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"Why Abigail, Hannibal?" The words landed like a stone dropped on a frozen lake. It wasn't exactly an impromptu question, at least, not from Will's perspective.Although, two seconds after he said it, and Hannibal's slight raise of one of his eyebrows, he realised that maybe it was.He'd wandered into the study about five minutes from getting out of bed- around forty minutes from having woken up but being too meditative to pick himself up from the mattress-pressed himself into the doorjamb, and, whilst scratching a patch of stubble on his cheek, asked Hannibal a vague and immaculately painful question. He hadn't even spoken to him for the past two days; they slept on opposite sides of the bed. They refrained from touch. Random questions spun at inopportune times weren't new, in fact, they were expected. This one felt like a silver bullet that travelled between them both.The man in question only schooled his expression into one of open neutrality and put his pencil down. There was a long pause before he spoke. One of just looking."I had hoped this conversation would never arise." His gaze fell to the floor for a moment, then found Will's tired, scowling eyes again."Why?""It will be unpleasant. For the both of us.""All-- most conversations we have are unpleasant." Will noted, shrugging one-sidedly, and studying Hannibal as he sat back in his chair and looked away, as if settling into his presence in the room. He looked off into the middle-distance with glassy eyes like he was watching something Will couldn't see, something wounded. Will wondered if he was recalling memories, snapshots of white smiles, and wide eyes, and knife edges moving like birds wings; he wondered if Abigail ran through the corridors of his mind palace like Mischa had done, squealing and giggling, haloed in morning sunlight, birdsong.Sometimes, after all those years, Will would find her voice reverberating in his head, fresh and kind. She acted as a guiding light in the wells and crevasses of his mind, oftentimes replicating their time in Italy-- his time.It felt like she wanted reality, then, or she was in it, somewhere undiscovered. Sometimes she was in Will's reality, still.Until he would realise she wasn't."Why do you think I did it?" He tilted his head, eyes dark and hollow the same way they were under the stark lighting of his cell in Baltimore, gaze fixed and deceptively sly even when it wasn't on him, "I believe you can figure out the answer yourself, Will. You certainly know how." Was all Hannibal said when he looked up, adjusting the line of the pencil on the desk, clearly, with pathetic transparency, deflecting and avoiding. Will stared at him."I'd say as a punishment, but nothing you do is that simple." He crossed his arms over his chest, with the scrabbling claws of resentment itching between his ribs, "Was it because you couldn't control her? Did she know too much?" His words were clipped, tone viperous, but not genuinely angry. Hannibal looked down again.Silence dripped back between them like molasses. Perhaps the presence of the questions and the space they took up was what had Hannibal so quiet. Well, her presence.Will sighed and rubbed a hand into a gunky eye: "I am not vivisecting you. Again." He laughed a little, "And I'm not exhuming this.""It seems like you are.""I'm not." A pause."Are you sure?" His tone was clinical but his eyes were depthless."Yes." Will sighed again, and approached the desk to sit down on it, his back mainly towards Hannibal, "I want to understand it." In any other circumstance he wouldn't have allowed him to perch himself there, but he consoled that compulsion."Does that mean you didn't do so before you forgave me?" Will sighed again, "That's the second on the alphanumerical list, Will, 'understanding why'. Then comes rebuilding; letting go." He looked from Will's spine to the sharpened pencil beside him: "You've already thought about it.""I've thought about it." Will admitted, turning away from him, "I want to hear it from you."From half over his shoulder, Will watched Hannibal in his peripherals intermittently, trying desperately to predict whatever it was he was going to say. The man pursed his lips and folded his hands in his lap, thoughtful and, seemingly, apathetic."I regret it. More than most things in my life."Will gave the words distance before he answered, speaking as softly as he could: "I know that already.""I did do it to punish you. In the face of betrayal I hurt you as badly as you did me, but I don't reproach those actions." Will looked at him then, carefully like you would a dangerous animal."Is it really that textbook?" Will quipped, not joking.Hannibal inclined his head, "My main reasoning was protection. Making it all go away. It would protect her from herself: from becoming what I wanted of her; what her father wanted of her. She wouldn't have coped- not like you have." Will shifted like he'd been touched, "It didn't protect me- I was seen. The intention was pain, and it caused you that as much as it did me." His voice sounded weaker suddenly, "I view that with shame. Because she didn't entirely deserve that.""I deserved it." It sounded like a question but it wasn't clear whether it was or not. Hannibal clenched his jaw, tasting blood between his teeth."At that time: yes. But Abigail never provoked that, in me.""Then what did she provoke?""A feeling of fatherhood... Love. Family." Those words burned Will's chest, pushed him into tumbling through everything he'd lost and all the possibilities that