Will didn’t need to finish the sentence. The assumption was hovering between them right now. Clear as daylight, as loud as Hemlock’s heart monitor. “Only to question why our glands remain contrarily blank of a mating mark.”

“An easily rectified matter.” Hannibal brushed off casually, stacking the Tupperware into his carry bag before catching Will’s weary cocked brow. He’s smile was definitely indulgent, the same kind of smile Will used to see on the TV screen of a sitcom. The one where the parents were trying to calm down a child after an injection with a promise of this won’t hurt. What they never said in the TV shows or movies was much. “Not all packs exchange Bonding marks so quickly. I knew of one Pack that hadn’t for twenty-three years. It is more common than you think. I highly doubt any possible social worker would question it much beyond a superficial wondering.”

“And the rest?” Will flung back. “What happens if they question Jack? Lying on an official court record is punishable by prison time. What about Ruts? Heats? Hemlock’s an Omega, and while this recent trauma may push her heats off while she heals, they’ll eventually come back around and-“

“Will-“ Hannibal cut in sharply, steeply, a boulder running down a mountain side right at Will. “It is only a suggestion. Come what may, those deciding whether you are fit for guardianship will look for proof of stability and solidity. I can offer the both of you that. I only wanted you to know so. The choice, as always, is yours. If you believe you could win the petition by yourself, by all means, send in those documents. If not, I can… support the claim.”

Will scrubbed harshly at his eyes, snatching his glasses from his face. “Why?” He asked, a little bit breathlessly. “Why go through the trouble? If the medical board finds out you’ve lied to the judicial system, the best they’ll do is make sure you’ll lose your license.”

“As I have said-“ Hannibal zipped up his bag. “The benefits far outweigh any objections.” Catching Will’s disbelieving look, he continued. “I distrust the already stretched thin family court administrators will look too deeply on the matter, only happy one less teen will be put back into the system and strain their limited resources further.”

There was silence for a while before Will cracked. “I’ll… I’ll think about it.” And he can’t believe he said it, can’t believe he meant it either. How had he ended up here? What even was here? Moving in with his work appointed therapist to hoodwink a court into giving him custody rights of his recently discovered sister seemed, even to a man like Will Graham, rash, reckless, and radical. What would it even look like? This hypothetical plunge?

Will can’t picture being in Hannibal Lecter’s home for more than a visit or a begrudgingly attended dinner party. Can’t even begin to fathom what it could entail. Did the good doctor even own loungewear that wasn’t three pieced? Would his hair still be so neatly combed in the mornings after he’d rolled out of bed-

And that was completely off the point.

“Good.” Hannibal grinned, swinging the plastic bag left at a table leg back up, holding it for Will to take. Will smelled the clothes, bottle of menthol shampoo and shower gel long before he took it from the doctor. His clothes. His shampoo. His shower gel. A little bit of home, a little bit of conformity, to ease his nerves anew.

It was disconcerting how well Hannibal Lecter knew him.

Moreover, Hannibal must have collected them from his home this morning when he checked up on Will’s dogs and sorted out the mess with Jack and Alana. “Now go and get showered. There’s private bathrooms just down the hall for lodging families to use, if my memory of this hospital serves me well.”

Of course Hannibal’s not wrong. He never is. Still, Will’s eyes flickered to the comatose shape on the bed. Hannibal was quicker yet to intercept his worry and cork it down in the bottle of his apprehension. “I will watch over her while you clean up, Will.”

Will doesn’t know what’s more disconcerting. The fact that Hannibal was adamant he showered right now, which Will couldn’t really blame him for, he’d been wallowing in this hospital room for two days now and it was beginning to catch up, or the fact that the little Alpha predisposition in the back of his lizard brain didn’t immediately rile against the idea of leaving Hannibal Lecter alone with his severely injured, newly exposed sister. In fact, it seemed quite happy to go along with whatever Doctor Lecter was telling it to go along with.

Shower and more.

Perhaps disconcerting wasn’t the word for it. Deeply disturbing seemed more fitting.

Still, Will took the offered respite, stole the bag, and headed for the door, hand running along the foot of the bed as he passed, unconsciously straightening out the coat so it covered the feet making hills beneath the sheets. Covered. Protected.

Hannibal was generous enough not to make comment on that, either.

Like a fish of the deep rising to the surface of bright air and sun, Hemlock Potter swam up to consciousness out of a dead blank, flopping onto the shores of a whiter world than she had ever seen. It’s terrible, the brightness, and the first thing she consciously recognizes.

The second is the pain.

It’s awful, horrendous, the kind of ache that exceeded description, and it comes from her chest in pulsating throws of pure agony. She tried to groan, tried to call out, tried to say a name, who’s, she’s not too sure, Hermione, McGonagall, Molly, someone, anyone, but it doesn’t get very far at all. Her throat felt raw, bloated, as if something had been shoved down it and yanked out, and her larynx was left in tatters.  

She tried to move and found that as useful as her missing voice, managing, perhaps, a twitch of a finger, the wiggle of a toe, the pathetic collapse of everything else. She felt as if she was made out of spun sugar and gossamer threads, delicate and brittle.

Every breath felt like fire, every beat of her heart too heavy, too full, as if suddenly, unexpectedly, it was too big for her chest, too big to fit in the space of her ribs that felt like they were shattered like a mirror on concrete.

Through it all, she felt a weight on her, comforting, reassuring in a sense that impossibly left her more dizzy than the pain, trailing a scent of pepper and clove and fresh sap. It’s not a smell she recognizes, and yet she too somehow does in a way she can’t explain, name, or hold.

Flimsy and flighty like the rest of her groggy thoughts.

Where was she? Where was-

Tom? Tom had been-

Had she been stabbed? Had-

Blood. She could still taste the rust in her mouth, clinging to her teeth, the unnervingly pleasant heat of it on her cheek as she laid face down in a puddle of her own burgundy making-

“Hemlock?”

She thought, maybe, the distant voice came from her thoughts for a moment, only to realize, in the throes of the pain and a fumbling, outwards sense of, maybe, a warm hand on her wrist, it wasn’t from in but out.

“Can you open your eyes?”

Were they shut? It didn’t feel like it. It was too bright already, too vivid and hot and white, so white-

“Just push a little bit more.”

Push? Push through the thick fog of sleep? Hemlock’s not sure she wants to. She just wants to sleep, to finally rest-

But it seems her body has other ideas. Listlessly, her eyes bat open.

“There you go.”

The accented voice sounded pleased, and the colours of the bright-white world swim in analogous blobs of flashing colours, ink dropped in a pond, and she blinks again, blinks some more, the swirling forming, constructing itself back together again-

And she finds a man standing over her. He was tall, nearly monstrously so, so high above her prone form, pinned in a suit streaked with blood red stitching, with neat flaxen hair, features as sharp as they were cool, like a glacial carving. As beautiful as an iceberg might have been. He must have been standing before the light, a window perhaps, because he looks like he’s haloed in pale fire. “Are you death?” Her voice finally comes pitifully, whispered through what sounded like sandpaper to her own ears, and this, this, makes the man appear just as pleased as his voice had sounded before.

“Welcome back to the land of the living, Miss Potter.” He doesn’t answer her question. The fire in her chest burns brighter, whiter, almost matching the strangers corona crown. The hand on her wrist squeezes gently. Welcoming. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you.”

Chapter Text

Will Graham was still towel drying his hair when he came around the bend in the corridor to see the nurses bustling outside the door like wasps shaken from a nest. It took him all of two seconds to spot Hannibal in the crowd, head and shoulders above the rest, and even less time to realize it was Hemlock’s room that had drawn the irascible attention flittering in and out the door in dizzying intervals.

The damp towel plops at his feet, forgotten in its pool of shower water as his boots pick up the pace, a rising panic singing in his blood with every step. It hums in his ears like electrostatic, makes his stomach drop to the soles of his feet, knees knocking with his swiftly unsteady legs. He needs-

Hannibal catches him coming down the hall and smiles, and the fear, the panic, the dread, washes away like blood in the rain. “Will-“ He greats merrily. “Hemlock is awake.”

Awake? But that couldn’t be right. The sedatives in her system should have been enough to keep two full grown Alpha men under for another two days and-

Almost as if the universe wanted to prove a point, to hammer the nail home, a panicked voice echoes from just the other side of the closed private ward. “Miss, please-“ There was a feel of deep desperation to the nurses plea. “I need you get back on the bed. You might rupture an internal suture.”

There was a loud shuffling from behind the closed door, maybe even a hiss. “Touch me again-“ The new voice came with a disused grumble, elegant even in the thatch of misused and hoarse vocal cords, infused with the quintessential British accent Will had been convinced only really existed on TV. “And I’ll make all your teeth rotate a full fuckin’ ninety degrees, mate.”

The door swung open, a pale hand clasping onto the frame to keep steady, small, long fingered, scarred with-

Writing. I Must Not Tell Lies.

And out stepped Hemlock Potter, all five foot-nothing of her. She’s tiny in the door, made smaller by how the hospital pants, a pale blue, sagged down her ankles in heavy coats, leaving little toes to play peek-a-boo with the linoleum. Her chest and stomach were wrapped in layers upon layers of bandages and gauze, the only thing keeping her dignity intact, though she seemed to care little for that. Upright and awake, she appeared more hair than girl at first glance, the black curls of her head sticking up in every possible direction, some against nature and gravity, tangled into a heap about her bare shoulders from laying prone for so long without a brush.

Across the way, like kismet, their eyes meet.

There is a kind of green that speaks to the soul of nature, of fresh blades of grass and new spring buds. Those were not Hemlock Potter’s green eyes. Hers were infinitely more… violent. The kind of green that reminded Will of acid, gastric acid that consumes and devours and tears things apart by a glance. The green of a high summer, just before a heatwaves strikes, before the green blazes to a charred yellow under a heavy sun. A green that burns.

Hemlock slinks woozily out the door, keeping her hand on the wall for balance, and as those terribly bright eyes flick from Will’s down the hall, Hemlock began shuffling the way her gaze fell. “Miss-“ The nurse tried again. “I must insist-“

“Insist all you want.” Hemlock huffed as she toddled off towards the elevator located at the end of the corridor, brushing away the nurses like one would bat away an irritating fly. “I’m not getting back on that bloody bed. Not yet.”

Will did the only thing he could do. Follow. “Hemlock-“ He tried, but he knew it was pointless the moment he said it. This time when she glances his way, she doesn’t meet his eye. She gets as far as his nose.

“Morgue.” She croaked. “I need to go to the morgue, and then I’ll get back on the fuckin’ bed, or wherever else you want to stash me.”

The morgue?

The morgue.

Suddenly, it clicked, locked, snapped. By the time Hemlock made it to the elevator doors, Will had already darted ahead to press the button, and Hannibal had caught up to the pair, the three nurses left behind in their confusion. “I’ve got her.” Will calls to them. “We’ll be back in a few minutes.”

Hemlock lurched inside as the metal doors swooped open, puffing as she held herself upright by the hand railing around the small box. Hannibal shuffled in next, and Will smashed the needed floor button on the keypad. The doors closed with a ding. The little LED lights flashed on the viewscreen above the closed doors.

Going down.

It turned out Will didn’t need to flash his FBI badge at the guard of the morgue, Hemlock, who had been silent for the entirety of the journey since stepping foot in the elevator, eyes dead ahead at the imagined destination she was hobbling towards, had somehow pinched one of the nurses ID cards on her way through the hall, and without question, glance, or tête-à-tête, skirted around the guard’s scope of view, limited anyway by watching the small television in his boxed office, and used it to swipe her access into the ice-cold room.

The morgue, to Will, was more than sterile equipment, refrigeration units, and the body bags, filled or unfilled. It was a place where a specific type of death is resolved. Those where the cause is unclear or is the result of some intended or accidental violence. The bodies are almost always victims in some way - of crime, suicides and car crashes, but also victims of loneliness. It's where you go if you die alone in your flat and your body lies undisturbed for days. It's where you go if no one knew you were dying and no doctor attended your final hours. It's where you go if no loved one held your hand as you slipped away. In one way or another, then, all the people who pass through this room are the people who die screaming.

The body Hemlock sniffs out, the last on the second row from the bottom of the stacked cooling system, wouldn’t have had time to scream for long with his throat slashed as deeply has it had been. To the spinal cord Will sees as he helps the young girl drag the extendable table out. The mortician hadn’t sewn it up yet, though, down the bodies bare chest, the matching wound to Hemlock’s healing one had been hastily tacked together with staples.

The tag on the toe reads T. M. Riddle.

They must have done the heart transplant on the emergency flight over from Britain. Risky, but needed if the body was heading towards too far decay to be viable as a donor. How Hemlock knew Riddle’s body was here, in this small container in the bowels of John Hopkins basement, Will couldn’t rightly guess. Perhaps he didn’t want to guess, didn’t want to see. Perhaps he already knew, as he knew exactly when Garret Jacob Hobbs body had been carted from the home even though he’d been squirreled in the back of an ambulance under a shock blanket.

