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Will’s content in their life together. Mostly content. A casual observer would think they aren’t the type to compromise, but they are. They do. Their entire life together is predicated on compromise, on the ebb and flow of give and take.
Will turns a blind eye when kidney pie shows up on their table a week after a honey seller tries to pass off clover honey for the imported, expensive stuff. Over the dining table, he raises his brows and lifts a mocking toast to Hannibal, who smiles like the cat who ate the canary as he taps through the flaky crust with his fork. Hannibal sighs when Will brings home yet another dog (raising the grand total to five), but he says nothing, and a new dog bed shows up in the house a few days later.
The dogs aren’t allowed on the bed, and Will doesn’t want to hear about Hannibal’s other kills—the ones he does when they’re not together.
It works. They compromise.
The one thing Hannibal had not been willing to compromise on was Will’s drinking habit. He’d picked it up in their years apart, because that’s how he thinks of it in his head—not when Hannibal was in prison and not even when I was married to Molly—just, before. Like it was a temporary pause in their dance. Mutually agreed upon and polite. A chance to catch their breath.
In those years, he drank too much. He didn’t commit to alcoholism so much as slowly sink into it, but he can still call it what it was. He grew up with an alcoholic father. He knows what it looks like. He knew even then.
One drink after dinner turned into three or four. Hannibal was put on trial, and he was called to testify. He didn’t see anyone after that, not until Jack came knocking on his door with pictures of dead families. He stopped taking Jack’s calls. He resigned from his position at Quantico. He made so many excuses that Alana stopped reaching out—she was glad for it, he could tell.
He’d needed it, for a while. Loneliness, to be alone. The chance to get other people out of his head so he could sort through what was them and what was him. It worked, or it kind of did. He got everyone out of his head.
Everyone but Hannibal.
Hannibal was always there, no matter what. Constant as the seasons. Quitting the work, forcing the small-time killers to vacate the premises—it only made more room for him.
So Will started drinking.
He doesn’t have a good excuse, but he doesn’t need one. He drank because it made the part of him that was Hannibal shut the fuck up, at least for a little while. It was a terrible habit and a crutch, but he had no one but his dogs that year, and his dogs didn’t judge him.
“At least I’m not a serial killer,” he says to Winston, gesturing with a tumbler of whiskey in his hand. He’s a little shaky on his feet, and he catches himself with a hand on Winston’s flank. The fur is soft and plush beneath his fingers, and Will sinks his hand into it. He scratches behind the ears for good measure. “Good boy,” he says. “You’re a good boy.”
Woof, Winston agrees.
He wasn’t alone for long. It was a joke between them, but the kind of joke that carries the bite of truth—Molly did like strays. She adopted him and the rest of his wolf pack, brought them in and fed them. Of course they stayed. It wasn’t a whirlwind romance so much as clinging to an anchor in a very long and very fucked up storm that had left him tired. He did love her, but he needed her more.
She thought he would stop drinking eventually. To be fair, he did too.
He had thought the easy tide of domesticity would pull him into its current and wash away all his sharp edges—and it did, but not completely. There were still parts of him that smelled like blood, parts that ached to cave in the skull of a man who cut him off in traffic, that occasionally wished the porkchops Molly served for dinner tasted like something else. Something darker and more rare. Less acceptable. In short, there were still parts of him that Hannibal loved best, that hadn’t been cut out of him on the floor of a kitchen in Baltimore, and he drank to drown them night by night, diligent as any soldier.
Molly—dear, sweet Molly who really deserved better than him; always had, let’s admit it—Molly never said two words to him about it. About the drinking or any of the rest of it. Not the way he woke gasping from nightmares or the way he still sweat through the sheets on occasion. Not the way he would let her touch most of his scars, but not all of them—not the ones that ran across his belly or over his forehead. He never said why. She never asked.
They shared most things, but not everything. It felt safer that way.
He fell asleep on the couch sometimes on the bad nights, tumbler in hand, staring at the door as though Hannibal might walk through it at any moment. He didn’t fall asleep so much as pass out on those nights. In the morning he’d wake covered in blankets, glasses sitting neatly on the table beside him. His stomach curdled with shame in the aftermath, sour breath and pale amber whiskey in a glass on the coffee table accusing him of things he’d done.
He woke up to a pair of small, angry eyes once—Walter staring at him with a look of confusion that gradually resolved into contempt before Molly hustled him into the bathroom to get ready for school.
