Both scenes are depicting Will’s death. He died in that kitchen, a part of him was gutted. We saw the stag die there, and Abigail. Hannibal killed the superficial aspect that tied them to each other, and aborted out of Will the lies. Will, prior to Mizumono, was still in denial about himself, “the wrong thing being the right thing to do was too ugly a thought”. Only after he revives from that that he faces the truth, “I wanted to run away with him”. He had to go through a process of rebirth after Mizumono, searching for Hannibal, facing himself, facing Hannibal in order to face himself, and he still decided to shut his true self out. So in Wrath, we see the image mirrored because it is his true death. He’s not alone on the floor now, he’s on the arms of love and truth and acceptance. They’re both death scenes, but one is death of illusion, the other is death of shame. In one he dies alone, by clutching to his illusions. In the other, he dies willingly, clutching to the only truth.
The capacity to empathize, especially when it shows up as mirroring (which Will does and it’s confirmed on the scripts), can stem from a defense mechanism rooted in the fear of rejection or abandonment. Empathy might not necessarily be about “feeling with” the other in a pure sense, but rather about detecting, and adapting to, and mimicking others in order to remain safe, accepted, or invisible. It’s not conscious, and it’s not manipulative, it’s a form of survival intelligence, hence why in the script he seems to do it mostly (not always) accidentally.
