A/N: This takes place after most of the events of He Who Pours Out Vengeance, which I wrote between Season 1 and Season 2 and is now firmly AU.

Here's what happened previously: Hannibal and Will played a long elaborate game of prison chess, which ended with Hannibal killing Alana, thereby revealing his nature to the world and liberating Will from the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Will thanked him for that by gutting him with a linoleum knife.

When he first wakes up, he doesn't remember. His past is a haze. His present is a trap. Skeins of thought unravel in his mind, and in his mouth a taste not quite blood. Something sweeter. Not unlike the finish of a good Sauternes. He tries to speak around the mouthpiece of his ventilator, but to his shock the words he finds are from the native tongue in which he usually doesn't even think, let alone speak. The words roll over and die before they cross the boundary of his teeth. Overmastering her fear, the nurse removes the mouthpiece and leans in close to his lips. Into the vulnerable shell of her ear he whispers: "Will."

They adjust his morphine, take him off the ventilator for good. Clarity returns, and with it time stretches forward and memory back. Clarity begets curiosity, but his means for satisfying it are limited. His vision is dim. There is nothing to hear except the faint sounds of traffic many stories below and the steady whirs and pulses of the mechanical vigil at his bedside. Smell is all he has. One of the guards outside his door favors chewing tobacco. The nurse uses lavender-scented face soap, a drugstore brand. He can smell his own sterilized skin and unwashed hair, but these are perfumes next to the stench of his injury.

His attending physician avoids his eyes as he gives Hannibal the barest summary of his condition. Nothing he hasn't already ascertained for himself. It has taken them three surgeries to repair the damage done to his large intestine and stomach, but his spleen is gone for good. Hannibal makes some polite inquiries on the methods and equipment used in his colostomy, lures his doctor into complacency, and then asks:

"Do you still have it?"

"Have what?"

"My spleen." He labors for comprehensibility, but try as he might his voice remains nothing but rumbles and squeaks.

"Why do you ask?" says his doctor, when he finally understands.

"I would like to see it."

The doctor's mouth falls open unattractively, which makes Hannibal's own mouth curve upwards a fraction.

"I've never seen one of my organs before. This is a rare opportunity. If you don't mind indulging me."

The doctor wheezes out something unapologetic about waste disposal and hospital policy before beating a retreat. They don't show Hannibal his spleen.

When Hannibal shuts his tired eyes, he imagines his hands wrapped around his doctor's spleen, the organ firm and richly purple. He enfolds it in Serrano ham and sage leaves, braises it in stock; slices the result in a russet spiral, garnishes with cornichons and spears of red onion. Perfect. Usually he would file such an imagining away for deliberation and later orchestration—but now he simply discards it. There is a strange new freedom in imagining things he no longer has the power to make material, in imagining purely for imagining's sake. The thought divorced from the action.

Shame about his spleen, though.

He remembers, very distantly, the soft fall of organs in his hands. As he lay on the rough floorboards in his borrowed clothes, he felt the curve of his large intestine caressing his palm—or had that been Will's hand in his? The mind plays tricks.

Will saw his organs. Witnessed the dark interior of his body. So did Jack.

There is Jack, standing by the door. Firmly rooted but uncertain, as if awaiting the moment when he has summoned the willpower to turn around and go.

"Jack," says Hannibal, elevating his bed as much as he can without causing himself additional agony. "Good to see you."

Jack says nothing.

"You're looking well."

These social niceties make no impact. Jack looms darkly, taut mouth shut. Hannibal schools his face into mild incomprehension, a mask for his amusement.

"Have you only come here to stare at me?"

"So that's how it's gonna be." Jack's voice is quiet. "Still playing this game."

"Game?"

"Pretending to be my friend."

"I was never pretending, Jack."

"Uh huh." Jack's expression is forbidding.

