Who: Hannibal and Will What: Will wouldn't call it a session, but that's probably what it is. Where: Hannibal's office When: Recently Warnings/Rating: None really.
For once in his life there was nothing to do.
There was always something. Walking the dogs. Making lures. Reading. Thinking. Staring at the ceiling. Trying to figure out a killer, or a pattern of a killer. Talking to someone. Avoiding someone’s calls. Teaching. Arranging lessons. Rehearsing. Pretending he was in an empty room while he was in a room full of people (in an empty room). Driving. Fishing. Going to Quantico. Going to Maryland. Going anywhere that there was a work-relevant dead body. Talking to Crawford. Pretending he was listening when he wasn’t. Trying to untangle himself from whatever had gotten hooked in the back of his brain lately. Fighting insomnia. Seeing things that weren’t here. Hearing screams that never happened. Waking up without remembering falling asleep.
Now? Nothing. Sort of.
There were still things to do, but they struck him as pointless and improbable when half the reasons he’d do them were missing. And there were only so many times he could take the dogs out, especially with his time being as limited as it was. That first thrust back, that loss of control - hadn’t been enjoyable. He didn’t know how he’d get used to it. How anyone could, enough to willingly let it happen by going through a door.
Eventually, he gave up waiting around the house and started driving. Having spoken to Dr. Lecter, he knew there was at least one moderately familiar face around, and this was one that probably judged him quietly, in the professional way of psychiatrists, unlike absolutely everybody else. If they were in the same situation, then he could try and reason his way through it with help. And he wasn’t going to be looked at like he was crazy because the entire thing sounded insane. He had to give up the idea he was dreaming pretty early on, though.
It was getting dark by the time he got to the office. Quietly, he made his way up to the familiar door, hesitated, and then knocked rather than just walking in. My door is always open to you didn’t necessarily mean at all times. Will wasn’t about to interrupt him when he was with a patient.
The mind fascinated him in ways that nothing else could. The perceptions and associations that were bridged within the mind controlled and distorted one's reality and from a purely objective standpoint, enthralling. That's what made the appearance of Alexander, in his world of sand and bright lights, his mind of shadows and things left forgotten by the swell and sparkle of new things.
He did what was in his nature to do, and watched. The journals. Alexander's life. He was not compelling as Will was with his perfect empathy slowly tearing down the walls of his reason, but there was a deviation there, a break from the normal channels of thought that he still found interesting enough to watch.
To find out that Will shared in the same fate only added a layer upon his interest. How would Will react to the man he had? Or woman? The questions remained in the back of his mind as he saw his patients that day.
Stranger yet was the fact that Jack Crawford was missing from work. Hannibal did not know if Will knew of his wife's cancer or if that had something do with his disappearance, but it was a possibility.
Was it possible that Jack Crawford had been afflicted in the same way they had? It bore consideration, and with his last patient having left an hour ago, and his notes made on the session, he could finally consider things.
He had just sat down at his desk to begin drawing, as it cleared his mind, when he heard the knock. No one was due in at this hour, but curiosity had him standing up and going to answer the knock at the door. "Will. Please come in." He had extended the invitation to the other man to come by when he needed and he was glad to see Will take him up on the offer. Stepping back and out of the way, he held the door open.
For a few moments, Will hesitated at the threshold of the door. It wasn’t an unfamiliar place. He’d stepped through countless times before, usually when he was at his … almost at his worst. But it had never been under circumstances this bizarre, and even knowing Hannibal was stuck in the same situation didn’t make it much easier to consider talking about. Was he supposed to just … walk in, like everything was perfectly normal, and admit to his occasionally-psychiatrist that he thought he was stuck in someone else’s body most of the time? Even if it wasn’t thinking, it was knowing, and strong enough that it almost hurt to think about.
He stepped through anyway, silent in the face of the greeting. He looked around at the familiar walls of bookshelves, the sparse furniture, the occasional statues. Dr. Lecter’s desk with its notebooks and sketchbooks. Will felt the tension slowly seep from his shoulders as the memory of the place settled in. He was here, himself, right now, in this place. Nobody else.
“ … hey. Sorry. Thinking.” He pulled off his jacket and folded it over one arm, then dropped it over the back of the nearest chair. If he was going to be here he needed to at least try and be normal, or as normal as he got. After all, he’d come all the way out here. It’d be ridiculous to change his mind, turn around, and leave just because he got cold feet about discussing a potential mental issue with a psychiatrist who knew him and was moderately familiar with the way his brain worked. “It’s been a rough week.”
