Inferno (Hannibal's Influence), Chapter One.

One.

Night at the Graham house, Wolf Trap, Virginia. Masses of crickets chirping accompanied the otherwise still air that one would expect for such a warm August dusk; the noise from the bugs almost covered the sound of crunching gravel under Graham's pickup's tires as he pulled into the driveway after another long day at the hospital.

It was months after the injury -- he thought of it as the incident -- and physical therapy, combined with properly dosed medication, was chipping away at the remnants of what the stitches held closed. He was, if nothing else, healing. But beyond that, there was no word about Hannibal Lecter, or what he had done, even between Will and Jack Crawford. Late at night, around this time in fact, he could be honest with himself and admit that he'd expected the silence, the subtle excommunication of Lecter from the ordinary world. He could live with Lecter gone from his view.

But he couldn't live with Lecter in his head.

Not when Graham had met the darkness and found it so warm and welcoming, not when he had taken -- even for a moment -- those shadows into his heart. Not when he had put those newfound feelings aside and betrayed them, betrayed the darkness, and been punished for it. Rightly punished, the thought pierced him. He shivered in the balmy air.

The chills he felt from remembering bits of that night were a challenge Will did not expect to overcome.

Not without Hannibal.

Graham opened the door quietly and his seven dogs did not group up to greet him. Will had needed to give them away, all except Winston, after remembering what Hannibal had fed them...what Mason had fed them. But Winston was not here either; he was dead. Will had seen to that. It had been in the windy nights of March, when Winston's scratching at the door had sounded too much like a whisper, and before Will had learned to lock his guns away at night. That little gravestone out in the fields marred the land as much as a forest fire; the mound was a foot high at its apex, but in Will's nightmares it was a mountain. Perhaps that memory could be suppressed with enough effort. He didn't know.

Waking himself from the recollection, Graham stepped into his house and was soothed a little by the air inside; the bottle of whiskey he'd brought home was also helping. Will grabbed a second bottle to chase it, a different brand, from the shelf by the door that had once held happy things, and started to strip off the crisp suit he had been stuck in all day, setting free his unhealthy, pale flesh, and showing off the shiny scar to the emptiness of the house. Along the walls, more emptiness: liquor bottles reflecting their kindred in rows, the kaleidoscopic effect showing a thousand times the sailboat marking on the bottles of cologne Will would never wear again. The scent, now, made him break down, and he didn't know what would form itself together in his place should he crumble.

He leaned over the couch, resting his elbows on his knees, and glanced up at the window with buzzed confusion, then lurched forward, dragging himself to his feet to close the curtains. It was getting too dark outside, and the feeling that something was watching him was too much to bear no matter how much he dulled his senses.

He threw himself down on the toweled couch, losing himself in a wave of dizziness from what was, if he remembered right (and he didn't), his fourth bottle of whiskey. He wanted to sleep, but was it even worth bothering? The nightmares had gotten more pungent now, seeded by new traumas, fed by anxious memories, distilled in whiskey. And I watered it in fears, night and morning with my tears...

Last night, Will had dreamt he gutted a man and plunged his face into the mess inside, gnawing at the man's organs as blood pooled on the ground. He had dreamt of many things like it recently, but especially of Abigail, dying over and over, and of Winston's brain splattering the siding out back. The echoes reached him, again and again, of that last fearful whine of Winston's life, and suddenly Will couldn't sleep anymore, his face was burning and his eyes were wet.

He turned off the lamp beside him after a while, plunging the house into darkness, and brought his knees up to his chest, holding himself tight as he sobbed into a towel. "Please," he begged no-one, "please, no more." And in time, the exhaustion caught up with him and briefly, mercifully, he passed out, only to repeat the cycle of nightmare and painful awakening, so that he begged in different ways, offered more of himself, voice growing hoarse -- throughout the night.

At sunrise, the little space between the curtains on the picture window blinded him, and cast the skeletal form of Will Graham in an even harsher light. Will cringed away from the illumination, head pounding, and set to breathing heavily, trying to control himself and not scream in pain at the migraine his hangover had compounded. Screaming would only make it worse. He looked down at the floor beside the couch, struggling to remember how much he'd -- six bottles.

No more alcohol. Enough was enough.

The sun cut his skull with every bit of sharpness and finesse as one of Hannibal's cooking knives. Will let that idea simmer for a moment before it sent sudden, groundless panic lancing through him, flailing his limbs into life like newborn animals, each acting independently. A string of memories triggered by the cawing of crows outside made him scream in the end, and the aftermath, the ringing, was enough to force him to stand, and stagger down to the basement where there was no light at all.

But then he felt as if he were being watched again, and he couldn't stay in the dark for very long. He pulled the string for the dim overhead bulb before he could decide who it would be that would be watching him, letting the orange light soothe him through his closed eyes.

The bottle of pills for his wound was, as always, filled more than necessary by the doctor, and Will had taken to dosing himself a little extra whenever the hangover was more than he wanted to deal with. Today he would swear off alcohol at home, today he would mark his last day on the extra meds, today, today, tomorrow, never.

As the medication kicked in, Will was able to put on some extra-dark sunglasses and stuff a granola bar into his mouth for the drive to the next day of physical therapy, and he played with the idea of stopping the whiskey, but had forgotten by the time he was on the highway.