Chapter Text
Pattern Break
1.
With the Chesapeake Ripper stepping forward to claim his kills, the case against Will unravelled like a child's cat's cradle, guts trailing everywhere. Will emerged from the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane a man unmade – his life in shreds, his few stable relationships on the verge of being swept under by his actions and the media frenzy following his arrest. Everything around him was in limbo.
Yet he'd never felt more stable.
He felt as though he was leaving the fractured parts of himself behind, crushed into the corners of his dark cell in the basement of the psychiatric institution. Let the Chiltons of the world make of the pieces what they wished: it felt good to discard a skin Will felt he no longer needed, now that he'd already been stripped to the marrow of his bones.
Jack was waiting for him in the BSHCI's visitor hall, leaning against the handrail of the stairs with a nonchalance Will could see at a glance was a front. Bedrock, indeed. “You need a ride?”
Will slowed his step. Now there was an olive branch if he'd ever seen one. “I was going to call a cab.”
“We found Miriam Lass. Alive.”
Will wasn't as shocked as he might have been, expecting by now to have curve balls thrown at him every other minute. “You catch the Ripper?” Jack shook his head. “How is she, Miriam?”
“Traumatized.” Jack, hands in his pocket, slowly walked toward Will. “Miriam thanked me after we found her. Thanked me for not giving up on her. But I had. I had given up on her, and I gave up on you, too. I thought she was dead. I thought you were crazy. And I gave up on trying to find the both of you.”
It was likely as much of an apology, an admission of guilt, as Will was ever going to get from Jack. It grated. “You didn't have to find me, Jack.” He rapped his knuckles against one of the ugly, dehumanizing cages in the visitor hall, moving around and past the other man. “You just had to listen to me.”
He'd made it to the stairs when Jack's voice rang out. “I put Miriam in a room with Hannibal Lecter. She stated definitively that he is not the Chesapeake Ripper.”
Of course she would. Hannibal was never going to leave a witness to his crimes without some fail safe in place, some ulterior motive. Miriam Lass had been found because he'd wanted her to be found. Briefly, Will wondered what fail saves Hannibal thought were in place for him. Then he marvelled quietly at his own nonchalance, rolling that thought around for a bit. He wasn't bothered by it. What more could Hannibal do to him that hadn't been done already? “That definitive enough for you?”
“No. It wasn't.”
And here was the moment when, weeks, a lifetime ago, Will Graham would have asked to see the crime scene, the place where they'd found Miriam. He could see it clearly now, the way he'd willingly offered himself out of a desire to save lives. Saving lives felt good, and the knowledge of having done well, of having defeated and brought to justice yet another monster, had helped him resist the pull of every serial killer anchoring a piece of themselves in his mind.
That Will Graham was gone. While a small part of him felt vindicated that Jack, at least, now seemed to consider Hannibal a viable suspect in the Chesapeake Ripper case, a far larger part stomped its foot childishly. They would have let him rot. If the Ripper hadn't claimed his kills, and with Beverly dead, the FBI would have let Will rot in his cell. That was a bitter pill to swallow.
“I need evidence,” Jack said.
“Well,” Will resumed his pace up the stairs, toward freedom, “good luck with that, then.”
He imagined it was shock that kept Jack from calling after him.
*
Will took a cab to Wolf Trap. When he got out of the car, his front door opened and his pack of canine companions came bounding toward him. He dropped to his knees, a small, tight knot in his chest unfurling. God, he'd missed them.
Alana appeared in the wake of Will's dogs. “Welcome home.”
“Thank you.” He was stroking backs, flanks, enjoying the tails wagging, the happy whines, the wet, rough tongues on his cheeks and hands. A dog's love was unconditional, untainted. There wasn't much left in his life that hadn't been tainted beyond salvation, and it felt good to bask in something pure. “Thank you for looking after them. They seem happy.”
“Happy to see you.”
There was a dog among the pack that Will didn't recognize. “Who's this?”
“Apple Sauce. She's mine.” Alana waded into the dog pack, readying a leash. “She likes apple sauce. I rescued her.”
“Picking up some of my bad habits?”
“Picking up your good habits.” Alana looked at him. “You challenged my whole framework of assumptions about the way you are. The way I think you are.”
