To Stop This Crawling

by fatalism_and_villainy

Summary:

While in hiding after the fall, Hannibal helps Will unlock a new set of forbidden desires.

Notes:

This is, to date, the longest fic I have ever written. It is, in fact, the longest piece of writing I've ever completed. (Longer than my Master's thesis, also completed this year.)

I can't put into words how much I've poured into this project, and how many emotional ups and downs it's carried me through (despite, or rather because of, how emotionally wrenching and thematically dark its content is). I feel bittersweet about it being finished, but I can only hope reading it provides some similar element of fulfillment to others.

Thank you so much to Mencie for betaing, to Tei for first listening to my "Will Graham having noncon perpetrator fantasies" idea dump and helping it take shape, and to Val for additional encouragement.

Hannibal was on the brink of death for several days. At least, that was how it felt waiting for the antibiotics to kick in – with only rudimentary medical equipment, Will had nothing more than instinct to rely on. In the bedroom of the apartment, they were encased outside of time. And Hannibal, beset with erratic twitches and murmurs, was hovering between one reality and the next, death’s fingers teasing consciousness from flesh.

Will knew the touch of death now. He’d been submerged in its ever-yielding cold, felt it licking over his limbs and drowning out his lungs. Death was surrender to the enveloping quietude of the sea’s depths. Life lived in resistance, in the battering of waves against the shore.

That knowledge was why, when Hannibal’s fever broke and he began to stir awake, Will fell to his knees by the bedside and latched his mouth hard to the meat of Hannibal’s chest.

I’ve seen your weakness now, and I haven’t rejected it. I’m pulling you back by the skin of my teeth.

Hannibal’s hand came up to grasp the back of his head, strong and sure.

“Will,” he rasped. “You’ve made me a very happy man.”

 

The dwindling afternoon sun crept in through the curtains, more light than had ever graced Hannibal’s office. Will had grown so accustomed to playing in the shadows, each admission a calculating attempt to skirt another one, that it was hard to know what to make of this version of Hannibal, who spoke openly of Mischa, his parents, and his youth in Paris. In return Will offered up, with some wariness, talk of his favourite books, the mundane little humiliations he’d endured in childhood, and the summer he and his father had spent in Cleveland when he was ten – still one of the most peaceful stretches of his life.

We’re getting to know each other, Will thought to himself. It seemed so... ordinary.

Had he shared any of this with Molly?

“Of course I have. This is what people in relationships do, Hannibal. This is the stuff of first dates.”

Hannibal cocked his head. “We haven’t addressed that portion of your personal history yet. I want to hear about your wife.”

Will shifted position slightly. They were each propped against one armrest of the loveseat, their feet mingling in the middle. “Not exactly a conventional first date topic.”

But then Molly had mentioned her late husband on their first date. And then she’d paused, reached across the table to take his hand, and said, “Listen, maybe it’s not my place, but I have seen the news. I know you’ve been hurt. I have too. I know how it feels, when people try to… how condescending they can be. I just want us to enjoy each other’s company.”

It was only in retrospect that Will realized how deep the well of grief within him had run at those words. At the knowledge of how perfect she would have been for him, five years ago.

Well, he had to try. He had to try. There was nothing else to do.

“I believe it would be beneficial for you to talk about her, Will.”

“Is this therapy again?”

“I have always considered it my duty to guide you towards what is best for you,” Hannibal returned smoothly. “The tenderness of my feelings for you has only amplified that urge.”

That was something else to get used to – the simple directness of Hannibal’s admissions.

“What is there to talk about?”

“You could start with how you met her.”

“It’s not a very interesting story. We met in her shop. I was in there regularly, to pick up coffee and whatnot. She seemed interested – telegraphed it pretty strongly, in fact. But it seemed like she thought I should be the one to officially ask her out. So, I did.”

They’d gone to a café after she closed up. She’d explained that she was a widow, and a single mother. That she’d taken over the store after the first owner retired, and that she read mystery novels in her free time. Somewhere in the flow of conversation, it had dawned on him that this was what people typically did, that this was how it was supposed to work.

That realization had swelled up again the first time they’d had sex, round about the time he was unbuttoning her blouse, and she was whispering, “mmm, you’re so handsome”.

“I’d forgotten how much fun that could be,” she murmured afterwards. “I haven’t… to be honest, there hasn’t been anyone since my husband died.” A pause, then an embarrassed laugh. “God, that’s such a morbid thing to bring up in this context.”

“Hey, I’m used to morbid,” Will responded, after a moment of bemusement. (He’d tried not to think about warm arms winding around his pain-wracked body, or a knife sliding into his gut.)

“This can’t possibly be interesting to you, Hannibal,” Will said now.

“On the contrary.” Hannibal’s eyes were as intent as ever.

“Don’t you want to skip ahead to the part where I was unhappy with her?”

“Were you?”

Will laughed incredulously. “Of course I was.” He let his head fall back against the armrest, suddenly wearied by the banality of the admission. “Of course I was.”

Hannibal’s expression hadn’t changed, even to gloat. He had assumed the stance of the psychiatrist – patiently allowing his expectations to be confirmed.

“Tell me why.”

“Don’t you want to hear that I just couldn’t stop thinking about you?”

“That would be flattering, but not the whole truth. Do you believe my sole intention has been to usurp that woman’s position? When you turned your back on me, you abandoned yourself, starved your innermost urges of nourishment. I can only imagine the stress brought on by that kind of compartmentalization.” Hannibal leaned forward, gaze fixed on Will. “Tell me… was she aware that you beat a man to death with your bare hands?”

Will kept his eyes locked with Hannibal’s. “She’s aware that I used our friendship to conduct an entrapment operation. And, yes, that I killed in self-defense as part of that operation.”

A faint smile twitched on Hannibal’s lips. “But not the method of the murder?”

“She didn’t ask many questions. She respected my privacy. That’s why I liked her.”

“People who don’t ask questions make invaluable allies,” Hannibal returned. “Yet at a certain point, one aches to unburden one’s soul. Interrogation serves the secular role of confession. Mrs. Graham was undoubtedly a woman of considerable charity, eager to accept a man bruised by the force of his own righteousness. But you know how you felt when you killed Randall Tier; when you shot Garret Jacob Hobbs; indeed, just recently, when you killed Francis Dolarhyde. Could she have ever understood the elation of those moments? You have the ability to cloak your deeds in acceptability, but their exquisite beauty remains a dark seed in your mind, straining to blossom. Every time you touched your wife, you knew how conditional her tolerance was. If she ever learned that your most piquant taste of freedom came from taking a life, she would withdraw from you in disgust and horror. Isn’t that right?”

Will was quiet for a moment. “I wasn’t unhappy all the time. Not even most of the time. Moment to moment, things were pleasant enough. But the big picture – if I took a step back, even for a moment, I could feel the constrictions of her expectations.”

“What expectations did she have?”

Hardly any, was the thing. Molly never expected him to change, in his dress or habits. She didn’t push him to make a connection with Wally, instead letting the two of them muddle through it together during their dog walks or games of catch in the yard. She’d laughed in his face once when he’d suggested (painfully) that he attend a PTA meeting with her. (“Are you kidding?” she’d crowed. “You’d hate it! It’s all just busybodies anyway.”)

She was easygoing, took everything in stride. She derived a plenitude of joy from the smallest of outlets. She never demanded anything from Will, except that he be present and gentle.

She’d certainly never interrogated him like this.

“Our sex life,” Will said recklessly.

There, that was one truth. One that had the advantage of being – going by the expression on his face – genuinely unexpected on Hannibal’s part.

“Interesting. In what ways?”

“She, um – she expected me to, to be at peace with everything. To relax into it. That it would be easy for me.” Will raked his hands through his hair. “There were things I just couldn’t stop thinking, picturing – but I could never bring it up. In the aftermath, she just always seemed so happy.”

The bitterness in his voice was an ugly surprise. Their sex life hadn’t been bad at all – Molly had been frank and forthcoming, which put Will at ease, and she was deeply, vocally appreciative during the act itself. It was an acute relief to please her – a consolation to Will that he was good for something outside of death and destruction. And it was a reason to lie close together afterwards, eke out a bit of human warmth.

“What did you picture?” Hannibal probed.

Will opened his mouth, and then hesitated. His line of work had numbed him to explicit discussion of sex – he could make it through dialogue about vaginal tearing and semen samples without batting an eye. But it hit him, suddenly, how ill-equipped he felt to discuss pleasure. In Hannibal’s presence, the usual slang felt artless, crude.

He made an attempt. “Sometimes… sometimes, everything felt false. Like there was something pent up inside me that needed to be shaken loose. Some glass barrier that precluded me really feeling her. I wanted her – I just sometimes wanted her to dig her nails into me. Show me that she felt the same thing, that she wanted in the same way -”

Will gulped in a breath. His control over his words was slipping alarmingly quickly. He took a moment to compose himself, and to more deliberately shape what he said next.

“Sometimes, I’d have my hand between her legs. And she’d be liking it, but I’d find myself wishing she was tied down. I itched for it, in my fingers and deep in my core. I wanted to feel the limits of how far she could strain – feel them right in the palm of my hand.”

He willed himself to look at Hannibal head-on.

Hannibal’s face betrayed nothing - no surprise, satisfaction, or desire. He simply said, “I am given to understand that rope bondage is a fairly common practice between couples. I take it you never suggested it?”

“I couldn’t!” Wil burst out. “It wasn’t like that, it was… it was real to me, I couldn’t stop seeing it –”

Hannibal reassuringly pressed Will’s hands between his, the gentleness of the gesture contrasted with the rapacious gleam of interest in his eyes. Coaxingly siphoning off Will’s distress.

“What did you see, Will?”

 

It’d been abundantly clear, with Molly, that he needed to cultivate certain mindsets for sex, ways to contain the potential spillover in associations. It was safest if he thought of his cock as a tool for her pleasure, submerged himself into her little gasps and groans and melded his responses to the minute arches of her back. Took his mental gifts and used them to burrow beneath her skin.

He couldn’t lose sight of her for too long, couldn’t get sucked into the heated oblivion that her body promised. If he did, his mind would wander, and land on –

On things like –

Victoria Holmes, age seventeen, reported missing to the NOPD August 17, 1999, found dead three days later. Rope burns on her wrists, with chafing indicating considerable struggle. Raped, likely multiple times by the same perpetrator. Cause of death: strangulation. Muscular calves and an angelic cloud of blonde hair. Laid to rest by her killer in a back lot, with strangely tender care. Dead less than twenty-four hours when found. Decomposition hadn’t yet come for her, and she was whole and shining.

The crime exuded a radiance too awful for Will to look at head-on, but that didn’t stop his mind from bombarding him with sensations: the sharp jerks of her pulling against the ropes, the softness of her throat beneath his palms, the helpless fear in her eyes. Thighs tightening around his waist as she kicked in protest, arching her slender feet. Plunging into the silky heat of her, driving down with his hands and hips, enveloped by reckless, animal abandon –

Then abruptly pushing off Molly, his entire body shaking and nausea roiling up inside.

“Hey! Hey! Honey!” Molly grasped at him. “What is it, what’s wrong?”

Will was panting. Adrenaline was searing in his veins, the fire after extreme cold. “Nothing,” he breathed, hastily. Instinctively. “I just… got a little distracted. I guess.”

Molly’s brows were knit together. It had struck him, in the moment, that she was looking at him in a manner decidedly unlike Alana, or Jack. Not with the resigned pity of someone having their worst fears about Will confirmed, but with genuine, innocent bewilderment. “Well, do you want to stop?”

Will’s chest tightened. “No,” he blurted. The thought of being bereft of her warmth seemed suddenly unbearable. “No, I’m all right. Um – why don’t you get on top?”

He was rubbed raw, everything just shy of too much. When she lowered herself onto him again, the pressure was near excruciating, his nerve endings sparking against his will.

“Hey. You’re crying.” Molly reached to touch his cheek.

He had to focus on the weight of her legs over his – of her holding him in place. Containing him. He had to hide how volatile he was.

“Yeah,” he managed. “I’m just… overwhelmed. I just love you, is all.”

“Oh.” Molly stroked his cheek and leaned in to kiss him. “Oh, Will. You really are the sensitive type.”

When she pulled back, he saw not his wife, but Alana, riding him in the way he’d always fantasized about, with her hair loose and her thighs smooth beneath his palms. Looking down, he saw that it was Hannibal’s hands gripping her legs, as sensually precise as when they were handling a knife.

As he thrust upward into her, Will felt more encased in Hannibal’s skin than he had since he’d last seen the man – was aware, with an awful intimacy, of how it felt to lie not only with words, but with one’s entire body.

 

“So I did think about you, from time to time,” Will finished.

Hannibal was silent. His brow was furrowed, in the same imitation of concern he’d worn when visiting Will in prison, all those years ago. Impatience flickered within Will – didn’t Hannibal realize he didn’t have to pretend anymore?

But then, perhaps Hannibal had been genuine in his concern back then after all. They did both have a talent for carving up their authentic emotions and serving the most delectable cut.

Finally Hannibal said, “Did these rape fantasies disrupt your sex life with other women? Or just with your wife?”

“Fantasies? I’d call them intrusive thoughts.”

“Would you?” Faint amusement was creeping onto Hannibal’s face. “You were never one for psychiatric terminology, even to excuse your worst impulses. Why start now?”

“It just seems inappropriate to apply the word ‘fantasy’ to something undesired.”

“Can you say you derived no pleasure from these imaginings?”

“It’s not about pleasure. It’s about intention. Fantasy requires active construction. The connections my mind makes can’t reasonably be considered fantasy when they’re purely raw material.”

“Very well,” said Hannibal evenly. “Your… intrusive imaginings. Did they impact sex with other women, or just your wife?”

Will took a moment to answer. “It’s hard to say. I didn’t have much sex in my thirties.” Aside from Molly, there had only been Margot during that time period. A memory that lingered queasily in Will’s mind – the smell of her perfume, the calculation in both of their movements. Both so cynically, mechanically fixated on drawing out his orgasm. How dirty he had felt in the aftermath.

“And before that?”

“Before… before, it wasn’t on my radar as much. Though I remember being very conscious of my body – of its ability to do harm.”

He’d initially assumed all men had felt the same sort of scrupulosity surrounding sexual penetration. But that was more likely a result of how much mental company he’d spent with rapists and murderers.

Abruptly, he felt the need to change tack.

“What you did to Alana Bloom is rape, you know.”

Hannibal’s eyebrows lifted. “You haven’t brought this up before, Will. It can’t have been too pressing a concern.”

Will let out a scoff. “I’ve just thinking about Victoria. How different what happened to her was from what happened to Alana, and what happened to Mrs. Leeds and Mrs. Jacobi. And yet, Victoria and Alana aren’t all that different after all. Both seduced, as it were – courted. I think Francis Dolarhyde’s approach was cruder but a good deal more honest, don’t you?”

Hannibal was as calm as ever, Will could see that beneath the surface, he was rapt, unbearably curious as where Will was driving the discussion.

“My relationship with Alana Bloom was fully consensual,” he said.

“Rape by deception, Hannibal,” Will shot back. “It’s a legal term. Surely you’re familiar.”

“Don’t we all deceive our lovers?” Hannibal returned. “We lure them to us by showing ourselves in our best light. We tempt them into seeing what we want them to, and entice them with the prospect of seeing more of it. Isn’t that what you did to your wife?”

“It’s not the same. I never killed anyone when I was with her.”

“And before her -”

“I confessed to her. She understood, she knew that it was justified -”

“Justification is a means of deception,” said Hannibal triumphantly. “It constitutes rhetorical maneuvering – obfuscation.”

“You can’t honestly claim the situations are the same.”

“You just compared them.”

“I made the connection to Alana in the heat of the moment. My mind is frequently ahead of my reason.” Will frustratedly dug his fingers into the couch. Then –

“Didn’t it bother you?” he burst out. “Being with Alana? Having to pretend? To be – to be gentle?”

Hannibal was silent a moment, gazing contemplatively off into the distance. “Alana was pleasant company,” he said finally. “But to be honest, I wasn’t passionate enough about her to feel any desire to hurt her.”

“And now?”

“Purely contractual.”

Will thought of Alana as he’d last seen her – stern. Grimly determined. Severe. Worlds away from the woman who’d softened beneath his kiss, and let a delighted smile slip forth despite herself. There’d been a moment, just before her rejection, when the rigour of her self-discipline had fascinated him, and he’d felt a strange gratification at feeling it give.

Involuntarily, Will’s mind conjured up the image of Alana dead, wearing a mask made of mirror shards. Ravaged, rendered grotesquely pliable. The sickness that infected all the women he’d touched.

 

Kissing came to Will and Hannibal as an externally imposed compulsion, just as the grip of the moon brought the tide in. Each kiss spilled into the next as they tumbled and wrestled their way into each other, a mass of drops compounded into a sea.

Naked, Hannibal was more like the beast Will had seen on the clifftop than the refined figure he presented to the public. Hannibal had never shied away from his enjoyment of physical pleasures, but there was a rawness to his sensuality now, and Will’s fingers probed at the animal behind the impulses – the delicate edges of Hannibal’s bones, the thick trail of hair down his navel, and the throbbing of blood between his legs. As their thighs locked together and Hannibal’s erection burned against Will’s stomach, Will cradled Hannibal’s head against the side of his neck and giddily imagined tightening his fingers on the edges of his jaw, hard enough to choke.

Hannibal took this new turn in their intimacy as license to touch Will more and more. He would reach for Will’s hand at the table and run his thumb along the back of it, or sidle up behind Will as he stood at the window and wind his arms around him. Molly had done both those things, Will registered, the creature comforts of married life. It was a shock to the system to feel them from Hannibal. In Hannibal’s embrace, his gut twinged, still anticipating the blade.

(“Tell me how it felt,” Hannibal breathed one night, rubbing his hand down the scar on Will’s abdomen as he nibbled at his ear.

“It was… cold,” Will panted. He thrust impatiently into Hannibal’s tight grip. “It burned in the way that only frozen steel can. And it was wrenching, almost unbearable, made me physically weak, and, and, you were so steady -”

Hannibal hissed and pumped his cock even more furiously.)

Hannibal’s tactility must be rubbing off on him, Will reflected. His own hands were suddenly hungry for Hannibal’s skin, aching with the urge to grasp at the firm muscle of Hannibal’s thighs and upper arms, or feel his nipples harden.

It was a craving that intruded on thoroughly mundane moments. He watched Hannibal kneading dough and became mesmerized from the sight of bare forearms, the tendons flexing in his wrists. Or lazed on the bed and caught a glimpse of Hannibal in the bathroom, naked and wetting down his chest hair. He handled himself with the sensuality of a lover, rubbing slow circles down to his abdomen. Then he carefully guided his hand through the hair – the thick tufts around his nipples and the trail down his stomach – and with deliberate care snipped off the excess.

