Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Hannibal turned off a faded back road in Virginia onto a winding driveway. Gravel-covered and pitted with potholes, it snaked through stands of maple, birch, and oak that gradually merged into thick forest. High branches curved overhead, and he followed a single, carved line of civilization through an abrupt wilderness.

He checked the directions Jack had given him and then he checked his GPS. They both agreed that this was the place. After five minutes of slow crawl over uneven terrain and rain-guttered road, he emerged into a clearing. The house reached to the sky with turrets and a general sense of verticality, a cross between Gothic cathedral and gingerbread cottage. It fit the reputation of the man he'd come to see.

Dr. Graham, well known for his psychiatric work, was even better known as an eccentric and for his aversion to the outside world, especially since he closed his practice last year. Rumor suggested that a few patients still came to see him here. Hannibal hoped they weren't too badly off. The atmosphere of the place wouldn't contribute to anyone's mental stability.

The front door opened as Hannibal got out of the car, and at least five dogs rushed him. He froze for a second, but they had their ears up, tongues lolling, tails wagging. He knelt down to greet them and got his face licked for his trouble.

"Hey, come on. Get off him," a voice called. After a few more seconds of snuffling affection, the dogs scattered around the yard.

Hannibal stood and brushed himself off. Dr. Graham watched him from the porch in striped pajama bottoms that sagged around his hips and a faded t-shirt molded to his chest. Dark curls, bare feet, and an expression that spoke of sleep and confusion, though it was almost noon. Hannibal dragged his eyes upward to the man's face, where they would, he told himself, stay. With Graham's reputation, he'd expected someone older. Distinguished. Silver hair and middle aged spread. Not this.

"Unless you're a reporter," Graham said. "In which case I'll let them lick you to death. They're not much good for anything else."

Hannibal walked up to the porch and displayed his ID. "Special Agent Hannibal Lecter. Jack Crawford sent me."

"Alana said you'd be coming by." He rubbed at the back of his neck and frowned. "Was that today?"

"I'm afraid I didn't make an appointment."

Graham eyed him. "Jack thought you'd do better taking me by surprise, huh?"

"Something like that."

"You want coffee?"

"Please."

Dusty light filled the interior of the house. There were dog beds everywhere, a grand piano in the corner, floor to ceiling bookshelves packed with everything from cracked and faded leather volumes to tattered paperbacks. The kitchen belonged in a castle, and the modern appliances huddled along one wall in mortal terror of the massive fireplace, which came complete with a spit that would roast an entire pig.

Graham made coffee in a tin kettle on the stove, as one might over a campfire. "You'll have to wait for the grounds to settle," he said, as he handed over a mug.

"Thank you, Dr. Graham."

"Do you think Jack sent you because he knew you'd be attracted to me?"

Hannibal looked at his reflection in the inky surface of his coffee until he had his expression under control. It took a second longer than he would've preferred.

"If he had any thought of that factor affecting the outcome of this interview, he didn't share it with me." He paused. "And would it? Affect the outcome?"

Graham shrugged. "Almost everyone likes having their ego stroked, don't they? Come on, we can sit on the porch and keep the dogs out of trouble."

Almost everyone. But not this man, Hannibal thought. He followed Graham back out to the porch. They sat in wicker chairs that looked like yard sale finds. Three of the dogs loped up and sprawled at Graham's feet. The little one started to yip, and Graham quieted him with a word and a touch.

"They're well trained," Hannibal said.

"They have to be. Walking them all on leash would be nuts, and I can't have them running wild in the woods. You never know what you'll find in there."

"Dr. Graham—”

"Will." He smiled, sweet and almost painfully charming. "Special Agent Lecter."

"Hannibal."

"Better. Less of a mouthful. You were saying?"

"Jack sent me with a specific proposition."

"Aw, come on. You were doing great." He poked Hannibal's knee with his bare toes. "Good manners. No assuming it's my duty to give you what you want. You let my dogs slobber on you. You didn't flinch at the attraction thing, didn't even deny it, which takes guts, and now we're back to Jack's agenda?"

"His agenda is my agenda."

"Then tell me your agenda, Hannibal." He left his foot propped on the edge of Hannibal's chair and watched him over the rim of his mug, gaze still soft and sleepy.

It made Hannibal wonder exactly how much sharper Will would be when he woke up. He already felt like he'd been cut.

"Seven girls have disappeared recently in Minnesota. All the same age, height, hair color. I have photographs if you'd like to see them."

"I saw the spread in the Post. Pretty but not flashy, average clothes, minimal make up. He's got a type."

"Yes. We'd like you to do a profile of the person responsible."

"Why isn't Alana doing it? This is her thing, not mine."

"She was Jack's first choice. She declined and recommended you.”

"You should ask her again. I don't even practice anymore. I've never consulted for law enforcement. Not really interested in starting."

Hannibal blew steam off his coffee. The dogs darted into the shadows under the trees and back out into the sun. The maple leaves had just started to go red in the higher reaches, like a slow blush. “How long have you lived here?” he asked.

“About ten years. I got it cheap. There was a murder in the attic.”

“What happened?”

“Husband locked his family up there for a week or so. Killed the kids first and then the wife.”

“You don’t seem disturbed by the idea.”

Will looked at him, head tipped back against the chair. “Neither do you,” he said.

“I suppose the profession inures one to such things. To a certain extent.”

“How many murder scenes have you been to?”

“I haven’t kept track.”

“You’ve kept track of some of them.”

Hannibal rubbed his thumb over the faded design on the side of the cup: a fish with a hook in its mouth breaking the surface of a lake. “Eight,” he said, at last. “Eight that have stayed with me. For one reason or another.”

“Tell me about one of them.”

“I’m not here for therapy, Will.”

“Maybe you should be. You’re not carrying. Unless you’ve got a .22 in an ankle holster, and I don’t think you do. You’re not a small caliber guy. Psych eval pending?”

“It’s standard procedure after a deadly force encounter.”

“And who was on the receiving end of your deadly force?”

“A woman. She was holding a young boy hostage.” He paused. “My shot was not meant to kill her. It dislodged a chip of bone that pierced her pericardium. There was too much damage, and it was discovered too late.”

“That’s how it goes. Any little thing that finds its way to our heart can kill us. Chip of bone, air bubble, nasty case of feelings.”

Will shoved his bare toes under the edge of Hannibal’s thigh, and Hannibal stared at the tops of his feet, blue veins and bones skimming the surface.  

“My feet were cold,” Will said, unapologetic. He added the other one and wriggled his toes. “Much better. So. Who else have you killed?”

“Whose profile are you working on?”

“You’ve made yourself an easy target. Maybe I miss my practice more than I thought.”

“Why did you leave?”

Will shrugged. “I got bored.”

“Then perhaps you should try something new. There’s been another. Today. An eighth. We could use your help.”

“Look, Hannibal, you seem like a nice guy, but I have no motivation to do this. It sounds pretty hellish, actually. I’ve met Jack Crawford. He’s a good leader, which would pose a problem, because I am not a good follower. People would expect certain modes of behavior and communication from me that I’m barely capable of and have no interest in maintaining over the course of an investigation. And when we get the guy, what’s my reward? Demands to do it again for the next one. No thanks.”

“Would you at least look at the photos?”

“You can show me all the pretty dead girls you want. It won’t change my mind.”

“Is there anything that would change your mind?”

Will pushed his hair back from his face and watched him in silence for a moment. One of his dogs raced up to the porch and dropped its head on Will’s knee, panting. Will scratched it behind one ear, attention still on Hannibal.

“Would you have sex with me if I helped you out? That’s not an offer, by the way. I’m just curious as to how far you’d go.”

It set off every alarm Hannibal had acquired in a childhood spent fending for himself and a lifetime of law enforcement. He ignored all of them. “I’d have sex with you either way,” he said.

“I’m not interested, just to be clear.”

Hannibal found himself amused rather than insulted. Something about the slightly wary look in Will’s eyes. “Thank you for the clarification. Is there something you want from me that’s not sex?”

“What would I want from you?”

“A place to warm your feet, evidently. I could owe you. Would you consider doing it as a personal favor?"

“Not bad, but no. I don't find you that interesting.”

“Then what do you want, Will? There must be something, or you would already have sent me away.” He rested a hand on Will’s ankle, chilled skin and shifting bone. “No one’s life is complete. We are designed to want more, to strive consistently. We are never truly content. It’s not in our nature.”

“What makes you think you can give me anything I want?”

“I think I can try. If you let me.”

Will’s face was very still. The dog beside him nosed into his hand, but he didn’t move to pet it. A minute passed in silence and then two.

Hannibal stopped expecting an answer. He sat and drank his coffee and watched the wind-blurred clouds, high in the autumn sky. “Have you eaten breakfast?” he asked.

Will shook his head.

“Shall I make you something? I’m an excellent cook.”

“You talk big anyway.”

“False modesty is as dishonest as any other lie.”

“Okay,” Will said. “Show me what you've got.”

Hannibal rose and started for the door. Will stayed where he was. “Are you going to wait here?”

“Yeah, call me when it’s ready.”

One of the dogs slid between his legs as he stepped through the door and followed him into the kitchen with a hopeful, grinning face. Hannibal sorted through cookware and utensils and let himself smile. The honesty of Will’s rudeness appealed to him. It would not appeal to Jack. That would be something to see.

Old metal cabinets housed cast iron skillets and a stock pot big enough for a sizable turkey. He found tins of flour and sugar, raspberries in the fridge, picked wild by the look of them, some grown large and others tiny dabs of blood in a chipped white bowl. The taste was just on the edge of too tart.

He made a lemon crepe batter and cut off a few slices of ham to go with it. The dog sat quietly at his feet for so long that Hannibal forgot he was there until he tripped over him. He fed him a bit of ham in apology.

“Taking over my kitchen, spoiling my dogs,” Will said. He wasn’t smiling, but his voice held a surprising amount of warmth.

“I didn’t hear you come in.”

“Came in the back. I wanted to watch you.”

“Without my knowledge.”

“Yeah.”

“What’s his name?” He nodded down to the dog, now immovable from the spot where ham had fallen from the sky.

“Her name. That’s Medea.”

“Quite a weight of mythology for one small dog.”

“She ate one of her puppies. Her former owner was a patient of mine. He said of course they were having her put down after that.” Will snorted, derision and disgust. “Of course. So I asked if I could have her.”

“And has she eaten anyone else?”

“I got her fixed, so no more puppies. She’d have a hard time getting started on anyone full grown. Why did you stop?”

“The crepe batter needs to rest.”

“Oh. Do you want to see the attic?”

“Is there anything to see?”

“Hard to get bloodstains out of untreated wood.”

“All right.”

Will took the stairs two at a time. Medea followed, but her legs were short, and the stairs were high. Hannibal picked her up and tucked her under his arm.

The attic opened out at the top of the third flight of steps. The peaked roof had windows on either end and dormers on the sides. Bare boards served as a floor, covered in a scattering of sawdust at one end of the room and bleached clean at the other. The stains showed as a few pale discolorations. Hannibal wouldn’t have guessed what they were.

“You don’t use the space,” he said.

“I don’t use most of the house. How much space does one person really need?”

“Usually one’s life expands to fill the space that contains it. Unto overflowing, in some cases.”

Will walked to the window and cleared away a mass of cobwebs with his hand. “I’ve expanded as much as I’m likely to,” he said.

“You’ve contracted. Away from your practice in the city. Alone out here. Alana said she was the only person whom you see regularly.”

“Most people don’t like me.” Will grinned, sharp-edged and bright as a knife blade. “No idea why.”

“Do you offer to show all of them your attic?”

“No. Maybe you’re just special.”

“Am I?”

Will took a step back and then started toward him deliberately. He took Medea from Hannibal’s arms. “Or I was just trying to get rid of you,” he said.

“You need only ask me to leave.”

“Is that batter ready to cook?”

“It will be if I cook the ham first.”

“Fine. You can leave after. I wouldn’t want to be rude.”

Hannibal smiled. He couldn’t help it.

Will frowned, hair falling in his eyes, Medea trying to lick his chin. “What’s so funny?”

“You wouldn’t want to be rude? What do you think you’ve been so far?”

Will set Medea down, and his eyes stayed on her as she dashed for the stairs. “Myself,” he said and started down after her.

Hannibal's phone rang as Will’s footsteps faded. Jack. “Hello?” he said.

“Did he kick you out yet?”

“I’m making breakfast for him.”

“It’s almost one.”

“I don’t think he keeps regular hours. Jack, are you sure this is wise?”

“Why, you don’t think he can do it?”

“I think he can do it. I’m concerned about what it may do to him.”

“Is it going to kill him? Because we’ll have another dead girl in a week or two, and I’m not that concerned about Dr. Graham’s delicate sensibilities.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

He cooked the crepes and served them with sweetened butter and raspberries and crispy ham. They ate on the porch, Will once more with his cold toes jammed under Hannibal’s thigh. Will didn’t say a word until he’d scraped his fork across the off-white china for the last traces of butter and fruit.

“Okay,” he said. “You weren’t exaggerating.”

“I try not to. I can do better in my own kitchen.”

“Is that an invitation?”

“Would you like it to be?”

Will’s face got that closed off, wary look again. “I said I wasn’t interested.”

“Solely for dinner, with no other expectations.”

Will sucked his fork clean and set the plate aside. “I’ll think about it.”

“Let me know. I won’t bother you about it. Professionally, however, I’m afraid I must ask again. Would you at least come and see what we have? It would be an hour or two of your time at most.”

“Why do you want me to?”

“The disappearances—“

“No, I mean why do you personally want me to do this? You didn’t care that much when you got here and now you do. Why?”

“Surely the obvious answer would be my attraction to you.”

Will smiled a little. “Well played. But I don’t think that’s it.”

“What other reason could I have?”

“I don’t know, and that’s pretty unusual for me.”

“If I tell you, will you come? Just for this afternoon?”

Will hesitated and then nodded once. “Okay. Just for today.”

Hannibal hadn’t thought he’d agree, and now the prospect of baring himself in this way stopped his tongue for a moment. He picked up the coffee from earlier and took a drink. It was stone cold.

“I want to see what will happen,” he said. “That’s all. I’m curious.”

“How someone like me will react.”

“Yes.”

“Not very noble, Special Agent Lecter.”

“I have never claimed to be that.”

Chapter Text

Only the tick of the clock leavened the silence in Jack’s office. Hannibal watched Will stare at the case board and Jack stare at the back of Will’s head. Jack drew breath to speak. Will held out his hand, palm down, in a gesture Hannibal had seen him use to quiet his dogs. He wondered if it was unconscious or a deliberate insult. Perhaps his unconscious instinct was to be as insulting as possible.

"What the hell did you bring me?" Jack muttered.

"Only what you asked for."

"Alana took him to the opening of the Evil Minds Research Museum. He stayed just long enough to have his say about the name, drink two whiskeys in ten minutes, and call one of his colleagues a hack. Alana didn't even look surprised."

"Having known him only for two hours, I can't say that I would be surprised either."

"You think this will be worth it?"

"I think my immediate future would have been more peaceful if you hadn't sent me after him," Hannibal said.

"Did you promise him anything?"

"No. Nor did he promise to do anything besides look at the information we have."

Jack folded his arms over his chest. "How long can he stare at the same pictures?"

"You can both wait outside if you're going to keep talking," Will said.

Jack and Hannibal looked at each other. They fell silent. Jack clasped his hands behind his back, patience rendered in stone. Will pushed his glasses up and peered at the board again.

"What do we look for," Will said, not to himself or to them. Maybe, Hannibal thought, to the killer. "What do we search for when we know we're alone?"

"A mate?" Hannibal suggested.

"You've got mating on the brain," Will said with a glance back at him. One corner of his mouth twitched up, more a tic than a smile. “When we’re alone, we look for people like us.”

"Are you saying the killer is a woman?" Jack asked.

"I'm saying that the killer looks at these girls and sees a mirror in some way.” He paused. “Opposites attract for a reason. When we find ourselves, we usually turn out to be not what we wanted at all." He rubbed a hand quickly over the back of his neck, turned, and left the room.

"Go after him,” Jack said.

The order was unnecessary. Hannibal couldn't have stopped himself and he didn't want to try. He was pulled in by Will’s collapsing wake.

Hannibal found him in the men's room splashing cold water on his face. "Are you all right?"

Will spoke from behind his hands. "Got any aspirin?"

"In my office, yes."

"Lead the way."

Hannibal took him up a floor and down the hall. Will collapsed into Hannibal’s desk chair and swallowed two aspirin dry. "Jack asked you to come after me."

"He didn't need to. I was concerned."

Will stared past him at the framed painting on his wall and the array of plants growing under artificial light a story underground. "This isn't over, is it? He'll hound me until I give in."

"You can ignore him. He'll get the message eventually."

"He's not used to disappointment." Will looked at Hannibal, the same cutting gaze as before. "But we are, aren't we? You and me."

"You're looking for an ally. You don't need to manipulate me into that position. I'm already there."

Will's eye contact faltered for a second. The shape of his mouth became soft and unsure. "I know," he said. "Still don't know why."

Hannibal couldn't be sure that it wasn't another act. Will was clearly gifted in that regard when he tried. Hannibal found it unreasonably flattering to be thought worth so much effort. “You’re not going to suggest that it’s because I want to sleep with you? Or, I should say, you’re not going to suggest that again?”

Will breathed out a laugh, but his face settled quickly into stillness, like water disturbed only briefly by a stone. “No, it’s not just that. Most people give up when they realize what I’m like, and the ones who don’t—“

Hannibal took a bottle of water from the mini fridge in the corner and set it on the desk in front of Will.

Will blinked at it. “—don’t act like you do.”

“You should drink water with your aspirin. It will spare your stomach and dissolve more easily.”

“Very authoritative. Do they teach you that in FBI school?”

“Medical school.” Hannibal nodded to his degree in its frame on the wall.

Will leaned back a little further in the chair and put his feet up on Hannibal’s desk. “Huh. So what’s the story there?”

Hannibal sat on the edge of the desk. “Drink your water and perhaps I’ll tell you.”

Will gave him a sly look. He twisted the cap off and tipped the bottle back, baring his throat as he swallowed. And swallowed. Hannibal, as Will no doubt intended, couldn’t look away. Will set the bottle down empty and raised his eyebrows.

“I was a surgeon,” Hannibal said. “I got involved in forensic medicine through Alana, and I found it fascinating. Eventually, it led me here. The FBI usually requires some law enforcement experience, but it was waived in my case.”

Will studied him, arms crossed over his stomach. “Did they give you a scholarship to med school? I bet they did."

“They did,” Hannibal said. "For my anatomical drawings."

"He draws, he cooks. Catches the bad guys. Cuts you right open and sews you back up," Will murmured. “And still all alone in the world. There must be something really, seriously wrong with you. What is it?”

"Perhaps the same thing that has made me your ally almost against my will."

“It’s not against your will. You don’t do anything against your will. You like it. You like feeling out of control for once.” Will took Hannibal’s pen from his desk and pressed the cap against his lower lip. “It makes you feel alive.” He looked up at Hannibal with a sudden, crooked smile. “Am I your mid-life crisis? You’re about due for one, I’d guess.”

“You seem pleased by the idea,” Hannibal said.

“I love a good mid-life crisis. It was my favorite part of therapy. It’s only when people realize how fucked their lives are that they’ll seriously consider change. Are you considering change, Hannibal?”

“What change would you suggest, Dr. Graham, were you my therapist?”

“Oh, I don’t make suggestions. You would not believe the stuff people come up with on their own. It’s crazy.” Will waggled a hand in the air. “So to speak. So what have you thought about? There’s something going on in your head.”

“There usually is, yes,” Hannibal said. He looked at the wall, at his medical degree and the various other honors and certificates he’d acquired in his life. Pieces of paper that supposedly signified accomplishment. Collected together, they would not even be sufficient kindling for a good fire. “I have thought of going home,” he said. He hadn’t, not consciously, but he had dreamed of the castle more often recently.

“Where’s home?” Will said.

“Lithuania. My family’s estate near Vilnius.”

“Estate?”

“Lecter Castle. My family has owned the land for seven generations.”

Will let out a low whistle. “Nobility? Do I kiss your ring or something?”

“You may be thinking of the the Pope.” Hannibal took a breath and walked to the bookcase, running one finger along the spine of his books. “The castle is in ruins. Much of it was uninhabitable even when I was a child, and it’s worse now.”

They both turned at the sound footsteps coming from the hall. Hannibal recognized the purposeful stride and the certain click of Jack’s shoes. There was a brief knock before the door opened.

“When I said go after him, I meant bring him back,” Jack said.

Hannibal turned, already sure of what he would see: nothing. Will had ducked under his desk. “He had a headache,” Hannibal said.

Jack leaned against the wall. “Will he come to Minnesota? I want him to see the Nichols house.”

“I don’t know. He’s certainly aware that you’ll try to convince him to remain involved in the investigation. He’s not enthusiastic about the idea. Are you so certain he can help us?”

“Don’t you think so? After seeing him in there?”

Hannibal made a noncommittal gesture. “You can’t force him into this.” He paused, aware of Will listening, and then said it anyway. “And you shouldn’t. No one is so isolated except by necessity.”

“No one’s talking about force,” Jack said. He gave Hannibal a considering look. “Who’s doing your psych eval?”

“I don’t have an appointment yet,” Hannibal said with a rising sense of inevitability.

“Get Graham to do it. Would he?”

“Probably,” Hannibal admitted. “He seems to take some pleasure in dissecting me.”

“And it’ll give you at least an hour to work on him about Minnesota. Two birds, one stone.”

“And what tools would you suggest I use to work on him, Jack? He’s not the easiest man to persuade.”

“You’ll come up with something. You always do.” Jack nodded like it was settled and walked out.

Hannibal looked at his desk in time to see Will’s head rise over the edge of it. “Wow,” Will said. “Did he just pimp out your brain to me?”

“I suppose that depends.”

“On?”

“Whether or not you find my brain to be a tempting offer.”

Will crossed his arms on the desk and rested his head on them. “I’ll do the psych eval. Not at my place though. You offered me dinner.”

“I did,” Hannibal said cautiously. “Would you prefer to do it at my house then?”

“Yeah. Tonight. Can’t wait to see what tools you pull out of your belt to use on me.”

Chapter Text

At ten minutes to seven, Hannibal glanced up from his duck to see his guest had let himself in and was standing in his kitchen doorway. “Good evening, Will.”

“You probably shouldn’t leave your front door unlocked. Anybody could wander in.”

“It hasn’t been a problem until now.”

Will gave him a quick, twisted smile. “What’s for dinner?” He peered into the pot Hannibal was stirring. “It smells good.”

“Duck fesenjan with saffron rice and roasted vegetables. It’s a Persian dish, made with walnuts and pomegranate molasses.”

Will stuck a finger in the pot, sucked it clean, and paused. “Okay. That’s really good. Makes me glad I brought this.” He pulled a folded sheet of paper from an envelope and held it up for Hannibal to read.

“A clean bill of health,” Hannibal said.

Will tossed it on the countertop. “Congratulations. You’re totally functional and more or less sane.”

“I’m pleased to hear it. I thought I’d have to work harder to get your stamp of approval.”

“It’s mostly to spite Jack,” Will said.

“You resent his attempt at manipulation.”

“No, I resent him thinking I wouldn’t realize what he was doing. You know what the problem with the BAU is?”

“I could name several.”

“Save it for our next session. The problem is that everyone who works there is used to being the smartest person in the room.”

“As are you,” Hannibal said.

“But I actually am the smartest person in the room.” Will leaned back against the counter and watched Hannibal like he was waiting for an argument.

Hannibal turned off the burner under the duck and checked his vegetables.

“I can’t tell if you agree with me or if you’re just not willing to get into it,” Will said.

“I can’t tell if you said it because you believe it or because you wanted me to disagree with you. A poor position from which to begin an argument, so I choose not to.”

“Should I offer to set the table?”

“It’s done. You could open the wine.” Hannibal gestured to the bottle.

Will impaled the cork on the corkscrew with a few hard twists. “I believe it most of the time,” he said.

“I would imagine it’s true most of the time. Do you ever find it tedious?”

Will paused in pouring the wine. He leaned his hip against the counter and held the bottle against his chest. “Not tedious. I find it enraging. Don’t you? They can’t be bothered to think for themselves, so we’re supposed to do it for them.”

“We? You still consider yourself the smartest person in this room.”

Will passed him a glass with enough force to slosh a drop of wine over the rim. “Most people have an almost infinite capacity for self deception, especially when their emotions or their dicks get involved. It makes them easy to lie to. You’re not easy to lie to.”

“I have been forced to cultivate a greater than average objectivity toward myself.”

“Forced?” Will said.

“By circumstance. And personal preference. This is ready. Shall we move into the dining room?”

Hannibal plated the food. Will carried their glasses and the wine bottle. They settled at the table, and Hannibal waited for his guest to take the first bite. The usual anticipation he felt had a raw edge to it that only grew as Will failed to pick up his fork.

“Have I said or done something to put you off your food? Or perhaps it’s not to your taste after all.”

Will watched him, elbow on the table, fist under his chin. “What would you do if I hated it?”

“I’d be quite surprised.”

“It must happen sometimes. People have their own tastes. You can’t argue or charm someone into liking food they don’t like.”

“I try to accommodate my guests’s preferences, of course.”

“Of course. That’s the polite thing to do.” He waited and watched and didn’t touch his food.

“But this is to your taste, and it will get cold if you don’t eat it,” Hannibal said, despite himself.

“I was supposed to sing for my supper. I’m singing. What happens when their tastes conflict with yours?”

Hannibal set down his fork. “I’m not sure psychoanalysis combines well with dinner.”

“I haven’t started dinner yet.”

Hannibal looked at him, the dark sweep of hair over his forehead and the shadow in his eyes. “It is disproportionally displeasing when my guests refuse what they are served. Regardless of the reason. I don’t quibble over their choices. I do the correct thing. That is what matters. What we do, not how we feel.”

“Or what we’d like to do?” Will picked up his fork and took a bite. “It’s good,” he said with every appearance of honesty.

Hannibal picked up his fork as well, though his appetite had soured. “Why did you choose this subject to query me on?”

“Solving murders is just a hobby. This is what’s important to you. This house is like a beating heart, and all of the blood flows one way.” Will nodded toward the kitchen. “Do you invite them back if they won’t eat what they’re given?”

Hannibal chewed slowly, trying to concentrate on the fesenjan, the rich duck meat and the sweet tang of the pomegranate. “If it would be strange not to invite them back, then I invite them back.”

“And if not, they never darken your doorway again.”

Hannibal had conceived violent and entirely irrational dislikes for people at his table. On the scale of possible personality flaws, it was a small thing, easily mastered and disguised, but he did not like the gulf it opened up inside him. It seemed to go a long way down.

“I’ve never spoken of it to anyone,” he said.

“I’d be shocked if you had. That’s the one you worry about. More than killing that woman. More than the patients who died on your table. What’s wrong with me that I want to stab someone in the throat for turning down my sous vide fish eyes or whatever, right?”

“I wouldn’t say I’ve contemplated violence toward them,” Hannibal said.

"What would you say? What would you be willing to admit to?"

Hannibal did not answer.

“How did you feel when you killed her?” Will asked.

“She died in the ambulance. I wasn’t there.”

“And when they told you?”

Hannibal looked down at his plate. “I felt nothing. I reviewed my actions and found them appropriate and fitted to the situation. I feel no regret. No remorse. No discomfort. Knowing that, do you still feel comfortable signing that piece of paper?”

“I bet that’s not what you planned to tell whoever did your psych eval.”

“I had planned to display an appropriate amount of stoic emotional distress.”

Will raised his glass for a toast, one corner of his mouth turned up. “Here’s to appropriate emotional distress.”

Hannibal clinked his glass against Will’s, heart pounding against his ribs.

Chapter Text

Elise Nichols lay on her bed in the sort of old fashioned nightgown that Will had only seen in movies. Night wind streamed in through the open window, and the curtains reached out to touch him.

Will hadn’t planned to come to Minnesota at all. He’d planned to refuse, but Hannibal hadn’t asked. At the end of the evening, he’d walked Will to the door. Will had paused on the stoop, warm with brandy and crisp, chocolate cookies as the chill from outside crept up his back. And he had volunteered.

He looked down at Elise. Her lips were nearly blue. She looked so cold. Will wanted to pull the covers up for her. He turned away and rubbed his hands over his face. Everyone had left him alone. Even Hannibal.

Blood spotted her nightgown where she’d been pierced. Hung on something. Bled. Not like Will bled his own kills, but with less efficiency and more art. More ceremony. Will turned back to the bed and bent over the body. He wasn’t supposed to touch, but he wanted to. He could see something in there. Was it antler velvet?

Impaled on antlers, hung, bled. But then rejected. Returned. And not just returned, but sponged clean, dressed, and tucked in. Will looked at her dark hair arranged carefully on the pillow. Had it been combed? He touched it with the tips of his ungloved fingers.

It struck him that Elise, that all of these girls, could have been his sisters: dark hair, blue eyes, skin like waxen death. He crouched by the side of the bed. The killer had strangled her. It had been fast. Face to face. Not like the people Will hunted through his woods.

More straightforward in method, more art in the treatment of the bodies. The death was almost incidental then. It was what happened afterward that mattered. Will thought of the roasting spit in his fireplace, of the campfires he’d built out in the forest to cook what he killed. None of these girls had been found. Maybe there was a reason for that.

He rose, pacing the room with the killer’s half-formed desires jostling inside his skull. The blood scent of them abruptly filled his nose. He needed air. Jack and Hannibal were still out in the hallway. Will didn’t want to see them.

He climbed out onto the shallow slope of the roof. He drew his knees up to his chest and breathed deep and lost himself in the wind and the dark.

\*

“Go in there and see what’s taking him so long,” Jack said.

Jack had told Will he wouldn’t be interrupted, but Hannibal was glad his patience had run out. It had been too long, in his opinion, for anyone unaccustomed to such things to spend alone with a dead body. He pushed through the door. Elise Nichols lay on the bed. Will was not in the room. The window was open. It had not been open earlier.

He found Will perched on the flat stretch of roof created by the rise of the dormer window. He had his arms around his legs and he was staring out over the tops of the trees. The lights from the emergency vehicles streamed over his face.

Hannibal climbed out to sit beside him, folded awkwardly into the small space between the window ledge and the sheer drop.

“How much effort does it take to stay who you are?” Will said. He sounded musing, amused, and a little sad all at once.

“Almost none. The world has little impact on me.”

“Sounds nice.”

“You don’t have to do this,” Hannibal said.

“Pretty sure Jack will disagree."

"I can talk to Jack. You shouldn't have been the one to find her."

“That’s what I’m here for, right? To see what I can find.” Will paused. He pushed his hands back through his hair and pulled at it, face tipped toward the sky. “She was strangled. I guess you could tell that much just looking at her. It was fast, but close. Face to face. The killer was right there with her while she died. She wasn’t alone. The killer didn’t want her to be alone.”

“Is that why she was returned to her parents’ house?”

Will shook his head. “The killer couldn’t keep her. Couldn’t do whatever he or she planned to do. This is regret. An attempt to undo what was done. An apology. Do you think that’s strange?” Will said softly. “An empathetic psychopath.”

“Psychopaths are usually defined by their lack of empathy.”

One corner of Will’s mouth twitched upward and sagged back. “Yeah. Just goes to show, I guess. Got any aspirin? My head is killing me.”

“Still? I have some in the car, yes.”

Will stood and swayed dangerously toward the edge. Hannibal caught him by his shoulders. Will grabbed his forearms to steady himself and blinked at him. Up close and doused in the lights from the police cars, his eyes were an even more vivid blue than Hannibal had remembered.

“Head rush,” Will said roughly. “I’m fine.”

“You’re shivering.”

“I guess I was out here longer than I realized.” Will pulled away and ducked back through the window.

When Hannibal followed, he found that Will had not gotten far. He stood pressed against the wall, staring at the dead girl on the bed.

“Will—“

“I’m fine, okay? I’m fine.” Will pushed past Jack and nearly ran over Beverly, Jimmy, and Brian, who were waiting in the hall, both to meet him and to get at the crime scene.

Hannibal followed him down the stairs, out the front door, across the street, and caught up with him twenty yards past the tape. “Are you planning to walk home?”

“I just didn’t want to—“ Will waved a hand vaguely behind him. He stopped walking and wrapped his arms around himself. “Where are the parents?”

“You don’t have to see them.”

Will took a slow breath. “It’s cold. I didn’t notice.”

Hannibal took off his coat and wrapped it around Will’s shoulders. He had the satisfaction of seeing Will’s tension ease with the warmth.

Will turned his face toward the coat collar and rubbed his cheek against it. "You're gonna want to be a little less obvious if you don't want to advertise your crush on the creepy profiler to everyone you work with."

"You’re not creepy.” It was, in retrospect, not the ideal response, but it did make Will smile.

“You want it back before someone sees?” Will twitched a sleeve of the coat at him.

“Keep it.”

They walked back together. Hannibal spotted Jack leaning against a squad car, waiting for them. Will let Hannibal do most of the talking. He hung back, eyes downcast, clutching the coat around him.

It was most likely ninety percent pretense, but that still left ten percent unaccounted for. He had been genuinely shaken on the roof, and Hannibal didn’t think he was entirely steady now. When they’d finished with Jack, Hannibal got him the aspirin he’d asked for and a bottle of water.

Will took both without a word. He shrugged off Hannibal’s coat and held it out to him.

“Keep it,” Hannibal said. “I’m not cold.”

Will held it against his chest. “Can we go?”

“Yes.” Hannibal unlocked the rental car and held the door for him. He’d done it without thinking and was prepared to regret the gesture, but Will didn’t comment. He just got in the car and slumped into the seat, eyes closed. Hannibal resisted the urge to spread the coat over his knees.

“Hannibal!” Beverly waved to him from across the street.

“I’ll be back in just a moment.” Will nodded, and Hannibal left him.

“We don’t get to meet Dr. Strange?” Beverley asked.

“He’s not feeling well,” Hannibal said. “He isn’t used to this sort of thing.”

She winced. “Ooh. Did he puke? The body wasn’t that bad, was it? Am I just super jaded? There was barely even any blood.”

“It’s not the physical aspects that have disturbed him.”

“Well, it is pretty creepy that the guy broke back into her parents’ house to return the body, I’ll give him that. What does he think?”

Hannibal glanced at Will through the window of the rental car. He looked as if he might be asleep. “He said it was an apology.”

“To who? The dead girl? Little late for that.” Beverly looked from Hannibal to the car. “You’re taking him back to the motel?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Coming back after?”

“I’m not certain yet.”

Beverly raised her eyebrows. “Okay. I’ll call if we find anything.”

“Thank you.” Hannibal crossed the street and got into the car.

“Told you,” Will murmured. “Be less obvious.”

“It doesn’t seem to bother you. You’re encouraging their assumptions.”

“It doesn’t bother me. But you work with them. Are you even out?”

Hannibal pulled onto the road. “I’ve never directly discussed my personal life with anyone at work, nor have I attempted to conceal my preferences.”

Will rolled his eyes and then, as if that wasn’t sufficient to express his feelings, rolled his head against the head rest. “Right. I could’ve predicted that answer word for word.”

“And you?”

“I’ve never admitted to having any preferences. People are more trouble than they’re worth.”

“And if you were to admit to any?”

“Still holding out hope?” Will said.

Hannibal stopped for a red light. Its bloody glow reflected off the wet pavement and settled over the interior of the car to stain their skin. “I am curious about you.”

“How curious? No such thing as a free lunch.”

“What do you want in return?”

Will was silent for a couple of minutes as they drove away from the Nichols house in deep suburbia toward the highway and its clutch of motels.

“Truth or dare,” Will said. “Loser pays a forfeit of the winner’s choosing.”

Hannibal tapped a finger on the steering wheel. “And how do we determine the loser?”

“If you won’t answer and you won’t do the dare, you lose.”

“That sounds like a dangerous game. I should insist on limits for the dares. And the forfeit.”

“But you won’t. Come on, Mr. Mid-Life Crisis. Aren’t you sick of playing it safe?”

Hannibal turned off the main road, contemplating that piece of manipulation while he coasted in the dark space between street lights. “It will have to be in your motel room. I’m sharing with Jack.”

“That’s fine. I’ll order pizza.”

“I will provide dinner.”

“Well, I’m not gonna say no. Wouldn’t want you to turn on me,” Will said.

Hannibal could hear his smile and the triumph behind it.

\*

Hannibal had only bread and cheese and fruit and a selection of salamis to offer for dinner. He had done a search on the town while waiting for the flight and found a decent bakery and an artisanal butcher. He spread it all out on a cloth he’d brought from home and refused to let himself look at Will’s reaction.

“You always do this when you travel?” Will sat down at the table and bit into a slice of apple. “Or is it special for me?”

“Always,” Hannibal said. “My eating habits are particular.”

Will’s mouth twitched in a brief smile. “So are mine. Maybe I’ll cook for you some time. You want to flip for who goes first?”

“You may start.”

“What a gentleman. Okay. Have you ever lost anyone you loved?”

“Yes.” Hannibal took a bite of bread and cheese while he tried to select just one question from the seething mass of things he wanted to know. “You said correctly that I would prefer not to admit to my irrational dislike of those who refuse to eat what I offer them. What is that you don’t wish to admit to?”

Will saluted him with a piece of cheddar. “Nice one. Hardcore straight out of the gate. You’re not getting it that easy though. Dare.”

“I could ask you to kiss me. Or more. You were insistent. No limits.”

“You could, but you won’t. You don’t just want to fuck me. You want me to want you to do it.”

Hannibal contemplated the diminishing spread between them. He looked at Will’s mouth. “Close your eyes and let me feed you.”

Will stopped with a grape halfway to his mouth, a flicker of uncertainty in his eyes. “Feed me what?”

“I will choose from what you see in front of you. No unpleasant surprises.”

“Just one thing?”

“Just one bite.”

Will looked at him hard for a second and then closed his eyes. He squeezed them shut. It left a faint line between his brows.

Hannibal took a few seconds to study his face without sharp eyes studying him in return before he rose and rounded the table. He picked up a sliver of cheddar and a slice of kiwi. He touched them to Will’s lips.

Will jerked back a fraction of an inch and then stopped himself. He pulled his lips in to wet them. He opened his mouth.

“A little wider, please,” Hannibal said.

Will’s mouth closed briefly as he swallowed. He started to speak, or at least a sound escaped him. He stopped it dead and opened his mouth wider.

Hannibal set the cheese and kiwi between his lips and guided it in. He did not even graze Will’s lower lip with the tip of his finger.

A hint of color rose to Will’s pale cheeks as he chewed and swallowed. It was a few more seconds before he opened his eyes, and even then he didn’t look at Hannibal. “Was it good for you?”

“Yes,” Hannibal said.

“Yeah. I could tell.” Will took the glass of wine Hannibal offered him and drained it. “Who did you lose?”

“My sister. Did you enjoy your dare?”

Will filled his wine glass again. He paused. “Yes. How did she die?”

“She was murdered. Would—“

“Not good enough. Specifically how did she die? What was the cause of death?”

Hannibal looked away. The headlights of a car cut through the curtains. Maybe Jack or one of his other colleagues returning. “There was no autopsy.”

“Why not?”

