Chapter Text
There was a monster in my bed
“Will, where is your head at?” Anywhere but here, he thought, but kept silent as he stared at the masses of photographs on the pinboard in front of him. Jack Crawford pushed, “You haven’t been in the game for days. You have to level with me.”
“I’ve had personal distractions,” he said, by way of explanation.
“What does that mean?”
“It means he has a partner and all is not well in paradise,” Beverly Katz said from somewhere across the room. Her perception was admirable but frustrating. All eyes fell on Will and he pointedly ignored them. Beverly’s voice called to him again. “Girl or boy?”
Will shifted and took a third option. “Man. He even has a daughter.” Perhaps dropping details would encourage his colleagues to step back.
“What’s his name?” Brian Zeller’s voice. Apparently not.
“Hannibal,” Will supplied, and then sighed loudly to expression his irritation.
“Not Hannibal Lecter?”
To Will’s surprise, that was Jack. He straightened up and turned to him with a frown. “You know him?”
“Only by name.” Jack’s hands were in his pockets. “Alana Bloom mentioned him. He was her mentor during her residency, I think. A formidable psychiatrist by all accounts.”
Will was starting to feel like his life was one big joke. There were too many connections between Hannibal’s life and his, it was too easy to play six degrees of separation. Things were just too close. He huffed. “Well, now he makes pastries and toast and coffee for a living. Can we please focus on the Chesapeake Ripper?”
“Of course.” Jack pulled his hands from his pockets and folded his arms instead. “Will - why don’t you tell us everything that you see of the Ripper. Everything that we know, everything we’ve learned right from the beginning. Perhaps all at once we can glean something new from it.”
Will nodded. “The Ripper has been active for a minimum of four years,” he started. “Most likely much longer. We know of fourteen victims, but he kills more than that, I think he has to. He usually kills them in groups of two or three over the course of a week but a few - a few singular bodies have been found, ungrouped from the rest.
“He behaves like a butcher but he clearly has extensive surgical knowledge; he takes their organs neatly, and only mutilates them to help confuse the visibility of his scalpel work. Post mortem reports all indicate that each of his victims were probably alive when he opened them up.” Will turned away from the pinboard, from the maps and photographs and ideas.
“He butchers these people because they deserve it. Maybe they’re not villains in the way that we might think. These victims never killed or intentionally harmed anyone. They just had... ignorant, foul personalities. They were pigs. Dumb livestock. He lays them out like... like art.” Will’s brow creased. “He’s refined, a man of culture and grace. He makes art out of beasts because he has the taste to.”
He fell silent. Something in his description itched at the back of his mind. It felt like he should see this killer clearer now, yet in Will’s mind he was still wrapped in shroud and mist and pierced by sunlight. Will was too blind to see him still. Perhaps it was because he hadn’t been on this case since the start. Maybe there was something missing, or he just wasn’t... immersed enough.
Jack tilted his head at him. “Are you getting something, Will?”
“I don’t know,” he answered earnestly. He added softly, “He likes killing. He enjoys hunting the same way anyone else does. The only difference is his choice of game. It’s not just art, what he does with the bodies. This is how he displays his kills.”
Will left it there. The mental trail went cold after that. Anything more personal than external analysis of the Ripper’s murders was hidden to him. It sounded like a lot, when he put his thoughts and their accumulated knowledge together and spoke it out loud - but it really wasn’t. How a man hates his victims isn’t any clue to who he is, not without something more obvious to go with it.
Will stared at the pinboard. Photographs of victims, maps, the tamer of the crime scene pictures - a grotesque tribute in full colour.
And then something came to him, like a sense memory, as if he’d caught a scent that reminded him of something long gone. His head almost itched to try and remember what it was, and then Will straightened up very suddenly and asked Jack, “We never had any leads on the copycat Shrike, did we? He killed the girl in the field and a girl in Hobbs’ cabin, but the trail went cold.”
Jack paid attention to that, standing up and walking over to Will, coming level with him and staring at the pinboard. “You think the copycat is the Ripper?”
Softly, Will said, “It’s the same MO, beneath the antlers and daughters. He hated them. He put them on display for whatever crimes they committed against him... but he made it an homage, too.”
There was a long, pregnant silence in the room, and Will waited.
Finally, Jack turned to Beverly and Brian and Jimmy and instructed, his voice sharper than it had been in a while, “Get every file we have on the copycat Shrike murders.”