Will didn’t remember joining him in the bathroom, just the cold hard tile beneath his knees and the trembling warmth of Hannibal’s stomach beneath his lips. Will firmly rubbed the back of his thighs and grasped at his buttocks, mouthing frantically at the head of his cock. He was restless, and hot with greed. Frantically, he pulled away and began to stroke Hannibal off. He had almost forgotten that what they were doing constituted having sex, or even that it was intended to bring Hannibal pleasure, until Hannibal rolled his head back with a gasp and spilled on Will’s collarbone.

He was nothing like Will’s former sexual partners. His body was completely bared to the torrents of Will’s impulses, an unmoving cliff face in the face of Will’s eroding touches. As they wrestled and sweated together, Will wondered whether he was really attracted to Hannibal sexually, or if sex had simply become the container for a more primal aggression.

But wasn’t that what rapists felt?

The question was immaterial. There were no limits with Hannibal.

 

Nightmares posed less danger for Will while in close quarters with Hannibal. But Hannibal’s presence was still not an entirely effective safeguard against the Red Dragon, who came to Will in the sleepy shadows of his mind.

“You’re dead,” Will said to the hulking figure. “I killed you.”

They had left the bedroom. Will found himself seated on the windowsill, the shadowy contours of the living room assembled around them.

The Dragon stalked closer, his bony, angular face drawing into view.

“How does it feel? To have a monster on your back?”

“It’s not a particular novelty. I’ve carried a bevy of ghosts. You’re just the most recent.”

“But I was your becoming. Your sense of yourself is built on me, just as mine was built on the Leedses and the Jacobis. Every time you take a life, you’ll feel me guiding your hands, feel the power of the Dragon blazing in your chest.”

“Hannibal Lecter guides my hands. You were only an instrument, just like those women you desecrated.”

“Not flesh and blood, but light and air and colour,” quoted the Dragon. “The quality of the sacrifice makes a difference. We both realized that, at the same time.”

He drew closer to Will. Unnatural heat radiated from his body, and when he spoke, his breath singed the shell of Will’s ear. “We could have been together, if you’d only let me kill Lecter.”

Will laughed humourlessly. “You don’t believe that any more than I do. You wanted me too, once you’d used me to get to Hannibal. Why share power? Why let another source of strength go untapped?”

“I had vision. Purpose.” The Dragon pulled away from Will and paced back. Broad, leathery wings unfurled from his shoulder blades, cutting an imposing silhouette. “You and Lecter just use others for sport.”

“You were afraid and ashamed. And you cloaked it in artistic grandeur.”

The Dragon whirled around to face him. “I sublimated my deformities,” he hissed. “Can you say the same?”

“You had to die,” Will said quietly. “You were a problem. An aberration.”

“And Lecter?”

“He’s a necessity. He keeps things in balance – the virus that makes vaccine.”

“You’re too weak to sacrifice him. Too cowardly to devour his strength for yourself.”

The verbosity fell away eventually, with the temporal dissolve of dreams, in favour of flesh against flesh. They struggled not out of antagonism, but from the simple fact of their closeness, the almost choking heat of the Dragon’s presence. They were back on the rocky cliffs, tussling in slow motion. Will dimly registered that he was bleeding again, and that pain was eating away at his shoulder, but it faded into the background. What mattered was the solidity of the Dragon’s body - the angular handholds of his shoulders, the way Will’s heel slotted into the hollow of the back of his knee. And then the push – the moment when his straining burst through to the giddy rush of victory, as he rolled them over and buried his knife in the Dragon’s stomach. When the whole of his perception shrank to the knife’s handle and the force of his wrist and the grip of his fingers, and the Dragon was nothing but flesh.

A soft whimpering noise came from beneath him. Too high-pitched.

With creeping dread, Will lifted his head to see Abigail Hobbs lying on the ground, eyes wide and breath gurgling in her throat.

“No,” she whispered in crestfallen disbelief. “No, no, you promised –”

She was talking to someone else, but her eyes were fixed on Will, as if seeing directly through him.

Trembling, Will pressed his palms to her abdomen, cradling the knife in place. The warm, liquid throbbing of her blood was identical to the Dragon’s. Only flesh, in the moments of dying.

“Not you,” he panted desperately. “Never you. You were supposed to leave.”

Then he was awake, heart hammering in his chest and Hannibal slumbering on beside him.

 

“We murdered a rapist,” Will said the next day.

Hannibal laid the local newspaper down on the table. Will’s Spanish was coming along, and he could make out various turns of phrase without actively translating.

“Does it count as rape if the victims are already dead?” Hannibal inquired.

“It comes from the same place, doesn’t it? Wanting to use someone else’s body for your own gratification. Even if they were dead, he – violated them.”

“Is it really so simple?” Hannibal folded his hands and leaned forward. “The Dragon’s victims were little more than fleshy vessels to fuel his ambition. But some men are more… delicate. Reactive rather than proactive. What about that unfortunate girl you were fixated on? The New Orleans case? Did her killer see her as nothing more than a body to use?”

“I mean, he –“ Will rubbed the back of his neck. “He was obsessed with her. We found love letters among his belongings – very disturbingly intense stuff. And he stalked her. They went to church together – it’s how they met – and he would show up at the ice cream shop where she worked, intercept her when she was walking home from school… he wasn’t bad looking, and by her friends’ accounts, she found his attention flattering. Until... well. Maybe he kidnapped her, but it’s possible she went to his house willingly. Nobody knew, and I couldn’t make it out.”

That possibility had been intriguing to the crasser personalities in the division. Will recalled, with unbearable clarity, an overheard remark passed between two officers: I bet she moaned like a little slut the whole time. The words, and the revulsion that had flooded him like a full-body flush.

Another snippet of conversation rose to the forefront of his memory – Molly, at the kitchen table with a friend, speaking in a low, conspiratorial tone: I mean, he’s been through the ringer, investigated some really creepy stuff… you know, sex perverts and the like. This time it had been shame that flooded him, heavy and leaden.

“Does love redeem the act?” Hannibal mused. “Or does it cheapen it with sentimentality?”

“It’s not what I would call the most elegant of crime scenes.”

“Pathos has a certain elegance,” Hannibal countered. “At times.”

“Yeah, well, he discarded her in the end. Dumped her like a piece of trash. That’s what his love amounted to.” Will clenched his fingers into a fist, anger unexpectedly bubbling up inside him.

“The Dragon loved his victims too,” he said, after a moment. “I could feel it when I stepped into that bedroom in the Leeds house. The air was so thick with it that it was hard to breathe. But it – it amounts to the same thing. It’s love that’s one-sided. It has nothing to do with the other person.”

As he spoke, Will realized it was useless to try to make Hannibal understand. Hannibal, after all, was unscrupulous in his love.

 

Hannibal had a plan for the future.

Will hadn’t questioned their surroundings at first. After repeatedly stepping into the ring with Bedelia Du Maurier and seeing Frederick Chilton follow Freddie Lounds into the furnace of his nightmares, Will had been content, upon arising from the dead and into Hannibal’s world, to take that world on faith. It had been a relief not to think.

But the profiling habit inevitably crept back, and Will found himself noticing how uncharacteristic of Hannibal the apartment was. It was small, with only an open living area and adjoined kitchen, and then a bedroom and ensuite bathroom in the back. Furthermore, it was, if not exactly dumpy, still completely lacking in adornment. The wallpaper was a faded pea green with a nondescript yellow pattern, and there were plain white blinds on the flat back window. The furniture was strictly utilitarian. The kitchen, as Will discovered upon rifling through the drawers, didn’t even have a proper cheese knife.

The only essence of Hannibal was the books on the living room shelf – an impressive assortment including thick, leatherbound medical books, first editions of Proust in the original French, and an illustrated copy of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience.

“This is a new apartment, isn’t it?” Will asked Hannibal. “It’s not one of your original hidey-holes?”

They had gravitated once again to the couch in the centre of the room. Will had rifled through the books available and made off with Borges’ Labyrinths.

“That’s correct.” Hannibal looked pleased. “Tell me how you know.”

“Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? Before, you were all prepared to keep living the high life in exile. Now, you can’t afford to do that. Not when the entire world knows your taste in wine and truffles.”

“We will experience the high life again,” Hannibal assured him. “When enough time has passed.”

“Question is, how’d you swing this place from prison?”

“Chiyoh, of course. We arranged everything, before I surrendered to Jack Crawford.”

“How’d you communicate? She didn’t visit you in prison, did she?”

“Of course not. It was entirely too risky, especially since Jack is already aware of her connection to me. We exchanged letters. She posed as an admiring student of psychiatry. We devised the writing code when she was just a child. She has a remarkable memory.”

Will nodded. His old self was clawing its way back, and with it the anxiety of being out of the loop, of having strings pulled behind his back.

Hannibal seemed to sense his trepidation. “It will benefit us to lie low for a time. We will be quite safe here.”

And then – “Allies are useful, Will. Unfortunately going public with my identity meant cutting most of mine loose. But nobody in my pocket was as dependable as Chiyoh.”

Chiyoh. For Will, the name signaled not dependability but capriciousness. The wild joy of throwing caution to the wind.

The sound of her scream piercing the night from far off; the reckless plummeting inside him settling into tender acceptance paired with the satisfaction of getting his suspicions confirmed.

If you ask for what you want, you never know what to expect in response. But if you just take it... results guaranteed.

 

There was one other uncharacteristic feature to the apartment – a loaded .45 semi-automatic pistol, stashed in one of the kitchen drawers.

“Chiyoh must have left it for us,” Hannibal said, when Will waved it questioningly in front of him. “Personally, should a fight find us in the kitchen, I feel much more comfortable defending myself with this.” He gestured towards the knife block.

Will nodded and slipped the pistol back into place. But when Hannibal was in the shower, he carried it off to the bedroom and, after a moment of deliberation, stashed it under his pillow. A ludicrous position for an actual fight, but it felt right. A reminder to remain vigilant. And of the precarity of the balance between them.

 

“What was your sex education like?” Hannibal asked Will the following day. He had taken to corralling Will onto the couch for their makeshift sessions. Still insisting on the illusion of formality.

“My sex education?”

“You heard me.”

“Why, exactly?”

“I’m curious,” Hannibal returned, “because you seem to have a lot of sexual shame.”

Will opened his mouth to protest, and then shut it again. The return of his rebellious impulses had left him feeling unsteady, pulled in too many jagged directions.

“I didn’t have one,” he said finally.

“Your father never explained anything to you?”

“Not exactly. I mean, I guess he alluded to the topic a few times, and I alluded in return that I’d already picked up the knowledge here and there, and that put an end to it.” Will and his father had often communicated in those sorts of meaningful silences. In his young adulthood it was a silence that always awaited him when he arrived home, companiable and familiar.

“I guess I was passed back and forth between a few church programs, depending on where we were. There was a pastor in Perry, Ohio who rounded up some of us boys when we were around twelve, thirteen, and gave us a whole spiel about it. There was a long tangent about how we shouldn’t masturbate. Yeah, I’m not sure that one caught on with anyone.”

“What else?” Hannibal probed.

“Well, you know, he went on about how as men we could expect to start experiencing powerful urges anytime now. And how we had to be vigilant, because there were a lot of loose women out there in this day and age, and sinning in your thoughts was just as bad as sinning in your deeds. The usual claptrap.”

“Did you take it seriously at the time?”

“Like I said. No one did.”

“And yet,” Hannibal pressed, “you have contended with powerful – near uncontrollable – urges. In fact, that’s formed the basis of our therapy, wouldn’t you say?”

“That’s –” Will was getting tripped up again. “It’s not – it doesn’t come from the same place.”

Hannibal said nothing, merely lifted his eyebrows in prompting.

Will sighed, then clenched and unclenched his fingers. “At that age, I’d already developed an acute perception that I wasn’t a… wasn’t a person in the way that other people were.”

“Because of your neurological capabilities,” Hannibal supplied. “Your spectrum disorder traits.”

“Yeah, that’s one way of putting it. I cried a lot as a child. I was affected profoundly by things that seemed to bother the other children only superficially. I had such a visceral sense of other people, but I was walled off from them by a sheet of thick glass. And I was bamboozled by rituals and impulses that came instinctually to everyone else. And so I guess, those urges that men were supposed to feel – well, they would be understandable, even expected, in anyone else. But from me, they were… grotesque.”

“Grotesque in what way?”

“In the sense that I was affecting being a normal person, when I wasn’t, and anyone could see that.”

“You had a lonely childhood,” Hannibal responded. Not asking, only agreeing.

The time Will spent with Wally – taking the dogs out for a walk in the woods, or driving to Little League practice – was occasionally uncomfortably shadowed by Will’s knowledge of his sexual relationship with Molly. The three of them, for all their amicability, had never managed to fully come together as a family unit. Their dynamic had instead been fragmented through the three duos they formed. Wally offered his acceptance of Will with undertones of knowledge of his own maturity and openness, a kind of diplomacy befitting someone much older. The kid’s relationship with his mother remained completely opaque to Will. It was something he recognized from his own relationship with his father – the way a child and single parent developed rituals and understandings that politely barred the way to outsiders.

It was for that reason that being alone with Wally impressed upon Will the inappropriateness of his encroachment on the boy’s mother, his development of his own rituals with her alongside Wally’s own. The innuendos that laced Will and Molly’s interactions, the secretive smiles and the little knowing arch of her eyebrow. The fact that Will knew exactly how to nibble at her ear or nuzzle at her neck to make her go slack.

He could feel Wally’s hesitation sometimes, his attempts to assimilate the knowledge that his mother was separate from him in a way he’d never had to consider before – that she had adult needs that had nothing to do with him, and now this stranger had been chosen by her to satisfy them.

That wasn’t why Will had married her. Not for the sex. In fact, it had taken a bit of effort to see her that way. But not much. She was easy and open with him, and her mindset was easy to slide his way into.

It was her acceptance he wanted. Sex was only an appendage of that.

Sometimes, with Wally, Will had been compelled by the urge to pull the car over and say, “Look, kid, don’t blame me. This is just what’s expected of married couples.”

 

Will’s father had had girlfriends, occasionally. They were nice enough women, though Will hadn’t seen them that way at the time. His main impression had been of their hands, reaching out to cup his face or fluff his hair, and of himself violently jerking away. And then his father’s voice in the background: “He’s a quiet kid. Just let him be.”

His father developed a taste for savior types – women who would be moved by Will’s solemn bearing. But none of them stuck, and he and his father inevitably retreated into their two-person orbit.

 

“At what age did you start masturbating?” Hannibal was persistent.

“About twelve or thirteen. Though I think it was mostly idle curiosity. It took me awhile to realize that it’s much better when you’re thinking about something that turns you on.”

“What did you think about, once you’d come to this conclusion?”

“Believe it or not,” Will said, “some woman my father was sleeping with.”

Hannibal raised his eyebrows.

“Yeah, I know. That detail is a real treat for a psychiatrist. Nothing Freudian about it, though. My father and I were in a world of our own. It’s natural that a kid my age would be affected by a female intrusion.”

“And did you resent her intrusion?”

“Not this one. Not Lydia. She minded her own business, didn’t try to patronize me. I’d caught wise to the fact that I had to slip outside at certain times, and I’d sometimes be hanging around by the steps as she was leaving the house. She’d turn her head to look at me, and this understanding would pass between us. She wasn’t chummy, but she wasn’t embarrassed either. I liked that about her.”

“And what did she look like?”

“I honestly don’t remember well. She dressed well, I remember that. She looked like she had money, at least more than we did. But she always came to our house. She must have been married.”

Hannibal’s lips were slightly parted, mouth hanging slack. He was waiting for more.

“I remember the noises she made better.” Will’s voice had gone slightly breathier. “I could hear them through the window sometimes. She sounded… desperate. Shocked. Nothing like the woman I’d seen. And… that was what enthralled me. The contrast between her usual cool remove, and the way she could come undone. It took some time to make the connection that that fascination I held could be considered a sexual fantasy.”

“Did you ever indulge in violent fantasies about her?”

Will twisted his hands together. “You don’t consider that violent?”

Hannibal was silent for a moment. A frown had worked its way into his brow. The kind of expression he would have worn before he dropped his mask.

“Frankly, Will, no, I don’t,” he said finally. “You were compelled by the concept of this woman experiencing sexual pleasure. This is a common facet of sexual fantasies, no?”

Will laughed grimly. “It wasn’t about her feeling pleasure, not exactly. I wanted her uncomfortable. I sensed that this woman’s comportment was important to her, that she exacted perfect control in every aspect of her life. And I could spot a crack in that self-control, and I wanted to work my way into it. Split her open.”

“And that was the subject of your masturbatory fantasies,” Hannibal finished for him.

“Almost disappointing, isn’t it?”

“Not at all.”

“It’s banal. Even at the time, it seemed like such an unremarkable outlet for such a promising impression.”

 

In all of his sexual encounters with women, Will had gotten the distinct feeling that there was something embarrassing about an erection. Despite the cultural potency ascribed to it, its association with force and entitlement, there was a certain bathos to actually unveiling the organ.

In his twenties Will had endured his way through multiple blowjobs and pity fucks on blind dates with that background noise of embarrassment. There was always a distinct air of magnanimity when they spread their legs for him or straddled him – as if in order to soothe his tortured soul, they sought to demonstrate that they understood that he was a man like any other, whose excesses they could accommodate.

It had been hard, sometimes, for Will to believe in the way Molly would reach to rub him through his jeans, or unbuckle his belt in that slow, anticipatory way, as if he were giving her an incredible gift.

Hannibal never waited to be gifted what he wanted; he simply took. Whenever the whim got hold of him, he would greedily encircle Will’s cock with his lips as if he owned it. In the shower, Will’s back pressed against the wall; sprawled on the couch, with Will kneeling over him; lying in bed and slithering down Will’s body, not even bothering to get in a proper position, and then throwing his leg over Will’s face when finished and letting Will fumble to bring him off in turn. On one memorable occasion, as Will was chopping green pepper on the kitchen counter, Hannibal plastered himself against Will’s back and slyly slipped a hand into his sweatpants.

The jolt almost made Will drop the knife. “Hannibal,” he hissed.

“Yes?” Hannibal murmured nonchalantly, squeezing him through his boxers.

Will tried to draw in a breath and let out a giggle despite himself. “I’m going to – you’re going to make me cut myself if you carry on like that. I’ll bleed all over the food.”

“Delicious.” Hannibal nuzzled at his neck.

The rules of the game crystalized around them. Will controlled his breathing and continued slicing with careful precision. When he’d relaxed enough for Hannibal to snake his other arm around him, Will moved, quick as a flash, and sliced.

Blood streaked the blade and Hannibal hissed in surprise. Will laughed properly then, and spun around to pull Hannibal into a kiss. And then another longer kiss, and then another, longer still.

 

Will hadn’t thought about Lydia in years. But the memories of the development of his self-pleasuring process were rolling back to him now. He hadn’t imagined himself actually having sex with her at first – he’d just played those throaty gasps on loop through his head, accompanied by the occasional visual detail, like the way her blouse had clung to her breasts.

Later, she’d been the prototype for his imaginings of what it would feel like to be inside a woman, a sensation he’d later discovered was both exactly like and completely unlike he’d imagined.