“I keep thinking he’s going to sit up.” It’s the first time Hemlock’s spoken since the elevator, and Will doesn’t want to contemplate too hard that her first word to him was morgue. Neither does he know if she knows who he is yet, what he’s doing here, why he followed, what any of this means, he doesn’t think Hemlock knows, but he understands that those conversations can’t come until this had been done. “And then I blink, and he’s still laying there. Not sitting up. Dead. He’s… Really dead.” She glances towards Will, in his general direction, but she falls short. Very short. Barely gets her face turned towards him. “Do you know who he is?”

“I know of him.” Will said, shuffling at the bottom of the mortuary table. The reflection of the bare bulb above bounces off the stainless-steel rim. “I know what he did to you.”  

“So you know who I am, then?” She asked.

“I know of you.” Will repeated. “I know what you did to him.” Because that’s what she was really asking. Not for a name, or an age, or a place they might have run into each other that she’s forgotten. She wanted to know if he knew what they were doing here. Will does know. There’s no reason to hide.

Hemlock grunted, turning her attention back to the body before her. Even under the harsh lighting, even in death, Tom Riddle was a devastatingly handsome man, perhaps heading towards his early fifties, salt and pepper sprinkled at the temples of his black hair. He'd find no more grey hairs now. 

They look alike, he and Hemlock. Dreadfully so. Will wonders if they were related, perhaps on her father’s side. “You know-“ Hemlock said as she regarded the slack face staring milky up at the ceiling fan. “When I was little, I used to picture Tom as this… Bogeyman. I’d imagine him with red eyes and no nose, skeletal and snake-like-“ Will has a sickening feeling that Hemlock might imagine like he does, with sight unseemly for company. “Somewhere along the way, I almost… I think I started to believe it. The fairy-tale picture I painted in my head. But he’s not that.” She stated sharply, resolute, nearly dejectedly. “The worst monsters never look like monsters, do they? And that’s how they get you. Tom was never that. He was just a man… And now he’s dead like every other man. He’s not going to sit up. He’s never going to sit up again.”

“You have nothing to fear-“ Hannibal spoke up from the doorway, and Will startled a little from his voice, having momentarily forgotten, or overlooked his presence, for it was nearly impossible to forget a man like Hannibal Lecter. “Tom Riddle is dead. He can’t reach you anymore.” That was a lie, wasn’t it? A nice lie, aimed to calm a thought-to-be distraught teenager, but a lie all the same.

A pointless lie because by the answering scoff, Hemlock knows better.

Death didn’t necessarily mean a cessation of existence. Tom still lingered, and he would, always, in Hemlock’s memory. It’s the price you pay in a hunt, whether you were a willing participant or not.

“Fear?” Hemlock asked with a swivel towards Hannibal, and she’s smart, she must be, because Will sees she understands this too. Tom is gone, and contrarily he won’t ever be gone. “No… I was never afraid of Tom. Not really. Not the way everyone else was.” She doesn’t elucidate further, merely grasps at the edge of the morgue slab, and Will rushes to help her as they slide the body back into the gaping, black mouth of its cold home.

Will knows what she’s feeling then, there, now. He felt it too, hideously, staring down the body of Garret Jacob Hobbs. Not fear. Not confusion. This sojourn into the morgue wasn’t about punctuating the fact Tom Riddle was dead, Will guessed Hemlock had already known that when she woke up, lived.

This was about conquest. The crowning ceremony of a marathon raced.

She’d won, and Tom hadn’t, as Will had won his own game of cat and mouse with the Minnesota Shrike, where the latter had lost. They got the cheese and now they had it… and neither one seemingly knew what to do with it.

“The mark?” Hemlock asked, and its only as Will tracks her hand skimming over her bandages does he realize what she’s asking.

“In Tom’s last attack, he sliced through your right atrium and ventricle. Carved through your superior vena cava too.” A beat. “You needed a heart transplant.” Will doesn’t have to say more, for she peers to the closed door of Tom Riddle’s cubicle, must be seeing through the metal and the dark to Tom’s identical wound.

Will doesn’t know what he expects, sadness, horror, despondency when Hemlock put two and two together, but pragmatic black humour snorted through a huff of a nose wasn’t high on the list. “Good thing I aimed for his neck then, eh?”

“Don’t you want to know who I am?” He asked, and she pauses across the way, keeps her back to his face.

“You’re Will Graham, someone who works for the FBI. He’s Doctor Hannibal Lecter, and he was born the twentieth of January nineteen sixty-three.” So she knows their names, but how does she know Hannibal’s birthday or-

By Hannibal’s little frown, barely a pucker between his brows, he hadn’t told her their names, definitely not his birthday, hadn’t told her anything in what Will was presuming was the short stretch of time she woke up and Hannibal was there before he called the nurses in.

She glances back from over her shoulder, pale face white in the light, a flush to her cheeks from exertion, and from who knows where, she pulls her hand up-

Holding Will’s FBI badge and Doctor Lecter’s driving license.

Will scrambled, patting his pockets-

Finding it empty. Hannibal’s similar, if more put together, search of his coat pocket came up equally meaningless. Hemlock dashed them down on the small instrument table by her side, right by a line of neatly laid scalpels. Somehow, someway, her voice was more sharp than their edges. “Might want to be more careful with these-“ She grinned. “Who knows what sort of trouble could be caused if some miscreant got their grubby hands on them.”

Will crossed the short distance to take his ID badge back, plucking up Lecter’s licence to hand it to the waiting psychiatrist too. “We’re not here to hurt you.”

“Know that now, don’t I?” Hemlock quipped far too carelessly with her own welfare in mind. “No Death Eater would ever be called Will-“ Death Eater, the moniker given to Tom Riddle’s supporters and devotees in the political sphere, possibly what Hemlock had believed they were-

Before the elevator, where she’d somehow lifted their IDs in the enclosed space and took a peek. “And while Doctor Lecter-“ Hemlock gestured to Hannibal with a jut of her chin. “might fit Tom’s little gaggle of ghouls to a T, right down to his Savile row suit buttons, no Death Eater would have been caught dead driving themselves around town. Doesn’t fit the whole ‘Pureblood’ nonsense Tom cooked up for the Toffs back home. Privileged pillocks.”

“So-“ Hemlock finished with a flurry of a shrug. “If you’re not Death Eaters, and you’re not Mi5 by your American and… Lithuanian accent-“ Hannibal appeared impressed by her grab of his dialect. “And I know Tom’s little blood war hasn’t seeped so far to reach the American security radar over the great pond… what exactly are Will Graham from the FBI and Doctor Lecter born in nineteen sixty-three doing at my bedside?”

“I-“ Will started and stopped again, suddenly a loss for words. How was he meant to broach the subject? He thought he had another few days left before crossing this bridge, and now that he was here, saying hey, I’m your long-lost brother seemed a bit… brunt. Thankfully, curiously, Hannibal interjected.

“What do you think we’re doing here?” Hemlock observed the tall Alpha, head cocked, humming.

“It’s personal. If not, you would have already spilled the beans. You’re worried about how I’m going to take it, given how suddenly coy Will is being, acting like a nun caught with a hooker’s hand up her habit-“ Will spluttered on his spit, cheeks glowing rosy. She’s blunt, Hemlock. Frank in a way Will wasn’t used to having directed at himself, only directing at others.   “Personal, possibly ramifications of upsetting me, indications of knowing my who I am and what I’ve done mean its something do to with my past… I’m going to go out on a limb and say Albus Dumbledore has somehow fucked me over again from the grave.” Hemlock popped a dark brow. “How close am I?”

“Close.” Will Graham groused before he bit the bullet. “I’m your brother.”

“Huh.” Hemlock breathed, her nostrils flaring. He knows the moment she strikes gold, when she connects the pine sap and pine needles in their respective scents. Lily Evans must have had the same woodsy note, once upon a time.

For a while the only sounds in the room was the buzzing of the lights above, and the whirring of the cooling units. Then she turned towards Doctor Lecter, gaze locked on his tie. No higher. “Are you a head shrink or a body stitcher, Doc?”

“I am a psychiatrist-“ Hannibal began fairly. “Although I used to be a surgeon, and have a strong grasp on anatomy.”

“So what’s your professional opinion on someone who’s just got out of major surgery having hard liquor?” Hannibal smiled, lean and keen.

“I wouldn’t advise it with the drugs you are currently on.” Will could see Hemlock swipe her tongue over her teeth behind her closed lips.

“So I’m going to have to have this conversation relatively sober, then. Fuck.”

Fuck indeed.

Chapter Text

Trussing (v.) - to tie meat or poultry, such as turkey with a string, woven through the bird parts by using a needle, in order to create a more compact shape before cooking

When the faucet finally gives way the old copper pipes start to sing - a chorale from the deteriorating brick and plaster all old buildings, no matter how many times they had been renovated, had. The water doesn't flow from the bathroom sink but coughs out a rasping splutter before spitting out a thin running stream. Hemlock bowed over the basin, splashing as much of the cold water she could cup in her hands right onto her heated face, scrubbing.

She thinks of death with her eyes closed. He is, after all, an old friend of hers.

Popular faith would have you believe that death brought you closure. It doesn’t, Hemlock thinks. Death is not the end of a story, not for those left behind, but more like a… full stop. Only, that full stop didn’t come at The End, it came halfway thr.

Do you see? She could have thought up any ending of that sentence. It came halfway through a sentence, and you would carry on never knowing how it ended. Or; It came halfway through a story, and there was nothing you could do about it. Or, maybe; It came halfway thrown, seemingly out of nowhere, and you would never see the hit until it was smacking you in the bloody face.

Death was a full stop, fat and black and as round as a spiders belly.

Flicking the excess cold water from her fingertips, Hemlock blindly swiped for the paper towel dispenser, dabbing her face and scowling as the thin paper disintegrated in her wet hands.

Not hers though.

Not Hemlock’s death.

Hemlock’s death was more a semi-fuckin’-colon. Punctuation used to join two related independent clauses in place of a comma and a coordinating conjunction. Hemlock had died; Hemlock had lived.

It’s the latter half she doesn’t know what to bloody do with.

It wouldn’t be a lie to say Hemlock hadn’t expected to come out of this alive. Had thought, as the dagger slipped in between her ribs, as Tom’s pale face smirked down at her, or had he been crying, oh, this is it.

Bracing herself on the sink, Hemlock regarded herself in the mirror above. She looked a mess.

You’re alive, she tells reflection. Tom’s not, it seemed to smirk back.

Tom Riddle was dead; Hemlock was alive.

She doesn’t know how she feels about that.

If we were to understand grief as a natural reaction to deficit, then Hemlock Potter is not grieving. She has lost nothing with Tom Marvolo Riddles death. He does not walk her world anymore, and her sun shines brighter for it. She’s free.

Then why does it feel like a loss?

Don’t get her wrong, she’s relieved Tom is gone, maybe even a little spitefully happy, the least she’s owed right now, surely? Well, perhaps not happy… but she’s not exactly sad about it either. On a surface level, logically, Hemlock understands what Tom’s loss has gifted her. Physical and emotional safety, the tangible and emotive security of those she cared about, even those she did not know, Tom Riddle was a maniac, so it is a relief to not carry the heavy weight of those lives he could have possibly taken on her shoulders anymore, every time she failed to stop him.

She feels guilty about that, too. Remorseful that it’s such a release to not bear the burden of Tom’s actions,  the people he targeted to get to her, just because he could, even if she knows with reason it was never her fault, not really-

Blame was easier to invert than export, for Hemlock Potter.

So… It’s not quite relief, and it’s not really happiness, she’s not sad and neither is she really guilty…

Unconsciously, her hand raised, floating over chest, staring at a nauseating reflection. Below her palm Hemlock felt the steady beat of a heart, not her own, Tom’s.

Tom’s heart was in her chest, would always be in her chest, and irrationally, crazily, she wants to suddenly tear the bandages off, delve her fingers through the wound splitting her breasts in two, wiggling fingers in between her ribs and yank the bloody beating thing right out and fling it as far as possible away from her. Where it could roll into a dark, damp corner and stay there forgotten.

What was it Tom had said to her once?

I have seen your heart and it is mine.

He got it backwards, hadn’t he? Tom’s heart beats in her chest, her heart now, and it would continue to do so until the day she died.

Again.

Perhaps permanently this time.

Trelawny, a pseudo-psychiatrist that leant too heavy on LSD trips and quack theatrics, a loony Dumbledore had forced Hemlock to speak to for the totality of two whole sessions in her fourth year, fat lot of good that did for her mental stability, once wrote a paper on Hemlock and Tom and tried to get it published. Of course, Hemlock being underage, and Tom still the shining darling of the upper English elite, had forced Trelawny to use aliases and pseudonyms. Harry, Hemlock had been called in the journal if she remembered correctly. Tom had been named ‘Voldemort’. French origins – 'vol' means, variously, 'flight' or 'theft'; 'de' means 'of' or 'from'; and 'mort' means 'death'.