It was not gratifying when Jack looked back to Will and said, “Good job.”
Will slipped away from Quantico as soon as he was able, eager to be away from thoughts of the Ripper - and with an apology on his mind. It had been nearly a week since he’d last spoken to Hannibal, and longer since he’d left in the middle of the night. He only hoped that he could catch Hannibal in some sort of forgiving mood.
It had taken time, to reconcile the truth of who Hannibal was and who Abigail was and what that meant for their relationship - and Will had concluded, after nightmares that left him throwing up in the small hours of the morning, that in the end for his relationship with Hannibal it ultimately meant nothing.
The meaning of things hinged on Abigail’s recovery and whether or not she would accept Will’s presence in the life of her guardian. Garrett Jacob Hobbs might’ve been a serial killer, a cannibal, a man crazed by how much he loved his family, but he was still Abigail’s father, before and after. Will had a feeling that may just make him a murderer worse than Hobbs, in Abigail’s eyes.
But he would never know until he tried. Even if it was far safer - emotionally speaking - not to. He remembered something Alana Bloom had said to him some months back, “Dogs keep a promise a person can’t.”
It was dark when Will got to Baltimore, darker still by the time that he’d made his way to the front of Hannibal’s place. The ‘Closed’ sign was hung in the door of the Grace Café, but Will leaned in close to the glass and through the gloom he saw Hannibal’s shape, leaning over tables and wiping them clean.
He knocked on the glass door as loudly as he dared.
“This is a surprise,” Hannibal said when he let Will in, stepping behind the counter and leaning on it as if Will were just a customer. The distance between them felt unusual, yet Will knew he deserved that. “Will you be staying long?”
Will opened his mouth to say no, and then closed it again. He settled for, “I don’t know. It depends how this goes.”
Hannibal raised his eyebrows at him and then said, “Long enough for coffee, I hope.”
Will smiled, though it twisted with a kind of pain he didn’t know he had in him. He swallowed it back and nodded, and then as he watched Hannibal turn and pull up mugs and turn back on machines - working with expertise in the dark, having neglected to turn on the main café lights when he let Will in - Will said to him, “I came by to apologise. I behaved like a child, running out in the middle of the night, and then when I stopped calling...”
“I found it rude,” Hannibal acknowledged, and the words pricked under Will’s skin like a thousand needles and they each drew blood. “But I also knew you needed time. The resurfacing of memories regarding Garrett Jacob Hobbs was troubling for you. Traumatic, even.”
Will found that he'd rather missed Hannibal’s terrible habit of psychoanalysis. It came to him as naturally as breathing, it seemed. He listened, rapt, and leaned forward onto the counter, putting his weight on his hands.
Hannibal returned to the counter, drawing Will’s eyes to his. He mirrored Will, hands down on the countertop, but he put one hand further forward than the other. The fist of that hand came level with Will’s, and Will breathed in slower when Hannibal stroked against his knuckle with one finger. “I know that you are not an unkind person, Will. Not deliberately. You would have been in touch sooner if you felt that you could have been.”
“I’m sorry,” Will murmured, and then laughed, a bitter choked noise as he remarked, “I haven’t exactly provided you with the,” he gestured with one hands, “stability and commitment that you asked for.”
Hannibal shrugged and then moved away, finishing up the coffee and holding out one cup to Will. “I didn’t ask you for anything.”
It was Will’s turn to let their fingers touch and linger, as he accepted the drink. “You didn’t have to.”
They shared a small couch at the back of the café, comfortably shoulder-to-shoulder, saying little over their drinks until they were empty and set aside on the table in front of them. They said even less then, trading in words and subtly for the crush of Will’s lips beneath Hannibal’s.
He’s been starved of this, by himself, by work and nightmares, and Will drinks in each touch like a dying man. He consumed Hannibal’s breath into himself, tasting coffee on warm sweet air, and Will craved more, opening his mouth further to Hannibal’s and reaching out. His stomach roiled when Hannibal’s teeth caught on his lower lip, and pulling and tugging and then they were kissing again.
Will eased away to ask, “Where’s Abigail?”
“Upstairs,” Hannibal supplied, and there was a darkness behind his eyes that made Will suppress a shiver.
“Will she come down here?”
“No.”
“Good.”