(The memory of fucking Molly was still sharp, the little jolts of electricity up and down the shaft of his cock. The way he’d internally cringed away from it. Danger: High Voltage.)

(He felt the same prickling in Francis Dolarhyde’s body as he braced himself over Valerie Leeds. Valerie Leeds, everted, reduced to the sumptuous world nestled between her legs. The Dragon, not to be demeaned.

But no, no, the women needed to be wet, slippery wet, and you needed to feel the burst of satisfaction when you drove into them at precisely the right angle to make them cry out. Necrophilia... what a toothless form of conquest, from a man fixated on teeth.)

Strangely enough, Will had never imagined what sex would be like with Hannibal. Hannibal had simply eroded him down to the bareness of his want, until the brutality of his imagination was left exposed to the open air.

Sex felt only like a byproduct of their magnetic affinity and intellectual hunger for each other. The boundaries between fucking and not-fucking had gotten washed away somewhere in the sea. There were no rituals in the purgatory they’d created together, only spontaneous meetings. Now, here in the kitchen, they kissed with the quick haste with which little waves lapped impatiently but aimlessly against the shore. Arousal for arousal’s sake.

I shared with Reba in a way she could survive, the Dragon had said.

 

The sexual element of Francis Dolarhyde’s crimes was something Will could only consider slantwise. Trying to look head-on at the crime scene has seared his vision. But associations came anyway - the sensation of power melting through his veins, washing over and between the sordid forensic details of the mirror shard wedged in her labia and the semen drying on her thighs. He’d pumped them full of the stuff. Where Garrett Jacob Hobbs’ love had led him to dismantle and devour, bury his shame in the cracks and crevices of his life, Dolarhyde had left his victims whole, hollowed out and gushing fluid. Will recoiled from the grotesquerie of the reports, even as the sight of the freshly killed Valerie Leeds, enticingly spread out and not yet spoiled, drew him back.

Look at her, the Dragon murmured behind him. They stood at the side of the bed, looming behind the crown of her head. Doesn’t it feel good, knowing she belongs to you?

What about them? Will inclined his head towards the other Leedses, propped up puppet-like against the wall.

They don’t matter anymore. We’ve taken her from them. The Dragon leaned closer, looking over Will’s shoulder. With a feather-light touch, he lifted Will’s hand and brought it down to cradle Valerie Leeds’ face. Will drew in a breath at the contact, at how naturally his hand curved to her cheek.

Feel her, breathed the Dragon. Feel how soft her skin is.

Slowly, he guided Will’s hand lower, down past the unbuttoned opening of her nightgown and over the swell of her breast, and then up again to brush the tender length of her throat.

Will closed his eyes, letting the headiness of the moment grip him tightly.

How can – he began. He flinched from it, even here in his mind. To formulate the thought alone was monstrous. How can it possibly be good if you can’t feel her struggling?

Believe me. The Dragon’s voice was a low rumble. It’s good. It’s cleaner. Less background noise.

 

Will often contemplated the desperation of a rapist. That was what he’d seen, over and over, in both rape and (as with Garrett Jacob Hobbs) in its determined absence – a grasping at a kind of fulfillment that was less tangible than the clasp of flesh. Desperation and fear, invisible to the naked eye but vibrant in his imagination.

Hannibal didn’t feel desperation. That was one thing that had initially drawn Will to him, when he was still cloaking himself in respectability – he was rarely on edge. Always sure enough of himself to trust that the universe would orient itself in his favour.

Except –

Could he daily feel a stab of hunger for you, and find nourishment at the very sight of you?

Will had been so on guard during their meetings at the prison that it was only in hindsight that he was able to read the piercing gaze Hannibal had fixed him with then. The eyes of a starving man.

“Do you still think about eating me?” Will asked Hannibal. They were sitting at the little kitchen table. Their lunch, such as it was, was cheese and crackers and grapes. It was a far cry from the fare Will had previously enjoyed with Hannibal, but he’d noticed that he didn’t seem to need much food these days. He was still digesting from when they’d gorged themselves on light and air and colour.

“What would be the point?” Hannibal responded. “Of course I still wonder how you might taste, and lament that I will never discover that unique flavour. But the benefits of keeping you alive and whole far outweigh those regrets.”

“Reassuring,” Will said dryly.

“You said it yourself.” Hannibal snapped a cracker in two. “We’re both alone without each other. During that embarrassing episode with the autopsy saw – well, I thought the only way I could have you was to devour you. Neither of us was fully in control of ourselves – Italy had a volatile effect on us. But now that I have the assurance of your company, I find myself quite content.”

Will’s fingers were rubbing the scar on his forehead before he realized what he was doing. He tried not to think too much about Italy, or Lithuania.

“There is a specific meal I would like us to share, however,” Hannibal added.

Will didn’t have to ask what he meant. “Bedelia Du Maurier.”

“Indeed.” Hannibal took a moment to chew and swallow. “It has a certain elegance. After all, she put the idea into my head in the first place.”

“She didn’t force your hand, Hannibal. It’s in you to do what you did.”

“All the same. I’d say she needs to learn that someone always ends up on the table in the end.”

“In the abstract, I’d agree,” Will said carefully. “But I’m not sure – well, it’s like what you said about Alana. I don’t think I’d get pleasure from personally delivering that lesson.”

“Don’t worry,” Hannibal returned. “We’ll take our time, just as I said. She will come to us, or be delivered to us, when it’s meant to happen. And when it is, we’ll be ready.”

He paused, and then asked, “Has Bedelia Du Maurier ever featured in these fantasies of yours?”

“You mean my rape fantasies?” Will put as much deliberate emphasis on the words as possible, though he wasn’t exactly sure why. He just felt firmly that there was danger in not being specific.

“Yes.”

“I – that’s not how it works, Hannibal.” Will tossed his napkin onto the table – Hannibal still insisted on them, for some godforsaken reason. “I’m not – I mean, I despise her. And even if I didn’t, she wouldn’t be my type.”

“It has nothing to do with attraction. Disdain and contempt are common enough motivations for rape, as far as I understand.”

“That’s not the draw for me,” Will insisted, frustratedly. “It’s –” he fumbled for the words. He was still instinctively self-protective in Hannibal’s presence.

The draw was – what? Grasping for control over a desire that felt uncontrollable? A fascination with physical force? An assuaging of fear?

Fear – that was the rub. Bedelia had stirred him up, there was no doubt about it – she had a particular talent for provoking him. But he’d never been afraid of her – at least, not the kind of fear that had bubbled up in him around Molly, or Abigail, or Chiyoh. (Chiyoh, who he still resolutely avoided every time she arrived at the door of their hideout with another grocery bag in her arms.)

Fear not of them – that wasn’t right. Fear of some dormant part of himself that stirred to life when each of them was around.

Hannibal was staring at him – not the sharp-eyed, hungry stare he’d given him from behind the walls of his cell, but one that emanated satisfied, vaguely amused curiosity.

“As far as I understand it, rape is an expression of power,” he remarked. “I’d imagine you’d enjoy having power over Bedelia Du Maurier.”

“All right. I wouldn’t mind seeing her humiliated. Knocked down a peg, if you will. I’ll admit to that. But that doesn’t equate to wanting to have sex with her. Not for me.”

Hannibal waited a moment, that enigmatic smile still resting on his face. “Very well,” he said finally. “But if you change your mind... once we have her in our grasp, you will, of course, be free to experiment with her however you like.”

Then he went back to his food.

 

“What do you think it takes for sex to be really, really good?” Will asked.

They were in therapy again. The room itself, with its faded furniture and thin curtains, remained exactly the same, but the atmosphere always shifted when they resumed the roles of doctor and patient, every word they spoke echoing within the depths of potential that yawned between them.

“A sense of adventure,” Hannibal replied. “And generosity.”

Will chuckled. “Don’t you think we’re lacking in generosity? We’re competitive.”

“Aren’t they the same?”

Hannibal was dressed up again, in a gray cashmere suit. Apparently, in planning to take temporary residence here, he’d anticipated a profound dissatisfaction at his impoverished surroundings, because there were multiple lavish outfits encased in plastic garment bags stashed away in the closet.

If Will concentrated on the image Hannibal cut, in that ensemble, he could mentally transport them to the shadowy, ornate enclosures of Hannibal’s office in Baltimore. Away from the homey trappings of this place and back into the squalls of sickness and misplaced trust – and then, later, the rushes of excitement and fear and an ever-flowing curiosity that was more foreboding even than savagery.

“Competition is a gift in the sense that it pushes the beloved to new heights of achievement,” Will said. “But they’re only equivalent if you assume that love can only be expressed through constant betterment.”

“In the case of sexual pleasure, the impulse to perform better can only benefit one’s partner,” Hannibal returned, amused.

“For you,” Will said quietly.

Hannibal inclined his head. “Generosity has been a cross for you to bear. Your wife’s enjoyment came at the expense of your own.”

“It’s not that it wasn’t enjoyable. It just wasn’t – “

“Satisfying?” Hannibal interrupted.

“Sure.” Will raked his fingers through his hair. The word was banal, pedestrian. A word for wellness retreats or self-help books. “Sure, let’s go with that.”

Hannibal eyed him beadily. “What would it have taken to make sex with your wife truly satisfying?”

Will barked a laugh. He felt suddenly disoriented – sitting here opposite Hannibal Lecter, cloistered from the world, describing a woman of whom his memories had the faintness of a dream. “It would take a gravitational pull strong enough to realign the spheres of reality.”

It would take a reality without Hannibal’s knife piercing him, without the memory of his gentle, coaxing hands. A reality in which Will’s mind remained darkened and dusty, without furnished halls to beckon him.

But there was still Victoria, the mark of his original sin. Hannibal’s influence couldn’t be blamed, not for that.

As in in response to his thoughts, Hannibal said, “The theatre of your mind is never quiet. What would it look like, if you made those marionettes dance?”

“Hannibal,” Will said quietly. His fingers were clenching and unclenching, seemingly of their own accord. This was wrong – this couldn’t be fodder for one of his flights of fancy with Hannibal. Molly was real, or at least a different kind of real. “Hannibal, she’s my wife.”

“Was,” Hannibal agreed. “And yet you offered her not love, but charity. Isn’t that right?”

Will’s face was growing hot.

“What would it have looked like,” Hannibal continued, “for you to love her?”

“Why do you want to know?” Will shot back. “You can’t possibly be invested in me loving anyone but you.”

Hannibal tilted his head to the side, considering him. “I do want you to myself,” he said simply. “And I want you willing. But no one else will ever own you the way I do. Your awakening has solidified the bond between us. The proof of that is in your presence, here, with me, with your wife the relic of another existence. Yet now that I have you in my orbit, I find myself curious as to what would happen if I directed you elsewhere.”

Will raked his hands through his hair. “Hannibal,” he said again, shakily. “Don’t – don’t make me –”

“Come here.” Hannibal reached for him soothingly, hands maneuvering him closer. It was only at their touch that Will realized how powerfully he was quivering inside. “Lie down, it’s all right now – “

Will allowed himself to be steered onto his back, head resting in Hannibal’s lap. Hannibal stroked down his body, comfort both nurturing and sensual.

“It’s all right,” Hannibal said again. “We fell off the edge of the world, Will. Your wife could never touch us, even if she were to travel here physically. She will be safe from the ravages of your imagination, I promise you.”

Will pressed his cheek to Hannibal’s palm. “But I’m swept up in the ravages of your imagination.”

“Your mind is a wild thing,” Hannibal murmured. “Yet you’ve kept it cramped and kenneled. I would see you set free.”

“You don’t consider this charity?”

It was a rhetorical question. Hannibal was nothing but selfish – he was simply bountiful in his selfishness.

“Charity is not a dialogue,” Hannibal confirmed. “Now tell me about your wife. Tell me what you would do if you had her bound, as you described.”

Will followed the memory on a thread of spider’s silk. The bedroom at their house in Maine. Molly twisting beneath him. Hair sifting through his fingers, giving way to the shock of wetness. The pressure in his head from the sheer force of her presence, and the way his hands itched from the looseness of her movements.

“I just don’t want her to touch me,” he breathed out raggedly. “I’m… on edge about what her hands might do.”

“Hmm.” Hannibal caressed Will’s cheek lightly. “Why did her hands instill such anxiety in you?”

“Hands are… interpretive. They inscribe meaning onto the body. I don’t like feeling out of my own control. Out of control of my perception of myself.”

“Her hands were an imposition, then.”

“They were too much to process. I would get caught up and rocked in the force of her perception.”

“You resented how she saw you. An impression that she retraced every time she touched you.”

Hannibal’s hand had shifted back down his body, settling just above his scar.

“She was attracted to me,” Will replied. “That was never in doubt.”

“And that was your cross to bear,” Hannibal finished.

“I didn’t like it,” Will burst out. “Or, it was… comforting, at times. Reassuring. But whenever we went to bed, it just felt patronizing. As though she didn’t see me at all. I was just transparent.”

“You resented her mental image of you,” Hannibal surmised. “Your fantasy was one of unmasking yourself.”

Will took a deep breath. Then another. He summoned the image of her wrists bound, her fingers clenching into fists. “I wanted to punish her for it sometimes. When she’d call me handsome, or kiss my neck, or, or run her fingers through my hair when I was going down on her, I would occasionally – occasionally – swell up with horrible, vicious urges. I wanted to – to –”

“Rape her?” Hannibal finished.

“I… I wanted to not care about her approval, yes.”

“Mmm.” Hannibal sounded pleased. His hand worked its way into Will’s hair. “How would you have her? Would you let the beast free? Or would you be calm and methodical? With her hands restrained, you could afford to take your time.”

Will’s stomach quavered. A knot was forming in his throat, coupled with an undeniable pulse of arousal.

“I – I thought about taking my time,” he breathed. “Cutting off her desire and feeding it back to her, gradually, on my terms. With only my hands in play. But I also wanted to be cruel. I could feel, in the centre of my palm, a boundless capacity – I wanted to hit her, fuck her brutally, but my words were what would devastate her. I would put my mouth against her ear, with the vindication of total control, and say this is what you wanted.”

Will stopped to gulp more air in. A sob was building up in his throat.

“I wanted – just in those fleeting moments – I wanted to see her cry. It was never, I mean, I hated it when she cried, Wally was in the hospital for a concussion once and I was more of a wreck than she was, I couldn’t bear to see her upset – but I wanted it, from time to time, just to see her break.”

He was fully trembling now.

Hannibal’s hand steadied him. “Appeasement has never been part of your empathic process, has it? Your intense receptiveness to others’ feelings is far from mutually exclusive with sadism.” Hannibal’s thumb brushed a tear from his cheek. “You must feel regularly assaulted by the onslaught of others’ affect, penetrated by the din of their emotions. It’s natural you would want to make another feel the same way – force yourself inside them and invade them in the way you are regularly invaded.”

Will breathed out shakily. “The desire to be known is nothing short of monstrous.”

“And it prompts transgression,” Hannibal agreed.

“You would understand.”

“Of course. That’s why I’m qualified to help you.”

Will thought then of Reba McClane, of the hoarseness of her voice and the wet squeaking sound of her sucking on a chunk of ice. In her presence he had been closer to the Red Dragon than ever before, her body beckoning him to see through the Dragon’s eyes and latch onto reasons to desire her. Will had felt the man there, viscerally, in the tenderness she stirred in him – tenderness more frightening than aggression.

In the theatre of his mind, between consciousness or subconsciousness, he sometimes crawled to her on his hands and knees, whispered beseechingly I won’t hurt you, I promise, I’m not like him. Bargaining, helplessly, amidst the onslaught of memories that were not his own – memories of the Dragon showing himself to her, wings unfurled, and snarling, this is what you wanted. And what does it make you, to want a creature like me? The brutal, ice-cold pleasure of revealing oneself to the woman one loved. His head lying between her breasts, a reservoir of potential within him – not knowing where the Dragon ended and where he was still Will Graham.

You’re a very sweet man, Molly had said.

Then Molly again, lying completely still with mirror shards gleaming in her eyes. He and the Dragon bent over her and pressed their love into her with the force of their composite, melded self. Crushing out her perceptions until all they saw was their own reflection.

How could you give love that that, and expect someone to survive? The Dragon hadn’t tried – he had shied away from Reba at the last moment, shrouding himself in his wings. Will felt a pull to finish the job – to force her down, set his gaze on living eyes, and let her see him through the touch of his hands. Pressing the force of his desire into her skin and whispering, look at me. Look at me.

 

Hannibal’s hands were holding Will fast, one at his head as it rested against Hannibal’s knee and the other gripping the base of his dick. An anchor for his physical body as he sank into that long-proscribed corner of his mind. The place where Victoria beckoned him.

Will’s imagination was sinewy in its movements, winding its way past the forensic details to paint a fuller picture between the marks on her wrists and the perforations in her vagina. Fixations developed like pinpricks of light behind his vision. Whether her nipples were hard. How she had shifted and undulated beneath him, shoulders twisting and heels scraping. The precise timbre of the noises she would make. The possibility – she was so young and inexperienced – the possibility that she’d never had an orgasm before. A possibility that made him sick with excitement.

How many licks to the centre of a lollipop?

Will wondered if envy was in play – envy towards the men who could probe at those pressure points, who could worship her long limbs without noticing or caring how she tensed and flinched away, without experiencing her fear and revulsion.

There was a special kind of humiliation in physiological arousal, the external steering of blood flow. The fact that the soft manipulations of his tongue would see her nipples and clitoris stiffening against her will.

The mind was more capricious – more stubborn but also more plastic than flesh.

Will didn’t know if it made it better or worse that he imagined making her melt for him. Driving up the pulsing of her blood to such a degree that it drowned out the flailing of her thoughts. As his head moved lower, and his lips and tongue molded themselves around her clit, unhooking her cries of “no, no, don’t” from any semantic meaning. How it felt to push inside her – she was so helplessly wet – and the way she whimpered when he was fully buried, a sharp jerk of a sound that poured another layer of arousal over him. The anticipatory fizzing beneath his skin, the delicious tension between the desire to ease her into it and murmur soothing words against her ear, and the clenching animal urge to just thrust and thrust and thrust. He could get off just from hanging in the balance there in that blissful cocoon, from the delayed gratification of knowing how vicious he could be.

Hannibal’s voice rippled far above him, like wind rippling the trees.

Do you bring her to orgasm, in this scenario?

God, yes, over and over… she can’t help it, she just needs me so much… it’s like I reached inside her and carved out a space where only I fit, and when I’m not touching her she just fills to the brim with need… despite herself, always despite herself…

Do you imagine killing her?

Yes. No. I don’t – I just want to touch her more. That’s why he strangled her – her throat was so soft and the force of his need was so relentless and he just needed more of her –

Would you continue intercourse while doing this?

I would if I needed it. I could, easily. But I don’t need it.

But she does?

Yes.

You like that she needs it, and you don’t?

Yes.

How does it make you feel?

Powerful. Insulated.

As though the only thing that matters is what you want.

Yes.

What do you want, Will?

I want to cut her.