Hemlock had read it once and only once, before she’d thrown her sent draft copy into the fireplace and watched it crumble to ash in Grimmauld Place.

The parasitic, quasi co-dependent nature of our subjects insures a likelihood of mutual destruction, Trelawny had started her conclusion,  if their preoccupations remain entangled with one another. Both remain steadfast matches, both victim and perpetrators in their own way, eerily similar in both disposition and personal histories, and I believe the only possible conclusion to this sorrowful affair would be the death of one, for neither personality shown above would allow the other to live while the supplementary survives. In targeting Harry’s parents, and his continued hounding of the boys childhood, Voldemort has, either intentionally or otherwise, marked Harry as his equal, and mirrored his self, both tragic childhood and sociopathic adolescent tendencies, into the child from a young age, where violence is the language spoken between the two. That is to say, the distinction of Harry and Voldemort as separate entities slims with each new aggressive meeting between them. Whether this was a compliment or affront in Voldemort’s assessment is unknown, whether he chose the boy for this purpose, as a surrogate child of his own when the real-life application of love and romance sickens him so, or merely was insulted someone, especially a toddler, could have survived one of his attacks, is still indefinite, but there remains one thing I am sure of as I am confident that this will end in demise. Which ever comes out of this living will never truly leave the other behind.

Standing here, now, Hemlock might have thought Trelawny part seer, if she believed in any of that. Half mad too, she did often spike her cups of tea with magic mushrooms, after all, and that had got her disbarred from the medical profession.

Hemlock does not grieve Tom Riddle. It’s too simple a word to use right then. Clear cut, unambiguous, it didn’t fit the complicated nature of… of them.  

Whether Hemlock liked it or not, whether Tom had liked it or not, the night he killed her biological father on that staircase and slain her mother over her crib, when the bullet had somehow recoiled off her skull, bounced off the wall, and hit him-

It felt like a part of his rotten soul had latched on and weaved itself through her own. Now that he was gone, now that it was over, now the full stop came… Hemlock could feel the hollow space he’d left inside her, in her life going forward, the blank page of the next part of her story without him in it.

What would she do now? For so long it had been a contest of surviving, out running, orbiting Tom Riddle and his games as the moon orbited the earth. If the earth suddenly disappeared, where would the moon go? Into dark space? Into the sun to burn up and disintegrate as the paper towel had in her wet hands? Or would it stay there, exactly as it is, with no earth and no orbit… just floating?

Tom had died; Hemlock had lived-

And the girl didn’t have a single fuckin’ idea on who Hemlock Potter without Tom Riddle was. He had been with her from cradle to morgue slab, quite literally, and now his heart was her heart, and she felt sick, tired, angry-

Anguish.

Fuck, she cursed at her own reflection, knuckles white on the porcelain.

Fuck, she hated him. Loathed him. Detested everything Tom stood for, everything he did, to her, to her friends, to innocent people-

And she fuckin’ missed him too.

What kind of monster did that make her?

Knock, knock, knock.

“Hemlock? You alright? You’ve been in there for a while now and the nurse is here for your post-op examination.” It was Will Graham’s voice from the other side of the door, and Hemlock snapped away from the sink and the mirror and the uncertainty of her feelings she would never speak in the light of day. No one would understand. Worse, they might, and they’d send her straight to an asylum.  

She wouldn't blame them for it, either. Invert. 

Pulling away from the sink and flushing the unused toilet as an alibi, Hemlock dived straight first into another confusing headache.

Will Graham… her brother. Wasn’t that a tangled web too?  “Just finishing up! I’ll be right out!”

Will doesn’t reply, but she hears the steady retreat of his boots on the tile outside. Boots. Her brother has boots, and jeans, and ten fingers and, though she hasn’t seen them, Hemlock guesses ten toes.

A walking, talking, not so mint-condition out of the box brother.

What do you do with one of them, also? Hemlock had never had a sibling, the closest she’d had was Dudley and… Well. He hadn’t been right since that tunnel and the park and his taunting group of friends, where Hemlock had snapped and-

Dudley didn’t count. Bastard had it coming for years.

Neither did Vernon or Petunia. Hemlock was more a house pet than any sort of family to them, and all her other family were buried six feet under. She knew how to deal with those. You go to the grave once a year otherwise people start looking at you funny, lay customary flowers at the headstone, usually lilies or roses as every other poor shmuck had in the cemetery, make some idle chatter to the wind just to convince the graveyard worker you were there on visitation and not planning a mausoleum robbery, and then walk away, duty done.

Hemlock doubted Will would like her laying lilies on his lap, might cringe at the symbolism, however. Or put a tombstone on his head just so she knows how to interact with him.

She supposed you do what you do with everyone else, really. Giving one last glance to her reflection, Hemlock beamed, dimpled, rosy cheeked, a little glassy in the eye, perfectly normally, almost cavalier, roguish and perfectly practiced.

Just how Tom used to smile.

Pretend everything is okay and hope no one tries to peek below the mask.

“You can turn around now, Mr. Graham.” At the nurses invite, Will turned from the window, watching as the pale privacy curtain was drawn back to reveal the scrubbed nurse jotting notes on a plastic clipboard, and Hemlock sitting on the end of the bed, fresh bandages on chest, wrangling on the white t shirt, Will’s own from the bag of clean clothes Hannibal had brought with him this morning, down her slender stomach.

“You’re healing remarkably fast.” The nurse quipped just as Hemlock finished tugging the hem of the shirt down into her lap, so big on her it brushed her thighs.

“Not had many Omega patients, have you?” She bantered right back, and as the nurse flushed and Will’s brow popped up in silent question, Hemlock’s grin grew. “Alpha’s got the strength, Betas got the social skills, and us Omegas got the supercharged healing. I break a toe at evening and it’s healed by sunrise.”

“Well-“ The nurse flustered at being caught out. “I will have to consult with your leading physician” The implication that she, a Doctor Leviers, would know about the boundaries of Omega healing or whether Hemlock was trying to get one over on her was implicit, “but if she signs off on my screening, you might just be able to head home tonight.” The nurse pointed to Will, flipping her clipboard shut and stashing it on the end of the cot in its little sleeve. “Of course Hemlock would need to come in every other day for a check-up, just for the first couple of weeks, to ensure nothing like infection or loose stitching or rejection of the transplant is taking place, but I’m sure you’d both be more comfortable at home.”

Home. It was a loaded word. Especially seen as they, Hemlock and Will, hadn’t really brokered it yet. So Will just grits his teeth, smiles closed lip, and nods.

The nurse takes her cue, and then it’s just them in the room, Hannibal having left an hour ago because he was needed at his psychiatric clinic for an afternoon session.

“So-“ Hemlock chirped in the lapsing silence. “You’re really my brother?”

“It would appear so.” This time, the smile on Will’s face felt less forced.

“Poor sod.” She grinned back. “Not very lucky, are you? Ending up with me.” There’s a hint there, secreted in the sarcasm, a taste of self-loathing at the fringes of Hemlock’s voice that doesn’t pass as smoothly. It chafes against Will something vile. Like rubbing salt in a wound.

“If you knew me, you’d think it opposite.” And maybe they really are siblings, just for a flash, because he has the same inward animosity lurking at the edges of his tone.

Hemlock, like he had with her, snatched it right up, and if he didn’t think she might… see things how he does, he would now. “Your husband seems to like you well enough, can barely keep his eyes off you, so you can’t be that bad.”

“Husband?” The wires in Will’s brain short circuits like he’s suddenly missing a few screws, particularly when he realizes, belatedly since Hemlock’s awakening there’s only been one other, apart from the doctors and nurses, she had seen Will around. “Do you mean Hannibal?”

“The tall European stereotype who looks like he’s just stepped foot off the cover of an Florentine vogue magazine?” Hemlock prodded cheerily; the same way Will imaged imps would poke you with a pitchfork. “Yeah. Him.”

“Me and Hannibal-“ Will stammered. “We’re not-… He’s-“

“Oh-“ Hemlock beamed. “Shite, sorry, Bonded.”

“No-“ Will barked a little to fast. “We’re not-… We’re not together. At all. Not-… That way. he’s my work therapist.”

“You’re therapist?” Hemlock parroted, deliberately with a deadpanned face. “You brought your… work therapist along to a hospital to meet your partially dead sister in ICU?” She whistled low, turning her burning gaze to the wall. “Well… Seems the fuckery that is I is apparently genetic. Go-go team broken brain.”

“You’re brain’s not broken.” Will said, unsure of quite who he was speaking to right then. Himself or Hemlock. Either way, he was happy to get the conversation off Hannibal Lecter and the concept of Bonding. “I know you may… Feel that way right now-“

“Do you?” Hemlock cut him off abruptly, gaze flying back like a boomerang to strike at his chest. “Do you understand?”

She’s not talking about possible genetic failures, Will knows. “I understand…” He can’t say it, can’t go into depth about Garret, how far in the dark he’d wandered and the darkness he had brought back with him, can’t cross that bridge yet. He’s always been more comfortable in abstracts. “What it’s like to take a life.”

“You killed someone?” There’s no blame or disgust waiting around the corner in Hemlock’s face or voice, just curiosity.

“A man-… A serial killer. He-“ Will can’t. He can’t. He doesn’t have to.

Hemlock appears to see, a light burning behind her too bright eyes, and she must spot something in Will’s face, in his shadow on the wall, because suddenly she looks as small as she is, sagging on the end of the bed. “We make quite the pair, don’t we?”

“We could.” Will bartered back. “I know this might be overwhelming… I know you have no reason to trust me or…” He’s really fluffing it, isn’t he? “But I want to try to get to know you. When you get discharged, I can set you up in a hotel, I could visit you, take you to the hospital for your appointments, if that’s what you want. I’ll even see you off to the airport once the doctors give a thumbs up if that’s where you want to go.”

“And what is it that you want?” She’s quick, Hemlock. Quick as a whip and as sharp as a blade, and, strangely, idly, Will thought it might be, if he was a little more psychopathic, fascinating to see Hemlock and Hannibal in an argument against one another.

Will, finally, settles on honesty. “I would like you to come live with me. I don’t have much. I’m not rich. You’d have to put up with my dogs but… I would like it if you stayed.”

“Shacklebolt’s been to visit already, hasn’t he?” There it was, the gunpowder mind ticking over the six barrel. Will nodded. Hemlock, in turn, sighed. “Thought so. They want me back in England, don’t they?”

“He didn’t say as much-“ Will stated modestly. The unspoken he didn’t have to, remained just that, unspoken but no less heard.

“I’m not nineteen yet.” Hemlock didn’t need to further the implications. She must know them well enough at this stage. “They’re going to try and camp me with another guardian. The Dursley’s won’t take me back. Not now.”

Heavy. That’s how Hemlock sounded. Heavy and too old for such a young face. “If you stay with me, I could petition the courts. As your brother, I have legal precedence. They’ll look favourably on my claim over others.”

“I thought you said you weren’t rich? You’d need a lawyer-“ Hemlock chuckled, the noise rasping in her throat, velvety. “And I’m pretty sure they’re expensive no matter what country you live in.”

“Hannibal said he’d help me.” Immediately, Hemlock blinked up at him.

“Hannibal Lecter… You’re work therapist who you said isn’t your husband or your Bonded… Will help you adopt an orphan Omega?”

Will winced. “I know what it sounds like but we’d only be living with him for a little while during the courts investigation-“

He knew he slipped up when Hemlock’s wild grin was wide enough to flash her fangs. Hemlock was good at chess, Will guessed. One break in a line and she had you at checkmate. “Oh, so now not only is he going to be signing off on official papers, but we’re moving in with him. Jesus, Will… just how broken is your brain?”

Will, despite the barb, grinned back. “A fair bit, actually.” But then shook his head. “But it’s not like that. We’re friends, that’s all.”

“Friends who try to adopt together? Move in together? Come visit ailing families together? You know… We’re passed the nineteenth century, right? You don’t have to adhere to the whole Sappho and her friend schtick.” This conversation wasn’t going how Will had planned for it to go. Not an inch.

He suspected that's how it normally went with Hemlock. 

“Hannibal doesn’t-“ Will shook his head. “He’s helping because he’s a good man.” Maybe. Will still wasn’t a hundred percent sure what type of man Hannibal was. He had to be somehow messed if he thought of Will in any good light. Yet, Will was pragmatic enough, had spent a childhood on food stamps, not to sniff at a handout. 

“Or he’s helping-“ Hemlock shrugged. “Because he can’t keep his eyes off your arse-“

“Okay!” Will interjected. “I know what you’re doing. You’re not that slick. You think by diverting this conversation onto embarrassing waters you’ll slip by without having to answer any uncomfortable questions yourself.”

Hemlock, it seemed, settled on honesty too. Or, Will had a sinking suspicion, she found more amusement violent candour offered if it meant watching someone else squirm. Imp, had been right. “Shite. Nearly had you though, didn’t I?”

