Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Prologue: Touch

The light flashes, and the metronome clicks. Hannibal makes soft shushing sounds, soothing, and indulges his desire to touch. He trails his fingers along Will Graham’s sweaty forehead while he describes blood, the scent and the taste, the love and the betrayal twining together, the importance of doing right by his daughter. He tells Will that Garrett Jacob Hobbs had left him with a calling, with a responsibility.

“Are you a good father, Will?” Hannibal whispers, and Will begins to seize.

Hannibal strokes the hair back from his head, and murmurs encouragements until the seizure subsides. He allows Will time to breathe, for the trembling to stop, for his heart to slow. With his lips directly beside Will’s ear, Hannibal whispers that all is well and Will must only do what is necessary, to finish what fate began all those months ago.

He brings Will forth from the depths of his mind.

Will is glassy-eyed and disoriented when he wakes. He stands and stumbles for the door.

“I… I’m going to… I have to… see Abigail,” Will slurs. 

Hannibal smiles.

Act One: Trials

Will Graham cannot breathe.

He panics, flails, chokes, gags. He is uncoordinated; his limbs don’t respond. It’s like moving through molasses, every motion heavy and slow and imperfect. His vision is distorted. His throat burns, and the inside of his nostrils burns, and his mouth and chin are coated with a sour mix of bile and thick, phlegmy saliva.

He manages to turn his head and coughs violently, clearing his airway, gasping for breath. He trembles, his muscles aching, his body coated in sweat, his heart hammering and his lungs burning.

He… might have just almost died?

He sits up. There’s sweat and spit and bile on his blankets, on his pillow, on his shirt. He’s staring at the space between the pillows. His brain is struggling to process what he’s seeing.

Garrett Jacob Hobbs takes a seat on the bed across from him and stares, too.

He almost choked to death. He almost aspirated in his sleep.

He threw up an ear, which is now laying on his bedspread.

He doesn’t remember.

He doesn’t fucking remember.

His hands are clumsy and his fingers leaden as he reaches for his cell phone. Sunday morning, 7:43am. Sunday? He can’t remember anything after Thursday afternoon.

Garrett smiles at him, and black ichor drips from the corners of his mouth.

Will can remember, but only flashes. Flashes of Abigail, terrified. The scent and the taste of blood. Love twining with a terrible need to do what he must as a father. To finish what he started all those months ago.

To honor her.

Oh, Christ. No. No, no, no, no.

He’s looking at his hands now. There’s blood beneath his nails. He can taste it, taste iron in his mouth, behind his teeth. He hunches over, his stomach clenching, heaving, and he throws up again, and again, nothing but spit and the dream of freedom from nausea.

He killed her.

He ate her.

He honored her. 

Christ. Garrett is grinning at him, blood leaking from his teeth, and Will is drenched in cold sweat and shuddering and something is wrong, something is so wrong.

He is like a corpse falling into rigor. His fingers are stiff upon his phone as he dials a number and he can’t hold on. He drops it on top of the mattress as he stumbles to the floor, shuddering, seizing.

There’s blood in his mouth and more bile in his nose when he comes to again and he can hear Jack Crawford yelling through his phone but he can’t process what’s being said.

“I killed her,” he croaks. He can’t sit up. “I killed her, Jack. You have to stop me. Something is wrong. Please, Jack, I don’t know what happened. I can’t… I don’t remember but I…”

Will begins to sob, and soon he loses consciousness.

He is shaken awake some time later by Jack Crawford. He is disoriented, his tongue like cotton in his mouth, and he still tastes blood. There are lab techs scouring his house already. He assumes the ear has been carted away.

Looking at Jack is like setting his own eyeballs on fire. There is a horrible smear of bright, vivid reality, the pity, the fear, the guilt, and Will’s reaction is a visceral whine as he attempts to roll his body into a tight ball and escape the onslaught.

“Please,” he begs. “Please s-stop looking at me. I can feel… It won’t stop, everything, please, I’m sorry, I don’t know, I don’t know!”

“Will,” says Jack, gruff but low, his hands outstretched, placating. “Will, you’re unwell. You’re not okay. We’re going to take you with us. We’re going to get you some help.”

Will can only cry and curl tighter around his aching, cramping stomach. In the corner of the room, Garrett Jacob Hobbs is laughing, and blood spills like tar from his mouth and spatters down onto the floor. No one else can see him. No one else can hear him. Will covers his ears and prays for the hideous, wet laughter to stop.

“I killed her,” Will whispers. “I don’t know. I don’t remember. Her ear. I tasted blood. I took her. I killed her. I was her father and I killed her.”

“Okay, Will,” says Jack, gently. “Okay. Just come with us. We’ll get you all the help you need.”

Will is lifted beneath his arms by a pair of agents and taken outside to an SUV. The seat is lined with plastic, and there is a tarp beneath his feet. His feet are filthy. He must have walked. He must have hunted. He must have…

He seizes on the way to Quantico. He knows that, because when he wakes up there is an agent with their jacket placed between his head and the window, and they have their phone out with a timer. He is sluggish again, and the fear is creeping higher. He can see Garrett Jacob Hobbs in the driver’s seat, milky eyes full of laughter and malice, and despite the best efforts of the agent assisting him, Will panics and cannot breathe and his heart his hammering so hard and so loud he’s sure that Abigail can hear it in her grave, even with one ear, and his body collapses.

When he wakes yet again, there is a whirlwind of activity around him. He is being processed. He is in a wheelchair, and his legs and feet are being scraped for materials. He cooperates because he is guilty and he deserves to be punished. He doesn’t speak. He is too tired and his brain is foggy. 

At some point—time is like a series of disconnected moments, interspersed with panic and visions of a creature waiting for him in the darkness—Beverly is scraping blood from beneath his fingernails. He tries to swallow, but his throat is dry and cracked and tastes only of sick.

Beverly sees that he is awake and frowns. “Will,” she says. “I can’t do this. I can’t pretend I don’t know you. I can’t pretend we don’t both know what I’m finding under your nails.”

“Yeah,” he says, and his voice grinds like gravel. “I killed her. I ate her all up. I honored every part of her. You can’t find her. She’s all gone.”

“Will, don’t… don’t say shit like that. You don’t… You’re clearly not in your right mind, you can’t—”

“Her blood in my teeth,” he murmurs. “Her fear in my heart. So quick, baby girl, and it’s all over, so quick, I promise, it won’t even hurt, don’t be… don’t be afraid.”

“Will…” Beverly has to stand and leave and that is good.

She should leave. Everyone should leave. No one is safe. The creature across from him wears his face. Horns spiralling toward the sky, ribs standing out starkly, stomach hollow and empty and hungry. He is a beast and he will only keep killing if he isn’t stopped.

Jack tries to interrogate him. He tries to confess. He tells Jack that he killed her, he killed her and he ate her and he made her part of him forever and that’s what a father does, he protects his child, he did what he had to do, all he did he did for her—

And then Will has another seizure, a bad one, long enough that when he wakes the fear in Jack’s eyes is enough to spike deep into Will’s fevered brain and lance the dam Will had been building to hold back his own fear. It is so intense he shakes and they worry he’s having another seizure, but it’s just panic and guilt and all the lights in the room are piercing his eyes and he curls up tight until the EMTs come to take him away.

Will’s diagnosis comes as a shock. It’s not enough to absolve him of what he’s done, of course. He’s the same monster, the same villain, the same killer. Just because his brain was on fire doesn’t mean he didn’t kill Abigail.

Jack tells him, almost gently, that it was more than just Abigail.

Cassie Boyle. Marissa Schurr. Donald Sutcliffe. Georgia Madchen. Nicholas Boyle.

The Copycat victims.

Will is handcuffed to the hospital bed. He should be fully restrained. He tells Jack this, but Jack simply asks him if he remembers anything. If he remembers doing any of these things, because evidence was found in his house that doesn’t seem… right.

“Will, your… your motor functions have been deteriorating for…” Jack rubs at his face. “I should have noticed. This is on me. I let this happen.”

“No,” says Will. “I killed them. You didn’t kill them. I killed them. I killed her.”

“But do you remember anything? Do you—?”

“I don’t… remember anything. I don’t know if I was sick when Cassie and Marissa were killed. Which means if I killed them, I was… just me. Just Will. And if that’s the case, Jack, I need to be locked away. For good. Forever.”

“Will, you’re still recovering. Now’s not the time to be making declarations like that.”

Will frowns. “But… you asked me.”

“I have to ask, Will. We found your lures.”

“My… lures?” He shakes his head. “I haven’t… worked on them in… months.”

“These were fresh, Will. Bone and bits of lung, human hair, teeth.”

Will’s frown deepens. “Those would make bad lures,” he says.

Jack sighs and stands. “Okay, Will,” he says. “Okay.”

Will completes the first ten days of treatment at Johns Hopkins, with two FBI agents constantly monitoring his door and a handcuff constantly attached to his wrist, and then he is transferred to the Baltimore Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

He belongs here. His mind is clearer, he supposes. He’s not having seizures anymore. But he isn’t stable, and he certainly isn’t safe for the public. The fact of the matter is that he doesn’t remember killing any of those people, but he knows that he did, and that means he is exactly where he should be.

He sits in his cell for an hour before Frederick Chilton comes to see him. It’s strange; Will would have expected him to come and gloat, but Frederick just seems… nervous.

“Mr. Graham,” he says, his haughty voice low. “How are you feeling?”

Will looks at him. It’s a struggle now, not to fall into the horrible smear of other people’s feelings. Something happened to his brain when it was burning. There are parts that turned to ash, and swirl around inside him now. The ashes stick to the feelings he’s forced to endure, and every emotion turns into something visual.

Frederick is surrounded by a low, brackish green warble, wibbling like the thick impasto on a Van Gogh painting, and it makes Will’s stomach clench. Frederick is positively sick with it. Worry? Not quite. Guilt? No. Disbelief? Closer.

Doubt. Frederick is teeming with doubt.

“I killed them,” Will says, earnestly. “It’s okay. I belong here.”

Frederick frowns, and the dark green lines thread with a muted blue as his doubt begins to run with worry. “Has anyone explained your illness to you, Mr. Graham? Its side-effects? How severe it had become?”

Will looks down at his hands. “They said it was some kind of encephalitis.”

“Yes,” says Frederick, gently. “Did anyone speak with you after your last scan, before you were brought here?”

“No.”

Frederick approaches the bars, cautiously, and places a hand upon the metal supports. “Will. You and I have not always seen… eye to eye. But believe me when I say that in your condition…” He trails off, and from the corner of Will’s eye he can see the green and the blue begin to thread with a rich purple thread of pity. “There is permanent damage, Will. Your condition deteriorated to the point that it is highly unlikely you will make a full recovery. Do you understand? It is highly unlikely in your condition that you would have been capable of—”

“But I was. I did,” says Will. He glances at Frederick, and the burnt umber of fear is beginning to meld with the green and the blue and the purple. “If I was so bad, why didn’t anybody notice?”

“Why, indeed,” murmurs Frederick, and steps back from the bars. “Rest assured, I will do all I can to ensure your stay is a pleasant one, and you continue to receive the appropriate treatments. A mind is a terrible thing to waste, particularly in your case. I have already received petitions for visitation. Jack Crawford, Dr. Bloom, and Dr. Lecter will be coming by this week to see you. I thought perhaps you might appreciate it if they did not all accost you on the same day.”

Will pauses for a moment, then glances up to meet Frederick’s eyes. The man does look startled, and scared, and guilty, and he is filled to the brim with doubt. Will looks back at his hands.

“Thank you, Frederick.”

“Of… of course, Will. Please get some rest. I will escort Jack to see you tomorrow morning.”

Will lays in his bunk and stares at the ceiling and can’t remember the faces of the people he’s killed.

“Except for one,” Garrett whispers from beside him, curling close around his body. He leaks black ichor onto Will’s shoulder, and Will allows it, if only for the warmth.

A few hours pass and there is the sound of keys jingling down the hallway as one of the orderlies begins their nightly cell checks. Will doesn’t have anyone across from him, which is good. He can mostly drown out the muttering and babbling in the other cells, because there’s far too much going on in his own mind to bother with those he can’t look directly into.

The keys keep jingling, and a soft voice with a slight lisp checks in on Will’s neighbor before moving on. The keys stop just in front of Will’s cell, and then jingle a little more as their owner steps closer.

Will sits up, Garrett clinging to his back and peering over his shoulder as though Will could or would protect him from the orderly.

The man is leaning against the bars, his elbow resting on the cross-bar, his eyes dark and calculating, his head cocked slightly to one side. He’s smiling, but he’s hiding his teeth as though he fears being too expressive will give him away.

The colors swirling around him are riotous. There is the rich burgundy of attraction, the blood-red of violence, the golden thread of excitement and exultation, the quiet blue of serenity and calm, the bright green of interest and pleasure. Will can see the killer in his eyes sizing up the killer in Will’s, and finding something worthy.

Will tears his gaze away.

He’s not worthy of anything. He’s a killer. He’s a monster.

“Oh, don’t be like that,” whispers the orderly, soothingly. “I’m not judging. I’m a big fan.” He leans down, his chin on his arm, his ankles crossed casually behind him. “I just really wanted to meet you. They’re saying you were out of your mind but you seem pretty sane to me.”

“Appearances can be deceiving,” says Will, and lays back down, pulling his blanket up to his shoulders. Garrett is gone.

“I’m Matthew. If you ever need anything, you just have to ask. I’m yours.”

Will doesn’t answer, and the orderly chuckles softly to himself as his keys jingle back down the hallway.

Jack Crawford’s first question doesn’t surprise him.

“Will. Were you aware that you were being arrested for the Copycat Killings?”

Will doesn’t look at him; he’s swirling with guilt and anger and exhaustion. He shrugs.

“I don’t remember being read my rights, if that’s what you’re asking. But I remember you telling me I killed them.”

“I told you we found evidence in your home,” Jack corrects, sharply. “I didn’t say you killed them. You keep saying you killed them.”

“Because I did. Obviously I did. Why else would I be here?”

“You’re here because we’re still trying to sort out what happened,” Jack says.

They’re in a private interrogation room at the hospital, one Frederick doesn’t have legal rights to record in. However, Will has invited Frederick to attend this meeting, anyway.

“Are you suggesting, Agent Crawford, that Mr. Graham is here without having formally been arrested?”

Jack scowls. “We got a court order for an involuntary commitment until we could verify Will is in his right mind. And he seems pretty coherent to me.”

“Jack, I must protest. There was permanent brain damage—”

“People are still responsible for their actions, doctor. And if Will really is responsible for what happened to those people, the courts will decide. Will.”

Will watches Jack’s mouth as he’s read his rights. The words fall hollow, like splats of uncoordinated paint, no conviction, no place in Jack’s artistic design. He doesn’t want to be doing this.

“Do you understand your rights as I have read them to you?” Jack is saying, and Will nods. “Okay. We’re going to find out the truth, Will, whatever that may be.”

“I know you will, Jack. And I’ll be here, if you ever need me for anything.”

Jack’s colors all turn the flashing neon orange of distress and he practically flees the room.

The visit with Alana is… strange. Her guilt runs so deep he has to keep tearing his eyes away or he’ll fall into it, and her pity makes him sick to look at it, but her need to save him, her belief in him, is so intense that he has to keep his eyes shut or risk that icepick of lancing pain directly to the center of his brain.

Her huge, ice-blue eyes are kind and gentle and sweet and in a way she loves him. She wants him to be innocent, she believes he couldn’t have done this, or if he did he wasn’t himself. She fully and completely blames the FBI for putting him in the minds of killers over and over and failing to recognize his condition as it grew to the point where he was seizing daily.

She also blames Hannibal. This is the most surprising piece. Every time she brings up his sessions with Hannibal there is contempt, as though he were somehow personally responsible for Will becoming a multiple murderer.

Will unhelpfully reminds her, “Cassie Boyle was killed before I even knew Dr. Lecter. Including that scene, I’d met him twice, for a total of ten minutes. He couldn’t have stopped me from killing her.”

“Will, please, you have to stop talking like that.” She reaches out and takes his hands, and he pulls away. Her guilt and pity surge. “Will…”

“Don’t touch me,” he manages to say. “Alana, I’m… like poison. I shouldn’t be near… anyone. If you touch me, I’ll hurt you. I don’t know how but I’ll hurt you.”

Her grief hits him like a wave, and he tastes blood in the back of his throat. He has to stare at his hands to escape it.

“I’m going to get you a lawyer,” she says. “I’m going to help you, Will. We’ll get you out of here. Let me help you.”

“Okay,” he says, and Alana finally leaves.

Matthew Brown, the orderly he’d met on his first night, is the one escorting him back to his cell. He’s supposed to be all locked up on a dolly, more or less, with a bite mask and a dozen other safety requirements, but Frederick has been… almost kind in this regard. It’s as though he doesn’t think Will is a threat.

He could be a threat. He could show them.

But what would be the point? They already know he’s a monster. He’s just a broken monster, with nothing left to sink his claws into. His daughter is dead. He has fulfilled the purpose fate set out for him.

Matthew’s grip on his arm is firm but not painful. He walks at an even pace, allowing Will to shuffle along without feeling as though he might trip on his ankle restraints.

It’s nice, having a real, actual body this close. Touching him. Holding on to him, with no trembling or fear. Matthew continues to exude the same things: violence, lust, admiration, pleasure, joy, serenity. Another monster, with no fear of him. Someone he can’t hurt.

“You got some good friends,” Matthew says, conversationally.

Will frowns and tilts his head to the side. Matthew’s lisp is gone. Another cover, he supposes, but there are microphones nearly everywhere in the hospital. Matthew glances at him, rich brown eyes sparkling like polished oak, and grins.

“Oh, Chilton? Don’t worry.” He points upward, to what looked like just a power box. “Who do you think wired up all the mics in here? We’re safe, at least in this spot, for a couple of minutes.”

“Safe for what?” asks Will, and Matthew’s amusement crashes over him hard enough that he can’t fight the reflective smile.

“Just to talk, Mr. Graham. Just for a minute.” He pauses, considering, then says, “I think you should let your friend Dr. Bloom help you. I mean, for real. Let her and her lawyer friend help you. I’ve heard some things. FBI seems like they’re gonna angle for the death penalty. And you don’t want that, do ya?”

“Don’t I?” echoes Will, and he really starts to think about it.

“Nah. Go for insanity, they put you in here. FBI can come see you, consult you on cases, right, like you suggested to Mr. Crawford?” At Will’s sharp glance, Matthew grins. “Frederick gossips. Just, trust me on this. Let her help you. Go for insanity, worst case scenario you’re in here, best case you get a not guilty because you were temporarily insane. It’s not a bad gamble.”

“Why are you trying to help me, Matthew?”

Matthew laughs and starts them walking again. “I told you, Mr. Graham. You need anything, I’m your man.”

Hannibal comes to see him.

Will watches through the door as Matthew and Hannibal talk about the rules of the private rooms, and he meets Matthew’s eyes as the door swings closed.

There is an oppressive rage boiling beneath Hannibal’s skin, but he isn’t showing it on the surface at all. There are thin strands, deliberate threads of guilt, of grief, of worry, of doubt, as though he’d plucked bits and pieces from all the others. There are two undercurrents Will can feel; one is that golden thread of exultation, and the other is the warm pink glow of satisfaction.

Will doesn’t speak. He didn’t request this meeting. He just stares at Hannibal, waiting for the man to explain why he bothered to come.

This seems to throw Hannibal off, somewhat. Those thin, deliberate threads stutter, and unease grows between them like a weed.

“Will,” says Hannibal, taking a seat across the metal table. “I am not sure what to say. If I could have recognized your illness earlier, perhaps—”

“You’re not sorry,” says Will, frowning. “You’re glad I’m in here.” Hannibal opens his mouth to protest, but Will goes on: “You’re right to be glad. I belong in here. I’m a killer, Dr. Lecter. I murdered those people. You couldn’t have done anything to stop me. I’m a danger to society and I’m exactly where I should be. I’m a monster, and I deserve what’s coming to me.”

Hannibal recoils, and for a moment his emotions are clearer than they’ve ever been. Rage, yes, and a deep sense of satisfaction, but also concern, and disbelief, and indignation, and a creeping, roiling dread blooming like a flower through the thick layers of smeared paint outlining his body.

Then he leans forward, his hand covering Will’s, and he says,

“You deserve freedom and peace, Will. You do not belong in a place like this, where your mind and your life will be stifled.”

Will shakes his head. “My mind is already broken, Dr. Lecter. I’m sure Chilton can’t stop talking about it to anyone who will listen. I’m sure you already heard.” He doesn’t pull his hand away. Hannibal is warm, and comforting, and trembling. Or is that him? It’s so hard to tell anymore. “I’ve been slowly boiling away for months. Nobody could have seen it because it was so gradual but it… it showed what I really am. What I’ve always been.” His voice drops to a whisper. Garrett, behind Hannibal, leans in close to listen. “I hope they find me guilty. I hope I get the death penalty. It would be safer for everyone.”

Hannibal’s grip on his hand tightens to a painful degree and he snarls, “That will not happen.”

Will sighs. “No, I suppose not. I won’t get off that easily.”

“Will.”

“Hm?”

Hannibal’s thumb glides across Will’s knuckles and then he pulls away. “I will assist Alana with your defense. Rest assured, you will have the best counsel money can buy.”

“It won’t make me any less guilty, Dr. Lecter.”

Hannibal stands, abruptly, the chair scraping back across the floor. “It will save your life, Will. And that is enough.”

And he, too, leaves.

Will holds his tingling hand to his cheek, extracting the last remaining warmth, and then he curls in on himself to cry. He cries so hard his eyes feel like they’ll pop out of his skull, and his wrists and ankles ache from being pulled against the chains, and his face is hot and puffy and uncomfortable, and at some point he realizes that he is not alone.

There are arms around his shoulders, and a soft voice humming some haunting song, soothing him even as he shudders and sobs in this harsh metal chair in this horrible concrete room.

He struggles to catch his breath. He is not terribly surprised, when he manages to uncurl himself and sit back, to find Matthew Brown watching him with a tiny, covetous smile.

There is no pity in Matthew, and no fear. There is only awe, and curiosity, and sincere calm.

“Why are you helping me,” Will whispers, and this time it’s not really a question.

“Because we’re alike,” Matthew says.

“In what way?”

“In a lot of ways, I think,” says Matthew, softly. “Come on, let’s get you back to your room.”

And they shuffle all the way back, until Will is shut behind the bars of his cell once again. And this time when Matthew asks Will if he needs anything, Will glances nervously at the cameras.

“Don’t worry,” says Matthew, softly, “I can erase the tapes before he sees them in the morning.”

Will sets his hand on the crossbar and swallows. “Would you just… hold my hand?” he whispers.

And Matthew’s eyes shine, and the aura around him turns to a warm, rich red streaked with calming blues and gold, and he threads his fingers together with Will’s, just for a little while.

Chapter Text

The FBI wants this embarrassment dealt with as soon as possible, so the trial is scheduled to begin within three weeks of Will’s arrest. Will spends a lot of this time sitting in his cell, staring at his hands. He frequently dissociates. He also finds himself subject to fits of uncontrollable crying or anger, both of which he attempts to deal with by curling up on his mattress with his pillow and blankets piled on top of him.

He requested a weighted blanket from Dr. Chilton, and he’s waiting to hear back about whether or not he’ll be allowed to have one. Chilton seems… sympathetic to his needs, but as Will is considered dangerous to himself and others by the state, there are legal restrictions Chilton must adhere to even in his own institution.

Matthew comes to see him five nights a week, during his evening shift. He spends late hours just sitting with his back against the bars of Will’s cell, sometimes silent, sometimes reading out loud. This doesn’t seem to bother the inmate whose cell is next to Will’s, if there even is one.

Sometimes Will sits with his back pressed against the bars on the inside of the cell, feeling the warmth of Matthew’s body, and sometimes Matthew will quietly hold his hand. Will finds immense comfort in these small, brief touches. There is still no fear or disgust in Matthew, only those beautifully blended threads of pleasure and sincerity and lust and calm. He always smells like Old Spice cologne, just a little bit, like it lingers on his skin or in his hair after a shower, and there’s also dust and paper, like an old library. It’s only being so close that Will can smell it, but that’s pretty comforting, too.

Alana and the lawyer, one Byron Metcalfe—who Will immediately clocks as belonging to Hannibal—come to visit him together a couple of weeks before the trial is supposed to start.

Metcalfe flips through a few documents, but he doesn’t really look at them. He is swirling with rich red-orange confidence, a royal purple arrogance, and the blue of calm. Alana, meanwhile, is a sick mess of nauseating yellows and greens and oranges, all nerves and guilt and distress and fear and disquiet. The threads around her wriggle and twist violently, while those around Metcalfe are a quiet, gentle swirl.

“I think you already know, Mr. Graham, that your best option is an insanity plea,” says Metcalfe, almost casually. “You were clearly out of your mind at the time of these killings. You were pushed to place yourself in the heads of violent offenders by an FBI superior who was warned by a psychiatric professional that it would be damaging to your psyche, even before it became clear you were suffering from encephalitis.”

“I’m willing to testify to that, Will. I warned Jack, I told him not to let you get too close.” Alana sniffles and looks down at the table, tears shining upon her lashes. The swirling colors around her all dip, blue and gray and sickening, crushing guilt. “I’m so sorry. I should have fought harder for you.”

“I was never your responsibility, Alana,” says Will. He doesn’t look at either of them, at least not directly. He’s staring at the folders. “I’ll accept your advice, Mr. Metcalfe. Insanity. Hopefully I’m just placed here for the rest of my life and I can never put anyone else in danger again.”

“Don’t talk like that,” says Alana. “You’re not a danger to anyone. You were sick, Will. You would never have hurt anyone otherwise.”

Metcalfe clicks his tongue. “Let’s not suggest that he’s actually guilty, please. Mr. Graham is not a danger to anyone at this time, yes. Mr. Graham was very ill when these terrible crimes were taking place, yes. Bad enough you confessed to the head of the BAU and this hospital, and anyone who will listen.” Metcalfe taps his chin, thoughtfully. “Though, it does serve to make you look crazier. Emphasise the permanent brain damage aspect. You’re no longer a reliable narrator. Your confession holds no weight, considering you admit yourself you don’t remember doing anything.”

“They found bits and pieces in my house,” Will says, dully.

“Tied to flies you wouldn’t have had the manual dexterity to work on,” Metcalfe points out, flipping through a few pages. “Right, and actually your fingerprints aren’t even on the parts they found. On some of the flies, your prints were on layers beneath, or on the hooks themselves, but no prints or skin cells or anything were found trapped in the thread, the feathers, the glue, anything. As though you wore gloves, which would have limited your dexterity even further, and would have required a level of planning you simply weren’t capable of.”

“But I killed them,” Will says, frowning. “I had to have. I… I threw up Abigail’s ear, for Christ’s sake.”

Metcalfe shrugs. “It was cut off with your knife, sure. The knife you kept on the same desk with the flies. A knife you wouldn’t have been able to take on the plane with you to Minnesota, which is where she was supposedly killed. But she would have been killed at least a day before you threw up the ear. I’m not a doctor, Mr. Graham, but having worked on a surprising number of cases which hinged around vomit, I can tell you with certainty that you couldn’t have swallowed that ear any more than probably an hour before you threw it up. Forty-five minutes, more likely, since there’s basically no sign of digestion, based on the photos. That’s not even long enough to get from the airport to your house.”

“So I brought it home with me,” says Will. “TSA misses things all the time. Especially if I flashed my FBI badge. It wouldn’t have been that hard. I killed her. I know I killed her.”

“As long as you don’t say that in court,” says Metcalfe, shrugging. “If you want to go for insanity, you can’t sound so sure of anything. You don’t remember killing her. You don’t remember having anything to do with any of them. You were having seizures, losing time, pounding aspirin just to get through the day, constantly feverish, hallucinating.”

Garrett, from Will’s left, murmurs, “You still are.”

“Yeah,” says Will, softly.

“Exactly,” Metcalfe continues, “so that’s our angle. You had a freakout at a crime scene where you got into the recreation so far, you thought you really were the murderer. Who’s to say that didn’t happen with Boyle, or Schurr, or Sutcliffe, or Hobbs?”

“And Georgia?” Will asks, looking up. There’s a thread of yellow, questioning, curious, in Metcalfe’s halo now. “Who would I have been recreating when I killed Georgia Madchen?”

Metcalfe flips through some pages, while Alana says,

“You didn’t kill anyone, Will. There’s not enough evidence to suggest…” She pauses, and her aura flashes red with frustration and green with nausea. “You were clean at Dr. Sutcliffe’s scene. And Georgia, you were in the hospital, under observation, when she was killed. You were… Will, you were the only person who thought she was even murdered at first.”

“Because I knew she had been. Because I killed her,” he says.

“No, no, Bloom’s right,” says Metcalfe. “All the official reports here say somehow a plastic comb got into this girl’s high-oxygen chamber? How would a patient at the same hospital have been able to do that? Where would you even have gotten that type of comb?” He frowns. “The argument being made here is you’d have killed her because she saw you kill Sutcliffe. But, again, there was nothing on you at that scene.” He taps his pen on the table. “I wonder… if we can get security footage from near the motel you were in on the night Boyle was killed, we might be able to cast doubt on the idea that you left at any point. And same with Schurr, we might be able to prove definitively that you didn’t leave your room.”

“This doesn’t sound like an insanity defense,” says Will.

“It’s not,” Metcalfe says, rubbing at his mouth. “This is going to sound crazy, but I think we should seriously consider a not guilty plea.”

“If we do that and we lose, Will could get the death penalty.”

“I know, but I think there’s enough doubt—”

“I want to go for the insanity plea,” says Will, frowning. “I’m clearly guilty. There is no hope I’ll be acquitted. I shouldn’t be let out into the world. Either I should be in here for rehabilitation, or I should be in here because I’m dangerous.”

“But, Will,” says Alana, pleading, the rose pink of affection and the sickly yellow of worry threading around her, “listen to what Mr. Metcalfe is saying. Listen to what I’m saying. There’s reasonable doubt for all of these cases.”

“Reasonable doubt won’t matter when I go up on the stand and tell them I did it,” Will snaps.

Metcalfe rubs at his eyes. “But you don’t know for sure, Mr. Graham.”

Will frowns. “Just because I don’t remember the details doesn’t mean I didn’t do it. Nothing else makes sense. I did it. I can taste the blood behind my teeth. I’m broken. It’s not safe for me to be out there. I could hurt more people.”

“You’re not sick anymore,” Alana pleads. “Just, please, trust us with your defense. Mr. Metcalfe is an incredible lawyer, you said you’d trust his choice.”

“Any lawyer of Dr. Lecter’s would have to be incredible,” Will says, and Alana looks briefly guilty. Will doesn’t understand why. “And I did trust his choice, when it made sense. But I’m not going to win a not guilty plea. Listen, at least if I’m locked up in here, I can still be useful. I can still act as a consultant, even if it’s unofficial. But I can’t help anyone if I’m dead. So you help me with the insanity defense or I’ll find someone who will.”

Metcalfe sighs. “Well. We can make a very good argument for insanity, if that’s what you want. I’ll start putting our strategy together. We’re going to have to call some folks you may not want up on the stand, though. They’ll make you look bad.”

“I am bad,” says Will, his voice nearly inaudible.

The discomfort swells, thick and syrupy like muckwater, and Will squeezes his eyes shut to escape it.

When he opens them again, he’s sitting on his bed in his cell, and Matthew is sitting next to him, rubbing his back, talking quietly. He still smells like Old Spice and books.

Will realizes Matthew is telling him a story in French. Will can only pick up about sixty percent of it, since his Louisiana Cajun French is rusty, and Matthew’s speaking what he thinks is Quebecois French, but it’s nice to listen to nonetheless. Matthew’s voice has a nice cadence to it.

He waits until the story ends, and then he says,

“Merci,” though he knows his accent must be atrocious.

Matthew chuckles softly. “Welcome back,” he says.

“How long—?”

“About forty-five minutes. You finished your talk with Dr. Bloom and your lawyer, but when they left your eyes were all empty and you wouldn’t move on your own. I got you back here twenty minutes ago, thereabouts. Just been keeping you company.” Matthew’s hand is still on Will’s back. It’s very warm, and it feels incredibly nice. “You feeling okay now?”

“No,” says Will, rubbing his face. “But I’ll live.”

Matthew pauses, his fingers trailing up and down Will’s spine. “Chilton is still working on approval for that blanket you asked for. Looking like they’re going to try to block any, uh… luxuries until after the trial, though.”

“Okay.”

“I’m… working on a different solution for you, though.”

“Okay.”

Matthew squeezes his shoulder and stands. “I should get back to my rounds. But, you need anything, cher, you just let me know. I’m your man.”

If the attraction rolling off him like a rolling amaranth storm is any indication, Will believes him.

Beverly Katz comes to see him a few days later. She’s got a folder full of photos of missing people and dead bodies pulled out of a river. She wants his help.

He takes the file.

He’s a monster, but he can at least be a helpful one.

Beverly is watching him, and the paint strokes surrounding her are all in shades of curiosity, concern, and questioning. She doesn’t know what to think or feel about him. She isn’t sure whether or not he’s guilty. She knows there’s evidence, but she’s not entirely convinced by it. She doesn’t understand that the evidence doesn’t matter—Will is dangerous, and she should be more careful.

“It’s a color palette,” he says, discarding a stack of the photos. The remaining ones, about twelve, are a clear range from light to dark skin tones, like paint ready for the canvas. He points to the images of the most recent victim. “The painter didn’t scrape him out. He tore his own stitches. Look at the damage here. This was a man who was fighting for his life. Made it all the way to the river and got unlucky. Hit the rocks on the way down. You’re looking for somewhere abandoned or isolated upstream from where this body was found.”

“That doesn’t narrow it down much. Only about a hundred little tributaries that feed into the river.”

“You’ll find something else,” says Will. “You’ll narrow it down further. I know you will.”

Beverly pauses as she’s gathering the photos back up. “Will—”

“It’s okay,” he says. “I deserve to be in here.”

She scowls. “Y’know, the more you say that, the less I believe it.”

“I killed those people, Bev.”

“I’m not totally sure you did, Graham. I checked you over myself after Sutcliffe, if you remember. Not a single drop of blood. Not a single fiber. Nothing. And no prints, no hair, not a single solitary eyelash of yours in that guy’s office. This whole thing just tastes off, and I’m not the only one who thinks so.”

“You just don’t want to admit you didn’t see what I was,” Will says.

“What you were was sick as a goddamn dog, Will, and we all failed you on that. But even when you were at your most unstable, the worst thing you did was contaminate a crime scene. You never hurt anybody. You’d think if you were that bad off that when you blacked out you were capable of super complicated murder scenes, just once it would have happened when you were, I dunno, surrounded by the FBI agents you worked with almost on a daily basis.”

Will just shrugs, and Beverly stuffs the file back into her bag.

“You might think you’re guilty, Will, but anybody with eyes looking at the evidence should be asking a hell of a lot of questions. And we are, even if you refuse to.” She takes a great big breath, and some of her calm returns, along with a wash of contained frustration. “Just… get some rest, okay? And don’t tank your defense, for God’s sake. There are people out here on your side.”

“Whatever happens, I’ll still help,” he offers, and Beverly scoffs.

“I don’t care about that. I care about you, dumbass.” She shakes her head and turns for the door. “I’ll see you at the trial. Do something about your hair. And wear a damn tie.”

Will sits beside Byron Metcalfe, wearing a suit and thick-rimmed glasses but looking frumpy beside his expensive lawyer, his focus fading in and out as the opening statements begin. The glasses aren’t helping very much. The entire first day of the trial is just opening statements so he doesn’t feel too bad about his inability to pay attention.

The prosecution is painting him, correctly, as a dangerously unstable and violent offender who mutilated multiple people in Copycat displays based upon the work of others, burnt alive the one person who could potentially have identified him, and then brutally murdered and cannibalized a teenage girl he had grown obsessed with after killing her father in front of her only months ago. They lay out a very comprehensive timeline of evidence and assure the jury that they will prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Will deliberately and knowingly committed these terrible crimes.

The defense suggests that Will’s encephalitis had progressed to a degree where he was suffering frequent hallucinations, delusions, sleepwalking, missing time, and fevers so high they caused brain damage, all while working a high-stress job trying to catch murderers by getting inside their heads in order to prevent them from harming others, despite the clear detriment to his own mind. Metcalfe emphasized how Will and other professionals had warned the FBI that he was being pushed closer to his breaking point, and even brought up the incident with Abel Gideon which resulted in Will’s hospitalization with a fever of one hundred and four degrees as evidence that even when Will was deeply, deeply ill, he focused on protecting his coworker and stopping a violent criminal. He was being portrayed as a deeply damaged individual whose desire to help others was fundamental to his identity, but whose illness began to warp his reality so severely that the murderers he took into his head began to control his internal narrative. Metcalfe assures the jury that by the time all the evidence has been presented, the jury will understand that Will Graham’s mental state was so warped by his illness that any actions he may have taken were the actions of a broken man who simply cannot be held accountable and instead should be provided with the help he was denied for so long by a system he fought tooth and nail to protect.

Will does not agree with the defense, of course, but he can pretend. His goal, after all, is to remain in the hospital and be of help to the FBI in the future, and the death penalty runs a little bit counter to that.

The second day of the trial is dedicated to expert testimony from the BAU science team, breaking down the details of each individual crime, beginning with Cassie Boyle.

The prosecution focuses heavily on how complicated the crimes are, how much detail there is, and how absolutely no evidence was found at any of the scenes. Even Brian, the most likely of the group to agree that Will is guilty, seems annoyed. The prosecutor is practically vibrating out of her skin every time Bev, Jimmy, or Brian is forced to agree that the crimes appeared to be meticulously crafted and cleared of evidence. She can’t outright ask them to state that this is not the sort of thing a man suffering from encephalitis would be capable of, but the jury is picking up on it.

Byron Metcalfe, though, is a very good lawyer, and to Will’s surprise, each cross-examination seems to come as a relief to the lab team. They seem like they want to help him.

Metcalfe asks them about the flies and fly-tying gear found in Will’s home again. The prosecution had focused on getting confirmation that those pieces included bits of hair, lung, teeth, bone, and other body parts from Will’s victims, but Metcalfe asks for more detail.

There were fingerprints, Brian says, but only on the hooks and the lower layers of some of the flies.

The style of the flies does not match the flies in the rest of Will Graham’s tackle box, says Beverly. The knots are more ornate.

There were no skin flakes or impressions found in the glue or sealant used to waterproof the thread, Jimmy says. No skin oils, nothing. Almost as though gloves were worn while the flies were completed.

“Dr. Price, would you say this skill requires fine motor skills?” asks Metcalfe.

“I’m no fly-fisherman,” says Jimmy, “but, yeah. Anything with little knots like that, you need excellent fine motor control.”

“And would you say that gloves interfere with fine motor control?”

“I would say it depends on the kind of glove, and what you were doing, but if we’re talking tying teeny tiny knots?” He shrugs. “This isn’t my area of expertise, mind, but, yeah, I’d say gloves would make it harder.”

Metcalfe spends the entirety of his cross-examination giving the BAU science team the opportunity to speak up about every instance they saw Will sweating and shaking or saying extremely unhinged things and requesting their expert opinions on Will’s state when he called Crawford out to Wolf Trap the morning he’d found the ear.

The third day of the trial, the prosecution calls Jack to the stand.

Will keeps his head down. Prurnell is here in the audience, and he’s sure she’s given Jack explicit permission to throw Will fully and completely under the bus in order to protect the FBI.

But… Jack doesn’t.

The prosecution attempts to paint Will as this aggressive, unhinged agent, and Crawford contradicts them.

“Will Graham is a good man, and he’s always been a good man, but he got sick and I pushed him past his breaking point,” Crawford says. “I was told what could happen if I pushed him too far. He warned me he felt unstable. Dr. Bloom warned me not to push. Dr. Lecter warned me not to push. But I thought what we were doing was worth more than the risk, so I ignored them. I knew he was breaking. I could see it, and I ignored it. It was my job to protect him, and I failed, because I was focused on the lives he was saving. That’s on me, and I have to live with that.”

Metcalfe’s cross-examination of Crawford is brutal, but Jack takes it fully in stride.

He admits that Will told him as early as the Angel-Maker case that he was feeling unstable and unsafe and he wanted to quit. He admits that he as much as bullied Will into staying, and ignored all the signs that something was wrong even though Will was getting more and more unstable. Crawford admits he pulled Will right back onto cases as soon as he was out of the hospital after Gideon and Madchen, without caring about what that was doing to Will or how ragged he was running his star profiler.

He admits he spoke with Dr. Lecter on multiple occasions and was warned that Will was absorbing too much of the darkness in the minds he was going up against, and that he had explicitly told Dr. Lecter that Will could handle it, because he always had, and he wouldn’t let himself break.

He admits Alana Bloom made him promise not to let Will get too close to cases, and he broke that promise immediately and repeatedly because he believed he was doing what was right.

He describes receiving the call from Will, hearing his incoherent mumbling over the phone, the thirty seconds of silence and gagging, and then Will’s slurred, broken voice begging for help and claiming to have killed someone. Jack’s voice cracks as he describes arriving on scene, three FBI SUVs flashing lights behind him, and finds Will shivering and shuddering, glassy-eyed, clinging to the corner of the mattress in his living room while his dogs whined around him, vomit and bile and a human ear smeared across the bedspread, and how it took almost twenty minutes to get Will to respond to anything he was saying.

“He was sick,” Crawford says, and he doesn’t look at Will. “He’d been sick for a long time to get to that point and I didn’t see it because I didn’t want to see it. I was too focused on what he was doing for the FBI.”

The fourth day, the prosecution calls Freddie Lounds to the stand.

This is an interesting tactic, considering that she thinks Will is insane and unstable, but the prosecution chooses to focus on her constant assertions that Will is a murderer.

Freddie is surprisingly unhelpful to the prosecution. She continuously brings up details about her belief that Will has always been an unstable, dangerous lunatic. This does not help the prosecution build him up as the intelligent psychopath they’re hoping to make the jury see.

Will doesn’t understand why Freddie is toying with the prosecution until the cross-examination starts and Metcalfe instead says that the defense has no questions at this time, but reserves the right to recall this witness. Freddie smiles at Will as she flounces off the stand.

That’s not the weirdest thing to happen this day, either.

The prosecution calls Frederick Chilton to the stand, and he seems nervous. Rather than pompous and self-important, Frederick casts an almost apologetic look in Will’s direction when the prosecution begins to grill him about his understanding of Will.

“Will Graham is an interesting case, psychologically speaking,” Chilton says. “There has been very little research done on individuals with his particular set of neuroses.”

“Would you please clarify for the court what particular set of neuroses you are referring to?” asks the prosecutor.

Chilton glances again at Will and frowns. “Well. In the few sessions I have had with… Mr. Graham, during his time in my facility, I have a few preliminary diagnoses. Social anxiety, depression. An argument could be made, I suppose, for Asperger’s or autism, though nothing that could not better be explained by Mr. Graham’s hyper-empathy. There is not an existing diagnosis to fully encapsulate the disorder, but it is best explained as an excess of mirror neurons. Mr. Graham suffers from an acute inability to shield himself from the emotions of others.” He gestures to the table where Will and Byron are seated. “You may have noticed that throughout the entirety of these proceedings, Mr. Graham has not once looked up from the table in front of him. This is not due to a lack of understanding. Quite the contrary. Mr. Graham is intensely aware of his surroundings and, I would argue, the smartest person in this room. He simply knows well enough that, after the damage done to his mind from prolonged, untreated encephalitis, he is no longer capable of filtering the emotions of others enough to protect himself in an environment like this.”

Will can’t help himself. He isn’t sure why. He doesn’t think about it, and he doesn’t have time to stop himself; he just looks up and makes eye contact with Frederick, just for a moment.

It’s not just Frederick, though. It’s the judge, and the prosecutor, and the bailiff, and the jurors in his line of sight.

The colors are swirling around, muddy and terrible, rage and hatred and pity and guilt and smug satisfaction and amusement and pleasure and distractedness and boredom and fear and hunger and sleepiness and arrogance and worry and a genuine golden thread of care, bizarrely spooling off of Chilton. The courtroom looks like a van Gogh painting, everything smeared and spread with thick brushstrokes and strands and heavy impasto and as discordant as it is in all its shades of red and gray and blue and brown and neon pink and orange and purple and rich green it’s also beautiful, so beautiful, and it’s burning into the inside of his brain.

Will tears his eyes away and puts his face in his hands, knocking his glasses away, trying to calm his brain, trying to calm the colors and the feelings swirling and spreading. He’s breathing hard, his heart hammering, his lungs squeezing, and he’s trembling, his stomach clenching violently, his guts twisting, his skin clammy, sweat bursting from his forehead, and he’s trying to curl up and curl up but he’s locked in place, he’s locked he can’t move he can’t he can’t he can’t he’s sorry he’s sorry he’s so—

And then there’s a familiar scent. Old Spice and a library.

“Matthew,” he chokes out, and a pair of arms tighten around him.

He realizes he’s got his face pressed against Matthew’s chest, and his hands are wrapped like claws in the front of Matthew’s work shirt.

“You’re alright, cher. Don’t worry. Broke for lunch, on account of the five or six doctors in the room were about to start a riot if they tried to keep going while you were having a panic attack like that.”

“Fuck,” says Will, squeezing his eyes shut.

Matthew’s laugh vibrates in his chest. “Yeah. Well. You just kept sayin’ you were sorry, you didn’t mean to look, and so we got you into one of these little side rooms. I sent the other guy off for lunch, said I’d watch you. Only been in here five minutes. Got another twenty, probably, before they come back. There’s a security guy outside though, just in case you decide to go psycho on me.”

Will doesn’t answer. He just sags, leaning closer to Matthew, burrowing against his chest. Matthew’s arms tighten again, and one of his hands begins to drag through Will’s hair.

“You don’t deserve this,” Matthew says, quietly. His nails are blunt against Will’s scalp, but they feel nice. “Wish they’d just let you sit out until they need you. Chilton suggested that, y’know.”

“I don’t know why he cares.”

“He’s not so bad, really,” says Matthew. “Kind of a priss, yeah. Wants to be the best at something. He’s incompetent. But at the end of the day, he wants to be liked. You know that. And when he saw how messed up you were when you came in? I dunno, Will. Maybe he’s doin’ it because he thinks if he helps you, he’ll get somethin’ out of it, but I kinda think he just feels bad.”

Will snorts. “Maybe.”

“I’m pretty good at readin’ people, too, y’know. Not like you, but. Pretty good, when it counts.” He pauses. “For example. Your friend Dr. Lecter peeked in here a few minutes ago.”

Will’s brow furrows. “He did?”

Matthew begins to drag his fingers down Will’s ribs. “Oh, sure. He was worried. They all were. But, he was the only one who came to check on you. Or, at least, the only one that got past the security guy.” The hand in Will’s hair gentles, almost petting. “Look on his face when he opened the door up and saw you, calming down, in my arms?” Matthew whistles softly. “Didn’t care for that, I’ll tell ya.”

Will doesn’t know how to answer, so he doesn’t. He just tightens his grip on Matthew’s shirt and steadies his breathing, until a few more long, quiet, comfortable minutes have passed and he feels like he can stand on his own. He takes one last deep breath and rolls his shoulders as he stands. 

Matthew is surrounded with amaranth and gold and cyan, beautiful threads of attraction and passion and serenity in whorls and waves, and Will feels an intense, irresistible need to kiss him. The impulse is impossible to ignore; Will grabs the front of Matthew’s shirt and pulls. He tilts his head to the side and slots their mouths firmly together, just for a moment, just long enough that Matthew doesn’t get a chance to react.

Then he realizes what he’s doing and steps away, mortified.

“I-I’m sorry,” he says, putting at least an arm’s length of space between them. “I don’t… I just felt… I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”

Matthew, though, is grinning ear to ear and touching his lips. “You followed your instincts is all,” he says, softly. “Did what felt right in the moment. Don’t ever apologize for that, cher. You never have to apologize for that with me. Plus, I mean… been wanting to do that myself since I met you, so… I ain’t mad about it.”

Will frowns and shifts foot to foot, the chains on his wrists and ankles tinkling. “But I’m—”

“Will. Gorgeous. Everything else aside, you’re a fuckin’ bombshell, and you gotta know by now you don’t scare me.” Matthew shrugs. “The rest doesn’t matter. You’re beautiful, you’re dangerous, you’re brilliant. That’s about perfect in my book.”

Will pauses, then huffs a laugh. With a crooked smile, he says,

“Matthew. I think maybe you’re a terrible orderly.”

Matthew raises a finger to his lips and his rich brown eyes shine as he smiles.

Chapter Text

Though Will really doesn’t understand it, Dr. Chilton slips into the little side room shortly before the lunch break ends and, with a sharp glance at Matthew (as if to say keep your mouth shut), Chilton says,

“Will. As your current primary care provider, I must express my concern for your health. It would be cruel to continue the trial in your current condition. The risk of another panic attack is far too high, and high stress may stunt your recovery or even cause your encephalitis to flare back up. With all this in mind, and with your consent, I would like to administer a sedative.” He pulls a small bottle and an unopened syringe packet from his pocket. Diazepam. The dosage is meaningless to Will.

“Whose prescription is this?” Will asks.

“Yours. Technically,” says Frederick. “It was approved for emergency use, primarily as a chemical restraint in case of a violent behavioral outburst. This is not that, however with a minor adjustment to the dosage, you should find it far easier to block out the other minds in the courtroom.”

“Is that allowed?” asks Will, scratching at the stubble on his cheek. “Should we… tell somebody?” 

Frederick shakes his head. “I am your doctor, Will. As far as I am concerned, your health comes first. Don’t worry about the court. I do not intend to sedate you to a noticeable degree. It should only… take the edge off, so to speak. As for whether or not this is allowed?” Chilton shrugs and waggles the hand with the bottle, shaking it slightly. “Technically, the dosage is listed as variable, depending on the severity of the outburst. Or, it will be. Once I return to my office. Just… let me do this for you, Will. Please. You will still be cogent and present in the courtroom, but your nerves will be calmer.”

Will frowns, staring at the bottle. “Why do you care, Frederick?”

Chilton opens his mouth, looks up at Matthew, closes his mouth, and takes a deep breath through his nose. He opens up the needle, draws a small amount from the diazepam bottle, and tucks it back in his pocket. He sets the syringe on the table, and as it clicks on the tabletop he says,

“You do not know me well enough to see me clearly, I think. Beyond the petty jealousies and aspirations.” He takes his hand off the syringe and stands straight as he looks into Will’s face, with no expectation that Will should look back. His voice is firm, but a little forced, as though he were frightened. “I may be a coward, Will, but I am not stupid. There is more to your story than you are capable of seeing, and what was done to you is unforgivable and tragic. In other words, Mr. Graham, I care because you are what happens when people in positions of power are more focused on experimentation than ethics, and I have seen firsthand the terrible results of that manner of focus.” He touches his stomach, where Abel Gideon had torn him open and made a gift basket from parts of his insides. He swallows and turns for the door. “As long as you are a resident of my institution, I will aid you in whatever capacity I can. I only hope your residency is a short one, and when you have gained your freedom I would advise you to run as far and as fast as you can, to warmer shores and greener places, well outside the influences of… untrustworthy actors. In the meantime, I advise you to take peace wherever you can find it.”

Frederick leaves, and Will reaches for the syringe.

“Better let me,” says Matthew, softly. They quickly bare Will’s shoulder, and once Matthew has injected the sedative, he kisses the tiny spot of blood. “There ya go, gorgeous. Should be feeling better real soon.”

“Isn’t that, uh… unsanitary?” asks Will, buttoning his shirt and adjusting his tie.

Matthew shrugs and holds up Will’s jacket. “You already kissed me.”

“Yeah, but, kissing an open wound?”

“Oh, yeah, I’ll go tell every parent in the world to stop kissin’ skinned knees. Magic don’t work, everybody, we gotta worry about blood-borne pathogens, pack it up, get your sterile gauze and iodine. Filthy animals.”

“It’s just a needless risk of infection. Unsafe practices. You shouldn’t be relying on magic anyway, you’re supposed to be a professional. You’re a bad orderly, that’s all I’m saying.”

Matthew backs him up against the table, nose to nose, his hands on the wood to either side of Will’s hips. His aura is thick with amaranth and gold, sweating blood-red, but it’s… a lot less oppressive. A lot more still, already. Will can look him in the eyes, though that results in an immediate and painful erection given the intensity of the lust he’s reflecting back.

Matthew licks his lips, slowly, then parts them just enough for Will to watch the tip of his tongue glide across his teeth.

“You already told me that,” Matthew says. “You got a plan to make me shape up, cher?”  

Will swallows. “I don’t… think the imbalance in our, uh, relative positions of power really… lends itself to—”

Matthew kisses him, and Will kisses back. He feels almost feral, like he wants to split Matthew’s lips and bite his tongue and taste his blood.

No—wait, that’s… Matthew’s feelings. He thinks.

He pulls away. Dazed. Soft. He watches Matthew, who watches him like a crocodile watches a gazelle getting closer to a watering hole.