“Do we need to talk about this, Will?” She asks once they’re alone. Her, quiet and wounded. Her, giving and kind.
Him, the mangy stray that still startles and snarls when anyone moves too fast. Not the one you want around your children.
“No,” Will says. And he doesn’t stop drinking, but he does stop doing it in the living room. He does start hiding it better.
* * *
And then Hannibal comes back, and they are whole again. And Will doesn’t need to drink to kill the parts of him that were Hannibal’s, because he’s decided that it all belongs to Hannibal now. Except he still does—still drinks. Because he’s a fucking alcoholic like his father, but at least he isn’t a cannibal.
He hides it still. Less out of shame and more out of just not wanting to talk about it.
But Hannibal being Hannibal, of course he knows. There’s no do we need to talk about this here. Just Hannibal regarding him the morning after an ill-spent night, leaning into his space when Will’s trying to figure out their ridiculously complicated new coffeemaker. He puts his nose inches from the nape of Will’s neck and breathes deep.
“Quit it,” Will says waspishly, self-consciousness masquerading as annoyance.
“Hmm,” is all Hannibal says in reply. He removes himself from Will’s personal space between one breath and the next, leaving Will to struggle with the coffee machine alone, with the chill of vacancy at his back.
It doesn’t come up until after dinner.
Will helps with the washing up, and he’s about to retreat to his room the way he usually does when Hannibal stops him with a light touch on his arm.
“Have a drink with me,” he says, innocent as the fresh-fallen snow, and Will’s eyes narrow.
Will thinks about saying no, but he has no real reason not to. After all, it isn’t that he objects to Hannibal’s company—he doesn’t. He’s got an arrest warrant in all fifty states that attests to exactly how far he’s willing to go to just to keep Hannibal’s company, but something about this prickles his suspicion.
This house isn’t exactly like the one in Baltimore, but it could easily be its cousin. Will takes one last longing look toward the staircase that leads to his bedroom, to privacy and oblivion—a quick glance, but one that Hannibal’s sharp eyes pick up nevertheless—then shrugs and follows Hannibal into the sitting room.
“Okay.”
Will sinks into one of the two chairs—red instead of green in this house, but just as plush and indulgent as the last pair—angled slightly away from each other to spare its occupants the intensity that comes from sitting directly across from someone and staring into their eyes. Not that Hannibal needs perfectly angled chairs for intensity, but Will knows he appreciates the drama of it.
Hannibal pours them both a glass of bourbon from a tall, crystal decanter. Will knows without needing to try it that it’s bourbon; it would be—his drink of choice, except better. More refined. Hannibal hands him the glass, and Will accepts it without so much as a thank you. He may be complicit, but he draws the line at appreciative. Will balances the glass on his knee, watching as Hannibal sinks gracefully into the chair opposite him.
They’re both patient men who are comfortable with silence. Hannibal takes a sip, and Will doesn’t. The modest glass of wine he had at dinner has done basically nothing because his tolerance is appalling, but he can almost feel the low simmer of it in his blood. He doesn’t feel compelled to fill the dead air by talking, but he would have appreciated a fire to gaze into, an alternative to staring at the lapel of Hannibal’s tailored jacket. Hannibal probably knows it, and the fireplace yawns dark and empty before them. Will gazes into his drink, swirls the amber around to watch the little syrupy trails it makes when it moves.
Hannibal takes another sip, watching him.
“Why a drink?” Will asks at last. He tells himself it’s tactical rather than cracking under pressure.
“It’s your habit, is it not? Did I guess right, bourbon?”
“You didn’t guess. You smelled it on me.”
Hannibal doesn’t move. Doesn’t shrug or smile, but his face twitches in a way Will reads as amusement. Three years of prison hasn’t changed the fact that he always seems like he’s having the best time of anyone in any given room.
“Worried I’ll taint the meat?”
Hannibal’s lip twitches. “Alcoholism is such a common, inelegant form of self-destruction. It doesn’t suit you.”
“Do you object to the inelegance or the self-destruction? God forbid I don’t leave behind a handsome, well-preserved corpse.”
“Neither, actually. The secrecy and the shame it suggests, I do object to those.”
“You don’t want me to stop,” Will translates as Hannibal’s motives clarify, becoming as solid and clear as a crime scene. “Or you do, but that’s incidental. You want to watch. You want to participate.”
