Chapter Text
There are two Level 1 trauma centers in the greater Maryland area, both in serviceable distance to the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.
One is better suited to extreme abdominal trauma than the other - foremost in the state and often the greater DC metro. After all, it is hardly the province of the entire medical community to be on call for the vengeance of cruel-fingered storm-eyed boys like Will Graham. There must be people held in reserve for the likes of that, made of tougher stuff, and cleverer hands. There must be people meant for the likes of him, Hannibal Lecter.
But only one of the two is approved for the state medical insurance structure, as he is required to participate as an inmate of the “mentally incapable” variety.
And so Hannibal must go there.
In the typical caprice of the universe, Hannibal’s acquaintances and colleagues, and the phenomenally unfortunate sense of comedic timing that god graciously provides Hannibal since meeting said stormy-eyed boy, Johns Hopkins Hospital opens its doors for its most hated alumni and once most successful trauma surgeon with a brittle yes.
His name grows old with each form and transfer of custody.
“Hannibal Lecter?” says the intake staff, who see the serious faces of the marshals, and Hannibal latched to his gurney as surely as a moth to a pinboard. All that’s missing is the center pin - Hannibal likes to imagine it as Will’s arm, standing straight up and tense muscled from naval to overhead examination light.
Some of these people he recognizes.
Others he has fed.
Those he has fed upon, well, Hannibal doesn’t have to worry about being recognized by.
“The Hannibal Lecter?” says a grey faced resident who Hannibal gives a lazy wink to from beneath the oxygen mask. He has appearances to uphold, even if he is grossly disappointed with himself tonight, this morning, whatever these twilit hours mean between standing up and laying down with Will, who knows just where to strike the chisel to break the stone.
“Doctor Lecter,” says one of the nurses that likely has been with the hospital since before Hannibal began his own surgical studies. “Can’t think of someone more deserving of having their guts rearranged.” He remembers liking her. Handy with an IV catheter. Perfect technique in finding those hard-to-poke veins under the skin. Competency is so underrated when accounting against disposition.
He thinks he might like her more now, the only person not shy of him and his usually very white smile. Red now - the organs remain unpunctured, and there is nothing to suggest that his internal bleeding would make it’s way up the esophagus, but he does bite a very impressive line in the side of his mouth in his effort to not scream under Will’s scrabbling, questing hand, or to let go of Will long enough to strangle the fight out of him.
Will promised Hannibal. He warned him properly this time in person, rather than rapidly by phone, and Hannibal arrogantly thinks that the slaying of the Dragon is where Will Graham’s forgiveness will finally drop the knife for the last time.
“What happened to him?” asks someone outside of Hannibal’s field of view, fentanyl taking its streaming course between a flurry of forceps, hemostats, the blue gloves of a dozen hands he may have trained himself.
Hannibal hums in the oxygen mask.
“I happened to me,” he says to the benefit of no one’s skill, swallowing away a mouthful of blood, as he has ever maintained from Bedelia du Maurier’s office for the first time, to the courtroom, to Will Graham leaking all seawater surge sad above him, asking Hannibal if he understands why.
He flexes his dirty and meticulously cuffed hands, now crusting with his own insides until the smoothness of a gold band around his pinky finger is all but forgotten in the grime, and if he is careful, perhaps it will rust in place and no one will be able to excavate it from his bones.
—
(Hannibal never asked for the ring, but you knew he wanted it - the concept of your commitment to someone else and getting rid of it more than the physical thing, but in the absence of being able to have both, he would certainly take one. You are sure of this. You are less sure if it was something to take for the sake of taking, to see if you would let him.
You wonder if it would have ruined the fantasy if you had given it up quickly, and that it would become no more consequential than the discarded sterile syringe water.
You wonder if it’s more at home being forgotten - cast away with all the parts of your old life, as Hannibal had cast off you and Abigail.
Beneath the moons of dried blood underneath your nails that Alana will not give you something sharp enough to dig out, you are uncertain if you have cast off ownership of anything, only that they will likely not return to you. Rings. Hands. The idea of either. You gave it away in any case.
That means you are even now.)
—
The worst part isn’t the lack of screaming, though Will wishes Hannibal did.
(You didn’t last time this happened, you suppose.)
It’s that Will has to drag out the worst part of himself from behind the most wanting part, with none of the satisfaction that he thought for certain would come afterwards from a debt repaid.
(Hannibal didn’t have any last time either, you suppose.)
Different in practice, Will thinks later when everything is washed and put away. Sheets changes for fresh ones, a scratchy blanket for the old, jumpsuit from matching grey to the bland navy that he recalls from his first time around the block here.
They even give Will something to hold onto him, in Hannibal’s absence - his very own handcuffs to be worn through the holes in the glass wall so that the orderlies can switch out these things and pretend that there’s nothing more to this than routine.
“Hands through the opening, from the elbow down,” they say coldly.
“As opposed to up?” he asks without much fire behind it, picturing what that would be like. Extruded, like a fresh pasta through a press perhaps, each bone and joint snapping itself off to ease through the wall, and all that’s left afterwards is something easily consumed.
It sounds violent.
It sounds peaceful.
They don’t reply, only close the cuff with clinking, ratcheting teeth.
No one says anything about Hannibal either - if he’s alive, if he’s angry, if there’s more room inside of him now for another meal, but Will doesn’t ask because he already knows.
Yes, Will thinks, recalling the unkind way he shoves himself inside of Hannibal’s belly against the resistance of the organs there. He wonders if Hannibal felt better once it was all over with, like getting past an appointment you didn’t want to attend, or a dinner you didn’t want to host - the anticipation of getting bad news and finally being able to breathe now that it’s happened. The car crash is over. The tumor has grown.
The orderlies rattle the sheets behind Will. He tries to envision their clean folds, tucking it under the unfamiliar mattress that comes in wrapped in plastic, as the ravaged red old one is taken out. Thinner - something they keep in stock for the rest of the flock.
Will turns his attention to himself, when pain flares in his shoulder. The new mattress certainly won’t help with that. The glass presses against his forehead.
(“Let’s see about your lateral motion,” says Hannibal who in a rare moment is ignorant to your resolve, that maybe he could appreciate feeling the same as when he smelled Freddie Lounds’ perfume on you, or maybe more accurately your refusal to run away once he knew. Immediate. Sad. Terribly determined and confident, right?)
He envisions falling through the glass into a pile. He pictures the turning of the press, and Hannibal’s once clutching fingers guiding him through it to give Will to the floor - firm, insistent, remembering Will working at his bared intestines like Prometheus’ eagle looking for gall.
Yes, there’s room inside Hannibal now.
—
(Hannibal will see your work for the copycat that it is, you think, as a master of imitation himself. Nobody hollers louder than a hit dog, and it feels…not good, but important to know that now you are equal in this way.)
(You hate that you still feel anything about it at all.)
—
For the better part of a week, Will hears nothing save the occasional visit from the staff, and the distant droning of machines. He thinks Alana considers saying something to him one day, staring at him with a puzzled rosette for a mouth, but maybe she thinks it’s a more fitting punishment to say nothing as he did to her.
“Are you better now?” she could asks, and the answer would be not no, but not yes, similar to no longer needing to immediately vomit but everything is bitter and sore anyway. The thing inside him is sated. The thing inside him is miserable in its satiation.
“Do you want that lawyer? Maybe do you want that drive?’ she could ask, because technically, no one really knows that Will is here, and this is the rare moment that Will can be removed from her responsibilities, and Alana can be removed from Will’s long list of questionable guardians without consequence.
Hannibal’s not going to sue for not being protected in prison. He’s not going to ask for Will back like a well-loved book. He’s going to get even, because anything that happens to him, no matter how deserved, is paid in treble damages, and this is Will’s small window to leave.
But she doesn’t ask.
And he doesn’t either.
“Deal’s a deal,” he tells the skylight, and rolls to face the empty space where Hannibal would have slept if he was here. He hears the air, but he never feels it. He would if Hannibal was here to breathe it in and out.
He presses a thumb to the now-neatly sealing scab of his shoulder, and picks it until it comes off. When that is done, he rests, finger nail to pink, capillary-wet dermis.