Does he find this arousing, or is that all Matthew?

Is there a meaningful difference? Does it matter?

Matthew reaches out and swipes his thumb across Will’s lips. He brings it to his mouth, languid and casual, and then inclines his head at Will.

“Best get you looking presentable again, huh? Fix the tie. Straighten that collar.” As he speaks, he follows through, patting Will’s lapels. “There. Can’t even tell anything went on.”

Or almost went on, as the case may be.

The security guard knocks on the door. The other orderly comes in to help escort Will back to the courtroom, where the bailiff takes over. He’s walked back to his seat, and meets Metcalfe’s eyes for just a moment. Still, static emotions this time (confidence, a little boredom and a little interest both warring, arrogance, and the brilliant red of desire—in this case, the desire to win). Metcalfe does give him a little bit of a second look, but when Will settles into his seat and returns to staring at the table, there is the barest hint of a shrug and then Byron is fully locked in on the proceedings.

Chilton is called back up on the stand to finish out his psychological profile of Will as though there had been no interruption at all. Metcalfe tears into him about his history of mistreatment of inmates like Abel Gideon during his cross-examination, and Will sort of wishes he had asked him not to.

The sedative is… good. It is a good thing Frederick has done for him. It doesn’t matter what the motivation was. 

After Frederick is dismissed, there’s a series of testimonies from the families of the victims—Marissa Schurr’s mother, Georgia Madchen’s mother, Nick and Cassie Boyle’s parents, Dr. Sutcliffe’s brother—and if it hadn’t been for the sedative, Will would have suffered hideously through their grief and their rage and their hatred of him.

When court ends for the day, and Will is back in his cell, Chilton comes to see him again, accompanied by an orderly wheeling a cart.

“Hello, Dr. Chilton,” he says, but he doesn’t stand from his bed.

“Good evening, Will. I have something for you.” He gestures to the cart. “A weighted blanket, per your request.”

Will blinks and sits straighter. “Really? It’s not too dangerous?”

“I do not consider you at risk to that degree, and as I am still the administrator of this facility, the final judgment on the danger, or lack thereof, falls to me. It is unlikely you would be able to use a twenty pound blanket to harm yourself or anyone else, in any case.” After a beat, he adds, “It does not have a cover, unfortunately, as that was not deemed therapeutically necessary. I hope you still find it helpful.”

“Thank you, Frederick.”

“Of course. I am going to open the door, Will. Please stay seated.”

“Okay.” 

He knows they’re supposed to cuff him to the bars, at least, but Frederick seems to trust that he’s not going to move. He’s a monster, but he doesn’t want to be. He doesn’t want to hurt anyone. The orderly sets the folded blanket on the bed next to him and Will doesn’t move until the orderly is safely outside and the door is locked back up. Chilton gestures to the blanket and says,

“Feel free to test it. I’m afraid that it is the heaviest weight considered safe for a setting like this, but you may fold it however you like, and I can recommend a number of brands which offer higher weights for,” he glances at the orderly, “after your treatment has concluded.”

Will nods, as though that wasn’t the weirdest possible way Chilton could have said that, and lays down, pulling the blanket on top of him. It is immediately better, but also immediately not enough.

“Thank you,” he says, and his voice is muffled by the thick gray fabric.

Chilton seems like he wants to say something else, but he and the orderly just wish him goodnight and then walk back down the long hallway. Will lays in bed under his blanket and stares at the ceiling for a couple of hours. The murmuring of the others in the corridor almost drowns out the soft breathing of the skeletal, starved creature underneath his bunk, whose claws curl up from either side of his cot to cradle him like a blackened ribcage.

After a while, Matthew comes to sit with him. It’s probably about nine thirty, which means Matthew’s shift should almost be over. Will keeps the blanket wrapped around his shoulders but sits on the floor with his back against Matthew’s. They hold hands through the bars, their fingers twined together.

“You work a lot,” Will whispers.

“Been taking a lot of doubles lately,” Matthew says. There’s a lilt of amusement to his voice, but if he laughs Will can’t feel the rumble through the blanket. “Found myself extra motivated, is all.”

“Need the paycheck that bad, huh?” asks Will, and Matthew’s grip tightens on his hand for just a moment.

“No,” he says. “No, it’s not for the money, Will.”

“You sure? Don’t need to pay for some… nice vacation? Art school? Hot date?”

Matthew laughs audibly and his head falls back against the bars. “Think I got enough of school. And if I was goin’ on a vacation I’d take that hot date along with me. Only he’s a bit, uh… tied up right now. Can’t take him anywhere, much as I’d like to.”

“Sounds like a shitty date,” says Will.

Matthew turns and presses a kiss against Will’s shoulder through the bars and the blanket.

“I dunno,” he murmurs. “Ain’t felt like a single wasted minute with him so far.”

Will pulls the blanket tighter around himself. “What are you doing, Matthew?”

“I think most people would call it flirting.”

“I—”

“It’ll make a pretty impressive story down the road, you gotta admit. Hell of a meet-cute. I’ll be like, oh, how did we meet? Such a funny story. I was actually working in the mental institution where Will was wrongfully imprisoned—”

“There is no future with me! I am never getting out of here!” Will pulls his hand away and hunches over further. “I was rightfully imprisoned. Rightfully so. I killed those people. I ate Abigail.”

Matthew exhales through his nose. “Okay. Say you did. So what?”

Will echoes, “So what?”

“Yeah. So fucking what? I mean, listen, gorgeous, you are… a lot of things. Twisted and righteous and yeah, sure, a little crazy. Exactly my type. And I don’t care if you did it or not.”

“You don’t care if I’m a murderer or not.”

“Don’t act surprised, now. You’ve known that about me from the beginning. You can see it clear as day.” He takes hold of the bars to either side of Will’s head, on his knees, looming behind Will’s back. “I told you when we first met, Will. I’m your man. I’d do anything you needed me to do. Anything.”

Will turns his head, just slightly, and peeks at Matthew’s wild, manic aura of devotion and lust and exultation and desperation. He doesn’t look directly at the shining oaken eyes, but he can see the glint of violence like a slash of light across them.

“You’re not afraid of me because you can handle yourself.”

“I told you that.”

“So shouldn’t I be worried you’re just as dangerous as I am?”

“Not to you, Will.” He stands and reaches through the bars to ruffle Will’s hair. “I gotta head out. I’m not gonna be here this weekend so, get some rest and stay strong, okay?”

Will scrambles to turn around, his blanket slumping around his lower body. He grabs the bars.

“You won’t be here at all?” he asks, and his voice sounds pathetic even to his own ears.

“You’ll be okay. You got a new anxiety med to help get you through the day. And on Monday I’ll be here bright and early to help get you up and ready for court. But I can’t do that if I’m workin’ all weekend.”

Will’s heart races. “What if… somebody comes to see me? And I have an episode?”

Matthew looks down at him, his head cocked slightly to one side, and he says, “You really wanna rely on me that much, Will? Aren’t you worried I’m dangerous?” 

Will doesn’t answer, and Matthew’s lips twitch as amusement swirls around him. He’s not necessarily enjoying Will’s discomfort, but he is enjoying the sight of Will on his knees. Will forces himself to stand and keeps his eyes on the floor. 

“I’m just… different than I used to be,” Will says, stiffly. “It’s easier to manage around people who feel… stable.”

“Been called a lot of things,” says Matthew, “but that ain’t one of ‘em.”

“I said feel stable, not are stable. You just… you’re… consistent. When you’re here I feel s… safer.”

Matthew steps close to the bars again, taunting, playful. “And what were you gonna say originally?”

Will shifts from foot to foot and his cheeks grow hot. “I… Saner. I was… You make me feel saner.”

Matthew chuckles and clicks his tongue behind his teeth. “I think you mean more sane, gorgeous.” Will doesn’t respond, so Matthew places his hand on the crossbar, palm facing up, in invitation. Will curls his fingers with Matthew’s for just a moment. “You’re gonna be fine. You gotta be able to take care of yourself. There’s gonna be times I can’t be there and I need to know you’re gonna be okay. Okay?” Will nods, and Matthew squeezes once before letting go. “Okay. Goodnight, Will.” He checks his watch. “Lights out in ten. I’ll see you first thing Monday. I promise.”

“Goodnight,” whispers Will, and Matthew walks away, keys jangling all the way down the long, lonely hallway.

Beverly Katz comes back to visit him on Saturday afternoon, with news about the killer who made a color palette out of human bodies. Through a series of coincidences, and some astute advice from Dr. Lecter, they were able to identify the corn field that the victim, Roland Umber, had escaped through. This had led them to the silo where they had found what they were calling The Eye of God, and now they were trying to hunt down The Muralist.

“But he’s… right here,” says Will, frowning.

“What?”

“He…” Will covers his eyes with his hand. “Something in this picture isn’t right.” He gets a bit sing-song. “One of these things is not like the others. One of these things just… doesn’t belong.” His finger hovers over the man in the center, who had replaced Umber in the mural. “The original design didn’t include a reflection. This… this was painted by a different hand.”

“What the hell does that mean, Will?”

Will covers his face with both hands, now. “I just… imagine you were him. You had your perfect vision for this great, beautiful eye staring up into the heavens, searching for God, and there is nothing looking back. Do you see it?”

“Um…” Beverly stares at the photos for a while, the ones taken from the silo roof, and then slowly nods her head. The swirl of emotions around her includes curiosity, unease, but also, yes, a hint of understanding beginning to tinge the others. There’s still no fear, and no pity, and only a deep anger running below everything else. “Yeah,” she finally says, tilting her head this way and that. “Yeah, okay, I think I see it.”

“Okay. Okay, good. And now, now imagine, your vision is disrupted. A… a brushstroke falls off, chips off the canvas, falls off the page, you can’t fix it. You were so close, so fucking close to being done, and you know they’re going to come for you soon but the work, the work needs to be done. Okay?”

Less sure, more hesitation curling alongside the curiosity, but Beverly says, “Okay. Go on.”

“So imagine… before the FBI can find you, imagine you… you find someone else, or, or they find you.”

“Another killer?”

“A killer. An artist. Someone who understands. Someone willing to help. But someone whose vision is… different.”

“Okay… so somebody else stitched him into his own mural?”

“Someone convinced him that the shine would be appropriate, but only if it was him. Because God doesn’t exist, but this man, this painter, he does, and if no one else is looking back, he is, and his friend, his helper, he’s looking back too. And what are they, with the power of life and death in their hands and great works at their fingertips, what else could you call them but gods?”

Beverly has become unsettled, but intrigued. She’s writing notes and looking up to study the images from a different perspective.

“So… another artist. Another killer, with a god complex, convinced the muralist to make him part of the display.” She pauses and pulls out a second folder. “I wasn’t supposed to bring this. I mean, I wasn’t supposed to bring any of this, but, Jack was explicit he didn’t want this shared outside the lab.” She slides the folder over. “What do you make of that?”

It’s the body of the muralist, removed from the rest. Part of one of his legs is missing. Will swallows. He starts to tremble.

“There will be something else,” he says, almost too quietly to hear. “He’d think it was so funny to distract you with something so obvious, but he’d hide something else, something more signature to him, in places you weren’t likely to look. Somewhere you overlook, because he loves to disrespect the FBI at every chance. He thinks you’re overlooking him. Or overlooking something, something massive. What is his game, what is he playing? Why now?”

Beverly leans forward, her voice low. “Then you’re thinking what I’m thinking. What Jack doesn’t want to think.”

Will closes the folder and tries to shake the sensation of someone looming, large and imposing, breath hot and wet and wanting on the back of his neck.

“It’s him,” he says. “It’s the Chesapeake Ripper. You just have to find the other connection. Check inside the muralist, see what else he took. Look for other incisions. Look where you wouldn’t expect them, where you already looked but not close enough. He’s playing but I… I don’t know why he’s playing.”

Beverly’s aura turns briefly sad, then alarmed, then she schools it and it settles on simmering with questions. “I… might have some ideas. Give me some time, Will.” She gathers up the folders. “Thank you.”

“Thank you for… being kind to me,” says Will, softly. “Thank you for visiting. Even if it’s just… for advice.”

Beverly pauses and lays a hand on his shoulder. “As soon as the trial is over, I promise you’ll see a lot more of me.”

Will smiles, but it’s crooked and broken and it makes Beverly very, very sad.

Alana and his lawyer come to see him on Sunday morning. The defense is going to begin calling witnesses, and Alana will have to go up on the stand. Metcalfe points out that the prosecution will ask questions relating to Alana’s romantic attraction to Will, and this makes Will actually laugh. Alana’s swirl of feelings turns to a hurt mess of confusion and indignation, but Metcalfe is mostly amused.

“What’s so funny, Will?” Byron asks.

“Alana’s interest in me has always been about saving me,” says Will. “There wasn’t really anything romantic there. It’s… clearer now than it was when I was sick. She felt bad for me. She tried to avoid being alone with me so I wouldn’t get the wrong idea about the psychiatric side or the romantic side of things. She just wanted me to feel safe. And not pursued. But I’ve always scared her a little bit.”

“Will, that’s not true.”

“Sure it is,” says Metcalfe. “Unstable profiler who lives in the middle of nowhere. Antisocial. Nice to you in a way that you, as a professional woman, worry might be breaking the boundaries of a normal, ethical friendship. Your psychiatric interest in his condition, tempered by your concern about exploiting him. And then he starts acting even more unstable, and you see it happening, and he kisses you to try to distract you, and that breaks all kinds of boundaries? Must have felt very uncomfortable and out of character, since he’d kept you at arm’s length for a long time, too, right?”

Alana grits her teeth. “Yeah. I guess that’s more or less the truth.” She glances at Will. “You told him about the kiss?”

Will doesn’t have to answer because Byron says, “No, you told some friends about it at brunch after it happened. Prosecution got a hold of a text conversation referencing it. You gotta be careful with that stuff. Luckily the worst thing you said was he was a good kisser, the rest was all about how it was inappropriate and you could tell there was more going on he wasn’t telling you and you were really concerned. And, of course that it never should have happened.”

“Yeah,” says Will. “It shouldn’t have.”

Alana is genuinely hurt by this for some reason. He can read the way she’s feeling perfectly, but he doesn’t understand why she’s offended. She’s a mess of different feelings all fighting for dominance, but at their core is the pity he wishes he could escape from.

Byron walks them through Alana’s testimony regarding her relationship with Will and what it looked like when they first met versus from the time just before the Shrike killings to his arrest. The timeline of his deterioration is horrifyingly clear when laid out this way by someone who has known him so long, and Alana is visibly disturbed.

“I should have seen it,” she says, for perhaps the thirtieth time.

“It progressed slowly,” Metcalfe says. “Think of it like owning a hundred shirts that start white and fade to black, and you wear them in color order every day. At what point do you think people realize it’s not the same shirt?” He shrugs. “Differences are subtle enough over a long enough period, you might believe the shirt was always black. Or, that the profiler was always that unstable. No offense, Will.”

“None taken. I am unstable.”

“You were, when you were sick,” Alana says, firmly. “Your treatment is progressing very well.”

Garrett Hobbs, from behind her, nods, and Will cocks his head to the side to say,

“I’m still hallucinating.”

There’s a beat of quiet, and then Alana says, “That’s… normal, when you’re recovering from this type of disease. Auditory and visual hallucinations can continue for weeks. But you know they aren’t real, right?”

He watches Garrett, who shrugs and sniffs at Alana’s hair.

“Yeah,” he says. “I know they’re not real. Now.”

“What do you see, Will?” asks Byron.

“Most often, I see Garrett Jacob Hobbs.”

“The man you shot.”

“Yeah. Or a monster. Like a… bogeyman. With antlers. And it wants to eat me alive. Or consume me in some way. I don’t know. It mostly just watches me when I can see it.”

“Jesus,” whispers Alana.

“It’s fine,” says Will. “I mostly don’t see it. I just… hear it breathing.”

“You’re going to talk about these hallucinations on the stand, Will,” says Byron, brooking no argument. “People need to understand the depth of the damage done to your mind. We’re going to have the neurologist Chilton brought in talk about the extent of the damage, and bring Chilton himself back up to talk about the psychological impact. But Alana, I want your focus to be on the social psychology at play here. Will’s isolation. Will’s purposeful separation from his peers, almost as if he knew something was going wrong and he was trying to protect them.”

“Wouldn’t Dr. Lecter be the better choice for social psychology?” asks Will.

Alana and Byron exchange a look. Alana’s is hard, her mouth set in a firm, grim line. Metcalfe sighs.

“Dr. Bloom doesn’t want Dr. Lecter to take the stand on your behalf.”

“Why?”

“She believes he’s… unreliable. Biased.”

“I believe he failed in his basic duties as your psychiatrist. You were meeting with him weekly, Will. I don’t know how he could have missed such a severe decline. How could you have been having seizures near-daily and not even once when you were—” She stops herself, presses her lips together, and takes a deep breath. “Hannibal feels… responsible. I’ve never seen him so… devastated. I think he was too close, Will. I think your relationship pushed the boundaries of what was appropriate and Hannibal’s objectivity was compromised.”

Will blinks. “Compromised by…?”

“By his… friendship with you,” she says, after a long pause.

Will doesn’t say anything, because Alana is swirling with a mix of outrage, discomfort, indignation, and jealousy, of all things, and Byron is curiously—but appropriately, given who writes his checks—neutral.

Hannibal comes to see him that Sunday, too. It’s strange and stilted, like Hannibal is trying to recreate the feeling of sitting in his office across from each other, but they’re on the wrong sides of the room and Will is chained to the chair. Hannibal’s discomfort and distress are curious.

And the rage, the frustration, it’s practically pulsing beneath Hannibal’s skin. Something is wrong. Something is not how it was meant to be. This injustice will not stand.

Will doesn’t have anything to say to Hannibal, so he just… looks.

Looking at the doctor is emotionally exhausting and raises more questions than it ought to, but Will still didn’t ask him to come and he still doesn’t know why Dr. Lecter is bothering to come see him.

Finally, Dr. Lecter wets his lips and clears his throat and says, “I was surprised not to find your regular orderly guarding the door today.”

Will tilts his head, frowns, watches the sick thread of jealousy snake its way around Hannibal’s outline and begin to radiate outward, infecting the false calm and projected nonchalance.

“He doesn’t work weekends, mostly,” says Will. “But that’s why you came today. Because you knew that. And you wanted to talk. About him.”

Dr. Lecter’s annoyance flares, then subsides. He laces his hands together on the table and crosses one ankle over the opposite knee. He carefully smooths out the paint around him, scraping as much of the jealousy and the indignation and the rage away as he can, and he paints in rather unconvincing concern, calm, friendliness, unease. There is confidence which is not feigned, and a golden thread of thrill.

“Yes. I am afraid I was rather… surprised, I suppose, that this stranger was so…” He rolls the word around in his mouth and it paints his aura a soft pink for a moment: “Intimate when assisting you during your episode on Friday. I came to offer my own support, of course.”

“Of course,” Will echoes. “As my psychiatrist. And my friend. And… whatever blurred line there is between the two.”

Hannibal can’t hide the flash of surprise, not from Will. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean. You are my friend, Will. Not my patient. We have only ever had conversations. There has been no ethical blurring.”

“Alana seems to think there was,” says Will.

Hannibal’s annoyance grows beyond his ability to contain. “Alana has spent your entire history believing you an invalid incapable of consenting to even the most innocent of relationships. She believes that as a psychiatrist it is entirely unethical for me to be your friend.”

“She said you got too close to me.”

Hannibal’s jaw tightens. “And do you agree? Did we become too close, Will? Did you feel our relationship pushed beyond the bounds of ethics or appropriateness?”

“I don’t know, Dr. Lecter. I was burning alive the entire time. I’m not sure I even remember most of our friendship.” Will pauses at the alarm and curious distress in Hannibal’s eyes. Why, he wonders, is it easier to look into Hannibal’s eyes than anyone else’s? “I don’t really know how close we became. Most of the last few months is… moth-eaten, tattered. I remember bits and pieces. Sometimes I wonder if I’m remembering something or if it was a dream.”

“Like what, Will?” whispers Hannibal, and his eyes shine red in the fluorescent glow.

Will licks his lips. “Like… on one hand, it feels easy with you. Comfortable. It makes me think we were close. But I don’t… really remember how we got there. I know I saw you often. I remember seeing you for cases. I remember seeing you with your hands inside a man’s body. I remember seeing you on a beach, in a funny hat.” Hannibal huffs, but he doesn’t seem offended. More… engrossed. Will goes on: “I remember coming to your house on the night Gideon took Frederick but then I… don’t know. It feels like a dream. It feels like I kept having dreams about your… your hands on my face, or in my hair. I’ve had dreams where I can sense you behind me and I feel your breath on my ear and I feel so safe. And that makes me think maybe we got a lot closer than I… than I can remember. And maybe that’s why you come here even though you don’t have a reason and I didn’t ask you to. Maybe that’s why you hired your own lawyer to represent me. And maybe that’s why you’re so upset to see me like this, with no memory of whatever we were.” He pauses again, watching the roil of emotions spilling off of Hannibal; awe, affection, satisfaction, curiosity, interest, loneliness, irritation, distaste, surprise. “Or maybe I hallucinated all that, and we just sat in your office and drank wine and I bitched about work, and you really are just worried about an unprofessional orderly and you’re not jealous seeing me with someone else. Maybe it’s not killing you that I don’t remember, because there’s nothing I’m forgetting. Maybe we really were friends, and that’s all it was. I’m not sure, Dr. Lecter. Are you?”

Hannibal takes his hand. It’s soft, well-manicured, and the grip is like iron. Hannibal’s thumb makes little circles along Will’s knuckles, outlining each one.

He doesn’t respond, though. He just squeezes Will’s hand, his emotions all wither and blacken and flutter to the ground around him like ash, and he stands. There is nothing left but icy determination within him.

“I will see you tomorrow, Will,” he says. “All will be well. I promise.”

Will frowns as Hannibal leaves. That felt… significant, but he doesn’t fully understand why.

Chapter Text

First thing Monday morning, Alana is supposed to take the stand.

She is mostly acting as a character witness for Will, but also as a psychiatric expert. He knows she cries a little when she’s talking about her warnings to Jack, but she’s giving off a stoic fury. He also knows the prosecution did poke and prod about her ‘romantic overtures’ during the cross-examination, and she more or less follows Byron’s advice. Her testimony is full of little details that probably would have bothered Will if he’d been paying very close attention, but Alana’s emotions are far too tumultuous to look at for very long so Will is, broadly, dissociating the entire time.

Matthew had helped him get ready, but there had been another orderly present so they hadn’t gotten a chance to talk.

Dr. Chilton was busy that day as well, because he was overseeing the transfer of a high-profile patient of some kind.

The anxiety is creeping up. Will feels like he’s going to crawl out of his skin.

It is for all these reasons that Will fails to notice that the bailiff is not the same person as every other day of the trial, at least until everyone comes back from the mid-day recess and Byron Metcalfe opens an envelope with a human ear inside of it.

The ear is male, thirties or forties. Like the missing bailiff.

The cuts on the ear are identical to those on Abigail’s. They spent enough time looking at high-res close-ups that he knows instantly. Which means the ear was cut off with his knife, which is meant to be in evidence. Evidence which would have been accessible by someone like the bailiff.

Will doesn’t tell anyone any of this, because he doesn’t get the chance; he is rapidly detained—though he didn’t do anything—and taken to a holding cell in the courthouse until the scene can be processed.

It is quite literally hours, nearly until five o’clock, before someone comes to get him. The stand-in bailiff comes with a bottle of water and a granola bar. He waits for Will to finish eating and then escorts him back out to the transport van, where Matthew and the second orderly are waiting to take him back to the BSHCI.

He doesn’t understand what happened, and he’s not given time to sort it out because Jack is waiting for him in one of the private interview rooms at the hospital with a stack of fresh pictures. Will’s lawyer is there, too.

“The bailiff checked your knife out of evidence and took it home,” Jack says. “Then somebody recreated all of, uh… your greatest hits.” He tosses photos on the table. “Mounted on a stag head like Cassie and Marissa. Slit from navel to sternum like Nick Boyle. Cut his jaw wide open like Sutcliffe. And when the tac team breached the house, it set off a trap that injured two good men and roasted the body like Madchen. And, of course, the ear was cut off with your knife and sent to the courthouse.”

“Okay,” says Will.

“That’s it, just okay?” says Byron. “This could be your ticket to a not-guilty verdict, Will.”

Will frowns and points to the photos of the chest. “I never shot anyone,” he says. “This is a completely different MO. All the mutilation was post-mortem.”

Jack rubs at his face. “Yeah. I know.”

“So why show me this at all? It doesn’t prove anything, Jack. This is somebody who’s been watching the trial, who probably convinced the bailiff to take the knife so they could do this. It’s just a… a fan, sending a fucked up compliment.”

“Christ, I’ve never worked with somebody so intent on getting convicted,” says Metcalfe, almost to himself. “Remember we talked about reasonable doubt?”

Will’s frown deepens to a scowl. “I might have brain damage, Mr. Metcalfe, but that doesn’t make me stupid. I understand the concept of reasonable doubt. I also understand that there’s no point in trying to use a Copycat copycat’s work to establish reasonable doubt for my case, especially considering we already built our case on the insanity plea. What I don’t understand is why you’re trying to use a completely unrelated case, which the prosecution will point out is unrelated, to build an argument nobody is asking you to build? I had nothing to do with this murder, aside from providing inspiration, so forgive me if my damaged brain is having some difficulty with figuring out why we’re even having this conversation.”

“Mr. Crawford, please,” says Byron.

“Sorry, Jack, were you actually trying to convince someone that this could have been done by the ‘real’ Copycat? Because—”

“I was trying to help you, Will! For God’s sake, you couldn’t have done this! This, this could have been an out, if you were just willing to consider—”

“Consider what, exactly? Lying to the court? Trying to pass this off as some kind of gift sent to absolve me? Does the prosecutor really seem like she’s stupid enough to ignore the goddamn bullet holes?”

“Why won’t you let anyone help you?” Jack roars, and Will slams his cuffed hands on the table as he shouts back,

“Because you’re not trying to help me, you’re trying to save me!” His chest heaves and he squeezes his eyes shut. “I should be in an institution for the rest of my life. If you really want to help me, you’ll leave me in here. I need real, actual help. Not your pity. Not your guilt. Not your… your bullshit crime scenes that don’t prove anything. Just… stop. ”

Jack takes a deep breath and casts an exhausted glance at Metcalfe, who just shrugs and shakes his head.

“Okay, Will. Okay. We’ll treat this as its own crime. Nothing to do with you, apart from inspiration. I’ll get the team working on it.”

“This means we’re not buying any extra time,” says Byron, crossing his arms. “We’re putting you on the stand tomorrow.”

Will jolts in his seat. “Tomorrow? Why? I thought we had other witnesses.”

“We do. Dr. Bloom created a baseline idea of what your mental state is like. Chilton gave them a psychological profile. Now we’re going to show them where your head is at and the extent of the damage. You won’t be giving a full statement. We’ll recall you later on. We just want to play off the momentum from Dr. Bloom’s testimony, and the fuss from the ear. We’ll show the jury who you are and what’s going on in your mind.”

“I’m—”

“Don’t worry. I know what I’m doing. I don’t want you to seem too prepared. Just…” Metcalfe sighs. “Just don’t sit up there and tell them you’re guilty.”

“Be honest,” Jack murmurs.

Will is intensely anxious, but there is very little he can do at this point. He’s taken back to his room and he wraps up in his weighted blanket, but it’s really not enough.

He doesn’t even hear Matthew approach down the hallway because his heart is beating so loud in his ears. He just becomes aware, suddenly, that his cell door is swinging open, creaking closed—but not locked—and there are soft footsteps approaching his cot.

He doesn’t move from his bundled, curled-up human comma position. He just peeks out from the depths of the weighted blanket, eyes huge, body trembling, and catches sight of the aurora of reds, blues, golds, and rich greens surrounding Matthew. This is perhaps the softest expression he’s ever seen on Matthew’s face.

“Hey, gorgeous,” Matthew murmurs. “Heard you might be having a tough time. Thought I might come help.”

Will’s reply is heavily muffled. “Didn’t you just tell me to take care of my own problems?”

“Oh, don’t be like that,” says Matthew, chuckling. “Two things can be true, y’know. It’s good for you to have independent coping skills, and I can help you out when I’m here. And I am.” He sits on the edge of Will’s mattress. “I’m here, Will. Whatever you need.” A beat, then, “Cameras are down for maintenance the next two hours. Mics, too.”

Will curls up a little tighter. “You shouldn’t have done it.”

“What, turned the cameras off?”

“Killed the bailiff.”

Matthew pauses, then lays a careful hand on Will’s flank. “Why not?”

“Because he didn’t deserve it. And it didn’t accomplish anything.”

Matthew sighs. “It’s because I shot him first, huh?” Will doesn’t answer, but Matthew makes a frustrated sound anyway. “I kinda hoped they’d miss it ‘cause of the antlers and the fire. Real hard to source antlers like that, by the way. Total fuckin’ pain. All for nothing? Fuck.”

“Why did you do it?” Will whispers.

“How did you know I did it?” counters Matthew. 

“I used to profile people for the FBI, Matthew. I had encephalitis, not a fucking lobotomy.”

“Fair enough.” Matthew absentmindedly runs his hand along Will’s body, though it’s still covered by the heavy blanket. “You and me, we’re different to most people. We’re hawks, Will. Hunters. But, thing about hawks is, they’re solitary. You ever see a hawk sitting on a power line? Flocks of smaller birds will band together, fly up there, drive the hawk away. But if the hawks started working together, well…” He shrugs. “Things could be different, is all.”

“You killed the bailiff because you wanted to set me free.”

“Yeah.”

“So we could… hunt together?”

Matthew pauses. “Well. Watch out for each other, at least. Be… y’know.” He chews on his lower lip. “I want us to… I mean, I want to… be with somebody who understands.”

“But you don’t believe I’m guilty. So if you think I didn’t do it, what makes you think I understand?”

Matthew laughs softly. “Just because you haven’t done a real murder yet doesn’t mean you don’t get it. A hawk is still a hawk even if it hasn’t left the nest.”

Will lays there for a while, thinking, while Matthew continues to trail his fingers up and down Will’s curled body, from shoulder to ankle and back. 

“Why do you even care if somebody understands? Why do you want…?” He struggles to find the words. Matthew doesn’t seem to mind the wait, but it feels like it takes Will ages to figure out how to express even the smallest piece of the idea. “You never seem lonely,” he finally says. 

Matthew tilts his head from side to side. “I don’t think loneliness was a concept for me until I met you. I was fine on my own. And now whenever I’m not with you I feel…”

And Will can see it unspool around him, blue-blacks and clot-reds, seething slate tendrils, pitch and asphalt swirling, terrible and bleak, and it’s only the echo of a feeling Matthew is trying to recall.

“Oh,” says Will.

“Probably doesn’t surprise you to learn, but I never really felt like most people,” says Matthew, and the horrible dark aura dissipates back into the same affection, lust, pleasure, calm blend. “Soon as I understood what was different about me, I started learning how to look more like everybody else, least as long as they were payin’ attention. You spend enough time in places like this, you learn what they’re looking for. And once I was old enough to start over, it was pretty easy to get a job on the other side of the glass. And that was fine, right? I was staying under the radar. Doing what I wanted. There wasn’t anything missing from that picture. But then I met you. And it was like learning I’d had one arm tied behind my back my entire life.” His hand stops on Will’s shoulder and squeezes. “I just want to be near you. Because you make me feel like trying harder. You see me. And I can see you, too. What you are, what you don’t wanna be, what you’re aching to let yourself be. And, Will, I want you no matter which part wins.”

Will opens the blanket. He doesn’t really think about it, or about what’s going to happen. He just… lifts the edge and raises his arm and Matthew burrows beneath the weighted blanket with him, bringing a refreshing chill into the furnace around Will’s body.

It doesn’t necessarily surprise him, but it does startle him a little when Matthew immediately takes Will’s face in his hands and crushes their mouths together. He is very rapidly maneuvered beneath Matthew, and the weight of the man in combination with the weight of the blanket is sheer bliss. Will moans into Matthew’s mouth, gripping tightly to his hips, his tongue clumsily answering every wet, teasing flick.

They allow each other a moment to breathe, and Will is overwhelmed by the attraction, the lust, the need rolling off of Matthew. He aches with it, they both do, and Will is so painfully hard he can’t think clearly. He rolls his hips and Matthew hisses, capturing his lips again for just a moment. 

“Might be movin’ a little fast, cher,” Matthew manages. He shifts, with a sigh and a soft grunt, to one side of Will’s body, and encourages Will to take up the position of little spoon. “There,” he says. “Let’s… just remove the temptation.” One of Matthew’s hands rests low on Will’s stomach, and his voice is rich and warm in Will’s ear as he says, “At least, for now.”

Will nods. He’s still tense and he’s definitely still hard, but without Matthew looking directly at him, feeding directly into it, it’s less frantic and more tolerable. He doesn’t want to make a mess on his blanket anyway. 

“Will you stay until I fall asleep?” he whispers.

Matthew tightens his arms around him and snuggles up close, drawing their legs both up into an almost fetal position. It is immensely comforting for Will; he sighs, soft and content, and Matthew buries his nose into the crook of Will’s neck.

“I would do anything for you,” Matthew says.

“I know,” says Will, and breathes that Old Spice and library books scent until he falls asleep.

Will takes the stand in the morning. He is nervous, twitchy, and trying desperately to keep his eyes low. Frederick isn’t here—apparently it was Abel Gideon who was transferred back to the hospital, for some reason, but he was hospitalized. The details are scant at this stage, but it’s definitely a crisis. Will is worried about having another attack, but Matthew has apparently been entrusted with a syringe of the diazepam solution in case Will needs it. 

That’s good. He’s certain he’s going to. 

Byron calls him up, and Will keeps his eyes on his shoes, his hands, and then the microphone in front of him. He is sworn to the the truth, and then Byron asks, 

“Mr. Graham, how are you feeling today?”

The prosecutor rolls her eyes; Will tilts his face further down, so that the crowd is hidden behind the fringe of his hair and the edge of his glasses. 

“Um. Anxious.”

“How has your treatment been progressing?”

“Dr. Tyler says the inflammation is significantly lower. But I’m supposed to… keep an eye on my stress.”

“Why is that?”

He shifts and just for a second he glimpses the court room. He shuts his eyes for a moment and his voice wavers.

“Dr. Chilton said that um… stress can cause encephalitis to flare up. And my anxiety is already… high.”

Byron clicks a button and a slide appears on a projector screen across the room. Will can’t see it. Byron talks for a minute, reminding the jury of Will’s condition at the time of his arrest, then clicking the slide to show his scans after his first ten days cuffed to a bed in a normal hospital, before he was transferred to the BSHCI.

“I’d like to remind the court Mr. Graham is still within the first three weeks of his treatment,” says Byron.

“The court remembers,” says the judge. “Get to the point.”

Spilling from the booth to Will’s left is a rippling pool of annoyance and apathy. He has a golf game later, Will thinks. He doesn’t care about this. He thinks Metcalfe is a prick and Will is a conman.

Will frowns and adjusts his glasses. 

Byron doesn’t miss a beat. “Mr. Graham, can you describe the symptoms you experienced?”

“I was losing time. Blacking out. Apparently having seizures. Night sweats. Hallucinations.”

“And are you still experiencing any of these symptoms?”

He swallows. “Yeah.”

“Please elaborate.”

“Um. I’m still… hallucinating, sometimes.” Byron waits for him to go on, so he squeezes his eyes shut and says, “I started seeing Garrett Jacob Hobbs after I shot him. He… never went away. Not for more than a few days at a time. And sometimes I see… or hear, a creature. Like a man but… thin, starving. Covered in tar. Antlers. Claws. It stays under my bed in my cell. It… holds me at night, from below, and I feel like it’s going to slice me apart. But at least now I know it isn’t real. It was… worse before.”

There is a murmur in the courtroom.

“Mr. Graham, did you tell anyone about these hallucinations before your arrest?”

Will shakes his head and says, “No. No, I was…” He pauses, working his jaw. His eyes are still tightly closed. Slowly, he says, “I’ve always been um… afraid of being put in an institution. I thought, because of the way my mind works, if I went in, I wouldn’t ever, um… They wouldn’t let me out. So, I didn’t want anyone to think I was… crazy. I just thought I was stressed.”

“You didn’t tell your psychiatrist about the hallucinations?” asks Metcalfe, casually.

“I didn’t have a psychiatrist, officially.”

“Officially,” Metcalfe repeats. “I see. So, Dr. Hannibal Lecter was not your psychiatrist?”

“No.”

“You met with him on a weekly basis, is that correct?”

“Not every week. Cases got in the way a lot of the time. But when I could, and when I needed…” He hesitates. “When I needed a paddle.”

“And what do you mean by ‘a paddle’?”

“I… Jack Crawford, he knew I wasn’t…” Will makes a frustrated sound. “The way my mind works. It’s easy for me to get lost. To get… wrapped up in other minds, especially the bad ones. That’s why I’m good at catching killers, but it’s also… it’s what made it so hard. Staying afloat, staying… in my own head. Dr. Lecter, he was supposed to help steer the boat. When I started drifting too far into… Hobbs, or Stammets, or Buddish, or Budge, or Wells, or… the Ripper. Or a half dozen others.”

“You’ve used the phrase ‘the way my mind works’ a few times, Mr. Graham. Would you please describe for the court what you mean by that?”

Will rubs at his face with one hand, beneath his glasses, and nods. He doesn’t open his eyes.

“Yeah. Okay. Um. Dr. Chilton explained it. Earlier. Before. I have a, uh, empathy disorder. Uncategorized. Excess mirror neurons. It means I can um… I can reflect back the feelings of other people. If I look into somebody’s eyes, I can… mirror them. Mannerisms, speech patterns. It’s been a… a problem. Forever. Any conversation longer than a few minutes, I start sounding more and more like the person I’m talking to. I try not to do it. People think I’m making fun of them, but I… it’s not conscious, really. But it isn’t just conversations, that’s just when it’s most obvious. Easiest, like… like breathing, like it’s automatic. Right?”

“Sure. Please, continue.”

“Right. So… it works with spaces, too. Like, uh… I can walk into a person’s office, or their bedroom. And based on everything I see, all the little details, my brain just… soaks everything in, and I can tell you… Just about everything about them. It’s…” He licks his lips and leans forward, resting his forehead in his palm. “I’ve had people treat me like I’m psychic or something. But all the details, they’re always there. Y’know? That’s… It’s what made me so good at catching killers. Crime scenes. I look at them, the way I could look at somebody’s room, and I can read the same things. But I’m not pulling information out of nowhere. There are certain… certain books, on the shelf, the pens are arranged in color order and from tallest to shortest, the plants are well-loved but haven’t been watered in a couple of days, the victim was stabbed more than thirty times, there’s bruising around the entry wounds, the fingernails on the victim’s left hand are broken, there’s a scuff mark by the window. Forensics would find all the same things. I just… see them all at once, even if I don’t know what I’m looking at, and I…” He chuckles softly. “Jack Crawford came to me about the Shrike and said that he had heard I ‘make leaps that can’t be explained.’ And I told him then, and I’ll tell you now: the evidence always explains. I don’t see things nobody else sees, I just… put together patterns in a different way, because I’m tuned into feelings and behavior. Like a cursed radio.”

“Would you say your disorder was impacted at all by your illness?”

Will hesitates. He’s sure his expression is difficult to read, especially since his eyes are still closed, but his brow is furrowed and his jaw is clicking and his nostrils are flaring and he doesn’t know how to respond.

“Um. While I was sick, it made it a lot harder to get out of the killers’ heads. I got lost in the reconstruction at a scene. And, now…” He tugs at his tie and rubs the fabric between his fingers. “There was um… damage.”

“Damage?”

“Yeah. Um. My brain was boiling, y’know. And the seizures. So. Damage.” He sniffles, and scrunches the tie in his hands more aggressively.

“Would you elaborate on the damage as you understand it?” 

Will’s guts squirm, but he says, “Well… the entire right hemisphere was inflamed, so it was pretty extensive. But, uh… They said most of the permanent damage was to my frontal lobe.” He can hear Byron click to the next slide on the projector, presumably showing his most recent brain scan. There are a few uncomfortable sounds from the courtroom. He had thought they all knew, already. He frowns. “I have… poorer impulse control. Poor emotional regulation. Sensory overload, persistent anxiety. Severe depressive episodes. Some… personality changes. I don’t know the extent yet, it hasn’t been very long.”

“And what was the impact on the empathy disorder?”

“It’s… worse. It’s more overwhelming. It’s more intense. More invasive. I get caught in… feedback loops.” He stops, rubs at the bridge of his nose, rubs at his mouth. He still doesn’t open his eyes. “I can’t… turn it off anymore.”

“I see.” There’s the sound of some shuffling paper and then Byron says, “Mr. Graham, do you believe you are guilty of the crimes you have been accused of?”

There’s a ripple through the courtroom, and the prosecutor scoffs.

“Yes,” says Will.

There’s a bit of an uproar, and the judge has to call for order. Will can picture Byron’s catlike smile as he says,

“One last question for the moment, Mr. Graham. Why?”

“Why… did I do it?” Will asks, confused.

“Why do you believe you did it,” Metcalfe clarifies.

Will frowns. “Because… the FBI found evidence in my house. And I… I feel like I did it. I feel like I killed them, all of them.”

Byron says, “No more questions for the defendant at this time. We reserve the right to recall him for further testimony.”

The prosecutor’s heels click on the floor as she approaches him and he hears the crinkle of a plastic bag.

“Mr. Graham,” she says, “would you please identify this item for me?”

Will freezes.

“Mr. Graham?” she says.

His lip quivers and his heart hammers in his chest. His eyes are still shut. He begins to tremble.

“Mr. Graham, you will respond to Councillor Vega’s question.”

Oh. Was that her name? Vega? Good. Great. They probably said that at the beginning. He hadn’t ever really paid enough attention.

“Mr. Graham,” the judge repeats, and his annoyance is leaking into Will’s head. 

He gestures awkwardly toward his face. “My eyes are closed.”

The judge drawls, “Then open them, Mr. Graham.”

“But I can’t… block out anything from anybody in my line of sight.”

“I only need you to focus on the object I am holding in front of you,” Ms. Vega says, as though he is stupid.

“If I open my eyes, I’ll see the whole courtroom,” Will says, his voice small. “It’ll be… everybody in the room, all at once. I can’t…” His heart is stuttering in his chest. “Please don’t make me look.”

“Mr. Graham. You will be held in contempt if you do not comply.”

He takes a shaky breath. “I… Can you put it on the stand, instead? I’ll… the bailiff can cuff me so I can’t touch it, and then—”

“Open your eyes, Mr. Graham, or I will have you removed from this court and you will face further charges,” snaps the judge.

A distressed whine tears from Will’s throat, but he opens his eyes.

It is… immediate. A sea of faces, all swirling with color and flavor and feelings, the prosecutor smirking in front of him as though the baggie in her hand is some kind of gotcha, with his hunting knife in it. The judge, bored and annoyed and bordering on pissed off. Metcalfe, a little alarmed, actually, but curious. A lot of people out there are concerned. Unnerved. Restless. Afraid.

But there’s one person out there who is enraged, and it’s that intense, blinding fury which tips Will over into a full, head-clutching, lung-exploding, brain-screaming panic attack. He can’t breathe. He can’t think. He’s babbling and he doesn’t know what he’s saying. He tastes metal and salt and maybe he’s crying or maybe he bit his tongue or maybe he’s hurt someone again and oh god what if he hurt someone oh god he’s a monster what did he do what did he do—

And then he’s in the little side room and the orderlies are there and Matthew is pulling out the syringe but the other orderly seems unsure if they’re allowed to do that so he turns to go ask somebody and Matthew stops to reassure him it’s Chilton’s orders but Will can’t think, can’t focus, doesn’t want anyone near him, it’s too bright, the unease and mistrust and tiredness and worry are swirling and swirling and he scrambles into a corner to tuck his face into his knees.

He’s trembling violently and he can hear very little over the blood rushing in his ears, but he knows Matthew is crouched in front of him and the other orderly has gone. He doesn’t know who, or why, or what Matthew is saying. It’s something soothing but it isn’t working and Matthew’s touch upon his shoulder isn’t working and he needs more, but then the door opens back up and Will hears a very clear voice say,

“You were right to come find me. I will take care of him from here.”

There’s a brief, heated conversation and then Matthew is gone, and the other orderly is gone, and Hannibal is there, crouched on the floor, and he is blessedly blank—

No, wait. No, not blank. Not really. Just… suppressing. Suppressing well, but there’s still so much going on beneath the surface. It’s just… it’s out of sight, and Will can leave it alone. He sighs and shudders and tucks his face tighter against his knees.

“Will,” says Hannibal, softly. “Are you alright?”

“No,” Will says, miserably.

“Do you know what is in this syringe?”

“Diazepam.”

“Would you like me to administer this for you?”

Will just nods. He feels a tug, then Hannibal’s gentle, warm fingers roll up his sleeve. There’s a slight sting as the needle slides into his forearm, and then Hannibal smooths his sleeve back down and Will focuses intently on how long Hannibal’s hand lingers on his arm.

He’s still shaking, but just sitting here in the quiet with Hannibal is… good. It helps. He’s not sure how much time passes.

He wishes they were back in Hannibal’s office, with the heavy drapes and the multi-level bookcases and the comfortable leather chairs. He wonders if his standing appointment is still open. He wonders if Hannibal misses him. He wonders if Hannibal thinks of him.

“Have you been lonely without me?” Will asks, though he doesn’t mean to break the silence.

“Very,” murmurs Hannibal.

Will lifts his head and his eyes settle on Hannibal’s shoulder. He can just barely see Hannibal’s expression, and the very muted colors around him are fuzzy and soft and growing more static as the sedative kicks in.

“So you came to my rescue.”

Hannibal huffs a laugh. “I was summoned by an orderly to administer a medication, Will. I would hardly call it a rescue.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess it wasn’t.” Will’s arms slacken around his knees and he leans his head back against the wall. “You said everything was going to be okay, Dr. Lecter. But it’s not. Nothing is getting better.”

“You have suffered so terribly.” He reaches out, tucks a curl behind Will’s ear, and trails his knuckles along Will’s jaw. “I assure you, Will, I never break a promise. A little patience is all I ask. Please, grant me that.”

“Were we close?” Will asks.

Hannibal’s voice is strained as he replies, “Yes. And no. And… nearly.”

He looks into Hannibal’s eyes.

There is so much hiding away behind them. Hints and flickers of devotion, affection, want, possession, obsession, hunger. Rage. That deep, overwhelming rage from the courtroom. Sorrow. Loneliness. Need. All surfacing just for a moment, not long enough to dig their claws into Will’s mind but enough to be recognized.

Hannibal seems so tired. Will leans into his touch, and Hannibal cautiously extends his fingers until his broad, warm palm is covering the entirety of Will’s cheek.

It’s easy, with Hannibal. It always has been. So much easier, so much safer than with anyone else. Everything is clear, because Hannibal can keep his feelings under such impressive control that even now, after being suffused with a hundred minds, Will has found himself again.

But Hannibal can’t control the fondness in his eyes. Not with his hand on Will’s cheek. Not with those big blue eyes, still wet with tears, staring up at him. Not when this delicate, devastating creature is parting his soft pink lips and reflecting that fondness right back. 

Will presses his hand against Hannibal’s, holding it against his own face. There are flickers of memory. Moments, just flashes. These long, warm fingers on his jaw, his cheek, his forehead, sliding through his hair. The scent of this cologne, carefully selected so as not to overwhelm him. The rumble of a laugh, the scent of wine puffing between lips stained a bit redder, a charmingly crooked smile startled onto a normally severe and serious mouth. 

And joy, his own joy, at just sitting shoulder to shoulder, a glass of too-good whiskey loosely set upon his thigh. A warm room and a warm body beside him and the snow falling outside. An arm so casually resting on the desk behind him, that strong, sure hand flat against the blotter but close to his body, close enough that if he’d been in his right mind he might have realized that it was supposed to be wrapped around him.

He is lost in low-lit maroon eyes brimming with suppressed, muted feelings, but this sorrow feels like his own.

Were we close?

Yes. And no. And… nearly.

“Oh, Hannibal,” Will whispers, and the doctor kisses him.

Will kisses back, with a remarkable amount of certainty. He feels lightheaded. Hannibal pushes him against the wall, hunched over him, his free hand braced on the floor. Will’s knees are spread, his feet flat on the ground, and he feels a bit scrunched by the weight and the force of Hannibal’s body, but it’s grounding.

He can imagine what it would have been like. That winter evening, in the warm, dim office. Their eyes would have met, and Will would have smiled, really smiled in a way he never did with anyone else, and their thighs would have pressed together and Hannibal’s arm would have been settled on the desk behind his back, and the tension between them would have been intense, and the moment would have been perfect…  

But neither of them had crossed that line. He didn’t know if he had thought about it then. Probably not. It would have to have been around when he had kissed Alana. He had gone to see Hannibal right afterward to tell him all about it. Hannibal had seemed… agitated, though Will had assumed that was more to do with the interrupted dinner.

Yes. And no. And… nearly.

Will can taste Hannibal’s desperation for him, for his closeness, and his own heart is pounding even with the sedative working to keep him calm. It’s bittersweet, like dark chocolate. He sighs into Hannibal’s mouth and tilts his head, wanting more.

Wanting what they could have been, if Hannibal hadn’t—

What?

Hannibal breaks the kiss and presses his forehead against Will’s, taking a deep, shuddering breath. His emotions riot for a moment, and he seems to struggle to get them back under control.

Will is still holding Hannibal’s palm against his cheek.

“I’m sorry,” Will rasps. “I’m trying to remember. I want to remember.”

A surge of emotion, then, something Will struggles to identify because it is throttled so quickly.

“We can build new memories,” Hannibal says. “And we soon will. But… for now, perhaps it is best…” He trails off, delicately, at a loss.

“Oh,” says Will, his voice soft and small. “Okay.” He lets go of Hannibal’s hand, and Hannibal sits back on his heels. Will fidgets. “Thank you for… helping me.”

Again, a surge of throttled emotion.

“Of course, Will. Should you need anything, anything at all, you have but to ask. I have only ever wanted the best for you.”

Will nods, though something uneasy twists in his stomach.

Hannibal stands, and offers his hand to Will for help. Will takes it, and then allows Hannibal to fix his suit and his hair and check his pulse.

“In my professional, medical opinion,” Hannibal says, “your symptoms have subsided enough for a return to the courtroom.” 

“Okay.”

Hannibal gently presses their foreheads together. “This suffering is not all you will ever know. Have patience for better days.”

He doesn’t answer, and—though so much seems unsaid between them—Hannibal leaves. The orderlies come back, and Will keeps his eyes on the floor. Matthew has different colors around him now. Brighter greens, uneasiness and jealousy. Angry reds. Worried blues. A terrible, twisted rope of the awful kind of loneliness threads around his body like a Gordian knot, infecting the rest. They don’t have a chance to speak.

Will isn’t called back up to the stand that day; he just sits through the remainder of the court proceedings, which mostly involve speaking with his neurologist, Dr. Tyler. He is returned to his cell.

Matthew doesn’t stay, and he doesn’t come to see Will that night.

In the morning, he expects Matthew to come help him get ready for another day in court. Instead, Frederick Chilton appears in front of his cell, a ball of contrition and concern and genuine fear but not of Will and not for himself. 

“Mr. Graham. I’m afraid I come bearing unfortunate news.” Will blinks and doesn’t answer, so Frederick takes a step forward. He clears his throat. “Less than an hour ago, the judge overseeing your trial was found in the courtroom. Murdered. Strung up like a puppet, apparently. I’m sure that the… BAU will be stopping by to discuss. However, more to the point, the death of the judge means—”

“A mistrial,” Will says, dully. “We have to start all the way over. From the beginning. It… All of it was for nothing.”

He must suffer through it all, endlessly. There is no hope for a better future. Hannibal’s platitudes were worthless. Matthew’s absurd dream of freedom appears more and more cartoonish with every passing moment.

“I’m afraid so, yes,” says Chilton, remorsefully, and the most insane thing about this situation is Will’s absolute certainty that Frederick is the most honest ally he has right now.

“Thank you for telling me,” he says, and lays back in his bed without another word.

There is no point.

The FBI will come and ask him questions. He will tell them what he can but they won’t catch this killer either, because they can’t catch anybody without him holding their hands.

Except for him.

But even then, he had been the one to call them, hadn’t he?

He doesn’t even bother pulling his too-light weighted blanket over his body. It won’t help. Nothing will help.

He is alone. 

Hannibal isn’t here, and he isn’t coming, and they were never going to be whatever potential future he had squandered when he had murdered their daughter and eaten her. He hopes Hannibal doesn’t bother getting involved in the new trial, or the one after that, or the one after that. It’s a waste of time. Will is a waste of his time.

Matthew isn’t here, and he isn’t coming either. He wanted some fairytale future where two killers could live out their days in peace, and  neither of them deserved that. Monsters don’t get to be happy. He hopes Matthew saw whatever near-connection Will had with Hannibal and it pissed him off so much he’ll leave Will alone forever.

