How To Be Eaten.

A post-fall fic exploring Will’s past, weaving through time to find Hannibal, love, cannibalism and other drugs.
TW.

The mind perceives existence as a thread unspooling, one event birthing the next, past sculpting present, present carving the future. Yet in dreams, the mind dissolves, slipping between moments, untethered by time, stripped of causality. There, in that formless drift, we glimpse a hidden truth: that life, which appears so linear, is but the rippling echo of a primordial force, a breath from the vast and originless void, where only the great nothing hums.

Here, we are not architects of our future, nor sculptors of our fate. We are first-degree witnesses, adrift on an endless ocean, where waves do not rise from some distant beginning but have always been—moving, colliding, unfolding everywhere at once. And yet, to touch each moment, the mind slows, weaving the illusion of time, a trick of perception that lets us believe in sequence, in order, in a story being written rather than simply revealed.

So Will couldn’t bring himself to blame his mother for everything that had happened in his life. Even when she had plunged his head beneath the water, her trembling hands gripping his small shoulders, he couldn’t find it in himself to resent her. She had whispered fevered prayers, calling upon God to cast out the darkness she believed had taken root inside him. If anything, he wished no one had come to save him. If anything, his mother had been right.

“What a precious little thing, with those big blue eyes,” an old woman cooed, leaning over the stroller where baby Will lay swaddled in blankets.

Elizabeth Graham forced a smile, the corners of her lips twitching as though the muscles had long forgotten how to hold such an expression.

She didn’t think her son was precious. She didn’t think anything of him at all, really. Her body had been hollowed out into a graveyard, and Will was nothing more than another tombstone. Another punishment from God. Another child of the devil sent straight into her womb, a creature she had to purge from this world before he could curse it. But no one believed her. They called her sick. Delusional. Hospitals and medications, white rooms with no edges, bitter liquids forced between clenched teeth.

So she learned to pretend. To be quiet. To smile, to nod. Because if she didn’t, they would take her away again. They would lock her up, and the demon child would be left to wreak his havoc on another family.

So she remained quiet about Will.

Will didn’t think he remembered being a baby. But the sensation of boiling water flooding his nose, blurring his vision, pressing against his skin like a second, searing body…that never left him. Sometimes, even now, he could feel it. Unaware of where the memory came from, only that it lived inside him, dormant until sleep pried open the locked doors of his mind and the truth came spilling through the cracks.

“LIZZIE, NO!” A man’s voice, half-swallowed by the water.

“Let me go! We have to do this!” she yelled, thrashing against his grip, her wet hair plastered to her face in wild strands. She clawed at his arms, but he shoved her back, sending her stumbling against the tile as he lunged toward the water. He pulled baby Will out, cradling the soaked bundle against his chest, his breath coming hard and fast.

“Hey, hey, hey,” he murmured, brushing dripping strands of hair from Will’s forehead. “It’s okay, buddy. It’s okay.”

“My God, no wonder you’re such a weird little thing,” Margaret Thatcher scoffed, exhaling a plume of cigarette smoke that curled lazily toward the ceiling. She tilted her head, her yellowed, brittle hair cascading over her shoulder in stiff strands. Her long red nails tapped against the armrest as she studied Will with blue-shadowed eyes, lined heavily with kohl.

“I mean, with a mother like that,” she added, taking another slow drag. “Who wouldn’t turn out a little strange?”

Will sat silently beside her, small hands clasped in his lap. Outside the smudged car window, fluorescent gas station lights buzzed faintly in the night. They were waiting for his father, who had gone inside to buy cigarettes. A few years had passed since his mother had been institutionalized, and in that time, Robert had met Margaret in some roadside bar. She had been around ever since—rude, sharp-edged, wrapped in the stale scent of nicotine and whiskey.

“You’ll have a big brother to look after you,” Robert had told him when they loaded their things into the truck, bound for Margaret’s trailer park. “It’ll be good for you.”

Jason was fifteen when Will was five, and he did not look after Will.

Jason thought Will was stupid. A silent, strange little boy who never talked, never fought back. They shared a room, and Jason wasn’t bothered by Will’s presence there, no matter what type of activities he was engaging with. And after a while, he decided Will should participate in his activities, whether he wanted to or not. And so, whenever Will felt the crushing weight of something pressing down on his back, the scent of sweat and old pillowcases thick in the air, he remembered Jason.

Robert and Margaret were heavy drinkers. They would come home in the early hours of the morning, fumbling at the door, voices slurring into incoherence before one of them collapsed in a heap on the couch. Sometimes, they didn’t make it that far. Will had stepped over them more times than he could count, their bodies sprawled on the stained carpet, their breath thick with liquor.

Jason took those moments alone with Will as opportunities to experiment with the human body. Maybe he wanted to be a doctor, who knows? He definitely liked to see what he could fit inside Will, no matter what it was. It was a fun game for Jason, who had a crazed smile on his face throughout the entire time.

This went on for two years, until one night, Will woke to screaming.

He followed the sound, his small feet padding hesitantly across the cold floor. When he reached the kitchen, he froze.

Margaret was clawing at Robert’s arms, her fingers scrabbling for purchase as his hands tightened around her throat. Her face, once flushed with fury, was draining of color, her lips parting soundlessly.