Only know did Will realize he was still smiling. He hadn’t smiled for so long in-… Well, so long. “Almost. You’ve still got a few Nietzschean bolts to tighten.”

“Well, as good ol’ Nietzsche would say, nothing matters, God is dead, so my answer doesn’t count in the end anyway, so why give it?” Will snorted. A more sloppy diversion tactic this time.

They both now it. “You read philosophy?”

Hemlock’s face dropped. No smile, no wink, no nothing. Blank, cold ice as wintry as her voice. “He was Tom’s favourite.” As quick as it came, quicker it went.

“I… Don’t know.” It was the most uncertain Will had heard Hemlock be. Even in the hall earlier this morning, hobbling from the wearing off sedatives, she’d been resolute in her demand for the morgue. “I don’t know what I want. I’ve never… No one’s… I’m not… used to thinking about it.”

And she wouldn’t be, would she? Her whole life had been where other, older people had placed her, told her what to do, who to be, who they needed her to be. Not anymore. “I may not be rich… But I can offer you the chance to find that out. Whatever you want, you can have it. You never want to see me after today? You’ve got it. You want to go to Jamaica; I’ll buy you the ticket this afternoon. It’s your choice now, and it will always be your choice with me.”

When she glances up to him, she gets to the bridge of his glasses between his eyes, and there was a suspicious dampness to her own eyes that Will was kind enough not to draw attention to. “You really mean that, don’t you?”

“On my life.” Will doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t let himself or his voice be unsure, and this is, perhaps, the best thing, the right thing, he’s said or done all day.

“Home.” Hemlock yelped, sucking in a large lungful of breath through her nose, not so delicately scrubbing at her face with the back of her hand to scour off signs of tears, slipping back into cynicism like a nice warm bath. “I’ve never had one of those.” A softer note, a gentle breeze. “I think I might like to try and make one.” And a heavy, hard drop back into sarcasm, where she was comfortable swimming. “Never had a brother either. Best not to waste that chance, eh?”

“So you’ll stay?” With me, as with most of their conversation, the most important bits of it, the connections hiding between the lines, was suggested rather than spoken.

Hemlock waggled her brows. “You’d sold me the moment you mentioned dogs. I bloody love dogs.”

“Good.” And when Will sighs, when he sags, he hadn’t realized how tense, locked, strained he had been waiting for the answer. “Because I have eleven.”

“Eleven?” This time Hemlock’s laughter was light enough to bounce off the white walls. Clinking like crystal. “No wonder you’re ‘best friends’ with your therapist. You’re a psychoanalyst’s wet dream.”

“The air quotes are unnecessary, Hemlock, and I never said best friend.” Just his only friend, recently. Will wasn’t about to let his sister in on how sad his life was just yet, however. She had plenty of time to see that for herself, now. Turning from Hemlock and her too watchful scrutiny, Will headed for the bedside table and the thermos of tea Hannibal had left the pair.

“Sure... Either way, I don’t suppose you have any cigarettes on you, do you?” Earl grey with lemon zest. Will should have known Hannibal wouldn’t have lowered himself to a normal builders’ brew.

“You know you’re not allowed cigarettes or booze, Hemlock.” He heard the bed sheets shuffle, the plod of bare feet as she crept closer for the extended cup of tea. “You were pronounced dead a few days ago.”

“For the total of twenty-three minutes.” The young girl scoffs and takes the drink, downing it in one. It must have been scalding. She doesn’t even flinch. “That’s barely a bloody nap.”

“Hemlock.” Will warned. He had a gut deep feeling he was going to get very used to doing that in a very short amount of time. Especially when Hemlock merely grins mischievously, holding her cup out for another fill.

“Okay, alright, no booze and no smokes.” Her teeth were a stark white, wolfish in her slim face. “But Hannibal’s a head shrink, right? He must have a prescription pad somewhere. I didn’t see it when I went through his bag earlier-“ When did she have time to- “Must be at his office. Do you think you could swipe it? I know some guys back home who’d pay a pretty penny for a blank cheque to cash in for any sort of ‘amines-“

“Hemlock.”

“What?” Her voice too coquettish to be anything innocent. “You’re the one who said they weren’t rich. I was just trying to help.”

“No-“ Will gulped down the last of his tea. “You’re trying to give me an aneurysm.”

Hemlock sipped her drink, biting through a slither of lemon with a chomp, the gremlin, and smirked over the plastic. “What else did you think sisters are for?”

Chapter Text

Alana Bloom’s heels clatter along the sterile floor of the hospital hallway. For a long while that was the only steady sound around. A click-clock, click-clock, click-clock, that pairs the beats of her heart with the strike of Louis Vuitton on tile. That is, of course, until she reaches the fifth floor of the west wing, where most of the acute rehabilitation patients were kept under the watchful eyes of a Post Intensive Care unit. Turning the corner, she’s met with… well, a hiss.

“Psss!” Alana stalls, the snapping of her heels stammering with the skip of her heartbeat. She waits a second, two, “Psss! You there!” she manages to track the noise, the voice, this time, up the hall to a bay window, where a potted plant had been placed.

A fiddle leaf fig tree with a face poking around the foliage. It’s a girl, Alana sees. A teen with a sharp, pale face and a crown of messy, dark curls, and possibly the greenest eyes she had ever seen before. Something about it, that face, that jawline, the slope of an eye, rings something familiar in the back of Alana’s hindbrain.

Alana, nevertheless, doesn’t have much time to ponder over this before the girl is grinning when she notices she’s been spotted. A nimble hand joining the face to shepherd Alana closer. “Yes, you!” she nods encouragingly, as if she was tempting a cat over with a can of tuna. “Come over here a sec.” Wearily, Alana edges down the hall, towards where she was beckoned.

The closer she gets, the easier it is to scent the air. She’s struck with sweet pomegranate, tart pine, a little black liquorice like the penny candy Alana used to have as a child and always left abandoned in the bottom of her paper bag, capped with a zingy type of taste that’s a little bit burnt and cracks in the air like pop-rocks. Underlying was the unmistakable incendiary scent of an unmarked Omega.  

“Are you alright?” Alana asks, giving the hall a quick scan for any parents or guardians or nurses that might be in care of the girl. She finds nothing but a few paintings on the wall, more closed doors, one of which must belong to Will, the person Alana had come to visit, and the water cooler down the way. “Do you want me to fetch you a doctor or-“

“Fancy a trade?” Alana crests around the fiddle leaf, far enough now to get a proper look at the girl. She’s in hospital greens, a woollen blanket thrown haphazardly over her knees, sitting in a wheelchair. Above said knees, laying over the blanket as if it was the most natural place for it to be, was… a dust bunny hand-held vacuum cleaner that had seen better days. “So what about it?” The girl barters with dimples pressed deep in her freckled cheeks. “Got something in that nice handbag of yours?”

“Uh,” Alana begins, because what else is she meant to say? “I’m sorry. I’m not… really… interested in a new vacuum.”

“No?” the girl cocks her head curiously, delving a hand beneath her blanket, by her hip, digging something out of the creases. “What about some-“ she pulls the limb out, palm open, flashing silver at Alana. “Nescafe coffee pods?” She must take Alana’s stunned silence for insouciance, because she goes back to digging under her blanket, this time coming out with a golden tube that glints in the sunlight filtering through the large window besides them. “Or, to go with your pretty handbag, what about some Chanel lipstick? The red will really match your coat.”

“I-“ Alana begins, falters, begins again. “I’m sorry, what is going on-“ but the girl won’t be deterred.

“Lipstick ain’t your thing. Got it. But what about some sunscreen?” she pulls a travel sized bottle out, carelessly throwing it over her shoulder at Alana’s bewildered blink. “Safety pins?” They clatter like Alana’s heels as they bounce away down the hall. “This mighty fine Rubik’s cube? Okay, okay, okay,” the girl ditches the multicoloured box on the windowsill, settling Alana with a no-nonsense look with a steeple of her hands she presses to her lips. “You’re a tough cookie to crack. I give you that. I suppose if you give me thirty minutes, I might be able to get my hands on some very potent opioids that I would be willing to part ways with for a tidy little price. Say… a bottle of coconut rum and a curry-“

“And that’s enough of that for today.” Finally, since strolling into this fairyland hall, Alana is struck with good sense, with reason, with a friendly face. Will Graham comes out of a door only three down the way, one that had been left slightly ajar. He fixes himself by the wall, leaning up against plaster by his shoulder. He smiles almost apologetically at Alana.

“Excuse, Hemlock.” He says in way of greeting, as if this was a perfectly normal sentiment, as if he’s said it ten times already just that morning. “She’s been out here haggling with any passers-by for the last hour. Honestly, it’s been a little impressive to witness. She only started out with a single gummy bear she found on the floor.”

The girl, Hemlock, and suddenly it makes sense-

More sense, at least, to Alana, because that was the name Hannibal had given to Jack about the girl in the hospital, Will’s surprise sister, a Hemlock Potter… and didn’t Alana spot it from the beginning? There had been something familiar to the girl, recollection hiding in a curve and a freckle.

“Excuse Will,” Hemlock bats back just as quickly, before Alana can truly find her footing in this conversation. “He’s just annoyed I wouldn’t give him the Rubik’s cube.”

“That is not true,” Will interjects, and suddenly it’s like Alana isn’t there at all. So centred on each other the two became.

“Yes it is,” Hemlock accuses impatiently. “I’ve seen you eyeing it.”

“I’ve been eyeing your mounting psychosis if you think you’re going to be able to trade your way up with strangers for a pack of cigarettes, Hemlock.” Will kicks off from the wall, shoving his hands into the pockets of his khakis. “What would you even do if you got them? You can’t smoke in a hospital.”

“Ah,” Hemlock grins, no longer the girl tempting but the cat itself. The cat who ate the canary. “Whoever said I was after a smoke? I want Vodka. Whisky. Bloody hell, I’d take a warm beer right now-“

“Yes,” Will rolls his eyes, as if they’ve been through this before more than once, “because you’re going to find someone carrying any of that in a hospital. No one in their right mind is going to give an underage teen alcohol in a post intensive care ward-“

“But that’s the point, isn’t it?” Hemlock chuckles, impish and playful. “We’re in a hospital. Half of the people here aren’t in their right mind, or they wouldn’t be here to begin with. Plus, we’re in the land of red, white and blue, baby. That means I bet ya by the end of the day I could get my hands on a gun, and then it’s a simple case of stick-‘em-up at the local seven-eleven-“

Will pinches at the bridge of his nose, as if he’s fighting a migraine and not a teenage girl who’s currently seat bound. “I swear, Hemlock, you try and get a gun and I’m taking the wheelchair back-“

“Then keep your sticky fingers away from my Rubik’s cube-“

“Me? You’re calling me sticky fingered? Who was the one who pick-pocketed the poor nurse who came to change your sheets this morning? Because it wasn’t me-“

“Oh, lay off. It was a pack of juicy fruit gum. He’s hardly going to miss it-“

“That’s not the point and you know it. You keep this up, and you’re going to be discharged straight into a jail cell this afternoon-“

“Bold of you to assume a jail cell could hold me-“

“I’m beginning to think a lake of ice in the ninth circle of Dante’s Inferno couldn’t hold you for long, Hemlock-“

“Are you calling me Satan?”

“If the shoe fits-“

Alana, politely, coughs into a closed fist. She keeps her hand there a while, if only to hide her rising smile. Despite the harsh words traded between the two as swiftly as song between birds in a treetop, hardly any were said in true malice. Throughout the exchange Will’s grin had never faltered, Hemlock’s dimples never lessoned, and it was… good to see Will this way.

At ease, smiling, shoulders drawn low from his ears and back in relaxation. Far away from the twitching, Advil downing, dark-circle eyed man he’d become after Garret Jacob Hobbs.

That is to say that man was still there, of course he was still there, Will needed a good sleep and a good shave still, and he couldn’t hide the slight tremble of fatigue to his hands, but to see him so… comfortable, so calm, it was… good. Yes, good.

Good, and odd, as if Alana had stepped through the looking glass and was watching some inverted, upside down, buttons-for-eyes Will. There’s a tinge of something else too, a bite in the bottom of her belly that stings something fierce, a feeling Alana refuses to label as jealousy. Envy that, despite her best efforts, despite how long she’s been seeing Will inside and outside her office, Alana had not come even remotely close to eliciting the same response from the habitually reclusive man.

The only other time Will seemed so at ease in his own skin was when he was around Dr. Lecter.

“Before we resort to robbery or exorcisms, how about an introduction?” Alana steps in when the two blink back at her, snatched out of each other’s orbit by her intervention. “I’m Alana Bloom. I’m a…” she hesitates here, searching for the right word though that seems to be far out of her reach.

Alana’s not quite friends with Will. Their professional relationship, or more aptly her professional curiosity over someone like Will, negates that claim. Neither is their relationship entirely professional, so calling him her patient was an outright lie. In truth, Alana doesn’t really know what she and Will are to each other, and so she settles on the easiest, the safest, definition. “Colleague of your brothers. We work together sometimes.”