Will is alone, and he should be alone. And he is never getting out of this place, and he is never getting better.

At least if everyone stays away, he won’t hurt anyone else.

Will sinks into a deep, scalding pit of tar-black despair, because the world is dark and lonesome and there is not even the hope of a quick end to offer an ounce of relief.

Chapter Text

Matthew has been jealous before. Or course he has. You can’t be a guy like him—intense, obsessive, possessive, under certain circumstances — without getting jealous now and then. Comes with the territory. 

And, well, he knew there was somebody with an interest in Will Graham. Somebody put him in the asylum. Did a real number on him, in Matthew’s opinion. People like them don’t put in effort like that if there’s not some kind of interest. Convincing Will he did it was a hell of a feat, too.

But he’d kind of assumed the interest had been purely destructive. That is to say, Matthew had been operating under the assumption that whoever had dropped Will Graham in his lap had done so with no intention of coming back for him. 

But then the judge got taken out after he made Will have that panic attack, and the only person who seemed as pissed off about it as Matthew was Dr. Lecter.

And he already knew Lecter had some kinda interest of his own. That one he’d assumed just wasn’t a threat to begin with because, well, they weren’t actually together, and Lecter couldn’t be there for Will like Matthew could, so… if there was anything there, it’d just sort itself out.

He suspects, after the look on Lecter’s face when he’d kicked Matt and Townsend out of the room, he miscalculated on that one. 

He’s certain he miscalculated after the judge gets his brain scooped out. 

It’s like a dream and a nightmare asking him for a threesome. 

Dr. Hannibal Lecter.

The Chesapeake fucking Ripper.

No wonder Abel Gideon had tried to get himself beaten to death. He knew something. He’d told Chilton as much, he just refused to say what it was.

Shit, was that why he was being transferred back? Was Chilton trying to get him to help Will? Did Frederick fucking Chilton piece together who the Ripper was before anyone else? 

The first two, probably. The third one, Matthew doubted. It was more likely Chilton had figured out Lecter did something to Will during therapy and probably knew he was sick. Fred had all kinds of complexes about unethical psychiatric practices after Gideon cut him open. But if he thought Gideon knew something, had witnessed something on that night Will had eventually shot him, it made sense for Fred to bring him back to try to get him to help out with the trial. 

And if what he knew was that Will’s psychiatrist friend was the Chesapeake Ripper, well. Matt hopes for Abel’s sake Lecter isn’t willing to go after him in a public hospital. 

It’s enough to drive a guy crazy. 

Lecter. The Ripper. The Copycat.

The frame job. 

The encephalitis. 

The permanent fucking damage. 

If this guy wanted Will like it seems like he wanted him, why the fuck did he let Will burn until he broke? What did he think was going to happen? 

And, honestly, Christ, what a terrible frame-up. Unworthy of the Ripper.

He really thought the FBI would look at a guy that fucked up and believe he was physically capable of those crimes? Especially considering two of the victims were also framed? 

Ridiculous.

He can admit he hasn’t handled the realization very well. He got jealous after Lecter booted him from the room, yeah. But then he was stuck in his own head, and then the judge was killed and he saw the truth and now he’s got to figure out how to keep Will when his rival is literally the biggest name in the game. 

But, all this has meant he left Will alone all night and all morning. And from the cameras, he can tell Will is in one of his deep, dark moods. He’s probably pretty upset about the mistrial. And he’s lonely. And Matthew wants to crawl in bed with him and hold him until he relaxes and sighs and falls asleep.

Unfortunately he’s got a real actual job to do, and with no trial going on he’s got to help out with the care and feeding of the other patients all goddamn day. He checks on Will whenever he can, through the cameras at least. He’s not assigned to Will’s wing this morning, and since he wasn’t needed as an escort for transit he has no good reason to go down there. 

It’s not until his second shift starts that he gets to take over from Townsend, who has basically just spent the whole fuckin’ morning sitting in the security booth watching Sailor Moon. Which is fine, except it means none of the day shift tasks got done except medication pass, and Matthew has to spend the first half of swing on cleaning and charting and restocking and escorts to the courtyard and the library and the visitation rooms.

He doesn’t even get to help with delivering dinner because he has to handle an incident report about some paranoid chick claiming her dead husband grabbed her wrist so hard it bruised, and normally that would just be a behavioral note but there was a bruise and nobody knew where the fuck it came from, so the state has to hear about it.

By the time nine o’clock rolls around and it’s time for bedtime meds, Matthew is exhausted. The nurse finishes up, wishes Matthew goodnight, and finally, finally, the floor is empty. Nobody will be here until ten, when it’s lights out and shift change.

The schedule has been updated already, now that the trial is on hold. Starting tomorrow, Matthew will be picking up overnights until it’s rescheduled. Hopefully that will help Will feel better.

It seems unlikely that anything will help, though. Matthew stands in front of Will’s cell, frowning. He looks like he hasn’t moved. He definitely got up to take his medication, and Matt was pretty sure he ate at least a bit of his dinner, but he’s gone right back to laying down on his cot, on top of his blankets, hands limp, expression vacant, staring up at the ceiling. 

“Hey, gorgeous,” says Matthew, quietly. “I’m sorry I couldn’t come see you more today. Got real busy. Couldn’t stop thinkin’ about you, though. Okay if I come in?”

Will’s only response is a minute shrug.

Good enough invitation for him. Soon he is seated on the edge of Will’s cot, and he takes one of Will’s chilled hands in his own. 

“Oof, you’re freezin’, cher. Let’s get you under your blankets, huh?”

Will shrugs again, but doesn’t resist as Matthew pulls him up out of bed, flips the blankets aside, and settles Will back onto the mattress. He pulls the weighted blanket up to Will’s chin and frowns.

Tears are welling in those beautiful blue eyes and spilling down those soft, stubbled cheeks. Matthew swipes the tears away with his thumbs and kisses Will’s damp eyelids, tasting salt.

“I know, baby,” Matthew says. “I know you don’t want to sit through it all again. I don’t want that for you either. But we’ll get through it. And I ain’t goin’ anywhere. I’m your man, remember?”

The silent tears turn into shuddering sobs, and Matthew climbs on top of the blankets, curling around Will’s body, hoping the added weight is comforting. He tucks his nose against Will’s jaw and holds him, eyeing the time ticking by on his watch. It’s still early. They’re okay.

The tears stop flowing after just a few minutes, and Will begins to squirm under his blankets.

“What do you need?” Matthew murmurs into his ear. 

“Closer,” Will says, his voice raw. “I want to be closer.”

Matthew easily maneuvers himself under the blankets and pulls Will close, his right arm and leg draped over Will’s body, his left hand cupping Will’s cheek. Chest to chest, navel to navel, hip to hip. Intimate-like. 

“Why are you… here?” Will manages to ask. 

“Because this is where I want to be,” Matt says, simply, and kisses Will’s plush pink lips with a low-burning tenderness.

“But… but I…” Will squeezes his eyes shut and shakes his head. “You don’t understand. Dr. Lecter—”

Matt’s chuckle is slow and sultry. “Hey. Nobody owns you, Will. Whatever the hell it is you got goin’ on between you and Lecter, it’s your business. And this? Right here, right now, with me? This is our business.” 

He kisses Will again, softer this time, dragging his hand down to Will’s hip. He takes a sudden, firm hold, and grinds their bodies together. Will moans into his mouth, and Matthew’s kiss turns hungry, probing, slick. He pops a couple of buttons on Will’s jumpsuit, just enough to get his hand in, and Will jerks at the touch. He doesn’t pull away, but he does break the kiss.

“Matthew—”

“Let me take care of you, Will.”

“But I’m… This is—”

Matthew kisses him and murmurs against his mouth, “Just tell me when you’re close.”

Will nods and buries his face into the crook of Matthew’s shoulder. He likes that. He can hear every little sound, feel Will’s strong, callused fingers tightening on the front of his uniform, and those pretty pink lips are hot against his neck.

He slides his hand into Will’s coarse hospital-issue boxers and muffles his anticipatory growl when he wraps his fingers around Will’s thick, pulsing cock. Christ, he wants that inside him. He wants Will to shove him down and rail him until he can’t walk. He’ll be stretched so wide afterward he’ll need a plug so he doesn’t sob at the emptiness.

And it’s leaking steadily, already beginning to soak a spot on the inside of the boxers. Matthew slides them down further and has to look, he has to see this beautiful monster for himself.

He glances down to make sure he’s gotten Will well and truly freed from the lower buttons of the jumpsuit, and his mouth bursts with saliva. Fuck. Sticky strings of precome trail from the heavy, dark tip and onto Matthew’s hand. The shaft is long and slightly curved, a thick vein along the underside. Matthew wants desperately to feel that pulse against his tongue.

He kisses Will’s shoulder and begins to trace his thumb against the slit, drawing first a moan and then a burst of sticky fluid. He coats his palm and then brings it to his mouth. It’s bitter and bleachy and it tastes like fucking heaven as far as he’s concerned. He slathers his hand with saliva and then begins to work Will’s cock in earnest, savoring every little whimper and groan and pant and gravelly exhalation. 

He can’t stop thinking about what it’ll feel like when he gets to be fucked within an inch of his life by his beautiful, his gorgeous Will. He’ll be so good, he’ll take all of it, every inch, wherever Will wants to fuck him, as hard as he wants, as long as he wants. He can fill Matthew to the fucking brim, until he sloshes when he walks. He’ll wake choking on this cock and go to sleep with it still pumping inside of him. 

He’s panting now too, his mouth watering, his body aching, and when Will squeezes his arm and gasps,

“I’m close,”

it’s not a moment too soon.

Matthew keeps pumping his hand but he scrambles down under the blankets and wraps his lips greedily around the blunt head, his tongue lapping at the leaking slit, his hand still eagerly stroking, and Will comes with a cry muffled by the weighted blanket. Matthew moans and milks every drop, taking as much of the still-hard length into his throat as he can while he swallows.

The thought of Will using him, fucking his mouth until he can’t speak, keeping him on his knees as a cock warmer, filling his belly over and over, gets him glassy-eyed.

Will seems, though, to be getting overstimulated. Matthew quickly cleans up and tucks him, reverently, back into his jumpsuit, then wriggles back up to the pillow. Will kisses him, sudden, uncoordinated, and filthy, and Matthew is floored. They are both panting when the kiss breaks and Will’s hand is on the bulge in Matthew’s pants.

Matt lets out a breathy laugh. “Best not, cher. Probably not enough time.” He checks his watch and curses. “Definitely not enough time. I have to leave in less than five minutes.”

Will pulls him close and kisses him again, intense and needy. “I don’t want to be alone,” he whines, and Matthew cups his cheeks. 

“I’m coming back tomorrow, baby. And until the new dates are set, I’m taking night shifts down here. So I can spend the whole night with you, long as nothing else happens. Starting tomorrow.”

“I won’t see you in the morning, then?”

“Two o’clock. Two until six in the morning, until Saturday.”

Will struggles to sit up, then sighs and rests his elbows on his knees. He hangs his head and murmurs, “I’m sorry. I should be handling this better. I just… sometimes I get so…”

Matthew sits up beside him and rubs his back. “It’s okay. You’re still getting used to what’s different. It’s not gonna be easy. But I’m with you.” His watch beeps, and he curses again. “I have to go, Will.”

“I know. I’ll be okay. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Matthew kisses him, hard and passionate, and Will touches his face with a tenderness that feels new. Matthew grins at him.

“Sweet dreams, gorgeous. Lights out in ten.”

“Goodnight, Matthew.”

He erases the recordings before Barney shows up to take over. Barney inclines his head at Matthew, and Matthew inclines his head back. They have a bit of an understanding. Other recordings go missing, from every department, for every shift, on random days of the week. Sometimes, if Matthew can’t get there in time, he’ll ask Barney about a particular recording that he ‘noticed was on the fritz again,’ and Barney will see it gets deleted. Barney doesn’t ask, and Matthew doesn’t tell anyone about all the personal effects from famous killers that Barney sells on eBay.

He’s glad he got to this one himself, though. He had time to watch it first. And, while it was impossible to make out the details, just the expression on Will’s face was enough to get him salivating again.

Matthew barely makes it through his apartment door before his cock is in his hand. He kicks the door shut. He drops his jacket, his keys, his bag, and he hunches over his kitchen table, tugging his pants down around his thighs, sucking two fingers into his mouth. He jerks himself rough and fast, stretching himself open with those two spit-slick fingers, whining because it’s not enough.

Will would be so much bigger, so much deeper, so much rougher. The thought of the inevitable slow, aching stretch is enough, though. With a guttural cry, Matthew spills across the surface of the kitchen table. And then, because he is very good, would be so very good for Will, he licks up his spend before he gets himself ready for bed.

He needs to learn more about Hannibal Lecter. A bit of stalking over the weekend, maybe. Closer attention whenever Lecter visits Will. He never intended for the Ripper to take notice of him, let alone in the context of a romantic rivalry, and he knows he’s out of his league in a lot of ways. He needs every advantage he can get, because fucking Will Graham is liable to have a negative impact on his life expectancy and he has no intention of letting that stop him.

Will belongs to no one. He said that, and he meant it. 

Matt, on the other hand. Well. He belongs to Will Graham, body and soul. And not even the Chesapeake Ripper can do a damn thing about that.

Hannibal allows a day for the news to sink in before he goes to see Will. He’s sure to be devastated, and require comfort. He originally petitions for a private room, but curiously Frederick denies his request.

“You may visit with Mr. Graham, as he is permitted to have visitors, but the private consultation rooms are reserved for, well, private consultations, as I am sure you well know. As his trial is no longer ongoing, you will be asked to follow all expectations of regular visitors. I trust this will not be too much of an issue, Dr. Lecter?” asks Frederick, and he reeks of fear but he is controlling it very well.

Interesting.

“Of course,” Hannibal says, inclining his head graciously. “This is, after all, your institution. I have no qualms with following the rules. Has that been an issue recently, Frederick?”

“No,” says Chilton, straightening his jacket. “And I should very much like to keep it that way. Come. I will escort you to see Mr. Graham myself.”

“How kind of you,” says Hannibal, but his eyes are glinting like a predator’s.

Chilton knows something. Or, suspects something, more likely.

Ah. He believes Will is innocent, and that Hannibal has used psychic driving to convince him otherwise for the purposes of studying his mind.

A reductive inference, but not altogether untrue. Potentially problematic, although Hannibal has enough on Chilton that he cannot risk coming forward without taking himself down with far more prejudice.

The hallway toward Will’s cell has never felt longer than it does with Chilton walking at a stately pace, his cane tapping against the linoleum floors, and Hannibal forced to politely keep in step with him.

When they reach the cell, two things hit Hannibal more or less simultaneously.

The first is that Will is clearly deeply depressed. He is wrapped in his weighted blanket, his arms around his knees, in the furthest corner of the room. He has, however, begun to look up—dead-eyed though he is—and the blanket has slid slightly down his broad shoulders.

The second thing which strikes Hannibal, or assaults his senses, is the overwhelming stench of terrible cologne, poorly-maintained books, and lust. Will’s cell is saturated with the smell of another man, that odious little orderly who tried to argue with Hannibal back at the courthouse.

The bailiff’s killer, then.

He must carefully control the snarl threatening to tear across his face. That vile little beast has had his hands all over Hannibal’s Will. And Will, even after their beautiful moment of shared intimacy, has gone straight into this stranger’s arms.

Did Hannibal miscalculate? He thought by gently pushing Will away, he would drive the man to feel desperate for his touch, for his approval, for his kiss. He would provide a platform of reason and stability in an unsteady and frightening world, for a Will pushed far beyond the point Hannibal had ever truly intended.

“Mr. Graham,” says Frederick, gently, “you have a visitor.”

“Hello, Dr. Lecter,” says Will, dully.”

“Are you feeling well enough for a visitor?” asks Dr. Chilton, and Will huffs a laugh as he stands, allowing his blanket to fall in a heavy pile against the wall.

“Yeah. Thank you, Frederick. And thank you again for the blanket. I wish it were heavier, but it does help.”

“Of course, Will.” He turns to Hannibal and clears his throat. “Please remember to stay on this side of the white line. This conversation will be monitored. You may return to the security booth when you are ready to leave. If Mr. Graham indicates he would like for you to leave, an orderly will be sent to escort you.”

Hannibal blinks, slowly, and then slightly inclines his head. “Of course. I understand.”

“In which case, I will take my leave,” says Dr. Chilton. “Will, I will see you for our session this afternoon.”

“Thank you,” says Will again, and then Frederick is gone, bustling down the hall.

Will is just watching him now. He wishes he knew what Will could see. There was something, clearly—the way his eyes sometimes caught on something around Hannibal’s silhouette and followed it, the way his expression sometimes shifted when Hannibal’s line of thought pivoted to something else.

It did not feel as though his mind were being read, exactly. But it did feel as though he were being read, and he did not care for the implications.

Will doesn’t say anything, and he’s frowning. Fidgeting. He doesn’t know why Hannibal is here. He never seems to. That is, in its way, more distressing than anything.

“Hello, Will,” he says, standing precisely at the edge of the white line. “I imagine the news of the mistrial has not been easy for you.”

“I think it was probably harder for the judge’s family,” Will says, stiffly.

“It is more important for you to be concerned with yourself at the moment, Will.”

The closer Will gets to the barrier, the stronger the scent of the orderly becomes. Will wraps his hands around the bars and frowns.

“I’m not concerned about myself. This is where I should be.”

There’s something on his breath. A hint of Will’s own release, hours old, as though he hadn’t brushed his teeth the morning after a tryst of some kind. Perhaps if it had been merely kisses and physical closeness, Hannibal wouldn’t feel this way. But Will belongs to him. After all his hard work, everything he had done to open Will’s eyes, he would not allow this to be a failure so complete it ends with Will fully in the arms—and the bed—of another man.

Hannibal deliberately softens his voice, and his expression, though he knows Will can tell there is something roaring beneath the surface.

“Will. Please. Remember what I promised you.”

Will steps back from the bars. “Didn’t you say it was best for us to keep a distance, Dr. Lecter?”

“Will—”

“You don’t see me barging into your office or showing up on your doorstep,” Will says, and his back is pressed against the far wall. “So why did you bother coming to see me?”

“Because you are my friend,” says Hannibal, quietly. “And I thought you might appreciate the company.”

“I don’t need your company, doctor. And you don’t want my friendship.”

“Will. There is nothing I value more than your friendship.”

Will huffs a laugh. “You have too much sense for that to be true.”

Hannibal licks his lips and shifts from foot to foot. “Perhaps I should come back at a different time.”

“Yeah. I’m in one of my moods. I get those now. Real fun to be around.” He frowns at the floor. “I don’t expect you to put up with any of it, Hannibal. I won’t inflict myself upon you. Just… don’t visit anymore, and you’ll never have to see me again. It’s that easy.”

Hannibal’s jaw clenches. This was not supposed to happen.

“Will,” he says, evenly, “I will be back to visit you in a few days. You are very important to me and I will not abandon you.”

“Yes. And no. And nearly,” Will murmurs, perhaps too low for the microphones to pick up. He looks up for a moment to meet Hannibal’s eyes. “You should abandon me,” he says. “I’m not the same as I was. And you know that. And you hate it. I don’t understand why you hate it so much but you do and eventually that will turn into hatred of me. As it should.”

“I will never hate you, Will. I will help you regain whatever you can, and I will relearn how to appreciate the man that you become when all is said and done. It is… tragic and unfair that you have been so affected. But we will do all we can. Together.”

“Together,” Will repeats, with a hopeful little lilt.

“I will come see you again soon.”

“Can you… bring pictures of my dogs?”

Hannibal feels a twinge in his chest and clears his throat. “I will do what I can. Dr. Bloom is caring for them. I’m sure she would allow me to take some photographs, though I would need to consult with Dr. Chilton as to whether or not there are limitations or rules regarding passing such photos to… patients.”

Will nods, crestfallen, and slumps down into the pile of weighted blanket against the wall. He works to pull it up around his shoulders and then retreats into his own mind, with nothing but a final,

“Goodbye, Dr. Lecter,”

to indicate his awareness of the world around him.

Hannibal is, in a word, livid.

Not only is his Will more broken and more withdrawn from him, Will is also receiving physical and sexual comfort from a stranger who committed an amateur crime which could very well have cost Will his trial, had anyone managed to convince him to use it as evidence the Copycat was still at large. This simply will not stand.

The Ripper rips. Not a sounder of three, but five.

Simultaneously, Dr. Hannibal Lecter sends invitations to an intimate dinner party, where the BAU team, Dr. Bloom, Dr. Chilton, and Byron Metcalfe will be in attendance, as well as a few hand-picked acquaintances from the Baltimore cultural society.

He goes to visit Will very regularly during these weeks, while the trial is repeatedly pushed back given that all the key witnesses are busy hunting down the Chesapeake Ripper. It feels as though every time he goes to see his darling Will, there is more and more of that horrific scent in the cell with him. It permeates his clothing. The oils from wandering fingers almost shimmer on his skin. Hannibal knows it’s just his mind playing tricks, but he swears he can see almost the outline of arms wrapped tightly around Will from behind, and cold eyes staring over his shoulder.

Matthew knows from the visitor’s logs that Lecter has been here, and been here a lot. He also knows from the papers that the Ripper is out there, busy little bee, up to something. He figures he doesn’t have much time left before Lecter frees his gorgeous Will, however he plans on doing that, so after many mouth-watering nights of hand- and throat-related delights, Matthew decides it’s time.

He gets himself ready, because it’ll be a hell of a lot easier explaining bruises and cum on his body than on a patient’s. He puts a few sachets of medical-grade lubricant in his pocket before the night shift starts, while the evening nurse is making the rounds to hand out nighttime medications.

Then, he checks each cell to make sure everybody is on their best behavior, logs their whereabouts, and heads down to see Will.

“Hey, gorgeous,” Matthew says, opening the silent cell door—fresh grease on the hinges—and leaning against it. “How’s your day been goin’?”

“Busy on another floor again?” asks Will, seated on his cot. His legs are crossed beneath him, and he’s got a book in his lap. “You don’t get to see me during second shift much anymore.”

“I see you all the time,” Matthew says, his grin wide and toothy. “I check the cameras whenever I get a chance. Think I could get through a whole shift without looking at you? Fuck no. I’d wind up right beside you in here.”

“Wouldn’t be so bad,” Will hedges, with a quick, furtive glance and a blush Matthew wants to lick off his cheeks.

He kneels on the floor in front of Will, the plug shifting inside of him, and he bites his lip just briefly before he says, “I got a surprise for you, cher. You and me. Everything we need, if you’re ready. But you’re gonna have to be patient until after lights out.”

Will swallows. “Um. Matt, no one’s ever—”

“Don’t worry, baby. I got us covered.” He lifts one of Will’s hands and kisses it. “I want you. I want to feel how deep you can get. We can try it the other way when you’re out of here, if you want to.”

“Okay,” says Will, faintly.

“Is this somethin’ you’re ready for?” Matthew tries not to sound anxious, he knows it’ll just get into Will’s head, but he also knows Will’s gonna pick up on it anyway. “It’s okay if you’re not. I can just touch you instead. Taste you, if you’re up for that. Or, I can hold you, until you fall asleep. Whatever you’re okay with, beautiful.”

Will lets out a shaky breath and squeezes his hand. “I want… to be close to you. I just… I don’t want to hurt you.”

Matthew chuckles and lays his head against Will’s knee. “Oh, don’t you worry, baby. If you do, worst that happens is I finish first.”

Will scoffs and leans back, his shoulders against the wall. “You don’t take anything seriously, do you?”

Matthew crosses his arms on top of Will’s crossed legs and rests his chin atop his forearms. He can feel Will twitching inside his jumpsuit, and he smirks.

“Not really,” he says. “Except you, I’m dead serious about.”

Will picks up his book and holds it in front of his face. “Fuck off.”

“I’m seriously serious,” Matthew argues, his thumbs circling against Will’s calves and ankles. “Never been more serious about anything in my life. Why do you think I want you so bad?”

“Because you can’t get a date outside of a mental institution?”

“I can and I have,” Matthew says, rolling his eyes. “It’s just so fuckin’ pointless, y’know? What, I go on three dates with somebody, go back to their place for a lackluster fuck with no feeling behind it and then one of us ghosts? They’ll never get me, Will. But you do.”

Will peeks disapprovingly over the top of his book. “And what if this turns out the same way?”

Matthew blinks. “What?”

Will sets his book aside. “What if this turns out to be another ‘lackluster fuck’ for you? Because I don’t know what I’m doing. You understand that, right? I’ve had three girlfriends in my life and a handful of one-night stands. None of them were men, and none of them were interested in anal sex. So I have no frame of reference for what you’re asking me to do, from either direction.”

Matthew snorts and tilts his head to the side, his ear pressed against his elbow. “You’re adorable. It’s not all that different from fucking a woman, Will. Just takes more prep work. All of which I already did. You’re welcome. And as for you bein’ worried about hurting me, fun fact about your very handsome friend Matthew Brown?” He gestures vaguely to himself. “Bit of a sadomasochist, if you couldn’t tell. I like pain. I want you to hurt me. I want you to dig your fuckin’ fingers into my hips and leave great big scratches down my chest.”

Will frowns. “But… won’t somebody…?”

“Ah, who the fuck is gonna notice? It’s not like I get dressed in the locker room. And even if they saw it, they wouldn’t assume it was you. But me, I can’t touch you. ‘Cause I’d leave marks, and somebody would see those. We don’t want any investigations kicking off.”

His watch begins to beep, and Will swallows as Matt stands up (biting his lip again as the plug moves).

“Okay. Lights out in ten. I’ll be back in, say, twenty?”

Will nods and tilts his face up, eyes averted, shyly asking for a kiss. Matthew obliges, sliding his tongue between Will’s teeth, tasting the cheap mint toothpaste and the bitterness of Will’s evening pills. He kisses the tip of Will’s nose before he heads back up the hallway, keys jingling, to input the shift-change notes and flip the lights off.

He considers the cameras. He doesn’t want anyone to see the recordings, obviously, but he wants to watch them later. He records over the time he just spent with Will, empty hallway, him walking up and down, all shit he’s had stored and prepared for days like this. It’s so easy, when he put the system together himself. He decides to set the cameras and mics to maintenance mode for a couple of hours, but the one in front of Will’s cell he sets to record to a thumb drive. He’ll scrub it before he leaves, of course, and it’ll only be video, no audio, but it’d be a shame to lose such a valuable memento.

He makes his way back down the hall, checking on the others as he goes. No trouble tonight. Good.

He opens up Will’s cell and slides the door closed. Will has been pacing, but he stops when Matt comes in.

“Where’s your head at, gorgeous?” Matthew says, softly. “You just tell me how you want me, and I’m yours.”

Will pauses for just a moment, then his expression sharpens and he stalks across the room. Matthew is startled enough by the full shift in body language that he backs up two steps and into the bars, where Will grabs him by the front of his uniform and pulls him into a hard, unforgiving kiss. Matthew groans softly into his mouth and Will quite suddenly yanks at his hair, which is barely long enough for such a grip.

“Be quiet,” Will hisses. “You want somebody to hear you?”

“Kind of,” says Matthew, licking his lips.

Will’s grip tightens fractionally and Matthew’s eyelids flutter.

“Well I don’t,” says Will, low and menacing. “Chilton hears a word about how far this has gone, you’re getting fired and where does that leave me?”

“I can be quiet, sir,” Matthew whispers. “So quiet.”

“Good,” murmurs Will. “That’s good. Now turn around.”

Matthew obeys, thrumming with anticipation, his hands finding a natural hold on the bars. Will checks his pockets and finds the little lubricant packets, warmed by body heat, and makes a soft sound of either appreciation or just acknowledgment of the forethought. Then, Will tugs his scrubs down to his thighs.

The caress of his callused fingers upon Matthew’s bare skin is intoxicating. He shudders, breathing shallowly through his mouth in order to stay quiet. Those fingers trail up and down his thighs, squeeze his glutes, press against the plug inside of him. He whines once, softly, and the movement stops.

“You said you could be quiet,” Will reminds him, and Matthew nods. “Good.” The fingers circle the base of the plug and take hold of it, rotating it gently. Matthew’s body responds, but he keeps his voice in check. “Have you been wearing this all day?” Matthew nods. More or less. It had to be taken out a few times and re-lubricated. Will begins to pull at the plug, firmly but slowly. “We can do better,” he says.

As the plug slides free, Matthew lets out a long, shuddering breath and tightens his grip on the bars. He’s sweating a little already. Will opens one of the sachets of lube and dribbles it on Matthew’s aching, empty hole. He massages it in, replacing the slightly tacky lubricant from a bit earlier with fresh, slick gel, and three of his fingers comfortably slide in and out. He hums, apparently happy with this, and opens another packet.

Matthew arches his back, holding tight to the bars, his breathing now ragged. Will’s body drapes over his, until his mouth is beside Matthew’s ear.

“Are you going to be able to stay quiet for me?”

Matthew nods, vigorously, and his knuckles are white around the bars. Will kisses the side of his jaw and then stands straight, one hand digging into Matthew’s hip, the other guiding his cock into Matt’s body.

The stretch is exactly how he imagined it would be. It feels like he’s being split in half, even after all that preparation. He locks his throat and glances up at the camera, opening his mouth in a wide, silent moan, his eyes rolling, his hips thrusting back to take more. Will snaps forward, seating himself fully, and Matthew trembles and sweats and clenches around him.

Part of him wants to keep playing it up for the tape, but, fuck, it really is distracting having a cock this big rearranging his guts.

Will pauses, his thumb gentling on Matthew’s hip, the other rubbing just so at Matthew’s lower back, and Matt has to glance back over his shoulder to smile. Will looks a little nervous, but a little reassurance gets him going again.

He starts to thrust, shallow and quiet. Matthew knows that’s smarter, but he can’t wait for the day they can fuck as loud as they want, flesh slapping on flesh, Will panting and Matt howling his name. Christ.

He tilts his hips just a little, and suddenly every thrust is dragging against his prostate. He has to bite his lips to stop the noises this time, and Will digs his fingers into Matthew’s hips as though he’s trying to drive him over the edge after less than ten minutes.

Maybe he is. Will’s starting to tremble, and his thrusts are growing erratic. Oh, the fact he’s so close already, Matt can’t take it. He’s been so lonely for so long. They both have.

“Will—” he breathes, and his beautiful, his gorgeous, his Will almost instantly shudders and spills inside him, filling him just the way he’d wanted (or, halfway, at least).

Matthew is not far behind, with Will still twitching inside of him and thoughts of the future swirling around in his head. He, however, fills a far less satisfying condom, which he ties off and wraps in a tissue in his pocket for later disposal.

Will is tired now, and they clean up as quickly and as well as they are able, with a few wet-wipes and a hand towel which will go to the laundry tomorrow. Matthew climbs into the cot beside Will and holds him, stroking his hair, kissing his forehead.

“I’m sorry. That was… fast. It was just—”

“Hey, don’t apologize. It was intense for me, too. You felt so fuckin’ good, I could barely keep it together,” Matthew says, softly. “I can’t wait until we don’t have to be quiet.”

“Yeah,” murmurs Will. “My house is in the middle of nowhere. We could be as loud as you want. As long as we don’t bother the dogs.”

“Looking forward to it,” Matthew says, and he stays until Will is smiling at his dreams.

Hannibal can tell, two nights before the dinner party, that Will and his orderly have consummated their relationship. Something in the way Will moves, light and airy, his heart full, his smile shy and soft and entirely unwilling to meet Hannibal’s eyes.

Will stiffens, though. Somehow, he realizes that Hannibal knows.

“Have you found your own comforts, then?” Hannibal says, softly.

“It’s…” He licks his lips. “I just needed—”

“Please, Will.” Hannibal closes his eyes. “There was a world where things could have been different. Perhaps when you have returned to that world, we will see.”

“You were the one who told me—Hannibal!”

But Hannibal is already striding back down the long hallway, lost in the mindlessness of his rage. Two days. That is all he must survive. Two more days and then this hellish incarceration will end.

He cannot go back to see Will until after he has been freed. He cannot walk back into that sex den, reeking of a man who has no idea the quality of the creature he is enjoying. It will be far too difficult to maintain his composure.

He throws himself into his preparations. The party must go off without a hitch. There is only one singular goal, and it should be relatively easy to achieve. However, the BAU team has begun to grow suspicious, in their own way. Not of him, but of the timing of the killings, and of the veracity of the claims against Will. Inevitably, this will lead them to question all those close to Will, who may potentially have had a hand in his framing, and that, of course, will lead back to Dr. Hannibal Lecter.

As such, he needs a bulletproof alibi for this next display. Something that will place him fully above reproach. Or, rather, someone.

The evening of the dinner party, Hannibal wears a rather somber suit for his tastes. He wishes to give the impression that he is serving fellow guests at a funeral. His jacket is a rich blue, so dark it appears black in certain light. There was no stated dress code, but everyone else appears to have had the same general idea. All the dresses and suits are dark, muted, and understated, even those of his high society guests. 

The chatter at the party is equally as muted. All of the talk is about the trial. It makes Hannibal’s teeth ache from grinding. 

All anyone can talk about is how tragic it is, what has happened to Will. How unbelievable it is. How they do not, in fact, believe it at all. Beverly Katz mentions seeing Will, and Jack doesn’t glare or even shoot her a reproachful look. He simply listens, morosely, as she describes how much more broken and withdrawn he is every time she has seen him. 

“I just can’t imagine how he’s handling the mistrial,” says Alana.

Hannibal sighs. “Not well, I’m afraid. I have been visiting as often as I can recently, in hopes of offsetting some of the despair. Unfortunately… there is only so much support one can give from the outside.”

“He has been… responsive to therapy,” Frederick says, slowly. “But, much of what you have seen is less to do with his situation and more to do with the permanent damage to his brain.”

Hannibal tries not to clench his fist, or his jaw. He instead makes a soft, sad sound and takes a sip of his wine. 

“I still can’t believe we missed something so serious,” Alana says, her lip trembling. “If we could have… if we’d realized—”

“You mustn’t blame yourself,” Hannibal says. “There was simply no way to know until the scans came back.”

“But we knew he was behaving strangely and he was hearing things and… damn it!” She stands, tears gathered at the corners of her eyes. “Please excuse me. I just need a few minutes.”

She leaves the table, and the despair creeps up even further.

This is a terrible dinner party, to Hannibal’s mind, but it is at the very least serving its purpose.

The gathering does not last much longer beyond that. Everyone has eaten, but even Hannibal’s incredible dishes are not enough to overcome the ashy flavor of gloom and guilt. He sends them all home with their desserts in little boxes, having anticipated the possibility that things would end early.

All the guests leave, apart from Alana. She is still in the study, and he can hear her plinking away at the harpsichord.

Perfect.

He comes to sit beside her, quietly, and plays a short, gentle melody. She sighs and drinks a glass of whiskey—the kind he reserved, normally, for Will. He bites back his annoyance. She is seeking comfort in small things. He can allow her that, if it serves his ends.

When he has finished playing, the silence stretches between them until Alana decides to break it.

“I feel like we’re burying him,” she says, her voice cracking. Tears spill down her cheeks. “It feels like… even if we can prove he didn’t do it, he doesn’t care. It’s not… it’s not him anymore, Hannibal. How did we miss this?”

“None of us are more than what we are, Alana. We are only human. We can’t hold ourselves to impossible standards of perfection.” He closes the lid over the harpsichord’s keys. “I blame myself for this.”

“Hannibal—”

“I believed his symptoms were just the stress of his work, the influence of the minds being forced into his. Had I considered the alternative for even a moment—”

Alana covers his hand with her own. “If I’m not allowed to talk like that, neither are you.” She wipes at her eye and smiles, though shakily. “Let’s be fair, here. I knew him a lot longer than you.”

His laugh is low and rich and warm and deeply, deeply sad. “It would be my greatest wish for anything about this situation to be fair, Alana. All we can do is wait, and in the meantime try to live our own lives with care and intention.”

She is still holding his hand, and watching his face. They are very close on the bench, by design. He knows his hair is falling softly over his forehead, and his usual veneer of control has cracked. He is allowing her to see some of his true grief.

“I’ve never seen you like this,” Alana says, quietly.

“I have lost patients,” Hannibal says. “Never friends.”

“Back in med school, you were always so sure you’d never lose anyone.”

“I was.”

Her thumb strokes the back of his hand and she smiles at him, her eyes big and blue and wet with unshed tears. “All the interns believed you were this… infallible, unapproachable being.”

He huffs. “Yes, well. They believed a great many things which turned out not to be true. They were convinced we were having an affair.”

Alana pauses and says, “Why didn’t we?”

Hannibal smiles.

Chapter Text

Matthew can’t stay with him on the weekends. That’s okay. They’ll see each other on Monday evening. Saturday morning, near the end of Matthew’s overnight shift, they lay together in the quiet before everyone else wakes up. Matthew kisses his forehead and his cheek and his mouth, and whispers things both incredibly sweet and extremely filthy, and Will’s face is blazing hot beneath Matt’s roving lips.

“I’ll see you Monday, gorgeous,” Matthew says, and closes the cell door behind him. “Lights up in twenty.” He pauses. “Will?”

Will sits up and cocks his head, smiling. Matthew is surrounded by that warm red and turquoise and gold, but there’s a thrum of something like molten metal threading through the rest, the appearance of something that would burn if touched. Will knows what it’s supposed to be, but he also knows that it isn’t, quite.

“Yeah?” he says.

Matthew fidgets and glances at the floor, his lips quirked up on one side. “I, uh. I’ll be thinkin’ about you all weekend.”

Will’s grin is crooked, almost pained, and his nostrils flare. “I know you will. I’ll be okay. I’ll see you in a few days.”

“Yeah. Okay.” He chews his lip. “Hey, Will.”

“Hm?”

“I um…” He takes hold of one of the bars, his thumb tapping against it. “I just wanted to say… you mean a lot to me, y’know?”

“Yeah,” says Will, gently. “I know.”

“Okay. That’s all. Be good. Don’t want to come back and find you in solitary. Be real hard to sneak in.”

“I promise, I won’t cause any trouble.”

“Good. I’ll see you soon, cher.”

And he’s gone.

And it shouldn’t hurt like it does.

He had never expected to find comfort within these terrible gray walls, but Matthew is an unexpected bright spot. Will can ignore the fact that he was only interested because of the danger and the fact that he’s a murderer because he’s… warm, and fun, and he brought a sense of stability to Will’s chaotic life. He feels lucky that Matthew took an interest in him, considering he was the only person in any position to provide the kind of comfort Will desperately needs right now.

Sure, there’s another voice Will sometimes thinks ought to be rumbling in his ear. And, sure, there are other hands, larger hands, he thinks should be holding him by the jaw. But that’s a future that no longer exists. He can remember their kiss, and the possibility of others, and still find happiness elsewhere.

With a homicidal maniac.

He snorts aloud and wraps the blanket around his shoulders.

The weekend is quiet, at first. Saturday passes without any upheaval or really anything remarkable at all, beyond Barney giving him an extra library book.

But Sunday.

Sunday afternoon there are several sets of determined feet marching down the hallway, followed closely by the pitter-patter of Frederick’s fine leather shoes and the rapid tick of his cane against the linoleum as he tries to keep pace.

“Hello, Jack,” says Will, without looking up from his book.

“Will. Has anyone told you what’s been going on?”

Will shrugs one shoulder. “With my trial? No. I haven’t heard anything new.”

“There’s not going to be a trial anymore,” says Jack, firmly. “You were framed. We have proof.”

Will freezes.

Beverly steps closer to the bars. “Abel Gideon was abducted from the hospital sometime Friday night.” She holds up an envelope, shaking photos out into her hand. She shuffles through them as she speaks. “His security guard was gutted and strung up over his empty bed. Strung up with fishing line. From your house. And there were flies attached to the lines.”

“Flies like yours,” Jack says.

“Well, like the ones we thought were yours, but always seemed a little… fishy,” says Jimmy Price, to the audible disgust of Zeller.

Beverly points to different flies in the photos as she says, “These five are from the Copycat victims. These five are the most recent Ripper victims, not including Abel Gideon. This one had brain matter from the judge. This one had skin and hair from Abigail Hobbs.” She glances up at Crawford, then back through the bars. She points to the last two flies. “This one had bone splinters from Miriam Lass. And… this one had hair and nail clippings from you, Will. Do you see what we’re saying? They’re all Ripper victims.”

Will can’t breathe. His lungs are locked up. He hunches over, trembling, his arms wrapped around his body. Bile rises in the back of his throat.

He did it. He did it, he killed them, he ate her, what are they saying? What could this mean? How could the Ripper—? Is he the—? No, no, that doesn’t make any—! Somebody did this? Somebody else, somebody put him here, somebody… How is this possible, how could he, how, how? He did it, he did it, he did it he did it he—

Frederick injects him with a sedative and massages the muscle of his arm in order to encourage the medicine to spread. He is speaking, low and reproachful.

“It was highly inappropriate to come here all at once, let alone to show him those photos. Proof of his innocence is not enough to cure what was done to him.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” Jack barks. 

“The Ripper doesn’t make mistakes, Jack,” says Will, hoarsely. “He says I’m a killer. And he doesn’t make mistakes.”

Frederick absently rubs Will’s shaking back and clicks his tongue behind his teeth. He speaks softly, but he’s bleeding the reddish purple of strained irritation into the air around him like slit veins.

“Agent Crawford. Someone went through a great deal of trouble to warp Mr. Graham’s reality so completely that he fully believes he is a killer. It will take intensive therapy to reverse. Showing him those photos is not going to convince his altered mind that he deserves to walk free.”

“Convinced or not, he’s getting out of here. He’ll have some time to rest and recover, but then he and I will catch the bastard that did this. Together. I’m not letting him down this time.” There is a long pause, and then Crawford leans in and says, “Do you know someone who might have been capable of… warping his reality this way?”

Frederick opens his mouth, closes it, and shakes his head.

Jack sighs and speaks quietly for a moment with his team, while Frederick continues to rub Will’s back as though they are friends. At this point, perhaps they are. It is a comfort, in any case, and Will is no longer one to turn away comforts.

“Will,” says Jack, crouching in front of the cot. “I’m on your side. I want you to know that. The whole team, we’re on your side. The Ripper doesn’t get to dictate how any of us see you. Okay?”

Will nods, slow like his head is trapped in ballistic gel. “Okay.” 

Jack squeezes his shoulder. “Your lawyer will want to talk to you about a case against the state, and the Bureau. I suggest you take his advice.”

“I suggest you get a different lawyer,” murmurs Frederick.

“I’d be happy to make a statement on your behalf. We can talk about it on the drive out to your house,” says Jack.

“No,” says Will. “No, I… can’t leave. I can’t… I’m supposed to be here.”

“You’re supposed to be at home, Will. With your dogs. Alana is bringing them first thing tomorrow morning.”

“Tomorrow,” says Will, faintly. “Tomorrow is Monday.”

“Yes,” says Jack. “You’re gonna have some time off and then we’re gonna offer you your job back at the FBI. Teaching, if you want to go back to that. Consulting with me, I hope. Helping people. But this time you make the rules. I promise.”

“Fifty bucks that lasts less than a month,” mutters Brian Zeller, and both Price and Katz smack him.

“I can’t leave,” Will repeats.

Frederick pats his shoulder and stands, gesturing for the others to shuffle out of the room. “Will. You may stay tonight, and tomorrow morning I will drive you home myself. That way, I will have the opportunity to go over all of your discharge paperwork, referrals, and medication regimen, and you will have more time to acclimate. Is that an acceptable compromise?”

“But… I can’t just leave.”

Their emotions are a tumultuous smear he has not been able to bring himself to look at properly. There is guilt, and regret, and fear, and uncertainty, and genuine care. There is hope, and confidence, and unwavering support, and a tiny dark thread of despair. It looks like a dark cafe at night, spots of warm orange and yellow surrounded by greys and blacks and dark purples and thick reds and deep blues, with the occasional glitter of green smeared through the black.

“This is an unlawful hold, Will,” says Jack. “Legally you’re supposed to leave right now. Dr. Chilton is taking a risk letting you stay.”

“Yeah,” he says, with numb lips. He stares at his hands, flexing them, and frowns. “I can’t keep the blanket, can I?”

He can hear the heartbreak and the pity surge in the hall outside the open cell door from the shuffle of feet and the soft inhalations.

“Of course you can keep it,” says Frederick, gently. “And I will take the liberty of ordering you a heavier one. With a cover, this time. It is the least I can offer.” He pauses, then says, “I will let you stay, Will, but I will not leave you in a locked room now that you have been released. The door will be closed, but you will be able to come and go as you please.”

“I can’t go anywhere,” Will says, quietly. “I don’t… I need to think.”

“Of course,” says Frederick. “Please ask the staff if you need anything. In the morning, we will process your discharge and I will take you home. For the moment, might I suggest that you rest, if you are able?”

“Yeah. I’m… I’ll do that. Thank you.”

“We’re here when you’re ready, Will,” says Beverly.

“Yeah, you’ll be back in action before you know it,” says Price.

“Or you could quit. I mean, I’d quit,” says Zeller, and it actually makes Will laugh (creaky and awkward though it may be).

“He’s not quitting until we catch the bastard who did this,” says Jack. “Do what you need to do to get back in the saddle, Will. We’ll talk soon.”

What he needs to do? Will buries his face into his knees and he starts to see the colors of his own feelings swirling behind his eyes. Panic, a jarring orange. Fear, a startling yellow. Self-loathing, a deceptively rich smear of umber. Melancholy, almost denim blue, muted and pastel. Bile-green nausea. And rage, crimson and thin and insidious like ink on top of oil, spreading, leeching into the others.

He doesn’t know what he needs to do. All he knows is that he still feels guilty. Even looking at the pictures, seeing the proof with his own eyes, doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t take away the taste of blood.

He doesn’t see Garrett Jacob Hobbs sitting at the end of his bed anymore, but the antlered creature’s claws still click against the tile in his peripheral awareness. 

He knows he fed it, and he knows what it eats.

He curls up on his cot, his weighted blanket folded on top of him, and it’s not enough.

He wishes Hannibal was here. He wishes Matthew was here.

He wishes his dogs were here, all of them, piled around him, warm and snuffling and wagging their tails. His vision gets blurry and his eyes start to burn. Tears pour like molten lead down his cheeks.

He wants to see them. He wants to be back with his little family, in his little house, with their little noses pressed against his hands and his cheeks and their excited little yips keeping the silence at bay.

He wants the sound of their nails on the floorboards to distract from the creature stalking, always stalking, a kohl-black pool wibbling in the air around it, its eyes dead and milky like the corpses of the people he—

No—not he.

The Ripper.

He never actually killed anyone, apart from Garrett Jacob Hobbs. 

The Chesapeake Ripper framed him.

Reality is a shattered mess of mirror shards at his feet, and here he is, a bootless, witless fool. Somehow, he’s been backed into a corner. And, somehow, the Ripper himself has swept a path through the shards, to apparent safety.

But… the Ripper is so careful. So careful, so patient, so precise.

Framing Will Graham.

Freeing Will Graham.

Why do the former at all if he planned to do the latter?

What was the purpose?

He squeezes his eyes shut and the colors swirl. Confusion, white like daisy petals. Frustration, red-purple like innards. And a thrill, like incandescent gold.

The Ripper wanted him to think he was a killer. He had gone through a lot of trouble to make it so. He’d framed Will and allowed the trial to proceed until Will took the stand himself, and then he had killed the judge, begun a back-to-back set of sounders which concluded with Abel Gideon’s abduction, and gift-wrapped all the evidence necessary to exonerate Will Graham and take back the credit for his own work.

There was intent Will simply wasn’t seeing. The Ripper is too careful to have done this without a great deal of consideration. He had always planned on freeing Will, clearly. He had just been waiting for something to happen.

And either he had succeeded in whatever he’d set out to accomplish, and he knew he had succeeded after Will took the stand, or he had seen that he had failed and decided to exonerate Will anyway. Perhaps he thought Will would be more interesting as an opponent than Jack.

Or…

Perhaps what he had seen was that Will was broken.

Perhaps when he had watched the proceedings, seen Will’s brain scans, heard the neurologist discuss in detail the permanent effects of the damage…

Perhaps when Will had had another screaming, incoherent panic attack, begging for forgiveness for looking, the Ripper had been dissatisfied with the results of his work.

Perhaps he had decided to discard his broken little puppet with its shattered glass eyes and its cracked porcelain skull and the stench of melted plastic hair like a cloak around its aggressively disappointing silhouette and take center stage personally once again.

How could anyone believe that this was responsible for his masterpieces? Absurd. Laughable. A pity, that Will Graham—a man with such potential, had he not wasted it all—should be so very underwhelming, in the end. Hardly worth the effort to frame.

Will pauses. That doesn’t make any sense. That can’t be right. 

He licks his lips, tasting salt. He bites down and digs his nails into his biceps through the fabric of his jumpsuit. Pain grounds him, cuts through the swirl of color with a bright glimmer of diamond clarity.

Try again.

The Ripper doesn’t feel pity. He’s curious.

The Ripper isn’t disappointed. He’s angry.

He wants credit for his own work, yes, but he’s far too patient to need credit. He could have allowed Will to be convicted and imprisoned for years before doing this, even on death row.

Which means he wants Will to be free. 

It isn’t just about showing the world Will isn’t responsible for the Copycat killings. The Ripper put a stop to the trial because he didn’t actually want Will to be prosecuted.

He stopped the trial by killing the judge.

The Ripper kills the rude.

Will’s lip splits. He slowly releases the pressure from his teeth, all the while tasting his own blood.

Red, red rage in the courtroom, overwhelming enough on its own to throw him into a panic. 

Hannibal Lecter’s rage. 

Matthew had been angry, but Hannibal had been… incandescent. 

He had promised Will he would be free.

He had seen Will more often than anyone else, but somehow never noticed a seizure or a blackout. 

“Did you just smell me?”

Phantom touches upon his cheeks and throat. A tattered wisp of sense memory that wets his mouth and stings his eyes.

The dogs wouldn’t fuss or bark at someone they knew.

A surgeon. Brilliant, by all accounts.

“I channeled my passion for anatomy into the culinary arts.”

Fits the profile, he thinks.

It can’t be him, he thinks back.

He fits, he insists.

Yes. And no. And… nearly.

Will chews his bleeding lip, tasting Hannibal’s mouth. 

Tasting sausage and eggs.

The Ripper is a cannibal.

Protein scramble. Homemade sausage. 

“I’m very careful about what I put into my body.”

Cassie Boyle’s lungs. 

Will’s mouth floods with saliva and he swallows back what he hopes is nausea.

But he feels no disgust toward the Ripper. He never has. The claws click gently on the tile beneath the bed.

The disgust is for himself.

Because even now, his eyes stinging with fresh tears, his body wracked with silent sobs, his brain a swirling mire of disconnected fogbank memories colliding in the dark, he thinks only that Hannibal Lecter is supposed to be his guide, but he has somehow failed a test he was never aware he was taking and now the lighthouse keeper is gone. 

And the tragedy consumes him, and the guilt consumes him, and Will Graham is devoured by the beastly thing below.

Fredrick comes to wake him just after shift change in the morning. He’s given a stack of clean clothing taken from his home, apparently brought yesterday by Jack. There’s also a paper bag with the personal items he had on him when he was arrested.

“They were in an evidence bag,” Frederick admits. “I thought perhaps it would be… less difficult for you this way.”

Will walks uneasily at Frederick’s side down the long, yawning hallway. He should not be free from his restraints. He should not be leaving this place.

I’m not guilty, he tells himself. It feels like a lie. He knows it isn’t.

He’s shown to the employee bathroom, where there are a few small shower stalls, some scratchy hospital towels, and a few tiny bottles of multipurpose soap which he stares at for a long time. It’s the sort he might have bought in his old life: twelve-in-one, wash, shampoo, condition, shave, degrease, burn for light in case of emergency like a fucking crayon.

He’d stopped using its like a few months after killing Hobbs. He’d also stopped using his old aftershave, the one his father always sent him for Christmas. The one with the ship on the bottle.

Because Hannibal didn’t like the smell.

He sets the soap down and changes his clothes. He’ll shower at home.

It still makes his brain stutter and skitter, the thought of home. Going home. Being at home. It doesn’t feel right.

He dresses slowly. He’s worn these clothes before, but like the soap it feels like they’re from another life. The jeans are faded and supple because he’s had this specific pair for almost a decade, but they’re a bit snug on his hips. He supposes the medication and the regular meals have probably played a role. The buttons on the flannel are cool and familiar under his fingers, but there’s a dreamlike quality to putting it on over the soft green tee shirt. He should be buttoning up his jumpsuit over something crisp and white that scratches against his skin.

No, he reminds himself, you’re not guilty, you’re going home.

He takes his wallet, his dead cell phone, and his keys from the paper bag and slides them into the appropriate pockets. He leaves the folding knife and his dirty, sweat-stained cotton shirt and boxers at the bottom of the bag.