I want to take my knife and cut a line into her, and retrace it over and over. Starting shallow and then pushing deeper and deeper, until she’s squirming and the blood is spilling freely over my hands. I want to see if she’ll beg me to stop, or if she’ll just scream. Or if she’ll be good for me and stay quiet and endure it, even though her lips are trembling. I want to press down with my palm and feel the wound throbbing, suck on the places where her flesh tore, get my tongue under her skin… ahhh… fuck… fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck

 

Will opened his eyes.

His head was still in Hannibal’s lap. The afternoon sun was still spilling through the window. His hands were dry and clean of blood. His pelvis and upper thighs were throbbing with a golden warmth, and his body was weak and drained of energy.

“How are you feeling, Will?” Hannibal’s hand was cool on his forehead.

Will took a moment to parse the strange hollowness in his stomach, and the heavy, jet lagged fatigue that clung to him. “I just had the most intense orgasm I’ve had in probably years. So I’m a little rattled.”

Hannibal’s hand began to stroke, rhythmically hypnotic.

“You find orgasms jarring?”

“In this context, yes.” Will was still mentally fumbling around, trying to place the sensation he’d been feeling so vividly. The oozing wetness of her, in blood and vaginal fluid – her, not Molly and not quite Victoria either, but someone else whom he couldn’t, didn’t want to pin down –

“You need to clean up.” Hannibal produced a handkerchief – surreally, ridiculously, why did he have a fucking handkerchief on him when they hadn’t been out in months – and dabbed at Will’s dick before wiping off his hand with a flourish.

Hannibal’s genteel bearing, so soon after wringing the most repulsive possible train of thought from Will, was suddenly, unbearably infuriating. Quick as a flash, Will seized Hannibal’s hand and bit down.

To his satisfaction, Hannibal let out a startled wince.

“Is this the gratitude you demonstrate towards this hand? After the transcendence it just squeezed out of you?”

“My brain did that,” Will countered. “And your words were the kindling to my neurons.”

“The mind is the largest sex organ,” Hannibal agreed. “And yours particularly impressionable. Still, how much responsibility do you believe I am due?”

“I want to suck you off,” Will interrupted. The restlessness was still buzzing inside him, and he was desperate not to talk. To be distracted and cradled and contained –

Hannibal tsked. “Are you willing to put your teeth away?”

His fingers probed at Will’s lips for an answer, sliding in and pressing at the inside of his cheek. Will hollowed his cheeks and pursed his lips around them, almost unconsciously, and cushioned them with his tongue. Let his mouth collapse into pliable softness.

A different kind of restlessness prickled within him, lamenting that it was too soon to get hard again.

It was awkward rolling over onto his stomach and trying to brace himself on his arms, let alone opening Hannibal’s belt and working to free the bulge that had formed in his crotch. But the physical strain registered only fuzzily next to the sharp clarity of Will’s purpose, and the warm relief that blossomed in his core when he managed to get his lips around Hannibal’s bare cock.

He knew what Hannibal liked at this point, an education cobbled from their almost clumsily frantic couplings. He always wanted Will to spend a long time kissing and licking and mouthing over the head before taking him in deeper – an exercise in anticipation for both of them, he said. It was easy for Will to follow that mandate this time, slow soothing repetitive movements suspended in one prolonged moment.

Hannibal pressed his palm to Will’s back and rubbed back and forth, fingers splayed out. “You never fail to fascinate, Will,” he murmured.

Will drew back. “Don’t say anything,” he breathed. The tip of Hannibal’s dick hovered in his line of sight, slick with saliva. “Just be quiet for a moment.”

“Or what?” Hannibal chuckled. “You’ll stop? You need this more than I do.”

Will couldn’t put a name to the way his insides lurched – shame? Recognition? Maybe an actual erection, finally.

If he were in a different state of mind, he might have called Hannibal’s bluff. Gotten up and walked away, left Hannibal frustrated and unbuttoned. If he were feeling less fragmented.

Wordlessly, he lowered his head again.

“No, no, not like that.” Hannibal’s hand stilled him. “On your knees.”

Will flinched inwardly as he settled between Hannibal’s legs. His knees still stung from fervently kneeling for Hannibal on the bathroom tile. He felt Hannibal shift and settle back contentedly as he worked his mouth back around him, and then strong hands gripped the sides of Will’s head.

“Like this,” Hannibal said silkily, and jerked Will’s head back and down again on his dick.

Will whimpered around him, more out of surprise than discomfort. This – this was all right, then. Just stay still and let Hannibal work him, puppet-like, and use the seal of his mouth. A comfortable oblivion.

Hannibal’s voice burst through the bubble he was in.

“Where was I?” Hannibal’s hands and voice were entirely too steady for a man who had someone else’s head bobbing up and down on his cock. “Oh, yes – you need this. Don’t you? No need to respond. It was a rhetorical question. Being used wipes your mind clean – and your conscience. You feel that servicing me, allowing to debase you, absolves you of what you’ve just told me. You cling to the fantasy that pain and humiliation are redemptive.” At this Hannibal’s fingers curled into Will’s hair and gave a brutal pull.

A guttural moan escaped Will, and a string of saliva drooled out of his mouth against the shaft of Hannibal’s penis. It was accompanied by a hard throb in his groin.

Now that was a real erection.

“Do you know how it feels to hold the power to grant salvation?” Hannibal continued. His hands were cupping Will’s head almost lazily, just the barest touch enough to guide his movements. “The devil’s powers are limited in that regard, at least if you go by Milton’s interpretation. Doomed only to subvert God’s will, and never to forge a path of his own. The power to corrupt is fulfilling only in concert with its antithesis. Something of which I was always aware, but I admit only came to conscious understanding of through you.”

Hannibal’s breathing had quickened, and his excitement was palpable to Will, a thickening of the air.

“Do you know how many times I’ve envisioned you like this? Your ferocity burning out, and you crawling to me on your hands and knees. Laying your head on my knee like a devoted dog. Offering me your vices for safekeeping.”

Will let out an involuntary whimper. Hannibal’s words seemed to swirl free-floating around him, lingering in the air like scent. The stirring in his stomach was hanging somewhere in the heady balance between distress and sexual frustration, Hannibal’s hands and thighs caging him within that heat.

It was… why did it feel so good?

Will let another whimper spill out from deep in his throat.

“Mmm, yes, you’re doing wonderfully,” Hannibal exhaled. “It’s good that you understand your place. You hold the world at your fingertips, and I own you. That’s more than a fair tradeoff, wouldn’t you say?”

Warm ribbons of light were sliding through Will, flaring out into his upper thighs and coalescing deep in his groin. Squeezing together into one solid mass and shuddering out in blissful palpitations.

He moaned, long and low, and jerked free of Hannibal’s grasp to mouth more frantically at his cock.

He expected - perhaps hoped – that Hannibal would steer him back in place and chide him, but it seemed Hannibal was far gone, his thighs going tense and low, throaty noises spilling from him. Finally he roughly grasped Will’s head and held him down, grunted in seeming exertion, and emptied himself into Will’s mouth.

 

“How much did you mean?” Will asked, an immeasurable amount of time later, head lying heavily against Hannibal’s thigh. “Of what you said?”

“How much did you mean?” Hannibal replied.

 

Teresa Marlow was there on the periphery of his vision. Lying in that pool of blood, anguish frozen on her face.

There was nothing stopping him...

Of course – his own voice, scornful, though towards her killer or her he couldn’t say –

that doesn’t mean she can’t feel pain...

Christ, make it stop –

it just means she can’t do anything about it.

Then Will was awake again, body icy and clenched up from fatigue.

If a tree falls in the forest... he thought grimly.

If she feels pain, but I can’t perceive it, does she truly feel it?

The distinction hadn’t mattered to her killer – not relevant to his flavour of brutality. He was one for hoarding. It would matter to Francis Dolarhyde, whose artistic vision was more delicate. She couldn’t be truly changed if her soul was still wretchedly fluttering against the walls of her body.

It made a difference to Will. How could it not? Even in his imagination, he couldn’t look down at her without being flooded with abject horror, and the sense that the world around him was irrevocably shattered.

He met her, killer to victim, in that crumbling reality. At the place where everything he had taken for granted, everything he had known to be true, fell away. The moment where he came to realize that he could do anything at all to her. Anything.

Teresa Marlow on the kitchen floor, paralyzed and burning up inside. The greenhouse effect for agony. Valerie Leeds spread out on the bed, cooling and serene and purified.

It wasn’t enough.

Will had known it wasn’t, even before Hannibal’s little exercise. I want her pain. I want her to let me share in it. I want her wanting.

I want the part in her that resists me. I want it alive and flailing. I want to fit that resistance in the grip of my fist.

Victoria struggling beneath him, their bodies rocking unevenly like boats on the waves...

Will snapped his eyes open. He couldn’t fall back into that abyss. Not right now.

To distract himself, Will rerouted his attention to the back of Hannibal’s neck.

Hannibal’s hair had grown out since his stint in prison. It was starting to thicken in the back and fall across his forehead again. Will felt an unexpected regret at the loss of his close-cropped haircut. It had seemed completely unremarkable at the time, but now there was something that seemed unexpectedly and powerfully erotic to Will about the profile it cut.

Possibly because Will was now newly acquainted with Hannibal’s head. His fingers had learned the sensitivity of Hannibal’s scalp, and his palms had molded themselves to the curve of his skull; the meeting of skin and hair at the nape of his neck was the place where Will used his hand to guide Hannibal’s ravenous mouth ever lower, a tactile sensation now entwined with inner anticipation.

Possibly Hannibal would cut his hair again, just to please him.

Will genuinely couldn’t remember if he’d ever had such strong feelings about Molly’s hair. But then, her hair was never his favourite of her features. It was her voice, throaty and a bit raspy, that had initially stood out to him as sexy.

He did remember admiring the length and lustrousness of Alana Bloom’s hair, and feeling a twinge of regret at her new chin-length style – the vestige of an old attraction not quite shaken.

Victoria’s hair had grown thicker and cloudier in his imagination, shockingly pale next to the women he’d loved in waking life.

In the darkness behind his eyelids, Will reached out for his own head, twitching and blank-eyed and the hair gone damp with fever. Saw the long, elegant fingers of the hands he commandeered cradling his skull and taking estimation of the gray brain matter inside. Good to exploit or eat.

Opening his eyes, Will scanned the length of Hannibal’s spine, from the swell of bone at the base of his neck to the crevice of his buttocks. He honed in on the small of Hannibal’s back – the exact place where the Dragon had promised to snap Will’s spine.

But he’d restrained himself. Will had recognized it in his bearing in that motel room – the flinch. Another thing they shared.

In his restlessness, Will molded himself to Hannibal’s back and gave himself over to the sort of possessive pawing that Hannibal regularly enacted on him.

It took more kisses than expected to rouse Hannibal. For a predator, he was a surprisingly deep sleeper, heavily blanketed by contentment. Will’s mouth had traversed the entire length of his neck twice before Hannibal twitched in his arms; it took burying his face against his hair and nuzzling open-mouthed against his scalp to draw a sleepy, pleasured groan out of him. As Will was nibbling lightly at the shell of his ear, he finally stirred.

“Will? What is it?”

Will didn’t answer right away. He instead drifted down to softly suck on Hannibal’s earlobe and kiss the delicate corner of his jaw just beneath. Hannibal wouldn’t object if he just continued and started grinding his hips against Hannibal’s bare ass, the thin barrier of his boxers only adding to the friction. Hell, he’d earned that.

Will cupped the front of Hannibal’s throat, the same gesture he’d use to cup his bulge through his pants. This was the sweet spot, the way to crush the life out of him. The act for which all the rigorous manipulations of Hannibal’s cock had only been the rehearsal.

Will wasn’t sure if the line of associations that led him to the question was built on honesty, or just another flinch.

“How does it feel to snap someone’s neck?”

“Mmm.” Hannibal shifted and arched his neck into Will’s touch. “It feels satisfying. I’ve played tennis recreationally from time to time, and you can feel, deep in your body, when you hit the ball at exactly the right spot on the racquet. The sensation is about the same.”

“Oh,” Will murmured.

Hannibal paused, and then added, “Not a style of killing I expect you’d enjoy much.”

“Why?”

“It’s useful for catching an opponent unawares. Not a good combative move. And it’s too quick for your preferences. You don’t want to catch anyone unawares. You’re too… passionate.” Hannibal rolled to his back and eyed Will. “You want to see the light leave their eyes, and for them to know precisely what you are doing to them and why.”

A sharp pulse laced through Will’s groin. He remembered, intimately, the hard satisfaction that had rung from his wrist to his shoulder as he forced the knife into Francis Dolarhyde. As he slammed his fist into Randall Tier over and over, the moment of release stretched out gloriously over several minutes. Yes, ohgodohgod yes –

It was as if his cock was suddenly learning what his fingers already knew – the excruciating, devastating rush of pushing and plunging and taking.

“Yes,” he whispered, the word more ragged and desperate than expected. “I – yes.”

He sank down onto Hannibal’s chest, drained from the confession.

“Why does it still feel monumental to say?” Will murmured. Hannibal’s hand came to rest in his hair. “It’s nothing I haven’t told you already.”

I liked killing Hobbs.

That doing bad things to bad people makes you feel good? Yes.

“We had barriers between us upon your earlier confessions,” Hannibal replied. “At first, the barrier of your knowledge. And then… the barrier of my knowledge.”

Will sensed a flicker of lingering displeasure from Hannibal.

“Besides, you haven’t told me this before,” Hannibal continued. “Enjoyment and the derivation of pleasure from the act of killing are one thing. And you have grown adept at engineering that pleasure through happenstance. But wanting is action-based. Premeditated. And you are still in the early stages of learning how to want – especially after that three-year setback. But I can guide you now that those barriers are gone. I am finally free to be the stability you saw me as when we first met.”

It was tempting, cradled between Hannibal’s palms, to simply let himself be guided.

“Where do we go from here?” Will said sleepily.

“We enjoy ourselves. I continue your sensual education. I will introduce you to the finest wines and cheeses, and the best of music and the arts. I will dress you in tailored silk and ravish you on thousand thread count sheets. And under my tutelage, you become attuned to a multitude of new sensory inputs. Does this feel good?” His nails sank deep into Will’s scalp, drawing a whimper from him. “We will acquire numerous implements and experiment with your responsiveness. You’ve spent so much of your life half-asleep. It’s necessary to awaken you to your senses.”

“And what about killing? Where does that fit into my sensual education?”

“Are you that eager for it already?” Hannibal’s voice was laced with amusement.

“No,” Will said carefully. And he wasn’t, as far as he could tell. He was still surfeited with the memory of Francis Dolarhyde. “I’d just like to know what shape to bend my expectations into.”

“Forget expectations.” Hannibal smoothed his hand over Will’s back. “Focus only on fantasy and the pursuit of beauty.”

“And, what? Leave the expectations to you, is that it?”

“My expectations –” Hannibal paused. “I have been devoting considerable thought to the pursuit of beauty. On that cliff, we both experienced an ecstasy beyond what we dreamed possible. I believe it would be unwise for us to try too hard to chase down that feeling too quickly. Such religiosity is best cultivated over time.”

“The Chesapeake Ripper went several years between killings,” Will said. “Is that what this is?”

“The Chesapeake Ripper is gone. A snakeskin shed a long time ago. I can feel myself entering a new artistic period, the exact contours of which are still coming into focus.”

“So you intend to continue lying low?”

“I intend for us to entertain ourselves the way we always have. Establish ourselves in some new circles. See what fascinating creatures emerge from the woodwork for us to toy with. When we need to take a new victim, we will both know. And I assure you –” Hannibal gave Will a quick squeeze – “the victim will be suitable to your standards. Trust me.”

 

“You never told me what happened with the Victoria Holmes case,” Hannibal said the following day. “How did you catch the killer?”

Will rubbed the back of his neck. “Wasn’t hard. Like I said, everyone knew he liked her. He was appallingly sloppy in how he conducted himself. We went to his house to interview him, just prematurely. I was surprised – he wasn’t the suave, charismatic type. He was quiet, and… guarded. Self-contained, but with a nervous energy underneath. His hands were tense – I could tell he was holding himself back from fidgeting. Bony, narrow hands, and a bony, narrow face. My knowledge wasn’t considered proper evidence at the time, but I knew he was guilty. This thing he’d done was eating him alive – not from guilt itself, necessarily, but the dawning realization that he would have to live with others’ knowledge of it. That it was no longer the wrenching, beautiful moment he’d made privately with her, the bittersweet ache of giving in to what he’d long resisted – it was just the rape and murder of an innocent young girl.”

“Did you find any evidence?”

“I did. But as it turned out, we didn’t need it. We went back to his apartment to bring him to the station, and he’d killed himself. Well, that certainly sped up the process. Saved us a warrant, and we found some more conclusive evidence.”

“But what was your evidence?”

Will rubbed the back of neck. “Well, he’d left the ropes on when he abandoned the body. Instead of untying the knots, he just cut her free and left those ties around her wrists. I assume it was because he’d done a sloppy job and couldn’t get them untied, but when I took another look at the crime scene photos, I realized that wasn’t the case. The knots were clean, practiced – I could feel the killer’s hands on the rope, and I knew it had been tied meticulously. Not only by someone who was used to working with his hands, but who took some level of pride in what those hands had shaped. Which our man was. He worked as an auto mechanic, and he was always whittling these little sculptures in his free time.”

“Trust you to see a flash of beauty in such a sordid scene,” Hannibal said.

Will closed his eyes briefly, teeth sinking into his lower lip. There had been a kind of satisfaction in the realization – the same settled feeling that working with his hands brought. “There was a strange tenderness in those knots. I could feel him harnessing the pure, transcendent creature he saw in her.”

“And how did you feel when you found him dead?”

Will laughed joylessly. “Rage. Pure, unadulterated rage.”

“Is that so? No sympathy for the pitiful creature he undoubtedly was?”

“I felt pity before. When I first met him, and I could feel him realizing how far out of his depth he was. But then, looking at his corpse, I hated with a physical intensity. God, I wanted to beat him to a bloody pulp – make him answer for what he’d done, instead of just slipping away like it was nothing. That girl – I looked through so many crime scene photos, yearbook photos, report cards, trying to get a handle on why someone would kill her - god, he had no idea what he’d destroyed. For all his… worshipful obsession, he’d never looked at her with that amount of focus, never. He didn’t care that she was gone, he cared about living with his own disappointed, hollowed out, cowardly soul.”

Will came to a stop and realized he was panting for breath, and his eyes were burning hot.

Hannibal was quiet a moment, eyes never leaving Will’s face. Finally, he wet his lips and said, “Could it be that your anger is based in jealousy?”

“What?”

“You believe, perhaps, that you could have done a better job than your killer. You resent how artlessly he discarded Miss Holmes, how he squandered what creative potential he had with those ropes. You lusted over the girl you came to know so intimately, and so you also resent him for taking her from you and doing such a slapdash job with her.”

“That’s –” Will’s voice shook. “That’s not what this is about.”

