#empath!will

Naturally, at his light suggestion ten miles into the drive that she lay back down and get some more shut-eye, she sat ramrod straight with legs criss-crossed in the middle of the back seat. Each time he glanced into the rearview mirror, he found her staring back. He hadn't spoken during much of their time since leaving the Great Red Dragon to his meal. After her reassurance that the injuries from the wreck were superficial at best, she'd remained quiet with her back to him on the spongy and suspiciously damp bed. From there she'd fallen to an exhausted sleep. If she hurts, she makes no comment. Only watches.

Hannibal sits with far more ease. He's content in the passenger seat to watch electric poles swing by in rapid fashion, the snow whipping by and blinding with each random flash of car lights in the distance. Will wonders if he'd slipped back around to grab the linoleum knife in order to get his revenge when Will least expects it.

I'm fond of you. Can you see?

Will envies his ease. Since he'd driven away from what had almost become his final resting place, ants marched along his skin and left vengeful rashes. Red Dragon with walls as high as mountains, Dolarhyde's decimated in his need to be Seen.

Pressed between the cold and the vending machines, Will had felt something powerful in how he'd been able to finally, finally see through Hannibal so easily, and yet...

Now, in the cramped space of the car, Will finds that he desperately wants to run. Run and run and run until his legs give out. He wouldn't get far; Will's pretty quite sure he couldn't get much more than a mile before falling into a ditch and letting the cold take him like Purnell likely will.

Will had let her do that. He'd shut his eyes and let her walk into the frigid night to die alone. Wandering the halls of his own mind palace, opening doors and peeking behind curtains, he's not quite sure if he can find the guilt he should be feeling right now. His body aches something awful, and bruises from the seatbelt  had already formed in a striped fashion across his chest and neck. Small cuts had dotted his shirt a suspicious pink where the belt broke skin. He hadn't noticed until taking a quick shower.

"So many questions you must have to remain so silent," Hannibal observes once they find their way to the interstate.

Plows had long already gone through to pave the way, semis keeping most of the falling snow at bay in the aftermath. Giants alongside their lone, nondescript car. He imagined each one as sentinel as they passed by.

"He's waiting for me to fall asleep-" Abigail says sweetly.

"Abigail-"

"I don't mind her hearing what I have to say," Hannibal assures him lightly, as though that's the only thing tying Will's lips into a knot. He looks away from the window, and Will avoids his stare.

"Why are you going on the run with us?" Abigail asks when Will still can't speak. "No one could have ever figured you out."

"You knew?" Will asks, stunned.

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

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

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

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

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

           “But is he speaking,” she repeats.

           “No.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

           Or permanent retirement.

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

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

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

           They know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-

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

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

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

           “Do you feel particularly accused of something?”

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

           “What made you think of it?”

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

           “So he did speak?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

           I’m fond of you.

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

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

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

           It’s what they know that’s important.

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

           “Oh,” Hannibal says, just behind him.

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

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

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

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

           And it is coming from Hannibal.

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

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

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

           He’s feeling something.

           I’m fond of you.

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

           “Are you processing?”

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

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

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

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

           Can you see?

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

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

-

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

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

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

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

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

           “What tip?”

           “CCTV outside of a K-mart.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

           God, he’d better not.

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

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

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

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

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

           Don’t forget you’re always being watched.

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

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

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

           You’ll have it when you come in.

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

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

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

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

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

           His lips still hummed from the feeling of their kiss.

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

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

           “There are a few apartments for sublet. What little money is left after settling to the grieving families will likely carry me to it, then I need a job if I’m going to supplement what little I get monthly from the government for dad’s death.”

           Abigail speaks with a carelessness that belies how she draws her knees her to her chest and stares out of the window fixatedly. Will passes a finger over the edge of a hand-cut star whose optimism suggests, ‘Think Positive!’ and looks back to her.

           “Are they making you discuss that in therapy?” he can’t help but ask.

           She shoots him a sardonic glance, albeit it relaxes the way she holds onto herself so tightly. “Yes.”

           The room feels like the harried steps of someone that knows they don’t have a lot of time. How long until she was kindly but firmly removed from the hospital? How long until the government’s mercy ran out and she was forced to move onto a place where there was nothing waiting? Will traces the paces she made in the throes of her most emotional fears, and he pauses just at the foot of her bed where she’d finally slid into a crumpled lump on the floor and laid for some time. Compared to how subtle, how gentle the feelings are that he gleans from Hannibal’s home, it’s positively unpleasant. Will tastes the hint of teenage despair, and he bites down on it.

           “We won’t allow you to end up on the street, Abigail,” Hannibal assures her. “You’re more than welcome to stay with me until you have a place to stay.”

           “Dr Lecter, I couldn’t—”

           “You can,” Will reminds her kindly, although his voice is tight. It’s not Abigail’s despair anymore, it’s his, and he’s so very relieved to have gloves on as he sits just on the edge of the bed and surveys her, fingers curling into the edge. “Dr. Lecter is helping me, Abigail.”

           There’s a lot of weight to the words, and it’s not lost on her. He feels her stare, but he instead worries over the feeling of the inside of his gloves, grounding in the wake of her emotions. He’s going to let her puzzle over it and decide for herself what it meant; in truth she could choose just how much she let Dr. Lecter know. It’s the sort of consideration he’d want for himself. For them.

           She glances to Hannibal and folds her arms tight over her ribs to self-sooth. “And what’s your opinion of it?”

           Careful but not entirely subtle. Obviously testing what he’s willing to admit he knows.

           Hannibal’s smile is utterly polite. “I’d like for you to help him weaponize his gift, of course. If it’s not too much trouble for you after what’s happened.”

           Teenage girls are something to be marveled at. She doesn’t sit on his words for much longer than a second before she’s standing and facing Will with a resolute set to her jaw, be damned her fears and the mental breakdown she’d had just the night before.

           “Do you think you can handle it?” she asks—her voice is not so confidant as the way she stands.

           “Yes.”

           “Your barriers—”

           “Are stronger than before,” he reassures her. He stands and brushes his palms onto his jeans, as if to rub away what could have clung from the blanket. There was the quiet fear he’d grab her by accident as he had Hannibal, but she was going to See him anyway. Would she notice the Thyme he’d planted, should she tumble inside?

           She scrutinizes him, and he studies her shoelace. There’s a long, pained pause as she tries to find just what she’s looking for, then she sighs. “Like I said before, it’s not how it sounds. You turn their mind around, and that’s really how you weaponize your gift. Your make their own mind trick itself.” She fetches chairs for the two of them from the small arts and crafts table, and she fusses with them in the small patch of sun from the window, sitting them across from one another. “No offense, Agent Graham, but even with them being stronger, it won’t help. You’re going to have to trick them and hide your reality somewhere else.”

           Will glances to Hannibal whose face is wrinkled ever-so-slightly. Even with his knowledge, this isn’t something that a neurotypical—or even a trained FBI agent—would know much about. Weaponizing gifts. The words hold as much danger to them as they do promise.

           The best Dreamers know how to make dreams so real they hurt.

           “I’m ready,” he assures her. He swallows, resents how his throat is suddenly dry.

           She gives him the same searching, careful look, brow furrowed. He isn’t sure if it’s a test he’s sorely failing, or a sign she’s on the look for, but when they sit down in the small promise of sunlight, he keeps his gloves firmly on all the same because despite her willingness, there is a remnant of fear just at the curve of her mouth. No matter how willing, the three of them are taking a rather large risk, and it has absolutely nothing to do with what would happen should Agent Crawford kick the door in.