His fingers feel stiff, claw-like, when he lets the hospital-issued jumpsuit and underclothes fall into the laundry cart. His brain is screaming at him that he’s doing something wrong, they missed something, somebody is messing with him, it’s all a trick, he needs to go back to his cell before— 

He frowns at the cart for a long time before Frederick comes back.

They sit down in Dr. Chilton’s office and Will feels an overwhelming sense of both deja vu and wrong. The last time he was here, it was to discuss Abel Gideon. He was an FBI consultant. He was a professor at Quantico. He was—

You’re going to be all of those things again. You’re free, remember?

He’s handed a stack of paperwork relating to encephalitis and the possibility of recurrence. He’s also given pamphlets for the medications he’s supposed to keep taking. Lamotrigine for seizure prevention and mood stabilization. Low-dose clonazepam, to be taken daily, for anxiety. A higher dose of diazepam as needed for panic attacks.

He’s not allowed alcohol or caffeine anymore, apparently. The risks are numerous and severe.

He doesn’t really care. He’s not going to stop drinking whiskey or coffee. He’ll give up grapefruit, though.

“I would like to discuss the possibility of antidepressants after you have settled in at home,” Frederick says, and hands him another pamphlet. “My hope is that the mood stabilizer will be sufficient, but if it is not, I would advise a targeted medication to address your… darker moods.”

“Okay,” says Will, though he has no intention of coming back for further medication management.

He apparently also has an appointment at Dr. Tyler’s office in about four months for an immunosuppressant infusion. He’s handed the appointment card, which he tucks into the same pocket as his useless phone.

Frederick does spend a decent amount of time providing him discharge instructions as though this had been a legitimate hospital stay and not an imprisonment. Will isn’t bitter; Chilton has actually been nothing but pleasant to him the entire time and has only ever treated him like a patient, not a criminal. It’s just… funny, in a way.

Chilton’s feelings today are an interesting braid of anxiety and relief, with a cinnamon swirl of irritation, though not with Will.

When he’s finished handing over the medication bottles, Frederick stops and the colors around him bleed with regret.

“Will, I wanted to… before you return home, I wanted to be certain you understand a few things about your situation.” He shifts, folding his hands on top of the desk. “You understand that there was permanent damage, of course. But I wish to…” He sighs. “Your driver’s license. It has been suspended as a result of the seizures.”

Will blinks. “But… I don’t have a—”

“It is, unfortunately, irrelevant whether or not you have a seizure disorder. You had multiple seizures as a result of the encephalitis, and you are at risk of future seizures if you are not careful.” He taps his thumbs together, the regret spooling into discomfort. “It is not permanent, necessarily. At your next visit with Dr. Tyler, schedule a follow-up to discuss the reinstatement of your license. He will need to complete an attestation on your behalf that you have been seizure-free for at least six months.”

“I… Frederick, I live in the middle of nowhere. With seven dogs. What if something happens? What if—”

“I would strongly recommend that you employ a temporary aide, Will.”

“With what money? I’ve been locked up in here for almost three months. I don’t know if I’ve got access to anything. I don’t know if my cards work. I don’t even know if my mortgage was being paid.”

“It was,” says Frederick, softly. “As far as I understand it, your father was given control of your accounts. They have been fully surrendered to your control as of this morning. Your lawyer seemed to feel that they had been well-managed.”

Will rubs at his eyes. “Yeah. I guess I should call him.”

“Your father?”

“My lawyer. To talk about the lawsuit. But. Yeah, him too.”

Frederick shuffles through a few more pamphlets on his desk and slides one over to Will. “Here. You very likely qualify for disability services. That may include a certain number of care hours, which you would not have to fund personally.”

“I’ll think about it,” Will says, and stuffs the pamphlet into the paper bag with the medication information and the folding knife and the dirty, sweaty clothes he’d been arrested in.

When he’s done lecturing, Frederick escorts Will out a side entrance, to the employee parking lot, and to his own little silver convertible. 

“I had Marcus load your blankets. The new one is thirty pounds.” Frederick pauses with the passenger door open, as Will is poised to climb in, and quietly says, “I know the provided blanket was… insufficient for you. I hope this one will prove therapeutic.”

And, once again, though Will can’t look at him, he gets enough of the feeling to know that Frederick isn’t pitying: he’s genuinely, deeply regretful, and hopeful, and frustrated at the entire situation.

“Thank you,” Will says, and Frederick closes the door for him.

They are quiet for much of the drive. Will’s eyes are closed, and he’s listening to the blues station on the radio. It’s not exactly what he expected Chilton to listen to, but it feels fitting. He opens his eyes when they get off the freeway. It’s all forests and fields and melting snow.

Frederick’s hands are drumming on the wheel. There’s tension thickening in the car. When Will looks at Chilton’s reflection, the colors are still there, thick and peaked like they’ve been spread by a palette knife.

“Just say what you’re going to say,” Will murmurs. He’s too exhausted to tiptoe around.

Chilton lets out a puff of air from his nose, reluctant, but he says, “Do you remember what I said to Jack Crawford? Or, rather, what I did not?”

“He asked if you knew anyone capable of messing with my head,” Will says. He’s still looking out the window. “You didn’t answer.”

“Yes. Because I thought it unwise to… sling accusations.”

“But you do have one.”

“An answer?”

“An accusation.”

Frederick’s teeth creak in his jaw. “Yes.”

“I know,” says Will, tiredly.

“You know—?”

“I know who you’re talking about.”

Chilton’s grip tightens on the wheel. “Well. Then you know that we are dealing with a madman who was willing to see you burn for his own amusement. Were I in your position, I would pack my things, pack my dogs, and hire someone to move me to a remote location of their choosing.”

“He’s not a madman,” says Will, pressing his forehead against the glass. “If he were a madman, he’d have been caught by now. But he’s not. He’s smart. And he’s patient. And if he thinks anyone has him figured out, he’s going to get rid of them.”

Chilton swallows audibly. “I do not believe I have given him any reason to believe I have suspicions.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t count on what you believe,” Will says, softly.

“Will, do you intend on bringing your concerns to Jack Crawford?”

“No,” he says, without thinking.

There is a long silence, then, “And, pray tell, why not?”

“I could ask you the same question.”

Frederick’s laugh is breathy and a tad hysterical. “Obviously I am terrified. There is not a single shred of proof, apart from the very circumstantial, and if word were to reach him that I had been casting aspersions, I believe he would finish what Gideon started and take the rest of the gift basket straight from the source.”

“No proof,” Will repeats, shrugging one shoulder. “That’s a good enough reason. Take it to Jack with no proof, even if we both go, and best case scenario he leaves it alone and starts paying closer attention. I think we both know Jack Crawford is never going to leave anything Ripper-related alone. More likely, he tries to go digging. He can’t get a warrant with no justification, but he’d fumble around trying to get a to-go box from one of those pretentious dinners so he could test it for—”

Chilton gags. “Oh, God, I’d forgotten—”

Will glances at him and immediately back outside, steadying his breathing. The revulsion, the nausea, the self-loathing, the panic. A terrible green maelstrom.

He swallows around his dry tongue. “You ate there recently, I take it.”

“There was a… dinner party. On Friday. We… mostly spoke of you.”

“On Friday,” says Will. “The night Gideon was abducted.”

“Will. You should run,” says Chilton. His eyes don’t leave the road. There’s an intensity to him now that he’s forced the nausea down. “He clearly has some kind of fixation upon you. It is unwise and unsafe for you to stay.”

Will closes his eyes. “I have to stay, Frederick.”

“Why?”

“Because he’d follow me,” says Will, simply. “There’s nowhere I could go. He’d always find me. At least here, I have allies. Sort of.”

“Not sort of,” Frederick says. There’s iron in his voice. “You have quite a few friends who have been on your side from the beginning.”

“Yeah,” says Will.

Frederick is talking about Jack, and the Team, and Alana, and himself. But Will is thinking about Matthew, and he’s thinking about Hannibal.

When they arrive at Will’s house, the driveway is empty. He supposes his car must have been impounded. He’ll have to get it back at some point, but it doesn’t really matter if he’s not legally allowed to drive it for five more months anyway. There’s some graffiti on the siding, but it’s minimal. Probably too much effort to come all the way out here to vandalize it. The windows are intact, at least.

It feels like his key shouldn’t fit in the lock. Like he’s breaking into the home of some other lonely man, disturbing his solitude. But when the door swings open, it’s the same little house he left. His chair, his couch, his rug, his bed in the living room. His books on the shelf. His boots and his coats by the door. His empty fly-tying desk.

He drops the weighted blankets on the bed. The paper bag crumples beneath them. It doesn’t matter. Chilton hovers near the door, and Will almost laughs at the contained judgment and mild ick. It’s dusty, to be sure. There are webs up in several of the corners. There’s a generally musty smell which would probably elicit the most sophisticated wrinkled nose imaginable from Hannibal.

Will lets out a heavy breath.

“Are you going to be alright?” asks Chilton, from the doorway.

“Probably not,” says Will. “But I’ll make do.”

“If… Should you need anything, please do not hesitate to call.”

He means it. Will nods, his brow furrowed, his lips pressed together.

“Well,” says Chilton, “it is quite a drive back, and I have much to do. I wish you the best of luck, Will. And should you change your mind and take my advice, well, I hear the west coast has many wonderful little towns where one can disappear.”

“Thank you, Frederick. Really.”

“Of course. Take care, Will.”

He hurries off the porch and back to his car, and Will is left with the silence and the medication and the guilt and the fear.

This is the house of a different man now. A lonely man, with impulse control issues and no driver’s license. A man who needs a low dose of benzodiazepines just to make it through the day. A needy, anxious man who isn’t supposed to drink but it’s almost eleven in the morning and he’s seriously considering cracking open the bottle of whiskey under the sink, assuming it’s still there.

He has no way of contacting Matthew, telling him what happened or… asking for his help. Maybe it’s better this way. It’s certainly safer, for both of them. If Jack gets his way, Will is going to be back on the FBI payroll in a matter of weeks. It would be dangerous for them to keep spending time together.

He knows he should probably tell somebody that there’s a murderer working at the hospital. He should tell Jack he has a hunch or something. And he can keep using Frederick’s excuse—there’s no proof—until the stars burn out, and it’s true, but really he just… doesn’t want to. They’re birds of a feather, after all, if only in his altered mind.

He finds his charger and plugs in his phone. It’ll be a while before it’ll turn on but he’s probably got messages from Alana, at least. Maybe from Jack. Maybe something from Hannibal, although after their last conversation he doubts it. That still stings.

It shouldn’t feel like he betrayed Hannibal by taking comfort from Matthew. There was nothing between them, whether one or both of them wished for something or not. But the look in Hannibal’s eyes—how had he even known?—sticks to the inside of his ribcage, heavy and clawing. There had been disbelief, and a dawning realization, and jealousy, and a cold, possessive rage, but there had also been heartbreak and loneliness and hurt.

It also shouldn’t bother him. Hannibal did this to him. Fucked up his entire life. Let him burn. Made him vulnerable. Lied, manipulated, twisted him up. He should be enjoying the memory of that look. Instead, he wishes Hannibal had been the one to bring him home. He wishes Hannibal were here, now, so they could talk.

Not about the Ripper. He cares less and less about the Ripper.

They need to talk about the time they spent together that Will doesn’t remember. Time Hannibal clearly cherishes, despite what he did. Time—a connection—Will desperately wants back.

Gravel crunches outside. He glances at the old alarm clock on the bedside table. It’s a little before noon. The porch creaks under his boots as he stands, hands in his pockets, and waits for Alana Bloom to unload his dogs from her little car.

The pack is about to scatter to the four winds, yipping and barking and hopping like excited pups, but then they catch his scent and swarm him at the bottom of the porch steps. He whistles softly, and they rein themselves in, sitting, scooting in closer, whining for his attention.

There’s a dog he doesn’t recognize.

“Hello,” he says, rubbing her ears between his fingers. “You’re not one of mine.”

“She’s mine,” says Alana. “Her name is Applesauce. She… Well, she likes applesauce.” He doesn’t look at her, so she goes on, her hands tucked into the pockets of her stylish jacket. “I knew they’d let you out. I knew you didn’t do it. You couldn’t have. And I suppose I thought to myself, well, my house is going to be awfully quiet when I give Will all his dogs back. So, I rescued her, to keep me company.”

“That’s good,” says Will. He’s scrubbing his fingernails through Buster’s short white coat, and Buster is wagging his entire body. “Dogs are… good, when you don’t want to be alone.”

There’s an awkward pause, then Alana says, “You don’t have to… Will, you know you have friends who would be happy to look after you for a while. You could stay in someone’s guest room. Mine. Jack’s. Hannibal’s.” There’s something about the way she says Hannibal’s name. He glances up, cautiously, and she takes it as a sign she should continue, with more enthusiasm. “We could help make sure you have a good routine, and make sure you’re not too overwhelmed. We’re just… we’re worried about you being on your own out here. It’ll be a few weeks before you get to go back to work, and in the meantime you’re still at risk. The last thing we want, after everything you’ve been through, is for you to end up back in the hospital. You’d have your pick of places to stay, Jack offered and I spoke with Hannibal this morning.”

Every time she talks about Hannibal, her cheeks get a little rosy and the air around her wibbles with a pink-red stain. She’s worried for Will, certainly, but it’s being overridden by her personal excitement and the butterflies she gets thinking about Hannibal.

His stomach is in knots. He shouldn’t feel betrayed, either. Did Hannibal do this as punishment?

“I’ll figure something out,” he says. He rubs at his stubble and frowns at the dead grass while his dogs frolic in the yard, marking territory they haven’t seen since the last time Alana brought them to Wolf Trap, whenever that might have been. “I don’t want to… get in the way.”

Alana’s blush darkens, and a thread of self-consciousness begins to wind through the colors around her. “You would be more than welcome. It would make us feel better.”

Will furrows his brow, and Winston appears at his side. He sets his hand on top of Winston’s head and finds relief in the texture of the fur, the feel of his furry friend breathing beside him, the stoic loyalty. He sighs.

“Thanks, Alana. But… I want to be at home.”

“Okay,” she says, and her smile is encouraging. There’s still pity, but there’s more relief and validation. “If you need anything at all, you give me a call, okay?”

“I think you’ll be busy enough, with a new relationship,” he says, and her smile stutters. He doesn’t mean to say it out loud, but, “You blush every time you say his name. It’s… obvious.”

“Will, we—it’s new, it, just this weekend, we…” She looks away, up at the sky, and lets out a long, shaky breath. There’s guilt, for some reason. Guilt and dismay. “We were going to tell you.”

“It’s fine. I’m happy for you.” He isn’t. He should warn her. He doesn’t. “It’s good that you found comfort in each other.”

Her smile returns, with some hesitance. “Yeah. It’s… a little odd, after knowing him so long. But it feels like something we should have done a long time ago.”

No doubt Hannibal never saw a point in a relationship with Alana before. Either there’s some other game going on, or the point is that he wishes to hurt Will. He’s a petty, vindictive creature. And Will hopes he’s proud of himself.

“I won’t keep you,” says Will. “I need to… settle back in.”

“I brought you some groceries, I hope that’s okay? I know you don’t have your car back yet.”

“Oh. Yeah.” He huffs a laugh. If he tells her about his suspended license, she’ll tell Hannibal. He doesn’t want to give Hannibal anything. “Thank you.”

She helps carry the groceries into the house, and then gives him a tight, quick hug.

“Call us if you need anything. We’ll check in soon, okay?”

“Yeah. Okay.” As she heads for the door, he adds, “Stay safe.”

She smiles, all warmth and friendliness. “I’ll do my best. You, too.”

“I’ll do my best,” he repeats, and she gathers Applesauce into her little car.

He is left with his pack, with his freedom, with his thoughts, and reality begins to crash down around his shaking shoulders.

Chapter Text

Act Two: Tribulations

The first few days are awful. 

On Monday, after Frederick and Alana have gone, he’s alone with his thoughts and his pack and the fading sounds of the antlered creature he no longer sees.

It’s too quiet, so he calls his lawyer. Metcalfe is already pursuing a settlement on his behalf from both the state and the FBI, but he’s also willing to help get the disability services Frederick talked about.   However, they’d have to find an agency or a qualified individual actually willing to take Will as a client, and that might be tricky.

“Not a lot of media coverage about you being framed. Certainly not as much as there was about you being on trial. Far as most people who hear your name will know, they’d have to be crazy to be alone in a house in the middle of the woods with you. We’ll put in the application and I can push for them to move forward, but unless you can find somebody in private care willing to make the drive, realistically you’re going to struggle with getting help right now. I can get my assistant to work on scheduling you a grocery delivery, pharmacy pickup, whatever you need, and we can tack this on to the lawsuit, needed services you’re being denied because the FBI convinced everybody you’re a murderer.”

“The Ripper had a pretty significant hand in that,” Will murmurs. 

“Yeah, well, when you find him, we’ll sue him, too,” says Metcalfe, and Will almost laughs, considering who Metcalfe actually works for. “I’d say I told you so, but it’s about the last thing you need right now. You’re out, but you still got a bum deal and things are going to be hard for a while.” A beat, then, “Listen, Will. It might be worth getting your side of the story out there. Just… spread the word a little. I’ve gotten calls from a few news stations. If more people know you’re innocent, your life gets easier, that’s all I’m saying.”

“I’ll think about it,” Will says.

“I’ll do my best to help you. Anything you need, Will, truly.”

“Just how big a percentage are you taking, exactly?”

Metcalfe laughs. “Enough that you should feel free to call me for anything you need.”

“Well. There is something else.”

“I’m all ears.”

“I, um… I need help to rehome my dogs.” It aches, but there is no other option. They aren’t safe with him.

Byron pauses. “Are you sure?”

“I’m not really in any condition to take care of them. Not all of them, at least.”

“Okay. Okay, we can help with that, too. And, it’s additional emotional distress.” 

He’s not wrong, but it stings to think of it that way. Will wraps up the conversation as soon as he can.

He sends a text to his father, thanking him and wishing him well. His father reads it, but doesn’t respond. Classic Charlie Graham. Nothin’ to say, won’t say nothin’. It’s not a reproach or anything, he just probably saw it as his duty to manage the accounts until Will got his mess sorted out. Now it’s sorted, and there’s nothing left to say about it.

Sleep comes painfully and in fits. He wakes up several times, sweating, panting, clawing at the weighted blanket on top of him, his eyes searching for the low light of the long hallway or the solid loom of the bars six steps from his too-soft, too-wide bed. Eventually, though his brain whispers to him about the potential harm he could do to them, he calls all of the dogs up onto his bed to sleep. He cries into Duke’s shaggy coat until consciousness at last leaves him.

Byron’s assistant, Jeanette, comes out Tuesday morning, towing Will’s car behind her truck. She hands over a packet from Metcalfe’s office full of forms and attestations and things he doesn’t worry too much about; he just signs and hands them right back. Jeanette is polite and professional, with little coloring the air around her other than curiosity and the bland positivity common in those who have a great deal of experience with customer-facing jobs. It’s appreciated, in this case. 

She takes a grocery list, and makes no comment or judgement about the inclusion of coffee and whiskey. 

They work to create little profiles of each dog, because Will isn’t sure who he’s going to keep and he wants to make sure the new owners take good care of everyone. Some of the dogs are older, or have medical needs, or aren’t as well-trained, so they might be harder to rehome. He chews his lip and worries, agonizes over the choice. He doesn’t want to let any of them go. He shouldn’t be keeping any of them at all. Selfish, either way. His fingers are cool against his face.

Jeanette gently suggests holding on to the two most capable dogs in his pack, Winston and Max. Less for him to manage, she says. Young, healthy. No medications, fewer vet visits. Just need to play and get in a bath and a brush regularly. The exercise will be good for him, and he’s less likely to need a car. It feels like a lead weight in his chest and a chuckling, razor sharp claw around his heart, but he knows she’s right. He agrees with her, partially just to have the decision made and out of his hands. It still feels heavy. It still feels wrong.

He gives her a list of priority individuals to contact, to see if they would be open to adopting a dog or two, and she promises to get in touch with them. Alana is not on that list. The BAU team, his neighbors, and his veterinarian are, though, and Jeanette herself seems quite taken with Ellie.

He breaks down when she leaves. She’ll be back to collect the dogs as soon as she can find a kennel for them, or a new home. They can’t stay with him. It isn’t safe. 

He weeps. The dogs whine and swarm him, struggling to get into his lap or press their noses into his face. He curls up on the rug in front of the fireplace and they curl up with him. They don’t know why he was gone, or what people think of him, or why he’s different, or what’s upsetting him now. 

They won’t understand when they go to their new homes. They’ll whine and tippy tap by their new owners’ doors as they wait and wonder when he’s coming to get them.

He knows it’s better, he knows it’s safer, but it’s not fair. It feels like yet another punishment, another layer on top of everything else he has suffered and will continue to suffer because Hannibal has decreed it so. Well, Will is sick of being buffeted by Hannibal’s schemes and ploys and selfish plotting. He’s sick of being punished. He’s sick of the games.

In the depths of despair and rage at the injustice of it all, Will scrubs the dismay from his cheeks and makes a call he probably shouldn’t. But fuck Hannibal. If he didn’t want Will speaking out, he should have either left him in the hospital or fucking killed him.

Freddie Lounds pulls up right on time, at three o’clock on Tuesday afternoon.

Her eyes are sparkling. She’s wearing a fiery red peacoat which should clash horribly with her hair, but somehow she makes it work. The colors swirling around her are reminiscent of a Monet—lots of curious and calculating purples, greedy greens, grays both pale for apathy and steely for sharp, businesslike resolve, all bleeding and blending together. There is a sense of purpose behind every movement. She feels like she’s a shrewd and serious journalist at her core, without even an ounce of guilt. 

“Well,” says Freddie, slinging her camera over her neck, “I think we can both agree this was unexpected.”

“Which part?” asks Will, scowling at his feet. “Me calling you? You actually showing up?”

“You getting out of prison?” she offers, cheerfully.

“The hospital, technically.”

“For the criminally insane. Technically.” She waggles her camera and quirks an eyebrow, and Will responds with one jerky nod. Freddie snaps a photo of him, hunched and uncomfortable in front of his shoddy, vandalized home. “Why call me, of all people?”

“Because the people who read what you wrote about me are only ever going to believe what you write.”

She pauses and lowers the lens. “Don’t tell me you expect me to write a retraction?”

Will’s scowl deepens. “Please. I wouldn’t insult either of us by asking. I want you to write my side of the story. As an exclusive. I know other publications were interested. They’d have to run your story, under your byline. I know whatever I tell you, you’ll tear it apart until you find the truth of it.” His jaw clicks and he shakes his head. “It’s going to take a long time before I stop feeling guilty. Maybe I want to know if what you were seeing was always there, or if it’s part of… all of this. You don’t like me, and I don’t like you. That means you’re not going to pull punches. You don’t pity me, you don’t feel sorry for me, you just want the story. I might not be the most reliable narrator anymore but I can tell you what I know, and I can tell you what I feel, and I can tell you what the FBI has told me so far. I can tell you how fucked up I am now.”

“Now?”

He actually laughs, self-deprecating and huffy. “Yeah. Now. I’ll tell you all about my treatment. Therapy with Chilton. The meds they put me on. The consequences I’m still facing. The social fallout.” He pauses and glances at the house, and his voice cracks. “I’m giving up most of my dogs.”

The surprise is muted, but thick. “No shit?”

“I feel like I can’t close my eyes around them. Every time I do I feel like I’m going to wake up, days later, with blood under my nails. I’m not even having seizures anymore, or losing time. Just… panic attacks, and impulsivity.” He gestures toward her. “Calling you, that was impulsive.”

“Rumor has it you were framed by the Chesapeake Ripper,” she says, and there’s a triumphant flare as though she’s caught him on something.

But he just shrugs and says, “Yeah. I’ll tell you everything I know, like I said. Obviously I haven’t been working for the FBI so I’ve only got so much, but I’ll bet it’s enough for you to run with.”

She watches him for a moment, her lips pursed, her calculating eyes ticking from his face to his hunched shoulders to his restless hands at the hem of his flannel, and then, slowly, she nods.

“Alright, Graham. You say what you need to say, and I’ll tell my readers what they need to know.”

The interview takes about three and a half hours, partially because Freddie goes back and forth between her tape recorder, typing up lines she wants to use for her article, and taking dramatic, pathetic little photos of Will in the sad world he’s found himself left in. When she has everything she wants, Will gives her Byron’s card so she can verify what he’s saying and potentially get copies of some of what they were using for his defense, like the brain scans. He doesn’t care—he wants the truth out there, and the more detail she has, the better the story she can craft.

“I think I got everything I need,” she says, tucking her recorder and her camera into her bag. “Gotta say, Graham, if half of what you said is true, even I might start to feel bad for you.”

“All of it is true,” he says, crossing his arms.

“Tough break,” says Freddie. “You ever want to write a book about the whole experience—”

“I’ll keep you in mind,” Will says, tiredly.

“Bet I could get it written and sold before you get that settlement money from the FBI,” she says, but there’s little wibbling around her other than greed so he shakes his head. “Ah, well. If you change your mind, give me another call.”

They don’t wish each other goodnight or anything like that; Freddie just mocks a curtsey and leaves him alone again.

He’s not supposed to drink. He knows that. It’s bad, with his medications. He doesn’t care. He pours himself two fingers of whiskey and sits in front of the fire, keeping the dogs as close as possible while he still can. He sits there, staring into the flames, for such a long time that the logs burn down to blackened cinders and the ice in his glass has long-since melted into a bitter topaz pool.

He is startled by the sudden tension of his pack. They rise and pad over to the door, whuffing curiously, pawing at the doorframe, whining at the window. He whistles and clicks his tongue, ordering them all back to their beds. They are out of practice; it takes another, firmer order before they all scamper back to the fireplace and their cushions.

Will rises, hesitant, and glances at the clock. It’s almost midnight. There are headlights outside, quietly approaching up the long driveway. He can hear the gravel, now. The car is moving slowly, and Will thinks it’s because the driver isn’t sure they’re in the right place; if they were trying to hide, they wouldn’t have their lights on.

He opens the door and steps outside, but leaves the porch light off. The car, a beat-up old white sedan, stops abruptly and the engine cuts. The headlights go out, and then a lithe figure he’d know anywhere bursts out of the driver’s side, slams the door behind him, and half-sprints to close the distance.

Will’s heart squeezes and hammers in his chest as he descends the steps, his vision blurring a little. He reaches out, desperate, and just before they collide he chokes,

“Matt—!”

He’s lifted off of his feet by the force of Matthew’s embrace and spun. Matthew’s nose is buried in the side of Will’s neck, his arms tight and unforgiving around Will’s ribcage.

“Will, Christ, I’m so sorry, I would have come sooner but Chilton got real fuckin’ protective over your file and I couldn’t get an address and…” He pulls back, taking Will’s face in his hands, studying his features. His emotional portrait is an armature of that molten metal wire with a backbone of the horrific, mind-bending loneliness, draped in relief, calm, attraction, violent rage, and joy. “I about went off the fuckin’ deep end when they told me you got released while I was gone.” His thumbs swipe the tears from Will’s cheeks and his warm oaken eyes soften. “I missed you.”

Will huffs and shakes his head, though Matthew’s hands are still firm upon his jaw. “It’s only been four days.”

“Four days too fuckin’ many,” Matthew murmurs, and kisses him.

His mouth is hot and eager, but he freezes the moment his tongue slips between Will’s lips. He leans away, frowning, brow furrowing.

“You been drinkin’?”

“Just a little whiskey,” says Will, squirming under Matthew’s reproachful gaze. “I’m thirty-eight, not twelve. I’m allowed a drink.”

“Not with what you’re taking, you’re not. Will. You could trigger another seizure. For fuck’s sake, mixing benzos and alcohol is a quick way to a blackout and respiratory failure. You know this. What are you doing? You can’t… You need to be careful.”

Will pulls at Matthew’s wrists until he lets go. He takes a step back, knowing he’s being difficult, knowing he’s being an asshole. Knowing Matthew is right. He scowls.

“I’m not your patient anymore. You don’t have to monitor my medications. I’m not your responsibility. So if I want a drink, I’m gonna have a drink, and you don’t have to worry about what happens after. And if that bothers you, then you can leave.”

Fear and rage flare around Matthew like an aurora, outlined in that thick rope of tar-black loneliness which always seems to spike at the thought of anything happening to Will. His hand darts out, snake-strike quick, and locks around Will’s wrist. It’s a firm hold, but it’s not painful.

“Will. Don’t push me away. I know you don’t want me to go. You’re shaking. Let me take care of you. Please. I—”

“You what?” Will whispers, hating himself, loathing his own cruelty. “You love me?” Matthew’s aurora blooms with embarrassment and insecurity and doubt, and his eyes drop to the dry grass beneath their feet. Will scoffs. “You barely know me.”

“I know enough,” Matthew says, terse and tense in equal measure. He gentles his grip and, before Will can pull away, he takes Will’s hand in both of his. “I know you hide from people. I know you’re lonely. Even though you’re in a fuckton of pain you’re trying to keep people at arm’s length so they don’t get hurt. You still feel guilty even though you know you didn’t do anything wrong. But if you’re not a killer you don’t know who you are. You’re not pushing me away because you want to, you’re trying to protect me. You’re brilliant, and beautiful, and—”

“I kissed Hannibal,” Will blurts.

Matthew pauses, squeezes Will’s hand, and quietly answers, “And where’s Dr. Lecter now, Will? ‘Cause I’m not seein’ him. And after—” He stops, snaps his mouth shut, shakes his head. He tries again. “Just… he ain’t here, and I am. That’s all. I don’t care what you do with other people. I don’t own you. But I’m yours, whatever you need me to be. I can be a friend if that’s all you want. Or we can keep it professional. I know you can’t drive. I know you need somebody here to help. And I’m certified for all that shit. So, if that’s all I can do, fine. But don’t send me away. Don’t try to run me off. I’m here, and I want to be here, and I think you want me here, too.”

Will trembles; his throat bobs as he swallows around a lump of self-loathing and curls his fingers around Matthew’s. “I… I don’t want you to go,” he says. His voice feels small, strained. “I just feel so—”

“I know, baby,” Matthew murmurs, pulling him back into a tight hug. “It’s okay. I know. You’re still all dysregulated and shit. I know you don’t mean it.”

Will buries his face into the crook of Matthew’s shoulder and lets out a frustrated snarl. “I don’t… I don’t want to be like this. Hurtful. Cruel. Mean. But then I just… It’s like I just start—”

“I know. It’s all okay. We’re okay. Promise.” He strokes Will’s hair and takes a deep breath. “I know you don’t want a lecture. Just… be careful, with the booze. Okay? And coffee, too. You have another seizure, you reset the clock on when you get your license back, y’know?”

“I know,” Will says, muffled by the fabric of Matthew’s shirt.

“And, uh… hey. I know your thing with Lecter ain’t any of my business, but… be careful with him, too.”

Will snorts. “Why? It’s not like he’s gonna frame me again.”

Matthew jolts so hard it jars Will’s jaw and he about bites his tongue. He stammers apologies, but Will just licks his teeth and settles his head back onto Matt’s shoulder as though nothing happened.

“I’m good,” he says.

“I…” Matthew takes a breath and lets it out through his nostrils. Carefully, he says, “You know the Ripper framed you, yeah?”

“Yeah. And he’s not gonna bother doing it a second time, like I said,” Will replies, closing his eyes. He’s leaning a lot of his weight on Matthew now, nuzzling against his neck. “Don’t tell me you didn’t figure it out. Frederick figured it out.”

“Shit. Is he going to the feds?”

“I’m the feds,” Will murmurs.

“Not right now you’re not.”

Will snorts. “No, he’s not going to tell anyone. He’s afraid it’ll get back to Hannibal. And he’s right to be afraid, although I’ll bet Hannibal doesn’t plan on killing him.”

Matthew holds him tight for a few minutes, swaying on the spot.

“You’re not mad at him,” he finally says. “At Lecter, I mean.”

“Oh, I’m mad,” says Will. “I’m mad as hell. But… He can’t stop being who he is any more than you or I can. Everybody is fragile in their own way. He let things get out of hand. He’ll have to deal with the consequences.”

“Which don’t include getting arrested?”

“It’ll be worse for him to feel like he lost.”

“Lost…?”

“Me,” Will says, softly. “I’m not who he wanted me to be because he let me burn for too long. I believed the story he put in my head instead of fighting against it. Instead of getting angry, I got sad. And once he reads the Tattlecrime article about all the rest—”

“Fuck, Will, you talked to Lounds?”

“We know the Ripper reads Tattlecrime. He’ll see it as soon as it goes up. And I’m not going to go to him so… I had to make him come to me.”

“Christ. What are you trying to achieve, exactly?”

“I just want him to see what he’s done. I want remorse.”

“From the Chesapeake Ripper.”

“From my friend. Who clearly wanted to be more than that.”

Matthew sighs and holds him a little tighter. “That brain damage might have been worse than we thought.”

Will snorts again and shoves him away. “Don’t be rude. The Ripper will get you.” He begins to head for the house, and Matthew follows.

“The Ripper will get me anyway once he finds out I’m fucking the object of his obsession.”

“He already knows,” says Will, climbing the porch.

“He what!” squawks Matthew. “How—?”

“I don’t know. But he seduced the one woman I’ve shown any romantic interest in for the last five years after he found out, because obviously he had to punish me for finding comfort in someone who wasn’t him. But he had to be practical about it, too, because that appeals to him, so if my math is right they got together the same night he took Gideon, and now she’s his alibi.”

“Christ, that’s diabolical.” Matthew whistles softly. “I can’t believe you kissed him. I’ll admit, I am jealous. But not of him.”

Will shows Matthew into the living room, where the dogs stir just a little in their sleep. He shushes them with a soft command and shuts the door. It’s warm in the house, and the cold starts to seep out of the tip of his nose and his fingers and toes, though he hadn’t realized it had set in at all.

“Technically,” says Will, shrugging out of his flannel, “he kissed me.”

“That’s worse. You see how that’s worse? I’m so fucked,” Matthew sighs. He reaches out to tuck a curl behind Will’s ear, and his eyes sparkle. “But, I can’t say it hasn’t been worth it.”

Will’s cheeks turn pink and he scoffs. “Yeah, I’m sure it’s been a real thrill, taking care of the Ripper’s little puppet. Must be disappointing to know for sure I’m not a murderer.”

“I told you. Hawk’s still a hawk, remember? You still understand. You see what nobody else sees. It’s beautiful. You’re beautiful.” He cups Will’s cheek and his expression softens. 

That molten thread is back, brighter than ever, and Matthew steps in for a slow, passionate kiss, his other hand holding tight to the front of Will’s cotton tee shirt, their bodies molding together. Will’s arms are wrapped around him, one settled on his waist, the other pressing against his spine, tender and gentle.

When their lips part, Matthew starts to say, “Will, I—”

“Don’t,” Will interjects, breath puffing against Matthew’s chin. He feels… borderline hysterical. “Don’t say it.”

“Why not?” Matthew says, bumping their noses together. “You already know.”

“Because it… if you say it, you can’t take it back.”

Matthew chuckles. “Got no intention of takin’ it back. Ripper’s gonna have to pry you outta my cold, dead hands, cher.”

“Yeah. Sort of the… problem.”

“Will.” Matthew kisses him again, short, soft, and whispers, “I love you.”

“Matt—”

“You don’t have to say it back. I’m yours. That’s all that matters. Whatever you need, whatever I can do.” He captures Will’s lips, earnest, honest. His voice is husky when he says, “All yours, gorgeous, as long as there’s breath in my body.”

Will kisses him, hard, needy, desperate. His fingers dig into Matthew’s hip and drag along his scalp, through hair grown out just to make it easier for Will to grab. Matthew groans and slams him against the wall beside the coat rack. His tongue slides into Will’s mouth and he grinds their hips together, aggressive and wanting. His nails scrape down Will’s chest, to the hem of his shirt, and then glide back up so that he can properly scratch through Will’s coarse, dark chest hair and draw stinging welts.

Will hisses through his teeth, and a few of the dogs whine. He shushes them, then grabs Matthew by the belt, dragging him up the creaky wooden steps to the little-used upper floor. 

They tear each other’s clothes off like bestial things, biting and snapping and clawing, drawing blood.

They fall upon Will’s bed and the skin-to-skin, after so long seeing each other only in part through their respective uniforms, is blissful. 

Matthew’s lust is devouring him, and the frenzy is almost too much to bear.

Sex with Matthew now—with the freedom of movement, to leave marks, to make noise—requires all of Will’s concentration in order to remain even somewhat present. It would theoretically be quite easy to lose himself in Matthew’s need, but Will is too anxious to allow himself to relax so completely.

Nonetheless, it is intense enough that Will is able to escape the worst of his own thoughts for a while. Matthew’s ragged panting and howls of pain and pleasure become entwined with the sensations of teeth and fingernails tearing into flesh. The sensory smorgasbord fills his awareness and for a short time his mind buzzes with the static of transient bliss.

He and Matthew lay curled together afterward, skin stinging and purpling with bruises, sweat plastering their hair to their faces and the sheets to their bodies, the unpleasant post-coital stickiness bearable for the moment but soon to grow bothersome. Matthew kisses Will’s forehead and hums contentedly. 

“Everything is going to be alright, cher,” he says, and his aura is warmed by his conviction. “I’ll be here whenever you need me.”

Will believes him, but he is troubled by the thought that it may not be enough. The thought spirals in on itself, a litany of more and more terrible what ifs which Will can’t shut off. He hates his mind, his thoughts, himself. He rails against the anxiety and the panic.

When at last he calms down, he is in the bath. He feels the familiar fuzz of his anxiety medication, and Matthew gently massaging his scalp with lavender scented conditioner. He feels a little silly, but mostly grateful for Matthew’s support. He could finish washing his hair himself, but he lets himself enjoy being cared for. Matthew is extremely gentle, and of course careful to keep any suds from Will’s eyes. He even dries Will off with a thick towel, warm from the radiator, and helps him dress in soft, comfortable clothes selected with Will’s sensory needs in mind.

This time when they lay down, they do so downstairs. It helps, hearing the dogs breathe and snore and snuffle nearby, though there aren’t nearly enough of them and that thought alone makes his heart ache.

“I hope you’re right,” Will says. He realizes, belatedly, that he isn’t sure how long ago Matthew told him everything would be alright. Half an hour? An hour? He sighs and shakes his head. “I don’t know what’s going to happen after the article goes up. I don’t know what Hannibal is going to do. But I know what he wants. And I…” He hesitates, and Matthew just strokes his hair, giving him time. He appreciates that. Eventually he says, “I just want him to be honest with me. And when he can do that, I want to be able to be honest with him, too.”

“Might be waiting a while, love,” Matthew says, softly. “But, might be worth the wait.”

“I know you said—”

“And I meant it. I don’t care what you do with Lecter. I’m obsessive, not possessive. I’m a hundred percent yours, you don’t have to be a hundred percent mine. Can’t say the same for him, but, you want the freedom to be fully honest with him, you don’t need permission from me. Okay?”

Will huffs a laugh. “Okay.”

“But, uh… you know he won’t be up front with you that easy. He’s still playing.”

“I know. That’s the point of the article. I’m playing, too.”

Matthew snorts, kisses Will’s hair, and says, “Well, now I really want to read it.”

The article is published Friday at about two thirty in the afternoon. 

First thing Wednesday, Will had gotten a call from Byron Metcalfe, confirming that Will had given Freddie Lounds permission to access his court documents. Will had confirmed, and Byron had said this was not quite what he meant. Will admitted it was unorthodox, but explained Freddie would spread the word like wildfire, which was ultimately what they wanted. Byron had sighed, but agreed to provide what he could.

Thursday, Jeanette had come to drop off some groceries and to collect the dogs. Will had not been able to contain his grief, even though he knew it was the best choice for them. He had been unable to play with them as much, struggled to keep up with their homemade food, and was even late on Duke and Ellie’s medication Wednesday night because of a panic attack. He had sent them with their favorite toys, their beds, and lots of hugs and kisses, and then he had cried until Matthew arrived, well after midnight. 

Matthew was already falling into a routine of showing up at Will’s after his shift at the BSHCI and then leaving about ten in the morning to go home and change before his next shift. When Will got approved for home care hours, Matthew would be changing his schedule at the hospital to part-time, but for now this would suffice. 

As such, Will is home alone on Friday when the article goes up. He sits on the front porch with his laptop, watching Max and Winston play, and he reads Freddie’s vicious takedown, not of himself but of the FBI.

It is a scathing and yet curiously compassionate commentary on the entire process of Will’s arrest, incarceration, trial, and release. There are photos of Will’s vandalized house, taken while he was still imprisoned. Photos of Will as he is now, broken and pathetic, a shell of himself. There is a cold, livid breakdown of all the issues Will is going to have to deal with going forward and the FBI’s direct fault, including the loss of his license, the effects of the brain damage, the surrender of his dogs, the medications, not to mention the social, legal, and career impacts. 

Freddie has also included statistics of cases Will closed and associated them with quotes from ‘sources within the FBI,’ describing his physical and mental state during those cases. She emphasizes that Will was working cases while his brain was actively being damaged, boiling in his skull, and he was hospitalized after the Abel Gideon incident due to the incredibly high fever. She venomously suggests that if the FBI and the hospital had done their due diligence, perhaps Will would not struggle to look at more than one person at a time without having a panic attack.

There’s more, of course. The article is an expose, thousands of words about what was done to him, with a whole section near the end about the Chesapeake Ripper framing him to remove him from the board and then releasing him for reasons yet unknown, but likely to do with his ongoing feud with Jack Crawford. All that aside, though, the part that puts a slow, satisfied smile on Will’s face is a direct quote from him, right at the end. 

“A colleague once told me it seemed like the FBI saw me as fine china you bring out for special occasions. And maybe that’s true. Maybe I was a fragile little teacup. But honestly, they took me out for everything, and then everybody acted so surprised when I got shattered. Even the people who should have seen the cracks.”

The article is titled ‘The Shattered Teacup: A Life In Pieces’ and so far, based on the comment section, the response is more or less exactly what Will had hoped for. Freddie’s readers are mercurial, and  despite their rabid condemnation of him mere days ago, they have now been successfully swayed to Will’s side. He mostly hopes that Hannibal is incensed by that quote, particularly by being referred to as just a colleague.

He gets a missed call from Frederick and two missed calls from Alana. He also gets one text from Beverly which simply includes a photo of Buster settling in on his dog bed beside a heater in what he supposes is her apartment. It makes him feel both better and worse.

At about eight o’clock, Hannibal’s Bentley appears in the driveway. It’s expected, but a twisting nervousness still blossoms in Will’s stomach. He is in the middle of a half-hearted attempt at cooking an egg sandwich for dinner; he slides the egg out of the pan and onto his toast, then shoves the plate far enough back that the dogs won’t be tempted to jump up and get it. He opens the front door just as Hannibal is popping open his trunk. 

Will stands, arms crossed, backlit by the warm yellow light from his little house, and scowls at the Chesapeake Ripper.

“Good evening, Will,” Hannibal says, with one hand resting delicately on the raised trunk lid. “I’ve brought groceries, if you’re willing to accept them.”

“Why are you here, Dr. Lecter?”

Hannibal’s lips twitch downward at the corners. “Is it so strange to wish to support a friend?”

“Oh, we’re friends now?”

“We are certainly more than colleagues,” Hannibal drawls, and for just a moment the air around him wibbles blood red. 

Will snorts, and turns back into his house. He leaves the door open, a tacit invitation. The dogs are quietly told to stay in their beds, and at this hour they are not too fussed about obeying. Will opens his fridge and roots around for the head of lettuce he’s pretty sure is somewhere in the crisper.

He hears the front door creak closed and Hannibal’s footsteps—deliberate and heavy—coming up behind him right about the time he closes the fridge. Hannibal makes an indignant, almost offended sound and sets the grocery bags on the counter. 

“Will,” he says, stiffly, “please tell me that isn’t your dinner.”

“Well I didn’t make it for the dogs,” Will grumbles, tearing a couple of leaves from the lettuce. He goes to rinse them, but Hannibal places a hand on his shoulder. “What?”

“Allow me to cook for you. Something nutritious.”

“This is fine.”

“Will.”

“Don’t Will me. There’s nothing wrong with—”

“Indulge me,” Hannibal says, and his hand slides up to cup Will’s cheek. “Please.”

Will’s face grows hot; he glowers as he shoves Hannibal away and stomps out of the kitchen.

He sits on the sofa, one leg crossed over the other, tapping his foot incessantly while Hannibal makes himself comfortable and begins to make some kind of chicken and vegetable dish. 

As he’s chopping, Hannibal casually says, “I read Ms. Lounds’ article. It surprises me that you would speak with her at all, let alone so candidly.”

Will rolls his eyes. “Yeah, well. My lawyer recommended I get the story out there. Definitely meant I should talk to the Sun or something, but I’m a bit impulsive now.”

There is the slightest disturbance in the rhythm of the knife, and the briefest pulse of distress, rage, annoyance, dismay. It is schooled back to neutrality almost immediately, but the echo hangs in the air around Hannibal’s shoulders. 

“I was saddened to learn that you had rehomed your dogs.”

“Yeah. Well. That wasn’t impulsive. I didn’t want to wake up and find out I killed them.”

The chopping does stop now, and Hannibal turns to look at him. 

“You would never have harmed them, Will.”

“Can’t be sure what I’ll do anymore,” Will says, bitterly. “I’m not who I was when we met, Dr. Lecter. Even if there’s proof I didn’t kill all those people, I still believe I did it. I’m capable of it. I still dream about it. I still taste their blood in my teeth.”

Hannibal looks… hungry. “Do you?” he says, softly.

“Yeah,” says Will, “and it makes me sick.”

A flash of disappointment, and Hannibal turns back to his knifework.

“An understandable reaction, considering what you went through.” A pause. “I tend to take Tattlecrime articles with a heaping helping of salt—”

“If you’re about to ask what she exaggerated or got wrong, the answer is nothing. It’s part of why I chose her. She wasn’t ever going to make me seem sympathetic if she thought it was bullshit. She told it straight and went after the FBI because there isn’t a better angle.”

Hannibal sets the knife down and there is soon the sound and scent of sizzling vegetables. The oven beeps, and he slides a pan in. He seems to be mulling over his words as he tosses the vegetables in some kind of oil or sauce.

Finally, he says, “I was unaware your condition was so severe.”

Will laughs, his knee bouncing more intensely. “Really? You were at the trial. You saw the scans. You heard the neurologist.”

Hannibal’s shoulders tense, and there’s a sudden burst of that blood red aurora. His voice is tight when he says, 

“There is a significant difference between prognosis and lived patient experience.”

Will snorts and leans back against the sofa cushion, his arms draped along the back of the couch.

“Yeah,” he says, “tell me about it.”

“I would prefer if you would tell me,” Hannibal says.

“The article wasn’t enough for you? You need to hear me say it again?”

“It’s very important to me that you can be honest with me. I value your trust.”

What makes Will throw his head back and laugh is not the absurdity of such a sentiment coming from the man who lied, manipulated, and framed him for murder, but rather the sincerity.

“I don’t think I can be more honest,” Will says.

“You can,” Hannibal says, taking the vegetables off the heat. He turns his head, glancing just so over his shoulder. “You have.”

Will’s incredulous smile fades into a dark frown. He stands. “The man you knew boiled alive, Dr. Lecter. He’s gone. Whatever you shared is gone.”

He stalks out the front door, whistling for the dogs.

He’s gone about half an hour, throwing sticks and wearing Max and Winston out in anticipation of bedtime. It’s about a quarter to nine when he heads back in with two panting dogs at his heels. Hannibal brings a plate to the dining table, along with a glass of water and a tray with Will’s evening pills. 

Will snaps, “I can manage my own medications.”

“You were due to take them at eight o’clock,” Hannibal says. “Am I incorrect in assuming you did not take them before I arrived?”

Will grumbles and grabs his meds. He rattles them in his palm, checking that everything is there (and nothing has been added), but it all looks to be in order. He supposes, briefly, that he should never have left Hannibal alone with access to his pills, but he dismisses the thought. After all, the Ripper had broken into his house more times than he’d been invited, and he wasn’t likely to stop now. 

He takes his medication and sits down to eat. Hannibal takes the seat across from him with his own plate and a glass of wine. He tries to start some kind of conversation, but Will glares at him with such intensity that he closes his mouth for once, and they eat in silence.

By nine thirty, they have moved to the living room. Will has a small glass of whiskey, which elicits a frown and a burst of vibrant concern from Hannibal, but Will studiously ignores him until the silence grows too unbearable and Hannibal can no longer allow it to stand. 

“Will. Please.”

Will scoffs and sets his glass down a little too hard on the side table. “Please what? You can’t just say please and think it’ll get you something.”

Hannibal swallows. The neutrality around him pulses a deep, melancholy blue. 

“When last we saw each other—”

“You left?” Will leans forward, one leg curled up on the cushion and the other foot flat on the floor, pointed at Hannibal. “You showed up for two minutes, got angry that I wasn’t saving myself for you, and left?”

“It was—”

“It was unfair, Dr. Lecter.”

Hannibal’s jaw tightens. “Perhaps. This is also unfair, Will.”

“What?”

“Treating me like a stranger.”

“You are a stranger.”

Hannibal’s aurora stings with indignation, guilt, rage, loneliness, then is smothered again by perfect poise. He adjusts his tie.

“Do you often share intimate moments with strangers, Will?”

Will glowers. “No.”

“Just me, then.”

“Do you have a point, Dr. Lecter, or are you just here to antagonize me?”

Hannibal slides forward across the couch and reaches out, covering Will’s hand with his. His eyes are soft like red velvet, and just as heavy, built to obscure.

“Will,” he repeats, and his voice is lower, silkier. “I only wish to rebuild what was lost. To regain your trust. To help you remember. Please.”

And, staring deeply into Hannibal’s eyes, Will wants that, too. God, does he want it. Why the fuck does he want it? This is the man who put him on trial for serial murder. The man who destroyed his brain, damaged him for life. The man who has killed and mutilated twelve people that the FBI knows of and made art from the corpses as a hobby. Will should want to get as far away from this man as possible.

Why doesn’t Will want to get away from him?

He squeezes his eyes shut so hard he sees stars. “Hannibal—”

He was half expecting it—hell, he’d invited it—and yet the kiss still startles him. Hannibal’s lips are needy, and greedy, and wonderfully warm. He grips Will’s hand where it rests against his knee, and his other palm presses against the back of Will’s neck. 

He can taste the desire, again. The slick copper tang of violent possession, the cinnamon spice of lust, the oak-aged sigh of longing, the cool spearmint undertone of triumph and self-congratulation. He chases the honeycomb sweetness of Hannibal’s shy, sincere affection, and Hannibal responds with a low, cider-tart groan of selfish wanting. He pushes forward, slowly leaning, until Will is pressed against the arm of the sofa and Hannibal is laying half on top of him, braced against the cushion beside Will’s hip, slotted between his thighs, his desperate tongue the sharp, refreshing citrus of a key lime pie.

He kisses Will with abandon, hands roving, hips grinding, and Will? Well, he kisses back, obviously. How could he do anything else?

It isn’t until Hannibal kisses down the side of his jaw and breathily pants in his ear that Will remembers this is not how this was supposed to go.

He was supposed to tell Hannibal to fuck off. It’s the only way to get him to be honest, ultimately: deny him what he wants. If he wants Will, he’s going to have to earn him.

“Oh, Will,” Hannibal breathes, kissing down the side of his neck, “if only—”

“S-stop,” Will whispers.

Hannibal instantly freezes, lips bare millimeters from Will’s skin. He leans back, slow and deliberate.

“Are you alright?” Hannibal says, with what appears from the sparks and glimmers around him to be genuine concern and even a little anxiety.

Will wants to say yes, God, please take me to bed, but what he says when he opens his mouth is, “No, Dr. Lecter. I’m not alright. I can’t… do this.”

Hannibal leans back even further, his weight on one knee. “Will—” 

There’s a note of pleading, or maybe it’s wheedling. Either way, Will sits up, cheeks flushed, hair mussed, lips reddened, and he snaps, 

“I’m not your Will Graham. Do you understand? That Will Graham trusted you. Maybe that Will Graham even wanted you. I don’t know. But I’m not him anymore. I don’t remember almost any of our time together. I don’t trust you. I don’t know you. Whatever residual comfort or desire I’m feeling can be much more easily explained as… as transference, from you. Or, maybe it’s just impulsivity and emotional dysregulation. Y’know, the result of the permanent brain damage I suffered from the neurological condition you failed to identify.”

Hannibal looks like he’s been slapped, but his aura is suspiciously clear. “I will bear the burden of regret to the end of my days for what happened to you, Will.”

Oh, I’ll bet! I was only supposed to be unstable and unreliable, right? Not actually fucking broken. 

“It doesn’t matter how much you regret it. I’m not going to get better. And you… you don’t help. You don’t make me feel better, Dr. Lecter, you make me feel worse. I don’t understand why you’re here, why you’re doing this. You’re just confusing things and making me feel—!” He drags his hands through his hair and looks up, not meeting Hannibal’s eyes but staring unfocused at his perfectly still expression. “Just… go. Okay? Go home.”