Will smiles reassuringly at her, that kind-soft-lopsided one he did without thinking, and-

Hemlock scans her from peep-toe to neck scarf, and her nose curls up like she’s smelled something positively foul. “Really?” She asks Will, not waiting for a reply “Will.” She moans with a rueful headshake. Equally indulgent and scandalized. “What will Hannibal think of this, aye?”

“Okay,” Will holds his hand up, as if he was trying to ward the girl off, “that’s not-… we’re not… you know what? I think it’s time for your rest.” He crosses the short distance between the two, seizing the handles of Hemlock’s wheelchair, dragging her from her hidden perch behind the fiddle leaf tree with an undignified Hey! squawking from the small teen.

“It’s not my fault,” Hemlock contends as she’s dragged towards what must be her room door, still looking like the cat with a yellow feather poking out her teeth “you attract head shrinks like Apple collects sweatshops.”

Will pauses by the door, going far enough to kick the lock break on the back roller of the wheelchair, regarding his sister with an unimpressed arm cross. “For the last time, there is nothing going on between me and Hannibal, and,” he stresses hard, “there is nothing going on between me and Alana. In fact, it’s Alana and Hannibal who have been going out for coffees over the last month,” Alana hadn’t known Will had known about that, “they’re the ones dating.”

Well, Alana thinks but doesn’t say, dating is a bit of a… stretch. Hannibal has cooked for her, yes, and took her out for coffee and pastries twice, and… sure, she had spent the night a couple of times, but they had yet to put anything tangible into words.

Hemlock, however, meets her brother head on, unconvinced. “Yeah,” She scoffs heartily. “Because no where in the history of all human kind has someone ever dated the best friend to try and get the attention of their crush. Honestly, Will-“

“Honestly,” Will butts in, unlatching the lock, hip-checking the door to Hemlock’s room wide open and carting her in. “It’s time for a rest.”

Nevertheless, before Hemlock is hauled around the door and out of sight, she shoots one last look Alana’s way, and the smile on the teen’s face could be taken as wry. In an unkinder light, it might be mistaken for mocking. “Hannibal would look better in those kitten heels too. He’d work them harder and make them look less… tacky. Not like a piglet in tutu-“

The teen disappears, and unceremoniously, Will shuts the door in her face, cutting her voice off. Slowly, deliberately, he runs a hand down his face. “You really will have to forgive Hemlock,” he repeats, palm catching on his stubble. “She means well, but she uses insults as ice-breakers.”

“No I don’t!” comes a yell from the other side of the door. “I never mean well. I mean unwell. The worst well. I radiate ill-will!”

“Go for your nap!” Will shouts back, and there’s a squeak behind the door, tire on tile.

“Fine, fine,” there’s a mumble, perhaps another insult, “I’m going. Keep your Henley on.” By the fading of the voice, Hemlock was heading towards her bed and now out of ear shot.

“That was… uh,” Alana flounders, “something.” She pathetically lands on. Will’s answering laughter is warm and dark, like Panama dark chocolate that melts on the tip of a tongue.

“Something?” Will cocks a brash brow. “You mean a menace. That’s what Hemlock is. A menace.”

“But you look good,” Alana rushes to correct herself, to stomp down on the blush rising to the apples of her cheeks. “You look happy which is good. Are you? Happy, I mean.”

“If you are suggesting I was expecting Monday evening to end the week with a sister I never knew existed? I can’t say I was.” Will states, shuffling. “But neither can I say I’m entirely upset I have. Everything else is so…” now it was Will’s turn to struggle for the right word, the right fit, “new. I haven’t got a grasp on exactly how I feel right now.” Then, mentally, it appeared Will struck gold. “She makes me laugh, so there’s that. And there hasn’t been a dull moment since she woke up. Keeps me on my toes. Keeps me from thinking about-“

Will breaks off, but he didn’t have to. Alana already knew the ending. Keeps me from thinking about Garret Jacob Hobbs. The man I killed.

“That’s good.” Alana repeats herself. “New things and new relationships can be hard to quantify,” and doesn’t Alana know that one. “The rest will come in time.”

Gingerly, she gestures over her shoulder with a thumb and a smile. “Feel like coming to the cafeteria for a lukewarm coffee in a too small cup?” Typically, Will would jump at the chance. He’d nod and follow her along, and they would talk idly about their respective days in obtuse roundabout ways-

Not this time. This time, Will shakes his head. “I’m going to stick here with Hemlock,” he pointedly glances down to his wrist watch, “and Hannibal is due for a stop over soon. So…”

So.

Alana’s hand flops down, swinging listlessly by her hip. It’s different, new, Alana would admit, being on the opposite end of a refusal. “Oh,” she starts, and paints on a bright smile. “Yes, of course. I really should have rung before coming. Maybe next time?”

Will nods, and his kind-soft smile, as lopsided as it always is, looks to Alana more imitating in this light. “Next time.”

Alana retreats after a quick, flimsy goodbye, retracing the steps she came from. Her heels once more clattering along the sterile floor of the hospital hallway.

Hemlock stands by the wall, peering out the hospital window to the carpark out front. She lazily considers the people coming and going. Some in ambulances strapped to stretchers, other’s toddling from their cars carrying big teddies and colourful balloons, a few with flowers and wide steps that screech grief-heavy.

Her wheelchair was left empty behind her, by her hospital bed.

Hemlock shouldn’t be standing, but as with everything she shouldn’t do, she is.

Her doctor said she should only be walking or on her feet for an hour a day for the next fortnight, to ease any possible stress to her shiny-not-new-heart. Yet, Hemlock can’t bare sitting any longer. Laying down any longer. Being still any longer. It feels like any moment now a Death Eater was going to pop out the heart monitor and strangle her to death if she lingers a moment more. So here she stands, half hidden by the blinds and the wall, watching people go about their lives with the humdrum landscape of the steady march of time.  

She feels a bit cut off from it all, like she was pressing her nose up against an aquarium glass to spy the sharks swimming in the zoo. 

The subtle knock of the door latch catching makes her glance over, just in time to see Dr. Lecter slipping through the door. He’s in a suit again, three-piece and personally tailored Hemlock suspected, with a substantial duffel bag in hand.

He walks like Tom Riddle used to walk. With all the grace that is contrary to their immense height and stature. A man who is not only used to taking up room, but expects it to be owed to him.

“Will’s not here,” Hemlock chirps as he shuts the door behind him, “he’s gone to find my lead Doctor so she can sign my discharge papers. If you hurry, you might be able to catch him.”

Hemlock turns back to the window, to the people below who look so small from this high up it feels like she’s looming herself, towering over an ant hill. She pictures herself with matches, with sticks, with a heavy boot to stomp. Godzilla in need of an ego check. 

“It is a good thing I already caught him in the hall then.” Dr. Lecter teases, earning another backwards glance from Hemlock. She finds him moving to the table at the end of the room, a large Tupperware tub in the hand not holding the duffel bag, which he had already set down at the end of her bed. “I’ve brought you lunch.”

Hemlock pushes away from the window, hobbling for her wheelchair. She feels slow and unsteady on her feet, as if a breeze could knock her down, and she hates it. Being slow gets you killed. “It’s not going to work, you know.”

“hmm?” Hannibal quietly questions as Hemlock falls into her wheelchair, already setting out napkins and utensils. He pops the lid to the Tupperware, and the smell of meat and spices bud tantalizingly into the air.  

“Yeah, it’s not going to work,” Hemlock takes her time wheeling herself over to the table, fights down the urge to snatch the food and gobble it all down before it can be taken from her. Growing up eating scraps she found in the kitchen bin of Petunia’s house had made her a little… food insecure.

It was something she was working on.

“Being nice to me, it’s not going to magic Will out of his clothes. This isn’t some Hollywood movie,” Hemlock kicks back in her chair, trying very, very hard to nonchalantly peek inside the Tupperware, to make it seem as if she’s unbothered by the smell, not hungry, “being kind to the orphan doesn’t grant you three wishes.”

“Is that the only way you can imagine someone showing decency to you?” Hannibal questions back without missing a beat. He doesn’t seem the type of man to ever do so. “When they believe they have something to gain from it?”

The question hits too close to home, comes far too close to the truth, and so Hemlock side-steps it completely. “Because if this was a Hollywood movie,” she jokes, “Will would be played by Sandra Bullock. You,” she regards Hannibal cleanly, tapping her chin as if she was deep in serious thought, “would be played by Gwendoline Christie or... Mads Mikkelsen. Yeah, Mads would do you well, I think.”

“And who would get the honour of playing you?” Yes, Hemlock had been right. He really never missed a beat, did he?

“Me?” Hemlock hums long and low, feeling how the cords in her throat stretch tight, “I’m more of a silver screen soul, silent movie type. Charlie Chaplin, maybe. I could rock the hell out of that end speech from the Great Dictator, don’t you think?”

She’s said too much. Remembers just what that speech was about a fraction too late. Machine hearts and machine minds. And Hemlock has one of those now. A heart Tom never used now ticking away overtime in the chest of a machine girl programmed to fight the good fight. She tries to grin as bright as she can through her slip-up. “Or, you know, Steve Buscemi. My friend Hermione said I was about as bug-eyed as him once. Then again, I had just accidently set her favourite dress on fire.”

“Well,” Dr. Lecter takes a spare seat, finally, politely pushing the Tupperware her way. “Bug-eyed or not, you should eat.”

Hemlock finally caves, gazing into the Tupperware. She finds a type of one-pot pork pilaf that smells heavenly. She still hesitates before plucking up the fork. “Aren’t you going to eat?”

Whatever he makes of her suspicion, Dr. Lecter smiles at her for it, seemingly a little impressed. “We’re going to eat later, but you could use the extra protein. Go on,” he urges, “before it gets cold.”

Hemlock takes a tentative first bite, and if she thought it smelled heavenly, the aroma had nothing on the taste. Her manners last all of three bites before she’s decidedly shovelling it in in break neck speeds.

“Will told me you were rather rude to Dr. Bloom earlier.” Dr. Lecter says a little while later, and Hemlock has to hastily chew and swallow before she can respond.

“Dr. Bloom?”

Lecter nods. “Alana.” He clarifies. Oh.

“I wasn’t rude.” Hemlock retorts in an almost kneejerk reaction. Too fast and too precipitous to be innocent. She promptly corrects herself, and she was adamant it had nothing to do with the cynical look playing out between Dr. Lecter’s dark gaze and her delicious pilaf. “I wasn’t as rude as I could have been.”

“Is there a particular reason you could have been rude, then?” Dr. Lecter throws her words right back at her like a game of hot-potato. He sits tall in his chair, straight backed and straight faced, and Hemlock snatches up the napkin, wiping her mouth before neatly re-folding it to place on her lap. This, for some reason, seemed to greatly please the good Doctor.

Hemlock, though, was only reminded of the years Petunia and Vernon had beat manners into her. When she was let out her cupboard, which was rare, of course.

“I know her type.” She shrugs carelessly. “I’ve ran into them before.”

“And what is Alana’s type?” His head is cocked, as if Dr. Lecter was actually interested in what she had to say, on what she had interpreted, as if anything she knew actually held value.

It was a far cry from being back home shouting until she was blue in the face that Tom Riddle was back and no one believing her. Sometimes, not even her closest friends.

“The type that doesn’t really see you.” Idly, Hemlock begins picking at the seam in the napkin below the table, counting stitches on the underside. It must be an expensive sort of napkin. Bought in singular rather than a six pack from some fancy shop that didn’t have home bargain bins. The tag says hand wash only. “They think they do, but they don’t. Alana only sees the Will she imagines she can make. She’s what I’d call a fixer.”

Tired of the stitches, tired of the counting, tired of this bloody hospital and being forced to sit in this fuckin’ chair, Hemlock huffs. “She’ll push with Will on the concept that she can turn him into the image she’s made of him in her head, and she’ll tell herself she’s ‘helping’ him. When that inevitably fails, when the dopamine hit of successfully repairing the poor, broken thing she was ‘good’ enough to take under wig never hits, she’ll say that it’s just not working out and dust her hands of it all and move onto the next project. Problem is,” Hemlock presses on, “by that point it’s too late. She’s already imprinted her idea of Will, on what he could be if only he was what she imagined, inside him. Then he will be left not being able to measure up to a man who never even existed in the first place, and do you know who he’ll blame for that? Not her. Never her. Himself.”

Just as Hemlock blames herself for not quite living up to the Saviour Dumbledore had made her out to be. The sacrificial child who gave their life for the greater good, for love.

Truth is, the sad, sad truth, Hemlock had just wanted to survive. That was it. There, with Tom, had been no time to think of repercussions or grand acts of heroism. And any acts that might be construed as heroic on Hemlock’s part had been accidental. Lucky happenstance.