“It’s my turn.” Hannibal poured himself more wine, though he knew he shouldn’t. They might get a call at any point tonight. More evidence. Another body. “Why did you close your practice?”

Will picked up his glass again and turned it between his hands. “I retired. People retire.”

Hannibal waited and watched.

Will’s face gave nothing away, but his fingers paled with pressure against the glass. “Did Alana tell you about me?”

“She told me you are an accomplished psychologist and that your skill set would be useful to us.”

“Then she didn’t tell you. It’s not my skill set anyone’s interested in.” Will shifted and set his glass down with a hard click. “I was bored. My clients were boring.”

“A partial answer at best, I suspect.”

“So was yours,” Will shot back. “Why wasn’t there an autopsy?”

“Because her remains were consumed.” Hannibal couldn’t get his next question out.

Will leaned forward in his seat. His lips had parted. Hannibal could almost see the next question like a bead of blood on the tip of his tongue. He looked hungry for the answer.

Hannibal considered forfeiting, but he couldn’t do it. He was hungry too. “What did you think Alana might have told me about you?”

Will stuck his finger in his glass and drew a streak of wine across the table. He tapped one end of it and spoke in a rush, hurrying through his answer to get to his next question. “Psychopaths. Sociopaths.” He stabbed the middle. “Normal people.” A little between the two points, smirking. “Politicians and surgeons.” And then he touched the far end. “Me. What are we graphing here?”

“Empathy,” Hannibal said.

“Right.” Will considered and then tapped out beyond the end of the line. “Actually, I’m more like out here. That’s why I was a good shrink. That’s why I stopped doing it. It always fucked me up, but it was—“ He stopped and wiped out the line with his palm. “It was getting worse. And I couldn’t— Who ate your sister, Hannibal?”

Hannibal meant to tell him. He did. He couldn’t. “Dare.”

Will leaned his elbows on the table and stared at him for what felt like much too long. Hannibal had the unnerving sensation that Will was looking straight through his skull.

“Piss on the food,” Will said.

“What?”

Will leaned back in his chair. “Unzip, get your dick out, and piss on the food. It’s not complicated.”

Hannibal could muster no response. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been shocked, truly shocked by anything, even in his work with the BAU. He’d thought all his shock had been used up in a single moment when he was nine years old.

“The room will smell of it all night,” he said finally.

Will shrugged. “I’ll live.”

“The mess,” Hannibal said.

“Yeah. I used to work cleaning motel rooms. It’s a shit job. Sometimes literally.”

“Then why would you suggest it?”

“Because I care more about fucking with you than about the kid who’s going to have to clean it up.”

Hannibal looked at the remaining food on the table. “Perhaps in the bathtub, or—“

“No. Right here. Right where you absolutely shouldn’t. Come on, Hannibal. You know that’s the whole point. Yes or no?”

It was absurd. Obscene. Hannibal should forfeit. He knew that. But he wanted to continue the game, wanted to ask Will another question. And part of him wanted to do this.

He stood slowly, not looking at Will. He was aware of Will standing as well and moving back a step. Hannibal looked only at the food, the carefully researched and purchased baguettes and salami and organic fruit. His voice came out rough. “You don’t want any more?”

“Nope. Go ahead.”

Hannibal would have eaten more, but now, in the contemplation of this act, the food seemed tainted. He left it where it was. And he unzipped his pants. He’d had enough to drink. The urge wasn’t strong, but it was there; enough to ruin everything on the table.

“You wouldn’t like to change your mind?” he said.

Will stepped in close behind him, presumably for a better view. “Not a chance.”

Hannibal closed his eyes and tried to let go. His body wouldn’t do it. The problem was not his audience. It was an ingrained low grade horror at the idea of such disrespect toward the food. He opened his eyes again and imagined it, liquid soaking into the bread, draining across the plastic tabletop. At some point, horror spilled over into taboo thrill, and he spilled over as well.

The sharp scent filled the air around them, and the only sound was the splatter of the thin stream hitting the table, the bread, the fruit, the cheese.

Will made a soft, considering noise behind him. “I didn’t think you’d really do it.”

Hannibal concentrated on getting the last of it out. He shook himself off and fastened his pants again. “You sound impressed.”

“I am impressed. I’ll get a towel.”

Will walked toward the bathroom and left Hannibal to survey the damage he’d caused. He felt both mild nausea and an odd elation.

Will returned and laid two towels on the floor to soak up what was dripping off the edges of the table. “Did you enjoy it?” he asked.

Hannibal took a deep breath. “It’s my turn.”

“And you earned it. Okay. Go.”

“Finish your sentence. You couldn’t what?”

Will walked to the window and twitched one curtain aside just enough to peer at the outside world. “I couldn’t hold onto myself. I was slipping. And I didn’t like what I had to do to hold on. So I stopped.” He looked over his shoulder at Hannibal. “There’s only one question I want to ask. Are you going to pick dare again if I do?”

Hannibal surveyed the dark stain on the carpet and the ruined meal. “Perhaps we should call it a draw. For now.”

“Why would I agree to that? I can make the next dare a lot worse.”

“I believe you. But I meant to answer. I still intend to.”

Will watched him for a second and then nodded. “Okay. We’ll call it for now. Are you going back to Jack?”

“I should.”

“Stay here. There’s two beds.”

“Do you want them to believe we’re sleeping together?”

“The more they see me as your property, the more they’ll leave me alone. I want a shower. Go ask the office for another towel.”

Chapter Text

Hannibal woke from a dream of footsteps echoing through the cellars of the castle and sat up in bed, still hearing them. Will was asleep with a pillow over his face. The sound came again. Not footsteps. A knock on the door. Hannibal pulled on his robe and answered it.

Beverley looked him over and then glanced past him at the two beds, both slept in. “Morning. Coffee in Jack’s room. Wow, this place reeks. How did you sleep in here last night?”

Hannibal came as close to blushing as he had in the last two decades. “We’ll request a different room if we stay tonight. Is that likely?”

“Given what we just found? Yeah, maybe. Come have coffee. Bring Dr. Strange. We’ve got something to show you.”

“We’ll be there as soon as we can.”

Beverley gave Will one more look over Hannibal’s shoulder and waved as she walked off. Hannibal closed the door behind her.

“Dr. Strange?” Will said, now sitting up in a wreckage of twisted sheets.

“I believe he’s a comic book character.”

“I know who he is. He was my favorite when I was a kid. Him and the Hulk.” He kicked off the blankets, stretched, and flopped back on the bed with a sigh. For once, it seemed artless. “I guess we better get going.”

“We’ve been promised coffee if that helps.”

Will made a face. “It won’t be as good as yours.”

“I will make you some when we get home.” Hannibal looked away so he wouldn’t have to see Will’s response to that and headed quickly for the bathroom to shower.

\*

“So this is the victim’s hair,” Beverly said. She held up a few strands in an evidence bag. “And this is a hair we found on her. They look the same, right?”

Will and Hannibal peered into the second evidence bag. “They do,” Hannibal said. “Similar, at least.”

“Same color, same length, but wrong thickness and wrong texture, and,” Beverly said with triumph, “chemical analysis says wrong shampoo. We’re waiting on DNA, but that’ll be a while.”

“I’m satisfied,” Jack said.

“He was satisfied last night,” Brian said. “Which is why me and Jimmy were up till three looking at security camera footage from the train station.”

“I was mostly there for moral support,” Jimmy said.

“And you did a great job, buddy. Especially when you fell asleep and drooled on my shoulder.” Brian swiveled his laptop around and played a video clip that showed two girls of the same height, age, and coloring walking side by side. Brian froze the frame as one looked up.

“Elise Nichols,” Jimmy said. He tapped the other girl’s head. “And, maybe, our killer.”

Jack looked at Will. “You said he—she sees them as a mirror. It would’ve helped to know you meant that literally.”

Will hunched one shoulder. “A mirror can be a lot of things. I’m not psychic.”

“Do we have a clear shot of her face?” Hannibal asked.

“She never looked up,” Brian said. “But she gets in a cab outside. We’ve got a call in to the cab company. I think the guy I talked to was drunk, but we should know where they dropped her soon.”

Brian’s phone rang. He answered, and, after a second, gave them a thumbs up. He scribbled something on a piece of paper and showed it to them as he kept talking, asking for more details: St. Cloud State University.

\*

“Are we expecting to find her wandering around campus?” Will said. He had his hands stuck deep in his pockets and a black knit cap pulled down over his ears. He looked ready for a hunting trip rather than an FBI investigation, except that he probably would’ve looked happier about a hunting trip.

“We have a sketch from the taxi driver. You didn’t have to come. It will likely be tedious. Much of the work we do is.”

“Is it all worthwhile if you catch the bad guys? Or is that why you’re thinking of going back home?”

Hannibal held the door of the building that housed the Admissions Office and gestured Will through. “Every job has its tedium. It no longer bothers me.”

Will leaned in to look at the directory and stabbed the up button for the elevator. “What’s the problem then?”

They stepped into the elevator together, and Hannibal pushed the button for the fourth floor. Despite the roar of the fan overhead, it smelled strongly of popcorn and cheap body spray. “There is no specific problem. It has been an average, unobjectionable career.”

Will snorted. “Average. Most people would settle for one job where they saved lives on a daily basis, but not Special Agent Lecter, MD. For him, two aren’t good enough.”

“Would they be good enough for you?”

Will gave him a quick, bright smile. “Hannibal, I’m bored just thinking about doing your job every day. Either one of them.”

The elevator dinged, the doors opened on a hallway lined with frosted glass doors and generic nature photos. They walked between a row of black and white oaks to the Admissions Office. Hannibal showed the secretary his ID and the police sketch. He wasn’t hoping for much, but she started nodding as soon as she saw it.

“I remember her. She was here touring the campus just last week with her father. Nice girl. Lovely smile. Is she all right?”

“We just need to speak with her about something she may have seen,” Hannibal said. “Could you give us her name and contact information, please?”

After getting authorization from her superior, she did. The girl, their prospective killer, was named Abigail Hobbs. She was eighteen years old and lived with her parents in a town about two hours away.

“Now what?” Will said on the way out.

“Now I call Jack and we get a team in place. With luck, it will go quietly. It’s possible it’s not her at all.”

“Hell of a coincidence if it’s not. I’ll get lunch while you call Jack. I saw a diner down the street. What do you want?”

“Nothing, thank you.”

“Come on. Not even a burger? You can’t be that much of a food snob. You’d starve to death.”

Hannibal sighed. “You choose. I suppose I do have to eat. I’ll be in the car.”

“Right, see you soon.”

They parted ways on the sidewalk. Hannibal watched him go for a few seconds too long. He tore his eyes away and pulled out his phone.

\*

Will ordered their lunch—cheeseburgers, root beer floats, and curly fries; surely even Hannibal couldn’t object to that—and walked to the back to use the men’s room. He paused in the hallway. An old pay phone hung between the two restrooms. He’d watched Hannibal write down Abigail Hobbs’s address and phone number, and he could still see it, clear and sharp. He picked up the phone and dialed.

“Hello?” It was a young woman’s voice.

“Abigail Hobbs?”

“Yes? Who’s this?”

“Not important. I’ve got a message for you. Are you listening?”

A pause. “Yes,” she said.

“They know.”

Will heard her tiny inhale. He replaced the phone on the hook, wiped it clean with his sleeve, and went into the men’s room. Afterward, he paid for the food and walked back to the car. Only eighteen. If it was her, he was impressed. She deserved a warning. He wondered what she’d do with it.

“Curly fries,” he said to Hannibal, holding out the bag. “They’re not fried in duck fat or anything, but they’re still good. What are we doing?”

“Driving. We’re to meet Jack there as soon as we can make it.”

“You want me to drive for a while?”

Hannibal turned to look at him. “You’re being unusually accommodating.”

“I just want to see how it ends.”

“Do you believe it’s her?”

“Yes,” Will said. Abruptly, he was sure of it.

On the drive, Will could not stop the images that seeped into his mind: Abigail Hobbs bleeding her kills on antlers, a body spit-roasting in his own fireplace, Hannibal’s sister cooked up and served to him.

Hannibal hadn’t been able to spit it out, but it must’ve been that. Someone else eating her, that would’ve been an easier story to tell. Maybe he’d never told anyone.

So it was all three of them, him and Hannibal and this unknown girl. It felt like stumbling into a family.

Chapter Text

“Please wait in the car,” Hannibal said.

“Sure.” Will reclined his seat to show that he wasn’t going anywhere. “Have fun. I’ll call the motel about getting us a different room. If you’re still sharing with me tonight.”

Hannibal gave him a long look, nodded once, and got out. He was meeting Jack and the local police at the end of the block and moving in on the Hobbs house from there. Jack and Hannibal would knock on the front door. The cops were there in case Abigail decided to run out the back.

Will stretched and got out of the car for a stroll. According to the map he and Hannibal had looked at, a stream ran along the edge of the property and into a small pond in a clearing about 200 yards into the forest. He thought he might just take a look at it. And, incidentally, be on hand for whatever went down at the Hobbs house. He could cut through the woods and be back at the car before Hannibal knew he was gone.

Two shots were fired before he made it to the trees. He was running by the time he heard the scream. Jack shouted something he couldn’t make out. Someone else was directing officers through a megaphone. Will jumped over the stream and pulled himself up into a tree, out of sight.

A girl came running toward him between the trees. She wore jeans and a brown sweater and carried a rifle. Will watched her clear the stream. She ran right past him without looking up or back. He swung himself down and followed her. He ran where she ran. She knew these woods better, but he knew how to see rocks hidden under leaves and half buried roots, how to avoid the traps nature set for the unwary. They both ran silently. Will could hear pursuit coming, not silent at all, which meant that she could too.

Abigail reached the clearing and circled the small pond. Will sprinted forward, putting everything into it, as he might to catch his prey.

“Abigail!”

She stopped and whirled and leveled the rifle at him.

He put up his hands. “Where will you go?”

The barrel of the rifled dipped. “It’s you. You’re the man on the phone.”

“They’ll be here in a minute. What are you going to do?”

“I won’t be here. Don’t follow me.” She turned and made for the trees again.

Will started after her, unable to stop himself. She scooped up something from the ground, turned, and threw it almost without breaking stride. It caught Will on the temple with a crack of pain. He staggered sideways with the force of it. His foot slipped on wet leaves, and he tumbled into the water. He got a mouthful of it, breathed in, choked, and fought his way to the surface, coughing and dizzy and already shivering with cold. Abigail was gone.

A second later, Hannibal was there, as if one had replaced the other. He was saying urgent things that Will couldn’t quite hear. Water in his ears maybe. A ringing in his head that wouldn’t shut up. Too many cops being too loud. He held onto Hannibal’s sleeve and blinked up at him and watched Hannibal’s face soften.

“Can we go back to the car?” Will said.

“We can get you checked out by the paramedics.”

That, finally, came through loud and clear, and the roar in Will’s head eased along with the dizziness. “But you’re a doctor.”

Hannibal smoothed Will’s hair back from his wound. “Nevertheless. Come along.”

Will let himself be helped up and then had to hang onto Hannibal’s arm as the ground lurched under him. Hannibal held him carefully, slid out of his coat, and wrapped it around Will’s shoulders.

“What the hell is he doing out here?”

Jack’s voice came from somewhere outside of Will’s field of vision, and Will didn’t feel like turning his head to track it. Hannibal’s touch on the back of his neck discouraged any movement at all.

“I think explanations can wait until he’s stopped bleeding,” Hannibal said. He didn’t wait for approval before he led Will away and he didn’t wait till they were more than five seconds out of earshot before he repeated Jack’s question. “What were you doing there?”

“I wanted to see her,” Will said.

“You could have been killed. She has a rifle.”

“I know. I saw.”

“She killed her parents.”

“Yeah, I figured when I heard the shots.”

Hannibal lifted a branch for him and helped him up the incline to the road. “Did you know she would kill them?”

“Wouldn’t you? They were her parents. They were supposed to be on her side, and she knew they wouldn’t be, not if they knew. She couldn’t stand it.”

Hannibal looked down at him. “Because she loved them. And they could never love her.”

Will nodded and regretted it.

Hannibal was silent as he led Will over to the waiting ambulance. This time, Will didn’t try to object. He didn’t think Hannibal would listen.

The paramedics cleaned the gash on his head and wrapped a warm blanket around him. Once he was bandaged up, people started talking about the hospital. Will got up and walked away.

Hannibal caught up with him within a few steps but said nothing.

“I want to go back to the motel,” Will said.

“All right. I’ll drive you.”

“No arguments? Don’t you have to check with Jack?”

“Jack doesn’t need me for this. The local police will be far more useful in tracking her down.”

“Ten to one the family has a hunting cabin somewhere. She didn’t cut up those girls in the garage.”

“A property search will turn it up.”

Will let Hannibal load him into the rental car. They pulled away from the crowd of emergency vehicles. Will’s fingertips were numb, and his head throbbed.

“I’m cold,” he said. His voice sounded distant to him, like he was still lying in Abigail’s pond and each word had to bubble up to the top to be heard.

“I’d suggest a bath when we get to the motel. Why did you feel the need to see her?”

Will stared ahead at the road, the unnaturally bright center line glowing in the afternoon sun. “Who ate your sister, Hannibal?”

The silence in the car was the silence of a forest when something has frightened the birds. Will could hear nothing but the crunch of leaves under Abigail’s feet and the screams of the last man he had killed.

“He served her remains to me in a stew,” Hannibal said. “I did not know. But perhaps part of me did.”

“How did she taste?” Will asked, hoping and not wanting to hope.

“Like nothing else.” Hannibal dipped his chin a fraction of an inch. His jaw worked. “I have dreamed of the taste.”

He pulled into the motel and got out of the car. Will followed him into the room. Neither of them spoke as Hannibal started the water running in the bath

Will leaned against the sink, watching him. After a few seconds, he started undressing. He was down to his boxers by the time Hannibal turned around.

Hannibal’s gaze moved up his legs and over his thighs, his stomach, his chest. “I’ll get something for dinner,” he said and started toward the door.

Will caught his wrist. “Wait till I’m done. I’ll go with you.”

Hannibal nodded once and left him alone. He left the door open a crack behind him. Will didn’t shut it, just took off his boxers and sank into the water up to his chin.

It was too hot at first, but he bore the searing tingle until it eased. His skin warmed. He stopped shivering and floated.

He wanted Hannibal to tell him more about his past, above all more about eating his sister. Will tried to find the place inside him that would let him feel what Hannibal had felt, but it remained out of reach this time. Maybe that was why he found Hannibal so easy to be wtih. He operated on some other emotional frequency than the rest of the world, and Will wasn’t picking up his broadcasts.

He blinked slowly up at the ceiling. The paint was yellow, and a wallpaper border of blue and yellow butterflies ran around the top. A couple of plastic butterflies clung to the frosted window via suction cups. Will’s eyes grew heavy. Their wings moved.

A knock on the door. “Will?”

He stared at the butterflies. Nothing, no movement. “What?”

“I wanted to be sure you were still awake. You’ve been in there for some time.”

He must’ve fallen asleep for a second. A little dream of wings. Will rubbed his wet hands over his face, sat up, and pulled against the lull of the water to get to his feet. He grabbed a towel and slung it low around his waist before he pulled the door open. “Still conscious. Ta da.”

Hannibal’s eyes were a little wider than normal as he looked down Will’s body. He pressed his lips together. “I’m glad to hear it. Would you like your bag?”

“Yeah. And can I borrow a sweater? I’m still kind of cold.”

“Of course.”

Will leaned in the doorway and watched Hannibal bend over his own bag. “Did you ever taste it again?”

Hannibal paused. “Human flesh? No. I have not.”

“Did you ever think about it?”

Hannibal straightened up and looked at him, face still and blank.

“It’s not an unreasonable question for someone who’s admitted to displaying appropriate emotional responses on queue,” Will said. “You must know that.”

“You no longer speak of taste but of acquisition. Few people these days are comfortable acquiring their own meat, regardless of the animal in question.” Hannibal pulled a blue sweater out of his bag and tossed it to Will. “What do you want for dinner?”

“Don’t care.”

Will thought about dropping the towel and getting dressed right there, but he wasn’t up to putting on that much of a show or dealing with the potential fallout. Not that he really thought there would be any. Hannibal seemed determined to behave like a gentleman. And maybe that was the other reason Will took his clothes into the bathroom to dress instead of teasing him. Maybe. He wasn’t sure why he’d done anything he’d done today, and he felt exhausted by all of it.

His reflection watched him in the steamy mirror, wrapped up in Hannibal’s overlarge sweater. He looked like he felt: vulnerable, in pain, and tired. At some point he’d decided that those were safe things to be with Hannibal around, and that pissed him off.

He left the bathroom in a cloud of steam. “Let’s go out.”

Hannibal sat on the edge of the bed, laptop balanced across his legs. “Out?”

“Yeah, out. Hit a bar, listen to some bad music, have a couple drinks.”

“I don’t think that’s wise.”

“So don’t come. And don’t wait up.”

Hannibal set his laptop aside, watching him warily. “I have the car keys.”

“I’ll hitch.” Will headed for the door. He didn’t bother to pick up the room key. He knew he wouldn’t need it.

Sure enough, Hannibal caught up with him at the door and followed him silently out to the car.

Chapter Text

The bar’s jukebox offerings focused on unintelligibly loud rock music. It played nothing recorded after 1989. Above the wall of bottles behind the bar hung a smoke-stained no-smoking sign.

Will sat on the barstool next to Hannibal drinking bad whisky, watching the room, and occasionally eating a peanut. He had ignored Hannibal’s attempts to get him to eat anything more substantial and was now on his second drink. The first had gone down in two large swallows.

Hannibal was uncomfortably aware of the flush of alcohol on Will’s cheeks, the nearness of his body, and the looks they were getting from the other patrons of the bar. They were too well dressed for this room full of denim, ball caps, and untrimmed beards. Too obviously out-of-towners, perhaps even too obviously law enforcement. One man had gone pale when they walked in and shortly afterward slunk out the back.

Hannibal was expecting trouble. If no one at the bar started it, he felt sure that Will would.

“Relax,” Will told him.

“Should I?”

“Do you ever?”

“That’s rather an obvious tack to take with someone like me.”

Will swiveled the stool so he was looking at Hannibal instead of the room. Hannibal tried not to be pleased by this. His efforts bore no fruit.

“Someone like you,” Will said. “What are you like, Hannibal?”

“Haven’t you already categorized me? The overachiever. The perfectionist. Arrogant but talented enough to make up for it in most situations and glib enough to smooth ruffled feathers when necessary.”

“Wow, it’s like you read your own psych file.” Will watched him over his drink. He held the glass pressed to his lips. It didn’t quite hide his smile.

“Did I?” Hannibal said mildly. “Perhaps more to the point, did you?”

“You obviously did since you’re quoting from it.”

“Which means you obviously did, since you recognize it.”

“Glib isn’t the word I would’ve used.”

“Did Jack give it to you?”

Will raised his eyebrows and lowered the glass, smile out in the open now. “Why would you think that, Hannibal? Trouble in paradise?”

“Are you suggesting that Quantico is Heaven?”

“Are you suggesting it isn’t?”

Hannibal drank his beer. He had wanted Campari and soda, but it didn’t seem like a wise drink to order in a place like this. Something more alcoholic seemed both less wise and more desirable by the second.

“Jack came to my house,” Will said. “The night before I came to yours. He said he thought I should see what the last guy said about you.” He finished his whiskey. “It pissed me off. So did the last guy who fumbled around in your head like some sticky-fingered high school boy in the back of a car. Tacky. Tasteless.”

“But not wrong.”

“Get me another drink.” Will pressed the glass into Hannibal’s hand and closed his fingers around it with a lingering touch. It was a blatant promise: get him another and Hannibal would get to hear how wrong that other psychiatrist had been, how much better Will understood him, how much more intimately. As if he hadn’t already proven that over and over to the detriment of Hannibal’s calm.

Hannibal ordered the whiskey anyway, knowing he was a fool. Knowing and trying to make himself care and, underneath that, feeling a low, warm excitement spread through his body. He knew the night would end badly, one way or another. Part of him wanted it. The rest of him watched, detached, waiting for it to begin.

“Perfectionist,” Will said. “That part sounds right. Arrogant…” He held up his hand and tipped it side to side. “I’d like to say yes, but I’m not sure that’s it. Is it arrogance if you really are right all the time? If you’re the smartest guy in the room? It ain’t bragging if it’s true, to quote Mohammed Ali.”

“Have we not had this conversation before? Are you speaking of me or of yourself?”

Will watched him with a crooked smile. “In this room, we might be tied. But there’s not a lot of competition.” He continued, voice now pitched to carry. “Everybody in this bar, idiots, right? IQ, what, barely struggling into the triple digits, if that? Take the guy next to you.”

Hannibal glanced at his neighbor, a large, muscular man with various poorly done tattoos covering his arms and neck, including the double lightning bolt of the Aryan Brotherhood.

“Fresh out of prison,” Will said, looking at the man now instead of Hannibal. “Days, a week at most, and he’s already out looking for trouble. Wants to get sent back. He can’t handle it out here in the real world. Inside, he’s just got to be big and mean, but out here you need at least half a brain to get along, some activity above the neck. Not much, obviously. Look at the rest of this place—“

“You want to shut your buddy up?” The words were even, but there was an edge in the man’s voice and a tension in his jaw. “Or do you want me to do it for you?”

“That won’t be necessary. We were just leaving.” Hannibal rose and touched Will’s elbow, urging him off his stool.

Will swiveled around to face him, legs spread so Hannibal stood between them. He hooked one heel casually behind Hannibal’s knee as he spoke to the man. “You think I’m the one who needs shutting up? The second we walked in here, he had you pegged. What did you say, Hannibal? That he was probably using white supremacism and preserving the purity of the race as an excuse for his sublimated desire for his mother?” He turned back to the man. “That’s a fancy way of calling you a dumb Nazi motherfucker in case you missed it.”

If Will had really intended to transfer the man’s attention to Hannibal, it didn’t work. The words had come out Will’s mouth, and that was where the man’s heavy fist headed.

Hannibal caught it, deflected it, and shoved the man up against the bar with a hand on his chest. “We don’t want any trouble.”

But he could see the man was past hearing or thinking. Big bloodshot eyes and a twisted mouth spoke only of unreasoning anger so intense that Hannibal wondered if Will’s offhand diagnosis was actually correct.

The man tried for a roundhouse, which Hannibal easily ducked, but then caught him with a short jab to the stomach and a solid blow to the kidney. Hannibal’s breath left him, and he staggered back. The man came after him and followed up with a blow to the mouth.

Hannibal tasted blood. He saw Will’s face over the man’s shoulder, intent, eyes bright and fixed only on Hannibal. And Hannibal knew exactly what he wanted to see.

The man came at him again. This time, Hannibal ducked down, turned sideways, and shoved an elbow in his stomach. He turned and brought his fist and forearm up together to slam into the man’s nose. It broke in a mist of blood. Hannibal saw Will’s lips part and the flecks of red on his cheek and then he was in the fight again, the man grabbing for him, howling, spittle flying from his mouth. Hannibal locked his arm in place and twisted until he felt the bone snap.

The man screamed and wobbled and went to his knees. The bar was silent. Hannibal could feel the slow, steady rhythm of his own heart. He looked down at his opponent and thought how easy it would be to snap his neck and stop the noise he was making.

“It’s been fun, but I think we should go.” Will was at his side, hands in his pockets, nodding casually toward the door.

“I need to call the police,” Hannibal said.

“Pretty sure someone’s already taken care of that.” Will hooked a finger in the collar of his shirt and towed him toward the door. Hannibal didn’t resist. When Will held out his hand for the keys, Hannibal handed them over.

In the car, Will in the driver’s seat, Hannibal leaned back and closed his eyes. He listened to the hiss of the road under the tires. “You planned that.”

Specks of rain on the windshield added a staccato beat to the road noise.

“Yes,” Will said finally. “Didn’t plan you breaking his arm though.”

“You have his blood on your face.”

“So do you.”

They sat in silence for the rest of the ride back to the motel. When they arrived, Will turned off the engine, but neither of them moved to get out of the car.

“I should call Jack,” Hannibal said. “And the local police.”

“Don’t. No one’s going to find out. No one’s going to care. You know that.”

“That’s not the point. It is the proper thing to do.”

Will pulled the keys from the ignition and tossed them into Hannibal’s lap. “Then you better do it.”

He left Hannibal sitting in the car in the shadows of the motel parking lot. The light flicked on in their room. Will’s silhouette moved behind the thin curtains. Hannibal took out his phone and swiped over to his most used contacts, where Jack’s face stared up at him, holding a cup of punch at an excruciatingly banal office Christmas party.

Seconds passed. The screen went dark. With a serial killer on the loose in their town, the local police would spend roughly ten minutes investigating the incident at the bar, if that. Hannibal was not concerned about being caught if he didn’t do the proper thing. He was concerned about what he might do, or fail to do, next.

Despite his concern, or because of it, he put his phone away, locked the car, and walked into the motel room.

Will was bent over the sink, shirt off, splashing his face with water. He turned to look at Hannibal. His teeth showed briefly. “You didn’t call.”

“No. I did not.” Hannibal took out his phone again.

“Don’t tell me you’re going to do it now.”

“I am going to order dinner.”

Will dried his face. He leaned his hip and shoulder against the doorway. “What are we having?”

Hannibal scrolled briefly through the limited delivery options. “Italian.”

“Romantic. Very Lady and the Tramp.”

Hannibal moved toward the bathroom but stopped when Will didn’t get out of his way. “I would like to wash the blood off my face first.”

Will moved just enough to let him pass by but stayed in the doorway until Hannibal slowly closed the door and forced him out.

Hannibal examined his face in the mirror. He had a cut on the inside of his mouth from the punch he’d taken, but nothing showed on the outside. He rinsed his mouth and spat blood into the sink.

\*

“I would like to wash the blood off my face first.”

Will sat on the edge of the bed imagining Hannibal saying those words in a different context. Hannibal at his side, hunting with him. Hannibal butchering what they killed. Hannibal washing off the blood before he cooked dinner.

When the knock came, Will started off the bed like someone had electrified it. He’d been deep in the woods. It took him a second to calm his breathing and steady his hands and stop seeing blood in Hannibal’s teeth. As if he’d ever eat it raw.

Hannibal was still in the bathroom, but the meal was paid for, including tip. Will set it all up on his bed, the spaghetti marinara, the ravioli, the lemon broccoli, the slightly wilted salad, the damp garlic bread.

Hannibal emerged and looked it over with an expression of resignation. He reached for the spaghetti.

“Aren’t you going to sit with me?” Will said. “We can’t share the garlic bread if you don’t.”

“Do you want me to sit with you?”

Will scooted over to make room. When Hannibal sat gingerly next to him, he moved closer and leaned against Hannibal’s side. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“You’ve been very clear about what you don’t want from me. I wish you would be as clear about what you do want.”

“Does it matter? You like it when I tease you.”

Hannibal let out a minute sigh. “I suppose I do. May I?” He lifted his arm to put it around Will’s shoulders.

“Sure.”

He did, and Will settled more closely against him, warm and comfortable. His eyes closed. For a second, he wished he could sleep like this.

Hannibal’s hand brushed over his hair. “You’re tired.”

“Mm.”

“Sleep if you wish.”

“I’m awake,” Will said but he didn’t open his eyes.

A second later, Hannibal eased the plastic fork from his hand. “This meal will be just as edible later as it is now.”

“It’s not that bad.”

“It’s not that good.” He pulled a blanket over Will’s legs. “Rest.”

“Never slept with anyone before,” Will mumbled. “I mean just slept.”

“I’ve never broken a man’s arm to—“ The words cut off with a click of teeth.

“To what? More confessions? I like those.”

Hannibal swallowed audibly. Will liked the way it sounded, the wet shift of muscle and tendon and tongue.

“I have never hurt anyone because I knew someone else was watching,” Hannibal said.

Will squeezed his eyes tighter closed. He could see the hunt again. He could smell the wet earth. He put a hand on Hannibal’s chest. “Would you like to do it again?”

“Go to sleep, Will.” Hannibal’s voice was hoarse.

“Whatever you say, Hannibal.”

For once, sleep was easy. More than easy. He felt drugged, both too hot and too cold, and his headache was back. He pulled the sleeves of Hannibal’s sweater over his hands, balled them into fists, and slid away.

In dreams, he was back in the woods, but now there was no prey. There was nothing. At least nothing he could see. As he sank ankle-deep into old leaves and climbed over fallen logs, he felt something watching.

The feeling wrapped around his spine and crawled into his gut. It got bigger and bigger until he was spinning around at every night noise, every scurrying mouse, every soft owl call. Behind him, just behind him, he heard snorting breath and the sound of hooves.

He woke with his hands clenched on Hannibal’s shirt and Hannibal cupping the side of his face. “Will? Can you hear me?”

He nodded, but his breath came too hard and fast to speak.

“Are you all right?”

Will swallowed. His mouth was full of saliva. Sweat slid down his ribs and the back of his neck. He’d never been afraid in the forest before. “I was dreaming.”

“Do you often have nightmares?”

“Only every night of my life.”

“I hope that’s an exaggeration.”

“Not much of one.” He reached blindly for cold garlic bread, needing something to tie him to the real world.

“What did you dream of?”

He shook his head, took a bite of greasy garlic bread, and got it down. His throat felt full of things that might choke him, and the garlic bread was the least of it.

“Most people who are involved in this sort of work find that it affects their dreams.”

“It wasn’t that. It was the woods by my house.” He wished he hadn’t said it. Couldn’t understand this compulsion to confess. His only comfort was that Hannibal had the same problem.

“All the same. Perhaps it’s just as well that you’re done here.”

“Am I? She got away.”

“It is a matter of routine investigation now. Jack won’t need you. You can go home.”

“I guess so.”

“Don’t you want to?”

He wanted, and he didn’t know what he wanted. “I’ll go home,” he said. “You can drive me to the airport in the morning.” It came out sounding like a question instead of a demand, but that was okay. He knew the answer would be yes. All of Hannibal’s answers were yes for him.

“Of course.”

“What time is it?” He wouldn’t sleep again regardless, so he hoped it was close enough to morning to get up.

“Just after midnight.”

Will sat up and rubbed his face. “Shit.”

“Shall I reheat dinner?”

“Will that make it any better?”

“Not a great deal.”

They ate it cold.

In the morning, Hannibal drove Will to the airport and Will flew home to the forest.

Chapter Text

By the time he got off the plane, Will’s headache had returned full force to jackhammer the backside of his eyeballs. The headlights pulsed with it. Sweat formed in his hair, and chills followed in its wake. He switched from heat to air conditioning and back again

Miles ahead of him, his forest beat like a heart. It should be home. It should be safe, but his dream from the night before rode in the back of the car and stroked his neck with cold fingers.

A hunt. A hunt would put everything right. It always did. When other minds pressed in on him, he took one to the forest and made it quiet. He wanted to do that now. He couldn’t. He’d had two unannounced visits from the FBI in less than a week.

But Jack and Hannibal were in Minnesota. If he wanted to hunt, now was the time. Maybe the only time in the foreseeable future.

Thinking about Hannibal didn’t help. He kept replaying the night before, Hannibal’s grace in the fight, the crack of the man’s arm, the way Hannibal had looked to Will afterward. For approval, though he might not know it himself. Will had seen it. He wanted to see it again.

He wanted to take Hannibal out into the woods with him. He dug his nails into the steering wheel and stared at the yellow line until it flinched.

Hannibal in the woods with him, Hannibal running beside him, Hannibal with someone else’s blood on his face again.

“Shut up.” Will spoke aloud through gritted teeth. “Just shut the fuck up.”

When the hitchhiker appeared like a ghost in his high-beams, Will's foot was on the brake pedal before his rational mind had a chance to intervene.

\*

Hannibal coordinated the search for Abigail Hobbs from Jack’s motel room while Jack took the forensics team up to the Hobbs cabin. He got several texts from Beverly, photos only, of the cabin’s attic, a forest of antlers. Jack texted soon after to say that they needed Will’s opinion on it.

Hannibal had been fighting the impulse to call Will since dropping him off at the airport and was now happy to give in. Will’s phone rang and rang. Eventually, it went to voicemail. Hannibal checked his flight information. His plane had landed hours ago on schedule. He should be home by now. So he was merely away from his phone. Hannibal would call back later. He had more than enough to occupy his mind while he waited.

That last assumption proved incorrect, as his mind found time and space to think about Will and what might be keeping him from the phone despite speaking to the local and state police, reviewing footage from security cameras at various rest stops, and writing his incident report for the confrontation at the Hobbs house yesterday.

It was late afternoon when he allowed himself to call again. He observed that his heart rate picked up as he pressed the call button next to Will’s name.

“Hello? Who’s this?”

Will’s abrupt, irritated tone sent a wash of relief through him. “Hannibal Lecter. How was your flight?”

Will paused. “It was a flight. Is that really why you’re calling?”

“No. Jack has sent me some photos he wants you to look at.”

“Do you want me to look at them?”

Hannibal closed his eyes briefly, glad he was alone in the room. “I would like to know how you’re feeling. How is your head?”

“It’s been better.” Static came across the air as Will’s cheek or hand brushed the phone’s speaker. “You better show me the pictures. It’s the cabin, right?”

“Yes. You may find them disturbing.”

“What do you think I’d find disturbing? Are we talking whole taxidermy people?”

“I’ll send them.”

He did, and Will was quiet for a long time.

“Will?”

“A nest of antlers,” Will said quietly. “Something she and her father built together. How the hell did he not know.”

“Perhaps he did.”

“Do you hunt, Hannibal?”

“Apart from hunting killers?” A gulf of memories opened. “Not for many years. My father took me hunting as a child. My uncle when I was slightly older.”

“Not on your own? Not interested in killing your own food?”

Hannibal had trailed along behind his father, who stalked deer with an intense anger that he otherwise never allowed into the open. Hannibal’s uncle had taken him to Italy to hunt boar with a group of his friends, all older wealthy men, prone to jocular jokes and back slapping. “My early experiences did not endear the idea to me.”

“But you’d go with me if I asked,” Will said. It wasn’t a question.

“Would you want me to?”

“I was just thinking about it.” Will sounded almost dreamy. Something crackled in the background, either fire or cooking. “I don’t know what it was like for you, but it can be better.”

“Do you go often?”

“Just been. Cooking the result. My cooking’s not as fancy as yours. When we go, I’ll kill it and you cook it. Deal?”

“Deal.” Hannibal couldn’t have said anything else. The way Will lingered over the word ‘kill’ shifted something inside him. From what to what, he didn’t know, but he felt the change. “What would we hunt together?”

“Prey,” Will said softly. “Doesn’t matter. It’s the hunt that matters. The woods by my place go back a long way. There’s all kinds of stuff in there.”

“Is that where you hunt?”

“Yeah. It’s good in the autumn. Cool. Quiet. That smell. You know what forests smell like in the autumn.”

“Tell me,” Hannibal said, though he remembered the scent well.

“Earth. The leaves that just fell, that sharp, sap scent. The decay. Wet bark. Dry grass.”

Hannibal leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. “I can smell it.”

“There’s a stream nearby. Can you hear it? Rushing over the rocks. It’s shallow there.”

“Is that where we will go?”

Will’s voice dropped to something low and intimate. “We can wait there in the trees. The prey will come to drink.”

“At that particular spot?”