“Will, I—”

“Listen. There is nothing between us. And there never will be. Anyway, you already belong to someone, and so do I. So just leave. And don’t come back.” He takes a breath and glances down at the floor. “I think it’s best if we keep some distance between us, Dr. Lecter.”

“Cruel thing,” Hannibal murmurs, and for a moment there is enough of a crack in the facade for Will to taste that blinding, panic-inducing rage from the courtroom. 

Then it is gone, and so is Hannibal, the door closing with a curt snap behind him.

Will curls up on the sofa and succumbs to the darkness and the panic and the rage for some time, but when Matthew arrives a couple of hours later it’s as though Hannibal had never been there at all.

Chapter Text

Hannibal Lecter sits, pensive and still, at the harpsichord in his study. His hands rest upon the keys, delicate, poised to play. There is no score set in front of him, nor calligraphy pen and  partially-drafted composition.

The lights are off. The fire has burned low. He could still have made out the notes upon a page in the half dark, had he bothered to place any sheet music in front of him, but he hardly notices that he has failed to do so. Poised to play, yes, but not precisely present. 

It is after midnight. He still wears the blue and gray windowpane check trousers and highly shined dress shoes he had worn to his office that morning, but he has tossed the matching jacket and waistcoat over the back of his antique sofa. The top few buttons of his silver-gray dress shirt are undone, and his sleeves are rolled nearly to the elbows. His tailor would probably be appalled. The product in his hair has relaxed throughout the day and now silver-blond locks fall unnoticed across his forehead and even a little over his eyes. If he had the presence of mind, he might note his need for a trim.

There is a crystal glass of whiskey set atop the harpsichord with about a mouthful remaining. It’s the last of a bottle he has slowly been making his way through, savoring it, one glass each evening. The bottle was originally meant for Will, of course, but after Alana so rudely opened it, Hannibal has been drinking it himself.

He reaches for the glass, his expression stony, his brow furrowed ever so slightly. He tilts the tumbler back and forth, allowing the amber to catch the light of the low flames and turn, briefly, to the color of blood.

How had things gone so wrong? 

Three weeks now since he had visited Will. Three weeks since a kiss so passionate Hannibal almost forgot the muted drudgery of everyday feeling. Three long, agonizing weeks since the taste of Will Graham had made all else seem dull and flavorless by comparison.

Three weeks since he was told, in no uncertain terms, that Will doesn’t want him.

He drinks. He holds the whiskey in his mouth, not really seeing the room or the harpsichord or the glass. The liquor burns pleasantly as he allows it to settle and then flow down his throat. The warmth spreads in his stomach. 

Hannibal is not the kind of man who accepts defeat easily, or at all in most cases. There is a way to turn this around. There must be.

True, things had gone too far. Will had been seriously harmed, beyond what Hannibal had predicted. The consequences were devastating and aggravating in equal measure. 

His fingers drum against the crystal and it plinks musically. He pays it no more mind than anything else in the study. 

He had been so close with Will. So near, so dear, so nearly dear. There had been moments where, if he had simply been bold enough to reach out and touch, he could have tilted Will’s sharp, beautiful face upward and claimed his plush pink lips. He’s certain of that. But he had been too focused on his plans. Showing Will the darkness within himself, winding him up and watching him go, seeing what would happen if a mind like Will’s was weakened and suggestible and then put under a very specific type of psychological strain.

His fingers tighten around the glass. 

He could have had him. If things had been different, Will would have come out stronger. Bolder. More dangerous. He would have seen Hannibal, would have come after him with a righteous fury, would have used every tactic at his disposal until he realized that he could find an equal only in Hannibal, and ultimately would have demanded his rightful place at Hannibal’s side. And in his bed.

 Instead, the potentially wrathful, manipulative, murderous Will Graham had gone up in smoke, and a more vulnerable, more volatile, in some ways more perceptive man had taken his place who wanted nothing to do with Hannibal Lecter.

It was maddening. He had, of course, had no way of knowing or predicting the outcome of the experiment. That was always the beauty of games involving Will; he was remarkable and unpredictable and thoroughly entertaining at every turn. He had, however, made the rather foolish assumption that the result would fall within a set of expected parameters, based on the arrogant notion that he had the ability to balance Will’s encephalitis well enough to keep the game interesting without compromising Will’s brilliant mind long-term.

Obviously he had failed. Spectacularly so. And while it had cost him the Will he had expected, the Will who had emerged was no less interesting, no less beautiful, and no less Hannibal’s.

It was a matter of finding a way to regain Will’s confidence. This distance… Hannibal scowls, though he isn’t aware he’s doing so. The distance is unacceptable. The orderly, Matthew Brown? He is unacceptable. 

Hannibal moves to take another drink, and pauses when he finds his glass empty but for two thin droplets of whiskey clinging to the crystal.

He sets the glass down. 

He needs… a consultation.

Because he is polite, he gives Bedelia du Maurier a full forty-eight hours of notice that he will, in fact, be attending their usual appointment time this week. He has not been to see her since Will’s trial began, but she is perfectly gracious about resuming therapy, of course.

Why wouldn’t she be?

She greets him at exactly five o’clock and they settle across from one another in her sitting room. Bedelia is more cautious than usual, perfectly collected, her eyes ticking from his face to his hands to some invisible imperfection in his suit or on his shoes. Perhaps she’s taking note of the fact that he has let his hair grow out more than usual, despite the care he took styling it to appear just as it always does. 

“What would you like to discuss?” she asks, and the lack of inflection is just as telling as a mocking laugh might have been. 

“I am… processing certain changes in my relationship with Will Graham,” Hannibal says, crossing one leg over the other. “I fear I have not made sufficient effort toward repairing the damage done by his incarceration, and his separation from me. I was unable to provide support during a crucial time, and our friendship has suffered.”

“You would consider Will Graham to be… a friend?”

Her pause rankles. That is its intent. He does not allow it to distract him from his purpose.

“Will is unique,” Hannibal says, lifting his chin.

“And you are obsessed with him,” Bedelia murmurs, her head tilting just slightly to one side.

“I am invested in him,” Hannibal replies, fighting the twitch of a frown. “I care about Will.”

“Obsessively so,” Bedelia says, soft and almost dismissive. “What is it you hope to accomplish by offering vulnerability to a man who you, yourself, have suggested may have the capacity to see through the facade you have built for everyone else?”

Hannibal hesitates, which is strange enough that Bedelia hones in on it. He can see her sharp, predatory eyes plucking at the threads of his discomfort.

“It was my desire to offer… support,” he says, carefully. “To become indispensable to Will. I wished for him to feel that he could rely upon my presence in times of uncertainty.”

“Uncertainty,” Bedelia hums, and the corners of her lips just barely tug upward before she schools her expression. Her eyes sparkle enough to betray her amusement, even if he had missed the twitch of her mouth. “Are you referring to the demands of his career with the FBI or the suffering he faced surrounding his incarceration?” She allows the smallest catlike curl of her lip as she purrs, “Or, perhaps, were you hoping to offset the bitter taste of his freedom?”

“I wished to be the port he might seek in any storm,” Hannibal says. He smooths the fabric of his trousers, furrowing his brow in annoyance. “I expected that he would turn to me in his time of distress. He has instead found… alternative sources of comfort.”

“Has he,” Bedelia says, archly.

“He has been seeing an orderly who assisted him during his trial.” Hannibal scowls.

Bedelia lifts one eyebrow. “Am I to understand that you had hoped for a romantic relationship with your former patient?”

“Our relationship has always defied the conventional,” Hannibal says, and he is unable to keep all of the defensiveness from his voice. “Will and I understand one another in a way that transcends what others are capable of seeing. It was never my intention, but why shouldn’t we pursue our connection to the logical conclusion when we are so well-suited?”

“Have you discussed these feelings with Mr. Graham?”

Hannibal huffs through his nose, and for a moment the sound causes his heart to squeeze because it reminds him so much of Will.

“He claims there is nothing between us. That the version of him which may have held affection for me is gone as a result of his illness. He claims he no longer wishes to see me.”

“It sounds as though your pet project has turned out rather differently than you hoped.” Her lips curl mockingly and one graceful finger circles the rim of the water glass on the table at her side. “You have the irrational urge to hold on to Will Graham as though you can scrape him clean and begin again, like an artist with a disappointing canvas. It occurs to me that, on this occasion, he was left alone long enough for the paint to dry, and someone with a less discerning eye has grown fond of your imperfect creation. You might save yourself, and Will Graham, a great deal of pain and effort by letting that orderly appreciate him as he is, and focusing on a project with more… potential.” Her smile widens, and her finger stops its incessant circling, tilting the glass instead from side to side. “You know what they say about art, Hannibal.”

Kill your darlings.

He smiles back, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. Something, clearly, does, because Bedelia’s own smirk disappears, replaced instead by a stony mask of professionalism and the beady shine of anxiety. She has gone too far, and she knows it. She lets the glass still, and her hand moves quietly back to her lap. He lets her words hang for a long time, and then his voice falls like a drop of water in a cavern untouched by life or light, harsh only because it has broken such perfect stillness.

“I have no intention of allowing an obstacle so easily erased to stand between Will and myself,” he murmurs, and they both know that he is speaking of more than just the orderly. “I would, however, be grateful for any advice you would be willing to offer as it pertains to regaining Will’s trust.”

Bedelia swallows, almost imperceptibly, and then nods.

When their hour is up, Hannibal stays for a glass of red wine and politely ignores the slight tremor in Bedelia’s hand. He is pleased to have reminded her that—lovesick or not—he is always in control.

He must, after all, act quite differently with everyone else. Bedelia sees enough of him to understand the threat, but not enough to ever truly understand him, in the way Will might.

Alana Bloom comes over most evenings. She certainly does not see the truth of him. She is a mix of kindness and maternal concern for all things great and small, with a lemon-twist of self-righteousness just sharp enough to keep her from boring him. Still, he has long since grown accustomed to plastering a sort of caricature of the man she wants him to be overtop his person-suit whenever she visits, and he pays little attention to their interactions unless the topic is something of particular interest.

“I’m worried because even after the article, even after the settlement, you and I both know that Jack Crawford is too stubborn to let him go,” Alana says, chopping an onion with far too much vigor. The knife snicks, quick and arrhythmic, against his fine cutting board, until she finally sets it down a bit too hard and glances up at him, eyes icier blue than he likes, cheeks pink with righteous fury, red-painted lips pursed. “It’s been like pulling teeth to keep him from calling Will about the one that’s going right now. As if the active lawsuit isn’t enough!”

Hannibal hums sympathetically as he dices tomatoes with even, controlled rocking of his knife. He could plunge it into her eye and end this conversation, end this dinner, end this farce, but he dismisses the thought in favor of considering how to use this information to aid his quest to bring Will back into his sphere of influence.

“Jack cares deeply about the pursuit of justice,” Hannibal says, wiping bits of tomato off of his gleaming blade. He wipes his finger upon a pristine cloth and then carefully uses the back of the knife to sweep the tomatoes into a saucepan. “His priority is, and has always been, to put a stop to the harm done by the monsters of the world. He knows very well that there is no man better suited to hunt them than Will Graham. He will always be willing to bend or break rules which stand in the way of saving lives, to his mind, and that means he is more than willing to attempt to bring Will back to the team before it is technically legally allowed. He sees it as a moral issue, not a legal one.”

“Well, he’s wrong on both counts,” Alana says, shoving the onions into a saute pan. “It is absolutely a legal issue, and there is nothing moral about forcing a man who has suffered the way Will has to go right back to the work that caused his suffering in the first place.”

“And if it were Will’s choice?” Hannibal asks, adding other aromatics to the saute pan. Alana stares at him, and he glances at her with a half-shrug. “Will may yet decide to return to profiling of his own accord.”

“It’s bad for him, Hannibal!”

“He is a grown man. He is fully capable of making his own decisions.”

“Is he?” she demands, crossing her arms. “I mean that. Do you honestly think, after everything that happened, after everything we saw at the trial, after everything in that goddamn article, do you really think Will is still capable of making informed decisions?”

Hannibal pauses, letting his spatula rest against the edge of the sizzling pan. “Do you truly believe he is not?”

“I don’t know!” She turns and begins to pace, one hand on her cheek, the other still crossed over her chest, holding the opposite elbow. “That kind of brain damage… the impulsivity… I mean, for God’s sake, Hannibal, he can’t even drive on his own. He needs home care now, and he probably always will, at least in some capacity. He’ll struggle with organization, with social situations even more than before. He just…” She stops, looking up at him with big eyes sparkling with unshed tears. “He’s always been so… sensitive. And isolated. And he’s more alone than ever, and I… God, I feel so guilty!”

Hannibal sets the spatula on a drip tray and takes her in his arms, laying his cheek against the top of her head. She clings to him, trembling, and he tries to breathe more through his mouth than his nose because the scent of her perfume in combination with the conditioner she uses is actually quite unpleasant. Her hair is silky, though, and her body is pleasantly warm and soft against his; he can close his eyes, nuzzle close, and savor her distress in relative comfort.

“We have discussed this, my dear,” he says, gently. “You have nothing to feel guilty for. Will has chosen not to reach out, nor to respond to attempts to contact him. It is understandable that he should wish to distance himself from us right now. He is emotionally compromised, and may be experiencing feelings of betrayal or abandonment given… Well.” He kisses the top of her head, and she sniffles, but it’s halfway to a laugh. “There is also every possibility that his lawyer may have advised him to avoid contact until the suit has resolved.”

“Shouldn’t you know?” she asks, and there’s a lilt of humor to it but he knows she expects an actual answer.

He sighs. “It’s true that I hired Mr. Metcalfe to represent Will at first, but when the initial charges were dropped, so, too, was my involvement. The current suit will, I presume, be paid by a significant percentage of the settlement. And, in truth, even when I was funding Mr. Metcalfe’s services, I was not consulted on the case beyond what was necessary as a witness for the defense.” 

That had been a bit of a sticking point between Byron and Hannibal, actually; the man had very few principles, but attorney-client privilege was one he held absolute. Hannibal could not be too annoyed about it, as it had benefited him to a significant degree often enough to make up for this one transgression.

“I’m just… worried he’s all alone out there. He got rid of his dogs, Hannibal. And the article suggested… Well, how is he going to get the care he needs? He has no car, and his reputation is… I just want to help.”

Hannibal pauses, and hides the hesitance with a tight hug and another kiss to her hair. “I know, my dear. Mr. Metcalfe will see to it he is receiving regular grocery deliveries, at the very least. And, given the reach of Ms. Lounds’ article, I suspect it will be easier for Will to find a carer. After all, he is now seen by the majority of the public as a victim, rather than as a killer.”

“He is a victim,” Alana says, venomously. “The FBI failed him. We failed him.”

Hannibal resists the intense urge to snap her neck and, instead, tilts her chin up and kisses her, a chaste and gentlemanly thing which brings that pink blush back to her cheeks.

“It will take some time,” Hannibal murmurs, “but if it means doing right by Will, the effort will be worth it. He will appreciate it, and he will find it in his heart to forgive. All will be well again, as it should be.”

Alana’s smile is rich and loving and a bit coy, and he can smell her arousal. She cups his cheek and sighs.

“You always know just what to say,” she whispers.

He doesn’t smirk as she kisses him again, but the monster inside his chest is rumbling with hideous laughter.

Other dinners with Alana are far less interesting. Conversation is dull and domestic. Work, colleagues, films, television, books, tedious anecdotes. He engages dutifully, but there is no passion in it, just as there is no real passion the twice per month he takes her to bed. He would never have it be said that he is a selfish or inadequate lover, of course, but as he is bringing her to her second or third climax he is always thinking of what he will draw after he has permitted himself to finish and, naturally, ensured she is cleaned and warm and contentedly dozing. 

Inevitably, when he kisses her sleepy forehead and pads down to his study to retrieve his sketchbook, he finds himself beginning yet another sketch of Will. Sometimes he draws Will in the positions he had just had Alana bent into, one after the other. Sometimes, the expression he imagines on Will’s face, if Hannibal were enthusiastically sating his hunger for Will between his thighs. He has drawn Will’s fierce eyes and swollen lips a dozen times now, from all angles, trying to capture the complex blend of confusion and resentment and lust on the day of his rejection. He has drawn the wilting, demure heartbreak and Will’s small, sad oh after Hannibal had rejected him at the courthouse.

That stung more than ever, now. Another miscalculation, perhaps his most egregious. Will had been willing in that moment to try to remember what they had been to one another, if he had only agreed to offer the support Will had needed. But he had thought that creating distance would make Will want him—need him—even more.

When he is not distracted by the tedium of his relationship with Alana or his bi-weekly sessions with Bedelia, brainstorming means of reacquiring Will’s confidence, Hannibal is either working at his own office or offering his services to Jack Crawford as a consultant, ‘playing Will Graham.’

The killer Alana had been going on about was abducting college students, torturing them, then dumping their bodies in storm drains. Forensics had determined, based on the water found in the victims’ lungs, that the killer dumped them when they were still alive. Unfortunately, their throats, tongues, and teeth were so damaged they could not scream for help, even as close as some of them must have been to being found before the storm drains flooded. Only when the sluice gates open and the water rushes out into the Potomac are the bodies found, battered and coated in sewer grime.

Hannibal works tirelessly, whenever he is available, to assist the BAU team with apprehending this killer. After some time studying the victims and the scenes—or, photos of the scenes, in cases where he was not able to respond immediately to Jack’s summons—it becomes clear that they are after a civil engineer with an intimate understanding of the DC metropolitan area’s drainage systems. Hannibal is able to crack the case, so to speak, when he realizes that this engineer is using the bodies to prove a point, creating blockages that will cause spillage and overflow in specific locations which lead to street closures and damage to critical infrastructure which could otherwise have been avoided.

Through intensive study of civil engineering proposals from the past few years as well as minutes from open forums and city council meetings, they are able to narrow down the suspect list to a hydrologist whose father died from pneumonia likely related to mold exposure after significant flooding impacted their home. Hannibal is the one who finds the final key piece: the council meeting where this engineer listed locations at risk if certain drains became blocked. The order of locations matches with the four victims who have already been lost, and as the sky cracks open with yet another deluge, the team rushes to the next critical drain on the list.

A few hours later, Hannibal sits in Jack’s office with a towel around his shoulders. The victim had been dead for twenty minutes by the time they arrived, and there was no resuscitating her. They had caught the hydrologist, but at the cost of another young woman’s life. Not that Hannibal really cared about that, of course; he had done his best, and used his skill to make connections that no one else on the team had seen. This was not a failure. The killer had been found, and Jack Crawford was slamming things around his office, cursing, all but vibrating out of his skin with his need to bring Will Graham back into the fold.

What had taken Hannibal days would have taken Will mere hours, if that, and they would have saved that woman. Jack knows it, and Hannibal knows it. Of course, Jack can’t be angry with Hannibal for being the closest thing to Will Graham. But that won’t stop him from being angry.

“We were so close!” Jack snarls.

“We did the best we could, Jack,” Hannibal says, softly. “There will be no others. We must take what comfort we can from that.”

Jack grunts and sits, heavily, in his chair. His head falls into his hands. “That poor girl. Screaming until the water covered her mouth. And we were right there.”

“There was no way for us to know about the other blockages. There was never any evidence of that with previous victims. We thought we had more time.”

“Twenty minutes, Dr. Lecter. If we’d been twenty minutes faster—”

“To be twenty minutes faster, Jack, would have taken a leap which I am sorry I am not capable of making.”

Jack closes his eyes. “I’m not blaming you. You did everything right.”

“And yet, it was not enough.”

Jack sighs and glides a hand along the top of his head, across the short dusting of graying hair. “It was enough to stop him,” he mutters. “You were right. We have to take that as a win. I just… I know we can do better, if we have the right resources. I’d like to get back to saving lives, not just catching killers.”

Hannibal only nods, and after a few more minutes of pensive silence he stands, folding the towel over his arm. “Please feel free to call upon me again, Jack. If I am able to help you save the next one, know that I will do the best I can.”

Crawford doesn’t answer, but lifts his hand in a farewell as he stares down at the photos of the scene scattered across his desk. Hannibal steps into the hallway and smiles. The moment that he is legally permitted to do so, Jack Crawford will be breaking down Will’s door to bring him back to the FBI. And when he does, Hannibal will be there to guide him.

It takes about two and a half months to finalize the settlement agreement. Metcalfe is smug and satisfied with the amount he was able to wring from the FBI and the state of Maryland, probably in large part due to the fact that he gets about forty percent. Will doesn’t really care about the money, though admittedly it’s going to make his life easier.

With Metcalfe’s help, as well as Frederick Chilton’s support, Will gets an expedited approval for disability support services. No disability payments, not without further court dates, but home care hours and temporary access to specialized transit services, among a few other things. Matthew, as planned, reduces his hours at the BSHCI by a significant margin so that he can step in as Will’s home care provider. Now he spends Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays working at the hospital and the other four days of the week working at Will’s house, though he’s only technically being paid for twenty hours per week.

The settlement agreement is finalized on a Wednesday afternoon, and by Friday morning the money has been paid out. Will enjoys a quiet weekend at home with Matthew, and Winston, and Max, and he thinks for a few days that he could get used to a life where he wakes up in the arms of a man who cares for him, who kisses his forehead and tells him how beautiful he is, who whines and pants and begs for him, who is willing to give him space when he needs it and pressure when he needs that more.

But, of course, Jack Crawford shows up at Will’s house at eight in the morning on the Monday immediately after the check clears. It’s probably earlier than the FBI would prefer, but Jack has been pretty clear throughout this whole fiasco that his intention was to get Will back into the BAU as soon as the legal barriers have been removed. Will is supposed to get his teaching position back, too, but not until next semester. For the moment, Jack comes bearing a very generous consulting contract which is less an offer and more a feverish demand.

And, of course, it’s Monday, so Will is alone. 

“I’ve already started the process to get your credentials reinstated, but in the meantime I’ll personally escort you in and out of the building. You can start looking at the Ripper files as soon as you say the word. Your primary focus will be catching this bastard once and for all, I promise, but if that was all this was I would have given you a bit more time to rest. I need you today, Will. A case came in this morning, and I need you on this.”

Jack’s sense of justice, his conviction, blur the air around him like a halo of rich blues and shockingly bright metallic grays, as much a bulwark as the man himself.

“Let me be your anchor, Will,” Jack urges, and Will is so swept up in Jack’s mind that he can only nod numbly and scribble his signature on the contract.

He is already sweating a bit as he gets into the SUV with Jack. It’s difficult to be around this much… triumph, and anticipation, and excitement, and righteousness. The thick, cloying taste of victory is as overwhelming as a cloth of chloroform held over his nose and mouth, but Will cracks the window slightly and stares out at the passing scenery, counting every careful breath, his eyes focusing alternately upon the blur of trees and fields and the thick plastic rims of his glasses.

Jack takes him to a ranch an hour or so away. He had been talking on the drive, and Will had sort of half-listened. Enough, at least, to know what he was about to walk into, more or less.

A worker had called the veterinarian early this morning, about five o’clock, because a horse had appeared ill or dead. The vet had found evidence of a C-section, and clipped the stitches. Inside was not a baby horse, but the nude body of a woman. It had gone first to the state police and then very rapidly been escalated to the BAU due to the odd, disturbing nature of the crime.

Will’s lips move before they park, murmuring things he isn’t even listening to. “The horse wasn’t meant to be disturbing, it was meant to be a rebirth.”

But Jack is listening, and frowns at him.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Jack asks.

Will doesn’t really know what he just said, but his mouth answers anyway: “Means the killer didn’t put her in there. Whoever put her there wanted to help.”

Jack hums. “Haven’t even seen it yet, Will. You don’t know that.”

Will presses his forehead against the glass for a moment and closes his eyes. “No,” he says, forcing all the breath from his lungs. “I guess not.”

Jack gets out without another word, and Will, reluctantly, follows. His coat feels heavy, his gloves tight, his skin even heavier, his smile even tighter. There are swirls and whispers all around him. Pity, and shock, and a bit of horror but not at him, no, at Jack, because everyone knows what happened to Will Graham and they can see he’s still unwell and he shouldn’t have to be here, poor thing, what is Crawford thinking? And the swirling of purples and greens and yellows and pale blues seeps into the edges of his vision until he has passed through the barn doors.

He takes a beat to breathe, tugging off his gloves, his eyes squeezed shut. It’s not as bad as it was during court. He took his medication this morning. He’s okay. He tucks his gloves into his right coat pocket; there is an emergency dose of diazepam in his left pocket, just in case. 

He follows Jack past a few closed stall doors and hears the nervous nickering of horses behind two of them. He can sympathize. There are techs coming in and out of the open stall where the scene awaits.

Jimmy, Brian, and Beverly are all there. There’s more of that shock-pity-horror from the three of them but it’s threaded with the flaky brown-red of simmering outrage mostly coming from Beverly and a squeamish yellow-green sort of discomfort, mostly coming from Brian.

“What a surprise!” says Jimmy, and there is a genuine bit of delight in between his concern and his disapproval toward Jack. “Welcome back, Will. Bit of a strange case to start off with, but I for one am glad to have you with us on this.”

“Thought you’d be recovering a bit longer,” Beverly says, frowning at Jack. 

“Yeah, well. Who else do you have to deal with the strange cases?” Will drawls, his eyes glued to his shoes.

“Dr. Lecter has been giving us a hand,” Jack says.

“Yeah, he’s pretty good,” says Brian, edging just slightly further away.

“He’s good, but he’s not Will,” says Jack, emphatically. “We need the best, and that means you, Will.”

“Did you tell Lecter that?” Beverly asks. “Because he’s already here.”

Will’s body goes cold as Jack huffs about it being Will’s first case back, and having some support on hand could be a good idea, and no harm in having another expert eye on things. He breathes in through his nose, and out through his mouth, and reaches up with a shaking hand to take his glasses off. 

“I need the scene cleared, Jack,” he says, quietly. 

Jack starts barking orders, and techs begin to emerge from the open stall. Hannibal steps out last, looking prim and smug in a rich, dark brown suit and heavy wool coat. 

Will ignores him, ignores the blank space around him, and tucks his glasses into his breast pocket. He moves past Hannibal as though the man were merely set dressing and swings one of the two stall doors closed behind him.

He doesn’t look, yet. He prepares himself. His eyes are closed, but his other senses are open. The crunch of the straw beneath his feet, the earthy and herbaceous scent of it, the stench of large barn animals, urine, horse manure, the stagnant water trough, the grain dust of the feed bag. The oil and leather of tack draped thoughtlessly over a stool in the corner. Sweat, dandruff, horse hair.

Blood. Offal. The taste of it, heavy and choking, thick and nauseating. Long cold, but he can still feel the great steaming heat of the open innards pulled out onto the rubber sheet. The sweet, delicate prelude to putrefaction.

He breathes it all in. Listens to the murmur of voices down the long hallway. Rolls the fear of the horses and the nerves of the crew back and forth on his tongue. Lets the disgust settle in his nostrils, twine through his sinuses, glide across the surface of his brain. 

He opens his eyes, and the pendulum swings violently. It shudders and jolts across his vision, stuttering one way in a flash of visceral white, freezes, abruptly slashes back the other direction, then swings wildly, back and forth and back and forth until it’s so fast it’s like he’s watching the scene frame by frame on an old projector. 

The world smears, feelings and intentions and thoughts like a Van Gogh, and he can see the design, the painting, the desire, and it’s so clear he can’t even breathe.

It’s twisted and discordant and distorted. He knows, distantly, that he’s hyperventilating. But he sees.

A kind man, a misunderstood man, who cared about the victim. Heavy, saturated blue, dark with grief. A man who hated the killer. Who wanted the killer found. Who was afraid. Bile yellow fear, needle sharp and sour like curdled cream. A man who loved living things, who cared for life, who wished to give comfort to a woman he had believed deserved better. There would be something else, something living, something to represent hope. Pink, blossoming, warm, sweet, memory, the scent of apple orchards and the taste of spring.

A killer who hated women. Black, twisting, iridescent oil slick, clogging his nose and mouth. A man used his position to take advantage, and to blend in. Who never would have been seen, if this kind soul had not gone out of his way to craft this scene. A sick, saccharine falsehood, caramel coated rotten onion. A man who had killed before and would happily kill again. Who would have empty eyes and a practiced smile and Will would wish to erase him from existence. Glass between his teeth, glass and aluminum foil, blood and metal and the helpless churn of an empty stomach.

And more, more information spooling from the scene, the veterinarian’s baffled response to this horse’s death, the grief over the loss of the horse from those who knew her, the tactile sense of the woman’s body folded tight into the horse’s womb, the bored detachment of the techs, the casual back and forth of the science team so desensitized by the work they are unaffected by the bitter sadness of the scene, the excitement of the teenager who had left the tack in the stall, the boredom and lazy reluctance of the stable hand who had refused to put it away, the fear and the pain and the grief and the screams and the begging and the pleading of the victim and the killer’s excitement and his glee because nothing feels like this and nothing thrills him like this and nothing gets him hard like the way they beg and nothing makes him feel alive like the sounds they try to make when his hands are wrapped around their throats and nothing tastes as good as the tears of these cunts and—

Will’s vision bursts with too many colors, and his mouth floods with saliva as too many flavors overwhelm his senses. The air is melting. The walls and the floor and the body of the horse and the woman and his own legs beneath him all begin to distort and swirl like turpentine breaking down oil paint. He staggers backward against the wall of the stable, struggling to close his eyes, struggling to control his breathing, struggling for calm. The panic is rising. He is the killer and the horse and the victim and the man who sewed the rough threads into the horse’s belly and it’s his belly and the victim is his child and he is killing her and he is dying and he is burying her within the hope of a womb and he can’t do it, he can’t focus, it’s too much, he needs—!

He has no memory of leaving the barn. He comes, slowly, back to himself. His mouth tastes of mineral water, and his head is beginning to fuzz just slightly with the calming effects of his anxiety pill. His eyes are closed, but he knows he is no longer in the main barn because he cannot smell the hay or the blood or the animals. Instead he can smell sandalwood, leather, a spice he can’t quite name. He takes a deep, soothing breath and his eyes slowly slide open.

He is in a small room, an office perhaps, and he is pressed face-first into Hannibal Lecter’s chest. He isn’t holding Hannibal, but the doctor does have his arms wrapped around Will, along with a shock blanket. Hannibal is humming, low and melodious, and the rumble is putting Will’s mind further at ease. 

Fuck.

He groans and leans harder against Hannibal’s chest. His head is pounding. He wants to curl up and sleep for days, and he wants Hannibal’s arms around him while he dreams. He hates how easy it is to relax into the Ripper’s embrace, but if it helps to stop him from trembling and banishes the threat of nightmares, he is finding it very hard to care.

“I do hope that my presence is not making this more difficult for you,” Hannibal says, and the smug lilt is enough to earn a scowl from Will but not enough to make him step away.

He’s remembering now why he has tried so hard to keep Hannibal at arm’s length. 

“You know how to handle a panic attack,” Will mutters. “You’re a psychiatrist. It’s fine.”

“Several other qualified individuals attempted to help you, Will,” Hannibal says. “You sought comfort from me. You were very specific.”

“So you’re the most familiar person to my fucked up brain. Don’t read too far into it.”

Hannibal chuckles, and his voice drops to a sultry purr directly beside Will’s ear. “You needed me, my dear. You pleaded so sweetly for my help in calming your rioting thoughts. How beautiful you were, clinging to my jacket, begging me to make it stop.” He takes a sharp breath, and his arms tighten around Will’s body, his nose trailing along Will’s jaw. “And I have. When you are most lost, Will, there is no other who can find you. I am happy to be your light in the darkness.”

Will heaves a disgusted sigh and leans back, intending to distance himself from Hannibal, but when his fingers are tight around the lapels of Hannibal’s jacket he finds there is only one thing he has the power to do. 

He yanks Hannibal forward and kisses him.

He’s angry. He crashes their mouths together, tasting Hannibal’s triumph and vindication, tasting the smug bastard’s gloating, tasting I told you so on a cannibal’s tongue. Hannibal had at least suspected Will was lying about having feelings for him. And this, this stupid case, this stupid scene, it had thrown two months of silent brooding and contemplation out the goddamn window.

Because Hannibal had been a lighthouse for Will. He had been a paddle, a guide in times of uncertainty. He had been so fucking important to Will, and whatever he had done had erased so much of their time together that Will can’t even remember why.

Will pulls away, panting, still gripping Hannibal’s jacket in white-knuckled fingers. He is glaring, his face hot, his eyes stinging.

“Oh, Will,” Hannibal says, and slides a hand through Will’s hair. “Why do you feel the need to fight so hard? All I wish to do is show you how important you are to me.” He cups Will’s cheek. “I will be your champion, if only you will allow me.”

Will kisses him again, harder this time, and his teeth cut into the inside of his lip. Hannibal can’t stifle his groan; he chases the taste of Will’s blood, his tongue sliding along the cut and swirling between Will’s teeth.

When they part, Hannibal keeps their foreheads pressed tightly together and their mouths mere inches apart. 

He breathes, “Please, Will. Allow me to cook for you. Stay with me for the night. I will help you to forget all of your woes if you only let me. Come home with me, amore. You belong at my side.”

Will wants to say yes. He wants to scream yes. He wants to leap into Hannibal’s arms and sob and beg for him to make everything right again. He wants to bend over this desk and let Hannibal have him right here, right this second, if it means keeping his brain quiet and the colors under control.

But that won’t get him what he really wants. If he wants to force Hannibal to be honest, he needs to make it clear that, anxiety or not, Hannibal hasn’t won. Will certainly won’t be the one going home with him today.

Will leans in, just shy of touching their lips together again, and whispers, “Why don’t you ask your fucking girlfriend?”

Then he shoves Hannibal away, straightens his own jacket, and stalks out of the office to find Jack. After all, he came here to do a job, and despite how horrible the experience was, he's still going to do it. And in some ways, he thinks he might be doing it better than before.

Funny, how things work out sometimes.

Chapter Text

Jack is a mess of different emotions when Will explains what he’s seen. Most of that is more triumph, validation, an eager sort of bloodthirstiness, but a decent smear of it is flashing neon alarm. He’s actually concerned about the changes to Will’s party trick, and concerned about Will. Admittedly the pendulum swing is far more intense and far harder to control, and when Jack gruffly asks if Will is sure he can keep doing it—a reluctant ask, but a sign he really is trying to do better—Will equally gruffly replies that he isn’t sure of anything, anymore, but he’s willing to try.

“Your focus will be on the Ripper, don’t worry. But, we’ll make sure to have Dr. Lecter on hand at any scene we call you in for,” Jack says, patting him on the shoulder in a curiously gentle show of support.

Will fights the answering scowl and instead nods. There really wasn’t any getting around that.

Apparently he had been rooted to the spot in the barn stall, shaking as though he were seizing but eyes wide and alert, darting around to different points in the room. Tears had streamed down his face and words had tumbled from between his lips describing every feeling and intention he was picking up, but there was no interpretation of any of the information. Wide, wet blue eyes lost in the flavor and texture of feelings beyond them had, for a heartbeat, ensorcelled the team (that was Jimmy’s descriptor, ‘ensorcelled’, though the rest of the purple details were Will’s mind filling in the gaps). Then, Jack had tried to shake him out of it.

The team quietly told him he had huddled over, tears falling like diamonds lost among the straw, and he had begun to chant the word no like a prayer, almost in a curious sort of syncope with his teardrops pattering to the ground. Jimmy had tried, gentle and awkward, but Will had only begun to tremble more. When Beverly had stepped in, he had at last squeezed shut his eyes and begged—and, boy, did they emphasize the word begged despite their professed sympathy—for Hannibal. 

Not ‘a doctor.’

Not ‘Dr. Lecter.’

“Please,” he had moaned, “I need… I need Hannibal. I need Hannibal.”

And when the good doctor had swept in, apparently all aflutter with concern, Will had not moved until Dr. Lecter had quite gently placed a hand upon the back of his neck and asked petal-soft if he was alright. 

“I can’t make it stop. Please… please make it stop.”

Hannibal had looked up at the others and said he would do his best, with an expression they described as ‘definitely off-kilter, for him’ and ‘honestly kind of spooked,’ at which point, much to the doctor’s apparently visible distress and embarrassment—though everyone assured Will it was clear that Dr. Lecter was not upset with him, no, he was just such a concerned friend—Will had shuddered (“Like how you see a cat do in cartoons sometimes,” Jimmy said, “from the top of his head to the tip of his tail!”) and dropped face first into Dr. Lecter’s chest. 

Hannibal had oh-so-graciously spoken on his behalf to say that Will was intensely overwhelmed by his emotions and—much as he had done during the trial—he was gravitating toward Hannibal. They had fallen over themselves to explain that they understood, of course, and Hannibal had helpfully informed them that, as a psychiatrist, he was far more emotionally controlled than the average person, which probably felt like a balm upon poor Will’s overworked brain.

Hannibal had said some nonsense line that sounded very insightful like, “Consider me a candle, while the rest of you may feel to his mind far more like floodlights,” and insisted on taking Will somewhere darker and quieter to recuperate. He had obviously also found the diazepam, though Will is still puzzling out how.

Jack had gone personally to retrieve the shock blanket and a bottle of mineral water, which he had handed over about the time Hannibal coaxed Will into the office. The team said they were as worried as Jack, but nobody was as worried as Dr. Lecter.

Right.

A sort of fuzzy recollection of what he had been mumbling with his face pressed to Hannibal’s chest in that tiny room makes its way back to him, and he narrowly resists the urge to scrub his face with his hands to scrape away some of the embarrassment. 

“I disturb you,” Will remembered whispering.

“Do you?” Hannibal had asked, softly. “How so?”

“Your feelings, not mine,” Will had mumbled in response.

“I’m afraid I am not such an expert in feelings. Even my own.”

He had sighed and rubbed his cheek against Hannibal’s shirt. “You’re… still. So still. Like a pond, but not made of water. Something… harder to ripple. You want me to disturb you. You like it.” 

“Ah. And why might you suggest that is?”

Will had furrowed his brow and tried to focus. It meant pushing his face even harder against Hannibal, who held him just as tightly, as though the moment would shatter if they parted.

“Because still ponds… stagnate, no matter what they’re made of.” His dry lips caught and rasped against the material of Hannibal’s tie. “You want me because I can make ripples on the surface. And if I go under, you think there’s a chance I might not come back up. But you want to see what I look like if I do.”

Hannibal had kissed Will’s curls but offered no response. They had fallen into silence as the daze began to properly lift, but Will had hummed as he floated in a strange mental space both comforting and unsettling in its lack of control. Perhaps that’s why he had fought so hard upon waking properly. 

Either way, hearing about the whole please Hannibal I need you part from the crew had been pretty goddamn mortifying, and Hannibal is now fully unavoidable. Dug in like a tick, the utter bastard. Perhaps Will deserves this. Perhaps he did it to himself. 

It doesn’t matter; what’s done is done, even if it’s an undoing. He accepts Jack’s sympathy and his assurances that all Will’s emotional support needs are going to be tended to by a cannibal who wants desperately to fuck him, possibly to death, and they continue on with the case.

When they speak with Peter Bernardone, Will is immediately certain that he put Sarah in the horse, he knows who the killer is, and he knows where the other bodies are, because he knows from the flavor and the feeling of the killer that he has done this many, many times. Jack fully believes Will already, so it’s a matter of convincing Peter to talk. 

Peter himself is exactly the swirl of grief, nerves, mistrust, and aching gentleness that Will had expected to find. He’s mouselike in a way, warm and wide-eyed but he gives the impression he could bite or flee at any moment. He is cagey at first, confirming that he knew of Sarah and had seen her, but very little else. Jack frowns at Will. Okay, different tack.

“You’ve got a shadow, don’t you, Peter?” Will says. “Somebody who’s got his hand on your shoulder, but nobody ever sees him for what he really is.”

“Nobody’d believe me,” Peter whispers, and Will huffs a little laugh. 

“Yeah. I’m sure he set it up that way,” he says. “But I believe you. I’ve been on the other side. Somebody very clever and very dangerous convinced a lot of people that I was the dangerous one. It worked so well, got so deep in my head that I believed it. And you know who never gave up on me, even when I was convinced I was guilty?” He points to Jack, and Peter’s eyes flicker that way for just a moment before dropping back to his twisting, nervous hands. “And look. Here I am, free and clear, where I can help you. Because Agent Crawford there fought for me, even when I felt hopeless. Believe me, he’s not gonna let this shadow of yours get away with any of this. And neither am I. We are going to protect you, and keep your animals safe. That’s a promise.”

It’s a manipulative little gamble, but it pays off when Jack straightens just slightly. There’s a bronze halo of righteous justice around his head. Crawford will protect Peter the way he tried to protect Will. Whoever is trying to set Peter up to look violent and unstable is about to get their goddamn teeth kicked in by the Guru himself. 

It’s also at least partially a lie. It suggests that Will wasn’t ever dangerous, and that the people who thought he was were in some way wrong. It certainly suggests that, like Peter, Will actually doesn’t have much capacity to be dangerous, except in extreme circumstances. Only, every moment of Will Graham’s life these days feels like extreme circumstances, and he is beginning to wonder if he actually has any desire to step back and stop courting violence.

Manipulative or not, lie or not, it’s enough to convince Peter. That, or the offer to have a couple of uniforms stay and make sure nothing happens to his animals during the investigation appeals enough to loosen his tongue.

The real killer is the poor guy’s social worker, a guy named Clark Ingram. Will can’t stand to stay for the interrogation because looking at his false, flat smile and empty black eyes is like choking on the toxic cloud of living pollution from Fern Gully with absolutely none of the sex appeal of Tim Curry’s luscious voice. It’s acrid, acidic, hanging at the back of his throat. He waits in Jack’s office instead, pacing, trying to get that taste out of his mouth before the others show up.

Frustration rolls around Jack Crawford beneath the weight of obligation and protocol, a tooth-gnashing conflict which mimics the sight of a desperate animal slowly being trapped under an automatic pool cover made entirely of red tape. Alana, by contrast, swans in on a cloud of glowing pink self-satisfaction and rich aubergine pride, practically gliding a few steps ahead of Hannibal with an unmistakable sashay in every step that speaks to her desire to entice, regardless of the raspberry haze hovering over her like heat distortion. She casts a flirty wink over her shoulder, and Hannibal’s sly and sultry smirk feels like some scandalous secret Will should be ashamed for intruding upon.

This was probably a mistake.

Hannibal’s eyes flick to Will’s the moment Alana is no longer looking. The heat ratchets up; blazing scarlet lust caramelizes to a rich maroon of desperate need that tastes like burnt sugar, and then all of it disappears as the doctor closes the blast doors separating his heart from the world.

This was definitely a mistake.

“He shut down,” Jack growls. He trudges to the window and sweeps his suit jacket back, his fists settling on his hips. “Called his lawyer. We’re not getting anything else out of him.”

“Well I feel like I got plenty,” Alana says, and settles delicately into one of the chairs in front of Jack’s desk. “His discomfort around women is significant. He showed almost no emotional response whatsoever. I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a perfect example of a psychopath. It was unsettling, actually. I’ve interviewed men with that exact look before. In prison, for murder. It’s not something you can really miss, when you know how to recognize it.”

Will accidentally snorts, which draws everyone’s attention to him. He’s still pacing back and forth along the far wall, so it’s awkward for Alana to face him. Jack just turns his head, and Hannibal perches with no small measure of impudence upon the corner of the director’s desk, one eyebrow lifted, his hands clasped in front of him.

Alana glances at Jack, then her pitying smile returns to Will like a searchlight upon an escaped prisoner. “Are you okay? You don’t have to do this. You’re still recovering. It’s understandable if this is triggering some negative feelings for you.”

“No, I’m… fine. I just—” He drums his fingers against his thighs, his eyes glued to the regulation carpet. He just what, exactly? “If the look in somebody’s eye was the deciding factor for conviction, I think I’d have walked a lot sooner.” That’s a sharp enough rebuke and a believable enough explanation to get her off his back. Predictably, she drops her gaze, and Will goes on. “He got a lawyer. It doesn’t matter. We’re already digging up the other bodies. We’ll find evidence. Killers like him always make mistakes.”

“Except the Ripper,” Jack drawls, and Will snorts again.

This time, though, he’s quick to snap back: “Ingram’s nothing like the Ripper. He’s… generic. They’re not even playing the same game.” After a beat, he huffs a laugh and adds, “Anyway, don’t forget, the Ripper did make a mistake. He let me go.”

He lets it hang for a moment. The pride bursting from Jack is overwhelming enough on its own, but Alana’s contemplative swirl of thoughtful reappraisal is enough to force Will further away, his back toward them. Out of the corner of his eye, he catches just a hint of affection, longing, and hungry anticipation bleeding from Hannibal before the clamp comes back down.

If only Hannibal knew that the aforementioned error had almost nothing to do with releasing Will from the BSHCI, things might be different. But the lesson has clearly not been learned, and Will was always something of a hardass when it came to teaching.

It’s starting to get late by the time Jack decides they’re all done gawking at the bodies. Jack decides to stay to get some more of the paperwork processed—fifteen bodies is a hell of a lot—and apologizes.

“I know I said I would drive you back, Graham, but I have to sort out this thing with the bird and—well, you know how this job goes. Point is, this is on me. I’ll get you a cab.”

“Nonsense. I would be happy to take you home, Will,” Hannibal says, and the flare of annoyance from Alana is almost worth a yes.

Almost, but not quite.

Will shrugs noncommittally and turns his attention fully to his cell phone. Hannibal’s irritation lashes out for a moment like the sting of a switch, but he reins it in just as rapidly.

“I’ll just call Matthew,” Will says, scrolling casually through his contact list as though there are more than fifteen names. “Don’t worry about it. Jack, I’ll just wait in your office until my ride is here?”

“Sure. Some files on the table you could look at while you wait if you’re looking to get started on the Ripper case early, but they’re not going anywhere. I’ll call you tomorrow. Dr. Bloom, Dr. Lecter.”

“Goodnight Jack. It was nice to see you, Will.” Alana reaches out and squeezes his arm, and Will glances up just long enough to nod at her without having to actually look her in the eye. She’s radiating a smug sort of relief that sticks to his teeth with an odd, dusty flavor, like old toffee. He doesn’t care for it. “Get home safe, okay?”

“Sure,” says Will. “G’night.”

She squeezes one more time for good measure and then exchanges a few quiet words—and a chaste kiss—with Hannibal.

The phone rings twice before Matt picks up.

“Hey, gorgeous.”

“Hey. Are you driving?”

“Caught me at the store, actually. You’re outta the good cereal. Why?”

Will sighs. “I’m at Quantico.”

Matthew is silent for too long. “Okay, cher. Need a pickup?”

“Yeah. Thank you.”

“I’m about twenty-five minutes from you.” He clicks his tongue against his teeth. “Have you eaten?” The silence is answer enough; Matthew swears under his breath. “Take it you missed your evening dose, too.”

“Matt—”

“They ambushed you when you were alone, Will, and they didn’t even bother to make sure you had everything you needed. You better be planning to lay down some ground rules, ‘cause otherwise I’m gonna have to fuckin’ fight your guy Crawford and the last thing I need is the FBI on my ass for assaulting some bigwig dickhead who hasn’t learned his lesson about keeping precious assets safe.”

Heat creeps up Will’s neck and paints his cheeks. “I’m not precious,” he mumbles, and becomes hyper aware of the fact that Hannibal is lingering near the fucking doorway.

It makes sense. He and Alana had come in separate cars. He’s probably going to meet her somewhere, but he has to have the last word.

“You are. You’re precious to the FBI for what you can do—and, Christ, Will, can you even do it anymore? That kind of overload, you could trigger all kinds of—shit, I know, I know, you don’t need me to lecture you. Fuck. I just… you’re precious to me, you grumpy bastard.” A car door slams, then Matthew purrs, “And I think I’ll spend all day tomorrow showing you just how fuckin’ precious you are.”

“Matthew!” he hisses. “Can we… talk about this when you get here?” He glances over his shoulder at Hannibal and murmurs, “I’m not… alone.”

Hannibal’s aurora of rage and jealousy flares for just a moment, but he’s getting better at schooling it.

“Oh. Well. In that case.” His mouth gets closer to the receiver. “You really don’t like what’s comin’ outta my mouth, you’ll just have to fill it up with somethin’ tastier. I promise I can even beg real pretty for you.”

“Christ—”

“See you soon, cher,” Matthew says, and the sizzle goes straight to Will’s cock.

Which is incredibly inconvenient, given that Hannibal starts in on his bullshit the moment the phone call ends. 

“I was hoping we might have a moment to speak after you recovered from your… attack,” Hannibal says, and Will wants to tear the smirk from his lips.

“Well, we don’t,” he mutters. His attention remains on his phone screen. “And it wasn’t an ‘attack’, it was just… a more intense reconstruction than I’m used to. I’m out of practice. I’ll figure it out.” The I don’t need your help is unspoken, but distractingly loud.

Hannibal sucks in a breath and clicks his tongue behind his teeth, with a little quarter-turn on his heel for maximum annoyance. “I was under the impression we had approximately twenty-five minutes.”

“Don’t you have somewhere better to be?” Will snaps.

“I can assure you, there is nowhere better than by your side.”

Closing his eyes is purely involuntary. Opening them again takes deliberate effort and a deep breath through his nose. Will stares resolutely at the list of unread emails in his inbox and scrolls, as though somehow he’ll find an answer two hundred messages deep.

“What,” he says, “exactly, were you hoping to discuss, Dr. Lecter?”

“Will.” Soft. Admonishing. Patient, but a little weary. “Please.”

“What?” The t hits like a plosive blowing out a microphone.

Hannibal’s entire aura frowns. Will still doesn’t look at him.

“If you intend to continue consulting, there are certain supports that will clearly need to be put in place to ensure that—”

“Jack already said he’d bring you in. I guess he didn’t tell you. Congratulations, you’re my designated wrangler. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Ah, yes, because all intimacy aside, at the end of the day, I belong to Alana and you belong to your orderly,” Hannibal says, and his light mockery tastes of bile and bitterness more genuine than his tone.

Will throws back his head and laughs; he glances at Hannibal, just briefly, a savage grin displaying his teeth. “Now, that’s not actually what I said, Dr. Lecter.”

Hannibal scowls and takes a step closer, dropping his voice. “Those were your words, Will. You and I both already belong to someone. That is what holds you apart from me. Why you insist on being so… frustratingly abrasive, even in a professional setting.”

Will’s grin widens, and his eyelids slip down like the shoulder of a slinky dress. “Oh, don’t you worry. I’ll play nice at work. As for the other piece, I’d rather not talk about it anymore. We’re done. Go on. Alana’s expecting you.”

They’re in the office of the goddamn director of the BAU, and Hannibal has boxed him in against the table loaded down with files on the Ripper.

“Alana can wait,” Hannibal insists. “I would much rather clear up this little misunderstanding before it can interfere any further.”

The phone settles heavily on the table beneath Will’s white-knuckled hand. He is staring into Hannibal’s eyes, seeing and tasting the scalding rage, the raspberry lust, the ice-mint curiosity, the rich chocolate need, and he is letting it all pool and dance within his head. They’re sharing breaths, sharing thoughts, sharing a pulse, sharing the throb straining against tight slacks.

“You said that you already belong to someone,” Hannibal murmurs. “I took that to mean your loyalty to Mr. Brown was the barrier between us.”

His lips hardly move, but his voice rasps harshly. “That was your first misunderstanding, then. I wasn’t talking about Matthew, Dr. Lecter. He doesn’t own me.”

“Then who does?” the doctor hisses, and the crisp autumnal spice of his possession threads its way around Will’s spine.

It comes out as a sigh, or maybe a moan: “The Ripper.”

Hannibal freezes. His face is so near to Will’s now that—had he wanted to risk it—he could have fused their lips with no effort at all. A solar flare of emotion riots around him, and Will’s tongue is heavy with a wicked combination of feelings and flavors: a feast of succulent exultation sits like delicate roasted pheasant and champagne with candied petals perched against his lips, and crushing devastation sours and oozes like underripe cherries and expired, half-melted, freezerburnt vanilla ice cream between his teeth. It is delicious.

Will licks his lips, and Hannibal’s eyes glaze a bit as they track the movement. “He staked a pretty clear claim, don’t you think?”

“That he did,” Hannibal says, softly. “You would accept a claim placed upon you by a man like the Chesapeake Ripper?”

“He isn’t going to give me much of a choice, now, is he,” Will answers, and it’s almost a declaration.

“And what do you think the result of this ownership will be?”

Will shrugs without breaking eye contact. “If he wants something specific from me, I don’t know what it is. I expected some sign, after the Tattlecrime article, but I think he’s been making me wait.”

“Perhaps he lost interest after reading Ms. Lounds’ thorough explorations of the rather catastrophic results of his efforts.”

“No,” Will says, and their eyes positively bore into each other. “He let me out because he saw the trial. He already knew what he’d done. He was curious what I would do and disappointed to see me fold, but whatever the fuck is wrong with me now is interesting. Once word gets out that I’m consulting again, he won’t be able to resist some kind of tease, some sharp reminder that I’m not really free until he decides he’s done with me.”

“And do you believe he will remove anyone who might stand between you? Do you believe your paramour’s life is at risk?” Hannibal whispers.