Will eased himself onto Hannibal’s lap, knees planted in the couch either side of Hannibal’s hips. It wasn’t a particularly comfortable position for two men of nearly the same height, but something burned inside Will, a craving for intimacy that he had the lead and control over. In the dark of the café, here at the back tucked away to the sides, he knew passersby wouldn’t - couldn’t - see them.
“Hannibal,” he said, his voice wavering, somewhere between a plea and a question.
There wasn’t the need for lengthy, drawn out foreplay; no teasing and talking, just an insistent roll of hips until Will couldn’t breathe and demanded more, so he pushed Hannibal back against the couch and got off his lap, hastily getting one leg out of his pants and boxers - he took the time, little though it was, to rub his hand against the swell in Hannibal’s pants before he undid belts, buttons, zippers, and then he was back in Hannibal’s lap.
Hannibal rumbled his name into the soft skin of Will’s throat and the sound went right through him. His fingers were digging into the skin of Will’s bared thigh, pressing white indentations, and Will took Hannibal’s hand in his to kiss his fingers. The marks on his thigh glowed and then faded, in the same time that it took for Will to wrap his lips and tongue around Hannibal’s first two fingers.
Will was, in a way, surprised at Hannibal’s compliance; somewhere in the back of his head he had expected doctorly protests, warnings of pain that would’ve felt more like promises, suggestions to go somewhere else, somewhere more dignified, do this out of sight where lubricant and condoms were on hand, where they could take all night and have all the time in the world.
Comprehension was blinding, striking him when he was fighting the pain of the burn and stretch, bearing down on Hannibal’s fingers inside him: Hannibal understood him. He had come to the very same conclusion before, but this was different; he saw with clarity that Hannibal was capable of stripping away his skin, to see beneath the mess of neuroses that he couldn’t control and societal expectations that crippled him.
He understood, for example, that this was what Will wanted - sex that was rough and dirty and a little bit painful, a consummation of his apology, an end to their lack of communication and to Will’s guilt for it. A heated catharsis.
The notion that Hannibal not only understood him so completely but willingly responded to him was very nearly overwhelming.
Will said nothing, biting his tongue on words and whimpers, exchanging them for the use of his tongue on his own hand, using that for the most rudimentary of lubricants to swipe over the length of Hannibal’s cock.
He wanted to tell Hannibal that he was ready but he didn’t have to; Hannibal pulled his fingers out and shifted down on the couch without being asked, making things easier, more comfortable, and then with his help Will was sinking down on his cock with a satisfied moan.
In the gloom he could only just see the shine of Hannibal’s eyes, but he could feel the heat from his gaze. He was a master of keeping Will’s eye contact without even trying, keeping them nose-to-nose as Will rode him, as he levered his hips up to match Will’s every movement.
It was, somehow, too much. Will opted for burying his face in Hannibal’s throat with a breathless groan, grasping at his hair, one hand gripping the back of the couch like a safety bar. Hannibal’s hands were firm at his waist, tips of his fingers pressing into his skin through his clothes, the occasional guttural groan escaping from the back of his throat.
“Hannibal,” he panted, repeating his name until he was no longer capable of finishing it, until it came out as a string of a single syllable, like comic book laughter. He squeezed his eyes shut, rutting down desperately, bestial, but then Hannibal coaxed him up into a kiss that soothed him just enough.
Between them, Hannibal’s fingers wrapped around Will’s cock, thumb skimming over the head with each upstroke. He gasped, leaning back, and Hannibal followed, his mouth latching onto Will’s pulse. It sparked an almost playful battle for control; Will tangled his fingers into Hannibal’s hair, kissing him fiercely, and scraped his teeth against the clean-shaven line of Hannibal’s jaw. Hannibal’s hand that wasn’t busy he took in his own, fingers wrapping around the wrist and then skating under his palm to catch Hannibal’s fingers and lead his hand up, off his waist to the side of his throat.
He laid his hand over Hannibal’s there. Hannibal’s thumb pressed up, hard under the side of his jaw. A car drove through the street outside, the headlights so bright that they lit up the shop as the car went by; they were illuminated for long enough that Will could drink in all the rich details of Hannibal’s face, the shape of his jaw and the slope of his nose.
“Will,” Hannibal murmured.
Will’s thighs had begun to tremble from the sheer exertion, the repetitive motion, and they ached all the more as the fire in his belly grew and he knew he was close. Hannibal knew it, too; his hand around Will’s cock went faster, strokes firmer, coaxing Will closer to the edge until he went over it, coming with a startled, loud cry that Hannibal kissed to silence.