could've been. He would have blamed Hannibal, if forgiveness hadn't have stepped in first, instead, dead children framed in crime scene tape and his own family portraits flitted behind his eyes. Will couldn't tell how he felt about it, so he fiddled with his fingers. Hannibal also looked down at his hands: "There's not a word for it. When you lose your parents, you're an orphan. A lover, a spouse: a widower. There's not a word for what you are when you lose a child.""What you are," Will considered, testing the words on his tongue and feeling them knock against his teeth: "You can't know what family is like. It must be an intangible concept to you." Not a question, and Hannibal recognised it as such."It's one I can vastly appreciate the appeal of." Hannibal countered, standing from his seat, avoided neatening the drawings, and came around the desk to lean up against it beside Will. Two orphans painted in a despaired daylight, identically different, "Was it intangible to you? Even when you had it?"Will hadn't expected that: "It was... secure. And nice.""Is that all it was?" Hannibal's tone sounded amused."I've found that it doesn't suit me--didn't. Never did. You should know that.""It didn't fit the mould, then: the reality of expectations normally don't. Human concepts of happiness and the ideals we have are exactly that; ideals. Ever optimistic that life will get better. They're terribly simplified.""It couldn't be like that for us. Not even with Abigail. Simplification doesn't adhere to our-- anything." He sighed again, harsh."I would've liked it to.""Liking something to happen only helps for a time." Will coughed once, swallowing back the lump in his throat with it: "Abigail was a lamb caught between wolves. Always was." Bitterness rose in his voice like bile."I wouldn't belittle her into such innocence. She was much more like us than we would want: hardly a lamb at all, spare her wrath." Hannibal looked at him with a humbled knowledge that Will felt shiver across his back, "Remembering her as she was is far better than revering her: Abigail Hobbs should never be sainted, nor worshipped. It would be unjust. She certainly wouldn't have appreciated it.""Nothing that happened was her fault. Not really." Hannibal would've challenged that if Will didn't give him a quick glance to decide him against it."A victim doesn't always deserve such idolisation.""I'm not idolising her. I cared for her like she was my own-- she felt like my own!" With her father plaguing his imaginings outside the boundaries of his nightmares played into that effect, but he need not remind anyone, particularly not himself. He breathed steadily, calmed: "Did you feel like Garrett Jacob Hobbs when you slit her throat?""Did you?" Will closed his eyes to rebuild what little restraint he had left from receding to a crumpled sob on the floor. That, or crushing Hannibal's jugular beneath his palms. He let the conversation dwindle for long, sweeping minutes, watching his hands shake and repeatedly ball into fists in front of him. His control admonished the pain, only enough, speech coming out hushed and mumbled, akin to whispering at a church mass."You knew her far better than I did.""I nurtured in her what I could, yes. I understood her. I wanted what's best for her, like I did you. Like I still do.""Killing her? That's what was best for her?" Hannibal acquiesced to that, genuinely unsure of where to look."Yes." Will's stomach went hot and coiled. He remembered the dreadful, weeping expression on her face; how she'd went to him and backed into his embrace like a dance, surely knowing what was coming. But he'd seen himself do the same moments prior.Her body bag was the same darkness that held him, tight and familiar, hiding him inside. Safe and sound. Her dead eyes blinked at him in his dreams, the same ones that sung of barbed wire in cats-cradles and the rooms coated red. Nightmares like that came almost every night for the eight months apart, before Florence, especially prevalent in his time in hospital, introducing a whole new breed of suffering into the mix.The noises she made as they faded into the tiled floor, Will's hand clasping at her neck futility, infuriatingly weakened by blood loss, gargling, spitting, and coughing. Those sounds linger on the air whenever he would wake breathing like a man drowned.He would've cried if that choking feeling came, but it didn't."I don't want to have to accept that." Will sighed, alleviating the ugly feeling that made his whole body feel stuffed with cotton wool."The truth can do more than just hurt," Hannibal averred, leaning back to sort the papers on the desk, sketches of Will from memory, head turned away or studies of his hands, accompanied by exquisite replications of Salone dei Cinquecento's artworks in Palazzo Vecchio, impeccably detailed: "We understand that more than most."Will breathed a laugh without humour in it, voice cracking, getting to his feet, "So did Abigail, thanks to you." He regretted the horrid words when they left his mouth, visibly wincing, and retreating in his eye contact. Hannibal merely adjusted his posture in consort with his anger, and exhaled gently to withhold it."I'm sorry, Will." The words fell on deaf ears, eyes tearing in front of him."You should've said that to her." He muttered, scarcely enraged anymore, but voice faltering. Will looked at him for a brief moment like he would kiss him, wet lost eyes and soft bed-hair lovely, like something out of a painting.But he didn't. And walked out, leaving Hannibal alone again. In the company of the dead.