           Don’t want to turn her into Agent—Mr.—Jackson.

           “When you look into my eyes, how does it happen?” Abigail asks, interrupting that train of thought. “How do you see?”

           He knows what she means. “I see the eye, then I fall in. I always fall.”

           Abigail nods. “Most empaths do. We see the emotion before we see the situation that caused it, and that’s what drags us down. It’s something dad said they teach at the Academy.”

           “They do.”

           At his response, Hannibal sits up from his lax repose beside the window. It’s subtle, but it’s there –he wonders if there’s something to be said about an empath sharing just what it’s like at the Academy. While it’s not forbidden, not many people discuss just what goes on within the walls whose brick and mortar house enough power to see within the most corrupt of minds, unwind the minds of the most powerful of monsters. It’s a mandatory boarding school with little time allowed to visit family outside of the outer walls, and not for a moment does Will miss it.

           “They teach it because it’s easier for a neurotypical to see when empaths are using their gift that way. That’s how they control you. When you looked at me, Dr. Bloom could tell that you were looking for the truth. I watched her watch you do it.” She glosses over just what Will found inside of her mind. “You have to un-train yourself from falling in, or else they’ll know.”

           They know.

           “You walk in,” Will clarifies, just shy of sounding awed.

           “I walk in, I take what I want, and I walk out,” Abigail agrees. She’s entirely too proud of the admission, and it shows in the way she forces herself not to smile. “I didn’t have to unlearn anything, so was easier for me than it will be for you, I think.”

           Easier but not impossible. Just out of the corner of his eye, Will catches Hannibal leaning back into his chair and getting comfortable. Only a whisper of the academy, merely the barest part of a hint. “What’s the first step?”

           “The first step is to create a space where you keep your secrets.”

           His secrets being the entirety of the state of his mind. His violence. His cruelty. He laughs wryly and lets his gaze wander to her nose. The freckles betray her as a mid-western American beauty. “That easy?”

           “Yes,” she replies firmly. Hands clasp tight at the knees. “I do it all the time.”

           Her barriers. Her barriers? Will tilts his head, and without giving any warning he looks into her eyes and tries to image himself walking in, walking instead of falling because there isn’t any reason that he can’t use his two damn feet.

           And just like that, he’s walking into a wall, but walking none-the-less.

           Empaths that know themselves can consciously feel the presence of another empath just within the sacred spaces of their mind. It’s feather-soft when one knows what they’re doing—perhaps just as violently prevalent, as Red Dragon was as he tore through the minds of RA’s he was told to devour—and every empath has a signature print. If one has felt it once, they’ll always remember it, and Will is as much aware of Abigail seeing him as he is seeing her wall.

           The place where she keeps her secrets.

           “You don’t see anything because my emotions aren’t overwhelming you into a memory,” Abigail explains, and Will nods along. “People don’t usually keep as much hold on their memories like they do their conscious thought. That’s how they don’t know if you’re digging around for it unless you’re being mean about it.”

Minds aren’t blocked so well as this, at least none that Will has encountered before. Even resilient RA’s that made it consciously to the end were easy to break through, their barriers just as shifting as Will often felt his was. He wonders if she likes the thyme within his slowly strengthening walls. He wonders if she is afraid of the Monkshood.

           She’s not beside him, but he feels her near as he passes hands along brick that is impenetrable and sturdy. Made to last, like all the other ranch-style houses were in their prime. Solid brick, a dark, aged pink bordering on brown, and there’s something familiar about it as he presses hands and can’t pass through it.

           Abigail is testing as much as Will is. He feels her Seeing him. “Can you Dream a wall around this place? A wall past…past the sand.” Will’s spit curdles at how she hesitates in saying it.

           “Is it as easy as a dream?”

“If you Dream it well enough, you can make a place they can get lost in so they can’t find the cracks inside of it. Like this.”

           And just like that, Will blinks and he finds himself within a room as ordinary as you please, only he recognizes this room because it’s one he walked through once as he was on his way to find Garrett Jacob Hobbs. He turns around slowly, and Abigail is beside him. Her face gives nothing away. The aged brick is now as memorable as the fireplace that lays empty just to the side.

           He’d passed by that fireplace to go and press his hands to her dead mother’s neck.

           “This is what I imagine the Seer that sometimes visits group therapy sees when she manages to catch my eye. My secrets are always behind my wall, and this is the perpetual waiting room.” Will senses her smile, feels it in the wallpaper. He blinks again, and she stands behind him with her arms folded tight around her, as much a self-soothing stance as it is a defensive stance.

           He can’t reciprocate her humor, though. Will supposes it’s the way the room makes him think of killing things; the last time he saw this place, it’d been painted in death, the very air seeping it. He feels it in the carpet just beneath his shoes, and it reeks off of the 1980’s wall hangings her mother never updated. He inhales Garrett Jacob Hobbs, then drowns in it.

Without a second thought he Dreams away his gloves, and he takes Abigail’s hand tightly, surprising both of them as he finds himself quite suddenly yanked behind her walls where her secrets come tumbling out around him in a torrential downpour.

           Don’t know how this is going to—

           Never thought my father would—

           How’d he save me? How’d he manage to save someone like—

           --don’t think he’s ever going to—

           WHAT IS HE DOING WHAT IS HE—

           Will looks around the wide, open space, and he inhales the crisp morning air that leaves his throat cold and prickling. It’s Fall, and his boots make leaves snap and break as he spins around, taking everything in. He’s not in that hell-house anymore.

           He’s not trapped outside of her barriers.

           “Don’t keep secrets from me, Abigail,” he says, turning around slowly.  His eyes are fixed to the forest. “You’re the reason I’m in the mess.”

           It humbles her, to be reminded that despite his troubles he did know how to use his gifts. He wonders if Garrett Jacob Hobbs had to struggle with her pride, or if he was so proud of her he didn’t mind it. There was something to be said how he cherished her above anything else in the world, that he’d destroy himself over it. A father’s love, only it’d been poisoned.

           “Do you think like that because this place reminds you of the cabin?” she asks, softly. Although she can’t see the thoughts directly, she feels it, a shift in the way their minds connect. While she is more present with what he is doing in her mind, Will is more than aware that Abigail is now sitting on one of the benches in the garden, very still and very somber.

           “That’s because it is the forest where the cabin is,” Will replies, turning about. The sun arcs overhead and casts dappled light from golden, aging leaves. The air is tangy with apples beginning to get too ripe in the late August sun. There’s the rot of the leaves underneath their feet.

           “I’ll never see this place as it is again,” she explains, but that isn’t quite it, is it? He chases the tail end of a lie, and he finds it beneath the edge of the woods where an apple tree bears rotting fruit.

           “Your favorite memories are hunting here,” he says. Just at his feet, the poor remnants of a long-molded and withered core persisted to survive. “You shouldn’t feel guilty about that.”

           “If you do it that obviously, they’ll know you’re hiding something,” she snaps, and without warning the walls are in place and they’re standing at his door, his shabby, shabby door. She’s shaken, and although he’s reluctant to open the door for her, he feels the need to even the playing field a bit.

           “Use what you find against them,” she says, and she tracks his hand as he unlocks the door and opens it. “If you have your walls up, if you let them think they found you, then their emotions don’t overwhelm you and you can walk right in. They won’t have a guard up.” A pause. “You know they won’t have a guard up.”