Will’s laugh is breathy, and he doesn’t miss the slight, shuddering inhale which pulls that mirth straight into Hannibal’s lungs like smoke. 

“Well, there’s your second misunderstanding, Dr. Lecter. See, I don’t give a damn what the Ripper thinks about who I’m sleeping with.” He leans in until the dry skin on his lips rasps against the shell of Hannibal’s ear. “I just don’t find you that interesting.”

They recoil from one another like two rearing snakes, not touching but perfectly mirrored, shoulders arched back, hips still drawn close, and the swell of stinging, indignant rage threatens to drag Will into Hannibal’s mind like a sneaker wave. But the shutters come down and Hannibal takes first one step back, then two. He straightens his lapels and flattens his tie as though that will somehow soothe his ruffled pride.

Will picks up his phone like nothing happened and checks the time. “Matt should be here soon.” As he heads for the door, he decides to be petty and drawl, “Guess I’ll see you at the next scene. You and Alana have a nice night, Dr. Lecter.”

“Allow me to walk you out,” Hannibal says, stiffly.

With a slow, almost pitying half-turn of his head and only a sliver of a view of the Ripper out the corner of his eye, Will gently replies, “I would really rather you didn’t.”

Matthew is leaning against his car outside, dressed down after work in a loose old tee shirt, an open blue button-up, and well-worn jeans slung low on his hips. He’s scrolling on his phone, and a cigarette dangles from the corner of his mouth. Will doesn’t love it when he smokes, but he’s sort of hoping the intermittent glow is visible across the parking lot, blinking like a signal lantern, and the trails of drifting smoke wafting into the sky will act like a little beacon. Sometimes Will gets lost, and Matthew wants to make sure he always knows how to find his way home.

He’s parked as far as he reasonably can be from Lecter’s Bentley. No reason to cross paths with the good doctor tonight, especially not after that little tease over the phone. It means Will has a long way to walk, but it also means Matt picks up his footsteps with plenty of time to finish his cigarette before Will has something to frown about.

“Evenin’, beautiful,” he says, flashing his teeth. “Need a lift?”

Will huffs a short laugh and pulls a hand out of his pocket to remove his glasses. “Evening,” he says, and Christ, that voice could stiffen a dead man. “You, uh… wouldn’t happen to be heading toward Wolf Trap, would you?”

Matthew sidles up and slides a hand onto one of those tantalizing hips, his teeth catching against his lower lip. “Hm. I could be convinced.”

For just a second, Will’s eyes catch his, then they drop to his chin and Will furrows his brow. “Thank you for coming to get me,” he says, quietly.

With a kiss upon his troubled forehead, Matt answers, “Any time, Will. You know I’d do anything for you.”

“I know.”

“Come on. Let’s get you home, cher. Got you a burger and a peanut butter milkshake so you don’t stay hungry.”

“I’m… not really—”

“Yeah, well, you gotta fuckin’ eat anyway.”

Will laughs, a sudden, musical sound, and Matthew’s chest warms and tightens all at once. When Will looks at him, that crooked little smile snags in his heart. It’s like the stomach drop of a long fall and the first breath after a long time underground. No words pass between them, but clearly Will sees whatever the hell it is he sees when Matt’s thinking about love because he glides forward until they’re pressed together against the car, his eyes like chips of sapphire in the dim light, and his kiss is petal-soft and delicate, a fluttering little thing, testing. 

Matthew nips at his lips, a sigh crawling its way up to the stars, and Will captures his mouth again, only this time he’s trembling.

His fingers curl into the back of Matt’s hair and they are lost in a long, smoldering kiss. The car door is cool and firm against his back; every soft, muffled groan is carefully swallowed so nothing escapes that belongs between them. Matthew slowly slots his thigh higher and tighter until Will is rocking against it; those goddamn hands of his, wound tight in Matthew’s shirt, fuck, if only they were around his throat. But those sounds, those tiny, whimpering moans, Christ, what Matt wouldn’t give to slam him down on the hood of the car and—

Will starts to pull away, his breathing ragged. Their tongues have barely whispered goodbye to one another; a trail of saliva still connects them like spider silk. 

Will murmurs, “I hate how you taste when you smoke.”

“But I look so fuckin’ cool,” Matthew hums back, and Will snorts as he leans in for another wet, desperate kiss.

This one doesn’t last as long as the first, and Will doesn’t pant and shudder against his thigh again, either. This time, when he pulls away, Will  looks a little embarrassed. Matthew doesn’t let go of his hips; he quirks an eyebrow, and Will mumbles,

“We, uh… We should probably wait and, y’know. Do this at home.”

Matthew hums, tilts his head from side to side, and shrugs one shoulder. “If you say so, cher. Coulda been fun to fog up the windows a bit.”

“Yeah, uh, there are… probably cameras in this parking lot. Which is at Quantico. Where I work. With the FBI. So.” 

He’s doing that adorable little head bob every time he starts a new sentence. Matthew wants to lick the nervous sweat off every line of his beautiful body.

“Understood. Don’t piss off the FBI with a public indecency charge. Last thing either of us needs is a criminal record.”

“Hilarious,” Will drawls, and tragically disentangles himself so that he can climb into the passenger seat.

Will likes to stare out the window when he’s in the car, and he doesn’t like to talk. Fine with Matt—he doesn’t mind silence with anybody, really, and with Will there’s a quality to it that he can’t quite place that sets it apart in a pleasant sort of way. He can play his eclectic mix of EDM, classic rock, power metal, and random shit he’s picked up from games over the years, as long as it’s quiet. He can even sing along and drum his fingers on the steering wheel if he wants and Will won’t be bothered, but there’s a sag to the line of Will’s shoulders that speaks to his exhaustion, so Matt just watches the road and considers the best way to make Crawford’s death look like a humiliating accident.

At least Will ate his dinner. Cheap, greasy burger, limp fries, decent enough milkshake. Good enough, considering he’d gone all day running on empty. Matt was gonna have to start carrying emergency doses of Will’s medications if this shit was going to become a recurring issue, and somehow he doubts Crawford’s attention to detail when it comes to Will’s needs is any better than it was when the guy was sweating and seizing himself half to death.

When they get home, Will has to take care of the dogs first. That’s just the way it goes. The pups whine a bit and dance around until they’re let out, and they scarf down their dinner when their urgent dash outside is done. Will coos and frowns and apologizes under his breath as he rubs both of their adoring little faces. Max’s tail wags so hard it beats a frantic rhythm against the recliner, but Winston is calm as ever once he’s fed. That dog is smart—he seems to see what Matt sees, that trembling exhaustion, and he sticks close to Will’s leg as they go through the motions of their nighttime routine hours late.

Not sure what it says about him that he and a dog are reacting the same way to their owner’s distress, but, maybe it’s appropriate.

Matthew lays in bed, waiting for Will to finish up in the bathroom, frowning at the ceiling. This shit was easier when Will was still in the hospital. No other people to interfere, no FBI dragging Will around and getting him all—

“Hey,” says Will, and Matthew sits up, his arm slung over his knee.

“Hey, gorgeous,” Matt says. “Long day, huh?”

Will sits down on the mattress and ruffles his hair, heaving a tungsten-heavy sigh. His boxers are soft and well-worn, cornflower blue; he has opted to go shirtless, and Matthew subtly admires the little love bites, suck marks, and scratches across his chest and shoulders.

He chews at his lip; Matthew would rather chew at it himself, but he’s gotta focus on what happened today. As Will recounts the story, halting in places, the idea of locking him back up in the hospital grows more and more appealing. If that trick of his is so overwhelming now that he can’t come out of it without Lecter’s help, that’s a level of complication Matt’s not sure how to deal with. Plus, Will really laid it on thick, antagonizing a guy who turns human bodies into art as a hobby. Screwing with him a little bit, sure, that’s all fun and games, but pretty soon he’s gonna run out of patience and Matthew is his most likely target.

Gonna have to do something about that. But for now, Will needs him.

“I know I’m not gonna talk you out of going back,” Matthew says, tracing patterns between Will’s shoulderblades. “Especially not when you’re this close to getting Lecter to break. I just… I need you to be okay. I’d go fuckin’ crazy if something happened to you.”

Will’s shoulders slump just a little. “I think I’ll be fine. It’s… I just need time to get used to it. Build some new walls.” He looks over his shoulder at Matt, eyes half-lidded. “Get out of my head for a while.”

Oh, yes.

What Will needs is control. He doesn’t want to be protected, he wants to be a protector. He wants to be loved and worshipped and valued for his strength, his cunning, and his stability.

“I might be able to help you with that,” Matthew says, and crawls into Will’s lap.

Their mouths meld together. Will’s grip is like iron around Matthew’s waist, and it’s impossible not to lose his fingers in those incredible curls. The feel of Will’s heavy cock thickening against the crease of his thigh is enough to tear a groan from low in Matt’s throat, and he salivates at the thought of how pretty those sounds will be when they’re rattling past bruises.

Sure, he could make Will forget his worries by fucking him until he’s too raw to scream, but that’s not a long-term solution because that’s what Lecter is going to do. Lecter’s bound to have Will gagged and spread wide, leaking, drooling, begging. And, fuck, the thought of that makes Matt’s cock twitch so hard Will groans into his mouth and pulls him down flat on the mattress for easier access.

Their sleepwear disappears, and it’s flushed skin on skin still slightly damp from the shower. His body, it’s unfair. Muscles lean and tight, legs for the best days of a lucky man’s life. Skin just begging to be bitten and scratched and bruised. Hands that have callused over the last few months, enough that they catch when they glide along Matthew’s chest.

Legs tangled, hips rocking, mouths hot and exploratory. The absolute fucking dream, especially shared with someone so perfect for him. His chest swells again, and he savors the salt and sweat beneath Will’s jaw.

“Tell me what you want,” Will murmurs.

Matt kisses the hinge of his jaw. “Ain’t that my question?”

Teeth scrape against the side of his neck; Will hums. “Maybe. But… you want something specific.”

Matthew’s sultry chuckle barely disturbs Will’s soft, meandering bites. “Same thing I always want, cher. I want you buried so deep inside me I can taste it.”

Another hum, and a sharper bite just below his ear. “There’s more to it. More you want.”

He pauses, and the bites turn back to wet kisses. “I want you to use me,” he breathes. “Whatever way you need.” Will lets out a soft little moan and sucks hard on Matthew’s neck; he can only hiss through his teeth and whimper, “That’s all I want. Please. I want to make you feel so good.” Will’s moan vibrates through Matt’s throat and his eyes roll back. “Please, daddy.”

With a sharp smeck, Will’s lips and tongue disappear from his skin. Matthew whines and looks at Will, whose answering stare is blank.

“Did you just—?” Will blinks a few times, rapidly, and shakes his head as if to clear it. His face scrunches with something Matt would best describe as bafflement. “Did you call me—?”

Matthew doesn’t blush or anything. He’s not really embarrassed. All things considered he kind of did it on purpose. After all, giving Will the sense that he’s the strong, stable partner with a handle on every situation was the point, wasn’t it? And Will had a protective nature. Nurturing. He wanted somebody to need him.

Well. Matthew needs him.

And he’d thought about saying something else. Please, Sir was a little too Oliver Twist. Please, Master was a little too Igor. Please, baby was a little too goddamn cute, and it would have made Will feel like he was being commanded to do something Matthew wanted, rather than permitted, begged, even, to do whatever he wanted.

So. Please, daddy.

And he had fully expected Will not to know how to respond.

He licks his lips and shrugs, with a close-mouthed smile and a coquettish glance through his lashes. Will fuckin’ loves it when he looks at him like this.

“I dunno, it just… if you don’t like it, I can say somethin’ else. It just feels right. Not, y’know, not for all the time. But, sometimes—”

“You think calling me—calling me that is going to make me feel better?” Will’s laugh is aggressively seasoned with hysteria and incredulity, but his cock is still filled out and leaking against his stomach, and he hasn’t stopped trailing his fingers up and down the planes of Matt’s body. “You thought you’d just spring this on me, and it’d be okay?”

Matthew deliberately wriggles closer, digging his fingers into Will’s hips. He bites his lip, his gaze hot, his voice smoky. Will hisses as their hard lengths drag and press together.

“I promise I’ll be good,” Matthew says, nosing along Will’s hairline. “Use me. Punish me. Own me. Make me everything you need, and I’ll call you whatever you like.”

Will grumbles and grinds his hips into Matt’s, startling a groan from deep in his chest. “You still don’t know how to keep your mouth shut.”

With his lips pressed against Will’s temple, Matthew whispers, “Is that really what you want?”

“I want you on your knees,” he growls. “Now.”

Oh, fuck yes.

Matt scrambles off the bed and thumps to the scratched wooden floor, mouth already wet, tongue eagerly tracing the inside of his Cupid’s bow. Will flows to his feet like goddamn liquid, feeding hungrily from the bottomless well of Matthew’s lust, and when he yanks Matt’s head backward he pours some of it back in through his greedy, black-blown eyes. A thumb drags along Matthew’s lower lip, gliding through each sharp, ragged puff of breath.

Matt moans and sucks that teasing thumb into his mouth. It pops out, and then the whole hand claps, sharp and spit-damp, against his cheek. Not enough to hurt, really—not enough to make him do much more than flinch—but enough for him to learn. There’s a drag of spittle across his cheek as Will’s thumb smooths the surface and tuts.

“You promised you’d be good, darlin’.”

Oh, fuck, he’ll be so good. He’ll be so fuckin’ good for daddy.

His glassy, eager nod is met with a huff, and he’s slowly pushed further down, his knees spreading wider and wider until his ass is pressing against his ankles. Will towers over him, admiring the arch of his neck and the dip of his collarbones. Matt expects him to lean down and bite, worry his teeth deep, spray blood across the dark oak floor, rip a chunk out and swallow it down like his psycho cannibal doctor, and something about the idea hooks him under the balls so hard his breathing stutters.

But Will just lets out a breathy laugh and, without breaking eye contact, slowly settles a foot against Matthew’s cock. Heel to toe, with agonizing deliberateness, the squeeze unforgiving by the time it reaches the tip. Matthew shudders and whines as pleasure rockets up his spine until a clear, heavy droplet slides down to pool obscenely along the crescent of Will’s biggest nail. Sweat glistens on Matt’s forehead and cools just as quickly as it springs from the small of his back. Fuck. Fuck. He could come just like this. Just staring into Will’s eyes, crushed underfoot, his hair fisted in one of those beautiful hands, panting like a needy little whore for daddy to tease and torment.

“Doesn’t take much, does it?” Will says, and the ball of his foot presses even harder against the underside of Matt’s cockhead.

He moans shamelessly and loud enough that there’s a curious whuff from one of the dogs. Will’s eyes tick toward the fireplace, then back to Matthew’s. He puts more weight on his foot, and it’s painful now, and more precome leaks down his toes as Matthew’s breath gets even more ragged. 

Oh, Christ. He’s throbbing like hell, he wants Will so bad. He’s got to sink. He’s got to fall into being a very good boy, focus hard on how much he wants to please Will and keep him close because if he doesn’t he’s going to slam this beautiful bastard against the floor by his pretty little throat and fuck him until he cries for the Ripper to save him.

“I asked you a question.”

“Not from you,” Matt breathes, his jaw tight and aching against his teeth. You could whisper in my ear and it’d be enough, baby; I love you. I love you. I need you. I’ll keep you.

Will hums, and the pressure dials back. “You show me how good you can be, and I’ll give you as much as I think you can take. Deal?”

He babbles a strangled sort of agreement he isn’t even sure is comprehensible. Will seems satisfied with his answer, though, or with whatever he sees dancing through Matt’s eyes, and it’s almost a shame to be pulled back up into a position that’s comfortable again. Harder to stay focused without the pain of his knees digging hard into the wood and the burn of his thighs spread just a bit too wide.

No time for wistful thoughts; the broad head of Will’s cock is brought to his mouth, and he chokes back a shuddering groan, anticipating that bitter, salt-sweat taste. He opens wide, flattens his tongue, lets drool start to leak down his chin, but Will doesn’t press inside that open, welcome heat. No—he just watches the pitiful and pained expression deepen to something like despair as he glosses Matt’s lips with precome.

“You’re awfully pretty when you’re desperate,” Will murmurs.

His eyes roll back when he’s finally allowed to taste. Will is so thick, and Matt is so careful to keep his lips around his teeth because he’s good, he’s being so good, he can be so good when he’s given the chance. Will’s rough hands are gentle in his hair, at first. They tighten fractionally when Matthew’s fingers start to twitch up to wrap around him, and he freezes.

He’s good. He’s being good. He’s being what Will needs.

“On my thighs,” Will says, softly, and Matthew drools as he takes a solid, steadying grip on either side of Will’s legs.

Short, steady thrusts at first, just to get everything wet and slick and moving. A little deeper each time, a little more pressure against the back of his throat. Matt relaxes, keeps his breathing even, lets his whole body go slack so Will can take what he needs.

Faster, now, and deeper—breaths must be quick, and his vision blurs with tears. Harder, those once-gentle hands tightening, tightening, pain pricking at his scalp, his own neglected cock throbbing in time with the slap of Will’s skin against his slick lips and glistening chin. The stretch of his throat is fucking unreal, and he wants so badly to feel the hot flood of come soothing the ache of it that a pitiful moan escapes, vibrating its way up Will’s spine and rattling out through his mouth as a startled sigh.

Suddenly the stretch and the ache and the taste of Will is torn from his mouth, and instead a hand latches around his throat.

“Up,” Will growls, and Matthew is good—and wrecked—so he obeys. 

Will draws him in for a filthy, lip-splitting kiss, and orders him to his hands and knees on the bed. He stands beside the bed, letting his eyes trail over Matthew’s body. He must look dazed, puffy-mouthed, needy. Will traces the line of Matt’s neck, down his shoulder, to the tattoos on his ribcage, circles the divot of his hip, the curve of his ass, down one powerful thigh. There’s a sigh—contentment, Matt thinks—and then Will pours a generous helping of lubricant on one of his fingers.

He presses one hand flat against Matt’s lower back, and of course Matthew is happy to oblige; he arches like a proper little slut and sways his hips back and forth, a coy smile cast over his shoulder. Will smirks and slides that one strong finger inside him.

It’s honestly not long. He’s wound up, pent up, and he’s still got the taste of Will’s cock heavy on his tongue. A few crooks of that finger against a certain special spot, and Matthew is coming buckets on the fresh, clean sheets he’d put on last night, goddamnit. He hangs his head and takes a deep, nourishing breath. Oh, hell, he needed that.

“I think you can take another,” Will murmurs, and Matt barely has the time to glance back at him before he’s pouring more lube into his hand.

A mere handful of fluttering, nervous heartbeats, and Will is kneeling between Matt’s legs with two well-slicked fingers sliding inside him, aimed ruthlessly for his prostate. Whenever Matt starts to whine or push back, Will delivers a sharp, stinging slap to his ass and grips the cheek to firmly hold him in place. It’s too much, and it’s agony, and it’s fucking incredible.

Matt howls and clenches tight as the relentless rubbing rips him over the edge into another ragged, gasping orgasm. His lungs burn as he gulps down air, trembling, spurts of his release clear and thin between his hands. He wonders if it’s over, but the fingers don’t even withdraw fully this time.

Instead, they circle his rim, playful, almost thoughtful, and then more cold lubricant drizzles down and three fingers slide back in, pumping and stretching but always, always rubbing against the same fucking spot. Electricity sparks at the base of his spine, pulsing, and his moan cracks on its way between his teeth. His cock twitches, dripping a pathetic thimble of fluid, and his thighs shake.

“W-Will,” he groans, and he earns a harder slap against his stinging cheek than before. He rolls his head down and chokes out, “I—can’t.”

“You can,” Will murmurs, and his focus is absolute, unrelenting, until he wrings a third strangled climax from Matthew’s battered prostate, this one entirely dry but hard, so much so he sees stars and his shoulders fall to the mattress, his arms too shaky to hold him.

The fingers still don’t stop, but they switch back to a gentle glide, in and out, and a scissoring stretch which tugs at his rim. He swallows and manages to look back over his shoulder again. Will is watching him, eyes bright and gentle, and god, if he doesn’t fall in love all over.

“I want to give you one more,” whispers his beautiful tormentor. “But not with my fingers.”

“Please,” he rasps from his bruised throat. He licks his lips. “Please, I need it.”

“What do you need?” Will says, softly.

Matthew pushes back against those fingers, his head fuzzy with static and warmth, and he begs,  “Please, I need you inside me. I need you to tear me open. God, I need you to fill me up, I’ve been so good, I need you to fuck me, daddy, please.”

Will’s answering groan is positively guttural, and the sound Matthew makes when the girth of his cock slams home isn’t much less viscerally carnal. Every brutal thrust forces what little breath he manages to draw right back out of his lungs with debauched sounds fully out of his control.

Will grabs him by the hair and pulls him up, chest to back, sinking his teeth into the join of Matt’s neck almost as hard as he’d imagined earlier. There’s the sharp tang of blood, the deafening slap of Will’s hips against his ass, and a sudden twist to one nipple, and Matt’s coming undone yet again, his voice strangled and wanton, chanting yes, oh, daddy, yes, god, fuck, harder, please, please, just, ah, fuck, Will—!

And then Will is shaking and spilling hot and deep inside of him, moaning against his neck, breath warm, lips and tongue lapping at the sweat behind his ear, hips stuttering through the aftershocks.

He doesn’t want to lose a drop of what Will’s given him, but the second Will starts to pull out a warm rush slides down his quivering thighs. There’s a moment of grief, but Will wraps his arms tightly around Matt’s chest from behind and kisses his neck and his jaw and the shell of his ear and murmurs,

“You were so good for me. You’re exactly what I need, darlin’.”

And the warmth and the fuzz and the euphoria come rushing back. He leans into the embrace, no thoughts but keeping his Will, keeping him close. Nobody else can be what he needs like Matthew can. Nobody else will be so good for him.

“I love you, cher,” Matthew manages to say, though his voice is garbled and he’s utterly wrecked. “I’m yours. I’m all yours. Won’t let those bastards take you away from me. Don’t ever want to be alone again. Never.”

“I know,” Will says, and holds him for a few minutes more.

Chapter Text

“‘Scuse me, doc. You, uh… got a couple minutes?”

Frederick glances up from his desk, pen tapping thoughtfully against the page of notes in front of him, and lifts his eyebrows at a rather flustered Matthew Brown hovering in the doorway. The young man is not yet dressed in his all-white scrubs, and is in fact—Frederick’s eyes tick to the elegant clock above the mantel—a full thirty minutes early for his afternoon shift. The doctor sniffs, caps his pen, and lays it to the side as he gestures with one sweeping hand to the fine leather chair in front of him.

“Of course, Matthew. I always have time for my employees.”

This isn’t precisely true, but it is true enough in this particular case. Brown has been quite a valuable hire. A diamond in the rough, one might say. More than once, his soft, lisping voice has provided a surprisingly insightful bouquet of reason and innovation. He is quiet, and dedicated, and has repeatedly demonstrated his trustworthiness. He also very rarely visits this office, only ever with some purpose or suggestion. As such, Frederick can certainly make time to hear from him.

Matthew clears his throat as he closes the door, and his shoulders are rounded forward as he practically tip-toes to the guest seat. He seems as though he is choosing his words; he is often careful with them, likely due to some embarrassment surrounding his speech impediment, the poor boy. His cheeks are a bit pink, and his brow is furrowed.

Frederick laces his fingers together on top of the desk and clicks his tongue softly behind his teeth. “You reduced your hours in order to provide home care to Will Graham, correct?”

“Um… Yeah, doc. I…” Matthew twists the bottom of his t-shirt in his hands. “How’d you know that’s what I wanted to—?”

He hadn’t, but he chuckles anyway and taps his index fingers together. “An educated guess, my boy. Tell me, how is our Mr. Graham doing, now that he has your—I am certain—much-appreciated support?”

Matthew’s tongue darts out to touch his bottom lip and his eyebrows knit together; he shakes his head once, firmly, and his nostrils flare. “He… They got him working with the FBI again. Looking at, um… y’know.” He twirls a finger near the side of his head. “Putting it together for them.”

“Reconstructing crime scenes,” Frederick says, inclining his head. It’s endearing, in a way, how Mr. Brown avoids using a great number of sibilants in a row. “Consulting for Jack Crawford again. I must admit, I am surprised that Mr. Graham was willing.”

“Crawford came over on Monday. I wasn’t there,” Matthew mutters.

“Ah. So Mr. Graham was alone, with no advocate.”

Matthew nods, a bitter frown curling his mouth. “I picked him up after. And it did a real number on him, y’know? Like what happened in the courtroom, remember, but he told me it went deeper and he couldn’t turn it off without help. I’m worried. He’s been through so much already, y’know? And, I mean, Dr. Lecter helped him, got him to calm down. And they’re gonna have him there in the field with Will all the time now, but—”

“Crawford has engaged Hannibal Lecter’s services? As a means of providing stability for Will Graham?” He swallows, leans back, ignores the squeak of his chair, tugs at his suddenly too-tight tie and too-warm collar. “And his… reconstructions are amplified. I see. This is… concerning.”

Normally, Frederick would be distracted by how fascinating this change to Will’s empathy disorder would be to the psychiatric community. Normally, he would ask a dozen more questions and hungrily devour details in hopes of having some new and groundbreaking content for an article. But… after what had been done to Will, the idea of using his condition for clout had soured in Frederick’s stomach. And it was worse, knowing who had done it. Worse still, knowing that Hannibal was dragging his eerie fingers through what was left of Will’s pitted gray matter, searching for the thread that would turn the poor man into his puppet.

It must be agonizing for Will; he shared Frederick’s suspicions that Hannibal Lecter was far worse, far more sinister than simply a deranged, unethical psychiatrist, and he was now expected to take comfort from the very man who had damaged him so badly to begin with. It was maddening that somehow Crawford and the entire FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit were unable to see the monster standing in their midst. Graham, fragile as he was, had already expressed an unwillingness to point fingers at Dr. Lecter, given the complete and utter lack of evidence, and Frederick, intelligent coward that he was, had readily agreed. It would have been utterly foolish to get involved.

That was before.

Now, Crawford was giving express and exclusive access to Will Graham in his most vulnerable moments to a man whose motivations were so wildly unclear that Frederick found himself struggling with whether he ought to be more frightened of the unethical psychological torments or the literal, physical ones Dr. Lecter might have in store for his former patient.

He chewed at the inside of his lip. What to do? He wanted to help. He wanted to provide some measure of support, some camaraderie, something for Will to hold on to in this unsteady and uncertain time.

“Woulda been better if he never left the hospital,” Matthew mutters, rubbing at his forehead. “Too loud for him, out there. Too many people. I dunno what to do, doc. I…” He sighs. “All I wanna do is protect him.”

Frederick snorts; he certainly understands the sentiment, but he doubts such a thing would work. “I’m afraid that Will Graham is not a man who would respond well to feeling… trapped, or controlled. I believe he wished to stay with us at first only because he truly believed he deserved to be here. Now that he is free, and he knows that he deserves his freedom, I suspect that any and all restrictions must grate terribly.”

Matthew nods. “Yeah. He hates all the rules.”

He closes his eyes and leans his head back against his expensive—and uncomfortable—chair. How best to help? The desire is extremely genuine, and a bit terrifying, if he is honest with himself. He has no interest in drawing the attention of the Chesapeake Ripper, but as he is currently the only other person who knows the Ripper’s identity—and that Will is being forced to endure his presence at every emotionally devastating scene Crawford drags him off to—Frederick wants to offer some kind of aid. Something to lessen the burden, even for a short while.

The issue, of course, lies with Will’s own tendency for self-destruction. Difficult to save a man who is in many ways his own worst enemy. But, worth trying, for a good man who has suffered more than his fair share.

“Will Graham is not one to choose to care for himself on his own,” Frederick says, carefully. “He will allow Jack Crawford and the FBI to toss him into fire after fire, because he has learned that the good he can do for others is more important than the damage he does to himself.”

“How do we make him stop? How do we protect him?”

“I am afraid that we cannot. Oh, we could build for Will a golden cage,” Chilton murmurs, “with all the wonders and delights he could ever possibly require. However, the moment we locked the door behind him he would bash himself against the bars until his head was rendered into paste and all our efforts would be wasted.” He tuts, circling his thumbs. “Perhaps if we built our metaphorical cage—wonders, delights, etcetera—and the door remained open, Mr. Graham could be enticed to spend the majority of his time inside. Not all of his time, granted. We will not be able to prevent him from assisting the FBI, as it is something he feels he must do. But, often enough, if we are very lucky, that any… damage, or undue influence might be mitigated by the support, the safety, the structure provided.” He opens his eyes. “In other words, we cannot stop him, and we cannot force him to accept our protection, but we may be able to provide him a safe place to recover. We can provide support. And one day he may choose comfort over uncertainty and pain on his own.”

It is the best he can think to do, in honesty. Frederick is not the sort of man capable of confronting Jack Crawford, let alone the Chesapeake Ripper. But he is a doctor, and a psychiatrist, and he feels a responsibility to offer actual stability to Will Graham, to quietly counteract whatever false aid is being forced upon him with the FBI’s full cooperation.

Mr. Brown is staring at his hands, contemplative, his lower lip caught in his teeth, nodding just so. “He won’t do therapy. I asked, but you’re right, he can be… stubborn. Maybe you could come by? Not for therapy, I mean. As a friend. One who doesn’t want anything from him. Maybe one who happens to have a word of good advice.”

“I have been meaning to check in,” Chilton says, thoughtfully. “Yes. I believe that is a fine place to begin. I will plan to stop by for a visit in the next few days, and we will officially commence with Operation: Support Will Graham. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” Matthew says, and there’s a different quality to his voice for just a moment which Frederick supposes must be due to his determination. The orderly shakes his head, and his eyes drop demurely to the floor. “Well. Almost two. Better not take up any more of your time. Um… Thank you for speaking with me, doc.”

“Of course, Matthew.” Before the young man reaches the door, though, Frederick calls, “One last thing, if you would?”

“Sir?”

Frederick works his jaw from side to side and drums his fingers upon his desk. “If… Should Dr. Lecter spend more time with Will, I would like to know.”

Matthew pauses. “Any particular reason, doc?”

“He is providing intensive emotional support during cases,” Frederick says, with a dismissive little laugh. “He was somewhat unprofessional during the trial. I feel compelled to monitor the state of the boundaries between them.”

“Yeah,” says Matthew, slowly, “he was pretty weird during the trial. I’ll keep an eye out, Dr. Chilton. Don’t you worry.”

If only he could explain, Matthew might understand; there is nothing to do about this situation but worry. He smiles wanly anyway, and returns to the pile of paperwork on his desk.

He wonders if Will enjoys travel shows. 

At first, Will is mostly just exhausted by Frederick’s visits. It’s not that the man himself is necessarily all that unpleasant to be around or anything; he’s not as controlled as Hannibal, granted, but the feelings he brings into Will’s Wolf Trap house are contained mostly to genuine concern, delight, and an almost fraternal warmth. That’s a bit strange, but Will had known from his time in the hospital that Frederick’s desire to help was nothing if not earnest.

It was just unexpected, having to deal with somebody who insisted on visiting for lunch on the weekends or dinner randomly throughout the week. It interrupted his time with Matthew and the dogs. It interrupted his alone time, when he was working on motors or scrubbing through copies of the Ripper case files.

That said… after the initial groan and painful pinch of the bridge of his nose, Will had come to sort of look forward to Dr. Chilton’s visits. He had to disconnect from the work he was doing for the FBI. He had to disconnect from whatever mess was going on inside his own head. 

Frederick, oddly, didn’t seem to want anything. He didn’t expect anything other than company. Or, that’s what he was offering, at least. Maybe he knew that was something Will needed.

And he did. Need it, that is.

It has been about a month since the horse case. Frederick has been to the house half a dozen times, and each has been easier and more pleasant than the last. It’s actually kind of nice.

After Ingram had been arrested—skin cells found around one of the dead girls’ necks, a few eyelashes scrubbed out of the folds of their clothes, one warrant, and a box of sixteen pairs of torn, stained panties under the bed in his featureless little apartment later—Will’s focus had turned fully to the Ripper files. But the Ripper, as ever, cannot stay quiet when challenged, and Will’s not exactly flush with real-world distractions (barring Matthew and the dogs, of course, but playing with his pets can only do so much). 

That conversation with Hannibal must really have pissed him off, because he kicked off a rather spectacular sounder which has so far involved a woman cut into artful pieces like a mannequin and a man who seems to have been grown into an endangered tree. How Hannibal managed to get that set up in a parking lot without anybody noticing, Will has no idea, but he would be very curious to find out. He was not asked to see either scene in situ; instead, he was given more photos to add to his files, and he was brought to the lab to see the bodies in person. This was… easier, in some ways, though the Ripper’s disdain coated the inside of his mouth like oil for days after. He’s not looking forward to the last scene.

Freddie Lounds sent him an email a couple of weeks back asking for an interview about his return to consulting, and he did respond with a quote she used in an article about both this new Ripper sounder and Will’s return: ‘The name of the game is minimizing harm. Is it difficult for me to look? Yes. Is it painful? Very. But catching him will be worth the cost.’

He has, as of this particular morning, exactly sixteen unread text messages from Hannibal Lecter, which he will not be opening thank you very much. If the good doctor would like to talk, he can come out to Wolf Trap himself, like Frederick has been doing, though likely with a very different purpose in mind.

Frederick tends to bring books. At first, fairly generic but well-loved paperbacks in a variety of fiction genres, but Will had responded so positively to a travel book about South America that Frederick had pivoted almost entirely to non-fiction on his second visit.

There’s something oddly… sleepy, he supposes, about flipping through books about faraway countries. He can almost sink into the relaxed atmosphere of a sleepy cafe or a seaside cottage, or feel warm white sand against his palms. His mind’s eye follows along like a little lens on the shoulder of the travelers as they experience the natural wonders of the world.

“I must say I am pleased to see you getting so much enjoyment from these books,” Frederick had said during that second luncheon, setting aside his own guide to ghost towns along the west coast. “They are not everyone’s cup of tea, as it were, but I have amassed quite the collection.”

“It’s nice to read something that isn’t focused on… character drama, or mysteries. I get enough of that day-to-day.” He snorted. “Y’know, I used to actually like Agatha Christie.” He lifted the dog-eared paperback about the Iberian peninsula and waggled it a little. “This? I can enjoy this. The beaches, the cities, the food.” A huff of a laugh as he’d turned the page. “Interiors are harder, though. Some of these writers… go into a lot of detail about, y’know, crown molding, and sconces, and eighteenth century arch styles and I can’t, uh… can’t picture it so clearly.”

Frederick’s delight had bloomed, lilac and pearly and soft. “I believe I may be able to assist you! I have quite the collection of architectural tomes, you know. And I would be happy to forward you a few video tours, if that might be helpful. I have a particular interest in home design.”

Will had allowed Chilton’s joy to infect him for a moment so that he could respond with the kind of genuine smile such excitement deserves. Frederick was offering to share something dear to him, and some of the happiness inherent in the very existence of such openness had belonged solely to Will. He’d just needed to channel back something from Frederick himself because Matthew was skulking around, bursting with distractingly negative feelings, and Will never wants to accidentally channel something rude, especially in this case where Frederick has given something so personal and so helpful.

Nevertheless, after every single visit, as soon as Frederick’s bright, cheery pinks and purples and rich, satisfied greens clear the air, Matthew’s surly clot-red-black and pitch-shimmer blue ooze into the space instead. He’s been playing things off like he’s not upset. Finishing up some task in the background, pretending he wasn’t listening intently to every moment of the conversation. His expression is neutral-pleasant and his tone light as he asks if Will would like anything specific for dinner.

“I’d like it if you took a breath, Matt,” Will says, archly, as he locks the door behind visit number six. He frowns at Matthew, who—to his credit—has dropped the false half-smile and is glowering at the floor. “You were the one who suggested I let him in here in the first place. Hell, Matthew, you asked him to visit.”

Matthew glances up, sharply. “He tell you that?”

“He didn’t have to. It was all over you the first time he showed up. Self-satisfied, smug. Sour-sweet, like—” He waves his hand in front of his pinched face. It’s hard to explain out loud, and he’s barely bothered to try to explain the synesthetic elements of his condition, even with Matthew. “You thought it would be a good idea, and it was. It’s been good for me, having something to escape to. Okay?” A few steps carry him to Matthew, who is still sulking and staring at his feet. Will cups his cheek and forces those rich, dark eyes to meet his. It’s familiar, the swirl of affection, desire, longing, eager need. He drops his voice, low and raspy. “You did good, Matt. Don’t worry about him. Between you and the Ripper, you think there’s room for Frederick fucking Chilton? As what, lunch?”

They both laugh, a huff, a snort, the amusement melding, twisting itself up in that glowing-hot metal thread that Matthew thinks is love but if it is, it’s no kind of love a sane man ought to want any part of.

Well. Will can’t really be called a sane man anymore, can he?

He kisses Matthew as much for a general sense of reassurance as because the man’s pretty, pouty puppy eyes quite simply demand that he be forced against the nearest wall. Matthew moans, digging his fingers into Will’s hips, flicking his tongue, murmuring something Will’s brain is turning to static about how he needs daddy to put him in his place—

And, of course, the fucking goddamn phone rings.

“Graham,” Will mutters, stepping out onto the frigid porch.

“We found Miriam Lass,” says Beverly, without preamble. “Alive.”

Fuck.

“Wh—how?”

“Jimmy and Brian did something really clever with the tree and the water in the Isley case. Narrowed us all the way down to the specific workshop the Ripper used for putting the display together. We found her in one of the empty tanks. Jack is with her now, obviously, but he wants you to come in. Talk to her.”

Will chews at his thumbnail. “You understand this is what he wanted, right? He wouldn’t have made such a stupid mistake. Everything you found in that workshop is something he wanted you to find. Including her.”

“Yeah. Obviously. But don’t go telling the others that right now, especially not Jack. He’s not gonna want to hear it. Everybody’s in celebration mode and Crawford’s got a heaping helping of guilt on the side. Take my advice: keep it between us for now. Do you need a ride, or can your guy bring you?”

He doesn’t see the point in going, but he agrees anyway. He supposes he wants to see what Hannibal has managed to accomplish with Miriam Lass, when he’d managed to do so much to Will in only a few months. Matthew is quiet on the drive, which Will dearly appreciates. It gives him time to process, to consider what he might say or do if Hannibal is there.

All for naught, as it happens, because Dr. Lecter is either not invited to this particular interview or not able to come at such a late hour. Will does not fail to notice that Alana is also not present. He doesn’t let himself wonder if their absences are related. He tells himself he doesn’t care.

Miriam is traumatized, obviously. Will can’t really be in the same room with her, but he does watch through the two-way mirror into the interview room while Jack has her walk through what she remembers. He plays her the last voicemail he received from her, and the only thing spooling off of her is unease and confusion and a raw, primordial dread that makes Will’s stomach clench and his guts feel like they’re going to be pulled out through his salivary glands. She is like a blazing torch, pitch at the center and glaring reds, yellows, oranges snapping and crackling off in all directions, the occasional sparking roil of blue sick with sadness and despair and instability.

Her mind is in tatters. The more she talks, the less her emotions match with what she says.

“I don’t remember,” she says, flush with fear and doubt.

“I don’t know how I found him,” she says, and she’s hit with a wave of nausea and terror.

“He was kind to me,” she says, and her body trembles as a wave of dreadful calm sweeps over her, a horror so intense it has looped back into stillness, like a rabbit frozen in the underbrush.

Looking at Miriam reminds Will why he doesn’t pay so much attention to his own feelings, these days.

He ignores Beverly’s advice when it comes time to talk to Jack.

“He wanted you to find her, Jack. She doesn’t remember because he doesn’t want her to. But he had plenty of time to fill her head with all kinds of memories. Thoughts. Ideas. Just like he did to me.” He shrugs, tucking his hands in his pockets. “Whatever he made her believe, we’ll find out eventually. And I get the feeling it won’t be pretty.”

Jack watches him for a moment, tapping his thumb against the stack of papers on his desk. “Will,” he says, carefully, “I’ve been thinking a lot about what Dr. Chilton said.”

Will stiffens. “Oh?”

“Somebody did this to you. And somebody did this to Miriam. Somebody with psychiatric and surgical training. Particularly somebody on the more… eccentric, experimental side.” He pauses again, then lets out a frustrated breath through his nostrils. “Somebody who had a hell of a lot of access to you while you were getting sick. Somebody who, for some reason, you take a lot of comfort in when you’re distressed, in a way that feels almost programmed.”

“Programmed,” Will repeats, covering his mouth with one hand. His brow furrows and he blinks hard behind the false lenses of his glasses. Jack is too damn smart for his own good. Will shakes a bit as he sets his hand down on the desk between them. “If… what you’re suggesting were true. It would mean we were talking about someone with very intimate knowledge of our team. And someone with a history of targeting… vulnerabilities.” His eyes flick up, grazing Jack’s forehead. It’s more than enough to see the determination and low-level hatred give way to flutterings of thoughtful concern. “This is a situation that would need to be handled with utmost care. I’d go so far as to say it’s best not to approach it at all.” After a beat, Will does meet Jack’s eyes and murmurs, “Unless you aren’t worried about any particular vulnerabilities he might be willing to exploit.”

“You already suspected him,” Jack says, and it’s not an accusation, exactly. It’s just tired. “I assume Chilton did, too?” There’s a bloom of dread and exhaustion and bitter acceptance as Will slowly nods his head. “What do you need from me, Will?”

“Honestly? Nothing. Don’t do anything different. Call him for cases. Sit at his table. Be friendly. Keep him comfortable.” He takes his glasses off and rubs at his eyes. “Whatever his plan is with Miriam, fall for it. That’s what I need from you, Jack. You suspect nothing. Leave it alone.”

“You know I can’t promise that.”

“Which is why I didn’t fucking tell you,” Will hisses, and Jack’s shock is like a dash of icewater to the senses. Will inhales sharply through his nose. “Listen to me. He will kill Bella. Not you. He’ll kill her and then he’ll disappear if he thinks for even a second that you’re investigating him. So do me a favor. Do yourself—no, do your wife a favor: leave it alone. Do you understand me?” He rises and presses his knuckles against the desktop, just briefly. “This conversation never happened, Jack.”

Jack doesn’t say anything, and Will hopes that’s an acquiescence.

When he gets home, he edges Matthew for almost two hours, until the begging is incoherent and tears drip onto the sheets in rhythm with the patter of precome. He loses himself in the rush of salt-sweet need and desperate desire, of faith in him, of trust, of control. Matthew wants to give him that, or the illusion of it, and he’ll be damned if he doesn’t take every last reverently-presented ounce. 

It feels better, for a while.

And then, there’s another call, and this time Jack wants him to see the scene fresh. Maybe it’s some kind of punishment, maybe it’s just so he can observe Will and Hannibal fresh, too. Who the hell knows? But Will is dragged at five thirty in the goddamn morning to a freezing-cold truckstop for whatever fucking reason, and Hannibal Lecter is there too in his stupid little fur hat, and Will can only do his best to ignore the mopey looks he’s getting.

A truck driver has been torn to pieces, and the team is debating what type of animal is responsible. Is it a wolf? Is it a bear? Is it a wolf riding a bear? Their banter is very funny and engaging, and Will couldn’t care less. He’s sucking ice crystals through his teeth as he stares up at the cab and the body scattered across the snow, his eyes glazed, his chest heaving.

There is something primal sharpening his teeth, his claws, aching like feverish starvation in his belly, whining and scrabbling with an ancient need to go, hunt, kill, and it is infecting his mind. It has been since the moment he arrived. All the pettiness, squabbles, foolish human nonsense, falsehoods and utter garbage. Jack’s placating smile, the team averting their eyes like that will keep him happy, keep him from ripping out their goddamn throats. The witnesses, doltish, prey animals the lot of them, cattle, Christ, they make his mouth water. The victim, random, just a foolish fawn too far from the safety of the herd. He can taste the flesh, the blood, the hunt, the success. It tastes like iron and copper and breath and life and ecstasy. It tastes like freedom.

And Hannibal. Dr. Hannibal Lecter, the Chesapeake Ripper, greatest of predators, is practically purring as his hands settle on Will’s shoulders. He tastes like satisfaction. He tastes solid, simmering. Warm. Steady. He is the heat of breath upon Will’s ear, murmuring encouragement, bringing him back from whatever shaking, trembling precipice he’d found himself teetering upon.

Fuck. He’s hard as steel and if he turns around everyone will see it. More human nonsense, embarrassment. But it weakens his position with Hannibal. He needs to get control over himself. Control. Control.

“He… struggles to control himself,” Will manages to say, with Hannibal pressed almost entirely against his back. He stuffs his hands into the pockets of his coat and draws it tighter around his body. “A man. Not an animal. He… feels… pressured by society. Expectation. He’s a… a beast, trapped in the body of a man. Forced to be what he appears to be, and he resents it. He wants freedom. He’ll feel as though he’s been imprisoned by his body. He’ll have built himself a…” He struggles, as Hannibal casually slides one hand from his shoulder down to his bicep. “As close an analogue as he can. Something with teeth. Something with claws. Something strong enough to bite through bone. He’ll have tested it. Look at… cattle mutilations.” The hand on his bicep tightens, and Hannibal is whispering something in his ear but Will raises his voice to drown him out. “He’ll do it again. Soon. Now that he’s got a taste he won’t be able to go back. The flavor is… intoxicating.”

Hannibal places a hand over his eyes. He stiffens, bares his teeth, and the hand on his bicep tightens again. Hannibal’s voice, low, molten, whispers,

“Very good, Will. You’ve been very helpful. Now, let us step away.”

Will doesn’t mean to relax. He doesn’t mean to melt back against Hannibal’s body. He certainly doesn’t mean to exhale so softly, so delicately when he does it. And yet, Hannibal rumbles with self-satisfied laughter as he leads Will back toward the parking lot.

“Dr. Lecter—”

“I have this well in hand, Jack. Will merely needs a moment to recover himself.”

Jack’s uneasiness is almost overwhelming and Will can’t even see him. 

“I… hope it isn’t always going to be like this,” Jack says. 

“As do I,” Hannibal says, and gently steers Will away from the scene. 

“It was better this time,” Will mutters. He trusts the firm grip upon his arm, the hand blinding him to the world. He shouldn’t, but he does.

“You were growling, amour,” Hannibal purrs. “You spoke of the joy of rending flesh and the thrill of the hunt with an awe that bordered on the obscene. You were deeper within the mind of this beast than you realized.” Pressure against his hair, and the sharp intake of breath. The creep is sniffing him again. “And I find your enjoyment of the recreation to be of particular interest.”

“Why?” Will curls in on himself, hunching his shoulders.

“Because you once told me that the memory of blood in your teeth made you sick. And yet—”

“Could be the killer gets off on this type of thing,” Will snaps, and the hand drops away from his eyes.

They’re next to the passenger door of Hannibal’s car, a good distance from the scene and from any other people. Hannibal turns him around by the viselike grip upon his arm, eyes glittering in the pre-dawn light.

“Does he, Will?”

His tongue darts out like a lizard’s, sharp and nervous, and his lips taste like blood and ice and cardamom, like Hannibal’s patient affection. He swallows, and a stutter of desire breaks past Hannibal’s incredible defenses to color the air garnet and gold between them, just for a moment.

“No,” Will mutters.

“No,” Hannibal repeats, and reaches out to brush a wayward curl from Will’s forehead.

“What the hell do you want from me?” Will asks, rubbing the lingering phantom touch from around his eyes.

“Nothing more than you are willing to give,” Hannibal says.

He doesn’t have an answer; Hannibal doesn’t seem to expect one. Jack approaches like a barreling bull, gruffly offering Will a ride home, and Hannibal graciously bows out to return to his practice.

Jack, mercifully, does not ask very many questions on the way to Wolf Trap, and only one of those questions is regarding Dr. Lecter. Will, of course, bites his way through the lingering taste of blood to tell Jack everything he learned from the scene and then, haltingly, explains that the doctor is still doing what he needs as far as bringing him back when he’s too deep in the reconstruction to find the path on his own. The rest goes unsaid, which is good because Will can’t exactly think very clearly.

There’s another scene about thirty-six hours later. A couple. 

The female tried to run, and she only drew his attention. Her blood steamed upon the snow while her mate gurgled just steps away from their pitiful little campfire. Her insides were hotter, brighter than the fire. More vital. He had burst from the trees like a wild thing and tasted fear upon his slavering tongue. A hunter of men, an apex predator, to be adored and admired in his spectacular Becoming, cheered as he claws his way free from the weak and pitiful flesh cocoon and shows everyone the animal inside. He had torn these morsels apart and left them as a message, a warning to the other humans: there is something in the dark with claws and teeth and it is coming.

“Shh,” Hannibal is murmuring, pressing Will’s nose against his shoulder. “Deep breaths, Will.”

They’re seated, somewhere. It’s a tight space but not cramped, exactly. Dark. Will is practically pulled into Hannibal’s lap.

“He’s… h-he believes—” Will shudders and struggles to center himself, his head lost within the mind of the beast. He scrabbles at Hannibal’s fine coat with blunted, chewed-down fingernails, unworthy of a hunter. “There will have been signs before this. This didn’t come out of nowhere. He bit people when he was young. He showed… too much interest in predator animals.” His eyes are squeezed shut, his nose buried against Hannibal’s necktie. “This isn’t the kind of thing you can hide without a hell of a lot of c-control.”

Control. Control. Christ. It’s always about… In the end, it always comes down to—

Hannibal hums a few notes of some lost, lonesome song and absentmindedly strokes along Will’s spine. 

Safety. Strength. Serenity. Will leans in closer, allowing the animal inside of him to sheathe its claws, curl up, and rest under the protection of a like creature, grand and glorious, with wicked teeth stained red that will keep him well through the long, cold night. And he needs it. He needs the warmth and the sandalwood and the leather and the wool.

Will sighs, so soft it’s nearly a moan, and his lips touch the side of Hannibal’s neck. The doctor goes still.

God, Will just wants to be at home, wrapped in blankets with Max and Winston. And a glass of whiskey. And Hannibal, he needs Hannibal. He needs the taste of his sweat and the warmth of his skin and— 

Wait, what the fuck?

He shoves away, clutching his head, cornered against what he distantly recognizes as the rear passenger door of Hannibal’s car. Breathing comes hard and fast, sharp in his lungs, like the ice is still crackling between the alveoli. His brain feels heavy. Something… ticking, something hissing, sibilant whispers, slithering between the folds of his gray matter, inking the fabric of his being, rewriting, rewiring, reworking the foundations of his identity. It’s like an icepick to the brain, an instant screaming migraine bearing shreds of memory he is struggling to process.

“Why… do I—? What did you… do?”

Hannibal reaches for him, and Will scrambles back, pressing harder against the door, one hand out as if to hold Hannibal back, the other clamped tight over his eye, pressing, until he can see spots. The doctor pulses with annoyance, rage, possession, distress. 

“Will. Please. Allow me to help you.”

“No, I don’t—don’t need you,” he slurs. “Not giving you… anything.”

Cold, imposing rage and despair flood the space, choking him, making his eyes water, heavy and bitter upon his tongue.

A knock on the dark window. Cop knock. Jack.

A muffled: “Everything alright?”

Will struggles for just a moment to open the door. He gulps in fresh air, free of that intoxicating—no, that overwhelming Hannibal Lecter scent. He doesn’t manage to speak, only to grunt and gesture to his head.

Hannibal appears behind him, apparently having slid across the backseat just to stand close enough to transfer heat as he says, “Jack. Based on some of what Will has been saying, I believe I may have some insight into this case.”

“Well, Dr. Lecter, I’d be very interested to talk about your insight back at HQ. Meet me there,” Jack says, looping an arm around Will’s shoulders. “As for you, Graham, you look like you’ve had enough for one day. I’ll drop you off. Come on.”

Hannibal looks for a second like he’s going to protest—a wibble of affront, offense, indignation—but then he prunes those feelings like misshapen leaves and inclines his head. Jack takes Will home again, and this time the drive is dead silent. Or, maybe it isn’t, and Will just… can’t think about any more talking. His head throbs in time with the incessant tap of his thumb against his slacks.

Memories crawl just outside of his awareness, vile and slinking.

He wants them back. He wants them all back.

When he gets home, Matthew is inside the house with the dogs, and it’s getting late so he’s dressed down in sweatpants and a soft gray henley. He’s not much of a fan of Will working crime scenes again, which is understandable given the yawning emptiness which roars to life inside him whenever Will is away for too long, but, Christ, that gnawing disapproval has got Will’s hackles up the second he steps through the door and it’s clear Matthew can tell there’s something off. 

Something off. That’s funny. He’s never seen it so clearly before. Matthew is a predator masking as prey, and Will can taste the deception on his tongue like bitter almonds. It’s all done with love, or something approximating love, but it’s a lie nonetheless.

Matthew clucks softly at the dogs and directs them into the mud room, his eyes glittering and locked upon Will’s.

They circle one another. Matthew’s head quirks and his lips part just far enough for Will to see the tip of his tongue gliding against his teeth, catching on the sharp canines. His movement is more fluid than usual, lighter.