Hannibal inclines his head. Will’s glass is still full, but his own drink is empty, and he makes his way to the wet bar to refill it. He looks at Will, waiting for an answer. Will looks at the staircase and imagines what it would be like to say no.
Fuck it. He thinks perhaps he gave up the ability to say no when they failed to die at sea, or at least the inclination.
He drains his glass in one swallow and savors the smooth liquid burn of very expensive whiskey. He enjoys the feeling of wasting something of Hannibal’s more than he enjoys the indulgence itself; Hannibal doesn’t care about money, but Will does. Will still checks the price of every cut of meat in the grocery store and balks at the idea of spending more than $20 for a bottle of wine. There’s a fear of lack carved from nights gone to bed with an empty stomach and filling up with water to stop the ache, and it’s never quite left him. Shooting whiskey that’s meant to be savored feels like a small and hollow victory, but Will can be petty, and he’ll take his triumphs where he can.
He presses his tongue against his palate, chasing the taste even as he stands and sets his cup next to Hannibal’s.
It earns him a slow, chilling smile, and Hannibal refills their glasses.
Hannibal sits back down, and Will paces the floor. He runs his hands absently over everything, a clock on the mantle that looks older than him, paintings set in gilded frames. Hannibal watches him from his chair, easy and relaxed, a cat playing a long game with a mouse though some days it’s hard to tell who’s who.
“Are you nervous?” Hannibal asks.
Will shakes his head. “That’s not the right word. Annoyed. Cornered.”
“Ashamed?”
Will blows out a breath. His hand pauses on the head of a carved lion before finding its way back into his pocket. “Yes,” he admits.
“Why?”
Will smiles, wry. “You’ll have to get me drunk first.”
“That can be arranged.” Hannibal raises his glass in a toast, and they drink.
After the second drink, Hannibal stops matching him. He isn’t drinking at all, Will notes with sharp eyes, although he’s still nursing a glass of whiskey for politeness’ sake. He keeps refilling Will’s glass, though, and after a little while the sharp stab of his empathy, the prick of his conscience eases. He feels mellow and light, suffused with muted pleasure, full of the smoky sweetness of the bourbon he’s been consuming all night.
“Your father drank,” Hannibal says.
“My father was an alcoholic,” Will corrects. To his own ears, there’s no hint of a slur in his words, but whether that’s objectively true is anybody’s guess.
“Like you.”
“Like me,” Will agrees.
“Why?”
They’re back to that question again. Will frowns, squinting at his cup. He could have sworn it was empty just a minute ago. “I think the reason might bore you.”
“I doubt that’s true, but you’re welcome to try me. You are one of the least boring people I’ve ever met.”
“Flattery.”
“I don’t flatter, Will,” Hannibal says mildly.
“No, you don’t,” Will agrees easily because he’s not married to whatever he’s just said. He’s pushing buttons, but they’re the wrong ones. Calibrated to someone else, maybe. Molly? Alana? Hard to say when his head feels heavy and slow. He lets it loll on his shoulder, looking at Hannibal through heavy-lidded eyes, seeing himself the way Hannibal sees him—flushed cheeks, labored breathing, legs splayed haphazardly. Through the whiskey-haze, he sees something he hadn’t seen before, or maybe hadn’t let himself see.
He tests a theory, letting his knees fall open. Huffs a laugh that’s mostly breath when Hannibal mirrors him, just a little. A minute gesture that brings everything into vivid focus. He licks his lips and watches Hannibal’s eyes grow dark and intent.
“What are you doing, Will?”
“Having a drink with my friend,” Will says, tasting the word friend and letting it linger on his lips. He brings his head upright and watches the world spin. “Did you know lust and murder look the same on you?”
“No. You’re the first person who’s seen both.”
Will gasps from the weight of the admission as much as the severe depression of his central nervous system. A moment passes between them, and Hannibal rises to his feet. He holds out his hand, an invitation. A door.
Will’s had far too much to drink. He knows it before he stands, but he knows it better once the world is tilting around him and he’s unsteady on his feet. Hannibal holds him up, arm like an iron band around his waist, and Will slouches forward, content to be held. His lips find the pulse in Hannibal’s neck, and he rests there.
“I think I overdid it,” he murmurs against skin, and Hannibal chuckles.