Most of the time Hemlock had been flying on the seat of her knickers, just trying to live to the next hour, the next minute, the next second. Tom and his followers had dogged her for years, crowded her around every corner she tried to escape to. Every path she took, Tom had been waiting at the end for her. 

From being poisoned with the worlds deadliest snake Venom to being accosted in Parliament on a school trip, when did Hemlock have time to breathe let alone even conceptualize a notion of the greater good and her role in ensuring it?

She didn’t.

She fuckin’ didn’t.

And just like Will would with Alana, she can’t blame Dumbledore for that. She faults herself for falling into the trap, for buying into the programming, for drinking the bloody Kool-Aid. And that’s not right. That’s not fair. None of this is fair.

And she’s angry.

Furious.

Suddenly, Hemlock is livid that no one, not Molly, not McGonagall, not Arthur or Shacklebolt, not even Sprout, fully grown adults with all their cognitive abilities intact, had stepped in and said enough is enough, said one simple thing. Thought one thing. Considered. One. Fuckin’. Thing.

She’s a child.

She was a child… Hemlock was a child, and no one thought to try and take the weight of Tom and his unholy war from her shoulders. To bare the weight with her. To say it wasn’t her responsibility to end an underground conflict she didn’t begin.

Even just to hold her hand.

Open participation was bad, but, Hemlock was beginning to think, sitting back and letting something happen because it came up aces for you and yours could be just as insidious.

What’s one life to a hundred? Too high a cost. Or it should be too high a cost. If this imperceptive greater good cost the good of just one soul… how ‘good’ could it really be? Where did you draw the line? Ten for a thousand? A hundred? Half?

Hemlock doesn’t know. She really doesn’t know. Maybe she’s just projecting onto Will and feeling tender about it all.  Maybe none of this matters a lick, and good and morals and truth were just safety blankets everyone wrapped themselves in to hide from the dark.

To pretend anything they ever did mattered to anything at all.

Maybe, in the end, her head is just rightly fucked right now.

“Or it could be,” Hemlock verbally sneaks back, slips into joking because it’s safer, better, “I just didn’t like her handbag. Did you see it? It was at least five seasons out of London Fashion week.” It’s a jab too, at Dr. Lecter, at his clear-cut penchant for fashion and finery. He takes it with a tiny smile tweaking at the corners of his mouth.

“You’re very observant, aren’t you?” He questions in the way people ask a question when they don’t expect an answer. When they think they already have it. “So tell me, what do you observe when you look at me?”

“You?” Hemlock chews the conversation over better than she had chewed the pork in the pilaf, debating on just how far she should go. Ultimately, she settles on what she typically settles on. Too far. “I think you put a lot of effort into how you are perceived by the outside world. Everything about you, from your haircut to your shoelaces, perfectly tied by the way showing your attention to detail, is picked and preened over. The way you walk is like an actor on a stage play. The way you talk is out of the pages of a verbose gothic novel. It’s not because you particularly care about what people think of you,” at least Hemlock didn’t think it was because of that, “it’s because you’ve realized it’s a certain face, a certain tone, an air of romanticism that gets you what you want. But underneath all that... yes, underneath all that…”

Doctor Lecter sits through it, silent, straight, staring. “Underneath all that?” He pushes when Hemlock doesn’t seem willing to jump the last hurdle.

“Underneath all that you’re an incredibly, achingly lonely man.” Hemlock can see that much, at least. It’s there for others too, if they were to simply look. It’s hiding in the way he lingers on the outskirts of conversations, talking but not speaking, in the way he watches Will leave through a door or go down a hall.

Once more, Hemlock, like a ricocheting bullet, bounces back to joviality. Back to safer ground. “I mean you have to be if you think rushing into quasi-adopting a feral Omegan teen who is quite possibly either going to develop PTSD or already has, is a smart move. Never mind that you're willing to risk all the dog hair Will is going to track about your Parisian rugs.”

There’s a clock in the hallway outside her door, and though it is too far away for it to be possible, Hemlock thinks she hears it ticking on for a long, long while before… Well, before Dr. Lecter is smiling at her, really smiling, a flash of white teeth in a broad face. “Me and you,” he says as he reaches for the near empty Tupperware, popping the lid primly back on. “Are going to get along swimmingly, I believe.”

Hemlock, nevertheless, is not so convinced. “I don’t find you that interesting.”

There’s a glint now, a steely edge in Lecter’s eye, mirth keen as a daggers blade. “You’re brother once said exactly the same thing. I will tell you what I told him. You will.”

Well… he’s got her there, hasn’t he. Still, Dr. Lecter doesn’t give Hemlock time to formulate a comeback, something witty about Will’s obviously poor taste, before he’s gesturing to the duffel on the bed.

“I’ve brought you some clothes for when you are discharged,” he holds his hand out for the napkin, which Hemlock relinquishes. “I did not know your size, so I had to go by eye. They should fit for now, however. I also know you are currently on high-strength scent blocking aerosol,” on instinct, thinking of that horribly nasal spray the doctors make her shove up her nose and spritz, Hemlock’s face screws up. “But I took the initiative to lightly scent them with my own smell. I hope I haven’t been too forward.” He makes his way to the duffel on the bed, rummaging through it with his back turned.

He had been. Very forward. Bordering improper for even speaking about it.

But, and it was a begrudging sort of but Hemlock thinks, it made sense. The scent blockers simply temporarily neutralized her ability to notice smells, not that she wasn’t smelling them at all. As an Omega, Alpha scents could be… problematic. Especially when they were on her, They could instigate fight or flight responses if suddenly shoved into her face. Given her recent heart transplant, an abrupt exposure to a too strong scent could lead to stress and thus, heart failure.

Being slowly introduced to it through scent blockers and a light, gradual introduction to it continually before slowly weaning her off the blockers all together would very much reduce the probability of that outcome.  

It would also mean she’ll be partially inclined and instinctually equating the smell to ‘pack’ before she even gets a proper whiff of it herself. Then she’ll want it around her all the time. Have a small comfort-reliance on it.

Omega's got the unfortunate overdose of sensory-stimuli sensitivity while Alphas ran with a penchant for emotional instability, and Beta's lucked out with slight temperature regulation issues. That means while Betas needed an extra scarf or fan during winter and summer, Alpha's were losing their shit or having a breakdown on the flip of a coin, while Omega's were in a dark corner huffing fuckin' scents like glue highs and rolling around in blankets trying not to get sensory overload. 

Not for the first time, that had been the absolute shit-show of being smacked in the face with all the sensory input a shared dorm room with pre-teen girls gave, Hemlock begrudged the fact she wasn't born a Beta. 

Dr. Lecter likely didn’t know that though. Not many people did with Omegas, with the rarity of Hemlock’s secondary gender. He likely believed he was merely making sure her heart would continue beating, and not soft-bonding on the down-low. Still, it’s a big thing to ask for, even inadvertently, and Hemlock was about to say no thanks when Dr. Lecter turned, holding up a piece of clothing.

It wasn’t a dress, thank god, but neither was it her typical jeans and jacket. No. Dangling from his fingers was the fluffiest, softest looking jumper Hemlock had ever seen. Another Omegan weak spot.

Soft things.

Hemlock’s mouth snapped shut from where she had been able to speak. The palms of her hands felt itchy, greedy and grabby. The glands on her wrist and neck gave a merry little buzz of excitement. Appreciation.

Well… it’s not like she couldn’t ween herself off from wearing the scent when she became acclimatized to it. When the risk of it causing rejection to her heart was over the hill. It might make her irritable for a month or two… but Hemlock was an irritable girl to begin with and that jumper looked so soft-

She’s before him and taking the jumper before she even realizes she’s on the move. Dr. Lecter’s smile reminds her of the hunger she felt when she smelled the pork pilaf. A thing that knots up and squirms. Yet, it’s gone before it’s really there, and he’s shoving move clothes into her hands, soft corduroy trousers and fluffy socks and a t-shirt made out of finely pressed cotton. “You should get changed,” he gestures to the second door beside the bed, the one leading to the bathroom, “Will will be back soon with your discharge papers.”

Hemlock shuffles along to do as she’s bid, feeling a little like she’s accidently chose trick instead of treat.

It feels indescribably good to step out into the carpark, to breathe in fresh air, to be out of a hospital gown. This moment, this beautiful moment in time, Hemlock savours.

Will is beside her, helping her down the steps, and Hannibal Lecter is already waiting at the bottom for them, her empty wheelchair folded and carried underneath a strong arm.

Hemlock had been adamant about this. That she walk out the hospital on her own two feet. Will had kicked up a fuss, but she hadn’t budged on the matter, though she had compromised with a promise to use the blasted chair for the rest of the day.

It felt important, this moment, to walk away by herself while Tom Riddle laid rotting on a morgue slab behind her. Poetic, a little.

They’re halfway down the steps when Will catches a whiff of her. “Why do you smell of Hannibal?” His tone is positively snappy.

Hemlock, feebly, and god she hates how weak she is right now, shrugs, leaning heavy on the arm she clutches as she limps down another stair. “Exposure therapy. Hannibal thinks it will mess with my heart less this way due to the scent blockers holding off any reaction until I’ve already become accustomed to it.”

Will hums, and there’s something in the way he cuts a glance from her to Hannibal, from Hannibal back to her, a sort of eclipsed avarice itch that strikes up in his pupil, and he pauses them there, in the middle of the steps, to shuffle awkwardly around. “Have you got ants in your pants or-“

She’s cut off by the sweep of fabric, the heavy, comforting weight pressing on her shoulders from where Will had shifted his own jacket around her. He does that lopsided grin of his, the one he does when he thinks he’s being slick. “Best to cover all bases, then, right?” He scoops up her arm again, moving them along and down.

Hannibal is grinning at the end of their path, and suddenly the hairs on the back of Hemlock’s neck raise and heckle. At him. At Will. For a brief blink, her flight instinct nearly breaks through the heady wall of the cocktail of drugs and scent blockers she’s on, before pathetically fizzling away to a muted unease.

She side-eyes her brother, and for a flash, a flicker, she sees a black heron where his shadow stretches down the stairs.

When the black heron hunts, it shapes its wings into an umbrella that creates shade. This allows it to see down into the water by reducing the sun’s glare, but serves the dual purpose of attracting fish, which were drawn to the dark because they thought it was safe.

Hemlock resolutely shakes that image off. Of Will with his jacket as an umbrella. Of being tricked instead of treated with a fluffy jumper. She’s being paranoid.

It isn’t the first time.

Hannibal had been right. When someone shows her some sort of kindness, she thinks they’re after something from her. She thinks of the lemon drops in the crinkled paper bag Dumbledore held out for her to take for being ‘good’.  

Sometimes kindness is just kindness, Hemlock resolutely tells herself.

“Ready?” Will asks when they’re nearly at the bottom of the stairs. No, Hemlock doesn’t think she’s ready, she wants to go back up to the top of the hospital and stare down at the rest of the world where it looked like an ant hill, but she’s never been one to go backwards instead of forwards, no matter how perilous the climb might look, so she nods. “Ready.”

Hemlock takes the last step off the stairs, holds onto Will tighter, and finds herself walking into a strange, new world.

Chapter Text

Hannibal Lecter softly closes the bathroom door shut behind him. He does not move from the entryway. He stands there, facing out into the long stretch of hall, door to back and wall lamp above a freshly washed head, and-

His nostrils quiver. A short, sharply silent inhale. Once. Twice. The corner of his mouth twitches. Like a frown in one light, a delighted smile at another angle.

Hannibal does not delay any longer. He takes a prompt turn on his heel, marches down the hall in long, sure strides, finishing the buttons on his blazer as he heads for the stairwell at the very end of the gallery. He disappears around the bend quick enough, his footstep echoing his descent to the ground floor of his grand home.

For three heartbeats the hall is soundless and pacific-

And then a little dark head of darker thoughts comes peeping out from around the turn, the opposite way Hannibal had gone. Hemlock, like Hannibal, lingers, ears pricked for noise, of the mans return should he have forgotten something on a sink counter or lost in the bottom of a drawer. Eyes watchful in case Will came up and around from his own rooms, looking for her, ready to drag her to breakfast.

Fingers twitchy to start rooting around where they don’t belong.

The urge wins out in the end and Hemlock scurries out, stealing herself into the recently vacated bathroom. The door, like with Hannibal, shuts softly behind her.

If you wish to get to know someone, really, really get to know someone, how they tick and turn and tumble through life, you didn’t need to read their diary. You didn’t even need to speak a word to them, truly. You didn’t need to know their favourite colour or what Saturday night takeaway they preferred.

What you did need to do was take a good, hard look at their bathroom.

There was just something about the sanctity of a bathroom that laid a person bare, Hemlock knew. Perhaps it was because you spent ninety percent of the time in there equally naked, or because it was where people typically preened and pruned themselves, or maybe, unlike a bedroom, people generally spent time blissfully alone in there, but whatever it was a bathroom could tell you a million things about a man or woman no diary, conversation or three-course meal could.