Hannibal expected Jack's reaction, of course. But what Hannibal did not expect is the pang of loss he experiences at seeing their friendship sundered. Hannibal relishes this feeling inside himself, examines it from every angle. Finds it very rare and interesting.

Jack is struggling with a similar pain. The pain of betrayal. It clings to him like a second skin, especially prominent in the creases of his shirt, the shadows in his eye sockets. He is five pounds thinner than when Hannibal last saw him. Jack has come here out of professional curiosity and personal vendetta: to pull back the veil and finally confront the monster behind it. So Hannibal resolves to give him nothing but the man.

He bows his head politely. "I'm sorry you have to see me in this state."

"I'm sorry, too."

"Because you'd rather see me cold and prone on a mortuary slab?" Hannibal smiles. "It's all right, Jack. We must learn to live with disappointment, and would you really have it any other way? Dreams cease being dreams when they come true. Tell me, how is Bella?"

A nerve well struck. Jack snaps: "You don't get to call her that."

"Phyllis, then."

Jack takes a step towards Hannibal, his head lowered like a charging bull's. "Are you being malicious," he asks, something like wonder in his voice, "or just delusional?"

"I'm being courteous," says Hannibal.

"You've killed forty-eight people. That we know about."

Hannibal cants his head, his polite listening face.

"Are there more? My gut tells me there's more."

A wistful hum from Hannibal. "I no longer have the luxury of consulting my gut."

The joke falls flat as a corpse. And to think Jack used to laugh the loudest at the feeblest of Hannibal's little quips.

"You want to be courteous?" Jack says, eyes narrowed. "Then you help me out here. It's in your best interests if you're honest with me right now about the number of people you've killed."

Hannibal makes a show of ruminating on this, using the time to accustom himself to the way in which Jack is staring at him. He isn't used to being stared at in this manner, at least not by someone who isn't moments away from death. Will never looked at Hannibal like this; even at his most accusatory, there had always been the light of recognition in his eyes. But Jack stares at Hannibal as if Hannibal is a hitherto unknown creature belched out of the alien depths of the ocean, phosphorescent and ageless with spines and teeth dripping venom. Hannibal imagines he will be the object of stares like Jack's with some frequency henceforward. He finds he doesn't mind it.

He bathes in the silence until he can see Jack's patience ebbing. Then he says: "I'm not a sportsman, Jack. I don't keep score."

Jack's eyelids slip. He doesn't believe a word.

"And even if I did," Hannibal continues, "we can't have that conversation without my lawyer present."

Jack smiles now, bitterly. "I thought you wanted to be friends."

"It's nothing personal."

"Nothing personal?" Jack stalks forward almost to the foot of Hannibal's bed. "You served me human flesh at your dinner table, Dr. Lecter. In wine reductions. In soufflés. On toast points. You served it to me. You served it to my wife."

"I shared my predilections with all my friends."

"Why?"

Hannibal rolls the answer on his tongue for a good long moment. "It gives me pleasure watching others enjoy what I enjoy."

"It gives you pleasure perverting and destroying everything you touch."

A sad smile on Hannibal's face, one he hasn't consciously manifested there. "You don't understand."

"Then explain it to me."

"But you don't need me to explain it."

And with this, Hannibal's eyes score Jack's face, looking for anything, anything…

Jack's expression closes, but not fast enough.

"Ah." Hannibal turns away. Stares at a strip of sunlight caught between the window blinds. A note of weariness in his voice he can't disguise.

"He's already gone."

Predictable Jack goes bright-eyed with fury. "He isn't your business any more."

"Neither is he yours," says Hannibal, still looking at the window. "Now that he has left the FBI. Become his own man."

Jack's jaw and fists clench. Physically grasping at the tattered edges of his patience. Clearly Will has become a verboten subject between them: and to think there was once a time when they discussed him almost exclusively.

"It's just you and me now," says Jack. "So work with me here. Explain yourself to me. Explain—explain why you killed Alana Bloom. Start there."

