Will had been ready to hit that icy water and the rocks at the bottom of the cliff. He had accepted it. It was a necessary consequence for his choice to finally embrace what Hannibal had known was inside of him all along. Because he really had embraced it. He’d never felt more alive than he had in those violent preceding moments, and that black blood in the moonlight-so much of it it was impossible to know what blood had belonged to him and what had belonged to Hannibal or Dolarhyde- was the most painfully beautiful thing he could ever remember witnessing. He was finally truly on the same page as Hannibal, and that meant that they both had to go. So he’d done the only thing the last vestiges of his conventional morality could think of. Pull that horrible brilliant man with whom he was so inextricably linked into an embrace, then hurl the both of them off the ledge.
He didn’t know if they would die instantly or wind up drowning after surviving the initial fall, but survival was not an expectation. So when he found himself opening his eyes to the empty lobby of a hotel, he was initially taken aback. His body was on autopilot as he assessed his unsettling lack of injuries and picked up the ringing phone in a daze. What he heard was absurd, but who was he to argue with the logic of what he was swiftly deciding was some form of afterlife?
This assumption was seemingly confirmed when he found himself wandering outdoors in a further attempt at getting his bearings and found himself staring at the back of a person he recognized immediately, even without seeing his face. He stood there for several long moments, just staring at the back of his head, then slowly made his way over to stand beside him. He should probably have been more worried about retribution for what he had done, but he felt no fear whatsoever as he took in the view that Hannibal seemed so enamored with.
“Is this a dying hallucination or purgatory?” He asked finally, voice very calm in light of their surreal situation. “I can’t entirely decide.”