           He hesitates only a moment before opening the door. He has to think on his feet what sort of place the FBI would believe he kept his secrets, the place where he stored his realities. He wonders if there’s something to Abigail purposefully making her waiting room the front room, the place where everything went so wrong. Did the empath that read her say she longed for community? Did they think she was homesick for what she’d never find?

           Will opens the door for her, and he follows her inside.

           He gives her time to look around. He walks along smooth rocks and grainy sand and makes his way to the riverbed. Sunlight glitters and winks on the water, and fish leap about. He remembers birds, and they sing in trees, a simple thing to Dream.

           A wizened weeping willow drips and dips over the running water, and Abigail sits down beneath it, reaching up to the boughs. “Where’s this?” she asks. It’s difficult to say whether or not she’s impressed with how quickly he made it.

           “A river my father used to fish at.”

           “You remember it clearly.”

           “I don’t remember much from back then, but this place I do.”

           He watches the water and imagines walls around his walls, a box around his secrets. Tucked away, hidden, and there’s a fishing pole in his hand. Tucked away, hidden, he thinks this is just the sort of space an FBI empath would tell Jack Crawford about. The king of thing that might make Jack Crawford ease just, even for just a little bit.

           But that’s what Dolarhyde had wanted, wasn’t it? Just to let him rest?

           He senses rather that sees Abigail attempting to find secrets in the leaves. Fingers grasp, then puzzle over the texture. “What are you looking for?” he asks.

           There’s a long pause. “You felt that?”

           “I’m a Feeler.”

           They both laugh, and it surprises Will into laughing more. He holds the fishing pole in his hand, and it occurs to him that it’s not entirely a good sign he so quickly adapted to turning his mind so quickly, adapting to using his power so well. It’s too easy to bend things, to easy to become now that he and Abigail share the same space, and aren’t they the same?

           Abigail caught the turn of his thought; she saw everything, it seemed. “You catch on fast,” she agrees.

           “I’m an RA in the making.”

           That sobers her enough that she manages to look away, and without warning Will finds himself within his own skin in the rea world once more, chilled and suppressing a shiver that starts from the tip of his head and fizzes out by the time it hits his feet. He’s blocked out, the wall enough that he risks glancing just to the corner of her eye to try and See.

           His gloves are still on, but his fingertips tingle like he’s pressed his hands to something naughty. Abigail regards him warily, cornered. She once loved hunting with her dad. She loved hunting, and it wasn’t lost on her that she was both the hunter and the prey.

           “I’m sorry,” he says immediately. “I wasn’t thinking.”

           “You were, but not about that,” she replies after a time. She wears a scarf on her neck, and it occurs to him he hadn’t noticed until that moment. It’s stark against the otherwise muted and therapeutically calming room. “You don’t need my help. You’ve done something bad, Agent Graham.”

           Hannibal sits stiffly, and Will can’t be certain if he’s only just done it, or if he’s been that way the entire time they were gallivanting about in their mind.

           “It was an accident,” he says, and he takes just as long a time as she did before he replies. His throat is dry, and he wishes for something to drink. Maybe he’d call Beverly after this. “I…I didn’t know it’d leave an imprint like that.”

           “He left his imprint, and you channeled it like it was nothing.” She shakes her head, and it’s then that he can finally sense the fear from her, small but very pungent. “That’s what it’s like to be an E-3?”

           He supposes so, and the thought stays with him, even after leaving. He stares into his eyes in Hannibal’s guest bathroom that night, and he wonders if he can see something of Dolarhyde in the pupil, or if everything he saw was still some semblance of himself. He Dreams himself into an FBI office where the standard test would be conducted, and he sits for a time on the tub, seeing it as at the edge of his chair.

           He wonders if that is also what it is to be an E-3, or if any empath can spread their mind past the matter of their brain to see it in the room around them. When he hears Hannibal just down the hall, he quickly stands up and finishes up in the bathroom.

-

           Jack wakes Will with a phone call at exactly 7:42 a.m.

           “It’s the empath that’s not an RA,” Jack says by way of greeting. “We’ll swing by and get you on the way.”

           Will has only the barest amount of time to get Hannibal and make their way to his house where the dogs are waiting to be let out. Hannibal is standing in the field of snow when Jack pulls up, and Will steadies himself using one of the beams holding up the porch. The energy that wafts out of the SUV when the doors open makes his hackles rise. Behind him, there is the sense that people have roamed his home, searching. He’d crushed two more bugs before he heard the car up the drive.

           “I’ll brief you on the way,” Jack calls out.

           Will takes his time buttoning his coat. His walls that morning rose high, high enough breakfast had seemed a Dream to him. Hannibal had been particularly pleased with his breakfast, a hearty liver and kidney pie, the gravy a light berry that’d been glazed just as generously over Will’s pie that lacked the meat that reeked of a butcher’s knife.

           Will, in truth, doesn’t resent the fact that he can’t stomach much of meat.

           Hannibal sits beside him in the car. His leg is just beside Will’s, and they touch ever-so-often at the lurches in the road, the potholes that cursed Wolf Trap every winter.

           “It’s ugly,” Jack says, handing his phone over.

           Will is torn between looking or not; his need to see overcomes, ultimately. He glances down and stares at the poorly lit but decently clear image. “Who sent it?”

           “Price got there first, I came to get you.”

           “It’s ugly,” Will agrees.

           “Where your head?”

           “Intact,” he replies, pointedly.

           “Speak for yourself,” Jack grunts and waves a hand.

           Will scrolls to the right at Jack’s motion, and he acknowledges the next photo. His walls are high. He swore he Dreamed another row of Thyme.

           “Three bodies, two identified as Irene Dawson and Samantha Meyers; one yet to be determined.” Another photo slides into view, and Will acknowledges it with a soft hum under his breath.

           Hannibal leans over just slightly to see the photo. “A John Doe?”

           “No identification, fingerprints haven’t pulled anything yet. We’ve kept it as contained as possible, but it was a couple of joggers that found it and photos are already out.”

           Photos are out. Will would have to do his work in front of an audience.

           The joggers found the bodies in the park’s central gazebo, and as Will walks along the park path, he finds himself stopping just at the crest of the hill where the sunshine streaks in a dart of gold along the last clinging splash of red on a stubborn tree’s branches. It’s a bright, sunny morning with brilliantly blue skies, and between the dappled light of the branches the clouds are streaks of white, reaching. Will is breath-taken for just a moment, enough that Hannibal stops beside him, enough that Jack has to look back when he realizes no one’s there to listen anymore.

           “How are you feeling?” Hannibal asks, quiet enough Jack can’t hear as he waits for them to catch up. Will hadn’t spoken much on their way to Wolf Trap. He’d let his silence sit just long enough to likely sour.

           “They chose this location intentionally,” Will says, and he looks at the spreading stain of a beautiful winter morning and how it cuts across the crime scene just ahead. “Just like before.”

           “Jack said that Beverly was here.”

           “If she wants to see an honest reaction, I already told her how,” Will retorts.

           Hannibal smiles and follows just beside him. Jack glances back to them periodically, and his curiosity at their behavior is as palpable as the disgust that roils across the skin of everyone else around them.

           The gazebo has marble steps that have been long swept clean from the snow. Will reaches the top, and for along moment he stares at the scene, stares because despite the gristly pictures that’d prepared him somewhat, it in no way prepared him for the way it looked in real life, when one was forced to stare reality in the eye.

           “Where’s his brain?” Will asks, hollow.