“Of course it is. You were so tormented by thoughts of raping this poor girl that it cut into your marital relations with your wife. I find it difficult to believe that has nothing to do with your resentment of her killer.” Hannibal leaned forward. His eyes were shining with purpose. “Perhaps you would have infused the same tenderness used to restrain her into the presentation of her body. Adorn her in such a manner that everyone could see the glorious being that she was, in your eyes. Turn your private shame into a public marvel.”

“Hannibal –” Will began quietly.

“Or perhaps,” Hannibal pushed on, “you find the idea of forcible penetration a bit pedestrian. After all, most men would be able to physically overpower her. But you are unique in your ability to read others. Had you isolated her… you would have been able to probe into her most cherished fantasies, and her most deeply ingrained fears. You would pluck at those impulses gradually, painstakingly, promising and threatening with such subtlety that you would never need to force her legs open. You would have her offering herself to you, thinking it was her own idea.”

Will swallowed. His imagination was on the verge of overheating.

“You’re projecting, Dr. Lecter,” he said, with an enforced steadiness. “I believe that’s the clinical term. Because that’s what you do isn’t it? You make people think they want it. Except it’s not their legs you’re interested in forcing open, it’s their skulls. The gray brain matter – that’s what interests you.”

Hannibal watched him a moment, a faint smile behind his eyes. “Believe me, Will, I am completely on your side here,” he said finally. “Your killer sounds very uninspired. One ought to understand the gravity of taking a life. Those who perform the act with one eye closed rarely leave compelling results. I simply know that your mind is capable of more. And I trust that you’ve imagined something much more deftly mounted and grandiose in impact.”

Will started straight ahead. “He may have been good with his hands, but he lacked vision. Too knotted up in sexual neuroses and religious guilt.”

Hannibal folded his hands over his knee. “You never told me his name.”

Will smiled grimly. This part was a bit funny.

“Graham.”

Hannibal raised his eyebrows.

“First name, Graham,” Will clarified. “Last name, Nielsen. I know. Believe me, I know.”

“I see.” Hannibal was clearly still waiting.

Will sighed. “To forcibly obtain power over another person… it has such a magnitude of potential. Graham Nielsen failed to take advantage of that potential. He just indulged his weakest impulses. And yes, that lost potential did chafe at me.”

A smile twitched onto Hannibal’s lips. “Naturally, it would.”

 

Will and Chiyoh were back on the train. The tracks whistled by beneath them. The prisoner hung above them in the stars, the cocoon rendered constellation-like.

Will gestured skyward. “Are you surprised? Was it what you expected?”

Chiyoh gazed impassively back at him. “No. Violence is what you understand.”

He was on her in a split second, not to be waylaid this time. Her wrist was hot in the grip of his fingers, body unexpectedly soft as her pressed her flush against the guardrail. The contrast with her usual cool ruthlessness made each of her little twitches as she struggled against him even more compelling.

Slowly, so as to emphasize his hold on her, he brought his hand to her face and gripped her jaw tightly, forcing her to meet his eyes.

“That’s not what I mean,” he whispered. They were close enough for him to breathe the words directly into her mouth. “You know what I mean. When you were killing him – when he had you trapped and was crushing the life out of you, and you felt that burst of exhilarated relief when you broke through and lived – did it feel how you imagined it would feel? Did you feel righteous, denying yourself that? Do you feel unclean now?”

She was panting, her mouth parted to him, but her gaze never faltered. “You did this. You shaped him into what he is now.” She angled her eyes up towards the blazing firefly chrysalis. “This was your design. I was only your blade.”

Will jerked her head back. “It had to be you who struck the blow,” he hissed. “You know that. You know that, goddam you…”

Red spots were flooding his vision. Antlers were sprouting and growing rapidly, piercing through her body.

Chiyoh gritted her teeth in pain. “He never hated like this. Garrett Jacob Hobbs.”

Will took a step back. Watched in trepidation as she shuddered, blood dripping from her puncture wounds. “I don’t hate you. I’m only… frustrated.”

“None of them struck in anger,” she gasped out. “You – you borrow their fears, their longings, their temptations. But your rage is your own.”

Then Will was blinking awake, hands aching from him clenching them into fists.

It took a moment to get his bearings. He was lying in bed, damp with sweat. The covers had been kicked off at some point. It was morning. Hannibal was not beside him – Will could hear him in the kitchen.

His body was still coasting along a rush of vindication. It was the same feeling as when he’d seen Chiyoh sitting on the ground hunched over herself, her guilt a dark bruise that beckoned him to press down.

Will exhaled shakily and ran his hands through his hair. Means of persuasion other than violence, she’d said. But all persuasion was violence to some degree. Bending another person to your will, entrapping them within the labyrinth of your design. He’d taught her that.

A freshly pleasurable sensation tumbled over itself within him – the same undeniable pleasure that he’d felt in the dream, when she’d said, I was your blade.

Abigail Hobbs’ plainspoken accusation rippled through his head. There is something wrong with you.

 

“I have to admit, I find the behaviour of men like Graham Nielsen perplexing,” Hannibal remarked.

Will cupped his mug between his hands. He was on his second cup of coffee. “Just perplexing? Not trite and unimaginative?”

Hannibal inclined his head. “That too, of course. But – and you’ll have to assist me here, with your insights – I find it hard to wrap my mind around simply wanting sex as reason to go to extremes.”

“Doesn’t seem particularly extreme, by your standards.”

“I am cognizant of the gravitas of what it is I do. One must have some grandiosity of vision, and some level of ironic remove from oneself, to properly mount such a deed. Personal weaknesses and insurmountable cravings leave a decidedly messy signature. No artistic distance.”

“Not everyone can be as chameleonic as you.”

“In the past, when I have experienced cravings of some sort – including for a particularly appealing member of my social circle – I have simply indulged them. My best works have come from a place of inner coldness. Deeds like those of Graham Nielsen are overheated in the execution.”

“Then you must feel as if your work has been getting worse and worse since we met,” Will observed tartly. “Did that origami heart come from a place of coldness?”

“Detachment.” Hannibal was ready with the response. “I detached myself from the longing I felt for you by mapping it onto a folding pattern for flesh. It’s sublimation.”

Will laughed out loud. He realized, suddenly, how much he was enjoying himself. “I’m not sure I believe you, Dr. Lecter.” He ran in finger along the rim of the mug, still chuckling. “What about the cliff? Was that ‘sublimated’ enough for you?”

Hannibal’s brows were primly arched. “It would have been, had we had more time. Whatever passions are indulged in the moment of killing, they ought to be buttoned up and solidified in the presentation. Just like that chrysalis sculpture you mounted – yes, Chiyoh told me. Men like Graham Nielsen – they never make a statement. They never speak authoritatively. They leave their most neurotic emotional outputs smeared all over the crime scene. It’s profoundly distasteful.”

Will’s smile had faded. The mention of Chiyoh had unsettled his stomach.

“Why would Graham Nielsen not pursue Victoria Holmes normally?” Hannibal asked.

Will set his mug down and leaned back in his chair. “You’re playing dumb, Dr. Lecter. It’s pretty easy to formulate. Standard rate male sexual shame. Plus, he was a religious nutjub. Those letters to her –” Will closed his eyes and recited from memory. “For all that I am tormented by you, I grow convinced that the Lord has placed you on this Earth to test me – not to prove the fortitude of my virtue, but to reveal the weakness inherent in all men.”

“The syntax could use some work,” Hannibal observed archly.

“Yeah, well, the man wasn’t a trained poet.” Will rubbed his hands together. “Still a bit heavy fare for a man in his twenties.”

“Are they always motivated by shame?”

“Yes,” Will said simply.

“Do you really think so?”

“There’s a certain…” Will hesitated. “Men who dehumanize women all have a certain fear at their core. The kind of fear that begets rage.”

Your rage is your own.

“Was Garrett Jacob Hobbs angry?”

It was a dangerous topic – a touch close to Abigail.

“No, not particularly,” Will said carefully. “But he was motivated by shame. He suppressed his true intentions and scattered his impulses among nine stand-in vessels. Ultimately, he was more destructive for it.”

Hannibal was silent, but Will could read the unspoken question in his bearing. Do you wish he’d just killed Abigail, and spared the other girls?

And his own answer: You know I can’t wish for that.

“Graham Nielsen –” Will went on. “I mean, he never could have pursued her normally. Francis Dolarhyde tried that with Reba McClane, and it nearly destroyed them both. It’s not in men like that to have that kind of relationship. That desperation is always pulsing beneath the surface. Some stave it off for longer than others, but the dam breaks loose eventually.”

He thought of Molly, and his resentment of her hands. How badly his own had begun to ache with unfulfilled impulses.

He thought of Abel Gideon’s words to him, outside Alana Bloom’s house. Just those kinds of people who shouldn’t be in a relationship.

 

Will was stirring awake, and something was wrong. He wasn’t alone.

He shifted, on guard, and felt an answering stiffness in his arms. It took another pull to realize, with mounting horror, that he couldn’t move them. His hands were pinned above his head, fingers twitching uselessly.

Another sleep paralysis episode. That sickening numbness in his hands, the knowledge that something was lingering beside his bed and reaching out with long, shadowy fingers –

No, it wasn’t sleep paralysis. He was awake and thinking consciously. Furthermore, he wasn’t in Wolf Trap, and hadn’t slept alone in some time.

“Hannibal?” Will whispered, and then burst out desperately, “Hannibal!”

A cool hand came to rest on his cheek. “Relax, Will,” his companion’s voice soothed. “It’s just me.”

The lamp came on. Hannibal was perched on the side of the bed, wholly intact and eyeing Will with amused interest.

“What –” Will began, and then trailed off as he craned his neck to look up. He was stripped naked, and his hands were tied to the bedpost above his head with –

A rope tie.

Victoria.

Will’s relief at seeing Hannibal alive rapidly melted away.

“Hannibal.” He gritted his teeth. “This isn’t funny.”

Hannibal looked rather put out. “It’s not meant to be funny.” He lifted one knee over the other and folded his hands across his lap. “This is educational.”

“Educational.” Will let out a sound between a scoff and a hysterical laugh. Squinting, he took in the state of the room. Dim light was straining its way in through the curtains, just beyond the lamp’s reach. “Hannibal, it’s the crack of dawn. At least let me have a fucking cup of coffee first.”

“Later.” Hannibal stood and began unbuttoning his shirt. “Right now, I think we should seek to preserve the visceral qualities of the moment.”

Will squirmed slightly, digging his heels into the mattress. Exhaustion was still weighing heavily on his body, but he could tell that Hannibal’s current exercise in whimsy was inescapable.

“Just because you’ve restrained me doesn’t mean I’m going to cooperate,” he said evenly.

Hannibal chuckled and climbed onto the bed, kneeling between Will’s spread legs and grasping one ankle in each hand. “Oh, I believe you will. But you’re right, it’s not because I’ve restrained you.”

Will let his head fall back onto the pillow. “Why am I going to submit?”

“For the same reason you always have.” Hannibal massaged slow circles into Will’s ankles. “Because you desperately need an outlet for the obsessions clawing at your mind. Because this particular scene, and this particular victim and killer, has haunted you for years. My only intention is to continue therapy.”

“What is this? Forced Q&A? You really know how to push my buttons, Dr. Lecter.”

“It’s intended to be more immersive than our regular conversations.” Hannibal’s hands slid up to Will’s calves, almost carelessly, as if he owned Will’s body. “I want you to sink into the helplessness of that beautiful, lost girl, so as to better feel the strength and power of my hands guiding you from above. You will feel the grip of deliverance, as she never did.”

“Graham Nielsen was playing God, in your profile?”

“Why else would anyone do such a thing?”

“He couldn’t bear the… sublimity of that kind of power,” Will murmured. He let his eyes slide shut. “Wasn’t fit to play God. He crumbled.”

“Most of them either crumble or succumb to vulgarity,” Hannibal agreed. “I won’t crumble, Will. I’ll be here, holding you, all the way through.”

The imminence of sex between them was undeniable, and newly sinister. The easy spontaneity of their earlier intimacy had fallen away, parting the waters for the shadowy creature who had stalked Will in dreams. The two realities of Hannibal had split, grinding against each other like tectonic plates.

Will schooled his expression to the haughty indifference he had worn while trying to entrap Hannibal. “Let’s just get this over with.”

Hannibal’s long, shapely mouth twisted into a smile. “Tell me – do you ever experience what Victoria experienced? Could you reach through the bombardments of her killer’s design and feel her screams?”

“I feel it all, Hannibal.” He felt the numbing shock of recognition as Nielsen’s face swam into view, that face that had smiled at her weekly in the church lobby – one reality sickeningly sliding over the other. “I just wasn’t encouraged to cultivate all of it. We don’t profile the victims.”

“Would you like to cultivate it?” Hannibal’s hands grasped at him, rubbing their power into his flesh. “Slough off the excesses of heroism and justice and simply derive pleasure from disempowerment? You’ve managed it in the reverse.”

“There’s a difference. Killers enjoy killing. Victims don’t enjoy being victimized.”

“Graham Nielsen didn’t enjoy it.”

“I’m sure he enjoyed it in the moment. He just couldn’t live with the aftermath.”

“The aftermath,” Hannibal repeated. “Yes, the aftermath was a problem for you, too.”

Will’s arms were beginning to ache. Silently, he wondered whether they were truly out of the aftermath.

“One of the most fascinating experimental questions you pose,” Hannibal continued, “is how your empathy is compatible with your ability to inflict violence. Your mind is an open window to the infinities of human possibility – yet also, to the infinities of human suffering. Every stroke you deliver reverberates through your own body as well.”

“An athlete can tune out the soreness of their muscles when in the heightened state of competitive play. It’s a similar thing.”

“I see. So in the adrenaline high, you go numb to the other’s pain, and it only comes rushing in in the aftermath?”

“Sometimes. When I was killing Randall Tier -” Will took a deep breath. “When you punch someone out, you don’t notice the skin of your knuckles breaking. The heat of the moment bestows the invulnerability of a dream. My mind is just an extension of my fist in that regard.”

Hannibal was riveted. “And when you killed Francis Dolarhyde?”

“With the Dragon… it was different with him. I felt everything – the searing as his sinews snapped, the liquidity of the life ebbing from his body – but it didn’t hurt. Or rather, the pain didn’t subdue me. I felt it, deep inside, but it just stoked the fire.”

“Beautiful,” Hannibal murmured. “You are such a conduit for pain. It never festers within you; you always channel it towards some glorious vision.”

His fingernails bit into Will’s thigh, and Will couldn’t contain a whimper.

“Are you going to fuck me?” he asked abruptly. He felt, suddenly, embarrassedly exposed, ready to have this over with.

“It would be a waste not to.”

“You going to warm me up at all? Or just shove it in?”

“What do you think your rapist would do?”

“He’s not my rapist,” Will sullenly protested.

“Of course he is. You’ve kept him tucked away in your mind for so many years now, his imago stamped on your psyche. Who else would construct a mental shrine to his most monumental deed? Certainly not his family. Perhaps that gentle creature he coveted could have opened her heart to him – but it was essential to his eternization that he snuff out that understanding.”

“She wouldn’t have understood,” Will interrupted. He was enfolded by a sudden, desperate sadness for Victoria – that she should be dragged from her grave and into the midst of this whole sordid discussion. “She wouldn’t – she wasn’t –” he was getting choked up. “I mean, she was just an ordinary girl.”

“There was only you, then. He as good as gave himself to you when he died.”

“If he’d wanted to give himself to me, he would have let me kill him.”

Frustration mounted again at Nielsen’s elusiveness, along with the same itch in the fingers that Will had felt when the body was first discovered.

Perhaps this was why the Dragon haunted him so vividly, and Nielsen’s face was only a pinpoint in the distance. Perhaps it was for the better to be spared his portentous visitations. There was responsibility in ownership.

“You haven’t answered my question,” Hannibal probed. “Would your rapist have eased his victim into the act?”

Will swallowed. His mouth was very dry. The two points of evidence loomed large in his mind: the passionate love letters and the state of her vagina post-mortem. If they really were the same, under the forceps and the harsh lighting of the evidence room, then there was no hope for anything. “No. He was… pretty rough with her.”

“But you wouldn’t be,” Hannibal probed. “Would you?”

“That’s not what this is about.”

“Of course it is. We are civilized people, the both of us. Here, angle your hips up.” Hannibal reached for a pillow and slid it under Will’s lower back. “There, now if you arch up –” Hannibal forced Will’s knees back – “perfect.” Hannibal swung himself off the bed and unbuttoned his pants, letting them fall to the floor. He rustled around a moment in the bedside table drawer. Then there was a slick sound as he rubbed his hands together.

Will didn’t bother to look; he could smell the substance. “Olive oil. Very classical. Glad you had that squirreled away.”

He would have taken it from the kitchen – had he done that before or after he’d tied Will up?

“Unfortunately, we have limited resources at our disposal.” Hannibal maneuvered himself back between Will’s legs. “When we have a proper home, we will procure a variety of top line lubricants. We’ll test them out and see which ones we like best. Legs up, now.”

Will drew his knees back and felt the press of Hannibal’s oily finger against his hole. He was horribly exposed, spread out like this.

“Will,” Hannibal chided. “Relax your muscles. I know you know how.”

“It’s a bit hard to relax under these circumstances,” Will bit back icily. But he reluctantly let out a long breath and willed his muscles to loosen.

“Good.” Hannibal worked the finger deeper inside him. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

This was nothing like the grappling they’d fallen into throughout the past few weeks, with its steady if brutal exchange of give and take. Hannibal was chiseling, and Will was his Galatea.

Soon enough, he added another finger, rocking into Will with the full force of his wrist.

Will’s lips dropped open, and he let out a protracted gasp. Hannibal had fingered him before, in the shower, stimulating his rim and letting him feel the pressure. But he’d never taken him like this, at such a controlled, deliberate angle. A warm tingling was slowly enveloping the lower half of Will’s body, from the arches of his feet to the tip of his penis.

“There, doesn’t that feel good?” Hannibal crooned.

It did. That was the worst part.

“Of course it does,” Hannibal continued. “You’re resilient. Resolutely untroubled by invasions of your body. It’s the invasion of your mind that you perceive as a true violation.”

Hannibal paused in speaking, fingers relentlessly stroking him.

“I remember your sickness,” he continued. “I remember the way its sweetness rolled off your skin in tandem with your sweat. The way desperation eroded your resistance, and your body became waxen. Malleable. I remember how easy it was to push my way inside.”

Will gritted his teeth, but not before a whimper slipped out. He’d worked tirelessly to block out that period of his life – the sluggishness accumulated from of daily sleepwalking, the blank spots in his head. At Hannibal’s words, the cold fear was seeping into him again, drowning out the warmth of arousal.

“I remember that night at your house.” Hannibal’s voice left a film on his skin. “You on your knees. The little twitches of your head. The sight of your lips wrapped around that tube. The rush of power I felt at stopping up your breath, and then seeing it come stuttering out again.” Hannibal’s fingers pressed down more forcefully. The sensation twinged. “I must admit, I’d never been tempted to take advantage sexually in such a situation – gauche, according to my standards. But you did erode some of those standards. To hear you making those wet gagging noises around my cock… the pull was extraordinarily hard to resist. But it hadn’t occurred to me to bring condoms. And I don’t leave evidence at crime scenes, Will. I am very firm on that rule.”