As if something had snapped, her body crumpled, falling heavy against the floor with a dull thud.

Robert turned, chest heaving, eyes dark and unreadable as they landed on Will’s small, rigid form in the doorway.

“You listen to me,” he said, voice steady, almost gentle. He crouched to Will’s level, his large hands bracing against his knees. “If you ever tell anyone about this, you’ll be out on the streets. And you know what happens to little boys out there, don’t you?”

Will’s breath hitched. He said nothing.

Robert nodded as though he had expected the silence. He reached out, resting a heavy hand on Will’s shoulder.

“I did this for you, son.”

Will was young, but he knew his dad hadn’t done it for him. Margaret wasn’t kind, that much was true. She gave him smaller portions at dinner, let his clothes sit unwashed, ignored him when he needed help. She threw away anything that reminded him of his mother—photos, trinkets, even the blanket he had clung to as a child. She forced him to sit through adult movies he was too young to understand and asked him strange questions afterward.

No wonder Jason was sick.

But Robert hadn’t killed her to save Will. He had done it because that was the way they were, him and Margaret. They fought constantly. This time, it had gone too far. And Will believed his father when he told him he’d end up on the streets if he said anything. So he stayed quiet.

He stayed quiet as his father made him stand there while he cut Margaret into pieces, muttering under his breath as he worked, as if she was still arguing with him. Will stayed quiet as he watched Robert fit those pieces into a wooden box like a grotesque puzzle. He stayed quiet when they drove out to an empty stretch of land and buried it beneath the cold dirt. Margaret had been a drunk, a mean and bitter woman. People expected her to disappear. When Robert went around, red-eyed and slurring about how she had left him, no one asked questions. He sent Jason to live with his grandparents. That was that. No one came looking for her. Or if they did, Will never heard about it.

“You got a lighter?”

Will looked up from the dock where he sat, the late afternoon sun casting long shadows over the boatyard. A boy stood in front of him, dirty blond hair sticking up in places, green eyes catching the light.

Will pulled out his lighter—a cheap gas station one, red and blue—and handed it over. The boy flicked it a couple of times, then lit his cigarette, inhaling deep before flashing a grin. Will didn’t know it then, but he would keep that lighter for years.

They were sixteen when they met, two kids killing time in a place where time stood still. Will’s father worked on boats, fixing motors, and so did Dean’s. But Dean’s dad wasn’t around much. When he was, he was the kind of man people avoided.

Empty afternoons filled with smoke, grease, and books became something else with Dean around. Will had never had friends before—he didn’t like how people looked at him, the way they filled silence with empty words. But Dean was different. Like Will, he carried an invisible weight, the kind only wounded boys could recognize in each other. Will saw it in the way Dean deflected with humor, in the glint of his eyes that only those who fought demons had. But they didn’t talk about it. They didn’t need to.

Instead, they would drive around in Dean’s old car, wind tearing through the open windows, Nirvana blaring from the radio. They climbed onto the roof, lay back, and smoked while staring at the stars. Will didn’t understand, then, the strange tightness in his chest when Dean laughed or the way his skin prickled when Dean’s arm brushed against his own. He only knew he wanted it more.

When Will dozed off in Dean’s car, he would wake up screaming, drenched in sweat. Dean’s hands would find his shoulders, grounding him.

“My brother gets those, too,” Dean had said once, voice low.

Will didn’t know much about Dean’s brother. They went to the same school, but Dean never talked about his family. All Will knew was that the nightmares ran in their blood, that his brother was quiet and strange, and that he liked dogs. Like Will.

At home, things got worse. Robert had learned after Margaret that it was easy for a man like him to get away with things. And so he started collecting bones.

Women from bars, the ones no one missed. He’d bring them home, slit their throats, make Will mop the floors. Cut them up. Take a marrow. Dispose of them.

Will learned to shut down. His body moved through the motions like a machine, a vessel emptied of anything human.

Dean talked about running away all the time.

“We can make money easy. I know a few tricks, and we don’t need much,” he’d say, lighting a cigarette, the glow illuminating his sun-kissed skin. “We’ll take my car. Sleep in it if we have to.”

One evening, Dean picked Will up from the boatyard. Will’s hands were trembling. His father had hidden a body earlier that day—the first one that year, in that town—and he couldn’t shake the cold weight of it. He wasn’t hiding it well. Dean noticed.

“We leave tonight,” he said. “I can’t take this anymore either, you know? My dad—he…” He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. We’ll get rid of them tonight.”

So they left. They drove until the world stretched out wide, until they were nothing but two boys parked in the middle of a canyon, the night vast and open above them. They stayed there, one night, then another.

One morning Will woke to soft, broken sobs in the driver’s seat.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, voice groggy.

Dean wiped at his face, shook his head like he could brush off the feeling. But he couldn’t.

“I have to go back,” he whispered. “I can’t leave my brother alone.”

And so they turned around.

When Will walked back into the house, Robert didn’t say a word. Just looked at him, long and heavy.

Dean never showed up again. Not at the boatyard. Not at school. Not ever again. All that was left was the blue and red lighter.