“Mm. There’s a path. Even the deer use it. The trees can get pretty thick. Feels like they’re grabbing for you when you walk past.”

Hannibal could see it perfectly, smell it, hear it. Almost feel Will standing beside him. “And when we see our prey?”

“We run it down,” Will murmured.

Hannibal’s eyes jolted open, but he still saw the forest. His breath came faster. “No guns?”

“Nah. Where’s the sport in that?”

“You must lose it sometimes.”

“Not yet. The dogs help. You have to keep up with them. Think you can?”

Hannibal imagined running beside Will with the pack baying in front of them and their prey running for its life. “I believe I can.”

“They usually get it first.” Will’s voice was just above a whisper now, right in Hannibal’s ear, just for him. “They won’t kill it though, except by accident. I have to do that. Or maybe you’d rather do it yourself.”

“I think I would rather watch.”

“Yeah, I bet you would.”

“You enjoyed watching me,” Hannibal said. He took a slow, careful breath. “At the bar.”

Will’s voice was rough when he answered. “Not quite the same kind of hunt.”

“But you did.”

“And you’d enjoy watching me get my hands dirty too. How much are you enjoying yourself right now, Hannibal?”

Hannibal cupped one hand over the growing bulge of his erection. He couldn’t answer.

“Where are you?” Will asked.

“In Jack’s motel room. Alone.”

“Alone is good,” Will murmured. “Get up and go in the bathroom. Lock the door.”

Hannibal walked into the bathroom and locked the door behind him.

“Are you there?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” Will said. “You do whatever you want to do. I’m just going to keep talking.”

Hannibal knew what he was meant to do and knew that he shouldn’t. And then the thought occurred: why not? Propriety, decency, how much did he care for these things? More than he cared for the sound of Will’s voice describing the way he cut into the beast’s abdomen and the hot rush of blood? No. Not at all.

He closed his eyes and unzipped with one hand, fumbling to pull himself free. He stroked himself once, unable to mask the shaky inhale.

Will laughed softly. “That’s right. In your boss’s room, Agent Lecter. Filthy. Do you like it?”

Hannibal couldn’t answer. He was in the forest of his childhood and Will stood beside him. Hannibal wanted to keep him there always.

“We gut it right there,” Will said. “The dogs like the intestines. We can wash it out in the stream. Joint it if you want. Drag it back in a sling made of its own skin. Animals are handy like that, aren’t we?”

“Will.” It was a prayer.

“Close, huh? Do you want me to tell you how you cook it on my spit? The way it smells when its roasting? It’ll make my mouth water, Hannibal. I’ll be begging you for it.”

Hannibal came with a hitched breath on the word ‘begging’ and spilled into the toilet in hard spurts that jolted his whole body. His eyes came open. He was out of the woods, back in a cheap motel bathroom in Minnesota, states away from the voice on the phone, worlds away from the fantasy he’d just lived. The air smelled of semen. He opened the small bathroom window and turned on the extractor fan.

“All done?” Will said, maliciously cheerful.

“Yes.”

“What did you like more, doing it in Jack’s room, or the blood?”

“I wasn’t in Jack’s room. I was in the forest. With you.”

He heard nothing for a few seconds, just the static of breath, then the beep of a disconnected call.

\*

Will turned the roast on the spit in his kitchen fireplace. The hitchhiker had made it almost two miles before Will and the pack caught up with him. Fat dripped and sizzled onto the logs.

The phone call had been monumentally stupid. He’d framed it as Hannibal’s desires, Hannibal’s abnormalities, but Hannibal wasn’t a fool. Will’s own had been fully on display as well. Even his cock had taken an interest and usually it found other people as dull as the rest of him did.

He put a hand over it now and pressed as he turned the spit. Not enough time before dinner. But maybe after. Maybe he’d try a fantasy with a face for a change.

For now, he sliced meat from the bone and served it with potatoes he’d roasted in the coals. The dogs pressed close against his shins and looked up at him for scraps.

“After dinner. You guys had yours.” It’d taken forever to wash them off in the stream. Their muzzles and feet had been soaked in blood.

Will sat at the table to eat his kill. During the hunt, he’d thought of nothing. Now all the thoughts came back. The FBI was too close to him. Hannibal was too close to him. He was too close to Hannibal. He’d practically narrated a murder over the phone for him. All that was missing was the name of the deer.

He could break off contact. Hannibal was so concerned about propriety. With propriety sitting in for morals and a conscience, he had to be. If Will said he never wanted to see him again, Hannibal would respect that. But Will did want to see him again. That was the whole problem.

Something pale moved outside Will’s darkened window. He jerked upright in his chair. Medea whined once, and then all of them started barking. Will whistled. The silence that followed betrayed nothing. Had they started barking because of his reaction, or was there really something out there? The back end of a white tailed deer would’ve been that pale. So would a face.

Will rubbed at his eyes. They ached with heat. His head was a low roar. But he had seen something. This wasn’t his dreams bleeding into reality. He slung his rifle over his shoulder, told the dogs to stay put, and stepped outside.

A fall chill hit him along with the smell of woodsmoke. He’d burned the bones. Tomorrow he’d scatter the remains in the stream with the others. And maybe with one more if someone was sneaking around his property at night.

The hoot of an owl jolted him. He kept close to the house, walking the perimeter, seeing nothing. No pale face. No deer. No prints. No sound or sign that he wasn’t, as usual, completely alone. After twenty minutes of fruitless search, he gave up and went back into the house and up to bed.

Chapter Text

A massive black stag pinned Will to the earth with its antlers. Its body was slick with blue-black feathers, and its hot breath smelled of prey rotting between its pointed teeth. It planted a hoof on his chest. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, couldn’t escape until he finally gasped awake.

He woke with the point of a knife at his throat. Abigail Hobbs leaned over him, dark hair sweeping across his cheek. “Why did you call me? Why did you warn me?”

“How did you find me?”

“Didn’t you see the TattleCrime article? Takes one to catch one? It was all about you and your creepy murder house and your cannibal dog. She’s cute, by the way.”

The dogs. Will grabbed for her, but she pushed the knife down harder and he felt his skin split.

“Don’t move,” she said. “Your dogs are fine. I fed them sausage. They love me. She really ate her puppies?”

“Not the whole litter.”

“All it takes is one and you’re a cannibal for life. They painted it on my garage door. Cannibals. Like my whole family—“ She stopped. “But they were. They just didn’t know it.”

“You brought home the bacon.”

Her mouth twisted briefly. “My dad taught me to hunt. Rabbits. Deer. We butchered them together. But he stopped going with me after a while. I think he knew. Do you think he knew?”

“I think he knew something was off. Do I think he knew you were bringing people home for dinner? No. Is that disappointing, Abigail?”

She sliced his cheek open with a quick twist of the knife.

He didn’t let his expression change. “You wanted him to know. You wanted them both to know.”

She pressed the point under his chin, teeth bare and gleaming. “Why did you call?”

“You wanted them to understand. They didn’t. They won’t. They’re dead. The world won’t understand either. I know where you are right now. You want to tell your story.”

“I don’t. I don’t care what people think.”

“Good. I hoped you’d be gone when the FBI showed up. I didn’t want to watch them shoot you down or cart you away.”

“That’s not going to happen.”

“You’re here. You could be clean away, but you’re here. Asking me if I understand you.”

She said nothing.

“I do,” Will said. “And I’m telling you, lock up the part of you that needs this, because it will get you caught. You’re either free and alone or you can pour your heart out to the prison shrink. Which one do you want?”

She smiled at him. “You’re wrong though. I was just curious. I’ve got what I need.”

She turned and ran. Will jumped up and dashed after her, but she threw herself through the window, out onto the top of the porch, swung down, and was away across the fields.

When he went down to check on the dogs, they all panted their happy sausage breath at him.

He sighed. “Thanks, guys. Great job.”

Will checked the doors and windows. The front door lock was intact. She’d come in through the bathroom window. He closed and locked it. He thought about calling the police. That was something a normal person would do.

Will poured himself a whiskey, sat, and thought. What had she said? She had what she needed. She needed understanding, whatever she claimed. So she had someone she thought could give it to her. Will had assumed the girls were a mirror for Abigail. Maybe they were just substitutes for someone else.

Will walked slowly back up to his room, picked up his phone, and dialed Hannibal’s number. It rang five times, and Hannibal’s voice was rough with sleep when he answered.

“Will? What is it?”

“Abigail’s here.”

“What?” Much sharper now.

“In Virginia. She was just in my house. And I don’t think she’s alone.”

\*

Will tried to go back to sleep but only managed to drift off twice. Both times, he was awoken by the nightmare stag hunting him through his dreams. He got up around three, made coffee, and presented an authentically pathetic picture when Hannibal knocked on his door.

Hannibal looked nearly as bad, for him, hair in mild disorder, slight stubble, no tie. It was barely dawn. He must’ve left for the airport the minute he’d hung up. Will waved him in.

Hannibal stopped just inside the door, staring at Will’s cheek. “She cut you.”

“It’s fine. It stopped bleeding.”

“Has anyone looked at it?”

“You mean besides me?”

“I spoke to the local police outside,” Hannibal said. He’d insisted on calling them. “They didn’t mention you’d been hurt.”

“I told them it happened when I got this.” Will tapped his bandaged head and shuffled toward the kitchen. “Coffee?”

“Thank you.”

He poured a mug for Hannibal and topped up his own. “You got here fast.”

“I took the first available flight. I told you I would.”

Will looked down at his coffee. “Yeah. Thanks.”

Hannibal took a step forward like Will had reeled him in. It was fascinating to watch. Less fascinating was the way Will wanted to meet him halfway.

“And how is it?” Hannibal reached toward the bandage on Will’s head, but stopped short of touching it. “May I?”

Will nodded.

Hannibal frowned faintly as he peeled it back. “You haven’t changed this.”

“Was I supposed to? My doctor didn’t tell me.”

Hannibal gave him a chiding look. “Do you have a first aid kit?”

“Not much of one. Neosporin and bandaids.”

“I have some things in my car. I’ll be back in a moment.”

Hannibal strode out, and Will took his coffee and confusion into the bathroom. He peeled off the bandage and frowned at the gunk around his wound, a mix of blood and antibiotic cream. He rubbed at it with a damp towel.

Hannibal came in seconds later and took the towel away from him. “Gently.”

Will let Hannibal clean him up, gently, and tried not to lean into his touch. He was tired, and his head ached. He drifted back to the forest, to the prey, to his thoughts of Hannibal hunting with him, or—

Hannibal running naked ahead of him through the trees, sides scored by branches, blood in streamers down his skin. Will usually let the prey keep their shoes because it wasn’t much of a challenge otherwise, but Hannibal would be barefoot. Bared entirely.

Moonlight, blood, skin, hot breath, the feathered stag from his dream with its knife-sharp antlers—

“Will? Are you all right?”

Will squeezed his eyes shut. No forest. No stag. No prey, no hunt. Just his house and a very sharp FBI agent. He searched for something to say that would give Hannibal something else to focus on. “Did you check on Abigail’s friends?”

Hannibal paused, fingers woven through Will’s hair to hold it back. “Yes. A young woman is missing. Her friend and neighbor, Marissa Schurr. Marissa’s car is gone as well.”

“Explains how she got here. Although not how she sold the post-murder road trip to Marissa.”

“Perhaps Marissa simply did not believe her friend could be a killer.”

Will kept his face blank as he examined Hannibal’s, but Hannibal seemed to be talking only about the case. He tended the wound on Will’s cheek now, although his hand still cradled Will’s forehead. It felt so cool.

Hannibal taped the bandage into place and smoothed it down. “Have you eaten? I could make you something.”

Will shook his head. The ache had increased. He pictured black antlers piercing his skull from the inside. “I don’t need food.”

“What do you need?”

Will pulled back and rested his face in his hands. He needed peace. He needed fewer people around him. He needed his forest back, unhaunted by nightmare creatures.

“Can we go somewhere else? Your place, or— I don’t know. Anywhere. Somewhere quiet.”

“Of course. Now?”

“Now, yeah.”

Minutes later, they were in Hannibal’s Bentley, rumbling slowly along the gravel drive. “I can get someone to stay at the house with you,” Hannibal said.

“You’re not offering to do it yourself?”

“I will if you want me to.”

Will didn’t answer. He didn’t know what he wanted.

He assumed they’d head for Baltimore, but Hannibal drove past the turn for the highway and into Wolf Trap, through empty streets in a gray dawn.

“Where are we going?” Will said. “Nothing’s going to be open yet.”

Hannibal parked in front a small bakery just as someone behind its steamed-up windows flipped the sign in the door from Closed to Open. Of course.

“I’ll only be a moment,” Hannibal said.

He returned with a paper bag and two cups of coffee. It wasn’t as good as his, but it was much better than Will’s. Will held it in both hands and watched the light grow. They wound through the town center and back out to the quiet edges. The Bentley was a predatory shadow slipping past manicured lawns and spotless sidewalks.

Will didn’t ask where they were going. He didn’t want to think about that or anything else. He wanted to trust, did trust Hannibal to take care of it. At some point, he closed his eyes.

Silence and stillness woke him.

“We’re here,” Hannibal said.

Hannibal had parked the Bentley near a small picnic area by a lake. Maple trees burned in red and gold in a pale, growing light. They were the only people there. Will looked over at Hannibal. “Breakfast picnic?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t you have a manhunt to organize?”

“Come and eat,” Hannibal said. He got the bag out of the back and took it over to the table to unpack. He set out croissants, cherry jam and marmalade, dark rye bread and smoked salmon, and a dish of ripe strawberries. They sat across from each other in silence. Will drank most of the coffee but had very little appetite.

Afterward, they walked along the edge of the lake. The sun was fully up and almost hot in a spotless sky. Will picked up a flat stone and skipped it four times across the surface of the water. “About that manhunt you’re ignoring.”

“What answer are you looking for? I assume if you wanted to be rid of me, you wouldn’t be so oblique. Do you want me to reassure you that this is how I wish to spend my morning?”

Will did, he realized. He wanted exactly that. He picked up another stone, but not to skip. Just to squeeze. “I don’t know what you’re after. The case is over. At least my part is. Unless you want me as bait.”

Hannibal stood with his hands clasped behind his back. “Did you think I would abandon you?”

Will crushed the stone until his fingers ached.

“Other people are working on the case,” Hannibal said. “No one else is here with you.”

“This doesn’t exactly read as concern to me. Fancy coffee and croissants by the lake at sunrise? That sounds more like a date.”

“Is that what you would like?” Hannibal said.

Will stopped walking. “I thought I’d made it clear what I’d like.”

“You’ve made it clear you don’t want to have sex with me. That doesn’t answer my question.”

Water lapped at a border of stones on the shore and stained them dark. Leaves fell and lay in flat yellow rafts on the lake.

Will shoved his hands in his pockets and ground his knuckles into the cloth. Even one-night stands required more human connection than he was usually willing to bear. But here was Hannibal offering the connection without the sex, the hook without the bait, and Will wanted to take him up on it.

“If we’re not going to fuck, what makes it a date?” Will said.

“The fancy coffee, according to you.”

The corner of Will’s mouth twitched. “Asshole.”

“Romantic intentions, I suppose. And intimacy.” He paused. “I think I have already been more intimate with you than with any other person in my life.”

“Calm down, we’ve known each other a week.”

“But you feel the same, or we wouldn’t be having this discussion.”

Will dug his nails into his palms. “So what if I say yes? What changes? Since we’re already so intimate.”

“I would feel more confident about asking you to have dinner with me tonight.”

“Not tonight,” Will said. He needed to finish the clean up from his hunt. Somehow. With a yard full of cops. “But you could ask about tomorrow. If you wanted.”

“Would you have dinner with me tomorrow night, Will?”

“Fine. Yes. What else would be different?”

“I might touch you more often. In ways I hope you would not find objectionable.”

Will looked at him out of the corner of his eye. Hannibal was still looking straight ahead at the water. “Like what?”

“I’d like to put my arm around you,” Hannibal said, voice even and toneless.

Will toed at a wet rock until he dislodged it and kicked it into the water. He remembered how it had felt to fall asleep in Hannibal’s arms and to wake there from his nightmares. “Okay.”

Hannibal stepped closer. He put an arm around Will’s shoulders and rested his cheek against the side of Will’s head. Will leaned into him. He didn’t know what to do with his hands. After a second, he slid one under Hannibal’s coat to grip the back of his shirt.

“All right?” Hannibal murmured.

“I’m not going to break if you breathe on me wrong. If I don’t like it, I’ll tell you.”

“Will you tell me if you do like it?”

“You could just assume.”

“I’ve been trying not to assume anything with you.” Hannibal kissed his hair. “Do you like this?”

Will turned toward him so his face was half hidden in Hannibal’s shoulder. He nodded.

Hannibal didn’t laugh. He just held Will tighter. “I’m glad.”

“Do you?” Will said.

“I do. Very much.”

Will wanted to kiss him. He couldn’t remember actively wanting to kiss anyone, not since he’d satisfied his curiosity about what it was like. It was different with Hannibal. Other people pushed at him, even when they didn’t mean to. Hannibal somehow did the opposite. He cleared a space for Will to breathe. Realizing that was more disturbing than wanting to kiss him.

Will pulled away and picked up another stone. His skip failed this time. It caught only once on the surface before it sank out of sight. He waited for Hannibal to object or to pull him close again.

Hannibal picked up a stone as well and turned it from side to side. “One throws it level with the surface of the water?”

Will looked at him. “You never skipped stones? What, do they not do that where you’re from?”

“I presume they do. I may even have done it myself. My memories of the time before my family was killed are uncertain. Some things are startlingly clear. Others are gone entirely.”

Will took his hand and curved his forefinger along the edge of the stone. “Try it like that. Level, like you said.”

Hannibal threw it. The stone skipped four times over the surface of the lake and sank, concentric ripples spreading out on the still water.

Will laughed. He couldn’t help it.

“Why is it funny?” Hannibal asked mildly.

“Because you really are good at everything. It’s unnatural.” Will glanced at him. “You’re even good at me.”

Hannibal had picked up another stone, but he was looking at Will as he touched its edge. “At you?”

“Dealing with me. With the way I am.”

“Should I reassure you that there is nothing wrong with the way you are?”

“There’s plenty wrong with it. I’m rude and overly honest and I like to make people uncomfortable, and as a result nobody wants to spend much time around me, which is how I prefer it. Except you.”

Hannibal looked down at the stone in his hands. “I like the way you are.”

“I know. Freaks you out a little, huh?”

“I have put a great deal of effort into being socially acceptable. To find myself so extraordinarily attracted to someone who is the antithesis of the image I have striven for is occasionally disconcerting, yes.” He skipped the stone across the water, only three this time.

Will took his hand afterward. It was cold and damp. Grit from the stone stuck to his skin. Will ran his thumb over it. He scratched his thumbnail along the creases in Hannibal’s palm and felt Hannibal’s small shiver.

Hannibal’s phone rang. He answered with his free hand, but Will dropped the one he’d claimed. He didn’t know what the hell he’d been doing. Hannibal was talking to Jack, about Marissa and Abigail, something about traffic cameras on the highway.

He hung up and turned to Will. “I must take you back. I’m sorry.”

“You shouldn’t have taken me to start with. I bet Jack had something to say about that.”

“He doesn’t know.” Hannibal started packing up the remains of their picnic. “Perhaps he will find out, but I cannot say that I care for his opinion on the subject.”

“Are you always like this when you like somebody?”

“Like what?”

“Go big or go home? Zero to sixty? Most people are more restrained.”

“I don’t think playing hard to get would be terribly beneficial in this situation.”

Will glanced at him. “Fair point. I guess I’ve got that covered.”

“Do you? I didn’t think you were playing.”

“I wasn’t.”

“And now?”

“I don’t know what the hell I’m doing now.”

“Would it help to know that I feel the same? You said I enjoyed feeling out of control. That’s not typically true, but it does seem to be the case when it comes to you.” He paused in putting away the last of the strawberries and glanced sideways at Will. “Has it occurred to you that you’re due for a mid-life crisis as well?”

Will pressed his lips together to keep from smiling. “Shut up. It’s way too soon. I’ve got another two years till I’m forty. And there’s nothing wrong with my life. I like it fine the way it is.”

They walked to the car and got in. Will sank down into his seat.

Hannibal slid the key into the ignition and paused. “But you like it with me in it.”

“You don’t sound real sure about that.”

“I’m not. But I believe you do.”

Will studied his profile. “Why’s that?”

“Because I’m still here.”

Hannibal reached over very slowly and put his hand over Will’s. He fit his fingers into the spaces between Will’s and curled them under. After a few seconds, Will returned the grip. Hannibal’s hand was larger and softer than his, skin just a shade darker, veins visible under smooth skin. Will thought about tracing those veins with his tongue. Maybe biting down until they burst.

Chapter Text

Will walked barefoot on the forest floor. Damp leaves cushioned his feet. Each step raised the scent of decomposition. The moon arced overhead in time lapse: crescent, half, gibbous, full and tinted red. He had no other light, but he could see with more than just his eyes.

He caught glimpses through the night forest of pale horses, things that were not horses, and shimmering riders with faces he knew but couldn’t place. “You’re late,” someone told him.

Abigail looked down from her horse. The choker around her neck was gold wire twisted into the shape of flowers and set with rubies. She gestured to the mount behind her.

It was the stag from Will’s nightmares, feathered and horned and breathing steam through its flared nostrils. It had no saddle, but Will placed his hands on its back and in its mane and mounted without effort. His bare legs pressed against its warm sides. He sank into its feathers.

“Who are we hunting?” Will asked.

Abigail gave him an odd look. “Don’t you know?”

A horn blew. Their mounts sprang forward, and the wood rushed past them. Will couldn’t hear the stag’s hooves strike the ground. All he heard was the horn and the singing of bells.

The ground and the trees blurred into a dark river. Will buried his hands in the stag’s feathered mane and hung on and still felt himself slipping. Beside him, Abigail laughed.

When the hunt broke into a clearing, he could see their prey just vanishing into the trees, a flash of ash brown hair and a perfectly fitted suit torn to shreds by the forest.

Will opened his mouth but he couldn’t call out. The stag leapt over a fallen log, Will tipped sideways, and the world dissolved around him.

He stood in the forest in his boxers and T-shirt. It was still night, but clouds covered the moon. His arm ached. When he touched it, his hand came away wet. The blood was black as oil. When he probed the wound, he found a small hole but a deep puncture. A branch maybe, but sharp antlers lingered in his mind.

Medea sat at his feet and whined. Will crouched down to stroke her head. The dog breath went a long way toward convincing Will that he was awake now. Awake and safe from his dreams.

The sky was brightening on his left. That meant his house would be on his right, to the west. He buried his freezing hands in Medea’s fur for a few seconds and then he started walking. She led him home, whip-thin tail wagging as Will stumbled, footsore and freezing, behind her.

When Will got home, he showered, cleaned his wounds, and put on the warmest sweater he owned. He made coffee. He waited for the sun to come up.

\*

Hannibal took his cubed watermelon out of the refrigerator twenty minutes before Will was due to arrive to let it warm and regain some flavor. Each cube sat on a leaf of basil. He had fashioned roses from prosciutto to go on top, petals edged with creamy strips of fat.

From his party guests, these drew bosom-clutching praise and melting expressions of pleasure. He suspected the best he’d get from Will would be mild surprise and maybe an equally mild comment. It was just as well. He wasn’t sure if he’d be able to handle melting pleasure from Will.

The wine was chilling for the melon cubes. The wine for dinner had been decanted to breathe. The main course was in the oven. Hannibal had gone up to change. Twice. He’d put on a suit, come down to rearrange the antlers in his centerpiece, and then gone back up to put on more casual trousers and a sweater on the pretense of trying not to make Will feel uncomfortable.

Will, he knew, would not feel uncomfortable, regardless of what Hannibal wore. He had changed because he suspected that Will would like him better in more casual things. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. Part of him liked it a great deal. Another part of him feared what else it might lead him to do.

Will arrived nearly half an hour early. He walked in without ringing the bell and dumped his coat on a chair in the foyer. Hannibal hung it up for him. Will had his hands thrust deep in his pockets and his hair falling forward into his eyes. He didn’t push it away. Hannibal wanted to do it for him.

“Smells good,” Will said.

“I hope it will be.” Hannibal expected some quip about his own reaction if Will didn’t enjoy it, but he got nothing. Will just walked ahead of him toward the kitchen, shoulders drawn forward and head down.

Hannibal poured him a glass of wine, and Will drank half of it in two gulps. He looked at the melon cubes but didn’t take one. Finally he raised his head and looked at Hannibal straight on. “What do you know about sleepwalking?”

“The onset of sleepwalking in rarer in adults than in children. Causes can range from exhaustion and excessive drinking to fever, some medications, or simply stress. The body reacts in unusual ways to unusual stimuli.”

Will chewed this over with more wine to wash it down. “Can you get it from nightmares?”

“Many sleepwalkers report acting on their dreams, pleasant or otherwise, but it is not cause and effect.” He paused to refill Will’s glass. “You must know at least some of this.”

Will shrugged. “I know there’s no cure. But we didn’t exactly do a deep dive into the parasomnias when I was getting my degree, and it hasn’t come up since.”

“What did you dream of, Will?”

Will looked down into his glass. “I was in the forest by my house. Abigail Hobbs was there. And other people. Everyone was dressed up in silks and jewels. I think some of them weren’t human. We were all on horses.” He paused. “We were all riding, anyway. Hunting.”

“The Wild Hunt. What was your quarry?”

Will looked up at him and then quickly back down at his wine. “Don’t know. But when I woke up, I was still out there in the woods.”

“Alone?”

Will gave him a sharp look from behind the shield of his hair. “Well. Medea was with me.”

Hannibal stopped for a moment to contemplate this man who had pried his most closely held secrets from him with ease, who treated the living with savagery and the dead with a tender respect, who had dared Hannibal to urinate on a cheese plate and adopted misfit dogs and had now placed his fears and nightmares in Hannibal’s hands. All of it throbbed in Hannibal’s chest.

He pushed the tray of melon cubes toward Will. “You don’t have a history of sleepwalking, I take it.”

“First time. As far as I know. How the hell would I know?” Will popped one in his mouth whole and chewed. He said nothing about it, but he reached for another before he’d swallowed the first.

“You might not. But I find it more likely that recent events have taken their toll on your body and mind. Have you been drinking?”

“Not as much as I’d like to,” Will said. He ate another melon cube and picked up one more in his free hand. “The cops are doing a great job, by the way. Apparently no one saw me going into the woods or coming out.”

“They’re watching the road.”

“They’re pretty easy to avoid is all I’m saying. Anyway. The cops. Abigail Hobbs. The sleepwalking. The hour long commute to my…date. It all takes up a lot of prime drinking time.” He took another swallow of wine and swirled it around the glass.

“You may stay here tonight should you need to. Or want to.”

“Encouraging me to drink, Doctor?”

“Only to be certain that you are welcome in my home.”

“And in your bed?”

“I do have a guest room, but of course you are welcome in my bed.”

For a second, Will looked like he wanted to take him up on it. He shoved another melon cube into his mouth and turned away, staring at the far wall where a taxidermy bat hung in a shadowbox frame. “I saw the new antlers in the dining room,” Will said after he swallowed. He paused for the space of a breath. “The thing I was riding had antlers. And feathers. In the dream.”

“You called it a nightmare earlier.”

“It was. I don’t know why. Nothing happened.”

“Legend says that the Wild Hunt is a harbinger of disaster. The best one can expect after a sighting is one’s own death or abduction into another world.”

“I feel like I’ve already been abducted to another world,” Will muttered. He picked up another melon cube and then paused, looking up at Hannibal. “Are you not having any of these?”

The plate was half empty already. Hannibal restrained a smile. “If you want them, eat them.”

“Is this like fairyland? If I eat your food, am I stuck here forever?”

“If you are, it’s much too late now.”

Will let out a quick breath of amusement and then his expression slowly sobered. “Yeah. Guess it is.”

He finished the plate of melon cubes on his own while Hannibal pulled the roasting pan from the oven and arranged its contents on a silver dish with garlands of silver fruit around its edges.

“What is it?” Will asked.

“Chicken stuffed with rabbit and figs. We’ll start with a salad of blood oranges and asparagus. If you’re not too full.”

“You said I could— Are you actually teasing me?”

“Perhaps.”

Will’s smile lasted longer this time, all the way to the table. They sat down to eat and he picked up a spear of asparagus with his fingers. Hannibal took this behavior as a sign of his recovering spirits.

“The Wild Hunt, huh? Aren’t you supposed to be awake when you see them?”

“The spirits of dreamers may also join them. Perhaps you did a bit of both.”

“I can’t keep wandering around in the woods. You never know what’s out there.”

“That’s the second time you’ve said that to me. What do you think lives in your woods?”

Will shrugged. “I’ve seen coyotes nearby. Even a bear once.”

“Are you afraid of being attacked by a bear while you are sleepwalking?”

“No,” Will said.

“Then what do you fear?”

“I don’t like not knowing what I’m doing.”

“The lack of control frightens you more than any potential consequences.”

Will swallowed and took a drink of the pinot noir Hannibal had poured to go with dinner. “That. Yeah. Guess so. Anyway. How’s the case? Any progress?”

“Abigail Hobbs was caught on security footage at a service station north of Baltimore. The current theory is that she and Marissa are heading for Canada.”

“Whose current theory? Not yours.”

“The US Marshals and the state police. Senior officials at the FBI.”

“Senior officials who include Jack Crawford?” Will asked.

“No. Jack does not believe she has left the area. Nor do I.”

“What do you believe?” Will bit into a slice of blood orange and licked a drop of juice from his lips.

“Jack and I both believe she will try to speak to you again. She would not have driven here from Minnesota without a pressing motivation.”

“Everybody wants to be understood.”

“And you can give her that,” Hannibal said.

“I can give everybody that. Doesn’t mean I want to.”

“But she will seek it nonetheless. Or do you believe she’s no longer interested in you?”

Will tapped his nail against the stem of the wine glass for a long stretch of seconds. “No. She’s not done with me. And she’s not done with her friend Marissa either.”

“Do you still believe Marissa is helping Abigail without coercion?”

“Why not? People believe what they want to believe. If I turned up at your door on the run from the cops, wouldn’t you at least hear me out?”

He looked up at Hannibal and met his eyes with an odd intensity. Hannibal couldn’t look away and he couldn’t lie. “Of course,” he said.

After dinner, they moved into the drawing room. Will had finished most of the bottle by himself and now poured himself a glass of scotch. “Light a fire,” he said.

Hannibal reached obediently for kindling and matches. He knelt by the fireplace. “Are you trying to get drunk, Will?”

“Excessive drinking can bring it on, you said.”

“Yes. Do you want to sleepwalk tonight?”

Will kicked off his shoes and folded himself into the corner of Hannibal’s sofa, knees drawn up. “If I can make it happen…”

“Then you are in control of it. For one night, at least.”

“Dumb,” Will said. He held his glass up against the fire and turned it so the crystal reflected orange and red. “But yeah.”

Hannibal brought out a plate of the chocolate tuiles that Will had liked so much last time. He sat down on the sofa, closer than he might have before their discussion by the lake, but not too close.

“What about fever?” Will said. “You said that could do it. And you said I felt warm before. Do I feel warm now?” Will blinked at him slowly. He leaned closer.

Helpless to do otherwise, Hannibal laid a hand on Will’s forehead. Will leaned into it and rested his head there. Hannibal brought his other hand up to cup Will’s cheek almost without noticing what he’d done and certainly without giving himself permission to do it. He stroked his thumb behind Will’s ear.

Will’s eyes creased in tired amusement. “Well, Doc? Am I hot?”

“You are a little warm.” Hannibal didn’t take his hands away, and Will didn’t pull back.

Will blinked at him, eyes very blue and very close. “If I got really stinking drunk, would you try to talk me into something?”

“As you said yourself, if you don’t want it, I’m not interested.”

Will reached out slowly and pressed his finger against Hannibal’s lower lip. And then pushed it into Hannibal’s mouth. “Bite it. Not too hard.”

Hannibal’s eyes snapped shut. He could taste the chocolate on Will’s skin. His cock started to harden so fast it left him dizzy. He wanted to suck. Instead, carefully, he closed his teeth around Will’s finger with just enough pressure to dent his skin.

“Little harder,” Will said. “Look at me.”

Hannibal closed his teeth more tightly, aware of the give of Will’s flesh and of how easy it would be to keep going. After a few fluttering tries, he got his eyes open. He could smell blood and wondered if it were his own, so loud now beneath his skin.

Will was staring at him, eyes very wide. After a few more seconds, he pulled his hand back. He finished off his scotch and held out the empty glass. Hannibal rose, refilled it, and returned it to his hand.

“Am I sick?” Will said.

“It may be the heat of the fire,” Hannibal said, voice rough. He felt much too warm himself. “Shall I get a thermometer?”

“Are we going to play doctor? Do I get a full checkup?”

“Will.”

Will sighed. He leaned into Hannibal and slumped down against his side, head on his chest. “Tomorrow. Maybe.”

“You’re staying here tonight then?”

“Yeah.”

“In my bed or in the guest room?”

Will looked up at him. “Your bed.”

They sat in silence.

Hannibal watched Will, which was like watching the fire: minute flickers and changes and the stirring of uncomfortably primal feelings. He could think of nothing to say.

When Will finished his scotch, he ran a finger around the bottom of the glass to wet it in the remnants of his drink. He pressed it to Hannibal’s lips again and inside. This time, Hannibal could not stop the reflex to suck. His tongue pressed against Will’s finger, and his cheeks hollowed briefly. His eyes closed and remained closed when Will pulled his finger from Hannibal’s mouth.

“How much drinking is excessive?” Will said. “Am I going to ride out with the Wild Hunt tonight?”

Hannibal felt drunk himself, though he’d had barely three glasses of wine. And two tastes of Will’s skin. He shook his head. “I don’t know, Will. I can only say that I will be here if you do.”

Will wet his lips, tongue a brief pink flicker. His cheeks were flushed and his eyes bright, but he looked perfectly in control of himself. “Going to lock me in your room all night?”

“Would you prefer that?”

“Maybe you should just hold onto me. It worked for Tam Lin.”

Hannibal closed his eyes briefly, trying not to imagine that and failing. “I will if you want me to. But if I were to choose a surrogate out of legend for you, it would not be Tam Lin.”

“Who then?”

“La Belle Dame sans Merci, I think.”

Will breathed out a laugh. He caught Hannibal’s wrist and pulled him up. “Come on. Let’s go to bed.”

Chapter Text

Upstairs, Hannibal busied himself with finding a spare toothbrush, towels, and pajamas for his guest and with trying to calm the overclocked thud of his pulse. When he returned to his bedroom, Will was sitting on the edge of his bed in his boxers and a T-shirt. A bloody bandage cut across his upper arm.

“What is this?” Hannibal reached toward it but stopped short of touching it. He remembered smelling blood earlier. That must have been from this.

Will glanced at it. “I got it sleepwalking. A branch or something.”

“I’ll get you a clean bandage.”

“It’s fine,” Will said.

“Let me tend it for you.” Hannibal could hear the yearning in his own voice and could do nothing about it. In truth, he didn’t want to do anything about it. “Please.”

Will blinked at him a couple of times, lips parted. He swallowed. Hannibal watched the movement of his throat. Finally, he nodded.

Hannibal brought bandages, antiseptic ointment and a bowl of water to the bed instead of bringing Will into the bathroom. He peeled off the bandage, and the scent of fresh blood filled his nose.

“This is a clean wound for a branch.”

Will shifted on the bed. “Maybe it wasn’t a branch.”

“What then?”

“I don’t know, do I? I was asleep.“ He wet his lips.

Hannibal waited, hand cupped over the wound, the scent in his mouth and in his lungs.

“The thing I was riding, in the dream, it was a stag with black feathers. Huge. Sharp, sharp antlers. I keep dreaming about it. I was dreaming about it when Abigail—“ He gestured to the wound from Abigail’s knife.

“It’s not surprising you’d dream of antlers. Especially after those photos I sent you of her hunting cabin.”

Will took a deep breath. “Well, unless I tripped and fell on a deer, it’s got nothing to do with this.”

“Perhaps you were not as alone in the woods as you believed you were.”

Will stared at him for several seconds without blinking. He shook his head once, sharp and hard. “If you’re right, those guys you’ve got watching me really were doing a shitty job.”

“And it’s just as well you are here with me tonight.”

The words escaped him, and he looked up, almost afraid of Will’s reaction to them. But Will was just watching him, quiet and still. Hannibal met his eyes and breathed in deeply, filling himself with the scent of Will’s blood.

Will’s hand came to rest on his hair. “There’s something you want.”

Hannibal’s grip on the bowl tightened, and the water sloshed. “To tend your wound. I told you.”

“Is that all? I don’t think it is. I want you to do it. I don’t care what it is.”

Hannibal wanted to sink the plumbline of his tongue into the wound and measure its depth and fill his entire mouth with Will’s taste. “The possibility of infection—”

“Doesn’t interest me.” Will gripped his hair painfully tight. “Come on, Hannibal. Things don’t change unless you change them. Who do you want to be? The guy who wouldn’t do it or the guy who would?”

Hannibal knew the answer he wanted to give and he knew the truth. He leaned in slowly and breathed over the wound. Will’s free hand gripped his shoulder, and Will took a shuddering breath himself. Hannibal dipped his head and sealed his mouth over the wound. A hole in Will’s body. A way inside.

He licked over it, feeling Will’s fingers drive harder into his skin. He pressed his tongue against it. Will made a low sound that rose in pitch and faded out entirely as Hannibal pushed the tip of his tongue into it.

The smell and the taste of blood, of Will, filled his nose and mouth and mind. He set his teeth to the flesh around the wound just hard enough to dent it. His saliva trickled over Will’s arm. His mouth was watering. He was hard

The wound was deep but narrow. Only an inch of his tongue would fit, but he thrust that inch into it again and again, hoping to get deeper. Will was clutching him, sinking his nails in, making soft breathless noises each time Hannibal entered his body. Hannibal wriggled the tip of his tongue in the wound, and Will cried out, almost panting. Hannibal breathed in hard through his nose, dizzy, but that only flooded him with the scent of Will’s blood and arousal.

Hannibal pressed Will back onto the bed, and Will went easily. The bowl of water tipped and spilled. It soaked the mattress and their clothes. Hannibal could feel the wet outline of Will’s cock. He pressed his tongue in again and felt his own cock jerk and his muscles clench. He did it again, deeper, wriggling in, seeking and tasting fresh blood as he split the wound wider.

Hannibal came with a startled cry. Will’s nails scored his side. “Don’t stop. Don’t stop, don’t fucking—“

Hannibal didn’t stop. He thrust into fresh blood and swallowed and sucked. He flicked his tongue around the edges of the wound over and over, and Will shuddered against him. Will’s hips jerked, and Hannibal felt the heat and smelled it when he came.

Hannibal licked once more. Will heaved a breath like a sob. They clung to each other, one or both of them shaking.

Hannibal pried his eyes open and his mouth away from Will’s arm, he saw that the water had soaked half the bed and spilled onto the floor. His trousers and Will’s boxers were stained with semen. The bedclothes had twisted around them. Will still had one bare foot braced on the floor, calf taut to hold him in position. His face was buried in Hannibal’s neck.