Will thought of their bloodied fight on the cliff, dimly aware of the possibility of once again throwing that counterexample in Hannibal’s face. But the part of him that was capable of sparring was pinned down, as surely as his hands.

“But I did have my gloves. So instead, I contented myself with sliding two fingers into your mouth. Do you remember that part, Will? Do you remember what you did?”

Will made a strangled sound. Memories were rushing over him and flooding his body – in the woods behind the house, stumbling around barefoot, unnaturally long fingers grasping his hair, and then –

At his lips –

“You sucked on them, Will.” Hannibal was positively oozing satisfaction. “Even semiconscious, you instinctively closed your lips and tightened your cheeks around them, slipped your tongue between them…”

It was too much – he was so hot, the memory of fever clinging to his skin, and his throat was constricted and his cock was throbbing –

“Breathe, Will.” Hannibal’s hand stopped its movements. “Don’t tug at the ropes. Just give in to it. It will be much easier if you do.”

It took several abortive gasps for Will to get his breathing under control. Finally, he steadied himself, sinking into the heaviness in his body.

“Good,” Hannibal soothed. “Relax into it.”

Will took in another breath. Hannibal’s praise, along with the calm emanating from him, was pushing Will into a drowsy languor. The panic had concentrated itself in his groin and upper thighs, buzzing insistently.

“Look how hard this is making you,” Hannibal continued. He folded his hand around Will’s turgid erection, prompting another sharp inhale. “The memory arouses you, doesn’t it? For all your fierceness, your prickly self-protectiveness, there is a part of you that aches to be nothing more than a passive receptacle.”

Distress pooled headily in Will’s stomach. Hannibal gave his erection another deliberate tug. The greediness with which he had devoured Will over the past few weeks, as they tumbled together on the mattress, had dissipated.

He had no reason to be greedy. He was in control.

“I had half a mind to abandon the entire plot,” Hannibal went on. “Forget the frame job and just spirit you away, in that semi-conscious state. Keep you confused and dependent. You were so frightened – you would have been desperate for any kind of contact. With your mind in its addled state, I could have persuaded you to do anything for me, provided I caressed and soothed you.”

Will swallowed. Hannibal loomed above him, exerting a gravitational pull, and the lightness of his touch made Will feel adrift.

“I still could,” Hannibal mused quietly. “You remember the light. I could reintroduce it during a moment like this, when I have your attention focused on me. Hollow you out and make you newly acquiescent. I am only free by your design – and I am grateful, I assure you. But don’t forget that you, in turn, are only free by my design.”

He withdrew his hand fully. Will shivered. He was stretched tight in all directions, brittle enough to shatter.

“There,” said Hannibal, and the matter-of-fact tone jarred Will somewhat from his reverie. Like waking up from a dream, the details of the situation came rushing back to him – it was dawn, and Hannibal had woken him up –

“I think you’re ‘warmed up’ enough, don’t you?” Hannibal finished.

Will was buzzing inside, his infuriation warring with a powerful internal beckoning to just give in.

A squelching noise sounded from above. Hannibal was rubbing more oil onto his cock, taking a moment to masturbate with some enthusiasm. Then he shifted closer and said, “Legs up again.”

There seemed no choice but for Will to obey.

The blunt head of Hannibal’s cock rubbed circles around his rim, shocking in its tactility. Then Hannibal was pushing his way inside.

It didn’t hurt. Will almost wished it did – it would suit the gravity of the act more. But he was beyond hurting, the core of him lulled into a languid relaxation.

Then Hannibal drew back, letting the friction linger a moment, and thrust his way back in.

An involuntary whine spilled from Will’s lips. It was all too much. His body was being slowly inverted, a palimpsest whose meaning was being rewritten. Everything pulled and reoriented to the dense, exacting point of Hannibal’s desire. Was this what Molly had felt when Will entered her? How could she have been able to stand it, if it was?

And Victoria – trapped and split open and brutally aware of the reality of her own flesh.

Hannibal’s hands were hot on Will’s thighs as he drove into him. But another, phantom pair of hands had settled on his throat.

Nielsen’s hands, strong and slender, more intimately familiar to Will than his face. The hands that had delicately looped the rope about Victoria’s wrists. The hands that had crushed the life from her.

He was braced over her now – over her –

Will strained against the ropes.

– his hot thick throbbing cock slamming into her over and over and over –

finishing the story his fingers had begun, in his last letter to her: you are glorious.

You are pure and I am unworthy and I can only ever have you by force

He was writing over her, violently altering what her body was for, and her consciousness was beating rapidly against the insides of her skull like a trapped bird.

Will had once read in a book a description of the moment of death as blissful, the swoon of surrender like a neurological orgasm. He felt, right now, as if he were on the brink of death, his mind breaking loose of his body and brushing up against the sublime.

Up against a shadowy realm where spindly fingers pushed down through his scalp and swirled inside his brain –

Will jerked violently away from that train of thought. It was better to reach for Valerie Leeds and her still, calming presence, her eyes vacant and glassy. Spread out only for him. Freeing him from having to think about his body. As Will reached for her, the part of himself that was still himself lamented the loss of her vibrancy, the lovely softness of her smile.

No, the Dragon whispered within him. She’s better like this. She obeys us. She’s something greater than herself. And then her face was lit up with a mirror-smile, eyes shining back at him like endless pools.

Do you think she would ever see you? Do you think she would respond to your hands, on her terms? She’s better this way. She’s our design.

Her body rocked against the bed, in time with the sway of his hips.

I’m not like you, Will whispered back. He was thrusting mechanically, workman-like, drinking in her thighs and breasts and vice-tight cunt. It was disgustingly good, stimulation in its most distilled form. He kept his eyes determinedly from her face. I’m not like you, I can’t look.

The rhythm was jerky and haphazard, and the little inconsistencies in tempo ground away at his patience. The Dragon’s hands were heavy on his shoulders. His life was ebbing away and her flesh was growing cold. Frantic, Will cast her aside and groped for the nearest source of warmth. Then his fist was in the Dragon’s stomach, the knife’s handle slippery to the tip. Snarling, Will raked the blade through the softness of the tissue, catching the heat of the blood pouring forth.

Then he melted into another reality. One in which his hands wrenched free of the rope and he tackled Nielsen, rolling them over with the clasp of his legs and the strength of his core. He landed one punch and then another, amped up by the burst of pain in his knuckles. Nielsen was clawing at him, trying to go for his throat again as Will’s fist pounded into him over and over. Hands battling hands. Touch brutally asserting itself before words, before even breath. Power was sputtering to life inside Will, licking at the undersides of his skin and flaring along the lengths of his thighs, surging and tightening into the centre of his fist. The frustrated knots inside him slowly unraveled with each punctuated spark of knuckles against skull, until the sinews of his spirit burst and he spilled against Nielsen, spent.

Victoria was there, somewhere. He crawled back to her, hips dragging across the floor, blood – someone’s blood – streaking his path. Then finally, finally, he was on her, and she was warm and gulping in breath after breath and shaking like a leaf.

It’s okay, it’s okay. I’m here. He cradled the back of her head. Her hair was getting mussed up with blood. I can fuck you better than he can, anyway.

Her skin was soft, her body an open embrace. She was pulsing, at her throat and deep between her legs. Her sobbing was the rapid hiccup sobbing of newborns.

It’s okay. Will’s hand grasped for purchase against the ground above her head, seeking stability amidst her trembling. It’s okay. One strenuous push, and then dual gasps. You lived. He was braced over her, riding her with increasing speed. You lived. Oh god, oh thank god, you lived.

 

Hannibal did provide the promised coffee afterwards. There were still no fresh eggs, but there was porridge, and toast with marmalade. Hannibal presented it all, with a magnanimous flourish, on a tray carried to the bedroom. Taking none for himself, he simply sprawled out on the bed and watched Will eat.

Will handled the spoon with slow, meticulous attention. His stomach was unsettled. It was as if his failure to cry had sent the lump in his throat plummeting further down.

Victoria was dead.

“You are aware,” Will said finally, deliberately, “that you’ve just sexually assaulted me.”

He avoided the word rape. It had too much gravitas – it was too charged.

Hannibal was unfazed. “Are you trying to claim you didn’t enjoy it? Because I remember considerable evidence to the contrary.”

Will flinched from the new memory, but it blazed into view regardless – the trembling of his stomach, the heat of Hannibal’s tongue as he licked up each trail of semen.

“Physiological responses mean nothing,” Will pressed forth. “A person can’t exactly give informed consent under those circumstances.”

He was needling – fruitlessly, he knew. Anything to compensate for the queasiness.

Hannibal’s tongue darted out between his lips. “If you continue to focus on minutiae, we won’t make any progress.”

“I’m just saying that most people would appreciate some kind of warning beforehand.”

“We are not most people,” Hannibal responded.

He watched Will for a few moments, and then asked, “What did you think of anal intercourse?”

Will let his spoon drop with a pronounced clink. “I’d appreciate it if you’d let me eat my breakfast in peace.”

Hannibal ignored him. “Personally, I find being on the receiving end invigorating. The prostate is a marvelous organ. An astonishing number of men deny themselves this pleasure. That potential lies dormant, locked in their flesh unrealized.”

“The kind of potential you need to unlock by force,” Will supplied sourly.

“It’s not worth unlocking in most people,” Hannibal responded. “What would be the use of instilling a taste for the world’s delicacies in the palates of those who lack the intellect to appreciate it?”

“And I’ve always been special to you.” Will tipped a spoonful of sugar into the coffee and stirred with a particular vigor. “Well, don’t expect me to fawn with gratitude over your admiration.”

“You never have.” Hannibal fixed him with an earnest gaze. “Your pride has prevented it. Instead, you’ve taken initiative in recalibrating your own body, teaching your hands to sketch out movements that take a unified shape over time.” He paused. “I have noticed, over the years, how infrequently you directly ask for what you want.”

“You’re the same.” Will cradled the mug between his hands. The shape of it was comforting. It made him feel a little more anchored.

Hannibal inclined his head. “But not, I think, for the same reasons.”

“No,” Will agreed. “You’re entitled.”

“And what’s your excuse? Guilt? Fear? What do you want, in this moment?”

Will took a sip of coffee, staring ahead past Hannibal. What he wanted was to be free from scrutiny. To fling the entire breakfast tray aside and punch Hannibal in the face. To be properly caught after being untied, instead of being left in free fall. To sink into the oblivion of Hannibal’s arms.

“I want you to admit what you did,” he said finally.

Hannibal was silent for a moment. “Very well. I raped you. And before that, I tried to have your family killed. And I expect the retaliation will be swift. Does that satisfy you?”

“Retaliation,” Will repeated. He was bone tired. “That’s what this is about. Channeling my pain towards some glorious vision.” Slowly, he put the mug down and picked up a slice of toast. “Don’t exactly see the point of causing you pain, then. It’ll just end up locked away in some underground mental vault. Just like Mischa.”

From the corner of his eye, Will he saw Hannibal’s mouth tighten in displeasure. He took a large, vindictive bite of toast.

It was a hollow victory.

 

Will tried to read. He couldn’t read.

He wandered across the room to the windowsill, drifted to the kitchen table, and then found his way back to the couch, where Hannibal was perched. His presence was inescapable, like a droning background noise that couldn’t be shut out.

It was offensive. Hannibal had been his solace in the past few weeks, the warm, steadying presence he awoke to from his nightmares. For him to tug Will into another, waking nightmare –

Will flicked a page over in Labyrinths and thought unhappily of Victoria. The exact moment for her when the warmth of flattery was overcome by a chill of fear. She wanted, and bore the consequences.

He thought of Reba McClane’s testimony, when she’d described regaining consciousness and realizing that she was bound, and that Francis Dolarhyde was responsible. I didn’t know you cared about me this much, she’d said. Jack had been incredulous when he read that part, but Will understood. The mind was slow to acclimate to such a drastic change in footing.

You said he was loving. I believe it. That’s what you brought out in him, he’d told Abigail Hobbs. And what a heavy burden that was.

His thoughts then turned to Molly. Molly woozily stirring awake within the dark confines of his mind. Yawning sleepily and shifting to roll over, only to feel the restraints around her wrists.

Will? Will, what – what is this? Will, what’s happening? Why are you doing this to me?

And himself, stony-faced and resolute. Powerful in his remove. I’m your husband, Molly. Don’t you recognize the man you married?

Didn’t you promise to worship me with your body?

Will snapped his mind back to reality and rubbed instinctively at his wrists.

Hannibal was only being honest with him. Just as he always had been, in his own way. Rape by honesty, Will thought, and chuckled darkly to himself.

“What’s a ten-letter word for an Australian Aboriginal instrument?” Hannibal asked. He was curled up serenely on the other side of the couch.

“Didgeridoo,” Will said tonelessly.

“Of course.” Satisfied scratches from the pencil followed.

This was unbearable.

Abruptly, Will shut the book and hurled it across the room.

Hannibal looked up from the crossword, eyebrows raised.

“Well, is that all you’re going to say?” Will demanded.

“What else can I say?” Hannibal laid the crossword aside, pencil tucked inside the book. “It’s a serious question, Will. What more could I possibly say that would actually satisfy you? You’re insatiable.”

“You can’t just – you can’t just pretend nothing happened.”

“You forgave Abigail,” Hannibal said quietly. His gaze was hard and probing. “Why is this so much harder to forgive?”

“I had eight months to forgive Abigail,” Will returned. “And besides, you said yourself. We weren’t in our right minds in Italy.”

But even as he spoke, Will knew that wasn’t the real reason.

It was because it was easy to preserve Abigail in his mind. Easier to imagine his own hand reaching into that pool of blood they’d drowned in together and raising her up from it, unblemished and whole. Easy to set her free under the great dome of the Cappella Palatina, knowing it would encase her.

Easy to rescue her without despoiling her.

Abigail was something done to him, but not inside him. Her death had unlocked nothing, taught him nothing about himself, except that she ultimately had very little to do with him at all.

In a way, that had been Hannibal’s gift to him – keeping him free from complicity. The last of his rare gifts.

It’s worse when they make you want it.

“I think you know how to make this all better, Will,” Hannibal said shrewdly.

“How’s that? Wade into the quiet of the stream?”

“In a way.” Hannibal let the moment linger. Then: “Admit you liked it.”

“Excuse me?”

“Admit that you enjoy being violated. Admit that you want to surrender to me. Admit that the selfishness with which I just consumed you both consoles and excites you. I’ve done my share of confessing, Will. You need to hold up your end.”

Had he liked it?

In that shadowy place he’d gone to, that brush up against the death of consciousness, liking or disliking seemed irrelevant. But there had been something in him that was aching to go – something that went beyond rational anticipation or what psychologists might term mental time travel. It was a compulsion lodged deep in his body, an epigenetic remnant that precluded language or reason. A process no more under his control than the production or release of semen.

He thought, again, of Victoria. She’d been his anchor, the glow of life down in the byzantine depths of his mind. Where had she disappeared to, what did she cling to, in those last few minutes of her life?

I’m sorry, Will told her. I’m so sorry.

“Yes,” said Will finally. “Yes, I liked it.”

The words had barely left his lips before Hannibal had drawn close and pulled him tightly into his arms.

“Of course you did,” Hannibal murmured. “Don’t be ashamed, Will.”

He was embracing Will with all the vigour he’d shown in his kitchen in Baltimore. His cheek nestled against Will’s temple, and his hands rubbed slow circles into Will’s back.

Something was shuddering inside Will’s chest, all the pent-up tension giving way. He was going to dissolve, right here and now, into the oblivion of Hannibal’s arms.

“I wanted to demonstrate to you that I understood,” Hannibal went on, reassuringly. “That I share the fantasies you’ve been harboring.” He rocked Will back and forth, slowly. “And I wanted to show you that it’s not such a terrible thing to want. What you endured – it wasn’t so bad, was it?”

Will was being slowly, inexorably drained, like an hourglass abruptly flipped over.

“Victoria,” he whispered. “And Nielsen –”

“Forget them,” Hannibal interrupted. “Don’t worry about them. They’re not like us.”

 

Hannibal mounted him again that night, this time with Will’s hands free. He clawed at Hannibal’s back, invigorated by each powerful thrust. Low growls emanated from deep in his chest. He was blissfully free of his mind’s unruliness, driven only by the fleshy beckoning of his body, and Hannibal’s, and the sweat that mingled between them. And his ghostly visitors were banished for the time being. There was only Hannibal – his lithe, muscled build and the thick hair on his chest and the demanding grasp of his hands. Hannibal, who commanded all his attention.

“Tell me,” Will panted. “Tell me –”

“Tell you what?” Hannibal was cradling the back of Will’s knee in his palm.

“Tell me – ugh – ah – tell me you raped me into liking this. Tell me you’ve – you’ve broken me in, and you’re going to climb on top of me and use me whenever you feel like it – ohhh fucking Christ –”

Hannibal jerked Will’s knee back farther and slammed into him, drawing out a guttural groan. Then his mouth was against Will’s ear, the heat of his breath shivering through Will in tandem with the pressure of his cock.

“I can force you to enjoy anything, Will,” Hannibal purred. Two more hard, knowing thrusts. And then – “Your wife was right. You are sensitive – and enormously impressionable.”

Will hissed and curled his fingers viciously in Hannibal’s hair. Rocked up desperately and lodged his heel against the small of Hannibal’s back.

He could feel, beneath the bellicosity of his movements, Hannibal’s satisfied smile.

“It’s impossible to rape you,” Hannibal continued. “You’d always enjoy it too much. That’s how your mind works – if I enjoy it, then you enjoy it. Isn’t that right?”

Will’s jaw was clenched, his toes curled so tightly that his ankles ached. Please, oh god, please – and then the dam blissfully broke, and his nails bit hard enough into Hannibal’s flesh to draw blood.

“Yes,” he cried out.

There was one unsolved facet of the Graham Nielsen-Victoria Holmes case – whether he came inside her before or after she was dead. Will had, for a time, obsessively fixated on that ultimately trivial detail. He was struck by how lonely both scenarios seemed. If it was the former, then her death was an anticlimax, bathetic and ridden with shame. If the latter, then he’d been alone in the moment of transcendence, left with nothing but the biological compulsion of ejaculation.

That was why it hit Will in a rush, as Hannibal tensed above him, how miraculous the fact of Hannibal’s being alive was, and of their being there together. He clung to Hannibal, bathed in warm relief, as his companion stilled against him and then rocked his hips, languorously slowly, and a prolonged, euphoric noise spilled from his throat.

“I know what you’re doing,” Will murmured later. They were twined together, still in drunken stupor. Still lost in each others’ bodies.

Hannibal kissed his chest lazily, the press of his full lips stirring Will’s cock again. “Awareness of the treatment doesn’t make it less effective.”

 

He was fucking Victoria again.

Raping her, his mind hissed.

He batted the thought away. The distinction didn’t matter, not in dreams.