Only a week. sure as hell didn’t seem like it.
"It is quite all right." As he stepped past, Hannibal breathed in slightly, checking his scent. He had noticed it when things began to change for Will, when it became harder for him to tell reality from his empathetic state. The scent remained, fevered and sweet. He wondered how it affected Will's person on the other side, if it did at all.
Alexander's presence did not affect him. The playing he did interested him little, but the mind that created those multitude of fantasies, acting into a prescribed ideal while giving little of the truth away, that did pique his interest. That he seemed to be known by Alexander was of greater appeal and soon enough he would have his satisfaction.
But, that would all be later. Now he had Will in front of him and Will required his attention. "A rough week? Are you working on a new case?"
“No, no cases. It’s all pretty pear-shaped over there without Crawford around to give everyone orders.” And despite his technical legal authority to be there, Will still felt uncomfortable walking in there. People there knew he wasn’t real FBI, just a skilled and lucky intruder on their territory, so he stayed away unless there was an emergency. So far there hadn’t been. “But it’s been a week since this … since I woke up in someone else’s head.” It was so bizarre to say out loud. “It’s not a first-time experience I’d like to repeat.”
He considered a drink, then stopped considering it. On the other side of the door there was enough alcohol consumption to kill a horse, or at least seriously impair it, and anyway he wasn’t really in the mood right now. That would probably just make things worse.
“Has it been different for you?” How could it be? The loss of control had been suffocating.
Without Crawford, they would be as a horse without a master, directionless until a new master could be found. It could be bad, it could be good for him, he would have to wait to reserve judgement. And in the meantime, what of Will? Jack pushed him as all masters must, not with a whip but with barbed spurs into the sides of his mind, digging ever closer to a place where Will could not return from.
It was exquisite to watch. Angels in Heaven could not be lovelier to his red tinted eyes, like thinnest blood on freshly cleaned windows. "He tells me that he finds me a very respectable fellow and I find him to not be deficient." If he had woken in another's mind, in someone that had no personality or a bumbling, fumbling idiot's mind, it might have been different. He might have found it as distasteful as Will found his circumstances.
"I rely on my patient's to tell me what they see, how they feel, what and how they interpret their reality. Seeing it through another's eyes, seeing it as he does, is an invaluable experience."
‘Not deficient’. That was an interesting way to put it. Probably high praise from Hannibal, thought Will, though he didn’t voice it. It sounded almost like a compliment. Backhanded but there nonetheless. He grimaced at the description the doctor gave of his take on the situation … well, of course someone who focused so strongly on the mind would find this interesting, rather than the claustrophobic situation it was for Will. He couldn’t take it personally. He shook his head and folded his arms across his chest.
“I can see that,” he half-agreed, not sounding sullen but maybe a little distant. “I think. But you’re saying it’s not … confining? At all?” You don’t feel trapped, he wanted to ask, like your leg’s in a bear trap and all you can do is wait to see what finds you first? Which was probably overdramatic, so he didn’t say it out loud. It wasn’t like he was confined to a hospital bed, open prey for vengeful serial killers. Someone else’s mind was at least … moderately safe. Sort of. “It’s not that I don’t like this guy, but this isn’t … it’s not … ”
A pause. The right word sounded stupid as hell right now, but it was the only word he could come up with at the moment.
“Not normal,” he finished, flatly.
Hannibal listened to the words coming out of Will. What a person chose to say first, before they thought to edit themselves tended to be the most truthful. Even with Will, who amended his statement with that flat 'Not normal.'
It was not about liking the other person, it was about sharing his mind with someone else. It was constricting in sharing a body, the division of time between his world and Alexander's. But Will did not like having another in his mind, barely tolerated his analysis, having someone else he was forced to share with was likely unbearable.
"Nevertheless, it is the situation we find ourselves in. Does he know you as you know him?" Or was it the fear that who Will had would know his thoughts in a way that Will never wanted his thoughts known? It had taken time and acceptance from Will, Will's perception of acceptance from him that finally gave him the best view into his mind. It would likely take as much time if not more for him to be comfortable with this person.
Nevertheless. A good word, Will thought glumly. Dismissive and conceding all at once. The situation was bad, but nevertheless … he started to pace across the room, moving his hands to his sides, his pockets, thumbs catching the belt loops on his jeans. It was almost a nervous habit, if he’d ever been prone to it before. It looked like it.