Hannibal sat up. He pulled Will along with him and onto his feet. “A shower.”

Will gave him a jerky nod. They stripped together in the bathroom. Will’s cock lay against his thigh, damp and sticky. His lower legs and side were covered in scratches.

“Did you get these last night as well?”

Will nodded again.

Hannibal leaned down to examine one particularly deep scratch along this ribs. He traced it with one finger.

“Don’t,” Will said softly. “Not—not right now.”

Hannibal looked up at him. Will was staring down at him, flushed, eyes glazed and hazy. Hannibal realized with a small shock that Will had expected him to do to this wound what he had done to the other. The shock was more pleasure than guilt.

“I was only thinking it should be cleaned. Truly.”

“I cleaned them last night. This morning. Whatever. As well as I could anyway.”

Hannibal reached a hand into the shower to feel the water. It was hot. He held the door and gestured Will inside. They stood under the water together, soaking in it. Hannibal watched the clear film of it drip down Will’s naked body.

“Take a picture, it’ll last longer,” Will said, but he looked more amused than annoyed.

He didn’t object when Hannibal took up the soap and started to wash his wounds.

“Don’t tell anyone,” Will said abruptly. “The sleepwalking, I mean. Or any of it.”

“It would be a good reason for Jack to leave you alone. He’ll be back from Minnesota tomorrow, and he will want to speak to you.”

Will blinked through the water that ran down his face. “Don’t tell him.”

“You shouldn’t be involved in this. It’s affecting you. There is no shame in admitting that.”

Will pressed up against him, the full length of his naked body touching Hannibal’s. “Promise me you won’t tell anyone.”

It took Hannibal a few seconds to remember how to breathe, and then he breathed in Will’s scent and that came close to overwhelming him again. “I suppose you know what I’m going to say.”

“Mm,” Will agreed. “I like it. That you’ll do whatever I want. That you want to do whatever I want. Even if you know it’s not such a great idea.”

“Will you at least consider severing your involvement with this case? I think Jack was wrong to invite your participation. And I was wrong to—“

“What? Seduce me into it? What do you think you did? It was my choice.”

“Of course. I’m concerned for you. That’s all.”

Will pushed his dripping hair back from his face and met Hannibal’s eyes. “You don’t get to tell me what to do just because you like me.”

“I only asked the question.”

“The question was a suggestion and you backed it up with emotional blackmail.”

“It wasn’t my intention.” Hannibal squeezed out shampoo and held out his sudsy hands in a peace offering. Will bent his head and let Hannibal work the shampoo into his hair. “How should I express my concern then? What would you find acceptable?”

The only sound for a long time was the patter of water on the floor of the shower. Steam had fogged the glass and isolated them from the everyday reality of Hannibal’s bathroom and the house beyond. Hannibal wished briefly that they might stay in this small world forever.

“Maybe there isn’t a way I’d be okay with,” Will said finally. “Every way I can think of sounds like manipulation to me.”

“That has been your experience.”

“When people want you to do something, they tell you how good it’d be for you. Or they say it’d mean a lot to them. Or they want you to stop doing something because you’re scaring them. Like it’s your fault. Like they’re not responsible for their own goddamn emotions. It really pisses me off.”

Will tipped his head back to rinse his hair. Hannibal watched his chest and shoulders flex. Water ran down the clean lines of his body. It caught in the curly hair between his legs and dripped over his thighs and cock.

“Are you responsible for your own emotions?” Hannibal asked.

“I don’t shove them on other people.”

“If you were concerned for me, would you keep that to yourself?”

Will frowned a little and licked water from his lips. “Why would I be concerned for you?”

“I have a dangerous job.”

“But you know what you’re doing. You’re not stupid.”

“Bad luck can triumph over any amount of training and intelligence. What if Abigail Hobbs had waited for us with her rifle instead of killing her parents first and giving us a warning? I was the first agent in the door. She might have killed me instead.”

Will’s frown grew. “She couldn’t. She had to kill her parents first. They mattered way more than you did.”

“And if they had escaped her? If they had been at work when we came for her?”

“It wouldn’t have happened.” Will turned his back to Hannibal, face lifted toward the spray. “I would’ve known.”

Hannibal stepped closer. He put a hand on Will’s back and felt the twitch and tightening of muscle. “Will you know in the future? In every case? Even the ones you are not involved with?”

Will twisted away from his touch. “Shut up. You’ll be fine.”

“And if I’m not?” Hannibal bent close to Will’s neck. He breathed in the steam and the warm scent of Will’s discomfort. “Will you mourn for me?”

Will turned to face him. His eyes were uncertain, lips parted and glassy with water. Hannibal wanted badly to kiss him, but he stayed still, as though Will were some wild thing in the woods that might as easily gore him as run away if startled. Hannibal thought he would prefer the wound to Will’s absence.

Slowly, without meeting his eyes, Will reached out and put a hand on his chest, over Hannibal’s heart. He didn’t speak.

“If you ever had reason to express concern for me,” Hannibal said carefully, “I would not see it as manipulation. It might not affect my actions, but I would welcome it as a sign of your attachment to me.”

Will still said nothing. His throat worked briefly. He edged closer, both hands on Hannibal’s chest now. He leaned forward until his forehead rested on Hannibal’s collarbone.

Hannibal didn’t dare touch him. They stayed like that until the water ran cold and then Will jerked back from him and got out to grab a towel. He dried himself off roughly, reopening two of the scratches across his side.

Hannibal disinfected and dressed his wounds in silence. He stripped the bed, put towels down on the mattress to soak up the water, and then led Will into the guest room. They got into bed still naked. Will smelled so good, warm and damp and strangely sweet, with the sharper salt-metal tang of blood underneath.

“You want something,” Will said. “Again.”

Hannibal wanted to drown himself in Will’s skin. “I want many things.”

“As long as you don’t want to tongue-fuck the hole in my arm again, go for it. I think once a night might be my limit for that.”

“You would let me do it again?” Hannibal’s voice sound rough and little breathless. Aroused. He had never conceived of this as something that could arouse him, never even considered it as something he might want.

Will nodded. “It was…something.”

Hannibal eased closer. He hesitated, but Will had given him permission and his desire once again overrode propriety and sense. He pressed his face to Will’s chest and rubbed it against his skin. His stubble caught against Will’s sparse chest hair. Hannibal breathed in through both his nose and open mouth and tasted Will’s scent on the back of his tongue. He slid down to Will’s stomach, eyes half closed, bathing in scent.

Will’s hands came up tentatively to cup his head. “I don’t know what you’re doing,” he murmured. “But you’re really into it, aren’t you?”

A high whine lodged in the back of Hannibal’s throat. He wouldn’t let it out, but neither could he speak around it.

Will stroked his thumb over Hannibal’s eyebrow and down his temple. “It’s okay,” he said gently. “You don’t have to stop. I kind of like it.”

Hannibal pressed his whole face into the hollow of Will’s stomach and stayed there, eyes closed, as Will combed through his hair and stroked the back of his neck. He dared to touch the tip of his tongue to Will’s skin, just beside his naval.

Will gave a little hiccup of laughter and gripped Hannibal’s hair. “That tickles.”

Hannibal rubbed his nose there experimentally and was rewarded with a tiny snorting giggle.

Will squirmed under him, but not in a serious attempt to get away. “Hannibal.”

Hannibal looked up. Will was trying to look stern and failing badly. It came to Hannibal all at once that this was irrevocable, this thing between them. Change was coming for both of them, as unstoppable as the Wild Hunt.

“What?” Will said. “What’s that look for?”

Hannibal shook his head, struck dumb. He moved up Will’s body and nudged him onto his side so that he could curl around him from behind. He laid a hand over Will’s stomach and nuzzled behind his ear.

He expected Will to insist on an explanation, but Will only put a hand over his and leaned back against his chest. They lay still, listening to each other’s breath until they fell asleep.

Chapter Text

Will lurched awake. His phone was ringing, and he groped on the floor to answer it. It was the dog sitter he’d gotten to stay over last night. She wanted to tell him that there were two police cars parked in the bushes at the end of his driveway. He told her it was something to do with poachers and not to worry about it.

Hannibal walked in with a breakfast tray and an inquiring expression.

“Dogsitter,” Will said.

Hannibal raised his eyebrows. “Then you planned to stay last night before you even arrived here?”

Will shrugged. “It’s good to have options.”

“And you didn’t tell her about your visit from a serial killer?”

“She’s not Abigail’s type. Tall, redhead, thirties. She’s perfectly safe. What’s for breakfast?”

Hannibal gave him a long look but said nothing else.

He set down the tray and slid back under the covers before giving him a tour of breakfast: warm biscuits with honey, sliced strawberries, ham and grits, which Will hadn’t had for years. They smelled just like he remembered, rich and savory. A pat of butter was melting on the top.

Hannibal got some on his fork and held it out to Will.

Will looked at it and then looked at him. “Really?”

“Please,” Hannibal said. “Let me.”

“Are you just going to beg for whatever you want now?”

“You shouldn’t provide positive reinforcement for unwanted behaviors.”

Will fought down a smile. “So I’ve got only myself to blame?”

“Precisely.”

“Okay, fine. Feed me the damn grits.”

Hannibal held the fork to his lips. Will opened his mouth and took the offered bite. He closed his eyes. It tasted like the past, or like a past he’d never really had, bright and warm and comfortable. Simple. His life at the moment was anything but simple.

He let Hannibal feed him another bite and then some bacon. Hannibal pressed a slice of strawberry against his lips, and Will licked his finger as he took it. Hannibal’s pupils were wide and dark. He watched Will almost without blinking. He’d fed Will nearly all the grits and half the bacon before Will put a hand on his wrist and asked if he was going to eat anything himself.

Hannibal blinked at the food like he’d just remembered he was also a human being and needed it to survive.

Will took the fork from him. “You want me to…” He scooped some of the grits and gestured toward Hannibal’s mouth. “Or does that not work with whatever weird thing you’ve got going on?”

“I don’t know,” Hannibal said slowly. He sounded dazed. He looked dazed.

Will liked it. He’d liked it last night too. He held the fork to Hannibal’s lips and coaxed him to take it.

“It’s for you,” Hannibal murmured. His eyes were half-closed.

“I’ve had plenty. It’s your turn now.” Will fed him another bite and watched the curve of Hannibal’s lips around the fork and the movement of his throat as he swallowed. Will fed him sliced strawberries with his fingers, one by one, until the bowl was empty. Hannibal leaned back against the pillows and let him do it.

Will touched his lips afterward. They were sticky from the juice. Hannibal slid his cheek against Will’s hand, breathing in.

“You’re smelling me again,” Will said.

“I can’t help it.”

“You’re not trying to help it.”

“No, I’m not.” Hannibal leaned sideways and pressed his whole face against Will’s neck. The tip of his nose rubbed lightly behind Will’s ear.

Will squirmed. “Why?”

Hannibal sighed, which also tickled Will’s ear. “I have an extremely acute sense of smell.”

“Like a dog,” Will said slowly, thinking of his own pack sniffing him all over when he came home.

“Not that acute, but certainly more so than any other human I have met.”

Will pulled back to look at him. “Could you have tracked Abigail Hobbs through those woods?”

“They had dogs for that.”

“Later. Not when she first ran.”

Hannibal was silent for a moment. “Perhaps I could have. At the time, it did not occur to me. I was thinking of your injury. And I don’t know that I would have done it in any case.”

“Jack doesn’t know.”

“None of my colleagues do. I do use it at work, but I would not care to do it on command.”

“That’s fair,” Will said. “It’s none of their business. Do I really smell that good?”

“When the scent of your aftershave has dissipated, yes.”

Will grinned. “Harsh. Okay. You can go back to what you were doing if you want.”

Hannibal leaned against his side and breathed against Will’s skin like it was the only thing he wanted to do all day. After a minute or two, Will slid an arm around his shoulders and rested a hand on the back of his neck.

Hannibal seemed utterly content with this. Happy. And Will had done almost nothing except exist in his presence. Will wondered what sex with him would be like. He thought he’d like to find out.

“Do you have to work today?” Will asked.

“Yes. I should go in soon.” The words were muffled against Will’s skin.

“Doesn’t seem like you’re going anywhere.” Will stroked his hair and down his back. “Maybe you should just stay here. With me.”

Hannibal pulled back enough to look at him. “With you?”

Will slid down in the bed and tugged Hannibal on top of him. Hannibal’s eyes were half closed, gold-brown irises like half moons.

“I need to go in,” Hannibal said. His cock was rigid against Will’s thigh. “With Jack gone, I’m the senior agent. I’m responsible.”

“What if I call Jack and tell him I lied on your psych eval? That you’re not fit for duty. That you’re not fit for anything but staying home and fucking me through the mattress?”

Hannibal gripped the sheets with both fists. “You’re teasing me.”

“Maybe. You’ll have to stay home to find out.”

Hannibal dropped his head to Will’s chest. “Will, I can’t. Truly.”

Will laid a hand on his hair. He liked this. Hannibal’s undemanding weight on top of him. His desperation. Will shifted to rub up against Hannibal’s cock. Hannibal’s groan rumbled through both their bodies.

“Will. Please.”

“Please what? What exactly do you want from me?”

“Everything,” Hannibal said.

“What do you want from me specifically right now?”

Hannibal stole a glance up at him through the fringe of his hair. “I want to rub off on you and lick my semen off your skin.”

Will blinked twice while he processed that. “Okay,” he said.

Hannibal’s eyes widened. “Do you mean it?”

“Yeah. That was more specific than I was expecting, but yeah. Go ahead.”

“Will—“

“No take backs. Do it.”

Their eyes met and held for a second and then Hannibal yanked at the drawstring on his pajamas and pushed them down around his thighs. He shifted up until his cock dragged against Will’s bare stomach and let out a slow sigh as he started to move.

His eyes were closed. Will watched the shift and roll of muscles in his arms and shoulders and back. He raised his head to see Hannibal’s ass clench as he thrust forward and down, rutting against Will’s skin. His cock was leaking pre-come, getting them both sticky, making the slide a little easier. Hannibal’s breath came in time with his thrusts. His exhales grew harsher. The sound of them and the friction of skin filled the room.

“That’s good,” Will murmured. He cupped the back of Hannibal’s head. He felt almost protective of him in this moment, with Hannibal laid so bare. “Go on. You can do it harder than that.”

Hannibal made a soft noise and pressed his face to Will’s shoulder. “Will. Please.”

“Please what? You want something else? Just ask.”

Hannibal was silent for a few seconds, thrusting against him. One hand clutched Will’s shoulder. “Come to work with me,” he said finally. “Or wait for me here. Let me see you again tonight. Please.”

Will wanted it, to see Hannibal again, not to be parted from him. To do this again, or more. To touch, to be touched. He also wanted Hannibal to give in to him. To give up on saving Marissa and catching Abigail. To let Will rule him instead of his duty. “You’re seeing me right now. Stay. We can do whatever you want.”

Hannibal’s breath shook, and he slipped an arm under Will’s back to hold him tight as he came. “I can’t,” he murmured, and he said it again as he moved down Will’s body and licked streaks and smears of semen from Will’s belly. He lick in broad flat strokes, thorough, covering every inch of skin.

Will put a hand in his hair and squeezed it slowly into a fist. “You can.”

Hannibal looked up at him, mouth red, semen on his chin. “We have to find them. Before Abigail does to Marissa what she did to all the others. You must see that.”

Will only saw that Hannibal cared about something more than him, and he didn’t like it. He wavered, pulling Hannibal’s hair until it stretched the skin of his forehead. And then he let go and made himself smile. “Of course,” he said. “You’ll find her. I’m sure you will.”

He couldn’t say that he didn’t care if Marissa lived or died. He couldn’t say that he would prefer her to die while Hannibal stayed in bed with him all day because it would mean Hannibal had chosen him over her life. It had been years since Will had hit so hard against the wall that divided him from normal people and much, much longer since the impact had hurt.

He waited until Hannibal was in the shower and then slipped out of bed and out of the house and hoped that his absence hurt Hannibal half as much.

Chapter Text

Somewhere on the highway, Will lost himself. One second: simmering with anger, head pounding, patting himself down for aspirin. The next: in the woods.

He smelled rain and heard the baying of his dogs in the distance. They didn’t bay when they hunted. They’d caught what they were after.

Steam boiled around him, and he turned. The ravenstag lowered its head, feathers shifting like oil in the moonlight. Will closed his eyes. He was asleep. He was dreaming again. Had to be. He dug his nails into his arms.

When he looked again, the stag was gone, but he could still hear his dogs. And, borne on a cold wind through the trees, he could smell death. The wind pulled him forward, and the crackle of leaves under his feet sounded like fire.

He came to a small clearing. The first thing he saw was blood. It coated the fallen leaves and soaked into the earth. Of the body, he could see only one denim-clad leg and a pale face, eyes open and staring at the sky, immobile and inanimate. The rest was blocked from view by the feeding dogs.

Abigail stood a few feet off. She leaned against the tree, hand tight on the trunk, and she didn’t take her eyes off the scene even when Will walked over to stand next to her.

“Marissa?” Will said.

“She was my best friend growing up.”

“What changed?”

Abigail shrugged. “I guess I did. Or maybe I was different all along. We used to do stuff, burn bugs with magnifying glasses, things like that. But then we got older and I wanted to do more, and she said it was cruel. And I didn’t really know what that meant.”

“I know,” Will said.

“I pretended I did. And we still hung out. But it was different. Everything was different.”

“She was still your friend. She still came when you called because you were in trouble.”

“Her mistake,” Abigail said.

“Did she figure out her mistake?”

“I told her. Not everything. Only a little bit. I thought she’d understand. I didn’t want to hurt her.” Abigail wrapped her arms around herself. “The dogs are really well trained. I hardly had to do anything. Once I started chasing her, they were right there with me. And they waited for me to cut her first.”

“They’re good dogs.”

“My dad used to have hunting dogs. They weren’t like this.”

Will said nothing.

Buster trotted over, stub tail wagging, and deposited a lump of bloody viscera at Will’s feet. Will knelt down to scratch his ears. “Thanks, buddy. Good boy. But I don’t need it. You have it.” He tapped the ground beside it. Buster wolfed it down and went back for more.

“You do this a lot?” Abigail asked.

“Did you have a plan for the body?”

Abigail surveyed her dead friend. “Well, I can’t really do it the way I usually do. She’s kind of a mess now, and there’s dog drool on everything. I guess bury her out here?”

“I don’t want bodies in my woods.”

“What do you do with yours?”

Will watched the dogs and didn’t answer.

“Come on,” Abigail said. “This obviously wasn’t their first time. Or yours. All that stuff you told me before about wanting to be understood, you wanted that too. You’re like me.”

Will passed a hand over his face. His head ached so badly he couldn’t think. He was past the point of denial. Or caring. “I don’t let the dogs eat until I’ve gutted the body. They get the offal. I get the meat. The bones are good for soup.”

“What about the heads?”

“I burn them, break them up, scatter the pieces in the stream.”

“We can do that.” Abigail looked up at him, eyes bright. “We can do it together.”

“No,” Will said.

“Why not? It’s like fate. Two hunters, the same prey. Haven’t you ever wanted to hunt with someone else?”

Not until he met Hannibal. Will tried to imagine the three of them, father, father, and daughter, but he knew before the picture fully formed that it wouldn’t work. He wanted Hannibal all to himself.

“Not with you,” he said.

Her eyes went cold. Her jaw set. One of the dogs looked up and whined. “I knew I should’ve killed you. No one would’ve found you out here for weeks. Talk about a perfect crime. And you couldn’t even fight back.”

Will touched his bandaged arm. “You did this.”

“I tried to talk to you in the woods that night, but you didn’t answer.”

“I was sleepwalking.”

“Yeah. I thought you were pretending, so I stuck you to make sure, but you weren’t. You looked like you were waking up after that, so I left.” She took a step closer. “You want to know what I said?”

Will shook his head wearily.

“I said I thought you were like me. Now I know, but I thought so before. I said we should go after that FBI agent. Do you remember?”

Will backed away and shook his head again, but something was coming back to him. He didn’t want it.

“I saw him with you in Minnesota, taking care of you after I knocked you into the pond. The way he touched you. Like he cared. Like my parents, like Marissa. He wouldn’t care if he knew. He’d put you in prison. Maybe he’d even shoot you.”

Will knew it was true. His back hit a tree, and he leaned hard against it. He could feel his pulse in his ears like a drum.

Abigail came closer. “But if we got him out here, he’d run. We’d catch him. And you could keep him forever. Inside.” She pressed her palm to his stomach.

Will caught her wrist and shoved her back. He could feel his sense of himself slipping away, a receding tide that exposed the mud flats underneath, barren and featureless and too easily molded into something that was not him.

He looked at the dogs, still gorging themselves. He tried to feel the separation between the body on the ground and himself. This was why he killed, to make the distinction. The other was not him, was dead, was meat. Food. But Abigail was still here, still alive, still tangled up in his mind and too close to him.

Will thought of his dream, of hunting Hannibal here. He could do that. They could do that. It would solve everything. Hannibal’s death would give him an excuse to sever his ties with the FBI. No one would show up at his house unexpectedly or want his time and company.

He could send Abigail away afterward, keep Hannibal safe in his freezer, and he’d be okay. Stable. Alone. Hannibal would never talk to him or tickle him or confuse him ever again. They would never kiss even once. Or maybe they could do that, Will could do that while Hannibal was…dying. While Hannibal was leaving him.

“Will?”

“No,” he said. His sense of self solidified. “You need to leave. I don’t want to see you back here again.”

He whistled for his pack and set out through the trees without waiting for an answer.

\*

Washing the dogs’ feet and faces in the stream was a long and mindless task. It left his back aching and his hands freezing. He sacrificed his jacket to get them all a little dryer and then he took them back to the house.

His car was the only one in the driveway. No Hannibal. No cops. Abigail must’ve parked a long way off and hiked in to avoid the surveillance on Will’s house. Hopefully she’d left the same way.

Now the only problem was the body. He didn’t want bodies on his property, but it was too much of a mess to joint and cut properly now. Despite what he’d told Abigail, it would be quickest and safest to bury it. If the FBI ever got enough on him for a search warrant, he was fucked anyway. The hole would need to be deep. He’d be digging a long time.

Will set off into the woods again late that afternoon with a shovel and pickaxe. Marissa’s body lay where he’d left it. He squatted down, hands hanging loose between his knees, and stared at it. He blinked.

It was Hannibal lying there with his stomach torn open.

Will put his hands over his eyes, but the image remained vivid. He breathed in hard and let the scent of carrion into his lungs. Hannibal’s body rotting in the forest. The flies had found it hours ago and buzzed around the corpse, feet sticky with blood.

He lurched upright and turned away. At the edge of the clearing, he stood with his back to the body. It wasn’t Hannibal. It was a stranger. He didn’t know this girl or care about her.

Except that he could feel her fear and pain like a mist seeping from her body, like they were his own. Like they were Hannibal’s. If Will hunted him through the forest, would Hannibal be afraid? Would he be shaken? Would he beg Will for mercy? Will wouldn’t hunt him with Abigail, but he might do it alone. Just the two of them.

Part of Will wanted to see that, to hear it, to kiss him like that. To be Hannibal’s whole world. Forever. He closed his eyes. He could see it perfectly.

Chapter Text

It was well after dark by the time Hannibal got home, which was why he did not immediately see Will Graham standing on his doorstep. Will faced the door, still and rigid. As Hannibal approached, the motion-activated light came on. It would shut off after ten minutes with no further movement. Will must have been standing there in the dark for some time.

“Will?” Hannibal got no response. He moved closer. Will’s hands were covered in blood.

Hannibal glanced around quickly, but the neighborhood was still and quiet. Will’s car was parked up the street, one door partially open. He unlocked the house and hurried Will inside. Will went without protest or response for the first two steps, and then he stumbled and caught himself on the wall. His hand left a smeared red print.

“Hannibal?” Will turned his head frantically, seeking, panicked.

Hannibal stepped into his field of vision. “I’m here.”

Will took a gulping breath and came at him, hands outstretched. Hannibal was braced for an attack, but Will only clutched him close, arms around his neck and hot breath shuddering against his skin. “You’re alive,” he said.

“I am,” Hannibal said cautiously. He rubbed a hand slowly down Will’s back. “Are you all right?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know how I got here. I was in the woods, at my house. How did I get here? Did I come here with you?”

“This is my house. You drove yourself, I believe. Your car is outside. I found you waiting on my doorstep.”

“And you’re all right?”

“Did you think I wouldn’t be?”

Will just shook his head and held him tighter, so tightly that Hannibal had some difficulty getting a full breath. He disentangled himself gently and held Will by the shoulders. “Can you wait here a moment for me? I’m just going to lock your car.”

Will nodded dumbly. He still seemed dazed. He rubbed at his eyes and left smears of blood across his cheeks like wings. Hannibal waited, watching for the moment of realization.

When it came, Will only stared at his hands, red to the wrists. His mouth opened once, but he said nothing. He lifted his eyes to meet Hannibal’s.

“I’m going to lock your car,” Hannibal said. “And then you’d better tell me what you can remember.”

“I think I better go,” Will said slowly.

“Is there something I shouldn’t see in your car, Will?”

“I should go. You should really just let me go.”

“Would I ever see you again if I did?”

Will looked past him toward the front door and the car beyond. He wrapped his arms around himself, bloody hands clenched in his sleeves. His eyes jerked back to Hannibal. “I didn’t kill her.”

Hannibal looked past him at the bloody handprint. Not the best addition to his foyer. He’d had the walls repainted only two months ago. Briefly, he contemplated all the things he ought to do: call Jack and Beverly, call the police, keep Will in his sight to ensure he didn’t wash his hands so that the blood and any other evidence could be sampled and documented. Instead, he took a blanket from the hall closet.

“I’ll be back in a moment,” he said. He left Will staring after him and walked out.

The body lay in the backseat in full view of anyone who might come by. Will clearly hadn't been in his right mind when he loaded it into the car. Or he had been and all of this was pretense. Hannibal couldn't, at the moment, imagine why he would bring the body here by choice, but Will's motivations were not always obvious upon first examination.

It was Abigail's friend, Marissa. Hannibal had two photographs of her pinned to the board in his office. Even with her face speckled with blood and her midsection mostly gone, she was easy to identify. But this was not how Abigail Hobbs killed. Was this, perhaps, how Will Graham killed? The flesh looked as if it had been torn, not cut. Hannibal thought of Will's dogs.

He laid the blanket over the body. There would be trouble about that later, perhaps a formal reprimand, but he would deal with it when it came. If it marred his record, he was no longer certain he cared. What he cared about was that he and Will not be disturbed until the moment of his choosing.

He closed the back door and took the keys from the driver’s side seat. He locked the car and walked back to the house.

He found Will in the kitchen, feverishly drying clean hands on a dish towel. Will was flushed, hair damp at the temples with sweat. He looked down at the towel wrapped between his fingers and would not meet Hannibal's eyes. "I didn't kill her," he said.

"Do you know who she is?" Hannibal asked.

Will hesitated for a few long seconds. Hannibal wondered if he would lie. Perhaps Will was wondering the same thing. In the end, he nodded. "Marissa. Abigail’s friend.”

“Do you believe Abigail killed her?”

“Yes. Marissa said something wrong, or found out something and—“ Will made a slicing gesture. He swallowed and looked up at Hannibal with fear in his eyes that might or might not have been genuine. “I know this looks bad. I know. But I swear I didn’t touch her. You’ll help me, won’t you? Please, Hannibal. I need you.”

Hannibal wanted to fold him in his arms and promise him anything, but experience suggested that this appeal was pure manipulation, especially when Will stepped closer and clung to his sleeve.

He put a hand under Will's elbow. "Come and sit down."

They settled in the living room on the couch. Will sat pressed up against him, and Hannibal couldn't stop himself from putting an arm around his shoulders.

"Tell me how she died."

"I don't know," Will said. "She was dead when I got there.” He paused. “You saw the body. They’re good dogs. They didn’t know any better.”

“Your dogs did that?”

“I take them hunting with me sometimes. They always get their share."

Something in Will’s delivery prickled along Hannibal’s spine. "So you found the body. And then what?"

"I got the dogs off her and took them back to the house. I went back to the body. To stay with it until you could get there." He hunched away from Hannibal now, hands rubbing up and down his own thighs. "You remember that dream I told you about?"

"The wild hunt."

Will nodded. "It was you," he said in a rush. "I was hunting you. And when I looked at the body, I saw you."

"A vision?"

"A hallucination.” Will swallowed. “It wasn't the first one.”

When Hannibal laid a hand on his back, he found that Will was shaking. Part of it was the frantic rhythm of his heart thudding through his body, but other tremors came in a slow rhythm like waves.

"I saw you dead on the ground. And I felt like I'd done it. I'd killed you. Or I would, like it was a premonition. A harbinger of disaster. That's the last thing I remember before I woke up here." Will bent over his knees, hands clenched into fists.

Hannibal gazed at the opposite wall where he had a cross-section of a human skull mounted under a glass dome. He wished it were that easy to see into Will's head. What would he find if the man in his arms were rendered down to bones? What was the truth of him?

Hannibal rubbed his back and coaxed him out of his tight curl. Slowly, Will eased against him until his forehead rested on Hannibal’s shoulder.

There was at least some honesty there, Hannibal decided. He considered the hallucinations, the sleepwalking, the headaches and fever and lost time. And the sweet smell he had noticed on Will. He had put it down to his own, also currently fevered, imagination, but he inhaled deeply now and found it stronger than it had been the night before.

It had been many years since he had used his sense of smell for diagnosis. Cancer and diabetes were common enough and easy to identify by scent, but this was something rarer. Even with the other symptoms, it took him a moment to place it.

Will leaned away from him. “Not really in a mood to be snuffled at right now, Hannibal.”

“I’d like to take you to the hospital tomorrow for an MRI.”

Will froze. “What?”

“A brain scan.”

“Yeah, I didn’t think you were planning to scan my liver. What do you think is wrong with me?”

“I might be mistaken.”

“Don’t pull that doctor shit. Fucking tell me.” Will turned to face him and gripped his arm tight. “Right now.”

“The symptoms you are displaying would fit with a diagnosis of encephalitis. It’s not conclusive. There are other possible causes, but I did see a few cases before I left the hospital, and there was a particular scent associated with it.”

Will swallowed and blinked at him a few times. “You can smell it? What does it smell like?”

“There is a certain fevered sweetness. It has grown markedly stronger in the past few days.”

Will stared at him a few seconds longer and then bent over to rub both palms over his face. “It’s some kind of brain disease, right? That’s why I’m seeing this stuff?”

“It causes a inflammation of the brain tissue, yes.”

“And it’s treatable?”

“It is treatable.” He put a hand on Will’s shoulder. “It will take some time, but it’s reasonable to expect a full recovery. If my diagnosis is correct.”

“I kind of thought I might just be going nuts,” Will said quietly. “I’ve seen patients with hallucinations and weird fixations before. Sudden personality changes. It doesn’t usually end well.”

“Fixations?”

“You,” Will said.

Now it was Hannibal’s turn to stare. “Is that what I am?”

“I can’t stop thinking about you. It’s really annoying. Oh, don’t do that. Don’t make that gooey face at me.”

“I’m not making any sort of face,” Hannibal said, though he was fairly sure it was a lie. Not only his expression but his entire chest felt liquid and warm.

Will turned toward him and slid his arms around Hannibal’s waist. He leaned his head on Hannibal’s chest and sighed. The embrace felt honest this time, if only for the way Will gave no particular care to where his elbows ended up.

Hannibal held him and combed his fingers slowly through Will’s hair. Across the room, the skull grinned half a grin at him. He tried to think what to do. There was still a body in the car parked outside his house.

“Will.”

“I know. You have to call the cops,” Will said, muffled against Hannibal’s chest. “Am I going to be arrested?”

Hannibal wanted to say no very badly. He wanted to take Will away somewhere, far out of reach of the police and the FBI. He pictured the two of them in Lecter Castle, alone in the woods. “I can’t promise that you won’t be. But I will speak to Jack.”

Will looked up at him. “You believe me, right?”

Hannibal was silent for a long time. Did he? He couldn’t shape a more plausible version of events in his mind. Certainly Will had no reason to lure Marissa Schurr from Minnesota and kill her himself. Will was rude and abrupt, sometimes callous and often cruel, but Hannibal did not see in him the lack of empathy that he had seen in so many other killers over the years. And in himself. It was difficult to imagine Will killing without reason, and Hannibal could not, at the moment, see what reason he might have had.

“I don’t know that I do, entirely,” he said. “But I will still protect you to the best of my ability.”

Will looked up at him without any sort of expression that Hannibal recognized. “Always? No matter what?”

“Always. I promise.” It was the truth. He thought it would be the truth even if he knew for certain that Will had murdered Marissa Schurr. It was a foolish promise to make, but he couldn’t do anything else.

Will leaned up and carefully, slowly, pressed his lips to Hannibal’s. It only lasted a second. Will touched his cheek afterward and leaned their foreheads together. “I thought about doing that another time. But it’s better now.” He licked his lips, and they were still close enough that Hannibal caught a flash of that wet heat against his own mouth. “Okay. You better call Jack.”

Hannibal nodded, but he didn’t move, couldn’t make himself move for a long time after that.

Chapter Text

The FBI forensics van arrived first. They’d already descended on the body and Will’s Volvo en masse by the time Jack arrived. Jack found Hannibal in the kitchen making coffee.

“Are you serious right now?” Jack said.

“I believe we had this conversation on the phone, Jack.”

“We’re having it again. He shows up covered in blood with a body in his trunk—“

“He had blood on his hands. He wasn’t covered in it.”

“With a body. In his trunk. And you didn’t make the call immediately?”

“He was in a fugue state. It was some time before I could get a response from him. My duty as a medical professional—“

“Your duty as an FBI agent comes first.”

Hannibal poured him a cup of coffee and slid it across the counter to him. “I checked on the victim and found her beyond help. Will was not beyond help.”

“You don’t leave the body! Do you know what could’ve happened? What this could do to your career if it ends up on your record?”

“You must do as you think best,” Hannibal said.

They looked at each other. Jack’s willingness to bend the rules did not extend to behavior that he personally did not approve of, but Hannibal would be more useful to him with an untarnished record. They both knew that.

“I should have recognized his condition sooner,” Hannibal said. “I attributed his symptoms to stress caused by his involvement in this case.”

Jack picked up his coffee and let out a breath. “Encephalitis. That’s convenient.”

“He believed he was losing his mind. I wouldn’t call it convenient.”

“I’d call it a good excuse for murder.”

Hannibal stirred his own coffee, mindful not to grip the spoon too tightly. It had not escaped him that it would be a good defense at trial.

“You think so too. I know you, Hannibal. You’re one of the sharpest agents I’ve ever met. Or you were before you started following Graham around like a puppy dog.”

“I didn’t want him involved in this investigation at all, Jack. I told you I believed it would be damaging to him. You insisted. You wanted him to do my psych eval. You told me to get him to Minnesota. If I have been following him around, it is at your instigation.”

“I don’t remember telling you to lie back and think of the Bureau.” Jack leaned over the counter and poked a finger toward Hannibal’s chest. “Get your head on straight, or I’ll have to remove you from this case. I should do it right now. Your relationship with Graham—”

“My friendship with Will allows me to see him more clearly than you do. Your tendency to accuse anyone who disagrees with you of unclear thinking is one of your least attractive habits, Jack. And you are a poorer agent for it.”

Jack’s face froze. “I did not just hear that. Did I?”

“You did. Perhaps I should have told you sooner. I can’t imagine anyone else has had the courage.”

“Courage?” Jack bellowed. “Is that what you’d call grossly insulting—“

“I would call it necessary! If you will persist in the illogical hounding of an ill, unstable man who you dragged into this, don’t expect me to let him go undefended.” Hannibal took a breath and set his spoon down on his saucer with a small clink in the silence. He hadn’t meant to raise his voice. “He has no motive. No possible reason. Unless you can see him as another psychopath, one under all our noses, your accusations make no sense.”

Jack was watching him, anger gone from his face. Hannibal often wondered how much of the shouting and bluster was an act. “You really buy his story,” Jack said.

“I buy enough of it to give him the benefit of the doubt. And I am certain that he is a very ill man. He made poor choices. So would you, if your mind were on fire.”

“That doesn’t absolve him of all responsibility.”

“I’m not saying it does. I am only saying that he needs to be in a hospital, not a detention facility.”

“So get him to one. And if he disappears on us, it’s your ass on the line.”

“Understood,” Hannibal said.

\*

Will sat on the couch while various FBI agents and local cops swirled through Hannibal’s living room. He clutched a cup of coffee in ice cold hands. Hannibal had made enough for everyone, and apparently had a matching set of coffee cups for at least twenty people. The cups were now scattered over every available surface in the house.

Will hadn’t been arrested. He knew it’d been a close thing. He’d heard Jack shouting in another room, and then he’d heard Hannibal shouting, which he hadn’t expected and almost couldn’t believe. He might’ve blamed it on the encephalitis if he hadn’t seen Hannibal come out of the kitchen looking actually flushed with an expression that parted the ranks of agents and cops alike. He’d gone down on one knee next to the couch and told Will gently that he’d stay here tonight and go to the hospital in the morning, that Hannibal would be responsible for him, and that he’d better call someone about the dogs.

Once the dogs were taken care of, Will had tried to make himself invisible. He hadn’t moved from the couch, hadn’t met anyone’s eyes, stayed hunched over and drawn in on himself and hadn’t said a word to anyone but Hannibal. Agent Katz had stopped by to give him a judicious look and tell him that they’d get this straightened out as quickly as possible. That wasn’t exactly reassuring, but Will wasn’t sure she’d meant it to be.

It was hours before they all left. Will had provided directions to the kill site in the woods, and they were headed there next. They’d search his woods. They’d search his house. They’d search his barn with its freezer chest full of human remains. Someone would try to open it, just to make sure Abigail wasn’t hiding in there. They might let it go when they found it locked. They might not.

If they didn’t let it go, they would ask him for the key. It would be better to hand it over straight away. They’d open the freezer, see the fish and the frozen meat, and hopefully look no further. If they dug through it, he was fucked.

He picked at a button on his shirt. Like his freedom, it was hanging by a thread. He could leave tonight. Wait till Hannibal was asleep, take his car, and just go. He had money and ID stashed in a place he owned about two hours north. He had clothes there, another car, everything he might need. He could go and forget all of this. Forget Hannibal.

He could take Hannibal with him.

Will bit the inside of his cheek and tried to unthink that thought. It didn’t work.

Where could they go? Hannibal’s family home in Lithuania? That sounded remote enough. Planes and border crossings though. A boat would cut out a lot of that, make it easier to leave the country. He might manage to find one and get out to sea before Jack started looking for them.

But Hannibal had already chosen duty over Will once. He would do it again. Will needed to bind him closer. People did stupid things more often for sex than they did for love. Tonight.

Hannibal sank onto the couch beside him. “They’re nearly done.”

Will nodded, still wrapped up in his own head. “Can any of those cups go in the dishwasher?”

Hannibal sighed. “No.”

“I’ll help. Hannibal?”

Hannibal turned to look at him. “What is it?”

“If they put me in prison, would you come and visit me?”

“They won’t put you in prison.”

“But if they do?”

“Yes. I would visit you.”

Will leaned into his shoulder, foolishly comforted.