His breath came in short, fast bursts, his heart pounding in his chest and his body tingling all over with burgeoning sensitivity; Hannibal took the opportunity of Will’s growing weakness to take control, hands hard on Will’s hips, his own hips driving up. Each thrust make Will groan weakly; he still shifted back into each one, determined that Hannibal would get as good as he gave.
When Hannibal came, it was with a low groan, his fingers twitching against the small of Will’s back. Will inhaled sharply, leaning heavily onto Hannibal, nosing against his hair on the exhale.
A long silence passed, and then Will said, “I’m gonna... need to borrow your shower.”
Hannibal huffed a laugh against Will’s collarbone. “Of course.” He splayed his palm across Will’s back, and then said, “If you were to stay the night...”
“I’d love to,” Will said, raking his fingers through the shorter hair on the back of Hannibal’s head.
They took care to delicately extricate themselves from each other. Will carefully pulled himself back into his clothes, shifting uncomfortably when he stood and became hyper aware of a trickle down the back of his thigh.
If it had been anyone else, Will thinks he would’ve been repulsed by the feeling. Although he was still grateful for the chance to shower.
“I’ll put our clothes in the laundry, too,” Hannibal said, standing and doing up his belt. His eyes went from the front of his own clothing, and then to Will’s, and he cleared his throat with a smile.
Will glanced down and conspicuously attempted to make it look less like he had come on his shirt. He didn’t want to think about what Abigail’s reaction would be if she saw her guardian and her guardian’s boyfriend covered in stains. “We’re gonna go straight for that shower, right?”
Hannibal’s shower - located in his ensuite - was plenty big enough for two, as it turned out. Will hadn’t actually expected that they’d share the space, but he didn’t object either. It was comfortable rather than claustrophobic, the water just on the right side of too-hot so that it turned Will’s skin pink as he cleaned up.
He turned under the spray to face Hannibal, unable to hold back a smile at the usually put together man drenched under the water with a bottle of shampoo in hand. Will leaned in and kissed Hannibal. He appreciated the quiet intimacy, the two of them together with only the sound of spray hitting the tiles and the occasional thoughtful hum from one or the other.
Will turned back to the tiles eventually, and washed his hair and scrubbed clean with the aid of soap and felt all the better for it; he needed this shower, the time to clean and relax, even if he wasn’t washing off miscellaneous body fluids at the same time. He closed his eyes under the stream of water and after a while forgot that he wasn’t alone - it was only when Hannibal’s hand slid across his bare hip that he remembered, and startled, straightening up and leaning back into Hannibal’s touch.
“Are we done?” He asked, and Will nodded.
Drying off, Will glanced at the grey towel he was using and commented, “Somehow I’m surprised that this thing isn’t monogrammed.”
Hannibal had wrapped a white towel around his hips and was wiping his face off with a smaller towel that he hung on the wall. “Mine aren’t,” he confirmed, “but Abigail’s are.”
“She likes to keep her things completely separate?”
“She tells me that many teenage girls are the same.” Hannibal walked out into his bedroom and Will followed, and just as he was watching Hannibal fold their clothes into a small wicker laundry basket and he found himself wondering what he was going to wear, Hannibal said, “We are not dissimilar in size, I hope you have no objections to borrowing some of my clothing.”
Will thought about himself wearing Hannibal’s clothes for a very long moment, about just how private it was to wear another man’s clothes, and then quickly said “Not at all” before his mind could run away from him. His mouth betrayed him before he could stop himself and he asked, “Does that thought - interest you as much as it does me?”
Hannibal moved to his drawers and pulled out a dark blue shirt, unfolding it as he handed it over to Will. The button down was made of a very soft, slightly fluffy fabric. A pyjama shirt. Will was glad. He couldn’t envision being able to sit around in something with a very high thread count; he’d ruin it.
Will suddenly remembered that earlier in the evening he’d gotten come on one of Hannibal’s very high thread count shirts, just as Hannibal said, “Are you asking if I find it arousing?”
Will tucked his towel around his hips to sit on the edge of the bed and pull the shirt on, buttoning it up slowly as he said, “Yes, I’m asking that. You do that on purpose.”
“Yes, I do. Knowing that you have to borrow clothing from myself because we dirtied yours, for one, is a potent feeling.” He could feel Hannibal’s eyes on his back. “And I do what on purpose?”
“You ask for clarification on a question you already understand.”