Suddenly the atmosphere between them matched the cold, wide fields surrounding Will's farm. “Oh, the way you think I am isn't always a reliable guide to who I am.”
“I was wrong about you.”
“Because you didn't believe me? Or in me?” Will spread his arms wide, shrugging. He was smiling, but it felt wrong on his face, as frozen as the snow under the soles of his boots. “Because you let me question my sanity? My sense of reality?”
“Because you tried to kill Hannibal.” Alana wasn't smiling. “You're wrong about him, Will.”
Alana knew how to choose her words. She wasn't aiming to hurt him, Will could tell, simply telling him the truth as she saw it. That didn't take the sting out of the verbal missile. He knelt again, petting Winston. “You're wrong about him, Alana. You see the best in him. I don't.”
“What was done to you doesn't excuse what you did. Are you going to try to hurt Hannibal again? Is he safe?”
The urgency in Alana's tone of voice struck a chord in Will. He glanced up at her. Realisation dawned in increments, along with a hefty dose of ugly jealousy he swiftly suppressed. So that's how it was. The smile slipped from his face. “From me, or for you?”
Alana didn't answer. That, in itself, was an answer.
Between the jealousy and the blow to his ego, Will felt curiously calm. Love made blind to the faults and abysses in loved ones. He was a shining example of that trope, opening up to Hannibal Lecter like he had never opened to anyone, trusting the man to help him, all the way until the truth had been screaming in Will's face, undeniable and rank. Even now, his feelings for Hannibal were conflicted, rapidly ping-ponging back and forth between genuine affection, a sense of security, of being cared for, and hate, disappointment, abandonment.
Really, he couldn't blame Alana. It wouldn't be fair to her. Hannibal was good at what the did – too good, good enough to fool even Will Graham, with his 'empathy disorder' that allowed him intimate insight into the minds of killers, practically, literally let him step inside their heads. Hannibal had pulled the wool over everyone's eyes. He'd been right under Will's nose the entire time, and Will hadn't seen him until it was too late.
Until now. He saw Hannibal now. Saw what he was.
Will rose. Alana was still expecting an answer, her mouth tight with disapproval. That...hurt. Will had been vaguely in love with her for almost as long as they knew each other: a schoolboy's crush shattering against harsh reality, a pleasant, half-imagined possibility denied fruition. Now she was looking at him with concern, but it wasn't concern for him. Beneath the crisp, cold winter air, he smelled a burnt bridge, acrid and tarred; in his hand, he felt the match.
Will gave her the answer she wanted to hear. “He's safe. From me. You're all safe from me now.”
He called his dogs and headed for the open front door to his house. Alana's gaze was burning a hole into his back, but he didn't turn. He should warn her, tell her to stay as far away from Hannibal Lecter as possible, but to what end? He'd been pointing fingers at the other man for so long now, it felt redundant to do so again, when it was clear his words would fall on deaf ears.
Will was done fighting windmills.
*
Jack left him alone for a week. By the time the call came Will had composed and sent his resignation letter. There hadn't been any word from the officials at Quantico about a possible reinstatement either as an FBI consultant or a lecturer at the Academy; Will made it easy for them, spared them the trouble. He was due a rather hefty reimbursement for unlawful imprisonment, so money wasn't an issue, and if it became one, well, there were always boat motors. It wasn't like he was living the high life, anyway.
Jack called late in the afternoon on a Wednesday. “I need you,” he said without preamble, without greeting. “I know you feel wronged, and I get that you want to spend some quality time out there in the middle of nowhere moping, but I need you.”
Will wouldn't call what he was doing 'moping'. He was reacclimatizing himself with the concept of wide open spaces, the absence of bars, the freedom to do as he wished. When he wasn't taking long walks with his dogs, he was fixing up his house and sorting through his belongings. The FBI forensics teams had left a mess behind when they searched for physical evidence in the wake of Abigail's disappearance, and though Will could tell someone had cleaned up – Alana? – he felt it was time for a more thorough inventory of the paraphernalia of his life, or what was left of it.
It was time to throw out the old, the useless.