Matthew murmurs something, but Will doesn’t answer, just continues to prowl, slightly lowering his center of gravity, adjusting his feet. He slides his heavy, too-hot wool coat off his shoulders and lets it fall to the floor. The lust, the attraction, the interest, raspberry and crimson and clear bright blue, swirl until they’re all Will can see other than his too-casual, too-confident prey.

Will is an apex predator, after all. The thing in the dark which all men should come to fear. Claws and teeth just waiting to shred flesh.

Matthew’s arousal peaks, blurring every other color around him with warm pink-red. He says something, low and throaty, but Will’s watching the way his body tenses.

It’s no surprise when he throws himself hard to one side, a fake-out toward the front door which sends him careening toward the kitchen and the back stairs instead. Will vaults over the railing and latches onto his ankle, but a single swift kick to his bad shoulder forces him to let go. He snarls and scrambles up the steps after Matthew, whose euphoric laughter echoes throughout the mostly-empty upstairs. He slams a door behind him and locks it fast enough to make space, but Will is too frenzied to let such a flimsy barrier keep him from getting what he wants.

He kicks hard just beside the handle and the cheap wood splinters with an explosive crack! The door bounces off the wall and leaves a fist-sized dent but Will barely registers the damage to his house as he rushes into the spare bedroom. He is just in time to see Matthew disappear through the window. Will growls and tears after him, launching himself onto the snowy roof. Matthew glances behind himself, cheeks pink, grin broad, and drops over the edge and out of sight.

Will is moving before he can blink, snow spraying up beneath his feet like mist. He skids and slides off the edge of the roof, plummeting into the piled snow below, registering the ache of his ankles and calves but ignoring it in favor of the clear, fresh tracks and the sprinting, vibrant prey widening the gap between them.

Matthew is younger, but he’s not actually faster than Will, and this is Will’s home.

A detour through the trees has him out of sight and in the low brush before Matthew glances backward a second time. The prey’s footfalls slow and he comes to a thrumming, high-tension stop, his head swiveling as he searches the property for any sign of Will. The breath steams from his lungs in great clouds as he pants, brow furrowing, head cocked, listening for any sign.

Will explodes out of the underbrush beside him and tackles him into the snowy grass, knocking the wind clean from his lungs. A knee presses hard into the small of Matthew’s back and his arms are wrenched high and tight between his shoulderblades, his head held down into a pocket of hard-packed snow by a rough hand wound into his hair.

Matthew grunts, struggles, kicks his legs ineffectually. After a few moments of pointless struggle he goes limp, and then he begins to laugh.

Will relaxes his grip just a fraction, and Matthew bucks hard enough that Will loses his grip on Matt’s arms, and once he’s got those underneath him Matthew tries to throw Will all the way off.

But Will’s still got a hell of a grip on his hair, and he’s not letting go. He yanks Matthew backward, earning a sharp yelp, and then sinks his teeth into the meat of Matt’s shoulder until there’s blood and a groaning hiss of pain. He clamps down more, and Matthew drops to one knee, dragging Will down with him. He’s scrabbling, his nails scraping at Will’s thigh on one side and at his shoulder on the other, huffing and panting, but Will isn’t going to fall for any more tricks.

He doesn’t loosen his grip on Matthew’s hair or let up on the bite—if anything, he worries his teeth deeper—but he starts to unbuckle his belt with his free hand and Matthew fully moans, the kind where Will imagines his eyes roll back and his cock leaks. Will, too, is throbbing in his slacks, but that’s not why he’s sliding his belt free of the loops.

He lets go of Matthew’s hair just long enough to snatch both of his wrists and loop them together, tight, with the belt. Matthew whines and his breath hitches a little; he leans his head back against Will’s shoulder, his chest rumbling, speaking again. 

Will isn’t registering any of the words. The words don’t matter.

What matters is that his prey is drenched in sweat, shivering from the chill and the wet clothes and the melting snow, trembling with need, beautiful and pliant and fully under his control.

Matthew’s words turn to a sharp ah! when Will’s teeth slide free of his shoulder. Will licks his lips, a hot puff of satisfaction chasing the flavor of high-adrenaline blood in his mouth. He’s got a solid grip on Matthew’s bound wrists; he uses the other to tear open the tattered henley and the stained undershirt beneath so he can really appreciate the ragged bite wound. He leans down, and Matthew tenses like he’s worried Will is going to bite him again.

And he will. But right now, he just wants another taste.

His tongue paints a path along each rugged toothmark, lapping up the blood sluggishly spilling across pale, pretty flesh. He follows along to the column of that tempting, trembling, taunting neck, and nips at the hinge of Matthew’s jaw.

Matthew gasps as Will squeezes the bite, and his knees involuntarily spread a bit wider in the snow as the words start to grow clearer. “Unh. I-I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’ll be good. I’ll be—I swear.”

He slides his blood-smeared hand up the front of Matthew’s neck and holds, leaning so that he can see the side of his prey’s face.

“Please,” Matthew says, his eyes wild, pupils blown, voice strained from the pressure against his throat. “Please. You caught me. You did it. You win. And I’ll be so good for you if you let me.”

Will growls softly. His prey’s lips quirk into a smile, and the bound hands begin to reach, straining toward Will’s body. It must ache something awful, but he’s making slow progress stretching closer and closer toward Will’s zipper. He wants to touch, does he?

Matthew is facedown in the snow again before he has the time to look surprised. He grunts when he hits the ground, sputters to get ice and grass out of his mouth, tries to speak again but stops when Will hooks the waistband of his pants.

Will watches his prey go still, calculate, tremble, lick his lips. It’s strange; in this light, those normally-dark eyes look almost teal. Matthew huffs and arches his back, angling his shoulders to take some of the strain off of the bite, but that’s likely not too pleasant either given his tightly bound wrists and the snow under his cheek.

The sweatpants strain around his spread thighs, so Will pushes them all the way to Matt’s knees. He holds tight to those bound wrists even as his eyes glaze over with desire.

God, Matthew looks so pretty like this. Struggling, bleeding, bound. Spread wide on the snow. Wanton. Obedient. Like a good little pet.

“Mine,” Will murmurs, trailing his palm reverently along those trembling white thighs.

“All yours,” Matthew says, and snow blows in a little arc away from his lips.

Will’s hand is searing in comparison to Matt’s shivering body, but he finds heat when he looks for it. Matthew groans and somehow arches his back even further as Will cups his balls and presses his dripping shaft hard against his stomach. It’s not nearly enough to satisfy, but it is enough to coax a hot pulse of precome which Will is sure to collect before it can drip and burn through the snow. Wouldn’t want to waste it, after all. 

Will draws his slick fingers to his mouth and groans at the taste, sweet and sharp like a high note. He sucks until saliva glides down his chin and his fingers are drenched, and moments later he’s already one knuckle deep and Matthew is hissing, whimpering, fighting to relax. He gets one finger all the way inside and begins to work Matthew open, rough and fast, letting drool trail from his tongue to ease the way.

Two fingers in, his prey stuttering and groaning and pushing back into him, Will is struck by the realization that—for several very good reasons—they cannot actually reasonably fuck out here in the yard.

Well, that’s irritating.

But, Matthew is shivering hard. He might be panting and moaning but he’s doing it through chattering teeth. His clothing is wet where the snow has melted against his body, and the bite wound is still visibly bleeding beneath his torn shirt.

And Will is getting cold, too. The chill of snowmelt is soaked into his own clothing, and his shoulder is starting to ache. The adrenaline is gone, and the Beast’s thoughts have dribbled out of his head, and while the hunt was very satisfying, all that’s left now is a stark, bitter need for control. 

That’s what it always comes back down to, isn’t it?

He makes a disgusted sound, stops what he’s doing, and tugs Matthew’s filthy, slush-covered sweatpants back up. Matthew starts to speak, but Will grabs him by the hair again and yanks him to his knees.

“Be good,” he hisses, and starts dragging Matthew back toward the house.

Matthew yelps and his legs kick out, his heels snagging on the earth enough to propel him a bit closer to Will, but not enough to relieve the strain against his scalp. Great gouges in the snowy ground mark their passage across the yard and to the bottom of the steps, where Will is forced to pause. He frowns as he stares down at Matthew’s panting body, his hips flush with the lowest step.

Will growls softly and drops his hand from Matthew’s hair to his blood-flecked bicep. He roughly forces Matt to his feet, shreds the remains of his shirts and drops them with a wet slap on the ground beside the steps, then tromps toward the front door. Matthew whines and pants at the uncomfortable pull against his shoulder, and the frigid air, but he obediently stumbles his way up the stairs and across the porch, backwards.

Moments after they have made their way back inside the house, Matthew is forced to his knees in front of the fireplace, nude. Will leaves him there to warm up and goes to change, retrieving a few items that call to him along the way.

Control.

Matthew is still shivering when Will comes back, of course, but he’s quite interested in the items Will lays out on the bed. Will beckons, and Matthew starts to rise, but a sharp scowl puts him back on his knees. He shuffles over, arms still tied behind his back, and he is a veritable tidal wave of arousal as his eyes tick between the various bindings Will has arranged on the bed.

Will owns two belts. One of them is around Matt’s wrists, and the other is laid out on the mattress. Matthew’s belt is here, too, along with a handful of spare leashes and a thick leather collar which had been a gift intended for one of his rescues, only it doesn’t have a safety catch. He thinks it will be suitable for his purposes tonight, however.

Control.

He wraps Matthew up like a goddamn spider. He hasn’t had much practice with ropework but he’s seen enough shibari and tied enough lines to have a solid enough handle on knots. A beautiful interconnecting latticework of multicolored rope leads and dog leashes all braided together leave Matthew looking like an interstate roadmap where all trails lead to his pulsing, neglected cock.

Matt’s own belt is fitted between his teeth, and the shine of drool trails from either corner of his mouth as he pants around the cheap faux-leather. His teeth are leaving marks that probably aren’t going to come out, but he doesn’t seem too fussed about that.

The heavy leather collar is tight around his throat, and Will has it clipped to a short leash, wrapped almost cruelly around his hand. Every time he pulls, Matthew wheezes and groans and tries to wriggle, arch, entice him to touch. He’s fully trussed up, arms behind him, thighs tight together, pretty and flushed and finally warmed up.

Will’s other belt taps against Matthew’s flank, held lazily, almost an afterthought. But every time it touches, drags against skin, Matthew whines and his eyes roll back and he tries to spread his legs. He’s almost wild with need now, a veritable palette knife of rich raspberry the taste of grenadine and dark chocolate, but he’s not getting anything until Will decides it’s time.

Control. It always comes down to—

Memories.

He snaps the belt across Matthew’s ass and closes his eyes at the whimpered moan. Another snap, panting breath. Another, and a muffled word he can’t quite make out.

Control. And memories.

The tick of the metronome. A voice he can’t quite make out. A groan, panting. His own voice, distressed, whimpering. The other voice, soothing, reassuring, guiding.

Guiding toward what?

Matthew’s slick belt pops free of his teeth and he moans Will’s name as another red-hot welt blooms across his tender body. He pushes himself up like an inchworm to get just the slightest bit closer.

Will pulls tight on the leash, cutting him off with a choking whine.

It’s too late. The memory fragment has tattered.

His frustration is immense, but Matthew’s lust is overtaking even that. It’s blinding, almost. What else can he do? He lays another three sharp, stinging, bruising stripes across Matthew’s ass, tosses the belt aside, and holds tight to the leash and the collar while he slides inside of Matthew’s hot, clenching body.

He grips tight to the ropes around Matt’s hips and slams home, certainly hard enough to make those bright red welts ache even more. They criss-cross Matt’s cheeks and thighs, and they’re warm against Will’s skin. The choking, desperate sounds Matthew is making are obscene. The poor, debauched thing comes from the first three strokes, but Will doesn’t intend to let this end so quickly.

It all comes down to control.

Chapter Text

Will stays home the Monday after the spontaneous bondage sesh. He won’t really talk about what happened, but Matthew gathers it was something to do with whatever killer was getting inside his head. Doesn’t bother Matt any, aside from the eight or ten stripes across his ass and thighs that are kinda interfering with his ability to sit comfortably, and the very minor patches of frostburn on his face. And, y'know, the big-ass bite wound on his shoulder that he had to scrub down, slather in ointment, and wrap in gauze and medical tape.

Worth it.

Will’s watching the newest video Chilton sent over (Victorian interiors or some shit). He’s bundled up in his favorite chair with a mug of herbal tea and a couple of granola bars because sometimes he can get lost in the travel stories for longer than he means to and having a ready-made snack on hand is sometimes the only way to make sure he actually fuckin’ eats.

It’s late Monday morning; Matt’s getting ready to leave for his shift, but a call comes in from Will’s boss. Will fumbles to get his arms free of his blankets so he can pause the video and pick up.

“Uh, yeah. Graham.” A pause, then a wary, “Okay.” 

Matthew has gone still, straining to listen. Ain’t that hard, since Crawford is loud as hell.

“Talked to him this morning. He puts fossil skeletons together for the museum. Resident expert, actually. And according to Dr. Lecter, had an identity disorder when he was younger. Thought he was an animal. Bit a few people. Saw a shrink. Now, Mr. Tier tells me he’s a model citizen. Takes his medication. He’s proof positive of what good psychology can do. You believe that, Graham?”

“I’m not sure I’m… qualified to answer.” Will shoots a glance at Matthew, who is trying very hard to school his expression but not all that hard to seem like he’s not listening.

“Well I don’t believe it. Felt like I was talking to a script, and you know exactly who I think wrote it. I want you to talk to this kid, Graham. See if you get the same feelings off him that you get at the scene.”

“I don’t… think that’s such a good idea, Jack.” Will licks his teeth; Matt’s starting to get concerned, now. “I’m not supposed to go in the field like that anymore. Do interviews. A-and this guy, if he is who you think he is, I might get lost in his mind. You remember how it was with Ingram, I couldn’t even observe his interview. Talking? To a guy who…” He runs his fingers through his hair. “Jack. You saw me at those scenes. It was bad enough picking up the residual feelings. If I talk to Tier in person, and if he is this… Beast? I-I don’t know if I can come back from that. Not without…” His eyes flick to Matthew, then back down at his lap. He needs help, clearly, and Matt’s not gonna leave him hanging. “Not without Dr. Lecter right there to pull me out of it.”

Nope! Fuck that. Enough of that.

Matthew plucks the phone from Will’s grasp before he can say another word. The fake lisp comes easily, but he’s definitely playing it a lot more firm than he would with anybody else.

“Hello, Agent Crawford. Good morning. My name is Matthew Brown. I’m Will Graham’s personal aide.”

Crawford pauses, audibly baffled. “You’re the… home care worker?” 

“Yeah. So, Mr. Graham is actually still recovering after the consultations he did for you this weekend, and he won’t be able to perform any other tasks for a few days.” 

“Listen, Brown, I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but my job is to watch out for Will when we go to work on cases like this. You help him out at home, I’ll help him out in the field. I promised I’d keep an eye on him and I mean to. You’re not protecting him by trying to keep him from helping people. You’re just interfering with FBI business. You go on and hand Graham his phone, and I’ll know we understand each other.”

“Oh, I understand you just fine, Mr. Crawford. But, see, my job is to make sure Mr. Graham is taken care of across the board. He’s recovering now. You want him to be in any condition to help you out in the future, you’ll give him the time he needs to get back to being physically and psychologically stable before you try to get him back into the field.” 

Crawford snorts. “Kid, I don’t know what kind of authority you think you have to stand between me and my best consultant, but I can assure you that Will wants to make the right choice regardless of whatever limitations you think he has, and he’ll be pretty pissed off that you tried to take that choice from him.”

“Yeah, well, you’d know plenty about that, wouldn’t you, sir?” Matthew purrs. Before Crawford can sputter a response, he adds, “Maybe I should mention, the other part of my job is to act as Mr. Graham’s legal and medical advocate, so that when he’s not willing or able to make good choices for himself, somebody is fighting for his best interests. You can go right ahead and talk to Byron Metcalfe if you have a problem with that. Have a nice day, Mr. Crawford.”

Matthew hangs up, and relishes the feeling of cutting off the outraged tirade on the other line. Will looks a bit shell-shocked. Matt tosses the phone back at him without really looking and digs his own phone out of his pocket. Clearly this is gonna be an all-day thing, so he calls Chilton. It’s not all that hard to play demure and worried about Will—after all, he is worried—and Chilton is a hook-line-sinker chump for Matthew’s games and for Will’s needs so the day off is practically a gift.

When he’s done, he taps the phone against his palm a couple of times and says, “Well. Looks like we both got the day off, cher.”

“I didn’t ask you to—”

“Will, come on. He would have turned your no into a yes, and you’d have ended up doing some shit that hurt you.”

Will frowns, twisting the fabric of the blanket between his fingers. “Yeah,” he says, gruffly. “I know.”

Matthew leans over the back of the recliner to press a soft little kiss against those warm curls. “You know I’m not gonna let anybody hurt you. Not even yourself. I’m your man.” Another kiss, this time to Will’s cheekbone. “I love you.”

“I know,” Will grumbles. “I just… I can speak for myself.”

“I know you can,” Matt says, leaning back. “And I also know you fuckin’ won’t, Will. Especially not when it comes to Crawford.”

Will huffs and crosses his arms. “I should probably be more concerned about a serial killer trying to prevent me from helping the FBI.”

Matthew laughs, bright and ringing. “Sorry to tell you, that ship sailed when you fell ass over teakettle for the Ripper himself, cher.”

Will jolts, indignant and a bit disturbed. “I’m not—I didn’t—!”

“Uh huh. Hey, keep tellin’ yourself that, maybe you’ll win out.” He laughs again, and Will’s scowl deepens. It’s cute as hell, honestly. “Come on, gorgeous, don’t be like that. Tell ya what, let’s play a little hooky today, huh? Call it a… a date.”

“A date? Matthew, I can’t exactly go to dinner and a movie.”

“Not out there. In here.” Matt crouches, folding his arms on top of the recliner armrest, and gestures to the fireplace, the record player, the sleeping dogs. “We’ve got the makings of paradise right here.”

Will tilts his head to the side just slightly, following the line of Matthew’s gaze. He’s thoughtful, considering. Slowly, one rough hand settles on top of Matt’s, and that callused thumb begins to stroke almost absently across Matthew’s knuckles. 

“You sure you want to go on a date with me? I’ve been called unstable once or twice. And you just accused me of being in—of falling for the Chesapeake Ripper.”

Matt can’t contain his grin. “Oh, there ain’t one damn thing in this world I’d rather do. Not. Fuckin’. One.”

He doesn’t want to fuck with Will’s routine, but he does want the whole day to be about the two of them, so he makes himself part of it. The blankets, the pillows, even the couch cushions end up on the floor in a big, beautiful pile. Matthew leans back against Will’s old recliner, with Will seated in between his thighs; they are nested like antique spoons worn to familiarity, and Will’s head is laid back on Matt’s shoulder so that they can both look down at the travel book Matthew is holding in Will’s lap.

Matt reads, low and smoky, his lips tickled by stray curls arcing beside the shell of Will’s ear. Their breathing is almost synchronized. Will is practically melting into him, his hands absently massaging Matt’s thighs while they explore some old town in Japan together; the words on the page honestly aren’t registering with Matt too much because he’s paying too much attention to every soft little sigh and huffed laugh and languid stretch as his beautiful little minx sinks deeper and deeper into his recreation. It’s a place Matthew can’t follow him physically, but his words can—his voice can. He can paint the gold-filigreed watercolors and the vibrant red torii gates and the billowing pink cherry blossoms so thick the writer couldn’t see the weathered stone path more than a few steps ahead of her booted feet, and he can feel that Will walks those paths with Matt by his side. He reads three chapters, but when they get into the author’s descriptions of the onsen Will heaves a sigh and sits up.

“I’ll bet Frederick’s got stuff on Japanese interiors,” Matthew suggests, softly.

“Yeah. I know he does.”

Matthew’s arms are still around Will’s middle, and he gently draws Will back into an embrace. He kisses the back of Will’s shoulder.

“Y’know, a bath sounds pretty nice,” he says, casually.

Will glances at him, eyes sharp and gorgeous as ever. “Then take one,” he replies, but there’s a teasing lilt running beneath the surface.

“We’re on a date. It’d be rude not to stick with activities we can do together.”

“Right. And the last thing you’d want to be is rude,” Will says, archly.

Matthew frowns. A misstep, one that once again brought the Ripper between them. He changes tacks.

“Y’know, actually, I’ve got a better idea. How about we run to the hardware store? We can stop at that little bakery next door, grab something sweet. We can go on a nice long walk with the pups, have a picnic. When we get back, we can fix up that door upstairs, and by then we’ll both be up for a bath. Shared activity, see?”

Will watches him for a moment, and it’s hard to read his expression, but it turns into a laugh. He’s shaking his head, but he’s laughing and he’s leaning back into Matt’s arms.

Success. Fuck off, Lecter.

“Okay,” Will says, holding Matt’s hands against his chest. “Fine, have it your way. But we have to fix the drywall, too. I uh, kinda did a number on the wall last night”

He sure fuckin’ did. He did a number on a lot of things. Matt’s body was still protesting. But it was well worth it. 

He kisses Will, soft and sure and so in love. Everything, all of it, anything was worth this.

They leave the pile of blankets on the floor and head out, quiet but comfortable. The car ride isn’t long; Wolf Trap proper is only about twenty minutes from Will’s place. They find a hardware store with a mostly-empty parking lot and Will sticks close to Matthew, his eyes down. Since the house is in more or less the exact condition it was in when Will moved in, they’re able to find the same type of cheap pressboard door but they can’t find identical hinges or a matching doorknob and latch. Fortunately the existing hardware hadn’t been that damaged, and Will suggests some pliers and some new screws are probably good enough, since the door is really what broke. Matt’s not so convinced, but it’s not his fuckin’ house, and Will barely uses that room except to fuck without bothering the dogs anyway so, he tosses some spackle and a tiny tin of white paint into the cart and keeps his damn mouth shut.

As promised, they go to the little mom and pop bakery and Will gets some danishes with different jams and a half-dozen custard-filled donuts. Matt insists on paying, because he’s a goddamn gentleman, and Will gets that pretty pink blush high up on his cheeks that Matthew always wants to lick off. He eats one standing in the store and it’s so big he ends up with chocolate on his nose, and Matt gets to swipe it off with his thumb and get a taste, which only makes Will blush and grumble and shove him out the door.

The door is just a little big for the car so they both have to sit with their seats awkwardly far forward, the backs perfectly straight. It feels ridiculous, and it would be extremely fucking annoying except that Will finds it so funny he can’t stop laughing. That beautiful, unrestrained laughter entwines with his own while the man of his goddamn dreams holds his hand a little too tight in the stupid straight-backed seats of his stupid little car, and tears of joy prick the corners of his eyes. Christ, he could die happy right this second.

The warmth and the joy persist even as they unload the car.

“Y’know, actually, from this angle, I can see why you thought it would fit.”

“It did fit!” Matthew protests, and Will dissolves into another peal of silvery laughter. “Alright, tough guy, let’s see you get it up the stairs on your own, then.”

“Easy. Good posture is half that battle, and you made sure I got plenty of practice so I think I’ll be fine.”

Matthew scoffs, but he’s delighted that Will is teasing him. Things are going well. Will does get the door up the steps and into the spare room without much trouble, and while he’s taking the old hardware out of the frame (which quite luckily was much less damaged than the door), Matt starts on lunch. He keeps it real simple, picnic fare, and tosses in a thermos of hot cocoa they can share. By the time Will is trotting downstairs, their picnic bag is full up and ready to go.

Will carries the bag while Matthew throws a ball (and then a stick, and then a scavenged bone, and then the ball again) for Max and Winston. They walk a short way in a long time, meandering, just enjoying the sun and the chill and each other’s company. The pups are ecstatic, and their delight seems to implant itself in Will’s chest. His smile is soft, and beautiful, and every plume of breath looks to Matt’s eyes like a cartoon heart.

They lay out a thick blanket on a relatively clear hill, where the snow has melted off and the grass has been warmed by the sun. Honestly, there could be anything in that picnic bag and it wouldn’t have mattered; Matt packed the damn thing himself, and he’s paying so little attention to the food that he can’t remember what any of it was. He’s too focused on Will.

“I haven’t been on a picnic in years,” Will says, thoughtfully. “I think I did one of those teddy bear picnics in the third grade with my class. I brought a stuffed dog.” He takes a sip of cocoa. “A kid tried to tattle on me to the teacher because I didn’t bring a bear, but, like, nine other kids didn’t bring a bear. Including her.” He shakes his head, laughs. “Weird memory.”

“Probably had a crush on you,” Matthew says, grinning. “Y’know, I kinda always thought ‘teddy bear picnic’ was just an expression. Like, just another way of saying ‘tea parties’ or make-believe. Didn’t know people actually did them in real life.”

“Maybe they don’t. Maybe just that one weird little school,” Will says, shrugging. “You didn’t do weird little activities at school? We had to do a President’s Day pageant one year, dress up as a different president, do a report. I got James Monroe. I don’t remember anything about him except that the costume was uncomfortable. Did you do that?”

“I uh…” He laughs, rubs the back of his neck. “I did have weird little days in school but, not President’s Day stuff or teddy bear picnics. We had this, uh… Canada Day celebration, when I was in the fifth grade? Fuckin’ weird, we had to sing songs in French and then again in English, and dress like fur trappers or some shit, it was… Yeah.” He glances at Will, whose eyebrows are lifted just a little bit. “What?”

“Nothing. I didn’t say anything.” He pauses. “Quebec?”

“Yeah. Suburb of Montreal. Until I was fourteen. How’d you know?”

“I mean, I heard you speaking Quebecois French in the hospital. You call me cher, which threw me off a bit. Made me wonder if I heard wrong.”

“You got a good ear. As for cher, well… You’re from Louisiana. I roamed around there for a while, in my early twenties. Picked it up. And I thought you might… like it.”

There’s a beat, and then Will snorts into his cocoa, hiding a smile.

“I do like it,” he says.

Matthew’s smile could have split his face wide open. “Y’know,” he says, “we coulda crossed paths down there.”

“You think so?”

“Maybe. When did you move up here?”

Will leans back on one arm and hums. “About thirteen years ago. I was twenty-five, I’d been hurt, I decided to quit being a cop, come up and get my Master’s at GWU. Apply for the FBI.”

Matthew wriggles over to lay his head in Will’s lap and closes his eyes. “Yeah, see, we coulda met up right before you left town. I was twenty, I’d just gotten to New Orleans, fresh-faced, lookin’ for action.”

“Action. You mean sex, or violence?”

Matt shrugs, and Will’s fingers begin to drag through his hair. “Either. Both. I found ‘em, anyway. But, imagine, you and me, meeting up at some bar—”

“You were twenty, you couldn’t get into a bar.”

“Baby, I had four fake IDs, I coulda got in anywhere you wanted.”

Will snorts. “Okay. So, you’re twenty, I’m twenty-five, a beat cop. Have I been stabbed in this scenario?”

“Dunno. I got into town about March. When did you get stabbed?”

“Summer.”

“Okay, so, no, you’re just a gorgeous twenty-something on the town.”

“I don’t think I ever went out on the town in my life.”

“Well, you do this night.”

“Sure.”

Matt settles in further, his hands laced over his stomach. Will’s nails scrape gently along his scalp, and he sighs contentedly.

“So. You’re out on the town. And you meet a young, handsome, charismatic gentleman.”

“What’s his name?”

Matt cracks open one eye. “His name is fuckin’ Matthew, what do you mean?”

Will chuckles. “I mean, what name were you actually going by, then?”

Matt rolls his eyes. “I always go by Matthew. It’s a really common name. It’s not hard to find IDs to steal where the first or middle name is Matthew.” Will hums, fingers trailing across Matt’s forehead, no comment or judgment. The air suddenly feels so heavy. Feels like the sky before a lightning storm. Honesty pushes against the back of his teeth, but fear seals his lips like superglue. After a beat, twisting his fingers, heart in his throat, he wrenches his mouth open and blurts, “Garneau. My real name. It’s, uh… Matthew Edward Garneau. In case you… care.”

He hasn’t spoken that name aloud in almost twenty years. It sits heavy on his tongue, and feels strange and slithery in his thoughts.

Will, though, leans over—hunches, really—and kisses him, slow and searching, his fingers still tangled in Matthew’s hair. When he leans back, he catches Matt’s eyes and murmurs,

“William Thomas Graham. It’s a pleasure, darlin’. By any name.”

A shiver zips from the top of his head down to the base of his spine, and he swallows. “Pleasure’s all mine.”

It’s hard to think clearly when his heart is full of the smoke from Will’s voice. It slips into all the spaces his old life hollowed out inside him, and it calms the buzzing in his head like the bad thoughts and memories are nothing more than bees. They fall quiet for a little while, and when the dogs come back, panting, from chasing squirrels through the woods, they pack up the picnic and head back home. As they’re walking, Will says,

“So. I’m twenty-five. I’m on a night on the town. I meet a handsome, charismatic gentleman named Matthew. Then what happens?”

Matthew blinks and stammers, “R-right. Yeah. Uh. A handsome and charismatic young guy buys you a drink. And you think to yourself—”

“I think to myself, damn, he sure is handsome and charismatic.”

“Shut up, I’m building the mystery.”

“Oh, the mystery. Right. Sorry.”

“So you meet this guy and he buys you a drink and you think, I wonder what his lips taste like.”

“Pretty sure I wasn’t attracted to men back then.”

“Sure you were. You just hadn’t met me.”

Will’s brow furrows a bit, but he laughs. “Okay. So I meet you, and I have a sexuality crisis at twenty-five instead of at thirty-eight. And I want to kiss you at a random bar in New Orleans in 2001, which I’m sure will turn out great for both of us.”

“Depends on the bar,” Matthew says, airily, and Will throws back his head to laugh. “I’m just saying. Having done a lot of kissing at a lot of bars in a lot of towns with a lot of different feelings about who oughta be kissing who, I’m sayin’ it comes down to the bar, not the town.”

“Well, in this scenario I had a crisis when I saw you, not beforehand, so if I’m at any bar it’s probably the kind of place cops frequent, because remember, when I’m twenty-five I’m also a cop.”

“You’re ruining my immersion, Will.” Matthew sets a hand on Will’s shoulder and squeezes. “Think of it like one of your travel books. Let yourself step into the story, huh?”

Will laughs again, softer, and shakes his head. “I’m sorry, but I don’t really think if we’d met back then that I’d have ended up taking you home.”

“Kinda figured I’d end up bent over a sink in the bathroom or something. Maybe in an alley behind the bar.” Matthew grins at the bright red blush blooming on Will’s cheeks. “What? We’d never have made it to your place or mine, Will.”

“And do you ask for my number after this tryst?”

“Come on. I fuckin’ carve your number into my arm.”

“And this doesn’t disturb me for some reason.”

“Because you like it. And you call me because you like me, too.”

“Well. You are handsome and charismatic.”

“Fuck off.”

A beat of comfortable, companionable silence, then Will asks,

“Do you really think we’d have gotten along? Before what happened, before I was… Before I was like this. Do you think you’d have wanted to be around me?”

Matthew takes his hand. “I think you’ve always been beautiful, and clever, and smart, and thoughtful, and understanding. I think you’ve always been able to see the darkest parts of people and still find something there worth talking to. So, yeah. I think we’d’ve always gotten along.”

“Ignoring the fact I was a cop and you were a serial killer.”

“Baby you currently work for the FBI, let’s not play like it’s an issue.”

Will laughs again, rich and bright, and Matthew’s chest tightens.

The door—and the broken wall behind it—don’t take as long to fix as Matt would have expected. Will is very good with his hands, and with a few careful tweaks of his pliers he’s got the hinges more or less ship-shape, or well enough that the door won’t hang crooked. And they’ve got wood putty, sandpaper, and stain, so the splinters from the frame are pretty easily slotted back in, puttied in place, and before they know it the door looks like for some reason a few parts of it got particularly well-scrubbed. The drywall is easy, too, with a bit of plaster, mesh tape, more sanding, and that little tin of white paint Matt had picked up all working together until there’s nothing but a bright white spot on the otherwise aged wall.

Will’s not too fussed about that; he just seems pleased by the physical activity. He’s got that satisfied look he gets when he finishes working on a particularly tough engine part, and the sweat sticks his curls and his clothes to his body in a way Matt would call distracting if it wasn’t already the only thing he could pay attention to. Chalky white plaster, wood dust, and a few drips of paint spatter his hands, and it’s easy enough to coax him into a well-deserved bath.

The bathtub isn’t pathetically small like the one at Matt’s apartment; it’s one of those wider, deeper tubs from the 50s and 60s, probably original to the house. The caulking is all new but the tub itself is yellowed, the faucet ancient with a dented spigot and little metal knobs like in a cartoon. The shower curtain hangs from a metal railing that loops around most of the tub. There’s absolutely nothing fancy about any of it.

Still, it’s the most luxurious bath Matt’s ever had the satisfaction of sinking into, ‘cause he’s sharing it with Will. Honestly, he could drown in Will’s satisfied little moans and the relaxed droop of his long, dark lashes as they lounge in the steaming hot water. They sit just like when they were reading, Will’s head leaned back against Matt’s unbandaged shoulder, and Matt has the pleasure of pouring a generous dollop of some unlabeled body wash into his palm, lathering up Will’s chest and shoulders, and massaging rich foam into sore muscles which practically melt at his touch.

Another bottle with a scent Matt only recognizes as Will’s, and he’s got his fingers scrubbing through those luscious curls. He drags his nails across Will’s scalp and pulls a low rumble from deep in the man’s chest. He’s practically purring—and half asleep—when Matt gently prompts him to stand up and shower off the last of the suds. Matt peels off the bandage tape on his shoulder and checks for inflammation, but dousing the damn thing in alcohol and slathering it with antibacterial ointment seems to be doing the trick. 

Will’s brow furrows a bit as he looks at the wound, but Matt just pushes them both back under the water. Will catches him by the jaw and kisses him in the scalding spray, apologetic and affectionate and beautiful, and once again he has the sense he could keel over right this second and face the devil a happy man. Hell, he could usurp the devil, if it meant keeping Will just like this, hot and gorgeous and relaxed in his arms.

A little early for PJs, but it ain’t like they’re planning to go anywhere. Will’s comfy and content in loose flannel lounge pants and a gray t-shirt, and Matt’s back in his sweats but he’s borrowing a thermal since the sleep shirts he’d brought were still shredded and flung somewhere outside. Will is a bit apologetic, but Matt kisses his damp temple and laughs him off.

“Trust me, cher, that’s a sacrifice I’m real happy to make. I’m sure my local thrift store will be happy I have a reason to spend more money.”

“I should pay for—”

“Yeah, and theoretically I should have gone and got some shots after you bit me. But here we are. I’m fine. The scar is gonna be great. I ain’t mad about it.” He takes Will’s hands, catches his eyes, frowns at the odd wash of shame he sees there. “Hey. I love you.”

“I know,” Will murmurs, squeezing his fingers.

Matthew kisses his forehead, nuzzles their noses together, sneaks a quick, off-center kiss that leaves Will huffing with embarrassed laughter. It’s exactly what he was aiming for. Matt’s grin is crooked when he says,

“Alright, now, no date night’s complete without dinner. And I got just the thing. Back when I was visiting Nola—”

“You sound like such a goddamn tourist.”

“—fuck you, I learned to make a fried catfish that’ll blow your mind.”

“Matty. We don’t have catfish.”

“We got trout. I can make it work.”

“If we’re frying trout, you oughtta just let me do it. I’ve been making fried trout since I was six.”

Matthew sighs, long-suffering, his head tilted back. “Okay, fine, but I’m makin’ mac and cheese. And I’m makin’ greens.”

Will pauses, scrunches his nose. “We don’t have collard greens either, Matty.”

“Baby, I will figure it out.”

“I don’t think you know what ‘I’ve got just the thing’ means,” Will drawls. “A plan is implied there. And, uh, the components needed to execute that plan.”

“Ah, c’mon, Will. Live a little.”

Will sighs. “Alright. Okay. But only because I know at least the fish will be good.”

They share space in the kitchen, breathing shared breath and the spices and the comfort of home cooking. Will carefully slices the trout and hand-mixes the batter. He also throws together some hushpuppies while he’s waiting for the oil to heat up, and smacks Matt’s hand with a folded towel when he acts too playful around the stove. Matt, meanwhile, makes every excuse to touch him (and tease him) while he shreds cheese and browns butter and squeezes lemon juice over a pot full of spinach leaves. Will reminds him to keep an eye on the noodles, and Matt reminds Will to keep an eye on his own damn business. Will snorts a laugh and the sizzle-pop-crack of frying fish fills the air between them. Matt makes breadcrumbs from scratch and chucks the gooey, sticky, spicy mac into the oven just enough to melt an extra layer of cheese and brown the top, and then dinner is ready.

They sit side-by-side at the dinner table as soon as it’s done broiling, soft smiles and softer touches. Will rolls his eyes as Matt nudges a little plate with his nighttime medications laid out, but he takes them without complaint (though he does take them with whiskey, and there’s a challenge in his eye that keeps Matt from commenting). The spinach experiment was a dud, if the scrunch of Will’s face is any indication, but they laugh about it over mouthfuls of crisp, flaky trout and pleasantly spicy mac and cheese folded into fluffy, crunchy little hushpuppies. Will leans back in his chair, eyes closed, satisfied, and exhales satisfaction into the cabin.

“Alright,” Will says, his hands folded over his stomach, “I’ll admit it. That was a pretty good date.”

“Still got those pastries for dessert,” Matthew says. “And I’ve got one more thing I want to do before bed.”

Will cracks one eye open, aghast, cheeks pink. He sounds flustered as he stammers, “Matty. Darlin’. I-I was pretty… you really need time to—”

Matthew snorts. “Listen, first of all I need you to trust I’ll take time if I feel like I need it. But second, that’s not even what I was talkin’ about.”

“No?”

“Nah.” He stands, tucks his chair in, and offers Will his hand, his eyes sparkling. “Will. Would you care to dance?”

Will sputters and chokes a laugh. “What?”

“Dance. Y’know. Moving our bodies to music. With rhythm.” He sways in place and waggles his eyebrows. “Ever tried it? Awful fun with a partner.”

“I haven’t danced since… junior prom, I think,” Will says, but settles his hand in Matt’s and rises, a half-smile half-grimace twisting his lips.

“Tryin’ to scare me?”

“Just… managing expectations.”

Matthew huffs and shakes his head as he leads Will over to the record player. Will starts to reach for the vinyls on the shelf, but Matthew ticks a finger back and forth and pulls a specific, well-loved record from the far end: Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Song Book. A downright classic. He sets it in Will’s hands and winks.

“Get this going for us, gorgeous. I’ll light some candles, we’ll crank the romance as high as we can get it.”

Will sighs, but turns to pull the first record from the sleeve. He flips it back and forth a couple of times, contemplating which side he wants to play, while Matthew gets a handful of candles lit on top of the fireplace mantel. He’s humming along to the first few bars of Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall In Love when Will’s hands slide onto his hips from behind, and he can’t help but shiver a bit even as he turns around. He falls headfirst into those stormy blue eyes, sighing, wrapping his arms around Will’s neck.

It’s safe, in this embrace. Safe, singing softly along to Ella Fitzgerald, nose to nose, swaying, pressed together so tight they’d have a pile of chaperones rushing to split them apart and there ain’t an inch of space left for Jesus. Safe, warm, beautiful. He sighs his way into a kiss, his head tilted, his lips parted, and Will answers with fingers twining into the back of his borrowed thermal, pulling him even closer, wanting, wanting his warmth, wanting his heartbeat, wanting him.

“God, I love you,” Matthew breathes, his hands lost in Will’s hair, his kiss blurring into Will’s lips, his heart thudding in Will’s chest.

Will whispers his name, and for a moment everything is bliss.

All of you, Matthew thinks fiercely, as Ella Fitzgerald croons and the vinyl crackles and Will’s mouth glides hot and needy against his. Love at least a small percent of me. I love all of you.

Will’s cheeks are pink as he pushes back, his eyes hazy, his lips shiny with saliva, and he swallows. His fingers are dug into Matt’s lower back, and despite the residual ache of the welts—or perhaps because of them—nothing has ever felt so deliciously stimulating.

“Matthew—” he says, softly, his eyes shining, his expression almost desperate, and then his attention turns to the dogs.

They are on their feet, growling low in the backs of their throats, hackles raised, eyes on the door.

Will peels himself free of Matthew’s arms and the chill is overwhelming. Matt’s hackles are up, too, and he’s watching where the dogs’ eyes are going. They’re stiff and staring along the side of the house, and Will is hunched beside them, frowning, his face twitching as though he’s hearing something unpleasant and discordant.

Suddenly, there is noise and motion and intrusion. A bulk of bone and dark cloth and audacity shatters its way, snarling, through the side window and barrels toward Will.

How fucking dare he?

Not this nobody—no, how dare Lecter?

This is his doing. A perfect night, and it’s fucking ruined.

Matt doesn’t make a sound as he steps in front of the charging figure, scowling. The creature skitters to a halt, breathing hard, the man beneath suddenly pulled forth by uncertainty. Matthew scoffs.

Fucking amateur. Can’t even keep himself together, can’t even adapt when there’s a wrench in the works. Some predator. Some fucking Beast.

Will is whimpering behind him and he can’t stand it. He’s got the advantage over this hulking mess of stolen bones and hydraulics; he’s fast, and he’s agile.

Not to mention he’s definitely killed a lot more than this complete mess who calls himself a hunter.

The bastard is kicking himself up into a frenzy, snarling and rolling his shoulders, trying to make himself big, trying to intimidate, trying to get Matt to cringe or move or back down. Trying to play alpha, apex, dominant.

Hilarious.

Matthew lunges forward, whip-quick, and he can see the glint of his teeth reflected in the stranger’s eyes as he grips either side of the little idiot’s jaw and wrenches. With a loud, wet, satisfying crack, he snaps the cunt’s neck and lets the body drop—fwhump!—heavy and rattling upon the wooden floor. He tilts his head for a moment, eyes tracking a few scratches and scrapes from the inconsiderate asshole’s claws; easy enough to fix with a bit of sanding, but, Christ, resealing hardwood floors is a pain. As if replacing the fucking window wasn’t enough!

He’ll do it, though. He’ll do anything for his Will.

He turns, a joke perched upon his lower lip, and freezes when he sees Will, pale and trembling, hunched over behind the dogs, eyes distant, breathing rapid, the pulse thudding in his throat. Matt approaches slowly, patting the pups on their heads, and kneels between them so he can take Will’s hand.

He makes gentle shushing sounds and traces Will’s clammy cheek with one soothing palm. “Hey, hey, it’s okay. We’re okay. Don’t you worry ‘bout a thing.” He registers the silence, distantly, as the record ends. The hiss-pop from the speakers as the needle lifts from the vinyl tells him only that several minutes have passed since their beautiful, perfect moment was interrupted. “I’m gonna take care of everything. I’ll get rid of all this. I’ll fix it. C’mere.” Matt stands up, slow, telegraphed, and guides Will over to a safe spot on the floor. He’s registering now that there’s glass scattered all over the fucking place. He’ll need to take care of that first so Will can walk around safely. “Don’t you worry, baby,” he repeats. “Here, you stay nice and warm, curl up. I’ll be done before you know it and we can cozy up and I’ll read to you some more, yeah?”

Will doesn’t respond. He’s still shaking as Matthew wraps him in a thick blanket and helps him settle into his chair by the fireplace. The dogs sit either side of Will, wary of the open, whistling window. The candles on the hearth have gone out but the fire is still going, so it’ll stay warm long enough to take care of things. Matthew kisses Will’s damp forehead and then gets to work.

He gets his boots on, then drags the body over to the window and shoves it back outside into the snow. No sense letting the guy soil himself all over the hardwood, after all. The glass is swept up next, and he’s sure to be extremely thorough so the pups aren’t at risk of any glass splinters or shards, ‘cause if anything happens to them Will’ll never forgive him.

Will is just sitting in the chair, his phone in his hand, still dazed, still distant. Matthew is trying his damndest to keep his resentment toward Lecter under his own skin, but the doc sure knows how to dig his way in. Fuckin’ tick. He wishes he could sit with Will and comfort him until he comes back to the present, until he’s centered and calm, but that window needs to be covered before the house gets any colder and that body’s gotta go. He promises Will he’ll be back soon, and again there’s no answer. He kisses Will’s curls, hoping to provide the smallest bit of relief, and heads out into the barn.

A couple of hours pass. He staples up some clear plastic sheeting over the window and tapes around the edges to seal it as best he can, and then he drags the body into the woods. He separates the suit from the man inside and goes through the motions of disposing of both in different ways. He’s got a number of standard methods he uses to get rid of things, and as far as he’s concerned this is just a bump in the road. It’s methodical but barely requires any thought. A hole about yea deep, a barrel in a particular parking lot, a tributary that joins so many others. 

His mind’s not on it, and his heart’s not in it. His heart’s at home, half-catatonic in an old leather recliner with two dogs standing guard, and the ache of its absence is killing him.

Of course, that’s all the more reason to be careful, take things seriously. More reason to make sure he keeps up his usual standards and there’s nothing left but a missing person.

That’s why it takes so long. That was the problem.

The attack came at about nine o’clock, and he’d left the house at almost eleven. Matt gets home, sore and tired, about two in the morning.

Will’s car is gone.

Will is gone.

Matthew’s eyes sting and his chest hurts and breathing is painful and he can’t even be angry, he can’t even blame Will for leaving. Still, he slams his fist into his steering wheel until his knuckles go bloody. He needs it. He needs the pain. He needs to be grounded, or he’s going to do something really fucking stupid.

After all, he knows exactly where his beloved has run off to. 

Chapter Text

It is twenty minutes to midnight. Randall is late with his precious cargo, and Hannibal is distinctly unbothered. It’s an indicator that something has gone terribly wrong, or more likely something has gone terribly interesting. He does hope that whatever state Will is in, he is capable of sitting down and enjoying a late-night dessert.

Hannibal is in the process of removing six little lemon-raspberry custards from their chilled molds in preparation for their sweet raspberry compote topping and a bit of mint garnish. He will plate the most perfect three and present them in the dining room just as soon as Mr. Tier deigns to arrive. Shortly afterward, he will put Will to bed in the guest room and introduce Randall to the basement, his purpose served.

The custards—perfect, all six of them—are left to sit on a chilled pan and slid into the refrigerator to keep. Hannibal checks the clock again. A slight frown tugs at his lips. Ten minutes to midnight.

He wipes his hands on a towel and moves into the dining room to ensure that the place settings are precisely as he wants them, though he has already checked twice so far. His centerpiece is a lovely collection of bones, antlers, and flowers hand-designed to express his love, his adoration, his awe for the frustratingly tantalizing creature Will has become.

Hannibal is tweaking a few stems just so when he smells the slightest hint of cedar and juniper and petrichor and a crisp undercurrent of citrus, among a few other, subtler things. He pauses, head tilted, listening. The house is silent. No conversation, no booted feet upon his floors, no nervous greetings from Mr. Tier. But that scent, that bergamot and damp forest bespoke fragrance, that’s Will. It’s the very set of body and hair care products Hannibal had quietly purchased for him before he had been permitted to return to his own home.

There is no sign of Randall. No hydraulic fluid, no fossilized bone, no curiously clean body odor, no mud. Not a drop, so far as he can tell, of blood.

Curious.

He pads down the hall toward the foyer, but stops when he reaches the open door to his study. The fireplace is low, untended this last hour, and the lights are off, but Will’s scent is permeating the space and his silhouette is hunched and trembling just beside the mantel. The room is windowless, but the flicker of low flame spills across Will’s heavy peacoat, his wild curls, his dour expression, and the juxtaposition of his loose flannel pyjama pants.

Hannibal lingers in the doorway for a moment, considering. Will was not brought here by Randall Tier, clearly, but he also shows no sign of having killed Randall. Where was the boy, then? And how had Will gotten here in the first place?

“Always a pleasure, Will,” Hannibal murmurs. He adjusts his cuffs as he enters the room. “I am surprised you were feeling well enough to drive.”

The answering glance is bloodshot, and there’s a shudder to Will’s shoulders. He shakes his head once, firmly.

“I’m… not feeling well enough for much of anything, Dr. Lecter.”

“And yet you found your way to me.”

Will snorts and turns back toward the fire, his hands tucked deep into his pockets. “I always seem to, don’t I.”

It isn’t really a question, which is in some ways Hannibal’s favorite kind of question. “You once came to see me quite suddenly to tell me you had kissed Alana Bloom as a clutch for balance. Then, as now, you seek stability. An anchor in a tumultuous sea.” 

“Yes,” Will says, slowly, and his hands—still tucked into the pockets of his coat—slide across the front of his body, closing him off further from Hannibal. He hunches just a little more, and his brow furrows just slightly. “That’s… a bit more of an awkward memory now, isn’t it.”

There’s a pause, and in the silence dawns the obvious: mentioning Alana was a mistake. It’s alright, though. This is salvageable.

He steps closer and softens his voice. “Tell me, Will: what was it that made you feel the pitch of the waves so acutely tonight?”

Will’s shoulders relax fractionally, but he turns his body toward the fireplace and his face away from Hannibal. Frustrating. Tantalizing.

“I was on a date,” Will says, quietly. Hannibal’s turn, now, to stiffen and to frown. Will was meant to be alone tonight; his orderly was meant to be working. “It was… good. I felt good. But… there was a ghost hanging over my shoulder the whole time. Whispering, louder and louder until ignoring it was… no longer an option.”

Hannibal steps closer, within arm’s reach of the opposite side of the fireplace. Will has relaxed further, one arm up and resting upon the mantel, his forehead pressed to the back of his wrist, eyes twinkling in the dim firelight, face pale and forlorn and begging for Hannibal’s cool, comforting hands.

“What did these whispers say, Will?”

A huff of a laugh. “You say my name a lot, Dr. Lecter.”

“I enjoy the way it feels upon my tongue,” Hannibal purrs, and slides over until they are nearly shoulder to shoulder.

“They remind me who I belong to,” Will says, and the bitter twist seems to sit heavily in his chest.

“The Ripper,” Hannibal says, thoughtfully.

“He finds a way to make everything I do feel empty without his influence.” A forced laugh. “And nothing he influences can just be easy or straightforward. He can’t even deal with me himself. Just sends… intermediaries.”

Hannibal keeps his breath even as he lays his hand on top of Will’s, sliding boldly beneath the cuff of the woolen coatsleeve as he joins Will in leaning against the yawning fireplace. “Have you been visited by such an intermediary? Has your Ripper reached out to you?”

Will glances, just for a moment, at their overlapping fingers, then turns back to the fire. Hannibal takes it as tacit approval; his thumb absently strokes across soft, delicate skin on the underside of Will’s wrist, his forefinger laid along the radius as though he were pointing toward Will’s lovely, pensive expression.

“I wasn’t able to, uh… talk with the guy. He interrupted our date, so Matthew got rid of him,” Will eventually answers. “So, if there was a message, I didn’t get it.” 

The accursed orderly had interfered, of course. He is becoming more of a dagger than a mere thorn in Hannibal’s side. Something will have to be done about him, sooner rather than later. Bad enough that he is disrupting Hannibal’s plans; worse, and more loathsome, that he is so… entwined with Will.

Yet, despite the setback, two very important things stand out for Hannibal. 

Firstly, he had still achieved his aim: Will had come to him, sought him out, desired his company following Randall’s intrusion, even though he had been in the midst of an apparently pleasant evening with his frustrating little distraction.

Secondly—and in some ways more importantly—this is proof positive that Will Graham is comfortable tangling with killers. 

There is no other interpretation of the situation; Matthew Brown is most certainly a fledgling killer who grew attached to Will during his stay in the hospital. This much, Hannibal has already determined. Randall Tier had been tasked with attacking Will’s home, putting the ferality of the Beast into his head, and, once he was so out of his own mind he could not think straight, bringing him to Hannibal’s table. The doctor can only assume that once Randall had broken through Will’s front door or climbed through a window or whatever dramatics he preferred, the meddlesome little orderly had murdered the lad. Likely, he is disposing of the body even as Will stands, needy and resigned, in Hannibal Lecter’s study.

“A shame,” Hannibal says, casually settling his thumb against Will’s pulse point. “Perhaps there will be another.”

Will slowly shakes his head. His pulse is steady, but slightly elevated.

“No,” he says. “I don’t think so.” He turns his head and his eyes lock with Hannibal’s. The fire glimmers between them, sparks dancing from blue to maroon and back. “A proxy was beneath him. Too cautious. If the Ripper wants what’s his, he’ll know now he can’t trust it to someone else. He needs to reach out and take it with his own two hands.”

“To take you, Will,” Hannibal murmurs, and Will’s pulse picks up. Excited? Frightened?

“Yes,” Will whispers.

“And are you prepared to give yourself to him?”

“You asked me something like that before.”

“I recall that your answer was rather evasive.”

“It wasn’t evasive. He won’t give me a choice.”