“He knows I’m here,” he said, “but not … we don’t talk.” Will didn’t even know if that was possible. He could hear the other guy’s conversations like they were his own, so this conversation had extra ears in the walls. It was not a pleasant thought. “I think he’s used to this. It’s happened to him before. I’m just another link in the chain to the hotel.” Was it him that felt so much vitriol toward the place, or Aiden? It was hard to tell, and that made him pull his hands out of his pockets and lock them behind his head as he stared out one of the windows in the office.
It was dark and cool outside, he could tell, even in the summer heat. It made Will want to go outside and just sit on the grass for a few hours. Clear his head. Clear it completely.
“If he’s listening to whatever I think about,” he said, quietly, “then he’s not talking about it, and that’s not a lot of comfort.”
Hannibal was silent as he watched Will pace, the movements that signalled his discomfort. It was only when Will was comfortable or when there were no barriers left that he stilled and sat and remained there. He moved as his thoughts moved, mental barriers fighting to go back into place where Will wanted them.
"Would you prefer it if he talked to you?" Hannibal asked as he sat in his chair, still except for what turning of his body was required to keep his focus on Will. For Alexander and he, Hannibal had to rely on what Alexander showed him of his world, his life. It was most like opening the door and on the other side was another's life, watching as it played out. When the door was shut, he knew nothing of Alexander.
It worked much the same when Hannibal was in control, but he showed much less of his life. There were some things that Alexander did not need to know about and things that he would not share.
“I don’t know. Maybe. But then I’d know I was actually crazy, because I’d be hearing voices.” Will said it with an empty grin and a tone that could ostensibly be considered amused, but it was barely funny to him, considering his recent worries and restless nights and … things he’d heard, out in the streets and empty fields. “Maybe it’s not as bad as that. Feels like it should be.”
But if they talked, then he might be more comfortable sharing his brain with someone. It wasn’t as if he had to listen to the litanies of a psychopath, just the normal, everyday busywork of someone who had a straightforward job and a total lack of social niceties. Hell, the latter half could describe him, too.
“Do you know how to shut yours out? Keep him from paying attention, or listening, or anything?” Because that would be nice to know. He could have some time to himself. Guaranteed privacy to think about nothing, or at least nothing he wanted known.
"Not if you are hearing only one voice," Hannibal clarified. Many thought that hearing one voice meant that they were crazy, but it was a multitude of voices that indicated an illness of the mind, a break in normal processes. And Hannibal knew his mind well enough to know that Alexander was no creation of his.
But then there was a question of how. Should he tell Will how to do the same things that he had done to limit their knowledge of one another? Would Will be capable of it in his current state? He did not like that whoever Will had was privy to things he was not -- better to remain Will's sole confessor of all his mental demons.
Yet, for him to establish some stability in his mind might have unintended consequences that Hannibal had no desire to create. "The connection is different for everyone. My connection to him will be different than yours. Have you tried asking him?"
Will gave Hannibal a skeptical, and possibly a little critical, look at the one voice comment. One voice didn’t mean he was crazy? It was meant as a reassurance, he knew that much, could tell it even as far off the social capability scale as he was, but it still almost felt like a slight. Like the man knew about everything else and was leaving a question mark at the end of the sentence for Will to feel even more doubt about.
-- christ, he was getting paranoid. Hannibal wasn’t trying to make any jabs, he didn’t even know about half the things Will was dealing with because he’d made a decisive point to not tell him even if that was the worst move he could make. He looked back down at the floor and then out the window again before turning and starting to make another circuit across the room.
“No. Like I said, we don’t talk. I don’t know if we can. The most I get is thoughts, and I can’t push through to ask any questions.” Nor were any being passed over to him. There wasn’t even a headache. “It would be time-consuming and awkward to try and communicate by leaving notes. Maybe this is enough.” Maybe overhearing all this would mean courtesy enough to look away and stop listening, but he couldn’t trust it as a guarantee.
"It is too time consuming to ask him to look away?" Hannibal countered, curious. While writing notes for long conversations could be as time consuming as Will suggested it was, did Will not find it worth that time for his own peace? Interesting. The lack of desire to spend time on it was telling of an upward, manic cycle. There wasn't enough time, wasn't enough stillness, rapid, rabbit leaping of thoughts, sharp, jerky movements.