—
In a lot of ways, it’s not so bad.
(You suppose maybe Hannibal felt some satisfaction after all, flying to Paris with a beautiful woman who’s in on the secret, playing at debonair, dancer, always doctor.)
In his inexpert way, Will made it a point to not permanently damage anything. Hannibal will survive. He pried past organs, mindful of their sinewy sheaths. He tied no knots and bows into the long chain of Hannibal’s insides. He didn’t pluck at arteries and veins as he went, and the gold of the ring will have been quickly recovered from the abdominal cavity if that’s the wishing well that it was cast into. He doesn’t feel guilty, and while it is blank and untextured, he does sleep.
But then he gets to thinking about it.
Where would they have gone if they didn’t fall to the bottom of the sea? Morocco? Vietnam? A convenient desert island?
Will tries to disparage it in his head as this ridiculous thing that Hannibal has suggested that can never be, and Will wonders how much of that is because he cannot picture them clearly outside of the places that they have made important to one another. Baltimore. The house in Wolf Trap. On a bench in front of the Primavera, both planning how best to harm the man they’re sat next to. Will Graham reads evidence in spite of an impressive capacity for imagination, and what he’s read suggests no white sandy beaches and no evenings in enjoying the softness of a drink and a sunset.
What would it have been like, beyond the considerations of butchery which Will doesn’t have a taste for, and arbitering justice with death which he does?
(“You wouldn’t have believed it to be honest once you knew who I was,” says Hannibal, and you think at first he means that simple affection would be an artifice, instead of the possibility that you would just assume that it was an artifice, like it’s impossible for a bear to take pleasure in afternoon sun, or a lion to enjoy the gentle company of another that they know belongs to them, which you know full well to be true in the kingdom animalia.)
Will doesn’t enjoy cooking, but he enjoys watching. Hannibal doesn’t enjoy fishing, but he’s an accomplished hunter of sorts and appreciates the craft. They read. They discuss. They lock wits as bucks lock antlers, and come apart afterwards happy for the challenge. They sit in comfortable silences just as effortlessly as they make passes at trying to pull the soft meat from one another, looking for another memory to peel, chew, appreciate.
They could have been more than just hateful, if things started differently. Maybe even if they started exactly the same, and time got the chance to wear them smooth with sand, where it smoothed a million other small things away to make the sand.
He has the bed, where he can now turn and sleep in any direction without the inconvenience of another body. He minds his own meals, keeps his own routine of stretches and medication. He takes guardianship of the cell in careful steps around its perimeters, fingertips feeling out the picture moulding off the walls - plastic, not wood after all, no nails, nothing sharp or expensive or artful about them save that they look like what Hannibal should like but are made of things Hannibal hates most - and is left alone.
So, it’s not so bad.
But it is worse.
(You suppose Hannibal must have come to feel that way, when the satisfaction of revenge-punishment-escape begins to lessen with the months - he left a heart over his favorite pair of skulls, of the thousands he has seen, in hopes that you would see them too, and see yours and his inlaid in the floor. Not so bad to live the high life of Roman Fell, but objectively not so good that he didn’t send up a smoke signal hoping you’d reply.)
No visitors after the evening meal of what is presumably the standard issue compressed meat of a Salisbury Steak, a vegetable medley, and a mound of bland white potatoes that will not irritate his mouth. No stitches left for any of it to catch in, after a white-faced and pinch-lipped nurse comes in and pulls them all out with none of the grace Hannibal would have, but Will presses on it now from the inside anyway, and imagines a ray of yellow-red light coming from where it will unzip to cut the blue quiet of the room.
The air conditioner kicks on. He’s fresh out of dinner parties and poets to reassemble into wounded valentines, and instead considers tearing the gold-painted plastic paneling from the walls with his hands to find it to open the hole of the duct work, so he has something to scream into and at.
—
Breakfast comes at the appointed time - some kind of farina porridge, lightly sweet with artificial maple syrup, and something he kept in the cabinets at home. He can smell it. He wonders if Alana ever made note of it, or if he’s always had the basic tastes of people who eat hospital food and need pills, and it’s merely circumstantial that it’s here.
But they tell him “Hands through the glass, from the elbow down,” and Will complies and thinks of being crushed to squeeze all the way through it, and the smell of the artificial maple over all that chlorine from the laundry and the hospital-issued scrubs, and that makes him relax.
Fresh linens? Random inspection? Maybe charges will be pressed again him after all, he’s certainly earned a few between the manslaughter, and the conspiracy to murder, and the assault, and battery, and-
The double doors swing wider open, and between three orderlies, a second metal bedframe comes rolling down the hall, new mattress crinkly in its wrapping. It’s charmingly like plastic wrap around the bloat of pillowy fat, far more expensive than the one Will has slept on as a replacement.
Will chews the scarring line of collagen in his mouth, until both are rolled where he can’t see.
Both fall into place loudly somewhere behind him - and the same way the backfire of a car or the snap of a coiled spring does to him, Will winces at its landing.
Two beds now, mirrored to each other.
Doctor’s orders, Will thinks with a distant hysteria.
Alana comes to stand in front of him, a column of dark green velvet suit and clever little pointed shoes, with no voice save the question that is hiding somewhere behind all that heavy fabric. Her cane is very straight, her fingers very tight and bony at its handle, now the last handhold between now and when she must shut the gate on her rabid dogs for men.
But that’s ungracious, Will supposes, watching her watch him with the same pointed stare that she asks all her hard questions with.
(Still want that call? Still want that drive?)
Will stares at the ground - elbows pinched on the edge of the glass holes, forehead pressed against curls and the cold wall, still chewing away until the cheek beneath each molar feels acid and hot. That’s something like an answer, with his own pointed silence.
They arrange the sheets - corners tight and unwrinkled, smoothed down, classy. Two pillows, no seams. They snap on the blanket - same as it ever was, blue, featureless save that this one appears to be new from the package. Nice of them to consider turn-down service in their very own suite accommodations. A quick spray and wiping of the giant metal table at the room’s center, the aerosols running over the smell of breakfast to replace it with antiseptics again.
Still they don’t exit, and the double doors don’t close until the next piece of the room can be wheeled in.
Will only makes eye contact once while everyone watches, and accidentally.
Hannibal has an admirable talent for serving himself to spaces, rather than being forced into them. The awkward straps of the strait-jacket and bite mask do nothing to dull the impression of a time-forgotten king returning to his halls, the dead-eyed glance intimidating and forgetting the press of weary circles beneath them. This is not the man sent to have his body stitched back together and showcased. This is the man from the newspapers, and the five o’clock news, and the one time key speaker at conferences that surely half the staff of this place have attended and watched with admiration. What insight , they might have said to a classmate or supervisor. What a sharp man.
It’s a relief in some ways that this is inalienably the man that will probably kill Will.
(It is a joy that for two minutes - you are able to surprise him the same way he surprised you.)
The straps come off in segments. Will’s handcuffs are left on. There’s a passing moment that Will wonders if they’ll just leave him tethered to the glass as an offering and that the fantasy of being jointed and processed is less of a fantasy and more of an insight, but the cuffs fall away too when the door can finally be sealed, all the sycophants that play at being in control finally safe on the other side of the enclosure.
Arms from the elbow down scrape at the holes. Will sucks on a corner of scar tissue that feels like a thread wanting to be pulled, and turns to face Hannibal’s red-eyed observance and hands clasped behind his back.
“That will be all, Alana,” says Hannibal, who gingerly turns to face their audience.
She doesn’t quite sneer, but something in her face wants to. Will doesn’t have as much sympathy when he notices it this time- she was every bit as capable of letting Hannibal die as Will was of irreparably disemboweling him.
“He can be moved to another room,” she offers.
It’s clear who she means - it’s Hannibal’s room with Hannibal’s things, with probably Hannibal’s blood flaking somewhere between the press of floorboards. Every whorl of fake gold woodwork belongs to him. Every hair on Will’s head he wants to touch is his to pull softly or pull out.
So Will says nothing, because he agreed to this.