They washed and dried twenty-four coffee cups. Hannibal made lemon sole for dinner with new potatoes and spinach, restrained by his standards. Neither of them spoke of the case. After dinner, Will followed Hannibal up to bed.

They took turns in the bathroom. The spare toothbrush was still set out beside the sink from the night before. Will brushed his teeth and wondered if this would be the last time he saw this room, this house, the outside world.

When Will returned to the bedroom, Hannibal was sitting on the edge of the bed in striped pajama bottoms, looking at his phone. Will sat next to him and looked over his shoulder. Hannibal let him. He was texting with someone named Suttcliffe about Will’s MRI.

“A neurologist. I knew him in medical school and when I worked at Johns Hopkins.”

“What happens after that?”

“They will likely want to admit you, at least for a few days, while they begin treatment.”

Will looked down at his hands. He’d fallen into this role of someone who needed Hannibal’s protection, and somehow it seemed less and less a lie. “Will you come with me to the appointment? You’re supposed to be responsible for me, right?”

“I am, and I will. I’ll stay with you as long as you like.”

“Are they going to put guards on my door?”

“No,” Hannibal said, in a tone that meant, not if he had anything to say about it.

Will wasn’t sure he would have anything to say about it.

Hannibal touched his cheek, fingertips barely making contact. “What is it?”

Will leaned in and kissed him, harder this time than the first, with more intent. He put a hand on his chest and tried to push him back on the bed.

Hannibal caught his wrist. He gentled the kiss and finally pulled back, searching Will’s face with an unreadable expression.

“What’s this?” Will said. “You’ve wanted to jump me since we met and now that it’s my idea you’re saying no?”

Hannibal hesitated. He brought Will’s hand to his lips and kissed the back of it. “You still don’t need to manipulate me into being your ally.”

“I know that! Or I wouldn’t be doing this. Except apparently I’m not doing this.” Will jerked his hand away. “I’ll go sleep in the guest room.”

He was barely on his feet before Hannibal had his arms around him, pulling him into an embrace. Will shoved against him, not very hard. Hannibal wasn’t letting go. Will looked up finally, hands settling on Hannibal’s bare chest. His skin was warm, and his heart thumped slowly under Will’s palm.

“Can you blame me for questioning your motives?” Hannibal asked.

Will looked away. “I guess not.”

Hannibal’s hands moved down his back to rest at his waist. He dipped his head just a little, enough so that Will could lean up and bring their lips together. Will felt the warmth of Hannibal’s breath and the damp catch of his mouth. When he slid his tongue against Hannibal’s lips and inside, he got no resistance, only a tightening of the grip on his waist.

Hannibal pulled back after a few seconds. “Let’s get into bed. If you’ll stay with me tonight.”

Will nodded. They got under the covers. Hannibal switched off the lights, and Will turned toward him, head on his chest and one leg over his. “It wasn’t to get you on my side,” he said. It was a lie, but only half a lie. He’d wanted it too. It might be his last chance. “Most people are dull, and sex with them is dull, and they’re just not worth it. But you’re…”

“I’m what?”

“You’re okay, I guess.”

Hannibal let out an amused breath. He wrapped his arms around Will and hugged him so tightly that Will squirmed and smacked his chest.

Hannibal’s grip loosened, and he kissed the top of Will’s head. “You spoke of fixations and sudden personality changes. Encephalitis can cause those as well. Perhaps your attraction to me is a result of the disease. Have you considered that?”

“Now you’re just being a dick. You don’t really think that.”

“No,” Hannibal admitted. “But you are ill and you need rest, and there’s no reason not to wait until you’re out of the hospital. We have time.”

“What if we don’t?” Will looked up at him, thought he couldn’t see much. Just sharper shadows in the shape of Hannibal’s face resting against the softer shadows of the pillow.

“They’re not going to arrest you.”

“What if they do? What if this is the last night we get together?”

Hannibal rubbed slow circles on his back. “I believe I promised to visit you in prison.”

“How often?”

“At least once a week unless I’m called out of town for a case.”

“Twice,” Will said.

“All right, twice.”

“You promise? No matter what, until I get out?”

“I promise, Will. You have my word.”

Will closed his eyes. His jaw ached from clenching it, and his chest ached with emotions he didn’t want and couldn’t get rid of. “Okay.”

“Rest. This is all going to be fine. You’ll see.”

What a fucking mess. Will stared into the dark, exhausted and as far from sleep as he’d ever been. He’d always thought he’d run if they found him.

Chapter Text

Will’s MRI was at nine the next morning. Hannibal sat with Sutcliffe as the results scrolled across the computer screen.

“On the nose as usual,” Sutcliffe said. “You’re wasted in law enforcement. Or do they use you as a bloodhound?”

“It has been as helpful in my current job as it was in medicine. Perhaps more so.”

“Is that how you found this guy?”

Hannibal turned to look at him, though it was difficult to stop staring at the inside of Will’s head. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Sniffed him out? Hunted him down?”

Hannibal kept looking at him, expressionless, waiting.

“Come on, I know there’s something going on with him. I got a call from the head of the BAU this morning saying I’d better be sure about my diagnosis because I might have to testify to it under oath. He’s a suspect, right? You can tell me. You know I don’t talk just to hear myself.”

“He’s a person of interest in an ongoing investigation,” Hannibal said.

Sutcliffe rolled his eyes. “Fine. You were more fun in med school. We’ll keep him here for a while, see how he gets on with the treatment. He’s pretty badly off. If he did anything wacky in the past couple weeks, I think you could legitimately blame it on the encephalitis. You can tell your boss I said so and that I’ll say it again in court.”

“Thank you,” Hannibal said. He stood.

Sutcliffe stood as well and looked him over. “Did he kill somebody? Are you cooking up a murder defense here?”

“Does murder fall under your definition of wacky?” Hannibal asked.

Sutcliffe shrugged. “It does if you want it to. I owe you. I’ll call a nurse. You want to meet him in his room, or—“

“I’ll go with him,” Hannibal said.

“You want to fill him in on the scan results too? I’ve got a staff meeting in five minutes. I barely squeezed you in.”

“And I won’t forget it. I’ll tell him, yes.”

They parted. Hannibal went out to help Will sit up and slide off the metal table.

Will took out his ear plugs, rolled his shoulders, and rubbed his hands together. “I’m freezing,” he said. “Can we go home now?”

“I did tell you they’d want to admit you.”

Will tucked his hands under his arms. “So you were right?”

“Was there ever any doubt?”

That got a reluctant smile. “Yeah, okay, smartass. So where are we going?”

The nurse appeared just then and escorted both of them to Will’s room. She’d brought a wheelchair, which Hannibal expected Will to resist, but he slumped into it without a word. Hannibal took off his suit jacket and put it around Will’s shoulders. Will held it close around him as he had with Hannibal’s coat.

The clothes Will had worn to the hospital already sat on a shelf in the closet. They were yesterday’s clothes, spattered lightly with blood at the cuffs. Hannibal had packed a bag for him, and Will disappeared into the bathroom to change into pajamas.

He flapped the overlong sleeves at Hannibal. “Don’t you own T-shirts? Sweatpants? Something normal?”

“There is nothing abnormal about wearing pajamas to bed.”

“Who actually owns pajamas,” Will said, but it was just a grumble under his breath as he shuffled to the window, socks sliding on the tile.

“Your indictment of my matched set of twenty-four coffee cups was perhaps reasonable, but I’m fairly certain that many people own pajamas.”

Will waved this off, deliberately retracting his hand as far as he could so that the end of his sleeve flapped even more. “So I’m stuck here. Until when?”

“No one is going to force you to stay, but it would ease my mind if you waited until Dr. Sutcliffe approves your release. A few days, perhaps a week.”

Will walked over to him and stopped only when their bodies were nearly touching. “It’d ease your mind, huh?”

“It would. Are you going to be angry with me again for expressing my concern?”

Will shook his head slowly. He took half a step closer and leaned against Hannibal’s chest, gripping the edge of Hannibal’s sweater. Hannibal cupped his head with one hand and rubbed the other over his back, trying to ease whatever fears were eating him.

“Are you going to stay in the FBI forever?” Will said.

“Why do you ask?”

Will shrugged, sliding a chilled hand under Hannibal’s shirt to press against his skin. “You talked about going back to Lithuania.”

Hannibal closed his eyes. It took him a few seconds to get the question out. His chest tightened in what he thought must be panic as he spoke. “If I did, would you care to come with me?”

“Yes, you idiot,” Will said.

“When this is cleared up—“

“We could go now.”

Hannibal blinked slowly at him. “Will. Is there something you would like to tell me?”

\*

Will wanted Hannibal to know. It would be disastrous for Hannibal to know. He wanted to slice Hannibal open and hold him until he was gone. He wanted to make a life with him.

He shouldn’t have said it. He’d known it as soon as the words were out. Hannibal was already suspicious. Will felt his mind stretched on the rack, ready to snap.

The door to his hospital room opened, but he barely heard it through the storm inside him. The next thing he was aware of was Hannibal saying, very calmly, “You don’t need the knife, Ms. Hobbs. No one here wants to hurt you.”

Abigail looked between them. She held a six inch hunting knife with a serrated blade, the same one she’d used to cut Will’s cheek. The same one she’d used on Marissa. “Maybe I should’ve brought flowers,” she said.

Will tried to edge between her and Hannibal at the same time as Hannibal stepped forward to put himself between her and Will. They collided, shoulders bumping.

Abigail rolled her eyes. “I could just kill you both if you’re that into it.”

“I don’t think you could,” Hannibal said, still deadly calm.

He hadn’t reached for his gun. No, he didn’t have it. Despite Will’s stamp of approval, he still didn’t have clearance. They wanted to review his psych eval, and it had only been a few days. Vertigo consumed Will. He had met Hannibal barely a week ago.

“I heard you were sick,” Abigail said to Will. “Have you told him how sick you really are?”

Will went for her without thought. He dove for her legs and knocked her down, but she was fast. She’d have to be, to do everything she’d done. He heard Hannibal’s voice raised in a wordless cry and felt a flash of heat across his stomach. He saw light on Abigail’s blade and saw it stained red.

She rolled away. He followed and landed a fist in her face. She was grinning. Blood in her teeth. His or hers? Did it matter? They were family, all three of them, bound by other people’s blood.

Hannibal hauled him back and made a grab for Abigail himself. Will clutched at his bleeding stomach.

She crouched, knife in front of her. “Ask him what’s in his freezer, Agent Lecter.”

Hannibal never took his eyes off her, but Will saw his focus waver.

Abigail saw it too. “Go on. Ask him. You already know, don’t you? You can take a guess anyway.” She looked at Will. “You should just tell him. Get it over with. Sorry, did I spoil your plans? Were you going to take him home for the dogs?”

Hannibal did look at Will then, less than a second, but it was enough. Abigail threw the knife.

Hannibal dodged without looking, without any possibility that he’d seen it coming. He was there and then he wasn’t, and the knife stuck in the closet door with a solid thunk.

Hannibal rushed her and pinned her against the wall. Will saw the second knife as it arced up toward Hannibal’s ribs.

“Don’t!” Will said. “He’s like us.”

Abigail and Hannibal both stopped. They turned slowly to look at him. Will met her eyes and avoided Hannibal’s. “He knows what it tastes like.”

It was as good as confessing to murder, but it got the point of Abigail’s knife away from Hannibal’s heart. Only an inch, a sag of muscles as she realized what he meant, but it was enough. Hannibal had her disarmed and face first against the wall in an arm lock in two seconds.

“Is it true?” She tried to crane her head to see Hannibal. “Is it?”

Hannibal was quiet for a long time. He didn’t look at either of them. “Are we speaking of human flesh?”

“We sure are,” Abigail said.

Another long pause. “Then yes. I know the taste.”

Abigail took a hitched breath. “But you’re not one of us. Not really. Are you?”

This pause stretched so long that Will thought his nerves would break on the cutting edge of it. “I don’t know,” Hannibal said.

All three of them stiffened at a voice from the hall: Jack, asking for Will’s room number.

“If they catch me, I will tell them,” Abigail whispered. “I’ll tell them everything.”

Hannibal pushed her sharply toward the bathroom. “Get in there. Don’t shut the door all the way. Get in the shower and be quiet.”

Abigail disappeared into the bathroom. Hannibal bent over the dresser and slammed his own head into the wood. He clutched it to stay upright and turned to Will, blinking, eyes unfocused. “It will explain why I didn’t go after her. I lost consciousness for a moment. Call for help.”

He arranged himself on the floor. Will shouted for help.

Jack was there seconds later. He took in Will bleeding on the floor and Hannibal struggling to rise with blood on his temple. “What the hell happened here?”

“Abigail Hobbs,” Hannibal said.

Jack strode back into the hall, dialing his phone and barking orders to the newly arrived security officers at the same time.

Hannibal knelt beside Will. Will gripped his wrist. He didn’t know what else to do and could think of nothing to say.

“Let me see your wound,” Hannibal said. He pushed Will’s shirt up and wiped away blood with a paisley handkerchief. “Not as bad as I feared. Someone will be here in a moment.”

Will swallowed. “You’re really doing this?”

Hannibal smoothed Will’s hair back from his face. “It appears that I am.”

\*

The next few hours took on the same quality in Hannibal’s mind as the winter occupation of his house by the man who had killed his family. He moved through it but was not part of it. He made choices that seldom seemed like choices. Color drained from the world and left the hospital curiously like the snowed-in forest of his childhood: anemic, paved with flat white surfaces and lacking in detail, more movie set than reality. Except when he looked at Will.

Will met his eyes with terrible hope and disbelief. His eyes were blue, his lips were pale, the creases at the corners of his eyes stood out like branching twigs reaching toward spring. Hannibal stayed with him, even when Jack wanted him elsewhere. He felt helpless to leave.

Will had seventeen stitches, but the knife hadn’t gone in deep. He would be weeks in healing. It might have been months. Or worse. Hannibal stayed by his bed and thought of his stomach and what he put in his stomach. And in his freezer.

“Your kitchen freezer?” he asked quietly at one point.

“Chest freezer. In the barn.”

“Is it locked?”

“Yeah.”

They took Abigail’s knives away for fingerprinting and to compare with the wounds on Marissa Schurr. That, finally, took Jack’s focus off of Will. The knife matched the wound pattern on Marissa’s body. Abigail’s prints were on it. Will’s were not.

By the time Will’s inedible hospital lunch was delivered to his room, Jack was gone. They had searched the hospital and found nothing. Will was asleep. Hannibal sat by his bed and considered the young woman in the bathroom.

It would be simple to kill her. It wouldn’t be simple to get away with it, but it should be possible. Those two thoughts circled each other and left little room for anything else. When she slipped out of the bathroom, he was still undecided.

“Is it true?” she asked. “Who did you eat?”

“I don’t intend to tell you.”

“What if I won’t leave until you do?”

“What if I call security and have you arrested?”

She crossed her arms over her chest. “And get your boyfriend arrested too?”

“I am a federal agent.”

She edged around the bed and leaned over to look at Will’s sleeping face. “You could be something else. I bet you’ve thought about it.”

He reached out and curled his fingers around her neck. “I am thinking about it right now.”

She jerked back and danced out of reach, smiling. “I really thought I’d kill you before I left, but now I think the world’s more interesting with you in it. I’ll make you a deal.”

“I am not interested in bargaining with you.”

“It’s a pretty good one. You leave me alone, I leave you alone. Stay off my case, I’ll stay off yours. You’re leaving the FBI anyway, right? You’re not gonna keep going after serial killers while you’re shacking up with one.”

Hannibal was silent. He looked down at Will’s slack, tired face.

Abigail sighed. “I’m just gonna pretend you’re agreeing with me. The three of us could’ve been something, you know. Something amazing.”

“Go,” Hannibal told her.

“Tell him I said goodbye.” She pressed her ear to the door for a few second and then slipped out of the room.

Hannibal waited for any outcry, but heard nothing. She was gone. He was alone. With Will.

Twenty minutes passed. He stood, not thinking, so carefully not thinking, and got in his car to drive to Wolf Trap.

Chapter Text

Will’s long and winding driveway seemed just as peaceful as it had the first time Hannibal drove down it, just as isolated, just as much an exit from civilization. There was no way he could have known how much.

Jack now had the formerly covert surveillance parked right in front of Will’s house, four cars’ worth of it. Hannibal spoke to the agent in charge and found that everyone but her and one other agent had been sent out to search the woods for Abigail. He told her he wanted to get some of Will’s personal effects for his stay at the hospital and headed into the house.

Inside, he found the dog sitter, shaken by the increased police presence but unwilling to leave her charges. Hannibal explained the situation—Will’s illness and involvement in a federal investigation—and arranged for her to continue her duties for the immediate future. She agreed, if reluctantly. Hannibal packed a bag for Will. And then he headed out to the barn.

He’d taken Will’s keys. The one that matched the lock on the freezer was easy to identify. It turned with a well oiled click. The first layer was fish and a few frozen steaks. When he had unloaded those, he found the catch that let him lift out a panel and see the rest. It began with a human jaw, tongue intact.

Other pieces were less immediately identifiable, but Hannibal could make some guesses. This large cut was a thigh, this fatty one perhaps off the stomach or back. This was certainly a lung. A set of kidneys. A heart.

Hannibal had always thought his lack of empathy a gift. It allowed him to do his job more effectively. It allowed him perspective. He didn’t have perspective now.

The frozen heart chilled his palms until they burned but he couldn’t put it down. He tried to imagine the faceless person it had belonged to, but his mind was filled to splitting with the image of Will with a knife in his hand and his pack baying at the heels of his prey.

Hunting. Will had said they could hunt together.

He closed his eyes and dropped the heart into the bag he had taken from Will’s closet. The meat fit poorly beside the clothes he had packed, but he stuffed it all in and got it closed. The agent didn’t look twice as she waved him off.

Hannibal drove it far away, unpackaged it, and buried it. Bugs and wildlife would take care of the meat in days. The jaw he smashed with a rock until it was jelly and bone splinters. He wiped the packaging clean of prints and left it in three different dumpsters on the way back to Baltimore. He could still smell the meat on the bag and on Will’s clothes inside it, but no one else would.

Will’s room had an agent guarding the door. Hannibal sent the young man off for coffee and got no argument. The perks of being a senior agent. It made aiding and abetting a criminal far easier.

He stepped into Will’s darkened room and waited for his eyes to adjust. He could smell Will’s shampoo faintly under a blanket of hospital disinfectant.

“You came back,” Will said.

“I brought you some things from your house.”

“They put a guy outside my room.”

“After Abigail’s attack, it couldn’t be avoided. I’ve sent him away for the moment.” Hannibal crossed the room and sat in the chair next to the bed.

Will turned on a light. Its low, orange glow formed a bubble around them. “Tell me what happened in the woods,” Hannibal said.

“I did tell you. No lie. Well. Little lie. Marissa was dead already, like I told you, but Abigail was still there. She’d hunted Marissa down with my dogs.”

“As you have hunted your victims.”

Will’s eyes got very wide at that, as if he hadn’t thought Hannibal would say it. His pulse fluttered in his throat, visible and nearly audible just under his skin. “Yes,” Will said, almost a whisper.

“We will have to take them with us. It wouldn’t be safe to find them new homes.”

“Hannibal—“ Will reached for him and stopped, gripping the edge of the sheet instead.

“I cleaned out your freezer. We have time. And you have a choice. Abigail has removed Jack’s suspicion. Your life is your own again, whatever you wish to do with it.”

Will swallowed and looked away. “I always thought I’d run if they got close, and it doesn’t get closer than Feds all over the house. I thought about going last night.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I couldn’t leave without you.”

Hannibal had to lower his eyes as well. They sat in that silence with a well of emotion between them that neither dared dip into, not yet.

A soft knock sounded on the door. It was the agent, with three coffees. “I got one for you too, Mr. Graham, if you want it?”

Will gave him a monstrously bright smile, instantly warm and human again. “You’re a lifesaver. One more rehash of this case without coffee and I might lose my mind.” He knocked on his skull. “What I've got left.”

“Yes, sir.” The agent handed both of them their cups and delivered a mildly disapproving look to Hannibal before he left, presumably for bothering a sick man in his hospital room in the middle of the night.

“Thank you for that,” Hannibal said when the agent had gone.

“At least he doesn’t think we’re in here making out.”

“Charm, focus, ruthlessness. Many would find your charm debatable, but it’s there when you choose to exercise it.”

“The psychopath’s triumvirate,” Will said. “Are you thinking you should’ve seen it sooner?”

“You don’t lack empathy.”

Will’s laugh was ugly and nearly silent. “I told you, I’ve got too much of it. That wasn’t a lie either. You’re the one who’s lacking.”

“As we have discussed. It allows me to kill when I must without consequence. But you kill—“

“When I must,” Will said, each word tight.

Hannibal sipped his coffee.

Will only held his and scratched at the plastic lid with his thumbnail. “It’s hard to remember that I’m me. And not—“ He shook his head. “I see some guy in the mall hitting a vending machine to shake something loose. I can feel the impact on my palm, and I can see he’s pissed off, and then I’m pissed off, and I can’t shake it. Because some jackass didn’t get his Snickers. I know who I am, but I sink into people if I’m not careful. If I’m not careful all the time.”

“And when you hunt them, do you not feel their fear?” Hannibal heard himself ask the question calmly and felt no true disgust at the thought. A sense of duty pulled at him, but Will’s pull, for the moment, was stronger.

“I don’t feel. I don’t think. I just hunt. And then they’re dead, and I’m alive.”

“You kill because of your empathy, not despite it.”

Will nodded, watching him. “You’re okay with all this?”

“I don’t know. My mind is divided.”

“Forget your mind. What about your gut?”

“My gut or my heart?”

Will looked down. “Instinct. Go with instinct. Emotion isn’t reliable. Especially not that kind.”

“Swear not by the inconstant moon?” Hannibal took Will’s hand in both of his. “Does it not seem to you that I’ve made my choice?”

“How does it seem to you? You’re the one with the divided mind.”

“You have known me more thoroughly in these past days than I have ever known myself. What do you say, Will? Do you know this about me as well?”

Will laid his other hand over Hannibal’s. “Don’t ask me that. I’m too selfish. I’ll only tell you what I want to hear.”

Hannibal tightened his grip. “No. This once you will tell me the truth.”

Will raised his head. Their eyes met and held. Will wet his lips. “Okay. Fine. You’re going to regret it either way. If you turn me in, you’ll never get to touch me again, and you’ll hate that. If you go to Lithuania without me, same thing, and you’ll wonder what I’m doing without you. If we leave together, you’ll always wonder if you’ve done the right thing, and you’ll wonder if you care if you’ve done the right thing, and you’ll feel as close as you can feel to guilt about that for the rest of your life. Especially when I kill again. And when you kill with me. Because you will.”

Hannibal’s eyes slipped closed. “Will I?”

“You already know you will. You’ve already thought about it. You’re fucked no matter what. That’s the truth. You were fucked as soon as we met. And so was I.”

Hannibal kissed him, because it was true, and because there was nothing else to do.

Chapter Text

Hannibal had fallen asleep with his head on the edge of Will’s bed, bent in two. His phone vibrated in his jacket pocket, pressed between his thigh and stomach. It jerked him awake like the sting of a wasp.

He pulled it out and saw the caller ID: Jack. He felt calm as he answered, the same calm he’d known when the man who’d murdered his family walked away and left him with his sister’s taste in his mouth.

“Hello, Jack.”

“We found her. She’s in a motel under the name of one of the girls she killed, just outside Baltimore. Are you still at the hospital? How soon can you be here?”

Outside the window, sun glinted off the dull metal of the air conditioning units on neighboring rooftops. Traffic moved far below. A pigeon huddled on the window ledge, ragged and watching him. A photograph for the walls of his memory palace: the moment of choice.

“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” he said.

When he’d hung up, he touched Will’s shoulder.

Will squinted at him, gray and groggy. “What?”

“Jack has Abigail cornered. If he can take her alive…”

“She won’t go down alone, yeah, got it.” Will pushed himself to a sitting position and rubbed both hands hard over his face. He met Hannibal’s eyes. “So what’s it going to be?”

“Do you have a passport?”

“Real and fake, yeah.”

“Then I suggest we get the next flight out of the country.”

Will grabbed his forearm and dug his fingers into Hannibal’s skin and muscle. He squeezed to the point of pain, and meeting his eyes was pain as well, something too much to bear and something gladly borne. “So let’s go,” he said.

\*

They flew to Vancouver, silent almost the whole way. Will faced the deplaning with resignation. If Jack had caught Abigail, it was even odds someone would be waiting for them at the other end.

No one was.

They looked at each other, stopped just outside the jetway, while the rest of the passengers parted around them and streamed past.

“It’s not over,” Hannibal said.

“It won’t ever be over. Where to next?”

“Tokyo, I think.”

“Sure. Where else would two white guys who don’t speak Japanese go to stay under the radar?”

“I speak Japanese,” Hannibal said.

Will rolled his eyes and followed him. When the long lines of the airport terminal sprouted trees in the corner of his eye, he tried not to look. When the noise of people and flight announcements faded, replaced by night noises, hooves on damp leaves, and heavy breath behind him, he tried not to listen.

Hannibal took his arm and squeezed it hard. “Will.”

“What?”

“Take this. Wipe your face. Focus. If you look too ill, they may not let you on the plane.”

Will took the offered silk handkerchief and buried his face in it. The smoke and citrus of Hannibal’s cologne enfolded him. He rubbed it over his neck, balled it up, and shoved it into his pocket where he clutched it in a sweaty fist.

“Only a few more minutes,” Hannibal said. “Come. They’re boarding first class.”

Hannibal had an arm around his waist. Will leaned gratefully into him. He was warm, and Will was both hot and cold. Shivers gripped his chest. A bead of sweat ran down the back of his neck.

One of the flight attendants stopped them at the ticket gate, inches from the freedom of the plane. “Is your friend all right, sir?”

“Too much to drink last night, I’m afraid,” Hannibal said.

“I need twenty pairs of sunglasses and an espresso,” Will managed.

The man’s face slid from worry to amusement. “I’m not sure about the sunglasses, but we can manage the espresso as soon as we’re airborne, sir.”

They passed through, down the jetway, and found their seats. Hannibal reclined Will’s for him, and Will fell into a fevered sleep. He was aware only of moments: Hannibal tucking a blanket around him, returning his seat to its full and upright position for their eventual takeoff, reclining it again. Asking him to drink from a bottle of water over and over until Will pushed it away too hard and spilled it. Hannibal dabbing at his own lap with a handful of napkins.

The feathered stag walking along the aisle and turning to look at him as it breathed out steam from its flared nostrils. Antlers growing from his cushy first class seat, growing up around him, trapping him, growing into his flesh—

“Will. You need to wake up now.”

Hannibal had a hand over his mouth, and the other gripped his shoulder. The plane was dark. Will’s throat hurt. He wondered if he’d screamed. He nodded to show Hannibal he understood, that he was here and awake, at least for now.

Hannibal took his hand away and laid it on Will’s forehead. He frowned. “We will land in five hours and then we will take you to the hospital.”

“Is that a good idea?”

“It is a necessary idea.” He took his pocket square back from Will, wet it, and cleaned his face with it.

“Keep me awake.”

“You need to rest.”

“I need to not freak out all of first class.”

“Sleep. I will watch you and wake you if I see any sign of nightmares.”

That had to be enough. Will could already feel the abyss of his exhaustion pulling him back down.

He dreamed of the stag again. This time Hannibal rode it behind him and held Will’s limp body against his. They were hunting something through the dark, but Will didn’t know what. Or who. Woven through his dream, he heard Hannibal’s voice, very low, speaking steadily. Will couldn’t understand the words. The thread of it kept the dream from sliding into something darker, but he still felt the threat of nightmare all around him.

His next conscious moment came in a brightly lit men’s room. White floors and white tile reflected white ceiling lights onto every surface and into Will’s aching eyes. His first thought was that he was back in the BAU, but it was too new, too pristine.

He squinted at Hannibal. “Plane?”

“We just got off. I need you to be present when we go through passport control and customs. Can you manage it?”

“Can I have some aspirin?”

Hannibal handed him two. Will took them dry and then, at Hannibal’s look, twisted his mouth under a motion-activated faucet to drink. He splashed his face with icy water and wet his hair, running his hands through it until it lay back slick against his head. He took a deep, gulping breath. “Okay. Let’s go.”

The shock of the water bought him a few minutes of clarity, but the line at passport control snaked back to the end of time. A stale heat gripped the room. Will shuffled forward, back locked straight, concentrating on nothing but the next step, even as the thorns grew up around him.

Will reached the front of the line. The passport control agent, a uniformed young man with neutral eyes and a small scar on his chin, beckoned him forward.

“Good morning, sir.” He spoke English with a slight British accent. “Are you visiting us for business or pleasure?”

The scar on his chin opened and wept blood. Will watched it drip down onto his own passport photo. Drop after drop until it obliterated his face.

“Sir?”

“Uh, pleasure. Just to see the sights.”

The young man watched him more carefully. “And how long are you staying?”

Will tried to remember the date on the return tickets Hannibal had bought, but it was gone. “Just a couple of weeks.”

A wall of thorns and antlers tangled together rose up from the floor to block the exit. Will knew he’d never get through it, never get out.

“Sir? Are you well?”

Will dug his nails into his palms. “Sorry. I haven’t slept in— I can’t remember. I can’t sleep on planes.”

The young man held his gaze a second longer and then nodded. He stamped Will’s passport. “I hope you will enjoy your stay, sir.”

“Thank you, I’m sure I will.”

Passport in hand, Will walked through, but the tangled thicket still blocked his way. He stopped in front of it. Things watched him from its shadows. Marissa Schurr hung, impaled, in the center.

A hand grasped his arm. “Come,” Hannibal said.

“Can’t,” Will mumbled. “Can’t you see—“

“Close your eyes if you must, but we need to go. Now.”

He started walking. Will closed his eyes and followed Hannibal into the thorns.

\*

Hannibal had planned to get a taxi, but he was afraid they would be too memorable. Will was fading in and out of consciousness, and anyone close enough to hear his mumbling would have cause for concern, especially when he started talking about how his deer had run from him. A hospital seemed unwise at best, but Will required treatment.

After thirty seconds of hot internal debate, Hannibal bought a prepaid cell phone and called Chiyoh.

She answered on the first ring, voice hard. “Who is this? How did you get this number?”

“You gave it to me,” Hannibal said.

“You’re here.”

“Yes. Are you glad?”

“Of course,” she said softly. “Of course, Hannibal. I am glad.”

“I must ask you a question. Are we family still?”

Her response came without hesitation. “We are family.”

“I have brought you a problem.” He glanced at Will, now staring blankly at the opposite wall of the lounge, eyes wide with waking nightmare. “Potentially a serious problem. We need a ride from the airport and a discreet doctor.”

“We?”

“My friend and I.” Hannibal’s heart beat five times while he waited out her answering silence.

“I will send a car and arrange for the doctor.” She paused again. “I look forward to meeting my brother’s friend.” She disconnected the call.

Hannibal couldn’t tell for certain if she was annoyed or pleased, but he knew she would help them either way. At least until she found out who Will was. After that, he couldn’t be sure. She had an unbending morality that he, even with his chosen career, had never fully grasped.

The driver, a slim, uniformed young woman with her hair pulled into a severe knot at the back of her neck, arrived a miraculous ten minutes later. She loaded their small bags into the trunk of a limo while Hannibal loaded Will into the back and did not say a word to either of them.

The drive, slogging through traffic, took only a little over an hour. They headed toward the coast and climbed up a switchback driveway that belonged to a house in Chiba, set high on its own small hill overlooking the ocean. A iron grilled gate at the top swung slowly open as they approached.

The house looked to have been built in the 70s or 80s, its curves and white tile now slightly worn by the assault of wind and salt air. The front courtyard held an empty swimming pool and the rusted wrecks of several lawn chairs. Chiyoh stood on the steps. She lifted a hand to him.

Hannibal walked toward her, conscious once again of his own heartbeat, neither fast nor slow, but very loud in his chest. She offered him her hands, and he took them and bowed over them to kiss her wrists.

“This isn’t your house,” he said.

“It’s rented. I thought it might be wise, depending on the nature of your problem.”

Hannibal glanced toward the limo where the driver was unloading their bags. “It is.”

“The doctor is inside.”

“Thank you.”

He held onto her hands a moment longer. She turned them in his grip so that she could hold him back. “Go and bring your problem indoors.”

Will had slept for most of the journey to the house in Chiba. Rather than wake him now, Hannibal lifted him from the back of the limo and carried him inside.

Chapter Text

Will woke with a clear head. Salt air and reflected light filled an unfamiliar bedroom. He could hear the sea. Hannibal was asleep in a chair, drooped over, face slack.

Will scooted to the far side of the bed and peeled the covers back. Vertigo struck him as he stood, and he clutched the bedside table for balance. When it had cleared, he made his way along the wall to the balcony.

Its sliding doors stood open, and a temperate breeze flowed through the room. Will stepped outside. The white tile chilled his bare feet. Sun blazed off every surface. A blue-gray sea heaved fifty feet below.

A woman appeared beside him. Will jerked upright and reached for a knife he didn’t have.

She moved past him to the edge of the balcony and looked down at the sea. “I’m Chiyoh.”

Will said nothing.

“Go back to bed, Will,” she said, still without looking at him.

“Why should I?”

“So that my brother’s vigil is not in vain. He has been watching over you for two days in hope of being your first sight when you woke.”

Will glanced back at Hannibal, still asleep, and noted the stubble on his face. “Your brother?”

“Go back to bed.” She walked out as silently as she had entered, despite boots that should have clicked on the tile floor.

Trying to emulate her, Will eased over the distance between balcony and bed. He crept back between the covers. A weight of exhaustion pulled him flat against the mattress.

He closed his eyes for just a second and woke with the room dark. Hannibal was reading by the insufficient light of a small yellow lamp.

“We made it,” Will said. He wondered if his earlier waking had been a dream.

Hannibal set his book down. “Yes. We’re in Japan. So far there has been no suggestion of suspicion from anyone here.”

“What about—“ Will coughed, mouth dry and sticky. Hannibal passed him a glass of water and he chugged it down. “What about back home?”

“Your disappearance made the local news in connection with the Hobbs case.”

“They didn’t catch her,” Will said.

“No.” The yellow light turned Hannibal’s eyes to a soft gold. He slid a piece of ribbon into his book and set it aside. “Or you would be a much bigger story. I’m certain Jack has guessed that we left together. What else he knows, I can’t be sure. Nothing has been said of it in the news.”

“Is that good or bad?”

“There is no way to know, but Jack has only suspicions of you. He has proof of what Abigail Hobbs did. He will focus on her.” Hannibal paused. “Our host asked if you would feel well enough to join us for dinner.”

Maybe not a dream then. “Chiyoh?”

Hannibal dipped his chin in acknowledgment and did not ask how Will knew her name.

“Can’t wait,” Will said.

\*

The dining room had another balcony and another set of glass doors, open to admit the much cooler night air. Will was glad he’d taken the sweater Hannibal had offered him. The three of them sat on the floor on the same side of a low table that faced the sea. They could hear it but no longer see it. The frame of the balcony was filled with a rushing void and a few scattered stars.

Dinner was roasted quail with a sweet, cracked glaze, tiny yellow beets, mushrooms, and a bed of steamed greens. Chiyoh had cooked and brought it all out to the table with a pot of tea. Will found himself grateful for that too, holding the small cup in both hands as the warmth leeched into his palms.

“Did you know Mischa?” Will asked her.

Beside him, Hannibal stiffened, though he kept eating without pause and made no sound or gesture.

“Yes,” Chiyoh said. “I was not there when it happened. I found Hannibal when I came back.” She glanced at him. “A wild thing, lost in the forest.”

“I was not lost,” Hannibal said.

“Perhaps not in the forest.”

Hannibal turned his head toward Will, but didn’t quite look at him. “Without her, I would have been lost altogether.”

Will looked past him to stare at Chiyoh’s smooth jawline and wonder how it would look covered in blood.

“Will.” Will continued to stare until Hannibal put a hand on his cheek and turned his head away. “Will. Look at me.”

Will wouldn’t. Couldn’t. “I thought all your family was dead.”

“Chiyoh isn’t my blood.”

“I can fix that.” With both of them split open, no one would be able to tell whose blood was whose.

Hannibal slid his hand up into Will’s hair and curled his fingers tightly into it. “Don’t.”

“Don’t,” Will repeated, mocking. He tried to yank his head away and failed. He bared his teeth at Hannibal. “You don’t even know what I was thinking.”

“Yes, I do.”

Will met his eyes and saw the hard light in them and hated her even more. Hannibal wasn’t supposed to look at him like that.

“We came to live with Hannibal’s aunt,” Chiyoh said softly. “In a house north of Kyoto. He learned Japanese. It was years before he spoke any other language again.”

“Language is the midwife of memory. I did not yet have my memories contained.”

Will ripped a tiny wing off his quail. “Did you tell her? About Mischa?”

“He did not tell me,” Chiyoh said. “But I saw the kitchen. I knew.”

Hannibal set his chopsticks down on the table. “We didn’t discuss it. We won’t discuss it.”

“We discussed it,” Will said. “You and I.”

Chiyoh turned a mostly expressionless look on Hannibal, and Will felt some of the rancid churn of jealousy in his stomach settle.

Hannibal set down his chopsticks and folded his hands on the table. “This is not acceptable dinner conversation.”

Will let out an involuntary snort of laughter. “Do you want us to talk about opera? Maybe modern art?”

“That would be preferable.”

“How about cooking? Should I tell her about my fireplace?”

He hadn’t told Hannibal what he used the spit for, but he could see the moment when he got it. And the moment when he imagined Chiyoh finding out. Hannibal’s expressions were always understated, but those, especially the second, held a haunted quality that anyone could’ve read.

Will put his palms on the table and pushed himself to his feet. “I’m going back to bed.”

Stupid, he thought on the way up the stairs. Stupid, stupid to tie himself to Hannibal. Stupid to let Hannibal get to him. Stupid not to have killed him. He stopped on the stairs. It wasn’t too late. He could do both of them, just the way he’d pictured it. And they could be together forever.

“Will.” Hannibal’s voice came from the bottom of the stairs.

Will dug his nails into pre-existing bloody crescents on his palms, a souvenir from the airport. That had been better than this. He would trade all his current lucidity to have Hannibal to himself again. The thought tore at him with wolf teeth. He sprinted up the rest of the stairs and staggered down the hall, too tired to keep up the burst of speed, too tired to do anything useful about Hannibal and his sister, too tired. And he didn’t even have a knife.

He shut the door to his room behind him but pitched forward onto his knees with a sudden sick wave before he could lock it.

Hannibal knocked.

“Go fuck yourself,” Will said.

Hannibal entered and shut the door behind him. He knelt beside Will. “I didn’t plan to see her while we were in Japan. I brought you to this country because I know it well and I could find help for you. I called her only after it became apparent that we were out of time. I was concerned about what you might say if I took you to a public hospital.”

“Were you ever going to tell me about her?”

“I don’t know.” Hannibal paused. “She is the only one I would trust with you. Can I trust you with her?”

All Will could see was blood. He didn’t answer.

Hannibal put an arm around his shoulders and drew him close. Will overbalanced and ended up sagging against him, head leaning resentfully on his chest.