           “Where’s any of his organs,” Price corrects, circling the area with great care. He takes a photo and examines, squinting against the sunrise. The flash leaves bright lights dancing across Will’s vision.

           “He’s empty,” Hannibal clarifies, quiet.

           Will stares at the man before them, reaching for the rising sun, eyes glazed in death icy enough they haven’t yet begun to discolor. The bodies are stiff, though, the women’s skin draped in robes with their hair flowing about the face, fixed with hair pieces on their heads.

           Whispering, they are, in the ears of the man between them. Will ignores them and steps forward, his gloves removed with little more than a brief hesitation before they’re pocketed and forgotten. He wants there to be some hesitation, but in truth could there be? The rising sun beckons him. The marble stones, the scene. He thinks of the house of mirrors, the empty man, the way he heard the man so clearly yet could not see at all…

           He inhales, and he lowers his walls, walls that rise high and hide behind the perfect fishing spot. Still crumbling, but from within the walls he was fine. Maybe, one day he’d take Abigail to it in real life, if he could remember where it was he once fished with his father. He’d teach her to catch and release. You didn’t always have to kill the poor bastard in the end.

           He takes a breath before he puts his hands on the shoulders, just a hair away from touching the hands of the reaching women. The John Doe’s head is open. It’s empty of anything that ever made it someone inside.

           Can you see?

           He’s sitting in a museum. Will inhales, and he tastes the warmth of familiarity, a place he’s surely been before. A place much loved, a page turned over and over again, only to be returned to just when one needs it the most.

           Just before them, Callumny of Apelles in its glory is fixed to the wall. He’s aware of someone beside him, yet all he can do is stare at it, something he’s surely seen a thousand times before because why else would he feel the need to look upon it for so long? The way the red lays along darts of gold, of hands reaching and pushing, forcing? And Slander dragging the innocent, robes of blue and white whose torch beckons torment from the all-powerful King? The King whose ears hold Ignorance and Suspicion?

           Yes, surely he’s seen this a thousand times before. Surely he knows which place he’d like to be.

           Surely, the empath whispers, surely, Agent Graham, you know what happens in the end when the powerless are brought before the King.

           He sets the phone down on the desk, on top of Will’s files and turns it on speaker phone. Will deviates from his swaying steps and walks towards the desk, hesitating by the front of it in order to stare down at the display –to better avoid the expression he supposes is on Hannibal’s face. Better now than never, in truth, for him to warn Jack about Will’s actions.

           “I invited him to my home for dinner after our session,” Dr. Lecter explains, and he sits down in his leather chair, folding his hands across his chest. “Is everything alright?”

           “Your house?” Jack’s voice is tinny, echoing.

           “Yes.”

           The line crackles, then goes quiet. Jack lets out an aggravated laugh, then, “You know, he’s surprising me more and more every god damn day.”

           Will spares Hannibal a glance, and they share grim smiles.

           “I may safely agree, Agent Crawford,” Hannibal replies. “Is he needed for work? We’ve only barely sat down before you called.”

           “No, no, don’t worry about it. He barely gets out enough, I’ll let him enjoy your fine cooking for a night before I pester him tomorrow.”

           Hannibal smiles, and it suits his eyes. “The least we can do.”

           “Yes, of course. Good bye, Dr. Lecter.”

           “Good evening, Agent Crawford.”

           The line goes dead, and silence settles back into the room. Will’s pace doesn’t cease; rather, it seems to persist with a fixated vengeance until Hannibal clears his throat. It disturbs his stride and focus, and he jolts before looking back to Hannibal with an expression much like the one he’d given when they first met, when Will realized that there was nothing at all normal about this Lecter person, no matter how hard he looked at him.

           He thinks back to how close Lecter held him, and it solidifies his suspicions.

           “If I feed you, I can’t be called a liar.”

           “I’m not hungry,” Will replies.

           “Aren’t you?”

           Will is, but he isn’t quite sure how to say it; how he hungers for something not quite tangible, not quite able to be felt. He wonders if it was the hunger that did Hobbs in, not necessarily the fantasies that prompted it.

           He looks to the grandfather clock that stands regally against the wall beside darkened cherry wood. It’s close to dinner time, and most people kept their meals on a schedule. Most people eat three meals a day and eat them around generally the same time.

           Most people, when doing their job, don’t stick their nose so far into things that it exposes their neck.

           “I don’t trust your eating habits,” Dr. Lecter decides, and it pulls Will from his thoughts, disjointed as they are. He can feel his walls, now, crumbling. Not large boulders that tumble, crack and smack together, but grains that dust away with the persistent wind. Things are loud, in Will Graham’s head. He wonders if Francis Dolarhyde’s mind is quiet, or if he feels bombarded by the screaming.

           Can you see?

           “Is there much you trust about me?” Will asks, humorlessly. He allows himself to be guided down an austere hallway of elegant drapes and refined paintings. He thinks of the hunger he’d felt, bare hands pressed to the pages of Blake’s work.

           He wonders just what it is that Hannibal Lecter is hungry for.

           “I believe that at your core, Agent Graham, you want to help people,” he replies, and he flips the lights to his kitchen. “That tells me that at that same core, you have good intentions. I can work with those.”

           “I can’t.”

           “You can,” Hannibal replies with ease.

           Will is deposited onto a stool as dinner is prepared ‘as quickly and painlessly as possible.’ It’s vegetarian, and Will tastes nothing in the soup, more basil than tomato and richer in cream than the normal canned version he’d personally buy for about .79 cents each.

           It’s nice, though. It gives him time to compartmentalize. The flavors won’t allow him to dwell on his real problems.

           The guest bedroom is accented in bold ocher and gold threading in the tapestries that adorn windows closed against the frosted edging. A couple of hours later, Will sits on the plush blankets and presses gloved palms to the duvet, wondering at the thread count he’s about to sleep on. To say that Hannibal Lecter’s personal living quarters are lavish is an understatement, and although Will certainly doesn’t live in squalor, government wages aren’t exactly the lap of luxury.

           He thinks of how careful Hannibal was to steer the conversation away from Jack Crawford’s phone call during and after dinner. He didn’t make mention of it, and Will was quite fine to set the situation aside for the evening.

           Just enough to rest. God, that was all Dolarhyde wanted for him, wasn’t it? He just needed some fucking rest?

           He lays down, and he closes his eyes. Behind his eyelids, marked by a gaze seeing yet unseen, he watches small grains of his walls crumble with each gust of worry that bursts against him.

-

           When he dreams, he dreams of walls sturdy and strong. Thick layers of cement hold them, carefully weighed and measured, fitted to exact specification. They sit two feet thick, and try as he might, Will can’t see the top of them, for all the world they keep stacking higher and higher. The air around him is light, the grass beneath his feet warm. Within his walls is a glade, and a stag moves about it, as at ease with him as he surprisingly is with it.

           Where the bricks come from, he can’t see, but something about them is familiar to him, a touch as soft as his own and equally yearning. With his back to the stag, he presses fingertips to the stone, then palm, then forehead.

-

           Hannibal broaches the topic of their next step at breakfast.

           “About an hour ago, Jack Crawford called this morning to give me more information regarding his call yesterday,” Hannibal confides, pouring Will a glass of espresso.

           The fact that he even has an espresso machine isn’t lost on Will as something that ordinary neurotypicals don’t typically do, but the man also has a bidet in the guest bathroom. Eccentric seems to be his thing.

           “What’d he say?”