He was sitting on the floor in front of the bookcase in his living room, the dogs snug against him, between stacks of books and journals. He wasn't surprised Jack was calling him – the curious case of a woman found inside a horse was all over the news.
“You don't need me,” he told Jack. “You have the best and the brightest working for you. Let them earn their pay and contribute.”
“No one contributes the way you do, and you know it. There are lives at stake, Will.”
“There will always be lives at stake. The last few times I contributed, I ended up contributing myself all the way into the loving care of Doctor Chilton. That's not a mistake I'm anxious to repeat.”
Somewhere in the background of Jack's heavy sigh, a horse was whinnying. “Just take a look. One look. That's all I'm asking. We can do this one off the books. No one needs to know you came.”
“Sorry, Jack. Not interested.”
A few seconds of silence passed. Someone was speaking to Jack, too softly for Will to identify them. Then Jack said, “I don't accept your resignation, Will,” and hung up.
There had been a definitive echo of 'this isn't over yet' to Jack's words, and some part of Will wanted to go out there and find the person who'd stuffed a corpse into a horse. As much as he hated the side effects of his 'gift', he had always been fascinated by them, these people who spat on all morality and acted out their fantasies and urges because they wanted to, because they had to. In the sea of dull mankind, they stood out like pillars of swirling darkness, iron to the magnets in his mind.
Just as he must have appeared like a pillar of something to Hannibal. Not darkness, though, at least not then. Shades of grey, perhaps, in the reflective pieces of a personality capable of sucking up the worst in others like a sponge. Hannibal had worked tirelessly to coax those pieces to the surface, with a clinical, ice-cold kind of curiosity, and Will had let him, turning up for one appointment after the other, always on time.
The thing Will abhorred the most he'd given Hannibal a free pass to: access to his mind, and the keys to unlock him.
Wind him up, and watch him go.
Will was going to have to deal with Hannibal, sooner or later.
First, though, he was going to deal with the dead woman inside the horse and the mind who'd put her there.
*
Ironically, the press had little interest in an exonerated serial killer. The same papers that had printed front page articles about Will Graham, Copycat Killer, printed second or third page blurbs about his release and the dropped charges against him. Innocence didn't sell.
For the most part, Will was glad. He didn't need or want that kind of attention, least of all from Maryland's tabloid press. Freddie Lounds sent him an email, reminding him that he still owed her an interview, but refrained from resorting to her usual kind of semi-stalking tricks. She was likely very busy following up on the development of the 'Horse Hounder', as the latest perpetrator had been dubbed.
Will was thankful for the lack of attention to his miraculous release from the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Journalists shoving their recorders and microphones in his face would have seriously impaired his freedom of movement. One nightly visit to the Blackbriar Stables near Northwood, and he had a decent impression of the killer. It wasn't as easy as it was when the FBI's forensic team provided names and exact times and dates, but Will could make do if he had to. It wasn't always empathy, feeling his way into unfamiliar territory. A lot of it was deduction based on evidence: detective work, plain and simple, and Will had been a detective for far longer than he had ever been an FBI agent.
In order to pick the correct horse to fit into what had to have been a tight schedule, considering the amount of work involved in stuffing an adult woman into a mare's uterus, the killer had to have known the horse. He or she had to have been familiar with the layout of the stables and the working schedule of the people there. The killer had to have medical knowledge, too, enough to locate a mare's uterus while working under less than favourable conditions in a badly lit stable.
Will visited Blackbriar Stables a second time, during the day, when the Baltimore PD and FBI vans were gone. The proprietor, run ragged already and understandably concerned about what the media attention would to do his business of renting horses to tourists, didn't ask to see the FBI badge Will no longer possessed. An hour later, Will stood in a shabby barn at one of the outlying stations of Blackbriar Stables and met Peter Bernadone. He talked to him for three hours.
*
Peter Bernadone was a man infinitely more damaged than Will would ever be. Digging a corpse out of her grave, putting a live bird in her chest and then sewing her into a mare's uterus was an act that broke all kinds of taboos, not to mention laws, but Peter had seen it as an act of healing. He'd tried to undo the damage caused by someone else, in a way Will couldn't help but think of as innocent.