Hannibal draws a long breath, lets his eyelids slip down martyr-like. "I'm sorry, Jack."

Jack says nothing, but his nostrils flare.

"I can't explain that to you."

Jack rolls his eyes. "Not without your lawyer present."

"I can't explain it," says Hannibal, patient to a fault, "because I don't understand it myself."

Jack's eyebrows jump. "You don't understand it," he repeats dubiously. "You."

Hannibal is rueful, even as a part of him preens at the implicit compliment.

"I'm afraid I don't. No more than I can fathom the complexity of those great mysteries of nature: the origins of life, the sudden downfall of an ancient empire, the mass extinction of a hardy species. Chains of cause and effect stretching back into time immemorial, beyond my comprehension, beyond anyone's. Alana reaped the misfortune of having strayed into the convergence of those merciless forces beyond our ken that govern our lives. In my kitchen she and I stood at the center of a web comprised of chance and choice, factors and decisions, some of them hers, some of them mine, some of them…" Jack's nostrils flare again, so Hannibal lets the sentence trail. "How can I explain what happened, Jack, when I constitute but a part of it?"

"You could explain your part," says Jack, singularly unmoved by all this rhetoric.

"My part, on its own, is inadequate." Hannibal sighs now, not for show. If he is to be interrogated, he'd rather it not be about Alana. "I can't help you, Jack. I can't repair the damage done."

Jack's face is grim. "I'm not asking you to repair the damage done. I just want to understand the damage you did."

Hannibal scrutinizes Jack's face, nods in sympathy and respect for the emotion he sees there. "If you want to understand it, then there's only one thing you can do. You must reconstruct. Bring back together all those shattered parts that once comprised the fatal whole. Unfortunately Alana's part is lost to us. That leaves only mine…"

"And Will's," says Jack, his expression hardening to stone.

"The results would be illuminating," says Hannibal, mildly.

Jack takes this in. "You'll cooperate with my investigation if I put you and Will in a room together again, is that what you're telling me?"

Hannibal smiles.

Jack leans forward, smiles back—a cruel smile, calculating in its viciousness. "That. Is never. Going to happen."

Hannibal stops smiling. He says:

"A perilous word to use, 'never'. Tempts fate."

Now Jack leans forward, bracing his arms on the rails of Hannibal's hospital bed. He comes in so close their foreheads are almost touching—an act of considerable bravery, for Hannibal's teeth are as sharp as ever.

"I see I'm gonna have to make something clear to you, because apparently it isn't clear enough already. I don't care what you say, what you do, how much solid information you bargain with. You are never going to see Will Graham again. And when I say that, I'm not tempting fate—I am waging war against it. I am making it my personal mission to keep the two of you apart any and every way I can. That's a promise."

Jack's eyes are large and purposeful. Beautiful eyes. Hannibal looks into them and feels something like pity for Jack, damnably stubborn Jack, so dominated by his own guilt that he's trying to assuage it by putting himself between heaven and earth in the middle of a lightning storm. If he insists on standing there, then let him fry.

"You won't be able to keep that promise, Jack."

"Watch me." For one charged instant, Jack's fists tighten on the bedrails. Then he stalks from the room.

Time passes in uncountable increments. The machines hooked to his body warble and tick, tick and warble. A chemical haze clings to everything. Hannibal sleeps when he doesn't mean to, wakes when he'd rather dream. He has no appetite.

The nurses come regularly to change his bandages, irrigate his wound. They pull at his riven flesh in ways that make the cords stand out on Hannibal's neck. His eyes leak tears that run through the crevasses of gray, tightly drawn skin, the salt stinging when it comes into contact with the half-healed bite mark on his cheek. Where injuries meet injuries, a cascade of pain. Try as he might to retain his reason, he becomes a creature of pure feeling in these moments, overburdened as he is by indignities, by these mortifications of his flesh, this helplessness. Now he wishes—oh how he wishes—that the linoleum knife had been pointed on both ends.