And Hannibal says nothing too.
Will doesn’t know why, because long after the double doors do finally close, Hannibal says nothing to Will either. None of the witticisms, or observances. No “are you hurting today, Will”- “let’s see about your lateral motion” - “did you think I’d waste you” and above that, no grasping hands.
He keeps those long-fingered hands fisted behind his back, no matter that his gut wound must be twice as weak as it was the first time, enough that he must allow other people to care for it. He sits stiffly on the bed that’s so new that it doesn’t make a single sound against his weight, and watches Will from across the room, porridge steaming from Will’s breakfast tray until it has gone cold, and smells of nothing but stale flour.
He does this for hours.
—
(You don’t get to feel disappointed. You did what you set out to do.)
(You are anyway.)
—
The anticipation of what comes next is less of a dread once night falls, and more of a forecast.
Light rain lasting through the evening, thinks Will, taking in the shade of the skylight’s coloring, straining his ears to listen for anything other than Hannibal’s metronomic breathing, with clear skies and good visibility from midnight onwards. Waxing half moon, with astronomical dusk at 5:47 p.m. Turbulent violence expected.
It’s Will that ends up breaking their uninterrupted day with the clutter of noise.
“You look remarkably well for someone who had their insides recently mapped,” says Will to the room, blue cutting between them, the rise of Hannibal’s shadowed shoulder hiding the gold paint behind it.
“A little scraped out,” says Hannibal in reply, “but that’s what you intended, isn’t it Will?”
He says nothing else for a long while, still sitting straight up and rendered grey and murky in their version of night here. If he thinks that’s funny, Will can’t see it. If he intends that to be a threat, well, Will can’t see that either, but Will knows that he is watching either way.
The room darkens. The air goes through three cooling cycles somewhere down the hall. Hannibal sighs through his nose sometimes, clutching his hand close to his face. Sometimes the fake gold of the plastic paneling winks like an eye near to where one should be.
Will falls asleep after a few of those. It’s impossibly lonely on this side of the room, deliberately separate and not his place to bring together, but the sighs are familiar where the vacuous space of his own mattress isn’t, and Will is accustomed to hearing them.
—
Day two is more of the same.
Hannibal sits in silence. Hannibal does not fidget when he does this. He does not cross his legs, he does not close his eyes, and whatever he is watching for, he does not make mention of it to Will, and so it is not for Will to know.
(A sign of apology? You’re not sorry - you’re just sad that it happened, and that it needed to. You pruned an ugliness that was never going to stop growing, no matter the fantasy of the happy ending. You saved the two of you the trouble of misunderstanding that love is painful.)
(An opening? Ha, you laugh.)
Hannibal rests, occasionally making an effort to lie down and take the weight off of what must be an impressive abdominal mesh that holds him together right at the Adonis belt, an invisible metal veil between where Will has last touched him. It makes Will not quite happy, but something like satisfied to know he will be a risk of herniation on Hannibal's side for the rest of his life, just as he himself was warned.
And what an image it is: to think of some poor medical student telling Hannibal Lecter to lift with his knees, to avoid loads greater than ten pounds for the coming months, like they and everyone in the hospital don’t know he deadlifts the average weight of most men and women when not allowing himself to be desecrated, that three years past, he carried Will and might not be able to do so again without spilling from the inside out.
On day three, Will knows that whatever is to be seen in his face is not yet what Hannibal wants to see.
There’s no real fear in Will. Hannibal will do whatever Hannibal will do, and if that means to hold him again, in an act of hate or love, is for him to decide.
There’s no amusement either - Will’s satisfaction is in the promise being fulfilled, and his mouth has grown very tight and sour with something other than healing cheek and gums, and once the bright pain of that has faded enough that it is hard to make it hurt as a distraction, he turns once again to his shoulder, thumb digging-digging-digging until he can make it spot invisibly onto the navy of the jumpsuit which Hannibal can’t see.
Dogs chew at their own feet when nervous, he thinks to himself that night, when lights out comes and the night glow begins. He is a one-headed one now.
He dreams of soft hands at his ears, that he is long-snouted and sharp-toothed and not so man-shaped and stupidly trapped in an unremarkable body after all. He dreams that he has muscled, bending legs for arms, and glossy fur that hides how pink skinned and scarred he is beneath it, and that this too is softly smoothed from the memory of being pulled apart, or maybe just away.
—
In the following days, Will isn’t entirely sure if Hannibal hasn’t finally gotten rid of his inconvenient affection for Will - excised it like diseased tissue, and unspooling the bandages at Hannibal’s waist beneath the new bloodless jumpsuit would show a pit carved into his belly.
He thinks about asking sometimes. Did you take care of that bother of yours? Did you scratch it out with your forgiveness?
He wonders if Hannibal ever wanted to do the same with Will’s own scar, and if both of them would be afraid the answer is yes, it’s gone, just like you wanted.
Conversation is largely still at Will’s behest, which all but guarantees that it is near non-existent. He has never been a nervous talker, and while he misses Hannibal’s lighthearted diatribes, he recognizes he will not get one if he asks for it at present.
Those are saved for Alana and the orderlies.
“Your trust in my own care is much appreciated,” he says on the second day to a tray full of all the usual oddments and tools to clean his wound. “I find after a couple weeks of leaving it to my colleagues, my bedside manner is as poor as theirs.”
“I’m hoping you similarly lapse in your medical rigor,” says Alana. “That it makes you happy to risk it just serves both of us, as it has in the passing months.”
No one looks at Will, but Will feels seen.
“You have my utmost respect for finding new and creative ways to make me feel geriatric,” he says on the third day, staring down at a plate of what appears to be steel-cut oats and pineapple. “I should consider myself so lucky to not have the toilet removed, but I see you’ve left everything more or less how you found it.”
“Seems inappropriate to punish you for something Will did,” says Alana.
“Will’s got a taste for irony these days,” says Hannibal, humming with his close-lipped smile, turning his plastic spoon in circles through his breakfast. “It would be fitting for you to have done so.”
It’s true, of course, so Will leaves it for what it is, and ignores his own matching bowl. That annoys him more in some ways - that they are back to their marked insistence of Hannibal’s ownership of him, even if Hannibal has not so much as crossed the invisible center of the room. Maybe it’s just easier to keep track. Maybe it’s just easier to make portions for two.
He eats it anyway, and in what marks their tradition before and after the incident, Hannibal watches that too.
“I hope you weren’t looking forward to my death overly much,” he says on the fourth day to their visitors. “I’ve grown used to avoiding it when possible. I have a great deal to look forward to. Imagine all the forthcoming Christmas cards I wouldn’t be able to send.”
Will smiles a bit at that, hands folded behind his head, laying down to stare at the ceiling until the recessed lights are burnt into his eyes. Four days of Hannibal in perfect, monk-like silence makes for difficult company when there’s no cues to read, but the assurance that Will hasn’t broken him of his ritualistic reminders to Bedelia, and other people that have crossed him that he remembers them, brings a bright flutter of content to Will that he doesn’t expect.
An unbroken horse, still snorting and biting and refusing to be made tame, not even by Will or for Will.
(Would he have sent them to you if he thought he could get away with it, despite your attempts to forget him? They don’t give him your address in those three years, but you know he could have found it somehow. Seasons Greetings! It would scream with a spurned hand from the parchment, with Lamb Sweetbreads A La Sevigne written in clear instructions beneath. Would you have reported him? Send him a letter to remind him that you don’t think about him anymore?)
(Would you have cooked it?)
Will must make a sound without knowing it - he’s so accustomed to the noises of the building, and learning the noises of the near-mute Hannibal, that he doesn’t really notice his own, but Alana does. Hannibal does. They both look at him, and his little mean smile.
Alana doesn’t stay long.
And while Hannibal still doesn’t say anything to Will, the black of his eyes has a small mean smile of its own.
A little bit of affection left, then. Enough for a Christmas card, and the consideration of how best to make sure he wasn’t wasted if he were given access to a kitchen and all his many splendid knives, if he has decided Will makes it to another Christmas.