Will saw the parallels between himself and Peter – they'd both been betrayed by people they trusted – and felt immediately protective of him.
But not enough to step in and keep him from being arrested, when the FBI made the same deductions leading from Blackbriar Stables to the barn. Will read all about Peter's arrest on Tattlecrime.com, relieved when he learned that the man had been immediately transferred to a secure facility specialised in mentally ill criminals – not the BSHCI – and not a prison cell.
Behind walls and bars, Peter was safe from the monster casting its long shadow over him. The man responsible for Peter's attempt at healing, the real 'Horse Hounder', required more than simple police work to catch. Better for Peter to be safe while Will went hunting.
*
Three days later, before noon, Will returned home from a shopping trip to find Jack sitting on the front porch. The dogs were barking their heads off inside the house. Will lugged the heavy grocery bags out of the trunk and to his front door, greeting Jack with a nod.
“Strange thing,” Jack began, staring out across the snow-covered ground of Will's property, “that 'Horse Hounder' case.”
Will searched his pockets for his keys. “I heard you caught the guy. Congratulations.”
“I'm not sure we caught the right guy. We found soil in the first victim's throat, leading us to a site with sixteen graves. So Peter Bernadone killed sixteen women, then dug one back up and sewed her into a horse. Why her? Why not the others?” Jack rose, kicking snow from his boots. “The time line doesn't match up, either. Some of these women vanished while Bernadone was at the hospital months ago, recovering from a hoof to the head.”
“Really?”
Jack's gaze came to rest on Will. “Did you go to see Bernadone, Will? He says a man came to visit him, fitting your description. He also says he didn't kill any of these women, just that he sewed Sarah Craver into the horse because he wanted to help her. He says his social worker killed them.”
Will leaned against the door, hands in his pockets. “I went to see him, yes.”
“Why?”
“I was...curious. I wanted to see if I could still do my thing.” He smirked. “I was afraid I'd gotten a little rusty, locked away and all that.”
“And can you? Do your thing?”
“Yes.”
Jack stepped closer. Will could tell he was doing his best not to loom, to appear non-threatening, casual. It was so unlike Jack's usual in-your-face behaviour that it was comical. Will gave him points for trying, wondering at the same time if Alana or Hannibal had cautioned Jack about the way he approached Will.
Gentle, gentle. Don't spook the fragile teacup.
Jack said, “You could have helped. We could've found Bernadone a lot faster if you'd helped us.”
Will looked away, gaze on the horizon. “You found Bernadone the same way I would have, by looking at the evidence. My resignation is final, Jack. I'm not going back out there, no matter in what capacity.”
“Unless it's to make sure you're not rusty, of course,” Jack said shrewdly.
“Of course.”
“I see.” Nodding to himself, Jack burrowed deeper into his coat. “Well, then I guess you won't be interested in Clark Ingram.”
“Who's that?”
“Bernadone's social worker. The guy Bernadone claims killed the sixteen women. We've been trying to get a hold of him, but no luck. It's as if he disappeared off the face of the earth. Clocked into work the morning Bernadone was arrested, didn't clock in the next day.”
“Could be an admission of guilt. Maybe Bernadone is telling the truth. Maybe Ingram ran because he's guilty and Bernadone was just his fall guy.”
“Could be. We've issued an APB for him. I'm just thinking it won't do us any good.”
It was time to get to the real reason for Jack's visit. “You got something to say to me, say it. Don't fish around in the dark. You're better than that.”
Jack shrugged. “I'm not fishing. Just saying it's weird – you visit Bernadone, Bernadone points at Clark Ingram, and Clark Ingram's vanishes.”
Will looked him straight in the eye. “You think I killed Clark Ingram.”
“I don't know. Did you?”
“No. Want to search my property? Pump my stomach?” Will patted his belly, stepping forward. “Maybe you think I swallowed Ingram's ear, the way I -”
Jack held up his hands in a placating gesture. “Will, stop, I -”
“- swallowed Abigail's. Is that why you're here?”
Looking downright uneasy, like a man who'd poked at a snake's nest and now saw the cobra uncoil, Jack retreated, literally taking a few steps back. It was only then that Will noticed he'd moved right into Jack's personal space with every word. It was a weird feeling, knowing he'd made Jack back down.
