Author's Note: I'm posting two chapters at a go this time around I'll be on holiday for the next few days. Hope you enjoy!

It's a relief for Will to graduate high school early. Not because he enjoys the years of ostracism and bullying he went through for always being the youngest in his class, but because it means he can finally get away from the shell of a woman his mother has become. The husk of a human being that no one else but him can tell is empty.

She still goes through the motions, of course; still feigns interest and enthusiasm in his life in front of others, but at home, in the same house they've always lived in, she's a shadow of herself. Haunting the hallways of his life until he learns to block her out, to lock his door, and to never turn his back on her, even if he doesn't think she'll ever hurt him. Hurt herself, though, that's a different story.

He goes away to college by himself. He's young for it – too young, really – but he has a chaperone and his mother, for all her distance, makes sure his needs are taken care of. She sends clothes, she sends money, and sometimes even a container of homemade cookies he never eats.

She never once asks him to come home, though. He's pathetically grateful for that. Most days.

It takes a few years for him to finally get the call about his mother. She's overdosed on sleeping pills. Everyone Will talks to for burial arrangements calls it 'accidental' and a 'tragedy'. Will doesn't. Not that anyone notices. Not that anyone cares.

His college years are over before Will can really get his head around it. It's not that he thought he'd stay in school indefinitely but it's still a shock when he's amassed all his credits and graduates with top marks. He opts not to do the ceremony. There's no one who'd be there to see him do it anyway.

It's not really a conscious choice to sign up for the police academy. He just does it because it seems like the right thing to do. The – proper – thing to do.

Later, when people ask why Will decided to become a cop, the answer is always the same. He tells them he likes to "help people". He doesn't tell them that it's what his father always wanted to be but couldn't – his old man had been a washout; a boat mechanic who was too flat footed to be anything more than what he was.

He was nothing like Will.

Nothing.

At least, that's what Will tells himself as the smell of brackish water starts filling up his senses.

The last case Will works before leaving for George Washington U is a triple homicide in Metairie. The bodies are side-by-side-by-side on the rocky shore that makes up the coastline near the Causeway. Will spends three days chasing down leads, talking to the locals, and generally just being seen and heard by everyone in the area before he gets an anonymous tip about a man known only as 'Lou'.

Lou – full name Louis Marcel Fontenot – turns out to be a sixty-two year old homeless man who drifts from Parrish to Parrish looking for work and is willing to tell Will anything he wants to know if he'll feed him a hot meal. Will buys them both bowls of shrimp gumbo and listens to the man talk, nudging his own untouched and still warm styrofoam bowl towards the man when he seems like he might slow down.

He closes the case two days later and leaves for D.C. with a kind of finality that promises him he'll never come back.

Will breezes through his course work with a practicality that comes from having worked real crime scenes before, unfazed by some of the more gruesome aspects of the coursework and strangely at ease with the thought that this will one day be his life. He's good at it, after all, and it's always nice to be good at something. Even if it does mean he'll spend most of his time courting unspeakable violence and inescapable death.

Despite stories to the contrary, Will doesn't exactly plan to start working for the FBI's crime lab. Much like joining the academy, it isn't really a conscious choice, and Will decides that it's probably not a bad thing. It's good work, honest work, and he excels at it, especially once people realize his difficulties with social interaction and friendliness mean the best thing to do is let him just get on with it.

Teaching is a surprise. He never thought he would be any good at it – never even desired to give it a try – but he is. Good at it. Better than he thought he would be.

Teaching is how he meets Alana Bloom. She's a psychiatry professor who volunteers to speak to his students. After one haltingly failed attempt, she stops trying to analyze him and instead settles on being his friend. Will isn't really sure why, can't imagine what he's done that makes her want to be his friend, but he's – thankful, is probably the word for it.

Jack Crawford is everything and nothing like Will expects him to be. Tall and stocky, he makes Will nervous every time they're in the same room, which isn't often, thankfully, and invades Will's personal space at every turn, insisting on making eye contact. That's hard for Will – eye contact – and he doesn't understand why Jack can't understand that.

He doesn't say anything about it, though. Can't, really, because he's not sure he knows the right words for it. Doesn't know if it would matter even if he did.

Jack isn't a man known for caring about what other people want or think. That's probably why he takes exception to Will's disagreement on the name of his new pet project: the Evil Minds Research Museum. As if something as complex as a disturbed mind is as easily explained by a word as heavy as 'evil'.

Carolyn Graham wasn't evil. Disturbed, maybe. In desperate need of help, definitely.

But she wasn't evil. Not in the traditional sense of the word. Will has to believe that.

Needs to believe that.

Field work is another surprise that comes along. It jumps up and onto his plate without him really thinking about it and he falls into the same sort of patterns he did when he was a cop. It's hard – harder – than lab work or teaching because he's expected to be social, but he gets through it and excels again. Even if he's eventually told that he probably needs to leave the questioning to someone else unless absolutely necessary.

Building a design is easy. Only raw data is needed. A few simple details that a foundation can be built on.

Once he has those, the rest is easy.

Too easy, maybe.

A few months gone and Jack Crawford comes back into his life like a raging bull in a tightly contained suit. He picks at Will, pushes, and Will goes along with it because Jack is right: Will has a unique perspective. One that makes it easy to see what is staring everyone else in the face.

Like the fact that it's not about all the girls. It's just about one.

It's after seeing the latest victim that the phantom smell of brackish water and sound of splashing comes back. It plays in an infinite loop in the back of his mind. Like a strange and horrific theme music.

Will doesn't realize until just that moment that it ever went away. That, for years now, there had been nothing left but silence. One that shattered the second he started building this design.

There is a hunger in Will's belly that grows as he pieces together the – his – design. It aches inside of him every time he thinks of it. Pieces blurring slowly into place until he dreams of blood and the taste of raw meat. Of devotion without limit.

Jack says nothing about bringing someone else in. He just does it. Cornering Will in the halls of the Behavioral Science department with a hand on his elbow and tells him to meet them in his office after lunch.

Will agrees, if only so Jack will stop touching him.

Physical attraction is strange for Will. It doesn't manifest itself in him the way it does with other people. Or perhaps it does and he's too unfamiliar with it to notice.

Either way, Will has never been good with people. Has never been able to show what he feels and how he feels it. Not with any clarity or precision, which so many people seem to need nowadays, so it's a surprise – a big one – when he meets Hannibal Lecter.

TBC