Will spends the rest of the day thinking about that - what festivity looks like to Hannibal, what he would drink with the remnant of Will’s brain on the plate, if he would be at all sorry that it was there, or if he would still be thinking of how it felt to turn it in buttermilk over and over again until it was rinsed clean of all the bitterness.
—
“Hannibal?” he asks the room when night falls again and the lights dim to nothing.
It’s hard to distinguish Hannibal from the rest of it when the moon is gone - he didn’t have to worry about that when Hannibal slept-didn’t sleep at his back. He only had to distinguish Hannibal from himself, and the instinctual inclination to hold his neck tight between shoulder and skull was distinguishing enough.
Maybe he needs glasses after all. Not just the fake kind. He’s getting old. Hannibal too, oatmeal or otherwise, to the surprise of no one but themselves.
Will’s not sure at first if Hannibal will say anything. That would be fair - Will said hardly anything, and wasn’t half so injured, or made to understand why he was.
He doesn’t, but he does shift somewhere - prison uniform crinkling, the denim of it creasing under the weight of so consequential a man. Just a man, Will tells himself, like any other that he is allowed to hold the organs of. That will have to be sufficient - that Hannibal is listening, and watching for whatever that he is looking for that his hands have lost the strength for.
“Where would you have picked?” Will asks.
Hannibal doesn’t answer, but Will feels Hannibal’s eyes like a country, sovereign and distinct. They do not fully cross the blue gloom of the room, but they make borders, laws, and entry points anyway, and whatever language they speak there, Will realizes he may never know it in its entirety.
Somewhere, hours later or what he thinks should be hours, Will imagines the new moon gliding through the dark, present, unseen, and unmarked - he doesn’t see this, eyes shut tight and frowning. He wonders if Hannibal would have a fun biology fact for that - animals that deliberately display vulnerability in hopes to get the whole ugly business over with, or if he’d just think Will’s still playing dead.
Hannibal rolls somewhere across the room, all limbs tight to his sides, and not a breath to say what he thinks, or whether he sleeps well, or if he sleeps at all.
The sheets rustle when he rolls his head to face the wall. His thumb rasps at the edge of the new pink scab of his shoulder. The air conditioner kicks off.
“I told you,” Will says quietly.
—
(What you would do.
Not where you’d go. These days you think you had always trusted him on some level to decide, and you’d get the luxury of being the skeptic, the critic, the one that Hannibal laughs off pointing guns in the kitchen, and invites to stay afterwards. He laughed off your little knife in the piazza, and prison, even your marriage. He laughed off your fake aloofness in front of the Dragon, and a cliff, and held you like something he wanted to pack with him forever because he expected all those things on some level. But he didn’t expect you to still feel wronged by the dozen things you were expected to laugh off too, with none of the foresight he benefited from.
So you did it - you found something that Hannibal can’t do that you can - still love you when served his particular brand of unanticipated, exacting punishment. And you do, despite yourself - still love him.
You wonder if he understood you. )
—
Eventually, Will stops counting the days.
It’s dull, most of them. Prison and involuntary institutionalization alike are designed for that, at the greatest expense, with the least to show for it, and Will doesn’t even have the anger he had before to keep him going - just an ache.
Hannibal resumes much of what he did before, methodically probing his insides from the outside, small stretches and walks on one side of the room, little bitchy comments on occasion to Alana who clearly is still annoyed with his increasing good health, and that Will and Hannibal haven’t strangled each other yet if they’re going to insist on not getting along, or going their separate ways.
(“He can be moved,” she says like you are an intruder to their arrangement, and you already know what that feels like, and you cannot imagine moving yourself from it anymore than the first time it happened. You will make Hannibal remove you himself.)
Will, the proverbial cricket in the reptile tank, feels forgotten, save that Hannibal doesn’t wholly ignore him.
He doesn’t extend any olive branches, or offer conversation to pass the hours either, but he does seem to resume the general assumption that Will is safe to be around.
He showers, and minds his cleanliness between bandages and pressing examinations of the now crescent grin of a scar that puckers his waist. He very nearly shows it off on a few occasions - look, it says. Look how much more memorable I am now that you are done. In some unknown passage of time, he even begins to make careful forays into abdominal stretches, sweating and tight-mouthed with pain which no one minds because he has his permanent smile speak for him. He fists his hands in front of himself until they go white with the burden of his thumbs tucked into them.
“You’ll have to be careful if you don’t want to go visit your old stomping grounds as an inpatient again,” Will says without really expecting any response beyond the now perennial long, black stare.
“Imagine being robbed of the opportunity to say that you didn’t need anyone,” he shrugs, plucking at the seam nearest to his collarbone, craving the scratch of it across the raw skin beneath.
Hannibal, mid squat, rising slowly, smiles in matching speed.
And to Will’s soft shock, he speaks.
“You do love to assume the worst of me,” he says like he can’t quite help it, and that he wasn’t quite done with his silence, but that Hannibal is unfailingly full of words and accustomed to telling Will them. If his amusement is because he thinks Will is funny, or that Will is on to something is unclear, only that both feel at home together as a pair.
“Consider what you’ll do if you’re right,” Hannibal adds, lowering down again, eyes forward to the glass and the table in picture perfect form for a man who was likely just a series of drains and IV lines a month ago.
Still, Will is happy to hear his voice, veiled threats or otherwise.
“Probably what I’ve always done,” he says.
Hannibal’s smile is a proper one this time - the kind that watches Flora run from Zephyr on the gallery floor, or clumsy teeth take chunks out of ignorant men. It must be obnoxious for him to know the shape of his fondness, and feel it take over each fold at the corner of his eyes.
“Then we are aligned in this, as we have always been,” says Hannibal, rising to his full height again, sore but satisfied, rubbing at his fingers until Will hears the small bones creak as Hannibal pops them. “You and I are creatures of habit, and would be wise to remember it.”
“Cheers to aberrant instincts,” says Will, who watches each knuckle and crease of the skin with what he hopes is guarded eyes, but are likely just sad.
“Long may they guide our hands,” says Hannibal, whose eyes are very dark and have no specific name save in that unknown language that Will doesn’t speak anymore.
—
Breakfast comes as it invariably does every day.
The selection grows more interesting the more resolute Hannibal’s appetite becomes - for all his underhanded comments to Alana, she does seem to take some semblance of responsibility for upholding her end of whatever bargain they have. Today’s offering - turkish eggs made bright by paprika and herbs, olive oil held in a paper cup to the side, looking like medicine and smelling like summer, even in styrofoam plates, and between plastic utensils.
Hannibal nods when he sees it, unusually keen. He’s been feeling better. Will sees it in how he holds himself upright.
“A change of pace in honor of a change of circumstances,” says Hannibal to the item slot and not so much Will. “Fortuitous for me, and a taste of something a little different for Will, today.”
They sit across from each other, meeting briefly in the middle to receive their trays - not quite shoulder to shoulder, and certainly different from the previous nearly entwined balance of Hannibal at his side, Hannibal at both of their trays, eying them critically, Hannibal making certain that Will doesn’t wince through each aching sip of broth, bisque, and soft stew.
Hannibal pierces each poached egg with lateral strokes of his fork, and asymmetrical slashes of yolk–sourdough-dill , eating with a single-minded focus. He skims around the plate with the oil, but uses very little.
(“Too much richness too quickly makes for a difficult meal, but you’d know that, wouldn’t you, Will?” says Hannibal when you look for too long.
“Don’t bite off more than you can chew!” you say cheerily to some nobody on the lakeside once upon a time, and pull down the edge of your shirt like no one’s ever seen a scar before, no one’s ever been hurt before you were.)
Will thinks it all looks like an abscess. It looks like his withdrawn ringless fist, and turns his fork in the yogurt and red-yellow of sauce.
He bites his tongue accidentally to the point of bleeding, taking each dripping spoonful.
As is the routine, Hannibal watches that, and enjoys his meal all the same.