Will teetering on the edge between sanity and that open void within him that allowed him to see within the minds of killers. He said they did not talk, they received thoughts, if his man on the other side received them in the same manner that Will did. "If it does not, will you write him letters? Tell him in your own words what you want?"
Yet, keeping them divided was in his best interest. Relationships evolved and changed over time, he knew he could expect the same from his connection with Alexander, but he wasn't ready to part with Will yet. There would come a time, eventually, when Will would place himself between Hannibal and his freedom and then Hannibal would have to remove him, but it wasn't yet time for that.
Will thought: It might be and he might not care. But what he’d picked up from sulking in the back of someone else’s mind hadn’t been bad impressions. They were normal, and almost alarmingly so. No serial killers and no deranged pressures trying to push him one way or the other. If he was as normal a person as he seemed, then it seemed more likely than not that he’d politely shut his eyes and cover his ears when Will wasn’t interested in him listening in.
A little tension eased out of his shoulders, and he stopped pacing. Too much paranoia was bad for pretty much everything. Will wished he had something decisive to do with his hands and kept them in his pockets.
“One or the other might work.” A letter would at least be solid, something to pass through the door. He just had to hope it didn’t disappear between thresholds. “I guess they have to, eventually. Otherwise nobody stuck here would have any peace and quiet.” And secrets, he didn’t say. “I’ll let you know if it does, and … you tell me how yours is working out, if that doesn’t get into bad territory for you.”
Will had no idea what kind of person Hannibal was dealing with, but doubtless he’d be able to handle it even if the guy (or girl) was a crazy person. Psychiatrists were experts in the mind. It was just another mental world to go through, he supposed.
The letter writing would be optimal as it would not provide a deeper look into Will's thoughts than his person already enjoyed. The mere thought that someone else came unbidden into them was enough to have Hannibal gritting his teeth for a moment, a slow grind of bone and muscle before the tension in his jaw ceased. No one should have such unreserved (undeserved) access to Will's thoughts.
Just as no one had unreserved access to his thoughts. The only person that had come close in recent years was Doctor Du Maurier, but he was not completely honest with her. And certainly not to any of his patients, but Will was not the typical patient. He considered, weighing the options, the possible outcomes before he began slowly, "They might like the attention. Mine is content to let me have my privacy."
A small tidbit, an offering of his own world in exchange for his prying into Will's thoughts. "You must find what works for you. The form of communication does not matter as long as you both find it beneficial." There were meditative practices that could help Will that Hannibal was not going to volunteer -- he wanted to see where Will's mind would take him with minimal guidance from him.
Attention. From what he’d gleaned watching the relatively dull life on the Vegas side of the door, Aiden was not an attention-hungry sort of person. Which was a benefit here, he supposed. Curiosity alone wasn’t going to drive him to try and listen in on important conversations. He still didn’t fully trust the guy - as if Will fully trusted anyone at this point - but … right. He’d try what Dr. Lecter suggested, and see what happened next. He’d get the letter written before going back to Vegas.
“Right. It’s … yeah. I’ll find something solid.” He tried to relax a little more. “Thanks. I mean it. I appreciate you seeing me on such short notice, Dr. Lecter.” Now that he was a little less distracted, concerned, generally anxious about the whole affair (and more than a little paranoid), it was easier to see that maybe he’d been close to overreacting. It was interesting, the calming effect of a place like this and a person like Hannibal just listening and offering careful advice. That was the point of psychiatrists. Had always been. Had been even through to now. “I should probably head out. Don’t want to interrupt your schedule … and the dogs need to eat before I leave.”
Leaving. Whole new meaning to the term, now. Will finally pulled his hands out of his pockets and headed toward the door.
"Of course." He stood when Will removed his hands from his pockets, advice delivered, calm beginning to hold sway instead of panic. There were no longer those rapid movements, the wild pacing that indicated more about Will's emotional state than his words would allow, instead his actions showed his determination. It was enough to please Hannibal, a faint tilt of his chin up, a deeper curve to his mouth, and if Will succeeded, it would distance him and the man he had.
Will's mind was somewhere he was unwilling to share with anyone. "I am your friend, Will. I'm here whenever you need me." Smoothing down his jacket so it fell again in clean, smooth lines, he stepped towards the door to let Will out to the public reception room. "My office and my home are always open to you."