Hannibal pauses, drinking in the resolute thud thud thud of Will’s pulse against his thumb. “Are you so unbothered by the loss of agency?”

Will snorts, and his pulse quickens. Frustration, anticipation? “I still have agency.”

“Oh?”

“Obviously.” He twists his hand until their grips are mirrored and Hannibal can no longer track Will’s heartbeat. His voice lowers, exhausted, resigned. Disappointed. Slow. “Just because he won’t give me a choice doesn’t mean I didn’t make one.”

“And what choice was it, Will?”

The answering snort is frustrated, huffy, and Will both breaks their eye contact and tugs his hand free as he mutters, “I guess we’ll have to find that out together.”

Hannibal’s lips twitch at the corners.

His beautiful, brilliant Will has most definitely identified him. Most definitely wants him, despite his unusual hobby. There is the question of when this realization came about, but Hannibal can amuse himself with that consideration later. Will belongs to Hannibal, and he knows it.

He reaches out, cups Will’s cheek, tilts Will’s face toward his own. The man’s eyes are closed now, but there is absolutely no resistance.

“Tell me why you’re here, Will. What is it that you need?”

A hint of something, not quite a flinch, and Will’s tongue flickers between his lips, wetting them. Oh, his aggravation is so sweet, so intoxicating. Hannibal steps in closer, nearly pins him against the leg of the fireplace.

“I am at your service,” Hannibal says. “You have only to ask.”

Will’s eyes slide half-open, provocative, burning, and he whispers, “Tell me how you made me need you.”

Hannibal pauses, his thoughts stuttering, freezing, dashed.

Is Will looking for a confession?

He wonders, detachment climbing up his spine, if that is all this is. He wanted Hannibal to admit the truth on his own. Is he still trying? Is this all some ploy to catch him?

Will, with his startling and discomfiting insight, exhales softly through his nose and whispers, “I remember flashing lights. I remember a… a ticking, steady. A metronome. I remember a voice. Hands on my face.” He takes Hannibal’s other hand and brings it up, so that both palms are pressed to his cheeks. “Like this,” he says, quietly. “I was having a, uh… a mild seizure. I remember that. I know what happened to me.”

“Have you given Jack a suspect, then, Will?” Hannibal asks, his expression flat, his thumbs tracing Will’s cheekbones. 

A betrayal, now, after all they have shared, will feel more like dying than he is prepared to handle. The grief is already beginning to rise like bile, and he swallows it down, replacing it with predatory calm. Will, again, seems to see it, because he laughs low in his throat and holds tightly to the hands cupping his stubbled jaw.

Will’s gaze is intense, unrepentant. “Jack came up with a suspect on his own. The Ripper had to have a lot of access to me while my brain was on fire and he had to be familiar with psychic driving, on top of the existing profile. He’s the director of the BAU. I didn’t have to give him anything. But he is looking.”

“And is that the reason you came, Will?” Hannibal says, in a tone only Will could read as anything but emotionless.

It takes a great deal of effort not to squeeze too tightly around Will’s head. Not to drop his hands to Will’s neck and crush his windpipe. Not to spring immediately to violence.

But Will only huffs a laugh, turns his mouth against Hannibal’s palm, shakes his head. “I belong to the Ripper, not Jack Crawford,” Will says, his lips dragging on Hannibal’s skin. “I’m not here to talk about work. I’m here to talk about the time we spent together that I forgot. I want to remember what you did to make me feel… like this.” A hot, sensual kiss upon the sensitive skin of his palm, teeth nipping, the hint of tongue, a heady sigh. “This is real. I want to remember where it came from. Please, Hannibal.”

Hannibal closes his eyes, inhales, holds the scent of the fire and the books and the soap he chose for Will, and slowly lets the breath and the violence pour back out of him. He hums a few notes of that near-forgotten song from his childhood and feels the relaxation in Will’s answering sigh and the heat of lips in the palm of his hand.

“Would you care to join me for dessert?” he asks, and Will leans back with a curious, quizzical quirk of his eyebrow. “This is a conversation which will benefit, I think, from a sweet accompaniment.”

“To offset the bitterness?” Will says, dry and mocking, and it echoes Bedelia so precisely that for a moment Hannibal cannot help his scowl.

“To ease the recollection of your memories,” he answers, coolly.

Will exhales through his nose and nods. He follows Hannibal through the house, a silent shadow, palm damp against the doctor’s own. The dining room is dim, the candles unlit, and Will pauses at the far end of the table. The tug at his arm is enough to bring Hannibal to a stop, and he glances over his shoulder at his guest.

“Set,” Will murmurs. “For three. A little late for dinner, isn’t it, Dr. Lecter?” Those piercing, perceptive blue eyes fall upon Hannibal. “I hope I’m not interrupting something again.”

“I can assure you, Will, there is nothing to interrupt. You find yourself once again the beneficiary of a last-minute alteration to my evening plans. I must admit I won’t mind if this becomes a pattern. It feels fortuitous for the both of us.”

Will doesn’t answer, and Hannibal leads him, wordlessly, into the kitchen. The space is more intimate, though the lighting is by necessity much brighter. He flicks two switches as he passes through the doorway, and the room dims to a level he considers acceptable. They sit on the barstools tucked against the kitchen island, side-by-side, spoons clinking upon their plates, thoughts booming amidst the hush of the house.

“What do you remember, Will?” Hannibal asks, tracing the taste of sour lemon and soft, sweet raspberry upon his teeth.

Will squishes some of the custard beneath the back of his spoon, smearing it in a smooth arc across the plate like he’s preparing a fine dining experience, as though this is not the finest dining experience possible (or the only one he would ever be willing to tolerate). The pale yellow is tinted by pips of pink-red, violent little comets at daybreak.

“I remember the beginning,” Will says, softly. “Meeting you. Hobbs. Getting rubber-stamped so we could… talk. Visiting Abigail together.” There’s tension in his voice at that, but it drains away. “I remember going with Alana and Abigail to Minnesota. She… wanted to recreate the crime.” 

Hannibal’s mouth twitches up at the corner. “You were to be her father.”

He glances at Hannibal and murmurs, “And you be the man on the phone.” Hannibal’s smile widens just slightly, but he doesn’t respond. Will looks back down at his plate. “I remember Marissa Schurr. Lounds being a pain in my ass. Nick Boyle, what happened to him.” He snorts. “I half-remember confronting you after his body was found. You told me we were Abigail’s fathers.”

“I did. And I meant it,” Hannibal says, sliding a small bite of custard, sour and tart, between his lips.

Will shakes his head. “Well. I remember everything up through… most of the Angel-maker just fine. Then things start to… blur.” He licks his lips and his brow furrows. “I remember Bella Crawford’s diagnosis. Jack was… I was falling apart. I wanted to quit. I know that. You told me it was stress. The job. Jack, pushing me, and me pushing myself. You said I was being abused.” Blue, accusing eyes tick toward Hannibal, but Will keeps his nose pointed toward the refreshing lemon scent of his plate and his nervous spoon, tapping wetly against the custard. “I-I remember Abel Gideon. I remember feeling—reliving the death of the nurse. Worrying I was losing my mind. Knowing, with certainty, he wasn’t the Ripper. He wasn’t even a copycat. Just a cheap imitation, created by a plagiarist.”

“And you were correct,” Hannibal purrs. “Your instincts, your understanding of the Ripper, is unique.”

“If you say so. Seemed to me like Miriam Lass did a pretty damn good job, or she wouldn’t have turned up years later as… just a point to be made. A way to successfully humiliate Jack Crawford.” 

Will absentmindedly sticks the spoon in his mouth and Hannibal watches, rapt, as his lips slide along the metal, his tongue rasping against the edge, red juice like a stain upon his pink mouth. His own tongue darts out, sympathetic, gliding across his cupid’s bow. Intoxicating creature. 

“We spoke at length, during that time,” Hannibal says. “Of Dr. Gideon. Of… misunderstandings, and identity. You paced back and forth in my office, muttering to yourself more than to me. You had a great deal to say about feeling forced to become someone other than you are.”

Will snorts. “There’s an unforgettable feeling.”

“You have only misplaced the memory of sharing that feeling with me, Will. I cherished your honesty.”

“I told you about the academy, huh?”

“Yes. Do you remember?” Slowly, Will shakes his head, and Hannibal’s voice drops, soothing, as he says, “You mentioned your father. Your teachers. The school psychologist. The Iron Maiden in the shape of a normal young man, which you felt forced into.”

Another scoff. “I wouldn’t say it like that.”

Hannibal smiles, the corners of his eyes crinkling just so. “Quite right. You described it as a box with a label written in bold letters. A stamp they wished to apply to your forehead to match you with the box they had designated as your own.”

“Sounds about right.”

“You were angry,” he says. “Angry that the box and the labels and the list of approved traits they developed without your input had nothing in common with the man that you are, or that you wanted to be.”

Will sighs and rubs at his eyes. “I became him anyway.”

“After a fashion,” Hannibal agrees. “But, as I said then, Will, you are your own man now. Your choices are yours. Your actions are yours also. You may become the Will Graham you desire to be, no longer the generic Normal Young Man your instructors forced into being and shipped out into the world.” Hannibal’s smile softens. “Imagine how boring you would be, if you had not picked away the packaging tape and torn free of the burden of normality.”

A laugh, which turns into a half-sob. “I wanted to be a good man, Hannibal. I wanted to be a cop. I wanted to save people. But I’m…”

“What makes a good man, Will?” His voice is low, intense, his eyes blazing. “You wanted to save innocents, and you have. You wanted to work in law enforcement, and you do. Have you done great harm, Will?”

“Sometimes I still feel like I have,” he murmurs. “I want to. I want to.”

“Is that so wrong?”

“Isn’t it?”

Hannibal sucks in a breath and considers. He has had this conversation—or, conversations like it—with Will in the midst of sessions involving hypnotic suggestion. He first began employing hypnosis, and flirting with psychic driving, around the time Abel Gideon had made his claims. Will was more… open, more vulnerable, more willing to speak under the effects of hypnosis. But he was also more willing to accept the parts of himself he currently sees as loathsome.

This is delicate work, as it has ever been, and the stakes are staggeringly high.

“Violence is part of the symphony of nature,” he says, trailing his fingers up Will’s forearm. “We exist because we fought for breath, for resources, for shelter, for company. The instinct is ingrained, deeply, within all of us. There is nothing inherently evil or immoral in violence. Storms are often violent, but never evil. The lion and the gazelle are both violent during a hunt, as attacker and defender, and you would cast no moral judgment upon them. Morality exists only within the collective human consciousness, and even then it is purely subjective. What makes a man evil, Will? What is your subjective morality?”

Will scowls at his plate, but he leans fractionally into Hannibal’s touch, almost chasing the drag of the doctor’s fingertips. “I assume we’ve had this discussion before.”

“We have.”

“Then you know what I’m going to say.”

“I do.”

“It’s cruelty, Hannibal. Cruelty and greed.”

“And you are neither greedy nor cruel. Whatever darkness exists within you has never taken recklessly, or punished without reason.” Hannibal waits for a moment, half-expecting Will to make a sarcastic comment about the Chesapeake Ripper—which he would, of course, refute, as there is neither greed nor cruelty in the Ripper’s actions, only a certain elegant purging of filth—but the other man stays silent, drumming his fingers upon the island. He decides not to press, and instead asks, “What else, Will? Do you recall more, after Dr. Gideon?”

“Other than the Ripper tormenting Jack? Other than Miriam Lass’ arm being left in the observatory?” He huffs. “Yeah. I remember sticking my hand in somebody’s chest in a hotel bathroom straight out of The Shining. Trying to save him. I remember you suggesting that the Ripper might be an organ harvester. And then suddenly the Ripper was in the middle of a six-pig sounder and Zeller made some comment about sausage that… stuck.” He licks his lips, unconsciously, but the words and the gesture imprint themselves in Hannibal’s mind like an afterimage burned onto an old screen. He itches to draw it. Will goes on. “I don’t… remember the details. I think one of the victims there was a… a bus, a school bus. It’s, I mean, they blurred. They weren’t important, any of them. They weren’t worth remembering. But I… I remember seeing you. With your sleeves rolled up. With your hands in someone’s chest,” he says, and his eyes are a bit glazed. “Blood on nitrile blue. Your attention on me like headlights in the dark. I remember… seeing something. Feeling… something.”

“What were you feeling, Will?”

“Awe,” Will says, distantly. He blinks, and his focus shifts for just a moment to Hannibal’s face. “And doubt.”

“Doubt?”

“About… misplacing my own attention,” he says, and there’s humor behind his awkward half-smile, but it is a thin veneer over a core of something darker. “I remember why you stopped being a surgeon. I remember telling you I had a date with the Ripper.” A pause, then, “I remember the look on your face, but I couldn’t… parse it, at the time.” 

Hannibal’s smile is thin. Brittle, in a way. He lays his arm across the back of Will’s chair and his fingers continue to trace up and down Will’s bare forearm, up to the hem of the short gray sleeve of his soft tee shirt.

After Silvestri’s first victim had appeared, and Will had spent a significant length of time describing the reconstruction—how he could picture himself so clearly cutting the body open, spreading the ribs, gripping the heart in his hand, the visceral panic and the thrill—Hannibal had focused his psychic driving on emphasizing and reinforcing the strength of those visions. He had whispered in Will’s ear stories of Cassie Boyle’s death, the feel of her organs in his hands, the heat of the inside of a fresh human body. The scents. The sounds. The screams.

And Will, under the effects of hypnotic suggestion, had proven surprisingly receptive to absorbing those details, but more to the point he had proven surprisingly receptive to honesty. He had opened his mind to Hannibal, spoken tearfully about the weight of his obligation to use his curse to save people, the frustration of knowing he is seeing the killer clearly and being ignored or doubted, the wretched craving to destroy those killers himself, to become the lesser evil if that is what is required to assuage the guilt he feels for simply existing as he does.

It had been a turning point for Hannibal, in a way. He had already been thinking about friendship, and connection in general, even before the idea had come up with Bedelia. That shared moment with Will, their eyes locked over the oozing lifeblood of a man whose future rested in Hannibal’s hands, had felt like the culmination of their many long conversations about the nature of friendship and the relief of understanding. The truth had been clear and undeniable: Will was the only person who could possibly see him, and even with his mind already fighting against him, it was inevitable that Will would be the first to legitimately (without the aid of sheer dumb luck) identify him as the Ripper.

The grooves of his fingertips catch and swirl the fine hairs on the back of Will’s hand. He traces delicate little circles and hums, softly. Not the lullaby from before, this time—no, an old blues melody Will had hesitantly sung for him once, two whiskies and a short psychic driving session deep into their evening, pliant and pink-cheeked and perfect.

He likes being able to touch Will. He likes the way Will’s shoulders relax at the sound of his voice and the touch of his hand, the way Will sighs and closes his eyes and tilts his body to ease Hannibal’s access. It’s better this way. Better than stealing moments, pressing boundaries, the barely-tolerated press of a hand upon Will’s lower back. This is the way things should have been, from the moment Will stepped out of the hospital.

This is the way it should have been from the moment Hannibal realized that Will belonged to him.

Will’s comfort with his touch had increased dramatically after Silvestri, in large part due to Hannibal’s concerted effort to ensure Will associated his presence with comfort and safety. That effort had begun in earnest after the dinner party. It was rather moving that Will had gone to the effort not only to inform Hannibal in person that he could not attend, but that he had also brought a bottle of wine which he had clearly gone out of his way to obtain. It was this thoughtful effort which confirmed for Hannibal that his feelings—of friendship, obviously—were reciprocated.

The only natural conclusion had been to make a slight adjustment to his plans. Will would still be arrested, as the ordeal was a necessary element of his transformation (a theory which has still proven true, if not in the way Hannibal originally intended), but there was no reason not to make good use of a golden opportunity to make himself indispensable to his dear, brilliant friend.

Will leans forward on his elbow, his forehead resting in his palm, and the fingers Hannibal is tracing, knuckle by knuckle, dig into his flannel-covered thigh just slightly. His eyes are still closed, and he takes a deep breath through his nose. Hannibal gently slides his hand up Will’s shoulder and cups the cool dampness at the back of his neck.

“I’m saving the wine,” Hannibal says, “for a very special occasion.”

Will huffs a laugh. “It’s still here?”

“No. I stored it with some of my more valuable bottles elsewhere.”

“Hannibal, it was, like, thirty dollar wine.”

“Forty-five,” he says, and his smile just barely flashes his teeth. “Its value is not in its monetary worth, Will. It is precious to me because it was a gift that would have cost you more in the currency of time and trouble than dollars and cents.”

With a long-suffering sigh, Will sits up straight and shovels another bite of custard between his lips. The lemon scent is delicate, and swirls pleasantly with the underlying citrus of Will’s bespoke soap. The softened lighting in the kitchen catches on the line of his jaw, and again Hannibal is struck with the impulse to draw him. He considers, briefly, asking Will to stay still for him. To pose. To allow him this indulgence.

The first time he had drawn Will from life, rather than from memory, had been shortly after the dinner party. It had also been the first time he had touched Will’s face, cupped it in his hand, caressed the stubble with his thumb. Only to pose him, of course. And, well, it had comforted him, so it could be argued that it was therapeutic. Hannibal had certainly made that argument to himself, before he was willing to accept the alternative.

A hypnotherapy session. A simple, if sardonic, comment about Will’s ‘date’ with the Ripper. A conversation nearly two hours long not about who the Ripper is but about what he does, what he creates, what art and expression and captivation, his flair, his knowledge, his gift. Will had compared the Copycat to the Ripper in passing, and it had annoyed Hannibal deeply to interrupt their conversation in order to interfere with that mental connection and instead reinforce the false memories he had so far spent weeks building upon. 

It had taken a toll on Will. He’d been lethargic, sweaty, distressed. He had sat in his chair in Hannibal’s office, sweat sparkling upon his brow, eyes hazy, and he had turned to look at the sliver of moonlight sneaking through the top of the long curtains, and he had looked so beautiful Hannibal couldn’t help himself.

He had gently ordered Will to stay still, but the poor man was in such a daze he had swiveled his head around, blinked—long lashes sweeping over hollow eyes—and only then had he registered the request. His face had crumpled, but Hannibal had only shushed him.

‘It’s alright, Will. Allow me.’ And he had taken Will’s face in his hand, the skin clammy against his own; Will had nearly whimpered as he leaned into the touch, and for a moment Hannibal had been so enchanted he could only murmur, ‘Bellissimo.’

Then he had tilted Will’s head up and to the side, toward the window, and told him again not to move, and he had sat for twenty minutes savoring the line and shape of Will Graham’s living form.

Now, though, is not the time for any of that. Perhaps later.

“What else? After the dinner party, what do you recall?”

Will sighs. “I… bits and pieces. Hearing things. Seeing things. Moments that feel like static. Things better forgotten, like kissing Alana and rushing over to see you afterward. Fucking embarrassment.”

“Well. You did not feel the need to kiss anyone else as a clutch for balance, at least until your trial. And your relationship with Alana did not suffer for it.”

“I’m sure that was frustrating for you. Or, maybe not, considering.”

“Will. Please. My relationship with Alana—”

“I don’t want to talk about Alana right now, Hannibal.”

Foolish. He already knows this is a tender subject. There will be time later. “Of course. Forgive me. Please, continue.”

“Not much to continue with,” Will mutters, shaking off his bitterness. “It’s hard to say for sure what I’m remembering and what I just know happened. I mean, I know about Budge, I remember seeing the… the cello. But I remember the song, our song, more than anything. I remember hearing it in my sleep, and in my waking hours, and not being sure which was which.” There’s a pause, and then a small, uncertain, “Something… made it go away.”

“Yes, Will,” Hannibal says, squeezing his hand. “You came to my office a few days after—ah, after the last time we enjoyed a dessert together in this kitchen.”

As though reminded of the dessert in front of him, Will takes another small, thoughtful bite. With the spoon tapping against his lips, he hedges, “Was it… snowing?”

The bubble of joy is difficult, but not impossible, to contain. Hannibal schools his expression and tempers his response. It wouldn’t do to give too much away.

“Yes, Will,” he purrs.

They had sat together, watching the snow, drinks in hand, and in the silence Hannibal had begun to hum the lullaby he had last allowed himself to recall when he was still a child. Will had relaxed so completely, so perfectly, and sighed, and told him that the melody was beautiful.

‘I used to sing this song for my sister, when fear or anxiety kept her from sleep. It would calm and reassure her that all was well. I hope it does the same for you, Will. I hope to bring you comfort, whenever you may need it.’

‘Thank you, Hannibal,’ Will had murmured, and how it had ached.

Hannibal had very nearly wrapped an arm around Will’s tempting waist, not through any conscious thought but because their proximity, their intimacy, seemed to beg for further escalation. They had shared body heat—Will’s fever scorching, the scent a rot-sweet distraction—with their thighs pressed together and the lights so low the fire illuminated more of the room. Will had been watching the heavy, fat flakes of snow falling outside, and Hannibal had been watching Will. The glimmer of his eyes. The planes of his face, lit by the warm yellows and flickering oranges. The delicate curl of his hair upon his forehead, sticking to sweat-damp temples. The awful temptation of his pretty pink lips.

The attraction had been startling in its intensity. When Will had tilted his head, the graceful arch of his neck had made Hannibal salivate, and the easy, coy, trusting smile practically demanded to be tasted. He had ached for the shattering of their glasses upon his fine floor and the desperate creak of his desk beneath their combined weight. If he had been bolder, or weaker, he would have claimed Will then and there.

“I wanted very badly to kiss you that night,” he admits.

“I know,” Will says, plucking a raspberry from the plate. “I mean, I don’t think I knew then. But… at the courthouse, when, uh… when you kissed me. I remembered watching the snow. I remembered your arm behind me. I remembered… feeling stable. Safe. Just… good. It’s the only thing I remember around the time we caught Tobias Budge.”

“You didn’t catch him,” Hannibal says, and Will’s whole face darkens, scrunches, as he struggles to remember. “You saw him in his shop. You discovered his curing room.”

“Catgut strings,” Will murmurs.

“Human gut strings,” Hannibal gently corrects. “You fought.”

“Yes,” Will says. “He… almost killed me, didn’t he.” Not a question. Not the pleasant sort of non-question. Too near to a question for Hannibal’s comfort. “My ear was bleeding. I couldn’t hear for hours.” His head slowly tilts back until his eyes are locked on a seemingly-random spot on the ceiling. “You killed him. That’s right. Your patient knew him. He went to your office.”

“Yes, Will.” Hannibal threads his fingers, carefully, with Will’s. Those hazy eyes don’t turn his way. “Do you remember coming to my office?”

Will chews his lip and his brow furrows further. “I… remember your relief. I remember that because it was the first—the strongest real emotion I ever felt from you. Other than… amusement.” He huffs through his nose and shakes his head. “I don’t… No, Hannibal. From the moment I heard the song, it’s like everything cracks and scatters to the wind. I only know what I read in the reports. I wasn’t seeing any of it.” 

Hannibal’s eyes slide shut and he grips tighter to Will’s hand. “I thought he had killed you. For over an hour, I believed I would never see you again, Will. When I did—when I saw that you were alive—” He shakes his head, and holds Will’s hand between both of his own. “I couldn’t contain my relief, obviously. And I could no longer deny the truth of my feelings for you. I wanted to be your friend. I wanted to be more. I had some hope that such a thing might be possible.” His thumb dips into the valleys between each of Will’s knuckles. “You sat with me while Jack and the CSI team cleared my office.”

‘I feel like I dragged you into my world,’ Will had said.

‘I got here on my own. But I appreciate the company.’

Hannibal takes a breath, which catches just slightly in his throat. “Jack wanted me to come give an official statement immediately. You refused, on my behalf. You insisted that he content himself with speaking to the first officers on scene and wait for me to come in the next day.”

“He must have been pissed,” Will says, and squeezes Hannibal’s hand.

Hannibal chuckles. “I would call that an understatement, but I can’t be certain. He left right after and had calmed significantly by the time I presented myself for formal questioning.” He swallows. “You stayed with me, Will. When the others had gone, you tended my injuries.”

Will smirks. “You let me do that?”

“I protested, but only for a moment. Your expression deterred me from resisting too much.” His eyelids flutter; he recalls the ghost of Will’s touch, warm and brusque and confident, worried, gentle. The sting of iodine, the drag of sterile gauze and cotton. The tug of a few butterfly stitches. “You tore the knee of my trousers to examine the wound in my leg. You allowed me to stitch it myself, but you cleaned and bandaged it for me.”

The image of Will, kneeling, his hands rough but careful upon Hannibal’s bare thigh, the sight of those brilliant blue eyes looking up at him… He swallows again, harder this time, and his throat clicks.

“I hope I didn’t pay for replacement pants,” Will drawls, but there’s a blush on his cheeks and Hannibal suspects that his control is not as absolute as he had hoped.

“I would never have presumed to ask. Your care was enough of a gift.”

“And you probably have three more pairs just like them,” Will says with a soft laugh.

“Near enough,” Hannibal concedes, and leans back. 

He needs a bit of distance. He takes a spoonful of his own custard, mostly as an excuse to untangle his hands from Will’s. This won’t do, however; he feels bereft, as though he is missing a piece of himself. He settles for a continued, slow exploration of Will’s arm with his fingertips, tracing the muscle groups, enjoying the spread of goosebumps.

Will smiles at him, knowing, a little teasing. “What else happened, Hannibal? I know there was a totem pole made of human bodies. And I was… helpful, apparently.”

“Yes,” Hannibal says. “You arrived at my office after seeing the scene. You had no memory of the drive. More to the point, during the same period of time, Nicholas Boyle’s body was discovered. Jack suspected that Abigail was responsible.”

Will’s face falls, his brows knitted, his nostrils flared. “He was right.”

“Yes.”

“And you knew.”

“Yes. When you came to discuss the matter with me, I admitted that I helped her to hide the body. She betrayed my trust by digging him up for the FBI to find.”

“Is that why you killed her?” Will whispers, and his fingers dig hard into his thighs. Hannibal is silent; there is no answer to this question that will be good for either of them. Eventually, Will exhales, long and shaky, and the tension bleeds from his shoulders. “I wouldn’t have told Jack. I would have wanted to protect her. And you.”

Hannibal’s eyes crinkle at the corners. “Yes. We spent a great deal of time discussing the allure and uncertainty of having a family, given our own less than exemplary experiences. Your conclusion then was that while we may both feel a sense of obligation toward providing fatherly guidance for Abigail, neither of us would make particularly good fathers.”

“I think I could have been a good dad,” Will grumbles, defensively.

“Under ideal conditions, perhaps,” Hannibal concedes. “But there are no ideals in parenthood, and no perfection to be had. Pain is an inevitable part of the human condition, and you would be unable to shield your child from harmful experiences or poor choices. Theirs, or yours.”

“All parents make mistakes, Dr. Lecter. It doesn’t make them bad parents.”

Back to his title. His mongoose has siphoned a venomous bite from the snakes he has been forced to do battle with these past months.

Hannibal lifts one shoulder in a graceful half-shrug. “As I said, it was not my conclusion that we would make poor fathers, Will. It was yours.”

“And what exactly were my reasons?”

“You said that I would be too exacting. Apparently I have certain obsessive compulsions bordering on a disorder which, in itself, wouldn’t be an issue—in fact, you made it a point to emphasize that many parents with various forms and severities of OCD or OCPD were perfectly loving and capable—but my pretentious nature and low tolerance for mild annoyances would make me both insufferable and damaging for any children unfortunate enough to find themselves in my care.” 

Will snorts, and Hannibal allows himself to smile.

“As for you,” he continues, tapping out a rhythm upon the back of Will’s hand, “it was quite a bit simpler than all that. You concluded that your lack of positive role models and your reclusive lifestyle were barriers, certainly, but could be overcome. What could not, to your mind, was your empathy disorder. You believed it would become… something of a privacy issue, even were you to adopt.”

‘A kid should be able to lie to their parents. Be pissed off for no reason. Be excited about something personal. Their feelings are their own. Their privacy, their thoughts.’ Will had sighed and rubbed at his temple. ‘Any kid of mine would have to get very good at lying to other people and they still wouldn’t stand a chance with me. They’d have to suppress their emotions for anything in their life to ever just belong to them. A-and God forbid they have the same curse as me. Two mirrors. An infinite corridor. A nightmare that never ends. So, yeah, Dr. Lecter, I’d say pretty definitively this is the one chance either of us is going to get at fatherhood. Let’s not fuck it up.’

Will mirrors his past self, his eyes closed. “I guess I can see that. And I guess it doesn’t really matter now, does it? That’s one door I don’t think I’m ever going to open again.” He rolls his shoulders and leans back in his chair, head tilted back, neck bared and tempting. “I’m assuming you escalated things after that.”

Hannibal licks his lips. “Why do you say that?”

“Reward and reinforcement,” Will says. “Classical conditioning.”

“You believe I conditioned you to feel safe with me.”

“I believe we conditioned each other,” he answers, archly.

“Hm. I suppose we did.” He leans the opposite direction, his elbow on the kitchen island, and continues idly stroking Will’s lax hand. “Abigail decided to work with Freddie Lounds. A book about her experiences. Neither of us approved, but she was determined to have her way. We invited Ms. Lounds to dinner, to show a united front. And, of course, to ensure it was understood that any foul play on Ms. Lounds’ part would not be tolerated.” He ignores Will’s derisive snort and continues: “You arrived at my home looking… worse for wear, in many ways. You were distressed, and your hands were shaking. I offered to help you.”

Will’s eyes snap open, but he doesn’t move. “The soap. That was when… you gave me the kit to take home, because the smell was… it calmed me down. Different than this smell, but I—”

“Yes, that was juniper and lavender and lemongrass, among other things. It was good for anxiety. The scent you wear now was crafted by the same shop but it is… uniquely yours.”

Will’s throat bobs. “You shaved me.”

“I helped you. And brought you comfort.”

And he had, indeed, reverently shaved Will’s face and neck with a straight razor.

He had ushered Will upstairs to his bedroom and through to the ensuite, patted the countertop with his hand, and then retrieved his shaving kit from the bathroom cupboards. Will sat on the counter beside the sink, looking like a wary wolf struggling to survive a harsh winter and a wracking illness, eyes red-rimmed above dark, heavy bags, cheeks a bit too sallow, clothes loose on a once-powerful frame, broad shoulders drooping with exhaustion. He had been nervous when Hannibal had opened the kit, and questioned if he couldn’t just use a safety razor or an electric trimmer, but Hannibal had only smiled and asked for his trust.

And Will, despite everything, despite all his misgivings and his traitorous brain and the killers swirling inside of his head, had smiled back, crooked and gorgeous, and relaxed.

A hot towel rested upon Will’s face while Hannibal whipped up the shaving cream with a thick bristle brush, and Will had sighed at the scent when his cheeks and neck were lathered and coated with a good, clean layer. Hannibal had begun to hum as he plucked one of the straight razors from the box and flicked it open, and Will didn’t even flinch, even as the doctor sharpened the blade on a strop. He had laid a towel over one arm and asked if Will was ready—a nod, in response, the eyes glassy and a bit dazed—and very gently tilted Will’s head to the side so that he could begin.

The blade had sung as it glided across Will’s skin. The pulse in his neck had fluttered and thrummed so deliciously Hannibal had to fight the temptation to slit his throat and drown in the arterial spray. He wanted to chase the razor with his tongue. This side of Will was so delectable, so precious, so intoxicating. So pliant.

They didn’t speak. The only sound was the swish-scrape of the razor against Will’s skin, the airy shush of the flat of the blade upon the towel, and Hannibal’s low, comforting hum of a lullaby he had once thought left behind. 

When the edges were neat and trimmed, Hannibal used another warm towel to clean the remaining soap from Will’s face, and then pulled a small pair of scissors from his kit to trim up the handsome stubble he had left clinging to Will’s cheeks and jawline. Will didn’t resist, though he certainly could have taken the task over at that point. He only sat, his hands in his lap, his chin tilted up, his eyes half-closed, listening to the hum while the doctor took care of him.

Hannibal’s hand had lingered upon Will’s jaw. ‘How are you feeling now, Will?’ he had asked.

‘Better. I feel… better,’ Will had said, softly. ‘Thank you, Dr. Lecter.’

‘It is my pleasure,’ Hannibal replied, and forced himself to step away.

“You wanted to kiss me then, too, didn’t you,” Will says. Not a question, but a sort of exhausted, exasperated teasing.

“Very much,” he says.

Will hums, scratches at his neck. “There was more, after that. But things really got out of control, didn’t they? I contaminated a scene.”

Ah, yes. “Georgia Madchen. She murdered a childhood friend, Beth LeBeau. You were the only one to recognize that there was no malice in the act, only fear and confusion. Psychological instability, of some kind.”

“Yeah.” A pause. “She was dead. Thought she was dead.” Another pause. “I remember trying to peel off a woman’s face because she was an impostor, or, or I couldn’t see her face and I didn’t know if she was real. But I didn’t do that.” He licks his lips and sits straight again, lacing his fingers together between his knees, pulling his arm out of Hannibal’s easy reach. “She was there the night Donald Sutcliffe was murdered. I know I was supposed to think I did it, but Georgia sort of threw a wrench in that. They still processed me, I know that. Beverly told me she checked me herself, and I was clean, but I don’t remember.”

“You called after you were processed,” Hannibal says. “I happened to be at my office, and you were distressed. I invited you to come sit with me. Not to talk, if you didn’t want to. Just to rest, and not be alone.”

Will’s expression flattens. “You happened to be at your office, huh.”

“I was in the area.”

“Uh huh. And I went to you, again, in the middle of the night, after maybe killing a guy.”

“You said yourself that forensics found no evidence on you, Will. You needed comfort. And I was your primary source of comfort.”

In fact, Will had been trembling terribly when he had arrived at Hannibal’s office, and he had tried to explain the source of his distress but it had only made him more upset. Hannibal had quieted him, and set his hands upon Will’s shoulders, and breathed with him for several minutes until, finally, the panic subsided and the exhaustion began to slip into its place.

Will’s eyelids had sagged, and Hannibal had slid his hands beneath the collar of Will’s coat in order to gently push it down his arms. Retrieving the jacket without allowing it to fall to the floor was akin to an embrace, and for a moment Will had pressed his forehead to Hannibal’s collarbone with a pained sound, like a whimper. Hannibal had pressed his cheek against Will’s and shushed him.

‘It’s alright, Will. I have you. You’re safe. Listen to my voice. You’re comfortable here. Safe and comfortable.’ He mirrored some of the language from their psychic driving sessions and felt Will relax further.

He began to hum that old lullaby as he walked Will across the room to the chaise longue.

‘Have a seat. Lay down, if you like.’

Will had moved to lay down and then stopped, blinking blearily at his feet, his hands sliding to his hips. His face had crumpled with frustration.

‘I… It’s not… It’s… can you open a window?’

Hannibal had glanced at Will and laughed. ‘If you feel warm, Will, I would suggest removing some layers.’

It had been fascinating and mouthwatering to observe as Will struggled his way out of the dark green sweater he had, for some reason, chosen to wear over his usual button-up. He was flushed and visibly annoyed by the time he succeeded in pulling the sweater over his head and off of his arms. After a beat, he handed the bunched sweater to Hannibal and attempted to lay down.

In the time it had taken Hannibal to shake out Will’s sweater and drape it beside his jacket over the back of one of the chairs, Will had apparently determined there were several other barriers to his comfort which he did not have the manual dexterity to address. His hands shook terribly, and beneath Hannibal’s persistent humming grew a distressed, frustrated grumble.

Hannibal, with grace and patience, covered Will’s hands with his own and ignored the downtrodden look as he assisted first with the removal of Will’s belt, then his shoes, and then the buttons at his cuffs. He pretended not to notice the searing red of Will’s cheeks and forehead as he tugged the tucked shirt free of his slacks and then slowly unbuttoned it, starting from the bottom. He had paused at the collar, his thumbs ever-so-gently caressing the underside of Will’s jaw, and then he had dropped his hands.

‘There. Now you can get some rest. I can keep singing for you, if you like.’

Will had nodded and curled up on the chaise longue in nothing but socks, slacks, and a thin black tee shirt, damp with sweat. For one, brief moment, he had cast crystal-clear, startling blue eyes in Hannibal’s direction, and then his eyelids had dropped shut and he had fallen into a deep, exhausted sleep.

Hannibal had not been able to resist drawing him like this, but even a page worth of drawings, all at different angles, wasn’t enough. The lullaby continued, lilting, as Hannibal carefully, indulgently, lay down upon the chaise and, to his surprise and delight, Will had instinctively rolled toward him, into his arms. He had stayed there for nearly an hour before the torment—and the risk—grew too suffocating. It had ached terribly to extricate himself, but he had reminded himself that Will needed to complete his transformation before they could truly understand one another.

It seems foolish, now. It seems wasteful, now.

“Yeah,” Will says, softly. “I guess you always have been the only person who could… make me feel stable. Even when I don’t want you to be.” He leans forward on one elbow, his forehead resting in his palm. “I… guess that explains why I came here with Hobbs. Or… not with Hobbs. Gideon.”

“You remember coming here that night?” 

He glances at Hannibal. “I got flashes when I was in the hospital. Not clear. It swims. I know I had a seizure. I know it wasn’t the first one. I, uh… I remember the sensations more than anything else. The sweat. The cold. Your hands. You were… gentle.” 

“Do you remember anything else from those days? The hospital?”

He shakes his head. “I was losing days at a time by then, and everything in between was a fever dream, if I was lucky. It got a little clearer for a little while, I guess because of the treatment, but… I know Georgia Madchen burned to death while I was in the hospital, but I don’t really remember. I remember feeling angry. A-and sad, I remember that. Helpless.” He rubs at his mouth and his brows knit again, deep lines, furrows at the center of his forehead. “They said she killed herself. I remember thinking everyone else was insane, how could they be so blind when I could see it and I was definitely losing my mind? But… I don’t remember anything concrete. Hell, I lost almost four days before I was arrested, and I barely remember what happened when Jack showed up at my house. I… I don’t really even remember the ear. I just remember feeling like I was going to die because I couldn’t breathe.”

There was a great deal more, between Will’s hospitalization and Abigail Hobbs’ ear.

Will had been so open, so vulnerable every time Hannibal had seen him. The hypnosis and the psychic driving were so effective, Will was leaving sessions without ever registering the hours he had spent in Hannibal’s company. He had sought Hannibal’s touch, leaning into his palm, laying his head upon Hannibal’s shoulder, clinging to the front of Hannibal’s suit. He had nearly begged to be touched, and he would go glassy-eyed and pliant whenever Hannibal would sing or hum for him, especially the lullaby. He had sung for Hannibal, too, as the metronome ticked. Absent, low, hauntingly sad.

The seizures had worsened and increased in frequency as the madness and paranoia had continued to build, and Will’s need for Hannibal had only grown as his illness burned and shattered his mind.

It had been both hellish and thrilling to see him this way. To know how close they were to the finish line. To wonder what Will might do, pushed to his absolute limit.

It is… something of a relief to know that Will doesn’t remember what happened.

It is an immense relief that he does not remember the days leading up to his arrest.

Will had come to see Hannibal for the last time before Abigail Hobbs’ disappearance, shaking and broken. He had been near tears, clothing rumpled and damp with sweat, hair plastered to his forehead and the back of his neck, and he had begged, but not for anything in particular. Hannibal had watched him stumble around the office, aimlessly touching photos and art pieces and the ladder to the balcony, lost and whimpering, his breathing ragged.

‘Please, I-I can’t, I… I don’t know what’s… I—!’

His eyes had grown wild, and he had collapsed to the floor beside the desk as though his knees had given out. For a moment he had sat there, staring at his hands pressed into the carpet, dazed, and then his head had snapped up. Wide, wet eyes darted around Hannibal’s general location, like he did not quite have the strength to focus. He had licked his lips, nervous, jaw trembling, and crawled over to mewl at Hannibal’s feet.

‘Please,’ he had whispered, taking a sweaty, claw-like grip upon the leg of Hannibal’s trousers. ‘Please, Dr. Lecter. I-I need…’

He could not, apparently, articulate what he needed; instead, he had wrapped his arms around Hannibal’s calf and sobbed, laying his head on Hannibal’s knee.

The doctor had hummed, dragging his fingers through Will’s greasy curls, and Will had pulled himself even closer, tucking his cheek against Hannibal’s thigh with a broken, choked sob. The heat of tears and breath had begun to seep through the fabric of Hannibal’s slacks, and he had not bothered to control his arousal. Will was in no state to notice, after all. This total submission was beyond anything Hannibal had dreamed, and the triumph was blissful, sheer, ecstatic ambrosia.

He sang quietly for his precious little mongoose, petting his poor, pounding head, acting as the purest and only comfort he could ever know, until his tears had dried and the hazy, spicy sweetness of his fever began to spike again. And then?

Then, he had spent two hours giving Will the final push he needed to give in to his madness, and when he had gone home he had drawn the scene over and over, altering details each time until he had fully twisted it to Will on his knees, eyes begging, Hannibal’s thumb pressing down upon his tongue, and he had painted that final drawing with come as though it were Will’s own face.

It is one memory he will certainly not be giving back, given the overwhelming number of reasons to keep it for himself.

“Well. Do you feel that you understand the progression of our connection, at least to some degree?”

Will shrugs. “I guess so.”

“And do you still question whether you are… misplacing your attention?” he asks, sliding his hand to the back of Will’s neck.

“Yes and no,” Will says. He’s playing with the custard, scooping smooth half-circles out of the mold and dropping them on top of the mint garnish on one side of his plate. “It’s… you’re a complicated person, Hannibal. I knew that already. I knew this would be… complicated. I knew you weren’t going to tell me everything. I knew you wouldn’t lie about what you did tell me, but there are obviously… There are aspects we should talk about, but I know we’re not going to, because…” He forces a breath out through his nose. “I just… it feels like the ball should have been in your court and you deliberately passed it off to me. You created a situation where I was gonna need you so that I would come here, instead of just talking to me yourself. Do you get what I’m saying?”

Hannibal hums diplomatically. He understands, but he certainly does not agree. Will feels that Hannibal owes him some sort of concession, some gesture that proves his trust and remorse. Of course, Hannibal has already made the greatest concession he possibly could: he has allowed Will to know him, and see him, and live. Between the two of them, it is Hannibal who stands to lose more if Will’s heart proves untrue and he succumbs to the labile whim of his morality. If anyone should be asking for proof of loyalty, it is Hannibal. He has been more than patient, and more than fair when it comes to this utter foolishness with the orderly.

But Will is here. That’s what matters. Will is here, and Will is his.

He squeezes just slightly at the nape of Will’s neck. “It is only natural to wish to be pursued, Will. Your affections have been somewhat mercurial, after all. Not to mention divided. I consider your presence here a show of good faith. The first of many steps we will take toward our future together.”

Will frowns. He sets his spoon aside and drags his hand down his mouth, searching for something in the marble countertop. His body stiffens as the seconds tick by, and, perhaps unconsciously, he leans away. He crosses his arms, shoulders hunching up enough to force the palm on his neck to slide down.

Finally, he grits out, “After everything you did, after everything you took from me…? You think this was a win for you, a-a surrender? You really think you deserve to see me bow and scrape and beg for forgiveness? You think I oughtta throw myself into daddy’s big strong arms and bat my eyelashes and promise to do whatever you want because I’ve been such a bad boy?” He snorts, derisive, a touch hysterical. “You don’t get to make demands, Hannibal. You took everything, even the choice to give you anything at all. What the hell have you done to deserve a future with me? I wanted literally one thing. It would have been so easy. You could have come to me at any point and said five words and we could have… I mean, I would have—! Fuck! Why does everything have to be on your terms?”

Hannibal’s jaw tightens. “My terms are not unreasonable considering the stakes, Will.”

“Christ, I’m not asking you to walk into Quantico waving a fucking flag around! It’s a symbolic gesture of trust. You could have whispered it in my fucking ear!”

“You already have the knowledge and presence of mind to exploit my every vulnerability. Why is that not enough for you?”

His eyes are stormy, his expression glacial. “If you don’t trust me, why the hell am I here?”

Hannibal sighs, clicking his tongue against his teeth. “Please. If I didn’t trust you, Will, you would know.”

“Wow. Not killing me. Real romantic.” He scoffs and shoves his plate away with his crossed arms; it clatters across the island, plinking and scraping upon the stone, the sound harsh and discordant.  “I don’t know why the hell I’m surprised. You stuck your fingers in my head and spent a good long time drawing a picture of us holding hands. You want your efforts to be rewarded.” The stool clatters to the floor as he pushes himself up, his teeth gritted, his voice strained as though his throat is raw. “And maybe they would have been, if you actually bothered to do anything that proved to me that you—that I matter to you. But if you really think that I would exploit your vulnerabilities, and you really think letting me live proves anything, well, I think that speaks for itself, don’t you? Maybe you’re not even capable of… of caring for anyone but yourself.”

“Will—”

“Thank you for dessert, Dr. Lecter. But I should go. Clearly coming here was a mistake. One I won’t repeat.”

The panic is instantaneous and startling. Adrenaline pulses through Hannibal’s veins. This is not the way this was meant to go. Will is two steps away, skirting around the fallen barstool, eyes bloodshot and dull, tense and trembling as though he expects a blade in his back. 

Hannibal leaps to his feet and cringes at the inappropriate, awkward volume as he declares, “I will end my relationship with Alana. Right this moment, if you wish. I will break her heart so thoroughly she will never speak to me again, if that is what you ask of me.”

It has the desired effect. Or, it appears to, for a moment. Will freezes, mere steps from the archway into the hall, and slowly turns on his socked heels. The domesticity is striking; Will Graham, exhausted, hair ruffled, wearing flannel pyjama bottoms and a tee shirt at twelve-thirty in the morning in this kitchen, the smallest bit of raspberry juice staining his lips. Only, of course, in an ideal world, his expression would be soft, his cheeks pink with affection, his eyes hazy with sleep.

Instead, Hannibal has the distinct impression that Will is only barely containing the rage which is reddening his face and whitening the knuckles of both of his hands.

“Did you not hear a word I just said?”

“Will—”

“No, I mean, were you actively not listening, or are you trying to piss me off now?”

“Will, please—”

“Why the hell would I want you to hurt her, Hannibal? Why would you think that offering to do something you were already going to do but with an added layer of unnecessary cruelty would be the thing that fixed this? Th-there is no fixing this! Don’t you get it?” Tears spill, unchecked, down Will’s cheeks. “You wanted to experiment on me. You wanted to hurt me and see what would happen. Well, congratulations. You did it. And here’s your final result: leave me alone.”

Before he can whirl back toward the exit, Hannibal has caught him by the shoulders. There is something crawling up his throat, perched around his collarbone, pulsing and thrashing. Will is glaring at him, eyes wet, wriggling to try to break the grip, but Hannibal holds firm.

Something for Will. Something that would prove he cares for Will. Not about cruelty. Not about himself. Some sacrifice he can make that is solely for Will.

“Your dogs,” Hannibal says. “I can get them back. I will buy them from their new owners if I must, no matter the cost. And I will keep them here. I will care for them, here, in my home. All five of them. You can visit any time, whether I am home or not. You can bring Winston and Max. I will bring them to you, if you prefer. They will want for nothing, if knowing they were here would bring you even a moment’s joy.” 

Will swipes the back of his hand across his wet cheeks and huffs, “Hannibal. You can’t… That’s the stupidest—”

His hands tighten on Will’s shoulders, and he feels the sting of tears prickling at his eyes. “I will love them because they are a part of you, Will. You are mine to love.”

Will forcefully pulls him into a rough, biting kiss, a searing and frantic interruption. Their bodies slot together so easily, so perfectly. It’s as though Will’s waist and his hair exist to accommodate Hannibal’s hands, their hips were made to press together, their mouths to share heat. 

“Was that so hard to say?” Will puffs against his lips, drawing him tighter, closer, his nails digging into Hannibal’s spine.

They push and claw and demand to fuse as closely as possible, until Hannibal has Will pressed against the cabinet by the door. His hot, desperate breath hitches as Hannibal kisses the side of his neck, nips just behind his jaw, nibbles his earlobe.

With a rumbling purr like a contented panther he whispers, “Had I known variations were permitted, I may have laid my claim sooner.” 

Will grumbles, “You didn’t even—” He takes a breath and rubs at his eyes. “It’s fine. We… got here, eventually. Mostly.”

His lips brush the fluttering pulse at Will’s temple, then the still-damp eyelids where crystalline teardrops cling to tantalizing lashes. He can’t stop himself, now that Will is his; a slow parade of languid kisses traces the planes of that gorgeous, irresistible face. The prospect of exploring the rest of Will’s body in the same way makes his mouth water.

“Mostly?” he says, mouthing at the palm of Will’s hand, an echo of Will’s own impassioned kisses earlier in the evening.

Will’s fingers drag through Hannibal’s hair and, with a wry lilt, he says, “There are still a few things we need to… work out. But not tonight, Hannibal. Not… Not right now.” He lifts Hannibal’s chin and draws their mouths together, a kiss as soft as it is exhausted. “I just… want this to feel easy. For a minute. Until the bubble pops. Y’know?” 

He supposes he does. There are still many considerations and barriers to deal with. The dogs. Alana. The orderly. Jack. The Ripper, who stands between them in his own way, despite Will’s acceptance. Miriam. 

Abigail.

All the external factors aside, there is still Will’s own resentment and understandable upset to work through. Hannibal is confident, of course, that they will overcome whatever stands between them, but for the moment he can certainly appreciate the desire to simply enjoy the relief of finally acknowledging their love and connection.

“Come to bed with me,” he whispers. Before Will’s body language can shift too far toward indignation, Hannibal chuckles. “To sleep, beloved.”

“I… okay. But I can’t stay, Hannibal. I have to… to get home.”

A twinge of annoyance. The orderly needs to be dealt with.

“As long as you like, or as little as you need,” Hannibal murmurs, and takes Will’s hand.

Leading Will to his bedroom feels very much the same as it did the night of the dinner with Abigail and Ms. Lounds, though this time Will’s eyes are ticking thoughtfully from art piece to art piece and he makes a few low comments about Hannibal’s tastes. He encourages Will to make use of the ensuite to ready himself for bed—a spare toothbrush, some facewash, hand lotion, anything Will may decide he needs—and quickly heads back down to clean up the kitchen.

Will is sitting on top of the duvet when Hannibal returns. Hannibal’s nighttime routine takes a few minutes, but when he emerges from the ensuite Will still has not made himself comfortable. Instead, he’s watching Hannibal, wariness and caution and curiosity thrumming up and down his spine. Hannibal pretends not to notice; he undresses, piece by piece, feeling Will’s eyes upon him as more and more skin is exposed.

“I don’t know why I expected you to, uh…” Will gestures awkwardly to his own chest.

Hannibal glances down, briefly, as he drapes his slacks and crisp button-up over his arm; the thick thatch of hair on his chest is beginning to turn silver-gray. “Does it bother you?” he asks, stepping into his closet. “It would be no hardship to remove it.”

He can’t see it, but Will is audibly flustered: “N-no, no, that’s… It doesn’t. I just, I guess I made an assumption about your, uh… aesthetic preferences. And I, uh, don’t really…”

Hannibal hums as he deals with his laundry and selects a pair of sleep pants. As he slides them up his hips, he calls back, “My aesthetic preferences have a remarkably broad range, I assure you. I have an appreciation for all beautiful things.” 

He steps back out into the main room, and Will has at last curled up on the bed, though he remains above the duvet. When the lights are turned off, there is a stripe of moonlight across the bedspread which glimmers in Will’s eyes. Hannibal climbs beneath the covers and settles in, one arm held up in invitation. It takes a moment, but Will slides across the bed and, cautiously, lays a hand in the center of Hannibal’s chest.

Hannibal smiles at him, and Will, shyly, smiles back. 

“Comfortable?” he asks.

Will nods, gaze blurred with sleep and the shine of the moon, and leans down to kiss him. Hannibal’s chest aches and roars and squeezes tight, as tight as he wants to hold Will. So perfect, so soft, so long overdue. He wants more—he wants everything. 

But Will is here to rest, and even that only for a short time. They lay together in the simmering darkness, and the ragged rhythm of his beloved’s breathing drags Hannibal into a low, almost hypnotic state of relaxation. The silence paves the way for anxious thoughts to burrow their way into Will’s head, resting upon Hannibal’s shoulder, and after only a few hours his fingers are in the fabric, twining and tugging and trembling and tense.

It is near four-thirty in the morning when Will slithers free of Hannibal’s arms, muttering apologies and justifications and half-hysterical pleas for forgiveness, not all of which seem directed toward Hannibal. The door doesn’t squeak, nor do the stairs, but Hannibal does distantly hear the thud of the front door and the squeal of Will’s little car somewhere on the otherwise-silent street.

He sits up in the chill of the early morning and scowls at the rumpled bedcovers. 

Will has run away, again. Will has dangled his affection only to tear it away, again. 

He closes his eyes and takes three deep, nourishing breaths.

The first major barrier has been broken. Will is his.

There are merely a few final steps to solidify Will’s place at his side. Simple enough corrections. Ending his relationship with Alana. Proving his dedication to Will.

And, most crucially, getting rid of that infuriating orderly.