Hannibal pulls him away, tilts him back just enough so that Will’s more or less upright again. His eyes slid shut at some point, and it feels too exhausting to peel them open, so when Will feels the touch of something slick and hard against his lips, he opens more out of surprise than anything else. Spicy liquor prickles against his tongue, and he swallows reflexively. Blinks his eyes open. It takes a moment for the world of colors and shapes to resolve into recognizable forms again: Hannibal with his forgotten glass of whiskey pressing insistently against his mouth.
He pauses long enough for Will to catch his breath, then he tips the rest of it into Will’s mouth, slowly, carefully. Will swallows rather than choke on it. Hannibal sets the empty glass on the side table and wipes a stray drop from the corner of Will’s mouth with something that looks obscenely like tenderness.
Eventually they make their way to the bedroom, Hannibal half leading and half carrying Will there.
“Can you stand on your own?” he asks, although he lets Will go before waiting for an answer. It’s just as well. Will’s tongue feels thick and slow in his mouth, and talking sounds exhausting.
Will sways on his feet, watching Hannibal get undressed. He’s efficient and methodical, and it almost feels like watching him in the kitchen. The bedroom’s shadows seem to grow long around him, sprouting arching horns and reaching with taloned fingers. Will closes his eyes again, and there goes his balance. His knees buckle, and he sits heavily on the bed behind him, sinks into its plush embrace.
He might be sleeping, tipping somewhere toward unconsciousness when there’s a dip in the bed calling him back. Curious hands touching his cheek.
“Will?”
He finds the strength to pry open his eyes, and he shapes words that fit awkwardly in his mouth. Too big, maybe. Too frank. “Did you drug me?”
Hannibal laughs softly. “No, I’m afraid not.”
He touches Will, runs his hand down Will’s chest. He starts to undress him, slipping buttons free from their loops, one, two, three. A neat little row of them gleaming in lamplight. Will gasps when the cool air brushes his flushed and fevered skin. Hannibal opens his shirt, coaxes Will to lift one arm and then the other so he can slip the sleeves free. Will feels heavy and pliant, like a doll. He forces his eyes open and watches.
“What are you doing?”
“Helping you out of your clothes,” Hannibal says.
“Why?”
“I’m going to have sex with you.”
Will closes his eyes, nods. That makes sense, doesn’t it? He feels like he might be floating somewhere outside his body. Hannibal’s fingers are quicker than he can follow as he undoes a belt and slips it free, opens Will’s pants, shimmies them down his hips, bidding Will lift up with a tap to his pelvis. Will manages, awkward and uncoordinated. He sighs, breathless.
When he’s finally bare, Hannibal drags his hands over Will’s skin, covetous. Reverent. Will turns his head to look. He’s spread out across the bed with Hannibal above him, and the room is quiet save for the soft drag of skin on skin—Hannibal petting him, learning him by touch. His hand brushes the scar on Will’s stomach, and Will’s breath quickens. He doesn’t linger in any one place for long, just touches all of Will equally, exploratory and strange. He runs his hand over Will’s cock, down between his thighs. Will is soft from too much alcohol. He can’t tell if it feels good. Can’t tell if he likes it.
He could say no. Some distant part of his mind thinks that might be an option. He could, but it’s so much easier not to. To drift and let Hannibal do what he likes. Hannibal usually gets what he wants anyway; the logic seems sound right now. Will isn’t sure that he wants this, but he also isn’t sure that it matters. The room spins when he closes his eyes and spins when he opens them, and he’s not sure which is better. He keeps them open to watch.
Hannibal pulls his legs apart, spreads him wide and sets a tangle of embarrassment blooming in his stomach. Hannibal stares, pushes his nose between Will’s legs and breathes deep. Licks at Will’s cock in a long, slow stripe, obviously more for his own pleasure than Will’s.
Will wants to close his legs. Hannibal holds them open.
“Have you ever been with a man?” Hannibal asks.
Will shakes his head—left, right. An intelligible gesture. He feels proud of it.
He thinks there might be more conversation, but there isn’t. Just Hannibal spreading his cheeks and devouring him. Will arches off the bed at the first touch of a warm, wet tongue against his hole. It’s all insistent heat and slick pressure, and a garbled yell falls from his mouth. He reaches down instinctively, gets his fingers in Hannibal’s hair, tries to push him away even as his fingers tighten and try to hold him there.
“Hannibal, fuck.”