The cycle was exhausting. Graham Nielsen’s mind had been chafed raw, picturing this over and over. There was a reason serial violence tended to escalate in its intensity – because there came a time when the fuse of pleasure had been burned through, leaving only compulsion. A time when the only option was to bear down more.

To slide more deliberately into her, find the exact angle that made her involuntarily arch her back.

“Don’t,” she breathed. Dazed and almost shocked by pleasure.

Relief filled him. This – this was interesting.

“Why?” he returned. He spoke against her ear. They didn’t look at each other. Their words were spoken to thin air. “Doesn’t it feel good?”

“I didn’t – I didn’t ask for –” She kicked helplessly against his back. He could picture her toes tightening. “Please, don’t make me –”

The ground was hard beneath his palm. He could feel her fear. He was drenched in it, soaked through and shivering inside. But it didn’t matter. He was a world unto himself. And she was… his.

Tenderness blossomed within him, pulsing with every twitch she gave. And there was no need to do anything about that either, except revel in its warmth. This was what soothed the agitation – what Graham Nielsen hadn’t been able to tap into.

His lips moved again, and the words came through intuition. “You only want not to want it. That’s what this is.”

She whimpered. The tears were coming. Will swept her hair back and cradled her head beneath his palm.

“I know. I know it’s hard.”

 

“Why do men specifically target women?”

Will shifted his feet in Hannibal’s lap. “Because they find them attractive, and feel entitled to them. Because they expect women to care for them, and therefore perceive their rejection as more of a betrayal.”

“Is that all?”

“There’s –”Will hesitated. “Most men perceive women as more delicate. Something to be protected. For the sadistic types, there’s a special appeal in crushing them.”

“Women are no more delicate than men, in truth.”

“No,” Will agreed. “But the associations still linger.” He fixed his eyes on the ceiling, conscious of Hannibal’s attention on him. “If you’re angry at another man, you can just throw a punch. Get in a barroom brawl. It might be frowned upon, in some quarters, but it’s an acceptable social script.”

“Have you even been in a bar fight?” Hannibal asked, amused.

“Not really. When I was angry, I took it to the shooting range.”

“I appreciate it. Brawling is very unbecoming, in my opinion.”

“When men are angry at women,” Will went on, “it comes out in privacy. Behind closed doors. And it’s asymmetrical and ugly. Or else, it develops through voyeuristic fixation – it takes shape from afar, and compresses in on itself, and then explodes in one suspended, destructive moment. A design that pulses like a supernova.”

He could feel Hannibal’s resistance, even without meeting his eyes.

“You never hit your wife,” Hannibal said finally.

“Yeah, but I wanted to,” Will burst out. “It’s as good as the same thing.”

“You wanted to hit her out of sexual excitement. That’s hardly the same motivation as a domestic abuser.”

“It is the same.” Will was keyed up all of a sudden. “I was angry with her, and there was fear simmering beneath the anger. Fear of her touching me, and what her hands would find. I needed control. It’s – It’s the same.”

He stumbled off into silence, coherence failing him.

“Your fear stemmed from your denial of your own taste for power and sadism,” Hannibal replied smoothly. “If you had let yourself want freely, the fear would have dissolved. Aggression is alchemized from fear. But you never could have, could you? When the Dragon gazed into the eyes of those women, he saw himself, accepted. He saw what he could become, if he stopped hiding behind his loneliness and self-pity. And when you gazed into the eyes of Molly Foster Graham, you saw yourself as you thought you should be, loving as you ought to give love. She was your design.”

Will’s eyes slid shut. His chest was aching. “It all comes down to the same thing,” he said quietly. “Which is that Abel Gideon was right that I shouldn’t be in a relationship.”

“We have a relationship,” Hannibal countered.

Will snorted. “If you want to call it that.”

“What else would you call it?”

“We are… passionate,” Will replied carefully. “But the same rules don’t apply to us.”

“Because I never qualify my love for you, and never expect you to do so either?”

“Because you’re –” Will broke off. “You’re a special case.”

“Hmm.” Hannibal’s affect, now more than ever, resembled the persona he had worn in therapy. Contemplative, probing – always circling around his own conclusions.

“I must ask, Will,” Hannibal said finally. “Have you ever imagined raping a man?”

There were two paths to honesty.

The first was no. No, because it doesn’t come up often enough in investigation to paint itself on my psyche. No, because there’s no mechanism in my daily life that might flip the switch. No, because it doesn’t frighten me.

“Yes,” Will said. “You."

He met Hannibal’s eyes then. Predictably, Hannibal was looking utterly delighted.

“Tell me.”

“When I was trying to entrap you –” Will pronounced the words very deliberately. “I used to regularly fantasize about killing you. Pinning you to the ground, getting my hands around your throat, driving my fist into it. It was a place I went to when I was wandering along the boundary between waking and sleep – that place where you were locked tightly under me and there was nothing but the hardness of my knuckles and the softness of your throat. Certain associations started to bubble up from the cracks, veins of pleasure buried beneath the ground we wrestled upon. I would come to and I’d be facedown and grinding against the mattress, and imagining it was you.”

“Were you penetrating me, in these… waking dreams?”

“Maybe,” Will breathed. “It didn’t seem to matter. My fist was leading the rhythm, and everything else followed."

“Did you ever construct more elaborate fantasies? Giving me a shock collar? Putting me on my knees?”

“I hate to disappoint you, but no. It wasn’t something I wanted to make a production of. The appeal was in using your body in an almost lazy, impromptu manner. Impress upon you the extent of my advantage over you. Humiliate you, in the way you humiliated me.”

“Did you reach climax? Were you deliberate in pleasuring yourself, upon waking? Or did you desperately stumble back into the thickets of your subconscious? Did you derive only incidental enjoyment? Or did you want?”

“I touched myself,” Will said softly. He was feeling the impulse towards embellishment, the performance of seduction. “The first time, I slipped my hand between my legs and rocked back and forth for a bit. I was… delirious with anticipation. I delayed gratification for as long as I could stand it. Then I rolled over and spread my legs, shoved my boxers out of the way and got my hand around my bare cock… I was in that powerful state of arousal where the first brush of contact sends a jolt through you. And when I applied more pressure, really squeezed the shaft, I felt a swell of warmth in my upper thighs. Sometimes masturbation is just pleasant friction, a little relief, and sometimes your whole body is just in thrall to the sensation of it. This was the latter. I just pumped my cock over and over and over, to the rhythm of my hands bashing your head into the ground.”

Hannibal was gazing intently at him, lips parted. Will nudged his foot against his crotch and was met with a bulge.

“When I came,” Will went on, “it was… shocking to my system. Like getting the wind knocked out of you. My whole body felt weakened by it.”

“Hmm.” Hannibal was hard, but still as prim as ever. “And how did that make you feel?”

Will twitched his foot in Hannibal’s lap. “Disquieted. Like I could still feel your grasp around me, draining my life force. I hadn’t taken control at all.”

Hannibal, once again, was maddeningly silent for a few moments. “How often did you indulge these particular fantasies, before I featured in them?”

“I didn’t,” Will said with enforced precision, “indulge them. I was trying to clamp down on them, stop them from bubbling up unexpectedly. I didn’t want to… nurture the associations.”

Hannibal clicked his tongue. “Suppression only makes the problem worse. I think it would be much better for you – for you sense of control – if you took time to really explore your fantasies.”

“Is this your prescription? You’re telling me to jerk off?”

Hannibal companionably gripped Will’s ankles and feet. “I am telling you to stop denying yourself. And to stop relying on chaotic happenstance to help you understand your own desires. Do you think Graham Nielsen had a healthy, conscious relationship with his body and pleasure? You must hone your own ability to want.”

Will closed his eyes. “Oh, I’m capable of wanting plenty – at least in terms of what plays out in the masquerades of my mind. It’s tempering those shadows into usable form that’s a slipperier process.”

“Precisely why it will require practice,” Hannibal said smoothly. “Was masturbation an infrequent exercise for you, prior to our intimacy?”

“Not at all. It was habitual. It helped stave off more dangerously imaginative pathways.”

“And what did you think about, during these habitual and preventative indulgences?”

“Various things. Alana Bloom, for a while. But you ruined that association, of course.”

“Another concern about the nature of our relationship?”

“No.” Will wet his lips. “She hypnotized me. When I was in prison. She was trying to help me recover my memories of what you did to me. And I recovered something, all right.”

Hannibal was eyeing him with the intent focus of a bird of prey.

“I felt a wave of tranquility rush over me, powerful enough to drown. And when she was looming over me, I wanted to surrender to her, to let myself be sucked into the undertow. And it wasn’t a new feeling. That was the frightening part. I remembered you putting me under – remembered not through mental imagery, but through instinct. I remembered you working your way into my mind, and I remembered… wanting it. Remembered your words, and the touch of your hands, as a balm. It was a new layer of memory. On one level, there was the fear and disorientation of losing time. But, written over it like a palimpsest, there was pleasure, and comfort.”

“And that frightened you enough to ruin your associations with Alana Bloom.”

“With my… fantasy construction of her, at least.”

“Alana was always acutely aware of her potential to abuse power,” Hannibal mused. “Her level of insight into those around her frightened her, as it did you. She resisted the level of influence it could have granted her – but a need for control is as much a part of her nature as it is ours. I must say, I found her taste too pedestrian to try to develop those talents in her, but I am pleasantly surprised to see what she’s become. And I am rather curious as to how she will develop.”

“Curious enough to forego your contractual obligation to her?”

“We shall see.”

“That’s your answer to everything, nowadays.”

“Spontaneity has often been my approach,” Hannibal replied. “I am simply inviting you into my private contemplations.”

And then –

“Your desire to violate me, and your desire to violate your wife, ultimately come from the same place.”

“You think so?”

“Fear, and anger as a response to that fear,” Hannibal quoted. “I molded you into something against your will. Your wife’s hands, as you said, also tried to mold you into something against your will. Touching is interpretive. You needed to take back control from us."

“It’s not the same,” Will countered.

Hannibal chucked. “Because I deserve it?”

“Because you’re not delicate.”

“I see. Do you think Randall Tier was delicate?”

“Yes,” said Will quietly. His hand tightened into a fist at the memory, and then unclenched again. A world unto itself. “He was a predator, yes. But lower on the scale. In an equally matched conflict, his heart was prone to quivering. The fear was radiating off him in his final moments – you tasted it. Easy prey.”

“And the Dragon? Was he delicate?”

“In a different way, maybe. He had sensitive points. There was a brittleness to his self-conception.”

“Some would say all men feel that way. That masculinity, for all its strength, is ultimately fragile and defensive."

Will let out a scoff. “I don’t think Francis Dolarhyde was all that attached to his masculinity. At least, not for its own sake. He valued physical power, that’s all.”

“Do you believe he valued delicacy in his female victims?”

“Well, they were dead once he got to… handling them. Didn’t really matter.”

“Isn’t that the ultimate form of helplessness? They can’t fight back.”

“it’s not about fighting back or not,” Will countered frustratedly. He pressed his hand into the armrest. “Delicacy… you need them alive. It’s about the satisfaction of crushing a petal. Hearing them whimpering, feeling their bodies go loose with defeat… that’s what a rapist who’s interested in delicacy wants. Dolarhyde, he killed them quickly. He wasn’t that kind of sadist.”

Hannibal lifted his eyebrows. “Would a true sadist want to feel their victim deflate? Surely the anticipation of a fight is the appealing part.”

Victoria had fought back. A closer examination had revealed DNA beneath her fingernails. She must have scratched Nielsen before he sedated and secured her. Nails Will had felt, in the depths of his imagination, biting into his own back and forearms.

He thought of Teresa Marlow’s killer, the train of thought that had circled his mind repeatedly, and never failed to make him shiver. That doesn’t mean she can’t feel pain… it just means she can’t do anything about it.

“It’s the realization of helplessness that appeals to a sadist,” he articulated. “Aggression and self-defense from a victim are exciting because they… prolong the onset of despair. It’s a realization that steadily builds and builds.”

Randall Tier, straining against him as he took blow after blow. Victoria clawing at him, helpless against the softness of her own skin, the way she made his blood dance in his veins.

(No, no, she was tied up... don’t rewrite it in your head, don’t let her touch you, you’ll make it worse...)

“Aggression and malleability are an intoxicating combination,” Hannibal remarked. “The more fiercely the victim resists, the greater the rewards.”

Will fixed his eyes on Hannibal. “I never realized my helplessness, Hannibal. Not consciously. Not while I was in the thick of it.”

“No,” Hannibal agreed. “A shame, in some ways. I had hoped you would become lost in my vision for you and succumb to your potential, and then come to me out of desperation. I had imagined numerous scenarios in which I revealed myself to you once you were in my thrall. But I’ve enjoyed you in other ways.”

Hannibal paused, rubbing slow circles onto Will’s ankles.

"Besides,” he went on, “there is a certain intellectual reward in uncovering your shame in the aftermath. Your encounter with Alana Bloom, for instance.”

Will exhaled slowly. The touch of Hannibal’s hands beckoned him to surrender. “It’s like you said. We can finally be honest with each other. Just as you were honest with me.”

“And how do you feel about our history together now?”

Will lifted his feet from Hannibal’s lap and pulled his knees to his chest. “You’ve… helped erode some of the barriers to admitting my desires. But I haven’t lost sight of why I resisted in the first place. I wouldn’t count on that, if I were you.”

Hannibal inclined his head slightly. “If you stopped resisting, you would cease to be yourself. As to how far that stubbornness will stretch… I am still working out my own desires.”

Will was only aware of how instinctive his resistance had become as he was uttering the words, “And I’m still working out durable you are.”

“Naturally,” Hannibal replied.

He took Will’s hand in his and bent his head to it.

 

Will was back in the greenhouse in Maryland. The place where he’d told Abigail Hobbs that murder was the ugliest thing in the world.

The alchemy of dreams had rendered it much larger and more labyrinthine than it had ever been in life. Will stumbled through row after row, increasingly hampered by dead ends and flagging energy.

Finally, he caught a glimpse of Abigail – sandy hair and a scarf to cover the line on her throat. Through the knowledge of dreams, Will understood that she was covering Hannibal’s mark this time as well, overlaid on the one her father had made.

He drew closer, desperately needing to tell her – what?

I know what you did – you can tell me what you did, and I’ll listen. I won’t get angry this time. I won’t be weak. I promise I promise I promise.

A high-pitched, panting sound was emanating from where she sat. It took Will a moment to realize that it was the sound of someone crying.

He rounded the corner and was met with the sight of Abigail with her arms wrapped around Victoria Holmes, who was shuddering with sobs.

“It’s okay,” Abigail whispered. “It’s gonna be okay.”

Then she lifted her head and met Will’s eyes, cold and reproachful. Will stumbled back as if slapped.

A sense of imminent danger gripped him. I have to get out of here – I have to get out – If I don’t, I’ll cut her too.

He spun around and he was back on the cliff, wind whipping at his face.

Will pressed his hands to his knees, breath coming in short bursts. A thumping noise, accompanied by scraping, made him raise his head.

The Dragon was striding towards him, wings unfurled. He dragged a corpse behind him.

“I did this for you,” the Dragon proclaimed. “Come and look.”

Will crept over, heavy with foreboding.

“I improved her,” the Dragon said softly. “Just like you wanted.”

Will was expecting Molly. But then he looked down, he saw that it was Victoria again, hair mussed up and eyes and mouth mirrored over. Her gaze was fixed and cold, refracting the moonlight in a thousand directions.

Will knelt on the ground beside her and took in the marks that had been imprinted on his memory – the bruises on her throat, the rope burns on her wrist. What was once grotesque and pathetic was now, under the reflected light and the aegis of purpose, almost queenly.

“What have you done to her hands?” Will’s voice came out raspy, almost a growl. He lifted one hand, absorbing its dead weight. The nails that had bitten into him in dreams were blunted. “She’s cold and distant. I don’t want her like this. I want her fire.”

“I’m only giving you what you’ve imagined,” the Dragon rumbled. “You offered me this. Don’t you remember?”

Will turned his head down and saw that the hand he was holding had become longer, with more pronounced veins and hair on the knuckles. He trailed his eyes upwards to find, with horror, that he was looking upon Hannibal’s inert corpse and blank eyes.

“No,” Will whispered. He clambered to his feet and stumbled back. Hannibal’s mirror smile blazed up at him, a grotesque mockery. “No, no, no, I didn’t want this – not like this –”

And then he was awake, hands trembling.

Will scrambled to take Hannibal’s sleeping form in his arms. Then he simply lay there for a few moments, soaking in the relief of Hannibal’s warmth and the minute twitches of his muscles. He wondered when he would grow accustomed to Hannibal’s being alive, when he would wake in contented certainty. If ever.

Then he switched on the lamp and shook Hannibal awake, suddenly desperate to unburden himself.

“It was your eyes,” Will whispered. “In the house on the cliff, when you looked up at me – I knew I couldn’t let him take your eyes. I wanted you for myself, even if I had to destroy myself to protect you.”

Hannibal gazed up at him, eyes as hungry as they had been upon their meeting at the prison.

“And what would you have done, had you been able to dispatch of the Dragon quickly? Would you have finished his work? Put your own indelible mark on me?”

“I don’t think I could.” Will lifted his hands to cup Hannibal’s face. “It’s an exercise of wanting that never reaches its conclusion.”

“And does that bother you?” Hannibal returned. “Does it trouble you that you recoil from properly hurting me, when you fantasize so readily about violating those innocent women?”

Will jerked back as if physically struck.

“Hannibal – stop. Just stop.”

“Stop what?” said Hannibal innocently.

“Stop – stop needling.” Will’s voice was still lowered, but furious. “I’m trying to – how did you say it? – I’m trying to love you without qualification, and you won’t even allow it. That’s how petty your punishments are.”

Hannibal blinked, and then swallowed. “What am I meant to be punishing you for?”

“For all my past rejections. For that grudge you were nursing when we were reunited. You lash out in anger when you’re afraid, too, Hannibal. And it’s an ugly habit that you won’t surrender, even now that you’re secure. You’re like a dog that won’t stop gnawing on the same bone. Well, you won, Hannibal. I’m here, aren’t I? You won.”

“Yes,” said Hannibal simply. “I won. But you were never my opponent, for all that you might think otherwise.”

“Then who was?” Will demanded.

“Your wife. Jack Crawford. Alana Bloom, for a time. Everyone who would have you live as a paler version of yourself.”

“And what a failure you were.” Will smiled cruelly. “You didn’t even manage to kill one of them.”

“They all have been, or will be, dealt with, in their own ways,” Hannibal said measuredly. “Even if you were to go back to your wife, for example, you would never look at her the same way. Would you?”

Will was silent, breaths coming heavily.

“Although, if we had had more time,” Hannibal mused, “perhaps we could have cut out the middleman there. Given what you’ve confessed to me… well, you might have been persuaded to dispatch with your wife yourself. Enact your carefully guarded sexual fantasies, get truly intimate with her. Tell me, do you think you could have painted a better picture than the Dragon?”

Will slapped him.

Hannibal blinked up at him. He looked genuinely startled.