“I like people to know what they’re asking. To be clear about it.”
“A psychiatrist habit, then.”
“More than likely. Here.” Hannibal was holding out a matching pair of pyjama pants. Will took them with a quiet “thank you” and discarded the towel to put them on. By the time that he was done, Hannibal was in pants and was buttoning up a shirt.
Will watched him and when Hannibal made to tuck the shirt in, he said, “Don’t.”
Hannibal paused and rose an eyebrow at Will. Will supplied, “You’re always so put together that seeing you without your shirt tucked in is... different. Leave it. Uh. Please.”
Hannibal did as he was asked and stepped close to Will, and Will said, “It’s just a shirt but it... something about it makes you look more... wild.”
“Wild,” Hannibal mused, and after stealing a short kiss he said, “We should go to the kitchen. And call for Abigail. I’ve had braised lamb hearts cooking slowly for most of the afternoon; she will have kept an eye on it in my absence but I’m sure it is well ready for finishing and serving. There should be plenty for three.”
As they walked through to the kitchen - Hannibal holding the wicker washing basket in front of him - Will commented, “I would have thought you would be more careful about portions and precise measurements, what with your business and tastes, but this is the second time you’ve talked about making too much.”
“I used to be very meticulous about it,” Hannibal explained, setting the basket down and crossing to a large thick pot on the stove. He picked up a folded up kitchen towel and carefully removed the lid, checking the contents. “But then I adopted Abigail and I found that teenagers have a propensity to ask for seconds, or more often get up in the middle of the night to dig around for leftovers. I changed for her sake. She is a child and needed to be able to eat when she wanted.”
“She was a child, you mean.” Abigail appeared, her hair in a short French plait and her arms folded.
“Of course,” Hannibal amended graciously. “I’m glad you’re here, Abigail, I was just about to call you out of your room.”
“I was about to send out a search party for you.” She walked straight past Will, peering over Hannibal’s shoulder into the pot. “You and Will were down there... a really long time.”
“We had much to talk about.”
Will didn’t miss the way Abigail rolled her eyes. “Sure. Talking is obviously exactly what you did.”
“Abigail.” There was a gentle warning in Hannibal’s voice. “Please set the table for three. Will is going to be staying tonight.”
“Gotcha.” Abigail did as she was told, pulling out plates and cutlery and glasses, and she said to Will, “So you and Hannibal patched up whatever was wrong?”
Will managed a smile. “Yeah, we did.” He wasn’t sure how to feel or act around Abigail still, with the knowledge that he killed her father. He’d dreamt of Garrett Jacob Hobbs’ madness for months after he was dead, saw him behind his eyelids even when he was awake, and now it was like he could see Hobbs’ shadow behind his daughter.
Over Abigail’s shoulder he saw Hannibal preparing food and watching them. Something in Hannibal’s eyes told him to just stick out the evening. The secrets that dwelled inside him could wait.
Abigail said, "I'm glad." Will was surprised enough to smile.
The dinner passed quietly, pleasantly, without incident; in the midst of conversation Hannibal brushed his fingers against Will’s affectionate, gentle, and they stood shoulder to shoulder cleaning up in the kitchen afterwards, as they did on their first date. Classical music floated softly through the house all the while, a pleasant background sound.
After that was done, Hannibal took Will’s hand and inspected the palm where he had once cut it. “No injuries this time,” he said, and Will nodded.
“And yet now I have more reasons to do this.” He pressed his mouth to Hannibal’s. He asked, “When can we talk to Abigail - ?”
“Tomorrow,” Hannibal said, “after we are all done with work. If you would like. I know you would like to get that particular conversation out of the way as soon as you can.”
“Not that I look forward to it. Thank you.”
Hannibal offered a glass of wine, and they drank together in Hannibal’s study. Will browsed the lengths of the bookshelves and saw the titles, of old medical books, of art books, of books in languages that he didn’t know. “Where were you born?”
“Lithuania.”
“How many languages do you speak?”
“Three fluently. Others in fragments. Some better than others. I’m ashamed to admit that I do not speak my native Lithuanian quite as well as English, now. I’ve gone too long without engaging it in conversation.”
Will paused, reaching out to a book and touching the spine. “Don’t you think in Lithuanian?”
“I generally think in the language I spoke last. So I do an awful lot of thinking in English.”
“I’d like to hear you speak Lithuanian sometime,” Will murmured.