“We will leave as soon as you are well enough.” Hannibal was quiet for a few seconds. “Not speaking of her has become a habit. To explain her role in my life is to explain my past. I cannot call her a friend, and she is not my blood, but she is part of me. Without her in the world, I would be incomplete. Knowing that, can you accept her?”

“Part of you,” Will said.

“Yes.”

Will tried that as balm for the monstrous rush of his thoughts and felt them calm. Not someone to take Hannibal from him. Part of Hannibal. The same person. The same soul. The rational part of Will’s mind didn’t believe it, but that wasn’t the part baying for blood.

“Maybe,” he said. “But I don’t want to stay here.”

“Only until you are well enough to travel, as I said. Where do you want to go?”

“Your house. Your home.”

“Very well.” Hannibal stroked Will’s hair. “I believe I should call Jack.”

“Are you fucking nuts?”

“He has not caught Abigail. He has no proof against you and little ground now even for suspicion. The most suspicious action either of us took was our flight. I can paint it as a romantic impulse.”

“He won’t believe it for a second.”

“Perhaps not . But, with our actions explained and my resignation officially offered, he will not be allowed to pursue us in a foreign country. We will be as safe as we can reasonably be.”

“Unless he gets Abigail.”

Hannibal inclined his head. His chin rested against Will’s forehead. “That risk will be with us until she is dead. Or we are.”

Will tried to think past the mire of exhaustion and fever. It was no good. He had to trust Hannibal now. And Hannibal’s sister. “Okay. But wait until just before we leave. I wouldn’t put it past him to hop a plane and drag us back himself.”

“Nor would I.”

“My dogs,” Will mumbled. Sleep was coming for him again.

“We will make arrangements.”

The world tipped and fell away into the dark.

\*

Will woke again to early light through gauzy curtains. This time, he was alone. He pulled on a robe and made his way downstairs to the main room. Chiyoh sat at the dining table with a pot of tea and some kind of soup.

She looked up at him, expressionless. “Tea?”

“Yes. Thank you.” Will sat on the cushion next to her.

She poured. “Hannibal tells me you are a killer.”

“He tells me you’re part of his soul.”

She set down the tea pot and turned to face the ocean, silent for a few seconds. “I believe that is true.”

“So is what he said about me.”

“I see.” She paused. “Did those you killed deserve to die?”

“No. I mean, statistically, probably some of them did. But that wasn’t why I picked them.”

He expected her to ask why he’d picked them, but she only nodded, once, slowly, a gesture that made her look very like Hannibal. She touched her soup bowl. “Would you like miso?”

“That’d be good. Thanks.”

She rose and disappeared into the kitchen, returning with a bowl for him. Bright green rings of spring onion floated on top. The scent that rose from it was thick and savory. “You no longer wish to kill me.”

“He says you’re part of him.”

“Then you don’t wish to harm him.”

Will drank broth from the bowl. “I did for a while. I don’t think I can now.”

“Good,” Chiyoh said. She held her tea cup with the tips of her fingers, again watching the ocean. “Do you ever think of the families of those you have killed?”

“No.”

“The thought of their suffering does not please you?”

“I don’t care about them one way or the other.” Will studied her profile, but she was as hard to read as Hannibal could be. “If you’re asking whether the guy who killed Mischa wanted you and Hannibal to suffer, to remember, yeah. I think he did.”

She nodded again. They finished their tea and miso without speaking.

Hannibal emerged from another room some time later and paused when he saw them. His gaze shifted from Will to Chiyoh and back.

“We are both still alive,” Chiyoh said. “As you see.”

“I’m glad of it.”

“Tea?”

“Please.” Hannibal sat next to Will. “I’ve spoken to a contractor in the village nearest the castle. Much of it is open to the sky where the roof has collapsed, broken windows, crumbling walls. But the core around the kitchens is still intact. He will work on repairs and plumbing until we arrive.”

“I have found someone near the castle to care for the dogs.” Chiyoh said. “She will fetch them from the airport. Only tell me when.”

“They can be on a flight tomorrow,” Hannibal said. “I will send you the details.”

Seeing them together, something in Will eased a little further. Part of him. Part of her. All right. And he wondered if Mischa would be part of them both if she were still alive. Or maybe she was. Maybe she was what had bound them so closely together. The shared sliver of their souls. Maybe, if she hadn’t died, Will would have Hannibal all to himself.

Hannibal spread a hand over Will’s shoulder blade, a touch with a question in it.

Will shook his head. He wasn’t ready to explain the track of his thoughts, especially when he wasn’t sure where they were leading him. “Where are we?”

Hannibal sipped his tea. “Chiba. The city is below, on the coast.”

“Can we go down there? I want to walk.”

Hannibal and Chiyoh glanced at each other, but Hannibal nodded. “I believe it should be safe enough.”

“The doctor will return at noon for your treatment,” Chiyoh said.

Will stood and stretched. He wanted to see the ocean, and not from fifty feet up. He wanted saltwater on his skin.

Chapter Text

Hannibal drove them down to a park by the seaside. Will went to the water first and dipped his hands in the surf. They walked on clean swept paths beneath the trees. The air smelled of salt to the point where even Hannibal could smell little else. Apart from the sweetness of Will beside him.

“I know you’re smelling me,” Will said.

“Do you object?”

Will shook his head.

Hannibal leaned over and breathed into his hair.

“Weirdo.” Will took his wrist and squeezed it briefly.

The path led them out of the trees to an open area of grass that sloped down toward the ocean. A trail of black stepping stones wound down to the tide line. A man in a suit stood on the last stone and stared out at the ocean, unmoving.

“Mischa’s part of you too,” Will said.

“Yes.”

Will paused for one roll of the waves. “Is her killer part of you?”

Hannibal felt his expression freeze. He stared out past the businessman to the gray-green sea. Each swell rose like a sea serpent about to breach the surface. They didn’t break until the moment before they hit the land. “Perhaps,” he admitted.

“All those people I killed, am I part of their families now? I never meant to be. I never thought about them.”

“Some people have a profound effect on our lives, for good or ill. And, for good or ill, they stay with us. As you said about the two of us, once we met, there was no possibility of return. Neither of us can go back to what we were. We can only go forward.”

Will leaned his shoulder against Hannibal’s. “Which way is forward?”

Hannibal was quiet a long time, breathing in salt and sweet, listening to the muted song of the sea. “You said you will continue to kill.”

“I said you’d kill with me.”

“Is it necessary to you?”

Will’s fingers plucked at the hem of his sweater. “I don’t know. Why would I stop?”

“Killing near a major population center is different from killing near a remote castle. You would have to pull your victims all the way from Vilnius and even then the pattern might become noticeable.”

Will shifted. “Out there, away from everyone, I might not need to. But I want to hunt with you. At least once. Don’t you want to know what it’s like?”

Hannibal closed his eyes. He did want to know. It pulled at him. The emotion that stirred was not precisely guilt, but it was not comfortable. A lifetime of duty left its mark, even on someone like him.

“Don’t you ever think about him?” Will said. “What it was like for him? Why he did it?”

“At times.”

“Did you look for him? You must have. You and Chiyoh both.”

“We did. I did.”

“Is that why you joined the FBI?”

Hannibal shook his head. “I have no reason to believe he ever left Lithuania. The Bureau's resources did me little good.”

He felt Will’s focus shift fully to him and sharpen like a blade on the whetstone of that statement.

“He’s still there? Where? It’s not that big a country. How do you know?”

Hannibal clasped his hands behind his back and fixed his gaze on the sea. He should not have admitted even so much. He knew that. If he did not want Will fixed on this, he shouldn’t—but he was now forced to ask himself the question. Did he want Will fixed on this?

“I have tried to bury the past,” he said.

“Should’ve dug it a deeper grave,” was Will’s instant rejoinder.

Despite himself, Hannibal’s mouth twitched with amusement.

“Did you find him?” Will said. “Do you not think he’s still there? Do you know?”

“I did not find him.” Chiyoh had found him, years ago, when Hannibal was in medical school. She had told Hannibal that he was still in the country and no more, and Hannibal had not asked. He had thought of what he might do if he knew, and he had not asked lest he allowed himself an experience he might wish to repeat.

As if looking into the mind of Hannibal’s younger self, Will said, “I could tell you about it.”

Hannibal shifted. His fingers wound together behind his back and he forced them back to their proper places. “I know what it’s like to kill.”

“You know what it’s like to kill someone you have to kill. You don’t know what it’s like to hunt. Take this guy.” Will nodded toward toward the businessman at the edge of the sea.

“Why him?”

“Why not?”

The man turned at that moment and followed the black stepping stones back to the main path. He turned left, away from them, and walked with his head down. Will nudged Hannibal after him.

“What are we doing?” Hannibal said quietly.

“Nothing. Just watching. Come on.”

“Stalking.”

“In the legal sense or the hunting sense?” Will shook his head. “Anyway, we’re not. We’re just observing.”

They followed him through the park, past the parking lot, and out into the streets of the city. Will kept them back, but the man appeared to have no care for his surroundings. He kept his head down, eyes on the sidewalk in front of him.

“I did a lot of hitchhikers,” Will said. “People at bus stations looking for rides. Not usually working stiffs like this guy, but a couple. Take him Friday evening, he wouldn’t be missed till Monday. The police wouldn’t hear about it until Tuesday or Wednesday.”

“If he lives alone.”

“Look at him. He lives alone.”

Hannibal was inclined to agree. For him it was only a guess, but Will seemed certain. And intent.

“Would you wait for Friday?” Hannibal asked.

“He goes to the park every day after work. He stands by himself and he watches the ocean. It washes him clean. I’d take him from there.”

“How?”

“I’d ask. He’d come with me. He wants something, and he doesn’t know what he wants. He’s looking for it in the sea. He won’t find it there. But he’d find it in my forest.”

Hannibal watched his face. “What would he find?”

“Himself.”

“Do you believe you are helping these people, Will?”

Will shook his head, expression coming back into focus. “I’m not that delusional. But they do know themselves before they die. Everybody knows who they are in that last second.”

The man turned into the lobby of an apartment building. Will caught the door before it closed and followed him inside. Into the elevator. They rode up to the sixth floor. The man glanced at them once and quickly looked away. The doors opened with a soft chime.

All three of them got out. The man gave them a wary glance over his shoulder, but it was no more than wary. He did not know what they were. He only thought it odd that two strangers had gotten off on his floor and now followed him toward his apartment.

He put the key into the lock. Will closed the distance between them with a few quick strides. Hannibal was caught off guard and left behind, unable to do anything but watch.

Will touched the man’s shoulder as he passed. “Tag, you’re it.”

The man jolted and turned to stare at him, but Will just kept walking. Hannibal murmured an apology as he passed. The man stared, stepped into his apartment, and closed the door. The lock clicked.

Will waited for Hannibal at the end of the hall. “See? Easy.”

“Easy,” Hannibal repeated, more an echo than agreement.

“But I don’t know how I’d do it here. Not and get away with it. I don’t know this place.”

“I do.”

Will’s gaze moved back to the man’s apartment door, speculative.

“No,” Hannibal said. “I did not mean that to be a suggestion.”

“It’s not a good idea anyway. Especially if you’re going to call Jack from here. And I’ve been thinking about that. Don’t call Jack, or at least not just Jack. Call Alana. Or the other people you worked with. Anyone.”

Hannibal nodded. He had been thinking the same. If Jack were allowed to keep his suspicions secret, he might pursue them in secret. The more people who knew about Hannibal’s resignation and romance, the better. Especially if they were going to Lecter Castle. It would not be difficult to find them there, so Jack must be prevented from trying.

“Was your kitchen clean?” he asked.

“Yeah. If you took care of the freezer, they won’t find anything unless they drag the creek for bone fragments.” He made a face. “Except maybe Marissa’s blood. That got everywhere.”

“That’s not an issue. For the creek, we must rely on luck, but Jack is sufficiently distracted by Abigail at the moment.”

“We should have killed her,” Will said. “I didn’t want to. I don’t know why.”

“She is our blood whether we like it or not.”

He put a hand on Will’s back and led him to the elevator.

\*

It rained that afternoon as Will slept. When it cleared, Hannibal and Chiyoh sat on the balcony to drink tea and watch the ocean tremble under the sinking sun.

“How many people has your friend killed?” Chiyoh asked.

“I don’t know.”

“How many more will he kill?”

“I can’t promise that he won’t kill again. Chiyoh.” She looked back to him, away from the sea. “I need him. He is part of me.”

“He is a part of you that I used to worry would swallow you whole.”

“But it hasn’t,” Hannibal said.

She looked at him a long time. Finally, she nodded. “When one has done all that one can,” she said.

“Then there is nothing left to do,” Hannibal finished. His aunt had said it often in times of stress. He still heard it in her voice, the particular intonation and the way she smiled at them both afterward.

“Do you still think of the man who killed our sister?” Hannibal asked.

“I do. Often. Do you?”

“Yes. Often.”

The silence that fell between them drowned out the roar of the waves.

“You have never asked me about him,” Chiyoh said.

“In another life, I would have killed him. That was not the life I chose.”

“Is it the life you choose now?”

Hannibal poured another cup of tea. He rose and stood at the railing. The sea filled his vision. Chiyoh stood at his shoulder, silent and warm.

“I do not know. But the life I have lived is over. I could not have lived it forever.”

Chiyoh nodded once. “When you joined the FBI, I asked if it would make you happy. Do you remember what you told me?”

“I said I didn’t understand happiness. I said I would be as well occupied there as I could be anywhere and that I hoped not to be too bored.”

Chiyoh curled her hands around the rain-slick railing. “Yes. What if I ask you the question again?

“I will not be bored with him.”

“Will you be happy?”

Hannibal closed his eyes against a spray of mist. “I am happy.”

“And when you leave this place? When you go home?”

“How can I know? But we cannot stay in this halfway house you have found for us. We must cross over. And one must pay the ferryman to enter the next world.”

“One does not pay the ferryman in blood.”

He put a hand next to hers on the railing. The metal was very cold. “I will be what I will be.”

Chapter Text

Hannibal sat down at the small table on the balcony outside Will’s room. He had bought thick, deckle-edged stationery while walking with Will in the city a few days ago and a fountain pen just that morning. He filled the pen with crimson ink, watching the slow siphoning of it up into the reservoir.

“You should’ve been the serial killer.” Will leaned in the doorway to the balcony. “I never had that kind of flair. Who are you writing?”

“Various acquaintances in Baltimore. Mostly people I knew from the opera or from charity organizations.” He had decided that he owed them at least a letter of farewell. It was the polite thing to do.

“Sounds like it’ll take a while.”

“I imagine it will.” He picked up his pen and began to write.

Will settled in the chair opposite him. He sat in silence as Hannibal wrote letter after letter. It took over an hour. Each letter felt like an examination, a final test of what Hannibal had learned to pass as: the doctor, the agent, the law abiding citizen, a man with morals and empathy and conscience. Everything that he might now unlearn. If he chose.

When he was done and the last letter addressed and sealed, he set his pen aside.

Will took it from him. He uncapped it and pressed the point into the pad of his index finger. Red ink spread through the loops and whorls of his fingerprint. “This is nice. I wondered what you got it for.”

“For this. But also to have it.”

Will reached across the table and took his hand. He pressed the nib into Hannibal’s finger and watched the same slow leak of ink. When he took it away, he touched his own marked finger to Hannibal’s and left it there, face unreadable. “I’ve been thinking about blood. About family.”

“What are your conclusions?”

“That we know it when we see it. I knew it when I saw Abigail. And when I saw you.”

“You didn’t like me when we met.”

“But I knew you,” Will said. “I didn’t want to, but I did. Take your shirt off.”

Hannibal unbuttoned his shirt, slipped it off, and folded it on the table. Will stood and moved closer, between his legs. He set the nib of the pen on Hannibal’s shoulder and drew down his arm, a long red wound. Another. Another.

“Are you cutting me to pieces?” Hannibal asked.

Will was frowning with concentration. “I don’t know what I’m doing. Ask me when I’m done.”

He kept going, more lines, more marks. They curved around Hannibal’s muscles and bones and moved down his back. Will reached his waist and tugged at the waistband. “Pants off,” he said.

“We should move inside then.”

“Who’s going to see us? The gulls?”

Hannibal looked out to sea. He saw three or four fishing boats. Without telescopes, they would see nothing of note, and if they chose to spy, they could hardly complain of what they saw.

He removed his trousers and hung them over the back of his chair. He took off his socks and underwear. Will turned him and pushed him face-first against the wall.

He drew over Hannibal’s buttocks and thighs, drew swirls into the backs of his knees, down his calves, around his ankle bones. He wrote on the soles of Hannibal’s feet, and Hannibal felt the shape of each letter. Hunter, hunter, hunter.

“Is that what I am?” he asked.

Will paused. “If you’re not the hunter, your’e the prey. I don’t want you to be the prey.”

“Do you worry about killing me, Will?”

“Not as much now. Turn around.”

Hannibal turned to face him and the sea. Will knelt in front of him. He drew radiating lines over the tops and arches of Hannibal’s feet. “Abigail wanted us to hunt you together. I told her I wouldn’t. I didn’t want to hunt with her. But I thought about hunting you alone.”

“And that was not so disturbing a thought.” The pen progressed up Hannibal’s shins, a light scratch, the drag of gold and ink. He was starting to get hard. He couldn’t help it.

Will glanced up at him. “I really thought you’d turn me in if you knew. But I wanted you to know. I needed you to know.” He drew circles over Hannibal’s kneecaps and then started along his inner thighs. “I imagined the hunt. You wouldn’t be thinking about anything except me. You’d never think about anything except me ever again. I imagined holding you at the end. Kissing you as you died.”

“That was what you meant when you said you had imagined kissing me before.”

Will nodded. He had reached the tops of Hannibal’s thighs and drew out over his hips. And then he took Hannibal’s penis in one hand, stretched the foreskin with his thumb, and began to draw on that. “I thought about never talking to you again. Never touching you. You gone. Forever. I didn’t like it.”

Hannibal tried to answer and only gasped as the pen spiraled in toward the head. “Will—“

Will released his grasp and moved on, marking lines across his stomach as Hannibal panted and his cock swayed, aching, in space.

Will dragged the pen in a single line up the center of his chest and stopped. He capped the pen and set the end of it against Hannibal’s lips. “Suck.”

Hannibal took the pen between his lips. He sucked at it, tongue pressing against it. Will slid it deeper.

He watched Hannibal’s face as he slid the pen in and out. “Would you like to be sucking my dick instead of this?”

Hannibal’s eyes fell shut. “Yes.”

Will’s free hand closed around his cock and started to work it with torturous slowness, timed with the thrust of the pen between his lips. “You’ll let me do anything to you,” Will said softly.

Hannibal shook his head, but the denial was useless. He did not know where he could draw the line with Will. He didn’t know what line he could draw.

“What would you do if I told you I wouldn’t touch you again until you hunt with me?”

“Please,” Hannibal managed around the pen. He was close, so close, body tensing and stomach tight.

Will took his hand away and pulled the pen from Hannibal’s mouth. “Have you ever wanted someone this much in your life?”

“No,” Hannibal said. “Never.”

“Good.” Will sat back on his heels and looked him over, satisfaction in his eyes. “Truth or dare, Hannibal?”

Hannibal blinked down at him slowly. He swallowed and made an attempt to calm his body. It mainly failed. His fingers clutched the cold wall behind him. “It’s my turn. I answered your question about my sister.”

Will’s mouth curved, and he showed his teeth, eyes bright. “You’re right. Shoot.”

“Truth or dare?”

“Dare.”

Hannibal reached down to touch his cheek. “Do to me exactly what you most want to do in this moment.”

Will studied him. “You’re a hundred percent sure I don’t want to cut your throat?”

“Not one hundred. No.”

“Not bored anymore, are you, Agent Lecter?”

“I am not.“

Will made a small, considering noise, eyes half closed. “What would I like to do to you. What wouldn’t I like to do to you?”

Hannibal waited.

All expression faded from Will’s face. He stood, pressing himself against Hannibal’s body as he did, cold clothes against chilled skin. And leaned in, inch by inch, until his lips were nearly touching Hannibal’s and the heat of his breath washed down Hannibal’s neck. He lifted his chin and pressed closer. The last fraction of space between them closed.

Will’s mouth was warm and soft. His fingers stroked Hannibal’s neck and did not squeeze. Hannibal pressed into the kiss. He kept his hands against the smooth surface of the wall, unsure how Will would react to touch. He licked at Will’s lower lip and, when his mouth opened, inside.

Will slid his hands into Hannibal’s hair and pulled lightly, rhythmically, like the kneading of a cat. “Your turn,” he said into Hannibal’s mouth.

“I forfeit. You win.”

“Seems like you’re the one getting what you want.”

“Only if you want to give it to me.”

Will’s hips ground against his. Hannibal’s control slipped, and his arms went around Will, holding him tight.

Predictably, that was the moment Will pushed away from him. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He watched Hannibal. They were both hard. “You want to make me that promise?”

Hannibal took a slow breath. “I cannot promise to hunt with you. Not yet.”

“Then you can wait a little longer.” Will walked past him and left him there, alone with the sea.

Hannibal tipped his head back against against the wall. He started to reach for his cock and stopped. He could wait. He found that he wanted to wait.

Chapter Text

They stayed at the house on the hill overlooking the sea for three weeks. The doctor came daily for Will’s treatment, asked no questions, and exhibited no curiosity about his patient outside that treatment. By the end of that time, Will’s stitches had been removed and he was declared well enough to travel. He would need to be watched, and he still tired easily, but the danger was past. A trip to a private hospital and an MRI confirmed it.

As their time between lives came to an end, Hannibal called not Jack, nor Alana, but Beverly. He had tendered formal resignation to the Bureau weeks ago, but had spoken to no one from his old life. Hearing her voice was akin to hearing a ghost. Or perhaps he was the ghost.

“Wow,” Beverly said. “Wow. I knew you’d resigned. And obviously we all knew you’d taken off and we could guess with who, but still, wow. Jack was not happy.”

“Was not or is not?”

She made a non-committal noise. “Less not happy now. You can imagine what it was like around here right after you left.”

“I can.”

“You could’ve said something.”

“He would have stopped us. Once his suspicion of Will was proven to be unfounded, I chose not to wait.” He chose the phrasing, the casual assumption of Will’s innocence, to see if she would let it pass. She did.

“Is he doing okay?”

“His condition has improved. Far more so than I believe it would have if we had stayed.”

“Being suspected of murder and hunted by a serial killer is a pretty stressful situation.” She paused. “You know we never got Abigail Hobbs. She’s still out there.”

“She is unlikely to find us where we are going.”

“Good.” Again, a pause. “I’m glad he didn’t do it. And I’m glad you guys found each other, really. But you couldn’t have known when he showed up with that body in his car— You shouldn’t have let him wash his hands!” It came out like she’d been waiting to say it since that day.

Unexpectedly, it made Hannibal smile. He had found most of his co-workers wearing, but Jack and Beverly he had genuinely liked. “No. I should not have. It was improper. But I could not do otherwise.”

“Blinded by love, huh?”

“Perhaps. All I may say in my defense is that I could not ask him to remain covered in a stranger’s blood while Brian and Jimmy collected themselves and drove to Baltimore through rush hour traffic. Not knowing how long that would take.”

“And obviously you didn’t believe he’d done it. Even if you couldn’t know.”

Hannibal hadn’t been at all sure that Will hadn’t done it. He simply hadn’t cared. He could not share that fact, now or ever, and so he said nothing. He closed his eyes and pictured her face. He wondered if he would ever speak to her again and if he would miss her if he did not. No answer came to him. He had missed Chiyoh. He still missed Mischa. He would miss Will like sutures to a mortal wound. Other people had never made much impact on him.

“I apologize,” he said at last. It seemed the proper thing to say.

“Yeah, yeah.” She sighed. “You only met him like a month ago. Are you sure about this?”

“I am sure.”

“Must be nice.”

“It is,” Hannibal said, although nice was not the word he would have chosen. The conversation turned to work, to their colleagues, to the Hobbs case—no significant progress—and others Hannibal had left open when he departed.

And then, quite abruptly—“Oh, here’s Jack. Jack, it’s Hannibal”—Jack Crawford was breathing into Hannibal’s ear like a jilted lover.

“Hello, Jack.” Hannibal found it surprisingly difficult to keep his voice level.

“Hello, Hannibal.” Jack didn’t even try. Then tension in those two words could’ve shot an arrow from the BAU to Chiba.

“I apologize,” Hannibal said again. It had worked with Beverly. And perhaps it was even honest. He would do it again, but if he’d had a choice, he would preferred to follow procedure. That had always been his preference, until Will.

Jack’s answering sigh was as deep and long as the roll of the waves outside. It contained three weeks of built up irritation, not so much released as pushed forcibly into Hannibal’s ear. “You think that makes a difference?” Jack said.

“I think it does to you.”

“On a personal level, it might.”

“I do not care about the Bureau's opinion of me.”

That got a snort of near-laughter from Jack. “No, you never did. All those commendations. The FBI’s golden boy. Did you even think twice before you walked out?”

“I thought a great deal. But in the end, I felt I had no choice.”

“Love.” It was another sigh, this one less filled with resentment and more with resignation.

“Recognition. We saw something in each other than we had seen in no one else.”

“What the hell did you see that made you take off halfway around the world with a fugitive?”

“He was not a fugitive. Abigail’s attack and the evidence you found on her knife exonerated him.”

Jack paused long enough for a whole set of waves to curl up and in and crash along the rocks. “He didn’t kill Marissa Schurr, no.”

“He was a suspect in no other crime.”

“No,” Jack said.

Almost, Hannibal asked him what he then suspected Will of, but that could do nothing except clarify and calcify what was now only a feeling. Jack’s feelings were not infallible, and Jack knew that. Given no new additional evidence, he could come to believe he had been wrong about Will.

Hannibal wondered if Jack had ever had a feeling about him. If, perhaps, that was why Jack had kept him at his side for so many years, ever since Hannibal joined the Bureau. He did not ask about that either.

After they’d hung up, he sat and looked at the phone in his hands. They were free. He had expected it to feel like triumph. It felt like nothing at all.

He sat there long enough for the light outside to fade toward evening. At sunset, Chiyoh knocked on his door. When he opened it, she went out onto the balcony. He followed. Once again, they stood side by side and stared into the sea.

“You still have not asked me for his name.”

“I assumed you would not give it to me,” Hannibal said.

“If you search, you will find him. What would my denial do except keep the blood from my hands?”

“Is that not enough?”

The outside of her little finger brushed his. “I fear losing my brother.”

“If I remove this man from the world, will I be lost to you?”

“Is that what you want?”

“To kill him or to be lost?” Hannibal said. “I do not want to be lost to you.”

“And the other?”

Hannibal was silent a long time. The last reflection of the sun’s light vanished and left them in darkness. “He breathes free. He walks the Earth as if he did nothing to us. Is that just?”

“It is not just.”

“He may have done the same to others.” Hannibal was uncertain how much he cared about that, but Chiyoh might care more than he did.

“He may have. That, too, I have thought of often.”

“Doesn’t he deserve death?”

“Death is better than he deserves.” She spoke quietly, voice calm as always.

Hannibal turned to her. He could find no reply.

“Does that surprise you?”

“Yes,” Hannibal said. “But you have always surprised me.”

“Do you remember when you first came to Kyoto? It was the end of winter, not yet spring. Our aunt sent us on errands, and you followed me about the city like a ghost.”

“I remember very little of that time.”

Chiyoh nodded. “One day, after we went to the market, I took you to the park. I told you what the plum trees would look like when they bloomed. Do you remember what you said? You had learned just enough Japanese to say it.”

Hannibal shook his head. There was a shadow somewhere in his memory, an ancient film loop, frayed at the edges. In it, Chiyoh pointed up toward bare branches. Her lips moved, but the film was silent.

“You said they would not bloom. You said it so certainly that I asked our aunt about it later. I wanted her to reassure me that they would.”

“Did she?”

“She did, and they did. But when I took you to see them, you looked through them. For you, they had not bloomed. For you, it was still winter. I think it has been winter for you for many years.”

Hannibal thought of how gray the world had been to him in the hospital, every part of it but Will. “Perhaps.”

“One does not pay the ferryman in blood, but blood turns the seasons.”

“Sacrifice.”

“I would like you to see the spring, Hannibal.”

Still, she did not offer the man’s name, and Hannibal did not ask. She touched the back of his wrist with her fingertips and left him.

Hannibal stayed out on the balcony for a long time. He stood in a rushing void, darkness on all sides, no sound but the heartbeat of the ocean, a return to the unborn. A return to his last days with Mischa, in the dark of the cellar, the slow drip of water. He could almost feel her small hand in his.

Chapter Text

Hannibal’s childhood loomed out of the November mist. It looked exactly like Will had thought it would look. “This explains so much about you,” he said.

Hannibal gave him an irritated glance and got out of the car to open the massive wrought iron gates. They creaked ominously.

“Has your family ever heard of WD-40?” Will called out the window.

This time, Hannibal didn’t even look at him.

“No one told you you couldn’t jerk off,” Will said. “Don’t take your blue balls out on me.”

Hannibal stalked back to the car, got in, and pulled through the gates. As he got out to close them again, they both heard barking in the distance. Will was out of the car without a thought, looking around, searching.

Hannibal’s expression softened. “The kennel is there. I think you can just see it.” He pointed.

“You have a kennel? Of course you have a kennel. Jesus fucking Christ.” Will took off, first at a walk and then at a jog. He’d missed his dogs. He hadn’t known how much he’d miss them, their comfort, their touch that only meant one, simple thing. He was winded by the time he reached the kennel. He still got tired way too easily.

A few weeks of long walks in the forest with his dogs would fix that. And it was a hell of a forest. The trees had arched over the road to the castle like a portal to another world. That Robert Frost poem had kept coming back to him as they drove. The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

The kennel was a low, stone building with slate tile on the roof and a wooden door that looked like it was from the middle ages. It opened, and a young woman stepped out. For a second, Will was sure it was Abigail. Same dark hair, pale skin, blue eyes. Just like him. Like family.

A second look told him no, this girl was younger, fifteen at most, shorter, longer hair. And her smile was nothing like Abigail’s, no bitterness in it, no sharp teeth. She waved to him and said something in, probably, Lithuanian, and then, carefully, “Mr. Graham? Your dogs?”

“My dogs,” Will agreed. He wished he’d gotten Hannibal to teach him some Lithuanian over the past month, but he didn’t think it would’ve stuck. Half the time, he’d had trouble finding English words for the things he wanted to say. Still, he’d gotten one down. “Ačiū,” he said, equally careful. Thank you.

She smiled again and then gestured him inside.

Will’s dogs barked and jumped up against the wood and iron gates of their kennels, tails wagging so fast they blurred. Will opened the gates and let them all out, let them tumble him onto the floor and sit in his lap and lick his face and neck and ears. And his teeth when he smiled too wide.

“Gross, guys.” But he didn’t push them off, and he couldn’t stop smiling.

The girl was smiling as wide as he was. She touched her chest. “I am Danute.”

“Will,” Will said, doing to the same.

“Good dogs,” Danute said. “I like them very much.”

Will hugged Medea close. “They are good dogs.”

That seemed to exhaust her English conversational skills, and he’d already shot his full load of Lithuanian, so it was good that Hannibal stepped into the kennel at that moment. He talked quietly with Danute while Will scratched various ears and chests and backs and got licked in more disgusting places.

Eventually, he surfaced enough to see that the girl was gone and Hannibal was watching him with something approaching a smile. He leaned against the stone wall, arms crossed over his chest.

“What?” Will said.

“Will they be sleeping in the house with us?”

“Of course.”

“Not on our bed,” Hannibal said.

Will looked up at him. They hadn’t been sharing a bed in the house in Chiba. Except on the nights when they had. But Will knew if he commented, Hannibal would find separate rooms for them. He didn’t really want separate rooms. “We’ll have to get some dog beds.”

Hannibal inclined his head in agreement. “Would you like to see the castle?”

Will stood up and dusted himself off. “Lead the way.”

The grounds were big enough that they got back in the car to drive up to the entrance, with all seven dogs crowded into the back and a pained expression on Hannibal’s face.

The mist had grown thicker. Will felt he could almost see it rising from the ground. It had entirely eaten the castle and now disgorged it in parts. First, the top of the central tower with its sharp peaks and its clock that had stopped forever just before nine. As they bumped over the cobblestones, the door came into focus, arched dark wood that looked ready to withstand a siege. The rest of the building spread out to either side and vanished into the mist, which made it look like it went on forever.

When Hannibal shut off the engine, the silence that rushed in hurt Will’s ears. Several of the dogs started to bark as though they felt it too. He hushed them with a gesture, and all of them stood, silent, as Hannibal walked up to the door. He took a key from his pocket, black iron, the size of his hand, with a snake that wrapped around the shaft.

“Have you kept that all these years?”

Hannibal glanced back at him. “Of course. It is the only remaining key.” He fit it into the lock, turned it, and pushed the door open. Unlike the gate, it swung open in complete and eerie silence. Hannibal stood on the doorstep.

Will crossed his arms. “What’s wrong now? Scared?”

“Yes,” Hannibal said simply.

Will stepped up beside him. He watched Hannibal’s face. It had settled into a still, blank expression like the surface of the murky pond they’d passed on the way in. Dark and choked with memory instead of decayed water lilies.

Will didn’t like it. He didn’t want Hannibal to look like that. And he could have said a number of things to get that expression off Hannibal’s face, but he didn’t really want Hannibal to be annoyed with him right now either. Not anymore. Instead, he caught Hannibal’s hand and dragged him forward. “Come on. I won’t let anything in there get you.”

Will didn’t look back to see what effect that had, but Hannibal’s reply sounded lighter. “Are you planning to fight my ghosts for me?”

“I’ll set the dogs on them.”

They stood on broken tile. A few weeds grew up through it, and moss had colonized the door sill. A bird flew over them in a mad flurry of wings, and a feather floated down to catch in the ornate frame of a clouded mirror.

“What would you like to see first?” Hannibal said, voice more or less steady.

“Worst parts first.”

“The cellars then.”

Hannibal led him to the right, through an echoing, empty room with birds fluttering in the rafters, down a narrow hallway. Leading off the hallway was an even narrower set of stone steps, dips worn in the centers from centuries of use. Hannibal had kept his grip on Will’s hand, but he released it now. They had to go single file.

“I’ll go first,” Will said. He didn’t know why. It wasn’t like it would actually help. He wasn’t even sure he wanted to help. But he’d liked the way Hannibal held onto him and the way Hannibal looked at him now as he nodded.

He liked Hannibal.

He thought about that as he walked down shallow steps, slippery with moisture, as the air around them grew colder and damper, as a sense of weight grew above them. He knew he needed Hannibal. He’d known that for a while. Liking him was something else.

The wall fell away on one side, and Will stopped to peer into the shadows.

Behind him, Hannibal flicked on a flashlight. He swept the cellar with it and showed Will glimpses of wine bottles, what looked like a jail cell against the wall, gardening tools, wooden wheels, and thousands and thousands of snail shells.

“What the shit,” Will said.

Hannibal let out a soft, amused breath behind him. “The skeletal remains of my cochlear garden.”

“You raised snails?”

“I did. To eat and to be eaten.”

“What were they eating?” Will continued down to ground level. The floor was made of massive stone slabs. One or two were missing and showed the bare dirt beneath.

“Herbs. Grapes. Whatever I could find to feed them. I experimented to see what would change their flavor. My sister and I lived on them for a time.”

“And then?”

Hannibal stood in the center of the cellar. He looked up at the vaulted ceiling for a long moment and then walked to the cell. “He put us in here. We ate what we could reach. After a time, we could reach nothing.”

Will waited and watched.

Hannibal’s hand hovered over the iron bars, but he did not touch. “He brought us water. He told us it was snowing outside. That there was no more food. It was a lie. Even aside from the snails we could not reach, I knew it was a lie. My mother always prepared for the winter. It is easy here to get snowed in for a week or more.”

He grasped one bar, wrapped his hand around it and held tight. His expression didn’t change. “Mischa grew weaker. I fed her all that I could catch, and as a result I grew weaker as well. He asked me what I would do when she died. He asked me how much I wanted to live.”

Will joined him by the cell. He put his hand over Hannibal’s on the bar. “What did you do when she died?”

“Nothing,” Hannibal said quietly. “I lay down beside her and I waited to follow her. He was angry, but by then I could barely understand him. My mind was going. I slept. When I woke up, she was gone.”

Will waited. He could guess what came next. A few flippant comments bubbled up. He squelched them. He wondered briefly what would happen if he locked Hannibal in that cell again, and he squelched that thought too.

“He brought me soup. I thought it was a reward of sorts. That I had passed the test he set by not doing what he encouraged me to do. I didn’t understand until I found her teeth at the bottom of the bowl.”

“What did you do?”

“I don’t remember. That is my last memory until Chiyoh found me in the forest. After that, I remember screaming. I remember nightmares. Fragments, shards. The narrative of memory picks up again in Kyoto, watching my aunt arrange flowers. I believe that day was two months after Chiyoh found me.”

“I think we could get rid of these snail shells,” Will said. “Kind of a tripping hazard.”

Hannibal almost smiled. “I agree.”

“You want to grab some wine and we’ll get drunk?”

“Is that what one does in these circumstances?”

“I don’t think it could make things any worse.”

Hannibal picked out four dusty bottles, and they climbed up out of the depths.

Chapter Text

“And then,” Will said, “and then I set it on fire.” The words slurred slightly due to too much wine and also an ancient bottle of whiskey they’d found under the floorboards in the bedroom. “Sedditon. Fire. Set. It. On. Fire. Yeah. I did that.” He nodded and finished off the wine bottle in his hand.

They lay side by side on a carved wooden bed the size of a small room. Twisted posts reached up to the ceiling with strange animal faces leering out of them. Hannibal had told him that most of the original furniture had been sold off or stolen. The bed must’ve been more trouble than it was worth.

“What?” Hannibal said.

“What?”

“What did you set on fire?”

Will frowned up at the wood-beamed ceiling. “Can’t remember. Wow, I am drunk. I don’t get this drunk.”

“A bad idea when you have secrets. Corpses. Secret corpses.”

“You’re drunk too,” Will said.

Hannibal nodded slowly. “I also do not get drunk.”

“And you don’t even have any secret corpses.”

“But I do have secrets.”

Will flopped over to lie with his chin on Hannibal’s chest. “Tell me one.”

“You know them all.”

Will made a scornful noise. “Bullshit. You’re made of secrets. I just know the big ones.”

Quiet, the crackling of the fire, something howling in the forest. Will’s dogs looked up from their improvised bed of blankets by the fireplace, looked to Will, and settled down again.

“Chiyoh knows who killed her,” Hannibal said.

Will sat up, or tried to. He ended up listing sideways, holding onto Hannibal’s arm. “What? She fucking what?”

Hannibal swallowed. “We discussed it.”

“Did she tell you who it was?”

“I did not ask.”

”What? Why not?”

Hannibal laid his head back on the pillows. He gazed at the ceiling. “I have tried so hard to forget him. To fit myself into the world, as if my every other thought were not of death. If I know who he is, what will I do? I must kill him. In doing so, I abandon the effort of a lifetime for one moment.”

“It’ll be a good moment,” Will said.

