Will sat in his living room, rocking a glass in one hand. The whiskey sloshed, swirled, a dark amber that he couldn’t see in the dark anyway. It didn’t matter. He drank so much of it he had the color memorized.
There was a letter in his lap, open, read once, twice. It was like the others, love and longing and the miss of an intimacy that the two had once shared. Hannibal’s penmanship was still so elegant, Will could try to trace the words with his fingers, think of those skilled hands on his body, closing over his throat to hold him steady as Hannibal kissed him, drew out his soul and swallowed it down into the pit of his belly.
Will downed the rest of his whiskey and grabbed the bottle from the table next to his chair, refilling it. Another sip, but it still hurt, the words on the paper. Hannibal’s love hurt. He’d been locked up three months now. Will hadn’t gone to see him once. And he begged- or more, he requested lovingly, almost pleaded, in his letters, to see Will. Even if briefly, to hear his voice, smell his scent, for the chance to take him in and commit him to memory.
Will knew Hannibal already had him memorized.
Will closed his eyes, but the black of his eyelids seemed just an extension of the black of his house, endless, as if the rooms opened wide like gaping mouths into great halls, a waiting labyrinth for him to get lost in. And he had. He had missed so many of his classes Will was sure they’d fire him soon, if he didn’t change. Alana had covered him at first, but then there had been no choice but for Quantico to find a temporary replacement.
Will hadn’t worked a case since Hannibal’s incarceration. Jack called and he didn’t answer. Alana visited and he locked himself in the bathroom and didn’t answer the door. He did his grocery shopping after dark, when he remembered at all.
The only things he needed were food for the dogs and whiskey. Everything else was secondary.
Will kept his eyes closed, finished off his whiskey again. The dark around him swarmed, stretched open, gawked at him and there was a growl, an angry sound. The demons behind Will’s eye lids, inside his head, calling him, calling him home.
He opened his eyes to the darkness of his house. He dropped his glass on the table, heard the glass clink, and grabbed the bottle, getting up and taking Hannibal’s letters with him to his desk. He sat sat down, tossed them on it, took a swig right from the bottle and grabbed a pen, scrawling out on a piece of paper with no heading, no introduction-
Ever wonder if the world would be better without you?
That was all he ever wrote to Hannibal. Over the past three months, he’d scrawled it over and over and over again, had never once sealed and sent the letter, but had wanted to, in these moments when his blood was sluggish with whiskey.
“Fuck you,” he muttered, to no one in particular. To Hannibal, for severing the halves of Will’s life and leaving him to drown in the seams. To himself for loving the man, for having to hole up in his house for fear he would break, see him, love him and cry for him.
He had to escape Hannibal, his words and his love and the strings that tied them together.
Will had to escape himself.
He took another swig from the whiskey bottle, continued to scribble his question over and over and over again. The house around him creaked, felt as if it expanded, took the dogs and left him alone in the cavern of his own chest, where he was drowning in the icy cold breath of nothing. He was swallowed up, but it was the opposite feeling of being trapped in his skin, this nothing he wallowed in, day after day, strung together by streams of whiskey and Hannibal’s letters.
Will had ever letter. He stored them in his desk. Instead of shoving this latest one in, he lifted it, pressed it to his trembling lips- when had they started trembling?- kissed the words that had come from Hannibal’s fingers, kissed the shapes the man had created.
Wished the paper was Hannibal. Wished he was with him, curled up in his warmth, and not the opening endlessness of his house.
Will looked down at his paper, and whispered, quietly to himself, “Ever wonder if the world would be a better place without you?”
Will was sure the world would be far better without him. He was sure reality would stop spinning, this emptiness around him would disappear, if he simply ceased to exist.
Most nights, that was a charming idea.
Tonight, it seemed his only option.
A Madness Between Two 