Glasses empty, they found themselves back in Hannibal’s bedroom, and Will was more content than the last time he was here to just climb into bed with him and settle down. It was easier to fall asleep this time, close but not quite touching Hannibal. Like the last time, though, he fell asleep to the sound of their breathing.
And like the last time he was here, dreams came to him.
He was in the woods, and the beast returned, lurching towards him on two feet. Will had thought to keep his gaze low, to avoid seeing those terrible heads and the horns that curled out from them, but it didn’t necessarily do him any good: at the feet of the beast there was Abigail, swathed in golden cloth.
Her throat was bleeding. She didn’t seem to notice. She gazed up at the beast with gladness.
Will looked up. Hannibal’s face stared down at him, with cold, black eyes. Smoke rose from the crown that circled his forehead, and blood dripped from the tips of his great curved horns. His six other heads seemed sad.
The beast reached for Will.
He woke up.
It was not a lurching dream, thankfully. His eyes opened and his heart hammered against his ribcage, and he could feel the faintest sheen of damp sweat on him; somehow the dream was at once worse and better than the last. It was shorter. His reaction was better.
It was disturbing, though. Will hated seeing Hannibal in his nightmares. The one person who had made him feel safe lately. He turned in bed, as quietly as he could, to look at Hannibal’s face in sleep. He seemed not a lot different from when he was awake. Will doesn’t know what he expected. It wasn’t as if unconsciousness ever really changed how people looked; it only ever changed how people perceived them. Seeing Hannibal as not a lot different, Will thought, was a good thing. It meant he already had a pretty well rounded vision of Hannibal.
Still unsettled by his nightmare, Will slid out of bed as quietly as he could. No deranged panicking this time, but he could really use a glass of water and the opportunity to silently pace. The ringing in his ears wasn’t so loud as normal.
Will navigated down the hallway towards the kitchen in the dark, unwilling to risk waking up Hannibal or Abigail by turning on the lights - it was gloomy but not pitch black, he could still see. He reached for a glass and then squatted down, opening Hannibal’s freezer to root around inside for a couple of ice cubes.
He grabbed a cold package to move it aside, and then stopped, turning the package over in his hands. It was meat of some kind, or organs, frozen fresh judging by the blood in the vacuum-sealed packet.
Will noticed the thin ice drawer and put the meat back where he found it, and as he was standing up, he felt like a ghost passed through him. He shivered, and quietly closed the freezer, forgetting about his drink entirely and putting the empty glass on the side.
He knew now.
“Will.”
He turned, and saw Hannibal stood down the hall. He approached silently, and there was a stiffness to him, little warmth in his eyes when he said, “Come back to bed.”
It wasn’t an invitation. It was an out. A chance to pretend like this never happened, like revelation hadn’t passed over him right there in the kitchen at god knows what time in the morning whilst wearing another man’s pyjamas, and Will’s stomach ached with the temptation to take the out. To fold and lose and accept it gratefully.
He couldn’t do it. Will’s voice was strained as he asked, “It wasn’t lamb heart we ate tonight, was it?”
Hannibal’s hands were held neatly behind his back. “It belonged to a particularly supercilious receptionist. I won’t bore you with the details.”
Will swallowed, taking a step forward, and then he stopped. The ground beneath his feet suddenly felt that much colder. “Does Abigail know that you’re the Chesapeake Ripper? Does she know that you were the Copycat Shrike, that you killed her friend - ?”
Hannibal inclined his head. He was so polite, so formal, and yet Will had no difficulty imagining him wrist-deep in Anthony Moore’s chest. “Are you really so concerned about whether or not she knows, Will, or are you stalling to buy yourself time?”
“Time before you kill me?” Will’s lips felt numb. “No.” It was true. His life felt particularly worthless, suddenly. He was more concerned about the teenaged girl sleeping in her room, if she was still a victim or if Hannibal had groomed her into a beast like himself.
He hated that Hannibal’s place in his nightmares made sense now.
Hannibal brought his hands to his sides. Something silver flashed in the dark and Will tensed, stepping back as Hannibal showed him the long, thin knife in his hand. “I was hoping I would not have to.” Hannibal stepped forward and told him, “I care deeply for you, Will. Things don’t have to go this way.”
“Don’t do that,” Will muttered. “You sound like a run of the mill psychopath.”
Hannibal’s eyes flashed dangerously.
Will whispered, “What are you asking me to do?” He knew already, but he had to hear it.