Hannibal hooks his arms around Will’s thighs and drags him closer. If there’s an answer, it’s lost to the wet lapping of skin on skin. The sound is squelching and obscene, and Will doesn’t know if he’s ever been this turned on in his life. He digs his heels into Hannibal’s back and holds on while Hannibal licks him until he feels sloppy and loose and swollen. While he forces his tongue into Will in a way that makes him writhe and moan. There’s an intrusion then, the blunt press of fingers against him, dipping in as Hannibal licks around them to ease them inside. There’s a press in and in, a stretch that burns as Hannibal pushes his way deeper.
His body clenches, trying to expel the intruder, but Hannibal stays put. Shoves his way into Will until he thinks he might scream. He groans as Hannibal rubs against something that lights his nerves on fire.
“Stop,” he says. “Don’t,” while his hips find a stuttering rhythm, pressing back into Hannibal’s fingers out of sync with his measured, even thrusts.
“You’re okay,” Hannibal murmurs into his skin, pressing kisses along his hip. “You’re doing so well, my charming boy.”
He fucks Will with his fingers until Will is panting and gasping, begging please, please, please, and he doesn’t know what for. Hannibal pulls out at last, leaving him stretched and aching—he can’t tell if the feeling is relief or loss.
Hannibal gets up, and the bed rises in his absence. In the time it takes him to come back, Will’s hand goes to his cock of its own accord, still soft but wet and leaking. Wanting. He curls his hand around it protectively. His eyes are open or closed. They must be closed because there’s something blunt and slick pressing against his hole, and he can’t see it. Hannibal is settled between his legs where the muscles are starting to ache and cramp from being held wide.
“Look at me,” Hannibal says, and Will does. How can he not?
There’s an inexorable press in, something wide and heavy breaching him, cracking him open. He clutches Hannibal’s shoulders and pants. Someone makes a high, tight noise.
“Shh,” Hannibal gentles him. He pets Will’s hair, strokes his face. “It’s okay. Everything is fine.”
He presses in and in, and it’s too big and too much and, “Please,” Will says, broken. “Hannibal.”
Hannibal gives him no time to adjust, just drives into him hard and relentless, knocking the wind from him until he’s clinging and gasping. He wants it, and he doesn’t. He wants it like killing, like stepping in front of an oncoming train, ruined and damned and no one to save him.
How is killing supposed to feel?
Like this. Just like this.
“Stop,” he gasps, mostly just to see if Hannibal will. “Stop, stop. You’re hurting me.”
He doesn’t actually know if it’s hurting—it might be, could be pleasure or pain. He can’t tell through the anesthetic of alcohol. It’s not hard to imagine that it does, though. Not hard to convince some relevant part of his brain that it hurts terribly, to let his voice go breathy and strained. It’s frightfully easy to let himself cry, to tap into the deep well of betrayal that runs like groundwater between them and let it wash over him until he cracks.
“Stop,” he says. Then, “Hannibal, please. It hurts.”
It occurs to him that he's never actually asked Hannibal to stop anything before. He's never begged Hannibal not to hurt him, not even when Hannibal slid a knife into his gut. Some part of him instinctively bends toward whatever Hannibal gives him. It must occur to Hannibal in the same instant, because he stops moving in Will. His mobile face goes blank, then concerned. And Will knows then that he's got Hannibal as surely as Hannibal has him. His face twists into a cruel grin because oh, he’s tamed a monster. It’s terribly funny.
Hannibal narrows his eyes and repays Will with a particularly vicious thrust that knocks his head against the wall. He can’t tell if that hurts either, and Will laughs and laughs, pained tears still streaming down his cheeks. Hannibal fucks him through it, yanking Will down the bed so his head doesn’t clatter into the drywall, shutting him up with the press of a finger against the place where their bodies are joined.
“Oh fuck, oh fuck.” Will’s eyes slam shut of their own accord at the burning stretch of it when Hannibal slides his finger in on the next thrust. He moans as Hannibal keeps it there, filling him up as he rocks their bodies together. His limbs still aren’t quite willing to obey him—there’s a long delay between thought and action, so he lies there and takes it. Hannibal doesn’t seem to mind. His expression is fierce and bright when Will manages to pry his eyes open long enough to see it.
Will’s cheeks are still wet. His breath hitches like a reminder, and his body decides it would really like to keep crying. His mind is useless, thoughts scattering like bubbles, like marbles. He can’t quite remember why he shouldn’t.
