Chapter Text
The ocean eats him, and doesn’t let him from it’s maw. Salt scours, brine chokes, and the waves batter him to his core: edges weathered away to the smooth, dense truth. He is a human animal clawing at life.
Water is mass and force, heaving like a sick dog, and it takes everything away: no ground, no horizon, no direction, no name or past or anything save the sharp breaks of air. The ocean is, and the man is not. Eons pass without rest.
Finally she rears and spits the remains onto hard sand, rolling and dragging over the pulp. Everything is dark and wine-soaked in the dawn. Wet ground pushes up as the waves drag him back, and he is too tired to fight when the water breaks over him again. Barely conscious, the ocean pushes him idly up the beach until he stays there.
The sun rises, and burns his arms and legs, his back feeling sticky and heavy like too many layers of coagulating blood. The foamy water occasionally breaches his dry mouth. He is not quite conscious, only aware of the aching heaviness of living.
A shadow moves over him, and in that brief respite from the flaming sun, the first switches turn on. He is not alone. He tries to turn his head to the right, but his body is not obeying. Baked in salt. Move.
“Breathe,” his company says.
He does; he wasn’t quite before. It’s difficult for his chest to fully expand. But oxygen gets into his blood and pumps through his body, and at last, he can move his head, like twisting a rusty screw. Eyelids break from their chrysalis.
White loafers greet him on the blistering sand. Hannibal wears a cream suit, like he wore in the church. His visage comes with a burst of relief, and it’s not right, to be so relieved by the presence of this man.
“Crawl to the shade, Will,” Hannibal says.
Will doesn’t know why Hannibal doesn’t lift him from the shore, where his body is being flayed. He twists more, but Hannibal’s face is a shroud before the sun. Maybe he will leave him here to die. Maybe this is the last test: crawl if you want to live.
But Will is dead already. The cliffs saw him off and the ocean took him. They had to die.
Hannibal walks away from the ocean, and the sun blinds Will. He falls on his swollen, misshapen back. His chest is burning tight, but the ocean has taken all of his tears.
He is skinned, he is leadened, and Hannibal won’t even eat his dried-out husk.
Will turns back onto his stomach and stares at the wavering darkness: a dense green mirage that towers before a sea of white sand. He reaches out into the heat and digs his way forward. One arm lances pain through his body, but that wakes him up and he presses through it. The sand seems to cut and his muscles scream, but he crawls and crawls. If I reach the shade I can stop, he thinks over and over, hips and feet pushing his corpse along. If I reach the shade I can die .
The dark doesn’t seem to get closer. Will doesn’t stop, because if he stops he won’t be able to start up again. It feels like he’s digging his own grave and dragging his own corpse all at once, but if he stops the ocean will take him back and that fear is alive in him.
The dense green begins to resolve into form: leaves, stalks and trunks. The ocean beats behind him, always. Then, the ground is more solid beneath him, and he falls into the cradle of shadow.
Will doesn’t move, for a long while.
The sun has already peaked and bent away from the strip of beach by the time consciousness returns to him. His mouth is baked dry and his head is filled with a toxic, painful cloud which makes thought scatter away. Looking down upon himself he recognizes for the first time that he is wearing a life vest.
He didn’t have a life vest on before the fall.
Nor does he recognize the clothes he wears beneath, coated in sand.
He doesn’t know what happened after the ocean took them, but the thin-trunked trees that burst into vivid green above speak of someplace far from the Atlantic coast of the United States. He doesn’t know where he is, and not remembering triggers a panic. The life vest is too tight on him all of a sudden, and he fumbles at the buckles as he heaves like a fish out of water, adrenaline shocking an already battered body. He tears at the last strap with a choked cry and kicks at the ground.
Hannibal’s hand comes over his, and unbuckles the vest.
Will throws the damn neon-orange thing from him and curls around Hannibal’s ankles, gasping up at him. Will can see his face now that they are free from the direct sun, and he looks stern. “Find water, or you will die,” Hannibal says simply.
Will buries his face in Hannibal’s shoes and won't let go. Help me, he tries to say. But Hannibal slips from his grasp like water and disappears between the fronds, and Will is alone again. Despair creeps in.
Water. Just focus on finding water. He can do that. Will uses a nearby tree to climb to his feet, and leans against it for several minutes while the world tips around him. Everything feels off balance, like he doesn’t have his land legs back. Will takes tentative, barefoot steps forward onto the loam, and when his legs don’t give out, he moves deeper into the jungle.
It’s not easy to find water. Will has to stop every handful of minutes to catch his breath and ride out a wave of nausea. He walks between huge, flat leaves and tries not to trip over the twisted roots, the color of gone flesh. The jungle is loud and wet around him, buzzing and chirping with bugs and the calls of birds.
In the shadiest parts of vegetation, there is still condensation on the leaves. He sits down and laps at a the vein of a leaf as big as his torso, out of breath. He feels like he should remember something about this leaf but can't, and the frustration keeps him from standing again for a while.
It goes on like this for another eternity: walking through the jungle and pausing to sit with his dizziness and disorientation, licking the sweat from leaves until he can get up again.
He emerges first upon an inlet of the ocean, about 20 yards wide at the mouth, which disappears into a curve of the island’s body. Will goes carefully towards the shallow edge that plunges into the water, clinging to the snake-like trees. The water is clear and teal, and alive with fish—food will not be as difficult to come by here. If the inlet meets a body of freshwater, Will can follow it to a source he can drink; but it might just as likely end in a beach or more ocean. Will can’t see much of the island from here, or if there’s a mountain inland beyond the tall trees.
Elevation will mean more resources, he thinks, but he doesn’t know how long he can keep moving. There’s something wrong with him, either extreme dehydration or something else, but his mind is too foggy to piece it together.
Will sits down to catch his breath. His heart is racing and he feels over-warm. The water mocks him with its azurine beauty.
He wishes Hannibal were here, and doesn’t know why he doesn’t help him.
Everything blurs, bright and swimming.
In the church, Will stands at the altar beneath the cross and a fresco of deliverance. He is draped in sheer whites that glow, gilded in the light. In his hands a copper bowl swollen with blood.
Hannibal kneels before him in the blood of the dragon’s wings, basking in the wrath of his lamb.
Will pours. The blood cascades, slow, anointing Hannibal. Rivulets of crimson flow over his face, neck, and shoulders; and Will’s visage is the terrible beauty of angels.
Hannibal drowns, and loves, and drowns.