Hannibal said simply, “Come back to bed. And when you wake up, if you cannot forget what you worked out, you can learn to accept it.” Hannibal was in Will’s personal space before he could register it or flee, and Will jumped, anticipating the knife in his gut, but there was only Hannibal’s hand over his heart. “You don’t want to kill me, Will, or be killed by me. You don’t even want to see me go to jail. There are no other men like me, no women, nobody who could fill the void for you the way that I have.” He tipped his head forward, close enough to kiss Will when he asked, “Am I wrong?”
“You are not wrong,” Will said, and his heart could feel Hannibal’s fingers pressed over it even through skin and bone and muscle and blood, and his heart beat faster for it, straining out of his chest for Hannibal’s touch. “You are a brilliant psychiatrist, Hannibal. But then it’s not really psychiatry, this, is it.”
“No, it’s not.”
“You weren’t suffering from... ‘sleeping preclusions’ when we first met, were you?”
“Of course not. I was disposing of waste. And I stumbled upon an injured lamb.”
Will shut his eyes, stepping back from Hannibal. He turned away, bracing his hands on the sides, trying to catch his breath. No matter how deeply he inhaled, his lungs felt empty. “How much did you lie about, exactly?”
“Many more things than I could ever list for you, I’m afraid.” He heard Hannibal sigh. “I knew that you would eventually begin to suspect me but I admit I didn’t anticipate you figuring it out so quickly.”
Will shuddered and opened his eyes. “Did you know about me? About... my connection to Abigail, when we met? Who I was, what I do...”
“You can choose not to believe me, but it was chance. I did learn about it soon after, though. Freddie Lounds is a remarkable source.”
“And you kept quiet.”
“Of course. What made you realise the truth?”
“I don’t know,” Will admitted, as he looked at Hannibal’s rows of kitchen knives. They were too far away. Hannibal would know what he was going for and slide his own blade between Will’s ribs before Will could even touch them. “I was looking for ice...” He eyed the empty glass by his hand. “And it was like someone whispered it in my ear.” It was the only potential weapon he had, but he didn’t touch it.
Instead, he balled his hands into fists and turned back to Hannibal. He took two steps to his side and said, “I thought that I understood you.” It was Garrett Jacob Hobbs all over again except Will had never loved Hobbs; he’d never laid in his bed and shared all his personal spaces with him. He had only ever wanted to understand Hobbs, and just as he thought he had succeeded he failed, catastrophically, and left a child without parents and a scar that would never leave her.
He thought for certain that he understood Hannibal. It was what allowed him to get so close. He understood that Hannibal had a penchant for psychoanalysing, something he had been unable to drop even after he quit seeing patients, and that Hannibal was a lover of fine foods and classical music and that he was a good father, and that in return, Hannibal understood Will.
“You do understand me,” Hannibal said, and it sounded like a pitiful, out of character reassurance until he continued, “You understand me perfectly. You knew me intimately as a member of society and as a shade that you hunted, and the only reason you failed to connect the two was that you refused to recognise me.”
Will’s heart dropped into his stomach as Hannibal said, “You let me remain a silhouette so that you would never have to see.”
“I see you now,” Will answered in an undertone. He saw the truth of it all, the puzzle pieces sewn together, and the Chesapeake Ripper became something that Will both wanted and loathed, someone who terrified and excited him.
He saw Hannibal Lecter with the heart of Anthony Moore in his hands, cradled between them, envisioned him packing someone’s cooked liver into a food processor and serving the resulting pâté to waiting customers. He saw him making breakfast sausages from a sad girl’s gut and feeding them to his tired adoptive child.
He saw the Chesapeake Ripper’s hands on his own body, saw all the thought and grace, the kindness, the way he would flirt, remembered the taste of his mouth and the wash of his affections.
“How does it make you feel?” Hannibal asked.
Will swallowed, pain grating his dry throat. “Disgusted.”
Hannibal’s spine stiffened. “How do you think your Jack Crawford would feel if you brought me in, Will? Would you be able to tell him how you feel for a serial killer? How you have done much more than empathise?”
Will inhaled slowly. “Well,” he said, with a forced smile that made his teeth hurt, “I’ll have to cross that bridge when I get to it. If I ever get to it.” He looked to the knife in Hannibal’s hand. “I don’t think both of us will be leaving here alive.”
“It seems that way,” Hannibal acknowledged. He seemed sad. Or disappointed.
Will reached for the glass.