           “He informed me that Dolarhyde attacked one of your fellow agents just this past evening, and when he couldn’t get a hold of you, he became concerned. I informed him that you decided to finish work early yesterday in order to meet me for dinner to discuss something I posted in the journals.”

           “They know,” Will reminds him, quietly. Breakfast is sweet, and he spoons a small helping of pomegranate into his mouth.

           “Yes, but it is the power of how much they know, Agent Graham. Your six-month evaluation is coming up, according to Dr. Bloom. How are your walls?”

           He’d stared at himself in the mirror, earlier in the morning. The only eyes he couldn’t seem to see into were Hannibal’s, and his own.

           “They feel…sturdier.”

           “I’ll take this moment to remind you the importance of stable friendships. Stress isn’t always so stressful when you have a strong outlet for your emotions in times of trouble.”

           “It’s not my emotions that I generally struggle with,” Will retorts dryly, but something stops him from entirely laughing, and he turns his spoon over, studying his oblong face in the back of it. It reminds him of the house of mirrors, and he quickly spins it around once more. “Friendship. Is that what you’d call us? Friends?”

           Hannibal is quiet, and Will glances up to his face, studying the curve of his lip as he smiles. It’s faint, and Will wonders how easily he sees it, that he is used to looking so intently to find it.

           “What would you call it?” Hannibal wonders.

           “You’re my therapist, but it’s a work-mandated therapy. You accompany me in my work, so that counts as both colleague and babysitter.” Will ticks them off on his fingers, propping his elbows onto the table. “You watched my dog while I was gone, so that is either a fellow church member, or at the least an acquaintance.”

           “I have no membership to a church, although I have several Sunday masses under my belt,” Hannibal assures him.

           “You have met me for coffee a few times outside of therapy or work-related business, so that adds the potential for ‘old high school acquaintance’.”

           “I don’t have a pyramid scheme to sell, though.”

           “And you’re currently abetting an empath in committing several felonies, so that’s somewhere within an emotional spectrum. Maybe friends, maybe enemies. I think either one illicit enough of an emotional response to count.”

           Will wouldn’t quite say that that sobers Hannibal, but he is contemplative as he polishes off his juice. Will isn’t quite sure how to steer away from that topic of conversation, nor is he sure the thoughts running through Dr. Lecter’s head. Abetting a felon. A felon that isn’t quite known yet as a felon, but a felon none-the-less. He wonders if he’ll have a matching black hoodie like Dolarhyde’s, soon; if he’ll have to go and find his own chloroform so that he can question mentally unstable empaths within the confines of a musty hotel.

          There’s something relaxing about the ease of Lecter’s house, the rooms and walls that look untouched because out of all the places Will walked through, Hannibal is the only one to live in them. After breakfast, he is left to his devices as Lecter gets ready for work, and he takes his time admiring the paintings on the wall, the instruments in a small parlor adjacent to the study.

           He is tempted, if but for a second, to take his gloves off and roam throughout the kitchen, where Hannibal’s work, passion, and emotion is most obviously prevalent. He wonders if that would be inappropriate, though; if Hannibal’s hardened resolve would crumble in the wake of a nosy empath whose hands touch what was never theirs to own.

           He did take them off in the guest bedroom, but that was to sleep. Hannibal had ensured no one else’s skin had touched that pillow, let alone the covers, and Will had rested surprisingly well despite not having to lay his jacket down to protect the bone arena of his skull. He wonders if he’d ever slept so soundly at the EBAU; if dreams were so tangible within such a public and scrutinized space.

           “I’m fond of you,” Hannibal finally says in response to Will as he’s dropping him off at the FBI HQ. It’s a casual statement, but the weight of it sits on Will as the cement walls loom behind him, grey and imposing. Hannibal glances to him, and that same faint smile flickers. No thoughts. No intrusions. Just his words and his smile. “We’ll start working on your walls in our next session.”

           “You’re fond of me,” Will repeats, and it sounds more like he’s clarifying rather than parroting.

           “Yes.”

           They stare at one another. Will swallows, hard, and he tracks the steady pulse in Hannibal’s neck, the same steady beat that he’d felt when they were locked within his wardrobe, cheek pressed to wool as a killer lurked just outside. Steady. Dr. Hannibal Lecter, in all things, seems steady.

           “Do have a pleasant day, Agent Graham,” he says, and he gives enough time for Will to take his cue and step back onto the sidewalk, lest his shoes get run over.

           I’m fond of you.

           The air is crisp and cold, although the sidewalks are swept clean from snow. Salt clumps in small piles where the automated doors slide open.

           I’m fond of you.

           “Agent Crawford is waiting for you in his office, Agent Graham,” the receptionist, a Dreamer, informs him at the front desk.

           I’m fond of you.

           “Good morning, sir,” a security guard greets by the elevator.

           I’m fond of you.

           “Jack’s on a warpath,” Beverly warns him as she passes by him with a purpose, hell-bent on the labs.

           I’m fond of you.

           “You can head right in, Agent Graham,” the EBAU’s clerk chirps.

           I’m fond of you.

           Jack’s waiting beside the desk when Will walks in, poised like he’s been waiting for this moment since the day before when he called Hannibal.

           I’m fond of you.

           “Morning, Jack.”

           I’m fond of you.

           “Morning, Will.”

           I’m fond of you.

           Will studies the room, and it’s not lost on him that there is another man sitting neat and tidy in the corner, quietly content. It takes another scan of the office for Will to realize just who it is that’s sitting tucked away, and when he does cold sweat breaks out on his back, a dotting of it just along his forehead, too.

           I’m fond of you.

           “Morning,” he greets Agent Jackson, slowly.

           Agent Jackson’s expression yesterday when he first came across Will at Gateway Corp. was the resigned look Will no doubt often had when doing a particularly unpleasant part of his job. The second, surprise. The third, fear, blinding and all-consuming. Now, though, his face is pleasantly blank, a slate wiped clean of anything that ever made somebody something. His clothing looks much like someone that’d slept in it, and when Will looks to the space just at the side of Jackson’s eyes, he’s dismayed to see nothing much at all, like passing by a doll in a toy store with plastic parts and nothing of importance tucked away inside.

           Agent Jackson blinks at Will, once. His smile is distantly vague, and when Will looks back to Jack, three things become incredibly obvious at that moment:

           First, Agent Jackson is no longer the man Will found in the bathroom at Gateway Corp.

           Second, Jack is trying to see whether or not Will is realizing just that.

           Third, if the EBAU knows that he weaponized his gifts, he’s not leaving HQ alive.

           “What’s wrong with him?” Will asks, and he thinks of Hannibal’s words, how they echo and bounce about with wild abandon within mildly sturdy walls. They bounce soft, though. They know the sort of danger he’s in.

           It is the power of how much they know.

           I’m fond of you.

           “You think something’s wrong?” Jack asks.

           Will lets his lip curl, but only a little. “I think that even neurotypicals could see something’s wrong with him, Jack.”

           Jack relents after a moment, but his shoulders are still taut. He circles the desk to come around and stand beside Will, too close for comfort. “Found him at Gateway Corp. Can’t see anything on their cameras, but looks like Dolarhyde dropped by for a visit.”

           “Evidence he wanted to hide?”

           “From this guy, or from us?”

           Will frowns down at Jackson’s stupidly placid face. “Maybe both. Do you…do you want me to see?”

           “Do you want to see?” Jack asks.