“Do you think so? Have you ever killed for revenge?”

Will was quiet for a few seconds. “No.”

“No. Your victims matter to you not at all. This man matters too much to me. Perhaps it is not Chiyoh you should be jealous of.”

Will closed his eyes for a second to stop the room from spinning around his head like a child’s mobile. “And he’d be your first kill.”

“Not the first.”

“You know what I mean,” Will said. “The first that counts. And then he’d matter even more.”

“Yes. And I ask myself, do I want this? And I do not know the answer.”

“So you’re not asking, and she’s not telling.”

“Just so.”

Will flopped back beside Hannibal on the pillows. They flattened under his head with a puff of air and dusty goose down. Hannibal had informed him that previous occupants of the castle had hunted the geese themselves.

Christmas was coming. What did you get the guy who had a title, a castle, and untold wealth in multiple Swiss bank accounts? Maybe the head of the man who’d murdered his little sister would be a good start.

\*

The next morning, one of the dogs jumped on the bed to wake Will, poking a familiar wet nose into his ear. Will pushed at him until the nose went away and Buck lay down, solid and warm, across his legs. The heat was welcome, and it made him aware that there was no heat beside him. Except for Buck, he was alone in the bed. Hopefully, Hannibal was in the kitchen making coffee.

Will jammed his feet into boots to protect them from the icy stone, put on every warm layer he’d brought, and got up to let the dogs out. He found the kitchen cold and empty, the wood stove unlit.

Will opened the kitchen door for the dogs and stood blinking, distracted from the question of Hannibal’s whereabouts by the sheet of blinding white that covered the estate.

The dogs leapt into it, bounding and snapping at loose powder, rolling in it like puppies. Will couldn’t help smiling at them and, despite Hannibal’s absence, the sight eased a knot that had lived in the back of his throat since the last time he’d left Wolf Trap. The snow covered his field of vision, untouched by footprint or tire track. It was broken only by the dark vertical lines of the trees. It was not his forest. Not yet. But maybe it could be.

The tug in his chest produced by that thought was too much to cope with before coffee. Will shut the door on the white estate, his happy dogs, and the knifelike wind, and set about finding where Hannibal had stashed the matches. While he poked around for them, lit the wood stove, and made coffee, he considered Hannibal’s absence.

Hannibal’s coat still hung by the door. He was in the house somewhere. He’d be back. Will had lived happily alone all his adult life. He didn’t need to spend twenty-four hours a day in Hannibal’s company. It would be a relief to have some time to himself.

Will set a pan on the stove to heat and prodded at the unfamiliar emotion slinking around his stomach. It didn’t feel like relief. One part annoyance, two parts resentment at being abandoned in a freezing castle in a foreign country, but those were just seasoning for the bulk of it, which he could not identify. Will was afraid it might be hurt, which was ridiculous.

He focused instead on the resentment and set to banging cupboard doors in a search for plates and eggs. It was rude of Hannibal to run out on him, even if he’d only run to the east wing or whatever. They were supposed to be in this together. Also, apparently, he’d hidden the eggs before he left. What an asshole. Will didn’t have to put up with this shit.

He stalked to the door and yanked it open to whistle for the dogs—Sunshine was a damn good tracker—and stopped.

A battered, white hatchback rumbled slowly over the white lawn around the side of the house. Danute’s cheerful face appeared through the window as it approached. She waved a mittened hand and called, “We do not know if you know it is going to snow!”

“I figured it out,” Will said.

She jumped out and waded toward him, holding a basket up high, out of reach of the dogs who swarmed her. “We bring breakfast and firewood,” she said, grinning, flushed with cold. Her purple knit cap came down past her eyebrows and kept slipping over one eye. The fluffy ball on top bobbed with each step.

An old man climbed from the truck, tall and straight with an iron gray mane of hair. He wore a quilted jacket and no hat so that his hair blew straight out to the left of his face like a flag in the stiff wind. Danute had a head start, but the old man’s legs were longer, and they reached Will at the same time.

“My grandfather,” Danute said. “And this is from my mother.” She handed over the basket, which smelled of bacon and baking and warmed Will’s hands.

Will deployed his one word of Lithuanian again, with feeling.

“Genimidas.” The old man stuck out his hand.

Will took it and got his own hand nearly crushed. It didn’t seem like a macho thing. Genimidas just had massive paws and was accustomed to using that strength, not restraining it. “Will Graham.”

“I do not know if you want me for the dogs?” Danute said.

“If you could feed them, that’d be great.” She looked uncertain, and he said it again, slower and with less mumbling morning voice.

She nodded and smiled. “Yes, I am happy.” When she called to them, they dogs went easily off toward the kennel with her, head-butting her hands to encourage petting. Medea, old and short-legged, fell behind. Danute scooped her up and carried her.

Will smiled after them for a second. He waved Genimidas inside and poured him coffee, for which he got a grunted thanks.

“Where do you want the wood?” Genimidas asked. “The woodshed?”

“I don’t know where the woodshed is.”

“I will show you.” He nodded to the basket. “Take breakfast or it will get cold.”

Will uncovered Danute’s basket. It was full of soft, golden rolls. When he bit into one, he found out that they reason they smelled like bacon was that they were full of bacon. Despite the lure of coffee, bacon rolls, and the only warm room in the castle, there was still no sign of Hannibal. If Hannibal had abandoned him for good, maybe he could shack up with Danute’s mother.

“Right,” Will said. “Let’s go.”

They got into the truck, which was warmer than the outside air, but not by much. Voices muttered from the radio, turned down low. The smell of pipe tobacco permeated the cab.

“My granddaughter loves your dogs.”

“They love her. She’s good with them.”

Genimidas showed white teeth in a slicing grin. “Dogs are not picky, hm? But she is a good girl. She was very happy to get this job. She loves all the animals.”

For the first time, it occurred to Will to wonder how Chiyoh had found a teenage dog-sitter from half a world away. He was assuming Danute didn’t have an ad up on the Lithuanian version of Craigslist. But hell, maybe she did.

Genimidas drove over the wide lawn, around the edge of the castle. He wound between trees, both standing and fallen, around hummocks in the snow and bramble patches. At one point, he swerved to follow dozens of delicately pointed hoof prints all the way to the edge of the forest. He stopped. “Look there.”

It took Will some time to see them in the darkness under the trees. Four deer, three does and a stag, stepping lightly through the snow. The stag had the wide branching antlers of a veteran. He looked straight at the truck and seemed to have no fear of it.

“I have hunted that bastard for years,” Genimidas said. “And I am here without my gun.”

Will and Genimidas watched for several minutes until the deer picked their way back into the forest. Will thought of Abigail’s father teaching her to hunt. His own father teaching him. He wondered if Genimidas had tried to teach Danute. He thought not.

Genimidas shrugged. “I am not so hungry now as I was when I was young. Then I would have gone after it with my knife. Or my teeth. I am glad my granddaughter doesn’t know what it is to be hungry.” He started driving again. When they hit frozen mud under the snow, the truck left skidding wheel ruts across the pristine lawn.

Will hadn’t seen even a quarter of the castle yet and hadn’t seen the back of it at all. It rose in a sheer cliff face, as geared toward defense as the front, but less ornate. A stone courtyard in the back was scattered with broken household objects: a rusted out wheelbarrow, a cracked claw foot tub, even a skeletal car up on blocks, wheels long gone, hood open to expose the cavity where its engine had been.

“Reminds me of my childhood,” Will said.

Genimidas gave him an inquiring look, but Will didn’t feel like explaining. They drove on, across the courtyard and maybe another fifty yards, until they came to a shed. Will thought it seemed like a hell of a hike for firewood in the middle of winter and said so.

Genimidas’s mouth pulled up at one corner. “Yes, but they had servants for this.”

“But we don’t.”

“You want it more close?”

“The front hall’s fine as far as I’m concerned.”

“Hm. Short walk, yes, but you are having work done. It should be out of the way.” Genimidas paused, thick gray brows drawn together. “What about the coal room?”

“There’s a coal room?”

“In the cellar. There are many rooms in the cellar.”

“Sounds fine to me.” Better firewood than dead snails.

They set off again, skirting the courtyard this time and rumbling over an uneasy combination of frozen mud and gravel. Will tried to picture the cellar in relation to the outside of the castle, but all he remembered from the brief tour last night was that cell. They stopped at a patch of snow that had an iron handle sticking out of it.

“It has not been used in so long, you know, forty years, more.” Genimidas got out of the truck and grasped the handle.

Will was about to suggest they get a shovel, but the old man heaved on it, teeth bared, veins and tendons standing out under his leathery skin. It creaked. He strained harder.

Will wondered if Hannibal would be liable if the guy had a heart attack and dropped dead right here. “You want help?”

“Small handle,” Genimidas grunted. “Only room for one.” He heaved again, and this time the snow split. The door swung up and revealed a square of darkness beneath. Genimidas dusted his hands off on his pants. “Done.”

They stood together at the edge and peered down. It was perfectly black. Will could make out no detail to suggest the room below was anything other than a void. It must have been a combination of a fairly featureless room and coal dust coating the walls and floor, but it was still an eerie effect.

Genimidas spoke in a low rumble beside him. “Who says this about do not gaze into the abyss?”

“Some jackass.” Will had never liked Nietzsche.

“But we have found the abyss, hm?” Genimidas clapped a heavy hand on Will’s shoulder. For a moment, the force was nearly enough to knock Will forward into the abyss, and then Genimidas laughed and grabbed a handful of his jacket to pull him back. “Do not fall.”

Will gazed into the abyss, and his mind began to turn.

\*

After Will and Genimidas had unloaded the wood, after Danute had finished with the dogs, after she and her grandfather had left for home, Will went down to the cellar again. He took a flashlight, a bacon roll, and a broom.

The first thing he did was find the coal room. Snail shells crunched gratingly under his boots with each step. The second thing he did was sweep a clear path to it from the bottom of the stairs. That done, he sat on the broad bottom step to eat the roll. Even cold, it was delicious.

He surveyed the sea of shells. He’d known they would still be there, but he’d also pictured them crawling away, up the stairs and out of the house now that Hannibal had come home. Ghost snails reinhabiting their old homes and oozing out into the woods or the stagnant pond.

When he was done eating, he started sweeping. As he swept, he thought. Genimidas was in his sixties or seventies, which would make him the right age. There was no other evidence against him, but Will saw something sharp in him, something long concealed. What if Chiyoh hadn’t chosen Danute at random?

He paused in his sweeping to go and stand in the abyss of the coal room. He looked up at the thin line of daylight around the trapdoor above. It was very easy to imagine Genimidas smiling down at him as he shut that door and trapped Will in the dark. Had he wanted to be helpful when he suggested it, or had he wanted a door into the castle that had no lock?

Will returned to sweeping. It took about five minutes before he had a pile big enough that it was getting in his way. The shells crunched under his shoes like bones.

He wandered the cellar rooms, looking for a vessel. One room was full of old, broken furniture, another of racks and racks of wine, another of dresses, all gowns, all sparkling with beads and pearls and gold lace. All dirty and tattered and rotting.

He found a decayed cardboard box that contained a full silver tea service. He found a room that was empty except for a pile of animal bones in one corner. Finally, he found a couple of wooden buckets. They smelled like sour milk. He scooped up snail shells in his cupped hands and filled both of them. Five feet done. Probably fifty left to do.

A bucket in each hand, he walked to the coal room. He scattered them on the floor around the piles of wood and returned to his work.

Eventually, he lost count of the trips he’d made to and from the abyss. His hands ached from clenching the broom handle. The noise of crunching shells grated inside his skull. The floor of the coal room was awash, a moat to guard their castle walls.

He dumped the last bucket and leaned in the door frame. His arms ached. His eyes burned from straining in dim light. He closed them and let out a long breath.

A hand landed on his shoulder. To Will’s disgust, he still didn’t have a knife. He turned, bringing the broom handle up to horizontal and slammed Hannibal back against the wall.

Hannibal’s lips were slightly parted, eyes bright. He didn’t look unhappy with his situation. “Whom were you expecting?”

Will shrugged. He increased the pressure, feeling the points of resistance where wood pressed on bone. “Who knows? A cellar in a crumbling old castle in the middle of nowhere? In a blizzard? Sounds like horror movie potential to me. The audience is screaming for me to get the hell out and drive to the airport.”

Hannibal’s mouth twitched toward a smile. “The audience doesn’t know that you are the horror?”

“That’s the big plot twist.” Will let the broom drop to the floor with a clatter. He pressed his body against Hannibal instead, smelling not his usual aftershave but only dust, warmth, and age. “You smell like an old library. Where have you been?”

“An old library. Among many other places.” Hannibal angled his mouth for a kiss, and Will let him have it. “Do you remember what I said about language?”

The midwife of memory. “Some pretentious bullshit.”

Hannibal ignored him. “Before yesterday, I had not spoken my native tongue since I said goodbye to my sister.”

Will could feel the unsaid words around them, like a pool of snail shells.

“When I woke this morning, I could not speak any language at all. Each word I recalled birthed new monsters. And so I left you to walk among them. I could not think what else to do.”

“You could’ve taken me with you.”

Hannibal looked at him a long time, silent, face still. He curled a hand around the side of Will’s neck. “I did. And when I had greeted all the monsters that once lived here, I found you at their birthplace, sweeping away their bones.”

“I was sick of the noise they made under my boots. Plus all those little shell fragments stick in the treads. They’ll scratch the hell out of your wood floors.”

Hannibal kissed him again, desperate, and Will didn’t pretend he couldn’t feel it. He pressed Hannibal hard against the wall, against his body, holding him close. Trapped. Safe.

The wire tension in Hannibal’s arms eased. They came around Will, and Will felt Hannibal’s breath, deep and slow, where their stomachs and chests touched. It came out again with a sigh. “I do not know what to do in this place,” Hannibal said.

“You could find me a knife. Some weirdo snuck up on me in this creepy basement, and all I had was a broom.”

Hannibal let out an amused breath. “So next time I may find a knife in my chest instead of a broom handle?”

“Just don’t sneak up on me is the lesson there.”

His cheek rested against Will’s, and his hand moved slowly through Will’s hair. “I believe I have just the thing. There is only one room in the castle I have not visited today. Shall we?”

Will raised his eyebrows as he stepped back to free Hannibal. “How many monsters does that room have?”

“None, I should think. It is too well guarded.”

Chapter Text

Hannibal pressed a carved acorn on a wood panel that looked just like every other wood panel in the long echoing hallway that cut through the ground floor of the castle. It swung open to reveal a spiral staircase that led both up and down into the dark.

“Up or down?” Will said.

“Up.” He started to climb, flashlight sweeping the narrow stairs.

“Where are we right now?” Will said.

“These stairs run inside the walls of the north tower. There is a chamber at the top, hidden just under the roof.”

Most parts of the castle had been thick with dust, dirt, cobwebs, and even plants that had taken root in the debris. The hidden staircase was oddly clean, perhaps through having no windows or cracks. It was dusty and smelled dry and old, but no more than that. It was also pitch black except for their flashlights, which skittered across the stone and cast disturbing shadows.

“No hints about what’s in the chamber?” Will asked.

“What does one guard above all else?”

“Secrets?”

“What makes a thing secret?”

“It’s harmful to someone. Or valuable.” Will paused. “Valuable. Treasures. The family jewels?”

“Yes. My father showed me this place just once when I was seven, as his father showed it to him. Chiyoh and our aunt never knew of it. I think even my mother did not. And now I am certainly the only person alive who would know to look for it. It has remained hidden since the castle was built in the twelfth century.”

“What about the people who built it?”

“They were killed,” Hannibal said. “The man who designed it was locked in the tower until he died. My ancestor wished to be sure he had not included an alternate exit route. The original staircase reaches down to the cellars, but the cellars often flood in the spring. When the door on the ground floor was added, a generation later, the craftsmen responsible for that were murdered as well.”

They reached the top. The beams of their flashlights reflected off a bronze door. The Lecter family crest sat in the center of a starburst pattern of raised metal. One of the snakes had a hole where its eye should be. Will still didn’t know any Lithuanian, but he knew the words underneath were not the family motto.

“What does it say?”

“It says Let me drink.”

Will stared at the hole. It was about finger sized. He didn’t like the way this was going. “Let me guess. You stick a finger in there, the snake bites you”—heavy airquotes, which made Hannibal’s mouth narrow—“and only the ones with Lecter family blood get in?”

“Just so.”

“What happens to everyone else?”

“Look down.”

Will did and took a step back. It was a trapdoor, not obvious, but there if you were told to look. It was about five feet across, wide enough so that you’d have to stand on it to reach the door at all. “Obviously, that’s bullshit,” he said.

“Obviously. Would you care to try it?”

“Where are you going to stand if I do?”

Hannibal stepped off the trapdoor and onto the top step.

“Oh, come on. Are you serious?”

“Very,” Hannibal said.

“So what’s the trick? The door isn’t going to read my DNA.”

Hannibal smiled. “Is there a trick?”

Will crossed his arms and waited.

Hannibal stepped back onto the trapdoor. He stuck his forefinger into the hole. It came back with a pinprick of blood at the tip. The door swung silently open.

Immediately, Will stepped forward to look for the mechanism. Hannibal caught him by the shirt and yanked him back. Two massive axes swung down from either side of the doorway and met in what would have been Will’s intestines.

Will touched the edge of one. Still sharp. “That’s the trick.”

“Partially,” Hannibal said. “There are two levers inside the hole in the door, one behind the other. To fully disarm the trap, you must push the first to the left and depress the second. Depressing the first will trigger the trapdoor. Pushing the first to the right will open the door but arm the trap inside. It was meant to be used under duress. Primitive, but so far effective.”

“These must be some jewels.”

“They represent only a small fraction of the Lecter family fortune now, but their history makes them irreplaceable.” Hannibal pushed one axe up into its slot in the wall and then the other.

They stepped into the chamber. The two of them could just fit side by side. Their shoulders touched the walls and came away dusty. No spiders had spun their webs here. There was nothing for them to eat. The ceiling touched the top of Hannibal’s head, and Will fought the urge to duck. It was not only the weight of stone that pressed in on them. The years were piled above them as well, waiting to fall.

“Your family’s older than my country,” Will said. It had plucked at the strings of his mind from time to time since they’d first seen the castle, but now it grabbed and held on, an unavoidable fact that nevertheless stuck halfway down, impossible to swallow.

“Yes,” Hannibal said simply.

“Sure you’re not a vampire?”

Hannibal’s exasperated look lifted the weight of history enough to let Will concentrate on what he was doing, which was working to open a small wooden casket with an apparently jammed lock.

“You have the key for that too? How many massive medieval keys were you carrying around with you for forty years?”

“Only the two,” Hannibal said. “There are more, but Chiyoh had them. Ah. There.” He lifted the domed lid of dark wood. Inside was a layer of white silk, half rotten with time. Hannibal lifted that away with careful fingers and revealed the jewels.

A lot of them were just that: jewels, loose, uncut and unset lumps of precious rock. Will saw also a massive gold brooch set with blue stones that he assumed were sapphires, a delicate crown like a jewel-studded halo, gold bracelets, silvers ones with chunks of polished amber, necklaces, and piles and piles of rings.

Set apart, under another fold of silk, lay something else. Hannibal lifted away the tattered fabric to reveal a pair of slim knives. They were sheathed in dark leather, about as long as Will’s forearm. The hilts had only a single, polished cabochon of amber. As Hannibal unsheathed one, Will saw the gold knots of a stylized serpent coiled around its blade.

Hannibal regarded it, expression unreadable. “They were bought by an ancestor for him and his bride. She too was a hunter. He wished to assure her that he would not ask her to stop.”

Will stared at the blade, almost hypnotized by the slide of light along the inlaid gold. “What did they hunt?”

“Wolves,” Hannibal said softly.

“You don’t hunt wolves with knives.”

“There is nothing to stop one from doing so. Except perhaps common sense.”

“Are there still wolves here?”

“Oh, yes.”

Will reached out to touch it and paused. “How old is it?”

“Older than your country. Is that an issue?”

“Shut up. How old?”

“I do not know. They were old already when Hannibal the Grim acquired them. That was eight hundred years ago.” Hannibal contemplated the knife a moment longer and then sank slowly down to one knee and offered the hilt to Will.

A vise squeezed around Will’s heart. The snakes stared up at him, eyes and fangs gleaming. He reached out to take it and paused. “If I have this one, you have to take the other. You know that, right?”

Hannibal bowed his head. “I know.”

Will freed the other knife from its sheath. He wrapped his hand tight around the blade and offered Hannibal the hilt. Hannibal tightened his own hand around the blade of Will’s knife. They gripped the hilts together and pulled. It cut as deeply as Will had hoped it would.

Hannibal reached for his hand, and Will felt their matching wounds press flesh to flesh, palm to palm, blood to blood. They laced their fingers together. Will dug his nails into the back of Hannibal’s hand and knelt down with him. They bent toward each other, foreheads touching, resting against each other’s bodies.

Will laughed, shaky and strained. “Well, that’s it. You’ve done it now. You’re not getting out of this relationship alive.”

“I know.”

Will could feel the pulse of blood under his skin, under Hannibal’s skin, lines of heat and life flowing and merging. He squeezed his eyes closed. His chest hurt. He felt dizzy. “I’m not joking. Do you get that? I’m not joking.”

Hannibal didn’t answer. Will imagined how calm his face must be, calculating whether it was better to break Will’s neck now and leave him up here, hidden forever. That was the sensible decision, and Will knew it. Maybe it would be better that way.

Hannibal cupped his cheek. He stroked a thumb over Will’s eyelid. Will opened his eyes. It wasn’t deliberation he saw on Hannibal’s face. It was triumph.

“I know,” Hannibal said. “I have you. At last.”

Will leaned in and kissed him, teeth against his lips, struggling not to draw more blood. “Come out to the forest with me. Now.”

“Are we hunting wolves?”

“Just come.” Will pulled him up.

They closed the door to the tower room in silence and picked their way down the stairs. Will’s pulse was hard and fast. His hand clenched on the hilt of his knife.

As they stepped back into the main house, they both stopped dead at a sound from outside. It was a cry of hoarse, animal terror, and it went on and on. Something was dying in agony.

“What is it?” Hannibal spoke quietly. He didn’t seem to expect an answer, but Will knew the sound.

“It’s a deer.”

“I did not know that deer could scream.”

Will thought of Genimidas and the stag. “Almost anything can scream if you hurt it bad enough.”

Chapter Text

The scream had set Will’s dogs barking. They found them in the kitchen, scratching to get outside. Hannibal hesitated to let them out into an unknown situation, but Will did not. He flung the door open, and they piled out into the snow, racing ahead around the side of the castle.

Will and Hannibal went after them. The barking and commotion faded to silence, and Will started to run, Hannibal on his heels, wishing for his gun.

One of the dogs came trotting back. Buster, one of the smaller ones. He seemed uninjured, as tongue-lollingly happy as ever, but his paw prints in the snow were stained red.

Will knelt and checked him over. Hannibal continued on. He met Buck coming back, paws also stained red. Buck nosed at the back of his knee. They walked together around the corner of the castle.

He saw it from a distance, a red gash in front of the massive front doors. When he reached the bottom of the steps, the image shifted from mere gore to an identifiable form: a great stag with a dark coat and antlers wide enough to span the front steps. Shot through one eye, gutted, and laid on their doorstep.

Its internal organs had been placed around it in the snow. Its eyes were flat, but it was still warm to the touch. The killer could not have gone far. Hannibal stepped back. He was treating it as a crime scene, but killing a stag was not murder. Displaying the carcass in such a way might be called trespassing or threat. Or it might be called a generous gift. It would depend on the intent of the giver.

The dogs sat at the base of the stairs, waiting. They had trampled through the blood, but they had not touched the body. The carcass. Hannibal knelt by the head. He could see veins running under under the creature’s skin. Its fine eyelashes. The frost around its nose where its last breath had frozen.

Will appeared at his shoulder, blank-faced. It was a long time before he spoke. “I met Danute’s grandfather this morning. He brought us that firewood.”

Hannibal stood and frowned, for once not following. “Yes?”

“Genimidas. Big guy. About ten, fifteen years older than you. Lived in the village his whole life. He talked about hunting this stag. About being hungry as a young man.”

Knowledge stirred inside Hannibal. It was knowledge he did not want.

Will was watching him, eyes sharp. “Did Chiyoh tell you why she picked Danute?”

Hannibal felt the knowledge spill over, something hot and electric and unavoidable. “It is him.”

“Maybe. Can’t say for sure. Could you? If you saw him?”

“I cannot believe that any number of years could change him enough that I would not know him.”

They stood together and looked out at the dark line of the forest. Hannibal stepped toward it, but Will caught his shoulder. “He’s not out there.”

“How do you know?”

“Because you’re not out there.” He jerked his head toward the front door. “Do you have the key on you?”

Hannibal unlocked it. Will gestured to the dogs, and all of them stopped, tails wagging, standing in the blood stained snow while Will knelt in the front hall. “Remember where I put the snail shells?”

“In the coal room, with the wood. Yes.”

Will wiped his fingers across the stone floor and then across Hannibal’s palm. Hannibal felt the fine, sharp grit there.

“It’s all over my boots from doing the basement, but I haven’t been through here since we came in the first time.”

Hannibal rubbed his fingers through the pulverized shells. “This is why you put them in there. You believed he might enter through the coal room.”

“I wondered, that’s all. It’s an easy way in.” Will walked to the stairs and ran his fingers over the first step. “He went up here. Maybe while we were out there looking at the body.”

There was little discussion. Hannibal closed and locked the front doors. Will took the dogs to the kitchen. They looked at each other and then began to climb. The traces of the powdered shells were faint. But, as Hannibal knew, remnants of the cellar clung to one with surprising tenacity.

The trail turned left at the top of the stairs, and so did they. Inevitably, it came to their room. Will and Hannibal stood outside their door and looked down. Hannibal saw the bits of shell, thicker here than they had been on the stairs. And there the trail ended.

“Think he’s hiding under the bed?” Will said quietly.

Hannibal felt the upward curve of his own lips that stopped just short of baring his teeth. “Perhaps. He believes he is still the monster here.”

“Yeah.” Will pushed his jacket open to reveal his knife, sheath tucked into his belt. “We’re going to kill him, right? You’re not going to tell me to back off at the last minute?”

That could get one of them killed. Hannibal ran his fingers over the blade of his own knife. “No. Not if it is him.”

“What do you think the odds are that it isn’t him?”

“Low. But one must allow for the unlikely. If he is only an unbalanced old man, or even a thief, we will not hurt him.”

“Fair. Open the door.”

Hannibal swung it open. This room was empty. Hannibal knelt, still in the doorway, to look under the bed. No one. He took one step inside. The door swung hard into his shoulder. It knocked him sideways, and his head cracked against the doorframe. He lost his grip on his knife and fell to his knees.

His sister’s killer stood over him. His eyes looked almost yellow in the dim light. He held a rifle.

Will came in low from the hall. He tackled Genimidas at the knees, but the old man simply stood and swung his rifle butt like a bat into Will’s head. He grabbed Will’s shirt and threw him against the wall. Will lay on the ground, hand empty, knife skidded away to some dark recess. His teeth were bared in pain.

Genimidas backed up to cover them both and pointed his rifle at Will. “Stand up.” Will climbed to his feet. He had blood on his mouth and the forest in his eyes.

He was ready to spring, and Genimidas must have seen that. He spoke to Hannibal, but kept the rifle and his eyes on Will. “You too, little Hannibal. Come and stand with your lover, please. I want the set together and matched.”

Hannibal obeyed. He stood at Will’s side and felt the heat of anger coming off of him. Hannibal himself felt nothing. No anger. No fear of this man. All his dread was for his memories, which he could not alter or escape. The mortal being who had been their wet nurse was nothing to him now.

Genimidas gestured them out of the room. “Move.”

“No,” Hannibal said.

Genimidas shoved the rifle into his stomach and then switched it to Will’s. “I say yes.”

“And I still say no. You will take us to the cellar. You will lock us in.”

“Of course. Why else have you come back to me?” He swung the rifle to Hannibal again and laid the barrel along his cheek. “I waited for you, little one. I knew. I knew you would come back.”

Hannibal felt Will’s weight shift and touched his hip in warning. Will subsided, but it would not be for long. “I came home,” Hannibal said. “I did not come to you.”

“You were always for me, you and Mischa both. I knew, all the time I watched you grow.” He set the barrel of the rifle against Hannibal’s lips, and it was almost tender. “You were like me. She wasn’t, but you were. We were family.”

“We are not family.”

“You did not kill her. I know. You chose to die. And so I chose to die also. I worked, I married, I had children. I was good.” He laughed like a wolf, more a howl than a bark. “I had not even a traffic violation. You were good and so I was good. But you came back.” He leaned in close. His breath was hot, and his pupils were wide and dark. “This time, you know hunger. This time, you will choose to live.”

“I will not get back into that cage,” Hannibal said.

“You will.” Genimidas swung the rifle to Will.

“Not to save his life. Not to save my own.”

“I would not kill either of you, but I could weaken him for you. I could break his knees. Or his hands. I could break him down until you agree. Until it is easy to say yes and easy to feed.”

Hannibal shook his head. “You say we are alike, but you believe you can hurt him to gain my compliance? Do as you like, but I say no. I will not get back in that cage.” He meant it, and he could see that Genimidas knew he meant it. He watched the weathered features contort into something monstrously human, a two year old’s tantrum on a grown man’s face.

“Then I will kill you both.” Genimidas pressed the rifle against his left eye so hard that colored static filled Hannibal’s vision.

“That will not get you what you want.”

“You do not know what I want.”

“I do,” Will said brightly.

“You know nothing about me, boy,” Genimidas said.

“I know you were meant to be a hunter,” Will said. “You’re either the hunter or the prey, right? And you’ve been the prey. You flipped a coin and that’s how it fell. But the joke’s on you, because he was never the prey. The little boy you locked in that cage grew up to hunt people like you. Like me. He hunted the big game while you settled down and worked some shitty job to feed your brats. You should’ve tried your experiment with them. Most kids will sell each other out for a chocolate bar.”

The tremor in Genimidas’s hands passed through the steel of the rifle into the bones of Hannibal’s skull. “I was good,” Genimidas said dully.

“Yeah, how’d that work out for you? Time to be something else. Ditch the gun, take my knife, give us a head start. Be a hunter. That’s what you really want.”

Genimidas was silent. The rifle did not waver. At any moment, Hannibal expected to feel the click of the trigger, the heat of the shot.

“You will use your dogs,” he said at last.

“Lock them in the cell. Hell, lock me in there with them. If you win, you can leave me in there. Dogs eat when they’re hungry.”

“No,” Hannibal said. The denial was pulled from his stomach, from his guts. It left him hollow and breathless.

Genimidas jerked his chin in a sharp nod. “Yes. We will do this.”

“No, we will not, no, Will—“

Will met his eyes. “Just be better than he is. That’s all you have to do.”

Just do what Will had wanted from him all along. Kill.

Chapter Text

The iron door of the cage clanged shut on Will and his dogs. The sound made Hannibal’s stomach turn.

“Go,” Genimidas said. “I will wait three minutes. That is enough. Then I will come.”

He checked his watch, and Hannibal was aware the countdown had begun. Despite that, he took a moment to look back at Will, who sat casually on the floor inside Hannibal’s nightmare. His dogs surrounded him, relaxed and panting for now. But in three days? A week? Would they turn on each other or on Will first? They were accustomed to the taste of human flesh.

Will gave him a cheery wave, and Hannibal turned away. He walked until he was out of sight and then he ran, as silent as one could be over stone floors, deeper into the cellars.

He had no light and trailed a hand along the wall, counting doorways to navigate. He had no plan. No thought would stay fixed in his mind long enough to form one. They moved through his consciousness like fireflies through the dark.

He and Will would not be safe as long as Genimidas was free. Hannibal could call the police, but his word was the only evidence—the word of a traumatized child, grown into an adult whose memories of that time were fractured at best. Any competent lawyer would get an acquittal.

So he must plot a murder as he was hunted through his childhood, while his sister’s killer held his heart in a cage surrounded by wolves. With these difficulties laid out, Hannibal’s mind began to calm. It was a challenge, yes, but he enjoyed challenges, and this one was more consuming than most. So to speak.

Behind him, something howled, and it was not Will’s dogs. Genimidas was coming to find him. Good. The further he was from Will, the better. But Hannibal was not ready to be found.

He turned left into a storage room and felt his way past rows of empty wine crates to the stairs that led up to the kitchen. There he disturbed the dust on the first few steps, but had time for no more than that. He could hear Genimidas coming.

Without a flashlight, he could not see his own tracks on the floor or the stairs, but Genimidas would. He crawled back over the top of the crates so that the tracks would lead in only one direction.

He left the room and kept moving. Behind him, he heard footsteps and saw a distant light. Genimidas reached the storage room and saw the open door, the stairs, the tracks. Silence, and then the footsteps continued—not up the stairs, but deeper into the cellars. Still pursuing him.

The man was not a fool. He had seen the undisturbed dust on the upper stairs, had taken the time to look instead of rushing after his prey. Hannibal had hoped to trick him, double back, and release Will. Now he would have to go on, and quickly. Genimidas was not far behind.

The dark intestines of the castle sprawled before them. Hannibal wanted him up and away from Will, but many of the staircases were too straight and too long. He would not reach the top before Genimidas was at the bottom, and Hannibal did not trust him to use the knife rather than his rifle. A shot in the back and it would all be over. He wished one of the spiraling tower staircases reached this far down—and then he remembered: one of them did. The hidden stairs in the north tower.

His father had never shown him the original access point in the cellar, never told him how to open it, but if he could work it out before Genimidas caught up with him—if he could lead him up the tower stairs—up to the chamber at the top—

Hannibal calmed the sudden agitation of his mind and searched his memory. He had already passed the wine racks and here was the room with a wolf’s head for a doorknob, so then a right turn here into the wider hallway. Now a left, straight on through dust and rotted fabric that crumbled under his fingers and the occasional crunch of a stray snail shell. He wondered how far his snails had crawled in hope of escape they never found.

Here was the room, but Genimidas was close behind him. Hannibal closed the door and shoved a stack of crates against it. It would not hold for long, but Hannibal did not want to keep him out forever.

Stone blocks formed the back wall of the room, no different from any other in the castle. Hannibal could not feel a seam or any way a door might appear. For a moment he thought he must have gotten the wrong room and trapped himself, but his memory insisted, and in this he trusted it.

Genimidas hit the door with a dull thud that shifted the crates a scraping inch across the stone floor.

Hannibal put his hands on the stone. He conjured the position of the north tower in his mind. The entrance would be on the right side of the room.

Another thud, a growl from outside.

He felt no hidden hinges, no gap, nothing. And then, as he pressed both palms to the wall, he felt a difference: one stone was warmer than the others. Almost as if it were not stone at all. Hannibal pressed on it. Nothing happened.

Outside, Genimidas hurled himself against the door again with a wordless shout. The crates moved inexorably inward.

Hannibal groped in the dark, arms stretched wide, searching. There, as high up as he could reach, another warm stone, much smaller. He pressed both at once as hard as he could. Both depressed. The smaller one sprang back. The larger slid away entirely.

Hannibal dove through the hole into the dark and launched himself up the spiral stairs. Behind him, he heard splintering wood and heavy footsteps.

The glow of Genimidas’s flashlight shone upward to light Hannibal’s way—just a little too late for him to avoid the gap in the stairs. His foot went into it up to his knee. He grabbed the stairs above him, shoved with his other foot, and came free, but Genimidas was on him. The old man caught his ankle in a crushing grip and twisted.

Pain. He got both hands on the stairs and kicked with his free foot. It caught Genimidas in the face and sent him reeling back. Hannibal scrambled forward, upward. His ankle throbbed. He hoped it was not broken. He could ignore pain, but if it was a break, and bad enough, it might not continue to bear his weight.

He tried to save it, climbing on two hands and one foot like a beast. Like prey. Will had called him a hunter, but Hannibal’s time in the FBI had not been a big game hunt. He had done his job. He had done it well. He had derived intellectual pleasure from parts of it and been bored by others. He had not hunted.

And here, in this house, he had always been prey. He could feel the beast’s breath behind him. He could smell his parents’ blood, caught in the stone and preserved like a fly in amber.

He was younger and perhaps fitter than his pursuer. Even wounded, he pulled ahead. Not far, but enough to give him a moment at the top to open the door. He stood at the back of the small room inside and pressed himself against the wall. To a hunter, he would look like a beast brought to bay.

Genimidas stopped just inside the door. His lips pulled back as if he wanted to smile, but he was too wary. “What is this place?”

Hannibal gestured to the casket, unlocked and open as he and Will had left it. “My family’s treasure.”

Genimidas stared into it. Silent, unmoving, head bent as if he had seen a jeweled Medusa within and it had turned him to stone.

“Take it,” Hannibal said.

“And let you go?”

Hannibal nodded and thought: If he takes it, if he wants nothing else, let him go. He is an old man. He will die soon enough. Make his granddaughter rich.

Genimidas ran his hands through the jewels. “Why would I do that? When I can kill you, have this, and leave your lover to his dogs?” Genimidas laughed, high and sharp. “Oh, little Hannibal. I’m so glad I waited. I’m so glad you came back to me.”

Hannibal had to disguise his relief as terror. He sank back against the wall, eyes closed. Could he have gone through with it if Genimidas had agreed? Perhaps. But it would have eaten him to leave this man alive.

Now, he only needed to get between Genimidas and the door. “Please,” he said. “There is more here. In a hidden panel. Come and see. You will change your mind.”

“Show me.” The old man came to him and put Will’s knife at Hannibal’s throat, and Hannibal’s blood surged with joy.

He grabbed Genimidas’s wrist and twisted the knife free. It fell to the ground. Hannibal snatched it up, but he did not use it. He did not need it. He needed the impact of his body against this man’s, this beast’s. It was the closest Hannibal had ever been to him, and, he thought as he punched him in the throat, brought his knee up to his stomach and face, perhaps the closest he had ever been to himself.

He shoved Genimidas back into the corner, staggering but conscious. That was how Hannibal wanted him. Fully aware.

Genimidas saw his plan a half second too late. They both sprinted for the door, but Hannibal made it first. He pushed it shut in Genimidas’s mad, panicked face, and heard the lock click home.

Chapter Text

Will sat on the floor of the cell. He leaned back against the wall with Medea in his lap and Sunshine pressed against his side. “So what do you think, guys? Will you eat each other first? Or would you all go for me? I mean, I couldn’t blame you, I guess. My fault you got a taste for people.”

Buster began barking. It was his alarm bark, with all four legs planted wide and stubby tail quivering.

“Hush,” Will told him. Buster stopped, but he stayed put at the door of the cell, ready to defend his pack.

As the echo of his barks died away, Will heard what Buster had heard: footsteps coming down the stairs. They were slow and heavy. It didn’t sound like Hannibal, but it didn’t sound like Genimidas either.

Buster’s tail started wagging. Hannibal’s boots came into view a moment later. He was limping, and he carried a sledgehammer. Will couldn’t see any blood on it. Or on him.

Hannibal crossed the cellar without a word. Something kept Will quiet as well. He and the dogs drew back. Hannibal raised the sledgehammer. It came down on the lock with a sound that made Buck hide behind Will. Buster started barking again, high and urgent. Will let it go in favor of covering his own ears.