Will in turn sees the golden viscousness of the egg comes up with each pass of bread, each shining crooked tooth, and thinks Hannibal looks properly like himself - a man, of the kind to crack femurs open for marrow, and jokes out for blood. He wipes his hands and the cup of oil gingerly on linen that will be taken with the laundry tomorrow, because paper is insufficient, until every fiber is glistening and wasteful, but the plates are very clean.
Will watches Hannibal do his stretches not long after - less pained today, but shiny eyed and lipped following the meal. He rises in carefully modulated breaths, waist bending, and Will imagines his new scar grimacing, too tight with black sutures to show its teeth.
—
The lights go off at whatever time they go off - 8:30 maybe, like a house full of school children instead of the mentally questionable, the chronically unstable, the high-minded sociopaths. 9:00, like responsible adults should. 9:30, because everyone here of note is over thirty and has nothing but themselves to waste their hours on and so they may as well sleep.
Will stares across the room, weak shoulder to the air, once-weak shoulder to the mattress because there’s no such thing as a good part of his body these days.
Parallel to him, Hannibal does the same, pressure off his firmly sealed grin of a waistline, determinedly untroubled by the press and pinch of his own body against it to make it stronger. Maybe it does trouble him. Maybe pain is just as constant for him and it was for Will, no secondary infection or not.
“Will?” he hears from across the blue of the room, gold winking at him from where Hannibal should be.
Will doesn’t reply - just blinks owlishly into the dark, tracing the range of Hannibal’s body in the dark. The peak of his shoulder. The saddle of his spine and his neck to either side of it. The cavern of his abdominal wound hiding beneath all that black rock, full of bones and soft things that Will still thinks about every once in a while.
The silence meanders. Will blinks into the mute indigo of the night. Hannibal knows he’s listening.
“Georgia,” says Hannibal. “In the Caucasus, is what I had thought, in honor of Miss Madchen. Anonymity to the north over the border if you wanted it, the long stretch of the sea to the west if you needed one.”
Will frowns at first of the reminder - poor Georgia Madchen, who didn’t deserve what happened to her. Rich of Hannibal to think that Will could think that was something that needed reminding of.
Then he frowns that this doesn’t sting quite as it should. He doesn’t know what the western shore of Georgia looks like, or the northern border. He would have undoubtedly complained if told either of his options all the same, but it sounds right. Unfamiliar to Will, and just familiar enough to Hannibal to navigate. Somewhere that doesn’t know the name Verger, or Jack Crawford, or Molly Foster, and probably never thought much of unremarkable Will Graham.
It sounds like somewhere they could have been, even if they weren’t necessarily always happy. It sounds like it sets an expectation.
Will nods, and tries to memorize the summit of Hannibal’s jumpsuit in the dark before he falls asleep to the gentle, long percussion of the ductwork. It would have been nice if the Coast Guard were slower, or the fall had been to friendly waters. He could have made more of an effort to not get wounded. He could have tried to not be so jealous and tired and swam so that his shoulder wouldn’t be so tight.
Will curls into himself, and rests his eyes to the navy-cobalt-steel of the room, and the flash of gold that passes from Hannibal’s face to rest at his middle.
—
Will dreams he is long-legged and soft haired again.
He is stretched, and dragged, and clenched-jawed from one animal-limbed side of himself to the other, wandering mountain passes and seaside shoals. When he surfaces from those places to the wakefulness of the room, he grits his narrow teeth to the cold, air buzzing between them, thumbed at-pried-pulled from a slack mouth, the open buttons of his jumpsuit a chasm to be climbed.
Will opens his eyes at the first chill of glass to his back.
And he is not an animal once more, but a man.
The jumpsuit is still open. His animal limbs are held pinned behind his back by forge hot fingers.
Whispered, just behind the curls of his right ear: “And where did you run this time? What heights must you still throw yourself from to be at rest?”
For a few scant seconds, Will assumes he is still dreaming. But no, his back remains cold and sore to the flat plain of the wall behind him, his feet not standing so much as gently resting against the wooden floor. His socks feel very thin now, toes pointed and pressing outwards. Where are his shoes? Where is his strength to stand?
Will blinks, and focuses until the quiet blue of the room coalesces into something he knows how to read, and that doesn’t work either - there is only the tall, black silhouette of Hannibal and his dark eyes that Will does not pretend to understand the workings of, and at either shoulder, beneath the gaping neck of the prison suit, Hannibal’s hands are broad, hot, and metal firm at the dome of his shoulders.
Will tries to think of something suitably sharp.
Have you decided what you want to do? he thinks about saying. Have you satisfied whatever internal quota that you have for following through on what you should have done before all the inconvenience of being in love started?
But that is too pointed, and Will is afraid to know the answer, only that there is a hand underneath his undershirt, dropping from shoulder, to armpit, to the flat expanse of his chest where one thumb makes itself at home where Will has been so diligently keeping the knife wound alive and pink with unfinished healing.
“It’s interesting,” says Hannibal, as matter of fact and loud as he would in his own office or kitchen now, perfectly at home in the gloom of the cell. Alana left Will in here, so presumably Alana knows Hannibal might do something with Will, and there is nothing for him to be quiet about. “How you choose to pick at things that otherwise heal on their own.”
“Overthinking is a sort of self-harm,” whispers Will, shuddering when the hand working under his clothes and at his chest does what he has only previously fantasized about - plucks at the rise of a nipple with a thumbnail cut neat, if a little long. Perhaps, the work of a fastidious nurse in weeks past who does not differentiate the maneater’s nails from the car accident driver because the work is the same, no matter the thumb.
“As is passivity,” says Hannibal, and puts unseen teeth to the skin of Will’s neck, very carefully as to not break the surface, but hard enough to bruise.
Will’s breath catches in his throat. His hair catches at the edge of one of the holes in the glass. His back tries to find room to stretch upwards and outwards, and all that his spine finds is the relentless weight of Hannibal’s body holding it pinned, and pushing it further away from the floor.
You’ll hurt yourself, thinks Will, but doesn’t warn him. You’ll open yourself clear up just to do the same to me.
It’s funny to think for all the many ways Hannibal has very boldly used touch on Will, not once has it been with his mouth. Will imagines it’s the absence of this that makes it feel so much more heavy than it is, and that each shining tooth should leave a shiny scar to match the ones beneath their navels. And it’s hardly anything… Just a open lipped bite that scratches at stubble, and the soft skin beneath it that makes Will want to scrunch his neck to protect it, and to open it wider and offer the hyoid bone, the ridged cartilage, the soft dip of the jugular notch that had only been good for snowmelt tears before.
Hannibal leaves a pinching bite where the shoulder meets the neck, and when he is done there, he pulls the collar of the undershirt until he can leave a piercing one above the picked-at knife wound. It will bruise like a little torch at its top, a little cudgel to swing.
Will struggles just once, because it hurts between the teeth and the straining cotton - even if he thinks it’s out of habit more than a desire to escape.
Hannibal, not broken by having his liver weighed by Will’s graceless prying, or the waves of the ocean, or the thousand things that should have stopped him before he ever even heard Will Graham’s name, is untroubled by such a minor inconvenience.
He slams Will’s head, once, and then twice against the glass, hand fisted at the fabric gathered at his arm, and the other at the waist next to his own smiling mark, knee coming up again to support Will’s weight.
Will swallows, gasping, breath very loud between them.
Once he is sure Will doesn’t struggle again, the hand at the waist pets down the back of Will’s head, soothing away what is more the shock of the sound than the actual impact of the glass.
“As long as I like, as long as it suited me, I think is what you said,” Hannibal says in a whisper again. “If I still wanted to once you had done your work. And you have done it,” Hannibal adds with a thumb that very gently traces the tender skin just above Will’s cheekbone, gone hot with something between embarrassment and anger. “I knew it the second it came into your eyes - passed through the room and down the hall with me and the rest of me dragging behind. Have I been given my just deserts?”
Will sees a streak of gold when it passes - the wedding ring, fit to Hannibal’s pinky finger because Will’s own are too slender to fit the ring finger.
Will stares into the dark where Hannibal’s face should be. He looks back down to the hand. His shoulder hurts in new places, another injury to collage over the old ones. He’s glad that it hurts. He’s glad that the ring is somewhere that Hannibal got to choose. Will gave it to him after all, just like the rest.