Take this mansion Doctor Lecter calls a home, for example. This house had three bathrooms, one of which Hannibal kept, and the other two he gave out like raffle prizes to Will and Hemlock for personal use.

Hemlock had stolen herself into Will’s before the sun had risen that morning.

He hadn’t done much with it, even though he’d retrieved his things from his own house three days ago and had unpacked everything else. Toothbrush in a pot on the sink. A mirror tilted away so he wouldn’t have to look at himself in the morning. A drying washcloth left to hang limply over a curtain. A horrendous green bottle that smelled like cheap dish soap that promised to wash seven different things in one perched at the base of a shower block.

Will was a practical man. Austere and pragmatic, repetition with his own history of poverty. A dollar for soap, a dollar for toothpaste, a dollar on a stick of old spice, and Will was ready to roll with a bedhead right into the day.

No frills and all flannel, that one.

Hemlock stands on her tiptoes, flinging open the medicine cabinet above the big-bowled sink. Her sticky fingers pass over somethings, barely landing a passing glance. An expensive rosewood handled razor; the kind actual barbers use. A tin of lemon and pepper mouth mints, the costly ones from old-school apothecaries that are individually wrapped in confectionery paper. A rack of combs, all with inversely spaced teeth, neatly stacked in their own discrete homes.

Hemlock snatches down the bottle of aftershave she fumbles across. She tests it, bouncing it, checking the weight in the palm of her hand. It’s heavier than it looks, sharp, glass cut corners that could nick a finger if not handled with care, the perfume inside an amber so dark it looks like brandy.  The label is in Italian, but she recognizes the words for House and Of.

Hemlock huffs. She bets this aftershave alone would cost a waiter’s five-year salary. The kind of aftershave brewed in secret in the back of century old caskets by scent merchants who had been in business for longer than Oxford University had existed.

The kind of perfume that still fucking used ambergris.

She could get a very good payday from this if she took it. If she haggled the right people, crossed the right wires, found the right back-street to hack some… creatively acquired wares. It wouldn’t be anywhere close to what Hannibal must have originally paid for it, but it would be enough to stash away for an emergency.

A nest egg she can crack if she has to get the fuck out of dodge.

Hemlock pries the lid off and takes a sniff and is hit with Hannibal. A very syrupy-thick, resinous belly crawl through crushed dark flowers, ruthless amber, with a bright burst of aroused spice at the end. But there’s something missing too, something that is just intrinsically… Hannibal, a hint of him that aftershave cannot cover, that seeps out and plumes like midnight mushrooms.

Hemlock slips the lid back on-

Then thinks better of it, pops it off and pockets it before putting the now lidless bottle back in its home askew. She’s not going to sell the lid, even her silver tongue isn’t that good, neither is she doing it outrightly to annoy or irk Hannibal when he would clearly spot it missing.

She just… takes it.

Hemlock doesn’t know why she takes a lot of things that she does. Maybe she does it as a sign of her existence, and assurance that she is alive and she is real, and other people, even for a moment, will notice. A girl who was shoved into shadows and locked in cupboards, stomping on daisies just to show the world her footprint was there.

That she was, in fact, walking amongst them.

Or maybe because it was bloody funny watching people scramble for the oddest of things. A tarnished buckle on a bag. One frayed shoelace from a pair of runners. One cracked coaster from a set of Four. Broken things. That’s what Hemlock takes. Broken things that no one else would look twice at.

Hemlock hoards these damaged morsels and titbits for herself. Piles them up in her own bathrooms until the counters are full of dented monopoly pieces and men’s scuffed right cufflinks and left footed socks that have holes in the toe. Hemlock does not know what that means about her-

She’s not a bloody psychiatrist.

Yet she takes them all the same, as she takes the aftershave lid with a miniscule, barely there chip in the rim.

It’s the only slightly damaged thing in this bathroom. Everything else is spotless and perfect, all lovingly put in just the right position in just the right place by a just-right man who scrupulously melded exactness with luxury.

Hemlock shuts the medicine cabinet and takes one last look around the bathroom. The seamlessly put toilet roll on the hanger, the pressed Egyptian cotton towel ready to use on a hook, the Tuscan tiles that have not a speck of damp in the grout.

Hannibal Lecter is clearly a man who prefers the finer things in life, only the best of the best for our good Doctor, assessing thread-counts and artisan soaps against colour pallets and herringbone hardwoods.

He’s also evidently a man who painstakingly and meticulously takes care of everything he owns.

“Hemlock! Breakfast is ready!”

It’s Will’s muffled voice shouting up the stairs. It’s also Will’s subdued footsteps coming up.

Hemlock scuppers out the bathroom like a spider descending from a web, shutting the door and getting a good few steps away before Will comes up and around the corner. Far enough away from the bathroom that he wouldn’t be able to tell it was where Hemlock had been moments prior.

He smiles when he spots her in the hallway, looking like she’d just come tumbling from her own bed she’s borrowed. (Borrowed, never had. Hemlock didn’t ‘have’ things. She was custodian of them for a while, and then she either had them snatched from her or was forced on the run again or she had to sell them in seedy pubs to get a little cash for dinner.)

“Ah, there you are. Breakfast is ready.”

Will repeats and nods back over his shoulder the way he came, obviously trying to lure her down with the promise of the bacon she could already smell emanating from below.

Three days she had been here, in this expensive house, and for those three days Hemlock had mainly spent them kicking around her leased room or sleeping. So much sleeping.

Who knew life-saving heart surgery could be so tiring? But she’s not tired now. No. She’s curious. And typically, trouble wasn’t far behind when Hemlock got curious.

Hemlock grins back, theatrically patting her stomach over the large (and so fucking soft) fleece pullover Hannibal had left in her closet just for her. Fleece that was hand woven no doubt from Shetland sheep by blind nuns.

The best of the best, eh? Even for an undoubtedly volatile teen survivor taken in like a stray.

“Who am I to pass up free grub?”

Will’s smile widens, dimples pressing deep as he begins to lead her down the gallery and to the stairs. The stolen aftershave lid weighs heavy in her fleece pocket, like a black hole with it’s own gravitational pull sucking in all her questions to devour whole.

Just who was Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham?

Curiouser and curiouser.

Hemlock sits at the dinner table before a barren plate, eyeing the colourful cornucopia of still steaming food like a King’s feast with the Jester allowed at a seat. It’s been years since she’s seen so much food, nevertheless had the chance to eat any of it.

Maybe never.

Of course there had been her boarding school days, the welcoming feast had always been a huge affair, but between sixty students at a single House table you only really ever got the scraps if you weren’t fast enough.

Sitting next to a gaggle of Weasley’s naturally meant being the slowest when food was involved.

Hemlock, one way or another, through attacks on the train or stealing a car to get to school on time (and then accidently crashing said car into the Founders tree cause she’s twelve and doesn’t know how to bloody drive yet), she had always been late to the show.

Always with the scraps.

But there’s no scraps here. Just food, as far as the eye could see, every which way that could tickle your bleary-eyed morning fancy.

Stacks of pancakes with jugs of syrup and cream and bowls of fresh fruits and vividly fat berries if you were sweetly inclined. Trays of plump sausages and crispy bacon and fried toast for the more carnivorous fiend. Jars of granola with pecans and walnuts and milk that came in glass bottles and not cardboard cartons for the more health conscious. Roasted tomatoes and fried up mushrooms, bruschetta breads grilled with just the right amount of garlic for the refined fellow.

So much food-

And Hemlock doesn’t know what the fuck to do with any of it.

Before the last attack, before Tom had found her for the last time, she’d been on the run, homeless for a year, hopping from tents in a forest to sofas from well-meaning strangers to, sometimes, just being out in the street, huddled under bridges or clustered in alley ways. Not only keeping an eye out for Tom shaped shadows, but keeping watch for people who saw a vulnerable teenage Omegan girl and got ‘ideas’ in their heads.

She’d stolen most food. Swiped goodies from stalls in markets she’d past or swindled enough money from her nefarious dealings for some bread at a bakery, or raided said well-meaning strangers home to leave them with empty pantries before escaping in the middle of the night with dead-headed rose bushes she’d go on to sell bouquets from on road corners. But the last proper meal she had had been-

Well, Hemlock can’t remember.

“Help yourself.”

Hannibal offers as he reaches for the tomatoes and bruschetta, dusting it off with perfectly cut mozzarella slices. Will’s a step ahead of him, sausages on plate already missing a bite.

Hemlock lingers, judging, eyeing-

And she doesn’t need to be told twice.

She steals herself the syrup jug, the whole thing, and forks off a hearty stack of pancakes onto her plate. She rolls one up with her hand tightly, ignoring her knife and fork, and then promptly crams it all in her mouth in one swift go (Hemlock had grown up knowing if you don’t eat what you can fast enough, you don’t eat full stop). Then, mouth full of warm, golden, sweet pancakes… she starts drinking from the syrup jug.

Maple syrup, it turns out to be. Sweet and thick and pleasant on her tongue.

Pleasant until it’s unceremoniously seized from her grasp by Will.

“Jesus, Hemlock.”

He protests.

“You’ve just got out of a heart transplant. You don’t want to clog the arteries in the first week.”

Hemlock chews the saccharine mess in her mouth three times over, sticky and sweet before she swallows it all down in a gulp, licking the syrup off her lip. Will Graham, her syrup jug in hand, watches the action a little too closely, eyes tracking the tiny pink peekaboo of a tongue.

Hemlock thinks she must look weird, perhaps. Like one of those lizards with a large tongue that licks their own eyeball after gobbling a fly.

Why else was he looking at her like that?

“Hannibal said help yourself.”

Was Hemlock’s great response. Will huffs.

“Yeah, help yourself to breakfast not a diabetic coma.”

Pointedly, Will put the maple syrup jug down-

Across the table from Hemlock, far out of her reach. She thinks about kicking the pillock under the table, but decides against it. Her short legs won’t reach, and she suspect Will would just find the attempt at grievous bodily harm funny.

Will digs into his own breakfast once more, but not before he slides a slip of paper in her direction.

“I have to head into work for a debrief with Jack this morning, but I shouldn’t be too long. My numbers on top there. If you need me at all, for anything, call. If, for whatever reason, you can’t get through to me that way, the number below is Jack’s. If you somehow can’t reach Jack to reach me, the number below that is the tip line. Just tell dispatch you’re name and mine and they’ll link you through to whatever office I’m in at the time.”

Hemlock plucks up the paper (but only after scoffing down another pancake), eying the chicken scrawl of numbers Will had whittled off on a little yellow sticky note.

So the house would be empty, then.

Hannibal had work. She knew that because he had his briefcase leaning against the table leg. A brief case Hemlock had already had her fingers in this morning while Hannibal had been having his shower. He had all sort of psychiatrist treats in there. Notes and prescription pads and 5150 forms ready to be filled out and used if needed.

Which means Hemlock would have this place to herself.

Maybe she’d go pour Will’s seven-in-one down the drain for stealing her syrup. Maybe she’d go out into the garden and rip up the petunia patch she had spotted on her way in three days ago. Build a bonfire and burn them all to ash and dance around it naked. Maybe she’d-

“You should get dressed.”

Hemlock swivels to Hannibal’s direction, pocketing the sticky note next to her aftershave lid and using the back of her hand to scrub off any possible pancake crumbs from her mouth. It was almost like he could sense the mischief she had brewing up in her thoughts.

“Get dressed?”

Hannibal slices off a perfectly cut rectangle of his bruschetta, savouring the taste as he chewed slowly. Hannibal, as he did with most things Hemlock had seen so far, took his time when he ate. Fastidious, precise, he savoured every last damn bite.

“You’re still too weak to be left unsupervised by yourself. We thought you’d be more… comfortable at my office than you would at Will’s. Of course, it is your choice.”

We, was it? Clearly, in this context, We meant Will and Hannibal, Hannibal and Will, and decidedly not Hemlock.

Great, she’s getting tag-teamed.

Still, if those were her options, being stuck in the middle of a pond of police officers drooling over dead bodies, or in a comfy no-doubt affluent office while Hannibal was distracted by metaphorically chewing over peoples brains as painstaking as he eats his fancy cheese on toast… it wasn’t really much of a choice.

“Seen as crime squads give me the heebie-jeebies, I choose the, I assume, cosy chesterfield you have stashed at your office I can curl up into.”

Hannibal does not smile at her response, but she must have pleased him somehow because he, with his long (too fuckin’ long) wingspan, reaches across the table and plucks up the maple syrup jug, transporting it right on over to her greedy hands.

Hemlock does what Hemlock does, moving it from her greedy hands right into her greedy mouth.

She thinks she hears Will laugh, or perhaps it was a low winded sigh of frustration, maybe a mixture of both. Woe is him, then.

It’s not nice getting tag-teamed, is it?

Hannibal’s office is precisely how Hemlock thought it would be. Big open rooms, old world flavour, and of course, with its own corner kitchen. It’s in the top floor of a historical building in a gentrified street, with an art nouveau heart dotted with Danish furniture and a colour scheme of grey with splashes of intense, blood red.