           It’s the staged look of it, Will decides much later, that determines what he does. Jackson purposefully positioned away from the main portion of the room, Jack close enough to touch but not close enough to feel. Jack’s office isn’t small, yet they’re sequestered far enough away from the main angles of the cameras that the look of it isn’t quite damning.

           Yet.

           “Jack, what’s going on,” Will prompts, softly. “What’s wrong.”

           Jack lets out a slow breath, something speaking of the years between them and all of the work Will’s done in his time. The RA’s under his belt. The killers crowding his head. The whisper that one day, maybe one day, he’ll be right alongside them, dead. This time, Will isn’t entirely tempted to try and glean secrets from his boss. There’s something in him, something persistently needing, that whispers that maybe, maybe Jack will give him more than just death.

           Maybe.

           “Tell me your whereabouts yesterday, and I’ll tell you why I’m worried about it,” Jack says heavily.

           Will looks from Jackson to Jack. He fixes his gaze onto the curve of his cheek, where his jaw determined years ago that no matter the expression on his face, Jack would always appear mildly aggressive in nature. It’s a bone he’s being thrown, Jack allowing Will to fill in the gaps first. He doesn’t miss the opportunity, and he doesn’t let it pass him by. He wets his bottom lip, tucks his hands into his pockets.

           “Shit, Jack, you know I’m feeling the heat,” he says. “I called Dr. Lecter.”

           “You called him?”

           Will nods. “Yeah, I called him. I wanted to talk about his articles.”

           “Bloom says you have a fixation on his articles.”

           “I do.”

           I’m fond of you.

           “So you call him?”

           “He invited me to his house, I go, we talk about his articles. He invites me to stay for dinner, and I do. He said you called.”

           “You didn’t answer my calls.”

           “Phone died. It was charging at Lecter’s, but I hadn’t turned it on yet.” He allows a pause to flutter about, awkward, before he plunges on. “Do you…you don’t think I did this, do you? Jack?”

           Jack laughs, but its humorless. “I don’t think you did, but you’re the only E-3 not institutionalized, Will. It spooks higher ups when something…well, shit, something like this happens. You look at that man, you tell me what you see. Feelers couldn’t get anything off of him, so it’s making Purnell nervous.”

           “So it’s a show, then. I’m humoring you,” Will clarifies.

           “Humoring the bureau,” Jack replies. His expression is just as humorless as his laugh.

           Will isn’t quite sure how to voice it in a way that makes sense, but seeing what’s come of Agent Jackson is terrifying on a personal level. The man doesn’t so much as blink when Will puts bare palms to his temples, and when Will looks into eyes vacant, trusting, and open, there’s something that breaks inside of him, to see just what he’s capable of.

           I’m fond of you.

           There is nothing. Where thoughts, panicked and frantic in the face of Will’s ambush used to rush, fleeting and wild, there is silence. Walls of memories hold doors laid open, the feeling like a house newly modeled and ready to sell. The white picket fence isn’t peeling. The door is wide open, and there is a sense that no feet have walked through the foyer, no hands that have touched the dry wall and claimed it as their own. Will trembles, touching Jackson’s shoulders. He can see inside, but there is nothing to see, and it’s like what he imagines the Perkins house to look like, now that someone’s had the time to paint over the screams.

           He inhales, and he smells Dolarhyde.

           It’s not the end table that dumps Will unceremoniously onto the chair opposite of Jackson’s, but a small ottoman. It hits the back of his calves, and he crumbles onto the cushion with hardly a resistance. He thinks of chloroform pressed to his nose, how everything smelled like gasoline and dread. He thinks of Dolarhyde across from him, gun trained to him yet eyes begging him to just fucking see.

           “What do you see?” Jack asks after Will has caught his breath.

           He feels something bitter, like biting into a bad almond on his tongue as he replies, “Dolarhyde.”

           Jack bows his head, and there’s quiet in the room. Agent Jackson is a blank slate, never-ending, and Will for the first time truly understands what it is to fear the power an E-3 could hold, should they ever decide weaponize it.

           His walls were down. The other boy was bleeding in.

           “Are…you alright?” he asked. His voice shook, weak, and he gritted his teeth. The crying warbled to a stop, sniffles punctuated by ragged breathing.

           “Yeah.”

           “Were you having a nightmare?”

           There was no answer to that, and Will pressed his ear to the wall, straining to catch a sound. Aware now that he’d been caught, the boy seemed to hold his breath, unable to let the slightest sound escape.

           “Are you new here?”

           No answer to that, either. The urge to cover himself, to protect his genitalia was near-overwhelming when he took in a breath, and he pulled his knees taut to his chest as a tremor worked its way through.

           “No one is going to hurt you here,” he said through the wall. “I promise.”

           There was another muffled sob, likely exhaled into the pillow.

           He wasn’t supposed to use his gifts for anything but school and training –the urge to do so gave him a stab of shame, that he was going to get caught and put in detention. When another sob made its way through the paper walls, though, he cringed into the sensations that washed over him like a wave, and he closed his eyes, reaching out past his walls to find the mind whose dreams were crashing all around them.

           Fear. God, there was so much fear.

           Will clapped his hands over his ears like he could deafen the sounds of sobbing that echoed inside of his mind. It was near-overwhelming as he felt for the Dreamer whose dreams had fallen away from him. It wasn’t hard to find the darkness that spread, a tar-like ichor whose thickness were fast enveloping the boy that cried and fought to be free. As his walls lay flat around him, he saw within his mind’s eye the struggle, the fear as someone reached, reached, reached and god why did loving her hurt so much?

           Will knelt down beside the pit of tar and reached out, pressing his palms to it. It stank of abuse, of years of pain and love intertwining into an ooze that was unrecognizable. Hands clawed their way from it, even as the boy drowning within took a gulp and drowned.

           He Dreamed of steps, stairs that rose from the pit and lifted the boy from it with slow, easy assurance. He imagined boards cross-hatching over the pit so that no one could fall into it, barriers that isolated and locked away the nightmares that made him fear what the glint of scissors looked like in the muted moonlight. As the boy was lifted up, Will hurried up the steps and Dreamt railings, a protection so that no one would fall.

           The crying boy vomited sludge onto the marble floor, viscera hanging from trembling lips.

           Will could Dream that away, too.

           In their shared dream, he wrapped his arms around him and imagined them safe, protected from harm and fury alike. He imagined their peace, a serenity as all was made to fall quiet, calm in the silence. The boy didn’t hug him back, but he didn’t push him away, either. After a few moments passed, he let go.

           They didn’t speak for awhile, kneeling as they were in his fears and his painful memories. Will took hold of his shoulders, thinking on the calming things of sunlight on bright summer days and Full Harvest moons during autumn.

           He felt a trickle of calm, of comfort as he imagined a full moon above them, restoring them and invigorating them. The image above was fixating for the boy, and he gaped up at it with glazed, wild eyes. His breaths heaved, mouth gaping. His cleft palate somehow made it look wider. Will Dreamed away the bile that they sat in. He Dreamed them eons away from the pit below.

            In their shared dream, he wrapped his arms around him and imagined them safe, protected from harm and fury alike. He imagined their peace, a serenity as all was made to fall quiet, calm in the silence. The boy didn’t hug him back, but he didn’t push him away, either. After a few moments passed, he let go.

           “They’re just dreams,” Will assured him, thinking of his nightmares. “They can’t hurt you.”

           “The best dreams can,” the boy murmured. His voice was ragged from his crying. “The best Dreamers know how to make the dreams so real they hurt.”