“Do you feel punished?” Will asks.
(The betrayal, the prison sentence. The rejection, and being left behind for another person. The story you don’t want to tell that is written into your body, but you have to every time your shirt moves just so. The phantom pain of being pulled apart. The lingering weakness. The expectation that you know why you were and are, and that you were supposed to feel bad about it, and that it didn’t pain him at all that you suffered, so long as you understood.)
(You think that’s repaid. You think maybe he understood after all.)
Hannibal doesn’t reply - just stands and considers Will’s tense face, hand still careful and ghosting over the skin left cracked open to the room’s restful dark-night blue. It passes from sternum to shivering belly, and lower down to raised mesa of scar tissue. Just a body, like any other man’s, Will tries to tell himself when the shock turns to quaking legs and arms, waiting.
Will shudders and nods.
“Yes,” he says low, breathless, hissing, and embarrassingly aroused at each plucking fingertip, his head rolling back into the glass to stare at the mute shade of the ceiling. “Yes, I’m done.”
Will pushes down the tightening of his throat. He feels the edge of one of the openings near his ear, and the cool glide of the air through it, over his neck, in all the places that Hannibal and prison uniforms cannot cover, and it feels good. Long drive over, project completed, file closed. Whatever Hannibal feels about Will, and the wound, and the displacement of the things that aren’t necessarily Hannibal Lecter but are the closest Will is going to get to being inside him these days, is for Hannibal to decide.
Will is done.
Hannibal is not.
He brings a hand along the side of Will’s head as he did in the kitchen. It’s too dark to know if he is sad, or angry, or some mixture of those things as Will was, and he himself was the first time, but the grip at his shoulder and the knee at his legs are sturdy and do not account for abdominal wall healing, muscle loss, bloodless meals that are meant to keep people alive but bring nothing to remember. They memorize. They hold Will together again.
Hannibal says nothing, and neither does Will, and this time when Hannibal moves forward, no one has any knives, or hands made to be knives because they have to make do. Their teeth click together in rictus, biting frowns-grimaces-smiles, and once the loudness of that passes, they gentle into needy kissing that feels less like affection and more like a fight to scream what they feel as quickly as they can. All the time in the world between three walls of plastic, cheap paneling and a display cage wall, and it is not enough.
Will keeps his hands aside, and the memory of the last time they touched each other. Objectively, lips feel like organs too - warm, sliding, unyielding but soft regardless. This alongside the tongue, he supposes, are the ones Hannibal values the most and never shared with any sort of honesty, and they are Will’s here and now.
The hand at his shoulder pushes to the glass until the shoulder will bruise. The free hand sits pressed with a spread palm over the scar, and there is only the sound of them struggling to breathe fast enough through their noses and the periodic clack of bony incisors looking for vulnerable things to chew and only finding each other.
Will feels dizzy. He doesn’t push Hannibal away, but turns his head enough to take a deep breath. He heaves a few of those, and Hannibal stays so close each must be taken in by him.
The glass squeaks against Will’s ear. The air conditioner kicks on, and with it, the blackness of Hannibal’s eyes.
Will braces without knowing what for, but knowing that he should.
Hannibal grabs him by the waist and the uniform and pulls to throw Will to the top of the steel medical table, empty save for the symmetrical piles of gauze, sodium chloride bottles, and the day’s laundry meant to be put out tomorrow. It rings in a way that the glass doesn’t, buzzing up against the skin of Will’s neck and down the spine.
“You weren’t entirely fair in dealing your punishments out,” says Hannibal with a tight voice, and his arms shaking now that they don’t have to hold Will’s weight. Will can only stare up from the clean expanse of the steel table at how Hannibal’s hands tremble at the sleeves of Will’s jumpsuit, pushing things to the side, the warbling metal beneath occasionally groaning.
Will tries to push himself up at the elbows.
Hannibal pushes him back down, fingers tight at his wrists.
“I ripped you open,” he says, hands now fully working at freeing Will’s, and when that is done and the cool air rushes over Will’s chest, Hannibal then jerks the fabric down further-further-further. “And in turn, you opened me up too.”
He takes Will’s undershirt from him - catches Will’s mouth in another kiss that is not a mess, but considered and ready, tongue pressing past Will’s gasping mouth to outline the inside of that scar too, and that it is only an inconvenience of anatomy that he does not bite to bruise this one too. He worries at the same corner that Will thinks about opening back up. He traces it to the farthest back he can go, and then comes back around from molars to the hard palate of Will’s mouth above that, and Will lets him, thinking this is a kind of being held too.
When he pulls away, even in the non-light of the skylight, Will can see Hannibal’s eyes shine.
“But Will,” he says, and grabs for the waistband of the standard issue underwear, at first tracing the drawn stroke of the scalpel above it, and then waiting to see what Will does.
Will does nothing but blink wide-eyed and white-hot up at the round disc of the skylight, and Hannibal again no more obvious to him than mountains on a horizon.
Still Hannibal does nothing either.
(Passivity is self-harm, or so you and Hannibal have decided.)
Will lets a breath go, and nods. Whatever happens, happens.
(You’ll have to participate.)
Hannibal gives that a moment, and when it is sufficiently paid, he shucks off the underwear alongside the pants of the jumpsuit, leaving Will’s legs hanging from the tableside, feet pointed downwards, ankles cracking as he rocks them to disperse the anxiousness of being laid out and seen.
Hannibal is very dedicated in his seeing, looking more at Will’s face than any of the rest of Will’s bare skin, hands for a moment busy with grabbing something from the piles that survive Will’s arrival. He turns his hand in the white of something that could be gauze, or a towel, left hand methodically running over the right until he has surely touched the entirety of it where he has not touched Will.
Will is surprised at the rise of frustration he feels when he realizes that. He’s been naked before, certainly, shucked clean of the safety of his button ups, coats, well worn t-shirts. They did it to him the first time he arrived here, and the second, but his legs still quake, and his arms go between relaxing and clutching at the edges of the table, like he is cold and can’t contain his shivers, but instead he is impossibly hot and panting, ignoring the weight of his own cock and the tightness of his skin. He supposes it’s never mattered before.
Maybe it still doesn’t. Maybe Hannibal sees just another body - surely a person can only see so many of them before they are stones in a pile. The shaking is not excitement but the work of sympathetic nerves, the arousal anticipatory. They are unequal again in that.
He doesn’t get much time to think on it before Hannibal discards what’s in his right hand, the streak of gold glittering as it passes, to prop Will’s right leg over his left arm. The joint nestled into the elbow, shivering again at the contrast of the canvas cloth to naked skin.
Hannibal bends down, and presses a chaste kiss to the scalpel scar. He turns his head to look at Will looking down at him.
“You did your best to feel around inside me, see how it felt while you were there,” Hannibal says, cheek flat to the skin of Will’s stomach. “Since we are in the business of equivalence, I haven’t gotten to do the same.”
Will expects blood at first. Hannibal has sharp enough teeth to open an old wound, even a three years healed one if he really wanted it.
Will expects a knife next. Hannibal is smart enough to hide a wedding ring from intake staff at hospitals and prisons alike - it wouldn’t be so strange for him to find a way to bring one back with him.
Will doesn’t expect the slick, insistent press of Hannibal’s pinky finger to his ass that stops for nothing once it finds the furl of its entrance. Not Will’s now insistent trembling and the warble of the metal. Not the clench of muscle that doesn’t know the feeling, and is galled by Will’s own wedding ring nested at its end.
Will says nothing.
His mouth falls into a stubble-chafed gape of surprise. His eyes close, and open to Hannibal’s head staring back at them, fiery and colorless jet-black, and close again when the ring finger comes to join the pinky finger, working in and out of him in slow, unrelenting glides. It burns. It feels uncomfortable, and at the same time essential to work past that to extend the strange pleasure that allowing it brings.
(You never specified where you could and couldn’t be touched.)
When Will does not protest this either, Hannibal presses another kiss to the raised skin at Will’s belly with a long, lewd inhale, and a probing tongue.
