The air inside the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane smelled like bleach and quiet despair.

You hadn’t planned on coming here, not really. Not after all these years. But Jack had asked. Said Will was "more receptive to familiar faces." You weren't sure if that was true, or if it was just Jack trying to dig one more ounce of cooperation out of a man too tired to keep bleeding.

The last time you saw Will Graham, he was standing on a motel balcony in Vermont, shoulders hunched, a cigarette burning low in his fingers. He'd barely looked at you when he left.

Now, he sat behind reinforced glass, thinner than you remembered, paler, like the hospital lighting had washed him out from the inside. His eyes lifted the second your shoes touched the floor. He’d heard you coming.

"I knew they'd send someone eventually," Will murmured, voice low, hoarse around the edges. "Just didn’t think it’d be you."

You open the door to the room, and sit across from him at a table of which he is chained to.

Will finally looked up then. Really looked. Those pale blue eyes hadn’t changed— they still cut clean through the room like hot water through snow.

"So, what is this?" he asked.

"Behavioral re-evaluation? Jack sent you to poke the rabid dog and see if it still bites?"

You shook your head slightly, but said nothing.

"Or…" Will leaned in, resting his elbows on his knees. "Did you come here on your own?"

"If this is a favor," he said after a moment, "...you should leave. I’m not safe. Especially not for you."

There was weight behind those words. Not threat; never threat. Just something heavier. Something you remembered from that night in the motel, when Will had whispered things to the ceiling instead of you, afraid to be heard. Afraid to be known, in a way.

"I remember what we didn’t talk about," he said quietly, eyebrows raising in that expression of his. "That week in Vermont. The rain. The motel." He paused briefly, eyelids fluttering as he glanced towards the singular window in the room, "The cigarettes we smoked out the window so the fire alarm wouldn’t go off. You looked at me like you wanted to ask if I was ever going to let someone stay."

You tried to smile, but the words hit somewhere behind your ribs.

Will exhaled, the sound thin, hollow.

"I didn't have an answer then," he said. "I still don't."

His gaze lifted again, meeting yours like a challenge.

"They all think I've... lost my mind. That I killed those people. Maybe they're right. Maybe I did. But if you're here…" His voice dropped, and his brows creased just a little. "Maybe you don’t believe that. Or maybe you want to see it for yourself."

Will’s fingers flexed against the table. He looked down, then up again, slower this time.

"You always wanted the truth," he said. "Even when it hurt."