           “Did that happen to you?” Will couldn’t help but ask. “Did someone Dream the pain?”

           “Yes.”

           “Are they still here?” Will wondered. He stomped down his own trickle of fear.

           “No,” the boy assured him, and wide eyes looked from the moon in order to pierce Will with his glazed stare. “No. I Dreamed that they died, then they did.”

           Will was so startled by that admission that he was back in his room with his walls up around him before he could think to try and understand further, to confirm whether or not that’s what he actually means when he said that he dreamt their death.

           His eyes, honest and forgiving, had pierced through Will, branded him with something.

           “Are you still there?” the boy asked softly through the wall.

           “Yeah.”

           “…Good,” he said, and Will heard the creak of the mattress, a soft thud as the boy leaned against the wall between them and rested his head against it. “Good.”

           Will had nothing to say to that. He thought to ask further, but the admission given in of itself was so staggering, so personal that to beg for more felt sordid. His guilt churned, but he set it aside.

           “Thank you,” the boy murmured into the space between them, so quiet he barely caught it.

           Will turned his head, ear pressed to the wall, and they slept like that for the rest of the night.

           The next morning, he went to the dorm room next to his, but there was no one there. He thought to maybe tell his teachers or the agents about the boy with the dreams and the scissors, but he didn’t want to concern anyone. It was clear he’d come from a place where people weaponized their gifts and used them against innocents –one of the Academy’s worst fears about the cruelty that empaths could have if they’re not careful. If he was new, he would learn how to control himself, how to overcome his traumas.

           When asked if he’d had a pleasant night’s sleep, Will said yes. Yes, he did.

-

           Dolarhyde’s file is thick.

           Will turns over early pages, his Marine Corp background before he went into the FBI. His tumultuous past regarding the constant shift between grandmother, mother, foster care, grandmother, then foster care again is jarring in the midst of medals, awards, and ribbons for his hard work and service in the military. His walls were strong, a Staff Sergeant noted in a report.

           He found the intel that no one else could.

           His progress through the FBI is the smoothest Will has ever seen –no hiccups, no lapses in behavior or in his abilities. He’s quiet, compliant, and willing to work.

           After, Purnell snaps him up, and that’s when things become interesting.

           His intel is thorough –he caught the potential RA before the EBAU had to step in. If you keep him focused, he knows what he’s doing.

           “Focused,” Will murmurs, and he studies the date. Years prior. When everything tasted sweet and full of hope, full of promise for this job where he could utilize his skills and keep the public safe.

           Six-month evaluation clean, mentions of his childhood but nothing concrete and clear. Just as close-lipped about it as he was at the academy.

           There, a small print out contains his admission to the academy as a teen, his quiet mannerisms as he refused to discuss just what he’d come from that made him wake in the night with a wet bed and terrors.

           He missed intel on the Keller case, expressed regret. Mentions of Graham being able to find them before people were hurt. Requested to speak with Graham about the mannerisms of the RA when he was brought in –request denied.

           Will frowned over that, his wanting to speak to him about Keller –an E-1 that was planning on setting off a bomb at the Pentagon.

           Six month evaluation clean.

           Six month evaluation clean.

           Six month evaluation clean.

           He skims through that, looking for any other mention of his name or anything remotely suspicious. It isn’t until the early year that he finds something of note, something that makes him pause with his breath bubbling in the back of his throat.

           Request to see therapist about loss of time.

           Will rereads that several times, his breath catching. Loss of time. Time lapsing, slipping through fingers, falling to the floor where he picks it up and can’t recall quite where he left off.

           He said he felt that time was slipping out of his hands, Reba had said.

Psychiatric Evaluation: Francis Dolarhyde

June 6th, 2017

Doctor: Hawthorne

           Patient exhibits lapses of time, waking in his bed with no memory of leaving work. Lack of spacial awareness at times, prone to quiet moments of reflection rather than speaking. Fear of doing job poorly, feelings of inadequacy. When speaking a hand lifts to cover the mouth.

           He’s becoming suspicious. He dreams of something called a Red Dragon.

           Will pauses over that, studying the capitalization of it. There’s a tab at the top of the page, followed by another tab of the same yellow color farther back. He turns to that page, intrigued.

           Red Dragon:

           Agent Yan –neutralized

           Agent Mathers –neutralized

           Agent Thompson –neutralized

           Agent Nyong –neutralized

           Agent Smith –neutralized

           Agent King –detained

           Beside Agent King’s name, there is a note that someone put, almost as an afterthought: Was able to evade Red Dragon and managed to reach out to police department to aid. Brought in by EBAU, currently residing at BSHCI.

           The word ‘neutralized’ resonates with him, as it’s a specific way of referring to a potential threat. The difference between neutralized and detained is a gaping chasm, one referring to someone being apprehended versus someone becoming something neither positive nor negative –neutral.

           Dead.

           Will only vaguely recalls these agents names, as they were not people he hunted down but people Dolarhyde watched –Red Dragon neutralized? People within the FBI or other government positions, people that were observed and found wanting.

           Agent Hobbs –neutralized via Agent Graham, E-3 –EBAU

           He goes to that tab at the mention of Hobbs, his spit turning rusty at the confirmation that neutralize means to end, to finish.

           Agent Hobbs observed. At the abduction of Gertrude, the first victim, Red Dragon was to neutralize after report. Instead, allowed RA to escape with victim. Case moved from EI to EBAU under Director Crawford and Graham –E-3.

           Six month evaluation clean.

           Clean? With a confirmed loss of time, he was still found somehow clean? Will turns back to the pages referring to Dr. Hawthorne’s reports on Agent Dolarhyde, moving on to the next session that was requested by Francis.

           Paranoia, questions regarding whether or not he watches or if he is the one watched. When asked on the particulars regarding the Hobbs investigation, an expression of fear that if he does not catch the next one fast enough, he will be neutralized. Agent Dolarhyde produced a notebook from cover to cover depicting every event and action that he can recall, as well as the time lapses in between where time was lost. Requests hypnosis, or anti-psychotics.

           There is a note attached to that, written in what Will recognizes as Purnell’s handwriting:

           Have Mr. Perkins release the proper medication.

           Agent Graham –observed

           He stills at his name, fingers passing over it so that he can better study and understand. He follows those tabs to Dolarhyde’s observations, written in a perfect and elegant penmanship.

           Evening: Dogs, dinner, reading, tinkering, sleep. Clockwork.

           Morning: Breakfast, dogs, shower, dogs, work.

           Work: Focused. Goes about business with a sense of urgency. Purposeful.

           Social: Non-existent.

           Mind: Cracked but resilient. Six month evaluation prior to Hobbs clean. Cracks began after Hobbs case began, attributed to pressure and matter of work. Request for lower hours or lighter load.

           Mind: Cracks. Sometimes he dreams that his daughter will leave.

           Target displays a quiet contemplation and pain after death of Hobbs. Request rest rather than counseling. He is tired. So tired.

           Time lost. Paperwork was filed on man I hadn’t reported on. Suggest paid leave for Graham before returning. Cracked but still good.

           These pills aren’t working.

           Beside that, there is a stamp with a spongy and speckled ‘Request Denied’ beside Will’s requested yet unrequested paid time off. Dolarhyde had requested that he had time to rest before he returned to work? Why hadn’t Jack suggested it to Will? He turns another page, heart pounding.