The third finger he does protest. Not in so many words, but in the stuttering jerk of his body - not enough time, not relaxed enough, not familiar enough, not-
Hannibal twists the two fingers inside of him. It still burns, but then it also hits something else, and the jerk of his body becomes an arch instead, the whorls of fingerprints on the inside of him little brands.
“I do not want you to suffer,” Hannibal says, drawing his head back to mouth at the skin of the leg over his arm, jaw pressing teeth into bright indented rings from knee to inner thigh. He pulls away with another chaste kiss, sealing it with a bow of sorts.
“Despite your best intentions, I didn’t - not the way you think. There was pain, yes… you’ll have that now too,” he hums. “Surprise.The sudden certainty that you could kill me at any time, and that I might not recognize it, or stop you. A great deal of blood,” he adds as an afterthought, biting at his own lip. “Not this time,” he says, turning his forehead into the hot bitten skin of Will’s thigh.
(But you must take this, says your intuition.)
Will swallows - wishes Hannibal would touch his cock. Would touch his face, kiss him, distract him from the swell of pressure inside of him, and that this hurts, and that it should.
The third finger joins the rest without warning to the hilt, each carded on the other and hot, the ring the same temperature as the rest of Will. He chokes down a loud hah.
Hannibal adjusts his arm. He pulls his right hand out - towels it again with the cloth, and presses back in with merciless persistence, and once it feels like there’s never going to be a time that he is not going to be drawn tight like this.
Hannibal pushes against the spot that twists Will’s spine again - makes him crave to be close, or very far away, but accepts that half the exercise is the acceptance of it, and being seen, and this feels more flayed and open than having a fist in his gut would have been. Too intimate for him, where the questing hand in Hannibal’s abdomen had been too intimate for Hannibal, who likely has done this before.
(Another moment where you feel the fire of your body, and the sear of the pinky finger held locked and straight with the other two, the gold of another person’s love of you used in service of his, and where you feel curious, tingling heat, you feel his delight when you relax into it - sigh at him rubbing the side of his jaw down your leg - tilt your head back to stare at the blue of the room and wonder if anyone’s watching this other than Hannibal, if he would kill them if they were or if half his pleasure is knowing that they do and will not stop him anymore than you will.)
(You know, of course. You are creatures of habit, aren’t you both? )
The fourth finger feels like the third did, and suffers no more than a choked sigh in the back of Will’s throat, throwing a hand up to push the hair away from his face. The addition of the top of the thumb is a throaty groan. The first suggestion of a knuckle makes you kick with your free leg into Hannibal’s, and it is Hannibal that gives a shuddering sigh.
Will chews at the inside of his mouth and considers splitting it, arousal growing fuzzy with the haze of discomfort.
As though he has been looking for that, Hannibal mouths the side of Will’s cock with careful passes, polar opposite in contrast to below that. Will wonders if his mouth is as hot as the inside of Will’s rectum and beyond that the intestines, if he could heat a brand in it. If Hannibal held the ring in between tongue and jaw to pass the nurses, and the guards, and Alana who is too vexed to see that he has lived to know that he has also claimed another banner to wave.
Two knuckles, three, and once there, four feels like an afterthought save that Will nearly laughs to himself that Hannibal has inevitably reached the edge of how far he can crawl inside Will.
The table has warmed under his back to the point of skin sticky, sweat squeaking beneath the bulk of his chest and squirming middle. Hot breath and saliva to the tender skin of his groin, the artificial coolness of the hospital against his shoulders and forehead. He feels quartered. He feels small. He feels turned inside out. He feels like there’s a stone inside him that makes him heavy, and this is the ocean floor.
It doesn’t feel good. It doesn’t feel bad. It just feels, and that he needed to, and that there might not be room for anything else, and that nothing would make Hannibal happier.
“Will it be enough for you?” Will asks, and thinks he sounds very selfish for asking.
“Yes,” says Hannibal, who pulls his head up with a long lick from the head to the base of Will’s cock. “No,” says Hannibal, like he rebukes the yes as foolish. “There will always be a new enough. But there is neither without you,” he admits in a pained voice.
Will hisses in a chestful of air, pinned and nodding.
“Breathe and bare down,” says Hannibal.
Will does, and the sting of it all is a blur next to the knowledge that the hand that cut him open is inside living tissue, unharming and unharmed, and the man who owns it looks covetous and lost.
It’s not the same - but Hannibal knew it wouldn’t be, and maybe that was the point.
“How does it feel?” asks Will for lack of a more sensible question, barely able to keep his eyes open to the sensation. There is pain, as promised. There is the surprise that it is not as much as he thought there would be.
“I would live between your ribs if I could stretch you and crawl far enough inside,” says Hannibal like it hurts him more than it does Will, teeth gritted, eyes pressed closed in the notch between hip joint and old injury, and maybe it does.
The fist doesn’t move, but stays at rest inside Will. There are no pleasures to wring from this, Will too drawn out and between sensations, and Hannibal too careful of hurting him this time. Another kind of holding then.
“Maybe next time,” says Will, who doesn’t think either him or Hannibal are capable of not harming the other in the long term, and cannot stand to be separated all the same. That they cannot trust each other to not try, and that Hannibal is a force to not be stopped, and Will is an emotion that cannot be unfelt.
He trembles his way upward, and presses his own palm against Hannibal’s half covered face to wipe the damp from the corner of an eye.
—
It is noiseless and cold when Hannibal withdraws from Will, one long slide that has none of the anticipation of the buildup to ignore that it hurts, and that it likely will for some time.
“Let me help you up,” says Hannibal who is clothed but may as well be naked with the wild look in his eye - abdominal injury damp with rosy colored fluid that stains the front of the jumpsuit and will be seen in the morning, but for now is simply the warm glow of inflammation. Will figures he’s torn some stitches for his trouble, and doesn’t stifle the small gladness in himself that they will both be sore.
“You were so eager for me to stay down,” says Will, feeling out his shoulders - both gone numb on the flatness of the table and tingling with each step.
Will’s shakiness is from feeling cold now - a scratchy blanket will do for him. It might even feel good now, comparatively.
Will halfheartedly folds his clothes in a mockery of Hannibal’s own fastidious stacks, and wobbles his way to the twin mattress that he was stolen from. His teeth clack against themselves. His whole body feels wringed out.
Unprompted, Hannibal drags his own blanket from across the room, and leaves the mess of their night on the floor. He settles behind Will as they had before. He rests the arm that held Will’s leg over the rise of Will’s hip now, too tired for much other than what is an affectionate squeeze of Will’s forearm, the hand that worked inside Will now washed and nested again in the curls at the back of Will’s neck.
He tells him about the blue lakes in the high passes of Zemo Svaneti, and the yellow volcanic stones of the Anchiskhati Basilica in the capitol, and whatever small asides he can recall reading in the past but has yet to see.
Will faces him at some point, letting him talk, and occasionally rubs the wetness away from Hannibal’s ever-proud face.
—
There’s a moment in the morning, before anyone can see their mess, that Will wonders what people will think.
There’s charming words for how they’re resting together that don’t really fit - carded-spooned-embracing. Those are words for lovers.
It’s possible Margot sees it for what it is. Will doesn’t think Jack does. Will doesn’t think Alana wants to, but is committed to the bit now that they’ve all followed along for enough time for it to be sort of true.
Bucks tangled by the horns is more appropriate - they could have had the peace of dying tangled up in the water, unable to pull apart. Hyperparasitism, where they’ve grown into each other to the point of mutual destruction. Hatefully co-dependent by design and accident. Hannibal’s a bit like a kudzu vine in that respect - he’s curled around Will enough times that it would likely kill them both for him to be removed.
( Those can be words for lovers too. )
So no one will think anything, and they don’t.
—
It takes them another week to sort out the close quarters paired with their recent vulnerability - mostly of the emotional variety. For a talented therapist and good read of his fellow man, Hannibal is remarkably incapable of processing large life events in good temperament that are not to his exact plan. Or worse still, unplanned and open-ended, but with expectations of how he fantasizes it will go.
Will isn’t allowed to cast the first stone in that department.