Hannibal takes his time giving her the tour, showing her where to get a cup of tea if she was thirsty, or where the logs for the fire were stored if cold, and it was nearly midday when the receptionist, a mousy man with thick tortoise shell glasses, peeks his head through the door.

“You’re noon appointment is here.”

Hannibal gives a sharp nod, and the mouse of a man dips away. Hemlock goes to follow him out the main area but Hannibal’s voice stalls her only a few steps away.

“Where are you going?”

Hemlock turns back slowly, cocking a curious brow.

“Out into the waiting room so you can deal with your patients?”

It comes out more of a question then a statement, spoken little by little as if she was testing out a new language. Again Hannibal does not smile, but there is an implication of being pleased. As if she has gone and done and said exactly what he wanted when he wanted.

“I thought you might like to stay. Of course,”

He stresses.

“You will have to… keep out of sight. Perhaps on the upper landing. I already have a chair, snacks and blankets set up.”

The curious brow skyrockets into the incredulous stratosphere of her forehead.

“Are you saying we break patient confidentiality, Doc? Pretty sure you can lose your licence for that.”

Hannibal’s smile is just like his aftershave. Syrupy thick and sharply dark.

“Ah, but I would only lose said licence if it was discovered. Are you planning to contact the American Psychiatric Association, Hemlock?”

It’s a test. Is it a test? See if Hemlock was willing to bend a few rules here and there? If so Dr Lecter was behind the curve and clearly hadn’t read her case file properly before opening up his home.

Hemlock had already broken more than a handful of laws, had even been put on trial at one point for grievous bodily harm against Dudley even though it had been one of Tom’s thugs who had cornered them when they were fifteen. Some demented fellow dressed all in black that no one had believed her about until a group of them had shown up on the school train and then to her sports match (what’s new).

It wasn’t the only time the long arm of the law had tried to close a fist around her, either.

Charges of grand larceny, arson, conspiracy to commit murder and, of course, acts of terrorism hadn’t stuck in the end when the light was finally shone on Tom Riddle’s crimes. That doesn’t mean Hemlock hadn’t necessarily done each and every one of her charges but… well, context matters.

What’s a bit of eavesdropping against all that? A drop in the ocean, really.

Still, coming from Dr Lecter? The just-right man in the just-right suit where everything was put in their just-right place in his just-right home, the suggestion of even jay-walking seemed out of his wheelhouse.

Yet here they are.

Curiouser and curiouser.

Maybe it was a midlife crisis. Men tended to go through those, especially ones in high-stressed jobs. Little acts of rebellion to distract themselves from how picture-perfect shit their lives were. If Hannibal Lecter wanted to spice up his life by walking on the wrong side of the street, who was Hemlock not to go dumping a whole jar of jalapeno into his soup?

“Got a bit of a dark side hiding somewhere under that stiff collar, Doc?”

There it is again, that damned smile.

“Oh, Hemlock… if only you knew.”

Hemlock snorts a chuckle. Hannibal Lecter with his suits and his suavity and his svelte fuckin’ voice, he most likely thought dine and dash was the height of immoral behaviour.

“Alright serial killer, let’s play your little game then.”

His laugh is like his aftershave, like his smile, smooth and severe in dizzying spins. Hemlock finds herself laughing along with it, doubted anyone would be able to stop themselves from laughing along with a man like Doctor Lecter, even though she doesn’t quite realize what she must have said that’s so funny.

Hemlock is stashed away on the upper landing of the main area, by the side of a bookcase, out of the way underneath a crochet blanket that must have come from some sort of farmer’s market, a tray of tea and biscuits and cake left just for her on the arm (it’s almost like Hannibal is trying to fatten her up), listening to the woes and afflictions of Doctor Lecter’s patients.

It’s oddly nice.

Not the suffering people, of course. The woman who lost her parents and still can’t leave her house, the man who is eating rocks and breaking his own teeth on pebbles, the fireman who keeps having flashbacks of the kid he couldn’t save, they’re all suffering and Hemlock doesn’t take joy out of peoples suffering.

Hannibal would call it uncouth to do so. Will would say she’s empathetic. Hemlock would say she doesn’t enjoy innocent people suffering. There’s an important distinction there to be seen.

People like Tom? Like Bellatrix? Like the Carrow twins? Oh, she enjoyed their immense suffering by the end extremely.

Hemlock has a strong sense of justice, you see. Has since she been little. Sometimes that sense of justice makes her a little bloodthirsty. Boo-hoo. There was worse things to be.

At least she isn’t running around eating people.

Still, it was nice, hearing other peoples problems if only to realize she wasn’t the only one fucked up around here. That everyone, no matter how put together their lives look on the outside were a little bit broken in little different ways on the inside.

They’re all in the same downward spiral known as life.

By the time they got to the last patient, some stock broker by the name of Harold who had a crippling cocaine addiction, Hemlock was particularly enjoying herself, hidden away like the aftershave lid still in her pocket, picking at peoples darkest secrets like a crow pecks at an already stripped bone.

And then the mousey man comes back, and though Hemlock can’t see him from her hiding spot she sure as hell hears him.

“Dr Lecter, Miss Bloom is here to see you.”

There’s a shuffling of papers, Hannibal putting down his notepad Hemlock suspects.

“Ah, Mr Livingston, I believe our time is up.”

The broker doesn’t argue. He’s likely itching for another hit after digging into his childhood trauma for an hour straight.

“Same time next week, Doctor Lecter?”

More shuffling, someone being led to a door, being shown out, hushed goodbyes and then-

A door shutting. Not so much shuffling now but a clacking of heels. It’s then that Hemlock realizes Hannibal has silent footsteps. Not so much as a squeak of a sole.

Dancer, maybe? Once upon a time.

“Alana, I thought you were visiting later?”

Hemlock sits up in her chair, blanket settling down to her hips, before shuffling off her comfy chair. Hannibal is down below, spotting her immediately, Dr Bloom in her peacoat with her back to Hemlock still hasn’t realized they have a guest hiding in the rafters.

Hannibal does the strangest of things. He raises his hand just a little, barely an inch, and motions Hemlock to sit back down while Alana places her handbag on the table, going to unbuckle her coat ( she’s planning a long talk then).

Ah. Yeah.

Dr Bloom’s just saw a patient leave out the only door. If she spots Hemlock now, Bloom will know she was here for his session.

The cat would be out the bag.

Hemlock slinks back into the shadows, back into her seat, but angles herself just right (Hannibal would be proud) so she can get a birds’ eye view of below.

“I think we need to talk about Will.”

Hemlock watches as Hannibal silently offers Alana a seat across from him before taking his own once more. All players in the checked spots on the board, and Hannibal moves the first piece.

“You are worried about him.”

Unlike Hemlock earlier, Hannibal’s question comes out more of a statement, more like, as with her, he’d been expecting just this.

Alana doesn’t waste time. Her voice is hoarse, a little. Congested. Fighting off the remnants of a cold.

“I don’t think this is a good idea for him. Will isn’t… stable right now, and adopting his sister who is clearly traumatized is not a good course of action for either of them. Will needs to work on himself without any distractions, and Miss Potter needs proper care and attention from medical professionals with experience dealing with her type of history. They run the risk of trauma bonding, and given the… volatile nature of Miss Potter from her case file, it could be detrimental to Will’s own progress.”

Any lick of enjoyment Hemlock had from listening into conversations she shouldn’t evaporates. Like someone’s yanked her gut out through her feet.

“It could also build a strong security net for them both, Alana.”

Hannibal argues.

“Family is important in the act of psychological healing. You know this as much as I do.”

Hemlock didn’t know that, but then again she wouldn’t, would she. She’s never had family.

Well, she has Will now-

But shouldn’t, according to Dr Bloom.

“Of course, but Hannibal… you’ve read what I’ve read. Miss Potter is unpredictable, prone to great acts of violence, disposed to disregarding rules and authority and the safety of those around her… the signs of functioning sociopathy are there, and she needs appropriate attention from those skilled in dealing with disorders such as Anti-social personality.”

Hemlock is pretty sure psychiatrists aren’t meant to diagnose someone without speaking to them at least three times. Without running a few test. Without fuckin’ permission. Still, being called sociopathic, being labelled with Anti-social personality disorder by a complete fuckin’ stranger doesn’t hurt a bit.

Alana’s opinion doesn’t matter. Not many people’s opinions matter to Hemlock. So few she hardly needs a full hand to list them off (maybe she is a little anti-social).

What does smart is where Hemlock thinks this conversation is going. That it is being had without her.

“And you don’t think me nor Will can handle it.”

Again, Hannibal states and does not ask. Alana sighs long and low.

“I think you’re too close to Will and Will is too close to this to see things clearly. I’m going to go talk to Miss Potter’s social worker tomorrow morning. I can’t speak on Miss Potter’s mental health-“

But she sure as fuck has done a lot of that already, hasn’t she.

“But I can speak on Wills. He isn’t ready to take responsibility and care of a vulnerable teen with suspected... extra needs. They need to know this before considering Will’s appeal.”

Hemlock’s hand slips into her fleece pocket, tightening around the aftershave lid. The two carry on talking between themselves below, but Hemlock cannot hear it. It’s like she’s far away-

Or down below. Buried underneath damp, dark earth.

She thinks of the food on the breakfast table this morning that she won’t have again. She thinks of the burrowed bed, another lost to her. She thinks of the bathroom Hannibal’s given her, cabinets and sink empty of broken bricker-brack she hasn’t managed to steal away and put on show yet.

She thinks of Will going back to his dogs without her. Of not catching a whiff of Hannibal’s aftershave as she passes.

She thinks of being sent back to England. At sitting at the Weasley’s table with Fred now missing. Of being on Shacklebolts arm as he runs for MI5 leadership and wants to show off his ‘good-friend’ and the girl who took down the worst serial killer in European history.

They’ll put her face back on the front newspapers. Make her smile and pose like Barbie in a Malibu home. They’ll put her through the hospital, prodding and poking her will scans and tests. They’ll ask her questions about that night, put her under disposition, force her time and time again to repeat. She’ll never escape Tom’s shadow. Everyone will always look at her and see him, because how couldn’t they? His sole survivor. His last work of unfinished art.

They’ll take everything she is and meld it into what they want.

And then she thinks, oh, and then she thinks-

No.

There’s a calmness here that Hemlock isn’t quite used to. A composure that is sharp as it is slick that settles over her as cosily as the crochet blanket had. There’s no fear, no hap dash panic, not even a stutter of dread.

There’s a particular, relaxed thought.

What would Tom do?

He would likely follow Alana home, skin her alive in a bathtub and then raise her up on a crucifix in the middle of Trafalgar square as a message to his political opponents. Not very helpful given the differential circumstances. Hemlock isn’t running an opposing electioneer party against the doctor-

But she does need a good smear campaign. And if Tom has taught Hemlock one thing it is the best smear campaigns come from laying the groundwork of distrust. Make the doctor look crazy, and no one will believe a word she says (just as no one believed a word Hemlock said about Tom until it was too late).

And what is crazy if not being in the right state of mind?

It’s almost like she can hear Tom then, sitting at her side in the shadows, in this mental grave dirt, kicked back and relaxed with that serpentine smile of his, whispering, egging her on, hissing and how do you make someone appear not in their right mind?

Trauma’s the best one, but if Alana is going to the social workers tomorrow morning, Hemlock barely has anytime to properly break the doctor without leaving her fingerprints all over it come dawn. Plus, she barely knows the doctor enough to know what sore spots to hit the hardest.

If Hemlock is going to traumatize someone, she would prefer to go full out and not half-arse it.

She could commit a crime and pin it on the doctor, but without sowing any basis of suspicion amongst her and everyone else… it’ll be shoddy work that wouldn’t cling to where it needs to stick.

If only the Dr Bloom had a nasty secret like Harold-

Like Harold.

Harold Livingston with the cocaine addiction and enough cash to blow it up his nose. Alana likely has a good salary too. Who would be desperate enough, Hemlock thinks, to keep a stash on him just for after his appointment, where he can white-wash his horrible childhood away in a snowstorm if only for a few hours. Who would spend a little time perhaps in the alley or in his car trying to mentally erase the last hour or so.

Cocaine stays in blood and saliva for up to two days after taking it. Four in urine. Tom seems to say helpfully. Hemlock knows this already. Know because Greyback used to be Tom’s drug lord in Camden, only he spiked his drugs with HIV because he was a sick fuck, and Remus got infected as a kid after finding his dads own Heroine stash and curiously playing with the needle.

What’s it been, ten minutes since Harold left? There’s still time to-

Slowly, deliberately, Hemlock turns across the landing, towards an innocuous window.

The two below continue talking as a lock clicks open. Alana does not notice, rebuking one of Hannibal’s points, but-

There.

A flicker of Doctor Lecter’s gaze up and over, and a smile at the corner of his mouth twitches. Like a frown in one light, a delighted smile at another angle.