           Directive filed to retire Graham after next six month evaluation –Director Purnell

           There is another note, and he flips the pages to a blue tab. Written in Dolarhyde’s careful hand, there is a letter.

Director Purnell,

           I write this because there are people filed under my observation list that I see have been neutralized. When I looked into the matter of Agent Mathers, I’d documented that he should be retired. Public record displays him as such, but private documents when I was filing my work show him as otherwise. Are my observations being trumped by something that I’m unaware of?

           I’m still experiencing time lapses. This medication isn’t working. I’d like to request either vacation or sick leave until I can reassemble myself.

                                                                                                           -Agent Dolarhyde

 Director Purnell,

           Someone attempted to neutralize me last night.

           I don’t recall the situation in its entirety. I recall writing ‘I am being watched,’ but the next thing that I recall is waking up to blood on my hands and one of your men in my trunk. I have been trying to get help for my time lapses, but when I was attempting to research just what was happening to the targets that I filed under ‘retired’ I found a separate file that you have me under.

           Red Dragon? Is that who you refer to when I cannot find myself?

           He killed your man, Director Purnell. Whatever you’ve been manifesting and encouraging while I tried to fix it, he is much displeased with what you’ve done. In my dreams, he comes into my head and whispers that I should kill you.

           I think I’ll let him.

                                                                                                           -Agent Dolarhyde

           Will rereads those letters once, twice; on the third time, he leans back and lets out a slow, pained breath, tugging the gloves from his hands because he knows, he knows and it’s suddenly making so much sense as to why Francis Dolarhyde was placing mirrors in the eyes of these people –

           He just wanted someone to see.

           Can you see?

           He grasps the paper with his bare hands, his breath catching as he’s hit with a shock of fury, a shock of betrayal, and he’s falling into the memory before he can quite prepare himself, before he can peek through the windows like Abigail begged him to.

           The man is silent.

           I pace, steps graceful and lithe, although my hands clench so tightly I can scarce contain them. I both am and am not, both the victim and the aggressor. I snarl, smoke billowing from nostrils like the Dragon, powerful and all things destruction. In my Dreams, I see the smoke and know that it is true.

           “She thinks to end me?” I hiss, and I round upon the man. He is glued to the chair. To remove him would be agony for him, and the thought brings me joy, dark and all-encompassing as it burns through my skin, pushing farther with each beat of my heart. “She would end me when I have quieted those that would disobey?”

           “Agent Dolarhyde, you have exhibited RA tendencies. Director Purnell is merely-”

           “I KILLED FOR HER,” I roar, and I’m upon him, knees digging into his thighs. Spit flies from my mouth, and he cringes against the sound around him.

           “You killed for yourself. She merely encouraged it,” the man manages.

           “She sends a neurotypical to end me? After all that I have done?” I pace again, and I imagine my tail, sleek and long and powerful trailing after me. It is beautiful, scaled and deadly; everything that I am and could be.

           “You’re a danger to your own organization, Agent-”

           “Have you seen the power of an empath before?” I interrupt, and I turn about, staring at him. His voice withers, his eyes widening. “Surely you have not, try as your kind does to stifle us. We who struggle beneath the boot of your fears, taught that our gifts are to be despised, loathed. You have grown up in a world where we are whispers, servants to the government that would break us.

           “Francis believes that to retire, we allow them to go to their homes and their pensions and their happy ending. You and I know the truth; a dead empath is a neutralized threat. So comfortable were you all, banking on my compliance because I was allowed to shed blood and Make; to cross me is to fail. You will tremble in my power, for do you not see that only through your Change can I fully Become?”

           “Agent-”

           “Do you not wish to see the might of an empath that knows their worth?” I ask. I do not wait for an answer though, moot as it is. I will show him. “I have seen it. I am that power. That fury. You will tremble before me, knees to the ground as you quiver and beg, prostrating yourself before your God. I will show you.”

           I will show them all.

           I am grabbing his face before he can respond, before he can process just what is going to happen to him. Minds like his are weak, vulnerable to my power and capability, and I’m inside of his mind before he can think to defend himself, his eyes my own as I delve deep, deep, deep into the waterfall of thoughts, fears, and dreams.

           Oh, god; the dreams.

           I Create them, sick as they are. Rivers of blood that he drowns in, where he wakes trembling and paralyzed as a crone leers over him to consume –his fears are there, each and everyone, and as I crash through his psyche I Dream them all against him, breaking what paltry resistances exist because so foolish were they do bank so much on our fear of our own power that they never thought to try and control their own.

           The walls do not come for me. To consume them, I Become them, and as I step away, I carry his fears as my own. He is comatose, awake but never again to Be, unaware and never again to Live.

           Which is just as well, Director Purnell, as you will learn when you force a Feeler to glean from this paper this scene: he won’t live long enough to truly suffer that fate.

           I’m coming for you. You and every other that dared to cross Francis and The Great Red Dragon.

           Will is only able to come back to himself because of the sharp, piercing ring of the phone back in reality. He drops the paper and has to rub his palms into his jeans, shaking, and once he has sufficiently wiped them down he puts his gloves back on. He’ll need to wash his hands soon.

           He’s sweating, and he wipes at his hairline as the phone rings once more and Reba answers it, voice hushed as she tries to let him keep to his work.

           His work. Dolarhyde.

           “No…no, no one is in here,” Reba says, politely confused. “You know that I work well alone.”

           He’s running out of time. Will hears the mild evasion in her voice, and he shoves Dolarhyde’s file aside so that he can look at his own, his heart beating both too slow and far too fast as it struggles to be both Dolarhyde and him, both excited and utterly, utterly afraid. He licks his lips, unable to quite remove the taste of what someone else’s mouth feels like when he’s ripping it off of their face. The pride. The joy.

           God, the joy.

           “No, Mr. D hasn’t been here for work in…well, I’d say a little over a month?” There is a laugh. “Why are you asking all of these questions?”

           His file is much thinner, and when he opens it, there is a pointed, pained silence as Reba falls quiet and his ears begin to roar.

           The first page, written in a familiar, precise handwriting, is all that Will needs to fully understand just what he’s going up against. He wonders what he’ll take away from it, should he press his fingers to these words instead:

           They know.

           “I see. Well, I’ll keep a look out.” There’s another laugh. “Yes, okay. Thank you.”

           There is a click as Reba hangs up, and Will turns the page in the file, palms sweaty as he stares at a blank page, then another blank page, then another. Dolarhyde had somehow gotten to his files.

           They knew.

           “Agent Graham?” Reba prompts tentatively. He looks up, the wavering green of the lenses giving her an ethereal look as she gazes in his direction, mouth pursed with unsaid words.

           “Yes?” he asks hoarsely. He clears his throat –it sounded far too much like Dolarhyde.

           “The front desk men…they say there are some agents looking around the place.” She shifts, hesitating with her next words. “Are you…are you in some kind of trouble? Is everything alright?”

           “They know,” he says, and it only takes a moment for Reba to catch on. Her face seems to fall in on itself, and she’s sinking into the chair next to her so that she can collect herself, mouth pressed to lips that no doubt wish to cry.

           “What are you going to do?” she asks, muffled. “For him? For…for you?”

           It’s a good question, and he packs up the files, tucking them into his bag. There aren’t a lot of options for him at this moment, stomach close to mutiny and lips savoring the taste of another person’s blood. One thing is for certain, though:

           Despite what all has happened, Dolarhyde is innocent.

           Will is innocent.

           That certainly didn’t mean they were safe, though.

           Can you see?