Will was trembling. The impact sang in his palm. He had spent so long persuading and posturing and deflecting, playing along with Hannibal’s little games. Enough.

He wound up and struck Hannibal’s still-stunned face again. Wild excitement flared inside him. New worlds were opening up. Not missing a beat, he backhanded Hannibal, and pain sparked in his knuckles as they caught Hannibal’s cheek.

He raised his hand again and Hannibal’s iron grip closed around his wrist.

“Would you like a fight?” Hannibal was recovered from the initial shock, and his eyes had taken on the intense gleam they’d had in prison. “We can certainly have one.”

Will snarled and closed his other hand around the soft flesh of Hannibal’s throat. Tightened the pressure enough to make Hannibal sputter and loosen his grasp on him.

A momentary urge brushed up against him – the urge to press down with both hands and choke the life out of Hannibal. Instead, almost lazily, he slapped Hannibal again, prompting more guttural noises from him. Then, with the same sensuous delay, he slid his hand under the pillow and rooted around, with Hannibal struggling and sputtering beneath him. His fingers closed around the metal of the gun.

Then the barrel was nestled against Hannibal’s temple, and everything fell into stillness.

Will spoke, very deliberately. “Turn over.”

Something flared in Hannibal’s eyes – surprise? Apprehension? – but his mouth was set and resolute. Slowly, like a lumbering bear, he rolled onto his stomach.

Will inhaled deeply, breath after breath to steady himself. He was tightly wound – so much so that even the slightest outside interference would shatter him. He took in the territory of Hannibal’s back – the fading brand, the lean but powerful shoulders, the seam of his backbone and the place where it vanished into crevice of his firm buttocks. Tentatively, Will laid his palm – god, he was sweating – against the small of Hannibal’s back. The exact place the Dragon had promised to snap Will’s spine.

Will pulled back, lightning quick, and drove his fist into the meat of Hannibal’s shoulder.

A little noise emanated from Hannibal, nothing more than an involuntary release of breath.

(Victoria in his dream, moaning breathily despite herself –)

Will snuffed out the thought like a candle.

His fists rained over Hannibal’s back, driving into the soft give of his skin and the unyielding muscle and bone beneath. He was alight with the same exhilaration as when he’d killed Randall Tier – the same but better, because this was the real deal, the truth behind the smokescreen. Hannibal jostled beneath him, surrendering to the sway of his pummels, warm and panting and diminished into nothing but nerves and flesh.

Frantically, so as not to lose the rhythm, Will spat into his hand and pried Hannibal’s buttocks apart.

Everything was slippery and surreal. He fingered Hannibal and grasped at his own cock with the fumbling hastiness of a dream, his hands barely within his own control. The hard, chafing push inside took an otherworldly kind of strenuousness – the effort of clawing one’s way from one layer of reality to the next. The effort of burying his knife inside the Great Red Dragon and ripping him open from the inside.

(Hannibal’s knife carving out a cold, throbbing hollow inside him –

Will was reaching beyond reality now. And when Hannibal had stabbed Will he’d been reaching towards it, his hand striking towards Will amidst the damp, hot respirations of the living world -)

Beneath him, Hannibal twitched, as if once again in the throes of fever.

Will was most aware of his own thigh, hooked around the back of Hannibal’s. The sweat curdling between them. Skin chafing against skin as he moved, legs grasping Hannibal tightly as if he were scaling a great height.

That thumbnail frame in his mind, the detail closeup of their bodies locking and interlocking, distracted from the magnitude of what he was doing. Another reason to smash mirrors – the splintering of consequence. To see oneself not as one, but as a glistening array of possibilities. Through a glass darkly.

Nielsen looked head-on, and it blinded him. The flames beating inside him and the hard clench of his jaw and the beckoning of her throat –

and the knowledge that underneath the sweeping inferno it was actually very ordinary, nothing more than the sliding and squeezing of two bodies, grimy and arduous and even repulsive –

Will let out a sound, ragged and desperate, and latched his mouth onto the reddening mark his fist had left on Hannibal’s shoulder. Latched and clung on for dear life. Hannibal’s quiet whine sent electricity jolting through him.

His climax folded and unfolded. Physical pleasure was almost beyond what he could bear. He collapsed, shaking, against an impassive Hannibal.

I should pull out. His thoughts were lagging. It was like his mind was dizzy. I should – because that’s what you – that’s when it ends. That’s when you know you’re done with – physiologically impossible otherwise.

He eased his dick out.

That’s when your partner gets to be disappointed. Or. Well. Not something a rapist has to worry about.

He thought of Lydia, and the unremarkable outlet for his fantasies about her. About Victoria. It was too ordinary for Nielsen too. He had to spice things up a bit.

Will rolled Hannibal over to lie on his back and their eyes met. Hannibal’s gaze was completely unreadable. Tracing his eyes down Hannibal’s body, Will saw that his cock was still rock hard and leaking on to his stomach.

Will reached for him. His fingers were cold at the tips, and he moved with effort, as though underwater. He knew, as he curled his palm around Hannibal’s shaft, how to finish it.

It’s worse when you make them want it.

“I should have let him rape you to death,” Will said hoarsely.

Hannibal’s eyes remained fixed on him. He was panting softly, bestial but self-contained.

“You would’ve enjoyed it, wouldn’t you?” A snarl was edging its way into Will’s words. His hand quickened its pace. “You’re an exhibitionist.” Will tilted his head, considering. “In fact, I’m not sure we could even call it rape, could we? Rape is what’s done to... respectable people.”

Hannibal exhaled, just a little hiss between his teeth. Satisfaction blossomed in Will’s chest.

“Look at you,” he continued. “All your aristocratic affectations, your refined table manners... and yet you don’t have an ounce of dignity.”

A strangled sound emanated from Hannibal. His mouth fluttered, grasping at the air for a few moments, and then semen was streaking his stomach.

Everything was quiet for a moment. The room seemed smaller all of a sudden, and bizarrely commonplace - plain white sheets on the bed, cheap wood paneled doors on the closets.

Will’s grip on Hannibal went slack. The wave of vindication he’d been riding dropped out, and the room swam out of focus, like pigment dissolving in water. He was back on the cliff top, with Hannibal’s body weighing in his arms. Waiting for momentum and gravity to take them.

He was suspended in the sea’s strangling embrace, water flooding his lungs and nothing at all to cling to -

Will opened his eyes with a shudder. A cold, numb sensation clung to him, and he was suddenly, desperately alone.

“Hannibal,” he whispered. “I – oh god, Hannibal -”

He crawled forward and half-fell on top of him, clinging to him as if they were still in that howling abyss. Hannibal’s arms, ever-accepting, came to wind around him.

“Will.” Hannibal’s voice floated down to him, deep and low. Soothing, but with an inquisitive note to it.

Will lay between Hannibal’s thighs and settled his head on his chest. Hannibal’s body heat, the proof of life, brought such intense relief that a sob welled up in his throat.

“It’s all right, Will.” Hannibal’s fingers worked through his hair, moving with the precision used in touching something new. “We’re all right. Everything’s all right.”

It was dangerous to lie down and go to sleep in the extreme cold, because you would never wake up. Some similar survival instinct tugged at Will, urging him not to give into the deep well of comfort Hannibal provided.

But Will felt so raw –

He goaded you into this, Will thought. You offered yourself to him, thinking it was your idea.

He’s nothing but accepting, as long as you come to him.

But his body was heavy enough, and his mind addled enough, that he had trouble keeping hold on precisely what it was that he had given away.

 

Asleep that night, in Hannibal’s arms, Will dreamed of the Red Dragon.

They were entangled again, a sweaty humidity emanating from their bodies’ points of contact. Will lay on his back and the Dragon pinned him down, with a hand flat to his chest and his powerful thighs grasping Will’s waist. They were fucking, Will’s cock buried deep in his ass, and the Dragon undulated against him with the vigor of one trying to shake off a headlock.

He was riding him the way Molly used to, Will realized – rocking back and forth at a slight angle to the side, tightening his muscles on each downward push in a way that had always made Will delirious. Guttural, animalistic noises spilled from the Dragon’s throat. His face was contorted, body arching and straining towards some new configuration of his skin – something both longed for and deeply dreaded.

Will’s dream-fingers had developed muscle memory by now. Blindly, he reached to his side and found the knife he and the Dragon had shared, its grip worn familiar by the revolutions of his mind.

Murder or mercy? Hannibal had once asked.

Mercy or lust?

With practiced aim, Will thrust the knife between them and buried it in the Dragon’s stomach.

The Dragon’s movements stuttered to a stop, thighs and buttocks clenching down hard. He flung his head back and howled, body quaking with inhuman force, before enormous leathery wings burst from his back and unfurled above them.

Panting, Will pulled the knife out. Blood poured forth, more than there had ever been in life, soaking Will and seeping into his skin. Then the Dragon was looming over him, his wingspan blocking out the light, blocking out everything. His hand seized Will’s jaw, tight enough to choke.

See? the Dragon whispered. See?

 

Sleep washed him clean and licked the night’s horrors from him, just as the waves licked the blemishes from the rocks on the shore. The next day, Will was able to take some satisfaction in how gingerly Hannibal perched on his chair at breakfast, and the memory of Hannibal’s back beneath his fists brought only vindication. When they retired to the couch, he caught Hannibal’s wrists and pushed him down, in graduations, until he was on his back and Will was straddling his hips.

“You’ve recovered,” Hannibal observed.

Will wet his lips. “Dreams bring clarity, if not always comfort.”

“And what entity has been haunting your dreams this time?”

“The Great Red Dragon,” Will returned.

“The Dragon,” Hannibal repeated. “It’s a shame we never got a chance to share him.”

“Yeah? What would have been the choicest organs?”

Hannibal observed him amusedly. “I meant in bed."

“I see.” Will was disconcerted. Hannibal was once again reaching into his subconscious and plucking new strings. “Is this what you’ve been gunning for the whole time?”

“Not quite. It’s just a flight of fancy. You remember the thrill of subduing him. Imagine that powerful body trembling between us.”

“I don’t tremble enough for you?” Will said wryly. Defensive.

“You tremble beautifully. The exquisite satisfaction it brings me – I want you to experience that too. I want to share all the world’s pleasures with you.”

“All right.” Will drew away from Hannibal, companionably leaning against his thighs. “What would you do with him?”

“Hmm.” Hannibal contemplated for a moment. “For such a specimen as he is, physical force does little to quell him. It’s humiliation that really makes its mark. I would have him restrained, on his hands and knees. Dole out some demeaning punishment – like smacking those spectacular buttocks for a while – and then ride him like a dog. All while you kneel opposite me and –” Hannibal smirked – “muzzle him.”

Will raised his eyebrows. “You aren’t worried he’ll bite?”

“I trust you to tame him.”

“I see.” Will was getting warmed up, suddenly aware of the friction Hannibal’s stomach and thighs could provide. They’d both been out of their minds that night on the cliff, devouring and devouring without restraint. It was only in hindsight that Will realized how much fear had been mingled with the pleasure – the giddiness of rocketing down a hill without brakes. It was reassuring to imagine restraining the Dragon – taking time to nurse and revel in the feeling of control.

“All right,” he said. “I want to go down on him. I want him strung up like a Verger pig, cock and balls swinging in the breezes, and I’ll lie under him and lick at them.”

Hannibal looked intrigued. “And why does this particular act appeal to you?"

“I like tormenting him with something he wants. I’m… compelled by the cruelty of forcing him to accept the truth he’s desperately trying to evade.”

“And that is?”

“That he sleeps with dead women to suppress the fact that he’d prefer a living man.”

Hannibal chuckled. “Do you really think that’s all there is to him?”

“Of course not. That would be lazy psychiatry. But it is an interesting idea to test.”

Hannibal was quiet a moment. “And did you test anything last night?”

Will hesitated. “I was clumsy. Though I suppose it leveled the score a bit. You raped me, I raped you.”

“Indeed.”

“Will we ever reach equilibrium?”

“You said it yourself,” Hannibal replied. “No decisive victory.”

Will sighed. “It is so wrong to want one?”

“It is never wrong for you to want anything, Will.”

A pause. And then - “It surprised you, the way I broke down.”

“Yes,” said Hannibal simply. “I wonder sometimes, if there will ever come a day when you fail to surprise me.”

Will curled his mouth into a half-smile. “Then you’ll have to kill me, I suppose.”

Hannibal took Will’s hands in his own. “Your sensitivity is, at times, perplexing to me. Personally, I enjoyed myself thoroughly. And in the future, if you ever wish to bind me, or whip me, or cut me with knives, you need only ask.”

“You’re confused,” Will said, “because it doesn’t bring you guilt or trepidation to hurt me.”

“Not particularly. Though I do notice which kinds of hurt are the most disruptive to the harmony between us.”

“Of course.” Will laughed, somewhat grimly. “How does it feel to hurt me?”

Hannibal’s eyes were focused intently on him – as intently as when he’d been in prison, but softer in their gaze. “A warm, satisfying glow.”

“Oh.” A shiver passed through Will, another melding of fear and pleasure. “I – I envy you that, sometimes.”

“You’ve experienced the same pleasure in hurting me, at least. Haven’t you?”

“Yes, but – I flinched. It’s what I’d fantasized about for so long, but I couldn’t properly follow through on it. I know there are ways of hurting you that go deeper than minor embarrassments. But I flinched.”

“I haven’t plumbed all the ways of hurting you, either,” Hannibal returned. “Consideration for one’s lover is to be expected.”

“That’s what I’m worried about.”

Hannibal regarded him a moment. “Feeling these doubts indicates that you have lingering needs. Needs that hurting me couldn’t fully satisfy. Isn’t that right?”

“It felt –” Will swallowed. “It felt good. It did. But I could feel the artifice of it boxing me in. I didn’t mean it.”

“When would it feel real? With Francis Dolarhyde?”

“Yes, but – that’s not the whole of it,” Will said darkly. “I want – I want – innocence.”

He let the word, and the sibilance of its ending, linger in the air.

Hannibal was placid. “If you desire innocent victims, we can certainly have them.”

“That’s not – it’s more complicated. I want –” Molly twisting in the ropes. Fingers twisting into his brain. Hannibal’s ambitions to show him the world’s indulgences. “I want to kill innocence, not the individual. I want to break someone, such that only I can soothe them.”

He thought of Chiyoh, blood on her hands and horror etched on her face. And then of Abigail, his knife at her throat and his voice against her ear. I can make it all go away.

Hannibal looked utterly unsurprised by his confession. “If that’s what you want, Will, then you ought to indulge yourself.”

“I can’t,” Will choked out.

“You can.” Hannibal’s thumbs rubbed Will’s hands in tandem. “I’ll be there to guide you. Didn’t I say we’d take things slow, and let others come to us?”

“No, no, I mean – I don’t think I’m physically capable.”

“Of course you are. You know you are. That’s what you’re afraid of.”

“Hannibal –”

“It’s all right.” Hannibal lifted Will’s hands to his mouth and kissed each one. “There was a seed in you that blossomed. Others will blossom as well.”

“But I –”

“Shhh.” Hannibal rubbed the outsides of Will’s hands, guiding them to curl into fists. His mouth played across the knuckles that had pressed bruises into his back. “You should have everything. I want you to have everything.”

Will laughed, a ragged, desperate sound. “Hannibal, I... sometimes I don’t know where you end and I begin.”

“I understand. I have gone through a significant upheaval as well. My artistic process – indeed, central aspects of my artistic ideology – have been diverted by the sheer magnetism of your influence.”

“I – I’m not sure it’s safe for me to do what you want.”

“What you want.” Hannibal’s eyes were shining. Intent.

“Look at the destruction we’ve wrought, through the entanglement of our wants.”

“We have the power to preserve as well. Between us, we’ve helped others flourish. Abigail. Alana and Margot. Even Francis Dolarhyde. Imagine what we could have done, if we had Abigail back. If we had them all back. It’s all still possible.”

“Margot and Alana are still alive,” Will said quietly.

“And they are slated for death. Though perhaps that can be reversed. At the moment, my curiosity is outweighing my contractual obligation.”

“Curiosity about what?”

“About what they’re capable of. My decision ultimately rests on what’s most elegant.”

Will swallowed. A possible future was coming into focus, its canvas billowing out across the stretches of his mind.

“At any rate,” Hannibal went on, “I think we can agree that it’s time for us to leave. We need to expand the world we inhabit again.”

Will nodded, contemplating. Then he said – “where to?”

 

Their bags were packed. False passports lay on the table. A boat was lined up to take them off the island the next morning. They curled up together in that plain, bare-walled bedroom for the last time.

“Don’t worry about the logistics,” Hannibal had reassured him. “Not this time. Just let me take care of you.”

“You mean us,” Will returned. “Because it’s you and Chiyoh. Isn’t that right?”

“Does the distinction matter?”

“Well, I can’t say I’m keen on her taking care of me.”

Will had known, from the get-go, that Chiyoh wasn’t a person he could afford to show weakness around.

Hannibal regarded him amusedly. “You know, she may feel responsible for you. Given her miscalculation in shooting you, that is. I’m sure you’ve worked out by now that Chiyoh has a pathological need to care for those she hurts. Even if it’s despite herself.”

Despite herself. Bedelia Du Maurier had asked him once about his instinctive response to encountering an injured bird. Helping or crushing - Will wondered what Chiyoh would choose. Most likely, she would refuse the choice, and let time tumble its way down into death.

Still, that impassivity had served her well. She’d been more unscathed than anyone else who’d been caught in the flytrap between his intent and Hannibal’s. Will’s mind ambled idly through an accounting of the others. An elegy to lull him to sleep.

Beverly Katz – dead.

Abigail Hobbs – dead.

Bedelia Du Maurier – apparently slated for death.

Randall Tier – dead.

Mason Verger – dead.

Francis Dolarhyde – dead.

Frederick Chilton – alive, barely.

Freddie Lounds – alive, though still regularly burning to a crisp in the furnace of his nightmares. One of the many rituals of his subconscious.

Alana Bloom – slated for death, likely along with Margot Verger. Though possibly reversible, if they danced to Hannibal’s satisfaction.

Jack Crawford – almost certainly slated for death as well, though Will flinched from considering it.

Nielsen and Victoria – dead. Though they didn’t belong to Hannibal. He’d relinquished them, in a rare magnanimous gesture. They’d been an exercise to him, nothing more.

Victoria’s hair spilled over Will’s lap, and his hands came to hold her head in place. She was neither alive nor dead here, just a shade drifting amidst his memories. His past conquests with Hannibal had been laid to rest, relics of a life behind the new one they were beginning. But Victoria had come before Hannibal. She was what was primordial in Will. Unshaped, unrefined matter.

If Hannibal could speak to her, what would he say?

He would know – he knew – that between her and Nielsen, she was the one Will would want to keep.

It doesn’t matter. He can’t touch you here. Will stroked Victoria’s hair. Lifted one of her wrists and delicately ran a finger around the reddened skin. Because you’re mine.

For better or worse.

Because you’re mine.

Notes:

The idea that violence against women ultimately stems from fear comes from the novel Red Dragon.

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