Predictably, Hannibal reverts to their initial arrangement.
“You are aware that it’s literally impossible for me to go anywhere at this point without a dramatic change of circumstances, right?” asks Will in the middle of an afternoon, feeling Hannibal sidle up next to him after a regiment of exercise and put an overwarm palm over spindly rib bones.
Holding him. Always holding.
Hannibal offers half a smile, and changes nothing about what he does, coming to lay alongside Will, encircling his waist as best he can from the cot.
“Don’t be so hard on yourself, Will. You’re a good candidate for early release,” Hannibal teases. “Not a single verified murder to be seen, no matter your immense talent for it.”
“Aptitude is different from enjoyment,” Will snorts.
Hannibal smiles fully at that.
“When convenient to make the distinction, certainly,” he says, and settles in, smelling of metal at his neck where the heat works its way out from the collar, and bar soap at his hands. He stretches his arm further over Will’s side, and lets the hand wander Will’s chest.
It’s strange to think that Hannibal sweats, or has ever had to work to maintain anything, but here he is. Another way the two of them are different - his enjoyment came before the aptitude. Will’s aptitude before the enjoyment. He chose to be here some time long ago, and Will just fell into it.
(You find you admire his resolve, and memorize the subtle movement of his thumb over the xyphoid process of the sternum.)
For a half hour or so, they are comfortable this way. Maybe this is what the rest of life will look like, and that’s not so terrible a thought now, when it no longer needs testing, and the weight of a few terrible years is gone. Being held feels without the anticipation of loss.
Hannibal must think something similar. He clutches for a moment, breathing shallowly through his nose at the base of Will’s neck, rubbing his mouth at the scratching tiny hairs there where they have since belonged whenever Hannibal thinks they do.
Hannibal’s mouth stops moving, considering.
“What made you decide it could wait no longer?” he asks.
Will nods - it’s a question he’s expected. The injury. Choosing when to widen it. How it felt to have Hannibal’s eyes widen, gored on a hand it once bandaged like he was tending to Christ’s feet.
It’s a fair question, even the kind that changes how either should feel about it. Did Will want to wait to maximize the damage? Was he bored? Was there some invisible point in the night that insisted to know what it would be like to dip into a kidney like feeling the temperature of a pool? Was it random?
He wonders how long Hannibal has been thinking about it, or if he ever meant to ask at all.
“When you stretched out my shoulder,” says Will, without pretense. “I knew I wouldn’t be willing to hurt you if I waited long enough to be healed.”
(Because you keep letting him hurt you, and likely will again.)
Behind him, Hannibal nods in return, face pressing back into the hairs at the back of Will’s skull. It seems at home there - worn to fit it like a worry stone.
Only a few weeks to decide, Will thinks guiltily, but then corrects that.
No, a few months. A few years. The undercurrent of the temporariness of his marriage to Molly is inescapable. That everyone else secretly thought the same and was content to put him in here to do something about that is disheartening as it is affirming. Will arrives with the rest of them, squirming on the glass, on the table.
Something prickles at the back of Will’s thoughts with that. A blush, but also a similar curiosity.
“What made you decide?” he asks, shifting his weight. He feels too close again. He knows being apart is worse, so he doesn’t shuffle away, but the nervous restlessness of his legs makes him squirm anyway at the sensation of the small bed, and Hannibal’s constant, inescapable grasp.
For his part, Hannibal is amused - Will feels the grin more than he sees it. It parts the cover of his hair to the scalp beneath it, white and sensitive to little teasing breaths. It finds the crease of muscles to slide from bony chest to gently dipping navel with fingers that mapped him one long stretch at a time.
“When the eggs came with the oil in a cup,” says Hannibal.
(Because Hannibal waits for the momentum to do what he wants, and likely will again, and that comes with occasional hurts.)
Will wants to be annoyed, but only manages a huff of laughter beneath the red that he feels creep up his neck, and after a moment’s consideration longer, the hiccuping full bodied kind, and he doesn’t remember when the last time that happened was, only that he is suddenly glad Hannibal can surprise him in ways that don’t always cause pain.
—
Weeks become months. Maybe the months become a year. It’s hard to say, because Will never asks for that call, or that drive.
The meals come on disposable plates with officious names, and eventually the books that entertained Hannibal before Will do too, because they need to be rewarded for good behavior. The dual beds are useless, save the variety of sleeping on one side of the room instead of the other. Will asks to cover the gold paint with plain white. Hannibal twists Will’s wedding ring on his pinky finger and says that he likes it as is.
Hannibal holds Will’s side when he sleeps, and helps him rebuild strength in the muscles of his arms. Will shares air with Hannibal, face to face on whichever bed they opt to fall on, and doesn’t pay attention to the machinations of the building to pay attention to Hannibal’s instead.
Somewhere in that, they learn intimacy when both are certain that the other is ready for it - Hannibal, in that he is lazy and unconsidered in how he handles Will, because he is allowed to, and no one, least of all Will, tells him no. Will, in that they are both eventually healed, and the temptation to thrash himself and Hannibal open passes. They can be inside each other in more enjoyable ways. They have all the hours of the white days and blue nights to find the unpleasant ones in words, and they are more careful with those now, to save them for everyone else that isn’t them.
It’s not a mad dash escape to all the distant places of the globe that don’t know their faces, and it’s not the office in Baltimore, or the kitchen floor, or the Uffizi Gallery, or the sun mote dusty warmth of Wolf Trap. It’s the waves beneath the surface of the ocean that cannot be heard despite their size because their ears are full of other sounds.
Hannibal talks about winter in Kutaisi, methodically pushing inside him with hands, tongue, and cock, like this isn’t the thing that he can barely consider enough without wanting to add every part of himself alongside what’s already there.
Will asks Hannibal if he’s capable of admitting he doesn’t know what that looks like, and does the same to him.
Will hopes Alana and Jack enjoy the view.
They picked it for him, after all.
—
One morning, the double doors open.
Breakfast - folded dough boats of cheese filled bread, golden brown at their edges and served with pretty slices of roasted tomato and parsley. On the side - a single bowl of maple syrup porridge, and the first to go into Will’s hands.
“You have a visitor today,” says the orderly - Barney, Will recalls between turning spoonfuls of his food. Polite to Hannibal, and shy of Will.
“Brave of them,” says Will, who doesn’t wish the two of them on anyone, but thinks it’s amusing when Jack Crawford tries to anyway. Jack himself doesn’t visit - Will reckons he can’t stomach the sight of them, an admission of his own failure. It’s strange to send anyone that could recognize Will at all.
“Or very desperate,” says Hannibal who thinks this as well as the orderly sets out a single folding chair with a snap, as a man who’s never seen a visitor that didn’t need something from him that he didn’t think of a dozen ways to take advantage of.
They only have a brief time between - double doors closed, but the lonely singularity of the chair in front of the many holes of their enclosure, and all the paired things that they share as if there was only one.
“Imagine where you’d like to go, Will,” whispers Hannibal, lips pressing beneath the lobe of each of Will’s ears, where the muscles of the neck meet the skull. He uses his hands to straighten the collar of Will’s jumpsuit, and flicks the top button like he wants to pull it open. “Fill it with the things that you like.”
“Are there waterfronts in Georgia I should know about with wine bars holding seats?” asks Will, who closes his eyes to the intrusion of a narrow mouth and broad teeth that fascinate easily with the reddening of the skin beneath them.
“To the west on the Black Sea,” says Hannibal, who steps away and folds his hands behind him, waiting for their guest, the flash of gold hidden in clenched fingers. “Tens of thousands of rivers from south to north, looking for it. Think of all the trite things we could be mistaken for enjoying alongside them.”
Will smiles into the jumpsuit collar, and makes himself similarly inhospitably alien, saying nothing.
—
(You’ll come find him afterwards to put his fists back where they belong, and listen to him talk about how best to use this new person in your lives. Hannibal Lecter never did see a wave he didn’t think he could swim and take you along with him, and you’ve never seen open water that you didn’t follow Hannibal through.)
(They thought this was safe, and the two of you together are anything but.)