Jack Crawford never backed down. He wouldn't have, before. Jack was good at intimidating people when he had to, a skill both rooted in his nature and refined over long years in a stressful job, handy when he needed results fast. He was a bully with enough good qualities to offset that particular character trait, and most importantly, aware of his tendency to strong-arm others. He knew how to push.
He also knew when to back down, like he had now. Will wondered just how broken Jack thought he was.
“I didn't come here to antagonize you.” Jack sighed. “I don't know why I came. So much about this is unresolved.”
“About me, you mean.”
“About everything. We still don't know how Abigail Hobbs' ear ended up in your stomach. Look, I'm not trying to browbeat you into rejoining the FBI. I accept that you want to quit. But don't you want to know what happened? The Chesapeake Ripper set you up. Don't you want to get back at him?”
Will knew what had happened. He knew exactly how Abigail's ear had gotten into him, who had shoved it down his throat. He also knew that trying to indicate Hannibal as a killer again was futile. Jack seemed to want to believe him, going by the conversation in the BSHCI's visitor hall, but Jack needed something concrete, evidence. Hannibal had eluded capture for so long; he wasn't going to start leaving fingerprints or hairs at his crime scenes now.
No, Will was going to deal with Hannibal Lecter on his own terms. The man deserved to reap what he'd so carefully sowed. He deserved to experience what he'd coaxed forth from the bottom of Will's soul, deserved to see the result of his machinations.
Jack mistook Will's silence for uncertainty. “Just think about it. Give me a call when you've made up your mind, all right? Don't be a stranger.”
Will nodded. He suspected they both knew that call wasn't going to happen any time soon, but if it helped to keep Jack away from him for a while, he'd play the part of the recovering victim. “All right.”
He watched Jack drive away. Then he gathered up his grocery bags and went inside. It was a nice day. Perfect for some ice fishing out on the lake. The dogs could use another long walk, too; they'd picked up on the tension between Jack and Will and were subsequently agitated. Winston kept butting his head into Will's thigh, asking to be petted.
Will packed away his groceries, humming to himself. His glance fell on his work bank: a perfect opportunity to test the lures he'd been working on.
*
The sky was just beginning to shade into a darker grey when Will returned from the lake. He saw the Bentley parked near his house and the man leaning on it long before Hannibal turned his head and watched him stalk through the knee-high snow.
When he reached the car, Will set down the bucket with the three trout he'd caught. Keeping his calm was harder than he'd anticipated now that he stood face to face with Hannibal. The desire to drive his fist straight into Hannibal's visage, to strangle him with his bare hands, was a physical compulsion travelling all the way down from his shoulders into his fingertips.
Will settled on a neutral, “Hannibal.”
“Good evening, Will.”
Hannibal didn't move from his comfortable lean against the Bentley. He was dressed in a long coat, a scarf snug around his neck, expensive-looking leather gloves on his hands. He was avidly looking at Will with an intensity Will would have found unsettling, even invasive, before. People, especially those in Baltimore's psychiatric community, had a habit of staring at him as though they were hoping to tunnel straight into his head.
How telling, then, that he was used to it coming from Hannibal. That he didn't mind.
The silence stretched between them. Hannibal broke it first. “I was waiting for you. You didn't come.”
It was Friday. Usually the day Will went to Chandler Square in Baltimore for his standing appointment. “I didn't think you'd appreciate my company. I sent someone to kill you.”
Hannibal nodded gravely but made no comment on that specific element of their past relationship. “Are you going to invite me in?”
A number of answers went through Will's mind, from giving in to the urge to murder Hannibal right where he stood, to telling him to get the fuck off of his property, to picking up his bucket and walking away without another word.
He knocked the tip of his shoe against the bucket, instead. “Do you know how to cook trout?”
“I do. I must admit, though, your kitchen was not properly equipped to my standards, last time I saw it.”
Ears in the sink, and all that.
“Oh, don't worry about that.” Will picked up the bucket. The trout in their shallow layer of water flopped and beat their tails as though sensing the fate that awaited them. “I've expanded. Let's go inside.”
Hannibal followed him, wearing a Mona Lisa smile.
*