Hannibal leans forward to press a sweet kiss against his lips, and he sobs.
“Will,” Hannibal says, pulling back. Stopping now—stopping for real. He pulls out of Will’s body, and the loss feels like being gutted all over again. The finality of it feels the same.
“Don’t stop,” Will slurs. “Please,” he says, and he means it. It’s easier to beg now that he’s got the knack of it, like a cork that’s been undone. “Please don’t stop.”
His eyes are closed because Hannibal peels them open with clinical efficiency, peering at his pupils and counting the pulse in one numb wrist. Hannibal is just as naked as he was a second ago, but there’s a palpable shift. It reminds him of the early days of their acquaintance, when Hannibal was polite but remote. Clad in three piece suits and impeccable. Untouchable. Will never felt the urge to muss him up, to break him and seep into the cracks in his skin then, but he does now. Being shut out is worse than being hurt.
Will is laid out flat on his back, but he pushes himself to his elbows, struggles his way upright. Everything is swimming. He topples forward, tries again. Finds his way into Hannibal’s lap crawling and dizzy.
“Please,” he croons into Hannibal’s ear. He finds Hannibal’s mouth and kisses him, messy and inexpert. Too much tongue, teeth sliding and clacking together. “Hannibal, please.” He wraps his hand around Hannibal’s cock, still hard and straining. Still something that should be Will’s. “Hannibal, fuck me.”
Hannibal’s eyes slide shut. Will wonders what hell looks like to him. Wonders if it looks like this.
He disentangles Will’s hands from his body and pushes Will off his lap and back onto the bed, gentle but firm. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
Gentleness feels like a slap to the face.
“Oh, fuck you,” he hisses. “This is what you wanted, isn’t it? You wanted to see me sloppy and drunk. This is your design, and now you won’t finish it? That’s the line you’re not willing to cross?”
It’s wrong that there might be lines between them, any lines that might hold. A flaw in an otherwise orderly universe. Will draws lines in the sand, and Hannibal sweeps them away. That’s who they are. That’s the story they make.
“This may have been a mistake,” Hannibal says softly, and it pulls Will up short.
He studies Hannibal’s face, looking for truth there—something recognizable, a crack to widen and let himself in. It’s there at the bottom. Wounded, injured love, a vein of it running deep.
“I hurt you, didn’t I?” Will asks. Past and present. Future too. He touches Hannibal’s face, wondering.
“No worse than I hurt you.”
It’s adjacent to forgiveness; it’s as close as they come. If they never forgive each other, they’ll never be free.
No one here wants to be free.
“Let me make it hurt worse. You’ll like it, I promise.” Will finds his way to his hands and knees, crawls his way over to where Hannibal is sitting, watching Will like he might bite. He plants a hand on Hannibal’s chest and pushes. Hannibal bends so easily, falls onto his back. His eyes are wary and helpless when he looks up at Will, and Will thinks he’s never seen anything so beautiful. “I want to remember you like this.”
He takes Hannibal’s cock in a clumsy hand and lines it up. Sinks down onto it with a hiss—it still hurts. It hurts the both of them. Hannibal steadies him with hands on his hips, and Will rocks against him, messy. Inelegant. Hannibal flips him onto his back, and Will sighs beneath him.
“You know why I drink. You just wanted a different answer. A different ending to the story.”
“Why?” Hannibal asks, enraptured, gone. It’s amazing Will didn’t realize that he’d killed this man years ago.
“The same reason anyone drinks, to forget.”
He sees the moment Hannibal understands. The moment it hurts. Hannibal tries to twist away, but Will holds him down, wraps his thighs around his hips and holds. He looks into Hannibal’s eyes and drinks down the suffering there, presses kisses to fluttering lids. He shushes and gentles him. He rips the cut deeper.
“I’m with you til we’re dead, but I can’t fucking stand you. You’re the only thing I have.”
Hannibal clings to him, and Will rocks his hips, clenches his muscles and makes him moan. There’s no escape for either of them.
“I can’t love you without hating one of us, but I do. I love you.”
Hannibal comes with a noise that sounds like death, and Will feels it bloom hot and wet inside him. He feels like he’s killed something. Hannibal is still and trembling beside him, and Will folds the feeling and tucks it in his chest. He’ll pull it out tomorrow and run greedy fingers over it, if he remembers it at all.