On the fifth blow, the lock broke. Hannibal looked at it for a moment and then went to work on the hinges.

Will didn’t interfere—although he did pick Buster up in case he decided to help—but watched Hannibal’s face. There was no emotion, only concentration on a task. He swung and he swung.

The hinges gave way one by one. Hannibal stepped aside. The cell door fell outward and crashed to the ground. Will’s ears rang in the silence.

He got to his feet. Hannibal still wasn’t looking at him. He had dropped the sledgehammer and stood with his head down, breath coming hard.

“Is he dead?” Will said.

“Not yet.” Sunshine trotted over and licked Hannibal’s fingers. He rested a hand on her back. With the other, he pulled Will’s knife from his waistband and passed it to him. “He will be.”

“Where is he?”

Hannibal told him.

“Show me,” Will said.

Hannibal looked up at him slowly and nodded once. His shoulders straightened. He surveyed the wreckage of the cell like someone else had done it and then he turned toward the stairs. He limped more noticeably as he climbed.

“You’re hurt,” Will said.

“A minor injury.” He paused, and then resumed his slow climb. “There is a hole in the dining room floor. We shall say I caught my foot in it.”

“What shall we not say?”

“That he grabbed my ankle and twisted it as I fled up the tower stairs.”

They reached the main floor. Will made a detour to leave the dogs in the kitchen and found Hannibal standing at the entrance to the hidden staircase. They began to climb again.

“You don’t have to come,” Will said.

“I do.”

At the top of the spiral, there was nothing but silence. Will stepped forward and knocked on the door. Immediately, a frantic pounding started from inside. He could hear muffled shouts but could not make out the words.

“For the love of God, Montresor,” Hannibal murmured.

Will pressed his ear to the door. The desperate scraps of Genimidas's voice reached inside him until he could feel his own throat squeeze around a scream, the door bruising his shoulder, the panic of being trapped forever in the dark.

He jerked himself away. “We were going out to the forest.”

“Now?” Hannibal said.

“Now.”

Hannibal gave him a long look but, after a moment, started down the stairs without comment. Will followed. Two steps down, another scream dug a hook into him and wouldn’t let go.

Just a few days, maybe even a single night in the unheated tower room, and Genimidas would be gone. Will could deal with a body, hide a body, consume a body. A body was only a thing. It was not a person.

Hannibal was watching him again. “I thought you would see the justice of this death for him.”

“I do.” He did. But he did not want Genimidas to be a person, even if it meant he would suffer longer.

Tomorrow would be worse. He’d have Danute’s worry to deal with when she realized her grandfather was missing. The local cops, maybe search parties. All of them pushing, pulling, jostling his mind, and Genimidas up here like an old, mad gargoyle in the dark. By then, Will wouldn’t even know if he was alive or dead. That thought made him grit his teeth until his jaw ached.

“Will? Are you coming?”

“Yeah. I’m coming.” But he couldn’t move. Shouldn’t have come up here. Should’ve known better.

Hannibal climbed the few steps back up to him. “You feel his fear.”

“It’s not just that.” This was not how hunts were supposed to end. They ended with bodies, with the certainty of distinction between self and other, hunter and prey. What was he now? What was Hannibal?

Will turned back toward the chamber. Hannibal didn’t stop him, but Will stopped himself a foot from the door. He rested his palm against it. This wasn’t his prey. It wasn’t his right.

“Do it,” Hannibal said.

Will shook his head.

“Do it. He does not matter. Not anymore.”

“What about his suffering? Doesn’t that matter?”

“Not as much as yours. Do what you wish to do, Will.”

He meant it. Will could feel it, and the grinding clench of his jaw eased. He traced around the snake’s empty eye socket. “We could do it together.”

“Not this time.”

Hannibal sounded certain, and maybe it was better this way. When they hunted together for the first time, Will would prefer that Hannibal think of no one and nothing but him. He could wait for that.

What had Hannibal said? Pushing the first lever to the right will open the door but arm the trap. Will stuck his finger in the snake’s eye and felt for the levers.

“You might want to stand back in case I get this wrong.” He swung the first to the right. The door’s lock clicked open.

Still, nothing but silence for a few seconds, and then a shout, heavy footsteps. The door swung open, and Genimidas’s hand emerged. As it did, the axes came down.

His hand dropped to the floor, and he surged forward with the hoarse scream of the dying stag, that cracked and rusted noise of pain and the knowledge of death. Genimidas shoved the axes aside and lurched toward Will. The stump of his wrist fountained blood. Color drained from his face, but he still came.

Will stepped aside, avoiding blood and the swing of his remaining fist. He stepped in and sank his knife into Genimidas’s throat. The scream stopped.

Will’s own throat eased. The old man’s breath rattled as he fell to his knees and then to his side. Will felt it in his own lungs, but he was used to that from his hunts. This was the end. This was how it always ended. He bent down to watch.

Breath. Head turning. Breath. Eyes moving, searching as the vision went. Breath. And then no breath. Eyes open but unseeing. Gone. Done.

Hannibal stepped around him to kneel by the body. He felt for a pulse and looked up at Will. “Do you wish to check as well?”

“No. I know he’s dead. I saw him go. Do you want to leave it up here? Or use it?”

Hannibal hesitated, visibly uncertain in a way he seldom was. Will didn’t push. He just waited.

Hannibal nodded at last. “We will have to do the butchery here. I do not want his body dragged through the house.”

“We can give some to the family.”

Hannibal looked at him. “You are serious.”

“Tell them it’s from the stag. He’ll be part of them. Like Mischa's part of you. Don’t tell me you’ve never thought about that.”

Hannibal was silent a long time. “I have thought of it. Sometimes it has been a comfort. But they will not know.”

“But they’ll still have him.”

“Shall I get the knives?”

Will shook his head. “Not yet. He can wait. We’re going out to the forest.” Will stood and stretched. _Finally._

Hannibal followed him down the stairs without a word.

When they stepped outside, it was to a blue and gray world lit only by a blazing full moon and its reflection off the snow.

“It will be darker in the forest,” Hannibal said.

“Doesn’t matter. We’ll find our way.”

Chapter Text

The storm clouds had cleared and left a void pocked by stars brighter than any Will had ever seen. He caught Hannibal’s hand in his and pulled him into a run.

Hannibal came with him, quick and silent and without protest, despite his ankle. The logical part of Will’s mind knew this headlong charge over unknown terrain could end with much worse than a sprain, for both of them. Another part of him knew that nothing could hurt them tonight.

His heart pounded. The stars pulsed in time with his blood. In places, they sank into fine powder up to their shins. In others, the top layer of snow had melted and refrozen in a fine crust that cracked as they passed but bore their weight for the split second of each footfall.

Snow-laden pine boughs dimmed the moon. There were no paths. Will didn’t look for any. He ran until his lungs hurt with cold and his face stung and his legs were giving out. Hannibal stayed with him, at his side when there was space, at his heels when the trees closed in.

Will stumbled to a stop in a clearing. His breath fogged the air. His chest heaved. He swayed on his feet, staring up into a well of stars and the blinding light of the moon.

Beside him, Hannibal bent to clear snow from the surface of a small lake. Stars shone out of the black ice. “I remember this place,” he said. “I took her here. I did skip stones. I had forgotten.” He took off his glove and touched the ice with bare fingertips.

Will watched his face. Even in the moonlight, he could see desire there. “What do you want?”

“I want to be clean. To be new. To begin again.”

Further out, the ice was more delicate. Easy to break. They made a hole big enough for both of them and returned to shore to shed their clothes. Their feet stuck to the ice as they walked the few steps to their baptism. They jumped together, hand in hand.

The shock of the cold was a full-body blow, sucker punch and electric shock and orgasm all at once. Will came up shuddering, gasping, grabbing for the edge of the ice to pull himself out and heard Hannibal beside him doing the same.

They scrambled out and, just for a second, stood naked on the edge of the black ice, stars above and stars below. Will pulled Hannibal in for a brief, frozen kiss.

Ice had already started to form in their hair. Will’s feet were freezing to the snow. He wondered how long it would take for anyone to find them if they stayed there and what they would find. Ice-filmed statues, embracing as the snow piled up around them.

He shook off the vision and forced himself to move. They pulled on their clothes, both of them racked with shudders, and then they ran again. They ran until heat crept back into their limbs, until Will saw stars all around him instead of just above, until Hannibal’s limp grew more and more pronounced and he finally stumbled.

Will dragged him to a stop, chest heaving, hands now shaking from exertion instead of cold. Hannibal turned to him. He cupped Will’s face and stared at him, eyes dark. Will grabbed the front of his coat and yanked him in.

Hannibal’s mouth felt hot against his. The kiss was savage from the start. They bit at each other’s lips, tongues, jaws, necks. Hannibal backed Will against the rough trunk of a fir tree. Will hooked a foot around his leg and held him there, bodies pressed close.

Will had gone from freezing to searing. He needed to feel Hannibal’s skin against his, needed to feel his blood underneath. He yanked open their coats, their pants, pulled up their shirts, and he got what he wanted.

Hannibal’s bare stomach and thighs ground into his as Hannibal shoved him back against the tree. Will’s cock slid against his, stiffening as they rocked together. Will got his breath back and lost it again when Hannibal wrapped a hand around them. The contrast of his icy hand and hot cock pulled a moan and a shudder from both of them.

Will held onto his shoulders, brought a leg up nearly around his waist, and thrust blindly. He needed it, and he needed more, needed Hannibal inside him, on top of him, surrounding him. He ground his face into Hannibal’s neck and wished for Hannibal’s sense of smell to take him in that way too. All he could smell was the warmth of skin surrounded by the pure ice and pine of the forest.

Hannibal had paused in his movements. One hand touched Will’s frozen hair. “Hold onto me,” he murmured.

Will obeyed, arms tight around his neck, almost strangling. Hannibal hooked his hands behind Will’s thighs and lifted him. Their noses touched, perfectly level, tip to tip. Their breath created a mist around them. Will shifted between Hannibal’s strength and the immovable trunk at his back. There was nowhere to go. His cock jerked between them, and he heard himself make a harsh, low noise that belonged more to the forest than to him.

Hannibal echoed it and leaned in for another kiss. This one was a sealing of their mouths together, not gentle, but without teeth now, only the movement of tongue and lips and effort on both sides to be closer than it was possible to be. They pushed their bodies closer as well, hips rocking in tiny increments. Neither had a hand to spare, and so it built slowly, heat and friction, cocks trapped between the warmth of their bodies.

Will tore his mouth from Hannibal’s at last and pressed his forehead to Hannibal’s shoulder, thrusting hard against him with what little leverage he had. He felt frantic with need, heels digging into the backs of Hannibal’s thighs. He couldn’t stop.

He could feel Hannibal watching him, holding him, but now letting Will do all the work. He stayed still as an ice statue as Will worked himself against him, hips jerking nearly in time with his wild pulse. Will tried to say his name, but the forest had stolen his words. Each sound drew a rumbling answer from Hannibal, almost a growl, but he still did not move.

Will struck Hannibal’s back with his fist. He felt Hannibal’s chest heave against him with the hitch of his breath. He did it again, and Hannibal’s fingers sank harder into his thighs, bruising, nails biting. Will dragged his own nails down the back of Hannibal’s neck, and Hannibal arched, teeth bared, and, finally, shoved his hips forward against Will’s.

They had frightened the forest to silence, and the only sounds were their rough breath, the slide of skin on skin, the rustle of clothes, and the creak of fresh snow under Hannibal’s boots. They rutted against each other, held on with teeth and nails, and Will felt his orgasm like a waiting scream at the bottom of his chest.

Hannibal pressed him harder against the tree, smothering. He ground his hips against him and spoke into his ear. “I have you. I have you.”

Will’s thighs clenched around Hannibal and shook as he started to come, spasms he couldn’t stop, for longer than seemed possible. His vision was white with more than the snow, and he opened his mouth and let it come out of him. His cry turned to a howl that filled the forest.

Hannibal followed him over the edge, silent but shaking as well, teeth in Will’s skin. They held each other and held the moment, the night, the silence.

The cold closed in on them. Their muscles began to relax despite their best efforts, and Will slid down to the ground. As they were putting their clothes to rights, they heard a howl to answer his.

A moment later, Hannibal grasped his shoulder. Gold eyes watched them from the shadows. The wolf looked almost black in the moonlight, and its fur gleamed like an oil spill. Hannibal raised a hand to it, in greeting or token of peace. It turned and passed on, and so did they.

Chapter Text

They never crossed their tracks, but Hannibal brought them out of the forest only yards from where they’d gone in. Will’s feet and legs felt cased in ice for those last steps to the kitchen door, numb and heavy, lungs aching, but still more alive than he’d felt in months.

“We must at least gut the body,” Hannibal said.

Will grimaced. “Yeah. And we should drag the stag inside. It’s frozen solid already.” It could defrost in the pantry, which was about the temperature of a walk-in fridge. “I’ll gut him. I’m used to it.”

“I will see to the stag and to dinner as well.”

They went to their separate tasks. Will cut the clothes from the body, gutted it, jointed it, and removed the more easily identifiable parts—head, hands, feet. They could be disposed of later. For now, he set them in the tower room along with the meat. It would all be frozen solid soon enough and would keep until the weather thawed, which might be months. He skinned and trimmed part of a thigh into anonymity, closed the door, and started down the stairs.

Bloodstained and creaking with cold and exhaustion, thigh bone in one hand, he made his way back to the kitchen. The stag was defrosting in the pantry. He left Genimidas there to keep it company. The dogs had cleaned their bowls and lay around the cooling stove. But there was no sign of Hannibal.

“Where’d he go, guys?”

Sunshine got up immediately, and the rest followed her, trotting up the stairs. Will stumbled in their wake. He hoped dinner could be eaten under the blankets, or by the fire, or both. He’d come in cold from the forest, and the cold of the tower had settled in his chest. His legs ached. He was becoming more and more aware of the dried semen in his pants.

When he opened the bedroom door, his dogs all filed over to their blankets by the fire. Will stayed where he was, staring. There was a lot to stare at.

Hannibal, naked in a massive claw foot tub of steaming water in front of the fire, raised a mug of mulled wine to him.

“How…”

“You ought to close the door,” Hannibal said. “You’re letting the heat out.”

Will closed the door. He walked closer and dipped his hand in the water, yelped, and drew it back. And immediately stuck it in again. It was so hot it burned, and it felt like the best idea in the history of the world.

Hannibal watched him, eyes half closed. “I had intended to surprise you tonight in any case. I did not know how necessary the surprise would be.”

“Okay, but how? We don’t even have running water, do we? There’s just a hand pump in the kitchen.” Will undressed as he spoke. Hannibal could’ve told him it was fairy magic, and he wouldn’t have argued. He just wanted to get in.

“The boiler is still functional. It needed to be stoked, of course. It is not electric. And some of its connections are uncertain. We have running water in places. One of them is the bathroom down the hall.”

Naked, Will stepped into the bath. He stood between Hannibal’s legs and looked down at him. Hannibal reached up a hand. Will took it. He let himself be drawn down to sit between Hannibal’s legs in water so hot his skin turned red. He gritted his teeth against the pain until his body began to adjust. Unnoticed shudders eased. He leaned back against Hannibal’s chest with a long sigh.

They lay unmoving, stewing themselves. Will thought inevitably of Mischa and he wondered if Hannibal was thinking the same. He decided not to ask. The thought drifted away on tendrils of steam. Hannibal handed him a mug of mulled wine, and soon Will’s insides were as warm as his skin.

“I can feel my toes again.”

“A good sign.” Hannibal handed him bread and cheese.

“Never had dinner in the bath before. Booze, even chips, but not dinner.”

“Nor have I,” Hannibal said. “I normally prefer to dine at the table.”

“Does this place even have a dining room table?”

“Not anymore. We will have to acquire another.”

Will subsided further into the water and closed his eyes.

Something touched his lips. He opened his mouth and let Hannibal feed him a slice of apple, a piece of cheese, a bite of bread. He had nothing to do but float and take occasional sips of his wine. Between bites, Hannibal touched him: soft strokes over his stomach, his thighs, his chest. A light pinch to his nipple, another bite of cheese. As he chewed, Hannibal’s fingers brushed delicately down the length of his cock.

They paused after that, as if Hannibal thought Will might object, but Will had no more objections in him. He only wanted, anything and everything.

The food disappeared between Hannibal’s cautious touches. Their wine was gone. The water was cooling. Hannibal nudged him up, and Will stood, dripping, on a rug older than he was. Hannibal handed him a towel that had been warming by the fire.

When they crawled together between the sheets, those were warm as well, heated by hot water bottles that Hannibal ejected unceremoniously to the floor.

Will yawned. “There’s no drain under that tub.”

“No.”

“How do we get the water out?”

“The same way it went in. One bucket at a time.”

Will made a face. “So that’s not happening tonight.”

“No,” Hannibal agreed. He kissed Will’s neck. “Is this happening tonight?”

Will had been simmering in mild arousal for the last half hour. He reached for Hannibal, tangled their legs together, and bit gently at his lower lip. “You have me, remember?”

Hannibal’s eyes closed on a shudder that was not from the cold. His hands on Will’s thighs and ass were greedy, grasping, pulling Will on top of him.

“What do you want?” Will bent over him, lips touching his as he spoke. “Anything.”

“Let me touch you.”

“You’ve been touching me.”

“More.” Hannibal rolled him onto his back. He kissed the center of Will’s chest. He brushed his fingers over Will’s nipples, tiny, soft touches, until they grew hard. And then he descended under the blankets, nosing his way down Will’s stomach, breathing him in. His fingers dragged down Will’s sides, and he licked at Will’s naval with the tip of his tongue until Will giggled and squirmed.

Will felt warm from the tips of his toes and fingers inward. He tingled with it. He lay with his limbs splayed and heavy, making no attempt either to resist or participate. He closed his eyes, and his mind showed him ice crystals breaking up beneath his skin. Each touch thawed him a little more.

By the time Hannibal lay between his legs, placing light kisses on his thighs, Will was already hard. Hannibal left his cock alone, untouched except for the soft warmth of his breath. He continued down Will’s thighs to spread his legs wider. He brushed his fingertips along the join of his hips, down his legs to draw his nails lightly over the soles of his feet.

Will pointed his toes and closed his eyes, no ice left in him, every nerve awake and hot.

“Turn over,” Hannibal murmured.

Will let himself be turned, shaped, and molded. Hannibal put a pillow under his hips. He stroked Will’s legs open, arranged his knees, even the set of his feet against the mattress. “Are you comfortable?” he asked.

Will made some noise of agreement, too comfortable, too warm, too relaxed to bother with speech. He couldn’t think of a better way to get fucked and waited for the hot press of Hannibal’s body on his.

It didn’t come. Instead, he got more of those light, fleeting touches: to the arches of his feet, his ankles, the backs of his calves. Kisses placed in the hollows of his knees, soft bites in two lines down the backs of his thighs. And then Hannibal’s hands parted his cheeks and held him open.

Will craned his head to see him. “What’re you doing?” Even his tongue was relaxed, and the words slurred together.

“Looking.”

Will watched him a second longer and then put his head back down on the pillow. From someone else, even from Hannibal a week ago, he would’ve hated this. All of this. But that was before. If Hannibal wanted to look, he could look.

It lasted only a few more seconds, and then Hannibal bent over him, warmth breath on his skin, and licked over his hole. Will breathed in hard. His hands clutched at the sheets. Hannibal licked again and then traced the point of his tongue around the edge in small circles.

Will’s knees dug hard into the mattress. His mouth was open against the pillow, breath coming faster. Hannibal dipped his tongue in and then began to thrust, to lick, to suck, sloppy and wet.

The only noises in the room were the crackle of the fire, wind against rattling glass, the sounds Hannibal was making, and Will’s own noises as he slowly lost his mind. He came unmoored from his body, aware but no longer in control.

It started with low grunts with every deeper thrust of Hannibal’s tongue into him. The sucking kisses made him squirm against the sheets, and he heard his soft cries as if they belonged to someone else. Sweat broke out over his back and forehead. He panted into his pillow, each exhale a high, thin sound.

When Hannibal speared his tongue deeper and wiggled the tip inside him, Will remembered how to move at last. He got his knees under him and thrust back, and the sounds coming from him now were wordless pleas for more. His cock hung between his legs, heavy and hot. The tip brushed the pillow every time he pushed back onto Hannibal’s tongue, and he almost whimpered from that light touch.

Hannibal held his hips and fucked him open with his tongue. It moved inside him, and Will did whimper then. Hannibal didn’t stop. He stayed impossibly deep, thrusting, sucking, tongue squirming inside Will until Will hung his head and sobbed with it.

He subsided slowly onto the bed again, hips moving in uncoordinated thrusts against the pillow. His muscles were trembling as they had from the cold. He squeezed his hands into fists and then unfolded one to clutch at the headboard. “H-Han—“ The first syllable was all he could get out.

Hannibal moaned into his skin. He sounded nearly as gone as Will was. His hands gripped Will’s ass more tightly and then slid down his thighs, nails scoring his skin. One hand moved, seeking, between Will’s legs, over his balls, until it found his cock.

Will made a high, choked noise. Hannibal stroked the head with his fingertips, so light he could barely feel it. He tried to fuck into Hannibal’s hand. He tried to thrust back onto his tongue. He rubbed desperately against the pillow, and then Hannibal was guiding him up to his knees again, hand closing tight around his cock, and that was all it took.

Will fucked into his hand once and came silently, mouth open, unable to make a sound. It felt pulled out of him like an organ and it left him gasping. He curled onto his side, barely aware of Hannibal curled behind him, a warm shelter for his oversensitive body.

Hannibal touched him again, soothing now, long strokes over his chest and down his side. Will’s breath and pulse slowed. The world returned. He was almost surprised to see the room as he’d left it, the cooling bath water, the sleeping dogs, the fire burning down toward ash.

Hannibal placed a kiss behind his ear. It felt almost hesitant. Will turned to meet him, and, as their mouths opened to each other, became aware of Hannibal’s cock pressing against him. He wiggled back against him until it slid between his thighs.

The kiss faltered and broke on Hannibal’s stuttered breath. He pressed his forehead to the back of Will’s neck and thrust once.

Will reached back to squeeze his hip and managed a noise of encouragement. He still had no words in him.

Neither, it seemed, did Hannibal, who simply wrapped his arms around Will’s torso and rocked against him. His breath grew harsh. He kissed the back of Will’s neck, open-mouthed and wet. His teeth closed there as he came.

For a few minutes, his body slumped so heavily against Will’s that Will thought he’d gone instantly to sleep, but then he was rolling out of bed. He fed the fire. He dipped a cloth in the tub to clean himself up and brought another for Will. He poured them both more wine.

Will reached for him, and Hannibal slid back under the covers. They moved toward each other as if the night had magnetized them. Neither took a sip of wine. They only held on to each other and closed their eyes.

Chapter Text

Hannibal had been cold before the snow fell, cold since he saw the castle rising out of the mist. The endless winter damp, the particular scent of the stones mixed with the same linens he had slept in as a child, the same lanterns, woodsmoke from the same fireplaces—all these things had set the hooks of memory in him, and the chill had gone down to his marrow.

This morning, he did not feel it. Perhaps he had drowned his past in the deeper, cleaner cold of the forest. He woke beside Will, warm despite the dead fire. Even so, he pulled on socks before setting foot on the stone floor.

He built up the fire and then began the tedious emptying of the tub, bucket by bucket. Instead of carrying them down the hall to the bathroom, he did it as he had seen his grandmother do it when he was very young: he emptied them out the window.

Will’s voice emerged from their nest of blankets. “I think that open window is cancelling out any good we’re getting from the fire.”

“Fresh air is beneficial.”

“Unless it’s cold enough to give you pneumonia.”

“I’m sure you’re aware that you cannot contract pneumonia from a draft.”

“How about a blizzard?”

A few desultory flakes drifted down from the white sky. Hannibal finished emptying the tub and shut the window. “Shall I make coffee?”

“Yes,” Will said and pulled the blanket over his head. Medea wormed her way under the covers with him. Two more dogs joined him on the bed as Hannibal stepped out into the hall.

While the coffee brewed, he toasted bread in a pan on the wood stove and cooked eggs to go with it. They’d have to go into the city for more food. One quick stop on the way from the airport had not been sufficient to stock their larder, even with the recent windfall of meat. They would both need more clothes, things suited to this place, to this life. Cleaning supplies. Dog beds, as Will had reminded him twice already.

As he finished cooking, the dogs arrived to be let out. Hannibal watched them romp through the snow. The dark band of the forest was veiled by wind-blown flakes to a hazy gray. He closed the door against the winter and considered the corpse in the tower. The man who had killed his family, his Mischa, was gone. There was nothing left of him but meat.

They had buried Mischa’s few remains on the estate. Chiyoh had shown him photos of himself by her gravestone, standing stiffly in a suit too big for him. Hannibal had no memory of it.

Without thought or decision, he took the pan from the stove, put on his boots and coat, and went to the pantry. He carved a slice from the slab of thigh Will had left there. It looked little different from the venison.

Hannibal paused and lifted it to his nose. He recalled Genimidas’s scent, the smoke of pipe tobacco, the lingering odors of forest and butchery. Most of that was gone, removed with clothes and skin. He recalled the smell of the stew and how grateful he had been for it. He took the meat and walked out the kitchen door into the cold.

It took him perhaps half an hour of searching to find the grave. It rose out of the snow near the small pond, dark and angular in a white landscape. He crouched in front of it and touched her name. It occurred to him that he had no idea where his parents were buried. He had never asked.

The ground was not yet frozen solid. He was able to force his fingers into the cold earth and pry it open. He dug until his hands ached, until his nails began to splinter. Into the hole, he laid the meat. And then he covered it, buried it, and smoothed the snow back over the top.

He could find no words to speak, but he knelt in the snow, forehead and dirty hands pressed to the stone, for a long time.

A shadow passed over him. Will crouched down and let a handful of snail shells slide from his palm into the snow. He put his hand over Hannibal’s on the gravestone. Wind hissed through the bare trees. The ice on the pond shifted and cracked in the silence. Finally, Will took his wrist and led him back to the house.

In the kitchen, he pushed Hannibal down into a chair and scraped the long-cold breakfast into the trash. He started over, slicing bread, cracking eggs.

“Who would she have been if she had lived?” Hannibal folded his hands on the table. “I have asked myself this. Many times. Would we still be so close? Many siblings are not. People grow apart. Would she have married? Would she care for another more than me? Could I bear that?”

Will slid a plate across the table to him and sat with his own. “Would you kill her or her lover?”

Hannibal dragged the tines of his fork across his egg until it bled. This, too, he had asked himself. “I always gave her anything she wanted if it would not hurt her. I wish to believe I would have given her freedom as well. But in truth, I do not know.”

“What about me?” Will said. “Would you give me freedom?”

“No.”

Will smiled and raised his coffee mug in a toast. “Good.”

\*

They had finished butchering the stag after lunch when someone knocked on the door. Will gave them both a quick once-over before he answered it, but they looked normal. No blood, even from the stag. Only Hannibal’s bandaged ankle gave any sign of yesterday’s struggle. He pulled the door open and gestured Danute inside.

“Hello, hello,” she said to both them and the dogs. She was smiling but not so brightly as usual, and she hugged Buck, who leaned into her with a whuff.

“Hey, your grandfather didn’t leave us a dead deer by any chance, did he?” Will said.

Danute jerked her head up. “Grandfather? What?”

She looked stricken when they told her about the stag. “I hope not him who kills it,” she said quietly. “But then who?”

She said that no one had seen him since yesterday, that he’d said he was going to the bar with his friends but they hadn’t seen him either and he’d never come home.

Her worry and uncertainty pulled at Will, and he knew it would only get worse.

\*

Search parties were organized. The local cops had decided that the old man had gone hunting in the woods, gotten lost or injured, and couldn’t make it back.

Will felt sick with their hope, as he’d known he would. He breathed and reminded himself: there was no hope. Genimidas was in pieces on the kitchen counter and partially through the meat grinder.

“Your dogs, they can maybe find him?” Danute asked.

“We can try,” Will said, curious despite himself. What had Genimidas done before he laid out his gory gift? “Got anything of his?”

She did. Hannibal, with his ankle now significantly more swollen after their run through the forest, stayed in the kitchen. He offered to make refreshments for the search parties. Will left him stuffing the object of their search into sausage casings and stepped out into the cold. Medea stayed behind to doze by the hearth, but the other six piled out into the snow and bounded through it like puppies until Will called them to order.

Danute waited with a young policeman and two great aunts. Will retained none of their names through the fog of their emotion. It felt like every one of them was pulling at his hair. He took Genimidas’s shirt from Danute and walked ahead with Sunshine until he could think again.

The scent trail was hours old, but Sunshine picked up something almost immediately. She forged through the drifts. Will had to carry Buster when the snow got deep.

The forest muffled sound. Every now and then, they heard a call from one of the other search parties, flat and far off, a cry from another world. The young policeman twitched every time.

The snow had covered Genimidas’s tracks, but after about a quarter mile they began to see spots of frozen blood dropped into the snow. “He carried the deer this way,” one of the great aunts said. She spoke perfect English. The other had yet to speak at all.

The forest thickened. Black pine limbs piled with snow formed cathedral arches overhead. The trail became clearer. They could see now where Genimidas had dragged the carcass, and, in another five minutes, they came to the kill site.

Sunshine barked in triumph, and all the dogs danced around the frozen lake of blood. The young policeman waved his hands at Will like the dogs were contaminating a crime scene, and Will called them off.

The great aunts stood shoulder-to-shoulder, iron-haired and iron-jawed. They had to be Genimidas’s sisters. Will could see not just the family resemblance but the hint of something wilder in their eyes. They circled the site, one clockwise, one counter-clockwise. The silent one picked up something from the ground and showed it to her sister.

“It was him,” her sister said. “This is his coat button. I told him to fix it. He said I should do it for him.” The sisters exchanged a look of scorn.

The young policeman spoke in a halting voice, addressing the air rather than any of their party. “So we know he kills the deer and from here goes to the castle. But after? Where does he go after?”

“The path to the village,” Danute said.

They walked back along the bloody path, amid the smothering snow and the calls of the searchers. Danute stayed closer to Will than to her great aunts, or at least closer to his dogs. Buck walked at her side and pushed his head under her hand.

“It is bad luck, my mother says,” she said quietly. “To kill this animal. It is wrong.”

Her great aunts caught the words and turned in unison. “It was not bad luck, girl. If he is dead, it was greed and stupidity that killed him. Not bad luck.”

Danute tightened her grip on Buck’s fur, and he leaned into her as they walked.

They came out into the clearing around the castle. The policeman and the great aunts led the way to the path that cut through the woods to the village. Will and Danute fell a few yards behind. “They don’t like their brother much, huh?” Will said.

Danute pressed her lips together and frowned. “When they are little childs, they fight and Genimidas bite—bit her—“ She stuck her tongue out and pointed at it. “This. Now she can speak only a little.”

“Tongue? He bit her tongue off?”

Danute nodded. “Part. Not all. Accident,” she said, but she sounded uncertain.

They showed Sunshine the trail. She cast about, on it and off it, over packed snow muddied with footprints. All the searchers from the village had come this way. Even if Genimidas had taken this path last night, she wouldn’t have much of a chance. Eventually she came back to sit at Will’s feet and whine.

He bent to scratch her ears. “It’s okay, girl. You did great.”

The young policeman looked gloomily at the well used path. “We should have thought.”

The silent great aunt laughed, harsh, head tipped back to the open sky. She said something in Lithuanian that seemed as lost on Danute and the policeman as it was on Will.

Her sister did not laugh. “She says he is dead. I will believe it when I see his body. Now we will search with the others. Come.”

Will cast a glance back toward the castle, but everyone in the village too old or too young to search had showed up to help Hannibal cook. Will wanted to be trapped in there no more than he wanted to be out here. At least out here, Danute was the only one in their party who still had any hope that the old man was alive.

\*

Snow began to fall again just before sundown. The light went from gray to violet as they slogged back. Danute was shivering, and the young policeman, who had given her his scarf, was nearly blue. Will had lost feeling in his fingertips about an hour ago. Only the great aunts seemed unaffected. They plowed through the snow like icebreakers, slow but steady, never pausing.

It was nearly full dark when they reached the castle. A beaten path led to the kitchen door, lanterns hung outside, and several aging cars were parked in the courtyard. Will flinched from all of it. The ruin of the castle had welcomed him. This made him want to turn back to the woods.

He slid through the packed kitchen, snagged a cup of coffee, and paused to breathe in the cold hall beyond. He sent his dogs upstairs and wished he could follow them. He had to get their dinner before he could escape. And he wanted to see Hannibal, even if only from a distance.

A straggling stream of cold and weary searchers led him to the decrepit formal dining room. Its gilt wallpaper hung in shreds and its inlaid wood floor was cracked and broken, but lanterns hung from the ceiling and silver candelabra sat on the windowsills, casting it and its inhabitants in a warm glow. A table full of sweet pastries, sausage rolls, and more coffee sat against one wall. Searchers sat on the floor or perched on various semi-functional chairs and stools.

Will spotted Hannibal immediately. He moved from person to person, radiating calm and reassurance, the lord of the manor, the perfect host.

Their eyes met across the room. Hannibal’s held a question, but Will was too tired and too assaulted by other minds to guess what it was. He shook his head.

Moments later, Hannibal appeared at his side, a hand under his elbow. “How are you?”

Will shrugged.

Hannibal held up a dusty bottle and poured a shot of its contents into Will’s coffee. “Cognac. Drink.”

Will took a gulp. Both heat and cognac burned his throat, but it helped dull the clamor. “We found where he shot the stag. Nothing else. How was it here?”

“As you see. Uneventful.” Hannibal paused. “They are losing hope.”

“I don’t know if I can take another day of this.”

“You won’t have to. There is a blizzard coming. There will be no search tomorrow.”

Will nodded. He hoped it was true. He hoped the snow buried everything.

“Go upstairs,” Hannibal said. “You don’t need to be here.”

“I have to feed the dogs.”

“Their dinner is waiting for them in our room, as is yours.”

Will stopped arguing. He let Hannibal guide him to the stairs and climbed blindly. His fingers and toes stung with returning heat. The noise of the crowd below faded. The knots in his neck began to relax.

He found his dogs flopped on their blankets in front of the fire, bowls already empty. His own dinner was mulled wine and sausage rolls. He fed one to Sunshine for her hard work and ate the rest with an appetite that surprised him. He recognized the taste.

After dinner, he stripped to his boxers and climbed into bed without even brushing his teeth. Sunshine lay down across his legs. The darkness folded in around him, and he let go.

\*

The bed dipped. Will pressed his face into the pillow and hoped it wasn’t morning yet. The only light was a dim glow from the banked fire. Hannibal turned on his side and pulled Will against his chest.

Will drifted, leaning back against him. “They gone?”

“Yes.” Hannibal kissed his temple.

Will stretched. He thought he could feel it: the space, the ease, the absence of other minds. “Did you see the great aunts?”

“I did. Formidable women.”

“You know the one that doesn’t talk? Genimidas bit off her tongue when they were kids. Both of them hate him.”

Hannibal nodded thoughtfully. “I met his wife as well. I do not believe she will mourn him. Do you hear the wind?” It shrieked past the window like Hannibal had summoned it. “The snow is falling harder. We will have another six inches before morning.”

Will nodded, eyes closed, drowsing in the heat of Hannibal’s body.

Hannibal put a hand at his waist and slid it down to his stomach. “Do you want to stay here?”

“In the castle?”

“Yes.”

“Assuming we get electricity and running water, sure. Heat would be nice, too.”

“Those are the only problems you see? If it is the isolation you want, we can achieve it elsewhere. A private island in Greece or Italy. A cabin in the mountains. Whatever you like.”

Will turned toward him. They lay with their heads on the same pillow, noses almost touching. “Do you want to leave?”

“I would like to travel,” Hannibal said. “Not now. Perhaps in the spring.” He touched Will’s cheek. “There are many things I would like to show you. But I would wish to return here.”

If they hunted together in Florence or Paris, they could be out of the country before anyone found the body. Will did not say it. That was something they could talk about when the time came. “Sure. As long as we’re not gone for too long.”

“You like it here.”

“Yeah, I do.” Will kissed him, eyes closing. He felt the warmth of Hannibal’s hands, his lips, his tongue. Their knees and thighs touched under the covers. He finally had to break the kiss for a yawn.

Hannibal laughed quietly in the dark. “Then we will stay.”

Chapter Text

As Hannibal had predicted, white-out conditions kept the searchers inside all the next day. The day after that, the search was called off entirely. High drifts made the forest nearly impassable, and an iron sky still spat out sharp, icy flakes. No one now expected to find Genimidas alive. They were done with hope.

The fourth morning came with a blue and gold dawn and a fresh, sugar-white coat of snow. Every trace of the search and the searchers was gone. The castle, the grounds, and the forest were theirs again.

“We will need to go into the city,” Hannibal said. “We have little left but venison and sausages.”

“You go to the city,” Will said. “I’m going fishing.”

Hannibal regarded him in silence for a moment and then nodded. “Let me know if there is anything you would like me to bring back.”

Will left the dogs at the castle and set out after breakfast, heading for the lake in the woods. The drifts had piled up against tree trunks and fallen logs. He walked in the valleys between them when he could. When he couldn’t, he swam through loose powder like breaking waves.

The lake, too, was coated with snow. He wiped it away and eased out far enough to test the thickness with the chisel he’d brought. It was well and truly frozen now: four inches of solid ice. More than good enough.

At home he’d had an auger. Here, he made do with the chisel and a pickaxe. It took a while, chipping away, but he didn’t mind. He was alone. The dogs were safe and warm. The forest surrounded and sheltered him. When he finally dropped his hook into the hole and sat on the upturned bucket he’d brought for his catch, an ease settled into him that he hadn’t known since he’d met Hannibal.

They’d destroyed each other’s lives. Will thought now that they’d had to. There had been no space in his life for Hannibal, no space in Hannibal’s for him. Now they both had space. He looked up through the arching tree branches to the translucent sky. They had as much as they needed.

One of the trees at the edge of the clearing shed its load of snow with a muffled thump onto the ice. A shadow stepped onto it. For a second, he thought it was Hannibal come to find him, but it was too large, too much a part of the forest.

It was the wolf. Three times the size of his biggest dog, like something out of prehistory, gray as mist, with gold eyes that met his across the ice. Will did not move. He wasn’t afraid.

It padded silently across the ice until it stood on the far side of his fishing hole, no more than five feet off. Will could feel its presence, almost feel its warmth. Its paws were a paler gray with soft tufts between the toes. Its ears pricked forward, delicate and attentive. It watched him. He watched it.

Will got a bite. He concentrated on the fish. It was habit, ingrained, and he was halfway to reeling it in before he checked on the wolf again, sure it would be gone. It wasn’t. Will pulled the trout from the water, a big one, flopping and fighting with energy.

That energy faded in the icy air to feeble jerks. Will removed the hook with his bare hands and nearly got the metal frozen to his skin. He looked at the wolf. The wolf looked at him.

Slowly, Will stretched across the fishing hole and laid the twitching trout at the wolf’s feet. It took the fish in its mouth, broke its spine with an audible crunch, and turned away.

As it faded back into the trees, Will caught the oil-slick black of feathers scattered in its fur.