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Hannibal’s office was an oasis of warm light and soft music in the chilly silence of the brownstone that housed it. He could have gone home after his session with Will Graham, but he chose to remain in the room where the vibrations of Will’s voice still lingered in the wood under his feet and the hot, fevered scent of encephalitis blended with cheap aftershave to bite at his nose and rest on his tongue with each slow breath he took while he sketched both on paper and in his imagination.
The man emerging from the graphite shadows his pencil left in its wake was looking pensively away from Hannibal’s hand, but in his imagination, Hannibal was building a setting that would force Will to look at him – to see him.
That it would break Will seemed an acceptable sacrifice, and perhaps once he was broken he could be––
“He is not as disposable as you think.”
Hannibal’s pencil froze, his shoulders stiffened almost imperceptibly, and his mind immediately left thoughts of art to travel to the near neighborhood of violence in which he assessed how close to hand his scalpel was, from how far behind him the voice had come, and whether he could hear or smell anyone else.
Only then did one other detail scream itself into the forefront of his perceptions – that voice. He didn’t recognize it as the voice he heard every time he spoke, but it was the voice that spoke to him from recordings – his voice. How?
Every thought and plan and question swept through his consciousness with a speed that left no outward sign in the space of a breath they took to be considered, discarded, or kept. Long enough for Hannibal to shift his grip on his pencil and push his chair back the inches needed for him to swivel slowly around to face––
–-an older man with brown hair gone sandy with grey, heavy brows with hair so pale as to appear invisible, dark eyes, a broad mouth, and cheekbones sharp as the scalpel Hannibal had eschewed before turning. The scar on the right cheek was unfamiliar and long healed, but Hannibal had no choice but to accept the truth of his senses – he was looking into his own future, and that future had not been wholly kind.
The older man stood under his scrutiny with all the equanimity that Hannibal would expect from himself, but as he took a step forward, he could see that this doppelganger moved stiffly, and his left leg had a slight drag that spoke of poorly healed injury. Scarred, limping, aged, and dressed in clothes that were obviously off the rack, Hannibal saw in him a future that encompassed some of his less preferred imaginings of a time beyond Baltimore.
He took another moment for self-assessment. Was he breaking with reality?
As though reading that thought, his older self favored him with a hint of a smile and took two steps forward to come near enough to hold out a small journal to him. “I could know your thoughts only up until the moment when my past and your present diverged. However, I am uniquely well-qualified to make an educated guess as to their direction.”
Hannibal took the journal when it was offered and flipped it open at random to find pages and pages of equations interspersed with notes written in the code that only he knew, the same code he used when taking patient notes, and every page was recognizably covered in his handwriting, even if the equations were beyond anything his prior dabblings in particle physics and string theory had ever shown him.
It was, in a way, a passport, a proof of identity from this familiar stranger.
“It has taken more than twenty years from this night to return here with this book and this message.” The man he would become spoke as calmly as he ever had to a patient, but Hannibal could see the scrim of tears come down across his vision. “The hall you are building in your memory palace – the one with the painting of Achilles and Patroclus as its door – will become as the dark halls of our silent years if you continue on this path.
“You have a choice – learn to love with all its accompanying pain and sacrifice.”
Hannibal barely tilted his head, but between himself and this aged mirror it was enough to express his skepticism.
“Or kill Will Graham now.”
Hannibal the elder held his younger self’s gaze and blinked, allowing the tears to fall in a slow stream down his cheeks.
“Choose and unmake me.”